StarD_Bean_1910s_final

by Ellen Dawson

  4. See Lew Sarett, “Ballade of a Rheumatic Vampire,” Motion Picture Magazine, April 1918, 100; Gordon Seagrove, “In the Vale of the Vampire: A Terrible Thing in One Installment,” Photoplay, March 1917, 91–93; Jack Frost and F. Henri Klickmann, “Theda Bara (I’ll Keep Away from You),” McKinley Music Co., 1916; Helen Carlisle, “The Deadly Ten-Angled Limerick!”

  Motion Picture Magazine, December 1916, 87; Gladys Hall, “Plays and Players,” Motion Picture Magazine, March 1916, 97; Helen Carlisle, “The Vampire,” Motion Picture Magazine, May 1922, 8, 42.

  5. Irving Berlin, “Sadie Salome Go Home,” 1909, www.lyricstime.com/irvingberlin-sadie-salome-go-home-lyrics.html.

  6. See, respectively, “Some 500,000 Spectators Follow Her Every Day,” New York Times, 20 February 1916, X8; “Theda Makes ’Em All Baras,” New York Times, 17 November 1917, 11; Alma Whitaker, “New Theda Bara Is Born of Exclusive Society Setting,” Los Angeles Times, 28 July 1918, 11.

  6 ★★★★★★★★★★

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  Geraldine Farrar

  A Star from Another Medium

  ANNE MOREY

  Despite the brevity of her screen career, the experiences of soprano Geraldine Farrar (1882–1967) in Hollywood and Fort Lee, New Jersey, define many of the most significant trends in stardom of the mid-teens to the early 1920s. Her entrance into filmdom in 1915 and her exit from it in early 1920 similarly bracket a period of major transition for American film as a whole, marking the moment when directors came to rely less on stage talent and more on talent created within the film industry (Koszarski 228). Farrar’s career marks the peak of the importance of stardom derived from the stage, or, in her case, the opera, taking, as Jesse Lasky observed, “the curse off movie work for stage personalities” (118).

  Geraldine Farrar. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

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  But while Farrar obviously represents a classic instance of the star-making strategy of borrowing fame garnered from elsewhere, this chapter argues that the specific contours of Farrar’s personality and training made her far more valuable to the film industry than her opera prestige alone would suggest. Her importance resided in her ability to unite two apparently incompatible aims: she permitted film to make a claim for the upper-middle-class carriage trade at the same moment that she helped to domesticate a cadre of risqué “brothel play” roles.

  Farrar was perhaps the most popular American-born opera star of the first quarter of the twentieth century. After beginning her career in 1901 in Germany, where she trained with Lilli Lehmann (Farrar 34) and was rumored to be a possible marriage prospect for the son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, she returned to the United States in 1906, where in 1907 she performed as the first American Cio-Cio-San in Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, opposite Enrico Caruso. She continued her career largely at the Metropolitan Opera under the general direction of Giulio Gatti-Casazza, performing frequently with Caruso in operas such as Carmen. Farrar developed a fervent following, with troops of primarily female “Gerry-flappers” (including Dorothy Gish) worshiping at her shrine (Wagenknecht, “Geraldine” 24).

  Indeed, during her final performance at the Metropolitan Opera in 1922, the “Gerry-flappers” unfurled a banner reading “None But You” (Brenda Ueland, “Geraldine Ferrar and Her Father,” Liberty, 25 April 1925, 23), and Tim Page noted that “Farrar was mobbed by thousands of admirers who escorted her open car up Broadway” after her last matinee (“The Opera’s First Superstar,” New York Times, 28 February 1982, D19). Cecil B. DeMille attempted to explain the swarms of admirers by describing the Farrar personality as “not synthetic. It was magic” (DeMille 140). When she signed her first film contract in 1915 with Lasky, her participation in filmmaking was considered quite a coup; Lasky, Morris Gest, and Samuel Goldwyn all emphasize their personal roles in garnering her services, suggesting how important her stardom seemed to each of them (Gest, “Winning Farrar,”

  Photoplay, July 1915, 115; Lasky 116; Goldwyn 83). Indeed, William C. de Mille describes her at the time of her first contract as a star so important that she was Famous Players’s best hedge against the drawing power of Mary Pickford, who had been signed by Adolph Zukor (de Mille 147).

