A Wartime Story: Peterborough Welcomes “America’s Sweetheart”
Mary Pickford, with (on the left) James E. Girven, Assistant CGE Works Manager, and (on the right) Ian F. McRae, CGE Works Manager, fronting some massive machinery. In the background to the left, a man still manages to work. May 1943, Trent Valley Archives (TVA), F327 McRae scrapbook, Pickford 060.
Mary Pickford Comes to Town – On Screen and Off
“Peterborough Welcomes America’s Sweetheart!” Examiner, May 25, 1943, p.5
“Mary Pickford Arrives in City,” Examiner, May 26, 1943, p.9.
Imagine: three thousand CGE workers happily deserting their desks and work stations and streaming out of the buildings onto the lawn near the Park Street entrance. A famous woman was in town.
My father, Ganton Clarke, in the foreground, leaving his job in the Instrument Lab and walking up Park St. from the CGE gates, c.1940s.
I readily imagine that my father was there, a farm boy who had come to the city for wartime work – a youthful thirty-four years old and two years into his twenty-eight years at the company. He began as an assistant in the engineering lab in Building 8A, a squarish four-story structure not far from the front gates on Park Street.
I can imagine him outside on the lawn that day, standing and mingling and chatting with others whose names I can so easily remember – his boss Mr. Hanscom (Bob, or Robert), his brother Jack, Harold Murduff, Stu Daniels, Joe Daynes, Velma Stewart – all waiting in the bright morning sun for the ultra–Hollywood silent movie star to arrive.
Examiner, May 25, 1943, p.5.
May 1943, in the midst of the Second World War: when the iconic Hollywood star Mary Pickford carefully stepped down from the morning train at the CPR station in Peterborough, for a moment her illustrious presence got swept away in a swarm of excited citizens.
A welcoming committee of men delegated to greet her stood on the train platform. They were “scanning the cars trying to decide which one housed their guest, when the crowd surged forward leaving them out of it all together.” The dignitaries had to fight their way halfway up the platform before getting close enough to play their official role. It was as though – and the press made this clear – a Royal figure had descended on the town. That was not unusual for Mary Pickford – she was treated like royalty wherever she went in the world.
Here she was now, in Peterborough, the so-called “little woman” — five-foot-one and barely over 100 pounds — born in something close to poverty in Toronto. Once known as the “Queen of Hollywood,” she was often credited with starting the Hollywood star system — in which actors were not only “named” for the first time, but paid appropriately. She was known for a youthful, winning presence on screen — she could do comedy or drama — but in Hollywood talent was never enough: her enduring success depended on her audience’s love and approval together with pragmatic and savvy business skills.
In May 1943 the locals were not disappointed. The Examiner reported:
“Mary Pickford . . . has an attractive personality and a most vivacious manner. As people gathered around her she shook hands graciously and spoke a few words to those nearest.
“Though exceedingly small in stature and of a slight build, Miss Pickford appeared to be a bundle of energy. She was wearing a smart navy dress topped by a check coat in blue and white with a little touch of red. Her attractive fair hair and her sparkling blue eyes added weight to her title of “America’s Sweetheart.”
Examiner, May 25, 1943, p.5. With the scheduled program, which does not include a quick visit to the Lift Locks.
Pickford was in the midst of a twelve-day Canadian war relief tour, paying her own expenses and raising money for three British war victim funds. A day earlier she had been in Toronto, helping to sell shares in a “Toronto Bungalow Project” to benefit child war victims. Overall she expected to raise something like $165,000 ($2.5 million in 2021) for the funds, which included the Lions Club British War Victims’ Fund, Evening Telegraph British War Victims’ Fund, and Malta War Relief Fund.
Her tour focused on war defence plants – and Peterborough’s Canadian General Electric (CGE) was in that category. The Toronto bungalow she was promoting boasted “C.G.E. fittings valued in excess of $2,000” – including Hotpoint range, refrigerator, coffee-maker, toaster, iron, three radios, two Telechron clocks, vacuum cleaner, and modern electric fittings.
