Go West, Young Women!

by Hilary Hallett

  Parsons also celebrated scenario writers as personalities in their own right. Often she accomplished this through a sleight of hand that traded on their associations with more visible players. Anita Loos, “The Girl Who Made Fairbanks Famous,” was a good example. Wisecracking Loos later wrote the best-selling novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Intimate Diary of a Professional Lady (1925), about the first so-called dumb blonde, Lorelei Lee, the secretary who marries well and then heads for Hollywood to produce and star in the movies. Her “satire has won her fame and fortune,” Parsons declared, before describing Loos as, “the possessor of more originality and honest-to-goodness brains than any six-footer now engaged in plotting for motion pictures.” According to Parsons, Loos raised Fairbanks from a “juvenile lead getting about $350 a week” to a star so fast that “he couldn’t quite understand himself how it all happened.”95 Similarly, she explained the favorable terms that scenarist Jeanie MacPherson received at FPL/Paramount—“only two scenarios a year” for five years so that she might “spend as much time as she wishes researching works”—through her relationship with director Cecil B. DeMille.96 Calling MacPherson “one of the best known scenario writers in the business,” Parsons presented her as integral to his success. Given that MacPherson wrote or adapted virtually every film he made, the claim appears well founded. Pickford lent her glamour to discussions of Frances Marion. Marion “had adapted and written many of the star’s best scenarios,” Parsons reminded readers before announcing that she would direct the actress at UA. “Personally I think it is a splendid thing,” Parsons gushed. “Above everything else,” Pickford had “enough brains to recognize ability in another woman.”97

  In the context of her day, Parsons’s remarks placed her among the disparate group of individuals who first called themselves feminists. Self-styled “feminist” women and men during the 1910s asked for more than women’s formal equality with men, a demand most forcefully symbolized by the mass movement that won a federal amendment for woman suffrage in 1920. The strategy that won the vote attempted to forestall opponents’ derailment of woman suffrage by linking it to feminism, a concept signaling a radical reenvisioning of women’s place within society. Coined in 1880s France, feminisme traveled to fin de siècle England and to the United States during the 1910s. In part because of women’s unusual war work, feminism garnered more attention by the late 1910s.98 Although militant suffragist Alice Paul made the term virtually synonymous with the activities of the National Woman’s Party by the late twenties, feminism initially resisted definition. In 1913 Harper’s Weekly called feminism “of interest to everyone,” reflecting “the stir of new life, the palpable awakening of consciousness.” Yet one anti-suffrage organization displayed how conflating woman suffrage with a feminist consciousness raised the specter of women’s complete rejection of respectable femininity. “Feminism advocates non-motherhood, free love, easy divorce, economic independence for all women, and other demoralizing and destructive theories,” explained the Missouri Anti-Suffrage League in 1918.99 The fact that there was some truth to the argument eased the job of so-called “Antis.” For, indeed, suffragists who also considered themselves feminists sought to call into question the whole architecture of customs surrounding sex roles and the meanings attached to sexual difference.100 The actress’s long association with the anarchy of sexual instincts and work in the wider world indicated why she so often acted as a kind of feminist avatar who might teach women how to pursue their ambitions like men while preventing what Simone de Beauvoir called the “mutilation” of their sexuality.101

