The vamp and the serial queen’s shared expression of sexual virility and physical prowess placed their stars on the most volatile boundary that actresses performed in their redefinition of the public woman. A playful story entitled “Lady Gunman” savored explaining the connection created by their taste for masculine conquest. In real life, both vamp Louise Glaum and serial queen Mary Fuller could “handle a six-gun with all the sincerity of Douglas Fairbanks himself,” readers were assured. Ellis Oberholtzer, head of Pennsylvania’s powerful state film censorship board, objected to just such promotions. In a tract written to channel the growing dismay about the movies’ moral influence, Oberholtzer charged that vamps, “sex photoplays,” and serial-queen pictures provided the most damning evidence of the need for federal control. Oberholtzer decried how the typical serial depicted its heroine “in high air; in a sewer without an outlet; under straps on a log while the saw draws nearer and nearer.” “If I were to travel the country over I should not know where to find women who conceal revolvers in their blouses, or in the drawers of their dressing-tables” or a woman who grasps “an iron from the fire-set on the hearth or seizes the inevitable paper knife to slay the villain, her lover rising in time to take the blame for the crime.”154
As movie production settled around Los Angeles after 1915, publicity promoted its new habitat as a western frontier that fostered this kind of fearless femininity. “Out in Culver City the girls are growing militant,” was how one fan magazine described the behavior of some dare-devil actresses in this new locale: “quick on the trigger, and not one of them is afraid of the smell of [gun]powder—they’re used to various kinds.”155 “The ‘feel’ of Hollywood at this time was like carnival, or the way one feels when the circus is coming to town, only the circus was always there,” Lenore Coffee recollected, echoing a sentiment shared by many who attempted to capture the ambience created when the flickers came to town.156 One early account tracked a reporter wandering around the “big, bustling Western” ranches-cum-studios in “Motion-Picture Land.” Here, “in the dazzling California sunshine” a “bewildering democracy” prevailed among players. Here, playacting and reality fused. “No part of the world” was free from the “invasion” of these players, whose work spilled into the cityscape so often that one looked about for a camera when anything happened “unexpectedly.”157
Another article in Photoplay used the mythic history of the West to depict the sex-specific opportunities of this frontier circus by the sea. “The early years of the twentieth century brought to American women the same vast, almost fabulous chances that came to their grandfathers,” a writer interviewing Pearl White intoned.158 “What the expansion of the West and the great organization of industry opened up to many a young man,” the article continued, “the motion picture spread before such young girls as were alert enough, and husky enough, and apt enough to take advantage of it.” “With the exception of Mary Pickford, I can think of no girl who has reaped her field of chance so completely, opulently, securely, as Pearl White.” White’s good fortune derived from a spirit that made her a “female Alexander” bent on finding “new worlds to conquer.” But her achievement was also cast in the more modern terms associated with corporate success: Pearl White possessed “that which is really the quality of few men: the true financial instinct.” The actress-heroine of Rupert Hughes’s Souls for Sale (1921), an early novel about the movie colony, defends her little sister’s decision to run away and join her in Los Angeles in a manner straight out of the Pearl White mold. “All over the world was full of runaway girls striking out for freedom and for wealth and renown,” the heroine of the novel thinks.” “Let love wait! The men have kept us waiting for thousands of years, till they were ready. Now let them wait for us.”159
CHAPTER 2
Women-Made Women
Writing the “Movies” before Hollywood
We built the modern movie industry on the star system, but the public made the stars
—Adolph Zukor
Prominent stories about Mary Pickford and Pearl White in magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal and Photoplay augured the rise of the type of journalism that the star system shaped and spread: celebrity reporting as mainstream news. Advertising “movie” personalities—the nickname that stuck despite many insiders’ preference for the higher-toned “photoplay” and “motion picture”—quickly became essential to the industry’s profits. Carl Laemmle and Adolph Zukor won the gamble that audiences would pay more to get closer to favorites, teaching a lesson that became an early axiom of movie production: stars best forecast box office success. Thus, women’s preeminence in the movies’ celebrity culture emerged from the shared assumption that women mostly decided which of the era’s exploding number of consumer goods succeeded. The idea positioned the female consumer at the center of the struggle between an established ethos of production that prized the industriousness necessary to produce a mountain of things and an emerging ethos of consumption that celebrated the abandon needed to buy them (possibly even on credit!). As many have shown, the nation’s budding advertising industries often addressed this consumer as a paranoid, passive, irrational conformist who needed the guidance of advertising elites to navigate this new landscape of desire.1
