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CHAPTER 2

Women-Made Women

Writing the “Movies” before Hollywood

We built the modern movie industry on the star system, but the public made the stars

—Adolph Zukor

Prominent stories about Mary Pickford and Pearl White in magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal and Photoplay augured the rise of the type of journalism that the star system shaped and spread: celebrity reporting as mainstream news. Advertising “movie” personalities—the nickname that stuck despite many insiders’ preference for the higher-toned “photoplay” and “motion picture”—quickly became essential to the industry’s profits. Carl Laemmle and Adolph Zukor won the gamble that audiences would pay more to get closer to favorites, teaching a lesson that became an early axiom of movie production: stars best forecast box office success. Thus, women’s preeminence in the movies’ celebrity culture emerged from the shared assumption that women mostly decided which of the era’s exploding number of consumer goods succeeded. The idea positioned the female consumer at the center of the struggle between an established ethos of production that prized the industriousness necessary to produce a mountain of things and an emerging ethos of consumption that celebrated the abandon needed to buy them (possibly even on credit!). As many have shown, the nation’s budding advertising industries often addressed this consumer as a paranoid, passive, irrational conformist who needed the guidance of advertising elites to navigate this new landscape of desire.¹

But the movies more often addressed women as experts who understood their importance as figures who acted as the arbiters of what counted as successful popular culture in modern times. “Three out of every four of all cinema audiences are women. I suppose all successful novels and plays are also designed to please the female sex too,” instructed film curator Iris Barry in The Public’s pleasure (1925). The alarm prompted by this idea, after all, generated much of the mounting concern over the feminization of American culture that intellectuals like Hugo Munsterberg expressed. Yet if the task is to explain the broad power of the mass culture consumed by women, rather than to judge its moral implications or aesthetic properties, then what becomes apparent is how it acted as a market domain that tirelessly discussed the problems and promises of managing a new womanhood. Put differently, in becoming a consumer bloc considered to share core interests and desires, movie fans participated in “an intimate public,” in Lauren Berlant’s influential formulation. Mass-mediated stories about movie personalities addressed fans as holding a common worldview, thereby cultivating a sense that women writers, celebrities, and readers were sharing confidences about their common travails and triumphs. Participation in this fan culture offered lessons not just about how to choose the right things but also about how to help each other survive and thrive in the wider world. Calling herself “a woman’s woman” in one interview, Pickford noted in another: “I like to see my own sex achieve. My success has been due to the fact that women like the pictures in which I appear. I think I admire most in the world the girls who earn their own living. I am proud to be one of them.”²

Women journalists writing in newspapers and fan magazines did the most to help their female readers imagine these movie personalities as women-made women.³ The “moving picture has opened a great new field for women folk” where her “originality,” “perseverance,” and “brains are coming to be recognized on the same plane as [a] man’s,” declared Gertrude Price, one of several prominent female “moving picture experts,” in the Toledo News-Bee.⁴ In Breaking into the Movies (1927), publicist Virginia Morris explained how the industry’s preoccupation with the female fan turned publicity writing into a field open to both sexes. Since “the large majority of film audiences consisted of women” eager to know about “the feminine star,” producers decided “that the woman picture patron could be most easily reached by information written from the feminine angle.”⁵ The strategy of using women writers to appeal to other women was one of multiple tactics devised to attract more women into movie audiences during the 1910s. By 1914 motion picture editors and publicity departments advised theater owners that “women and girls” were the most avid followers of “motion picture news.”⁶ By the early 1920s, Photoplay claimed that women composed 75 percent of movie fans. One editorial extolled the movies as a “blessed refuge” for “the lonely girl” without “the money for expensive drama” after a hard day’s work.⁷ As a result, insiders imagined their ideal spectator as a young white woman eager to identify with role models who, however fantastically, reflected the changed condition under which they lived, worked, played, and dreamed.⁸

