by Ellen Dawson
63
produced an empathic response from audiences, men and women. Fredrick Wallace wrote in Motion Pictures, “I am a cold, calculating man . . . and as unemotional as a turnip (naturally), but when Mary Pickford smiles I sit in and grin into the dark like a Hindoo idol . . . and when she weeps—well . . .
it’s all I can do to keep from . . . wading right into whomever made her cry”
(July 1916). Such commentary points to a cathexis between screen bodies and embodied viewers. The extra-cinematic power of this relationship became a cause for discussion when Pickford found she could no longer go shopping or travel in public without attracting a crowd.
Such visible demonstrations of public fascination suggested that the cinema was insinuating itself into everyday emotional and perceptual experience. Terms such as “magic,” “hypnosis,” “fascination,” and “magnetism” are invoked to explain a new kind of “power” at work, extraordinary because invested in the figure of a girl. Thus the New York Review’s “Kindly Kritic”
records Pickford’s visit to a Broadway performance: “Mary Pickford sat in a box. Not all the King’s horses and all the King’s men of a typical first night could drag attention from her. It was wonderful to behold—this sure, unerring power to have and to hold. . . . EVERYBODY looked in Mary’s direction—continued to look, fascinated—a species of hypnotism, drawn to the slip of a girlie by the marvelous power of Personality” (11 September 1915).
In the mid- to late 1910s, the Pickford commentary moved toward the auratic. As the Ohio State Journal noted, “Fans recognized stars long before the general critical press . . . but in course of time we all come to the shrine”
(27 June 1915). Such perception structures the opening of many accounts of meeting Pickford, staging the moment of revelation and tone of venera-tion associated with stardom as well as a common narrative device for later star vehicles: “The spot where all these people wanted to stand was in the center of the room near a small table—a table on which stood a little golden-haired girl, who smiled and nodded brightly, and shook hands with as many as could fight their way up within hand-shaking distance. . . . The little girl on the table was Mary Pickford” ( St. Louis Globe Democrat, 12 October 1916).
If the auratic suggests the mystery of personhood at the heart of stardom, the distinction between British and American conceptions of personality and acting articulated this differently. The shift from person as mask to
“actual self” recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary maintains a distinction between outer role and inner being that persists in British culture’s investment in “visible” acting. Play-acting, even of the “do-nothing kind,” maintains a division between private and public, personal life and social role, that is vital to a culture embedded in social differences even as democratization was eroding them (see Gledhill Reframing). But American film stardom cuts
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CHRISTINE GLEDHILL
Pickford demonstrates visible acting for her British commissioned pamphlet How to Act for the Screen (1919).
MARY PICKFORD
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across the relationship between acted and “actual self,” suggesting the American Chambers’s integrated definition of “person” as “living soul, self-conscious being,” seemingly accessible through film. If, for British culture,
“visible acting” represents a powerful sociocultural value against which native would-be film stars would always struggle, Pickford’s American stardom suggests the elision of performance and self that would underpin the Method. This is not to suggest that British audiences and reviewers did not fully embrace Pickford’s star performances and Hollywood stardom in general. On the contrary, it is rather that explanations of her appeal are cast differently, veering away from the naturalism of personality to the thrill of performance. It was a London publisher that commissioned Pickford in 1919
to write a booklet, How to Act for the Screen.
Similarly, when the New York Review seeks to record the auratic experience offered by Pickford’s girl-child, she pronounces directly from the page, a missionary voice enveloping readers: “I am the spirit of youth. . . . I move, like a Fairy of Childhood’s Wonderland, across the white screen of the Universe. The very azure skies are not too far reaching for my silent drama” (28
November 1914). In contrast, British fanzine writers resorted to the storytelling voice, emphasizing the paradoxical combination of distance and intimacy in the auratic. One fictional story published in Pictures and the Picturegoer, entitled “She,” is about a wimpish young man who one night is transformed: “I went to the pictures last night, and I saw—Her.” Intrigued, the narrator accompanies his friend and is himself overcome: “A single figure occupied the screen, a figure of a girl. . . . Of the dignity and grace of her beauty I can and will say nothing, only this—a feeling of rest stole over me. . . . It was a glimpse of Paradise. . . . There she stood for a moment, and I will swear she nodded to Robbie and smiled. And her smile . . . remains with me yet” (7–14 April 1917, 37–38). In “Through Mary,” a dour Scots minister, inspecting the evils of the picture-house, is converted to the movies: “Gradually an indefinable ‘something’ in the character of the heroine . . . caught and held his attention. Then the greatness of her acting, the wonder of her beauty, kept him enthralled. He was carried out of himself”
( Pictures and the Picturegoer, 27 October–3 November 1917, 463).
