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PROLOGUE I

Landscapes

I

By 1920, city and country were all mixed up. Between the “War to Liberate Cuba” and the “War to Make the World Safe for Democracy,” migrants made their way from rural homes in record numbers. The process was a familiar one, dating back to before the Civil War. What was different about these migrations was the velocity of the movement, the volume of those on the move, and the destinations to which their ambitions drove them. Generally westward migrants continued as before, but few now went in search of a homestead on some sketchily mapped piece of the country. Hopes for a different life lay, for most, along city sidewalks, great and small. Thus the 1920 census made official what many already knew: for the first time, the majority of the U.S. population lived in cities. Imagining the migrants who headed for cities in the new century conjures images of wayfarers in unfamiliar dress disembarking from steamships at Ellis Island, or from trains with the musical rhythms of the race-riven South. Such snapshots abound, documenting the generation between what we now call the Spanish-Cuban-American War and World War I. In this period the movement of the “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe peaked and the first Great Migration of black Americans streamed north. Both groups mostly settled in midwestern and northern cities, against whose brick, concrete, and steel they hurled their ambitions. The same 1920 census revealed the altered landscape wrought by their resolve: in no major city east of the Mississippi or north of the Ohio did white, native-born citizens remain in the majority.¹

This book concerns the implications of reimagining another rural exodus of the era, one that explains how the bucolic backwater of Hollywood, California, became HOLLYWOOD, an industry and a place that specialized in shaping people’s fantasies and fears about modern times. Although it brings few images to mind today, the dimensions of this crossing were no less immense. Indeed, the movement of native-born, white migrants out of the Midwest—“white” here doubling for the ethnic heritage then commonly called Anglo-Saxon—was enormous enough to leave the proportion of native-born to foreign-born in all American cities unchanged despite the massive waves of Europeans settling in the East. Less absolute need, but as much imagination, sent these erstwhile farmers and shopkeepers across prairies, plains, and mountains in a migration similarly premised on mobility’s promise to provide emancipation from the limitations of the known. Southern California was the favored destination of these migrants who helped to create the era’s so-called rural problem. “The rural problem” was the term Progressive reformers coined to capture their belief that social deficiencies, as much as economic deprivation, explained the mounting flight of white Americans from the land during a period of unprecedented agricultural prosperity. Those who aimed to address these deficiencies—called “Country Lifers” for the Country Life Commission Theodore Roosevelt created in 1908—viewed the rural problem from a distinctively masculine, nativist perspective. Assistant Secretary of Agriculture William Hays focused on addressing the needs of those he called “the best crop on the farm,” native-born, Protestant men from the Midwest and Northeast.²

As scholars have well explained, what drew many of those who fit this description to Southern California was the vision that popular writers and savvy commercial developers concocted to advertise the region’s special charms, including its natural beauty, temperate climate, romantic “Spanish” history, new work ideals, and singular ethnic composition. Best-selling novels like Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) helped to explain the different heritages said to distinguish rugged, raucous Northern California from the state’s more gently rustic southern half. Here one found the gentleman dons and wine-drenched Spanish missions the novelists used to endow the region with a colorful exoticism. Here the health-giving aspects of the landscape and light promised that, at last, labor might become synonymous with pleasure. Historian Hubert Howe Bancroft’s California Pastoral (1888) was another early exemplar. “And so they lived,” wrote Bancroft, a midwestern transplant, publisher, and bibliophile whose collection of books, maps, and manuscripts formed the basis for the West’s first great library, “opening their eyes in the morning when they saw the sun; they breathed the fresh air, and listened to the song of birds; mounting their steeds they rode forth in the enjoyment of healthful exercise; they tended their flocks, held intercourse with each other, and ran up a fair credit in heaven.”

The developers of modern Los Angeles used this image of California Pastoral to fashion perhaps the most shining example in the nation’s long line of astonishingly successful booster campaigns. Curiosity about such descriptions sent the first waves of tourists to the area, tourists who were the bedrock of the region’s economy by 1910. By 1915, just as moviemakers began to venture there in earnest, Collier’s called Los Angeles “The City Advertising Built,” writing, “Here is one dusty little city . . . in the Western desert” made “great by intelligent, consistent, scientific advertising” whose picture of the good life became one of the most tantalizing promotions of the times.³

In this way, the Los Angeles of story, history, and, above all else, booster campaign offered a picture of life that attracted the remarkable number of migrants-with-means needed to launch its speculative, service-heavy projects aloft. Here, publicized railroad officials, real estate agencies, agricultural associations, and finally the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce to the prosperous of the Midwest, lay the country’s own Mediterranean garden, greened by the latest technological wonders and filled with freestanding bungalows decorated in a freshly minted Spanish past. Los Angeles beckoned not just as the “farm perfected, saved from loneliness and back breaking labor,” but also as a refuge from farming itself and from the new immigrants inundating cities east of the Mississippi. Here, proclaimed booster Charles Lummis, lay a new “Eden for Anglo-Saxon home-seekers” as eager to luxuriate in the sunshine as to escape “the ignorant, hopelessly un-American type of foreigner” who “infests and largely controls Eastern cities.” A piece of the heartland responded and moved to Los Angeles, the city that both “benefited from and helped to cause a major internal mass migration in the United States,” according to historian Kevin Starr. During the decade after 1910, the city grew faster than all others on the Pacific Coast combined, passing the million-soul mark and San Francisco as the West’s largest city just after 1920. Many of these youthful strangers from someplace else shared not only their midwestern Anglo-Saxon Protestant origins but also a willingness to use their economic and imaginative resources to chase new desires in the City of Dreams. In this first great metropolis of the twentieth century, country and city were, indeed, all mixed up.⁴