These writers created new western myths that appealed to these fans’ desires, blending wish fulfillment and social reflection.⁹ Journalists downplayed some aspects of women’s accomplishments, such as their managerial roles, and exaggerated others, such as the frequency with which extras became stars. But, as women experts explained to women readers how ordinary women became extraordinary new women, they created a female-centered leisure space that reinforced two impressions: the movies aimed to help women satisfy their new desires, and fans’ support of the industry furthered their ambitions as a sex. The social imaginary that emerged as a consequence mostly described these women-made women as shedding traditional ways of acting female to become “twentieth century,” “modern,” or “New Women,” to use Photoplay’s preferred terms.¹⁰ The common use both of contests that promised readers the chance to work alongside their favorite scenario writer, “cutter” (editor), or star in Los Angeles, and of inspirational interviews with female movie personalities allowed fans to imagine experimenting with their own self-transformation.¹¹

No single writer in this era did as much as journalist and publicist Louella Parsons to explain to readers who mattered to the movies and why. This chapter uses Parsons’s reporting to track the development of the celebrity discourse aimed at female fans. Parsons honed her craft by giving form to the figures inhabiting the movie landscape before the business of making pictures and Hollywood were synonymous.¹² Between 1915 and 1920, Parsons was among the first, and certainly the most successful, reporters to write a nationally syndicated daily column focused not on films, but on the news surrounding the industry and its stars. The industry had provided Parsons with the means to effect the kind of melodramatic, near-magical personal transformation that she later specialized in selling to readers. As a producer of this fan culture, she earned a following by describing the professional and personal activities of the industry’s assertive, in de pen dent, resourceful, and glamorous female protagonists. And, increasingly, Parsons described the industry’s new home in Los Angeles as a novel kind of western frontier that sought women adventurers. In helping to set the tone and content of the movie industry’s relationship with women fans, she fashioned an image and role that afforded her a great deal of power. In the process, Parsons became at once agent and symbol, cause and consequence, of the industry’s production of new ideas about femininity.

I

Born in 1881 in Dixon, Illinois, Parsons was the granddaughter of a woman’s rights activist and the daughter of a “stage-struck girl.”¹³ Her first heroine was Nellie Bly, the stunt reporter who championed workingwomen and traveled the world, alone, in fewer than eighty days. Part of the first generation of middle-class women who benefited from broader access to higher education, Parsons attended college while working sporadically as a reporter and teacher. Like most of this cohort, she married later, at twenty-four, and then relinquished her ambition to write, moving with husband John Parsons to Burlington, Iowa, where she gave birth to her only child, Harriet. Her choices mirrored those made by most privileged white women in the era, women who skirted the volatile topic of mixing work outside the home with a family inside it by seemingly sacrificing one for the other.¹⁴ Her decision to leave her philandering husband and move to Chicago in 1910 set Parsons on a path closer to the one trod by less privileged urban migrants. Working as a secretary at the Chicago Tribune, her $9-a-week salary barely supported her small family. Yet, like many workingwomen, she managed almost nightly trips to the movies, reveling in a fan culture that nurtured her ambition to write.

The few fan magazines that existed in the early 1910s touched lightly on the lives of famous personalities, but lavished attention on scenario writing, offering tips to hopefuls, contests with cash prizes for the best stories, and tales about women who succeeded at the job. Female-authored scenarios poured into film studios, convincing Essanay to hire an editor to evaluate the material.¹⁵ Parsons got the job. Now earning $20 a week, she brought her mother to Chicago to care for Harriet. Parsons loved the work. She read scripts and wrote more than one hundred scenarios. Most important, she turned herself into an authority on the new field, publishing How to Write for the Movies in 1915. The book was a hit and Parsons sold the serialization rights to the Chicago Herald-Record. With her job at Essanay threatened by an “efficiency man,” she flirted her way into a part-time gig at the newspaper, writing the Sunday column “How to Write Photo Plays.” After the series’ success, she talked her way into a job as a columnist who offered a “behind the scenes look” at the “personalities ‘up front’ ” in motion pictures.¹⁶

