by Ellen Dawson
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Matters look a bit different, Stamp argues, if one considers the types of marriages serial queens helped fans envision. For instance, when the New York Federation of Women’s Clubs complained of the movies’ “ ‘degenerat-ing influence upon the young’ by encouraging women to be ‘pals’ with men,” White responded by endorsing just that program: “‘Why not give our men the same comradeship that many of them never find outside their clubs?’” she asked (qtd. in Stamp 147–48). Such comradeship, and the gender confusion it entailed, was a defining element of White’s persona. For example, her publicist, Frank Bruner, characterized the “real Pearl White”
as, first, “a rattling good fellow,” and then, “a human, likeable person”
(“The Real Pearl White,” Motion Picture Magazine, July 1919, 33–34). More broadly, coverage in newspapers and fan magazines depicted the serial queen’s private life as according with expectations for women in some ways while defying tradition in others. Visits to their (always impressive and tasteful) homes, attention paid to their (always plentiful and lovely) gowns, and reminders of their devotion to relatives and pets appeared alongside indications that those relatives depended on the stars’ salaries, descriptions of the serial queens’ characteristic passions such as motoring and outdoor sports, and notices that they lacked enthusiasm for domestic chores. While serials conducted their heroines’ adventures in a way that appeared to restore patriarchal order, the serial queen herself arguably modeled a new kind of woman within broader fan culture: she appeared a talented shopper and homemaker, perhaps, but also an adventuresome, and equal, companion for a modern man.
Singer and Stamp both situate the serial queen amidst the social upheavals of turn-of-the-century modernity in order to argue for her particular relevance to the changing social circumstances of women in her audience. Jennifer M. Bean reverses that impulse. In her account, the serial queen figures for the possibility that anyone might survive the perilous pleasures of modern life, and in so doing secures cinema’s claim to represent it. Looking back in 1932, Cunard slighted then-current stars as fussy and pampered, pointing out that in her day, in addition to working long hours, “We did all the stunts and went to the hospital regularly. They used to call the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, ‘Grace Cunard’s Hotel’ ”
(“Crowded out of Stardom,” New Movie Magazine, February 1932, 117). Her cohort’s performances were authentic, Cunard implies, because they put their bodies on the line. This same conceit established the serial stars’
appeal in the first place, argues Bean. Celebration of the physical hazards of motion picture performance proclaimed a defiant, bodily reality in the face of modernity’s rationalization not only of work, but also of increasingly
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ritualized mass consumption. Bean particularly notes the frequency with which serial queen’s risk-taking is attributed to “nerve-strength” as opposed to knowledge or reason. White is “nervy”; Marie Walcamp is “absolutely stupid when it comes to defining the word ‘fear’”; while Cleo Madison
“does not know the name of fear, and it is not a question of what her director . . . can prevail upon her to do, but what he can prevail upon her not to do” (qtd. in Bean, “Technologies” 38). Here as elsewhere, Bean points out, the serial queen’s risk-taking subjectivity is “staged in opposition to a ‘they’
or, more often, a ‘he’ who knows better—more simply, one who knows.”
That such discussions would credit knowledge as masculine (if curiously diffuse and impersonal) is less notable, however, than the fact that “the star’s ability to act without thinking—to take play seriously—registered as a sign of enviable resiliency” (Bean 38). “I have actually gotten to like fear,”
writes White (161). Such a condition was enviable in a world where display windows, mass transportation systems, traffic, and crowds all signal pleasure and danger: if one wants to get to work on time, or linger in front of an alluring shop window, there is no time to weigh the risks of being mugged or run over. Whereas Singer and Stamp explain the serial queen’s particular appeal to women, Bean proposes her intuitive, bodily response to hazardous stimuli as a reason why her cult extended to, among others, modernists around the word.
