But Normand had higher artistic aspirations as well: Born into a working-class French Irish family on Staten Island, she had grown up with dreams of becoming an illustrator and had begun modeling to pay for art classes. By the time she made an impression as Vitagraph Betty, she was already a master at deploying the power of her pretty, protean face. Normand’s image had sold Coca-Cola, dress patterns, luggage, and lingerie. As a young teenager she had posed for influential fashion illustrators like Charles Dana Gibson and James Montgomery Flagg, embodying the “Gibson Girl” type in all her bicycle-riding, taboo-breaking, suffrage-demanding glory. Normand came not from vaudeville or the dramatic stage but from the world of modeling and advertisement. ![]() In 1915, Julian Johnson-the same Photoplay critic who rapturously praised business whiz Mary Pickford’s childlike freshness-described Normand as “a kiss that explodes in a laugh cherry bonbons in a clown’s cap sharing a cream puff from your best girl a slap from a perfumed hand the sugar on the Keystone grapefruit.” But behind the camera as well as in front of it, Normand’s role went beyond mere sweetening. ![]() But it was Normand’s mischievous, incandescent persona, which translated instantly to the screen, that served as both Keystone’s chief artistic asset and its main marketing draw. Sennett was a masterful public relations mythmaker and a keen spotter of new talent, even if he was too cheap to hold on to his strongest performers for long. Sennett, who sometimes appeared in his own films in the part of an ungainly oaf, was a colorful and eccentric figure, an Irish Catholic immigrant from rural Quebec known for conducting studio business from the e8-foot marble bathtub he had installed in his studio office. In a 1915 poll she was chosen as the top female comedy star, with Chaplin as her male counterpart and Pickford as the favored “leading actress.” In her own time, Normand was sometimes called “the female Chaplin” her more popular nickname, “our Mabel,” gives a sense of the intimate connection she inspired in her fans. She was the first star to have her name appear in the titles of her films, the first actress to serve as her own director, and among the first film performers, male and female, to start their own self-named production companies. But in the 38 years she had on earth, over half of them spent in the motion picture business, she got a fair bit done. ![]() To watch her films now-the majority have been lost, but dozens still survive and are widely available-is to ache for the future she might have had. ![]() Normand came as close as any woman in silent comedy to achieving that degree of success and creative freedom. One loves her.”īy 1916, Mary Pickford was the highest-paid performer in all of show business. Photoplay critic Julian Johnson, whose long-lived Impressions column was a haikulike tribute to the charms of a different actress each month, compared Pickford to “dawn over a daisy-filled meadow the spirit of spring imprisoned in a woman’s body the first child in the world.” But Pickford’s appeal also lay in the implacable force of will she manifested both on screen and off: To quote the besotted Johnson, her “feminine fascination” and “luminous tenderness” were contained within “a steel band of gutter ferocity.” A colleague of Johnson’s at Photoplay, the splendidly named gossip columnist Delight Evans, answered his florid tribute with a simpler formulation: “But one does not understand Mary Pickford. Barely 5 feet tall, with a round angelic face, a childlike frame, and a dense mass of pale-gold sausage curls, she was adored by audiences with a fervency that’s hard to comprehend in our celebrity-sated era. The most powerful woman in Hollywood in the 1910s was unquestionably Mary Pickford, a one-woman media conglomerate who rose from a rough childhood spent touring the country in juvenile dramatic roles to become, by 1916, the highest-paid performer in all of show business.
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