Yet few have considered the part that Hollywood, that unrivaled generator of good dreams and bad, played in drawing migrants west and subsequently shaping the growth and reputation of modern Los Angeles.⁵ The avoidance stems from the long-standing penchant among the city’s educated, Anglo elite to discount the influence of the “flickers” and their “movies,” as many called the infant industry’s workers and product. The idea that Los Angeles was too controlled by uptight, conservative Anglo midwesterners to nurture anything but artless conformity became a shibboleth of the city’s image as early as 1915, when Willard Huntington Wright published his infamous essay “Los Angeles—The Chemically Pure” in the Smart Set.⁶ The tendency supported casting Los Angeles as colorful, cosmopolitan San Francisco’s censorious, pale-faced sister and thus eased the erasure of the movie industry’s dynamism from most histories about the city’s development. By 1920, a leading progressive journal could poke fun at many respectable residents’ denial of the city’s most obvious attraction: “The Angelo rises and paws the air, when told the present booming prosperity of the city is due to motion pictures and tourists,” but “everyone knows that the factories are trivial, that the fruit-growing lands are miles removed from the city, and that the money pouring into Los Angeles is from movies and tourists.”⁷

At first Los Angeles was just one faraway destination among many for early filmmakers. “How far will a modern motion picture company go to get the ‘atmosphere’ for a film drama?” the Mirror wondered in 1910. The answer was far indeed. As the nickelodeon business boomed between 1905 and 1914, the thirst for fresh incidents and locations initially sent film companies along many different roads. To avoid “Jersey scenery,” a term the New York Dramatic Mirror coined to describe the attempt to foist fake locations on eyes grown adept at discerning the real thing, early film studios traveled from northern New York to Florida. Keeping up with the competition in Chicago and New York required a daily program adjustment to satisfy the “nickel madness” that was sweeping the land. The omnivorous demand from thousands of exhibitors left the flickers scrambling for new material. In a pinch for new product, many realized that story pictures, or narrative films, best satisfied the diverse tastes of fans. Story pictures were also easier to make since their dramatic events could be staged, unlike earlier actuality films that displayed brief glimpses of significant places and people, new inventions, and civic events. Film production companies sprang up in response to the demand for story pictures and hit the road in search of gasp-producing vistas to help sustain interest in these longer films.⁸

Los Angeles earned the loyalty of early motion picture makers for several tangible reasons, some as evanescent as the light. First there was the land, which offered to the camera’s eye not just unparalleled variety but each thing in a seemingly ideal form. Within a day’s drive of Los Angeles, a film crew might access mountains that tumbled down to the Pacific; forests of redwoods, the tallest and oldest trees on Earth; hundreds of miles of beach; uninhabited islands, canyons, and desert. Next came the light, whose color and constancy lived up to the best advertisements, the most lyrical description penned by Bancroft or his like. The sun shone, as Moving Picture World reported in 1910, an average of 320 days a year. This surfeit of sunshine and splendid scenery was a critical natural resource for the industry’s growth. Selig Polyscope, the first picture studio known to have shot in Los Angeles, left Chicago in the midst of a typically brutal winter in 1907. As Colonel Selig trumpeted, “nowhere, but in the real West could the proper atmosphere and wide vistas have been found.”⁹

Southern California also sported several man-made advantages. The Southern Pacific Railroad and the city’s electric trolley system offered transportation services with both a national and a neighborhood reach. Ever expanding streets provided access to cheap sprawling spaces on which to build the first enormous production studios, like the new ranch-cum-zoo-cum–technological wonder Universal City that opened its gates in 1915. And finally, the implacable hostility of business leaders toward unions, coupled with many rural Midwesterners’ distrust of organized labor, gave the city a well-deserved reputation as a defender of the open shop.¹⁰

The sum of these natural and commercial charms prompted American film production to relocate to Los Angles in short order as the “Come to California” campaign that attracted Midwesterners and tourists also drew would-be moving picture directors, actors, writers, producers, and technicians when short days and cold settled upon the original film centers of New York, New Jersey, and Chicago. Few in motion pictures had ventured to Los Angeles in 1910. By 1922, industry trade papers estimated that the city produced 84 percent of the pictures made in America and nearly two-thirds of those shown around the world. The modern motion picture industry and Los Angeles, the “Film Capital of the World,” sprang up together, and virtually overnight.¹¹

Thus Go West, Young Women! opens with an insight that was as obvious as Southern Californian sunshine to the era’s contemporaries: the Los Angeles that emerged after the city’s explosive transformation during the 1910s was largely built around its identity as the “Capital of Movie-Land.” A chorus of commentators marveled at how motion pictures had become not just the largest business on the Pacific Coast but the fourth-largest industry in the nation immediately after the conclusion of the Great War, as contemporaries called World War I. By the mid-twenties some 35,000 of the city’s residents earned $1.25 million a year working in the picture industry—not including extras paid to wait on call. The publicity surrounding the city’s rise as a movie-made metropolis drew many different types of people tempted by its promotions that promised liberation from the Protestant work ethic’s mistrust of pleasure and new freedom to reinvent the self. Put differently, as the industry settled in the West, motion pictures embellished the image of California Pastoral in ways that intensified its appeal for many. In advertising this “Picture Eldorado” as the “Chameleon City of the Cinema,” this publicity described a shape-shifting, cosmopolitan city within a city, a place “as changeable as a woman,” “the biggest city of make-believe in the universe,” where “the occident and the Orient” met. Wherever they hailed from, those who created and consumed such promotions imagined Los Angeles as a new kind of city-by-the sea where residents appeared to make something new from once irreconcilable parts.¹²