After her somewhat chaotic arrival, a police escort took Pickford and her party north on George Street to the Empress Hotel, where she stayed just “a short time” before heading off in a private auto to the CGE plant. There, standing on a temporary platform constructed on a square of lawn – an open space criss-crossed with walks leading to and from the various plant buildings – the Hollywood star spoke to an assembly of close to 3,000 workers:
“I have been invited here today to talk to you about one of the most important jobs that has to be done in the world at this time. It isn’t the job of the statesmen or the fighting men – though no one would deny the importance of the mighty part they are playing. It isn’t even the glamorous job of making motion pictures to stimulate patriotism. It[’]s the plain honest-to-goodness job that you folk are doing right here – the job of sticking to the job and turning out the fighting equipment that the United Nations must have for victory.”
CGE Works Manager Ian McRae with Mary Pickford at the Kawartha Golf and Country Club. TVA, F327, McRae scrapbook Pickford 062.
After that it was off to Clonsilla Ave. and the Kawartha Golf and Country Club (owned and established by the CGE) for a reception, lunch, and further speeches by local worthies. Senator J.J. Duffus “lauded her as a true daughter of her native Canada.” Senator Iva Campbell Fallis, speaking (so she said) for the women of Canada, paid “personal tribute” to the star attraction, “as a woman whose grace and charm has made you beloved by two nations.”
For her part, the Hollywood legend responded: “When I look around every Canadian face seems familiar, seems a part of me. My mother and father were Canadian, my grandparents English and Irish and I am proud of my Canadian ancestry.” (Following the visit, Pickford politely sent a letter to Senator Fallis thanking her for the public remarks.)
*****
One of the earliest images of Mary Pickford as a motion picture actor. Moving Picture World, Dec. 24, 1910, p.1462. She had begun appearing in motion pictures in May 1909.
Mary Pickford was born Gladys Louise Smith on April 8, 1892, in a house at 211 University Ave. in Toronto. A sister, Charlotte (called “Lottie”) joined the family in 1893, and a brother, Jack, in 1896. Her father, John Charles Smith, was an alcoholic who worked at a variety of odd jobs and died in 1898 as the result of an accident, leaving his wife, Charlotte, and three children to fend for themselves.
To bolster the tattered family income, mother Charlotte managed to get Gladys a theatrical role as a child actor (at age seven) in Toronto – and after that “the stage” became a family enterprise, with Lottie and Jack also getting jobs, and Charlotte carefully managing and monitoring them. The family travelled here and there for a few years, always living from hand to mouth. After Gladys Smith landed a supporting role in a Broadway play in 1907, the show’s producer insisted on a name change: “Mary Pickford.”
At age seventeen in May 1909, with the family living in New York and work on the stage inconsistent, Mary Pickford reluctantly shifted to the very new and less respectable – indeed, “contemptible” (she said) – medium of short silent film. After a screen test she was taken on by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company and its pioneering director, D.W. Griffith – at first earning the hefty sum of $40 a week. Mary had a sense of “shame” about the transition – she considered film “a guilty pleasure,” but appearing in the new and rapidly proliferating “photoplays” offered quick money on a daily basis. In 1909 and 1910 Mary Pickford had spots in about eighty short films, appearing mostly in bit parts but with a few leading roles.
Mary Pickford arrives on screen in Peterborough
Examiner, Oct. 9, 1909, p.14. Mary Pickford was there on screen on opening night at the Princess, in a tiny role as “a girl in the crowd.” The Biograph studio had released Pippa Passes; or the Song of Conscience (based on a poem by Robert Browning) only a few days earlier, on Oct. 4: The Princess was showing a very new film. On April 19 a Biograph prop boy (age fifteen) had spotted a “good looker” sitting in the studio lobby — it just happened to be Mary Pickford, age seventeen. Director D.W. Griffith decided to try her out with a screen test, instructing a group to improvise a scene for Pippa Passes; Pickford did not get the lead role for that film, but got a contract and steady work with Biograph beginning the next day.
