Go West, Young Women!

by Hilary Hallett

  From its first frame, Tess announced its intention to satisfy female fans’ expectations for a rousing romantic melodrama in which a young, beautiful girl saves the day—and then gets her guy. The film’s opening credits read: “Daniel Frohman Presents America’s Foremost Film Actress, Mary Pickford, in the famous tale of woman’s heroism, ‘Tess of the Storm Country’ by Grace Miller White.”110 Reviews confirmed Tess was a feminine affair, calling it “a story by a woman, of a woman, and for women,” though conceding the movie was “for men too.”111 In highlighting the film’s relationship to White’s best-selling novel, the movie aimed to draw the large readership for these novels into movie houses. Future films turned the strategy into a near-formula, as Pickford produced popular “growing girl” novels like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), based on Kate Douglas Wiggin’s 1903 novel, and Daddy-Long-Legs (1919), written by Jean Webster in 1912. Often these films were adapted, written, and in some cases even directed by Frances Marion, Pickford’s close friend and one of the era’s most successful screenwriters.112 Given the engrained habit of viewing Pickford as playing innocent children, it is crucial to emphasize the in de pen dent, spirited, and adult personalities of most of her heroines. Of her fifty-two feature films, Pickford played a child in seven and remained a child in only three.113 More typically, whether based on literary adaptations or on original screenplays, as with The Little American (1917) and The Love Light (1921), Pickford’s romantic melodramas featured young women struggling to find happiness and to restore order in a chaotic world.

  Zukor called Mary Pickford “the first of the great stars,” undoubtedly because the success of Tess of the Storm County lifted Famous Players “onto the high road,” paving the way for the vertically integrated, monopolistic structure that characterized the studio system of Hollywood’s so-called classical era.114 Pickford used Tess to negotiate terms in January 1915 that included a salary of $2,000 a week and an equal share of her productions’ profits. Unbeknownst to Pickford, film exhibitors absorbed her raise by paying more for her films than others released by Famous Players’ distributor, Paramount. “Block-booking” offered a more efficient means to monopolize the business than the Edison Trust’s interminable legal wrangling. By forcing exhibitors to purchase less desirable movies to secure a favored star, block-booking made Pickford the “nucleus around which [Zukor] built his whole program,” in William de Mille’s words.115 When she caught on to the practice in 1916, she demanded another raise and a host of concessions that afforded her greater artistic control.116 Zukor’s decision to meet her terms reflected his belief that stars—as the most reliable predictor of box office returns—were also the key element in the industry’s profit structure.117 But Paramount’s head balked at Pickford’s salary, believing that exhibitors and audiences would revolt at the higher prices it entailed. Rather than lose Pickford, Zukor seized control of distribution by merging with a rival company owned by Jesse Lasky.118 Combined, the Famous Players–Lasky Corporation accounted for nearly three-quarters of Paramount’s product, allowing FPL to control the company.119 Pickford’s revised contract at the end of 1916 guaranteed her the greater of either a million-dollar salary or half the profits of her films, the right to select her director and supporting cast, and created Artcraft as a separate “star series” for her work.

  The development was widely reported as making Pickford, “The Latest Addition to Our Actor Managers” and the leading exemplar of a broader trend. By the next year, Photoplay’s editor James Quirk decried the effect of this “ ‘her own company’ epidemic” on the industry’s health.120 Put differently, Pickford’s star may have burned the brightest and lasted longest, but many other female celebrities glimmered around her light. Indeed, a disproportionate number of the players who earned the interest of audiences during the era of silent features were other women.121 “Remember this was the day of women,” scenarist Lenore Coffee recalled, “Beautiful women in full flower.”122 Clearly, actors like Charlie Chaplin, William Hart, Wallace Reid, and swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks, who became Pickford’s second husband in 1920, were huge stars. But if the stars of lower-prestige Western films and comedies are set aside, the list of those capable of opening either a movie or an independent film company remains heavily skewed toward the leading ladies of the day. Actresses had a near-monopoly over leading roles in adventure serials and the romantic and society melodramas that became the industry’s first prestige features, films that coincided with the star system’s development.123