II

Beginning with the film industry’s invention of Los Angeles also recasts the explanation of how the formerly marginal, WASP-controlled and run-amok business of making movies in America became the dominant, highly centralized, cosmopolitan industry of early Hollywood. Indeed, the burden of this book’s opening chapters is to reconceive this process by describing the central role that women and the era’s sexual politics played in the metamorphosis. Accounts of the transition from the nickelodeon era to the age of the silent feature production in Los Angeles during the 1910s have long focused on how the industry abandoned its working-class, immigrant orientation to become a classless form of respectable entertainment. From this view, the move west helped producers to shed the nickelodeon’s identity as a disreputable, working-class form of entertainment “made by and for men.” This version of how Hollywood became Hollywood has an aesthetic corollary as well, one that roots American cinema’s development as an art form in the innovations of a few heroes out west. “By the end of the silent era [in 1929] the major dramatis personae of the tale were well known,” writes film scholar David Bordwell about the invention of what he calls the “Basic Story” about the origins of the look and feel of American-made movies: “American film is the creation of [D.W.] Griffith, Thomas Ince, [Cecil B.] DeMille, Mack Sennett, and Charlie Chaplin.” Iris Barry, the English film critic who became the world’s first film curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1933, helped to create this canon by preserving and publicizing these filmmakers’ work. Their films display the black-and-white moral certainties of Griffith’s traditional melodramas, the sweeping vistas of Ince’s many Westerns, and the slapstick antics and pathos of Sennett and Chaplin, the early industry’s two favorite clowns. Down to the present-day, retrospectives on American silent film still focus mostly on Griffith, whom Barry called “the ruling planet of the birth of motion picture production” and eulogized in her D.W. Griffith: American Film Master (1940).¹³

But even a cursory inspection of the era’s fan culture reveals the same assumption at every turn: American silent film was mostly made for women with very different tastes. “Now one thing never to be lost sight of in considering the cinema is that it exists for the purpose of pleasing women,” Barry warned in an unhappy acknowledgment of this reality in The Public’s pleasure (1926). In their initial heyday, the Western and slapstick films of Ince, Chaplin, and Sennett, were understood to appeal to an increasingly marginalized audience of children and young men. Moreover, many of the most powerful leading ladies of the day deserted Griffith because of his insistence on casting them in what they considered old-fashioned melodramas. Indeed, it is possible to read Barry’s elevation of these directors’ status in part as a project of replacing early Hollywood’s feminine cast with a more manly sheen. For as Barry knew so well, in the years around the Great War, the years in which Hollywood rose, the industry’s reputation worldwide increasingly depended upon its mastery at producing the kinds of lavish, thrilling dramas and romances preferred by most of the female trade. The era’s contentious sexual politics ensured that women’s prominent roles in creating and consuming this distinctive visual landscape would make them into some of the most arresting figures out west. Thus an origin story about how Hollywood became Hollywood that marginalizes women cannot hope to explain why its first “social imaginary” lit up imaginations around the world.¹⁴

Those who composed the first movie fan culture often framed their tales about the women who made Hollywood as part symbol of the particular desires female fans invested in the picture business, and part realistic picture of what a wage-earning woman who landed in Los Angeles might expect. Margaret Turnbull, the author of the first novel advertised “to lift the veil” on motion picture production in Los Angeles, offered what quickly became the conventional wisdom about these heroines’ motivations. Turnbull wrote The Close-Up (1918) three years after leaving New York City to help her friend William de Mille organize the new scenario department at Lasky’s Feature Play Company in Hollywood. She was a successful playwright, a published novelist, single, and just entering early middle age when she arrived at the Los Angeles Santa Fe depot in 1915 and headed for her new job at an old barn down a dirt road lined with pepper trees. The novel begins with its twenty-seven-year-old protagonist, Kate Lawford, suffocating under the “factory-like” conditions of her secretarial job in New York. When her boss asks her to help him organize a new studio in Los Angeles, Kate assents, thinking, “Here was a vision of the West. The West which spelled adventure, and that fantastic world of make believe, a picture studio, adventure, and strange people hers for the taking, and if God were good, the power to dream again.” Life inside the “little [movie] colony” provides a perfect antidote to the dead-end drudgery of life back east. Kate begins as the studio’s office manager and ends as its biggest star. At the novel’s end, she lovingly bids her friends and fellow workers adieu before retiring to marry a childhood sweetheart and run a California ranch. Here, then, was a place where a working girl “with lots of ‘nerve’ ” could find interesting work and professional mobility, dance till morning with friends of “delightful” warmth, and experiment romantically with several men before selecting the one of her dreams. Like most of the first stories about the “Romance of Making the Movies” in Los Angeles, the tale presented an optimistic picture of what an ambitious working girl with “brains and beauty” (in the parlance of the day) and some luck might find in this New West.¹⁵

This presentation offered a sharp contrast with the parts played by women in the Old West. For much of the nineteenth century, the great newspaperman Horace Greeley’s charge “Go West, young man!” signaled a broad commitment to colonize the continent by sending the discontented men from all manner of Easts west. In the process, the West became not just a region populated mostly by single men but a space that symbolized their hope for seizing the main chance. “To the rightly constituted Man, there always is, there always must be, opportunity,” Greeley assured in 1850, exhorting men to “turn . . . to the Great West, and there build up a home and fortune.” But by 1900 female migrants outpaced male ones, effecting a “stunning” reversal in western migration patterns. Yet even as the feminization of western migration became entrenched, cultural elites and popular entertainers alike looked west to revitalize and rework masculine ideals that many white men feared under assault as women’s entrance into public life, the immigration of non-Anglos, and the corporatization of the workplace threatened their entrenched privileges. In this way, the long shadow cast by the West’s relationship to new masculine ideals and the tendency for studies on womanhood to look east have continued to obscure how the modern West’s possession of Hollywood created perhaps the most powerful generator and lure for a New Western Woman in full flight from feminine norms.¹⁶

