Motion Picture Production Photography 101

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Still StillAmerican Silent Motion Picture Photography David S. Shiel ds

The University of Chicago Press : : Chicago and London David S. Shiel ds is the McClintock Professor of Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina and chairman of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. His books include Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America and Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01326-8 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01343-5 (e-book)

Title page illustration: “The Garden of Sleep and Death” (detail). From John Van den Broek’s The Blue Bird (1918).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shields, David S. Still : American silent motion picture photography / David S. Shields. pages. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-01326-8 (hardcover: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-01343-5 (e-book) 1. Stills (Motion pictures)—United States. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States. 3. Photographers—United States. 4. Cinematography—United States. I. Title. PN1995.9.S696S55 2013 791.430973—dc23 2012026790

∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48—1992 (Permanence of Paper). for Marcus Shields

contents

Acknowledgments ix Overture 1

I Inventing Glamour, Composing Worlds

1 Photography and the Birth of Professional Beauty 31

2 Glamour Comes to California 53

3 Worlds Distilled: Motion Picture Production Photography 101

II The Visual Artists

4 Manly Faces: Jack Freulich, Bert Longworth, Ray Jones, and the Universal Studio Aesthetic 163

5 The Dying Photographer and the New Woman 187

6 Opium Dreams: Ferdinand P. Earle and Visual Fantasy 213

7 Royal Photographer to the Stars: M. I. Boris and Visual Artistry 239

vii III Artistry andR egimen

8 The Eyes of Lillian Gish 265

9 The Wide-Open Spaces 299

10 Studio Men 331

Notes 369 Index 391

viii Contents acknowledgments

I began writing this book in 2003, shortly after coming to the University of South Carolina. Conversations with Scott Jacob, the collector and devotee of Melbourne Spurr’s photography, convinced me that the time had come to organize information on the early Broadway and motion picture still photographers. In 2004, I uploaded on the World Wide Web an introduction to the genres, formats, and practitioners of early Hollywood glamour imagery. Though modest, the site was the most accurate and compendious source available on the subject at the time. It attracted the attention of Ralph DeLuca, the well-known dealer in posters and entertainment memorabilia. DeLuca proposed that I come to New York City to examine the Culver Service Collection, one of the twentieth century’s major image brokerage archives in the United States. Harriet Culver was selling the vast assemblage of vintage photographs and ephemera. De- Luca wanted me to vet the collection to assay its extent, its depth, and its aesthetic importance. The immensity of its riches and the breadth of its coverage of the work of theatrical and motion picture photographers astonished me and convinced me of the importance of developing a summary understanding of this culturally influential and artistically expressive body of work. The Culver Service Collection was eventually purchased by collectibles dealer Jay Parrino, proprietor of The Mint. Both

ix Ralph DeLuca and Jay Parrino at various times gave me electronic access to the scans they made of the collection; this proved invaluable in the early stages of preparing this book. A number of images appearing here were reproduced courtesy of Jay Parrino; acknowledgments appear in the captions to the figures in question. When Parrino began dispersing the collection via eBay, I became a regular purchaser because of the solid provenance of the material and the wealth of information written on the back of the photographs by publicists and magazine editors making use of the images. Several institutions aided my researchers substantially. As a visiting fellow at the Princeton Humanities Institute, I explored the stills collection in the Firestone Library. An award from the University of South Carolina Eng- lish Department’s research professorship enabled a semester of study, during which time I explored the holdings of the Herrick Library at the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Seaver Center for Western Histo- ry Research at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum; the Louis B. Mayer Film and Television Study Center of the Cinematic Arts Library at the University of Southern California; the Charles E. Young Research Library, Department of Special Collections, and the Performing Arts Special Collec- tions at the University of California, Los Angeles; and the Western Costume Company. During fall semester of 2010, when coleading a weekly seminar at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, I spent Friday mornings working in the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Reading Room, or across the hall at the Motion Picture and Television Reading Room. On several occasions in the past seven years, I have visited the Billy Rose Performing Arts Collection at the New York Public Library and profited from the wisdom of Jeremy Megraw there. I regret that the Museum of Modern Art’s film stills collection was unavailable, having been closed a decade ago, during a crucial period of this study’s composition. In addition to making use of the holdings of these institutions, I benefited from the expertise of a number of people, some of whom have become good friends. Amy Rule, head of research at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona shared my enthusiasm for William Mortensen and Francis Bruguiere. Amy Henderson, historian, and Ann Shumard, curator of photography, at the National Portrait Gallery could not have been more enthusiastic in their support of an aesthetic revaluation of performing arts portraiture. The late Robert Cushman, curator of still photography at the Margaret Herrick Library, read an early version of this manuscript with great sympathy and offered several concrete suggestions for its improvement. Kris- tine Krueger of the National Film Information Service at the Herrick Library handled the great number of my queries and requests with dispatch and good humor. Mary Mallory, an avid champion of Hollywood heritage and member of the Herrick’s photographic archive, has become the greatest sort of elec-

x Acknowledgments tronic pen pal. At the George Eastman House, Ulrich Ruedel was a model of efficiency hunting down several quite obscure titles for me. Robert Montoya of Special Collections in the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA made my two sojourns there rich experiences. Ned Comstock unearthed Ferdinand P. Earle’s correspondence regarding his special effects work onBen-Hur in the MGM administrative archives in the Film Collection at the University of Southern California. Barbara Nathanson of the Prints and Photographs Divi- sion of the Library of Congress helped me navigate the vast resources stored in that repository. Rob Brooks, organizer of the Mary Pickford Collection in Toronto, discussed Karl Struss and Charles Rosher, Pickford’s photographers, at length with me. Don Spiro, a current still photographer and member of IATSE Local 600, manifested great interest in the technical aspects of early still processing. Bruce Robertson provided repeated aid. Silent film and performing arts photography historians possess a strong sense of common cause, perhaps because of the amount of work that requires doing before sense is rendered from the visual archive of early motion pictures. I engaged in correspondences with several important scholars of the era: Marc Wanamaker, Richard Koszarski, Mark Viera, and David W. Menefee proved particularly helpful. Conversations with my colleague in the English Department, Mark Cooper, have provoked quite a few new lines of inquiry. Marcella Sirhandi of Oklahoma State University revealed to me the surprising late career of Richard Gordon Matzene as portraitist of Nepalese royalty. Lloyd Bishop of Ponca, Oklahoma, also aided greatly in my research into the mysterious R. G. Matzene. General ruminations about visual culture and fashion with my friend Catherine E. Kelly of the History Department of the University of Oklahoma assisted me in understanding how fashion photography diverged from performing arts photography in the 1930s. I have corresponded with numbers of curators and librarians over the past decade about individual photographers or productions for which I sought images. In most cases, my requests, no matter how recondite, were met with polite interest and often resulted in the discovery of useful prints or information. I wish to thank the staff of the Motion Picture Stills Archive at the Eastman House, the Lothar and Eva Just Films Stills Collection at the Harvard Film Ar- chive, Special Collections at the University of Vermont Libraries, the Cecil B. DeMille Collection at Brigham Young University, the Performing Arts Divi- sion of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Special Collec- tions at the University of Louisville Library, and the staff of the Thomas Coo- per Library at the University of South Carolina. I have supplied credit information on the sources of the photographs in the captions to the individual figures. If no provenance information appears in a caption, then the image derives from the collection of vintage prints I myself amassed to enable the writing of this book. This collection is currently housed

xi Acknowledgments at the Department of English at the University of South Carolina. The majority of photos reproduced here are in the public domain, or were issued under the standard copyright waiver that studios gave for publicity images mass distributed to magazines and newspapers. The exceptions are certain unique, unpub- lished images by M. I. Boris. I thank Ivan and Tomas Majdrakoff, Boris’s two sons, for permission to print these several rare photographs. Finally, I thank my photographer/editor Alan Thomas for his faith in the book, and my wife Lucinda E. Shields who has tolerated for ten years the irrational obsessions of a collector. The financial support of Dean Mary Ann Fitz- patrick of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Carolina enabled the printing of this volume with the size and fidelity it deserves.

xii Acknowledgments F

Overture

In March 1915, a twenty-five-year-old chorus girl from Kansas City entered the New York studio of Underwood & Underwood believing that the key to success on Broadway would be found there. She had already done much to secure a modest place on the New York stage—the usual things— dyed her hair, changed her name, acquired a British accent, and bedded men with connections. She also did things beyond the usual—married and abandoned a manager of a provincial acting troupe, sacrificed a child to a career, and toured the country as a player with America’s foremost female impersonator, Julian Eltinge. She belonged to that multitude of restless men and women who fled the obscurity of America’s interior seeking limelight in Manhattan. Few had the ambition, intelligence, de- cisiveness, and intuition to pass from invisibility into the floodlight of theatrical celebrity. Jeanne Eagels did. She had glimpsed a photograph in the January 10, 1915, edition of the New York Times and saw in it clues to future glory. Its caption read, “Elsie Ferguson with Yaku in ‘Outcast’ at the Lyceum Theater.” Seated pensively

Figure 0.1 herman Mishkin, Mishkin, New York: Elsie Ferguson, 1915, in Outcast. Duotone illustration, Theatre Magazine, March 1915, 141. One of the dozens of images that appeared in print during the winter of 1915 celebrating the glamorous appearance of Ferguson in her breakout role. Mishkin was the official photographer of the Metropolitan Opera.

1 on a sofa, her glowing face and neck emerging from a plumy shadow, Fergu- son incarnated elegance and soulfulness as “Meriam” the city mistress of an amoral businessman. Ferguson had won stardom with this role culminating a fourteen-year ascent from the chorus of Florodora to featured parts in Arizona and The Strange Woman, to her breakout role in The Outcast.1 She had transformed herself from dancing girl to tragedienne, from variety to legitimacy. Not only did Ferguson’s career pattern Eagels’s ambitions, but Ferguson’s image became the appearance that Eagels knew she had to assume. Elsie Ferguson more than any other actress of the first decades of the twentieth century, except her friend and fellow Florodora girl Evelyn Nesbit, gave herself to photographers for experiment. The young camera artists used Fer- guson and Nesbit to invent a new visual language of allure, shorn of the ornament, prettiness, and staginess of traditional theatrical portraiture practiced by the established theatrical studios, White Studio, Joseph Hall, Benjamin J. Falk, and Colonel Theodore Marceau. In time this language would acquire a name—glamour. Eagels entered Underwood & Underwood studio searching for a visual talisman, something to study and incarnate. Rifling the bin of Ferguson images, she discovered a powerful image, not the one in the newspaper, but better, more adventurous. “Armed with this, she made an attack in force on two or three exclusive Fifth Avenue shops, where she purchased duplicates of everything Miss Ferguson wore in this particular photograph. The next morning she donned them all, after having her hair dressed in exact copy of Miss Fer- guson’s coiffure.”2 She then marched to the offices of Thomas W. Ryley, the theatrical agent, who, despite having never heard of her, signed her to take Ferguson’s part in a touring company of The Outcast. In Newport News, Atlanta, Syracuse, and other provincial outposts of theatrical culture, Eagels electrified audiences with her acting and her person. She returned to New York amid a storm of critical buzz and justified the noise in repeated triumphs as leading lady in George Arliss’s theatrical troupe. She joined the pantheon of Broadway immortals in 1924 playing Sadie Thompson, a prostitute stranded in tropical Pago-Pago, in Rain. When she died of a heroin overdose in 1929, Eagels had just created her most vivid screen performance as Leslie Crosbie in The Letter. She earned a posthumous Academy Award nomi- nation for Best Actress. Eagels ornamented every moment of her brief but brilliant career as a stage and screen actress with memorable portraits and still images. As a creature born of a photograph, she retained an intense regard for the medium’s power to project image and mood. She hired the best photographers of her time: Sa- rony Studio; Herman Mishkin; Homer Peyton of Kansas City; George Moffett of Moffett Studio, Chicago; Frank C. Bangs when she worked at Thanhouser Films in the 1910s; Charlotte Fairchild; Alfred Cheney Johnston; Mortimer

2 Overture Figure 0.2 [Ernest H. Burrow], Sarony, New York: Jeanne Eagels, 1915, in Outcast. This seated half- length profile of Eagels shows the sartorial care of her remodeled appearance. From the former Culver Service Collection. Offner; and James Abbe. Abbe’s profile view of Eagels wearing a cap inDaddies was the first photographic cover used by theSaturday Evening Post. She sat repeatedly for Underwood & Underwood. The images from these many sittings with New York’s greatest performing arts photographers remain the most eloquent testimony to Eagels’s art. Theatrical performances vanish from memory, living only in the recollections of an ever-dwindling band of witnesses. Silent movies have proven almost as perishable. All twenty-four of Elsie Ferguson’s silent films, including her masterworks with Maurice Tourneur, have disappeared. Ferguson’s genius as a cinematic actress survives only in stills. Because of the lackadaisi- cal quality of Jeanne Eagels’s surviving silent motion pictures, the same may be said of her. Her vitality, her glamour, survives in portraits and production shots, and only intermittently in one of her surviving Thanhouser releases, The World and the Woman, a five-reel feature based loosely onThe Outcast.3 F

The tale of Jeanne Eagels’s makeover reveals many of the powers held by photographs between 1910 and 1920, that period when silent cinema grabbed the visual allure that had been the preserve of the theater. It provides an introduction to the sorts of things Still seeks to recover about the ways still images worked. What do we learn about photographs over and above that they existed to create a desire in the public to see a particular performer or show? Several things. The spectator of Elsie Ferguson’s photo was a woman who saw the image as a means of personal reorganization; this is not a story of the male gaze and how it dominated the pictorial aesthetics of glamour. The photograph was first witnessed in print, in a low-grade reproduction, and had to be secured as a high-definition photographic image. Photograph- ic images had different manifestations of varying fidelity communicated through different media. Everyone encountered low-fidelity images printed on cheap paper in halftone. Persons concerned with art and power strove to obtain high-fidelity images. Photographs embodied style, and this style through emulation might em- power onlookers.4 Possession of the image might prompt the purchase of clothes, accessories, shoes and the hiring of the services of a hairdresser. The photograph stimulated commerce. For Jeanne Eagels the photo operated as an instrument of self-consciousness, enabling her to fix her image to a model, Elsie Ferguson. Her model was personating a role rather than appearing as herself. In the world of performing arts the power of certain images could trump all other considerations of background, training, or talent—even personality.

4 Overture We should also note the major historical implication of Eagels’s story— that theatrical photography created the star image before cinematic photography. We see both Ferguson and Eagels establishing themselves as stage stars before gravitating to the motion picture studios. They joined in that 1910s transit of performers, directors, art designers, and authors who refined cinematic art in the United States when World War I distracted Europe. Photographers also joined this exodus and with them the imagery of the portrait and the still pioneered in Manhattan came to Fort Lee and Hollywood. Jack Freulich, the man who took Elsie Ferguson’s portrait for Underwood & Underwood, shortly thereafter shot the most important portrait sitting of the 1910s in the estima- tion of motion picture publicists. In 1916, Freulich took a series of stills of The- da Bara as a female vampire that excited newspaper editors across the country. They drove the publicity campaign that transformed minor theatrical personality Theodosia Goodman into the most notorious celebrity in the entertainment world—“The Wickedest Woman in the World.” Theda Bara’s elevation would be the greatest demonstration of the star-making power of motion picture publicity in the 1910s.5 Freulich, who photographically channeled Theda Bara’s dangerous femininity, would be courted by every New York and New Jersey motion picture studio for almost three years before agreeing to become head of Universal’s portrait galleries in 1919, becoming the first salaried film studio portrait and still photographer to receive credit regularly. (Freulich’s innovative career at Universal Studios will be treated in chapter 4.) The most surprising findings in the Eagels/Ferguson/Freulich story? That the still image rivaled the moving image in revealing personality and that it proved a more durable medium for preserving action, character, and personality than the motion picture. We begin with a paradox: the moving image seemed more real, more sensational, more alive precisely in its difference from the arrested world of the painted image, the drawing, the still photograph. Yet by a curious irony, the silent cinema has in large measure been reduced to an array of stills.6 By current estimate, over 80 percent of the silent motion pictures have perished, victim of the fragility and flammability of nitrate stock, of a commercial mentality that viewed releases as consumable products that should be rented and run until prints fell apart, of the mortality of film companies whose owners trashed their titles rather than have competitors profit from them, and of prohibitions upon private ownership of prints, preventing their collection. All that survives of many releases are publicity shots, production photos, and cast portraits. Of the 18–19 percent of motion pictures that escaped loss and destruction, a dis- couraging proportion survive in visually degraded prints that only gesture at the visual world that excited the audiences of the 1910s and 1920s. Even landmarks of silent cinema, works hailed immediately as classics or celebrated for their artistry—Douglas Fairbanks’s Robin Hood (1922), Rudolph Valentino’s

5 Overture Figure 0.3 [Jack Freulich], Underwood & Underwood: Theda Bara, 1915. Publicity portrait issued in conjunction with the William Fox Vaudeville Company release of A Fool There Was, January 12, 1915. Goth glamour at its most provocative. Vinous hair straggles over the shoulders in a recollection of the entrapping strands of fin de siècle symbolist femme fatales. Courtesy of Mack Dennard.

The Conquering Power (1921) and Monsieur Beaucaire (1924), Ramon Novarro’s Ben-Hur (1925)—survived in third-generation copy prints, devoid of the tinting, dodging, and carefully registered lighting effects that galvanized their initial viewers. Only heroic restoration work can recover an intimation of their original splendor. Their visual audacity for the most part survives in stills that have resiliently resisted degradation. Consequently, stills have served as icons

6 Overture for the films in the major studies of silent cinema—in the works of William Everson, Kevin Brownlow, Edward Wagenknecht, and John Kobal. Changes in taste have also contributed to the increasing substitution of the still image for the moving picture in popular memory. While a community of devotees (I number myself a faithful member) delights in witnessing the creation of a pantomimic language for communicating human feeling and thought in early cinema, the majority of motion picture viewers find silent movies odd. The thorniest problem has to do with motion, not muteness. (Musical soundtracks are conventionally supplied to silent rereleases.) Too often the pantomimic shorthand developed to communicate action to early film audiences exaggerates to artificiality. The large stage gestures employed by movie performers until the late 1910s seem hyperbolic particularly when the camera views them close-up. Too many silent features speak a kinetic language too elementary, too artificial, and too emphatic for the visually saturated eyes of current audiences. Even after D. W. Griffith had trained a generation of performers in a more constrained mode of expression,7 the conditions of filming gave rise to another difficulty. George Arliss—Jeanne Eagels first important Broadway employer and leading man, and later one of the great character actors of the silent screen—supplied a trenchant diagnosis of the problem in the summer 1923.8 The discontinuous nature of filming, and the disinclination of directors, except for Griffith, to rehearse scenes extensively led performers to find the gesture and the emotion of particular scenes, rather than develop coherent characters determined by a sense of the whole arc of the motion picture’s action. Lacking a character concept, actors resorted to stock gestures and generalized expressions. If the movies prior to 1920 seem exag- gerated in their acting, those after 1920 often seem inauthentic. The pull of a tight plot, the splendor of the visual spectacle, and the ingenuity of editing cannot entirely compensate for the emptiness of characterization, the oddly automatic way that persons move. Stills and portraits rarely suffer from these mimetic liabilities. An expansive gesture photographically frozen in its arc possesses a monumentality and timelessness lacking when the arm cartwheels. Scenes that seem odd in motion—Alla Nazimova’s waifish coochie dance in the Aubrey Beardsley Never- land of ancient Palestine in Salome (1922)—take on an uncanny splendor when her twisting and lurching has stopped. Photography preserved what was most vivid and splendid about silent cinema, the unprecedented visual elaboration of places and people—the beauty, the horror, the moodiness. They speak with a force little diminished by ninety years of history. We can see why in the early twentieth century the images became idols of fan worship around the world, clipped from magazines and pasted into scrapbooks, or secured by fan letter from studio publicity offices and framed for the wall or bedside table. The photos revealed the expressions, attitudes, and gestures mimicked in the

7 Overture Figure 04 [Arthur F.] Rice: Alla Nazimova, 1923, in Salome, Nazimova Productions, released February 13, 1923. Natacha Rambova, art direction. mirror by the multitudes desiring to look beautiful, amusing, dangerous, and talented. They conveyed the complete visual code for desirability, manliness, womanliness, heroism, and villainy. Fans learned the “looks” from portraits. Fans learned of the splendor of places from stills. Taken during the process of cinematic filming, stills captured the scenes of action, the locales of romance and distress. At the beginning of the twenty- first century, we have become so saturated with images of locations that we can scarcely recapture the novelty that the silent cinema offered even the cosmopolitan person. The scenic world of the theater in 1900 was elaborated in most cases out of three sets. Motion pictures reveled in their variety of scenery, offering eighteen to twenty different interior and exterior locales. The exterior locales radiated an aura of reality, and producers soon grasped that all of the fascination of early news film could be borrowed by filming on location. The cost of moving a cast and crew to the lush Florida tropics or to Jamaica (locale of the first $1 million movie,The Daughter of Neptune, 1914) grew so large that one of the great studio efforts of the 1920s was creating a semivirtual exterior world to keep costs in place. Hollywood’s first artistic exhibition of still photography took place in 1921 in connection with the most radical experiment in illusionary world creation, poet-painter Ferdinand P. Earle’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (See chapter 6.) Employing 190 hyperrealistic paintings of medieval Persia as backgrounds, the movie was publicized in a suite of stills by America’s foremost visual chronicler of the American Indian, Edward Sheriff Curtis. In the hands of Curtis and Earle the still certified the verisimilitude of an impossible place. It became a vehicle of a higher sort of mimesis, not concerned with securing a likeness so much as composing an unprecedented location, style, or way. In 1914, Alvin Langdon Coburn, the most eloquent of the period’s art photographers, wrote, “To speak of ‘composition’ in connection with photography seems, on first thinking of the problem, to be rather a contradiction in terms— that you ought really to say ‘isolation,’ which would perhaps come nearer to what is done in most cases; but while it is not possible to shift hills and trees about in the Hurculean [sic] manner of the painter, it is still possible to move the camera in such a way that entirely new arrangement is achieved.”9 In motion pictures, the Herculean labors of world creation were a matter of course. That power of composition that painters, poets, sculptors, and architects possessed, and to which artistic photography aspired, was made available, by unprecedented expenditures of money in the cause of image-creation and by extraordinary applications of manpower and collaborative intelligence, to cinematographers and still photographers. Both (if they were not one and the same person) would “move the camera” through the composed worlds, and the latter often with the greater liberty of rearrangement.

9 Overture Still photographs stopped action as well as envisioned places. Because a still arrested action in a moment, or a gesture, it evaded a second quality of silent films disturbing to twenty-first-century taste—the melodramatic morality of the plotting. Moving pictures presented stories of crime and punishment, virtue and reward, peril and rescue, loss and redemption, separation and consolidation. Theirs was a programmed sequence of cause and effect in a world dominated by the struggle between good and evil, virtue and vice. In- dividual stills captured tensions at work, not the working out of plot. Theatri- cal exhibitors kept demanding in the pages of the industry’s trade magazine, Moving Picture World, that producers send stills that tell the story.10 But the most that even telling stills could manage was to reveal turns in a plot. The public never saw the entire sequence of stills—the keybook—only solitary pictures, or a selection of half a dozen images. (Because motion picture exchanges were always attempting to rent or sell their stock of stills to exhibitors,11 the numbers in the late 1910s and early 1920s were limited to the minimum needed to get featured in the local newspaper and build a creditable window display at a theater.) In theater lobbies enough appeared to highlight the conflicts in play, not enough to give the plot away. If producers were banking on drawing an audience to a familiar story or a release derived from a popular novel, the scene had to be illustrative as well as dynamic.12 Melodrama compelled the attention of early twentieth-century audiences. It presented the world’s dangers in terms of contemporary problems—im- migration, racism, capitalist exploitation, consumerism, urban poverty, ma- terialism, imperialism, political zealotry, religious bigotry—giving stories an intense timeliness and immediacy.13 The morality, on the other hand, asserted a timeless domesticity—a condition in which men of good character and women of personality despite interference mated and formed or maintained a household governed by reason, sympathy, and virtue. Commentators on early cinema have noticed that romance plots dominated early film stories. Clashes between opposing forces, such as capital and labor, Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, Old World and New World, city and country, repeatedly achieved resolution in the pairing of a man and a woman; in the last reel strife in the factory ceases when the daughter of the factory owner marries the reformist strike leader. Heterosexual attraction—complicated enough in its own right—assumed the enormous burden of social reconciliation. Har- mony in the household, peace in the drawing room became the utopia that pacified society’s moral struggles. The locale of the domicile hardly mattered. The happiest of endings might be located in a jungle hut, a pastoral cottage in the American heartland, or the parlor and nursery of a townhouse in a Euro- pean capital. While the still might illustrate any point along the arc of the story, from travail to domestic bliss, the greatest visual interest lay in scenes that did not

10 Overture Figure 0.5 [Friend Baker]: Lew Cody and Louise Lovely, 1918, as Jim Douglas and Lou McTavish in Painted Lips (also named The Straw Cellar), Universal Film Manufacturing Company, February 4, 1918. Unwanted passion, feminine distress, hetero-drama at its most flagrant. Edward LeSaint, director.

present the happy couple at home. While ads might feature the “two-shot” moment when hero and heroine fix one another in eye-to-eye contact, or meet in the clinch, assuring the audience that the promise of love will be fulfilled in the picture, they did not as a rule feature the normal routine of the domestic interior. Instead, the still portrayed those forces that distress the world of the would-be lovers. They pictured tension, struggle, action. The effective still conveyed the exact dynamic of the struggle by visual typing. The code operated on two levels keyed to two audiences. For the “yo- kels in the sticks,” there was a binary opposition, a clash of good and evil. For the urban audience, there was a novel gradation of styles of self-presentation. As a rough rule of thumb, the movies presented human appearance as a physiognomic register of character or personality.14 Moral fortitude in men showed in the clarity and symmetry of features. It was a Kantian world where hand-

11 Overture someness connoted virtue. Peculiarity of features connoted humorousness, genius, or moral deformity. Beauty in women, however, proved a much more problematic matter. Its power so dominated that it made plausible the unlikely pairings of persons from different backgrounds and persuasions that enabled social conflict to resolve into domestic bliss. Yet beauty was a dangerous power, attracting the attentions of unwanted suitors, or intoxicating its possessor with ambitions that could not be contained in a drawing room or the bonds of wedlock. Indeed the cultural agony lurking behind the romance plot lay in the haunting possibility that beauty might not betoken an inner excellence, a spiritual integrity, a personal discipline. Masculine anxiety about the possibility of falling into subjection to an immoral beauty, who consciously exploited sexual attractiveness for personal ends, or as an expression of malice against the cultural hegemony that males exercised in society, recycled in hundreds of plots peopled by femme fatales, vamps, and gold-digging showgirls from 1900 to the end of the silent era. Beauty was the trump of trumps—the quality that could change a shopgirl into a society matron, a slumgullion into a star. It was, par excellence, that quality explored in the publicity photography generated by silent cinema. Beauty—and its later visual particularization as glamour—has been the one matter of early entertainment photography that has garnered scholarly attention. The appreciation of Hollywood photography spearheaded by John Kobal in the late 1970s discovered its artistic importance in glamour portraiture. Kobal understood glamour to have been a visual phenomenon that co- alesced in the work of studio portraitists at the end of the silent era and was summarily realized in the work of George Hurrell, who became MGM’s chief portrait artist in 1929. In several landmark studies of Hollywood portraiture, Kobal argued that a uniquely memorable visualization of feminine face and form became a common language of publicity photographers of the 1930s— persons such as Whitey Schafer, Ernest Bachrach, Max Munn Autrey, Elmer Fryer, Eugene Robert Richee, and Ray Jones. At the focus of this glamour re- clined a beautiful woman bruised by the world—or rather two women, the introspective beauty, the Garbo, and the vulnerable extrovert, Joan Crawford. For all its appreciative insight into the arresting work of the 1930s studio portraitists, Kobal’s histories failed to account for certain historical eventualities needful for any account of the development of photography in the entertainment industry. Two questions pose particular problems. If visual glamour was a creation of the Hollywood studios after their industrialization in the mid-1920s, then why did the word “glamour” emerge in common linguistic usage shortly after 1900 applied to stage performers and their photographic images? If glamour was an attribute of a certain type of woman touched—even bruised—by the world, then why did it first appear applied to “the girl,” that figuration of femininity that came to dominate the stage in the late 1890s?

12 Overture This history, unlike Kobal’s, proceeds from a sense of the continuities between theatrical photography and early cinematic photography. It questions the myth of the new with which early film artists surrounded their labors, advancing a different view of the evolution of glamour than that argued by Kobal or by the Hollywood publicists of the 1920s. Portrait photography was intimately concerned with every phrase of this evolution, beginning with the emergence of the “professional beauty” in 1877—a being for whom surface beauty trumped virtue or talent. Beauty transmuted into glamour, an aura that condensed around the figure of “the girl,” a creature who dominated the stage after 1894. When the word “glamour” became popular in the 1890s, its characteristic uses emphasized the allure of places with magical atmospheres, rather than a magical quality in persons: the glamour of the footlights on stage, the twilight charm of a Newport lawn. For instance, Clinton Scollard’s poem, “The Play”:

When the arc lights on avenue and square Shed their white glamour, and the gas jets glow Adown the street, far-reaching row on row, And one scarce knows if in the upper air Is cloud or starshine or the moonlight fair, Forth to the play the merry pleasurers go To see the mimes enact, in mimic show, Life with its passionate joy and dull despair.15

Certain persons who inhabited these places took on the atmosphere, the glow. The atmosphere was independent and, then, attached to the person. The soft- focus portraiture of performing arts photographers influenced by pictorialism captured these atmospherics and perfected a style from 1905 to 1915. The air was sugary with light, or tone, or plumy with mysterious shade. Early twentieth-century entertainment photography captured the transformation of this atmospheric style. Influenced by the increasingly potent ideal of “personality,” glamour began to emanate from persons rather than enveloping them. At first this radiance had the same soft-focus pearliness of pictorialist portraiture, then the light began to dissipate the mist. In the 1930s, the radiance of the light beaming from faces and bodies took on beacon clarity, giving the star image the drama and luster that Kobal celebrated. As Mark A. Viera has shown, George Hurrell, the foremost glamourist of the sound era, began his career at MGM in 1929 working in the soft-focus aesthetic, then in the early 1930s sharpened the image until the sitter became as beacon of clear luminosity emerging from dramatic shadow.16 The sharp-focus Hollywood glamour of the studio era emerged from the personality of “the woman,” a creature first imagined by American cinema during World War I. Still recasts the story of

13 Overture Figure 0.6 [Frank E. Geisler], Geisler-Andrews, New York: Francine Larrimore as Enid Vaughn in the Rida Johnson Young and Rudolf Friml musical Sometime, Shubert Theater, New York, October 4, 1918. Geisler (1867–1935) mastered the atmospherics of pictorial photography as a member of the photographic circle that formed in 1890s Albany around E. S. Sterry and Pirie MacDonald. The optical diminution of detail in soft focus caused sitter and surroundings to meld in an integral visual mood in pictorialist portraiture. Portraying soul or ideality rather than personality was the desideratum of the pictorialist likeness. glamour that has dominated discussions of the visual culture of early twentieth-century cinema since the 1980s by recognizing the primacy of the visual culture of the stage in these developments and exploring the relocation of the focus of glamour from the vicinity of the face in girl glamour to the luminous body in woman glamour. Kobal recognized certain problems with his archaeology of glamour. He knew that there was something anomalous about claiming that the late 1920s and early 1930s marked the decisive moment in the development of performing arts photo publicity. The motion picture fan magazines that generated the world of fandom and cults of personality around particular stars came into being well before this, from 1910 to 1913. Before the motion picture studio had become an industrial image production facility, the pages of Motion Picture Story and Photoplay broadcast multitudes of portraits and stills to an avid readership and stimulated the willingness of editors in national “slicks” and culture magazines to devote greater numbers of pages to motion picture still photography. In sum, Kobal’s story of the Hollywood genesis of glamour failed to speak to its creation and role in the global popularity of cinematic image. It claimed originality for what in truth was a late development in the evolution of the image of the alluring performer. Mine is not the first revision of Kobal’s history. A renovated understanding of the imagery of Hollywood publicity began in Robert Dance and Bruce Robertson’s landmark Ruth Harriet Louise and Holly- wood Glamour Photography, a work that showed definitively that the fashioning of star imagery took place well before George Hurrell made Norma Shearer look sexy in 1929. Dance and Robertson’s study supplies a trove of information about the way photography served the emerging studio system of mid-1920s Hollywood, as did Terence Pepper’s The Man Who Shot Garbo, a study of Met- ro and MGM photographer Clarence Sinclair Bull in which Kobal played an ancillary role. In both works, the authors indicate that photographic work at MGM represented the height of a kind of industrial rationalization infused by an intense communal impetus for aesthetic polish. Yet in many regards MGM was a follower, not a leader, in the industrial organization of image production and in dividing image production into tasks and specialties—shooting (still, portrait, continuity, fashion), lighting, retouching, printing, and image selection for publicity. Famous Players–Lasky (Paramount) and Universal in 1919 and Metro (MGM’s ancestor) in 1920 laid the groundwork for Hollywood still image production. But we will not fix attention so intently on the industrial dimensions of studio work to neglect the distinctive artistic and technical contributions of the 120 other still and portrait photographers besides Louise and Bull who worked regularly in film publicity during the silent era. Two dozen of these 120 were artists of extraordinary vision who created images so memorable and so vivid as to have survived the general wreck of silent cinema as a popular art form. Besides Louise and Bull, the superlative

15 Overture cinematic still camera artists included Edward S. Curtis, Hendrick Sartov, Karl Struss, Charles Albin, James Abbe, Edwin Bower Hesser, Eugene Robert Richee, Junius Estep, Fred Archer, M. I. Boris, Albert Witzel, Nelson Evans, Ar- thur F. Rice, Ernest Bachrach, Melbourne Spurr, Walter F. Seely, Henry Wax- man, William Mortensen, Arthur F. Kales, Jack Freulich, Bert Longworth, El- mer Fryer, Russell Ball, Harold Dean Carsey, Frank Powolny, C. S. Warrington, and John Van den Broek. To discern the exemplary quality of their work requires that the norms of visual practice contained in performer portraits and productions stills be recovered. So besides the distinctive and visionary artists, we must study the work of those persons who invented the basic vocabulary of production stills and film portraiture. The names and accomplishments of these innovators are less well known: James E. Woodbury, D. W. Griffith’s first chief of still photography; Jens Rudolph Matzene, the first Los Angeles glamour photographer; Paul Grenbeaux, the man who first captured the slapstick mayhem of Mack Sennett’s troupe of comic anarchists; Donald Biddle Keyes, who did many of the Famous Players–Lasky and DeMille pictures; C. Heighton Monroe, Vitagraph’s chief still and portrait photographer on the West Cost in the early 1920s; and Frank C. Bangs, one of the creators of glamour as a theater photographer and one of the New York photographers who transferred the expertise of Broadway to Hollywood as chief photographer for First National in the early 1920s. We must consider the typical fan photo portrait and the regular keybook production still for the run-of-the-mill release as well as the most striking images generated by the prestige productions. While the aesthetic revolution occasioned by the introduction of a sound track to a motion picture is deemed so epochal that no one questions the parti- tion of cinematic history into “silent” and “sound” eras, does it make sense to limit an inquiry into portrait and stills at 1928? After all, sound in no way influenced the organization of paper-based visual publicity. Yet there are other reasons that make the crisis year of American motion pictures the point of transformation in the art of still photography. In 1929, George Hurrell, the visual innovator who would inaugurate the high-key, high-resolution glamour photography of the “golden age,” broke into motion picture work. In 1929, the major studios finally replaced orthochromatic film with panchromatic film, altering the tonality of portraits and stills. In 1928, the still photographers consolidated into a union and enjoyed a modicum of job protection for the first time in history. In that year, too, the small high-speed Leica camera became standard issue in the studios. Style, medium, and professional standing all changed immediately upon the close of the silent era. The photographers understood that a transformation of their craft had been accomplished. In 1931, a Los Angeles Times article, “Still Photography Abreast of Talkies,” reflected on the change: “The use of the new super-sensitive type of panchromatic film, the development of angles, new methods of lighting and numerous

16 Overture other results of constant effort on the part of stills photographers in the various studios have little by little eliminated the orthodox rules which sprang up in the early days.”17 Of the cited developments the use of angles was perhaps the oldest, inspired by German cinematography and developed by Bert Long- worth of Universal, MGM, and Warner Brothers. The employment of high- speed film and panchromatic film had the most sudden and greatest stylistic effect. Gestures could be captured in the instant of motion without blurring. The early 1930s saw the elaboration of the candid style of still photography— explored thoroughly in the publicity for 1931’s A Woman of Experience and The Common Law—in which character seemed more animated because the most pronounced movements had been captured mid-motion. It is the task of this book to recover the “orthodox rules” that would be overthrown by the studio photography of the early sound era. Curiously, the alteration in the character of still photography with the rise of sound did not give rise to any sense that what went before had been rendered “historical” and therefore worthy of collection, preservation, and study. Other concerns drove the consolidation of silent cinema’s pictorial record. First, it must be observed that the collection and preservation of photographs has been a much more messy affair than the preservation of motion pictures. Stills were not numbered among those materials that the Townsend Act of 1912 stipulated as desirable for copyright archiving.18 Aside from the Marga- ret Herrick Library at the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Museum of Modern Art, and the George Eastman House, no institution has broad coverage of the imagery produced in the silent era. The Los Angeles Museum of Natural History has extensive holdings from the 1910s, and the UCLA Art Museum has substantial files of stills from various prestige pictures of the 1910s and 1920s. The studios themselves have been strangely casual in their retention of still photography. While studios used every legal recourse at their disposal to prevent private individuals from gaining possession of their motion picture prints, and maintained a jealous eye policing the circulation of posters and lobby cards through the film exchanges, they began in the early 1920s doing everything they could think of to insure that portraits of performers and stills of their releases got into the hands of the general public. Hundreds of thousands of postcards and fan photos (five-by-seven-inch mass- produced images with faux signatures) were dispatched gratis by performers or studios in reply to any letter received. Publicity departments and exhibitors flooded the editorial office of every newspaper and national magazine from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Key West, Florida, with star shots and stills. It was the greatest PR desideratum to get an image printed in a paper or a magazine, so copyright was waived—in the late 1910s and very early 1920s explicitly with a back stamp, after 1924 the waiver was implicit and universal, no stamp was needed.

17 Overture Still photography served multiple uses within the movie industry. In 1920 producer William Fox, head of Fox Pictures, reflected on the emergence and range of these publicity functions: “in the past the still photograph was merely a record for the producer or director, to assure accuracy of detail in settings and costuming of a picture. The director took his still picture today for reference on the morrow to check the detail of his set or the clothes of his players. But for several years now the larger producing firms have been publishing photographs from the photoplay. These have been used for press books, for publications of the industry, for fan journals and for the newspapers that have opened their columns to the screen. From the stills, also, the posters have been made, and lobby photo plays cards of various styles.”19 Fox details their centrality in exploitation carefully, but does not attend to a range of other functions the images were performing in the motion picture world, serving as props in motion pictures, tests of the photogenic qualities of performers or the visual impact of costumes, fashion advertisements, portfolio images that performers could show casting directors, mementoes of projects upon which one worked, items of exchange among the community of performers, archival images for the keybooks that recorded the crucial moments and sets of each feature release, and concept pictures for the use of art directors. In 1921, after the Fatty Arbuckle and William Desmond murder scandals of 1921, a further function emerged; studios generated candid photographs of stars at home to suggest that performers led normal lives. Who preserved the still photographic record of silent cinema? Where did it survive? How can it be studied at this point in time? The photographers themselves saved their finest work. Yet in 2010 none of the cameramen named in the rolls of the first union of cinematographers and still photographers in 1928 walked the earth. Irving Lippman, the last of them, died in 2006. Caches from photographers’ personal archives have been passed down in some families. Certain images by Paul Grenbeaux, one of the very first still photographers, appearing on Mack Sennett’s payroll in 1913, have passed to his grand- daughter, Pauline Grenbeaux. The print archive of M. I. Boris, who shot art portraiture for Paramount in the mid-1920s, survives in the possession of his two sons, Ivan and Tomas Majdrakoff. Robert Coburn’s ample life’s work has passed into the hands of his son, Robert Coburn Jr., himself a talented still photographer. Certain photographs of James Abbe, who mastered theatrical photography, movie still work, and photojournalism, remain in the hands of his descendents. George Hurrell’s son, George Hurrell Jr., possesses substantial numbers of his father’s prints. Robin Duvall holds a substantial portion of Henry Waxman’s archive. Linda Passman owns an archive of stills and portraits of Maurice “Goldy” Goldberg. Portraitists who presided over independent studios frequently sold off the contents of their studios to photographic services when they retired. All too often years of work were dumped. Where

18 Overture are the archives of Carpenter Studio, Preston Duncan, Walter F. Seely, and Nel- son Evans? Gone out of memory, perhaps out of the world. If the photographers worked for motion picture studios, as they increasingly did after 1923, their prints might survive in any number of places. Key- books and still sets of the major studios were deposited in the collections of the Herrick Library. Other publicity material remains in the hands of the longest-lived of the American studios: MGM, Paramount, Columbia, and Warner Brothers, yet the permission costs for using such images—even if they predate 1923 and are clearly public domain—are so prohibitive that composing an illustrated volume such as this would mean personal bankruptcy. Indeed, the reproduction and permission charges for photographs from all museums and libraries range from $70 to $140 per image. Can this topic be studied if it costs $132,000 to secure use of the one hundred and sixty images required for an adequate survey of the subject? Early in this project, I realized that it would be cheaper to purchase original vintage stills and portraits and compile my own archive. Since I began this collection in the era of eBay before the value of these images began to ramp skyward in 2004–5, I obtained extraordinary material cheaply and built a systematic study collection containing several examples of the work of every active portrait and still photographer working in the silent era except two: Newton Hopcraft and William Potter. Studying the market for entertainment memorabilia on eBay educates even veteran students of cinema. Nothing is more informative than provenance information supplied by dealers offering large collections for sale. By logging the sources, one constructs an extraordinary cultural map of where early film photography was saved, by whom, and for what reason. Since 2000, large collections have come for sale from the following sources: photographic services, newspaper photo morgues, magazine archives, magazine editors’ personal image collections, photographers’ archives, performers’ estates, talent agents’ estates, the collections of performers’ secretaries, the collections of studio technical staff, movie theater collections, fan assemblages and scrapbooks, collectors’ material, study collections of cinema scholars, and images stolen from public institutions. Then there are the expected sources: the prescient autograph dealers and Southern California bookstores that generations ago stockpiled old studio publicity materials convinced of the aesthetic value and profitability of fine portraits and stills. Of this list of conservators, two groups had particular potency: fans and collectors. In the minds of the photographer, the head of publicity, and the magazine editor, the ultimate consumer of a cinematic image was the fan— that would-be subscriber, repeat movie customer, and purchaser of knockoff star fashions. Fans gravitated to stars, and photo portraits nourished their devotion. Because these photographs operated more as tokens of connection than as aesthetic objects for the fans’ delectation, the poses emphasized like-

19 Overture ness over expression. A few Hollywood photographers specialized in this basic photography, Lyman Pollard being the most industrious. Cheap paper, stock poses, commonplace sentiments, a mechanically reproduced signature. The photos and the accompanying boilerplate letters were cherished and kept safe by enormous numbers of men and women during the late 1910s and 1920s. (The reported numbers of fan letters received and the number of fan photos dispatched unfortunately have the fanciful inflation of Tinseltown publicity at its most extravagant. So accurate measures may be impossible.) Yet they in no way satisfied the hunger to see and to possess images of those performers who excited them. While it is absurd to speak of an average scrapbook, given the peculiarity of fan devotions, and the vagrant schemes of organization employed in collections, anyone examining numbers of them recognizes certain tendencies: the preponderance of pictures scissored out of motion picture fan magazines, the predilection for large face shots, the general willingness to cut up multifigure scene stills to isolate one person, or one couple, and the relative unimportance of text to image. In certain intensive scrapbooks—a Mae Murray trove from 1920–28, for instance—the compiler ravaged every major motion picture fan magazine then published in the United States, from the costly Shadowland to the cheapo Motion Picture Weekly, posing questions of the cost of pursuing her fixation—though the less than pristine condition of certain of the images suggest that certain issues had circulated through numbers of hands before its evisceration by the devotee of the “vainest woman in Holly- wood.” Very persistent fans badgered studios and performers for eight-by-ten portraits and personal notes. Currently, the archival value of these scrapbooks as a source of knowledge about early cinema is proportional to the amount of print ephemera—film programs, pamphlet publicity, and obscure material— they contain. Only infrequently do scrapbooks produce a wondrously rare and eloquent silver gelatin photograph of a performer or a scene unavailable from other sources. Having examined over three hundred scrapbooks in the past decade, I have found unexpected gems in two. Conversely, the images amassed by collectors now make up a substantial part of the research collections of silent motion picture photographic material in university collections and museums. The collector gathered materials to satisfy a conception, and to assemble sufficient visual and verbal information to come to a new understanding of whatever concerns him or her. The first serious collectors external to the studios emerged in the 1920s among the transatlantic community of newspaper critics, writers, and cultural commentators struck by the potentialities of cinematic art. A rare manuscript memoir of one such collector, Robert Herring (1903–75), resides in the Rare Books Division of the Firestone Library at Princeton University. Herring was the film critic of the Manchester Guardian from 1928 to 1938 and editor of the British periodical Life and Letters from 1935 to 1950. He first collected stills to illustrate articles

20 Overture and books. His memoir is worth quoting extensively:

I began using stills in 1926, but of course some of those I used then were from films made before that date. In those days, it could be difficult to determine when a film had been made. . . . Not only were titles changed, but films cut and thereby considerably altered. . . . Frequently, some scene which had been much admired abroad and for which a critic had told his readers to look out, simply was not there when the film finally reached England. For this reason, it was a help to be able to “pin down,” as it were, one account of the authorized version of a film with stills. Here a new difficulty arose. Often the scenes most effected did not lend themselves to still photography. It was hard, and nine times out of ten, impossible, to get stills of thing one most desired. The Germans & Russians were better in this; the French apt to be haphazard, & the British and Americans plain dumb. Over and over again in this country [England] I have had to have a still specially made for me from a copy of the film because those in charge had not others to give a correct idea. In those early days of film-criticism, all stills were regarded by the trade as mere advertisements. And the thing that advertised a film best was the “star.” So one was offered close-up after close-up of “stars,” and after that of “colos- sal” sets. It was, in those days, not long since the direction had been allowed by the trade to be as important as the “star;” that a cameraman should also have credit was an idea only just creeping up, though of course “Caligari” had for long furnished the trade with the parrot-cry of “expressionism” and “significant angles,” just as Eisenstein was later to oblige them with “montage.” Moreover, stills were not necessarily taken by the same photographer as shot the film. Of what use, therefore, to praise some lighting or some composition in a picture and then put forth, to illustrate it, the work of a still photographer with probably quite different ideas & almost certainly different skill? The answer was, as time progressed, that a director aware of his rhythms and images saw to it that his still photographer caught and recorded the spirit of his film and, for the crucial moments, provided photographs that were replicas of what the cameraman shot, in lighting, angle, distance. This being a counsel of perfection, it is remarkable how often it was achieved.

Of Herring’s several insights, three deserve highlighting: that the star cult so saturated the thinking of American studio executives that publicity was skewed in favor of portraiture and presentations of glamour, then extravagant constructed scenery; that film photographs, whether portraits or stills, were understood to be commercial vehicles rather than autodynamic works of art; and that the directors drove the aesthetic improvement of still photography. Each point will be taken up in the course of this history.

21 Overture One point deserves particular attention here—the matter of the commercial character of the cinematic photo. Herring first reminds his readers that the motion pictures themselves were curiously mutable things, changing titles, scenes, and sequences as the commercial instincts of local distributors or exhibitors dictated. The sanctity of the directorial “final cut” would not be admitted in the business until well into the sound era. Still photographs were similarly alterable. Anyone who has spent much time in collections of early twentieth-century theatrical or motion picture photography can attest to the extraordinarily intrusive hand of persons other than photographers on the prints. As a body, motion picture photography operated at a far remove from the prints of the art photographers—whether pictorialists or modernists—that adorned the gallery walls as fetish objects for study, veneration, and contemplation. First, studio images were festooned with print—typed ribbons of PR copy called slugs or snipes, studio stamps, and scrawled notes adorned the backside. Independent photographers and photo studios also blazoned images with text—titles, circumstances of composition, and creator credit information. The supplied facts were intended to cue editors or theater managers how to treat the stars and film releases. Yet editors felt entirely free to ignore or rewrite the messages on the reverse side. Indeed, with an almost vagrant liberty they cropped, altered, collaged, and titled the photographs they received. Something about the cinematic photo invited artistic transmutation. Elaborate graphic borders, photographic superimpositions, and erasures of elements were typical in any newspaper use of stills from 1910 onward. There was something fanciful about movie imagery that invited the cut and paste recreation of scenes and figures by gazette graphics specialists. Histories of early American cinema stress the improvisational nature of production practices from the late 1890s to the consolidation of the feature story film in the mid-1910s. The story of still photography echoes this tale of change. Its transformations were driven by the evolving art of publicity, by technological innovation in lighting, film emulsions, and camera mechanism, and by transformations of visual aesthetics in the world of art photography generally and theatrical photography particularly. One of the most striking attributes of cinematic photography as a genre was its presentation of worlds brought into being at great expense. A signal change that took place during the silent era was the conspicuous elaboration of that expense in scenes. Each year brought novel orgies of extravagance. While the great urban portrait studios of the nineteenth century (Jeremiah Gurney, Matthew Brady, Napoleon Sarony, Jose Maria Mora, Morrison Studio, Gilbert & Bacon, Sanford & Davis) made the display of emblems of wealth—statues, urns, velvet swags, antique furniture, stuffed exotic animals—in the background of subjects a feature of the visual celebration of the sitter, there was always something miscellaneous, even arbitrary about the scenes created. In the most accomplished motion

22 Overture pictures such scenes were unique and integral. A still from a Cecil B. DeMille spectacle of the late 1910s or early 1920s trumped the exotica of the Sarony studio while conveying a sense of organization combining the spatial ingenuity of an architect with the textural elaboration of an academic painter. Their exoticism made even the newly fashionable “home portraiture” parlor pictures of the beaux arts babies of the moneyed elite look stodgy. Stills from 1914 onward hold up to study an unprecedented splendor, “what God could do if he had money.” For a swelling spectatorship that spanned the nation from the rural berg to the immigrant urban enclave lurid worlds and lavish lifestyles became the furniture of their imaginations. The peculiar features of these splendors must be recovered to understand the Xanadu extravagance of the dream industry when demonstrating the creative power of capitalism. Yet my interest does not extend to demonstrating how the populace through commerce fashioned their lives in imitation of cinematic fancy. Nor does the role of capital in projecting material desires through motion picture and still photography greatly interest me—the subject has inspired much intelligent comment among those persons interested in the history of advertising. Rather, I am interested in reconstructing the poetics of depiction—the intuitions, ideals, and practices that vested faces with allure, enveloped bodies with glamour, and discovered them in richly elaborated worlds. My aim is not to deconstruct beauty or excavate the dubious political visions that subtended the worlds articulated in silent film photography. Rather, I wish to understand the enchantment, the visual qualities that exploded obscure performers into world celebrity and made certain scenes icons of world culture. The portions ofStill dealing with glamour and scenery recover a poetics of mystification. The global character of the subject can scarcely be escaped. Though I fix attention on photography generated by motion pictures with a genesis in the United States, I cannot deny that a kind of incoherence hovers around making such a bounded delimitation of the subject. American motion pictures were made by an international cast of performers and technicians largely under the administration of immigrants or sons of immigrants. They were marketed for foreign as well as domestic eyes. In cinematography and still photography, the example of European films—particularly the Italian epics of antiquity,Quo Vadis? and Cabiria—showed just how elaborate and strange the visual world of a motion picture could be. No one who saw the images, which were published in Photo-Play and Theatre, Vanity Fair and a host of metropolitan newspapers, could doubt that the cinema had pushed beyond the illusionist extravagance of nineteenth-century salon painting in its evocation of uncanny worlds. The trio of expressionist German masterpieces The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Golem, and Nosferatu and the Swedish filmHaxan—Witchcraft through the Ages exerted similar influence over the depiction of the uncanny, the horrific, and

23 Overture Figure 0.7 [Eugenio Bava], Krauss Manufacturing Company: Worshipping the idol, Cabiria, 1914, Itala Film, American release June 1, 1914. Giovanni Pastrone, director. The integrity and scale of the production design of this Italian epic stunned motion picture professionals in the United States. Photographer-cinematographer Bava also worked on the earlier landmark Italian epic Quo Vadis? (1913). the sublime in a host of 1920s American films—and not simply the usual half dozen cited in every history of horror—the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Phantom of the Opera, The Cat and the Canary, He Who Laughs, and London after Midnight. Nor will we ignore the other direction of influence. We will show how still photographers such as Junius “June” Estep schooled Ernest Lubitsch in the creation of rich visual worlds. I undertook this history in part because the artistry of the portraiture and the stills from the late 1910s and 1920s struck me whenever I encountered them. That said, I must confess that I am a peculiar expositor of this art. I am singularly immune to the impulse to fandom: the charms of Jean Harlow, Clara Bow, Louise Brooks, Olive Thomas, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Rudolph Val- entino, Wallace Reid, William S. Hart, or Ramon Novarro do not inspire the passions that they did in collectors or the moviegoing public of the silent era. I find them interesting, of course, but not substantially more interesting than the images of other performers who did not inspire cultic admiration—Dolo- res Costello, Billie Dove, Corrine Griffith, June Caprice, Constance Talmadge, Jane Novak, Wallace MacDonald, Richard Barthelmes, Victor Moore, and so on. As a historian with substantial experience in reconstructing long passed periods of expression through extensive archival research, I undertook this project intent on adducing what the pictures themselves conveyed rather than concerning myself overmuch with what received opinion held. Fortunately, the relative paucity of comment on early cinematic photography freed me from the necessity of having to argue points of doctrine with a host of authori- ties. I could give myself over to telling what happened, when, by whom, for what reason, and to what effect. Because cinematic photography developed immediately out of practices used in the promotion of the America theater at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, I felt I could not undertake this history without familiarizing myself thoroughly with the world of theatrical photography. This I undertook from the beginning of my inquiry, viewing both Broadway and silent motion picture photography as comprising a larger kind of visual performance, “performing arts” photography. This branch of visual creation had two interesting problems that played out in the images it created. In portraiture: how does one represent someone who impersonates a multitude of characters rather than presenting a stable persona? In still photography: how does one choose to frame the invented world being displayed—as something patently artificial? By presenting an illusion of reality? By offering a mystery that requires the onlooker to judge the nature of the scene, whether it be dream or actuality, fantasy or history? Within each of the chapters that follow the ways these questions play out will demonstrate the generic distinction of this branch of photography from other forms of portraiture and documentary representation.

25 Overture One writes big books for odd reasons to achieve peculiar understandings. There are private dimensions to this inquiry that perhaps should be explicat- ed. I grew up in a house witnessing the creation of the glamorous face nearly every day. My mother, Louisa R. Shields, was head of cosmetics at the Neiman Marcus store serving Washington, DC. So I saw the labor and calculation of glamour, yet found myself entirely smitten by the effect, despite knowing its artifice. I knew also that things, including “looks,” have histories. I knew that glamour was an appearance that came into being at some peculiar time for particular reasons. After the death of my mother in 1994 after a decade of struggle with cancer and chemotherapy, a struggle that robbed her of youth and beauty, somehow the historicity of glamour came to have weighty implications. Recovering the fullness of beauty, the radiance of youth, the self-possession of mature mastery became something that historical inquiry might perform. My mother came into womanhood in the 1940s, and her points of reference were Ingrid Bergman and Lauren Bacall. But the face preexisted both. I began seeking the history of the face sometime in first years after her death, knowing that photography would be the medium where the archaeology could be performed. Being a literary historian, I looked in magazines first:Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, then Motion Picture Classic and Theatre Magazine. I realized that some- where the original images from which the illustrations were struck must exist. I found out where to get them and began collecting in 1997. The images themselves instructed me from that point onward. My curiosity about their creators, the conditions of their production, and their reception grew more intense and more frustrated when I discovered there was very little information in print about them. I began gathering that information, and forming it into stories that made sense. By a curious happenstance, the turn in cultural history toward the study of visual culture coincided with this private turn in my interests. I began writing. I first fashioned the sixty-four bio-critical profiles of the important camera artists and studios that photographed the American stage that are found on my research website, Broadway Photographs (http:// broadway.cas.sc.edu). In 2004 I began writing Still. From the first I had multiple purposes in view: to assay the qualities of motion picture portrait and still photography as expressive forms of art; to document the play of commercial and artistic concerns governing the production of this imagery; to understand performer portraiture in light of the theatrical precedents yet conscious of the distinctive features of the publicity methods of the emerging motion picture star-making system; to provide a summary view of aesthetic developments in still photography; to supply capsule biographies of the significant photographers who worked for the industry; and to provide an anthology of significant photographs illustrating the character, artistry, and history of cinematic still photography before the coming of sound. I envisioned a general rather than an academic readership, so confined most of my dialogue with film studies

26 Overture scholars and photographic theorists to my endnotes. For the sake of narrative flow, I did not foreground my theses and points of argument by framing them in an obtrusively rhetorical structure. Nor did I artificially delimit my subjects believing that the meaning of the images discussed here can only be adduced by seeing them with a circumspection that views what is happening in American culture generally. Mindful, too, that creativity in the motion picture industry was and is a profoundly collaborative enterprise, I kept in view the tension between cinematography and still photography at every point of this account. More could be said about the matter, but histories should not be so lengthy as to tax a reader’s patience. So I am content to leave pages on the cutting-room floor.

27 Overture

I Inventing Glamour, Composing Worlds

1 Photography and the Birth of Professional Beauty

The “professional beauty”—or “the beauty”—emerged relatively recently as a cultural figure, sometime between 1877 and 1880. She first appeared as twins—as a society woman seeking publicity and as an actress seeking a station in society. Her birth announcement was a piece of albumin- coated cardboard four and a half inches wide by six and a half inches tall called a cabinet card. When inexpensive photographic prints first became popular in the early 1860s, in the diminutive form of cartes de visites, they could not quite capture beauty. He or she generally reckoned handsome in the flesh was too “often a great sufferer in going through the photographic process.” The camera robbed vitality from those upon whom providence had lavished looks. “There are many beauties of colour and expression which cannot be rendered by the agency of the camera. Colour of hair, colour of the complexion generally, of the lips, the cheeks, the eyes, these go for nothing; and as to expression, the most expressive countenances suffer most invariably; a little happy touch of expression is a phenomenon one hardly ever remembers to have seen caught in a photographic portrait.”1 From 1860 to 1880 photographers upon both sides of the Atlantic labored to remedy the problem. They devised technical means of imbuing men

31 and women with allure—tricks of lighting, filtering, and focus. They also sought out faces and figures that somehow conveyed those vital touches of expression when posed before a lens. Enterprising photographers discovered a new species of being, the photogenic beauty. To honor their success magazine pundits bestowed upon them the title “artist.” In 1880, Harper’s Bazaar instructed readers “How to Have One’s Portrait Taken.” Its first recommendation—seek a camera “artist”:

It is a great mistake to imagine that photography is a mere mechanical trade. There is as much difference between two photographers as between two engravers. Nor will a fine lens alone produce a good picture. The pose of the sitter, the disposition of lights and shadows, the arrangement of drapery, are of the greatest consequence. A good artist has almost unlimited power in this direction. He can render certain parts thinner by plunging them into half-tone or by burying their outline in the shade, and he can deepen and augment other portions by surrounding them with light: thus if the head is too small for beauty, he can increase its size by throwing the light on the face; and if it is too large, he can diminish it by choosing a tint that would throw one-half the face in shadow.2

The camera artist had distinguished himself from the job photographer through a knowledge of pose and a mastery of lighting. The tactical manipulation of light could edit a sitter’s face toward a pleasing ideal of configura- tion. Knowledge of aesthetic ideals of face, figure, pose, and expression distinguished the greatest camera artists. The savants boldly announced the new beauty in their exhibition galleries or in the display cases that adorned the entranceways of studio buildings. As early as the 1850s, London and New York housed hundreds of photographic exhibition spaces. On the eve of the Civil War a writer for the New York Times observed that there were two hundred galleries “in Broadway, the Bow- ery, and the several Avenues.” At 707 Broadway, Jeremiah Gurney, who had learned the art from Samuel F. B. Morse, the first American practitioner, had erected a “marble palace” for his pictures. Show portraits—most often head shots and half-lengths of public men and their wives—covered the first-floor walls from floor to ceiling. Photographic preparation took place on the two floors above. The portrait studio occupied the top floor to make use of the building’s ample skylight. Two galleries maintained by Matthew Brady in Manhattan nearly matched Gurney’s in splendor. Visitors could purchase celebrity portraits in several formats or visit the studio for their own sittings. “There is no place in New-York where one can better amuse himself than at either of these Galleries—Brady’s is full of pictures of historical characters and pretty women—Gurney’s is equally well furnished in both particulars.”3

32 Chapter One These pretty women (Lola Montez and Ada Isaacs Mencken no doubt numbered among them) were the foremothers of the beauties who would burst into public view in the late 1870s and 1880s. The first “professional beauty” emerged in London in 1877 in the person of Lillie Langtry (1853–1929), the handsome Jersey-born wife of a wealthy English yachtsman. Her wit, bearing, and beauty entranced the philandering Prince of Wales, who made her his mistress, the focus of high society, and the fascination of the photographers. Gallery windows filled with “pictures of Mrs Langtry in every conceivable costume and attitude abound. . . . Mrs. Langtry with a quill thrust through her hat; Mrs. Langtry with a dove in her hand which she is tenderly regarding. . . . Mrs. Langtry in morning costume and again in evening dress; Mrs. Langtry with a Japanese umbrella over her right shoulder.” Though dominating the gallery

Figure 1.1 W. and D. Downey: Lillie Langtry, London, 1879. Brothers Wil- liam and Daniel Downey of Newcastle dominated the market for celebrity imagery in Great Britain. Their Ebury Street studio in London became the center of the British beauty trade. Daniel Downey perfected the art of negative retouching for cabinet cards. Here Langtry appears as a woman of flawless fleshliness Negatives were worked in London, shipped to New- castle for printing, and then distributed to dealers throughout Britain, America, and the continent. Dealers purchased prints in box lots of fifty. glass of London, she did not monopolize it. Her rivals in society kept her company. “In one window I counted twenty-nine photographs of different ladies, all of them belonging to society. . . . Of Mrs Langtry alone there were thirteen different photos.”4 When Langtry’s affair with the prince ended, she faced the prospect of pariahhood. Rather than languish as a castoff in the country, the beauty banked on her celebrity. She engaged with theatrical producers, strode the stage, and continued her reign as the city’s premier human spectacle. Her beauty, her audacity, and her notoriety overcame her modest talent as a mimetic artistic. Her performances even charmed her former lover, the Prince of Wales, who urged his circle to attend her shows. Langtry’s dual identity—creature of society and a theatrical attraction— set up the tension that would govern the uneasy, but increasingly intimate, relation between the realms of privilege and popular entertainment for the next decades. Society belles began to savor the sensation of commanding the public eye and consented to the display of their images in photographic galleries and sometimes their sale. Young beauties from obscure backgrounds who possessed modest skills at singing, dancing, and acting found an increasingly conspicuous place on the stage because of the new photographically stimulated premium on feminine beauty.5 The theater became the space in England and America where the beauty could be seen in the flesh. A spectator could enjoy “professional beauties” visually in the theater or in a photograph album upon payment of a modest fee. Their appearances were commodities. Special- ists in theatrical photography—W. & D. Downey in London, Napoleon Sarony and Jose Mora in New York City, Chandler & Sheetz Studio in Philadelphia— grew wealthy servicing the public demand for cabinet photos of the beauties. In 1882 a commentator for the Boston Daily Globe reflected on the business:

Within the last three or four years the mania for collecting photographs of actresses celebrated for their grace and beauty, or for their genius, has assumed enormous proportions. The production and sale of such pictures has proved to be a very lucrative business with photographers. The discovery of the fact is due to the Englishman who flooded the shop windows in London with portraits of Mrs. Langtry, Mrs. Cornwallis West, Lady Lonsdale, and other society beauties. The enterprising solar artist realized a fortune from the sale of the photos of those ladies, and it is asserted that the fair dames themselves received considerable additions of pin money by way of commission. Sarony of New York, Scholl and Chandler and Sheetz of Philadelphia were not slow in profiting by the experience of the English photographs. They employed gen- tlemanly agents to call upon prima donnas and actresses of note to solicit sittings. In many instances, especially with buffo artists, whose celebrity was due more to their beauty of form or feature than to their talents, a sum of money in addition to “as many photographs as the lady desired” was the guerdon

34 Chapter One demanded by the beautiful prey of the camera and lens. Their pictures sold by the hundreds and thousands.6

Desirous young men did not monopolize the market for photographic celebrity. “Young ladies in particular are assiduous customers.” Older men had a taste for costume photos of buffo women.7 When buxom Nellie Larkelle of The Black Crook graced a cabinet card in her Amazon uniform, the photo galleries and newsstands were “besieged by gray-haired and bald-headed gentlemen in quest of copies.”8 Purchasers archived images of the favorite, or of favorites, in specially manufactured albums that had slots for dozens of photographs. As soon as the rage for collecting beauties erupted, commentators pon- dered the psychology of those who kept beauty albums. In England the first professional beauties had been married women in society or on the stage. In the United States things differed. Photographers noticed that the flash bachelor segment of the trade fell off upon the “removal of a stage beauty from public view by reason of death, marriage or any other cause.” One writer sur- mised that young men bought pictures of actresses “from a feeling of propri- etary interest. They admire a pretty actress, and are at liberty to go and see her, send flowers to her, write letters to her, dream wildly of a possibility marrying her, or, at least, of making her acquaintance. They feel that they have the same right to display her picture that any man has.”9 The photo beauty became a figure of male fantasy whose visual availability gave her an exciting and in- determinate aura of possibility. Even the married actress owned the aura because of the chance that she might give in, Langtry-like, to an affair with a likely man. Displaying an actress’s picture in one’s bachelor apartment attested to membership in a masculine society defined by common desire. Male sociability formed around shared tastes for particular women or types. The fantasy desideratum was to own the beauty, through marriage or parading her in public on one’s arm. The literature on bachelor picture collecting did not mention a private bedroom devotion to the beauty. Yet when stories of women buying actors’ photographs appeared in the press, the commentators noted, “they confined their attention to the large $2 and $3 panel pictures that one can worship in one’s boudoir.”10 In these tales writers invariably invoked a community of desire. In one exemplary story the women were six stylish, good- humored, and healthy sixteen-year-olds who ransacked the photographer’s boxes for images of English-born actor Kyrle Bellew. “They wanted Bellew in every suit he ever wore, in every play he ever acted in, in as many postures as he could conveniently assume. . . . They reveled in Bellew lying on a rug before a fire.”11 These young ladies embodied one pole of urban image consumption. They collected intensively, pursuing one subject in all his variations. Both men and women bought images in this manner, creating immense demand for certain celebrities. In 1887 the hot-selling actors included Robert Hilliard,

35 Photography and the Birth of Professional Beauty Figure 1.2 Benjamin J. Falk: Kyrle Bellew, New York, 1882. The heartthrob of the 1880s, Bellew became the first photographic icon of masculine beauty. Noteworthy is the recumbent pose—an extreme rarity in masculine theatrical portraiture. The sitting took place during Bellew’s 1882 scouting visit to America; he would not perform on the Broadway stage until 1885, when Lester Wallack engaged him as a leading man.

Herbert Kelcey, Maurice Barrymore, and E. H. Sothern. Histrionic talent had a market—Henry Irving’s portrait sold, “but not to equal the beauty men.”12 The other pole consisted of the extensive buyers, those who filled their albums with a different player for every page. When a customer bought a portrait of one of the theater’s beautiful people, they got more than an image; they obtained a name. Possession of the name permitted persons to access the person by checking for schedules of performance. When society women permitted their images to be displayed in the gallery cases of photographers, they often constrained the dealer from publishing their names. Nor were copies of images allowed to be sold. Withhold- ing the name prevented the interested bystander or cabinet card collector from contacting the beauty in person. Of course, within the hermetic circle of blue book society, images would be recognized. But since marriageable persons within society had a mutual interest in one another in terms of partnership potential, the pictures worked to increase one’s market value. If a beauty created a sensation at the galleries, winning a public, she enhanced her mystique

36 Chapter One within the charmed circle. Consider the effect of an article such as 1888’s “The Beauties of Chicago,” published with wood engravings taken from cabinet cards: “A Dozen Pretty Faces from the Photograph Galleries—All are Chicago Girls, but Their Names Must Remain a Secret—Perhaps if You Are in Society you Can Guess Who They Are—Neither Love nor Money Can Procure Pictures from the Suspicious Photographers.”13 The exclusivity of access gave such beauties zest in the eyes of flash bachelors, and a culture of photo gallery deni- zens grew up, scanning the exhibit cases for rare specimens. In 1895, the sensation one beauty caused among the young men of the nation’s capital made the local news columns of the Washington Post: “A new beauty has bloomed upon Washington, a rare type of the unconscious and dudedom is in agony over its failure to solve the mystery of her identity, for her picture, just put upon exhibition at the up-stairs entrance to an F street photographer’s discloses nothing but a face unfamiliar to society and the fashionable thoroughfares, but still a face to be remembered. Half the dudes in town fainted the first day, tolling up the stairs after looking at the fascinating contour.”14 Young women sometimes prohibited sale of the photographs fearing that a copy might fall in the hands of the cigarette men. These swashbuckling mar- keters ordered thousands of images from the principal galleries. “We only deal with the best artists. . . . the prettiest women or the most popular singers and actresses—only go to the first-class galleries.”15 The cigarette men enhanced the salability of a pack by including a card of a trophy beauty. A fine lady’s image would be subjected to the gaze of the commonality without her permission, and since bold chorines in tights appeared on the packs, the associations were regrettable. Society women consented to the public exhibition of portraits to secure a mystique that they could import into the closed system of the haute monde. But what use did they make of the portrait prints that they secured for themselves? These were given as gifts to classmates, friends, relations, and beaus. One maintained an album of one’s circle, and the presence of others’ images evidenced the company one kept—those persons within the bon ton with whom one had personal connection. Beyond this, the photograph provided an opportunity for expression. Since the power of beauty had been demonstrated to the extent that a commoner could captivate a royal prince and galvanize the stage with her glory, could one access its power for one’s own purposes? The 1880s marked an era where status within society for women might be determined by looks rather than wealth, bloodline, or virtue. Indeed beauty could trump all other qualities that connoted power in society. Mrs. John W. Rennie, the seventeen-year-old Hispanic Californian wife of an engineer and mining tycoon, became the talk of the town in New York in 1880. A society reporter for the New York Times observed, “It is only fair to set her down as the most beautiful woman in New York . . . and when I call her a professional beauty, I simply

37 Photography and the Birth of Professional Beauty adopt a phrase used respectfully enough in London to designate Mrs. Lang- try, Lady Lonsdale, Mrs. Cornwallis West and several other highly respected women famous for their personal charms, and who do not affect to be unaware of the admiration which they excite. Mrs. Rennie has begun a similar reign in this city. She will be all the rage this winter. At the front of theatre-boxes she has already become a rival of the attraction on the stage. At the opera she is the focus of all glasses. Society is talking of her.”16 The reporter observed that several photographers had made overtures to her to shoot pictures for sale to the public; that she refused, but would consent for some to be used as wares for a charity fair. A professional beauty might be anyone in society or on stage who unem- barrassedly professed her beauty. For the society lady beauty operated as cultural capital, securing invitations to the most exclusive circles, the pleasures of deference, desire, and envy. For the actress it was fundable capital, securing bookings, income, and even access into high society by marriage. Both sorts of professional beauties appeared in the theater, maintaining a distinction by location (society belles in the boxes, performing beauties on the stage), though both were part of the spectacle of the evening. The photographer attended both, and the photograph proved the most durable medium for pro- fessing one’s beauty. For the society beauty the photograph amplified interest in her status, wealth, and connections into public power. For the stage beauty the photograph could be the means by which she won transatlantic fame and fortune.17 A humorous newspaper sketch of 1885 revealed the connections between photography, social aspiration, and the role of the professional beauty. A flash gent encounters a female friend dressed to the nines on Fifth Avenue:

“Why Flossie,” said Jerome, “what a swell you are! What are you doing now?” “I am a professional beauty now, dear boy.” “A what?” “A professional beauty, my lamb.” “Oh, I say now, how the deuce can you be a professional beauty? Only a month ago you were selling ribbon.” “You do not seize upon the scheme, dear chappie. I sit for photographers for celebrated beauties. Today, for instance, I sat as a famous ballet dancer. I wore a jet black wig with the hair coiled up on top of my head, a tarletan [sic] dress, tights and dancing slippers. Next week my pictures will be for sale as Signorina Pillicoddi of the ballet at La Scala, Milan, and lots of young crushers, like you, who love to decorate their rooms with photographs of pretty women, will buy copies and tell their friends they received them from the fair ballet dancer herself when they were on the continent last summer,

38 Chapter One don’t you know? Tomorrow I am going to sit in a magnificent ball costume, with extra double low neck and short sleeves, and a blonde wig, as Lady Mary Gravelberry, the new English beauty. And that picture will sell like smelts, because it’s ‘English, quite, English, you know.’”18

Visually how did beauty appear? Descriptions do not quite get at the quality that so galvanized the 1880s. Consider Mrs. Rennie: “Her height is about five feet seven, and she has a faultless figure—just full enough to be round, with pleasing swells and tapers, and a perfectly graceful carriage. Her head is held proudly, but without stiffness. Her hair is coal black and naturally abun- dant. If I have left her face to describe last it is because that is the climax of her beauty. Her complexion is as dark as a quadroon’s, but without a tinge of yellowness, being as bright and clear as that of a blonde. The richness of her color is something marvelous. Her eyes are large, black and the most pas- sionately expressive I ever saw. Her features are precisely regular, except that her lips are rather full, though shapely.”19 What can be distilled? A preference for curves, a posture that combines drama with relaxation, regularity of features, clarity of complexion, and a touch of visual exoticism or ethnicity.20 Not discussed: clothing, styling of hair, or characteristic gestures. In this sketch it would appear beauty is entirely a natural endowment of a person. In the contemporary literature on stage beauty, however, more searching eyes fixed upon the subject. Joseph P. Reed and William S. Walsh in 1893 observed that contemporaries were witnessing the great era of the stage beauty. A fair face mattered more than slender talent. Even a capable dramatic artist had to cul- tivate appearance. “She too must find her fortune in her face. She must not be content to rest on art alone. . . . She must call in the adventitious aid of the hair-dresser, the wig-maker, the manicure, the milliner, the deft manipulator of rouges, patches and cosmetics.”21 The manager played his part in the creation of aura, summoning the scenic artist, the costumer, and the master of stage illumination “to throw around his protégés the glamour of gorgeous surroundings of costumes and upholstery” to harmonize the whole. Beauty amalgamated natural endowments of the sort appreciated in Mrs. Rennie and the manipulations of technicians. Beauty was a theatrical event. Note that “glamour” in the 1890s referred to a theatrical atmosphere that beauty inhabits. It had not yet become the allure that radiates from a beautiful person. Photographs served “to keep up the illusion off the stage,” prolonging the moment of magic. “Vignettes and cards and panel pictures that catch the poses, the expressions, even those fleeting and variable nuances where in reside the charms of the ingenue or soubrette or tragic actress. These are exposed for sale in shop windows and mounted in frames for advertising purposes in hotels, restaurants, and other resorts of the patron of theatres.” Making magic

39 Photography and the Birth of Professional Beauty with a camera was also making money. Two modes of commercial exploitation of beauty received mention here: direct sale and advertising. Napoleon Sarony, the greatest of the nineteenth century’s Broadway photographers, set the terms of commerce for the beauty. Sarony (1821–96) had been trained as a fine artist and had established a solid business as a lithographer before going to England and learning photography in the 1860s with his brother, Oliver. Returning to New York in 1866, he determined that the most economical way to compete with Matthew Brady and Jeremiah Gurney was to elaborate his own image, projecting “Napoleon Sarony” as a character and a brand. He dressed in exotic costume, injected himself in every high-toned social scene he could manage, and, with Bar- numesque élan, cultivated publicity. He staked out the theater as his special preserve. He chose his subject at a fortuitous moment, when theatergoers were becoming smitten with a new form, the “extravaganza,” popularized by the enormous success of The Black Crook. This hybrid form added ballets, vi- gnette entertainments, to melodrama or dramatic burlesques, creating the ancestor of the American musical comedy. This new form placed a premium on the appearance of performers that legitimate drama had not. “It is in the rise and growth of the ballet and in the incorporation of many of its distinctive features into the burlesque of yesterday and the comic opera of to-day that we can trace the gradual evolution of that passion for female beauty which marks the theatre-goer of our time [1893]—beauty of form and contour as well as beauty of face.” Sarony pioneered the nationwide direct sale of images of actresses, singers, comedians, and dancers. Networking with other photographers, and later with newsdealers, he produced multitudes of cabinet cards, which he shipped to cities and towns on the touring routes of theatrical companies. He instituted a three-rank hierarchy of performers. He paid stars for the exclusive right to employ their images. Those who were not stars paid him for their publicity images. Certain attractive nonstars —buffo dancers and actresses—he contracted as models for sittings, selling their images as eye candy, usually in newsstands, creating photographic celebrities of them. Sarony’s greatest challenge in setting up this commercial system was obtaining legal recognition of his copyright for exclusive images of personalities. He finally achieved this on March 17, 1884, in a landmark Supreme Court copyright ruling concerning his photographs of Oscar Wilde, Burrow-Giles Lithographic Company v. Sarony.22 Still photographs henceforward had copyright protection, even from media manipulation such as reengraving or tinting. Sarony’s hunger for prestige led him to emphasize the high end of his business: star shots in increasingly larger sizes—5½˝ × 8 ½˝ inch “Boudoir” cabinet cards or 7˝ × 10˝ inch “Imperial” cabinet cards. To impress his sitters, he created a studio that rivaled any metropolitan theater for backdrops and stage furniture, commissioning Lafayette Seavy, the great theatrical set painter to

40 Chapter One create background flats. Indeed, it became a tourist attraction, a famously extravagant temple of odd props, old art, palm trees, and stuffed exotic wildlife. A visitor in 1884 described the twelve-by-twelve-foot sitting room: “From the top of a dusty oak cabinet in one corner, fashioned by some cunning Floren- tine artificer, grinned in grotesque ugliness an Aztec idol, round whose feet of clay was coiled a string of glittering sequins from the Levant. A covered ar- moire serving as a window seat was covered with a heap of strangely fashioned garments of silk, satin and velvet, surmounted by a stiffly-starched ruff. A cinque-cento plate made a spot of color on the side of a dark wood chiffonier, the open drawer and shelves of which were crowded full of photographs.”23 In this sanctum of ornamental miscellany sat a sofa and two chairs and a huge eleven-by-fourteen bellows camera. More important than the fantastic atmosphere were the rituals Sarony had in place for sittings with beauties. They had been devised in the 1870s for dealing with opera divas and the volatile aging tragedian Adelaide Ristori, whose trips to photographic galleries caused her to channel an ample measure of the hysteria that she enacted on stage. On sensitive days, the discom- forts of fitting her head into a posing rig swelled into an episode of Sicilian torture. A photographer, if he mistakenly assumed a businesslike insistence on posing, morphed easily into some cruel and audacious Scarpia gazing at her charms with an impertinent sense of mastery. To expose herself to his mechanism would be to surrender some very personal and precious element of her being into his possession, for sordid cash. Making her . . . she could not name the word! But Napoleon Sarony—there was no tyranny in that suave painter of light. He was a little man, as small as a woman, with an English wit, a French delicacy of features and manner, and an American energy and friend- liness. Sarah Bernhardt, the most temperamental of French actresses, called him endearingly, “Mon Petit Sarony!”24 He made no peremptory demands. Many of the arrangements were fixed weeks in advance by correspondence. An entire day would be reserved for the sitting, with a backup date in case of inclement weather or maldisposition.25 Her costumes would be determined by letter and sent ahead. On the morning in question, the beauty, her maid, and dresser would arrive by coach and retire to the private dressing room— “it is furnished more comfortably and handsomely than the average theater dressing room”—for fitting. Sarony would have already selected the painted backdrop, furnishings, and props. When the actress emerged into the sitting room Sarony greeted her with an energetic torrent of complements, whose tone (lyric, emphatic, dramatic, sardonic) would cue the actress to the mood being sought in the sitting. Sarony never approached the camera. George Richardson, his assistant, manned the machine, exposing the plates when cued by Sarony’s hand signals, subtle gestures that the sitter never registered. Indeed Sarony’s mode of conducting a sitting was to make it not appear a

41 Photography and the Birth of Professional Beauty sitting, but a play rehearsal, or a particularly amusing conversation. He ordered tea and refreshments, or a cold collation for lunch, filling coffee cups and dispensing cakes, and afterward, conversing, sitting or standing a civil arm’s length out of the pictorial field, attention fixed upon the sitter. Posing was not so much the dictation of an attitude to a sitter, but a process by which, through conversation and interaction, the photographer cajoled a sitter into interesting expressions and stances. He never issued verbal directions to Richardson and rarely acknowledged his existence during the course of the sitting. Sarony’s pursuit of moods other than languor or winsome amiability

Figure 1.3 Napoleon Sarony: Sarah Bernhardt, New York, 1887. Moody and entirely willing to manifest “attitude,” Bernhardt slouches over one of Sarony’s Renaissance revival plinths. In the back an “aesthetic style” art glass panel sits before a vast canvas scene painted by Lafayette W. Seavey, greatest of photographic backdrop painters. Bernhardt was touring in La Tosca at the time of the portrait. in the beauties made the sittings pleasurable, even memorable for the sitters. Sarony explained, “When I took her [Ristori’s] Marie Stuart I became wild when I looked at her and saw that noble face and figure. She partook of my emotion, and I saw that great vein in her forehead begin to swell and the features lit up. I seized the moment, and the photograph . . . was the result.”26 No one could cajole temperament or beauty as Sarony could, for he exerted all his powers and material goods in an effort to make the beauty conscious of her special quality and calling. His studio more than the stage or the ballroom was the inner sanctum of the temple of beauty where it scintillated in a glory on his

Figure 1.4 Napoleon Sarony: Adelaide Ristori in the title role in Schiller’s play Mary Stuart, New York, 1872.

