“Studlar's work in Precocious Charms is especially remarkable considering the scope of film and femininity she has presented. Touching on questions of the youthful female, sexuality, pleasure and disavowal, the book is a fresh approach to studying the characteristics of these celebrated actresses and films.” —Lucy Fischer, Distinguished Professor of Film Studies and English, University of Pittsburgh

“Going far beyond the hackneyed ‘images of’ writing on movie stars we have seen so much of in the past, Gaylyn Studlar's Precocious Charms makes a major contribution to our understanding of how Hollywood works by enabling us to understand the complicated way in which stars function within culture.” —Virginia Wright Wexman, author of Creating The Couple: Love, Marriage, And Hollywood Performance

"Gaylyn Studlar’s study of young female actors is an eye-opening and provocative revisitation of stars that long have been revered by fans and analyzed by film scholars. Thanks to the close analyses of these films that have also marked her previous scholarship, Precocious Charms will be at home on the bookshelf of anyone interested in the vicissitudes of Hollywood’s performances of adolescence, gender, and sexuality." —Donald Crafton, Joseph and Elizabeth Robbie Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre, University of Notre Dame

Gaylyn Studlar is David May Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age and In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic. She has co-edited four anthologies: John Ford Made Westerns, Visions of the East, Reflections in a Male Eye, John Huston and the American Experience, and Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster.

Precocious Charms

Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema

By Gaylyn Studlar

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27424-2

Contents

List of Illustrations, xi,
Acknowledgments, xv,
Introduction, 1,
1. Oh, "Doll Divine": Mary Pickford, Masquerade, and the Pedophilic Gaze, 19,
2. Cosseting the Nation; or, How to Conquer Fear Itself with Shirley Temple, 51,
3. "The Little Girl with the Big Voice": Deanna Durbin and Sonic Womanliness, 91,
4. Velvet's Cherry: Elizabeth Taylor and Virginal English Girlhood, 133,
5. Perilous Transition: Jennifer Jones as Melodrama's Hysterical Adolescent, 159,
6. "Chi-Chi Cinderella": Audrey Hepburn as Couture Countermodel, 203,
Conclusion, 235,
Notes, 249,
Selected Bibliography, 289,
Index, 299,

CHAPTER 1

Oh, "Doll Divine"

Mary Pickford, Masquerade, and the Pedophilic Gaze

Mary Pickford, doll divine,
Year by year, and every day
At the moving-picture play,
You have been my valentine.
—Vachel Lindsay, "To Mary Pickford, Moving-Picture Actress"

Mary Pickford was, arguably, the most famous woman of the first quarter of the twentieth century. Inarguably, she was one of the first major stars of the Hollywood film industry and one of the very few—female or male—able to sustain stardom for more than twenty years. Born Gladys Smith in Toronto, Canada, Mary Pickford became a stage actress at age six (published age "5"). She first appeared in motion pictures in one-reelers of American Biograph in the spring of 1909. In the 1910s the actress known as "Our Little Mary" quickly cemented her popularity through numerous films that coincided with the industry's shift to Hollywood and using the actor as a personality for drawing audiences to the box-office. Pickford was promoted as "America's Sweetheart," "The World's Sweetheart," and, as poet Vachel Lindsay dubbed her, "The Queen of the Movies." Her films for Famous Players in the late 1910s regularly netted more than a million dollars a year. In 1918 an article in American Magazine proclaimed what by then was obvious: "Our Little Mary" had become "the most popular motion picture actress in the world."

What made her so popular? What exactly was the appeal of Mary Pickford and of her films? In attempting to answer these questions, it cannot escape notice that from the beginning of Pickford's film career, the actress's characters often are ambiguously inscribed with characteristics of both child and adult woman, as a child-woman. As I will show, even when she ostensibly is cast as an adult, the grown-up Mary Pickford registers as an adolescent girl or a "child-woman," ambiguously poised between childhood and womanhood. As her career moved into the feature-film era, her screen persona grew even younger, until she was, for all intents and purposes, a child impersonator.

