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Sob Sisterhood Revisited
———. “Mrs. Thaw’s Great Sacrifice.” New York Evening Journal 1 Feb.
1907: 5.
———. “Women Juries in Future
Foreseen as Real Necessity.” New York
Evening Journal 16 Feb. 1907: 3.
Rodgers, Viola. “Remarkable Interview.” New York American 26 Jan.
1907: 4.
“Roosevelt Plans Thaw Censorship.”
New York Times 12 Feb. 1907: 1.
Ross, Ishbel. Ladies of the Press: The
Story of Women in Journalism by an Insider. New York: Harper, 1936.
Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
Schilpp, Madelon Golden, and
Sharon M. Murphy. Great Women of
the Press. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983.
Somerville, Charles. “Crowd Fights to
Hear Evelyn Thaw.” New York Evening
Journal 19 Feb. 1907: 2.
Strychacz, Thomas. Modernism, Mass
Culture, and Professionalism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
Sumpter, Randall S. “Sensation and
the Century: How Four New York
Dailies Covered the End of the Nineteenth Century.” American Journalism
18.3 (2001): 81–100.
“Thaw Stirred to Wrath.” New York
Times 28 Jan. 1907: 3.
Film History, Volume 18, pp. 174–184, 2006. Copyright © John Libbey Publishing
ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America
“Thaw Trial Begins.” New York Times
24 Jan. 1907: 1.
Travis, Jennifer. “The Law of the
Heart: Emotional Injury and Its Fictions.” Boys Don’t Cry? Rethinking
Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion
on the U.S. Ed. Milette Shamir and
Jennifer Travis. New York: Columbia
UP, 2002. 124–40.
Umphrey, Martha Merrill. “Media
Melodrama! Sensationalism and the
1907 Trial of Harry Thaw.” New York
Law School Law Review 43 (1999/
2000): 715–39.
Walsh, Blanche. “Six Lawyers Always
Ready.” New York Evening Journal 9
Feb. 1907: 2.
Warner, Michael. “The Mass Public
and the Mass Subject.” Habermas and
the Public Sphere. Ed. Craig Calhoun.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. 377–
401.
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler. “He Killed in
Interest of Society.” New York Evening
Journal 25 Feb. 1907: 4.
Williams, Linda. “Melodrama Revised.” Refiguring American Film
Genres. Ed. Nick Brown. Berkeley: U
of California P, 1998. 42–88.
“Witness Blushes for First Time in Her
Six Days of Testimony.” New York
American 27 Feb. 1907: 1.
Women in the driver’s seat:
The auto-erotics of early
women’s films
Women in the drivers seat: The auto-erotics of early women s films
Jennifer Parchesky
I
n the first quarter of the twentieth century, women
drivers of automobiles emerged as signal figures
of the ‘New Womanhood’. Freed from both the
confines of the domestic sphere and dependence
on male drivers, they embodied an autonomous
mobility that challenged conventional gender roles.
Operating recalcitrant vehicles in often hazardous
conditions, early women motorists – especially the
celebrated race car drivers and cross-country pioneers – demonstrated ‘masculine’ courage, stamina
and technical skill. While such unladylike behavior
did not go uncensured, the press and public on the
whole celebrated the woman motorist – typically
young, affluent and attractive – as a positive symbol
of female emancipation.1
As previous scholars have observed, automobiles figured prominently both in the on-screen exploits of a new breed of action heroines and in
off-screen publicity about stars’ personal vehicles,
from images of ‘serial queen’ Helen Holmes repairing
her own stunt car (infant daughter at her side) to Anita
King’s highly publicised Paramount-sponsored
transcontinental solo journey in 1915.2 Yet there are
even broader parallels between the pioneering
women motorists and the women directors, producers, screenwriters and stars who sat, metaphorically,
in the ‘driver’s seat’ of so much of the early film
industry. Not only actors but women in all branches
of the industry were celebrated in fan magazines, the
mainstream press, and even girls’ dime novels as
hardworking, technically skilled and courageous,
holding their own in a man’s world in conditions that
were fast-paced, physically demanding, and subject
to all kinds of human and natural disasters.3 Like
women motorists, women directors emphasised the
technical demands of their craft – ‘[k]nowledge of
camera operation, of lighting effects, and of all the
hundred-and-one less important mechanical details’
– even as they insisted that ‘there is no reason why
[a woman] cannot completely master every technicality of the art’.4 While women in both fields tended
to emphasise individual achievements over collective struggle, both motoring and filmmaking were
deeply imbricated in the larger feminist movement.
Suffragists promoted their cause with both spectacular cross-country automobile tours and stirring
propaganda films throughout the 1910s; in 1913,
when California women won the vote, director Lois
Weber and a coalition of studio women made national headlines by sweeping to victory the nation’s
first all-female municipal government in the newly
incorporated Universal City.5 Whether behind the
wheel or behind the camera, women’s mastery of
exciting new technologies offered a spectacular image of New Womanhood as both practical power and
thrilling adventure.
In this essay, I examine three films about female automobility in which women held key positions
of creative control: Mabel at the Wheel (1914), directed by and starring Mabel Normand; Something
New (1921), written, directed, produced by and starring Nell Shipman; and Zander the Great (1925),
starring Marion Davies with script and ‘editorial direction’ by Frances Marion. Spanning the heyday of
Jennifer Parchesky is Assistant Professor of English
at Arizona State University. Her previous work on early
women filmmakers has appeared in Cinema Journal.
She is currently completing a manuscript entitled
‘Melodramas of Everyday Life: Popular Realism and
the Making of Middle America’.
E-mail: [email protected]
Women in the driver’s seat: The auto-erotics of early women’s films
powerful women filmmakers to the consolidation of
the studio system, these changing representations
of women in the driver’s seat resonate with the filmmakers’ own experiences of empowerment and constraint within the industry.6 While these films may not
have been consciously intended as allegories of their
conditions of production, they nevertheless articulate
a ‘political unconscious’ in which we can read a
larger narrative of the history of first-wave feminism,
from the politically-charged ‘New Womanhood’ of
the 1910s to a more circumscribed ‘modern’ femininity that conflated liberation with consumer desire and
heterosexual romance.7 While this historical narrative
may seem to take a rather depressing turn, my analysis aims to seize the empowering and subversive
potentialities embodied in these texts, recuperating
the work of early women filmmakers as a valuable
resource for a contemporary feminist analysis of the
dialectics of power and desire. My argument thus
participates in the larger struggle of recent feminist
film scholarship to reclaim female subjectivity, desire
and pleasure from an overly monolithic view of the
patriarchal constraints of classical narrative cinema.8
While such arguments have generally assumed that
women viewers must ‘negotiate’ their pleasures in
the interstices of the patriarchal text, I focus on the
negotiations taking place at the level of both production and discourse, suggesting that these early
women’s films articulate alternative discourses of
female pleasure and agency that defy patriarchal
norms.9 Certainly early women filmmakers were not
immune to the pressures and constraints of a patriarchal society, but they were supported by both a
widespread popular feminist discourse and the
growing importance of the female audience. I contend that these factors, together with the relative
fluidity of generic and representational conventions
in early cinema, created a far more open field for the
articulation of female subjectivities, desires and
pleasures.
In defining these representations as ‘autoerotic’, I connect the eroticisation of female automobility with psychoanalytic and feminist theories of
sexuality and subject formation. Early women drivers
described their experience in highly erotic terms,
citing the ‘thrills’ and ‘excitement’ of speed and
power as well as the queer intimacy of body and
machine: ‘There is wonderful difference between sitting calmly by while another is driving and actually
handling a car herself. There is a feeling of power, of
exhilaration, and fascination that nothing else gives
in equal measure. When the ponderous car begins
to move and the motor seems a living, breathing
thing responding to your slightest touch, then comes
the realisation of “motoring” in its truest sense.’10
Such comments echo Audre Lorde’s construction of
‘the erotic’ not as narrowly sexual but rather as a
whole constellation of emotional and creative energies suffusing a woman’s being.11 They also resonate with Freud’s description of pre-Oedipal
‘auto-erotism’ as a diffuse field of libidinal energy that
is neither ‘unified’ in a particular region of the body
nor directed toward a particular object but which
instead ‘obtains satisfaction from the subject’s own
body’.12 Indeed, just as Freud cited among the chief
sources of auto-erotic stimulation the ‘mechanical
agitation’ provided by trains or bicycles, the ‘muscular activity’ or ‘romping’ of little girls, and the feverish
activity of ‘intellectual work’, these films link the ath-
175
Fig. 1. Posing
for the White
Studio
photographer,
World film star
Alice Brady
‘changes her own
tire’.
[Courtesy of Fort
Lee Film
Commission.]
176
Jennifer Parchesky
letic heroine, her powerful vehicle, and the creative
process of filmmaking as a nexus of autoerotic pleasure.13
While Freud contends that ‘normal’ sexual
maturation redirects the girl-child’s active, multifarious libido into a passive desire for penile penetration,
Luce Irigaray argues that female sexuality remains
essentially autoerotic: ‘[W]oman has sex organs
more or less everywhere ... the geography of her
pleasure is far more diversified, more multiple in its
differences, more complex, more subtle, than is
commonly imagined – in [a masculine] imaginary
rather too narrowly focused on sameness’.14 In this
view, to reject the patriarchal repression of such
diverse pleasures is to reject the myth of the unified
subject: women must ‘(re-)discover’ themselves by
embracing multiplicity, ‘sacrificing no one of her
pleasures to another, identifying herself with none of
them in particular ... never being simply one’.15 Irigaray’s argument echoes feminist film theory’s critique of the ‘subject of classical cinema’ as a fantasy
of masculine individualism and sufficiency sustained
by the objectification of women. Rather than supporting Laura Mulvey’s call for a radical aesthetic that
destroys both cinematic pleasure and unified subjectivity, however, Irigaray’s model underwrites the more
recent interest in the complexities of women’s cinematic pleasures and subject positions, anticipating
Christine Gledhill’s call for decentered subjectivities
as the vehicles of new kinds of agency: ‘We need
representations that take account of identities – representations that work with a degree of fluidity and
contradiction – and we need to forge different identities – ones that help us to make productive use of
the contradictions of our lives’.16 I suggest that automobility, as constructed in these films, functions for
women filmmakers, protagonists and even spectators as a source of autoerotic satisfaction, an experience of pleasure and power that can energise both
a stable but unbounded sense of self and a desire to
extend that power and pleasure into artistic creativity.
The connection between women’s driving and
their growing power in Hollywood is epitomised by
Mabel at the Wheel (1914), one of the first films made
following the announcement that ‘Mabel Normand,
leading woman of the Keystone Co. since its inception, is in the future to direct every picture she acts
in’.17 In this two-reel comedy, Mabel takes the wheel
of her boyfriend’s race car, thwarting the machinations of a villainous Charles Chaplin and speeding to
victory on her own. While the film seems at first a
simple fusion of Normand’s established comic persona with her well-known love of fast cars, it can also
be read as an allegory of Normand’s own directorial
career. The fictional Mabel initially quarrels with her
beau over the use of his race car, much as Normand
had struggled with producer and lover Mack Sennett
to ‘take the wheel’ of her own star vehicles. Her
conflicts with the villain mirror the obstacles posed
by Chaplin – then an inexperienced film actor with his
own directorial aspirations and the only member of
Keystone to resist Normand’s authority.18 In the film,
their conflict stems from the villain’s incompetence
behind the wheel – to make her boyfriend jealous,
Mabel goes for a ride on Charlie’s motorcycle but is
outraged when he accidentally sends her flying into
a mud puddle.19 She reunites with her beau, who
allows her to take the wheel and joins her in confronting Charlie. When the villain kidnaps the hero to
prevent him from racing, Mabel takes his place,
overcomes the obstacles the villain places in her
way, and is rewarded by a throng of cheering spectators. While off-screen events differed in many respects – rather than siding with Normand, Sennett
conceded to Chaplin’s resistance by allowing him to
co-direct – the film nevertheless provides a compelling image of the emergence of women directors in
the 1910s: a woman’s demonstrated talent is applauded by male colleagues and the general public
and resented only by the most ridiculous and impotent of competitors. Normand, like many of her female contemporaries in the industry, was welcomed
by most of her cast and crew and heralded by the
press, who declared that Normand’s new role as
director would not only allow the star to expand her
comedic talents but would ‘undoubtedly make Keystone more popular than ever’.20
Mabel at the Wheel constructs the woman
driver as an image of not merely professional competence but also uninhibited desire and active resistance to patriarchal constraints. Mabel’s conflict with
Charlie stems from her resistance to ungentlemanly
behavior that includes sexual harassment and physical assault – he repeatedly pinches and pokes her
thigh and, when she slaps him for his effrontery,
punches her back. When she goes in search of her
kidnapped boyfriend, he grabs the collar of her dress
and exposes her upper chest. She, in turn, grabs his
hand and bites down until he retreats in agony. The
film thus alludes to popular discourse about the
sexual harassment routinely faced by women who
‘travel alone’ in the urban environment, a phenome-
non that included both ‘unwanted advances’ and
violent responses to female resistance.21 In contrast
to the sadomasochistic fascination with which the
popular press and ‘white-slave films’ of that era represented such threats, however, Mabel at the Wheel
defuses the threat by comically emphasising Mabel’s
feisty resistance.
The real thrill of the film lies in the fast-paced
action of the race and the audience’s identification
with Mabel’s excitement and satisfaction. Camerawork and editing function not to objectify the attractive Mabel but to encourage identification with her,
an identification facilitated by Normand’s technical
innovations – rather than using an advance car for
driver close-ups, Normand mounted a camera on the
front of her race car, a practice later adopted industry-wide.22 Scenes of the speeding cars and the
obstacles placed by the villains are intercut with
close-ups of Mabel, whose face alternates between
intense concentration and delighted laughter as she
grips the wheel. (Her male mechanic-passenger, in
contrast, registers a comic anxiety and dismay.) The
only shot-reverse-shot sequences in the film do show
Mabel as the object of the male gaze, but the gaze
highlighted is that of her father, who registers first
astonishment but ultimately pride in her unladylike
competence. The reverse shots of Mabel highlight
not her feminine physique but her restless physicality
as she drives, refuels and recovers from accidents.
When Mabel takes the wheel, she strips off both her
feminine frippery and her girlish frivolity, donning a
bulky, shapeless white coat and scarf that renders
only her face clearly visible, and shifting from exaggerated gestures and comic face-making to a more
natural air of poised self-assurance. Significantly,
Mabel does without the unattractive driving goggles,
which rest atop her head, the better for us to see her
expressions in closeup. However, the film avoids
calling attention to this omission and her male passenger is also sans eyewear, suggesting that its
motivation is less to highlight Mabel’s beauty than to
keep her face free as it registers the erotic pleasure
with which the audience is invited to identify.
At the film’s conclusion, Mabel’s autoerotic
pleasure is not repressed but ecstatically celebrated
by a mostly male crowd, which pours from the stands
to congratulate her. The men neither resent her
achievement nor subject her to unwanted advances,
enveloping her instead in comradely admiration. The
villain and his henchman are defeated by their own
smoke bomb. Rather than ending with a heterosex-
ual clinch, the final shot shows Mabel’s boyfriend,
now freed from captivity, and father, now reconciled
to his daughter’s activity, lifting her to their shoulders
in celebration. The film explicitly insists that Mabel’s
triumph should not be viewed as a solicitation of
masculine desire: when a man in the crowd attempts
to take advantage of the carnivalesque celebration
to grab a nearby woman, she and her female friend
respond swiftly and decisively, battering him with
hands and feet until he releases them. Then they
continue on their way to join Mabel at the finish line.
Mabel’s auto-erotic activity – and by extension, the
creative power of the woman filmmaker – can thus
be seen as the vehicle of not a revolution against but
rather a utopian transformation of the patriarchal
order, in which female agency and desire are not
bounded by the demands and restrictions of men but
rather serve as a galvanising force for a new heterosocial community. Significantly, the cinema plays
an important role in constituting this community, as
suggested by the presence of a cameraman in the
concluding scene, excitedly cranking the machine
that records Mabel’s triumph.
As women directors and stars continued to rise
in power in Hollywood in the late 1910s, many chafed
under the confines of the studio system and turned
to independent production as a new vehicle of artistic
freedom. While most such ventures were ultimately
crushed by the studios’ stranglehold on distribution,
the brief heyday of independent women filmmakers
produced films of remarkable power and innovation.23 One of the most intriguing of these is Nell
Shipman’s Something New (1921), which stars the
filmmaker as a young ‘writing woman’ who goes to
Mexico in search of ‘ATMOSPHERE – real, red, and
RAW’. When the remote mine she is visiting is attacked by banditos, she is captured, threatened with
rape, and rescued by a handsome mining engineer
who pursues the villains across the desert in his
Maxwell automobile. It is Shipman, however, who
emerges as the true hero: after the engineer is injured, she must take the wheel and pilot them across
the desert to the safety of the American border.
While the film echoes many conventions of the
serial-queen melodrama – alternately reveling in the
sadistic spectacle of the heroine’s victimisation and
celebrating her triumphant agency – it goes well
beyond those conventions in its complex and highly
erotic articulation of female agency and automobility
with intellectual creativity.24 The fictional ‘writing
woman’ is conflated with the well known writer-direc-
177
178
Jennifer Parchesky
tor-producer-star in a peculiar framing narrative that
shows Shipman seated at a typewriter in the midst of
a campsite, wracking her brain for ‘something new’
to write about. Inspiration strikes when she witnesses
a man on a horse (‘the OLD’) defeated in an off-road
race by one in an automobile (‘the NEW’). While the
scene’s setting alludes to Shipman’s established
persona as ‘the Girl from God’s Country’, an intertitle
constructs the authorial imagination as machine, describing her writers’ block as ‘one of those muddy
mental hills with the old brain hitting on one cylinder’.
With its emphasis on the identification of woman and
automobile and on the conquest of ‘old’ by ‘new’, the
scene marks an important shift in Shipman’s oeuvre
from the association of woman with nature to the
identification of the New Woman with technological
modernity.
The film was financed by the Maxwell-Briscoe
Motor Company and, as such, has been dismissed
by some critics as merely an extended and somewhat melodramatic commercial for the off-road capacities of the Maxwell automobile.25 But Shipman’s
collaboration with the automaker represents less a
capitulation of art to commerce than a strategic alliance enabling her independence from the equally
commercial and increasingly patriarchal studio system. Demanding only a favorable presentation of its
product, Maxwell likely seemed a far less oppressive
master than a 1920s studio boss. Moreover, the
company had long been associated with the empowerment of female motorists, sponsoring Alice Ramsay’s pioneering transcontinental journey in 1909, a
1914 feminist campaign to promote automobile
saleswomen, and numerous women’s tours and
races.26 While the film embodies the ongoing tension
between women’s desire to prove their ‘masculine’
prowess behind the wheel and automakers’ desire
to market their products as so reliable and easy that
even a woman could use them, Shipman navigates
this rocky ideological terrain by constructing the reliable automobile as a valuable friend to, but no substitute for, the courageous and capable female
driver.27
Perhaps the most intriguing feature of the film
is the way in which the automobile emerges as a
quasi-subjective companion and lover whose relationship with the woman soon displaces the male
hero to the visual and narrative margins.28 Scenes of
the hero’s race to the rescue emphasise the subjectivity not of man but of car in head-on long shots that
invest the Maxwell’s ‘face’ with a personality. Its
headlight eyes, mouthlike grill, and arduous movement toward the camera suggest that the car itself is
rushing to the rescue, while the man fades into gray
obscurity behind the wheel. In contrast, scenes of
Shipman driving emphasise her agency with frequent close-ups of her expressive face and physical
exertion; even in long shots her white shirt, blowing
hair and active movements make her visible as an
active presence behind the anthropomorphic face of
the auto. The displacement of man by automobile is
most decisively signaled in the film’s crisis, when they
reach a steep cliff where even the trusty Maxwell can
go no further. With suicide the only alternative to a
fate worse than death at the hands of the rapacious
Mexicans, the engineer offers Nell his gun – only to
discover he is out of bullets. Failed by the hero and
his phallic weapon, Nell turns to her true love, the
Maxwell, passionately embracing its ‘face’ as she
pours out her sorrows and thanks it for its loyal
service. Although a miraculous ray of sunlight points
a new path up the hill, they are soon trapped again.
A precariously perched boulder suggests itself as a
weapon against the villains below, but the hero struggles impotently against its solid mass. In a flash of
inspiration that had apparently not occurred to the
engineer, who watches anxiously from the sidelines,
Nell leaps into the Maxwell; together, woman and car
ram the boulder until it falls to crush the villains below.
Much as Kay Armatage has suggested of the faithful
dog in Shipman’s Back to God’s Country (1919), the
automobile can be seen as both a partner in an
intersubjective relationship and an extension of the
heroine herself: ‘the representation of the excessive
desire of femininity, a transgressive desire which
exceeds the capacity for satisfaction through relations with the woman’s human lover/husband’.29
What makes Something New so remarkable is not
only its attribution of such subjectivity to a machine
but also its insistent identification of the automobile
as feminine, repeatedly ignoring the masculine
brand name to define the Maxwell as ‘she’ and ‘the
real heroine of this story’. Constructing the Maxwell
as both prosthetic extension of the heroine and
feminised lover, the film figures their relationship as
a multivalent field of homo- and auto-erotic desire
surpassing the love of men.
