As the sun came up over 1913 America it would find Douglas Fairbanks, the man who would soon be Silent Hollywood’s most favored leading man, wowing the crowds on Broadway. Hawthorne of the U.S.A. starred Fairbanks in the title roll and closed after 72 performances; he was also married to a woman who wasn’t named “Pickford” – but rather named Anna Beth Sully, who had sired his namesake. Life was good for the actor and he wouldn’t turn his gaze West for another two years. By contrast, his future bride, Mary Pickford (né Gladys Smith, 1892 – 1979) had been prancing before the cameras since 1909 and by the time 1913 rolled around had appeared in well-over 100 short films and earned the nickname “Little Mary”.
1913 was also the year that Cecil B. DeMille and Dustin Farnum first stepped onto the dry, manure-strewn streets of Hollywood, California in order to start production on the very first feature-length film, The Squaw Man
“The craze for ‘Westerns’ was so great that cattlemen suffered a labor problem due to the cowboys trying to get into the ‘movies’.”
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