✩★
✩★
✩★
✩★
✩ Conclusion: Star Power
What, in the end, are we to make of the fact that the power of this new form of intersubjectivity is manifested through the figure of a girl-child? Arguably the mutability of Pickford’s girl-child and the range of evanescent emotions it released meant she was never perceived merely as
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“In the course of time we all come to the shrine.” Auratic Pickford photographed by Baron Adolph De Meyer, Vanity Fair (1920).
child. Rather, the childlike generosity of her open collaboration with the camera promised intimate induction into experience significant to the adult. As already noted, emphasis in the Pickford discourse on “wistfulness”
tapped into an undertow of sadness often remarked in her eyes and voice.
This could be read back, as she frequently suggested herself, to her own loss of childhood. But to some commentators, her girl-child’s transparent mutability of feeling hooked individuals into a broader sense of universal connection. The auratic tone of many responses suggests film stardom’s role in filling the gap that Peter Brooks, writing about melodrama, argues marks the shift in Western society from a religion-based and hierarchal social order to the individual at its imaginary center.10 A frequent term in Pickford
MARY PICKFORD
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discourse, “charm,” may be devalued now, but its reiteration throughout the 1910s—“you are charmed with Little Mary, that’s what is the matter”
( St. Louis Globe Democrat, 20 August 1916)—suggests a sense of uncanniness in the star-viewer contact. Thus Alice Coon Brown noted that “in everything that she does there is the strange, unexplainable eerie quality” ( Ohio State Journal, 21 June 1915). Peter Grindley Smith admits to “strange emotions . . . at the sight of Mary mothering an army of orphaned little ones”
( Photoplay, January 1918). If the intersubjective relationship offered by stardom activates the liminality of personality, registration of the uncanny suggests encounter with the otherness at the center of selfhood that could be transformative. In this sense, following Brooks’s account of melodramatic morality, the sacral dimension of stardom modernized morality in terms of the ethics of personality and personal relationships. The storyteller’s overwhelming encounter with “She” arises from feeling that “here was one who knew life, and appreciated its difficulties as few have done . . . and had strength to spare for the support of her weaker brethren” ( Pictures
and the Picturegoer, 7–14 May 1917, 37–38), while the New York Review’s enshrined Pickford intones a veritable sermon: “I am all that is good and clean and innocent and wholesome in the fine art of Making Others Happy. . . . I bring to the darkness of side streets and the melancholy of desolate hearts and the bitter byways of Less Fortunate, a sudden majesty of peace that passes all understanding” (28 November 1914).
The shift from church to film stardom as source of ethical enlighten-ment is dramatized in the story of the Scots minister’s conversion: “I have learned more in half an hour than the kirk has taught me in forehty [ sic]
years.” His conversion is itself a melodramatic sign of the power of a new form of cinematized virtue: “Ah, he thought, surely a girl like that wields a power that kings might envy” ( Pictures and the Picturegoer, 27 October–2
November 1917, 463).
The central values embodied in writings about Pickford’s Girl are Beauty and Love, for which writers on both sides of the Atlantic felt the early twentieth century was starving. The Scots minister’s “ugly cult of Bitterness was flung aside, forgotten, and for the first time he realised that a love of the Beautiful is necessary to man’s welfare” ( Pictures and the Picturegoer, 27 October–3 November 1917, 463). But it is perhaps the strength and novelty of the intersubjective relationship materialized in film stardom that centers Love at the heart of Pickford’s stardom, amalgamating her offscreen activities—in particular her children’s’ charity work, public appearances, and later campaigning on behalf of overseas soldiers—with her films. Love is understood as a kind of practical empathy. Answering the question “Why
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Do We Love Mary Pickford?” a fan writes in Motion Pictures that “most of all we love Mary Pickford because she loves us. We know she loves us because she seems to love everything around her. Her pulse beats in unison with the whole world” (May 1918). To Julian Johnson’s euphoric invocation of Pickford that opens this chapter, Delight Evans replies: “What can I say? But one does not understand Mary Pickford. One loves her” ( Photoplay, July 1918, 111).