  The persona of the era’s greatest serial queen and Pickford’s personal heroine—Pearl White—displayed how important women with virile personas were to the star system’s development. Pickford called herself “a devoted fan” of White.124 Although White probably never set foot in California, Pickford claimed to have encountered her on a train bound for Los Angeles in 1914. “In awe I watched her enter the club car, light a cigarette, and in the presence of all these men, raise a highball to her lips,” she recalled, relishing her identification with a woman whose persona was a running rebuke to propriety. The publicity surrounding Pickford’s Broadway stardom associated her with serial queens like White: “You have seen her rough riding on the western plains. You have watched her during thrilling moments on runaway motorcars and flying machines. And of course you tried to find out her name and failed.” White’s example also influenced Pickford’s answer to a query about how she kept in shape. “I used to ride broncos, drive racing cars, swim dangerous rapids and slide down precipices.”125

  As the first film genre designed to appeal to women, serials featured young women whose western toughness and virility shaped their allure with both sexes. Released in both print and film formats on a weekly or monthly basis, short serial films were held together by an ongoing adventure plot. Actresses went uncredited as was still customary. But the journalistic discourse that ran alongside the print versions of serial films made Mary Fuller, Helen Holmes, and White into the first international film stars. Beginning with Mary Fuller in the first female-centered serial thriller, What Happened to Mary (1912–1913), stories about these actresses celebrated how their real-life heroism inspired their parts; they were said to perform their own stunts after all.126 Edna Vercoe, a teenage fan in Chicago, filled her “movy album” with stories about all three actresses’ remarkable bravery and romantic successes. “Mary Fuller a Real Heroine,” declared one article about Fuller’s protection of the cast and crew from snakes during a recent shoot.127 “Miss Fuller finds that her proficiency in riding, shooting, and other outdoor sports” was “most helpful in creating many of her parts,” announced another.128 Such reporting indicates why most film scholars agree that the focus on these women’s authentic bravery and athleticism sold fans “a fantasy of female power.” But most also concur that this picture was tempered by an “equally vivid exposition of female defenselessness and weakness” that required the intervention of a strong, male hand for eventual success.129 Such a view captures the ambivalence that these heroines often provoked, but it misses how female fans may have also enjoyed the erotic tension produced by watching these conventionally feminine-looking but manly-acting heroines oscillate between aggression and subservience, pleasure and pain. Moreover, as specifically western heroines, these actresses needed to be able to both cause and tolerate acute physical distress in order to prove their valor and achieve the type of progress equated with the continent’s conquest. This ability was a hallmark of the iconic masculinity associated with western heroes from Davy Crockett to William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Silent western films exaggerated and then spread the association of modern “Americanism” with sensationally mobile men whose violent actions made possible the nation’s continental claim.130

  FIGURE 6. A general publicity photograph of Mary Pickford emphasizing her tough serial-queen side, c. 1922. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

  The longest-running serial, The Hazards of Helen (1914–1917)
, promoted a similar vision of modern American women. A cursory glance at the extant prints of Hazards displays the mise-en-scène of a modern Western, as giant locomotives, fleet horses, speedy motorcycles, and rifle-toting good and bad guys track back and forth across the dusty open spaces of California.131 Like the men with whom she works, Holmes confronts constant tests of her daring, bravery, and endurance as she attempts to tame her harsh environment. A telegraph operator charged with protecting a railroad station under continual assault, Helen is the film’s lone female, a woman who rides, shoots, rescues, and is rescued by her fellows in a landscape in which outlaws abound. The publicity about Hazards’ first lead, Helen Holmes, emphasized her identity as a genuine westerner, born in “her father’s private car somewhere between Chicago and Salt Lake” and raised “in the railroad yards.”132 An excellent horse woman reputed to perform her own stunts, Holmes insisted that doing so was just “one of the demands upon a leading woman that must be met” without “losing sympathy or that air of femininity of which we are all so proud.” By that, she explained, “I mean the heroic side, deeds of valor, based on the highest ideals.”133 Their identification with the West—a region that valued toughness and endurance in either sex—smoothed serial queens’ display of a type of overtly sexy American girl rarely seen on screens at the time. “This slim, seductively rounded young woman with the luring lips and the ‘come-hither’ eyes, looked to be a most dangerous person,” one piece about Holmes tempted. Others described her in more conventionally romantic terms, detailing her marriage to the serial’s director, J.P. MacGowan, and decision to adopt a baby girl.134 Yet marriage and motherhood produced not fewer public responsibilities but more. When MacGowan fell ill in 1915, Holmes took charge of directing, writing, and managing Hazards; in 1917 the two started their own film company.

