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Designed by women, curated by women, and built by women

Marie Dressler was one of the great actresses of early Hollywood and her career was a true roller coaster worthy of a Hollywood script. A vaudeville sensation at the turn of the century and early teens, she starred in Mack Sennett’s first feature length comedy in 1914 and was so famous three years later she joined Mary Pickford, Doug Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin in touring the country to sell war bonds. Marie returned to New York and organized Broadway chorus girls who were overworked and underpaid, but with the coming of the Jazz Age, her style of broad comedy was out of fashion. By the mid-1920s, she was so down on her luck she considered becoming a housekeeper. Marie said that it was Frances Marion, the young woman who had been a newspaper artist when they first met in San Francisco in 1912 but by 1927 was MGM’s highest paid screenwriter, who talked production chief Irving Thalberg into hiring Marie and bringing her back to Los Angeles. The result was a new career high, including an appearance opposite Garbo in Anna Christie followed by a starring role in Min and Bill for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. When the Depression circled the globe and hit filmmaking with a wallop in 1932, Marie was the most popular actress in town and is credited with being the reason MGM was the only studio operating in the black that year.

Hollywood might not be the greatest in remembering its own, but Marie’s birthplace, Cobourg Ontario, has long recognized their favorite daughter. The house where she was born on November 9, 1868, has been marked as Marie’s for many years, even if it was just with a sign and a few pictures on the wall. Originally built in 1833, the house had been through many incarnations including as a private home, a restaurant and offices before the Dressler Foundation entered a long-term lease for the property with the goal of turning it into a museum.

Rick Miller, President & Chair of the Marie Dressler Foundation, the non profit charity organization founded in 1990, sought out the Museum Studies Masters’ Degree program project class at the University of Toronto in 2014 with the idea of creating a Dressler museum. The results were spectacular, highlighting Marie’s career and packing in a remarkable amount of information in a small space.

I was privileged to be the guest speaker at their celebration of Marie Dressler’s 150^th birthday three years ago. I was so impressed with what had been accomplished and with the Board of Directors that came together to boost both Cobourg and Dressler. We took advantage of that time to delve into the possibility of expanding the Museum to include Pickford (born in Toronto on April 8, 1892) and Norma Shearer (born in Montreal on August 10, 1902). Not only were they all Canadian natives, the three women were back-to-back-to-back Best Actress Oscar winners in 1929, 1930 and 1931.

In 2019, Rick Miller returned to the University of Toronto’s Faculty of information, Museum Studies Program to enlist five new women students to expand the museum as their Master’s project. One of them, Michelle Wright, was hired as project manager.  Covid complicated their efforts of course, but they persevered and now the Pickford Gallery is complete. Norma Shearer’s space will be open to the public next year.

The Mary Pickford Foundation is so pleased to have become a partner in the expansion of the museum into the Canadian Women in Film Museum, supporting them with dozens of film clips, photographs, dvds and well researched historical information. Of course, much thought, many people and a lot of fundraising went into the project, but one of the key things that impressed us so much was that from the beginning the museum was designed by women, curated by women, and built by women.  The Dressler Foundation has walked the walk of bringing women into all levels of the organization — and the importance of that cannot be overstated. And by working through the University, they were able to take advantage of cutting-edge creativity and save money at the same time. Women students being taught by female professors to celebrate these amazing actresses is a win, win, win.

In addition, the Dressler Foundation has opened its arms to networking with organizations such as The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who helped connect them to the Motion Picture Editors Guild in Los Angeles who provided the museum with a long term loan of a real Moviola. (The Museum is proud to note that this very editing machine made an appearance in Martin Scorsese’s film The Aviator.)  AMPAS also has donated photographs through their association with the Mary Pickford Foundation. Photographs were also donated to the Mary Pickford exhibit by Rob Brooks, Chris Milewski, Marc Wanamaker of Bison Archives and Joseph M. Yranski.

When reviewing all that has gone into the creation of the Museum, the phrase that comes to mind is “It takes a village.” And in this instance, it is an almost all female village and that nudges me to pay proper homage to Rick Miller. He is the personification of the warning not to judge a book by its cover. At first meeting he seems quiet and unassuming to the point one might wonder what he can accomplish. And therein lies the book cover. Yes, he is quiet and unassuming, but he is also confident in his knowledge and commitment as well as being comfortable in his own skin. He was ready to retire from his executive career in Toronto to his beloved Cobourg with his equally impressive wife, but he was not ready to stop giving and being creative. He turned his organizational and diplomatic talents to the Marie Dressler Museum and followed through to spearhead the creation of this unique experience for which we are most grateful.

To have a physical space where these three great Canadian actresses can be honored is such an important step in sharing their stories. Mary Pickford was not only the first actress to be offered a million dollars a year, but she was also a founder of United Artists where she stayed involved as an advocate for the workers through the early 1950s, one of three women in the original group of 36 founders of The Academy and the founder of the Motion Picture Television Fund. Yet in the Academy’s just opened Museum in Los Angeles the only mention of Mary is the display of her Oscar from Coquette which the Academy now owns and some rather opaque remarks about her inviting members to Pickfair to convince them to vote for her. All this adds to our appreciation of the Canadian Women in Film Museum.

In the summer of 1935, Mary was repositioning her public persona. Doug wasn’t in residence anymore and their divorce was in process, but she was determined to hold her head high and be as engaged in the business as ever. She was occupied with United Artists, writing books and forming a joint production company with Jesse Lasky.

In the midst of all this, Mary was approached by John Hay “Jock” Whitney, to help establish The Museum of Modern Art’s Film Library. The multimillionaire Whitney was a MoMA trustee whose family lineage went back to the Mayflower and was laced with Vanderbilts and Harrimans. He also had his hand in Hollywood as one of the initial investors in Technicolor and he was about to become Chairman of the Board (and the major funder) of the new Selznick International Pictures. David O. Selznick in turn had been spending time at Pickfair that summer negotiating his own partnership in United Artists. With everyone wanting to please everyone else, Mary was happy to discuss hosting a dinner party (with Whitney picking up the tab) to inspire donors to the new MoMA Film Library. However, at the moment she was on her way to New York and the plans would have to wait until her return in early August.

As the stock market crashed in late 1929, it was hardly an auspicious time to start a museum, let alone one as grand and sweeping in its mission as The Museum of Modern Art. Beginning in two rooms at 57^th and Fifth Ave in a building that had been an orphanage, MoMA soon moved to a brownstone on 53^rd where, according to Iris Barry, paintings by Picasso and Cezanne were shown in America for the first time.

Barry would have known as she had only recently arrived from  London where she had mingled with the Bloomsbury crowd while co-founding the London Film Society and serving as the film critic for The Spectator.  Born Iris Symes in Birmingham in 1895, Barry showed an early propensity for self-invention when she renamed herself after her maternal grandmother. Iris looked the part of the proper matron, but before marrying (and then divorcing) the poet Alan Porter, she had two children with the writer Wyndham Lewis.  The story went that she was ingloriously fired from The Spectator when she slammed a film based on an Elinor Glyn story after Barry’s boss had promised Glyn a rave. Barry left her children in England and came to New York to start anew; after looking around, she made a trip to Hollywood, and was up front with friends and colleagues about her need to work.

Barry met Alfred Barr, the first director of MoMA, at one of the many New York parties she frequented and he was intrigued by her history with movies. He envisioned developing a permanent collection of films to be screened at schools and educational institutions and having films appreciated as an important facet of modern art. And he saw Barry as the woman who could make that happen.

After Iris married the reportedly dull but wealthy stockbroker John “Dick” Abbott who was six years her junior, Barr asked her and her new husband, who decided he liked movies much better than Wall Street, to write a funding proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation; they in turn were sufficiently impressed by the idea of a MoMA film library to give them $100,000, almost 2 million in 2021 dollars. (There had been college courses on film before. Douglas Fairbanks had helped create one at USC, Joe Kennedy had organized a series of symposia at Harvard in 1927 and their Fogg Museum had even started to collect films until the funding fell through.)

Barr named Abbott director of the Film Library and Barry its librarian, but, as Iris pithily asked, “what is a film library without films?”  They talked to a few people on the east coast where some films were still being made, but most of the business had moved to Los Angeles. ^[i]

Barry and Abbott knew they needed to head west as well and when they arrived in Hollywood in mid July 1935, they ensconced themselves at the Garden of Allah Hotel. Iris kept Barr informed of their activities by letter and justified her trip (and their almost two month stay) by saying, with more than a trace of condescension, “As it turns out, it was a very good thing we did come, as we should certainly not have secured a single film from any of the people here otherwise. I had forgotten what a long way Hollywood is from New York: they read different papers, have different values. We have had to start in one way from the beginning and do a lot of educational and promotional work before our aims and objectives were at all clear to anyone here. And it is all slow work anyhow with so many different people to see, and see just right – there are hierarchies indeed and it is easy to make false steps and see the wrong people first. Also the jealousies….I hope we bring it all off properly.” ^[ii]

At first, they approached filmmakers and studio heads one by one but met with little success. Every morning Louis B. Mayer’s secretary called to tell them he wished he could meet with them, but his schedule did not allow it. Maybe tomorrow….

Barry realized that to “bring it all off properly” she had to aim higher – and that meant introducing their film library to Hollywood with a dinner party at the most impressive venue in town, Pickfair. With that event as the cornerstone of their crusade, everything else started to fall into place. Iris was pleased to report that “I think Mary Pickford will give us 75 of her pictures…but what is more important is that she herself will launch a big ‘give these people your best old films’ campaign.” Barry understood success would only come with “personal persuasion of many key people” and Pickfair was the place to accomplish that. ^[iii]

On the evening of August 24, more than 70 industry leaders gathered at Pickfair with a guest list that emphasized producers rather than actors. After all, they were the ones who owned the films that MoMA wanted. It was a warm evening and almost in spite of herself, Iris was impressed with the hostess and her home. Dinner tables decorated with flowers, candles and linen cloths were set out around the veranda that encircled the house allowing guests to appreciate the wide lawn bathed in lights while an orchestra performed. Walter Wanger, Harold Lloyd, Jesse Lasky, Sam Goldwyn and his wife Frances, Mack Sennett, Colonel Selig, Walt Disney and Mrs. Thomas Ince were all in attendance and Iris was struck by how many of these famous people commented on how long it had been since they had seen each other. Upon reflection, she realized that “they work long hours during films, go out little and once the film is finished, they rush away for a holiday.” ^[iv]

After dinner, the guests convened inside to watch films reaching back to The Kiss from 1896 and Mary Pickford’s final Biograph from 1912, The New York Hat, costarring Lionel Barrymore and written by Anita Loos. But it was the appearance of Louis Wolheim, who had recently passed away, in a clip from All Quiet on the Western Front, that seemed to truly touch the audience. He was gone, but he was still with them. That was the power of films – it was their chance for immortality and the emotion that swept through the room was something they seldom paused to appreciate. In fact, they rarely paused to focus on anything beyond their current production. The response to seeing their early work and colleagues who were no longer with them united them as a community.

Mary welcomed everyone with a sincere plug for the library and then Abbott was followed by Barry; they quickly knew they had hit a nerve. Iris thanked the hostess and told the story of Mary suggesting she might get rid of her earlier films, but then realizing from the overwhelming response she received, they were not really her films at all. They belonged to the world. Whether she had actually made such a grandiose statement, it reminded the powers that be that their work was valued for more than its box office and they wanted to be a part of that.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Barry left Hollywood with “more than a million feet of film from her newly-won donors,” but, in reality, she left with promises that films would be delivered eventually. While Louis B. Mayer never did follow through with a meeting, it was MGM’s corporate attorney, Robert Rubin, who wrote the template contract for “governing the Film Library’s acquisition and use of films” that other donors used. ^[v]

In retrospect, MoMA’s timing was most fortuitous. They were able to sweep up the silent films from what was now considered financially useless. Studios soon needed to clean out their vaults to make room for new material so why not just pass them on to the museum? It was assumed that all these films were permanently out of distribution and if by chance they ever did want them again, they would know where they were.

Within months, the floodgates opened and producers such as Walt Disney, Harold Lloyd and Sam Goldwyn contributed some of their films.  Studios gave in bulk as well with Universal donating Lois Weber’s The Dumb Girl of Portici starring Anna Pavlova and several directed by von Stroheim. Paramount gave the first film Adolph Zukor had bought and promoted, Queen Elizabeth starring Sarah Bernhardt.Lillian Gish was an early supporter and Iris asked her to persuade D.W. Griffith to donate his films. Gish said she was eventually successful because he “could not afford to continue to pay the storage costs for housing his collection [so] the museum received an extensive array of the filmmaker’s negatives, prints and parts including 325 of his films.” Lillian was a life long supporter and left a substantial portion of her own estate to MoMA for the care and preservation of Griffith’s films. ^[vi]

MoMA quickly made use of their new collection; in February of 1936, over 400 people packed a New York theater to see Pickford in The New York Hat, along with films starring Theda Bara, Ben Turpin and William S. Hart. Each screening brought more publicity and positive reinforcement for the new Film Department. ^[vii]

When the Museum of Modern Art officially opened on May 11, 1939, the celebration included a series of thirty programs of films, running through early October. They featured some of the finest of the silent era: Garbo, Gish, Pickford alongside Douglas Fairbanks who had donated his films only weeks before. It would not be until the end of 1939 that the film department itself was able to move into their spacious new offices and thirty years later, Iris remembered the space, the projection room and the large theater all right down the hall as her greatest joy. Barry stayed with MoMA until she retired in 1951; she died in France in 1969. ^[viii]

And in Barry’s frequent retelling of the founding of the library, she credited Pickford front and center. For instance, in a 1940s article Iris wrote of our “considerable amazement-in Hollywood about to entertain an alarmingly brilliant concourse of filmdom’s greats at Pickfair. Certainly, the gracious gesture of Mary Pickford in thus throwing open her famous house and herself acting as hostess could alone have afforded the infant Film Library so excellent an opportunity of putting its case before aggregate film chiefs and, through the press which reported the somewhat unusual event, a wider circle of film employees and the public.” ^[ix]

Mary Pickford’s films have been featured at MoMA many times over the years including a series alongside Soviet films in 1969 and a tribute consisting of two dozen of her movies in the summer of 1979. Several of her films were also showcased in a 1998 program honoring her friend and screenwriter Frances Marion. ^[x] 

And the relationship between the museum and Mary Pickford continues to this day with MoMA continuing to screen her films and take an active role in preserving some. As pleased as all this might make Mary today, in the summer of 1935 she was happy to be front and center as an advocate for the importance of film and to have re-established Pickfair as THE pinnacle of influence in the industry, a preeminence that would be reinforced many more times over the years.

[i] “what is” Barry to Barr, 8|27|1935, MoMA

[ii] “as it turns” Barry to Barr, 7/22/35, MoMA

[iii] “I think” Barry to Barr, 7/22/35, MoMA

[iv] “they work” unpublished article by Barry in 1936, her MoMA papers

[v] “more than” quoted in Film Quarterly, Summer 1969 p 23.

[vi] (NYT 11/24/35)

[vii] (NYT 2/5/36)

[viii] (4/30/39 NYT)

[ix] Barry, Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, Jun-July 1941

[x] NYT 3/22/69; NYT 6/15/79.

How the Mary Pickford cocktail came to be created might not be the most earth-shattering revelation, yet as the 100^th anniversary year of Prohibition comes to a close on January 17—and with so much else on the public mind these days—I thought someone had to get to the bottom of who dreamed up the legendary cocktail  (two-thirds pineapple juice and one-third rum, with a dash of grenadine) named after the most powerful and popular actress and producer of her generation.

Many of the histories of Pickford’s famous pink drink seem to have been made up out of thin air and then added to as it went along. —and then repeated over the years. For this reason, I decided to wade through a passel of books and articles on the topic, hoping to set the record as straight as possible.

The most oft-repeated story is that the Mary Pickford cocktail was “invented” in Cuba in the ’20s in honor of the silent-screen star, who was visiting the island along with her husband Douglas Fairbanks while they were making a movie there. Sometimes in the telling, they are accompanied by Charlie Chaplin. It’s a nice yarn, but a review of Mary and Doug’s schedule reveals no trips to Cuba—and they never made a film there during their marriage. What’s more, Chaplin was a frequent guest at Pickfair, but rarely, if ever, traveled with them. When Pickford was at Independent Moving Pictures in the early 1910s, along with her then husband Owen Moore, they did make several films in Cuba. However, Mary was miserable there for quite a few reasons, including the humid climate that wreaked havoc on her fabled curls.

