spread before such young girls as were alert enough, and husky enough, and apt enough to take advantage of it.” “With the exception of Mary Pickford, I can think of no girl who has reaped her field of chance so completely, opulently, securely, as Pearl White.” White’s good fortune derived from a spirit that made her a “female Alexander” bent on finding “new worlds to conquer.” But her achievement was also cast in the more modern terms associated with corporate success: Pearl White possessed “that which is really the quality of few men: the true financial instinct.” The actress-heroine of Rupert Hughes’s Souls for Sale (1921), an early novel about the movie colony, defends her little sister’s decision to run away and join her in Los Angeles in a manner straight out of the Pearl White mold. “All over the world was full of runaway girls striking out for freedom and for wealth and renown,” the heroine of the novel thinks.” “Let love wait! The men have kept us waiting for thousands of years, till they were ready. Now let them wait for us.”159
CHAPTER 2
Women-Made Women
Writing the “Movies” before Hollywood
We built the modern movie industry on the star system, but the public made the stars
—Adolph Zukor
Prominent stories about Mary Pickford and Pearl White in magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal and Photoplay augured the rise of the type of journalism that the star system shaped and spread: celebrity reporting as mainstream news. Advertising “movie” personalities—the nickname that stuck despite many insiders’ preference for the higher-toned “photoplay” and “motion picture”—quickly became essential to the industry’s profits. Carl Laemmle and Adolph Zukor won the gamble that audiences would pay more to get closer to favorites, teaching a lesson that became an early axiom of movie production: stars best forecast box office success. Thus, women’s preeminence in the movies’ celebrity culture emerged from the shared assumption that women mostly decided which of the era’s exploding number of consumer goods succeeded. The idea positioned the female consumer at the center of the struggle between an established ethos of production that prized the industriousness necessary to produce a mountain of things and an emerging ethos of consumption that celebrated the abandon needed to buy them (possibly even on credit!). As many have shown, the nation’s budding advertising industries often addressed this consumer as a paranoid, passive, irrational conformist who needed the guidance of advertising elites to navigate this new landscape of desire.1
But the movies more often addressed women as experts who understood their importance as figures who acted as the arbiters of what counted as successful popular culture in modern times. “Three out of every four of all cinema audiences are women. I suppose all successful novels and plays are also designed to please the female sex too,” instructed film curator Iris Barry in The Public’s pleasure (1925). The alarm prompted by this idea, after all, generated much of the mounting concern over the feminization of American culture that intellectuals like Hugo Munsterberg expressed. Yet if the task is to explain the broad power of the mass culture consumed by women, rather than to judge its moral implications or aesthetic properties, then what becomes apparent is how it acted as a market domain that tirelessly discussed the problems and promises of managing a new womanhood. Put differently, in becoming a consumer bloc considered to share core interests and desires, movie fans participated in “an intimate public,” in Lauren Berlant’s influential formulation. Mass-mediated stories about movie personalities addressed fans as holding a common worldview, thereby cultivating a sense that women writers, celebrities, and readers were sharing confidences about their common travails and triumphs. Participation in this fan culture offered lessons not just about how to choose the right things but also about how to help each other survive and thrive in the wider world. Calling herself “a woman’s woman” in one interview, Pickford noted in another: “I like to see my own sex achieve. My success has been due to the fact that women like the pictures in which I appear. I think I admire most in the world the girls who earn their own living. I am proud to be one of them.”2
Women journalists writing in newspapers and fan magazines did the most to help their female readers imagine these movie personalities as women-made women.3 The “moving picture has opened a great new field for women folk” where her “originality,” “perseverance,” and “brains are coming to be recognized on the same plane as [a] man’s,” declared Gertrude Price, one of several prominent female “moving picture experts,” in the Toledo News-Bee.4 In Breaking into the Movies (1927), publicist Virginia Morris explained how the industry’s preoccupation with the female fan turned publicity writing into a field open to both sexes. Since “the large majority of film audiences consisted of women” eager to know about “the feminine star,” producers decided “that the woman picture patron could be most easily reached by information written from the feminine angle.”5 The strategy of using women writers to appeal to other women was one of multiple tactics devised to attract more women into movie audiences during the 1910s. By 1914 motion picture editors and publicity departments advised theater owners that “women and girls” were the most avid followers of “motion picture news.”6 By the early 1920s, Photoplay claimed that women composed 75 percent of movie fans. One editorial extolled the movies as a “blessed refuge” for “the lonely girl” without “the money for expensive drama” after a hard day’s work.7 As a result, insiders imagined their ideal spectator as a young white woman eager to identify with role models who, however fantastically, reflected the changed condition under which they lived, worked, played, and dreamed.8
These writers created new western myths that appealed to these fans’ desires, blending wish fulfillment and social reflection.9 Journalists downplayed some aspects of women’s accomplishments, such as their managerial roles, and exaggerated others, such as the frequency with which extras became stars. But, as women experts explained to women readers how ordinary women became extraordinary new women, they created a female-centered leisure space that reinforced two impressions: the movies aimed to help women satisfy their new desires, and fans’ support of the industry furthered their ambitions as a sex. The social imaginary that emerged as a consequence mostly described these women-made women as shedding traditional ways of acting female to become “twentieth century,” “modern,” or “New Women,” to use Photoplay’s preferred terms.10 The common use both of contests that promised readers the chance to work alongside their favorite scenario writer, “cutter” (editor), or star in Los Angeles, and of inspirational interviews with female movie personalities allowed fans to imagine experimenting with their own self-transformation.11
No single writer in this era did as much as journalist and publicist Louella Parsons to explain to readers who mattered to the movies and why. This chapter uses Parsons’s reporting to track the development of the celebrity discourse aimed at female fans. Parsons honed her craft by giving form to the figures inhabiting the movie landscape before the business of making pictures and Hollywood were synonymous.12 Between 1915 and 1920, Parsons was among the first, and certainly the most successful, reporters to write a nationally syndicated daily column focused not on films, but on the news surrounding the industry and its stars. The industry had provided Parsons with the means to effect the kind of melodramatic, near-magical personal transformation that she later specialized in selling to readers. As a producer of this fan culture, she earned a following by describing the professional and personal activities of the industry’s assertive, in de pen dent, resourceful, and glamorous female protagonists. And, increasingly, Parsons described the industry’s new home in Los Angeles as a novel kind of western frontier that sought women adventurers. In helping to set the tone and content of the movie industry’s relationship with women fans, she fashioned an image and role that afforded her a great deal of power. In the process, Parsons became at once agent and symbol, cause and consequence, of the industry’s production of new ideas about femininity.
I
Born in 1881 in Dixon, Illinois, Parsons was the granddaughter
