by Nancie Clare
The antipathy exhibited by the neighborhood is especially curious considering Hollywood did not have much else in the pipeline to generate business at the time moviemaking started to grow. For the first decade of the twentieth century, the home and gardens of French painter Paul de Longpré had been enough of a tourist draw to boost occupancy at the city’s few hotels. With de Longpré’s death in 1911, that more genteel attraction to outsiders ended and nearby hotels faced ruin. While land speculator C. E. Toberman welcomed the new industry—and its pocketbook—with open arms, his more fastidious neighbors held their collective noses.
In 1911, not long after Griffith wound up his months-long stay in the area, David and William Horsley moved their Nestor Studios from Bayonne, New Jersey, to the Los Angeles area. Hollywood was in business and an industry was born. And what a business it was. The way studios were springing up all over the region was dizzying. Within three months of Nestor Studios opening, there were fifteen or so more studios in Hollywood. “Studio” being a relative term, since many of the companies shooting Westerns, comedies, and melodramas were as Mary Pickford described: open lots with an elevated platform shielded by large white curtains hung on wires so they could be adjusted to filter the sun. Even studios that had come west to the region before Nestor set up shop, like Brooklyn-based Vitagraph, shuttered their studio in Santa Monica and moved to Hollywood. It was during this period that some of the actors who would join Mary Pickford in her battle against Beverly Hills’ annexation to Los Angeles came to Hollywood, including Harold Lloyd and Tom Mix.
4
A Crash Course in Influence
It could be argued that nothing less cataclysmic than America’s entry into World War One was the first step toward the eventual relocation of Douglas Fairbanks and, after their marriage, Mary Pickford to Beverly Hills. Even though Mary and Doug’s affair had started in 1916 while the pair were working in New York City, when the United States entered the war in 1917 both were living in homes on either end of Hollywood, married to other people. There is absolutely no doubt that their support of the war effort on behalf of the U.S. government was sincere, but the silver lining was that their patriotic cheerleading enabled them to appear together in public cloaked in the innocence of their good intentions. The subterfuge worked, but only for a while.
If their popularity with audiences helped Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks learn how to negotiate higher and higher salaries with the studio chiefs, it was the Orwellian-sounding Committee for Public Information (CPI), established in 1917 as the government’s department of propaganda to sell World War One to the public, as well as the Department of the Treasury under Secretary William McAdoo, that showed them just how influential they could be in the world at large. In fact, for Pickford, Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and others, working with the CPI to make movies and with the U.S. Department of the Treasury to sell Liberty Bonds during World War One was their on-the-job training for how to influence crowds of people into doing something that, left to their own devices, they probably wouldn’t.
President Woodrow Wilson had a problem that extended beyond the drumbeats of war coming from Europe. Through the early days of World War One, his primary foreign policy goal had been to keep the United States out of the hostilities. When Wilson ran for his second term in 1916, it was on a platform of U.S. neutrality. Even at the time, though, Wilson must have known that staying out of the war was like whistling by the graveyard. By 1915 it had become clear that it was going to prove difficult if not impossible for the United States to avoid entering the fray. Great Britain declared a naval blockade of ships from neutral countries going to Germany; Germany declared the waters around Great Britain a war zone with no guarantees of safety for ships flying the flags of neutral countries. By 1915 Germany was sinking ships flying under American flags, including passenger ships. In May 1915, the British liner RMS Lusitania was torpedoed, sinking off the coast of Ireland. Many of the more than one thousand victims who lost their lives were Americans. Three strongly worded diplomatic protests to the Germans were rebuffed. It was becoming clear to Wilson and other members of the government that the United States was going to have to come to the aid of its European allies England and France. Wilson’s secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, a pacifist, resigned and was replaced by Robert Lansing, an authority on international law who had been a special counsel to the State Department. In 1916, Wilson requested appropriations for 500,000 troops and a buildup of naval vessels that included battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines.
President Wilson’s primary domestic challenge in the months before he was certain that the United States would have to go to war was to inform the country’s citizens and get them on board. Every student in U.S. schools learns about the great American melting pot. But in the second decade of the twentieth century, the “pot” was more along the lines of swirling ingredients that hadn’t yet mixed let alone “melted” together. And one of those components was a large population of German descent, many of whom had been born in Germany or were first-generation Americans. The government had to calibrate a consistent and uniform message to encourage patriotism while at the same time discouraging allegiances to the old country; they had to provide a message that addressed the government’s seeming contradiction of turning from neutrality to taking up arms. And the government had to navigate the potential land mines of freedom of the press while quashing dissent.
