Go West, Young Women!

by Hilary Hallett

  II

  Beginning with the film industry’s invention of Los Angeles also recasts the explanation of how the formerly marginal, WASP-controlled and run-amok business of making movies in America became the dominant, highly centralized, cosmopolitan industry of early Hollywood. Indeed, the burden of this book’s opening chapters is to reconceive this process by describing the central role that women and the era’s sexual politics played in the metamorphosis. Accounts of the transition from the nickelodeon era to the age of the silent feature production in Los Angeles during the 1910s have long focused on how the industry abandoned its working-class, immigrant orientation to become a classless form of respectable entertainment. From this view, the move west helped producers to shed the nickelodeon’s identity as a disreputable, working-class form of entertainment “made by and for men.” This version of how Hollywood became Hollywood has an aesthetic corollary as well, one that roots American cinema’s development as an art form in the innovations of a few heroes out west. “By the end of the silent era [in 1929] the major dramatis personae of the tale were well known,” writes film scholar David Bordwell about the invention of what he calls the “Basic Story” about the origins of the look and feel of American-made movies: “American film is the creation of [D.W.] Griffith, Thomas Ince, [Cecil B.] DeMille, Mack Sennett, and Charlie Chaplin.” Iris Barry, the English film critic who became the world’s first film curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1933, helped to create this canon by preserving and publicizing these filmmakers’ work. Their films display the black-and-white moral certainties of Griffith’s traditional melodramas, the sweeping vistas of Ince’s many Westerns, and the slapstick antics and pathos of Sennett and Chaplin, the early industry’s two favorite clowns. Down to the present-day, retrospectives on American silent film still focus mostly on Griffith, whom Barry called “the ruling planet of the birth of motion picture production” and eulogized in her D.W. Griffith: American Film Master (1940).13

  But even a cursory inspection of the era’s fan culture reveals the same assumption at every turn: American silent film was mostly made for women with very different tastes. “Now one thing never to be lost sight of in considering the cinema is that it exists for the purpose of pleasing women,” Barry warned in an unhappy acknowledgment of this reality in The Public’s pleasure (1926). In their initial heyday, the Western and slapstick films of Ince, Chaplin, and Sennett, were understood to appeal to an increasingly marginalized audience of children and young men. Moreover, many of the most powerful leading ladies of the day deserted Griffith because of his insistence on casting them in what they considered old-fashioned melodramas. Indeed, it is possible to read Barry’s elevation of these directors’ status in part as a project of replacing early Hollywood’s feminine cast with a more manly sheen. For as Barry knew so well, in the years around the Great War, the years in which Hollywood rose, the industry’s reputation worldwide increasingly depended upon its mastery at producing the kinds of lavish, thrilling dramas and romances preferred by most of the female trade. The era’s contentious sexual politics ensured that women’s prominent roles in creating and consuming this distinctive visual landscape would make them into some of the most arresting figures out west. Thus an origin story about how Hollywood became Hollywood that marginalizes women cannot hope to explain why its first “social imaginary” lit up imaginations around the world.14

  Those who composed the first movie fan culture often framed their tales about the women who made Hollywood as part symbol of the particular desires female fans invested in the picture business, and part realistic picture of what a wage-earning woman who landed in Los Angeles might expect. Margaret Turnbull, the author of the first novel advertised “to lift the veil” on motion picture production in Los Angeles, offered what quickly became the conventional wisdom about these heroines’ motivations. Turnbull wrote The Close-Up (1918) three years after leaving New York City to help her friend William de Mille organize the new scenario department at Lasky’s Feature Play Company in Hollywood. She was a successful playwright, a published novelist, single, and just entering early middle age when she arrived at the Los Angeles Santa Fe depot in 1915 and headed for her new job at an old barn down a dirt road lined with pepper trees. The novel begins with its twenty-seven-year-old protagonist, Kate Lawford, suffocating under the “factory-like” conditions of her secretarial job in New York. When her boss asks her to help him organize a new studio in Los Angeles, Kate assents, thinking, “Here was a vision of the West. The West which spelled adventure, and that fantastic world of make believe, a picture studio, adventure, and strange people hers for the taking, and if God were good, the power to dream again.” Life inside the “little [movie] colony” provides a perfect antidote to the dead-end drudgery of life back east. Kate begins as the studio’s office manager and ends as its biggest star. At the novel’s end, she lovingly bids her friends and fellow workers adieu before retiring to marry a childhood sweetheart and run a California ranch. Here, then, was a place where a working girl “with lots of ‘nerve’ ” could find interesting work and professional mobility, dance till morning with friends of “delightful” warmth, and experiment romantically with several men before selecting the one of her dreams. Like most of the first stories about the “Romance of Making the Movies” in Los Angeles, the tale presented an optimistic picture of what an ambitious working girl with “brains and beauty” (in the parlance of the day) and some luck might find in this New West.15

