Go West, Young Women!

by Hilary Hallett

  These contradictions often intensified when the figure of the male movie director, portrayed as a patron of aspirants, entered the column, causing Parsons to proffer advice that, willy-nilly, wove strategies long considered innately feminine with others long deemed masculine. The advice to “find out the name of the man who holds your destiny in his hands” sounded a conventional note by suggesting that hopefuls locate a Svengali-type master who could orchestrate their path to success. Yet Parsons delivered this pronouncement in the context of teaching aspirants the importance of making their own breaks. Armed with a name, she pragmatically suggested, one had “a much better chance.” “Better still,” she advised hopefuls to “discover when a big feature is slated for production. To succeed one must be both resourceful and inventive.” Parsons solicited tips from D.W. Griffith, the director made famous by the critical praise and social controversy provoked by The Birth of a Nation (1915), a traditional melodrama about the era of Reconstruction that glorified the Ku Klux Klan’s salvation of the South from Northern carpetbaggers and its white women from the rape of lascivious black men.29 As described by Parsons, the “new Griffith doctrine,” was simply a novel name for the old Pygmalion myth. According to Griffith, the best actresses emerged from “untrained” young women who followed a director’s every command. Parsons also reported that directors Cecil B. DeMille and Thomas Ince had a preference for women willing to act as moldable clay. Their talent in shaping such raw material was said to have put “numberless untrained girls on the road to fame and success.”30 Yet even as these men underscored the importance of ladylike behavior on the set, all three also warned that manly “courage” was vital to succeeding in front of the camera.

  Indeed, a fan following Parsons’s column, or myriad other accounts that circulated about Pickford and the other actresses who worked with Griffith and DeMille, would have encountered many more stories about the control they exercised over men.31 Certainly, as Parson’s column evolved, she devoted far more space to describing women’s individual struggles and accomplishments in breaking into the movies than to telling stories about men’s role in the process. Written by, for, and about women, these stories predominantly framed the topic of what constituted a successful presentation of femininity in the context of what other women wanted to hear in an era in which the New Woman, feminism, and women’s influence on popular culture were all topics of social controversy. In fact, when men entered Parsons’s column at all, she was more often interested in demonstrating how women managed to get the upper hand. Her description of Clara Kimball Young’s relationship with her director husband was one such instance. Parsons presented Young as the “Ideal Film Personality” whose “beauty and brains and wealth” made her the “Ideal of Whatevery Sixteen-Year-Old Girl Would Like to Possess.”32 “Neither one of us would be willing to submerge his individuality into the thoughts of the other one, no matter how much we love each other,” she explained. Indeed, Young declared that although her husband was the director, “he is not always the boss. When I make up my mind I generally get what I want. Sometimes I have to argue with my good friend [producer] Mr. Selznick, my sweet mother, and my dear husband, but if it is for my ultimate good I GET it.”33

  Young’s insistence on demanding her way fit neatly into the groove crafted by the stage’s prima donnas. Indeed, movie stars like Young magnified this convention on both the silent screen and in the explosion of print that created the first movie stars’ personas, making her a visible sign of modernity itself: a glamorous, individualized, and work-defined personality known for breaking and reassembling the codes governing feminine propriety.34 Griffith, DeMille, and Ince—all former stage actors in the “player-centered institution” that the theater became by 1900—knew exactly what they were up against when confronting the industry’s emerging female stars.35 They also understood as well as anyone in the business the economic basis of these women’s power. Virtually everyone in the movies agreed that even the most famous director’s name, as Griffith’s indubitably was before Cecil B. DeMille’s replaced it by 1920, meant little to the average fan and, hence, a movie’s bottom line.36 As Cecil’s older brother, William de Mille, put it, since “the names of writers and directors meant nothing to the public, the only thing the customers could count on in advance to give them some degree of satisfaction for their money was the name of a favorite player whose work and personality they knew and liked.” Only the star’s name above the marquee, and the title emblazoned across it, translated into box office.37 The Exhibitors’ Herald, the trade paper for theater owners, emphasized this reality in a prominently displayed letter from a publicity director. “Take it or leave it,” a man from Toledo, Ohio, declared, “the star system is what brings the shekels into your box office. This is a rule that might hang in the office of any theatre manager.”38

