Go West, Young Women!

by Hilary Hallett

  Given her ambition to make herself known, Pickford’s landing at Biograph in 1908 was equal parts fortuitous and frustrating. After 1908, the shift to story pictures, or what scholars now call narrative film, threw the work of film acting into relief, focusing audience’s attention on gelatine Juliets (a celluloid version of Shakespeare’s most famous ingénue). Plot development in story pictures revolved around the action of fictional characters that new camera techniques like close-ups brought within intimate reach. Biograph’s leading director, D.W. Griffith, pioneered the close-up’s effective use. The technical mastery of both Griffith and early cameramen at the studio probably explains why two of the industry’s earliest, if still nameless, stars emerged from Biograph’s ranks: Pickford and Florence Lawrence. Since movie players appeared without billing in the earliest years, curious fans dubbed Lawrence the “Biograph Girl” and Pickford “Little Mary,” a character name she often used. By 1910, Motion Picture World’s new section, “Picture Personalities,” answered fans’ questions about the identities of performers like Lawrence and Pickford.71 But, while many production companies began to release the names of leading actors, Biograph continued to refuse to promote its popular players.

  Carl Laemmle, a German-born immigrant working in the industry’s western hub of Chicago, viewed the mounting popularity of female film players like Lawrence and Pickford as an opportunity to distinguish his new company.72 In 1909 Laemmle left the first film industry trust, a patents pool engineered by Thomas Edison called the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC). Shut out from the MPPC’s screens and facing litigation for patent infringement, the independent Motion Picture Company (IMP, which became Universal in 1912) could survive only by quick success. Laemmle hastily added producing to the studio’s functions and lured Lawrence, whom Biograph had fired for seeking better terms, to join its ranks. Laemmle promoted her move by sandwiching a large photograph of her familiar face between her name and a headline proclaiming, “She’s an Imp!” Laemmle then orchestrated a stunt to stoke the ardor of audiences. In March 1910 he bought ads that declared “we nail a lie” above a close-up of Lawrence. The “enemies of the Imp” had “foisted on the public of St. Louis” a horrible story “that Miss Lawrence (the ‘Imp’ girl, formerly known as the ‘Biograph’ girl) had been killed by a street car.” In good melodramatic fashion, the ad created a stir by casting Lawrence and IMP as scrappy survivors fighting against nefarious rivals. Shortly after the stunt a new motion picture editor in the Toledo News Bee declared: “Her name is Florence Lawrence. There. After two years exercise of sway over the admiration and curiosity of the public the most popular moving picture star is known” despite “the so-called moving picture trust” having “fought every effort to learn her identity.”73 “The rumor caused considerable depression among our patrons,” a theater owner wrote Lawrence, until the manager promoted her location “in the land of the living” and promised “the ladies . . . souvenir photographs” of the actress. “I have taken the greatest interest in your pictures,” wrote sixteen-year-old Betty Melnick from St. Louis after Lawrence appeared there. “Why you make me cry, laugh, and oh you make me see things different”; she concluded, “My one great wish is to pose with you.”74

  FIGURE 5. Florence Lawrence on a postcard for fans, c. 1912. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

  Lawrence’s persona as a western American–styled New Woman bent on hair-raising demonstrations of women’s social and physical mobility likely accounted for the different perspective Betty Melnick took from the star.75 A cowgirl in an era in which frontier mythology influenced how so many Americans’ viewed their past, Lawrence’s exceptional equestrian skills made her the female counterpart of an already prized American hero and won the actress her first substantial role in the Edison short Daniel Boone, or Pioneer Days in America (1907).76 Playing a Boone daughter captured by Indians, Lawrence executes a daring escape, riding bareback at breakneck speed, long blonde curls flying behind her. After joining Vitagraph the next month, her first leading role demanded similar skills. Producer J. Stuart Blackton called Lawrence “a splendid rider,” extolling her aplomb after she narrowly escaped an accident while playing a Union spy who gets chased on horseback through the woods in The Dispatch Bearer (1907).77 The same qualities also reportedly caught Griffith’s eye. “Can you ride horses?” demanded the director at their first meeting. “I would rather ride than eat” was Lawrence’s cool reply. Dressed “like a cowgirl in the wild and wooly West” for The Girl and the Outlaw (1908), she went on to make over a dozen “Wild West Pictures” there.78 Yet Lawrence’s roles cohered less around a particular filmic type than around the display of a dramatic range that swung from knockabout romantic comedies like the “Jonesy” film series to dramatic love stories like Resurrection (1909).79

