Cushman’s bright particular star thus sent multiple, seemingly contradictory impressions about the model of individual achievement she offered to her increasingly female fans. Some critics marveled at how the “manly”-appearing Cushman managed to perform love scenes “of so erotic a character that no man would have dared indulge in them.” Yet “the most respectable female audiences” watched actresses in breeches roles fight duels and make love to other women “with much apparent satisfaction.”36 Indeed, female patrons made Cushman into a self-made woman of unrivaled wealth and public stature. “I feel much better about womankind,” confided playwright Julia Ward Howe after Cushman’s conquest of New York in 1857.37 In 1874 an “unmarried lady” sent Cushman a letter shortly before her death that conveyed the meager opportunities for self-support, let alone self-definition, available to women of any class. The lady was “proud to direct other ladies who were struggling for their bread, to take example from your noble career, and work out for themselves an independent and individual life.” She added: “As a working woman I am under obligation to you for the footprints you leave on the sands of time.”38
Although poor health finally forced Cushman to retire in 1874, women’s importance as theatrical stars and patrons only increased apace with the industrial engine that sped the growth of commercial entertainment after the Civil War. Between 1880 and 1900, the number of shows touring the country jumped from fifty to more than five hundred. By 1900 the number of popular-priced theater seats in cities like Chicago, Denver, Philadelphia, and New York outdistanced population growth by four to one.39 Women’s prospects for employment in the melodramas performed in many of the new, inexpensive (at ten or fifteen cents), family-friendly segments of the theater business like vaudeville soared along with the proliferation of play houses and touring companies that aimed to attract lower-middle-class workers of both sexes. After employing almost entirely men in 1800, performing became one of the largest professions for women a century later.40 Many more women worked in nursing and teaching, but both occupations demanded an education, forbade marriage, and paid barely subsistence wages.41 The stage offered the best chance for both self-support and social mobility for women with the fewest resources—women who otherwise would likely have worked from sunup to sundown in filthy factories, stood six and half days at a department store counter selling products they could not afford, or served at the beck and call of a mistress nearly every hour of each day.42 Only as performers and writers did women earn the same, or greater, wages as men for equal work. In the celebrity culture that blossomed around the stage, theater directors were distinctly less important than the divas and handsome matinee idols who preened to spark the interest of “matinee girls.” And as lionized actresses outnumbered their male counterparts and often visibly doubled in the brass by taking their shows on the road, the stage offered a singular arena for exhibiting a woman’s ability to openly compete and best a man.43
The mounting centrality of women as consumers and producers of American popular culture continued to create variations in the melodramatic aesthetic that subsequently shaped the development of motion pictures during the 1910s. Variously labeled immoral, problem, and of the emotional hydraulic school, female characters frequently drove the action of these plays, many of which were written, adapted, or commissioned by women.44 Displaying innovations in stock characters and plot devices, these plays often featured active, independent heroines in stories in which chance and responsibility factored into judgments about women’s character.45 As the publicity about Cushman’s private life prefigured, threats to a loved one often justified the exercise of these protagonists’ wills. A heroine, not a hero, executed the first hair’s-breadth rescue of a victim strapped to railroad tracks. As she batters through a train station door with an axe, her helpless beloved shouts “Courage!” and “That’s a true woman!”46
Other players in so-called immoral melodramas tackled the sexual double standard that judged chastity as central to a woman’s worth and meaningless to a man’s.47 This was the subject of La dame aux camellias (1852), an adaptation of the popular novel by Alexandre Dumas fils. After its 1854 American debut, Camille; or, The Fate of a Coquette, as it was often called, became not just one of the two most popular plays performed in the United States but also the signature part of the late nineteenth century’s greatest international star, the French actress Sarah Bernhardt.48 Repeated revivals never wanted for an audience, since, following Bernhardt’s example, every great actress demanded to assail Camille’s lead, Marguerite, the courtesan whose self-sacrifice for her lover demonstrated that even a “fallen woman” could be more than she appeared. After seeing Bernhardt in the role, the great Italian actress Eleanora Duse called the older star’s performance “an emancipation.” As Duse recalled, “She played, she triumphed, she took possession of us all, she went away . . . and for a long time the atmosphere she brought with her remained in the old theater. A woman had achieved all that!”49 Like Cushman, Bernhardt displayed qualities associated with both sexes. But in contrast to the Anglo-American context, in Bernhardt’s day the French accepted, indeed expected, overt displays of actresses’ sexuality, including motherhood without marriage.50 Yet even the more tepid version of Camille performed in the Anglophone world prompted alarm among early critics who called it a “deification of prostitution.”51 Indeed, the play’s popularity with women audiences and actresses spawned a host of imitators exploring the erring woman’s relationship to society.52 The trend prompted escalating concern over how the “morbid fictions” of a “herd” of female playwrights threatened to force Shakespeare, Scott, and Dickens to the margins of the American theater.53 Such views indicated why Camille sounded an early note in the swelling cacophony over how women’s entrance into masculine preserves threatened to disrupt the nation’s fragile cultural standards and social stability.
