PERHAPS CECIL B. DEMILLE said it best: “There have been hundreds of stars. There have been scores of fine actresses in motion pictures. There has been only one Mary Pickford.” He wrote those words in 1955, but they ring even truer today, when it’s clear that not only has there been only one, there’s never going to be another. Pickford was the biggest of the big, a top box office draw, an international superstar, and a strong woman who took charge of her own career in a tough business run by competitive men. The early film historian Benjamin Hampton assessed her career in 1931 by saying, “Mary Pickford is the only member of her sex who ever became the focal point of an entire industry,” but he got it wrong. She was the only member of either sex to do so—and still is. And yet today, although people know her name, and though silent film historians keep trying to set the record straight, they have no real grasp of who she was, how important and beloved she was, or how she pioneered stardom and the concept of the career woman. Isn’t it ironic that the biggest female star in history ends up being the most misunderstood?
People think of Mary Pickford as a bargain-basement Shirley Temple—that she was an older actress who masqueraded as a child, dimpling around, cheering everyone up while her characters lived a Dickensian existence with nothing but a bowl of gruel and a brave smile between them and disaster. While it’s true that many of Mary’s characters were relentlessly optimistic, she was no dimwit blonde who created problems; she was a clever minx who solved them. Furthermore, she usually played a young girl, not a child, and often appeared as the lovely woman she was in real life. She was an actress, not an infant phenomenon. She was sometimes sentimental as befit her times, but there’s a difference between sweet and cloying, and Mary Pickford was never cloying. Her film character connected directly to her audiences because she was funny and nothing got her down. Whatever grim turn of the plot presented itself, she exhibited no self-pity and kept on trucking. Her determination to set things right often resulted in hilarious movie chaos, but she offered hope and escape, two things Americans have always been happy to embrace. Her cheeky females make a go of it on their own, standing in gamely for anyone in the audience who was poor, who had ever faced real trouble, and whose pants might fall down at a crucial moment.
Mary was one of the big three of the silent era, along with her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, and their friend, Charlie Chaplin. Fairbanks is generally accepted as the energetic male Zeitgeist of the silent era, Chaplin is called its social conscience, but Pickford rarely gets credit for being its female soul. She can match them joke for joke, caper for caper, heart for heart. Her characters exhibit inner fire, and her arguments have no gender bias. Over the years more than one large male gets kicked in the butt by Mary Pickford; she’s a fairly astonishing role model for women, a modern woman before such a concept was fully understood.
Her acting style is of its own time, of course. She first learned how to perform onstage, and she never lost the basics she mastered there: how to hold the audience’s eye, how to move her supple body to convey specific meanings, how to lift an arm or cock her head to shift attention to herself, how to hold that attention without losing pace. These were the tools of her trade, and she brought them with her to movies, sharpening them and miniaturizing them, adjusting them for a subtle camera that could come up close to her expressive face. Like other stars of the new medium, she quickly understood that actors in motion pictures could win an audience by more or less allowing their physical presence—their essence—to fill out the role. She became more natural. “I lived my characters,” she said. “That’s the only way you can be. You have to live your parts.” Thus, she was perfect for movies—an actress who loved the camera and feared nothing from it, being able to ignore its presence and “live” in front of it. She was one of the first to combine the old and new performance styles, linking her new knowledge of movies to the theatrical tradition her audience knew and understood.
In some ways, Pickford is a female Charlie Chaplin. She has the same remarkable physical control over her own tiny body. Like him, she can enter the frame, focus the eye, and perform a series of actions that are both comic and inherently honest. Chaplin’s bizarre and careful carving of his boiled shoe for lunch in The Gold Rush is hilarious in content and unrealistic in action, but it’s grounded in the ability to cook, cut, and eat. Pickford was similarly adept. When she straps wet brushes onto her feet in Through the Back Door to “skate” across dirty kitchen floors so as to wash them more efficiently, she too links comedy and reality, skating and scrubbing, with a dancer’s awareness of the first and a poor girl’s familiarity with the second. She “skates” in perfect character, that of a tomboyish little girl anxious to get the job done so that she can run outside to play. Slipping, sliding, twisting and turning, falling down on her behind, she never loses the awkwardness of the girl, her determination, her inventiveness. In her little socks and Mary Janes, slippery brushes sliding her forward, she performs a perfect ballet of both physical control and detailed characterization.
Pickford on “skates” in Through the Back Door (photo credit 1.1)
Pickford is delightfully natural and spontaneous, but she’s also a beauty, a far greater one than can be inferred from still photographs. Her sparkle worked well in comedy, and her radiance illuminated melodrama. Lamenting that for inexplicable reasons she has come to be more associated with the latter (and to “represent silent film tragedy”), historian Kevin Brownlow said, “Nothing could be more ludicrously inaccurate. Mary Pickford was essentially a comedienne, although that description cannot do justice to her rich talents as a dramatic actress.”
Her best films showcase both abilities. Although she has been criticized for having a narrow range, her movies reveal the opposite: she has the broadest range of any silent film actress. She can play a spunky tomboy, a grand lady, a royal princess, a deformed cripple, a freckled farm girl, a tragic heroine, an old woman, a young girl, and a little child that is really a little child and not a grown-up’s falsification of a little child. Lillian Gish, unquestionably a great actress, had a narrower range in the roles she undertook. What Gish had was depth, real depth, and what Pickford had was the ability to do many different things across a broad surface.*
Pickford’s fans adored her beyond the usual level of popularity. They themselves picked her out of the pack and made her “America’s Sweetheart.” It wasn’t a title invented to sell her, like the “sweater girl,” the “oomph girl,” or the “It” girl. It was first a fact, and then an advertising slogan, lovingly bestowed, and it came from honest and direct feelings: moviegoers called her their sweetheart because that’s who she was. And she accepted the responsibility of their adoration, saying, “I am a servant of the public. I’ve never forgotten that.” She took everything about her career seriously. She wanted her films to make money, but she also wanted them to be good. She paid close attention to every aspect of production, always hiring the best talents and constantly monitoring their work. (“I frightened them,” she said.) If she hadn’t been a star, she might have become the best producer in Hollywood. Pickford gave the business everything she had, both behind the scenes and in front of the camera. “Mary Pickford deserved to be named America’s Sweetheart,” said Adolph Zukor, president of Paramount Pictures, praising her commitment to her fans, to her career, and to the business itself. (Zukor was in a position to know. He admitted, “I started out giving her $5 per week, but I finally paid her $5,000.”)
The sum of Mary Pickford is impressive. She could act. She had comedy skills. She had beauty and personality. She had charisma (lots of charisma), and she definitely had brains—she was a tough negotiator who managed her own career brilliantly, and she supported her entire family from childhood to old age. She was no Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and certainly no Pollyanna.† The great film historian and collector William K. Everson said she and her films had it all, “a happy mixture of quantity, quality, variety and spontaneity.” To understand her, and to restore to her the status she deserves, one has to consider three things: her career, her marriage, and her celebrity.
Mary Pickford firmly stated: “My career was planned. There was never anything accidental about it. It was planned, it was painful, it was purposeful.” She went for full control in a way that few actresses ever pursued and even fewer ever achieved. “Mary had her hand in everything, writing scripts, arguing with directors, making suggestions to other players … and her ideas were helpful,” said Adolph Zukor. “I am convinced that Mary could have risen to the top in United States Steel if she had decided to be a Carnegie instead of a movie star.” Her cameraman, Charles Rosher, added, “She knew everything there was to know about motion pictures.” In the beginning, of course, she knew nothing, but her determination, hard work, and intelligence took her where she wanted to go, and where she wanted to go was the very top.
Like most of her contemporaries, she came from nowhere and nothing. Born in Canada as plain Gladys Smith in 1892 (not 1893 as is sometimes suggested), she faced poverty and hard times throughout her youth. Her father, a poor provider, died when she was about six years old, leaving her mother, Charlotte, a penniless widow with three small children to raise—Gladys and her sister, Lottie, and brother, Jack, both of whom would also have substantial movie careers. Charlotte did the best she could by taking in sewing, but on September 19, 1898, things took an upturn: it was the day Gladys, age six, made her stage debut at the Princess Theatre in Toronto with the Cummings Stock Company. Within three years, she became a well-known theatre personality in Toronto, and was invited to go on tour in a play entitled The Little Red Schoolhouse.
Pickford’s story has been written—first in her autobiography, Sunshine and Shadow, and later in biographies by Scott Eyman and Eileen Whitfield. The story of her early years, in which she and all her family became regular troupers and she literally grew up onstage, has been told. Her motivation for getting into movies is linked to a decision she made in 1906, when she was fourteen. She had been on tour for six years, and felt she had mastered the craft of acting. And, as she always would, she knew what she wanted: to stop touring and live in one place, and to have real success, the kind that only the Broadway stage could bring an actress in those years.
Pickford’s legend begins with the story of how she decided she must be hired by David Belasco, the famous New York impresario. In this tale, she is cast as the determined female who always insists on what she wants and always gets it. It’s a simple plot: a little girl, just barely in her teens, demands an audience with a formidable theatre maestro. He’s too busy, but she persists. He hasn’t time for her, but she won’t give up. He hasn’t heard of her, but she overrules him. And finally she enters his office, a small, delicate creature with a head of beautiful golden curls. She’s a child, really, but she looks him straight in the eye. She never blinks. She never wavers. She faces him with courage and strength, telling him, “I am an actress, but I want to become a good one.” Naturally she wins him over and is immediately cast in the important role of Betty Warren in William de Mille’s latest play, The Warrens of Virginia, for twenty-five dollars a week. Belasco has only one problem with Gladys: her name. It’s too plain for a star. Gladys suggests one of her other family names, Pickford, and says she always liked the name “Marie.” They agree on “Mary Pickford,” and that evening, the newly christened Mary sends her mother a telegram: GLADYS SMITH NOW MARY PICKFORD ENGAGED BY DAVID BELASCO TO APPEAR ON BROADWAY THIS FALL. This scene is by all accounts reasonably true and is also a perfect Mary Pickford movie scenario—little girl, big man, she wins.
Pickford’s career with Belasco went well, but in the spring of 1909 she and her family were thinking about the summer season that lay ahead: since theatres weren’t air-conditioned in those days, there would be little work for stage actors. Her mother suggested she consider motion pictures, the new medium that provided summer work and paid a hefty five dollars a day. Mary allegedly was unhappy at the suggestion. Was she not a Belasco actress, and would it not diminish her status to work in the upstart medium of the movies? But the lure of the money and the prospect of being able to keep her family together through the summer motivated her. She took a trolley car to the Biograph studio, and again, as legend has it, she found an opportunity to play a grand scene involving “the little girl and the very big man.” This time the big man was D. W. Griffith, and she sniffed at the five dollars per day because she was “a Belasco actress” and demanded “at least ten.” Furthermore, she added, “I must have twenty-five dollars a week guaranteed.” She was hired, and on April 20, 1909, Mary Pickford, with her makeup applied personally by Griffith, made her movie debut in Her First Biscuits, “a comedy subject.” (According to Scott Eyman, who consulted Biograph records, she appeared in the background, as the film starred Dorothy Bernard. Pickford later said Griffith’s makeup job made her look like Pancho Villa.)
These stories about Mary’s early encounters with Belasco and Griffith are charming and grounded in fact, and they are deeply revealing. First, they emphasize the hard fact that she was already a tough-minded professional as a teenager, having started supporting her family while still a child. Second, they show her sharp negotiating skills. She went alone to meet two powerful men and to work out a deal for herself; no agent accompanied her to ask for ten dollars a day or a guaranteed weekly salary. Last, they reveal how Mary Pickford’s life is the stuff that legends are made of, or, perhaps that legends are made up to accommodate. They are part of the larger-than-life story that ultimately became the movie of her life.
After going to work for Griffith at Biograph in 1909, Mary rapidly became an audience favorite. Like Florence Lawrence before her she became identified as the “Biograph girl,” but also as “the little girl with the golden curls.” When for convenience her characters were named “Mary,” audiences started singling her out as “that little Mary.” It’s no legendary story that moviegoers fell in love with her and made her a star. That is fact, the foundation of her popularity.
