Go West, Young Women!

by Hilary Hallett

  35. On Hays's role in Harding's election, see Ellis Hawley, The Great War and the Search for Modern Order (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.), 44–49; Michael McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 169–171; John Braeman, “American Politics in the Age of Normalcy,” 17–18, in John Earl Haynes, ed., Calvin Coolidge and the Coolidge Era (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1998); Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 811–813.

  36. “New Organization of Distributors and Producers Planned—Will Hays Offered Presidency,” Wid's Daily, Dec. 9, 1921, pp. 1–2.; “Says Hays Accepts,” Wid's Daily, Dec. 21, 1921, p. 1; “Hays Accepts Offer to Head Producer-Distributor Alliance,” Exhibitors Herald, Jan. 28, 1922, pp. 43–45. Accounts of the idea for the MPPDA and the precise timing of the approach to Hays vary. See Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 803–821; Sklar, Movie-Made America, 82–88, 132; Garth Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 152–159. May, Screening Out the Past, 179, 204- 205; Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 131–132; Gregory Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 29–33. All agree that the scandal convinced producers to go ahead with Hays's hire and to create the MPPDA. For a broader analysis, see Gary Alan Fine, Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept, and Controversial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), ch. 4.

  37. “Hollywood” first appeared in the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature (Minneapolis: H.W. Wilson Co.) with “In the Capital of Movie-Land,” Literary Digest (Nov. 10, 1917): 82–89. The term appeared regularly only after 1922. Similarly, in ProQuest Historical Newspapers, “Hollywood” was first used to mean something more than a location in “Hollywood Is Interested,” Atlanta Constitution, July 3, 1921, p. F3. The usage proliferated during 1922.

  38. Scholarly descriptions of Rappe rely on popular accounts. See David Yallop, The Day the Laughter Stopped (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976); Andy Edmonds, Frame-Up! The Untold Story of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (New York: William Morrow, 1991); Stuart Oderman, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994); Robert Young, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle: A Bio-bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994).

  CHAPTER 1. “OH FOR A GIRL WHO COULD RIDE A HORSE LIKE PEARL WHITE”

  1. Mary Pickford, Sunshine and Shadow (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954), 99. “In and Out of Focus: Mary Pickford,” Aug. 1, 1920, Parsons Scrapbook no. 4, MHL.

  2. Vachel Lindsay, “Queen of My People,” New Republic (July 17, 1917): 280–281. See also Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Liveright, 1970 [1915]), 3–4, 16, 54, 64, 127. “Mary Pickford,” Aug.1, 1920, Parsons Scrapbook no. 3, MHL. Zukor, The Public Is Never Wrong, 110, 171. Benjamin Hampton, History of the American Film Industry, from Its Beginnings to 1931 (New York: Dover, 1970 [1931]), 166, 190. On Lindsay, see Myron Lounsbury, “The Origins of American Film Criticism” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1966), 50–58. The first film histories by participant observers convey Pickford's undisputed importance. See Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 746; Hampton, History of the American Film Industry, ch. 8; DeMille, Autobiography of DeMille, 182. Pickford's reappraisal began with popular treatments that built upon the restoration of her films; see Eileen Whitfield, Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997); Kevin Brownlow, Mary Pickford Rediscovered: Rare Pictures of a Hollywood Legend (New York: Harry N. Abrams, in association with the Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1999); Jeanine Basinger, Silent Stars (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000 [1999]; distr. by University Press of New England), ch. 1. The first scholar to treat Pickford seriously argued for her marginalization as a child; see Sumiko Higashi, Virgins, Vamps, and Flappers: The American Silent Movie Heroine (Montreal: Eden Press, 1978). For a more nuanced approach focused on her marriage's promotion of consumerism, see May, Screening Out the Past, ch. 5. For an excellent summation of her career through the founding of United Artists, see Tino Balio, “Stars in Business,” in Balio, The American Film Industry, 153–172. See also the presented-minded work Gaylyn Studlar, “'Oh Doll Divine’: Mary Pickford, Masquerade, and the Pedophilic Gaze,” in Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra, eds., A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 349–373. On these heroines’ literary provenance, see John C. Tibbetts, “Mary Pickford and the American ‘Growing Girl,’” Journal of Popular Film and Television, 29.2 (Summer 2001): 50–62. On Photoplay, see Fuller, At the Picture Show, ch. 8.

