8 THE POOR

LITTLE RICH GIRL

Class and Embodiment in
the Films of Mary Pickford

Victoria Sturtevant

Although the prose of the fan profile is a shade more purple than most, Photoplays
portrait of Mary Pickford is not atypical of the genre, and certainly captures the
general spirit of Pickfords publicity:

At the entrance were grouped a half-dozen children, ragged, dirty as no heroine of

the movies ever could have been. One of them leaned forward to touch Mary
Pickfords dress. Instantly the girl was down on her knees on the pavement, talking
with the youngsters with that camaraderie that only the young of heart can show to
childhood. Instantly they were her friends. Wonder-eyed, they clustered around her
till she looked like a good fairy descended among the children of the streets of
NewYork. One might have expected her to fly off in a glittering chariot drawn by
winged horses. (Synon 1914, 40)

All the essential elements are present: Little Mary is kind; little Mary is childlike; little
Mary glows with a mystical charisma that imbues the ordinary realm of existence with
temporary magic. In the early days of the star system, there was little cynicism in the
publics relationship to its most popular idols. Photoplay named Pickford its number
one star in the United States for each of 15 different years, a far longer run than any
other star has ever enjoyed; hers was a stardom that did not seem to produce the same
kind of resentment or ambivalence that have now become so common (Basinger
2000, 57). Fans wrote corny poems to her and sent them to fan magazines to be printed:

Twinkle, Twinkle, little star,

In the sky so high and far!
You, though bright and shining, very,
Cant compare with Little Mary!
(Davies 1916, 44)

The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, First Edition. Edited by Cynthia Lucia,
RoyGrundmann, and Art Simon.
2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
2

The sing-song rhyme scheme of this ode is typical. Pickford inspired both
adoration (In the sky so high and far!) and familiarity (Little Mary!). Her
beautiful child persona linked the two seamlessly.
The Pickford persona was so cherished in part because it had these two sides,
and so embodied a number of dynamic contradictions. The film roles Pickford
played as often emphasize her doll-like beauty as they ask her to dress in rags and
present herself as a feisty ragamuffin child. She is glorious but humble, remote but
familiar. Her films often indulge these twin compulsions (to muddy Pickford up
and also to style her in beautiful lace dresses with golden curls) by placing her in
narratives of class rise, or fantasized class rise, that allowed her characters to make
a shift from one half of the persona to another, from grubby urchin to democratic
princess. Time and again she descends among the children and is restored anew to
a magical position of privilege.
The public narrative of Pickfords personal history emphasizes a similar rags to
riches logic. Her publicity in the teens foregrounded a childhood as a struggling
theater actress, supporting her mother and younger siblings with a small salary as
the whole crew took trains from town to town to earn a living with a series of
theater companies until she climbed her way up to Broadway in David Belascos
production of The Warrens of Virginia (1907). In 1915, an old theatrical colleague
rehearsed the story of her virtuous poverty, already well known, for Photoplay:

My recollection of her is as a very delicate child, with a well-worn shawl drawn

tightly about her tiny shoulders. Her stockings were well darned, and her shoes were
not new, either, but she had a wonderful wealth of curls, and a wistful smile that
instantly and universally appealed. ( Johnson 1915, 58)

Like all star stories, the emphasis is on Pickfords specialness, how her particular
appearance, talent, and charisma were recognized by her producers and costars
appraising her in the key moments before she was plucked from obscurity. Its just
like a movie.
This narrative of sudden class rise, from poverty to unimaginable wealth, was
familiar in literary and theatrical narratives long before the movies, of course (it is,
in many ways, a perfect modern iteration of Cinderella), but the story of an
ordinary girl becoming a glorious star brought together rather perfectly many
different threads drawn from the tradition of class rise in literature. In essence, the
star system itself, as it was developing in large part around Pickfords story,
repurposed myths of class mobility long cherished in American popular culture.
There was the emphasis on skill, work, and charisma familiar from the masculine
narrative of class rise, based on education or entrepreneurship:

An artist isnt supposed to know anything about business. But dont you get that idea
about Mary Pickford. Shes one of the shrewdest and best informed business women
in the country. Those baby curls on her head cover a very big and active brain.
(Kingsley 1921, II, 1)
 3

Simultaneously, there was an emphasis on specialness, deservingness, and

attractiveness familiar from the feminine narrative of class rise, based on marriage
or adoption by a wealthy patron. Indeed, instead of being adopted by a single
patron, Pickford was adopted by the filmgoing public, which expressed a very
proprietary attitude about her. Because her star text figured Pickford as equal parts
hard work and natural charisma, it drew together several strands in the cultural
drama of class advancement, which were richly reflected in her films.
Social class as a concept was undergoing important changes in the first half of
the twentieth century, a time of incredible technological and industrial expansion
in the United States, when an agricultural system based on property ownership
gave way to a greater concentration of wealth and opportunity in industry and
commerce. The US national census of 1920 was the first one to indicate that more
Americans lived in cities than in rural places (Fourteenth Census 1921, 37). Income
inequality in the United States from the teens up until World War II was greater
than at any other time in the century (Piketty & Saez 2001, 2). This was an era
of boom-and-bust markets, increased immigration, entrepreneurial business
ventures, and growing mass media that offered new opportunities for class
voyeurism. American movies replicated this complicated new world. From the
teens through the 1940s, class was often represented as an essentially binary system
of aristocracy separating the haves from the have-nots. Drawing on theatrical
melodramas that found easy moral outcomes in the conflict of rich and poor, early
movies were quite forthright about class, and often used class as a basis for the
narrative conflict. Melodramas showed poor girls being abused by the rich;
comedies explored Cinderella stories of cross-class romance or just the wild
adventures of the down-and-out. Charlie Chaplin made a career out of transforming
the social marginalization of poverty into a satiric spectacle. There were simplistic
archetypes on both sides of the spectrum: the virtuous poor, the idle rich, the
street tough, the long lost uncle who solves everything with a well-placed check.
Although American silent films often took a binary and didactic approach to
class, there was no single message. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster has argued that
American cinema has historically been defined by utterly contradictory messages
about class: Stay in your own class. Marry in your own class. Run away from your
own class. Be happy with what you have. Make the most of it. Just do it. Go for it.
Foster goes on to say that these contradictory maxims both reinforce the American
Dream ideal and at the same time cause anxiety and desire for a fetishized class
mobility (2005, 13).
It is the possibility of mobility that is the fetish here, not necessarily the outcome.
It is quite likely that American movie screens have never presented a unified
message about class to audiences. In this, Pickfords movies were no exception,
although patterns emerge from the chaos. In the five comedies with child characters
spanning the late teens and early 1920s that will form the core of this essay The
Poor Little Rich Girl (Artcraft, 1917), Amarilly of Clothesline Alley (Artcraft, 1918),
Daddy Long Legs (First National, 1919), Through the Back Door (United Artists, 1921),
4