  Clearly, then, Farrar’s film career, involving only fourteen films and four directors, marks a moment when the film industry successfully used class to appeal to the mass. Both Lasky and Goldwyn claim in their autobiographies that Farrar’s presence before the camera represented a bid for high culture’s long-delayed approval of cinema (Lasky 116; Goldwyn 83), a view ratified by

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  Sumiko Higashi, who sees Farrar’s contract as the sign of a more aggressive and programmatic attempt to extend the mass of filmgoers upward ( Cecil 1).

  But more than obvious lion-hunting explains Farrar’s value to her producers: she was not only already famous but associated with particular kinds of realist dramas that her two studios (Paramount and later Goldwyn) desired to replicate onscreen. If Farrar’s movies attracted highbrow audiences, they also made it possible for producers to introduce less genteel stories and more daring performances than would have been acceptable had they been under-taken by someone without Farrar’s associations with European high culture and Yankee rectitude. Specifically, stories of “the woman who pays,” the reformed or unreformed woman of ill-fame, would not have been as acceptable onscreen had they not been enacted by an opera star whose reputation as a performer was associated with a notable gift in classical music.

  These roles, which represent a significant portion of major nineteenth-century repertoire for sopranos, consorted both with Farrar’s taste and with her operatic résumé. Katie Johnson notes that a “consistent feature of both highbrow and lowbrow entertainments [was] . . . the repeated obsession with the prostitute figure” (2), adducing as evidence fifty stage plays involving such characters produced in New York between 1898 and 1922 (1), rising to a peak during the panics about young urban women being sold into white slavery during the early 1910s. While narratives of this sort had been present in film as well, they were often presented clinically, buttressed by claims that they were forces for social hygiene rather than entertainments, and/or featured competent but asexual heroines whose aim it was to contain sexuality rather than to celebrate it. Farrar’s reputation, fan following, respectable background, and association with serious music made it possible to claim for art her performances as a sexually liberated woman, thus cementing the respectability of quasi-operatic and sexually suggestive plots for a status-conscious and socially vulnerable industry. That Farrar was simultaneously, as an actress, part of what Johnson calls the “display economy” essential to narratives of the fallen woman of the early twentieth century (22) and a woman who earned her living through the mastery of a demanding training explains the dual nature of her appeal. As a performer impersonating the seduced or the seductress on stage, Farrar flirted with the déclassé; but as a competent, admired singer she held the déclassé at arm’s length. Her offstage reputation for hard work, probity, and devotion to her parents also made any imputation of personal irregularity unthink-able. Clearly, Farrar possessed a shrewd understanding of her gifts as a performer and of the state of two performance traditions, one well established and the other just developing.

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  Farrar was an alert businesswoman in addition to being an insightful and articulate performer, and her decision to sign with Lasky indicates that the gratifications of Farrar-on-film were not exclusively on the studio’s side.

  The offer to appear in motion pictures (which might even have originated with Farrar, as Goldwyn’s account implies [Goldwyn 83]) came at the moment when the opera houses of Europe were closed to her as a result of World War I. When Farrar returned to the Metropolitan in triumph, signaling the Americanization of European high art, she doubtless intended to devote a
significant part of her time to American audiences. Had the war not intervened, however, she would have expected to accept engagements in Europe that did not conflict with the Met season. Notably, her work in cinema was contained entirely in five summers, whether in Fort Lee or California, when her services as singer would otherwise not have been much in demand. For a woman who could foresee her eventual retirement from the opera stage (as Farrar mandated for herself at age forty), motion picture work offered a hedge against lost income and an opportunity to accumulate capital.

