by Ellen Dawson
(Smith 88). And her publicity often played on this contrast between her old-fashioned screen image and her offscreen status as the embodiment of modern womanhood: “Lillian Gish has always stood alone in the world of the cinema—a gentle figure of idylism [ sic], a maid of poetic elusiveness.
But she is infinitely more than all this, for she not only thinks intelligently, but her view is at once alert, advanced, and even radical” (Smith 16).
Often, publicity for Gish evoked the technology that defined the modern age, with Gish in the role of scientist or industrialist. Her characterizations of the “sweet, demure” creatures she played on the screen were inspired not by a feminine instinct for emotion but by intelligent analysis: An electrician watching her work one day suddenly exclaimed, “That girl ain’t an actress—she’s a mechanic.” He could give no explanation for his observation aside from a mumbled, “She knows her stuff.” Examining Miss Gish’s characterizations you find that she achieves greatness of effect through a single phase of emotion—namely hysteria. And she knows precisely the method of it. “It is expressed by the arm from the elbow to the fingers,” she says scientifically, “and depends entirely on rhythm—the gradual quickening of movement up to the point desired.”
(James R. Quirk, “What Does the Future
Hold for Lillian Gish?” Photoplay 1919)
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Likewise, while she embodied domestic femininity on screen, Gish would never marry nor bear children. She explained to one interviewer why she intended to remain unmarried: “Marriage is a business. A woman cannot combine a career and marriage. . . . Marriage requires the same concentra-tion, undivided energy, and skill that is demanded to successfully manufacture automobiles or steam yachts” (Smith 16). Gish’s rhetoric—suggesting that a woman’s role in marriage is the domestic equivalent of manufacturing modern machines—echoes the ideology of domestic femininity by suggesting an equivalence between women’s role in the home and men’s in the modern world of manufacturing, only to reject marriage in favor of a career.
To a certain degree, female stardom is by definition emblematic of modern womanhood simply by virtue of the stars’ visibility. Gish was widely celebrated as “the most beautiful blonde in the world” and publicity capitalized on her status as an object for public consumption and a tool for advertising commodities, especially to women. Triangle, for instance, offered photographs and promotional tips designed to capitalize on her beauty. In promoting A House Built upon Sand (1916), in which Gish plays a society girl transplanted to a factory town where she recognizes the empti-ness of her former life, Triangle proclaimed: “The first few reels comprise a real fashion show. Lillian Gish appears in some beautiful gowns and further adds to the ornamental value of the picture by giving a graceful exhibition dance” (“The House Built Upon Sand,” New York Telegraph, 24 December 1916). Likewise, for Diane of the Follies, in which Gish played a frivolous showgirl, exhibitors were advised to trumpet the cost of the gowns she wore in the film. “There are some excellent photographs to be obtained of Miss Gish in many of the gowns worn in the picture. A lobby display made up from them would prove a strong magnet for women patrons” (“Flashes through Scenes of Interesting Tale,” The Triangle, 2 September 1916). Far from positioning the fashionable, exhibitionist woman as a danger to the continuing progress of civilization, exhibitors appealed to women’s presumed penchant for self-display, promoting fashion as a means for women to participate in modern life.