A cultural concept, social reality, and frustratingly slippery term, the “New Woman” arose with modern urbanity in 1895 and was inconsistently applied to several generations of women who challenged different aspects of Victorian ladyhood. Many of the changes associated with the type emerged from women’s soaring participation in work outside the home, as the number of adult wage-earning women shot from 2.6 to 10.8 million between 1890 and 1920. Indeed, the term New Woman gained currency in relationship to the first generation of middle-class women who challenged assumptions about women’s intellectual and physical abilities by eschewing marriage in record numbers in favor of work in “male” professions, political activism, and social reform. By the 1910s the expression conjured images of women and “girls” who emerged from the working-class milieu associated with the leisure habits and labor conventions of female bohemians, entertainers, and ordinary wageworkers. As they took jobs in department stores, offices, and social services, for the first time the majority of women, usually those who were white and native-born, experienced work as an endeavor that sent them outside the confines of factories or other women’s homes. Exiting their jobs each evening, many of these recently rural transplants treated the city itself as a precious metal to be mined, extracting new pleasures from its burgeoning world of commercial amusements.¹⁷

Women associated with this less respectable scene did the most to embody, create, and consume the New Western Women associated with Hollywood’s original social imaginary, women like the “peerless fearless girl,” serial queen Pearl White. “You know my adventurous spirit and desire to live and realize the greatest things,” White reminds her crestfallen suitor in the first episode of The Perils of Pauline (1914) after rejecting his marriage proposal so she can gather material for the novel she wants to write. The first movie stars like White and actress-writer-producer Mary Pickford invited their female fans to identify with a protagonist liberated from many of the customary restraints that economic dependence and the cult of domesticity placed on their bodies and hearts. As was still customary, White received no credit on celluloid for her portrayal of a heroine whose popularity reached across the Atlantic and beyond the Pacific. Yet as far away as China, publicity trumpeted the western American–styled athleticism displayed by serial queens like White, “riding on a furious horse, climbing the cliff as if walking on flat land.” Indeed, the journalistic discourse that ran alongside the print versions of serials in newspapers and magazines made their protagonists into the first American film stars, explaining why the serial craze that began after 1912 coincided with the development of the star system. Like many of the first movie stars, White’s supposed real-life persona presented an even more extreme vision of a New Western Woman. Reports detailed her life history as an Ozark-raised former circus performer turned globetrotting single cosmopolitan who sought European “pleasure jaunts” and “beefsteak [or automobiling] and aviation” for fun. Artfully blending social reality with desire, such publicity displayed how even the most ordinary women workers gained access to the movies’ bohemian social settings and exciting work environments out west. After opening in 1915, studios like Universal City became major tourist attractions whose novelty and appeal involved their display of women’s unrivaled opportunities for physical mobility, romantic exploration, and professional satisfaction. A workplace whose corporate mythology promised an environment “Where Work Is Play and Play Is Work” supported other inversions such as becoming the first city where “ ‘Movie’ Actresses Control Its Politics.” Such promotions help to explain why so many young women and their elders around the world came to view what happened inside the little movie colony as having consequences for their own lives.¹⁸

The appeal of these mass-produced narratives and personalities encouraged many women to seek work in some aspect of the picture business, making them a particularly visible eddy in the massive current that washed up in Southern California in the early twentieth century. “There are more women in Los Angeles than any other city in the world and it’s the movies that bring them,” one shopkeeper bluntly asserted in 1918. The city census supported the claim. In 1920, Los Angeles became the only western city where women outnumbered men, a development sharply at odds with traditional boomtowns that had long been dominated virtually “everywhere and always” by single young men. The city’s female residents were unusual in other ways as well. Nearly one in five was divorced or widowed. Since single women tended to work outside the home more than their married counterparts, this helps to explain what one demographer called the most noteworthy characteristic of the Los Angeles labor force: the high number of women who worked after the age of twenty-five.

These gender dynamics were at odds with older western boomtowns. In the decades after gold was discovered in 1848, young single men swarmed the northern reaches of the Pacific Coast in search of riches in sex-restricted occupations like railroad construction, mining, and lumber. Consequently, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco all initially sported an urban version of the virile, ethnically polyglot masculine culture associated with the Wild West. But Los Angeles’s economic base of real estate, tourism, and motion pictures created the service and clerical jobs that attracted women. Women in these sectors of employment in Los Angeles also benefited from California’s early passage of woman suffrage and jury service in 1911, as well as legislation establishing the eight-hour day (1911) and a minimum wage (1917) for women. Gender stratification and racial discrimination remained widespread, but white women experienced less social stratification and greater legislative protections than in most cities. In all these ways, Los Angeles better reflected the direction of twentieth-century urban development than San Francisco, Chicago or New York. This urban frontier attracted the modern pink-collar worker out for economic opportunity and excitement as much as it did Midwesterners. Indeed, the two were often one and the same. “At night in bed I would lay [sic] awake and day dream about the big hit I would make if I were to go to California,” recalled one young women in the motion picture autobiography she wrote in Chicago in the 1920s, adding parenthetically, “I know better now.”¹⁹

