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Populär Culture Review
whatsoever. M y whole life was wrapped up in the Creative. The career is
a very exciting thing. In fact, it’s a monster. It possesses you, body and
soul” (Eyman 158). Because Pickford began acting in plays and movies
at such a young age in order to Support her family, she never had a real
childhood, and her career offered her little leisure time. Thus, she
immersed herseif in her little-girl movie roles, which gave her the
opportunity to go back in time and experience on screen a childhood and
carefree life she never had. There she could run, get dirty in the mud,
ride ponies, play games, tussle with boys, flirt a little, act tough, and let
o ff steam. H er approach to filmmaking exemplified the intensity of
trying to pack everything in, which resonated with early film audiences.
As Powell theorizes, the emerging modern society was obsessed with a
temporal paradox: “we require less time to travel, communicate, to
produce and consume, but then this time ‘saved’ is countered by the
quest to pack in ever more things to each temporally charged moment
because we can” (Powell 26-27).
Even in the great romance o f Mary Pickford’s life, time imagery
played a m ajor role. In late 1916, while Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks
were strongly attracted to one another but still married to their first
spouses, Fairbanks’s estranged mother, Ella Fairbanks, died suddenly. At
the fiineral, Fairbanks showed no emotion, but a few days later, as he and
Pickford were driving through Central Park, he began to weep
uncontrollably. As Pickford tried to comfort him, she noticed that the
clock on the car’s dashboard had stopped at the precise hour o f Ella
Fairbanks’s death. According to Pickford biographer Scott Eyman, Mary
and Douglas, who used the pet names “Hipper” and “Duber” for one
another, “took this as a sign from beyond, a justification and
sanctification o f their growing love for each other. In years to come,
whenever their love needed to be stressed to one another, either verbally
or in letters or telegrams, they would say ‘by the clock’” (112). They
exchanged this phrase regularly, even after Pickford filed for divorce in
1934 and they subsequently married other people. Their divorce became
final on January 10, 1936, and when Fairbanks suffered a fatal heart in
December 1939, he was still using it: he told his brother Robert, “If
anything happens to me, I want you to give Mary a message. Teil her By
the Clock" (251). Robert Fairbanks delivered it the next day. In later
years, Pickford would suggest that she could stop time in her mind. She
said o f the vibrant Fairbanks, “He was a little boy, always . . . He was
just in life as he was on the screen” (Whitfield 162).