Indeed, one of the few attempts to determine why women migrants dominated the exodus that created the rural problem that had so worried progressives since Teddy Roosevelt suggested why studio work would have appeared to satisfy the impulse that drove so many to cities like Los Angeles. The editors of a massive survey conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1912 regarding the opinions of “farm house wives” about why so many rural women left home called the theme of the responses they received the “feeling that the attractiveness of one’s surroundings is of more importance than the practical farmer” recognized. Women’s letters to the USDA repeatedly recorded how the search for sociable work, more attention to aesthetic pleasures, and “the entertainments and amusements that the towns and cities offer” sent them down country roads to town. One Arkansan succinctly summed up the difference between rural women’s and men’s needs: “We would rather have free telephones and moving pictures than free seed.” Taken together, the letters present the countryside’s landscape as so bereft of feminine influence that a woman with a taste for aesthetic pleasures and the society of others was left with few choices but to escape. “Do you wonder we get lonely and discouraged and are ignorant and uncultured and long to get away for good?” The comedic actress Louise Fazenda testified to how many felt they had nothing to lose. “At my home in Utah they impressed on me how utterly useless I was until I could bare [sic] it no longer,” Fazenda recalled. “So like the old darky song, ‘I packed up my grip and took a trip,’ coming to Los Angeles to do or die. And I pretty nearly died.” Publicity that depicted studios as the “most perfect democracy the world has ever known, promised migrants a social equality that was still the stuff of dreams. Thus the story about how the déclassé “movie” business became the glamorous industry of Hollywood depended upon its publicists’ finesse at advertising “Motion-Picture Land” as located inside a new urban frontier that catered to women pioneers.25
For these reasons, the most widely circulated tales about Hollywood’s birth often linked the industry to the excitement and alarm prompted by the so-called revolution of manners and morals of modern young girls after the Great War, as this book’s second part explores. Strategies first developed in the original film centers of Chicago and New York laid the foundation for associating the movie colony’s residents with the era’s increasingly voluble, and volatile, debates about the terms under which women’s emancipation should advance after winning the fight for suffrage in 1919. In describing the movies as a great new frontier, as a “democratic art” that offered common cultural ground for all, industry publicists wrapped a business still feared by much of the respectable middle class as immoral and un-American in cherished stories about the nation’s frontier heritage. But journalists like Louella Parsons did much more than this when they retooled the frontier thesis that then commanded the country’s view of its past to describe motion pictures as a gold rush business for ambitious, single, young white women on the make. Most radically, the sexual politics of this booster literature promoted the movie colony as that quintessential metropolitan neighborhood of lusty self-invention, a bohemia—a Hollywood Bohemia to be exact. A novel character best personified the liberation that this bohemian scene promised: the extra girl who went west in search of unparalleled opportunities for self-invention, artistic exploration, professional advancement, romantic adventures, and just plain fun. For some, this Hollywood Bohemia intensified anxieties about the manners and morals of the rising generation of modern girls. For others, it offered a place to bring her to life. In this way, the flickers’ mass-produced narratives and personalities became another essential element in the era’s broader conversation about the “grounding of modern feminism.”26
III
Thus the women and men who went to Los Angeles with an interest in making and breaking into pictures entered a contest, often unwittingly, for cultural power that played out along the frontier of mass culture and inside Los Angeles’s new urban West. Arriving by train, taxicab, and automobile, the flickers moved into new bungalows and old barns where they quickly attracted both critics and fans. Like many artistic scenes, the so-called movie colony sported a cosmopolitan crew whose often sexually unconventional mien encouraged a kind of social insularity despite the highly public nature of their work. In addition to many prominent New Woman types, the colony also contained a number of powerful immigrant Jews who mostly hailed from the working-class, urban milieus of the business’s early fans. In short, the flickers were just the sorts that some already settled in Los Angeles wanted to avoid. Frances Marion, whom many consider the silent era’s most successful screenwriter, recalled the tensions that resulted after moving from her native San Francisco to Los Angeles in 1913. After working part-time as a commercial illustrator, the unhappily married Marion found a full-time job as an assistant for Lois Weber, then the most famous director on Universal Studio’s new lot. The new paycheck and the close friends she made, including writer Adela Rogers St. Johns and Mary Pickford, gave Marion the courage to divorce her husband. Marion’s life as a New Woman was possible only after trading her elite upbringing in more established San Francisco for the bohemian movie colony in Los Angeles. But she still seethed over the bigotry exhibited by some of her new neighbors, fuming over landlords who baldly declared, “No Jews, actors, or dogs allowed.” The neighborhood associations that sprung up at this moment also displayed the determination of some local Angelenos to keep the flickers out of their backyards.27
FIGURE 1. Inceville, Thomas Ince’s studio by the sea along the Santa Monica coast, c. 1915. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.
