by Ellen Dawson
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RICHARD ABEL
4. Gauntier did appear in the early photo story that highlighted Florence Lawrence:
“On the Moving Picture Stage: Have You Seen These Faces?” Des Moines News, 6 May 1910, 16.
5. The New York Dramatic Mirror later offered free color portraits of Joyce and Gauntier to its subscribers (14 June 1911, 30).
6. “Chats with the Players” first appeared in Motion Picture Story Magazine in February 1912 (135–38).
7. See, for instance, Price’s story about Selig’s emerging star, Kathlyn Williams—“‘Miss Billie Unafraid’—Torn by a Tiger but Nervy as Ever to Act the Most Daring Things Ever Seen on the Stage!—Heroine of the Movies” ( Des Moines News, 17 November 1912, 7).
8. A similar boast can be found in a wide range of daily newspapers: Gaiety ad, Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette (2 June 1912, 9); Royal ad, Mansfield News (13 July 1912, 16); “Among the Theatres,” Charleroi Mail (10 August 1912, 3); Colonial ad, Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette (25
August 1912, 8); and Ada Evening News (4 December 1912, 3).
2 ★★★★★★★★★★
✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩
Mary Pickford
Icon of Stardom
CHRISTINE GLEDHILL
“Dawn, over a daisy-filled meadow: the spirit of spring
imprisoned in woman’s body: the first child in the world” ( Photoplay, July 1918, 111). Thus, with Mary Pickford emerged the world’s first experience of full-blown film stardom. Others, notably Florence Turner and Florence Lawrence, had marked out the path a few years earlier; and others, for example, Mary Fuller, Mabel Normand, the Gish sisters, and serial queens Pearl White and Helen Holmes, emerged alongside her. But through the 1910s it was around Mary Pickford in particular that star practices were consolidated and star discourses woven. Through Pickford, studio executives and publicists, cultural commentators, newly constituted film critics, Mary Pickford, 1914. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
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CHRISTINE GLEDHILL
and fan-magazine journalists confronted a novel phenomenon, exploring its economic, ideological, cultural, and aesthetic possibilities.
Cinema gave “America’s Sweetheart” to the world and with her a model—an imaginary horizon of “starriness”—to be competitively emulated in different film cultures from country to country, for example in Britain with the promotion of Alma Taylor as the “English Mary Pickford,”
or the naming of Ermeline as the “Indian Pickford.” Accordingly, this chapter engages with the circulation of “Mary Pickford” in a British as well as an American context. Central, however, to both arenas is the inauguration of film stardom through the figure of “The Girl.”
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✩ Naming and Numbers
The story repeated endlessly as the need to tell it grew with her fame was that Pickford—then known by her birth name, Gladys Smith, and living in her home town, Toronto—was thrust onto the stage at age five after her father died, leaving her mother to bring up three children and Mary to become the family breadwinner.1 This story echoes the popular account of the equally fatherless Florence Turner’s first stage appearance, supposedly at age three. In both cases the child performer spontaneously upstages the adults, much to the merriment of the house and chagrin of parental guardians. The absence of the father, the strong maternal household, and the precociousness of the child in both stories suggest the power of the girl-child as the imaginary locus of growing social and emotional stirrings that would be intensified with the phenomenon of film stardom.
However, playing minor child roles in minor traveling theatrical companies would not turn “Baby Gladys,” as she was billed, into a national icon. Echoing Turner’s theatrical advancement with Henry Irving’s company, the turning point for Gladys Smith was winning a child role in David Belasco’s production of The Warrens of Virginia (1907). When this closed in April 1909, she—initially reluctant—goaded D. W. Griffith at Biograph into giving her a trial. In retrospective stories about these encounters, charismatic paternalistic directors bow with some amusement but shrewd calculation to the demands of an adolescent girl, whom they then mold for future fame (Gordon Gassaway, Motion Pictures, September 1915).2
Stardom required not only visibility but crucially a name. However, given Biograph’s reluctance to identify actors, it was, her story says, the public who named her after her characters: “Little Mary.” How this came about became a matter of fascinated retrospective speculation in her later publicity ( Moving Picture World, 29 July 1911, 216; Nashville Democrat, 29 December 1912).