  In a bid for recognition of the gentility and wealth of film producers, much was made of the size of Farrar’s contracts in the press, with Photoplay and the New York Times reporting Jesse Lasky’s offer of two dollars per minute of sunlight for the summer engagement (Gest, “Winning Farrar,”

  Photoplay, July 1915, 117; “Miss Farrar in Movies,” New York Times, 28 April 1915). Farrar received other emoluments, such as the use of a private rail car out to California, a furnished house, servants, and a private dressing room/bungalow equipped with grand piano (de Mille 140). Her salary for film work ultimately compared favorably with her compensation for singing. Farrar’s 1918 contract with the Metropolitan Opera offered her $1,500 a performance for a season of forty-five performances (FP, box 12, folder 15),1 an improvement upon her 1915 contract with Lasky, which provided $20,000 for eight weeks work (according to William de Mille

  [148], although the editor’s note in Gest’s account calculated her salary at $75,000 for the summer [115])—but her 1917 contract with Goldwyn offered her $150,000 for four months’ work in each of her final two years, 1918 and 1919 (GP, File 4770, 12 July 1917 memo regarding contract). Farrar’s penultimate contract with Goldwyn contained the provision that she would receive the larger of 10 percent of the gross or $300,000 for the two years’ work, a stipulation that sales figures never triggered (FP, box 12, folder 11), but there was no doubt that Farrar was earning one of the largest salaries granted a “part-time” movie star. Her multiple sources of income meant that when her popularity waned and Goldwyn sought to

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  suspend her contract for a time, she could afford simply to tear up the agreement, an act of generosity so unprecedented in Goldwyn’s experience that he marvels at it in his autobiography (Goldwyn 154–56).

  Film also had the potential of multiplying the effects, in terms of both money and fan following, of recording contracts that Farrar had already negotiated. Like Caruso, Farrar performed early for Victor Records (beginning in 1907), evidently commencing her recording career in Germany a year or two prior. Film similarly held out the promise of preserving another aspect of her persona, as a 1915 plug in Woman’s Home Companion attested.

  In it, Farrar acknowledges the importance of the phonograph in populariz-ing her work but notes that “to you in the thousands of small towns and to many of you in the big cities I am but the voice, an elusive being—no visible personality. It is because I want to come closer to you in reality that I have taken up that other imperishable record—the motion picture. I want to record my work as an actress in ‘Madame Butterfly,’ ‘The Goose Girl,’

  ‘Carmen,’ as well as my singing. I want to give you these records now, while youth smiles upon me” (Helen Duey, “The Newest Motion Picture Star,” August 1915, 16). Farrar’s recordings may also have helped the domestication process, making her seem a more familiar figure, as someone associated with the home phonograph. Her film performances, as she suggests, are likewise an amplification of an already extant persona and not a creation de novo.

  Farrar’s correspondence shows her to be alert to the status problems in opera, and, in another instance of mutual colonization between Farrar and her producers, she may have hoped to win opera fans through cinema performances. Her opera career commenced as the less disciplined, more demonstrative audience for such entertainments, as detailed by Lawrence Levine in Highbrow/Lowbrow, was subdued into well-behaved bourgeois worshippers at the shrine of culture. Farrar’s return to New York occurred at just the moment that Gatti-Casazza noted that American audiences were so disciplined that they might be insufficiently critical of poor work (Levine 194). The price of the disciplined audience was the loss of some of its members to more popular entertainments, and Farrar appears to have come down on the side of maintaining concessions to popular taste even within

  “highbrow” forms. In an undated reply to a letter from stage actress Minnie Maddern Fiske, who was apparently contemplating the writing of an opera libretto, Farrar writes that “a good imitation of our popular repertoire is not to be despised. If there is a melody or motif for mechanical reproduction, so much the better for operatic success. We are using double bills often—and the change is very appreciable to offset the heavy repertoire of great length

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  and stereotyped opera form” (FP, box 9, folder 12). As this letter suggests, both the film industry and contemporary opera (represented presumably by figures such as Ruggero Leoncavallo as well as Puccini) experienced a hunger for texts that were at once popular and critically well regarded.

