White’s emergence as a star in The Perils of Pauline (1914) has obscured her image as a heroine whose fame also depended on her incarnation of a western persona capable of enduring intense distress.139 The serial best recalled today, Perils ensconced White among the East Coast elite, playing an orphaned heiress whose guardian plots her assassination in order to claim her fortune. Yet White’s persona was composed of equal parts western toughness and cosmopolitan glamour, ensuring her fans knew that “Pearl White . . . is quite another person” than Pauline.140 Publicity about White and her loyal, love-struck costar, Crane Wilbur, dominated Edna Vercoe’s scrapbooks. Indeed, White reported that her fan mail was “mostly from women,” including more than a “few mash notes.”141 These stories, as well as White’s autobiography, Just Me (1919), focused on her western upbringing and stressed her rural, hardscrabble start in a “lonely log cabin” in the “Ozark Mountains of Missouri.”142 They also explained how White cultivated her remarkable athleticism during an adolescent tenure as “a bareback rider” in the circus where she perfected the equestrian skills that led to her first film breaks in shorts like The Horse Shoer’s Girl (1910). “Oh for a girl that could ride a horse like Pearl White,” swooned one young man, indicating her appeal to both sexes. After viewing a serial, one woman recalled that White “had done things the like of which I had never dreamed. She became my idol.” Her love of White sparked filial rebellion, as her father had prohibited watching serials at “the ‘houses of iniquity’,” as he called movie houses.143
Just such reactions explained why some accused serial queens of encouraging immoral behavior among their female fans.144 “I have always liked pretty women,” explained a woman in a “motion picture autobiography” that sociologist Herbert Blumer collected from Chicago youths for the Payne Film Study (PFS) in 1929. “When I’d see them in the movies I positively would try to act like them. . . . I think the movies have a great deal to do with the present day so-called ‘wildness.’ ”145 The first large-scale effort to document the effect of movies on youth, the PFS responded to mounting alarm among cultural custodians about movie stars’ displacement of traditional models of authority among the young. In the accounts offered by one hundred moviegoers about their habits and preferences from 1915 to 1929, women struck with what Moving Picture World called “serialitis” described an experience that supports film critic Elizabeth Cowie’s thesis that the process of identification stems from fans sharing “a structural relation of desire” with characters—in this case, with their independent pursuit of sex and adventure.146 The account of one self-described “naturally reserved” woman displayed the intense empathy produced by “following up some serial . . . three or four nights a week.” “I started, I believe, to suffer as much as the girl of the story did,” she admitted, adding, “I admired Miss White for her daring and courage. . . . I can recall distinctly saying to myself, ‘Oh, what a Lucky Girl to have enough money to take a trip like that—a trip across the wild desert. . . . Oh, how daring! If only it were I!’ ”147 Another, Chicago girl recalled how her “idols” “gave me an inkling of what I could do with that sense of adventure of mine.” “All summer this long legged girl in her teens, who should have been learning to bake and sew for her future husband, ran wild,” becoming a “bold, brazen hussy” who pursued the men she liked. “When I came away to college instead of getting married . . . I definitely proved that I had no sense.”148
FIGURE 11. Pearl White on a postcard for French fans, c. 1918. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.
The personas of vamps, another type that attracted much fanfare before the war, grappled more explicitly with women’s sexuality. But the publicity surrounding vamps stressed the adult and distinctly foreign identity of the actresses who played them. Their identities as non-Anglos and foreigners linked the vamp to the femme fatale type so prevalent in fin de siècle European culture. “Grab everything you want and never feel sorry for anyone but yourself,” was how one vamp, played by Louise Glaum in Sex (1920), summed up their general philosophy.149 Like the femme fatale, the vamp was an amoral predator who used her sexual power to triumph over weak-willed men. Many films about vamps featured their destruction of a man who exercised the day’s sexual double standard, which permitted men’s libertinism with less respectable women. The vamp emerges unscathed after cynically using that double standard to get what she wants. Her forgettable leading men, who represent generic stand-ins for a sort of everyman elite, are left wrecked on the shoals of her sexual power.150 Actress Theda Bara—initially described as half French, half Arab—became synonymous with the type after the release of A Fool There Was (1915).151 Olga Petrova, whose vamps were nearly as well known as Bara’s, was exclusively promoted as “a European star.” “Madame Petrova is truly an international character,” her press assured fans in 1917, “having been born in Warsaw, educated in Paris, London, and Brussels.”152 Fashioned as dark exotics, Bara, Glaum, and Petrova’s location outside the American racial mainstream supported their more sexually graphic representations, suggesting why they openly endorsed not just woman suffrage but also feminism, a new concept associated with women’s interest in sexual freedom. A widely publicized statement by Bara called her destruction of men a long overdue vengeance for her sex. “Women are my greatest fans. I am in effect a feministe,” she declared.153
The vamp and the serial queen’s shared expression of sexual virility and physical prowess placed their stars on the most volatile boundary that actresses performed in their redefinition of the public woman. A playful story entitled “Lady Gunman” savored explaining the connection created by their taste for masculine conquest. In real life, both vamp Louise Glaum and serial queen Mary Fuller could “handle a six-gun with all the sincerity of Douglas Fairbanks himself,” readers were assured. Ellis Oberholtzer, head of Pennsylvania’s powerful state film censorship board, objected to just such promotions. In a tract written to channel the growing dismay about the movies’ moral influence, Oberholtzer charged that vamps, “sex photoplays,” and serial-queen pictures provided the most damning evidence of the need for federal control. Oberholtzer decried how the typical serial depicted its heroine “in high air; in a sewer without an outlet; under straps on a log while the saw draws nearer and nearer.” “If I were to travel the country over I should not know where to find women who conceal revolvers in their blouses, or in the drawers of their dressing-tables” or a woman who grasps “an iron from the fire-set on the hearth or seizes the inevitable paper knife to slay the villain, her lover rising in time to take the blame for the crime.”154
As movie production settled around Los Angeles after 1915, publicity promoted its new habitat as a western frontier that fostered this kind of fearless femininity. “Out in Culver City the girls are growing militant,” was how one fan magazine described the behavior of some dare-devil actresses in this new locale: “quick on the trigger, and not one of them is afraid of the smell of [gun]powder—they’re used to various kinds.”155 “The ‘feel’ of Hollywood at this time was like carnival, or the way one feels when the circus is coming to town, only the circus was always there,” Lenore Coffee recollected, echoing a sentiment shared by many who attempted to capture the ambience created when the flickers came to town.156 One early account tracked a reporter wandering around the “big, bustling Western” ranches-cum-studios in “Motion-Picture Land.” Here, “in the dazzling California sunshine” a “bewildering democracy” prevailed among players. Here, playacting and reality fused. “No part of the world” was free from the “invasion” of these players, whose work spilled into the cityscape so often that one looked about for a camera when anything happened “unexpectedly.”157
Another article in Photoplay used the mythic history of the West to depict the sex-specific opportunities of this frontier circus by the sea. “The early years of the twentieth century brought to American women the same vast, almost fabulous chances that came to their grandfathers,” a writer interviewing
