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Childhood Revisited: An Evaluation of Mary Pickford’s Youngest Characters
- The University Press of Kentucky
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23 CHILDHOOD REVISITED An Evaluation of Mary Pickford’s Youngest Characters EileenWhitfield It is childhood and its environment which teaches us things that are poignantly influential on our later lives. Mary Pickford, Visual Education, July 1924 Pickford was twenty-four when she portrayed a ten-year-old in The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917). Her remarkable re-creation of childhood was praised by critics and fans alike. Pickford frequently appeared with tall actors such as Winifred Greenwood, pictured here in an o∑-camera shot from M’liss (1918), to make her look even smaller onscreen. A Good Little Devil is a fairy tale, adapted from a story by George Sand. Its first and only Broadway production was lavishly designed, with winged sprites hanging in the air, a picturesque apple tree, and a magic well. Pickford added to the enchantment and was praised for giving “real childish spirit” to a character so “demure and tender” that the play’s “wild [animal] friends of the forest . . . come to her garden because they trust her.”‹ To the sta∑ of Theatre magazine, her ethereal streak and unadorned manner recalled Adams’s star performance in Peter Pan. Nodding to Pickford’s fame in one-reelers while claiming her as Broadway’s own, they dubbed her “The Maude Adams of the ‘Movies.’”› When Pickford returned to film later that year, one-reelers had given way to features. But the custom of casting both grown-ups and juveniles as children continued. The actress starred in a few roles in which she appears briefly as a child and becomes an adolescent. In 1917 she played a child for the entire length of The Poor Little Rich Girl, a film that brings her gift for playing preteens to remarkable life. As one critic observed, “There is never a false move or expression” to spoil the illusion that Gwendolyn (Pickford’s character) is ten years old.fi It helped, of course, that the star was only five feet tall and looked even smaller when surrounded by oversized furniture , props, and actors who were chosen for their height. She could also mirror children’s body language, writing later in Vanity Fair that a child moves “freely, its arms [swing] carelessly , its shoulders droop very slightly . . . the knee joints are loose, and the toes point inward.”fl No aspect of Mary Pickford’s career is as misunderstood as her work playing children. These characters, featured in a fraction of her movies, are beautifully rendered and deserve their popular and critical success. But after the close of the silent era, distortions and half-truths about their nature had a toxic e∑ect on Pickford’s image. Writers repeatedly claimed that Pickford usually or always played children on the screen. Others incorrectly wrote that the films in which she played adults were box-o≈ce failures. Critics who apparently had not seen the movies described the portrayals as false and coy. Indeed, her “anachronistic little girl roles” were deemed a “bizarre preoccupation.”⁄ In fact, such work by actors was common. As Pickford grew up in the 1890s, both adults and juveniles played prepubescent roles. In 1904 Maude Adams gave one of Broadway’s landmark performances as the title character in James M. Barrie ’s Peter Pan. The actress was thirty-three years old, while Peter still had all his baby teeth.¤ Broadway regulars such as Ruth Chatterton (Daddy-Long-Legs) and Patricia Collinge (Pollyanna) played both waifs and ingénues, while Pickford, Norma Talmadge, Lillian Gish, and others appeared in one-reel films as children, adolescents, and newlyweds. In January 1913, when Pickford took a respite from film and opened on Broadway as a blind girl in A Good Little Devil, she was twenty years old, a married woman, and an old hand at suggesting that her character was younger than her actual age. EileenWhitfield 24 [18.232.88.17] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:52 GMT) Actor Ernest Truex sits with Pickford under an apple tree in the 1913 stage production of A Good Little Devil. Lobby card from Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921). EileenWhitfield 26 But these would have been mere technical tricks had Pickford not instinctively related to the inner life of a child. Most of us remember only glints of childhood, and the fragments we retain are either overintense or blurred. Pickford had a gift for connecting freshly to the way a child assimilates the world. In addition, Gwen—who is virtually a prisoner in her mansion...