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In the meantime, the trade press began to register the impact of this particular actress on their fortunes. In October 1913, Bioscope, offering advance notice of Pickford’s coming appearance in the film version of A Good Little Devil (1914), and reminding exhibitors of her “clever leading
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parts . . . with the A. B. Company,” noted the effect of Pickford’s filmic presence on attendance and audience response (9 October 1913, 135; 30 October 1913, 361).6 Since wartime meant severe shortages of product for exhibitors, many of the old Biograph films were reissued several times over.
Nevertheless, it was only when the last films of Pickford’s 1912 period at Biograph were reissued for the first time toward the end of 1914 that her presence was acknowledged. By the time of the third reissue of her first Biograph films, running between 1915 and 1917, Bioscope’s copy suggested that she was the only attraction in crude or out-of-date stories, while the later 1912 films are characterized as accomplished star vehicles: “a charming Mary Pickford comedy,” a “Mary Pickford drama.”
Pickford’s value to the trade was closely bound up with the enhancement of her artistic reputation following her Belasco engagement and subsequent contract with Famous Players, a company to whom Bioscope offers
“undying gratitude” for establishing the feature film “as a solid, serious, dig-nified form of dramatic art” (12 March 1914, 1179; 19 November 1914, 711). Creating a popular mass market meant crossing entrenched class divisions to incorporate those values that would appeal to middle classes and allay nervousness about the democracy of millions. In the Bishop’s Carriage (1913) is, Bioscope declares, “the sort of picture that is wanted more urgently every day, now that the cinematograph theaters are beginning to appeal to intelligent people, as well as to the lower classes” (13 November 1913, 667).
It later notes that such patrons are also “wealthier” (16 December 1915, 1249).
Significantly, it was following her second Belasco engagement that the British trade press developed its own commentary on Pickford and her films, for the film trade’s understanding of performance was rooted in culturally embedded theatrical values. From 1908 a lively relationship with stage actors had tended toward a theatricalization of British filmmaking and criticism (see Burrows, Legitimate). Film Censor greeted Pickford’s Belasco engagement as the achievement of public (because theatrical) recognition:
“Little Mary is to be nameless to her admirers no more. She is now seen in a Broadway Theatre” (26 March 1913, 5). Pictures and the Picturegoer’s
“Greatest British Film Player Competition” warned its readers that they must vote according to “artistic merit, not popularity or good looks,” and proceeded to list different character types in which an actor might excel (17
April 1915, 50). Drawing on British theatrical precedent, Bioscope suggested that “the power of Mary Pickford’s personality draws people to cinemas as Ellen Terry did to the theatre” (6 May 1915, 563, 565), and British reviewers frequently noted the good performances of supporting actors, request-
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ing that they be named alongside Pickford as star ( Bioscope, 20 August 1914, 715, and 26 November 1914, supp. v). By the time of Mistress Nell (1915), the cultural gravitas of a new Famous Players–Lasky/Pickford release led Bioscope to comment that J. D. Walker’s trade shows “are rapidly assuming an importance in film circles comparable, let us say, with a first night at His Majesty’s Theatre” (6 May 1915, 563).
Thus Anglicization initially incorporated Pickford into a theatrical framework. However, her stardom, sent from America, required cultural recognition of a performance mode quite different from the foregrounded acting of Florence Turner’s impersonations which, supported by her personal presentation of her films to British audiences, made her so popular here (see Gledhill, “Screen Actress”). If Turner’s tour-de-force mimicry—
supported by her U.K. public appearances—ultimately impeded the development of the consistent personality necessary to stardom, Pickford’s presence had to be established from afar. Thus advertising copy played with capitals, bold and normal type, and brackets to foreground intimate first name over formal surname and to dramatize the approach and eventual arrival of the star with successive films, exclaiming, for example, “YES!
MARY PICKFORD IS COMING ! ” ( Bioscope, 13 August 1914, xi), later followed by a Pictures and the Picturegoer cover declaring “MARY PICKFORD is HERE!”
(29 May 1915). Meanwhile, Illustrated Films Monthly informed readers that it was “Little Mary’s dearest wish to visit the United Kingdom . . . and arrangements had been made,” but wartime conditions prevented it (November 1914, 191).
