in the context of teaching aspirants the importance of making their own breaks. Armed with a name, she pragmatically suggested, one had “a much better chance.” “Better still,” she advised hopefuls to “discover when a big feature is slated for production. To succeed one must be both resourceful and inventive.” Parsons solicited tips from D.W. Griffith, the director made famous by the critical praise and social controversy provoked by The Birth of a Nation (1915), a traditional melodrama about the era of Reconstruction that glorified the Ku Klux Klan’s salvation of the South from Northern carpetbaggers and its white women from the rape of lascivious black men.29 As described by Parsons, the “new Griffith doctrine,” was simply a novel name for the old Pygmalion myth. According to Griffith, the best actresses emerged from “untrained” young women who followed a director’s every command. Parsons also reported that directors Cecil B. DeMille and Thomas Ince had a preference for women willing to act as moldable clay. Their talent in shaping such raw material was said to have put “numberless untrained girls on the road to fame and success.”30 Yet even as these men underscored the importance of ladylike behavior on the set, all three also warned that manly “courage” was vital to succeeding in front of the camera.
Indeed, a fan following Parsons’s column, or myriad other accounts that circulated about Pickford and the other actresses who worked with Griffith and DeMille, would have encountered many more stories about the control they exercised over men.31 Certainly, as Parson’s column evolved, she devoted far more space to describing women’s individual struggles and accomplishments in breaking into the movies than to telling stories about men’s role in the process. Written by, for, and about women, these stories predominantly framed the topic of what constituted a successful presentation of femininity in the context of what other women wanted to hear in an era in which the New Woman, feminism, and women’s influence on popular culture were all topics of social controversy. In fact, when men entered Parsons’s column at all, she was more often interested in demonstrating how women managed to get the upper hand. Her description of Clara Kimball Young’s relationship with her director husband was one such instance. Parsons presented Young as the “Ideal Film Personality” whose “beauty and brains and wealth” made her the “Ideal of Whatevery Sixteen-Year-Old Girl Would Like to Possess.”32 “Neither one of us would be willing to submerge his individuality into the thoughts of the other one, no matter how much we love each other,” she explained. Indeed, Young declared that although her husband was the director, “he is not always the boss. When I make up my mind I generally get what I want. Sometimes I have to argue with my good friend [producer] Mr. Selznick, my sweet mother, and my dear husband, but if it is for my ultimate good I GET it.”33
Young’s insistence on demanding her way fit neatly into the groove crafted by the stage’s prima donnas. Indeed, movie stars like Young magnified this convention on both the silent screen and in the explosion of print that created the first movie stars’ personas, making her a visible sign of modernity itself: a glamorous, individualized, and work-defined personality known for breaking and reassembling the codes governing feminine propriety.34 Griffith, DeMille, and Ince—all former stage actors in the “player-centered institution” that the theater became by 1900—knew exactly what they were up against when confronting the industry’s emerging female stars.35 They also understood as well as anyone in the business the economic basis of these women’s power. Virtually everyone in the movies agreed that even the most famous director’s name, as Griffith’s indubitably was before Cecil B. DeMille’s replaced it by 1920, meant little to the average fan and, hence, a movie’s bottom line.36 As Cecil’s older brother, William de Mille, put it, since “the names of writers and directors meant nothing to the public, the only thing the customers could count on in advance to give them some degree of satisfaction for their money was the name of a favorite player whose work and personality they knew and liked.” Only the star’s name above the marquee, and the title emblazoned across it, translated into box office.37 The Exhibitors’ Herald, the trade paper for theater owners, emphasized this reality in a prominently displayed letter from a publicity director. “Take it or leave it,” a man from Toledo, Ohio, declared, “the star system is what brings the shekels into your box office. This is a rule that might hang in the office of any theatre manager.”38
For such reasons, Parsons’s column emphasized that success in the movies depended on impressing other women as much as men. Parsons’s stories about director Lois Weber demonstrate the point. After visiting the set of her Universal production of The Dumb Girl of Portici (1915), starring ballerina Anna Pavlova, Parsons lauded Weber’s “executive ability,” pronouncing her “the most famous woman director and photo playwright.” By 1915 Weber was Universal’s most famous director, male or female, with a style as distinctive as Griffith’s.39 Another stage actress turned movie-writer-producer-director, Weber’s persona stressed her respectability by focusing on her past as a former Salvation Army worker, and on her present as a married middle-class matron. This star image allowed Weber to exploit assumptions about respectable women’s inherent moral superiority that smoothed her making films about volatile topics like abortion and birth control. Little wonder that Weber’s co-worker at Universal, director Ida May Park, boasted in Careers for Women, a well-received 1920 vocational guide aimed at high school and college graduates, that there was “no finer calling for a woman” than directing movies.40 Another interview detailed Weber’s career trajectory: her start at Gaumont Film Studio in 1908 with her husband Phillips Smalley; their eventual move to the Rex Company to work with director Edwin Porter, who was said to bequest the production company to their “capable hands” upon his departure. When Rex became a Universal subsidiary in 1912, the couple became co–production heads, but it was Weber who built a national reputation as a filmmaker. “It’s all up to Lois Weber,” Parsons reported the director confiding; “I am blamed or praised whichever way the picture turns out. Phillips would efface himself entirely and make me director in chief.” Parsons left no doubt about who was in charge, noting that Smalley “came to [Weber] for advice upon every question that presented itself.” By the time a “distressed masculine voice” from the wardrobe department interrupted the interview, the kinds of gender inversions that flourished on motion picture sets were plain.41
Parsons was able to call Weber “the most famous woman director and photo playwright” at Universal, because eleven women directed more than 170 films from the studio’s 1912 inception through 1919. The May 1913 opening of Universal City, the company’s West Coast headquarters, displayed how publicizing the studio as a tourist attraction involved promoting it as a place that encouraged gender play. “Where Work Is Play and Play Is Work: Universal City, California, the Only Incorporated Moving Picture Town in the World, and Its Unique Features. ‘Movie’ Actresses Control Its Politics,” declared the Universal Weekly in December 1913. “Linking work and play,” historian Mark Garrett Cooper writes, “the corporate mythos of Universal City valued women who publically played with authoritative parts.” A mock election staged by Universal City displayed one outcome when a group of actresses formed what the Weekly called “a ‘Suffragette’ ticket.” Reports across the country claimed the suffragette ticket developed because actresses “from the East” were “keenly enthusiastic about exercising their rights of suffrage, recently conferred by the California State Legislature.”42
Women’s political participation in California was one of the many disorienting features that confronted Easterners. One of the first reports about the “big, bustling Western” ranches-cum-studios featured a dazed reporter’s catalog of their Kaleidoscopic contents, including “a Japanese pagoda,” “a Dutch village with windmills,” “the ruins of a Scotch castle,” “a New York tenement district,” and “the largest private collection” of “jungle animals” “in the world.”43 Universal City’s election of actress Laura Oakley as its new police chief and of Lois Weber as its mayor suited a landscape defined by its flair for gender ambiguity. The new Universal City that opened in 1915 supported these performances by including a day-care center and a school for workers’ children. Universal City’s administrators, called “some of the brainiest as well as the most beautiful women in America,”
