The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (326 page)

In his eighties, he is still casual yet adventurous: directing
C’Est Pas Tout à Fait la Vie Dont J’Avais Rêvé
(05);
Gardens in Autumn
(06, Otar Iosseliani); as
Le Roi Lear
(07, Don Kent) on French TV;
Sous les Toits de Paris
(07, Hiner Saleem); in
Belle Toujours
(07, Manoel de Oliveira), a reflection on
Belle de Jour
in which Bulle Ogier replaces Deneuve; as Khrushchev in
Rencontre Unique
(07, Oliveira);
De la Guerre
(08, Bertrand Bonello);
The Dust of Time
(08, Theo Angelopoulos);
L’Insurgée
(09, Laurent Perreau).

Mary Pickford
(Gladys Marie Smith) (1893–1979), b. Toronto, Canada
In 1923, when she was thirty, Mary Pickford appealed through the pages of
Photoplay
for suggestions about parts she might play. Back came the answers: Cinderella, Heidi, Alice, Anne of Green Gables. Alexander Walker has suggested that those answers disappointed Mary’s search for a pretext to become a more mature woman on the screen. And there are hints throughout her ingenue roles of vigor, realism, and a no-nonsense understanding of sex. As Molly Haskell put it, “She was a little girl with gumption and self-reliance who could get herself out of trouble as easily as into it.”

But it may be misleading to regard Pickford simply as an actress, retarded by the public’s preference for her in juvenile roles. Any frustration was greatly alleviated by her astonishing financial rewards, and her artistic aspirations seem to have taken second place to an uncompromising emphasis on her career. She was an expert businesswoman, prepared to take great pains to hone herself down to a desired product. Indeed, she was the business brains in United Artists, and her historical importance is as the silent era star who controlled her directors and held production companies to ransom.

She was also the first vestige of Hollywood royalty, with Doug Fairbanks. She was loved, but her status was just as popular, for she ordained the power of movies.

The contrast between the curly-haired, dewy-eyed “Little Mary” and the imperious organizer of her own affairs is obviously central, but there should be no doubt about the pragmatic equanimity with which she conducted herself. She knew when to retire and she assessed herself with the simple pride of an industrial titan: “I left the screen because I didn’t want what happened to Chaplin to happen to me.… The little girl made me. I wasn’t waiting for the little girl to kill me. I’d already been pigeonholed. I know I’m an artist, and that’s not being arrogant, because talent comes from God.… My career was planned, there was never anything accidental about it. It was planned, it was painful, it was purposeful. I’m not exactly satisfied, but I’m grateful.”

Her father was killed in an accident when little Gladys was five, and when the widowed mother let rooms to actors it introduced the child to the stage. Alexander Walker has argued that these family circumstances, and the child’s love of her lost father, figure strongly in the psychology of her films. But “Little Mary” is not morbid. Her strength was comedy and high spirits, and it is doubtful that she was conscious of any underground meanings to her long-lived childhood on celluloid.

In her teens, she was acting in the theatre for David Belasco, but in 1909 she was engaged by D. W. Griffith at Biograph. She stayed with him until 1912, appearing in seventy-five of his two-reelers and becoming one of his leading players. But after the last of these,
The New York Hat
, she was stung by Griffith’s lordly introduction of Mae Marsh and so returned to Belasco. Of all his actresses, Pickford was coolest about Griffith: although she admired him, she was irked by the legend fostered by the Gish sisters.

Her departure was also a means to an end. In 1910 she had briefly left Griffith for Independent and had thereby boosted her salary. In 1913, she was back in movies with Zukor’s Famous Players at $500 a week; by 1916, it was up to $10,000 a week. She bid her price higher and higher as her films helped to establish Zukor and to enshrine the sentimental heroine that Griffith had first called “Little Mary”:
A Good Little Devil
(13, J. Searle Dawley);
Hearts Adrift
(13, Edwin S. Porter);
Tess of the Storm Country
(14, Porter);
Cinderella
(14, James Kirkwood);
Dawn of Tomorrow
(15, Kirkwood);
A Girl of Yesterday
(15, Allan Dwan);
The Foundling
(15, Dwan);
Poor Little Peppina
(16, Sidney Olcott);
Madame Butterfly
(16, Olcott). Zukor even named a studio after her as her earnings went over $500,000 a year.

