Go West, Young Women!

by Hilary Hallett

  32. See Lasky, I Blow My Own Horn, 140.

  33. Herbert Howe, “Is Mary Pickford Finished?” The Preview, March 25, 1924, pp. 7–11, PCC, MHL. “She Changed Her Coiffure,” Photoplay (Sept. 1920): 33. On Lasky’s intention, see Lasky to DeMille, Jan. 6, 1917, quoted in Higashi, “The New Woman,” 301. Actor Antonio Moreno sued Vitagraph for trying to force him to accept this condition when his contract called for starring roles; see Antonio Moreno, Deposition, Box 7, Albert E. Smith Papers, Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. For how the move to “unstarring” became a widely recognized technique, see “Era of Sanity Is Commencing,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 16, 1921, pt. III, p. 1.

  34. http://www.silentsaregolden.com/dontchangehusbandreview.html.

  35. Marion, Off with Their Heads! 69; “She Changed Her Coiffure,” 33; Glyn quoted in Anthony Glyn, Elinor Glyn (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1955), 278. Swanson, Swanson on Swanson, 160.

  36. Marion, Off with Their Heads! 98. For accounts of motherhood, see “Gloria Swanson in Elinor Glyn Story”; Adela Rogers St. Johns, “Sight-Seeing the Movies: A Personally Conducted Tour of the Hollywood Film Colony,” Photoplay (April 1921): 31; Elinor Glyn, “A Photobiography of Gloria Swanson,” Photoplay (June 1921): 24.

  37. Moore, Silent Star, 103. Moore bobbed her hair in 1920, but did not become the definitive flapper until the release of Flaming Youth (First National, 1923). “All-time prototype”: St. Johns, Honeycomb, 103.

  38. Peter Bailey, “The Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype,” in Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 156, 151. See also Joanne Meyerowitz, “Women, Cheesecake, and Borderline Material,” Journal of Women’s History 8.3 (Fall 1996): 9–33.

  39. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “glamour.”

  40. Marshall Neilan, “Acting for the Screen,” in Opportunities in the Motion Picture Industry (Los Angeles: Photoplay Research Society, 1922), 11; Marion, Off with Their Heads! 69.

  41. Anonymous undated item; Frances Norton Manning (“Mrs. H.T. Manning”) to Gloria Swanson, June 30, 1937, both in “Fan Mail,” box 66, file 4, Gloria Swanson Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin (hereinafter HRC).

  42. On the cosmetics industry, see Peiss, Hope in a Jar. On women fashion designers, see Hollander, Sex and Suits, 134–136. On department stores, see William R. Leach, “Transformations in a Culture of Consumption,” Journal of American History 71.2 (1984): 319–341. The term “expressive goods” is taken from Lorna Weatherill, “The Meaning of Consumer Behavior in Late Seventeenth-Century and Early Eighteenth-Century England,” in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), 207–227. The term focuses attention on the demand for, and meanings of, the goods that fueled the consumer revolution.

  43. The net national product climbed from $15.8 to $70.3 billion in the United States during this era; see May, Screening Out the Past, 201–203. For a discussion of the widespread assumption that women did 85 percent of all shopping, see Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 66–69. Since the mid-1950s, the film industry has made the opposite assumption, targeting teenage boys in what is called the “Peter Pan syndrome”; see Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 10, 221; Elsie deWolfe, The House in Good Taste (New York: Century Co., 1915), 3. On deWolfe’s career, see Jane S. Smith, Elsie deWolfe (New York: Atheneum, 1982); Stanley Abercrombie, A Century of Interior Design (New York: Rizzoli, 2003), 22, 31, 41–5.

  44. DeWolfe, The House in Good Taste, 4–5. DeWolfe declared, “This American home is always the woman’s home,” in which “men are forever guests.” “The style in which we live”: de Wolfe quoted in Alfred Lewis, Ladies and Not-So-Gentle-Women (New York: Viking, 2000), 283.

  45. Swanson, Swanson on Swanson, 63. Basinger, Silent Stars, 207; Sennett echoed Swanson, writing that “her dramatic talents and beauty were so outstanding” that “comedy merchants” couldn’t keep her; see Sennett, King of Comedy, 171–173, 194.

  46. Swanson, Swanson on Swanson, 81. “Gloria Glorified,” Photoplay (Aug. 1918): 28. You Can’t Believe Everything (Triangle, 1917).

  47. Swanson, Swanson on Swanson, 135.

  48. See, for instance, Gloria Swanson’s studio press biography, “Blue Book of the Screen” for 1924, Gloria Swanson Core Clipping File (hereinafter GS File), MHL.

  49. “Gloria Glorified”; Glyn, “A Photobiography,” 24; Gloria Swanson, “Gloria Swanson Talks on Divorce,” Motion Picture (Dec. 1919): n.p., GS File, MHL. See also, “Intolerance Blamed for Divorce,” San Francisco Bulletin, April 23, 1920, p. 3. Swanson again states her support of divorce in this interview.

