by Ellen Dawson
On 22 March 1914, the Cedar Rapids Daily Republican announced, “It is becoming a fad among the great companies to film a serial picture that will interest the multitude of picture patrons in every city” (“Perils of Pauline at the Palace” 17). This was news not only in Cedar Rapids but also across the United States. At that moment, two strong precursors defined what would soon be a thriving genre. In July 1912, Thomas Edison’s motion picture company began releasing monthly the twelve chapters of What Happened to Mary?
in which Mary Dangerfield (Mary Fuller) travels to New York City in search of work, finds herself beset by a wicked uncle and his henchmen, and eventually discovers that she has come into a sizable inheritance. A prose version of Mary’s adventures appeared concurrently in The Ladies’ World, a monthly magazine with a very large circulation among working-class women; this tie-in apparently succeeded in luring a substantial portion of the magazine’s readers into movie theaters (see Enstad; Stamp; Singer, Melodrama). The Selig Polyscope Co. repeated Edison’s success beginning on 29 December 1913
when it teamed with the Chicago Tribune newspaper syndicate to present The Adventures of Kathlyn biweekly: Kathlyn Hare (Kathlyn Williams) travels to India to rescue her kidnapped father and has many thrilling encounters with big cats as well as locals, both wicked and benign. She serves briefly as queen of Allahah before restoring native administration and returning home with her father and newly acquired big-game-hunter husband.
In consequence of the success of Kathlyn, almost all the major filmmaking companies (except Biograph) began producing serials of around fifteen one- or two-reel chapters with a newspaper tie-in.1 Interest in action series increased as well, and the genres cross-pollinated one another, the
176
MARK GARRETT COOPER
technical difference being that a series features recurring characters and situations but completes a story in each episode, whereas a serial continues a narrative arc across the episode breaks. By 1915, the suspenseful cliffhanger had evolved into the serials’ default chapter-ender. The audience would have to return to the theater to see the heroine survive her newest, presumably lethal predicament. Thanhouser found early success with The Million Dollar Mystery starring Florence LaBadie (1914). The Kalem series Hazards of Helen (1914–1917) and The Girl Detective (1915) established Helen Holmes and Ruth Roland, respectively, as major stars.2 But the decades’
most prolific producers of serials were Mutual, Vitagraph, Universal, and the New Jersey–based branch of the French firm Pathé Frères. Beginning in 1914, Pathé and Universal each released no fewer than two serials every year for the remainder of the decade (see Singer, Melodrama 213–24).
Accordingly, by 1920 the fad anticipated in Cedar Rapids had produced a long list of serial queens (see Bean “Technologies”).
The Perils of Pauline, with Pearl White in the titular role, opened in cities across the United States in the week following the Daily Republican story. At the time, local theater owners largely controlled their own programming and marketing. Because of the need to coordinate film releases with print publication, serials began to shift such control to producers. This change encouraged and drew strength from the developing star system. As early as 1910, White had been noticed as a “picture personality” for her work in short films (“Picture Personalities,” Moving Picture World, 3 December 1910, 1281; see also Abel in this volume), but her star persona congealed around Pauline, an orphaned heiress and aspiring fiction writer who declares her wish “to be absolutely free for a year,” puts off her marriage to Harry Mar-vin, and inspires the treacherous trustee of her estate to plot her destruction in hopes of seizing her fortune for himself. Developing the precedent set by What Happened to Mary and The Adventures of Kathlyn, Pathé publicist P. A. Parsons arranged a “hook up” with Eddie McMannus of the Hearst newspaper syndicate. The Hearst papers published the prose version of Pauline’s perils and helped coordinate a massive advertising campaign, including a $25,000 prize contest for fans eager to supplement Pauline’s adventures (and mimic her writing ambitions). Leading questions urged them to fill in plot points not elaborated in print or onscreen (see Stamp).