Indeed, by 1900 many cultural custodians linked the nation’s advanced state of democratization and industrialization to its production of an emancipated type of modern woman whose influence had debased American culture. Considered a “quintessentially American” type, the modern woman was one of the first national exports that presaged the reversal in the direction of cultural influence across the Atlantic that Hollywood later intensified.54 Hugo Munsterberg was one of many leading public intellectuals who predicted that cultural deterioration would follow women having come to “dominate the entire life of America,” in the words of his German compatriot Albert Einstein. A specialist in visual perception who taught at Harvard from 1892 until his death in 1916, Munsterberg developed a keen interest in film late in life, creating one of the first theories of film spectatorship.55 In his guise as a successful popular writer, Munsterberg set about explaining how his foreign perspective offered particular insight into American culture, in writing that often displayed “the strikingly misogynist” tone that characterized much of this commentary. According to Munsterberg, American women’s influence spun “a web of triviality and misconception over the whole culture.”56 In 1901 Munsterberg worried that the theater’s female audience had placed it under the control of patrons who could not “discriminate between the superficial and the profound.” “The whole situation militates against the home and the masculine control of high culture,” he lamented, warning, “if the whole national civilization should receive the feminine stamp, it would become powerless and without decisive influence on the world’s progress.” Munsterberg’s estimates were supported by a 1910 survey of theatrical producers and critics that claimed women composed between two-thirds and three-quarters of the audience for performances even at night.57 The next year Clayton Hamilton, a drama critic at Columbia University, summed up the results of this reality: “Every student of the contemporary theater knows that the destiny of our drama has lain for a long time in the hands of women. Shakespeare wrote for an audience made up mainly of men and boys,” but “Ibsen and Pinero have written for an audience made up mainly of women,” making the theater “the one
great public institution in which ‘votes for women’ is the rule, and men are overwhelmingly outvoted.”58 And given that Ibsen and Pinero were renowned for controversial female protagonists who blew up the constraints of true womanhood, the fame of these playwrights suggested that women wanted to see actresses who refused to remain trapped in “a doll’s house” (the title of Ibsen’s 1879 play).59
II
By 1900 actresses in vaudeville and on the legitimate stage displayed how a girl might act “the Daddy of the Family,” as Mary Pickford’s early publicity described her, while still exhibiting a specifically feminine allure. This meant that actresses like Pickford made the ambition to achieve renown compatible with femininity itself. As the first film stars made the transition from stage to screen during the 1910s, many of the most successful occupied a terrain in which the exhibition of feminine charm and public authority coexisted. Not long after her theatrical debut in 1900, Pickford and her now avowedly “stage-minded” mother, Charlotte, met one successful example of the type: the thirteen-year-old vaudeville sensation Elsie Janis. Pickford recalled how Janis earned the “unbelievable salary of seventy-five dollars a week” for her “magnificent imitation” of the Ziegfeld showgirl Anna Held and renditions of songs like “Oh, I Just Can’t Make My Eyes Behave!” Pickford and Charlotte asked Janis and her mother how little Gladys might emulate the older girl’s “brilliant career.”60 “ ‘Take her to see the finest plays and artists,’ ” Mrs. Janis advised, but “first, and above all . . . let her be herself.” Evoking the modern artist’s edict to explore and express the self, the advice registered how the theater nurtured a type of individuality in girls that encouraged them to seek out some kind of happiness