None of this means that the cocktail did not originate down Havana way. Just that the actress was not there for its inception.  Digging back through newspaper articles and books, it seems that the first time the cocktail was recorded in print may well have been in Basil Woon’s book, the long-neglected classic, When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba, published in 1928.

A minor detour is in order here. I have long been attracted to unique characters, and Basil Woon captured my attention years ago in spite of the fact that there is little pretense of objectivity or accuracy in his works. As a New York Times reviewer observed while singing the praises of Woon’s “enthralling” 1924 book on actress Sarah Bernhardt, “the utter absence of corroborating evidence for the thousand and one startling statements categorically made [herein] is a very definite obstacle.”

Woon, born in England in 1893, created a life as dramatic as the stories he wrote. He traveled to Alaska at the age of 16 where he founded a weekly newspaper. He didn’t stay long, heading out across the globe to cover wars (the Mexican Revolution for United Press) and boxing matches (the Jim Jeffries Jack Johnson championship fight in 1910). Woon is credited as a screenwriter on 17 films. He also wrote plays and at least half a dozen books, most of which combined tales of his travels, vignettes on different personalities, and recommendations for eating, drinking, and various forms of carousing.

He had written about Bernhardt and his frequent Atlantic crossings on famous ocean liners before he published When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba, soon to be followed by the book that happened to be my first Woon purchase, From Deauville to Monte Carlo: A Guide to the Gay World of France.

Woon was hired by the Cuban government to promote the country—and what better way to do that than to write a book? By putting “cocktail time” in the title, he managed to highlight the island nation’s capacity to provide what the United States couldn’t in 1928: legal drinking.  Prohibition, of course, had hardly stopped the flow of alcohol in America. In fact, speakeasies were credited with encouraging women to drink, in contrast to the male-only bars that had existed pre-Prohibition. The tastes of female customers of the era helped to popularize the use of fruits to sweeten many drinks, but that also served to cover the frequently bitter taste of poorly produced homemade booze.

Which leads us to the subject of rum which had long been Cuba’s most popular and available alcoholic libation.  And the Bacardi family, based in Santiago, had built a big business there, opening their doors in the 1860s. Woon reported that after the daiquiri—named for the Santiago beach where the Bacardi family had its distillery—the two other cocktails most “in demand in Havana are the Presidente and the Mary Pickford.”

Prohibition, meanwhile, helped instigate a large-scale stateside emigration of bartenders—often to sunnier climes. Many set up shop in Havana. And most sources agree that it was either native New Yorker Eddie Woelkeor the Englishman Fred Kaufman, head barman at the Sevilla Hotel, who first concocted the drink that came to be known as the Pickford. But there is no doubt that Prohibition sparked the “Americanization” of the bar culture of Cuba, and that helps explain the cocktail coinage of the day, such as the Mary Pickford, which was soon as popular around the world as the actress herself.

It was Woon’s widely read book that first called attention to it and he reported the cocktail’s omnipresence throughout the island. He particularly enjoyed the way the Pickford was made at La Florida (the Americanized name of what Cubans and everyone else calls the Floridita). A combination bar, store, and restaurant, the Floridita would become famous as a favorite haunt of Ernest Hemingway’s. In the 1920s, Woon sang the praises of its “head barman Constantino, a saturnine individual whose peculiar gift consists in his accurate, though seemingly casual, measurements of drinks.”

Woon went on to ask his readers to visualize a fantasy sojourn to the bar:  “Six of you visit the Florida and order Mary Pickfords. A boy [a term, derogatory to be sure, for a young barback] is put to work squashing and squeezing the pineapple. Meanwhile another boy fills six glasses with ice to frost them. When the pineapple juice is ready Constantino pours it into a huge shaker, takes the Bacardi bottle and, without looking, pours a quantity in the shaker. Then, still apparently without a glance at the shaker, he does the same with the curacoa [sic] or grenadine. The drink is shaken by throwing it from one shaker and catching it in another, the liquid forming a half circle in the air. This juggling feat having been performed several times, Constantino empties glasses of ice, puts them in a row on the bar, and with one motion fills them all [until] each glass is filled exactly to the brim and not a drop is left over. It’s worth a visit to Havana merely to watch Constantino operate.”

Woon contends he told the barman he “could make a fortune in Paris. He smiled. ‘I no do so badly here.’” When I read that description, my first thought was that Constantino could have found steady employment at MGM playing the barkeep in films such as The Thin Man—decades before the movie Cocktail.

And what of the Pickford itself? “Like its namesake, the Mary Pickford cocktail sneaks up on you,” said one critic. “It’s so smooth and sweet, you don’t realize what a kick it’s got until it’s too late.”

Demand for the drink spread back to America and across the Atlantic, offered in bars throughout Europe. The recipe began to be promoted elsewhere, including The Savoy Cocktail Book,courtesy of the American Bar at London’s Savoy hotel. (The storied watering hole was run by Harry Craddock, another American ex-pat who left during Prohibition. The book, first published in 1930, is still in print.).

According to Woon, “The Presidente is made with half Bacardi and half French vermouth, with a dash of either cauracoa or grenadine. It is the aristocrat of cocktails and is the one preferred by the better class of Cubans. The Mary Pickford… is two-thirds pineapple-juice and one third Bacardi, with a dash of grenadine. Both cocktails are sweetish and should be well shaken. The pineapple juice must be fresh squeezed.”

The result was, and remains, a very light pink cocktail. The color varied a bit in its later incarnation, which included the addition of maraschino cherry liqueur.

Which requires another minor digression. My job the summer after high school – and physically the hardest one I have ever had – was working in a cannery. I stood and pitted peaches eight hours a day. But on my way to the assembly line I passed the vats that bleached cherries from their natural red to a haunting white. Then they were drained and dyed that famous bright red. I have not had an American maraschino cherry since. And I say American because I have learned, while doing this research, that there is a very expensive and very delicious Italian cherry sold under the name of Luxardo. It comes in a jar with the darkest and richest juice ever; it is really more of a syrup, yet still less sweet than the American version. The nectar of the Luxardo cherry is the juice recommended for the superior Mary Pickford cocktail, with the added bonus of one or more of the cherries being served on the side.

That is if there are any left after being spooned on vanilla ice cream or cheesecake. But back to the story at hand. And I must thank my friend, cocktail (and film) maven Theresa Brown and her friends who are responsible for elevating my maraschino cherries knowledge. (I am told you can also jar these at home, but no thank you.)

Almost any tome on choice cocktails or mixology – and their number seems to have grown annually – will contain a recipe for the Mary Pickford. There are at least a dozen YouTube clips demonstrating the step-by-step process. Rachel Maddow once painstakingly instructed her audience on how to properly mix and serve the drink. And what is the Pickford’s proper receptacle? Either a standard triangular martini glass or a traditional curved cocktail coupe.

Of course, half the fun is in trying variations on the contents. Some call for dark rum instead of light. Many recommend fifty fifty, rum to juice. Some suggest clear Maraschino liqueur for flavor so that a little grenadine is needed to give it that light pink hue. Fresh pineapple juice appears to be the one sacrosanct ingredient. And, for me, the juice of Luxardo cherries is now a necessity as well.

And so it goes. The vaunted Pickford—even if Mary and Doug and Charlie weren’t on hand at its birth—is still a perfect pick-me-up for those hankering for a taste of Havana with a splash of Hollywood glamour. Enjoy.

(This article originally ran in Vanity Fair Weekly online, posted on January 14, 2021 – it has been altered slightly while adding some new information)

Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were married on Sunday evening, March 28, 1920 and when the world learned of it three days later, the news was greeted with joy. On the front page, above the fold, the Los Angeles Times declared that the “famous film romance is crowned by nuptials,” almost as if the union had been expected for some time and had finally come to fruition.  

While movie fans were celebrating Hollywood’s new royal couple, Mary herself was breathing a huge sigh of relief. For almost two years, she had been agonizing as she lived a bifurcated life – making her films as she publicly pretended to be happily married to one man while privately in love with another. 

Mary and Doug first met at a party in Tarrytown, New York, in November of 1915, both accompanied by their spouses. As their hostess, vaudeville star Elsie Janis put it after she and Doug and Mary took a long walk around her property, “Mr. Fairbanks and Miss Pickford had become Douglas and Mary by the time we dragged our weary bodies home.”        

By early 1917, Doug and Mary had privately declared their love for each other and within months, they had worked out a variety of ruses to see each other, often enlisting trusted friends as beards. Charlie Chaplin was pulled in to be present when photos were taken at the studio, but more intricate plans were laid for their assignations. For instance, Doug and his screenwriter, Anita Loos, would head out on a horseback ride while Mary and her friend and screenwriter Frances Marion made a public point of going to a different stable and then – as prearranged – secretly met up with Doug and Anita.  Doug and Mary went off, usually to his brother’s house in the Hollywood hills, and Frances and Anita rode together for an hour or two until they reunited with the couple.

At first, Frances was pleased to see Mary so content and had to admit there were benefits to the affair; Mary was more cheerful than ever and while she had always thought of Mary as pretty, when “she was with Doug, she actually looked sexy.” 

Mary’s mother knew about the affair and tacitly approved. As Frances said later in life, ” ‘Mama’ loved Mary to be happy and Mary was never lovelier than when she was with Doug. That was enough for Mama – if only they both weren’t married to somebody else.”

As enamored as they were of each other, neither Doug nor Mary were anxious to make any drastic moves. Their stardom was too important to them and it was assumed that fans wanted to put their favorite actors on a pedestal and live vicariously through them. At least that’s what studio chiefs wanted their players to believe to keep them in line. The fact was that when it came to stars divorcing and remarrying, there was no path to follow.

Doug and Mary might have been able to keep their relationship secret but a series of events – both international and domestic – intervened. First, the government reached out to them, along with Charlie Chaplin and Marie Dressler, to go on a nationwide tour to sell war bonds. Both Mary’s mother and Frances urged Mary not to go, but when she insisted, Charlotte went along and was rarely out of camera range. Enough fans and reporters noticed the way Mary and Doug looked at each other that questions were raised, but they kept repeating that they were just friends. The tour affirmed their popularity more than they could have imagined and that gave Doug the confidence he needed to divorce his wife Beth. She had been Doug’s manager and financial advisor, but now he turned to his brother Robert and Mary’s attorney Cap O’Brien for guidance. For $500,000 cash and full custody of their young son, Doug Jr., Beth filed for divorce in the fall of 1918 without naming a co-respondent.  

Two months after the war was over, Mary and Doug joined Griffith and Chaplin in announcing the formation of United Artists. More meaningful looks, more questions raised about their relationship.  When Beth married an old flame, Jim Evans, and Doug’s box office saw no negative effect, he began, according to one of his biographers, “wheedling, begging and threatening” Mary to divorce Owen.   .  

As Doug’s son later explained, “Dad wanted all of Mary  – herself and her talent and her fame and her exclusive devotion. And he longed to be able to display their union to the world like a double trophy.” 

Mary was petrified of making a mistake of such a magnitude that it could wipe out everything she had worked for. She turned to Frances and together they decided they were too close to the situation. If anyone from the outside could be trusted to give an honest assessment, it was Frances’s good friend, the writer Adela Rogers St. Johns.  As difficult as it was for Mary to let anyone into her private circle, she agreed to invite Adela for tea. Like everyone else who went to the movies, Adela felt she already knew Mary, but the first thing that struck her as Mary introduced herself was that she had never before heard her voice. Adela was enchanted and, for once in her life, more than a bit in awe. As the three of them sat in Mary’s living room, Frances explained they needed her thoughts as a reporter, a fan of moving pictures and someone with a sense of public opinion. And someone they could trust to keep a secret.

Adela knew that Mary and Owen’s marriage had been in name only for years, yet still she was surprised with Mary’s bluntness. “If I get a divorce and marry Douglas, will anyone ever go see my pictures again?” Mary asked, “Do you think they will forgive me?” Then Mary added something that would always echo in Adela’s mind as exemplifying how seriously she took her position: “Above all, there are my people to consider.”

“My people” meant more than just those who depended upon her. Along with the business acumen that served her so well, Mary had almost an innate understanding of this new phenomenon called stardom; the public’s sense of ownership of the personalities they took into their hearts. 

Adela hedged her advice. “I think your chances are better than even if it’s handled carefully… All the world loves a lover.” Overall, she was encouraging, and Mary thanked her for coming, and excused herself. As soon as they were alone, Frances explained how complicated things had become for Mary. In addition to everything else, her adored brother Jack didn’t approve of Doug; he thought he was a charlatan trying to buy his own importance through his association with Mary. Frances and Adela both found Jack charming, yet also knew that was exactly how many saw his relationship with his sister. If Mary lost her stardom, she would be fine – she had enough money to live and support her family comfortably. But there was another nagging question — would Doug still love her if she was no longer a star?    

Frances left for New York as soon as Pollyanna, Mary’s first UA film, finished shooting. Frances’s fiancé Fred Thomson, the Army chaplain Mary had introduced her to on the set of Johanna Enlists, was finally coming home from the European War. And on November 1, 1919, the day before their Manhattan wedding, Mary arrived to be matron of honor. As usual, Charlotte was there as well.  When they were alone, Mary told Frances she had finally made up her mind – she was willing to risk losing the title of “America’s sweetheart” because “I only want to be one man’s sweetheart.” 

Once the decision was made, Charlotte and their attorney Cap O’Brien started making the necessary arrangements. First, a deal was made with Owen to buy his cooperation for $100,000. He even helped speed up the process by conveniently arriving in Minden, Nevada with his attorney after Mary and Charlotte had been in the state for only a few days.  Publicly claiming he was scouting film locations, Owen’s presence allowed him to be served with papers so Mary could go to court the next day. 

She arrived dressed in black with a veil, almost as if she was in mourning for the marriage. The newspapers reported her as being prostrate between sobs, explaining how she had been deserted by a drunkard who berated her at every turn. She was portrayed as a woman who had suffered beyond any normal standards of endurance. She had been felled by the flu at several points over the past year and now she said she was the brink of a physical breakdown. That was, after all, why she was in Nevada – to seek refuge and regain her health. Nevada’s divorce laws were already liberal, but they required a several month residency so Mary’s words were carefully gauged. 

“Do I understand you came into the state in good faith, seeking health and nothing else?” asked the judge.       

“Yes sir.”

“And you have given up Los Angeles as your residence and your permanent residence is Genoa, Douglas County, Nevada?”     

“Until I have regained my health, this will be my home.” 

Well, there was obviously a miraculous recovery, because as soon as the decree was granted, Mary and Charlotte, making no public statements, boarded a train to Los Angeles that very evening. When she and her mother arrived home on the morning of March 5, they were surrounded by reporters.  Realizing that the rumors would just keep churning until Mary made a statement, they invited a reporter from the Los Angeles Times to their home that evening. The main message was that Mary had no plans for the future except to “devote her life to producing films to gladden the hearts of her admirers.” But she was quoted as saying other things as well – the divorce been “unpremeditated,” the rumors she would marry Doug or anyone else were “absurd,” there had been no financial settlement with Owen and she was planning on returning often to Nevada.  

Mary had told Frances she wanted to wait a year until she married Doug, but that resolve crumbled as he gave Mary an ultimatum; marry him now or he was leaving her. They had been in love for two years and he was not waiting any longer. And she was tired of resisting. 

Doug had recently completed renovation of his isolated “hunting lodge” in Beverly Hills and he was already getting in the habit of inviting a variety of people to dinner. However, two of the guests on Friday, March 26 were unusual: the Baptist minister J. Whitcomb Brougher and a certain Mr. Sparks, a local marriage license clerk. Sparks had never been invited to dine with Fairbanks before and knew enough to bring all the proper paperwork with him, but Mary refused to be married on a Friday night. Besides, she was dressed in black and she wanted to wed on a Sunday. And so, 48 hours later, they arrived at Brougher’s home on 4^th Street in Los Angeles, along with Charlotte, the actress Marjorie Daw, Doug’s brother Robert and his wife Lorie. Mary wore a lovely white toile gown trimmed in green, and her present to Doug was a portrait of her in her wedding dress. Doug’s present to Mary was the Beverly Hills home he was so proud of, soon to be dubbed Pickfair.  

