The Many Faces of Mary Pickford

"... we all remember that beautiful dress, but what’s so much more interesting is the mud that stained the fringes."

Mary Pickford really loves dirt. In fact, there’s no other performer, classical or otherwise, so willing to make muck, soot, mud and sewage an integral part of their screen presence. Each of her comedies seems a challenge—how much mud can a woman fall into, and how long can that joke remain funny?

My fascination with Pickford is unique in that it has nothing to do with her outings with noted auteurs. She spent the early years of her career as a favorite of D. W. Griffith’s Biograph company, playing the usual Griffithian women: your farmhouse wives, treasured daughters, besieged coquettes, none of which managed to stick with her image the way it did for Lillian Gish or Blanche Sweet. After graduating from Biograph and starring in a few popular silent dramas, she did two films with Cecil B. DeMille: The Little American and Romance of the Redwoods, which returned her to dramatic roles, though in newly modern settings. Despite the relative success of these outings, she never starred in another DeMille picture, or any of the major directors’ of the day. The insistence of “Mary Pickford, serious actress” was promptly refused.

The bulk of her roles (and arguably the most personal ones) were for comedies, and with personally appointed directors, most of which worked very little outside of Pickford’s purview: Marshall Neilan (who directed a whopping seven Pickford vehicles), Frances Marion (though mostly as writer, excepting The Love Light as director), James Kirkwood (Cinderella), Sidney Franklin (Heart o’ the Hills); and work-for-hire filmmakers like Alfred Green (Little Lord Fauntleroy), Sam Taylor (My Best Girl), Jack Dillon (Suds), Maurice Tourneur (The Poor Little Rich Girl), and her own brother, Jack Pickford (Fanchon the Cricket). A few of them would go on to have some auteurist following (mostly posthumous), but little can be said of their authorial touch when met with Pickford’s own.

But what is this touch? A surface level gleaming would suggest a schizophrenic, megalomaniacal stew—complete with impressions of Chaplin’s tramp, Oliver Twist, some proto-Little Rascals routines, and, still, some of the religious madonnas found in her Biograph days. In fact, the sum total of her influences seem to be present in her United Artists co-founders: Griffith, Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks. And yet, the vulgar blend of these influences, mixed and churned in the great iron pot of “America’s Sweetheart,” does not strike me as haphazard, redundant, or confused. These films, often incredibly cheap and rarely crossing the threshold of 70 minutes, have an undeniable magic to them, a forward drive that cannot be ignored, and a lead performer with as many faces as a hydra.

If you have seen a Mary Pickford film, it is almost certainly The Poor Little Rich Girl. One of two Pickford vehicles directed by Maurice Tourneur, you could find frames from the movie plastered in every little girl’s scrapbook, posters hung proudly among china dolls on bright pink walls—the film was considered the quintessential Pickford outing. Mary plays the eponymous figure, a young girl living in a tall, labyrinthian family mansion, forbidden from playing with the poor kids outside, and bereft of familial support. She spends most of the film in a frou-frou white spring dress and thin, southern-style bows in her hair. The film, again, seems to be a concerted effort to get such an outfit as dirty as possible. To stave off her misery, the young girl terrorizes her plumber with a garden hose, organizes a mud fight with local boys, and all but murders a fellow rich girl halfway through the film. We see each new outfit, more luxurious and sparkling than the last, turned into tattered, infested rags.

The film itself is rather simple, even clumsy in its direction as Tourneur struggles to make Pickford’s twerp a sympathetic presence, but her performance is anything but. An adult woman plays a child, not an uncommon choice, and in terms of Pickford, her size almost guaranteed such roles, but there is a tension, almost carnivalesque, between actor and character. When we see Pickford explore her vast mansion home, measuring her up in relation to walls, tables—even to the seams of her dress, she appears much too small, always growing in to something — then we understand her as a child. Perhaps not completely, as the image is just too bizarre, not so far off from an effect in The Incredible Shrinking Man, but it is believable, by our measurements, that this figure is helpless in her surroundings. The world is big and old and therefore Pickford is small and young. When we see her in action, however, the seams begin to break apart. In the mud fight, for instance, she plays against actual child actors, without the tension of size and stardom. Suddenly, even as her actions become ostensibly childish and pouty, we can no longer understand her as an infant. In a world that is even with her height, she suddenly gains mass, an alchemic reaction certainly, she becomes the woman trapped within the child. Her movements are too long, too presumptuous, without the staccato of inexperience. The performance seems to break apart whenever faced with the real, tangible world. When the mud is introduced, we cannot help but see outside of the character, into the actress underneath. The scenario becomes uncanny, more than comic, a disguise drooping into mud, inch-by-inch.