Much to the later consternation of those like Iris Barry, such women were at the center of the film industry’s expanding fan base in the years surrounding the Great War, the years in which the movies became Hollywood. The re orientation of fan culture toward women during the 1910s was sped by the creeping conviction among many industry insiders that their good fortune demanded catering to the female trade. Focusing on the ladies in the audience was one of several strategies the flickers adopted from the stage. All types of theatrical impresarios had learned decades earlier that attracting the ladies with new kinds of plays and heroines enlarged their audience and increased the respectability of the entertainment offered. In hopes of effecting the same changes, movie fan culture mostly addressed an idealized, “fanatic” female film spectator with increasing savvy during the 1910s. This book builds upon the explosion of work on women in film’s silent era. By examining the motivations and tactics behind attracting more female fans, Shelley Stamp, Janet Staiger, Miriam Hansen, and others have explored how the movies became a space to contest gender norms. By 1914 Motion Picture News, a trade paper aimed at exhibitors, was reporting that “women and girls” were the principal readers of “moving picture news,” a remarkable shift of opinion given the emphasis on men a few years earlier. By the early twenties, some estimated that women occupied 75 percent of seats. As a result, the movies’ ideal spectator became a young white woman. Women’s identity as the most fanatic moviegoers led to the feminization of movie fan culture just as the industry’s most prestigious fare became a feature-length story picture centered on a female star. Such developments were behind an English actor’s lament that Hollywood was “a land where the worship is not of the hero but of the heroine.”²⁰

Like all good mythmakers, movie fan writers shaped their tales about the industry’s female personalities as much to answer the perceived needs of this ideal fan as to fit the facts. As with western myths more generally, these stories were not simple fictions, but a blend of wish fulfillment and social reflection. Stories that aimed to appeal to these movie-struck girls linked their heroine worship of the first movie stars to supporting their ambitions as a sex. As with the tales of an earlier era aimed at boys, these stories romanticized and sensationalized their protagonists’ quests for individual success.²¹ Yet women’s remarkable record of influence inside the movie colony of this era was no fantasy. The increasingly female audience for the movies selected many deserving of their allegiance, but a disproportionate number of those who earned their most enduring fealty were other women. In a trajectory that followed those of other women professionals, their record of influence as actresses, directors, writers, producers, and publicists through the early 1920s would not be equaled until more than half a century later. Involved in all aspects of the business, these women offered some of the most visible models of professional advancement and personal freedom available at the time. Women like Mary Pickford, Alla Nazimova, Norma Talmadge, Gloria Swanson, Anita Loos, Frances Marion, June Mathis, Clara Kimball Young, Elinor Glyn, and Lois Weber were all key players in shaping the infant industry and the new images of femininity and masculinity that it sold. Journalists like Adela Rogers St. Johns and Louella Parsons churned out the publicity that explained who mattered in the industry and why. Such women spun stories about heroines whose fearless navigation of the West’s preeminent modern city foretold their ability to win once inconceivable renown.²²

Future star-producer Gloria Swanson got ideas about the type after meeting Clara Kimball Young, one of the first stars to establish her own production studio. Swanson met Young shortly after moving from Chicago to Los Angeles, recalling how “the world of 1916” was “a man’s world” and a “business run entirely by men.” But Young’s success suggested otherwise. In what other business,” Swanson wondered, “could this delightful elegant creature be completely in de pen dent,” “turning out her own pictures, dealing with men as her equals, being able to use her brains as well as her beauty, having total say as to what stories she played in, who designed her clothes, and who her director and leading man would be.”²³ Again, theatrical practices cleared a path for women like Young. By 1900, the field of commercial entertainment had already promised so-called stage-struck girls a unique avenue to individual success. On all types of stages, female performers from “extras” to stars often earned greater recognition and more money than men, making commercial entertainment one of the largest, best-paying fields open to women without much formal education. As the theater’s fortunes fell, stories about women’s prospects in the movies played to a fresh generation of female wage earners with much more than survival on their minds.²⁴

Indeed, one of the few attempts to determine why women migrants dominated the exodus that created the rural problem that had so worried progressives since Teddy Roosevelt suggested why studio work would have appeared to satisfy the impulse that drove so many to cities like Los Angeles. The editors of a massive survey conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1912 regarding the opinions of “farm house wives” about why so many rural women left home called the theme of the responses they received the “feeling that the attractiveness of one’s surroundings is of more importance than the practical farmer” recognized. Women’s letters to the USDA repeatedly recorded how the search for sociable work, more attention to aesthetic pleasures, and “the entertainments and amusements that the towns and cities offer” sent them down country roads to town. One Arkansan succinctly summed up the difference between rural women’s and men’s needs: “We would rather have free telephones and moving pictures than free seed.” Taken together, the letters present the countryside’s landscape as so bereft of feminine influence that a woman with a taste for aesthetic pleasures and the society of others was left with few choices but to escape. “Do you wonder we get lonely and discouraged and are ignorant and uncultured and long to get away for good?” The comedic actress Louise Fazenda testified to how many felt they had nothing to lose. “At my home in Utah they impressed on me how utterly useless I was until I could bare [sic] it no longer,” Fazenda recalled. “So like the old darky song, ‘I packed up my grip and took a trip,’ coming to Los Angeles to do or die. And I pretty nearly died.” Publicity that depicted studios as the “most perfect democracy the world has ever known, promised migrants a social equality that was still the stuff of dreams. Thus the story about how the déclassé “movie” business became the glamorous industry of Hollywood depended upon its publicists’ finesse at advertising “Motion-Picture Land” as located inside a new urban frontier that catered to women pioneers.²⁵