and Little Annie Rooney (United Artists, 1925) there are examples of several
different narrative paths, from literal rags to riches, from riches to riches, from rags
to middle-class stability. Sometimes she marries a rich man, sometimes the rich
man turns out to be the wrong choice, but usually he appears somewhere in the
narrative when a little cash or a moment of fantasy would be helpful.
In Suds (United Artists, 1920), for instance, a laundresss infatuation with a
nobleman proved so confounding that three different endings were filmed, each
with a different class destiny for the poor girl. Pickford plays the laundress,
Amanda, who has become infatuated with a wealthy customer, Horace, whom
she has only seen once, when he dropped off a shirt eight months before. Here,
Pickford is more than usually dowdy in her working-class role, with unfashionable
clothing, contorted movements and facial expressions, and her famous curls bound
up in an untidy bun. In the original ending, Amanda sadly watches the object of
her affections leave with the shirt he has finally dropped in to pick up, and then
wails, Who could love me? Who could? Nobody never wont. The film originally
ended with her crying on the laundry steps. This sad final scene proved so
problematic for a Pickford comedy (although it wasnt unusual for Chaplin to end
his comedies as a lone and lonely figure) that two alternate endings were filmed,
so that one or the other could be added as an epilogue, after the sad scene in the
laundry. In the first one, found in the Library of Congress print of the film,
Amanda goes to the country to work for a rich patroness, trades in her dingy
laundress uniform and bun for a summer frock and curls, and is there reunited
with Horace, the wealthy suitor. In a short epilogue, she serves him tea, and he
quietly moves her chair, tricking her into sitting on his lap. All very tidy and
bourgeois. In the second ending, found in the print from the Mary Pickford
Collection, Amanda appears as she did at the laundry, not made over, although she
is still out in the country at the patronesss estate. There, she reunites with a man
of her own class, Benjamin, the laundrys delivery boy. Benjamin laughs as Amanda
is thrown from a horse. A model of good-natured proletarian romance. Both
happy endings are utterly consistent with narrative conventions of the class-
conscious comedy other films in the genre could go either of these two ways,
along with a few variants involving adoption or reinstatement with a rich parent as
an alternative to marriage.
One of the most compelling qualities of silent-era film comedies was the
absence of any one narrative pattern or right choice presented for young girls.
Three factors, however, do emerge with some consistency in Pickfords films. One:
Marriage and romance are the routes to class change. Two: Mary always moves up
the class ladder, never down (except temporarily). And three: If Pickford plays an
orphan, she is more available for class mobility than with ties to a family, particularly
one marked by ethnicity (as in Little Annie Rooney or Amarilly of Clothesline Alley).
What these three factors have in common is an adherence to middle-class values
like attractiveness, hard work, and family loyalty. No matter what the material
circumstances of her characters might be, her values remained constant.
 5

Mary Pickford, the most significant exemplar of the star system of the teens,
embodied these ideals in her film performances. Her personal history of family
hardship, childhood labor, individual exceptionalism, and the inevitability of suc-
cess provided a model for the industrys developing conventions of movie star-
dom. And as these conventions developed, Pickfords film roles mined similar
ideas, developing narratives of virtue and reward. One of the real legacies of
Pickfords star persona is the way in which her films helped endear the danger-
ous new technology to a dubious middle class. Pickfords films presented a senti-
mental approach to work, interpersonal appeals, family, and relationships that
flattered middle-class attitudes, even as they sentimentalized and aestheticized
poverty.

The Gentrification of the Cinema

A poem, longer on righteous sentiment than literary merit, published in the July
1915 issue of Photoplay magazine, marks a double shift in the cinematic audience
in the teens:

Weve a picture show in our town now

An Mother an me are glad;
Cause Daddys got a place to go now nights
Thout makin us feel bad.
He used to go down to a dreadful place
An drink, an stay, an stay;
Because, he said, a man must have some fun
When hes worked so hard all day.
An bettern that he takes Mother an me;
An we see the whole thing through.
For, he says, a woman works hard all day,
An needs a bit o fun, too.
(Wilson 1915, 68)