Such advertisements were supported by longer trade press reviews and by the new fan magazines that kept American news stories about Pickford circulating while offering illustrated novelizations of new films in anticipa-tion of future releases. Pickford is drawn closer to the British public through repetitive advertising of her life story—ambivalently titled “The Film Life of Mary Pickford” ( Film Flashes, 13 November 1915, inside cover)—and the circulation of the pet names devised in America. Significantly, “America’s Sweetheart” is rarely used, while the diminutive “Little Mary” of the early years is gradually displaced toward the end of 1914 by recognition of her growing authority as the “World’s Sweetheart.”
By 1917 the trade recognized Pickford’s stardom as an economic force.
Bioscope noted that “she is almost an institution” (17 February 1916, 733), while J. D. Walker’s advertisements bluntly trumpeted “official” box office figures, naming her “the showman’s mascot and sure money-maker” (9
August 1917, 657; 29 September 1917, 58). However, British trade and fan press commentators and fans themselves also worked to appropriate
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Pickford’s Americanness. Shifts from “World’s Sweetheart” to “Everybody’s” or “People’s Favourite” effectively localized the star’s celebrity (see Film Censor, 10 December 1913, 8). And Pictures and the Picturegoer boldly challenged readers with its front cover question “Is there an English Mary Pickford?” below a portrait of the Hepworth star Alma Taylor (12–19 May 1917), to which readers responded in the affirmative (2–9 June 1917, 206; 9–16 June 1917, 224).
✩★
✩★
✩★
✩★
✩ Girl-Child
Pickford’s film career, as we know, did not last beyond the 1920s. Her stardom was in one key respect rooted in the popular imaginary of the 1910s and early 1920s in America and Britain: its investment in the girl-child and the fantasy world of child’s-play. Contrary to the usual career progression of the theatrical actress toward ever more “heavy” or “emotional” parts, Pickford’s filmography shows a staged reduction in age from the ingénue roles of the Biograph era to the “Growing Girl” roles identified by John Tibbetts and finally to where she began onstage: at twenty-five years of age playing the child in Poor Little Rich Girl (1917). Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), Daddy Long Legs (1919), Pollyanna (1920), and Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921) followed. Although, as Tibbetts points out, Pickford played the literal child relatively late in her career and rarely throughout the film, the combination of Victorian child-woman injected by Griffith into her Biograph roles and her own diminutive childlike appearance and previous stage experience playing children meant that the child haunted her ingénue and girl characterizations (Tibbetts “Mary Pickford”). When IMP
cast her in The Dream (1911) in the dual roles of virtuous wife and the husband’s dream transformation of her vamping in a public bar, Motion Picture World was surprised: “Our feelings . . . were somewhat sentimental when we saw ‘our Mary’ as a wife arrayed in the evening gown and dining with swells. . . . We have always considered ‘Mary’ as a child. It has never occurred to us that she might grow up and be a woman some day” (28 Janua
ry 1911, 182). Much of the Pickford publicity continued to perceive her as child-woman, which her own reported activities with children both on and off the set, including adopting a 400-strong orphanage, reinforced (see Los Angeles Times, 24 January 1915, 3:12; Photoplay, September 1915 and January 1918; Cleveland Leader, 22 October 1916). Commentary emphasized her childlike features, such as her ready ability to cry ( Vanity Fair, 25
January 1913); her “piquant pout of the lips” ( New York Dramatic Mirror, 19
March 1913); and her “ingenuous face” ( St. Louis Globe, 20 August 1916).
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While her girl-child roles demonstrated acting skills and interviews detailed her techniques of child impersonation, this also enabled her to maintain the persona by which she had become beloved—“Little Mary”
( Moving Pictures, February 1917; Vanity Fair, December 1917). Some “sweetheart” manifestations were too much for realists on either side of the Atlantic, and sarcasm directed at cuteness and curls could be cutting. But while much of the publicity—photographs of “Mary” holding her skirts, or caressing flowers or kittens—promoted a public image of chocolate-box simplicity, her films, their more considered reviews, and even lengthier examinations of her stardom suggest that the girl-child cued into a cultural imaginary working between a Victorian past and coming modernity, social change and a world at war.