  3. Fame's democratization is magisterially captured by Leo Braudy, who ignores gender; see The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (New York: Vintage, 1997 [1986]), 315–598. Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Atheneum: New York, 1987 [1961]), 57. The most influential treatment on personality's reflection of new views of the self is Warren Susman, “ ‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture,” in Culture as History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 271–285. Susman argued that the shift from “character” to “personality” addressed the dilemma of standing out in a mass society and the growing importance placed on consumption, noting that motion picture stars most vividly displayed the process, using Pickford's husband, Douglas Fairbanks, to illustrate the shift; here Susman relied on the popular critic Richard Schickel, in His Picture in the Papers: A Speculation on Celebrity in America Based on the Life of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (New York: Charterhouse, 1973). Schickel ignores women except as victims; see Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity in America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1985), ch. 2. For a more sustained examination of celebrity's relationship to modernity that emphasizes its relationship to the negative values associated with consumption, see Charles L. Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). See also Richard Dyer, Stars (London: BFI, 1998); Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Celebrity (New York: Routledge, 1986); Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). DeCordova, in Picture Personalities, notes that women were singled out for fame first, but he doesn't explore the point; Inglis looks only at Marilyn Monroe. Those who examine celebrity's different implications for American women include Glenn, Female Spectacle. The scholarship on American serial queens begins with Wallace Davies, “The Truth about Pearl White,” Films in Review (Nov. 1959): 544. The best recent treatments include Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls, ch. 3; Singer, Melodramas and Modernity, ch. 8. Important treatments on the ways commercial leisure spaces supported new gender norms include Peiss, Cheap Amusements; Nasaw, Going Out; Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure; Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women; Hansen, Babel and Babylon. On how women entertainers fulfilled this role, see Faye E. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790–1879 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); M. Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Karen Ward Mahar, Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Mark Garrett Cooper, Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010).

  4. On Bernhardt, see Robert Gottlieb, Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Ruth Brandon, Being Divine: A Biography of Sarah Bernhardt (London: Mandarin, 1991); Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

  5. Simone de Beauvoir, “The Independent Woman,” in The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 1989 [1949]), 702–703. On the book's “scandalous” reception, see Judith G. Coffi
n, “Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir, 1949–1963,” American Historical Review 115.4 (2010): 1061–1088. On Victorian middle-class sexual ideology, I follow Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 2 (1966): 151–174; and Cott, “Passionlessness.” Welter identified the core components of the ideal as piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Later scholars linked the emergence of the New Woman to mass, rather than female, culture; see the special issue “The Cult of True Womanhood,” Journal of Women's History 14.1 (2002).

  6. Hampton, “The Pickford Revolution,” ch. 8 in History of the American Film Industry. The Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, records the first use of “celebrity” as by a female author celebrated for her story about a poor boy making good: 1849 D.M. Mulock Ogilvies ii, “Did you see any of those ‘celebrities,’ as you call them?” “Personality,” the older term, suggested someone with noteworthy personal characteristics and was used almost interchangeably with “celebrity” during the second half of the nineteenth century. On Cushman, see Joseph Leach, Bright Particular Star: The Life and Times of Charlotte Cushman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972); Lisa Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). French and English actresses help to make the point; see Lenard Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve: French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Lenard R. Berlanstein, “Historicizing and Gendering Celebrity Culture: Famous Women in Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of Women's History 16.4 (2004): 65–91; Gail Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  7. DeCordova argues that the focus on film stars’ “real lives” distinguished their personas from theatrical stars, but my own view is that this began earlier, with stage actresses; deCordova, Picture Personalities, 98–117.

  8. “Miss Cushman,” Feb. 26, 1876, in The Spirit of the Times: The American Gentleman's Newspaper, vol. 131, Robinson Locke Collection, Billy Rose Theater Division, New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, New York City (hereinafter RLC), 25. On Cushman's magazine writing, see Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman, ch. 2. See also Mary Jean Corbett, “Performing Identities; Actresses and Autobiography,” Biographies 24.1 (Winter 2001): 16.

  9. “Legitimate productions” first distinguished plays with spoken dialogue from melodramas with music and accompanying dialogue. By 1900, the term suggested higher-brow content to fans, but in the theatrical circles it merely separated dramatic plays from comedy, slapstick, and acrobatics. Gerald Boardman, The Oxford Companion to American Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 66–67, 213, 295.