Before considering that global reception, it bears observing that as a movie star, the serial queen might be associated with risk in one final way: she managed it. For the young and rapidly growing film industry, serials were a substantial undertaking. Relatively expensive to make, they also required careful orchestration in order to coordinate national publicity with regular releases of episodes. Phenomenal profits were possible— Photoplay in February 1917 reported that Perils of Pauline had taken in nearly a million dollars (“Harvesting the Serial” 19–26)—yet competition among producers was also intense. Success in the marketplace depended on three key strategies: the print tie-in, which transformed readers into moviegoers; the cliffhanger story-structure, which lured moviegoers back to theaters week after week; and the star who helped cultivate a predictable audience. Of these three strategies, the star was arguably the most important, because she most clearly distinguished the serials of different producers from one another; and she was also the most difficult to manage, because the extent of her appeal to a diverse and far-flung audience was apprehensible only in retrospect, after it had been produced. For this reason, filmmakers were willing to devote a significant portion of the budget to her salary. According to Cunard, White was paid the “unbelievable sum of $200 a week” for
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her work in The Perils of Pauline while she herself earned $125 a week for Lucille Love.4 Two years later, Cunard’s salary had grown to $750 a week (“Crowded out of Stardom” 117–19) and White’s presumably kept pace. If Pathé and Universal considered the expense worth it, this was doubtlessly because the star offered what the brokerage firm of Halsey, Stuart, & Co.
later described as “insurance value.” By taking individual risks to minimize corporate risk, the serial queen managed multitudes.
✩★
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✩ Propinquity
Those multitudes present a descriptive problem. To produc-
ers and audiences of the 1910s, it must have seemed that the whole world had miraculously united in its admiration of serial queens. But this global unity had only to appear in order to fracture into diverse nations and types, each with peculiar preferences. Accordingly, producers and exhibitors modified Cunard’s and White’s star personae to suit different contexts around the world. Meanwhile, studios, stars, and fan magazines developed mechanisms capable of filtering out fans’ individual idiosyncrasies so that their appreciation could be treated as a mass phenomenon—and reproduced. Serial queen fans from Racine to Paris and Poona City might learn of their shared interest through print media, but they would likely never meet, communicate directly, or exchange information that would let them explore other areas of mutual concern. Their relationships with one another, then, were less a matter of commonality than of new and surprising closeness, less a matter of mutuality than of propinquity.
In 1914, fifteen-year-old Edna G. Vercoe of Highland Park, Illinois, began piecing together six scrapbooks. Perhaps a third of each inch-thick leather-bound volume is devoted to The Perils of Pauline, and other serials captured Vercoe’s attention as well. The Exploits of Elaine (White’s follow-up to Perils), Lucille Love, The Million Dollar Mystery, and Universal’s Trey o’ Hearts (with Cleo Madison) all rate major sections. Through selection and juxtaposition, Vercoe produces a unique collage of mass-produced newspaper and magazine materials. She clips and assembles celebrity profiles, synopses, half-tone images, prose versions of serial adventures, and answers to questions posed by other fans. Sometimes the collage reveals a researcher’s instincts, as when conflicting answers
to questions about White’s marital status appear side by side in volume one. Often they reveal a keenly ironic sense of humor, as when, in volume six, she places a story headlined “A Mummy Come to Life” (describing the first Pauline episode), next to an answer to “Gussie H.—The Perils of Pauline are ended, yet you may yet
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come across one of them.” The scrapbooks also include stars’ replies to her letters and a few bits of correspondence from her friends about their shared movie obsessions. Crane Wilbur, White’s co-star in Perils of Pauline, receives almost as much attention as White herself, and a letter from Vercoe’s friend Flossie insinuates that Vercoe has a crush on him. Less expected, perhaps, is Vercoe’s interest in Lubin actor Romaine Fielding. Among the letters from actors that survive in the scrapbooks, Fielding’s reply is exceptional both in its length and in his request for a response: he asks for a photograph from Vercoe in return. For White—whose letter to Vercoe is unfortunately missing, although the envelope remains carefully pasted into volume six—one-way communications were clearly the norm (Edna G. Vercoe Scrapbooks, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, California).