While Back to God’s Country had resolved its
subversive interspecies romance in a cozy domestic
scene – the hero and heroine snuggle by the fire while
the dog watches over a new baby – the conclusion
of Something New represents a far more ambivalent
179
30
structure of containment. ‘Was the real heroine of
this left, like a bloomin’ bird, on a mountain top?’ a
title asks. A long shot of the Maxwell driving into the
foreground reassures us, ‘No Sir-ee! She got ‘em in
and she got ‘em out!’ Far from displacing the heterosexual couple, the automobile is figured as the natural vehicle of a reconstituted nuclear family: the hero
now drives while the heroine holds his dog. Yet a dog
is not quite a baby, and its conspicuously sudden
reappearance – having been absent since calling the
hero to the heroine’s aid back in the first reel –
suggests the tenuousness of the film’s desperate
effort to defuse the queer intimacy of woman and
machine. Equally conspicuous is the phallic signifier
under whose auspices the new ‘family’ is reconstituted: as they drive into the foreground, Nell rises to
look in the distance and an iris shot reveals the
American flag waving in the distance. The hero puts
his arm paternally around woman and dog, and they
all gaze rapturously at Old Glory.
While we might dismiss this as merely a conventional gesture toward a patriotic postwar audience, the scene brings into sharp focus the
nationalist and imperialist discourses implicit
throughout a film set on the contested frontier of the
U.S./Mexico border during an epoch of bloody revolution. Mexico is described first as a ‘land of rogues
and romance, mystery and murder’ and later as ‘the
Country God Forgot’, in sharp contrast to the majestic U.S. and Canadian forests of Shipman’s ‘God’s
Country’ films. Both the rugged terrain and the
swarthy, horseback-riding villains are figured as hostile, lawless forces that must be conquered by American technology – whether mining operation or
automobile. The writing woman discovers that her
racialised national virtue cannot protect her from this
lawless otherness: ‘You forget that I am an American!’ she ineffectually defies her leering captor just
before the hero and automobile arrive to save her.
Yet while merely being American is no protection, the
heroine triumphs by learning to act American – using
technology to master savage nature and conquer
threatening Others. While such jingoism may seem
odd on the part of the Canadian-born Shipman, it
must be understood as part of a complex negotiation
with American sponsors, industry, and target audience in a postwar America striving to incorporate
both new technology and female emancipation in the
service of a patriarchal, imperialist, capitalist
hegemony.
At the same time, the film evokes a far more
ambivalent historical resonance in its recurrent images of the capable woman driver and her bandaged, bleeding and often unconscious male
passenger: the highly visible role of female ambulance drivers in World War I. While such women were
praised for giving up frivolous pursuits in service of
the nation, they also evoked a host of postwar cultural anxieties about women’s entry into ‘masculine’
roles vacated by absent, incapacitated, and even
literally castrated men. With a generation of young
men physically and psychologically damaged just as
the nation sought to consolidate its global power,
such heroines were both needed and reviled and,
frequently, demonised as lesbians.31 In this light,
there is considerable tension between the film’s celebration of the New Woman’s passionate attachment
to the feminised vehicle of her independence and its
insistence upon channeling that power in the service
of a patriarchal, capitalist imperialism. While she
uses technology in the service of man and nation, the
heroine’s erotic attachment to the pleasures of that
technology exceed the hegemonic uses to which it
is put.
Most importantly, the film does not end with
the reunited American family but returns to the solitary pleasures whence it began, recasting the identification of New Woman and new technology in the
figure of the woman author/filmmaker. Man, dog and
flag disappear as the film announces its ambiguous
‘MORAL’: ‘Be it MOTOR – ’ ‘ – or MAID – ’ ‘THERE IS
ALWAYS SOMETHING NEW!’ A ‘closeup’ of the Maxwell’s ‘face’, framed to cut off its human passengers,
zooms into the foreground. The ‘motor’ is graphically
matched by the image of the ‘maid’ Shipman, pounding excitedly at her typewriter until both machine and
operator begin to tumble over the edge of the desk
toward the camera. The typewriter here seems to
Fig. 2. The
author with her
automotive and
cinematic
machines. Nell
Shipman on te
location of
Something New.
[Courtesy of the
Boise State
University
Library, Nell
Shipman Archive.]
180
Jennifer Parchesky
substitute for the motion picture camera as a visible
reminder of the mechanical mediation of the female
imagination: like the automobile, the typewriter is not
a substitute for female agency but a prosthetic extension of herself, an autoerotic vehicle of pleasurable
creative power. The final title is punctuated with an
equally exclamatory final close-up: Shipman laughs
radiantly into the camera as she nearly falls over the
desk herself, completely uninhibited in the overflowing pleasure of her creative activity.
The solitary pleasure of the scene is underscored by the conspicuous absence of Shipman’s
lover, Bert Van Tuyle, a former race-car driver who
plays the hero and was credited as co-writer and
co-director of the film. Appearing in the opening
frame only as driver of the car that inspires the story,
Van Tuyle’s disappearance in the closing frame echoes biographical evidence that his credits reflect less
a true creative partnership than a concession to male
vanity. Indeed, the historical Van Tuyle, whose alcoholism and poor business sense would ultimately
contribute to the downfall of Nell Shipman Productions, resembles less the capable engineer who rides
to the rescue than the incapacitated burden he becomes after his head injury, a passenger in a vehicle
clearly driven by Shipman.32 While the fictional conclusion restores the hero to the driver’s seat, the
framing narrative depicts a far more subversive fantasy: male partner, sponsors and imperialist ideologies melt away as woman, automobile, typewriter
and camera blur together in an ecstatic jouissance
of autoerotic creativity.
By the mid-1920s, the heyday of powerful
women directors and producers had passed. Those
who established independent studios in the late
1910s, including Shipman and Lois Weber, succumbed to the box-office slump of the early 1920s,
while the increasingly rigid division of Hollywood
labour made it more difficult for others to move from
acting or screenwriting into postions of greater
authority. Perhaps, as some have speculated,
women were simply pushed out of what were by then
recognised as highly powerful positions in a lucrative
industry.33 Nevertheless, a few women – mainly
screenwriters and actors – continued to exert significant creative control well into and beyond the 1920s,
albeit by negotiating their visions with the demands
of powerful male studio heads and the ever more
codified conventions of Hollywood filmmaking. My
final reading examines the effects of these changes
on the discourses of female authorship and auto-
eroticism in Frances Marion’s Zander the Great
(1925). Some may question my claim of ‘authorship’
for Marion, an established screenwriter who, after
successfully directing three films in 1920–21, had
renounced the overt authority of the director’s chair
– and the resistance such authority provoked – in
favor of a less visible behind-the-scenes power.34 On
Zander, she is somewhat ambiguously credited as
‘editorial director’ of a film produced by William Randolph Hearst, directed by George Hill (an inexperienced former cameraman whom Marion promoted
and would later marry), scripted by Lillie Hayward,
and starring Marion Davies. Yet it is clear that Marion
was the driving force behind the film: conceiving the
story, co-authoring the script, selecting cast and
director, ‘suggesting shots and angles’, and negotiating ongoing conflicts between the insecure Hill and
the tyrannical Hearst.35 The film marks the culmination of Marion’s long struggle with Hearst over the
direction of Davies’ career, which began when he
hired her as a writer in 1916 and continued after her
promotion to head of Cosmopolitan’s West Coast
production in 1923. While Hearst longed to ‘smother’
his young mistress in opulent costume dramas –
constructing her as aesthetic object – Marion fought
for vehicles that would allow Davies’ comedic talents
to shine. Zander epitomises the success of that
struggle and was praised as a ‘personal triumph’ for
Davies.36
Although the film makes only brief use of motor
vehicles, the scenes in which they appear – and their
subsequent disappearance – reveal a complex negotiation between the diffuse energies of autoeroticism and the centripetal pressures of patriarchal
femininity. Davies plays an impish orphan who
blooms into womanhood, simultaneously imitating
and subverting Mary Pickford’s idealised ‘child impersonations’. With her plain, freckled face, pigtails,
scrawny form and aggressive movements – all exposed in harsh, unflattering shots – young Mamie
defies the aesthetic objectification of the ‘pedophilic
gaze’ that Gaylyn Studlar has associated with ‘Little
Mary’, even as her activities demonstrate a precocious sexual drive.37 In the opening scene, Mamie is
distracted from her labour in the orphanage laundry
by a delivery man who gives her a lollipop and shows
her his marvelous motorcycle. When he walks away,
Mamie (with some nudging from her companions)
climbs atop the motorcycle and begins to bounce
vigorously upon the seat, sucking her lollipop intently. The scene not-so-subtly evokes the wide-
spread turn-of-the-century anxieties about women’s
bicycling, which decried not only the subversive freedom of movement the new vehicle offered but also
the dangerous masturbatory possibilities of the bicycle seat – pleasures and dangers both enhanced
here by motorization.38 Yet there is no effort to construct Mamie’s autoerotic pleasure as coy invitation
to an objectifying gaze: she is intensely focused on
her own activity, her only observers the other girls
who clamor for a turn as she absentmindedly slaps
them away. Mamie’s frenzied autoerotic activity is
soon disrupted, however, by the repressive figure of
the matron, whose appearance startles Mamie to
shift into gear and take off on a wild ride across the
yard. The film revels in the terrifying yet pleasurable
thrill of the forbidden ride: pigtails flying, circling
wildly, she crashes through fences and laundry lines,
knocks down the matron, and generally wreaks
havoc until she bumps into a basket of laundry and
falls in a heap.
The motorcycle disappears as Mamie’s autoerotic pleasure is, in classic Freudian fashion, first
repressed – the matron binds her hands and locks
her in a closet – then sublimated into a more ‘mature’
domestic femininity, when she is adopted by the
gentle Mrs. Caldwell and given a baby – little Alexander Caldwell – to care for. But Mamie’s transformation from ‘cabbage’ into ‘rose’ is disrupted by Mrs.
Caldwell’s death, and she must again take the wheel.
When the orphanage threatens to take Zander,
Mamie sets out in an old Ford to deliver her young
charge to his father, who is seeking his fortune in the
West. Although the arduous automobile journey is
represented somewhat elliptically – the distance
from New Jersey to Arizona comically signaled by
Zander’s rapidly multiplying pet rabbits – the film
highlights the challenges of early cross-country motoring. (The rabbits also provide a visual reminder of
Mamie’s precocious sexual awareness: when later
asked if she traveled alone, she ingenuously exclaims, ‘Alone! Say, mister, have you ever traveled
with a couple of rabbits?’) While we do not see
Mamie’s face during the sequence, her subjective
point-of-view is evoked by the ironic juxtaposition of
a sign – ’Welcome Visitors! You are now enjoying our
splendid highways’ – with jerking shots of the rocky,
rutted dirt track through the windshield and long
shots of the tiny car bumping across the desert. Like
Mabel at the Wheel and Something New, Zander
sensationalises the dangers facing the woman who
‘travels alone’: with no service stations for miles,
Mamie stops to beg for food and rest at a rancho
inhabited by a gang of bootleggers. As she enters
the dark, gothic building, the Ford is visible behind
her, steam pouring from its engine to indicate the
impossibility of escape. While her mud-spattered
face, goggles and cloak testify to the rigors of her
journey and emphasise the smallness of her form as
she is greeted at gunpoint, they also serve as armor
against her feminine softness, recalling the spunky
orphan within.
The Ford soon disappears as Mamie is reinscribed in the realm of domestic femininity: the
gang’s leader, Dan, finds woman and child a convenient blind against the law and persuades Mamie
that he is Zander’s father; she moves in as cook and
housekeeper and the two gradually fall in love. Yet
the independent spirit articulated in those early
scenes of auto-eroticism remains in constant tension
with her new role as angel in the house. She domesticates the gang almost forcibly and, when she discovers their illegal activities, threatens to report them
to the law. Finally, when she and Zander are taken
hostage by Mexican banditos, she escapes, steals a
horse, and rides, still bound and gagged, to seek
help. Ultimately, Dan promises to give up his wicked
ways and begs Mamie to stay, for he ‘need[s]’ her to
‘help [him] build a home’. Much as in Something
New, white American woman and man unite to conquer racialised villains and domesticate the wilderness. Mamie, Dan and Zander ride off into the sunset
– albeit on horses rather than in an automobile –
followed by the proliferating herd of rabbits which fills
the foreground as the new family recedes into the
distance. Much as turn-of-the-century magazine fiction had ‘reframed women’s bicycling as a trip that
would end in married happiness’, Zander the Great
rechannels Mamie’s precocious autoeroticism into
reproductive heterosexuality.39
We should not be too hasty, however, to dismiss the film’s closure as subordinating the heroine’s
desire and agency to the imperatives of the patriarchal order. Mamie remains the subject of her own
desires even as they are redirected heterosexually:
when Zander interrupts the couple’s kiss with demands of his own, she dismisses him – ‘Not now,
honey, Mamie’s awful busy’ – and returns to her new
love object much as she brushed away the clamoring
girls who interfered with her solitary pleasure on the
motorcycle. Moreover, their relationship is founded
less upon Dan’s rescue of Mamie than his acknowledgement of his own need. In contrast to the classi-
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Jennifer Parchesky
cal Hollywood construction of woman as a chaotic
force to be investigated, punished, or saved, woman
here emerges as a powerful force of civilising order
desperately needed (and ultimately, desired) by the
lawless masculine West – much as she had in Something New.40
While this construction of woman as driving
force of civilisation seems less sexy than the anarchic
jouissance of unfettered autoeroticism, it was a central theme of first-wave feminism, which justified
women’s empowerment not merely as an exercise of
personal freedom but as a force for reinventing a
society corrupted by masculine violence and greed.
Indeed, the notion of women as the vanguard of
moral and social reform was central to the self-concept and public perception of many early women
filmmakers, who were viewed as bulwarks against
the corruption and anarchy of both industry and
society. The Universal City women candidates ran on
a platform to ‘clean up’ the company town, and
directors like Lois Weber and Dorothy Davenport
Reid made their careers with sweeping polemics for
such causes as birth control and economic reform
and against drug abuse, capital punishment, ‘white
slavery’, and political corruption.41 Such efforts, in an
era of war, greed and seething social inequities,
represented less a Victorian conservatism than a
quite radical progressivism, though they were often,
like much of the progressive movement, complicit
with racist and imperialist agendas. In this light, both
the narrative of Zander the Great and Marion’s strategy of working for power within the system rather
than striking for independence can be seen as consistent with the general direction of first-wave feminism, which responded to the victory of suffrage by
assuming (albeit erroneously) that women had become equal partners and could now turn from the
pursuit of their own freedoms to become full participants in the progress of the nation.
While few early women filmmakers fared well
as a patriarchal capitalism gained a firmer control of
the diverse energies of cinematic creativity – and
those who did, only by subordinating their autonomous dreams to the imperatives of Hollywood convention – their works survive as material traces of the
powerful desires and utopian visions of our feminist
foremothers. As such, they represent a valuable resource for a feminist film theory and practice long
impoverished by the fear that our cinematic pleasures are always already compromised by patriarchy.
We need not sift through the cracks and fissures of
patriarchal discourse to reconstruct feminist pleasure – it is right there before us (especially in the first
two films) in the radiant image of the woman in the
driver’s seat, unselfconsciously reveling in the manifold pleasures of speed and power, not a fetishised
object of the male gaze but a subject of her own
desires, an ‘ideal-I’ calling forth both the desire and
the identification of the female spectator. Female
automobility thus serves as a paradigm of a pleasure
defined by neither commodity fetishism (though
commodities facilitate pleasure, they are not in themselves objects of desire), nor a heterosexual dichotomy of active male subject and passive female
object (though it can encompass heterosexual desire), nor even a narcissism that turns self into object.
Instead, these auto-erotic fantasies offer paradigms
of female pleasures and powers that elude the subject-object oppositions of the phallocentric imagination. Moreover, the autoerotic pleasure of becoming
one with the speed and power of the machine provides a potent metaphor for female creativity – like
Shipman in the framing narrative, the artist becomes
one with the creative drives that emerge from both
within and beyond herself.
While the eroticised linkage of woman and
machine has been a recurrent trope in feminist filmmaking from Christopher Strong (1933) to Thelma
and Louise (1991), such films seem unable to imagine any but tragic outcomes for their heroines’ desires. In contrast, early women’s films offer a vision
of female automobility not merely as self-destructive
flight from patriarchal oppression but as a galvanising experience of freedom and satisfaction that empowers women to take up more powerful roles within
their societies. As Audre Lorde has suggested,
The erotic is an internal sense of satisfaction
to which, once we have experienced it, we
know we can aspire ... Once we know the
extent to which we are capable of feeling that
sense of satisfaction and completion, we can
then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.42
The films I examine suggest that narrative closure need neither purge subversive female energies
nor bind them safely back into an unchanged patriarchal order; rather, the energies unleashed by
woman and machine provide the engine of a new,
utopian future. The victorious Mabel, cheered by men
and women alike, the impassioned ‘writing woman’
pounding away at her typewriter, even the domesti-
cated Mamie, riding off into the sunset with the men
that she loves – all signify the promise of a future still
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184
Jennifer Parchesky
that both ‘white-slave films’ and many serials exploit
this threat; see Chapters 2 & 3.
unwritten but one in which women will surely be a
driving force.
22.
Drew Chapter 3; see also Fussell, 44–45, 54–55,
60–62.
23.
On Nell Shipman’s distribution troubles, see Kay
Armatage, ‘Nell Shipman: A Case of Heroic Femininity’ (1995), rpt. in Armatage et al, ed., Gendering
the Nation: Canadian Women’s Cinema (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1999), 22–23.
24.
Like the ‘writing woman’, serial heroines were often
imperiled by their own quest for adventure (Stamp
126). On the sadomasochistic aspects of the serial
queen tradition, see Singer 93, 124.
25.
Slide 68–69. Shipman had used a similar financing
strategy in the 1920 short Trail of the Arrow, in which
two women in an Essex Arrow counter a chauvinist’s
dismissal of women drivers by beating him in a
cross-country race (Drew Chapter 10).
26.
Scharff, 47, 84; McConnell, Chapter 2. Drew also
notes that Mary Pickford’s first highly publicised car
was a 1915 Maxwell nicknamed ‘Fifi’ (Chapter 2).
27.
Scharff, 64–66.
28.
The intimate companionship of woman and automobile is anticipated in the accounts of pioneering
women motorists like actress Anita King, who told
reporters that ‘what [she] enjoyed most’ about her
transcontinental solo voyage was ‘the daily companionship with my motor. You cannot realise how close
we seemed. There were many, many times in my
long and tiresome trip, when had my motor failed
me I would surely have perished, as I was miles
beyond help, and as I realised how perfectly to be
depended upon my KisselKar was, I grew more and
more pals with my car.’ Qtd. in McConnell 129.
Notes
1.
2.
For a fuller history, see Virginia Scharff, Taking the
Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age
(New York: Free Press, 1991), especially Chpater 4.
See also Curt McConnell, ‘A Reliable Car and a
Woman Who Knows How to Drive It’: The First Coastto-Coast Auto Trips By Women, 1899–1916 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000).
The best extant analysis of both publicity and screen
images of women drivers is William Drew, ‘The
Speeding Sweethearts of the Silent Screen:
1908–1921’,
http://www.welcometosilentmovies.
com/features/sweethearts/sweethearts.htm (downloaded 12 September 2005). The automobility of
Holmes and other ‘serial queens’ is discussed in
Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000), 143, 148. The most
detailed discussion of King’s journey is in McConnell,
Chapter 4; he notes that reports of King’s adventures
were greatly exaggerated by the army of studio
publicists who followed on separate cars throughout
the journey (103).
6.
For a standard account of this timeline, see Slide
Chapter 1.
7.
My understanding of the relationship between narrative form and conditions of production draws on
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell, 1981). The incorporation of feminist
discourse in the 1920s is discussed in Scharff Chapter 8 and in Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern
Feminism (New Haven: Yale, 1987), Chapter 5.
8.
Christine Gledhill surveys this shift in ‘Pleasurable
Negotiations’ (1988), rpt. in Sue Thornham, ed.,
Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (New York: New York
University Press, 1999), 166–179.
9.
Cf. Gledhill, 170–171.
10.
11.
3.
4.
5.
For example, the Moving Picture Girls dime novel
series by Laura Lee Hope (1914–1915) represented
the adventures of early filmmaking in terms much
like those of the contemporaneous ‘Automobile Girls’
and ‘Motor Girls’ series. On the latter, see Nancy
Tilman Romanov, ‘Mobile Heroines: Early TwentiethCentury Girls’ Automobile Series’, Journal of Popular
Culture Vol. 28 No. 4 (Spring 1995): 231–243. On
publicity discourse about the real dangers faced by
actresses performing their own stunts, see Jennifer
Bean, ‘Technologies of Stardom and the Extraordinary Body’, Camera Obscura 48 (2001): 9–56.
