Go West, Young Women!

by Hilary Hallett

  Scripps’s injunction to keep readers’ blood near boiling with dramatic stories that spoke to their interests reflected the so-called melodramatic imagination that animated so much of the era’s successful mass culture. The mode of expression had only gained momentum during a century of repetition in popular plays aimed at the theater’s increasingly female fans, dime store adventure stories for boys, and the penny press.58 When used in serialized fiction, performance, and news stories, the melodramatic mode attracted huge followings because, unlike classical literature and repertoire, melodrama located drama in the lives of average folks. Current usage associates melodrama strictly with “women’s weepies,” stories that stick close to hearth and home and register heightened emotionalism and sentimentality, but such tales composed only a small fraction of melodrama’s substantial body. And, certainly to audiences in Hearst and Parsons’s day, melodramas aimed at women fans displayed extreme emotions in a variety of genres and forms that dramatized the pursuit of something better by ordinary women. Next to production values, Hearst placed the convention of polarization—between good and evil, rich and poor, male and female—at the center of the style he used to increase circulation in his media empire–building years. “Spare no expense,” he ordered his staff. “Make a great and continuous noise to attract readers; denounce crooked wealth and promise better conditions for the poor to keep readers.”59 When viewed from the ground, melodrama’s popularity also signaled some of the most progressive features of modernism, as the hero’s once singular, stentorian tones receded to make room for the clamorous din of many voices.

  Certainly by 1912, stories in Hearst’s evolving domain of newspapers, national magazines, and movies displayed the importance of women’s tastes and female protagonists to their success. As the movies settled around Los Angeles, fictional heroines who hurled themselves into the fray were everywhere. As the coproducer of The Perils of Pauline (1914), Hearst launched one of the best-recalled examples of the type in both his movies and his newspapers. The man who became Parsons’s long-term, and beloved, employer in 1924 publicized each film episode’s release in an illustrated Sunday feature the week before its filmic release.60 A review in the Literary Digest, a weekly whose circulation and influence among the middle class crested in the twenties, summed up the differences between younger melodramatic heroines and their older sisters. Pauline was “the apotheosis of the old-time melodrama heroine,” a girl who would have “perish[ed] ignominiously if faced by half the perils that surround her more advanced sister of the screen.”61 Another reporter noted that while “stars of the first magnitude” like White accounted for the serials’ “almost unbelievable financial success,” other factors helped as well. “Advertised all over the world in magazines, newspapers, and billboards” until “everybody knows that they exist,” serial queens became inescapable symbols that tracked women’s physical and professional mobility, as well as the new sexual dangers and freedoms it entailed.62 Indeed, since discussions of stars’ personas in fan culture depended on stories about players’ private lives, motion picture sections in newspapers and fan periodicals had ample opportunity to describe their exploits in real life. Thus, by the time Parsons joined the Morning Telegraph in New York in 1917, she was well positioned to help fashion what counted as commercially viable news by spinning romantic melodramas about the exploits of these women workers out west.

  Parsons new job coincided with America’s entry into the Great War. After being ruled a business and not an art by the Supreme Court’s Mutual Film Corporation decision in 1915, the movies demonstrated how potent their art, and artists, could be at the business of rallying support and raising money for the war effort.63 Liberty Loan Films “left no doubt,” Parsons crowed, “that the moving picture industry had placed a powerful weapon in the hands of the Government with which to spread American propaganda.”64 The government needed all the help it could get, since Woodrow Wilson had been re-elected president a year earlier on the platform “He Kept Us Out of War.” “Never before,” remembered scenarist William de Mille, “had the services and personalities of our well-known actors been so much in demand.” Wilson may have “urged the whole population to ‘give until it hurts,’ ” but de Mille thought it took the “emotional pleading of ‘Little Mary’ to bring home the bacon.” The number of Liberty Loan bonds sold when Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin toured the country surpassed even the industry’s own spectacular standard of success. Thousands in New York gathered “to greet these three film stars but committed murder just to get a glimpse of Mary’s golden curls,” Parsons cheered.65 The industry’s turn to feature-length story pictures and demonstrations of patriotism, together, improved its standing among the middle class, prompting the first official screening of a movie before the president and Congress. Yet Parsons betrayed how the event signaled the industry’s still-precarious reputation, wistfully expressing the hope it might bring the industry closer “to that long wished-for day when the silent drama will be treated with respect and dignified consideration.”66

  FIGURE 13. Mary Pickford entertaining the crowd at the Shaw-Butcher Shipping Works in San Francisco on the fourth Liberty Loan Drive, October 9, 1918. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

