Edith Wharton on Film

Introduction: A Glittering Place

 . . . I fear I must put my veto on the cinema plan. —Edith Wharton to Rutger B. Jewett (1928) Introduction: A Glittering Place In 1928, Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was invited to participate in a short documentary celebrating the accomplishments of several illustrious American women called Woman Marches On, to be produced by the Will Hayes Motion Picture Association. Through a letter to her American publisher, she declined the invitation, explaining that she thought it would tire her too much. Then she added, “I must confess that I should not be greatly flattered at being associated with some of the ladies named in the list who are to figure in this same series” (Lewis and Lewis 515–16). This note might be of passing interest to a Wharton scholar. To a film scholar interested in Wharton, the note is especially interesting. The “ladies named in the list” were a rather distinguished lot, including Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, sculptor and patron of the arts; Florence Sabin, professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University; and Kathleen Norris, writer of popular novels. From what we know of her biography and her published correspondence, Wharton most likely knew who these women were and probably would not object to being grouped with them. But the last name on the list would have given her more than enough reason to decline: Mary Pickford, reigning queen of Hollywood, California, and international movie star. Only if she had lived on the moon would Edith Wharton not know something about Mary Pickford in 1928. As it was, Wharton lived in France, where Pickford’s movies were shown regularly. Wharton probably knew more than she wanted to know about America’s Sweetheart, because  Introduction Pickford was one of the most famous celebrities in the world at the time, and not just because of her movies. She ghostwrote a syndicated weekly newspaper column, her face was plastered on countless consumer goods, and her name showed up regularly in newspaper and magazine articles in both the United States and Europe.1 With her fellow United Artists—Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith—Pickford had helped transform the novelty of moving pictures into the filmmaking industry in the years following World War I.2 By 1928, the Hollywood dream machine represented the most lucrative corporate entity in the United States and was well on its way to being America’s most valuable export to Europe and beyond. American movies and movie stars commanded respect and attention from Wall Street to Main Street and around the globe, thanks to the popularity of stars like Pickford. As Samantha Barbas points out in her study of Hollywood celebrity , Movie Crazy, by the early 1930s, “Time magazine began featuring film actors on its covers, and even the New York Times regularly reported on Hollywood” (57). Movies were now legitimate by so many standards that “film stars had become national if not international celebrities” (57). Wharton, however, would not have been convinced that sharing the screen with a celebrated film actor would have been such a great honor in 1928, and she continued to regard the cinema with trepidation for the rest of her life. Nine years after she declined the invitation to be part of Woman Marches On, Wharton explained why she disliked movies. The cinema was one of “the two world-wide enemies of the imagination,” she wrote in the 1937 preface to Ghosts (the other was radio). “To a generation for whom everything . . . used to nourish the imagination,” she lamented, “the creative faculty . . . is rapidly withering” (8–9). Wharton sensed a sea change in the sensibilities of her reading public that she associated with the popularity of movies, and that saddened and alarmed her. Writing about the movies made Wharton cranky and forlorn: “All this is very depressing to the ghost-story purveyor and his publisher” (9). For Wharton, storytelling and reading were essential creative activities. Movies suggested passivity, atrophy, and manipulation.3 Also in the preface to Ghosts, Wharton tells an old joke: “Do you believe in ghosts?” “No, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them” (7). To understand Wharton’s relationship to Hollywood, we can recast this joke: “Do you believe in movies?” “No, I don’t believe in movies, but I’m afraid of them.” Hollywood and the likes of Mary Pickford alarmed her, even as she was drawn to them. For just as stories about movie stars A Glittering Place  had begun insinuating themselves into mainstream...