  50. Howe, “Is Mary Pickford Finished?”

  51. Berg, Goldwyn, 92.

  52. Lasky, I Blow My Own Horn, 140. DeMille recalled Glyn “deserved more credit than I for inventing sex-appeal”; DeMille, Autobiography, 231. Goldwyn agreed; see Anthony Dawson, Elinor Glyn (Garden City, NY: Double-day, 1955), 279.

  53. “Three Weeks,” Current Literature (Dec. 1907) (APS). On this trend in American fiction, see also Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes (New York: R.R. Bowker Co., 1947), ch. 2; Nina Baym, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood,” in Lucy Maddox, ed., Locating American Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 215–231.

  54. Elinor Glyn, Romantic Adventure: The Autobiography of Elinor Glyn (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1937), 128–138; Joan Hardwick, Addicted to Romance (London: Andre Deutsch Ltd., 1994), 53–78.

  55. Elinor Glyn, Three Weeks (New York: Duffield Co., 1907), 124, 51. Sales in Great Britain, the British Empire, and the United States reached two million by 1916. In 1917, three separate publishers released cheap editions, causing the total number sold by 1933 to reach five million. The book was also immediately published in every European language. Anthony Glyn, Elinor Glyn, 126; Mott, Golden Multitudes, 249–251, 312.

  56. Glyn, Three Weeks, 80, 109–110, 77, 157, 106, 194.

  57. Glyn, Romantic Adventure, 131. Dr. Alice Stockham, in her sex education manual for women, quoted in D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 179.

  58. George Jean Nathan, “The Girl-Alone-in-the-City Novels,” The Bookman (April 1911); “Why Do Women Write More Bad Books Than Men?” Current Literature (Jan. 1908) (both APS).

  59. “Three Weeks,” Current Literature (Dec. 1907): 693. See also Mott, Golden Multitudes, 248–249.

  60. Glyn, Romantic Adventure, 131–132, 8.

  61. Here I follow Colin Campbell, “Understanding Traditional and Modern Practices of Consumption in Eighteenth Century England: A Character-Action Approach,” ch. 3, in Brewer and Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods. See also Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pt. 1.

  62. Hardwick, Addicted to Romance, 128–129, 211.

  63. Glyn, Romantic Adventure, 139; Hardwick, Addicted to Romance, 127–133; “Elizabeth Visits America,” Current Literature (Aug. 1909).

  64. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). On film Orientalism, see Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar, eds., Visions of the East (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997). On Orientalism in advertising, see M.H. Dunlop, Gilded City (New York: Harper Collins, 2000): 59, 96–98, 100–104; Leach, Land of Desire, 104–111. For its role in modern dance, see Judith Walkowitz, “The ‘Vision of Salome,’ ” Journal of American History 108.2 (April 2003): 337–376; Elizabeth Kendall, Where She Danced (New York: Knopf, 1979).

  65. Walter S. Trumbull, “Served Her Right,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (May 1908); Current Opinion, “Lite Ratu Re An D-Art” (May 1916); M.E. Ravage, “I Laugh as I Think,” Puck (Jan. 20, 1917); George Jean Nathan, “What the Public Wants,” McClure’s Magazine (Nov. 1917).

  66. Delight Evans, “Tiger Skins and Temperament,” Photoplay (Jan. 1921): 70, 120; Elinor Glyn, “In Filmdom’s Boudoir,” Ph
otoplay (March 1921): 29; Glyn, Romantic Adventure, 139.

  67. O.R. Geyer, “The Golden Age of Pictures,” Photoplay (June 1920): 53–54. The article describes the 300 percent increase in foreign trade between 1916 and 1919. See also “American Films Corrupting Britain,” Literary Digest (Dec. 4, 1920): 34–35.

  68. Swanson, Swanson on Swanson, 159; Walkowitz, “The ‘Vision of Salome,’ ” 340.

  69. Evans, “Tiger Skins,” 70; Glyn, “In Filmdom’s Boudoir,” 29. On Glyn’s sister, the clothing designer Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon, see Meredith Etherington-Smith and Jeremy Pilcher, The “It” Girls (London: H. Hamilton, 1986); Lady Duff Gordon, Discretions and Indiscretions (London: Jarrolds, 1932).

  70. Swanson, Swanson on Swanson, 160; Anthony Glyn, Elinor Glyn, 302; Glyn, “In Filmdom’s Boudoir,”29; Glyn, “A Photobiography,” 24. On Glyn’s casting approval, see Lasky, I Blow My Own Horn, 141–143.