Examiner, Oct. 14, 1909, p.5. In The Broken Locket (September 16, 1909), directed by D.W. Griffith, Pickford had a leading role as the “trusting sweetheart” of a young man gone wrong through drink and womanizing.
It was not long before audiences everywhere, including Peterborough, were seeing this new youthful face on screen – though they would not yet have known her name. In Peterborough in September 1909 the Crystal Theatre offered the Biograph film The Cardinal’s Conspiracy (July 12, 1909), a historical romance with Mary in a minor role as a servant. In October the Princess Theatre had Pippa Passes and The Broken Locket (Sept. 17, 1909).
Variety, Dec. 31, 1910, p.17. An early acknowledgement of the on-screen impact of this new actor.
In September 1910 D.W. Griffith’s film An Arcadian Maid (Aug. 1, 1910) was one of four films shown at the Princess, and its small cast included Pickford in the lead role along with Mack Sennett, also originally from Canada – although, in keeping with the norm at the time, these two actors were still receiving no on-screen credit. At the time actors or “photoplayers” (and directors) were not receiving credits on-screen (or even in film listings); both a summary and a review published at the time made no mention of them. But it would not be long before they became household names.
Mary Pickford quickly became “the Biograph girl,” with fans writing in to magazines to find out the name of this sparkling, curly-haired, feisty young woman. In 1911, writes film historian Christel Schmidt: “ ‘Moving Picture Mary’ was the first movie star to adorn the cover of the New York Dramatic Mirror, an honor previously bestowed only on theatrical stars.” Schmidt points out:
“In 1914, Pickford’s Tess of the Storm Country, the story of a fiery young woman fighting for the underclass, caused a sensation. The extraordinary reaction made Pickford an international star and created fan worship that had never before been witnessed. In turn, this success gave Mary Pickford incredible bargaining power. In 1916, Pickford had negotiated a contract that gave her a $10,000 a week salary, 50% of her film profits, and her own production company.”
Moving Picture World, Feb. 11, 1911, p.290. At the Imp studio, a family affair, including mother Charlotte (Mrs. Smith) in the middle of the back row; in the front row, brother Jack (John Smith) in the centre and sister Lottie to the right; behind them, Mary in the centre of the second row. Her first husband, Owen Moore, is to her right.
In 1929 a Peterborough writer recalled seeing and “admiring” Pickford and her fellow actor (and first husband-to-be) Owen Moore working together in the early days, when Pickford “was a negligible quantity.” That was when Mary Pickford “was a bright girl with long braids. Her name was never flashed on the screen, but that of her sister Lottie was featured to quite an extent.”
Moving Picture News, Jan. 7, 1911, p.4. The first of a series of “Little Mary Imps,” this one including newly wedded husband Owen Moore. It was a disastrous marriage that ended in 1920.
Lottie in fact was never a big star, but audiences everywhere quickly fell in love with the unnamed young woman with the curly hair, bright eyes, and sense of “fearless innocence.” As her renown built, Mary’s income quickly went up to $100 a week at Biograph, and then to $175 when she shifted to the Imp studio. She began making longer “features” rather than shorts, and appeared in fifteen films in 1914 and 1915 alone. By that time she was news enough to be the subject of a local headline: “Mary Pickford at the Empire” – with the short article explaining that she was “one of the ‘movie’ stars,” with a salary of $60,000.
In 1915 she formed her own corporation – the first female star to do so – and in the following year gained a landmark contract with her studio, Famous Players. Now she was making $500 a week, and, as biographer Eileen Whitfield related:
“a teacher, a factory worker, or a farmer would have laughed in disbelief. Such income-earners (and many of them were among the movies’ first fans) made five hundred or less in a year.”
