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273 Chapter 13 Coquette Goodbye to the Glad Girl If you want to see the signs of the times, watch women. Their evolution is the most important thing in modern life. —Rachel Crothers During the production of Douglas Fairbanks’s The Iron Mask late in 1928, Mary Pickford was busily preparing her first talking picture, Coquette. It premiered on April 12, 1929, just two months after her husband’s film was released. In another two months, both Doug and Mary would begin their first—and only—sound film together, The Taming of the Shrew. Unlike The Iron Mask, which was essentially a silent film, limiting Fairbanks ’s two spoken prologues to scant minutes of screen time, Coquette was all talking, affording curious viewers their first opportunity to hear what “America’s Sweetheart” sounded like. It proved to be a box-office triumph, although today it is one of her most neglected films. Now, if Coquette is remembered at all, it is because it won her an Oscar for Best Actress honors in 1929—the first such award ever to be given for a talking picture. Today’s viewers, unaware of the film’s immediate cultural and technological contexts, will watch it with some puzzlement. How could this talky, static melodrama, this aggregate of self-conscious poses and stilted speech, ever have enjoyed any degree of acclaim? Can this really be the same Mary Pickford, who was once “the glad girl” of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Pollyanna, and the most popular and successful actress in the world? Doug and Mary Find Their Voices 274 It must be said that while Coquette is very much a film of its time, its use of synchronized sound is at least a considerable technical advance over The Iron Mask and earlier all-talking features, like Warner Bros.’ The Lights of New York. It affords us a close-up in time of an industry and a career that, for both Doug and Mary, were at a crossroads. A reconsideration is in order. In the late l920s, after a spectacular career that began in 1909 at American Biograph, matured in the mid-teens at Paramount-Artcraft, and soared to its greatest heights in 1919 with the formation with her husband of United Artists, Mary Pickford found herself facing an uncertain future. She had just released My Best Girl a few months before, and even if an isolated critic or two caviled at the obviousness of the thirty-five-year-old Mary’s youthful makeup, she was still clearly a box-office draw. But change was in the air. Mary was disconsolate at the death of her beloved mother, Charlotte, on March 21, 1928. Rumors were flying that her fabled marriage with Douglas was breaking down under the pressures of his alleged extramarital pursuits. Moreover, she was growing increasingly dissatisfied with the “little-girl” image the public clung to. In August of that year she abandoned her famous curls and cut her hair into a stylish bob. “I wanted to be free of the shackles of playing little girls with curls,” she recalled in 1958. “[But] I got the most indignant, insulting letters. I thought, ‘If that’s all it is, after a lifetime in the theater and motion pictures, if it’s only eighteen curls keeping me in pictures, it’s about time I retired.”1 Here, at least, was a challenge Mary could tackle. Despite United Artist producer Joe Schenck’s declaration that UA would not make talkies, she was determined to experiment with the new technology. Drawing upon her theatrical background, she decided to adapt a popular play of the day. Allegedly, it was her friend, Lillian Gish, who first recommended George Abbott’s Broadway stage play, Coquette. Coquette was the big hit of the early 1927 Broadway season.2 Helen Hayes appeared in the title role. The Jed Harris production premiered on November 8 and ran for 253 performances. Abbott is best remembered today for his hit stage productions of Pal Joey (1940), The Pajama Game (1954), Damn Yankees (1955), and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962). At the time of Coquette, he was very much the young man about Broadway. He had been a student of George Pierce Baker at Harvard; acted in the role of “Dynamite Jim” in John Howard Lawson’s important production of Processional in 1924; and had staged his first successes on Broadway, The Fall Guy, cowritten by James Gleason (filmed by Coquette...

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