43 Photography and the Birth of Professional Beauty negative plate. As Sarony constructed and presided over the worship of theatrical celebrity, intensifying its brightest lights, rivals (Warren’s Studio of Boston, Gurney in New York, Morrison Studio in Chicago) were forced into the lower end of the trade, the buffo beauty pictures. Only two challenged Sarony with their innovative ways of celebrating the beauty—Jose Mora and Benjamin J. “Jake” Falk. Cuban-born Jose Maria Mora (1846–1926) trained as an assistant with Na- poleon Sarony in 1868–69 before establishing his own studio in Manhattan in 1870. A member of the immensely wealthy Mora family whose lands were confiscated by Spain during the Cuban rebellion of 1868, he felt at ease in the highest levels of society, yet by accident of politics had been forced to support himself financially. Blessed with a sensitive eye and a pictorial tact that kept him from indulging in the sort of ornamental orgy that Sarony periodically indulged, especially when shooting opera singers, Mora quickly established himself as his master’s chief rival in the United States. In 1878, the year that the beauty became a fixture in American visual culture, Mora sold 340,000 cabinet cards. Forty-two thousand of these sales were for images of Maude Branscombe, the quintessential buffo picture celebrity.27 A burlesque starlet who premiered in New York in a revival of Ixion, she had sumptuous looks and scant talent. But her handsome features so suited still representation that she became, through Mora’s enterprise, an international celebrity. The Paris cor- respondent of the New York Times asked in 1880,

Who is Maud[e] Branscombe? Her portrait is in every photographic shop- window. Sometime she is a nun, her eyes raised toward heaven in fervent ec- stasy; in another place she appears as an odalisque, with her yushmak drawn aside and her beautiful brow glittering with rows of sequins; elsewhere we see her dressed as a fine lady of the nineteenth century, and yet again as Ophelia or the Magdalen. Not a lounger on the Paris boulevards has passed unheed- ingly before that wondrously lovely face, and yet no one knows who she is, whence she came, nor whither she goeth, and if anybody in the United States can give information on these points, especially the third, a great boon will be conferred upon Parisian chroniclers, who are terribly exercised as to her personality.28

In truth, the Parisian chroniclers had available all the personality that Maude Branscombe could muster, for it was entirely expended on her surface. Un- like Lillie Langtry whose intelligence, sensuality, and mastery of conversation made her beauty stageable, Branscombe was at her best when immobile and silent. Few dramas featured such moments of quiet repose. So her career was made of fitful, short engagements, including a ludicrously brief stint doing Gilbert and Sullivan with the D’Oyly Carte Company in London. Yet Brans-

44 Chapter One Figure 1.5 Jose Maria Mora: Maude Branscombe, New York, 1878? One of a multitude of poses of Branscombe that Mora took and popularized. combe’s portraits by Mora were so attractive that she became a star of shop windows. Sarony felt obliged to act and hired Mora’s creation away from him with an exclusive contract. After doing his own version of some of Mora’s more popular poses, Sarony used Branscombe for several experimental sittings, trying to come up with a more visually dynamic style of presentation. Close-ups, chin set at raking angles, high-contrast profiles with features sculpted by dramatic shadow—these images would become the lodestar of the photographers who would develop the new theatrical portraiture of 1900–1910—Frank C. Bangs, Burr McIntosh, and Benjamin Falk. Mora, deprived of his star sitter, did not sulk empty-handed. He had grasped a principle. People would be willing to pay for pictures of beauties regardless of their fame as thespians. He went at the buffo market with a vengeance and opened up a second revenue stream for theatrical photographers when the National Police Gazette, that wonderfully duplicitous national magazine that purported to assist in the repression of crime while feeding the popular appetite for illicit sensation, commissioned him to photograph portraits of “Footlight Favorites.” These favorites were the most visually pleasing young women in the corps de ballet of the New York theaters. The Police Gazette engraved these portraits, since halftone reproduction and rotogravure had not been perfected and Woodburytype images cost too much for mass printing. When engravers led by photographer and technologist William Kurtz refined these printing processes at the turn of the century permitting reasonable photographic fidelity in mass-printed magazines, the economics of theatrical photography changed. The magazines provided images and so much more for the twenty-five cents per issue; a cabinet card cost fifty cents. As cabinet card sales sank, the cheaper postcard supplanted it at the newsstands, while magazine editors and theatrical managers became the chief purchasers of images other than the sitters themselves. The magazines destroyed the old exclusive patronage contracts between stars and photographers. Neither Sarony nor Mora experienced the eclipse of the old commercial order by the rise of the market for illustrated magazines. Sarony died in 1896, turning the business over to his son Otto. Mora went mad about the same time, agitated by the Spanish-American War and the agonizing diplomatic struggle surrounding the settlement of the Mora claim. He could no longer stand to see customers and walked away from his studio. He lived the final fifteen years of his life as a recluse in the Hotel Breslin, subsisting on pies and cakes donated by other guests, despite having $200,000 in bank deposits. His sole companions were pigeons. The walls of his apartment were papered with the images of celebrities from the 1870s and 1880s. His bathtub was filled with yellowed theatrical programs. He died October 18, 1926.29 In 1900 Benjamin “Jake” Falk (1851–1925) alone endured of the New York photographers who created “the beauty” to participate in the invention of vi-

46 Chapter One sual glamour. Born in New York City and educated at City College, Falk apprenticed with George Rockwood, the Broadway portrait photographer. In 1877, he opened his first studio, distressingly far from the theater district. A friend and fellow photographer, Jacob Schloss, assisted. Falk’s personal audacity and his attention to the latest technological inventions kept him in the theatrical portrait business despite lacking the opulent studio fixtures of Na- poleon Sarony and Jose Mora. His acute business practices eventually enabled him to move his studio into the Waldorf-Astoria. Falk repeatedly brought nonpaying player clients to court throughout his career, more than any other photographer in the city. Legal agitation follows naturally upon commercial adventure. Falk was also ferocious in taking newspapers and lithographic companies to court for violating copyright. With Theodore C. Marceau, Falk formed the Copyright Protection League that lobbied Congress for stronger protections for photographers’ images. No other New York photographer from 1880 to 1910 experimented so energetically with commercial arrangements, advertising, technology, and lighting technique. Sarony’s fine arts training had made him a traditionalist when it came to portrait formats. His Branscombe close-ups were entirely exceptional. Mora rarely deviated from the costume full-lengths and society portrait busts with which he made his reputation. Falk embraced the novelties of representation wrought by painters James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent in portraiture. Sargent’s fascination with painting figures in artificial light prompted Falk to attempt theatrical portraiture with electric illumination. Using a bank of electrical bulbs, he captured the first stage production picture, a second-act tableaux fromThe Russian Honeymoon at the Madison Square Theater on May 1, 1883. By 1890, he had become the innovative force in entertainment photography, pushing for faster exposure times and more stable photographic emulsions. Because flashlight photography was instantaneous, it did away with the posing process and seized images almost by serendipity. In 1906, Falk indicated in an interview with Sadakichi Hartmann that attentiveness to changes in technology and a willingness to adjust one’s representational style were essential to success in the field. While the majority of professional portraitists in New York City considered themselves “society photographers” on the model of Davis & Sanford Studio,30 Falk, emulating his model, Napoleon Sarony (whose bronze bust adorned the sitting room of Falk’s townhouse), asserted that he was a theatrical photographer. Shortly after Falk’s death in 1925,Theatre Magazine named him one of the twenty-five most significant photographers of the stage in the twentieth century. He was the oldest of the persons named and the only one to have survived the transformation of the theatrical photographic business from an image retail market to an image production for contract market where national magazines dictated demand and publicity agents shaped the conditions of supply.

47 Photography and the Birth of Professional Beauty Figure 1.6 Benjamin J. Falk: Act II, The Russian Honeymoon, New York, 1883. The first theatrical production still. Electrically illuminated. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Division of Prints and Photographs. LC PR 03 X Size, container 12, Entertainment & Theater, folder 5.

If the beauty was born in the theater with the photographer for a midwife, she grew to the fullness of her power in print. London again took the lead in showing how the beauty could be installed as a popular icon driving magazine sales. In 1880, a scant three years after Lillie Langtry made beauty a profession, Clement Scott began editingThe Theatre: A Monthly Review of Drama Music and the Fine Arts in London. Its reviews, vignettes, cartoons, and photographic portraits (expensive, high-fidelity Woodburytypes) would serve as model for the American Theatre Magazine, which lasted from 1900 until 1936. But the apo- theosis of the figure occurred in 1897 with publication in London ofThe Beauty Book, a celebration of the paragons of English society, as photographed by Baron Adolph DeMeyer and other photographic luminaries. In 1903 Rudolph Eickemeyer and others collaborated with publisher R. H. Russell to publish The American Book of Beauty, portraits of eighty daughters of the American plutoc- racy.31 Priced at $500 per copy and printed on gilt-edged vellum, this limited edition release marked the horizon of preciosity in the portrayal of privileged

48 Chapter One Figure 1.7 Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr., Campbell Studio: Evelyn Nesbit, New York, 1904. Erotic presence, luminosity of face and body, a three-dimensional palpability, this bust portrait is an instance of the earliest photographic presentation of glamour. The candid, expressionless face, the self-possessed tilt of the head—all attributes that will be recycled repeatedly in decades to come. A version of this image was also issued by Elmer Chickering. women of the haute monde.32 There is a curious stiffness in the likenesses of these twenty-year-old beauties swathed in painterly atmospheres and rigged out in elaborate dresses, hairdos, and stoles. Eickemeyer would find this imagery too hieratic in its vanity, and would seek out a new style, a new incarnation of beauty in the person of the showgirl, and a new relaxation of pose and gesture. About the figure of Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, Eickemeyer constructed a new visual language of allure, glamour, that would dominate the newsstands, the magazines, the stage, the screen, and the boudoir. This visual language would have an American genesis (no more “English, quite English”) and would radiate from a distinctive new creature in culture—the successor to “the beauty”—“the girl.” Furthermore, the projection of a celebrity through a representational medium that communicated appearance rather than acting talent or reputation or newsworthiness, that elicited questions about who was being represented (who is Maude Branscombe?), and that stimulated a massive expenditure of money for the images of someone were precisely the preconditions for the rise of motion picture stardom in the early years of silent motion pictures.

50 Chapter One F

2 Glamour Comes to California

In spring of 1918, D. W. Griffith, the greatest filmmaker in the world, entered Hoover Art Studio at 6321 Hollywood Boulevard, intent on stealing its chief photographer for Artcraft Pictures. Usually Griffith assigned Paul Woods to hire and fire persons on the production staff. In this case, the director scheduled a sitting and in the midst of the shoot tendered a personal invitation to the photographer to join his crew. Hendrick Sartov (1885–1970), aged thirty-two, possessed none of the allure he so adeptly captured on glass negatives. Skinny, with a slight photographer’s hunch, thickly bespectacled, plagued with “fuzzy hair” giving way to male pattern baldness, he spoke laconically with a difficult Danish accent. His studio manner oscillated between mute aloofness and patrician formality. Despite his ugliness and inelegance of manner, Sartov knew more about the new imagery of glamour than any photographer in Los Angeles. His lighting went well beyond the usual studio effects. Instead of backlighting his subjects rimming their silhouettes with a halo of light, he used multiple lamps, and lit faces from the side and from just beneath the chin, like Baron Adolph DeMeyer, chief photographer for Vogue. Wrinkles vanished. Years evaporated. Sartov trained a

Figure 2.1 [Hendrick Sartov], Hoover Art Gallery: David Wark Griffith, 1918.

53 special lens that he guarded jealously from prying eyes upon his sitters, not the usual Dallmeyer Patent Portrait soft-focus lens.1 Sartov’s lens gave a distinctive softness and roundness to a sitter’s face and body. His more artful portraits radiated luminousness, a glow that won notice in exhibitions. Sartov and Ed- ward Weston alone of California’s photographers won prizes in the salons of the American Association of Professional Photographers during World War I. Sartov received commendations at the Pittsburgh Salon of Pictorial Photogra- phy and the London Salon of the Royal Photographic Society. The director wanted Sartov to supply visual finesse to his features, a poetic delicacy that Griffith’s longtime cameraman, Billy Bitzer, could not manage. Glutted with the grandeur and huge scale ofIntolerance (1916) and mindful of expenses, Griffith contemplated more intimate films, dramas that depended more upon close-quarter impression than vista. He wanted someone who could light the faces of his heroines with a tenderness that would make them visually irresistible, even in squalid surroundings. “The light of glamour shines out of the darkness.” Several stories tell how Griffith came to call upon Sartov. Billy Bitzer— who regarded Sartov a rival—connected his hiring with Griffith’s infatuation with the actress Carol Dempster:

Carol Dempster left her pictures with the casting department and Griffith thumbed through them. He was first intrigued by the photographer’s skill; then he studied the face which seemed to come out of a new method of lighting. The photographer was Hendrik Sartov. Griffith sent for him, as well as the girl. Sartov had made several revolutionary portraits of Carol at a Hollywood studio. He knew next to nothing about movie camera technique or running a motion picture camera, but with my training, his new method could become a valuable property. . . . Sartov was an apt pupil, foreign-born, with an accent and a resigned nature. What he had in talent, he lacked in enthusiasm: he always seemed bored.2

Bitzer’s tale has the hallmarks of fantasy. Griffith’s infatuation with Dempster, an imperfect beauty in Bitzer’s eyes, paralleled his fascination with the visual artistry of an imperfect photographer, a man lacking passion for art. Lillian Gish claimed that she, not Dempster, was the female conduit between Griffith and Sartov.

I went to this Hollywood Art Studio, came back with “heads” of the character I was playing in “Hearts of the World,” and I said to Mr. Griffith and Billy Bitzer, “Look how that cameraman makes me look. Why don’t I look like that on the

54 Chapter Two Figure 2.2 [Hendrick Sartov], Hoover Art Gallery: Lillian Gish, 1918. screen?” Mr Griffith said, “Well, if you’re so smart, go get him, and have him make you look like that on the screen.3

Gish of course did not hire anybody. Yet no silent actress had greater credibility when commenting on portrait photography. She promoted the careers of portrait photographers James Abbe, Charles Albin, Richard Burke, Kenneth Alexander, Henry Waxman, Nelson Evans, and MGM still photographer Mil- ton Brown.4 Upon her recruitment by MGM in 1925, Gish insisted that Sartov be retained as her cinematographer. Sartov in gratitude named his soft-focus lens after her. (Their collaboration will be explored in chapter 8.) Several surviving Hoover Art portraits radiate the sort of splendor that would warrant Gish’s intervention. Yet we must not neglect the question, why had Gish been dispatched for stills at Hoover Art in the first place? Both Bitzer and James Woodbury, or camera assistant Karl Brown, could have shot publicity during takes on the set. Gish remarked, “we were always being sent to get still pictures.” Sent out of the studio because Griffith already revered the artistry of Sartov at Hoover Art, and to a lesser extent Albert Witzel. In 1915, D. W. Griffith had read in theLos Angeles Times about the international recognition bestowed upon Hoover Art’s photographers and may have heard the rumors circulating about Sartov’s background—that he had been a lecturer on the physics of light at the University of Rotterdam before abandoning academics for photography in Hamburg.5 Sartov may have looked and acted like a professor, but that tale was pure fantasy. Who was this photographic genius, and how did he come to be in South- ern California? Sartov’s life has the episodic shape common to persons who get bored whenever mastery makes one’s work unchallenging. Born in 1885, he was educated in the public schools of Kolding, Denmark. At age fourteen, Sartov apprenticed to Kolding’s senior photographer and internationally recognized camera designer B. G. B. Möller. After five years of study, he took over as studio manager, and worked three years learning how to manage the business as well as the art. He did so well that a Copenhagen Studio hired him as manager. He ran a studio in the Danish capital for three years, and then received a more lucrative offer to superintend a studio in Kiel, Germany. Several months of labor revealed there was nothing more to be learned or gained. In 1912, ambition and wanderlust impelled him across the Atlantic to the Sweet Brothers Studio in Minneapolis.6 That midwestern city too greatly resembled the places he had left in Europe, so after six months he accepted the invitation of George C. Thomson and E. C. Schoetner to trek to the wilds of the Montana copper country to practice his art in Anaconda.7 A half year roughing it drove him to salubrious Southern California. Los Angeles agreed with him. Studio owner Frank Sheridan Hoover’s willingness to fund darkroom experimentation, the purchase of high-end papers, and submission costs to photographic

56 Chapter Two Figure 2.3 [Hendrick Sartov], Hoover Art Gallery: George Beban as Pietro Massena in The Alien, New York Motion Picture Company, July 1915. Three years before D. W. Griffith hired Sartov, director Thomas Ince commissioned the photographer to shoot this charac- terful, expressionistic, and dramatically lit close-up of Beban. exhibitions gave Sartov a free hand to explore portraiture as he wished. He had been working with great success at Hoover Art for four and a half years when Griffith walked through the door. Griffith’s talent raid on Hoover Art Studio proved more complicated than he had anticipated. Some months before Sartov had partnered with the company treasurer, Frank Harmon, to purchase the business from Frank Hoover for $16,000, so Sartov was no longer hired help ripe for plucking, but a proprietor. He could not walk away. So he worked two jobs, at the gallery and at the Artcraft studio until Griffith moved east in 1919. At that juncture, Sartov sued Hoover, claiming fraudulent misrepresentation of the studio’s revenues at the time of sale, the suit a rather transparent means of extricating himself from the business so he could move to New York with Griffith. Hoover Art Studio became Hoover, L.A., run by Harmon, with Jacques D’Auray taking over as artistic director,8 until the hiring of Russian-born portraitist Sergis Alberts in 1923.9 In the 1910s, Griffith’s artistic instincts rarely failed him when it came to collaborators. Sartov, after his tutelage at the hands of Billy Bitzer, became one of the premier cinematographers of silent cinema, the man who more than anyone else established soft-focus pictorialism as a visual idiom in Hollywood. His masterworks of the 1920s—Way Down East, Dream Street, La Bohème, The Scarlet Letter, and Quality Street—won effusive praise for their visual poetry. Belying Bitzer’s characterization of Sartov as a disengaged and disinterested figure—all talent and no passion—he proved to be an adventurous cameraman, pioneering the aerial representation of the Grand Canyon with airborne vistas shot from the wing in 1928’s The Bride of the Colorado. His contributions to still photography rivaled his contributions to cinematography, for he perfected the lustrous atmospherics of Hollywood glamour portraiture in the 1910s. Numbers of the great cinematographers of the 1910s and 1920s began their careers in portrait studios—Charles Rosher, who was Mary Pickford’s cinematographer of choice; Gene Gaudio, who lensed the finest of Alla Nazimova’s features of the decade; John Van den Broek, Maurice Tourneur’s clairvoyant cameraman; Karl Struss, the photo secessionist who would be cowinner of the first Academy Award for cinematography; James Wong Howe; Ned Van Bu- ren; and Leon Eycke. All would contribute significantly to still photography as well. None, save Struss, approached Sartov as a practitioner of glamour, yet Sartov’s contributions have been entirely forgotten, because no single image he created bore his name on the prints. They all read “Hoover Art” or were anonymous stills issued by Griffith’s PR offices. Let him be recognized here. When John Kobal analyzed Hollywood glamour, he discovered two photographic types: the extrovert (the immodest radiance of a Joan Crawford blooming in a camera’s gaze) and the introvert (a beautiful soulfulness and

58 Chapter Two depth of presence that looms beneath the immobile features of a Garbo staring at the horizon). Sartov’s Lillian Gish gleams with the latter. Hers is a sober beauty rather than a decorative prettiness, despite the hat, the curls, and lustrous blouse. Her image has such an integral effect that all the technological disciplines that enabled it—the innovations in lighting, cosmetology, optics, photographic chemistry, set painting, hairdressing, millinery, clothing design—vanish in its glow. The image is a close-up. We witness with privy access, a presumed familiarity. Gish’s eyes do not address us. She gives herself over to some other matter—whether external object or internal imperative. Her attractiveness has nothing of the extrovert’s sexual burn or of a starlet exuding “it” or “oomph.” Rather, the poise, self-possession, and human strength of a woman comfortable in the all too mortal beauty she possesses. According to Kobal, this was the profounder mode of glamour’s presentation. John Kobal,10 however, believed that glamour did not exist in Hollywood in 1918 and wouldn’t for another decade. While The Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers, 1925–1940 performed the landmark service of insisting upon cinematic portraiture’s aesthetic merit and cultural influence at a time, 1980, when critical opinion demeaned glamour as a form compromised by commerce, it faltered as history.11 Kobal claimed that the glamour portrait developed its own practices, conditioned by the factory system of the Holly- wood studio, rather than photographic custom or example. He believed the studio engineered the conjunction of a myriad of advances in cosmetology, electric lighting, film chemistry, optics, clothing design, and print processing that enabled photographers to create a vision more splendid and alluring than had existed before in photographic portraiture.12 Kobal went so far as to claim that these technical advances and the model of the cinematic “close-up” inspired Hollywood studio photographers to create beauty without precedent in the annals of portraiture, freed of the influence of painted or photographic representation.13 The “great” studio portraitists—Ruth Harriet Louise, Ernest Bachrach, Josef von Sternberg (given auteur status for directing the lenses of Eugene Robert Richee, Don English, and William Walling Jr.), George Hurrell, Clarence Sinclair Bull, and Lazslo Willinger—captured human appearance in the moment of its supreme vividness in their images. Kobal bolstered his claims with suites of spectacular images (110 full-page stonetone black and whites). The pictures may not have belonged to that canon of American art photography from Alfred Stieglitz to Diane Arbus installed in museums. Yet there was no denying their aesthetic force or historical resonance. These were the poses that multitudes of men and women mimicked in the mirror. They posited the complete visual repertoire of self-possession: chic, cool, menace, hauteur, invitation, icy appraisal, bemusement. Kobal effectively championed the aesthetic merits of the Hollywood portrait and the Hollywood still and eloquently appreciated the sort of high-

59 Glamour Comes to California contrast, sharp-focus version of glamour that he favored. Yet his history in nearly every respect was fanciful when he moved beyond the biographies of his favorite photographers to tell the story of the developing aesthetics of cinematic portraiture. Hollywood star portraiture was not a self-created art. It owed an enormous debt to theatrical photography of the 1900–1925 era. Its style was not a product of the factory system. Indeed, its most celebrated practitioner, George Hurrell, learned his art with theatrical and society portraitist Eugene Hutchinson of Chicago and had a fully formed style by the time that he shot the famous suites of Ramon Novarro and Norma Shearer that earned him his first studio job at MGM in 1929. His style did not borrow the close-up from cinematic practice, but from theatrical photography. Rather than refute point by point the characterizations in Kobal’s history, I offer this chapter’s account as an entire substitute for his tale of origins, trac- ing the development of photography during that portion of the silent era prior to 1925, his date of nativity for glamour. It will begin in 1903 and narrate the evolution of portrait functions and styles up until the influx of New York celebrity photographers in 1919–21. We will see that glamour emerged as “the girl”—in 1900, not as “the woman” in 1926. The coming to power of the cinematic portrait was witnessed in several related cultural happenstances: the emergence of the movie “star system,” the explosion of fan magazines, and the saturation of mass periodicals, newspapers, and magazines with performer portraits. These were cultural phenomena of theearly 1910s, not the late 1920s. One does not have to be schooled in the doctrines of glamour to recognize it. Its features stand apparent. The radiance, the self-possession, the whole- ness, the more-than-human beauty and power, the perfection of flesh and features. Nevertheless, several maxims calling attention to specific features of this photographic dialect may help orient us before we immerse ourselves:

The disciplines enabling glamour vanish in its glow. In glamour the fire of personality dispels darkness. Glamour is most apparent in repose. The glamorous have the luxury of choosing whether or not to be charming. Glamour is suited to rooms. The glamorous body makes no effort to hide the enjoyment of pleasure. The self-possession of the glamorous is communicated in the leisure of their motion. There is a joyful immodesty to glamour. Glamour is sexy, but sexiness is not enough to make one glamorous. While age does not preclude glamour, the serenity of soul required makes it the rarest of rarities.

60 Chapter Two Figure 2.4 George Hurrell: Norma Shearer, 1929. Shearer contracted for the shoot after seeing a suite of images Hurrell had made of Ramon Novarro. Fearing that she would forever be slotted as a society woman in films, Shearer instructed Hurrell to make her sexy. Hurrell complied. MGM publicity image. Courtesy of Jay Parrino’s The Mint. “Glamour” has been used in English since the eighteenth century (it derived from Gaelic and names the charm practiced by fairies trying to lure mortals to their realm “under the hill”), yet it became particularly associated with the lure of theatrical life in the 1890s, just at that juncture when “the girl” became a theatrical and cultural phenomenon.14 Who was the girl? A visiting Italian chroniqueur, “Bergeret,” in 1915, supplied a trenchant assessment:

In the United States the unmarried girl occupies the niche in society reserved, in Latin countries, for married women. She takes the lead in conversation, creates the styles, and regulates matters of taste. The very laws and customs seem to have been inspired with the sole purpose of making life easy and delectable for her. What are the experiences that go into making the American girl? Not the boarding school. Not the confessional. Not the romance novel read on the sly. Rather, “co-education, the dance, hoydenish flirtations, and sport.” The principle she grasps instinctively in terms of the relation of the sexes in society is that, “the power of woman is equal to the desire of man.”15

While the capacity to elicit desire is the key to her social power, as it is with many a fictional heroine of the nineteenth century, the girl possesses several novel elements: her physical energy, her willfulness, her voice in conversation and society, and her potency in shaping taste, manners, and “the very laws.” On the stage the ascendancy of the girl can be charted precisely.16 She first marched into view in her modern form in 1894 with the premier of The Gai- ety Girl. From that premier until Ziegfeld’s immense hit of 1916, The Century Girl, the American stage saw sixty-nine musical comedies in which “Girl” appeared in the title.17 Concurrently, the periodical press glorified illustrator Charles Dana Gibson’s “Gibson Girl”; the opera contributed Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West in 1903, and Tin Pan Alley hymned “The Girl on the Flying Trapeze.” These works of popular art freed “girl” from its designation of female childhood and adolescence. Any unmarried young woman from fourteen to twenty-six possessing a free spirit, willfulness, and lack of matronly responsibility could claim the name.18 Girls, not women, according to Ameri- can popular culture, championed equal rights and showed the sex’s ability.19 The stage gloried in her exploits. In 1895’s 20th Century Girl the “bachelor girl” heroine dresses in pants and runs for Congress. Later that season, The Bicycle Girl celebrates her mobility tearing around town on two wheels to the strains of “Hail the Conquering Shero.” A whole series of girl musicals—The Regatta Girl (1900), The Vanderbilt Cup (1906), The Girl at the Helm (1908), The Motor Girl (1909)—concerned young women dressing as men and winning races. Another subgenre dealt with girls tired of routine existence who opted for adventure, running away—A Runaway Girl (1898), The Rollicking Girl (1905), The

62 Chapter Two Girl on the Film (1913), and the hit The Girl from Utah (1914). The musical theater repeatedly explored the lives of working girls, lower-class girls, and foreign girls. All were energetic; all were ingenues; not all were glamorous. Indeed, the mobility, activity, energy of the girl stood at odds with glamour, a power of attraction exerted in repose, ease, and practiced mastery. Glamour did eventually settle comfortably about one species of girl, the showgirl. When a showgirl managed to radiate personality, even in the midst of a chorus, lighting up the stage in that moment when the spot picked her out of the pack in her most winning pose, then she stood revealed, glorified with glamour. “Girl” and “glamour” first linked together about the person of Ethel Bar- rymore after her immense 1900 success,Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines. Barrymore’s granitic haut-matronly self-possession in her movies of the 1930s and 1940s may loom too forcefully in memory to enable the recovery of her earlier more lyric and elegant persona. Though called a “glamour girl” in 1900, Ethel Barrymore did not appear in photographs as that radiant creature until the 1910s. Her first star images, taken by Burr McIntosh in four sittings over 1900, had the ornamental furnishings and dress, noontide lighting, and theatrical posing of a Sarony or Falk cabinet card portrait. She appeared a professional beauty. Two other photographers—not McIntosh—would develop a visual analogue to the concept of glamour in treatments of two other showgirl/performers of the era, the model Evelyn Nesbit and actress Elsie Fergu- son. All of the visual attributes Kobal associated with the most potent glamour goddesses of the 1930s can be seen in the photographs by Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr. (1862–1932) of Campbell Studio, NY of the infamous Nesbit, the beauty at the apex of a fatal love triangle. Nesbit’s husband, Harry Thaw, gunned down architect Sanford White, his wife’s seducer. Nesbit incarnated the extrovert glamour goddess—the woman whose sexual presence shown with such unambiguous force that she had no need for charm, for engagement with the onlooker, for broadcasting emotion through facial expression. Her expression was all in her eyes. If Nesbit provided the model for fleshly allure, Elsie Fergu- son, the superbly beautiful, patrician dramatic actress, provided the image for the introspective, glamorous soul. Arnold Genthe (1869–1942) captured that soul in silver shortly after having moved his studio from San Francisco to New York City. Both images do not distract attention from the sitter with elaborate backgrounds, ornate furniture, props, or patterned clothing. Both images convey the luxuriousness of the costume but, by subtracting detail with softened focus, make it integral to a composition rather than an object of interest in itself. Both images feature an expressionless face, an expressive hand, and an expanse of exposed skin to suggest the palpability of the body. Shadows are gradual, not starkly contrastive, suggesting warmth rather than drama. We see both glowing. Light appears to emanate from them. Nesbit flares with the

63 Glamour Comes to California Figure 2.5 Burr McIntosh: Ethel Barrymore as Madame Trentoni in Clyde Fitch’s Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, February 1901. Figure 2.6 arnold Genthe: Elsie Ferguson ca. 1915. Published in Vogue, 1917. From the former Dr. Mehemed Fehmy Agha Collection.

flame of the flesh. Ferguson shines with the luminosity of soul—to use the characterizations of that era. Both of the inventors of the visual glamour, Eickemeyer and Genthe, came from the ranks of the art photographers, that cadre of aesthetically ambitious cameramen and -women who in the 1890s organized into an international community intent on fighting the slapdash amateurism of the mass of Kodak- wielding weekend shutterbugs, the routine posing and eclectic composition of the professional portrait studio, and the condescension of a fine arts critical establishment that denigrated photography as a mechanical craft. Yet neither man felt drawn to the priestly vision of haute-amateur visual aestheticism championed by Alfred Stieglitz. Eickemeyer and Genthe both felt sympathy for the ideals of the arts and crafts movement, particularly its ambition to meld beauty with function. Nei- ther, however, shared John Ruskin’s suspicion of mass-produced things. Both operated commercial studios as well as participating in the national and international salons that became the central venues of artistic expression in photography. Both grew enamored with the visual vitality of the American stage in the first decade of the twentieth century and made a specialty of portraying performers—actors, dancers, and singers. Eickemeyer learned from theater that beauty was a quality capable of manipulation, a visual mode that could be vested upon persons of any background or rank. It was not a property of breeding or the genteel upbringing of gentry women, such as those featured in The American Beauty Book. Any girl might have glamour, provided she had personality, an instinct for mimesis, and came into the hands of the artists who could burnish her image. The theater since the late 1879s had been the great laboratory for such burnishing.20 Both Eickemeyer and Genthe realized that photography could not only reveal the theatrical glorification of the girl, but amplify the splendor and broadcast it throughout the land. Both took particular interest in the publication of photographs in books and periodicals, refusing to confine the artistry of photographic work to the hand-pulled print. Nor did they restrict themselves to photogravure reproduction when publishing images; they trusted pictures to halftone printing, which after 1890 achieved a fair measure of image fidelity in the slick-paper national magazines. Eickemeyer, when employed by Campbell Studio from 1902 to 1905 and when in partnership with Charles H. Davis from 1905 to 1910, supplied images for Town and Country, The Dial, the New York Times, and Vanity Fair.21 Genthe published in Overland Monthly, a San Francisco illustrated magazine. He moved to New York in 1912, because it was the center of artistic ferment in the theater and because it was the nation’s publishing center. After his arrival, he became a regular contributor to Town and Country, Outlook, the New York Times, McClure’s Magazine, and Vanity Fair.

66 Chapter Two Because so many of the figures in this book trekked from New York to California pursuing fame and fortune in the film industry in California, we must underscore that the first transit took place in the other direction with the Broadway stage as the cultural magnet. Col. Theodore C. Marceau, Francis Bruguiere, Frank C. Bangs, and Arnold Genthe won international celebrity after leaving the West Coast and installing themselves as the photographic witnesses of the blooming of the American theater in Manhattan. Genthe’s path was particularly circuitous and suggestive. Trained as a classical philologist at the University of Jena, Genthe completed a doctorate on the Roman poet Lucan, but before contracting for an academic post, took a year’s employment as a tutor in San Francisco. He fell in love with the city, took up photography, and ventured into Chinatown with a hidden camera to capture on film its distinctive features and folkways. The success of these images when exhibited caused him to open a photographic studio specializing in portraiture and civic documentation. His learning, wit, cosmopolitanism, and charm made him a welcome presence in the city’s elite social scene. The earthquake of 1906 destroyed his workplace and his archive. But his photographs of the shattered city became the most eloquent visual monument to its crisis. In 1908, he took a photographic vacation in Japan. He returned dissatisfied with the artistic possibilities that running a studio on the West Coast afforded. Theatrical friends suggested that he move to New York where the fine arts, photography, and theater scintillated. He left San Fran- cisco in 1911 for Manhattan. Because of his innovative work with autochrome color processes, he made an immediate splash in New York’s photographic and publishing worlds. An articulate man with exquisite taste, he installed himself in New York’s artistic circles, providing illustrations for poetry books and be- friending the various dancers of the city. Genthe’s talent with a pen matched that with a lens. He wrote crisply argued articles on aesthetics, photography, and the state of the arts for the New York Times, appearing there more frequently than any other photographer of the day. He took little notice of motion pictures until the mid-1910s. When he became cognizant of the movies, he never felt the urge to experiment with cinematography, though his fascination with the chemistry of color film made him follow developments in both still and motion picture color stock through the 1930s. He believed that the problems of pictorial composition applied universally to all reproductive forms. He photographed numbers of movie stars during the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. In his memoir, As I Remember, Genthe claimed a priority in the new style of artistic photo portraiture that only his colleague, Eickemeyer, could challenge: “I believe I was the first professional photographer to give people portraits that were more than mere surface records—pictures that in a pictorially interesting composition, in a carefully considered pattern of light and shade,

67 Glamour Comes to California showed something of the real character and personality of the sitter. In the finished pictures I tried to subordinate unimportant detail and emphasize the essential characteristic features. I preferred the soft tones of a mat surface paper to the harshness of the glossy paper.”22 He devoted a chapter of his autobiography to “The Beauty of Women.” Perhaps the most insightful passage in his meditation notes the changing nature of beauty—that what is deemed beautiful by a culture is a shifting, historical perception. “Fashions change in beauty. The change in our day has been chiefly a closer approach toward the Greek ideal, away from the indolent harem type once so popular. The modern American girl moves with a free stride that marks her wherever she goes.” Genthe suggests additional maxims about glamour:

The glamorous person radiates freedom and vitality, even motionless and at rest. Yesterday’s glamour may seem strange, yet its power is not wholly then and there.

Figure 2.7 arnold Genthe: Greta Garbo, 1925. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-USZC4-4938. Film Photography before Hollywood

Cinema became an industry around New York City, the center of the American theater. Just as the nascent film companies cannibalized the acting companies of Broadway for its performers, so they took over the techniques of theatrical publicity to promote their titles and personalities. When the first movie magazines appeared in the 1910s, their editorial offices were located in the center of American publishing, New York. Consequently editors contracted the established performing arts photographers in the city, all of whom began as theatrical portraitists.23 Early American movie photography replicated the forms and functions of early twentieth-century theatrical photography. In a magazine piece written in 1897, Broadway producer Daniel Frohman identified 1880 as the signal year in photography’s renovation of theatrical publicity: “We began a system of photographing ‘situations’ in the various plays at the Madison Square Theatre in segregated scenes. For this purpose recourse was had to the photographer’s studio, and the results were so wholly satisfactory that, from that point on to the present day, theatrical photographing became a very important factor in play advertising. The benefits of the photographing system enabled managers to display pictures subsequently in other cities when these companies were seen on tour.”24 In 1883, Benjamin Falk suggested that the actors not come to the studio to recreate scenes, but that he go to the theater and with banks of electric lights capture scenes on stage. He created the first stage picture in 1883, the second act ofA Russian Honeymoon, and recorded a dozen other stage scenes before the end of the decade.25 Well before the turn of the twentieth century, the publicity agent had expanded his technique from verbal blurbing (human interest, faux scandal, ballyhoo, and quoted accolade) to visual previewing. The growing legibility of mass-printed photographs in the 1890s had made the illustrated magazine transform from a treasury of drawn and engraved illustration into a collection of photojournalism and portraiture. Newspapers by 1900 were boosting circulation by featuring pictorial sections. The cult of theatrical celebrity that Napoleon Sarony, Jose Mora, and Benjamin J. Falk had nourished with cabinet cards in the 1880s and 1890s suddenly expanded into new areas of display.26 In 1900, a lavishly illustrated monthly, The Theatre,27 began publication, the model for a multitude of film fan magazines that would emerge in the second decade of the century, beginning with Motion Picture Story and Photo-Play in 1911 and Motion Picture Stories in 1913.28 The Theatre was full of reviews, chat, performer profiles, and photographs. By 1911,The Theatre, had distinguished several kinds of photography—the founding genres of entertainment imagery—each associated with a separate section of the magazine:

69 Glamour Comes to California Production shot—stage pictures, what the movie publicity departments would call ‘the still”—found in articles and reviews in the first third of the magazine. Personality portrait—a depiction of a performer in contemporary dress—found in the middle portions of the magazine in “spotlight” features. Character—a portrait of a performer dressed for a role—also found in the middle section of the magazine. Fashion—a performer as clotheshorse showing off some store’s designs— found in the final pages of the magazine. Home—an informal picture of a performer at home or play—found as an element of the fashion section and usually depicting a home setting. The ancestor of the candid shot. Art photography—imagery of attractive young performers showing some flesh—scattered through the magazine, particularly in conjunction with dance articles after 1915.

Photography was more central to cinematic art than it was to theater. The early name for film—“ photoplay”—attested its importance. The technical processes (the lighting), posing (focal length), and even the developing of film were in large measure congruent. So we expect to see that the earliest production stills for movies being shot by the cameramen cranking the movie reels; especially since many of the early cinematographers came from the ranks of photographers.29 Personality portraits of movie performers, likenesses in modern dress, were not at first performed in-house or on set.30 Since celebrated portrait studios existed in New York City, producers would send performers to the same artists who had burnished the celebrity of matinee idols and ingenues. Sar- ony Studio, White Studio, Campbell Studios, Apeda, and Underwood & Un- derwood did a regular schedule of sittings of film personalities before World War I.31 From 1910 onward, several studios and portrait photographers began making a specialty of film portrait work: Moody, NY, National, Floyd, Puffer, Victor Georg, and Samuel Lumiere.32 These studios had entrée with magazine editors, so were considered a necessary component of product promotion, or “exploitation” as it was coming to be called. The New York movie portrait specialists of the 1910s were decidedly a sub- set of the Fifth Avenue studios that served all sectors of the entertainment industry. They had decidedly more cachet than the lensmen who serviced vaudeville (Nasib, Foley, Gould and Marsden) and the burlesque circuits (Strand). They had more access to national magazine editors than the major operatic photographers (Herman Mishkin and Aimee DuPont). They were deemed less artistic than the major theatrical portraitists, although in B. Frank Puffer (1880–1964) we encounter a unique case of a theatrical and society photogra-

70 Chapter Two pher who gravitated toward servicing motion picture publicity because of a fascination with technology.33 Yet their fortunes with editors and in the professional/institutional world of photography rose with the growing power of motion pictures in the late 1910s and receded in the early 1920s when the motion picture business migrated to the West Coast and when studios and exchanges began resisting their jealous maintenance of copyright and credit in court.

The Credo of the First Hollywood Glamour Photographer

The 1910s saw the explosive growth of the film industry in Southern Califor- nia. Companies evading the patent monopolies enforced on the East Coast exploited the bandit liberties and perpetual sunshine of Los Angeles. In 1900, Los Angeles languished, a backwater stop on the circuit of touring theatrical stock companies. In 1906, a small operation of the American Biograph and Mutoscope Company opened in Los Angeles. In 1906 Frank Boggs of Chicago’s Selig Polyscope Company did a shoot in the city and was so smitten that he convinced the company to move. In 1911, David Horsley, heeding the advice of Los Angeles photographer Frank Sheridan Hoover, the founder of Hoover Art Gallery, moved Nestor Films to the Los Angeles suburb of Hollywood, initiat- ing its emergence as the West Coast center of the film industry.34 The quality and efficiency of Nestor’s production, aided by the three hundred plus days of California sunshine, turned heads in the East. By 1915, the cultural forces the antimonopolists Horsley and Carl Laemmle had unleashed would enable the Los Angeles suburb to eclipse Kansas City and Chicago as centers of the American entertainment industry. In 1920 Hollywood was generating more money than New York City’s theatrical agencies and motion picture companies combined. Initially producers in Hollywood did not import New York photographic talent, but made use of the portrait studios available in Southern California.35 Mass-circulation magazines made the look of the great New York portrait studios, and the innovations of the best artists of Chicago (George Moffett, Lewis-Smith, Sykes Studio), Kansas City (Orval Hixon, Benjamin Strauss & Homer Peyton), and Philadelphia (Gilbert & Bacon—who shot publicity for Lubin Studios) available nationally to be imitated. Trained photographers could emulate style with modest effort. Los Angeles boasted the multiple- gold-medal-winning portraitist George Steckel, known internationally for his carbon print portraits. Furthermore, Los Angeles in 1913 benefited from a new arrival, a photographer who had presided over a Broadway studio: Richard Gordon Matzene. Richard Gordon Matzene, aka Count Jens Rudolph Matzene, aka Jems Matzene Razlsmlau, was a virtuoso of self-invention, a lively precursor to that multitude of self-remade creatures who would people Hollywood in decades to

71 Glamour Comes to California come. Born in Denmark sometime between 1861 and 1881 (official documents list a variety of dates),36 Matzene claimed to have been trained as a painter, either in Paris or London, studying with James McNeill Whistler or in the Aca- démie Julian. (Neither Matzene or Razlsmlau are names listed in the records of either artist’s atelier.) When he first appears in American records—in Chicago in 1900—he is styled Count Jens Rudolph Matzene. There he founded the first of three photographic studios bearing his name in the United States: Chicago (1900–1937), New York City (1908–11), and Los Angeles (1911–16).37 In Los Angeles, Richard Gordon Matzene’s charm, fashionable attire, monocle, portfolio of published portraits in national magazines, and vaguely aristocratic air were sufficient to secure him a long-term arrangement with the Los Angeles Times to supply society and theatrical portraits. Broadway style à la Matzene appeared nearly weekly in the society columns of the Los Angeles Times. Two hundred and sixty-three portraits appeared the Times from April 1911 to autumn 1916,38 more than twice as frequently as any of the other important photographic studios in town, George Steckel’s, Afred R. Lindstedt’s, Albert W. Witzel’s, Fred Hartsook’s, and A. Louis Mojonier’s.39 Matzene remained market leader until he was seduced by the movies. In 1916 he closed his portrait studio and organized a film company, Matzene Productions. Matzene failed spectacularly as a motion picture producer. He depended upon the oldest idea of artistic distinction that feature length movies possessed—that you could secure eminence and box office by securing the most famous player available. Unfortunately when thinking of the famous player to secure, the one who came to mind was the identical actress that Adolph Zukor and the Frohman brothers exploited in 1912 when launching Famous Players Studio with the prestige feature, Queen Elizabeth, starring Sarah Bernhardt. The intervening years had not been kind to Bernhardt, depriving her of a leg and any tincture of youth. With uncharacteristic discretion Bernhardt chose to play only a minor role in Matzene’s production. She contributed the scenario for It Happened in Paris (October 1919), and appeared incidentally, allowing her appointed dramatic heir, Madam Yorska, to perform the female lead.40 The movie, for all its name cachet, proved box office poison. Madame Yorska won her sole renown in the annals of Hollywood for being the first name actress to get a nose job. Matzene, financially compromised, abandoned wife and studio, and boarded ship for the Orient.41 Matzene’s historical importance lay in his carefully articulated and realized philosophy of women’s portraiture. In an 1904 interview he gave to the Chicago Tribune his credo: “the aim is be ‘poised’ rather than ‘posed.’ The turn of the head, swing of the body, or familiar lifting of the shoulders is regarded as the most potent element of a striking resemblance, especially when reckon- ing with the ‘verve’ and action of the American girl or woman. . . . High lights and deep tones are avoided, white backgrounds are used with white draperies,

72 Chapter Two Figure 2.8 Richard Gordon Matzene [Jens Rudolph Matzene]: Margaret Illington, Los Angeles, 1915. Illington was touring in the drama The Lie at the time of the portrait. A classic example of Matzene’s ideal of white glamour, showing the clarity, finesse, and sensitivity to the sitter that made him such a power in the Los Angeles portrait market in the mid-1910s. in a way that tends to bring out outlines instead of strong contrasts in light and shade. . . . Dress, too, and the manner of wearing it helps to express a woman’s individuality.”42 Matzene argued that expression in male photography registered in the face, while in women it registered in the body through characteristic pose and attitude. This is the first overt declaration by a portrait photographer that feminine beauty in photography requires physiognomic rather than a pathognomic representation.43 If the camera lens amplifies facial expression to the point of exaggeration, the further amplification of the close-up risks caricature. Kobal made the unsmiling face of Garbo his icon of glamour and the half- lidded passive-aggressive smolder of a reclining Marlene Dietrich his model of allure. Hedy Lamarr memorably burlesqued the aesthetics of the Hollywood portraitists when she observed, “any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” No smiles, no smirks, no frowns, no fright. Such expressive antics were “hard sell,” whereas the nature of glamour was effort- less magnetism. Matzene presciently observed that dress was more important than background. Clothing signaled a woman’s individuality. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the quality of a photographic studio could be determined by the lavishness of its painted back flats. Sarony Studio, Herman Mishkin, and Ira L. Hill in New York boasted the finest sets in the country painted by masters such as Lafayette W. Seavey and his artistic heirs. Representing Gainsborough glades or the verandas of a country houses, the sets suggested an aristocratic locale for the sitter. The sitter accrued importance from the surroundings. The aesthetic of glamour, however, insists that meaning radiates from the person of the subject; it is not lent by material or visual surroundings. Finally, Matzene insisted on the informality of the pose. He believed that beauty characterized a woman to the extent it manifested her unself-conscious sense of being.44 Here too a paradox was at work. Beauty is a discipline as well as a gift of nature. Poise has the self-possession of pose, but not its ex- ternalized self-consciousness. Glamour doesn’t regard what the photographer thinks about proper positioning. It is at ease with its own integral rightness and can withstand the gaze of any man or woman at any time in any place. The strength of one’s truest self shines in poise, not pose. Matzene projected women’s portrait aesthetics beyond Sarony’s ideal of characteristic poses. Matzene’s faith in the radiance of a poised woman disposed him frequently to flooding images with light and amplifying the lightsomeness with white or pale-toned clothing and backdrops. No sharp tonal contrasts. No shadows obscuring body or face. The solarium glory of Matzene’s transparently beautiful woman suggested that an onlooker beheld all of the sitter’s body and soul. English precedents existed for white glamour. E. O. Hoppe and Furley Lewis in England had become known for his preference for light featureless back-

74 Chapter Two Figure 2.9 Richard Gordon Matzene [Jens Rudolph Matzene]: Florence Reed, Los Angeles, 1912. Reed was touring in The Master of the House at the time of the portrait. Background subordinate to and tonally consonant with the subject’s dress. grounds. William Morrison, Chicago’s foremost celebrity photographer of the 1890s, also cultivated this approach.45 Matzene etched the approach into the eyes of Hollywood portraitists. There were several strong disciples—Gor- don Marsh of Carpenter Studio, LA, and C. Heighton Monroe of Hartsook, LA. He also had detractors who believed that glamour might also entail mystique—that there is something in the soul of the alluring person that is never quite attainable or wholly comprehensible. In 1911, shortly after Matzene had established his studio, actor-photographer Burr McIntosh (1862–1942) appeared in Los Angeles.46 McIntosh had been Matzene’s publisher from 1903 to 1908 when McIntosh helmed the most lavish illustrated photographic magazine in the country, the Burr McIntosh Monthly.47 A man drunk with projects, McIntosh appeared in Southern Cali- fornia intent on creating utopia. McIntosh announced he would “make Los Angeles the art center of the country.” To do this he would found an art colony on two hundred acres of land equipped with galleries, workshops, a social hall, a hotel, and a theater. Central to the enterprise was an art school with a photographic academy. He declared that he would reestablish his monthly magazine in Los Angeles to provide funds to underwrite the scheme.48 Unfortunately his financial backer in New York had died, gunned down for infidelity on his yacht by a disgruntled spouse. McIntosh never established his colony, the photographic academy, or even a studio in the city. Matzene was certainly one of more frequent visitors to McIntosh’s rooms in the Alexandria Hotel. On August 20, 1911, the Los Angeles Times entertained Angelenos with an extensive feature in which McIntosh reflected on photography, the theater, and photographic celebrity. Two observations from this long interview deserve extracting. These insights more than McIntosh’s images would influence Hollywood’s engagement with the art:

There is no single advertising agency which the ambitious theatrical person can compare for a moment to the photograph. There is nothing so convincing as a photograph, if you wish to sell any animate or inanimate thing. Why should this not be accentuated in the individual? I know scores of women and girls who owe their first fame in the stage world to photography.49

As to the profit in the theatrical photographic business, that depends altogether on what use is made of the pictures. Until about ten years ago millions of photographs of popular actors and actresses were sold every year. Now that is absolutely a lost trade. Before the magazines and newspapers used photographs so extensively, theater-goes had to have an “album” of their favorites. Now, with a new face of their particular joy appearing almost hourly, an “album” would be ridiculous.

76 Chapter Two McIntosh knew performers. He knew that photographs for performers worked as a means to notice within the profession. It was the power in one’s portfolio. He prophesied the Mary Astors, Myrna Loys, Ann Sheridans, and Jinx Falkenbergs who secured their first contracts when a producer saw their photographs.50 He also saw that the magazine would be the means of conveying celebrity to the public. The magazine image would be that refraction of the star’s glory that a fan could keep in his or her possession, in that magazine on a bedside table, or in the pictures scissored and lovingly pasted in a scrapbook.

Capturing Celebrity: The First Hollywood Portraitists

When “Count” Matzene arrived in Los Angeles in 1911 there already existed approximately a hundred portrait studios,51 seven of which had distinguished themselves as “society photographers,” camera artists whose quality and social cachet entitled them to the patronage of the wealthy and genteel. The term “society photographer” entered general parlance in New York City in 1882 to designate professional portrait photographers who specialized in refined likeness of “private persons” of quality rather than those who, like Na- poleon Sarony, paid celebrities for the right to publish their images for public consumption.52 After the invention of glamour as a mode by theatrical (not society) photographers, society women increasingly wanted to resemble the stars of the stage, so the shooting of celebrities ironically became a requisite for the patronage of the gentility. Los Angeles society proved balky about film folks, who too often seemed in the early years a raffish lot of theatrical second- raters and volunteer performers drawn from the common mass of humanity, until the influx of titled aspirants to screen stardom prompted a change of heart in the last years of the decade. Yet George Steckel, Albert Witzel, Louis Mojonier, Alfred Lindstedt, Frank Sheridan Hoover, Hemenway Studio, and Hartsook Studio, LA, all did portraits of established theatrical personalities on the Western circuits as well as shooting private portraits, well before the first film studio contracted with them for a publicity session. Theatrical work was considered an adjunct to depicting the carriage trade. All of the society photographers belonged to the national professional associations, submitted work to national and international salons, studied the work of other studios, and equipped their premises in the manner expected of high-end artists: elaborate painted back flats; a heavy drape tied back with a golden cord in a “Sarony Swag”; a gothic chair, stone bench, and piano bench for sitting; a Roman column; and tropical plants. The studios were on the top floors of buildings to make use of the natural lighting provided by skylights. The dean of Los Angeles portrait photographers, George Steckel (1864– 1938), came to Southern California in 1887 from Allentown, Pennsylvania.53

77 Glamour Comes to California He was twenty-one when he arrived in Los Angeles and opened his first studio at 220 South Spring Street determined that he would become a source of local pride. He joined every important national association of photographers, entered their exhibitions, studied the successful entries, and quickly began winning prizes. By 1892, the San Francisco Chronicle observed, “He is the Sarony of California, and was the first to introduce on this Coast the beautifully soft and artistic platina [platinum print] work which has so greatly added to his reputation. In the matter of artistic posing Mr. Steckel has no equal, and the finish of his work cannot be surpassed.”54 He won international fame when awarded the gold medal for large format photography at the World’s Columbian Exposi- tion in Chicago for a study of age.55 Steckel’s success vaulted him to the pinnacle of his profession in Los An- geles. The bon ton flocked to his studio for portraits. In 1901, theLos Angeles Times published its first portrait bearing a photographer’s credit—by Steckel. He built new quarters at 336½ Broadway, a studio that included an exhibition space that would become the principal venue in the city for displaying fine arts, rare books, and photographs for the first decade of the century. He was a moving spirit behind the Los Angeles Camera Club that began organizing salons in 1902. Unqualified success and unstinted praise breed a certitude about one’s way of doing things that eventually grows into complacency. By the end of the decade his attitudes toward posing, production, and business had become formulaic.56 The young Edward Weston, newly graduated from the Illinois College of Photography, thought to establish himself as a photographer in Southern California by securing employment as a retoucher in the studio of the region’s most reputable artist. He found Steckel dictatorial and narrow-minded, leaving after a few months for the more inventive Louis A. Mojonier. In 1913, Steck- el purchased land in the orange groves of Covina, building a house and home studio there. Just as the Motion Picture industry began establishing itself in the city, Steckel was withdrawing, leaving his studio business to his assistants In 1919 Steckel announced the construction of a central finishing laboratory for the development of motion picture film.57 The man who began the twentieth century as the one photographer in Southern California with an international artistic reputation, would largely abandon the production of imagery to service other people’s film in 1920.

Witzel, LA, and Witzel, Hollywood

Born in Deadwood, South Dakota, of German parents, Albert Walter Witzel (1879–1929) moved to Seattle, Washington, in 1886 and apprenticed to a photographer there in 1894. He eventually ran the studio and made sufficient money to finance the transfer of his business to Los Angeles in 1909. Witzel

78 Chapter Two embraced that one clientele that had little interested Steckel—show people. Witzel would follow Sarony—not Steckel—in exploring the problems of portraying persons who vocation was not being themselves. Sarony’s way with theater portraiture had been pathognomic—emphasizing the passing moods and expressions of sitters rather than enduring features, shapes, and postures (the physiognomic aspects of persons). Witzel began his theatrical portraiture under the influence of this approach. He favored pronounced facial expressions for women, rather than the self-possessed reserve of the glamour idols then first appearing in the pages of New York magazines. Furthermore, he had a penchant for typifying sitters into the character types of the old stock companies (ingenue, comedienne, matron, showgirl, soubrette, femme fatale, leading man, slapstick comedian, cowboy, villain). Witzel’s cultivation of an approach greatly familiar to touring performers made him the favorite Southern California photographer on the coastal theater circuit. When the new movie studios began looking for portrait photographers to supply publicity photos for their motion picture stars, the theater folk steered them to Albert Witzel’s studio. On August 21, 1913, he supplied the first movie star portrait to be published as a copy image in the Los Angeles Times, Miss Viola Barry in The Sea Wolf by Balboa Films. This was followed on the twenty- seventh by Elsie Albert “as the Princess in ‘Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp,’ A Venus feature film being produced by M. C. Matthews of the Powers Com- pany.”58 In September Witzel supplied a portrait of author and actress Lois We- ber, star of the Phillips Smalley Company. All were illustrations for columns of Bonnie Glessner, the first newspaper movie columnist covering Hollywood. Witzel was the only credited photographer whose images appeared during this early newspaper experiment in motion picture coverage. Witzel spent much of the last quarter of 1913 and early 1914 shooting publicity portraits for the multiplying motion picture companies in the region. Balboa Films in Long Beach sent its performers repeatedly to his studio, and had Witzel shoot female lead Jackie Saunders in a variety of looks and guises. The Kalem Company, having recently moved its West Coast base of operations from Santa Monica to East Hollywood, sent Marin Sais, a Latin beauty from one of the oldest California families and the romantic interest in Kalem’s Westerns, to the studio where Witzel posed her as a fashion plate, a flirt, and a post-Raphaelite beauty. Because the studios paid for publicity photos from Witzel, those who wanted to get into pictures figured that he had the stylish touch that might prove an advantage at the casting office. Would-be film performers flocked to the studio paying out of pocket to have portfolio shots taken. All of his sittings, whether studio commissioned or privately contracted, were contracted on a job basis. Consequently every motion picture company in the area felt free to make use of him. Ince-Triangle was his steadiest source

79 Glamour Comes to California Figure 2.10 albert Witzel: Marin Sais, 1914. Sais was a Kalem Company contract actress. When early Hollywood wished to inject a charge of ethnic exoticism into the romance plots of the era, the Latin became the favored exciter. From an old California Hispanic family, Sais here appears bare shouldered and flirtatious, a “gay girl,” open to adventure. From the former Culver Service Collection. of studio supply throughout the 1910s. The volume of trade grew so great that Witzel was forced to follow the production procedures of the New York corporate studios, hiring a laboratory manager, Henry Nealson Smith, to oversee the retouching, developing, and finishing of photographic prints. Because Matzene’s “white glamour” dominated the society pages of the Los Angeles Times (rendered more emphatic by the Times’s practice of erasing the backgrounds of portraits and having figures surrounded by white space), Witzel, when he added glamour to the palate of his visual styles, alternated between white glamour and its opposite, shadow glamour—images with an introspective, nocturnal mood. The glamorous beauty most frequently appeared

Figure 2.11 albert Witzel: Clara Kimball Young, 1916. Presiding over her own production company, the Clara Kimball Young Film Corporation, Young had total control over all aspects of her publicity. A hand-signed exhibition print by Witzel, this image shows the power of his mood painting. Young, who positioned herself as a serious actress amid the flood of feminine movie leads, appears monumentally serene and self- possessed.

81 Glamour Comes to California in profile. Flesh was luminous. His exhibition prints tended to use richly shadowed “Rembrandt lighting,” using single source natural light in a studio, amplified, concentrated, or diffused by mirrors and scrims. Witzel’s success prompted him to expand his business, opening a branch studio in Long Beach. In 1916 he hired away from rival Fred Hartsook the chief photographer of its Los Angeles branch, Walter Frederick Seely (1886–1959). Trained as a landscape painter, Seely had codirected the Redwood Gallery in Eureka with his brother Ed Seely from 1907 to 1911, so he knew how to run a studio. Seely stayed with Witzel until setting up an independent gallery under his own name in 1920 and created the most daringly composed images produced under the Witzel brand. His fine arts background inclined him to horizontal formats and reclining figures, a different orientation and disposition of subject than the vertical stock-in-trade of portraitists. A colorist whose eyes had been nourished by the natural tones of his native California, Seely imported into his photography an exquisite sense of tonal modulation and lighting dramatics. He favored the spare ornaments and props of pictorialist portraiture—the fat-bellied urns, ewers, and ollas—and embraced pictorialism’s interest in exotic costume. He had a finer sense of pictorial design than Witzel, but not as great an interest in the subtleties of facial expression. That part of Witzel drawn to glitz—to visual sensation for its own sake—found an amplifying eye in Seely. Witzel, like Steckel before him, had a mind for business and made a point of providing studios and sitters with whatever service he could provide. Free of irritability, genial, and efficient, he rarely said no to proposals if the job paid sufficiently well. Motion picture companies periodically approached him to shoot stills. Knowing that his forte was portraiture and that production publicity consumed inordinate amounts of time, he discouraged invitations. Yet when the project promised a high quotient of visual novelty, he said yes. Ap- parently the prospect of capturing on film the gaudy exoticism and bare-navel vamp sexuality of Theda Bara proved irresistible. He did stills for Theda Bara’s luridly risqué Cleopatra and her equally picturesque Salome. For the former, he and Seely crawled over the faux Egyptian sets, shooting close-ups of Cleopatra lolling on divans, rugs, and pillows wearing nothing but diaphanous harem pants and pretzeled metal asps on her breasts. Rarely in early cinema had a major actress been made to seem so exotically vulgar. Salome, despite its potential for lurid display, paled in comparison because the art direction opted for garishness rather than sexual burn. Creating stills for Bara’s costumers seems to have chastened Witzel. From 1918 onward he restrained his love of glitz. Seely, on the other hand, had his taste for posturing and dress up sharpened. It would remain a distinctive element of his style as a solo portraitist throughout the 1920s when he ran one of the most influential independent photo studios in Southern California, and in the 1930s when his attention

82 Chapter Two returned again to his brushes. He eventually became the favorite portrait painter of celebrity children in Hollywood. After Seely’s departure, Witzel sought someone who could take his place. After hiring a series of journeymen cameramen, Witzel discovered an artist in Texan Max Munn Autrey. As decidedly as Seely was a pictorialist, Autrey was a glamourist. He always sought for integral effect, poses that enhanced the sitter’s mystique, and lighting that made the image more sensuous and more spiritual simultaneously. The enthusiasm of Witzel’s motion picture clientele for Autrey’s work grew so great that he set up a branch studio in Hollywood,

Figure 2.12 [Walter F. Seely], Witzel, Los Angeles: Theda Bara as Cleopatra in Cleopatra, Fox Film Corporation, October 14, 1917. The decided preference for landscape formats in movie stills prompted Witzel to assign Seely most of the shooting of Cleopatra, since his assistant was comfortable with the form. Seely produced a dozen memorable images during the shoot that have been among the most reproduced of all silent motion picture images. Figure 2.13 Walter F. Seely: Charlotte Pierce, 1921. A bit player for First National at the time of this sitting, Pierce became a regular performer in Charles Ray’s productions of the early 1920s. A visual dramatist more than a glamourist, Seely could make interesting pictures out of minimal props. which Autrey manned from 1922 to 1924. The praise finally prompted Autrey to strike out on his own.59 Both Seely and Autrey would become independent artists working under their own credit lines in the early 1920s and would maintain private studios after being contracted by motion picture studios later in the decade.60 Autrey’s later career will be detailed in chapter 10. After the forced relocation of the Hill Street studio to Seventh Street in November 1923, and the departure of Autrey from the Hollywood branch

Figure 2.14 [Max Munn Autrey], Witzel, Los Angeles: Clara Bow, 1923. Expert lighting, soft focus, interesting massing of hair and sweater, candid expressionless face, bold eyes. Publicity portrait commissioned by Bow as a portfolio and general publication image.

85 Glamour Comes to California in 1924, Albert Witzel found himself in an odd situation. He had more business than he could service. But what his clients desired he had done repeatedly for a decade. There was no Seely or Autrey to challenge him with new lighting scenes or novel setups. No one desired experiment from him. He began losing interest in his camera. So he exploited his reputation, enjoying club life, serving as a judge for beauty contests, offering opinions on fashion and cosmetics for the papers. He sought distraction in an office romance. But while indulging leisure and love, he became ill. In 1927, he turned the studio over to his brother Charles. Witzel died in 1929. From 1914 to 1924 his studio photographed more motion picture performers than any other.

Hartsook Studio

Witzel’s greatest rival for the motion picture trade was the Los Angeles branch of Fred Hartsook’s West Coast photographic empire, Hartsook Studio, located on the top floor of the Orpheum Theater. Fred Hartsook, the entrepreneur- ial photographer who had established an eleven-studio network throughout California by 1910, had been born in Indiana in 1877 into a family of photographers. He claimed that his grandfather “made the first photograph mounted on a card in the United States” in Richmond, Virginia.61 In the last decades of the nineteenth century several eastern studios attempted to construct national photographic services—Sarony, Pach Brothers, Underwood & Underwood, and Marceau being the most successful. Armed with an ambition, Hartsook, just before the turn of the century, went to the part of the country not adequately covered by the eastern firms, choosing San Francisco as his base of operations. Hartsook’s method for gaining control of the California market (then dominated by the San Francisco–based Bushnell Studio chain) combined elements of Underwood & Underwood’s business model (hiring a cadre of young, talented cameramen at minimal wage to do family portraiture and photojournalism without credit, creating a personal mystique about the founder, cultivating print outlets) with a number of innovative ideas. Hartsook understood that a vast public would welcome the notion of having their portraits taken by the same studio that did the celebrity photos appearing in the slick magazines. In order to place his celebrity portraits in periodicals, Hartsook distributed prints with a provisional waiver of copyright, permitting any paper or magazine to print an image provided that full credit to Hartsook appeared with the image. He received a token fee for the image or no fee, under- selling his competition. This business strategy, pioneered by Moffett Studio, Chicago, had never been attempted on the West Coast. He calculated the loss from diminishing payment from print sources for an exclusive copyright image was more than covered by the value accrued in name recognition among

86 Chapter Two the public. This calculation could only be made by studios operating on a large scale or in the nation’s publication centers—New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia. Hartsook established the company’s Los Angeles branch as early as 1904, but the center of the West Coast celebrity trade remained San Francisco until 1913 when Los Angeles’s motion picture industry eclipsed the theater in cultural and financial power.62 In Los Angeles Hartsook put W. F. Seely in charge of sittings, where he did the studio’s celebrity portraiture from 1911 to 1916. When Seely left for Witzel, Hartsook retaliated by hiring away Nealson Smith,

Figure 2.15 [Melbourne Spurr], Hartsook, Los Angeles: Mary Philbin, 1921. Back lit, soft focus—“girl” glamour at its dewiest. Philbin was a player with Universal at the time of the sitting. Witzel’s laboratory manager, to head Hartsook’s production facility in Los An- geles. In Seely’s place, Hartook secured the services of C. Heighton Monroe, who would superintend Hartsook’s celebrity portraiture from 1916 to 1919. Monroe may have been a more prosaic cameraman than Seely, concerned with registering visual information rather than communicating impression; he compensated by being more efficient in production. His style—straight and circumspect—suited still photography more than portraiture, so it does not surprise us to see him surrendering to Vitagraph’s invitations to leave Hart- sook and shoot stills for the studio’s prestige releases, such as 1920’s Black Beauty.63 Monroe throughout the 1920s concurrently ran a home studio and shot production photography During the World War I, Fred Hartsook’s financial instinct prompted him to diversify his holdings from photography to the resort trade and cattle farming. On the Redwood Highway in Humboldt County he built an Adirondack- style rustic retreat costing $300,000 named the Hartsook Inn that enjoyed immediate popularity.64 He assembled one of the finest cattle herds in Cali- fornia at his ranch in Lankershim.65 In 1916, Hartsook claimed to have the largest photographic business in the country with three hundred employees in his several studios. “More of his portraits are reproduced in local and foreign magazines and periodicals than those of any other one photographer.”66 Hart- sook’s numbers and boasts must be taken with a several grains of salt. He was of that school of publicity that held if you said something loud enough and often enough it might become true. But there is no denying that among the multitude of employees working in his name over the years, Fred Hartsook had four who made fundamental contributions to the aesthetics of early Hol- lywood glamour, W. F. Seely, whom we have discussed; C. Heighton Monroe, his successor as chief photographer; Melbourne Spurr, Monroe’s successor; and Lansing Brown, Spurr’s successor.67 All would set up independent portrait studios in Hollywood during the 1920s. C. Heighton Monroe’s work dominated the company’s published imagery from late 1916 through 1919. It possessed four signal traits: bust shots usually showed a slight head tilt and a nondramatic shading with the light source usually falling on the right side of the sitter’s face; standing figures tended to be three-quarter length cropped at the knees unless they are fashion or performer costume images; head shots tended to have the eyes of the sitter looking slightly to the side and slightly above the onlooker, while shots taken at a distance of eight feet or longer may have eye contact; all photographs appeared to be taken in high natural light. Typically distinct in profile and clear in focus, Monroe’s portraiture made only the most general gestures in the direction of glamour. It is much closer to the “good likeness” ideal of the army of professional photographers working in the country than the imagery of his successor, Melbourne Spurr, who proved to be a glamourist of great skill.

88 Chapter Two Figure 2.16 Melbourne Spurr: Alice Terry, 1922. Radically cropped close-up, expert toning, and a pair of brilliant eyes. Brought up in Iowa’s leading family of photographers, Melbourne Spurr absorbed the artistry of his father and uncles. Because Spurr was deaf, his training took place visually, an advantage for a photographer. Spurr could work with natural or artificial light. He mastered the drama of luminosity and shade central to glamour imagery, and could make a cliché such as the backlighting of a beauty with spectacular hair actually seem a spiritual glow rather than a glare spot. Close-ups brought out Spurr’s greatest visual ingenuity. He used Matzene’s principle of implied natural motion being the most eloquent index of personality, but achieved his results with the head and shoulders. Matzene thought one had to view to the body to see the soul of the sitter moving. Spurr, abiding by glamour’s directive to mute facial expression, could communicate more about personality in a head shot through pose and lighting mood than anyone in Los Angeles in 1920. His sitters, struck by his artistry, urged him to go solo. This he did late in 1921.68 He would remain an important independent portrait artist until the end of the silent era. Spurr’s successor, Lansing Brown, lacked the versatility and mastery of lighting. Yet Brown’s cultivation of the head shot in a compressed range of tone suited the requirements of newspaper editors in need of faces to adorn gossip columns. Brown retained the job of manager of Hartsook’s Los Angeles studio until early 1925 when he, too, went independent. His career as a Hollywood camera artist unfortunately would be dominated by a tragic accident. Crooner Russ Columbo died from a bullet wound to the head when he and Brown examined an antique pistol at Brown’s home studio. Though exonerated by a jury, the public believed Brown and Columbo had been playing Russian roulette. Hartsook’s personal interest in photography waned in the 1920s as his love of cattle farming grew into a ruling passion. Then Hartsook’s life began un- raveling. An outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease in 1927 forced Hartsook to destroy his herd of Holsteins. Later in the year, the Hartsook Inn burned as a result of an arson fire set by redwood country bootleggers. On April 26, 1928, Fred Hartsook submitted a bankruptcy petition. The chain of photographic studios went into receivership. In the year that silent cinema expired, so did the business of one of its most thorough visual chroniclers. In documents submitted to Judge James of the US Federal Court, the studios were calculated to have a net worth of $400,000, an indebtedness of approximately $200,000, and an annual business of between $500,000 to $1 million.69

Mojonier Studio

Located at 6667 Hollywood Boulevard, Mojonier Studio was founded by Au- gust Louis Mojonier (October 28, 1869–December 10, 1944). Born in Illinois to Swiss immigrant parents, A. Louis Mojonier began his career as general merchandise broker in Danneboro, Nebraska, in the early 1890s. The birth of his

90 Chapter Two daughter, the demands of his Illinois relations to see a photograph, and the absence of any photographer within two hundred miles of Danneboro prompted Louis to send for a mail-order kit. He was immediately smitten with the art, abandoned merchandise, and set up a studio in Larned, Kansas. Looking for greater opportunity he moved to Wichita, where a client suggested that he move to California.70 Mojonier decided to move to Los Angeles where a cous- in, Clara Mojonier, was living. At a time when the aesthetics of Californian photography was tending to soft-focus pictorialism and symbolism, Mojonier

Figure 2.17 Mojonier Studio: Nance O’Neil, 1907. The volcanically emotional O’Neil’s temperament is well conveyed by this dramatically lit image. sought clarity of focus, directional illumination of subjects, and discrete, rather than excessive retouching of his subjects. While a traditionalist in pose and representational matters, Mojonier was in the front rank of technicians, embracing the pyrogallol with hydroquinone additive formula for developing. In late 1908 Mojonier hired Edward Weston, fleeing a job as retoucher at Steckel Studio, to work as retoucher and camera operator in his gallery. Weston stayed until 1911 when he opened his own gallery in Glendale specializing in pictorialist portraiture. Mojonier moved to the top floor of the Forrester Building on Broadway, building the most commodious studio in the city.71 By this time he had built extensive connections with newspapers and wire services, placing his photographs in periodicals across the country. He advertised himself as the “newspapers’ friend.” Mojonier also enjoyed great success during World War I as the preferred photographer of military officers stationed in Southern Cali- fornia. Publicity work for the film studios was a subsidiary line of business for the studio, and the photographer’s functional style suited only those performers attempting to project them as “regular sorts.” His best images experimented with subtle cross-lighting effects, at first using mirrors redirecting natural light, later using multiple electric lamps. By 1923 Mojonier had ceased to be a significant photographer of the Hollywood scene.

Lindstedt, L.A.

Alfred Robert Lindstedt (July 28, 1879–January 19, 1958) was born in Sweden and emigrated to the United States in 1899.72 Trained in his native country, he intended to set up a studio in one of the burgeoning cities of the American West and in 1900 settled upon Kansas City, Missouri, as his initial residence. Kansas City, the juncture of several rail lines and three vaudeville circuits, was a promising location for a portraitist. But other photographers had grasped the same truth. George Curtiss, Benjamin Strauss, and Studebaker Studio dominated the market during the first years of the century, driving Lindstedt further west. He settled in Los Angeles, erecting an elaborate studio complex in suites 203, 204, and 205 of the Columbia Building at 312 West Second in 1910. His aesthetic strategy was ingenious. The dreamy, aesthetic, and atmospheric style of the pictorialist art photographers he applied to children.73 To adults, he cultivated a straighter, less rhetorically poetic style of presentation. Men often faced the viewer candidly engaging in direct eye contact. Women could be subdued and glamorous or extravagantly outfitted and audacious in pose. A member of the Camera Pictorialists, the West Coast art photography association headed by Edward Weston, Lindstedt exhibited regularly in that group’s salon from 1916 to the mid-1930s.74 His earliest surviving images are often extensively reengraved, resembling drawings. After Matzene appeared in Los Angeles, Lindstedt adopted a straighter style, often highly illuminated, with

92 Chapter Two Figure 2.18 lindstedt, Los Angeles: Kathleen Clifford, Los Angeles, 1918. Clifford was a featured actress with the short-lived Plaza Pictures in 1918. minimal background. His studio remained in operation over fifty years, sometimes under the name Lindstedt-Phelan Studio.75

Evans Studio and Evans, L.A.

Nelson Frazier Evans (b. June 6, 1889 in Columbus, Ohio; d. October 17, 1922, Los Angeles)76 had the most playful visual imagination of any of the early photographers of Hollywood. He took the first candid movie star photographs for Photo-Play magazine in late 1914,77 invented the Hollywood cheesecake genre with his seaside portraits of Mack Sennett’s bathing beauties cavorting on the rocks and in the surf in swimwear, and refined the various traditions of portraiture being practiced in Los Angeles in the 1910s. Unlike the older studios in the city, Evans had no interest in society portraiture. So the suggestion of opulent surroundings—the ornate chair, the antique pedestal, the brocade drape—were jettisoned by 1917. Thereafter, he preferred to use blank textured walls or drop cloths as backgrounds. If he wished some sort of visual backdrop, he painted it directly on the negative. Evans had a penchant for aggressive intervention in the pictorial field. He extensively manipulated backgrounds, employing at times a retoucher-painter who would supply stars, bubbles, or rain as a background feature. In the 1920s he took to engraving his glass plate negatives to give abstract texture in the manner of theatrical photographers of Kansas City. Evans borrowed liberally from a broader range of models than any of his competitors in Los Ange- les. His focus could be sharp, like Mojonier, or as poetically soft as Sartov. He could shoot fanciful full-figure vignettes like James Abbe, or superbly lit and expressive close-ups like Melbourne Spurr. In 1918 one can see an increasing fascination with artificial studio lighting, producing masterworks that made starlets and film stock company players appear to radiate. What he could not accomplish by lighting or posing, he would work out in the darkroom. He was the greatest photographer-retoucher of early Hollywood, as obsessive about the perfection of his negatives as George Hurrell and Jack Shalitt were in the 1930s. Of the California glamourists, he was the most avid student of the New York theatrical photographers, borrowing motifs such as Ira L. Hill’s picture window or Alfred Cheney Johnston’s shadowed leafy limb to his visual repertoire. In the 1920s, Evans rivaled Witzel as the favorite resort of Hollywood publicity departments. He did contract work for Paramount, Fox Film, Metro, Ince Studios, Goldwyn Pictures, First National, Famous Players–Lasky, Art Craft, United Artists, and Mack Sennett. During World War I, when Sennett’s regular still men were both in the service, Evans shot stills for Sennett. Ev- ans’s early death in the fall of 1922 deprived Hollywood of one of its greatest visual talents. During the final months of his life, anxious about his legacy, he formed a partnership with the DeGaston Studio of Santa Barbara, the most

94 Chapter Two Figure 2.19 Nelson Evans: Marie Prevost, Los Angles, 1917. Prevost, one of the sauciest of Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties, incarnates the cutesy-flirty spirit of the earliest cheesecake. Figure 2.20 Nelson Evans: Mary Pickford, Los Angeles, 1918. An homage to Alfred Cheney Johnston’s Ziegfeld portraiture, Evans employs Johnston’s signature technique of painting in the background on the negative—in this case a firefly-bedizened willow tree. Pickford burlesques her girl image in a Follies romper and hyper-hat with the hat box, the favorite Follies publicity prop of the 1917–18 season, in the foreground. Pickford took a keen interest in exploring the limits of self-infantilization and the visual symbolization of girlishness. Courtesy of Jay Parrino’s The Mint. artful California portrait shop other than Edward Weston’s located near Los Angeles.78 After his death fellow artists made his studio at 6033 Hollywood Boulevard the Nelson Evans Memorial Art Gallery, showing work by local photographers, painters, and etchers.79 Evans during his brief life had experienced the full range of photographic experience in Hollywood short of becoming a cinematographer. He developed an extraordinary visual intuition that allowed him to generate hundreds of successful portraits. He realized that star publicity portraiture had to operate in a kind of tension with the increasingly extravagant visual world of the motion pictures. He tended not to shoot publicity of stars in costume, thinking that the persona of the performer had to be fixed visually in the present moment and not in a fictional time and place. So most of his women’s portraits showed the sitter in fashionable garb, often wearing a head covering of singular visual interest. The beauty of the actress must be here and now. The beauty of the character, invoked in the movie still, had to be there and then. The male portraits were perhaps too bound by the dress conventions of the 1914–22 era to transcend general attractiveness. Evans’s men appear as dispas- sionate, civilized sorts in well-structured wool suits, starched collars, ties, and scientifically groomed hair—only the infrequent male comedians (almost invariably depicted full figure), or cowboys, possessed sufficient expression to own a personality. Evans could make a woman’s face a compelling mixture of generalized beauty and distinct character. Indeed, he could make a female face iconic in its allure—an image of arresting power and eloquence. But Evans couldn’t make the man magnetic as well as distinct in personality. Nor could any of his photographic colleagues in Los Angeles in the 1910s. There was no male glamour. At best there was a kind of male “character portraiture” in the manner of Pirie McDonald, where life experience was written on the face and communicated in stance. Sartov and Melbourne Spurr could manage that well. But a visual language that conveyed animal magnetism as well as individuality would not be developed until the 1920s. It would not be perfected by the independent camera artists of Los Angeles, but by portraitists working for the motion picture studios—Jack Freulich at Universal Pictures and Clarence Sinclair Bull at Goldwyn, later MGM.

The Disreputables

All of the photographers profiled here sought to win reputation. Reputation meant several things: earning the right to publish one’s name on the image or beneath it in print; having one’s work recognized by one’s peers through awards in regional, national, and international photographic salons; being able to place one’s portraits in newspapers and magazines for pay; being contracted by motion picture production companies for publicity images; being

97 Glamour Comes to California sought out by motion picture performers and would-be performers for personal and portfolio pictures; and having one’s expertise as a visualizer of the photogenic potentials of persons respected by motion picture casting offices. These photographers operated as the gatekeepers of the industry, determining from among the vast throng of aspirants to the screen who would be taken on as an extra, a character actor, a type, or a starlet. Norma Talmadge, in a 1923 reflection on “How to Be a Movie Star,” observed that only one in six hundred female applicants to casting offices has any chance of employment. Ev- ery applicant was typed by gender, age, looks, talents, and experience. “Good looks are not so important as the ability to screen well. . . . Girls with ravishing complexions and figures apply daily at these studios for work, but fail because they do not ‘register’ well photographically. The camera is a fickle creature.”80 Talmadge’s recommendation: consult photographers in one’s hometown for a blunt assessment of one’s photogenic potential. If one did not trust the hometown cameraman to shoot stylish portraits, one could come to Los Angeles and hire the services of that cadre of photographers that specialized in portfolio images. Several troves of aspirant portraits from early Hollywood have survived. Perhaps the most comprehensive belonged to William S. Hart.81 Hart usually retained one or two images from persons applying to be used in subsidiary roles in his Westerns. The reverse often carried the name, address, measurements, skills, and capsule career record of the applicant. Besides Witzel and Evans—who were reckoned by the starlets and character actors of Southern California as the two most effective portfolio artists until the advent of Henry Waxman in 1923—the following studios produced images: Bushnell LA, Carpenter LA, Chateau Studio, Dando, Empire Studio, Junius Estep, Paul Grenbeaux, Hartsook, Hoover Art Gallery, Johnson LA, Lindstedt, Martel-Caruthers, Kohler LA, Lorrilard, Mitchell LA, Mojonier, Talmage H. Morrison, Murillo, Paralta LA, Sorboe and later Sorboe-DeVorkin, Stapleton Studio, Sunnyland Studio, Victoria Studio, and Woodbury. Of these images, the Hoover portraits were pictorially the most arresting, followed by those of Paralta LA. Sunnyland Studio specialized in presenting a portfolio in a single still, collaging several portraits on one eight- by-ten-inch sheet. Norma Talmadge’s advice to Hollywood aspirants presumed that the photographer would make an honest evaluation of a sitter’s qualities. Not every photographer was so saintly. In 1925 the Oakland Tribune published a story by Syl MacDowell recounting the adventures of “three inexperienced young girls from the country who journeyed overland to Hollywood because the home town paper said one of them, May, was more beautiful than Mary Pickford.”82 May and her companions show up at the crowded casting office at Paramount Studios where she offers the casting director several enlarged snapshots of herself. “No good,” he uttered, “Get some real stills.” One of the regulars in

98 Chapter Two Figure 2.21 [Alexander J. “Xan” Stark], Alta Studio: Olive Alcorn, San Francisco, ca. 1919. A second-rank star who began her career as a nude model for the West Coast’s most successful “art nude” mail-order photo company. the waiting area explains that he meant clear, “sharp-lighted” eight-by-tens in “snappy” poses. These could be deposited at the office of an employment agency, which would file her application with every studio that was casting. Not knowing which photographic studio could supply the requisite stills, May enters the first studio she encounters. MacDowell here observes, “The studios advise screen aspirants to patronize reputable photographers only.” This studio was disreputable, adorned with nude photographs that “were not delicately shaded or especially artistic.” The photographer operated a kind of extortion scam, taking six stills but asking so exorbitant a price (twenty-five dollars) that May could not easily afford the shots. The photographer then indicated that the session might be paid for in another way, if she would consent to perform some “special poses.” When she inquired what these poses were, the photographer handed her a sheaf of images of young women sans clothes. May paid the twenty-five dollars, then bolted without the pictures. No doubt the readers of McDowell’s narrative saw the disreputable photographer as the gatekeeper to other industries that placed a premium on beauty—the porn and prostitution businesses. And the numbers of naked girls in the photographer’s sheaf suggested that the likelihood of employment in this business was much greater for the throng of beauties transplanted to South- ern California than in motion pictures. Prostitution in Los Angeles underwent the sort of large-scale consolidation in the 1910s and 1920s that the motion pictures performed in their reorganization into the studio system.83 Prostitution’s relation to the motion picture business and its human history is only now being unearthed, but there can be little doubt of the role of certain photographers in the sexual exploitation of young women. Yet we should be careful not to equate nude photography per se with sexual exploitation. Even MacDowell, whose moralism tended to stark contrasts, distinguished between artistic nudity and bare exposure. Among the reputable photographers—those accorded the highest esteem by the studios and the print industry—Albert Witzel and Walter Frederick Seely regularly shot and exhibited nude studies. Studio still man Harold Dean Carsey also made the nude a specialty. Because of the naturist ideology of certain major performers, directors, and art directors in motion pictures, the screen itself saw a rather extensive exploration of nudity during the 1914–18 period.84 Disreputability in the photographic treatment of the human body increasingly became associated with inciting prurient sexual excitement, while reputability pursued a “delicately shaded” and sublimated physical idealism. In the 1920s, this distinction would suffer erosion as directors such as Cecil B. DeMille and Eric von Stroheim became engaged in the representation of an erotic sublime and photographers such as Alfred Cheney Johnston and Edwin Bower Hesser projected an erotic ideal in a greatly theat- ricalized female nudity.