It is an accidentally gruesome image. In fact, it calls to mind certain shots from Tod Browning’s Freaks, and yet it’s not unwelcome, and not without its popular appeal. She’d play similarly endowed characters: Cinderella, The Little Princess, Little Lord Fauntleroy, to various levels of success, all of which contain this same uncanny oscillation. Even more intriguing, however, is when the same formula is applied to a character of a different class and age. More than the coquette routine she became instantly popular for, Pickford’s roles mostly consisted of orphans, ne’er-do-wells and Dickensian heroes. She plays the tortured yet whimsical vagabond in Sparrows, Little Annie Rooney, Daddy Long Legs, Stella Maris, and Fanchon the Cricket to name a few.

At first, the image is about as eerie as in Poor Little Rich Girl. Stripped of her fine satin, her pretty pink bows and perfectly kept curls, without the heavy mascara, powder and red lipstick, she’s almost unrecognizable. Stella Maris serves as a stark example. Pickford plays two characters: the titular Stella Maris, a rich girl paralyzed at birth and forbidden from outside contact, and the orphan Unity Blake, terrorized by both orphanage officials and foster parents, molded into a meek and impish servant-girl. As Unity, Pickford is quality-less, almost androgynous, especially when contrasted to the pure 19th century femininity of her counterpart.

Stella Maris, confined by her family’s wealth as much as she is coddled by it, is near indistinguishable from her gilded bedroom for most of the film. Her golden locks are lit at almost the same temperature of her white bed sheets and pillows, her pasty white skin as liquid-smooth as the sunlight petered through her vermillion drapes. The poor Unity is almost always out of place—her rags a shade too dark for the streets and her light hunch always turned to the opposite direction of the furniture. When these two Pickfords meet, it is less like seeing doubles, and more akin to a mother laying her eyes on her daughter. The strangeness of Stella’s ethereality makes her impossibly large, the borders of her body difficult to delineate from her bedside. It is as if her waif-ish innocence covers the whole room, whereas the displaced Unity is terribly small, contracted into smaller and smaller shapes as the enormity of Stella closes in.

The technique continues in the more comedic Dickensian films like Sparrows and Daddy Long Legs. Pickford plays a familiar figure: the Christlike defender of a group of poor orphans. Again, she plays a child against actual child actors, either in the squalid poverty house of Daddy Long Legs or the muck and grime of the Bayou in Sparrows. Her size is, then, constantly in question. Sparrows has the actress perform Keatonesque gymnastic acts in order to save her band of exploited children, from pirouetting over crocodile infested waters to a speedy motorcade escape. We see her perform acts that a child simply could not, express emotions that children simply don’t have the muscular training to express. She is an uncertain figure—superhuman, even. The world bends to her will in one scene, while in another, she is completely helpless. She can swim across a river with a child on her back, but she cannot escape the grip of an old man. She is both child and woman, somehow androgynously asexual one moment and an exploitation vehicle in another. Such waffling could be considered poor ability, a lack of continuity on the part of the actor, but to me, it describes the exact opposite. Pickford is in complete control of her body, her persona, her character. There is a method to the madness of a Mary Pickford performance, however mad it may be.

Pickford is an actor of volume. Whereas a silent actor of any talent level must be trained in movements and gestures of exaggeration, there is nothing exaggerated about Pickford. It is all about her size, her weight. Like a peacock flushing its luxurious feathers outward, gaining the superficial mass of a lion, Pickford manages to switch, rather elegantly, from the coquette, a shrinking creature in layers of white satin, to the tramp, a bigger, rowdier character, a different weight class on the screen. She is less comparable to a Chaplin as she is to an iguana. Certain strains of marine iguanas are able to change their length, their size, sometimes even their mass, in order to compensate for a lack of available food, or to ward off predators. We can say Pickford has that same ability—to change her filmic mass, contort and shift her persona into odd new shapes, even change her age—in order to better suit her character or world view. She is an irresistible body, puny enough to fit through any thin opening, large enough to fool any villain. Unlike the meticulous Chaplin, she is haphazard and raw, an object that only moves forward, with seemingly limitless potential energy.

It is even stranger to consider these contradictions within Pickford’s performance style when held against the infallibility of her public image. I won’t pretend cinephiles in 2024 really think about Mary Pickford all that much (I have probably expended more energy into these films than anyone has this century), but in the event one of them is pressed to describe her, the closest you’d get is The Poor Little Rich Girl. Even less, you will get the prim and proper china doll on the film’s poster, a Victorian-era dream. This is not an accident, of course. The actor’s brand is based off that troublesome ballerina, or otherwise, “America’s Sweetheart,” and it’s a rather successful one to boot. So successful that it manages to eclipse a truly unique and multifaceted performer, with a body of work rich in gaiety and subversion, commercial pleasures and personal detours. Put into other words: we all remember that beautiful dress, but what’s so much more interesting is the mud that stained the fringes.

Fran Kursztejn is a writer and filmmaker based in North Carolina. She writes about silent cinema, former Soviet films, and kaiju. You can find her on social media @fkursztejn.