ABSTRACT
The San Francisco News Letter likewise reported that socialite women traded in their privilege for an excuse to deign themselves in the presence of a “movie queen” and to reveal themselves as fans (“High Class” 1918). This chapter explores the political import of live film star appearances during the Liberty Loan Bond Drives of 1917 to 1919. Adhering to a policy of neutrality during the start of World War I in Europe, upon US intervention the Wilson administration faced the task of reshaping public opinion in support of the war. Part of the government’s propaganda campaign involved the recruitment of the film industry and its biggest stars-Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford, also known as the “Big Three”—to lend their celebrity capital for the purposes of war mobilization. In short, stars toured the country appearing live before massive crowds to whom they preached the virtues of Liberty Bond investments, thrift, and Americanization. In discussing this case study, I am interested in problematizing liveness in
early film stardom as a discursive mechanism of political authority. By liveness, I mean film stars appearing before the public as themselves. A distinction exists between liveness in stage performance and the film star appearing live as the “real” person, or more accurately within the confines of a persona, which appears as real to the spectator. I focus on the live film star persona as a phenomenon in the 1910s that operated within the interstices of filmic texts, the beginnings of celebrity journalism, and, for the first time, the public sphere. Of course, live star appearances were mediated for the much larger nonpresent public, while publicity efforts by exhibitors and studios also anticipated them. Experiential understandings of live appearances inhabited most people’s imaginations of what it would be like to see the star through their screen memories. I consider live appearances with respect to two methodological issues. The first concerns thinking about how live appearances by silent film stars figure into calculations of the star image in a way that might respond to Janet Staiger’s call to treat a history of cinema less in terms of film history and more in terms of media history (2004, 127). The corporeality of live star bodies in the public sphere during the Liberty Loan tours signified more than film’s arrival into the pantheon of communications. I argue that political authority of entertainment celebrity was written into the construction of stars at the moment they began to appear live on behalf of the nation for war mobilization. Put another way, live appearances by stars articulated model citizenship in the public sphere for the first time during the war. Given film’s entrance into a media environment characterized primarily by the rhetorical practices of political elites-which is to say long-standing traditions of print and oratory and renegotiations with the rhetorical salience of images-I treat the newfound political authority conferred on popular culture’s emissaries as a cultural technology expedient for the propaganda campaign of the moment. At the same time, celebrity political authority comes on to the scene in everyday life as a regulatory guide to behavior. In thinking about stardom in a historically specific case but also the broader category of celebrity as a cultural technology, I highlight, first, the reproducibility of celebrity as image constituting a culturally valorized form of visibility that communicates meanings distinct to the celebrity in question. Second, and consequently, I call attention to the celebrity testimonial deployed as a form of power in the naturalization of particular meanings. When this happens as policy in conjunction with the state, celebrity as a central part of popular culture, to borrow from Tony Bennett, is “brought within the province of government” in the management of populations (1995, 18). This represents a move away from the dominant propaganda model of centralized top-down power toward a reconceptualization of the relationship of the state to popular
culture in terms of governmentality. In other words, the government’s success with its domestic propaganda campaign may be understood vis-à-vis its ability to diffuse culturally its policy objectives by inviting apparatuses of popular culture (managed independently) to aid in the formation of patriotic subjects who “voluntarily” financed the war. If, as media theorists might argue, existing relations of social power are disrupted when new uses of technology arrive on the scene, then we might expect to find resistance to the idea of film stars as sources of political authority, given persistent attitudes respecting distinctions between high-and lowbrow cultural tastes and steadfast policy initiatives to censor and reform cinema in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Unsurprisingly, we do not find signs of disapproval in the trades or the dailies for the most part, which brings me to my second methodological issue: apprehending liveness as a construction by film industry press and print dailies during wartime. Here I simply wish to reiterate Donald Crafton’s warning to scrutinize our faith in the early presses to speak for audiences. More to my point, Crafton notes that film industry professionals and publicity personnel “have been instrumental in trying to shape films’ critical evaluation” (1996, 462). Anthony Slide puts it this way: “Page after page of early trade periodicals is filled with the most unbelievable nonsense” (1978, 122)! The film industry, from the start of World War I and throughout US intervention, worked relentlessly through the trades to declare its value to the government as on a par with the written word, then ultimately superior to it. This was, in part, a strategy to win essential industry status (DeBauche 1997), but it was also an industry-wide ethos responding to an unprecedented opportunity made by wartime conditions: at stake was the industry’s utility to political elites and the reimagining of cinema as a cultural form equivalent to or better than other venerable modes of persuasion, expressions of national identity, and tools for political and cultural policy. To be sure, the dailies and industry trades detailing the stars’ involvement in the bond drive tours are rife with celebratory hyperbole during a period, first of anti-interventionist sentiment, and later of increasing bond fatigue, trends that are evident through discursive fissures found in other contemporary historical documents. Thus the press, and particularly the trades, must be read with these competing realities in mind. The public’s initial fascination with film actors coincides with an important history of industry strategy designed to create star value, which began years before the stars were called upon to do their “bit.” The ontological underpinning of the star image is the idea that fans, in varying degrees, want to know who the person behind the screen image “really is”; thus they turn to extratextual discourses such as fan magazines to gain the dope on the star. Before
studios identified their players, curious fans sought out information about their favorite players by pestering exhibitors, writing to studios, and turning to the industry’s trade publications (Bowser 1994). The public’s exuberance with the stars’ private lives was largely circumscribed by fan magazine discourses starting in late 1910, which became a strategy to control knowledge about the star (deCordova 1990), except for the advent of live star appearances in theaters to promote their films. But these appearances were restricted geographically to big cities so that very few fans could actually glimpse their screen idols in public. Prior to 1910 people living in or visiting New York City could manage fairly easily to watch a film being made or even to meet movie actors, “most of whom,” Kathryn Fuller writes, “had the same meager celebrity as traveling stock-company performers” (1996, 129). Richard Abel’s work (2006) affirms that the first live appearances by film stars date back to the IMP stunt in 1910 during which Carl Laemmle publicized Florence Lawrence, formerly “the Biograph Girl,” by faking her death in a news story, only to resurrect the “film star” in a series of articles published in the St. Louis Times. Stories published in advance alerted fans to her two-day live appearance upon which she was greeted at the train station, allegedly, Abel points out, with a reception comparable to that given to President Taft or Commander Peary (232).1 The stunt spawned others and by 1913, stars were touring theaters to promote their films, attending balls sponsored by the various segments of the industry, and making appearances on behalf of their studios at the exhibitors’ trade conventions. The exhibitors’ national conventions started in 1910. Star appearances privately wooed the exhibitors who, like the public, held their favorite stars in high esteem. Essanay was the first to capitalize on this strategy at the second annual convention held in Chicago. Having set up an “office” at the La Salle hotel in Chicago, the studio provided refreshments, handed out souvenirs, and made sure popular stars from its eastern stock company were there to “welcome and meet the exhibitors and their friends personally” (“Essanay’s” 1912). “Room 1811,” as it was called, was such a success that it initiated an industry standard. The following year, studios assigned themselves days (e.g., Biograph Day, Vitagraph Day) during which they publicized that exhibitors and the public would have a chance to meet “the players who have been their favorites for so long but who until recently existed as unnamed personages” (“To Entertain” 1913). Within two years, the crowds grew so big that the convention was augmented with an exposition to accommodate the public but also to provide exhibitors’ privileged spaces to conduct their business dealings, including chances to meet the stars privately. In 1916, the Exhibitors Herald claimed that a quarter of a million people attended the Chicago Exposition (“Film History” 191b, 17).
