USA TODAY International Edition
‘Girls’ celebrates silent-film friendship
The Girls in the Picture by Melanie Benjamin (Delacorte, 415 pp., ★★★g) is a fictionalized account of the real friendship between silent film actress Mary Pickford and screenwriter Frances Marion. In the era of #MeToo, Girls could not be more timely — or troubling — about the treatment of women in the workplace. Benjamin has a flair for historical fiction about women’s lives. Her best-selling novels include The Aviator’s Wife, about author Anne Morrow, wife of Charles Lindbergh, and The Swans of Fifth Avenue, the story of the New York socialites who swanned about with writer Truman Capote. Girls begins in 1914, at the start of the movie industry, when a tiny young actress from Toronto named Gladys Smith changes her name to Mary Pickford and charms her way to the top of the box office as America’s Sweetheart. Her girlish curls belie Pickford’s grown-up business savvy. Pickford propels her popularity as the first movie star into pioneering deals with movie chiefs, launches United Artists studio with fellow actors Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. (whom she later marries), and cofounds the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Girls captures the enthusiasm of the “flickers,” when Pickford wrote her own scenes, did her makeup, acted and edited the finished product, then twisted her hair into her trademark curls at bedtime.
Benjamin portrays the affection and friction between Pickford and Marion with compassion and insight. Pickford gave Marion her big break, and Marion wrote the little-girl roles that came to define — and somewhat imprison — Pickford. Marion became one of the most acclaimed and top-paid screenwriters of her era, winning Academy Awards for The Big House and The Champ.
Along the way, the women are bullied, belittled and even battered by the men who surround them. Their ideas are dismissed and their work mocked — until the response to their creative collaboration proves the naysayers wrong.
The heroines of Girls struggle with what it means to be a woman in a maledominated industry, seeking love — however flawed — along the way.
As the film industry deals with the sexual mistreatment scandal that has riven Hollywood, the rest of us can settle in with this rich exploration of two friends who shaped the movies.