Director King Vidor thought that the social insularity and artistic license that the movie colony’s residents displayed would have engendered a similar reaction in many other American towns. Hoping to become a director, Vidor left Texas for Los Angeles in 1915, not long after the newsreel cameraman made his directorial debut with the short story picture Hurricane of Galveston (1913). According to Vidor, the colony’s residents cultivated the experience of living in “a magic bubble,” a sense as much nurtured as imposed. Residents of the movie colony “spoke a silent language, a different language from the orange growers who surrounded them,” Vidor recalled. Yet they “felt camaraderie with all the other members of their clan” who congregated together inside ever more elaborate production lots like the “Studio by the Sea” that Thomas Ince built in 1912 on several thousand acres of land encompassing a stretch of Pacific coastline and the surrounding hills and plateaus of Santa Ynez Canyon at present-day Pacific Palisades and Malibu (figure 1). These environment’s camera-thin walls magnified their workers’ goings-on from multiple angles, acting as both blessing and curse for a business that needed viewers’ curiosity to survive. Like many early residents, Vidor remembered how the community’s isolation encouraged a release from customary restraints, leading inhabitants to believe “they could establish their own habits and behavior,” which could appear outlandish, immoral, or glamorously modern depending on the point of view.28
The firestorm of local, state, and federal actions to control the movies that swept the country during the 1910s supported Vidor’s judgment that the movies and their makers provoked anxiety not just among some Los Angeles landlords and orange growers but across the land. The Supreme Court decision Mutual Film Corporation v. Ohio Industrial Commission (1915) displayed the intensification of concern about protecting moviegoers from the influence of films. The Mutual case made motion pictures the only medium of communication in the United States ever subject to prior restraint censorship, which allowed for the prescreening, cutting, and licensing of films before the public ever saw a foot of celluloid. Chicago pointed the way toward this type of regulation when it passed the first municipal censorship law in 1907. The law required a police permit for every moving picture shown in the city. During the nickelodeon era many other cities and towns had used their police powers to rec
tify the dangers presented by firetrap theaters. But police licensing proved a blunt instrument, helpful primarily for ensuring that early movie theaters conformed to fire safety codes and for excising scenes that contained obviously criminal behavior, like murder, arson, and robbery. Since most film censorship activists through the early 1910s believed that immigrant, working-class men dominated movie audiences, the approach indicated their intention to prevent films from inspiring anti-social behavior in this group. Two of the very few story pictures that were entirely suppressed, The James Boys in Missouri and Night Riders (both 1908), illustrated this concern.29
The revised censorship law that Chicago passed in 1914 displayed the shift in regulatory efforts that mirrored the larger change in attitudes about the movies’ cultural identity and location by the late 1910s. Go West! Young Women enters the history of censorship efforts here, when concerns over the impact of America’s newly feminized film audience first peaked. The re orientation of the business toward primarily female consumers caused film reformers to focus more on how film content and stars incited criminal behavior among young women. Chicago’s decision in 1915 to replace its police board with a ten-person commission of salaried civilians composed equally of men and women offered the more delicate touch needed to address problems associated with women’s immorality. The Supreme Court’s Mutual decision that same year also assumed that the movies tended to provoke immoral conduct among viewers. Most legal scholars agree that Mutual’s reasoning that film’s unique capacity to do “evil”—in this case, its special ability to incite sexual immorality—was what justified the Court’s protection of the state’s right to wield singular controls over the medium. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice McKenna suffused his opinion with fears about how the whole atmosphere of story pictures incited erotic havoc among the “promiscuous” crowd that attended movies. In the dark, throngs “not of women alone, nor of men alone, but together” watched “things which should not have pictorial representation in public places,” because of the “prurient interest” they “appealed to and excited,” McKenna declared.30
Increasingly, reformers argued that the movies’ cultural ascendancy had unleashed a flood of “indecent,” “sexually immoral” images that had made the number of “problem girls” soar. “Problem girl” was a catchall label given by social workers to young, wage-earning women whose appearance and independent participation in consumer culture created novel difficulties with policing their sexuality. Historians Joanne Meyerowitz, Kathy Peiss, Regina Kunzel, and others have skillfully evoked how such women’s new purchase on public spaces generated anxieties as many recently rural women poured into cities to work and play nationwide. These young women’s bold attempts to refashion themselves according to their own design also led them to experiment with cosmetics, products previously reserved for actresses and prostitutes. Thus, like many of the first movie stars, their behavior disrupted visual conventions that had long allowed observers to separate the good girls from the bad. “The way the women dress today they all look like prostitutes,” a waiter reported to one of the many Progressive reformers who cruised dance halls looking for the prostitutes such environments were thought to breed. What these young women may have experienced as “vistas of autonomy, romance, and pleasure,” according to Kunzel, many others judged to be “promiscuous sexuality and inappropriate delinquent behavior.” The result: for the first time, state authorities deemed sizable numbers of women criminals who required rehabilitation in the new juvenile courts and homes that went up in cities across the country.31