100 Chapter Two 3 Worlds Distilled Motion Picture Production Photography

A portrait portrays a personality, a still depicts a world. —Henry Waxman, 1926

After four hours of thumbing through the files my eyes had gone stupid. My eyeballs ached and my memory had glutted on drawers full of photographs. I had finished a file cabinet and two drawers in a long rank of chin-high, World War II green metal storage units, yet had only glimpsed a fraction of the plentitude that was the Culver Service, one of the great image brokerages of the twentieth century. Begun as the personal photographic archive of Charles Frohman in the 1890s, taken over and expanded by Jay Culver in the late 1910s, the Culver Service Collection contained production shots and performer images for every Broadway production from Florodora to The Producers, and publicity from a multitude of motion pictures. Harriet Culver estimated the collection at “way over” two million images, not including negatives, not including ephemera, not including illustrated sheet music covers. No catalog existed to guide one through the maze of cabinets, antique steel shelves, and boxes. No writing summarized the treasures in that trove. The organization was rough and ready. Theatrical images separated from movie images. Movie stills separated from star portraits, arranged alphabetically. Within the

101 files—a jumble of images, sometimes stills from different versions of the same movie (Treasure Island, I, II, and III; The Last of the Mohicans, I, II, III, and IV) intermingled. Some glossies gleamed pristinely, untouched since their first deposit; others looked the victims of rough trade, daubed with correction flu- id, backed with reinforcing paper, pencil lined with editors’ crop marks, and thumb creased. The pre-1930 material fascinated me, but I was not at Culver to do research. I was vetting the photographs for sale, providing an indication of the range and quality of the performing arts photography in the collection for the prospective buyer.1 It was an unparalleled assemblage, containing everything from the hand-sized stills of the earliest story films of 1906–7 to the unopened publicity packets for second-rank blaxploitation films of the mid- 1970s. On two walls sat boxes full of the glass negatives of Herman Mishkin, photographer of the Metropolitan Opera during the age of Caruso, Mary Garden, Jeritza, and Laurie-Volpe. In large cardboard folders I scanned over two thousand Alfred Cheney Johnston portrait shots of Ziegfeld Girls, Francis Bruguiere’s experimental production photos for the Theatre Guild, and scads of 1930s glamour shots by George Hurrell, Elmer Fryer, Whitey Schafer, Ray Jones, Ernest Bachrach, Scotty Welbourne, William Walling, Ned Scott, Bert Six, Ted Allan, and Lazlo Willinger. During my four hours, I examined perhaps five thousand stills, riffling through the manila folders, pausing only when striking images arrested my eye. So many didn’t. That, in retrospect, was educational. It impressed upon me the effects of the profusion of pictures generated by motion picture publicity departments. As with every art and craft, the camera craft of the still photographers had various levels, from the incompetent (producing illegible scenes of who knows what in a drawing room), to the competent (producing the all-too-legible view of ingenue Alpha receiving the long-awaited propos- al), to the fascinating (glimpses of worlds scarcely believable in their precision, uncanny rightness, and splendor). Seeing four hundred kissing couples, two hundred fist fights, sixty glowering matrons, one hundred and forty trench- coated men skulking in the shadows, and four dozen blonde moms clutching blonde children made one’s imagination remarkably like that of the jaded editor of a national magazine in 1927 looking through the morning’s tide of photo publicity from Hollywood. That editor immediately recognized professional adequacy—the visual evocation of a situation generally reckoned interesting by the moviegoing public—and immediately passed over it to seize those few stills in the stack that communicated something more. The “more” photos got featured in the magazine. Once in print, the images were studied, imitated, and reiterated by the guild of cameramen until they became the visual cliché of the next season. In subsequent years these select images inspired the connoisseurship of an informal community of collectors who cherry-picked the photo morgues of

102 Chapter Three fan magazines and newspapers to assemble private hoards of “iconics.” Their collections became the nuclei of important institutional collections, particularly at universities. Examining the still collections at Princeton, UCLA, the University of New Hampshire, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Michigan, I never experienced the stupefaction that had numbed me at the Culver Service. Expert eyes had culled the dull surplus and saved the scintillating two or three images from a release. There were certain titles that generated brilliant image after brilliant image: The Blue Bird, Male and Female, Robin Hood, Salome, Sparrows, Ben-Hur, and The Private Life of Helen of Troy. Serendipity did not give rise to these shots, rather the application of genius. The emergence of master image makers in so messy, so untrammeled, and so crassly commercial a creative workshop as early silent cinema is a matter of historical interest, particularly since prior to 1913 there was no such creature as a “still photographer,” a cameraman devoted exclusively to recording continuity, scene shots, and publicity for motion pictures, on the movie lot. Cinematographers and assistant cameramen shot most of the stills. Some were artists, many not. First, a provisional definition of still photo artistry: The genius of the still lay in distilling the particulars of a scene, the dramatic tension of a human presence, and the pointedness of a moment of time. As with all persons engaged in the creation of a motion picture and its ancillary arts (movie music, poster design, and publicity photography), the makers of still photography practiced an institutional sort of creativity. While success depended on the eye at the viewfinder, it also depended upon the talent of a set decorator, the style of a costume designer, the expertise of a cosmetologist, the rapport of the performers, the subtlety of the lighting director (if the cameraman did not set the lights), and the sense of occasion supplied by the director. A useful still captured the fitness of these elements in an integral image. The superlative still seized the eye and communicated the pungency of a unique mood. Artis- tic stills were and are rare creations, revealing style that takes a scene beyond mere fitness. If contemporary art photography aimed “to convey a mood and not to im- part local information,”2 the artistic still differed by conveying a mood while imparting “local information.” It had to present the world conjured on a motion picture set. An artistic still posits a world integral to itself, suffused with mood, irra- diated with an attitude. It makes the viewer pause and notice the intensity of a place, a person, a gesture. It supplies an optical record of what stands before the lens supplemented at minimum with a visualization of a possible way of being. Such a scene prompts feeling and thinking. Before the artistic image the onlooker assumes the heightened seeing of the camera artist. In such pictures the creator vanishes into invisibility before the spectacle, as does all

103 Worlds Distilled cognizance of the backstage world of technicians and constructions that extends just beyond the margin of the photo. While employed incidentally in promotion since 1903,3 the still came into vogue as an instrument of film publicity in the period between 1909 and 1913, when studios began to experiment widely with advertising.4 Richard deCordova, the archaeologist of film stardom, observed that the emergence of the movie star in 1909 encompassed three phenomena—the revelation of a performer’s name in the printed publicity issued by a producing company, the identification in contemporary commentary of the performances that took place on film as acting and the performers as actors, and the formation of a fan interest in certain persons from the appearances in motion pictures. “The picture personality’s fame . . . stemmed primarily from his or her appearance in films, not from previous theater work; the picture personality was a movie star, not a theatrical star appearing on film.”5 The constitution of fame wholly on the basis of appearance in a representational commodity was, as we have seen, the sort of stardom experienced by Maude Branscombe and other buffo artists in the 1880s. And when the phenomenon reemerged in 1909–10, the public demand took the same form as it did in the 1880s, a demand for pictures of the personalities. Florence Lawrence, the “first film star,” enjoyed this imagistic celebrity, even before Carl Laemmle released her name to the public when he announced her (faked) death in a trolley car accident. In the Florence Lawrence Papers in Los Angeles, a poem lamenting her death festooned with cutout photos of the performer on ruled school paper, bears the editorial notion “kill this,” no doubt inscribed when the obituary was revealed as a fraud.6 As deCordova notes, the public hungered for portable icons. “Man- agers of pictures theaters and nickelodeons all over the country are making repeated urgent requests upon the producers of moving picture subjects for photographs of the principal actresses and actors taking part in them” (Mo- tion Picture World, January 15, 1910). In January 1910 Kalem began issuing posters and stills to theater managers for lobby display with players identified by name. This heralded the importation into motion picture PR of the methods of the Broadway publicists with provincial theaters. Vitagraph, Biograph, Es- sanay, Lubin, and Selig—the most profitable members of the Motion Pictures Patent Company—followed suit. Two developments encouraged the creation of quantities of images for studio productions: the rise of the feature length film and the burgeoning of trade magazines and other publicity outlets. The concentration of capital in four- and six-reel features pressured studios to increase box office; they adopted the Broadway practice of distributing still photographs of key scenes to theater managers across the United States and to periodical editors, largely because the Frohman brothers, two of the largest Broadway producers, pushed the practice when they entered the film industry with Famous Players Studio

104 Chapter Three in 1912.7 Until their campaigns, studios were content with narrow publicity— first in product books distributed to exhibitors, listing all a company’s releases with one to four miniature frame captures; later in bulletins and news sheets such as The Edison Kinetogram (commencing 1909), Éclair News (1912), Kalem Kalendar (1911), Lubin Bulletin (1914), and the Biograph Bulletin (1907). Some were simply broadsheets, giving the title, a plot synopsis, and a single modest still (rare double-length releases bore four scene shots). These diminutive illustrations—some of them frame captures from the motion picture positive print—were not reproduced with much fidelity and served more as genre

Figure 3.1 [Billy Bitzer]: Fighting the Flames, Dreamland, 1904, Biograph release. Here reproduced to the size of images on the Biograph Bulletins. Earlier fire company images used in publicity had been frame captures. This was an independently photographed still, giving superior optical clarity to an image taken from a frame. The still preserves the landscape format of the original frame photograms. From the former Siegeman Collection. markers to show that the title applied to a Western, costume drama, domestic drama, religious fable, crime melodrama, or fantasy. If posters were issued, they were often genre markers rather than as illustrations of specific scenes as well. Before 1910 only costume dramas—whether biblical or literary-historical—regularly marked their releases by the distribution of a half dozen publicity images, as a gesture to their respectability of subject matter. These would appear in ads in one of the trade periodicals such as the Views and Film Index (1906–8) or the Moving Picture World (1907–15), or in the New York Dramatic Mirror (1889–1917), which early on established a motion picture section. Or they were printed on flimsy paper six-by-eight sheets handed out at theaters, nickelodeons, and vaudeville houses.8 Vitagraph from 1905 to 1910 proved most innovative in its cinematic dramaturgy and publicity. Albert E. Smith (1875–1958), cofounder of the Vita- graph Company, in his later years became concerned with his company’s place in motion picture history. He recorded seventeen reels of tape about the company; wrote a memoir, Two Reels and a Crank;9 compiled scrapbooks of his most important productions; and assembled complete volumes of the Vita- graph Bulletin from 1909 to 1916 and files of stills. Because a 1910 fire destroyed every film negative back to 1896, Smith could not include any of the earliest motion pictures in the collection. Smith’s stills from Vitagraph’s earliest days number from one to six for a select minority of productions. No visual matter survives for the majority of the releases. He preserved images of favorite Vi- tagraph players—John Bunny, Maurice Costello, Florence Lawrence, Annette Kellerman, Paul Panzer, Bill Phillips—in single images. He preserved multiple stills from a group of prestige productions—the two-reel Shakespeare plays Othello (1908), Macbeth (1908), Romeo and Juliet (1908), Anthony and Cleopatra (1908), Julius Caesar (1908), and Twelfth Night (1910) and the second American feature length film,The Life of Moses (1909), which cobbled a multireel narrative out of installments of a serial.10 In the players’ portraits one glimpses the visual vernacular of insta-production in the days of nickelodeon-driven demand when Vitagraph churned out three titles a week. In the scene shots, one sees that aspiration for visual artistry found in productions that sought placement in theaters rather than nickelodeons and vaudeville bills. Shakespeare without dialogue was not so daunting a liability as one might first think. The Bard showed how to employ a dumb show tellingly inHam - let. There existed a robust tradition of English pantomime Shakespeare productions. The Vitagraph Shakespeare stills reveal that the pictorial tradition mattered greatly in shaping the cinematic presentation. The genre of painted Shakespearean illustration and the print tradition of scenes of star actors in Shakespearean roles provided a visual template for Smith and J. Stuart Black- ton in the creation of their works. In Smith’s collection three stills exist for

106 Chapter Three Macbeth and five forRomeo and Juliet. Both Smith and Blackton had grown up in the English music hall and had come to the United States as a vaudeville novelty act, “The International Novelty Company,” in 1894. They moved into motion pictures two years later. Their national sensibilities were no doubt bruised when in 1907 Frenchman George Mèliés brought to the screen a ten- minute film pantomime ofHamlet. In 1908 they turned to their countryman, the experienced Shakespearean actor Frank R. Benson, then touring the Unit- ed States, to design and instruct the productions of Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Anthony and Cleopatra.11 Benson, who had overseen the Strat- ford-upon-Avon festivals since the mid-1880s, had directed performances of classical tragedies in Greek at Oxford, and had taught many of the rising generation of English actors the repertoire,12 brought with him an integral sense of stage style, his touring company’s stock of costumes, and a willingness to cut and block the plays to their dramatic epitome. Despite the degradation of the silver bromide surface, the stills from Mac- beth present the most visually refined fictive world from any American movie of the first decade of the twentieth century. In each image the dominion of the background wall over the pictorial field is challenged by beds or tables projecting toward the viewer. The camera placement—about fifteen feet from the characters—affords a view standard in theatrical production shots. Indeed there is some likelihood that J. Stuart Blackton secured the services of one of New York’s professional theater photographers—Benjamin J. Falk, Joseph By- ron, Joseph E. Hall, Herman Mishkin, or Percy Valentine—to do the stills. In the dynamic friezelike placement of performance across the scene, the stills resemble those of opera more than contemporary costume drama. Only in a still depicting the visitation of Banquo’s ghost upon Macbeth do we see a characteristic of cinematic photography: the use of double exposure presents the ectoplasmic murder victim.13 Historians of the silent cinema have lambasted the tendency of early producers of prestige releases to mimic stage dramaturgy charging that they failed to advance cinematic art by not exploiting the mobility of the camera and failing to shoot outdoors, ignoring the power of natural scenery and the built environment.14 The stills offer a counter to this critique. The visual world of Macbeth manifests a stylistic integrity informed by professional practice in creating illusory space and an academic (in the best sense) attention to the historical suitability of costumes and props. Once the camera ventures outside, as in Romeo or Juliet or the scene of Moses coming upon the worship of the golden calf in The Life of Moses, hilarious anachronisms intrude. Romeo in regulation tights scales a rope ladder to Juliet’s balcony on the facade of a protomodern mission-style house. The deluded multitudes of Israel bow to a fanged, gape- mouthed cow’s head the size of an open-air hotdog stand. The costumes were right; the scenery and exterior material world ludicrously wrong. With the

107 Worlds Distilled Figure 3.2 anonymous: Louise Carver, William V. Ranous, Paul Panzer, and cast, Macbeth, New York, Vitagraph Company of America, 1908. One of the first American stills to create an effective imagined world, Lady Macbeth’s hallucination scene highlights the consternation of the witnesses as well as Lou- ise Carver’s mad visions. Though employing a painted set, by setting the back wall at a receding angle an impression of verisimilitude has been created. Albert E. Smith Papers, Col. 2004, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

exception of Selig’s location Westerns (see chapter 9), exterior scenes would lack stylistic coherence until 1912. The visual nadir of film still photography of the early period is found in the surviving publicity for fantasy films. The incapacity to visualize a wholly other place (a feat accomplished with great regularity on the Broadway stage from 1900 to 1915) troubled film fantasy from the beginning. Camp sensibility finds a primitive charm in Georges Méliès’s 1902Le Voyage dans la lune, with its two-dimensional barbed and pocked moonscape. But Méliès’s other imagined worlds often fall from wondrous naïveté to ludicrousness. Selig Pictures’ 1910 Wizard of Oz incarnates Frank Baum’s magical world with sets

108 Chapter Three Figure 3.3 anonymous: Pat Hartigan and Charles Kent as Moses and Aaron, The Life of Moses, New York, Vitagraph Company of America, 1909. From the second installment, 40 Years in the Land of Mid- ian, of the five-chapter serial, where Moses and his comrades turn their backs on high priest Aaron and the golden calf. The second large-scale serial release by Vitagraph, the movies premiered in December of 1909. Despite the laughable character of the golden calf, the scene merits close attention, for it is the first large-scale cinematic built environment in American moviemaking, constructed at Coney Island. Stills from this release were the first that Vitagraph issued as eight-by-ten silver bromide prints, the standard publicity format for the next several decades. Albert E. Smith Papers, Col. 2004, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

of folk art crudity, the sort of painted freakishness that characterizes midway paintings at carnivals and state fairs. Vitagraph, despite its ability to lens creditable history photoplays, when visualizing hell or the North Pole resorts to slapdash crudity—painted flats that made no gesture to three-dimensionality and papier-mâché boulders. We see an irate regulation Santa with arms raised to assault an icicle monster (anonymous actor in a panto Jack Frost mask and tinfoil cone-shaped icicle fingers) in a cheapo, painted ice cave. In hell we get a grinning devil in a union suit trying to pitchfork some pleading middle-aged miscreant while Lucifer (Karl Marx with painted cardboard dragon wings) and Jehovah (a spot-lit white-robed patriarch in a white gown) posture. Hell is a

109 Worlds Distilled Figure 3.4 anonymous: Maurice Costello as Slippery Jim, Slippery Jim’s Repentance, New York, Vitagraph Company of America, 1908. Albert E. Smith Papers, Col. 2004, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

dark-painted two-dimensional cave. If the essence of visual imagination is getting beyond a brute legibility of characters, places, and things, then this still betrays none. Crudity typified the fantasy genre until 1914 when Annette Kell- erman’s Neptune’s Daughter brought a plausible fairy tale with an engagingly imagined world to the screen. The most prestigious film of the era, 1912’sQueen Elizabeth, a historical drama starring Sarah Bernhardt filmed in Paris and purchased by Adolph Zukor for American release, transformed the contempt of first-tier theatrical performers toward movies into interest. The stills reveal an elaborately fitted but ineptly blocked stage play, markedly less adept in its visual design than the 1908 Vitagraph Shakespeare two-reelers. The problem: because the movie set freed a photographer from shooting the production from the dead center,

110 Chapter Three Figure 3.5 anonymous: Sarah Bernhardt as Elizabeth I of England, Queen Elizabeth, Paris, Famous Players Film Company, 1912. Eight stills have been identified as having circulated in the United States as part of the publicity. The variety of imagery nowhere approached that of Quo Vadis? in 1913.

eighth row back perspective that typified stage production photography of the era, the film photographer set himself wherever he wished. And he wished (perhaps because Bernhardt wished) to be at a place where Bernhardt stood dead center in the visual frame—or center right. Even the baldest vanity vehicle stage productions knew enough to range the star across the stage in various attitudes. The only images of compositional interest were those in which Bernhardt was not present. Liberty of camera placement, the boon of movie still photography, led to pictorial fixation on the star once the star became a fixture in films. In this respect, the one merit of theatrical production photography—its display of the dramatic relations of an array of characters in stage space at key moments in the action—was abandoned. Truth be known, the era when the movie still

111 Worlds Distilled came into being was not the great age of stage production photography, so the theatrical model was not aesthetically compelling. The theatrical still between 1905 and 1907 was being wrested from the hands of the two visual poets who had plied the genre, Joseph Hall and Joseph Byron,15 and into the all too pedestrian grasp of Luther White of White Studio. Not until Luther White hired Canadian George Lucas,16 and not until Lucas perfected his art in photographing the 1911 stage fantasy Chantecler, did the first movie producers, directors, cinematographers, and press agents have an example of production photography that captured the visual magic of performance. Even possessed of such an example, studio photographers found it easier to emulate Lucas’s less uncanny pictures than his art shots. There was a kind of brute efficiency in locating the camera dead center to capture the scene from a perspective point within the spatial ambit of a normal drawing room. J. Stuart Blackton, the president of Vitagraph, and theatrical impresa- rio Daniel Frohman independently acted over the two-year period 1911–12 to make the movie still an adequate vehicle for conveying the visual artistry of motion pictures. In February of 1911 Blackton commenced publication of Mo- tion Picture Story, the first “movie magazine.” The periodical offered “a monthly presentation of at least a dozen short stories lavishly illustrated with photographs from life of those actors engaged in the presentation of the photoplay upon which the story is based, and which will be produced within the current month at all of the leading photoplay-houses throughout the country.”17 The emphasis upon story rather than star gave the photography an illustrative rather than a decorative character. Captioned with key moments of dialogue taken from title cards, the photographs distilled the drama of a photoplay; in this, they mimicked the publicity stills prepared for theatrical productions. Yet Blackton wanted to convey something more than this in his illustrations. In an editorial in the March 1911 issue, he observed that “one advantage of the motion picture over the theatre play is in the variety of scenery and the facility with which it can be changed. At the theatre we seldom see over three scenes, and we are obliged to wait several minutes to see even these.” The stills illustrating the tales in Motion Picture Story exposed a variety of scenery. No two images in sequence had the same locale. At a time when studio bulletins featured a single image, or four for prestige releases, Blackton’s magazine made five stills per tale the norm and would print as many as thirteen for a title such as Tho’ Your Sins Be as Scarlet (April 1911). Individual stories had more illustrations than the first photoplay editions of novels published by Grosset & Dunlap in 1914–15.18 The typical issue ofMotion Picture Story featured a dozen illustrated stories, isolated stills from a half dozen further features, and a dozen portraits— “Personalities of the Picture Players.” The functions of portraits and stills were strictly discriminated, each genre having its own section—portraits prefacing

112 Chapter Three illustrated stories. Portraits polished the luster of the earliest identified movie stars. Stills captured the signal moments in the cinematic action. While the editors showed some freedom in sizing images, they favored half-page reproductions of three by five inches—a size congenial to the consumer of American popular imagery since it approximated that of a postcard. Full-page pictures were four and a half by eight inches. By the third issue, Blackton had expanded the coverage of the magazine beyond Vitagraph releases to encompass a fair cross-section of products in the American film industry. By providing a publicity venue that emphasized the narrative character of films, Blackton forced his rivals to think of the production of stills in numbers well beyond the one-to-eight-photo norm. Producers began to grasp that stills had to present the entire arc of a story. By reproducing the images in good quality duotone, Blackton also forced producers to fret over the visual quality of their publicity photography. Frame captures from the film itself would no longer be the default publicity imagery. In 1912, Blackton’s lessons were reinforced by two publicists of genius who dazzled American eyes with a fusillade of spectacular imagery. One of the most powerful men in the American theater, Daniel Frohman, determined to make the motion picture a theatrical feature. Frohman had instituted the stage production shot in the 1880s. When he entered into motion picture production in 1912, he demanded something more than documentary accuracy or star glorification in a movie still. In the theater Daniel Frohman had demonstrated the utility of production shots for continuity as well as publicity. The images provided a visual reference needed to maintain consistency of costuming, decor, and blocking for road productions. They also provided teasers of dramatic situations or character types that might tempt the passing public to purchase tickets for a production. Still photography as a form emerged under the banner of work, commerce, and publicity, not personality and art. Yet Frohman quickly realized that in the print-saturated world of New York City, visual style might elicit praise from the jaded theater critics. He had been one of the Broadway producers who had installed the art director as a member of a theatrical production team. In 1912, he encouraged the art director’s importation into cinema. Affiliating with Adolph Zukor in the creation of the Fa- mous Players Company, he ensured that the first film vehicles for America’s premier actress, Minnie Maddern Fiske—The Prisoner of Zenda and Tess of D’Urbervilles—would have a visual splendor greater than Bernhardt’s Queen Elizabeth. He brought in Richard Murphy III, the theatrical designer, to serve as art director and had J. Searle Dawley direct. Dawley, who Thomas Edison hired from Broadway in 1907 to direct the films shot by Edwin S. Porter, was the most senior active director in motion pictures in 1913. Judging from the quality of the stills, Frohman may have arranged for a Broadway photographer—perhaps Frank C. Bangs—to do the publicity.19

113 Worlds Distilled Figure 3.6 anonymous: Minnie Maddern Fiske and David Torrence as Tess Durbeyfield andA lec D’Urberville, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, New York, Famous Players Company, September 1, 1913.

The second key figure in the consolidation of the still as a vehicle of visual excitement was George Kleine, a Chicago distributor, cofounder and sometime producer for the Kalem Company, organizer of the Motion Picture Pat- ents company, and exhibitor. While touring Europe in 1912, he saw Enrico Guazzoni’s 1912 twelve-reel motion picture of pagan/Christian conflict in ancient Rome, Quo Vadis? Visually conceived on an enormous scale, Guazzoni’s Rome contained crowds, huge classical sets, enormous visual depth of field in exterior scenes, ravening lions, suffering Christians, a mad emperor, and a climax in which a working-class man kills a bull with his bare hands to save a Christian girl being sacrificed for sport. Stunned, Kleine bought the rights for American exhibition for $200,000, cut the film to eight reels, and determined to make it the greatest cinematic sensation ever witnessed by Americans.20 He invented the press book, sending to theater operators a compendium of images, plot abstracts, news stories (an extra eaten by a lion), and exploitation

114 Chapter Three ideas to use in local publicity campaigns. Since Kleine’s invention, the press book has remained a fixture of motion picture publicity.21 Additionally, he designed two separate photo publicity campaigns and a graphics campaign featuring two lithographed posters and a dozen color lobby cards. He aimed one small set of photographs at small town America, a large set at the cities. He flooded provincial papers with copies of a still in which gladiators saluted the imperial box, in an imaging quoting a much-reproduced painting by the French academic historical painter Gérôme.22 He gave editors an alternative image, of the Roman protagonist Vincius driving through the interior of the coliseum in a triumphal chariot.23 Both images incarnated familiar pictures of ancient Roman in a way that suggested its splendor, power, and cruelty. The city papers and national magazines were sent rich assortments of images, pictures uncanny for their recreation of the ancient world with a breadth of scale and precision of detail unprecedented in experience. Certain of the images were sublimely strange. They seemed visual eruptions from another world and received widespread play in print in spring 1913. Theatre appended to the two stills it printed the longest caption it ever printed for a cinematic still in the decade:

The Massacre of the Christians. The Lions about to be let loose on their human prey. The burning of Rome and flight of the panic stricken population. This remarkable moving picture exhibit is probably the most ambitious pho- to-drama ever shown on the screen. The pictures, which were made in Italy, have all the elaboration and artistic finish to the smallest detail that mark foreign-made films, and the mise-en-scene is masterful and magnificent. The story, based on the well-known book by the famous Polish author, is amply provided with sensation thrills and follows the novel closely. The original production was on a lavish scale, the tableaux all being of sumptuous splendor, while the company of exceptional size and ability, comprises several hundreds of players. Noteworthy among the many spectacular scenes are the burning of Rome, the banqueting and attendant orgies of the court of Nero, the chariot race and battle of the gladiators in the arena, and the massacre of the Chris- tians by the lions. The latter scene, especially, is one of remarkable realism., the effect having been obtained by means of a double exposure. The effect is so real as to bring gasps of horror from the spectators. The film well deserves its name, “Masterpiece of the movies.”24

The stills, shot by cinematographer Eugenio Bava, established a benchmark for artistry and suggested just how potent captured instants of the moving world could be.25 Kleine had seen the stills with the original movie in 1912 and made sure that their lesson was applied immediately to Kalem releases. He insisted upon location shooting in the Middle East for Kalem’s From the Manger to the

115 Worlds Distilled 116 Chapter Three Figure 3.9 George K. Hollister: Robert Henderson- Bland and cast as Jesus and Apostles, From the Manger to the Cross, Kalem Company, 1913 . Shot on location in Palestine and Egypt, the release combined a painterly historicism derived from James Joseph Jacques Tissot and a sense of locales derived from photographer Arthur Campbell’s famous Bible illustrated with photographs taken in the Mid- dle East. Christ and the fishermen taken on shores of the Sea of Galilee. Courtesy of Profiles in History.

Figure 3.7 eugenio Bava: Gladiators entering the Coliseum, Quo Vadis? Società Italiana Cines, Rome, 1912, American release 1913. The set was entirely constructed, an unprecedented exercise in built imaginative environment. The depth of field, the size of the crowd, and the integrity of the historical stylization stunned American viewers of 1913.

Figure 3.8 eugenio Bava: Carlo Cataneo and cast, 1912, Quo Vadis? Società Italiana Cines, Rome, 1912, American release 1913. Emperor Nero receives a lion at the imperial reception area. The genius of Enrico Guazonni’s motion picture lay in the succession of uncanny scenes. Cinematographer Bava took just under two hundred stills, the most of any production to date. Cross and the creation of a suite of evocative stills that would imbue the story of Jesus’s life with a distinctive texture and authenticity.

1912

How did the industrial mode of production pursued by the early motion picture studios influence the forms and uses of the still photograph? It made the image a product of mass manufacture. As early as 1912, the Vitagraph Com- pany, in a special issue of its in-house magazine explaining How and Where Motion Pictures Are Made, described the work of its still department in terms of industrially generating publicity: “After every scene of photo-play is taken, a still picture is made of the same. The still pictures are used for advertising purposes and through the Publicity Department, are sent all over the world. They are used for Posters, Bulletins, Newspapers and every phase of Publicity work. They are also used for reference. The Still Picture Department is a very busy one, as the demand for photographs is very large, and it always working to capacity.”26 Brief though this glimpse of the first American studio still department was, it conveyed a great deal. Vitagraph emphasized reproduction, rather than the creation of the images. Indeed, the photographers, the image creators, received no mention. By 1912, a protocol for image production—one shot per one scene taken after its filming had ceased—had been instituted.27 Vitagraph understood the two functions of still photography to have been publicity and reference, precisely the two functions served by theatrical production photography when instituted by Daniel Frohman in 1887. The list of publicity outlets, too, said much. Motion picture magazines did not appear on it—they were less than a year old in 1912, still experimental, and would not inspire wild popularity until 1913. Posters appeared first, re- flecting their preeminent importance as an advertising vehicle in the minds of show business publicists. Plastered on the front of nickelodeons, vaudeville houses, and movie theaters, fixed on the walls and fences throughout a town, the color lithographed, multisheet graphics cannibalized elements from stills recomposing them into as lurid or as alluring reimagining of a picture play’s climactic moments as the artist’s imagination could manage.28 The still served the posters much like a sketch did a finished painting, as a provisional source of imagery and ideas—not as an aesthetic statement or public message in its own right. Broadsheet bulletins conveyed the film title, the movie order number, and one to four still photographs from a release. After 1910, a bulletin might print the names of cast members. Dispensed by the production companies, bulletins alerted theater owners of projected releases. They provided exhibitors advanced information on titles available for lease. These periodically published information sheets pulsed through the distribution network, the informa-

118 Chapter Three tional lifeblood of the business, all through the painful period of chain formation and reorganization in the 1910s. Newspapers since 1907 had been a venue for publicity imagery, incremen- tally taking over more column space from theatrical performances each year. The breakout year 1912, which saw the release of Guazonni’sQuo Vadis? and Adolph Zukor’s Queen Elizabeth, would witness a shift on the part of editors toward favoring illustrated motion picture coverage in entertainment sections. The world war led an increase in the number of publishing dailies in the United States. By 1920 the number peaked at 2,042, with 27,790,656 paid readers. The number of papers declined in subsequent years, bottoming at 1,939 in 1928, the year of silent cinema’s demise. Readership, however, climbed to 37,972,592.29 The vast majority of these dailies published illustrations—drawn ads and halftone photographs. Silent motion picture publicity became imagistic because newspapers had in the first decade of the twentieth century so avidly embraced photographic illustration as a means of boosting advertising revenue and reader interest. “The half-tone, more than any other factor, has been held responsible for the tremendous circulation of the modern periodical and newspaper. It has, indeed, revolutionized the mechanics of journalism, for it has completely changed methods of advertising, of paper and ink making, as well as of press construction and press work.”30 With mass media’s un- ceasing hunger for image content, we do not wonder at Vitagraph’s claim that the still department labored at capacity in 1912 to keep up with demand. It generated images in quantity and reproduced multiple copies to service a “world.” Vitagraph provided no specific statistics, but we can presume that industrial tank developers and drum printers duplicated images in two thousand copies at a minimum.31 Smaller printings of “exclusive” images were hand developed for use by particular papers and magazines in target markets. Vitagraph’s still department did more than feed the cravings of the press. It engaged in “every phase of Publicity work.” This surely included the old theatrical tasks, distributing stills to vaudeville houses and theaters for posting in lobbies and posting images to talent agencies responsible for coordinating the live appearances of performers on their promotional tours. The magazine made no mention of Vitagraph producing portraits of performers or “behind the scenes” shots of the process of filmmaking—curious, since the magazine itself presented one of the first published collections of such imagery. Portraiture remained in the hands of independent studio photographers until Mack Sennett and Thomas Ince began putting photographers on payroll to do character exploitation in 1914. This archaeology of the studio still department shows that certain conditions of production imposed limits on studio photographers’ creativity from the first. The studio controlled the process of reproduction and rationalized it within a framework of publicity. Unlike pictorialist photography of the same

119 Worlds Distilled era in which the creation of the finished print obsessively concerned the camera artist, in the movie studio the development and finishing of images had been put in the hands of technicians other than the photographers. A set of demands preconditioned what sort of images a photographer created. The demand for an archival and referential body of images chronicling the visual character of each scene of a production derived from the studio. The other demand came from a national network of exhibitors curious to determine the genre of a forthcoming release, how its most compelling incidents appeared, how effectively it conjured a compelling fictive world, and how its chief performers looked in costume. These exhibitors served as proxies for the public, whose desire for more romance, action, thrills, and stars exerted an inarticu- late pressure on all parts of the motion picture making process. Images had to be fashioned for optimal impact in media that degraded the optical quality of photographs. Posters transmuted the image. Flyers reduced image size and clarity. So did newspaper reproductions, which subjected the image to further disruption through collaging, graphic framing, and the superimposition of text. The technical term for these small photo-based graphic ads was “cuts”—a designation calling attention to the violence done to the originating images. Only in the unelaborated sorts of “publicity work” mentioned at the end of the description do actual silver gelatin photographic prints get sent to persons. To be effective in lo-fi media, images could not depend upon detail for their aesthetic or rhetorical messages, could not display great swaths of shade, and could not employ subtle contrasts in their tonality. Because of the final two limitations, still photography had to pursue a visual character markedly at odds with the tonalist pictorialism of contemporary art photography. It became markedly compositional, rather than textural.32 Given the institutionalization of production and the erasure of the person of the photographer from the original vision of a studio still department, it does not surprise us to learn that Vitagraph did not offer credit to a still cameraman until 1920, when C. Heighton Monroe, photographer for Black Beauty received it.33 Throughout the late 1910s and early 1920s, Clifton L. Kling, Vi- tagraph’s staff still photographer, worked on countless features without ever receiving the right to affix his name on his images or credit on their published representations.34 The one great photographic talent that the studio nourished during the 1920s, Elmer Fryer, never had his name appear on a published still during the entire period of his employment, from 1924 to 1927.35 By the time Vitagraph sold its resources to Warner Brothers, its vision of the anonymous labor shop of image producers had largely been superseded in Hollywood by a newer view that kept the industrial process while celebrating the creativity of camera artists. The change in attitude had happened by 1922, a decade after Vitagraph published its introduction to motion picture manufacturing processes.

120 Chapter Three 1913

The year 1913 decidedly transformed the American cinema. UntilTess, until D. W. Griffith’sJudith of Bethulia, certain problems of natural lighting and chemistry of film dictated the visual quality of cinematography and still photography. After 1913, the will to overcome these limitations—whether through artificial lighting, photographic trickery, or ingenious art direction—drove the more ambitious of the producers in the industry. Some sense of what had to be overcome can be had from the observations of two New York savants after touring a studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1912:

The scenes, as they are set for moving-picture “interiors,” would never served for the “legitimate” stage; as we watch them shimmer on the screen, they look sufficiently natural—as a matter of fact, however, they have only two sides. The scene-painting likewise has a character all its own; it is not done in colors, but is in black and white. The moving-picture footlights, if they may be so described, are far more dazzling even than those demanded by modern musical comedy. They consist of gigantic arc or Cooper Hewitt lights; instead of drops and ceilings, another rose of Aristos lamps pours an intense mass of white light down upon the performers. The actors and actresses themselves, though in practically all cases taken from the “legitimate” stage, have undergone a weird transformation. “Make-up” in the moving-picture, is apparently a distinct art. Such artifices as highly rouged lips and cheeks, penciled eyebrows, and painted lines intended to accentuate particular features, play no part in moving pictures. As the figures on the screen are usually magnified to heroic proportions, and as the camera simply reproduces the things before it and does not blend its several impressions into a generally pleasing illusion, the “make-up” which is deemed indispensable on Broadway would make hideous the most beautiful human countenance. Almost the only useful device is whitening the face. Red and its correlated colors photograph dark; and a gentleman with a florid complexion and a highly rouged lady would look almost like negroes when “projected.” The actors and actresses, therefore, seem like unfamiliarly attired Pierrots and Pierrettes—an effect that is fairly ghostly, and not at all, as seen in the flesh, suggestive of beauty.36

Orthochromatic film had odd ways of translating color to black and white, so flats and sets were painted in black, white, and gray to secure the desired tonalities.37 The film demanded that sets be lighted rather more intensely than the artificial illumination prevalent in theaters. Huge arc lamps or solarium glass studios were constructed. When a large Agfa or Kodak glass plate still bellows camera was lugged on set to shoot the same scene for a still, the pictorial

121 Worlds Distilled field had a way of seeming overlit, and the figures seem curiously undifferenti- ated against a fake background. In the 1910s, less than half of the persons exposing glass plates had extensive training or experience in still photography, for they were cinematographers, or as the decade wore on, assistant cinematographers, and these cinematographers often hailed from technical fields such as electrical engineering or construction associated with film production and trained from scratch in the new art of motion picture photography. The cameramen who overcame these problems and produced the finest stills of the 1910s were often that minority contingent of cinematographers who had migrated into “motography” after working in portrait studios. Less numerous were the half dozen “still men”—photographers retained by West Coast studios exclusively to perform production and publicity photography. Yet the skill and efficiency of these pioneer studio still men would insure that every major studio in Hollywood would retain the services of a staff photographer in the 1920s. Let us be clear: the marked improvement in quality of still photographs after 1913 did not come from some desire to generate works of art. Producers wanted publicity that conveyed the new ambition of the movies. A group of aspiring men on both coasts saw that expanding the length of movies to four or five reels and over fifty minutes would enable the movie to claim the status of a bona fide theatrical feature and secure for it bookings in theaters. For the industry to keep producing one- and two-reel amusements would destine it to a perpetual place in the cheap movie halls and at the tail end of vaudeville bills. For the new features to merit showing in the great urban theaters, they would have to rival a theatrical entertainment in its ability to grab attention. Adolph Zukor saw that quickest way to do this was to secure Broadway’s headline talent for the screen. His “Famous Players” initiative of 1912–13 set off a status war in the movies, with producers vying to build features around the potent names of the stage. The potent names, no doubt, demanded that the professional level of “production quality” be maintained on screen. So art direction came to Hollywood, New York, and Fort Lee. The ambitious still had to advertise quality and prestige. Perhaps this is why the earliest prestige costume dramas fixed the star so centrally in the pictorial field, insuring that the onlooker could not miss the gorilla. The richer texture of costumes and props, the greater complexity of lighting, the practiced gestures of the principals insured that these stills had greater interest than any that had appeared before. But the images were far from being self- constituting expression—few possessed the uncanny rightness of art. Early Hollywood regarded the still as an instrument and consequently es- teemed it less than the portrait. Portraitists were often self-consciously artistic, and knew how to project style as well as the character or glamour of the

122 Chapter Three sitter on paper. Among industry people the custom of exchanging inscribed portraits as tokens of friendship and respect, or as invitations to collegiality, thrived. The stars who sought greatest influence within the community dis- persed portraits most liberally—Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, William S. Hart, and Charles Chaplin. In contrast, people bestowed stills on one another only under quite specific conditions: to remind an old friend of the primitive conditions in the early days of filmmaking,38 to show off among technicians a particularly spectacular or ingenious effect, and to elicit advice on how to tune a publicity campaign. Stills were too intimately associated with the business of moviemaking to be readily accorded the status of aesthetic object. Between the cinematographers who shot stills and the studio still men, the latter better grasped the utilitarian imperatives of the form. The circumstances of work required that the effective still photographer produce an image that sold the seats. Studios churning out one- and two-reelers to a weekly schedule in 1912–14 (Mack Sennett, American Film Company, Balboa Films, and early Biograph) burdened cinematographers with such weighty workloads that they hired separate still photographers, usually on the cheap. The first professional still men—Gerald D. Carpenter, Paul Grenbeaux, and Eugene Robert Richee— received no credit line on publicity images, modest pay, and little respect on the movie lot until about 1920. In 1914–15, when the standard studio release changed from a two-reel to a four- or five-reel feature, the expanded scale of production forced studios to hire additional cinematographers. Frequently the second cameraman on a production did the stills in addition to unit work; the exception was that small group of directors concerned with the visual artistry of their work. These wanted studio publicity to mirror the visual splendor or style of the production. They sought out or trained the most visually imaginative cinematographers and had them shoot stills. The still was perfected by two contingents of photographers—artistic cinematographers and studio still men.

Portraits of Still Men

The studio still man was a creation of the West Coast. In the East movie companies hired cameramen from established photographic studios. Edison Pictures hired Apeda or Floyd Studio of New York to do production shots and stills for its star Mary Fuller’s features. World Films used Samuel Lumiere. Why put someone on salary when the services of Victor Georg, Samuel Lumiere, Moody Studio, or Puffer might be had for a standard job fee? Besides, cloudiness prevented maintaining regular shooting schedules at the glassed-in natural light studios (cinematic “greenhouses”). Keeping an idle cinematographer on payroll irked producers—why double the pain with an idle still man? On the West Coast, the near constant sun permitted near constant shooting.

123 Worlds Distilled At first, the California producers followed the practice of the East Coast, no doubt because many of the western studios were branches of eastern concerns. Balboa Films in Long Beach from 1914 to 1918 used the services of Albert Witzel for production photography. When Fox Film Company opened its West Coast branch in 1917, it too hired Witzel for still work. Triangle-Ince used Witzel for some star portraits, but no stills. Selig employed Estep-Kirk- patrick Studio. Essanay hired Hartsook. As the number of independent producers grew in 1913, the need for publicity became acute. One had to gain notice for one’s pictures in the flood of new product, so the demand on name photographers became intense; certain producers shut out of service thought it more convenient to hire their own talent—young cameramen without reputations and high fees. Keystone in 1914 hired Paul Grenbeaux (1888–1955) to be a still photographer.39 Born in France on September 20, 1888, Grenbeaux came to the United States in 1906. An adventurous youth, he made his way to the West Coast, learned the rudiments of photography in high school as a teenager, and audaciously approached Mack Sennett for a job shooting his Keystone comedy players. Sennett, who conceived his earliest comedies improvisationally as a sequence of visual gags, immediately grasped the publicity value of freezing the moment of maximum ridiculousness in a still, hired the twenty-four-year- old as part of his staff. Given the frenzied production schedule for one- and two-reel Keystone Kop adventures, Grenbeaux found himself constantly in demand. His competence with the lens and his deft hand with photographic chemicals held him in particularly good stead. He worked in the processing department developing positive prints of the day’s film shoot when not doing stills.40 He made himself useful multitasking and enjoyed better job security than the changing group of Sennett cinematographers. When Sennett instituted simultaneous shooting of releases, Grenbeaux’s workload increased to the point that he needed an assistant. The man whom Sennett hired and whom Grenbeaux trained would become the greatest Hollywood still photographer of the 1920s—“Mr. Still”—Eugene Robert Richee (1896–1972). The history of Gene Richee’s entry into the film industry reminds us that in the 1910s the irrational collided with the rational in the formation of film companies. Sennett hired Richee for his skills on the baseball diamond, not for his savvy with a camera; indeed Richee had never picked up a camera before wandering onto the Keystone lot in 1913. Eugene “Gene” Robert Richee was stranded Los Angeles in 1913 when his semipro baseball team went belly- up during a tour of Southern California. He lacked the cash to get back home to Denver so took subsistence wage jobs in Los Angeles including a stint as a window dresser in a shoe store. While setting up footwear displays, he heard that Mack Sennett needed baseball players for his studio team, players durable enough to double as Keystone Kops during the week between games. (The early

124 Chapter Three comedy production companies were ferocious competitors on the diamond.) Richee couldn’t act. But he figured that falling down, sliding, and mugging— the thespic stock-in-trade of the Kops—were things he might be able to do. His interview consisted of batting practice. He was immediately installed in the Kops, but found that the injuries sustained doing pratfalls kept him out of the lineup. Sennett pulled him from the Kops and assigned him to Grenbeaux as an assistant.41 Grenbeaux taught him the elements of still photography, and he perfected his craft working with Sennett and other of the producers of Tri- angle Films from 1915 to 1917. Triangle was purchased by Goldwyn, so Richee shot Goldwyn pictures until enlisting with Grenbeaux as a signalman in the First World War. (Grenbeaux secured one of the cherished positions by pro- posing a scheme of aerial photography using kites.) He returned to Goldwyn after the war, working under Clarence Sinclair Bull, and stayed a year before a lack of work sent him seeking contracts with the independent producers who used the Brunton studio facilities. He worked on Norma Talmadge features directed by Frank Lloyd. Talmadge, whose preoccupation with her photographic representation approached that of Mary Pickford, had sat before every important independent photographer in Los Angeles and New York and discussed points of photographic style with Richee during their months working together in 1922. Paramount took over the Brunton facility in 1922; Richee stayed on the scene, insinuating himself onto the Paramount staff. There he remained throughout the 1920s and 1930s, shooting stills and portraits. Over the course of the decade he saw the daily production of shots rise from fifteen to 140 negatives a day.42 Grenbeaux’s postwar career was less stellar. Upon his release from the army in late 1918, he was hired to work for the Keystone film subsidiary set up for Mabel Normand by Mack Sennett. He also did Evans-style cheesecake shots of Sennett’s bathing beauties. Grenbeaux at this juncture photographed character shots of performers on set as well as stills. When the Normand Film Company floundered in the early 1920s, Grenbeaux worked for Robertson- Cole and set up a home studio doing personality portraits. In 1924 he was hired by Frank Bangs to work on First National features as a still photographer. He went to New York for a year, and memorably did stills for 1925’s The Lost World and 1926’s Men of Steel.43 He died in Stanislaus, California, on February 25, 1955. The stills for Sennett’s comedies made a virtue of cheapness. The undif- ferentiated solar lighting made everything on the set (whether it was an interior or exterior) curiously dimensionless, badly textured, and brittle. Comedic Middleburg was a town devoid of taste, but chock full of morality, pride, and perversely expressed sexual vitality. (Sennett’s bathing beauties all too frequently heated up some good burgher into a steamy pressure cooker overload.) Grenbeaux/Richee’s photographic evocation of a commonplace,

125 Worlds Distilled Figure 3.10 Paul Grenbeaux: Mabel Normand as Girl, My Valet, Hollywood, Keystone Film Company, November 7, 1915. This costume shot from this early Mack Sennett burlesque present the silent cinema’s premier comedienne in her sweetheart persona, one of several Normand managed with great panache. Respectability, trepidation, and vulnerability radiate from her pose and expression, even though the image was intended to evaluate the appearance of her ensemble and props. Figure 3.11 [Paul Grenbeaux or Eugene Robert Richee]: Ford Sterling, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, and the Keystone Kops, 1915. Courtesy of Jay Parrino’s The Mint.

middlebrow world of parlors and undistinguished streets was ideal for slapstick, because the scene suggested that this was the sort of world that should be busted up. And in many cases in Sennett’s films, the steam built until it blew up, and in the anarchy that ensued, the house, fence, sofa, vase, mirror, piano, model T, stable, outhouse, table, banister, family portrait, violin, and china service would be trashed, destroyed in comedic frustration by the protagonist or trampled underfoot by the righteous rampage of Keystone Kops. Noise contributes to the fun of breaking things, and lack of noise in the silent films and in still photographs had to be compensated for with a visual bang. Weird guys appeared to do impossible things in an ugly, familiar world made of cheap, breakable material. Who were these men with such bizarre taste in facial fuzz? Their odd moustaches, soul patches, and wigs owed something to the ethnic comedy of

127 Worlds Distilled Weber and Fields on the Broadway stage, and something to the retrograde un- fashionability of rural types stuck in the style of the 1880s. There was something Mittel-European about Mack Swain’s corpulence, bug eyes, and bristle brush moustache, while Chester Conklin (a Weber and Fields veteran) embodied the first-stage genetic deracination of Anglo-Saxon stock, with his weak eyes, ignoble chin, jutting Adam’s apple, and walrus moustache. Ben Turpin embodied the second stage: bald, cross-eyed, chinless, boney, bandy-legged. Ford Sterling, the wrathfully indignant chief of the Kops, sported a weird soul patch that looked like a carbonized mini-pom lodged beneath his lower lip. His raptor eyes blazed with violence as he loosed his motley myrmidons, with cor- pulent Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle fronting the pack. There was and is something triumphant in the violent ridiculousness of these images. Strange people had been moved to action—and the anarchy of their incompetence threatened to reduce all of the material and ideological trappings that dressed the dominant world of 1910s cinema, all the business of ethnic, class, gender, education, and race tension of society, to nonsense. Their penchant for cutting-edge machines—race cars, monocoque airplanes, robots, and appliances—placed the retrograde in charge of the material future. The stills captured that antago- nism to “message” that has been the essence of farce since the Satyr plays of ancient Greece. There was nothing beautiful in this visual world. Even the bathing beauties appeared carnivalesque with their striped, frilled, and flounced suits and their pouty, baby-doll facial expressions. Characters tended to caricature. The embarrassments, disasters, ambitions, and threats were baldly apparent. No mystery. What compelled attention was the extremity of the disaster, the dis- proportion of the threat, the baldness of ambition, the rawness of embarrass- ment. These excesses took place before a visual backdrop of conventionality. The stills could never quite capture the headlong hurtle of events to a climax of joyful, anarchic mayhem. At best they could freeze a moment just before the crisis, when all the tension and violence bloomed with malicious incipience for our considered amusement. Bovine Tillie Banks (Marie Dressler) march- ing her philandering beau, The City Guy (Charlie Chaplin), and his secret sweetie, Mabel Normand, across the lobby while volcanic rages swell her face to apoplexy. Indeed, the stills of Tillie’s Punctured Romance, the first feature- length comedy, cut the lard from the action and have much more punch than the film. Grenbeaux and Richee mastered this difficult genre, but by 1918 both saw that the creation of an uncanny visual world of greater allure than reality was the great power of cinema, and a power as tractable to still photography as cinematography. Both left the comedy companies, seeking a greater range and depth of expression in other genres of feature film in the 1920s. In their place Sennett hired whatever talent he could secure on a job basis: Nelson Evans shot stills as well as bathing beauty shots in 1917–18, James Abbe enjoyed a sev-

128 Chapter Three Figure 3.12 [Paul Grenbeaux]: Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand, and Marie Dressler as the City Guy, Tillie, and the Other Girl, Tillie’s Punctured Romance, Hollywood, Keystone Film Company, December 21, 1914.

eral month stint as guest cinematographer and still man in 1920. (See chapter 8.) Later, English medical photographer George F. Cannons would celebrate the anatomy of the bathing beauties.44 Thomas Ince and Mack Sennett of Triangle cultivated reputations as innovators, and viewed the still man as one of means of more efficiently producing one’s own publicity. Ince hired photographers Donald Biddle Keyes (1894–1974), Irvin Willat (1890–1976), and Casper Garrison Crane (1884–1949) to do portraits and stills for his productions during the 1910s. Keyes would become one of the great still men of the silent era, and a capable cinematographer. Willat would become a director. Crane would eventually find himself in trouble with the law in the wake of World War I and out of the business. It may be that Ince influenced D. W. Griffith, during his affiliation with Tri- angle, to look to other persons beside Billy Bitzer to shoot production stills on his features. When Willat, Keyes, and Crane were shooting stills for Ince, and Gren- beaux and Richee were working for Sennett, the American Film Company in Santa Barbara (known as “Flying A” for its logo) hired a young California

129 Worlds Distilled

native, Gerald D. Carpenter, to do still and portrait work for it. He would become one of the still artists of the late 1910s. An enduring confusion of early California motion picture photography has arisen from the existence of several photographers operating under the name Carpenter. There were three whose identities and work should be untangled. In Los Angeles, J. Cyrus Car- penter had established a portrait studio on the top floor the Burns Building at 525 South Broadway in the first decade of the century. In 1912 these premises suffered an extensive fire, destroying Carpenter’s negative archive and equipment.45 By 1913 he was up and running again, but had lost his zest for work. In 1915 he sold out his business to Richard G. Marsh.46 Marsh, born in 1855 in Indiana, may have been the oldest active photographer engaged in movie publicity in the 1910s and 1920s. Issuing his images with “Carpenter, LA” inscribed in the negative in squarish, spidery letters, Marsh favored lucid, featureless backgrounds—a version of Matzene’s “white glamour.” Gestures were natural—no extravagant poses—no stage postures. Faces smiled faintly, intelligent and composed. These lightsome, airy portraits enjoyed an intensive vogue during the four years following World War I. Once the vogue passed, Marsh decided to shutter the studio, retiring in 1924. Gerald Carpenter’s still work for “Flying A,” in contrast to Carpenter, LA, brooded with shadow. In the dark ranch house cowgirl Helene Rosson lounges on a rustic table. The shadowy background makes the young woman curiously palpable. There is a three-dimensionality and visual interest rare for Western interiors of the era. (So much of the pictorial genius of early Western images lay in the panoramic visualization of landscape, and figures moving across im- movable rock formations.) Even when Carpenter’s stills verged on portraiture, as in his famous and widely distributed photographs of Mary Miles Minter, the most comely of the curled girls who arose in the wake of Mary Pickford, the face looms from featureless night. Beauty appears looking pensively from a shadow. Carpenter’s work is distinctive among the earliest still imagery for its relative lack of concern with scene. The sets are cursory. Lighting and costume are the circumstantial determinants of mood. Single-person scenes tend to be viewed from a point of proximity. Multiple-persons scenes from a modest distance. In a shadowy world there must be intimacy for visibility. There is an aura of familiarity in this closeness of view, a quality entirely lacking in the work of Grenbeaux, Richee, Keyes, Willat, or Crane. Carpenter’s career lasted from 1912 to 1923, ending when the “Flying A” company went out of business. He spent the rest of the 1920s working as a bank teller in Santa Barbara.

Figure 3.13 [Richard G. Marsh], Carpenter, Los Angeles: Louise Lovely, ca. 1917. Marsh favored informal, seated poses for his sitters.T he simplicity of his white background makes the wintry, ornate coat and hat of the Australian ingenue somehow acceptable.

131 Worlds Distilled Figure 3.14 [Gerald D. Carpenter]: Helene Rosson, The Sheriff of Plumas, Santa Barbara, American Film Manufactory Company, June 16, 1916. D. W. Griffith and James E. Woodbury

In the Los Angeles City Directory of 1920 only one person identifies himself as a “still man,” James E. Woodbury. In 1920, James E. Woodbury worked for Rob- ert Brunton studio. In Hollywood no production photographer inspired greater respect. Why? Because Woodbury shot the stills for D. W. Griffith’s productions from 1915 through 1918. Woodbury’s images for Intolerance marked the first time that the publicity imagery for a Griffith production approximated the visual artistry of a superlative motion picture. For all the visual craft of G. W. “Billy” Bitzer as Griffith’s cinematographer, his still work (with the exception of isolated dark-background images from Ju- dith of Bethulia, 1913–14, and The Avenging Conscience, 1914) rarely exceeded the pedestrian. Even Bitzer’s stills from the highlight moments from The Birth of a Nation (1915) rarely possess the compositional dynamism or dramatic lighting that distinguish the running scenes. Cinematographer Karl Brown, Bitzer’s sixteen-year-old assistant in 1914, recalled that the still camera was always erected above and in the same placement as the usually fixed movie camera.47 The battlefield scenes of Gettysburg that climaxed the first half of the drama in stills have an odd lack of depth for panorama shots. The “Ride of the Klan” that climaxes of the second half of the film in its still incarnation suffers from a peculiar graininess and tonal compression. Indeed the stills look like frame captures. The photos reveal that the hoods of the riders are actually white painted toilet plungers passing for helmets, something not readily discernible when the riders are in motion. Griffith, trained in the theater, grasped the necessity of the still for good business for his features. Biograph Films, during Griffith’s years there, had the cinematographers take a few iconic shots for use on the cover of the Biograph Bulletin. When he realized The Birth of a Nation needed a concerted campaign to establish its cultural importance and get it booked into major city theaters, he set his PR chief, Frank Woods, upon the task of making sure multiple images of key scenes were put into the hands of every print outlet, theatrical manager, and opinion maker in every demographic center in the country. Woods demands taxed an overworked photographic department. Because Griffith was affiliated with Sennett in the Triangle Film Company in 1915, he may have adopted Sennett’s production procedure and decided that a still specialist was needed on the crew. Billy Bitzer, as director of photography, hired the middle-aged Woodbury after the successBirth of a Nation insured that the studio would be undertaking other ambitious projects. Woodbury was affectionately regarded by his coworkers. He was a “spare, dry, quietly humorous man who sometimes, but not often, let drop an occasional Greek or Latin epigram in the original. He was a lover of classical music. . . . But his real love was photography. He knew every process and every

133 Worlds Distilled Figure 3.15 [William “Billy” Bitzer]: The ride of the Klan, The Birth of a Nation, Hollywood, David W. Griffith Corporation, March 3, 1915.

trick of the trade.”48 A New Yorker by birth and training, he moved to Califor- nia sometime in 1913–14. He was thirty-four when Bitzer recommended him to Griffith in 1915. Bitzer would shortly also recommend the young Madison Lacy to work as Woodbury’s assistant. Woodbury was an efficient and placid presence who oversaw construction of a photo factory on the studio grounds using the proceeds from The Birth of a Nation. As cinematographer Karl Brown attested, Woodbury’s mastery of photographic process was complete. He owned a vast library of magazines, tracts, technical pamphlets, and manu- facturers’ brochures on cameras and photographing dating back to the era of the daguerreotype. He knew lenses, lighting, papers, photographic chemistry, and all the tricks of developing. He taught Brown to dodge the film while being developed. Brown’s experiments applying this technique to movie film positives proved a success and a headache. Griffith had him dodge every one of the circulation prints of Intolerance. But one can see Woodbury’s mastery in the

134 Chapter Three Figure 3.16 James E. Woodbury: Babylon, Intolerance: Love’s Struggle through the Ages, Hollywood, Triangle Film Corporation, September 5, 1916. The most famous set of the 1910s in Hollywood captured by a camera artist capable of communicating its excessive luxury. Figure 3.17 [James E. Woodbury]: Pauline Starke as the Favorite of the Harem, Intolerance, Holly- wood, Triangle Film Corporation, September 5, 1916.

great improvement in the aesthetic quality of the production images for Intol- erance over Bitzer’s for The Birth of a Nation. Textbooks invariably feature his famous image of the city of Babylon, the greatest set constructed in America in the silent era. Yet his mastery is better seen in images in which the spectacular nature of the subject does not dominate one’s perceptions. In the nocturnal stillness of Lillian Gish as the ur-mother rocking the cradle of history. Or the spidery beauty of Pauline Starke as the “The Favorite of the Harem.” Only a very small proportion of the stills distributed by Griffith’s company bore a credit in the form of a back-stamped notice: “Woodbury Fine Arts Studio, 4500 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles.” The credit indicated that Woodbury worked for Griffith as an independent contractor on a job basis. One senses with Griffith a peculiar ambivalence about the static character of the still, something that made him reluctant to develop the form as serious-

136 Chapter Three ly as he undertook transforming film narrative. On one hand, Griffith, having mastered the forward impetus of film narrative, realized the dramatic effect of stopping action for a “tableaux shot” in the wake of a climax. Yet such moments took their power from the tension created by the hurtling of imagery leading up to it. A still photo lacked the tension lent by preceding narrative movement for it presented a scene out of context when it appeared in papers, magazines, or even movie programs. Another dimension of Griffith’s ambivalence derived from the peculiar complication of his feelings toward his foremost rival, the Famous Player Film Company (1912–19) and their cinematic aesthetic. D. W. Griffith’s hunger for reputation had driven him to break with Biograph in 1913. An ex–stage actor, his conceptions of repute were molded by images and narratives of theatrical eminence, and this orientation went well beyond his long-held ambition to be a successful playwright. After 1913, he aimed to show his features in major metropolitan theaters, not movie halls. He prepared printed programs, retained orchestras to play commissioned scores like theatrical shows, and sought to have the films reviewed in print. A goad to his ambition was the formation of the Famous Players Film Company in 1912 by Adolph Zukor and Broadway producers Charles and Daniel Frohman. The sensation caused by Sarah Bernhardt in Queen Elizabeth, the inaugural Famous Players release, redefined cinematic fame in a way that spoke closely to Griffith’s hunger for recognition. In December of 1912 the New York Times published an interview with Daniel Frohman, who announced he would make “motion pictures the most elevating and beneficial factor in our social life.”49 Griffith, then the most accomplished maker of films in the land, though virtually unknown, no doubt wondered whether he would be left in the backwash of the theatrical invasion.50 Judith of Bethulia has long been recognized as Griffith’s demonstration of how to do costume drama—Queen Elizabeth (1912), Prisoner of Zenda (1913), and Tess of D’Urbervilles (1913)—of the sort that Famous Players was offering as the salvation of motion pictures. Indeed, the New York Times notice for Tess on July 1, 1913, could serve as the template for Griffith’s ambition: “The photoplay will be given in five reels and constitute a complete evening’s entertainment. It is intended to be shown as a feature film at first-class theatres only.” Griffith found the Famous Players photoplays static, their dramaturgy too bound to the conventions of the stage. For all of Woodbury’s expertise at still photography—his sense of composition, his range of tone, and his ability to work with both natural and artificial lighting—he dissatisfied Griffith, because his still photographs were often too still and insufficiently atmospheric. Bitzer’s stills, for all their flatness of visual texture, captured bodies in motion. Woodbury’s services were dispensed with when Griffith took a skeleton crew with him to Europe to shoot Hearts of the World. Woodbury lacked anxiety about his art, perhaps because

137 Worlds Distilled Figure 3.18 James E. Woodbury: Barbara LaMarr as Mona Reid, The White Moth, Hollywood, Maurice Tourneur Productions, May 11, 1924. LaMarr, known as “The Woman Who Was Too Beau- tiful,” in her White Moth costume. his age and technical mastery made him immune to the competitive head games that Griffith liked playing with his personnel on set. (Contemporary reports suggest that whatever penchant for worry he possessed was expended on his daughter’s career as a classical musician.) Woodbury quickly found other patrons in Hollywood, particularly Arthur L. Todd, a cinematographer trained by Maurice Tourneur. With Todd he joined a production team working under producer and ex–art director Robert Brunton creating films distributed by Pathé. Woodbury worked on the most elaborate of Brunton’s projects, 1921’s Without Benefit of Clergy, Rudyard Kipling’s story of the tragic consequences of a British engineer’s mating with a native girl in India. Kipling’s personal assistant, Randolph Lewis, codesigned the production.51 When Tour- neur came to Hollywood from New Jersey, he secured the services of Todd and was delighted that Woodbury came with him, for Tourneur revered the accomplishments of Griffith and cherished the opportunity to work with persons who contributed to creating that cinematic art. Woodbury worked with Todd through 1924. Griffith returned from Europe in 1918 and reorganized his company into an independent production unit distributing its films through Paramount- Artcraft. He secured the services of Hendrick Sartov who did the cinematography and still photography on True Heart Susie and Broken Blossoms. When Griffith moved his operation to New York in 1919, he hired Frank Diem, a twenty-six-year-old portrait photographer in Queens, to be the still man for his productions. Diem’s fastidiousness and Germanic roots and his penchant for clear focus and depth-of-field long shots caused the prickly Billy Bitzer to regard him as completely simpatico, indeed his number one ally on the lot against Sartov, soft focus, and artiness. Diem’s stills forWay Down East, Or- phans of the Storm, and America conveyed the integral visual style that Griffith sought so energetically in his filmmaking. They did not convey any personal, expressive approach or the conscious artistry of James Abbe, whom Griffith brought in for character portraits of the Gish sisters for Orphans of the Storm and later for stills on Dream Street. (Diem however did stamp his own name on some of Abbe’s scenic character shots.) Diem’s ability to suit the wishes of the people in charge enabled him to remake himself as a commercial photographer after the collapse of Griffith’s studio in 1926. Griffith’s greatest legacy in terms of visual stylistics was his projection of an ideal of integral visual style manifested with perfect continuity throughout a prestige feature. In 1916 visual artistry in cinematography and in still publicity photography became the preoccupation of two camps of filmmakers—the stylists and the spectacular realists (or “reelists” as Cecil B. DeMille was once called). Both camps understood their approaches to be syntheses of Griffith’s pictorial technique and a contemporary theatrical approach to dramaturgy. The stylists, whose foremost representative was Maurice Tourneur, looked

139 Worlds Distilled Figure 3.19 Frank Diem: The Paris bob, Orphans of the Storm, New York, D. W. Griffith Productions, December 28, 1921. Diem captured the extraordinarily textured material world of a cinematic 1792 Paris with clarity and dynamism. Griffith, inspired by the painstaking historical reconstruction in German motion pictures, such as Passion, generated his most detailed virtual world.

to the artifice, fancifulness, and aestheticism of Gordon Craig’s theatrical de- cors. The reelists, embodied by Cecil B. DeMille, looked to David Belasco and Sir Henry Irving for a richly elaborated historicist setting. Each tendency generated cinematic masterworks whose genius was refracted in novel and brilliant production still photography. Cecil B. DeMille’s Joan the Woman, premiering in early 1917, combined inspired acting by opera diva/actress Geraldine Farrar with the brilliant art direction of Wilfred Buckland and carefully modulated cinematography of Alvin Wyckoff to recreate the life and death of Joan of Arc. Tourneur in 1917 and 1918 generated for his trio of impressionist-symbolist masterworks Bar-

140 Chapter Three bary Sheep, Prunella, and The Blue Bird. The stills for this trilogy, created by Tourneur’s short-lived director of photography, John Van den Broek, constitute the most distinguished body of still images produced in the 1910s. They appeared widely in print and established immediately the artistic ambition of the films being glimpsed. The stills forJoan the Woman number over 1,200. DeMille conceived the keybook, a master collection of costume, character, set, and scene images for his features for archival purposes that would become standard in studio productions in the 1920s. C. Heighton Monroe of Hartsook Studio’s Los Angeles branch did the series of character portraits in costume. Alvin Wyckoff shot the majority of the stills, aided perhaps by Charles Edgar Shoenbaum, or Charles’s brother Emmett Shoenbaum. The forty or so images selected from the multitude for use in publicity can be regarded the summit of reelism.

The Reelist. Several features characterize the stills for Joan the Woman: the chiaroscuro play of light against inky darkness, the dynamism of Farrar’s gestures as Joan, the visual arrangement of persons and props into a hierarchy of focus, the attention to historical suitability in costume, furnishing, and architecture. At various times called “Lasky lighting” or “Rembrandt lighting” the visual chiaroscuro had been brought into cinema from Broadway by Wilfred Buckland, whom DeMille had enlisted in 1913 as his chief artistic collabora- tor.52 It contrasted starkly with the promiscuously lit natural illumination of motion pictures filmed on outdoor lots. That visual norm became in reviewers’ minds a baseline photographic reproduction. “Mr DeMille has come to the conclusion that good motion pictures should resemble a series of paintings rather than a series of photographs. To this end, all of the Lasky directors are required to study the works of Rembrandt, his lighting and composition being well adapted to the use of cinema.”53 While this is classic PR fodder fed to the press by Lasky, viewers of Joan the Woman found the claims credible. “It is as though a beautiful art gallery were moving past you. These effects are gained not only by color and light, but by composition.” The ideal of the composed spectacle was the essence of the Belasco aesthetic. DeMille, having proved a mediocre playwright and producer, had noted the money being made in 1911–12 by the Kinemacolor Company for motion pictures. Their product was all visual novelty—two-colored large-screen spectacles—coronations, horse races, public ceremonies. The various attempts at fictive narrative film were slapdash, episodic, and elementary. DeMille came to the conviction that if he could combine the totalized dramaturgy of Belasco with the visual novelty of the motion pictures, he could make a success in the nascent entertainment form that had eluded him on stage. DeMille believed that film scenarios “lacked construction and technique” and that they required finished crafting like stage plays.54

141 Worlds Distilled Figure 3.20 [Alvin Wykopf]: Geraldine Farrar and Theodore Roberts as Jeanne d’Arc and Cauchon, Joan the Woman, Hollywood, Cardinal Film, Paramount Pictures, December 25, 1916.

The Belasco influence was a family legacy. Cecil’s dramatist father Henry C. DeMille had been Belasco’s partner. When Cecil moved to Hollywood in 1913 to try movie making he shanghaied Belasco’s art director, William Buckland, to supervise the creation of coherent material worlds for the motions pictures. DeMille tied this visual integrity to a narrative economy. David Belasco had been recognized as the American theater’s master illusionist as early as 1905. “From the first to last the imagination of the spectator is stimulated by every possible aid to deception.” Every scenic and mechanical contrivance that lent plausibility to the picture on stage was deployed. His was the most three-dimensional, palpable stage on Broadway, built by Buckland to create depth of space and occupied with suitable furniture and props. Belasco varied his locales—the Old West, Tokyo, Renaissance England, contemporary London—and haunted the auction rooms of Manhattan to buy authentic

142 Chapter Three items for productions he envisioned.55 If his settings seemed historical or anthropological, the performance he conjured from the actors amid the antiques was contemporary to the minute. He abhorred quaintness, and believed that the present had to bristle in the speech and gestures of his players. The tension between the antiquarian and the modern proved exciting for audiences, at once giving them the significance of the historical with the immediacy of the topical. Belasaco registered the adolescence of the motion picture from a critical distance. “I saw nothing in the moving picture over which to enthuse. The best motion picture productions, motion picture plays pointed out to me as masterpieces, were the main crude, far-fetched, farcical burlesques. Situations and climaxes occurred without provocation. Mechanical effects were introduced which detracted from rather than added to the action of the play. The picture came on the screen and there was a lack of continuity of story, a lack of environment in creating atmosphere, and above, all, there were no attempts made at creating susceptible moods of the spectators to place them in the proper state of mind to accept the situations when they occurred.”56 Two movies altered Belasco’s opinion about the artistic potential of the medium: Cecil B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man and Giovanni Pastrone’s Roman spectacle Cabiria. DeMille’s first movie in retrospect seems singularly unimpressive, lacking close-ups, dynamic camera placement in outdoor scenes, or distinct characterization among the minor participants in the action. It was said that DeMille learned the rudiments of directing from Oscar Apfel while making the film. What is no longer visible to us, and what proved the selling point to 1914 audiences who made it a box office hit and to Belasco, was its rigorous plot continuity. What DeMille needed to learn was D. W. Griffith’s technique of visual narration. This took him a year to accomplish. By 1916 he had absorbed from Belasco every lesson he needed, and had absorbed the lessons of Griffith as well.Joan the Woman brought into full flower his reelist art. First, he doubled the past/present tension. On the level of performance, he employed the Belasco paradox of modern motivation in a past time and place. Instead of presenting Joan of Arc as a sainted girl, a medieval warrior visionary, DeMille hired the most dynamic opera diva of the age, Ger- aldine Farrar. Farrar, in her thirties, wore a suit of armor with the panache of an Amazon and drew the focus of the camera as only a prima donna experienced in dominating the stages of Europe and America over blaring orchestras and bawling compeers could. She played Joan not as a god-struck girl, but a “suffragette general.” One mark of the modernity of Joan’s characterization was the love interest inserted in the plot by scenarist Jeanie MacPherson. Joan had to choose God and nation over romantic love. DeMille used a frame tale to amp up the past/present tension. The beginning and end of the film feature a French soldier in the trenches of France. He discovers a rusted medieval

143 Worlds Distilled sword, a talisman of Joan’s defense of the nation, and in a vision witnesses her sacrifice and see his ancestor, Joan’s one-time lover, betray her; the modern soldier faces the German machine-guns in self-sacrificing expiation of his family’s dishonor. DeMille would make time-displaced prologues and epi- logues a common feature of his filmmaking throughout the 1920s. Its struc- tural model, Griffith’s great temporal fugueIntolerance expired at the box office as its pacifist message began to seem impertinent to populations intent on world war, DeMille’s Joan the Woman had governments contemplating its use as a propaganda tool to drive enlistments.57 “Mae Tinee,” the sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued reviewer for the Chicago Tribune, condensed the effect of the play into a visual metaphor. “Geraldine Farrar is the big white light about which all the other lights revolve.” This is something more than the usual identification of the players as stars and the lead the sun. It literally describes the effect of Lasky lighting in the drama. The principals appear as luminous bodies against a nocturnal dark, and Farrar’s actions sets the orbits spinning, the constellations scintillating. Wilfred Buck- land claimed to have thought of the effect, but Alvin Wyckoff, the director of photography, made it visible on film. The stills sacrifice none of the tension between the fiery souls contending for the fate of France. Wyckoff vied with Jeanie Macpherson on the DeMille staff for movie experience. Macpherson had been an actress in the Biograph Company as early as 1908 and saw D. W. Griffith invent the language of film narrative, an education that proved useful when she turned scenarist in 1913. Wyckoff had acted in the first movies shot in California by the Selig Polyscope Company in 1908. Director and cinematographer Tom Perssons shot footage and stills of a Span- ish bullfighter in costume on a set constructed on the roof of a Main Street department store; the film was sent to Chicago for use in a version ofThe Count of Monte Cristo in which Wyckoff acted. Wyckoff continued his acting career in Los Angeles with Boggs and actor Hobart Bosworth, all the while studying the art of cameraman James Crosby.58 In 1913 he too switched from performer to technician, receiving his first credit for the landmark Western,The Spoil- ers (1914). He was hired by DeMille shortly thereafter. Wyckoff immediately grasped DeMille’s totalitarian vision of the motion picture studio—the hierarchy, the specializations, the ritual interactions. In the period between Joan the Woman and Fool’s Paradise, he erected at the DeMille studio the pecking order that cameramen would eventually endure in every major studio in Hollywood in the 1920s: director of photography (himself), first cameraman, second cameraman, assistant cameraman, and still photographers.59 Each rank had to be earned through a regimen of training and periodic evaluations of work. Wyckoff’s visual aesthetics were more free form than his professional politics. In a 1922 interview, “Light-Writing,” Wyckoff laid out his principles for matching the visuals to the mood and tempo of the dramatic action. “Photog-

144 Chapter Three raphy must always be in sympathy with the theme of the scene. We get our effects by watching the director rehearse the scene. From the rehearsal we get the tempo of the action and the psychology of the scene. With these facts in mind we light the picture.” Wyckoff distinguished between atmospheric lighting, a general effect determined by ensemble and locale, and character lighting, which highlights the ethos of the figure who dominates action in a scene. “Atmospheric lighting can be carried too far, however. There is a constant danger that the lighting will overshadow the action of the story. The eye will be so busy studying the lighting effects that the action of the characters and the psychology of the scene will escape the attention. That is fatal.”60 Wyckoff may be thinking of Lasky lighting as he said this. While the drama of the contest between dark and light in the pictorial field suited the psychology ofJoan the Woman, by 1918 it verged on cliché. The high key contrast promoted a kind of visual Manichaeism, with the forces of dark and light contending in an unsub- tle binary opposition. War times do not encourage low-key low-contrast drama, or the sort of visual exploration of mid-range tonalities one finds in the still work of that later DeMille cinematographer James Wong Howe. Besides the war of dark and light gave a traditional Christian atmosphere to a story whose heroine departs rather markedly from the received picture of the girl saint of Franco-Catholic hagiography. The motion picture seemed a history painting come to life. The stills heightened the precision of each scene’s composition by their fixation of persons and objects into a constellation of power relations: as in the priests of the inquisition elevated above the chained Joan. The power of theJoan stills as publicity and as a projection of the vision of the movie was such that Jesse Lasky became convinced that the still was the visual brand for the motion pictures and instructed all of the directors under his superintendence to concentrate on producing artistic images for publicity, “such attractive, unique and artistic photographs as will materially assist our work.” At this juncture DeMille and several of the other Lasky directors hired specialist still photographers for their work. Two camera artists would dominate still work for DeMille until 1922—Karl Struss, whose expertise with filters and lighting eventually led to his becoming an important cinematographer, and Donald Biddle Keyes, who worked with other Lasky directors as well as DeMille. Karl Struss (1886–1981), the youngest of the photographers of the photo- secession and inventor of the Struss soft-focus lens, before his Hollywood careers had been one of the most adventurous of the New York pictorial photographers. A student of Clarence White and a tireless experimenter with photographic technology and chemistry, Struss excelled in platinum print photography in New York on the eve of World War I. Though affiliated with a movement that voiced contempt for commercial work, Struss in 1914 opened a studio as an “interpretative photographer.” He secured a contract with the

145 Worlds Distilled Metropolitan Opera shooting dancers and candid shots of performers. When the United States entered the world war, Struss enlisted in the army intending to apply his photographic skill for intelligence work, but his German ancestry put him under political suspicion. Because his artistic colleagues in New York did not help exonerate him, Struss, in disgust, determined not to return to New York, went west, and hired on as a second unit camera operator under Cecil B. DeMille. He shot stills on the side. As Barbara McCandless has written, “most of the photographs Struss made on the movie sets were standard production stills, used for advertising and promoting the film. However when his filming schedule permitted, he also made a few pictorial stills and presented

Figure 3.21 Karl Struss: Gloria Swanson as Lady Mary Lasenby, Male and Female, Hollywood, Paramount Pictures, November 23, 1919. Struss’s single most famous still, Swanson as the Lion Bride, quoted Gabriel Cornelius Ritter von Max’s 1908 painting The Lion’s Bride. Film Stills Collection, Manuscripts Collection (MSS) TC021, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Published with permission of Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University.

146 Chapter Three copies of these to the producer and director as mementos of the film, and to publicity offices in both Los Angeles and New York. His talent for producing a more pictorial still became well known, and when a production company wanted something out of the ordinary, they hired him.” Particularly significant were the stills he shot for four productions, Male and Female, Fool’s Para- dise, Sparrows, and 1925’s Ben-Hur. His fame as a cinematographer, however, would soon eclipse that as a still photographer.

Figure 3.22 Donald Biddle Keyes: Leatrice Joy and cast as Lydia Thorne and Roman hedonists, Man- slaughter, Hollywood, Paramount Pictures, September 22, 1922. In regulation DeMille fashion, a modern perpetrator of vehicular homicide by drunkenness is brought to contrition by a lawyer who imaginatively transports her to ancient Rome to witness a collapse of civilization from an orgy of alcohol. Figure 3.23 [Donald Biddle Keyes]: The apostate Israelites, The Ten Commandments, Hollywood, Paramount Pictures, November 23, 1923. The Israelites worshipping the golden calf. Compare with figure 3.3 to see how a decade of art direction had transformed a visualization from the ridiculous to the sublime. The modern strangeness of the idol and the peripheral perspective point of the viewer enhance the uncanny mood of the spectacle.

Donald Biddle Keyes, a native of Chicago, spent the period before World War I working as a still photographer for the New York Motion Picture Cor- poration, a production company distributed through Thomas Ince’s Trian- gle Pictures Company. He specialized in location shooting of pictures under Ince’s auspices. Keyes was in attendance when art director Robert Brunton devised the “Ince improvements” on “Lasky lighting”—“taking concentrated light from a single source . . . driving it through window casement, door or draperies in such a way as to illumine only the essential portions of the set-

148 Chapter Three tings and the human figures, in which all photoplay action is, after all, concentrated.”61 Keyes had worked both as movie cameraman and still photographer with Brunton. Keyes left Ince to join the signal corps, but the rapid end of the war brought him back to Hollywood seeking a job. Lasky, wishing to cop any improvements on the lighting style bearing his name, had him put on the payroll. He proved a versatile, uncomplaining worker, who would become a favorite with DeMille because he could light orgy scenes with enough shadow to forestall the censors and enough light to excite the sensation seekers. From 1919 through 1922 he worked on every Cecil and William DeMille picture as still man, except those covered by Struss. He worked with Edward Curtis producing the publicity photographs for 1923’s The Ten Commandments. He left Cecil B. DeMille at that juncture, to contract with United Artists. His stills for the early California historical romance The Dictator and Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik (both 1923), The Sea Hawk (1925), and his memorable aerial stills for Howard Hughes’s Hell’s Angels (1930) constitute his greatest contributions to the art. Because he was considered one of the ace photographers of persons in costume, MGM, at Karl Struss’s behest, contracted Keyes’s services to work on Ben-Hur. He would remain active as a still photographer until 1950.

The Stylist. John Van den Broek worked only a scant four years lensing movies and shooting stills, from 1914 until 1918 when rough surf knocked him from the rocks at Schooner Head, Maine, during the filming of Maurice Tourneur’s Women. Director Clarence Brown testified that “he might have been the greatest cameraman today, if not the greatest director—but he was drowned.” There is no doubting that he is the first genius of the movie still. His name never appeared on any image he took for the twenty-eight titles he shot. Born in Hol- land in 1895, he came to the United States in 1901 with his younger brother Jacob, learned photography in his teens, was discovered at age nineteen in New York City by Maurice Tourneur. Van den Broek’s entire career took place on the East Coast, primarily in the movie enclave at Fort Lee, New Jersey, and on location in Florida. His eye was trained by Tourneur, the greatest visual artist of early silent film. Tourneur, an artist-turned-actor-turned-film-director, had studied sculpture under Rodin, had collaborated in mural making with the greatest French muralist of the postimpressionist era, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and had designed sets for the Odeon Theater in Paris under the experimentalist Andre Antoine. Van den Broek proved the perfect disciple of the master, channeling Tourneur’s vision. Indeed, their symbiosis became the model for the collaboration between director and photographer adopted by Josef von Sternberg when instructing Eugene Robert Richee, Don English, and Otto Dyar in photographing Marlene Dietrich in the 1930s. Von Sternberg witnessed Tourneur and Van den Broek while acting in the 1917 sporting drama The Whip.

149 Worlds Distilled Tourneur taught Van den Broek to stylize. As Gordon Craig had pointedly observed, “Why copy nature without adding something of our own?” There was little advantage to mimicking the common scenes of life with fidelity. Deeply conversant with the symbolist dramaturgy of Max Reinhardt, Stan- islavsky, and Granville Barker, Tourneur understood the limitations of realism. Documenting a drawing room, a dining room, a library perfectly had only the interest of verisimilitude. It could be done on stage better than it could on screen. Even the faithful representation of exteriors—where film exceeded the stage—limited the creator to copying nature. Tourneur understood that style embodied both the scene and a human reaction to that scene in the same image. Tourneur called his cinematic style “impressionism,” yet did not mean by that term a blurry atmospheric semblance of objects. Rather Tourneur sought a visual artifice that departed from realism, and turned away from prettiness, seeking an uncanny visual propriety to incredible worlds. While this visual propriety can be seen in nearly every film he shot in the 1910s, in a range of settings from the submarine vistas of the thrillerThe White Heather to the homey interiors of French-Canadian domestic drama The Broken Butterfly, the daring of his stylization can best be seen in three fantasies he shot in 1917– 18—Barbary Sheep, Prunella, and The Blue Bird. By ingenious design, juxtaposi- tions of sculptural elements (Rodin) with intentionally two-dimensional flat backgrounds (Puvis de Chauvennes) he suggested the existence of whimsical, romantic worlds. The look of a Van den Broek still is unlike any by any theater or movie photographer of the decade, just as the look of a Tourneur film is distinctive. Because art director Ben Carre had expunged every element of naturalism from the visual world of Prunella—the house, the garden, the walls—and supplied in their stead a two-dimensional material world with the look of a Maxfield Parrish illustration, Van den Broek’s stills create verisimilitude by arraying human figures in a visual space that extends in front of an artificial horizon. In certain images Van den Broek gives that space great depth and palpability by the use of a dark foreground that visually anchors a light background. In the stills representing Prunella’s life as a performer with Pier- rot’s troupe (scenes not in the stage play that were entirely Tourneur’s invention), we have the subjective placement of the point of view that is intrinsic to film, a simplified symbolist setting of the Gordon Craig sort, a radical visual foregrounding associated with Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr. in photography and a common feature of the visual composition of the Tourneur–Van den Broek cinematography, and a complex array of characters visually mapped with an emotional logic. Another image, showing the troupe performing, reveals how to depict a crowd without dispersing focus and losing simplicity of effect. The shadowed spectators in the foreground amalgamate into one mass of shadow,

150 Chapter Three Figure 3.24 [John van den Broek]: Marguerite Clarke as the title character, Prunella, Fort Lee, NJ, Famous Players Lasky Corporation, June 2, 1918. From the former Culver Service Collection.

whose contours suggest complexity, but whose lack of texture causes the eye to settle upon the players arrayed upon a makeshift stage. By a kind of dialectic the artifice of the symbolist fantasy world depends upon the character of the humans being depicted. Prunella is a young woman so protected from the world that she at the outset of the drama is emotionally still a girl. Pierrot at play’s outlet is a boy-man: selfish as an adolescent despite being as desirous and expert as a man. The childishness of the protago- nists makes storybook fantasy an appropriate externalization of their psyches. Their return to the garden and dilapidated house at the end of the drama marked their transformation by pain and a willingness to turn away from play to adult wisdom. In Houseman’s script, Pierrot blames Prunella for desiring marriage and the formalization of love into contract; yet their return to the garden seems a turn toward domesticity and adult self-sacrifice. Tourneur’s film lacks the speech, lacks the association of the house and garden with domestic normalcy, and makes the statue of Eros the place where the two lovers

151 Worlds Distilled return for solace and where they find themselves again. The promise of Tour- neur and Van den Broek’s visual conclusion is a recapture of the child magic of first love in Eros. In the final of Tourneur and Van den Broek’s trilogy of fantasies the link- age between childhood and an imaginary world is made even more explicit. The principals ofThe Blue Bird are two children seeking happiness in an alle- gorical journey. While the visualization has the same kind of aesthetic artifice asPrunella, the spatial world that Maurice Maeterlinck’s drama invokes

Figure 3.25 [John van den Broek]: Tula Belle and Robin Macdougal as Mytyl and Tyltyl, The Blue Bird, Fort Lee, NJ, Paramount Pictures, March 31, 1918. Art direction and costume design by Ben Carré. is less stable and more shadowed than that called for by Granville Barker. Van den Broek captures a curious world, with more of the dark European tones of märchen than the lightsome fairy lands of English and Irish lore. Yet the integrity of the vision makes one feel that this world rightly combines three dimensional bodies in two dimension horizons. One does not think, looking at the images, that animation would have been a more appropriate means of enact- ing the fantasy. Which animator in 1918, aside perhaps from Winsor MacCay, could have managed the beauty and the uncanny?

Figure 3.26 [John van den Broek]: The Garden of Sleep and Death, The Blue Bird, Fort Lee, NJ, Paramount Pictures, March 31, 1918. Art direction and costume design by Ben Carré.