First, moviegoing was in the midst of a transformation away from the seedy,
dangerous, and largely masculine world of the urban nickelodeons, where fight
films, slapstick, and sensational genre content dominated the screen. The exterior
windows of these early converted storefronts were covered with tin tiles or
stamped metal panels to keep out the daylight, transforming the secret interior
world into a mysterious and isolated place a dcor not unlike a saloon made
dangerous not only by the presence of idle people, immigrants, and the rough
working classes, but also by the threat of fires in these cramped urban spaces
where volatile chemicals passed so close to a hot light bulb. After 1914, these
6

nickelodeons gradually gave way to more gentrified, suburban, and female-friendly

theaters, a trend that culminated in the production of opulent picture palaces,
with orchestra pits, lobbies, uniformed ushers, and other markers of the legitimate
theater built into the architecture of the space. What makes the poem such a tidy
summation of what moviegoing meant to the class dynamics of the mid-teens in
America is the way it sentimentalizes the role of the cinema in uplifting the
working class through the use of a childs voice and a female perspective, both
because the author is female and because the child, whose sex is unknown, is
grouped together with the mother in being first left behind and then included in
the fathers evening entertainments.
What is important to my argument here is the way that Mary Pickfords films
helped to feminize the movies, thereby creating space for women and children
in a film culture that was rapidly becoming a democratizing national leisure
activity. Because Pickford herself played both women and children in her films
even portraying both a mother and her own child, as in Rags (Famous Players,
1915) or Little Lord Fauntleroy (United Artists, 1921) the ways in which the early
cinema came to treat virtuous women and children as nearly interchangeable
emblems of a wholesome and nostalgic domesticity is key to the way in which her
screen image served as a bridge to bourgeois enthusiasm about the movies. Indeed,
the development of a star system in the early teens (when actors names first were
used to publicize individual films and studios) itself pushed the cinema toward a
more bourgeois narrative structure: Star vehicles are necessarily about the
struggles of a charismatic person in difficult circumstances.
One of the ways cinema made the shift from sensational content in the cinema
of attractions mode to forms that were more narrative-centered was to repurpose
sentimental nineteenth-century literary and theatrical source material to market
to an industrializing and urbanizing America. This juxtaposition of a new and
threatening technology with an old and toothless nostalgia is important. As the
star system developed, Mary Pickford rapidly became a very respectable, bourgeois
star, whose wholesome and highly classed star image helped sanitize the sensational
new medium for middle-class audiences. Pickford was a respected Broadway
performer, a veteran of David Belascos company, when the larger movie salaries
first lured her into the employ of D. W. Griffith and the Biograph Company.
Griffith, of course, brought a highly sentimentalized approach to character,
setting, and narrative in his filmmaking, pioneering the use of pastoral sets, literary
and pseudo-literary source material, narratives centered on virtue rewarded with
especially prominent roles for women, whose emotional displays focused the
sympathies of the audience toward pity and outrage. In this way, D. W. Griffith
was a practitioner of sentimental, politically charged melodrama in the tradition
of Charles Dickens or Harriet Beecher Stowe.
The cinemas great lurch toward a star system in the teens, however, drew it
away from political engagement with a collective working class, and instead
emphasized individual traits and virtues. Peter Stead notes of transitions brought
 7

about by the star during the period in which a melodrama with a star in the
mainpart is already well on the way to becoming something different. Necessarily
the star passes through difficult situations, escapes from dilemmas, and resolves
problems. We notice the appalling conditions but not as much as we appreciate
theenergy and vitality of the star (1989, 30). Whether that star suffers (as in melo-
drama), triumphs (as in adventure films), or endures indignities (as in comedy), the
focus on an exceptional individual already replicates bourgeois values and
emphasizes the single exceptional subject rather than the solidarity of class. This
was particularly true in the case of Pickford, whose status as a girl/woman
navigating adolescence, with its twin promises of education and sexual development
(either of which could produce a class shift, if played correctly or incorrectly),
placed her as an individual seeker within a rigid class system, often without a
family. Pickfords star persona as Americas Sweetheart further emphasized her
role as ideal subject, who even if she was victimized by the class system, always
retained the sympathy of middle-class audiences in exchange for her perfect
embodiment of their values. Pickfords charisma, then, and her positioning as one
of the first superstars of the new medium, pushed cinema toward the ideology of
individual exceptionalism before the actress even set foot on the film set for each
new project.
Pickford, a savvy businesswoman, managed to work at the most gentrified
studios at each stage in her career of the teens. Her star persona always carried
with it the strongest form of cultural capital available to the new entertainment
form. She first left Broadway for Griffiths Biograph, then moved to Laemmles
Independent Moving Picture Company (IMP) as it developed the market strategy
of publicizing stars a move that boosted Pickfords earning power. She then
returned to Biograph, and also returned briefly to Broadway, followed by a move
to Adolph Zukors new enterprise, Famous Players. Zukors new company, with
the tagline Famous Players in Famous Plays, was built on the idea of using the
technology of cinema to bring quality literary and theatrical source material
that already enjoyed higher cultural capital to the middle class. Pickfords later
work, at the expanding First National and finally at her own company, the
ambitiously titled United Artists (UA), demonstrates a rising standard of budgets,
source material, and prestige over the course of Pickfords career, an elevating
standard that runs parallel to the cultural capital accruing to the cinema over
that time.
The apparent irony of Pickfords rising status as a marker of artistic prestige and
middle-class values in American cinema is that frequently Pickford played a
member of the working poor, in roles ranging from orphans to servants to urban
waifs and Appalachian wild women. It is significant, however, that in her working-
and marginal-class roles, Pickford plays a very bourgeois vision of what it means
to be poor. She is poor and chaste. She is poor and values education. She is poor
and blonde and pretty, with uncannily coifed hair. She is poor and white. She is
poor and dreams of wealth or comfort. The narratives that often elevate this poor
8

Pickford (and not all of them do) suggest that the cure for poverty rests with the
individual who deserves elevation from poverty, while leaving behind her less
deserving peers. Hardly a Marxist indictment of the political and economic systems
that create poverty, the narrative formula is, instead, a Christian model of elevation
from bodily life to spiritual life for the virtuous individual.