for themselves. Pickford made the counsel an axiom, and the four became lifelong friends, the first in a series of mother-daughter teams whose success they first imitated and then supported. “Hollywood was a matriarchy,” observed Adela Rogers St. Johns, the journalist who became “Mother Confessor” to the first movie stars. “No more wise, wonderful and remarkable women than Charlotte Pickford, Mrs. Gish, Peg Talmadge, Phyllis Daniels ever lived.”61 Indeed, the prevalence of female-headed households among those who became the greatest actresses of their day suggests that the stereotype of the stage mother who prostitutes her tender charge might be better viewed as a family survival strategy that required tossing norms of feminine decorum into the breach. Not just Cushman, Bernhardt, and Pickford but also Florence Lawrence, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Norma and Constance Talmadge, Pearl White, Ruth Roland, Pola Negri, and Gloria Swanson were all reared without fathers. Beyond the powerful economic impetus such circumstances engendered, the absence of intimate patriarchal control in childhood may have improved their chances of reinventing how to act like a girl.
FIGURE 3. The two parts of Pickford’s persona: motion picture magnate Mary Pickford keeping track of “Little Mary,” c. 1920. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.
For indeed, the personas of the first film stars often involved elaborating the means by which a seemingly conventional girl could incarnate a type of fame that arose from meeting the challenges and opportunities confronting the progress of her sex. By the time she incorporated United Artists in 1919, Mary Pickford’s persona was composed of equal parts “America’s Sweetheart”—a romantic, spirited ingénue who politely called for women’s rights—and “Bank of America’s Sweetheart,” as her competitor and colleague, Charlie Chaplin called her—a skilled businesswoman who became the highest-paid woman in the world.62 These two images—one a perennial youth involved in a perpetual process of self-definition, and the other a trailblazing professional engaged with achieving a stature still mostly reserved for daddies—were entwined in the projection of her star image. As with Cushman, her publicity conveyed information that complicated and contradicted her performing type. Press stories, interviews, and the syndicated column “Daily Talks,” which Pickford wrote (in name if not in fact) between 1915 and 1917, focused on her salary and work, and made no secret of her real age or the existence of her husband, actor Owen Moore. Both working-and middle-class magazines described her as a woman whose accomplishments placed her alongside the industrial titans who had loomed so large in the imagination of Americans since the dawning of what Mark Twain called the Gilded Age. A piece signed by Pickford in the Ladies’ Home Journal, the largest-circulation women’s monthly and one aimed mostly at the middle class, reported that next to her age (“twenty four, but someday I may not want to tell it”), the question most frequently asked in the five hundred letters she received daily was, “How much do I make?”63 “I enjoy my work immensely,” she reported; “there is a wonderful fascination in the ever changing scenes and the varied excitement.” When the workingwomen’s monthly Ladies’ World announced her the winner of a reader’s popularity contest months later, “her hundred thousand dollar a year salary” was again central.64 Her “photo-play supremacy . . . justified” her salary, the piece explained, stressing the breadth of Pickford’s achievements. “Her versatility of talent is marvelous, and is evidenced by the fact that she writes as well as she acts.” Since only one-quarter of wage-earning women earned the $8 a week that constituted a living wage in 1914, it is easy to imagine why Pickford’s annual salary of $50,000 for exciting work led “thousands of American girls to ask about motion picture acting as a profession.”65
FIGURE 4. Mary Pickford as idol of the “Working Girl” readers of the Ladies’ World in 1915. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.
