ABSTRACT
The Mary Pickford-Douglas Fairbanks pairing was just one example of high-profile personal and professional partnerships that proliferated in early Hollywood. Pickford and Fairbanks's 1920 working European honeymoon and the hyperbolic media coverage thereof meant that they returned to a US press and public prepared to overlook their extramarital liaison and embrace their compelling and lucrative partnership. Pickford and Fairbanks's love story exemplified the newly emergent twentieth-century ideal of the companionate marriage—a more equitable partnership in which romantic and sexual love figured prominently alongside other economic, social, and political considerations. Based at Pickfair and running their own studio, they emerged as international symbols of a rising American empire and dignitaries of a new cultural and social elite. In 1926, Pickford and Fairbanks memorably visited the Soviet Union. Footage shot during Pickford and Fairbanks's 1926 trip was incorporated into the Soviet film Potseluy Meri Pickford (The Kiss of Mary Pickford).