  For such reasons, Parsons’s column emphasized that success in the movies depended on impressing other women as much as men. Parsons’s stories about director Lois Weber demonstrate the point. After visiting the set of her Universal production of The Dumb Girl of Portici (1915), starring ballerina Anna Pavlova, Parsons lauded Weber’s “executive ability,” pronouncing her “the most famous woman director and photo playwright.” By 1915 Weber was Universal’s most famous director, male or female, with a style as distinctive as Griffith’s.39 Another stage actress turned movie-writer-producer-director, Weber’s persona stressed her respectability by focusing on her past as a former Salvation Army worker, and on her present as a married middle-class matron. This star image allowed Weber to exploit assumptions about respectable women’s inherent moral superiority that smoothed her making films about volatile topics like abortion and birth control. Little wonder that Weber’s co-worker at Universal, director Ida May Park, boasted in Careers for Women, a well-received 1920 vocational guide aimed at high school and college graduates, that there was “no finer calling for a woman” than directing movies.40 Another interview detailed Weber’s career trajectory: her start at Gaumont Film Studio in 1908 with her husband Phillips Smalley; their eventual move to the Rex Company to work with director Edwin Porter, who was said to bequest the production company to their “capable hands” upon his departure. When Rex became a Universal subsidiary in 1912, the couple became co–production heads, but it was Weber who built a national reputation as a filmmaker. “It’s all up to Lois Weber,” Parsons reported the director confiding; “I am blamed or praised whichever way the picture turns out. Phillips would efface himself entirely and make me director in chief.” Parsons left no doubt about who was in charge, noting that Smalley “came to [Weber] for advice upon every question that presented itself.” By the time a “distressed masculine voice” from the wardrobe department interrupted the interview, the kinds of gender inversions that flourished on motion picture sets were plain.41

  Parsons was able to call Weber “the most famous woman director and photo playwright” at Universal, because eleven women directed more than 170 films from the studio’s 1912 inception through 1919. The May 1913 opening of Universal City, the company’s West Coast headquarters, displayed how publicizing the studio as a tourist attraction involved promoting it as a place that encouraged gender play. “Where Work Is Play and Play Is Work: Universal City, California, the Only Incorporated Moving Picture Town in the World, and Its Unique Features. ‘Movie’ Actresses Control Its Politics,” declared the Universal Weekly in December 1913. “Linking work and play,” historian Mark Garrett Cooper writes, “the corporate mythos of Universal City valued women who publically played with authoritative parts.” A mock election staged by Universal City displayed one outcome when a group of actresses formed what the Weekly called “a ‘Suffragette’ ticket.” Reports across the country claimed the suffragette ticket developed because actresses “from the East” were “keenly enthusiastic about exercising their rights of suffrage, recently conferred by the California State Legislature.”42

  Women’s political participation in California was one of the man
y disorienting features that confronted Easterners. One of the first reports about the “big, bustling Western” ranches-cum-studios featured a dazed reporter’s catalog of their Kaleidoscopic contents, including “a Japanese pagoda,” “a Dutch village with windmills,” “the ruins of a Scotch castle,” “a New York tenement district,” and “the largest private collection” of “jungle animals” “in the world.”43 Universal City’s election of actress Laura Oakley as its new police chief and of Lois Weber as its mayor suited a landscape defined by its flair for gender ambiguity. The new Universal City that opened in 1915 supported these performances by including a day-care center and a school for workers’ children. Universal City’s administrators, called “some of the brainiest as well as the most beautiful women in America,” likely understood the necessity of such measures in capitalizing on this self-consciously meritocratic environment’s promise to support women’s physical and occupational mobility.44

