THIS WEEK IN HISTORY: 1916
Mary Pickford’s newspaper column warned girls about ‘spooning’ before marriage
Movies were silent in 1916. But silent film star Mary Pickford found a way to talk to her fans — she wrote a newspaper column. Daily Talks by Mary Pickford was a syndicated feature that ran from 1915 to 1917 in newspapers throughout North America, including The Vancouver Sun. Pickford was at the height of her fame — her angelic face and golden curls earned her the nickname “America’s Sweetheart.” Many of her hits were done in her “Little Mary” persona, where she would portray a child. She could pull it off because she was so small (five feet tall and 100 pounds). In one of her biggest hits, Poor Little Rich Girl, Pickford played a 12-year-old, when she was actually 25. Poor Little Rich Girl was written by Pickford’s friend Frances Marion, whose online bio describes her as “the most renowned female screenwriter of the 20th century.” Marion has quite a resume — she wrote 188 screenplays, and picked up Academy Awards for The Big House in 1930 and The Champ in 1931. She wrote 11 movies for Pickford between 1917 and 1921, including Poor Little Rich Girl, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and Pollyanna. She was also the ghostwriter for Pickford’s newspaper column, which helped promote Pickford’s squeaky-clean image. A good example is a column from May 8, 1916 on “Spooning”. “I am not going to put on a pair of cross old grandmother spectacles, draw my eyebrows together and ‘shush!’ the happy young engaged couples who seek the cozy corners of the moonlight garden walks to exchange their lovers litany — no indeed, because that is the sweetest and most beautiful time of a young girl’s life,” wrote Pickford/Marion. “But this I do think is dreadful — unengaged couples spooning promiscuously. Is there anything more jarring upon one than seeing a foolish young girl not out of her teens allowing a boy to make love to her? And is as nearly always the case, the silly girl who tolerates promiscuous familiarities has much to regret when the one man comes along for whom she has been waiting for many years. “Even if she does not confess, it is always in her heart — the ghosts of other men who have put their arms around her and kissed her.” Pickford was no shrinking violet herself — she had an affair with fellow star Douglas Fairbanks while she was married to another actor, Owen Moore. Pickford married Fairbanks the same month she divorced Moore in 1920. America’s Sweetheart was actually Canadian. Pickford was born Gladys Louise Smith in Toronto on April 8, 1892. Her father died when she was six, and her mother took in a boarder who managed a theatre company. He suggested she should try acting, and in 1900 she made her stage debut in The Silver King. A year later, Pickford and her two siblings hit the theatrical circuit with their mother. In 1909, she made her film debut in Her First Biscuits, directed by D.W. Griffith for the Biograph Company. In her early pictures she was uncredited, which led her to be dubbed “the Biograph Girl.” She was incredibly hardworking: she made 50 films in 1909, 51 in 1910, and 51 in 1911. She started off at $10 a day, but proved to be a shrewd negotiator who demanded and got the highest pay in the movie business. In 1917, she was earning $10,000 per week; two years later, Pickford and Fairbanks formed their own studio, United Artists, with Charlie Chaplin and director Griffith. Pickford and Fairbanks were Hollywood royalty in the 1920s, living in their legendary mansion Pickfair. In 1927, the couple were the first stars to have their hands and feet cast in the cement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. In 1928, Pickford shocked the world by cutting her hair. A year later she made her debut in talking pictures in Coquette, for which she won an Academy Award. But she retired from film in 1933, the same year she separated from Fairbanks. She married another star, Buddy Rogers, in 1937. She died in 1979 after a stroke.