Enter George Creel. On April 13, 1917, a week after the United States formally entered the war, President Wilson created the Committee on Public Information. He asked Denver newsman George Creel to head the new civilian agency based on a memo Creel had sent the president about “expression, not suppression” of the press. Rather than put the screws on freedom of the press, not unexpected during times of war, Creel was proposing to spin the press; he suggested using the “carrot” approach of providing packaged news reports to newspapers around the country with the understanding that if these reports weren’t accepted, the “stick” of censorship would be sure to follow. According to Words That Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information, 1917–1919, by James R. Mock and Cedric Larson:
“The Committee on Public Information was assigned the staggering task of ‘holding fast the inner lines.’ The story of how it fulfilled that mission is a dramatic record of vigor, effectiveness, and creative imagination. The Committee was America’s ‘propaganda ministry’ during the World War, charged with encouraging and then consolidating the revolution of opinion, which changed the United States from anti-militaristic democracy to an organized war machine. This work touched the private life of virtually every man, woman, and child; it reflected the thoughts of the American people under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson; and it popularized what was for us a new idea of the individual’s relation to the state.”1
Consider the challenge: Reaching out to the country’s widespread population with a consistent message was a tall order; even radio, which seems like ancient technology today, didn’t begin until 1920 when KDKA sent out its first broadcast. Radio networks wouldn’t exist for another six years after that. And even though there was an ongoing shift in population from rural to urban at the time, large numbers of people still lived on farms miles from the closest village or town. Daily papers weren’t delivered to remote farms, and the local weekly papers that were common in rural areas weren’t timely enough, plus there was no guarantee that they would be read, or that they could be read. In 1917 there was still a surprising number of people who were illiterate. A large number of these citizens lived too far afield to attend patriotic rallies put on by local organizations. But by 1917, millions of Americans were going to the picture shows, many on a weekly basis. They frequented movie theaters religiously and watched Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Tom Mix, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, and Mabel Normand week after week after week. It was, in every respect, a captive audience and a perfect opportunity for the government
to deliver its wartime messages. George Creel’s committee had an incredibly effective delivery vehicle designed to fill in the approximately four minutes it took to change the film reels on the projector: For each venue, the committee would tap a community leader, known as a Four Minute Man, to stand before the audience and deliver the weekly message on the war. The Four Minute Men, drawn mostly from local lawyers and bankers, men comfortable with delivering messages in a succinct way—as opposed to orators such as clergymen who loved the sound of their own voices and rarely adhered to admonitions of brevity—would prepare weekly addresses relating to the war based on topics provided by Creel’s committee. Admonished to hold the audiences’ attention, keep overt partisanship at bay, maintain restraint, and exhibit good manners, the men conveyed news on such topics as the Liberty Loan program, the national Red Cross Drive, conservation of food and fuel, and donations of binoculars to the navy. The CPI’s central office issued bulletins suggesting topics and guidelines on how best to deliver the points. Creel’s CPI went one step further: It sought and received the support of the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry, which named the Four Minute Men as the “official and authorized representatives of the United States Government in the movie theaters of America.”2 The program reached millions of people a week in a way that no other method could and the idea’s effectiveness extended from remote rural areas into the cities. Each week in New York City alone, sixteen hundred Four Minute Men speaking in English, Yiddish, or Italian addressed more than half a million people. It was the first step in the relationship between the motion picture community and the war effort. There would be more.
In fact, no city was more patriotic and gung-ho than Hollywood. Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and director D. W. Griffith led a Liberty parade on Hollywood Boulevard. Hollywood was the first community to oversubscribe its allotment of war bonds; Fairbanks alone spent $100,000.3 The names of well-known actors may not have been on the lists of men being inducted into the armed services, but that didn’t mean Hollywood wasn’t throwing itself into the war effort. When the CPI came calling, asking for films with sympathetic story lines that reinforced the government’s message that the war was worth the cost, Hollywood threw itself into the task. As Words That Won the War summarized:
“No field of entertainment felt the effect of war more strongly than the movies, and none was of greater interest to the CPI.… [The] movie film was both the easiest way of presenting propaganda in the form of entertainment and one of the important items in a broad program of civilian morale.”4
It was a mutually beneficial partnership: Hollywood would make movies that the CPI would actively promote. The men at the helm of the movie companies relished their roles. In fact, the movie industry’s War Cooperating Committee, which included William Fox, D. W. Griffith, Thomas H. Ince, Jesse L. Lasky, Carl Laemmle, Marcus Loew, Joseph M. Schenck, Lewis J. Selznick, and Adolph Zukor, traveled to Washington, D.C., in July 1917, to confer with each government department to learn how their industry could help. And it was the smart move as there was little doubt that lack of support and cooperation on the part of Hollywood could quickly translate to censorship—or worse. Films deemed as appealing to Anglophobes or pro-German, in other words “pro-peace,” could be seized under Title XI of the recently enacted Espionage Act and producers could be tried and imprisoned. Making war movies wasn’t going to make the studios rich—profits from the films were shared with the CPI—but Hollywood’s enthusiastic participation would not only secure priceless government goodwill, but also make sure moving pictures had a positive place in the American psyche.
No one threw themselves into supporting the war effort through their work more than Mary Pickford. She starred in The Little American, proclaiming, “I used to be neutral till I saw your soldiers destroying women and shooting old men. Then I stopped being ‘neutral’ and became a human being!”5 She was everywhere: In addition to leading the march through Hollywood, she appeared in the propaganda short War Relief, posed for posters, had photographs taken of her collecting cigarettes to send to the troops overseas, had others taken of her kissing the American flag, and led a Marine band through San Francisco. As the patron of a Red Cross unit, Mary Pickford signed the receipts that were sent back to donors. She was made an honorary colonel of the 143rd California Field Artillery, who all wore her photo in a locket.6 Mary Pickford was a one-woman war-support machine.