Girlhood, Christianity, and the Legacy of Little Eva

Despite recent efforts to complicate her legacy, the career of Mary Pickford
continues to foreground a doll-like white femininity that is easy to caricature.
Molly Haskell calls her more saccharine and fluorescence than sweetness and
light (1987, 58).
In the teens, Pickford was a woman in her twenties whose most popular roles
frequently called upon her to play little girls, often in films drawn from girls
literature, including the dreaded Pollyanna (United Artists, 1920). Indeed, Pickfords
films had a tendency to fetishize childhood or small size, most obviously through
the obsessive repetition of the word Little in the titles of her films, from The
Little Darling in 1909 (Biograph) on through Little Pal (Famous Players, 1915), Poor
Little Peppina (Famous Players, 1916), The Poor Little Rich Girl, The Little Princess
(Artcraft, 1917), Little Lord Fauntleroy, and Little Annie Rooney. Biographer Eileen
Whitfield claims that Pickford was suited for childrens roles not only because of
her diminutive height, a scant 5 ft, but also because her head was a shade too large
for her body, giving her dimensions more typical of a childs (1997, 154). Gaylyn
Studlar points out that these proportions, combined with Pickfords slightly
shapeless dresses and expansive curls, give the actress a doll-like appearance (2001,
211212). Though Pickfords performances usually invested her characters with
determination and even a quiet ferocity, the optics of her films emphasized the
infantile.
Many of Pickfords most famous film vehicles were remade in the sound era
with Shirley Temple, another fact that seems to suggest something a little gross
about the cloying, quaint sentimentality of the silent stars girl roles, and
something quite a bit more gross about the publics sexual idolization of the child
impersonator. Studlars influential essay Oh, Doll Divine has identified a
problematic pedophilic gaze inscribed by these films, which exploit Pickfords
liminal girl/woman persona to make the stars sexuality both visible and
ambivalent (2001, 209). Available and sacrosanct, a new woman disguised in the
body of a pretty child, Pickfords persona drew on a contradictory and too-tidy
infantilizing logic.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that the curly-haired moppet half of
Mary Pickfords persona was already out-of-date in her own time and is part of
what made her a perfect public relations vehicle for a dangerously alluring new
technology. The shockingly new was made comfortable to a nervous middle class
 9

through the stardom of a nostalgic girl-woman. A mean-spirited fashion editorial

in the Los Angeles Times in 1915, titled They Are All Trying to Be Mary Pickfords,
bemoaned the new-old-fashioned style of long curls and ankle-length dresses that
women on the street were copying, unsuccessfully: The spectacle of a fat woman
with Mary Pickford curls giving you a baby stare is something terrible to
contemplate. It freezes the blood (III, 1). Even in the teens, then, Pickfords
trademark look was a little old-fashioned, and increasingly so as the 1920s brought
shortened hemlines, bobbed hair, and world-weary hauteur. Pickfords romantic
style was a throwback, something nostalgic, a reference to a pastoral American
past that never was. Even her adult characters have a childlike dimension, perhaps
in part because the element of nostalgia, a longing for a past fictionalized in
memory, so heavily informs her star persona. The national past is the rural and
agrarian ideal, while the personal past is an aestheticized childhood. Pickfords star
persona neatly conflates these two forms of nostalgia.
This past felt so familiar to audiences of the teens in particular, in part, perhaps,
through the various ways Pickfords persona so precisely evokes the character of
Evangeline St Clair from Uncle Toms Cabin, better known as Little Eva. Harriet
Beecher Stowes riveting best-seller was published in serial form in 1851, and
quickly became a sensation on the American stage. As a measure of the most
popular play in the history of American theater, there were still 500 Tom Troupes
in North America in 1900 (Whitfield 1997, 32). Like many young white actresses of
her generation, Pickford learned her craft in the role of Little Eva, starting in 1901.
A beautiful, sainted child who begs her plantation-owning father to free his slaves,
Eva is the precocious moral center of Uncle Toms Cabin, a kind of living angel, and
an obvious ideal of white upper-class girlhood.
Richard Dyer has pointed out that Stowes representation of Eva uncannily
predicted the way film transformed white skin and blonde hair into light shining
through clear plastic (1997, 122). The novels Eva is described as having singularly
transparent skin and golden hair (Stowe 1892, 167). While a flesh-and-blood
person never has truly transparent skin, celluloid does in fact register very light
colors as translucency that is, dark colors are rendered by blocking the light from
the projector, creating shadows on the screen. But because white images on black-
and-white film stock are created as a result of the absence of pigment blocking the
lights flow through the celluloid, the color white appears as an actual glow. Given
a Christian emphasis on the value of the spirit over the body, whiteness was thereby
transformed into a disembodied image of spiritual perfection.
In effect, Stowes description of Evas skin wasnt fully realized as a literal
representation of white girlhood until the movies rendered it possible whiteness
could now appear as a kind of transparency, particularly with the aid of backlighting.
Pickford herself is credited with inspiring the invention of backlighting, when
pioneering cinematographer Billy Bitzer noticed one day what an extraordinary
halo effect was created with her blonde hair as she sat on a bench in the sunlight
with her husband, Owen Moore. Out of curiosity I aimed my camera at them and
10

looked into the ground glass. It sent back a misty rainbow effect, with a haze
around the figures. This was caused by the sun shining into the lens (Bitzer 1973,
84). Whether or not this romantic anecdote is to be taken seriously as history, the
fact that Bitzer credits her as the original subject of backlighting speaks to the
power of Pickfords glowing image. She was certainly one of its most ideal subjects
in the early years of cinema, with her hair dressed loosely to pick up the light,
especially in her upper-class roles. It is useful to keep in mind that, although the
discourse of transparency functions to suggest that the camera simply unlocks
and reveals the virtue of the woman through its magical gaze, the developing
representational conventions of the new technology were instead shaped around
a preexisting ideal of white femininity.
Dyer quotes a key passage describing Little Eva, and points out that it is almost
an uncanny foreshadowing of the kind of glowing femininity created by
backlighting in the cinema, more than 50 years after the novel was written:

Eva came tripping up the verandah steps to her father. It was late in the afternoon,
and the rays of the sun formed a kind of glory behind her, as she came forward in
her white dress, with her golden hair and glowing cheeks. (Stowe 1892, 170)