The first quotation is from Ida May Park, ‘The Motion-Picture Director’, in Catherine Filene, Careers for
Women (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), 335–337,
rpt. in Anthony Slide, The Silent Feminists: America’s
First Women Directors (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow,
1996), 143–146. The second is from Alice Guy Blaché
who cites her own work in the ‘laboratory of the
Gaumont Company ... when motion picture photography was in the experimental phase’, in ‘Woman’s
Place in Photoplay Production’, Moving Picture World
Vol. 21, No. 3 (11 July 1914): 195, rpt. in Slide
139–142.
On automobile tours, see Scharff 79–87; on suffrage
films, see Stamp, Chapter 4. Among the national
news reports of the Universal City election is ‘In
Woman’s Realm’, New York Telegraph (10 June
1913).
Mrs. Sherman A. Hitchcock, ‘A Woman’s Viewpoint
of Motoring’, Motor (April 1904): 19, qtd. in Scharff
27–28. Similarly, race-car driver Joan Cuneo asserted that ‘if women could realise the exhilaration
that comes from being able to handle a 60-horsepower touring car, the sight of a woman driver would
be anything but a novelty’ (qtd. in Scharff 29).
Audre Lorde, ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’
(1984), rpt. in Katie Conboy, et al, Writing on the Body:
Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (New York:
Columbia, 1997), 278.
12.
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). Translated by James Strachey (New
York: Basic Books, 1962), 99, 47.
13.
Freud, 67–70.
14.
Freud, 63, 73; Luce Irigaray, ‘This Sex Which Is Not
One’ (1977), rpt. in Conboy et al, 252–253.
29.
Armatage, 30–34.
15.
Irigaray, 254.
30.
Armatage, 34, 24.
16.
Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, rpt. in Thornham 59; Gledhill 173.
31.
17.
Moving Picture World (13 December 1913), qtd. in
Slide 119.
18.
Drew Chapter 2; see also Betty Harper Fussell,
Mabel: Hollywood’s First I-Don’t-Care Girl (NY: Limelight, 1992), 72–73.
On women ambulance drivers, see Scharff 107, who
notes that screenwriter Anita Loos made humorous
use of this association in her 1925 novel Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes. My reading of the castration anxiety
in this discourse is indebted to Kaja Silverman’s
analysis of ‘historical trauma’ in World War II films in
Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Rout-
19.
Drew notes that this unscripted accident points to
an additional source of resentment for Chaplin, who
at that time had even less experience with motor
vehicles than he did with filmmaking (Chapter 3).
20.
Moving Picture World (13 December 1913), qtd. in
Slide 119. Women directors at Universal were similarly welcomed by male cast and crew (Slide 41–42).
21.
Ben Singer, ‘Female Power in the Serial-Queen Melodrama: The Etiology of an Anomaly’, Camera Obscura 22 (January 1990): 122. Stamp demonstrates
ledge, 1992). Ben Singer traces the trope of female
heroism as response to male incapacity from the
serial queen back to Augustin Daly’s 1867 stage play
Under the Gaslight. It is worth noting that this early
image articulates together technology, feminism and
the trauma of war: the man the heroine rescues from
the train tracks is a disabled Civil War veteran who
marvels, ‘And these are the women who ain’t to have
the vote!’ (qtd. in Singer 109–110).
32.
Armatage, 23. Director Lois Weber made a similar
concession to male vanity in granting undeserved
co-credit to her husband, Phillips Smalley. See Slide
32.
33.
Slide 134–135; Ally Acker, Reel Women (New York:
Continuum, 1993). On the fate of independent studios, see Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)
13 and Peter Morris’s introduction to Nell Shipman,
The Silent Screen and My Talking Heart (Boise: Boise
State University Press, 1988).
34.
Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances
Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood
(New York: Scribner, 1997), 130.
35.
Marion, qtd. in Beauchamp, 165–166.
36.
Beauchamp, 106, 148, 165–166, 185.
37.
Gaylyn Studlar, ‘Oh, “Doll Divine”: Mary Pickford,
Masquerade, and the Pedophilic Gaze’, Camera
Obscura vol. 48 no. 3 (2001): 197–227. The notion
of Davies’ performance as both imitation and parody
of Pickford is also suggested in Diane MacIntyre, rev.
of Zander the Great, Silents Majority: On-Line Journal
of Silent Film (1997): http:///www.mdle.com/ClassicFilms/FeaturedVideo/video128.htm, 31 October
2001, para. 5 [article no longer available at this site].
38.
Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s
to 1910s (New York: Oxford, 1996), 115–117.
39.
Garvey, 107.
40.
Cf. Mulvey, 65.
41.
Slide 10–11, 30–32, 84–89.
42.
Lorde, 278.
Abstract: Women in the driver’s seat: The auto-erotics of early women’s
films, by Jennifer Parchesky
The trope of women’s ‘automobility’ in three films centered around female drivers is examined in order to
chart the changing fortunes of women’s creative control in early Hollywood, looking in turn at Mabel
Normand, Nell Shipman and Frances Marion. Whether behind the wheel or behind the camera, women’s
mastery of exciting new technologies offered a spectacular image of New Womanhood as both practical
power and thrilling adventure.
Latitude in Mass-Produced Culture’s Capital
New Women and Other Players in Hollywood, 1920 –1941
brett l. abrams
When Your Urge’s Mauve, [go to] the Café International on Sunset Boulevard.
The location offered supper, drinks, and the ability to watch boy-girls who
necked and sulked and little girl customers who . . . look like boys.
The 1940 guidebook How to Sin in Hollywood offered tourists this description
of a commercial establishment that they could see when they visited the Hollywood area. On the opposite page, a cartoon featured two women in tuxedos
above the caption “the little girl customers.” 1 One smoked a cigar and both
wore prominent lipstick. The description and cartoon presented images of
women in the Los Angeles area who defied the culture’s gender and sexual
norms.
The description and cartoon of Café International suggested that the book’s
creators and readers accepted a link between the urban area of Hollywood,
cross-dressing females, and homosexual women and men. Hollywood, the
town, offered nightspots and other locations where Hollywood industry
figures could act upon their non-normative gender and same-sex interests. Between the early 1920s and early 1940s, the Hollywood industry publicity departments and movie-making personnel, novelists of Hollywood, and the
newspaper reporters and gossip columnists capturing Hollywood industry
people’s daily lives placed cross-dressing females and other people who defied
the culture’s prescriptions about proper gender and sexual behavior in their
depictions of Hollywood people and places. These figures—in this article
called Hollywood players— did not adhere to the automatic link between biological sex and gender behavior, such as females behaving in a conventionally
feminine manner. They eschewed heteronormativity, or the cultural prescription that bound sexual activities to a man and a woman who were already married or soon intending to be wed. These female Hollywood players used
Abrams: Latitude in Mass-Produced Culture’s Capital
Entering the Club International on Sunset Boulevard. (Jack Lord and Lloyd Hoff, How to Sin in
Hollywood, Hollywood [?], California, 1940.)
nightspots, homes, parties, and studio lots in downtown Hollywood, along
Sunset Strip, and in the exclusive areas of Hollywood Hills and Malibu Beach
to pursue their interests, and they forged a concept of Hollywood as a place of
latitude for unconventional figures. The representations of these female Hollywood players portrayed them as complex, successful figures, an unusual depiction for living persons and fictional characters who defied conventional
sexual and gender norms.
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These images flourished immediately after World War I because of changes
in the culture and the industry. The United States witnessed the breakdown of
genteel culture and its restrictions on topics of discussion in the aftermath of
the war. The new “modern” culture invited greater presentation of sexual innuendo and sexuality in the mass media. Indeed, in the first era to revision sexuality around desire and fulfillment, the culture interpreted sex as central to
personal identities. The entertainment for this culture would logically focus on
presenting such an important topic to its audiences, and news media outlets attempting to describe celebrity personalities would focus on sexual identities, as
well. By 1920, the movie studios changed their publicity approach. The divorces
and other off-screen activities of several major stars forced the industry to shift
from promoting stars as picture personalities, reflections off-screen of their
on-screen characters. Instead, the studio publicity featured the star’s supposed
everyday life and personality, with the latter necessitating the discussion of the
star’s sexual behavior, which was considered central to personal identities.2
The number and variety of media that featured Hollywood movie people
expanded significantly during the era. Newspaper coverage included regular
articles about the industry’s personalities, occupations, and products and daily
gossip columns from the six major syndicated writers on the beat. Generalinterest magazines, such as Time and Life, and the fanzines, such as Photoplay
and Silver Screen, reached millions of readers with their weekly photographs,
features, and gossip items on Hollywood. During the late 1910s, the Hollywood
novel changed its focus away from the technology of movie making to stories
about characters within the industry. Hollywood movies about the industry
increased as movie production solidified itself in the southern California
climate.3
Recent scholarship has demonstrated the development of places in urban
areas where people with same-sex sexual feelings could pursue their interests
and even establish a degree of community. Some locations, including parks
and bathhouses, offered only temporary and clandestine opportunities, predominately to males. Other locations, such as bars in vice or tourist areas, always faced the threat of official repression. A few spaces, including the social
club Heterodoxy and basement apartments in areas like Greenwich Village,
Harlem, and Chicago’s South Side, offered regular meeting places for a subsection of the nonconformist population of these cities for a short time.4 These
places rarely appeared in the media, except during local authorities’ efforts to
drive the people who defied gender and sexual norms from local bars.5
Scholars have noted that the images of women in the media changed significantly during the 1920s and 1930s. The dominant image of the “New Woman”
during the 1920s was the flapper. While flappers enjoyed greater freedom in
consumption and sexual awareness, much of their consumption and sexual
gratification focused on pleasing males, not on engaging in same-sex sexuality.
The flapper embraced a career for herself until she got married and rarely acted
in other ways that defied the newly established gender norms of the era.6 Images of women who defied the culture’s dominant images, such as matrons,
faced ridicule for representing Victorian rather than “modern” gender and
sexual attitudes.7 Figures who challenged sexual norms in literature of the era
sparked censorship efforts, despite appearing as miserable characters who
experienced emotional turmoil and became outcasts or suicide victims or
who engaged in self-loathing and despair.8 Despite the occasional movie that
showed a successful independent woman, during the period before the establishment of the Production Code Administration in the mid-1930s, most of the
adulterers, gold diggers, and other “fallen women” met unfortunate ends or
were forced to redeem themselves at the end of the movie.9
Scholars writing in the 1980s and 1990s, including Vito Russo and Andrea
Weiss, have observed that in most Hollywood productions from the early 1910s
to the mid-1970s, homosexuals led lonely lives, experienced derision, and
sometimes became victims of murder or suicide. Lesbians appeared as vampires who preyed upon innocent younger women.10 Historians of the movie
industry noted few instances of nonconformist imagery in news about the
movie industry. Generally, they determined that the industry viewed these images as detrimental to the business and observed that the industry covered up
gender and sexual nonconformity by mainstreaming the images.11
The depictions of Hollywood players created by the movie studio publicity departments, their movie-making personnel, newspaper and magazine
reporters, and other observers of the movie industry belied the findings regarding the types of urban spaces available to nonconformists and their presentation within the media. The Hollywood players of the 1920s and 1930s
illustrated that within the Los Angeles environs people engaged in alternative
gender and sexual behaviors and used nightclubs, homes, parties, and studio
lots as locations where they could act upon their interests. The media images
depicted these figures throughout the period. The players appeared successful
in their personal and professional careers, indicating that the capital of the
world’s mass-produced culture had a unique relationship to the “New
Woman” and other gender and sexual nonconformists of the era.
nightspots
The Café International nightclub appeared on one of Hollywood’s most magical streets, Sunset Boulevard. During the 1920s Hollywood’s population
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quadrupled as the area expanded west through Beverly Hills and north into the
San Fernando Valley. Los Angeles developed a manufacturing base in automobiles and aircraft, expanded its oil refinery industry, and emerged as one of the
top tourist locations in the country. Los Angeles also developed the Mediterranean and Spanish Revival architectural styles and Southland literature.
Movie-making became the eleventh largest industry in the nation. The large
studios transformed the “barn” structures of the early 1910s into the series of
buildings and sets behind tall gates, giving the studios the look of fiefdoms. The
production wings of the big eight studios functioned like factories. Each studio employed nearly three thousand people, and a single department, such as
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s makeup department, could handle twelve hundred
actors in an hour.
The growth of the movie industry brought more people and money to the
Los Angeles area. As the movie industry grew, related industries, including costume and prop stores, expanded. Between 1917 and the early 1930s, the number
of restaurants and lunchrooms quadrupled. They spread, as did nightclubs,
from the Spring Street area in downtown Los Angeles to two major sections of
Hollywood. The blocks around the intersection of Hollywood and Vine in
downtown Hollywood contained luxurious hotels, elaborate beauty parlors,
shops, and widely publicized restaurants such as the Brown Derby. The old
town of Sherman, later to become West Hollywood, clustered its stores, nightclubs, and restaurants in groups along Santa Monica and Sunset Boulevards.12
Stars continued to go to clubs during the 1920s in towns like Vernon and
Culver City to slum in the cabarets and speakeasies.13 However, by 1930, Hollywood had “more Neon lights than Broadway. . . . It is gayer, newer, brighter,
and younger than anything in the history of man.” 14 The majority of the “in”
places congregated along the Sunset Strip, a three-square-mile area that bordered Hollywood and Beverly Hills. The area remained outside the city of Los
Angeles and was policed by the Los Angeles County sheriff. Many famous stars
greeted the boys in the patrol cars by name in this unincorporated area of West
Hollywood. Such familiar relationships reflected the power relationships of the
city and the capacity of people from all walks of life to become star struck and
led to a more relaxed attitude toward the enforcement of certain laws. The
Sunset Strip gained notoriety as one of the most famous hot spots in the country. Of the nightclubs in the area, The Barn, La Bohème, the Club New Yorker,
and the Back Yard Café all featured cross-dressing performers and clientele.
Despite the protests of religious figures and other citizens that the bars and
nightclubs, gambling houses, and houses of ill repute invaded the best residential districts, the Strip drew the stars, the aristocracy, and the politicians.
Hollywood, the industry, and the newspapers and magazines that covered it
promoted these locations to maintain fan interest and boost the sales of its
products.15
One of the most famous night spots in Hollywood served its customers in a
building shaped like a man’s hat. The Brown Derby restaurant attracted actors,
directors, producers, and screenwriters of the industry from noon until the
early morning hours. The Vine Street location reserved its booths and the
north wall front tables for stars and executives, while others sat in the center.
All hoped to get noticed.16 One of the earliest scenes in the movie What Price
Hollywood? occurred inside this restaurant: Drunken motion picture director
Max Carey walks in throwing gardenias he bought from an old woman outside. Smiling, he greets the people he knows. He briefly exits the screen. (The
viewer sees a section of the restaurant as the shot switches from a medium to a
long shot.) Carey continues walking around the restaurant and bumps into the
mannishly attired woman as she rises from her table. His mouth drops as he
steps back and says, “I beg your pardon, old man.” As she straightens her suit
jacket, Max slowly looks down then up her torso and rolls his eyes back in his
head. Reaches out his hand and taps her elbow. “Pardon me, who’s your tailor?” She turns her back and strides out as he smirks then carries on giving out
the flowers.17
The creative team behind What Price Hollywood? (RKO, 1932) attempted to
“tell the truth about Hollywood.” 18 Producer David O. Selznick thought the
“trouble with most films about Hollywood was that they gave a false picture,
that they burlesqued it, or they oversentimentalized [sic] it. . . . And my notion . . . dialogue was actually straight out of life and was straight ‘reportage.’”
Evidently, Selznick and the movie-making personnel at RKO purposely included an image of a woman in men’s attire in their movie because they
thought it captured the essence of what occurred in Hollywood.
The movie places its audience inside the most famous Hollywood eatery in
downtown Hollywood. The scene puts a variety of Hollywood types on display,
including a lecherous agent, an egotistical actor, and a producer with his sycophant dining in a booth. The presence of the mannishly dressed woman indicates that these women are part of Hollywood nightlife. Her introduction
differs from the presentation of other Hollywood types. Carey briefly exits before returning into view and immediately bumping into the woman in a man’s
suit. Of all the Hollywood types presented in this scene, the movie tries to surprise its viewers only when it introduces the Hollywood player.
The separation of this woman’s image from the other industry types illustrates the significance of the role of Hollywood players in Hollywood nightlife. The image makes the restaurant seem like a wild and fantastic place. The
woman’s mannish dress hints that she had lesbian interests. The difference in
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her introduction indicates that the image represents a unique type of person
and spurs the belief that Hollywood nightlife is wild because it contains special
places where people who act on taboo interests dine. The player image provides audiences with the perception of Hollywood nightlife as fantastic by giving them the experience of seeing a person who pushes the culture’s sexual
boundaries beyond their everyday experience.
The scene at the Brown Derby and the image of the mannishly-dressed, presumptively lesbian enhanced the picture’s reputation for RKO. The scene corroborated the perception of Hollywood held by many people around the
world. As critics for the trade magazine Motion Picture Herald informed theater owners, What Price Hollywood? was a serio-burlesque load of inside dope
on what folks everywhere thought Hollywood was. The box office returns from
most U.S. cities validated the trade reviewers’ perceptions that the motion picture would fulfill audience expectations.19
The image sacrifices truth for entertainment value. The mannish female
character’s tailored suit is too large for her, prompting Carey’s quip about
wanting to know about her tailor. Among the Hollywood women wearing
masculine tailored suits during the era, actress Marlene Dietrich, director
Dorothy Arzner, and screen writer Mercedes de Acosta wore suits with impeccably sharp lines and style. Certainly producer David Selznick, director George
Cukor, and the four screenwriters knew about the sharp style affected by
women in men’s clothing. But the production team, wanting to add humor to
the scene, chose to make her the object of the joke. Still, the mannish woman
in the movie had more positive attributes than depictions of lesbians in the
popular culture of the era: she had an attractive face and a torso that was neither overly boyish nor overweight; she treated herself well, dining at a hot spot;
and she had a place within the motion picture industry community.
Hollywood women in masculine attire appeared occasionally in newspaper
and magazine gossip columns. While validating the image from What Price
Hollywood? the gossip items exchanged information, fostered understandings
of the conception of Hollywood, and created a community among its readers.
With items such as “Director Dorothy Arzner, who favored ‘man-tailored
suits,’ dined with actress friends at La Maze,” “[Arzner] lunched with a variety
of women friends, including actress Claudette Colbert, at the exclusive Vendomes,” and “Director George Cukor and screenwriter Zoe Akins held a party
for their friend actress Tallulah Bankhead [who frequently donned mannish
attire] at a downtown French café” 20 they placed women in men’s clothing at a
variety of Hollywood’s eateries and watering holes. Like the character in What
Price Hollywood?, the gossip items associated Hollywood nightlife with the
thrill of seeing women who defied the norm for women’s attire. Frequently,
adoption of such clothing signaled a same-sex sexual interest, so that readers
also received the titillation of encountering females who pursued taboo sexual
interests.
Items like the three above benefited the movie industry and the media organizations. The publicity focused readers’ attention on movie industry figures. The items seemed to present specific knowledge about the women’s
activities, providing readers with what they wanted and presumably keeping
them reading the news outlet for more information. As Richard Schickel argued in Intimate Strangers, readers wanted knowledge about celebrities in their
daily lives. This desire defined Hollywood publicity departments and the media’s presentation of celebrity pieces. The items could not be too sensational,
or readers would disbelieve it and would not get the experience that they
sought from reading. The disappointment would presumably motivate them
to seek another source of information and thus stop reading the original media source.21
Publicity items about the mannishly attired women in Hollywood nightclubs and restaurants portrayed them as successful people, Hollywood players
who enjoyed fine lives in Hollywood. Important industry figures, the women
worked for the major movie studios on big-budget pictures, earning large salaries that enabled them to dine at exclusive nightspots. They forged friendships, attended and hosted parties, and built a community of like-minded
women in Hollywood.
