 First Stars: Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks
Before 1910 the movies had discovered that stars sold cinema tickets; the earliest stars were former stage actors like comic John Bunny or Bronco Biliy Anderson, billed in 1912 as "The World's Greatest Photoplay Star".
But the greatest stars of Hollywood's formative years were Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. From 1914 they, with Charlie Chaplin, achieved a celebrity quite unlike anything ever seen before them. More than the scale of their popularity, what made stardom a new phenomenon was that it detached fame from achievement in the strenuous life of work or battle.
Readers of the fan magazines that began to appear in 1912 became as familiar with their idols' off-screen lives as with their movie appearances. Chaplin's "little tramp" first appeared in 1914, and was an immediate success with audiences. But Charles Chaplin the actor behaved quite differently from Charlie the clown.
Pickford and Fairbanks projected the same image on screen and off, and between them they offered their audiences new role models. Fairbanks' comedies ridiculed Victorian restrictions on fun. In newspaper columns and books such as Laugh and Live and Make Life Worth-while, he advocated sport as a means of regenerating the urban masses.
In His Picture in the Papers, made in 1916, Fairbanks played the rebellious son of a dour cereal manufacturer. He learned to box, became attractive to women, and rescued a big businessman from criminals. Asked the secret of his strength, he advertised his father's cereal. Sales improved now it was associated with robust fun-lovers.
Mary Pickford embodied the "new woman": healthy, robust, self-reliant, she combined sexual allure with chastity. "Little Mary", "America's Sweetheart", was more popular even than Chaplin. In 1916,. she became the first star to be the producer of her own films.
In them, she brought out the spontaneity and playfulness which Victorian culture had repressed in women. Emancipated and even a suffragist, in her performances she questioned the female role in the family and at work. When she married Fairbanks in 1920, the Hollywood mansion they built, Pickfair, became famous as a paradise in which high-Ievel consumption was advertised as the basis for a secure and stable family life.
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