Go West, Young Women!

by Hilary Hallett

  113. Pickford remained a child or adolescent only in The Poor Little Rich Girl (Artcraft, 1917), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Artcraft, 1917), and The Little Princess (Artcraft 1917).

  114. Zukor, The Public Is Never Wrong, 4, 102. Although he downplays how controlling the star system figured in Zukor's calculations, the best summary of this remains, Sklar, Movie-Made America, ch. 9. On the stylistic and industrial norms associated with “Classical Hollywood,” see Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 121–122.

  115. Balio, “Stars in Business,” 158; De Mille, Hollywood Saga, 146.

  116. Hampton, History of the American Film Industry, 156–159. Hampton sought to sign Pickford for the American Tobacco Company so as to control a merger between First National, VLSE, and Famous Players; see Balio, “Stars in Business,” 159–160.

  117. For an account that portrays Zukor as the chief stalwart supporting the star system against a rising “anti-star faction,” including Griffith, Sennett, and Ince's Triangle Productions, see Alfred A. Cohn, “'Stars or No Stars'—That Is the Question,” Photoplay (Jan. 1918): 95–96. On the point more generally, see Balio, “Struggles for Control,” 110–115; Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 98–99.

  118. Hampton, History of the American Film Industry, 162, 174. Lasky Feature Play Company was an independent committed to producing feature-length films that used Paramount to distribute. See also Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 744–750.

  119. Correspondence between Lasky and DeMille reveals a slightly different chronology than the one customarily described, indicating that Lasky Features became the partner of Famous on a fifty-fifty basis in the Mary Pickford contract of June 1916, but did not merge with FPL until June 1917. See letters between Jesse Lasky and Cecil DeMille, in Cherchi and Codelli, The DeMille Legacy, 366, 383–385, 405–406.

  120. See Balio, “Stars in Business,” 159–160. Louella Parsons, “How Mary Pickford Makes Good as a Businesswoman,” Columbus Dispatch, Dec. 10, 1916; “Mary Pickford to Be Independent,” New York Telegraph, Mar. 26, 1916, vol. 387, RLC; “Mary Pickford Tells Her Own Story,” Toledo News Bee, Mar. 22, 1915; “Ambitions and Other Vices, by Mary Pickford,” Green Book Magazine, n.d., all Mary Pickford, vol. 386, RLC.

  121. Photoplay (May 1917): 121. On the loyalty of Pickford's female fans, see Adela Rogers St. Johns, “Why Does the World Love Mary?” Photoplay (Dec. 1921): 108–111. See also the letters between Zukor, DeMille, and Lasky, in Cherchi and Codelli, The DeMille Legacy, 489–491.

  122. Lenore Coffee, Storyline: Reflections of a Hollywood Screenwriter (London: Cassell, 1973), 45 (italics in the original). Actress Clara Kimball Young gave Coffee her break writing in 1919.

  123. This is a general impression of mine but is not meant to suggest men were ignored. For a list of leading ladies in 1923, see Koszarski, An Evening's Entertainment, 116.

  124. Pickford, Sunshine and Shadow, 99.

  125. “Belasco Contract Christmas Present.” Pickford, “Best Known Girl in America,” 9. On her athleticism, see also Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, 3.

  126. What Happened to Mary (Edison, 1912). On the focus on danger, see Jennifer Bean, “Technologies of Gender and the Extraordinary Body,” in Bean and Negra, A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, 404–443.

  127. Edna Vercoe (“EV”) to Floss Schreiber, Dec. [?], 1914, file 4, vol. 2, box 1, fan scrapbooks compiled by Edna G. Vercoe (hereafter VC), MHL; “Mary Fuller a Real Heroine,” n.p., n.d., file 7, scrapbook 3, box 1, VC, MHL.

  128. N.d., p. 89, file 1, scrapbook 1, box 1, VC, MHL.

  129. Singer, Melodramas and Modernity, 224, 255.

  130. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 11. Andrew B. Smith, Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003); Richard Abel, Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), ch. 4.

  131. The Hazards of Helen (Kalem, 1914–1917). Series titles viewed on Yesteryear Video include No. 82, Leap from the Water Tower; No. 62, Pay Train; No. 60, In Danger’s Path; and No. 63, The Open Track. Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses,” in Linda Williams and Christine Gledhill, eds., Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2000), 332–350.