Not surprisingly the Empire Theatre announced in February 1917 that the price of admission to see Mary Pickford’s latest would be going up to 25 cents. In the mid-1910s, the war years, not many days went by without a Pickford picture playing in one or more of the four downtown movie theatres.
Examiner, Dec. 16, 1914, p.8. The first mention I’ve found of Mary Pickford’s name in the local paper.
Examiner, Jan. 4, 1915, p.8. The name “Mary Pickford” is now featured on ads, and would remain so for years. Here she is being announced in a coming picture as well.
Moving Picture World, July 11, 1914, pp.150—51. She was now under contract with Famous Players.
Pickford, says cinema historian Richard Koszarski, “revolutionized the motion picture industry” – especially by asserting her rights as a woman, employee, and box-office draw. Early on, realizing her popularity, she had demanded her fair share of the exhibition receipts. She raised the profile of “star” players (and their salaries), helped to create a demand for the pictures, and lobbied for creative control. By the end of the decade she was earning $10,000 a week – and she had helped to co-found a new production/distribution company, United Artists, joining up with Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and her second husband (and another iconic actor), Douglas Fairbanks. She was acknowledged to be the fiscal expert of the group (though perhaps it really was her mother who provided the “business brains”). As Lary May puts it in his study of the silent era: “Pickford was the joyous, spontaneous female who brought into her personality that which Victorians had repressed.”
A portion of a lavish window display for the appearance of Mary Pickford in Suds (June 1920), which screened at the Allen Theatre from Jan. 10 to 12, 1921. Peterborough Museum and Archives (PMA), VR 2280.
Examiner, May 25, 1928, p.13. A “capacity audience” for the first evening’s showing. “The little star is in her very best vein,” said the local reviewer, Jeanette, in a film that has “a profusion of the little human touches that make the onlookers chuckle in sympathy, and there is plenty of comedy.”
In the 1920s Pickford continued to make successful feature-length films: Pollyanna (1920), Tess of the Storm Country (a remake in 1922), Rosita (1923), Little Annie Rooney (1925), and Coquette (1929, her first talkie), among others.
By 1933, and with the transition to talkies, Pickford’s star – all too long lit by a youthful, girlish ideal – was dimming. As writer Molly Haskell puts it, “The Victorian ideal of childlike innocence and can-do spirit that Pickford brought to luminous perfection crashed on the shoals of a more cynical age.”
Even so, in the summer of 1933 in Peterborough, according to a local reviewer, her role in her final feature film, Secrets (1933), apparently “enthralled” the young folk in the audience at a matinee showing. The writer, Cathleen McCarthy (using the byline of “Jeanette”) mentioned how “one very junior youth murmered ‘hotcha’ in awed admiration when the heroine, her crinoline skirts billowing out behind her, eloped through the window by way of a ladder.”
Examiner, July 18, 1932, p.9.
Jeanette had her own, somewhat ambiguous response: “Mary Pickford, apparently almost as young as in the days when she did ‘kiddie’ roles with such acclaim, makes a lovely appealing heroine, although she is not able, evidently, to quite step down from the pedestal on which popular opinion has placed her.” While her acting was as “graceful and expert” as always, the watcher, Jeanette thought, could never forget that it was Mary Pickford, as always, on the screen.
By the 1940s Pickford was no longer appearing on screen – Secrets, made by her own production company, was her last film, and her once-dominant attraction as a film star had waned. Her second marriage, to Douglas Fairbanks, had slowly disintegrated and officially ended in 1936. She had wedded a somewhat lesser film star, Buddy Rogers (known mostly for his role in Wings [1928]), in 1937.
