by Ellen Dawson
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✩ Work
Before a series of high-profile scandals in the 1920s established the movie star’s private life as a tragic nexus of substance abuse and sexual promiscuity, the star system of the 1910s policed itself in ways cal-
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culated to counter the image of the actor’s life created by theatrical stars (see deCordova; Fuller). Rather than being part of a nocturnal demimonde, movie stars engaged in wholesome and exhausting work during the day and retired to normal family lives in the evening. The serial queen’s athleticism perfectly harmonized with this orientation. In 1916, Cunard recommended rope climbing both as a corrective for the “underdeveloped arms” that menace any woman’s beauty and as a practical necessity for the stunts required by her serial work (“Rope Climbing Keeps Grace Cunard Fit,” Moving Picture Weekly, 10 June 1916, 31). White echoed the sentiment, advising aspiring actresses in 1917 to “Be strong. Exercise. Live in the open if possible. Go to bed early and get up earlier. Ride horseback, dance, swim, do everything that makes for health and steady nerves. Even beauty and ability cannot exist without them” (John Ten Eyck, “Speaking of Pearls,”
Photoplay, September 1917, 117). On the other hand, White’s 1914 pronouncement in Cosmopolitan Magazine that movie work “solves . . . the problem of women’s economic independence . . . for she may earn as much as two hundred dollars a week, and for fifty-two weeks in the year” may have been greeted with ambivalence by the contemporary “family values” crowd (“A Model of the Movies,” July 1914, 263). If so, they could find solace in White’s later declaration that she envied the domestic life of her married sister because “the woman who seeks a public career is bound to have an empty old age” (Hazel Simpson Naylor, “All Over the Plot at Pathé,” Motion Picture Magazine, May 1918, 48).
A married woman working in motion pictures in 1914 could be considered a demographic trendsetter. In the United States, the percentage of married women in the civilian labor force roughly doubled from under 6
percent in 1900 to just under 11 percent in 1910, at which point about a quarter of all women and about half of single women over sixteen worked for wages. To be more precise, 1,122,000 married women joined the civilian workforce through the course of the decade. Despite periods of reversal, the percentage of working married women remained relatively constant through 1930, when it began to grow by 4 to 8 percent each decade. Meanwhile, the proportion of single women who worked remained far more stable, fluctuating between 43 and 51 percent from 1900 to 1970, so that the doubling of the proportion of women in the workforce overall (from 21 to 42 percent) may be attributed largely to the growing numbers of employed married women (U.S. Census Bureau). While it seems safe to say that White voiced contemporary commonsense in opposing the financial independence of work to her sister’s married life, it also seems likely that her audience was beginning to wonder about the possibility (or necessity) of
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combining the two. Far from merely indicating a change of attitudes, the shift altered an established division of a labor in which a wife’s uncompensated domestic work supported her husband’s wage-earning activities. The change had broad socioeconomic causes and consequences (see Cott; Blackwelder; Livingston).
The question of whether or not stars were married—certainly among the most common of published fan queries—concerned not only romance, then, but also the possibility of combining it with work. Universal’s publicists seemed to surmise this early on. White largely succeeded in keeping her 1914 divorce and her second marriage in 1919 out of the papers and therefore appeared decidedly single at the height of her fame. In contrast, newspaper movie columns and fan magazines kept the news that Cunard and Ford might be married to each other alive by constantly denying it.
Only rarely did replies to fans note Ford’s marriage to writer Elsie Van Name. Rather than emphasize his domestic commitment, publicity underscored his working partnership with Cunard. In a typical 1916 interview, Ford explained: “Miss Cunard and I are an ideal team. We even work out the story together. Sometimes one of us, sometimes the other, has the original idea, and then she usually puts it into scenario form. She can dream scenarios. We play into each others’ hands. She is a very capable director herself, you know” (Mlle. Chic, “Talking to Francis Ford,” Moving Picture Weekly, 13 May 1916, 9). Describing the arrangement as incredibly efficient, Photoplay declared: “Both Ford and Miss Cunard are able to write, direct, and act with equal brilliance” (William M. Henry, “Her Grace and Francis,”
April 1916, 28). In all their serials except Lucille Love, competition between the characters establishes them as equally matched and eventually develops into a romance. When it celebrated their professional collaboration, then, publicity not only extended their onscreen personae offscreen but likely fueled speculation that the actors had a similar romantic destiny. Interestingly, when Cunard married Joseph Moore in late summer 1917, Universal publicist H. H. Van Loan presented the arrangement to readers of Motion Picture Classic as an extension of her frenetic production schedule. Over dinner at Levy’s Café after work, she bets fellow stars that she “can be introduced, wooed and married within twenty-four hours”—and wins despite five hours of sleep and a full morning shooting exteriors (“Here Comes the Bride,” August 1917, 46).