The “Girl” was a ubiquitous figure in the 1910s and into the 1920s—a figure shared by Britain and America not least through literary and cultural sources (see Burrows “Girls”). The Girl cued back into Victorian middlebrow culture’s “child-woman” but also forward into the adventurous girl/boy of the transitional, cross-century period’s investment in the fantasy world of child’s play for grown-ups.7 The ingénue roles of Pickford’s romantic and domestic comedies and melodramas were imbued with immediately recognized “girlish” qualities: there are references to “girlish emotions”
( New York Dramatic Mirror, 11 September 1913, of In the Bishop’s Carriage);
“budding girlish figure” ( Cosmopolitan, July 1913); “girlish beauty” ( Motion Picture World, January 1916); “unassuming girlishness” ( Photoplay, August 1917, 12). Girlishness, however, meant more than adolescent quirks. To the interviewer Katherine Synon, Pickford appeared “a girl standing on the threshold” (“The Unspoiled Mary Pickford,” Photoplay, September 1915). If psychologically the “threshold” implies a state of transition, the Girl is its archetypal representative: her culturally assigned femininity open to empathic feelings; her youth to mutability; her body and psychology to physical and emotional change; her cultural position veering between the carefree irresponsibility of childhood and idealism of the young adult. Pickford’s “girl” roles, therefore, enabled her to exercise her much admired capacity for conveying fleeting, often contradictory emotions or passing thoughts made available as aesthetic experience, with pathos and comedy, laughter and tears the most frequently cited combinations. If Pickford’s increasing adoption of child roles intensified this combination, her source materials opened up the more fantastical terrain of childhood fictions, connecting their investment in magical transformations and mutability with cinematography’s capture of fleeting moments of liminal being and transient feeling. An identification of Pickford with the fairy world of Belasco
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and Barriesque whimsy runs through her publicity in the 1910s, from the cameraman cranking his machine to release a Pickford fairy (unattributed cutting, December 1912) through the Fort Wayne Journal’s “deliciously whimsical sprite of a girl” (7 February 1915) to the fan declaring “Mary Pickford is a fairy . . . not of this world” ( Motion Pictures, May 1918). While descriptions of Pickford as a “will-o’-the-wisp” link the liminality of the fairy world to the mutability of Pickford’s Girl ( Evening Mail, 13 November 1915; Motion Pictures, January 1916 and May 1918), her invocation in both the American and British press as a “female Peter Pan,” “never grow-up Mary,” or “the Girl who never Grows Up” underscores her hesitation at the threshold ( New York Review, 11 September 1915; Syracuse Post Standard, 28
September 1918; Bioscope, 17 December 1914, 1197).
Comedy, however, renders Pickford’s girl more robust. Thus the British Bioscope argues of Cinderella (1914), this “is no ordinary Cinderella—for she is Mary Pickford. . . . The lonely little kitchenmaid becomes, in her hands
. . . a figure of childish dreams, gloriously young and natural, and marked by that humanising grace of humour of which Mary Pickford so thoroughly understands the secret” (17 December 1914, 1197). Yet humor, while injecting a robustness into Pickford’s girl, also intensified her underlying fragility, a combination invoked in recurring, double-edged terms: “whimsical,” “winsome,” and the endlessly repeated “wistful.”8
Wistfulness, ameliorating loss through tenacious hope, attached to the many orphan or bereaved child roles in which the “Girl” appeared. As an orphan Pickford became available to everyone, while loss of a parent and childhood hardship was often read back into her biography. Orphanhood literally clothed her in rags—to her own frequent discomfort and some complaints from the fan press. More significant, it tapped into an aesthetic structure of feeling that resonated for a period caught between acculturated Victorian values and the aporias of a modernizing world. The pathos of Pickford’s girl-child produced acute pleasures. In A Good Little Devil she is
“winningly pathetic” ( Baltimore American, 24 December 1912); Tessibel of the Storm Country (1914) offers the “beauty of pathos” ( Photoplay, September 1915) and The Foundling (1916) “exquisite pathos” ( Chicago Tribune, 3 January 1916), while for Photoplay’s Julian Johnson her performance was
“soul-wrenching in its quaint piteousness” (February 1916, 51).