The mannishly dressed woman in Hollywood nightlife reached its apex with
the publicity featuring Marlene Dietrich. Certainly, people knew that Dietrich
could cross-dress. In two other successful Hollywood movies, she wore tuxedos. As early as the fall of 1930, gossip columnist Louella Parsons noted Dietrich’s preference for pants in her daily life. During those early years Paramount
avoided discussing Dietrich’s clothing preferences. However, in late 1932, Dietrich had a box office failure with her movie Blonde Venus. Paramount signed
Dietrich to an expensive five-year contract and severed her relationship with
the director, Josef Von Sternberg. The studio sought an image with which to
promote their star, and the studio’s publicity department launched a huge
publicity campaign for Dietrich’s new movie, Song of Songs (1933). The publicists featured her clothing, knowing that most successful publicity campaigns
revolved around an aspect of the star’s personality, because, as noted earlier,
that was the information that the public sought. As one industry columnist
stated, “The truth about that masculine attire which Marlene Dietrich affects
these day is this. She liked wearing that sort of clothes—trousers. Paramount
objected. Marlene insisted on trotting about in pants. Finally they gave up. ‘Oh
well,’ sighed Paramount, ‘then we’ll make a cult of it— exploit Marlene in
men’s clothes.’” 22
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Paramount’s publicity department staged their events in the same places in
downtown Hollywood and along the Strip that the earlier depictions of women
in men’s clothing occurred. In January 1933, a few articles and several industry
columnists chronicled Dietrich’s attire. A tabloid piece provided abundant detail about Dietrich’s apparel. “Marlene Dietrich gave the photo snappers and
autograph hounds a real thrill yesterday by appearing at the Brown Derby with
long gray flannel trousers, blue sweater, cap to match, dark gray mannish coat
and her attorney, Ralph Blum.” 23 An item in the Los Angeles Times offered
more context. “Lunching with Mamoulian [Dietrich was] still wearing trousers
and coats and evidently having them made to order. It is said she has just ordered two or three Tuxedo suits to wear in the evening. It is also said that she
ate considerable humble pie in coming back to Paramount.” 24 Another tabloid
item suggested a reaction to readers as it informed them that Dietrich’s Hollywood nightlife style caused heads to turn. “Marlene Dietrich created a mild sensation when she arrived at the El Mirador hotel in Palm Springs. . . . She wore
masculine attire for all occasions at the desert resort.” 25 These items accomplished the studio’s goal of having the star receive significant media coverage,
and reporting the actress wearing men’s clothing at Hollywood restaurants
made Hollywood nightlife appear wild and decadent in a humorous manner.26
The studio offered readers an interpretation of these images that did not
promote the connection between Hollywood nightlife and the star’s romantic
life. Paramount’s publicity department framed this “new” Dietrich image as
the start of a fashion trend. Despite clothing that stretched gender conventions
for women, the publicity department still linked Dietrich’s image with a cultural understanding of woman as display object of consumer culture products.
Some contemporaries writing on Dietrich’s masculine attire interpreted the
image similarly. “‘Will it be overalls next?’ an industry columnist wondered.
‘Depends probably on how much publicity Katharine Hepburn gets out of her
favorite garb. Anyway, they seem to be organizing a publicity campaign on
them. It’s probably rivalry for Dietrich’s trousers.’” 27
Others perceived that the “new” Dietrich image offered hints about Dietrich’s sexual activities. The images spurred readers to connect the star’s romantic life with Hollywood nightlife, turning that nightlife into a site for
fantasies. Dietrich’s occasional beau and confidant Maurice Chevalier expressed the star’s interest in heterosexual males. “I told Marlene myself that if
she would wear men’s clothes and women’s garments even to the extent of fiftyfifty, I would find it the most attractive and charming idea. . . . [S]he looks wonderful in men’s attire.” 28 Director Josef von Sternberg noted that Dietrich’s
adoption of masculine dress also appealed to another romantic interest. Von
Sternberg described his motive for Dietrich in male tuxedos in two motion
Marlene Dietrich, Paramount Pictures Promotional shot,
c. 1932. (Mercedes de Acosta Collection, Rosenbach Museum
and Library.)
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pictures. “The formal male finery fitted her with much charm, and I not only
wished to touch lightly on a Lesbian accent, . . . but also to demonstrate that
her sensual appeal was not entirely due to the classic formation of her legs.” 29
The Dietrich image positioned the Hollywood player in Hollywood nightlife
but also gave that nightlife an appeal to those readers with player interests of
their own.
The Dietrich images revealed that Paramount’s publicity department devised a campaign around presenting one of the industry’s biggest stars as a
Hollywood player. The decision to promote their star’s habit of wearing tailored suits and slacks in restaurants and other locations illustrated both the
studio’s intentional use of Hollywood player imagery and the promotional
value of the imagery. The Dietrich campaign worked. People remembered the
images.
Other creators used the Dietrich Hollywood player image and connected it
to Hollywood nightlife. In mid-1933, the great songwriting team of Richard
Rogers and Lorenz Hart wrote “I’m One of the Boys” for the motion picture
Hollywood Party. The song chronicled the activities of a woman “who was One
of the Boys, girls. I go to the tailor that Marlene employs because no dresses
from France are so modern as these. And under my pants are BVD’s. . . . Now I
take my brandy at the bar. Dice, cards, and tobacco are my favorite toys. . . .”
The possibility that the song might appear in the movie caused the Studio Relations Committee’s head to write to MGM executive Eddie Mannix. As the
chief of the censorship organization for the industry, he advised Mannix not to
play “I’m One of the Boys” in any way that might be suggestive of lesbianism.30
The Dietrich campaign proved successful because audience members remembered it. When readers visited Hollywood a few years later, they regularly
asked whether Miss Dietrich really wore trousers. Guides told visitors that the
Brown Derby would be a good place to see the star for themselves. The guides’
advice confirmed the accuracy of the Dietrich publicity campaign. They also
gave the visitors the chance to experience the Hollywood nightlife fantasy
themselves.31
The city government tried to halt the cross-dressing of women and men in
the nightclubs. The Los Angeles City Council passed a law that prohibited the
appearance of people in drag within a café, unless employed by the café. Contemporary observers and current scholars observed the numerous raids on female and male cross-dressing nightclubs in late 1933 and thought the law
would close these locations, but the existence of Club International in the late
1930s proved this incorrect. The fans’ enjoyment of the Dietrich image and the
chumminess of the Los Angeles Sheriff ’s Office offered key reasons as to why
the policing effort failed.32
Women in men’s clothing dined and drank in restaurants and nightclubs
in downtown Hollywood and along the Sunset Strip. These female industry
people influenced the perception of Hollywood, the town and the cultural
symbol. Their appearance made Hollywood a place where women who did not
abide by the culture’s gender and sexual norms had a public presence on the
town and in the media. They formed an unmistakable addition to the mystique of Hollywood nightlife. Their presence helped the restaurants and nightclubs appear wild and decadent, allowing Hollywood nightlife to stand apart
from all other depictions of city nightlife in the media.
houses
During the early 1920s, the growing movie industry and expanding city offered
several women who worked in the other creative trades the opportunity to establish homes where they could be Hollywood players. Alla Nazimova, an accomplished violinist and Stanislavski-trained actress who became the leading
interpreter of Ibsen on the Broadway stage before becoming known as a silentfilm actress, ranked among the top stars in the annual Photoplay popularity poll
in the late 1910s. The star moved west of downtown Hollywood, and her house
at 8080 Sunset Boulevard made her a leader in the transformation of Sunset
Boulevard into the Strip.33 She formed a development company and turned her
homestead into a complex of twenty-five bungalows that lined the largest
swimming pool in Hollywood. She named the place the “Garden of Allah,”
adding the “h” to her given name to associate it with the garden hostelry of sacred and profane love in Robert Hichens’s 1904 novel, The Garden of Allah.34
Nazimova’s homestead influenced the development of Hollywood as a town
and its conception as a place of latitude for women. A group of Nazimova’s
friends who met regularly at the star’s home and enjoyed ribald activities became known as the “8080 Club.” After Nazimova left Hollywood in the mid1920s, her homestead became an apartment complex for many of the workers
who came to Hollywood during the first years of the talkies.
Media descriptions of Nazimova’s home revealed that her house offered the
star the opportunity to display her cross-gender clothing and other aspects of
her Hollywood player personality. As the head of her own production company, Nazimova decided that this type of publicity was beneficial to her image
and would make her movies successful. An interviewer for Photoplay described
her masculine attire in the living room of Nazimova’s house:
“She enters whistling,” I observed aloud. Nazimova made a move and
twirled into the corner of a divan, drawing her feet up after. The effect was
boyish, shining black hair cropped very short and parted on one side, a
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white Eton collar over a dark blouse, a short plaid skirt and flat-heeled
brogues, and an abnormally long cigarette holder properly functioning.35
the private world of her sexuality. “The little blonde of fifty,” he wrote, “could
hear the fifty assorted opinions of Hollywood . . . a sentimental dope, the
smartest woman on the lot, and of course, nymphomaniac, virgin, pushover,
a Lesbian.” 40 Most labels were generally not used by studio employees to attack but to understand the wealthy writer.
The extensive newspaper coverage of a bizarre love triangle in the late 1920s
thrilled readers with revelations that some screenwriters pursued their Hollywood player interests in their homes. After the disclosure of her husband’s
death and his female biological sex, screenwriter Beth Rowland explained in
the press that her marriage to Peter Stratford resulted from the love and respect
that emerged during a two-year correspondence before Stratford declared
“his” love for Rowland. The widow described her role as a platonic wife, nurse,
and homemaker to a fastidious gentleman. However, the testimony of others,
including Rowland’s son, depicted Stratford as a healthy and active person,
raising the suggestion that the pair shared a same-sex marriage. This appears
more likely when one considers that Rowland used the term “infidelity” when
she discovered Stratford wrote endearing letters to Rowland’s screenwriter
friend Alma Thompson.41
Alma Thompson appeared to live a player’s existence in a ranch house in
Hollywood. Thompson studied mysticism and claimed she wrote to Stratford
out of sympathy for his affliction, but their letters contained appeals for a
deeper love and carried the salutations “Dearest Lamb” and “Dear Pedar.”
Thompson sent Stratford secret rose petals and Stratford referred to Thompson as “my soul.” The exchange of deeply emotional letters with a person she
knew as the husband of her friend made Thompson the “other” woman.
Whether Thompson knew herself to be part of a triangle of three females, the
screenwriter actively engaged in an adulterous emotional affair with a person
she believed to be a married man, or knew to be a woman living as a man. Fittingly, Alma Thompson’s one screen credit came a few years later for the 1933
feature I Loved A Woman.42
Another screenwriter with few movie credits generated enough interest to
appear in publicity pieces throughout the 1930s. The child of an aristocratic
Spanish family from Cuba, Mercedes de Acosta’s mother called her Rafael,
dressed her in male clothes, and encouraged her to believe that she was a boy
for several years. De Acosta married painter Abram Poole in 1921, but the pair
led increasingly separate lives and were divorced in 1935. A novelist, playwright,
poet, and Hollywood screenwriter, de Acosta achieved fame as a confidante
and companion to several women in theatrical, artistic, and motion picture
circles.43 During de Acosta’s first year as a screenwriter, Hollywood reporter
Nazimova created a cross-gender look while she also appeared to be the
“head of her castle.” The interior décor of purple divans, crystal lights, and a
mirror laced with gold reflected Nazimova’s outsized personality. The reporter
notes that within the house Nazimova revealed a dash of “diablerie” (wickedness) about her, so that one could not precisely say that heaven was her home.36
The star directed her publicity in a similar manner with newspapers. Newspaper coverage described Nazimova’s home as a location where she could express another of her personality traits, a preference for the company of women.
Nazimova brought a Hollywood player’s defiance of gender norms to her
friendships with young women, telling reporters that, “They call me Peter and
sometimes Mimi.” Nazimova’s first nickname linked the actress to a male
character, Peter Pan, while the latter nickname alluded to the tragic lover in
La Bohème. One set of gossip items said that the star’s swimming pool,
crowded only with Hollywood ingénues, contained underwater lights that illuminated the water at night. The gossip united the physical display of female
bodies around a swimming pool with a sensuous environment to suggest
homosexuality at her Hollywood home.37
Nazimova used interviews at her home to publicly attack gender conventions. The movie star emphasized that a woman must live her own life: “A
woman living a creative life is bound, necessarily, to do things sometimes defiant to convention. In order to fulfill herself, she should live freely.” Nazimova’s position regarding women’s domestic role was unique even among
women who identified themselves as feminists during the 1920s.38 Scholars
have observed that a few second-generation New Woman writers used their
feminist language to attack conventions. However, their efforts sparked representations that depicted them as unnatural followed by criticism and the full
brunt of social ostracism and legal censorship. Nazimova and other Hollywood players issued stinging attacks on gender and romantic conventions of
the era and received little criticism from the media, politicians, or other industry people.39
Nazimova was not the only woman in Hollywood to use her house as a location for the expression of Hollywood player behaviors. Women dominated
the industry’s screenwriting departments throughout the 1920s. As career
women who earned significant incomes, screenwriters faced questions about
their attitudes toward their careers, motherhood, and family. Indeed, the sexual and gender behavior of these women was questionable enough that twenty
years later F. Scott Fitzgerald noted in his last novel, The Last Tycoon, that successful screenwriter Jane Meloney received numerous labels, many focused on
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Alma Whitaker visited de Acosta’s home and offered a description of de Acosta
in terms that revealed her Hollywood player nature. Whitaker noted that de
Acosta was in her dangerously attractive late thirties and “affects the strictly
tailored idea, even unto a genuine walking shoe.” 44 The screenwriter crossed
the culture’s gender boundaries for clothing within her home.
After mentioning that de Acosta lived alone in Hollywood while her husband stayed in New York City, Whitaker noted, “Miss de Acosta has taken a delightful house at Brentwood Heights, where she is ensconced with her servants
and her dogs and she says her stay is indefinite. She also owns a home in New
York and an apartment in Paris.” 45 The screenwriter expected a long, comfortable stay in her new, charming residence without her husband, whom she
soon divorced. Afterward, she established a “family” in her Hollywood home
over which she ruled. The image highlighted de Acosta as a Hollywood player.
Unlike other images of screenwriters and their homes, the piece neither describes de Acosta’s house in feminine terms, nor does it define the screenwriter’s relationship to her home in a manner that the culture associated with
females.46 Readers discovered that the screenwriter created this life for herself
in the hills of Los Angeles County, in an exclusive residential area north and
east of Beverly Hills where stars like Gary Cooper and Shirley Temple lived.
De Acosta, like Nazimova, argued for the right to defy the culture’s gender
conventions. She told an interviewer, “Of course, I think matrimony is out of
date. I don’t approve of it at all. . . . Divorce . . . should be unnecessary. And if
matrimony were abolished it would be.” Then, de Acosta added that she had
no children, noting that “she can imagine how some mothers will feel about
me.” 47 The Hollywood player challenged the prevailing family structure of the
home during a time when the culture strongly encouraged women to limit
their aspirations to husband, family, and domesticity. Still, de Acosta faced no
repercussions within or outside the industry as the result of expressing her
opinions.48 She lived in Hollywood over the next decade, with Greta Garbo
and Marlene Dietrich among her circle of friends.
For two decades Hollywood actresses and screenwriters used their homes to
pursue their Hollywood player interests. They wore men’s clothing as they relaxed in their private space, creating memorable images for reporters to share
with the public. Nazimova held all-female pool parties in their expansive back
yards, and Thompson engaged in sexual mysticism with their girlfriend’s female husband in their small Hollywood bungalow, both notable examples of
pervasive player activity. They used their porches to offer opinions to the press
that challenged the culture’s limits on the woman gender. Their presence made
the Hollywood town a place where women owned and ruled large homes.
Their appearance associated the Hollywood celebrity home with outsized personalities that carried overtones of the taboo, unique among the depictions of
large homes in the media.
parties
Private parties provided another Hollywood location where female Hollywood
players acted upon their interests. A journalist of the era described these galas
as “the last word in American social relaxation, rich with the super costly meats
and drinks, alive with the unrestrained wit, whoopee and love-making of the
Republic’s most romantic characters.” 49 During the 1920s, disclosures such as
those from the trials of Fatty Arbuckle gave Hollywood parties a reputation as
wild affairs.
A famous movie comedian, Fatty Arbuckle attended a large, exciting party
in a San Francisco hotel during which former actress Virginia Rappe died under mysterious circumstances. Accused of causing her death, Arbuckle underwent three trials that received detailed coverage in metropolitan dailies from
late 1921 through 1922. Despite an acquittal, the negative publicity ended Arbuckle’s career. Scholars have used the Arbuckle affair to demonstrate that the
industry strove to control scandal and the publicizing of unorthodox behavior.
The coverage of the Arbuckle incident illustrated the important difference
between the Arbuckle image and the Hollywood player images. In the Arbuckle case, the industry struggled to control the dissemination of information
and perspectives on the incident because the trial grabbed the nation’s attention and granted opponents of the industry a weapon with which to advance
their view that Hollywood was a pernicious influence upon American morals
and values. Furthermore, Arbuckle’s story did not allow for a humorous perspective that could put a spin on the matter that might benefit the industry.
Other groups successfully argued that the Arbuckle affair was symptomatic of
social problems that required collective legal action against the motion picture
industry. Arbuckle might be a murderer, or at least, a menace to other people.
This potential threat motivated the Hollywood industry to work to remove
negative images from media and public attention as soon as possible and to
placate opponents.50 In contrast, the Hollywood player image represented
Hollywood insider or semi-independent perspectives and did not create sparks
that threatened the movie industry or the conception of Hollywood. The
Hollywood players made Hollywood locations look fun and playfully decadent, but certainly not violent or harmful.
Two novels, one by Nina Putnam and another by Jim Tully, featured Hollywood private parties within five years of the Arbuckle affair. Each included de-
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pictions of Hollywood players that the editors and publishers deemed acceptable to present to readers. As observers of the Hollywood industry and its
world, both authors sought to describe to the readers of their novels what each
saw as the truth about Hollywood.
Author Nina Putnam included a Hollywood private party in Laughter Limited, her book about a young woman’s attempt to become a movie star. Bonnie
and her friend Anita meet a writer, who takes them to a famous director’s
house on Malibu Beach for a party. All kinds of pawing occurs after enormous
amounts of great food and drink. “[When] Bonnie ran away as Tom Muro
himself put a hand on her shoulder [publicity director Greg] Strickland tells
Bonnie to come across and she’ll get into pictures.” 51
The author depicts Hollywood private parties as a place of intense revelry.
After sating their eating and drinking desires, all the partiers begin acting to
satisfy their libidos. Hollywood private parties offered industry people and
their guests locations where they could meet the upper echelon of the movie
industry. They also served as places where the guests could engage in any sexual activity they desired. Many enjoyed these Hollywood player activities. Others, like the lead character in the novel, perceived the experience as a potential
source of extortion. While this image suggested that some might see Hollywood player activities as coercive, it also suggested that other women enjoyed
the revelry. In addition, none of the revelers at the party hurt their professional
or social lives through participation in the party activities.
The novel received only a few reviews. Most respected Putnam’s writing and
thought the book entertaining. One reviewer concentrated on the experience
of the main character and believed that the “age-old story” of the “job party”
was beneath Putnam’s capabilities. This reviewer likened the women at the
party to the forty-niners going west to stake their claim at striking it rich and
having as likely a chance at success. She saw no reason to doubt the party’s realism but suggested that a focus upon the producers and directors who received the women’s favors would prove as truthful and more interesting.52
In 1926, Jim Tully, one of the founders of the naturalist “proletarian” school
of writers in the U.S. and former publicist for Charlie Chaplin, released his
Hollywood novel, Jarnegan. The publisher promoted Jarnegan as the first honestly written novel about Hollywood. Tully’s book sold well in its first printing
but never went into a second printing. Over the remaining two decades of his
life, Tully wrote novels and articles about Hollywood stars for magazines ranging from Vanity Fair to The New Movie Magazine.53
Near the end of the novel, the main characters set off to crash a large party.
Jarnegan, his assistant director Jimmy, and two female friends drive into the
Hollywood Hills. Fueled by a strong anger over a fellow director’s misbehavior
with a female extra for whom he cared, Jarnegan goes to find the man. He
walks into the petting party of a movie producer to see “women at the party
were semi-nude, not in happy abandon, but in middle-class vulgarity.” 54 The
director’s Hollywood private party offers guests splendid costly food, drinks,
and the most beautiful people in the movie colony. Despite Jarnegan’s jaundiced view of the affair, the private party provides the best of everything.
Hollywood women can enjoy the lavish environment and also use the Hollywood party as a place to engage in a variety of sexual activities with other
guests, regardless of marital status or sexual interests.55
Critics enjoyed the novel. They viewed the book as a vivid picture of life out
of the commonplace and written directly from material observed at first hand.
A story about a rough customer, the novel struck critics as part of the expansion of the scope and intensity that changed the formerly polite American
novel. The reviewers saw the party as part of the depiction of a feverish populace’s pursuit of wine, women, and song—and they cared little about missing
the singing. While not addressing the truth of the presentation, reviewers
noted that Tully’s experience meant he should know of what he wrote.56
Both Putnam and Tully thought that describing Hollywood—the town and
concept—required a scene featuring the lavish private parties thrown by the
industry’s creative people. The novels placed these private parties in the large
homes along Malibu Beach and in the Hollywood Hills, exclusive residential
areas in distinctive natural environments. Top movie people competed to own
homes in these locations. Industry people who owned the limited number of
places along Malibu Beach included a small percentage of the studio heads, directors, and top actors.57 The homes were far away from everyday life and received little police surveillance, and an invitation to a private party there
offered the guest the chance to escape. Both authors showed that in such an environment people established their own rules and provided male and female
guests a place where they could engage in a variety of sexual activities with any
other guest. According to both authors, the guests could partake in these activities without negative repercussions in their personal or professional lives.
The party scenes mixed morality, titillation, and coercion. Some readers might
have enjoyed the hint of sexual excitement and absorbed a moral lesson. Others could have felt titillation from the sexuality and a charge from the sense of
coercive nature to the sexual exchanges. The party images offered the first set
of readers a tonic to purify their excitement, while the latter set of readers received excitement and the fulfillment of potential fantasies.
