Go West, Young Women!

by Hilary Hallett

  Motion picture production had coalesced on the West Coast by the time Parsons reported on Flanner’s skirmish with The Woman Pays Club in 1920. Charting the westward movement of the business left Parsons ideally positioned to teach readers about the significance of the movies settling in the West. Few interested in pictures had ventured to Los Angeles in 1910; by 1920, the city produced 85 percent of American-made movies and two-thirds of those watched around the world.123 The industry’s explosive growth transformed the city’s postwar landscape, as the “graceful pepper trees” fell so “tourists could have a better view.”124

  Parsons offered readers a clear view of this new urban frontier in a column that, she declared, “every girl who is determined to become a picture actress should read.” After seeing just one movie, Parsons reported, Dorothy Dalton quit her job as a leading player in a stock theater in the Midwest and “took herself to California.” “There was Dorothy Dalton, many miles from home,” Parsons empathized, “with a good job in the past and nothing in the future. Most girls would have sat down and cried or begged on bended knee for something to keep the wolf from prowling around the door.” But not this heroine. After suffering countless refusals for work, Dalton merely “gritted her teeth, clenched her hands and forced herself to smile . . . and said pleasantly, ‘Very well, I shall come again tomorrow; perhaps something will unexpectedly develop.’ ” With Dalton having won a contract in the business, Parsons offered the actress’s experience as a parable for what other women with determination, grit, and good grace could expect in this new West.125

  A piece on the imminent move of scenarist Josephine Quirk from New York to Los Angeles resurrected Horace Greeley’s old advice for feminist ends. “When Horace Greeley penned those immortal words, ‘Go West, Young Man,’ he failed to reckon with the feminine contingent. That of course was before the days of feminism,” Parsons excused. “In the good old days when Horace philosophized over the possibilities in the golden west he thought the only interest the fair sex could have in this faraway country was to go as a helpmate to man,” she explained. Parsons then spelled out what such a role entailed: “If her husband, her father or her brother set out to explore the vast unknown—she should accompany him as cook, chief sewer of buttons and to make sure that his home was kept clean.” Banishing the thought of consigning her readers to such an inglorious fate, Parsons declared, “But that was in the good old days. In the present day, if milady goes west she travels not to sew on buttons or do the family washing, she goeth to make her own fortune.” Calling Quirk “one of those up to date young women who is following Greeley’s advice,” Parsons heralded the better prospects faced by these modern adventurers. No possible calamity faced Quirk. Her “future is assured, since she has accepted a position with the Goldwyn Company.”126

  And so the hopeful responded, traveling westward as before. By the time that Parsons encouraged Quirk’s imitators to go west, Los Angeles was known not just as “the Capital of Movie-Land” but as a “picture Eldorado” that particularly attracted ambitious single women.127 Journalists like Parsons helped to spark women’s westward migration by describing the first movie personalities and the social terrain they occupied as fantastically connecting the two most influential environments that young women moved into in this period: the world of mass culture and the world of work. Their stories described some of the most visible freedoms resulting from women’s work vis-á-vis the new social conventions that mass cultural forms like the movies and the press engendered and publicized. The place that women occupied within this industry as it settled in the West offered tangible evidence that women could succeed in areas, and on terms, previously reserved for men. And yet, in celebrating the glamorous side of feminine power, women celebrities shaped and sold a fan culture that acted as a bridge from the past, in effect promising young women they could have it all. In the process, the women-made women who helped to midwife the birth of Hollywood demonstrated different ways to act female in public, ways that the movie industry, quite literally, needed to fill its new picture palaces. Out west, women in the motion picture business turned the process of creating Hollywood into an adventure story about just how far women’s emancipation could go.

  PART TWO

  Melodramas of Hollywood's Birth

  PROLOGUE II

  The Postwar Revolution in Morals and Manners, Redux

  The first part of Go West, Young Women! maps the currents that converged in Hollywood, California during the First World War. There, the industry's women-made women helped to power the film industry's explosive growth by attracting the multi-ethnic, cross-class audience of women fans who so buoyed the industry's expectations by the war's end in 1918. The book's second part, “Melodramas of Hollywood's Birth,” plunges readers into the tumultuous postwar scene that shaped Hollywood's crystallization as symbol in the City of Angels. To capture what this development meant to different audiences at the time, the next three chapters re-create distinct, if at times overlapping, melodramatic narratives about the significance of Hollywood's birth. “Hollywood Bohemia” and “The Movie Menace” offer two competing stories about how the industry's postwar transformation influenced “the revolution in manners and morals,” to use the memorable phrase that Fredrick Lewis Allen coined in his bestselling popular history, Only Yesterday (1931), to capture the widely shared belief that traditional gender roles shattered in the conflict's wake.1 The final chapter, “A Star Is Born,” details the multiple melodramas that initially narrated the industry's first sex scandal, and then explains the implications of the one that won out for women, both real and imagined, in early Hollywood.