The popularity of, and outrage provoked by, a series of so-called white slave pictures in the early 1910s was an early indication of the trend that made “immorality” and “obscenity” the “keywords” that captured the concerns of censorship boards by 1920. Although judged a moral panic by most historians today, concern about white slavery—the belief that large numbers of young white women, often fresh from the countryside, were being forced into sexual slavery—tracked women’s movement into the workplace and onto the city streets after 1900. Muckraker George Kibbe Turner’s “The City of Chicago: A Study of the Great Immoralities” first galvanized Progressive reformers into action on the subject. Turner’s exposé described a chain that connected the liquor trade to immigrants, and the latter to a white slave market run mostly by Jewish immigrants from Russia. The racial identities of the villain and victim in these tales also revealed how the white slavery scare reflected the era’s heightened fears about the racial degeneration of Anglo-Saxons in cities through racial “mongrelization,” in the language of the day. Films like Inside the White Slave Traffic (1913) became some of the first feature-length blockbusters. At six reels long, white slave films played for over an hour, cost patrons twenty-five cents to view at the first motion pictures palaces in New York, and attracted audiences notably composed of young women. Critics from the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly accused the films of inciting the era’s “Repeal of Reticence” about sex, of teaching white slaving techniques to men of “the impressionable classes,” and of generally pouring “oil upon the flames of vice” before “the promiscuous audiences of the motion picture theaters.” They also lamented that so many female fans watched scenes of their imperilment with delight, laughing at the generic conventions and gendered stereotypes employed by these traditional melodramas about the danger the city posed to women’s virtue.32
In the volatile postwar climate, the fact that so many movie publicists had turned such traditional dark tales about young women’s experience of urban modernity—of countrified naïfs brought to ruin in the city—on their head now counted as evidence of the danger presented by the industry’s growth in Los Angeles. Having breezily described the City of Angels as an urban El Dorado for intrepid female migrants, these brighter stories’ success in drawing women into movie theaters and to Los Angeles reflected the hunger many felt about exploring where their gathering freedoms might lead. But the industry’s efforts may have succeeded too well by the early 1920s. Reports announcing that more than ten thousand girls went to Los Angeles each year to work in the movies generated mounting anxiety about the dangers that awaited them in an industry controlled by “morally degenerate,” “un-American” Jews.33 After the Great War, with anti-Semitism and nativism on the rise, fears about Hollywood’s impact spread along multiple fronts. A wave of more risqué films, featuring daring, decidedly non-Anglo stars like Pola Negri, Gloria Swanson, and Rudolph Valentino, made headlines. Growing numbers came to believe that protecting the nation from what one activist called, “The Movie Menace” demanded controlling the movie industry itself.
The event that produced the industry’s first so-called canonical scandal illustrated these tensions. “S.F. BOOZE PARTY KILLS YOUNG ACTRESS; GIRL STRICKEN AFTER AFFAIR AT S.F. HOTEL; Virginia Rappe Dies after Being Guest at Party Given Here by ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle; Film Comedian,” wailed the headlines that framed the event. The scandal erupted following a party hosted by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, a slapstick star second only to Charlie Chaplin in popularity. Arbuckle held the party at the St. Francis Hotel on Labor Day, 1921. An actress named Virginia Rappe and two other Angelenos, Maude Delmont and Al Semnacher, were among the first to arrive, around noon. Still wearing pajamas, Arbuckle greeted the trio with a pitcher of bootleg gin and orange juice. Within the hour, the comedian requested a phonograph be brought in to entertain the dozen or so guests who crowded the suite’s reception room. Happy revelers later recalled in court a “royal good time, dancing and kidding and drinking,” with Arbuckle “at the center” of the “clowning.” Rappe and Arbuckle ended up alone in one of the suite’s bedrooms for an undetermined length of time. Late in the afternoon, guests discovered the actress there in great pain, tearing at her clothes. Thinking her drunk, some female guests tried to revive her with a cold bath; Arbuckle placed a piece of ice between her legs for the same reason. Around 5 P.M., Arbuckle called the management to have Rappe moved to a separate room, and t
he party ended. Dr. Beardslee, the hotel staff physician at the St. Francis, administered morphine to relieve Rappe’s pain, later testifying at Arbuckle’s first trial that “any evidence of alcoholism” “was very slight” and “overshadowed” by her “intense pain.” Arbuckle returned to Los Angeles on Tuesday for the premiere of his latest film, Gasoline Gus (1921). That same day the hotel’s doctor diagnosed Rappe as suffering from a ruptured bladder, recommended Delmont take her to a hospital, and left on a hunting trip. Rappe languished for three days at the St. Francis, mostly unconscious and in pain so severe that only continuous injections of morphine, supplied by a new doctor Delmont hired, provided relief. Late on Thursday Delmont moved Rappe to a private sanitarium where she died the next morning of peritonitis resulting from a ruptured bladder. Delmont immediately told the police that Rappe blamed Arbuckle for her death. The San Francisco district attorney accused the comedian of murder. A media frenzy erupted in which even typically staid papers like the New York Times ran headlines based on hearsay that shrieked, “ARBUCKLE DRAGGED RAPPE GIRL TO ROOM, WOMAN TESTIFIES.”34
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