Adela had been right about the world loving lovers; The news was heralded on the front page of newspapers across the country as the closest thing to a formal coronation of the reigning king and queen of movies.¹  

In retrospect, all of the angst and lost sleep Mary had suffered over her decision seemed unnecessary and the pictures of both of them after the wedding reveal how truly happy they were. In the end, it was the fans who clamored to see Doug and Mary on their honeymoon in New York and Europe who put an end to any doubts they had about their careers. The Attorney General of Nevada would soon go to court with questions about the propriety of Mary’s divorce, but that’s a story for another day. 

Sources

1. NY Times March 7, 1920; NY Times March 31, 1920.

By 1922, the press had proclaimed Doug and Mary the King and Queen of Hollywood and Pickfair the castle from which they reigned, so maybe it isn’t surprising that they began mingling with other royalty – the European kind that came to their titles through birth. As they were entertained by high society during their trips to London, Paris and Madrid, Doug developed a habit of saying something like “And if you are in California, you must come stay with us.” And so they did.

One of the first to take them up on the offer was Lord Louis Mountbatten.  Two years earlier, the marriage of Pickford and Fairbanks had caught the world’s attention as throngs of fans followed them everywhere and resulted in front page newspaper coverage.

Now it was the wedding of Mountbatten on July 18, 1922 that was capturing international attention.  Christened Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicolas and called “Dickie” from an early age, Mountbatten was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria at a time when her progeny were high placed throughout Europe. And his bride, Edwina Ashely, was dubbed “the richest woman in England” due to the recent death of her maternal grandfather, the financier Ernest Cassell.

King George V, Queen Mary and many of the extended royal family were in attendance at their London wedding. The Prince of Wales served as the best man. (After they traveled together on diplomatic trips for over a year, the Prince considered Dickie his best friend.) Thousands gathered outside the church and the press followed as Dickie, just 22, and Edwina, 20, set off for a honeymoon tour of Europe. Three months later, they were still honeymooning as they boarded the Majestic for two months in America. In New York, they took in a Yankees game, posed with Babe Ruth and rode the roller coaster on Coney Island a reported nine times before slowly crossing the country. It had been publicized that they were staying at Pickfair during their week in Los Angeles, but they arrived the third week of October, just as Mary and Doug were getting to New York for the premiere of his biggest film to date, Robin Hood.

Doug had insisted the Mountbattens make themselves at home at Pickfair even if they weren’t in residence. It was fully staffed and with Charlie Chaplin assigned to play host, the Fairbankses didn’t really think twice about their personal priorities. It had been three years since creating United Artists and then their own studio; if they weren’t hard at work making films, they were busy promoting them. Usually they traveled with Mary’s mother, other family members and maybe a Fairbanks brother, but this time Mary and Doug were off on their own, training up the coast to Canada and taking several weeks for stops at Lake Louise, Banff and Montreal before heading down to New York for the October 22 premiere.  Both Doug and Mary needed the rest and the uninterrupted time together.

Mountbatten didn’t need much convincing – he was a big movie fan. He had been infatuated since his older brother bought a projector and had already accumulated “a large library of films.” He also enjoyed taking home movies.^[i]  Chaplin took his hosting duties seriously and after giving them a tour of his studio on La Brea, they went over to Melrose to meet Cecil B. DeMille who showed him his sets for Adam’s Rib. Newly inspired, they decided to make a film of their own and Chaplin improvised a one reeler starring Edwina as the lady in distress. The businessman Robert Thompson, who had loaned the Mountbattens his private train car to cross the country, joined them and played one of the bad guys out to steal Edwina’s pearls. Charlie brought Jackie Coogan along and he played a small part as did Mountbatten’s valet, Thorogood. Dickie, handsome enough to pass for a matinee idol of the day, clearly had a great time hamming it up as Edwina’s worried lover. Chaplin, dressed as the Tramp, rounds up the villains and saves the day.  Entitled Nice and Friendly, it was filmed entirely on the grounds at Pickfair and then given the full studio treatment with editing and insertion of credits and title cards before being presented to the royals. One of Mountbatten’s biographers claimed that Nice and Friendly, along with the film of his wedding, “remained amongst Dickie’s favorite viewing pleasures” throughout his life.^[ii]

After being “on” so much of the time for the past 4 months, it must have been a relief to spend a day in a protected setting with a few friends playing make believe. The day before, two reporters were invited up to Pickfair and the result was a “we are the rubes, but he was nice to us anyway” piece that was headlined “Mountbatten Likes Us” on the front page of the second section of the Los Angeles Times on October 19, 1922.

Chaplin and Mountbatten appeared to have bonded during their week together – Charlie told reporters his new friend was “such a nice, simple boy” and Dickie wrote his mother that Charlie was “the most loveable, shy and pathetic little man and yet so full of humor that he can keep one amused by the hour.”^[iii]

Back in New York before embarking for their return to England following two months of touring the United States, Dickie declared Hollywood and the Grand Canyon the highlights of their trip. He would later tell Kevin Brownlow “Pickfair was about – certainly, the most, best taste house, I should think in Hollywood, and run very much on English country house lines…In fact, they really kept court there. It was like Buckingham Palace in London; it was the house that everyone wanted to go to. To be asked, they would have to be more or less passed certain standards of behavior generally. Things were very proper and correct.”

Mountbatten also showed his talent for diplomacy by praising a film industry very much in need of friends. In late 1922, the business was still being whipped about by scandalous headlines about Fatty Arbuckle and the murder of director William Desmond Taylor, but Mountbatten told the assembled press that he had found “no wickedness” in Hollywood and “altogether it was a delightful place.”^[iv] (When Fairbanks was asked about the scandals around the same time, he claimed no knowledge, explaining, “You see, we live in Beverly Hills, and that’s seven miles from Hollywood.”^[v])

While the Mountbattens were being filmed for the newsreels, he asked if someone could send him a print in England. He carried his own movie camera as he went up the gangplank, saying he had taken “some very interesting films which would be developed in London and shown to the King and Queen.”^[vi]   It was a lovefest all around. (And Dickie’s love of the movies was lifelong: In the early 1930s, as the officer in charge of wireless communications, Mountbatten converted silent projectors to sound on all the 70 ships of the British Mediterranean fleet.)

Pickford and Fairbanks were regularly mentioned in the coverage of the Mountbattens and it is doubtful they ever got so much press for NOT being somewhere. It would be another year and a half until the two couples stayed together in the same house at the same time when Doug and Mary were the Mountbatten’s guests at their country estate, Adsdean.

The Mountbattens stayed in regular contact with Mary and Doug and, on several occasions, Edwina stayed at Pickfair on her own and at least once with a lover. Dickie spent much of his time at sea and Edwina liked to be entertained.  While the Fairbanks would eventually divorce over jealousy and infidelity, the Mountbattens stayed married in spite of the same until Edwina’s death in 1960. According to their younger daughter, Lady Pamela Hicks, her mother “had at least 18 lovers, but my father, to my knowledge, only had one other.”^[vii]

One more thing the foursome had in common: none of them used their birth names. Mary had changed Smith to Pickford for its marquee value and Fairbanks had been born Douglas Ulman, but his mother had changed her and her sons’ name in 1899 to purge any memory on that unhappy marriage. Mountbatten’s original surname was Battenberg and even though his father had served in the British Navy since he was 14, he was forced out of service and changed his name in 1914 with the wave of anti- German sentiment with the start of World War I. (It would be another two years until the British monarchy took the name Windsor that they still use today). Only Edwina changed her name the “traditional” way – by taking her husband’s through marriage.^[viii]

Sources

[i]  “large library” New York Times, 11/15/1922

[ii] “remained”    Lownie, Andrew  The Mountbattens: Their Lives and LovesBlink Publishing, London 2019, pg 430. Film available for streaming at https://www.charliechaplin.com/en/films/

[iii] “such a” Los Angeles Times, 10/19/22; “the most” Lownie p 53

[iv] “wickedness… delightful” NYT 11/15/22)

[v] “You see” Goessel, Tracey  The First King of Hollywood: The Life of Douglas Fairbanks, Chicago Review Press, Chicago, 2016, p 299

[vi] “some very” NYT 12/3/22

[vii] “had at least” Telegraph 12/16/2012

[viii] Battenberg name change, NYT 9/12/21

They called themselves United Artists, but the trades called it a “rebellion against established producing and distributing arrangements” when Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith went before the cameras on February 5, 1919 to sign the documents that created the corporation that the filmmakers claimed was necessary to protect their own interests as well as to “protect the exhibitor and the industry from itself.”

It wasn’t any great prescient vision that had brought Hollywood’s biggest money makers to this point. Rather, they were reacting, and quickly, to the what they saw as a threat by producing companies to limit their salaries and the quality of their films.

Pickford, Fairbanks and Chaplin might have volunteered to tour the country selling war bonds for patriotic reasons, but the overwhelming crowds their presence generated gave them a new confidence in their popularity. Why were they giving so much of the profits to producers? After all, didn’t audiences come to the movies to see them, not Zukor or Lasky?

While they were asking themselves those questions, executives at the producing companies were asking themselves why they were paying the stars so much.

A little backstory: During the 1910’s, film production companies, theaters and distribution mechanisms had multiplied and, in retrospect, reaction was often the catalyst for change.  Production, Exhibition, Distribution. They were the three legs of the film business and the participants were often in flux.  Like so many companies, First National had come into being as a reaction; in this case to Adolph Zukor’s practice of block booking. If theaters wanted Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks films, they had to agree to purchase all of the 100 plus Famous Players films each year, no matter the quality. In response, 26 smaller theater owners banded together in 1917 to buy and distribute films at competitive rates, vowing not to compete against each other. The idea was so successful that a year later, 600 theaters were in the First National cooperative. Then, no longer content just to buy films from others, they created First National Pictures to make their own films. The first big name to sign with them was Mary Pickford, for $1,500,000 a year with “complete artistic control” and D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin soon joined her at First National.

But a few months later, when First National executives were gathering at the Alexandria Hotel in Los Angeles in January of 1919, Chaplin went before them to request a larger budget and was refused. He was indignant. How could you have “complete artistic control” without control of the budget?

Still, their complaints and dreams might have remained just that if not for reported rumblings of a merger between the two major distributors, Paramount and First National, in early 1919. Mary had thrived on playing one off against the other to continually increase her income and if such a merger went through, they all knew it would “clamp the lid on the salaries.”

The stars hired the Pinkerton Agency to go undercover at that gathering of First National representatives and when their female agent confirmed the rumors, Doug, Mary, Charlie and Griffith were ready with their own plan. That January, Mary had been felled by the flu, but Charlotte stepped in to take her place at the meeting at Charlie’s brother Sydney’s house where their plans came together. Griffith was there and Doug brought in his and Mary’s attorney Dennis O’Brian and his brother Robert Fairbanks.

Initially, the cowboy star, William S. Hart, was a participant in their plans for a releasing corporation, but when Zukor promised him $200,000 a film without any production headaches or financial commitments, he re-signed with Famous Players.

They were committing to put up their own money to produce their own films without hindrance from anyone, including each other. William McAdoo, the former Secretary of the Treasury whom Doug had befriended on the bond tours, was named their General Counsel, adding an air of prestige from outside the industry. McAdoo knew little about making pictures, but in these heady times, Fairbanks, Pickford, Chaplin and Griffith represented the most successful and experienced combine imaginable.

They would face many challenges over the years and, in the mid-twenties, they would bring in Joe Schenck to run the company who in turn brought in his wife, Norma Talmadge, his sister-in-law Constance and their brother-in-law Buster Keaton. Other stars and producers came and went. For Mary, who was already in love with Doug and would marry him the next year, it was not always easy to deal with both a husband and his best friend as business partners. But she proved herself to be an inspired and informed businessperson as she actively helped steer UA from its inception through the early 1950s.

But all that was in the future on that exciting day, February 5, 1919, when the balancing act between production, distribution and exhibition was altered irrevocably by the stars taking control of producing and distributing their own films.

To many in the teens and twenties, Mary Pickford and her golden curls were one, yet she had long been wrestling with the question of whether her famous locks were holding her back. She had consistently given her fans what they wanted; after several attempts at playing grown women, she had returned to playing a young girl in Little Annie Rooney and Sparrows. Mary said that except for bangs when she was a child, scissors had never touched her hair. While others might wash it, Mary usually tended to her hair herself, using leather curling rags after her hair was almost dry. She also insisted she wouldn’t trust anyone to comb her hair, except her mother, because it needed to handled gently to keep the curls in place.  Finally, after her mother Charlotte passed away in early 1928, Mary was ready to take action.  She was in her mid-thirties and she decided she “couldn’t go on being Rebecca and Tess and Pollyanna and Annie forever. I had to take a courageous stand, once and for all. “

When Mary and Doug stopped in New York as they returned from their annual trip to Europe in June of 1928, Doug was full of plans to make his next film, The Iron Mask. In fact, he had convinced the English set designer Laurence Irving to drop everything and come with them to America and while in France, Doug had hired the designer Maurice Leloir who would follow them shortly. Mary had been quieter about her plans, but once in Manhattan, she secured the rights for the play Coquette. It would be her first “talkie” and she convinced herself that to play the role effectively, she needed short hair.

In her draft manuscript of her autobiography, Mary goes into more detail about deciding to cut her hair than was eventually published in Sunshine and Shadow.

They had been my making, those curls, and my unmaking too. They had given my pictures a badge of respectability. They prohibited me from playing anything in the slightest degree censorable. [They were the trademark that made my films safe for children.] Mothers trusted those curls as they trusted their own consciences.

Between that restriction and the weight of the curls, there was little left for me to do and very little ground that I could cover…..[After making Sparrows] I played a little girl for the last time. I was determined now, as I had never been before, to close the door on my screen childhood and to be my age, or something near it.

She told Doug where she was going as she left their suite at the Sherry Netherlands, but he wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not. But even more surprised about her decision was Charles Bock, the stylist whose hair salon was on the corner of 57^thand Fifth Ave.

Let Mary take up the story from there where she says she had to assure Bock:

 “Are you sure that you are not going to regret this step, Miss Pickford?” he asked.

I replied, “I’m quite sure. I have thought it over again and again. They’ve become a stumbling block to the future of my career.”

“All right; here goes.”

As he gripped the shears I had the feeling he needed aromatic spirits of ammonia more than I did.

The hair cut was deemed so consequential that it made the front page of the New York Times the next day:

After he had carefully cut off the twenty or so ringlets of hair….she gathered them in her lap and pronounced, “Well, they’re gone and I’m glad.” Bock looked over the head of hair in front of him that still reached to her shoulders while Mary told him she didn’t want “a shingle, a bob or anything like that.” He agreed and suggested, “What you want is a long bob, to suit you, the Mary Pickford bob.” And with that the real work began “with precision” to style her remaining hair intro a stylish, still curly cut.  With a smile, she took out five dollars from her purse, paid Bock and took her curls with her back to her hotel.

Mary picks up the story once she returned to the Sherry Netherlands:

When I removed my hat and showed Douglas my shorn head, he turned pale, took one step back and fell into a chair, moaning “oh, no, no no.” And great big tears came into his eyes.

“But I told you I was going to do it…”

“I know, Hipper, but I didn’t think you meant it. I never dreamt you’d do it.”

I must have looked very crestfallen over his reaction, for he immediately changed his tune.

“Whatever makes you happy, Hipper. After all, they were your curls and you’ve done what you thought best.”

Mary later claimed she “wasn’t at all prepared for was the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me from all corners of the earth. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live.” Laurence Irving described her fans’ surprise by saying, “If the Pope had appeared in St. Peter’s with a full-bottomed wig, his global flock would have been no less shocked.”

Movie magazines couldn’t write enough about the haircut and Mary was quoted often, mostly in apologetic tones. But she also pointed out, “Wouldn’t you think it a very sad business indeed for an actress to be made to feel that her success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.”

Ironically, her hair might have been much shorter, but for the first time in her life she had to start going to the hairdresser regularly.  “I naturally missed the curls, after they were gone… For weeks I told myself that I shouldn’t have done it. I thought it would free me. That was what I had been hoping and I suppose in a way it did, because I began to feel a change, in me personally, a sense of ease and liberation I hadn’t known before. “

She said her hair cut was “my final revolt against the type of thing I had been doing. There was no retracing my steps now. I made Coquette and had the great satisfaction of winning the Academy Award. For that my curls had been a very small price to pay.”

The war in Europe had been raging for almost three years when America entered in April of 1917.  Neutrality had been stressed for so long, President Wilson’s reelection the previous November had hinged on the fact that he had kept the country out of war. Yet when increased German submarine warfare against American ships made the flow of trade questionable, and the boost the war had brought to the American economy was endangered, the powers that be decided they could no longer afford to stay out.

