Mary Pickford: Queen of the Movies

Introduction

INTRODUCTION 1 Photo by Campbell Studio, circa 1918. INTRODUCTION Molly Haskell S S o quickly did cinema move from the stagy theatrics of onereelers to the fluid intimacy of silent cinema and then to the completely di∑erent registers of sound that Mary Pickford, who had been in the forefront of the first revolution, came to seem old-fashioned in the second. It wasn’t just a matter of acting style and voices, but the zeitgeist as well. TheVictorian ideal of childlike innocence and can-do spirit that Pickford brought to luminous perfection crashed on the shoals of a more cynical age. The brittle disillusion that followed the FirstWorldWar, the end of Progressive Era idealism, and audiences’ hunger for more sexually daring stories and stars—all these combined with the coming of sound to render Little Mary’s brand of optimism passé. Against this harsher background , Pickford’s image crystallized and hardened into a stereotype of a Pollyanna with golden ringlets and simpering charms. It has been left to devotees of silent cinema to rescue her reputation and convince moviegoers, who today consider even black and white archaic, to take another look at the exquisite gems from the silent past over which this lady reigned—with spirit, gumption, beauty, and (perhaps most of all) tenacity. She was the first great star and, as historian Robert Cushman states without exaggeration, “the most popular, powerful, prominent and influential woman in the history of cinema.”⁄ Yet no one so vital to the development of motion pictures in the first half of the twentieth century fell so far from fashion in the latter half. Even in the fervent cinephilia of the 1970s, when film bu∑s excitedly disinterred early movies as if they were time capsules from the past, the poison-pen letters of ErichVon Stroheim were more welcome than the valentines from America’s Sweetheart. Charlie Chaplin, director D.W . Gri≈th, and Buster Keaton made their claims on modern audiences who were much too sophisticated, much too liberated to look upon “the girl with the golden curls” as anything but a quaint curiosity. Precisely for this reason—fearing that she would be laughed at— Mary Pickford withdrew her films from distribution. At the time, she was living out her days at her Beverly Hills home, Pickfair, in her own, rather more benign version of Sunset Boulevard. We critics colluded in turning Pickford into a joke by circulating the story that she was the arch-prude who had ended Mae West’s career by complaining to newspaper magnateWilliam Randolph Hearst about the bawdy lyrics of her songs. Molly Haskell 2 This introduction is drawn from a book review published in the New York Times, June 6, 1999. Anyone who has seen more than one of the major Pickford films knows that she was a great deal more than a cuddly little girl in pinafores. In appearance alone, she ranges from the winsomely beautiful to the almost unrecognizably, even grotesquely, plain. Then there are her amazingly varied incarnations: she is child, adolescent, and mother (in one 1921 film, Little Lord Fauntleroy, she plays both mother and son and, in an astonishingly sophisticated sleight-of-camera scene, kisses herself ); she is tomboy and coquette, the queen of Herzegovina and a cockney laundress, a coddled rich girl and a misshapen slavey (in extraordinary dual roles in 1918’s Stella Maris); she is obstreperous, belligerent, sweet, fierce, and ingenious; a spitfire and a street fighter; a lady, singer, dancer, and daughter. She plays Spanish, French, Scottish , and even Asian in a version of Madame Butterfly (1915). If these impersonations were not uniformly successful, they testify to the way her vast ambition dovetailed with the rich pantomimic possibilities of silent cinema, before sound narrowed its vocabulary, exacting authenticity of diction and accent. The scope of Pickford’s popularity in the 1910s and 1920s is di≈cult to imagine now. Discovered by audiences when actors were unbilled and unidentified, she emerged from the pack at Biograph to become the first real star and the begetter of what would emerge as the star system. By 1914, just a year after signing with Adolph Zukor, she had experienced an almost frighteningly meteoric rise, becoming beloved above all others in every country where movies where shown.Vibrant, sincere, disarmingly funny, and, above all, good, she had an appeal that was spiritual rather than erotic and was...