As P. A. Parsons relates, this effort made “ ‘The Perils of Pauline’ . . . so well known that it passed into a figure of speech.” Commodifiers proliferated. “A very popular song called ‘Poor Pauline’ was voluntarily composed by a music publishing house,” Parsons recalls, “and could be heard in almost any vaudeville theater” (“A History of Motion Pictures Advertising,” Moving Pic-
PEARL WHITE AND GRACE CUNARD
177
Grace Cunard and Francis Ford on the set of The Broken Coin (1915). Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
ture World, 26 March 1927, 308). Pathé and White worked diligently to extend the success of The Perils. By decade’s end they had released nine chapter plays in the United States, plus multiple spin-offs abroad.
The Universal Film Manufacturing Company followed Pauline to the screen by just under a month with episode one of Lucille Love, the Girl of Mystery, in which Grace Cunard’s Lucille commandeers a hydroplane and sets off on a globe-spanning pursuit of Francis Ford’s Hugo Loubeque, who absconds with secret government papers entrusted to her father. Already popular for their work in short westerns, mysteries, and adventure films, Cunard and Ford became major stars through a total of four successful serials for Universal, the last of which appeared in 1917. Since Cunard and White portrayed similar sorts of characters onscreen, it only makes sense that their star personae would share certain features. Fans of both performers were urged to marvel at their hazardous stunt work (doubles were not typically used). In addition to their risk-taking, the global popularity of these serial stars also awed commentators. Reports established, for example, that to be a Cunard fan in Racine, Wisconsin, United States of America, gave one something in common with residents of Poona City, Bombay Presidency, India. This raises the question of what exactly such commonality
178
MARK GARRETT COOPER
entails. If admiration of serial queens made one modern in the 1910s, did this modernity confirm or contradict traditional affiliations of class, gender, race, and nation? Cunard’s celebrity, like White’s, encouraged discussion of the risks of modern life and of the new web of social connections moviegoing created. Her fame differed, however, due to her sustained collaboration with Ford. Cunard and Ford were co-directors as well as co-stars, and she also wrote their scenarios. Their characters often married, but the stars never did. To consider these filmmaking partners alongside White thus foregrounds a third problematic defining the serial queen’s “now,” namely, that of a changing division of labor, with all that entailed for women’s prospects at work and for the organization of married life.
✩★
✩★
✩★
✩★
✩ Risk
In a February 1921 interview called “The Ninety-Nine Lives of Pearl White” for The Picturegoer, a fan magazine, Alice Hall stages her visit to White’s Long Island home as if she were entering a serial episode:
“A harmless-looking house enough,” I thought, as I walked up the broad drive-way leading to Pearl’s palatial home. But if you know anything about serials and their makers, you will remember that it is just these seemingly innocent abodes which prove to be the lair of dynamiting gangs, Black Handers, and criminals of the deepest dye. So I did not relax my vigilance. . . . I stood ready to make my escape the moment [the butler] began to exhibit those disquieting tendencies indulged in by the serial butler—who is invariably the villain in disguise.
(31)
Hall turns out to be perfectly safe, of course. The butler poses no threat, and the star hosts a not-at-all-poisonous, “super-feature” tea, despite the “3,750
attempts against her life” reported in a sidebar. Although White claims to have “renounced serials in favor of features” (she would in fact make one more serial, Plunder, in
1923), the persona established by her work in serials of the 1910s structures the interview. Echoing a trend established by journalists as early as 1914, Hall discovers a White more ordinary than one might imagine (cf. Mabel Condon, “Sans Grease Paint and Wig,” Motography, 22 August 1914, 279–80; Condon, “The Real Perils of Pauline,” Photoplay, October 1914, 59–64). Readers learn of her humble upbringing in the Ozarks, her work ethic, and her forthright good humor. Yet the star also turns out to be every bit as extraordinary as one expects: “golden-haired, rosy-cheeked, lovelier than I had ever seen her on the screen” (31). She also confronts death with a sangfroid exceeding that of her characters.
White tells a wide-eyed Hall
PEARL WHITE AND GRACE CUNARD
179
how she fought with villains on the narrow girders of unfinished buildings, high above the streets, and dangled from ropes that were severed to the last strand; how she was thrown upstairs by the villain, and downstairs by his accomplice; how, in one scene, a big china vase was smashed in pieces against her head; how climbing down a 300-foot flag-pole, or being cut loose in a drifting balloon, were but insignificant episodes in a day’s work.
