Pickford

A knockout of a biography." -- Newsweek A silent-film star. A woman who played children, wide-eyed and gamine, skipping about in frills and long curls. That's how most people remember Mary Pickford. In reality, Pickford was a towering figure in movie history, central to the evolution of film acting and the development of the Hollywood motion picture industry. Born in Toronto in 1892, Pickford began acting as a child. She switched from stage to film at seventeen, joining D.W. Griffith's Biograph Company, and became almost unimaginably popular.

This allowed her to dictate the terms of her contracts -- power she seized and consolidated. She developed her own production company at Adolph Zukor's Famous Players, and in 1919 she co-founded United Artists (along with Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks), taking not only creative control but also direction of the marketing and distribution of her films. Eight years in the making, this definitive biography brings Pickford to life as a complex knot of contradictions and establishes her as a groundbreaking genius, casting new light on one of the most influential and least understood artists in the history of popular culture.

Eileen Whitfield recreates Pickford's life in meticulously researched detail, from her trying days in turn-of-the-century Toronto through her reign as mistress of Pickfair, the legendary Beverly Hills estate at which she and Fairbanks entertained the world's elite, to her sadly moving demise. Along the way, Whitfield explores the intricate psychology that tied Pickford to her mother throughout her life and analyzes Pickford's brilliant innovations in the art of film acting, her profound influence on the movie business, and her role in the history of fame: once the best known woman in the world, she was the object of a mass adoration that prefigured today's cult of celebrity.

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Editorial Reviews - Publishers Weekly

In a 1925 interview with Photoplay magazine, Mary Pickford (1892-1979) asked her millions of fans to submit ideas for her next film. She got 20,000 responses, all requesting the type of child's roles (Anne of Green Gables, Heidi) Pickford wanted to escape. Biographer Whitfield quotes the magazine to explain that her fans simply wanted " `confirmation of the belief that the sweet, wholesome things in life are worth while.' " This remark turns out to be a perfect, if unintentional, explanation for the success of the escapist movies Pickford offered. Whether or not she portrayed a child, her films retouched reality to affirm the values cherished, though not always practiced, by Pickford's generation. If this emphasis on wholesome innocence left a largely unremarkable body of work, Whitfield's well-written, enjoyable biography underlines Pickford's interest as an actor, and as a canny businesswoman. Though Scott Eyman's 1990 Pickford biography relies more on original interviews, Whitfield more effectively synthesizes authoritative background passages (on Belasco-era theater, the origins of film, the growth of Hollywood, the influence of sound, etc.), which inform as insightfully as her ongoing discussion of Pickford's life and career. Her career eventually dictated her life: Pickford's decade-long reign with Douglas Fairbanks, her second husband, as Hollywood royalty, ended when sound changed popular tastes. Her last screen role in 1933 was followed by the long anticlimax of her final alcoholic decades untilwhen her body, mind and many of her films had disintegratedAmerica's sweetheart died. Sixty b&w photos, not seen by PW. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Silent screen star Mary Pickford was "America's Sweetheart," capturing the imagination of the public as "Little Mary," the adolescent with spunk. She married swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks, and with Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith they formed United Artists, the first production company run by people who acted and directed. Pickford and Fairbanks were the closest thing to royalty that era had, but behind Pickford's success was personal unhappiness: she did not make the transition to adult roles or the "talkies," her marriage ended, and she died a reclusive alcoholic, almost forgotten. Though it does include delicious anecdotes from those who were there, this is not simply a typical celebrity biography but a "biography" of the times, that golden era when a star could dictate the tastes of the public and hide behind a glittering persona. Journalist and film reviewer Whitfield skillfully analyzes the social impact of Pickford and her films and delves behind the facade of fame. Though there have been other biographies of Pickford, this will stand as the definitive one. Highly recommended.Rosellen Brewer, Monterey Bay Area Cooperative Lib. System, Cal.

Charles Taylor

[I]f Eileen Whitfield's Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood were merely a superb biography, it would be an invaluable book. Mary Pickford -- at the height of her fame arguably the most famous woman who ever lived -- is a seminal movie figure whose work, unlike that of her silent-era contemporaries, has never fully emerged from behind the veil of history. When Pickford is thought of at all today, it's as "America's Sweetheart," a curled and crinolined precursor to that pint-sized contraption, Shirley Temple.

