Talking Up the Queen of Silents

Mary Pickford is a bit of a surprise. Everyone knows the legendary actress’ name and her famous Beverly Hills mansion Pickfair, but not many know exactly what she accomplished.

“Basically, she was one of the most important women in film history,” says Elaina Archer, who manages the Mary Pickford Library for the Mary Pickford Foundation. “It’s kind of sad that people are just starting to realize it just now in a lot of ways.”

Born Gladys Smith in 1893 in Toronto, the diminutive Pickford toured with road companies as a youngster and made her Broadway debut at age 14. At 16, she was working with D.W. Griffith at Biograph Studio. By 1916, “The Girl With the Golden Hair” was making $10,000 a week and even had her own studio, the Mary Pickford Co.

In 1919, she entered into a partnership with Charlie Chaplin, Griffith and her soon-to-be second husband, Douglas Fairbanks, to create United Artists. Dubbed “America’s Sweetheart,” Pickford played a variety of roles during her 25-year film career but was best loved for her little-girl roles in such films as “Pollyanna” and “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”

She received a best actress Oscar for 1929’s “Coquette” and retired from the screen after 1933’s “Secrets.”

“Mary is the prototype of the typical star,” says Dennis Doros, vice president of Milestone Film and Video, which has the rights to over 80 Pickford films. “She was the highest paid actress of the day and the only woman to own a major Hollywood studio. She was the highest paid woman in the world for the time. This was a poor, little uneducated girl from Toronto who had never gone to school and she became the most powerful woman in Hollywood. She was as tough as Cagney.”

“This was a woman who was the first who really learned the craft of movies from a technical point of view,” says Robert Berk, president of ClassicVision Entertainment, which produced two Pickford documentaries, restored Pickford’s charming 1927 romantic comedy “My Best Girl” and is in pre-production on a TV movie based on her life.

“She seems to be the quintessential thing that women’s lib was all about,” Berk adds. “The truth of the matter was, she could make things happen. She could fight with the big boys.”

Though Pickford’s films have been shown in Los Angeles over the years, most notably at the Silent Movie Theater, she is a novelty in most areas of the country. Founded in the early 1970s, the Mary Pickford Foundation has made a concerted effort over the past 18 months to reintroduce the film pioneer.

Pickford, who died in 1979, began hiding her own films in the 1940s. “At that time they [audiences] were making fun of silent films and [theaters were] playing them at the wrong speed and dating them,” Archer says.

“By the end of her life when she thought her films didn’t matter, she was going to burn them, but Lillian Gish and Colleen Moore convinced her not to. Here is a woman who was one of the most famous women in the world for 20 years and suddenly she wasn’t important anymore. Times changed.”

Milestone is currently touring a collection of 12 to 14 of Pickford’s films around the country and will be bringing out six of her films on video, including “Stella Maris” and “My Best Girl,” in the spring. Though no Los Angeles dates have been set for the Pickford film festival, Doros says he’s talking with several theaters.

Pickford has also piqued the interest of writers. Eileen Whitfield’s book “Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood” (“University of Kentucky Press, $25) was published in early fall and Kevin Brownlow (“The Parade’s Gone By”) is writing a coffee table book with Robert Cushman in conjunction with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

“The Academy is going to do a traveling exhibit [of photographs] to accompany the book,” Archer says. “We’re going to budget in a restoration of a lost Pickford film [as yet undetermined] to go along with the exhibition in the spring of 1999.”

The foundation also just completed a two-hour documentary on Pickford, hosted by Whoopi Goldberg, which it is now trying to sell to television. ClassicVision Entertainment sold its two documentaries--”Star Power,” which looks at the founding of United Artists, and “Mary Pickford: A Star”--to Unapix distribution company.

Though Pickford kept most of her films, the foundation has sent a researcher to all the major archives. “We’re examining every single element of Pickford film, nitrate and acetate, to see what still exists and the quality of it,” Archer says.

“Plus, in the middle of all of this research this past year, I’ve been able to uncover with the help of the archives, especially the George Eastman House, lost Pickford films. It’s like a rolling stone. It’s exciting.”

The films currently on tour, Archer says, were chosen to demonstrate Pickford’s range. “She was an incredibly natural actress. These are the films we’re trying to show. We’re trying to get away from ‘Pollyanna’ and ‘Rebecca.’ We made a new print of “Amarilly of Clothes Line Alley” from 1917, which we showed at FilmForum [in New York]. That’s one Mary made with her own production company.

“When I introduced Mary at FilmForum, I told them when you see a Pickford film, you’re not just seeing a performance. You are seeing an entire work. She bought the rights to the story. She hired the writer. She hired the director. She hired the crew, looked over the cast and the editing, and helped market the film.”

“She was as funny as Chaplin, as great a dramatic actress as Gish,” Doros adds. “She had better range than just about anyone in cinema. To see her, you recognize what a great actress and what a great woman she was. She really had a lot to do with the changing views of women from 1912 to 1920.”

Both Doros and Archer have discovered that Pickford is working her magic on young audiences. In fact, Doros says, the Pickford films have attracted a a “wide audience of different races and ages.”

“We had an intern who was 17 and had never seen a silent film before,” Doros says. “She fell in love with Mary and watched 30 or 40 of her films.”