She was an alcoholic (information apparently hidden from journalists for over fifty years), but still had a relatively successful career as a businesswoman. She remained something of a power on the Hollywood scene, still a force, with Charlie Chaplin and others, in United Artists – although not without considerable harsh dissension among the principals; she and Chaplin, who lived nearby each other in Hollywood, would barely speak to each other. Politically, unlike Chaplin, she was not a figure of the Hollywood left; to the contrary, she was so far to the right of the spectrum that in the 1930s she offered praise for both Mussolini and Hitler. Biographer Eileen Whitfield notes a strain of anti-Semitism. In the 1950s, though, she did turn the page a little by supporting Jewish causes and defending Chaplin when he was being condemned for being a Communist.
Motion Picture Herald, June 12, 1943, p.10.
Still, in Peterborough in 1943 she was supporting the war effort, and fans had by no means forgotten her star appeal, her glamorous Hollywood life, and her penchant for doing good in the world. At 2:30 p.m. on the day of her visit, Pickford returned for a rest to the Empress Hotel – and at some point in her visit (though it was not on the official program) she snuck in a quick trip to the Lift Locks. At four o’clock a parade (and a group from the Air Cadets Corps) took her from the Empress via Water Street and George to catch the C.P.R. train back to Toronto. From there her travels would take her to Callander (home of the Dionne quintuplets, May 28), Montreal (May 30), Verdun, Que. (May 31), Kingston (June 2), and St. Thomas (June 4).
Examiner, July 12, 1954, p.18.
Although in the following years and decades she became more reclusive, her celebrity never did completely vanish. She came close to getting the Gloria Swanson role in Billy Wilder’s classic Sunset Blvd. (1950), and a few other roles that would have made a difference to her life and legacy also eluded her.
From time to time the Examiner drew attention to her activities. In 1948 she visited Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto in a postwar campaign to raise money to support children in need in Europe and Asia. In 1953 the Examiner reported that she was on yet another bond-selling route, similar to the one she had travelled during the First World War, in 1918. A May 1953 report indicated that the “living legend,” now sixty years of age – who had made her last film twenty years earlier – was still “a youthful, slim figure in high fashion clothes, modern as tomorrow’s newspaper and as friendly as the lad next door.” It also noted that she was still a major stockholder in United Artists even though she was on the road selling those U.S. savings bonds.
The next year an article maintained that she was growing old gracefully. In 1956, amidst much pressure, she finally sold her last remaining stock in United Artists “for a cool three million dollars.” Upon her death in 1979, the New York Times characterized her as “one of the richest women in America.”
*****
Thanks, as always, to the folk at the Trent Valley Archives and Peterborough Museum and Archives; and to Ferne Cristall, my first reader and constant support.
Sources
Peterborough Examiner, Peterborough Daily Evening Review.
Including, in the Examiner: Jeanette, “Theatres, At the Capitol, Mary Pickford in ‘My Best Girl,’” May 25, 1928, p.13; Jeanette, “At the Capitol: Mary Pickford in ‘Secrets,’” Examiner, Aug. 29, 1933, p.9.
Moving Picture World, esp. Aug. 6, 1910, Aug. 13, 1910, pp.309, 351; see also “Toronto, Canada, Claims Birthplace of ‘Little Mary,’” MPW, July 15, 1916, pp. 410-11.
Who’s Who in the Film World, ed. Fred C. Justice and Tom R. Smith (Los Angeles: Film World Publishing Co., 1914), p.51, “Mary Pickford.”
Douglas Gomery, “The Rise of Hollywood: The Hollywood Studio System,” in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ed., The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Molly Haskell, “Introduction,” in Mary Pickford: Queen of the Movies, ed. Christel Schmidt (University Press of Kentucky, 2012).
Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1990).
Peggy Dymond Leavey, Mary Pickford: Canada’s Silent Siren, America’s Sweetheart (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2011).
Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980/83).
George Melnyk, One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).
Christel Schmidt, “Mary Pickford,” in Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds., Women Film Pioneers Project (New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013).
Edward Wagenknecht, Movies in the Age of Innocence (Norman: University of Oklamoma Press, 1962).
Eileen Whitfield, Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood (Lexington: University Press of Kentucy, 2007).