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      FIGURE 10. Ruth Roland, real estate entrepreneur, promoting women’s business opportunities by writing “how to get rich maxims” for women in Los Angles, c. 1928. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

      Pearl White’s emergence as a star in The Perils of Pauline (1914) has obscured her image as a heroine whose fame also depended on her incarnation of a western persona capable of enduring intense distress.¹³⁹ The serial best recalled today, Perils ensconced White among the East Coast elite, playing an orphaned heiress whose guardian plots her assassination in order to claim her fortune. Yet White’s persona was composed of equal parts western toughness and cosmopolitan glamour, ensuring her fans knew that “Pearl White . . . is quite another person” than Pauline.¹⁴⁰ Publicity about White and her loyal, love-struck costar, Crane Wilbur, dominated Edna Vercoe’s scrapbooks. Indeed, White reported that her fan mail was “mostly from women,” including more than a “few mash notes.”¹⁴¹ These stories, as well as White’s autobiography, Just Me (1919), focused on her western upbringing and stressed her rural, hardscrabble start in a “lonely log cabin” in the “Ozark Mountains of Missouri.”¹⁴² They also explained how White cultivated her remarkable athleticism during an adolescent tenure as “a bareback rider” in the circus where she perfected the equestrian skills that led to her first film breaks in shorts like The Horse Shoer’s Girl (1910). “Oh for a girl that could ride a horse like Pearl White,” swooned one young man, indicating her appeal to both sexes. After viewing a serial, one woman recalled that White “had done things the like of which I had never dreamed. She became my idol.” Her love of White sparked filial rebellion, as her father had prohibited watching serials at “the ‘houses of iniquity’,” as he called movie houses.¹⁴³

      Just such reactions explained why some accused serial queens of encouraging immoral behavior among their female fans.¹⁴⁴ “I have always liked pretty women,” explained a woman in a “motion picture autobiography” that sociologist Herbert Blumer collected from Chicago youths for the Payne Film Study (PFS) in 1929. “When I’d see them in the movies I positively would try to act like them. . . . I think the movies have a great deal to do with the present day so-called ‘wildness.’ ”¹⁴⁵ The first large-scale effort to document the effect of movies on youth, the PFS responded to mounting alarm among cultural custodians about movie stars’ displacement of traditional models of authority among the young. In the accounts offered by one hundred moviegoers about their habits and preferences from 1915 to 1929, women struck with what Moving Picture World called “serialitis” described an experience that supports film critic Elizabeth Cowie’s thesis that the process of identification stems from fans sharing “a structural relation of desire” with characters—in this case, with their independent pursuit of sex and adventure.¹⁴⁶ The account of one self-described “naturally reserved” woman displayed the intense empathy produced by “following up some serial . . . three or four nights a week.” “I started, I believe, to suffer as much as the girl of the story did,” she admitted, adding, “I admired Miss White for her daring and courage. . . . I can recall distinctly saying to myself, ‘Oh, what a Lucky Girl to have enough money to take a trip like that—a trip across the wild desert. . . . Oh, how daring! If only it were I!’ ”¹⁴⁷ Another, Chicago girl recalled how her “idols” “gave me an inkling of what I could do with that sense of adventure of mine.” “All summer this long legged girl in her teens, who should have been learning to bake and sew for her future husband, ran wild,” becoming a “bold, brazen hussy” who pursued the men she liked. “When I came away to college instead of getting married . . . I definitely proved that I had no sense.”¹⁴⁸