When Clark Gable separated from his wife, Maria Langham, gossip columnists noted that he and actress Carole Lombard attended public affairs and
places together. Knowing the media coverage and the stars’ continued appear-
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ance together, MGM invited its star Gable to the movie premiere and party
for the movie 1938 Marie Antoinette at a famous nightclub on the Sunset Strip.
Lombard accompanied Gable, despite his status as a married man. A huge
photograph in Life magazine showed the pair smiling as they sat at a table. The
caption noted, “Carole Lombard and Clark Gable had the best time at the Trocadero. Always full of fun and careless of dignity, they are one of Hollywood’s
delightful couples. They can not marry because Gable’s wife has refused to divorce him.” 58 The style in which the information about the stars appeared and
the positive presentation of Gable and Lombard’s behavior encouraged readers to approve of the couple and their nonconformist sexual activity. The image also offered readers the opportunity to imagine themselves in this type of
relationship.
A major media entity taking a photograph inside a studio party would most
likely have occurred with studio cooperation. Usually, studios encouraged
publicity when they believed that the image benefited the star and the industry. As noted earlier, the studios strove to link publicity images to either a real
or imagined personality trait of the star. They also hoped to make the image
something with which fans could identify so that they would feel closer to the
star and continue coming to their movies.
MGM and Life proved to be correct, for both stars remained very popular.
Gable went on to his biggest role in Gone with the Wind. Lombard made a few
more successful movies with Paramount studios. Readers accepted Gable’s image as a rogue, but what enabled them to accept Lombard’s status as the other
woman? Carole Lombard developed her popular screen persona based on
several screwball comedies during the 1930s. After her short marriage to
actor William Powell, Lombard forged an off-screen personality as a single
woman— quirky, feminine, and independent. The actress was also well known
for her big parties. Her party across the entire Venice Pier Amusement Park
late in 1937 was a big hit with industry people. The party generated some racy
publicity images, including photographs of Dietrich, Claudette Colbert, and
Lombard showing their legs. After Lombard cut back on these affairs because
of her relationship with Gable, many Hollywood insiders missed them. A fan
magazine reporter summed up the attitude of some in Hollywood in an article
entitled, “What ever happened to Carole Lombard?” Like Hollywood insiders
who enjoyed her personality, many of her fans enjoyed Lombard’s antics and
lifestyle and presumably thought her an appropriate match for the rogue
Gable.59
The image of the pair at the movie premiere party illustrated the degree of
acceptance of Hollywood players. The studios invited Hollywood players to
their premiere parties and did not force them to hide their nonconformist be-
haviors. In this instance, the studio featured the Hollywood players in their
publicity about the studio party. The industry party offered Lombard a place
to enjoy herself with her paramour and their friends. Lombard maintained her
position as a movie star and as an admired person within and outside the
movie community. Studios did not extend the same invitations to same-sex
couples.
studio lots
Female Hollywood players did not have to confine their pursuit of their gender bending, adultery, or same-sex interests to their leisure time. The studio
grounds also provided times and places where the women could behave as they
wished. While the public could not often walk behind the studio gates, studio
publicity departments, newspaper reporters and gossip columnists, and Hollywood novelists provided a public view of the lots and the women who defied
gender and sexual norms.
Gossip columns about the movie industry devoted a significant amount of
space to glimpses behind the scenes. Some of the earliest columns noted the
presence of stars who crossed gender boundaries. Alla Nazimova, during the
height of her popularity, appeared so comfortable around the studio that she
wore her masculine attire. This prompted one columnist to report that “[There
were] rumors around that Nazimova has adopted trousers while lounging
at the studio.” A decade later, another star with Metro studios made her private space on the lot reflect her defiance of gender norms: A magazine article
characterized Greta Garbo’s large dressing room, where the reclusive actress
frequently rested between takes, as so lacking in decorations that the environment suffered from a masculine severity. The fan magazines ran a two-part
piece a year earlier on Garbo’s private life that included gender-bending decorations and actions. Indeed, MGM released a few publicity items regarding the
star’s cross-dressing, featuring a beret and tailored suits that she wore.60
MGM’s Bombshell a 1933 movie about the industry, argued that the producers went further than providing female Hollywood players space to be themselves on the lot; they helped to manufacture a player image for its female stars.
The movie depicted the life of fictitious star Lola Burns, played by Jean Harlow. Burns, known to her fans as the “Blonde Bombshell,” had an image as a
wanton woman who loved and left all sorts of men. Jean Harlow was known
for her platinum blonde hair and alluring figure, and the movie was based
loosely on her real-life experiences.
In the movie, Burns dislikes her image and the daily demands she faces, and
she wants to change everything. At work, the actress needs to shoot retakes of
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her last movie, because the Hays Office and the production codes deem some
scenes too risqué. At home, she copes with a free-loading family and her two
jealous suitors. In the media, she faces questions stemming from false stories
about her liaisons. She seeks to change her public image, despite being told by
the studio publicist, Space Hanlon (Lee Tracy) that romantic scandal is what
her adoring public wants. Burns tries unsuccessfully over the course of the
movie to replace the image of herself from that of a sexually aggressive woman
to the picture of the girl next door. Hanlon does everything he can to undermine Burns’s efforts and to continue promoting her image as a free-spirited
woman.61
Bombshell offered a revelation about the activities within the studio and in
the life of a movie star. The movie made fun of the creation of star images and
the assumed link between a star’s image in the movies and her or his off-screen
life. Most strikingly, the movie depicted a female movie star whose studio
wanted her to lead a Hollywood player existence. In its opening montage, the
movie shows how a woman with this image can remain a popular star. Young
and old commuters, housewives, and other people appear, eagerly reading a
series of newspaper headlines that catalogue Burns’s crossing the boundaries of
sexual propriety. In the view of the director Victor Fleming and screenwriters
John Lee Mahin and Jules Furthman, a spectrum of audience members enjoyed the Hollywood player antics and wanted to know the details about their
favorite star’s activities in Hollywood. The movie industry insiders behind
Bombshell portrayed the studio publicity department actively promoting a star
image of an actress as an unmarried woman having sex, sometimes with married men.
Critics generally praised the movie. Calling it adroit, markedly clever, and
one of the best comedies of life in Hollywood, reviewers praised the cast’s performances as well. The reviewers considered Burns a temperamental star who
dabbled in everything, including relationships. They enjoyed the publicist
character and relished the way he humorously used Burns’s pseudorelationships and his imagination to grab any front-page headlines that he could. The
public expressed mixed reactions. Although the movie did well in the big cities
on the first week, it did not prove to have the box office power to last there for
long. The movie grossed excellent box office receipts in midsized and smaller
cities across the country.62 It allowed audiences to view Lola Burns as a sexy,
wild woman, yet having her attempt to change this image made it easier for audiences to like and accept her. Burns became the good bad woman, an obvious
fantasy figure for many men but also one for those women who wanted to play
this part.
By the early 1940s, the depiction of Hollywood players behind the scenes be-
came much more infrequent. This change occurred because the industry as
well as the U.S. Government sought to diminish its focus upon Hollywood as
a separate community during World War II. They established a branch of the
Office of War Information to oversee the motion picture industry’s output and
located it in the center of Hollywood. The local government increased its policing activities. The Los Angeles Police Commission began reviewing nightclub
performances before issuing the licenses that allowed the shows to appear. The
first act they stopped was by Julian Eltinge, a popular female impersonator
who had a great following among Hollywood movie stars. In addition, the understanding of the definition of homosexuals changed by the early 1940s, making this large group of Hollywood players less humorous and thus less useful
to the entertainment industry.63
One of the last female Hollywood player images of the era appeared in Ann
Bell’s 1940 novel Lady’s Lady. Lotus, a female star who finds the studio lot conducive to her sexual interests, falls deeply in love with Bunny, a woman she has
picked from among the hundreds of extras while filming a scene in a movie.
Bunny sleeps with Lotus but the extra’s coolness causes the star to plead for renewed affection.
My heart is aching. Whenever I close my eyes, I can see you in my imagination with other girls. I had planned and hoped never to have any more
heartaches, but the way I feel about you is pitiable. I would give my life to
be with you this very moment, just to feel you near me, to drift in the
dreamland of heavenly bliss for only a few minutes. I would be happy if
you would allow me to be with you once again . . . but regardless of anything and everything, I wish and am longing to hear your voice again.
Darling, may I? 64
This novel presented the sound stage as a place for performers to fulfill their
romantic interests. Readers learned that a star could walk around the stage and
exchange glances with hundreds of extra girls to decipher their level of interest to her and in her. The representation indicated that a star expressed little
concern about engaging in this activity and exhibited little fear that one of
these extra women or other studio workers might object to her Hollywood
player activities. While Bunny might not have wanted to pursue the relationship beyond one night, her response to Lotus’s letter makes it clear that Lotus
could have chosen a different girl to fulfill her romantic desires. Lotus may fail
to retain Bunny’s love, but she maintains her position as a movie star and continues to receive the income and adulation associated with her status. Lotus has
free reign of the studio to pursue her homosexual interests and faces no overt
condemnation for this activity. The story also suggests that an unheralded ex-
85
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tra could find romance with a wealthy, popular star, adding a Cinderella
promise to romance behind the scenes in Hollywood.
Cross-dressing, free-spirited, and homosexual women appeared on the
movie studio lots in downtown Hollywood, Culver City, and other neighboring areas. They lounged in their men’s clothing, decorated their dressing rooms
in masculine severity, and sought liaisons and potential relationships on studio stage sets. These women and their activities received a public presence
through their appearance in the media. These depictions added to the mystique of Hollywood behind the scenes by bringing the taboo and forbidden
pleasures to the mystery and glamour that dominated depictions of the studios
as a workplace.
styles that could be rich and rewarding. The players demonstrated that cultural
gender and sexual norms did not represent the precipice beyond which lay
an abyss of misery. This offered audience members, particularly those who
crossed the boundaries themselves, great excitement and relief. This element
in the representation of women in the media deserves further investigation.
The examples I have presented and others I have found indicate that the studios purposely created and presented Hollywood player images. Newspapers,
magazines, and the novels and movies about the motion picture industry in
Hollywood presented them. As portrayed in Bombshell, young and old women
and men bought the consumer products that the stars endorsed to identify
with them, read the banner headlines of their activities to be in the know,
pored over the feature articles and novels to acquire details about the players
and their lives, and watched the movies that featured the player images to fantasize about them. The most striking images in the montage that opens Bombshell included one woman and one man, each lying down in their homes
dreaming, with a fan magazine featuring Burns draped over their torsos.
Clearly, racy, risqué, and shocking images comprised part of the dream of
Hollywood for some in the audience.
Then, as now, the movie studios pushed the envelope of culturally acceptable images to generate more attention and business. Movie makers, along
with the Hollywood novelists and newspaper writers, used the images as a way
to entertain but also to describe and explain their Hollywood world. Together,
these groups’ use of Hollywood players helped forge the mystique of Hollywood’s locations and the movie capital in general.
The Hollywood players had an extraordinary run of two decades. The depictions illustrated that the phenomenon’s mass-produced cultural capital offered
women who defied gender and sexual norms many places where they could act
upon those interests. The Hollywood movie industry, its observers, and the organizations that reported on this world presented Hollywood players to the
public, positioning media sources as places where the women also had a public presence. Media sources, as shapers of Hollywood’s cultural image, used
these images to add the taboo and forbidden pleasures to the mystique associated with these Hollywood locations.
The female Hollywood players appeared as successfully integrated into the
Los Angeles-Hollywood world. They drank and dined in the restaurants and
nightclubs in downtown Hollywood and along Sunset Boulevard. The women
expressed their personalities in their homes in central Hollywood, along the
Boulevard, and in the exclusive residential district of the Hollywood Hills.
They partied with the upper echelon of the movie industry at private parties in
the Hollywood Hills and in chic Malibu Beach. They pursued their personal
interests in the dressing rooms and on the sets at the studio lots. The lifestyles
they led raise issues about urban life for scholars of women, gender, and sexuality to consider.
The presentation of the Hollywood players offered them a public presence
in the culture. As celebrity figures, many of the players likely attracted audience
members’ attention, and their words and deeds appeared more seductive to
emulate. In the increasingly urbanized United States of the era, with its expanding mass-produced culture, the Hollywood players appeared as figures of
a vibrant present and an exciting future. Unlike what scholars have previously
found, that nonconformist figures that appeared in movies, literature, and
newspapers led horrific lives, the media images of female Hollywood players
leading successful lives offered audience members examples of alternative life-
notes
1. Jack Lord and Lloyd Hoff, How to Sin In Hollywood (Hollywood, CA: n.p.,
1940), 39.
2. Sharon R. Ullman, Sex Seen: Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997); Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995); Vern L. Bullough, Science
In the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Lynn Duminel, The Modern Temper: American Culture in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1995); Richard de Cordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star
System in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 140 – 43; Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 35, 66 – 68.
3. Edward Alwood, Straight News: Gays, Lesbians and the News Media (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996); Simon Michael Bessie, Jazz Journalism: The Story of
87
8. These topics included the seduction in Upton Sinclair’s Oil! and the rape and
voyeurism in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary. In 1929, the New York Special Sessions
Court overturned a lower court ruling that Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was
obscene because it “idealized and extolled perversion.” Over 100,000 copies of the
book sold between the decision in April and the beginning of 1930. The decision offered
the publishing world the ability to print books with homosexuality as a theme. Felice
Flanery Lewis, Literature, Obscenity and Law (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1976), 109 –11; Jeannette Foster, Sex Variant Women in Literature (New York: Vantage Press, 1956); Roger Austen, Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel In America
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977), 20 –30, 69 –72; Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and
Twilight Lovers: History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 65, 100 –102.
9. Janet Steiger, Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship
and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928 –1942 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).
10. Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York:
Harper & Row, 1981); Andrea Weiss, Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film (New York:
Penguin Books, 1993). Scholar David Lugowski argues that homosexual representations in motion pictures during the Great Depression were linked to other groups considered disreputable and otherwise socially outcast. David Lugowski, “Queering the
(New) Deal: Lesbian and Gay Representation and the Depression-Era Cultural Politics
of Hollywood’s Production Code,” Cinema Journal 38 (1999), 3 –35.
11. More recently, works have noted that publicity on particular stars, such as Marlene Dietrich and Clark Gable, suggested that nonconformist behavior might account
for some of their popularity. Hollywood players included a wide array of movie industry workers who found Hollywood filled with places and opportunities to act outside
conventions. Patty Fox, Star Style: Hollywood Legends as Fashion Icons (Los Angeles:
Angel City Press, 1995); Samantha Barbas, Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars and the Cult of Celebrity (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 150 –56.
12. Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990), 94, 290 –340; Leo Rosten, Hollywood: The Movie Colony— The Moviemakers (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1941), 5, 371; Edwin O.
Palmer, History of Hollywood (New York: Garland Publishing, 1938), 236; Neal Gabler,
An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Crown, 1988),
36 – 42, 63 – 64, 104 –54; Los Angeles City Directory, 1927, 2330 –35; 1933, 2637– 43; Sandborn Fire Insurance Maps of Los Angeles, 1919 –1950; David Ehrenstein, interviewed by
author, West Hollywood, California, January 15, 2000.
13. Margaret Tante Burk, Are The Stars Out Tonight: The Story of the Famous Ambassador and Coconut Grove (Los Angeles: Round Table West, 1980), 25 –39; Robert S.
Sennett, Hollywood Hoopla: Creating Stars and Selling Movies in the Golden Age of
the Tabloid Newspaper (New York: E. P. Dutton., 1938); James Parris Springer, “Hollywood Fictions: The Cultural Construction of Hollywood In American Literature, 1916 –
1939” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1994); Anthony Slide, The Hollywood Novel (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1995); Christopher Ames, Movies About the Movies: Hollywood
Reflected (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997).
4. Brett Beemyn, ed., Creating a Place For Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories (New York: Routledge, 1997); George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890 –1940 (New York: Basic
Books, 1994); Kevin J. Mumford, Interzones: Black / White Sex Districts in New York and
Chicago in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997);
Judith Schwarz, The Radical Feminist of Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village, 1912 –1940
(Norwich, VT: New Victoria Publishers, 1986); Elisabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and
Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993). The Club International operated in the western section of Hollywood. Other nightspots catering to this clientele appeared within Los
Angeles’s Twelfth District, an area northwest of downtown that included portions of
the Colegrove, Edendale, and Wilshire-Pico and contained mostly middle- and working-class housing. For references to the bars see Los Angeles Times, May 3, 1933, sec. 2;
May 4, 1933, sec. 2; Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express, September 11, 1935, sec. B.
For information about the area of Los Angeles see Sandborn Fire Insurance Maps of Los
Angeles, 1919 –1950, and Eshref Shevky and Marilyn Williams, The Social Areas of Los
Angeles: Analysis and Typology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), 68 – 89,
appendixes C–E.
5. Thomas A. Bolze, “Female Impersonation in the United States, 1900 –1970” (PhD
diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 1994), 162 – 63; Chauncey, 333 –54. As
George Chauncey concluded, the visibility of homosexuals in the public sphere, where
they were perceived as a threat to the gender and sexual arrangements already in crisis
because of the Great Depression, proved so powerful that even the representation of homosexuals disappeared from many media forms.
6. Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1987), 155 – 65; Mary Ryan, “The Projection of a New Womanhood: Movie Moderns in the 1920s,” in Decades of Discontent: The Women’s Movement, 1920 –1940 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983). Depictions of New Women in mass culture, such as
Hollywood movies, showed them desiring to escape work and winning retirement
through the prompting of love and trusting submission to her man. The idea for a contestation of stories forming lesbian identities and media representations of the “mannish
lesbian,” appeared in Lisa Duggan, “The Trials of Alice Mitchell: Sensationalism, Sexology, and the Lesbian Subject in Turn-of-the-Century America,” Signs 18 (1993): 792 –94.
7. Kathy Peiss, Christina Simmons, and Robert A. Padgug, eds., Passion & Power:
Sexuality In History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 159 – 61.
89
90
Hollywood (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1998), 86 – 89; Jim Heimann, Out
With the Stars: Hollywood Nightlife in the Golden Era (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985),
23 –37; Anthony Slide, “The Regulars” article in the Hollywood Community MFL, NC
2812 folder, New York Public Library (NYPL); unidentified clipping, Patsy Kelly folder,
NYPL.
14. Mildred Adams, “The City of Angels Enters Its Heaven,” New York Times, August 3, 1930, sec. 5.
15. Untitled article in Cinema: Hollywood folder MWEZ, 14, 280 at NYPL; Christopher Finch and Linda Rosenkrantz, Gone Hollywood (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1979), 215 –19; “Protest West Hollywood’s Alleged Vice,” Los Angeles Evening Herald,
June 20, 1933, sec. B; Hedda Hopper, “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times,
December 11, 1939, sec. 2; Slide, “The Regulars,” Heimann, Out With The Stars, 43 – 47;
Sennett, Hollywood Hoopla, 86 –91.
16. “The big men came in [the Derby] and casually nodded to unimportant folk.
In-betweeners rated a quick smile and a vague, ‘H’yuh.’ Top notchers received an enthusiastic back slapping, ‘Old boy-old-boy!’” Jimmy Fiddler, “Jimmy Fiddler in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, May 29, 1939, sec. 2; Heimann, Out With The Stars, 44 – 49.
17. What Price Hollywood? directed by George Cukor (1932, RKO).
18. Quoted in Rudy Behlmer, Memo to David O. Selznick (New York: Avon Books,
1972), 132. See also Irene Mayer Selznick, A Private View (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1983), 168 –72.
19. The teaser campaign of what was happening behind the picture studios proved
alluring to customers. Eastern, Midwestern, and far Western cities provided strong box
office returns. However, it did poorly in southern cities like Louisville and Birmingham. Motion Picture Herald, June 18, 1932, 35; Film Daily, June 22, 1932; Variety, June 28,
1932; July 12, 1932; July 19, 1932; July 26, 1932; August 16, 1932.
20. Herbert Cruikshank, “Director Dorothy: The One Woman Behind the Stars,”
Motion Picture Classic 30, (September 1929): 76; Los Angeles Times, September 18, 1927,
sec. 3; February 9, 1936, sec. 3; June 9, 1935, sec. 3; August 16, 1936, sec. 3; Los Angeles Evening Herald, November 15, 1932 sec. B.
21. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 3 –22; Jack
Levin and Arnold Arluke, Gossip: The Inside Scoop (New York: Plenum, 1987), 7–30;
Richard Schickel, Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985).
22. Grace Kingsley, “Hobnobbing in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, January 2, 1933,
sec. 2; January 25, 1933, sec. 2. As the contracts of both director Josef von Sternberg and
Dietrich approached their end, most of the studio’s executives wanted to break up this
pairing. Dietrich’s last motion picture in 1932, Blonde Venus, earned unenthusiastic reviews and lackluster box office returns. The top executives released von Sternberg and
strove to get Dietrich into another picture before her contract expired. Dietrich re-
belled over von Sternberg’s absence and spoke of returning to Germany, but Paramount sued the star for irreparable loss due to its inability to proceed with filming of
The Song of Songs. The star agreed to act in the motion picture two days later and received a new five-year contract. Donald Spoto, The Blue Angel: The Life of Marlene Dietrich (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 100 –102.