However, it proved to be a challenge to shift popular sentiment and simply declaring war did not bring support from the population at large. It was estimated that one million men were needed to fight and yet in the first six weeks, only 73,000 enlisted. The draft was instituted, and the government created an unprecedented propaganda campaign.^[i]

Raising taxes only went so far to finance the war effort so the first Liberty Loan Act was passed April 24, 1917. The idea was to get the general citizenry to invest in war bonds, even in small amounts, and they would be repaid, albeit at a relatively low interest rate, after the war was won.

When the results of the first two bond drives proved disappointing, Treasury Secretary William McAdoo reached out to Hollywood for help. Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks all agreed to jump on the band wagon. Adolph Zukor was named to head the committee on Bond Subscriptions and immediately pledged that Famous Players Lasky would buy $100,000 worth of bonds. No one was going to be more patriotic than the film industry which was lead primarily by immigrants.

One of few dissenting voices came from Charlotte Pickford.   First and foremost, she was afraid of the crowds, and she did not think Mary’s image needed polishing.  They were carefully riding the crest of a perfect wave: “Our Mary’s” picture was everywhere, her films were making a fortune and she was already doing, in Charlotte’s mind, more than enough for the war effort. She also knew that her daughter was already in love with Doug and traveling and appearing together risked a potential public relations disaster.

They were going anyway, so Charlotte was on board the train, along with Mary, Charlie, Doug and a small entourage, when it left Los Angeles on April 1, 1918, almost a year after the US had entered what was now called The World War. Their first major rally was scheduled for Chicago, but at every train stop along the way, one of the stars went out on the rear observation platform to speak to the gathered throngs. The Chicago rallies produced crowds like they had never seen gathered in one place before. (See Donald Ogden Stewart’s experience with Mary at Marshall Field’s department store.) They had seen packed theaters and lines outside the box office for their films, but thousands of people showing up for just a glimpse made them realize the full power of their fame for the first time.

By the time the “Three Star Special” train departed for Washington D.C., they were all exhausted. Still, along the way, they continued their routine of rotating their role as speakers at the small towns along the route, no matter what time of day or night.^[ii]

April 6 brought them to Washington DC where they were joined by Broadway star Marie Dressler for a parade down Pennsylvania Avenue and a reception at the White House. The bond rally that afternoon was held at the Capitol Plaza where it was reported that then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, bought the first bond.^[iii]

It was on to Manhattan where Mary even sold a lock of her curls for the cause. Everywhere they went, together or individually, to speak at rallies – Uptown, Midtown and the Financial District – the crowds they attracted were reported to be “unprecedented.”^[iv]

After their heady experience in New York, the three stars separated and went to different parts of the country to continue selling bonds. By the time Mary returned to Los Angeles, she was declared “Uncle Sam’s most successful saleswoman” with reports that she was responsible for selling as much as 40 million dollars in bonds.^[v]

When a fourth Liberty Bond Act was passed in the fall of 1918, Mary took to the road again, but this time stayed in California. She returned to San Francisco where she had sold over 2 million in bonds only months earlier and it was reported she attended as many as a dozen events in a single day. She was joined again by Marie Dressler for a rally in Union Square and then was greeted by 5000 Bethlehem Shipbuilding workers at their plant. She challenged Oakland’s citizenry to compete with other cities to see who could buy the most bonds and encouraged them by contributing $5,000 of her own money to their war bond fund.^[vi]

On the train home, Mary stopped at small towns such as Visalia and Fresno, for rallies and speeches and returned to Los Angeles in time to join D.W. Griffith, Lois Weber and other film luminaries for a big rally to celebrate the 4^th Liberty Loan Drive on October 19, 1918.^[vii]

In less than a month, the war would be over, and they would be facing a new threat of a flu epidemic. By the time Armistice was declared in November of 1918, America had changed in many ways. “Patriotism” had been successfully capitalized and Mary, Doug and Charlie were more famous and popular than ever. Mary and Doug were also more in love than ever, but that’s another story.

Sources

[i]. Records of the National Archives, the Committee on Public Information; Enlistment numbers from Zinn, A People’s History, page 355.

[ii] Goessel, p 182

[iii] Washington Post 5/7/18

[iv] Goessel p 185

[v]  40 million, Houston Press 10/14/18; “Uncle Sam’s, Oakland Tribune 10/8/18

[vi] dozen events, LA Times, 10/15/18; 2 million, SF Chronicle 10/8/18; Bethlehem and $5,000, SF Chronicle 10/10/18

[vii] LA Times 10/20/18

By early 1930, Mary Pickford was looking for a great epic to follow The Taming of the Shrew and she decided on Secrets with a starring role that spans fifty years. She cast the Broadway actor Kenneth MacKenna to play opposite her and, hoping to recapture their past successes, she asked Mickey Neilan to direct. But Mickey’s drinking had progressively taken its toll; after a succession of quick, low budget films his career was close to a standstill when Mary’s call came. From the beginning, the filming was a fiasco; on screen, MacKenna looked years younger than Mary, always a sore spot, and she and Neilan had little patience for each other. After a month on the set and spending at least $300,000 in production costs, Mary closed the picture down and ordered all existing negatives burned. ^[i]

Seven years earlier, Frances Marion had adapted the play Secrets for Norma Talmadge to bring to the screen. Told in flashback, it opens with an old woman reading her diary as she sits with her husband on his deathbed. She falls asleep and dreams of the earliest days of their romance, moving on through their hard life as pioneers, the death of a child, the birth and growth of four more children, his success and accumulation of wealth, his affair that threatens their marriage, her decision to stand by him and finally, their declaration of devotion to each other in old age.^[ii]

Mary saw it as a great romantic saga, but Frances had always thought it was “just too much story.” While she tried to talk Mary out of taking it on, Frances appreciated its allure. “It was the kind of movie a star would love. Mary saw herself in those costumes. She saw herself in a great dramatic role, making an impact on Doug as well as on her public. She would be faithful to one man on the screen, through three generations. She felt it would be the vehicle through which she could prove herself all over again.” ^[iii]

Yet the deeper meaning for Mary was that it told the tale of a woman willing to stand by her husband who had flaunted his affair with another woman, foreseeing the love they could still share as they grew old together.

Mary had long suspected Doug of infidelities and there had been mentions in the English press that he had been keeping company with “a woman of nobility,” but now, for the first time, she had proof. A bracelet engraved to a woman he had met in England in early 1931, Lady Sylvia Ashley, was delivered to Mary by mistake.

Confronted with the hard evidence of Doug’s affair, Mary was determined to fight back the only way she knew how; not by traveling with her husband, not by stopping drinking, but by showing him what she envisioned herself capable of in real life by portraying a part on the screen.

Frances remained convinced Secrets was little more than a hackneyed melodrama, yet she saw how downgraded Mary felt by Doug and knew this was the only way she was able to confront her personal situation. Mary had already paid for the rights to the story and when she point blank asked, “Please come do this,” Frances agreed to write the adaption. If Mary had already done so much work on the project and was so determined, “I knew I could put in a little more.” ^[iv]

Their old friend Frank Borzage was hired to direct and Leslie Howard was chosen to play opposite Mary. Buddy Rogers asked to be considered for the part, but Mary was determined to concentrate on the task at hand and not complicate matters. This was to be her grand epic and, most importantly, her message to Douglas.

Trying to tighten her adaptation, Frances wrote the script without flashbacks, opening with Mary as a beautiful young woman riding in a carriage with her mother, and peeking out from behind a parasol at a handsome flirting Leslie Howard riding along side on a bicycle.

Mary’s voice is strong yet soft, almost lilting, and while the earlier scenes have her a bit wide eyed, she requites herself well throughout the scope of the film. Leslie Howard seems physically a bit slight to play the hero, but in their close ups the chemistry is believable. Still, Frances’s fears about “too much story” are borne out as it opens as a drawing room comedy, evolves into a western with the last act a melodrama. Mary was careful to have the last image of herself on the screen be a flashback, radiant in all her beauty as a young woman riding across the plains in a pioneer wagon. ^[v]

And with that, Mary’s personal agenda was met. She had put the little girl of her Pollyanna days firmly behind her by playing a role that took her into her seventies and then back again. She made her speech to Douglas on the screen: she knew of his infidelity, but she was willing to forgive and look ahead to the potential happiness that lay before them.

That Christmas, Doug returned from overseas, but the holidays were clouded by Jack Pickford falling ill. And Secrets opened in March of 1933, the same week the new President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, declared a bank “holiday,” closing all banks for a week to grapple with the Depression that had circled the Globe. Mary’s public had little cash on hand for necessities, let alone to buy movie tickets. ^[vi]

And while Mary’s and Doug’s marriage would last for another few years, their failure to talk to each other face to face instead of through the characters they played doomed their marriage. Secrets would be Mary Pickford’s final film as an actress.

[i]. Jack Spears, Marshall Neilan, Films in Review, November 1962, page 535; Scott Eyman, Mary Pickford, page 202.

[ii]. Secrets with Norma Talmadge (Schenck- First National, 1924) viewed at the Museum of Modern Art.

[iii]. “It was the kind…” Frances Marion to Booton Herndon.

[iv]. “I knew…” FM to Booton Herndon.

[v]. Secrets with Mary Pickford viewed at UCLA

[vi] New York Times, March 8, 1933

Mary Pickford was always on the lookout for new material, and because of her busy schedule, squeezed that search into any down time. Frequently, when she was spending the evening washing and setting her hair, Frances Marion, who lived a few houses away, would read to her.

It was during one of their informal sessions that Frances read the novel The Star of the Sea by William Locke. It was the story of two, polar opposite teenage orphans: the rich, but crippled Stella Maris, “a figure of wondrous beauty,” and Unity Blake, “another victim of cruel fate, deformed, but equally beautiful of soul.” Stella lives in luxury, protected from the realities of the world by her titled aunt and uncle. Her reason for living becomes the handsome journalist John Risca who visits her daily and it is not until she is operated on and walks again that she learns John is “burdened by a drink-crazed wife” who is in jail for beating the orphan who worked for them, Unity Blake. Out of pity and guilt, John adopts Unity who also comes to love John. Keeping that secret to herself, Unity knows that the happiness Stella and John share will end when his wife is released, so she commits the “the ultimate act of sacrifice.” Unity kills the wife and then herself, leaving John a note explaining “You was the only one as was ever kind to me. God bless you and Miss Stella Maris and make you happy.”^[i]

It was fairly strong, serious material and Frances was surprised when Mary announced her determination to play both characters. Mary’s mother Charlotte hesitated as well, but she was always a bit concerned that another actress might try to upstage her daughter and Mary playing both Unity and Stella would moot that threat. Director Mickey Neilan and the cinematographer Walter Stradling put their heads together and worked out how it was possible for Mary to appear in both roles on the screen at the same time.

Closeting herself to dress in her Unity costume, Mary appeared with her hair dulled, darkened and greased down, a slumped shoulder and little makeup; it took even Frances a minute to recognize the pathetic little figure standing in the doorway. Mary was so thorough (and appreciated the importance of costumes in helping her immerse into a role) that she had one shoe cut down and the other elevated, so it would be natural to limp.^[ii]

Adolph Zukor came to the set and “the look of dismay on the poor man’s face was something to see,” Mary said. “I had to pacify him that I died early in the picture.”

Zukor replied, “The sooner the better!”

Stella Maris brought a new pinnacle of acclaim for Mary’s dramatic talents, particularly for her role as Unity Blake. Mary maintained the limp and slumped shoulder along with a twisted mouth throughout all her scenes, and the fact that a beautiful actress was willing to look so plain brought unprecedented praise. “Stella Maris should prove a turning point in the history of America’s favorite star,” Photoplay proclaimed. “The public will never again be satisfied with plays in which Miss Pickford is not given an opportunity to act.”^[iii]

Mickey Neilan came in for his share of praise and Walter Stradling was celebrated for his technical achievements in the scenes where Unity and Stella share the screen. Frances Marion’s name was mentioned occasionally such as when the scenario was lauded for “rising far above the novel through pure artistry of development.”^[iv]

The publicity department went all out in promoting Stella Maris and theater owners received sample post cards to send customers, ideas for store tie ins and life size cardboard cut outs of Mary. It was even suggested exhibitors put a gun in the pocket of the Unity Blake mannequin and “fire it off occasionally,” claiming “this caused a great sensation at the Lyceum Theater.”

Alfred A. Cohn, who had written puff pieces on Mary, Doug and Mickey for Photoplay, was hired as Mary’s personal publicist. Cohn prided himself in having friends in high places, such as President Wilson’s personal secretary Joseph Tumulty and George Creel, the former reporter and film writer named head of the Committee of Public Information created to garner public support for America’s participation in the war.

Cohn’s efforts culminated in pictures of President Wilson, quoted as saying: “I have to thank you for the opportunity of witnessing Stella Maris, a production which I am sure will hearten the nation at this time of crisis. Its theme of woman’s lofty ideals has an irresistible appeal and its portrayal of all phases of life must be an incentive for good and loving deeds.”^[v]

Even accepting that the President of the United States would allow himself to be used in publicity for a film, how murder and suicide were considered “incentive for good and loving deeds” is beyond comprehension. Still, the promotion underscored two facts: Mary’s image was unassailable and everything, even Stella Maris, was being tied to the World War.

[i].”a figure of…” and other titles from film; “the ultimate act,” Stella Maris press kit, AMPAS.

[ii]. Neilan, Hollywood Echos, unpublished memoir. Peterson, Frances Marion Goes Over, Motion Picture Magazine, Jan 1919 page 54.

[iii]. “the look of…” Pickford, Sunshine and Shadows, pages 241-242; Motion Picture World, Feb 9, 1918; “Stella Maris should…” Photoplay April 1918.

[iv]. Photoplay April, 1918; “rising far above..” MPW February 9, 1918, page 864

[v]. Stella Maris press kit, AMPAS. President Wilson had been quoted praising other films, including The Birth of a Nation and his interest in the industry was shown in making time to officially open a motion picture convention in New York in 1914.

By 1925, Mary Pickford had been an international super star and “America’s sweetheart” for over a decade. While still in her teens, she had played everything from waifs to married women and matrons, but she had secured her fame by portraying young girls in films such as Poor Little Rich Girl, A Little Princess and Pollyanna. In the spring of 1925, Mary was looking ahead to her 33^rd birthday and wanted to play adult roles, yet her last two films, Rosita and Dorothy Vernon of Hadden Hall, had not been as successful as she hoped. And when Photoplay asked her fans what they wanted to see, the magazine reported they received over 20,000 letters begging her to play a child again. As her own producer, Mary faced those facts and looked at several possibilities, but came up with the idea of Little Annie Rooney, according to Kevin Brownlow, “while walking through empty sets of the lonely studio at night and wrote the story in two weeks.” (Just as she had reviewed her family tree when she changed her name from Gladys Smith to Mary Pickford, she credited the screenplay of Little Annie Rooney to her grandmother, Catherine Hennessey.)

Pickford created a story that is both a comedy and a tearjerker and a role for herself as a “tomboy of the tenements” who also tends the home front for her widowed father and brother. For the families that constitute the neighborhood, Mary selected a wide ranging, multi ethnic cast that seems organic to the story even if stereotypes of the era occasionally pop up. (At the time, the Little Rascals were the rare exception to the almost exclusively white casts coming from studio films).

Little Annie Rooney was shot over 10 weeks entirely on a set created by art director John D. Schulze at the Pickford Fairbanks Studio on Santa Monica Blvd. One of the joys of seeing the film on the big screen is that the details of the set decoration, down to the eclectic group of used candles that adorn the birthday cake, can be appreciated. Pickford brought in the director William Beaudine; she had not worked with him before, but he had an established record as a successful director of children and comedies. And for her cinematographers, she depended upon her long time friend and colleague, Charles Rosher and Hal Mohr. In 1917, Pickford had chanced upon the effectiveness of a “baby spot” light on her face to make her look younger, and used it regularly, but it was particularly important when, at 33, she was playing a young teenager. Little Annie Rooney bears witness to Pickford’s total physicality and her use of every muscle in her body to play an active youngster. She also knew that making the film in sequence, a technique that as producer she had the power to institute, helped her in developing her character.

With Little Annie Rooney, Pickford provided her fans with the film they wanted to see. As the Los Angeles Times reported when it premiered in October of 1925, “A new popular triumph goes to Mary Pickford. Her picture ‘Little Annie Rooney’ will be hailed far and wide as great entertainment. It is the most amusing comedy she has made in ages, and marks her return to the hoyden type of role in which she has always won the height of favor.”

