championed workingwomen and traveled the world, alone, in fewer than eighty days. Part of the first generation of middle-class women who benefited from broader access to higher education, Parsons attended college while working sporadically as a reporter and teacher. Like most of this cohort, she married later, at twenty-four, and then relinquished her ambition to write, moving with husband John Parsons to Burlington, Iowa, where she gave birth to her only child, Harriet. Her choices mirrored those made by most privileged white women in the era, women who skirted the volatile topic of mixing work outside the home with a family inside it by seemingly sacrificing one for the other.14 Her decision to leave her philandering husband and move to Chicago in 1910 set Parsons on a path closer to the one trod by less privileged urban migrants. Working as a secretary at the Chicago Tribune, her $9-a-week salary barely supported her small family. Yet, like many workingwomen, she managed almost nightly trips to the movies, reveling in a fan culture that nurtured her ambition to write.
The few fan magazines that existed in the early 1910s touched lightly on the lives of famous personalities, but lavished attention on scenario writing, offering tips to hopefuls, contests with cash prizes for the best stories, and tales about women who succeeded at the job. Female-authored scenarios poured into film studios, convincing Essanay to hire an editor to evaluate the material.15 Parsons got the job. Now earning $20 a week, she brought her mother to Chicago to care for Harriet. Parsons loved the work. She read scripts and wrote more than one hundred scenarios. Most important, she turned herself into an authority on the new field, publishing How to Write for the Movies in 1915. The book was a hit and Parsons sold the serialization rights to the Chicago Herald-Record. With her job at Essanay threatened by an “efficiency man,” she flirted her way into a part-time gig at the newspaper, writing the Sunday column “How to Write Photo Plays.” After the series’ success, she talked her way into a job as a columnist who offered a “behind the scenes look” at the “personalities ‘up front’ ” in motion pictures.16
The nationally syndicated daily column that Parsons wrote beginning in 1915 partially presented the movies in ways that prefigured how Hollywood’s star system helped to spread the consumer ethos that exploded during the 1920s.17 Her coffee-klatch tone and “just folks” manner suited the needs of expanding corporate media structures that sought to preserve an intimate feel despite their scale, blurring the lines separating hard (political) from soft (cultural) news, city from country, working from middle class in order to attract the largest possible market audience. As a late-Victorian middle-class woman from the countryside turned single working professional middle-aged mother in the city, Parsons was ideally suited to address the target consumer culture coveted: a cross-class, multigenerational audience of white women with a modicum of disposable cash.18 All these women led “monotonous and humdrum lives” and craved “glamour and color,” according to the advertising trade journal Printer’s Ink.19 Parsons’s column presented the industry’s female celebrities’ personal relationships and work lives as designed to fill these needs.
Yet in ways that pointed to the industry’s Janus-faced relationship to modern femininity, the mass-mediated fan culture of the movies that Parsons helped to create also treated readers as intimates in a conversation about the pleasures and perils of modern womanhood. A special new series in the Herald-Record, “How to Become a Movie Actress,” demonstrated the relationship that Parsons cultivated. The paper’s announcement of the series assured readers that Parsons’s “technical knowledge of the game” and status as “an intimate of all the big movie stars” made her uniquely “qualified to give inside information to girls who are eager to enter the motion picture field.” Thus Parsons used the rhetoric of expertise to establish her authority as an instructor in the art of composing a successful personality.20 But she adopted the stance of a warm, motherly guide rather than the distant scold who later became classic to advertising. Her chatty, tongue-in-cheek style encouraged readers to consider themselves her intimates, thereby nurturing the kind personal connection that fans sought with movie stars.21 The column’s promotion also emphasized that Parsons sold lessons in nothing less than personal transformation. “Others have become rich and famous. Why not you?”22 The assumptions built into the column testified to the limits of the kind or romantic individualism she preached, while promising women a means to imagine transcending the typical boundaries imposed by gender.
Indeed, the series seemed designed to induce a self-reflective reverie in female readers that encouraged them to take their daydreams to heart. Its opening prelude whispered, “Dreams—dreams most fascinating to young women all over America are coming true every day. Do you dream of becoming a motion picture actress and actually plan to be one?”23 If so, such readers were not to worry, since “not a day passes but some girl who has shared your fondest fancies is made exquisitely happy.” The format that followed involved Parsons soliciting tips and advice in short interviews with those already successful in the movies, allowing her to advertise the movies’ women personalities as modern celebrities by fleshing out their exploits both on and off screen. Equally important, she then used their personal experiences to create a new genre of success stories for girls whose master plot centered on presenting the movies as a place where those with “brains and beauty,” in the parlance of the day, and a little luck could reinvent the terms of feminine success.24 Parsons, and those she interviewed in “How to Become Movie Actress,” treated the ambition to become a star with matter-of-fact aplomb, contradicting the notion that such expectations were at all fabulous. Indeed, in Parsons’s hands, the movies’ central product was coming-of-age stories for girls that promised happily-ever-after endings. The fact that these stories offered young women the chance to win interesting, lucrative work that celebrated their femininity made them unique. Casting young women in the role of adventurer, Parsons sought “to inspire the ambitious” by making a romance of their quest for individual success.25
The column thrived by communicating a host of contradictory messages about the qualities women would need to achieve their ends. This approach in part imitated, in part further twisted the ethics of chance and rational striving that had long coexisted in the coming-of-age tales told to boys.26 Some of the advice sought to inculcate in young women the so-called masculine values, like aggression and self-promotional skills, which the nation’s corporate order prized. Determine “if you genuinely photograph well,” Parsons instructed, and ascertain which studio “you think you fit best with, and then send them your picture and a letter saying that you would like a chance to prove your worth as an extra.” Here the hopeful’s fate depended on possessing an image whose value others recognized. The column also prescribed the traditional path of starting at the bottom, as an “extra girl,” in order to reach the top. Yet even as such a course paid tribute to the logic of the Protestant work ethic, chancy factors such as “pictorial beauty” and talent entered into the equation of what determined an aspirant’s eventual fate. “Start as an extra in some good studio,” Parsons quoted Pearl White’s costar Crane Wilbur as having instructed. But Wilbur quickly tempered this statement with one that indicated an awareness that success might lay outside an individual’s control. “If you have talent they’ll find you quick enough.”27 The column’s contradictory messages about how to get ahead—it preached diligent effort in climbing up from the bottom even as it celebrated instant results tied to magical forces outside one’s control—were a commonplace of the Protestant work ethic and of the times. Stories by writers like Horatio Alger required that young men exhibit a commitment to the virtues of constant industriousness, thrift, sobriety, and moral rectitude in order to qualify as worthy heroes. Yet, as the plots of these books unfolded, ultimately “luck and patronage” became the architects of the hero’s good fortune.28 Here the relationship between form, as disciplined effort, and content, as talent and a pretty face, grew even more attenuated, as a girl armed only with confidence in her perfect picture went forth to triumph in one of the nation’s fasting-growing industries.
These contradictions often intensified when the figure of the male movie director, portrayed as a patron of aspirants, entered the column, causing Parsons to proffer advice that, willy-nilly, wove strategies long considered innately feminine with others long deemed masculine.