These are difficult values to articulate in the twenty-first century, and at the time skeptical, satirical voices interrupted the adulation. However, the construction of the world’s sweetheart demonstrates the formation of a cultural imaginary capable of recognizing loss and pain as a stimulus to renewed hope and interpersonal contact.
N OT E S
I want to thank Jennifer Bean for her work as a patient and encouraging editor and in particular for her productive suggestions for restructuring the essay’s different concerns.
1. In fact her father had already abandoned the family, and Mary was eight at her stage debut (Whitfield 11–12).
2. Most newspaper and some trade sources cited in this chapter were accessed in the Robinson Locke Scrapbooks housed in the New York Public Library, Performing Arts section.
Scrapbook cuttings excise page numbers and in some cases are unattributed and/or undated.
Any archival citation missing page numbers, dates, or source may be assumed to be from the Robinson Locke Scrapbooks.
3. Majestic announced Pickford’s appearance on the front cover of the New York Dramatic Mirror.
4. Maude Adams was a beloved American actress for whom J. M. Barrie wrote the role of Peter Pan.
5. Figures were hyped since each coupon sent in counted as ten votes for first choice and five for second choice, thereby inflating the appearance of mass popularity.
6. It appears that Famous Players tested response by trade-showing the film in England before the American release on 1 March 1914. Bioscope reviewed it on 27 November 1913
(908) as did Picturegoer on 27 December 1913 (367), both warmly recommending it as a Christmas film and noting its release date as 1 December 1914.
7. The New York Review declared Pickford to be a “story book girl come to life” (11 September 1915). See also Wullschlager.
8. See Photoplay, “The Charm of Wistfulness” (August 1913, 35), and Alan Dale’s interview, which notes her pensiveness three times ( Pittsburgh Leader, 27 April 1914). In July 1918, Photoplay commented that Pickford has “the saddest eyes in the world” (111).
9. See Brooks. Eileen Whitfield suggests the impact of Pickford’s early appearances in stage melodrama on the star’s own outlook and later choice of film material (23–24).
10. See also Dyer “Star.”
3 ★★★★★★★★★★
✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩
Lillian Gish
Clean, and White,
and Pure as the Lily
KRISTEN HATCH
In the summer of 1912, eighteen-year-old Lillian Gish wrote to her friend, Nell Becker: “We are going . . . to New York in a few weeks as mother has rooms engaged. I don’t know what we are going to do when we get there. Dorothy [Lillian’s younger sister] wants to pose for moving pictures, so watch the billboards” (Gish, letter to Nell Becker, undated, 1912).1 Once the family reached New York, Lillian and Dorothy renewed their acquaintance with an old friend, Mary Pickford, whom they had met years earlier during their childhoods as itinerant stage actors. Pickford offered them an introduction to her director, D. W. Griffith, and later that summer the sisters starred in their first film, An Unseen Enemy (1912).
Lillian Gish, “The Lily Maid of the Cinema,” 1919.
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KRISTEN HATCH
Despite the fact that she appeared in over thirty films in 1912 and 1913, Gish did not become a star through her work with the Biograph Company, which was the last of the film production companies to publicize its performers. Although fans wrote to Motion Picture Story Magazine clamoring to know the names of the actors who appeared in such films as The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) and The Lady and the Mouse (1913), both of which featured Gish, the magazine’s “Answer Man” sternly scolded readers that questions about Biograph players would remain unanswered in accordance with the company’s policy of keeping its actors anonymous. However, in May 1913, the same magazine announced the “joyful news” that Biograph had finally relented and agreed to share personal information about the actors who appeared in Biograph films (“Greenroom Jottings,” May 1913, 166). The next month, Motion Picture readers were informed that Dorothy and Lillian Gish had starred in An Unseen Enemy, and in July, Lillian’s photograph appeared in the magazine’s Gallery of Picture Players, followed by Dorothy’s appearance there in the August issue. After Gish left Biograph for the Mutual Film Company in 1913, she began to appear more prominently in film publicity. In August 1914 she was featured in an article in Motion Picture Magazine, and in December of that year she and Dorothy both appeared on the cover of Photoplay. However, it was not until the release of The Birth of a Nation in 1915 that Gish began to gain widespread recognition. Some journalists erroneously described this as her first film, though most remembered her as having been among the Biograph “pioneers.” Readers of Motion Picture Magazine voted her performance in Birth as one of the year’s best, though she ranked far behind Mae Marsh, whose performance in the same film received much more acclaim.