As Zukor and Jesse Lasky joined forces, they tried to reduce her power—but to no avail. In fact she often directed her films and had no equal as a judge of her own material. In the last years of the war, she reached a peak, touring the country to sell bonds and making
The Pride of the Clan
(17, Maurice Tourneur);
The Poor Little Rich Girl
(17, Tourneur);
Romance of the Redwoods
(17, Cecil B. De Mille);
The Little American
(17, De Mille);
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
(17, Marshall Neilan);
The Little Princess
(17, Neilan);
Stella Maris
(18, Neilan), in which she played two parts, one a crippled serving girl who shocked Mary’s fond admirers; and
Captain Kidd Junior
(19, William Desmond Taylor).

Nineteen-nineteen was the turning point. She left Zukor for First National. With Chaplin, Griffith, and Douglas Fairbanks she formed United Artists, intended to distribute their work. And, after the breakdown of her first marriage to actor Owen Moore, she married Fairbanks. Although nearing thirty, this is the period of her best films and the most complete exploitation of America’s Sweetheart:
Daddy Long Legs
(19, Neilan);
The Hoodlum
(19, Sidney Franklin); and
Heart o’ the Hills
(19, Franklin). She then formed the Mary Pickford Corporation and released through United Artists:
Pollyanna
(20, Paul Powell);
Suds
(20, Jack Dillon);
The Love Light
(21, Frances Marion); as mother and son in
Little Lord Fauntleroy
(21, Alfred E. Green and Jack Pickford); a remake of
Tess of the Storm Country
(22, John S. Robertson). She chose directors and had the sense to cultivate Charles Rosher as her cameraman—the effort to show her as still adolescent led to significant advances in the art of lighting. In 1923, she brought Lubitsch over from Germany. It was a matching of opposites;
The Parade’s Gone By
has an amusing account of German innuendo and chilly American response. She made
Rosita
(23, Lubitsch), but loathed the experience and reverted to more amenable, indigenous directors:
Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall
(24, Neilan);
Little Annie Rooney
(25, William Beaudine);
Sparrows
(26, Beaudine); and
My Best Girl
(27, Sam Taylor).

The decline in quality in her work may indicate reduced enthusiasm, the difficulties of her marriage, and an inability, artistically or commercially, to transcend the teenage character. But she tried sound and made
Coquette
(29, Taylor)—winning an Oscar—and her only film with Fairbanks,
The Taming of the Shrew
(29, Taylor). She made only two more films:
Kiki
(31, Taylor) and
Secrets
(33, Frank Borzage), the last with Leslie Howard. Like so many who flourished in the period 1915–25, she had been coarsened by the exaggeration that passed for mime. She was too set in her ways to learn, and there was no obvious character she could adopt to bridge Pollyanna and a world peopled by Garbo, Bette Davis, and Katharine Hepburn.

When her marriage to Fairbanks ended, she married actor Charles “Buddy” Rogers. Her retirement allowed her to develop as an executive and she produced
One Rainy Afternoon
(36, Rowland V. Lee),
The Gay Desperado
(36, Rouben Mamoulian), and years later,
Sleep, My Love
(48, Douglas Sirk). She and Chaplin sold up their share of United Artists only in 1953—though, according to Chaplin, an earlier and better opportunity was lost when Pickford was upset at having to wait two years for $7,000,000.

Walter Pidgeon
(1897–1984), b. East St. John, Canada
With or without a moustache, Pidgeon was unfailingly handsome and attentive. But he never established himself as a player capable of sustaining films. How shrewd of Preminger to cast so loyal and industrious a support as the Senate majority leader in
Advise and Consent
(62), competent and experienced, but self-effacing, deferring to the idea of democracy. That is one of his few good films. For his long career was depressingly filled with unworthy pictures.

He was a stage actor, invited to Hollywood by Joseph Schenck to play opposite Constance Talmadge. By the time he arrived, Schenck had had second thoughts, and Pidgeon drifted from one studio to another:
Mannequin
(26, James Cruze);
The Outsider
(26, Rowland V. Lee);
Old Loves and New
(26, Maurice Tourneur); and
Marriage License?
(26, Frank Borzage). As a bland male model, he fronted films without ever dominating them, even if his gentle, deep voice responded to sound:
The Heart of Salome
(27, Victor Schertzinger);
The Gorilla
(27, Alfred Santell);
The Thirteenth Juror
(27, Edward Laemmle);
The Girl from Rio
(27, Tom Terriss);
The Gateway of the Moon
(28, John Griffith Wray);
Turn Back the Hours
(28, Howard Bretherton);
Her Private Life
(29, Alexander Korda);
A Most Immoral Lady
(29, Wray);
Bride of the Regiment
(30, John Francis Dillon);
Sweet Kitty Bellairs
(30, Alfred E. Green);
Renegades
(30, Victor Fleming);
Viennese Nights
(30, Alan Crosland); and
Going Wild
(30, William A. Seiter).