This is not to say that publicity for Gish entirely rejected the ideology of domestic womanhood that characterized her film roles. To the contrary, many stories about Gish attempted to resolve the tension between this vision of modern womanhood and the celebration of a more traditional femininity found in her films. Although Lillian Gish remained unmarried, interviews often positioned her within a family context, with Mrs. Gish in the role of the ideal mother. And Gish’s work as a screen actress was reconfigured as woman’s work, providing uplift on a grand scale. One interview
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with Mrs. Gish, for instance, quotes her explaining, “My girls believe in rather a close corporation so far as family life is concerned, but they do derive unlimited pleasure from the realization that they are helping to lighten the burdens of humanity by their artistry on the screen” (Billy Leyser, unidentified clipping). Although Gish did not enjoy the beneficent protection of a husband or father, magazine and newspaper stories produced the impression that D. W. Griffith had stepped into the role of paternal protector of his star.5
In this sense, Gish embodies the contradiction that underlies female stardom during this period. While mainstream American culture may have idealized female domesticity, women on the screen were by definition inhabiting a realm beyond the domestic sphere. Rather than representing heterosexual romance that would result in the perpetuation of the American family, they invited a different sort of love, a sterile adoration. James Branch Cabell captured the phenomenon in his controversial 1919 novel, Jurgen, which includes a character modeled on Gish. She is Queen Helen, a paragon of beauty who lives in the city of Pseudopolis and represents all women men have loved in vain. The novel’s protagonist is overwhelmed by Helen’s beauty: “Never had Jurgen imagined that any woman could be so beautiful nor so desirable as this woman, or that he could ever know such rapture” (228). However, Queen Helen remains as untouchable and remote as a film star, unaware of his admiration, or indeed his very existence.
This characterization of Gish as a sterile beauty was not limited to Cabell’s novel. While most commentators associated Gish with the lily of her name, at least one journalist opined that “her exquisitely graceful personality reminds one of the wax-like gardenia” (Benjamin Zeidman, “The Lily of Denishawn,” Motion Picture, October 1915). And while flowers might generally suggest fertility, Gish was a “pale, perfumeless lily” (Julian Johnson, “The Real Lillian Gish,” Photoplay, August 1918, 24). Her pale coloring in this context connotes not racial purity, but the cool remoteness of a movie star. Likewise, in a letter to Motion Picture magazine, a fan fantasizes what he would do if he were “a young and handsome millionaire”: “I’d get me a whole outfit and buy, bribe, bluff or marry Lillian and make her make pictures for me all the rest of her life, and they wouldn’t be shown outside our home, ’eyether” (E. A. Wamsley, letter, Motion Picture, January 1917, 166). The writer at once celebrates Gish’s beauty and imaginatively repositions her within the home. Paradoxically, however, this wish-fulfilling fantasy shuns the image of traditional domesticity, replete with children, in favor of reproducing moving-picture images of Gish. However privatized the screenings, this fantasy retains and reflects the image of Gish as, pre-
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cisely, a motion picture actress rather than the traditional embodiment of domestic femininity.
✩★
✩★
✩★
✩★
✩ Conclusion
Gish’s star persona was clearly at odds with the ideology promoted in her films. Ultimately, this worked to undermine the logic of millennial Darwinism. Gish was celebrated as a paragon of her race, “the most beautiful blonde in the world.” However, while her films with Griffith demanded that idealized white womanhood be defined in relation to motherhood and domesticity, Gish herself demonstrated that the modern world offered new roles for women.
Further, the disparity between the meanings associated with Gish onscreen and off- helped to destabilize the relationship between image and reality that was the basis of eugenic thinking. In The Birth of a Nation, Ben Cameron falls in love with Gish’s Elsie Stoneman long before he ever meets her. When he sees a photograph of Elsie, Ben is immediately smitten. He carries the photo with him to war, and there is never a moment of doubt that the real woman will fulfill the expectations produced by her image. In this way, the film suggests that there is a stable correlation between image and reality; her s
weetness and virtue are visible, as apparent in the photograph as the color of her skin and hair. Likewise, in Broken Blossoms, the Yellow Man falls in love with Gish’s Lucy when he sees her from afar; her delicate frame and pale skin signal that she is a gentle and fragile creature.
Indeed, this trust in the correlation between physical attributes and moral character was one of the foundations upon which the ideology of racial progress rested: the visible characteristics associated with one’s race signaled one’s moral and intellectual stature.
