Mary Pickford, page 8
Maurice Tourneau, who had come to New York from Paris in 1914, directed Mary in the 1916 film The Pride of the Clan. The movie was shot on location at Marblehead, Massachusetts, a setting so much like the coast of Scotland, with seabirds flying about and waves crashing onto the rocks, that one could easily imagine the picture had been filmed in that country.
In the film’s climax, Mary’s character is aboard a fishing boat that is supposedly sinking. The situation got a little too authentic, however, and suddenly the director shouted, “Everybody leave the boat! We’re sinking!”
They actually were. As the scene was being shot, some barrels that were on the deck had shifted, and gradually the boat began to fill with water. Immediately, the whole cast and crew went over the side, where some were lowered into a lifeboat and others swam the 300 yards to shore. No one seemed to have noticed that Mary was not among them.
She had been using the cabin of the boat as her dressing room and now remembered that she’d left her cosmetic kit inside. She headed back to get it.
Just as she was about to open the door to the cabin, something told her not to, some instinct which she referred to in her memoirs as “a voice.” She turned and hurried back toward the side of the boat, surprising director Tourneau, who thought he was the last one on board and was about to abandon ship. By this time, the water was up to their knees, and the cabin would surely have been completely submerged.
Fortunately, Tourneau was able to help Mary into the lifeboat before swimming to shore himself. Mary credits that mysterious voice inside her head with saving her life, and she continued to be guided by it over the years.
She had had an earlier brush with death when she was filming In the Sultan’s Garden for IMP in 1911, and it, too, had involved an incident on the water.
The scene they were shooting called for Mary’s character to have been sewn into a bag and tossed into the Bosphorus (actually, the Hudson River). The lady-in-waiting in the story had given the girl a dagger beforehand, and she would use this to cut herself free of the bag. Subsequently, Mary’s character would be rescued by her American admirer, in a speedboat.
Mary couldn’t swim, and she was instructed to tread water, looking as if she’d just cut herself out of the bag, until she could be rescued. The operator of the speedboat was so excited about being in a movie for the first time that he wasn’t paying attention. Suddenly, it became clear to the crew on the dock that the boat was heading straight for Mary, who was bobbing in the water.
Realizing what was about to happen, one of the men who had been told to keep an eye on her dived into the river, grabbing Mary by the legs and pulling her under, just as the speedboat passed overhead. Panic-stricken, Mary didn’t know what was happening and was convinced that her rescuer was trying to drown her.
Everyone on the dock, including Charlotte, watched in horror until finally Mary came to the surface. She was barely conscious.
Mary had often played characters of other nationalities. She was an Inuit girl in Little Pal, released July 1, 1915; a Japanese girl in Madame Butterfly, released November 8, 1915; a Dutch girl in Hulda from Holland, released in July 1916; an Indian girl in Less than the Dust; and now, in The Pride of the Clan, a Scottish girl. But box office sales always seemed to slump whenever she moved away from the crowd-pleasing “Little Mary” roles.
Frances Marion adapted Mary’s next picture, The Poor Little Rich Girl, from a stage play. This movie would be the first time Mary starred as a little girl throughout an entire film. It was bound to please her fans.
Frances Marion, a journalist and a combat correspondent during the First World War, has been credited with being the most renowned female screenwriter of the twentieth century. She was a close friend of Mary’s, becoming her official screenwriter and also appearing in some early Pickford films.
The two young women were so in tune with each other that together they wrote magazine articles, under Mary’s name, for Ladies’ Home Journal and Pictorial Review, as well as a newspaper column that ran in 1916 and 1917, where Mary answered questions and discussed her life and her movies. Mary became the first film actress to appear on the cover of a national magazine, and in 1917 the readers of Woman’s Home Companion voted Mary Pickford “The Ideal American Woman.”
Released in March 1917, The Poor Little Rich Girl features Mary playing a wealthy eleven-year-old who longs for a normal life. Mary appears shorter in the film than she actually was, because director Tourneau used furniture that was two-thirds larger than usual, so that Mary has to scramble up to sit in a chair.
