Go West, Young Women!

by Hilary Hallett

  Pettijohn argued that reformers who once used the protection of native American morality to control what people drank would now use it to control how they played. “Censorship will be at the high water mark between November 1920 and June 1921,” observed the only Wid's symposium participant who was connected to political currents that ran outside of the industry and away from seaboard cities. We “will be defeated in several states unless we get busy and equip ourselves to meet the situation. This cannot be done without a mutual understanding and a working arrangement with a national exhibitors’ organization,” he continued.23 Like a “prophet,” as the contemporary film historian Terry Ramsaye called him, Pettijohn foretold that the internecine feud between producers and independent exhibitors had blinded them to the political storm descending.24 Put differently, in the war's aftermath the industry's connection to the revolution in manners and morals threatened to unleash a storm that just might drown them all.

  CHAPTER 3

  Hollywood Bohemia

  One of the first films imported from Germany following the Treaty of Versailles displayed how the “Orientalized” glamour of European artists licensed the startling shift in gender roles that many of early Hollywood's biggest stars and films flaunted after the war.1 Packing movie houses and drawing critical hosannas throughout the year, Passion (1921) starred Pola Negri, a raven-haired Polish actress who rose to fame working with the film's Jewish director, Ernst Lubitsch, in his native Berlin.2 The fanfare surrounding the film's release in the United States centered on Negri's role as the sexually sophisticated heroine Madame Jeanne du Barry, the infamous milliner-turned-mistress of the king of France. “POLA NEGRI AND A CAST OF 5000 PEOPLE in Passion,” promised ads. “This is a story of a wonder woman—the world's most daring adventuress.”3 Negri and Lubitsch both exuded the distinctly un-American sensibility that Hollywood offered to postwar audiences. Decades later, when recalling her decision to invite Lubitsch to work at United Artists on what would be his first American-made film, Rosita (192.3), Pickford still emphasized the difference between her American sensibilities and theirs. “Now of course, [Lubitsch] understood Pola Negri or Gloria Swanson, that type of actress,” she said of the man who went on to make the boldest sex comedies of his day, “but he did not understand me because I am of course a purely American type. I'm not European.”4 Yet, however much Pickford later renounced her decision to have Lubitsch direct her as a Spanish street singer, Rosita not only succeeded in its day but also indicated her awareness of the growing appeal of a non-Anglo-American allure. Indeed, just this recognition prompted producers like Pickford and Jesse Lasky to absorb the threat that European talent posed after the war by bringing them to Hollywood.5 After wooing Negri to Los Angeles, Jesse Lasky, FPL/Paramount's (soon to be Paramount's) vice president of production, changed the title of her starring vehicle from Madame du Barry to Passion to ensure that American audiences understood the romantic nature of the heroine's conquests.6 As Jeanne du Barry, Negri plays a country girl who heads to Paris to find her fortune. A romantic swashbuckler, Jeanne delights in directing erotic games as she follows “adventure, siren fingered,” into the arms of a succession of men. Acting the frightened naïf one minute, the frightening dominatrix the next, she burlesques the prewar era's stereotyped performances of female sexuality for her lovers. Even her plea while waiting to lose her head—“One moment more! Life is so sweet!”—suggests the pleasures taken in her life of sin.7

  Although Madame Jeanne du Barry pays for her wicked ways in the end, the character's actions drove the film outside the conventions established by Pickford's romantic melodramas. Prewar romantic melodramas made room for assertive women, but typically treated overt demonstrations of female sexuality and desire as what separated good women from the bad, with Theda Bara playing women driven by supernatural forces rather than human needs. But after the war the personas and films of actresses like Swanson and Negri often demolished the conventions that had held the sexuality of heroines hostage for so long. Jeanne offered a different template for understanding women's erotic desires and individuality, since the character's preferences, alone, explained her behavior. Moreover, publicity about the real-life personas of stars like Negri sparked equal alarm. After divorcing a Russian count and moving to Los Angeles, Negri took a series of high-profile lovers, including actors Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino, and projected a “mysterious aloofness” that became “part of the equipment of every foreign star to follow.” Women like Negri and Swanson—who became the first American star to marry into the European aristocracy when she took a French marquis for her third husband in 1925—were sophisticated, globe-trotting cosmopolitans whose personal conduct graphically illustrated their sexual emancipation. The first so-called glamour queen, Swanson was notorious for flaunting her unconventional behavior and opinions, including her demand for more mutually satisfying erotic relationships between the sexes. The ability of stars like Swanson to alter what constituted an acceptable, if still contested, performance of femininity involved their success in using strategies that mobilized both artifice and attitude. In this way, actresses like Negri and Swanson used consumer culture's exploding array of aesthetic goods to create themselves as glamorous subjects who stood a better chance of achieving their ends in what was, as Swanson put it, still “a man's world” after all.8

  FIGURE 15. Pola Negri displays the new, decidedly non-Anglo postwar allure on a fan postcard in 1921. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