Gish herself, however, was not what she appeared to be. As one commentator described her, “In reality Lillian, an ingénue in appearance, is a rather suave woman off the screen” (unidentified clipping, Photoplay, August 1918). Gish did not merely enact the roles she played on the screen; she embodied them. She was, after all, “clean, and white, and pure as a lily”
(Martha Groves McKelvie, “The Lily of Hearts of the World,” Motion Picture, August 1918, 120). The characteristics attributed to her race—her pale, almost translucent skin, her halo of golden hair, her delicate features—all contributed to her characterizations of fragile, pure, and innocent girls who long to transform themselves into mothers. However, this vision of whiteness was not what it appeared to be; her racial status was merely a mask that did not correlate to her personal qualities. Far from Griffith’s cherished
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imago of the eternal mother, Lillian Gish—the star—was an ambitious and intelligent woman who sought fulfillment through the art of film acting.
Gish made only two more films with D. W. Griffith in the 1920s, Way Down East (1920) and Orphans of the Storm (1921), before she and the director with whom she was so strongly associated parted ways. Griffith would never again achieve the critical success that he had attained, in part, through the films he made with Gish. His narratives would come to seem increasingly old-fashioned. Gish, however, would enjoy a long and celebrated career, redefining herself on the screen through such roles as Mimi in La Boheme (1926) and Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter (1926). With these roles, and with directors such as Victor Sjöström and King Vidor, the contradictions between her on- and offscreen personae would become less pronounced and she would be remembered less for her representations of virtuous wives than for her dedication to the art of acting and to preserving the reputation of her former director.
N OT E S
1. All correspondence between Lillian Gish and Nell Becker cited here and throughout the text can be found in Box 3 of the Lillian Gish Collection, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library.
2. Many 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. Bederman demonstrates how this ideology worked to support not only Euro-American male dominance in the writings of G. Stanley Hall and Theodore Roosevelt, but also the discourses that challenged white male dominance, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s arguments for (white) women’s rights and Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching campaigns. I would argue that vestiges of this ideology persist in discourses about democracy, whether in the American drive to impose democracies overseas or in the debates over gay rights, which are often framed in terms of American society’s evolution toward a complete democracy.
4. Griffith was well aware of the eugenics movement. The year before the release of The Birth of a Nation, he directed The Escape (1914), which opens with a prologue in which Dr.
Daniel Carson Goodman traces the evolution of microscopic life forms. According to the New York Times, “The Escape treats of eugenics and sex questions and shows in an interestingly told story what . . . the producers believe to be the haphazard way in which human beings select their mates and contrasts it with the alleged care used in the same selection by the lower animals” (“Show D’Annunzio’s Photo Play Cabiria,” New York Times, 2 June 1914).
5. Later, rumors would emerge that Gish and Griffith had been romantically involved, but there was no hint of a romance between the two in their publicity during the 1910s.
4 ★★★★★★★★★★
✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩
Sessue Hayakawa
The Mirror, the Racialized Body,
and Photogénie
DAISUKE MIYAO
Many popular audiences of cinema remember Japanese actor
Sessue Hayakawa (1886–1973) for his Oscar-nominated role as a frowning Japanese military officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). Yet Hayakawa was a movie star in the United States as early as 1915, and the only Asian matinee idol of the silent era (see Miyao). His astounding performance as a sexy villain in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915) propelled him to superstardom during a time when the general public supported segregation and when mixed marriages were illegal in many states.
Sessue Hayakawa, circa 1918. From the author’s collection.
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In The Cheat, Hayakawa played the role of Hishuru Tori, a rich Japanese art dealer on Long Island, and famous stage actress Fannie Ward portrayed heroine Edith Hardy, a young married Caucasian woman. In a key scene, Edith faints upon hearing that her stock investment has failed. Under the moonlight, in front of a shoji screen shining white in the dark corridor of a Japanese-style house, Tori slowly leans toward her limp body, whose skin is strikingly alabaster, and steals a kiss. When Edith awakens, Tori offers her money in exchange for her body. She accepts. But when she tries to return his money after her husband’s success in the stock market, Tori assaults her and brutally brands her naked shoulder with a hot iron bearing his trademark stamp. Edith fights back and shoots Tori in the shoulder. Ultimately, Edith’s husband pleads guilty to the shooting in order to save her name and he is arrested on a charge of attempted murder. During the trial, Edith confesses the truth, reveals the brand on her shoulder, and an enraged courtroom audience attacks Tori.