  Parsons’s reporting during the war also documented the industry’s rapid relocation to Los Angeles. “Convinced the Coast is the place to make pictures,” Metro’s president, Richard Rowland, decided to build “a new studio out in Hollywood” in 1918. Since Rowland actually planned to break ground in Culver City, his use of the name “Hollywood” revealed that, among insiders at least, it was increasingly the term of choice for movie-land. Thus Parsons gave readers a scoop on the emergence of a turn of phrase that became commonplace only after the Arbuckle-Rappe scandal of 1921. Rowland’s decision to house all of Metro’s employees “under one roof with one supervision” also illustrated another trend: giving a central producer the ultimate authority over, and responsibility for, individual films. The central producer system developed alongside the vertically integrated business structure that Zukor perfected. In an innovation designed to reduce the escalating costs of feature films, a central producer was charged with what many might consider to be several unenviable tasks: ensuring enough product to satisfy exhibitors’ demands for a complete program change twice a week; deciding which costs on lavish “special” features were necessary; and reigning in the power of movie stars. Although disagreement among producers was rife in the competitive industry, all agreed that stars’ demands drove the rapid escalation of production costs, as the price of the average special feature, or “star series,” made by those like Pickford and Young jumped 400 percent in 1915.67

  But stars, however expensive, were the foundation on which Hollywood rose. Zukor’s plan to use stars to sell features had perhaps succeeded too well. Now “the people wanted stars, in fact they insisted upon having them.” Cutthroat competition for the most popular players resulted. After Pickford’s deal with Zukor in 1916, lesser luminaries began to demand and receive enormous raises. Weekly salaries for contract players that averaged $150 to $250 a week in 1915 jumped to $1,000 to $1,500 in 1917.68 Film stars, typically female ones, also drove the exodus into independent production in this period. The greatest stars like Pickford wielded enormous clout in an industry organized around their appeal, which explains the trend toward actresses, particularly, leaving larger studios for independent production. Exhibitors, unhappy with producers’ attempts to dictate the films they showed, and directors, unused to the supervision of central producers, also made choices that favored independent control over streamlined efficiency. Various alliances between performers, producers, exhibitors, and directors regularly resulted in new film companies. Put differently, although the term “Hollywood” may have emerged among insiders during the war years, “Hollywood studio” in no way yet conjured solely a massive factory-like enterprise.69 Realizing how far they had come in the
half-dozen years since they were anonymous figures, many film actors decided to fight rather than relinquish the ground they had won.

  The patriotic performances of stars like Pickford during the war only increased their power by graphically demonstrating the pull they exerted over fans across the nation and around the world. On screen and off, Pickford’s turn as everyone’s favorite “little American” again established the important part that a fearless type of modern American womanhood played in demonstrating the national spirit.70 The Little American (1917) emerged from producer Jesse Lasky’s desire to capitalize on the image Pickford so successfully presented during her Liberty Loan propaganda tours. Create “something typically American” for the star, Lasky told Cecil DeMille and scenarist Jeanie MacPherson in Los Angeles. In this case, an American story demanded “a girl in the sort of role that the feminists in the country are now interested in—the kind of girl who jumps in and does a man’s work.”71 The film featured Mary helping to route the Huns and nursing French soldiers, targeting the female fans who made Pickford into “the idol of America’s young womanhood and girlhood” and FPL/Paramount, consequently, into the nation’s most successful movie studio.72 After the Armistice, a trip Pickford made to London with her new husband, actor Douglas Fairbanks, demonstrated her international stature. The enormity of the crowds and the intensity of their affection frightened many onlookers, including Fairbanks who at one point hoisted his tiny wife onto his shoulders. Parsons crowed over the international attention, reprinting an English editorial that called Pickford “the greatest woman of her age.”73

  Pickford’s career after the war also illustrated how the fight to control stars threatened to reshape the film industry again. Seizing the opportunity presented by the business’s still-fluid industrial landscape, she decided to resist the imposition of what she considered FPL/Paramount’s new “factory methods.”74 With Zukor mostly confined to managing finances in New York, Pickford grew increasingly alienated from Lasky and DeMille and the more corporate atmosphere of the studio.75 When her contract expired days before the Armistice, she made a change that Parsons announced with the headline, “MARY PICKFORD WILL BE HER OWN FILM DIRECTOR; ‘Daddy Longlegs’ to Be First of Her Productions.”76 Assuming the role of independent producer, Pickford released her movies through the First National Exhibitors’ Circuit, a cooperative distribution company incorporated in 1917.77 “The First National will have no part in the making of the picture,” explained the company’s president, J.D. Williams. “Miss Pickford is to select her story, her director, her cast, and, in short, be responsible for the entire production.”78 Begun by exhibitors who controlled some of the nation’s most profitable and prestigious theaters, First National created a powerful distribution network that broke Zukor’s hold over exhibitors by threatening (ever so delicately since boycotts were illegal) to exclude his pictures from their screens. The threat First National posed to Zukor was complete after it absorbed Pickford’s films into its network. Rumors that FPL/Paramount might merge with First National soon pushed Pickford into a more groundbreaking arrangement: the creation of United Artists in 1919, a studio founded to preserve the autonomy of artists within an increasingly centralized system.79 “ ‘BIG FOUR’ NOT ‘BIG FIVE’ FORM NEW FILM CONCERN,” Parsons declared, referring to the fact that Pickford, Fairbanks, Chaplin, and Griffith would run the as yet unnamed company of United Artists.80