Mary believed that you had to study people around you in order to make a character real and believable. “I didn’t act,” she explained. “I was the character. I lived the character.” She knew how to re-create a child. She’d observed how a child walks, how a small child gets up off the floor — bottom first. She had studied the way a child’s face reacts to different emotions, how a child stands with her toes pointed slightly inward.
Mary and Frances Marion decided that what their picture needed was some humour, and they added some unscripted slapstick, which included a hilarious mud fight. Director Tourneau was not happy; he wanted The Poor Little Rich Girl to be a dignified picture. Mary controlled the finished product, however, and Tourneau gave up. It appears that Zukor, too, let Mary have her way with the film, although she’d barred Lasky’s people from the set.
The end result was a movie quite different from the original stage play and script. When the studio execs saw the finished product, they were appalled. Mary was summoned to Adolph Zukor’s office and told that, as a consequence, her next two pictures would be directed by Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille’s word, as part of the merger agreement, was law. Not Pickford’s.
Mary was genuinely sorry she’d let Papa Zukor down and agreed to send DeMille a telegram in which she promised to obey him without question. Both she and Frances Marion went home in tears, convinced they’d ruined the picture.
In the spring of 1917, Zukor sent Mary and her entire family to California. The entourage included Lottie and her baby, Mary Pickford Rupp. The child’s name would later be changed to Gwynne.
Mary had to make her two pictures for DeMille in Los Angeles but would end up staying permanently. She and Charlotte settled into a bungalow in Los Angeles, and when Owen begged to be given another chance, Mary relented and let him move in.
Lottie Pickford had accepted an offer from American Film Company in Santa Barbara as a star in a serial. Unfortunately, she became involved with alcohol and drugs, as did younger brother Jack. Mary would spend years paying to get Jack out of trouble, even producing pictures for him to keep him in work. But he went from one scrape to the next, always confident that Mary or Charlotte would step in and save him.
Mary’s first film with DeMille was A Romance of the Redwoods, released in May 1917. She lived up to her agreement and managed to keep all her bright ideas for the picture to herself.
In a review of A Romance of the Redwoods, Vachel Lindsay, poet and film critic for The New Republic, said, “If there is anything in a film at all, it is worth seeing three times. I went to see this one six times because I was glad Mary was beginning to emerge.”
In the meantime, Mary and Frances Marion went to see the New York premiere of The Poor Little Rich Girl, which was now re-cut. To her surprise, Mary was mobbed by enthusiastic fans at the theatre. In spite of her fears, the picture was a smash hit. Even Papa Zukor sent her a congratulatory telegram.
The Poor Little Rich Girl turned out to be one of the most beloved of all Mary’s films. Several close-ups in the picture were illuminated using a Pickford innovation — a “baby spotlight” that was situated at a low level to provided artificial light to Mary’s face. She had discovered the technique purely by accident one day at her dressing table.
When Douglas Fairbanks joined Famous Players-Lasky, it was inevitable that he and Mary would run into each other at the studio. It was hard to deny the attraction between them, harder still for either to resist it. Because they were both married to other people, they began to meet in secret, either at Mary’s bungalow or at a cottage in Laurel Canyon owned by Douglas’s brother, Robert.
Owen Moore had begun to drink heavily again, and Mary told him to leave, this time for good. The surly Owen demanded to know the truth about the rumours he’d been hearing, and when Mary told him, he threatened violence again Douglas. Judiciously, Fairbanks decided this might be the perfect time to go elsewhere to make his next picture.
Mary’s second DeMille picture was The Little American. Full of anti-German sentiment, it was released July 2, 1917. The film was based on the actual sinking of the liner Lusitania, which had been torpedoed by a German submarine on May 7, 1915. The liner sank in less than eighteen minutes and 1,198 lives were lost with it.
