work on the emergence of the star system, which emphasizes the scandal’s precipitation of a shift in the discourse about Hollywood. Before the scandal, deCordova argues, publicity about the spotless domesticity and fabulous consumptive patterns of stars established the respectability of the movies and their personalities. After the Arbuckle trials, attention focused on exposing the private lives of residents to public view, making the topic of Hollywood’s moral impact on fans a subject of social controversy. Yet such accounts fail to explain what made the scandal so scandalous in its day.36
The Arbuckle-Rappe scandal of 1921 did not invent Hollywood, but as the final chapter of Go West, Young Women! explores, the images and words, stereotypes and censorship drives, “morality clauses” and jury verdicts that produced the scandal did as much to shape ideas about early Hollywood as any other single event. Most simply, the scandal circulated “Hollywood” among a broad audience—as a term indicating a place, product, industry, and approach to life. Used this way, “Hollywood” came into wide usage only in the scandal’s wake. As “Hollywood” quickly became a metaphor for the industry’s influence on American culture, its meaning, like the scandal itself, was not singular, transparent, or stable but was instead shifting and associational. Tethered to the fears and ambitions of different publics, contests over narrating the scandal continued for decades. Still, in the scandal’s immediate aftermath some interpretations clearly dominated others, leaving an impress of Hollywood’s social imaginary that stamped all others to come.37
Put differently, the scandal reveals much more about Hollywood’s origins if we spotlight its other principal character, Virginia Rappe. A former model turned actress of minor success, Rappe initially played a starring role in the scandal that reflected the prominence of unconventional New Western Women in the movie industry’s rise in Los Angeles. Yet fickle history has largely forgotten the important part she played in its production. Both scholars and popular writers alike have long reduced her significance to one or the other of two bit parts: an irrelevant, silly starlet, or a two-bit prostitute whose venereal disease caused her death.38 Like most historical erasures, her casting has served particular purposes, including a wish by some to clear Arbuckle’s name. Yet such characterizations have more broadly obscured young women’s agency and significance inside the landscape of early Hollywood, in part by trivializing the desires that sent young women like Rappe out west to work. Indeed, Rappe’s erasure raises questions about how the sexual double standard and the sociology of knowledge influence which version of an origin story takes hold. For even before the scandal’s eruption in 1921, many respectable Americans who could concur on little else agreed that Hollywood and its girls best symbolized the changes in gender roles and sexual feeling threatening to sweep the land. This shared assumption offered a piece of hard-to-come-by common ground in the contentious cultural climate of the postwar era.
Here, then, was the Hollywood born around Los Angeles during the era of the Great War: in a city that mirrored the larger cultural contests among Anglo-Saxon cultural custodians, new immigrants, and problem girls; in the explosion of print that surrounded and produced the first new women stars and their fans; in movie theaters filled with young working- and middle-class women; in the stories whose new western heroines shaped the fantasies and fears of a seemingly ever widening audience. Early Hollywood resulted from the collision of these parts. The rise of the movies in Los Angeles offered both a distillation and a dramatic magnification of tensions played out nationwide, as a multitude of migrants from many different countries crammed cities across the land. In the process, Hollywood provoked both loving devotion and shrill, sustained assault. Go West, Young Women! explores the implications of the motion picture industry’s development out west and then measures how the emotions generated by Hollywood’s birth influenced the sexual revolution to come.
CHAPTER 1
“Oh for a girl who could ride a horse like Pearl White”
The Actress Democratizes Fame
Mary Pickford, the silent film era’s single greatest star, published her autobiography, Sunshine and Shadow (1954), decades after the motion picture industry made her face “better known than the President of the United States.”1 Black-and-white images layer the book, and, with the skillful shorthand so necessary to celebrity, Pickford used the first photo-essay to sketch how her childhood foretold future renown. After opening with a full-page portrait of her pretty, resolute-looking mother, Charlotte Hennessy, the next photographs suggest what tested that resolve. A small cameo of her faraway-eyed, dandified father, John Smith, floats above a snapshot of the simple brick row house in Toronto that he deserted just shy of Mary’s fifth birthday, in 1897. The sorrow-faced women in the next grainy snapshot communicate their determination to shelter the three Smith children arrayed beside them on a modest apartment stoop. And here, following this picture of grim resignation and apparent innocence lost, Pickford first spotlights her preschool-aged self, Gladys Smith, a tyke whose manicured ringlets and lacy white ensemble hint at the hopes dashed by her father’s desertion. At first glance the portrait appears as conventional as little Gladys’s packaging. Closer inspection reveals a child whose furious gaze demolished the era’s portraiture conventions for her age and sex. Pickford captioned the image to emphasize both her intelligence and anger: “The cameraman thought me idiotic enough to believe there was ‘a little birdie in the black box,’ ” she explained with still simmering resentment. Thus Pickford used her coming-of-age to tell the story her publicity and films repeatedly retold: a girl needed the courage to ignore men’s prescriptions and recommendations in order to triumph over adversity and seize a man-sized share of the world’s regard.
In 1917, precisely two decades after her father’s signal act of paternal incompetence, poet Vachel Lindsay anointed Pickford “The Queen of the Movies,” and her royal highness permanently relocated to Los Angeles, where she reined over the star system that powered Hollywood’s rise around the world. By 1920, journalist Louella Parsons could, with unexpected credibility, declare the actress, writer, producer, and cofounder of United Artists—the sole independent film studio to endure in the studio era—the “greatest woman of her age.” “To repudiate this girl in haste is a high treason to the national heart,” Lindsay wrote, using Pickford’s talent to plead the artistic case of the “photoplay,” his more elevated term for moving pictures, before the New Republic’s high-brow readers. His argument displayed the tendency to equate the famous with the national spirit. For fifteen out of the magazine’s first twenty years, readers of Photoplay, which began publishing in Chicago in 1912 and quickly became the largest, wittiest, and most literate fan magazine in America, ranked Pickford the most popular star. “There has never been anything just like the public adulation showered on Mary”; she “could have risen to the top of United States Steel, if she had decided to be a Carnegie instead of a movie star,” recalled Adolph Zukor, who perfected the vertical integration of the American film industry. As another silent-era filmmaker described the awe her fame produced, Pickford was so “peculiarly pre-eminent that her position at the very top was subject to little question or jealousy.”2
Pickford’s preeminence was not quite so peculiar when placed within the broader sweep of how the actress came to embody the “democratization” of fame as elite men, and then men altogether, lost their monopoly over incarnating the combination of personal achievement, distinction, and freedom at the heart of modern renown. In this way, Pickford modified an already established role in a genre in which the actress performed a female self who grappled with what it meant for a woman to embody these ideals in ways that made her stand out from the crowd. Yet most historians’ unease with contemporary celebrity culture has complicated historicizing and assessing what the fame of actresses has to teach about modern gender roles. Without question, contemporary culture creaks under the weight of individuals talented mostly for their self-seeking display. The seemingly inexorable drift of public discourse since the Cold War toward fixating on the antics of those merely “well-known for [their] well-knowness [sic]” helped to make Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) a classic. Written as the power of television first became