For these reasons, the most widely circulated tales about Hollywood’s birth often linked the industry to the excitement and alarm prompted by the so-called revolution of manners and morals of modern young girls after the Great War, as this book’s second part explores. Strategies first developed in the original film centers of Chicago and New York laid the foundation for associating the movie colony’s residents with the era’s increasingly voluble, and volatile, debates about the terms under which women’s emancipation should advance after winning the fight for suffrage in 1919. In describing the movies as a great new frontier, as a “democratic art” that offered common cultural ground for all, industry publicists wrapped a business still feared by much of the respectable middle class as immoral and un-American in cherished stories about the nation’s frontier heritage. But journalists like Louella Parsons did much more than this when they retooled the frontier thesis that then commanded the country’s view of its past to describe motion pictures as a gold rush business for ambitious, single, young white women on the make. Most radically, the sexual politics of this booster literature promoted the movie colony as that quintessential metropolitan neighborhood of lusty self-invention, a bohemia—a Hollywood Bohemia to be exact. A novel character best personified the liberation that this bohemian scene promised: the extra girl who went west in search of unparalleled opportunities for self-invention, artistic exploration, professional advancement, romantic adventures, and just plain fun. For some, this Hollywood Bohemia intensified anxieties about the manners and morals of the rising generation of modern girls. For others, it offered a place to bring her to life. In this way, the flickers’ mass-produced narratives and personalities became another essential element in the era’s broader conversation about the “grounding of modern feminism.”²⁶

III

Thus the women and men who went to Los Angeles with an interest in making and breaking into pictures entered a contest, often unwittingly, for cultural power that played out along the frontier of mass culture and inside Los Angeles’s new urban West. Arriving by train, taxicab, and automobile, the flickers moved into new bungalows and old barns where they quickly attracted both critics and fans. Like many artistic scenes, the so-called movie colony sported a cosmopolitan crew whose often sexually unconventional mien encouraged a kind of social insularity despite the highly public nature of their work. In addition to many prominent New Woman types, the colony also contained a number of powerful immigrant Jews who mostly hailed from the working-class, urban milieus of the business’s early fans. In short, the flickers were just the sorts that some already settled in Los Angeles wanted to avoid. Frances Marion, whom many consider the silent era’s most successful screenwriter, recalled the tensions that resulted after moving from her native San Francisco to Los Angeles in 1913. After working part-time as a commercial illustrator, the unhappily married Marion found a full-time job as an assistant for Lois Weber, then the most famous director on Universal Studio’s new lot. The new paycheck and the close friends she made, including writer Adela Rogers St. Johns and Mary Pickford, gave Marion the courage to divorce her husband. Marion’s life as a New Woman was possible only after trading her elite upbringing in more established San Francisco for the bohemian movie colony in Los Angeles. But she still seethed over the bigotry exhibited by some of her new neighbors, fuming over landlords who baldly declared, “No Jews, actors, or dogs allowed.” The neighborhood associations that sprung up at this moment also displayed the determination of some local Angelenos to keep the flickers out of their backyards.²⁷

FIGURE 1. Inceville, Thomas Ince’s studio by the sea along the Santa Monica coast, c. 1915. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

Director King Vidor thought that the social insularity and artistic license that the movie colony’s residents displayed would have engendered a similar reaction in many other American towns. Hoping to become a director, Vidor left Texas for Los Angeles in 1915, not long after the newsreel cameraman made his directorial debut with the short story picture Hurricane of Galveston (1913). According to Vidor, the colony’s residents cultivated the experience of living in “a magic bubble,” a sense as much nurtured as imposed. Residents of the movie colony “spoke a silent language, a different language from the orange growers who surrounded them,” Vidor recalled. Yet they “felt camaraderie with all the other members of their clan” who congregated together inside ever more elaborate production lots like the “Studio by the Sea” that Thomas Ince built in 1912 on several thousand acres of land encompassing a stretch of Pacific coastline and the surrounding hills and plateaus of Santa Ynez Canyon at present-day Pacific Palisades and Malibu (figure 1). These environment’s camera-thin walls magnified their workers’ goings-on from multiple angles, acting as both blessing and curse for a business that needed viewers’ curiosity to survive. Like many early residents, Vidor remembered how the community’s isolation encouraged a release from customary restraints, leading inhabitants to believe “they could establish their own habits and behavior,” which could appear outlandish, immoral, or glamorously modern depending on the point of view.²⁸

The firestorm of local, state, and federal actions to control the movies that swept the country during the 1910s supported Vidor’s judgment that the movies and their makers provoked anxiety not just among some Los Angeles landlords and orange growers but across the land. The Supreme Court decision Mutual Film Corporation v. Ohio Industrial Commission (1915) displayed the intensification of concern about protecting moviegoers from the influence of films. The Mutual case made motion pictures the only medium of communication in the United States ever subject to prior restraint censorship, which allowed for the prescreening, cutting, and licensing of films before the public ever saw a foot of celluloid. Chicago pointed the way toward this type of regulation when it passed the first municipal censorship law in 1907. The law required a police permit for every moving picture shown in the city. During the nickelodeon era many other cities and towns had used their police powers to rectify the dangers presented by firetrap theaters. But police licensing proved a blunt instrument, helpful primarily for ensuring that early movie theaters conformed to fire safety codes and for excising scenes that contained obviously criminal behavior, like murder, arson, and robbery. Since most film censorship activists through the early 1910s believed that immigrant, working-class men dominated movie audiences, the approach indicated their intention to prevent films from inspiring anti-social behavior in this group. Two of the very few story pictures that were entirely suppressed, The James Boys in Missouri and Night Riders (both 1908), illustrated this concern.²⁹

The revised censorship law that Chicago passed in 1914 displayed the shift in regulatory efforts that mirrored the larger change in attitudes about the movies’ cultural identity and location by the late 1910s. Go West! Young Women enters the history of censorship efforts here, when concerns over the impact of America’s newly feminized film audience first peaked. The re orientation of the business toward primarily female consumers caused film reformers to focus more on how film content and stars incited criminal behavior among young women. Chicago’s decision in 1915 to replace its police board with a ten-person commission of salaried civilians composed equally of men and women offered the more delicate touch needed to address problems associated with women’s immorality. The Supreme Court’s Mutual decision that same year also assumed that the movies tended to provoke immoral conduct among viewers. Most legal scholars agree that Mutual’s reasoning that film’s unique capacity to do “evil”—in this case, its special ability to incite sexual immorality—was what justified the Court’s protection of the state’s right to wield singular controls over the medium. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice McKenna suffused his opinion with fears about how the whole atmosphere of story pictures incited erotic havoc among the “promiscuous” crowd that attended movies. In the dark, throngs “not of women alone, nor of men alone, but together” watched “things which should not have pictorial representation in public places,” because of the “prurient interest” they “appealed to and excited,” McKenna declared.³⁰