But the movies more often addressed women as experts who understood their importance as figures who acted as the arbiters of what counted as successful popular culture in modern times. “Three out of every four of all cinema audiences are women. I suppose all successful novels and plays are also designed to please the female sex too,” instructed film curator Iris Barry in The Public’s pleasure (1925). The alarm prompted by this idea, after all, generated much of the mounting concern over the feminization of American culture that intellectuals like Hugo Munsterberg expressed. Yet if the task is to explain the broad power of the mass culture consumed by women, rather than to judge its moral implications or aesthetic properties, then what becomes apparent is how it acted as a market domain that tirelessly discussed the problems and promises of managing a new womanhood. Put differently, in becoming a consumer bloc considered to share core interests and desires, movie fans participated in “an intimate public,” in Lauren Berlant’s influential formulation. Mass-mediated stories about movie personalities addressed fans as holding a common worldview, thereby cultivating a sense that women writers, celebrities, and readers were sharing confidences about their common travails and triumphs. Participation in this fan culture offered lessons not just about how to choose the right things but also about how to help each other survive and thrive in the wider world. Calling herself “a woman’s woman” in one interview, Pickford noted in another: “I like to see my own sex achieve. My success has been due to the fact that women like the pictures in which I appear. I think I admire most in the world the girls who earn their own living. I am proud to be one of them.”2
Women journalists writing in newspapers and fan magazines did the most to help their female readers imagine these movie personalities as women-made women.3 The “moving picture has opened a great new field for women folk” where her “originality,” “perseverance,” and “brains are coming to be recognized on the same plane as [a] man’s,” declared Gertrude Price, one of several prominent female “moving picture experts,” in the Toledo News-Bee.4 In Breaking into the Movies (1927), publicist Virginia Morris explained how the industry’s preoccupation with the female fan turned publicity writing into a field open to both sexes. Since “the large majority of film audiences consisted of women” eager to know about “the feminine star,” producers decided “that the woman picture patron could be most easily reached by information written from the feminine angle.”5 The strategy of using women writers to appeal to other women was one of multiple tactics devised to attract more women into movie audiences during the 1910s. By 1914 motion picture editors and publicity departments advised theater owners that “women and girls” were the most avid followers of “motion picture news.”6 By the early 1920s, Photoplay claimed that wome
n composed 75 percent of movie fans. One editorial extolled the movies as a “blessed refuge” for “the lonely girl” without “the money for expensive drama” after a hard day’s work.7 As a result, insiders imagined their ideal spectator as a young white woman eager to identify with role models who, however fantastically, reflected the changed condition under which they lived, worked, played, and dreamed.8
These writers created new western myths that appealed to these fans’ desires, blending wish fulfillment and social reflection.9 Journalists downplayed some aspects of women’s accomplishments, such as their managerial roles, and exaggerated others, such as the frequency with which extras became stars. But, as women experts explained to women readers how ordinary women became extraordinary new women, they created a female-centered leisure space that reinforced two impressions: the movies aimed to help women satisfy their new desires, and fans’ support of the industry furthered their ambitions as a sex. The social imaginary that emerged as a consequence mostly described these women-made women as shedding traditional ways of acting female to become “twentieth century,” “modern,” or “New Women,” to use Photoplay’s preferred terms.10 The common use both of contests that promised readers the chance to work alongside their favorite scenario writer, “cutter” (editor), or star in Los Angeles, and of inspirational interviews with female movie personalities allowed fans to imagine experimenting with their own self-transformation.11
No single writer in this era did as much as journalist and publicist Louella Parsons to explain to readers who mattered to the movies and why. This chapter uses Parsons’s reporting to track the development of the celebrity discourse aimed at female fans. Parsons honed her craft by giving form to the figures inhabiting the movie landscape before the business of making pictures and Hollywood were synonymous.12 Between 1915 and 1920, Parsons was among the first, and certainly the most successful, reporters to write a nationally syndicated daily column focused not on films, but on the news surrounding the industry and its stars. The industry had provided Parsons with the means to effect the kind of melodramatic, near-magical personal transformation that she later specialized in selling to readers. As a producer of this fan culture, she earned a following by describing the professional and personal activities of the industry’s assertive, in de pen dent, resourceful, and glamorous female protagonists. And, increasingly, Parsons described the industry’s new home in Los Angeles as a novel kind of western frontier that sought women adventurers. In helping to set the tone and content of the movie industry’s relationship with women fans, she fashioned an image and role that afforded her a great deal of power. In the process, Parsons became at once agent and symbol, cause and consequence, of the industry’s production of new ideas about femininity.
