122. “The Woman Pays Club,” April 18, 1920, Parsons Scrapbook no. 4, MHL; “Earning Her Rights,” May 20, 1920, Parsons Scrapbook no. 4, MHL. “This feminist organization consists of artists, musicians, motion picture writers, authors, newspaper women and other professional members of the fair sex who believe in their independence and prove it by earning their living”; “The Woman Pays Party,” Jan. 8, 1921, Parsons Scrapbook no. 6, MHL.
123. Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment, 102–104.
124. Marion, Off with Their Heads! 66.
125. “Every Girl Who Is Determined to Become a Picture Actress Should Read This Story of Dorothy Dalton, Who Quit a Good Job, Bought a Ticket to the Coast and Just Stuck Around and Smiled and SMILED till She Got a Contract,” Feb. 10, 1918, Parsons Scrapbook no. 2, MHL.
126. “In and Out of Focus: Josephine Quirk; She Is Following Horace Greeley’s Advice and Going West,” Nov. 21, 1920, Parsons Scrapbook no. 4, MHL.
127. “Confessions of a Motion Picture Press Agent,” The Independent, Aug. 24, 1918; “In the Capital of Movie-Land,” 82–83.
PROLOGUE II. THE REVOLUTION IN MANNERS AND MORALS, REDUX
1. Fredrick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (New York: Harper & Row, 1931), ch. 5, “The Revolution in Manners and Morals.” Scholars largely followed Allen’s lead in emphasizing dramatic postwar cultural changes among young middle class women in the 1920s until the critique offered by Estelle Freedman in “The New Woman: Changing Views of Women in the 1920s,” Journal of American History 61 (1974): 372–393. Freedman argued that too much emphasis had been placed on cultural freedoms among this set at the expense of evaluating women’s continued political involvement.
2. On the early dominance of the French industry, see Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). On postwar shifts, see Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939, ch. 1.
3. Exhibitors Herald (Oct. 22, 1921): 41; “The ‘Movie’ as an Industry,” Literary Digest (Oct. 6, 1917): 55. See also works cited in note 10 of prologue to part I.
4. Dwinelle Benthall, “Movie Influence,” Los Angeles Times Illustrated Magazine, Jan. 2, 1921, p. 17.
5. Hampton, A History of the American Film Industry, 172–173, 204–205. “Fear of the All-Devouring Movie,” Literary Digest (March, 20, 1920): 40–41. On the Digest’s influence, see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 296.
6. “A Movie of the Movie Fan at the Movies,” Literary Digest (Feb. 26, 1921): 47. See also Bailey Millard, “The Photoplay Has Come to Stay,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 27, 1921, p. 3.
7. The best source for statistics on the film industry is to be found in the annuals Wid’s Year Book or, after 1922, Wid’s Film Yearbook (New York: Jack Alicoate). The figure 50 million is an estimate based on all taxes paid on amusements. See Wid’s Year Book 1921, 20. For the estimate of 18,000,000 attending daily, see Current Opinion (May 1921): 652. See also Joel Finler, The Hollywood Story (London: Octopus Books, 1988).
8. Katherine Fullerton Gerould, “Movies,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1921): 22–30.
9. “Movie Morals,” New Republic (Aug. 25, 1917): 100–101. See also Carl Van Doren, Contemporary American Novelists, 1900–1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 13–17.
10. “Morals and the Movies,” The Nation (April 21, 1921): 581.
11. “Movie Morals,” New Republic, 100–101.
12. See “Announcing the Photoplay Magazine Medal of Honor,” Photoplay (June 1921): 29; “ ‘Humoresque’ Wins Medal as 1920 Prize Film,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, Oct. 30, 1921, pt. 5, p. 9. On the reorientation of Photoplay’s audience toward women, see Kathryn Fuller, At the Picture Show, 135, 145.
13. “First National Completes Interesting Survey,” Wid’s Daily, Oct. 18, 1920, p. 1. Estimates of the total number of theaters showing only movies usually hovered at around 15,000. The “average” feature film combined percentages specifying “female stars” totaled 43.8%; specifying men, 6.01%, specifying “all-star,” 19.39%. Other categories that did not mention stars included two-reel short slapstick, 9.9%; rural comedy drama, 7.98%; feature-length slapstick, 6.25%; adaptations of comedy stage successes, 6.01%; feature-length “stunt” comedy, 5.4%.
