Her publicity seized on this title when she won a starring role in a 1913 Belasco production of A Good Little Devil. Calling herself a daddy emphasized her status as an adult artist who laid claim to the rights and responsibilities of the patriarch, however much she appeared like a spirited, angelic girl. The Warrens also featured two other flickers of future importance, playwright (later screenwriter and director) William de Mille and his younger brother, actor (later director) Cecil. The press called its female star simply the latest in a line of actresses who were “FAILURES TILL ‘SVENGALI’ ARRIVED.”70
In likening Belasco to Svengali, the newspaper summoned the specter of George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), a popular novel that displayed the broader shift in popular culture’s depiction of men and women’s relationship to the production of art. The best-selling novel modernized the Pygmalion and Galatea myth, long the master print for viewing the male as the agent of the heavenly creative impulse, the female as his aesthetic stimulant. When mortal women fail to meet his moral standards, Pygmalion carves his perfect woman from ivory, worships his creation, and consummates his desire after the goddess Aphrodite gives her life. The fate of Trilby O’Farrell partially reproduced her classical predecessor’s. An artist’s model whose beauty and availability inspire a group of budding painters in the Latin Quarter, Trilby falls under the spell of Svengali, an evil mesmerist who hypnotizes the “tone-deaf” young grisette into becoming the voice of his musical ambitions. Svengali’s control over Trilby indicates why those who emphasize the manager’s role as that of proprietor of an actress’s talent in this era speak of a “Svengali paradigm.” And, no doubt, the Trilby-inspired crazes, from shoes to hats, that swept both sides of the Atlantic near the century’s end offered precocious examples of mass culture’s ability to turn symbols of women’s sexuality into fetishistic, salable parts. Yet Trilby also revised the moral interpretation of the novel’s female protagonist and described the male artists in the story as frauds or fallible. The bohemian Trilby “could be naked and unashamed” and was “without any kind of fear.” Those who judge Trilby come to grief as well. Still, Pickford’s fame displayed the American public’s uneasy relationship to female eroticism by celebrating a female artist who sought new professional, rather than sexual, freedoms.
Given her ambition to make herself known, Pickford’s landing at Biograph in 1908 was equal parts fortuitous and frustrating. After 1908, the shift to story pictures, or what scholars now call narrative film, threw the work of film acting into relief, focusing audience’s attention on gelatine Juliets (a celluloid version of Shakespeare’s most famous ingénue). Plot development in story pictures revolved around the action of fictional characters that new camera techniques like close-ups brought within intimate reach. Biograph’s leading director, D.W. Griffith, pioneered the close-up’s effective use. The technical mastery of both Griffith and early cameramen at the studio probably explains why two of the industry’s earliest, if still nameless, stars emerged from Biograph’s ranks: Pickford and Florence Lawrence. Since movie players appeared without billing in the earliest years, curious fans dubbed Lawrence the “Biograph Girl” and Pickford “Little Mary,” a character name she often used. By 1910, Motion Picture World’s new section, “Picture Personalities,” answered fans’ questions about the identities of performers like Lawrence and Pickford.71 But, while many production companies began to release the names of leading actors, Biograph continued to refuse to promote its popular players.
Carl Laemmle, a German-born immigrant working in the industry’s western hub of Chicago, viewed the mounting popularity of female film players like Lawrence and Pickford as an opportunity to distinguish his new company.72 In 1909 Laemmle left the first film industry trust, a patents pool engineered by Thomas Edison called the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC). Shut out from the MPPC’s screens and facing litigation for patent infringement, the independent Motion Picture Company (IMP, which became Universal in 1912) could survive only by quick success. Laemmle hastily added producing to the studio’s functions and lured Lawrence, whom Biograph had fired for seeking better terms, to join its ranks. Laemmle promoted her move by sandwiching a large photograph of her familiar face between her name and a headline proclaiming, “She’s an Imp!” Laemmle then orchestrated a stunt to stoke the ardor of audiences. In March 1910 he bought ads that declared “we nail a lie” above a close-up of Lawrence. The “enemies of the Imp” had “foisted on the public of St. Louis” a horrible story “that Miss Lawrence (the ‘Imp’ girl, formerly known as the ‘Biograph’ girl) had been killed by a street car.” In good melodramatic fashion, the ad created a stir by casting Lawrence and IMP as scrappy survivors fighting against nefarious rivals. Shortly after the stunt a new motion picture editor in the Toledo News Bee declared: “Her name is Florence Lawrence. There. After two years exercise of sway over the admiration and curiosity of the public the most popular moving picture star is known” despite “the so-called moving picture trust” having “fought every effort to learn her identity.”73 “The rumor caused considerable depression among our patrons,” a theater owner wrote Lawrence, until the manager promoted her location “in the land of the living” and promised “the ladies . . . souvenir photographs” of the actress. “I have taken the greatest interest in your pictures,” wrote sixteen-year-old Betty Melnick from St. Louis after Lawrence appeared there. “Why you make me cry, laugh, and oh you make me see things different”; she concluded, “My one great wish is to pose with you.”74
FIGURE 5. Florence Lawrence on a postcard for fans, c. 1912. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.
Lawrence’s persona as a western American–styled New Woman bent on hair-raising demonstrations of women’s social and physical mobility likely accounted for the different perspective Betty Melnick took from the star.75 A cowgirl in an era in which frontier mythology influenced how so many Americans’ viewed their past, Lawrence’s exceptional equestrian skills made her the female counterpart of an already prized American hero and won the actress her first substantial role in the Edison short Daniel Boone, or Pioneer Days in America (1907).76 Playing a Boone daughter captured by Indians, Lawrence executes a daring escape, riding bareback at breakneck speed, long blonde curls flying behind her. After joining Vitagraph the next month, her first leading role demanded similar skills. Producer J. Stuart Blackton called Lawrence “a splendid rider,” extolling her aplomb after she narrowly escaped an accident while playing a Union spy who gets chased on horseback through the woods in The Dispatch Bearer (1907).77 The same qualities also reportedly caught Griffith’s eye. “Can you ride horses?” demanded the director at their first meeting. “I would rather ride than eat” was Lawrence’s cool reply. Dressed “like a cowgirl in the wild and wooly West” for The Girl and the Outlaw (1908), she went on to make over a dozen “Wild West Pictures” there.78 Yet Lawrence’s roles cohered less around a particular filmic type than around the display of a dramatic range that swung from knockabout romantic comedies like the “Jonesy” film series to dramatic love stories like Resurrection (1909).79
“Florence Lawrence is a tomboy. She told me so herself,” began an early publicity piece that used her real-life western background to explain her self-reliance, derring-do, and political progressivism. “I have always been an actress. When I was a child I roamed all over the West leading a gypsy-like life,” she explained.80 The claim was no mere puffery. Lawrence was born Florence Bridgwood in 1886 in Hamilton, Ontario. Her father, George, was a carriage maker; her mother, Lotta, an actress thirty-six years younger than her husband. When Lotta permanently separated from George in 1890, she became “versatile as a leading lady of her own company which produced all sorts of plays,” taking “Baby Flo” along while she toured “the West with the Lawrence Dramatic Players.”81 This persona would have prepared readers for her support of woman suffrage, because western women’s movements had already won women the vote in most of the American and Canadian West. In 1913 Lawrence attended an eastern suffrage march in Washington,
