Mary Pickford (April 8, 1892 – May 29, 1979) was an Academy Award-winning Canadian-born motion picture star and co-founder of United Artists, known as "America's Sweetheart," "Little Mary" and "the girl with the golden curls." She was one of the first Canadian pioneers in early Hollywood and one of film's greatest pioneers regardless of nationality or background. She was a seminal influence in the development of film acting. Because her international fame was triggered by moving images, she is a watershed figure in the history of modern celebrity. And, as silent film's most important performer and producer, her contract demands were central to shaping the Hollywood industry.

Early life

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Pickford was born Gladys Louise Smith in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her father, John Charles Smith, was the son of British Methodist immigrants, and worked at a variety of odd jobs. Her mother, Charlotte Hennessy, descended from an Irish Catholic family. To please the relatives, Pickford's mother baptized Gladys in both the Methodist and Catholic churches (and used the opportunity to change her middle name to "Marie"). Gladys was raised Roman Catholic after Gladys's father, an alcoholic, left his family in 1895, and died three years later of a cerebral hemorrhage. Charlotte, who had worked as a seamstress throughout the separation, began taking in boarders, and through one of these lodgers Gladys, aged seven, gained a part at Toronto's Princess Theater in a stock company production The Silver King. She subsequently played in many melodramas and became a popular child-actress in Toronto.

Beginning of career to stardom

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Acting soon became a family enterprise, as Charlotte, Gladys, and her two younger siblings Jack and Lottie, toured the United States by rail in rag-tag melodramas. After six impoverished years of touring, Gladys gave herself a single summer to land a leading role on Broadway (she planned to quit acting if she failed). She landed a supporting role in a 1907 Broadway play, The Warrens of Virginia. The play was written by William C. deMille, whose brother, the then-unknown Cecil B. DeMille also appeared in the cast (and later altered the spelling of his last name). David Belasco, the producer of the play, insisted that Gladys Smith assume the stage name Mary Pickford. But after completing the Broadway run and touring the play, Pickford was once again out of work. On April 19, 1909, the Biograph Company director D. W. Griffith screen-tested her at the company's New York studio for a role in the nickelodeon film "Pippa Passes." The role went to someone else, but Griffith was immediately taken with Pickford, who instinctively grasped that movie acting was simpler and more intimate than the stylized stage acting of the day. Within a few days, Griffith agreed to pay her an astronomical $10 a day against a guarantee of $40 a week. ("Keep it to yourself," he advised her. "There will be a riot if it leaks out." Most Biograph actors earned $5 a day.) Soon, Pickford's comic blend of sweetness and temper had made her not only Biograph's most important player, but the most popular star of the nickelodeon era. In January 1910 she traveled with a Biograph crew to Los Angeles. Many other companies wintered on the west coast, escaping the weak light and short days that hampered winter shooting in the east. Pickford added to her east coast Biographs ("Simple Charity," "An Arcadian Maid," "Wilful Peggy" and "The New York Hat," to name a few) with films from California, including "My Baby," "The One She Loved," and "The Mender of Nets." The advent of feature film sent her fame into the stratosphere. Her appearance in 1914's Tess of the Storm Country represents the major turning point in her career. Her effect in this and similar roles was perfectly summed up by Photoplay magazine: "luminous tenderness in a steel band of gutter ferocity."

Pickford would go on to become Hollywood's biggest female star, earning the right to not only act in her own movies, but produce them and supervise their distribution. She was also the first female actor to receive more than a million dollars per year (the first male actor who made a million-dollar deal was Charlie Chaplin). Pickford starred in 52 features, and her last two silents, the Dickensian "Sparrows"(1926) and the romantic comedy "My Best Girl"(1927) are among the finest silent films made in Hollywood. But the arrival of sound was her undoing. She played a reckless socialite in "Coquette"(1929), a role for which she cut her famous hair into a '20s bob. Pickford's hair had become a symbol of female virtue, and cutting it was front-page news in The New York Times and other papers. But Pickford meant to signal the public that her previous image had been put to rest. Unfortunately, though she won the Academy Award for Coquette, the public failed to respond to her work in roles that reflected her own age. (In the silents, Pickford played adolescents and women in their early 20s, with a celebrated sideline in children's roles.) Then in her 40s, Pickford was unable to play the teenage spitfires so adored by her silent-film fans; nor could she play the soigne heroines of early sound. She retired from acting in 1933, though she continued to produce films for others, including "Sleep My Love" (1948), an update of "Gaslight" with Claudette Colbert.

