Flapper (33 page)

Griffith also shot the same scenes from multiple perspectives and skipped back and forth between two complementary plotlines—the husband’s ordeal on a desert island and his wife’s perseverance back in civilization.

Not everyone was enthusiastic about these bold departures in filmmaking. “How can you tell a story jumping around like that?” one of the Biograph bosses asked him. “The people won’t know what it’s about!”

“Well,” Griffith replied, “doesn’t Dickens write that way?”

Though he didn’t necessarily pioneer every new technique in the business—Edwin Porter had experimented with close-ups and multiple perspectives in his early work—Griffith soon acquired a reputation as the industry’s most daring and innovative practitioner of the new art of cinematography. He placed cameras on rolling dollies so that he could follow his actors as they moved, thereby eliminating the vast, black space between the lens and the stage that occupied the bottom third of frames in other early productions. He merged short cuts from different perspectives to achieve a sense of action, motion, and complexity. In 1908, he even went so far as to use forty different shots in a single ten-minute film.

Almost single-handedly, he made the movies modern. His 1915 masterpiece,
The Birth of a Nation
, cost a record-breaking $60,000 to
produce and ran over three hours.
²
Filmgoers were enraptured by its intertwining plotlines, its colorful and detailed set designs, its intricate character development, and its dramatic historical reenactments. The climactic scene depicted hundreds of white Klansmen on horseback, galloping off to save white womanhood from the black rapists whose primitive fury was unleashed by emancipation and radical Reconstruction. It was bad history and suffused with the sort of Jim Crow mentality that pervaded American culture in those days. But because—not in spite—of that, the audiences loved it.

If he was the industry’s leading trailblazer in those days, Griffith remained stubbornly backward in his social outlook. His films exalted the bygone world of the nineteenth century and scored the new urban-industrial order in which men found themselves wage slaves and women found their virtue compromised by the vice and corruption of the metropolis.

Lillian Gish, a popular actress who starred in many of Griffith’s early masterpieces, believed the great director was fundamentally a solitary and forlorn figure who glorified Victorian femininity on-screen but was terrified of women in real life. His heroines weren’t the “buxom, voluptuous form popular with the Oriental’s mind,” she observed with a tactlessness common to the time, but delicate, ghostly images who were the “very essence of virginity.”

Lillian and her sister, Dorothy Gish, were exactly the kind of leading ladies whom Griffith favored. Growing up in the Midwest, they had attended convent schools. Lillian had even thought of becoming a nun. On the set, they were closely chaperoned by their mother. There was little chance they would try to circumvent the director’s famously severe strictures against vice and intemperance.

So as to avoid even the “taint of scandal,” Griffith forbade his women players to entertain men in their dressing rooms.
³
They faced dismissal if they developed blemishes on their skin, as such imperfections, Griffith claimed, were surely a mark of a debauched character. And they were subjected to endless sermons on the virtues of clean living, for “women aren’t meant for promiscuity,” he explained. “If you’re going to be promiscuous, you will end up with some disease.”

So insistent was he on maintaining stringent standards of feminine
virtue that Griffith forbade his on-screen characters to kiss. They could only embrace.

Though he used African American actors to play the parts of slaves in
The Birth of a Nation
, when the script called for black characters to assault white women, the director used white actors in blackface. It simply wouldn’t do to have black men touching white women. Not in a D. W. Griffith production, anyway.

Griffith placed his leading ladies in front of white sheets, which reflected back the powerful glow of strobe lights and created a kind of “hazy photography” that served, in his mind, as “a great beauty doctor.”
⁴
The frail, angelic women who received this treatment personified the director’s larger moral scheme. The movies were America’s new, national pulpit, and Griffith eagerly ascended that pulpit to preach the nineteenth-century virtues of self-ownership, independence, reticence, sacrifice, and asceticism.

“It was all nonsense about youth going away from the old morals,” he maintained. “Never since the beginning of time have there been so many girls and boys who were clean, so young, their minds are beautiful, they are sweet. Why? To win the dearest thing in the world, love from mankind. That is the motive that separates out civilization from dirty savages.”

Griffith was well within the currents of the early motion picture industry. Most first-generation filmmakers were Protestant moralists who used the new medium to drive home the importance of virtue in an unvirtuous world. And this went double for women, whose intrinsic goodness was surely subject to a grave challenge from the forces of modernity.

Early movies like
The Fate of the Artist’s Model
(1903), in which an innocent young lass is seduced into a sexual affair by a lecherous artist who then leaves her high and dry, and
The Downward Path
(1900), the story of a young country girl who is tricked by a depraved theater agent into becoming a soubrette and commits suicide before her parents can come to her rescue, continued to inform Griffith’s style well into the late 1910s.
⁵

Writing a few years later, in 1925, the actress Linda Arvidson Griffith, Griffith’s wife, acknowledged that this plotline was growing
increasingly irrelevant in the years leading up to World War I.
⁶
“We were dealing in things vital in our American life,” she observed, “and [were] not one bit interested in close-ups of empty-headed little ingénues with adenoids, bedroom windows, manhandling of young girls, fast sets, perfumed bathrooms or nude youths heaving their muscles.”