  132. On Holmes’s persona, see file 7, scrapbook 3, box 1, VC, MHL; Holmes Core Clippings, MHL (hereinafter HCC, MHL); Helen Holmes Clippings, Robinson Locke Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (hereinafter HHC, RLC).

  133. “Action Is the Spice of Life,” New York Telegraph, Nov. 21, 1915, env. 737, vol. 1, HHC, RLC.

  134. “A Charming Dare-Devil,” Pictures and the Picture-Goer, Mar. 13, 1915, env. 737, vol. 1, HHC, RLC; George Craig, “When Helen Rented a Baby,” n.p., n.d., file 7, scrapbook 3, box 1, VC, MHL.

  135. “Ruth Roland Rides Again,” n.d., Roland’s Core Clippings (hereinafter RCC), MHL. On Roland’s persona, see also Roland’s Files, RLC. On western fans, see Smith, Shooting Cowboys and Indians, ch. 7.

  136. Frank V. Bruner, “The Modern Dime Novel,” Photoplay (June 1919): 118.

  137. The Red Circle (Balboa, 1915). Roland’s next seven films with Pathé were Hands Up (1918), The Tiger’s Trail (1919), The Adventures of Ruth (1919), Ruth of the Rockies (1920), The Avenging Arrow (1921), White Eagle (1922), The Timber Queen (1922), and Ruth of the Range (1923).

  138. Shenbao, May 2, 1921, quoted in, Weihong Bao, “From Pearl White to White Rose Woo,” Camera Obscura 20.3 (2005): 200. “Blue Book of the Screen 1923,” RCC, MHL.

  139. I viewed the surviving chapters of The Perils of Pauline (Pathé, 1914) on Grapevine Video.

  140. “A Model of the ‘Movies,’ ” n.d., p. 52, file 1, scrapbook 1, box 1, VC, MHL. White’s autobiography also emphasized this composite persona; see Pearl White, Just Me (New York: Georg H. Doran Co., 1919).

  141. “Great Cast Contest,” n.d., n.p., file 1, scrapbook 1, box 1, VC, MHL; Johnson, “The Girl on the Cover,” 58.

  142. “The Real Perils of Pauline,” Photoplay, n.p., n.d., file 7, scrapbook 3, box 1, VC, MHL. “Pathe Star’s Humble Start,” n.d., pp. 6–7; “Pearl White,” n.d., p. 10, both in file 13, scrapbook 6, box 2, VC, MHL.

  143. “Oh for a girl”: “The Motion Picture Autobiographies,” Case 6; “my idol”: ibid., case 7, both comp. Herbert Blumer, in Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller-Seeley, Children and the Movies, 263, 267.

  144. So said the University of Chicago’s Payne Film Study (PFS), conducted between 1928 and 1932. For the best-selling version, see Henry James Forman, Our Movie Made Children (New York: Macmillan, 1933). On the study’s politics, see Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller-Seeley, Children and the Movies, 1–14. See also Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1929), 242–267; Fred Greenstein, “New Light on Changing Values,” Social Forces 42 (1964): 441–450.

  145. “The Motion Picture Autobiographies,” Case 9, comp. Herbert Blumer, in Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller-Seeley, Children and the Movies, 275–276.

  146. ‘Serialitis,’ Moving Picture World, Feb. 10, 1917, p. 818. Elizabeth Cowie, Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 72–121.

  147. “The Motion Picture Autobiographies,” Case 1, comp. Herbert Blumer, in Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller-Seeley, Children and the Movies, 245, 242–243.

  148. “The Motion Picture Autobiographies,” Case 7, comp. Herbert Blumer, in ibid., 267–269.

  149. Sex (Parker Read Productions, 1920), Library of Congress. On Glaum, see Hebert Howe, “Vampire or Ingénue?” Photoplay (Aug. 1919): 34–35. A Fool There Was (Fox, 1915).

  150. “A Fool There Was,” New York Dramatic Mirror, Jan. 20, 1915, p. 21. The film established Bara’s star and set the formula for her performances in all but 6 of her 39 films
at Fox. On the type, see Staiger, Bad Women, 147–152.

  151. On the rigorous typing of Bara’s performances at Fox and the end of her career in 1919, see Robert Genini, Theda Bara: A Biography of the Silent Screen Vamp, with a Filmography (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996).