Once she started in movies, Mary shrewdly sized up the new medium, grasping its financial possibilities as unlimited. According to the Eyman biography, Belasco searched for her when fall came, but she was too ashamed to tell him she was in the movies, and avoided him. Later, William de Mille wrote to Belasco that he had bumped into her and “the poor kid is actually thinking of taking up motion pictures seriously. She says she can make a fairly good living at it … I pleaded with her not to waste her professional life … but she’s a rather stubborn little thing for such a youngster and she says she knows what she’s doing … So I suppose we’ll have to say goodbye to little Mary Pickford. She’ll never be heard from again, and I feel terribly sorry for her.” (So much for the wisdom of William de Mille.)
Typical films from 1910, her second year, include All on Account of the Milk and An Arcadian Maid. In All on Account of the Milk, she is the central female character, a girl who pretends to be shocked when she’s kissed, revealing later when she’s alone how delighted she really is. Her ability to include the audience in this secret relationship (“It’s just the two of us—don’t tell”) is remarkable. She portrays demure shock, a little surprise, and the secret pleasure with great clarity and specificity but also with considerable subtlety. She brings an audience to her. Her performance in An Arcadian Maid, a tragedy about a naive girl conned into becoming a thief, is totally different from that in All on Account of the Milk. It would be easy to believe that the two movies featured two different actresses.
During Mary’s formative years, she switched effortlessly from comedies to dramas, from westerns to romances, from the role of child to that of grown woman, from pixieish tomboy to elegant lady. What they had available for her to play, she played. She made forty-two titles in 1909 and another thirty-two in 1910,‡ with titles like The Lonely Villa and The Violin Maker of Cremona (both directed by Griffith), The Peach Basket Hat, The Country Doctor, His Wife’s Visitor, The Little Teacher, and To Save Her Soul. The examples available for my viewing were flickering, hazy copies that caused eyestrain and narrative frustration. Often a complex story is performed in broadly pantomimed action, with great gaps in exposition so that it’s difficult to be certain what is happening, since there are no titles other than the name of the movie itself. But even under such conditions, it’s easy to see why Mary Pickford became a star. Besides her obvious assets of beauty, youth, and self-confidence, she stands out through her ability to delineate what her actions are and what emotions they represent. She eclipses others because she can make clear what is going on in the story and what her character is thinking and feeling. She is distinctive right from the very beginning of her career.
Five of her 1909 movies display this ability in its embryonic form: The Way of Man, The Broken Locket, The Awakening, Getting Even, and The Renunciation. Although she’s not much more than a child, she plays a grown woman with a grown woman’s problems, as they are stories of romance, marriage, and problems with men. (The last two are comedies.) In these first months before the camera, she is an uncommonly pretty young girl, with the typical big head and small body of the silent film star. She has a mass of blonde curls, but, seen mostly in long shots, she looks like a traditional “little woman” from the previous century: wasp waist, huge hat, blob of hair, long skirt, ample bosom harnessed for the fashionable hourglass look. At this time, she weighs about 115 pounds, and she’s only five feet one inch tall (later, she would slim down to 95 pounds), so she’s somewhat stocky, a Queen Victoria figure packed with solid flesh. She’s not at all like the girlish Pickford she would later become.
By 1911, Mary was developing rapidly, learning her way around the business. She had a sharp nose for anything that might earn her an extra dollar, and when she realized people got paid for writing movie stories, she wrote one called The Goose Girl and sold it for twenty-five dollars. When she noticed that her stage makeup didn’t look right on the screen, she began trying new blends and checking how she looked with her cameraman, finally purchasing top-quality materials and demanding reimbursement, with a percent for her innovations. When she realized that brother Jack and sister Lottie could bring in cash by playing in movies, she found them steady work. And when she discovered that her popularity was great enough to make her desirable to other movie companies, she started negotiating for more money wherever she could find it. In 1911, she made When a Man Loves, White Roses, The Italian Barber, Three Sisters, and A Decree of Destiny for Biograph, and then decamped to join the Independent Motion Picture Company (IMP), because the founder (Carl Laemmle) offered her $5 per week.§ She wasn’t motivated by money alone. Her new husband, Owen Moore, a successful leading man, had signed with IMP, and she wanted to join him. IMP was under the direction of Thomas Ince, and various legal concerns prompted him to open his new studio in Havana, Cuba. Mary traveled there to make approximately thirty-four films.
For IMP in Cuba, in 1911, Mary made such movies as The Dream, The Mirror, Sweet Memories, Artful Kate, and In Old Madrid. Her work is strong, and she plays mature roles. In The Dream, she’s the good wife of a drunken husband who dreams she smokes, drinks, and runs around town (he wakes up a reformed man); in The Mirror she’s wooed by two men and consults a fortune-teller as to which to choose. In Sweet Memories, a sentimental portrait matched to a series of title cards that contain a poem (“We played at artists on the green … He painted my portrait at sweet fourteen”), she has a small role, but in Artful Kate and In Old Madrid she’s the leading lady. She and Moore wrote the story for the former, and in the latter she tests her sweetheart’s love by pretending to be a Spanish senorita who woos him (an early example of her ability to be two different people on screen).
By the end of 1912, she was a name, a major motion picture star. According to Belasco, “Mary Pickford was famous, and had become known as ‘The Queen of the Movies.’ ” Nevertheless, he was able to lure her back to the stage for a production of A Good Little Devil, which opened on Broadway in January of 1913. She received excellent reviews, and for a time seemed happy, having always claimed she wanted to return to the legitimate theatre. But when Adolph Zukor filmed A Good Little Devil for his Famous Players in Famous Plays series, Mary started negotiating her return to the screen. By mid-1913, she was back where she belonged and where she would stay—in the movies—and back where she had started out, at Biograph.
The return to Biograph meant, of course, a return to D. W. Griffith and a working relationship that was never comfortable for either of them. Mary was not as pliant as Gish, and she fought Griffith on many fronts, claiming he only gave her roles that other actresses in the company turned down. Years later, she was still complaining. She told Kevin Brownlow: “I respected him, yes. I even had an affection for him, but when he told me to do things I didn’t believe in, I wouldn’t do them. I would not run around like a goose with its head cut off, crying ‘Oooooh … the little birds! Oooooh … look! A little bunny!’ ” As Eileen Whitfield points out, however, Griffith actually “increased her expressive range to a degree she would never achieve again” by casting her in Friends (1912) as “a prostitute … [and] in Fate’s Interception (1912) … as a wronged woman who asks an admirer to kill her lover … and Female of the Species (1912), a film so atmospheric it is almost surreal.”
Pickford and Griffith engaged in shouting matches. She is said to have bitten him, and he allegedly once shoved her down. (Whitfield says that Mary declaimed from the floor, “You call yourself a Southern gentleman! You’re not only a disgrace to the South, but to the North as well! Never speak to me again, sir!” It’s another great Pickford scene from real life.) It’s interesting to speculate what would have become of Mary’s career had she followed Griffith’s guidance. Clearly, he was shaping her, as he did all his actresses, into his own concept of “female.” It reflects Mary’s determined nature off-screen—as well as the one she assumed on-screen—that she broke away from his domination and forged her own persona and career.
One of the most successful of the Pickford/Griffith collaborations of this period is the 1913 release The New York Hat (made in late 1912), from a story by Anita Loos. Lionel Barrymore plays the male lead opposite Mary in a story that modern women find appealing. As a mother lies dying, she gives a letter to her young minister (Barrymore) which says she has lived with her daughter’s stepfather for years, and although that was good enough for her, she knows he won’t give her daughter certain “things.” She leaves the minister money “for things she want and don’t need [sic].” Pickford plays the daughter, Mollie, who later dreams of a New York hat she has seen in a store window. But it costs ten dollars! Following the dead mother’s instructions, the minister buys it, giving it to her as a gift, but telling her to keep this a secret. Since townswomen shopping in the store saw him make the purchase, they naturally assume the worst when she wears it to church. Enraged, her father destroys the hat, and she is shunned and called a Jezebel. The minister is warned he will have to right the wrong he’s done her, but he shows everyone her mother’s letter and all ends well when he suddenly proposes to Mary of his own accord. Eyman makes the point that this film shows how Pickford had “already mastered the art of projecting emotions through the lens directly to the audience—the true art of screen acting.” He is specifically referring to a scene in which her character dreams of the hat she would like to own. She wakes up and feels for it on top of her head, as if it were there. When it isn’t, her face falls into what Eyman calls a “perfectly judged it-was-only-a-dream disappointment.”
In late 1913, Pickford signed a contract with Famous Players Film Company. It was then that she went into high gear as a star, finding enormous popularity in such 1914 releases as The Eagle’s Mate, Such a Little Queen, Behind the Scenes, Cinderella, and her first version of Tess of the Storm Country. In 1915 she made nine features: Mistress Nell, Fanchon the Cricket, The Dawn of a Tomorrow, Little Pal, Rags, Esmerelda, A Girl of Yesterday, The Foundling, and Madame Butterfly. Mistress Nell, Rags, and Madame Butterfly are good examples of Mary, the star, at this time.
In Mistress Nell Mary is introduced sitting sidesaddle on a large white horse, and her title card defines her character: “Mistress Nell of Drury Lane Theatre, of whom ’twas said ‘England would be worse than a Puritan funeral without her.’ ” Playing opposite her husband, Owen Moore, Mary is utterly natural, and completely at home in the frame. Her comic timing and precise gestures seem uncontrived—she seems to be about behavior rather than performance, yet she makes the most out of every moment. For instance, when Nell arrives at the Blue Boar for a rendezvous with the king, she draws out her entrance, taking as much time as possible. As she approaches the doorway, she lifts a dainty foot to lean forward and peek in one of the windows. Then, she ties a veil over her face as a disguise. Next she trips ever so slightly as she steps up onto the threshold, and when she knocks on the door, she makes sure to let the audience understand this hurts her knuckles. Finally, she kicks the door with her foot as a final knock (to save the knuckles, of course). It’s early 1915, and Mary Pickford films are already all about Mary Pickford, yet it’s never annoying; she knows exactly what she can get away with. Later, she passes that supreme test for any movie actor—an eating scene—by sitting in the center of the frame, easily dominating two other stars, and managing to devour a chicken as if she hasn’t eaten in days. The range of her skill is evident in two sequences: when she masquerades as an Irish lad, walking with a pseudo-male swagger, and when she enacts the role of Nell enacting the role of an Arabian princess. She’s natural and modern as Nell, but broadly posturing in Nell’s seventeenth-century performance-within-the-performance.
The New York Hat, her final film with D. W. Griffith (photo credit 1.2)
Two 1915 releases: The Dawn of a Tomorrow, intense drama, and Rags, charming comedy (photo credit 1.3)
Rags represents the popular Pickford formula of the day to such a degree that Variety said, “One thing about Miss Pickford … she and her bag of tricks are so well established in the minds of film followers no matter what she does in a picture they are sure to term it ‘cute.’ ” Pickford starts out as a young woman of about twenty who marries a bank cashier found short in his accounts. Allowed to leave town, the young couple end up in poverty in a mining camp, where the husband becomes an alcoholic. The poor twenty-year-old Mary dies in childbirth, making way for a second Mary, who becomes the sixteen-year-old Rags, the tomboy terror of the camp. (Mary playing her own mother caused Variety to sneer, “Mighty few of us can be a mother to ourselves, even in a film.”) Rags is the Mary Pickford the public had fallen in love with: she stomps around town terrorizing everyone—until, of course, she falls in love with costar Marshall (“Mickey”) Neilan. It’s one thing to see Mary attack a group of small boys who are tormenting a dog—she’s ferocious—but quite another to see her go after a saloon full of grown men who are being cruel to her father. She lets ’em have it but good, rushing them, socking them, bashing them with the furniture, until they’re finally cowering back against the wall. Then she stalks out, with an “I hope I don’t have to do this again” scowl on her face. The audience loved this aspect of Mary Pickford, and it’s the one that has more or less been lost over the years. As the critic Andrew Sarris observed, “Good may have prevailed in Mary Pickford’s movies, but the set of her tough little jaw told you that it damn well better.”