  Historians’ use of war as a fulcrum on which to hinge significant cultural fluctuations is a commonplace hard to discard. As engines of social change, wars can generate a momentum like no other, erasing whole sets of possibilities and turning others into dominating realities. Several factors contingent upon the Great War fueled the rapid growth of the American film industry's commercial power, prestige, and visibility, making it the world's leading producer of mass culture after the war's end. The war destroyed the once-dominant French film industry and decimated the flourishing Italian one as well, giving film producers in the United States an advantage they zealously protected over the century to come.2 The success of stars in selling the war to a doubtful public also graphically demonstrated their powerful appeal from coast to coast, granting newfound legitimacy to the industry.

  Indeed, after the war perhaps the only development concerning the motion picture industry that sparked little debate was that American-made movies had become the most popular, and increasingly preeminent, form of cultural entertainment both in the United States and around the industrializing world. By 1920 a chorus of commentators created a stuttering refrain: the picture business was the nation's “fourth or fifth largest industry.”3 This meant the film industry initially offered one of the few economic bright spots on the postwar scene as a recession spurred by demobilization descended. The speed of the industry's growth dumbfounded most. “The evolution of picture production, from a giant weed-like industry, crude and unformed, into an art has been one of the amazing revelations of the past five years,” one reporter marveled in 19Z0.4 Lavish picture palaces went up along the thoroughfares of cities and towns. Where once the grandest theater held 600 to 1,000 patrons, now movie palaces typically accommodated 1,800 to 3,000—and sometimes triple that number. The conversion of so many stage venues into movie houses also provided tangible evidence of the industry's prosperity and gentrification. “The movie seems to be developing an appetite that will not be content until it has swallowed the whole theater industry,” observed the Literary Digest. Entitled “Fear of the All-Devouring Movie,” the article argued that a cross-class audience of women had driven the film industry's takeover of the stage.5 “Time was when only lowbrows were supposed to attend the movies,” observed another reporter in the Digest, “but to-day everybody frankly attends, high and low alike. We are told that the
cinema now purveys amusement in America to more than 12,000,000 patrons daily.”6 Indeed, by 1920 an estimated 50 million people—fully half the nation's population—went to the movies every week.7

  As had happened earlier on the stage, women's decisive influence on this now most popular culture industry prompted worry and wonder among much of the educated elite. Many among this set expressed disgust over how the industry's reorientation toward women had resulted in the production of so many female-centered romantic melodramas. “Let me begin by saying I am not a movie fan,” announced Katherine Fullerton Gerould in the Atlantic Monthly. “Most of my friends honestly dislike them. But now and then I find one, equally intelligent, equally educated who attends regularly.”8 Despite the admitted lack of firsthand experience, commentators like Gerould remained grimly steadfast about what fans watched: romantic, thrill-driven melodramas focused on “the inevitable idealization of the heroine.”9 A Nation editor lamented the predictable influence that women's preferences for such heroines had on American culture more broadly. “The popular film ‘drama of heart interest’ is the lineal descendant of the cheap melodrama of a dozen years ago, and it is the contemporary relative of the fiction of our popular magazine.”10 The New Republic’s critic made a similar argument about the effect of women's fondness for “facile romancers” on the “most popular art form” found in “the picture theatre.” “The morals of the movies are also the morals of the popular magazine,” the piece declared, citing “Fanny Hurst” (and misspelling her name) as the best example of an author who succeeded in both forms.11 The reporter proved prescient. In 1921 an adaptation of Hurst's story “Humoresque,” about which Louella Parsons had raved, won Photoplay’s gold Medal of Honor, the equivalent of the first Academy Award for best picture.12

  Humoresque’s selection by Photoplay’s mostly female readers highlighted the increasingly widespread recognition of women's role in determining what counted as a success in motion pictures after the war. A 1920 survey of movie exhibitors also made plain that female-centered melodramas did the most to fill the new movie houses. Conducted by First National, the nation's largest distribution company, the survey asked theater owners about audiences’ preferences at 10,267 theatres located in “6,511 cities, towns, and villages, ranging from the big cities to lumber camps.” On “any single day in the year,” the report concluded, “the average” feature film was likely to focus on a “female star” performing in “a light comedy of society life,” “an emotional drama,” “a drama notable for action,” or “a drama of middle class life.”13 In this way, the so-called “flapper fan” became the “representative public” of the movies after the war.14