153 Worlds Distilled No account of the growing artistry of still photography can ignore the con- tribution of art direction in establishing the features of the pictorial world; yet that general consideration would better be undertaken in a discussion of still photographers of the 1920s rather than the 1910s. Here we can only pause to reflect on that extreme manifestation of stylization found in set decoration that purposely manifested unrealistic, painterly, or illustrative worlds. The direction Tourneur and Van den Broek blazed in the direction of the stylization of scene looks more toward The Wizard of Oz than The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Van den Broek’s images invoke fanciful realms, uncanny places, and exotic locales. Only in the images connected with Tourneur’s sea movies and crime thrillers did Van den Broek essay the sublime and the horrific—and in both cases through a kind of intensified realism. In the stills from the fantasy trilogy, Van den Broek made a place for a species of visual wonder that made one believe in incredible, artificial spaces and beings. Few had the visionary capacity to follow the path blazed by Prunella and The Blue Bird—Arthur F. Rice in his stills for Nazimova’s two stylized features of the early 1920s, Camille and Sa- lome, Edward S. Curtis in the stills to Ferdinand P. Earle’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Clarence S. Bull’s stills for the Greek garden sequence of George Fitzmaurice’s Idols of Clay (1920), and Arthur Kales’s and Charles Warrington’s stills for Douglas Fairbanks’s Robin Hood. Several photographers and cinematographers, however, found inspiration in Van den Broek’s treatment of Orientalist exoticism in Barbary Sheep. Barbary Sheep redeemed the visual world of the Orient from prop trunk exoticism. Scimitars, turbans, beards, chained Nubians, chained monkeys, veils, harem girls, and rugs adorned the filmic Middle East with promiscuous splendor in a host of bargain spectacles, such as The Gift Girl (Bluebird, 1916). Visual profusion and excess of ornament characterized the cinematography and still photography—and there was little tact, design, or material integrity visible. Women inhabited this world for the visual titillation of their bare midriffs. The nonsensical mess of this world was burlesqued by Mack Sennett inSalome vs. Shenandoah and captured in a classic still by Nelson Evans. Barbary Sheep re- envisioned that world. Tourneur, who knew Algeria, constructed a North Af- rican town on the film lot in Fort Lee. TheLos Angeles Times proclaimed it “the most remarkable duplication of architecture and “local color” ever staged for a motion picture.”62 Instead of a profusion of belly dancers, Tourneur contracted the most beautiful and refined actress of the legitimate stage in America, Elsie Ferguson, for her screen debut. She played a Lady Wyverne, wife of a man who cherishes hunting more than the love of his wife. “Alone in the desert, for her husband is away hunting Barbary Sheep, fanned by its hot winds, swayed by its mystery, Kathlyn, Lady Wyverne, falls under the spell of Benchaalal, son of a mighty chief. He, sensing her loneliness, and desiring her above all things,

154 Chapter Three woos her subtly, impassionedly, she struggling, but yielding more and more to the spell of the stranger.”63 Tourneur launched the great theme of 1920s cinema, the eroticization of the “Sheik”—making the alien man the object of desire, rather than the Harem girl. In Van den Broek’s stills one finds ethnographic precision, artistic composition, and a sense of alien beauty that seems the creation of some strange and powerful artifice. Onlookers saw how the exotic trumped the exotique.

Figure 3.27 [Stephen Rounds]: Louise Lovely and ensemble as Rokaia and attendants, The Gift Girl, Hollywood, Universal Film Manufacturing Company, March 26, 1917. The publicity stills for this Rupert Julian feature were among the most highly finished of the 1910s, with great care taken upon print texture and toning. Figure 3.28 [John van den Broek]: Elsie Ferguson as Lady Katherine Wyverne in Barbary Sheep, Fort Lee, NJ, Paramount Pictures, September 9, 1917. Art direction and costume design by Ben Carré. From the former Culver Service Collection.

There is great “stillness” in the artifice of the exotic as conjured by Tour- neur and Van den Broek. Ben Carré designed the Algerian village as a sequence of compositions drawn as scenes. Van den Broek used stationary cameras substantially more than tracking shots. Tourneur’s training as a muralist made him imagine his visual worlds more static than mobile, with figures moving against stabile grounds, as they do on stage sets. Van den Broek’s stills supply

156 Chapter Three the visual idealities that make up the world of cinema Algeria. They mimeti- cally fulfill the world that the film invokes.

1920—the Campaign for Effective Still Photography

The appearance of exceptionally artistic stills made the pedestrian character of most motion picture production photography apparent. In January 1920 the Moving Picture World, the film industry’s trade weekly, commenced a year- long crusade calling attention to the importance of the still in publicity and demanding its refinement as an expression of the producer’s artistic vision and as an instrument of sales. Ralph Rufner, manager of the Rialto Theater in San Francisco, inaugurated the complaint. He desired stills for newspaper publicity and for use in lobby displays. First to feel Rufner’s wrath were the exchanges, the regional distribution centers that warehoused publicity materials and motion picture prints. His supplier didn’t maintain an up-to-date collection of star portraits. Next among the malefactors were the studios, who failed to produce a sufficient number of stills, particularly of character actors. “For example, in ‘When Bearcat Went Dry,’ Lon Chaney has a prominent part, enough to justify a separate still of him in character, but what few usable newspaper stills the exchange possessed fail to show him.” He then complained of the tendency for producers of two-reel comedies to provide no usable stills of any sort. He closed his plea with a set of rules for producing stills to be reproduced in newspapers. He specified needs for the following sorts of items:

1. The star ni good poses, half, three-quarter, and full lengths—especially the latter if handsomely gowned. 2. Individual poses, full length, of those prominent in the cast—whether the star hollers or not (If it’s in his or her contract I guess we don’t get ’em) 3. which come nearest telling some important bit of the story. If of but two people, pose them as close together as consistent with the narrative. Oftentimes in the preparation of half-tone newspaper adv. cuts they will be too far apart to balance nicely with a four-column display. If in a unique costume or exceptional characterization will furnish the atmosphere desire for a particular scene, lets “get” this for the trade paper and newspaper display with the still camera. . . . 4. Comedies. Pretty girls, en-group or single poses—full lengths invariably.64

The same issue of the magazine contained an article commending the work of Frank Puffer, still man for Constance Talmadge’sTwo Weeks, who retouched out background foliage and a two-shot of Conway Tearle with Talmadge so the leading man’s profile might be seen with greater clarity. The writer opined, “there are hundreds of stills which could be vastly improved with a little intel-

157 Worlds Distilled ligent thought and a retoucher’s pencil.” Then he called upon studios to hire art editors to supervise the refinement of studio publicity.65 Later in January, the magazine noted the hiring of Charles Duprez, a news photographer, to direct photographic publicity for Selznick pictures.66 Duprez, famous for his iconic portrait of the smiling Teddy Roosevelt, would invent later in the year a long- lived subgenre of publicity, “the news still,” pictures that linked a performer with an occasion that would pique an editor’s interests—namely, starlets with witch hats and black cats on Halloween or child actors besieging fireplaces on Christmas Eve.67 An important component of the magazine’s campaign was browbeating less affluent studios into development of still departments with photographic specialists by celebrating the construction of the Famous Players–Lasky still plant. The facility, located in New York, had the capacity to print ten thousand eight-by-ten photographs a day. “One large room will be devoted exclusively to the making of bromide enlargements. Two modern enlarging machines will take care of this work. The drying room will be equipped with electrically driven and heated machines for drying matte surface prints and specially designed machine for drying ferrotyped prints. Coloring and spotting will be done in a room by itself and retouching, experts being employed in this work, will be carried on in the room adjoining.”68 The description gave no doubt of the industrial scale of the plant’s production. Stills were a content of mass media. But artistry was a concern of the studio as well, and the author observed that the “most important” innovation of the plant would be “the portrait gallery, which will be equipped with two cameras using the best portrait lenses obtainable and with facilities for daylight or artificial lighting.” This was the second, after the Universal portrait gallery under Jack Freulich, portrait studio and display space on an American motion picture lot. William O. Lyman, who had been Famous Player’s chief East Coast still man since the summer of 1918, was placed in charge of the plant. On July 17, Moving Picture World published schematic plans of the Famous Players–Lasky New York studio, showing the extent of the camera department. If this were not enough to rattle the production companies that had scant- ed still production, director Marshall Neilan in October 1920 launched a campaign to transform the artistry of stills in connection with the launch of Dinty. “The whole studio was turned over to the best still photographers obtainable on the West Coast for an entire day and the technical staff was placed at their disposal. The result is embodied in a series of negatives which embody not merely situations in story, but, rather characteristic studies that typify the theme of the story.”69 Printed in eleven by fourteen, the stills could be used as striking lobby displays and as magazine material.70 The names of the photographers who attended the experiment were not mentioned, but no doubt Donald Biddle Keyes, James Woodbury, and Nelson Evans participated. Neilan

158 Chapter Three gave photographers agency in creating images that were thematic, rather than descriptive. He justified the effort as an attempt to “overcome the vituperation that is generally accorded the producer on account of his stills.”71 In the same issue on the same page Collier’s Weekly (circulation more than 1.1 million) announced the creation of a motion picture department. If the challenge of a rival studio having more effective publicity was not enough to move a producer to emulate Neilan, Motion Picture World, in its next issue, employed humor. Listing the eleven most yawn-inducing images regularly issued by publicity departments—(1) “the beautiful So-and-So star in her new car”; (11) “the set which proves conclusively that the line $800,000 production is nothing but the truth”—William J. Reilly chided the laziness of the studios that stint on imagery. He reminded dull wits that the “still is the heart of the advertising on any picture. About it centers the poster, the press sheets, the lobby frame, the ad cuts for the exhibitor, the one-page ad or forty-page insert. . . . The good still registers in publicity, in advertising, in the . . . box office.”72 Ruth Imlay, head of exploitation at the most effective publicity office, that of Famous Players–Lasky, testified how Charles H. Bell, the new head of the London branch of the company, had personally vowed to establish a still department, so long neglected in Britain, and feature fashion particularly. To suggest that its campaign was having an effect,Moving Picture World in the October 23 issue noted the newly organized Special Pictures Corporation had created a publicity unit. “Special newspaper and art photographers have been put to work to secure artistic and reproducable stills.” More weighty was the notice in the November 20 issue that William Fox, head of Fox Corpora- tion, had instructed his East and West Coast crews “to concentrate every effort in securing photographs with a story in them—pictures that contain the quality which attracts the eyes—strength, action, and contrast in tones.”73 Each unit was issued an eight-by-ten and a portable Graflex camera to secure dynamic images. Fox was particularly concerned with the lobby display of images. Moving Picture World’s campaign for the development of the still climaxed in the final issue of 1920, when it announced the creation of a prize, to be judged by Baron Adolph DeMeyer, illustrator James Montgomery Flagg, and the art editors of the Hearst papers and the New York Times, for the best still photographs. The Maryland Institute of Arts would bestow a gold medal in several categories: for the most artistic pictures intended for use in magazines, newspapers, and lobby displays. For the magazine category, the candidate had to submit two photographs, one a star portrait, another a group scene; one soft focus, the other straight. For the newspaper, the candidate had to offer more “contrasty” images—a portrait and a production still. In the lobby image category, six images, including one poster template, one spectacle shot, and one exterior had to be submitted. While the categories recognized the generic distinctions between portrait and production still, their design stressed the

159 Worlds Distilled publicity venues in which they appeared. Imbuing commercial vehicles with artistry was what the gold medals were all about. No record exists whether the Maryland Institute ever bestowed the prizes. Late spring 1921, when the awards were due to be announced, found Moving Picture World completely distracted by the censorship scare that roiled the motion picture industry in that year. Little matter—medals would not be the incentive driving the aesthetic transformation of the still during the 1920s. Rather it would be another phenomenon that the magazine reported in its pages in 1921. The coming of a cohort of New York celebrity photographers to Hollywood. Jack Freulich, Frank Bangs, Arthur Rice, James Abbe, Alfred Cheney Johnston, Maurice Goldberg, Hal Phyfe, Kenneth Alexander, Henry Waxman, and Russell Ball would all make the journey during the decade. Es- tablished talents and national brands, they would improve the status of the still photographer in the Hollywood hierarchy while finding a way to project personal points of view in a profoundly collaborative art.

160 Chapter Three II The Visual Artists

4 Manly Faces Jack Freulich, Bert Longworth, Ray Jones, and the Universal Studio Aesthetic

Early American cinema happened anonymously. At first only the producing companies had names, then in 1910 the performers, then in 1912 the directors, and then the cinematographers in 1920. Producing companies preferred that the multitudes of persons laboring on a cinematic project perform as anonymous craftsmen. The executives knew the old truism of the theater box office: if you’ve got a name, you get more pay. The fewer people on the payroll that required hefty salaries, the better. One breaks the anonymity, granting a name to a creator, only when extraordinary skill or promise justifies violating the standard protocol. It took the granting of name credit to lure photographer Jack Freulich to Universal Pictures in 1919. He would be the first salaried motion picture still photographer to have his signature appear on every image he produced: his last name—Freulich—in legible script. The paradox of his career was that prior to Carl Laemmle’s recruitment, Jack Freulich was the most anonymous of New York’s celebrity photographers.1 As chief cameraman for Underwood & Underwood, one of the largest commercial image firms in the United States, Freulich’s work appeared widely and frequently in print, yet never under his name. Within the world of photography, he commanded immense respect as a portraitist and belonged to the major clubs and professional associations.

163 In the eyes of the New York publicists for motion pictures, no photographer had more mystique because he took the pictures for William Fox that vamped Theodosia Goodman into Theda Bara. Publicists knew it took a heated imagination to visualize a femme fatale more extravagant than those haunting the landscapes of Edvard Munch’s, Franz van Stuck’s, and Fernand Khnopff’s symbolist paintings. The PR men did not know that he had been driven to visualize uncanny women in order to overthrow the monotony of capturing the expressionless faces of government men. In 1914 he had worked as Underwood & Underwood’s portraitist in the nation’s capital. Born in Russian-occupied Poland,2 Jacob “Jack” Freulich (1880–1936) emigrated to American at age twenty-two, married, and set up as a studio photographer in the Bronx.3 In 1911, Underwood & Underwood, the country’s largest photographic chain, hired him as a cameraman.4 In 1914, he was dispatched from the New York office to Washington, DC.5 His position required him to perform official portraiture, a deadly subgenre of imagery perfected by the rival firm of Harris and Ewing.6 The formula: a middle-aged man in a dark suit and white collar, scrupulously groomed, stared off into the distance in profile or with face turned forty-five degrees away from the viewer. Background: sober. Facial expression: resolute. Focus: clear. His features scrupulously avoided any hint of personality—no sensitivity, mischief, humor, or grace. It was the age of Taft, not of Teddy Roosevelt. To keep his eyes from going numb, Freulich shot occasional news reel footage for Pathé and Vitagraph/Hearst.7 In late 1915, he was recalled to the New York office and appointed chief portrait photographer of Underwood & Underwood. His relief at being freed from polishing the dignity of male officialdom can be registered in the exu- berant experimentation of his portraits of Valeska Suratt and Theda Bara. Bara inspired an extraordinary set of character stills Freulich shot for Underwood & Underwood in conjunction Fox’s release of A Fool There Was. Unlike cinematographer George Scheiderman’s hokey stills of the seminude Bara sitting jauntily next to a recumbent skeleton of her male victim, Freulich’s image of Bara peering from her dark tresses has the outré craziness that Hollywood would soon make its signature. (See figure 0.3.) Given nearly full page prominence in newspaper spreads such as the Atlanta Constitution’s “Lo, The Poor Vampire!”8 the image projected a new archetype of danger-sex. If this were not sufficient to haunt the imaginations of troubled masculinity, the image would often appear next to a Freulich publicity shot forSin —Bara dressed in a clingy Goth tube dress glowering at the viewer with Svengali eyes and holding her dark tresses aloft in a dreadful V for Victory. The triumph of her gesture, the frank display of her curvy physique, the bare feet declaring bohemian disdain for the mores of the middle class all contributed to creating an icon of feminine malice. Other Freulich images became equally famous: Theda stroking

164 Chapter Four Figure 4.1 [Jack Freulich], Underwood & Underwood: Theda Bara, Sin, New York, William Fox, 1915. An image widely reproduced in newspapers, sometimes with a spiral background, always with the credit removed. Only vintage publicity eight-by-ten prints show the original Underwood brand.

the head of a raven, Theda’s face resting on a table gazing from beneath a cas- cade of jetty hair. So famous, so stylized, and so fantastic were these portraits that they became caricatured in the culture wars over gender styles. William Fox wanted to hire Freulich for his Fox Film Corporation. J. Stuart Blackton offered to make him a salaried employee. Neither apparently dangled the bait offered by Carl Laemmle, founder and head of Universal Pictures, in

165 Manly Faces fall of 1919: administrative authority over all portrait and still photography for the company, a hefty pay package (over $100 a week),9 ample leave time, and name credit. In November, news blurbs reported that “Jack Freulich, the erstwhile Underwood & Underwood portrait chief in New York, can’t take a vacation. He works twelve hours a day making Universal stars beautiful—in stills of course.”10 And not just stills, Freulich’s skills with the movie camera were exercised in cinematographic work on The Silk-Lined Burglar, a crook film about the beloved pulp fiction figure Boston Blackie. Laemmle’s reasons for securing Freulich went well beyond enlisting an eye capable of amplifying female mystique. Laemmle favored Jewish talent, particularly persons from eastern Europe who loved family. Laemmle conceived of Universal as a family company and promoted nepotism. (Laemmle would not object when Freulich hired his son, Henry [1906–85],11 and brother Roman [1898–1974],12 as assistant photographers.) Yet Laemmle most cherished Freulich for his respectability, his connections with Washington officialdom. The head of Universal Studios craved an aura of importance around his Universal enterprise. Appearances mattered. The studio would be a utopian city, the peaceable kingdom, the tranquil family. Freulich could supply a high-class sheen to performers who, truth be known, were being cycled through commonplace product. Laemmle preferred to do things cheaply, preferred stories that were middlebrow, liked a steady return on quickly produced product rather than depending on periodic prestige features to bring in cash. A messy man, Laemmle had an attraction to things that suggested corporate regularity, official method, and cultural credibility.13 That Freulich had presided over a division of a company organized as an industrial image production facility promised that he would bring scientific discipline to still making at Universal. Freulich’s expertise in both male and female portraiture interested Laem- mle as well. He understood that his competitors had banked on the drawing power of female stars. Freulich’s Theda Bara images showed he could handle that dimension of publicity with the best publishing photographers. But Laemmle would offer the public what the other studios did not make publicity priority number one, males—Wallace MacDonald, Hoot Gibson, Francis X. Bushman, Glenn Anders, Grant Withers, Lon Chaney. His intuition proved sound. When his competitors began hiring name Broadway photographic talent for publicity beginning in 1920—First National hired E. B. Hesser and Frank Bangs, Mack Sennett hired James Abbe, Metro hired Arthur F. Rice, As- sociated Producers hired Alfred Cheney Johnston—all had honed their camera skills in the age when the girl ruled the stage. Laemmle had the only camera artist who had perfected his craft by giving personalities to faceless bureau- crats. If Freulich could make a clerk in the US Treasury look interesting, he could certainly make a young man gifted with noble features look arresting.

166 Chapter Four Hollywood portrait photographers of the 1910s had not done as well with men as they had done with women. Perhaps the smooth-faced, clean-scrubbed, brilliantined, uncomplicated norm of leading men seemed too anonymous to have sex appeal. Only when illustrators such as James Montgomery Flagg vested these men with ship-prow jaws and Brancusi hair did they take on a character more interesting than that of one’s athletic and earnest older brother. Even the most vital of stage stars who scored in films, Douglas Fairbanks, won audiences by vitality rather than visual allure. Fairbanks’s portraits evince none of the relaxation of a man comfortable in his own skin, confident in his power to draw people to him. He lived in motion and endured a restless arrest in stills. It is odd to think that of all the male stars of the 1910s, the one who impresses most in portraits, radiating a compelling masculine presence is the greatest of early Western stars, William S. Hart. (See chapter 9.) That raw-boned, squint- ing, thin-lipped Saxon in a big hat radiated gravitas. Stoics tend to stillness and self-composure. Hart in motion took on an added measure of intensity precisely from the coiled potentiality of his moments of stillness. He stares from the early portraits by Spurr for Hartsook and Seely for Witzel with an attitude that seethes testosterone. He was markedly older and more weather- beaten than most other leading men. Freulich gave Universal’s male stars that quality of experience glimpsed first in W. S. Hart’s face. Whereas other studios in the 1920s heightened the visual interest of male leads by having them grow moustaches (Douglas Fair- banks Sr.; John Gilbert; Roy D’Arcy; et al.), Freulich amplified manliness by allowing wrinkles to play across the face and peculiar features of a visage to stand out. Freulich’s professional rivals—Donald Biddle Keyes, Clarence Sin- clair Bull, and Harold Dean Carsey—fretted about the shadow cast by the nose, or the hollows in one’s cheeks, trying to minimize them with reflectors or spotlights; Freulich let the shadows bloom. The kind of individual distinctness usually restricted to character actors and actresses became the visual property of leads. Francis X. Bushman, who had built a career and a nickname (Francis “Sex” Bushman) on his physique, became through Freulich’s lens a grizzled soul, a haunted face. Lew Ayres, who could be pabulum personified in ordinary studio publicity, in Freulich’s portraits seemed sensitive and spiritually bruised. Even Universal’s male character actors—that company of the round, rumpled, and old—have the personable vitality of a townsman from a Franz Hals painting, rather than the clownish oddity that typifies portraits of the Vitagraph, First National, and Metro players. Otis Harlan smiles with an open-countenanced joy. Even the seven-year-old Mickey Rooney gazes at us with a poise and seriousness he was rarely granted on screen as a hyperactive “zany” youth. In an interview in 1925 Freulich commented on the challenges of depicting performers. “Picture players are difficult camera subjects because they are

167 Manly Faces Figure 4.2 Jack Freulich: Francis X. Bushman as Colby MacDonald in The Grip of the Yukon, Hollywood, Universal Pictures, July 9, 1928. This vision of haunted manhood better fitted the first title of the motion picture, Eternal Silence, than its sound retooling. It is one of the most evocative front-facing close-up portraits of 1920s cinema. From the former Culver Service Collection. Figure 4.3 Jack Freulich: Lew Ayres, Hollywood, Universal Pictures, 1929. The eighteen-year- old instrumentalist had been plucked from the Henry Halstead Orchestra because of his clean- cut good looks. Yet his boyish appearance did not work well when acting opposite Greta Garbo in The Kiss. MGM dropped him, and Universal picked up the contract, having precisely the vehicle that would make use of that touch of immaturity, the war epic All Quiet on the Western Front. Freulich’s portrait was taken from Ayres first sitting on the Universal lot in the period when filming was just getting underway in late 1929. so accustomed to acting before a motion-picture camera and expressing their personalities in terms of action that they find it hard to pose for a portrait.”14 For Freulich a portrait sitting became an exercise in distilling an attitude. To aid in this effort he became the first Hollywood photographer to replicate the experiments in mood music taking place on the silent sets in his portrait studio. It was not unusual to have a pickup chamber orchestra playing light classics as background music during filming. The phonograph became, through Freulich’s action, an adjunct of 1920s Hollywood sittings. (George Hurrell would later became famous for his phonograph blaring at photo sessions.) A musically induced mood might produce an attitude. He did not pose the sitters, but let them find a comfortable or telling posture that he could capture. The sittings tended to be long, relaxed affairs, sometimes with refreshments. Forty-one when he became the head of the Universal still department, Freulich was older than the majority of performers who came to be photographed, and four years older the studio patriarch Carl Laemmle. Handsome, open-faced and manly,15 Freulich was unlike those still photographers in Hollywood who felt like peripheral figures on the movie lot during the 1920s; he commanded respect at Universal City. Having photographed many of the most powerful men in the world, he had credibility as an image master. Tall, dark, and temperamental, he could, when necessary, impose his will in his shooting gallery. But Universal, as a B-level studio, was not the “home of the stars,” or the playground of prima donnas—with the exception of director-performer Eric von Stroheim. Most sitters came into Freulich’s lair disposed to get the most advantage out of a portrait session as possible. Stroheim came to chat with another European and trade visual obsessions. Befitting Universal’s production on a shoestring work ethic, Freulich frequently did without settings, painted backgrounds, or props. In his earliest portraits—those of the 1921–24 period—he occasionally set women in front of textured fabric walls or patterned textiles. A costume might suggest a role, but the artistic photographer could manage the studio rapport that enables a personality to bloom on a face. He preferred shooting men close in—half lengths and busts—while women appeared full length, three-quarter length, and half length. When bobbed hair became popular in the mid-1920s, he began shooting female bust shots in greater numbers. He invariably used artificial light, varying effects as mood and faces dictated. He avoided harsh contrasts of dark and shadow, preferring modulated shades. Visual challenges such as Mary Philbin’s extraordinary mane of dark ringlets, or Gladys Walton’s diminutive proportions, or the extraordinary headdresses imposed upon beauties inspired repeated studies, visual explorations of how best to present features so as to seem qualities rather than oddities. Because Freulich came to Hollywood as a mature artist, he did not emulate the practices of his studio camera colleagues. What did transform his

170 Chapter Four Figure 4.4 Jack Freulich: Patsy Ruth Miller as Patsy Deveau in Painting the Town, Hollywood, Uni- versal Pictures, August 7, 1927. Miller, who became a star playing Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, was a victim of Universal’s haphazard schedule of production and inability to generate consistently interesting plots in film romances. When plot or theme couldn’t generate interest, Universal resorted to gimmicks, such as the headdress here. art were the innovations in lighting taking place on set. His grasp of the new lighting systems enabled him to elaborate an effective glamour minimalism, with the lighting supplanting all other scenery. The images—busts most often—presented faces, a clothed upper body, a wall, or aurora of light. These stripped down yet beautiful head shots were studied by publicity photographers throughout the movie industry and became part of the technical arse- nal of professional entertainment portraitists from the lowly fan photo specialists such as Lyman Pollard to the queen of MGM’s portrait gallery, Ruth

Figure 4.5 Walter Frederick Seely: Helen Ferguson as Nestina, The Scarlet West, Hollywood, Frank J. Carroll Productions, July 26, 1925. Ferguson, a WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) Baby Star and leading lady in the Pathé actions serials of the 1920s, was a holdover from the action girl ideal of the early twentieth century. She independently contracted Seely for this portrait. During the 1920s she studied the methods of motion picture publicity and when sound arrived became one of the powerful press agents in Southern California. Harriet Louise. While studio cameramen had little demonstrable influence on Freulich’s practice, one independent camera artist working in Los Angeles in the 1920s did teach him things about picture making, the painter-photographer Walter Frederick Seely. Hollywood directors had a penchant for imagining women and men lying down. Official portraiture as a genre reserved recumbency for portraits of expired leaders lying in state. Freulich looked to Seely for models of arranging a single figure resting on his or her back or side, kneeling, crouching, or squatting. Seely’s experience as a still photographer

Figure 4.6 Jack Freulich: Dagmar Godowsky, 1920. Godowsky was the daughter of the piano virtuoso Leopold Godowsky and sister of Leo Godowsky, the inventor of Kodachrome film. A free spirit and voluptuary, Godowsky bedded many of the great men of her day, including many of the major compos- ers of the early twentieth century. She became a Universal player in 1920 with The Forged Bride.

173 Manly Faces working for Witzel Studio in the 1910s had matured into a naturalistic style of posing sitters. Seely’s involvement with pictorialist art photography and Jap- anese woodcuts gave him an exquisiteness of taste in arranging a minimum number of objects to best aesthetic effect. Freulich’s most elaborate and poetic personality studies of the early 1920s—those with landscape rather than portrait orientations—took their direction from Seely’s setups.

Strange Points of View

Freulich oversaw still photography as well as Universal’s portrait gallery. Be- cause of the active production schedule pursued by studios throughout the 1920s, and because of several extended trips to Europe (in 1924, 1928, and 1930) Freulich hired several photographers besides his family members. He had an uncanny eye for talent, hiring two of the greatest photographers of the interwar era, Bert Longworth (1893–1964) and Ray Jones (1892–1967).16 Longworth may have been the most extravagant personality ever to point a lens at a sitter in silent Hollywood. Hyperkinetic, avant-garde in dress and taste, fearless in pursuit of a shot or a gimmick, slangy, adept at milking the criminal underworld for new technology on the cheap, he published the first personal anthology of motion picture stills printed in the United States: Hold Still Hollywood in 1937.17 Bertram “Bert” “Buddy” “Thirty Bucks” “Shorty” Longworth began his career unimaginatively as a studio portraitist in Detroit in 1910. He quickly realized that Chicago was where the photographic action was in the Midwest, went there, and by chance, happened to photograph the most horrific ferry accident of the early twentieth century on the Great Lakes, sold the photos to the news agencies, and made enough of a name to head to the West Coast. The combination of portrait work and photojournalism captured Freulich’s attention. He hired Longworth to shoot production stills. From the first Longworth’s stills radiated a distinct point of view. Fascinated with the highly subjective European style of art direction in films such as Ernest Lubitsch’sPassion and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Long- worth embraced the nonnormal perspectives of German expressionism; he cultivated angles—shots that did not emanate from the eye-high tripod level of the usual bellows plate camera. He scrambled over the Universal sets clutching a Graflex camera, crouched, crawled, climbed, and hung in suspension to get views of scenes that even cinematographers would not attempt. The ab- normal perspectives suited one genre of motion picture that Universal would make its forte. In the 1930s, it would be called the horror film, but the 1920s manifestations were not so intent on eliciting shock and sensation. They would better be characterized by the phrase that Edgar Allan Poe used to explain his short fiction, tales of the “Grotesque and Arabesque.”

174 Chapter Four Figure 4.7 [Willy Hameister]: Lil Dagover as Jane in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Berlin, Decia-Bioscop AG, American release March 19, 1921. While the expressionist distortions of the set design fascinated contemporaries, the features of the visual presentation that riveted Longworth were the odd relationships between human subject and built environment, and the novel relationships between camera/ viewer and subject. Here Jane’s position below eye level is confused by the nonnormal cant of the circumadjacent walls.

In grotesque and arabesque stories and films ugliness and deformity provoke a question—does humankind’s attraction to beauty and its tendency to associate beauty with truth cause an unjust repulsion to the unbeau- tiful? For such stories to work the audience had to be repelled by the ugly, and then discover the disquieting truth that appearances do not present the truth of someone’s soul. Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame, is shown to embody more nobility, valor, and justice than the people of Paris. Erik, the phantom of the opera, is driven by ambitions more complex and abstract than monster lust or revenge. When photographing the characters

175 Manly Faces Figure 4.8 Jack Freulich: Lon Chaney Sr. as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Holly- wood, Universal Pictures, October 6, 1923. The living gargoyle as thinker.

and scenes of these Universal productions, the various tasks fell to different photographers: Jack Freulich did the character portraits that suggested the humanity and vulnerability of the grotesques, the pensive hunchback or the haunted-looking phantom. Henry Freulich shot the production stills giving the scene—establishing settings, human relationships, and developments in the plot. Longworth shot the uncanny, weird, and sensational scenes—the images that showed the strangeness of the strange.

176 Chapter Four Figure 4.9 Bert Longworth: Lon Chaney Sr. and extras as Quasimodo and mob in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hollywood, Universal Pictures, October 6, 1923. Quasimodo lashes out at the jeering after being crowned the King of Fools at the Feast of Fools. The mob turns on the Hunchback and will bind him in the stocks.

Silent film had developed its own cinematic approximation of the French Grand Guignol theater of the macabre by the time Longworth picked up his camera on the Universal sets. The dramatic visualization of torture, deformity, murder, and sexual assault taken from the newspaper headlines, developed by Andre de Lord in Paris, found its most effective filmic elaborations in two American masterworks of 1920, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde starring John Barry- more in the title roles and The Penalty starring Lon Chaney Sr. as Blizzard, a legless criminal mastermind. Both exploited an urban milieu, both mingled scenes of ordinary life and sordid underworld spaces, both featured sadistic scenes of mayhem performed by men whose outward ugliness mirrored their

177 Manly Faces Figure 4.10 Bert Longworth: Lon Chaney Sr. as Erik in The Phantom of the Opera, Hollywood, Univer- sal Pictures, November 15, 1925.

inner deformity. The alternation of daylight and shadow, bourgeoisie tidiness with squalor became conventional features of the narrative and visual worlds of the genre. Longworth in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phan- tom of the Opera (1925) pushed beyond these conventions. First, he made the weird sufficiently sublime to seem beautiful as well as strange. The widely reproduced still of the phantom descending the stair of the opera house during the masquerade in which the public sports masks and he walks undisguised confronts the spectator with the splendid interest of the phantom’s grimace while the gawking maskers lining the stairs communicate the unimagina- tiveness of their disguises. Taken from an angle below that of the phantom, he seems truly a creature striding down upon one from some macabre legend of death incarnate. The hand on his heart, the traditional gesture of sincerity,

178 Chapter Four Figure 4.11 Jack Freulich: Conrad Veidt as Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs, Hollywood, Universal Pictures, November 4, 1928. Jack P. Pierce was the Universal makeup artist who prepared Veidt’s face. Film Stills Collection TC021, Manuscripts Division, Firestone Library, Princeton University. Photograph courtesy of Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University. seems touchingly candid. Only the still’s spectator, not those displayed in the scene, knows the irony of the entrance: that only the rules of masquerade, art, and fiction enable his deformity to be bearable to those around him—more than bearable—fascinating. Longworth loved to confront the grotesque individual with the mass of humanity and visually describe the agitations that result. Freulich, in contrast, loved to contemplate the individual in isolation. Yet he, and the other purvey- ors of gothic imagery during the later 1920s, learned from Longworth, particularly adding the tincture of allure to the grotesque rather than presenting the merely repulsive. Universal’s The Man Who Laughs (1928) starring Conrad Veidt occasioned Freulich’s most brilliant work in grotesquery. As Gwynplaine, the son of nobleman who is disfigured at the cruel behest of King James II, Conrad Veidt plays a clown whose smile has been carved onto his face. Fighting the machinations of a the king’s evil jester, and the qualms of his own conscience in loving the blind ward of the carnival, Gwynplaine is the least familiar of Universal’s humane monsters, the link between the phantom of the opera and Frankenstein’s creature. Freulich in one of his greatest male portraits captured the mixture of repulsiveness and attractiveness in the clown. Longworth, after his photographs forPhantom of the Opera made him a celebrity in Hollywood’s publicity departments, decided to join the phalanx of cameramen being recruited by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer upon its consolidation in 1925. Longworth reckoned that Jack Freulich was grooming his son to be the chief production photographer at Universal. Then, too, Lon Chaney Sr., the star of Universal’s macabre masterpieces, had been signed by MGM. Chaney, always fascinated by still photography, urged Longworth to come to MGM to shoot his features. Unfortunately Longworth walked into MGM’s Culver City compound just as Clarence Sinclair Bull determined that system would rule all aspects of the still department. Longworth’s idiosyncrasies—his striped flannel pants, his obsessive monitoring of the stock market’s fluctuations, his practical jokes and publicity gimmicks—did not sit well with the businesslike Bull. Bull assigned Longworth to work with director Tod Browning as part of the crew that did Chaney’s pictures. Since these did not occupy all of Long- worth’s contracted time, Bull consigned him to work on the most formulaic genre of motion picture still photography—romance pictures. Pensive loner shots, “two-shots” of lovers tête-à-tête, “three-shots” with the rival interpos- ing between the two, frustrated lover shots amid a sea of humanity, and worldly men and women conversing. Bull slotted Longworth to shootThe Torrent, the feature being manufactured for the newest foreign screen sensation (another in the sequence that included Anna Q. Nilsson, Pola Negri, Vilma Banky, and Greta Nissen), a young Swedish actress named Greta Garbo. Longworth lucked onto the gravy train. He knew what to do once he saw that he was photographing a world historical talent. He took the most hackneyed of romance

180 Chapter Four Figure 4.12 Bert Longworth: John Gilbert and Greta Gar- bo as Leo von Harden and Felicitas in Flesh and the Devil, Hollywood, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, January 9, 1927. One of the very few stills known by a name: “The Lovers.” still formats, the two-shot, and began exploring its formal potentials, demonstrating that the negative space between lovers could be poetically eloquent, and that contact could transport people into a selfless privacy. In two-shot after two-shot Longworth captured Garbo and Antonio Moreno, or John Gil- bert, or Ramon Novarro, in eloquent scenes of conjunction. The famous still, “The Lovers,” from Flesh and the Devil became the iconic still of the silent era, cited by critics as the greatest publicity photograph of early American cinema. Yet others were nearly as eloquent. While Longworth generated his memorable clinches, he also exposed multitudes of negatives of scenes from the Chaney pictures—The Blackbird, The Road to Mandalay, Tell It to the Marines, Mr. Wu, The Unknown, and Mockery— from peculiar perspectives, irritating Bull and exhausting all of the goodwill his Garbo images generated in the publicity department. After Garbo’s third feature, Longworth was pulled as still photographer, and Milton Brown installed in his place. Bull made it clear that there would be no future for someone who did not abide by the company protocols. Longworth abandoned MGM heading to Warner Brothers/First National, then building the most artistic camera department in Hollywood. In the experimental atmosphere of the Warner shop, he perfected his multi-image montage shots of the sound musicals that made Warner’s reputation. He indulged his penchant for angles and devised a ground-glass focusing mechanism for his camera that acted as a precisely accurate viewfinder, a necessity when setting up shots with nonnormal perspective.18 He also developed a talent for shooting “candids”—stars lounging by home pools in their swimsuits. Throughout the 1930s Warner Brothers permitted him to shoot glamour portraiture as well as stills. His reputation as the quintessential Hollywood photographer solidified in 1931 when Norman Krasna based the character of Snitz Gumble, publicity photographer, on Longworth, in his successful Broadway farce Louder Please, a dramatic satire of film publicity offices.19 At MGM Longworth’s influence did not go unregistered. Longworth’s playful treatment of distorted shadows, his manner of using angles to give architecture a dynamic and menacing quality, and his penchant for irrational lighting would be taken up by Wallace Chewning in the later Lon Chaney features, including the memorable and lost vampire classic London after Midnight. Lazlo Willinger a decade later would revive the antic shadow play in stills. Longworth’s experiments in montage found an ardent admirer in the young

Figure 4.13 Wallace Chewning: Lon Chaney Sr. and Edna Tichenor as Prof. Edward C. Burke and Luna the Bat Girl in London after Midnight, Hollywood, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, December 17, 1927. All of Bert Longworth’s signature elements—angles, irrational lighting, and the characterization of elements of architecture—can be found in Chewning’s image.

182 Chapter Four

Ted Allan, who in the 1930s began his own montage series at MGM when not shooting portraits of Jean Harlow. At Universal, Longworth’s way with the macabre would influence Roman Freulich, who shot the moody, poignant stills for Frankenstein. Meanwhile, Jack Freulich in the sound era created his own Frankenstein, retooling still photographer Ray Jones into the monster who would take over his style and job as chief of Universal’s portrait studio. Jones (1892–1967) began his career in photography as a teenage lab technician in the Drysdale-Perry Photographic Studio in Superior, Wisconsin, as a camera assistant, retoucher, developer, and printer. Growing restive at the lack of opportunity, the ambitious twenty-three-year-old headed to Holly- wood looking for fame.20 He arrived at a moment when Mack Sennett had determined that contracting out the photographic work on his features would be more economical than keeping photographers on salary. Jones and Edwin B. Hesser worked a concession, with Jones providing stills and Hesser performers’ portraits. Making less than eighty-five dollars a week, Jones shopped his skills around town, contracting jobs at Paramount, Goldwyn (as backup for James Manatt), and finally at Fox where he worked with Carl Dial on lesser grade pictures. Jack Freulich in 1930 traveled to Europe to visit his relations and was distressed by the conditions he saw. He worried that he would have to make repeated visits in the coming years to keep his relatives afloat. He determined to hire an assistant to work in the portrait gallery to cover his absences—not someone with an already established style, but someone used to the studio system, industrious, yet relatively unformed. Ray Jones, though lacking a high school diploma, had a broad range of practical experience, a personality blessedly free of neuroses, and an extraordinary curiosity. Freulich had little inkling of the limitless capacity of that curiosity. His assistant absorbed every lesson of the master and, in the privacy of his own laboratory, improved the formulas. Jones’s eyes could pry the secrets of any other camera artist’s technique, replicate it, and remake it for himself. Within two years his skills had improved to the point of impressing the people at Fox, who hired him to head the stills department. Ray Jones had a singular capacity to inspire trust in crusty studio executives. There was something about his dark, manly, conservatively styled appearance, his open face, and his midwestern calm and efficiency that suggested he could manage great things. Among colleagues, the elegance of his stills inspired envy. His work on Cecile B. DeMille’s 1934 epic Cleopatra, starring Claudette Colbert, became something of a benchmark for effective still imagery. In 1936, when Laemmle sold Universal to an investment group, the new regime cleared out the eastern European Jews in the organization. Freulich was

184 Chapter Four Figure 4.14 Ray Jones: Zita Johann, The Mummy, Hollywood, Universal Pictures, 1932. fired and Ray Jones installed in his place as chief of still and portrait photography. At fifty-six, Freulich was an ancient man in a city besotted with youth. He regarded the Universal pogrom as part of a global assault on Jewry. Dispir- ited, lacking the Zionist zeal of Roman or the absorption in technology and technique of Henry, Freulich fell into profound depression. He decided under the circumstances that there was only one personal statement left to make. He killed himself. It was little consolation to a conscience poisoned by studio injustice and horrified by Hitler’s growing power in Europe that his approach toward the representation of men had been embraced by photographers in every studio in Hollywood. Clarence Sinclair Bull and Virgil Apger had followed the Freulich model to vest Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, and Humphrey Bogart with a magnetism beyond prettiness. There was little comfort in knowing that he had enabled his brother and son to become photographic artists in the industry. Little satisfaction in having fostered the talent of the greatest photographic innovator in motion picture still photographer, Bert Long- worth, and personally trained one of the very greatest technicians, Ray Jones. Jack Freulich died holding fast to one truth: history is not kind. I do not doubt that he would have laughed sardonically to have learned that his hard-earned credit—his signature—had been regularly mistaken after his death for that of his brother, Roman Freulich, by dealers and collectors of Hollywood memorabilia.

186 Chapter Four 5 The Dying Photographer and the New Woman

Few still artists during the 1910s could lay claim to genius. Those who did possessed a clairvoyant ability to capture the visual style of a visionary director or art director. Usually a symbiotic relationship existed with the still photographer serving as the lens of one particular creator— John Van den Broek with Maurice Tourneur, James E. Woodbury with D. W. Griffith, Donald Biddle Keyes with Thomas Ince. In 1921 a still man emerged in Hollywood who captured the radically different visual worlds of two visionary film artists simultaneously: actress Alla Nazimova and director Rex Ingram. His name was Arthur Rice. He shot only four films, all for Metro—two for Nazimova; two for Ingram. His stills for these features have a peculiar piquancy, a power to distill the visual character of moving picture scenes in single cogent images. Some Rice stills became icons, pictures so resonant that they determined how subsequent men, women, and situations would be pictured: Valentino in gaucho garb leaning insouciantly against the cellar wall of a tango parlor in Four Horse- men of the Apocalypse. Alla Nazimova as Camille trailing her floral mantle through an art deco Paris, or cradling Valentino’s head in a modern boudoir.

187 Figure 5.1 [Arthur Rice]: Rudolph Valentino as Julio Desnoyers in The Four Horsemen of the Apoca- lypse, Los Angeles, Metro Pictures Corporation, 1921. The gaucho possessed all of the macho of the cowboy, yet a tincture of style that was novel and European. The cant of the hat, the cock of the hip, the cigarette, and the gaze radiated a kind of intensity that would burst forth on the scene in the tango. Frozen in a still, Valentino presents a new male icon, fancier, more temperamental, more expressive than the matinee idols of the day. Figure 5.2 arthur Rice: Alla Nazimova as Marguerite Gautier in Camille, Los Angeles, Metro Pictures Corporation, September 26, 1921. The art nouveau camellias on the gown, designed by Rambova, suggest how self-conscious the image branding of the creative team on the movie was. Widely published in newspapers, this became Rice’s most popular portrait of Nazimova. Courtesy of Ralph DeLuca. Rice’s virtuosity appears in his confidant handling of a disparity of visual styles: the queer artifice ofSalome, the straight naturalism of the drawing rooms scenes in The Conquering Power, the crowd scenes and battles ofFour Horsemen, the bedroom intimacy of much of Camille. With the exception of Ingram’s Four Horsemen, these movies did not manifest the genius of the still images. Rice edited out the visual and conceptual faults of the motion pictures. The spasmodic antics of the dwarf band providing accompaniment to Salome’s dance have been halted, as has the clownish mugging of Herodias as he savors the show. Ingram’s The Conquering Power suffered from overdepen- dence on title cards to convey its story (a loose adaptation of Balzac’s novel Eugenie Grandet) and too frequent use of close-ups to register shifts in the characters’ moods.1 In Rice’s stills we see the subtlety of lighting and visual arrangement and read the dynamic of emotional conflict without caption. Nazi- mova’s ultra-modern Camille rewrote the classic tragedy so that the heroine’s histrionics eclipsed the plot. Rudolph Valentino was relegated to a secondary attraction in a film whose central conflict became the rivalry between interior design and Nazimova for the viewer’s attention.2 Rice’s stills restored the some sense of dramatic interaction between characters with their emphasis on two- shots and multiple-character scenes. Who was Arthur F. Rice? Why did he shoot only four films? How did he come into this network of talents working at Metro in Hollywood? What elevated him aesthetically above the ranks of other still men in the wake of World War I? To measure Arthur F. Rice’s originality, we must see how he exceeded the visions of Nazimova and Rex Ingram, both artists of extraordinary visual ability. While visual extravagance became a hallmark of 1920 Hollywood, too often directors opted for garish vulgarity rather than brilliant style. Orna- mental Orients and baubled ballrooms crammed props, costumes, and festooned bodies in miscellaneous panoramas of exotica and simulated wealth. Few in the 1920s could combine Tourneur’s stylistic tact and DeMille’s optic zest. Alla Nazimova did. She took from DeMille his costume designer for The Woman Whom God Forgot, the dancer-designer Natacha Rambova, to supply visual audacity.3 Nazimova derived her exacting sense of style from her training in the Moscow Art Theatre, a training remarkably parallel in its aesthetic experimentalism to Tourneur’s in the Parisian theater. Of all the movie stills produced in the 1920s, those for Alla Nazimova’s 1922 proto art deco experiment Salome may be the most arrestingly stylish. They borrowed the art nouveau sinuousness of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s provocative scriptural drama.4 Some features of Beardsley’s linear style dictated features of costume and decor. Nazimova’s spectacular peacock gown derived directly from an illustration, The Peacock Dance. But Rambova crafted

190 Chapter Five Figure 5.3 arthur Rice: Alla Nazimova and Rudolph Valentino, 1920, in Camille. While art directors had experimented since 1918 with inventing novel interiors for drawing room dramas, no one had suc- cessfully visualized so thoroughly and radically novel a decorative scheme as Rambova, who reacted to the rectilinearity of mission style with circles and curves, and made the electric light a badge of modernity

a more geometric, textured world—metallic rather than floral in its features. At the center of this world loomed a singularly strange Salome lacking the passion of Gertrude Hoffman or the terpsichorean deftness of Maude Allen who galvanized the stage with their performances of the character. Nazimo- va’s Salome was oddly waifish—not the writhing princess with whom Richard Strauss had galvanized the musical theater world in 1905–7.5 This strangely

191 The Dying Photographer and the New Woman Figure 5.4 [Alvin Wyckoff]: Geraldine Farrar, Raymond Hatton, WalterL ong, and Theodore Kosloff as Tecza, Montezuma, Taloc, and Guatemoco, The Woman God Forgot, Hollywood, Artcraft Pictures Corporation, October 28, 1917. Natacha Rambova’s costumes vest the Aztec royals with exoticism. Dancer Kosloff attempted to claim credit for the costumes prepared by his dancer protégé, Rambova, but the truth came out.

desexualized gamin in a crisp blonde wig inhabited an audaciously artificial, static material world. The stills capture a radically stylish place, arresting ritual gestures in a series of handsome tableaux. They have a dignity entirely lacking in the movie, which seems kitschy in its affectedness. In motion, Salome’s dance, with its shrugging shoulders and backward leaning, lacks the dreadful grace needed to convince an audience that a king would sacrifice a life to witness it; instead it is cutesy and spasmodic. Yet frozen in moments of gesture, the dance seems hieratic and strange. Nazimova was responsible for hiring Arthur Rice. She was the one person in Hollywood who had firsthand knowledge of his ability. Scholars of still photography have long puzzled about his background and how he came to work

192 Chapter Five Figure 5.5 arthur Rice: Alla Nazimova as the title character in Salome, Hollywood, Nazimova Produc- tions, February 15, 1923. One mark of Rice’s personal connection with Nazimova is his consenting to shoot stills for this independent production after Nazimova split from Metro. The peacock gown had been copied directly by Rambova from the Aubrey Beardsley illustration from the published version of Oscar Wilde’s play.

in Hollywood. In Masters of Starlight, the editors could do little more than wonder at who he was: “Born near the East Coast. Apart from a brief period, 1921–1922, spent working in Hollywood, very little is known about the life of Arthur Rice. . . . In 1922 he left Hollywood and returned to either the East Coast or Toronto.”6 In 1922, he did leave for the east—New York City to be exact—in a cof- fin. The sixty-five-year-old photographer had expired of a disease on April 17, 1922, probably lung cancer, that had driven him from New York to Califor- nia in the first place. The four masterworks that Rice photographed were the final testament of a dying artist. Alla Nazimova had in 1921 persuaded Rice to take up his camera for a final exercise in artistry. Only Nazimova had enough

193 The Dying Photographer and the New Woman charisma to persuade Rice to interrupt his ultimately futile attempt at recu- peration in the California sun. No performer on the American stage in 1915 inspired more critical respect than the Russian actress Alla Nazimova. Trained in the troupe of the Moscow Art Theatre, Nazimova introduced Ibsen’s heroines to the American theatrical public.7 A feminist, a Jewess, a political radical, and an artist with great intensity of conviction, Nazimova in no way approximated any of the forms of feminine glamour that peopled the stage, the resorts, and the world of advertisements. Too short, serious, and discomposed to be a Gibson Girl; too intellectual to be a sex goddess of the Evelyn Nesbit sort; too lacking in patrician grace to be an aristocrat beauty, an Elsie Ferguson—regardless, on the stage she incarnated power, an ability to communicate the peculiar passions that drove Hedda Gabler and the very different Nora inThe Doll’s House. Her voice was warmly magnetic, her command of gesture unequalled in her generation of performers. Because Nazimova radiated a new kind of ethos, one electric with the ambition and anxiety of early twentieth-century white womanhood, she exerted a particular fascination for members of her sex. Like Bette Davis in the 1930s and 1940s, Nazimova became a figure who provoked markedly different reactions in male and female audiences, perhaps because she so audaciously incarnated “the new woman.” The new woman embodied the aspirations of a newly emergent educated class of women at the end of the nineteenth century. She celebrated her intellectual attainments, sought employment in positions that enable economic independence and stimulation, championed passionate sexuality and companionable equality with male partners, and sought a voice in politics and culture. Putting aside old norms of status and social interaction, she proved a controversial figure. In her literary manifestations, she often appeared torn between goals, sacrificing love for career or career for political significance. It is curious that in the performing arts the new woman, when she finally did march triumphantly across the American stage elbowing her way through the crowd of girls, had to be foreign, had to wear the mantle of “an artist,” had to incarnate a non-American repertoire in an accent.8 The new woman did not come from our town. To read some of Nazimova’s literary admirers, she did not come from our species. The poetic raptures in the magazines had a mas- ochistic tinge. Alla was always a fatal beast woman of the sort that fascinated the romantic poets and were revived in the femme fatales of the British aes- thetes of the 1890s9—a lamia shedding her snakeskin for female form, or some modernized belle dame sans merci:

Her sunken train a serpent seems, Her scarf, a spider’s snare;

194 Chapter Five The mystic wreathings of the Smoke United to beckon where This dark enchantress of the East Seems fashioned to decoy The most elusive man of all And make of him a boy.10

The personae was drawn from the symbolist repertoire, a misapprehension, given Nazimova’s own marked naturalism at the time. Some male intellectuals needed a succubus to incarnate feminine power. So, the Nazimova of 1913’s Bella Donna became the first vamp to trouble the popular imagination—two years before Theda Bara rendered the female vampire iconic on screen inA Fool There Was. We should not lose sight of the theatrical genealogy of the vamp out of the stage new woman. Nazimova (she became one of the few very single name attractions) expressed her ambition by assuming the powers of direction and decor in the productions in which she appeared. Her sole weakness lay in an inability to recognize among contemporary American plays those that might provide appropriate vehicles for her talent. Once she became contracted to manager Charles Frohman, a man not greatly enamored of the angst and sexual politics of European dramatic literature, this weakness came to the fore. When Frohman cast Nazimova in a hit, such as Bella Donna, she became bored with its conventional action and absence of intellectual struggle. When she had something made to order, such as That Sort, the public would stay away. This artistic impasse was finally broken on January 25, 1915, when she premiered as a headline vaudeville feature a short (thirty-five-minute) one-act pacifist drama, War Brides,11 at the Palace Theater in New York City. Playing a mother who had lost a husband and two brothers in battle, Nazimova’s character de- fies a government directive that women breed more children to people the army. She organizes a resistance and finally commits suicide rather than obey the state. World War I gave the play’s pacifism the thrill of controversy. Nazi- mova’s commitment to the character gave the message human immediacy. It and she enjoyed a huge critical and popular success.12 Lewis J. Selznick, the motion picture producer, wished to further the play’s success. He offered Nazimova thirty thousand dollars to film the one act. To sweeten the deal, he offered his most successful director, Herbert Brenon, to superintend the production. Brenon invited Nazimova to preview his latest release, A Daughter of the Gods. While Nazimova watched, Annette Kellerman splashed in a sylvan pool in nothing but her long tresses. Afterward, Keller- man ambled through a sylvan dell in a leisurely naturist promenade. Nazi- mova, a sexual adventurer with a growing penchant toward lesbianism, was delighted in the audacious nudity. She agreed to act her first movie.

195 The Dying Photographer and the New Woman War Brides, the movie, elicited strong critical approval and good box office during its one month of release. Upon the United States’ entry into World War I in May 1917, Selznick pulled it from circulation. Oddly, he did not follow up this promising project with a similar feature. Perhaps he believed Nazimova’s controversial politics might make her box office poison during wartime. Per- haps financial difficulties at the time distracted him. Nazimova returned to the theater until Maxwell Karger of Metro Pictures determined to make her the lead in a series of films. In summer of 1917, Metro was a bicoastal company with studios in New York and Southern California. It sent Nazimova to New Orleans for location shooting for Revelation, with husband Charles Bryant as male lead. The plot (model/prostitute dons the guise of the Madonna, performs miracles, then chooses a redemptive vocation as Red Cross nurse) permitted multiple costume changes and a range of attitudes from slut to saint. Nazimova seized the opportunity, making it a showcase of acting. The follow-up, Toys of Fate, marked her assumption of artistic control over her vehicles and the formation of a team, including screenwriter June Mathis, her husband Charles Bryant as male lead, and cinematographer Gene Gaudio. She would take all three to the West Coast, leaving only art director Ferdinand P. Earle behind. June Mathis, a woman with connections in the West Coast movie world, had a sharp eye for talent. She secured the services of Albert Capellani as director for Nazimova’s next feature. The capable Capellani, who had directed several important French features, would preside over two releases, Eye for Eye and Out of the Fog, before Nazimova’s desire to dictate conditions on the set led to his removal. Gene Gaudio, however, remained entrusted with capturing Nazimova, the film star, in moving pictures and stills until 1920. Gene Gaudio and his brother, Tony (one of the greatest of the early film cinematographers), trained in photography in their father’s portrait studio, before attending the University of Rome. The family moved to the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century. Gene became a chemical technician in one of the largest of the film manufacturing companies before being hired by a West Coast studio to oversee film processing. His abilities in every aspect of photography became known. In an age when cinematographers often proved unskilled at their task, Gene’s ability quickly manifested itself. His work on the 1916 science fiction classicTwenty-Thousand Leagues under the Sea caught Mathis’s eye, who had Metro hire him. Gaudio had an unusual ability to make set cities look authentic, not like carpenter knockoffs. The choice proved inspired. Critics noticed the atmospheric exteriors of Cape Cod in Out of the Fog. Even more striking were Gaudio’s scenes and stills for The Red Lantern, the wildly popular story of half sisters in China, one Euro and one Asian, during the Boxer Rebellion. Art director Henri Menessier had designed sumptuous sets and costumes with an imperial Chinese character. Gaudio’s

196 Chapter Five Figure 5.6 [Gene Gaudio]: Alla Nazimova and Harry Mann as Mahlee and Chung in The Red Lantern, Los Angeles, Metro Pictures Corporation, May 4, 1919. IMDb incorrectly lists Tony Gaudio as the cinematographer. Henri Messenier’s art direction and costuming made this the Orientalist spectacle of the immediate postwar period.

stills conveyed all of the texture of this imagined China and the volatile human dynamics of each key scene. Gene Gaudio died of appendicitis on the operating table in late 1920. His replacement by Rudolph Bergquist as cinematographer signaled a precipitous decline in the artistic surety of Nazimova’s releases. Her films had become increasingly odd, her husband’s acting increasingly perfunctory, and the audience response increasingly tepid. Karger had decreed that Nazimova must jettison her husband from the cast, that she must employ a recognized screenwriter on all films, and that she must select a subject that had box office potential. Her next choice—Aphrodite—would prove to be so kinky (in large measure

197 The Dying Photographer and the New Woman because of writer June Mathis whose connoisseurship of decadent sexuality had few equals in the film industry) that Karger pulled the plug and decreed that a classic box office winner,Camille, would be the story. Nazimova agreed, provided she could update the story. Nazimova had become fascinated with the costumer and designer Nata- cha Rambova, an ex-dancer in Kosloff’s Russian Imperial Ballet in Los Ange- les. Rambova had designed a dream sequence in Billions (1920), the last movie Gene Gaudio photographed, the segment of the picture that proved to have been visually most distinctive. Nazimova, with the aid of Rambova, began cultivating a new visual style—more aesthetic, daring, and artificial than any in films. She needed, however, the photographic talent that could show the world that Nazimova had moved to the cutting edge of movie art in spite of using the most traditional of dramatic vehicles. From someone Nazimova heard that Arthur J. Rice had come to Southern California to recover from a lung condition that had forced his retirement and trek westward. She coaxed the ailing sixty-five-year-old artist to pick up his camera. Rice had photographed Nazimova before, sometime in late 1915 or early 1916, in a candid sequence showing the actress in her New York apartment. The portraits appeared under the imprimatur of Campbell Studios. Na- zimova no doubt suggested that Rice, if he would shoot the stills, could do so under his own name. After making contact with Rice, Nazimova apparently told her confidant, screenwriter June Mathis, about the fortuitous appearance of one of New York’s veteran camera artists on the West Coast. Mathis then exercised one of her distinctive abilities, brokering talent. She had just written the screen adaptation of Ibanez’s novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse for director Rex Ingram, had arranged that the struggling actor-dancer Rudolph Valentino play a leading role, and was doing what she could to make the production a masterpiece of publicity as well as a screen tour de force. She convinced Rice to provide production stills for The Four Horsemen.

Arthur F. Rice

So, as the last acts of a long and interesting career, Arthur F. Rice documented the extravagant visual world of Alla Nazimova’s gay and lesbian film coterie in Los Angeles and Rex Ingram’s two film masterpieces starring Rudolph Val- entino. Though all four films play upon sexual crises and radiate European attitudes, they mark drastically different points on the horizon of visual artifice in early 1920s Hollywood. The stills are a curious and wonderful final testament for a man who was an all-American idealist, a progressive Repub- lican, a grown-up Boy Scout. Far from an urbane aesthete, Rice had been a vocal champion of American nature whose writings appeared regularly in Forest and Stream, Outing, and Boy’s Life from the 1890s into the 1910s.13 His

198 Chapter Five prose sketches had moments when the love of nature, a pictorial sensibility, and eroticism converged.

On the heart and in the brain of every man, country born, there is stamped the picture of some winding, wayward brook, threading its way through green meadows, tumbling down over the rocks, gurgling through rushes and flags, cool, sparkling, exhilarating. Its spirit is the boy’s spirit, but its music is that of a siren, drawing him along with its current, unresisting, and forgetful of all save present freedom and joyousness.14

There were some interesting cultural bridges between Nazimova’s religion of art and Rice’s religion of nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman fu- eled Rice’s love of the woods, and their radical libertarian and reformist impulses made Rice’s encounter with nature something vibrant with political, cultural, and erotic resonances. It made hunting and camp life sensate experiences in which one came to a fundamental physical self-possession. Photog- raphy could capture and hold the abundance of such moments of living, operating like Wordsworthian romantic poetry, as a means of revitalizing one’s powers dulled in city life. “The camera is . . . a most valuable adjunct to the camp outfit, enabling one to bring the woods and waters home with him, so to speak; giving to many a wild spot, where the foot of man has never trod, ‘a local habitation and a name’; furnishing endless themes for conversation and reminiscence, and incidentally revealing some of the facts and secrets of the wilderness to skeptical friends whose experience of the woods consists of viewing it from the porches of the big hotels.”15 For Rice the camera was an instrument of intensification, and a counterforce to the passivity of those whose life had the distance of skepticism, indifference, or amused spectation. Nature (a naturist nature of physical celebration, sensitivity, vivacity, and primal perception) operated for the photographer in a way curiously analogous to art for Nazimova and her Hollywood colleagues. Still, it is difficult to conceive of artists’ lives more different than those of Rice and Nazimova. Arthur F. Rice sprang healthy, vibrant, and strong out of the forehead of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was the whole man incarnate, born in Springfield, Vermont, into a family that encouraged self-expression. He attended Dartmouth College, distinguished himself as a writer, winning the Grimes Prize for English Composition upon graduation, yet avoided the reputation of a grind. His classmates elected him the chronicler of their year (1882). In sports, he excelled at trapshooting, earning a national ranking in his junior year. With diploma in hand, he chose not to tie himself to a desk, but trekked to the woods of northern Michigan to labor as a lumberjack in a logging camp to know hard work personally. After his year in the camps, he signed on as a junior executive with the Erie Railroad, a company heavily

199 The Dying Photographer and the New Woman involved in coal transport in the Northeast. He studied the coal business as he studied literature and wood life, left the railroad in 1885 to set up as a whole- sale coal dealer.16 He quickly became a model businessman of the progressive sort, making sure that the environmental impact of the mining and railroad building were minimized while his profits were maximized. In 1890 he entered the republic of letters as a rustic philosopher in the Emersonian mode, offering samples of “Green Mountain Philosophy” to readers of Century Magazine. His pieces hymned the strenuous life and the sanctity of the wilderness. He excoriated market gunning and commercial clear-cutting of the woods, while championing traditional hunting, including hounding and jack shooting deer. In 1898 he was elected secretary of the League of American Sportsman, a national organization promoting the uniform enforcement of game laws and the restraint of market gunning.17 An admirer of Roosevelt and Interior Secretary Gifford Pinchot, Rice became one of the conspicuous early conservationists Rice’s engagement with photography took place as an adjunct to his literary celebrations of camp life. He described the woods pictorially and began capturing on film the scenes he invoked on paper. Because Campbell Art Com- pany was heavily involved in the scenic postcard trade, its founder, Alfred S. Campbell, became aware of the photographer-businessman who stalked New England’s woods. In 1902 Campbell convinced Rice to join his firm as vice president. Rice consented, set up an office in the Flatiron Building in New York City where he managed Campbell’s huge photography studio while brokering coal. Concurrently, he served as the commissioner of the Coal Merchant’s Associa- tion for New York and proved instrumental in staving off a heating disaster when miners struck and during the coal shortages caused by war demand in 1917–18. His communications about coal addressed to the citizens of New York appeared regularly in the pages of the New York Times during his term as commissioner. In 1910, Campbell named Rice president of Campbell Art Company. Campbell Art Company was founded by English-born Alfred S. Campbell (1840–1912) in Elizabethtown, NJ, in spring of 1871.18 While Campbell probably envisioned Arthur Rice as building upon the popular scenic views and genre studies lines produced by the company, Rice took the business in another direction. He saw that substantial money was being made by New York City portrait galleries, so encouraged the opening of a city branch of the business under the artistic direction of William A. Morand, whose father, George Henry Morand, worked with Arthur Campbell in the early 1870s. He also hired Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr. Rice won repute among the progressive wing of New York’s fine arts community in 1913 when he attacked Anthony Comstock’s attempts to censor the public display of reproductions of Paul Chabas’s September Morning, a painting of a nude woman. Though the image was sentimental fluff, the principle mattered, particularly because of the campaign to aestheticize nudity by

200 Chapter Five America’s physical culturists. Their motto: “The Body Beautiful!” Writing as president of Campbell Art Company to the New York Times, Rice went after Comstock with fists flying. Rice’s own Emersonian libertarianism gave him no patience for paternalist protectors of a citizenry equipped to think and act for themselves. Given Nazimova’s own intense aesthetic and erotic interest in the display of female flesh, Rice’s defense probably registered. One notes that Na- zimova’s photographic portraitist of choice in New York switched from Her- man Mishkin and White Studio to Campbell Studios. Nazimova and Rice shared an interest in physical culture and exercise for women. Rice had contributed an article to Field and Stream on the physical benefits of women taking to the woods and fields; it celebrated the idea of a companionable salubriousness of health and thought among men and women. Nazimova became a physical culture adept to hold at bay the physical effects of aging. Like many of the other progressive women of theater and dance, she was drawn to the utopian ambitions of the movement.

The Young King

Rex Ingram (Reginald Ingram Montgomery Hitchcock) was an undergraduate at Yale when Rice tussled with Comstock in the pages of the New York Times. Circumstances would force him to withdraw before receiving his BA as a member of the class of 1914. Son of a professor at Trinity College Dub- lin, Ingram had attended college there before coming to the United States for a degree in fine arts in 1911. A talented sculptor and painter, he enrolled as an undergraduate at Yale University, supporting himself by working as a railroad checker at the New Haven station while apprenticing in sculptor Lee Oscar Lawrie’s atelier at Yale. He also worked briefly for Augustus St. Gaudens. Sometime in autumn 1913 Ingram trekked to New Jersey to view the old Edison studio. “Within a week he was writing scenarios, and within two he was acting. In a month, he was . . . ‘telling the other directors they didn’t know a thing about the business.’”19 He dropped out of college. His experience in the artists’ studios prompted Edison director Van Dyke Brooke to cast him as one of the bohemians in The Artist’s Great Madonna, an artists and models drama. Using the cognomen “Rex Hitchcock,” he spent much of 1914 working as a supporting actor in fifteen releases for the Edison and Vitagraph Companies. He grasped that he would be a second-rank performer at best; he preferred being a first-rank film writer, so shifted professions and companies in early 1915, becoming a scenarist for William Fox. By 1916, Ingram became convinced that he had more taste, a better grasp of the art of story-telling, and a clearer notion of how to make moving pictures than anyone he had met in the business. He wrote, produced, and directed The Great Problem for Bluebird

201 The Dying Photographer and the New Woman Pictures, a subsidiary of Universal. He was twenty-four years old. Once he had experienced the total control of a production, it became his desideratum ever after. He haggled, cajoled, threatened, and did everything in his power to secure this for fifteen years in an industry that increasingly discouraged autonomy of action. Ingram’s work bringing to screen Shore Acres, the sturdy James Herne play about fraternal rivalry, convinced the money men at Metro Pictures to bankroll something big. Ingram had made a commonplace conflict gripping through an atmospheric presentation of the coasts of Maine, the action’s setting. Ingram had a first-order cinematographer in John Sietz. But his own genius for laying out action in visual terms marked him as gifted even in the bleary eyes of Richard Rowland, Metro’s chief. Rowland had with the prompt- ing of Metro’s head scenarist, June Mathis, given Ingram the go-ahead to direct a prestige picture, an adaptation of Vicente Blasco Ibañez’s novel about the world war, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a work whose complexity had convinced other studio heads to declare the book unfilmable. Rowland called in June Mathis to work the novel into a scenario. Mathis, like Nazimova and Ingram, deserves a moment of explanation. Born in Lead- ville, Colorado, in 1892, she was exactly the same age as Ingram. She went on stage as a girl, supporting her widowed mother by circulating through the western vaudeville circuits before securing a place as the ingenue in the touring company of the greatest cross-dressing performer of the American stage, Julian Eltinge. Her career as a writer began with Eltinge, composing a number of his vehicles. Eltinge had shown an interest in moving pictures as early as 1914, thinking the medium the future of entertainment. He convinced Mathis that she should concentrate on her writing, get off the touring circuit into one of the compounds being constructed on the West Coast. Mathis made her de- but as a writer in 1916 after unsuccessfully attempting to win a scenario contest sponsored by Metro. Life on the circuits had equipped her with a work ethic, and the demands of refreshing vaudeville sketches, a capacity to generate plots and situations rapidly. She broke in by doing adaptations and found that tailoring stories to particular Metro actresses won her powerful allies. Her first champion was Mabel Taliaferro, then Viola Dana, and finally Nazimova. Mathis had two talents. She could churn out scenarios full of hooks that drew in the largely female viewing audience of feature films, giving even stock situations in obvious plots edge by pushing the psychology of the characters’ interactions into pathology. She could charm other talented people into working and associating with her. She admired talent extravagantly and judged mere competence as too contemptible for comment. She cultivated the talented and sought to bring persons of genius together in collaborations. By the end of the 1910s there was no better networker. She had complete trust in a handful of people—Nazimova and Ingram were two. When Nazimova com-

202 Chapter Five mended Rice’s talent, Mathis conveyed the sentiment to the fussy Rex Ingram who was seeking someone who could work with John Sietz in capturing the vision Ingram intended to create. The most insightful of the critics got what Ingram intended, a visually conceived set of events more energetic and potent than the individual performances of its actors. “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse . . . is . . . chiefly distinguished by its cinematography, with the emphasis on the composition of its moving

Figure 5.7 arthur Rice: Rudolph Valentino as Julio Desnoyers in The Four Horsemen of the Apoca- lypse, Los Angeles, Metro Pictures Corporation, 1921. A rare Rice close-up head shot. Figure 5.8 arthur Rice: Rudolph Valentino as Julio Desnoyers in The Four Horsemen of the Apoca- lypse, Los Angeles, Metro Pictures Corporation, 1921. War weariness and disillusionment frame the grizzled visage of Desnoyers.

pictures rather than on the pantomime of its players. . . . Rex Ingram, who directed this production, applied principles of painting and sculpture to his work, with the result that ‘The Four Horsemen’ contains some of the best examples of pictorial beauty and unity to be found on the screen.”20 Ingram composed his visuals both statically and dynamically. While Rice in his stills could exploit Ingram’s tendency to frame interior scenes with perimeter features that drew the eye toward the intended focus, he could not convey the dynamic movement of persons and objects through the extensive spatial fields that

204 Chapter Five Ingram evoked. No director of the early 1920s could convey the palpability of space through movement of characters as well as Ingram, a skill that he managed in long shots as well as medium range and close-in action. Rice created a still analogy, showing persons moving, mid-gesture, mid-expression. Even static figures possess a psychological potentiality that makes a close-up head on face seem to loom forward. Two face-front depictions of Valentino as Julio Desnoyers, one the brash and vain gaucho and the other the battle-bruised veteran and patriot of the world war, communicate his transformation of character while projecting two distinct sorts of charisma. Rice made no use of camera trickery in his stills—no radical angles, no soft-focus lens, no dramatic close-ups. His lighting borrowed from that of the sets. Yet no other photographer of 1921 consistently has stills so well composed, so attuned to communicating characters involved in their motives and expressive of their inner lives. Even in The Conquering Power, Ingram’s film of the human costs of greed, the domestic scenery and well-groomed parks never appear as commonplace surroundings. Both the film and the stills display a naturalism, a verisimilitude that made contemporary viewers remark on its realism. Painter-photographer Charles Albin wrote to the New York Times lauding the triumph of realism over reelism.

The Conquering Power [is] a perfectly consistent and amazing exhibition of the most glorious photography and lighting the screen has ever known. . . . Without resort to the idiotic fuzziness, whereby many a fool director or cameraman imagines that he produces an “artistic shot,” this cameraman has achieved a most beautiful waxiness, if I may use the word, never sacrificing essential sharpness. In his interiors he has produced masterpieces of lighting, pure and simple. He has subordinated background detail, emphasized his main groups, with blazing halos of sunshine “through the ceiling” (back lighting). For one thing he has made the light appear to enter the rooms from the windows as it should.21

The felicities of lighting worked out by cinematographer John F. Sietz receive an emphatic punctuation in Rice’s stills. The atmosphere of the interior creates a mood envelope for the psychic crisis being experienced by the individual characters. The character stills of Ralph Lewis playing Père Grandet display particularly the emotional engagement in role that only the finest screen actors of the 1920s manifested—no mugging, no telegraphic gestures, no direct address of the camera. Instead—tact, engagement in the dramatic moment, authenticity. It is against this authenticity and visual tact that the artificiality and invention of Rice’s stills for Nazimova’s Salome should be judged—the two bodies of imagery having been formed at virtually the same time. Nazimova, under the

205 The Dying Photographer and the New Woman Figure 5.9 arthur Rice: Ralph Lewis as Père Grandet in The Conquering Power, Los Angeles, Metro Pictures Corporation, July 8, 1921. influence of Rambova, completely abandoned any aspiration to virtuoso verisimilitude. No reconstructing ancient Palestine, no researching Hebraic dress. Rambova used Rome as an excuse to design fantasia togas and to dress guards in pearls the size of golf balls, black tights, metal hats shaped like thimbles, and metal armbands. Salome, because of its gay and lesbian genesis (Nazimova confessed the enterprise was an homage to Oscar Wilde), has been viewed as an early expression of camp sensibility, an outré ceremony of decorative gestures that subverts the religious pretext of the story and even the drama of sexual pathology offered by Wilde. Its stylization fascinated contemporary critics; its lack of emotional content nonplused the common moviegoer. Peo- ple stayed away in droves. Given the lack of normal motivation in characters’ behaviors, the motion picture suffers from odd lapses of taste and arbitrary expressions. To the eyes of the twenty-first century, these detract from the delights of the world being visualized. In Rice’s stills, however, the daring of Rambova’s project shines forth. Salome in its stills stands as the first instance of the triumph of the decorative over the scenic as the organizing aesthetic of the motion picture. Scenic worlds depended on their evocation of recogniz- able worlds. Ingram, the master of scenic visualization, built a French town in the California countryside and scoured all the old ranches in lower Cali- fornia before finding the Gilmore Homestead, a Hispanic hacienda that would become the ranch of Don Marcelo in the movie.22 Even the fanciful, fairy tale worlds that art designer Ben Carré designed for Maurice Tourneur’s The Blue Bird and Prunella had places—castles, haunted woods, and cottages—familiar to any reader of illustrated fairy tales. But the backgrounds in the stills for Sa- lome have no reference except their own patterned beauty. Furthermore, Ram- bova has costumed the characters so that they become subordinate elements in the decorative scheme. The effect is as radical as the expressionist decor in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which was enjoying its first American showing con- temporaneously with the release of Salome. These two movies would mark the two visual modes—terror and beauty—that decor would develop in the visual world of the cinematic 1920s in America.

Coda

Nazimova released Salome early in 1923. Rice’s remarkable stills began appearing in magazines and newspapers late in 1922, eight months after his death. Rambova married Rudolph Valentino and imposed the same tyranny of style over Valentino’s features—The Young Rajah, The Hooded Falcon, and Mon- sieur Beaucaire. The stills, by Donald Biddle Keyes,23 possessed the stylistic exu- berance of the sets and costumes, but little of the force of his contemporary work on The Covered Wagon, Within the Law, and The Voice from the Minaret. Too often Rambova’s sets lost the integrity of a decor by proliferating visual

207 The Dying Photographer and the New Woman details and becoming ornamental. After Valentino’s divorce from Rambova and his break with Paramount, he returned to the screen in The Eagle and The Son of the Sheik—both superior features in plot and visualization—publicized by suites of superior stills shot by Nealson Smith, A. W. Witzel’s old laboratory manager turned studio production photographer. Smith emerged as a photographic talent in the late 1920s, lensing the stills for Gary Cooper’s first starring performance, The Winning of Barbara Worth, and for the 1925 Marion Davies feature Zander the Great, boasting a decor by Joseph Urban of Ziegfeld Follies fame. Rex Ingram’s directorial career in the 1920s suffered the buffets of studio politics and the jealousy of Louis B. Mayer. Galled at the Metro-Goldwyn

Figure 5.10 [Fred Reynolds Morgan?]: Paris mob in Scaramouche, Los Angeles, Metro Pictures Cor- poration, February 1924. John F. Sietz, the cinematographer, had charge of lighting and setup of the visualizations of this motion picture.

208 Chapter Five decision not to let him direct Ben-Hur, he left the United States and set up a European outpost of MGM in Nice, France. Distance did not insulate him from the turmoil of dealing with an enemy in charge of distributing and publicizing one’s films. His releases were invariably visually arresting and the John F. Sietz cinematography as artful as any in the decade. But he became obsessive about exposition, so the pacing of his features—even the thriller Mare Nostrum— struck viewers as odd: too slow at first, and then when the plot kicked in, too manic. The stills from his Hollywood features, particularlyTrifling Woman and Scaramouche, communicate Ingram’s brilliance as a visualizer and Sietz’s as a director of photography. But the still images from the period of European exile for Mare Nostrum, The Magician, and The Garden of Allah were taken by coproducer Harry Lachman, manifest genius.

Figure 5.11 harry Lachman: Peter Wegener and Alice Terry as Oliver Haddo and Margaret Dauncey in The Magician, Nice, France, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, October 24, 1926. From the former Culver Service Collection. Lachman’s career as a photographer, fine artist, and motion picture director can scarcely be compassed in a paragraph. A Chicagoan, and an orphan at age six, he trained as an illustrator, and by his early 1920s had drawn the covers for the Saturday Evening Post and other national magazines. He practiced

Figure 5.12 Frank Powolny: Ensemble of the damned, 1934, Dante’s Inferno, Hollywood, Fox Film Corporation, August 23, 1935. A much more visually elaborate rendering of the afterlife than the silent spectacle of 1923. Harry Lachman, director. photography on the side and became so skilled at children’s portraiture that he became the favorite camera artist of the city elite. (He photographed Richard Loeb, son of Sears, Roebuck, & Co. Vice President Albert H. Loeb, some years before Richard and Nathan Leopold performed the most infamous thrill murder of the 1920s.) At age twenty-six, Lachman determined to go to Paris and train as a painter. He attended one art class in the city before heading out on his own to paint. He soon found himself in the circle of Renoir, Matisse, Ma- net, Modigliani, Bonnard, Utrillo, and Picasso. He became the most celebrated American modern painter in France in the early 1920s, decorated as a Cheva- lier of the Legion of Honor by the French government in 1922. Rex Ingram encountered him in 1925 at a moment when Lachman’s style had become passé and invited him to participate in the artistic end of moving making. Lachman said yes, and within six months he was running the MGM studio in Nice with three hundred employees. He did the stills for Ingram’s movies and brought a distinctive intensity of visualization to the images. In 1933, Fox Films enticed him to Hollywood to work as a motion picture director. One of his first projects, Baby Takes a Bow, made Shirley Temple an international star. His finest artistic statement as a director was 1935’s Dante’s Inferno. He worked closely with Frank Powolny so that the images of the underworld, echoing Gustave Dore’s famous illustrations of the poem, approached William Mortensen’s studio fantasy images of the same period for arresting strangeness. Lachman’s directorial career lasted into the mid-1940s. In the 1960s he returned to France to great acclaim and stimulated an enduring interest in his postimpressionist paintings. When Lachman died in Beverly Hills in 1975 he was celebrated by the movie and fine arts community. When Arthur Rice was interred in New York in 1922, the crowd who gathered at graveside was composed almost entirely of coal dealers and conservationists.

211 The Dying Photographer and the New Woman

6 Opium Dreams Ferdinand P. Earle and Visual Fantasy

When Alla Nazimova decided, after wrappingToys of Fare in 1918, to move her production team from New York to Los Angeles, she asked painter- poet Ferdinand P. Earle, who had written and illustrated the arresting title cards, to come work with her. “No,” he told her, “I’ve had a vision.”1 F

In December 1925, Antony Anderson, the principal art critic of the Los Angeles Times, attended a limited run engagement ofA Lover’s Oath, an Oriental fantasy starring Ramon Novarro based on the life of the medieval Persian poet Omar Khayyam. The film, cut and assembled by actor Milton Sills, seemed to Anderson a “desecration” of an earlier masterpiece, Omar Khayyam, that he had seen in 1921 in a private showing in Hollywood. That earlier work had been kept from public release by legal harassment, the machinations of megalomaniacal backers, and the “vituperation” of a cabal of Hollywood philistines jealous of the film’s creator, the “visionary” Ferdinand P. Earle. In his elegiac review of A Lover’s Oath, Anderson recalled witnessing Earle’s masterwork. “The film, uncut, unassembled, untitled, held us -en tranced for hours, a thing of amazing beauty, truly a moving picture, or rather an endless gallery of moving pictures, each more lovely than its

213 predecessor. Here was a Rembrandt in lights and darks, there a Corot in sylvan beauty of composition. For Earle had studied the masters, and he had incor- porated his knowledge in his work as a motion-picture director. He had shown himself to be a genius of the screen.”2 Even in its mutilated form Anderson reckoned Earle’s film beautiful. “At last we have ‘A Lover’s Oath’ a mere remnant of the great work of art in motion pictures. But even this remnant shows much of the texture and color of the original tapestry. ‘Omar Khayyam’ was, to my way of thinking, a masterpiece among motion pictures. It held all the color and the life of the Orient. It was like an Arabian Nights story. It still is, in spite of its title and its mutilation.”

Figure 6.1 Ferdinand P. Earle: Persian background, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Hollywood, 1920. Reproduced from a duotone illustration in Shadowland, August 1923. Despite extended efforts to track the original paintings down, the author has failed to locate any of the originals. The image combines the Orientalist fantasy of Maxfield Parrish–style illustration art with the fashion for massive architectural structures in German and Hollywood productions in 1920. What exactly inspired this unstinted praise? Anderson is unambiguous: its unprecedented pictorial gorgeousness. In 1921, Earle described the concept governing the creation of Omar Khayyam as “motion painting.” Instead of employing the forty to fifty location shots in a major film production, Earle presented nearly three hundred—“each is a painted bit of canvas . . . ranging from eight inches high to ten inches wide to ten feet high and twelve feet wide.”3 These paintings supplied the “distinctive character of any given spot on the earth’s circumference.” In short, Earle created the first film whose action took place before matte painted backgrounds in sequential process shots. Just as the artificial splendors of Industrial Light and Magic’s special effects scenes stun the eyes of twenty-first-century audiences, so Earle’s Ori- ent charmed even the jaded eyes of the Los Angeles Times’s chief art critic and cinema scholar. Earle’s scenic artistry derived from exceptional training. He had studied in Paris with James McNeill Whistler, the master of exquisite pictorial design and dynamic figure placement, and with William Bouguereau, the finest academic figure painter of the nineteenth century. There was no one in Holly- wood in 1920 who possessed anywhere near Earle’s credentials as a painter,4 and few that had his artistic ambition. His grasp of photographic perspective and pictorial integrity made him seek the finest collaborators to incarnate his vision on film and paper. He hired as cinematographer the French master of camera artifice Georges Benoit, who had been working with director Christy Cabanne at the Robertson-Cole Company. Benoit had particular expertise with double-exposure shots used in special effects. In one scene of The Rubai- yat depicting the angelic host glimpsed by Omar Khayyam in a reverie, Benoit used twenty-eight tiny dolls on a circular turntable, in a multiple exposure lasting fourteen hours to create a heavenly multitude. The visuals of the film were uncanny, as Earle had desired. So were the stills. Because Earle practiced artistic photography himself, and because the inspiration of the visual dimension of Omar Khayyam derived from the three hundred images he had created as backgrounds, Earle acutely desired that the production photographs incarnate his exotic world as vividly as he had imagined it. He chose Edward S. Curtis, creator of monumental series The North Ameri- can Indian, to do the images.5 Curtis, who had recently departed the Northwest after his wife Clara had been awarded his Seattle studio and the Curtis homestead in a divorce settlement, had established a portrait gallery at 663 South Rampart Street in Los Angeles with his daughter Beth. Curtis possessed both the ethnographic interest in accuracy (Earle’s own pictorial fetish about the rightness of clothes and props derived from Bouguereau) and a superb eye for arranging multiple figures in distinctive settings. Curtis knew the peculiar tensions between moving pictures and still images. He had written and directed two films,In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914)

215 Opium Dreams Figure 6.2 [Edward S. Curtis]: Ferdinand P. Earle seated at an easel painting a background scene for The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Hollywood, 1920. Perhaps taken to illustrate one of the many news stories published touting Earle’s method of motion painting, the still conveys the laboriousness of this skilled artisanal work. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. and Seeing America (1916).6 In 1919, shortly before coming to Los Angeles, he had been working as cameraman for film producer Christine Curtis, shooting a Western on location in Idaho.7 Indeed, Curtis’s experience in location shooting was precisely what Earle wanted. Curtis knew exactly what an outdoor scene should look like photographically, and had created thousands of memorable plein aire images—figures in dramatic landscapes illumined with natural light. Earle’s artistry with painted scenery in studio sets would only be triumphant if a master such as Curtis could use it to create the countryside of an imagined medieval Persia with perfect verisimilitude. In September 1921, Curtis showed at his gallery fifty of the five hundred stills he made for “Earle’s stupendous motion-picture pageant.” These were the first still photographs exhibited in the United States as art objects. The reviewer enthused: “They are wonderful things, and you cannot afford to miss seeing them.”8 The show’s announcement discussed the unusual merit of these images: “Mr Curtis’s camera studies of the story of the Persian poet-philosopher are ‘still’ pictures of the picture production which Ferdinand Earle, the portrait and landscape artist, is preparing for the screen. The production excels in pictorial values, it is said, and in addition to expensive settings, hundreds of scenes that have

Figure 6.3 edward S. Curtis: “Strange Scenes Met Them at Every Turn,” In the Land of the Head Hunt- ers, Seattle, Seattle Film Company, December 7, 1914. Duotone illustration taken from In the Land of the Headhunters (Yonkers-on-Hudson: World Book Company, 1915), 67 (the novelization of the motion picture).

