Golden Girl, Lost Lady

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Show Business

Mary Pickford: 1893-1979

When she died last week at 86, she was a shadowy legend, vaguely associated with the beginnings of movies, of celebrity in the modern sense. It is a tribute to the power of her former fame, and to the charm that most Americans know about only through the reminiscences of their elders, that her name could, for one last time, command the front page. Mary Pickford had been absent since 1933 from the movie screen that she had once dominated. For the past 13 years of her life, she was a recluse at Pickfair, the Beverly Hills mansion she had lived in since 1920, when she married Douglas Fairbanks, one of her few peers in silent films.

What younger generations could not know, since she closely guarded her films and an image she felt could no longer be appreciated, was that she was a great deal more than "America's Sweetheart." The plots of her films were often sentimental, but Pickford was not. She was a subtle actress, the best at the lost, enormously difficult art of silent-picture performance.

Her gestures were minimal, her expressions were mercurial, delicate yet powerful in their capacity to affect the emotions. If there was, finally, something unsettling about the way she continued to play nymphets until she was well over 30, it was a tribute to her mimetic gifts that she did so with such total persuasiveness. The reason was largely that her child-woman screen character was anything but sticky sweet. In Stella Marts, for instance, she played a double role: a crippled heiress and a love-obsessed slavey who commits murder so that the heiress and her lover (whom the slavey also loves) can find happiness. In the Dickensian Sparrows, she played a clever and persistent teen-ager who frees the inmates of an orphanage from sadistic bondage. It was a strong role for a forceful woman. Even in pictures like Pollyanna or Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Pickford showed wit, endearing mischievousness and sheer spunk.

These were qualities that little Gladys Smith of Toronto apparently had at age five, when, after her father died, she started to act in stock companies. Under the guidance of her mother, the ultimate stage mom, she trouped her way out of the provinces to New York City. There Theatrical Producer David Belasco named her Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffith, her first film director, began shaping the image from which she never quite escaped. "Through my professional creations," she once said, "I became, in a sense, my own child." She was not permitted her first romantic screen kiss until 1927, 18 years after she came to the movies. When she cut off her long golden curls and bobbed her hair, flapper-style, a year or so later, it caused a national furor. "You would have thought I murdered someone, and perhaps 1 had, but only to give her successor a chance to live."

The successor, however, never really developed. By then Pickford had become a Hollywood mogul as well as a star. In 1919 she joined with Fairbanks, Griffith and Charlie Chaplin to form United Artists. For years she had a firm hand in the running of the company. Her fortune was ultimately some $50 million, much of it from real estate. Unlike Douglas Fairbanks, she was frightened by the mass adulation that greeted their public appearances. It was unprecedented, the need of the public to touch these images when they appeared in the flesh. He thrived on it and restlessly roamed the globe as his popularity faded. The rest lessness became sexual and finally caused their divorce in 1936. By then she was 42, and all she really wanted was a chance to enjoy her winnings in comfort. Pickfair was perhaps the most comfortable great house in America, elegant and welcoming. In 1937 she married Buddy Rogers, the band leader and actor who had given her that first screen kiss. Until her final withdrawal into solitude, she occupied herself with various causes, including work for the aged. At the end, she was devoted to her Bible and her booze, allegedly sipping away a bottle of it each day. It is also said that in her nightmares she would cry out for her mother and for her great love, Douglas Fairbanks. On the good days, though, she could still regale friends and family with tart and funny stories about the times when she and the medium she helped to develop were young. The films of those years are her legacy, still capable of rekindling the admiration and affection she once knew in astounding measure.

-- Richard Schickel

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