In these last films, Pidgeon had already sunk to supporting parts. Illness now conspired to reduce him further so that after twenty-two films in five years, he made only seven films from 1931 to 1936, usually in nonlead roles:
The Hot Heiress
(31, Clarence Badger); a remake of
The Gorilla
(31, Bryan Foy);
Rockabye
(32, George Cukor);
The Kiss Before the Mirror
(33, James Whale);
Journal of a Crime
(34, William Keighley);
Big Brown Eyes
(36, Raoul Walsh); and
Fatal Lady
(36, Edward Ludwig).

In 1937, he was put under contract by MGM when his career was at its lowest point. At first the studio used him as a support:
Saratoga
(37, Jack Conway);
My Dear Miss Aldrich
(37, George Seitz);
Manproof
(38, Richard Thorpe);
The Girl of the Golden West
(38, Robert Z. Leonard);
The Shopworn Angel
(38, H. C. Potter); and
Too Hot to Handle
(38, Conway). He played leads in several B pictures, including
Nick Carter—Master Detective
(39, Jacques Tourneur), and was then loaned out for better opportunities:
It’s a Date
(40, Seiter);
Dark Command
(40, Walsh);
The House Across the Bay
(40, Archie Mayo); as the hero in
Man Hunt
(41, Fritz Lang); and
How Green Was My Valley
(41, John Ford).

Meanwhile, at MGM, he made
Phantom Raiders
(40, Tourneur);
Flight Command
(40, Borzage); was teamed for the first time with Greer Garson in
Blossoms in the Dust
(41, Mervyn Le Roy); and
White Cargo
(42, Thorpe). The mature, conservative romance with Garson was astonishingly elevated by war in
Mrs. Miniver
(42, William Wyler);
Madame Curie
(43, Le Roy), and
Mrs. Parkington
(44, Tay Garnett). The titles indicate Pidgeon’s escort status, but it was evident that he enjoyed feeding Garson.

After the war, he slipped back into duller pictures:
Weekend at the Waldorf
(45, Leonard);
Holiday in Mexico
(46, Sidney);
The Secret Heart
(46, Leonard);
If Winter Comes
(47, Victor Saville);
Command Decision
(49, Sam Wood);
Julia Misbehaves
(48, Conway), with Greer Garson again;
The Red Danube
(49, Sidney); as Jolyon in
That Forsyte Woman
(49, Compton Bennett) to Garson’s Irene; and, unwisely reprised, in
The Miniver Story
(50, Potter). Once more, he found himself a supporting actor:
Soldiers Three
(51, Garnett);
Million Dollar Mermaid
(52, Le Roy);
The Bad and the Beautiful
(52, Vincente Minnelli);
Scandal at Scourie
(53, Jean Negulesco);
Executive Suite
(54, Robert Wise);
The Last Time I Saw Paris
(54, Richard Brooks);
Deep in My Heart
(54, Stanley Donen);
Hit the Deck
(55, Roy Rowland); as the Prospero figure in
Forbidden Planet
(56, Fred M. Wilcox); and
The Rack
(56, Arnold Laven).

He left MGM and returned to the theatre. After that,
Advise and Consent
was a happy exception to some very ordinary films:
Big Red
(62, Norman Tokar);
Warning Shot
(67, Buzz Kulik);
Funny Girl
(68, Wyler);
Skyjacked
(72, John Guillermin);
The Neptune Factor
(73, Daniel Petrie);
Harry in Your Pocket
(73, Bruce Geller);
Live Again, Die Again
(74, Richard A. Colla);
The Girl on the Late, Late Show
(74, Gary Nelson);
Murder on Flight 502
(75, George McCowan);
The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case
(76, Kulik);
Two-Minute Warning
(76, Larry Peerce); and
Sextette
(78, Ken Hughes).