Indeed, this moment is such an apt description of backlighting and its spiritual
implications precisely because backlighting itself is a visual corollary to the
Christian representational systems associating light with spirit and flesh with sin.
In this golden moment, Evas cheeks are glowing because she is already sick with
tuberculosis, an illness she embraces with great joy. Her death is represented as a
calling home to Christ, a beautiful slipping away of one who was always made
more of spirit than of flesh. In a series of touching scenes, Eva gives away locks of
her hair to the family slaves, begs her father to embrace Christianity, and then drifts
off into a beautiful, pale sleep. The novel aestheticizes Evas death, suggesting the
extent to which both childhood and death are idealized states for the white woman.
In skipping over adolescence and adulthood, Evangeline avoids the original sin of
sexuality, and passes from one pure Christian condition to the next from Eve to
Angel with no snake in sight.
Stage productions often used elaborate effects to represent Evas touching
ascent into heaven and had her return as an angel to welcome Uncle Tom when he
died later in Act II. For her trips to and from heaven, the stage Eva was often lifted
or lowered on a cloud, amid a rain of gauze, or in a beam of concentrated light. In
one production she was raised up on a milk-white dove. In another, she sprouted
wings herself (Whitfield 1997, 35). An 1880 stage show of Uncle Toms Cabin is said
to be the first theatrical use of electric lights light being the perfect representation
of Christian spirit (Staiger 1992, 108).
This trifecta of perfection death, light, and childhood will serve as a kind of
guide to the representational strategies that come to signify class rise in the films
of Mary Pickford. Pickfords idealized child characters are often called into the
 11

upper class, as Eva is called into heaven, as a recognition of virtue. While those
characters do eventually grow up and marry, that process of growing up, when it
is also a process of class rise, is often shrouded in representational strategies that
suggest death, or a Christian abnegation of the body. This move from body to
spirit can also be understood as an upward movement, a rising above the earthy
roots of lower-class childhood.

Mud, Class, and Gender

Despite the cloying representational systems that often defined her characters,
Pickfords star persona had an important second strand the ragamuffin child.
Though she was trained by D. W. Griffith, whose films teem with fluttering,
sentimental girl-children, Pickfords style always had far more shading and far more
backbone than many of her contemporaries. Later, the actress would sum up her
many conflicts with the director by saying, I would not run around like a goose
with its head off crying Ooh . . . the little birds! Ooh . . . look! A little bunny! Thats
what he taught his ingnues, and they all did the same thing (Brownlow 1996, 123).
Pickford was quite economical in her gestures and expressions, and her performances
represented girlhood as a time of physical freedom and exuberance. She abhorred
the cloying, and in a rare moment of candor in her otherwise journalistic
autobiography, Pickford opines, If reincarnation should prove to be true, and I had
to come back as one of my roles, I suppose some avenging fate would return me to
earth as Pollyanna the glad girl (1955, 190191). Instead of descending into this
miasma of perfection, then, Pickfords child roles tended to represent girlhood as
something quite similar to boyhood. The actress much preferred to use her child
roles to explore unfeminine states like anger, physical daring, rule-breaking, and
dirtiness. Pickford once confessed, The more ragged and dirty I look, the better
Ican play (Synon 1914, 36). Indeed, in her stage roles as a child, Pickford often
played in drag, and many of her adult film roles include short sequences of gender
disguise, which briefly liberated the actress from the tyranny of her lovely hair and
gave her wider opportunities to perform physical comedy.
Pickfords gutter angels with dirty faces recall the logic of healthy outdoorsy
masculinity popularized by social reformers of the late nineteenth century as an
antidote to sissifying, overcivilizing city life. American popular literature tended to
figure boys as noble savages of sorts, whose essentially uncivilized nature gave free
reign to their natural moral instincts. Nineteenth-century essayist Charles Dudley
Warner praised the merits of the country-boy who has the primal, vigorous
instincts and impulses of the African savage, without any of the vices inherited
from a civilization long decayed or developed in a barbaric society (Warner 1897,
150). Gillian Brown concludes that in this racist chronology of history, the white
American middle-class country-boy recapitulates human development from
primitive times to this sophisticated age (1999, 9091).
12

Although this notion of childhood as savagery is applied here to boys, it is one

of the interesting aspects of Pickfords child characters that they served as similar
models of untamed virtue, with similar racial implications the process of
growing up is a whitening, cleansing, and taming one for Pickfords characters
aswell.
But it is a further important aspect of this formulation that her girl characters
had to be located in the lower class in order to enjoy the physical freedom of boys.
In Little Annie Rooney, Pickford is one of the guys in a gang of street toughs. Her
working-class Irish family origin gives her license to roam the streets with the local
boys and participate in cartoonish Our Gang-style brawls. The only girl in the
multiethnic gang, the point is made even sharper when Annie casts herself as a
male sheriff in the groups staging of a Western drama. The drag costuming
emphasizes Pickfords ragamuffin girl posture, which usually sees her standing
with her legs apart, arms in motion, and neck foreshortened. In childhood,
boyhood, or lower-class settings, Pickford often pointed her posture down toward
the ground, with much skipping, squatting, and flopping down onto the chairs or
the floor with legs apart. Many of Pickfords most famous physical gags whether
dancing a soapy ballet with scrub brushes attached to her feet in Through the Back
Door or losing her bloomers while trying to get an errant pan off her foot in My
Best Girl (United Artists, 1927) are gags that specifically use the lower half of the
actresss body. Mikhail Bakhtin argued that the lower half of the body, or what he
called the bodily lower stratum, is emphasized in carnivalesque contexts as a
satire against bourgeois attempts to control or discipline the social body (1984, 27).
In contrast with the elevated head and shoulders, the lower half of the body is
dirtier, in contact with the earth, and responsible for private bodily functions like
digestion, defecation, and sex. The emphasis on the taboo lower half of the body,
gentle though it is, ties Pickfords comedy into this folk tradition of bodily humor.
When those same characters join the middle classes and/or become adults, the
transformation is achieved largely with a change in posture, back straightened,
neck elongated, legs together. Her dresses are also usually lengthened to hide the
legs that were so much on display in the child roles. These are shifts that actually
downplay the body, suggesting that middle-class adulthood is defined by control
of appetites and desires, rather than fulfillment of them.
On the rare occasions when Pickford plays wealthy children instead of poor
ones, this lack of physical freedom is chafing (as in Little Lord Fauntleroy or The
Poor Little Rich Girl). As the neglected Gwendolyn in The Poor Little Rich Girl,
Pickford assumes a posture that is hesitant and diminutive. The sets for this film
were constructed on a giant scale in order to miniaturize Pickford and transform
her into a living doll, entrapped in a beautiful and lifeless dollhouse. Doorknobs
were placed at shoulder height to the grown woman, oversize tables and chairs
loom over her. As the rich girl puttering around this lonely oversized house,
Pickford shows limbs drawn hesitantly into the body, hands held in a posture of
uncertainty.
 13