217 Opium Dreams Figure 6.4 edward S. Curtis: Kathleen Key, Ramon Novarro, and Edwin Stevens as Sherin, Ben Ali, and Hassen Ben Sabbath in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Hollywood, 1920. Through image superimposition, the built studio foreground is melded with a painted background garden to create a fairy tale Oriental scene with total visual integrity. The background painting was probably two and a half by three feet in size. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Figure 6.5 edward S. Curtis: Frederick Warde as Omar Khayyam in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Hollywood, 1920. Earle’s illusionist tricks in painting the background conveys great spatial depth, with a hyperrealistic array of trees and rock and an impressionist cityscape in the distance. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. the appearance of reality in which living characters appear, are actually paintings.”9 TheLos Angeles Times featured several in the rotogravure section of the August 28, 1921, edition, albeit unaccredited. A suite of five of Curtis’s photographs were published in the November 11, 1921, issue of the Washington Post bearing credit. Everyone who commented on the images attested to their power as autonomous artistic statements. A New York reviewer commented, “If the still pictures are any indication ‘Omar’ must be a very beautiful production. The photographs of the settings and central figures are lovely enough to figure as illustrations in an art magazine or better still as pictures for our walls.”10 For Curtis the exhibition brought tangible results. Cecil B. DeMille saw the photographs and realized that Curtis could supply the visual distinction and Oriental panache needed for the biblical prologue to The Ten Commandments. DeMille hired Curtis to be co-cinematographer and co–still photographer for the epic. Curtis’s stills of Moses haranguing the idol-worshipping Israelites have long been considered among the most extravagant photographic images

219 Opium Dreams Figure 6.6 [Edward S. Curtis]: Theodore Roberts and extras as Moses and the Israelites in part 1 of The Ten Commandments, Hollywood, Paramount Pictures, November 23, 1923. The prophet towers above the huddled mass of despairing Hebrews intent on the private vision of his divine intuition. of the silent era. The hieratic gestures of native shamans performing traditional rites gave Curtis a gestural language for Moses’s (Theodore Roberts’s) prophetic imprecations upon the idolatrous Hebrews. Curtis built a Hollywood career sufficiently remunerative to help finance travel expenses for volumes 12–18 of The North American Indian. His work with DeMille gave him sufficient film colony cachet to allow him to move his studio into the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel. There he shot personality portraits of actresses in the glamour mode or character studies of male performers. Daugh- ter Beth and her husband handled the noncelebrity portrait trade. Because of Curtis’s frequent travels through the West, he was not in Hollywood for long enough periods to contract regularly as a cameraman or still photographer. DeMille used him to shoot the prehistoric inserts in Adam’s Rib and stills for his 1927 biblical blockbuster King of Kings in which Curtis teamed with Wil- liam E. Thomas and William Mortensen, who shot the bulk of the production. After publication of the final volume ofThe North American Indian in 1930, the financially strapped Curtis reentered Hollywood’s production world, shooting stills for The Plainsman. Age and fatigue soured his taste for the work. It is a curious irony that Ferdinand P. Earle’s landmark of “motion painting” has most widely been seen devoid of motion in Curtis stills. Omar Khayyam never appeared before the public. Its bastard offspring,A Lover’s Oath, toured in limited release in a handful of American cities serviced by Astor Films distribution. Curtis’s images appeared in newsprint and magazines (Theatre and Vanity Fair) read by hundreds of thousands. Of those few who saw the film, director Rex Ingram for instance, “It sets a new standard of production to live up to.”11 Why did Earle’s magnum opus falter? Perhaps because its original conception was so grandiose that it could not have been realized. Throughout 1919, Earle built a campus of cottages on Highland Avenue for his studio.12 The original plan had projected a building in the form of a cyclorama. In its circuit, he said he would array the “700 different sets, thirty of which will be done in color,”13 illustrating Edward Fitzgerald’s poem. At one juncture he announced that the film would be shot in color, using the Handshiegle process, giving tint to “practically all the scenes.”14 Every costume, architectural detail, and site would be historically accurate, vetted by a panel of experts including Prince Raphael Emmanuel, “chief of a large Chaldean tribe,” and Rev. Allan Moore, “lecturer on the Holy Land.” Charles Wakefield Cadman would compose the symphonic score that would accompany the performance of the film. (This was recycled by the composer in 1929 as “Oriental Rhapsody.”15) Halfway through the project, Earle announced that the Rubaiyat was only the first of a series of films he would make in his new method of double exposing actors performing in costume over his painted backgrounds. It would be followed by The Nibe- lungen Ring, The Iliad, Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Faust, and The Divine Comedy.16

221 Opium Dreams While working on Omar Khayyam, Earle collected twenty thousand image sources for the Ring and hired Francisco Machado to begin painting the backgrounds while Roberto Montenegro created costumes. The Mexican artists must have felt crowded when commencing work in the cottages because they were already filled with a cadre of painters—Frank E. Berier, Xavier Mucha- do (Francisco’s brother), Anthony Vecchio, Paul Detlefson, Flora Smith, Jean Little Cyr, Robert Sterner, Ralph Willis, and William Mortensen—generating Persia. Who bankrolled this dream factory of world historical literature and painting? Theodore Ahrens, the Pittsburgh porcelain king, whose Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company supplied most of the public commodes in American institutions and many of the household bathroom fixtures found in modern homes of the 1910s and 1920s. It is difficult to imagine the courtship dance that occurred between Earle and Ahrens that resulted in the formation of the Pageant Photodramas, Inc. Ahrens was a nouveau riche industrial autocrat, short on finesse, but confident of the proper way of running a business. He figured that if dry goods and distribution moguls could become the kingpins of Hollywood studios, he could too, provided he had talent on the art front. Earle, however, was the sort of creature no millionaire on the make quite knew how to deal with. Born into a wealthy gentry family, privileged son of a US Army general, he became during the 1890s one of the most conspicuous of the upper-class Bohemians stimulating transatlantic gossip. Not only was he an artist, but he was a romantic adventurer with a cavalier disregard for marriage. He collected and dispensed with four female soul mates (he popularized the idea of spiritual “affinity” being a sufficient warrant for jettisoning one partner for another) much to the horror of respectable people in the towns and cities in which he lived, enriching a half dozen lawyers with the legal hubbub in his wake, and becoming a favorite whipping boy of smart reporters. Handsome, patrician, and devastatingly articulate, he waged a campaign against the legal and commercial formalities of wedlock, posing through his actions the question whether one should submit to lifelong comity with a person with whom one lacked fundamental sympathy or interest. His attitude riled a broad spectrum of cultural commentators from evangelical monogamists to ethical human- ists. Yet Earle’s extraordinary abilities prevented persons from dismissing him out of hand. His talent with the brush was matched by his artistry with a pen. Trained in literature at Oxford University, he was a lyric poet with a decidedly modernist orientation—egotistical, psychological, and symbolist. He devised a new acoustic organization for the sonnet, premiered in his 1910 volume Son- nets. Two years later he compiled one of the important anthologies of early twentieth-century English verse, The Lyric Year.17 He discovered Edna St. Vin- cent Millay, whose first publication, the poem “Renascence,” appeared in the volume.

222 Chapter Six Ferdinand Earle would have continued as a minor modernist poet, sometime painter, and newspaper lothario if his younger brother, the society photographer and clubman William P. S. Earle, had not determined one day that he would like to become a film director. As brash as Ferdinand, William managed to sneak through the gates of the Vitagraph Company of America in New York everyday for a week in 1915. Inside the enclave, he studied what directors did and at the end of day five cornered company president Alfred Smith and told him what he had done. “I guess he thought I had a lot of nerve, and he probably thought that such nerve should not go unrewarded. Anyhow, he gave me a chance to show what I could do, and within three weekends I had been made a director.”18 What may have decided Smith in William P. S. Earle’s favor was that the young man had written a Columbia University revue,The Merry Lunatics, that had opened on Broadway and made a hit. Once hired, William cobbled together stock footage, some hastily sketched dialogue scenes, and a Columbia University crew race on the Hudson into the first collegiate life feature, For the Honor of the Crew, inaugurating a string of profitable movies. Wil- liams’s success piqued Ferdinand’s ambition. He entered the business in 1917 doing art titles for J. Stuart Blackton in a World War I, patriotic rouser, Wom- anhood, the Glory of the Nation. Blackton liked Earle’s background paintings for the titles, scenes that owed rather much to Maxfield Parrish. The director permitted him to experiment with painted scenery on his features. Earle’s titles and experiments earned him a place at Metro. Producers there made use of all Ferdinand’s talents, using his scenario 1918’s Pals First and his writing and artistic abilities on Toys of Fate. Toys of Fate saw Earle’s first exploration of “motion painting.”19 The second Metro feature of Alla Nazimova, the movie represented her first exercise in taking control over the moviemaking process. While George D. Baker nomi- nally directed the movie, Nazimova made the executive decisions. Nazimova received Earle’s proposals about painting backgrounds and double exposing the film with sympathy. The movie, despite its ludicrous plot about gypsies, feuds, and a daughter unwittingly attracted to a man who drove her mother to self-destruction, proved a triumph for all involved. TheWashington Post hailed the artistry of the photography and scenic design. Nazimova moved to Cali- fornia for her next release. Earle remained in New York, entrusted by the Met- ro bosses with the art direction of 1919’s Shadows of Suspicion. In this Harold Lockwood drama of World War I espionage Earle further experimented with “motion painting.” Finally, his work on 1919’s box office smashThe Miracle Man convinced him he could create major motion pictures, indeed lead a production company. So he went courting millionaires and found deep pockets with Ahrens, the titan of toilets. Ahrens was a decisive, ambitious man who exercised aggression in most of his business deals. He placed a premium on speedy completion of his projects.

223 Opium Dreams Earle was a decisive, ambitious man with a perfectionist streak and an aristocratic indifference to economies of time or money. Convinced that he was creating a new species of cinematic art superior to the merely reproductive visual mimesis of motion pictures, Earle acted to insure that Omar Khayyam looked right, whatever time and expense it required. In July 1921, the question of time and expense became critical, for Guy Bates Post announced that he had begun filming a version of his stage successOmar, the Tentmaker. In 1914 Guy Bates Post had made a hit in Richard Walton Tully’s Orientalist fantasy Omar, the Tentmaker, a theatrical farrago combining Fitzgerald’s Rubai- yat of Omar Khayyam with “old-fashioned blood-and-thunder melodrama, with treachery, and poisoned foods, prison walls, clanking chains, and stolen keys, the pursuit of a Christian, the torture of some Jews,” and an illicit love affair.20 The New York reviewers found the entertainment implausible, but commended two features of the drama: Post’s amiable impersonation of Omar and the sets by Wilfred Buckland. Buckland’s Persian garden in scene 1 was deemed one of the spectacular stage pictures of the 1910s. Despite its incoherent plot and foolish motivations, the visual novelty and charming central character enabled Post to tour with Omar for three and a half years before playwright Tully devised a second hit vehicle for him, The Masquerader (1917). Ferdinand Earle may have chosen The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as the focus of his experiment in motion painting precisely because he wished to show the superiority of his two-dimensional scenic artistry over the three-dimensional aesthetic that Buckland had perfected on the theatrical stage for David Belasco in 1901’s Du Barry and 1903’s The Music Master. Omar, the Tentmaker had been Buckland’s final experiment in three-dimensional scenic evocation on the stage, his finale virtuosic jeux de esprit before abandoning Broadway, heading west, to design sets for Cecil B. DeMille in 1914. Buckland as much as any man of the 1910s invented the position of cinematic art director in Hol- lywood. Earle wished to out-Buckland Buckland, using the same Orientalist imagery, the same literary pretext, and the same narrative mixture of lyric love and melodramatic folderol. There is little doubt that Buckland felt Earle’s challenge personally. In a March 22, 1922, interview he lamented the constraints imposed by the usual authority structure of a motion picture crew, arguing that “the functions of the art director should be enlarged to include some of those of the director proper.”21 No doubt the spectacle of Earle, the artist, directing Omar Khayyam aggravated Buckland. He lamented the usual situation of the art director, scrambling at scenic solutions because of the invariable overproduction imposed by studios. Across town, Earle, despite the primacy of his authority on set, suffered the same difficulties. In July 24, 1921, some weeks after Guy Bates Post and begun filmingOmar, the Tentmaker, Earle reported to the Los Angeles Times that

224 Chapter Six Figure 6.7 White Studio: Guy Bates Post and Jane Salisbury as Omar Khayyam and Shireen in Omar, the Tentmaker, New York, Richard Walton Tully and Wilfred Buckland, producers, January 13, 1914. This production still from the Broadway production conveys the visual splendor of Wilfred Buckland’s theatrical Persia. From the former San Francisco Examiner Photo Morgue. his production had reached a “cumulative point.” “Many of the biggest moments of the story” had been committed to film. In August he had sixty-five students from the Los Angeles Polytechnate High School dressed as Persians for the crowd scenes. On September 25, 1921, the New York Times reported, “the photography of the work having been completed, the film is being cut for exhibition.”22 Sometime in October, when Earle had begun cutting the film, Mrs. Queen W. Boardman, a stockholder in Rubaiyat, Inc. intervened, insisting that editing be turned over to the company because of Earle’s exorbitant expenses. (A news report in November 1921 placed the cost at that juncture as $130,000.) Ahrens’s henchman seized “three or four reels of the negative.”23 Because Earle had never turned the copyright over to the corporation, and because his contract granted him total artistic control over the final product, he sued to block issuance of any version of Omar Khayyam that he did not personally cut.24 The impasse endured until early April 1922, when Theodore Ahrens announced a trade preview of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam for the Eastern Film Corporation. This occurred concurrent to a heated meeting of the corporation in the first week of April. The interest of a number of distributors appeared to bring détente, with Earle surrendering his vice presi- dency and a contract adjudicating differences between the creator and Ahrens signed. The meeting announced that $175,725 had been expended creating the film. The meeting it would seem marked the triumph of Ahrens. It is uncer- tain who retained the print during the summer of 1922. Autumn brought more trouble. Norman Dawn, who claimed to have invented the cinematic double exposure, filed suit in federal court against Earle’s use of “motion painting.” Litigation and continuity problems with the print kept Omar Khayyam from release through fall of 1922. In December Earle announced that he would direct Theda Bara in her first Selznick release. Meanwhile Guy Bates Post and William Buckland worked on Omar, the Tentmaker. They hired Earle’s cinematographer, Georges Benoit, to shoot the film. Post then hired Edward S. Curtis to shoot publicity portraits. On Janu- ary 1, 1923, they premiered the film to rapturous reviews. “This is real poetry of beauty turned into visual language that can be understood, that entertains and that can be watched with pleasure. Really, I believe, that ‘Omar’ deserves a place on this account among the very best pictures of the year.” Earle no doubt seethed and Buckland preened when Edwin Schallert, a Los Angeles Times critic, opined that the movie’s distinction lay in “the mood that pervades the whose series of pictures. . . . This plot has such a beautiful setting pictorially that even its commonplaces seem to acquire a glamour.”25 To convey the palpability of Omar, the Tentmaker’s visual world, director James Young hired John Ellis,26 a still photographer with a talent for conveying depth of field in his images because of a background in architectural photography. Ellis lavished tremendous care and finish in the production of the stills, realizing that they

226 Chapter Six Figure 6.8 John Ellis: Guy Bates Post as Omar Khayyam in Omar, the Tentmaker, Hollywood, Richard Walton Tully Productions, December 1922. From the former Culver Service Collection.

would be judged by eyes familiar with Curtis’s important pictures of Omar Khayyam. On the strength of these pictures, Ellis made a career in Hollywood as the first-call photographer for costume epics, providing memorable images for a dozen features, including John Barrymore’s Don Juan (1926). Omar, the Tentmaker appeared at a fortuitous moment for costume epics with Middle Eastern locales. Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik premiering in late 1921 had made such vehicles sexy. The stills by Donald Biddle Keyes managed

227 Opium Dreams to make the sands of a Southern California beach seem like Arabian dunes. The discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb on November 4, 1922, in Egypt’s Val- ley of the Kings by Howard Carter amplified the visual dimensions of ancient splendor. William P. S. Earle would be the first director to translate the newly refurbished wonders of ancient Egypt onto the screen in 1923’s The Dancer of the Nile, and he managed the job by recourse to his brother’s invention, “motion painting.” William Earle modified Ferdinand’s process, using painted glass plates rather than canvas, and projecting scenes as backgrounds rather than double exposing costumed performers upon footage of background. Wil- liam Earle and cinematographer Jules Cronjager perfected and demonstrated the utility of the “glass shot.” The critics hailed this innovation as an important advance in cinematic art, praising The Dancer of the Nile for its visual beauty.

Figure 6.9 [Jules Cronjager]: Carmel Myers as Avia in The Dancer of the Nile, Hollywood, William P. S. Earle Productions, October 28, 1923. They found its plot as foolish as that ofOmar, the Tentmaker. In 1923 Ferdinand Earle saw William Buckland trump him as a creator of Oriental visions and his own brother gain credit for his method of transforming the visual aesthetics of motion pictures. A lesser man would have folded up his tent shaking the dust of Los Angeles from his shoes. Earle announced a change of plans. His next visual epic would not be a vehicle for Theda Bara, nor a silent version ofThe Ring, but that ancient tragedy of human aspiration and pride, Faust. Rumors floated through the ranks of financial backers caused potential funds to evapo- rate. Faust died stillborn. If Ferdinand P. Earle could not be a director, he would hire himself out as an art director, for he had more practical experience creating special effects than anyone in Hollywood. That skill was of concrete use to any studio in Southern California. He worked as art director for William Clifford’s 1923 motion picture Souls in Bondage. But his ambition directed him toward larger enterprises—to the newly formed MGM studios. In March 1925 Cedric Gib- bons assigned him to take charge of special artistic elements of the greatest film epic of the silent era,Ben-Hur. After the company had been pulled back to Los Angeles from the shooting debacle in Italy, the ancient world had to be built to order. His assigned scenes were

The Valley of the Lepers Star of Bethlehem. Flight to Egypt Four shots of the Legions. Ildrim’s first tent on the desert. The Interior and Exterior of the Circus The Jerusalem Street. The road shots and the Sheik’s tent.27

To perform the miniature work on the scenes of the Legions and the representation of the Circus Maximus, Earle compelled Gibbons to secure the services of Frank Berior, a special effects man working at Lasky. Earle’s tour de force of filmmaking in the epic was the color nativity scene, lurid in its verismo sentimentality as a nineteenth-century religious chromolithograph. Irving Thalberg understood the psychological power of the scene forBen-Hur ’s potential audience, so expended two single-spaced pages of instructions on how to tweak the footage for best effect. Earle took immense pains to achieve certain moments in the film. He me- morialized these moments by staging stills photographs. While Karl Struss did much of the still work for Ben-Hur, half a dozen of the most famous images that have been attributed to Struss were shot by F. P. Earle. These include the image of Messala in costume in the grove and Messala’s tryst with Iras.

229 Opium Dreams Figure 6.10 Ferdinand P. Earle: Francis X. Bushman as Messala in Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, Hollywood, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, December 30, 1925. When released for publicity, these images had snipes attached to the reverse citing Earle’s creation of the scenes. Each of these iconic images featured backgrounds painted by Earle and represented the culmination of his use of two- dimensional media to create a semblance of reality. In 1925, four years after finishing Omar Khayyam, Earle had received recognition for contributing to a landmark of filmmaking. The success ofBen-Hur ironically pried Omar Khayyam loose from the grip of Theodore Ahrens. Ramon Novarro’s enormous success as Ben-Hur made any picture featuring a performance by him potentially bankable. Omar Khayyam had been Novarro’s first screen role, playing a young lover. Ahrens handed the film to Milton Sills (not Earle) for cutting, had the action rejig- gered to make the Novarro character more conspicuous, and released A Lov- er’s Oath to less than a general accolade. The mutilation to the original had made the plot incoherent. Even beautiful scenery could not entirely compensate for a story that made little sense. So the public saw a hash instead of a masterwork. Earle rubbed persons in Hollywood the wrong way. He had better education, better manners, a quicker mind, and a finer eloquence than virtually anyone with whom he worked. A Bohemian who cared little about conventional morality, an artistic megalomaniac with a hunger for experiment, a man cavalier about other people’s money, a hedonist with a taste for rather odd sensa- tions, he did not fit well into the increasingly regimented world of the film industry. In a memo to Irving Thalberg dated October 20, 1925, announcing the completion of the Star of Bethlehem sequence, Earle requested his own directorial assignment. “For God’s sake, let me have a type of story that will bring you happiness in the shape of a not-costly but highly dramatic story, combined with impressive beauty, so that I may make for you a world-beater. And please never say Star to me again?”28 In December, after the first screenings before test audiences, Earle wrote Thalberg again, “If you and I had a way of combining what you know and what I know in one film (don’t make a face, Mr. Thalberg!) we might both profit by such a production. We might both feel very proud of such a combination. If I didn’t have something really worth while to be persistent about, I would not be in the game.”29 The proposed collaboration never took place. Per usual, Earle made enemies at MGM, particularly production manager Eddie Mannix, who insisted, “Earle’s episodes are weakest links in the film.” It didn’t matter that theNew York Times specifically commended Earle’s Valley of Hinnon scene or that the editor of Motion Picture Classic declared, “For us, Ferdinand Earle’s episode of the miraculous star of Bethlehem is the high point of this massive production.” Earle had achieved his effects at too high an institutional cost for the new industrial order being instituted at MGM and elsewhere. No one was willing to give him a directorial assignment or the financial backing to set up another production company, so he walked

231 Opium Dreams away from the MGM lot, and back to his studio. He spent much of 1930s in France doing special effects work in movies that needed sublime moments. He motion painted Charles Boyer’s spectacular ascension into heaven in 1934’s Liliom and supplied the grandiose vistas of ancient Jerusalem that gave so concrete a sense of place to 1935’s Golgotha. But his most characteristic work was an animated “painted symphony” to classical music, Ave, Imperator. Work on

Figure 6.11 William Mortensen: “The Moving Hand,” Hollywood, 1925, plate from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a photographic book produced by Wescosco Studio. Courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. this “chromophony” (Earle’s term) was interrupted by the Nazi invasion of France and Earle’s sudden flight to the United States. In a few short months after his return, Walt Disney began work onFantasia. Earle, in the 1940s, supported himself as a portrait painter. Because of his membership in the Freema- sons, he became the favored painter of lodges throughout the western United States.30 Most of the significant figures in California government and business sat for his portraits. Earle was working on a film deal with backers in England when he died in 1950. His son, Eyvind, was working for Walt Disney. Earle was no doubt aware that a young artist on the set of The Rubaiyat was studying him, his methods, his outré taste, his experimentalism, and his willfulness.31 William Mortensen, a painter toiling in the Rubaiyat workshop, drank in the Earle principles and persona. Mortensen aspired to be something more than a set painter, but making one’s way as a fine artist in Hollywood was unthinkably difficult, since photography so dominated the conceptions of representation. (When Earle launched his late life career as a portrait painter, he sought a clientele in officialdom, not the movie colony.) Mortensen over the course of the Rubaiyat experience trained himself as a photographer.32 He studied Curtis, secured a job as a retoucher in Albert Witzel’s Los Ange- les studio,33 and eventually fashioned a suite of sixteen posed illustrations of Fitzgerald’s poetic rendering of the Rubaiyat rather than the movie script, for a photographic book. No doubt Earle’s literary background, and his own history of book production, prompted Mortensen to adopt the book form, rather than exhibit prints as Curtis had done. It would be the first of several Mortensen photographic books produced in the 1920s. After production ofOmar Khayyam ceased in early autumn 1921, Mortensen led a gypsy existence, securing work where he could in addition to his labors in the Witzel laboratory. He hired on as one of the set painters decorating Doug- las Fairbanks castle for Robin Hood.34 While working on the lot, Mortensen encountered Arthur Kales, the oil company executive and avocational pictorialist photographer hired by Fairbanks to shoot a portfolio of scenes of the production. Kales as a photographer had the kind of experimental approach to printing processes and pictorial texture that Earle had as a filmmaker. A master of all of the “artistic” methods of image production—bromoil, gum- print, paper negative print, reengraving—Kales considered his images to be mood pictures. A photographer not only depicted a subject but conveyed an atmosphere. Kales’s special photography for Robin Hood (Charles Warrington, Fairbanks’s dependable still man from 1915 to 1926, shot the production photography and himself learned much from Kales) managed to make the sets seem something more that a series of Maxfield Parrish illustrations to a child’s book. The extraordinary depth of field, the rich modulation of tone, the dynamism of captured motion (a skill Kales perfected shooting performance

233 Opium Dreams Figure 6.12 arthur F. Kales: Sets for Robin Hood, Los Angeles, Douglas Fairbanks Pictures, United Artists, October 18, 1922. The original prints are in miniature format on textured paper. From the former Culver Service Collection.

photos of Ruth St. Denis’s dancers in the early 1920s), and the texture of the images made the action of Robin Hood possess the gravitas of history as well as the romance of story. Kales took Mortensen as his protégé, instructing him in the arcane arts of the darkroom. Mortensen could not have had a finer technician as an instruc- tor. Mortensen began his Hollywood photographic career shooting production stills on the Robin Hood set, proof sheets of which are preserved at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. Yet the visual worlds that Kales wished to incarnate did not fascinate Mortensen as much as those conjured by Earle. Earle had that Faustian aspiration for more—more “soul mates,” more “art,” more hype, more action. Earle’s hunger for sensation had made him quickly tire of the mere hedonism of Fitzgerald’s poem, so he added a hash-stoked assassin into a “boy meets girl and attains earthly para-

234 Chapter Six Figure 6.13 Charles Warrington: William Lowry and Billie Bennett, Robin Hood, Los Angeles, Douglas Fairbanks Pictures, United Artists, October 18, 1922. The High Sheriff fo Nottingham grills Lady Marion’s serving woman. The transformation in photographic quality of Warrington’s stills after his contact with Kales is breathtaking. Schooled as a newspaper photographer, the English-born Warrington retained a reportorial way of presenting scenes in the early Fairbanks features. With Robin Hood, his sense of composition, concern with lighting, and fastidiousness of retouching transform his work into art. He sends images out with a credit stamp for the first time. These images come from Mortensen’s collection of pictures he kept at Wescosco

dise” plot. Earle’s visualization of the medieval Persia quickly diverged from visual archaeology to Orientalist aesthete excess. Mortensen had a model upon which to elaborate his own pursuit of the more. In 1924, the painter-turned-photographer convinced West Coast Costume Company (Wescosco), the vast supplier of motion picture wardrobe, to take him on as a resident photographer. He inhabited the eleventh floor and had at his disposal an unimaginable variety of props and costumes with which to suit sitters. He instantly gained a reputation for visual adventurousness among performers by dressing up actresses as historical figures and publishing the results. He enjoyed enormous success placing his costume portraits in print

235 Opium Dreams Figure 6.14 William Mortensen: Rudolph Valentino and Mlle. Zanini, The Merchant of Venice. Duotone illustration, Theatre Maga- zine, June 1925, 33. Part of an unfinished book of star portraits in which Mortensen dressed and posed performers in fantasy roles.

Figure 6.15 William Mortensen: H. B. War- ner and Alan Brooks, Christ being tempted by Satan in The King of Kings, Hollywood, DeMille Pictures Corporation, April 19, 1927.

Figure 6.16 William Mortensen: Sojin, 1927. Mortensen got to know the distinguished Japanese actor on the set of The King of Kings, in which he played the Prince of Per- sia. In 1929 Sojin returned to Japan and enjoyed a major career ending in the 1950s.

and briefly made Wescosco a pictorial brand with a national following. Per- formers loved the portrait premise because it connected them with an icon of enduring fame while suggesting new possibilities of portrayal at a time when MGM was making the historical costume feature a staple of prestige film production. In late 1926 Cecile B. DeMille (a director with a deep appreciation of “more- ness”) hired Mortensen away from the costumers to shoot stills, along with Curtis, and William Thomas, forKing of Kings. Mortensen seized the opportunity with both fists, crawling about the sets with a handheld, high-speed camera, shooting a unique set of images that would later be printed for aesthetic delectation. The dynamic perspectives, immediacy, and moodiness of the images won an audience. With the King of Kings images Mortensen eclipsed Curtis and the studio professional, Thomas, as the photographer of record. He worked for DeMille for two years (not the six he usually claimed) before determining that he would rather work for himself. He opened his studio at Laguna Beech, gathered a set of photographic disciples, and loosed his imagination.

236 Chapter Six He considered no aspect of photography sacrosanct and manipulated any and all aspects of the picture. In the 1930s when the straight aesthetic increasingly dominated art photography, Mortensen practiced what might best be called bent photography—featuring an imagery that explored eroticism, vulgarity, sensationalism, and Hollywood dress up—incarnated by a technical virtuosity and experimentalism unequalled outside of the scientific laboratory. Ansel Adams named him the monster of American photography. Here we see that the artifice, freakishness, and visual extremity that Mortensen celebrated in books such as Monsters and Madonnas descended from the cinematic and photographic work of another monster in the eyes of the conventional, Ferdinand P. Earle.

237 Opium Dreams Figure 7.1 Boris I. Majdrakoff: King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, Sofia, Bulgaria, ca. 1919. By permission of Ivan Majdrakoff. 7 Royal Photographer to the Stars M. I. Boris and Visual Artistry

In early 1923, Boris Ivanovich Majdrakoff (1887–1962) shipped out of Con- stantinople for New York pursuing his beloved, the photographer Ivan- ka Hitrova. Or perhaps he was fleeing the vengeance of his best friend’s brother, having killed his friend in a hunting accident. Rumors circulated that Boris had bedded his friend’s wife.1 At age thirty-five Boris was already one of the master photographers of Europe. He had served as managing director of Atelier Adele, the photographer to the court of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria, as well as royal photographer of King Ferdinand and King Boris of Bulgaria. He practiced a recondite style of portraiture that entailed extensive etching of the photographic glass negative to create images that hovered between graphic and photographic likeness. Their fetishistic detail, fanciful elaboration of space with abstract pattern, aggressive toning and extensive reworking of the print surface produced pictures as uncommon as the society of aristo- crats, artists, and political revolutionaries whom Boris portrayed. In New York, he set up a studio in his apartment over the Stork Club in Manhat- tan, adopted the nom de plume M. I. Boris, and quickly installed himself into New York’s beau monde. He made portraits of the Stock Club’s luminaries, and his images created an immediate sensation, projecting a more obsessively crafted vision of beauty than that being worked out on

239 Broadway and Hollywood in the name of glamour. Contracted by Stork Club habitué Jesse Lasky, vice president of Paramount Studios, to supply portraits of his film stars, Boris spent three years, from 1923 through 1926, laboriously creating images of striking artifice. Numbers of these images would be collected in the Paramount Pep Club annuals, visual celebrations of the studio’s contract players for a select group of avid supporters and friends of the company. When Paramount moved its headquarters to Hollywood in 1926, Boris declined Lasky’s invitation to go west.2 He apparently had no interest in doing stills at the Astoria studio that Paramount maintained as an East Coast production facility. Boris also declined an invitation by Victor Georg to work on the gravure section of the New York Times. Boris preferred working alone perfecting images that did not readily lend themselves to mass reproduction because of the loss of linear detail. Spending hours in the darkroom and worktable, etching negatives with an angled blade of spring steel, shading or highlighting by dodging images in the chemical bath, Boris produced eleven-by-fourteen prints that performers might take for the portfolio, or exchange with favorite colleagues, or keep on one’s own wall.3 Not counting his Paramount Pep Club Yearbook portraits, which had coterie distribution, fewer than thirty of his images of the 1920s were widely disseminated. Consequently he is the most mysterious, least known of the important photographers of the world of entertainment between the two worlds wars. Yet he influenced the rising generation of photographers in New York City in the 1920s, Herbert Mitchell, Ralph Oggiano, John and Aarto De Mirjian, and Debarron Studios. His manner of reworking of the image became a stylistic signature of Broadway photography in the late 1920s and early 1930s—as ubiquitous as Alfred Cheney Johnston–style background painting of the negative. Both Boris’s etched lines and Johnston’s brushstrokes branded Broadway photography as more artful and more exclusive than movie glamour photography. It made the hand of the artist visible in the image.

Boris Means Art

Young Broadway photographers may have chosen Boris as their bellwether, but it was a Hollywood mogul in 1923 who made him a fixture in the world of entertainment imagery. Why did Jesse Lasky opt to patronize M. I. Boris? Lasky already had in his employ several of the more talented and experienced photographers in the motion pictures business, Otto Dyar, Eugene Robert Richee, and Ernest Bachrach. True, Richee and Dyar operated on the West Coast, and Paramount needed talent on the New York scene. (Paramount throughout the 1920s was a bicoastal company.) Yet it was not unusual for a film company to ship employees to whatever location most needed the skill. Dyar, for instance, was dispatched to England for a year to teach photographic methods to Para-

240 Chapter Seven mount’s UK subsidiary, Gaumont.4 Lasky did not call for his seasoned professionals on the West Coast. Nor did he make use of Ernest Bachrach, who was shooting stills for the Gloria Swanson vehicles being filmed at Paramount’s New York Astoria studio. In 1923 Bachrach was still five years from making a reputation as a talented portraitist as well as an able still man. What is more curious is his disinclination to hire one of the talented Broadway portraitist for the publicity shots he wanted. Nickolas Muray, Francis Bruguiere, Alfred Cheney Johnston, Maurice Goldberg, Ira D. Schwarz, Marcia Stein, and a half dozen other talented camera artists were available, and would have readily accepted Lasky’s commissions.5 Instead he chose an artist newly arrived and un- initiated in the local photographic idiom. Lasky had a penchant for novelty and relished being a step ahead of competitors in art or business. He had distinguished himself as an innovator from the moment he had abandoned vaudeville management and set up shop in Los Angeles. His Squaw Man (1913), directed by Cecile B. DeMille, was the first six- reel feature shot in Hollywood and the first film with credits. It was he, not DeMille, who hired and installed art director Wilfred Buckland in the movies. Lasky’s decade of experience in the trade had convinced him that perpetual change characterized motion picture art.6 Aesthetic, technological, and economical transformations altered the industry so rapidly that one could hardly speak of stasis or convention. People who did not recognize the rhythm of change irked him; New York–based pundits who habitually denigrated the artistry of movies without registering the mutation in the art form irked him more than anyone. Lasky knew that the movies were developing into a powerful popular art, a medium that brought meaningful stories into the hamlets of America without condescending to this mass audience or pandering to its commonest instincts. Lasky’s 1920 defense of the cultural value of films, “What Kind of a ‘Men- ace’ Are the Movies,” is a wonderfully conflicted document, at one time ex- coriating the elitism of Theater Guild drama for New York intellectuals while earnestly pondering the problem of improving the plots of motion pictures.7 In the article, Lasky demonstrated his ability to think boldly, recounting his attempt to secure the best dramatic writers for Famous Players–Lasky by buying up the Charles Frohman theatrical empire. Lasky had speculated that he might be able to bypass the inanities of the movie scenario office (that bizarre workshop of silent movie plots so graphically chronicled in Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By),8 and generate dramas on Broadway that might be readily transferred to the screen. He wanted the critics in New York to acknowledge the artistic worth of his productions as well. Lasky had art on his mind when he shook hands with M. I. Boris sealing the deal that put him on call for Paramount. Lasky grasped the advantages immediately: Boris Majdrakoff was a novelty. He had been a royal photographer.

241 Royal Photographer to the Stars His style was markedly different from that practiced by even the most artful of New York photographic innovators. The pictures projected such a pronounced sense of craft that even the unrefined onlooker sensed that a Boris photo was a work of art. For Lasky to discover “M. I. Boris” before Egmont Arens, art editor of Vanity Fair, had come across him would be a virtuoso demonstration of sensitivity to talent, a “find” worthy of a man who hired many of the significant writers of Europe to write for Hollywood and vied with Adolph Zukor in entic- ing Broadway’s “famous players” to perform in his features. Best of all, Boris was not schooled in the visual language of glamour that most of New York’s and Hollywood’s performing arts photographers employed. This was important because Lasky needed to make his film personalities appear more than conventionally glamorous in the eyes of New York critics. In 1923 he wished them to have that aura of importance and artistry that the greatest stage luminaries possessed. Lasky would have known the artistic stakes in the photography game in 1923. Vanity Fair, the most influential high-culture magazine in the country, had just appointed Edward Steichen, whom the magazine had recently dubbed the greatest portraitist in the country, as its director of photography.9 Steichen would concurrently serve as chief lensman for Condé Nast’s other important title, Vogue. So the most prestigious publishing arena for performer portraits had a master artist vetting the images. The New York scene boasted an extraordinary constellation of established talent photographing the stage, all of whom appeared in the Nast magazines. In Vanity Fair, discounting Steichen himself, these photographers merited the most space: Arnold Genthe (145 pages), Alfred Cheney Johnston (107 pages), Florence Vandamm (91 pages), James Abbe (73 pages), Charlotte Fairchild (68 pages), Edward Thayer Monroe (55 pages), Maurice Goldberg (50 pages), Ira L. Hill (48 pages), Francis Bru- guiere (47 pages), Marcia Stein, and Charles Albin (10 pages). Many of these artists had come to New York in the 1910s from other parts of the country and from Europe to participate in the aesthetic ferment that had erupted in New York. 10 The aesthetic politics of the New York scene during the heyday of theatrical photography from 1917 to 1925 did not exclude the outlander; rather, anyone who managed to capture something of the magic of limelight on film was granted respect. Individual style, a sense of pictorial design, a sensitivity to light, and audacity in playing with the visual language of glamour earned recognition and editorial patronage. While New York magazine editors covering Broadway in 1923 cherished individual photographic style, in Hollywood preferences differed. The studios, after the quasi-improvisational practice of the 1910s, were instituting an industrial model for the production of publicity.11 Under that system, each phase of the production process was broken down and assigned to a specialist.12 The

242 Chapter Seven pioneering spirit of the 1910s when everybody did everything on the production site only survived in the shoestring film companies and with certain of the comedy shops—Mack Sennett and Hal Roach. Under the developing new order, cinematographers were discouraged from shooting stills, that task being relegated to photographers; photographers by 1923 were segregated loosely into “portrait gallery” and “stills” service. Even the processing of the images was broken down into specialties, following the method of the large corporate photographic studios in New York and Washington, DC. The photographer posed and shot the subjects. The retoucher then worked the negatives smooth- ing flesh, clarifying zones of light and darkness, enhancing line. The printers insured that the refined negatives were produced in sufficient number, with proper image stability and depth of tone to be shipped of the publicity office, the prop and set manager’s offices, and in some instances, the sitters. The portrait photographer practiced a loose oversight, blind stamping or back stamping a credit line as seal of approval. The maker’s hand was not much evident in the final prints, except for a few special reserve images intended for gifts and exhibition pieces. Neither portrait photographer or still photographer had any influence on the captions, placement, or distribution of the images. In Manhattan among the theatrical and society photographers, a studio might employ a retoucher for portrait work, but the performer portraits were processed entirely by the chief artist of the studio.13 One by-product of the embrace of an industrial model in Hollywood was the creation of a corporate look in still photography. Only camera artists with particular expertise in lighting and a directorial sense of performance moment could impose a distinctive sense of viewpoint. Even these strong visual personalities were pressured by deadlines and work quotas into rather formulaic treatments of subjects, so the majority of still images showed scenes plausible and well lit, clearly focused, the performers arranged in terms of a scenic or dramatic logic, the leads centrally arranged, and the mood obvious.14 The growth of publicity departments in movie studios also contributed to standardization. The studios had taken over and expanded an element of theatrical ballyhoo when setting up the publicity department. Publicity agents had become a fixture in the theatrical world in the 1890s. The major producers and theaters employed them to create buzz about players and productions. The first publicity was textual, and from the first was characterized by fictionaliza- tion, exaggeration, and stunts (the Anna Held milk bath serving as a model for attention getting). By 1920 every early studio had a publicity arm of some sort, whose job was to float stories and pictures of players.15 Out of the multitude of images shot for a film’s keybook, the publicity office chose approximately 150 images for exploitation. In 1941, John Chapman gave a statistical rundown on still photography for the average interwar feature.

243 Royal Photographer to the Stars “No still man does his own developing or printing. About prints: Metro, for instance, does 150 negatives per picture and 11 prints per negative for local use. Then the stuff is shipped to New York. New York picks the 60 best shots, makes maybe 1000 prints of each.” Early in the 1920s the studios’ publicity print production greatly outstripped the one thousand prints that Chapman cited because studios shipped enormous numbers of five-by-seven-inch “fan photos” brandishing stamped or secretarial signatures to devotees who wrote to their screen favorites. Fan mania crested in the 1922–24 period with tens of thousands of effusive appreciations and heartfelt requests flooding performers’ mailboxes. The numbers of letters received by star-level Hollywood personalities had the improbable vastness that one encounters in statistics for biblical armies. The quantities of photographic images of performers that came before the eyes of American citizens was sufficiently great to achieve a kind of saturation effect: too many blemish-free youthful faces shining from the shadows. Lasky knew intuitively the ebb and flow of visual fashion. He knew when and how much novelty needed to be injected into a stream of imagery to initi- ate a new fashion. Recently, combinatory systems theorists, such as Piero Mel- la, have clarified our understanding of fashion beyond the recondite model proposed a generation ago by Roland Barthes. Mella charts a process that any fashion magazine editor or couturier would recognize.16 Fashion is an un- stable process in which attractive novelty begets imitation. Imitation consoli- dates a vogue for some look; the more potent the look, the more necessitous the imitation until a point of saturation is reached requiring the injection of more novelty (for aesthetic refreshment or commercial rejuvenation). Most frequently the novelty combines a marked distinction from the previous predominant vision with an instrumental homology of some sort (at some level a previous success must be replicated, while not seeming to be a reproduction). In Broadway photography the scale of publicity and the intensity of fashion it generated was never so great that the visual language of glamour itself had to be overthrown to refresh beauty. Enough variety and innovation occurred in the regular production of images to keep the visual language fresh and idi- omatic. When movie publicists took over the visual language created by the theater photographers of the 1910s, they reproduced it on a scale the stage publicists never dreamed of. Publicists chose certain images to be reproduced in tens of thousands of copies in industrial developers, until glamour became mere. By 1923 conditions of saturation arose that led to a radical renovation of visual language. A magazine such as Motion Picture Classic featured on average eighty-eight images (stills and portraits) of performers per monthly issue in 1923, exclusive of the thirty or so additional images found in advertisements. The average metropolitan daily newspaper—theAtlanta Constitution, for instance—featured fourteen images per week. For papers with a rotogravure/

244 Chapter Seven pictorial section, the numbers increased dramatically. In the American print periodical world of the early 1920s one could not escape the barrage of winsome actresses or manly visages. Portraits dominated over stills by over a two to one margin. They came in three varieties, here listed in order of frequency: head shots, half-lengths (usually seated), and full figure. The figure of a performer, usually female, dominated the pictorial field. The eyes were the focus of the image, but a body was always a suggested presence. Faces were frequently framed by flamboyant hats, particularly when posed against plain, tonal backgrounds. Men were often posed in profile or on a three-quarter bias. These were the conventions that M. I. Boris disrupted.

Boris Ivan Majdrakoff

M. I. Boris’s aesthetic sensibility was formed in 1905–7 in Vienna. Born in So- fia, Bulgaria, in 1887 to a bourgeois family, Boris I. Majdrakoff had been dispatched by his father Ivan to the capital of the Austrian Empire to learn railroad engineering. He took classes in the Academy of Arts instead.17 During that time (the two years previous to the enrollment of painter Egon Schiele), the school was intoxicated with the experiments of Jungenstil, the Germanic manifestation of art nouveau, typified by experiments in biomorphic form. The young Majdrakoff was torn between the symbolist mysticisms of Franz Van Stuck and the sensuousness of Gustav Klimpt’s portraits that juxtaposed realist flesh with abstract, decorative pattern. Majdrakoff’s forte was line. He could draw—and more importantly etch—with the uncanny genius of a Max Klinger. His talent was such that he was hired by Atelier Adele, the photographic studio of the Austrian court to work as a retoucher, etching alterations into the glass negative plates. Founded in Vienna in 1862 by Adele Perlmutter with her brothers Max and Wilhelm, Atelier Adele became the chosen studio of the Austrian high aris- tocracy in the 1880s. In 1890 the studio received appointment as court photographer and consequently opened a second branch at Ischl, the summer palace of the Austrian emperors.18 Adele retired from active camera work at this juncture, leaving management of the business to her siblings. In 1908, when Boris Majdrakoff entered its employ, it had established a consistent style of portraiture strongly influenced by the poses and representational conventions of court painting. Imperfections of complexion, awkwardness of pose, and defects of physiognomy were erased and an idealized perfection supplied in its stead. The result was not so much vain as hieratic and iconic. Artistic expression had no place, despite the intrusive alteration of the mechanically produced image. Majdrakoff excelled at his job, rising to the position of managing director by about 1910.

245 Royal Photographer to the Stars Figure 7.2 [Boris I. Majdrakoff], Adele Atelier, Vienna: Crown Prince Boris of Bulgaria, 1913. Photographic postcard.

On a visit home to Sofia in 1913, Majdrakoff’s idyllic career was rudely disrupted. A Bulgarian citizen, he was conscripted and sent to the front in the First Balkan War, King Ferdinand’s farcical exercise in Bulgarian imperialism. He was wounded. After recuperating, he was redeployed to the front in the Second Balkan War. He contracted typhus, almost died, and by force of will and protracted routines of gymnastic exercise brought himself back to func- tionality, only to be recalled to duty in World War I. Circumstantial evidence suggests he served at this juncture in army intelligence, making use of his photographic abilities. With the armistice and decommissioning, Majdrakoff returned to Vienna to find his apartment gutted and the Atelier closed. The economic and social disarray of postwar Vienna prompted him to return to Sofia.19

246 Chapter Seven In Sofia, his credentials as Austrian court photographer secured him the royal patronage of King Ferdinand. While producing images under his own name credit, he appears to have affiliated himself with the oldest and most reputable studio in Bulgaria, that founded by the country’s first professional photographer, and revolutionary patriot, Toma Hitrov. The studio in 1919 was operated by Hitrov’s widow, Elena Hitrova. The artistic constraints imposed by the images of the imperial court no longer operated; the empire had been dismantled. The changes in the political order in Bulgaria were symbolized by the forced abdication of King Ferdinand for his fomenting of the Balkan Wars and the installation of his son, the youthful Boris, as king. Culture in Sofia after the war experienced unprecedented artistic and political ferment. Majdra- koff participated, experimenting extravagantly with his images. Several styles emerged: a darkly toned expressionistic portraiture that captured persons in the throes of emotion. This style owed more to the dramatic psychology of Von Stuck than the primitivism of Die Brucke. A second style featured a boldly

Figure 7.3 Boris I. Majdrakoff: “The Actor,” Sofia, Bulgaria, ca. 1919. By permission of Ivan Majdrakoff. Figure 7.4 Boris I. Majdrakoff: A fashionable woman of Sofia, ca. 1920. By permission of Ivan Majdrakoff.

etched transmutation of photographic images, with audaciously artificial engraved foliage or abstract patterned frames. There was an intentional atavism about these images, recalling the engraved photographs of 1880s illustrated magazines, yet accomplished with the panache of an old master rather than a publisher’s journeyman engraver. Disrupting the retro aura of these images were pictorial regions of abstract pattern, the graphic equivalent of Gustav Klimt’s decorative zones in his high-society portraits. Boris’s third style derived from pictorialism. These portraits were atmospheric, often abstract in their soft-focus subtractions of detail, richly toned, and extensively manipulated after printing. Most finished prints from early in his career display some degree of artistic handwork on the image—abrasions, stipples, inked sections, embossing, applications of wash. The mechanical process of photographic reproduction was never more than a mediating feature in Majdrakoff’s art. When Boris Majdrakoff became M. I. Boris is difficult to determine. His first printed images in the United States, portraits of three Macedonian revolutionaries printed in the New York Times in 1923, are credited simply to

248 Chapter Seven Figure 7.5 Boris I. Majdrakoff: King Boris of Bulgaria, Sofia, Figure 7.6 M. I. Boris: King Boris of Bulgaria, New York, ca. Bulgaria, ca. 1922. By permission of Ivan Majdrakoff. 1923. Using the same negative as figure 7.5, Boris reengraved the plate, ground out the dark background, and replaced it with white light, enabling its easy reproduction in newspapers. By permission of Ivan Majdrakoff.

“Boris.” While his signed images from Sofia all bear the name Majdrakoff, an early landscape from Vienna bears the signature “M. I. Boris.” Two portraits of King Boris of Bulgaria present the transition of Majdrakoff’s artistic persona. A master negative was exposed in Sofia, perhaps in 1922, from which several images were derived—a three-quarter-length portrait was printed in Sofia signed “Boris I. Majdrakoff”; a bust with the suit reengraved and background abraded away was printed in New York in 1923 signed “M. I. Boris, Royal Pho- tographer” on its mounting matte. No doubt that Jesse Lasky saw the latter portrait.

Distant Stars

Glamour as a visual style did not simply give a clear shot of a pretty girl for the delectation of a male onlooker. The predominant audience for the first thirty

249 Royal Photographer to the Stars years of Hollywood productions was female. Glamour exerted an allure that inspired female emulation as much as male admiration. It was not “scopophil- ic”—eye candy for male fantasy, as 1930s “leg art” and 1940s “cheesecake” were. Glamour projected beauty that channeled personality, not a timeless image of ideal proportions and well-formed features. Glamour images radiated the light of a person’s soul, and sometimes that radiance was not meant for an onlooker, sometimes it was. In 1923, its visual effect derived from back-lit chiaroscuro, with the star’s outline gilded by a halo that asserted the beauty against a darker background. The beauty was highlighted, buffed clean of blemishes, and simplified. The person, even if adorned with outlandish ornaments and hats, was somehow recognizably an inhabitant of a world that the onlooker recognized, whether it was ancient Egypt, the Grand Hotel, or the Royal Court. M. I. Boris had no desire to offer more alluring images of beautiful people in the beau monde. He felt affinity for some elements of the visual language of glamour, particularly its distancing of certain of the beautiful women into a kind of rapt interior self-absorption. But for Boris, beauty had to be further distanced into the realm of the uncanny. In a memorable image of actress Dorothy Phillips that resembles an Eastern Orthodox icon, the subject gazes impassively out at the viewer. Her eyes, canted slightly up, do not connect with ours. She looks past, through, beyond us. Her peaceful face seems otherworld- ly in its composure. The early Christian father Athanasius explained the power of the icon upon a viewer (the “iconodule”)—indicating how the image was not representational, but instrumental, conveying pneuma from the invisible world. There is no drama of dark and light as in most glamour photography. Instead the head precipitates out of a uniform light focused in the circle of im- mortality. Of early twentieth-century aesthetic movements before Kandinsky’s abstract art, symbolism shared icon painting’s subordination of pictorial verisimilitude to figuring a spirit. Kandinsky began as a symbolist painter. Of the figures prominent in the Vienna Secession at the time of Majdrakoff’s training, symbolist painter Ferdinand Khnopff supplied the obvious warrant for the obtrusive artifice of Boris’s imagery. A Belgian, Khnopff emerged in the 1890s as an international celebrity for his enigmatic paintings of women standing or sitting in hieratically stiff poses embodying ideals. Emperor Franz Josef of Austria had approached him to paint a portrait of his assassinated spouse, the Empress Elizabeth, from photographs provided by Adele Atelier. Among the very few surviving early drawings by M. I. Boris in the possession of his son, Ivan Majdrakoff, is a small study of a mantled woman staring out in closed-eye mute rapture. Boris’s 1925 photograph of “Yvonne” reenvisions this figure of symbolist reverie. The symbolist topos of the sibyl, the blind female prophet, is employed. The closed eyes (the features most expressive in glamour) im- poses a fundamental distance between viewer and viewed. Yet the implication

250 Chapter Seven Figure 7.7 M. I. Boris: Yvonne, New York, 1925. Courtesy of Ivan Majdrakoff.

of the sibyl is that while the ordinary means of communication don’t pertain, the sibyl nonetheless knows your presence, your wishes, your larger purposes. The open garment, the bared breast, conveys vulnerability, while the cupped hand suggests receptivity. The figure emerges out of an abstract floral background, suggesting a connection with fertility, perhaps an association with the goddess Astarte. A 1926 photograph of dancer Gilda Gray in which her face appears as a dreaming mask floating disembodied on the verge between day and night conveys a similar symbolic gravity. The tousled hair merges with the luminous

251 Royal Photographer to the Stars Figure 7.8 M. I. Boris: Gilda Gray, New York, Paramount Pictures, 1926. Courtesy of Tomas Majdrakoff.

Figure 7.9 M. I. Boris: Gilda Gray, New York, Paramount Pictures, 1926. From the former Culver Service Collection.

ether above her head radiating her spirit to the surroundings. The image an- ticipates that type of glamour in which allure exerts its power in the repose of a beautiful person (the work of Hurrell and A. Whitey Schafer of the 1930s). Its provides a counterpoint to the mask shots of various mid-1920s Hollywood photographers concerned with isolating facial expression—Ruth Harriet Lou- ise and Max Munn Autrey. Autrey would borrow Boris’s scheme for memorable shoots of Linda Watkins and Swedish-American film actress Greta Nissen later in 1926. Boris did not visualize performers as having unitary souls. There is no tendency in repeated sittings to reiterate one visage, type, or pose in an obsessive homage to a subject’s potency (a penchant of some symbolist painters, including Khnopff, derived from Pre-Raphaelite painting). Another photograph of Gilda Gray, that would be adapted as a cover for Theatre Magazine in 1926, visu- alizes the dancer as an exotic, self-enchanted creature combining the adorn- ments of modern beauty with the Roman vegetative headdress of the goddess Flora. A background of etched boscage amplifies the association with fertility. Fanciful vegetation indeed makes up nearly every background represented in Boris’s American images of the 1920s. Humans in his visual world inhabit two- dimensional nature or a featureless tonal space. Other images of Gilda Gray show her as a charming femme moderne with a dancer’s bob smiling flirta- tiously at someone (not the viewer) out of the pictorial field. This suite of images shows that Boris understood the peculiar pathogenic variability of actors and actresses; he attempted to capture some of that multiple expressive manifestations of personality. The ability to create both iconic visualizations of a performer and images that convey his or her mimetic range of personification has been a hallmark of theatrical photographers since the rise of Napoleon Sa- rony on Broadway in the late 1860s. It perhaps accounts for the attraction his images had among younger Broadway photographers looking for a new way to perform an old task. Boris’s contact work for Paramount necessarily serviced certain preoccu- pations of the American entertainment industry. Most significant was Hol- lywood’s predilection for photographing women. In Sofia, the majority of Majdrakoff’s photographs had depicted men. In the United States, M. I. Bo- ris’s camera turned more frequently to women, presumably at Paramount’s behest. Boris’s finest portraits of male performers portray them as vessels of passion. Calling upon the drama and heightened expression that he had perfected in one stream of his Bulgarian photography, Boris made stars such as Richard Dix and Roy D’Arcy vessels of heightened vitality. As with his women’s portraits there is a tendency for the male sitters not to acknowledge the viewer with their eyes. The sitters are always emotionally or spiritually moved by something other than the viewer’s inspection. The implied viewer-fan-devotee is always the least significant factor operating in the pictorial world.

254 Chapter Seven Figure 7.10 M. I. Boris: Richard Dix, New York, Paramount Pictures, 1927. Courtesy of Tomas Majdrakoff. This is interesting because the photographs overwhelmingly indicate the spatial proximity of the onlooker. At a time when studio portraitists such as Ruth Harriet Louise, Max Munn Autrey, Ernest Bachrach, and Jack Freulich habitually photographed stars full figure and then cropped and did blowups for half-lengths, busts, and head shots, Boris habitually positioned his lens close to the sitter, rarely ever taking a full-figure image. One consequence of this passive intimacy of imagery is that the body is markedly subordinate to face and hands as an expressive feature. The sexual valences of glamour photography are muted when the body is not fully visualized. Just what Boris sacrifices can be measured by the impact of the one important surviving performer portrait in full body, the image of European star Liya DiPutti wearing a slinky skintight black dress. This Goth flapper combines the sexual aggression of the 1910s movie vamps (Theda Bara, Velaska Suratt, Louise Glaum) with the streamlined modernity of 1920s fashion. It is, perhaps, only just saved from being hokey by its overtly artificial background and etched frame. The more suggestive sexuality found in the bared shoulders of Louise Brooks has greater power to elicit admiration now. The suggested body is made vital by the intelligence and malicious wit of Brooks’s glance. The expressive power of the head as emblem of sexual force is quintes- sentially projected in his hypermodernists disembodied female head of 1927. Suspended in an artificially lit abstract juncture of light and shade, this introspective, expressionless visage has the sculptural quality of a Hurrell photo of 1930s vintage, the interiority of a Clarence Sinclair Bull study of Garbo, and the sleekness of a Brancusi sculpture. Boris’s ability to suggest soul as well as allure, his craft as an image maker, his stylistic range that could evoke a hypermodern futurity as fluently as classical antiquity, and his distinction as a manipulator of tone all made him a compelling figure to the younger chroniclers of the theater in the mid-1920s. Certain of the new Broadway photographers—the De Mirjian brothers, Ralph Oggiano, Hal Phyfe, Herbert Mitchell, even the slightly more senior G. Mail- lard Kesslere—saw the shadowy docudrama intensity that Florence Vandamm was developing as a “Broadway” alternative to glamour too visually pedestrian. They discovered Boris’s images and immediately saw that he had advanced beyond the sorts of image manipulations practiced by pictorial photographers. They used him as a style reference, not a model for practice, for none wished to expend the hours slicing into glass plate negatives. Fortunately for them, flexible film negatives became popular in the late 1920s, making this sort of manipulation much easier to perform. Max Thorek and William Mortensen published manuals on how to do it. Boris, having mastered the art of transforming glass negatives, was reluctant to use film. He used five-by-seven-inch glass negatives until the late 1940s.

256 Chapter Seven Figure 7.11 M. I. Boris: Liya DiPutti, New York, Paramount Pictures, 1926. A version of this image appeared in the Los Angeles Times, October 24, 1926, H1. Courtesy of Tomas Majdrakoff. Figure 7.12 M. I. Boris: Louise Brooks, New York, 1926. Courtesy of Tomas Majdrakoff. Figure 7.13 M. I. Boris: Modernist head, New York, 1927. Perhaps an altered image of Greta Garbo. Courtesy of Tomas Majdrakoff. Kesslere was the first to register Boris’s influence. Trained as a painter at the University of Rochester, he opened his first studio in New York in 1921 and attempted to win fame as a portraitist in oils. His taste ran to the sort of diaphanous prettiness of September morn and an oddly traditional sense of background, as though he were recycling the more exotic landscapes in Ira L. Hill’s photo studio of the mid-1910s. One sees in Kesslere’s images of 1923 and 1924, after Boris has made his mark, the simplification of background into abstract gestures, a growing concentration on the sitter’s head, and finally a suspension of the head in a featureless space. The boundaries of the head are made overtly graphic, rather than photographic. A similar sort of development is seen in the work of the revue photographer John De Mirjian. One reason for Boris’s influence was his growing prominence in the New York Society of Pro- fessional Photographers, in which he chaired the annual competitions during the 1930s. He also began lecturing and taking private students. From a surviving notebook of lecture notes, we can gather something of the flavor of his instruction.

composition: The photograph must present the essentials in a proper order. To give the picture stability, you must show a relationship between the essential elements. Coordination of lighting, shadow, and space is needed to bring about proper composition. A picture must have a sense of perspective, for depth can easily be lost in the transfer from reality to the plane surface of photographs. glamour: Waving the arms or sitting pretty isn’t glamour. Beauty alone is not glamour. You could meet any beautiful woman but she would not appeal to you, and yet one not so beautiful may attract you like a magnet. She has a certain quality and charm that grasps your attention. This then could be said to be glamour. instinct: A photographic artist should never forget the simplicity of primitive instinct. light: Daylight cannot compare with artificial light in its versatility, for it is more or less stationary and its intensity cannot be changed to any great degree by the photographer. imagination: Imagination is like a muscle; it can be developed only through exercise and training. insight: The photographic artist must have a thorough and deep understanding of life. He should be able to see certain characteristics in his subject. There is something in each and every one of us that makes us different from one another, and that something can add a spark and quality that turns an ordinary picture into something excellent. portraiture: In portrait photography we deal not only with the image but the personality of a human being. Camera equipment and mechanics are

260 Chapter Seven useless without a thorough and basic knowledge of the subject. We must learn about the structure of the face, the different muscles and how they form and change from birth to age. retouching: A negative requires all kinds of different treatments to bring it to a point where it will render an artist print. The first stage is to retouch the face with skill so that the pencil blends and remains undetectable in the final print. In retouching face, preserve the forms, and if necessary re- model them to make them more outstanding, emphasizing the character and personality of the person. Retouching requires many corrections in the hairdo, clothing, and posture of the body. It also requires the creation of a background to complement the particular subject and pose.20

When King Boris of Bulgaria died under mysterious circumstances on a plane flight back from meeting Adolph Hitler during the months leading to World War II, M. I. Boris took “Royal Photographer” off his stationary and business cards. In its place he put, “representing the highest attainment in the art of photography.” His career had first been established on the basis of the prestige of his royal subjects. In the United States, he grew to believe that it was not so much the sitter, as the artistry with which the sitter was shown, that mattered. In our age of digital aesthetics, Boris’s conviction that every aspect of a photograph was open to alteration in the light of an artist’s vision seems more prescient than the call for “straight” photography voiced by his contemporaries. It is perhaps time to recall how, for a moment in the evolution of entertainment photography, the one tradition of photography invariably concerned with artifice during the twentieth century, Boris drew a horizon of possibility that conflated the graphic with the photographic in a way unequalled until Kodak introduced the digital DCS photosystem in 1991.

261 Royal Photographer to the Stars

III Artistry and Regimen Figure 8.1 [Hendrick Sartov]: Lillian Gish as Lucy Barrows in Broken Blossoms, D. W. Griffith Productions, October 20, 1919. 8 The Eyes of Lillian Gish

In D. W. Griffith’sBroken Blossoms (1919) Zen missionary Cheng Huang erects a shrine around the recumbent figure of Lucy Burrows, the tragic Cockney girl who will be beaten to death by her abusive father, Battling Burrows, at movie’s end. Adorned with Chinese combs and hairpins and silk robes, the quintessential English lass has lost none of the angelic Saxon beauty in Cheng’s attempt to vest her with Oriental elegance. The girlish purity of the face, its symmetry, and the simplicity of the expression—uncomprehending at why anyone would revere her yet taking joy in the unexpected gift of regard—reveals the peculiarly spiritual form of glamour that could coalesce around the figure of the girl in the early decades of the twentieth century. If glamour meant the charming of mortals into a rapt elevation, then that radiating from Lucy—from Lil- lian Gish’s face—was the most traditionally sublime sort, recalling the poetry of Petrarch’s vision of his deceased Laura in heaven acting as his intercessor, or Christian loveliness of Eva on her deathbed in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, redeeming her planter father with her purity. It is the mystique that Edgar Allan Poe shrouded his beloved virgins, too early victims to the grave, haunting the imaginations of their surviving lovers in “Lenore” and “Ullalume.” In the twenty-first century, we have become too enamored of that later manifestation of glamour, the worldly woman, to fully

265 appreciate the spiritual glamour of the girl, the Anglo-Saxon angel. But gazing at Lillian Gish, one, can perhaps recapture it. No woman better knew how to convey that interior splendor and soulfulness. It was Gish who gave Garbo a warrant to deepen her privacy. Whether in Billy Bitzer’s motion picture scenes, or in Hendrick Sartov’s dewy stills, Gish assumed all of the power of Chris- tian sacrifice, of undeserved holy victimhood, pulling pity and fear out of the hearts of even jaded spectators. Her image encouraged catharsis, the release of emotion than makes humans sane, compassionate, loving. No one knew how to work through cameras better than Lillian Gish. From her first 1912 Biograph shorts to 1927’sThe Wind, she studied the art of visual representation with an attention unequalled by any actress of her age. Mary Pickford may have hired more lensmen and paid more on an annual basis for publicity images, but she chose in the end to dispense with the services of a visual genius, Charles Rosher,1 and hired an uninspired but agreeable still man, K. O. Rhamn, to be her personal photographer. Lillian Gish discovered talent. She brought Sartov to Griffith, and when Griffith moved east, insisted that James Abbe be brought in on Way Down East and Orphans of the Storm to sup- plement the production work of Frank Diem. In New York, she patronized four additional photographers: Kenneth Alexander, Charles Albin, Alfred Cheney Johnston, and Richard Burke. When she sailed with her movie company to Italy to film the Catholic in- spirational filmThe White Sister, she convinced James Abbe to give up one of the most lucrative studios in New York City for work as chief still man at a fraction of his usual pay. Abbe counted the adventure one of the turning points of his life. When Abbe couldn’t work on Gish’s follow-up, the Renaissance romance Romola, Gish convinced painter-photographer Charles Albin to leave Gotham for the Italian countryside. He would produce one of the most distinguished sets of stills created in the 1920s, exhibited in a gallery in Paris. Clem- enceau secured two images for his art collection. When hired by MGM in 1925 to serve as the female star for the studio’s pictures, Gish insisted that Kenneth Alexander be hired to shoot the publicity for La Bohème and Henry Waxman, ex–New York photographer and struggling Hollywood independent, to shoot the production stills. She was the driving force in the general adoption of panchromatic film for cinematography and still photography, pioneering its employment in her projects of 1923–24, and forcing MGM to employ it in 1925. Her knowledge, her self-possession, and her decided taste in terms of her own portrayal would place her at odds with MGM, the studio at the center of a top-down reorganization of the motion picture industry in the late 1920s. Lou- ise Brooks and her adherents among the film studies community believed that Louis B. Mayer targeted Gish in a campaign to dismantle the autonomy of star talent. Gish hated the fakery of studio publicity and had the clout to refuse to

266 Chapter Eight play along with the rumor mill. According to Brooks, MGM’s executives, aided by Photoplay magazine, decided to quash resistance among players to publicity campaigns by defaming the chief resistors.2 Mayer’s brutal treatment of John Gilbert, MGM’s biggest male star, and Gish’s first leading man at the studio, lends credence to the theory that an assault upon star power was underway in the final years of the 1920s. There may have been another dimension to MGM’s growing antipathy to Gish. She did not merely look intelligent, spiritual, and sublime; she was an intellectual, conversant with New York’s most creative minds, and self- possessedly articulate in her artistry. She had revived the Griffith method of rehearsing scenes and refined it in her first MGM feature,La Bohème (1926). The quality of the result and the prestige value of Gish’s name on the marquee made Thalberg and the studio bureaucracy tolerate the method. Yet in an industry in which time was money, rehearsing scenes to perfection could not be tolerated. Thalberg much preferred the retake method of product refinement. MGM reacted against Gish—against her image, her performing practice, her intellection, her sexual modesty, and her autonomy. She was decidedly not a member of the cast of feminine types that MGM featured in its product after 1926—flappers, peroxide blondes, socialites, vain royals, and tragic call girls. Gish’s penultimate films at MGM—Annie Laurie (1927) and The Enemy (1928)—demonstrated that her individual talent could not compensate for soggy stories and vague direction. Mayer wouldn’t assign an A-list director, a successful scenarist, or the most accomplished contract supporting actors to Gish’s projects. Only when the studio executives became absorbed in the crisis of transmuting all production to sound in late 1928 did their attention wander from Gish, permitting her to make her final silent masterwork,The Wind, with Lars Hanson. Curiously, the liabilities of Annie Laurie and The Enemy (stodgy pacing, type acting, and diffuseness of mood) vanish in the stills. Over these images she still exercised some control. Milton Brown’s work on Scarlet Letter and An- nie Laurie have an artistry he would never achieve in any other of his film projects including his work on Grand Hotel and the series of Greta Garbo features he photographed.3 How did Gish develop the acutest eye for camera talent of any cinematic performer of the era? How one learns to see in the absence of any obvious in- structor is hard to ascertain. Yet the direction of her knowledge can clearly be registered in the work of the still artists she employed. When one examines stills from the films under her most direct control,The White Sister, Romola, La Bohème, and The Scarlet Letter, one detects a growing sense of pictorial dynamism. The early pictures shot by James Abbe and Charles Albin present tableaux, scenes of arrested pose; the later, shot by Milton Brown and Kenneth Alexander, implicit motion.

267 The Eyes of Lillian Gish James Abbe and the Intimate Dark

Behind James Abbe’s modest, scholarly, exterior lurked an adventurer’s soul. He began as a Brownie-toting boy prowling the waterfront of Portsmouth, Vir- ginia, for ship arrivals that he could snap, print instantly as postcards, and sell to the maritime excursionists. He broke into the national magazines hawking glammed up portraits of the students at Virginia women’s colleges to New York editors as illustrations for fiction stories.4 Having sold to the big city magazines, he left Virginia to live in the big city. His first credited image appeared in print in 1917. After a year and a half of struggle, he established himself as a first-call Broadway photographer overnight in 1919, pioneering a style of onstage character photography. His artistry attracted the notice of Lillian Gish, and through Gish the elite of the movie industry. Abbe knew precisely the moment when he found his métier as a photographer. It occurred when John Barrymore, starring in The Jest, refused to come to Abbe’s studio for publicity shots, insisting that Abbe come to the theater. In his memoir, Wonderful Years, Abbe imagined Barrymore’s monologue to his publicity agent, Ruth Hale: “It is damned foolishness shooting pictures of performers in costume in some photographer’s studio. If photographers had any imagination they’d learn how to shoot in the theater, on the stage, with the sets and props that provided an adequate atmosphere.”5 Abbe offered to shoot on stage—provided that the stage crew and electricians manned the thousand-watt lamps. They agreed, and the photos, moody three-dimensional images with strong contrasts of dark and light, proved a sensation. The electric lamps were the important feature of this story. Abbe among theatrical photographers pioneered the exploitation of new lighting technol- ogies installed in theaters. Theatrical production photographs prior to 1917, whether by White Studio, Joseph Hall, Joseph Byron, or Ira D. Schwarz, employed explosive “flashlight” illumination that cameramen carried with them, not the electric lighting array in the theater. The visible signatures of a flash still were the flooding of the stage with a uniform brilliance, modest shadow, and no illusion of any light emanating from the lamps, windows, or doors on set. Theaters had been in the forefront of the electric illumination revolution, with the Savoy Theatre in London employing Swan incandescent lamps in 1881. In 1896 the Kliegel Brothers set up the first high-quality production facility in New York city; their carbon-arc lamps introduced in 1911 became popular in both film studios and on stage. Shortly after the turn of the century, Cooper-Hewitt introduced the Mercury-Vapor lamp, with its signature bluish tinge. The invention of the tungsten filament and the use of pressurized nitrogen in bulbs in 1913 improved lighting efficiency and bulb life greatly. In the 1910s the spotlight becomes ubiquitous. The effect of this innovation was extraordinary control of light and shade on stage.

268 Chapter Eight Frank C. Bangs, the actor-photographer, had realized that the dark’s suggestive drama had been sacrificed by stage photography in order to make the entire stage apparent to a lens. His portraiture attempted to restore the dark and some sense of the intimacy of stage interaction, showing actors pooled in shadow emoting scenes. Abbe did Bangs one better, capturing the peculiarly magical control of light and shade accomplished by production technicians by 1917. He shot the performers dressed in character but not performing a role. He captured them candid, backstage, onstage, and in the dressing room. An

Figure 8.2 James Abbe: Harry Beresford as Clem Hawley in The Old Soak, New York, August 22, 1922. Producer Arthur Hopkins was an aesthete with a sensitivity to visual innovation. Abbe portrait seemed a mystery encountered. The portrayed persons inhabited a peculiar zone between their personalities and their roles. Abbe did something distinctive in the history of early glamour. He recorded mystique, the atmospheric dark out of which glamour gleamed. In his post-1919 shots, theatrical limelight shines a zone immediately around persons—sometimes back-lit, sometimes underlit; the persons stand so intimately connected with glow that they seem themselves luminous. The richer the dark, the more the light seems a radiation of a human being rather than the ambient lighting of the set. Furthermore the dark had no tincture of peril. It was not the dark welling out of the cellars of the houses of dread. Rather it was the night of nightlife, rich with nocturnal poetry. In 1919 no photographer associated more closely with the gorgeous lighting effects that art directors had lavished on the stage. Producers hired Abbe to do lobby shots, the oversized portraits of the performers shown in character that graced the foyers of theaters after the first night. D. W. Griffith’s company, having moved to New York in 1919, witnessed the emergence of Abbe as the poet of theatrical lighting. While Griffith’s studio was being built on Long Is- land, the director made features on location in Connecticut and Florida with Billie Bitzer—Way Down East (shot in winter of 1920 and released September 1, 1920) and The Idol Dancer (shot in late spring 1920). Gish remained behind in New York relishing the intellectual stimulation of city life. When not acting, she haunted Broadway and the city’s intellectual salons on the weekends. During the filming ofWay Down East, she encountered Abbe’s work on Broad- way. Bitzer had already hired Frank Diem as still photographer for Griffith Studio. But Gish understood the value of the “special publicity photography” that Abbe did for stage productions. She prodded Griffith into securing James Abbe’s services. He shot special publicity shots for Broken Blossoms after the production had wrapped. When Griffith departed for Florida, Gish on her own contracted with Abbe for some images in connection with Remodeling Your Husband, a comedy about a married woman’s recapturing the interest of a philandering husband and Lillian’s sole experiment in film direction. George W. Hill cranked the motion picture cameras, New York wit Dorothy Parker supplied the titles, and Frank Diem did the stills—well-lit reportorial images. Diem’s face shots of the wife (Dorothy Gish) show her exercising a number of comic glares and startles—eye acting. In contrast, the poetic Abbe portrait of Dorothy Gish published in Shadowland in May of 1920 showed her as a complex human being of mixed emotion. It created an immediate interest among other film players. Abbe, when recalling in his memoir why he trekked to Hollywood in summer of 1920, indicated that D. W. Griffith urged him upon the adventure. “He thought I should pay the film colony a visit.”6 While Lillian Gish and others had advised him to go earlier, only the master’s verdict proved sufficiently

270 Chapter Eight Figure 8.3 James Abbe: Mary Pickford as Amanda Afflick in Suds, Hollywood, Mary Pickford Company, United Artists, January 7, 1920. Dressed as a fantasy princess in the daydream of a kitchen drudge. Gown by Adele Crinley. weighty to move Abbe’s will. The truth of the matter is probably this: Gish urged Griffith to suggest going to Hollywood for a jaunt during the dead period for production during the early summer of 1920. Arriving in Hollywood with the blessing of the man universally deemed the master savant of the industry opened doors, particularly among Griffith’s collaborators in United Artists. Mary Pickford hired him to do publicity shots for Suds. Abbe complied with his usual virtuosic and complicated studies of mystique. While Abbe worked on set with Pickford setting upSuds publicity, comedy king Mack Sennett visited, studying the photographer’s manipulation of lights. “Sennett watched me at work, then asked me to go over and take some shots of his bathing beauties. . . . I worked all one day with those gorgeous beauties. . . . Mack said, ‘Now I want you to make up a story, whatever comes to your mind. Direct the girls and I’ll send in Ben Turpin or Ford Sterling.’”7 When Abbe inquired about the script to be used in the shooting, Sennett informed him that none of the comedies employed scripts, being the spontaneous creations of his directors aided by the recommendations of three one-thousand-dollar-a-week gag men. Sennett then said, “they won’t help you now, because you are on trial. I want to see what you come up without outside help.” Abbe decided to riff on bohemian misadventures in Greenwich Village and produced a test piece creditable enough for Sennett to offer him a five-hundred-dollar-a-week directing job. Abbe accepted. At this juncture his recollections swerve from the historical record. He says that he could only think of a slapstick versions of The Water Babies, a suggestion that disappointed Sennett, who informed him that “a kick on somebody else’s shins” was the only truly comic situation. His career ended before it started. In truth, Abbe proposed a more ambitious scheme, a satire of the pretensions of the cinematic epics of antiquity—from Giovanni Pastrone’s La Caduta di Troia (The Fall of Troy, 1910) and Cabiria (1914), Enrico Guazoni’s Quo Vadis? (1912), through D. W. Griffith’sIntolerance and C. B. DeMille’s Male and Female—that had constituted the most prestigious of prestige productions in the previous decade. Over July 1920 Abbe shot substantial footage of antics in antique dress, with Ben Turpin and a host of toga-clad bathing beauties cavorting in mock-Roman architecture. Identified in studio records as the “Roman Slave Mart” movie, the project apparently pitted two sorts of cinema spectacle against one another—cheesecake and epic art direction—in an exercise in visual incongruity lacking much narrative premise.8 The footage was visually striking but incoherent even by the anarchic standards of the Sennett studio. The plug was pulled. Abbe left for the East Coast. Sennett let the footage sit on the shelf half a year before deciding that it could be salvaged as an insert in another story—a tale about a crew of old theatrical troupers whom fashion has passed by, among them Ben Turpin as an unlikely Don Juan pursued by multitudes of beauties, who manage to save themselves from penury by staging a show, using all of Turpin’s pursuers. The show was the parade of

272 Chapter Eight beauties at the Roman slave market. In publicity he played up the Abbe/artistry angle big because of the flood of prestige photographic talent being imported to Broadway—Freulich, Bangs, Rice, and Alfred Cheney Johnston.

James E. Abbe is Responsible for unique Success— Famous “Still” Photographer Creates Original Effects for New Sennett Comedy.

Several months ago Mack Sennett announced the engagement of James E. Abbe, celebrated New York photographer, who was to direct the lighting and posturing of fantastic comedy in which the Gotham expert was to explain those principles of high-grade portraiture which had given him world-wide fame as a “still” camera expert. The picture was completed in due time to the highest satisfaction of Mack Sennett and his associates. Its employment as part of a comedy device to introduce the artistic scenes was postponed till recently, owing to Mr. Sennett’s activities in behalf of “A Small Town Idol.” The entire picture has now been completed and, under the title of “Home Talent,” it will be released through Associated Producers, Inc., in this city in the near future. Phyllis Haver, supported by Mildred June, Kathryn McGuire, Harriet Hammond and the corps of the fairest of Mack Sennett’s feminine forces will be seen in episodes laid in the slave mart of Ancient Rome. Here, it is asserted, will be disclosed adequately for the first time the beauty of the Sennett girls. Each moving episode has been invested with the artistic charm of a finished Abbe portrait. His use of lights has long since given him celebrity and this skill he has been able to bring to bear on his “subjects” even while in action.9

One has to admire Sennett’s canniness in designingHome Talent and its publicity. Abbe was a theatrical photographer, perhaps the most famous theatrical photographer in 1920; so the slave mart scene appeared as a “show” staged by a group of washed-up troupers and wannabe showgirls. The lack of narrative in the slave scenes no longer mattered because its meaning—as cued by the publicity—was the revelation of the true pulchritude of the Sen- nett bathing beauties. Now Sennett had made money on such revelations since 1918 when the beauties supplanted the Keystone Kops in box office appeal. He made money on Home Talent as well, reinforcing his conviction that artistic photography could amplify the attractiveness of his bathing beauties and the ludicrousness of his oddball comedians. Sennett’s next salaried staff photographer, George F. Cannons, had specialized in portraying the body in his native England—as a medical photographer.10 For Abbe the experience with Sennett convinced him that his talent lay in depiction, not direction. He returned to New York, content to work as a hired

273 The Eyes of Lillian Gish Figure 8.4 James Abbe: Phyllis Haver and Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties as Roman slaves in Home Talent, Hollywood, Mack Sennett Comedies, May 22, 1921.

expert for film studios, doing prestige publicity and photographing theatrical productions that interested him. For Griffith and Gish, he shot on-set portraiture for Orphans of the Storm and Way Down East. Griffith even convinced him to shoot stills for one of his small-scale projects, Dream Street, starring Carol Dempster, Griffith’s slope-nosed love object. On Broadway he worked on projects that interested him—The Greenwich Village Follies, Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, the colorful Russian Chauvis-Soires. But the key to his freedom—the thing that gave him a unique ability to switch back and forth between film and stage, dance and still portraiture—was his singularly favorable position with editors in print media. For periods of time from 1919 through 1923 Abbe had special contract relations with Photoplay, with Theatre, with Shadowland, and with Vanity Fair. The New York Times rotogravure section adopted him as its

274 Chapter Eight Figure 8.5 James Abbe: Lillian and Dorothy Gish as Henriette andL ouise Girard in D. W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm, New York, D. W. Griffith Productions, December 28, 1921. The least familiar of a suite of images shot in costume as special publicity for Griffith’s costume drama set during the French Revolution. Still photographer Frank Diem, miffed at Abbe’s special session, did his own costume shooting emulating the Abbe set-ups. Figure 8.6 James Abbe: Carol Dempster as Gypsy Fair in Dream Street, New York, D. W. Griffith Productions, April 12, 1912. Griffith’s slope-nosed favorite proved photogenic but incapable of projecting passion on the screen. Abbe shot stills for this feature in addition to portraiture. lens on Broadway.11 A witty conversationalist, an effervescent, good-natured fellow as easy in the company of women as of men, and a man whose home became a salon, Abbe resembled the sort of men who ran the cutting-edge magazines rather than a hireling cameraman or publicity flack. In 1922, he made approximately twenty-six thousand dollars. Two thousand five hundred dollars of this came from a Photoplay-financed sojourn on the West Coast to shoot film stars. In 1922 his bohemianism and long trips away from New York began to strain his domestic relations. Married and a father, Abbe led dual lives—bon vivant and provider. The Jazz Age whirl of Manhattan spun him increasingly away from home responsibilities. He inaugurated a weekly party on Sundays held at his studio beginning in the afternoon and ceasing when the last artist or showgirl staggered off into the dark of the early morning. Sometime in early 1923 Lillian Gish, newly freed from her contract with D. W. Griffith, appeared at his studio with a proposition—come on location to Italy to shoot stills for The White Sister, at $150 a week. For an artist who averaged over $2,000 a month, the proposition had a kind of lunatic audacity to it. The prospect of a paid sojourn to Italy appealed to him, as did the opportunity to escape the demands of home life. Once the photographer agreed, Gish made a second re- quest—find a leading man to come on the trip. After an abortive effort to get Valentino—whom Abbe knew well—the photographer discovered a Scots actor new to Broadway whom he thought a likely lead, Ronald Colman. Abbe no doubt considered the adventure another tonic trip away from wife and home. It turned into something more fateful. Abbe fell in love with an actress in the troupe, Mary Ann Shorrock (showgirl name: Patty Platt) commenced an affair, and resolved not to return to New York in the foreseeable future. He would spend the next several years living in Paris, London, Berlin, and other European cities. Abbe’s work for The White Sister was extraordinarily varied. Gish, having noted the success of 1922’s location shoot of Nero, determined to do without the services of a conventional art director. Historic buildings in Italy would take the place of sets. Abbe served as director of lighting, still photographer, and actor. The story—a tale of thwarted love in which Gish enters a convent when she believes (incorrectly) that her beloved has been killed in a war, keeps her vows when he unexpectedly returns, and then is saved by her beloved at the cost of his life from a volcanic eruption—permitted Gish to maintain her aura of intangibility. At a time when sexual access to women was being celebrated with increasing fervency by cinema, Gish’s unassailable purity became a matter of increasing interest and controversy. InWhite Sister it led her into a marriage with Christ, and the performance of the Roman Catholic ceremony of betrothal formed the single greatest visual mystery in the film. For the first time in history, the rite of a novitiate wedding Christ was performed authenti-

277 The Eyes of Lillian Gish Figure 8.7 James Abbe: Lillian Gish and cast as Angela Chiaromonte and nuns in The White Sister, Rome, Inspiration Productions, September 5, 1923. Staged by a representative of the Vatican for director Henry King, the marriage of a nun with Christ is performed on film for the first time. From the collections of the Margaret Herrick Library.

cally for camera. While the solemnity of that ceremony had a peculiar soporific effect on the narrative of the movie, making it singularly grave and slow, so much so that the many positive reviews pronounced pacing as a caveat, when seen in stills, the film is visually one of the most impressive of the silent era. Abbe’s eye for composition, his dramatic sensibility in lighting, and his daring experimentation with panchromatic film, make the scenes ofThe White Sister operatic in their dignity and passion. Through 1923, Abbe’s stills appeared in print everywhere. When Gish contacted Abbe the following year to see whether he would repeat as still man for her follow-up project, Romola, the photographer refused. He had become so deeply imbedded in the life of Paris that the prospect of removing to Italy for a second sojourn held little attraction. In Abbe’s stead, Gish turned to her favorite New York portrait photographer, Charles Albin.

278 Chapter Eight Figure 8.8 James Abbe: Gail Kane, as Marchesa de Mola, the wicked older half sister of Angela Chiaromonte in The White Sister, Rome, Inspiration Productions, September 5, 1923. In the movie’s final scenes her duplicity in stealing Angela’s inheritance is exposed and she suffers. Albin had no film experience, but was fascinated by cinema (corresponding regularly to the editors of the New York Times on the subject) and had a visual sensibility second to none in Manhattan.