In “The Ninety-Nine Lives of Pearl White” ( The Picturegoer, February 1921), White explains that a team of stenographers handles her voluminous fan mail. This does not mean she undervalues it. On the contrary, her 1919
autobiography, Just Me, describes fan mail as “one of the greatest mediums through which we [movie actors] can judge our popularity,” because, unlike in live theater, the performers and audience are not co-present. She receives as many as ten thousand letters a month and confesses that, “although I don’t have time to read them all, I should be heartbroken if they ceased, because the bundles of letters that are handed to me each day cheer me on a whole lot” (106). Fans familiar with the protocol limited themselves to the pro-forma request for an autograph and photograph. Thus, we may assume that Vercoe’s letter mattered to White (and Pathé) primarily as aggregated into a bundle. That it came from a particular teenager in Highland Park, with a friend named Flossie, a crush on Crane Wilbur, and a keen eye for the inconsistent and ironic, can have made little difference to the star, because she almost certainly did not have this information.
Filmmakers developed their understandings of fans through processes of sampling and counting that defined groups of individuals as types. For example, U.S. fan magazines’ decisions to publish certain kinds of information contributed to the conviction, by the end of the 1910s, that “movie fans” were young people and especially young, middle-class women (see Fuller). Vercoe’s scrapbooks confirm that she can indeed be typed in this manner. In addition, they point to a constellation of preferences and talents invisible to publicists, editors, and filmmakers. From the vantage they provide, we see clearly that fandom does not homogenize so much as manage multiplicities. It makes the conduct of diverse individuals predictable by hitching them to a common star. Cunard and White provide striking early examples of how such a mechanism could be extended globally.
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The 9 September 1916 issue of the Japanese fan magazine Katsudõ no sekai (The Japanese Movie Magazine) devoted its cover and an entire section to Grace Cunard, including articles promising “Gossip of Cunard’s Real Life,” “The Psychological Explanation of Cunard’s Expression,” and a comparison of “Grace Cunard and Pearl White.” The following month, Universal’s house organ, Moving Picture Weekly, reported on the story, claiming Cunard as the most popular actress in Japan, followed by White. The previous May, it had headlined “Ford-Cunard Popularity Wave Hits India” (27
May 1916, 31), and in July, Daisy Dean reported for the Racine Journal News that Cunard and Ford films had inspired “Vishwanath Chintman Bhide, who lives in Poona City, Bombay Presidency, India . . . to ‘hazard’ himself in the films”; he had written Universal for advice on becoming an actor (“News Notes from Movieland,” 18 July 1916, 6). In November, lavish advertisements for Cunard and Ford in The Broken Coin (1915) promised Puerto Ricans an experience that had stirred Europe (Rodríguez). In Gretna, southwest Scotland, and Carlisle, Cumbria, England, mostly female, most teenage, mostly single workers in munitions factories flocked to White’s The Exploits of Elaine in 1915. They were spurred on by an aggressive publicity campaign that featured a giveaway of a thousand “Elaine”
hats (see Brader). In Mexico, White’s serials led a “yanqui invasion” of the market that nonetheless inspired a self-consciously national fan culture (see Serna). In France, White’s “almost ferocious smile announced the upheavals of the new world” to surrealists (Soupault 61). White herself found it “really marvelous to get letters from all the different countries . . .
even from far away places like Iceland, Siam, Finland, Guatemala, the Colonies of South Africa, etc.” (106).
Importantly, the serial queens’ global popularity defined their fame for locals around the world: they were famous for being internationally famous. This nonetheless entailed local modifications. Bao Weihong provides a salient example of how the serial queen’s moment contains a problem of geopolitical difference when she explains how Pearl White returns to U.S. audiences as the Chinese prototype for The Bride (Uma Thurman) in Kill Bill: Volumes 1 and 2 (2003 and 2004). Although Quentin Tarantino’s epic explicitly acknowledges its debt to the popular nüxiapian (female knight-errant films) made by the Shaw Brothers in the 1960s and 1970s, it is imperative to recognize that the nüxiapian genre emerged in the late 1920s as an amalgam of traditional Chinese literary and theatrical forms, western-looking Chinese modernisms, and tremendously popular U.S. serials, especially those of Baolian (White’s Chinese name, derived from Pauline).
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Grace Cunard appears on the cover of the Japanese fan magazine Katsudõ no sekai (The Japanese Movie Magazine), September 1916.
