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  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Lisa See Endowment Fund in Southern California History and Culture of the University of California Press Foundation.

  Go West, Young Women!

  Go West, Young Women!

  The Rise of Early Hollywood

  Hilary A. Hallett

  UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

  Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

  University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

  University of California Press

  Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

  University of California Press, Ltd.

  London, England

  © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hallett, Hilary A.

  Go west, young women! : the rise of early Hollywood / Hilary A. Hallett.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Includes filmography.

  ISBN 978-0-520-27408-2 (cloth : alk. paper) —

  ISBN 978-0-520-27409-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  eISBN 9780520953680

  1. Women in the motion picture industry—California—Los Angeles—History—20th century. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—California—Los Angeles. 3. Motion pictures and women—United States. 4. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—History—20th century. I. Title.

  PN1995.9.W6H23 2013

  791.43'6522—dc23

  2012027596

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% postconsumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

  For my boys—Miles, Jackson, and Christopher

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  PART ONE. ALONG THE ROAD TO HOLLYWOOD

  Prologue I. Landscapes

  1. “Oh for a girl who could ride a horse like Pearl White”: The Actress Democratizes Fame

  2. Women-Made Women: Writing the “Movies” before Hollywood

  PART TWO. MELODRAMAS OF HOLLYWOOD’S BIRTH

  Prologue II. The Postwar Revolution in Morals and Manners, Redux

  3. Hollywood Bohemia

  4. The Movie Menace

  5. A Star Is Born: Rereading the “Fatty” Arbuckle Scandal

  Conclusion: The Girl from Hollywood

  Filmography

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Illustrations

  Frontispiece: Ruth Roland at the beach.

  Thomas Ince’s Studio by the sea, c. 1915

  Charlotte and Susan Cushman in Romeo and Juliet, mid–nineteenth century

  The two parts of Pickford’s persona

  Mary Pickford as idol of the “Working Girl” readers of the Ladies’ World in 1915

  Florence Lawrence on a postcard for fans, c. 1912

  A publicity photograph of Mary Pickford, c. 1922

  Helen Holmes on a postcard for fans, c. 1912

  Helen Holmes and J.P. MacGowan shooting The Hazards of Helen (1913)

  Ruth Roland riding her horse Joker in a publicity photograph, c. 1912

  Ruth Roland promoting women’s business opportunities, c. 1928

  Pearl White on a postcard for French fans, c. 1918

  Louella Parsons, c. 1924

  Mary Pickford entertaining a war time crowd, October 9, 1918

  Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks after their 1920 marriage

  Pola Negri displays postwar allure, 1921

  Natalie, Norma, Peg, and Constance Talmadge, 1917

  Gloria Swanson on the cover of the Spanish fan magazine El Universal

  “An Actress . . . What everywoman would like to be”

  Elinor Glyn with protégé Gloria Swanson

  Aristocratic Elinor Glyn

  June Mathis, adaptor of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

  Rudolph Valentino as the Latin lover

  The Epicene Girls, Alla Nazimova and Natacha Rambova

  Virginia Rappe seduces Harold Lockwood poolside in Paradise Garden (1917)

  Virginia Rappe takes a ride with Rudolph Valentino in Over the Rhine (1918)

  Rappe warns her sex about the dangers of “too much liberty,” 1921

  Newspaper coverage of “movie orgies” in 1921

  “Arbuckle Case Rouses California’s Women Vigilants”

  Valentino and Swanson in Elinor Glyn’s Beyond the Rocks (1922)

  Poster from James Cruze’s Hollywood (1923)

  PART ONE

  Along the Road to Hollywood

  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 Progr
essive 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-c
um-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