Zorro, Mary, UA, and Pickfair
Written by Roger Kimmel Smith
See “The Mark of Zorro” (1920) at Silent Movie Under the Stars at Upper Robert Treman State Park, Saturday, August 24, 2024, starting around 8pm. The event is family-friend and free.
Douglas Fairbanks carved his Mark of Zorro upon the nation’s silent screens in the last few weeks of 1920. As I mentioned in the prior post, Zorro hallmarked a decisive shift in his film career; he was hereafter stamped in a new mold, with no looking back. Fairbanks’ adroit pivot into the promised land of swashbuckling fantasy also came in the train of extraordinary and triumphant events in both his personal life and his off-screen role in the movie business.
This post will try to sketch in some of that context, focusing on two key elements: Fairbanks’ relationship with Mary Pickford, America’s silent sweetheart herself, who became his second wife, and he her second husband, in March 1920; and the entrepreneurial endeavor the two stars had undertaken the prior year with their illustrious partners Chaplin and Griffith: a company called United Artists.
THE CURLY-HEADED MOGUL
In the previous post, I made the case that the first period of Fairbanks’ film career, the second half of the 1910s, was a period of astounding growth in motion pictures. The flickers were coming into their own as an art form and becoming more artistically ambitious. In those dynamic years, Douglas Fairbanks rose into the ranks of the leading players on the screen. And the woman on whom this virile specimen set his sights was one of the very first stars of this still-new medium, and by any measure the most famous of all.
That would be the party known as Gladys Louise Smith at her birth in Toronto in 1892. Before she’d even entered her teens, this child had tasted the best of what her hometown’s theatrical scene had to offer and become a seasoned trouper, along with a brother and a sister, in touring stock companies. She finally got her stage name, Mary Pickford, from the Broadway impresario David Belasco in 1907. Two years later, she reluctantly agreed to lend her talents to the far less respectable moving picture business. Hired by Griffith, she appeared in about 50 Biograph films in 1909, making a hit right away with audiences in the nickelodeons.
In these years, movie companies did not announce the names of their players, much less furnish on-screen credits. But theater proprietors recognized the draw of certain faces, and patrons demanded to know the names of individuals on whom they pinned monikers like “the Biograph girl.” That tag applied to Florence Lawrence — but Lawrence soon left Biograph for another studio, so by 1910 Pickford was “the [new] Biograph girl” as well as “the girl with the curls.”
She was the rare stage-trained performer who recognized the strikingly different requirements of acting for the camera. Her subtle expressiveness is evident in early works like The New York Hat (1912), Pickford’s last film with Griffith (also featuring Lionel Barrymore). She became a major star in 1914, with two standout roles: in Hearts Adrift, the first film in which any actor’s name appeared above the title in the opening card; and the five-reel feature Tess of the Storm Country, based on the novel by Ithacan Grace Miller White, which Pickford then remade just eight years later, that little Jungle guttersnipe Tess Skinner being her favorite of all her roles.
In her early twenties, Pickford was still exclusively playing curly-haired juveniles and was in fact represented to the public as a minor — even though she was making more money than the president of the United States. She was earning it, for still greater sums were filling the coffers of those producing and distributing her work. In fact, in 1916 Pickford became the first Hollywood performer to produce her own films. She delivered six features in 1917 for Famous Players-Lasky (which became Paramount), all solidly profitable.
Her distributors sold large packages of films to exhibitors on the premise of guaranteed Pickford material in the mix. This was the so-called “block booking” distribution system. Arguably, this method of ensuring a constant supply of product helped all three of the new industries, or sub-industries, of the film trade — production, distribution, exhibition — become stable and prosperous during the silent era. Pickford came to resent the arrangement intensely.
“AN UNKNOWN WOMAN”
Pickford had married Owen Moore, a fellow actor she’d met at Biograph, while still in her teens, and the early marriage was a failure. Moore had a drinking problem and seemed unable to handle his wife’s success outstripping his own. By 1917, her torrid affair with still another player, Fairbanks, was an open secret in the film colony. The two had met a few years back, and he captured her attention with flattery. “You do less apparent acting than anyone else I know,” he is reputed to have said to her, “and because of that you express more.” The astute compliment from an observant peer struck home, and very soon their professional friendship became something more.