The Museum of Modern Art, with cooperation from the Mary Pickford Foundation, has restored Ernst Lubitsch’s Rosita (1923), starring Mary Pickford, from the last known surviving nitrate print found at Gosfilmofond in Russia. The Pickford Foundation provided access to our 35mm elements and The Film Foundation and The Mayer Foundation also cooperated with MoMA on the restoration.

Rosita will be having its restoration premiere during a “pre-inaugural evening” before the Venice Film Festival on August 29 and it will be wonderful to have the film (and the original orchestral score they are recording for it) available to audiences again.

A variety of stories have grown up around Rosita over the years; in fact, the Venice press release says, “The film was, by all accounts, a major critical and commercial success on its first release, but in later years Pickford turned against it, for reasons that still remain mysterious.” Actually, the story isn’t really “mysterious” at all, but is nuanced and a bit complicated so this seems as good a time as any to revisit Rosita and Mary’s thinking about it.

Before even getting to that, however, it is important to note that it was Mary Pickford who brought Ernst Lubitsch to America in the first place, and, in 1922, that was no small feat. The World War had just ended and Americans who had been inundated with anti-German films and urged to “Come and Hiss the Kaiser” were not in a forgiving mood. Mary herself had ended her 1918 film Johanna Enlists with the proviso, “Don’t come back til you’ve taken the Germ out of Germany.”

Pickford had seen Lubitsch’s German films and was impressed. As she recalled in a 1958 interview with George Pratt, “I had already done the second Tess of the Storm Country and I wanted to do a grown-up role. I wanted to do an adult woman.” And she thought a director such as Lubitsch would have the “touch” to do that successfully.

But first she had to get the director to Hollywood and the American Legion, amongst others, objected vociferously. Pickford recalled to Kevin Brownlow in 1974 that she was on stage when the head of the American Legion took to the podium to say: “I hear that the Son of the Kaiser is coming here. He doesn’t belong here, he is still our enemy. Why are they bringing German singers over here? Do we not have good enough singers here in the United States, without going to Germany?”

Pickford’s response: “General. Since when has art had borderlines? Art is universal. And for my pictures, I will get the finest, no matter what country they come from. The war is over. And it’s very ill bred and stupid for the general to stand up and talk like that. A German voice is god given if it’s beautiful. Yes, I am bringing Mr. Lubitsch over here and I’m glad I can.”

Pickford, who appreciated her power yet was careful about how she used it, had stood up for what she thought was right. Still, the woman who had put her career on hold to tour the country and sell millions of dollars in war bonds said she found herself being denounced as a traitor for ignoring our own directors in favor of the erstwhile enemy.”

Pickford also told amusing (in retrospect) tales of getting Lubitsch off the ocean liner and eventually to Hollywood safely and with a minimum of publicity. The plan had been for him to direct the film Dorothy Vernon of Hadden Hall. He had read the script in German and had agreed, but once in Hollywood, he decided he didn’t like the story and insisted on doing something else.

Lubitsch next suggested Faust, and in retrospect Mary said she wished she had done it, but before that got off the ground, Mary’s mother Charlotte asked the director about the story. According to Mary, the conversation when something like this:

Lubitsch: “Yeah, she has a baby, she’s not married, so she strangles the baby”
Charlotte: “What? What was that?”
Lubitsch: “She has a baby, she’s not married, she strangles the baby”
Charlotte: “Not my daughter, no sir!”

As Mary summed it up, “And so I didn’t make Faust.” (Brownlow)

Mary was always happiest when she was in preproduction, production or even post production. But since Lubitsch had arrived, she had been in none of these and was starting to get anxious. She had gone out on a limb to bring him to America and she wanted to get to work. Finally, they compromised on a story about a young Spanish maiden caught in court intrigue in the late 1880s, loosely based on a French opera. Eddie Knoblock wrote the script for the romantic drama and the art director, William Cameron Menzies, went to work recreating Seville, complete with a castle and cobbled streets, all on the Pickford Fairbanks lot on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Initially, Mary was comfortable with the essence of her character, a strong willed young woman with principles and a backbone, who supports herself and her family as a street singer. In fact, at first, that was the film’s working title: The Street Singer.

Part of what Mary wasn’t comfortable with was the flirty nature that Lubitsch wanted her to exhibit. They were both very strong willed people, set in their ways and had more than their share of conflicts about the story and Mary’s performance, but Pickford said she was always careful to have those discussions in private.

Mary told the story of how, early on, she and Lubitsch had a disagreement about the way the love story was developing and she visited him in his office:

“Mr. Lubitsch, this is the first time you’ve met me, as the financial backer and the producer.”
He said “Vot is this?”
I said “I am telling you that I am the court of the last appeal.”
“Vot is this?”
I said “I’m putting up the money, I’m the star, I’m the one that’s known, and you are not going to have the last word.”

Lubitsch was used to being in charge and having a star who was also the producer was a new and disconcerting experience for him. While Lubitsch’s command of English was still in its formative stages, Eddie Knoblock spoke excellent German and could be called on to clarify any misunderstandings.

In later years, Pickford reflected on her experience being directed by Lubitsch in Rosita. “Of course, the director can be as much miscast as an actor,” Mary mused during her oral history for the Butler Library at Columbia. “For instance, take Lubitsch directing me. Now of course he understood Pola Negri or Gloria Swanson, that type of actress, but he didn’t understand me because I am purely Americana. I’m not European. Just as John Ford I don’t think could direct Negri.”

The bottom line was while Lubitsch saw himself trying to get Pickford out of her comfort zone as an actress, she felt he was asking her to play a character she eventually found to be one dimensional. Pickford tried to explain the give and take she experienced with Lubitsch to George Pratt. “Being a European, he liked to do naughty and suggestive things. He tried to be as moral as he knew how and I tried to be slightly naughty. And I have always thought,” she said with a laugh, “that the result was pretty terrible.”

She was speaking as an actress about her own performance, however when she put on her producer hat, she admired the film. She found “that the costuming, the décor and the sets are magnificent and so was the photography [by Charles Rosher].“ And then she added, “I just didn’t like myself as Rosita and I think it was my fault and not Lubitsch’s.”

So Mary’s feelings aren’t so mysterious after all. And the current restoration of Rosita allows us to see the film ourselves – Pickford’s performance, Lubitsch’s direction, Rosher’s cinematography, Menzies’s sets and all the other aspects of this 95 year old film, thanks to MoMA and all the artists, archivists and funders who made this possible.

Photographs courtesy of:
Joseph M. Yranski
Bison Archives
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences

By 1925, Doug and Mary’s home was known far and wide as “Pickfair” and they had hosted royalty and a variety of distinguished guests, sometimes for weeks at a time.  Parties large and small were held with regularity, but occasionally the house was also the site for family affairs such as the wedding of Mary’s cousin, Verna Watson, 20, to Selmar Chalif, 21. Verna lived in New York, but the offer of a sunny outdoor May wedding at one of the most famous homes in the country was well worth the trip.

We know how close Mary was to her mother Charlotte and her younger siblings, but she took care of her extended family as well. Verna was the daughter of Charlotte’s older sister Elizabeth, or Lizzie. Charlotte had been nine years old when her father died and to survive, she and her newly widowed mother moved in with Lizzie who had recently married William Watson. Taking care of family was in their DNA so of course Mary would offer her home. And she arranged for Reverend Dodd, the same Episcopal minister who had married her brother Jack and Marilyn Miller at Pickfair in 1922, to officiate.

Yet even a family wedding was not a simple affair. Two airplanes circled the house and flew in low to drop white and red carnations on the roof on the gathering below. Mary was the matron of honor and her niece Gwen, Lottie’s daughter, was the flower girl. The bride’s parents were there as were Charlotte and Jack Pickford alongside his wife Marilyn Miller.

Doug’s family was represented by his brother Robert and his wife and friends from the film business such as future director Raoul Walsh, Charlie Chaplin, Al Parker and Mary’s cinematographer, Charles Rosher, were included as well.

Home movies were made of the wedding and when the camera’s rolled, Mary and Doug could not resist hamming it up. In the Mary Pickford Foundation’s archives, some of the film still exists so enjoy this clip from a family wedding on May 10, 1925.

Charlotte Hennessey was born in Toronto on January 1, 1873. Her parents had emigrated from Ireland and before her twentieth birthday she married John Smith, a good looking man only a few years her senior. But John never made much money or much of himself before he died in early 1898, leaving Charlotte with three young children to raise on her own. She took in boarders, laundry, sewing and whatever was necessary to support the family before her eldest daughter Gladys found work on the stage. Once that daughter became Mary Pickford, courtesy of a starring role on Broadway for producer David Belasco, Charlotte changed her name and that of her younger two children to Pickford as well.

That faith in Mary and her commitment to her never wavered, but Charlotte was never a stereotypical “stage mother.” Mary’s future director and friend, Marshall Neilan, bristled when that appellation was used for Charlotte. “This would never apply to her in any way. She possesses the natural mothering instinct to protect her own…. Other directors that had worked with Mary had told how some girls had showed up during the casting of a picture with hair do’s exactly like the famous Pickford golden girl hair do – one look at the imitation and Charlotte’s battle cry would ring out and this outraged Mrs. Pickford would be in action carrying this fight to whoever the higher ups might be.”

Mickey also remembered that “mothering instinct” in action from the earliest days at Biograph. “Griffith knew women and he knew how to play one against the other….Charlotte Pickford saw through that like a pane of glass. Griffith could take a different girl dancing every night whispering much of this kind of hooky in their ears that they love to hear, but he never could get Mary out alone as Charlotte always managed to make it plain that she would have to go along.”

Charlotte also was the hard headed manager who was always at Mary’s side when it was time to talk about contracts, allowing Mary to demur into the role of always being the pleasant one. As Mary put it, “Mother always talked terms.” Adolph Zukor knew that first hand, negotiating several contracts with them, at one point claiming, “Mary, sweetheart, I don’t have to diet. Every time I talk over a new contract with you and your mother, I love ten pounds.” Charlotte also served as her agent, making trips to New York to buy rights to stories they judged right for Mary. And Charlotte was the one to invest Mary’s growing income. In the late teens, when they moved to Los Angeles for good, Charlotte perused the still developing landscape and decided it was best to buy land, but not houses. They continued to rent while Charlotte’s portfolio of holdings grew. The poverty of their earlier years influenced every decision Charlotte made and she made all the financial decisions.

While Charlotte stayed in the background, her reputation for being an astute operator was known within the filmmaking community. Raoul Walsh called her “the smartest woman in the motion-picture industry” and credited her with being “the first agent to make Hollywood producers tear their hair.” And he wasn’t alone. When Joe Kennedy sponsored a series of seminars on film at Harvard, Gloria Swanson chided him for not having a woman speak and they agreed that Charlotte Pickford would have been logical choice. Amongst her other talents, she was known to step into a theater and size up the box office in seconds.

Charlotte was always at Mary’s side making business decisions, but was careful when it came to giving personal advice. Mary had married Owen Moore in secret and Charlotte realized that her strictness may have been behind her daughter’s actions. When it came to Mary’s affair with Doug Fairbanks, Charlotte was often there as a public chaperone, particularly when they traveled the country selling war bonds. It wasn’t that Charlotte approved, but she had seen the misery Owen had caused Mary and wanted her happy. As Frances Marion put it, “The main thing was that ‘Mama’ loved Mary to be happy and Mary was never lovelier than when she was with Doug. That was enough ‘Mama.’” Charlotte went with Mary to Nevada when she divorced Owen Moore and was there a few weeks later when Mary married Doug.

While Charlotte often traveled with Mary and Doug, and went as far as New York to see them off on their European honeymoon, she kept her distance when they were all at home in Los Angeles. Once United Artists was formed, there were no more producers to negotiate with. However, she was often at board meetings or in conference with attorneys and still had a say in the films Mary made. The story is often told that Charlotte was the one who refused to have Mary star in Faust for Ernst Lubitsch. Mary always valued her counsel and her mother dined at Pickfair once or twice a week, but Charlotte had her own network of friends. According to Mickey Neilan, she had suitors that she enjoyed, but none she ever took very seriously. Ill health haunted her beginning in the early 1920s and after several operations, she refused to go through anymore when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in the mid-twenties. Mary moved in with her mother at her Santa Monica beach house for the last few months of her life and was there when Charlotte died on March 22, 1928.

If a true test of friendship is mutual respect, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith developed that early in their relationship and kept it up all their lives. Initially, he was the boss and then, when they founded United Artists together in 1919, they were partners, but whatever their circumstances, they kept the lines of communication open. In various interviews Mary conducted between 1955 and 1965, she often spoke of their unique relationship and, as this sampling bears out, they were both stubborn and opinionated, but always able to learn from each other.

In the oral history conducted for Columbia University, Mary delved into their early days of working together:

“[Mr. Griffith] was to some the great master which of course I never accepted. I respected him, I had an affection for him. but when he told me to do things I didn’t believe in, I wouldn’t do them….I would never object to anything of a technical nature; only when Mr. Griffith asked me to do something that made me feel foolish, like clapping my hands and saying ‘Oooo, look at the sweet little birdies.’

He said, ‘look at me.’ I said, ‘No.’ He said ‘I told you to look at me’ and I said, “Mr. Griffith, if I look at you, I’ll imitate you. And I don’t want to imitate you, I want to be myself.’ Oh, he was furious with me. I said ‘There’s enough people imitating you. I won’t overact.’”

“But he taught me a lot,” Mary told Kevin Brownlow when he interviewed her for his book, The Parade’s Gone By. “For instance in a picture, I came in a poor little girl and I had this miserable little coat on with a moth eaten fur collar and a funny little hat with a bird on it. I threw the hat on the bed and I threw the coat down. He stopped the camera. To stop the camera in those days I think it cost 2 cents a foot.

He said ‘Stop’ and he walked over to the set and he always called me Pickford. He said ‘You’ll never do that again. You never come in and throw the hat on the bed.’… You take off your coat and you don’t shake it and you don’t take care of it. You know, no heroine is untidy.’

I said ‘Yes, sir.’

He said ‘Now Pickford, you go back and come in again. Camera!’

I thought, Mr. Griffith is right. So I went outside and came in, took my coat off and shook it, brushed the fur, fixed the little bird on my hat, put it down on the chair, and put my coat on the back of the chair.

Mr. Griffith said, ‘Very good.’ That’s the way he would direct me.”

Even after Pickford had returned to the stage and then signed with Adolph Zukor to make films, she and Griffith stayed in touch. (She said that when she told Griffith she was leaving Biograph, there were “tears were in his eyes.”). The first film she made with Zukor was The Good Little Devil which Mary was the first to say “was very, very bad because we read all the lines from the play and it was dull, dreadfully slow.” But then came In the Bishop’s Carriage and Caprice. When she was briefly hospitalized in New York, Griffith visited her and she recounted the following conversation in the Columbia oral history:

“Mr. Griffith came in and said, ‘I want to give you some good advice, Pickford. You’re on the wrong track. Nobody will sit through five or six reels. It’s too long.’

So I said, ‘Mr. Griffith, before you make up your mind, please go and see the picture. It opens tomorrow night at 116^th and Amsterdam, I think.’

So he did. It was In the Bishop’s Carriage. This is what I think proved he was a very real fine man. He couldn’t wait to get back to the hospital to tell me he was wrong. He was there the next morning at 9 o’clock and said, ‘You were right and I was wrong. Yes they will see when pictures are produced like that, they will sit through them. I’m changing my whole mode of operation.’”

“I had an affection for him, but it didn’t stop me from always questioning him,” Mary told Kevin Brownlow. “We remained, until the day of his death, very good friends.”

Griffith died in Hollywood in 1948 and was buried in a church grave yard near his childhood home in Crestwood, Kentucky. In 1950, Mary, along with Lillian Gish, Richard Barthlemess and Griffith’s ex-wife, Evelyn Baldwin, traveled there to place the large stone marker, provided by the Directors Guild, on his grave.

ZaSu Pitts became a renowned character actress, beginning in the teens and working consistently through the early 1960s. She developed distinctive and eccentric affections that endeared her to audiences but limited the roles she could play. Behind that screen personality was a complicated woman whose life reflected the roller coaster that was Hollywood. Like so many featured players, she does not have a serious biography, but we know that Mary Pickford and Frances Marion were important in putting her on her path, so I wanted to pull together what I have collected over the years, particularly from previously unpublished memoirs and letters, to present a summary of her story.