  71. Ad in the Exhibitors Herald (July 9, 1921): 5. Glyn, Romantic Adventure, 299; Lasky, I Blow My Own Horn, 142.

  72. Lasky, I Blow My Own Horn, 146. On Reid as heir to the “Arrow Collar” tradition, see Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment, 276–278; Gaylyn Studlar, This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 191.

  73. See “Sessue Hayakawa,” Films in Review 27.4 (1976): 193–208. For an early hit that contrasts his sexual power with an American man’s asexuality, see The Cheat (Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Co., 1915).

  74. “ ‘The Great Moment’ Hit at Alhambra,” Los Angeles Daily Times, Oct. 5, 1921, pt. III, p. 2. The Great Moment (Paramount, 1921). Exhibitors Herald (Aug. 6, 1921): 46.

  75. Review of “The Great Moment,” Exhibitors Herald (Aug. 6, 1921): 49. Many exhibitors wrote in to “What the Picture Did for Me” section of the Herald, praising Swanson and the film’s success with the ladies; see, Exhibitors Herald, March 11, 1922, p. 75; March 25, 1922, p. 75; April 1, 1922, p. 70; April 15, 1922, p. 80.

  76. Glyn, “In Filmdom’s Boudoir,” 28–30.

  77. “What They Think about Marriage!” Photoplay (April 1921): 20–22, 110. Those interviewed included DeMille, Swanson, George Fitzmaurice, Will Rogers, Frances Marion, Pearl White, Marshall Neilan, Thomas Meighan, Norma Talmadge, Constance Talmadge, Mae Murray, William S. Hart, Anita Stewart, Antonio Moreno, Justine Johnstone.

  78. As Told by Cecil B. DeMille to Adela Rogers St. Johns, “What Does Marriage Mean?” Photoplay (Dec. 1920): 28–31; As Told by Cecil B. DeMille to Adela Rogers St. Johns, “More about Marriage,” Photoplay (May 1921): 24–26, 105. For criticisms of The Affairs of Anatol that charged the opposite of what DeMille claimed, see “Great cast. Great director. Great scenery. Absolutely teaches no moral lesson whatsoever,” Exhibitors Herald (April 1, 1922): 70; New York Times Film Reviews (New York: Arno Press, 1970), Feb. 3, 1919.

  79. St. Johns, “What Does Marriage Mean?” 28–31; St. Johns, “More about Marriage,” 24–26, 105. DeMille claimed he “received more letters concerning the publication” of the first interview “than from any picture he had made.”

  80. Higashi, “The New Woman,” 305–314.

  81. St. Johns, “More about Marriage,” 24.

  82. Of the 12 stories on the topic between 1919 and 1921, DeMille’s was the only one with this point of view.

  83. Joan Jordan, “Old Lives for New,” Photoplay (April 1921): 44–46. See also Florence Vidor, “Does Marriage Help or Hurt a Movie Star?” Chicago Herald and Examiner, Oct. 2, 1921, pt. V, p. 8.

  84. As Told by Marjorie Rambeau to Ada Patterson, “How Can a Stage or Screen Marriage Be Made Happy,” Photoplay (Feb. 1921): 32–33, 105.

  85. The term is D’Emilio and Freedman’s, in Intimate Matters, 239–274.

  86. Ben Lindsey and Wainwright Evans, The Companionate Marriage (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927). My understanding of “companionate marriage” follows that of Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 39–40, 50, 79, 80–83; D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 241, 244, 265–70, 273; Christina Simmons, “Modern Sexuality and the Myth of Victorian Repression,” in Barbara Melosh, ed., Gender and History since 1890 (London: Routledge, 1993), 29–33.

  87. This was the determination of the Payne Fund Studies, a University of Chicago investigation into films’ influence on youth conducted between 1928 and 1932. The research was published in eight volumes between 1933 and 1935. For the popularized, best-selling version, and on the politics behind this anti-industry project, see chapter 1, note 144.

  88. “What They Think about Marriage!” 22; Elinor Glyn, The Philosophy of Love (London: George Newnes, 1920).

  89. Joan Jordan, “Confessions of a Modern Don Juan,” Photoplay (May 1921): 46. For more on the Latin lover type, see Studlar, This Mad Masquerade, 178, 184, 191–193.

  90. Clara Kimball Young, “The Technique of Lovers,” Photoplay (March 1920): 39–41.

  91. On Valentino’s early life and transgressive masculinity, see Emily W. Leider, Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), 4–43; Studlar, “Optic Intoxication: Rudolph Valentino and Dance Madness,” ch. 3, in This Mad Masquerade.

  92. Griffith quoted in Gish, Dorothy and Lillian Gish, 81. On Valentino’s typecasting, see Leider, Dark Lover, 77–97. Eyes of Youth (Clara Kimball Young Film Corp., 1919), Library of Congress.