I
Born in 1881 in Dixon, Illinois, Parsons was the granddaughter of a woman’s rights activist and the daughter of a “stage-struck girl.”13 Her first heroine was Nellie Bly, the stunt reporter who championed workingwomen and traveled the world, alone, in fewer than eighty days. Part of the first generation of middle-class women who benefited from broader access to higher education, Parsons attended college while working sporadically as a reporter and teacher. Like most of this cohort, she married later, at twenty-four, and then relinquished her ambition to write, moving with husband John Parsons to Burlington, Iowa, where she gave birth to her only child, Harriet. Her choices mirrored those made by most privileged white women in the era, women who skirted the volatile topic of mixing work outside the home with a family inside it by seemingly sacrificing one for the other.14 Her decision to leave her philandering husband and move to Chicago in 1910 set Parsons on a path closer to the one trod by less privileged urban migrants. Working as a secretary at the Chicago Tribune, her $9-a-week salary barely supported her small family. Yet, like many workingwomen, she managed almost nightly trips to the movies, reveling in a fan culture that nurtured her ambition to write.
The few fan magazines that existed in the early 1910s touched lightly on the lives of famous personalities, but lavished attention on scenario writing, offering tips to hopefuls, contests with cash prizes for the best stories, and tales about women who succeeded at the job. Female-authored scenarios poured into film studios, convincing Essanay to hire an editor to evaluate the material.15 Parsons got the job. Now earning $20 a week, she brought her mother to Chicago to care for Harriet. Parsons loved the work. She read scripts and wrote more than one hundred scenarios. Most important, she turned herself into an authority on the new field, publishing How to Write for the Movies in 1915. The book was a hit and Parsons sold the serialization rights to the Chicago Herald-Record. With her job at Essanay threatened by an “efficiency man,” she flirted her way into a part-time gig at the newspaper, writing the Sunday column “How to Write Photo Plays.” After the series’ success, she talked her way into a job as a columnist who offered a “behind the scenes look” at the “personalities ‘up front’ ” in motion pictures.16
The nationally syndicated daily column that Parsons wrote beginning in 1915 partially presented the movies in ways that prefigured how Hollywood’s star system helped to spread the consumer ethos that exploded during the 1920s.17 Her coffee-klatch tone and “just folks” manner suited the needs of expanding corporate media structures that sought to preserve an intimate feel despite their scale, blurring the lines separating hard (political) from soft (cultural) news, city from country, working from middle class in order to attract the largest possible market audience. As a late-Victorian middle-class woman from the countryside turned single working professional middle-aged mother in the city, Parsons was ideally suited to address the target consumer culture coveted: a cross-class, multigenerational audience of white women with a modicum of disposable cash.18 All these women led “monotonous and humdrum lives” and craved “glamour and color,” according to the advertising trade journal Printer’s Ink.19 Parsons’s column presented the industry’s female celebrities’ personal relationships and work lives as designed to fill these needs.