23. Grace Kingsley, “Hobnobbing in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Evening Herald and
Express, January 5, 1933, sec. B.
24. Harrison Carroll, “Stars, Design Advocate Figure to Match Styles,” Los Angeles
Times, January 6, 1933.
25. Jimmy Starr, “Football Season Past, Film Folk Turn Toward Polo,” Los Angeles
Evening Herald and Express, March 22, 1933, sec. B.
26. Finch and Rosenkrantz, Gone Hollywood, 273.
27. Paramount Collection, Press Sheets, August 1, 1933 –July 31, 1934. Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, (AMPAS); Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer
Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985), 10 –13. Quoted material from Edward Schallert, “Warblers Ripe for Comeback,” Los Angeles Times, February 1, 1933, sec. 2.
28. Grace Kingsley, “Hobnobbing in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, January 25,
1933, sec. 2.
29. Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Hollywood Androgyny (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1985), 103 –5; Josef von Sternberg, Fun In a Chinese Laundry (New York: MacMillan, 1965), 247; Fox, Star Style, 52.
30. The song in its entirety follows: “When beautiful Lillian Russell put on a great
big bustle she glorified the backbone of a Nation! I wore it! I wore it! And made the
world adore it! It started the first inflation. When Madame Sara Bernhardt wore the
Hobble skirt I was the very first to Hobble on Broadway. I’ve always had a passion to
wear the latest fashion. That’s why I have to look like this today.” Chorus: “I’m one of
the boys, just one of the boys. I go the tailor that Marlene employs. No dresses from
France are so modern as these, And under my Pants are BVD’s. I’m one of the boys,
girls, I’m one of the boys. I handle a big cigar with manly poise. Once I was maternal.
Now they call me Colonel. I’m one of the boys, one of the boys.” Second Refrain: “I’m
one of the boys, just one of the boys. I’ve got to go in for things a man enjoys. Men who
bought me candy said ‘How sweet you are.’ Now I take my brandy at the bar. Dice,
cards, and tobacco are my favorite toys. People ask me ‘Dearie ain’t you Wallace Beery?’
I’m one of the boys, one of the boys.” Hollywood Party MPP, AMPAS. Letter from
James Wingate to E. J. Mannix, June 23, 1933, Hollywood Party MPP, AMPAS.
31. “Hollywood Tourists Accommodated,” New York Times, March 22, 1936, sec. 9.
32. Variety predicted that the craze in Hollywood would end in 1933. Variety, November 21, 1933, 59. Historian George Chauncey also believes that most of the spark
in the pansy craze diminished with the passing of the ordinance law barring cross-
91
dressing in local night clubs and bars in 1933, although he observes that the craze continued for two more years before either the discovery or enforcement of the ordinance
led to the demise of the clubs. Chauncey, Gay New York, 321.
33. Los Angeles City Directory, 1927, 2330 –35; 1933, 2637– 43; Insurance Maps of Los
Angeles, 1919 –1950, vol. 20.
34. Gavin Lambert, Nazimova: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 11,
178 –92. See also Rosten, Hollywood: The Movie Colony— The Moviemakers, 5, 371;
Palmer, History of Hollywood, 236; Gabler, An Empire of Their Own, 36 – 42, 63 – 64,
104 –54.
35. Herbert Howe, “A Misunderstood Woman: She’s Addressed as Madame Nazimova, but One Thinks of Her as Naz,” Photoplay (April, 1922), 19.
36. Ibid, 24 –25.
37. Quote comes from an unidentified clipping in Alla Nazimova file, Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, New York; Grace Kingsley, “Flashes,” Los Angeles Times,
April 20, 1921, sec.3; July 18, 1920, sec.3; Lambert, Nazimova: A Biography, 220 –22.
38. Quote comes from an unidentified clipping in Alla Nazimova file; Anne Frior
Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations In American History (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1991), 141–50; Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, 197–201. Feminist advocates offered compromise solutions about motherhood, which did not fully
offset the professional and salary risks and other issues that this path entailed. Most career advocates supported the gender norms of wife and mother, and these advocates
viewed women’s jobs as acceptable when this work aimed to improve family life. Most
creative women argued that being a mother helped their creative energy and provided
grist for their mill.
39. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Discourses of Sexuality and Subjectivity: The New
Woman, 1870 –1936,” in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past
(New York: North American Library, 1989), 276 – 80; Norma Fain Pratt, “Culture and
Radical Politics: Yiddish Women Writers in American, 1890 –1940,” in Decades of Discontent, 142 – 44.
40. “How Twelve Famous Women Scenario Writers Succeeded,” Photoplay (August,
1923), 31; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1941), 36.
41. “Woman Lived as Man, Wed to One of Her Sex,” New York Times, May 4, 1929;
“Writer Blamed Pity for Affair,” Los Angeles Times, May 4, 1929, sec. 2; “Dying ‘Man’
Proves Woman,” Los Angeles Times, May 3, 1929; “Tell Mother Romance with Woman
Poser,” Los Angeles Evening Herald, May 4, 1929, sec. A.
42. “Writer Blamed Pity for Affair,” Los Angeles Times; “Bare Loves of ‘Man’ Found
to be Woman,” Los Angeles Evening Herald, May 3, 1929, sec. A; American Film Institute
Catalog of Motion Pictures produced in the United States, 1931–1940, Patricia King Hanson, exec. ed., (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 1003.
43. Mercedes de Acosta, Here Lies The Heart (New York: Reynal, 1960); 212 –27, 240 –
45, 316 –18; Axel Madsen, Forbidden Lovers: Hollywood’s Greatest Secret—Female Stars
Who Loved Other Women (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1996), 9, 21–26, 66 –79;
Mia Riva, Marlene Dietrich (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).
44. Alma Whitaker, “Change Her Name? Well, Mercedes Just Refuses,” Los Angeles
Times, December 27, 1931, sec. 3.
45. Whitaker, “Change Her Name?”
46. Wendy Holliday, “Hollywood’s Modern Women: Screenwriting, Work Culture
and Feminism, 1910 –1940” (PhD diss., New York University, 1995), 330 –31.
47. Both quotes from Whitaker, “Change Her Name?”
48. Los Angeles Times, December 27, 1931, sec. 3. As a gender role, the position of
mother dramatically influenced the opportunities that women have had to enter the
cultural, political, and social worlds in the United States. During this era opponents of
women’s involvement in these worlds used motherhood to deny women the opportunity to enter those realms. As noted earlier, an ideology of motherhood enabled some
women to enter these worlds during the Progressive era, if their activities stayed within
those areas where the ideology could justify women’s involvement. Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston: Twayne Publications, 1982).
49. Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915 –1928 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990); quoted material from Duncan Aikman, “Hollywood Assumes the Grand Manner,” New York Times, March 8,
1931, sec. 5.
50. Gary Alan Fine, “Scandal, Social Conditions, and the Creation of Public Attention: Fatty Arbuckle and the ‘Problem of Hollywood,’” Social Problems 44, no. 3 (August 1997), 297–317.
51. Nina Putnam, Laughter Limited (New York: George Duran, 1922), 115 –23.
52. D.L.M., review of Laughter Limited, by Nina Putnam, Boston Evening Transcript,
November 4, 1922, sec. 5; Springfield Republican, October 29, 1922.
53. Mark Dawidziak and Paul Bauer, Jim Tully, Writer: Drifters, Grifters, Bruisers, and
Stars (Tucson, AZ: Dennis McMillan, forthcoming); Charles Willeford, “Jim Tully:
Holistic Barbarian,” in Writing and Other Blood Sports (Tucson, AZ: Dennis McMillan,
2000); “Miss Millay’s ‘Wayfarer’ and Other Works of Fiction,” New York Times, September 19, 1926.
54. Jim Tully, Jarnegan (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1926), 259.
55. Readers recognized the petting party as a reality in their lives. The mid-1920s
Lynds study of Middletown, Indiana, revealed that many high school boys and girls
had been to these affairs and engaged in kissing and light petting. Scholar Paula Fass
observed that many college women of the era had this experience also. Their peers, particularly among women, used social pressure to place limits on how “far” the sexual activities would go, even with the man that they intended to marry. Frederick Lewis
93
94
Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (New York: Blue Ribbon Books,
1931); Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
56. “Miss Millay’s ‘Wayfarer’ and Other Works of Fiction,” New York Times, September 19, 1926, sec.5; Will Cuppy, “A Roughneck in Art,” New York Herald Tribune,
September 19, 1926, sec. 7; W.B. “Jim Tully and ‘Jarnegan,’” Boston Evening Transcript,
October 20, 1926, sec. 5.
57. Edwin Schallert, “Star Invasion: Stars New Boom at Malibu,” Los Angeles Times,
June 4, 1933, sec. 2. At the time of the newspaper article the owners in Malibu Beach
were directors John Stahl, David Butler, William Le Baron, and Frank Capra, actors Alexander Kirkland, George Raft, Norman Foster, Stephen Gooson, and studio executives Jack Warner and Bud Schulberg.
58. “Movie ‘Celebs’ Show Off At a Premiere and Party for Marie Antoinette,” Life,
July 25, 1938, 44, in Premieres and Previews File, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences.
59. Ibid.; Ephraim Katz, The Film Encyclopedia (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
1979), 730 –31. Finch and Rosenkrantz, Gone Hollywood, 234 –35; William Mann, Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywood’s First Openly Gay Star (New
York: Viking, 1998), 219 –21; Barbas, Movie Crazy, 151–54; Edward Doherty, “Can the
Gable-Lombard Love Story have a Happy Ending?” in Photoplay Treasury, ed. Barbara
Gelman (New York: Crown Publishers, 1972).
60. “Pajama Charge Denied by Actress,” Los Angeles Evening Herald, November 22,
1920, sec. B; Isabel Ross, Taste in America: An Illustrated History of the Evolution of Architecture, Furnishings, Fashions, and Customs of the American People (New York:
Thomas Y. Cromwell Co., 1967), 180 – 82; Modern Screen, March 1931, cited in Finch
and Rosenkrantz, Gone Hollywood, 91.
61. Bombshell (MGM, 1933); Katz, The Film Encyclopedia.
62. Mordaunt Hall, “The Screen,” New York Times, October 21, 1933; Mordaunt Hall,
“Passing Broadway Pictures,” October 29, 1933, sec.10; Rush, “Bombshell,” Variety, October 17, 1933; October 24, 1933; October 31, 1933 through December 26, 1933.
63. Thomas Cripps, Hollywood’s High Noon: Moviemaking and Society Before Television (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1997); Los Angeles Herald Examiner, January 17, 1940; “Application of Julian Eltinge to operate as a female impersonator at the
Hollywood Rendezvous,” January 16, 1940, The Official Minutes of The Board of Police
Commissioners of the City of Los Angeles, January 2, 1940 to June 28, 1940. See Chauncey
and Kennedy and Davis for more explanation of this change in cultural perception.
64. Ann Bell, Lady’s Lady (New York: House of Field, 1940), 88.
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by Marsha Orgeron
Abstract: Fan magazines had a dramatic impact on actress Clara Bow’s career and
on female fandom more generally. This article examines Bow’s 1927 star vehicle It as
a parable for fan culture, particularly for the ways that fan magazines constructed
their female readers and Hollywood films addressed their female spectators.
The word play in the title of this article hints at several aspects of consumer culture that converged around Hollywood and its products during the decade of the
1920s. “Making it” is a colloquial term of achievement, in this case by Clara Bow,
whose fleeting but magnificent Hollywood success was facilitated by the popular
medium of the fan magazine. The title also refers to It (Clarence Badger, 1927),1 a
film that will forever be associated with the career and public persona of its star,
Clara Bow. Finally, the title resonates in the realm of the sexual, an appropriate
signification for an actress who became simultaneously a dynamic and a troubling
symbol of the New Woman of the 1920s.
What follows situates Bow’s star identity in the context of widespread concerns in the 1920s about Hollywood’s influence on a fantastical kind of female
sexuality represented in many of the magazines and films of the day, thereby demonstrating the interrelatedness of movie and other consumer cultures. Clara Bow
is just one of many stars of the decade whose extraordinary—and often highly
editorialized—life became a market commodity, sold by both the movie and fan
magazines that purported to disclose every aspect of stars’ lives. Robert Sklar explains that by the end of the 1920s, “movie players could speak to the public about
their divorces and love affairs with at least some of the frankness they used among
themselves.”2 This tacit and reciprocal encouragement of publicity stood in direct
contrast to the late-nineteenth-century belief that curiosity about the personal affairs of others—even public figures—was crude and improper. But by the 1920s,
curiosity had been institutionalized and in effect normalized, at least in relation to
the movie industry, whose studios and fan magazines fed the public information
(however fabricated) about stars’ lives. But this legitimization of gossip came at a
substantial price: those celebrities who participated in the publicity machine often
found themselves possessed of a permanently public life, so much so that—as with
Clara Bow—maintaining truly private lives became untenable.
Fan magazines, as what follows shall demonstrate, serve as crucial repositories
of information about celebrity making and unmaking in the 1920s. Fan magazines
Marsha Orgeron is an assistant professor of film studies at North Carolina State University.
She is currently working on a book about the impact of film on American culture, using case
studies of such figures as Jack London, Wyatt Earp, Clara Bow, and Ida Lupino.
© 2003 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819
95
Cinema Journal 42, No. 4, Summer 2003
are also an important resource for understanding 1920s notions of female consumption—of images, of products, and of films. In addition to examining the role fan
magazines played in the mythologizing of Hollywood and its stars, this article uses It
to situate Bow in the context of Hollywood’s influence on women’s commercial culture. Bow is a particularly suitable subject for anyone concerned with women’s roles
in the silent-film era not only because It documents the production of women’s cultural identities but also because Bow’s reputation hinged so greatly on the fictional
identity of her on-screen roles in general, and on this role in particular. Bow’s association with this film was so complete that a decade after making It, well into the sound
period and after the peak of Bow’s fame, the actress opened a restaurant on North
Vine Street in Hollywood—the It Café—yet another (ultimately unsuccessful) site
for the consumption of Bow’s “It” girl leftovers.
7KH&\FOHRIWKH)DQ0DJD]LQH6HHLQJYHUVXV%HLQJ
Women are less markedly affected by acting than are men. Women are always acting
more or less, anyways, whether they are professionals or not.
Dr. Louis E. Bisch, Photoplay, January 19283
Clara Bow’s rise and fall in Tinseltown were meteoric. She inauspiciously arrived
in Hollywood in 1923. By the late 1920s, she was receiving more fan mail than any
other star. By 1931, however, Movie Classic magazine had published an article
about her entitled “Can She Ever Come Back?”4 Bow made fourteen films in 1925,
eight in 1926, six in 1927, four in 1928, three in 1929, four in 1930, and only four
between 1931 and 1933, when she made her final appearance in Frank Lloyd’s
Hoopla, retiring permanently at the age of twenty-eight. She received forty-five
thousand fan letters a week at the peak of her career in 1929, a period during
which henna sales tripled as a result of adoring fans who wanted their hair to be
the wild red color of Clara Bow’s.5 Such “colorful” knowledge could have been
gained only through fan magazine articles and pictures, since Bow’s films were, of
course, in black and white.6
Perusing early fan magazines, one frequently encounters readers’ questions
about the color of stars’ hair and eyes. Wanting to know what the stars “really”
looked like, fans were pushing for a visual realism that the cinema could not yet
provide; the fan magazines were more than willing to offer this information in
their pages, creating a discourse that shaped fans’ perceptions of stars and made
their personal lives appear accessible and real, however otherworldly and fantastic.7 Details about her hair color, favorite perfume, and so on also served to make
Bow an imitatable commodity, as is evident in the increase in henna sales in the
late 1920s. Not only were the details of the star’s life made public, they “belonged”
to the public and were made readily available—purchasable is perhaps a more
accurate way to put it—through the medium of the fan magazine.
Bow’s turbulent tenure in Hollywood certainly demonstrates the reciprocal
nature of stardom and fan magazine culture during the 1920s. Her particular story
begins with the Brewster Publications contest that appeared in the January 1921
issue of Motion Picture magazine. “The Fame and Fortune Contest of 1921” used
a catchy slogan—“HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF!”—to solicit photographs from
aspiring starlets.8 The history referred to in the announcement is the highly successful (according to the magazine) contest of the previous year. The slogan suggests the fan magazine’s interest in tapping into the creative fantasy lives of its
readers. In particular, the contest attests to the (at least symbolic, if not realistic)
opportunities the behaviors of fandom opened up for the fan magazine reader.
Fans have historically been defined, as Joli Jenson points out, “as a response to
the star system” and thereby as passive, “brought into (enthralled) existence by the
modern celebrity system, via the mass media.”9 The contest, however, endowed its
participants with a sense of active involvement, although it did so in a deliberately
misleading fashion: “The Golden Key of Opportunity Is in Your Hands—Turn the
Key in the Doorway of Success and thru the portal of the Fame and Fortune Contest you may enter the kingdom of the screen.” The language of the contest promised fans a chance—however remote—to transform themselves into the images
they gazed at in the pages of the magazine and, more important, on the so-called
silver screen; the language was of the cinema-age fairy tale, and the reader was the
imagined princess.
The “Fame and Fortune Contest” also unites issues of spectatorship, consumerism, and celebrity. The very desire to move beyond the passive position of “seeing” to the active position of “being” reveals much about the psychological import
of celebrity in American culture, particularly as it relates to an understanding of
female participation in that culture. Miriam Hansen has approached “the questions of spectatorship from the perspective of the public sphere,” asserting that
“the cinema became a powerful vehicle for reproducing spectators as consumers,
an apparatus for binding desire and subjectivity in consumerist forms of social
identity.”10 The Motion Picture contest revises—but does not negate—such a
conceptualization by “binding desire and subjectivity” beyond the strictly consumerist discourse embodied and endorsed by the fan magazines. By enabling individuals to ponder their own personal transformation, if only on the level of fantasy,
the contest reproduces spectators not only as consumers but as actors, giving them
the opportunity to recreate themselves by literally sending their images into the
public domain. In other words, this contest—and others like it—enabled fans to
experiment with ideas of personal revision, of moving beyond the more passive
role of spectator by “turn[ing] the key in the doorway of success.”
Bow thus stood as a symbol for the many who remained on the other side of
the portal, a symbol of both the promise and the pretense of the necessarily exclusive star system. She is a reminder of the cinema’s ability to transform the spectator, here quite literally. By the 1920s there was a general understanding that
spectators could be influenced by both on-screen images and by the discourse
contained within the pages of the fan magazine.11 The female film spectator was
thus interpolated in these pages, for, as Richard de Cordova points out, “we call
stars movie stars no doubt because of the primary importance we attach to their
appearance in films (we do not call them magazine stars).”12
The female fan magazine reader was an obvious extension of the female film
spectator; the former desired and pursued information to supplement the limited
extratextual information provided by the films themselves. Hansen claims that there
is a discernible lineage of female spectatorship that “can be traced through concrete historical manifestation in which women not only experienced the misfit of
the female spectator in relation to patriarchal positions of subjectivity but also
developed imaginative strategies in response to it.”13
Such imaginative strategies, I would like to suggest, are offered in the pages of
the fan magazines, as in the case of Motion Picture’s “Fame and Fortune” contests.
Viewed in this fashion, Clara Bow’s participation in the contest was an active (if
prepackaged) mode of response to cinematic images, one that had radical consequences for her position as both spectator and consumer. When she became a star
herself, Bow dramatically shifted from the consumerist mode suggested by Hansen
to become an object (and agent) of consumption.
Fan magazine contests enabled and encouraged women to reevaluate themselves in response to the star system and to articulate their fantasies in tangible
ways through their participation. Fan letters, which materialized when fans sought
stars’ studio addresses from magazine editors, also make material fans’ desire to
emerge from anonymity, to create a concrete existence for themselves in relation
to the star system. In providing an outlet or means for such fantasies, the fan magazines were, of course, in no way subversive; rather, they were part of the mechanism of fandom that developed out of a spectatorial demand for information, created
in part by the industry itself. But while fan magazines were thus imbued with
Hollywood’s market-driven ideology, they still offered a practical way for women
to become actively involved with movie culture and, in the process, to negotiate
their own identities beyond the limited realm of their day-to-day experiences.14 As
Gaylyn Studlar points out, “This preparation in narrative left women free to contemplate other elements of the text: the stars.”15
While I agree with Studlar’s premise, it is necessary to add that female spectators who were actively engaged with fan magazine culture turned their contemplation not only to the stars on-screen but to themselves as well. The very existence and
nature of fan magazines necessitated that their readers consider themselves connected to the greater celebrity discourse, for so much of the content of these magazines revolved around creating personal desires in their readers—for things, for
styles, and for self-assessment. Thus, when Studlar concludes that “fan magazine
discourse of the 1920s did not encourage a total investment in an illusion but appears
largely predicated on the assumption that women could participate in an engagement in the cinema that might include, for lack of a better term, a ‘fetishistic’ pleasure,”16 it follows logically that this pleasure was and is consumerist in nature.
