“America’s Sweetheart” and So Much More
Mention the name Mary Pickford to anyone and if they have heard of her at all, the image of “the girl with the golden curls” is what immediately comes to mind.
There are countless variations on this image much like Charlie Chaplin’s tramp character. Chaplin is everywhere but Pickford is forgotten which is unfortunate because Mary Pickford played a far more important role in the development of what would become Hollywood’s Golden Age.
Born in Toronto in 1892 (three years younger than Chaplin) as Gladys Louise Smith, she became the family breadwinner at the age of six when her father was killed in a work related accident. She did this by going on the stage as a child performer urged on by her mother. Baby Gladys was a success and the family (her mother and two siblings) were able to move to New York where there were far more opportunities.
In 1907, at the age of 15, Gladys encountered David Belasco, the most powerful Broadway producer of the day and he cast her in one of his plays. The name Gladys Smith had to go and Mary Pickford (chosen from her Irish ancestors) was born. She was a big success and never looked back.
The problem was that theater work was seasonal and Mary needed to work all the time to support her family. In 1909 she went to the Biograph Company in downtown Manhattan to make movies with up and coming director D.W. Griffith. Movies were only one reel then (roughly 15 minutes) and Biograph made two or three a week. During her first year Mary appeared in over 60 short movies.
In 1910 she had the lead in Wilful Peggy, a variation on Taming of The Shrew, and it was an immediate success. Her subdued acting style, comic timing, and overall feistiness delighted audiences (especially young women). Griffith once said of her “all I had to do was start the camera rolling and she did the rest.” Soon audiences were asking for the “girl with the golden curls” as she became known because actors’ names weren’t given out then.
Mary made her last Biograph movie, The New York Hat, in 1912. She then moved to a fledgling company that decided to focus on feature length films. The company’s name was Paramount. By 1914 after the release of Tess of the Storm Country, she was an international star (before Chaplin) with her name above the title card. She became so successful that she demanded and was given her own production company where she had complete artistic control.
The one thing she didn’t have was control over how her movies were released, so in 1919 she and future husband Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and director D.W. Griffith got together to form United Artists. UA never had studios of their own, they were purely a releasing company which enabled a wide variety of films that the studios weren’t interested in (like Griffith’s Broken Blossoms) to be released.
In addition to appearing in her films and being the highest paid performer in the world, Mary Pickford was also a creative producer. That meant that she supervised her movies from casting down to design to choice of director. She frequently co-directed without credit. Her secret to success was simple. “Hire the best people, pay them well, and keep them under contract.” Many of her production practices were adopted by the emerging Hollywood studio system with highly successful results but their success coupled with an aging fan base and changing tastes in the 1920s would soon bring about an end to her career.
Mary was barely five feet tall and because of her consummate skill (and by surrounding herself with taller performers) she could easily impersonate a child. What started as a one shot deal with The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917), wound up typecasting her as “that little girl character.” Every attempt to break away from it in the early 1920s resulted in declining box office revenues. Her movies never lost money until the coming of sound but they were starting to gross less and less.
It’s an urban myth that Mary Pickford’s career ended with the coming of sound. That’s because only one of her early talkies (Coquette, 1929) is commercially available. She had a good voice having started on the stage (she sounds like 1930s star Jean Arthur) but her fans didn’t go to see her in adult roles and she made her last movie Secrets, with the up and coming Leslie Howard, in 1933.
The little girl roles she made famous (A Little Princess, The Poor Little Rich Girl, Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farm ) were remade in the sound era with Shirley Temple while her great silent films (Stella Maris, The Love Light, Swallows) were completely forgotten. The male studio heads were secretly glad to have her out of the picture. In a span of 10 years (1919-1929) she went from being “America’s Sweetheart,” and the most powerful woman in Hollywood, to becoming the poster child of an outmoded technology. She died in 1979 at the age of 87.
If you’d like to find out more, there are several in depth books on Mary Pickford currently available. Among the best are Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood by Eileen Whitfield and Rediscovering Mary Pickford by Kevin Brownlow. There are also two biographies, Mary Pickford: A Life on Film, and the PBS documentary Mary Pickford. A number of her classic silent films have been made available on DVD by Milestone Films.