Long before Charlie Chaplin ever met Mack Sennett, 'Little Mary' Pickford had become the first superstar of the cinema, exasperating director D W Griffith by being bigger than his movies which framed her. She was so popular that on a trip to the Soviet Union in 1926, director Sergei Komorov persuaded her to kiss a local actor for his camera and turned the clip into the centerpiece of "A Kiss From Mary Pickford". She would play the moppet her entire career, but underneath the trademark blonde curls and elfin grace was a steely businesswoman who knew her worth and pushed for it, first with Griffith, later with Adolph Zukor, and always until her early retirement. Her pragmatic nature refused to force a product on the public that it didn't want. When the 30-year old Pickford appealed through the pages of PHOTOPLAY for suggestions about parts she could play, the responses (Cinderella, Heidi, Alice, Anne of Green Gables) convinced her that audiences did not want to see her grow up. A decade later, she walked away from pictures at the age of 40.
Pickford's career resembled Chaplin's in many ways. Both their fathers were alcoholics, but her mother's toughness following her father's death saved the family from the punishing poverty the Chaplins would know when his mother's mental health collapsed after Charles Sr. abandoned her. Pickford showed her pluck early, refusing to allow the family to split up and consciously assuming the father's role as breadwinner. A working actress from the age of six, she solidified the family fortunes by aligning herself with producer David Belasco as a teenager, much as Lancashire Lad Chaplin had with the great William Gillette in London's West End and later joining Fred Karno's pantomime troupe. The two were similar in their mixture of comedy and pathos, in their wringing poetry from poverty, though Pickford's films often documented the search for a missing father to reunite the family while Chaplin was forever alone with his idealized portrait of the woman his mother had been (or he wished she could be). 'Little Mary' blazed the trail 'The Tramp' would follow, the two ragamuffins becoming the aristocracy of silent films.
Stage actress Pickford went slumming one day in 1909 and teamed with Griffith, a rising director of "galloping tintypes", who would help shape her screen persona. In those days, there were no credits listing the director's or actors' names, but that proved no impediment to stardom as people inquired about the 'Little Mary' they had seen in so many movies. Displaying the same intuitive genius for film acting as had Griffith for direction, Pickford rejected the broad stock gestures of 19th Century stage technique in favor of a stillness that riveted audience attention. She could not only show feeling, but she could capture the subtle shift of feeling without dialogue and, as the first actor to understand the impact of the close-up, soared to the top of the new art form. Movies were like religion, and she was their undisputed goddess, 'America's Sweetheart'. It was at her shrine that they worshipped, and she insisted on her fair share of the take, telling Adolph Zukor in 1916, "No--I really cannot afford to work for only ten thousand a week." Her hard bargaining, which some thought unladylike, prompted a no-doubt envious Chaplin to call her "Bank of America's Sweetheart."
It is a mark of Pickford's star quality that adoring audiences flocked to see her even in undistinguished movies. Little Mary had struck a deep chord in the new mass of moviegoers, reflecting their dreams and pain. America was a place of promise and unfairness, and her deeply personal and boldly social films, which depicted beatings, betrayals and early deaths, strove to bridge the cavernous gap between the classes. During her prime between 1917-1919, she and her filmmaking cohorts (screenwriter Frances Marion and directors Marshall 'Mickey' Neilan, Cecil B DeMille and William Desmond Taylor) were prime shapers in developing movie narrative, bringing verve and finesse to feature storytelling. Though perpetually typecast as the naif, Pickford kept things interesting by frequently playing multiple roles: mother and daughter ("Rags" 1915, "Pollyanna" 1920), mother and son ("Little Lord Fauntleroy" 1921), sisters under the skin ("Stella Maris" 1918). She also tortured and distorted herself to bring credibility to her performance (prior to Lon Chaney), most spectacularly in "Stella Maris" and "Suds" (1920).
Pickford never took a directing credit (and rarely a screenwriting credit) but, make no mistake, she was the power behind her pictures. Though Griffith helped her become a star, she never gushed about him the way the Gish sisters did, having waged too many stubborn battles with him. When Zukor joined forces with Jesse Lasky, their attempts to reduce her power failed. She so frustrated Zukor that, according to her testimony in a 1923 lawsuit, he once offered her $250,000 if she would simply stop making movies. What probably bothered the moguls most was that she had no equal as a judge of her own material. Her exacting standards certainly dismayed her directors. She was constantly critical of her own performance, insisting on retakes until she was satisfied, but she also enhanced the reputation of every director with whom she worked. She reached her peak of popularity during the last years of World War I, touring the country selling Liberty Bonds, and afterwards became a mogul in her own right as one of the founders of United Artists, along with Chaplin, Griffith and soon-to-be husband Douglas Fairbanks.
The business brains behind United Artists, Pickford fought with Sam Goldwyn and negotiated with Walt Disney, eventually letting Disney go in 1937 when he refused to sign over what both she and he knew would eventually be the lucrative ancillary rights to his films. The formation of United Artists also marked the period of her best films and the most complete exploitation of America's Sweetheart in films like "Pollyanna" (1920), "The Love Light" (1921) and "Tess of the Storm Country" (1922), a remake of her 1914 film. She chose her directors well and had the good sense to cultivate Charles Rosher as her cameraman with his efforts to show her as still adolescent leading to significant advances in the art of lighting. She brought Ernst Lubitsch over from Germany to help her adopt a more mature screen attitude but hated working with him on "Rosita" (1923), reverting to more amenable directors like Neilan ("Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall" 1924), William Beudine ("Little Annie Rooney" 1925, "Sparrows" 1926) and Sam Taylor ("My Best Girl" 1927, which cast her opposite future third husband Charles 'Buddy' Rogers).
For her first foray into talkies, Pickford showcased a "new" screen personality, renouncing her famous curls to play a flapper in Taylor's "Coquette" (1929), based on a Broadway hit that had starred Helen Hayes. She also used her clout as half of Hollywood's reigning royal couple to lobby and win the Best Actress Academy Award, though the coming of sound recording had revealed her voice as a chirping, grating contralto. After finally starring opposite Fairbanks in the disastrous "The Taming of the Shrew" (also 1929), she acted in two more films before surrendering to the relentless march of time, unable to find a character to bridge Pollyanna and a screen world now populated by the likes of Greta Garbo, Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. Having rejected the offer to play Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard" (1950), Pickford planned to act in "Storm Center" (1956) but gave way to Davis in the end, settling once and for all into genteel decay at Pickfair. Though the little girl never grew up, the movies did, and it's almost impossible to fathom her eminence today. Simply put, 'Little Mary' was the biggest star of the silent era, surpassing even Chaplin, perhaps because of the hope she expressed for a new American century and a new American art form.