Indeed, Pickford always credited the paternal power her salary made possible with inspiring her devotion to her work. The modest means she earned with her theatrical debut in 1900 had created a “determination nothing could crush . . . to take my father’s place in some mysterious way.” Her earliest publicity would later use her breadwinner anxieties to justify her decision in 1908 to trade Broadway for the less reputable choice of acting at Biograph film studio in New York. There Pickford used her artistic status to demand twice the rate paid to beginning film players: $10 a day, or $60 a week, a salary she credited with allowing her family to finally “beg[i]n to live.”66 She also recollected her debut in The Silver King in terms that presaged the type that brought her such acclaim. Although she claimed to prefer the “villainous little girl” she played in the popular melodrama’s first act, she reported that a comic bit of stage business she improvised as the hero’s dying son drew the “biggest laugh of the evening” and won the manager’s attention. Whatever its accuracy, her description deftly captured her later screen type: a feminine, feisty tomboy, orphaned in spirit if not always in fact, whose fiery emotions jumped from harmless misbehavior to wild humor to tender pathos.
The motivation to win her way in the world brought Pickford’s family to New York in 1907, where she resolved to meet “the Wizard of the Modern Stage,” David Belasco. A former actor from San Francisco, Belasco’s celebrity as a director-producer stemmed from his artful performance as the so-called “Maestro” of the theater’s feminization.67 Belasco built his unrivaled following among women on the “immoral” melodramatic plays that intellectuals like Hugo Munsterberg decried for corrupting the nation’s artistic and moral tenor. Noteworthy modern immoral melodramas like Madame Butterfly (1900) and Du Barry (1901) descended from Camille. Unsurprisingly, Belasco’s notoriety also derived from his relationships to their female stars. “BELASCO’S LATEST STAR A SUCCESS” was how a Philadelphia paper announced Charlotte Walker’s triumph in The Warrens of Virginia (1907). “How I do like to develop an actor or an actress. Then is when I am most happy,” Belasco explained in one press release. “I like to thrust in my hand, grasp his or her heartstrings and drag them out and play upon them like a musician upon the strings of his instrument,” he continued, expertly suggesting his talent for conducting both erotic and gender play.68 Pickford displayed a similar knack when she auditioned for a small role in The
Warrens, introducing herself to Belasco as the “father of the family” in a manner that made the Maestro laugh.69 Her publicity seized on this title when she won a starring role in a 1913 Belasco production of A Good Little Devil. Calling herself a daddy emphasized her status as an adult artist who laid claim to the rights and responsibilities of the patriarch, however much she appeared like a spirited, angelic girl. The Warrens also featured two other flickers of future importance, playwright (later screenwriter and director) William de Mille and his younger brother, actor (later director) Cecil. The press called its female star simply the latest in a line of actresses who were “FAILURES TILL ‘SVENGALI’ ARRIVED.”70
In likening Belasco to Svengali, the newspaper summoned the specter of George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), a popular novel that displayed the broader shift in popular culture’s depiction of men and women’s relationship to the production of art. The best-selling novel modernized the Pygmalion and Galatea myth, long the master print for viewing the male as the agent of the heavenly creative impulse, the female as his aesthetic stimulant. When mortal women fail to meet his moral standards, Pygmalion carves his perfect woman from ivory, worships his creation, and consummates his desire after the goddess Aphrodite gives her life. The fate of Trilby O’Farrell partially reproduced her classical predecessor’s. An artist’s model whose beauty and availability inspire a group of budding painters in the Latin Quarter, Trilby falls under the spell of Svengali, an evil mesmerist who hypnotizes the “tone-deaf” young grisette into becoming the voice of his musical ambitions. Svengali’s control over Trilby indicates why those who emphasize the manager’s role as that of proprietor of an actress’s talent in this era speak of a “Svengali paradigm.” And, no doubt, the Trilby-inspired crazes, from shoes to hats, that swept both sides of the Atlantic near the century’s end offered precocious examples of mass culture’s ability to turn symbols of women’s sexuality into fetishistic, salable parts. Yet Trilby also revised the moral interpretation of the novel’s female protagonist and described the male artists in the story as frauds or fallible. The bohemian Trilby “could be naked and unashamed” and was “without any kind of fear.” Those who judge Trilby come to grief as well. Still, Pickford’s fame displayed the American public’s uneasy relationship to female eroticism by celebrating a female artist who sought new professional, rather than sexual, freedoms.
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