Go West, Young Women! - Hilary Hallett

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to compensate for the poor quality of the movies.92 Back at Biograph by the year’s end, Pickford appeared in two films that, together, crystallized her appeal as a new type of ingénue. The Female of the Species (1912) is typical Griffith fare: a finely constructed, grimly sentimental tale about innate human depravity redeemed by mother love. Yet Pickford’s pugnacious sprite excels at demonstrating her physical capacity to deal with obstacles. Employing the more restrained style she thought translated best on film, her character appears to inhabit a different film than her female costars, who weep and roll their eyes with jealousy and fear throughout.93 Her last film at Biograph, The New York Hat (1912), displayed her gift for leavening tales of romantic pathos with comedic touches that capitalized on and modernized the era’s enormously popular sentimental literature about girls’ struggles to come of age. Pickford’s performance and the script, the first by future star scenarist Anita Loos, convey the genuine, if comical, significance of acquiring “the New York hat.” The film deftly reveals this small piece of big-city life as a symbol of a world that valued young women’s desires for more autonomy. Settlement house reformer Jane Addams similarly interpreted the significance of working girls’ fashion choices, declaring, “Through the huge hat, with its wilderness of bedraggled feathers, the girl announces to the world that she is here, she is ready to live, to take her place in the world.”94

      In 1913 Pickford returned to Broadway to play a lead in Belasco’s production of A Good Little Devil, using the move to gain greater recognition for both herself and the artistry of her craft. Although Pickford later claimed Griffith’s domineering personality and preference for “wishy-washy heroines” drove her from Biograph, she became the “NEW BELASCO STAR” in one such role.95 Demonstrating the short memory of celebrity culture, the press immediately passed Lawrence’s nicknames on to Pickford, hailing her as the “BIOGRAPH GIRL” and the “Maude Adams of the ‘Movies.’ ”96 Pickford used her new theatrical legitimacy to make the case for the superiority of film acting.97 According to Pickford, “film plays” offered greater artistic, financial, and personal rewards, thereby providing the best opportunity for ambitious working girls. “For years the ‘movies’ have been looked upon as the inevitable finish of the has been actor,” noted the New York American, “but according to Miss Pickford—no more.” “You can’t fool the camera,” she declared in one of many reports describing why “This ‘Maude Adams of the Movies’ Says Self-Reproduction on the Films Can Do More Than Any Director.”98 Such statements underscored that no Svengali controlled her talent behind the scenes. “I have had many years of technical training in the best possible schools of experience,” Pickford remarked after her Broadway debut; “it wasn’t as if I were a novice or a debutante.”99 Her press also emphasized the masculine concerns that motivated this “Daddy of the Family, Not Old Enough to Vote.”100 The “very small salary” she earned during her first stint on Broadway had led her to work at Biograph years earlier, she explained to a noted theater critic. “The larder was empty. What else could I do?” In short, the theater was “so much harder than acting for the movies.” Film work also promoted domestic harmony, since “ ‘Little Mary’ and Her Husband” now led a settled life with enough money to enjoy their leisure time.101 Yet Pickford also credited her hardscrabble theatrical start with her current success: “I am certain that I could not today at my age run the picture company that I do without the struggle” of her life on stage.102

      Pickford’s Broadway stardom made her a singular commodity: a proven film attraction who carried the imprimatur of the legitimate stage.103 Film producer Adolph Zukor liked the combination. Like Laemmle, Zukor was another recent addition to the ranks of in de pen dent producers working outside Edison’s trust. The handsome, soft-spoken, and impeccably mannered Hungarian came to the United States as a poor youth, made a tidy sum as a cloak manufacturer in New York, and then invested his profits in nickelodeons.104 Not much taller than the diminutive Pickford, both immigrants wore their competitive drives lightly and concentrated as much on the long-term potential of motion pictures as on immediate gains.