14. Herbert Howe, “Is Mary Pickford Finished?” The Preview, March 25, 1924, pp. 7–11, PCC, MHL. Again, there is no reliable means to precisely judge audience composition, but my interest is more in this perception than in the statistics. In 1920, the New York Times reported that women made up 60 percent of movie audiences; by 1924 Photoplay put the figure at 75 percent; see Stephen Bush, “Scenarios by the Bushel,” New York Times, Dec. 5, 1920, quoted in Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment, 30. Fredrick James Smith, “Does Decency Help or Hinder?” Photoplay (Nov. 1924): 36.
15. After conducting three massive surveys of colleges, religious institutions, and newspapers, Literary Digest published its findings in “Is the Younger Generation in Peril?” (May 14, 1921): 9–12, 58–73; “The Religious Press on Youthful Morals” (May 21, 1921): 27–28, 52–60; “To-Day’s Morals and Manners—The Side of ‘the Girls’ ” (July 9, 1921): 34–42. Pictorial Review, a woman’s monthly aimed at the middle class, displayed a similar obsession, running more stories on the topic than any other; see particularly Marion Harland, “What Shall We Do with These Young Girls?” Pictorial Review (Nov. 1920): 17; Helen Ferris, “Just a Moment Mrs. Grundy!” Pictorial Review (Aug. 1921): 23, 26; “Is the Girl of To-day as Bad as She’s Painted?” Pictorial Review (Jan. 1922): 12–13, 49; Nellie Weathers, “The Modern Girl Speaks for Herself,” Pictorial Review (March 1922): 22, 106. The indispensable account of the “youth revolt” among the college set remains Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
16. Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (New York, Macmillan: 1929), 288. On civilized morality, see D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 171–202. “Is the Younger Generation in Peril?” 9, 58.
17. Here I follow Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits (New York: Knopf, 1994), 126–138. Hollander argues that changes in modern fashions for women had less to do with comfort—formerly most women found concealment, constriction, and decorative projection “comfortable”—and more with expressing female corporeal pleasure linked to changes in sexual fantasies associated with practices like close dancing and the movies. See also Kevin Yellis, “Prosperity’s Child,” American Quarterly 21.2 (1969): 44–64.
18. Frank Dyer of General Film Co., speaking for producers: “Motion Picture Commission, Hearings before the Education Committee, House of Representatives, Sixty-Third Congress, Second Session; Bills to Establish a Federal Motion Picture Commission” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1914), 23. On how the rate of premarital intercourse jumped to roughly 50% of women coming of age in the 1920s, see D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 256. A survey of middle-class females in 1938 found that of those born between 1890 and 1900, 74% remained virgins until marriage; for those born after 1910 the figure dropped to 31.7%; see William Chafe, The American Woman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 95. See also Daniel Scott Smith and Michael S. Hindus, “Pre-marital Pregnancy in America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 5.4 (1975): 537–570. The authors found that the percentage of pregnant brides rose steadily after 1900.
19. Zukor, The Public Is Never Wrong, 202.
20. Wid’s Year Book 1920 (New York: Wid’s Films; Hollywood: Film Folks, Inc.), 333, 217–225. The summary took up only two of the volume’s five hundred pages. The Year Book noted censorship struggles in New York, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Missouri, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, Idaho, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania (333–335). State censorship already existed in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kansas and in an uncounted number of cities.
21. Wid’s Year Book 1920, 225, 237. On Pettijohn,
see Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 806–814; Hampton, History of the American Film Industry, 247. Pettijohn served as the chairman of the Indiana Democratic Party and as the state boss’s aide-de-camp.
22. “Pure stream”: Anti-Saloon League in 1915, quoted in Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, 212. On prohibition, see Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, 181–182, 191–200, 205–221; Jack S. Blocker, Retreat from Re- form (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 11, 156. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 267–269.
23. Wid’s Year Book 1920, 225.
24. Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 810.
CHAPTER 3. HOLLYWOOD BOHEMIA
1. The film was released in Germany as Madame du Barry (UFA, 1919).
2. On box office, see “ ‘Passion’ Sets Record,” Exhibitors Herald, July 23, 1921, p. 56. On Passion’s success, see “The Menace of German Films,” Literary Digest (May 14, 1921): 28–30; Paul Scaramazza, ed., Ten Years in Paradise (Arlington, VA: Pleasant Press, 1974), 15. The Berlin film scene took off under the Allied blockade and the German government’s decision to invest in cinema as a tool of propaganda. See John Baxter, The Hollywood Exiles (New York: Taplinger, 1976), 19–53. On Berlin, see Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).
3. So read posters and newspaper ads for the film; quoted in Basinger, Silent Stars, 242.
4. MPOH, 2733–2734.
5. The trend is described in “The Foreign Invasion,” Wid’s Yearbook 1921 (New York: Wid’s Films; Hollywood: Film Folks, Inc., 1921), 207–209. See also “The Menace of German Films.” On the importance of the international audience to the industry after 1917, see Vasey, The World According to Hollywood.
