offered a surprising lesson: stature on stage did not guarantee a following on film. “Movie” audiences had a mind of their own, Zukor learned, and the clearest expressions of their tastes ran to ingénues like Lawrence and Pickford and serial queens like Mary Fuller, star of the first action-adventure episodic serial What Happened to Mary? (1912). After parlaying the association with Bernhardt into an alliance with the respected Broadway producer Daniel Frohman, Zukor purchased the rights to film Little Devil with an eye toward approaching Pickford about joining Famous Players. “The screen public will choose its favorites. There will be a star system rivaling—maybe outshining—that of the stage,” he prophesized to Mary and Charlotte over lunch. Pickford needed little pleading, having witnessed how the “young girls [who] rushed up and said ‘Isn’t this Mary Pickford?’ ” at the stage door wanted to meet Little Mary of the screen, not Juliet of the boards.106 And so, “after a much heated negotiation” over terms, the two incipient titans formed a partnership in the summer of 1913 founded on the belief that the industry’s future lay in nurturing the relationship between audiences and stars.107
From the start, Pickford and Zukor’s collaboration sought to capitalize on the interest fans showed in her rapscallion ingénues. After returning to motion picture work, she played three sharp-witted scamps of humble origins in action-adventure stories that tethered her star’s advance to that of her sex’s. In The Bishop’s Carriage (1913), Caprice (1913), and Hearts Adrift (1914), Pickford played, respectively, an orphan who steals to survive before triumphing on the stage, a mountain girl who captures the heart of a wealthy beau after great difficulty, and the survivor of a shipwreck who starts a family with a man only to have his wife’s arrival prompt her suicide.108 Although these films are lost, the traces that remain exhibit the imprint of the classic Pickford screen type: a fearless, funny, lovely guttersnipe whose poundings by fate bind her audience to her in sympathy and love. These films employed a variation of the melodramatic mode that I call romantic melodramas, whose production swelled along with feature films. Taken up by many of the most popular actresses of the day, romantic melodramas tracked the exploits of a strong-willed heroine attempting to make her way in a hostile world. Charting their heroines’ risky adventures along the path to maturity, they required the display of physical comedy, emotional pathos, and derring-do and often abruptly concluded with their heroines clasped in the arms of the right man. Yet however conventional their endings, the action of these melodramas typically focused on women’s adventures rather than on capturing the heart of a man, the plot long used to narrate women’s lives.109
The part Pickford played in Tess of the Storm Country (1914) crystallized the appeal of heroines in romantic melodramas. Indeed, tomboy Tess proved so popular that Pickford remade the film as an independent producer at United Artists in 1922. A motherless urchin, Tess is the daughter of a fish poacher who gets framed for a murder. While he languishes in jail, Tess fights off the true killer’s attempt to force her into marriage, rescues an unwed pregnant girl from drowning herself, delivers her baby, agrees to raise it, and confers grace upon the dying child when a minister refuses. The film’s end features Tess reuniting with the wealthy beau she spurned earlier for his doubts about her moral character. The role showcased her ability to combine contrasting moral qualities into an inoffensive whole: hers was a virtuous rascal, a hoyden of preternatural self-control, a young woman whose mane of golden, Pre-Raphaelite curls telegraphed her sensuality and grace.
From its first frame, Tess announced its intention to satisfy female fans’ expectations for a rousing romantic melodrama in which a young, beautiful girl saves the day—and then gets her guy. The film’s opening credits read: “Daniel Frohman Presents America’s Foremost Film Actress, Mary Pickford, in the famous tale of woman’s heroism, ‘Tess of the Storm Country’ by Grace Miller White.”110 Reviews confirmed Tess was a feminine affair, calling it “a story by a woman, of a woman, and for women,” though conceding the movie was “for men too.”111 In highlighting the film’s relationship to White’s best-selling novel, the movie aimed to draw the large readership for these novels into movie houses. Future films turned the strategy into a near-formula, as Pickford produced popular “growing girl” novels like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), based on Kate Douglas Wiggin’s 1903 novel, and Daddy-Long-Legs (1919), written by Jean Webster in 1912. Often these films were adapted, written, and in some cases even directed by Frances Marion, Pickford’s close friend and one of the era’s most successful screenwriters.112 Given the engrained habit of viewing Pickford as playing innocent children, it is crucial to emphasize the in de pen dent, spirited, and adult personalities of most of her heroines. Of her fifty-two feature films, Pickford played a child in seven and remained a child in only three.113 More typically, whether based on literary adaptations or on original screenplays, as with The Little American (1917) and The Love Light (1921), Pickford’s romantic melodramas featured young women struggling to find happiness and to restore order in a chaotic world.
Zukor called Mary Pickford “the first of the great stars,” undoubtedly because the success of Tess of the Storm County lifted Famous Players “onto the high road,” paving the way for the vertically integrated, monopolistic structure that characterized the studio system of Hollywood’s so-called classical era.114 Pickford used Tess to negotiate terms in January 1915 that included a salary of $2,000 a week and an equal share of her productions’ profits. Unbeknownst to Pickford, film exhibitors absorbed her raise by paying more for her films than others released by Famous Players’ distributor, Paramount. “Block-booking” offered a more efficient means to monopolize the business than the Edison Trust’s interminable legal wrangling. By forcing exhibitors to purchase less desirable movies to secure a favored star, block-booking made Pickford the “nucleus around which [Zukor] built his whole program,” in William de Mille’s words.115 When she caught on to the practice in 1916, she demanded another raise and a host of concessions that afforded her greater artistic control.116 Zukor’s decision to meet her terms reflected his belief that stars—as the most reliable predictor of box office returns—were also the key element in the industry’s profit structure.117 But Paramount’s head balked at Pickford’s salary, believing that exhibitors and audiences would revolt at the higher prices it entailed. Rather than lose Pickford, Zukor seized control of distribution by merging with a rival company owned by Jesse Lasky.118 Combined, the Famous Players–Lasky Corporation accounted for nearly three-quarters of Paramount’s product, allowing FPL to control the company.119 Pickford’s revised contract at the end of 1916 guaranteed her the greater of either a million-dollar salary or half the profits of her films, the right to select her director and supporting cast, and created Artcraft as a separate “star series” for her work.
The development was widely reported as making Pickford, “The Latest Addition to Our Actor Managers” and the leading exemplar of a broader trend. By the next year, Photoplay’s editor James Quirk decried the effect of this “ ‘her own company’ epidemic” on the industry’s health.120 Put differently, Pickford’s star may have burned the brightest and lasted longest, but many other female celebrities glimmered around her light. Indeed, a disproportionate number of the players who earned the interest of audiences during the era of silent features were other women.121 “Remember this was the day of women,” scenarist Lenore Coffee recalled, “Beautiful women in full flower.”122 Clearly, actors like Charlie Chaplin, William Hart, Wallace Reid, and swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks, who became Pickford’s second husband in 1920, were huge stars. But if the stars of lower-prestige Western films and comedies are set aside, the list of those capable of opening either a movie or an independent film company remains heavily skewed toward the leading ladies of the day. Actresses had a near-monopoly over leading roles in adventure serials and the romantic and society melodramas that became the industry’s first prestige features, films that coincided with the star system’s development.123
The persona of the era’s greatest serial queen and Pickford’s personal heroine—Pearl White—displayed how important women with virile personas were to the star system’s development. Pickford called herself “a devoted fan” of White.124 Although White probably never set foot