  93. June Mathis, “Pursuing a Motion Picture Plot,” Photoplay Journal (Oct. 1917): 24–25. Moving Picture World, June 18, 1921, p. 719, Mathis File, SWEYD Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Theater Collection (hereinafter NYPL-TC). AFI credits Mathis with 113 films in her twelve-year career. See also Mathis Goldwyn Producing Corp., Mathis Biographical File, MHL; Casella, “Feminism and the Female Author,” 217–235.

  94. Mathis, “Pursuing a Motion Picture Plot”; Katherine Lipke, “Most Responsible Job Ever Held by a Woman,” Los Angeles Times, June 3, 1923, p. 6; Ivan St. Johns, “Fifty-Fifty,” Photoplay (Oct. 1926): 46. On sales of the book Four Horsemen, see Mott, Golden Multitudes, 241, 325, 328. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Metro, 1921).

  95. Adela Rogers St. Johns, Love, Laughter and Tears (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 167.

  96. “A Latin Lover,” Photoplay (Sept. 1921): 21. Robert Sherwood, untitled article in Life, March 11, 1921, n.p., Valentino Core Clipping File, MHL.

  97. On its box office success and rave reviews, see “ ‘The Four Horsemen’ Ride on the Screen,” Literary Digest (Mar. 26, 1921): 28–29; Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, 5; Lasky, I Blow My Own Horn, 146–147.

  98. Lasky, I Blow My Own Horn, 148. Glyn, Romantic Adventure, 299–300; “he knew everything”: Glyn quoted in Leider, Dark Lover, 195; Hardwick, Addicted to Romance, 242.

  99. The Sheik advertisement, Exhibitors Herald (Nov. 5, 1921): 12–13; “Letters to the Times,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 10, 1921, p. 11. The Sheik (Famous Players–Lasky/Paramount 1921), Kino.

  100. Although the exotic does not play a role in her argument, this reading illustrates the dynamic described by Janice A. Radway in Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). See also Studlar, This Mad Masquerade, 150–198.

  101. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America (New York: Harper, 2009), 250.

  102. “The Motion Picture Autobiographies,” Case 9; “The Sheik,” Variety, Nov. 11, 1921, p. 37; “What the Picture Did for Me,” Exhibitors Herald (April 8, 1922): 89.

  103. Exhibitors Herald (April 22, 1922): 76; unsourced clipping, Valentino Scrapbooks, RLC.

  104. Dick Dorgan, “A Song of Hate,” Photoplay (July 1921): 27.

  105. Lambert, Nazimova, 247. Born Adelaida Leventon to middle-class secular Jews in 1879, she took the generic Russian name Nazimova to hide her ethnic background when she entered Moscow’s prejudiced theatrical scene. On her upbringing, see ibid., 3–67.

&nb
sp; 106. “Nazimova Last of Great Stage Artistes to Heed the Call of the Screen,” Selznick Pictures Magazine, n.d., p. 4, Alla Nazimova files, SWEYD Collection, NYPL-TC; St. Johns, Honeycomb, 117. The Alla Nazimova files in the SWEYD Collection contain a mountain of material dating back to the actress’s first U.S. performances in Russian.

  107. Herbert Howe, “A Misunderstood Woman,” Photoplay (April 1922), 24. Alla Nazimova Files, SWEYD Collection, NYPL-TC, contains publicity shots for both causes. “Eccentric”: Helen Raferty, “Elsie or Allah?” Photoplay (July 1918): 23. “Russian superwoman”: “Alla Nazimova,” Motion Picture Classic (Aug. 1918): n.p, Nazimova Clippings, Film appearances, 1919–1920, SWEYD Collection, NYPL-TC. “Made”: “Made,” “Open Letter to Nazimova,” Photoplay (Aug. 1921): 31 (italics in the original). The letter was written by a woman who said she had been a fan since Nazimova’s Ibsen days.

  108. See Anna McClure Sholl, “Madame Nazimova—A Comparison,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (Nov. 1907) (APS). In 1908, another summary of reviews showed her artistic status; “Maude Adams in a New Incarnation of Peter Pan,” Current Literature (March 1908) (APS).

  109. See Lambert, Nazimova, 78–91; DeWitt Bodeen, “Nazimova,” Film in Review 23.10 (1972): 578–579. “Hedda Gabler,” Current Literature (Jan. 1907): 60, 152. On Nazimova taking over the play’s direction, see Lambert, Nazimova, 135–136. See also Gerald Bordman, Oxford Companion to American Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 501.

  110. Sholl, “Madame Nazimova—A Comparison,” 684.

  111. “Maude Adams in a New Incarnation of Peter Pan,” 319; “What Is Wrong with Our Theaters?” Current Literature (Nov. 1907) (APS); “The Transformation of Nazimova,” Current Literature (Dec. 1907) (APS); “Hedda Gabler.”