The physicality of her performance changes, however, when Gwendolyn

commits a minor behavioral infraction, and her parents inadvertently stumble on
a punishment that liberates their daughter from her entrapment. Her father
announces, through an intertitle, When I was a boy, I was made to wear my
sisters clothes, as a punishment. We will try it on Gwendolyn. This plot device
produces precisely the opposite of the intended chastening effect the fathers
shaming through forced transvestism simply doesnt translate to the daughter.
Though Gwendolyn at first dislikes the boys fancy clothes she is forced to wear
(complete with a cunning little bowler that artfully covers her long curls), she
soon takes the disguise out for a spin and enters into an enjoyable mud fight with
some lower-class neighborhood boys. A close-up shows Pickford mugging for the
camera and scrunching up her face into a scowl as a large clump of mud hits
Gwendolyn in the cheek. The entire physicality of the character changes in this
sequence: No longer pressing her limbs against her body, Pickford stands with
legs apart, eyes and mouth open, and begins to command the space around
herself. Delighted with the opportunity to get into the mud, the newly savage
Gwendolyn is disappointed when her parents hose her down and reinstall her in
the family home.
The issue of mud specifically as a signifier of class is a key motif of Pickfords
child characters. Indeed, while publicity stills of Pickford almost inevitably show
her to be so angelically clean and lily-white as to literally glow, her films delighted
in muddying her up. In the immigration tale Through the Back Door, for instance,
the actresss muddy feet are a bit of a fetish. A Belgian girl born into wealth but
abandoned by her mother and being raised on a farm, 10-year-old Jeanne loves to
fish and play in the muddy stream. Tracking mud into a neighbors house, she
decides to clean up by running her feet all over the towel roller in the kitchen.
Predictably, this technique does not meet with the approval of the homeowner
upon her return. A gently transgressive moment, the whimsical scene with the
towel roller is Chaplinesque, a piquant violation of rules only permitted outside
the rule-bound world of middle-class adults. For Chaplin, real social isolation and
poverty permitted these kinds of transgressions. Pickfords films were rarely about
social isolation; her characters were able to step outside social rules through a
shifting field of class mobility and childhood. In the scene that follows, Jeanne
performs another Chaplinesque physical gag, as she straps soapy brushes to her
feet, attempting to scrub her muddy footprints in a little skating dance. Although
Pickford refused to wear a costume that would show her bare legs and feet for a
Biograph picture in 1914, by 1922, her legs and feet are on display in nearly all the
roles in which she plays children, a marker of earthiness and humble beginnings
from which her characters are given the opportunity to rise.
A later scene recalls the mud motif when Jeanne, now 15 and a refugee from
World War I, is ashamed of her dirty shoes. A close-up of her mud-coated
shoesaccidentally staining her mothers clean tile floor brings an element of class
shame into the narrative. The emphasis on dirty feet permits a reading of
14

8.1 Muddy bare feet in Through the Back Door (1921).

classadvancement as a process of cleansing Pickfords class rise is made natural

and inevitable by her whiteness, insofar as her savagery was always a masquerade
in the evolution of her characters from mud to drawing room. She has been an
aristocrat from the start, and just hasnt known it. Her reinstatement is inevitable.
The visual motifs of cross-dressing, broad body posture, and mud trace out the
savage qualities in Mary Pickfords child characters. Yet it is important to note that
her child is a noble savage a fourth element of this figuration: Pickfords little
harridan was often placed in a maternal position relative to smaller, even more
vulnerable children, as a kind of natural mother. In Through the Back Door, Jeanne
adopts some picturesque orphan refugees and takes them with her into her new
life of wealth. In Daddy Long Legs, Pickfords character is an orphan who steals a
rich girls doll to give to a smaller child who is dying. In Little Annie Rooney, she
sticks up for the weaker members of the street gang. This is how she demonstrates
her virtue and earns her advancement into the middle class or above.
The implicit racial logic of this process of cleansing, raising, disciplining,
gendering, and finally racializing the noble working-class childs body becomes
even more visible as the beatified adult Mary Pickford emerges from the bodies of
the child savages. Scenes of dramatic transformation nearly always show the
grubby little guttersnipe emerging as the Little Eva half of the Pickford persona
wearing white, her curls long and blonde, and backlit. A post-transformation
Pickford in Through the Back Door stands so attired in a pose of anxious anticipation
 15