Priestly Devotion

If The White Sister sanctified Lillian Gish’s angelic innocence by demonstrating her faithfulness to her vows of purity and chastity as a bride of Christ, her choice of a substitute for Abbe as photographer strangely inverted the message. Charles Albin, born into a devout Canadian family in 1882, had as a teenager entered holy orders, but put off his robes to follow art. His Franciscan monastery, noting his graphic ability thought to make him a devotional painter, dis- patching him to the Cincinnati Art Academy to train under Frank Duveneck, one of the Munich school of American painters. Albin thrived under the tutelage of Duveneck. But the leadership of Albin’s monastery changed, and the new abbot doubted the value12 of painting as a vehicle of devotion. Albin was ordered to return to the cloister; he refused, staying with Duveneck who finished his training. Albin was defrocked. After graduation from the academy, he settled in New York as a portrait artist using both brushes and camera at his studio on Fifth Avenue. He enjoyed immediate success as a society photographer, but always regarded himself as a painter even during a period in the 1910s when he didn’t put brush to canvas. Providence seemed periodically set to punish Albin for his apostasy. His life was troubled with strange travails. The first occurred during the 1918 flu pandemic. Albin nearly died in Roosevelt Hospital. Lacking vital signs, he had been placed in the morgue. A physician friend hearing of this, demanded to see the body. Being placed on the cold metal examination table shocked the photographer back to animation. Resuscitation made him seek out that world where life seemed most antic, the theater. He quickly became an important portrait photographer of entertainers. His style was tonalist: a semblance of natural lighting using electric lamps, muting tonal range, a careful arrangement of sitter and objects almost to the point of painterly design, a disinclination for facial close-ups, a touch of soft focus, extensive retouching, but no graphic manipulation of the negative with pencil or brush. John Barrymore’s fascination with Albin’s portraits of beauty contest winner Mary Astor led to her getting entrée to Hollywood. Lillian Gish, who first sat for a portrait in 1920, loved the pearly luminousness of the images Albin produced. When Abbe declined the invitation to travel for a second time to Italy, Lil- lian Gish thought of Albin’s painterly formality of pose—just the sort of thing suited to an obsessively historical visual reconstruction of Renaissance Flor- ence. Again, Gish’s intuition proved correct. A man who had never shot stills

280 Chapter Eight Figure 8.9 Charles Albin: Lillian Gish, New York, 1920. Portrait of the actress taken at Albin’s studio. Albin was a master of intermedi- ate tonalities.

in his life produced a suite of images so evocative that they could be exhibited as art photography. Albin’s work in Florence did not resemble Abbe’s around Rome. Modern Florence was too visually intrusive to use as the background for the action, so art director Robert M. Haas and an expert crew of Italian workmen built fif- teenth-century Florence in a studio on the outskirts of the city. Albin worked with cinematographer Roy Overbaugh to perfect the lighting of the sets. The poetic tact of their work of recreation proved so mesmerizing that director Henry King let the action linger in the scenes. If the pace of The White Sister

281 The Eyes of Lillian Gish Figure 8.10 Charles Albin: Lillian Gish as Romola in Romola, Florence, Inspiration Pictures, December 6, 1924. had been solemn, that of Romola was soporific. Gish’s own fascination with the visual dimension of the story (“it failed somehow to arouse my enthusiasm for anything but the beauty of its period”13) would contribute to the lack of impetus, for she took charge of the final cutting of the film, hovering over the shoulder of W. Duncan Mansfield. In a curious way the action of the motion picture seemed to aspire to the majestic composure of Albin’s stills. If inaction characterized what appeared in front of the camera, it certainly did not characterize the life of the person who wielded it. In Florence, Albin suffered the second harsh stroke of Providence in his life. He was mistakenly arrested for the mutilation murder of an Italian woman and her baby. The public outcry for swift justice and capital punishment turned Albin’s hair white during his week in jail. The American consul secured his release when evidence indicated that a deranged Russian artist committed the crime.14 Giv- en the turmoil Albin suffered during the period making the stills forRomola, their serenity of mood seems nothing short of miraculous.

Figure 8.11 Charles Albin: Lillian Gish and Ronald Colman as Romola and painter Carlo Bucellini in Romola, Florence, Inspiration Pictures, December 6, 1924.

283 The Eyes of Lillian Gish What most impresses in Albin’s stills are the varied evocations of space. Images that present capacious spaces have a lighter tonality than those portraying constrained spaces, despite the detailed textural treatment of walls, stairs, and tapestries. Lillian frequently appears as a figure before a flat surface in compressed space, a creature halfway between a living being and a work of art on the wall. The disposition of light is always rational, and seemingly natural. Exterior scenes—particularly those associated with Savonarola’s immola- tion—have ambiguous space. Smoke, mist, and deceiving angles prevent one’s sure orientation. As a body they make up one of the most distinguished sets of stills generated by a motion picture photographer during the 1920s. They are the second body of work, after Curtis’s Rubaiyat stills, known to have been collected as art objects. Albin, upon his return to the United States, led a bicoastal life, working part of the year in his New York studio, then moving to California for the remainder to undertake studio work. His work for Inspiration Pictures on Soul- Fire, New Toys, and The Beautiful City, however, occasioned the third stroke of Providence against him. The incandescent lights employed on sets gave his eyes infrared neurosis, which disrupted his eyes’ ability to focus. He retired to Culver City in 1929 to paint flowers. His studio was dominated by a Gleb Deru- jinsky sculpture of Lillian Gish as the Madonna. In the 1930s, Albin rejoined the Franciscan order and spent the final years of his life in a monastery.

Extravagation

In 1924, after completingRomola, Lillian Gish became the prize possession of the newly created MGM studio. Behind Lillian Gish’s surrender of the status of independent filmmaker lay several causes, foremost among them her lawsuit with lawyer Charles Duell, a man who aspired unsuccessfully to gain control of Gish by leveraging his status as agent to that of husband. When he failed to get Gish to the altar, he took her to court, and suffered public humiliation and total defeat of his suit.15 Because Duell was so connected in Gish’s mind with her affiliation with Inspiration Pictures, the company that madeThe White Sister and Romola, severance from Duell meant severance from the company.16 Gish signed with the newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, who oversaw the distribution of Romola. Because of Metro’s involvement in the merged studio, Gish entertained the expectation that the management would be amenable to the creative needs of performing artists; it had been the home of Alla Na- zimova before her disastrous foray into independent production. Gish arrived in Culver City to a curiously chaotic reception. Louis B. Mayer had brought out the fire engines and crowds as welcome, but the studio had nothing prepared for her in the way of material. Since no one dictated what she would perform,

284 Chapter Eight Gish took the opportunity to shape her own agenda, suggesting La Bohème and The Scarlet Letter as her initial motion pictures. When recalling the making of these movies in her memoir, Gish weaves an interestingly complex tale, pitting symbolically the influence of two French artists on cinematic representation. The French theatrical and clothing designer Erté stood for the principle of extravagance; he wished to dress the consumptive French factory girl Mimi in crisp new calico. Erté reflected the biz-think of the studio executives: “How are we to get exhibitors to pay big prices for your pictures if they don’t see production values.”17 Pitted against the philosophy of extravagation was Madame Frederick de Grésac, the distinguished old playwright living in Hollywood, who supplied the screenplay for La Bohème. She stood for tact, rebuking Gish for running across a stage like an empress instead of a New England peasant girl when playing Lizzie Borden. Gish in her aesthetics opted for tact, for Madame Grésac. Mimi wore old, faded silk on camera. She lived in a garret, albeit one of vast dimensions. In the face of MGM extravagation Gish found herself increasingly spar- tan. When the publicity office pressured director King Vidor to make the love scenes between John Gilbert and Gish more overtly sexual, Gish sought the suppression of passion to give the movie greater tension. She lost that battle, but her regimen of discipline prevailed at other times. She instituted Griffith- style thorough rehearsals of all scenes. She inspired others on the set with her professionalism, her analysis of scene motivation, and her program of physical fitness. If art direction was in the control of the extravagant, the photography was in Gish’s control. Hendrick Sartov had been hired to do the cinematography. And Gish had the studio secure the services of two New York photographers for portraits and stills: Kenneth Alexander and Henry Waxman. She did not choose Clarence Sinclair Bull, then consolidating his control as head of stills at MGM after a successful career at Goldwyn pictures. The avoidance of Bull appears all the more marked when we recall that he had shot stills for The Big Parade, the feature that Gish had seen in rushes and admired to such an extent that she requested its director (King Vidor), leading man (John Gilbert), and supporting cast for La Bohème. Gish only knew Bull from The Big Parade stills and a few experimental portraits of second-rank female stars published in 1922 in Vanity Fair as studies in cubist photography (backgrounds, not faces). There was nothing to suggest he had any sensitivity in portraying woman. The empathic moodiness of “The Man Who Shot Garbo” had not yet manifested itself. In 1925 Clarence Sinclair Bull had no name outside the specialist camera tech circles of Hollywood. He had not made any great reputation as a portrait photographer in Montana or Michigan before coming to Hollywood. Because most of Bull’s greatest still work had been uncredited while he worked at Metro and Goldwyn Studios, Gish would have had no way of knowing of the

285 The Eyes of Lillian Gish brilliance of his best projects: his stills for Searching for Romeo, In the Palace of the King, and The Grim Comedian.18 Nor would she have known anything of the work of any of the cameramen Bull had hired to do stills and publicity for his camera department: Frank Bjerring, Milton Brown, Wallace Chewning, Bert Longworth, James Manatt, Arthur Marion, Fred Reynolds Morgan, Merritts Stibold, or Homer Van Pelt.19 None had an independent reputation as a portrait photographer. Little wonder she brought in persons in whom she had confi- dence to do portraits and stills for her first project. Both Kenneth Alexander and Henry Waxman were hired on a job basis, not signed as contract employees on the MGM staff, with the standard six-month term.

“A Photographer of Women”

English-born Kenneth Alexander (1887–1975) apprenticed as a photographer’s assistant in London before the turn of the twentieth century and absorbed the lessons of large-scale image production there.20 He emigrated to New York City with his parents in 1903. In New York City he continued his training as an assistant to the English-born photographer Ernest Walter Histed, an expert at dramatic portrait in low light settings. At age nineteen he went independent, moving to Millville, New Jersey, and commencing a business doing “home portraiture.” Alexander’s work earned national notice in 1907 when a print of painter Arthur W. Dow topped the portrait category in the Third American Salon at the Toledo Museum of Art. Alexander became a US citizen in 1914. He published portraits intermittently throughout the 1910s. His growing renown permitted him to redirect his business, moving from home photography to celebrity portraiture. His contact with the theatrical world during World War I led to romance, when actress Mollie King fell in love with him. They married in 1919, and he moved to New York City to accommodate her stage career. In the crowded New York studio scene he won distinction by advertising himself as “Photographer of Women Exclusively,” gender-switching Pirie McDonald’s famous motto about being a photographer of men. Because his studio enjoyed a fashionable address—542 Fifth Avenue—he won immediate cachet with younger actresses. Lillian Gish had a particular admiration of the lightsome texture of Alex- ander’s flesh tones and the diffused lighting he employed in portraiture She sat for him at least four times in New York in the early 1920s. He was perhaps the ideal photographer to portray a young beauty dying of consumption. Alexander had several tricks as a portraitist. He insisted that women not powder their noses before a sitting. “Powder in a photograph, it seems catches the light and turns the light rays into curved lines, which give the nose a bul- bous appearance. The natural oils of the nose pores, however, help the light to slide off gracefully and improve the appearance.”21 He had techniques that

286 Chapter Eight Figure 8.12 Kenneth Alexander: Lillian Gish, a portrait taken in New York City, 1924, shortly before the shooting of Romola.

made expression vivacious: “I put a lens in front of the light, as well as in front of the camera, and put a spark into the sitter’s eyes that makes them alive.”22 He was not averse to using soft focus for male portraiture. For Roy D’Arcy inLa Bohème he employed a Dallmeyer soft-focus lens, a scrim of gauze and cross- lighting. The portraits of Lillian Gish are all in character, either solo shots or two-shots with John Gilbert. Several features strike a viewer immediately. She never engages the onlooker or Gilbert with her eyes. Even in intimate tête-à- tête shots with Gilbert, her eyes look into space, not seeing anything, but registering her privacy, her absorption in feeling or thought. Alexander created

287 The Eyes of Lillian Gish Figure 8.13 [Kenneth Alexander]: Roy D’Arcy as Vicomte Paul in La Bohème, Hollywood, Metro-Gold- wyn-Mayer, March 13, 1926. images that suited Gish’s peculiar conception of personal publicity. Further- more, he overexposed her period dresses at times in order to obscure the fussy details, the ornament that would suggest an inappropriate access to wealth for Mimi. From late 1925 onward Alexander resided in Hollywood, working primarily with Samuel Goldwyn, but with brief sojourns with Paramount, Twentieth Century Pictures, and Joseph Schenck. During his Hollywood years Alexan- der split his photography into artistic work, exhibited at the annual salons of the Camera Pictorialists group at the Los Angeles Museum, and studio work, which became increasingly varied. He shot stills, he shot fashion, he shot costume shots, and he shot continuity images. When Los Angeles Times reporter John Wolfenden published his prose celebration of Hollywood still men in May 5, 1935, Kenneth Alexander figured prominently in the story.

Henry Waxman

Henry Waxman (1901–63), whom Gish selected to do stills for La Bohème, though only twenty-five, had earned reputations in both New York and in Hollywood. Born in New York City, he had been educated in the public schools of Manhattan, the younger of two children born to a German plumber and an Austrian housewife. Handsome, sociable, and artistic, Henry Waxman became a precocious city youth, haunting the theaters. His older sister Jose- phine, an aspiring actress and amateur photographer, initiated him into both of her fascinations. His earliest datable images (from 1921–22) bear strong resemblance to that of theatrical photographer Edward Thayer Monroe—precise, neoclassical images with minimal backgrounds, careful tonal modulation, and posed to suggest personality. Like Monroe, Waxman specialized in showgirls. Like Monroe, Waxman managed to get hired by Florenz Ziegfeld to shoot publicity for his Follies (late in the 1922 run). In 1923, probably at the instigation of his sister who wished to get a place in motion pictures, Henry and Josephine Waxman moved to Los Angeles and set up a portrait studio at 5821 Sunset Boulevard. Advertising himself as “official photographer of the Ziegfeld Follies,” he introduced himself on the Hollywood scene by recalling the bicoastal success of previous Follies photographers James Abbe and Alfred Cheney Johnston. Henry Waxman arrived in Hollywood at the last propitious moment to be an independent portrait photographer in Hollywood—early 1923. The most active independent film portraitist, Nelson Evans, had just died. Fred Hartsook had turned his attention to cattle farming. James Woodbury’s and C. Heighton Monroe’s time was monopolized by contract still work from movie studios. Melbourne Spurr and Walter F. Seely had more business than either could manage. Albert Witzel had turned over the Hollywood portrait work to Max

289 The Eyes of Lillian Gish Munn Autrey. Because most of the portrait photographers were working for the studios, one vast client base in the city found themselves underserved— the crowd of aspirants to stardom trying to get a foot in the studio doors. From the first Waxman specialized in portfolio shots—images of performers posed to suggest personality types that they could play. The vast human sea of extras, character actors and actresses, contract players, and starlets required a dozen novel shots in their folio case to show casting directors. Waxman almost immediately became the photographer of choice. The minimal backgrounds and dynamic posing made the sitter the entire show. Each sitting became an outbreak of multiple personality disorder. By 1924 Waxman had developed as strong a following within the studios as without. Waxman’s eye for drama and his care as a retoucher made his pictures eye-catching. He used less soft focus than Spurr and had better control over middle tones in printing than Autrey at Witzel’s Hollywood studio. When stars began making use of Waxman’s studio, he gave them special attention, creating artistic eleven-by-fourteen presentation images for them. Their subtle tonality and cream papers pointedly did not lend themselves to reproduction. These art portraits became immediately fashionable, drawing an increasingly stellar clientele. From a business standpoint, Waxman’s creation of these time-consuming, costly presentation images made perfect sense. What future lay in being the favorite photographer of the wannabes, that segment of the performing profession least able to pay? Yet financially, servicing the stars had its dangers. They were notoriously casual about paying independent photographers for sittings. In spring of 1925 the perils of running a specialist shop for star portrait photography in Hollywood became critical. Because of slow collections of payments, Waxman fell in arrears, and in the first week of April his studio was attached.23 At the same time a former employee filed suit. He needed a thousand dollars to clear the red from his books, and the money owed him more than matched this amount, but the mounting difficulties disheartened the photographer. He suffered a nervous breakdown. His sister Josephine stepped in to keep the business afloat while tending to her ill brother. He became so anxious that he could only sleep “after the administration of opiates.”24 Josephine shipped Henry to a friend’s ranch in Death Valley to recuperate. Five weeks later the Los Angeles Times published a story titled, “Portraits Expert to Join Films”: “Henry Waxman, nationally known portrait photographer, has abandoned his portrait work and will begin at the bottom as a motion-picture cameraman, according to an announcement made yesterday by officials of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. Waxman, though still a young man, has photographed practically every film star of note at his local studio.”25 The story noted that Hollywood felt surprise at the announcement. It also noted that Waxman’s first job would be for King Vidor.

290 Chapter Eight Figure 8.14 henry Waxman: Richard Dix, Hollywood, 1926. Presentation portrait. He would shoot stills for two of Vidor’s films:La Bohème and the costume romance Bardleys the Magnificent in the summer of 1925. Lillian Gish convinced Vidor to hire Waxman. Waxman’s stills, like the film itself, were shot on panchromatic film; consequently they have a tonal integrity that was striking when first issued. The stills dramatize one of the peculiarities of La Bohème’s visualization—the extraordinary visual depth of most scenes. Except for the famous death scene few walls face the viewer, and even that wall is only partial. Spaciousness gives the figures a peculiar envelope of seeming freedom that creates an interesting symbolic counterpoint with the inexorable drift of Mimi toward death by disease and the limitations on action imposed by poverty. Another point of visual interest common to film and stills is the dynamism of heads. Since the film portrays Bohemian society in Paris, there are most often two or more figures in a scene, and their interrelation is conveyed by the posing of heads. Mimi’s coyness with her suitor Rodolpho is eloquently expressed in the tilting of heads and the oscillating distance between the lovers’ faces from scene to scene. Waxman in his first cinema project proved himself as skillful a still man as portraitist. Extraordinary facility would be Waxman’s hallmark through the remainder of his career. He mastered various genres and styles of photography rapidly and rose to eminence in each new field. His still work reached its greatest visual ingenuity in his projects for Warner Brothers studio in the 1930s when it boasted the finest camera department in Hollywood. Yet when working for Warner Brothers, he maintained a private home studio on the side, and quietly perfected a style of commercial photography in the mid-1930s, winning in 1937 the Art Directors Club award for best photograph in the sixteenth annual exhibition of advertising art. He did contract work for Young & Rubicon advertising company throughout the late 1930s. Because of the intense interest in magazine advertisers in color, Waxman studied color process photography and became one of the finer color photographers of the 1940s. He, George Hurrell, and Erwin Blumenfeld became the favorite photographers of Esquire Magazine in the 1940s, when he became one of most tasteful and elegant cheesecake and leg art photographers of the Second World War era. Yet he would not permit himself be restricted to frisky starlets or Kodachrome shots of widgets in his subject matter. In the 1940s he cultivated a new representational niche: color portraits of champion purebred dogs. He quickly rose to national eminence as the great photographer of the most celebrated dogs of the postwar period. MGM in 1925 was in the midst of a bureaucratic rationalization, with the camera department serving the needs of the publicity department. Clarence S. Bull needed soldiers, not mercurial artists fascinated with exploring new avenues of representation. Waxman departed after his two jobs with King Vi- dor over the summer, reestablishing his portrait studio and taking on contract

292 Chapter Eight Figure 8.15 [Henry Waxman]: Lillian Gish and John Gilbert as Mimi and Rodolphe in La Bohème, Hollywood, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, March 13, 1926. Mimi expires from consumption.

work with various studios on a per job basis. Gish when she began her second feature with MGM, The Scarlet Letter, had to make do with one of the staff photographers under Bull’s command. If she followed her usual method of action, she examined the work of the various photographers before choosing. She no doubt consulted her cinematographer, Hendrick Sartov. She chose Milton Brown.

Milton Brown

Milton Brown (1904–1975) may have been the youngest photographer on the MGM lot in 1925. He combined certain of the best qualities of other members of the crew, emulating the talents of three of his comrades—Homer Van Pelt’s

293 The Eyes of Lillian Gish ability to maintain clarity through a deep visual field in exterior shots, James Manatt’s talent for making costumed persons look natural in highly designed surroundings, and Wallace Chewning’s aptitude for capturing subtleties of interior lighting. He represented a new sort of photographer, distinctive to the studios, who specialized in shooting and lighting, but did not concern himself with the processing of the photographs—retouching or developing. At MGM only Clarence Bull and Ruth Harriet Louise in the portrait studio ever performed the entire range of traditional photographic processes, and even they did so with assistants. In the case of Milton Brown, specialization led to the cultivation of a superb eye. His stills rarely duplicated the motion picture camera set up for a scene, but staked an independent view that preserved semblance with the moving image but supplied its own sense of a scene. Brown preferred maintaining some distance between himself and the subject, so there are fewer close-ups in Brown’s stills than in almost any other of the MGM photographers of the period. His stills for Scarlet Letter show this penchant for perspective well. Puritan New England as reconstructed by art director Cedric Gibbons approximated the uninformed imaginings of the 1920s. Individuals lived in rough-hewn log structures (more Appalachian in look than New Hampshire garrison house); men wore dark capes and pilgrim hats; women wore sober bonnets, aprons, and full-length monochrome dresses. Director Victor Seastrom restrained the Hollywood tendency to caricature—so the faces of the Puritans, including the prudes and scandalmongers who persecute Hester Prynne (Lillian Gish), appear plain, rather than grotesque, as a director of the Rex Ingram school would have sought.26 The Brown images also preserve the single most distinctive visual aspect of The Scarlet Letter, its peculiar lighting. Hendrik Sartov’s interest in the physics of light had given rise to a theory that “light rays, properly controlled, exert an influence over the work of the players.” Contemporary articles detailed Sartov’s experiment: “A mixture of reddish or ultra-violet rays were employed to duplicate Spring sunshine; a dull haze, such as is seen in the early hours of a fine day, is said to have helped in portraying depression or sadness and a quasi-red mixture made it easier for the actors to reflect anger.”27 He used connections with electrical engineers to secure first use of a 325-million-watt light nicknamed the “artificial sun.” Ex- ternal scenes, whether overcast or verging on dusk, glowed with a noontide glare. Interiors, because of Sartov’s banks of experimental bulbs, iridesced with light unprecedented in motion picture history. Victor Seastrom indulged Sartov’s experiments, even arranging crowds in such a way that their costume tones gradated in darkness across a pictorial field. Brown’s 180 stills caught Sartov’s vision of Puritan New England with a lucid precision. The tensions between community and individual, Hester Prynne’s candor (light) and Rev- erend Dimmesdale’s secrecy (dark), stand revealed. What Brown does not do

294 Chapter Eight Figure 8.16 Milton Brown: Lillian Gish, as Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Hollywood, Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer, August 9, 1926. Hester displays Pearl, her child out of wedlock, to the townspeople on the stocks.

is replicate the misty, soft-focus world of Sartov’s scenes of Hester and Arthur walking through the woods or peering at their reflections in the water. With Annie Laurie, Lillian Gish lost management of the visual world of her motion pictures. Sartov was assigned to shoot Roscoe Arbuckle’s The Red Mill, and Irving Thalberg arranged that Oliver Marsh, cinematographer for The Merry Widow, to lens the production, because of his track record with costume pictures. Milton Brown, having proven his ability on The Scarlet Letter, remained Gish’s still photographer, and Cedric Gibbons, art director. Gib- bons hijacked the movie, making it a fantasia of castles, kilts, and glens. Gish was marginalized even further in the making of The Enemy. Only in her final MGM film,The Wind, did she select the story, mold the conception, and secure her choice of director (Seastrom again) and cinematographer (John Arnold) whose work she had admired in The Big Parade. Milton Brown again served as chief still photographer. It proved to be one of the final masterworks of silent cinema, and a compelling source of still imagery.

295 The Eyes of Lillian Gish As usual with MGM productions of the late 1920s, two bodies of imagery were produced for The Wind—a set of portraits in character shot by Clarence Bull and Ruth Harriet Louise—and the stills. The qualities of the portraits have been treated admirably by Robert Dance and Bruce Robertson in Ruth Harriet Louise and Hollywood Glamour Photography. Here my concern is to show the merits of Milton Brown’s location still photography. The Wind dramatizes the story of Letty Mason Hightower, a young southern woman who travels to Tex- as in the 1880s, marries a man whom she does not love, settles in a landscape perturbed by constant wind, kills a man who rapes her, and goes mad when the wind keeps uncovering the buried corpse of the rapist she gunned down. In the novel by Dorothy Scarborough—a shocker that agitated Texas boosters for decades—Letty wanders off into the desert crazed by the wind. Seastrom in his shooting of the film hewed to the tragic resolution, but Irving Thalberg, heeding the plaints of MGM’s film distributors about the down ending, had it reshot, with Letty and husband Lige coming together to find love and peace. The happy conclusion marred a motion picture that was in all other respects a masterpiece of acting and visualization. The stills did not suffer from the stu- pidity of the film’s ending. Each image is fraught with mood, and from still to still that mood accumulates an increasingly dire cast. Tragedy requires narrative. But the stills of The Wind do not so much tell a story as provide glimpses of anxiety. They reflect the psychology of the various characters in the face of an environment unremittingly hostile to human comfort. Seastrom shot The Wind on location in the Mojave Desert. Contemporary accounts of the project indicate that heat and cold deviled the project, not wind. Gusts were supplied by nine airplane-prop wind machines, and visual texture was enhanced by shooting off smoke bombs and tossing sawdust into the propellers. Gish suffered from cinder burns, eye abrasion, and blistering in order to make the wind a visible character. More than the blasted landscape of the Mojave Desert, the sky, the agitated yard, the hammering door, the tortured vegetation materialized the passion of Letty’s psyche as crudity, male indifference, male lust, and loneliness pressed against her. The exterior stills from The Wind have no stillness to them. Like snapshots they seize moments of dynamic change; the stress of moving forces is registered by the entire lack of pose and repose. Bodies are seldom resolved into gesture, but totter, lean, slouch, stagger. When they stand they often stand off-kilter. The interior scenes begin with conventional domestic poses, but as the movie progresses, the interiors darken, Letty, Lige, and villain Wirt Roddy crouch. It is as though the wind had intruded into the house. The stills for Lillian Gish’s last silent movie reveal an interesting complication in visual sensibility. The verisimilitude of location shooting, which she had sought to vest The White Sister with dignity and antiquity, in The Wind operates symbolically as a reminder of the physical and psychic costs

296 Chapter Eight Figure 8.17 Milton Brown: Lillian Gish as Letty inThe Wind, Bakersfield, AC , Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, November 23, 1928. of pioneering in the American West. The cinematography and still photography of The White Sister bought sought clarity and lucidity; depth of field was graphically registered to impose distance and perspective. In The Wind because of the sand and debris carried in the gusts, the desert appears ob- scured. Instead of space, there is at times a claustrophobic dusty enclosure. No Western landscape in the silent era seemed less spacious. But then, few Westerns dealt with the circumstances and souls of women. If domesticity in the East confined a woman to a room, an apartment, or a house, in the Texas of The Wind, she suffered capture in a ranch house, a confinement enforced by an environment so inhuman, so hostile, that exposure to it risked losing one’s humanity. No doubt when Gish read Scarborough’s novel, she saw what could be rendered on the screen. Not the passive victimhood of a Griffith drama of imperiled girlhood, but a visualization of suffering in which the environment was the external correlative of a woman’s soul, the wind outside material- izing the tortured anima. Such a visualization depended upon the reversal of the visual codes of that most familiar of motion picture genres, the goodman-versus-bad-man Western.

298 Chapter Eight 9 The Wide-Open Spaces

Theatre Magazine in 1920 marked its twentieth year of publication by inviting critics to celebrate major accomplishments in the performing arts from 1900 to 1920. Helen Worthington celebrated the genius of American cinema. She chose not to hail the epic visual narration of D. W. Griffith, the extravagant imagination of Cecile B. DeMille, the improvisational brilliance of Mack Sennett, the pathos of Mary Pickford, the poetry of Maurice Tourneur, or the narrative panache of Thomas Ince. She picked Edgar Lewis to exemplify the artistry of the American motion picture. For Worthington, Lewis was the director who mastered the art of making the visual world more beautiful.

It is from his long study of the masters in painting that Lewis has caught the secret of lighting and composition. Like any of the great painters he waits and watches for just the right moment, or light, or mood, whatever it is, that gives his pictures that touch of enchantment that marks the difference between motion picture photography and motion picture art. In his handling of magnificent distances, and in capturing with the camera the elusive beauty of nature no one has outstripped him. There have never been more wonderful effects on the screen than he has produced in “The Great Divide,” where he has verily caught the

299 vast, mysterious beauty of the Grand Canyon. This is one of the examples where he demonstrates his power to put into his pictures what painters call “feeling.” And feeling is the thing in any art that never fails to go straight to the human heart. In some hands it might have been merely a good piece of motion picture photography. But no painter ever felt beauty nor worked more sincerely to reproduce it so that others, too, might see, that is why these “shots,” instead of being photography only, become glimpses of beauty eternal and real.1

Worthington reminds us that the pictorial qualities of silent cinema often trumped every other aspect of the art in the eyes of its original witnesses. Motion pictures brought to view human dramas in dazzling scenery. The Grand Canyon was, of course, the most spectacular landscape in North America, a topography that defied the abilities of painter or photographer to capture its vast grandeur in a way that did not diminish its sublimity. In The Great Divide Lewis opted to view portions of the canyon as frames for human drama.2 He used precise composition, balancing human subject and geological object, in such a way that environment interacted with the human characters in the dramatic conflict. That Worthington likened Lewis’s pictorial artistry to that of a masterful painting testifies to the extent that the early witnesses of the motion picture viewed its spectacle with eyes trained in the relatively immobile scenery of a still picture. Worthington understood the pictorial imaginations of the most ambitious directors, many of whom after 1912 consciously sought to emulate in their shots particular paintings. Guazonni’s Quo Vadis?, (1912), the ur-spectacle of silent cinema, quoted liberally from the historicist Roman paintings of Gérôme.3 Although the American West had its visionary painters—from Alfred Bierstadt to Georgia O’Keefe—the popular visual imagination and that of the early directors had been saturated by photographs, more than paintings. Displayed at the great expositions from the 1876 Centennial in Philadelphia to the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904, photographic panoramas of Western landscape by William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan, William Bell, Jack Hillers, and E. O. Beaman proved among the more popular of the attractions.4 They stimulated the scenic railway tourism boom that made the West a visual diversion for the eastern genteel classes. As film historian Andrew Brodie Smith reminds us, two still photographers consolidated and named the Western as a movie genre: William Selig and Harry H. Buckwalter.5 Selig, the founder of Selig Polyscope Company, based in Chicago, had sidled into motion pictures from commercial photography and vaudeville. Like most of the earliest film producers, Selig specialized in educational, event-based, and novelty shorts, not story pictures. Railroad companies quickly understood that motion extended the publicity potentials

300 Chapter Nine Figure 9.1 edward C. Earle: Ethel Clayton and House Peters, The Great Divide, 1915. Edgar Lewis, director. Advertising art derived from a photograph of the principals posed on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. Duotone image, Moving Picture World, December 18, 1915.

of still photography as publicity and hired Selig to film promotional travel movies. H. H. Buckwalter, a Denver-based commercial photographer, photojournalist, and real estate developer, saw tourism as the engine driving growth in his region. Photography + railroads = the peopling of Colorado. Buckwalter and Selig met in 1901 through their mutual involvement in railroads. Selig gave Buckwalter a polyscope camera, and the Westerner became a source of thousands of feet of footage of scenic Western views and scenes of frontier life that Selig employed in railroad promotion and entertainment films and as background for spoken travelogues by live lecturers. The Smithsonian partially underwrote Buckwalter’s films of reservation life, so he cultivated, some would say manufactured, ethnographic purity: Native Peoples—the Utes particularly—performed traditional dances,

301 The Wide-Open Spaces rites, and tasks with little or no intrusions of Anglo modernity.6 His films of Colorado settlers played up the romance of primitivism, and often seem atavistic eruptions of nineteenth-century frontier life into the new century. Only the railroad footage and mining scenes suggested the forces of industry, technology, and capital at work. The railroad footage had a way of melting into the timeless sublimity of mountainous Western nature, for he mounted his cameras on the cowcatcher of the locomotive. Selig and Buckwalter found the public demand for these shorts inexhaustible. In 1903 Edison released The Great Train Robbery, a crime story shot before painted backgrounds and outdoors scenes shot in the second-growth forests of New Jersey, to enormous public acclaim.7 Selig immediately saw that filming the same sort of action in a real Western landscape would meld the audience hunger for Western scenery with their dime-novel fascination with frontier bad men. He had Buckwalter filmThe Hold-Up of the Leadville Stage (1904) and A Lynching at Cripple Creek (1904). Significantly, both films eschewed still photographs in their publicity. The Buckwalter photos that survive of the filming ofThe Hold-Up of the Leadville Stage are both “reveal” shots—one of the earliest genre of still shots, demonstrating how film magic is made by showing the process of filming. Buckwalter in both the surviving photographs from Hold-Up shows a cameraman cranking away at the Polyscope as a stage coach rumbles down a Western dirt road. Neither shot appeared in print in 1904. Instead, a PR story, which Selig placed in the Hearst papers, recounted how the filmed action was interrupted by a group of tourists in a second coach, who opened fire and shot William Selig in the hand. Since the draw of the film was that it showed a hold-up in an authentic Western environs, the PR story—“Stage Was Held Up”—played up how mimic violence became real. Buckwalter and Selig, while “showing the effete east and the rest of the world just what a hold up is really like in the woolly west,” fell victim to real gunplay. Note the present tense in the quotation—“is really like.”8 The PR story ran in many papers with an illustration—a sinuous line drawing entitled “Five of the Masked Men Ran toward Us,” as fanciful as the tale it illustrated. “Stage Was Held Up” shows how the earliest conceptions of film publicity borrowed directly from the audacious narrative school of theatrical ballyhoo. While it is clear that Selig conceived of publicizing The Hold-Up of the Leadville Stage in the manner he had learned from his years in vaudeville, it did not occur to Buckwalter to publicize the film by distributing scene photographs to print media. It did not occur to him because he considered the film itself to be the publicity—for Colorado’s scenic wilderness. The hold-up was simply a pretext for showing the glories of Colorado country. Indeed, he believed that motion picture photography amplified the pictorial work of still photography. In Hold-Up the action is repeatedly interrupted by ruminative scenes of natural wonders—in effect, William Henry Jackson moments

302 Chapter Nine Figure 9.2 harry H. Buckwalter: The Hold-Up of the Leadville Stage, Colorado, Selig, 1904. Camera- man visible on right of pictorial field. Courtesy of History Colorado (Buckwalter Collection, Scan #20031683).

(Buckwalter was vice president of the Colorado Camera Club for years when the west’s greatest landscape photographer, Jackson, sat as president). These largely static inspections were the “stills” in the movie. Their message: come on out and see the “wooly West”! We cannot gauge the numbers who boarded trains to view the Western mountains after seeing Buckwalter’s proto-Westerns. We can however, be sure that large numbers went to the vaudeville theaters in which they were shown, for Selig began replicating them with an industrial intensity. Hiring Max Anderson, a theatrical director who had worked with Edwin Porter on The Great Train Robbery, Selig built a film unit based in Colorado, affiliated with Buckwalter, but financed wholly by himself, committed to story pictures— action tales in Western settings. If Buckwalter’s fixation had been scenery, Anderson’s was character. The Girl from Montana, The Bandit King, and Western Justice introduced a polyracial mix of identities to the screen: Hispanic farmers, Anglo cowboys and ranch girls, Natives, and occasional African Americans.

303 The Wide-Open Spaces Anderson would part company with Selig and join with a rival Chicago motion picture company, Essanay. Both companies in stiff competition would generate “the Western”—an action film with diverse characterization located in a scenic Western landscape—in 1909–10, filming their productions with mobile units ranging through the West. They built public interest in the genre by offering the scenic variety of location shooting. Their principal outlet became the nickelodeon, where they proved to be so popular that any Western found an audience. Because Westerns were presold, they did not need print advertising, and the foyer advertising tended to be in the form of graphic arts posters, often recycling generic images and scenes from the covers of dime novels and Wild West Show publicity. Only after rival company Essanay had made a star out of Max Anderson as Broncho Billy did William Selig figure in 1912 that he had to build star images for his male leads, Tom Santschi and William Farnum. He contracted with a pair of young photographers in Los Angeles—Junius Estep and James Kirkpatrick—to lens a series of formal performer photographs. Selig was delighted with them. But the images did not portend the Western portraiture to come, for they showed the sitters in business suits. The future would be determined by the publicity surrounding Broncho Billy Anderson. Essanay’s portraiture and stills consistently showed Anderson in character, wearing cowboy garb. When the series first began, Essanay heralded installments with 8½˝ × 11˝ flyers illustrated by a single low-fidelity still. Then, in 1911 the company began publishing the slick paper Essanay News, the front page of which was devoted to star stories of two sorts, tales of success in the market place (“G. M. Anderson Makes Big Hit in ‘Tell-Tale Hand”’) or sensational tales (“Van Pelt Wrests Knife from Chinese Cook”). Major stories were accompanied by a small head shot.9 On the rear page, or occasionally in the centerfold, were the listing of current releases, each illustrated by a postcard-sized still in rather good fidelity: “‘The Treachery of Broncho Billy’s Pal’ #00285.” While the camera crew never produced more that a half-dozen stills for a Broncho Billy release, those that were shot by cinematographer Jackson C. Rose, Marvin Spoor, or Conrad Superti, depending on who was shooting the release, were consistently interesting, showing the stocky Anderson dressed in his usual dark outfit interacting good-naturedly with some other person.10 Anderson visually became Broncho Billy in Essanay’s campaign. And so the peculiar generic distinction that characterized Western stardom was born: the marked predominance of publicity imagery in character, dressed as a cowboy or cowgirl, rather than in fashionable street wear. William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, Fred Thomson, and Ken Maynard, when they visited the portrait studio, in most instances came in full kit. The reasons for this were complex. But the overriding reason was a fan myth that developed in the 1910s, nourished by studio PR, that the major Western stars were who they

304 Chapter Nine Figure 9.3 [Jackson Rose]: Gilbert M. Anderson as Broncho Billy, Los Angeles, Essanay Film Manufac- turing Company.

purported to be—persons whose skills at riding, roping, herding, and fighting had been nourished on the range. Since the nineteenth-century ranch world had not entirely disappeared by the 1910s, this myth had some plausibility.11 Both Thomas Ince and William Selig had hired cowboys to wrangle horses and work before the camera. Tom Mix was one of these. Another source of quasi-authentic personnel was the Wild West Shows, whose members began migrating into motion pictures during the second decade of the century. The great traveling entourages had crisscrossed the continent and the oceans for decades reenacting the history of the West, particularly the Indian wars, featuring persons who had participated in the actual events. They reenacted themselves, performing as if caught in a time loop. Buffalo Bill Cody exerted enormous influence on the visual dimensions of the early Western actor, because of his effectiveness in imprinting the American public with vivid images of riders, shooters, and Natives.12 On one hand, he cherished gestures at authenticity; on the other, he realized that the appearance had to register over the substantial distance between performer and grandstander. So bandanas took on colors,

305 The Wide-Open Spaces hats expanded dimension, horse trappings became decorative, and Natives appeared nearly exclusively in ceremonial dress Thomas Ince and Williams S. Hart reacted against the showy tendencies that Cody had introduced into Western dress, featuring in their Westerns of the 1910s the functional, rather drab wardrobe of the late nineteenth-century ranch lands. But in the case of Native dress, it was the rare release that did not feature the festooned Native. In the 1910s the various motion picture companies all boasted Native performers and produced dramas of Native life with or without Europeans in the story line. Publicity portraits generated for the Indian leads never showed the performer in modern dress. Like an Edward S. Curtis’s ”ethnographic” portrait, the sitters performed a recollection of traditional life. This traditional image seemed authentic, and it was against its “truth” that canny filmmakers in the 1920s began to deploy the image of the Indian in a suit (Richard Dix in the Vanishing American), the tragic figuration of a Native embracing modernity and experiencing alienation from his (never her) community. Thomas Ince must be credited with consolidating the traditional visual elements of the Western. His shooting enclave in the hills of Santa Monica, Santa Ynez Canyon, would come to be known as Inceville. It combined the persons and objects necessary to conjure a convincing portrait of a time recently past—a band of Sioux Indians resident on the lot, a multitude of riders and wranglers from Oklahoma’s Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch show, a stable of horses that remained intact until the outbreak of World War I, a herd of bison, tepees, stagecoaches, and a motley assortment of wooden cabins and townscapes. Obsessed with production efficiency, Ince invented the Western lensed on a studio lot, and because Inceville was so redolent of the primitive towns and semiarid landscapes of the imagined West, made the lot Western entirely adequate as a visual world.13 Ince’s vanity inclined him to written publicity, so that his name might be pronounced in every venue that would listen. He did not extensively distribute stills as publicity until his 1915 epic Civilization. Perhaps as many as a dozen were taken for each two-reel release for use as lobby cards, preview slides, and flyer images. From 1911 to 1915, the period during which Ince perfected his conflict-on-the-plains picture stories, he was preoccupied with blazoning his name into public consciousness by branding it over his product. Seeing the name of the director publicized was a rare occurrence in this era. Ince inserted his last name in titles, in programs, in magazines, in newspapers, in the least significant papers that issued from a studio. The other dimension of his vanity found expression in his obsessive concern that the motion pictures evinced his own sense of integral construction and creativity. The few stills that do survive for Ince’s classic Westerns of 1912 and 1913— War on the Plains, Blazing the Trail, The Invaders, The Battle of the Redmen, and

306 Chapter Nine The Indian Massacre—were eloquent images. They displayed human conflicts amid a low hillscape of shrubs and barren prairie (or the California equivalent of prairie—a flat grassy pasture with circumadjacent hills rendered invisible by astute camera placement). This treeless landscape made the human built environment seem peculiarly obtrusive. The slope of tepees, the circle of Conestoga wagons, and the settler stores disrupted an ascetic undulation of sedge-covered ridges and scrubby swales. The expansive horizon of unfenced land evoked a time before the closing of the frontier. Yet Ince rarely showed that vast expanse of land to be uninhabited. The stills frequently showed the presence of indigenous peoples—their villages, their bodies. Indeed, the visibility of the Indian defied the fashionable “vanishing race” sentiments that pervaded the popular literature of the early twentieth century.14 Ince visualized

Figure 9.4 [Ray Smallwood]: The aftermath of battle, The Invaders, Inceville, CA, Kay-Bee Pictures, November 29, 1912. An image predicated upon Timothy H. O. Sullivan’s Civil War Harvest of Death imagery. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. an inhabited yet expansive landscape that became an arena for violence as a settler population strove to displace a resident people. Individuals fell victim to this violence on both sides. With the candor of Alexander Gardner’s famous battlefield scenes of Cold Harbor in the American Civil War, Ince showed stripped corpses littering the rocks and ground. Ince’s stills did not automatically adopt the perspective of the white settler. Frequently scenes revealed the Indian habitus with a point of view identifying with the Native. The Indian Massacre in particular presented a complex portrait of various peoples enmeshed in a tragic moral impasse, failing to comprehend each others’ motives and values. When Ince approximated the Native perspective, he often shrank the horizon, presenting a more intimate landscape from a point of observation closer to the ground. Yet at some

Figure 9.5 [Ray Smallwood]: Blazing the Trail, Inceville, CA, Kay-Bee Pictures, April 15, 1912. A historical panorama shot that characterized those moments in Ince’s films when the large perspective was invoked. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. juncture in every film, Ince took his cameramen to the canyon walls to look down upon the panorama of distant peoples arrayed over the land. This impersonal, “historical” perspective would become a feature of visualization in the epic Westerns of later years—William S. Hart’s Wagon Tracks, James Cruz’s The Covered Wagon, and John Ford’s The Iron Horse. Other signature elements of Ince’s visualization of the West found expression in the stills. They projected an outdoor world of human movement and communal history, rather than an interior world of domestic routine and intimate drama. The infrequent interior scenes, such as the telegraph office or the camp domicile in Invaders have the makeshift flimsiness of a set built on the cheap, a shabby counterpoint to outdoor imagery. The world outdoors appeared invariably sunlit and dry—earth and air were the elements that predominated, sometimes combined as dust. No nocturnal moods, no moist vegetal places, no rain, no cold interrupted the dominion of the noon sun. While women existed in this space, they were greatly outnumbered by men in both Native and settler communities. When people appeared, Ince showed them full figure, from a distance that ranged from ten feet to thirty feet. There were no Griffith close-ups, no intimate views of overwhelming emotion blooming on a face. Ince showed his human agents at more than arm’s length. Perspective was all. Early in his career, Ince did not usually invite the audience to inhabit the perspective of a hero or heroine, then he encountered in 1914 his one-time roommate from his theatrical stock company days, William S. Hart.

The Landscape of Conscience

An ex-Shakespearean actor who claimed a Western boyhood, William S. Hart became the iconic Western man of the silent era. Beside the tight-lipped Aryan intensity of Hart, Broncho Billy Anderson seemed whimsically boyish; Tom Mix, thoughtless; and Hoot Gibson, pedestrian.15 Hart’s unlovely long face, squint, and lipless slash of a mouth symbolically took on the austere, plainness of the West that Ince had visually conjured in the early 1910s. Behind those eyes a battle raged in every Hart film between primeval lawlessness and a sentimental civility. Invariably some other character would be gunned down, thrashed, kicked, or incinerated before Hart’s conscience took shape in favor of morality and domesticity. His own soul and body often suffered as well. Hart’s artistry as an actor lay in his ability to suggest in feature after feature that this struggle was in no way foreordained to result in peace, love, and order. The good bad man character he repeatedly personated had all of the psychological ambiguity that romantic writers first explored early in the nineteenth century in tales of doppelgangers. In a Hart Western typically some other person (often a member of Hart’s own outlaw gang) mirrored his negative. This person had to be destroyed for his humane side to triumph. Good women, children, and

309 The Wide-Open Spaces Figure 9.6 [Junius “June” Estep]: William S. Hart as Blaze Tracy in Hell’s Hinges, Los Angeles, Kay-Bee Pictures, March 5, 1916. The apocalyptic final fight in which BlazeT racy personally pummels corrupt Rev. Bob Henley while the tainted village of Hell’s Hinges burns in the fire’s judgment.

animals were frequently the catalysts for the emergence of the moral man. Since these were the stock figures of decency in nineteenth-century melodrama, a familiar morality made the dangers of self-confrontation in a Hart story more comfortable for audiences. Because the good woman was invariably white, the morality of the dramas had the familiar racial coding of that Eurocentric age.16 Hart was a willful, intuitive artist who preferred to oversee the creation of his films. He collected around him a company of collaborators whose abilities he trusted, and worked at his films until they seemed right to him with as little interference from Ince or the executives at Paramount as he could manage. The visual dimensions of his pictures he entrusted to two persons particularly: cinematographer Joe August and still photographer Junius “June” Estep.

310 Chapter Nine Estep was a Los Angeles portrait photographer in 1913 when the Los Angeles office of Selig contracted him to shoot publicity of its West Coast stars. From 1913 through 1915 he maintained his independent studio, working for the motion picture industry on a job basis and gaining a reputation for being a versatile artist as proficient at shooting exterior scenes as posed studio portraits. Hart had encountered Estep’s work for Selig and admired the publicity. In 1916 he offered Estep salaried, full-time work for Triangle Films. Estep shut his Los Angeles studio and worked as Hart’s still man on every release for Triangle and Paramount until Hart’s final epic,Tumbleweeds (1925). During World War I, Estep was a nominal employee of the Elco Company on Sunset Boulevard, a corporation involved in the defense effort, to avoid the draft.17 With Hart’s forced retirement from films, Estep attached himself to the young Josef von Sternberg and taught the director the nuances of working with Hollywood photographic technology on The Salvation Hunters. He remained with von Sternberg as still photographer through the 1930s. An examination of the stills for Hart’s features in the Hart photographic archive at the Seaver Center for Western History quickly detects Estep’s peculiar talent: he mastered making a visual field dynamic symbolically. There was almost invariably a binary tension in this dynamic. Certain of the binaries were drawn from pictorial conventions of the nineteenth century, for instance, the association of women with interior spaces and men with exterior. Men are associated with light, women with shade. Hart never appeared entirely at ease in interiors, whether domiciles, court rooms, stores, store rooms, or bars. His gestures at domesticity, often in the end of his features, have a repressed character to them. His head is bowed, body held in. Yet there are visual spaces in Hart movies in which male and female, domesticity and outdoor life, intersect serenely. Yards appear repeatedly in Hart’s visual world as places where love and understanding developed between hero and heroine. In a still from The Toll Gate Hart and a smiling, hearty Anna Q. Nilsson collaborate in cutting wood outside Nilsson’s cabin, Hart seated with a hand ax, Nilsson standing, working a saw across a knotted limb in a saw horse. A clothesline in the background reminds us that work characterizes domestic life as well as outdoor life in the West; it is the common fate of men and women and a possible common source of contentment. Hart’s Westerns often had substantial segments photographed on lot in the Ince fashion, combined with segments shot on location to enhance the variety of visual textures. Hart’s favorite location was the Mojave Desert, whose sandy, arid background expanses tended to intensify the visual presence of single persons. The Mojave made its greatest symbolic impact when viewed from a distance, as in Wagon Tracks, Hart’s epic of the pioneer transit across the Western badlands. A silhouetted antlike line of shadowing riders, livestock, and wagons traverses a gray expanse of sage beneath a featureless sky. In such

311 The Wide-Open Spaces Figure 9.7 [Junius “June” Estep]: William S. Hart, as the title character in Selfish Yates, Los Angeles, Artcraft Pictures, May 12, 1918.

scenes Joe August and June Estep convey the mystery of human determination in the westward expansion of the Euro-American population. Depicted from that impersonal historic distance that Ince made a feature of Western visualization, a human expedition is reduced to miniature array, dwarfed with a horizon so expansive that it evaporates into invisibility. No painted scene on any stage, no canvas by an Albert Bierstadt, could capture the grandeur and precision of these photographs. James Cruze must have studied the imagery of Wagon Tracks with care before imagining the world of The Covered Wagon. Hart’s Western boyhood had been on the plains rather than in the desert, because of his father’s attempt to establish a mill. Hart’s greatest sympathy for the Western landscape was for the prairie expanses. Perhaps it is fitting that Hart’s final motion picture,Tumbleweeds, elegized the closing of the frontier, showing the Oklahoma land rush that marked the overrunning of the wide-open spaces by humanity. Estep’s stills of the land rush played off

312 Chapter Nine Figure 9.8 [Junius “June” Estep]: Crossing the desert, Wagon Tracks, Los Angeles, William S. Hart Productions, July 29, 1919. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

the conventions of the historical panorama shot. To show that an abounding population was now filling the vacancy of space, Estep, following August’s camera placements, showed the scene of the lineup and the rush from the side, taking a low position in order to have a high horizon. Dust plumes mark the vertiginous coursing of riders and carriages across a minimalist grassland. The scenes were shot in the hill country outside of Los Angeles. Because Hart understood himself to be the conservator of a dying heritage, he took care not to restrict his representation of the West to stereotypical scenes of prairie and desert. Nor did he present a touristic anthology of famous views—Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Monument Valley, Brice Canyon. He devoted several features to exploring the world of the Western forests— the logging camps and wooden townscapes in the landscape of titanic trees.

313 The Wide-Open Spaces The Testing Block and Jean Petticoats command attention for their development of a nocturnal mood in Hart’s symbolic dramaturgy. As with many of Hart’s Westerns, the outdoor world was dominated by men, particularly members of Hart’s various gangs and outlaw bands. A conventional scene would show Hart’s character coming into conflict with a comrade or comrades and having it out in an open-air fist fight or gun battle. TheIn Testing Block the psychological depth of this confrontation (usually the exteriorization of an internal battle between a character’s good and bad impulses) was enriched by darkening the landscape. The contrast between the moment of solitary meditation and resolution and the frenzied outbreak of violent action becomes starkly highlighted in the sylvan gloom of the redwood grove. In Jean Petticoats we see Hart as a French-Canadian lumberjack felling the huge redwoods and then wrestling with civilization when he inherits a dress store in New Orleans. The elemental life in the woods contrasts with the artifice of fashionable commerce in the big city. Some critics have faulted Hart for the whitening of the Western. The charge arises, perhaps, from an overemphasizing of the racial message of one film,The Aryan, and a concentration of attention of the last few features Hart made, for Paramount, when artistic control had been largely wrested from him. Hart’s Triangle Westerns partook of the multiethnic miscellany that characterized most location Westerns by Selig, Essanay, and Bison during the 1910s. Indians abounded, and Hart appeared as a half-breed hero in one feature. His gangs frequently contained Mexican or California Hispanic characters. In the psychomachia performed compulsively in release after release, one hemisphere of Hart’s soul, one person of his dual make-up, identified with the alien, the primitive, the non-Aryan (and these were not synonymous). The interest of his pictures lay not in his foreordained resolution in favor of the white woman and civility. Rather it lay in the plausibility of Hart’s engagement with the other possibility.

Epic Land, Inhuman Sky

One of the peculiar ironies of the photographic history of early Westerns was that these movies’ scenic and generic popularity proved so great and so durable that it could be serviced routinely by producers. Whether the block-booked B Westerns of the late 1920s or the flood of product generated by Selig and others in the 1910s, the average release merited at most four photographs, for company release fliers. Many titles in the 1910s and 1920s generated no still publicity photography at all. This was particularly true of the B Westerns. Photographic publicity campaigns can be tied to a very specific set of circumstances through the silent era. Photographic publicity was produced when (a) a producer-director such as Thomas Ince out of a general principle of vanity sought to hype every production coming out of his studio,

314 Chapter Nine (b) when an actor (Hobart Bosworth, Williams S. Hart, or Tom Mix) exerted star prerogative to secure mainstream press coverage for releases, (c) when certain releases aspired to movie palace and special tour release—The Spoilers, The Covered Wagon, The Iron Horse, or The Vanishing American—or (d) when a studio was attempting to establish a new cowboy personality. In the last case, however, there was frequently more resort to portrait studio imagery than still shots on the landscape. Of all the reasons for generating photographic publicity, the one that has proved of durable interest has been the attempt to bring notice to certain prestige releases—epics—introduced in the New York movie palaces and booked for the major urban movie theaters across the continent and “class” venues in Europe. Adolph Zukor and the Frohman brothers had established the movie palace premier as a standard booking procedure in motion picture distribution. Charging two dollars a seat, accompanying the feature with an orchestra playing a score prepared specifically for the release, and surrounding the presentation with live performers and novelty shorts, powerful distributors underscored the aesthetic and commercial importance of certain features. Reviews in New York papers and magazines created buzz about major releases that was bankable throughout the telegraphically connected world of news organizations. Cecil Cunningham’s visual chronicle of life in a raw Alaskan gold-mining town, The Spoilers (Selig, 1914), was the first of the Western epics, clocking in at an hour and a half. It opened the Strand Theater in New York City to motion pictures. The film’s grimy, grainy realism, its variety of characters, and its grim climactic fight between villain Tom Santschi and hero William Farnum riveted the attention of contemporaries. We know from cinematographer Karl Brown’s autobiography that he, as a teen cameraman, was hired as still photographer because the cinematographers were too occupied with the complex task of generating footage to shoot stills. We know from his account, too, that the job was a one-off; there was no salaried slot for still photography at Selig in 1914. Brown had substantial work to perform, for Colonel Selig determined to saturate the country with images, sending several sets of photographs to small city newspapers. One set stressed the star power of the production, supplying head shots of William Farnum, Katherine Williams, and Tom Santschi— with one advertising template fixing the images in the middle of graphic five-point stars.18 An alternative campaign featured Brown’s stills from the production. The most frequently reproduced image was a smiling William Farnum in Western garb, with a legend that proclaimed him a “real” man.19 The second most reproduced image showed Farnum and Santschi grappling in the famous bar fight that climaxed the film. Yet as many as seven stills were printed with some regularity through 1914 and 1915. None of these, however, were the most startling and unprecedented images captured by Karl Brown

315 The Wide-Open Spaces from the action: the dynamiting of the town and the images of men wandering through northern downpours. The misery captured in these shots retain an uncanny quality, an inexhaustible strangeness, that few exterior scenes from the silent era possess. Only the smoking ruins of Rome filled with the ghostlike silhouettes of the survivors in Quo Vadis? precedes it as a picture of grandiloquent terribleness. A decade after lugging his plate camera around the Los Angeles Selig lot for The Spoilers, Karl Brown filmed the most famous of the prestige Westerns of the 1920s, James Cruze’s The Covered Wagon for Paramount. As with many of the prestige releases of the decade, The Covered Wagon combined a personal story of romantic rivalry with a visualization of an important juncture in history, the 1848 journey of two bodies of settlers along the Oregon Trail.

Figure 9.9 eugene Robert Richee: The parting of the wagon trains, The Covered Wagon, Hollywood, Paramount Pictures, March 16, 1923. From the former Culver Service Collection. Shot on location at the Baker ranch in the Snake River Valley near the Utah- Nevada border, the topography appeared more vast and subdued than the scabby, sage-clumped hills of the Mojave that served as backdrop for Hart’s Wagon Tracks. The expanses vested the scenes of travel with an oppressive sameness, conveying the psychological ordeal of the journey. Nature operated as a brute force, shaping the movements of the pioneers, confronting them directly when the Snake River curves into the line of march demanding that it be crossed. Cruze’s fidelity in recreating the materials of pioneer life—the wagons, cooking utensils, clothing, sidearms, musical instruments—and his simplicity in laying out the conflict of man and the Western environment inspired admiration in critics and respect, bordering on reverence, in the viewing public. Though Kevin Brownlow names Edwin Willat as still photographer for the film, contemporary printed credits of several of the most famous images,

Figure 9.10 [Edwin Willat?]: J. Walter Kerrigan and Johnny Fox as Will Banion and Jed Wingate in The Covered Wagon, Hollywood, Paramount Pictures, March 16, 1923. From the former Culver Service Collection.

317 The Wide-Open Spaces Figure 9.11 [William Walling Jr.]: George O’Brien and Madge Bellamy as Davy Brandon and Miriam Marsh, The Iron Horse, Hollywood, Fox Film Corporation, August 28, 1924. Horse flesh, steel, and a central couple torn in private musings about fate and futurity.

including the famous panorama of wagons strung out along the sinuous banks of the Snake River in a box canyon, appeared in print in 1923 credited to Eugene Robert Richee.20 It is not beyond probability that two still photographers worked the production. The stills divide neatly into two bodies of imagery, the magnificent middle-distance and long-distance panorama shots showing the wagon train and the canyons and prairies it traversed, and the character shots of camp life, interpersonal conflict, and courtship. The former possess the grandeur and grimness of the great tradition of Western photographic imagery developed by Ince and Estep; the latter, aside from the pictures of the ambushing Indians, appear entirely pedestrian. That this was so is not unexpected given the ideological thrust of the movie. The Covered Wagon was not a hero story, a chronicle of a great man or even of a bad man turned good.

318 Chapter Nine Its male lead, J. Warren Kerrigan (Will Banion) looked respectable, out of place, and entirely uncharismatic; in the plot he has a skeleton in his closet that he worries might sever his connection with a respectable woman. Lois Wilson, the female lead, looked clean. They were plain, respectable people of the sort upon whom civil society depended, the sort that married and founded families. Their persons and stories were so easily subsumed into the fate of the whole train that Cruze convincingly suggested that the trek on the Oregon trail constituted a sort of communal valor rather than individualistic exercises of will. The growing cohort of critics on the political left tended to ignore the echoes of manifest destiny in the story in order to celebrate the narrative of communal effort. The stills forThe Covered Wagon offered a textbook of antiglamour. The spaciousness of sky and the expansive landscape created so vast a visual field that no one person’s radiance could dominate it. Persons seemed expressions of the environment, faces sculpted from the elements or lined from experience. Cruze’s cast, peopled with character actors, authentic cowboys, Indians, and a half dozen modestly attractive leads, was singular for its lack of personality in the modern sense. Even Lois Wilson, the love interest, possessed commonplace features and ordinary manners. She lacked mystique entirely. The Indians, a substantial contingent of Arapahos, had faces with all the distinctness of Edward S. Curtis portraits, etched by wind and sun. In fact, Curtis had photographed a number of the contingent some years previously.21 In contrast, B Westerns repeatedly made gestures at glamour. Indeed, the distinction between the good and bad became a contest of beauty and ugliness. Over the 1920s, Tom Mix’s outfit became progressively fancier, horse saddles became increasingly ornamental, and cowgirls more glitzy. The Western epics, in the name of historical authenticity, made plainness a visual commonplace. John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924), the second-most successful of the 1920s epic Westerns in box office sales, combined the distressed, archaic look of the Cruze masterpiece with an more impetuous narrative flow. (A matter of some interest, since Ford’s film editor Dorothy Arzner had worked on Cruze’s epic.) Depicting the construction of the transcontinental railroad, Ford permitted aesthetic impact to overrule authenticity in his visualizations. He celebrated visual distinctiveness, manifesting a taste for peculiarity in features that rivaled Rex Ingram’s penchant for going beyond character faces to grotesquery. The Iron Horse prefigured a host of Ford Westerns in putting oddly memorable characters in front of arresting scenery. The spatial grandeur of Cruze’s West was supplemented with many shots of sublime beauty—a Chinese work gang laying track with snow-covered peaks in the background, a herd of longhorns grazing a desolate hillside, a war party of Indians parleying at night in a twisted forest of mountain pines. Juxtaposed against the variety of Western nature, the tracks and engines revealed the intrusion of human

319 The Wide-Open Spaces Figure 9.12 [William Walling Jr.]: The joining, Promontory, Utah, The Iron Horse, Hollywood, Fox Film Corporation, August 28, 1924. John Ford revisualizes the famous photograph (NARA 16-G099.2-1) showing the driving of the golden spike on May 10, 1869.

genius and modernity into a traditional landscape. Ford’s visualizations featured contrast: flesh in front of steel, live horses with iron horses. Yet his genius tended toward movement—contending forces: men working furiously in front of impassive landscapes, or gangs of frenzied men moving counter to one another. Thus when the great moment of joining comes at Promontory, Utah, the frozen tableau, engines and crowds facing each other from east and west, the historical fixedness of that moment, is emphasized by having the glass plate photographer in the foreground solidifying action into the image of fulfillment. The scene recreates the famous documentary photograph. All of the hurtling motion of the film renders the stillness super-emphatic. Who took the pictures? Film historian Kevin Brownlow identified William Walling Jr. (1904–83) as a still man for the production—an interesting and

320 Chapter Nine surprising discovery.22 A child of a talented San Franciscan theatrical couple, Walling performed stage roles before he could read, yet felt indifferent to the allure of limelight. His parents moved to Hollywood in 1921, where his father secured work acting in a series of Famous Players–Lasky Westerns. William Jr. talked himself into a job at the film-processing lab at Lasky, where he worked for six months before convincing himself that his genius lay in the field of commercial illustration. He enrolled in the California Art Institute in San Francisco, where he quickly learned that a multitude of other persons held similar convictions and possessed superior skills with pencils and brushes. He returned to Los Angeles and immediately fell victim to a reckless truck. He spent eighteen months recuperating from the accident. During this time William Walling Sr. caught the fancy of director John Ford who starred him in The Village Blacksmith (1922), North of Hudson Bay (1923), and featured him in The Iron Horse (1924). Senior must have convinced Ford to take on the young man as still photographer. We should recall that in some quarters in Hollywood, despite the influx of New York celebrity photographers into the motion picture studios in 1920, that the still man did not hold a place high on the food chain. As Walling himself commented about his early career as a photographer, “The job wasn’t any great shakes in those days, but it interested me.” Working with John Ford and cinematographer George Schneiderman afforded Walling contact with two very experienced sets of eyes. His experience as a photo technician at Lasky and his design training supplied the ground upon which artistry might grow. The Iron Horse was a singularly auspicious beginning for a still photographer in Hollywood. He was subsequently hired by another Fox director, Irving Cummings, who from 1924 to 1926 had Walling photograph publicity for a series of Westerns and urbane society pictures. Cummings not only appreciated Walling’s camera artistry, but became increasingly convinced that his manly good looks were ideal for the screen. Cummings secured a five-year acting contract for Walling with Fox. Using the screen name Richard Walling so as not to become confused with his father, “Will Walling,” the young man launched a brief career as glamour boy opposite a host of Fox ingenues—Janet Gaynor, Betty Bronson, Marion Nixon, and Sue Carroll. He found performing profoundly disquieting, and broke the Fox contract two years into its term. He played roles for a variety of producers (Universal, DeMille, Trem Carr, and Gotham) an additional ten months before abandoning the performing life for good. “I never liked acting,” he later told an interviewer.23 Then, Elmer Fryer at Warner Brothers convinced him to return to his lenses and join the camera department as a portrait photographer. Fryer assumed that Walling, having worked as a performer, could manage the tricky psychological business of managing sittings with the more prickly of his former colleagues. Walling became one of the great photographers of men of the 1930s, but proved sufficiently proficient in the glamour trade for

321 The Wide-Open Spaces Paramount to hire him away from Warner Brothers in 1932 to work with Otto Dyar, Gene Richee, and Jack Shalitt “shooting the pretties.” In the Westerns prettiness tended to be natural, ugliness, often man- made. The visual message of the Western was always the intrusion of the new upon a traditional/natural order. Because the majority of silent Westerns, following the example of the Wild West Shows, presented a “time now past,” they purported to be histories, representations of what had been. They were more than that and less than that—they obsessively reflected upon the nature of change. But the history they presented had more to do with rhetoric than factuality, with arguments about the way cultures and landscape transform than a record of what happened when and where. Some critics—Kevin Brownlow foremost among them—have argued that the silent movie extended the material culture, visual articulations, and practices of the nineteenth- century frontier well into the twentieth century, occasioning the final actual drive of longhorn steers on the range and performing Native traditional rites that expired in the early twentieth century.24 But suggesting that the silent cinema visually conjured the past fails to seize the most obtrusive truth of its visualizations: things are changing; the changes entail human violence; the changes disrupt the material world; and that the forces that impel the transformations are messy, entailing desire, capital, technology, communal aspiration, population migration, demography, disease, religion, and accidents of nature. Even the stark simplification of human morality in Westerns to the melodramatic opposition of good (fair play and Christian domesticity) and bad (bandit individualism and psychological sadism) can’t render these volatile forces neat and explicable. In the silent era the tendency was to conceptualize change in terms of two forces or conditions, one of which would overcome the established dominion of the other. The multitude of binaries is one of the fascinations of silent Western history. If we restrict our view to Anglo society exclusively we encounter the conflict between town civility and frontier primitivism, or town corruption and pastoral simplicity, or cattlemen free range liberty and sheepherder enclosure, or railroad capitalism and the comradely communism of freeholder, or homosocial roughhousing and hetersocial politeness, or Union loyalty and Confederate rebellion, or superstitious irreligion and Christianity, or covered wagon perseverance and desert inhospitableness. When we add the ethnic and cultural dimension—the conflicts between Anglo-Protestant culture and Catholic Hispanic culture, or the tribal cultures of a multitude of Native peoples, or the French loggers and trappers, on the infrequently visualized black settlers who had moved from the Old South— the dynamic of history became extraordinarily complex and its visual manifestations immensely rich.

322 Chapter Nine The least interesting Westerns conceptually and visually were those for whom all aspects of historical change were foreordained. Those fated to vanish or fail became stereotypes that performed gestures rather than motivated actions. The stills for these releases tend to amplify the tendency to visual caricature. The greasepaint on the “Indians” is readily visible. The sombreros and swarthy faces signaled “Mexicans.” The majority of non-Anglo women were lumpish, inhabited kitchens, and wore big dresses. The horse belonging to the male lead had more personality and unpredictability. The most interesting Westerns take up the possibility that history has a pattern, yet that pattern might be subject to human interruption. The Vanishing American (1925) is an interesting case. It begins with a prologue visualizing wave after wave of indigenous peoples supplanting an earlier population in the American Southwest. This stadialist progress concludes with the present day and the influx of Anglo-Americans into areas belonging to the Navajos. Yet the motion picture that follows is no tract arguing the historical inevitability of Aryan supremacy. Instead, it is a sentimental brief against the rapacity of the institutional management of Native peoples by the American government that climaxes in an armed revolt against corrupt rule and the martyrdom of a Native hero (played by Richard Dix) whose sacrificial death occasions the recall of the oppressive official whose misrule provoked the action. The politics of the film are both nationalist and inclusionist, emphasizing the willingness of young Navajo men to fight for the United States in World War I. The story frames the injustice on the reservation in terms of a broken contract. After veterans return from war having fought to defend the interests of the United States, they find their own community and people being decimated by officials of the government that they served. Since the recovering and viewing of the film, commentators have concurred that the feature was a missed opportunity, failing to achieve narrative coherence by reason of an excess of sentimentality in the treatment of the central figure. Indeed, this is one of those occasional silent films that works better as a set of stills, rather than as a cinematic drama. The stills spotlight the central paradox of the motion picture: the Navajos and their world around Monument Valley figure so distinctly in every scene that they arrest the viewers’ eyes. They are the opposite of vanishing. By comparison, the whites in the film seem visually insignificant. As with any prestige picture of the mid-1920s there were several visual modes in play within the picture. In The Vanishing American, the ethnographic tradition of photography informs the precision of representations of Navajo home life and ritual existence. (Zane Gray had made it a contractual stipulation that any movie treatment of his books had to be shot at the location being described.) An iconography drawn from the fine arts also influences

323 The Wide-Open Spaces Figure 9.13 [Eugene Robert Richee?]: The Cliff Dwellers conquered by the Pueblos, 1925, The Vanish- ing American, Hollywood, Famous Players, Paramount Pictures, October 15, 1925. Photographed on location throughout the Southwest.

scenes. James Earle Fraser’s famous sculpture of Native exhaustion, The End of the Trail, popularized by the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco, inevitably hovers behind certain images of Navajo men on horseback. Then too, the touristic tradition of photographing Native children and domestic scenes stands behind the extensive footage and still illustration of the young boy, Nocki, who has not yet earned a name among his people. Perhaps a word should be said about familiarization. As a literary technique it emerged in the eighteenth century as a weapon in the public opinion wars around the abolition of the slave trade. It has remained central to campaigns waged through appeals to feeling ever since. By picturing enslaved Africans and Anglo-Africans in terms of their domestic lives, their manners, their common aspirations and values, literary and graphic artists suggested that

324 Chapter Nine Figure 9.14 [Eugene Robert Richee?]: Navajo horseman, The Vanishing American, Hollywood, Famous Players, Paramount Pictures, October 15, 1925.

the African they and the Anglo-American we were greatly similar. Exploiting the Christian doctrine that all believers are brothers and sisters in Christ, abolitionists confronted citizens with images of a chained male imploring “are you not my brother?” The literary and visual assertion of the familial affiliation of the public with victim from another culture became the fulcrum upon which to move public opinion. Producer-directors quickly grasped the effectiveness of adapting the technique of political sentimentalism to issue movies. “Make the stranger familiar” was a neat inversion of the first rule of moviemaking, make the familiar strange and new. The stills fromThe Vanishing American work the domestication strategy hard. We of course have the scenes of Navajo home life, multiple images of Nocki, a thwarted romance story chronicled in

325 The Wide-Open Spaces key visuals. Supplementing these explicit images were two other sorts of familiarization devices: recognition images—photographs of landmarks of Monument Valley and the world of the Pueblos that recycle the postcard world of Southwest tourism; and, association images—photographs that echo icons (paintings, sculptures, photographs) that articulate an understanding of the historical conditions of Indians generally. The strategy overcame the major problem about the reception of the movie—for anyone to care that Americans are vanishing, they must first be affirmed as being Americans, that they are cherishable as such, and that they are imperiled. The allusive cloud of imagery surrounding Richard Dix and the other representations of the Navajos established a feeling as much as supplied a historical argument. The scenic content of the film amounts to a kind of soft suasion. There is a decided avoidance of the confrontational visual techniques of Soviet montage— the metaphoric cutting of scenes, split screen parallelisms, and stills that incarnated dialectical struggle through the juxtaposition of clashing forces in a single frame Because the Western had the least discriminating audience of any genre in motion pictures, with a demographic dominated by adolescent males and rural middle-aged men, the average release tended to sure-fire formula: caricature bad men, a hero of the “strong silent type,” a “gal,” sidekicks, horses, action including unmotivated fights, and chases across scrubby, rocky landscapes. It did not matter much whether the events occurred in the historic West or the modern West. It did not matter whether persons rode in cars as well as horses. It did not matter whether Indians or Hispanic Americans were among the personae, although Indians often held the promise of a “good tussle.” Certain stars carried sufficient clout to secure location shooting and good art direction. Trick rider Ken Maynard at First National, despite his incompetence delivering scripted lines, had a sure sense of what a Western should look like. Tim McCoy, an authentic cowboy with a profound knowledge and respect for the ways of Native Americans, also made his series of historical Westerns at MGM memorable, in part because he invited the company to try out new directing talent on his features. Maynard’s pictures had a peculiar influence on the visual world of the B Western, because First National and later Columbia would recycle sections of action in other Westerns. One feature of the late silent era besides The Wind deserves mention: Goldwyn’s 1926 epic on twentieth-century desert reclamation, The Winning of Barbara Worth. Filmed over three months in the Black Rock Desert 150 miles from Reno, this tale of the construction of an irrigation system in a rocky, arid waste had the sense of historical import and visual scale of the early 1920s epics of Western nineteenth-century settlement. Goldwyn’s crew of one hundred carpenters, five hundred thousand feet of lumber, and truckloads of laborers constructed three wooden cities in the desert—Rubio, Kingston, and

326 Chapter Nine Figure 9.15 h. Nealson Smith: Vilma Banky, Sammy Blum, and Gary Cooper as Barbara Worth, Horace Blanton, and Abe Lee in The Winning of Barbara Worth, Hollywood, Samuel Goldwyn Company, Octo- ber 14, 1926.

San Felipe—replete with hotels, banks, courthouses, stores, and houses, each fitted for a thousand inhabitants. The effort was advertised at the time as the first occassion “that so large a group of actors were transported over such a distance and kept on a desert location for so long a period.25 Landmarks of the traditional West—the horse and buggy and the saloon—appear in conjunction with the features of the new West. Like The Vanishing American, it had a historical prologue, showing the first peopling of the arid Imperial Valley in California by nineteenth-century settlers. An impressive sandstorm scene punctuated this segment. The bulk of the movie, set in the twentieth century, kept true to the historical and dialectical spirit of the prestige Western: “The

327 The Wide-Open Spaces West that was lives again with its vices and virtues, its hazards and pleasures, its golden promises and disappointments. The border saloon with its fights and brawls is contrasted to the simple home life and abounding faith of those who builded the empire from nothingness.”26 The dialectic is mirrored in the romantic triangle animating the movie with Barbara Worth (Vilma Banky) torn between an eastern engineer (Ronald Colman) and a rugged young Westerner (Gary Cooper in the role that would win him stardom). The forces of eastern capital and scientific technology do not march to triumph against the elemental power of nature, for in the climax of the film, the dam shatters, flooding the valley with the water that has been so rare and so valued throughout history. H. Nealson Smith, having just photographed the final Rudolph Valentino films, supplied the stills forThe Winning of Barbara Worth, shooting them through much of the late spring and early summer of 1926. Smith no doubt was chosen because his work on The Eagle and The Son of the Sheik demonstrated his excellence at capturing both the tête-à-tête scenes of the romance and the deep-field, broad-expanse spectacle exteriors. We glimpse the peculiar beauty of Cooper, that open-faced sincerity and simplicity of expression that would make him a Western and Hollywood icon in the 1930s. We glimpse too the tensions between modernity and the old ways in scenes of tractors bulling through a 1910s desert landscape followed by horses and wagons. Romance, the confrontation of past and the present, the anxiety of change, and the ordeal of culture confronting nature stand revealed. The publicity campaign forThe Winning of Barbara Worth proved enormously successful in the West and Midwest, where the picture did huge business. But the response of eastern critics approximated jaded forbearance when the motion picture premiered on Thanksgiving weekend 1926.27 The film’s genesis in the best seller by Harold Bell Wright did not predispose critics to regard its story and themes to be substantial. The reviews reveal a fatigue with filmic spectacle. “Possibly the highlights of this picture have been stripped of excitement through the flock of productions that in recent years have poured forth their turbulent floods upon the screen. Even the sandstorm has its prototype in film rainstorm, and therefore it may be glossed over in the mind of the hardy spectator.” The absurdity of likening the visual qualities of a sandstorm with torrential rain reveal the extent to which a critical pose was being assumed. “Art” in New York had ceased to be something found in “the spectacle of nature.” When Lillian Gish appeared some months later in The Wind, critic Mordaunt Hall felt no need to elaborate his prejudice. “Yesterday afternoon’s rain was far more interesting that the Capitol Theatre’s current screen offering, ‘The Wind.’” The dismissal of natural spectacle as a potent ingredient of the artistry of motion pictures proved to be among the least prescient judgments about the

328 Chapter Nine future of visual aesthetics pronounced by the New York critics of the silent era. Yet in the short term, the malediction proved useful to studio executives of the early sound era who found audio recording outdoors daunting. Balky technology and urbane jadedness with natural spectacle would make the early 1930s the motion picture heyday of the loud interior.

329 The Wide-Open Spaces

10 Studio Men

1922

A decade—1912 to 1922—wrought immense changes in the production of motion pictures. The power of the distributors (the brokers who organized arrays of theaters into block consumers of product) had grown great through financial accumulation and corporate acquisition. They invaded the welter of regional theater networks intent on driving the small enterprises out of business and ruthlessly rationalized the market for motion pictures. Distributors then turned to production. The most powerful figures in the industry—Adolph Zukor, Jesse Lasky, Samuel Goldwyn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, and Louis B. Mayer—materialized their power by building studio complexes, motion picture factories with all the arts and crafts accommodated on the lot to take advantage of the economies of scale. This vertical integration of the studio required that studios minimize the contracting out of services; all needs, whether in costuming, set construction, cosmetics, automobile usage, food services, or maintenance, would be performed in-house.1 Movie star portraiture had been one such contracted service. Carl Laemmle in 1919 put an end to this, hiring portraitist Jack Freulich to direct all aspects of publicity photography at Universal. Because of the artistic profile of photographic portraitists, their incorporation into the

331 camera departments at the Hollywood studios and their involvement in the production of stills raised the status of the job. Yet the still photographer of 1922 remained supremely conscious of the ambiguous, almost paradoxical position he occupied within the system. He was invisible, yet caused all other things and persons to be supremely visible. In 1922, Hollywood’s still photographers found a spokesman in Shir- ley Vance Martin, who introduced the mysteries of the craft to the public in “‘Still, Pictures:’ How and Why They Are Made.” Martin first won notice in the California Photography Clubs of the 1890s and 1900s for his architectural photography in Chicago and Pasadena.2 In 1918, when many motion picture cameramen and photographers enlisted, producer Robert Brunton enticed Martin into motion pictures. Brunton, an ex-artist, socialized in the bohemian arts community of Los Angeles where he met Martin. Once recruited into Hollywood, Martin’s wit, sociability, and stylishness won him connections throughout the industry. The pioneering cosmetician and actor Cecil Holland (Lasky), regularly modeled for him, trying out looks in experimental sittings.3 Martin wrote titles for First National’s Jackie Coogan feature My Boy (1921). Among Hollywood publicists he was known to shoot the most striking pictures of movie star home interiors, and supplied much of Photoplay magazine’s uncredited “Movie Stars at Home” imagery from 1919 through 1921. This connection secured him the job of introducing the art of still photography to the masses when Photoplay in 1922 decided to cash in on the huge audience of would-be motion picture people hoping for work in Hollywood by publishing Opportunities in the Motion Picture Industry.4

The Still Photographer: outside the lot such a person is quite unknown and the value and importance of his work scarcely recognized, by the same token inside the fence there are still to be found a few relics of an antediluvian period, who do not recognize and who refuse to be made to realize that upon the skill and resourcefulness of the still man and the excellence of the pictures taken during the making of a film play depend to a very great extent the returns upon the huge fortunes invested in production. (Pp. 47–48)

The Effective Still and its Uses: Still pictures are made for the publicity department to place in magazines for advertising in trade journals and papers, to shoot to the releasing agencies. Even though a film has been disposed of through such an agency, it has to be sold to the dear public after it has been sold to him. It is self-evident that the finer quality of the stills and the more truly they depict the dynamic moments of a play the keener the competition among the exhibitors to show the film, and—well, really and truly now, dear fanette, just what is it that takes you to the little Star Picture Palace week after week? You and your girl friend pass the much decorated lobby and its “Oh,

332 Chapter Ten Edna, let’s see what’s on this week!” and you consult what—the program? No, Ma’am. You look at the still pictures on display and if they are full of pep and lots of love and a hundred and fifty feet of kisses it is a copper riveted cinch— you are going to that show. And you go because you like the stills. Am I right? Or, about half right anyway—the other half being that you just had to see your very most favorite idol? And at that you found him first—in the stills—making perfectly grand love. Again, am I right? (P. 48)

The Supply and Demand for Star portraits: Did you know that stills are printed literally by the thousands for you? There is one actress who has mailed at one time twelve thousand pictures, character studies, of herself. She maintains a complete department for the work, well knowing the value to herself of still pictures, frequently placing single orders of 50,000 and 100,000 prints from one negative, all to be sent to admirers. (P. 49)

The Still Photographer and the Major Studios: The necessity for a still man of experience and ability in each separate working unit is being recognized to a greater degree every day. In fact, each production with any aspiration to greatness either pictorially or box-officially, carries a still man who is considered as essential a part of the personnel as director, movie cameraman or electrician. . . . The financials as well as the Exhibitors are rapidly becoming acquainted with the fact . . . that the still pictures do their large share in the successful exploitation of the film, just as do star, director and cameraman. So it truly seems to be that our still man is slowly, but surely, to come into his own, his talent recognized and his work rewarded as it should be. (P. 54)

Shirley V. Martin regarded the use of a still man as a hallmark of ambition by a studio, a sign that management aspired to greatness and possessed sufficient intelligence to realize the importance of still imagery in generating advance demand for releases and personalities. Two sorts of people within the studio had enabled the importation of artistic photographers into the publicity process: directors, such as Allen Dwan, and performers, such as Hobart Bosworth.5 Behind these figures stood the “financials”—the money men who grasped the role of good images in the process of “exploitation” of the film product. Martin noted the two dominant venues for the display of stills: magazines and theater lobbies. The poster had been relegated to secondary status in publicity, the bulletin had gone the way of all flesh, and the newspaper had been overtaken by the magazine as the print locus for movie imagery. In order to generate box office, stills had to appear in public shortly before the release of the picture. Lobby stills (or their cardboard derivatives, lobby cards) could be seen for free, did not diminish the optical quality of the original exposure, and appeared in number, sequentially arranged to suggest the developments in a

333 Studio Men film’s story.6 Magazine images appeared in conjunction with PR stories, novelizations of film plots, and conjoined with star portraits. They invariably sported captions. Verbal elaborations compensated for any loss of optical fidelity by halftone printing on magazine stock. Magazine images invited the scissors of the starstruck collecting images for their scrapbook shrines. By 1922, the still assimilated elements of portrait photography.7 An important component in the rise in the still man’s status on the lot lay in his manipulation of the vanity of performers and directors: “Every man jack on the lot—producer, director, leading juvenile and on down the list—likes to see himself or herself in the stills and when the daily ‘take’ is handed in, does Mr. Director look for ‘action’; does the technical man look to see how his pet scene photographed? No! He flips the prints through to see his own phiz smiling up at him.” Shots of performers in scenes had to project the scintillating personality of a studio sitting. The importance of the “behind the scenes” shot of the director at work for a still photographer’s career cannot be overemphasized. Because directors in 1922 exerted substantial control over their crews, a favorable impression could lead to a long-term collaborations, such as Frank Diem enjoyed with D. W. Griffith or James Woodbury with Maurice Tourneur. Martin insisted that the still photographer, though shooting scenes on the cue of the director, exerted substantial artistic control over the image, altering lighting set ups, posing performers, and editing images before submission to the director and performers for their inspection. In other portions of his article, he painted a picture of the photographer as an intrepid seeker after the striking image, crawling rafters to get aerial angles, or braving swirling waters to secure the best vantage on an action shot The character of the intrepid still man emerged in publicity in 1916 in stories such as the newspaper tale of the failed shot of an actress performing a rope stunt on a bridge to escape a speeding express train: “In photographing the daring feat performed by Helen Gibon in “The Perilous Swing” it was necessary for this photographer to climb out on a dangerous perch at the end of a bridge girder and in the excitement of the scene that followed he suddenly lost his balance and before he could recover the camera had toppled to the water.”8 By enduring such perils, the still man emerged from invisibility. A conspicuously enterprising character became a means of maintaining job security. Throughout the 1920s, graduates of New York’s Institute for Pho- tography drifted westward seeking jobs in the Hollywood studios. The still photographers brandished their heroic pragmatism as a badge of professional proficiency in the face of the mere technical competence of the New York graduates.9 Indeed, the graduates, if they secured work in the studios at all, tended to be hired in the photographic processing department, where their knowledge of photographic chemistry and printmaking would have some application.