Pickford’s version of Madame Butterfly, with Marshall Neilan (photo credit 1.4)
The Rags “formula” referred to by Variety gave viewers two Marys for the price of one. First, she’s the lovely mother, soft hair piled atop her head, a bouquet of roses in her arms, then the Calamity Mary, who is in turn herself replaced by someone like her mother, the romantic leading lady she becomes after she’s sent to boarding school and returns to win Neilan’s heart. Her fans liked her all these ways, yet she still made films in which she undertook a single dramatic identity, such as her Cho Cho San (sic) in Madame Butterfly. Although there are a few moments of light charm, the screenplay stays within the tragedy of the story. Mary walks, bows low, lowers her head, and sits in a style that was considered appropriate for a Japanese woman, and she never forgets or loses the posture. Usually boisterous in her movies—leaping around, girlishly jumping up and down—here she is the opposite, and her performance is highly effective.
In June of 1916 Famous Players merged with the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company to form Famous Players/Lasky, with the product to be distributed by Paramount Pictures. In July the company set up Artcraft Pictures to release the films of Mary Pickford—and she became the first actress to have her own production unit: the Pickford Film Corporation, which would be housed within Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players organization. She could choose her own directors and supporting cast, and she had approval over advertising, a voice regarding final cut, and the right to question any role she didn’t like. Zukor was not so much her boss as he was her colleague. Throughout 1916 she continued her string of successes with The Foundling (a second version, shot in late 1915), Poor Little Peppina, The Eternal Grind, Hulda from Holland, and Less Than the Dust. In 1917 she began an astonishing run of films, almost all of which would be enormous hits, although her first release, Pride of the Clan, was one of her few movies that didn’t do well at the box office (possibly because it was self-consciously beautiful). The story, directed by Maurice Tourneur, is set in a fishing village off the coast of Scotland, and the production is greatly enhanced by superbly designed sets by Ben Carré. Tourneur is one of the great visual artists of the silent cinema, and he uses silhouettes and compositions to create a strong sense of atmosphere. The image looks stark, spare, and dramatic. The houses that the simple folk inhabit are dark and dim, with low ceilings (clearly visible in the shots), giving a cramped and tight feeling to the interiors. The movie often uses a single source of light for dramatic effect. Mary gives a fine performance, but the movie, with a dour Scottish ambience that lacked comedy, didn’t appeal widely to her audiences, even though her character is within the range of what they liked to see her do and doesn’t depart significantly from her persona.
Her next, The Poor Little Rich Girl—enhanced by fanciful dreamlike sequences—was just the sort of thing her fans loved. Although many people think of Mary as always playing a child, this was the first movie in which she actually did so. Based on a successful play, Poor Little Rich Girl had first-rate artists working in all areas of production: Frances Marion wrote the scenario, Tourneur directed, and Ben Carré again did the scenery. It became a landmark film for Pickford, because of the enormous influence it had over the rest of her career. She touchingly plays a lonely little girl whose wealthy parents seldom have time for her, until she accidentally poisons herself by taking too much of a sleeping drug. While she is in recovery, she hallucinates an imaginative dream world, populated with bears, lonely children, and the Angel of Death. She recovers, of course, and her parents are suitably chastened, ready to pay her more attention in the future. Poor Little Rich Girl was an enormous success, providing an excellent outlet for Pickford’s skills, both in portraying a lonely and pretty little girl, and in showing her to be quite a handful. She sticks a plate of gooey cake under the seat of a nasty playmate, romps with an organ grinder, tosses her ornate gowns out the window in a fit of pique, and dresses up in male clothing, announcing, “I’m Gwendolyn, and I’m a boy.”
Also released in 1917 was the excellent A Romance of the Redwoods. It was to be the first of two films Mary Pickford would make with director Cecil B. DeMille, but they were not a happy match. Both were strong-willed and opinionated about their work. Although the end product was satisfactory and did well at the box office, these two determined individuals—some have called them tyrants—were respectful of each other but not comfortable together. (Mary Pickford was not content to be DeMille’s “little fella,” a kind of on-the-set pet—which is what Gloria Swanson would later become.)
Cecil B. DeMille directing Pickford in A Romance of the Redwoods (photo credit 1.5)
Shot outdoors on real locations, Romance is the story of a resourceful young woman in California Gold Rush days, who loses everything, but manages to cope and ultimately endure. Mary plays a character who is always prepared and always plans ahead. Where others are passive, she is active. Her character is, in fact, that of a provider, the role she was forced to play in her own life. Variety said, “Herewith enters Mary Pickford, actress. No longer does the queen of the unspoken drama rely on curls and pouts for effect, for in A Romance of the Redwoods, she actually acts and does it in such manner as to land her points with surprising effectiveness.”
The Little American (1917) was her second DeMille. Pickford was cast as a young American girl with two suitors, a Frenchman and a German, during World War I. At this stage of her career she’s very confident. In a scene in which a German general commands her to remove his boots, she skillfully conveys her character’s unfamiliarity with the dirt she finds on her fingers, as well as her repugnance for what she smells, and her distaste and inner outrage at having been asked to perform the service. Her response is partly political, partly female, partly sexual, and partly practical. It’s a delicate piece of acting.
The typical Pickford “little girl,” Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (photo credit 1.6)
Variety fell all over itself regarding her next film, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm: “Superlatives, so indiscriminately used with reference to pictures in many instances, seem inadequate in properly approximating the transcendent merit of … Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm … with Mary Pickford. It is a master work that is going to stand supreme … for several years to come.” Frances Marion adapted the famous book by Kate Douglas Wiggin which tells the story of Rebecca, who is sent away from her large family to live with her aunts. Today, when an excerpt is chosen as a typical Mary Pickford scene, it’s often one from this film. Mary, living with the two stingy aunts, is shown getting set to steal herself a piece of pie when she suddenly notices one of her aunts’ embroidered samplers: “Thou Shalt Not Steal.” Looking slightly guilty but assuming a pious expression, she starts to leave the room until she spots another needlepoint: “God Helps Those Who Help Themselves.” Immediately she starts gobbling! It’s unfortunate that this movie should be chosen as “typical” Mary Pickford, because actually it presents one of her more heavy-handed performances. More than one film historian has suggested that Rebecca is the main source of today’s misunderstanding of Pickford’s image because it was remade by Shirley Temple in 1938 (in a version that had almost nothing to do with the original book), and stills from it show Mary in her Temple-like golden curls. It’s certainly true that Mary never lets up for a minute in Rebecca—winking, stomping, prancing, too cute for words. Fans loved her to caper around in this manner, but she does more than enough of it in this film, and her actions lack the spontaneity she displays in her best roles, except for one marvelous sequence in which she first arrives in town and sits alone waiting to meet her aunts. As girls from the town walk by, Pickford’s facial expressions shift from open friendliness to suspicion—as she realizes they aren’t friendly—and on to outright concern as they scorn her, and finally to a menacing posture as she gets set to defend herself. The issue regarding the age of her character is neatly dealt with by a conversation in which one of her friends (Marjorie Daw) points out that “it will be four years before we’re ladies.” Pickford, playing age twelve, covers by adding, “Well, we’re the beginning of ladies.” In the meantime, as a lively female, she gets to pound her rival “into jelly,” have a series of small-town adventures with her gang, and create a huge drama by running away on a windy and rainy night. She’s out the window and down the drainpipe, executing a nice stunt. In the end, she’s a grown-up woman graduating from school with honors, and preparing to marry her sweetheart. Rebecca was another huge hit for Pickford.
The year 1917 had been one of remarkable success for her, and her final release kept up the pace. It was her very popular version of The Little Princess, based on the beloved novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Pickford plays Sara Crewe, a girl about ten or eleven years old. (Pickford’s role made her fans happy, as she was beautifully dressed in little short skirts, big bows, and long golden curls.) The good reviews said such things as “a more fitting story for Mary Pickford could not have been thought of,” and “Miss Pickford at her best,” and “her most fitting role.” Such comments reflected what was becoming the most popular response of the day—the audience liked Mary Pickford when she pretended to be a little girl.
In Stella Maris (1918), one of her best films, Pickford plays both the title character, a wealthy young woman who is crippled and thus overprotected, and Unity Blake, a deformed servant girl—two totally different people. Although the wronged husband in the plot points out that there’s a strange resemblance between Stella and Unity if only Unity were cleaned up a bit, no one seems to agree. And why should they? Thanks to Pickford’s ability to control her body, walk with a crooked gait, and find a new set of gestures, they really don’t look that much alike. As Stella, Pickford is sunny, all smiles, and she displays her famous head of curly ringlets to advantage. In this role we can see how pretty Mary Pickford really is. She has a lovely natural smile and a perfect complexion. As Unity, however, she looks dull-skinned, sallow, deformed, and downright ugly. (Mary obviously didn’t care how she looked if it was important to her performance.) The most difficult thing for any actor or actress to disguise is his physical self—voice, gesture, walk, even body shape (Lon Chaney is the exception who proves the rule). But Pickford could do it, too, as she demonstrates in Stella Maris.
The two Marys in Stella Maris (photo credit 1.7)
Pickford’s next release was Amarilly of Clothesline Alley, a charming comedy/drama in which she plays “a debutante” of a New York slum. It’s a story of class, with the typical American movie attitude: poor people are really rich and rich people are really poor—poor people have an inborn elegance and rich people have the souls of louts. (The upper-class Mrs. David Phillips is described in a title as believing in the “14th Amendment”: “Thou shalt not forget thy pose.”) Pickford plays a comic hoyden from a poor Irish family whose heart is generous and whose energy never flags. She washes windows, does laundry, sells cigarettes, and chews gum with equal determination, and she’s got up in a ridiculous wardrobe to indicate her poor taste and lack of fashion education. When she’s taken “as a social experiment” to the Phillips mansion, she’s outfitted tastefully and transformed into a beauty. (As always, clothes make the woman.) In the end, Amarilly/Mary returns home, because “you can’t mix ice cream and pickles.”
Amarilly is full of knockabout charm and a kind of pseudosocialist look at the slums. Pickford is particularly effective in a scene in which, to humiliate her, Mrs. Phillips invites her washerwoman mom and uncouth siblings to the mansion for tea. At first, Pickford is delighted, thrilled to have her loved ones with her again. As the event disintegrates (Mom dances a wild Irish jig with the butler and discusses the price of soap), she slowly begins to understand that Mrs. Phillips and her fancy friends are looking down on her family. Her pain at this understanding, her loyalty to her roots, and her peppy refusal to let the betrayal get her down are all beautifully conveyed in a complex mixture of intelligence, tenderness, and fire.
Mary was on top, number one in popularity, and her success enabled her to advance the careers of her siblings, Jack and Lottie. In early May of 1918, all three of the Pickfords were on-screen in first-rate material. Jack appeared in Mile-a-Minute Kendall, and Lottie played a supporting role as the villain. Mary herself opened in M’liss, based on a Bret Harte story. (The New York Times carried a big headline, PICKFORDS ALL HERE: MARY, JACK, LOTTIE, Famous Screen Family in New Plays at Broadway Houses.) Reviews for M’liss were excellent, because Mary was very good at playing naughty little girls like the heroine. Her M’liss is supposed to “swear like a trooper” as she raises plenty of hell, running around town doing as she pleases until love calms her down. (She meets the man of her dreams by beaning him with her slingshot—and also does battle with a big bear and a huge snake.) M’liss was a solid production, once again surrounding her with first-rate talent. Frances Marion wrote the screenplay, Marshall Neilan directed, and her love interest was the very handsome Thomas Meighan, a big star in his own right.
