Mary Pickford

A BORROWED BIRTH CERTIFICATE STARTED HER ON HER CAREER TO BE THE MOST FAMOUS WOMAN IN THE WORLD
 
Who is the most famous woman in all the world?
 
Frankly, I don’t know. But my guess would be that the title goes to a little Canadian Irish girl who weighs only one hundred and three pounds and who was christened Gladys Marie Smith.
 
Miss Smith went on the stage when she was very young. Fortunately, she came under the friendly and expert tutelage of David Belasco; and that master showman changed the uninspiring name of Gladys Smith into something more elegant and euphonious. Belasco called her Mary Pickford.

Mary Pickford was a star when Greta Garbo was still rubbing lather on men’s faces in a barber shop in Sweden. Her name was a household word long, long before Mae West was inviting us to come up and see her sometime.
 
She has been on the screen longer than any other motion picture star in the world. She was world-famous before Douglas Fairbanks stood, for the first time, in front of a camera. She was the highest-salaried player on the screen long before Charlie Chaplin ever saw Hollywood; she was lining ’em up at the box office before Tom Mix ever rode his first horse on to a motion picture lot.
 
Mary Pickford was earning her living when she was so young that she had trouble with the child-labor laws. Organizations such as the Gary Society in New York tried to keep her from acting on the stage. They said she ought to be learning arithmetic at school instead of strutting about in the theatre. So Mary fooled them. She had a cousin who was a year older than she was; she used her cousin’s birth certificate, and circumvented the minions of the law. That is why, to this day, "Who’s Who" and other directories give her age as being one year older than it actually is.
 
Mary Pickford’s grandfather was born on April 8th and her father also was born on April 8th. And by 1894 which was the year of Mary's birth it appears that April 8th had been sort of set aside by the Pickford family as a special day for bringing children into the world. So Mary's mother wanted to do what her mother-in-law had done. She wanted to give her husband a baby for a birthday present on April 8th. But, to everyone’s dismay, little Mary’s debut didn’t quite come off on schedule time.
 
Mary, as a matter of fact, didn’t arrive until 3:00 a. m. on April 9th; but the calendar and the clock were both ignored and her birthday was solemnly declared to be April 8th.
 
For more than a third of a century — or as long as her mother lived, the illusion was preserved, and the birthday continued to be celebrated on the 8th. But since her mother’s death, Mary has grown more exact and now celebrates her birthday on April 9th.
 
Few careers offer such striking contrasts as Mary Pickford’s.
 
At one time in her life, she did her own laundry, pasted her wet handkerchiefs on the window pane to dry and spent only ten cents a day for food. A dozen years later, she was making about $1,000 an hour or $15 a second. In the old days when she was jobless and homeless, her mother used to scrape together a few pennies and make hash for the children; and hash is still one of Mary Pickford’s favorite dishes. I have heard her say that she would rather have hash like her mother used to make than to dine on filet mignon or caviar.
 
How does the most famous woman in the world live? What does she do for pleasure?
 
Well, eating isn’t one of her pleasures. I dropped in to see her one day about six o’clock in the evening and she told me the only thing she had eaten all day was one slice of toast and a cup of tea. I asked her if she was hungry and she said, "No, not at all.”
 
Years ago, she read a book by Upton Sinclair called "The Jungle," and she has never eaten much meat since. The mere sight of a butcher shop window makes her ill for hours, so she always closes her eyes when she has to pass one. As a child, she used to play with a pet lamb; and every time she sees roast lamb on the table now, the memories of her childhood make it impossible for her to eat it. She never eats pork; and she can’t eat a fish that she has pulled out of the water herself; but she does eat fish that somebody else has caught.
 
Mary Pickford says that ambition is a curse. It drives you and possesses you and keeps you from doing the things you want to do. She likes to walk and ride horseback but she seldom has time to do either. She works from twelve to sixteen hours a day. She has two sets of secretaries, for she says she could never expect any secretary to work as hard or as long as she does.
 
She dislikes to waste a moment. She has a French traveling companion so she can polish up her French verbs even while she is traveling in her automobile.
 
She gets more mail than anyone else in the world. It would take her ten hours a day just to read her mail. The post office delivers it to her in great bags. She receives many begging letters. Her requests for money are ten times as great as her income.
 
Mary Pickford is real — the sort of person that you would love. Modest and sincere, she is totally unspoiled by any false ideas of her own importance. She told me she doesn’t even care whether there is so much as a gravestone to mark her last resting place.
 
As everyone knows, she has often played children s parts on the screen; and the reason that she did it was because she longed to capture, in the world of illusion, some of the fairy delights of childhood that had been denied her.
 
I asked Miss Pickford if there weren’t thousands of girls in America just as pretty and charming and capable as the stars in Hollywood. She said, "Yes, of course. Success, however, depends so much upon opportunity, and opportunity is just another name for what we call 'the breaks.’ So perhaps the stars in Hollywood are the persons with ability who got 'the breaks.’ ”
 
Mary’s father was a purser on a lake steamer running between Toronto, Canada, and Buffalo, New York. He was killed when Mary was four years old by a freak accident — by bumping his head against an iron pulley. His name was John Smith. How astonished John Smith would be if he could come back and find his little Gladys the most famous woman in all the world!