334 Chapter Ten The valorous daring necessary to join the ranks of the still men excluded a second group, women, who were presumed to be physically and temperamen- tally incapable of the ordeal of capturing the selling shot. There were no still women during the silent era, and a lone portrait photographer, the celebrated Ruth Harriet Louise. On Broadway numbers of women had photographed performers and performances. Charlotte Fairchild, Florence Vandamm, the Selby Sisters, Alice Boughton, Gertrude Kassibier, Mary Dale Clarke, and Marcia Stein placed theatrical photographs in the major magazines regularly during the period when studios consolidated in Hollywood and New York. In Los An- geles a significant group of camerawomen maintained businesses—Viroque Baker, Grace Bishop, B. B. Chase, Margaret Craig, Elva Finlay, Annie Gallardo, Mayme Gehrke, Lelia Grimshaw, M. A. Hulbert, Margrethe Mather, Mrs. M. L. Moore, Madeline Prior, Ruth Rice, and M. A. Sickner.10 The absence of women on the lot cannot be attributed to any lack of competent practitioners, or any lack of acquaintance with the performing arts. During the 1910s women had established a presence in many of the studios, primarily as writers and publicists, but also as directors, cosmeticians, clothing designers, as film inspec- tors and editors, and animal handlers. They did not break into the ranks of the camera department. Three women tried their hand at cinematography; their careers were cruelly brief. No women still photographers appear on studio rolls.11 Once the still men had consolidated themselves in Hollywood they maintained a fraternal closeness, a guild sensibility replete with craft secrets, exclusivity, and entre nous camaraderie. One sort of guild wisdom they communicated among the brotherhood concerned how to shape their images for the best possible reception by persons who had clout. Professional photographers sought clairvoyant connection with the imaginations of four sorts of persons—publicity directors, magazine editors, directors, and performers. Some proved better at the task than others. Bert Longworth during his stints with Universal, MGM, and Warner learned how to jab the editorial brain stem to provoke extravagant responses. Longworth also possessed the hungry eye that typified the cutting-edge photographers, studying the visual dimension of every foreign film shown in California, pouring over the national magazines, and attending all the photographic exhibitions. He appropriated the latest lighting schemes, camera angles, and poses, amalgamating them into a distinctive style. Publicity directors noticed stylishness and directors of photography noticed lighting technique. As the decade advanced, fewer executives wielded greater power. Studios consolidated from an array of modest production companies to less than ten significant corporations; so too photographic talent concentrated in fewer and more amply staffed shops. Determining who worked for which of these studios when is no easy task. Pay records for the camera departments of several studios have been destroyed

335 Studio Men for the silent period. Below is a roster of the most active still and portrait photographers working for salary in the 1920s. Not every staff photographer received credit for his or her work, so the systematic study of stills cannot identify every cameraman or camerawoman. Nor can the precise date at which certain photographers moved from one studio to another be determined,

Name Dates12 Employers during thes13 1920

Kenneth Alexander (1887–1975) Jackie Coogan, MGM, Sam Goldwyn Julian Ancker (1899–1932) Warner Brothers Fred Archer (1889–1963) DeMille, First National, Warner Brothers Max Munn Autrey (1891–1971) Fox Ernest Bachrach (1899–1973) Paramount (NY), RKO Russell Ball (1891–1942) Paramount, MGM (NY), Caddo, MGM (LA) Frank Calvin Bangs (1873–1928) Vitagraph, First National Warren Baxter DeMille Frank B. Bjerring (1902–1965) MGM Harry Blane (1886–19??) FBO Milton Brown (1895–1948) Fox, MGM M. I. Boris (1887–1962) Paramount (NY) Clarence S. Bull (1896–1979) Goldwyn, MGM Charles M. Bulloch (1881–1953) Columbia George F. Cannons (1897–1972) Mack Sennett Harold Dean Carsey (1886–1947) DeMille, Carewe (UA), First National Wallace D. Chewning (1902–1986) MGM Robert Coburn (1890–1976) RKO W. E. Cronenweth (1903–1990) Columbia Pictures Edward S. Curtis (1868–1952) DeMille, Paramount Carl Devoy (1899–1967) Columbia Carl Dial (1903–1968) Fox James N. Doolittle (1889–1954) First National Preston Duncan (1899–1958) Warner Brothers Otto Dyar (1892–1988) Paramount William Eglinton (1898–1964) Warner Brothers Mack Elliott (1903–1946) Warner Brothers John Altemus Ellis (1885–1951) First National

336 Chapter Ten since some photographers operated on a job basis. I have listed the studios in order of employment after the names of the photographer. Several studios hired independents on a job basis for special projects, usually at the behest of a director or star. These hired guns do not appear on the list.

Name Dates Employers during thes 1920

Donald English (1901–1964) Paramount Junius D. Estep (1877–1953) Triangle-Ince, Paramount Wm. Kendall Evans (1885–1952) Tiffany (Metro), William Fraker (1874–1948?) MGM Henry Freulich (1906–1985) Universal, First National Jack Freulich (1880–1936) Universal Roman Freulich (1898–1974) Universal Elmer Fryer (1898–1944) Vitagraph, Metro, First National, Warner Brothers Don Gillum (1901–1976) Christie Comedies Clarence “Stax” Graves (1885–1972) Hal Roach Paul Grenbeaux (1888–1955) Triangle, Robertson-Cole, First National William Frank Grimes (1895–197?) MGM Gordon G. Head (1899–1974) Paramount Fred Hendrickson (1894–1946) Warner Brothers, Paramount, RKO Clarence B. Hewett (1902–1972) MGM George Hommel (1901–1953) Paramount Newton Hopcraft (1885–1962) Warner Brothers, RKO Edward Hostetler Tiffany-Stahl George Hurrell (1904–1992) MGM Harry Jackson (1896–1953) Corrine Griffith Productions, Tiffany-Stahl Raymond H. Jones (1892–1967) Universal, Sennett Alex Kahle (1886–1968) Universal, RKO Donald B. Keyes (1894–1974) DeMille, Paramount, Frank Lloyd Glenn Kershner (1884–1985) Harry Langdon Productions (First National) Clifton L. Kling (1898–1960) Vitagraph, MGM Gene Kornman (1897–1978) Harold Lloyd Madison S. Lacy (1898–1979) Griffith, Hal Roach, States Rights, Paramount Irving Lippman (1906–2006) Warner Brothers

337 Studio Men Name Dates Employers during thes 1920

Bert Longworth (1893–1964) Universal, MGM, Warner Brothers Ruth Harriet Louise (1903–1940) MGM Warren E. Lynch (1896–1970) MGM Roy D. MacLean (1891–1966) Paramount S. C. “James” Manatt (1896–1989) Joseph Schenk, MGM Art Marion (1893–1969) MGM Shirley Vance Martin (1870–1949) Robert Brunton, Joseph Schenck Hal A. McAlpin (1901–1973) Paramount John Miehle (1902–1952) Sam Goldwyn C. Heighton Monroe Vitagraph Fred R. Morgan (1884–1965) MGM Talmage Morrison (1892–1974) Paramount William Mortensen (1897–1965) F. P. Earle, United Artists, DeMille William D. Pearsall United Artists Hal Phyfe (1892–1968) Fox William Potter Paramount Frank Powolny (1901–1986) Fox Arthur F. Rice (1856–1922) Metro Eugene R. Richee (1896–1972) Frank Lloyd Productions, Paramount Mark Leslie Rowley (1876–1956) Paramount Emmett Schoenbaum (1901–1973) Paramount, Pathé, Columbia Merritt J. Sibbald (1896–1983) Lasky, Paramount Oliver Sigurdson (1892–1983) RKO Bertram H. Six (1902–1967) RKO H. Nealson Smith (1881–1969) Feature Productions (UA), Sam Goldwyn Orville Snyder (1901–1974) Columbia Erick Stone (1902–1958) Fox William E. Thomas Pathé, DeMille Anthony Ugrin (1900–1973) Fox Homer Van Pelt (1905–1989) Warner Brothers Walter J. Van Rossem (1895–) Independent photographer, worked jobs for DeMille William Walling Jr. (1904–1983) Fox, Vitaphone, Warner Brothers Charles S. Warrington (1878–1928) United Artists Henry Waxman (1901–1976) MGM, Warner Brothers Consolidation of studios into industrial workplaces occurred in conjunction with the large-scale transfer of picture production to the West Cost. In 1924, New York, the first center of motion picture creation, generated only 12 percent of the country’s releases. Only Paramount’s Astoria complex, erected in 1920 could be said to be comparable to the studios being built in Southern California. One wave of New York talent moved westward at the beginning of the 1920s—the name Broadway portrait photographers. Only two major still photographers were nurtured in New York studios during the decade—Ernest Bachrach and Russell Ball. Both would master motion picture still photography at the Astoria studio.14 Both would leave for the West Coast at the end of the decade in the employ of other companies, Bachrach to head RKO’s still department and Russell Ball to work at MGM. Both in the 1930s specialized in glamour portraiture. The superficial parallelism of their careers masks the great difference in the personalities of Ernest A. Bachrach (1899–1973) and Russell Ball (1891– 1942). Bachrach was an even-tempered, methodical, and personable photographer, whose technical expertise emerged naturally in every shooting situation in which he found himself. He inspired trust in fellow workers through his carefulness, his willingness to subordinate personal wishes for the welfare of his team, and his industry. Coworkers called him Ernie. He thrived in institutional settings, and so the studio proved a congenial place to work. He had no personal style of portrait photography per se, adjusting his view to whatever the art director suggested. He did use the Graflex camera frequently to capture spontaneity. His Gloria Swanson pictures tended to be well lit, employing a camera placement that gave judicious prominence to the star’s facial expression. He made modern rooms seem accommodating and attractive. Yet his finest, most poetic images came from film fantasies, where he could combine the uncanny and charming in a single frame, as in the sensitive, nocturnal stills of street girl Betty Bronson’s inA Kiss for Cinderella (1925). Gloria Swanson grew so fond of Bachrach’s work that she demanded he accompany her to the West Coast in 1926 when she left New York, having formed her own production company. From 1926 to 1929 he shot the last of Swanson’s silent films, including the famously repressed Queen Kelly. After that debacle, Bachrach accepted the job of heading the newly formed RKO studio’s photography department where he nurtured the talents of Alex Kahle and Gaston Longet. Bachrach, having served as Swanson’s portraitist for three years, decided personally to photograph the A-list stars for the studio gallery. Russell Ball was a mercurial, cerebral artist shaped by the New York theatrical world. He established a name as a Broadway photographer in 1923, becoming a favorite of the Shubert Organization, which hired him to do publicity for Sigmund Romberg’s various projects—The Passing Show of 1923, Innocent Eyes, and Marjorie. He also supplied celebrity photography for print outlets,

339 Studio Men Figure 10.1 ernest Bachrach: Betty Bronson and Ivan Simpson as Jane/Cinderella and Mr. Cutaway in A Kiss for Cinderella, New York, Paramount Pictures, December 22, 1925. Image taken at the Paramount New York Astoria studio.

Figure 10.2 ernest Bachrach: Gloria Swanson as Marion Donnell in The Trespasser, Hollywood, Gloria Productions, November 11, 1929.

doing sittings with film stars such as Dagmar Godowsky, Alice Joyce, and Vivi- enne Segal. Ball excelled as a conversationalist and relished the company of writers and critics particularly. (He married columnist and playwright Gladys Hall and cowrote a play, Happy Ending, with her in 1932.) These “cultural connections” brought him to the attention of Harry Fischbeck, a cinematographer whose friendship with actor George Arliss and whose sympathy for the New York theater made him among the more cosmopolitan of 1920s cameramen. Fischbeck secured Ball to do stills and publicity for Rudolph Valentino’s

340 Chapter Ten

Figure 10.3 Russell Ball: Lois Wilson and cast as Queen Marie of France and attendants in Monsieur Beaucaire, New York, Paramount Pictures, August 11, 1924. Costumes by Natacha Rambova.

costume drama Monsieur Beaucaire, shot at the Astoria studio in New York. These stills, ranking with Bachrach’s forA Kiss for Cinderella as the most atmospheric produced on the East Coast during the 1920s, displayed Ball’s genius for composition, Fischbeck’s theatrical lighting, and Natacha Rambova’s costumes and decor. Ball preferred autonomy rather than studio security; he chafed at the constraints of the industrial system. He worked for Paramount on a job basis exclusively. When MGM, attracted by theMonsieur Beaucaire stills, approached Ball in 1925, he agreed to serve as an East Coast stringer, a free agent publicity photographer. In this capacity, he took the first photographs of Greta Garbo, newly arrived from Sweden, for MGM. MGM’s publicity subjected these images to a brutal retouching as well as overexposure before releasing the prints to

342 Chapter Ten Figure 10.4 Russell Ball: May McAvoy, Hollywood, 1927. Ball’s overtly sensual posing presaged the sultry glamour of the 1930s. Signed in green pencil on recto. McAvoy was the female lead in Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer. magazines. One of the images, however, presented signature features of Ball’s portraiture. Ball imparted freshness to his portraits by avoiding both vertical- ity and recumbence in his posing. Women he tilted backward, giving the spine some torsion; this gave them a passionate, gestural quality, particularly in the half- and three-quarter-length shots. Throughout the latter part of the 1920s, Ball shot portraiture for Paramount, Fox, Warner, and MGM freelance, perfecting his distinctively sultry, yet austere presentation. He became a bicoastal artist, working for parts of the year in New York and in Los Angeles. Ball’s art captured the attention of MGM’s West Coast publicity office. After Ruth Har- riet Louise’s departure from the portrait gallery in 1929, during George Hur- rell’s brief reign as head portraitist, MGM hired Ball. After Harvey White’s abrupt departure from the gallery in 1933, Ball became one the triumvirate of portraitist (Tom Evans and Ted Allan were the others) who performed the star shoots for the publicity department. His portrait style remained the most classically and austerely modern of any of the MGM cameramen, eschewing props and furniture, employing only a few geometric blocks of wood and several high-intensity lamps. His one extravagance was his green-crayon signature in the lower corner.

Eugene “Gene” Robert Richee

Eugene Robert Richee became during the 1920s “Mr. Still,” the photographer who embodied more than any other the versatility, intrepid spirit, and technical savvy requisite to the task. His education at Sennett and Triangle Studios may have been slow and distracted by stints working as second cameraman for the filming, but when he returned to California after serving as a signalman at Camp Kearney in World War I, he sought reemployment as a still man in Hollywood with a new professionalism and focus. Triangle had gone under in 1918, and its properties had been taken over by Goldwyn pictures. Fortunately, still photography at Goldwyn was being handled by another young westerner who despised pretense and shared a limitless curiosity about photographic technique and style, Clarence S. Bull. Richee worked for Bull for a year before a work lull and low pay prompted him to seek employment with Shirley V. Martin at Robert Brunton studios. In 1922 Paramount took over Brunton’s properties, and Richee transferred his allegiance to Norma Talmadge’s film company. There he worked as still photographer for the series of Talmadge vehicles directed by Frank Lloyd: The Eternal Flame, The Voice from the Mina- ret, and Within the Law. Paramount on the strength of his work offered him a contract and a choice, cinematographer or still man. “He chose the last named because he noticed that employment was steadier there.” His first major project for Paramount was Cruz’s The Covered Wagon, and his first published photographer credits were for the stills (including the famous image of the wagon

344 Chapter Ten train in the box canyon) in a photo feature entitled “Westward Ho” appearing the February 25, 1923, issue of the Los Angeles Times. From 1923 through the end of the silent era, Richee enjoyed the sort of liberty to choose his projects enjoyed by Jack Freulich at Universal. When the visual dimension of projects interested him—as in the case of Flower of the Night, Volcano, Wings, The Lady of the Harem, The Rough Riders, Forlorn River, The Spot Light, or Four Sons—he did stills. At other times he devoted himself to running Paramount Hollywood’s portrait gallery while colleagues Talmage Morrison, Otto Dyar, George Hommel, Don English, June Estep, and Emmett Schoen- baum handled production photography for the majority of Paramount’s West Coast releases. Richee’s portraiture won him fame among the photographic community as Hollywood’s preeminent visual stylist during the 1920s. Ruth Harriet Louise, for all her talent in capturing personality, lacked Richee’s lyri- cal treatment of background, the feature that earned him universal admiration in the studios. Richee achieved his pictorial effects entirely through optical means. At a time when the Broadway photographers manipulated the glass plate negatives with burins and brushes to make the gesture of the photographer’s hand visible in the image, Richee made his patterned backgrounds through lighting, playing with focal length, and selecting evocative backgrounds. His equipment did the work. He did not need to transform his negatives. They went to the Paramount Studio retouchers for touch-up work, not pictorial surgery. He composed shots in the camera, so he eliminated the post hoc cropping and enlargement that were central to the processing of images by Ruth Harriet Louise and Max Munn Autrey. When he turned to portraiture intensely in 1925 he developed seven pictorial strategies for treating subjects:

1. Taking a close-in head shot with focus centered on eyes and lips while the extremities of hair and clothing go out of focus. These center-focus shots are usually in midrange tonality. 2. Foregrounding the subject in sharp focus against a background plane of moderate depth just out of focus. 3. Employing a dark-gray textured background to give three-dimensionality to the figure of a sitter whose skin tone or dress is moderately lighter. 4. Echoing an arabesque linear element of the background in the pose or clothing of a sitter. 5. Counterpointing a sitter with a larger black shadow of something out of the pictorial field. 6. Abstracting face, hand, and portions of a profile against a dominant dark- black field. 7. Framing a standing figure in fashionable modern clothes in an art deco set.

345 Studio Men Conscious of the need for images to be reproduced in media with less optical fidelity, Richee restricted his range of tones to four or five, rather than the twenty to two dozen of a Davis & Sanford or a Rudolf Eickemyer print. Strategy 4 became Richee’s trademark in the eyes of magazine art directors and subsequent critics of photography. His posing and patterning drew a spectator’s eye in a sinuous circuit around an image, echoing the bold, curvilinear movement of art nouveau. Alvin Langdon Coburn of the art photographers wrote most insistently upon the importance of designs that moved the eye so as to trace the line of beauty and grasp the just proportion. The final two strategies were Richee innovations. Some would argue the single most arresting portrait of the silent era was Richee’s full-length image of Louise Brooks in black on black

Figure 10.5 eugene Robert Richee: Greta Nissen and Sojin as Pervaneh and Sultan in Lady of the Harem, Hollywood, Paramount Pictures, November 1, 1926. Whether tasked with evoking the brutal realism of the Nevada desert on location or the decorator Orientalism of a studio spectacle, Richee made his images arresting and convincing.

346 Chapter Ten Figure 10.6 eugene Robert Richee: Louise Brooks, Hollywood, 1927. The kimono session, with Brooks’s casual posing on a sofa setting into play a dance of line. Versions of this print were printed with different toning, this image being among the darker in its handling of grays. Richee using a Dallmeyer soft-focus lens.

dangling a long strand of pearls in her elegant hand. This minimalist masterpiece showed the modernist beauty in subtraction. Beauty without ornament. Besides this panoply of approaches, Richee had an attitude toward his subject that was distinctive. In a period in which photographers increasingly tried to establish an emotional rapport with the subject, to suggest intimate access to the star, Richee preferred to set his sitters at a distance. He allowed the persons to be objects in themselves—sculptural or graphic entities—with their own souls and privacies of mood. Few sitters of the twenties look directly at the camera. Certain stars regarded this tact as the essence of Richee’s artistry. By 1927 Richee had inspired a set of imitators. His closest disciple, George Hommel, worked on the Paramount lot. At Warner Brothers Irving Lipmann enjoyed a decade’s success imitating Richee’s full-figure art deco staging strategy for the multitude of fashion shoots commissioned at the studio. Even Richee’s friend and colleague Otto Dyar, whose fascination with the overhead lighting methods used in advertising photography gave him a distinctively different approach to imagery, found himself copping the stage-frame idea for several publicity campaigns. When Paramount in a political shake-up during 1941 deposed Richee as head of its portrait department, Clarence Sinclair Bull arranged for his employment at MGM, where he remained active until 1950. He closed his career at Warner Brothers. The first major photographer to have learned his craft- en tirely within the studio system, he left the business secure in the knowledge that elements of his style had been absorbed into the general practice of portraiture.

Max Munn Autrey

When Max Munn Autrey left Albert Witzel’s employment in 1924, he planned to establish an independent studio. He quickly found that lending institutions would not provide financial backing for sole proprietor photographic businesses. Exigency drove him into the arms of Fox Studio in 1925. With a reputation as a master of the glamorous head shot and an aptitude for making seated models look natural, he was immediately put to portrait work. He had to learn still production photography on the fly. Careful of his reputation in the photographic community, he did not claim credit for his still work until 1926, when his images for the hit war movie What Price Glory, and The Country Beyond (with its scenic exteriors shot in Jasper National Park in Canada) appeared widely in print with his name affixed. Thereafter he remained selective about which

Figure 10.7 eugene Robert Richee: Louise Brooks, Hollywood, 1927. An icon of modernist minimalism.

349 Studio Men publicity campaigns employed his credit line: 1927’s Seventh Heaven, 1928’s The Red Dancer of Moscow, Four Devils, Street Angel, and Mother Knows Best. He is perhaps most famous as a still photographer for his work on the “last silent film,” Charlie Chaplin’sModern Times in 1936. Autrey’s portrait work bore his credit from the start. He had been given the right by Fox to inscribe his last name in the negative, a recognition standard

Figure 10.8 Max Munn Autrey: Madge Bellamy as Sally Quail in Mother Knows Best, Hollywood, Fox Film Company, 1928. A publicity portrait in character for one of the last Fox silent releases. Throughout 1928, Autrey alternated soft-focus and hard-edge styles of portraiture. As a rule, the darker the background, the softer the focus. among independent studios, but possessed by only Jack Freulich at Universal among the studio men. At Fox, his shooting schedule was determined by the publicity office, the camera department, and various directors. The variety and number of shootings were well in excess of his busiest days at Witzel. Au- trey reserved his creativity for elaborate costumed posing sessions with the Fox stars: Olive Borden as a Jazz Age showgirl, Madge Bellamy in a tutu, June Collyer in Easter finery, Sally Phipps in lingerie, Janet Gaynor as a street girl, Fifi D’Orsay as a squaw, Buck Jones in chaps and cowboy shirt, and George O’Brien in the buff. He noticed in the cinematography of 1928 a move to higher contrast lighting and began experimenting with sharp-focus, high-contrast images. When George Hurrell coupled this style with a more blatantly erotic presentation of posers in 1930–31, Autrey paid attention and began experimenting in 1931 with the new worldly glamour style in a suite of photographs of Linda Watkins. Autrey, like Hurrell, never felt completely at ease in the studio system, particularly chafing at the loss of control over the handling of negatives and printing. In 1929 he convinced his wife, Bonnie Flannagan Au- trey (a beauty queen from Tyler, Texas, whom he convinced to marry him on their first date in 1918), to manage a private studio on Sunset Boulevard that he would support in his off hours. This side operation became so successful that Autrey walked away from Fox in 1933 to work as a private photographer full time. Thereafter, his labors for the motion picture industry were on a job basis. Nearly every star availed themselves of his services in the 1930s and 1940s. Active in the national professional organizations, he would win every title and honor that the profession bestowed before he shuttered his studio in 1967.

Frank Powolny

One of Autrey’s greatest contributions to photography during his stay at Fox was convincing aspiring director Frank Powolny in 1926 to lay down his bull- horn for a camera. Austrian-born Powolny emerged on the Hollywood scene in 1920 when he secured a job in the film processing department at Chaplin Studios. His father Frank Sr. had been a portrait photographer in Vienna employed by Atelier Adele working under the direction of Boris Majdrakoff until the outbreak of World War I prompted him to emigrate. The family settled in Clarkson, Nebraska, home to a large enclave of Czech immigrants and a relative, Ludwig Powolny. There Frank Sr. set up shop, training his two sons in photography. Frank Jr. enlisted in the artillery during World War I and upon release from active duty, headed west, working as a laborer and billboard artist until parlaying his photographic skills into a job at the developing plant at Charlie Chaplin Studios on the corner of Sunset and LaBrea in 1920. Chap- lin during this period began filmingThe Kid, his longest feature release to that point and a production that stretched the studio staff to the point where

351 Studio Men Powolny, because of his photographic experience, was enlisted as a second unit cameraman. Powolny had not yet turned twenty. Powolny stayed on staff with Chaplin for two years, but the pace of Chap- lin’s releases had slowed to the point where he did little work. He went job hunting and secured a salaried slot at Fox in 1923 working as a directorial assistant. He was tasked with solving difficult shooting problems arising in pictures. John Ford employed him as a unit director on The Iron Horse. This made him an asset in the eyes of the cadre of directors (Frank Borzage, W. S. Van Dyke, and Scott Dunlap) who shot Fox’s lot Westerns starring Buck Jones and Tom Mix. Powolny met Autrey in the hills of California generating stills for a Jones features in 1925. Autrey immediately grasped the young man’s photographic knowledge and saw his frustration at not advancing into the ranks of Fox’s directors. What happened next can only be inferred. Powolny was working as unit director for John Ford’s Three Bad Men. Shooting was underway when the still photographer of record called in sick. Someone informed Ford that Powolny was a wizard with the still camera, so shooting the production was added to his roster of duties. Thus began one of the most storied photographic careers in Hollywood. The great impetus to that career took place later in 1926 when Fox enticed Friedrich Murnau, the German meister-director of Nosferatu and The Last Laugh to California, to helm prestige productions for the company. Powolny, as a German-speaking Mittel-European, became Murnau’s Hollywood mouth- piece and eyepiece. Communing with cinematographer Karl Struss and director Murnau, Powolny became one of the visionary still photographers of the silent era creating his version of Sunrise, the hallucinogenic evocation of a man who rediscovers his love for his wife when he overcomes an impulse to drown her. The distorted, wondrous cityscape, the amusement park, which Murnau and Struss make magical in a symphony of dissolves, in Powolny’s stills seem strange, light-washed habitations of the psyche, an expressionist world made plausible in its palpability. In a stroke Powolny’s work on Sunrise made him the photographer most in demand on Fox’s lot. His willingness to collaborate with others on the set, his trust of the persons who did the photographic processing, and his efficiency endeared him to Frank Borzage and John Ford as well as Murnau. Because of Fox Studio’s intense activity in the period 1927 through 1929, when as many as eight units were making films simultaneously, Powolny found himself in constant demand. As a result of his popularity, he secured rights that only Max Munn Autrey possessed among the staff photographers, signature credit on photographs and a degree of choice in choosing projects. When Autrey left Fox in 1933, Powolny took over as chief portraitist and still photographer, a position he retained until his retirement in 1966. During that long dominion he served as official photographer for the Academy Awards, shot the single most reproduced negative in motion picture history (Betty

352 Chapter Ten Figure 10.9 Frank Powolny: George O’Brien, Arthur Housman, and Eddie Boland as the Man, the Obtrusive Gentleman, and the Obliging Gentleman in Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Hollywood, Fox Film Company, November 4, 1927. Anses (O’Brien) experiences qualms at plotting the murder of his wife. Fox Still M [Murnau] 1-156.

Grable’s famous leggy bathing suit picture distributed to five million service- men during World War II) composed the visually most arresting set of stills of the 1930s in collaboration with photographer-director Harry Lachman (the surrealistic hell scenes from Dante’s Inferno), and created several of the most memorable portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Powolny’s star portraits amalgamated features of Autrey’s style with Gene Richee’s. From Richee he took the use of hats as architectural devices framing a head shot. From Autrey he took the radical cropping of close-in images. He preferred to control all aspects of the photographic process, so avoided natural lighting for portraits and carried portable lights with him to the Academy

353 Studio Men Figure 10.10 Frank Powolny: Joan Bennett, Hollywood, Fox Film Company, 1932. The ravishing Joan Bennett here appears unexpectedly as a blonde, a brief hair-color experiment performed by Fox during late 1931 and early 1932. Awards and other venues where he was obliged to provide candid shots. He may have been the first Hollywood portraitist to do away with pictorialist soft- focus effects, opting for sharp focus as early as 1930. In this, he probably applied his aesthetic for stills to his portraits. Perhaps he, rather than Hurrell, pushed Autrey in the direction of the Linda Watkins experiments in hard- edge glamour. There can be no doubt, however, that Hurrell occasioned the triumph of the high-contrast sharp-focus style of glamour in 1932 among the photographic community at large.

Fred R. Archer

Certain studio men of the late 1920s suffered stylistic schizophrenia, as the soft-focus approach warred with the more abstract, sharper-focused styles of photography pioneered by New York modernists and disseminated in magazines. Fred R. Archer (1889–1968), sometime head of photography for First National, agonized about style more painfully than most. One of the central figures in the Camera Pictorialist Club of California, he developed a national reputation in the 1910s for exhibition prints in a literary and illustrative mode, pictures with titles such as While the Flock is Grazing, The Supplicant, and All thru the Night. His images hung in the first and second National Salon of Pic- torial Photography at the Buffalo, New York, Fine Arts Academy in 1920 and 1921. His major project of that period was a set of photographic evocations of the Arabian Nights. These images bore a strong affinity to the paintings that Ferdinand P. Earle prepared for his Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Orientalist, architectural, and rife with historical detail. Like Earle, Fred Archer entered into pictures performing the one service that made the most immediate use of graphic skill in silent films, the preparation of “artistic” title cards to explain the action and provide dialogue. In late 1920 he painted the titles for Tod Browning’s Outside the Law, an early Lon Chaney vehicle set in Chinatown. He probably did uncredited title work for Universal in the following years. He entered motion pictures professionally in 1924 signing onto the production staff at First National. The studio already had the services of Frank C. Bangs, who concentrated much of his efforts on the Richard Barthelmes features, as well as James N. Doolittle, a versatile artist with a special talent for trick photography that would be exercised in a set of memorable stills for The Lost World. Archer would urge the hiring of fellow pictorialist Harold Dean Carsey from DeMille in 1928. Archer immediately grasped the extraordinary potency of the studio as an industrial producer of imagery. He studied the process, analyzed it, and adapted his camera work to fit the needs of the studio. He realized that an extraordinary demand existed for images of performers in costume before blank walls and canvas for use in the poster and advertising art. This sketchy kind of

355 Studio Men Figure 10.11 Fred Archer: Ethlyne Clair, Hollywood, ca. 1928. Clair, the star of Fox’s The Newlyweds series, was a B-movie personality. In Archer’s minimalist portrait, visual interest is created by concentrating focus on the face, allowing jewelry and back-lit strands of hair to scintillate in soft focus. No background, no props, no expressive hands. portraiture contrasted in every aspect from his highly elaborated pictorialist images. With the zeal of the converted he embraced a minimalist, multiuse type of portraiture that has the peculiar distinction of being the least posed, least gestural body of star images of the silent era. Archer’s still work necessarily departed from his fanciful pictorialist prints, for First National had a decided bias toward features treating contemporary society. MGM, DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks, and Cosmopolitan did the fantasy, romance, and exotic locale pictures. Archer found himself the re- corder of lobbies, townhouses, and drawing rooms. Because art direction was not a preoccupation of the studio, these sets tended toward the generic. He worked at the job conscientiously, and reported his thoughts on the uses of stills to the Society of Motion Picture Engineers in 1926 in a piece cowritten by his assistant, Elmer Fryer. Fryer had been Archer’s discovery, and an extraordinary discovery it was. From picture to picture, Fryer’s control over his craft increased, and by Noah’s Ark of 1928, he had achieved a mastery at composition that eclipsed that of his mentor. In August 1928 Frank C. Bangs died. Archer, the senior photographer on the Burbank lot in years and experience, was elevated to chief of photography. Like Clarence Sinclair Bull at MGM, much of Archer’s energy was exerted ad- ministering the department. He restricted his own camera work to portraiture and fashion exploitation and depended upon Carsey and protégé Elmer Fryer for the bulk of the portrait and still production. Fryer thrived artistically, particularly in the portrait gallery working with Carsey, where he became a master of capturing the personalities and moods of sitters. Shortly after Archer’s ascension, Warner Brothers began acquiring First National stock, gaining control in 1929. They placed Fryer, the younger and more experimental photographer, as head of department and demoted Archer to staff photographer. Archer left. Fryer would preside over the combined Warner–First National photography crew throughout the 1930s when it became the preeminent shop in Hollywood, boasting a staff that included Henry Waxman; William Wall- ing Jr.; Homer Van Pelt; Ferenc; Fred Hendrickson; James N. Doolittle; Julian Ancker (until his death in 1932); Mack Elliott; Preston Duncan; William Eglin- ton; and George Hurrell. Release from administrative duties proved a stimulus to Archer’s creativity. He freelanced around Hollywood, working on six-month contracts for Paramount in 1930–31, MGM and Universal in 1932, and Jefferson Pictures in 1933. Highlights of this period of itineration include his stills for Grand Hotel (MGM, 1932) and The Mummy (Universal, 1932). At the same time he reinvent- ed himself as an art photographer, putting aside pictorialism for geometric abstractions of light and shadow more elegant and art deco influenced than the contemporary experiments of his contemporary Francis Bruguiere. He became greatly interested in photographic theory and pedagogy and became a

357 Studio Men frequent contributor to the photographic press. With Ansel Adams he created the compositional method that became popularly known as the “zone system.” He opened the most important photographic school in the United States in the post–World War II period and published in 1950 an instructional guide to portrait photography. When he died in 1968 he was one of the significant figures in American photography.

Harold Dean Carsey

If Elmer Fryer of Warner Brothers–First National’s photographers blazed the trail to the look of the 1930s, another of Archer’s colleagues summarized the style of the 1920s, Harold Dean Carsey (1886–1947). The Tennessee-born Carsey emerged suddenly as a Hollywood portrait photographer in 1925, at age thirty-nine. He devised a purposely flat style, annihilating depth of field and any sculptural quality to the face or body. These images, printed in ten by thirteen and eleven by fourteen, because of their resemblance to modernistic murals, immediately distinguished themselves as something “arty and different.” The best of them rank among the most arresting photographs of 1920s performers. The Los Angeles Times printed certain of these large portraits on the cover page of their weekly film magazine,The Pre-view in 1925, stimulating a brisk demand for his services among the studios. He would not commit to long-term contracts, preferring to work on an assignment basis. Consequent- ly, he worked for more production companies in California over the last years of the silent era than any other photographer. When a director wished to get special publicity notice for a prestige feature, he contracted Carsey for stills or, more usually, portraits. He worked on a series of significant pictures: War- ner Brothers’ Don Juan (John Ellis and Fred Hendrickson did the stills, Carsey the portraits); Duke Worne’s romance The Gallant Fool (1926); Cecil B. DeMi- lle Made for Love (1926); Edwin Carewe/United Artists’ flashy presentation of Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1927); Two Arabian Knights (1927) for Howard Hughes’s Caddo Company; DeMille’s Dress Parade (1927); George Fitzmaurice’s epic of early California for First National, The Rose of the Golden West (1927); and Paramount’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928). For most of these projects he put aside his mural style for well-lighted, expertly composed portraits and stills. The evocative scenes of costumed Hispanic Californians in Monterey proved particularly impressive and received substantial newspaper play throughout the United States. His artistry is best seen in the spectacular stills for The Pri- vate Life of Helen of Troy, a work far superior in its still form than as moving imagery. When First National looked to fill the vacancy caused by Frank C. Bangs’s death, they hired Carsey, in 1928. Archer, then head of the photography department named him head of the portrait gallery. Loosed in tech paradise at Burbank, Carsey began experimenting with the great fascination of

358 Chapter Ten Figure 10.12 harold Dean Carsey: Trojan guardsman, The Private Life of Helen of Troy, Hollywood, First National, December 9, 1927. Carsey and James N. Doolittle shot the stills and publicity portraiture for this film. A farce directed by Alexander Korda for First National, this costume comedy is a masterpiece in stills; not so as a motion picture, judging by the contemporary response. every ambitious photographer of the decade, perfecting a cheap and reason- ably faithful color process. In October 1928, newspapers across the country announced that Carsey “[had] invented a process whereby photographs may be taken in natural colors under artificial lights. It is expected to revolution- ize color photography.” A triple-lens system, much like Hessercolor, Carsey’s invention failed to derail Technicolor and Kodacolor’s march to market domi- nance. He would last as portrait gallery head until the Warner Brothers’ takeover in 1929 and left with Archer’s ouster. For the remainder of Carsey’s career, he preferred to work on assignment for magazines. In 1932 he reported an alteration in the character of glamour and the aesthetics of the female body in Hollywood. “Curves are the new order of fashion and I think you’ll find Hollywood going that way. The girls don’t need to be so careful of what they eat nowadays.” Curves belonged to women. Carsey understood that the sound era and the Depression had conspired to put an end to the porcelain virgins and the perfectly made-up, coiffed, and accou- tered creatures such as Mae Murray and Vilma Banky. “The doll-like beauty days are over. People are going for girls and women who look real—not too beautiful to copy. Artificial beauty in Hollywood is the biggest drawback to the industry today.” Hollywood would not, of course, do away with artifice. But the new stars of the screen—Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, Janet Gaynor—did not embody some abstraction ideal of physical proportion or facial composition. The vulnerable, natural, approachable woman would be the new nexus of beauty. Carsey knew himself to be at odds with the new fashion. The curvy, fallible woman would be the icon of a younger cohort of cameramen: Whitey Schafer; Robert Coburn Sr.; Elmer Fryer; Ted Allen; Scotty Welbourne; and George Hurrell. Carsey in 1932 knew that his eyes had witnessed their own obsolescence.

1932

In the third week in August, 1932, newspapers across America printed the following wire service sketch of the labors of the still cameraman.

The still cameraman, in keeping with his title, is seldom heard of but he is a very important factor in motion picture work. He is the fellow who takes the photographs of films in production, for publication in the daily papers and the periodicals when the photoplay is released. Yet his name is not listed among those of the production staff. The still man tells the story of the film in photos. He must sense the exact dramatic high point of each scene and shoot it as it is being made. These pictures are then numbered and given to the script girl for reference. In “The First Year,” Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell’s latest Fox picture, 207

360 Chapter Ten such pictures were snapped. The still man must snatch the opportunity to make his pictures whenever he can. Production cannot be stopped for him. He usually finds his chance when the action is changing from long to close shots. He then applies to the assistant director to hold the lights, their hoods are removed, they are turned on, the players are posed as the photographer requests, the picture is snapped and the film goes on according to schedule. At the Fox studio it is now the practice to devote an hour out of each day’s shooting to the taking of stills. At the end of the day’s film making the still man takes a picture of the set with every article in place. This still is developed and turned over to the head property man next morning. If some of the furnishings may have been removed, or disturbed, they can be replaced, from the still, exactly as they were. News sense is another necessity in the still man’s equipment. He must catch the players in off-scene activities that have news value; also in relaxed moments on the set during the production. If the feminine stars come to the studio in attractive new modes, he must photograph them in these before they change to picture costume. Distinguished visitors must be snapped with film notables. Some stars are more amenable to being photographed than others. Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell give the still man no trouble. Their only preference is to be photographed together rather than singly. They posed for 25 groups stills during “The First Year,” and 12 single shots. The still photographer uses two cameras, an 8×10 plate camera for posed pictures and a graflex for action photos. He develops his stills at night. In the morning they are examined and the objectionable ones killed. Ideas for new pictures are gained. Often entire advertising campaigns have been passed on stills that caught the spirit of the film in a single photo.

This sketch, despite its brevity, conveys a great deal about what has changed in the lives of the still photographers under the studio system. Their lack of credit had become an issue. They, not the director, determined the points in the action that must be captured. While the individual image remained important, conveying the arc of the film narrative in a series of images has become the prime desideratum. They pose and light the performers in shoots. Candid imagery has grown to such importance that the news and fashion angles possess as much attractive power in the world of magazine and newspaper editors as the feature itself. An instinct for the newsworthiness of a candid photographer has become a mark of distinction of the superlative still man. While the ame- nability of the performer remained a matter of concern, and playing to his or her vanity still mattered, an attunement to the psychology of the print media has become the most important sympathy a still man possessed. This put the

361 Studio Men still man in closer proximity to the publicity arm of the studio. Indeed, the almost ritual interactions laid out in the sketch between the photograph and assistant director, performers, script girl, head property man, and publicity office (interestingly unnamed, but implied) dramatize the extent to which studio system has regularized tasks. We should note the observation concerning cameras. For much of the silent period the eight-by-ten plate camera in various incarnations, despite its cumbersome weight and ungainly size, took the vast majority of shots in the keybook. The portable “Top Handle” Speed Graphic Graflex camera, introduced in 1912, came out for candid shots behind the scenes. The small lens boards did not accommodate the increasingly powerful and fast lenses being developed in the 1920s. They lacked the fidelity needed for still work. The 1928 Speed Graphic expanded the lens board and made it a much more versatile and useful instrument, but by that time the handheld Leica, which debuted in 1925, found its way on set in the hands of William Mortensen, Frank Powolny, and others. The portrait studio remained the bastion of the big plate camera. Updated models, such as the Eastman Century, when fitted with a superb lens, panchromatic paper, and used in concert with well-selected portable spotlights generated most of the 1930s glamour images. The sketch supplied disinformation on one point: concerning the development and editing of the stills. This was done by persons other than the still photographer. Even the portrait photographers, who exercised much more control over the final image than the still photographer, had others do retouching and printing. The exceptions to this rule were few—Preston Dun- can (1899–1958), the most reputable independent portraitist in Los Angeles in the late 1920s, when hired by Warner Brothers as a special projects portraitist made control of retouching a condition of employment; Mortensen when working on King of Kings processed his own negatives. The issue was speed. If a thousand copies of an image had to go out twenty-four hours after exposing the negative, one person couldn’t do the work. Retouching a negative, particularly if a star had say over the release of an image, could consume three to five hours. If as many as eight productions were in a studio pipeline, no photographer could spend that much time per day processing. They had to be taking pictures. While all-night sessions were frequent in the 1910s, under the industrial regime of the 1920s, they were rare occurrences. After the unionization of the camera departments in 1930, it would not take place in a union shop at all.

Twilight of the Idols

Baby Peggy, the last of the silent era child stars, recalling the coming of sound tells of a bonfire of the vanities: “After talkies came in, nobody collected silent film or silent film stars’ portrait stills and autographs. I saw thousands

362 Chapter Ten of stills being burned in Hollywood’s backyard incinerators where homeowners burned their trash.”15 The dreadful revelation here for Peggy was not that the studios had deposited the back files of the publicity office into the dump- ster, abandoning the old mainstays to the ash heap of history, but that fans were casting their idols into the flames for new gods. Performers knew that studio bosses adored the dollar, not their employees, no matter how talented or profitable. But when the devotee sought a new object of devotion, then the divinities tumbled out of the heaven of their worshipers’ regard. The fans- homeowners of Hollywood had become the iconoclasts, the disenchanted, the disbelievers. The violence did not fall upon the stars themselves, but to their icons. For a young girl, the mental picture of her autographed visage charring in the furnace must have seemed an image of perdition conjured out of the skull of Cecil B. DeMille. It was only right that the photos burned. For the image contained the magic, the chrism of the star. After the identities of performers became known in 1910, their personalities did not. The personalities remained disguised behind the manufactured blather of the publicity agent. Few darlings of the stage— aside from Maude Branscombe and her ilk—had lives so seemingly vacant of interest that every detail had to be made up. What drew the eyes and captivat- ed the hearts flickered on the screen or rested in the still image in the devotee’s hand. When it lost its charm, it fell from the hand. We must not make too much of Baby Peggy’s inference that sound somehow robbed the silent stars of their visibility. She was among the youngest of the screen performers in 1927 and 1928, too young to have witnessed how fires had consumed the vanities of a generation of performers before she stepped on set. Photos had been feeding incinerators since 1914, when the first movie star, Florence Lawrence, fell out of favor, and 1915, when the first matinee idol, Maurice Costello, could no longer compel stares. Stardom flourished only within a competitive world of commerce, with publicity offices vying to redirect dollars and devotions from another studio’s leading lights to theirs. The portrait photographs dispensed gratis to the public exploited every new wrin- kle of fashion, every innovation of pose, every advance in lighting to vest them with novelty, distracting them from any glimpse of the vacancy that might be lurking beneath the skin. The images multiplied until the pages of magazines were engorged with glamour We must not forget that still photography alone of the arts connected with silent cinema was fully and adequately formed by the time of the first feature films in 1912. Griffith was still working out film grammar. Cinematography had not yet gained control over lighting and managing depth of field. Costum- ing struggled with the color translations performed by orthochromatic film. Art direction was only just discovering the scope of possibility and the unique visualizations enabled by film in Italy. Acting was still, despite the influx of

363 Studio Men seasoned theatrical players, posing and telegraphing. Yet put a player, in costume or in modern dress, in front of Matzene, Witzel, Carpenter, Genthe, Hartsook, or any of a multitude of New York performing arts photographers in 1912 and an image could result manifesting state-of-the-art technique, aesthetic sensibility, and style. When photographers began taking publicity and continuity photographs of motion pictures in number in 1913, they applied a fully formed craft. Still imagery from this basic competence grew more aesthetically compelling with the improvement of every other of the components of cinematic production. It rendered the scenes envisioned by art directors incarnate in a timeless, Platonic perfection. They gained mystery and intensity with the growing control of lighting in the studio. As performers grew into their visual idiom, they seemed less artificial, less posed, and more expressive. By the 1916 and 1917, James Woodbury, William Wyckopf, John Van den Broek, and Karl Struss had managed in their stills to create a metonymic visual art associated with motion pictures, distilling moments of imagery into something memorable and compelling. The influx of celebrity photographers into Hollywood in 1919–23—Jack Freulich, Frank C. Bangs, Arthur F. Rice, James Abbe, Alfred Cheney Johnston, Edward S. Curtis, Edwin Bower Hesser—made artistry in publicity and production imagery a point of prestige in an increasingly competitive and predatory studio situation. Performers such as Lillian Gish; Nazimova; Richard Barthelmes; Douglas Fairbanks Sr.; and William S. Hart demanded impact in portraiture and still work. Directors such as D. W. Griffith, Rex Ingram, Allan Dwan, and Cecil B. DeMille agitated for photographic talent, so their own artistry could be mass reproduced in emblematic form. And the studio publicity bosses demanded cameramen who could get the newsworthy candid, the arresting still, and the ravishing head shot. With- in the motion picture industry a mounting demand for commercially effective and aesthetically striking images (the terms were not synonymous) created a need for versatile photographers. The industrial scale of image production and dissemination restricted the task of these photographers increasingly to taking the shot, not processing it. Because of the multiple tasks photography had to perform and because of the increasingly codified status of every worker on Hollywood sets of the major studios in the 1920s, successful photographers had to have a distinguishing specialty that marked them out from the crowd; this secured a position in a photographic department. Once within the system, the successful photographer had to demonstrate versatility with several sorts of photography. Though it has been characteristic to think of Gene Richee, Jack Freulich, Max Munn Autrey, Henry Waxman, and Clarence S. Bull as portrait photographers, they all proved equally adept at still photography. Otto Dyar did fashion and advertising shots, as well as stills. Even specialists in candid shots, such as William Grimes or George F. Williams, shot portraiture and costumes.

364 Chapter Ten Those photographers who fulfilled the needs of the studios were recognized by the granting of credit. Numbers of still men who labored through the 1920s never received credit for their work—never had a back stamp made— until the 1930s. Some of these anonymous cameramen—I think of Merritt J. Sibbald and Wallace Chewning—were artists of no little skill. Others—Frank Bjerring and Carl Dial—were journeymen. By the final years of the silent era one could see that the institutional pres- sures to diversify one’s talents in several genres of photography and to constantly renovate style to accord with the last trends in magazine page layout or portrait decor drove certain specialists away from the motion pictures. This held for cinematographers as well as photographers. Hendrick Sartov, the great champion of soft-focus cinematography, became an anonymous crafts- man in Hollywood circa 1930 when the pictorialist mist began to seem a cliché. Walter F. Seely turned from his camera to his paintbrushes in 1928 when he began to find his style of portraiture regarded as decorative rather than beautiful. William Mortensen’s grotesquery proved too weird for even Universal, so he moved to Laguna Beach to run his school and pursue his arabesque visions. Ruth Harriet Louise married and got out of the rat race. Yet the switch to sound and panchromatic film did not lead to a purge of the old guard in the photography departments. Performers may have been jettisoned, the photographs trashed and burned, but the icon makers remained. For once, the inconspicuousness, or lack of recognition accorded the still man, worked in his favor. What lead to transformations of photographic departments in the 1920s and 1930s was corporate restructuring, whether by takeover, studio consolidation, or changes among the executive staff of studios. By 1925 there existed sufficient demand for experienced photographers among the studios to permit a degree of job mobility. This mobility would be diminished when the labor unions imposed closed shop regulations in the 1930s. Within the fraternity of photographers a guild mentality arose relatively early in the 1920s and persisted to the Second World War. Certain values became ubiquitous. Among still photographers there arose respect for intrepid- ness, particularly a willingness to put oneself in peril in order to get an arresting image. Persons who could do aerial or underwater work enjoyed particular cachet. Still men revered technical expertise with the newest equipment, yet reckoned book knowledge inferior to practical experience. Amateur photographers and the latest graduates of the photographic schools became the butt of jokes and derision, particularly as increasing numbers sought employment in the studios. Great speed and efficiency in making setups and shots won general admiration. Audacity in breaking into the flow of production work to get an image also earned respect. Photographers found that the cultivation of a kind of brash personality won them tolerance on the set; if interruptions for images were amusing, then they inspired less resentment. The diplomatic still

365 Studio Men photographer would be a creature of the future. A thick hide in the face of temperament, too, constituted a virtue. Among portrait photographers another set of values prevailed. They shared a secret conviction that their artistry redeemed stars from their physical imperfections and rendered them beautiful and supernal. They reckoned that they could appropriate any trick of lighting, pose, or setup from the worlds of art and fashion photography and make them their own in their own studios. The highest sign of respect for a fellow photographer’s art was appro- priating his look. They valued those among their number who could establish rapport with the major stars and get a performance of personality in a sitting. A willingness to experiment and a tendency to expose numbers of negatives in a shot became general. A desire for individual style and recognition in a larger photographic community—the world of exhibition art photography—drove the portraitists. A tendency to compose a shot in the camera, rather than in the processing and cropping of the negative, grew when the retouching and development was done by others on staff. Finally, most portrait photographers harbored an ambition to devise a workable system of color photography, and experimented toward that end when at the studio or at home. The paradox of the portrait photographers who made glamour was that each strove to create an image remarkable enough to obtrude into a viewer’s notice from magazines filled with glamour shots. This restlessness and ambition kept the language of glamour from calcifying into a stock of poses. Yet since every successful image inspired immediate emulation, every look gave rise to countless reiterations by other studio portraitists, by an increasingly large cadre of fashion photographers, and by professional studios around the country. This drove ambitious photographers to increasingly novel and daring setups. The 1930s would suffer from a quest for novelty that took portraiture beyond tact and glamour to gimmick. No subgenre of glamour photography was more prone to gimmickry than the seasonal starlet spreads. Produced for magazines or calendars, these suites of girls on firecrackers, or short-skirted witches caressing black cats and riding brooms, became a fixtures of the shooting schedule in 1926–27. Publicity directors often assigned the shoots to still men who aspired to be portrait photographers to see what they could come up with. Almost invariably they came up with kitsch. While camp sensibility has rehabilitated these photographs as ironic cultural documents, there is no getting around that universal tendency to imbue every civic occasion, every communal rite with erotic interest. This was tease art—not explicit nudity like the figure studies in the art studies magazines of the 1920s that Edwin Bower Hesser and Harold Dean Carsey filled. It developed its own pantheon of specialist artists who could make the elf babe showing a lot of leg look both demure and inviting, avoiding vulgarity or out-and-out salaciousness or the sense of posed artificiality and formal-

366 Chapter Ten ism. Madison Lacy, Bert Longworth, and C. Kenneth Lobben were among the foremost of the men who made the phrase “glamour photography” attach to risqué pictures of young women in the 1940s and 1950s. When photographic publicity campaigns for silent films and stars began in the early 1910s, they operated under a principle of economy, indeed par- simony, with the minimum number of exposures to achieve a job mandated by those who financed work. At the end, excess ruled. A feature generated thousands of exposures, and from the multitude of stills and portraits, a suf- ficiency for archival, publicity, and continuity purposes would be chosen for development. From these prints a representative sample would be selected for mass reproduction and distribution, while others were discarded, and others relegated to the keybook, costume file, and personnel folders. The very finest portraits were sent to one or another national magazine on an exclusive basis for publication. Others were reproduced in one thousand copies for release to newspapers and theaters. One or two portraits would be selected for printing in batches of ten thousand for distributions to fans and autograph seekers. The editorial eyes doing the selection were not those of the photographer. Photog- raphers did, however, reserve certain negatives for their own uses—for exhibition prints, for experiments with papers and processes, and for presentation images given to friends and persons in the imagery. Because this select body of work was often printed by the photographer (although rarely retouched by him or her), they have assumed a special aesthetic merit in the eyes of poster- ity. These images, and the prestige prints prepared for exclusive use by magazines, became the body of worked collected by John Kobal and the first collectors of Hollywood glamour in the 1970s and 1980s. Since that time of aesthetic revaluation of Hollywood photography much has happened to alter our sense of the artistic accomplishment of the earliest cinematic still and portrait images. First and foremost, the heroic international recovery and preservation of the remaining corpus of silent films has confronted us with a body of work presenting unexpected qualities and concerns. The digital restoration and retinting of features has renovated the visual splendor of the motion pictures. Film studies has seriously engaged in the work of interpretation and cultural contextualization with this body of films. Invariably, given the relation between stills and motion pictures, the rehabilitation of the corpus of silent cinema photography has taken place in parallel with the recovery of silent film. Because of the substantially greater survival rate of stills to features, they have become essential to understanding that body of lost film. Which leads us to a salient truth. Despite Baby Peggy’s anguished report of the incineration of the stars, there was never an entire disenchantment with the images of the old screen demigods and goddesses. For every new cult of personality that would form, a cabal of old believers remained, true to their devotions to their original divinities. In their scrapbooks,

367 Studio Men on their bedside tables, framed on their walls, the icons endured, and the affec- tions seasoned. Like that other body of material given gratis—religious writings—the free pictures provoked two greatly divergent responses. It invited contempt, neglect, and destruction. Or it invited preservation, care, and reverence. The original collectors of these caches of treasured images have died or are dying off. eBay has tempted the inheritors to auction them off to the public. Despite the lack of a connoisseurship about the creators of the images, despite the lack of adequate descriptions of the sources, dates, and even subjects of the photographs, a brisk market sprang into existence for the pictures. There is something about beauty that is inexhaustible. The ingenue innocence radiating in the “girl” portraits of certain early actresses seems strangely fresh to eyes glutted with the urban worldliness of current fashion photography or the preppy slut posturings of the more notorious of the current generation of young female celebrities. The heavenly radiance with which the early photographers gilded their sitters is still recognized as glamour. That brooding shadow welling from the sewers and cellars of stills of those films of terror and the arabesque is still recognized as the stuff of horror. The finest of the images present their beauty and dread with that peculiar clarity that comes only when things are first glimpsed, first imagined, first imitated. This book directs attention back to the origins, hoping to recapture the freshness of that visual morning.

368 Chapter Ten notes

Overture 1. “Elsie Ferguson Ex-Chorus Girl, New York Times, November 22, 1914, X7; “Elsie Ferguson Seen in Outcast,” New York Times, November 3, 1914, 11. 2. “The Rise of Jeanne Eagels,”New York Times, September 30, 1917, X8. 3. The Thanhouser website provides the best succinct biography of Eagels currently available: http://www.thanhouser.org/people/eagelsj.htm. The sole known copy of The World and the Woman is housed in the collection of the George Eastman House. 4. Elsie Ferguson felt trepidation about her role as a paragon of feminine style. In an interview published in 1921 she remarked, “I look well in an Elsie Ferguson gown and an Elsie Ferguson headdress. Why? Because I am Elsie Ferguson. Marie Smith wearing an Elsie Ferguson gown would not look like me, nor would the effect be the same. Every one in the world is different from everybody else. . . . Dressing beautifully is purely a matter of studying yourself, your personality.” The anxiety about the loss of uniqueness occasioned by being replicated by others sounds palpably in her com- ments. “Dress Personality Theme of Interview with Elsie Ferguson,”Atlanta Constitu- tion, February 27, 1921, 22. 5. Eve Golden, Vamp: The Rise and Fall of Theda Bara (Vestal, NY: Emprise Publish- ers, 1996), documents the publicity campaign, yet fails to identify Freulich as the creator of the central images in the newspaper blitz of 1915–16. 6. I say this fully cognizant that such a substitution is something of a misrepresentation. Stills after 1908 were rarely frame captures from the film; rather they were separate images taken with different cameras from different perspectives. Therefore they had a metonymic rather than synecdochical relationship to the motion picture. 7. Roberta E. Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).

369 8. “George Arliss on Acting,” New York Times, July 22, 1923, X2. 9. “Alvin Langdon Coburn, Artist-Photography by Himself,” Wilson’s Photographic Mag- azine, January 1914, 23–24. 10. See [Howard O. Pierce], “Pierce Complains of Lack of Good Stills,” Moving Picture World, January 8, 1921, 203. 11. “Making Stills Advertise,” Moving Picture World, November 13, 1920, 191. 12. One popular use of stills was to serve as illustrations to novelizations or story forms of current releases published by Grosset & Dunlap publishers after 1914 or in the pages of the fan magazines. There were never more than fifteen images maximum for novel or story, rather than the two hundred or more for a keybook of stills. A percentage of these illustrations served as genre images, others as images communicating the tensions of the tale. The idea for these illustrated novels came from the earlier photographically illustrated play texts from the turn of the century. 13. See Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 37–59. 14. Here the functioning of physiognomy operates in a cruder way than that described by Bèla Balázs, The Visible Man (1924). 15. New York Times, June 17, 1900, 25. 16. Mark A. Viera, Hurrell’s Hollywood Portraits (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 50–56. 17. “Still Photography Abreast of Talkies,” Los Angeles Times, May 31, 1931, B9. 18. Here I should note, however, that the only way that the earliest motion pictures could be copyright protected was by depositing a release in the Library of Congress as a scroll of still photographs, since only still photographs had legal protection under copyright law in the first decade of the twentieth century. 19. “Fox Corporation Is Getting Out Many ‘Action Stills’ for Exploitation,”Moving Picture World, November 20, 1920, 368.

Chapter One 1. “The Carte de Visite,”The Albion, a Journal of News, Politics and Literature 40, no. 21 (May 24, 1862): 224. 2. “How to Have One’s Portrait Taken,” Harper’s Bazaar 13, no. 32 (August 7, 1880): 502. 3. “Pictures on Broadway,” New York Times, December 9, 1858, 2. 4. “Mrs. Langtry,” Chicago Tribune, July 6, 1879, 2. 5. For a description of the usual transit of a young lady from attractive shopgirl to a creature of the stage, see “Ladies of the Ballet,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 29, 1888, 6. 6. “Actresses’ Photos,” Boston Daily Globe, November 26, 1882, 10. 7. “Buffo” was originally a term designating a comic opera singer—usually a bass; it became in the theatrical parlance of the 1880s a designation for any stage performer who attractions depended upon appearance rather than talent. 8. Ibid. 9. “Portraits of Famous Beauties,” Atlanta Constitution, October 21, 1886, 1. This story carries a New York, October 20 dateline. 10. “Girls Who adore actors,” Washington Post, November 13, 1887, 4. The boudoir portrait would become a format designation in the image market of the 1880s for card-backed images 5¾ × 8½ inches in size. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. “The Beauties of Chicago,”Chicago Tribune, August 12, 1888, 17. 14. “A Beautiful Photograph,” Washington Post, July 6, 1895, 4. 15. “Cigarette Photography,”Boston Daily Globe, May 6, 1885, 4.

370 Notes to Pages 7–37 16. “A Professional Beauty Discovered and Set Up for Worship,” Washington Post, Novem- ber 20, 1880, 2. 17. “The face and figure that lend themselves readily to the art of the photographer and to the mechanical processes which multiply his results are an excellent foundation for the notoriety which nowadays is essential to managerial recognition.” James S. Metcalfe, “The Stage and the Beauty Problem,” Cosmopolitan 22, no 1 (November 1896): 13. 18. “She Had Struck a New Idea,” Boston Daily Globe, March 13, 1885, 5. 19. Ibid. 20. It is difficult to gauge the importance of ethnic exoticism as a feature of beauty in the 1880s—but it is worthy noting that Lola Montez and Ada Isaacs Mencken in the 1860s were the two persons who most anticipated the rise of “the beauty.” The countervailing aesthetic was the fairness of the British blondes, a quality found in Mary Anderson and Lillian Russell among later beauties. 21. Joseph P. Reed and William R. Walsh, “Beauties of the American Stage,” Cosmopolitan 14, no. 3 (January 1893): 294. 22. “Oscar Wilde’s Picture Patentable,” Washington Post, March 18, 1884, 1. 23. “Actors before the Camera,” Boston Daily Globe, July 27, 1884, 9. 24. Napoleon Sarony, “Sarony Le Petit,” Los Angeles Times, December 17, 1893, 10. 25. “No Snapshots Here,” Washington Post, May 6, 1894, 23. Reprint from the New York Commercial Advertiser; original issue not extant. 26. “Actors before the Camera,” 9. 27. “In General,” Atlanta Daily Constitution, May 21, 1878, O2. 28. “Maud Branscombe—a Woman Whom Nobody Knows,” New York Times, September 5, 1880, 10. 29. “Recluse in Hotel Held Incompetent,” New York Times, September 16, 1926, 20. 30. See my critical profile of the studio on the Broadway Photographs research website: http://broadway.cas.sc.edu/index.php?action=showPhotographer&id=71. 31. Not to be confused with the antebellum gift annual of the same name. 32. Mary Panzer, In My Studio: Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr. and the Art of the Camera, 1885–1930 (Yonkers, NY: Hudson River Museum, 1986), 66–73.

Chapter Two 1. Karl Brown, the assistant to D. W. Griffith’s cameraman Billy Bitzer, disliked Sartov and claimed that the famous lens was a trick—“Sartov’s miracle lens . . . was nothing in the world but a yellowed one spectacle lens with all its imperfections on its head.” Adventures with D. W. Griffith (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 206–7. 2. G. W. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer: His Story (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 201. 3. Lillian Gish, “Lillian Gish and the Universal Language of Film,” Oral History Inter- view, Columbia University Oral History Project, http://www.fathom.com/feature/121594/ index.html. 4. Lillian Gish Photography Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. 5. “Light Secret of Screen Illusion,” Charlestown Gazette, November 7, 1926, 9. This article identifies Sartov as the former professor of physics from the University of Rotterdam. 6. John Steven McGroarty, Los Angeles from the Mountains to the Sea, 2 vols. (Chicago and New York: American Historical Society, 1921), 2:103. 7. Studio Grand advertisement, Anaconda Standard, November 2, 1913. 8. French-born D’Auray would enjoy a remunerative relationship with the motion picture business during the 1920s, serving as technical director to an Arsene Lupin mystery movie, 813, in 1920 and acting French roles in several movies, including The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Claw.

371 Notes to Pages 38–58 9. Alberts (1888–1941) emigrated from Russia to California in 1923, was immediately hired by Hoover, L.A., served as chief cameraman there for three years before incorporating his own portrait studio. In his final years with Hoover he earned the right of separate credit, so the face of a photo print would read “Sergis Alberts Hoover, L.A.” 10. Austrian by birth, a frustrated actor by training, an energetic and personable cel- ebrant of golden age Hollywood, John Kobal began collecting his landmark archive of photographs in the 1960s when hosting a BBC show on movies. His prose and his sense of history was molded by mass media—radio, films, and mass market books—rather than academic history. Opinionated and prone to jeremiads about the declining condition of cinema, literature, glamour, and fashion, Kobal polished his vision of a visual golden age commencing in the mid-1920s and extending with waning brilliance into the mid-1950s. Garbo was his fascination. He wrote thirty books, most of which combined coffee table magnificence with breezy commentary. His passion that the great studio photographers of the 1930s be recognized led to the resurrection of the careers of George Hurrell and Clarence Sinclair Bull in the photography market as well as the rehabilitation of the reputations of Lazlo Will- inger and Ruth Harriet Louise. As a researcher Kobal was relatively indifferent to printed archives, but cherished oral history derived from survivors. He also had a romantic fascination with the Hollywood studios, viewing them as the definitive source of visual imagery projecting movie personalities, despite the important role played by independent photographic studios from those described in this study to John Engstead’s of the 1950s. Upon his death in 1991, his collection went into the hands of the John Kobal Foundation, which has bestowed an annual prize for portrait photography for a decade. 11. John Kobol, The Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers, 1925–1940 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980). Kobol’s book was in part conditioned by the surviving cohort of early photographers. The long-lived contingent of MGM portraitists and still photographers—Clarence Sinclair Bull, George Hurrell, Ted Allan, and Laszlo Willinger—made prints from their private store of negatives for the volume. Consequently they loom large in Kobol’s story. None of the earliest generation of Hollywood photographers treated in this chapter was alive when Kobol began his research forays from England to California in the 1970s. Kobal’s inability to resurrect the history of the photography of the Hollywood in its earliest phase is evident in his Stills of the Silent Screen (New York: Knopf, 1980), a companion volume to a Thames Television series treating silent film that provided the logical occasion for commenting upon the creators of the images employed in the book. 12. An analogous myth was advanced early in the twentieth century about the unprecedented art of the theatrical production photographers whose invention of “flashlight” illumination enabled the magic of the stage to be captured. Three pioneering photographers— Benjamin J. Falk, Joseph Byron, and George Lucas of White Studio—formed the trinity of artists who bottled limelight. Daniel Frohman, “Actress Aided by Camera,”Cosmopolitan 22, no. 4 (February 1897): 413–17; “Enter Flashlights,” New York Times, February 10, 1924, X2; “Luther White Dies, Photographer, 79,” New York Times, August 25, 1936, 19; “George W. Lucas, Stage Photographer,” New York Times May 30, 1942. 13. D. W. Griffith is usually credited with inventing the cinematic close-up. In photography, however, head shots were a feature of the professional portraitists’ repertoire since the 1890s, when newspaper layout editors began decapitating full-figure portraits, using simply the heads to illustrate articles. Photographers who cultivated newspaper outlets began supplying what the editors desired: the head shot, usually with the face occupying most of the pictorial field. Did Griffith get his idea for the close-up from the popular photographic convention? 14. Glamour as a power receives several extensive treatments in popular magazines during the 1890s: Edith M. Thomas, “Glamour,”Century Illustrated Magazine, 51, no. 2 (De- cember, 1895): 308–12; David Pryde, “A Natural Antidote to Pessimism,” Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, April 1896, 467–74. It’s connection with theatrical life is treated in numer-

372 Notes to Pages 58–62 ous newspaper pieces, “What Is Success? Julia Marlowe Tabor’s Lecture to the Stage-Struck Girl,” Chicago Tribune, November 18, 1894, 44; Clara Morris, “Stage Glamor,” Boston Daily Globe, August 22, 1891, 2; “Footlight’s Glamor,” Washington Post, January 31, 1897, 19. 15. Vanity Fair, April 1915, 45. 16. A table of the occurrence of the word “girl” compared to the word “woman” in Broad- way production titles from 1890 to 1925 has been posted on the website that supplements the contents of this book: Still: American Silent Motion Picture Photography, http://research.cdh.sc.edu/still/index.php. 17. This count is derived from the chronicle provided in Gerald Bordman,American Mu- sical Theatre, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). If one were to include musicals titled with the names of girls, the number would more than double. 18. In April 1915, the Italian chroniqueur “Bergeret” offered a portrait of “The American Girl: “In the United States the unmarried girl occupies the niche in society reserved, in Latin countries, for married women. She takes the lead in conversation, creates the styles, and regulates matters of taste. The very laws and customs seem to have been inspired with the sole purpose of making life easy and delectable for her. What are the experiences that go into making the American girl? Not the boarding school. Not the confessional. Not the romance novel read on the sly. Rather, ‘co-education, the dance, hoydenish flirtations, and sport.’ The principle she grasps instinctively in terms of the relation of the sexes in society is that, ‘the power of woman is equal to the desire of man.’” Vanity Fair, April 1915, 45. 19. My point here is not to deny the reality of “the new woman” as a significant cultural expression, but to suggest that its significance was confined to the periodical literary world and did not have the mass cultural traction of the “girl” as a figuration of feminine agency. 20. We should not neglect that the theatrical glorification of the girl took place precisely during the period between the two literary masterworks that denied that aristocratic bearing—kalon—outshone the confected splendor of the girl performing beauty: Henry James’s short story “The Real Thing” (1893) and George Bernard Shaw’sPygmalion (1912–14). 21. In 1905 critic James Henry Moser observed that Eickemeyer, “by his attractive illustrations, which have been made familiar through the magazines, is one of the most widely known of American pictorial photographers.” “The First American Photographic Salon,” Washington Post, January 15, 1905, F2. 22. Arnold Genthe, As I Remember (New York: Reynal & Hitchcok, 1936), 261. 23. Photo-Play began crediting portrait photos in 1914. In that year they contracted work from New York photographers Frank C. Bangs, C. Floyd Coleman, Stacy Studios Brooklyn, Sarony Studio, and Brunel; Chicago photographers George Moffett, Wallinger, and Selig Studios; and Los Angeles photographers Witzel, Estep-Kirkpatrick, and Matzene. Matzene, having moved to Los Angeles from New York, was the most familiar West Coast photographer to New York editors. 24. Daniel Frohman, “Actress Aided by Camera,” Cosmopolitan 22, no. 4 (February 1897): 413. 25. I have web-published the surviving Falk stage photographs of the 1880s in a posting at the Historical Ziegfeld Group Website: “The First Stage Pictures,” http://historicalzieg- feld.multiply.com/photos/album/538/The_First_Stage_Pictures. 26. Mary C. Henderson, Broadway Ballyhoo (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989). 27. Edited by Arthur Hornblow, who in the 1880s and 1890s regularly reviewed plays and commented on the state of the American theater in Peterson’s magazine and The Dial and The Bookman, The Theatre took as its model the English journal The Theatre, lavishly illustrated with Woodburytype photos of actors and actresses. Published in New York, the magazine remained a lively illustrated chronicle of the American stage until Hornblow’s retirement and the onset of the Depression. 28. The earliest issues of these magazines were dominated by an antiquated verbal publicity that quickly gave way to pictorial features. By the end of the decade, pictorials dominated the genre. 1915 was the year when image achieved an equivalence with text.

373 Notes to Pages 62–69 29. Kevin Brownlow’s portrait of Mary Pickford’s cinematographer, Charles Rosher, who would become the highest paid cinematographer of his generation, stresses the importance of Rosher’s training and experience as a portrait photographer. The Parade’s Gone By (New York: Borzoi, 1969), 226–29. 30. Something should be said about the resonance of the word “personality” in the lexi- con of show people and photographers. The most revealing exposition of the term is supplied by John Murray Anderson, producer of the Greenwich Village Follies in an interview with Violet Dare in 1925. Anderson indicates that the term developed its peculiar theatrical usage when casting chorus girls for revues. Hundreds of pretty young women responded to casting calls. Two persons would be selected. These were distinguished by some quality of self-presentation (a rhetorician would call it “ethos”) over and above beauty. Yet the distinguishing element was not “talent,” that ability that distinguished featured artists, regardless of appearance. The chosen “had personality. They weren’t just lovely, doll-like creatures who would wear clothes well and pose beautifully and look as if they didn’t know enough to draw in their heads when they closed a window.” Anderson observed that the English chorus girl lacked individuality, because the English cherished machinelike effects. “It makes the [English] girls lose that poise which is so great an asset to the American girl.” Violet Dare, “Beauty Up to Date,” Atlanta Constitution, January 18 1925, E6. 31. For profiles of these studios and their work, see my research website, Broadway Pho- tographs hosted at the University of South Carolina: http://broadway.cas.sc.edu. 32. Moody did contract work in 1916–17 for Universal; Victor Georg for D. W. Griffith Productions in 1919–20; and Lumiere for Famous Players-Lasky. Lumiere was also responsible for training photographer-cinematographer Henry Freulich and connecting M. I. Boris with Lasky and Paramount. . 33. A native of New York, B. Frank Puffer first set up business in Williamsport, Penn- sylvania, shortly before the turn of the twentieth century. Ambitious and technically innovative, he moved to New York shortly after his marriage in 1900. He became among the very first portrait photographers (perhaps only Henry Vanderweyde preceded him) to entirely abandon natural lighting in the studio, employing Ansco spotlights. His 1909 lecture-demonstration on artificial light photography at the Meeting of the Professional Photographers’ Society of New York converted numbers of his professional colleagues to electric illumination in the studio. He opened studio at 432 Fifth Avenue that he maintained for the winter season. In the first decade of the century Puffer concentrated on the blue book society trade. His expertise with electric lighting brought him to the attention of the more advanced theatrical and motion picture producers circa 1910. The latter made him one of the favored portraitists from motion picture stars. Norma and Constance Talmadge, Jewell Carmen, and other of the New York–based film actresses patronized him particularly. From 1915 to 1925 his portraits appeared regularly in national magazines. As the motion picture business moved westward in the 1920s, Puffer reoriented his trade once again toward society portraiture. 34. Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, 31. 35. Frank Bangs and James Abbe would be the first photographers purposely imported from the East Coast for portrait work. Bangs—who was doing close-up theatrical photography in California as early as 1902 and came east in 1904 to become a salaried photographer for the Metropolitan Opera. When Herman Mishkin supplanted him, he headed First National’s photography department in the east in the late 1910s and was transferred back to the West Coast studio to head that shop at the behest of Richard Barthelmes in 1920. He remained in charge until his death in 1928. James Abbe’s career is recounted in chapter 8. 36. 1910 US Federal Census Record, 2nd Ward, Syracuse, Onondaga, NY, Sheet no. 12; New Orleans, Louisiana Marriage Register 1831–1925, Vol. 31, 181, Marriage Date: May 9, 1909, “Jens Rudolph Matzene/Anton Baumer.” 37. 1910 US Federal Census Record, 2nd Ward, Syracuse, Onondaga, NY, Sheet no. 12.

374 Notes to Pages 70–72 38. I am counting the number pages upon which his photographs appeared. On perhaps a quarter of these pages Matzene has more than one image printed. This exploration of the archive of the Los Angeles Times was enabled by Proquest, historic newspapers online. Of Matzene’s rivals, Fred Hartsook, with his eleven branch studios, resort, and cattle ranch was the most formidable. 39. Hoover Art Studio’s emergence as a power in the market did not take place until Hendrick Sartov became its chief operating cameraman in 1915. 40. The production did not completely escape notice. Indeed, because Yorska got a nose job before going before the cameras, she entered the annals of Hollywood as the first female star who underwent surgical body modification to accommodate the prevailing taste in feminine beauty. Matzene and David Hartford codirected the production, which was shot at the Brunton Studios, a large facility where independent producers could hire space and create films. (Paramount Studios bought the facilities during its move to the West Coast in the 1926). The production company forIt Happened in Paris was Tryad; Hartford receives principle credit for directing the film in the Internet Movie Database, though contemporary news releases indicate that Matzene codirected as well as coproduced the film. Yorska was his project. 41. During the 1920s, Matzene opened studios in Simla, India, and Shanghai, China, and for a period was court portraitist of the Royal Family of Nepal. (A book documenting these spectacular portraits, Marcella Sirhandi’s Royal Nepal through the Lens of Richard Gordon Mat- zene was published in 2009.) Matzene relocated to China during the political disturbances and applied all his liquid assets to purchasing Oriental art, antiquities, and curios. A chance encounter on a tourist excursion with an Oklahoma oil millionaire ended his perambula- tory life. He settled in Ponca, City, Oklahoma, in 1927 as art broker to the wealthy and a focus for town gossip. Before his death in 1950, he transmitted bodies of Oriental art to the Ponca Public Library and to the University of Oklahoma. Matzene’s professional philosophy was summed up in a sentence delivered early in his career: “In these days a photographer needs to be an artist, a chemist, a keen observer, and perhaps a raconteur all in one.” 42. Chicago Tribune, February 4, 1904. 43. The first theatrical photographers—Napoleon Sarony, Arthur Campbell, Jose Mora, Benjamin Falk—had exploited the peculiar distinctiveness of performers: their protean capacity to express multiple personalities for commercial ends. While ordinary celebrities—the authors, generals, and governmental officials featured in the galleries of Matthew Brady and Gurney in New York—were interesting because of who they were, performers were fascinating for whom they could be. No single portrait could adequately capture the performer’s impersonation. So suites of images revealing the myriad attitudes, roles, and moods of the performer issued from the studios. The images were pathognomic (concerned with representation as a communication of the dynamic of expression; the term derives from Lavater), rather than physiognomic (concerned with fixing character). Glamour photography is physiognomic to the extent that it conveys its subject in the person of “the splendid being.” To do this, facial expression is minimized. 44. “Instead of posing Her Majesty, the American woman, in a downtown studio in the daytime and under what are bound to be artificial conditions, Matzene is eliminating altogether the idea of pose of any kind and is photographing her in the brilliant environment of the drawing-room and dancing floor, under the night light she loves, and at that moment of moments when her eyes are brightest and her charm the most dazzling. Under such conditions, declares the distinguished exponent of the new ideal, it is possible to catch the sparkle of mood and manners and that vividness of personality that the ordinary posed picture cannot possess.” Los Angeles Times, January 1, 1915, VII 79. 45. Richard Penlake, “A Note on White Backgrounds,” Wilson’s Photographic Magazine 46 (1909): 146–47. 46. Sadakichi Hartmann, “Burr McIntosh—Photographers of Fads and Fancies,” in The

375 Notes to Pages 72–76 Valiant Knights of Daguerre, ed. Harry W. Lawton and George Knox (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 246–50. 47. McIntosh’s archive is housed as the Burr McIntosh Photograph Collection, PR 041, New York Historical Society. It contains materials taken from 1900 to 1910, prints, and glass plate negatives. 48. “He Plans the Great City Beautiful,” Los Angeles Times, July 7, 1911, III 4. 49. Julian Johnson, “Fame via the Camera Route,” Los Angeles Times, August 20, 1911, III 1. 50. McIntosh himself created the career of Marie Doro. A walk-in off the street, Doro so impressed McIntosh with her photogenic face that he determined to make her a celebrity. He floated images of her in magazines. Theatrical producers hired her. Her modest abilities at declamation made her an ideal candidate for a career in silent film. 51. The listings of photographers in the rear of the annualLos Angeles Directory show remarkable volatility from year to year. The most durable practitioners for the period 1911–21 not mentioned in this chapter were T. K. Akashi, M. L. Bailey, David Canvel, J. Cyrus Car- penter, Antonio DelBeato, G. L. Eastman, Edward Erickson, Louis Fleckenstein, C. E. Gentry, and Abraham Lipshutz. 52. New York Times, March 5, 1882, 7; Washington Post, November 30, 1913, M2. 53. Dr. Nichol, “Words of Praise,” Los Angeles Times, November 5, 1893, 14. 54. “Steckel’s Success,” Los Angeles Times, February 21, 1893, 5. 55. “A Los Angeles Award,” Los Angeles Times, August 3, 1893, 1. 56. Steckel’s negative archive and a partial run of his studio account books are maintained by the Seaver Center for Western History, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. Few prints survive. Steckel arrived at his grammar of society poses by 1905 and deviated little from it thereafter. He distinguished his portrait sittings from his art prints meant for exhibition, which manifest a more improvisational and narrative spirit. None of the latter survive in the Seaver archive, yet appear with some frequency in the photographic magazines of the 1890s and 1900s. 57. “Finishing Factory to Be Built Here,” Los Angeles Times, August 4, 1919, II 1. 58. The Los Angeles Times began the regular coverage of movies in columns by Bonnie Glessner on August 1, 1913. The first illustrated article, on August 15, 1913, entitled “Lesson by Fire,” included a still from Universal’s A Fight against Evil. Witzel’s portrait would appear two days later. 59. Wendell Eckholm, Max Munn Autrey: One Man’s Hollywood (California State Univer- sity Press, 1988). All photographs bearing the designation Witzel Hollywood were by Autrey. 60. Witzel hand-signed his own prints in white or black ink. Seely’s imagery is found in pre-1921 negative images signed “Witzel, LA.” 61. “Fred Hartsook, the Photographer,” Los Angeles Times, January 1, 1916, III 90. 62. The earliest substantial notice of the studio in the news took place in 1907 when a fired employee, George Rasmussen, joined another firm and went throughout the city in- forming former Hartsook clients that the studio had closed, causing a fall off in business.Los Angeles Times, August 31, 1907, I13. 63. “Many Southlanders Will Make Themselves the Eyes of the Army,”Los Angeles Times October 28, 1917, II 8. 64. “Hartsook Inn Razed by Flames,” Los Angeles Times, August 10, 1927, 7. 65. One of the great tragedies of Hartsook’s life was having to destroy the herd during the hoof and mouth plague of 1924. Los Angeles Times, May 1, 1924, 4. 66. “Fred Hartsook, the Photographer,” Los Angeles Times, January 1, 1916. 67. “Romance Buds as Actress Is Photographed,” Los Angeles Times, December 22, 1925, A9. 68. I have not composed a more extensive appreciation of Spurr because Scott Jacob has long been preparing a summary account of his career and artistry. I have greatly benefited from conversations with Jacob over the course of composing this book, particularly in the early stages of research.

376 Notes to Pages 76–90 69. “Receiver for Photography Studio Named,” Los Angeles Times, March 26, 1928, A9. 70. “Newspapers’ Friend,” Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1911, II 3. 71. “Art Under Way,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1911, II 2. 72. US Census 1910, California, Los Angeles, District 7, Enumeration 232, Sheet no. 13. 73. See “Library Exhibit of Child Life Pictures,” Los Angeles Times, October 19, 1913, 10. 74. Los Angeles Times, February 13, 1916. 75. “Obituary,” Los Angeles Times, January 22, 1958. 76.“Nelson Frazier Evans,” in The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 20 (New York: James T. White & Co., 1929). 77. Theatre Magazine had begun a series of candid “Prominent Players in Their Homes” photo essays in their May 1914 issue. 78. Dr. Paul DeGaston was an obstetrician and pictorialist photographer who at times operated in Hawaii, China, and San Francisco as well as Santa Barbara. A figure untroubled by the niceties of law, he engaged in the trade of illegal Asian antiquities and ran an abortion clinic. He was named as a person of interest in the Black Dahlia murder case. 79. Antony Anderson, “Of Art and Artists,” Los Angeles Times, November 23, 1924. 80. “How to Be a Movie Star,” Lincoln State Journal, May 27, 1923, B8. 81. William S. Hart Collection P-75 Seaver Center for Western History, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, Publicity, Actresses & Actors, Boxes 18–20. 82. Syl MacDowell, “What Happens to Girls Who Fail to Make the Grade in the Mov- ies?,” Oakland Tribune, October 18, 1925, 94. 83. AnnMarie Koistra, “Angels for Sale: A History of Prostitution in Los Angeles, 1880– 1940” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2004). 84. The naturist nude photo of would-be actresses became a genre at the hands of Alex- ander J. “Xan” Stark of Alta Studios, whose “Art Studies” became a mail order fixture in the 1910s. A study of the nude in early Hollywood and the contemporary fine arts appears on the website associated with this monograph.

Chapter Three 1. Jay Parrino of Kansas City, the famous numismatic broker. 2. Alvin Langdon Coburn, “Alvin Langdon Coburn, Artist-Photographer by Himself,” Wilson’s Photographic Magazine, January 1914, 21. 3. The still is distinguished from the photogramic images generated by motion pictures and proto–motion pictures. Photograms are images that constitute the motion picture itself, whether as frames being projected, still images being flipped rapidly to create the illusion of motion in mutoscopes, or constituent print images of film frames submitted to the Library of Congress early in the twentieth century for copyright protection. The still characteristi- cally was an image of a filmic scene produced independently from the motion picture filming, for whatever purpose. 4. The production stills that became ubiquitous in 1913–14 were, in actuality, the second important incarnation of still photography in the commercial film business. Because the paper print photograph was an entity recognized by US copyright law, and because motion picture negatives and positives were not, the early producer-directors of the 1900s and early 1910s sent paper print positives of their movies to the Library of Congress, in effect transforming each release into one long seriated still. This attempt to secure whatever intellectual property protection they could manage given the ambiguities and silences of existing law led to the preservation on paper of a multitude of early shorts that would have dissolved to chemical mush or desiccated to a volatile, flammable dust if they had only been preserved in nitrate prints. I am not concerned here with this form of still photography. I am investigat- ing those production images that would be used for studio reference and publicity. 5. Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 52.