Born in Kansas on January 3, 1894, ZaSu (pronounced zay-zoo) was named after her father’s two sisters, Eliza and Susan. ZaSu was five when her father died and her mother decided to move ZaSu, her two older brothers and herself to Santa Cruz, a small beach town on the Northern California coast. They ran a boarding house there, but money was very tight so ZaSu, like so many other young women in the teens, left home to try her luck in the movies. She had found small roles in a few short films when she went to nearby Pleasanton where Mary Pickford was filming Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. ZaSu was cast as an extra in the film and then followed the company back to Los Angeles.

Frances Marion was finishing the script for Mary’s next film, A Little Princess, when a young man from the casting office called to say he was bringing over “a maiden fairer than Aphrodite” for her consideration. He walked in a few minutes later escorting a thin, awkward young woman with enormous eyes and Frances’s first reaction was to be reminded of “a trapped little animal.” But when the man said, “beauty like this should not go unnoticed,” Frances threw him out and admonished the girl, now with tears in her eyes, to pay no attention to him. ^[i]

“Tell me about yourself,” Frances said in an effort to make her comfortable and, without any evidence of self-pity, the visitor talked about her early childhood in Kansas, her father’s death and the family’s move to Santa Cruz. She had found some work with Universal, but had little luck at other studios. Zasu told Frances that she had even met D.W. Griffith, “but he said she looked too much like Lillian Gish to be in any of his pictures. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her.”^[ii]

As Frances watched and listened, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry and it occurred to her that audiences might be touched as she was. There was a part in A Little Princess for a young maid called a slavey and Frances went to Mary with the idea of casting ZaSu. When Mary heard the whole story, including the derogatory remarks, she approved immediately. ^[iii]

Mickey Neilan agreed that ZaSu was “perfect for the part” and records the following story in his memoirs:

ZaSu must have become inspired by something because she did a couple of dramatic scenes that were wonderful. Mrs. Pickford, always alert to protect het little brood from any direction, whether it was Mary, Lottie or Jack, saw these scenes in the projection room when we were running her the daily rushes.

Afterward, as we were all walking back towards Mary’s dressing room, she took me aside and said, ‘That girl is good, Mickey – in fact she’s too good, now can’t we just cut the scene out of the picture?’

I thought it best to humor her and I said, ‘Charlotte, Mary and I try in every way to get the best talent to play in these pictures which goes to make good and sometimes great pictures. One bad actor or actress can sometimes throw this picture way off key, spoiling the entire illusion we are trying to create.’

‘But Mickey,’ she exploded, ‘she’s stealing the picture.’

‘Oh, nonsense,’ I replied. ‘She is supposed to dominate this scene to make the situation real and believable.’ Charlotte squared off and her little hat slid down almost over her eye. ‘Now you listen to me you stubborn Irish…’ A quiet voice but carrying authority intruded into our little argument.

‘Mother, Mickey is absolutely right and tomorrow I am going to ask him to make a close-up of Zasu in this scene. She is simply marvelous and people will see her and talk about her, but best of all they’ll talk about My Picture which is what sells tickets.’

Mother Pickford, with the quick understanding of the Celt, quietly put her arm around my shoulder and said, ‘Well what chance have I got between you two Irish larks… Hum! Sell tickets? Well, come on, let’s go home. We’ve got to take that added scene of that wonderful girl tomorrow.’ Mary gave me the knowing wink and led her mother gently away. ^[iv]

When A Little Princess was released in November of 1917, it was indeed a big success and Moving Picture World was not the only one to make special mention of the actress playing the young “slavey”: “Watch ZaSu Pitts, for she is a coming star.”^[v] Still, Lasky did not put ZaSu under contract and while she appeared in another Pickford film, How Could You, Jean?, she went on to play a variety of roles at different studios before starring in Erich von Stroheim’s Greed in 1924. She was critically well-received in several serious roles including von Stroheim’s The Wedding March, yet in between she became familiar to movie goers as a comedienne, so when she appeared as Lew Ayres’ dying mother in All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930, the audience at the first preview started to laugh uproariously as soon as she came on the screen. Her heart-wrenching speech could not be heard over the laughter, and it was clear ZaSu was so identified with comedic roles, the scene would have to be reshot with another actress.^[v]

After spending several years as one of the earliest residents of the Hollywood Studio Club, ZaSu married the sportsman and promoter Tom Gallery in 1920. She gave birth to her daughter Ann who she raised alongside Don, the child the actress Barbara LaMarr asked ZaSu to adopt before she died in 1926. In 1933, ZaSu divorced Gallery and married John “Eddie” Woodhall, a handsome former tennis player seven years her junior. They would stay married until her death and from all accounts she adored him, although her friends did not agree, as Frances Marion wrote: “We all felt strongly anti-Eddie until finally we realized that while ZaSu had worked so hard for thirty years keeping him in gambling money she really loved him and if anyone even slighted him, she was upset. I’ll never forget when Eulalia said mildly, at a time when Zasu was hard pressed for money, ‘Can’t Eddie get a regular job?’”

Finances were often an issue, but they managed to buy a beautiful Paul Williams designed house in 1936 at 241 North Rockingham Road in Brentwood. Frances Marion, who stayed close with ZaSu over the years, was always on the look out for parts in her films ZaSu could play, such as the role of Gert in Blondie of the Follies starring Marion Davies.^[vii]

ZaSu managed to work fairly regularly and grew into a familiar and beloved character actress. She moved into performing in live television in the 1950s and was introduced to a new generation by playing Ann Sothern’s Aunt Martha in one of television’s first situation comedies, Private Secretary (1953-1957) and then as Gale Storm’s sidekick in the situation comedy, Oh! Susannah! (1956 – 1960). In the early 1960s ZaSu was a frequent guest star on established programs such as The Jim Backus Show, Perry Mason and Burke’s Law and her final big screen appearance was in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in 1963.

In the last few years of her life ZaSu became very political, raging against such relatively mainstream characters as Governor Pat Brown and UAW Chair Walter Reuther. Her friend, the screenwriter and journalist DeWitt Bodeen, described her as “to the far right of the late John Wayne. She got up to make a speech and soon even the Republicans were booing her. She had none of her facts straight. Newspaper columnists slapped her down in their columns, but ZaSu simply quietly withdrew from the public scene, realizing that electioneering was not for her.” That was an understatement. It was almost as if she had become an over the top character that would have been too much on the screen, let alone real life. ^[viii]

ZaSu had been stricken with cancer for several years, but pretended to her friends and family that she had recovered. Frances Marion wrote to Gloria Swanson, who asked Frances to forward a sympathy note to Ann, and recounted her experience with ZaSu’s final year:

“I hadn’t seen ZaSu in two or three months but we talked often over the telephone. Poor darling, she was so hopeful and convinced that she was entirely cured. But our mutual friend, Dr. Terwilliger, told me that while the Pasadena doctor [the nutritionist Dr. Bieler] truly a great man, he was not a miracle worker and Dr. T. was worried because ZaSu took such little care of herself. Her eagerness to make money – for Eddie – drove her to destructive lengths – such as only a few weeks before she died she motored herself to Phoenix and did the play Everybody Loves Opal for a week. An old friend, Mrs. Loyal Davis (the wife of the famous brain surgeon in Chicago) and Coleen Moore were both there and went to the opening performance. [Edith Davis was an actress when she married her second husband, Loyal Davis, and was already the mother of her daughter Nancy who would also become an actress and then marry Ronald Reagan]. They were both shocked at the way she looked and when Mrs. Davis found that she was staying in a motel, she picked her up bag and baggage and brought her to her own beautiful home in Phoenix. There she received fresh food and loving care, but Mrs. Davis said that it was unbelievable the torture ZaSu went through to gather enough strength in order to continue in the play with two matinees and sever performances. Then she drove back and about two weeks before she died, she flew to Canada to do the play for a week for about $750 I understand. This of course sealed her doom. Toward the last she was in agony and Eddie carried on in true dramatic style. His friends said, ‘He’s heartbroken losing her.’ Her friends said, ‘He’s heartbroken losing his meal ticket.’ Thus the civil war raged on. Now the poor old boy will have to get a job in the real estate business.

Like all mothers, ZaSu managed to keep from Ann not only how seriously ill she was but how intensely she was suffering, so naturally she was stunned when death came so suddenly. But she has the comfort of a very fine loving husband and those two wonderful children. I was almost as bad as Ann because ZaSu had me practically convinced that there was no longer any sign of the cancer in her body. In the Western story which I just finished and which will be produced as a movie I hope, I hope, I had written the most wonderful comedy role for her that she has had in years. To amuse her, I used to read scenes to her over the phone and even when her laughter sometimes ended in a cough I persuaded myself that the cough was only the tail end of a cold which she assured me she was getting over.” ^[ix]

ZaSu died on June 7, 1963 at the age of 69. Many of her obituaries reported her age as 63 as she had moved her birthdate from 1894 to 1900 when she married the younger Woodall. Following a Catholic mass, she was buried at Holy Cross in Los Angeles. The husband ZaSu worked so hard to support managed somehow as he lived another twenty plus years, passing away in 1988 at the age of 87 – (April 18, 1901 – Sept 25, 1988) buried at Holy Cross.

[i]. Marion, Hollywood, page 115

[ii]. “but he said…” DeWitt Bodeen, ZaSu Pitts, Films in Review June-July 1980

[iii]. Eliza + Susan = Zasu, Alfred A. Cohn, Photoplay, April, 1919; DeWitt Bodeen, ZaSu Pitts, Films in Review June-July 1980; Hollywood, page 116

[iv]. Mickey Neilan, Hollywood Echos, unpublished memoir

[v]. “watch for..” Marion Howard review, MPW Dec 22, 1917

[vi]. DeWitt Bodeen, Zasu Pitts, Films in Review, June 1980; Beryl Mercer replaced her in the sound film, but ZaSu was left in the silent version.

[vii]. Los Angeles Times, Jan 15, 1932; Los Angeles Times, April 27, 1932. Don Gallery told me he was never sure who his biological father was, but strongly suspected that it was MGM producer Paul Bern. “We all felt” Francis Marion to Gloria Swanson, June 20, 1963.

[viii]. “to the far right…” Bodeen, Films in Review

[ix]. “I hadn’t seen…” Marion to Swanson, June 20, 1963

Recently, a Mitchell Leisen-designed costume Mary Pickford wore in the film Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (1924) that had been loaned to the Pickford Theater in Cathedral City was returned to the Mary Pickford Foundation. In order to assure the proper care and preservation of this exquisite dressing gown, we made an easy decision: donate the costume to the place Mary herself had given several of her costumes back in 1932 and the custodian of the largest collection of Pickford costumes, The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.

The dressing gown now joins more than a dozen other Pickford costumes, including several others from Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall such as the green velvet gown with silk panels laced with silver and pearls and an ornate bonnet headpiece, the blue and magenta velvet gown with cotton lace collar and silk chiffon and taffeta linings, and a black evening dress with gold metallic brocading, velvet trim, pearl beading and gold metallic lace that Pickford wore in her most elaborately costumed drama. The NHM’s collection also includes a gown and a robe worn by Clare Eames who played Queen Elizabeth I in the film.

Beth Werling, Collections Manager of the History Department at the NHM, says that “the depth of Pickford’s involvement in costume design highlights her brilliant producing skills as well as her realization that clothes were key to the art of storytelling.” Indeed, the costumes at the Museum testify to Pickford’s attention to detail, her hiring of the most talented crew available as well as her ever-present thrift. For instance, the black evening dress she wore in Dorothy Vernon can be seen again in Taming of the Shrew—draped over a trunk.

Other highlights of the Museum’s holdings include the pink tulle evening gown Pickford wears in the country club dance scenes in Coquette. Mary convinced Howard Greer, the former head of costumes at Paramount who had left the studio to open his own store in Beverly Hills, to make her costumes for the film, and the satin and tulle dress personifies the sweet yet adult sophistication Pickford wanted to convey. The dress and the ribboned belt that cinches that dress remain in remarkable condition.

Mary’s dresses from Little Annie Rooney might not appear as spectacular as the laced and bejeweled costumes from Dorothy Vernon, but they are just as important in conveying the essence of her character. The Museum has two of Mary’s costumes from Little Annie Rooney, the plaid linen dress with a beige a wool tweed jacket and her tam o’shanter, as well as the printed cotton dress she wore in the birthday party scene.

The Museum’s collection of Pickford costumes doubled in size in 2005 when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art returned almost all of the film costumes that they had taken when they left the Exposition Park museum back in 1965 to establish LACMA on Wilshire Boulevard. Those Pickford costumes had been donated to them by Mary’s estate in 1981.

Everyone interested in preserving film costumes has learned hard lessons over the past few years as we watched the painful dismantling of Debbie Reynolds’ costume collection that she spent decades and a small fortune trying to save. There have been high points as well, such as Deborah Nadoolman Landis, director of the David C. Copley Center for Costume Design at UCLA, curating the spectacular costume exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and then bringing it to Los Angeles, under the auspices of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2014. But the exhibit also served to remind us how these costumes have been spread throughout the globe and that the cost and care necessary to pull off such a program is almost prohibitive.

That makes it all the more important that as many costumes as possible be housed in one place, and that makes the Natural History Museum’s collection such a treasure. Knowing that Pickford’s costumes are there to be exhibited and loaned to inspire new generations of film lovers is heartwarming. And the power of the Pickford legacy is confirmed by Beth Werling when she points out while the Museum has 35 million artifacts, among the top ten most requested items are Mary Pickford’s famous curls—five long golden ringlets from when she bobbed her hair in 1928—that she gave the museum in 1932.

Considering it is estimated that at least seventy-five percent of all silent films are “lost” – meaning they are gone because they were stored improperly, dumped in the ocean or melted down to be sold for the silver in the nitrate – we are fortunate that so many of Mary Pickford’s films survive. However, there is one of her “lost” films – A Girl of Yesterday from 1915 – that is particularly missed because there were so many things about it that made it special.

In A Girl of Yesterday, Mary plays Jane Stuart, a sweet old-fashioned girl who suddenly inherits wealth. While she tries to retain her traditional ways and wardrobe, her brother (played by Mary’s brother Jack) likes the attention that is now being paid to them by people who previously shunned them. Frances Marion, who was writing scenarios but went along with Mary’s urging her to act, plays “the wicked sophisticate” Rosanna Danforth. Marion’s character has her eye on Mary’s beau, played by Mickey Neilan, a friend of Jack Pickford’s who had been working in films for several years, but wanted to direct. (Many filmographies credit Mary with writing the story, but in his memoirs, Mickey Neilan claims that Frances wrote it.) ^[i]

The experienced Allan Dwan, who had worked with Flying A in Santa Barbara and Universal before joining Famous Players-Lasky in 1913, was assigned to direct after James Kirkwood, who had directed over half a dozen of Mary’s previous films, returned to the East Coast. For a while during the filming, Dwan and Neilan, who had worked with each other before, both lived at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, a men’s only establishment that featured a steam room, a swimming pool and of course, a well-stocked bar. Jack Pickford was a frequent guest. ^[ii]

All those close inner connections simmering in the cast and crew could have wreaked havoc, but everyone involved seemed to enjoy each other and Dwan was secure enough in his own abilities to include others in the creative process. The sense of community the company shared extended to Dwan inviting everyone to his wedding to the actress Pauline Bush in San Juan Capistrano during a weekend break from filming. Inspired by the church mission and in a burst of regret for the secret and secular surroundings of her own wedding, Mary and Owen asked the priest to renew their vows in a Catholic ceremony. The service struck Frances as half-hearted at best. She knew how little time they spent together and had seen too much of Owen’s behavior and Mary’s unhappiness to put any faith in a ritual. Yet she also understood how much Mary wanted to make her marriage work, even if the odds seemed against it. ^[iii] (The Bush Dwan marriage only lasted until 1919.)

The plot of A Girl of Yesterday included a scene where Mary is kidnapped and taken away by airplane that was to be filmed in Griffith Park. Three years earlier, Mabel Normand had starred in A Dash Through the Clouds where she had actually flown a plane, but just the thought of her daughter being in a plane was enough to horrify Charlotte Pickford. The fact that Mary was to fly was promoted in a spate of news articles for several months in advance and proclamations such as Variety’s –“Pickford Taking Chances” – didn’t help to soothe Charlotte’s concerns.