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Between 1909 and 1910—when Pickford appeared in over eighty short films—invented names were circulated for popular female players: the Vitagraph Girl (Florence Turner), the Biograph Girl (Florence Lawrence). When Lawrence left Biograph, Pickford took her place as “Little Mary.” However, on her move at the end of 1910 to IMP, Pickford’s stage name, established by the publicity-canny Belasco, was announced beneath her portrait as part puff for the studio’s coup in Motion Picture World: “Miss Mary Pickford (Independent Moving Pictures Company)” (24 December 1910, 1462). An early attempt to analyze Pickford’s appeal while claiming the artistic status of the film actor, the accompanying article suggests that by the end of her first twenty months in filmmaking, Pickford’s rise to notice was an established fact: “Miss Pickford is an artiste of the highest rank in a field where there are few of her kind. . . . Her success with another picture company [Biograph] was so pronounced that she became known to millions as ‘Little Mary’” (1264). IMP, recognizing the commercial value of a brand name, advertised their acquisition under the banner “She’s an Imp,” announcing “‘Little Mary’s’ First Appearance in IMP Films!” Another advertisement proclaimed of Her Darkest Hour (1911), “Exhibitors who know the drawing power of ‘Little Mary’
will be delighted to learn that she appears in almost every foot of this splendid reel” ( Motion Picture World, 4 February 1911, 280). The development of star exploitation was, however, an uneven process, with both IMP advertising and Motion Picture World reviewers continuing to focus on story, often without naming actress or even characters, while IMP collapsed Pickford’s individual identity into its production brand, the “Little Mary” series.
Pickford’s second move to the newly formed independent company, Majestic, at the end of 1911 produced another flurry of advertising trading on her iconic identity, reinforced by the film title The Courting of Mary, which reflexively merged Majestic’s coup with plot and performer with character ( Motion Picture World, 25 November 1911, 669). Pickford quickly abandoned Majestic after only five films, exchanging publicity and a higher salary for a return to the anonymity of Biograph, compensated not only by the artistic direction and developing cinematic expertise of Griffith, but also by the consequent increasing attention given to films by dramatic critics ( Moving Picture World, 2 December 1911, 761).3 Astutely, her next move in 1912 returned her to theatrical limelight and full public identification when Belasco cast her as the blind heroine of the fairy play, A Good Little Devil.
Playing in the flesh, in a fixed location, gave a material reality to her reported popularity, since not only was she nightly named in the playbill, but crowds gathered at the stage door and now recognized her on the streets ( New Jersey Telegraph, 27 January 1913).
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CHRISTINE GLEDHILL
“Little Mary” was more than a studio brand name, signaling, as the invariable quotation marks suggested, a collaboration in which publicity makers, studios, audiences, and Pickford herself participated to both liberate and contain a developing public icon. “Mary” generically designated
“every girl,” while “little” encapsulated both her diminutive stature and ingénue roles. In combination “Little Mary” Pickford encouraged identification of actress
with roles—frequently also named “Mary”—making the star available for audience possession.
Once named, the significance of Pickford’s popularity was initially registered in numbers, computed in “millions.” Positive reviews of her performance in A Good Little Devil by noted drama critics not only extended awareness of her existence to a theatrical clientele, but invited awed comparison of her visibility as a film star with the lesser reach of the more prestigious theater actress and the greater social importance of statesmen.
Theatre Magazine noted: “Not even the Divine Sarah has appeared before so many . . . in so many roles” (June 1913). Cosmopolitan pondered the paradox: “Mary Pickford is a pet of playgoers all over the country who don’t even know her name. Her acting has thrilled hundreds of thousands of people who never heard the sound of her voice. The answer to this paradox is: the
‘Movies’ ” (July 1913).