  “Florence Lawrence is a tomboy. She told me so herself,” began an early publicity piece that used her real-life western background to explain her self-reliance, derring-do, and political progressivism. “I have always been an actress. When I was a child I roamed all over the West leading a gypsy-like life,” she explained.80 The claim was no mere puffery. Lawrence was born Florence Bridgwood in 1886 in Hamilton, Ontario. Her father, George, was a carriage maker; her mother, Lotta, an actress thirty-six years younger than her husband. When Lotta permanently separated from George in 1890, she became “versatile as a leading lady of her own company which produced all sorts of plays,” taking “Baby Flo” along while she toured “the West with the Lawrence Dramatic Players.”81 This persona would have prepared readers for her support of woman suffrage, because western women’s movements had already won women the vote in most of the American and Canadian West. In 1913 Lawrence attended an eastern suffrage march in Washington, D.C.82 Parading on horseback, she proclaimed her “politics as a suffragette,” a term associated with British women who used violent tactics to demand the vote. This “short and light and slight and sensitive” girl was “a lady of spirit withal. My Yes! An ardent suffragist. A Banner-Bearing, Street-Parading Suffragist!” marveled another report in Motion Picture Magazine.83

  The repeated references in the press to Lawrence’s theatrical past and present resemblance to stage star Maude Adams again betrayed how stage conventions framed the emergence of the first movie stars. As Lawrence quickly developed a reputation as one of the screen’s greatest actresses, newspapers touted her as “the richest girl in the world” and “The Maude Adams of the Moving Picture Show,” the actress whose boyish charms led J.M. Barrie to write Peter Pan (1905).84 By continually likening Lawrence to Adams, the press elevated the status of still-déclassé film acting and placed her first in a line of future female film stars capable of innocently pursuing boyish adventures.85

  Moreover, her success indicated how the explosive demand for story pictures after 1908 encouraged film producers to absorb both stage actors and their customs, such as doubling in the brass.86 Experienced at managing all aspects of staging a show, thespians became the cheapest, best-trained labor supply available to make story pictures at the new film studios. The expectation that all workers perform multiple tasks reduced the sex segregation of labor and was supported by a work culture that responded to performative rather than ascriptive modes of authority based on the “natural” hierarchies of race, class, and sex.

  Lawrence displayed how the custom licensed women’s ability to run the show after joining Lubin Studio in 1911. At Lubin she received more money and control over her work, including the hire of her personal director, husband Harry Solter. One of their first productions, The Little Rebel (1911), featured her as a furiously horseback riding, rifle-toting daughter of the Confederacy who falls for a Union solider she fails to kill.87 Letters to her mother at this point convey a woman who imagined herself a free agent no matter her contractual obligations.88 Indeed, a multipart interview Lawrence gave entitled “Growing Up with the Movies” has her mother, Lotta Lawrence, reporting, “When Flo was a
tiny girl . . . she told the well known actor manager Daniel White that she was going to become a famous actress when she grew up,” adding that her “indomitable ambition” meant that “she would become a really famous actress.” By year’s end, Lawrence traded Lubin for IMP/Universal, where she hired Owen Moore, Pickford’s husband, as her leading man to work at Victor Film Company, an independent production unit that likely made her the first film actor to produce her own films.89 Having attained almost total control of her work, she increasingly played actresses and other professional women such as the comically exacting headmistress of a boys’ school in Flo’s Discipline (1912).90 Little wonder that “motion picture experts” writing in newspapers touted her success as proof that a “girl with talent, energy, and ambition” could “make a splendid income as an actress in the moving picture show.” In advising the “legion of ‘stage-struck’ girls” to train their sights on this “new business for girls,” the counsel displayed the transfer of professional aspirations once directed at the stage to the movie industry.91