The Cheat reveals an intriguing contradiction at the root of Hayakawa’s stardom. On one hand, the violent reaction of the courtroom at the end of the film expresses white Americans’ intolerance of the racial Other, and stresses the impossibility of fully assimilating the Japanese in American society. On the other hand, the affective charge of the scene in which Tori brands the white woman violently appealed to viewers and propelled Hayakawa to international fame. The powerful effect of the branding scene emanates from Hayakawa’s face, revealed in a series of close-shots as Tori tears Edith’s clothes, grabs her hair, and brutally throws her forward onto the desk. As he lowers the branding iron closer and closer to Edith’s bare shoulder, pausing as the iron almost reaches her white flesh, the lighting from the brazier casts ominous shadows on his taut face, intensifying the tension of the scene. The branding itself is completed offscreen, but the smoke shimmers in front of Tori as he grimaces with a tightly closed mouth.
The intensity registered by Hayakawa’s face, its veritable assault on the viewer, was likened in its effect to that of a gun by French film critic Jean Epstein: “Hayakawa aims his incandescent mask like a revolver. Wrapped in darkness, ranged in the cell-like seats, directed toward the source of emotion by their softer side, the sensibilities of the entire auditorium converge, as if in a funnel, toward the film. Everything else is barred, excluded, no longer valid” (Epstein, “Magnification” 239–40).
The sensational appeal of Hayakawa’s performance in The Cheat ignited his immediate ascent to stardom, launching a critical and popular acclaim that would grow throughout the remainder of the decade. Importantly, however, the recurrent motif in most of Hayakawa’s star vehicles, the unbridge-
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able gap between two cult
ures or races, is often explained in a famous—and infamous—Orientalist line, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” from British author Rudyard Kipling’s 1889 verse, “The Ballad of East and West.” The line appears repeatedly as intertitles in Hayakawa’s star vehicles, including The Cheat, and in reviews. Each to His Kind (1917), a Hayakawa star vehicle produced at Lasky, for instance, was described by the New York Dramatic Mirror as “a screen version of Kipling’s assertion that ‘East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet’ ”
(“Each to His Kind,” 10 February 1917, 26). Although Hayakawa’s fame enabled him to establish his own production company, Haworth Pictures Corporation, in March 1918, he pragmatically understood that in order to realize profits, it was necessary to maintain, or enhance, the star image that Lasky had constructed for middle-class American audiences. Hayakawa confessed later: “[At Haworth] I was not about to change away from the type of picture which had earned me my fame and following” (Hayakawa 143).
If the “type of picture” that defined Hayakawa’s career suggests a stark distinction between “East” and “West,” then the line that repeats “never the twain shall meet” can also be read as a warning to the viewer who is sensually attracted to Hayakawa’s cinematic body. The point, quite simply, is that Hayakawa’s screen presence, especially the close-ups of his face, had a profound phenomenological effect. Following the release of The Cheat at the Omnia Pathé Cinema in Paris in the summer of 1916, drama critic Louis Delluc wrote in Le Film:
Of Hayakawa, one can say nothing: he is a phenomenon. Explanations here are out of place. . . . Once more I am not speaking of talent. I consider a certain kind of actor, especially him, as a natural force and his face as a poetic work whose reason for being does not concern me when my avidity for beauty finds there the expected chord or reflection. . . . It is not his cat-like, implacable cruelty, his mysterious brutality, his hatred of anyone who resists, or his contempt for anyone who submits; that is not what impresses us, and yet that is all we can talk about. . . . And especially his strangely drawn smile of childlike ferocity, not really the ferocity of a puma or jaguar, for then it would no longer be ferocity.