Yet in ways that pointed to the industry’s Janus-faced relationship to modern femininity, the mass-mediated fan culture of the movies that Parsons helped to create also treated readers as intimates in a conversation about the pleasures and perils of modern womanhood. A special new series in the Herald-Record, “How to Become a Movie Actress,” demonstrated the relationship that Parsons cultivated. The paper’s announcement of the series assured readers that Parsons’s “technical knowledge of the game” and status as “an intimate of all the big movie stars” made her uniquely “qualified to give inside information to girls who are eager to enter the motion picture field.” Thus Parsons used the rhetoric of expertise to establish her authority as an instructor in the art of composing a successful personality.20 But she adopted the stance of a warm, motherly guide rather than the distant scold who later became classic to advertising. Her chatty, tongue-in-cheek style encouraged readers to consider themselves her intimates, thereby nurturing the kind personal connection that fans sought with movie stars.21 The column’s promotion also emphasized that Parsons sold lessons in nothing less than personal transformation. “Others have become rich and famous. Why not you?”22 The assumptions built into the column testified to the limits of the kind or romantic individualism she preached, while promising women a means to imagine transcending the typical boundaries imposed by gender.
Indeed, the series seemed designed to induce a self-reflective reverie in female readers that encouraged them to take their daydreams to heart. Its opening prelude whispered, “Dreams—dreams most fascinating to young women all over America are coming true every day. Do you dream of becoming a motion picture actress and actually plan to be one?”23 If so, such readers were not to worry, since “not a day passes but some girl who has shared your fondest fancies is made exquisitely happy.” The format that followed involved Parsons soliciting tips and advice in short interviews with those already successful in the movies, allowing her to advertise the movies’ women
personalities as modern celebrities by fleshing out their exploits both on and off screen. Equally important, she then used their personal experiences to create a new genre of success stories for girls whose master plot centered on presenting the movies as a place where those with “brains and beauty,” in the parlance of the day, and a little luck could reinvent the terms of feminine success.24 Parsons, and those she interviewed in “How to Become Movie Actress,” treated the ambition to become a star with matter-of-fact aplomb, contradicting the notion that such expectations were at all fabulous. Indeed, in Parsons’s hands, the movies’ central product was coming-of-age stories for girls that promised happily-ever-after endings. The fact that these stories offered young women the chance to win interesting, lucrative work that celebrated their femininity made them unique. Casting young women in the role of adventurer, Parsons sought “to inspire the ambitious” by making a romance of their quest for individual success.25
The column thrived by communicating a host of contradictory messages about the qualities women would need to achieve their ends. This approach in part imitated, in part further twisted the ethics of chance and rational striving that had long coexisted in the coming-of-age tales told to boys.26 Some of the advice sought to inculcate in young women the so-called masculine values, like aggression and self-promotional skills, which the nation’s corporate order prized. Determine “if you genuinely photograph well,” Parsons instructed, and ascertain which studio “you think you fit best with, and then send them your picture and a letter saying that you would like a chance to prove your worth as an extra.” Here the hopeful’s fate depended on possessing an image whose value others recognized. The column also prescribed the traditional path of starting at the bottom, as an “extra girl,” in order to reach the top. Yet even as such a course paid tribute to the logic of the Protestant work ethic, chancy factors such as “pictorial beauty” and talent entered into the equation of what determined an aspirant’s eventual fate. “Start as an extra in some good studio,” Parsons quoted Pearl White’s costar Crane Wilbur as having instructed. But Wilbur quickly tempered this statement with one that indicated an awareness that success might lay outside an individual’s control. “If you have talent they’ll find you quick enough.”27 The column’s contradictory messages about how to get ahead—it preached diligent effort in climbing up from the bottom even as it celebrated instant results tied to magical forces outside one’s control—were a commonplace of the Protestant work ethic and of the times. Stories by writers like Horatio Alger required that young men exhibit a commitment to the virtues of constant industriousness, thrift, sobriety, and moral rectitude in order to qualify as worthy heroes. Yet, as the plots of these books unfolded, ultimately “luck and patronage” became the architects of the hero’s good fortune.28 Here the relationship between form, as disciplined effort, and content, as talent and a pretty face, grew even more attenuated, as a girl armed only with confidence in her perfect picture went forth to triumph in one of the nation’s fasting-growing industries.
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