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    Mary Pickford: Canada’s Silent Siren, America’s Sweetheart
    Mary Pickford: Canada’s Silent Siren, America’s Sweetheart
    Mary Pickford: Canada’s Silent Siren, America’s Sweetheart
    Ebook218 pages3 hours

    Mary Pickford: Canada’s Silent Siren, America’s Sweetheart

    By Peggy Dymond Leavey

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    About this ebook

    Mary Pickford’s ambition, passion, innate talent, and savvy business acumen sent her career into the stratosphere and set the blueprint for the modern movie star. Born Gladys Louise Smith in 1892, Pickford was raised in a house on University Avenue in Toronto and began her acting career on the stage. However, her determination led her to the new world of motion pictures, where she not only revolutionized acting method but negotiated her own terms for the highest salary for any actress and complete creative control over her films – unheard of behaviour for a woman of that period.

    Pickford co-founded United Artists in 1919 with Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin, which turned the existing studio system on its head. The actress’s subsequent marriage to Fairbanks incited a fan frenzy comparable to today’s obsession with couples like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Although Pickford’s star faded with the advent of talking pictures, she was the catalyst for the culture of Hollywood celebrity that enthralls us today.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDundurn
    Release dateSep 14, 2011
    ISBN9781459700765
    Mary Pickford: Canada’s Silent Siren, America’s Sweetheart
    Author

    Peggy Dymond Leavey

    Peggy Dymond-Leavey is a writer, poet, and storyteller. Her books for young people include Sky Lake Summer, The Deep End Gang, The Path Through the Trees, and Growing Up Ivy. She is the author of Quest biographies Mary Pickford and Laura Secord, which was a finalist for the Speaker's Book Award in 2013. Peggy lives in Trenton, Ontario.

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    • 4/5
      A good but brief biography on one of huge stars of the silent movie era.

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    Mary Pickford - Peggy Dymond Leavey

    you.

    Prologue

    One morning, late in the year 1899, Charlotte Smith answered a knock at the front door of her Toronto home. Charlotte was a pretty woman in her mid-twenties, just five feet tall, with lustrous blue-black hair and a pleasantly rounded figure.

    The stranger on the doorstep removed his hat. I’m here about the room, he said.

    Charlotte’s three young children pressed around her, filling the doorway, eager to see who the caller might be. The little one, three-year old Jack (or Johnny, as he was known when he was on his best behaviour), and Lottie, who was five, had escaped the clutches of their older sister, Gladys.

    Charlotte promptly lifted Johnny into Gladdie’s arms and shooed them all back inside.

    The sign in your window, Madam? You have a room for rent?

    Oh, I don’t rent rooms to gentlemen, sir, Charlotte said. I am a widow, you see. Except for little Johnny there, this is a household of women. I only ever take ladies as lodgers.

    But I am a married man, the stranger hastened to explain. My wife will be with me in the city, wherever I stay. May I bring her around to meet you? You’ll like her; I’m sure you will.

    The man introduced himself as Mr. Murphy, and sensing that the young landlady seemed likely to reconsider his request, he suggested that he come back later for her answer.

    Charlotte agreed and shut the door. Now there would be time to discuss the proposal with her invalid mother, Catherine Hennessey, who lived with her, and to confer with her sister Lizzie Watson, who lived next door to their Orde Street house.

    In the end, the family agreed that renting the master bedroom under these circumstances was quite acceptable, and they voted in favour of the well-dressed gentleman.

    It was impossible to know then, but by renting out the room to Mr. Murphy and his wife, Charlotte was setting in motion a series of events that would change the lives of the Smith family forever.

    1

    The Toronto Neighbourhood

    Mary Pickford was born at 211 University Avenue, Toronto, shown centre.

    Seven-year-old Gladys, so often in charge of her two younger siblings, had been born in a house on Toronto’s University Avenue on April 8, 1892, the same year that the first electric streetcar went into service in the city and Queen’s Park became the home of the provincial legislature.

    Mary’s birthplace, 211 University Avenue, was a tiny, two-storey brick row-house with only six rooms. There were no houses on the other side of the street, and out front the bridle path was shaded by flowering chestnuts and red maple trees.

    Gladys later had pleasant memories of sailing like the wind down that path on her bicycle. And such was her attachment to her first home that when the house was torn down in 1943, she had twenty of its bricks sent to her in California.

    But that was many years later, long after young Gladys Louise Smith had been dubbed America’s Sweetheart, and her name changed to Mary Pickford, known then as the highest paid woman in the world, now as the most powerful woman in the history of motion pictures.