  The reorientation of American-made movies toward this audience explained its connection to debates about the postwar revolution in manners and morals. Although purportedly about changes among the entire “younger generation,” the debate actually focused on its female half, variously called “modern girls,” “problem girls,” or “the ‘Flapper Problem.’”15 “The whole revolution in the field of sexual morals turns upon the fact that external control of the chastity of women is becoming impossible.” So declared the respected public intellectual, journalist, and founder of the New Republic, Walter Lippmann, about the controversy at the end of the 1920s. Scholars now recognize that concern over the breakdown of the Victorian bourgeoisie's code of civilized morality that had idealized respectable women as essentially nonsexual began before the 1920s. The multiple nationwide moral panics that erupted before the war—over “white slavery” (forced prostitution), the birth control movement, and the appearance of a large class of sexually delinquent “problem girls”—all displayed the enormous efforts already unleashed to keep female sexuality under others’ control. But the controversy about the subject escalated dramatically after the war, in large measure because of the movies’ success at attracting a cross-class audience of female fans by splashing more sexually expressive heroines who specialized in so-called sex conflict across screens and fan magazines. Such heroines often deployed many of the new social habits and sexual customs first popularized by single working girls before the war. But by wrapping them in a glamorous and often exotically foreign aesthetic, early Hollywood spread them more easily among the daughters of the middle class. “Is ‘THE OLD FASHIONED GIRL,’ with all that she stands for in sweetness, modesty, and innocence, in danger of becoming extinct?” opened the first in a trio of massive surveys on the topic of changes in postwar gender roles published by the Literary Digest in 1921. “Girls to-day wear too few clothes and require too much ‘petting,’” complained one college boy.16 Spurred on by the leading ladies of the screen, women's dress changed dramatically after the war, as hemlines went up, ornamentation went down, and the accentuation of breasts and hips disappeared to create a simple silhouette that displayed the body beneath the clothes. As a result, clothes directly articulated the female form, and, for the first time in two centuries, women and men appeared more equal in scale. These easily mass-produced designs showed up not just in fan magazines and films, but on fans across the country. Their use of tactile, mobile fabrics that cut across the back, arms, and calves suggesting “how the female body actually felt to its owner, and how it might feel to the touch of others.”17

  Little wonder, then, that the Digest, like so many other cultural custodians, blamed the movies’ stars and stories for tempting their once respectable daughters to slip into the skins of glamorous new heroines who displayed a knack for flaunting sexual propriety with impunity. Industry insiders reversed the direction of influence, holding the “flapper's sophistication” responsible for the turn to more passionate melodramas and stars.18 According to Paramount president Adolph Zukor, “The post war revolution of manners and morals” left the industry “caught in the middle” between young women and their elders. But Zukor also admitted that the American film industry sought to become a glamorous international trendsetter by offering stories and stars that stoked fans’ new desires. “Our prime aim was always to keep abreast of audience taste,” he asserted.19

  Thus Hollywood's relationship to the postwar revolution in women's manners and morals provoked as much trouble as success. The revolution's alien origins provided grounds for joining the growing opposition seeking to protect “100 percent” native American morality, in the parlance of the war years, from the corrupting influences of the foreign aesthetic purveyed by the movies’ new “Hebrew Trust.” Some activists, fresh from their victory enacting the Prohibition amendment in 1919, drew strength and fresh allies by linking their cause to the postwar hysteria over the new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, particularly Jewish ones. By 1920 an unprecedented call for federal regulation of the film industry erupted to stop un-American, sexually perverse “movie morals” from debasing the industry's seemingly ever expanding circle of female fans. Put differently, the unintended consequences of the movies’ triumph at selling themselves as a cosmopolitan gender convention–defying new frontier unified reformers around the idea that only respectable American moral regulators could prevent the industry's spread of dangerously foreign ideas among their daughters. Activists’ ability to draw on established stereotypes about Jews’ penchant for corrupting their “host nations” through racial mixing and sexual perversion helped their case. Moreover, after the war talk about a new “Movie Trust” was well founded in actual material changes to the industry's organizational structure. By the war's end, a new set of mostly immigrant Jewish leaders controlled many of the largest film production studios in Los Angeles. These men were busy building the industry's new trust in a struggle that pitted the largest producers, like Paramount's Adolph Zukor, against independent exhibitors in a battle to control the industry though controlling its screens and stars.

  The reference annual most trusted by industry insiders betrayed the unprecedented attempts to control the “giant weed-like industry” that marked the beginning of the 1920s. “Censorship battles in at least 36 states will be fought during th
e winter of 1921,” observed Wid's Year Book 1920. Since this was “more legislative battles than have been handled in any one time,” Wid's predicted that Congress would debate federal regulation in the coming year. Yet an industry symposium entitled “What of the Coming Year?” betrayed almost no evidence of these serious threats.20 Only one man, Charles Pettijohn, openly contradicted the rosy prognostications offered by most of the film industry executives. Well connected across the political spectrum, the Democratic lawyer had recently helped the Republican National Committee's chairman, William Hays (his hometown friend and political rival in Indiana) marshal thousands of screens to support Warren Harding in the 1920 presidential race. “Watch your step,” warned Pettijohn, who had gone to work for producer Lewis Selznick in 1918. “With the prohibition question out of the way, pictures will furnish the most fertile field for salaried reformers,” he explained, referring to the long-sought passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, ratified in January 1919.21 A recent mid-western transplant, Pettijohn well understood how savvy rural activists in the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) had used the war to equate sobriety with 100 percent Americanism. During the war years, the ASL had out-maneuvered new urban majorities with a grassroots strategy that pledged to use a “pure stream of country sentiment and township morals” to “flush out the cesspools of cities.” In this way, the nativism stirred by the war and immigration helped to frame alcohol not just as an urban vice but also as “un-American” one. The approach allowed the ASL to cast its “crusade to regulate behavior” as consonant “with the preservation of the American way of life,” according to historian John Higham.22