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This Chapter is from Emeralds in Tinseltown: The Irish in Hollywood, written by Steve Brennan and Bernadette O'Neill, and published by Appletree Press
Owen Moore and Mary PickfordScreen Lovers - part 1 of 2The moving picture business was a hit with the public from its beginning back in 1888 when inventor Thomas Edison announced, ‘I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.’ The public was intrigued. When a few years later he began producing what he called the Kinetoscope and installed just twenty-five of the machines in store fronts in New York, Chicago and Atlantic City, the movies had begun. Soon the first one-reel flickers such as The Great Train Robbery were packing audiences into cramped spaces with wooden benches to watch with awe and often terror the first moving pictures. Just a few years later the uncomfortable wooden benches were being replaced by stylish cushion seats in cavernous and luxurious cinemas that were being erected around America. One of the earliest of these picture houses was built in 1918 and dubbed ‘the million dollar theatre’ having cost a million dollars to build. The public appetite for this exciting new medium was patent and it wasn’t long before little studios began springing up in the cities of the eastern seaboard to feed the public demand for movies. But the exciting new medium put a serious crimp in the traditional form of public entertainment, Vaudeville. Audiences were being drawn away in droves from the vaudeville theatres and performers were cast out-of-work and often onto the street. It was a given that they would gravitate toward the moving picture craze that was sweeping the country. Out-of-work actors lined up outside studios with names like Biograph, Essenay, IMP. The pay was good if you could get work in the flickers – as much $5 a day. It was into this cauldron of change that a young Irishman called Owen Moore, a stage actor, was flung. Little could he have known that he would soon be a player in the birth of the American movie business, and in the foundation of the Hollywood entertainment empire. Owen Moore pulled up the collar of his coat against a New York winter wind and cursed himself again for choosing such a foul night to elope. It was January 1910 and icy damp numbed his face as he waited. Out of the gloom came the petite figure of a young girl. Wisps of blonde hair peeked from beneath the sealskin coat that she draped about her. The girl was Mary Pickford. In time she would be a legend in the annals of Hollywood. Tonight she was in love. She was seventeen and running away with her handsome Irish actor. A stinging New York drizzle was their confetti, and a ferry boat was their wedding carriage, as Owen Moore and Mary Pickford steamed up river to New Jersey to keep an appointment with a Justice of the Peace and share marriage vows in solemn secrecy. Later that night the bride would creep silently back into her family home, praying her mother would not awaken. The groom went away to find a bar and drink. They would share their secret with nobody, not family, not friend. They dared not risk the wrath of a woman who disliked Moore intensely. The woman was Mary Pickford’s mother Charlotte.
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