  Even reporting that purported to temper the enthusiasm of hopefuls about heading to Los Angeles refused to discourage their investment in the success of movie personalities. “HOW ONE ‘EXTRA GIRL’ CLIMBED TO STARDOM” was the one tale in the “How to Become a Motion Picture Actress” column that sounded a pessimistic note, yet Parsons called it a story to “cheer the heart of every anxious to be photo-player.”45 A more accurate title for the interview with the former Chicago journalist Ruth Stonehouse would have been “HOW ONE ‘EXTRA GIRL’ SHOT TO STARDOM,” since Parsons reported that she progressed from an extra girl with no experience to one of “Essanay’s brightest stars” in eight short months. Despite her allegedly rapid ascent, Stonehouse confessed that she “felt like telling every girl to stay at home,” warning those she called “the movie mad” that “the profession is crowded now . . . it will be survival of the fittest.” Yet, Parsons interjected, “haven’t you something to say to the poor girls whom you so cruelly condemn to stay at home? ‘Tell them that a “pull” does not go in this business,’ ” she responded, “that unless they have the ‘goods to deliver’ to stay at home.” Thus, even as Stonehouse warned readers that only the most deserving, industrious individuals could hope to triumph, the flavor of the piece encouraged young women to cast themselves into the fray. And indeed, after Stonehouse traded work as a leading lady at Essanay in Chicago for Universal City, she went on to direct herself in many movies, including a successful ten-episode series about a willful orphan named Mary Ann.46 Photoplay later echoed Parsons’s strategy, warning that the industry’s rapid growth and consolidation meant writers would have “to be increasingly discouraging to the feminine youth of the land.” Yet it also called fans’ yearnings “to see themselves as they see their favorite stars . . . a very laudable ambition. In passing we might credit the screen with administering a knockout to the old fashioned pre-film days. . . . It is a golden lighted road to fame and fortune that had a dim counterpart yesterday in the way to stage success.” The article concluded, “Every one of them has the chance to be a Mary Pickford or a Norma Talmadge.”47 As in all good adventure stories modeled on the dream of social mobility, obstacles met and conquered sweetened eventual success.

  Parsons carefully edited her personal history to fit the inspirational lines of her column, crafting a persona that allowed her to stake out new prerogatives for women based on their association with traditional areas of feminine expertise. Published decades after she became a power house in the movie industry, her autobiography sketched an ideal girlhood for one destined to guide young women toward new possibilities in a still-perilous world. This construction of her persona began with a (fictional) fatherless upbringing spent writing stories that, in good Victorian fashion, were “always violently on the side of ‘a wronged girl.’ ” “This prejudice in favor of my sex has followed me along my entire career,” she explained. Even as Parsons presented her job as distinctly feminine, she claimed for herself—and for the industry’s “other career women”—the same “qualities of loyalty, square shooting, and straight thinking supposedly so exclusive of the masculine sex.”48 They might like to gossip with the girls, in other words, but the industry’s female personalities were not frivolous, empty-headed narcissists who fecklessly stumbled their way into success. The title of her memoir, The Gay Illiterate (1944), simultaneously mocked and embraced just such stereotypes.