Of course, on the day of the flight, reporters flocked to Griffith Park to bear witness. In his book, Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios, Frederic Lombardi tells the story of Famous Players manager Al Kaufman dressing in drag, complete with blonde ringlet wig, to try to fool them while appeasing Charlotte, but the reporters were kept so far away they could not get any pictures. When they voiced their suspicions, Mary stepped forward to be bound and gagged as the script called for and she was placed in the small, four-seater plane. Reports vary on Charlotte’s demands on the limit of how far it would go above the ground – 10 feet, 100 feet or 500 feet. Dwan, who knew enough to know that higher was actually safer, also knew not to go up against Charlotte and assured her the plane would not go over 100 feet. He later told Peter Bogdanovich that “I had kept my word to Mary’s mother. She was never over 100 feet.” Needless to say, everyone survived, the photographers got their pictures and the next day, the Los Angeles Times headlined, “While Her Frantic Mother Waited on the Ground, the Moving Picture Star Soared.” ^[iv]

Mary’s pilot was a local aviator, Glenn Martin, who would go on to found a pioneering airplane company and create the Martin bomber. Flying a plane was an everyday occurrence to Martin, but he balked at being in the film when he was told his role called for him to kiss a girl because “My mother wouldn’t like it.” The story goes that Adolph Zukor himself had to come to Griffith Park for Martin to eventually agree to give Frances a slight peck on the cheek. (Martin never did marry and lived with his mother until her death.) ^[v]

With the angst and drama of the Griffith Park scenes behind them, the company was free to enjoy themselves at other locations such as a day on a golf course. They were also treated to several days of shooting on the multimillion dollar yacht of John D. Spreckels, the wealthy “Sugar King.” ^[vi] They cruised around Catalina Island, which would serve as a key location spot in hundreds of films, often passing as the South Seas in films such as Mutiny on the Bounty and Gloria Swanson’s Sadie Thompson.

In part it is the thought of seeing all these locations circa 1915 that makes the loss of A Girl of Yesterday such a heartbreak for film fans. Of course it would also be great fun to see Jack Pickford, Mary Pickford, Mickey Neilan and Frances Marion all together on the screen, knowing as we do that Mary, Mickey and Frances would work together often in the years ahead and be lifelong friends.

“Lost” films are still being discovered – often in Australia or South America because they were among the last stops in distribution. Why bother paying to return them at a time when films were viewed as something not worth saving? Occasionally reels are found in European and other international archives, stashed on shelves, often renamed or misnamed and therefore a challenge to identify. So hope springs eternal that A Girl of Yesterday may yet emerge.

NOTES

[i] Mickey Neilan on film writing credit, Hollywood Echo’s dated Sept 4, 1958, p 210

[ii] Allan Dwan was initially intrigued with motion pictures in 1909 when he invented and installed studio lighting for the Essanay Company in Chicago. Mickey Neilan also writes extensively about his time at the Athletic Club in Hollywood Echos. Dwan staying there, Lombardi, p 39.

[iii] Dwan/Bush wedding, FM to Booton Herndon

[iv] “While her…” Los Angeles Times, May 25, 1915

[v] “my mother” Frances Marion, Hollywood page 62-63; Martin, his accomplishments and his mother, NYT, 12/5/1955

[vi] Spreckels yacht, Motion Picture World, October 9, 1915

In the spring of 1914, Mary Pickford was in Los Angeles, living off and on with her husband Owen Moore, and immersed in her filmmaking. Making movies was her sanity, her purpose and her profession, as well as the means of supporting her family and one of the results of her dedication was that she had little time for friends and few opportunities to make any. There was Dorothy and Lillian Gish, but they were working with D.W. Griffith in New York, so when Owen mentioned that he had met a woman who was an excellent portrait painter and someone he thought she might like, Mary was willing to make the time. Still, it had to be at the studio so she could cut the interview short if she wanted to.

Owen had met Marion Owens at a party at the Morosco Theater, where she painted the actors’ portraits for posters. Marion had been raised in San Francisco in a moneyed and culturally active family; Jack London and Enrico Caruso were dinner guests. However, the earthquake of 1906 had devastated her father’s business holdings and Marion left school and went to work as a model, a reporter and a commercial artist before coming to Los Angeles in 1912. Unlike many others associated with the theater, Marion was fascinated with the movies and she knew that Owen, like his brothers Matt and Tom, was an actor and that he was married to Mary Pickford, so it was natural for Marion to mention it when they met. She told him she thought the quality of Mary’s films was “above the rest,” but he responded by saying, “Mary has an expressive little talent… Hardly what one could call cerebral.” Marion was offended that any man would be so dismissive of his wife and started to turn away, but he stopped her by complimenting her on her paintings and asking if she would like him to introduce her to Mary. ^[i]

It was only a few weeks later that Marion stood at the studio entrance to be greeted by a young man who walked her through the dirt lot to knock at the door of a wooden building. A voice called out for them to enter and there in a darkened room stood Mary Pickford, editing film with the cutter. She greeted Marion with a smile and a firm handshake, and took her into a side room to talk.

Marion’s first reaction to Mary was to sense “a strange watchfulness behind her steadfast gaze.” She was surprised at the vulnerability from someone she had put on a pedestal, and she instantly developed a fiercely protective attitude toward Mary that was to be one of the hallmarks of their friendship.

Their mutual sense of ambition united the two women immediately and, although Mary was initially more reticent than Marion, they quickly established that they had both been married a few months shy of their eighteenth birthdays and shared a sense of failure in their respective marriages as well.

After over an hour of comfortable conversation, Mary assured her there would be plenty of time for portrait painting when she returned from New York in the fall. As Marion left the studio, the young man at the gate commented on his amazement that “Miss Pickford spent so much time” with her and she felt exhilarated. More determined than ever to work in movies, Marion asked her friend, the writer Adela Rogers St. Johns, to introduce her to Lois Weber, the most successful of the dozen women directors working in Los Angeles at the time. Six months later, when Mary and Marion met again, Marion had separated from her husband and had been working as an actress, writer and general assistant to Lois Weber under a new name the director had given her, Frances Marion. ^[ii]

Frances and Mary picked up where they had left off. When Weber decided to leave the Bosworth Studio where they had been working and go to Universal, Frances looked around at other options. She wanted to write, but everyone seemed to keep pushing her in front of the camera. Mary offered her work as an actress, with the promise that she could work on scenarios as well, and if Frances paused for a moment, “When Mary said, ‘We’ll have fun together,’ all my resistance fled and I signed on the dotted line.” ^[iii]

Frances moved into a bungalow in the same courtyard where Mary and her mother Charlotte were living near the Famous Players studio in Hollywood. The rooms were tiny, the overhead lights too bright and the plaster on the walls reminded Frances of “an advanced stage of smallpox.” She also soon learned that Charlotte looked at living on the West Coast as a temporary situation. Perusing the still-developing neighborhoods of Los Angeles, she invested Mary’s income in land, but not houses. The poverty of their earlier years impacted every decision Charlotte made, and she made all the decisions. ^[iv]

Charlotte and Frances liked each other immediately. Where others saw Charlotte as an oppressive influence, Frances saw genuine love and caring and, in turn, Mary’s mother’s welcomed her daughter having a real friend and confidante. When Frances’s mother visited from San Francisco, she spent time with Charlotte and the mothers became friends as well. ^[v]

Frances’s new living conditions were in stark contrast to the home she had shared with her husband Robert, but there was a vine-covered porch in front, and she considered the lack of luxury a small price to pay for her freedom. At twenty-six, she had been married to a poor artist and then a scion of a rich San Francisco family, and now she was truly on her own for the first time in her adult life. If it felt a bit precarious financially, living near and working with Mary filled her with a wealth of possibilities.

Frances and Mary were at the studio by seven in the morning, six days a week, and Frances devoted herself to writing, watching and learning. Over the first five months of 1915, they turned out three films under the direction of James Kirkwood, Mistress Nell, The Dawn of Tomorrow and Fanchon the Cricket, all based on plays or novels. And in the process, the seeds of a lifelong friendship were sown.

[i]. “Mary has…” et. al. Marion, Hollywood, pages 40-41. Note: more on Owen Moore in Photoplay, Interview with Owen Moore, by Estelle Kegler, December, 1912 and The Hero Brothers, Photoplay, August 1915.

[ii]. “a strange watchfullness” Hollywood, page 43.

[iii] “When Mary” Notes on Hollywood p 41

[iv] “an advanced” Hollywood, p 110

[v] FM to Booton Herndon

Mary Pickford willingly returned to Biograph and D.W. Griffith in early 1912, but she was now a married woman of nineteen and a much more self-assured actress. She had never been short of confidence in herself, but at IMP and Majestic, Mary had asserted herself and let her opinions be known in ways unfamiliar at Biograph. Now she raised questions with Griffith and tensions occasionally boiled to the surface. Adding to the strains between them was the fact that during Mary’s absence from the studio, he had hired other beautiful and talented young women such as Mae Marsh and Blanche Sweet who were ready to step into parts Mary balked at playing.

Among the films that Mary made during this time was Lena and the Geese and it would change the lives of friends from several years before, Lillian and Dorothy Gish. The Gish girls, along with their mother Mary, supported themselves acting in touring companies and that’s how they had first met the Smiths, as Charlotte and her brood were still calling themselves at the time. The Gishes’ father had made himself scarce when the girls were very young and they had shared an apartment with the Smiths one summer when money was particularly tight. While Lillian was only a year and half younger than Mary, she remembered her friend as being “like a little mother to us. There was never any question when she told us to do something. We did it.” In early 1912, Lillian and Dorothy had left the stage and were going to school in St. Louis while their mother ran a sweet shop next door to a nickelodeon. It was there that the girls saw Lena and the Geese and recognized their old friend Gladys. Lillian and Dorothy insisted their mother see the film to confirm it was their old friend and they all agreed to look her up when they were next in New York. The address of the Biograph Company was listed in the New York directory, but when they arrived, no one seemed to know a Miss Gladys Smith. When Lillian insisted she had starred in Lena and the Geese, the man in the foyer said, “Oh, you mean ‘Little Mary'” and the friends were reunited. Mary regaled the girls and their mother with stories of the financial rewards of making movies that included the family’s large apartment and a car. When Mary introduced them to D.W. Griffith, he was enchanted and hired Lillian and Dorothy on the spot.

Mary had been working in front of a camera close to nonstop for three years now and itched for a change. She recalled that it was with some trepidation that she reached out to William Dean, David Belasco’s manager, and was thrilled when he told her they had been “looking all over the place” for her. Still referring to her as Betty Warren from her role in The Warrens of Virginia several years before, Dean asked her to come to the theater where he subjected her to a bit of harassment for having been a “very naughty little girl” by appearing in movies.  Belasco, however, remembered their reunion differently, saying he knew exactly how to find Mary because by 1912 she was known everywhere as “The Queen on the Movies.” He claimed that he thought of casting her as the blind Juliet in A Good Little Devil the first time he read the play and when he handed her the script, they were a week away from starting rehearsals. Of course Mary jumped at the idea of returning to the stage, making the same two hundred a week she was now getting at Biograph, but she said she needed to talk to Mr. Griffith before formally accepting Belasco’s offer. Pickford remembered that both she and the director had tears in their eyes when she told him she was leaving Biograph. There was still a week until she had to report for rehearsals and so she agreed to make one more film. The New York Hat, co-starring a very young Lionel Barrymore and featuring Lillian Gish in the crowd scene, would go down in Hollywood history as the first screenplay written by Anita Loos who went on to fame as the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but at the time was just an ambitious teenager in San Diego.

When A Good Little Devil opened in Philadelphia, D.W. Griffith and many members of the Biograph Company were in the audience. Mary said that Griffith was more nervous than she was and he not only approved of her performance, but gave her his blessings. And when A Good Little Devil opened on Broadway, one of the frequent audience members was one Adolph Zukor.

Adolph Zukor had immigrated to America as a sixteen-year-old Hungarian orphan. He had immersed himself in the culture of his new country and risen to become a very successful furrier when, in 1903, he invested in arcades with machines where, by putting in coins and peering into a box, customers could watch dramas lasting half a minute. Initially, Zukor thought of the arcades as an aside to his fur business, but he soon found himself fascinated by the new phenomenon of movies and expanded to nickelodeons. Zukor saw a future in longer films when one-reelers were still being used to clear out theaters between vaudeville performances and became convinced, as one of his biographers put it, “that the movies only seemed like novelties because they were treated like novelties.” Unable to convince his contemporaries such as Marcus Loew or Carl Laemmle to share his vision, Zukor bought the American rights to a French film, Queen Elizabeth, starring Sarah Bernhardt and, by carefully screening the almost hour-long film as a stage production and distributing it state by state, Zukor quadrupled his investment. He joined forces with New York producer Daniel Frohman to create Famous Players Film Company with its slogan “Famous Players in Famous Plays.” Minnie Maddern Fiske, the grande dame of the American stage, was filmed in Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Lilly Langtry starred in His Neighbor’s Wife. Because of the interest in the hinterlands to see these famed actresses, the hour-long movies were fairly successful, but filmed stage plays were just that. They didn’t “move” like the one and two-reelers and of course the audience could not hear the voices. Still, Zukor stayed true to his vision and it was natural that he would come calling on Broadway’s premiere producer, David Belasco. Stalking was more like it, for Zukor became a fixture at the theater until finally Belasco agreed to sell him the rights to film A Good Little Devil starring its New York cast.

According to Zukor, Belasco warned him that Mary Pickford might not be willing to go before the cameras again, claiming “Mary was ashamed, you know, to come back to me after appearing on the screen.” Zukor, however, sensed that respect and money spoke loudly to the Pickfords and invited Charlotte and Mary to dine with him at Delmonico’s.  Sure enough, after listening to his speech about his belief in feature films and the public’s desire to see famous plays, Charlotte had one question: “What salary would you consider paying Mary?” When he suggested several hundred a week with promises of more to come, Mary ended the conversation by saying, “We’ll talk it over.”

According to Linda Griffith, D.W.’s wife who wrote an occasionally accurate account of this time, it was then that Mary and Charlotte returned to E. 14th Street and, as Linda put it, “Mary and Mother bearded the lion in his den” and the following conversation took place.

“Well, what are you asking now?” queried Mr. Griffith.

“Five hundred a week,” answered Mrs. Smith.

“Can’t see it. Mary’s not worth it to me.”

“Well, we’ve been offered five hundred dollars a week and we’re going to accept the contract, and you’ll be sorry one day.”

Linda concludes the story with “They could go ahead and accept the contract as far as Mr. Griffith was concerned. Indulging in his old habit of walking away while talking, he brought the interview to an end, calling back to the insistent mother, ‘Three hundred dollars is all I’ll give her. Remember, I made her.’” And Linda Griffith adds, “But whether Mr. Griffith has ever been sorry, nobody knows but himself.”

Whatever the string of events and the accuracy of the recounted conversations, Mary Pickford signed with the Famous Players at $500 a week shortly thereafter. Zukor said it was for a year, Mary remembered fourteen weeks, but we know that six months later, she was making $1,000 a week. After filming A Good Little Devil and two other films, Mary and the Famous Players company headed to Los Angeles.

Carl Laemmle’s decision in early 1911 to send most of IMP’s company to Cuba seemed like such a good idea. It put plenty of miles and even some water between them and the Trust and they could take advantage of Cuba’s warm climate, tropical locations and cheap local labor. Yet from the beginning, the excursion was ill-fated.

Professionally, the pressure was on Mary Pickford as never before because she was the one “star” in the group. Her supporting cast consisted of a ragtag band, such as one young man in amateur looking make-up masquerading as her father and a technician who was plucked from the laboratory to play her love interest in The Toss of a Coin.

Ever since Mary had revealed she was married to Owen Moore, she found herself pulled between trying to soothe relations with her estranged family and assuring her husband that all would be well. Her mother didn’t make things any easier. When they arrived at their lodgings, Charlotte pointed to one bedroom and announced with authority, “You take that room, Owen. Mary and I will sleep in here.” As Mary put it, “I soon discovered that Owen was jealous, not of the other men in the company, but of my family and my family of course returned the compliment with interest.”

Thomas Ince, who would become a major film producer, was her director, but he was a novice at the time. His learning curve was not helped by the fact that all the film was sent back to New York to be developed. Ince, along with everyone else in the company, could not watch dailies to see what their movie looked like, but Mary didn’t need film to know that the humid Cuban weather played havoc with her longs curls which now required new constant tending when the cameras weren’t rolling. To hide his inexperience, Ince became overly dependent on locations and his films were heavily laced with shots of the harbor, tobacco fields and palm trees.