The jingoistic movies starring the world’s most famous actors and actresses were serving their purpose. Creel and his fellow committee members were doing a superb job uniting the American population in support of the war thanks in large part to the movies they were seeing in theaters and the words of the Four Minute Men. But in spite of the slides being projected before and after each film exhorting Americans to buy Liberty Bonds, that program was lagging behind. Something more had to be done and Hollywood—specifically its biggest stars—would be the source of that “something.”
William Gibbs McAdoo, as Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of the Treasury (and son-in-law), was responsible for financing World War One, both stateside and through loans to America’s allies. It certainly helped that the citizenry had been brought around and was in favor of American involvement in the European war, but that enthusiasm wasn’t translating into robust sales of Liberty Bonds, which the government needed to finance the soldiers it was conscripting and all the munitions it was manufacturing. To proselytize the sale of bonds Secretary McAdoo would need a bold stroke, something more than including slides before feature presentations at movie theaters and asking community leaders and Four Minute Men to do their best to encourage their fellow citizens to buy bonds. So McAdoo did something that had never been done before: He called on stars of the moving pictures, people who, quite simply, were immensely popular and whose recognition transcended community, state, and even national borders, to spread the word. In retrospect, it was a genius move and must have seemed nothing short of revolutionary at the time. Movie stars had barely been invented, they certainly had never been called on by their government to lend their celebrity to a cause. In fairness to Secretary McAdoo, asking movie stars to lend a hand wasn’t the only bold step he took while helming the Treasury Department. He also closed the New York Stock Market for four months to prevent Europeans from selling their stocks and bonds, converting the dollars they received from the sales to gold and destabilizing the American economy. In the opinion of economics scholars, this action saved the country from a financial panic and began the process of shifting the world’s economic power from Europe to the United States. But it is asking Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin to be the spokespeople for the Third Liberty Bond tour for which he is probably best remembered.
In April 1918, one year to the day after the United States entered World War One, Secretary McAdoo’s Third Liberty Loan Drive was launched to great fanfare. Leaflets were dropped from airplanes over cities and there were patriotic parades down Main Streets across the country, but ground zero for the program was Washington, D.C., where Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and Broadway actress Marie Dressler were the main attraction. And while the circumstances that had brought the four to the nation’s capital were solemn and serious, the actors clearly enjoyed themselves. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks arrived in good spirits; the couple got the rare opportunity to openly travel together by train on the trip across the country. But the good spirits were shared by the entire quartet of showbiz folks. In her autobiography, Mary Pickford writes about the chagrin she endured when Marie Dressler told President Woodrow Wilson an off-color joke; Mary wished “the parquet floor of the Blue Room would open up and swallow me.”7 The hijinks continued on the steps of the Treasury Department, where Charlie Chaplin got uncharacteristically carried away with emotion (in the highly charged atmosphere of the time, not to mention the parts of the Espionage Act that equated antiwar sentiments with being pro-German, Chaplin took care to keep his pacifism under wraps), took a
misstep, and collided with Marie Dressler, causing both to fall on Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Years later, FDR would provide Mary Pickford with a photograph of that day in Washington, D.C., that she included in her autobiography, Sunshine and Shadow. It’s a very telling picture: The politicians and military men, with FDR on the far left, are grouped around the actors and actresses in the center. Mary is holding a huge bouquet of flowers and is caught by the camera gazing adoringly at Douglas Fairbanks, who is looking straight ahead. Mary’s mother, Charlotte, who had accompanied her daughter on the train ride from Los Angeles as a chaperone in an effort to quell the rumors of the couple’s goings-on, is looking at the couple with a less-than-pleased expression on her face.
After meeting with the Washington bigwigs, each of the four stars went to his or her separate booth to address the crowd, sell bonds, and sign autographs. In a foreshadowing of what would happen to Pickford on her honeymoon in England more than two years later, on the way to her station she was mobbed by hordes of fans. It took her over an hour to get through the throng. It had certainly been worth it to the Treasury Department, though—the Washington, D.C., kickoff to the Liberty Bond Drive brought in more than $3 million, just under $49 million in 2017 dollars. Following their Washington, D.C., success, the quartet of actors charged with helping the Liberty Bond effort fanned out across the country. Pickford, Fairbanks, and Chaplin made their next appearance together in midtown Manhattan. After that, while the trio stayed another few days in New York, they did not appear together again. The day following the midtown appearance, Fairbanks and Chaplin, who were best friends, spoke on Wall Street to crowds estimated at fifty thousand. Three days later Mary Pickford went to the same location. Standing in front of George Washington’s statue in New York City’s financial district in a howling hailstorm that blew her hat off and played havoc with her famous curls, she addressed crowds massed along Broadway, Wall, Broad, and Nassau streets. Shouting against the wind as the crowds surged toward her to hear what she was saying, Pickford exhorted the crowds to buy bonds, saying, “Every bond you buy is a nail in the Kaiser’s coffin!”8 The effort was clearly worth it because the sale was hugely successful.
