Lois Weber in Early Hollywood by Shelley Stamp

Author:Shelley Stamp
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520241527
Publisher: University of California Press

Figure 37. Paramount’s marketing campaign suggested similarities between To Please One Woman (1920) and “sex comedies” released by the studio. Author’s collection.

Yet, if reviewers noted comparisons between Weber’s work and other sex comedies—Wid Gunning, for instance, found that Too Wise Wives “closely resembles some of the recent DeMille pictures both in story and production”—they were also quick to distinguish her outlook. Although “Miss Weber shows you love troubles, somewhat on the general order of the domestic tangle dramas of Cecil B. DeMille,” one critic noted, she handled “sex themes without going too far.” As another reviewer put it, What’s Worth While? was “not a sordid problem play with the sex element running rampant . . . but a play dealing with the problem of just what it is in the average person’s life that is most worth striving for.” Framing the comparison more negatively, another writer complained that, despite its enticing title, Too Wise Wives, lacked the “ginger” that “picture patrons nowadays require . . . to keep their interest alive.”197 Even as Paramount sought to pigeonhole Weber’s films alongside lavishly appointed sex comedies, reviewers noted the distinct tenor of her offerings and her penchant for taking seriously such topics as marriage, sexuality, and consumption.

In interviews and public comments Weber herself joined the larger public conversation about marriage. Positioning herself as an expert on the topic, she exploited a persona long associated with a modern approach to heterosexual unions based on gender equality and professional camaraderie. In contrast to publicity earlier in her career, when more indirect portraits of her marriage emerged through reporters’ visits to her home or her work on set with Smalley, Weber now addressed the topic directly in profiles and promotional materials. In a series of interviews with female journalists, Weber spoke as a long-married woman, someone whose celebrity persona and working life were deeply enmeshed in her own marriage—a union at once conventional and groundbreaking in its combination of professional collaboration and personal intimacy. “There is no doubt that marriage is the most important event in our lives and the least studied or understood,” Weber told Motion Picture’s Aline Carter. Weber encouraged women to provide spirited companionship for their husbands by cultivating outside interests and activities rather than perfecting domestic tasks. Describing her own marriage, Weber explained how she “found friendship in my husband’s love,” confessing that “we have developed into the most wonderful friends in the world.”198 Weber’s emphasis on “friendship” echoed as much the earlier portraits of her intertwined professional and personal life in which she and Smalley were cast as “chums” and creative collaborators, as it did the wider discourse on companionate marriage. Weber later underscored these sentiments in a conversation with journalist Gladys Hall: “The successful marriage should be nine-tenths friendship and one-tenth attraction. . . . The first question any man and woman should ask of themselves before they take the final marital step is ‘Are we friends before we are lovers?’”199 Framed as an intimate chat between women, Weber’s

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