Mary Pickford: Queen of the Movies

The Natural

THE NATURAL 7 Pickford and Harold Lockwood in a scene from Tess of the Storm Country (1914). THE NATURAL Transitions in Mary Pickford’s Acting from the Footlights to Her Greatest Role in Film EileenWhitfield T T here was something about watching Mary Pickford that moved silent-era moviegoers in a way no other actor has ever achieved. And to find out why, one has only to watch her smashing work in Tess of the Storm Country (1914), the first surviving feature to fully convey what one fan, in Photoplay, called her “weird magnetic grip.”⁄ The grip still holds, from the moment Pickford (as Tessibel Skinner, a ravishing, unkempt young woman in rags) awakes from a nap beside a fishing shack. Disentangling herself from a heap of ropes and leaves, she shakes Tess to life with the force of a shock wave. And yet, on paper, the role is unplayable, a schizophrenic mess of clashing traits. Tess is rustic and ignorant of the world. Still, she knows enough to contact a lawyer when the squatters in her fishing village face eviction. She tosses her hair like Rita Hayworth and sashays across the screen, hands on hips. Even so, if a man responds, she kicks him violently out the door. In the face of the law, she becomes a hooligan, leading a riot and hurling sticks. A devoted Christian, Tess owns a Bible because she stole it. She sets a snarling dog on a man she hates and cheers when it almost takes his hand o∑. Later, she weeps when a bunny is killed. A foster mother, she is tender but unsentimental as she cares for a dying child.When she baptizes the child herself to make sure he goes to heaven, she’s a model of that other Mary’s saintly devotion. Still, Pickford fuses these contradictions. In fact, her Tess is so commanding, so elemental, that she seems to have leaped, fully formed, from the celluloid itself. It’s a startling achievement. Tess of the Storm Country was released in 1914, when the art of silent acting—especially at feature length—was still evolving. Add to this the fact that, even for its day, the film was rushed and badly made. But somehow Pickford created a character who is pure, transcendent cinema. How did she do it—and so early? Silent film acting is a hybrid of styles. In 1909, when Pickford auditioned for film director D.W . Gri≈th, she knew only one of them. First known as Delsarte (for semiotician Francois Delsarte’s nineteenthcentury theory), the style was all the rage in North America for decades. Unfortunately, it also devolved from a search for emotional truth into a code of declarative gestures to magnify passion, excitement, and thrills. These histrionics were common when Pickford, age seven, made her Toronto stage debut.¤ Players brandished fists at God or dramatically pointed enemies from the room; women received bad news by placing a hand to the brow. In moments of complete defeat, they threw themselves prostrate to the ground. EileenWhitfield 8 The fact that this system seems dated today does not mean it was a bad one. The language of acting always changes, defined by an unspoken pact between audience and players about the kind of stage behavior they are willing to believe. In addition, melodrama (then the Western world’s favorite genre) demanded flamboyance from performers , who appeared as forthright heroes, nefarious villains, plaintive children, and virtuous mothers in nick-of-time, roller-coaster plots. Pickford, who followed a year in Toronto with six years touring in such plays, worked with creatively jaded actors who (pushing histrionics to the edge) tore each character to tatters. She began to fear that her own work was ragged, too. To solve this problem, she sought and won a small role on Broadway in The Warrens of Virginia (1907). The play, a Civil War romance, was produced and directed by David Belasco, a glittering figure on the GreatWhiteWay and an icon of showmanship and taste. Under his direction, Pickford (playing a child in the Warren family) learned a subtler approach than the rip-roaring antics of the road. Unfortunately, she never explained Belasco’s specific views on acting or how he taught them. Luckily, Belasco’s greatest star, Mrs. Leslie Carter, recalled that the maestro stressed a measured pace. In addition, he preached that histrionics should “subordinate...