StarD_Bean_1910s_final

by Ellen Dawson

  “equestrian,” and “aviatrice” to which they are introduced by the modern family living next door. Playing the Girl’s rebellious self against doubles representing her virtuous self, as in Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) and Pollyanna (1920), or herself doubling roles as in Stella Maris (1918), became a key device of Pickford’s major features, scripted by her close collaborator and

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  friend, Frances Marion. By this means Pickford’s films maintained the Girl’s function as a dual sign of virtue and rebellion.

  About this time interviews on both sides of the Atlantic also explored the more unusual physical requirements of film acting, often including snippets about Pickford’s feats of endurance while filming, suggesting competition with her serial-queen rivals (see Bean “Technologies,” and Cooper in this volume). However, a prize-winning review submitted to the British fanzine Film Flashes suggests that doubling roles allowed Pickford to achieve a “great triumph as the prim maiden of long ago, and later, as the modern society girl”

  (12 February 1916, 14). If, as the Spokane Review argued of Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley (1918), the Pickford Girl’s old-fashioned values privileged

  “simplicity, kindness and honesty” over those of her “so-called social superiors” (27 April 1918), her mix of slapstick, comedy, and pathos summoned up comparisons with that other child of misfortune, Charles Chaplin.

  In February 1916, Photoplay identified Pickford’s role in Rags (1915) as a

  “Keystone farceur.” Later the Cleveland Times named her a “feminine Charlie Chaplin.” While, like Pickford, Chaplin is associated with Victorian pathos, the Cleveland Times suggests the greater irreverence of the Girl’s physicality: whereas Chaplin gains laughs subtly “by facial expressions anticipating events,” hers is “more robust buffoonery” (11 February 1918). Thus, if her construction as child seems to halt the forward thrust of girlhood’s threshold, regression to the child’s acerbic look at the adult world counters Pickfordian

  “sweetness.” Pickford’s growing girl-child legitimated a use of slapstick that provided scope for staging moments of rebellion by stealth—for example, her famed improvisation debunking the “glad-girl,” Pollyanna. Asking a fly if it wants to go to heaven, she grants the wish: she swats it. In her later films, slapstick cushioned her characters’ acts of increasingly violent resistance: witness the shooting of her abusive stepfather in Heart o’ the Hills (1919), which the British Bioscope found so shocking (1 May 1920, 68), and the murder of her former employer in Stella Maris (1918).

  Pickford’s persona of good-heartedness expressed in knockabout defiance of life’s “hard knocks” suggested to American commentators that she represented a “type of American girl . . . widely followed in this country and recognized in others” (unidentified clipping, c. 1918). For Photoplay “America’s sweetheart . . . is a girl of all girls, a real live American girl” (August 1917, 11). At Paramount, Laemmle had advocated her impersonation of diverse ethnic roles—British, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Anglo-Indian—often not to her taste nor well received. It was as an American girl that she circulated abroad. Mistress Nell (1915) provoked from Bioscope humorous recognition of a reversal of cultural power: “Mary Pickford is now so very much

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  more important a personage in English history than the second King Charles’s . . . favourite” (6 May 1915, 565). American stardom’s democratizing tendency partly explained Pickford’s appeal. Thus the cinema house magazine, Talbot Tattler, reviewing Such a Little Queen (1914), noted “the American idea of the uselessness of thrones and all such regal nonsense” (16

  December 1914, 30), while Bioscope suggested that “Americans see royalty through democratic eyes” (19 November 1914, 711). More cautiously, Picture Show commented that since “these pictures reach almost everyone from the poorest to the richest, it is a big moral responsibility” (31 May 1919, 17).

  However, Pickford’s representation of a specifically American, modernized femininity spun off from the American screen in 1917, when the United States entered World War I, and Pickford, along with Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks, launched a series of Liberty Bond campaigns around the country, undertaking a number of patriotic acts: adopting a company of soldiers, organizing letters and presents to be sent to the trenches, and so on.

  “America’s Sweetheart” eclipsed “Little Mary”—a national identification consolidated in The Little American (1917), in which Pickford plays an ingénue, Angela Moore, courted by both a German American and a Frenchman. Crossing the Atlantic after war is declared, Angela is rescued from the torpedoed Veritania and arrives in France where she turns the chateau she has just inherited into a hospital for wounded French soldiers. Compared to Allied propaganda of the time, the film was off-beat, not only in having the Pickford Girl confront the German military and cope with hysterical women in scenes of rape and pillage, but also in providing a conclusion that ended with the death of her French suitor and a kiss between Angela and her now chastened German lover through the wire mesh of a prison camp. The film was received positively by the American press, responding to Pickford as a figure capable of balancing patriotism with a humanism that rose above the

  “eagle-shrieking variety” and uniting a population of immigrants including those whose original countries were now at war. The New York Dramatic Mirror found it “singularly appropriate that Mary Pickford . . . almost a national figure in herself, should be presented as representing America’s womanhood in one of the most powerful war pictures yet produced” (14 July 1917).