While British commentators are cooler, less addicted to “girlishness,”
and more interested in Pickford’s ingénue and “girl-wife” roles as performed types, they too succumbed to the “pathos” of her girl-children, particularly as mediated by humor. Thus Picturegoer promises of the film A Good Little Devil “pathos galore and rollicking pantomime to drive away the tears”
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(27 December 1913, 367); Bioscope argues, “It is only Mary Pickford . . . who can create . . . just that particular kind of sentiment . . . almost unbearably heartbreaking in its tender pathos . . . mingled with enchanting humour”
(14 May 1914, 753); while the president of a British film club writes to Pictures and The Picturegoer of “humour that had with it a pathos that was at times almost heartbreaking” (14 June 1919, 596). Photoplay’s Julian Johnson sums up the piquancy of this combination as “that precious stage jewel: a laugh set in a tear” (February 1916, 51).
For many commentators, pathos explained Pickford’s power over audiences. In an interview for the Toledo Times, Pickford herself suggested that seeing “‘Little Mary’ weep, smile and express various emotions . . . they come to have a sort of proprietary interest in this little figure, as they share in its experience” (4 June 1916). As a participatory structure, pathos enables spectators to perceive what is withheld from characters—reinforced by the distance between adult audience and child protagonist and the distancing perspective of humor—and so to look beyond the child to the oppressive forces against which she struggles. In this sense pathos educates the feelings. Pickford’s Girl, positioned between an “old-fashioned” Victorian past and an evolving twentieth-century modernity, confronted a threshold of social change. The Girl’s ready sympathies for the underdog aligned her with the Victorian “true woman.” Emphasis on feeling drew on the same impulse by which nineteenth-century melodrama shifted moral legitimation from church to personally lived social relationships.9 In this sense Pickford’s roles, clothed in her girl persona, were received as manifestations of absolute good. “Whether comic or sad, a fairy or tom-boy she is always sweet, lovable, wholesome, sug
gesting good, never evil . . . Paramount estimate 10,000 people a day . . . benefit by the happy influence of this sunshiny little movie girl” ( Ohio State Journal, 27 June 1915). Nevertheless, as “tomboy summer-girl” ( Motion Picture World, 25 November 1911, 619), “tantalising, roguish girl” ( Chicago Herald, 30 June 1915), or “carefree little madcap” ( Daily News, 7 September 1915), she opened up space for mocking mimicry and emotion-fueled rebellion against injustice. As Delight Evans suggests in her Photoplay article “Mary Pickford, The Girl,” she
“upsets a few pet traditions” (July 1918, 91).
In tension with “old-fashioned” virtues, the signs of changing times in Pickfordian “fun” were recognized early. Motion Picture World, evaluating her career before moving to IMP, declared: “Miss Pickford is a veritable queen of comediennes: and back of that there is a thoroughly modern and progressive spirit unrestrained by worn out conventions” (24 February 1910, 1462).
Trade journals’ comments on her late Biograph, IMP, and early Famous
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Pickford as “love-pirate” counters her “cute” stay-at-home wife in The Dream (1911).
Players films sense the emergence of a new type. Of the IMP-produced Her Darkest Hour (1911), Motion Picture World’s reviewer sagely explained “a pre-possessing young woman . . . must . . . earn a living by being associated with men in public office” (11 February 1911, 323). Taking clever advantage of this tension, The Dream pitched that “well-known love-pirate, the female stenographer” against Pickford’s initial stay-at-home little wife, characterized variously as “simple,” “timid,” and “demure,” whose dreaming husband, tir-ing of her “cute little ways,” imagines her a vamp and then cannot handle the result ( Motion Picture World, 28 January 1911, 182; 21 January 1911, 152). In A Girl of Yesterday (1915), Pickford’s own script develops this doubling strategy not as a feat of performance but in order to play the ends against the middle. While the sketchy plot has Jane Stuart and brother John escaping the repressive upbringing of Aunt Angela, a series of “vaudeville sketches” enables Pickford’s Jane to test the modern pleasures of a “golfer,”