Mary claimed that their time in Cuba mercifully ended earlier than planned when Owen got into a fistfight with Ince’s assistant and the police were called. Charlotte stepped in and argued with the authorities long enough for Owen to slip on board a ship. “The next morning at dawn, I joined Owen on the boat in Havana Harbor and sailed back to the United States.”

The rest of the Pickfords returned shortly thereafter and Mary and Owen continued to work together at IMP for several more months. They had their own apartment for awhile, but Mary had no experience in real life relationships outside of her immediate family and, being raised on trains and in boardinghouses, knew even less about domestic skills. And her mother was always there; in their home, at the studio and even traveling with them. Mary’s star was rising and Owen’s, if not descending, was standing still and his drinking did not help matters. All these factors, combined with different shooting schedules, made for a troubled marriage.

While Carl Laemmle was off in Europe in the fall of 1911, Harry Aitken, an entrepreneurial distributor, formed the Majestic Motion Picture Company and staffed it, in large part, by raiding IMP. Amongst others, Aitken brought over Thomas Cochrane to be his general manager and Mary Pickford to be his star. (He accomplished this by raising her salary to $225 a week and agreeing to sign Owen as well.) Where the Trust forbade fellow companies from stealing their talent, the Independents only had the courts to fall back on so Laemmle sued Mary for breaking her contract with him. She took the stand and testified it was Laemmle who had broken his contracts, not only with Lottie and Jack, but with her as well because she had been forced to endure an “affront to her art” through compromises such as “co-stars” who were really lab men and other unprofessional indignities. Never mind that movies were hardly considered art in 1911; she read from newspaper reviews to establish her stardom and talent. In the end, the court voided her contract because she had been a minor when she signed it. But once again, we see how seriously she took her work and how she did not shirk from standing up for herself.

Even though the name of Mary Pickford now appeared in the press, she was commonly referred to as “The Girl with the Curls” and “Little Mary,” in part because that was the name her characters were often given. To play that up, her first Majestic film was entitled The Courting of Mary. Her agreement with Majestic included the provision that Owen not only come with her, but be given the opportunity to direct. Mary claimed that Owen never knew that her contracts mandated that he be retained as well, but said that he had “deeply resented that I made more money than he did.” It was one thing for a child to be the breadwinner for the Pickford family, but it was a constant source of strain for the Moores.

Mary hoped that if Owen was promoted to being a director, his confidence would return and their relationship would have a chance. But in his new power position, Owen put her down in front of others, verbally attacking her as a person and as an actress. He directed her in Little Red Riding Hood and a picture of Mary in costume for that film was featured in the first issue of Photoplay, a pioneer in what would soon become the fan magazine industry. She looks none too happy in the photograph, but other pictures taken of her with Owen at the time show that she clearly adored him and was trying to make things work.

Still, little was going as Mary had hoped and so she reached out for the one thing over which she felt she could exert some control: the quality of her films. In January of 1912, she returned to Griffith and Biograph while Owen went to work for yet another independent company. It would be the only time she took a step backward in salary – down to $175 a week – but it seemed a small price to pay to be a part of a community where she felt supported.

When Mary Pickford returned to New York from California in April of 1910, she was glad to see her family, but even happier to be reunited with Owen Moore. She had been taken with him since her first week at Biograph when Griffith called him over to rehearse a love scene with her. While Mary had seen more than most people twice her age, she had lived a very sheltered and disciplined life and nothing had prepared her for that first time an experienced man put his arm around her. The physical sensations she felt were entirely new to her and she was literally swept off her feet. About five foot, ten inches, with deep blue eyes and dark hair slicked straight back, Owen struck some people as almost too handsome. Mack Sennett called him “the best dressed man at Biograph.”

Mary thought she was keeping her feelings to herself, but soon old Biograph hands began warning her about Owen’s womanizing and drinking. He was seven years older than the just seventeen-year-old Mary. Born in Ireland, he had immigrated with his family as a child, along with his three brothers who also worked in films. At first, Charlotte welcomed Owen into their home, but when she thought the relationship was getting too serious, she told Mary to stop seeing him. Charlotte didn’t trust him, was nervous about Mary having any commitments beyond her work and immediate family and, along with the other strikes against him, he was “a five-dollar-a-day actor.” Mary had always done everything her mother asked, but now she began sneaking away to see Owen and was pulled between her enduring and deep loyalty to her family and what she considered real love. Maybe her mother would be happier if she brought in more money?

Mary had always felt the burden and responsibility of being the primary financial supporter for her family. Now, in seeking an increase in salary, she was about to become a highly paid pawn in the battle to break “The Trust,” the name commonly applied to the Motion Picture Patents company that claimed exclusive patents on cameras, projectors, lab equipment and even the film, down to the sprocket holes. Edison, Biograph and a handful of other companies were under the Trust umbrella and any exhibiters showing films made by non-Trust companies were threatened with having their supply cut off. The Trust had distributing offices throughout the country so their reach was wide and their power readily enforced. But the demand for product had skyrocketed as theaters quadrupled in number and piracy thrived.

Independent producers brought in cameras from Europe and bought film on the black market to make their movies. Carl Laemmle was a theater owner suffering from the shortage of films when he formed his Independent Motion Picture Company (IMP) in open defiance of the Trust. He methodically nabbed a star a Trust company had developed – Florence Lawrence – and then in late 1910, offered Mary Pickford, the current “Biograph Girl,” $175 a week. Trust companies were forbidden to steal each other’s talent; if they did, they could be brought before a meeting of the board and be heavily fined. While Independents had no such restrictions, they did have to come up with serious cash to lure someone like Pickford because talent faced the potential of being blacklisted by Trust companies in the future.

Still, almost doubling her salary was too tempting for Mary to resist. IMP would also hire Charlotte, Lottie and Jack at base wages for bit parts. Charlotte must have been pleased, but what Mary hadn’t mentioned was that Owen Moore was already at IMP. Some reports say he had quit because he was irritated at being left in New York while so many from the company went to California and others say he was fired from Biograph, but Owen had been working at IMP for several months and seeing Mary in secret. Now he threatened to leave her and IMP if she didn’t marry him. Did he sense her star might be rising beyond his grasp or did he see marriage as the only way to get Mary away from her family? All Mary was sure of was that she didn’t want to let him go, so in January of 1911, dressed in a gown borrowed from the Biograph wardrobe department, she trekked to the Jersey City court house to marry Owen. She was willing to go through with the ceremony, but not to tell her family. As soon as the paperwork was signed, she took her ring from her finger, put it on a string around her neck and returned home where she shared a bed with Lottie. She told no one of marriage for the next several months, but later claimed all the while she was riddled with “bitter self reproach,” feeling “like the biggest sinner that had ever lived.”

Mary and Owen made a few films for IMP in New Jersey – their first together was ironically entitled Their First Misunderstanding – but the Trust’s vigilantes were everywhere and many independents were setting up shop in California and Florida. Laemmle decided to go a step further and packed up most of the IMP company and sent them to Havana. Almost as a taunt to the Trust, he didn’t keep their evacuation a secret; newspapers headlined articles with “The IMP Company Invades Cuba.” But one secret that was still being kept was Mary’s marriage to Owen as the couple, along with Charlotte, Lottie and Jack all boarded the boat. How Mary thought she was going to continue to juggle her personal and professional life is almost unimaginable, but in retrospect she said, “What was to be a long delayed honeymoon was more like a funeral.”

They were only a day out of New York when Charlotte walked in to a cabin to find Mary alone with Owen. Charlotte was outraged, and when Mary finally admitted they were married, it didn’t improve matters. Charlotte reportedly demanded the boat return to New York, but to no avail. The rest of the voyage was punctuated with sobs by all concerned and when they arrived in Havana, Owen took off for what would be a three-day bender. And it didn’t get any better once the cameras started rolling.

Members of the Biograph Company often trooped to New Jersey for location shooting, but the harsh New York winters made outdoor filming iffy at best. So D.W. Griffith sought and received approval to take a portion of his company to California from January to April of 1910. Mary Pickford was chosen, along with Billy Quirk, Henry B. Walthall, Mack Sennett and over 40 other cast and crew, to make the five-day train trip to the West Coast. At the last minute, Jack joined them as well. Charlotte gave her approval because she liked the idea of someone – even if he was only 14 – keeping an eye on Mary. Mary was glad as well, primarily because she wasn’t happy about being away from her family for four long months.

Los Angeles in 1910 was part boom town, part frontier. Hollywood, with a population of 166, had been founded seven years before by a Prohibitionist from Kansas and it was just one of forty incorporated towns within a thirty-five-mile radius. The actors dressed at their hotels before trekking to the fenced-in acre of land they used as their base of operation. (Hence the term “shooting on the lot.”) A flat stage was built a few inches off the ground with wire along the top to hold cloth shades that provided the backgrounds for interior shots. There was no roof to make full use of the sun. Tents dotted the fences to serve as makeshift offices and changing rooms. (Booton Herndon says it was at the corner of Grand Avenue and Washington Street, though Mack Sennett remembers it at 12th and Georgia.)

Jack and Mary shared a room and then shared a bathroom with two other actresses, keeping their expenses below their allotment, but Mack Sennett overspent on a room with a bathtub at the Alexandria Hotel. Mary and Jack learned to ride horses for their films and to get around town. Griffith was the only one with a car, but there were also the trolleys that were beginning to connect the area. The company made full use of the incredible variety of locations the area had to offer; The Unchanging Sea was shot on the Santa Monica beach, Never Again featured Mary in a rowboat on a Venice canal, A Rich Revenge used the oil rigs of Edendale and Ramona is laced with shots of the Santa Monica mountains and its canyons. The still near-pristine San Fernando Valley provided rolling hills for several films. California-based actors were brought in when needed, including Jeanie Macpherson, who would go on to be Cecil B. De Mille’s longtime screenwriter, and the future star Mae Marsh, then a child actress. For Mary, the trip to California was no vacation; her focus, six days a week, was work. Besides the poppies and the palm trees, she didn’t find much to love about Los Angeles.

Mary also took advantage of Griffith’s request for story ideas and started selling one-page scenarios to him for 10 or 15 dollars each. She even sold a few to Essanay Studio, a Chicago-based outfit that was the only other major film company in the area at the time. It would be three more years before a feature-length film was made in Los Angeles: Cecil B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man.

Jack was also working almost every day, taking falls as a stunt double as well as appearing as an actor when the parts called for it. But he also began his lifelong passion of making plenty of time for fun. As Booton Herndon summed it up, “by the time he left Los Angeles, Jack, at fourteen, was well educated in whisky and women.”

With Jack getting his 5 dollars a day, Mary’s guaranteed salary and the additional income from story writing, as well as keeping their expenses below the allotted 14 dollars a week, Mary and Jack returned to New York four months later with $1200. They surprised their mother and sister with it all in cash and Mary called it “the beginning of affluence for the Pickford family.”

Mary would later say that, as she walked up the stairs of the brownstone at 11 E. 14th Street in 1909, she prayed no one she knew from the theater would see her. It was probably the most famous address in the film business at the time, but she considered “the flickers,” as almost everyone called the movies, lower class entertainment. Yet times were changing quickly; Variety had begun writing about films in 1906 because they were shown in between vaudeville acts to clear out the theaters, but smart managers saw movies’ growing popularity and began opening theaters just for the films. And they were cheaper and more dependable than live acts.

The mansion-turned-Biograph-studio had a large marble-floored foyer where a secretary manned the reception area. One room was set aside as the women’s dressing room and an alcove served as the wardrobe room. Mary said she was “overawed” by the vast circular ballroom that had been transformed into the main studio with lights hung low from the ceiling.

She loved telling the story that when Griffith offered her the standard five dollars a day, she pulled herself to her full five feet and said, “I am a Belasco actress and I must have ten.” He laughingly agreed, but swore her to secrecy because if others in the company knew, he would have “a riot” on his hands. Soon after, she agreed to forty a week with a guarantee of work. Griffith later said, “The thing that most attracted me the day I first saw her was the intelligence that shone in her face,” and he put her to work that very first day. Over the next year, they became a volatile, creative team.

Mary might have been getting ten dollars a day, but the highest paid actress at Biograph at the time was Florence Lawrence and she was making twenty-five a day. No names were in the credits, not even Griffith’s, but Florence Lawrence was popularly referred to as “The Biograph Girl.” Already the quality of Biograph films was becoming known – theaters advertised “Biograph days”to draw a crowd. But shortly after Mary arrived, Florence Lawrence was hired away by Carl Laemmle’s Independent Motion Picture Company with ads that ran “The Biograph Girl is now an IMP.” IMP’s gain was also Mary’s as she picked up the title of “The Biograph Girl.”

To Mary, Griffith appeared to be the ultimate authority figure, yet he had only been directing films for less than a year when she arrived. Born on a Kentucky farm, he had moved to Louisville after his father’s death when Griffith was seven. As a young teenager Griffith worked a variety of jobs to help support his mother and six siblings, including acting on the Louisville stage where he claimed he carried a spear for “the divine Sarah Bernhardt.” He was soon on the road, spending more than a decade traveling through the American hinterlands with different stage companies, acting and trying to be writer. To keep the wolf from the door, as he put it, he joined the Bronx-based Edison Company in 1907 and jumped to Biograph the following year. After several months acting and writing, he was approached to direct and, while he needed to be reassured he could return to acting if it didn’t work out, he quickly found his métier. All those years of learning stagecraft, story arcs and characterizations came together and in part because he was so thoroughly immersed in theatrical conventions, he was free to leave some of them behind as his techniques evolved. New as he was in a chronological sense, Griffith had already directed 100 one-reelers by the time Pickford arrived at his doorstep. He was only in his mid-thirties, but he cultivated the airs of a southern gentleman with Victorian manners. At Biograph, one of the first things the 16-year-old Pickford had to get used to was people calling each other by their first names, although no one called D.W. Griffith anything but Mr. Griffith. He, in turn, called her “Pickford” once he started remembering her name.

The Griffith method was to gather his company around him while he sat on the stage, explain the action and then rehearse scenes. Once he was sure everyone knew what was expected, the film was shot. “To stop the camera in those days,” Mary said, “was unheard of.” Wasting film was wasting money; it cost two cents a foot. And in part because Griffith was paid a bonus for every foot of film he produced, movies were turned out quickly. Mary was comfortable with rehearsals, but to get used to playing to the camera instead of an audience, she practiced her expressions in front of a mirror over and over again.

Her years in the theater had taught her to use her entire body to act the part, and this was at a time when close-ups and mid-range shots were unheard of. “I refused to exaggerate in my performances,” Pickford told Kevin Brownlow. “I would not run around like a goose with its head cut off.” While she believed she had to resist Griffith’s desire for her to be more expansive, she gave him full credit for teaching her the little things that made a performance realistic. Mary quoted Griffith as saying she would do anything “for the camera. I could tell her to get up on a burning building and jump – and she would.” While Mary didn’t go quite that far, she acknowledged that “there is something sacred to me about that camera. He once said to me that he could sit back of the camera, think something and I’d do it… I think in his way he loved me, and I loved him.”

Mary soaked it all in. As Griffith would later say, “I found she was thirsty for work and information. She could not be driven from the studio while work was going on.” That drive actually evolved; what was at first just a job soon became a passion and she immersed herself in learning every aspect of filmmaking. Mary’s strong sense of professionalism mandated that whatever she did, she was going to do it as well as or better than anyone else. Yet no one worked harder than Griffith. He often started days before dawn heading to a location, spent his afternoons and early evenings shooting interiors at the studio and stayed as late as midnight watching the previous day’s work. However, Mary put in long hours too. She befriended the cameraman Billy Bitzer and together they tested how various make-ups photographed on her as well as the impact of changing the position of the lights, using rudimentary reflectors such as oil cloth and white gravel. The art of filmmaking was advancing on a daily basis and the fact they were working in relative obscurity encouraged experimentation.

In retrospect, it is easy to see how Griffith and Pickford were learning from and with each other. Griffith is credited with making 138 films in 1909 and Mary was in 45 of them. Together, they broke new ground as they innovated filmmaking; Griffith through camera angles and movement, crosscutting, close-ups and fade-outs and Mary by bringing a naturalness to the screen as she played children, married women, waifs, Native Americans and housemaids. They were both discovering the depth and breadth of their craft and in the process, raising the bar for every other director and actor.

To view some of Mary’s work in these films, click here »

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