Cunard was not the only serial queen to acquire significant creative control over her productions. Kathlyn Williams directed herself in The Leopard’s Foundling (1914), for instance, and Ruth Roland produced a popular set of serials in which she starred, beginning with Adventures of Ruth
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(1919). Holmes co-directed “Escape on the Fast Freight,” although she was not credited onscreen—a not uncommon situation judging by contemporary accounts (see “Helen Holmes,” Moving Picture World, 16 January 1915, 382; “Escape on the Fast Freight,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 3 February 1915, 27). In general, the occupation of motion picture director was open to women in the 1910s (a window of opportunity that narrows considerably in the 1920s). Universal in particular distinguished itself for the numbers of women it credited as director (see Cooper; Mahar). Even so, Cunard was the only woman it entrusted with serials.9 This had everything to do with the fact that Universal tended to interpret the genre in ways that emphasized organizational hierarchy at the expense of professional collaboration. The company’s 1910s serials without Cunard and Ford tend to cast their heroines as talented amateurs who assist a male professional—he is a mine foreman, detective, military officer, etc. In contrast, Cunard and Ford often work for competing organizations. In The Broken Coin, for instance, he is the unacknowledged heir to a Balkan throne while she is a newspaper reporter in search of what turns out to be his story. Each holds half of a coin necessary to solve the mystery and save the kingdom. Similarly, in The Purple Mask she plays socialite Patsy Montez, who disguises herself as the eponymous bandit and, at the head of a gang from the Paris sewers, robs from the greedy to give to the needy. Ford’s Detective Kelley uses all the resources at his command in his efforts to apprehend her. In the end, however, they join forces to foil a bomb plot hatched by anarchists and abetted by river pirates. Whereas the development of the genre overall proposed that organizations worked best with clear, male-headed hierarchies, Cunard’s and Ford’s productions, consistent with their reputation as co-writers and co-directors, emphasized that the collaboration of professional equals was as effective and even more fun.
Although Cunard and Ford achieved unusual authority, a perhaps inevitable clash with management did result (see Birchard). White seems to have fit more neatly into the corporate machinery responsible for planning and directing her performances onscreen and off: “When fate picks out a girl for the photoplay career, it is liable to do all sorts of unexpected things with her life,” she tol
d Cosmopolitan readers, “exactly as the director does with her work” (“A Model of the Movies,” July 1914, 263).
Pathé’s manner of organizing White’s work, always directed by someone else in a story written for her, anticipates what would quickly become the industrial norm: men decide, women perform. Cunard and Ford’s success, however, suggested a different arrangement in which men and women might be equal work partners. In the publicity that linked these different
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approaches to the interests of fans, consideration of work was often explicitly connected with concern over stars’ marital status. In this way, serial stardom organized an early, if still inchoate and inconclusive, discussion of what would replace the traditional household headed by a male breadwinner. At the same time, it raised the question of what it would mean for men and women to compete at the office.
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✩ Conclusion
The serial queen’s volatile moment cannot be precisely
placed on any calendar; it is not a time period but a problem. Without a doubt, White, Cunard, and their imitators and rivals played a decisive role in the development of the global moving image culture of the 1910s. These
“nervy” heroines gripped the imagination of diverse audiences worldwide, and corporate filmmakers developed robust new mechanisms to circulate and commodify them. In tandem with formulaic serial narratives, multimedia marketing strategies succeeded in sustaining audience interest over a period of months. This provided an ideal platform for the development of star personae, which could in turn be used to manage the risks entailed by future production. If the resultant serials craze struck contemporary commentators as a decided novelty, however, the figure of the serial queen herself had clear precedents in magazine fiction, dime novels, and theatrical melodrama. In this sense, serials may be regarded as reassembling and enthusiastically repackaging well-tested cultural materials.
Whereas noting precedents drags the serial queen’s moment into the past, attention to her problems propels her into the future. Her fans wanted to know—or were expected to want to know—whether women could successfully combine marriage with work; whether being a woman necessitated subordination within a decision-making hierarchy; whether adventurous women had something in common with the potentially dangerous people on the other side of the globe and, if so, whether this made everyone more modern and substantially less like their parents; whether modern life demanded “nerve,” an unthinking and spontaneous approach to hazard; whether men and women could be “pals” as well as romantic partners; and whether it was possible to survive the numbing routines and surmount the shocking brutalities of modern life while still enjoying its proliferating pleasures—and all without damaging one’s reputation. For some early-twenty-first-century readers, these matters doubtlessly seem settled. For others, perhaps, they abide. The issue is less the existence of historical distinctions than their significance. One might feel the enthusiastic curiosity of
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Pearl White’s contemporaries to have long passed, but it is equally plausible to think of such enthusiasm living on among the contemporaries of Uma Thurman, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Garner, and other luminaries who have recently given new life to serial adventure. Perhaps the serial queen’s moment is, indeed, now.
