Free American Lightning by Howard Blum

she stormed from the set.
    Shaking, raging, Mary was walking down East Fourteenth Street when D.W. caught up with her.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “You must forgive me. I know you can do that scene. Let’s try once more.”
    D.W. led her back to the studio. He didn’t bother with a rehearsal.
    “Come on, now,” the director instructed. “Let me see the real Pickford! I know you can do it!”
    The experience, the fight with D.W., had left Mary seething with emotion. Now she trembled at the sight of the gun and tears rushed down her face. Her fear was palpable. The scene played out perfectly. And D.W. had learned an important lesson about the efficacy of a director’s belligerent authority.
    Mary’s magnificent face, and the many animated masks she could put on at will, encouraged D.W. to try new things. “Come on, Billy,” the director ordered his cameraman late in the afternoon while they were shooting
Friends,
“let’s have some fun. Move the camera up, and let’s get closer to Mary.”
    It was a startling suggestion. But Billy Blizter carried the unwieldy one-hundred-pound camera forward and took the shot.
    It was the first close-up in the history of pictures. They viewed it that evening in the Biograph projection room.
    “Pickford, what do you think?” asked D.W.
    At first Mary had been disconcerted by the sight of her own face magnified on the screen. But she quickly grasped that such shots could be effectively used to communicate emotions. “I think you’ll do more of that, Mr. Griffith. Maybe even closer.”
    “You’re right, but something’s wrong with the makeup. Can you tell me?”
    “I think there’s too much eyebrow pencil and shadowing around my eyes.”
    “You’re right, Pickford.”
    In such a collaborative fashion, they made movies and invented an art.

    Working with D.W., Mary became the first movie star. The films gave no screen credits, and none of the players’ names were ever mentioned in advertisements, but that did not matter. Audiences recognized her face. They called her “Goldilocks” or “The Girl With the Curls.” Mostly, though, she was known as “The Biograph Girl.”
    Fan letters arrived at the Fourteenth Street brownstone. “You know,” a surprised yet impressed D.W. told his wife, “we are getting as many as twenty-five letters a day about Mary Pickford.”
    “Why, what do you mean, letters about her?”
    “Every picture she plays in brings a bunch of mail asking her name and other things about her.”
    “You’re not kidding?”
    “Of course not.”
    “Did you tell her?”
    “No. I don’t want her asking for a raise in salary.”
    But D.W. did not need to tell Mary. She would walk down Fourteenth Street or ride on the subway to her home in Brooklyn, and people would recognize her. It was not just gratifying; it was exciting. Mary, shrewdly, began to realize that her growing celebrity brought with it a commercial power. Audiences were going to theaters and nickelodeons to see her. She deserved a larger share of the money that was pouring in.
    She was already imagining a more glorious future. “Someday I am going to be a great actress and have my name in electric lights over a theater,” she said with complete assurance to a group of Biograph actors over dinner at Cavanagh’s on East 23rd Street. She had a vision of the movie star, the American idol, she would become. But Mary also understood that to achieve such transforming fame, she would need to burst out of D.W.’s controlling, and often patronizing, grasp.
    They argued, ostensibly about money. Mary was earning $100 a week in the fall of 1910 when Carl Laemmle’s Independent Motion Picture company (IMP) offered her $175. D.W. refused to budge. And IMP also promised to display her name in theaters. D.W.’s own name was not credited; he would not allow one of his players to gain recognition that was denied to him.
    But the roots of the breakup ran deeper. Mary felt her talents and her celebrity