Relationships

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Pickford married three times. She first married Owen Moore (1886 - 1939), an Irish-born silent-film actor, on January 7, 1911. The couple had numerous marital problems, notably Moore's alcoholism and insecurity about living in the shadow of Pickford's fame, which he expressed by abusing his wife. The couple lived apart for several years, and Pickford became secretly involved in a relationship with Douglas Fairbanks, a Broadway actor who lent his humourous, acrobatic presence to a series of film satires between 1916 and 1920. The phrase "by the clock" became a secret message of their love; during their courtship, the couple was driving as Fairbanks discussed his mother's recent death. When he finished the story, the car clock stopped.

Pickford finally divorced Moore on March 2, 1920 and married Fairbanks on March 28 of the same year. The tone of their European honeymoon was set by a riot in London as fans tried to touch Pickford's hair and clothes (she was dragged from her car and badly trampled). In Paris, a similar riot erupted at an outdoor market, with Pickford pulled to safety through an open window. The couple's triumphant return to Hollywood was witnessed by vast crowds who turned out to hail them at railway stations across the United States.

"The Mask of Zorro" (1920) and a series of other swashbucklers gave the popular Fairbanks a more romantic, heroic image, and Pickford continued to epitomise the spunky girl next door. Together, they seemed to be the ultimate symbols of optimistic American values. Even at private parties, people instinctively stood up when Pickford entered a room; she and her husband were often referred to as "Hollywood royalty." European heads of state and dignitaries visited the White House, then asked to visit Pickfair, the couple's mansion in Beverly Hills.

Dinners there were legendary; guests ranged from George Bernard Shaw to Albert Einstein to Elinor Glyn. Pickford and Fairbanks were the first actors to leave their handprints in the courtyard cement at the Chinese Theater (Pickford also left her footprints). Nonetheless, the public nature of Pickford's second marriage strained it to the breaking point. Both she and Fairbanks had little time off from producing and acting in their films. When they weren't acting or attending to their company, United Artists, they were constantly on display as America's unofficial ambassadors to the world -- leading parades, cutting ribbons, making speeches. The relationship was fatally damaged when Fairbanks' romance with England's Lady Sylvia Ashley became public. This led to their divorce on January 10 1936.

On June 24, 1937, Mary Pickford married her last husband, actor and bandleader Charles 'Buddy' Rogers. They had two adopted children, Roxanne and Ronald. They stayed together for over four decades until Pickford's death from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 87.

The film industry

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Pickford used her stature in the movie industry to promote a variety of causes. During World War I, she was the most prominent film star to promote the sale of Liberty Bonds, an exhausting series of fundraising speeches that kicked off in Washington, D.C., where she sold bonds alongside Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Marie Dressler. Five days later she spoke on Wall Street to an estimated 50,000 people. Though Canadian-born, she was a powerful symbol of Americana, kissing the American flag for cameras and auctioning one of her world-famous curls for $15,000. In a single speech in Chicago she sold an estimated five million dollars' worth of bonds. She was christened the U.S. Navy's official "Little Sister"; the army named two cannons after her and made her an honorary colonel.

At the end of World War I, Pickford conceived of the Motion Picture Relief Fund, an organization to help financially needy actors. Leftover funds from her work selling Liberty Bonds were put toward its creation, and in 1921, the Motion Picture Relief Fund (MPRF) was officially incorporated with Joseph Schenck voted its first president and Mary Pickford as its vice president. In 1932, Pickford spearheaded the "Payroll Pledge Program," a payroll deduction plan for studio workers who gave one-half of one percent of their earnings to the MPRF. As a result, in 1940 the Fund was able to purchase the land and build the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital.

Within three years of her start in features, Mary Pickford became one of the film industry's most successful producers. According to her Foundation, "she oversaw every aspect of the making of her films, from hiring talent and crew to overseeing the script, the shooting, the editing, to the final release and promotion of each project." She first demanded (and received) these powers in 1916, when she was under contract to Adolph Zukor's Famous Players in Famous Plays (later Paramount). He also acquiesced to her refusal to participate in block-booking, the widespread practice of forcing an exhibitor to show a bad film of the studio's choosing in order to also show a Pickford film. In 1916, Pickford's films were distributed, singly, through a special distribution unit called Artcraft. An astute businesswoman, in 1919 she co-founded United Artists (UA) with Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and her (at the time) soon-to-be husband, Douglas Fairbanks. At that time, the Hollywood studios were vertically integrated, not only producing films but forming chains of theatres in which to show them. Filmmakers relied on the studios for bookings; in return they put up with what many considered creative interference. United Artists did not produce films; it was solely a distribution company, offering producers access to its own screens as well as the rental of temporarily unbooked cinemas owned by other companies. The producers who signed with UA were true independents, producing, creating and controlling their work to an unprecedented degree. As a co-founder, as well as the producer and star of her own films, Pickford became the most powerful woman who has ever worked in Hollywood.