  The Little American was largely well received in Britain, if with a changed ending that had Pickford back in America awaiting her French sweetheart ( Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 10 January 1918, 47). If the American press recognized in the figure of Pickford’s Angela Moore a revival of past American national pride ( Cleveland Plain Dealer, 3 July 1917), the two main British trade press journals split between humanist sentiment and modern skepticism. Bioscope responded to Pickford’s restraint: “There is nothing of

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  the flag-waving jingoist about her. She is never a platitude. . . . She is a perfectly normal little human being whose first impulse is to avoid discomfort, but who faces danger, not through theatrical courage, but because . . . her kindness and her good heart are more strongly developed” (10 January 1918, 40). Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, on the other hand, declared the film outright propaganda. Admitting the “gripping” realism of its war scenes, the review subjects the imaging of German atrocities and Pickford’s Little American to sarcastic parody for its national presumptions: “Angela Moore is Mary Pickford, and July 4th is her birthday. We all know what that day means to loyal Americans.” Later confronting the “beastly” Germans, “Angela finds that no one listens to her—despite her American citizenship; it is not worth a cent. She even has to take off their boots” (10

  January 1918, 47). In this respect Pickford’s combination of Victorian sentiment and American modernity brought to the surface shifting and conflicting currents in British culture, negotiating nationalism’s association with the past and modernity with America that frequently divided the stances of the two papers. Pictures and the Picturegoer, however, writing on behalf of fans, was quick to take possession of Pickford’s “Little American”

  as “‘Our Mary’ . . . the heroine of a tremendous story of the great war.

  Nothing more realistic has ever been staged” (19–26 January 1918, 80).

  ✩★

  ✩★

  ✩★

  ✩★

  ✩ Being Mary Pickford, Cinema Star

  It is in the inflection of the discourse of film acting toward the notion of personality that the aesthetic of film stardom itself is realized.

  As Gordon Gassaway, writing in Motion Picture Magazine, declared, “Today, from the manager of a Moving Picture theater to the actor appearing up
on the screen, personality is without doubt the prime factor which is putting the ‘move’ into Moving Pictures” (September 1915). British response cautiously concurred, attributing Pickford’s appeal to “an indefinable ‘something’ . . . Personality” ( Pictures and the Picturegoer, 27 October–3 November 1917, 463). Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, while skeptical about the credibility of The Heart o’ the Hills, declared, “Mary succeeds in putting it over somehow—just ‘how’ is a mystery; doubtless the genius of her personality”

  (1 April 1920, 98). Efforts to define film acting negotiated two different approaches. One, invested in traditional understandings of acting as the skill of impersonation, emphasized the technical requirements of performing for a camera in a silent medium. The second, stronger in America, separated personality from acting, articulating a sense of encounter with the person beyond technical skills. Thus Motion Picture World concludes its 1910 attempt

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  to analyze Pickford’s acting: “The essence of Miss Pickford’s charm is born in her . . . and carries over into the audience a sympathetic interest in all she does. ‘There she is,’ means we are glad to see you, Little Mary, no matter what part you are playing” (24 December 1910, 1462).

  These two approaches battled it out through the 1910s as reviewers and commentators sought to define star appeal. Thus in 1916, against the Chicago Tribune’s claim that “we love her not because she is Mary Pickford but because she is a gifted purveyor of charming personalities” (3 January 1916), the St. Louis Globe Democrat declared, “She has no method, no secret process, no formula. Her business in life is being Mary Pickford” (12 October 1916). But what did being Mary Pickford mean? Initially a Pickford personality is adduced from an amalgam of film roles, physical appearance, and behavioral traits—“rioting golden curls” ( Photoplay, September 1915),

  “wistful violet eyes” ( Cosmopolitan, July 1913). A similar merging occurs between actress and role in reviewers’ persistent reference to “Mary” whatever the name of the character she is playing.

  Richard deCordova argues of the emerging “picture personality” that while “acting” bestowed the prestige of theater, “personality” implied not a diversity of skillful characterizations but the existence of a stable identity rooted in the performer’s offscreen everyday home life (Pickford endorsed this conception in an interview in Photoplay, August 1913, 34–35). “Ordinariness” not only created a sense of democratic sameness with the audience, but also mitigated the exoticism associated with theater’s separation from normality. Moreover, “personality” itself was a changing concept to which film introduced a new dimension. At one end of the spectrum, deriv-ing from the Latin “persona” denoting a mask or enacted character, personality invoked the public person displaying the typical characteristics by which a performer became widely known: Little Mary, America’s Sweetheart. At another, more potently “starry” level, “person” denoted the

  “actual self” ( Oxford English Dictionary) or “living soul, self-conscious being”

  ( Chamber’s Twentieth-Century Dictionary)—the inner self, supposedly hidden from public view.