This fact intimated a new kind of wondrous power afforded by the cinematograph. A drawing of a cinematographer cranking his camera to release a fairy illustrates the text’s comment that “Miss Mary Pickford . . .
has been observed simultaneously by more than a million people . . . from coast to coast, from Alaska to New Orleans, from ’Frisco to New York”
( Nashville Democrat, 29 December 1912). This roll-call of America’s cities suggests the power of her numerical appeal to unify a nation—diversity and distance annulled in a common relationship with “Our Mary”—that was soon to become global. In April 1914, Motion Pictures noted, “In Paris, London, New York, or in strange nameless border settlements of Asia and Africa and Australia, this little figure has made friends. Millions have seen and applauded her.” Throughout the 1910s the relentless growth and tenacity of her following suggested a strange reordering of social priorities. In 1915
the Pittsburgh Gazette somewhat acerbically noted: “Revolutions, wars have their day, but Mary Pickford and Tennyson’s brook go on for ever. She is the paramount obsession of the pleasure-seeking populace” (5 June 1915).
The “pleasure-seeking populace” suggests the new visibility of the mass audience whom she drew together across social, state, and eventually national divisions. Initially, encouraged perhaps by Pickford’s strategic decision to return to Belasco, her appeal was explained in terms of “acting,” and
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theatrical precedents were in order. The New Jersey Telegraph (27 January 1913) reporting on A Good Little Devil noted “this clever little actress [is] intimately known” as “The Maude Adams of the Movies,” a comparison reiterated through the next two years.4 Her return to filmmaking to join Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players, however, provoked democratic distinctions between film and theatrical stardom: “Mary Pickford has come to be the intimate possession of all the people, whereas the great actress, whether she be Bernhardt or a celebrity from Albion or The States, remains more or less a tradition, more or less a mere soulless name” ( Photoplay, November 1915, 53). If ubiquitous visibility contributed to cinema’s intensification of stardom, the cultural arena of the stage actress removes her from ordinary lives. In a Blue Book interview for August 1914, Pickford knocked the Maude Adams sobriquet on the head: “I’m just plain Mary Pickford and that’s all there is to it!” Thus a struggle between traditional and new discourses for ownership of her fame initially marks the criss-crossing commentaries that probe its significance. Photoplay’s Estelle Kegler was equally blunt: “Out in Manhattan, Kansas, or Moose Jaw, they knew all about little Mary long before Mr. Belasco, dealer in highbrow drama, even considered offering her a prominent place in a Broadway production. And she burst upon the ‘big way’ with the acclaim of more than a million picture fans trailing her right up to the stage door” (1913, 34–35). Even the young Vachel Lindsay wrote a serenade aiming to “snatch her from Belasco’s hand and that prison called Broadway” (unattributed clipping, December 1915).
Locating her appeal in her commitment to both artistry and popular stories, Theatre Magazine noted that “she, unlike her co-actors, never saw the audiences as a ‘joke’” (June 1913).
Pickford’s millions also designated dollars. With each career move, her skillfully negotiated salary hikes became a matter of increasingly astonished comment, associating film stardom with new kinds of wealthy lifestyle and provoking a sometimes sour note from commentators. In January 1915, the Los Angeles Times announced, “Interview with Mary Pickford Costs Money,”
and detailed imaginary charges for time spent interviewing her: talking, losing her hanky, applying eye shadow (20 January 1915, 3:4). The same paper commented in May 1915, “Mary Pickford is a cute little motion picture girl with curls and a baby stare . . . [who] gets $2000 a week for staring” (11 May 1915, 3:1). In September 1915 Photoplay noted of her salary for the coming year that “she is about to receive a salary equal to that which our United States of America gives its President.” If the New Jersey Evening Mail cheerily named her the girl with a “million dollar smile” (2 October 1915), Motion Picture Mail’s special Pickford issue for 1 January 1916 opened
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CHRISTINE GLEDHILL
its otherwise appreciative dossier with “When a girl is only twenty-three . . .
yet receiving a weekly salary that is the equivalent of two hundred and fifty working girls’ wages, there is need of an explanation.”