  10. “Playhouse,” in Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, 21. On women's relationship to the nineteenth-century stage, see Claudia Durst Johnson, American Actress: Perspective on the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1984), chs. 1, 3. The Revolution created a brief opening for pioneering female playwrights to write more active roles for actresses; see Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 271–273. On melodrama in the early republic, see Bruce McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: Theater and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 38, ch. 1; Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 35–44. On the theater's special regulation and association with sinfulness, see “Censorship of the Motion Picture,” Yale Law Journal 49.1 (1939): 89; Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 52–53; T.J. Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking, 2002), 154–155.

  11. William B. Wood, Personal Recollections of the Stage, Embracing Notions of Actors, Authors, Auditors, during a Period of Forty Years (Philadelphia: H.C. Baird, 1855), 391.

  12. Celebrity's link to industrialization is usefully discussed in Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity, chs. 1, 5. On the growth and segmentation of theaters, see Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, 58–60; McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 26–31.

  13. Robertson Davies, The Mirror of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 22–26.

  14. Scholars’ use of “melodrama” began with Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). Brooks defined melodrama as a “mode of conception and expression, as a certain fictional system for making sense of experience, as a semantic field of force, a sense making system,” xiii. For a review of the literature on melodrama, see Rohan McWilliam, “Melodrama and the Historians,” Radical History Review 78 (2000): 57–84. It seems to me that melodramatic plays and literature shaped the popular press, which then shaped movies. Robert Park suggests as much in “The Natural History of the Newspaper,” in Park, Ernest Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie, eds., The City (Chicago: University of Press Chicago, 1925), 94–95. But part of the difficulty in discussing melodrama's development is that the histories of the press, theater, and popular fiction are separate, though their developments were intertwined. On printing, see Helmutt Lehmann-Haupt et al., The Book in America (New York: Bowker, 1952). On dime novels, see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents, rev. ed. (London: Verso Press, 1998). On domestic novels, see Nina Baym, Women's Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978). On antebellum theater, see Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, 6–7, 57, 60–62, 67, 70–74; McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, chs. 2, 4, and 5; Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 9. On the “penny press,” see James L. Crouthamel, Bennett's New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989), 20–25; George Juergens, Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), viii–ix. Juergens does not use the term “melodrama,” but the emphasis on personality-driven stories stretched out for suspense and treachery, spectacular stunts, and a crusading editorial stance championing the common man fits. William Randolph Hearst employed a similar strategy; see David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 95–125. The privileging of possessive individualism, a characteristic of the middle class that views social status as purely a function of the individual, has been noted by many, including Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

  15. On this theater as a virtually all male, “American” space, see McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 22–28; Butsch, The Making of American Audiences, ch. 3; Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 81–82. David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 33–36; Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, 108–111; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), ch. 5. Stansell notes that women were a demographic majority in New York City by 1830 and argues this made working women a significant presence on the streets and in places of commercial amusement. But she also writes: “Bowery men saw public life—in their case, working-class life—as a place where men were the main show and women the supporting cast” (96).

  16. Democratic Review (1845), quoted in McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 85.

  17. Reverend William Alger, quoted in ibid., 88. On the important role that Forrest's homosocial bonds and appeal played in his celebrity, see Ginger Strand, “My Noble Spartacus,” in Robert A. Schanke and Kim Marra, eds., Passing Performances: Queer Reading of Leading Players in American Theater History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1998), 30–31.

  18. On Edwin Forrest, see McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 77–109; Strand, “My Noble Spartacus,” 19–40. On the importance of authenticity to fame's classical model, see Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity,
3–34; Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 450–507.

  19. On the Astor Place Riots, see Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 58–66; on sacralization, see Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 83–168; on feminization, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977); T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 221–226, 241–260.

  20. Mary Pickford Oral History Transcript, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York City (hereinafter MPOH), 2654. Stansell, City of Women, 90–127; Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 40–44.

  21. Mary Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 76–79. See also Johnson American Actress, 39; Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, 78–82.

  22. Emma Stebbins, ed., Charlotte Cushman: Her Letters and Memories of Her Life (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1878), 1.

  23. Cushman quoted in Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman, 52.

  24. On “doubling in the brass,” see Mahar, Women Filmmakers, 39–43. On minstrelsy, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 195–201; Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 3–64.