  This presentation offered a sharp contrast with the parts played by women in the Old West. For much of the nineteenth century, the great newspaperman Horace Greeley’s charge “Go West, young man!” signaled a broad commitment to colonize the continent by sending the discontented men from all manner of Easts west. In the process, the West became not just a region populated mostly by single men but a space that symbolized their hope for seizing the main chance. “To the rightly constituted Man, there always is, there always must be, opportunity,” Greeley assured in 1850, exhorting men to “turn . . . to the Great West, and there build up a home and fortune.” But by 1900 female migrants outpaced male ones, effecting a “stunning” reversal in western migration patterns. Yet even as the feminization of western migration became entrenched, cultural elites and popular entertainers alike looked west to revitalize and rework masculine ideals that many white men feared under assault as women’s entrance into public life, the immigration of non-Anglos, and the corporatization of the workplace threatened their entrenched privileges. In this way, the long shadow cast by the West’s relationship to new masculine ideals and the tendency for studies on womanhood to look east have continued to obscure how the modern West’s possession of Hollywood created perhaps the most powerful generator and lure for a New Western Woman in full flight from feminine norms.16

  A cultural concept, social reality, and frustratingly slippery term, the “New Woman” arose with modern urbanity in 1895 and was inconsistently applied to several generations of women who challenged different aspects of Victorian ladyhood. Many of the changes associated with the type emerged from women’s soaring participation in work outside the home, as the number of adult wage-earning women shot from 2.6 to 10.8 million between 1890 and 1920. Indeed, the term New Woman gained currency in relationship to the first generation of middle-class women who challenged assumptions about women’s intellectual and physical abilities by eschewing marriage in record numbers in favor of work in “male” professions, political activism, and social reform. By the 1910s the expression conjured images of women and “girls” who emerged from the working-class milieu associated with the leisure habits and labor conventions of female bohemians, entertainers, and ordinary wageworkers. As they took jobs in department stores, offices, and social services, for the first time the majority of women, usually those who were white and native-born, experienced work as an endeavor that sent them outside the confines of factories or other women’s homes. Exiting their jobs each evening, many of these recently
rural transplants treated the city itself as a precious metal to be mined, extracting new pleasures from its burgeoning world of commercial amusements.17

  Women associated with this less respectable scene did the most to embody, create, and consume the New Western Women associated with Hollywood’s original social imaginary, women like the “peerless fearless girl,” serial queen Pearl White. “You know my adventurous spirit and desire to live and realize the greatest things,” White reminds her crestfallen suitor in the first episode of The Perils of Pauline (1914) after rejecting his marriage proposal so she can gather material for the novel she wants to write. The first movie stars like White and actress-writer-producer Mary Pickford invited their female fans to identify with a protagonist liberated from many of the customary restraints that economic dependence and the cult of domesticity placed on their bodies and hearts. As was still customary, White received no credit on celluloid for her portrayal of a heroine whose popularity reached across the Atlantic and beyond the Pacific. Yet as far away as China, publicity trumpeted the western American–styled athleticism displayed by serial queens like White, “riding on a furious horse, climbing the cliff as if walking on flat land.” Indeed, the journalistic discourse that ran alongside the print versions of serials in newspapers and magazines made their protagonists into the first American film stars, explaining why the serial craze that began after 1912 coincided with the development of the star system. Like many of the first movie stars, White’s supposed real-life persona presented an even more extreme vision of a New Western Woman. Reports detailed her life history as an Ozark-raised former circus performer turned globetrotting single cosmopolitan who sought European “pleasure jaunts” and “beefsteak [or automobiling] and aviation” for fun. Artfully blending social reality with desire, such publicity displayed how even the most ordinary women workers gained access to the movies’ bohemian social settings and exciting work environments out west. After opening in 1915, studios like Universal City became major tourist attractions whose novelty and appeal involved their display of women’s unrivaled opportunities for physical mobility, romantic exploration, and professional satisfaction. A workplace whose corporate mythology promised an environment “Where Work Is Play and Play Is Work” supported other inversions such as becoming the first city where “ ‘Movie’ Actresses Control Its Politics.” Such promotions help to explain why so many young women and their elders around the world came to view what happened inside the little movie colony as having consequences for their own lives.18

  The appeal of these mass-produced narratives and personalities encouraged many women to seek work in some aspect of the picture business, making them a particularly visible eddy in the massive current that washed up in Southern California in the early twentieth century. “There are more women in Los Angeles than any other city in the world and it’s the movies that bring them,” one shopkeeper bluntly asserted in 1918. The city census supported the claim. In 1920, Los Angeles became the only western city where women outnumbered men, a development sharply at odds with traditional boomtowns that had long been dominated virtually “everywhere and always” by single young men. The city’s female residents were unusual in other ways as well. Nearly one in five was divorced or widowed. Since single women tended to work outside the home more than their married counterparts, this helps to explain what one demographer called the most noteworthy characteristic of the Los Angeles labor force: the high number of women who worked after the age of twenty-five.