When she retired from acting in 1933, Pickford continued to produce films for United Artists, and she and Charlie Chaplin remained partners in the company for decades. Chaplin left the company in 1955, and Pickford followed suit in 1956, selling her remaining shares for three million dollars.

Later years

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After retiring from the screen, Pickford developed alcoholism, the addiction that had afflicted her father. Other alcoholics in the family included her first husband, Owen Moore; her mother Charlotte; and her younger siblings, Lottie and Jack. Charlotte died of cancer in the early 30s. Within a few years, Lottie and Jack died of alcohol-related causes. These deaths, her divorce from Fairbanks, and the decimation of silent film left Pickford deeply depressed. Her relationship to her adopted children, Roxanne and Ronald, was turbulent at best, and each left Pickfair at an early age. Gradually, Pickford became a recluse, remaining almost entirely at Pickfair, allowing visits only from Lillian Gish, her stepson Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and a few select others. In the mid-1960s, she often received visitors only by telephone, speaking to them from her bedroom. Buddy Rogers often gave guests tours of Pickfair, including views of a genuine western bar she had bought for Douglas Fairbanks, and a portrait of Pickford in the drawing room. Painted at the height of her fame, it emphasizes her girlish beauty and spun-gold curls. A print of this image now hangs in the Library of Congress.

The "Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study" at 1313 Vine Street in Hollywood, constructed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, opened in 1948 as a radio and television studio facility. The "Mary Pickford Theater" at the United States Library of Congress was named in her honor.

In addition to her Oscar as best actress for "Coquette" (1929), Mary Pickford in 1976 received an Academy Honorary Award for a lifetime of achievements. The Academy sent a TV crew to her house to record her reaction to the award. Her frail, doll-like appearance and her nearly unintelligible speech shocked the general public, who had remembered Pickford as she was from the movies she had made in her prime fifty years earlier. Before her death, Pickford petitioned the Canadian government to restore her Canadian citizenship which she believed had been lost when she became a U.S. citizen on her marriage to Fairbanks in 1920. Due to the byzantine immigration laws of the '20s, the Canadian government wasn't sure she had ever lost her citizenship; nevertheless, they officially declared her to be a Canadian. Thus, long before it became fashionable to do so, Pickford became a dual citizen. She died on May 29, 1979 at the age of 87, and was buried in the Garden of Memory of the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. Buried alongside her in the Pickford private family plot are her mother Charlotte, her siblings Lottie and Jack Pickford and the family of Elizabeth Watson, Charlotte's sister, who had helped raise Mary in Toronto.

Mary Pickford received a posthumous star on Canada's Walk of Fame in Toronto in 1999. In 2006, along with fellow deceased Canadian stars Fay Wray, Lorne Greene and John Candy, Pickford was featured on a Canadian postage stamp ^*.