  FIGURE 7. Helen Holmes on a postcard for fans, c. 1912. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

  FIGURE 8. Helen Holmes and J.P. MacGowan shooting an episode of The Hazards of Helen (1913). Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

  Actress Ruth Roland was another western daredevil whose international popularity displayed the appeal of this model of American womanhood to audiences worldwide. By most accounts, Roland’s popularity was second only to Pearl White’s. Both women were actress-writer-producers. Between 1911 and 1915, both were also the only women credited with earning spots alongside male Western film stars in popularity contests in a budding film genre that mostly targeted boys.135 Both also gained fame as serial queens working with the French film company Pathé. “The man sits in his office from nine to five dictating letters, invariably pines to be riding a spirited horse out West in the sixties or seventies and dodging redskins on the warpath,” Photoplay explained. “That’s why Pearl White, Ruth Roland, and Maire Walcamp have a following from Oshkosh to Timbuctoo [sic]. . . . In India Pearl White is the most popular of all the film stars and serials are about the only form of cinema that the natives will flock to see.”136 Born into a theatrical family in San Francisco, Roland took to the boards at age five, moving to Los Angeles to live with an aunt after her actress-mother died. Eight of her eleven serials were Westerns that showcased her equestrian skills on her horse Joker.137 Chinese advertisements trumpeted Roland’s western American athleticism: “Riding on a furious horse climbing the cliff as if walking on flat land, her talents are unsurpassable.” Other publicity emphasized her talent as “a business woman of the first water.” Roland also created her own production company, writing, producing, and starring in serials like The Timber Queen (1922). Later she put her fortune to work in real estate, buying “a tract of land between Universal City and Hollywood” that she subdivided and sold to “her fellow workers in the movie industry.”138 After largely retiring from the screen in the late 1920s, Roland became a prominent entrepreneur who promoted women’s business opportunities until her early death in 1937.

  FIGURE 9. Ruth Roland riding her horse Joker in a publicity photograph sent to fans, c. 1912. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

  FIGURE 10. Ruth Roland, real estate entrepreneur, promoting women’s business opportunities by writing “how to get rich maxims” for women in Los Angles, c. 1928. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

  Pearl White’s emergence as a star in The Perils of Pauline (1914) has obscured her image as a heroine whose fame also depended on her incarnation of a western persona capable of enduring intense distress.139 The serial best recalled today, Perils ensconced White among the East Coast elite, playing an orphaned heiress whose guardian plots her assassination in order to claim her fortune. Yet White’s persona was composed of equal parts western toughness and cosmopolitan glamour, ensuring her fans knew that “Pearl White . . . is quite another person” than Pauline.140 Publicity about White and her loyal, love-struck costar, Crane Wilbur, dominated Edna Vercoe’s scrapbooks. Indeed, White reported that her fan mail was “mostly from women,” including more than a “few mash notes.”141 These stories, as well as White’s autobiography, Just Me (1919), focused on her western upbringing and stressed her rural, hardscrabble start in a “lonely log cabin” in the “Ozark Mountains of Missouri.”142 They also explained how White cultivated her remarkable athleticism during an adolescent tenure as “a bareback rider” in the circus where she perfected the equestrian skills that led to her first film breaks in shorts like The Horse Shoer’s Girl (1910). “Oh for a girl that could ride a horse like Pearl White,” swooned one young man, indicating her appeal to both sexes. After viewing a serial, one woman recalled that White “had done things the like of which I had never dreamed. She became my idol.” Her love of White sparked filial rebellion, as her father had prohibited watching serials at “the ‘houses of iniquity’,” as he called movie houses.143