In the film, Mary’s character is aboard the liner Veritania, en route to France, when it is similarly torpedoed. Following her rescue, she is held captive by German soldiers. Critics said The Little American was so realistic that it seemed more like a newsreel than a movie.
From their earliest days together with David Belasco in The Warrens of Virginia, Cecil B. DeMille had respected Mary’s dedication to her work. It didn’t hurt that he made more money on A Romance of the Redwoods and The Little American with Mary Pickford than he had for any of his previous films.
When the U.S. finally entered the war in the spring of 1917, Mary threw herself behind the war effort. She posed for pro-war posters, started a tobacco fund for the soldiers, and sent pictures of herself to decorate the trenches on the battlefield. She adopted the second battalion of the First California Field Artillery and became its honorary colonel. A frequent visitor to Camp Kearney, near San Diego, she presented each of the 600 recruits there with a gold locket containing her picture, and the young men were wearing them when they shipped out to France.
As well as personally purchasing American Liberty Bonds, Mary bought thousands of dollars in subscriptions to the Canadian War Loan and made a point of delivering the money to Toronto in person.
The secretary of the U.S. Treasury, William McAdoo, asked Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks to join Charlie Chaplin on a tour to promote and sell Liberty Bonds. The drive began in April 1918, in Washington. Huge crowds came out to see the stars of Hollywood, with Cobourg, Ontario, native comedienne Marie Dressler representing Broadway, as they paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Thousands more came out to hear them at a rally on Wall Street in New York City where they made anti-German speeches. Barely able to lift the heavy megaphone, Mary didn’t disappoint the crowd, as she was wearing her trademark long curls loose down her back. Charlie Chaplin did his “Little Tramp” routine, twirling his walking stick, and Douglas Fairbanks flashed his infectious grin and performed his famous acrobatics for everyone. It was the first time Hollywood and the government in Washington had worked together. It was also the first time Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks had appeared side-by-side in public.
Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin, circa 1917. Here, the trio are plotting appearances to sell war bonds.
As their relationship developed, Douglas was bothered by the fact that he couldn’t warm up to Mary’s family. The Pickfords were a source of concern for him, particularly the fact that most of them drank. Fairbanks himself was a teetotaler, having promised his mother that he would not touch alcohol until after the age of forty.
Douglas wished Mary’s mother were more refined, more like his own mother had been. Charlotte had been drinking for years, often trying to hide it from Mary, and now that Charlotte’s figure had become barrel-like, she reminded Douglas of a low-class washerwoman.
Lottie Pickford, the forgotten daughter who had always lived in Mary’s shadow, had become a rebel. Once her baby daughter was born, she returned to her irresponsible lifestyle, drinking, using drugs, and throwing noisy all-night parties.
Prior to 1920, Mary’s brother, Jack, managed to make almost thirty movies, but he was unpredictable and a heavy drinker. He could be charming when it suited him, and for most of his life he lived off rich women. It was all a bit too much for someone like Douglas, who felt he had certain standards to maintain.
For her part, Mary was not especially fond of Doug’s friend, Charlie Chaplin. She found the man to be moody and introverted. At other times, Chaplin could bore her by lecturing her on his left-wing beliefs. What’s more, he and Douglas used to set up elaborate pranks together, which Mary found juvenile and annoying.
But Mary and Chaplin both loved Douglas and so they tolerated each other for his sake. And after all, their fans expected this trio of top stars to love one another. For ten years, Mary grudgingly took part in the crazy antics that became a trademark of the three.
As soon as Mary was released from her obligation to DeMille, she asked Frances Marion to adapt for the screen Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, a book by Kate Douglas Wiggin, published in 1903. She chose her former co-star Marshall “Mickey” Neilan (Rags, A Girl of Yesterday, Madame Butterfly, all from 1915) to direct the picture. It was released September 22, 1917.
“I was twenty-two years old [she was actually closer to twenty-five] when I played that unforgettable little eleven-year-old from Sunnybrook Farm,” Mary later wrote. “But I enjoyed the part as if I were still a child myself.”