  It may be worth briefly comparing Farrar’s screen career to those of her contemporaries Caruso and the Scottish-born Mary Garden, who moved to films more slowly and whose performances on celluloid never received much praise beyond their novelty value, limiting them both to just two films each. Farrar was able to turn her operatic background to greater advantage ( Carmen alone gave rise to numerous filmic spinoffs, as I argue below), whereas Caruso and Garden floundered when they attempted to parlay stardom in opera into stardom on the screen. Caruso, for example, played a Caruso-like opera singer in My Cousin (1918), which did so badly at the box office that his second feature, A Splendid Romance (1919), which also had a musical background, was never released; Garden made the unpopular Thaïs (1917) for Goldwyn, another courtesan role chosen presumably because of her strong association with it on the stage. Garden’s second film, The Splendid Sinner (1918), in which she plays the erstwhile mistress of a German spy, similarly exploited a somewhat risqué past—

  although evidently not very successfully, inasmuch as Variety commented that “some people will say that this picture did not get over because it did not have the usual happy ending. To the majority of the audiences the fact that Mary Garden as the heroine was shot at sunrise will be an extremely happy ending” (5 April 1918, n.p.). Notably, only one of Farrar’s film roles, her Carmen (1915), was an adaptation of an opera, although several of her films were set in the world of opera or involved the travails of a struggling young performer.

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  ✩ Farrar and Role Construction

  The length of Farrar’s screen career relative to Caruso’s and Garden’s can be explained in part by her good fortune in being associated with David Belasco and the de Milles,2 who made her the recipient of stories that suited her performance style. Not only was Belasco a close connection of the De Mille theatrical dynasty, having worked with Henry De Mille and William C. de Mille and Cecil B. DeMille, but he also helped as both playwright and impresario to mediate between the worlds of opera and the stage. His work (often with collaborators) was the source of two Puccini adaptations, Madama Butterfly and La Fanciulla del West, and he also adapted Pierre Berton and Charles Simon’s Zaza in 1898, which two years

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  later became the opera by Leoncavallo, with which Farrar was to finish her career at the Met. Gest, one of the figures who claimed to have captured Farrar for cinema, was Belasco’s son-in-law, reinforcing the importance of the connections among Belasco, the de Milles, and, of course, Lasky. This shared connection with Belasco suggests that Farrar was to some degree already well integrated, certainly on a personal level but also in terms of taste, with the figures who were experimenting in film with realist texts involving, to paraphrase Victorien Sardou, the �
�tortured woman.” Indeed, Belasco has very strong associations with the brothel play; beyond Butterfly and Zaza, there are his productions of The Easiest Way and Lulu Belle. Farrar’s opera repertoire had already exposed her to the kind of drama that appealed to the tastes and business strategies of the film producers of the mid-1910s, and her understanding of herself as performer mandated, as we shall see, a desire for more Belasco-like texts.

  Indeed, developing the right texts for Farrar initially proved to be a family affair for the de Milles and their immediate circle, likewise steeped in Belasco. Cecil directed all six of Farrar’s Paramount pictures, and William wrote or co-wrote the scenarios for the first three: Maria Rosa (1916), the former Sarah Bernhardt vehicle that also starred Farrar’s husband Lou Tellegen during its American run; Carmen, which obliged William to return to the Prosper Mérimée novella for reasons of copyright; and Temptation (1915), a project shared by William with Hector Turnbull, scenarist of The Cheat (1915).

  Now apparently lost, Temptation shares The Cheat’s interest in a woman who is obliged to “pay” for services rendered, bringing it in line with the plots of a number of Belasco texts. The screenplay reveals Temptation to be the story of a young woman who is brought to the verge of prostituting herself to a malignant impresario who demands her sexual favors to forward her opera career and the career of her fiancé, a violinist and composer played by Pedro de Cordoba. The final scene spares the heroine the agony of surrendering herself to her pursuer through a convenient murder performed by her dis-carded rival, but not until she presents herself to pay her “debt.” Stills indicate the film’s interest in orientalist detail, including costumes associated with a production of Butterfly, the appearance of Sessue Hayakawa in a minor role, and the deployment as decoration of the brazier so prominently featured in The Cheat as the means of heating the iron chop by which the heroine is branded in that film, suggesting an attempt to integrate Farrar into a narrative that shared some of that film’s preoccupations (they were released within two weeks of each other in December 1915). While The Cheat now looms large in any account of the important films of 1915, Higashi observes that Carmen received bigger notices among domestic critics ( Cecil 111).