Increasingly, reformers argued that the movies’ cultural ascendancy had unleashed a flood of “indecent,” “sexually immoral” images that had made the number of “problem girls” soar. “Problem girl” was a catchall label given by social workers to young, wage-earning women whose appearance and independent participation in consumer culture created novel difficulties with policing their sexuality. Historians Joanne Meyerowitz, Kathy Peiss, Regina Kunzel, and others have skillfully evoked how such women’s new purchase on public spaces generated anxieties as many recently rural women poured into cities to work and play nationwide. These young women’s bold attempts to refashion themselves according to their own design also led them to experiment with cosmetics, products previously reserved for actresses and prostitutes. Thus, like many of the first movie stars, their behavior disrupted visual conventions that had long allowed observers to separate the good girls from the bad. “The way the women dress today they all look like prostitutes,” a waiter reported to one of the many Progressive reformers who cruised dance halls looking for the prostitutes such environments were thought to breed. What these young women may have experienced as “vistas of autonomy, romance, and pleasure,” according to Kunzel, many others judged to be “promiscuous sexuality and inappropriate delinquent behavior.” The result: for the first time, state authorities deemed sizable numbers of women criminals who required rehabilitation in the new juvenile courts and homes that went up in cities across the country.³¹

The popularity of, and outrage provoked by, a series of so-called white slave pictures in the early 1910s was an early indication of the trend that made “immorality” and “obscenity” the “keywords” that captured the concerns of censorship boards by 1920. Although judged a moral panic by most historians today, concern about white slavery—the belief that large numbers of young white women, often fresh from the countryside, were being forced into sexual slavery—tracked women’s movement into the workplace and onto the city streets after 1900. Muckraker George Kibbe Turner’s “The City of Chicago: A Study of the Great Immoralities” first galvanized Progressive reformers into action on the subject. Turner’s exposé described a chain that connected the liquor trade to immigrants, and the latter to a white slave market run mostly by Jewish immigrants from Russia. The racial identities of the villain and victim in these tales also revealed how the white slavery scare reflected the era’s heightened fears about the racial degeneration of Anglo-Saxons in cities through racial “mongrelization,” in the language of the day. Films like Inside the White Slave Traffic (1913) became some of the first feature-length blockbusters. At six reels long, white slave films played for over an hour, cost patrons twenty-five cents to view at the first motion pictures palaces in New York, and attracted audiences notably composed of young women. Critics from the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly accused the films of inciting the era’s “Repeal of Reticence” about sex, of teaching white slaving techniques to men of “the impressionable classes,” and of generally pouring “oil upon the flames of vice” before “the promiscuous audiences of the motion picture theaters.” They also lamented that so many female fans watched scenes of their imperilment with delight, laughing at the generic conventions and gendered stereotypes employed by these traditional melodramas about the danger the city posed to women’s virtue.³²

In the volatile postwar climate, the fact that so many movie publicists had turned such traditional dark tales about young women’s experience of urban modernity—of countrified naïfs brought to ruin in the city—on their head now counted as evidence of the danger presented by the industry’s growth in Los Angeles. Having breezily described the City of Angels as an urban El Dorado for intrepid female migrants, these brighter stories’ success in drawing women into movie theaters and to Los Angeles reflected the hunger many felt about exploring where their gathering freedoms might lead. But the industry’s efforts may have succeeded too well by the early 1920s. Reports announcing that more than ten thousand girls went to Los Angeles each year to work in the movies generated mounting anxiety about the dangers that awaited them in an industry controlled by “morally degenerate,” “un-American” Jews.³³ After the Great War, with anti-Semitism and nativism on the rise, fears about Hollywood’s impact spread along multiple fronts. A wave of more risqué films, featuring daring, decidedly non-Anglo stars like Pola Negri, Gloria Swanson, and Rudolph Valentino, made headlines. Growing numbers came to believe that protecting the nation from what one activist called, “The Movie Menace” demanded controlling the movie industry itself.

The event that produced the industry’s first so-called canonical scandal illustrated these tensions. “S.F. BOOZE PARTY KILLS YOUNG ACTRESS; GIRL STRICKEN AFTER AFFAIR AT S.F. HOTEL; Virginia Rappe Dies after Being Guest at Party Given Here by ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle; Film Comedian,” wailed the headlines that framed the event. The scandal erupted following a party hosted by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, a slapstick star second only to Charlie Chaplin in popularity. Arbuckle held the party at the St. Francis Hotel on Labor Day, 1921. An actress named Virginia Rappe and two other Angelenos, Maude Delmont and Al Semnacher, were among the first to arrive, around noon. Still wearing pajamas, Arbuckle greeted the trio with a pitcher of bootleg gin and orange juice. Within the hour, the comedian requested a phonograph be brought in to entertain the dozen or so guests who crowded the suite’s reception room. Happy revelers later recalled in court a “royal good time, dancing and kidding and drinking,” with Arbuckle “at the center” of the “clowning.” Rappe and Arbuckle ended up alone in one of the suite’s bedrooms for an undetermined length of time. Late in the afternoon, guests discovered the actress there in great pain, tearing at her clothes. Thinking her drunk, some female guests tried to revive her with a cold bath; Arbuckle placed a piece of ice between her legs for the same reason. Around 5 P.M., Arbuckle called the management to have Rappe moved to a separate room, and the party ended. Dr. Beardslee, the hotel staff physician at the St. Francis, administered morphine to relieve Rappe’s pain, later testifying at Arbuckle’s first trial that “any evidence of alcoholism” “was very slight” and “overshadowed” by her “intense pain.” Arbuckle returned to Los Angeles on Tuesday for the premiere of his latest film, Gasoline Gus (1921). That same day the hotel’s doctor diagnosed Rappe as suffering from a ruptured bladder, recommended Delmont take her to a hospital, and left on a hunting trip. Rappe languished for three days at the St. Francis, mostly unconscious and in pain so severe that only continuous injections of morphine, supplied by a new doctor Delmont hired, provided relief. Late on Thursday Delmont moved Rappe to a private sanitarium where she died the next morning of peritonitis resulting from a ruptured bladder. Delmont immediately told the police that Rappe blamed Arbuckle for her death. The San Francisco district attorney accused the comedian of murder. A media frenzy erupted in which even typically staid papers like the New York Times ran headlines based on hearsay that shrieked, “ARBUCKLE DRAGGED RAPPE GIRL TO ROOM, WOMAN TESTIFIES.”³⁴

