Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [30]
Scott Fitzgerald’s favorite actress, the ethereal Lillian Gish, was another protégée of D.W. Griffith’s and star of the first modern blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation of 1915. Griffith offered her the chance to direct Remodelling Her Husband in 1920, but Gish was unimpressed by the experience. She told reporters afterwards that directing was a man’s job.
Gish had been introduced to Griffith by Mary Pickford. Perennially typecast as an innocent girl because of her ringlets and childlike body, she was known as America’s Sweetheart but behind the scenes wielded immense influence in 1920s Hollywood and was the first actress to earn over a million dollars a year. In 1919, she, Chaplin, her lover Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith set up United Artists, which would allow artists for the first time to produce and distribute their own work, and to be properly credited for their role in creating it. “The lunatics have taken over the asylum,” quipped one of their former bosses; but their success confounded the doubters.
The gravest threat to Mary Pickford’s hold on American hearts came not from another actress, but from her personal life. Unhappily married to an alcoholic actor, Owen Moore, who was jealous of her fame, when she met swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks in 1916 the attraction between them was immediate. Fairbanks wanted to divorce his wife and marry Pickford, but she was terrified of the damage a scandal would do to her wholesome reputation and hard-won career. Being a Catholic, she was also reluctant to divorce on religious grounds.
As women became more emancipated, divorce became more common and more socially acceptable. There were 100,000 divorces in 1914 and 205,000 in 1929. Once they could support themselves, fewer women were willing to remain in unhappy marriages. “The reason there are more divorces is that people are demanding more of life than they used to,” a female journalist from Middletown explained. A divorced woman used to be disgraced, but now, “We see that no good purpose is achieved by keeping together two people who have come to hate each other.”
Fairbanks and Pickford married in March 1920—two years after his divorce and just a month after hers. At first Mary was pilloried by the scandal-sheets of the day, but public opinion swung to her defense when the abuse she had suffered at the hands of Owen Moore was revealed. The fairy-tale nature of her match with Fairbanks—America’s Sweetheart married to its most dashing screen idol—was another factor that contributed to her rehabilitation, although conservatives continued to frown upon the Pickford-Fairbanks match for making divorce acceptable for “respectable” people.
Mary Pickford knew that her plucky, childlike screen persona was the key to her success and, apart from her divorce, she was reluctant to jeopardize her image. Not until 1929 did she dare to cut off the golden curls that had made her name. “I am a servant of the public,” she once said. “I’ve never forgotten that.” But although she continued to make successful movies and held on tightly to her position as uncrowned queen of Hollywood, as the twenties wore on, Pickford—who was twenty-eight in 1920—was gradually eclipsed by younger and more daring actresses whose Flapperish reputations were more in keeping with the mood of the age.
For a time Zelda Fitzgerald hoped that a movie director would discover her and make her a star, but her beauty was not unusual in Hollywood and there were plenty of eager starlets hoping to embody the Flapper on the silver screen. Some had the right attitude, but lacked focus. Constance Talmadge, known as Dutch, was