“It was inevitable that one of the most popular child heroines in recent fiction should be portrayed on the screen by the most popular film ingenue,” raved the New York Dramatic Mirror when Rebecca was released.
Director Neilan, an Irishman, could always be counted on to make Mary laugh. “Mickey was one of the most delightful, aggravating, gifted and charming human beings I have ever known,” Mary said. “To my way of thinking he was the best director ever, better than the great D.W. Griffith.”
The next picture, The Little Princess, was released November 7, 1917, with Neilan again directing and with Charles Rosher as cameraman. Rosher gave this film and A Poor Little Rich Girl a fairy-tale quality with his lighting techniques, and he became Mary’s favourite cameraman.
Stella Maris, released July 21, 1918, was Mary’s third film with Neilan as director. She was quite capable of directing her own pictures and had to occasionally when Neilan fell off the wagon. But Mickey was the best, and she trusted him.
Mary plays the title role in the film: the beautiful, sheltered invalid, Stella. But she also plays the unlikely part of Unity Blake, a homely little Cockney household slave. Mary is totally unrecognizable in the role. She plastered her hair down with Vaseline, applied special makeup around her eyes so that they appeared smaller, and made her cheeks look hollow and her nostrils appear wider. She also darkened her teeth.
D.W. Griffith used to say that Mary could never play anyone who was ugly, but with this picture she proved him wrong.
When Papa Zukor saw Mary in this unbecoming disguise, he was appalled, convinced the film would be a disaster. Mary was quick to assure him that she was also playing a second character, one he’d approve of — the beautiful Stella, with her full array of long curls. Stella Maris is today considered one of Mary Pickford’s finest films.
After Stella Maris, Mary made five more films for Zukor: Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley, M’Liss, How Could You, Jean? Johanna Enlists, and Captain Kidd, Jr. And for most of them, she played the slightly scruffy teenager.
Mary was getting tired of having to play the “girl with the golden curls.” But she didn’t want to offend all the little girls who loved her. At one point, she had eighteen false ringlets made up, at $50 a piece, for those days when the humidity made her own curls go limp.
Those long ringlets, which she often referred to as “a miserable nuisance,” took Mary an hour to twirl into shape around her finger each day, and they meant having to sleep with three different sized rollers in her hair every night.
“I hate curls,” she is quoted as saying. “I loathe them!”
Back in 1917, two exhibitors, Thomas Tally and J.D. Williams, had set up First National, a distribution company that would eliminate the middleman by making and showing their own productions. Looking for stars for the new company, they had already signed up Charlie Chaplin, and they offered Mary $675,000 for three pictures and one-half of the profits, plus $50,000 to Charlotte for her services. Included was one clause that was particularly important to Mary: no block booking.
She was close to the end of her two-year contract with Zukor and his Famous Players-Lasky. She asked him if he would match First National’s offer. Regretfully, he refused, and Mary knew it was over between them. Although they had become physically distant, with Zukor still working from the New York office and Mary making movies in California, they parted dear friends, bidding each other tearful goodbyes.
Zukor went on to pursue his own dream of establishing a chain of theatres across the country. Years later, when Mary and Papa Zukor were entering the lobby of the Paramount Theatre in New York together, he told her that her pictures were what had made that building possible.
Charlotte had gone to New York and bought the screen rights to the novels Pollyanna and Daddy Long Legs for Mary. The latter became Mary’s first picture with First National. It was directed by Marshall Neilan, who also played the suitor in the film. Grossing $1.3 million, it was Mary’s biggest financial success up to that point, and it became one of the best-loved of all her pictures.
In November 1918, Mary and Charlotte set up the Mary Pickford Company, a fifty-fifty deal between them, with Charlotte looking after the business end. For five and a half years under Zukor, Mary had been able to choose her director and co-stars, but she had been a producer in name only. That was all Zukor ever allowed. Now, for the first time, she had total control.