  Parsons’s description of many female movie personalities placed them among the still-ambiguous collection of individuals who were first called feminists. “I am a feminist,” her good friend actress Olga Petrova declared. “By that I do not mean that women should try to do the work of men. They should merely learn to do their own work, live their own lives, be themselves,” the producer-actress explained. “They should not be clinging vines, blaming men for all the ills that befall them, and forced to acknowledge men as the source of all their good fortune and happiness.” Others had sounded such calls before. Nearly a century earlier lonely voices like Margaret Fuller’s had evoked a more complicated vision of human sexuality and ambition; her call to “let [women] be sea captains, if you will,” evoked a world where tastes and aptitudes, not abilities assumed to be fixed in the nature of things, set the limits of an individual’s horizon.102 Feminists in the 1910s renewed this appeal, asking that women realize their individual ambitions, admit the importance of their sexuality, and experience—like men, but as women—the pleasures and challenges that went along with both. Women who entered the professions around the turn of the century sidestepped the question of work’s impact on the sexual politics and domestic labor of the home. Like Charlotte Cushman half a century earlier, most women still attempting to live within the bounds of respectability carved out new professional territory largely by maintaining exclusively female-centered domestic worlds that, theoretically, erased their sexuality. But the latest generation of so-called New Women began to openly challenge these oppositions by taking on jobs outside the home, frankly exploring their romantic interests, and experimenting with different domestic arrangements that suited both. This interest in women’s broader cultural freedoms, rather than specific legal improvements, provided opportunities to attack feminists as “sex radicals” and “free lovers” who sought nothing less than the destruction of the family, the foundation of society. Work after marriage for white middle-class women was viewed as so threatening to society that jobs like teaching, by far the largest occupation for this group, forbade it.103 Thus Parsons’s supportive talk about movie personalities juggling work, marriage, and a new kind of romantic femininity endorsed a practice many viewed as unconventional, if not dangerous. Indeed, movie screens rarely depicted such behavior. On screens, serial queens and the heroines played by Pickford were unfailingly young, single, and childless during their adventures.

  Despite the mounting opposition expressed toward the topic of work for wives, Parsons often depicted the movies’ new home in Los Angeles as a space that supported gender play within husband-and-wife professional teams. The approach emphasized the collaborative nature of these relationships while simultaneously displaying how a woman’s public accomplishments made her a more, rather than less, attractive romantic partner. Parsons called scenarist Ouida Bergere, “the feminine half of the highly successful motion picture team of Bergere and Fitzmaurice; wherein both the lady and her husband figure.”104 The director and writer met while working, married, and had conducted “a neck and neck race for fame and honors” ever since. Describing Bergere as a lady was itself a refashioning of that traditional marker, since ladies, traditionally, did not conduct professional competitions with their husbands. Yet Bergere’s behavior, according to Parsons, was not only ladylike but also responsible for her marital success, producing “a happy combination—Ouida Bergere with her brilliant, quick mind; George Fitzmaurice with his scholarly, more restrained intellect.” Indeed, Parsons even deftly swept away any hints of society’s opposition toward women combining work and motherhood. The announcement of Gloria Swanson’s marriage described the actress as having avoided a trip to the altar because of her youthful determination “not to permit matrimony to interfere with her screen career.”105 But Parsons assured readers that Swanson’s change of heart was premised on the actress’s more hopeful opinion about combining a career and marriage. Indeed, Swanson quickly provided Parsons with a chance to celebrate a working mother. Three months after the actress gave birth to her first child, Parsons approvingly noted that “baby Gloria” was “sufficiently aged to permit her mother to continue her screen career.”106

  One of the earliest stereotypes used to attack the moral reputation of the movie colony in Los Angeles was that the professional interests of its women personalities destroyed their commitment to marital bonds. A journalist in the Los Angeles Times complained a
bout how nonmovie residents of Hollywood contended with jokes such as “Are you married?” “No, I live in Hollywood.”107 Alarmist reports about the doubling of the national divorce rate from 4 to 8 percent between 1900 and 1920 fed the controversy.108 An article on California’s “rather appalling statistics” on divorce blamed the problem on the state’s unusual number of women in public life. The fact that most men procured divorces on the grounds of desertion demonstrated that “the recent trend of women to enter public life and the lessening ties of the home” was to blame.109 The argument followed the one first popularized by Theodore Roosevelt a decade earlier in a campaign he waged to stop the so-called “race suicide” of “Anglo Saxons,” a development he blamed on a sex role confusion marked equally by the overcivilized effeminacy of white men and the selfishness that led white women to avoid their domestic duties.110 In a line of thinking that continues to this day, the view held women’s new interests outside the home responsible for the rise in divorce, agitation over birth control, and the decline in middle-class birthrates.111 Yet Parsons initially treated marriage and divorce in the lightest possible terms. An interview with Anita Loos about her start in motion pictures mocked wedlock, conventionally construed. “I always wanted to see New York,” Loos told Parsons, so when a man “promised to take me to this wonder city . . . I married him to get my transportation.” Since “he only had money enough to get us as far as Omaha, on the third day I went out to get a hair net and I forgot to come back.” In response, Parsons merely lauded Loos’s “spirit of adventure.”112

