Mary Pickford and the American “Growing Girl”

Abstract

“I always study a part very carefully and try to get into the spirit of the child I am to portray,” commented twenty-six-year-old Mary Pickford (1892-1979) in a July 1918 interview in Motion Picture Classic. “The costume, dressing the character, means a lot. You know, when I'm dressed as a child, I never walk. I always skip or run. Funny how one feels a character when … dressed for the part. You just naturally lose your own identity” (McKelvie). During the years 1917–20 Mary Pickford achieved international celebrity appearing in screen adaptations of several classic children's novels and stories, including Eleanor Gates's The Poor Little Rich Girl (1912), Kate Douglas Wiggin's Rebecca of Sunny-brook Farm (1903), Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess (1903), William J. Locke's Stella Maris (1913), Belle K. Maniates's Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley (1915), Bret Harte's “M7apos;liss” (1868), Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs (1912), and Eleanor H. Porter's Pollyanna (1913). These “growing girl” films, as I shall call them, instantly eclipsed the popularity of her earlier films, most of which had featured her in adult roles.1 Audiences, if not all the critics, notes biographer Robert Windeler, were delighted to discover the “Little Mary” of the long, backlighted blonde curls, “in Tattered-Tom clothes, a sometimes smudged face, and with no visible breasts” (96). Now, at the zenith of her career, Pickford's little-girl roles established her indisputably as the highest paid, most recognized, most idolized, and most powerful female in the entertainment business. She had forged an image, says commentator Arlene Croce with a touch of sarcasm, that “had become the nearest thing to a universally recognized holy icon” (132).