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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 PickfordHollywoodland - part 2 of 2By springtime of the year they were married Pickford and Moore were on their way to becoming the screen’s first stars. But Pickford’s wayward innocence and the blonde ringlets that flowed down her back were attracting much more notice than her screen partner. She had negotiated her weekly salary up to an unheard of $100 a week while Moore could do no better than $60. Moore was not happy. Angry at Biograph for what he perceived as an insult Moore orchestrated a move to a new studio, the Independent Motion Picture Company (IMP), which was willing to pay the popular screen couple a good deal more than Biograph. It was a disastrous move. This was the time of the film industry’s Patents War, a violent and traumatic chapter in the early motion picture industry. Moore’s ambitions landed the couple squarely in the middle of this ugly and all too dangerous feud. Biograph, Edison, Essenay and other picture companies had banded together to protect the patented process of film-making. They operated under the umbrella of the Patents Company Trust. Independent film companies that made movies outside the protection of this clique were treated as pirates, and The Trust did not fall short of protecting its hold on the film industry with violence. Gangs of paid thugs would descend on the ‘pirate’ film companies to smash equipment, threaten crew and actors and even beat them up if they tried to resist. IMP, Moore and Pickford’s new employer, was one of those outside the Trust. When IMP decided to move its operations to Cuba to avoid the violence of the Trust’s heavies, Moore and Pickford had to go along. Pickford’s mother, sister and brother went along on the trip also. It was on the trip to Cuba that Moore insisted it was time to bring the secret marriage out into the open. Mrs Pickford was taken aside and informed that the man she despised as a drinker was her son-in-law. She went berserk. Mrs Pickford took to her bed and cried for three days while Moore’s new brother- and sister-in-law took on a raging silence, refusing to speak to the couple for the rest of the journey. But the debacle aboard ship was nothing compared to the disaster that Cuba was to prove. It would be an understatement to say that Moore was in a sour mood when the company disembarked in Havana. And nothing about this venture was about to change that. He disliked the company’s director Thomas Ince, a man who would find his own place in Hollywood’s roll call of legend and have a street named after him today in Culver City. But as far as Moore was concerned Ince was an ill-mannered swine. Pickford too was unhappy at this “amateurish and boorish” IMP team, as she described it. One day on set Moore overheard an assistant of Ince’s insulting his wife and he floored him with a punch to the jaw. The local police were called and Moore made himself scarce. He managed to hide out until he and Pickford could smuggle aboard a passenger ship headed back to the USA. Safely back in America the couple joined up with the Majestic Film Company in Hollywood where Moore began to direct as well as star in the films he made with his wife. He directed Pickford in some memorable melodramas including the romance Love Heeds Not The Showers. But despite his newfound success as a director, Moore could not compete with the overwhelming love affair that the patrons of the nickelodeon houses were having with his wife. Sacks of fan letters were pouring into the company every day demanding to know who this girl was. In those days the flickers did not carry actors’ credits and the letters read simply, ‘Who is that girl with the golden curls?’ The star system was being born and Moore and Pickford were among its principal architects. But Moore hated playing second fiddle to his wife, and when newspapers started referring to Pickford as ‘America’s Sweetheart’ he comforted himself with drink. Moore then did the unthinkable. He broke up the screen partnership and went it alone with the Victor Film Company. Pickford returned to Biograph. For Moore the magic was gone: his screen fame was fading. Later in that year of 1912 there was a brief professional reunion between Moore and Pickford that spurred a new drive in his ambitions. The couple was contracted to an ambitious new film company, The Famous Players Company. They boasted the slogan ‘Famous Players in Famous Plays.’ Moore was cast alongside Pickford in the classic love story Caprice. He became her prince in Cinderella and her kingly Charles II in A Tale of a Merry Time ’Twixt Fact and Fancy. But the reunion was to be all too brief – doomed once again by Pickford’s ever-increasing star earning power and the jealousy and rage this raised in Moore.
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