In 1914 an industry trade magazine, The Bioscope, published a review of the Pickford star vehicle Tess of the Storm Country (dir. Edwin S. Porter) that articulates one view of the actress's youthful appeal: "There are many young comediennes ... but it is only Mary Pickford ... who can create through the silent medium ... just that particular kind of sentiment—ineffably sweet, joyously young, and sometimes, if one may put it so, almost unbearably heartbreaking in its tender pathos—which has become identified with her name, and with which we are all familiar."

In Tess (as well as in its 1922 remake) Pickford was cast as an adolescent hoyden living in poverty. Many of the actress's other star vehicles, including Rags (dir. James Kirkwood, 1915) and M'Liss (dir. Marshall Neilan, 1918), followed the same formula, placing the girl in a small town or the country. A Variety reviewer of Rags thought that the basis of Pickford's popular appeal was already rather obvious: "she and her bag of tricks are so well established ... [that] no matter what she does in a picture they [film followers] are sure to term it `cute,' and in the current offering are many scenes that call for that expression." Pickford regularly played "cute" girls who, in the emerging language of the time, fell into the category known as "adolescents." In the late 1910s, however, her characters began to grow even younger. She became a child impersonator in The Foundling (dir. John O'Brien, 1916), The Poor Little Rich Girl (dir. Maurice Tourneur, 1917), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (dir. Marshall Neilan, 1917), and The Little Princess (dir. Marshall Neilan, 1917). Audiences and critics responded with enthusiasm. She spawned imitators, like Mary Miles Minter, and wrote for Vanity Fair about the techniques and technical problems of undertaking child roles.

The numerous textual iterations of the childlike "Mary Pickford" enabled her remarkable success. The model of young white femininity Pickford represented, sometimes fragile and imperiled, sometimes feisty and resilient, was not the only type available to audiences in the 1910s. In those same years Fox star Theda Bara was the most famous embodiment of the seductive power of the dark, orientalized vamp; and Pearl White and Grace Cunard exemplified the thrilling athleticism of the serial heroine who turned physical danger into high adventure. Yet none of these stars achieved the sustained popularity of Pickford.

In searching for an explanation of Pickford's juvenation, one might be tempted to assume that it reflected the predictable typecasting of a popular actress by an exploitative, male-dominated industry. Such a view has to be tempered by the knowledge that, by the late 1910s, the actress was already exercising a great deal of influence over her film projects made through the Artcraft division of Famous Players–Lasky. She briefly moved to First National, where she enjoyed more control as her own independent producer. As one of the founders of United Artists in 1919, she was in the forefront of film artists who exercised absolute creative mastery over their vehicles, from concept through distribution.

In spite of Pickford's unprecedented control over her films, the formula for her star vehicles changed relatively little. In fact, not only did she continue to play ragged adolescents, but also during the years in which she exercised the most creative authority over her silent film career, many of her most important and popular films present her in the role of a child. These included, at First National, Daddy-Long-Legs (dir. Marshall Neilan, 1919) and, at United Artists, Pollyanna (dir. Paul Powell, 1920), Through the Back Door (dir. Alfred E. Green and Jack Pickford, 1921), Little Lord Fauntleroy (dir. Alfred E. Green and Jack Pickford, 1921), Little Annie Rooney (dir. William Beaudine, 1925), and Sparrows (dir. William Beaudine, 1926). A commentator reacted to Pickford in Through the Back Door: "She stands absolutely alone in the portrayal of youthful roles, and conveys the impression of extreme youth, both through face and conduct as no other player ever has.... She appears with equal facility and conviction a child of eleven and a girl of seventeen."

The notion of a grown woman playing a child and the specific techniques used to represent "Our Little Mary" on- and offscreen certainly raise a host of questions about the fascination that Mary Pickford inspired in a broad...