N OT E S
Many thanks to Val Almendarez, Jennifer Bean, Barbara Hall, and Meeghan Kane for their help with research for this article.
1. Some were extended to twenty episodes or more and others had as few as eight.
2. In 1915, Rose (renamed Helen) Gibson took over from Holmes in the role.
3. Based on a European release, the nine-chapter version available on DVD differs substantially from the twenty-chapter version first released in the United States.
4. Using the Consumer Price Index, $200 in 1914 had the value in 2007 of $4,300.
5. Thanks to Qin Xiqing for the translation and reference: Zhou Shoujuan, “A Movie Review,” Shun Pao, 4 July 1920.
6. The term is George Sadoul’s (qtd. in Dall’Asta 161).
7. By the end of 1917, Universal had offices in London (through which it distributed to Africa and Australia), Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, Vienna, Budapest, Barcelona, Vilna, Pet-rograd, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Havana, Manila, Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore, Tokyo, and China (see Cooper). According to Hughes, Universal dominated the Indian market by the late 1910s and was the main supplier of serials to southern India after 1917 (38).
8. I know of no instance of local genius rivaling that of Félix and Edmundo Padilla, who reedited the 1916 Marie Walcamp serial vehicle Liberty, A Daughter of the U.S.A. as the heroic epic of Pancho Villa, on whom the villain of the serial was based. See Gregorio Rocha’s film Los Rollos Peridos de Pancho Villa (2003).
9. Universal credited a total of eleven women as director before 1919. Although Madison became famous for her role in the serial Trey o’ Hearts, she never directed serials.
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Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle
Comedy’s Starring Scapegoat
ROB KING
During the period of his greatest popularity in the mid- to late 1910s, few stardoms could have seemed more obvious, less in need of interpretation, than that of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, whose nickname encompassed his meaning. “Fatty” was, it seemed, the sole signifier of his stardom, a repeated fixing of Arbuckle’s identity that called for no supplement or explanation. One four-page fan magazine “profile” of the star, Photoplay’s “Heavyweight Athletics” in August 1915, offered little more than a tongue-in-cheek list of his daily diet, describing, for example, Arbuckle’s “very light luncheon” of “clam chowder; several seidels of beer; Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, undated photo.
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cold asparagus with mayonnaise dressing; a slab of roast beef; two or three baked potatoes; two pieces of blackberry or apricot pie . . . [and] a quart of buttermilk” (37). “How shall I describe for you the roly-poly of the screen, the cetacean of the cinema?” asked a 1919 newspaper interview entitled
“Roscoe Arbuckle, Mountain of Flesh, Achieves Fame.” The answer? “If all the jelly beans in the world were rolled into one that would be Fatty” (Ray Frohman, Los Angeles Herald, October 28, n.p.). Indeed, so deeply entrenched was Arbuckle’s fatness in his persona that it even shaped “news”
items in the more sober-minded trade press: “Comedian Eats and Wades His Way Across Country,” was how Moving Picture World described Arbuckle’s nationwide tour to publicize his signing to the Paramount program in early 1917; “Fat Actor Came in Special Car,” commented another report on the same tour, noting that Arbuckle was “so big that it was necessary to secure
[a] private car . . . as no berth or compartment is large enough to accommodate him comfortably” (“Arbuckle Finishes Transcontinental Trip,” 24
March 1917, 1930; “Arbuckle Warmly Received in Philadelphia,” 17 March 1917, 1891).
Countless further examples could be cited. The impulse to fix Arbuckle’s meaning, to freeze his stardom within his fatness, was a constant within critical discourse on the 275-pound comedian. If the “truth” of star discourse is, as some have argued, ultimately a truth of the body, then there can be few in whom that dynamic has been more powerfully articulated than Roscoe Arbuckle, whether as the much-loved “roly-poly of the screen”
of the 1910s or as the seemingly grotesque, perverted body of his career-ending scandal in 1921. “Arbuckle’s weight will damn him,” was the opinion of lawyer Earl Rodgers, who refused to defend Arbuckle from charges of manslaughter following the death of starlet Virginia Rappe a few days after a wild party in Arbuckle’s San Francisco hotel room. “He will no longer be the good-natured fat man that e
verybody loved. He will become a monster” (Edmonds 180). So capacious was this fatness that it ultimately came to stand for more than Arbuckle himself, becoming, with the scandal, a shorthand for broader anxieties about the movies and cultural hierarchy, a synecdoche for the vulgar world of cheap amusements from which the industry had long sought to distance itself. The events that terminated his career can thus be read as a necessary turning point in the movies’ emergence as “mass” entertainment, neatly separating the industry of the 1910s (a period of transition) from the industry of the 1920s (a period of consolidation). Arbuckle’s fatness became polluted and obscene, at once the dead weight that allegedly crushed Virginia Rappe’s bladder and a symbol of moral disorder whose expulsion permitted the “normalization” of the