“America’s Sweetheart” — or, more accurately, the woman behind this grown-up baby-doll persona — was afraid, understandably, that exposure of her extramarital activities would devastate her reputation and destroy the fan base she had won. Nevertheless, she stayed in California for most of 1917, becoming increasingly inseparable from Fairbanks and his best friend, Chaplin. In April 1918, the three celebrities worked together, barnstorming across the country and helping raise billions of dollars for the government’s Liberty Loan war bond drive.
That April, the dam of secrecy over the affair began breaking — news, breaking — with both Owen Moore and Fairbanks’ wife, Beth, speaking to the press. Pickford disavowed all allegations aimed at connecting the two failing marriages. Fairbanks briefly tried to pass the scandalous story off as German propaganda. Six months later, Beth Fairbanks filed suit for divorce in New York, on grounds of infidelity, “an unknown woman” as co-respondent.
AN ASYLUM OF THEIR OWN
Meanwhile, Pickford’s business moves were rocking the movie colony. Always a tough negotiator, now that she was the industry’s top attraction she was determined to put her bargaining power to use. In November 1918, in the same week as the armistice brought the war in Europe to a close, Pickford left Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players-Lasky company and signed with First National Pictures, which had offered her an unprecedented degree of creative control: in essence, they gave her final cut, along with half the profits.
First National was founded in 1917 by a consortium of film exhibitors who banded together to rid themselves of Zukor’s block booking system and distribute their own material. It signed both Pickford and Chaplin to multi-film contracts for large sums (in Charlie’s case, well over $1 million) in 1918. But at the start of 1919, town talk of Zukor’s firm merging with First National threw both Mary and Charles into a panic. Such an industry consolidation, Pickford knew, would land her back under Zukor’s control, and would let his company continue taking a major share of the profits her work generated while trading on the quality of her work to sell wagonloads of inferior films to theaters through block booking.
Pickford resolved to take action. As you might have surmised, she’s the true action hero in this section of “The Brand.” At least, it was her claim throughout her life that the germ of the idea that became United Artists was hers. It’s fair to say she took the lead and had the will to see it through. She certainly didn’t invent the whole proposal. A cabinet secretary had queried Fairbanks as to whether he’d considered becoming his own distributor. A couple of well-placed businessmen had tried bringing the idea to Chaplin.
The meeting was called for January 14 at the home of Chaplin’s brother Sydney. Five participants — Chaplin, Fairbanks, Griffith, the Western star William S. Hart, and Pickford, home with the flu, represented by her mother, Charlotte — signed an agreement to create what they called the United Artists Association. Hart dropped out and signed with First National. The other four followed through a few weeks later and signed themselves to contractual obligations.
It was a radical maneuver, in keeping with the immensely radical zeitgeist of its moment in time, those weeks and months after the Great War ended — the time of the Spanish flu pandemic (and a dozen other cataclysmic things — I covered it in this Syncopated Times piece). As it took shape, UA was an artist-led initiative to distribute independently produced films, by the principals as well as other producers. Rather than block booking, UA’s distribution was essentially film by film, with the idea that each would rise or fall on its own merits.
Just a few years earlier, the businessmen “moguls” who ran the startup movie industry wouldn’t even let the names of performers on the screen be known. Now the so-called inmates, the Tramp and little Miss Guttersnipe among them, would be running their own asylum. Call it a bold move on the Monopoly board of industrial power, but one based on a very savvy recognition of the economic leverage these stars held. They all knew they were among the most valuable assets any studio could have.
Other studios did still have them, actually: Pickford, Chaplin, and Griffith were already under contract when they formed UA. Pickford owed First National three films and got them all done promptly in 1919. Chaplin, at this stage of his career, was putting out product more slowly. He wouldn’t end up delivering his first film to UA, the wildly offbeat A Woman of Paris, until 1923.
As it turned out, the first official UA release was Fairbanks’ His Majesty, the American (1919). That film opens with these words over a black screen: “It is our hope and desire to attain a standard of entertainment that will merit your approval and continued support,” signed by the four principals for the United Artists Corporation. Then Fairbanks bursts through this proverbial curtain, does a somersault, points at the camera, and an intertitle reads: “Listen, Folks — they made me start the ball rolling. So here’s the first picture. Gee whiz! — I hope you’ll like it.”