The fetish Studlar invokes has everything to do with the interplay between
individual lack and ideal objects of desire that are created by the perfect images
of stardom.17 This fetishistic pleasure, in other words, could not exist were there
not an immense—but not too immense—disparity and desire between spectator/
reader and star/text. The fan magazines were advertisements, and their pitch was
attainability: if you buy this, you can be like star X. Bow made such aspirations
look particularly possible because she failed to create the distance between herself and her fans that other stars worked rigorously to achieve. She was in many
ways the star system’s best advertisement precisely because she perpetuated the
illusion of possibility for fans.
The fan magazines of the 1920s, costing anywhere from five to twenty-five
cents and with circulations of almost half a million each, created an alternative
discourse to that found in the firmly upper-middle-class, family-oriented periodicals, such as the immensely popular Ladies Home Journal.18 Movie stars became
the leisure time diversions of working girls and the stuff of their fantasies. The
subject matter of Bow’s films usually reflected the social status of these fans—
working girls with sufficient wages but even bigger dreams. These “New Women,”
as they were called, existed in a curious era of stasis and change; they challenged
gendered social divisions with their behavior, alerting the world to their “newness”
through bold visual statements in the form of shorter haircuts and skirt lengths.
Although its origins reside in the late nineteenth century, the term “New Woman”
was, over the course of the twentieth century, applied to virtually every generation
of women who appeared to rebel against accepted standards for gendered behavior.19 The cause of so much spilled ink in the popular press during the 1920s, New
Women (who were, of course, not as homogeneous as the term implies, although
they were often spoken of in this collective fashion) were asking to be looked at
and to look in ways that defied expectations while creating new ones.
As just one example of the gender changes that occurred throughout the decade, in 1921, the same Elinor Glyn who a few years later would create the “It”
label that defined the era and its wild child, Clara Bow, wrote an article for Cosmopolitan entitled “What’s the Matter with You American Women?” This interrogational early-twenties piece is replete with anxiety over women’s liberated and
promiscuous behavior, which Glyn perceived as threatening the character of American women across the board: “Has the American girl no innate modesty—no subconscious self-respect, no reserve, no dignity? I know what I think of them.”
According to Glyn, American women needed to attend to their “chastity, mental
and physical,” to reject the “age of the body” in order to nurture their neglected
spirits.20 By the late 1920s, Glyn was singing another tune in the pages of the same
magazine, celebrating women (and men) who had “It” (even though Glyn repeatedly and unconvincingly denied that “It” was equivalent to sex appeal) and could
use “It” to get what and who they wanted.
The disparity between Glyn’s two pieces, published less than a decade apart,
is symbolic of the tremendous changes witnessed during the 1920s, both in women’s
roles and the culture’s evaluation of their new attitudes, appearance, and actions.
As Kevin Starr notes in his discussion of 1920s Hollywood, “Hollywood emerged
in the American consciousness as the major source of imagery and energy for the
sexual revolution.”21 Bow became a symbol of all the behavioral possibilities opened
up by women’s postsuffrage liberation, for this was an era dominated by prosperity and gaiety, particularly in the cinema’s depiction of the contemporary world.
Movies helped create the nation’s mood, luring postwar audiences into theaters
with films that embodied and begat excitement, fun, and the spirit of rampant
consumerism.
The relationship between spectatorship and consumption was also clearly not
limited to movie audiences but had logical consequences for the fan magazine
reader. Kathryn Fuller demonstrates how Photoplay editor James Quirk used the
movies to create “a breed of ‘perfect consumers’ who were almost completely dependent on motion pictures to generate their needs and desires. Quirk predicted
that the persuasiveness of the motion picture medium, coupled with the added
weight of product endorsements by movie stars, would fuel an explosive growth of
consumer culture led by movie fans.”22 Following Quirk’s logic, spectatorship and
consumerism converged in the figure of the female fan. Fuller aptly claims that
such assumptions reflect both Quirk’s and the other fan magazine editors’ “growing awareness of women’s purchasing power.”23 With increasing numbers of women
entering the job market and becoming wage earners, women were being taken
seriously as economic forces, particularly, it seems, by the movie industry.24
Considering the actual content of the fan magazines, this argument becomes
much more complicated. While their premise was to disseminate information about
stars, their content reflects the gender politics of the era quite vividly. The tumultuous postsuffrage Jazz Age was not lacking in debates over women’s social position. However, the 1920s New Woman was notably different from her
late-nineteenth-century counterpart in two important ways: her class and her sexuality. The 1920s New Woman, at least as she was configured by the popular press,
was largely working class, like the shop girl that Bow plays in her definitive It role;
furthermore, the New Woman’s sexual behavior was much more visible, less unspeakable, and therefore more subject to debate. Women’s lives were becoming
increasingly more public, made so not only by employment and wages but also
through such “acceptable” leisure activities as moviegoing.
Even the movie industry’s standard, Photoplay, participated in the debate over
women’s rapidly changing roles in the family and society in its monthly column
“Girls’ Problems.” But it was through countless stories of stars’ lives, fashions,
makeup, hair, love, and homes that fan magazines created a litany of identificatory
modes for their readers. The ideological implications of these magazines and their
content are unusually clear: readers not only wanted to know about the stars; they
wanted to be (like) the stars as well. If such thinking sounds familiar, it is because
it is the same logic on which theories of spectatorial identification have been built.
Despite their obvious differences, the strategies of spectatorial consumption and
identification employed by the fan magazines and the movies are remarkably similar. It should therefore come as no surprise that when Clara Bow fought her way
through that doorway of “Fame and Fortune,” she became one of the many stars
imitated by her countless fans. As Budd Schulberg puts it in his memoir, “Clara
Bow became not just a top box-office star but a national institution: The It Girl.
Millions of followers wore their hair like Clara’s and pouted like Clara, and danced
and smoked and laughed and necked like Clara.”25
Schulberg articulates the behavioral influence that was part of the nature of
female spectatorship as it was constructed through fan discourse. Bow, who came
to stand for this sexualized “type” of New Woman behaving outside the conventional bounds of womanhood, paved the way for many of her adoring imitators by
becoming a model for identification and mimicry. According to Dr. Bisch’s problematic assertion in the epigraph to this section, women are always acting, always
performing. Such notions of female behavior are suspect, of course, yet fan culture did everything to foster such mimicry. While the sexuality of Bow’s characters, as we shall see in the analysis of It that follows, can in many ways be considered
liberating inasmuch as they often (but not always) defied the conservative strictures that still held sway over the vast majority of American women, in her real-life
affairs and scandals, Bow lacked the moral certitude of her cinematic counterparts. As Bow’s name popped into and out of the scandal sheets, Paramount offered her a series of cookie-cutter roles that fed the public’s perception of Bow as
a real-life accumulation of her on-screen roles. This was particularly true of the
film whose title still remains inextricably linked to Bow’s persona: It.
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Entertainment was conceived up in the Garden of Eden. Eve gave the first show the
day she slipped into a fig leaf. Adam, the audience, enjoyed himself so much, that he
decided to go into show business. From then on, shows were made by men for men.
Beth Brown, Moving Picture World26
Clara Bow’s film It can be understood as a parable about fan culture, particularly the
ways that fan magazines constructed female readers and Hollywood films positioned
female spectators. It is replete with the interplay between plenitude and lack, with
the elemental bases of spectatorial identification, and with the processes of personal
reevaluation that were central to the machinations of female fandom in the 1920s.
Like fan culture, which encouraged women to imagine and, on occasion, to act out,
certain fantasies about their identities in relation to star culture, It enacts a fantastic
narrative of female sexual aggression and class transcendence.
It was a cinematic response to the resignification of this previously innocuous
pronoun by Elinor Glyn, whose fictional story—itself a kind of treatise on “It”—
sparked extensive discussion of what “It” was and who had “It.”27 Glyn was given a
cameo role in It and became part of the propaganda machine for the film, whose
catchy title and general concept derived from Glyn’s story. As Lori Landay has
pointed out in reference to Glyn’s marketing of the idea of “It,” the cultural phenomenon she started demonstrates the commodification of ideas and feminine
public personas in the emerging mass consumer culture of the 1920s.28 The film
aptly demonstrates such intersections of female identity and mass culture by exemplifying both formally and contextually the status of the New Woman, primarily
through the device of the gaze.
Contrary to Beth Brown’s edenic metaphor for Hollywood,29 It is a film that
invites the gaze of its female spectator, largely to identify with the film’s heroine
Figure 1. The opening shot of It invokes the film’s consumer-driven narrative by
referencing both the store where Betty Lou (Clara Bow) works as a salesgirl and the
man, Cyrus Waltham (Antonio Moreno), whom she will eventually acquire. Paramount Pictures, 1927.
and with her decidedly sexualized and empowered modes of seeing and being.
The film celebrates its female star’s rebellion against traditional modes of passivity
and complicates her relationship to the process of objectification. In other words,
It seems every bit as much made for the male gaze as for its often neglected female counterpart.
It depicts the career of Betty Lou (Clara Bow) and her romantic pursuit of
Cyrus Waltham (Antonio Moreno), new owner of the department store where Betty
Lou works as a salesgirl. While the plot is hardly remarkable, the mechanics of the
narrative set it apart from the often-tired formal and narrative structure of the
class-crossed romance.30 The establishing shot dollies out to reveal a sign, on top
of a massive brick building, that reads “Waltham’s, World’s Largest Store,” signaling from the outset that the film will be concerned primarily with the workings of
consumer culture. The camera pans down to a view of the bustling street and
tracks in toward the store’s entrance to show many people coming in and out; here,
the film already suggests, is modern American life manifest in the hustle and bustle
of consumerism. In the second sequence, we enter the store and see the active life
within; shot from a high angle, the masses of customers and workers moving about
have the appearance of so many contented ants at a picnic.
As established in the opening sequence, consumption serves as the paradigm for
the entire film and particularly for Betty Lou’s desire. However, consumer-oriented
desire is hardly limited to the character of Betty Lou, for so much of spectatorship
has to do with the logic of consumption, as has been discussed in the first section of
this article. This thematic is ideologically in line with what Hansen has deemed the
relationship between the cinema and spectator culture: “Film spectatorship epitomized a tendency that strategies of advertising and consumer culture had been pursuing for decades: the stimulation of new needs and new desires through visual
fascination. Besides turning visual fascination itself into a commodity, the cinema
generated a metadiscourse of consumption . . . a phantasmagoric environment in
which boundaries between ‘looking’ and ‘having’ were blurred.”31
Waltham’s department store, in which the narrative in It is located, formalizes
the spectatorial constructs of the film, for it is a place (just like a movie theater)
where one is expected to look, to desire, and to experience pleasure through fantasies of acquisition. This “phantasmagoric environment” is aptly demonstrated when
we get our first glimpse of Betty Lou. Situated among rather undifferentiated individuals, she holds a piece of lingerie in front of her clothed body to show an
older, respectable-looking couple what they might expect from their purchase.
Thus, couched in the decency of the on-looking couple, whose “decorousness”
justifies exposing the lingerie (or at least adds a comic element to the image’s otherwise overtly sexual suggestiveness), the film allows its spectator momentarily to
enjoy looking at the wide-eyed Betty Lou with no more than a hint of the lingerie’s
sexual implications. As the man and woman smile and nod, the division Hansen
notes between “looking” and “having” is blurred. Since both the department store
consumer and the cinema spectator are expected to desire what they see, the scene
appropriately figures consumption as both an economic exchange and a mode of
ideologically sanctioned visual pleasure.
This flirtatious looking is fleeting, however, for another salesgirl interrupts to
tell Betty Lou that Cyrus Waltham is the “new boss.” From this moment, the film
reverses the gaze so prevalent in dominant Hollywood cinema away from a male
appraisal (singular or collective) of the attractive onscreen woman. Here the male
character, Waltham, is situated on the passive, receiving end of the sexualized gaze.
To invoke the metaphor that opened this section, Betty Lou removes her modernday fig leaf but in so doing enables sustained scopophilic leering at her Adam. The
preceding lingerie scene thus serves as a brief reminder of Betty Lou’s to-be-lookedat-ness, to borrow a well-known phrase from Laura Mulvey, because Betty Lou is
hardly the visual object in this mise-en-scène.32 I would like to suggest that the
scenes that follow enact an inversion that indicates the changing nature of the
New Woman and of the institutionalization of female fandom.
The scene proceeds as a series of shot/reverse shots, atypical in that the camera’s
eye recognizes only half the gaze relays—the woman’s (or women’s) half. The sequence transpires as follows: Betty Lou gets wide-eyed and stares directly at
Waltham, the object of her visibly increasing desire. In the mise-en-scène of the
department store, a business with the sole purpose of creating and then satisfying
personal desires, Betty Lou is the ideal customer: she sees, she wants, and, in the
end, she gets. But not without first undergoing some struggle, for in the reverse
shot of Waltham, he is oblivious to Betty Lou’s gaze. Furthermore, Betty Lou’s
Figure 2. It is preoccupied with the processes of looking and acquiring. Our first
glimpse of Betty Lou encourages voyeuristic pleasure with a somewhat comic edge.
Paramount Pictures, 1927.
Figure 3. Betty Lou and the other salesgirls in It take a moment to unabashedly
enjoy looking at their new boss, Cyrus Waltham, thereby reversing the traditional
economy of gazes. Paramount Pictures, 1927.
desires diverge from the material objects of consumption—the things that purport
to complete the lacking subject/consumer—to Waltham himself, a man who in
many ways represents the sum total of consumerism, the star, if you will, of the
commodity system.
The next reverse shot shows Betty Lou still agog, with nine more female clerks
behind her in similar stages of ogling. Betty Lou is up front with her chin on her
hand, enjoying the act of looking to an unusual degree and for an unusually sustained duration for a female character—hers is an unabashed voyeurism; one might
even suggest it is a proud display of her visual pleasure. In yet another reverse shot
of Waltham, he remains oblivious to the fact that he is the focus of this spectacle.
A medium shot of Betty Lou follows with the intertitle “Sweet Santa Claus, give
me him!” This scene articulates many issues concerning 1920s women’s behavior
in a concise series of shots that empower Betty Lou with an active, consuming look
while relegating Waltham to the status of the unknowing and sexualized spectacle.
This visual empowerment of Betty Lou can be understood as an inversion of
the politics of looking in the cinema, which has relied on the spectacle of women
and the privileging of the male gaze. Ironically, the press kit for It misrepresents
the film on this level by showing a photo of Betty Lou surrounded by a group of
staring men.33 The advertisement is a lie of sorts, since this configuration appears
in the film in quite the opposite fashion--there, Betty Lou and the other shop girls
are shown staring rapaciously at Cyrus Waltham.
The press kit perpetuates the idea of women as the object of the gaze and
suggests that whatever reversals might take place in the film, entrenched standards of representation remain unchanged. Removed from its cinematic context,
the image of a group of men staring at Clara Bow seems perfectly natural in the
context of her career. In fact, the press kit image says more about Clara Bow as a
star than about Betty Lou as a character, for Bow’s career was utterly reliant on
marketing her sexualized, visual appeal. While Betty Lou as a character initiates
this scopic inversion only to reverse it by fighting her way into Waltham’s visual
register, Clara Bow the actress seemed hard-pressed to exist outside the intense
visual scrutiny of the public and the studios. This is, no doubt, why Bow later in
her life removed herself to the Nevada desert, where she could gain the kind of
anonymity that would have impeded the spectacular nature of Betty Lou’s romantic conquest.
But It presents more than just a reversal of the status quo, a transposition of
the traditional male role with that of the traditional female. On the one hand, the
scene of Betty Lou and the other shop girls staring at Waltham is hardly that radical, for the film’s premise still revolves around a classed inequity that is linked to
Betty Lou’s “type” (the independent working girl) as well as to Waltham’s (the rich
capitalist man), the end result being, predictably, marriage and a reconciliation of
this divide. There is also a tacit understanding that while Betty Lou appears to be
a relatively carefree working girl, she would rather be an otherwise-occupied wife
of a rich businessman. She is, in other words, a working girl only because she has
to be.34 She sells lingerie but ultimately sells herself, even if this transaction is
seemingly enacted on her terms. On the other hand, the scene does suggest something important about the nature of the 1920s woman precisely because Betty Lou
is able to look, desire, and pursue without being punished or condemned. In fact,
by film’s end she is substantially rewarded—materially, emotionally, and morally—
for her aggressive behavior.
Ultimately, the gift that Betty Lou receives is Waltham, but Santa has little to
do with this acquisition. Rather, it is Betty Lou’s ability to perform that enables her
to capture Waltham’s previously absent gaze and to consolidate her active, aggressive modes of seeing and being with a retained, albeit revised, sense of femininity.
As spectators, we join Betty Lou as she experiences the various impediments to
her pursuit of her wealthy man. In particular, Betty Lou’s dilemma is how to redirect Waltham’s heretofore absent gaze. Much as Bow repositioned herself from
spectator to spectacle, from consumer to consumed, through the fan magazine
contest, Betty Lou turns the tables on Waltham’s gaze in order to enact a strikingly
similar negation of obscurity. By participating in the fan magazine contest, Bow
rejected the idea of being an anonymous fan much as Betty Lou rejects being an
anonymous employee. It therefore replicates the paradigm of plenitude and lack
that constitutes not only the foundation of stardom but also the motivating premise
of the fan magazine contest. To put this another way, the narratives Hollywood
tells and retells reinforce divisions organized around the binary of presence/absence that maintains audience desire, and the nature of that desire transfers from
fiction to star to material object.
In the case of It, we are presented with precisely this scenario of lack and
completion. As empowering as Betty Lou’s active looking may appear to be, to
realize her goal, she needs to complete what has been absent by attracting Waltham’s
gaze; she must get him to actively complete the companion shot to the earlier relay
of gazes in which he is an unknowing and unseeing object; and she must reposition
herself as an object in order to gain her object. So when Waltham wanders by
Betty Lou’s lingerie counter with his back to her and then leans on a piece of
fabric, Betty Lou gets an ingenious look on her face and pulls the fabric in an
attempt to attract his gaze. Her desire is to direct Waltham, but she fails here (as
she does in successive attempts) as he nonchalantly proceeds.
It takes Waltham’s bumbling and foppish pal Monty (William Austin)—who is
on a mission to find an “It Girl” in the store after reading the Glyn piece in Cosmopolitan—to notice Betty Lou, in whom he immediately recognizes that mysterious
quality that has gone unnoticed by the oblivious Waltham. Monty’s own “desires,”
feeble as they are, are dictated by the Cosmopolitan article—he is told about this “It”
and goes to find it. Thus, the film suggests that the press has power over desire, mirroring the rationale behind the fan magazine and its consumer-oriented discourse.
While Monty looks at Betty Lou with an ineffectual, easy-to-dismiss, even effeminate longing, Betty Lou continues to gaze salaciously at Waltham. Such sustained looking, coupled with her heavy breathing, makes Betty Lou into a caricature
Figure 4. After reading Elinor Glyn’s piece on “It” in Cosmopolitan, Cyrus Waltham’s
associate Monty (William Austin) detects “It” in Betty Lou. This is one of several
moments in It that suggests the degree to which print culture mediates desire.
of the New Woman: desiring to near animalistic proportions. While restraint is partly
lost in silent film because of the need for a compensatory acting style, extreme gestures, and the exteriorization of desire, Betty Lou’s hyperbolic desire is isolated and
unique, leading us to wonder about her particular lack of decorum and passivity,
attributes that have historically been associated with proper women’s behavior, particularly in the public sphere.
It presents a world in which it is not only possible but acceptable to behave in
this unabashed fashion. As Landay points out, “It participated in the construction
of a public femininity that depended on women’s active satisfaction of their desires, an ideal that encouraged women to participate in the public sphere as consumers as well as commodities.”35 In the character of Betty Lou, It presents an
ideal of spectatorship made literal: like the department store consumer, she sees,
she wants, and she gets. But while this last component of possession remains safely
in the realm of fantasy for the film spectator, whose pleasure is based on the constant deferment of desire, Betty Lou acts out the spectator’s fantasies by becoming aggressive, plotting, and sexually predatory without apology. Herein lies the
basis for the satisfaction provided by the fan magazine contests: they alleviated
that chronic postponement of fan adoration by allowing spectators/readers to do
something; so too did the star-endorsed products that fans were encouraged to
purchase in order to live like the stars did. Bow’s characters were appealing for
precisely the same reason: they enabled audiences to experience a kind of sexual
liberation and moral reward that was simply not available in such a neat, coherent
fashion outside the realm of fiction. While changes had certainly taken place in
women’s behavior during the 1920s, only in Hollywood could notions of the New
Womanhood be taken to such a sanctioned extreme.
Betty Lou’s “newness” is precisely what makes her so attractive to Monty and,
eventually, to Waltham. Female desire—be it sexual or economic in nature—is legitimized through Betty Lou’s persona of the unabashed modern woman. In her
behavior, Betty Lou, as a model for the female spectator, constitutes the triumph of
feminine independence over the constraints of class and culture; but this is, of
course, only a fictional transcendence. Her role validates the fantasies of
spectatorship and fandom discussed earlier in this article, and although the film reflects some of the culture’s permissiveness in terms of new modes of women’s behavior, It is far from a documentary reflection of some new American sexual liberation.
Rather, the film—like the fan magazine contest that propelled Clara Bow to fame—
provided an opportunity for women to fantasize about engaging in rule-shattering
behavior, to identify with a fantastical sexual identity that was simply impossible (and
possibly even undesirable) for the vast majority of women.