  This chapter explores the melodramas of passion that publicized early Hollywood's experiments in challenging the boundaries of the sexual order after the war, examining the character of this moment, its icons, and why it flourished in spite of, or perhaps because of, critique. As the nation's first mass cultural form, early Hollywood's birth made it “a great basin” that absorbed artistic practices originating from high and low culture alike and from across national boundaries and then repackaged them into a new whole.9 The rise of a group of cosmopolitan personalities—including Gloria Swanson, Elinor Glyn, Alia Nazimova, June Mathis, and Rudolph Valentino—offered glamorous instruction in the new gender roles, marital relations, and erotic behavior necessary to embody this style. These women and men helped the industry to stake out a position as an international fashion trendsetter by wedding conventions associated with prewar working girls to continental glamour and Oriental exoticism. These first so-called Hollywoodites were described as inhabiting an ideal environment for facilitating such tendencies and tastes, a Hollywood Bohemia that nurtured all women's personal, professional, and sexual freedoms. Increasingly, cultural commentators from both inside and outside the city fastened on women's unusual prominence within the bohemian movie colony, where even the most ordinary women workers, the so-called extra girls, appeared to live happily like bachelors in boomtowns of yore. In this way, the passionate melodramas surrounding Hollywood's birth challenged the nation's gendered boundaries by celebrating the exploits of these exotic, glamorous workers out west.

  I

  Initially Hollywood used stars like Norma Talmadge to advance and explain its position as a new, more democratic fashion capital for its “twentieth century,” “modern,” or “New Woman” fans.10 Since “the stars of silent drama are not content with following the fashions,” but preferred to “introduce them,” they “revolutionized fashions as well as a lot of other things,” Photoplay explained.11 The revolution that stars like Talmadge led offered all women a realm where they could prove their individual worth, since even fans in “small middle western” towns would know what was “new before Fifth Avenue.” The regular fashion column that Talmadge (ostensibly) wrote for Photoplay beginning in June 1920 gave lessons in the designers, trends, and jargon associated with haute couture, but it also assured readers the latest custom-fitted Parisian confection was not necessary to look their best. “Good dressing” did not require having “money to burn,” Talmadge assured. It was instea
d, “a matter of line, a matter of studying one's own figure,” and then selecting the styles that best suited the wearer. While Talmadge admitted “the services of a great stylist” made things easier, she acknowledged that “most of you girls can't do this—I certainly couldn't during the first years I was in motion picture work.” So she advised readers to avoid “the helplessness that leaves you at the mercy of the shopkeeper,” and to partake “in the joy of creating something” by making their own clothes instead.12

  Such comments displayed how Talmadge's persona as the screen's most down-to-earth star created a particularly inviting tone that encouraged women to experiment with their self-fashioning. Founded by one of the many female stars who benefited from the flourishing of independent production in the postwar boom, the Norma Talmadge Film Corporation turned out lavish hit after lavish hit from 1917 until she retired in 1930. Although husband Joseph Schenck ran the company, after the war her movies opened with a credit that emphasized her authorship and control. “I always like to play parts in which modern women have the principal role. I won't play a fast woman and I won't play a stupid one,” she explained in Pictorial Review, a progressive women's fashion and fiction magazine.13 She chose parts that appealed “to intelligent women,” films in which “a woman is doing something in the world for herself, by herself.” Considered by many the greatest dramatic actress of her day, Talmadge played everything from a Chinese aristocrat murdered by the emperor for giving birth to an illegitimate child in Forbidden City (1918), to an immigrant girl in A Daughter of Two Worlds (1920) who unites high society with working-class ghetto after her father sends her to be educated among the rich.14 Her persona and films provided a link to prewar modern romantic melodramas that earned her a “heroine worship” that elicited four thousand letters a week, mostly from women between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five.15

  Talmadge's star persona was thus perfectly positioned to appeal to the cross-class audience of women on whom early Hollywood, and so much of consumer culture, focused after the war. The presentation of her real life consistently emphasized her working-class past and happy present ensconced among the Talmadge clan, depicting her as the screen's most unpretentious star.16 Though childless, Norma was famously part of a brood that included a devoted mother and Hollywood's most celebrated sister act: younger sisters Constance, a rising comedic star, and Natalie, who married comedian Buster Keaton to great fanfare in 1921. Their press mirrored the formula for success that mother Peg described in The Talmadge Sisters: Norma, Constance, and Natalie (1924). In need of a job, Norma set her sights on the movies, worked hard, brought her family up through the ranks, enjoyed her career and good fortune, and never let it go to her head.17 “We love our careers, our successes . . . but more than these we love our Loves—our families and our romance,” Norma summarized the sisters’ philosophy for fans.18 In this way, Talmadge's persona projected a model of femininity that combined the extraordinary with the ordinary, the new with the old. Here was an ambitious working girl now at home among the best money could buy, a modern career woman protected by a loving husband and mother, a fantastic professional success who enjoyed nothing better than to dish about fashion with the girls. This explained why F. Scott Fitzgerald memorialized her as a symbol of what made the “cinema” the place “where all American women would be happy.” Although Photoplay’s mode of address still tipped in favor of addressing working-class women, the magazine increasingly suggested that what all modern young women needed to achieve real happiness was a new kind of leading man, an “ideal hero—so grandly different from all the men you know.”19

