men are overwhelmingly outvoted.”58 And given that Ibsen and Pinero were renowned for controversial female protagonists who blew up the constraints of true womanhood, the fame of these playwrights suggested that women wanted to see actresses who refused to remain trapped in “a doll’s house” (the title of Ibsen’s 1879 play).59
II
By 1900 actresses in vaudeville and on the legitimate stage displayed how a girl might act “the Daddy of the Family,” as Mary Pickford’s early publicity described her, while still exhibiting a specifically feminine allure. This meant that actresses like Pickford made the ambition to achieve renown compatible with femininity itself. As the first film stars made the transition from stage to screen during the 1910s, many of the most successful occupied a terrain in which the exhibition of feminine charm and public authority coexisted. Not long after her theatrical debut in 1900, Pickford and her now avowedly “stage-minded” mother, Charlotte, met one successful example of the type: the thirteen-year-old vaudeville sensation Elsie Janis. Pickford recalled how Janis earned the “unbelievable salary of seventy-five dollars a week” for her “magnificent imitation” of the Ziegfeld showgirl Anna Held and renditions of songs like “Oh, I Just Can’t Make My Eyes Behave!” Pickford and Charlotte asked Janis and her mother how little Gladys might emulate the older girl’s “brilliant career.”60 “ ‘Take her to see the finest plays and artists,’ ” Mrs. Janis advised, but “first, and above all . . . let her be herself.” Evoking the modern artist’s edict to explore and express the self, the advice registered how the theater nurtured a type of individuality in girls that encouraged them to seek out some kind of happiness for themselves. Pickford made the counsel an axiom, and the four became lifelong friends, the first in a series of mother-daughter teams whose success they first imitated and then supported. “Hollywood was a matriarchy,” observed Adela Rogers St. Johns, the journalist who became “Mother Confessor” to the first movie stars. “No more wise, wonderful and remarkable women than Charlotte Pickford, Mrs. Gish, Peg Talmadge, Phyllis Daniels ever lived.”61 Indeed, the prevalence of female-headed households among those who became the greatest actresses of their day suggests that the stereotype of the stage mother who prostitutes her tender charge might be better viewed as a family survival strategy that required tossing norms of feminine decorum into the breach. Not just Cushman, Bernhardt, and Pickford but also Florence Lawrence, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Norma and Constance Talmadge, Pearl White, Ruth Roland, Pola Negri, and Gloria Swanson were all reared without fathers. Beyond the powerful economic impetus such circumstances engendered, the absence of intimate patriarchal control in childhood may have improved their chances of reinventing how to act like a girl.
FIGURE 3. The two parts of Pickford’s persona: motion picture magnate Mary Pickford keeping track of “Little Mary,” c. 1920. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.
For indeed, the personas of the first film stars often involved elaborating the means by which a seemingly conventional girl could incarnate a type of fame that arose from meeting the challenges and opportunities confronting the progress of her sex. By the time she incorporated United Artists in 1919, Mary Pickford’s persona was composed of equal parts “America’s Sweetheart”—a romantic, spirited ingénue who politely called for women’s rights—and “Bank of America’s Sweetheart,” as her competitor and colleague, Charlie Chaplin called her—a skilled businesswoman who became the highest-paid woman in the world.62 These two images—one a perennial youth involved in a perpetual process of self-definition, and the other a trailblazing professional engaged with achieving a stature still mostly reserved for daddies—were entwined in the projection of her star image. As with Cushman, her publicity conveyed information that complicated and contradicted her performing type. Press stories, interviews, and the syndicated column “Daily Talks,” which Pickford wrote (in name if not in fact) between 1915 and 1917, focused on her salary and work, and made no secret of her real age or the existence of her husband, actor Owen Moore. Both working-and middle-class magazines described her as a woman whose accomplishments placed her alongside the industrial titans who had loomed so large in the imagination of Americans since the dawning of what Mark Twain called the Gilded Age. A piece signed by Pickford in the Ladies’ Home Journal, the largest-circulation women’s monthly and one aimed mostly at the middle class, reported that next to her age (“twenty four, but someday I may not want to tell it”), the question most frequently asked in the five hundred letters she received daily was, “How much do I make?”63 “I enjoy my work immensely,” she reported; “there is a wonderful fascination in the ever changing scenes and the varied excitement.” When the workingwomen’s monthly Ladies’ World announced her the winner of a reader’s popularity contest months later, “her hundred thousand dollar a year salary” was again central.64 Her “photo-play supremacy . . . justified” her salary, the piece explained, stressing the breadth of Pickford’s achievements. “Her versatility of talent is marvelous, and is evidenced by the fact that she writes as well as she acts.” Since only one-quarter of wage-earning women earned the $8 a week that constituted a living wage in 1914, it is easy to imagine why Pickford’s annual salary of $50,000 for exciting work led “thousands of American girls to ask about motion picture acting as a profession.”65
FIGURE 4. Mary Pickford as idol of the “Working Girl” readers of the Ladies’ World in 1915. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.
Indeed, Pickford always credited the paternal power her salary made possible with inspiring her devotion to her work. The modest means she earned with her theatrical debut in 1900 had created a “determination nothing could crush . . . to take my father’s place in some mysterious way.” Her earliest publicity would later use her breadwinner anxieties to justify her decision in 1908 to trade Broadway for the less reputable choice of acting at Biograph film studio in New York. There Pickford used her artistic status to demand twice the rate paid to beginning film players: $10 a day, or $60 a week, a salary she credited with allowing her family to finally “beg[i]n to live.”66 She also recollected her debut in The Silver King in terms that presaged the type that brought her such acclaim. Although she claimed to prefer the “villainous little girl” she played in the popular melodrama’s first act, she reported that a comic bit of stage business she improvised as the hero’s dying son drew the “biggest laugh of the evening” and won the manager’s attention. Whatever its accuracy, her description deftly captured her later screen type: a feminine, feisty tomboy, orphaned in spirit if not always in fact, whose fiery emotions jumped from harmless misbehavior to wild humor to tender pathos.
The motivation to win her way in the world brought Pickford’s family to New York in 1907, where she resolved to meet “the Wizard of the Modern Stage,” David Belasco. A former actor from San Francisco, Belasco’s celebrity as a director-producer stemmed from his artful performance as the so-called “Maestro” of the theater’s feminization.67 Belasco built his unrivaled following among women on the “immoral” melodramatic plays that intellectuals like Hugo Munsterberg decried for corrupting the nation’s artistic and moral tenor. Noteworthy modern immoral melodramas like Madame Butterfly (1900) and Du Barry (1901) descended from Camille. Unsurprisingly, Belasco’s notoriety also derived from his relationships to their female stars. “BELASCO’S LATEST STAR A SUCCESS” was how a Philadelphia paper announced Charlotte Walker’s triumph in The Warrens of Virginia (1907). “How I do like to develop an actor or an actress. Then is when I am most happy,” Belasco explained in one press release. “I like to thrust in my hand, grasp his or her heartstrings and drag them out and play upon them like a musician upon the strings of his instrument,” he continued, expertly suggesting his talent for conducting both erotic and gender play.68