6. Pola Negri’s given name was Apollonia Chalupetz. On her wooing, see Pola Negri, Memoirs of a Star (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 180–185; Zukor, The Public Is Never Wrong, 226–227; Herbert Howe, “The Real Pola Negri,” Photoplay (November 1922): 38; Joan Jordan, “You Can’t Hurry Pola,” Photoplay (March 1923): 63.
7. Originally released in Germany as Madame du Barry (UFA, 1919), the film appeared in the United States as Passion (First National, 1920) (viewed at Library of Congress).
8. Negri, Memoirs of a Star, 187; Swanson, Swanson on Swanson, 63.
9. Gerald Early, Tuxedo Junction (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1989), ix. Early refers to popular culture. For a synthesis of critical debates over the definition of popular and mass culture in the United States, see Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes (New York: Knopf, 1999). I follow Kammen in defining mass culture as commercialized products deliberately designed to appeal to, at least, a national audience with a tendency to commodify what it absorbs. I do not follow his definition of commodification or his periodization, which considers mass culture to have emerged with television in the 1950s. This view ignores the movies. Nor do I agree that mass culture induced only passivity and the privatization of culture. Through the 1920s, moviegoing was a public, interactive experience, and a politically charged activity because of the controversy surrounding it. Moreover, while mass culture’s absorption of popular culture often erases the agency of socially marginal groups, its products often emerges explicitly from the realm of outsiders, helping to give them their frisson. For an analysis of moviegoing as an alternative public sphere for women during the 1910s, see Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 90–125.
10. Sydney Valentine, “The Careers of Catherine Calvert,” Photoplay (May 1921): 62, 90. On Hollywood stars as fashion trendsetters in the 1920s and their impact on designers, see Kevin Yellis, “Prosperity’s Child,” American Quarterly 21.2 (1969): 58–61; Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits (New York: Knopf, 1994), 136–137, 148, 159.
11. May Stanley, “Jazzing Up the Fashions,” Photoplay (May 1920): 57–8.
12. The first article was Norma Talmadge, “What Fashion Really Means,” Photoplay (June 1920), 64–65, 113. Illustrations accompanying the articles often anticipated trends that turned up later in catalogues like Sears’; see Stella Blum, ed., Everyday Fashions of the Twenties (New York: Dover, 1981), 15–19, 35–38. Talmadge, “What Fashion Really Means,” 64, 65, 112.
13. “Most Important Event of the Year,” Wid’s Yearbook 1918, 69; Norma Talmadge, “What Do You Mean by ‘Sex Plays’?” Pictorial Review (June 1921): 1.
14. Forbidden City (Norma Talmadge Film Corp., 1918); Daughter of Two Worlds (Norma Talmadge Film Corp., 1920), both Library of Congress. On Talmadge’s dramatic reputation, see Adela Rogers St. Johns, “Our ONE and ONLY Great Actress,” Photoplay (Feb. 1926): 58, 135–137. For her top ranking as the era’s great dramatic actress, see Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment, 262, 281–283; Slide, Silent Players, 372–374. High-brow fans did not share this opinion, bestowing the honor on Lillian Gish; see Charles Affron, Lillian Gish (New York: Scribner, 2001). See also Basinger, Silent Stars, 141–158.
15. “Heroine worship,” quoted in Chicago Herald and Examiner, Oct. 16, 1921, pt. 5, p. 5. On her fan mail, see Talmadge, “What Do You Mean by ‘Sex Plays’?” 91.
16. “Before They Were Stars: Norma Talmadge,” New York Dramatic Mirror, April 17, 1920, pp. 744, 765; Marjorie Lachmund, “Our Norma,” Motion Picture (Jan. 1917): 110–112; Margaret MacDonald, “Norma Talmadge, a Modern Female,” Moving Picture World, July 21, 1917, p. 390; Faith Service, “The Amazing Interview,” Motion Picture Classic (Jan. 1920): 22–23, 87.
17. On Natalie’s marriage to Keaton, see “Before and After Taking,” Photoplay (Sept. 1921): 31. Margaret Talmadge, The Talmadge Sisters: Norma, Constance, and Natalie (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1924). Friends and co-workers described mother Peg as universally shrewd and beloved and the family as even more “down-home” than their press; see Anita Loos, The Talmadge Girls (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 4–7; Marion, Off with Their Heads! 65; St. Johns, The Honeycomb, 97.
18. Adele Whitney Fletcher, “Floating on Island on Olympus,” Motion Picture (March 1921): 22–23, 109.
19. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), 310. “To a Young Girl Going to a Photoplay,” Photoplay (Feb. 1919): 23.