  The two meanings would eventually collide in those “not talked about”

  areas of private life the film industry was anxious to avoid, the boundaries of which, in the interest of sales, it was constantly pushing back. Early on, IMP allowed innuendo to spice its acquisition of Pickford by linking her image with Owen Moore within a heart-shaped frame, each half of the heart tagged respectively “She’s An Imp!” and “He’s an Imp!” while Motion Picture World speculated in their prerelease comments on Pickford’s first IMP film, Their First Quarrel (1911, released as Their First Misunderstanding): “We would

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  not be at all surprised if there was not something more than acting in the work of Miss Mary Pickford and Mr Moore in the pretty Imp comedy that bears the above title. The loves, jealousies, quarrel and make-up of the two newly-weds in the story are so perfectly portrayed that one cannot help feeling it is all real” (31 December 1910, 1540). However, initially the development of the discourse of personality largely steered clear of Pickford’s romantic life. Although from 1915 onward interviews and feature articles begin to elaborate the details of her early childhood, theatrical career, and entry into filmmaking, these pieces remain respectfully distant and are often mediated by jolly interventions from Pickford’s mother and siblings.

  If Pickford’s retreat to the anonymity of Biograph and the paternal shel-ter first of Griffith, then of the high-toned Belasco, and finally of Famous Players’ protective Zukor held off the news media’s increasing identification of personality with private life, there was little she could do about the intimate probe of the camera. Lacking spoken dialogue and verbal narration, the material conditions of silent film performance foregrounded the camera’s relation to the performer’s body as source of narrative intelligibility—

  in “the appeal of a glance . . . the crook of an arm . . . the twist of a smile”

  (Gordon Gassaway, Motion Picture Magazine, September 1915). Although in the theater the actor’s body was subject to rigorous training, its collusion with cinematography made the least gesture a conduit to the fluid indeterminacy of self. In 1913, Motion Picture World urged its readers to go to see Miss Pickford in Caprice: “Mercy is a child of moods—we laugh with her, and as suddenly check ourselves as we see the cloud pass over her face. . . .

  It seems as if the heartstrings are under the influence of a hair-trigger control, and there is no foretelling a moment in advance on which side of the emotions the strain will lie” (15 November 1913, 718).

  As the discourse of film acting merged into a discourse of personality, a cinematization of the performer took place, suggesting a symbiosis between mutable girl-child and cinema’s power to capture the transient and liminal aspects of performing. Bringing to the screen “eyes that speak and light up in color and shade with her every emotion” ( St. Louis Globe Democrat, 20

  August 1916), Pickford’s girl reveals “not one side but any number of moods and depths as well as surface emotions” ( Ohio State Journal, 27 June 1915). At the same time, the struggle to reconcile personality with artistry clarified the distinction between theatrical and film stardom. The question was less whether the film star is “acting” or simply “being” than how the performer’s body and feelings, interacting with cinematography, become revelatory instruments. As the British Bioscope argued, “Mary Pickford’s is an art which is a part of herself. . . . Her art is herself, her only method to

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  be just what she feels at the moment according to the part” (14 May 1914, 753; my emphasis). Conceptions of the film actor as an “artist’s pallet [ sic]”

  ( Motion Pictures, September 1915) or “veritable Shakespeare’s pen in human form” ( Motion Pictures, May 1918) integrate the performer into the cinematic apparatus, dissolving the barrier between life and art. Thus Homer Dunne, observing Pickford at a charity event, suddenly sees her cinematic power: “It was while she was dancing that I saw a flash of the Mary Pickford with whom the public is so well acquainted. With a sudden sweeping swing of the arm and a roguish toss of the head, she removed her hat . . .

  in that instant the scene before me faded and there was a cutback to, say, Fanchon the Cricket.” Thus “the real Mary Pickford gliding at intervals before

  . . . [his] eyes” dissolves into “her phantom prototype, elusive and tantaliz-ing, fluttering before . . . [his] mental vision” ( Motion Picture Magazine, January 1916). In the New York Review an imaginary Pickford declares: “I am the delicate Feminism of Picturedom. The art seems to have culminated in me” (28 November 1914).

  This attempt to define a cinematic mode of perception released through film stardom suggests a new form of performer-cinema-audience relationship—initially described in theatrical terms as “getting over.” B
ut early in the Pickford discourse, the Minneapolis Journal intuited a force that leaves the screen, compensating for the lack of theater’s living presence: “There is a vivid spontaneity in her every move . . . which seems almost to bridge the gap between real drama and its pictured counterfeit” (11 November 1913).

  If cinema re-creates the actor’s being as star personality, the personality reaches into the being of picturegoers: “We picture-patrons sit by and indulge our willing and elastic feelings in all the various pulsings of joy, sorrow, inquiry, fear, disappointment and expectancy while she pours them out to us thru that will-o’-the-wispy, camera-invented medium—her intangible personality” (Clara Louise Leslie, fan, writing to Motion Pictures, May 1918).

  Thus the actor’s bodily absence, her mechanical reproduction, and acting itself are no barrier between performer and audience. Their relationship is perceived as intersubjective, initiated by “a personality . . . that gripped the heart . . . reach[ing] out from the screens of a million picture theaters in every land on the globe” ( New York Dramatic Mirror, March 1913).

  Through her film performances Pickford “worked her way into the hearts of her audience” ( San Francisco Post, 13 September 1915), registering “intimate personal contact with every member” ( Cincinnati Star Times, 17

  November 1916). In 1919 the British Pictures and the Picturegoer asked retrospectively, “How it is that this slight little fair-haired girl has thus crept into the heart of the world?” (14 June 1919, 595). This emotional penetration

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