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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 PickfordTheir First Role - part 1 of 2Moore and Pickford’s love for each other radiated on the silver screen. Audiences that crowded into crude ‘nickelodeon’ houses that were sprouting up across America began to recognise the girl with the golden curls and her rakishly good-looking hero. Their paycheques doubled and tripled as fan letters poured into the studio. The first movie stars were being created. Moore had come a long way from Fordstown in County Meath and the farm where he was born in 1886. The Moores emigrated to America when Owen was a boy. They teamed up with relatives in Toledo, Ohio. The Moore patriarch John Moore was not afraid of hard work but his skills lay with the land, and in this new city life he never managed to bring home more than a labourer’s wage that provided only the barest essentials for his family. But America had better to offer… as the Moore family was about to find out. An article in the movie fan magazine Photoplay would tell of this years later: ‘The Moore boys got something of an education, by the grace of God they didn’t need much – they were smart and quick… and Irish. They all took different trails out of Toledo with carnivals and one night stands.’ The brothers, Owen, Matt and Tom would all eventually make their way to Hollywood where each would find his share of fame in the young film industry. As Who’s Who on the Screen from 1920 reads, ‘Like many other stage and screen stars, Owen Moore is a son of Erin. When eleven years old, Owen arrived in America and a year later found him behind the footlights. He first attended school in Toledo, Ohio. More than ten years ago he sensed the possibilities of the screen and joined the old Biograph Company.’ Like Moore, Pickford’s early memories were of poverty and penny pinching. But things were also looking up for her now. She had made a name for herself in New York theatre literally, having changed her given name – Gladys Smith. She had taken it from the first half of her mother’s family name of Pickford Hennessy. Mary Pickford was a name that would become synonymous with the birth of Hollywood and the studio system. She would be the industry’s first great star and one of its earliest and smartest studio owners. “I took my name by which I have long been known to the public from my Irish grandfather, John Pickford Hennessy, who came out of a comparatively rich family from Tralee, County Kerry in the South of Ireland. My grandmother was also born in Tralee, but she was a miller’s daughter and very poor. Had the two of them remained in Ireland they would never have met; they moved in entirely different social worlds,” Pickford recalls in her autobiography. Pickford was just a child when she took her first acting role with the Cummings stock company in her home town of Toronto, Canada, in order to earn some much-needed money for the household. The family had been thrown into dire straits when her father died tragically young. A natural talent for the stage and a keen survival instinct led to New York and Broadway and star billing in a production of The Fatal Wedding. ‘Baby Gladys Smith is a wonder,’ proclaimed the show’s producers in handbills distributed around the theatre district. But a spell of unemployment followed and family funds were on a worrying retreat. It was then that her mother, a protective and strong presence throughout much of Pickford’s life, made what seemed to be a “shocking proposal”. She urged her daughter to look for work with the Biograph Studios – the moving picture people! Dreading the idea but feeling responsible for her siblings and mother, the youngster set out for an audition with the director D.W. Griffith at Biograph. She had some vague idea that moving picture people were a strange breed of vagabonds and hustlers, but a paycheque was a paycheque. That was the audition that would throw Pickford and Moore together and the first moments of a monumental Irish tale in Hollywood were written.
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