Partial chronology

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• 1909: discovered by David Wark Griffith at Biograph, worked for $5 a day, which he quickly increased to $40 a week.
• 1910: I.M.P., $175 a week, with the employment of her mother and siblings guaranteed. Unhappy with the quality of I.M.P. films, Pickford sued to be released from her contract and won.
• 1911: Majestic Film Corp., $225 a week, with the employment of her husband, Owen Moore, as an actor and director, guaranteed.
• 1912: back to Biograph, $175 a week, a pay cut she justified with the belief that the key to a great career was to "get yourself with the right associates." This period featured some of Pickford's most mature and varied work. Owen Moore signed with Victor Films and an unpublicized marital separation began.
• 1913: appeared as the star (with Lillian Gish in a small role) in Belasco's Broadway production A Good Little Devil for $175 a week, raised to $200 a week.
• 1913: Pickford moved to feature film by signing with Adolph Zukor's Famous Players in Famous Plays, for $500/week (D.W. Griffith had balked at paying more than $300).
• 1914: Pickford became an international phenomenon through her roles as barefoot adolescents and urchins in the features "Hearts Adrift" and "Tess of the Storm Country." Within the U.S., she was called "America's Sweetheart." In the country of her birth, she was "Canada's Sweetheart" and she became "The World's Sweetheart" overseas. Pickford asked Zukor for double her previous salary, and receives it ($1,000/wk.).
• 1915: At her request, her salary at Famous Players was again doubled, to $2000 a week, plus half the profits of her films. The movie "Rags" contained one of Pickford's seminal roles as a self-described "hellcat."
• 1916: Pickford formed her own producing unit, the Pickford Film Corporation, within Famous Players, and installed her mother as treasurer. She had a voice in the selection of her roles and the film's final cut. She chose her own directors and approved the supporting cast and the advertising. She was required to make only six films a year, a saner quota that earlier years, in which she made nine or more. She was paid annually $10,000 a week, plus half the profits in her films, or half a million dollars, whichever was greater. As the contract's duration was two years, Pickford was guaranteed at least a million dollars. Famous Players also created a special unit called Artcraft to distribute Pickford's features, rather than blockbooking them, a practice Pickford vehemently opposed.
• 1917: Pickford toured the United States with Fairbanks and Chaplin, supporting U.S. involvement in World War I and promoting Liberty Bonds. She played three of her legendary roles as children in "The Poor Little Rich Girl," "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm" and "A Little Princess." On the other hand, she was thoroughly adult in an anti-German propaganda picture "The Little American," and the western "A Romance of the Redwoods," both directed by Cecil B. DeMille.
• 1918: She signed a contract with First National to make three films for $675,000 (about $10 million in 2005-terms). Pickford also received 50% of all profits, and complete creative control, ranging from script to the final cut. Meanwhile, Famous Players released one of her greatest films, the tragedy "Stella Maris," in which she played a double role, as well as "M'liss" (another ragged spitfire) and the war comedy "Johanna Enlists."
• 1919: Pickford co-founded United Artists with Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith. During U.A.'s start-up, Pickford's films for First National were released, including "Daddy Long-Legs" (from the book by Jean Webster) and the violent melodrama "The Heart 'o the Hills."
• 1923: Hoping to expand her image, Pickford convinced Ernst Lubitsch to direct her next film. After considering "Faust," they settled on Rosita, the story of a Spanish street-singer who attracts the attention of the lecherous king. Though the role catered to Pickford's gift for playing sweet-but-fiery women in rags, it introduced a note of sexual sophistication which many of her fans loathed. Plans for future films with Lubitsch were abandoned. For the next few years she appeared in a series of superlative productions, culminating in "Sparrows" (1926), which blended German expressionism to Hollywood production values.
• 1927 United Artists, under Pickford's direction, opened their flagship Spanish Gothic movie theatre in downtown Los Angeles. Pickford became deeply involved in the design of the theatre, and two Anthony Heinsbergen murals in the auditorium feature her. Theatre architect Howard Crane opened two other UA theatres in the same year, in Chicago and Detroit. The Los Angeles theatre has become known as the University Cathedral of Dr. Eugene Scott. Pickford's last silent film, "My Best Girl," was released with her future husband, Charles Rogers, as her romantic opposite. The romantic comedy is still considered one of the finest American silents ever made.
• 1929: Pickford starred in a sound film, Coquette, a production that did well at the box office, earning $1.4 million. Pickford used the break from silent film to established a more flirtatious and sophisticated adult character. Her performance earned her an Oscar. In the same year, Pickford appeared with her husband Douglas Fairbanks in a sound version of "The Taming of the Shrew."
• 1933: Pickford starred with the young Leslie Howard in Secrets, a money-losing film which proved her last.
• 1937: Pickford founded Mary Pickford Cosmetics, a beauty company.
• 1941: Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Orson Welles, Samuel Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, Alexander Korda, and Walter Wanger founded the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers.
• 1949: Pickford and her husband Charles (Buddy) Rogers formed Pickford-Rogers-Boyd, a radio and television-production company.
• 1976: Pickford received an Academy Honorary Award for a lifetime of achievements.

Mary Pickford has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6280 Hollywood Boulevard. Her hand- and footprints can be seen in the courtyard of Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood.

Filmography

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One Reels

Feature Length

Talkies

49. Coquette 3/30/29.

50. The Taming of the Shrew 10/26/29.

51. Kiki 3/14/31.

52. Secrets 3/16/33.

See also

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• Haunted Hollywood

References

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• Whitfield, Eileen The Woman Who Made Hollywood University Press of Kentucky (1997) ISBN 0813120454 (Highly recommended by the Library Journal who described it as the definitive Pickford biography.)

External links

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• Mary Pickford at Classic Actresses
• Mary Pickford Photo Galleries
• About Mary Pickford, from the website of the Mary Pickford Institute for Film Education
• Mary Pickford, from American Experience
• Ontario Plaques - Mary Pickford

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