(34)
This recitation of perils—truly a set piece of writing on serial queens—
conflates character with performer only to end up neatly distinguishing them. Like her characters, the star repeatedly defies death, but whereas each life-threatening predicament catches her character by surprise, for the performer the risk is part of the daily routine, hence “insignificant.”
Made quotidian, the most implausible hazards can be shrugged off with blithe disregard.
Poised for flight on White’s threshold, Hall poses briefly as a naïve fan who mistakes fiction for real life. This is a ruse. The author playfully disavows her knowledge that villains do not infest the star’s Long Island home in order to allow readers the satisfaction of believing they can tell the difference between fiction and real life. In so doing, Hall defines what real life is and offers the star, rather than her character, as a point of identification.
Like White and the soon-to-be-enlightened reporter, fans know that the star only pretends to be menaced by “dynamiting gangs, Black Handers, and criminals of the deepest dye.” If such threats perpetually catch Pauline unawares, the fan (and the star) expects them. Readers may therefore anticipate Hall’s discovery of White’s workaday nonchalance and come to see something of themselves in the star who gets up every morning, risks life and limb, and returns home only to repeat the process. Identification with the star thus invites a sense of vicarious mastery over the world of omnipresent danger serials depict.
In her encouragement of this identification, Hall enacts a knowledge game the rewards of which lie not in winning so much as in continuing to play. At first, readers might assume that discovering the true nature of a threat will suffice to defuse it. When Hall hovers cautiously on White’s doorstep as if she were a serial heroine, she anticipates a danger that does not in fact exist. Her readers are wise to this and may take satisfaction in knowing what the mock-naïve reporter seems not to know. As the article proceeds to replace the character’s fictional hazards with the real perils experienced by the star, however, the rhetorical strategy stresses the degree to which uncertainty and danger define White’s daily routine, and lures the reader to anticipate learning more about the star’s ongoing antics from publicity and press releases. Not only does Hall imply that she learns more from White than she
180
MARK GARRETT COOPER
Pearl White in The Perils of Pauline (1914). Courtesy of Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive.
reports; she also hints that more adventures will follow. She mentions, for instance, that White has invited her to return to meet actor Warner Oland, whose villains menace White’s characters in The Lightening Raider (1919) and The Fatal Ring (1917). Extending screen stories by means of serial interviews, Hall and her ilk establish the riskiness of the serial queen’s undertaking less as a problem of knowledge than a problem for knowledge. Whereas the films encourage a disavowal, in which we know very well that Pauline’s perils are fictional but fear for her all the same, star discourse provides the pleasurable, open-ended project of discovering what precisely White experienced on set, divining what kind of person would undertake such stunts, and questioning whether one is that sort of person oneself.
This construal of the star’s risky performance, far more than the perils faced by her characters, provides a common denominator linking otherwise different serial queens. A reader turning from Hall’s article to the surviving version of Perils of Pauline, for example, may well find that Pauline’s heroics lack luster.3 When cut loose in a balloon, she saves herself by throwing out the anchor and rappelling down its rope, but then requires Harry to rescue her from the cliff-ledge on which she lands. His acrobatics make hers look somewhat feeble by comparison. Pauline’s peers often fare better. For instance, no other character’s heroics equal Helen’s in episode thirteen of
PEARL WHITE AND GRACE CUNARD
181
Hazards of Helen, “Escape on the Fast Freight” (1914)—she rappels from a railroad bridge onto a moving train, grabs a fleeing crook, plunges with him into a river beneath a railroad trestle, and, after chasing him to shore, holds him fast until reinforcements arrive. Alternately, the plots of the Cunard-Ford serials required their characters to be equally matched. In chapter six of Lucille Love, for instance, Hugo saves Lucille from the clinch of a lecher-ous sea captain, his employee, but when the crew mutinies, steals the secret papers, and throws Hugo overboard, she saves him from drowning. By alternating competition and collaboration, Cunard and Ford developed a distinct chemistry that their fans found compelling. If Holmes’s and Cunard’s onscreen personae differ in these respects from White’s, however, an insistence on the hazards of their performances unites them. Pauline’s temerity relative to Harry is not in evidence, for example, in the widely reported 1916 press stunt in which White dangled from the roof of New York City’s Gregory Building to paint her name on its side—all while wearing a scarf emblazoned “Votes for Women” (“Pearl White in Press Stunt,” Moving Picture World, 6 May 1916, 948).