The problem was, by 1920 or so these were precisely the things that a lot of American moviegoers wanted to see. “D. W. Griffith is an idealist,” observed Irving Thalberg, the production chief of MGM Studios in 1927, “and his love scenes on the screen were idealistic things of beauty … but his pictures are not stressed today because modern ideas are changing.
⁷
The idealistic love of a decade ago is not true today. We cannot sit in a theater and see a noble hero and actually picture ourselves as him.”

Thalberg had a point. The same social forces that were producing a revolution in morals and manners were rendering obsolete the didactic themes that informed Griffith’s work.

Films produced between 1908 and 1912—those directed not just by D. W. Griffith, but by all the major production outfits—tended to follow set plotlines. Leading men and women turned inward to find strength and thereby prevailed over insidious threats to Victorian virtue—over alcohol, material indulgence, sexual urges, crime, passion. By 1913 or 1914, those themes began to give way to a glorification of pleasure, excitement, physical comedy, athleticism, and luxury—that is, to the consumer ethos that was coming by and by to dominate American culture. Moviegoers now reveled in the antics of Charlie Chaplin, “the little tramp,” and the Keystone Kops, whose bumbling incompetence appealed to the lowest common denominator of popular humor.

The most popular film personages of the new era were Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, whose off-screen love affair—and, later, marriage—seemed to mirror perfectly the on-screen magic they produced in dozens of films.
⁸
Doug was a man’s man for the new age—athletic, handsome, dazzling, perfectly attired, and suave to a fault. Mary, on the other hand—“our Mary,” “Little Mary”—was demure and childlike, yet carefree and full of life. She represented the altar of youth before which so many Americans were dropping to
their knees. “We are our own sculptors,” she advised her devotees. “Who can deny that passion and unkind thoughts show on the lines and expressions of our faces … young people seldom have these vices until they start getting old, so I love to be with them.”

So compelling was her cinematic exaltation of youth and vivacity that the poet Vachel Lindsay composed an ode to Little Mary for
McClure’s
magazine:

Oh Mary Pickford, Doll Divine,
Like that special thing Botticelli
Painted in the faces of his heavenly
creatures. How you made our reverent
passion rise, our fine desire you won.
Oh, little girl, never grow up.

In fact, Little Mary did grow up. When the big distributors began clamping down on talent—insisting on lower salaries and more artistic oversight—she and Fairbanks combined forces with D. W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin to form a new company, United Artists, which arranged its own production deals and distributed its own films. Mary was a driving force behind the idea, and it made her one of the wealthiest women in America.

On-screen, though, she was still “Our Mary.” And by the 1920s, the public craved something more. It would take a new breed of movie men to grasp that business was business.

“If the audience don’t like a picture,” Samuel Goldwyn insisted, “they have a good reason.
⁹
The public is never wrong. I don’t go for all this thing that when I have a failure, it is because the audience doesn’t have the taste or education, or isn’t sensitive enough. The public pays the money. It wants to be entertained. That’s all I know.”

If he wasn’t the most articulate of wordsmiths, few could deny that Goldwyn had his finger on the pulse of the national film audience. He was a leading member of a small group of studio pioneers who were making the “movies”—a term that didn’t come into popular use until the early twenties—a top-dollar entertainment industry. Over were the days of Victorian moralizing. In were the currents of change.

Clara Bow bids farewell to 1927.

22
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ECHNICALLY SPEAKING
, Colleen Moore wasn’t the first actress to portray the flapper on-screen. In 1920, a small production company released an unmemorable film entitled, simply,
The Flapper.
“In some sections you may have to define the title,” one trade journal advised potential distributors, “though its meaning is pretty generally known by now.”
¹

The writer got it half-right and half-wrong. Even as D. W. Griffith was fighting a losing battle to wield film as a blunt cudgel in the fight against modern corruption, movie audiences in the decade before America’s Jazz Age were growing accustomed to a new sort of female character—far more sexual, more wanton, and more dangerous than charming Mary Pickford or dear, sweet Lillian Gish.

There were several early varieties on the femme fatale, none of which could be properly termed “flapper.” The “vamp,” commonly associated with the actress Theda Bara, was an exotic, sexually charged creature who left behind a trail of ruined lives and craven men. By one expert assessment, Bara had “the wickedest face in the world, dark brooding, beautiful and heartless.”
²
Bara and others played this role expertly, and to wide acclaim, between 1914 and 1920.

In a world where female sexuality was increasingly discussed—but still feared and misapprehended—the vamp was a tantalizing yet sufficiently dark and distant figure for public consumption. There
were fast women in the world, but they were still foreign and unusual creatures.

The vamp’s days were numbered from the start. As moviegoers became more comfortable with overtly sexual women, they turned to a less menacing model—that of Cecil B. DeMille’s crazy, debauched wife. In films like
Old Wives for New
(1918),
Don’t Change Your Husband
(1919),
Male and Female
(1919), and
The Affairs of Anatol
(1921), De Mille fashioned a stock story line: Bored—and boring—housewife faces stiff competition from a faster, looser, younger woman (often her husband’s secretary); husband leaves housewife (or considers leaving her); housewife dons makeup, hikes up skirt, and begins frequenting hot jazz clubs, often on the arm of a dark, mysterious sheik; husband falls in love with his wife again; marriage is saved.