Boxoffice - August 2019

Mary Pickford is an inspiration to women today, especially to me, being a woman
at MGM. She helped me believe that hard work pays off, no matter what gender
you are. I keep that in my mind each day, and I hope it remains an example for
women of all generations. –Lori Silfen, EVP Head of Music, MGM
explains Beauchamp “There was no other actress who parlayed
her success into producing, creating United Artists. It was not
just to maximize the income, but it was also to
protect her ability to control her own product.
One of the things that happened to some
of these women actresses in the teens,
they were typecast so quickly. Once the
profits were maximized,” the studios
would move on to the next actress. As
a part of UA, Pickford would control
not just her image but other aspects
of the films she produced. Beauchamp
tells a story about an assistant director
at Pickford-Fairbanks Studios laying out the
difference between Pickford and her husband:
“Doug would just say, ‘Oh, get the best
lighting people you can get!’ And
Mary would come along and say,
‘Wait, you have three electricians
working today. Couldn’t we make
do with two?’”
Mary Pickford made her final
film in 1933: Secrets, a Frank
Borzage talkie with Leslie Howard.
Popular wisdom would have
it that Pickford, no longer the
“modern woman” that audiences
wanted to see on the silver screen,
slid gracefully into retirement.
That, Beauchamp emphasizes, is
decidedly not the case. She stayed
active with United Artists well
into the 1950s, “bringing in people
or advising people and choosing
films and how much to spend on
them.” She had a separate production
arm with Jesse Lasky, with whom she produced
several films. Those films “had nothing
to do with her. But she would read the script,
help choose the directors, etc. She was very
active in that,” explains Beauchamp.
Pickford was an integral part of the wider film industry as
well. She was one of the 36 original members of the Academy
of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, founded in 1927. She
was an early proponent of an Academy Museum. She was a
co-founder and very active member of what is today the
Motion Picture Television Fund, a charitable organization
built to help film professionals in dire financial
straits. Pickford, in fact, devoted much of her time and
resources to philanthropy, donating her famous Pickfair—the
mansion she shared with Fairbanks when they
were married—for “dozens of events each year,” says
Beauchamp. This was a place thought of as the “Western
White House,” the “Buckingham Palace of America”—but
instead of selling it after her divorce, she would
regularly donate it as a site for parties for blind
veterans. “Sometimes she’d be there, sometimes
she wouldn’t. But she’d open it up. She’d pay
for the catering. She would take care of different
things, because she knew the cachet
of having a charity event at Pickfair was
immeasurable,” says Beauchamp.
“The more I learn about Mary, the more
respect I have for her, because of the wide
array of hats she wore and what she was
able to pull off, very much at certain points
alone, and certainly oftentimes the only
female voice in the room,” says Beauchamp.
“One of the things I really admire about her
is that she never forgot the poverty of her early
years. The Motion Picture Television Fund
was started by her putting out buckets on the
set—‘Hey, give me spare pennies! We have
to take care of our own.’ In the minutes of
[a] United Artists [meeting], somebody
said, ‘Well, we can cut back here. We can
cut back there.’ And Mary says, ‘Wait a
minute. These are employees who have
been working with us for at least a decade,
if not more. They are counting
on us. These are our people. I love
them. We have to protect them.’”
AUGUST 2019
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