Gaylyn Studlar, director of Film and Media Studies in Arts & Sciences, in the program’s new offices in Seigle Hall.
In Precocious Charm: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema, Gaylyn Studlar, director of Film and Media Studies in Arts & Sciences, explores the masquerade of youthfulness in the films of Mary Pickford, Shirley Temple, Deanna Durbin, Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Jones and Audrey Hepburn.
Between 1914 and 1967, these six stars helped to define girls and girlhood in the American imagination.
We sat down to discuss audience expectations, the studio system and the difficulty of aging in public.
You open with Mary Pickford, a founder of United Artists and one of the great stars of silent film, famous for playing girls and young women. Was Pickford’s career a case of Hollywood refusing to let a child star grow up?
Well, no, actually. As a teenager, when she first started working for [director D.W.] Griffith, Pickford was cast in a range of roles. You see her playing the ingénue, the matron — or at least, the adult married woman. What’s interesting is that, when she gets older, she plays an orphaned child in part of The Foundling (1916) and the public responds. Her roles start getting younger.
Did she resist that constraint or embrace it?
She tried other roles — a Spanish street singer in Rosita (1923), an Elizabethan-era aristocrat in Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (1924). And these movies made money, but not what they did when she played a teenager or a kid. So she retreated to type.
To what degree did Pickford control her own public image?
I think very much so. She was an incredibly savvy businessperson, which may be why she clung to that image of the little girl.
For example, when she married Douglas Fairbanks, it was very messy. They’d both been committing adultery, until the first Mrs. Fairbanks blew the whistle. This was during World War I — and Mary and Doug initially claimed the accusation was German propaganda! [Laughs].
But soon, the publicity around her is saying things like, “Oh, Mary had such a sad childhood.” “She had to support her family.” “She deserves this happiness.”
Mary Pickford in a studio portrait for The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917).
What was the constitution of Pickford’s audience?
Across the board. There was a belief — particularly in the 1920s — that women controlled family movie-going. We have exhibitor reports complaining about, say, Lon Chaney, “This guy can’t bring in women. He’s too gruesome.” Or “Great with men and boys, but the women don’t like it.”
Interesting how conventional wisdom has flipped. Today, Hollywood is all about boys and young men.
There’s this whole discussion about whether female stars can guarantee box office anymore. Everyone is so amazed by the success of movies like Bridesmaids and The Heat.
But it waxes and wanes. In the 1930s and ’40s, movie exhibitors would poll fans about their favorite stars. Women tended to like women and men generally liked men — except in 1934, when men’s favorite was Shirley Temple.
Let’s talk about Temple. She’s the iconic child star but, like many others, had difficulty transitioning to more grown-up roles.
Shirley Temple ran into that brick wall when she was 12. Twentieth Century-Fox basically said, “You’re too tall. You’re too fat. We’re letting you go.”
The singer and actress Deanna Durbin. Her popularity, in films such as Three Smart Girls (1936), helped save Universal Studios from bankruptcy.
At 12?
At 12. Then she was picked up by MGM, which said, “You’re too tall and too fat, but we can do something about the fat part.” It was cruel. Her one film at MGM was a flop, and they let her go.
So how do young stars — and their handlers — navigate the realities of maturing?
Well, it’s very dangerous. Sometimes they’ll use something very sexual — say, posing for racy pictures in Vanity Fair. Sometimes it’s manipulated through publicity. “So-and-so is dating so-and-so.” Dating becomes a way to announce the arrival of adulthood.
Of the actresses you profile, who successfully threaded that needle?
Deanna Durbin was such a hot property for Universal — as a teenager she basically saved the studio, financially and artistically — that she had to grow up. They had to find a way to keep that money machine going. But unlike Pickford, Durbin did not control her own career, and she chafed against that. She retired at age 27 and moved to France.
Shirley Temple’s transition was rocky, but in a strange way, she remained America’s darling. Even through the 1950s, after she retired from the screen, people would still buy magazines with her on the cover. Her most successful later vehicles, like The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, are those in which she’s surrounded by other stars.
But Shirley is pretty charming in some of them. People say that, as an adult, she was a complete washout, but that’s really not true.
Elizabeth Taylor in a 1944 studio portrait.
Elizabeth Taylor seems like a rare case of the public embracing both the girl and the woman.
Taylor is unusual, and I talk about some of the reasons in the book. For one, she was an unusually beautiful and mature-looking child. Uncannily so — Universal supposedly fired her because she didn’t look enough like a little girl.
Her first adult role was in Conspirator (1949), at age 17. For the first five minutes, they present her as this innocent teenager, but then she meets Robert Taylor and gets married. Suddenly, she’s a grown woman dealing with a husband who may be a murderer.
Another interesting thing is that Taylor’s voice didn’t fully mature for a long time. Even playing middle-aged, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), there’s this trail of youthfulness in her voice.
When an adult actress plays younger than her age, is this a reasonable response to the demands of the market, or is it something the studios impose upon her?
I think the better question is, Why does the public want this?
Audrey Hepburn is an interesting case because men didn’t really respond to her. They preferred bosomy women like Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe. Hepburn’s fans were teenage girls. But by the early ’60s, she was getting a lot of the same responses Pickford had gotten in the late ’20s. “Why are you still acting like you’ve never been kissed? Isn’t that a little silly for a woman in her mid-30s?” Her screen persona continued to be labeled “elfin” and “adolescent.”
Men are allowed to act eternally young. Bruce Willis is how old? I just saw him on Letterman. He was riding a bicycle.
But for women, we’re trained to think that younger is always better, that there are no benefits to becoming older. I mean, what happens to actresses? You’re relegated to playing the mom — often at the margins of a film.
Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face (1957).
So to what degree are these actresses embodying existing ideals of American girlhood, and to what degree are they shaping them?
Well, that’s always hard to say, but films do pick up on things in the culture. As an industry, film has had to cultivate different possibilities for viewer identification — it gives you a lot of options. And sometimes these become very popular, even when they seem to be going against the grain.
Mary Pickford is probably picking up on pro-Victorian sentiments, which are still swirling around even in the 1920s. She’s obviously not attached to the same kinds of values as exciting modern girls like Clara Bow or Joan Crawford.
But not everybody was becoming a flapper. Not everybody was moving to the big city. Not everybody was drinking gin, smoking cigarettes and losing their virginity. Older values remained important to many people, and Pickford’s little girls represented those nostalgic ideals in a powerful way.