  Still searching for a means to make her name known, Pickford followed Lawrence’s path from Biograph to IMP/Universal after Lawrence left the studio in 1911. Laemmle paid Pickford more for the opportunity to fan audience interest in the actress by releasing her name to Moving Picture World and then distributing a series of films featured simply as “Little Mary Imps.” The films opened with the phrase “Mary Pickford, America’s Sweetheart, in . . .” but the lavish credits failed to compensate for the poor quality of the movies.92 Back at Biograph by the year’s end, Pickford appeared in two films that, together, crystallized her appeal as a new type of ingénue. The Female of the Species (1912) is typical Griffith fare: a finely constructed, grimly sentimental tale about innate human depravity redeemed by mother love. Yet Pickford’s pugnacious sprite excels at demonstrating her physical capacity to deal with obstacles. Employing the more restrained style she thought translated best on film, her character appears to inhabit a different film than her female costars, who weep and roll their eyes with jealousy and fear throughout.93 Her last film at Biograph, The New York Hat (1912), displayed her gift for leavening tales of romantic pathos with comedic touches that capitalized on and modernized the era’s enormously popular sentimental literature about girls’ struggles to come of age. Pickford’s performance and the script, the first by future star scenarist Anita Loos, convey the genuine, if comical, significance of acquiring “the New York hat.” The film deftly reveals this small piece of big-city life as a symbol of a world that valued young women’s desires for more autonomy. Settlement house reformer Jane Addams similarly interpreted the significance of working girls’ fashion choices, declaring, “Through the huge hat, with its wilderness of bedraggled feathers, the girl announces to the world that she is here, she is ready to live, to take her place in the world.”94

  In 1913 Pickford returned to Broadway to play a lead in Belasco’s production of A Good Little Devil, using the move to gain greater recognition for both herself and the artistry of her craft. Although Pickford later claimed Griffith’s domineering personality and preference for “wishy-washy heroines” drove her from Biograph, she became the “NEW BELASCO STAR” in one such role.95 Demonstrating the short memory of celebrity culture, the press immediately passed Lawrence’s nicknames on to Pickford, hailing her as the “BIOGRAPH GIRL” and the “Maude Adams of the ‘Movies.’ ”96 Pickford used her new theatrical legitimacy to make the case for the superiority of film acting.97 According to Pickford, “film plays” offered greater artistic, financial, and personal rewards, thereby providing the best opportunity for ambitious working girls. “For years the ‘movies’ have been looked upon as the inevitable finish of the has been actor,” noted the New York American, “but according to Miss Pickford—no more.” “You can’t fool the camera,” she declared in one of many reports describing why “This ‘Maude Adams of the Movies’ Says Self-Reproduction on the Films Can Do More Than Any Director.”98 Such statements underscored that no Svengali controlled her talent behind the scenes. “I have had many years of technical training in the best possible schools of experience,” Pickford remarked after her Broadway debut; “it wasn’t as if I were a novice or a debutante.”99 Her press also emphasized the masculine concerns that motivated this “Daddy of the Family, Not Old Enough to Vote.”100 The “very small salary” she earned during her first stint on Broadway had led her to work at Biograph years earlier, she explained to a noted theater critic. “The larder was empty. What else could I do?” In short, the theater was “so much harder than acting for the movies.” Film work also promoted domestic harmony, since “ ‘Little Mary’ and Her Husband” now led a settled life with enough money to enjoy their leisure time.101 Yet Pickford also credited her hardscrabble theatrical start with her current success: “I am certain that I could not today at my age run the picture company that I do without the struggle” of her life on stage.102

  Pickford’s Broadway stardom made her a singular commodity: a proven film attraction who carried the imprimatur of the legitimate stage.103 Film producer Adolph Zukor liked the combination. Like Laemmle, Zukor was another recent addition to the ranks of in de pen dent producers working outside Edison’s trust. The handsome, soft-spoken, and impeccably mannered Hungarian came to the United States as a poor youth, made a tidy sum as a cloak manufacturer in New York, and then invested his profits in nickelodeons.104 Not much taller than the diminutive Pickford, both immigrants wore their competitive drives lightly and concentrated as much on the long-term potential of motion pictures as on immediate gains.

