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Go West, Young Women!. Hilary Hallett
Читать онлайн.Название Go West, Young Women!
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isbn 9780520953680
Автор произведения Hilary Hallett
Издательство Ingram
Here, then, was the Hollywood born around Los Angeles during the era of the Great War: in a city that mirrored the larger cultural contests among Anglo-Saxon cultural custodians, new immigrants, and problem girls; in the explosion of print that surrounded and produced the first new women stars and their fans; in movie theaters filled with young working- and middle-class women; in the stories whose new western heroines shaped the fantasies and fears of a seemingly ever widening audience. Early Hollywood resulted from the collision of these parts. The rise of the movies in Los Angeles offered both a distillation and a dramatic magnification of tensions played out nationwide, as a multitude of migrants from many different countries crammed cities across the land. In the process, Hollywood provoked both loving devotion and shrill, sustained assault. Go West, Young Women! explores the implications of the motion picture industry’s development out west and then measures how the emotions generated by Hollywood’s birth influenced the sexual revolution to come.
CHAPTER 1
“Oh for a girl who could ride a horse like Pearl White”
The Actress Democratizes Fame
Mary Pickford, the silent film era’s single greatest star, published her autobiography, Sunshine and Shadow (1954), decades after the motion picture industry made her face “better known than the President of the United States.”1 Black-and-white images layer the book, and, with the skillful shorthand so necessary to celebrity, Pickford used the first photo-essay to sketch how her childhood foretold future renown. After opening with a full-page portrait of her pretty, resolute-looking mother, Charlotte Hennessy, the next photographs suggest what tested that resolve. A small cameo of her faraway-eyed, dandified father, John Smith, floats above a snapshot of the simple brick row house in Toronto that he deserted just shy of Mary’s fifth birthday, in 1897. The sorrow-faced women in the next grainy snapshot communicate their determination to shelter the three Smith children arrayed beside them on a modest apartment stoop. And here, following this picture of grim resignation and apparent innocence lost, Pickford first spotlights her preschool-aged self, Gladys Smith, a tyke whose manicured ringlets and lacy white ensemble hint at the hopes dashed by her father’s desertion. At first glance the portrait appears as conventional as little Gladys’s packaging. Closer inspection reveals a child whose furious gaze demolished the era’s portraiture conventions for her age and sex. Pickford captioned the image to emphasize both her intelligence and anger: “The cameraman thought me idiotic enough to believe there was ‘a little birdie in the black box,’ ” she explained with still simmering resentment. Thus Pickford used her coming-of-age to tell the story her publicity and films repeatedly retold: a girl needed the courage to ignore men’s prescriptions and recommendations in order to triumph over adversity and seize a man-sized share of the world’s regard.
In 1917, precisely two decades after her father’s signal act of paternal incompetence, poet Vachel Lindsay anointed Pickford “The Queen of the Movies,” and her royal highness permanently relocated to Los Angeles, where she reined over the star system that powered Hollywood’s rise around the world. By 1920, journalist Louella Parsons could, with unexpected credibility, declare the actress, writer, producer, and cofounder of United Artists—the sole independent film studio to endure in the studio era—the “greatest woman of her age.” “To repudiate this girl in haste is a high treason to the national heart,” Lindsay wrote, using Pickford’s talent to plead the artistic case of the “photoplay,” his more elevated term for moving pictures, before the New Republic’s high-brow readers. His argument displayed the tendency to equate the famous with the national spirit. For fifteen out of the magazine’s first twenty years, readers of Photoplay, which began publishing in Chicago in 1912 and quickly became the largest, wittiest, and most literate fan magazine in America, ranked Pickford the most popular star. “There has never been anything just like the public adulation showered on Mary”; she “could have risen to the top of United States Steel, if she had decided to be a Carnegie instead of a movie star,” recalled Adolph Zukor, who perfected the vertical integration of the American film industry. As another silent-era filmmaker described the awe her fame produced, Pickford was so “peculiarly pre-eminent that her position at the very top was subject to little question or jealousy.”2
Pickford’s preeminence was not quite so peculiar when placed within the broader sweep of how the actress came to embody the “democratization” of fame as elite men, and then men altogether, lost their monopoly over incarnating the combination of personal achievement, distinction, and freedom at the heart of modern renown. In this way, Pickford modified an already established role in a genre in which the actress performed a female self who grappled with what it meant for a woman to embody these ideals in ways that made her stand out from the crowd. Yet most historians’ unease with contemporary celebrity culture has complicated historicizing and assessing what the fame of actresses has to teach about modern gender roles. Without question, contemporary culture creaks under the weight of individuals talented mostly for their self-seeking display. The seemingly inexorable drift of public discourse since the Cold War toward fixating on the antics of those merely “well-known for [their] well-knowness [sic]” helped to make Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) a classic. Written as the power of television first became evident, Boorstin sketched the kind of declension narrative now so familiar in cultural history: once, somewhere in the past, fame signaled society’s recognition of the authentically great deeds and thoughts of a few truly eminent men, whereas modern society’s worship of ersatz celebrities reflects our descent into mindless consumerism. A few have strayed from this interpretative path, exploring how famous personalities in modern times continue to reflect the public’s interest in changing views of the self and individual achievement. But such works either fail to gender their analysis or reduce the personas of female stars to agents or victims of consumption. Thus women’s role in the development of our celebrity-saturated culture remains poorly explained, even as feminist scholarship on how mass culture and female entertainers expressed and cultivated new ideas about sex piles up in the libraries.3
Yet one can trace the seeds of a new interpretation of modern fame to another midcentury text, much more infamous than Pickford’s or Boorstin’s: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). In her ex post facto feminist manifesto, Beauvoir argued that only the actress materialized a worldly, ineffable feminine authority that contradicted the equation of public renown with masculine identity. For this reason, the book’s concluding chapter, “The independent Woman,” declared the actress to be the “one category” of woman who pointed the way “toward liberation” of the sex. Born in movie-crazed France in 1908, the year before Pickford made her teenage transition from stage to screen, Beauvoir was a child during the time the “divine” Sarah Bernhardt shone indisputably as the era’s brightest star.4 Several factors accounted for the singular role of actresses, according to Beauvoir, including religious censure, relative financial independence, “a taste for adventure” that equaled men’s, and a unique status derived from working with men on equal footing while still attracting recognition for their attractiveness as women. Together these forces explained the actress’s identity as “the virile woman,” a protagonist liberated from many of the conventions that tethered the Victorians’ ideal “true woman” to the home. Above all, the actress’s freedom lay in how her work in the wider world, like that of men, produced an independence that supported other pleasures. “Their professional success—like those of men—contribute to their sexual valuation.” But by “making their own living and finding the meaning of their lives in their work, [actresses] escape the yoke of men,” allowing them “to transcend their given characteristics” as the unessential second sex.5
As Beauvoir suggested, the ability of actresses to perform new representations of women’s individuality originated in the nineteenth century, as industrialization, the explosion of print media, and the democratic revolutions made room for a few women, and many more men, to make their way, and to make themselves known, beyond the limitations