Whitfield quietly demolishes that misconception, describing an actress whose intuitive dramatic gifts signaled a break from the histrionic stage emoting that carried over into early movies, gifts especially suited to the lyricism that became the signature of silent films. Pickford was best known for her portrayals of children, and Whitfield, a former actress, claims for those performances a psychological acuity comparable to the best work directed by Steven Spielberg or Francois Truffaut. She's equally convincing writing on the "tragic stature" of Pickford's uncharacteristic performance in the 1918 "Stella Maris" and her sophisticated comic sense in the title role of Ernst Lubitsch's 1923 "Rosita."

Whitfield combines a great command of narrative with an unerring perceptiveness. The story encompasses Pickford's early years on stage, helping to support her family after they were abandoned by her alcoholic father; her early films with D.W. Griffith at Biograph; her graduation to starring roles; the stubborn business sense that led her to negotiate higher salaries and greater artistic control and to become one of the founders of United Artists; her fairy-tale marriage to Douglas Fairbanks and their reign as Hollywood's royal couple; and the long years of decline. Her marriage to Fairbanks ended, Pickford became known only as a relic to the moviegoing public, an alcoholic recluse in the bedroom of her Hollywood mansion, Pickfair. And through it all, there's never a moment when Whitfield falls back on movie-magazine clichTs. She gives real depth to Pickford's contradictions: her stubborn independence and the lifelong bond she maintained with her mother, her generosity and sudden vindictiveness, and her wish to remain in the spotlight and the sense of inadequacy that, in the '30s, led her to threaten to burn her films.

If Whitfield is everything you'd want in a biographer, she's also everything you could ask for in a film historian. Pickford is as good a history of the origins of the movies as I've ever read. Instead of seeing silent film as a vast, undifferentiated mass, Whitfield elucidates how technique and style changed as movies grew from nickelodeon flickers to two-reelers to the great psychological poeticism of the '20s. "Modern viewers," she writes "often watch [silents] as though [they] were attempting to be talkies and, mysteriously, not succeeding. A more accurate comparison is to dance: specifically, narrative ballet, which, like the silents, tells a story, free of speech, with music phrased to underscore and shape the drama." This superlatively researched and sensitively written piece of film scholarship has given me more pleasure than any book I've read this year. A program of 16 restored Pickford films has begun a tour of 200 cities, in hopes of restoring Mary Pickford's reputation as one of the pioneers of movies. If that happens, part of the credit may be due to this superb biography. --Salon

Kirkus Reviews

A capable account of the life and times of one of the greats of the silent-movie era.

Combining emotionally subtle, naturalistic acting with a sweet, wholesome demeanor, Pickford was one of the world's first film stars. For more than a decade she reigned as "America's Sweetheart," starring in such silent classics as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917) and Pollyanna (1920). As Whitfield relates, her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks in 1920 attracted the kind of attention and adulation normally reserved for royal weddings, and indeed, the two were often referred to as Hollywood's "royal couple." Our age might be celebrity-obsessed, but the devotion paid to Pickford seem almost unintelligible today. This doggerel verse from the New York Dramatic Mirror, cited by Whitfield, was all too typical: "Silent enchantress! Are any as blind to you/As not to feel the glad charm of your art?/Time spare the youth of you, fortune be kind to you,/Queen of the Movies and queen of my heart!" Reluctant to break from the image that had made her so successful, Pickford continued to play adolescent girls—and sometimes boys—into her late 30s. Then sound was introduced, and though she'd been theater-trained, she just couldn't make the transition successfully. Her last years were straight out of Sunset Boulevard (for which she auditioned), as she took to drinking and reclusively shut herself away in her mansion. Whitfield, a film critic for Toronto Life, does a thorough but unexciting job of chronicling Pickford's career, from her desperately poor childhood in Canada (she went on the stage, originally, to help provide for her family) to her reluctant debut in films to her key role in founding United Artists.

Sadly, many of Pickford's films have vanished. Any record of these losses, even an unremarkable one such as Whitfield's, thus ought to be valued by those who care about film.