  Despite the fact that her Sunday picture page was syndicated in eighteen other cities, Parsons lost her job when newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst absorbed the Chicago Herald-Record into the Chicago American, sending the journalist to New York City in 1917. Parsons’s country-to-city exodus from her small-town midwestern roots reflected the path taken by many of the women who created the “rural problem.” Yet while women composed the majority of these migrants, reformers focused on addressing the problems of men, making a 1913 survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture of “farm house wives” one of the few attempts to assess what sent them to cities and towns.49 Women’s replies to the USDA repeatedly expressed how the search for sociable work, aesthetic pleasures, and “the entertainments and amusements that the towns and cities offer” prompted their departure.50 “Why do they come to the city?” sociologist Frances Donovan wondered of these young women that anxious commentators called “women adrift.” “Because life is dull in the small town or on the farm and because there is excitement and adventure in the city. . . . The lure of the stage, of the movie, of the shop, and of the office make of it the definite El Dorado of the woman. It is her frontier and in it she is the pioneer.” A prairie girl with artistic aspirations, driven to the city by the moral strictures and limited opportunities of small-town life, also became a stock literary protagonist associated with the movement that critic Carl Van Doren memorably called “the revolt from the village” school in 1921.51 Such women’s mobility, real and imagined, reflected the dramatic reversal in western migration patterns that had occurred by 1900, when the movement of native-born white girls to western cities first outpaced the boys.52 But while Parsons increasingly pointed her readers west, at thirty-five, the self-supporting single mother headed east to the center of the publishing industry to find another job.

  FIGURE 12. Louella Parson, c. 1924. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

  After working freelance for the fan magazine Photoplay, Parsons landed a job at the New York Morning Telegraph and was quickly promoted to editor of the motion picture section.53 In this trade paper that rivaled Variety, she continued with her signature tone. Readers must have appreciated her confidences. The paper’s Sunday film supplement doubled in size in less than two years. Her quick ascent in New York drew the attention of competitors. As a rival reporter at the city’s oldest theatrical magazine, The Clipper, recalled, “By 1920 every motion picture columnist who got a break would automatically start gunning for her. Her column meant something. But I’ll say this for her, she never pulled the knife first.”54 That same year Parsons accompanied her friend Olga Petrova—the writer, outspoken feminist, and film star best known for the vamp roles she played under the direction of filmmaker Alice Guy Blache—on a trip abroad. In London, Parsons contributed several columns to the British fan magazine Picture-Goer, which called her the “Queen of the American publicity writers” and “probably the most prolific writer of fan stuff in the States—which is going some.”55 Receiving the star treatment she dished out for others, Parsons had become a movie personality herself.

  II

  By the time Parsons got her big break, publishers like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst had reengineered the purpose, look, and tenor of many newspapers in ways that both mimicked and then helped to spread the mass-mediated movie fan culture created by journalists like Parsons. Pulitzer and Hearst published well-made daily papers that appealed to all readers, but especially the city’s swelling numbers of blue-and white-collar workers, who as yet had no paper to call their own. Using bold headlines, illustrations, cartoons, and a narrativ
e style that some called melodramatic, and others simply “sensational,” the papers with the most spectacular circulation repackaged themselves to entertain as much as to inform or educate. This motivation transformed the newspaper, according to historian David Nasaw, into “an urban institution” that, “like the department store, the vaudeville theater, and the amusement park, transcended traditional categories of class, ethnicity, occupation, and neighborhood.”56 The rise of the city powered the rise of the new style of daily newspapers in other respects. Print offered metropolitan residents the feeling of keeping abreast of local goings-on, a need once satisfied by a trip down Main Street. Between 1850 and 1909, the jump in the number of daily papers almost perfectly mirrored the jump in the number of urban places in the United States. After 1910, the consolidation of papers into chains that cost Parsons her job in Chicago resulted in a steady slide in the total number of mastheads. But the business tactics developed by Hearst and his like continued to attract new readers. The circulation of daily papers outpaced the rate of urbanization after 1900. The use of wire and feature services by chains exploded in the new century, recasting newspapers again, now from an urban institution into a national one. By 1920 the same stories filled the minds of many men and women across the country and, with the advent of movies, around the world. E.W. Scripps, a pioneer in syndication services, summed up his formula for creating reproducible news: “Whatever else it is, our newspaper must be excessively interesting, not to the good, wise men and the pure in spirit, but to the great mass of sordid, squalid humanity. [Humanity] is passionate,” he reminded his editors; “therefore the blood that runs in our veins and in our newspapers must be warm.”57