YOUNG, Gwenda

Hollywood’s Royalty: “Doug and Mary”

 

Before Brangelina, before TomKat, there was “Doug-and-Mary”, a couple so feted in the 1920s that they seemed like Hollywood’s version of royalty.  Already major stars when they met in 1915, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were accustomed to living out their lives in the glare of publicity. When they married in 1920, however, they became Hollywood’s first über couple. For the next decade, the popular press was prolific in its relaying of the details of the ebullient Doug’s wooing of the demure Mary; of heartbreak as they struggled to contain their feelings; of hasty disposal of their respective spouses; of a blissful marriage in which each performed an agreed role; of their contented domesticity as they ruled over the kingdom of ‘Pickfair’. For Hollywood chronicler Adela Roger St John, the marriage of Doug and Mary was “a great love-poem in the practical, difficult, much-discussed relation of modern marriage.”

Examining contemporary fan and women’s magazines such as Photoplay, Screenland, Ladies Home Journal, as well as selected mainstream publications, my paper charts the history, construction and eventual destruction of this celebrity couple. With Fairbanks represented as a mercurial Peter Pan, a devoted husband and a prankster, and Pickford variously cast as the “eternal Madonna,” the “little woman” and “the Disraeli of the household,” the discourse surrounding the Pickford-Fairbanks marriage (and their attendant celebrity) intersected with some of the debates – on gender roles, marriage, business and leisure, youth and the body – that helped to define American society of the 1920s.

 

Dr. Gwenda Young is a Lecturer in Film Studies, University College Cork, Ireland.