That much, and little more, can be said with certainty about the circumstances from which the “ ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle Scandal” arose. What happened after Rappe’s death has interested many for decades, creating a powerful origins text about Hollywood that journalists, novelists, television writers, and popular historians alike return to again and again to convey how the movie colony’s licentious spirit combined with the venality of its producers to create its unrivaled moral hypocrisy. After the first jury deadlocked, the largest picture producers banded together in a new industry group, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA, or Hays Office) and hired William Hays as president. Will Hays was everything that the mostly immigrant, Jewish producers in the MPPDA were not: a native Midwesterner, a Presbyterian elder, and a leading Republican and Washington insider who became postmaster general after orchestrating Warren Harding’s successful 1920 presidential bid.³⁵ Arbuckle’s second jury also deadlocked. The third jury acquitted the star, issuing an apology to Arbuckle in the press. Nonetheless, in his first public act, Hays shelved all of Arbuckle’s films and banned him from the screen. Scholars have mostly located the scandal’s significance in the way Hays’s act symbolized the rise of an internal system of regulation that controlled the images made by and about Hollywood. This emphasis follows Robert Sklar’s pioneering cultural history, Movie-Made America (1975). Others have looked to Richard deCordova’s work on the emergence of the star system, which emphasizes the scandal’s precipitation of a shift in the discourse about Hollywood. Before the scandal, deCordova argues, publicity about the spotless domesticity and fabulous consumptive patterns of stars established the respectability of the movies and their personalities. After the Arbuckle trials, attention focused on exposing the private lives of residents to public view, making the topic of Hollywood’s moral impact on fans a subject of social controversy. Yet such accounts fail to explain what made the scandal so scandalous in its day.³⁶

The Arbuckle-Rappe scandal of 1921 did not invent Hollywood, but as the final chapter of Go West, Young Women! explores, the images and words, stereotypes and censorship drives, “morality clauses” and jury verdicts that produced the scandal did as much to shape ideas about early Hollywood as any other single event. Most simply, the scandal circulated “Hollywood” among a broad audience—as a term indicating a place, product, industry, and approach to life. Used this way, “Hollywood” came into wide usage only in the scandal’s wake. As “Hollywood” quickly became a metaphor for the industry’s influence on American culture, its meaning, like the scandal itself, was not singular, transparent, or stable but was instead shifting and associational. Tethered to the fears and ambitions of different publics, contests over narrating the scandal continued for decades. Still, in the scandal’s immediate aftermath some interpretations clearly dominated others, leaving an impress of Hollywood’s social imaginary that stamped all others to come.³⁷

Put differently, the scandal reveals much more about Hollywood’s origins if we spotlight its other principal character, Virginia Rappe. A former model turned actress of minor success, Rappe initially played a starring role in the scandal that reflected the prominence of unconventional New Western Women in the movie industry’s rise in Los Angeles. Yet fickle history has largely forgotten the important part she played in its production. Both scholars and popular writers alike have long reduced her significance to one or the other of two bit parts: an irrelevant, silly starlet, or a two-bit prostitute whose venereal disease caused her death.³⁸ Like most historical erasures, her casting has served particular purposes, including a wish by some to clear Arbuckle’s name. Yet such characterizations have more broadly obscured young women’s agency and significance inside the landscape of early Hollywood, in part by trivializing the desires that sent young women like Rappe out west to work. Indeed, Rappe’s erasure raises questions about how the sexual double standard and the sociology of knowledge influence which version of an origin story takes hold. For even before the scandal’s eruption in 1921, many respectable Americans who could concur on little else agreed that Hollywood and its girls best symbolized the changes in gender roles and sexual feeling threatening to sweep the land. This shared assumption offered a piece of hard-to-come-by common ground in the contentious cultural climate of the postwar era.

Here, then, was the Hollywood born around Los Angeles during the era of the Great War: in a city that mirrored the larger cultural contests among Anglo-Saxon cultural custodians, new immigrants, and problem girls; in the explosion of print that surrounded and produced the first new women stars and their fans; in movie theaters filled with young working- and middle-class women; in the stories whose new western heroines shaped the fantasies and fears of a seemingly ever widening audience. Early Hollywood resulted from the collision of these parts. The rise of the movies in Los Angeles offered both a distillation and a dramatic magnification of tensions played out nationwide, as a multitude of migrants from many different countries crammed cities across the land. In the process, Hollywood provoked both loving devotion and shrill, sustained assault. Go West, Young Women! explores the implications of the motion picture industry’s development out west and then measures how the emotions generated by Hollywood’s birth influenced the sexual revolution to come.