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P I C K F O R D :
BY EILEEN WHITFIELD
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY 441 PAGES · NONFICTION BY CHARLES TAYLOR | if 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 clichés. 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.
Charles Taylor lives in Boston. He is a regular contributor to Salon.
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