Nonetheless, Betty Lou’s uniqueness, particularly her willingness to ignore convention, is unquestionably appealing in the context of the film. The film proceeds as
an examination of all those things that make Betty Lou different, and as a result
desirable, as the spectator is increasingly aligned with her ambitious pursuit of
Waltham. Her foil, Adela Van Norman (Jacqueline Gadsdon), is everything Betty
Lou is not: rich, well dressed, well mannered, reserved, and perfectly predictable.
But Betty Lou’s presence reveals that Adela is no more than an outmoded type. Betty
Lou, who has to improvise her evening wear, who cannot read a menu in French, and
who would prefer going to Coney Island over the Ritz, is appealing precisely because
she defies Waltham’s expectations of bourgeois womanhood.
While it takes some work to capture Waltham’s gaze, Betty Lou controls the
remaining action of the film in virtually every scene: when Monty offers her a
ride home, she pushes him onto her crowded double-decker bus (much to his
surprise and consternation); when Monty asks if she would like to have dinner,
she agrees on the condition that he take her to the place where Waltham is planning to dine; when her roommate, an unwed mother, is unable to work because
she is sick, Betty Lou cheerfully takes care of her; and when the same roommate
is faced with losing her baby to nosy reformist neighbors, Betty Lou charges in
and claims the baby as her own despite the stigma attached to single motherhood. Her character’s dynamism makes her the visual and moral center of every
scene she inhabits. Her attractiveness—as an object of both desire and identification—is apparent and undeniable.
But what is it in Waltham that Betty Lou desires? Her lust for him is seemingly instantaneous, but it is mediated by both her visual assessment of his image
and her knowledge of what he is: rich, the owner of the largest department store in
the world. While the film stops well short of making Betty Lou a gold digger,
Waltham seems to have little that is devastatingly attractive except for his wealth
Figure 5. The prim and proper Adela Van Norman (Jacqueline Gadsdon) in It
cannot compete with Betty Lou’s playful physicality, as evident when Betty Lou
and Waltham frolic on the appropriately named Social Mixer at Coney Island.
and status. In fact, Betty Lou proves her moral correctness when she refuses
Waltham’s offer to maintain her as a mistress.
The classed nature of Betty Lou’s desire is addressed both while she prepares
for her evening out with Monty and when they arrive at their destination, the Ritz. As
Betty Lou cuts away at one of her dresses to make it into evening wear, her eyes land
on a newspaper advertisement for Waltham’s. Betty Lou appears dreamy-eyed, but it
is not clear precisely what is behind this love-dazed expression, which we witnessed
earlier when she first set eyes on Waltham. Not only does Betty Lou see the name
Waltham, which signifies both the man and the “largest store in the world,” but the
advertisement is also headlined by an announcement of “New Dresses at $11” and
the “Latest Fashions from Paris.” Keeping in mind that Betty Lou is in the process of
having to make her own poor imitation of the “latest fashions” with scissors and pins,
it seems plausible that her desire is again double: it is at once for Waltham and also
for what he represents in consumer culture. Further, Bow’s desire for Waltham and
his gaze is integral to her longing to be recognized by and within consumer culture,
for as a working girl it seems that only a man like Waltham (interchangeable as his
name is with the department store) can legitimate her consuming desires. Thus, the
advertisement is simultaneously a reminder of what she currently cannot have
(store-bought dresses, the latest Paris fashions) and of what she might be able to get
(Waltham); the one, of course, follows from the acquisition of the other.
Figure 6. While Betty Lou makes a homemade dress for her night out at the Ritz
in It, she spies an advertisement that reminds her of both the material things she
lacks and the man who embodies those things. Paramount Pictures, 1927.
That class and desire are united in Betty Lou’s lack is further evidenced when
she and Monty arrive at the Ritz. The mâitre d’ sizes up Betty Lou—as do we,
aligned as we are here with the camera’s perusal of her—and detects the flaws that
belie her class. As she is led to a “quiet table,” Betty Lou scours the restaurant,
looking for Waltham; her gaze is searching, predatory. When she spots him, she
does a double take as we inhabit her point of view, and the shot rapidly dollies in to
a close-up on his face. Her frantic desire is evident again in the dolly; ideologically,
we are aligned with Betty Lou and her quest—both visual and literal—for Waltham.
When Betty Lou drags Monty to a more centrally located table, again controlling
the action of the scene in her attempt to direct Waltham’s gaze, she finally gets
what she has been working for when the two make eye contact. Of course, once
Betty Lou has attracted Waltham’s gaze, the rest is quick to follow.
To a certain degree their ensuing romance is predicated on Waltham’s
fetishization of Betty Lou’s class, or, perhaps more precisely, on the way her class
allows her to behave outside certain class-bound gender conventions. Betty Lou
demonstrates a physicality that is absent in the affluent Adela, manifest most obviously in Betty Lou’s frenetic onscreen movement. When she and Waltham go to
Coney Island for their first date, at her suggestion, they dine on hot dogs and
relish in the physical delights offered at the park. At the end of their date, however, when Betty Lou returns Waltham’s kiss with a slap, the intertitle reads, “So
you’re one of those Minute Men—the minute you know a girl you think you can
kiss her!”36 In contrast to several other Bow films from the same year, such as
Victor Fleming’s Hula and Dorothy Arzner’s Get Your Man, “necking” is not part
of the otherwise playful behavior of the New Woman in It. This is somewhat surprising, if only because, until this point, Betty Lou’s interest in Waltham has been
blatantly sexual.
Betty Lou’s slap is an interesting nod to “the real world,” to the complexity of
her otherwise liberated behavior. Within the context of the narrative, her behavior
is easily explicable, for hers is both a defensive and a performative reaction, defensive because she has nothing to fall back on and performative because she is, to a
certain degree, acting out what she suspects she should do in response to Waltham’s
physical advances. It would be too facile to argue that Betty Lou’s behavior in this
scene is intended to serve simply as a morally correct guide for women’s dating
behavior, laid out by either the conservative Glyn or one of the film’s heads of
production. Rather, Betty Lou’s behavior is an acknowledgment of the tensions
between public and private, liberation and conservatism, that characterized the
1920s and its tumultuous gender politics.
My assertion that the slap is a somewhat performative reaction—one that denies what Betty Lou clearly seeks—is supported in a later scene. Immediately
after the slap, Betty Lou sits in her apartment rubbing her lips, enjoying the memory
of the kiss in private. However, it is only outside Waltham’s presence that she can
safely experience the pleasure of their interaction. To have embraced Waltham’s
advances would have compromised the pursuit of her goal, for Betty Lou wants
nothing less than marriage, of course, and therefore is trying to conform to how
she suspects a marriageable girl might behave. As Landay puts it, “It is clear that
she is not insulted by but pleased by his advance, but it is also clear that her sexual
favor is not easily purchased and that she will hold out for marriage.”37
Although Betty Lou’s originality is largely what makes her able to “win”
Waltham, she is not above imitating women she perceives to be her cultural superiors. During the scene at the Ritz, she notices that her rival, Adela, has pinned her
corsage on her chest, not near her waist as Betty Lou has done; Betty Lou adjusts her
corsage accordingly. Sarah Berry points out a related instance of “class
performativity” in her discussion of Joan Crawford in The Bride Wore Red (Dorothy
Arzner, 1937).38 This recalls the earlier scene in which Betty Lou sees the advertisement for Waltham’s, if only because it reminds us that Betty Lou has the odds
stacked against her because she cannot afford the trappings of the rampant consumerist. Nor can she afford to let Waltham suspect that she will give in to his physical
advances. When he ignores her after he mistakenly presumes she has an out-ofwedlock baby, Betty Lou thinks he is mad that she slapped him and apologizes: “I’m
sorry—but a girl has to do that. You know how those things are!” Betty Lou clearly
articulates that her reactions are based not on what she wants but on what she must
do to survive in the modern world. Sexual freedom is revealed to be little more than
an outward performance; the rules of propriety and morality appear to have changed
little, even if the attire and behavior seem to suggest otherwise.
Betty Lou’s behavior is consistent with Bow’s own life, testament as it is to the
ultimately conservative public allowance for New Womanish behavior. While the
film offers Betty Lou the traditional and safely respectable culmination of marriage, Clara Bow’s real-life affairs lacked such tidy, recuperative closure. When
Monty reads the issue of Cosmopolitan in which the Glyn piece appears, the camera lingers on a section of text in order to define the subject of the film: “The
possessor of ‘IT’ must be absolutely unself-conscious, and must have that magnetic ‘sex appeal’ which is irresistible.” Herein lies the falsity of Glyn’s concept in
the context of the 1920s and of It, for there is nothing about Betty Lou’s “It-ness”
that is unself-conscious. Rather, it is precisely the sexual nature of the New Woman’s
“It” that necessitates an increasing awareness of the dangers of the “magnetic ‘sex
appeal’” that Glyn claims is “It”; for examples, we need only turn to Clara Bow’s
career-long lack of self-consciousness, which resulted in repeated scandals. Betty
Lou’s apparent need to always consider how she is being perceived by Waltham—
how she is being seen—has everything to do with the “It” of the film’s title and
with her character’s ability, literally, as it turns out, to climb out of her class.
This same magnetic appeal that Betty Lou slaps away when Waltham tries to
kiss her is also what Waltham thinks she has succumbed to when he falsely assumes she is an unwed mother. Although the circumstances under which Betty
Lou’s roommate became pregnant are not part of the film’s narrative, Molly is
certainly a cautionary figure, representing the potential casualties of the New
Woman’s sexual liberation. Betty Lou escapes this fate, but only by self-consciously
keeping within the traditional parameters of premarital interactions.
The New Woman of the 1920s—with her bobbed hair, flamboyant attire,
and working-girl sensibilities—was still very much beholden to the sexual strictures of the dominant culture. As Paula Fass points out, the twenties were “a
turning point, a critical juncture between the strict double standard of the age of
Victoria and the permissive sexuality of the age of Freud.” 39 Betty Lou acts out
this doubleness by appearing to be both the wild, rapacious New Woman and the
morally correct and conservative young lady of the past—she is, like Bow herself,
at once a walking contradiction and evidence of the paradoxical nature of women’s
sexual roles in the 1920s.
It is worth returning here to the already-noted fragile boundary between public and private that is as much a part of the politics of It as it was of the life of the
movie star. The fan magazines exploited female audiences’ desire for the ingredients of movie stardom by redirecting and extending the spectatorial, consumerist
gaze to their own commercial products. Ultimately, the most telling sign of “It” in
It is a similar manipulation of the gaze—by both Betty Lou and the female spectator. Although Alexander Walker contends that “‘It’ boomed with the financial independence of the young female wage-earner who wanted to acquire not social
status, but sexual attractiveness to match her spending power,”40 Betty Lou, in
fact, controls the gaze through a knowledge of her sexual attractiveness, which
enables her to eventually gain social status. It is not an either/or proposition since
consumption and social status remain inextricably linked in the film’s narrative. In
the cases of both Betty Lou and Clara Bow, the New Woman saw and sought new
paradigms for negotiating the modern world. But the paradigms themselves—of
marriage and of fan culture—were already set for them.
Fan magazines, department stores, and films such as It all exist with the goal
of creating personal desire in their readers/customers/spectators. Both Betty Lou
and Clara Bow occupied such atmospheres of consumption, one of the commodity
and the other of the commodified image. The fan magazines extended the fantasy
world of the cinema, providing pages full of stars with extraordinary lives for ordinary women to ponder; these magazines were themselves a kind of department
store catalog selling images of the stars. Clara Bow, the star commodity, existed in
this fashion. Even in 1926, a fan magazine author could aptly assert that Bow “represented an investment,” concluding with the impersonal-but-true Hollywood
bottom line that “an investment must be profitable.”41 In fact, Paramount ultimately labeled Bow’s films by the seasons: “Fall Bow,” “Spring Bow,” and so on—
designations that further reinforced her status as a commodity not at all unlike
those offered in the commercial realm of the department store or in the many
advertisements littering the pages of fan magazines.
1RWHV
I first presented these ideas at the 2000 conference of the Society for Cinema Studies in
Chicago. An earlier version of this article took second place in SCS’s Student Writing Award
in 2001. I would like to acknowledge the thoughtful advice of Jonathan Auerbach, Jennifer
Bean, Charles Caramello, Robert Kolker, Diane Negra, Devin Orgeron, David Stenn, and
Jonathan Witte, as well as the invaluable resources of the Library of Congress Motion
Picture Division and the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences.
1. Josef von Sternberg shot several unidentified scenes in the film when Badger became
ill; however, von Sternberg is not credited as a codirector. Paramount produced and
distributed the film.
2. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Social History of American Movies (New York:
Random House, 1993), 81.
3. Dr. Louis E. Bisch, “What Does Acting Do to the Actor?” Photoplay, January 1928, 68.
4. T. Gallant, “Can She Ever Come Back?” Movie Classic, September 1931, 20+.
5. The volume of fan mail Bow received—“more than double any star’s in movie history”—is cited in David Stenn’s biography of the actress, Clara Bow Runnin’ Wild
(New York: Doubleday, 1988), 159; an advertisement in the June 27, 1928, Variety also
notes that the Los Angeles postmaster reported that Bow set fan mail records. The
henna statistic is from Adela Rogers St. Johns’s memoir, Love, Laughter, and Tears:
My Hollywood Story (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 233.
6. The exception was Bow’s 1928 film, Red Hair (Clarence Badger), one of the many
“lost” Bow films. According to Stenn, in Clara Bow Runnin’ Wild, a two-strip
Technicolor process was used for the sole reason of enabling audiences to see the color
of the star’s hair (128). Virtually every article on Bow discusses her hair color in detail.
One contemporary fan magazine begins by commenting on “her shock of dashing red
hair”; a second begins with “Clara Bow’s hair is red and so are her fingernails”; and still
another claims parenthetically that “(You’ve never seen such hair. It’s red. Just red
red).” From Alma Whitaker, “How They Manage Their Homes,” Photoplay, September 1929, 64+; Michael Woodward, “That Awful ‘IT,’” Photoplay, July 1939, 39+; and
Lois Shirley, “Empty Hearted,” Photoplay, October 1929, 29+. It is worth noting that
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
on the application for the contest that Bow entered and eventually won, only two choices
were given for hair color: “blonde or brunette.” Motion Picture, January 1921, 122.
A good example of this shaping is evident in one of Dorothy Blum’s scrapbooks at the
Library of Congress Motion Picture Sound Division. In this fan’s meticulously constructed two-volume homage to Joan Crawford—filled with autographed pictures, 8x10
stills, and articles from fan magazines—is a list of Crawford’s “stats”: height, weight,
hair color, etc. At one point Blum typed in that Crawford had brown eyes, but later she
crossed this out and amended it by hand to “blue,” information Blum likely gathered
from a fan magazine.
“The Fame and Fortune Contest of 1921,” Motion Picture, January 1921, 122.
Joli Jenson, “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization,” in Lisa
Lewis, ed., The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 10.
Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 7, 86.
Such assumptions would ultimately lead to a spate of pseudo-scientific examinations
of the effects of films on spectators, such as the twelve-part Payne Fund studies. Books
such as Herbert Blumer’s Movies and Conduct (New York: Macmillan, 1933) focused
on the moral consequences of cinema for modern society, and their existence attests to
the perception (and the anxiety) that cinema had a transformative effect on spectators.
Richard de Cordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 11.
Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 125.
While there is much evidence to support the claim that fan magazines were written
for and read by women, it is worth noting that nods were occasionally made toward a
male readership. According to “A Dream Come True,” the June 1922 Motion Picture
magazine article that announced that Bow had won the 1921 Fame and Fortune
Contest, there were male participants: “We are sorry to say that the judges could not
find a single male with the requisite qualifications for a winner” (94). Considering
their long list of female prize winners, that there were male contestants and, implicitly, male readers is somewhat suspect.
Gaylyn Studlar, “The Perils of Pleasure? Fan Magazine Discourse as Women’s Commodified Culture in the 1920s,” in Richard Abel, ed., Silent Film (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1996), 292. Motion Picture magazine blatantly used this logic in
an advertisement for itself in its March 1926 issue: “When you buy your movie ticket you’ll
be getting more for your money if you have read the newest issue of MOTION PICTURE
MAGAZINE. . . . It increases your enjoyment of the movies by telling you the things you
want to know about the players and directors most prominent at the moment” (90).
Studlar, “The Perils of Pleasure?” 293.
The ruthless perfection demanded of stars was nicely demonstrated in the July 8–
October 5, 1999, “Fame after Photography” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York. Curators included “before” and “after” studio photographs of stars, revealing the degree to which the imperfections in their faces and bodies were eradicated
through careful touch-ups and postphotographic manipulation.
The circulation statistic is from Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 170.
Richard Ohmann suggests that Sarah Grand first used the term in an 1894 issue of the
North American Review. Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
the Turn of the Century (New York: Verso, 1996). As Ohmann puts it, “A woman was
unsettlingly ‘new’ if she disrupted old understandings of the feminine” (270). This was
as much the case at the turn of the century, the subject of Ohmann’s study, as it was
during the 1920s.
Elinor Glyn, “What’s the Matter with You American Women?” Cosmopolitan, November 1921, 26, 25–26.
Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York:
Oxford, 1985), 323.
Kathryn Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie
Fan Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1996), 151.
Ibid., 160.
While such historical generalizations are always too reductive, Mary Ryan suggests
that “the rate of female employment skyrocketed in the teens and increased at only a
moderate rate, if at all, between 1920 and 1930 when over ten million women were at
work outside the home” (508). Ryan, “The Projection of a New Womanhood: The
Movie Moderns in the 1920s,” in Jean E. Friedman and William G. Shade, eds., Our
American Sisters: Women in American Life and Thought (Lexington, Mass.: Heath,
1982), 500–18. Stanley Coben’s study substantiates the essence of Ryan’s claim: “Females barely held on to most of their earlier gains in the professions and in education
during the 1920s; and in some cases, lost ground.” Coben, Rebellion against
Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991), 98.
Budd Schulberg, Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince (New York: Stein
and Day, 1981), 170.
Beth Brown, “Making Movies for Women,” Moving Picture World, March 26, 1927, 34.
Elinor Glyn’s “It” was serialized in Cosmopolitan, February and March 1927. The story
begins with a definition worth repeating here: “‘IT’ is that quality possessed by some
few persons which draws all others with its magnetic life force. With it you win all men
if you are a woman—and all women if you are a man” (44).
Space does not permit an extensive analysis of Glyn’s influence in Hollywood, or of her
cameo in the film It. Interested readers are encouraged to see Lori Landay’s study of
the female trickster for an informative discussion of Glyn’s celebrity and its role in the
making and marketing of It. In Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female
Trickster in American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998),
Landay writes that “Glyn first used the term [“It”] in a 1915 novel and then bandied it
about in popular magazines like Photoplay in order to strengthen her celebrity status
as arbiter of sexiness and romance” (76). My thanks to the anonymous reader at Cinema Journal who recommended Landay’s discussion of Glyn to me.
Brown, “Making Movies for Women,” 34.
As Elaine Tyler May points out in Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold
War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), “the plots of the most popular films in the
1920s centered on the romance between two young moderns leading to marriage, or
on stagnant marriages that were revitalized through recreation, sensuality, and excitement” (42). While many of these films may have appeared to advocate a new
wildness of behavior, particularly for women, for the most part these films were ideologically conservative.
Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 85.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Visual and Other Pleasures
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14–28.
Carol J. Oja, "Women Patrons and Activists For
Modernist Music: New York in the 1920s"
Modernism/Modernity 4.1 (1997) 129-155.
Historians of American music have vigorously acclaimed the rising
young composers of the 1920s. As the legend goes, that decade saw
something special happen, and New York City was the central place
where it occurred. Challenging a conservative and inhospitable music
establishment, figures such as Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, and
Edgard Varèse struck out on their own to form performance societies
and publishing enterprises that would promote the newest compositions.
In a few short years New York was transformed from a remote outpost
of modernism, a city whose concert life had been suffocated by "the
grey musty presence" of the traditional European repertory (as the critic
Paul Rosenfeld rued in 1920), into "the capital of the musical world," as
contemporary commentators repeatedly boasted. 1 The composers at the
center of these changes deliberately cultivated an image of autonomy
and iconoclasm. While such a stance was basic to modernists throughout
the Western world, it assumed particular contours in the United States,
where the battle for recognition and respect was especially intense.
Leaders among America's young composers, perhaps by necessity,
became deft spin artists who shaped gritty images of self-sufficiency,
often tapping into cherished American myths of the pioneer and the
inventor. Henry Cowell, for example, described his colleagues from this
period as "experimental," "uninhibited," and "untamed,"
characterizations that have been repeated over the years by subsequent
historians. The British critic Wilfrid Mellers, in a survey of American
music history, titles his chapter on composers since World War I, "The
Pioneer and the Wilderness." 2 [End Page 129]
While notions of iconclasm and aesthetic autonomy can account for
some features of the modern-music movement in New York during the
1920s, they obscure the complexity of the community that brought it
into being. Composers certainly dominated the foreground, but they did

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