  152. On the promotion of Bara, see Wallace Franklin, “Purgatory’s Ivory Angel,” Photoplay (Sept. 1915): 69–72; Roberta Courtland, “The Divine Theda,” Motion Picture (April 1917): 59–62. See also Theda Bara Scrapbook, RLC. Randolph Bartlett, “Petrova—Prophetess,” Photoplay (Dec. 1917): 27. Petrova is quoted as saying, “I am feminist.” See also “We Take Our Hats Off to—Olga Petrova,” Photoplay (Feb. 1921): 34. New York Dramatic Mirror, June 23, 1917, p. 21, box 5, Alfred Smith Collection, Charles Young Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

  153. Bara quoted in May, Screening Out the Past, 106.

  154. “Six-gun”: “Lady Gunmen,” Photoplay (Jan. 1918): 91. Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, “Melodrama, Serials, and ‘Comics,’ ” in The Morals of the Movie (Philadelphia: Penn Publishing Company, 1922), 55, 60. See also ibid., chs. 3 and 5.

  155. “Lady Gunmen,” 91.

  156. Coffee, Storyline, 23. See, for instance, Sennett, King of Comedy, 45.

  157. “The Romance of Making the ‘Movies.’ ” ; Johnston, “In Motion-Picture Land.” “The Romance,” Literary Digest, 902; Johnston, “In Motion-Picture Land,” 443.

  158. Johnson, “The Girl on the Cover,” 57–58.

  159. Hughes, Souls for Sale, 403. For other celebrations of women in the movie colony, see Turnbull, The Close-Up; Bower, The Quirt; Webster, Real Life; Hughes, Souls for Sale; Vance, Linda Lee Inc.; Wilson, Merton of the Movies. Negative tales include Putnam, Laughter Limited; Burroughs, The Girl from Hollywood.

  CHAPTER 2. WOMEN-MADE WOMEN

  Epigraph, page 69: Zukor, The Public Is Never Wrong, 4.

  1. By 1920, the six leading fan magazine cost between 5 and 25 cents and had circulations of almost half a million each. Tino Balio, Grand Designs: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 170. On the cultural shifts associated with the rise of consumer-oriented capitalism, see William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Tower, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993); Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, ch. 3; T.J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization,” in Richard Wightman Fox and Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1983); Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promise of Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995); Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  2. Iris Barry, The Public’s Pleasure, quoted in Antonia Lant, ed., with Ingrid Periz, Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema (London: Verso, 2006), 128. “Woman’s woman,” Mary Pickford Scrapbook, RLC. “Sex achieve”: Pickford, Mar. 5, 1915, quoted in May, Screening Out the Past, 119. “The Romance of Making the ‘Movies,’ ” Literary Digest (Oct. 23, 1915): 902–903; Johnston, “In Motion-Picture Land.”. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of American Sentimentality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 5-13.

  3. I distinguish between trade papers aimed at those with a commercial stake in films and press aimed at fans. Trade papers existed from the start, but periodicals for fans focused on celebrities developed only in the mid-1910s. See Marsha Orgeron, “Making It in Hollywood: Clara Bow, Fandom, and Consumer Culture,” Cinema Journal 42.4 (Summer 2003): 76–97; Richard Abel, “Fan Discourse in the Heartland,” Film History 19 (2006): 140–153; Studlar, “The Perils of Pleasure?”; Fuller, At the Picture Show, ch. 8. Women wrote more than two out of three stories with bylines in Photoplay in these years.

  I base my arguments about Hollywood’s publicity and mainstream reactions on the following sources: Everything between 1915 and 1922 included in Parsons Scrapbook, MHL. The Parsons collection contains professionally compiled press scrapbooks that pasted together the majority of what she wrote. The content of Photoplay between 1915 and 1922; a national publication with a circulation of two million, it was the largest of all fan magazines. Finally, I used the periodical database at the MHL to read all the stories indicated by keyword searches on “extras,” “contests,” “how to become an actress,” “Hollywood,” and “marriage and divorce” in these same years. For mainstream reporting, I read all relevant articles indexed on “motion pictures” in The Readers’ Guide to Periodical to Literature, as well as those produced by keyword searches on “extras,” “motion picture actors,” “motion picture stars,” and “Hollywood” in ProQuest: Historical Newspapers.

  4. Toledo News-Bee, Mar. 3, 1914, quoted in Abel, Americanizing the Movies, 2.47. Beginning in 1912, Price was the “moving picture expert” for the Scripps-McRae newspapers that targeted working-class women, see Gerald Baldasty, E.W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

  5. Virginia Morris, “Women in Publicity,” in Jones, Breaking into the Movies, 204–205.

  6. See Abel, “Fan Discourse in the Heartland,” 146–147. Few reliable statistics exist, but most agree that the industry focused on attracting women after 1910. Again, my interest lies with this shared perception, not a particular statistic; see introduction, note 17.