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As Bao explains, and Qin Xiqing elaborates, the serial queens found themselves embroiled in discussions of what it would mean for post-Imperial China (the Qing Dynasty fell in 1911) to become a modern nation-state, an argument that inevitably entailed the question of what it would mean for Chinese women to become modern. As in the United States, the serial queen’s heroism and her fashion sense together proclaimed a new order in which women’s movements and sexuality would be differently regulated, particularly in that they themselves would seem to have more control over them. The question of whether this type of woman would remain American, or might become Chinese, posed an additional complication. In 1920, movie critic Zhou Shoujuan wrote in the Shun Pao (Chinese Daily News): “What Baolian does is only acting of an actress, but her braving untold dangers on the screen is something beyond any ordinary women. I would like to ask if there are any sisters of our country who can do that?”5 The answer, it turned out, was yes. Far from remaining essentially American, Baolian was so successfully translated by the host culture that her heroic legacy might well strike Tarantino’s audiences as un-ambiguously Chinese.
Such a process of translation is evident even in White’s initial popularity in the United States. Monica Dall’Asta reminds us that Pauline’s adventures, directed by a young Frenchman (Louis Gasnier) for Pathé, were a centerpiece of the French company’s effort to maintain a dominant position in the international market by Americanizing its product for U.S. audiences (see also Abel, Red; Dahlquist). The French firm turned out to be so good at making American serials that they felt the need to revise them for release in their homeland. To present the first White serial shown to French audiences (in the winter of 1915–1916), the company compiled twenty-two episodes from the three serials that featured her as Elaine Dodge ( The Exploits of Elaine [1914], The New Exploits of Elaine [1915], and The Romance of Elaine [1915]), rewrote intertitles to transform American scientific detective Craig Kennedy into French patriot Justin Clarel, and created a new prose version for the
feuilleton, the more elliptical French counterpart of American newspaper and magazine fiction. Thus domesticated as Les Mystères de New York, Elaine’s exploits offered a prototype for what Dall’Asta assesses as the first major French serial, Judex (1917), and gave impetus to the “serialomanie” that gripped the nation after the war.6 Dall’Asta sums up the lesson taught by these feats of translation and retranslation: “As soon as the initial outline of an international-popular culture begins to take shape, identities show themselves for what they are and always have been, dynamic formulations in a field of relations” (167).
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Chinese identities no more precede this field of relations than French or American identities do, but they are not positioned equally. As Dall’Asta notes, Pathé’s transnational distribution network, by far the most robust of its kind before the start of World War I, uniquely positioned the French filmmaker to conduct the serial’s internationalization. Universal was hot on Pathé’s heels, however, and Cunard would not have won popularity contests in Japan and India if not for the company’s aggressive movement into Asian markets.7 Like Pathé, Universal had far more power to outline an
“international-popular culture” than any of the Japanese, Chinese, and Indian firms that drew inspiration from the serial fictions they made and distributed. That such asymmetrical power often entails fear and ignorance of others is certainly evident in the stereotypes serials circulated as a matter of course. Judging by English-language plot summaries, advertisements, and (relatively few) surviving prints, labyrinthine Chinatowns, despotic rajas, and typically inscrutable Oriental villains were part of serials’ stock-in-trade. Although there remains much to learn about local reception, the fact that Japanese, Chinese, and Indian audiences and filmmakers took up serials despite their Orientalist iconography doubtlessly testifies, in part, to the genius of the locals responsible for appropriating and promoting them (see Bao; Bernardi; Hughes; Vitali).8 Features of the form itself may also help to explain it. The “dangerous stranger” trope unites characters that a racist optic might view as profoundly different. The stereotypical Chinatown thugs who kidnap Pauline, for example, do not seem substantially more devious than the old sailor who lures her out to sea with tales of hidden treasure, more diabolical than the western outlaws who bury her alive, or more perverse than the dope-fiend doctor hired to botch her appendec-tomy. Above all, serials plots required that the heroine’s adventures bring her into proximity with someone new (or newly disguised) and more dangerous than she expects. Even as it reprises racist caricatures to define the foreign as threatening, this structure also makes the foreign intensely interesting, since every stranger may harbor a murderous secret—or be a friend in disguise. In a similar way, one might argue, the serial queen brought the world’s audiences closer together and made them more curious about one another, without making them less divided or suspicious.