  Just such reactions explained why some accused serial queens of encouraging immoral behavior among their female fans.144 “I have always liked pretty women,” explained a woman in a “motion picture autobiography” that sociologist Herbert Blumer collected from Chicago youths for the Payne Film Study (PFS) in 1929. “When I’d see them in the movies I positively would try to act like them. . . . I think the movies have a great deal to do with the present day so-called ‘wildness.’ ”145 The first large-scale effort to document the effect of movies on youth, the PFS responded to mounting alarm among cultural custodians about movie stars’ displacement of traditional models of authority among the young. In the accounts offered by one hundred moviegoers about their habits and preferences from 1915 to 1929, women struck with what Moving Picture World called “serialitis” described an experience that supports film critic Elizabeth Cowie’s thesis that the process of identification stems from fans sharing “a structural relation of desire” with characters—in this case, with their independent pursuit of sex and adventure.146 The account of one self-described “naturally reserved” woman displayed the intense empathy produced by “following up some serial . . . three or four nights a week.” “I started, I believe, to suffer as much as the girl of the story did,” she admitted, adding, “I admired Miss White for her daring and courage. . . . I can recall distinctly saying to myself, ‘Oh, what a Lucky Girl to have enough money to take a trip like that—a trip across the wild desert. . . . Oh, how daring! If only it were I!’ ”147 Another, Chicago girl recalled how her “idols” “gave me an inkling of what I could do with that sense of adventure of mine.” “All summer this long legged girl in her teens, who should have been learning to bake and sew for her future husband, ran wild,” becoming a “bold, brazen hussy” who pursued the men she liked. “When I came away to college instead of getting married . . . I definitely proved that I had no sense.”148

  FIGURE 11. Pearl White on a postcard for French fans, c. 1918. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pic
ture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

  The personas of vamps, another type that attracted much fanfare before the war, grappled more explicitly with women’s sexuality. But the publicity surrounding vamps stressed the adult and distinctly foreign identity of the actresses who played them. Their identities as non-Anglos and foreigners linked the vamp to the femme fatale type so prevalent in fin de siècle European culture. “Grab everything you want and never feel sorry for anyone but yourself,” was how one vamp, played by Louise Glaum in Sex (1920), summed up their general philosophy.149 Like the femme fatale, the vamp was an amoral predator who used her sexual power to triumph over weak-willed men. Many films about vamps featured their destruction of a man who exercised the day’s sexual double standard, which permitted men’s libertinism with less respectable women. The vamp emerges unscathed after cynically using that double standard to get what she wants. Her forgettable leading men, who represent generic stand-ins for a sort of everyman elite, are left wrecked on the shoals of her sexual power.150 Actress Theda Bara—initially described as half French, half Arab—became synonymous with the type after the release of A Fool There Was (1915).151 Olga Petrova, whose vamps were nearly as well known as Bara’s, was exclusively promoted as “a European star.” “Madame Petrova is truly an international character,” her press assured fans in 1917, “having been born in Warsaw, educated in Paris, London, and Brussels.”152 Fashioned as dark exotics, Bara, Glaum, and Petrova’s location outside the American racial mainstream supported their more sexually graphic representations, suggesting why they openly endorsed not just woman suffrage but also feminism, a new concept associated with women’s interest in sexual freedom. A widely publicized statement by Bara called her destruction of men a long overdue vengeance for her sex. “Women are my greatest fans. I am in effect a feministe,” she declared.153