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the famous tale of woman’s heroism, ‘Tess of the Storm Country’ by Grace Miller White.”¹¹⁰ Reviews confirmed Tess was a feminine affair, calling it “a story by a woman, of a woman, and for women,” though conceding the movie was “for men too.”¹¹¹ In highlighting the film’s relationship to White’s best-selling novel, the movie aimed to draw the large readership for these novels into movie houses. Future films turned the strategy into a near-formula, as Pickford produced popular “growing girl” novels like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), based on Kate Douglas Wiggin’s 1903 novel, and Daddy-Long-Legs (1919), written by Jean Webster in 1912. Often these films were adapted, written, and in some cases even directed by Frances Marion, Pickford’s close friend and one of the era’s most successful screenwriters.¹¹² Given the engrained habit of viewing Pickford as playing innocent children, it is crucial to emphasize the in de pen dent, spirited, and adult personalities of most of her heroines. Of her fifty-two feature films, Pickford played a child in seven and remained a child in only three.¹¹³ More typically, whether based on literary adaptations or on original screenplays, as with The Little American (1917) and The Love Light (1921), Pickford’s romantic melodramas featured young women struggling to find happiness and to restore order in a chaotic world.

      Zukor called Mary Pickford “the first of the great stars,” undoubtedly because the success of Tess of the Storm County lifted Famous Players “onto the high road,” paving the way for the vertically integrated, monopolistic structure that characterized the studio system of Hollywood’s so-called classical era.¹¹⁴ Pickford used Tess to negotiate terms in January 1915 that included a salary of $2,000 a week and an equal share of her productions’ profits. Unbeknownst to Pickford, film exhibitors absorbed her raise by paying more for her films than others released by Famous Players’ distributor, Paramount. “Block-booking” offered a more efficient means to monopolize the business than the Edison Trust’s interminable legal wrangling. By forcing exhibitors to purchase less desirable movies to secure a favored star, block-booking made Pickford the “nucleus around which [Zukor] built his whole program,” in William de Mille’s words.¹¹⁵ When she caught on to the practice in 1916, she demanded another raise and a host of concessions that afforded her greater artistic control.¹¹⁶ Zukor’s decision to meet her terms reflected his belief that stars—as the most reliable predictor of box office returns—were also the key element in the industry’s profit structure.¹¹⁷ But Paramount’s head balked at Pickford’s salary, believing that exhibitors and audiences would revolt at the higher prices it entailed. Rather than lose Pickford, Zukor seized control of distribution by merging with a rival company owned by Jesse Lasky.¹¹⁸ Combined, the Famous Players–Lasky Corporation accounted for nearly three-quarters of Paramount’s product, allowing FPL to control the company.¹¹⁹ Pickford’s revised contract at the end of 1916 guaranteed her the greater of either a million-dollar salary or half the profits of her films, the right to select her director and supporting cast, and created Artcraft as a separate “star series” for her work.

      The development was widely reported as making Pickford, “The Latest Addition to Our Actor Managers” and the leading exemplar of a broader trend. By the next year, Photoplay’s editor James Quirk decried the effect of this “ ‘her own company’ epidemic” on the industry’s health.¹²⁰ Put differently, Pickford’s star may have burned the brightest and lasted longest, but many other female celebrities glimmered around her light. Indeed, a disproportionate number of the players who earned the interest of audiences during the era of silent features were other women.¹²¹ “Remember this was the day of women,” scenarist Lenore Coffee recalled, “Beautiful women in full flower.”¹²² Clearly, actors like Charlie Chaplin, William Hart, Wallace Reid, and swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks, who became Pickford’s second husband in 1920, were huge stars. But if the stars of lower-prestige Western films and comedies are set aside, the list of those capable of opening either a movie or an independent film company remains heavily skewed toward the leading ladies of the day. Actresses had a near-monopoly over leading roles in adventure serials and the romantic and society melodramas that became the industry’s first prestige features, films that coincided with the star system’s development.¹²³

      The persona of the era’s greatest serial queen and Pickford’s personal heroine—Pearl White—displayed how important women with virile personas were to the star system’s development. Pickford called herself “a devoted fan” of White.¹²⁴ Although White probably never set foot in California, Pickford claimed to have encountered her on a train bound for Los Angeles in 1914. “In awe I watched her enter the club car, light a cigarette, and in the presence of all these men, raise a highball to her lips,” she recalled, relishing her identification with a woman whose persona was a running rebuke to propriety. The publicity surrounding Pickford’s Broadway stardom associated her with serial queens like White: “You have seen her rough riding on the western plains. You have watched her during thrilling moments on runaway motorcars and flying machines. And of course you tried to find out her name and failed.” White’s example also influenced Pickford’s answer to a query about how she kept in shape. “I used to ride broncos, drive racing cars, swim dangerous rapids and slide down precipices.”¹²⁵

      As the first film genre designed to appeal to women, serials featured young women whose western toughness and virility shaped their allure with both sexes. Released in both print and film formats on a weekly or monthly basis, short serial films were held together by an ongoing adventure plot. Actresses went uncredited as was still customary. But the journalistic discourse that ran alongside the print versions of serial films made Mary Fuller, Helen Holmes, and White into the first international film stars. Beginning with Mary Fuller in the first female-centered serial thriller, What Happened to Mary (1912–1913), stories about these actresses celebrated how their real-life heroism inspired their parts; they were said to perform their own stunts after all.¹²⁶ Edna Vercoe, a teenage fan in Chicago, filled her “movy album” with stories about all three actresses’ remarkable bravery and romantic successes. “Mary Fuller a Real Heroine,” declared one article about Fuller’s protection of the cast and crew from snakes during a recent shoot.¹²⁷ “Miss Fuller finds that her proficiency in riding, shooting, and other outdoor sports” was “most helpful in creating many of her parts,” announced another.¹²⁸ Such reporting indicates why most film scholars agree that the focus on these women’s authentic bravery and athleticism sold fans “a fantasy of female power.” But most also concur that this picture was tempered by an “equally vivid exposition of female defenselessness and weakness” that required the intervention of a strong, male hand for eventual success.¹²⁹ Such a view captures the ambivalence that these heroines often provoked, but it misses how female fans may have also enjoyed the erotic tension produced by watching these conventionally feminine-looking but manly-acting heroines oscillate between aggression and subservience, pleasure and pain. Moreover, as specifically western heroines, these actresses needed to be able to both cause and tolerate acute physical distress in order to prove their valor and achieve the type of progress equated with the continent’s conquest. This ability was a hallmark of the iconic masculinity associated with western heroes from Davy Crockett to William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Silent western films exaggerated and then spread the association of modern “Americanism” with sensationally mobile men whose violent actions made possible the nation’s continental claim.¹³⁰

      FIGURE 6. A general publicity photograph of Mary Pickford emphasizing her tough serial-queen side, c. 1922. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

      The longest-running serial, The Hazards of Helen (1914–1917), promoted a similar vision of modern American women. A cursory glance at the extant prints of Hazards displays the mise-en-scène of a modern Western, as giant locomotives, fleet horses, speedy motorcycles, and rifle-toting good and bad guys track back and forth across the dusty open spaces of California.¹³¹ Like the men with whom she works, Holmes confronts constant tests of her daring, bravery, and endurance as she attempts to tame her harsh environment. A telegraph operator charged with protecting a railroad station under continual

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