20. Marion, Off with Their Heads! 64–68. On Marion’s early career, see Beauchamp, Without Lying Down, 25–104. Joanna Enlists (Mary Pickford Corp./Artcraft, 1918); The Flapper (Selznick/Select, 1920).
21. For contrasting readings on the flapper, see Lori Landay, “The Film Flapper: Comedy, Dance, and Jazz Age Kinaesthetics,” in Bean and Negra, A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, 221–248; Mary Ryan, “The Projection of New Womanhood: The Movie Moderns in the 1920s,” in Jean Friedman and William Shade, eds., Our American Sisters (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1978), 499–518.
22. Kenneth McGaffey, “Introducing the ‘Vampette,’ ” Photoplay (Mar. 1919): 47. A sampling of articles on the vamp’s decline includes Louise Glaum, “Vampire or Ingenue?” Photoplay (Aug. 1919): 334; “A Fan’s Prayer,” Photoplay (May 1920): 45; Harry Carr, “Era of Sanity Commencing,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 16, 1921, n.p.; “At Last! The Secret of the Vampire Is Bared,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, Oct. 2, 1921, pt. 5, p. 9.
23. “A Fool There Was,” 21. A Fool There Was (Fox, 1915) (print viewed on Kino). On Fox’s rigorous typing of Bara, see Genini, Theda Bara. Establishing shots cut from Bara to the ocean and a thunderstorm to suggest the supernatural aspect of her sexuality. The asexuality of typical good women and wives is what protects men. Bara only destroys men with her sexuality, acting like a classic fin de siècle femme fatale whose independence makes her revert to a dangerously animalistic natural state. See Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 33–51.
24. See, for instance, Franklin, “Purgatory’s Ivory Angel”; Courtland, “The Divine Theda.” Delight Evans, “Does Theda Bara Believe Her Own Press Agent?” Photoplay (May 1918): 62; Agnes Smith, “The Confessions of Theda Bara,” Photoplay (June 1920): 57. See also Bara’s attempts to escape and explain the vamp type, in Theda Bara, “How I Became a Film Vampire,” For
um 62 (June 1919): 715–727; Theda Bara, “The Curse of the Moving-Picture Actress,” Forum 62 (July 1919): 83–93.
25. Evans, “Does Theda Bara Believe Her Own Press Agent,” 63, 107.
26. On Swanson’s unsurpassed reputation in the 1920s and her appeal to women, see Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 824–830. See also Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment, 293- 296.
27. See Jesse Lasky to Adolph Zukor, June 29, 1925; Lasky to Zukor, July 3–4, 1925, Adolf Zukor correspondence, file 8, MHL. These telegrams describe the 1925 negotiation to keep Swanson from moving to UA. Lasky offered her a six-picture, two-year contract with a $300,000 advance per picture against 50 percent of its profits. Swanson moved to UA anyway.
28. DeMille, Autobiography, 221. Swanson’s films with DeMille include Don’t Change Your Husband (Famous Players–Lasky, 1919); Male and Female (Famous Players–Lasky 1919); For Better, For Worse (Famous Players–Lasky, 1919); Why Change Your Wife? (Famous Players–Lasky, 1920); Something to Think About (Famous Players–Lasky, 1920); The Affairs of Anatol (Famous Players–Lasky, 1921).
29. Lasky to DeMille, Jan. 6, 1917, quoted in Sumiko Higashi, “The New Woman and Consumer Culture,” in Bean and Negra, A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, 301. DeMille also attributed the production of the films to Lasky’s repeated urgings; DeMille, Autobiography, 212–214. On MacPherson’s career, see Lee Shippey, “Lee Side o’ LA,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 6, 1942, A4; Franke, Script Girls, 13–15; Donna R. Casella, “Feminism and the Female Author,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 23 (2206): 217–235.
30. “Movie Facts and Fancies,” Boston Daily Globe, Feb. 20, 1922, 12. A search in ProQuest Historical Newspapers turns up MacPherson appearing in this capacity in several dozen features. “Feminine psychology”: Jeanie MacPherson, “Would You Write a Photoplay?” Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 7, 1921, D2.
31. Higashi, “The New Woman,” 302, 303. See also Sumiko Higashi, Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Years (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Higashi’s approach dominated feminist film studies after the publication of Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18. The analysis of marriage as an economic exchange began of course with women’s rights activists in the nineteenth century. More nuanced readings include May, Screening Out the Past, ch. 8; Orgeron, “Making It in Hollywood”; and Studlar, “The Perils of Pleasure?”
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