Pickford finished 1918 with two movies that aren’t well known today: How Could You, Jean? and Johanna Enlists. Variety commented about How Could You, Jean? that “the story is weak enough, but the direction is altogether uninspired by even a touch of brilliancy or originality.” (The director was “William D. Taylor,”‖ of whom Variety cruelly said, “It will probably be some time before he secures another opportunity to direct a Mary Pickford feature.”) Frances Marion again wrote the scenario, and it was a familiar one: Pickford plays a young woman who loses all her money and has to go to work as a cook, only to find wealth again by marrying it. In Johanna Enlists, she plays a Pennsylvania Dutch backwoods girl whose world comes to life when a regiment of soldiers encamps on her father’s farm. This film presents the Mary Pickford formula clearly. In the beginning, she’s a freckled mountain urchin, her face described as “a rice puddin’ stuck full of flies.” She sleeps in a laundry basket, wears a clothespin on her nose while she feeds the pigs, and falls backward off the porch—a slapstick comedy-relief character. After the soldiers arrive, she perks up and starts studying photos in fashion magazines and using her freckle cream. She takes a milk bath, gets a new hairdo (her own famous blonde curls), a new dress—and a toothbrush. As the film progresses, Mary becomes prettier and prettier, ending up in a ruffled, fancy white organdy dress and hat. This transformation—from bumpkin to beauty—is done with humor, including her very funny imitation of Isadora Duncan, a send-up of modern dance technique that inspires her parents to dump water on her.
Johanna Enlists, a wartime effort, had patriotic intentions. A final title card reads, “Now over there are all the soldiers who took part in this picture. They are the 143rd Field Artillery—of which regiment, Mary Pickford is Godmother and Honorary Colonel. ‘God Bless them all, and send them safely back to us.’ ” The final image is a stunning look at “Colonel Mary Pickford” and Colonel Ralph F. Faneuf, the “gallant commander of the famous 143rd.” Mary, looking very trim and spiffy in her uniform, executes a snappy salute to her audience.
Looking back over her 1918 releases, one realizes two things about the Pickford career: she had developed a screen character of her own; and she was already attempting to expand the boundaries of that character. Established on-screen as a young American girl with plenty of moxie, off-screen she was a married woman of twenty-six. Her fans loved her as a spunky kid, and she was smart enough to hold on to that image. She began, however, playing in films that afforded her a chance to be something else at the same time: a grown-up version of “America’s Sweetheart.” Throughout 1918, she appeared successfully in movies that gave the public “two Marys”: Stella Maris, Amarilly of Clothesline Alley, M’liss, and Johanna Enlists. In each she played her traditional character and a better-looking, better-dressed version of herself.
This is the major issue of the Mary Pickford career. The generally accepted opinion is that she became locked into her image as a feisty young girl because her fans wouldn’t have it any other way. As early as 1918, critics begin to refer to her movies as formulas (as if those of Fairbanks, Swanson, and others were not) and to suggest that she was going to have to grow up to survive. Pickford took their comments seriously (she was somewhat thin-skinned about criticism). As she aged, she complained to friends and coworkers about having to play her familiar screen character and about wanting to try more mature roles. Yet watching her movies suggests that it might be time to rethink some of this. She began her career by playing girls (she was one) as well as mature women. As she advanced, she undertook roles that put her remarkable acting skills to work, often allowing her to play two versions of one character. After she defined her traditional persona, she generally found release from its youngster format in some way: by growing up, by having a dream or fantasy, or by playing a second, older character. Perhaps she wasn’t held hostage to her “sweetheart” persona as much as we think. Perhaps it became a convenient excuse to be used by an aging actress who was tired of wearing hair bows. Instead of seeing her career as a tragedy in which a woman has to play younger than she is, perhaps it should be seen as a triumph in which an actress developed a persona, found a way to vary it, and kept it going far longer than most of her counterparts. Yes, she outgrew herself, but so did Fairbanks and Chaplin.
In December of 1918, after more than two years of constant success, Pickford got proof that she was at the very top: a Motion Picture Hall of Fame contest in which all of America’s movie fans were invited to vote for their favorite stars was won by her with 159,199 votes, considerably out in front of the number two entry, Marguerite Clark, who had 138,852. (Marguerite Clark, a forgotten name today, was, along with Mary Miles Minter, one of Pickford’s closest rivals during these years.) The top twelve, after Pickford and Clark, were Douglas Fairbanks, number three, with 132,228, Harold Lockwood, William S. Hart, Wallace Reid, Pearl White, Anita Stewart, Theda Bara, Francis X. Bushman, Earle Williams, and William Farnum. Norma Talmadge had 88,040 votes, Charlie Chaplin 86,192. (Lillian Gish, who ranks sixty-fifth, had 37,340 votes, and Mabel Normand 19,605.)
Pickford’s first film of 1919, Captain Kidd, Jr., was her last release by Artcraft, and her last produced by the Pickford Film Corporation. It was treated more or less as a film with nothing to offer except its star. During this period, Mary’s romance with Douglas Fairbanks was in full flower, and she was probably as distracted from her work as she had ever been—or ever would be. But in late 1918, she had begun to feel that her career was stalling. Movies like How Could You, Jean? (which she said should have been called “How could you, Mary?”) were disappointments to her, and in general, she felt that Artcraft hadn’t always handled her or her movies in the best way possible. After their long and fruitful association, Zukor and Mary had reached an impasse. She wanted total control over her work, and he, a good businessman, felt that he should retain input about how his money was spent. Finally, on November 9, 1918, Mary signed a contract with First National and broke off with Zukor. (Their parting has been reported as being of dramatic simplicity. She telephoned him to say, “Mr. Zukor, I’ve done it.” He replied, “God bless you, sweetheart.” She started to cry, and hung up.)
Mary’s First National contract began on December 1, 1918, and all her movies were to be jointly copyrighted. After a five- to six-year period of distribution, the ownership of the movies and the copyrights were to revert to her, a shrewd business move that put her in control not only of the money they could earn later on but also of her historical destiny. During the same period, she dissolved the Pickford Film Corporation and set up the Mary Pickford Company, which was co-owned fifty-fifty by Mary and her mother. Mary would copyright all her productions personally, and she now had full creative control over all aspects of her films—and, in addition to a big salary, a guarantee of 50 percent of the profits. In 1919, she made some of the most successful films of her career: Daddy Long Legs, The Hoodlum, and The Heart o’ the Hills. Each of these movies successfully employs what was by now Pickford’s established pattern of young girl/grown woman performance. Daddy Long Legs begins with her in an orphanage, a child-mother to the other poor kids. After she’s been taken under the wing of a mysterious guardian who doesn’t reveal his name (her “daddy long legs”), she grows up to be the beautiful young woman he decides to marry.
Daddy Long Legs was so successful that it was used in promoting her next film, The Hoodlum. Since it had come from her own studio, that, too, was touted. The ads for the movie proclaimed: “Hey! look out for THE HOODLUM when she comes to your theatre. She is MARY PICKFORD in her Second Picture from her own Studios. Miss Pickford is now personally responsible for every detail of her new pictures. That this one will prove a worthy successor to her first personal production, Daddy Long Legs, she confidently hopes. A First National Attraction.”
The Hoodlum begins with a significant demonstration of Mary’s raw star power. Prior to the beginning of the movie, she appears on-screen, dressed for her traditional “little Mary” role, with a big hair bow, long curls, and a short, lacy white dress with little shoes and short socks. She is seen writing on a blackboard that is supported by an old-fashioned artist’s easel: “Be an American. Help Uncle Sam pay for the war. The fighting’s over but the paying ain’t.” Obviously prompted from off-screen, she listens carefully and adds the word “not” after “ain’t.” Prompted again, she erases “ain’t” and puts in “is,” dimpling beautifully and making sweet faces at both the audience and the off-screen presence. Then she erases it all and writes BUY WAR SAVINGS STAMP. Prompted again, she adds the “s,” smiles, and curtsies like a little princess. Here was proof of the Mary Pickford success as well as the Mary Pickford curse. Her power and popularity were so great that she was chosen to be the star who could best sell the audience the savings stamps concept, because everyone knew that no one would be impatient with a sales pitch from “America’s Sweetheart.” Ironically, however, it was assumed that people might not be as responsive to the real Mary Pickford, a mature woman, making a direct and simple pitch to the audience as herself. They liked her both ways, but they preferred the young girl with the long golden curls. Yet, paradoxically, Pickford’s face is made up like a grown woman’s, with lipstick and mascara. She is not appearing as a child, but as Mary Pickford, movie star, in one of her most popular roles, the girl child.
The Hoodlum is vintage Mary Pickford. She plays the spoiled granddaughter of an old tycoon whose business methods are sometimes less than honorable. The early scenes of the film allow Mary to let it rip: she stamps her foot, screams, throws things, and storms into her grandfather’s business meeting in pajamas and slippers, demanding his attention. The Hoodlum reverses the usual formula, in which Mary travels from slums to a mansion, by having her travel from a mansion to the slums. Her father, who is writing a book about poor people, returns home from Europe and the two of them go to live in the poverty-ridden section of the city to aid his research. Her irritated grandfather comes to the slums himself, disguised as “Peter Cooper,” to see what will happen to her. What happens, of course, is that she turns into Amarilly of Clothesline Alley, making a superb adjustment and busily solving most of the problems of the neighborhood. Having arrived in the slums like a star, in silks and high heels and an expensive town car, she’s soon bouncing around in a silly hat with a feather on it and various striped dresses designed to scream “poverty.” Mary learns to shoot craps, to share everything, and to help the poor. In one wonderful sequence, she takes to the alley to do a wicked dance with a little slum boy. (Her grandpa watches, horrified, while she tangos around, shaking her little body and high-stepping through the trash.) While it can’t exactly be said that Mary gets down, at least she shows herself willing to boogie. She even dresses up like a street boy and burgles her grandpa’s house to help the young man she’s fallen in love with. Movies like Amarilly and Hoodlum make it hard to understand why modern audiences have such a mistaken idea about Mary Pickford. Apart from the obvious problem—her films haven’t been easy to find—how did the false notion of her as saccharine heroine come to define her work? Mary had such toughness in her, and such a willingness to deglamorize herself. When James Cagney received the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award, he referred to his success as being partly due to “the unmistakable touch of the gutter” he carried with him out of the slums. Pickford, another great Irish actor, carried with her “the unmistakable touch of the really tough female breadwinner.” This quality is fully on display in The Hoodlum.
The New York Times review of The Heart o’ the Hills indicates that critics were catching on to Mary’s strategy regarding her persona: “Apparently Mary Pickford is facing the realization that she cannot go on forever as the sweet, cute, and kittenish little darling of the screen, for her latest … shows her in more serious moods and with more mature manners than her previous productions.” Pickford played an untamed Kentucky mountain girl in a story taken from a novel by John Fox, Jr., a popular fiction writer of the day. The clever way in which she and her collaborators addressed the problem of her age—and of her fans’ unwillingness to let go of their “little Mary”—is effectively demonstrated. For more than half the movie, Mary is the fans’ darling, particularly when she beats the stuffing out of several boys on the school grounds, scaring them half to death. She’s at her best in an extended scene at a mountain hoedown, dancing up a storm, socking a citified partner who tries to put his arm around her waist (the young John Gilbert), and threatening to poke the eyes out of a beautifully turned-out rival. (This upper-crust female promptly faints dead away, leaving Mary to haul her off the dance floor, while an old-timer warns, “We’ll have no upscuddle here!”) In the final third of the film Mary becomes a grown-up, suddenly wealthy, having been conveniently adopted by “Colonel Pendleton.” She’s fashionably dressed in an elegantly cut riding habit, and she is a radiant, glowing young woman, her real off-screen self. In the end, reunited with her childhood mountain beau, the tomboy is seen to be still enclosed within the very elegant bosom of the mature young woman. Dressed in a beautiful organdy dress with a bow, she becomes again the playful young girl as she and her true love jump up and down in a stream and Mary falls on her bottom in the water. At this point, she gives her audience both her womanly self and her familiar youthful screen character.
Early in 1919, First National, which was releasing Mary’s movies, was rumored to be planning a merger with the powerful Famous Players/Lasky corporation, and the shrewd businesswoman in Mary Pickford understood at once that the control she had gained over her films could be lost. Acting swiftly, Mary, Douglas Fairbanks, D. W. Griffith, William S. Hart, and Charles Chaplin created their own organization to counter this potential loss of creative power, forming a company that would be known as the United Artists Association. (Hart soon left the group.) Their plan was to increase their profits, stop other organizations from using them for block booking purposes, and gain complete control once and for all over their careers. It was an unprecedented move on the part of major artists. “Freedom,” Mary said years later. “It’s a heady wine, and having tasted it, you find it impossible to go back to working for someone else.”
