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seemed designed to induce a self-reflective reverie in female readers that encouraged them to take their daydreams to heart. Its opening prelude whispered, “Dreams—dreams most fascinating to young women all over America are coming true every day. Do you dream of becoming a motion picture actress and actually plan to be one?”²³ If so, such readers were not to worry, since “not a day passes but some girl who has shared your fondest fancies is made exquisitely happy.” The format that followed involved Parsons soliciting tips and advice in short interviews with those already successful in the movies, allowing her to advertise the movies’ women personalities as modern celebrities by fleshing out their exploits both on and off screen. Equally important, she then used their personal experiences to create a new genre of success stories for girls whose master plot centered on presenting the movies as a place where those with “brains and beauty,” in the parlance of the day, and a little luck could reinvent the terms of feminine success.²⁴ Parsons, and those she interviewed in “How to Become Movie Actress,” treated the ambition to become a star with matter-of-fact aplomb, contradicting the notion that such expectations were at all fabulous. Indeed, in Parsons’s hands, the movies’ central product was coming-of-age stories for girls that promised happily-ever-after endings. The fact that these stories offered young women the chance to win interesting, lucrative work that celebrated their femininity made them unique. Casting young women in the role of adventurer, Parsons sought “to inspire the ambitious” by making a romance of their quest for individual success.²⁵

      The column thrived by communicating a host of contradictory messages about the qualities women would need to achieve their ends. This approach in part imitated, in part further twisted the ethics of chance and rational striving that had long coexisted in the coming-of-age tales told to boys.²⁶ Some of the advice sought to inculcate in young women the so-called masculine values, like aggression and self-promotional skills, which the nation’s corporate order prized. Determine “if you genuinely photograph well,” Parsons instructed, and ascertain which studio “you think you fit best with, and then send them your picture and a letter saying that you would like a chance to prove your worth as an extra.” Here the hopeful’s fate depended on possessing an image whose value others recognized. The column also prescribed the traditional path of starting at the bottom, as an “extra girl,” in order to reach the top. Yet even as such a course paid tribute to the logic of the Protestant work ethic, chancy factors such as “pictorial beauty” and talent entered into the equation of what determined an aspirant’s eventual fate. “Start as an extra in some good studio,” Parsons quoted Pearl White’s costar Crane Wilbur as having instructed. But Wilbur quickly tempered this statement with one that indicated an awareness that success might lay outside an individual’s control. “If you have talent they’ll find you quick enough.”²⁷ The column’s contradictory messages about how to get ahead—it preached diligent effort in climbing up from the bottom even as it celebrated instant results tied to magical forces outside one’s control—were a commonplace of the Protestant work ethic and of the times. Stories by writers like Horatio Alger required that young men exhibit a commitment to the virtues of constant industriousness, thrift, sobriety, and moral rectitude in order to qualify as worthy heroes. Yet, as the plots of these books unfolded, ultimately “luck and patronage” became the architects of the hero’s good fortune.²⁸ Here the relationship between form, as disciplined effort, and content, as talent and a pretty face, grew even more attenuated, as a girl armed only with confidence in her perfect picture went forth to triumph in one of the nation’s fasting-growing industries.

      These contradictions often intensified when the figure of the male movie director, portrayed as a patron of aspirants, entered the column, causing Parsons to proffer advice that, willy-nilly, wove strategies long considered innately feminine with others long deemed masculine. The advice to “find out the name of the man who holds your destiny in his hands” sounded a conventional note by suggesting that hopefuls locate a Svengali-type master who could orchestrate their path to success. Yet Parsons delivered this pronouncement in the context of teaching aspirants the importance of making their own breaks. Armed with a name, she pragmatically suggested, one had “a much better chance.” “Better still,” she advised hopefuls to “discover when a big feature is slated for production. To succeed one must be both resourceful and inventive.” Parsons solicited tips from D.W. Griffith, the director made famous by the critical praise and social controversy provoked by The Birth of a Nation (1915), a traditional melodrama about the era of Reconstruction that glorified the Ku Klux Klan’s salvation of the South from Northern carpetbaggers and its white women from the rape of lascivious black men.²⁹ As described by Parsons, the “new Griffith doctrine,” was simply a novel name for the old Pygmalion myth. According to Griffith, the best actresses emerged from “untrained” young women who followed a director’s every command. Parsons also reported that directors Cecil B. DeMille and Thomas Ince had a preference for women willing to act as moldable clay. Their talent in shaping such raw material was said to have put “numberless untrained girls on the road to fame and success.”³⁰ Yet even as these men underscored the importance of ladylike behavior on the set, all three also warned that manly “courage” was vital to succeeding in front of the camera.

      Indeed, a fan following Parsons’s column, or myriad other accounts that circulated about Pickford and the other actresses who worked with Griffith and DeMille, would have encountered many more stories about the control they exercised over men.³¹ Certainly, as Parson’s column evolved, she devoted far more space to describing women’s individual struggles and accomplishments in breaking into the movies than to telling stories about men’s role in the process. Written by, for, and about women, these stories predominantly framed the topic of what constituted a successful presentation of femininity in the context of what other women wanted to hear in an era in which the New Woman, feminism, and women’s influence on popular culture were all topics of social controversy. In fact, when men entered Parsons’s column at all, she was more often interested in demonstrating how women managed to get the upper hand. Her description of Clara Kimball Young’s relationship with her director husband was one such instance. Parsons presented Young as the “Ideal Film Personality” whose “beauty and brains and wealth” made her the “Ideal of Whatevery Sixteen-Year-Old Girl Would Like to Possess.”³² “Neither one of us would be willing to submerge his individuality into the thoughts of the other one, no matter how much we love each other,” she explained. Indeed, Young declared that although her husband was the director, “he is not always the boss. When I make up my mind I generally get what I want. Sometimes I have to argue with my good friend [producer] Mr. Selznick, my sweet mother, and my dear husband, but if it is for my ultimate good I GET it.”³³

      Young’s insistence on demanding her way fit neatly into the groove crafted by the stage’s prima donnas. Indeed, movie stars like Young magnified this convention on both the silent screen and in the explosion of print that created the first movie stars’ personas, making her a visible sign of modernity itself: a glamorous, individualized, and work-defined personality known for breaking and reassembling the codes governing feminine propriety.³⁴ Griffith, DeMille, and Ince—all former stage actors in the “player-centered institution” that the theater became by 1900—knew exactly what they were up against when confronting the industry’s emerging female stars.³⁵ They also understood as well as anyone in the business the economic basis of these women’s power. Virtually everyone in the movies agreed that even the most famous director’s name, as Griffith’s indubitably was before Cecil B. DeMille’s replaced it by 1920, meant little to the average fan and, hence, a movie’s bottom line.³⁶ As Cecil’s older brother, William de Mille, put it, since “the names of writers and directors meant nothing to the public, the only thing the customers could count on in advance to give them some degree of satisfaction for their money was the name of a favorite player whose work and personality they knew and liked.” Only the star’s name above the marquee, and the title emblazoned across it, translated into box office.³⁷ The Exhibitors’ Herald, the trade paper for theater owners, emphasized this reality in a prominently displayed letter from a publicity director. “Take it or leave it,” a man from Toledo, Ohio, declared, “the star system is what brings the shekels into your box office. This is a rule that might hang in the office of any theatre manager.”³⁸

      For

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