While Griffith devoted himself to directing the epic Intolerance (1916), in which she would play a small but pivotal role as the Eternal Mother, Gish appeared in a number of feature-length films that demonstrated her range as a performer. In Daphne and the Pirate (1916), for instance, she was a plucky French girl who manages to fight off the band of pirates that has kidnapped her en route to New Orleans, while in Sold for Marriage (1916), she played a Russian immigrant nearly forced into marriage with an older, wealthy man. By 1917, Griffith’s leading actresses—Mary Pickford, Blanche Sweet, and Mae Marsh—had signed lucrative contracts with other production companies. However, Gish remained with Griffith for the remainder of the decade, assuming the ingénue roles that once would have gone to her more famous co-stars. In 1918, with her appearance in Griffith’s Hearts of the World (1918), Gish emerged as a full
y established star. That year she appeared in a Liberty Loan appeal directed by Griffith, as well as two other
LILLIAN GISH
71
Lillian Gish graces the cover of Photoplay Magazine, November 1919. From the author’s collection.
Griffith films, The Great Love (1918) and The Greatest Thing in Life (1918).
That year, her salary tripled, from $500 to $1,500 a week, and in 1919 her performances in Broken Blossoms and True Heart Susie secured her position as one of the screen’s leading tragediennes (Affron 117).
Despite this critical success, Gish’s future was uncertain. She wrote to Nell Becker: “I . . . don’t know what I am going to do next. This business is
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in such a queer state now that no one seems to know where they are or what they are doing” (Gish, undated letter, 1919). That year, Griffith assigned her to direct Remodeling Her Husband (1920)—Gish’s only foray into directing—and the Toledo Times announced that she would appear onstage in a “Griffith playlet,” although this appears not to have been the case. One reviewer summed up the uncertain status of Gish’s stardom: Miss Gish is a screen pioneer, commencing her career with Mary Pickford, Mabel Normand, and the Talmadges, yet she has never become definitely established in a place of public favor. We can estimate the popularity of Gloria Swanson, of Mary Pickford, of Norma Talmadge and Pola Negri, almost to the decimal point. But Miss Gish’s remains a problem. She has given great performances in great pictures, and yet curiously we regard each new endeavor as a test of her. She appears as a wraith hovering on the borderland between oblivion and reality, a mystical creation whose power hypnotizes us momentarily and then leaves us wondering if it is not an illusion.
(James R. Quirk, “What Does the Future
Hold for Lillian Gish?” Photoplay 1919)2
To a certain extent, the “problem” of Gish’s stardom stemmed from her ongoing association with Griffith; she was a “Griffith girl,” which prompted a number of commentators to attribute her success to his direction. It may also be that Gish represented a different type of star than did Pickford, Negri, or the Talmadge sisters. While their stardom rested, to some extent, on the development of a respective character type that they enacted from one film to the next, Gish was celebrated for her ability to make each of her characters appear wholly unique. More important, Gish’s offscreen persona destabilized the very ideology that informed her films with Griffith. In her most celebrated screen roles Gish embodied a civilized womanliness, driven by maternal desire and dependent on the protection of men. Offscreen, however, her persona reflected a very different image of modern femininity. Within the pages of such magazines as Photoplay and Motion Picture, Gish appeared to be ambitious and independent. These two aspects of her stardom were not merely contradictory; her star persona in fact undermined the ideological work of the films, making them seem outmoded while helping to forge a new vision of modern womanhood.