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      FIGURE 4. Mary Pickford as idol of the “Working Girl” readers of the Ladies’ World in 1915. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

      Indeed, Pickford always credited the paternal power her salary made possible with inspiring her devotion to her work. The modest means she earned with her theatrical debut in 1900 had created a “determination nothing could crush . . . to take my father’s place in some mysterious way.” Her earliest publicity would later use her breadwinner anxieties to justify her decision in 1908 to trade Broadway for the less reputable choice of acting at Biograph film studio in New York. There Pickford used her artistic status to demand twice the rate paid to beginning film players: $10 a day, or $60 a week, a salary she credited with allowing her family to finally “beg[i]n to live.”⁶⁶ She also recollected her debut in The Silver King in terms that presaged the type that brought her such acclaim. Although she claimed to prefer the “villainous little girl” she played in the popular melodrama’s first act, she reported that a comic bit of stage business she improvised as the hero’s dying son drew the “biggest laugh of the evening” and won the manager’s attention. Whatever its accuracy, her description deftly captured her later screen type: a feminine, feisty tomboy, orphaned in spirit if not always in fact, whose fiery emotions jumped from harmless misbehavior to wild humor to tender pathos.

      The motivation to win her way in the world brought Pickford’s family to New York in 1907, where she resolved to meet “the Wizard of the Modern Stage,” David Belasco. A former actor from San Francisco, Belasco’s celebrity as a director-producer stemmed from his artful performance as the so-called “Maestro” of the theater’s feminization.⁶⁷ Belasco built his unrivaled following among women on the “immoral” melodramatic plays that intellectuals like Hugo Munsterberg decried for corrupting the nation’s artistic and moral tenor. Noteworthy modern immoral melodramas like Madame Butterfly (1900) and Du Barry (1901) descended from Camille. Unsurprisingly, Belasco’s notoriety also derived from his relationships to their female stars. “BELASCO’S LATEST STAR A SUCCESS” was how a Philadelphia paper announced Charlotte Walker’s triumph in The Warrens of Virginia (1907). “How I do like to develop an actor or an actress. Then is when I am most happy,” Belasco explained in one press release. “I like to thrust in my hand, grasp his or her heartstrings and drag them out and play upon them like a musician upon the strings of his instrument,” he continued, expertly suggesting his talent for conducting both erotic and gender play.⁶⁸ Pickford displayed a similar knack when she auditioned for a small role in The Warrens, introducing herself to Belasco as the “father of the family” in a manner that made the Maestro laugh.⁶⁹ Her publicity seized on this title when she won a starring role in a 1913 Belasco production of A Good Little Devil. Calling herself a daddy emphasized her status as an adult artist who laid claim to the rights and responsibilities of the patriarch, however much she appeared like a spirited, angelic girl. The Warrens also featured two other flickers of future importance, playwright (later screenwriter and director) William de Mille and his younger brother, actor (later director) Cecil. The press called its female star simply the latest in a line of actresses who were “FAILURES TILL ‘SVENGALI’ ARRIVED.”⁷⁰

      In likening Belasco to Svengali, the newspaper summoned the specter of George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), a popular novel that displayed the broader shift in popular culture’s depiction of men and women’s relationship to the production of art. The best-selling novel modernized the Pygmalion and Galatea myth, long the master print for viewing the male as the agent of the heavenly creative impulse, the female as his aesthetic stimulant. When mortal women fail to meet his moral standards, Pygmalion carves his perfect woman from ivory, worships his creation, and consummates his desire after the goddess Aphrodite gives her life. The fate of Trilby O’Farrell partially reproduced her classical predecessor’s. An artist’s model whose beauty and availability inspire a group of budding painters in the Latin Quarter, Trilby falls under the spell of Svengali, an evil mesmerist who hypnotizes the “tone-deaf” young grisette into becoming the voice of his musical ambitions. Svengali’s control over Trilby indicates why those who emphasize the manager’s role as that of proprietor of an actress’s talent in this era speak of a “Svengali paradigm.” And, no doubt, the Trilby-inspired crazes, from shoes to hats, that swept both sides of the Atlantic near the century’s end offered precocious examples of mass culture’s ability to turn symbols of women’s sexuality into fetishistic, salable parts. Yet Trilby also revised the moral interpretation of the novel’s female protagonist and described the male artists in the story as frauds or fallible. The bohemian Trilby “could be naked and unashamed” and was “without any kind of fear.” Those who judge Trilby come to grief as well. Still, Pickford’s fame displayed the American public’s uneasy relationship to female eroticism by celebrating a female artist who sought new professional, rather than sexual, freedoms.

      Given her ambition to make herself known, Pickford’s landing at Biograph in 1908 was equal parts fortuitous and frustrating. After 1908, the shift to story pictures, or what scholars now call narrative film, threw the work of film acting into relief, focusing audience’s attention on gelatine Juliets (a celluloid version of Shakespeare’s most famous ingénue). Plot development in story pictures revolved around the action of fictional characters that new camera techniques like close-ups brought within intimate reach. Biograph’s leading director, D.W. Griffith, pioneered the close-up’s effective use. The technical mastery of both Griffith and early cameramen at the studio probably explains why two of the industry’s earliest, if still nameless, stars emerged from Biograph’s ranks: Pickford and Florence Lawrence. Since movie players appeared without billing in the earliest years, curious fans dubbed Lawrence the “Biograph Girl” and Pickford “Little Mary,” a character name she often used. By 1910, Motion Picture World’s new section, “Picture Personalities,” answered fans’ questions about the identities of performers

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