    Gladys’s parents, John Charles Smith and Charlotte Hennessey, had both been born in Toronto, Charlotte possibly on Queen Street. John came from British Methodist stock. His father, Joseph Smith, had come to Canada from Liverpool, England, as an infant. John’s mother was Sarah Key, who had been born in London and arrived in Canada when she was six years old. Sarah Key Smith would attend the same Methodist church in Toronto for the next eighty years and live to the age of ninety-one.

    Charlotte’s family were Irish Catholics. Her mother, Catherine Faeley, had come to Canada from Tralee, in County Kerry in the south of Ireland. She had met John Pickford Hennessey, another immigrant from County Kerry, in Quebec.

    Until she married John Smith, around 1890, young Charlotte Hennessey had been a devout Catholic, educated by the nuns at the convent school she attended in Toronto. Charlotte was living with her older sister, Lizzie, and Lizzie’s husband, William Watson, when she first met John. Catherine Hennessey, the girls’ mother, a widow since 1882, also shared their home.

    In those days, Charlotte made her living as a seamstress, having learned the skill in the convent. After John and Charlotte married, they moved up the block from the Watsons, and Catherine Hennessey moved with them.

    John Charles Smith was one of twelve children. He was a short man with a slight build. His eldest daughter, Gladys, would inherit his rippling, golden brown hair, his delicate hands. He was good-looking, funny, and although he was often described as a dreamer, everyone seemed to like John and wanted to help him. Unfortunately, he also had a fondness for the drink.

    John Charles could turn his hand to any type of work. He’d been a salesman, a farm worker, a cowboy, a stagehand, a bartender, and after marrying Charlotte, he had clerked at a candy and fruit counter in a fish shop. At the time of Gladys’s birth, he was working as a printer.

    Little Gladys adored her father, but she found his mother, Grandma Sarah Key Smith, quite formidable, as straitlaced as Queen Victoria, whom the young Gladys thought she resembled. The child remembered fleeing out of the way of dour Grandma Smith whenever the woman visited the house, garbed in her usual black dress and purple taffeta petticoats that rustled when she walked.

    According to Gladys, one thing Grandma Smith could not stand was to see anyone enjoying themselves on the Sabbath.

    "There was very little a family like ours could do on a Sunday," Mary Pickford later wrote in her memoir, Sunshine and Shadow. Taking the beltway trolley that circled Toronto was about the only amusement. But that was enough for Grandma. For years she served on a citizens’ committee to urge passage of a law against the operation of streetcars on the Sabbath.

    When Gladys was about two, the family moved to a small house on Walton Street. Although the births of the two younger Smith children were never registered, Lottie, named Charlotte after her mother, was born sometime in June, 1893, and Johnny or Jack, probably in 1895.

    Of her two parents, the young Gladys loved her father best. Her mother was always too busy to play with her, having three children to look after. For Charlotte, there was the endless washing, cooking, and sewing to do, as well as her own mother to care for.

    But Gladys’s more happy-go-lucky dad could always find the time to play. She used to love to walk up to Queen’s Park with him and wander among the tulips, share a drink of ice-cold water from the copper cup that hung suspended on a chain at a fountain there, or go tobogganing in High Park.

    Late in the 1890s, John Smith got hired on as a purser with Niagara Steamship Lines on one of the holiday paddle steamers that crossed Lake Ontario between Toronto and Lewiston, New York. One day, while working on the Corona, where he ran a candy counter, he bounded down the stairs to the lower deck and hit his head on a dangling iron pulley, causing a fatal blood clot in his brain. He died on February 11, 1898. His death certificate gives his age as thirty.

    Although Mary Pickford never wrote of it in her memoirs, John Charles Smith, the good-natured dreamer, had skipped out on his young family three years before the accident. Ever since, Charlotte had referred to herself as a widow. It was considered more respectable to be widowed than abandoned, in Victorian times.

    John may have come back home sometime after his injury, because he died in the house with his family nearby. Gladys remembered hearing her mother’s screams the night he passed away. She recalled getting out of bed and going to look in the door of the room where her father lay — sleeping, she thought. Charlotte’s hysterical screaming and pounding on the wall petrified the child, and it was her Aunt Lizzie who came and took Gladys away to comfort her.

    Subsequently, the children were sent to live in various other households until Charlotte was able to bring her grief under control.

    Sometime after John’s death, the family moved farther up the block on Walton Street. They had gone through all their savings by the time John died. Nearly destitute, in spite of the collection the people in the neighbourhood had taken up for them, the family moved yet again to 9 Orde Street, next door to Lizzie. Charlotte managed to find work in a grocery store and took in sewing at night to try to provide for her family. Regardless, the neighbours occasionally had to step in with food for the children.

    Gladys was old enough to remember her father as he was in happier times, and it was always with great affection. It had never been a secret that Lottie, Gladys’s sister, who was younger than her by only fourteen months, had been John’s favourite.