  7. Photoplay, Nov. 1924, quoted in Studlar, “Perils of Pleasure?” 7. “The Lonely Girl,” Photoplay (Aug. 1919): 27; “To a Young Girl,” Photoplay (Feb. 1919): 23.

  8. Norman Anthony, “Movie Fanatics,” Photoplay (June 1921): 40.

  9. For my use of the terms “myth” and “mythology,” see chapter 1, note 76.

  10. Janet Flanner, “The Male Background,” Photoplay (Dec. 1920): 33. Sydney Valentine, “The Careers of Catherine Calvert,” Photoplay (May 1921): 62, 90.

  11. The periodical index of fan magazines at the MHL lists 120 articles on contests between 1912 and 1922. These virtually disappear after 1930. For the best description of this process, see Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls, 10–40.

  12. George Eells, Hedda and Louella (New York: Warner, 1973). Eells first disputed the idea that Parsons’s success was due only to her association with William Randolph Hearst. See also Barbas, First Lady of Hollywood.

  13. On Parsons’s childhood, see Barbas, First Lady of Hollywood, ch. 1.

  14. On these proscriptions, see Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, ch. 6; and Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

  15. See Francke, Script Girls, ch. 1. On the culture of screenwriting, see Beauchamp, Without Lying Down; Holliday, “Hollywood’s Modern Women.”

  16. Louella O. Parsons, How to Write for the Movies (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1915). The book was successful enough to be revised and reprinted in 1917. Barbas, First Lady of Hollywood, 40; Louella Parsons, The Gay Illiterate (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, and Co., 1944), 29.

  17. May, Screening Out the Past, ch. 8.

  18. After 1924, advertisers called this group “the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady”; see Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 65. The first example that I found is Dorothy Philips (Mrs. Allen Holubar), “How to Hold Him,” Photoplay (Nov. 1920): 47.

  19. Quoted in Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 67.

  20. N.d., Parsons Scrapbook no. 1, MHL. The series ran on Sundays for several months in 1915. On the “expert” strategy, see Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 35–37.

  21. My use here of the word “personal” is strategic. Following Janice A. Radway, in A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 282–6, 484, I employ the concept of personalism to stress a different aspect of what this literature may have offered female fans. Radway uses “personalism” to emphasize the affe
ctive, emotional, and empathetic aspects of individualism, rather than viewing it as a purely economic and highly intellectualized concept.

  22. N.d., Parsons Scrapbook 1, MHL.

  23. “How to Become a Movie Actress,” Sept. 15, 1915, Parsons Scrapbook no. 1, MHL (italics in the original).

  24. Caption under Norma Talmadge’s photograph, in “In and Out of Focus: Norma Talmadge.”

  25. “How to Become a Movie Star,” Oct. 5, 1915, Parsons Scrapbook no. 1, MHL. Colleen Moore, Silent Star (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), 27, 73. The quintessential flapper, Moore describes studying such interviews in her Florida home. Mary Astor also describes how a “Fame and Fortune” contest whetted her appetite to become an actress in small-town Illinois. Astor recalled: “I was being propagandized and didn’t know it.” Mary Astor, Mary Astor: A Life on Film (New York: Delacorte Press, 1967), 2, 4–6. Parsons mentions boys as possible aspirants only once.

  26. On stories for boys, see Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, ch. 5. On the gendering of traditional cultures of chance, see Lears, Something for Nothing.

  27. “How to Become a Movie Actress,” Sept. 22, 1915; “How to Become a Movie Star,” Sept. 29, 1915; “How to Become a Movie Star,” Oct. 5, 1915, Parsons Scrapbook 1, MHL.

  28. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 141.

  29. “How to Become a Movie Actress: How Can You Win Entrance to the Enchanted Palace of Your Dreams—the Motion Picture Studio? There Are Several Paths That You May Follow and in Today’s Article You Are Told Which Are Best,” n.d., Parsons Scrapbook no. 1, MHL. On Birth of a Nation, see Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 41–59.

  30. “How to Become a Movie Star; One of the Best Known Producers Places Little Value upon Stage Training and Contends That the Best Asset for Success Is Inability to Become Discouraged,” n.d.; “How to Become a Movie Star,” Oct. 31, 1915, both in Parsons Scrapbook no. 1, MHL.