The nationally syndicated daily column that Parsons wrote beginning in 1915 partially presented the movies in ways that prefigured how Hollywood’s star system helped to spread the consumer ethos that exploded during the 1920s.¹⁷ Her coffee-klatch tone and “just folks” manner suited the needs of expanding corporate media structures that sought to preserve an intimate feel despite their scale, blurring the lines separating hard (political) from soft (cultural) news, city from country, working from middle class in order to attract the largest possible market audience. As a late-Victorian middle-class woman from the countryside turned single working professional middle-aged mother in the city, Parsons was ideally suited to address the target consumer culture coveted: a cross-class, multigenerational audience of white women with a modicum of disposable cash.¹⁸ All these women led “monotonous and humdrum lives” and craved “glamour and color,” according to the advertising trade journal Printer’s Ink.¹⁹ Parsons’s column presented the industry’s female celebrities’ personal relationships and work lives as designed to fill these needs.

Yet in ways that pointed to the industry’s Janus-faced relationship to modern femininity, the mass-mediated fan culture of the movies that Parsons helped to create also treated readers as intimates in a conversation about the pleasures and perils of modern womanhood. A special new series in the Herald-Record, “How to Become a Movie Actress,” demonstrated the relationship that Parsons cultivated. The paper’s announcement of the series assured readers that Parsons’s “technical knowledge of the game” and status as “an intimate of all the big movie stars” made her uniquely “qualified to give inside information to girls who are eager to enter the motion picture field.” Thus Parsons used the rhetoric of expertise to establish her authority as an instructor in the art of composing a successful personality.²⁰ But she adopted the stance of a warm, motherly guide rather than the distant scold who later became classic to advertising. Her chatty, tongue-in-cheek style encouraged readers to consider themselves her intimates, thereby nurturing the kind personal connection that fans sought with movie stars.²¹ The column’s promotion also emphasized that Parsons sold lessons in nothing less than personal transformation. “Others have become rich and famous. Why not you?”²² The assumptions built into the column testified to the limits of the kind or romantic individualism she preached, while promising women a means to imagine transcending the typical boundaries imposed by gender.

Indeed, the series seemed designed to induce a self-reflective reverie in female readers that encouraged them to take their daydreams to heart. Its opening prelude whispered, “Dreams—dreams most fascinating to young women all over America are coming true every day. Do you dream of becoming a motion picture actress and actually plan to be one?”²³ If so, such readers were not to worry, since “not a day passes but some girl who has shared your fondest fancies is made exquisitely happy.” The format that followed involved Parsons soliciting tips and advice in short interviews with those already successful in the movies, allowing her to advertise the movies’ women personalities as modern celebrities by fleshing out their exploits both on and off screen. Equally important, she then used their personal experiences to create a new genre of success stories for girls whose master plot centered on presenting the movies as a place where those with “brains and beauty,” in the parlance of the day, and a little luck could reinvent the terms of feminine success.²⁴ Parsons, and those she interviewed in “How to Become Movie Actress,” treated the ambition to become a star with matter-of-fact aplomb, contradicting the notion that such expectations were at all fabulous. Indeed, in Parsons’s hands, the movies’ central product was coming-of-age stories for girls that promised happily-ever-after endings. The fact that these stories offered young women the chance to win interesting, lucrative work that celebrated their femininity made them unique. Casting young women in the role of adventurer, Parsons sought “to inspire the ambitious” by making a romance of their quest for individual success.²⁵