While gender attitudes contributed to astonished reactions at the dis-cordance between Pickford’s girlhood and business acumen, commentaries indirectly probed the meaning of the wealth spreading to a new class of film entertainers and its impact on the millions who followed them. Little Mary’s acquisition of a cabriolet automobile or her flight from Los Angeles to New York for a five-day shopping trip endorsed the sheer enjoyment offered by consumer culture along with superb advertising for manufacturers ( Los Angeles Times, 7 December 1913, 7:2; Photoplay, August 1917, 11–12, 54). But interview copy worked equally to mitigate the moral implications of a consumer identity that threatened to remove her from her audiences and undermine the democracy of her mass appeal. Thus many articles assure readers that wealth has not “spoilt” little Mary, that her tastes remain simple. As the Los Angeles Times commented, “This clever little lady is as simple and unassuming as the ordinary sweet school miss of sixteen summers” (7 December 1913, 7:2). One year and considerably more fame later, she is still “a very unassuming little person [who] prefers gardening and baking to state occasions” ( Los Angeles Times, 24 January 1915, 3:3).
✩★
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✩ “Little Mary” in Britain
While countless British stage actors had crossed the Atlantic throughout the nineteenth century, American cinema “virtually” reversed the trend. However, international following had to be created and was never certain. In India, for instance, while Pearl White and other serial queens appeared regularly in film advertisements during the 1910s, Pickford was almost invisible. Initially, promoting Mary to British audiences confronted geographic, temporal, and, to a certain degree, cultural distance.
Nevertheless, the British film industry was closely connected to the American, imports from which increased exponentially with the impact of the Great War on home production. “Little Mary” had come to Britain as part of Biograph’s output, supported by its Bulletins from which the two main trade journals— The Bioscope and Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly—derived their own, generally abbreviated, copy. Since Biograph suppressed the identities of actors, Pickford’s name did not feature. However, Motion Picture World’s article on Pickford’s acquisition by IMP was adapted by Bioscope under the heading “A Leading Picture Actress” (16 February 1911, 65).
Substituting Bernhardt for Belasco, the paper assured exhibitors that Pick-
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ford’s “work will receive as much warm commendation in England as in America.” Guaranteeing a popularity already established elsewher
e, it concludes: “‘Little Mary,’ as she is universally called in the States, is as charming a girl as can be found, and . . . she has real talent.”
In the initial absence of fan publications, it is unclear how far and by what means Pickford’s image penetrated the consciousness of British filmgoers between 1909 and 1912. A new “weekly independent newspaper for all interested in the photoplay,” established in June 1912 with the unlikely title of The Film Censor, vacillated about her name—she was “Mrs Owen Moore [who is] none other than the ever-popular Mary Pickford” (11 September 1912, 2), “Miss Moore” (9 April 1913, 3), and “Miss Mary Pickford Moore” (28 May 1913, 6)—suggesting the cultural distance to be crossed in establishing a British public relationship with film stars. However, in the same year Film Censor noted, “‘Little Mary’ has endeared herself to the hearts of thousands in all quarters of the globe,” and reproduced a photograph that “will be familiar to all picture-playgoers.” While her image in films may have been familiar and even popular, the concept of her worldwide fame stemmed from her American publicity.
The years 1913–1914 were a key period in the development of film-star discourse in Britain with the emergence of film magazines. Most important was The Picturegoer, which, established in June 1913 (and later retitled Pictures and the Picturegoer), began the process of separating performer from screen performance necessary to fandom. From its inception, Picturegoer sought to bind readers simultaneously to picture players and to its own monthly appearance by instituting a version of the numbers game established by American magazines—the “Favourite Players” competition—helpfully supported by lists of names to choose from and short biographies. This ran teasingly over several months between 15 November 1913 and 30 May 1914, when it was finally announced that the American Florence Turner had polled the top number of votes among actresses, ahead of Mary Fuller and Alice Joyce. Mary Pickford, although included among the choices, was nowhere in the outcome. A second competition was staged in 1915, however, strategi-cally separating “Greatest British Film Players” from the “World’s Greatest Film Artistes.” Now Mary Pickford topped the female poll of the latter with 250,545 votes to Florence Turner’s 170,335 and serial queen Kathlyn Williams’s 96,950 ( Pictures and the Picturegoer, 6 November 1915, 112–13).5