As the above comparisons with male heroics suggest, the serial queen’s risk-taking grabs attention in large part because it deviates from gender norms. Specifically, the figure modifies, though does not exactly upend, the ancient narrative convention that casts a man as the one who moves through a territory and, by means of life-threatening adventures, affects some transformation in it (see De Lauretis). Although often presented as strikingly new, this revision has strong precedents in nineteenth-century dime novels, serialized popular fictions, and “blood and thunder” melodramas, as well as in the short westerns and “girl detective” films derived from those genres (Enstad; Singer, Melodrama; Abel, Americanizing). The serial queen’s departure from heroic tradition, in other words, arguably continues a tradition of such departures. To pick just one landmark, E.D.E.N.
Southworth’s The Hidden Hand, first serialized in the New York Ledger in 1859, created the enormously popular character of Capitola Black. Introduced as a destitute orphan who masquerades as a boy, “Cap” has many heroic adventures in the process of recovering her family name, capturing the villainous
“Black Donald,” and marrying army officer Herbert Greyson (see Looby). If Pauline has a precursor in Cap, however, this still leaves the question of why she enjoyed such enormous popularity in print and onscreen in the 1910s.
Recent work by film historians supplies at least three compelling, if sometimes competing, answers.
“The serial queen’s oscillation between agency and vulnerability,” Ben Singer argues, “expressed the paradoxes and ambiguity of women’s new
182
MARK GARRETT COOPER
situation in urban modernity” ( Melodrama 262). “Urban modernity” refers to a cluster of changes coinciding with the extraordinarily rapid growth of c
ities worldwide in the late nineteenth century. In the United States, for example, the urban population quadrupled between 1870 and 1910. Expanding cities created jobs that brought women into the public arena, a situation that allowed greater independence but also created fears about sexual promiscuity and predation, which inspired new efforts to regulate women’s conduct.
Sexuality, like everything else, was increasingly commodified. The shop window and ubiquitous advertising hailed women as the ideal consumers for all manner of mass-produced commodities. Meanwhile, new communications and transportation technologies circulated people, information, and goods with increasing rapidity so that, while the city was the locus of change, its growth also affected the farms and smalls towns linked to it by means of, first, railroads, telegraphs, and magazines, and, soon thereafter, automobiles, telephones, and motion pictures. The new velocities and their concomitant dislocations often struck contemporary commentators as ener-vating: the thrill of mobility could prove excessively stimulating and also aroused fears of catastrophic technological failure. Just so, the cars, planes, speedboats, locomotives, and submarines that promised the serial heroine a thrilling escape are also liable to explode, spring leaks, or careen out of control. Thus, when the serial queen launched herself out of a domestic setting into a more thrilling and dangerous public arena, she joined the women in her audience as they entered an urban traffic flow that united peril and empowerment in uncertain relation.
Where Singer understands the serial queen to express the paradoxes of a newly urban society, Shelley Stamp sees her tentatively revising the rules of courtship. Stamp emphasizes a difference between serial plots themselves and the fan culture that developed around the respective stars.
Although, she argues, serials did “promote a kind of modern femininity clearly tailored to appeal to their cadre of female fans,” their plots also obsessively told “alarmist tales in which independence is always circum-scribed by the shadow of danger, the determinacy of familial ties, and the inevitability of marriage” ( Movie-Struck 126). Pauline’s case is prototypical in equating independence with the postponement of marriage, while associating wealth and security with its acceptance. Here, as elsewhere, wealth comes in the form of inheritance-with-strings-attached from an absent father. Pauline must marry to come into her father’s money, so that in delivering a husband the ending also continues the father’s estate. Let America’s daughters have their adventures, serials might seem to say, but in the end they remain daddy’s girls.