  These gender dynamics were at odds with older western boomtowns. In the decades after gold was discovered in 1848, young single men swarmed the northern reaches of the Pacific Coast in search of riches in sex-restricted occupations like railroad construction, mining, and lumber. Consequently, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco all initially sported an urban version of the virile, ethnically polyglot masculine culture associated with the Wild West. But Los Angeles’s economic base of real estate, tourism, and motion pictures created the service and clerical jobs that attracted women. Women in these sectors of employment in Los Angeles also benefited from California’s early passage of woman suffrage and jury service in 1911, as well as legislation establishing the eight-hour day (1911) and a minimum wage (1917) for women. Gender stratification and racial discrimination remained widespread, but white women experienced less social stratification and greater legislative protections than in most cities. In all these ways, Los Angeles better reflected the direction of twentieth-century urban development than San Francisco, Chicago or New York. This urban frontier attracted the modern pink-collar worker out for economic opportunity and excitement as much as it did Midwesterners. Indeed, the two were often one and the same. “At night in bed I would lay [sic] awake and day dream about the big hit I would make if I were to go to California,” recalled one young women in the motion picture autobiography she wrote in Chicago in the 1920s, adding parenthetically, “I know better now.”19

  Much to the later consternation of those like Iris Barry, such women were at the center of the film industry’s expanding fan base in the years surrounding the Great War, the years in which the movies became Hollywood. The re orientation of fan culture toward women during the 1910s was sped by the creeping conviction among many industry insiders that their good fortune demanded catering to the female trade. Focusing on the ladies in the audience was one of several strategies the flickers adopted from the stage. All types of theatrical impresarios had learned decades earlier that attracting the ladies with new kinds of plays and heroines enlarged their audience and increased the respectability of the entertainment offered. In hopes of effecting the same changes, movie fan culture mostly addressed an idealized, “fanatic” female film spectator with increasing savvy during the 1910s. This book builds upon the explosion of work on women in film’s silent era. By examining the motivations and tactics behind attracting more female fans, Shelley Stamp, Janet Staiger, Miriam Hansen, and others have explored how the movies became a space to contest gender norms. By 1914 Motion Picture News, a trade paper aimed at exhibitors, was reporting that “women and girls” were the principal readers of “moving picture news,” a remarkable shift of opinion given the emphasis on men a few years earlier. By the early twenties, some estimated that women occupied 75 percent of seats. As a result, the movies’ ideal spectator became a young white woman. Women’s identity as the most fanatic moviegoers led to the feminization of movie fan culture just as the industry’s most prestigious fare became a feature-length story picture centered on a female star. Such developments were behind an English actor’s lament that Hollywood was “a land where the worship is not of the hero but of the heroine.”20

  Like all good mythmakers, movie fan writers shaped their tales about the industry’s female personalities as much to answer the perceived needs of this ideal fan as to fit the facts. As with western myths more generally, these stories were not simple fictions, but a blend of wish fulfillment and social reflection. Stories that aimed to appeal to these movie-struck girls linked their heroine worship of the first movie stars to supporting their ambitions as a sex. As with the tales of an earlier era aimed at boys, these stories romanticized and sensationalized their protagonists’ quests for individual success.21 Yet women’s remarkable record of influence inside the movie colony of this era was no fantasy. The increasingly female audience for the movies selected many deserving of their allegiance, but a disproportionate number of those who earned their most enduring fealty were other women. In a trajectory that followed those of other women professionals, their record of influence as actresses, directors, writers, producers, and publicists through the early 1920s would not be equaled until more than half a century later. Involved in all aspects of the business, these women offered some of the most visible models of professional advancement and personal freedom available at the time. Women like Mary Pickford, Alla Nazimova, Norma Talmadge, Gloria Swanson, Anita Loos, Frances Marion, June Mathis, Clara Kimball Young, Elinor Glyn, and Lois Weber were all key players
in shaping the infant industry and the new images of femininity and masculinity that it sold. Journalists like Adela Rogers St. Johns and Louella Parsons churned out the publicity that explained who mattered in the industry and why. Such women spun stories about heroines whose fearless navigation of the West’s preeminent modern city foretold their ability to win once inconceivable renown.22

  Future star-producer Gloria Swanson got ideas about the type after meeting Clara Kimball Young, one of the first stars to establish her own production studio. Swanson met Young shortly after moving from Chicago to Los Angeles, recalling how “the world of 1916” was “a man’s world” and a “business run entirely by men.” But Young’s success suggested otherwise. In what other business,” Swanson wondered, “could this delightful elegant creature be completely in de pen dent,” “turning out her own pictures, dealing with men as her equals, being able to use her brains as well as her beauty, having total say as to what stories she played in, who designed her clothes, and who her director and leading man would be.”23 Again, theatrical practices cleared a path for women like Young. By 1900, the field of commercial entertainment had already promised so-called stage-struck girls a unique avenue to individual success. On all types of stages, female performers from “extras” to stars often earned greater recognition and more money than men, making commercial entertainment one of the largest, best-paying fields open to women without much formal education. As the theater’s fortunes fell, stories about women’s prospects in the movies played to a fresh generation of female wage earners with much more than survival on their minds.24