    They’d all heard the story often enough: Money, already scarce, had been even more so by the time Lottie arrived in 1893, and Charlotte had bemoaned the fact that now there was another mouth to feed. Besides, she’d hoped this baby would be a boy. John was hurt by her disappointment. Never mind; from that day forward the young father would never let Lottie forget that one of her parents loved her. She was Papa’s own little baby. My Chuckie baby.

    Gladys remembered how she and Lottie used to go to meet their father when he got off the streetcar each evening. Lottie was the one he’d scoop up in his arms, while Gladys, the little martyr, held back and waited for her father to come to her.

    As a young child, Gladys’s health was delicate, and she was often sick. She was frequently anemic, and at one time or another, she had been stricken with diphtheria, tuberculosis, pneumonia, as well as some undetermined nervous disorders. Because of Gladys’s precarious health, Aunt Lizzie and Grandma Hennessey tended to spoil and pamper the child, which may have helped to ease any jealousy Gladys felt toward her younger sister.

    After a visiting priest had one day discovered the household under quarantine, Gladys had been baptized Catholic and her middle name changed to Marie. Four-year-old Gladys had black diphtheria, and the priest had feared for her young soul.

    According to a later story, Charlotte never informed her husband of this hasty baptism, and after his death she had all three children baptized as Protestants, as a tribute to his memory.

    Charlotte had taken Gladys a number of times over the years to consult with Dr. George B. Smith, the head of the children’s hospital in Toronto. He and his wife were a wealthy, childless couple, and one day, well aware of the family’s dire financial straits, Dr. Smith asked Charlotte if she would consider allowing him and his wife to adopt Gladys. He assured her that the child would be loved as their own and given all the material comforts Charlotte was unable to provide.

    Charlotte refused at once. But when she later told her sister Lizzie about it, Lizzie criticized her for turning down the doctor’s offer. Had Charlotte really been thinking about what was best for Gladys?

    Sick at heart, Charlotte dressed her eldest child in her Sunday best and took her back to Dr. and Mrs. Smith’s house for an interview. It was a large, comfortable home, and while they were there, the little girl was shown the bedroom that would be hers should she decide to stay.

    You can have anything you want, Gladys, the couple promised.

    Can I have a pony and cart? And chicken and ice cream every day?

    Most certainly, was the answer.

    Charlotte said nothing; the choice was going to be up to Gladys to make.

    Later, waiting with her mother for the streetcar, the child chattered on about how thrilled Jack and Lottie were going to be about that pony and cart, how she would share the chicken and ice cream with her mother and Grandma Hennessey. That was when she learned her brother and sister were not going to be there to share in the doctor’s largess. Gladys would no longer be part of their family, Charlotte explained. She would be Dr. and Mrs. Smith’s little girl.

    Gladys burst into tears at the prospect, and throwing her arms about her mother’s neck, begged to be taken home.

    That’s the end of that then, Charlotte declared. There will be no more of that nonsense. And she vowed to tell Lizzie a thing or two when they got back.

    Mary Pickford later acknowledged that that was the day when she became determined to take her beloved father’s place in the family. She would be the one to keep them from ever breaking up. Gladys would be a child no longer. Instead, she became her mother’s little helper, more a contemporary than a daughter, and as her love for her mother grew deeper, so too did the fear that she would one day lose her.

    For a few months one winter, Gladys and Lottie attended the Louisa Street School in Toronto, where their father and all his brothers and sisters had gone. Because Charlotte had to be up and off to work by the time the little girls got themselves washed, dressed, and out the door in the morning, they were often late for classes.

    One day, the principal, Miss Adams, fed up with their tardiness, threatened to punish the girls the next time they were late. She scared them half out of their wits with a story of a big black wagon, sent by the devil, which would come to collect them, and how they’d never see their mother again.

    In terror, the two children ran out of the school into the sub-zero weather, without even putting their coats and leggings back on. When they tumbled, wide-eyed and out of breath, into the house again, they found their mother was there, having returned for something she’d forgotten. After hearing what had happened, Charlotte, who was silently seething, got the two dressed and marched them back to the school.

    Miss Adams did not deny that she’d told the story to frighten the children, but she defended herself by saying that what they really needed was a good, sound thrashing.

    Charlotte informed Miss Adams that if ever she laid a hand on either child, Charlotte would go to the school board and lodge a complaint against her.

    For weeks after the incident, Gladys had nightmares, waking in the night, screaming about the big black wagon. She stopped eating, and eventually the doctor advised Charlotte to take her out of school altogether. She was so often sick that she was frequently absent anyway. Later, Charlotte bought some text books, and wherever they happened to be, taught the three children their lessons herself. She had had the benefit of a good education at the convent

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