  FIGURE 16. “The Down-Home Girls,” (left to right) Natalie, Norma, Peg, and Constance Talmadge, setting sail on the Mauritania in 1917. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

  Scenarist Frances Marion was hired to fulfill the demand for heroines who, unlike Talmadge, openly defied respectability to chase after just such handsome heroes. When she returned to Los Angeles after serving as a war correspondent in Europe, Marion recalled, her first assignment was to write a story about the “modern girl who, irked by convention, had joined the erring youth revolt and kicked over the traces. This independence sweeping the country had stamped these girls with the sobriquet flapper.” Born Marion Benson Owens in San Francisco in 1888, Marion had married and moved to Los Angeles in 1912. “Grandchild of four pioneers,” Marion later recalled that she immediately “sensed a future in this fascinating if cock-eyed business.” Lois Weber renamed Marion after giving her a job as an actress-protégé, but Mary Pickford became her most important early mentor. Pickford had secured her a job as a war reporter after the screenwriter had adapted Rupert Hughes's short story “The Mobilizing of Johanna” into the successful Pickford vehicle Johanna Enlists (1918). Upon her return to the movie colony, Marion wrote The Flapper (1920), which introduced this most fashionable woman as part sophisticate, part ingénue.20 A slip of a girl with a short skirt and bobbed hair, the flapper smoked, danced to jazz, drank bathtub gin—Prohibition having taken effect that year—and generally pursued a good time along with the boys.21 Despite her bold behavior, the flapper did little more than “pet,” but her eagerness to exhibit her sexuality and skin linked her to the vamp. Trading on this familiarity, Photoplay used qualifiers like “Vampette” or “baby vamp” to introduce the type to readers. The flapper was “a youngish little rascal” with “big, innocent” eyes who had “all the experience of her . . . big sister—only she doesn't work at it.” The description pointed to why Bara-styled vamps fell out of fashion after the war.22

  The moral framework that encased the prewar vamp attributed one intention to “the lightning bolt” of women's sexuality: the destruction of foolish men.23 Prewar fan culture described Bara as a supernatural force, suggesting that only a woman from another world could possess an openly erotic side. But to postwar flapper fans, this formula appeared comically one-dimensional. Articles mocked Bara's style as “bizarre,” debunked her persona as “pathetic,” “impossible,” and “fake,” ridiculing her behavior as “hocus pocus,” “a ridiculous pose” that “defied any sort of human understanding.”24 Such a climate encouraged the revelation that Bara was really just a nice, middle-class Jewish girl from the Midwest. “Born Theodosia Goodman, of Cincinnati, Ohio,” she got her start performing “in a little Jewish Theatre on the East Side.”25

  No one star in early Hollywood better embodied the shift toward using continental glamour to present a daringly adult image of who the modern flapper fan might grow up to become than actress-producer Gloria Swanson.26 By 1921 Swanson's success allowed her to demand star treatment at Paramount, where she replaced Pickford as the reigning “Queen of the Movies.” There she also assumed another of Pickford's former roles, becoming the single star who “bolstered [Paramount's] whole program” by compelling exhibitors “to take weak features” they otherwise would have avoided.27 Swanson rose to stardom in six films, variously called “marriage and divorce pictures” or “sex pictures,” that Cecil B. DeMille directed between 1919 and 1921. The director said he spotted her potential after watching the “authority” she radiated “simply leaning against a door.”28 Lasky convinced the initially reluctant DeMille to make the movies. “What the public demands to-day is modern stuff with plenty of clothes, rich sets, and action” and “full of modern problems and conditions,” Lasky wrote to DeMille and scenarist Jeanie MacPherson before urging the duo to adapt the popular novel Old Wives for New (1918).

  Like so many women filmmakers of the era, MacPherson had begun working as an actress before directing her own production unit at Universal for two years and then joining DeMille at Lasky's studio in 1914.29 MacPherson became DeMille's primary collaborator and a top scenarist of the silent era who offered tips to “amateur continuity and scenario writers” in motion picture news columns. “The trend in photoplays is toward the romantic,” MacPherson advised, before noting the importance of learning “feminine
psychology” for success in the trade.30

  With the news full of alarmist stories about the country's rising divorce rates, DeMille's sex picture film cycle—Old Wives for New (1918), Don't Change Your Husband (1919), and Why Change Your Wife? (1920)—addressed the question of how to keep the flame burning after marriage. The films detailed the exploits of partners who used divorce, infidelity, and fashion makeovers to salvage marriages grown loveless or simply dull. Awash in lavish costumes and sets, DeMille's films have been mined for their relationship to the rise of consumer culture because of the importance they placed on marital partners remaining fashionable and fun. By doing so, according to one prominent historian of DeMille's work, the films scripted a new woman “entrapped in a process of self-commodification,” making her a “sexual commodity symbolizing the reification of human relationships, especially marital ones, in a consumer society.”31 But such a view reduces the subjective meanings that motivate and inform conduct to one familiar meaning, the production of passive, narcissistic feminine subjects. The approach ignores stars, and the construction of their personas, to focus on reading a few select films.