  Two of the earliest moral panics over the private lives of movie personalities seemed to teach Parsons a lesson about publicizing a woman’s flagrant breach of matrimonial norms. The first involved the uproar over the marital arrangements of Parsons’s friend New York writer Fannie Hurst.113 One of the most notable producers of popular fiction, Hurst was touted as the country’s “highest paid short story writer.” In an era in which reading short stories and syndicated novels was a virtual obsession, Hurst’s work was syndicated weekly in newspapers, was published regularly in prestigious magazines, and was about to appear on the screen. In May 1920 the news that Hurst had secretly wed pianist Jacques Danielson five years earlier splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the country. The timing seems suspicious, given that the story broke the day before the high-profile premiere of the film adaptation of Hurst’s short story “Humoresque.” But it was the statement that Hurst gave when approached to confirm the marriage that made news. “LIVE APART, THEIR OWN WAY,” the New York Times declared. After admitting that Mr. Danielson had eroded her “youthful determination that marriage was not for me,” Hurst remained steadfast in her belief “that marriage should never lessen my capacity for creative work or pull me down into a state of fat-mindedness.” Such a condition, Hurst declared, made “nine out of ten [marriages] . . . merely sordid endurance tests.” Hurst and Danielson’s marital arrangement included separate apartments, meetings by appointment that resulted in an “average of two breakfasts a week,” and the promise to respect the other’s privacy when apart. Hurst admitted the plan “was the result of very definite theories concerning wedlock,” but emphasized it “was not the result of a fad. . . . We believe in love but not Free Love. Rather we are willing to pay the price in mutual sacrifices toward the preservation of one another’s individuality.” According to Hurst, the approach improved romance as well: “After a five-year acid test, the dew is still on the rose.”114 Parsons kept silent while Hurst’s theories on modern marriage drew attacks from press and pulpit from coast to coast.115

  This treatment duplicated the response she gave to the news about Mary Pickford’s quickie Nevada divorce from Owen Moore later that month. Pickford’s remarriage, to Douglas Fairbanks, three weeks later left little doubt that the Catholic star broke more than one commandment. Parsons had hinted at the affair between Pickford and Fairbanks a year earlier, running an interview that featured Fairbanks’s first wife declaring her unwillingness to continue to act as “a shield” for her husband’s affair with “one of the world’s most famous motion picture actresses.”116 Then Parsons dropped the story. When the Fairbankses divorced later that year, she wrote nothing. Indeed, the Fairbanks divorce attracted very little attention from anyone, indicating how the sexual double standard made the subject play very differently for male versus female celebrities. Parsons continued her silence even as editorial commentary raged over Pickford’s divorce and the Nevada attorney general’s promise to annul it, a pledge that threatened to make the star a bigamist. Parsons also ignored the huge celebratory crowds that sent Pickford and Fairbanks off on their honeymoon, crowds whose enthusiasm indicated that Mary’s public did not begrudge America’s Sweetheart an affair—as long as it resulted in a marriage to her UA partner and the swashbuckling prince of the new “American aristocracy” (the title of Fairbanks’s 1916 film).117

