Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [34]
In many ways, what the movie industry was apotheosizing was not a new and debauched code of ethics, but the glamorous background against which the debate over those ethics was played out. Both on screen and off, Hollywood fetishized conspicuous consumption, reflecting back to this most materialistic of ages its own aspirational image of itself. Beautiful women, elegant clothes, fabulous houses, custom-built cars: in a movie theater, Hollywood promised its eager audiences: all this could be yours.
Although Mary Pickford played ingénue roles, as perhaps the most commercially minded actor of her generation she was acutely aware of how closely her fans identified with her and how passionately they wanted to feel they knew her. Like many of them—and like many of her fellow actors—she had come from a desperately poor immigrant background. As she told Anita Loos, one of her favorite scriptwriters, her family was “shanty Irish”: “Ma looked like a washerwoman.” Hard work and determination, as much as looks or talent, had raised her out of the circumstances into which she was born.
Her alcoholic father had abandoned the family (then living in Toronto) when Mary, the eldest, was three and to support her children their mother worked as a seamstress and took in boarders. It was through one of them that Mary got her first acting job, and that inspired the entire family—Mary, her mother and her younger brother and sister—to seek their fortunes on the stage. For six years they toured the United States by rail, working in shabby melodramas. Finally they reached Broadway where in 1909 Mary was given a screen test by D.W. Griffith. Griffith was so impressed by what a later reviewer called her “luminous tenderness in a steel band of gutter ferocity’ that he promised to pay her double the usual rate for movie actors, $10 a day. By 1913, Mary had moved into feature films and was earning $500 a week. Two years later she was on $2,000 a week, plus half the profits of her films. “I hated being poor,” she told Motion Picture Magazine in 1920.
She also hated not being in charge. In 1916, aged twenty-four, Pickford asked for and received permission from her studio, Adrian Zukor’s Famous Players, to form her own production unit, the Pickford Film Corporation. Although she was not Hollywood’s first female film producer, she was its first female mogul, using her company to ensure control over her roles, directors, scripts and finances (she installed her mother as the Pickford Film Corporation’s treasurer). Mary oversaw every detail of the films her company made, from hiring the crews, to editing the scripts, to shooting, to final release and promotion. In the Pickford Film Corporation’s first two years she earned a guaranteed million-dollar salary.
When Pickford, Griffith, Fairbanks and Chaplin founded United Artists in 1919, Hollywood studios were vertically integrated, owning the movie theaters as well as producing the movies they showed in them. United Artists was different because it was solely a distribution company—and therefore the producers and actors it used were, for the first time, independent from “the bankers, the distributors and the sales executives.” From 1920, Pickford and Fairbanks made their own films at their shared studio on Santa Monica Boulevard.
Mary described her career as “planned, painful, purposeful” and her extraordinary achievements attest to that. The most important element of her success was her dedication to what her fans wanted of her. “We love Mary Pickford because she loves us,” said Motion Picture Magazine in 1918. As her worries over her divorce and remarriage show, Pickford knew that her off-screen life was just as important to her public persona as her on-screen roles and she deliberately cultivated a dignified, almost matronly image. The Fairbanks’s Beverly Hills mansion, Pickfair, was as sumptuously decorated as her fans