Mary released only two movies through United Artists in 1920: Pollyanna and Suds. Reviewing the first, the New York Times once again raised the issue of when Mary was going to grow up on-screen. In a very telling piece, the Times opened up with, “People have been asking recently, ‘Why doesn’t Mary Pickford grow up?’ The question is answered at the Rivoli this week. It is evident that Miss Pickford doesn’t grow up because she can make more people laugh and cry, can win her way into more hearts, and even protesting heads, as a rampant, resilient little girl than as anything else. She can no more grow up than Peter Pan. When she stops being a child on the screen, she’ll probably just stop.” Chilling words, although the Times added a cheerful note: “But that time is a long way off.”
Pollyanna, the popular Eleanor Porter story, is about a little girl who is determined to “be glad” no matter what happens to knock her for a loop. This concept is enough to drive a modern audience crazy. (Even in 1920, the Times pointed out that meeting such a person in real life was “provocation to a justifiable homicide.”) It’s difficult for viewers today to understand a property like Pollyanna and how it was received in its own day, often assuming that no one found it overly sentimental or cloying at the time. However, Variety pointed out cheerfully that the charming world of Pollyanna, a nice place to live in, was “a fat lie, but it helps to believe it.” It was voluntary escapism even then. There’s something magnificent about the ridiculous concept of “be glad,” and also something terribly American in its incurable optimism. When Pollyanna’s beloved father dies and she is swept away from her familiar life to live with a wealthy maiden aunt, she finds a stern, unrelenting relative. For this, Pollyanna finds a way to “be glad,” and she soon has the aunt—and the entire town—twisted around her little finger. It’s perversely satisfying. And Pickford understands the story’s irony as well as its subtext, which is about a girl so tough that nothing can get her down. She arrives in New England during a downpour, and is blown around the streets, so that when she first appears before her austere aunt, soaking wet and muddy, she looks like a bedraggled rat, her clothes dripping and her shoes ruining the carpets. When her aunt lets her have it—not exactly a warm welcome for the bereaved orphan—she puts magazines under her shoes to keep the mud off the floors and carpets, but finds it difficult to lift her feet, which are now stuck to the paper. She begins to walk around, lifting her knees high with each step, taking on a crazy goose-stepping gait, but behaving as if this is perfectly natural and no one will notice. (She’s solved a problem, after all.) For several minutes, everything Pickford does is hilarious, yet very matter-of-fact. For antics like these, she received rave reviews.
Pollyanna (photo credit 1.8)
Suds, her other 1920 release, was a modest hit. In it, Mary Pickford played a role that had been acted on the stage by Maude Adams (in a play called ’Op o’ Me Thumb). She’s a hardworking washer-girl in a cheap French laundry in London, and some fans complained because her character never becomes wealthy—where was the rainbow and the pot of gold? Seen today, her performance is suspiciously Chaplinesque. Her downtrodden laundress is played more for pity than usual despite comedy sequences involving a horse brought up to her rented room and a fast-paced ride down the street in a wagon, which ends up with her newly washed laundry in the dirt. The carpers were right: for once, Mary got nowhere and found no wealthy lover, no rich daddy, and no moral to explain why, either.
Mary Pickford at her worst—and least accessible for modern audiences—can be seen in Love Light, her first release of 1921. There’s way too much of her in the movie—she appears in a series of incidents that stop the plot dead as she caters to her audience. Without a fresh conception in either script or direction, these incidents become nothing more than shtick, and in performing them, Mary both loses our interest and destroys the pace. For instance, a bunch of chickens get drunk (don’t ask) and reel around the yard, so “little Mary” can coyly chase them, to put them in her stew. This tiresome event goes on and on, yet it in no way reflects the tone of the rest of the film, which turns into a tragedy. Later, Mary, grown up and married, gives birth and goes temporarily mad, and as if that weren’t enough, her husband turns out to be a German spy. Nothing seems to matter except providing moments for Mary to be the little tomboy (beating up her brother) or to show her dramatic skills (stealing a neighbor’s baby after her own child dies). In Love Light we get a definite sense that Mary Pickford may be shoving what audiences wanted from her down their throats.
On the other hand, the idea of casting Mary Pickford in Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921) was so perfect, with Mary playing both the little boy and his beautiful mother, Dearest, that the Times had only to say: “Is there anything more to be said?” The movie is extraordinarily well made, with photography by Charles Rosher, honest settings, lovely costumes, solid direction, and a strong supporting cast. To play a young boy, Pickford—who was not only not a boy but was twenty-nine years old—uses her full bag of tricks. One of the most professional aspects of the movie is its superb exploitation of double exposure so that she can play the little lord and his mother together. There’s a marvelous moment in which Pickford reaches out—to herself—that is perfectly matched. (She’s portraying people of two different heights; she stood on six-inch lifts as the mother.) And she manages not only to be taller than herself but totally different from herself. As Dearest, she’s calm, regal, and sweetly loving. As the child, she’s antsy, energetic, and full of curiosity. She presents a properly boyish character, fighting, punching, climbing, jumping, wrestling, and executing a neat handstand. (One sly reviewer pointed out that she must have used her husband, Doug Fairbanks, as a model for these scenes.) At the gala opening of the movie at the Apollo Theatre in New York, Mary and Doug made a personal appearance. The crowds were so huge that the police had to cut their way through the throngs. Mary’s fame and popularity were at their zenith. (A 1921 issue of Motion Picture gushed, “Five years ago, Mary Pickford was the Queen of the movies. Today she is the Empress.”)
Pickford as little Lord Fauntleroy and as his beloved mother, Deares (photo credit 1.9)
In her final release of 1921, Through the Back Door, Pickford plays a child given to French peasants so that her mother can marry a wealthy man who’s not interested in having a child around, “sacrificing the joy of being a mother for the joy of being a wife.” She’s very much the public’s favorite Mary, riding a reluctant mule, splashing in a stream, and strapping brushes on her shoes to perform her famous “skating”-around-the-room sequence. It was the usual rags-to-riches, tomboy-to-becurled-heiress routine. Variety summed it up neatly as “a market product—that’s all—full of sweetness and light, a money maker and probably designed as such.”
In 1914 Pickford had made Tess of the Storm Country with great success, and it was a logical decision for United Artists to remake it in 1922. Although it had only been eight years since the original, Mary’s stardom had grown hugely. The money now available to spend on her productions was generous, and film techniques had greatly improved, so there was a solid business reason for re-creating the story. The remake of Tess turned out to be one of Pickford’s best films, as all of her talent was put to use. In Tess, her character is shown going about her daily work in great detail. To watch Mary cooking, preparing the wood for a fire, or cleaning house is to see totally credible action, which, in turn, makes her character totally credible. In addition, her Tess is very confrontational. She is living on her own in a highly independent manner, daring to ignore what others might think of her. She stomps into the frame completely free of the usual 1920s female trappings. She wears big boots—men’s boots—and a long, floppy coat, still the tough little tomboy. Pickford, of course, was a tiny person, inherently feminine, so when she becomes energetic or athletic (here she jumps into a roaring river to save a pregnant woman from drowning), she never becomes masculine. She defeminizes the female form in Tess, playing a woman cut loose from convention and societal expectations, but in the end she finds love and accepts motherhood in a believable manner.
Pickford made Tess of the Storm Country in 1914 and again in 1922, when she appeared with Jean Hersholt (photo credit 1.10)
In Tess can be seen the essential paradox of the Pickford image. She is young and old, she is male and female, she is childish and mature. Her filmed image embodies virtue—her characters are often saying indirectly to a viewer, “I am wonderfully the sum of all virtues.” At the same time, however, she’s a bad-tempered little devil. As Molly Haskell wrote of her, “Even at her most arch-angelic, Pickford was no American Cinderella or Snow White whose only claim to consequence was a tiny foot or pretty face. She was a rebel, who, in the somewhat sentimental spirit of the prize pup as underdog, championed the poor against the rich, the scruffy orphans against the prissy rich kids. She was a little girl with gumption and self-reliance who could get herself out of trouble as easily as into it.” Pickford managed to be likable and unthreatening yet also a character who was all about will, something audiences clearly responded to in her. (Off-screen, she was well known to possess an indomitable will.)
Rosita, Pickford’s only 1923 movie, was directed by Ernst Lubitsch, and it has one of the worst reputations in silent film history. Pickford was instrumental in bringing the great German director of such delights as Oyster Princess and Madame Du Barry to America, and their planned collaboration was eagerly awaited by everyone. Yet the movie, long unavailable in the United States, accumulated a bad reputation over the years, mostly perpetuated by the star herself, who was never comfortable with the end result. Rosita, however, is an excellent movie, and Pickford is excellent in it. In a public showing at New York’s Film Forum in August of 1997, a full house responded with laughter and applause to its sexy and sophisticated story. Its reputation is completely undeserved.a Almost everything said about Rosita is wrong: it earned excellent reviews, it made money, Pickford is wonderful, and Lubitsch has a firm hand on the direction. Variety said that Pickford “with her hair done up, pretty as a picture and displaying action ability few thought her capable of … tops the splendid work of Stella Maris, the greatest picture she ever made until the current feature.” The movie itself was called “one of the biggest pictures of the year.” Lubitsch, making his American directorial debut, also earned raves: “[He is] responsible for turning out a production replete with infinite detail, delightful atmospheric touches, consummate characterizations …” The New York Times said, “Nothing more delightfully charming … has been seen on the screen for some time,” adding such adjectives as “exquisite,” “swiftly flowing,” “impressive,” “witty,” and “pleasingly pictured.” Its conclusion was: “One of the most charming productions in which Miss Pickford has appeared.” As to money, Rosita grossed over $5,000 in America, Canada, and South America, and its European release brought in even more.
What happened so that between 1923 and now these accolades and all that money were reduced to flop status? Basically, what happened was Mary Pickford. She was disappointed by Rosita and began defining it as a failure very early on. (“It’s the worst picture I ever did; it’s the worst picture I ever saw.”) She was proud she had brought Lubitsch to America, and their personal relationship wasn’t terrible, but she described him as “a director of doors,” adding, “he didn’t understand me.” Knowing what we know about Lubitsch’s career—and knowing what we know about Pickford’s—it’s easy to understand that they were not a marriage made in movie heaven. Lubitsch was sly, sophisticated, and sexy. Pickford was fresh, direct, and, while not sexless, more or less disengaged from the concept. Lubitsch was European, and Pickford was prototypically American. Both wanted control of their movies. Yet Rosita is a testament to what professionals they both were, and how very talented; despite their incompatibility, they made a wonderful movie that shows them both to advantage. Neither suffers at the other’s hands.
Rosita has costly settings, including an outdoor Seville, beautiful gardens, castle rooms with vaulted ceilings, ornate furniture, and magnificent mirrors and doors. The pace is superb, and Lubitsch’s direction of the typical “cast of thousands” delineates a world of real people and colorful action. Holbrook Blinn as the lecherous old king is absolutely wonderful, and the costumes, hairdos, and jewelry are all beautiful. Pickford is excellent as the street singer who dances, flirts, and entertains the masses. Her eyes sparkle, her smile is enchanting, and she’s her traditional tough little self—throwing a would-be tax collector out into the streets after knocking him a good one—and yelling at the king, “I hate you!” She plays an excellent comedy scene in which Rosita, a hungry street girl, is first brought to the palace, where she spots a large bowl of sweets. Eyeballing the dish carefully, she begins to stalk it. As the camera holds steady on the bowl sitting in the middle of a large table, she walks back and forth past it, in and out of frame. After a few moments of “casing the joint,” she grabs up a bonbon and pops it into her mouth, smoothly sailing by again for another one. This scene is a perfect example of how Lubitsch and Pickford wed their styles harmoniously. The camera setup—static—and the clever action that allows the star to go in and out of frame while the audience gets the joke from watching an inanimate bowl—is pure Lubitsch. But the sly comedy of a little girl getting ready to steal from the big rich folks, and the resulting cleverly timed comedy action, is pure Mary Pickford.