8.2 Gwendolyns life of privilege nearly leads to her death in The Poor Little Rich
Girl (1917).

next to a vase of roses in her mothers parlor, the picture of aesthetic girlhood. In
Daddy Long Legs the orphan heroine makes her debut in a college theatrical, gowned
in the role of Juliet on a lovely hillside, with strands of pearls in her hair. In Amarilly,
the post-transformation scene shows the heroine wearing a white dress, with
blonde curls gloriously backlit against a twilight sky in a mansion garden a
heavenly scene. But just as Little Eva is a dying character from the start, this process
of class rise can finally be understood as a disembodiment a kind ofdeath.
Indeed, The Poor Little Rich Girl nearly kills off its heroine when Gwendolyn,
whose governess has given her an accidental and potentially fatal overdose of
sleep medicine, passes out at the foot of the garden stairs. The childs sterile life
finally overwhelms her inherent liveliness. In a dreamlike double-exposure
sequence, spiritual children dance around her body and take her to a land of
dreams. In contrast with the earthy boys who threw mud pies with her, here
Gwendolyns girl companions are ghosts, idealized spirits of disembodiment,
haunting the upper-class garden. Pickford herself has gone completely still, in a
coma of near-death.
It is useful to note that these two different tones in the movie boyish
rambunctiousness and graceful feminine inertia were partly a product of the
disparate creative input in the film. While director Maurice Tourneur was primarily
interested in poetic camera effects such as this dream sequence, Pickford and her
16

8.3 Pickford becomes a double for the doll in Amarilly of Clothesline Alley (1918).

new friend, screenwriter Frances Marion, were developing a working method of

improvisation around scrappy comic business like the mud fight (utterly absent
from the play on which this film was based). Rather than working at odds with
each other, the films movement from mud to light, from motion to stasis, is a
poignant representation of how the system of class representations in these films
separated embodiment from spiritual and class perfection.
The conflation of class rise with entombment, ghostliness, or death is reflected
in many other images of Pickfords class rise. In Amarilly, a Pygmalion story in
which a society woman decides to elevate the daughter of Irish immigrants as an
expression of her philanthropic ideals, the heroine is clearly repressed by the
objectifying demands of life in society. An early close-up of Amarillys unfashionable
shoes neatly evokes the imagery of feet versus head, and prefigures the class rise to
come. But this film eventually returns its heroine to her Irish family and working-
class suitor, and so is more overt in insisting that the life of the wealthy is desiccated
and chilly. An intertitle describes one heiress as a product of social cold storage.
At the society bazaar where Amarilly makes her debut, she is given the task of
auctioning off a curly-haired, white-gowned doll to tuxedoed male bidders.
Standing behind the display table, a curly-haired, white-gowned Amarilly clearly
mirrors the product she is promoting. The men in attendance have no particular
interest in the doll, but quickly start bidding instead on a kiss from the young lady.
Class rise is here a matter of becoming a product, a fetish, a dead object.
 17

Performing Class in Daddy Long Legs

To demonstrate the ways that Pickford used her body to emphasize and make
visible the intersecting codes of class rise, spirituality, and death that defined her
films, it is useful to examine Daddy Long Legs, one of Pickfords most successful
vehicles dealing with class rise and class anxiety. To discuss this film and Pickfords
performance of class positions as particular modes of embodiment, it is further
useful to reference the Delsarte method of acting, the most popular training
system for actors from the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Although
there is no particular evidence that Pickford herself studied Delsarte methods, the
fact that she was trained on Broadway in her childhood makes it nearly inevitable
that some aspects of Delsartes techniques would have influenced her developing
craft, as it was the dominant school of acting in the West at that time. Delsartes
methods for performing class positions on the stage require that the more elevated
the class position and refinement of the character, the more subtle and upward the
actors movements should be, tending toward artificiality. In his several charts
linking bodily motions to emotional states of character, the quadrant signifying
spirit or soul is always located at the top of the range of motion. There is very
little harmony or relation, Delsarte teaches, between the exquisite joints of a
refined nature, the swift and flexible movements of an elegant organism, and the
evolutions clumsily executed by torpid limbs, ankylosed, as it were, by labor both
hard and constant (Delaumosne et al. 1887, 443). In Daddy Long Legs Pickfords
performance precisely mirrors this transition from a childhood of labor and torpid
limbs to a graceful adulthood in which she is scooped up into the middle class and
later the aristocracy. Her physical motions gradually make the transition from
earthbound and awkward to highly constrained and upward-reaching. Combined
with the other elements of spiritual light, whiteness, cleansing, and a rejection of
the body, these patterns of motion complete the system of representing class rise
in Pickfords films.
Daddy Long Legs begins with a set of intertitles declaring first the birth of
wealthy Angelina Wyckoff, a child of privilege: Babies are a lot like flowers. Some
are born into the world nourished and cared for amid beautiful surroundings.
The film then contrasts Angelinas life of ease and comfort with the birth of Judy
Abbott, a baby discovered in an ashcan, wrapped in newspaper, and delivered to a
local orphanage: While others see the light of day from the sordid atmosphere
of dump heaps stunted, crushed, and fighting for their very existence. The
flower metaphor here draws upon the theme of dirt, and the garbage heap
imagery posits her lower-class origins as a kind of pollution or stain on the body
of the child.
Growing up in the orphanage, Judy suffers under a tyrannical headmistress, but
because of her ragamuffin tomboy disposition, she achieves moments of rupture
and physical freedom amid the routine and labor. Pickfords performance is
18

