Mary Pickford: The Little Girl
93
she could secure a more prestigious position on Broadway. Griffith took
one look at her and said, “Y ou’re too little and too fat, but I may give
you a chance” (Eyman 37). Seeing possibility in the tiny woman with a
pleasant face, long golden curls, and a fiery personality, he offered her
five dollars a day, but she demanded ten, with a guarantee o f twenty-five
dollars a week. They struck a deal, and Griffith later recalled that he
hired Pickford “on her own terms” (Eyman 40). W hen Griffith was
directing her, she refused to look at him saying, “If I look at you, 1*11
imitate you, and I want to be m yself’ (Mary Pickford: Muse o f the
Movies ). Taken with her talent, naturalistic style o f acting, and exquisite
comic timing, Griffith began moving the camera closer to her face to
capture her expressions, ushering in a new style o f filmmaking.
Together, they pioneered the close-up, a way o f ffeezing time.
Over the next two years, Pickford went on to make many
approximately eighty shorts for Griffith, generating nearly a film a week,
and Americans feil in love with the diminutive actress who frequently
played the role o f a feisty young girl who had lost her family.
Throughout her movie career, which spanned twenty-three years, one
hundred twenty-five shorts, and fifty two feature-length films, Pickford
always drove a hard bargain, becoming the first actress to eam a million
dollars a year. Studio head Adolph Zukor once told her, “Mary,
sweetheart, I don’t have to diet. Every time I talk over a contract with
you and your mother I lose ten pounds” (W indeier 92), and Samuel
Goldwyn quipped, “It took longer to make M ary’s contracts than it did to
make her pictures” (W indeier 92). Pickford was Hollywood’s first major
celebrity, already making $2,000 a week when Chaplin was still doing
slapstick shorts for M ack Sennett (Lee 20). Neither she nor anyone eise
knew much about stardom, but she did get one thing right: fame is
fleeting. “I’ve always been scared to death,” she said. “I’ve always feit
that everything was luck and that every year was my last so that I’d
better make good” (W indeier 166). Pickford negotiated her deals with
rigor, urgency, and an anxiety that her career was only for the moment.
In other ways, Pickford sought to control time and recover a
childhood she never had. As biographer Scott Eyman reports, Pickford
was a driven actor and perfectionist, and her life was very regimented:
she “usually rose at 6:30, had breakfast at 7:00, was at the Studio from
8:00 A.M. to 7:30 P.M. Dinner would be at 9:00 or 9:30 and then to bed,
usually before 10:30 P.M.” (Eyman 158). “M y pictures were my whole
life, outside o f my family,” she said. “I never went any place. I never
went to cafes, restaurants, never went dancing, I had no social life