Rosita’s reputation—and the fact that it was lost to viewers for so many years—illustrates one of the more depressing aspects of Pickford’s career. She had worked hard for her image, and she wanted it kept intact. Fearing that her films would be laughed at by later generations, she decreed that her work be destroyed after her death. As early as the May 1931 issue of Photoplay, Pickford was thinking about eradicating any chance for history to judge her unfavorably. In an article entitled “As Mary Faces Forty,” Pickford states flatly, “I am adding a codicil to my will. It says that when I go, my films go with me. They are to be destroyed. I am buying all my old films for this purpose. I would rather be a beautiful illusion in the minds of people than a horrible example on celluloid. I pleased my own generation. That is all that matters.”
Four famous figures clown around on the set of Rosita: Charlie Chaplin, director Ernst Lubitsch, Douglas Fairbanks, and Pickford. (photo credit 1.11)
Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (photo credit 1.12)
In Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (1924), Mary played in a costume film in which she was the spunky heir to Haddon Hall, betrothed as a child to the heir of the Rutlands, whose estate lies alongside. A slight touch of Fairbanks has crept into her work, as she races to the rescue of her lover in an extended sequence in which she rides her horse over hill and dale, along a castle wall, executing a brilliant jump. There’s a complicated plot involving Mary, Queen of Scots, and it did give Mary Pickford a grown-up role to play. However, it was not a critical or financial success, and is often cited by historians as an example of how, when she attempted to play a grown-up role, her audiences rejected her. Of all Mary Pickford’s films, Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall seems the best argument for that case. Seeing it today, there is no reason to object to the film except that Pickford plays a grown-up woman quite straightforwardly and is not the “little Mary” that audiences loved best. Dorothy Vernon is a well-designed film, with expensive costumes in which Pickford looks lovely, but it’s also a lively, playful movie with comedy, charming love scenes, and exciting action. (Many film historians, including Kevin Brownlow and Elaina Archer, believe that Pickford’s astonishing action sequences were probably performed by Douglas Fairbanks in a wig and cloak.) She was always honest with herself about the failure, saying, “So many costume pictures just then … and most of them were better than mine.” In her memoirs she told the truth about how she felt afterward: “I was quite ready to surrender to public demand and become a child again.”
So back to childhood she went for her next two movies—Little Annie Rooney (1925) and Sparrows (1926). In the former, she’s showcased in the kind of film that had made her a star a decade earlier. She plays a twelve-year-old (at age thirty-three) who is boss of a bunch of street kids, a sort of early Our Gang. Variety summed up the film’s appeal: “ ‘Our Mary’ is back again in Little Annie Rooney … She’s dirty-hands, dirty-face … and the fans are going to love her to death.”
Sparrows is an excellent example of why Mary Pickford was a success, although a Variety review at the time called it “one of the few duds put out by Mary Pickford.” Seen today, it is far more likable than Little Annie Rooney. Sparrows is a dark story concerning a group of pathetic children who are trapped like slaves on a baby farm deep in an alligator-infested swamp. Rather than making the film seem old-fashioned, this Dickensian situation lifts it up into a classic mold, giving it a fairy-tale quality, so that its melodrama and sentiment can be taken as unreal in a stylized manner that is really very modern. Its horrific tale—basically about child abuse—is presented almost jauntily, with considerable panache. There’s a constant vein of humor to it, which undercuts a modern audience’s potential rejection of the plot, and it has a tense and thrilling escape through the swamp that culminates in an insane boat chase that is practically madcap in its execution. (This chase is partly marred by the use of inadequate miniatures.)
Mary is perfect as the surrogate mother to the other swamp orphans. Here is the great movie star, Miss Pickford, who never gave birth (although she did adopt two children late in life), picking up babies and feeding them, rocking them, changing them, singing to them, as if she were an old hand at the job. (As she aged, Mary was often cast as the “little mother” to a brood of younger children. This gave her an excuse to have children without sex, and her movies to tackle mature plot responsibilities without threatening her image.) Her gestures with the children, and her rhythms in ministering to them, are all perfect. Mary’s film persona is well illustrated by Sparrows, as she holds off the old villain with a pitchfork and rescues a tormentor (having decided to feel sorry for him) by pulling him out of quicksand with a horse and rope.
Sparrows (photo credit 1.13)
My Best Girl in 1927 would be Mary Pickford’s final silent film. She was the greatest of the great, but she was near the end of her run. My Best Girl paired her with the man who was to become her third and final husband, the handsome Charles “Buddy” Rogers. She enters the movie for all the world as if it were 1917 instead of 1927 and she was still the little kitchen slavey of her early films. Although she plays a grown-up working as a stock clerk in one of those 1920s wonderlands, the department store, she is first seen as nothing but a pair of feet in worn shoes and dark stockings. This time the shoes have high heels, but she’s still the same resourceful “little Mary” as she hurries down the store aisle overburdened with pots and pans. She drops one, picks it up, drops another, picks it up, until finally she puts her foot in one of the pans to slide it along. Of course, her foot gets stuck! Just about when she gets where she’s going, her underpants fall down, and she steps out of them, rushing over to the counter to figure out what to do. In the meantime, another woman comes along, steps inside them by accident, looks down, and assumes they’re hers. It’s an appropriate comic introduction for a child actor, but Mary is now playing a flapper (or perhaps a semi-flapper). Her hair is shorter, although not fashionably bobbed, and she wears makeup (not too much), but she’s still the poor girl whose family depends upon her.
Pickford and the man who would become her husband, Buddy Rogers, in My Best Girl (photo credit 1.14)
My Best Girl is full of charm, however. Rogers plays a stock clerk who’s the boss’s son in disguise. When he and Mary fall in love, Rogers takes her to his mansion for dinner, telling her that the slogan of the boss is “We are all one happy family” and they’re sure to be welcome. She plays a wonderful scene. Winking to let his butler in on things, Rogers escorts Mary to the dinner table where they pretend to be “Mr. and Mrs.” She’s on home territory, carefully wiping her silverware before she uses it, grabbing items off the butler’s tray for Rogers before they can be served properly, and confidently signaling him to use his soup spoon instead of his cocktail fork when they bring in the “lobster sundae.” After she mistakes the consommé for tea and dumps milk and sugar into it, she tells him privately, “They may have great waiters here, but the food is terrible.” When his parents come home unexpectedly, she hides under the table and has to be coaxed out. Everything she does is standard Mary, the kinds of things her fans still loved her to do, and she is at her best doing them … but it is 1927. She has a final grand scene in which she pretends to Rogers that she was fooling him all along, so that he can be free to marry a suitable girl. She struts around, smearing lipstick on her face, choking over a cigarette she tries to puff, and dancing a hot Charleston, a nice girl pretending to be naughty. Pickford still knows how to strike exactly the right note of half-funny, half-touching waiflike behavior. Breaking down, she cries, climbs into his lap, and says, “I’m not really a bad girl, Joe … I love you, Joe, but I can’t marry you.” But, of course, she does. Both on-screen and in real life.
Pickford made her sound debut in Coquette, released in early April of 1929. She would win the 1928–29 Best Actress Oscar for her performance in it, which pretty much sums up critical opinion as to whether she could talk or not. Variety said, “She talks and she looks different with the new bob.” Otherwise, the implication was, she’s our Mary and that’s that. The Variety review concludes by quoting a woman in the audience overheard saying, “Well, after spending an entire night with a man in a cabin, Mary Pickford is still America’s sweetheart.” In an unprecedented tribute contained inside a review, Variety continued: “A notice on Mary Pickford in her first talker would not be complete without a personal comment. Miss Pickford’s screen career stands without parallel, in any way, in every way. For longevity, for stardom, for cleanliness and for the promotion of the American film industry. What Jolson did for the talkers, Miss Pickford did for the pioneer silents.”
In Coquette, which had been a popular stage success with Helen Hayes in the role of Norma Besant, Mary Pickford appeared before her adoring public completely transformed. It wasn’t just that she had a voice. This time she really was a flapper … and a distinctly flirtatious one at that. Her first spoken words were an off-screen reply to her brother, “Mind your own business, Marty, I’m just trying to get my skirt to hang a little straight.” When she appears shortly after, she comes flurrying downstairs as if she were Clara Bow. Her very blonde hair is now cropped short, a true 1920s bob of tight curls around her head. She has on a low-cut, spaghetti-strap evening gown that’s all gauze and fluff, topped off with a diamond clip at her stomach and a long chain of diamond beads. Her skirt is short and her little satin heels are high. She’s a new person, and definitely a woman with a sex life. (Perhaps her Oscar was awarded partly because she had challenged her image, playing a grownup anti-Pickford role. Whatever might be said about Coquette—it has the quality of a high school play—Mary Pickford can’t be said not to have deserved her Oscar. She had earned it by a lifetime in the business, and by her unprecedented popularity, and hers would not be the last acting Oscar awarded for the wrong reasons.)
The story is about her falling in love with a man her father does not approve of, and she and this love (Johnny Mack Brown, the hunk of his day) have lots of steamy embraces. Pickford’s voice goes a little high from time to time, and slightly false as she “acts” the devil out of the dialogue, which is frequently over the top. However, she speaks in a less exaggerated southern accent than the rest of the cast, and she delivers her dialogue more naturally than they do. (They’re all busily enunciating everything very clearly, in case we’re not listening.) Sometimes she makes the error of showing emotion and delineating response physically when she should be placing that response in the dialogue that’s carrying it. On the whole, though, she makes a respectable debut in sound.
The “new” Pickford in her sound debut and Oscar-winning role in Coquette (photo credit 1.15)
After Coquette, Pickford assembled her old creative team of Marshall Neilan and Frances Marion for a movie to be called Forever Yours, but things went badly. Neilan was drinking heavily, and they quarreled. Pickford said the footage was “stupid” and she scrapped it, taking a huge loss and claiming to have burned the unreleased film. (Actually, she was too practical for that. The remaining footage is now at the Library of Congress.) She made only three more movies: The Taming of the Shrew (1929), in which she costarred with Fairbanks and the famous credit line “additional dialogue by Sam Taylor” appeared, and Kiki (1931) and Secrets (1933), both of which were remakes of silent films that had starred Norma Talmadge. Secrets, beautifully directed by Frank Borzage, was Forever Yours completely reshot from top to bottom. Kiki and Secrets are not disasters, and the latter holds up well. However, Pickford seems no longer unique, and somewhat distanced from the new, tougher era of the 1930s.
When she completed Secrets, Mary Pickford was forty-one years old. Shrewd and clear-minded about her work as she had always been, she stepped aside. It was over. Despite reports that she continued to consider projects—and missed working—she terminated her career. Years later, she gave a coolly detached, honest appraisal: “I left the screen because I didn’t want what happened to Charlie Chaplin to happen to me. When he discarded the little tramp, the little tramp turned around and killed him. The little girl made me. I wasn’t waiting for the little girl to kill me.”
By 1915 Mary Pickford was the girl who had everything. She was “America’s Sweetheart,” hugely wealthy, respected in her profession, her emotional life linked to her work and to her family, to whom she always remained devoted. (A reporter once observed, “Her greatest interest in life is her mother,” and that may well have been true.) But Mary was flesh and blood and she found time to be interested enough in a young man to marry him behind her mother’s back. Charlotte Pickford was Mary’s partner in her career, and the two were very close in every respect, yet when Mary fell in love with the handsome Owen Moore, she defied her mother in a way she never had before, and really never did again. Moore and Mary were both at Biograph during her formative years as a star, and they fell in love. (Moore and his brothers, Matt and Tom, had significant careers as leading men of the stalwart variety.) In her autobiography, she described her love as “five feet eleven inches tall, extremely handsome, with a ruddy Irish complexion, perfect teeth, dark blue eyes, and a very musical voice … He was the Beau Brummel of Biograph, always dressed with immaculate elegance.” In other words, he was irresistible to an impressionable young girl, who managed to overlook stories about his heavy drinking and also her mother’s firm advice: “He’s too old for you.”
On January 7, 1911, when she was just eighteen, Mary married Owen Moore, who had turned twenty-four in December of 1910. “If ever there was a sadder wedding,” she wrote, “I have yet to hear of it.” She described how she worried because “I’m disobeying Mother … I don’t want to leave my family.” However, she did marry him, but to put her deep attachment to her family—and her guilt—in perspective, she went home to Mom right after the ceremony, climbing into bed on her wedding night to fall asleep beside her sister, Lottie. (With a start like this, it was hardly likely the marriage was going to be a success.) Mary finally told her mother, whose explanation was “He must have bewitched her.”
