This week, Comediva of the Week is going back to the very beginning. No, we’re not honoring primordial ooze. We’re talking about a Comediva who helped define one of our very favorite things — movies. We’re honoring one of the very first human beings who wrote her name in the history books using celluloid. A Comediva who was perfectly comfortable being the curly haired, bright smiled “Little Mary” that America loved at the same time that she was becoming a film mogul so powerful that her contract demands reshaped the entertainment business.
Our Comediva of the Week is Mary Pickford.
Wait. Who?
If you don’t yet know who Mary Pickford was, don’t worry, you’re not alone. She was pretty much the most famous woman in the world for two decades and you’ve probably never heard of her. Though she was an iconic star of her time, and an unparalleled business woman long before women could even vote, Mary Pickford’s legend has faded into the tomes of history and the hearts of even the truest of movie nerds. How utterly wrong is that?
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Mary Pickford was born Gladys Louise Smith in Toronto, Canada. After her father died, her mother turned acting into a family enterprise, taking Mary and her two younger siblings on the road. Mary started making movies when filmed entertainment was a lot like web-based entertainment is today. Everyone knew they liked it, but nobody quite knew what to do with it. Mary Pickford had a pretty good idea, though, and she wasn’t afraid to share.
In an era when no one was really sure what to do with moving pictures, Pickford never settled for what somebody else had decided was the right way to go. If she thought something was terrible, she said so. If she thought she had a better idea, she shared it. Pickford revolutionized not just the way people acted on film, but what people chose to put on film in the first place. If not for her, movies might be known as that thing people tried to use to mass market Broadway plays until everyone got bored with them sometime in the 1920s.
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Soon she was pulling down record-breaking salaries and acting as a producer on her own movies. But “Little Mary” didn’t just want to star in movies, she wanted to make them. She joined forces with some of the most famous male filmmakers of her day, D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, to create the first ever independent film production company, United Artists. Pickford was also one of the founding members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. By 1920, she and her second husband, Fairbanks, were referred to as Hollywood royalty and actually caused riots in the streets when they traveled.
So, why haven’t you heard of this internationally famous former queen of Hollywood? It boils down to one infamous mistake. Mary Pickford completely missed the boat when it came to talking cinema. As she put it, “Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo.” Of course, she was wrong, and even though she won the second Oscar ever awarded for a leading female performance in a talking picture, the woman who had helped to define the art of silent movies just couldn’t seem to translate herself into the next wave.
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But, that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn a valuable Comediva Style Lesson from Mary Pickford. If she has anything to teach us, it’s that if you want it, you should ask for it. If you think you’re right, fight for what you believe in. You might be wrong, but you won’t know unless you try. But Mary said it far better than I ever could:
“If you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.”