  Pickford’s hand in establishing United Artists (UA) would have appeared to Parsons’s readers as just one exceptionally dramatic example of the influence that actresses commanded between 1916 and 1921. By the time UA incorporated in 1919, Parsons had featured dozens of stories about actresses running their own shows. As she explained to readers in 1918: “The acme of motion picture fame these days is heading a company of one’s very own.”81 After “Mary Pickford started the fashion by making herself the boss, it sounded so good” that every actress “with sufficient backing and bank roll” sought “immediately to possess herself of a motion picture producing company,” she continued. Clara Kimball Young was the first to imitate Pickford when she formed the eponymous company with independent producer Lewis Selznick that same year.82 Photoplay’s editor James Quirk disliked the development, exclaiming that the “ ‘her own company’ epidemic” indicated the industry’s poor health.83 But Parsons happily hailed the trend, calling Doris Kenyon, “the very latest star to be featured in her own company,” a “lucky young lady.”84 In retrospect, Pickford’s part in the formation of United Artists was the most enduring example of the clout exercised by a female, or a male, star in this era. Most production companies formed by anyone, actresses included, were short-lived, whether because of mismanagement or because of the mounting difficulty of operating outside a major studio. The extent to which actresses assumed executive roles within these companies also varied widely. But Parsons ignored such pesky details, painting the world in which these women-made women operated with the bold brush of a Matisse rather than the precise strokes of a Vermeer.

  Indeed, Parsons justified the star-turned-producer trend by teaching readers about their importance to the industry’s profitability. An interview with star Norma Talmadge displayed the lesson. After establishing a following at Fine Arts, Talmadge married independent producer Joseph Schenck, who “created a film company—Select—for her,” Parsons explained.85 Schenck managed the business details, but Parsons left no doubt about who generated the dough. Talmadge more than “justified Mr. Schenck’s faith in her,” she declared, making “money so fast” that he began “to consider his beautiful wife a financial as well as a love investment.” The opening frames of Talmadge movies like Forbidden City (1918) graphically illustrated her stature.86 The film’s opening credits displays her name in a type size three times that of Schenck’s; the next shot emphasizes her authorship by announcing above an enormous, elegant reproduction of her name: “My latest photoplays, produced in my own studios all bear my signature.” Talmadge, a former working-class girl from Brooklyn, offered young women a no-nonsense standard of success: “Being poor may be romantic, but I like being just the way I am, with pleasant work, a devoted husband and a happy home. . . . I can do things for my family and indulge in some pet charities.”87

  Parsons seemed to particularly relish highlighting women who worked in purely executive roles. After lamenting how men still dominated this category, she called Universal’s business manager, Eleanor Fried, “one of the ‘females of the species’ blazing a trail to paths heretofore occupied by men.”88 Emphasizing Fried’s leadership and economizing abilities, Parsons announced she had “piloted the entire Henry McRae expedition” through China and Japan, “where her economy had saved Universal thousands of dollars.” Her description of Fried’s rise through the corporate ranks noted her seven-year tenure as an editor before “her talent for executive management was discovered.” “New Film Company Controlled by Woman,” proclaimed a headline announcing the appearance of the Catherine Curtis Corporation: “a new company headed, controlled, and planned by a woman.”89 Months later Parsons interviewed Curtis, “who says it’s one of life’s easiest jobs to raise a million dollars in New York.”90 After remarking that Curtis was “exceedingly easy to gaze upon,” she pointed out that the “very big names in the financial and industrial world” who backed Curtis’s venture were not the type to “listen to a petticoat for the mere sake of hearing a pretty woman talk.” Parsons quizzed Curtis on the secret to her success, observing, “A woman with enough business acumen to raise a million dollars . . . is not a common thing even in the twentieth century world of successful women.”

  According to Parsons, improving the artistic standing of the movies required more women writers to devise stories that would provide a “higher estimate of the masses.” Parsons’s more general focus on women writers in her column left the impression that only women, or “girls,” as they were called no matter their age, were scriptwriters of note. Since women wrote nearly a majority of screenplays in this era
, their frequent appearance was hardly surprising.91 But the rise of feature-length narrative films, the still-biweekly change of films demanded by exhibitors, and the growing pressure from cultural custodians to produce “cleaner,” “higher-class” pictures made the question of exactly what constituted good writing a hot topic of debate. “The burden of every film producer’s song these days is ‘My Kingdom for a Story,’” Parsons summarized the mood produced by these combined pressures.92 Parsons sympathetically documented the efforts of movie producers like Samuel Goldwyn to woo “eminent authors” like Rupert Hughes, Gertrude Atherton, and Mary Roberts Rinehart, writers with huge followings in their day. She also approved of forcing exhibitors to accept “fewer and better pictures,” since their omnivorous appetites threatened “to exhaust all the literary material in the world.”93 Yet Parsons also faulted producers whose “cheap pictures” “sold old fashioned work” that mapped out an “entirely conventional destiny for the heroine” and “expect[ed] the world to accept a plot as obsolete as the stage coach.”94