The Girls in the Picture by Melanie Benjamin

Author:Melanie Benjamin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

Years later, she would spend countless hours looking at all the photos from that time, marveling at how young she was, how slim, how unlined her face, how luxurious her hair. She thought, When you’re older, looking at your younger self is like looking at a promise you couldn’t keep. But still, you look, you marvel. You remember.

But there was something else about those photos that she kept returning to; those photos of her and Charlie and Douglas; her and Charlie and Douglas and Griffith; her and Goldwyn and Griffith; her and all the—

Men.

One after the other, Mary was the only girl in the pictures. Occasionally, Fran would be there, too, but Fran never really did seek that kind of publicity; Mary remembered always having to coax her into the photo, Fran reluctantly obliging and then looking so beautiful that Mary had to tease her.

“Why did I insist you stand next to me, Fran, dear? You’re so pretty, no one is even looking at me!”

But even as she said this, she knew it wasn’t true. In every photograph that she was in, it was Mary whose image drew the first gaze. Especially in those photos where it was only her and her new partners—males all.

How many photos they posed for, the partners in this embryonic endeavor, all of them simultaneously terrified and arrogant! How many interviews they gave, the four of them!

The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

Some wag said it, although no one ever claimed responsibility. Mary knew it could have been uttered by any of the studio heads and distributors who greeted their new studio with forced jocularity but mainly disdain. No one in the industry could imagine that actors, artists, were capable of running their own business; that they could produce and distribute their own films. No one could conceive of the idea that actors could pocket their own profits, too. Or that they’d want to, in the first place.

And that a woman could be one of them—unheard of! Yet she was. The very first. Mary Pickford—actress, producer, philanthropist. And now, studio head.

It started in November 1918. Right around the armistice, when Mary had reached the very peak of her fame thus far, single-handedly selling more war bonds than even Douglas and Charlie. Headlines such as Little Mary Wins the War were not uncommon; even President Wilson publicly congratulated her for doing more for the war effort than anyone else. Mary proudly packed away her custom-made uniform after a victorious parade in San Francisco. Then she and everyone else in Hollywood returned to the studios and resumed the business of making movies.

But movies were different, now that the war was over. Hollywood was different. No longer a new, struggling American industry, Hollywood was suddenly big business, big international business. It would be years before the European film industries recovered, and since the Allied countries had been introduced to Mary and Charlie and Douglas and the rest during the war, millions hungered for even more of their films. So now there was international distribution to think of; international box office to divide.

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