Queen Mary

There had been stage stars and eminent personalities before Mary Pickford, but they were assumed to be exceptional and inimitable. Mary Pickford not only radiated a universal feminine humanity, she also was accessible in a way no famous person had been before: You could feel you knew her, albeit through celluloid, by going around the corner to the neighborhood nickelodeon. Movies in their infancy were more than entertainment; they were a window on a new world.

Hailed as “the Queen of Hollywood,” Pickford chose the swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks as her King, and they ruled from the castle they dubbed Pickfair. Just as Princess Diana put a human face on British royalty, Pickford did the same for the movie stars. She was the first to be elevated to the status of paragon and the first person to be internationally recognized at a glance.

Born Gladys Smith in Toronto in 1892, Pickford was on the stage at the age of 5, supporting her widowed mother and two younger siblings by the time she was 8. And when the Broadway impresario David Belasco changed her name to Mary Pickford, the rest of the family didn’t hesitate to bank on her by changing their last name to match.

Pickford knew that the difference between acting on the stage and in front of the camera had to do with subtlety: In the theater the actor used his entire body, but in movies the eyes were more important, and with her eyes Pickford could evoke every emotion from sadness to joy, fear to relief, wariness to intimacy.

At a time when many stage actors looked at the movies with suspicion if not disdain, Pickford respected the camera from the start. Of course moving pictures paid ten dollars a week, while stage work was erratic, and she was eminently practical. Her stardom rose exponentially with the growth of the movies and, within a few years, she was making a thousand dollars a week and then ten thousand a week, helping to create an industry at a time when there were no rules to be broken and no rules to follow.

“Mary Pickford Rediscovered” is a tribute to this era and to one of its brightest stars. It is lavishly illustrated with posed portraits, stills taken of the sets of her films, behind-the-scenes shots and family pictures. They were culled from the vaults of the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences by chief curator Robert Cushman, and they are a humbling reminder of the history behind the academy’s walls. Having devoted much of his professional life to collecting and preserving these photographs, with Pickford as his chief raison d’e^tre, Cushman brings a passionate energy to his task.

But to call this a picture book is to underestimate its value. Kevin Brownlow’s prose brings Pickford’s story alive. Brownlow, a superb storyteller, is the undisputed dean of silent screen history, and this is his most personal volume to date as he chronicles his discovery of silent films in general and Mary Pickford in particular. Before seeing any of Pickford’s films himself, he tells us that, as a British teenager, he assumed “her antics . . . juvenile and tiresome,” but the night he saw her in “Hoodlum” was the evening that marked his “conversation to Mary Pickford and . . . surrender to the American silent film.” He would eventually see every one of her films and meet her face to face, finding her humorous and informed, “fascinated with motion pictures [and] as dogmatic as only passionate people can be.”

The heart of “Mary Pickford Rediscovered” is a dazzling array of her 50 feature films. As Brownlow discusses each film, new dimensions are added to her characters and her life. From the experience of filming “The Poor Little Rich Girl,” she emerged as the budding studio head who learned that comedies must be tested in front of live audiences. In “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,” she experienced a childhood she never had in real life. In “Stella Maris,” she risked stardom to stretch her skills by playing both the pathetically homely Unity Blake and the extraordinarily beautiful Stella.

For anyone who still thinks of Pickford as the classic little girl, a la Shirley Temple, of early cinema, this book will be a revelation. In fact, she didn’t portray a child for an entire film until “The Poor Little Rich Girl” in 1917, and by then she had made a dozen features and more than 50 shorts. She had been seen as characters as diverse as Cio Cio San in “Madame Butterfly,” a “half breed Indian,” a sweatshop seamstress and the Queen of Herzegovina before creating her little-girl persona. In looking at her sexually mature beauty in stills from “Fanchon the Cricket” and “Behind the Scenes” (both 1914), it is difficult to fathom her ability to play a 12-year-old child three years later, let alone to capture a nation’s heart by doing so.

It may well have been the golden curls that first attracted the audience’s attention, but it was her radiant versatility that kept them demanding more. Pickford soared above the rest of the unnamed actors who peopled the earliest screen stories. As her best friend and favorite screenwriter Frances Marion remembered in retrospect, “We began to look for a girl with long blond curls, Goldilocks we called her--these films were superior in quality to all the others.”

Pickford cut off her famous locks just as sound came in and she would make only four “talkies.” Her voice was strong and fine, but her age was starting to show on the screen and she had little left to prove. She became not only the first woman to own her own studio but the only one to distribute her films as well. (As Cushman points out in his introduction, “even the likes of Steven Spielberg and Barbra Streisand do not personally own their distribution companies.”) When she began United Artists in 1920, there were almost 100 “movie production companies” listed in the Los Angeles directory; by 1933, there were fewer than a dozen. United Artists was one of them, but filmmaking by then was big business. The last film she acted in, “Secrets,” opened the week of FDR’s bank closures, and the public had little spare change for entertainment.

Mary Pickford’s divorce from Douglas Fairbanks in 1936 disappointed a public that need to believe in happy endings. She would continue to head United Artists and work for charities including the Motion Picture Home, which she helped found, but her life in front of the camera was over. And as these photographs show, she only came alive when the lights were on her. She spent the last several decades before her death in 1979 rarely leaving the protective walls of her beloved Pickfair.

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With her films unavailable to several uninterested generations, Pickford became little more than a stereotype, most notably Pollyanna (ironically one of her least favorite films); she and her work were relegated to the scrap heap of irrelevance. Many of her movies, along with a majority of silent films, have been lost, an unfortunate euphemism used when works of art are destroyed through neglect or greed (the film was shamelessly recycled for its silver). In recent years, much has changed with a revival of interest in the silent era; cable channels now devote time to her early films. Her images flash across the silver screen again and in our memories, and with “Mary Pickford Rediscovered,” the glorious stills can be held in our hands, assuring Mary Pickford a growing legion of new fans.