This early marriage is usually referred to as a disaster, and no doubt that is a fair assessment. However, testimony to what inspired it and perhaps kept it going for a while exists: Owen Moore and Mary Pickford together in Cinderella (1914) and Mistress Nell (1915). In Cinderella, they meet playfully in the forest and seem to be genuinely smitten with one another; they have an easy physical familiarity, and a quick response to each other. In Nell, there is a golden moment in which she leans back against her husband in a very unchildlike manner. Obviously feeling the comfort of his familiar body, she lifts her arms to bring his head close to hers, her face lighting up in a radiant, sensual smile. Their playful love scenes and visible mutual attraction are evidence of theirs having been, at least for a time, a very hot romance.
Owen Moore, however, was never fully accepted into the tight-knit Pickford circle, and over the next few years his drinking increased, her disillusionment kept pace, and the final straw was her stardom, for which she earned much more money than he did, leaving him feeling emasculated and embittered. When Mary finally divorced him in 1919, their marriage had been dead for years, but her motivation was the man who really filled her life, her male counterpart in stardom, Douglas Fairbanks.
When the two great stars, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, fell in love and began courting, it was unprecedented. They were the top male and female stars of their time. The public loved them both individually, and to have them get together was beyond a fan’s wildest dreams of star heaven. From the beginning, their devoted public dubbed them “Doug and Mary,” “Mary and Doug”—just two down-to-earth, lovable people the fans felt they knew on a first-name basis. Their stardom was a gift from an adoring public who saw in them something honest and believable. In the public’s mind, who else would either of them ever possibly want to marry? They deserved each other and belonged with each other.
They are said to have first met in 1914 at the home of Elsie Janis, a popular Broadway musical comedy star. Doug was still wed to his first wife, Beth, and Mary to Moore. He was a stage success, but not yet a film star, and she was already successful. Of this fateful meeting, she later wrote, “I’ve always felt that my meeting with Douglas Fairbanks was predestined. I had no social life after working hours. And my only friends were those associated with me in the making of my films. Owen and I, needless to say, were anything but compatible …” The couple did not meet again for approximately a year, and by that time, Fairbanks’s first movie, The Lamb, was on-screen. They both attended a party at the Algonquin Hotel, and while they danced and Fairbanks praised Mary’s work, something began to happen between them. “I had been living in half-shadows,” Mary wrote in her autobiography, “and now this light was cast on me, this sunlight of Douglas’s approval.” Frances Marion, the screenwriter who knew them both well, said about Doug, “He’d listen to Mary. He treated her like an intelligent person. Any woman goes for that.”
For most of the three years Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford carried on a passionate affair, the public knew little about it. These years of contrivance and denial served to increase their ardor, and finally they felt they simply had to marry, although neither of them was confident that it would be a good thing for their careers. In particular, Mary felt that divorcing and then marrying a man who would also have to divorce, as well as leave his young son (Douglas, Jr.), could easily destroy her image as “America’s Sweetheart, a pure and honest little creature.” But they went ahead. On Sunday, March 28, 1920, Douglas Elton Fairbanks and Gladys Mary Smith Moore, ages thirty-six and “twenty-six” (Mary had reduced her age) were wed at Fairbanks’s home. Present were her family, Doug’s brother and his wife, Charles Chaplin, actress Marjorie Daw, Doug’s press agent, and the playwright Edward Knoblock. It was a simple ceremony with close friends and family, but then all celebrity hell broke loose. When the world’s most famous girl, radiantly beautiful, abundantly talented, and truly beloved, married the world’s most virile and handsome man, equally beautiful, talented, and beloved, it was a blockbuster situation. And the wonderful part was that they deeply loved each other, and it showed. In her autobiography, Mary includes a photograph that she has captioned “The dress I wore when I was married to Douglas.” She is meltingly beautiful and looks almost dumbstruck with love. Her head is backed by a satin pillow with a ruffle around the edge, and she is holding a fragile bouquet just underneath her bosom. Her dress is delicate, with the tiniest of bows below her throat. Her hair curls sweetly around her face, and although she’s not smiling, she looks utterly happy. The fact that she was already a divorcée, a tough business negotiator, and a seasoned actress is nowhere indicated. She could be any small-town girl, innocent and virginal, awaiting her wedding ceremony.
The fan magazines of the day naturally went all out covering the romance and marriage of Doug and Mary. In “The Pickford-Fairbanks Wooing,” from the August 1920 issue of Motion Picture, Billy Bates reassures fans that “there is a great love story behind the famous wedding.” And he gives details: “When Mary Pickford stood before the minister, she stood there as any woman might stand, radiant with love for the man at her side, a bit tearful perhaps for the tender memories left behind, but with smiling hope for the future. Except for the sensation-hungry world waiting just outside the door, she might have been the plumber’s bride looking forward to the honeymoon trip to Niagara Falls.” Some plumber’s bride. And not only had both Fairbanks and Pickford been married before, but there is no evidence that Billy Bates had attended the ceremony. Under a magnificent photograph of Fairbanks, this issue carries the caption: “There never was a more envied bridegroom than ‘Doug’ and, incidentally, it is doubtful if there is another who could have married ‘America’s Sweetheart’ and remained anything else in the world other than ‘Mary’s husband.’ ” (This caption, at least, makes a cogent point.) The magazine also presents a lavish photo layout: MEET MR. AND MRS. DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS. The bride and groom, extremely fashionably dressed and inexplicably carrying hats inside their own house, are seen posing with dogs, then cats, then in the grape arbor, and out-of-doors on a huge lawn.
Pickford and Fairbanks, mobbed by fans in London (photo credit 1.16)
After Mary completed work on Suds, Mr. and Mrs. Fairbanks left for a four-week honeymoon in Europe. As Mary wrote, “Neither of us had any suspicions of what lay ahead for us either in Europe or in America … So dense were the crowds that we didn’t dare set foot out of our suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel [in New York] … [In England] Douglas and I were swept up by mobs of fans till I could neither eat nor sleep, let alone drink in the historic sights. Our first stop was the Ritz in London. Outside our window we saw them, thousands and thousands of them, waiting day and night in the streets below, for a glimpse of us. I felt so inadequate and powerless to show my gratitude that it actually made me ill.” At an outdoor benefit in Kensington Gardens, Mary and Doug arrived seated in the back of an open Rolls-Royce, and as the crowds surged forward, Mary was grabbed and pulled out of the car. Doug managed to rescue her by clutching her by the ankles, but when they were finally able to step out, the crowds again closed in around them “like quicksand,” and she had to be carried on Doug’s shoulders to keep from being crushed. On the Continent, the mobs did not diminish. “I spent my honeymoon on a balcony waving to crowds,” Mary said.
After Mr. and Mrs. Fairbanks took up residence in Hollywood, they became the social leaders of the movie world. Like the royalty they were, King Doug and Queen Mary resided in the fabled palace of Pickfair, a twenty-two-room Tudor mansion that was a wedding present from the groom to the bride. Set on eighteen acres with a stunning view, the house had beautifully designed leaded windows, parquet floors, rich wood paneling, and high, frescoed ceilings. There was a lakelike pool (in which Mary and Doug were photographed rowing a canoe), tennis courts, a library (which Mary called “the book room”), a formal dining room, but only four bedrooms. (Luxurious though it was, it was more of a home than a mansion.) But there was plenty of staff: a head butler, two assistant butlers, two chauffeurs (for two stars), a cook, a gardener, a kitchen maid, a scullery maid, a laundress, Mary’s personal maid, a watchman, a handyman, and anyone else they needed. And in case the fans thought they were living too well, they economized by having one of the chauffeurs double as a projectionist.
Everything Doug and Mary did at Pickfair was not only legendary but hard-core important in the business. In a town in which the A-list/B-list concept was only just forming, to be invited there was to have arrived, a striking departure from the earlier, more democratic days of filmmaking. Joan Crawford once described to me what it was like to dine at Pickfair. Always a bit intimidated by (and resentful of) the grand Mary, who had arrived in a way Joan never felt she could arrive no matter what level of success she achieved, she detailed how what you wore had to be right, what you said had to be right, where you sat defined your status, and God forbid if you didn’t know how to use a finger bowl properly. For all of that, she said, the evenings at Pickfair were wonderful—and entertaining. There were always glamorous and famous people, good conversation, and superb food. She felt that parties at San Simeon were much more down-to-earth than those at Pickfair, despite the awesome surroundings of the Hearst castle. “Remember,” she told me, “Marion Davies was always just one of the gals, and Hearst put the catsup bottle on the table, but Mary was a Queen and everyone knew it.”
The Pickford/Fairbanks marriage—and the happy days at Pickfair—tragically came apart in the 1930s, after both Doug and Mary had passed their prime as stars. No one knows for certain what went wrong between them, but no one believes they ever really stopped loving each other. Their lives had changed when sound came in, and their stardom—while it didn’t exactly end for them—wasn’t at the same level, nor did they have the same passion for it. How can any superstar marriage survive? Did Doug and Mary just get tired of playing “Doug and Mary”? Or did the public tire of them playing “Doug and Mary” and render the roles passé? All anyone knows, despite many opinions on the subject, is that on December 8, 1933, Mary Pickford filed for divorce, and although they came close to reconciling, she ended up marrying Buddy Rogers after Fairbanks wed Lady Sylvia Ashley, a woman Douglas junior wrote frankly about in his autobiography, saying he had come “to actively dislike her.”
It is said that when years later, Mary’s niece, Gwynne (Lottie’s daughter), called her in the wee hours intending to tell her of Doug’s death, Mary Pickford was psychic, saying immediately, “Don’t tell me, my darling is gone.” Later, Robert Fairbanks, fulfilling a private promise to his brother, called to give Mary a coded message from their first days of courting that was meaningful only to them. It was 1939, and Mary Pickford would live, no doubt feeling alone in many ways, forty more years.
The Doug and Mary romance was only part of the phenomenon of Mary Pickford’s enormous stardom: if she had never married Douglas Fairbanks she would still be an object of tremendous interest. The way fans picked her out of the crowd and dubbed her “America’s Sweetheart”—and the way critics revered her—is the first real marking place in the history of fandom, stardom, and mass hysteria in twentieth-century America. About this fan adulation Mary made a simple, pared-down statement: “I’ve been loved.” It was a perfect understatement from a woman whose box office popularity has never been equaled by any other woman. Her stardom lasted twenty years, and she was named “number one” by Photoplay for fifteen of them. Over the years, those who’ve understood this seem to have stretched themselves to the limit to get it across. When she received an honorary Oscar in 1976, her film clips were introduced with “For more than three generations of movie goers, this was the face of the most popular woman in the world.” Social historian Edward Wagenknecht made a sweeping evaluation: “I do not believe anybody can understand America in the years during and after the First World War who does not understand the vogue of Mary Pickford.” The movie magazines and critics and allegedly hard-bitten journalists of her own time fell over themselves with superlatives such as “She is the glory of the American stage,” “She’s so simple, so competent, so enthusiastic, so natural,” “Any land might be proud of her,” “She’s a veritable Shakespeare’s pen in animated human form,” and “She’s unique.”
Mary Pickford is a quintessential specimen for the study of fan worship, but it isn’t generally grasped just how popular she really was. Although the fan magazines of the era carry articles on everyone, those on Pickford are unlike those about anyone else (and there are more of them). Ads and articles and fan letters demonstrate the crazy, worshipful adoration that Pickford inspired. People wanted a piece of her in whatever form they could get it, and her popularity pointed the way for fan passion to be translated into money outside the box office. For instance, Mary Pickford is all over the July 1918 issue of Motion Picture magazine, but one of the most interesting items is an ad for Pompeiian Beauty Powder, which features a large portrait of her, treating her as if she were the greatest beauty of her time. There is also on display “The Mary Pickford Art Panel,” which is available for a mere dime and, of course, proof-of-purchase from a jar of Pompeiian Beauty Powder and Day Cream. The ad says, “The world’s most beloved little woman has honored the makers of Pompeiian by posing exclusively for the 1918 Pompeiian Art Panel.” It is 28 inches by 7¼ inches, and it comes “in beautiful colors.” All you have to do is clip the coupon, add your dime, and your proof, and you, too, can own this panel, which shows Mary in a white ruffled dress, her curls hanging forward over her shoulders, holding a large spray of lilacs and daisies and tulips, with roses mixed in.