The column thrived by communicating a host of contradictory messages about the qualities women would need to achieve their ends. This approach in part imitated, in part further twisted the ethics of chance and rational striving that had long coexisted in the coming-of-age tales told to boys.²⁶ Some of the advice sought to inculcate in young women the so-called masculine values, like aggression and self-promotional skills, which the nation’s corporate order prized. Determine “if you genuinely photograph well,” Parsons instructed, and ascertain which studio “you think you fit best with, and then send them your picture and a letter saying that you would like a chance to prove your worth as an extra.” Here the hopeful’s fate depended on possessing an image whose value others recognized. The column also prescribed the traditional path of starting at the bottom, as an “extra girl,” in order to reach the top. Yet even as such a course paid tribute to the logic of the Protestant work ethic, chancy factors such as “pictorial beauty” and talent entered into the equation of what determined an aspirant’s eventual fate. “Start as an extra in some good studio,” Parsons quoted Pearl White’s costar Crane Wilbur as having instructed. But Wilbur quickly tempered this statement with one that indicated an awareness that success might lay outside an individual’s control. “If you have talent they’ll find you quick enough.”²⁷ The column’s contradictory messages about how to get ahead—it preached diligent effort in climbing up from the bottom even as it celebrated instant results tied to magical forces outside one’s control—were a commonplace of the Protestant work ethic and of the times. Stories by writers like Horatio Alger required that young men exhibit a commitment to the virtues of constant industriousness, thrift, sobriety, and moral rectitude in order to qualify as worthy heroes. Yet, as the plots of these books unfolded, ultimately “luck and patronage” became the architects of the hero’s good fortune.²⁸ Here the relationship between form, as disciplined effort, and content, as talent and a pretty face, grew even more attenuated, as a girl armed only with confidence in her perfect picture went forth to triumph in one of the nation’s fasting-growing industries.

These contradictions often intensified when the figure of the male movie director, portrayed as a patron of aspirants, entered the column, causing Parsons to proffer advice that, willy-nilly, wove strategies long considered innately feminine with others long deemed masculine. The advice to “find out the name of the man who holds your destiny in his hands” sounded a conventional note by suggesting that hopefuls locate a Svengali-type master who could orchestrate their path to success. Yet Parsons delivered this pronouncement in the context of teaching aspirants the importance of making their own breaks. Armed with a name, she pragmatically suggested, one had “a much better chance.” “Better still,” she advised hopefuls to “discover when a big feature is slated for production. To succeed one must be both resourceful and inventive.” Parsons solicited tips from D.W. Griffith, the director made famous by the critical praise and social controversy provoked by The Birth of a Nation (1915), a traditional melodrama about the era of Reconstruction that glorified the Ku Klux Klan’s salvation of the South from Northern carpetbaggers and its white women from the rape of lascivious black men.²⁹ As described by Parsons, the “new Griffith doctrine,” was simply a novel name for the old Pygmalion myth. According to Griffith, the best actresses emerged from “untrained” young women who followed a director’s every command. Parsons also reported that directors Cecil B. DeMille and Thomas Ince had a preference for women willing to act as moldable clay. Their talent in shaping such raw material was said to have put “numberless untrained girls on the road to fame and success.”³⁰ Yet even as these men underscored the importance of ladylike behavior on the set, all three also warned that manly “courage” was vital to succeeding in front of the camera.

Indeed, a fan following Parsons’s column, or myriad other accounts that circulated about Pickford and the other actresses who worked with Griffith and DeMille, would have encountered many more stories about the control they exercised over men.³¹ Certainly, as Parson’s column evolved, she devoted far more space to describing women’s individual struggles and accomplishments in breaking into the movies than to telling stories about men’s role in the process. Written by, for, and about women, these stories predominantly framed the topic of what constituted a successful presentation of femininity in the context of what other women wanted to hear in an era in which the New Woman, feminism, and women’s influence on popular culture were all topics of social controversy. In fact, when men entered Parsons’s column at all, she was more often interested in demonstrating how women managed to get the upper hand. Her description of Clara Kimball Young’s relationship with her director husband was one such instance. Parsons presented Young as the “Ideal Film Personality” whose “beauty and brains and wealth” made her the “Ideal of Whatevery Sixteen-Year-Old Girl Would Like to Possess.”³² “Neither one of us would be willing to submerge his individuality into the thoughts of the other one, no matter how much we love each other,” she explained. Indeed, Young declared that although her husband was the director, “he is not always the boss. When I make up my mind I generally get what I want. Sometimes I have to argue with my good friend [producer] Mr. Selznick, my sweet mother, and my dear husband, but if it is for my ultimate good I GET it.”³³