377 Notes to Pages 90–104 6. There is some reason to believe that Florence Lawrence may have composed this poem and decorated it herself. Another of her portraits also bears a constellation of miniature images pasted on the surface in a similar collage. Florence Lawrence Papers, Seaver Center of Western History, Los Angles County Museum of Natural History. 7. Daniel Frohman Presents: An Autobiography (New York: Claude Kendall & Willoughby Sharp, 1935), 275–80. 8. Examples of these ephemeral handouts for Vitagraph are found in the Alfred E. Smith Collection at UCLA Some appeared on tinted paper. 9. Albert E. Smith, Two Wheels and a Crank (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952). 10. Vitagraph’s earlier composite multireel feature—also cobbled out of serial installments—was Les Miserables. Smith did not deem it worthy of memorialization. 11. Kenneth S. Rothwell, “Shakespeare Film in America: O Brave New World of Bardola- try!,” Shakespeare in American Life, exhibition catalog (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2007). 12. For an appreciation of Benson, see Arthur Derbyshire, The Art of the Victorian Stage: Notes and Recollections (London: Ayer Press, 1969; reprint of 1907 ed.), 125–27. 13. In “Photographic Diversions,” Book V of Albert A. Hopkins, Magic, State Illusions and Scientific Diversions including Trick Photography (New York: Munn & Co., for Scientific Amer- ican, 1901), the chapter treating composite photography leads directly into that treating motion picture apparatuses, indicating how closely the techniques were linked in the minds of technical contemporaries. 14. James O’Neill’s 1913 cinematic version for Famous Players Lasky of his touring piece, The Count of Monte Cristo, in the critical literature has come to epitomize the liabilities in- herent in the theatrical artifice of the early silent fiction film. See, for instance, William K. Everson, American Silent Film (New York: DaCapo Press, 1998), 58–59. 15. The best contemporary assessment of Byron’s skill as a “flashlight” photographer of stage production was Sidney Allan, “Byron—‘The Stage Is My Studio,’”Wilson’s Photographic Magazine 44 (1907): 18–22. Byron used as many as eight magnesium lights in a theater in 1905 to give shade and some semblance of light sourcing. 16. See my assessment of White Studio on the Broadway Photographs research website: http://broadway.cas.sc.edu/index.php?action=showPhotographer&id=64. 17. J. Stuart Blackton, “Editorial Proem,” Motion Pictures Story 1, no. 1 (February 1911): 5. 18. Based on an earlier series using stage production photos as illustrations for novels that had been adapted for the stage, Grosset & Dunlap began publishing its series in late 1914. Its first best-seller was the 1915 photoplay edition ofSalomy Jane by Bret Harte based on the 1914 Beatriz Michaelina movie. The editions usually had from four to eight stills as illustrations. 19. For Dawley’s work on Tess of the D’Urbervilles, see Anthony Slide, “Forgotten Early Directors,” in Aspects of American Film History Prior to 1920 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1978), 43–44. Eleven stills illustrate the article “How Mrs. Fiske Posed for Movies,” Theatre 19 (1914): 86–87. 20. Kleine was a key figure in the growth of the early industry, an innovative thinker particularly in touring show campaigns that would dominate the movie palace prestige releases of the next decade and a half. His financing ofQuo Vadis? is detailed in Ledger no. 84, and the traveling company expenses for the release appear in Ledger no. 310 (pp. 31–41), George Kleine Records, New York Public Library. 21. Kleine may have also been the first to promote a catalog of releases by publishing a book of stills—a 1916 set of “photogravure reproductions” of stills for motion pictures. Kle- ine had moved increasingly into exhibition and distribution in the 1910s. 22. A typical publication of the image is the Reno Evening Gazette, December 29, 1913, 3. It accompanies an article entitled “Quo Vadis Film Is Spectacular,” and bears the following caption: “Thrilling Episode in Amphitheater Scene in ‘Quo Vadis’ Following the spectacular

378 Notes to Pages 104–115 combat Neor, by the position of his thumb, signified whether the defeated Gladiator shall be killed by his victor, or allowed to live.” The photograph is copyrighted to “GK.” 23. The template newspaper ad supplied in the press book showed a charioteer holding aloft the branch of victory. SeeTitusville Herald, February 2, 1914, 2. 24. “Quo Vadis,” Theatre,August 1913, 38–39. 25. Bava’s extraordinary career is chronicled in Tim Luca’s biography of Bava’s son, the famous Italian horror director and special effects wizard,Mario Brava, All the Colors of Dark- ness (Cincinnati, OH: Video Watchdog, 2007). 26. S. M. Spedon, “How and Where Moving Pictures are Made,” Vitagraph Life Portrayals V ([New York]: Vitagraph Company of America, [1912]), [7]. Copy found in the Florence Law- rence Papers, Florence Lawrence Collection, Gen Collection 1011, Box 3, Seaver Center for Western History, Los Angeles County of Natural History. 27. This might be expected. J. Stuart Blackton, coproducer at Vitagraph, had been the first to expand beyond the four to eight shot per release norm that prevailed before he created the movie magazine market by cofounding Motion Picture Story in 1911. 28. Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928, History of the American Cinema, vol. 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 36–41. 29. Douglas Waples “Daily Newspapers in the United States: 1920–1935,” Appendix C, in Research Memorandum on Social Aspects of Reading in the Depression, Studies in the Social As- pects of the Depression (New York: Social Science Research Council, Ayer Publishing, 1971; reprint of 1937 ed.), 216. 30. Robert Taft,Photography and the American Scene (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 445. 31. Vitagraph probably used a Photo Autopress, introduced in 1910. A decade later the Cameragraph, Spectro, and Prisms printers were used. 32. In the contemporary critical discussions of photography there were critics, such as Arthur Hammond, who critiqued the manipulation of prints by “pigments and brushes” and called for a compositional photography—in effect what the studio system was forcing still men to practice. “A picture is made by the selection of the subject and by the disposition of the lines, masses and tones rather than manipulation in printing, and the qualities that make a photograph pictorial can be secured by purely photographic means without manual manipulation of the negative or print. The artist in photography must be a sound technician, and should rely upon purely photographic means.” Pictorial Composition in Photography (Boston: American Photographic Publishing Co., 1920), 195. 33. The credit granted still cameramen during the silent era was “print credit” rather than screen credit. It meant that the photographer’s brand (last name, cognomen, or full name) appeared on the distributed image itself either (a) inscribed on the negative, (b) stamped onto the reverse of the print with an ink stamp, or (c) blind stamped (embossed) into the face of the print. It also meant that the photographer’s brand appeared noted in print reproductions of the image appearing in periodicals and books. 34. Indeed Kling’s 1918 draft card issued in New York City is the sole documentary record of his having worked as Vitagraph’s still photographer in the later 1910s. 35. Information from Fryer’s grandson, Roger Nichols, who preserves the remnants of Fryer’s photographic archive. See his Myspace shrine to his grandfather: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user. viewprofile&friendid=192952391 36. Bennet Musson and Robert Grau, “Fortunes in Films,” McClure’s Magazine 40, no. 2 (December 1912): 193. 37. The orthochromatic film distributed by Eastman lacked yellow and red sensitivity. Toward the end of the silent era DuPont produced an orthochromatic film that compensated for this lack. Filters were commonly used to minimize the effects of ortho’s insensitivity, but filters could never fully translate the sky into a viable black-and-white image.

379 Notes to Pages 115–121 38. See the Tom Powers photo album, P-45, Seaver Center for Western History, Los An- geles County Museum of Natural History. Composed by Mrs. J. S. Blackton, it was presented to Tom Powers in remembrance of his early work at Vitagraph. 39. Bennet Musson and Robert Grau, “Fortunes in Films,” McClure’s Magazine 40, no. 2 (December 1912): 193. 40.Telephone interview, Paul Grenbeaux Jr., September 8, 2005. 41. Rosalind Shaffer, “Every Famous Star Has Been Shot by Gene Richee,”Chicago Tri- bune, February 2, 1936, D10. Much of the material in this paragraph is drawn from this biographical sketch. 42. “The Still Man: Eugene Robert Richee,”Chicago Tribune, July 11, 1937, G6. 43. Conversations with Paul Grenbeaux Jr., September 8, 2005. Conversation with Pau- line Grenbeaux, September 12, 2005. 44. A biography of Cannons written by his grandson appears on theStill website. 45. Los Angeles Times, November 5, 1912, II 4. 46. Los Angeles City Directory (1920), 1514. 47. Karl Brown, Adventures with D. W. Griffith (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 44. 48. Ibid., 65. 49. New York Times, December 22, 1912, M7. 50. The reason for the invasion is interesting to consider. Bonnie Glessner in an article published in fall of 1913 wrote, “Realizing the great inroad the motion picture business has made into its well-filled coffers, the theatrical trust has at last come into the open prepared to wage war against the ‘movies’ that have taken a steady stream of nickels and dimes away from legitimate drama. Fighting with their own weapons, the theatrical trust, headed by Daniel Frohman, has entered the field of the ‘canned drama,’ and armed with the greatest actors and actresses of the stage, it plans by the very magnitude of its productions to force the small one reel concerns out of business.” “Theater Magnate Stages ‘Movies,’”Los Angeles Times, September 8, 1913, II 6. 51. “Producer Says Kipling Picture Sets New Pace for Screen Authors,” Cedar Rapids Tri- bune, June 18, 1921, 2 52. Though motion picture directors touted “Rembrandt lighting” as an innovation, it was an approach imported from still portrait photography. Its originator, William Kurtz (1833–1904), employed dramatic gradations of tone from plumy-black to silver-gray to dramatize the modeling of faces. He did this in the first electrified studio in the world in 1883 in New York City. By the mid-1880s Rembrandt lighting was a widely emulated portrait approach among photo professionals internationally. 53. Harry Carr, “Joan the Woman,” Los Angeles Times, January 16, 1917, II 6. 54. Grace Kingsley, “Reelism Must Be Real,” Los Angeles Times, January 14, 1917, III 1. 55. “At a recent sale of antiques David Belasco bought several thousand dollars worth of old furniture. It did not match the furniture in his house, and to those who asked him why he had bought it he said that he meant to keep it, knowing that some time, he would write a play in which it would be need. Some of the theatrical managers who do not like David Belasco then said that they would not be surprised to hear that he had written a three act play around a dining room chair, or had composed a sideboard tragedy in three acts. Henry Irving, Augustin Daly, David Belasco, Mrs Fiske, and Richard Mansfield have been foremost in the movement to use real stage fittings.” “Stage Settings Must Be Real,”Chicago Daily Tri- bune, August 25, 1907, I3. 56. David Belasco, “Why I Stayed Out and Why I went In,” New York Times, May 31, 1914, X8. 57. “May Use Picture to Aid Recruiting,” Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1917, III 19. 58. Ed Ainsworth, “Camera Kick,” Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1940, I7. 59. See “All Ready—Camera,” Atlanta Constitution, September 25, 1921, F6. 60. “Light-Writing,” New York Times, October 15, 1922, 100.

380 Notes to Pages 123–145 61. “Wonders of Camouflage That Are Accomplished in Movieland,”Current Opinion 64, no. 1 (January 1918): 31 62. Los Angeles Times, December 9, 1917, II 14. 63. Chicago Daily Tribune, September 18, 1917, 12. 64. “Ralph Rufner Makes Vigorous Plea for Good Stills,” Moving Picture World, January 3, 1920, 67, 68. 65. “Tricked a Still to Get Detail,” Moving Picture World, January 3, 1920, 70. 66. “Selznick’s Publicity Department Is Expanding under Guidance of Kugel,” Moving Picture World, January 17, 1920, 440. 67. “Hunting the News Still,” Moving Picture World, November 27, 1920, 464. 68. “Famous Players Studio to Elaborate on ‘Still’ Work,” Moving Picture World, January 10, 1920, 250. 69. “Neilan Creates New Style of ‘Still’ That Typify the Theme of the Picture,”Motion Picture World, October 2, 1920, 669. 70.A suite of the Dinty publicity photographs appears in a facing page spread of six images in the December 4, 1920, issue of Moving Picture World, 564–65. 71. Ibid., 669. 72. William J. Reilly, “Still, Still We’re Paging the Still,” Moving Picture World, October 10, 1920, 760. 73. “Fox Corporation Is Getting Out Many ‘Action Stills’ for Exploitation Uses,”Moving Picture World, November 20, 1920, 368.

Chapter Four 1. Only Edward Thayer Monroe, working as chief portraitist at White Studio, New York, rivaled him for reputation. Monroe went independent in early 1920. 2. His World War I draft registration card indicates that he was born on September 15, 1880, in Russian Poland. At the time of registration on September 12, 1918, he listed his employment as photographer of Underwood & Underwood’s Fifth Avenue branch in Manhat- tan. 3. Information found on his 1910 US Federal Census record: New York, Bronx Assembly District 32, District 1714. 4. Founded in 1882 in Ottawa, Kansas, by Bert Elias Underwood (1862–1943) and his brother Elmer Underwood (1860–1947), Underwood & Underwood moved to Baltimore in 1888, then to New York before the turn of the twentieth century. It built a national, then international business by repopularizing the stereograph, the duple image photograph. The idea for double image cameras and viewers was promoted by poet and jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes. The Underwood brothers read his description in a copy of theAtlantic Monthly and made it a reality, sparking a national craze for stereograph pictures and viewers. To supply imagery for this client base they traveled extensively and built branch offices. During the 1890s they determined that pictures of events in the news would bolster their sales, inducing the Illustrated London Times to publish a stereographic view of the Greco-Turkish War in 1897. At the turn of the century the firm sold three hundred thousand stereoscopes annu- ally and printed twenty-five thousand stereographic prints a day. It was diversified image company reproducing paintings, issuing lithographs and news pictures as well as producing stereographs. The Underwood Brothers retired in 1925, leaving Bert’s son C. Thomas Under- wood in charge. The business office was managed by Charles N. Thomas, who oversaw a staff of photographers in several cities. No employee was given individual credit, though certain camera artists would earn reputations for the work in various fields: Thomas Sand for sports photography, George Kadel for photojournalism and advertising, and James Elliott for commercial photography. Other important photographers include Alfred Wegener, who did fashion and food work for the New York Times; John Funk; Harry Gordon; and George J. Schmidt.

381 Notes to Pages 149–164 5. Los Angeles Times, September 13, 1925, 24, reported somewhat erroneously that “Freulich was with Underwood & Underwood in Washington for ten years before he joined Universal. During that time he photographed every public official and many of the foreign dignitaries who visited the nation’s capital.” Freulich was not in Washington for ten years, but had been in Washington ten years previous to the interview. 6. See my web profile of Harris & Ewing at Broadway Photographs: http://broadway.cas. sc.edu/index.php?action=showPhotographer&id=72. 7. Freulich’s reputation for salting the proofs with some experimental shots gave rise to an amusing story about a session he had with “Senator Gore, the blind statesman from Oklahoma,” who on leaving the studio after a jocular sitting observed, “If you’ll send me the proofs to Washington I’ll pick out the poses I like the best.” “Cinema Chuckles,” Indiana Eve- ning Gazette, June 23, 1920, 8. 8. Atlanta Constitution, December 3, 1916. 9. Given Laemmle’s notorious cheapness, the salary indicates how highly he valued the publicity power of Freulich’s images. Roman Freulich relates several stories of Laemmle’s penny-pinching in Roman Freulich and Joan Abramson, Forty Years in Hollywood: Portraits of a Golden Age (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1971), 64–69. 10. “Close-Ups of Movie Stars,” Mansfield Ohio News, November 9, 1919, 12. 11. Teenaged Henry had studied with the New York movie portraitist Samuel Lumiere. When Henry turned eighteen, Jack hired him to work in the Universal camera department shooting stills on The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Friendly, quick, and adept at overcoming technical problems, Henry established himself as the most dependable production photographer at the studio. He was hired away from Universal by First National in 1926 where he doubled as cinematographer, before settling at Columbia Pictures where he became a main- stay of the camera department until the advent of television. In the 1930s he gravitated toward cinematography, lensing miles of B movie fodder, including much of the Blondie series. His career ended in television as director of photography for Desilu Productions. 12. Jack’s younger brother by almost twenty years, Roman Freulich had volunteered for military service with the British Army, serving as a photographer. During the war Joseph Trumpeldor organized the Jewish Legion to fight in Palestine. Roman Freulich joined, went to the Middle East, and chronicled on film the activities of the force, including the legion’s march into Jerusalem and liberation of Palestine from Turkish rule. After demobilization of the legion, Roman, a committed Zionist, relocated to the United States, eventually coming to Hollywood at the behest of his brother to work at Universal. Though a second-string shooter during the silent era, he emerged as a name photographer for his stills on All Quiet on the Western Front, the Academy Award Best Picture winner in 1930. Roman pioneered the use of handheld Leica cameras on set, employing it in a series of important publicity campaigns in the early sound era—Foreign Legion, Waterloo Bridge, East of Borneo, Frankenstein, The Road Back, and Showboat. Roman Freulich, Soldiers in Judea: Stories and Vignettes of the Jewish Legion (New York: Herzl Press, 1965). 13. For all his love of the appearance of institutional regularity, Laemmle was the least patriarchal of studio bosses. Women directors worked at Universal, and women administra- tors ran Universal City. 14. “Declares Players Difficult, Jack Freulich Universal Photographer Finds Picture Stars Hard Subjects” Los Angeles Times, September 13, 1925, 24. 15. A photograph attached to his 1924 US passport application submitted in Los Ange- les shows him to have been rather youthful in appearance for his years, well groomed, and fiery-eyed. 16. He also hired San Diego photographer M. Otto Schellenberg in the portrait studio during the later 1920s. 17. Bertram Longworth, Hold Still Hollywood (Los Angeles: Ivan Deach Jr., 1937). The volume contained ninety-eight full-page duotone reproductions of his motion picture work, most of it dating from his stint at Warner Brothers during the sound era.

382 Notes to Pages 164–174 18. “Hollywood Gives Snapshooters Tips,” Charleston Gazette, January 1, 1927, 6. 19. Norman Krasna, Louder Please (New York: Samuel French, 1932). The comedy premiered on November 12, 1931, and played sixty-eight performances. Percy Kilbride played Snitz Gumble. Louise Brooks was originally slated for a part, but was replaced before opening night. 20. Tom Zimmerman, Light and Illusion: The Hollywood Portraits of Ray Jones (Glendale, CA: Balcony Press, 1998), 13.

Chapter Five 1. See “A Maker of Pictures,” New York Times, July 10, 1921, 65. 2. The faults of the picture are well summarized in Robert Sherwood’s review, “Camille,” Life 78, no. 2030 (September 29, 1921): 22. 3. Rambova, born Winifred Shaunessy into a wealthy Mormon family in Utah, had a cosmopolitan education. As a teenager she abandoned her mother to become the inamo- rata and dance partner of Theodore Kossloff, whose Imperial Russian Ballet was Southern California’s premier classical dance troupe during he latter half of the 1910s. A talented designer, she sketched the costumes for Kossloff’s troupe. Her 1917 designs for Kossloff’s “Azetc Dance” caught Cecil B. DeMille’s eye, who took them over lock stock and barrel for his 1917 film about an Aztec princess,The Woman Whom God Forgot. Kossloff took credit for the designs. Alla Nazimova met Rambova shortly afterward, learned the truth about her talent and secured her services for the dream sequence in Billions (1918). 4. Oscar Wilde, Salome a Tragedy in One Act: Pictured by Aubrey Beardsley (London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1894). See particularly the images “The Peacock Dance” and “The Dancer’s Reward.” 5. “Strauss’s ‘Salome’ the First Time Here,” New York Times, January 27, 1907, 9. The directors of the Metropolitan Opera banned the production after its opening. “A Case of Belated Conscience,” New York Times, January 29, 1907, 8. In January 1909 Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera staged the second showing of the opera in America with Mary Garden in the lead to tremendous acclaim. 6. David Fahey and Linda Rich, Masters of Starlight: Photographers in Hollywood (Los An- geles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1987), 42. 7. Nazimova’s career has enjoyed substantial scholarly scrutiny for both her aesthetic importance and lesbianism. Gavin Lambert’s Nazimova: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1997) provides an account of her career attention to both features of her life. 8. Sally Ledger, “Ibsen, the New Woman and the Actress,” in The New Woman in Fiction and Fact, ed. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (London: Palgrave, 2002), 79–93. 9. See Regenia Gagnier, “Women in British Aestheticism and the Decadence,” in ibid., 239–49. 10. Quoted Gavin, Nazimova, 164. The poem originally appeared in the December 1913 issue of Vanity Fair. 11. Composed by Californian Marion Craig Wentworth, “War Brides” was published in the February 1915 issue of Century Magazine after Nazimova made it a theatrical sensation. Shortly thereafter the Century Company released the play in book form. 12. “Nazimova Still the Keith Magnet,” Boston Globe, February 23, 1915, 13; “Again Mis- tress of Her Art,” Washington Post, February 28, 1915, SM2; “Nazimova in a New War Play,” Chicago Tribune, June 8, 1915, 15; Henry C. Warnack, “Sound Depths of the Tragic,” Los Ange- les Times, July 20, 1915, 116. 13. See “Jack Light or Hound,” Field and Stream 44, no. 5 (February 9, 1895): 112; “Trout That Rise at Night,”Field and Stream 44, no. 8 (February 23, 1895): 149; “Camp Saints Rest,” Field and Stream 47, no. 15 (October 10, 1896): 282. Or, “Call of the Open,” Boy’s Life, August 1919.

383 Notes to Pages 182–198 14. Arthur F. Rice, “Whitmore’s Brook,” Outing, an Illustrated Monthly Magazine of Recre- ation 26, no. 2 (May 1895): 128. 15. Arthur F. Rice, “The Sportsman Tourist: Pack-Basket, Rifle and Rod,”Field and Stream, 49, no. 15 (October 9, 1897): 284. 16. Details of Rice’s early career are found in his entry in Encyclopedia, Vermont Biography (Burlington, VT: Ullery Publishing Co., 1912), 297. 17. “Game Protectors Meet,” New York Times, February 14, 1901, 7. 18. A pioneering inventor and photographer, Campbell was enticed to come to the United States in 1867 by Napoleon Sarony with the promise of a partnership under the Sa- rony name. Sarony desired to make use of Campbell’s patented photographic inventions and processes, including his panorama lens, the first technical advance in outdoor field photography since Brady. Sarony’s extravagance clashed with Campbell’s methodical and scrupu- lous habits. They clashed, repeatedly, until Campbell broke off the partnership, crossed the river to New Jersey, and set up a studio—more than a studio, a photo production factory—in Elizabethtown. Campbell built an empire on scenic photography, a highlight of which was an edition of the Bible using photographs taken in the Holy Land. Campbell operated his enterprise on the nineteenth-century diversification model. The Elizabethtown office specialized in scenic views, portrait cabinet cards, postcards, and reproductions of artworks. Other branches specialized in other forms. See my biocritical sketch of Arthur Campbell and Campbell Studio, Broadway Photographs, http://broadway.cas.sc.edu/index.php?action =showPhotographer&id=33. 19. “Visit to Edison Studios Changes Ingram’s Vocation,” Boston Daily Globe , November 18, 1923, 66. 20. “Brought into Focus,” New York Times, April 10, 1921. 21. “Screen Pro Bono Publico,” New York Times, July 17, 1921, 67. 22. Grace Kingsley, “Flashes,” Los Angeles Times, July 22, 1920, III 4. 23. Assisted by Russell Ball.

Chapter Six 1. Interview Denise Earle, fourth wife of F. P. Earle, June 22, 2006. Aged ninety-six, Mrs. Earle lived then in Eugene, Oregon. 2. Antony Anderson, “‘Omar Khayyam’ a Picture Gallery,” Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1925, C44. 3. “Motion Painting: Ferdinand Earle Offers Something Claimed to be New,”Los Angeles Times, July 17, 1921, III 14. 4. Maurice Tourneur, the director, who resided at Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1920, had studied with Rodin and worked with Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, the greatest muralist of the late nineteenth century. 5. Eleven of the eventual twenty volumes had been published by the time of Curtis’s removal from Seattle to Los Angeles. The twelfth volume appeared in 1922 during work on Omar Khayyam. 6. Four stills from The Land of the Headhunters appeared in Theatre, January 1915, 20. The do not depart in any visible way from the more narrative of his portrait studies of Native peoples. 7. “Photographed Indian,” Atlanta Constitution, December 7, 1919, C7. 8. Anthony Anderson, “Of Arts and Artists,” Los Angeles Times, September 4, 1921, III 2. 9. “‘Rubaiyat’ Studies,” Los Angeles Times, August 25, 1921, III 4. 10. New York Public Telegraph, February 26, 1922, III 1. 11. Quoted in MS memorandum, Ferdinand Earle to Mr. Irving Thalberg, December 18, 1925, MGM Collection, USC Cinema-Television Library 12. “Building an Art Industry,” Shadowland 6, no. 4 (June 1922): 40.

384 Notes to Pages 199–221 13. “Art Effects in Cinema,”Los Angeles Times, August 11, 1920, III 4. 14. “In the News Net,” New York Times, July 18, 1920, 73. 15. Charles Wakefield Cadman, “Oriental Rhapsody, 1929: Score with Orchestral Parts from Omar Khayyam,” Box 5, Folder 7, Series II: Charles Wakefield Cadman Scores, Eber- hart Papers, New York Public Library. 16. This syllabus of projects would be completed in the 1920s in films of great visual distinction, all by other directors. 17. Ferdinand P. Earle, ed., The Lyric Year (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912). 18. William P. S. Earle, “How I Got into the Movies,” Washington Post, December 26, 1920, 32. 19. The film has not survived. 20. “Mongrel Play Made from the Rubaiyat,” New York Times, January 14, 1914, 11. 21. “Give Art Director Chance to Direct,” Los Angeles Times, March 12, 1922, III 36. 22. “Picture Plays and People,” New York Times, September 25, 1921, 70. 23. New York Public Telegraph, February 26, 1922. 24. “Omar Picture Crux of Suit,” Los Angeles Times, November 19, 1921, II 1. 25. “Omar, Tentmaker,” Los Angeles Times, January 1, 1923, III 3. 26. Ellis hailed from Washington, DC, where he had a fortuitous sitting with Carmel Myers, just as she was emerging as a movie personality. On her recommendation, he came to Hollywood in 1922. 27. “Ben Hur Shots,” MS memorandum, Cedric Gibbons to Irving Thalberg, March 23, 1925, Ben Hur, MGM Collection, USC Cinema-Television Library. 28. “Completed Bethlehem Star,” MS memorandum, Ferdinand Earle to Irving Thal- berg, October 30, 1925, Ben Hur, MGM Collection, USC Cinema-Television Library. 29. MS letter, Ferdinand Earle to Irving Thalberg, December 18, 1925, Ben Hur, MGM Collection, USC Cinema and Television Library. 30. Interview Denise Earle, June 22, 2006. 31. “I owe a great deal to the influence of this man, with his combined gifts of showman- ship and outlandish imagination.” William Mortensen, The Command to Look (San Francisco: Camera Craft, 1937), 10. 32. Mortensen’s older brother worked as a photographer for motion pictures in Fort Lee, New Jersey, during late 1919 and early 1920 when William Mortensen lived with him before embarking on a short career as a teacher of art in a Utah school in 1920. 33. Michael Dawson, “William Mortensen, Gothic Modernist,” in William Mortensen: A Revival (Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona), 13. 34. This claim is circumstantial. Fairbanks approached Earle to see if motion painting might be a technique useful to Robin Hood. After determining that it would be useful in a limited way, he hired the workers in Earle’s studio to work on the decoration of the set when litigation shut down work on The Rubaiyat and forestalled Faust. Though Mortensen is not specifically named, his presence on the set would explain how he came to know Kales, whose contacts with Hollywood were limited to doing special photography for Fairbanks on Robin Hood and Thief of Baghdad, and for Cecile B. DeMille.

Chapter Seven 1. Tomas Majdrakoff, “Boris Ivan Majdrakoff (AKA) M. I. Boris,” MS memoir communicated to the author May 14, 2005; Ivan Majdrakoff, letter to D. Shields, September 20, 2004. I asked each of M. I. Boris’s sons to supply me independent testimonies, which I did exchange with other writers in order to determine the degree of concurrence in their memories. 2. Tomas Majdrakoff, “Boris Ivan Majdrakoff (AKA) M. I. Boris.” 3. Ivan Majdrakoff, “In the Dark,” manuscript describing M. I. Boris’s work practices, February 9, 2005: “Working on plates (5 × 7) divided into 2 parts—mostly glass thou he did

385 Notes to Pages 221–240 shift into regular film (50s on?) or 40ssss on?). Retouching the negative with a graphite pencil, sharpening its point on sandpaper. Then also maybe a gentle scraping or shaving of the image with a blade of steel cut at the tip to a 45 degree angle. Scratching inwards. Reworking the shadows of the lids of the eyes—rebuilding the upper & lower lid & possibly eyebrows, certainly reshaping hair and carving away of jaw or neck.” 4. “Photographer to Work in England,” Los Angeles Times, November 2, 1935, A7. 5. For biographical profiles of these artists, see my research website, Broadway Photo- graphs: http://broadway.cas.sc.edu. 6. Jesse L. Lasky and Don Weldon, I Blow My Own Horn (New York: Doubleday, 1957). Lasky’s autobiography stresses his innovations. 7. Jesse L. Lasky, “What Kind of ‘Menace’ Are Movies,” North American Review 212, no. 776 (July 1920): 88–92. 8. Kevin Brownlow, “Scenario,” in The Parade’s Gone By (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 268–78. 9. Steichen’s work for the magazine became the focus of a 2001 exhibition, “Hollywood Celebrity: Edward Steichen’s Vanity Fair Portraits,” Frye Art Museum, Seattle, July 27–Sep- tember 16, 2001. In truth, Steichen shot more theatrical celebrities than Hollywood stars in his initial years working for Nast. 10. Genthe and Bruguiere had come from San Francisco, Victor Georg and Ira L. Hill from Chicago, James Abbe from Virginia, and Charlotte Fairchild from Boston. Crossing the Atlantic, Kenneth Alexander and Florence Vandamm hailed from London; Samuel Lumiere, Ben M. Rabinovitch, and Maurice Goldberg from Russia; and Nickolas Muray from Hun- gary. Marcia Stein and Edward Steichen had been working in Paris before returning to New York. 11. “All Ready—Camera,” Atlanta Constitution, September 25, 1921, F6. 12. The model of photographic production was not new. Larger professional photo studios at the beginning of the twentieth century—Sarony, Underwood & Underwood, Pach Brothers, Harris & Ewing, Hartsook Studio—broke down the processing similarly. 13. One sign of a photographer’s ascendancy to the first rank of importance in the media world was the granting by magazine editor’s of a degree of control over the final disposition of the images. One term of the commission contracts that editor’s began drawing up with certain first-tier artists (Johnston, De Meyer, Monroe, Vandamm, Bruguiere, Steichen) was a limited right to name certain of their images and to advise on the textual accompaniment of feature (full-page) images. 14. Certain photographers operated almost exclusively within pictorial formulae. Irving Lippman’s full-figure fashion shots in front of geometric deco backdrops reveled in pictorial cliché. 15. See the discussion of publicity in R. Dance and B. Robertson, Ruth Harriet Louise and Hollywood Glamour Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 16. Piero Mella, “Systems of Diffusion,”Combinatory Systems Theory, http://www.ea2000. it/cst/genindex.htm. Mella is a professor of economics at the University of Pavia. 17. Interview with Tomas Majdrakoff, July 27, 2005. 18. Henry Baden Pritchard, “The Atelier Adele in Vienna,” inThe Photographic Studios of Europe (London: Piper & Carter, 1882), 250–53. 19. Letter from Ivan Majdrakoff to D. Shields, September 20, 2004; Tomas Majdrakoff, “Boris Ivan Majdrakoff (A.K.A.) M. I. Boris.” 20. M. I. Boris, lecture notes, MS workbook in possession of Ivan Majdrakoff.

Chapter Eight 1. I have not supplied a summary of Rosher’s career and photographic work here because Kevin Brownlow has written a superb biographical summation inThe Parade’s Gone By (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 223–36.

386 Notes to Pages 241–266 2. See R. Dance and B. Robertson, Ruth Harriet Louise and Hollywood Glamour Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 207. 3. I was fortunate enough to tour “Garbo’s Garbo,” the exhibition of Greta Garbo’s personal photo archive curated by Robert Dance at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in June 2005. While Garbo probably chose Brown because he had worked with Gish, whom Garbo revered, to be her still photographer, only Anna Christie had the poetic treatment of interior space and the modulation of light in the exteriors found in the earlier Gish stills. Curiously the influence of departed MGM still photographer Bert Longworth is apparent in Brown’s repeated use of shadow in interior scenes in the other movies of the 1930s. 4. James Abbe, “Ah, the Sweet Taste of Success! James Abbe’s Wonderful Years: An Au- tobiography,” Oakland Tribune, February 6, 1962, D19. Abbe serialized this memoir through February of 1962 in the newspaper for which he served as media critic. 5. James Abbe, “Barrymore’s Rebellion, James Abbe’s Wonderful Years: An Autobiogra- p hy,” Oakland Tribune, February 8, 1962, D23. 6. James Abbe, “Hollywood Beckons, James Abbe’s Wonderful Years: An Autobiogra- p hy,” Oakland Tribune, February 9, 1962, D25. 7. James Abbe, “The Day I Made a Movie, James Abbe’s Wonderful Years: An Autobiogra- p hy,” Oakland Tribune, February 11, 1962, FL 3. 8. Warren M. Sherk, The Films of Mack Sennett (Lanham, MD, and London: Scarecrow Press, 1998), 105. 9. Daily Kennebec Journal, November 5, 1921, 3. 10. Cannons served as Sennett’s photographer from late 1924 into 1928. Cannons complied with Sennett’s predilection for full-figure shots and newspaper editors’ penchant for light tonalities. He returned to England in 1932, establishing a London studio. His grandson, Julian Ball, has prepared a biography of the photographer. 11. James Abbe, “I Photograph the Great, James Abbe’s Wonderful Years: An Autobiogra- p hy,” Oakland Tribune, February 7, 1962, D23. 12. Theatre Magazine in its May 1925 Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Issue named him one of the ten most influential theater photographers since 1900, a mere six years after commencing his portrayal of stage and screen personalities. 13. Lillian Gish and Ann Pinchot, Lillian Gish: The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me (Engle- wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969), 262. 14. “Gish Adoration Retained,” Los Angeles Times, September 30, 1931. 15. Charles Afron, Lillian Gish, Her Legend Her Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 178–95. 16. Inspiration Pictures remained an active production company affiliated with First National until 1930. Among its later prestige features were Resurrection and Ramona. Doro- thy Gish’s The Beautiful City was produced by Inspiration. 17. Afron, Lillian Gish, 279. 18. For the merits of Bull’s early work, see Terence Pepper and John Kobal, The Man Who Shot Garbo (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1989), 14–21. 19. Besides these persons, numbers of other persons took credited stills for MGM in 1925: Warren Lynch, whom Erich von Stroheim brought with him from Universal, shot The Merry Widow, cinematographer Karl Struss and special effects director Ferdinand P. Earle shot publicity for Ben-Hur. 20. See his amusing memoir of training in these studios in “London Photography,” Wil- son’s Photographic Magazine 46 (1909): 54–56. 21. Carolyn Croft, “The Family Pocketbook,”Oleon Times-Herald, November 11, 1935, 9. 22. “Making Glamour out of Drabness,” Lincoln Sunday Journal & Star, September 30, 1934, E4. 23. “Sister Runs Studio for Ill Brother,” Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1925. 24. This remedy would have long-term bad consequences, for he became a drug user

387 Notes to Pages 267–290 and eventually died of an overdose in 1963 during another bout of depression. Letter from Robin Duvall, August 28, 2007. 25. “Portraits Expert to Join Films,” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1925, A13. 26. A matter of comment in Mordaunt Hall’s follow-up review of the picture inNew York Times, August 15, 1926, X2. 27. “The Scarlet Letter,”New York Times, August 8, 1926, X2.

Chapter Nine 1. Helen Harrington, “A Genius of the Screen; Edgar Lewis Understands Not Only Life, but Art and Literature as Well,” Theatre, May 1920, 414. 2. The Great Divide is one of only two surviving movies produced by the Lubin Company of Philadelphia. 3. Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 119–22. 4. Julie Brown, Contesting Images; Photography and the World’s Columbian Exposition (Tuc- son: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 220–25. 5. Andrew Brodie Smith, Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films; American Culture and the Birth of Hollywood (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003), 10–31. 6. Both Edison and the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company included in their pre-1900 release lists anthropological shorts and Western scenery releases. The Edison Company filmed a series of Navajo ceremonial and documentary releases under the auspices of the US Department of Interior. The Mutoscope and Biograph Company did a similar series on “Laguna Games and Races,” nos. 2595–97, and “Navajo,” nos. 2659–66. 7. For the circumstances of the film’s production, see Charles Musser, “Moving Towards Fictional Narratives,” in The Silent Cinema Reader, ed. Lee Griveson and Peter Krämer (Lon- don and New York: Routledge, 2004), 89–91. 8. “Stage Was Held Up; Imitation Bandits Get a Bad Scare in Colorado Defile,”Indiana Evening Gazette, November 20, 1904, 6. 9. Headlines taken from Essanay News 5, no. 8 (November 21, 1914). 10. See the annotated photograph in folder 17, “Camera Staff of Essanay Co. 1912,” and folder 20, “Essanay Co., 1914—Camera Crew,” Jackson Rose Collection P-245, Box 1, Seaver Center for Western History, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. 11. A point made by Kevin Brownlow in The War, the West, and the Wilderness (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1979), 223. 12. Nanna Verhoeff,The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning (Amsterdam: Amster- dam University Press, 2006), 365–72. 13. The visual importance of the Ince pictures was recognized by William K. Everson,A Pictorial History of the Western Film (New York: Citadel Press, 1969), 28–33. 14. Scott Simmon is exactly right in showing the constructed character of what contemporaries took as the authenticity of Ince’s West in The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 56–65. 15. Of the silent cowboys, only Tim McCoy possessed sufficient gravitas and peculiarity to have a similar sort of resonance. His twenty-six silent pictures were historical investiga- tions into various periods and scenes. See Buck Rainy, The Strong Silent Type (Jefferson, NC, and London: MacFarland, 2004), 406–16. 16. Curiously, Hart’s biographer, Ronald L. Davis, fails to appreciate the psychological potency of his persona, and their importance as signs of a settler pathology much alive in the mentality of his audiences. Hart is more horrifying than Lon Chaney at times, because his violence seems less a deformity of body or character. William S. Hart, Protecting the Ameri- can West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 45–62, 226–30.

388 Notes to Pages 290–310 17. Junius Estep, World War 1 draft registration card, Los Angeles, California, 17. Infor- mation from the Los Angeles city directories reveal when he maintained a private studio in the city. 18. Ad, Emmetsburg Democrat, June 17, 1913, 5. 19. “He looks and acts like the Real Thing,”Reno Evening Gazette, October 14, 1914, 3. 20. “Westward Ho!,” Los Angeles Times, February 25, 1923, VIII 1; Brownlow, The War, the West, and the Wilderness, 379. 21. Tim McCoy and Ronald McCoy, Tim McCoy Remembers the West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988). 22. Brownlow, The War, the West, and the Wilderness, 390. 23. Rosalind Shaffer, “Nervous in Front of a Camera, but an Expert behind It,”Chicago Daily Tribune, September 29, 1935, D10. 24. Brownlow, The War, the West, and the Wilderness, 235–49, 381. 25. “Build Cities in Desert for Making of ‘Barbara Worth,’” Zanesville Times Signal, Janu- ary 2, 1927, C9. 26. “Barbara Worth Thrills Fans at Aztec,”San Antonio Light, January 23, 1927. On the same billing was Jolson singing in a Vitaphone short. 27. “Irrigating the Desert,” New York Times, November 29, 1926, 16.

Chapter Ten 1. Giacomo Negro and Olav Sorenson, “The Competitive Dynamics of Vertical Integra- tion: Evidence from US Motion Picture Producers, 1912–1970,” in Ecology and Strategy: Ad- vances in Strategic Management, vol. 23, ed. Joel A. C. Baum, Stanislav D. Dobrev, and Arjen van Witteloostuijn (Oxford and St. Louis, MO: Elsevier, 2006), 363–74. 2. Shirley Vance Martin, “Beautiful Residences of Chicago #2,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 9, 1898, 48. 3. See Martin’s photo of Cecil Holland as Pancho Villa in “The Exotic and Strange,”Los Angeles Times, November 19, 1922, VIII 6. 4. Shirley V. Martin, “‘Still’ Pictures: How and Why They Are Made,” inOpportunities in the Motion Picture Industry (Los Angeles: Ayer Publishing, 1970; reprint of Photoplay Re- search, 1922 1st ed.), 47–54. 5. He refers to Alfred Cheney Johnston and Clarence Sinclair Bull. See Bull’s portrait of Bosworth in Terence Pepper and John Kobal, The Man Who Shot Garbo (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1989), plate 6. Pepper reprints Bosworth’s testimony to Bull’s artistry on p. 17. The other celebrity photographer gestured at was Edward S. Curtis. 6. The distinguishing feature of a lobby still was the printed legend on the bottom margin of the image giving the producing company, title, director, and principal stars. A still dispatched to a newspaper or magazine had no legend on the front and a reverse side covered with a slug (a typed paper memo supplying release information and a story angle), studio stamps, star stamps, and sometimes a photographer’s credit stamp. 7. To some extent this can be attributed to the granting to stars the prerogative to choose their own technical collaborators. The animus behind the creation of United Artists was precisely this sort of control. Fairbanks had Charles Warrington as his personal photographer, William S. Hart had Junius Estep, Mary Pickford had K. O. Rahmn—all of whom had been portrait artists before being conscripted to do stills. A word on nomenclature: in Hol- lywood certain commentators used “still” to designate any solitary photographic image, not differentiating between portraits and productions shots. 8. “The Perilous Swing,”Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, February 9, 1916, 18. 9. The New York Institute for Photography published several textbook primers for the camera arts. Charles Wilbur Hoffman and Carl Louis Gregory’sCondensed Course in Motion Picture Photography (New York: Falk Publishing Co., 1920) was somewhat retrograde when it

389 Notes to Pages 311–334 observed that “the cameraman is expected to take ‘stills’ of his scenes and it is not considered necessary to tell him to bring his ‘still’ along. He always takes it along whether needed or not. A dozen plates or cut films are sufficient and all that will be required” (94). John Wallace Gillies, Principles of Pictorial Photography (New York: Falk Publishing Co., 1923), better served the aspiring portraitists heading to Hollywood, containing excellent advice on image making by Edward Weston and Nickolas Muray. 10. From the photographers listings of the Los Angeles city directories 1915–22. Viroque Baker and Margarethe Mather shot celebrity portraiture in the 1910s. 11. See Karen Ward Mahar on the lack of women cinematographers in Women Filmmak- ers in Early Hollywood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 16–18. 12. Birth dates are derived from three sources: World War One draft registration records and age information noted on the 1920 and 1930 census sheets. Death dates are derived from the Social Security Death Index, California death records, the Los Angeles Times obituaries, and the New York Times obituaries. The search engines and databases of Ancestry.com proved extremely useful late in the composition process for nailing down fugitive dates. 13. Employment information was derived from several sources: a thorough examination of newspaper information treating still photographers using the Proquest Archives for the Chicago Tribune, Atlantic Constitution, Boston Daily Globe, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and New York Times, and the microfilm edition of theNew York Tribune, San Francisco Ex- aminer, and American Periodical Series. Furthermore, I surveyed the credit information for photographs contained in Motion Picture Classic, Motion Picture, Photo-Play. Stills provided a wealth of information on who took what pictures of which movies for what company. I examined several major archives thoroughly: the Culver Service Collection, the UCLA Collec- tion, the University of Southern California Stills Collection, the Princeton University Stills Collection, the New York Public Library Performing Arts Photography Collection. The Mu- seum of Modern Art Collections were closed when I composed this book, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, because of its lack of a general catalog for its multitude of stills, proved too cumbersome to use for a general survey. I used the Herrick Library to answer specific questions about provenance. 14. Richard Koszarski, Astoria Studio and Its Fabulous Films: A Picture History with 277 Stills and Photographs (New York: Dover Publications for the Astoria Motion Picture and Television Foundation, 1983), 43, mentions the work of Bachrach. It doesn’t touch upon Ball’s brief but distinguished venture as a still man for Paramount East. 15. Tony Villecco, Silent Stars Speak: Interviews with Twelve Cinema Pioneers (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2001), 13.

390 Notes to Pages 335–363 index

Abbe, James, 4, 18, 56, 94, 128–29, 139, American Book of Beauty, 48, 66 160, 242, 266–79; Home Talent, 273– American Film Company, 129–30 75; Wonderful Years, 268–69 Ancker, Julian, 336 Academy Awards, 352, 354 Anderson, Anthony, 213–15 Adams, Ansel, 237 Anderson, Gilbert Max (Bronco Billy Adam’s Rib, 221 Anderson), 303–5, 309 advertisement, 4, 21, 47, 76, 159, 292, 301 animation, 232–33 aesthetics, 4, 22–23, 39, 47, 59–62, 91–92, Annie Laurie, 267, 295 103, 136–37, 143–45, 199, 207, 236–37, Anthony and Cleopatra, 106 242, 261; industrial studio, 15, 60–62, Apeda, NY, 123 144, 242–44; of visual fashion, 244– Apfel, Oscar, 143 45; symbolist, 195, 245, 250 Aphrodite, 197–98 Ahrens, Theodore, 222–24, 226, 231 appearance, 39, 50, 60–62 Albert, Elsie, 79 Arbuckle, Roscoe “Fatty,” 127, 295;The Alberts, Sergis, 58 Red Mill, 295 Albin, Charles, 56, 205, 242, 266–67; Archer, Fred, 336, 355–58 Romola, 278, 230–33 Arliss, George, 2, 7, 340 album, 35, 76 Arnold, John, 295 Alcorn, Olive, 99 art direction, 140–43, 150–57, 203–4, Alexander, Kenneth, 56, 160, 266–67, 223, 224–25, 229, 363; built visual 285–89, 336 environments, 154, 207, 281–84 Alien, The, 57 Artcraft Pictures, 53, 139, 192 Allan, Ted, 184, 344 Artist’s Great Madonna, The, 201 Alta Studio, 99 Aryan, The, 314 American Biograph and Mutoscope Arzner, Dorothy, 319–20 Company, 71, 133, 266 Atlanta Constitution, 244

391 audience, 103–4, 180, 254, 256, bachelor, 35, Birth of a Nation, 133–34, 136 37, 326; rural, 11; urban, 11 Bitzer, Billy, 54, 58, 105, 129, 133–37 August, Joe, 310 Bjerring, Frank B., 336 Autrey, Max Munn, 83–85, 256, 290, 336, Black Beauty, 120 345, 349–52; The Country Beyond, 349; Black Crook, The, 35, 40 Modern Times, 350; Mother Knows Best, Blackton, J. Stuart, 106–7, 112–14, 165 350; What Price Glory, 349 Blane, Harry, 336 Ayres, Lew, 167, 169 Blue Bird, The, 103, 141, 150, 152–55 Blum, Sammy, 327 Boggs, Frank, 71 Baby Peggy, 362–63 Bohème, La, 266–67, 277–79, 285, 287–88, Bachrach, Ernest, 59, 102, 240, 256, 336, 292 339–41 Boland, Eddie, 353 Balboa Films, 79, 124 Borden, Olive, 351 Ball, Russell, 160, 336, 339–44 Boris, king of Bulgaria, 239, 247, 249, 261 Bangs, Frank C., 46, 67, 113, 125, 160, 269, Boris, M. I., 18, 238–42, 245–61, 336; Atelier 336, 355, 357 Adele, 239–40, 245–47; modernist head, Banky, Vilma, 327 259; symbolist art, 249–50; “Yvonne,” Bara, Theda, 5–6, 82–83, 164–65, 195, 226 250–51 Barbary Sheep, 140–41, 150, 155–57 Bosworth, Hobart, 144, 315, 335 Bardleys the Magnificent, 292 Bow, Clara, 85 Barker, Granville, 150, 153 Brady, Matthew, 31, 40 Barry, Viola, 79 Branscome, Maude, 44–45, 104, 363 Barrymore, Ethel, 63 Bride of Colorado, The, 58 Barrymore, John, 280, Don Juan, 227; The Broken Blossoms, 139, 264–66, 270 Jest, 268 Bronson, Betty, 339 Barthelmes, Richard, 355 Brooks, Alan, 236–37 Barthes, Roland, 244 Brooks, Louise, 258, 346–48 Bava, Eugenio, 24, 115–17 Brown, Clarence, 149 Baxter, Warren, 336 Brown, Karl, 56, 133, 315–18 Beardsley, Aubrey, 190–91, 193 Brown, Lansing, 89, 90 “Beauties of Chicago, The,” 37 Brown, Milton, 182, 286, 293–95, 336 beauty, 23, 34, 48–49; body type, 68, 360, Browning, Todd, 180, 355 368; buffo, 34, 44–45; feminine, 12–13, Brownlow, Kevin, 241, 317, 320–22; The Pa- 36–37, 39, 50, 68, 72–74; male, 35, 74, rade’s Gone By, 241 97, 166–67, 186, 254; professional, 13, 31, Bruguiere, Francis, 67, 242, 357 33–35, 38–39, 50 Brunton, Robert, 139, 148–49, 332, 344 Beauty Book, The, 48–49 Bryant, Charles, 196–97 Beban, George, 57 Buckland, Wilfred, 140, 224–25, 229 Belasco, David, 140–43, 224, 380n55 Buckwalter, Harry H., 300–305; The Holdup Bella Donna, 195 of the Leadville Stage, 302–3; The Lynch- Bellamy, Madge, 318, 350–51 ing at Cripple Creek, 302 Belle, Tula, 152–53 Bull, Clarence Sinclair, 15, 59, 97, 125, 154, Bellew, Kyrle, 35–36 167, 180, 186, 256, 285–86, 292–93, 336, Ben-Hur, 6, 103, 147, 209, 229–31 344, 357 Bennett, Billie, 235 Bulloch, Charles M., 336 Bennett, Joan, 354 Bunny, John, 106 Benoit, Georges, 215, 226 Burrow, Ernest H., 3 Benson, Frank R., 107 Bushman, Francis X., 167–68, 229–31 Beresford, Harry, 269 Byron, Joseph, 107, 112, 268 Bernhardt, Sarah, 41–42, 72, 110–11 Big Parade, The, 285, 295 Biograph Bulletin, 105 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The, 23, 154, 174–75, Biograph Films. See American Biograph and 207 Mutascope Company Cabiria, 23–24, 143, 272

392 Index camera, 121–22, 199, 362; department, 144, costume, 33, 38–39, 74, 82, 107–9, 149, 207, 180, 182, 332; Graflex, 159, 174, 339, 362; 235–36; drama, 137–38, 227; Western, Leica, 16; polyscope, 301 304–6 Camera Pictorialists, 92, 289, 355 Count of Monte Cristo, The, 144 Campbell Studio, 49, 66, 70, 117, 198, 201; Country Beyond, The, 349 Campbell Art Company, 200–201, Craig, Gordon, 140, 150 384n18 Crane, Casper Garrison, 129 Cannons, George F., 129, 273, 336 Crawford, Joan, 12, 58 Capellani, Albert, 196 credit, 17, 58, 85–86, 97–98, 120, 163, 344, Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, 63 350–51, 360–61, 379n33 cards: cabinet, 32–39, 44, 46, 63; cigarette, Cronenweth, W. E., 336 37 Cronjager, Jules, 228 Carpenter, Gerald D., 123, 130–32 Cruz, James, 309; Covered Wagon, 309, 312, Carpenter, J. Cyrus, 131 315–19, 344 Carpenter, L.A., 76, 130–31 Culver Service, 101–2, 168 Carré, Ben, 150, 152–53, 207 Cunningham, Cecil, 315; The Spoilers, 315 Carsey, Harold Dean, 100, 167, 336, 355, Curtis, Edward S., 149, 154, 215–21, 226, 236, 358–60 306, 319, 336; In the Land of the Head- cartes de visites, 31 hunters, 215, 217; The North American Carver, Louise, 108 Indian, 221; Seeing America, 217; The Cateneo, Carlo, 116–17 First Year, 361 celebrity, 77 censorship, 200 Center for Creative Photography, 234 Daddies, 4 Chandler & Sheetz, 34 Dagover, Lil, 175 Chaney, Lon, Sr., 157, 176, 178, 180, 182–83 Dallmeyer Patent Portrait lens, 54, 287, 347 Chaplin, Charles, 123, 128–29, 350–52 Dance, Robert, 15 Chapman, John, 243–44 Dancer of the Nile, 228–29 character: masculine, 11–12; portrait, 69, 97; Dante’s Inferno, 210–11 typing, 11, 79, 98, 323 D’Arcy, Roy, 287–88 cheesecake, 94, 125, 182, 250, 272–73, 366 Daughter of Neptune, The, 9 Chewning, Wallace, 182–83, 286, 294, 336 Daughter of the Gods, A, 195 cinematography, 17, 27, 54, 58, 122–24, 139, Davis, Charles H., 66 146–47, 150, 196–97, 215, 294–95; Ger- Dawley, J. Searle, 113 man, 17; landscape, 299–303, 306–7 De Grésac, Madame Frederick, 285 Civilization, 306 décor: cinematic, 9, 107, 115, 121–22, 190–91, Clair, Ethlyne, 356 285; studio, 41, 94; theatrical, 9, 142–43 Clarke, Marguerite, 151 deCordova, Richard, 104 Clayton, Ethel, 301 DeGaston Studio, 94 Cleopatra, 82 DeMeyer, Adollph, 48, 53, 159 Clifford, Kathleen, 93 DeMille, Cecile B., 23, 100, 139–49, 224, 299, Clifford, William, 229;Souls in Bondage, 229 358, 363; Adam’s Rib, 221; Cleopatra, Coburn, Alvin Langdon, 9, 346 184; Fool’s Paradise, 144, 147; Joan the Coburn, Robert, 18, 336 Woman, 140–44; King of Kings, 221, Cody, Lew, 11 236–37; Male and Female, 272; Squaw collectors, 18–20, 26, 35–36, 102–3 Man, 143, 241; The Ten Commandments, Colman, Ronald, 277–79, 283 148, 219–20; The Woman Whom God comedy, 124–29, 157, 272–73 Forgot, 190 Comstock, Anthony, 200–201 DeMille, William, 149 Conklin, Chester, 128 Dempster, Carol, 54, 276 Conquering Power, 190, 205–7 Devoy, Carl, 336 Coogan, Jackie, My Boy, 332 Dial, Carl, 336 Cooper, Gary, 186, 208, 326–28 Diem, Frank, 139–40, 266, 270 copyright, 17, 40, 47, 226, 370n18; waiver, 86 DiPutti, Liya, 256–57 Costello, Maurice, 106, 110, 363 director, 335. See also individual names

393 Index Dix, Richard, 254–55, 291, 306; The Vanish- Fairbanks, Douglas, Sr., 5, 154, 167, 233–35; ing American, 306, 323–36 Robin Hood, 233–35 domesticity, 10–11, 151–52 Fairchild, Charlotte, 242 Doolittle, James N., 336;Lost World, 355 Falk, Benjamin J., 36, 46–47, 63, 69, 107 Downey, W. & D., 33–34 familiarization, 324–25 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 177 Famous Players Studio, 104–5, 113–14, 122, Dream Street, 274 137; Famous Players–Lasky, 158–59, Dressler, Marie, 128–29 241, 321 Duell, Charles, 284 fan: idolatry, 7–8, 19; photos, 17, 20, 243–44 Duncan, Preston, 336 Farnum, William, 315 Duprez, Charles, 158 Farrar, Geraldine, 140–44, 192 Dwan, Alan, 333 Ferdinand, king of Bulgaria, 238, 246–47 Dyar, Otto, 240–41, 336, 345, 349 Ferguson, Elsie, 1–2, 63, 154–56, 369n4 Ferguson, Helen, 172 Fighting the Flames, Dreamland, 105 Eagels, Jeanne, 1–5 film: flexible, 256; orthochromatic, 121, Earle, Ferdinand P., 9, 154, 213–26, 229–34; 379n37; panchromatic, 16; processing, Ben-Hur, 229–31; Golgotha, 232; Lilliom, 78 232; A Lover’s Oath, 213, 221, 231; First National, 84, 94, 125, 355–57 motion painting, 216, 223, 226; Rubaiyat First Year, The, 361 of Omar Khayyam, 213–14, 217–18, 231, Fischbeck, Harry, 340 355; Toys of Fate, 223; training as artist, Fiske, Minnie Maddern, 113–14 215 Fitzmaurice, George, 154 Earle, William P. S., 223; Dancer of the Nile, Flagg, James Montgomery, 167 228–29; For the Honor of the Crew, 223; Flesh and the Devil, 181 Merry Lunatics, 223 Fool There Was, A, 6, 164, 195 eBay, 19, 368 Fool’s Paradise, 144, 147 Éclair News, 105 Ford, John, 309; The Iron Horse, 309, 319–22, Edison, Thomas, 113 352 Edison Kinetogram, 105 For the Honor of the Crew, 223 Edison Pictures, 123, 201 Fort Lee, New Jersey, 122, 149–53 Eglinton, William, 336 Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 187, 189, Eickemeyer, Rudolf, Jr., 49, 63–66, 150, 200, 203–5 346 Fox, Jimmy, 317 Elliott, Mack, 336 Fox, William, 18, 165, 201, 331 Ellis, John A., 226–27, 336, 358 Fox Film Corporation, 6, 18, 82, 94, 164, 201, Eltinge, Julian, 1, 202 210, 344, 349–55, 360–61 emulation, 2, 4, 7–8, 59 Fraker, William, 337 Enemy, 295 frame captures, 106, 134, 369n6 English, Don, 59, 337, 345 Freulich, Henry, 166, 176, 186, 337, 382n11 epics: Italian, 23, 114–16, 143, 272–73; West- Freulich, Jack, 5–6, 97, 158, 160, 163–74, 176, ern, 309 179, 256, 337, 345, 351 erotics, 35, 60, 82, 98–100, 125, 194–95, 199; Freulich, Roman, 166, 184, 186, 337, 382n12 queer, 207; sexual modesty, 266–67, Frohman, Charles, 101, 104, 137, 195, 241 277–78 Frohman, Daniel, 69, 104, 113–14, 118, 137 Erté, 285 From the Manger to the Cross, 115–16 Esquire Magazine, 292 Fryer, Elmer, 102, 120, 321, 336; Noah’s Ark, Essanay, 304–5 357 Essanay News, 304 Fuller, Mary, 123 Estep, Junius “June,” 310–18, 336, 345 Evans, Nelson, 56, 94–97, 128, 158 Evans, William Kendall, 337 galleries, 31, 36; display cases, 36–37; mo- expressionism, 21, 23, 174–76, 247 tion picture studio portrait, 158, 243, Eycke, Leon, 58 345

394 Index Garbo, Greta, 12, 59, 68, 180–82, 256, 266–67, Haas, Robert M., 281 342–43 Hall, Gladys, Happy Ending, 340 Garden of Allah, The, 209 Hall, Joseph E., 107, 112, 268 Gaudio, Gene, 58, 196–97 Hameister, Willy, 175 Gaynor, Janet, 351, 360–61; The First Year, Harlow, Jean, 184 361 Harris and Ewing, 165 Geisler, Frank E., 14 Hart, William S., 98, 123, 167, 309–14; The Genthe, Arnold, 63–68, 242; As I Remember, Aryan, 314; dualism, 309–11; Hell’s Hing- 67 es, 310; Jean Petticoats, 314; Selfish Yates, Georg, Victor, 123, 240 312; The Testing Block, 314; The Toll Gate, Gibbons, Cedric, 229–30, 295 311; Tumbleweeds, 312–14; Wagon Tracks, Gibson, Hoot, 309 309, 311–12, 317 Gift Girl, The, 154 Hartigan, Pat, 109 Gilbert, John, 167, 181–82, 267, 285, 287–88, Hartmann, Sadakichi, 47 293 Hartsook, Fred, 86, 90 Gillum, Don, 337 Hartsook, L.A., 76, 77, 86–90 girl, 12–13, 50, 62–63, 68, 97, 131, 368; spiri- Hatton, Raymond, 192 tuality of, 265–66 Haver, Phyllis, 273–74 Gish, Dorothy, 275 Head, Gordon G., 337 Gish, Lillian, 54–56, 59, 123, 136, 264–68, Hearts of the World, 54 270–84; Annie Laurie, 267, 295; La Bo- Hell’s Hinges, 310 hème, 266–67, 277–79, 285, 287–88, 292; Henderson, Robert, 117 Enemy, 295; Romola, 278–84; Scarlet Hendrickson, Fred, 337, 358 Letter, 293–95; The White Sister, 274–78, Herring, Robert, 20–22 297–98; The Wind, 267, 295–98, 326, 328 Hesser, Edwin Bower, 100, 166, 366 glamour, 4, 12–13, 15, 39, 49, 58–62, 63–66, Hewett, Clarence B., 337 83, 122, 249–50, 260, 265–66, 366; ex- Hill, Ira L., 242 pressionlessness, 63, 74, 250; white, 74, Histed, Ernest Walter, 286 81, 131 Hitrova, Elena, 247 Glessner, Bonnie, 79 Holdup of the Leadville Stage, The, 302–3 Godowsky, Dagmar, 173 Hollister, George K., 117 Goldberg, Maurice, 18, 160, 242 Hollywood, 71–73, 83, 102, 122, 160, 270–71, Goldwyn Pictures, 94, 125, 289, 326–28 289 Golgotha, 232 Home Talent, 273–75 Grand Guignol, 177 Hommel, George, 337, 345, 349 Graves, Clarence “Stax,” 337 Hoover, Frank S., 58, 71 Gray, Gilda, 251–54 Hoover Art Studio, 53–58 Gray, Zane, 323 Hopcraft, Newton, 337 Great Divide, The, 299–301 horror, 23, 25, 174–80 Great Problem, The, 201–2 Horsley, David, 71 Grenbeaux, Paul, 18, 123–27, 131, 337 Hostetler, Edward, 337 Griffith, D. W., 7, 52–58, 121, 129, 133–37, 187, Housman, Arthur, 353 264–67, 270, 299, 363; Birth of a Nation, Howe, James Wong, 58, 145 133–34, 136; Broken Blossoms, 139, 264– Hughes, Howard, 358 66, 270; Dream Street, 274; Intolerance, Hunchback of Notre Dame, The, 176–78 54, 133–36, 144, 272; Hearts of the World, Hurrell, George, 12–13, 16, 18, 59–60, 94, 102, 137; Judith of Bethulia, 121, 133, 137; Or- 170, 292, 337, 355 phans of the Storm, 139–40, 274–75; Way Down East, 139, 270, 274 Grimes, William Frank, 337 Idols of Clay, 154 Grip of the Yukon, The, 168 Illington, Margaret, 73 Grosset & Dunlap photoplay editions, 112, In the Land of the Headhunters, 215, 217 370n12 Ince, Thomas, 57, 119, 129, 299, 306–9, 314; Guazzoni, Enrico, 114, 300 Civilization, 306; Indian Massacre, 306, Gurney, Jeremiah, 31, 40 308; The Invaders, 306–8; War on the

395 Index Plains, 306, 308 Kornman, Gene, 337 Indian Massacre, 306, 308 Kosloff, Theodore, 192, 198 Ingram, Rex, 198, 201–9, 221; Conquering Power, 190, 205–7; Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 187, 189, 203–5; The Garden Lachman, Harry, 209–11, 353; Baby Takes a of Allah, 209; The Great Problem, 201–2; Bow, 211; as postimpressionist painter, Mare Nostrum, 209; Scaramouche, 209; 211 Shore Acres, 202 Lacy, Madison, 337 Inspiration Pictures, 275–83 Laemmle, Carl, 71, 104, 163–66, 170, 184, Intolerance, 54, 133–36, 144, 272 186, 331 Invaders, The, 306–8 LaMarr, Barbara, 138 It Happened in Paris, 72, 375n40 Lamarr, Hedy, 74 Langtry, Lillie, 33–35, 38, 44, 48 Larrimore, Francine, 14 Jackson, Harry, 337 Lasky, Jesse L., 141, 149, 240–45, 249, 331; Jackson, William Henry, 300, 302–3 “What Kind of a ‘Menace’ Are the Mov- Jean Petticoats, 314 ies,” 241 Joan the Woman, 140–44 Lawrence, Florence, 104, 106, 363 Johann, Zita, 185 Letter, The, 2 Johnston, Alfred Cheney, 94, 96, 100, 102, Lewis, Edgar, 299–300; The Great Divide, 160, 240, 242, 266 299–301 Jones, Buck, 351–52 Lewis, Ralph, 206 Jones, Raymond H., 102, 174, 184–86, 337 Life of Moses, The, 106–7, 109 Joy, Leatrice, 147 lighting, 16–17, 31, 47, 53–54, 63, 67, 94, 125, Judith of Bethulia, 121, 133, 137 131, 172, 205, 260, 269–70, 349; electric Julian, Rupert, 155 lamps, 268, 294; Lasky, 141, 145, 148; Julius Caesar, 106 Rembrandt, 81, 141 Lilliom, 232 Linstedt, Alfred, 77, 93 Kahle, Alex, 337, 339 Lippman, Irving, 337, 349 Kalem Company, 79–80, 104, 114–17; Kalem Lloyd, Frank, 125, 344 Kalendar, 105 lobby: cards, 17, 115, 333; stills, 333–34, Kales, Arthur, 233–34 389n6 Kane, Gail London after Midnight, 182–83 Kansas City, 92–94 Longet, Gaston, 339 Karger, Maxwell, 196–97 Longworth, Bert, 17, 174–82, 286, 335, 338 Kellerman, Annette, 106, 110, 195 Los Angeles, 71–73, 76–77, 78, 87, 98–100, Kent, Charles, 109 123–25, 144 Kerrigan, J. Walter, 317, 319 Los Angeles Camera Club, 78 Kershner, Glenn, 337 Los Angeles Times, 16–17, 56, 72, 78–81, 154, Kesslere, G. Maillard, 256, 260 213–14, 219, 224–26, 290, 358 Key, Kathleen, 218 Lost World, The, 125 keybook, 10, 141, 243 Louise, Ruth Harriet, 59, 172–73, 256, 294, Keyes, Donald Biddle, 129, 145, 148–49, 158, 338, 344, 366 166, 187, 227–28, 337 Lover’s Oath, A, 213, 221, 231 Keystone Kops, 124–25, 127–28 Lovely, Louise, 11, 130–31, 155; The Gift Girl, Khnopff, Ferdinand, 250–51, 254 155 Kinemacolor Company, 141 Lowry, William, 235 King of Kings, 221, 236–37 Lubin Bulletin, 105 Kiss for Cinderella, A, 339–40 Lumiere, Samuel, 70, 123 Kleine, George, 114–15 Lyman, William O., 158 Kling, Clifton L., 120, 337 Lynch, Warren E., 338, 387n19 Kobol, John, 12–13, 15, 58–59, 372n10; Art of Lynching at Cripple Creek, The, 302 the Great Hollywood Portrait Photogra- phers, 59–60, 74, 372n11

396 Index Macbeth, 106–8 Miehle, John Macdougal, Robin, 152–53 Miller, Patsy Ruth, 171 MacDowell, Syl, 98-100 Miller Brothers 101 Ranch, 306 MacLean, Roy D., 338 Minter, Mary Miles, 131 MacPherson, Jeanie, 143–44 Miracle Man, The, 223 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 152–55 Mishkin, Herman, 107, 201 magazine, 46, 48, 50, 66, 69, 76, 88, 118, Mix, Tom, 309, 315, 319, 352 241–42; editor, 102, 104, 335, 361; fan, Modern Times, 350 60, 69–70, 112–14, 244–45, 333 Moffett Studio, 86 Magician, The, 209 Mojonier, Louis, 77–78, 90–92 Majdrakoff, Ivan, 238–39, 241–42, 245–46; Mojonier Studio, 90–92 “The Actor,” 247; “Boris I,” 249; “A Fash- Monroe, C. Heighton, 76, 88, 120, 141, ionable Woman,” 248. See also Boris, 338 M. I. Monroe, Edward Thayer, 289 makeup, 121, 286–87 Monsieur Beaucaire, 342 Male and Female, 103, 147 Mora, Jose Maria, 34, 44–46, 69 Man Who Laughs, The, 179–80 morality, 10–12, 125, 322 Man Who Shot Garbo, The, 15 Morgan, Fred Reynolds, 286, 338 Manatt, James, 286, 294, 338 Morrison, Talmage, 338, 345 Mann, Harry, 197 Morrison, William, 76 Mannix, Eddie, 231 Morse, Samuel F. B., 31 Manslaughter, 147 Mortensen, William, 221–22, 232–37, 256, Mare Nostrum, 209 338, 362, 366, 385n34; Rubaiyat of Omar Margaret Herrick Library, 16, 18 Khayyam (book), 232; Wescosco Studio, Marion, Art, 338 235–36 Marsh, Richard Gordon, 76, 131 Mother Knows Best, 350 Martin, Shirley Vance, 332–34, 338, 344; motion picture, 5, 67, 69, 133–39, 328–29; “Still Pictures: How and Why They Are color, 221, 229; exhibitors, 120, 332; Made,” 332–33 fantasy, 108–9, 149–55; feature film, Mary Stuart, 43 104, 110–11, 122, 315, 380n50; genres, Master of the House, The, 75 106, 143; narrative, 143–44; painterly, Masters of Starlight, 193 214, 280–81, 300; scenario, 141, 202–3; Mathis, June, 196, 198, 201–4 serial, 106, 304; special effects, 229–31, matte painting, 215–16, 221–22, 228; glass 328; studio, 331–33, 339; travelogue, shot, 228 301–2, 324 Matzene, Richard Gordon (Count Jens Motion Picture Classic, 244 Rudolph Matzene; Jems Matzene Motion Picture Patent Company, 104 Razlsmlau), 71–77, 81, 92, 131, 375n41 Motion Picture Story, 15, 69, 112–14 Mayer, Louis B., 208, 266, 284, 331 Moving Picture World, 10, 106, 157–60, 301 Maynard, Ken, 326 Murnau, Friedrich: The Last Laugh, 352; McAlpin, Hal, 338 Sunrise, 352–53 McAvoy, May, 343 Murphy, Richard, III, 113 McCandless, Barbara, 146 My Valet, 126 McCoy, Tim, 326 Myers, Carmel, 228 McDonald, Pirie, 97, 286 McIntosh, Burr, 46, 63, 76–77; Burr McIntosh Monthly, 76 National Police Gazette, 46 Men of Steel, 125 Native Americans, 301–2, 305–8 MGM, 12–13, 15, 59–60, 180, 208, 229–31, Nazimova, Alla, 7, 8, 58, 190–94, 202; Aphro- 266, 284–98, 326, 342–43, 357 dite, 197–98; Bella Donna, 195; Billions, Mèliés, George, 107–9 198; Camille, 154, 187, 189, 191, 198; Out Mella, Piero, 244 of the Fog, 196; The Red Lantern, 196–97; melodrama, 10, 196–98 Revelation, 196; Salome, 190–94, 205, Metro Pictures Corporation, 187–90, 207; Toys of Fate, 196, 223; War Brides, 196–206, 223 195

397 Index Neilan, Marshall, 158–59; Dinty, 158 society photographer, 72, 77, 248; still, Neptune’s Daughter, 110 21–22, 70, 103, 119, 121, 123–25, 187–90, Nesbit, Evelyn, 2, 49–50, 63–66 332–35, 360–61, 364–65; woman, 335 Nestor Films, 71 photography: artistic, 9, 66–67, 70, 103, 122, newspapers, 118–19, 157–60, 244–45 233–34, 240–45, 280–81, 300; business, Nilsson, Anna Q., 311 40–42, 44, 47, 76, 86–88, 90, 123, 277, Nissen, Greta, 346 290; candid, 17, 119, 182, 332; cinematic, Normand, Mabel, 125–26, 129 5, 13, 19–20, 67–71, 187–89; color, 67, Novarro, Ramon, 6, 60, 182, 218, 231 121, 292; engraved, 239–48; exhibitions, New York, 69, 77, 122, 239–43, 286 78, 92, 367; fashion, 70, 349; landscape, New York Dramatic Mirror, 106 199, 296, 299–300, 308–9; location, 117, New York Motion Picture Company, 148 311–21, 296, 323–24; pictorialist, 13–14, New York Times, 1, 44, 66–67, 137, 159, 200, 58, 80–83, 92, 146, 248, 355; sharp-focus, 226, 231, 240, 248, 274–75 13, 16, 60, 351, 355; soft-focus, 13–14, nudity, 99–100, 200–201, 366 68, 85, 91, 94, 139, 355; theatrical, 5, 13, 25–26, 69–70, 94, 111–12, 254, 256; trans- national, 23 O’Brien, George, 318, 351, 353 Photo-Play (also Photoplay), 70, 267, 274, Old Soak, The, 269 277, 332 O’Neil, Nance, 91 Phyfe, Hal, 160, 338 Orientalism, 154–56, 213–26, 228–29, 234–35 Pickford, Mary, 58, 96, 98, 123, 131, 266, 299; Orphans of the Storm, 139–40, 274–75 Suds, 271–72 Othello, 106 Pierce, Charlotte, 84 Outcast, The, 1–2 “Play, The,” 13 Overbaugh, Roy, 281 Plaza Pictures, 93 Pollard, Lyman, 20, 172 pornography, 100 Painted Lips, 11 Porter, Edwin S., 113; The Great Train Rob- Painting the Town, 171 bery, 303 Panzer, Paul, 106, 108 portraiture, 13–14, 59–60, 63–66, 72–74, 88, Paralta, LA, 98 260–61, 331–33; backgrounds, 63, 72, 94, Paramount Pictures, 17–18, 94, 125, 139, 170, 345–46; close-ups, 89–90, 372n13; 158, 184, 240–45, 252–54, 289, 316–18, full-figure, 245, 256; half-length, 245; 322–25, 345, 357; Astoria Studio, NY, head shots, 20, 47, 79, 166–67, 170, 245, 241, 339–40; Paramount Pep Club Year- 315; home, 23, 70, 286; landscape for- book, 240 mat, 82, 172–74; official, 164–65, 173; Pastrone, Giovani, 143 pathognomic, 79; personality, 70, 112; Pathé, 139 portfolio, 79, 98, 100, 290 Pearsall, William D., 338 posing, 31–32, 41–44, 46–47, 50, 94, 170; Penalty, The, 177 informality, 74, 170 Pepper, Terrence, 15 Post, Guy Bates: The Masquerader, 224; performance: cinematic, 7, 143, 267, 285; Omar, the Tentmaker, 224–27 theatrical, 1–2, 4, 7, 139, 194–95 posters, 17–18, 115, 118, 159 perishability, 5–6, 17 Potter, William, 338 personality, 4, 11, 13, 66, 374n30; personality Powers Company, 79 portrait, 70, 104, 112 Powolny, Frank, 210–11, 331, 351–55 Perssons, Tom, 144 preservation, 17–19 Peters, House, 301 Prevost, Marie, 95 Phantom of the Opera, The, 178, 180 print: bromoil, 233–34; developing, 94, 244, Philbin, Mary, 87, 170 362; exhibition, 82; industrial scale, 120, Phillips Smalley Company, 79 158, 243; manipulated, 248; platinum, photo secession, 145 78; presentation, 123 photographer: artistic, 31–33, 233–34; celeb- Prisoner of Zenda, The, 113 rity, 60, 69, 77, 86, 160, 163, 273, 364; ge- Private Life of Helen of Troy, The, 103, 358–59 nius in, 187; royal, 238–40, 245–47, 261; prize, 54, 58, 78, 159

398 Index prostitution, 100 Rosson, Helene, 132 Prunella, 141, 150–52 Rounds, Stephen, 155 publicists, 5, 10, 114, 133, 159, 243–44, 335, Rowland, Richard, 202 361–62 Rowley, Mark Leslie, 338 publicity, 10–11, 15, 17–18, 69–70, 79, 92, 102, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 9, 154, 213–14, 104–6, 113–15, 118–20, 145, 166–67, 217–18, 231 243–44, 300–305, 327, 333–34, 355, 367; Ruffner, Ralph, 157 bulletins, 118–19, 304, 315; fakery, Russian Honeymoon, The, 47, 48, 69 266–67, 302; press book, 115 Ruth Harriet Louise and Hollywood Glamour Puffer, B. Frank, 70, 123, 157, 374n33 Photography, 15, 296

Queen Elizabeth, 110–11, 119, 137 Sais, Marin, 79–80 Queen Kelly, 339 Salisbury, Jane, 225 Quo Vadis?, 23–24, 111, 114–17, 119, 300, 316 Salome, 7–8, 103, 154; Theda Bara’sSalome , 82 Salome versus Shenandoah, 154, 243 race, 303–6, 313–14, 371n20; visual typing, San Francisco, 67, 87 323 Sarony, Napoleon, 34, 40–44, 46, 63, 69, Rain, 2 77, 79 Rambova, Natacha, 8, 190–92, 198, 207–8, Sartov, Hendrick, 53–57, 94, 97, 139, 264, 342, 383n3 266, 285, 293–95, 365 Ranous, William V., 108 Saunders, Jackie, 79 Red Lantern, The, 196–97 Scaramouche, 208 Red Mill, The, 295 Scarlet Letter, The, 293–95 Reed, Florence, 75 Scarlet West, The, 172 Reed, Joseph P., 39 Schenk, Joseph, 289 religion, 277–79, 284 Schloss, Jacob, 47 Rennie, Mrs. John W., 37–39 Schneiderman, George, 321 reproduction: altered, 81, 120; cuts, 120, Schoenbaum, Charles, 141 157–59; formats, 112–13, 244, low- Schoenbaum, Emmett, 141, 338, 345 fidelity, 4, 22, 46, 105, 120, 157, 244, 342; Scollard, Clinton, 13 periodical, 46, 66–67, 112–13, 113, 119, scrapbooks, 20, 367 303, 367; postcard, 200 Sea Hawk, The, 149 reputation, 97–99 Sea Wolf, The, 79 retouching, 76, 95, 158, 261 Seastrom, Victor, 296 reviewers, 328–29 Seavey, Lafayette W., 42, 74 Rhamn, K. O., 266 Seeing America, 217 Rice, Arthur F., 8, 160, 187–94, 198–201, Seely, Walter Frederick, 82–84, 87–88, 100, 203–7, 211, 338; politics, 198–200 172–74, 289, 366 Richardson, George, 41–42 Selig, William, 108, 300–302, 311, 315 Richee, Eugene Robert, 59, 124–25, 127, 131, Selig Polyscope Company, 71, 144, 299–303, 240, 316–19, 323, 338, 344–49, 353; picto- 315 rial strategies, 345 Selznick Pictures, 158, 195–96, 226 Ristori, Adelaide, 41 Sennett, Mack, 18, 94–95, 119, 124–25, RKO, 339 127–29, 133, 184, 272–74, 299; bathing Roberts, Theodore, 142, 220 beauties, 273–74; Salome versus Shenan- Robertson, Bruce, 15, 296 doah, 154, 243 Robertson-Cole Films, 125, 215 Shadowland, 214, 270, 274 Robin Hood, 5, 154, 233–36 Shakespeare, film adaptations of, 106–7 Rockwood, George, 47 Shearer, Norma, 60 romance, 10–12 Sheriff of Plumas, The, 132 Romeo and Juliet, 106–7 Sibbald, Merrit J., 338 Romola, 278–84 Sietz, John, 202–3, 205, 208 Rosher, Charles, 58, 266 Sigurdson, Oliver, 338

399 Index Sills, Milton, 231 Talmadge, Constance, 157; Two Weeks, 157 Simpson, Ivan, 340 Talmadge, Norma, 98, 344; “How to Be a Sin, 165 Movie Star,” 98 Six, Bert, 102, 338 Tearle, Conway Slippery Jim’s Repentance, 110 Temple, Shirley, 211 Smallwood, Roy, 307 Ten Commandments, The, 361 Smith, Albert E., 106–8, 223 Terry, Alice, 89, 209 Smith, Andrew Brodie, 300 Tess of D’Urbervilles, 113–14, 137 Smith, H. Nealson, 87, 208, 327–28, 338 Testing Block, The, 314 Snyder, Orville, 338 Thalberg, Irving, 231, 267 Sofia, Bulgaria, 245–48 Thaw, Harry, 63 Sojin, 236–37, 346 theater, 34, 47, 62–63, 66–67, 107 Sometime, 14 Theatre Magazine, 47–48, 69–70, 115, 221, Souls in Bondage, 229 254, 274 Sparrows, 103, 147 Thomas, William, 236, 338 Spoilers, The, 144, 315–16 Tichenor, Edna, 182–83 Spurr, Melbourne, 87–90, 94, 97, 289 Tillie’s Punctured Romance, 128–29 Squaw Man, 143, 241 Tissot, James Joseph Jacques, 117 St. Denis, Ruth, 233–34 Todd, Arthur L., 139 star, 335; fan devotion to, 19, 244, 362–64; Toll Gate, The, 311 image, 5, 21, 60, 77, 111, 304–5, 315, 331; Torrence, David, 114 system, 60, 75, 104, 266–67 Torrent, The, 180 Stark, Xan, 99 Tourneur, Maurice, 4, 58, 138–41, 149–57, Starke, Pauline, 136 190, 207; Barbary Sheep, 140–41, 150, Steichen, Edward, 242 155–57, The Blue Bird, 141, 150, 152–55; Stein, Marcia, 242 impressionism, 150; Prunella, 141, 150– Stekel, George, 72, 77–78, 82, 376n56 52; symbolist, 150–51 Sterling, Ford, 127, 272 Toys of Fate, 223 still, 4–5, 8, 15–16, 21, 47, 82–84, 88, 103–60, Triangle Films, 125, 133–36, 148 243–44, 363–64, 377n4; arrested action, Tumbleweeds, 312–14 10, 136–37, 156, 292–95; artistry, 103, Turpin, Ben, 272–73 107, 137, 147, 151–54, 187–88, 217–18, Twelfth Night, 106 283–84, 364; cliché, 159, 244; department, 118–20, 332–34; functions, 18, 98, 332–33, 364; illustrations in periodi- Ugrin, Anthony, 338 cals, 112–13, 119, 157; interiors, 205–6; Underwood & Underwood, 1–2, 4–6, 70, 86, montage, 182, 184; mutability of, 22; 163, 381n4 numbers generated per film, 244; per- United Artists, 149, 271 spective point, 110–11, 174–76, 204; rules Universal Studios, 5, 11, 87, 155, 158, 163–80, for, 157; scenic locales, 8, 22–23, 112; 331, 357 Westerns, 304–6, 314–15 “Still Photography Abreast of Talkies,” 16 Stone, Erick, 338 Valentino, Rudolph, 5, 149, 190, 236, 328; Stroheim, Eric von, 100; The Whip, 149 Camille, 191; Conquering Power, 6; Four Struss, Karl, 58, 145–47, 229, 352 Horseman of the Apocalypse, 187–88, 198, studio: chains, 86–89; motion picture, 69– 203–5; Monsieur Beaucaire, 340, 342; The 71, 78, 97–98, 118–20; photographic, 15, Sheik, 149 36–37, 43–44, 69, 70, 72–75, 77, 79–96 vamps, 5–6, 12, 82–84, 164–65, 195, 256 style, 4, 11, 16, 92, 122–23, 139–40, 150–54, Van den Broek, John, 58, 149–57 174–80, 190–91, 198, 366 Van Pelt, Homer, 286, 293–94, 338 Sunnyland Studio, 98 Van Rossem, Walter J., 338 Sunrise, 352–53 Vandamm, Florence, 242 Swain, Mack, 128 Vanishing American, The, 323–25 Swanson, Gloria, 146, 339, 341 Vanity Fair, 66, 221, 242, 285

400 Index Veidt, Conrad, 179–80 White, Clarence, 145 Vidor, King, 285, 292–93 White, Harvey, 344 Vienna, 245–46 White Moth, The, 138 Viera, Mark A., 13 White Sister, The, 274–78, 297–98 Views and Film Index, 106 White Studio, 225, 268 Vitagraph, 88, 106–10, 112, 118–20, 223; Vita- Wilde, Oscar, 40, 190–91, 207 graph Bulletin, 106 Willat, Edwin, 317–18 Vogue, 53, 63 Willat, Irvin, 129, 131 von Sternberg, Joseph, 59, 311 Willinger, Lazlo, 59, 102, 182 Voyage dans la lune, Le, 108 Wilson, Lois, 319, 342 Wind, The, 267, 295–98, 326, 328 Winning of Barbara Worth, The, 208, 326–28 Wagon Tracks, 309, 311–12, 317 wire services, 92 Walling, William, Jr., 102, 318, 320–22, 338; Without Benefit of Clergy, 139 acting career, 321 Witzel, Albert, 56, 72, 77, 78–86, 100, 124, Walling, William, Sr., 321 208, 233, 290, 349 Walsh, William S., 39 Wizard of Oz, 108, 154 War on the Plains, 306, 308 woman, 13, 60, 265–66, 296, 298; high soci- Warde, Frederick, 217 ety, 31, 34, 36–38, 48, 77; “new woman,” Warner, H. B., 236–37 194 Warner Brothers, 18, 120, 182, 292, 322, 344, Woodbury, James, 56, 98, 133–39 362 World War I, 146, 195–96, 223, 323, 351 Warrington, Charles, 233–35, 338 Worthington, Helen, 299–300 Waxman, Henry, 56, 98, 160, 266, 285–86, Wyckoff, Alvin, 141, 144–45 289–94, 338 Weber, Lois, 79 Weber & Fields, 128 Young, Clara Kimball, 81 Western, 295–97, 299–329, 352; B Westerns, 314–15, 326; influenced by Wild West Shows, 305 Ziegfeld, Florenz, 289 Weston, Edward, 54, 78, 92 Zukor, Adolph, 110, 113, 122, 331 What Price Glory, 349

401 Index