  But after ignoring Pickford’s scandalous divorce and instant remarriage, Parsons covered the pair’s return from their honeymoon with a clear intention: publicizing Little Mary’s embrace of more conventional ideas about marriage. In response to reporters’ repeated questions about “how to be happily married,” Pickford “reiterate[d] over and over again that her idea of domestic bliss was not founded on a Fannie Hurst two-breakfasts-a-week cult but upon the very solid and old fashioned basis of seven a week.”118 The New York Times made the point more explicit: “Here in New York Fannie Hurst, having consulted her engagement book and found the evening free, mutters madly, ‘What is the name of that man I married? I ought to have his telephone somewhere,” while “out in Hollywood California a little woman with golden hair puts the chops on and wonders with a sigh if her adorable fellow will be late.”119 The message was clear. Pickford used unconventional means only to achieve the most conventional marital ends. Subsequent months found Parsons running similar stories that stressed how Hollywood’s working wives put their husbands’ needs before their careers. An interview with actress Miriam Cooper touted her roots as a convent-bred southerner, before calling her “well qualified to say whether a woman’s place is in the home or beside her husband in his work.” “Having tried both roles,” Cooper concluded that “a woman’s place is wherever she is needed most.” The verdict was “not at variance with feminist principles,” Parsons assured readers. Yet Parsons went on to cast Cooper’s work with husband director Raoul Walsh explicitly as work for him, noting he had “convinced her that her screen persona was irreplaceable and necessary to his film.” “Quick to say that ‘he is still the star of the family,’” Cooper also erased any hint of a professional competition. Parsons concluded the interview by noting that her meeting with Cooper “took place before Fannie Hurst startled the world by advocating the personal liberty, separate establishment program.” “Despite Miss Cooper’s opposite views on how married life should be spent,” she gushed, “the dew is still on the roses for the Walshes, after three years of married life.”120

  FIGURE 14. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks after their 1920 marriage. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

  Considering the engrained association of actresses with unconventionality, if not simple immorality, Parsons’s new presentation of actresses’ views of marriage was not so surprising. The unusual spaces actresses occupied in the American film business, and thus in the culture at large, made them vulnerable to attacks that used their private lives to undermine their public ones. In effect, Parsons’s recasting of actresses as feminists who respected traditional arrangements in the domestic sphere aimed to shore up the increasingly elevated stature of both actresses and the film industry at large. That Parsons continued to write positive stories about Hurst’s work even as she glowingly described Pickford and Cooper’s anti-Hurst matrimonial philosophy suggests that this was her strategy. The same day she publicized Pickford’s rejection of Hurst’s private life, Parsons gave an extremely positive review to Humore
sque (1920), a tale about the power of mother love that won Photoplay’s first medal of honor in 1921.121

  As significantly, she used Hurst as an inspirational symbol for other workingwomen when discussing the professional activities of The Woman Pays Club, a group of feminist creative artists in New York who met to celebrate each other’s work. Parson first discussed the club’s activities under the headline “THE WOMAN PAYS.” The club “was formed because these women never like the men to think they have anything to brag about,” Parsons reported. Composed of “forty newspaper women and writers,” the club met weekly, honoring guest speakers like Anita Loos and novelist Edna Ferber. The club took its name from the old Victorian saw that referenced how the sexual double standard punished women for the erotic freedoms that men enjoyed with little risk. Since the club was “patterned after the Dutch Treat Club,” which encouraged women to pay their own way with men, the name served as a literary reappropriation that signaled members’ belief in the economic basis of women’s independence, sexual and otherwise. Parsons’s article “Earning Her Rights” exhibited the pride members took in the financial independence women earned through their professional success. “Time was when Janet Flanner was a hard working woman. She earned her bread and ham as motion picture editor for the Indianapolis Star,” Parsons explained. But then Flanner found her prince. “Instead of pursuing the course of many of her married friends and continuing her career Miss Flanner became a typical clinging creature and allowed her husband to provide all the bread and jam.” “Janet was content with her lot,” Parsons reported, but “her friends found so much fault she knew if she wished to continue as a member of [T]he Woman Pays Club she must bring in some money.” Parsons now used Fannie Hurst to illustrate how far Flanner had fallen from grace. “When Fannie Hurst married,” Parsons reminded readers, she “proudly proclaimed to the world that she had kept her personal liberty intact by buying her own clothes and paying the grocer.” Hurst’s example underscored why if Flanner “ever expected to attend another meeting of the Woman Pays Club,” she had to “show the Club some money she earned. She wrote fast and furiously.” In this case, successfully imitating Hurst put Flanner “back in the Club’s good graces. ‘We’ll make her famous in spite of herself,’ said one of her stern judges.”122