  After Zukor moved from exhibition to production in 1912, the name of the company he founded—Famous Players—made plain his intention to feminize films by luring women into the audience with stars. In order to “kill” what he called “the slum tradition in movies,” he focused on making longer movies that appropriated the prestige of well-known stage players in adaptations of equally distinguished plays.105 He encapsulated the aim in the dictum that he would showcase only “Famous Players in Famous Plays.” In 1912 Zukor executed the plan, financing and distributing Sarah Bernhardt in film adaptations of her signature plays, Queen Elizabeth and Camille. But the Bernhardt venture offered a surprising lesson: stature on stage did not guarantee a following on film. “Movie” audiences had a mind of their own, Zukor learned, and the clearest expressions of their tastes ran to ingénues like Lawrence and Pickford and serial queens like Mary Fuller, star of the first action-adventure episodic serial What Happened to Mary? (1912). After parlaying the association with Bernhardt into an alliance with the respected Broadway producer Daniel Frohman, Zukor purchased the rights to film Little Devil with an eye toward approaching Pickford about joining Famous Players. “The screen public will choose its favorites. There will be a star system rivaling—maybe outshining—that of the stage,” he prophesized to Mary and Charlotte over lunch. Pickford needed little pleading, having witnessed how the “young girls [who] rushed up and said ‘Isn’t this Mary Pickford?’ ” at the stage door wanted to meet Little Mary of the screen, not Juliet of the boards.106 And so, “after a much heated negotiation” over terms, the two incipient titans formed a partnership in the summer of 1913 founded on the belief that the industry’s future lay in nurturing the relationship between audiences and stars.107

  From the start, Pickford and Zukor’s collaboration sought to capitalize on the interest fans showed in her rapscallion ingénues. After returning to motion picture work, she played three sharp-witted scamps of humble origins in action-adventure stories that tethered her star’s advance to that of her sex’s. In The Bishop’s Carriage (1913), Caprice (1913), and Hearts Adrift (1914), Pickford played, respectively, an orphan who steals to survive before triumphing on the stage, a mountain girl who captures the heart of a wealthy beau after great difficulty, and the survivor of a shipwreck who starts a family with a man only to have his wife’s arrival prompt her suicide.108 Although these films are lost, the traces that remain exhibit
the imprint of the classic Pickford screen type: a fearless, funny, lovely guttersnipe whose poundings by fate bind her audience to her in sympathy and love. These films employed a variation of the melodramatic mode that I call romantic melodramas, whose production swelled along with feature films. Taken up by many of the most popular actresses of the day, romantic melodramas tracked the exploits of a strong-willed heroine attempting to make her way in a hostile world. Charting their heroines’ risky adventures along the path to maturity, they required the display of physical comedy, emotional pathos, and derring-do and often abruptly concluded with their heroines clasped in the arms of the right man. Yet however conventional their endings, the action of these melodramas typically focused on women’s adventures rather than on capturing the heart of a man, the plot long used to narrate women’s lives.109

  The part Pickford played in Tess of the Storm Country (1914) crystallized the appeal of heroines in romantic melodramas. Indeed, tomboy Tess proved so popular that Pickford remade the film as an independent producer at United Artists in 1922. A motherless urchin, Tess is the daughter of a fish poacher who gets framed for a murder. While he languishes in jail, Tess fights off the true killer’s attempt to force her into marriage, rescues an unwed pregnant girl from drowning herself, delivers her baby, agrees to raise it, and confers grace upon the dying child when a minister refuses. The film’s end features Tess reuniting with the wealthy beau she spurned earlier for his doubts about her moral character. The role showcased her ability to combine contrasting moral qualities into an inoffensive whole: hers was a virtuous rascal, a hoyden of preternatural self-control, a young woman whose mane of golden, Pre-Raphaelite curls telegraphed her sensuality and grace.