Young’s insistence on demanding her way fit neatly into the groove crafted by the stage’s prima donnas. Indeed, movie stars like Young magnified this convention on both the silent screen and in the explosion of print that created the first movie stars’ personas, making her a visible sign of modernity itself: a glamorous, individualized, and work-defined personality known for breaking and reassembling the codes governing feminine propriety.³⁴ Griffith, DeMille, and Ince—all former stage actors in the “player-centered institution” that the theater became by 1900—knew exactly what they were up against when confronting the industry’s emerging female stars.³⁵ They also understood as well as anyone in the business the economic basis of these women’s power. Virtually everyone in the movies agreed that even the most famous director’s name, as Griffith’s indubitably was before Cecil B. DeMille’s replaced it by 1920, meant little to the average fan and, hence, a movie’s bottom line.³⁶ As Cecil’s older brother, William de Mille, put it, since “the names of writers and directors meant nothing to the public, the only thing the customers could count on in advance to give them some degree of satisfaction for their money was the name of a favorite player whose work and personality they knew and liked.” Only the star’s name above the marquee, and the title emblazoned across it, translated into box office.³⁷ The Exhibitors’ Herald, the trade paper for theater owners, emphasized this reality in a prominently displayed letter from a publicity director. “Take it or leave it,” a man from Toledo, Ohio, declared, “the star system is what brings the shekels into your box office. This is a rule that might hang in the office of any theatre manager.”³⁸

For such reasons, Parsons’s column emphasized that success in the movies depended on impressing other women as much as men. Parsons’s stories about director Lois Weber demonstrate the point. After visiting the set of her Universal production of The Dumb Girl of Portici (1915), starring ballerina Anna Pavlova, Parsons lauded Weber’s “executive ability,” pronouncing her “the most famous woman director and photo playwright.” By 1915 Weber was Universal’s most famous director, male or female, with a style as distinctive as Griffith’s.³⁹ Another stage actress turned movie-writer-producer-director, Weber’s persona stressed her respectability by focusing on her past as a former Salvation Army worker, and on her present as a married middle-class matron. This star image allowed Weber to exploit assumptions about respectable women’s inherent moral superiority that smoothed her making films about volatile topics like abortion and birth control. Little wonder that Weber’s co-worker at Universal, director Ida May Park, boasted in Careers for Women, a well-received 1920 vocational guide aimed at high school and college graduates, that there was “no finer calling for a woman” than directing movies.⁴⁰ Another interview detailed Weber’s career trajectory: her start at Gaumont Film Studio in 1908 with her husband Phillips Smalley; their eventual move to the Rex Company to work with director Edwin Porter, who was said to bequest the production company to their “capable hands” upon his departure. When Rex became a Universal subsidiary in 1912, the couple became co–production heads, but it was Weber who built a national reputation as a filmmaker. “It’s all up to Lois Weber,” Parsons reported the director confiding; “I am blamed or praised whichever way the picture turns out. Phillips would efface himself entirely and make me director in chief.” Parsons left no doubt about who was in charge, noting that Smalley “came to [Weber] for advice upon every question that presented itself.” By the time a “distressed masculine voice” from the wardrobe department interrupted the interview, the kinds of gender inversions that flourished on motion picture sets were plain.⁴¹

