a cigarette, and in the presence of all these men, raise a highball to her lips,” she recalled, relishing her identification with a woman whose persona was a running rebuke to propriety. The publicity surrounding Pickford’s Broadway stardom associated her with serial queens like White: “You have seen her rough riding on the western plains. You have watched her during thrilling moments on runaway motorcars and flying machines. And of course you tried to find out her name and failed.” White’s example also influenced Pickford’s answer to a query about how she kept in shape. “I used to ride broncos, drive racing cars, swim dangerous rapids and slide down precipices.”125
As the first film genre designed to appeal to women, serials featured young women whose western toughness and virility shaped their allure with both sexes. Released in both print and film formats on a weekly or monthly basis, short serial films were held together by an ongoing adventure plot. Actresses went uncredited as was still customary. But the journalistic discourse that ran alongside the print versions of serial films made Mary Fuller, Helen Holmes, and White into the first international film stars. Beginning with Mary Fuller in the first female-centered serial thriller, What Happened to Mary (1912–1913), stories about these actresses celebrated how their real-life heroism inspired their parts; they were said to perform their own stunts after all.126 Edna Vercoe, a teenage fan in Chicago, filled her “movy album” with stories about all three actresses’ remarkable bravery and romantic successes. “Mary Fuller a Real Heroine,” declared one article about Fuller’s protection of the cast and crew from snakes during a recent shoot.127 “Miss Fuller finds that her proficiency in riding, shooting, and other outdoor sports” was “most helpful in creating many of her parts,” announced another.128 Such reporting indicates why most film scholars agree that the focus on these women’s authentic bravery and athleticism sold fans “a fantasy of female power.” But most also concur that this picture was tempered by an “equally vivid exposition of female defenselessness and weakness” that required the intervention of a strong, male hand for eventual success.129 Such a view captures the ambivalence that these heroines often provoked, but it misses how female fans may have also enjoyed the erotic tension produced by watching these conventionally feminine-looking but manly-acting heroines oscillate between aggression and subservience, pleasure and pain. Moreover, as specifically western heroines, these actresses needed to be able to both cause and tolerate acute physical distress in order to prove their valor and achieve the type of progress equated with the continent’s conquest. This ability was a hallmark of the iconic masculinity associated with western heroes from Davy Crockett to William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Silent western films exaggerated and then spread the association of modern “Americanism” with sensationally mobile men whose violent actions made possible the nation’s continental claim.130
FIGURE 6. A general publicity photograph of Mary Pickford emphasizing her tough serial-queen side, c. 1922. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.
The longest-running serial, The Hazards of Helen (1914–1917), promoted a similar vision of modern American women. A cursory glance at the extant prints of Hazards displays the mise-en-scène of a modern Western, as giant locomotives, fleet horses, speedy motorcycles, and rifle-toting good and bad guys track back and forth across the dusty open spaces of California.131 Like the men with whom she works, Holmes confronts constant tests of her daring, bravery, and endurance as she attempts to tame her harsh environment. A telegraph operator charged with protecting a railroad station under continual assault, Helen is the film’s lone female, a woman who rides, shoots, rescues, and is rescued by her fellows in a landscape in which outlaws abound. The publicity about Hazards’ first lead, Helen Holmes, emphasized her identity as a genuine westerner, born in “her father’s private car somewhere between Chicago and Salt Lake” and raised “in the railroad yards.”132 An excellent horse woman reputed to perform her own stunts, Holmes insisted that doing so was just “one of the demands upon a leading woman that must be met” without “losing sympathy or that air of femininity of which we are all so proud.” By that, she explained, “I mean the heroic side, deeds of valor, based on the highest ideals.”133 Their identification with the West—a region that valued toughness and endurance in either sex—smoothed serial queens’ display of a type of overtly sexy American girl rarely seen on screens at the time. “This slim, seductively rounded young woman with the luring lips and the ‘come-hither’ eyes, looked to be a most dangerous person,” one piece about Holmes tempted. Others described her in more conventionally romantic terms, detailing her marriage to the serial’s director, J.P. MacGowan, and decision to adopt a baby girl.134 Yet marriage and motherhood produced not fewer public responsibilities but more. When MacGowan fell ill in 1915, Holmes took charge of directing, writing, and managing Hazards; in 1917 the two started their own film company.
FIGURE 7. Helen Holmes on a postcard for fans, c. 1912. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.
FIGURE 8. Helen Holmes and J.P. MacGowan shooting an episode of The Hazards of Helen (1913). Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.
Actress Ruth Roland was another western daredevil whose international popularity displayed the appeal of this model of American womanhood to audiences worldwide. By most accounts, Roland’s popularity was second only to Pearl White’s. Both women were actress-writer-producers. Between 1911 and 1915, both were also the only women credited with earning spots alongside male Western film stars in popularity contests in a budding film genre that mostly targeted boys.135 Both also gained fame as serial queens working with the French film company Pathé. “The man sits in his office from nine to five dictating letters, invariably pines to be riding a spirited horse out West in the sixties or seventies and dodging redskins on the warpath,” Photoplay explained. “That’s why Pearl White, Ruth Roland, and Maire Walcamp have a following from Oshkosh to Timbuctoo [sic]. . . . In India Pearl White is the most popular of all the film stars and serials are about the only form of cinema that the natives will flock to see.”136 Born into a theatrical family in San Francisco, Roland took to the boards at age five, moving to Los Angeles to live with an aunt after her actress-mother died. Eight of her eleven serials were Westerns that showcased her equestrian skills on her horse Joker.137 Chinese advertisements trumpeted Roland’s western American athleticism: “Riding on a furious horse climbing the cliff as if walking on flat land, her talents are unsurpassable.” Other publicity emphasized her talent as “a business woman of the first water.” Roland also created her own production company, writing, producing, and starring in serials like The Timber Queen (1922). Later she put her fortune to work in real estate, buying “a tract of land between Universal City and Hollywood” that she subdivided and sold to “her fellow workers in the movie industry.”138 After largely retiring from the screen in the late 1920s, Roland became a prominent entrepreneur who promoted women’s business opportunities until her early death in 1937.
FIGURE 9. Ruth Roland riding her horse Joker in a publicity photograph sent to fans, c. 1912. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.
FIGURE 10. Ruth Roland, real estate entrepreneur, promoting women’s business opportunities by writing “how to get rich maxims” for women