The same issue features a worshipful “Eulogy to Little Mary” by Arthur S. Brooks:
Mary Pickford
Say, Mary. I fell
Like a German “Ace” with
A bullet thru his gas-tank
For you …
Just a little appreciation
of the Immeasurable services
You are doing the people
You are helping to polish
The pewter of their lives.
Well, so long, Mary.
Thanks!
In December 1919, Motion Picture advertises “The Mary Pickford Manicure File,” made from “the very wood of the house in Canada where Pickford was born and spent her girlhood.” This holy grail is “A Lucky Piece” and it will be “the envy of all your friends, a magnetic charm, a treasured keepsake, an inspiration, a close association with filmdom’s most winsome, beautiful, lovable, dainty star, MARY PICKFORD.” And it costs a mere fifty cents. (Right under this ad runs this notice: “TO OUR READERS: Motion Picture Magazine guarantees the reliability and integrity of its advertisers. However, should there be any misrepresentation whatever, notify us promptly, and either the advertiser or ourselves will refund your money.”)
This adoration of Mary Pickford reflects the more innocent era of the earliest fan magazines. In those days, the magazines followed the public’s interest in the stars; whom the public liked the fan mags wrote about—in giddy terms. Later, the magazines, fueled by the studio flacks, would promote and actively sell stars to the public, but in the early years the coverage is a confirmation of how the public actually felt. Articles about Mary Pickford—and there’s at least one in every magazine—show how passionately she was loved. In the May 1918 Motion Picture, there’s an article entitled “Do We Love Mary Pickford? (from a Fan’s Own Viewpoint)” by Clara Louise Leslie. She writes:
Mary Pickford is a fairy! She is not of this world. She just happened down here to help rub a little of the soot off of everybody’s viewpoint and whisper to us of a place where perchance butter and eggs are within reason, where folks never have toothaches, and where they tell legends about divorce courts … There is yet to be found a woman who is jealous of Mary Pickford … We love her curls, we love her sunshine, we love her self-forgetful little ways; and most of all we love Mary Pickford because she loves us … Mary Pickford, sweetheart, is the sweetheart of America … Now and then one hears of some one who does not like Mary Pickford, but that person is like a highbrow and is generally a full-fledged fan’s idea of the type of individual who would steal, plague the cat, and gossip about the dead.
Ironically, this gushing and foolish piece touches in its own way on the real strengths of Mary Pickford. Her films took viewers out of their daily lives into a more innocent and likable world; they appealed to the average working man and woman; and she was believed to be genuinely nice. In March 1920, Motion Picture ran an article called “We Meet Mary” (by Gladys Hall) which explained Mary’s popularity. “Mary might have been you or me, you know, for all the air of import there was about her. She was sweet; she was wholly unaffected; she was interested and winning and sincere.” Before going to meet Pickford for the first time, says the writer, she was plagued by many questions. “What was she going to be like? What would she wear? Would she wear her hair in the famous curls? Would she be ‘upstage’?” and then, she writes dramatically: “She came. She didn’t in any sense take a stand or strike an attitude. She is … a good business woman … but she is, nonetheless, just a girl, able to meet other girls on their own footing, able to talk … with … a winsome sort of friendliness, wearing her honors, but wearing them lightly.” Pickford seemed to her fans to be a real person; in that sense she truly was “America’s Sweetheart.”
Not unlike the “Do We Love Mary Pickford?” article that actually defined her persona, “We Meet Mary” both treats her as royalty and claims she’s just one of the girls. Contemporaries of Mary’s in the business gave ample testimony over the years to her legend—her royalty, as well as her kindness and generosity. In The Real Tinsel, Bernard Rosenberg and Harry Silverstein printed a series of interviews with pioneer silent film people which speak of Mary Pickford in positive terms. Wini Shaw talks about Mary’s kindness. In her first days in Hollywood, Shaw went to the Brown Derby by herself and ordered liver and bacon, but when it came she couldn’t eat it because she had been crying from sheer loneliness. The captain came over and asked her name, and soon she was given a note reading, “Dear Miss Shaw: You look so lonesome sitting over there. I wonder if we may join you?” It was signed “Mary Pickford.” Shaw added in her interview, “Here I am a punk kid, and she’s the queen. So far as I’m concerned, she always will be. I’ll never forget that act of kindness until my dying day.” Conrad Nagel spoke of her generosity. “Mary was one of the few great stars of that era who had a social conscience.” Maxine Elliott Hicks, who played the other little girl with Mary in The Poor Little Rich Girl, said, “Mary Pickford was wonderful to me. Momma and I would go over on the streetcar or whatever we could get in the morning. In the evening, Mary would ask me if I was going straight home, and I would say yes. She’d say, ‘I’m having my chauffeur take you home, and I’m going with Mother.’ She sent us home more than one time in a limousine.” Madge Bellamy tells how Mary helped her fix her hair, taught her about lighting, and let her wear one of her dresses for a part. “I was always in love with Mary,” she says.
These anecdotes, told years after Mary’s golden days, when there was no gain to be had from them, illustrate part of what made Mary great. She never forgot her own lonely days, and she never forgot that some people had less than she did. In that sense, she was democratic, and the fans were responding to something they felt was part of her that really was part of her.
The fan mag articles on Pickford are very different from those on such luminaries as Gloria Swanson and Norma Talmadge. Instead of stressing fashion tips and glamour, the writing on Pickford treated her more seriously, and allowed her to express herself as if she were both wise and down-to-earth. In the April 1918 Motion Picture, in a large photo layout entitled STUDIO ACTORS KNIT WITH MARY PICKFORD, she’s seen knitting for the doughboys between scenes of her new movie, and teaching everyone else how to knit, too. The movie is Amarilly of Clothesline Alley, and not only is the entire supporting cast reduced to the level of schoolchildren here, but her director, Marshall Neilan, sits patiently holding her yarn. Mary reigns supreme, and the magazine calls attention to how she spends her off-screen time: no idle shopping and gossipy chitchat for the sweetheart; she knits for chilly soldiers.
In Motion Picture of June 1919, Mary was interviewed in an article entitled “On Location With Mary Pickford.” She was shooting the graduation scene for Daddy Long Legs at the Busch mansion gardens in Pasadena. Mary was full of “gay humor,” reported her interviewer, who had ridden out to the location with the star in Mary’s green Pierce Arrow. “I believe that a sense of humor is the greatest gift we can have,” said Mary, although later she admitted that “My thoughts are full of business these days.” Mary reflects “within herself” all humanity, said her interviewer, describing Mary’s life as one of denial, struggle, and disappointment. “Mary Pickford believes that it is neither wealth nor success that brings happiness and contentment. It is service, doing our share and not being drones.” Presumably, they all rode home together in the green Pierce Arrow after exchanging these philosophies.
Like the other big stars of the day, Mary Pickford was subjected to “character nose reading” in the February 1923 issue of Photoplay and even Mary’s nose was treated with respect! It was interpreted to mean that she was “evenly balanced, emotional, responsive, but not hypersensitive, practical, with a capacity for thought and emotion.” She had “strength, thrift, reserve, financial ability,” but exhibited in her dealings “caution, affection, and sympathy.” The upshot of all this science was a simple statement: “Her mind controls her heart.” (Though sometimes her control would slip. In the 1920 April–May issue of Motion Picture, Mary let loose. Sitting in the most expensive suite at the Ritz, she passionately cries out, “I hated being poor.”)
IT WOULD BE NICE to end the story of Mary Pickford on the lawn of Pickfair at the height of her fame, but things seldom fade out that way, particularly in the lives of movie stars. It would also be very wrong to sentimentalize the life of a woman who never had a real childhood or even a girlhood of her own. There is every indication that she herself wasn’t sentimental in her private life. (“I’ve worked and fought my way through since I was twelve,” she said.) She was married young and badly to an alcoholic actor, and was rumored to have lost her ability to have children through an early abortion. She lived through her brother’s messy life, which included marriage to the drug-addicted Olive Thomas and his early death in 1932 at the age of thirty-six. She was heartbroken when her closest confidante, her mother, died of a horrible cancer in 1928 (age fifty-five), and she lost her only sister, Lottie (like her brother, Jack, no saint), who died in 1936 at the age of forty-one. Finally, she faced the end of her career and great fame, and the bitter loss of the great love of her life, Doug Fairbanks. On a more positive note, she married her handsome costar from My Best Girl, the charming Buddy Rogers, on June 26, 1937. He was twelve years her junior, but they made an attractive couple, and seemed very right for each other. Their marriage lasted for forty-two years, until her death, and Rogers remained devoted, ever handsome and attentive.
Pickford spent the final years of her life out of the spotlight, and these years are sad to read about. She is rumored to have drifted into alcoholism, and she became reclusive, sometimes spending the day in bed at Pickfair. (Well, heaven knows she’d earned a rest.) For a while, she produced movies, kept United Artists going, and busied herself with charities—in particular, the Motion Picture Relief Fund and Home. Then she just seemed to fade away, last seen in March of 1976 propped up in a chair receiving an honorary Oscar, looking somewhat bewildered by it all, but making a game go of her performance. On May 29, 1979, she died, with Buddy Rogers at her bedside.
Why did the public lose interest in her? Obviously, the coming of sound, her age, and changing public taste all played a part. And she contributed to her disappearance by decreeing that her films should not be shown. Thanks to Buddy Rogers and Lillian Gish—and many others devoted to preservation—she was finally persuaded to let her movies survive beyond her death and be shown to a new generation.
Kevin Brownlow summed up Pickford brilliantly: “The ideal American girl is still the Mary Pickford character: extremely attractive, warm-hearted, generous, funny—but independent and fiery-tempered when the occasion demands … She had legions of imitators, but no rivals.” Mary expressed her own feelings about what her movies meant to her by saying, “There is something sacred to me about that camera … I think Oscar Wilde wrote a poem about a robin who loved a white rose. He loved it so much that he pierced his breast, and let his heart’s blood turn the white rose red … Maybe this sounds very sentimental, but for anybody who has loved a career as much as I’ve loved mine, there can be no short cuts.”
Mary Pickford took no shortcuts in life. She deserves to sit in her rightful chair, the throne of the Queen of Film History. And she deserves respect for what she really was: America’s first sweetheart—but also one hell of a woman.
Pickford as her fans liked to see he as she herself liked to be seen (1929) (photo credit 1.17)
* It’s inappropriate to suggest they were in competition, in that they were friends who started out together as children, and they were never rivals. Pickford was a top star, wildly popular, and Gish never achieved that level of celebrity, nor would she probably have wanted to. Gish had the good fortune to have a genius to guide her (D. W. Griffith), and she escaped the labels that stardom, with its attendant restrictions of persona, inevitably forces on actors.
† One has only to read her tart-tongued comments on Chaplin to realize that. Near the end of her life, her stepson, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., suggested to her that Chaplin had mellowed in his feelings toward her. “I don’t care,” she replied. “He’s still a son of a bitch.”
‡ Pickford’s long filmography is printed complete in both the Scott Eyman and Eileen Whitfield biographies.
§ In only three years, Mary traveled from Biograph to IMP and from IMP to Majestic and from Majestic back to Biograph, always increasing her salary.
‖ This is the infamous William Desmond Taylor, who was mysteriously murdered in 1922. He would direct Mary in two more films—Captain Kidd, Jr. and Johanna Enlists. Mary described him as “a very charming man who directed me in three very bad pictures.”
a Over the years, I’ve heard a great deal about Rosita: It’s a flop, it lost money, Pickford is an embarrassment, Lubitsch was off his feed … but something I hadn’t heard was that it essentially tells exactly the same story as The Spanish Dancer, the Lubitsch German film starring Pola Negri. In fact, it’s almost a direct remake, except that Rosita is a far more expensive production, and the leading character is tailored more specifically to Pickford’s charm than to Negri’s passion.