(It’s a cute, Fairbanksesque move, breaking the fourth wall like that. The “Gee whiz” reminds me a little of what Charles “Buddy” Rogers did on his first record. Rogers was already a well-known silent player, having co-starred with Clara Bow (Wings, the 1927 Oscar winner) and Mary Pickford (My Best Girl, 1927). Three years later, as the orchestra starts behind him, he sheepishly says: “This is my first recording. I’m sort of nervous, but I hope you’ll like it.”)
LOVE AND THE BRAND VANQUISH VICTORIANISM
The second UA release was Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919), a story suggested to him by Pickford, and a film he had completed for Zukor, who rejected it. It turned a respectable profit, giving the new company some working capital. Pickford’s first UA film, Pollyanna, released in January 1920, grossed over a million bucks and was the most profitable feature of her career. She made that most saccharinely optimistic of all her sugar-coated pictures during this daring transition in her career, all while under the strain of severe personal distress. Could her reputation survive a very public divorce?
In the winter of 1920, Pickford went with her mother to Nevada. She lied to the judge, as one does, as to her intention to take up permanent residence in the state. She batted her world-famous peepers and emerged with the papers she sought, freeing herself from Owen Moore.
On March 28, 1920, Pickford and Fairbanks married quietly at his residence. The attorney general of Nevada was unhappy and made threatening noises. But when the public got wind that their two favorite screen stars had tied the knot, all the couple’s fears were washed away by a torrent of adulation. Gigantic, record-breaking throngs greeted them in New York, and similar receptions awaited them in London and other European capitals on their honeymoon. There had been no more potent demonstration, anywhere in the world up to that point, of the colossal power of the unfolding celebrity culture phenomenon.
Our fairy tale couple returned home and moved into the renovated cottage Fairbanks had bought in a newly developing neighborhood called Beverly Hills. Christened Pickfair, the domicile became the all-but-official royal palace of the court of Hollywood.
The Pickfair romance, once crowned in wedlock, became practically the origin of the fan magazine, or of the whole celebrity journalism genre. The critical and commercial success of The Mark of Zorro in the fall of 1920 cemented the whole scheme. The new company would survive and prosper. Fairbanks had earned the top place among male screen idols, matching the status his bride had possessed for years. Their place in the public imagination appeared to grant them immunity as far as crimes of passion were concerned.
A year later, things would go quite differently in the celebrity journalism department for one Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. But that is another story.
As for this one, there we have some of the context in which Douglas Fairbanks made his Mark of Zorro and carried out his nimble leap from the district of modern-dress athletic comedies into the kingdom of swashbuckling adventure. Knowing this back story as you watch, you may well detect the breathtaking confidence he’s bringing to his performance, not just as an actor but as an auteur, a film artist, a film studio honcho, and both an on- and off-screen lover.
And by the way, Pickford and Fairbanks broke up, you know, in 1933. Earlier I mentioned Buddy Rogers — they tagged him “America’s Boyfriend,” I kid you not!. Well, he was Mary Pickford’s third and last husband, from 1937 until she passed in 1979.
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ROGER KIMMEL SMITH is a freelance wordsmith based in Ithaca. He hosts “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune” (“music and popular culture of the 1920s and 1930s in all genres and from around the world”), airing Fridays 12–2pm on WRFI Community Radio. As part of Silent Movie Month 2023, he curated and introduced a screening of shorts on the theme of Women in Early Silent Film. He is a former producer and co-host of the podcast “When Humanists Attack!!”
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SOURCES FOR “THE BRAND”:
Basinger, Jeanine. Silent Stars. Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
Eyman, Scott. Mary Pickford: America’s Sweetheart. Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1990.
McCulley, Johnston. The Mark of Zorro. Introduction by Robert E. Morsberger and Katharine M. Morsberger. Penguin Books, 2005.
Whitfield, Eileen. Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood. University Press of Kentucky, 1997.
Mary Pickford Foundation: https://marypickford.org/