Parsons was able to call Weber “the most famous woman director and photo playwright” at Universal, because eleven women directed more than 170 films from the studio’s 1912 inception through 1919. The May 1913 opening of Universal City, the company’s West Coast headquarters, displayed how publicizing the studio as a tourist attraction involved promoting it as a place that encouraged gender play. “Where Work Is Play and Play Is Work: Universal City, California, the Only Incorporated Moving Picture Town in the World, and Its Unique Features. ‘Movie’ Actresses Control Its Politics,” declared the Universal Weekly in December 1913. “Linking work and play,” historian Mark Garrett Cooper writes, “the corporate mythos of Universal City valued women who publically played with authoritative parts.” A mock election staged by Universal City displayed one outcome when a group of actresses formed what the Weekly called “a ‘Suffragette’ ticket.” Reports across the country claimed the suffragette ticket developed because actresses “from the East” were “keenly enthusiastic about exercising their rights of suffrage, recently conferred by the California State Legislature.”⁴²

Women’s political participation in California was one of the many disorienting features that confronted Easterners. One of the first reports about the “big, bustling Western” ranches-cum-studios featured a dazed reporter’s catalog of their Kaleidoscopic contents, including “a Japanese pagoda,” “a Dutch village with windmills,” “the ruins of a Scotch castle,” “a New York tenement district,” and “the largest private collection” of “jungle animals” “in the world.”⁴³ Universal City’s election of actress Laura Oakley as its new police chief and of Lois Weber as its mayor suited a landscape defined by its flair for gender ambiguity. The new Universal City that opened in 1915 supported these performances by including a day-care center and a school for workers’ children. Universal City’s administrators, called “some of the brainiest as well as the most beautiful women in America,” likely understood the necessity of such measures in capitalizing on this self-consciously meritocratic environment’s promise to support women’s physical and occupational mobility.⁴⁴

Even reporting that purported to temper the enthusiasm of hopefuls about heading to Los Angeles refused to discourage their investment in the success of movie personalities. “HOW ONE ‘EXTRA GIRL’ CLIMBED TO STARDOM” was the one tale in the “How to Become a Motion Picture Actress” column that sounded a pessimistic note, yet Parsons called it a story to “cheer the heart of every anxious to be photo-player.”⁴⁵ A more accurate title for the interview with the former Chicago journalist Ruth Stonehouse would have been “HOW ONE ‘EXTRA GIRL’ SHOT TO STARDOM,” since Parsons reported that she progressed from an extra girl with no experience to one of “Essanay’s brightest stars” in eight short months. Despite her allegedly rapid ascent, Stonehouse confessed that she “felt like telling every girl to stay at home,” warning those she called “the movie mad” that “the profession is crowded now . . . it will be survival of the fittest.” Yet, Parsons interjected, “haven’t you something to say to the poor girls whom you so cruelly condemn to stay at home? ‘Tell them that a “pull” does not go in this business,’ ” she responded, “that unless they have the ‘goods to deliver’ to stay at home.” Thus, even as Stonehouse warned readers that only the most deserving, industrious individuals could hope to triumph, the flavor of the piece encouraged young women to cast themselves into the fray. And indeed, after Stonehouse traded work as a leading lady at Essanay in Chicago for Universal City, she went on to direct herself in many movies, including a successful ten-episode series about a willful orphan named Mary Ann.⁴⁶ Photoplay later echoed Parsons’s strategy, warning that the industry’s rapid growth and consolidation meant writers would have “to be increasingly discouraging to the feminine youth of the land.” Yet it also called fans’ yearnings “to see themselves as they see their favorite stars . . . a very laudable ambition. In passing we might credit the screen with administering a knockout to the old fashioned pre-film days. . . . It is a golden lighted road to fame and fortune that had a dim counterpart yesterday in the way to stage success.” The article concluded, “Every one of them has the chance to be a Mary Pickford or a Norma Talmadge.”⁴⁷ As in all good adventure stories modeled on the dream of social mobility, obstacles met and conquered sweetened eventual success.