exuberantly physical and places the emphasis on horizontal lines of motion a low
posture, arms out, legs apart. Though its not true drag, the gingham uniform
unites the girl and boy orphans, who make common cause in their objection to the
ubiquity of prunes on the orphanage menu. I think it is fair to say that prunes,
being wholesome, bland, fibrous foods, suggest the coarse life of the body,
especially the lower bodily stratum, that is typical of lower-class representations.
When Judy and a little boy are exiled to sit on a bench in the orphanage yard as
punishment for their leadership of the prune strike, the two children find and
consume a large jug of applejack, becoming woozily drunk. The subsequent
sequence shows them falling down, sliding down banisters, dunking a hated peer
in the well, and setting their comrades free to raid the jam cupboard. The pleasures
of the orphans are bodily pleasures, and all point downward (down the staircase,
down the well). A friendly neighborhood dog also partakes, and wobbles about on
its hind legs. The sequence emphasizes the physicality, even the animal nature of
the orphans lives.
A single cut cues the shift from a preadolescent to a teenaged Judy. I find this
single medium shot one of the most remarkable performance moments in
Pickfords career because the transformation is immediate and obvious, with very
few changes in costuming and makeup. Pickford simply begins to carry herself as
an adult woman, which involves more upward lines of tension in the body. The
only visible change in costuming is that her hair is now in one braid rather than
two. But what really teaches the audience that time has gone by is the elongation
of Pickfords neck and the softening of her face. In an instant, these physical
changes register the raising and disciplining of the gender-ambiguous and class-
disadvantaged child.
The adult Judy immediately moves toward assimilation into the middle class.
Judy Abbott is rescued from the orphanage and sent to college, sponsored by a
mysterious benefactor, whom she nicknames Daddy Long Legs because she
doesnt know his real identity. The film first shows Daddy Long Legs as a shadow
upon the wall of the orphanage, the only glimpse young Judy has of her benefactor,
with whom Judy is instructed to correspond by letter. Later scenes of the older
man reading his protges letters always show Daddy Long Legs from behind a
high-backed chair, so his identity is obscured. It is a privilege of wealth to be
anonymous, to be disembodied. He never writes back to Judy, although he manages
her life from afar via his secretary.
A true boot-strapper, Judy also earns her liberation by writing a best-selling
book about her orphan days, and is able to refund her benefactors charity and
emerge a self-supporting college graduate. Her class status thus doubly secure,
Judy begins to travel in the same social circles as Angelina Wyckoff, the pampered
baby shown in the opening sequence, who has grown up to be a nasty snob. As she
makes this transformation into society, Pickford represents Judys emerging
elegance through increasingly constricted arcs of motion, longer dresses, and
 19

8.4 Pickfords feet perform the resolution of Judys class conundrum in Daddy Long
Legs(1919).

higher-piled hairdos. Eventually, Judy and Angelina find themselves at a party

together. In this party scene the women do not dance; they sit in chairs or on
window benches and hold themselves quite vertical and still, talking and gossiping.
In a secluded corner, an elegant admirer named Jarvis Pendleton proposes to Judy,
but she turns him down, cowed by Angelinas disapproval of the cross-class pair.
The proposal scene is agonizing: Judy loves Jarvis and longs to tell him so, but is
overcome by the disapproval of her peers. Throughout the scene, Pickford shows
this distress by a shocking and unnatural stillness. She sits absolutely upright and
commands the cameras attention to minute movements of her hands and eyes,
even sometimes just her breathing. The rambunctious orphan of the opening
scene has been reduced to a state of near-paralysis with this shift in class.
Immediately after this terrible experience, Judy asks a friend to get her out of this
mausoleum.
This scene of agonizing stillness is followed by the films denouement, when a
desperate Judy decides to violate her benefactors instructions and confront wealth
in the flesh. Storming into Daddy Long Legs mansion, she is surprised to discover
that her suitor, Jarvis Pendleton, is actually her Daddy, who thus knows and
accepts her past already. This secret is revealed in a sequence that interestingly
complicates this movies presentation of class rise as a series of physical limits.
20

Pickford is dressed in black, a rarity in her films here she is a successful lady
author rather than a living doll and is moving with longer strides. At the same
time, this sequence cements the films conflation of daddy with husband, in a
way that is all too convenient with orphan movies, whose heroines need both
husband and father in order to rise in class status. Indeed, at the moment of
revelation, Pendleton pulls Judy onto his lap, and her body disappears behind the
high back of his iconic chair, except for her feet, which kick out an expressive series
of arcs denoting first resistance and then joy. In other words, Pickford performs a
seduction in this scene using nothing but her feet, and does so with tremendous
expressive power: sharp kicks, a moment of static tension, and then she begins to
swing her legs with obvious sensuous pleasure. No question about the quasi-
pedophilic sexual charge here, with the girl on daddys lap being conflated with the
wife on her husbands lap. Also, as should be clear from the foregoing analysis of
her films, Mary Pickfords tiny feet were a matter of considerable fetishistic interest
in her film work and star persona.
But what is equally interesting about this scene is the way in which the reinfan-
tilization of Judy is the only way the film seems able to return her to a state of
pleasurable embodiment. Daddy Long Legs has been an abstract idea behind a big
chair, disembodied and entombed in his big lonely house. He draws Judy into his
space, but half her body, significantly the lower half, is left in view.
The Daddy Long Legs tale of rags to riches is complicated by this contradictory
and challenging ending, made vibrant by Pickfords vivid use of pantomime to
express pleasure. Unwilling to leave Judy a pretty ghost, the film seems to acknowl-
edge the impossibility of uniting bodily pleasure with aristocratic refinement and
abandons its heroine in a liminal space between: half child and half woman, half
orphan and half lady, half embodied and half disembodied, a swing of tiny feet
and a glimpse of hair. By leaving these tensions in place, rather than trying to solve
them, Daddy Long Legs acknowledges the ways in which both poverty and extreme
wealth are represented in the cinema as forms of physical excess: One is too dirty
and the other is too clean.
The invisible standard against which these excesses are measured, of course, is
the middle class, the class of people being invited into the theater seats by
Pickfords sentimental comedies. Yet the middle class that serves as the yardstick
against which Pickfords virtues are measured rarely makes an appearance in her
films. Instead, her film vehicles fetishize the extreme ends of the class spectrum,
where bodily excess becomes possible and visible. The sentimental narratives of
class mobility articulated in Pickfords films look with pity on the hardships of
the poor and simultaneously worship and resent the luxuries of the aristocracy;
they are precisely designed to flatter the values of the middle class. The emphasis
on Judys specialness, her deservingness, her industry, and her moderate appe-
tites presents the sort of meritocracy that forms the base of Christian narratives
of salvation, Hollywood stories of stars born, and popular literature of self-
improvement.
 21

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