      

      After Zukor moved from exhibition to production in 1912, the name of the company he founded—Famous Players—made plain his intention to feminize films by luring women into the audience with stars. In order to “kill” what he called “the slum tradition in movies,” he focused on making longer movies that appropriated the prestige of well-known stage players in adaptations of equally distinguished plays.105 He encapsulated the aim in the dictum that he would showcase only “Famous Players in Famous Plays.” In 1912 Zukor executed the plan, financing and distributing Sarah Bernhardt in film adaptations of her signature plays, Queen Elizabeth and Camille. But the Bernhardt venture offered a surprising lesson: stature on stage did not guarantee a following on film. “Movie” audiences had a mind of their own, Zukor learned, and the clearest expressions of their tastes ran to ingénues like Lawrence and Pickford and serial queens like Mary Fuller, star of the first action-adventure episodic serial What Happened to Mary? (1912). After parlaying the association with Bernhardt into an alliance with the respected Broadway producer Daniel Frohman, Zukor purchased the rights to film Little Devil with an eye toward approaching Pickford about joining Famous Players. “The screen public will choose its favorites. There will be a star system rivaling—maybe outshining—that of the stage,” he prophesized to Mary and Charlotte over lunch. Pickford needed little pleading, having witnessed how the “young girls [who] rushed up and said ‘Isn’t this Mary Pickford?’ ” at the stage door wanted to meet Little Mary of the screen, not Juliet of the boards.106 And so, “after a much heated negotiation” over terms, the two incipient titans formed a partnership in the summer of 1913 founded on the belief that the industry’s future lay in nurturing the relationship between audiences and stars.107

      From the start, Pickford and Zukor’s collaboration sought to capitalize on the interest fans showed in her rapscallion ingénues. After returning to motion picture work, she played three sharp-witted scamps of humble origins in action-adventure stories that tethered her star’s advance to that of her sex’s. In The Bishop’s Carriage (1913), Caprice (1913), and Hearts Adrift (1914), Pickford played, respectively, an orphan who steals to survive before triumphing on the stage, a mountain girl who captures the heart of a wealthy beau after great difficulty, and the survivor of a shipwreck who starts a family with a man only to have his wife’s arrival prompt her suicide.108 Although these films are lost, the traces that remain exhibit the imprint of the classic Pickford screen type: a fearless, funny, lovely guttersnipe whose poundings by fate bind her audience to her in sympathy and love. These films employed a variation of the melodramatic mode that I call romantic melodramas, whose production swelled along with feature films. Taken up by many of the most popular actresses of the day, romantic melodramas tracked the exploits of a strong-willed heroine attempting to make her way in a hostile world. Charting their heroines’ risky adventures along the path to maturity, they required the display of physical comedy, emotional pathos, and derring-do and often abruptly concluded with their heroines clasped in the arms of the right man. Yet however conventional their endings, the action of these melodramas typically focused on women’s adventures rather than on capturing the heart of a man, the plot long used to narrate women’s lives.109

      The part Pickford played in Tess of the Storm Country (1914) crystallized the appeal of heroines in romantic melodramas. Indeed, tomboy Tess proved so popular that Pickford remade the film as an independent producer at United Artists in 1922. A motherless urchin, Tess is the daughter of a fish poacher who gets framed for a murder. While he languishes in jail, Tess fights off the true killer’s attempt to force her into marriage, rescues an unwed pregnant girl from drowning herself, delivers her baby, agrees to raise it, and confers grace upon the dying child when a minister refuses. The film’s end features Tess reuniting with the wealthy beau she spurned earlier for his doubts about her moral character. The role showcased her ability to combine contrasting moral qualities into an inoffensive whole: hers was a virtuous rascal, a hoyden of preternatural self-control, a young woman whose mane of golden, Pre-Raphaelite curls telegraphed her sensuality and grace.

      From its first frame, Tess announced its intention to satisfy female fans’ expectations for a rousing romantic

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