Mary Pickford’s mugshot: early Hollywood celebrities and San Quentin Prison

ABSTRACT

On a 1924 tour of San Quentin Prison, film star Mary Pickford sat to have her photograph taken in the studio of imprisoned photographer Sid Kepford, who was responsible for taking the prison’s mugshots. Pickford was far from the only motion picture celebrity to pass through the institution, however, and this article exposes the extent to which San Quentin was a destination for Hollywood’s actors and directors, who moved about the prison with great freedom due to the permission granted to them by star-struck wardens. This article places the Pickford photograph in a history of carceral images, outlines a history of film spectatorship at San Quentin, and reveals just how inviting the prison was to its panoply of Hollywood guests.

KEYWORDS:

• Mary Pickford
• motion picture celebrities
• mugshot photography
• nontheatrical exhibition
• prison tourism
• San Quentin Prison

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Fifty-one women were held at San Quentin in 1923, the year before Pickford’s visit (Bookspan 1991, 81).

2. For more on California’s subjection of Tongva, Chinese, Mexican, and other communities of color to repressive systems of carceral control, see Hernández (2017).

3. In the same year that Pickford toured San Quentin, Photoplay magazine published Stars of the Photoplay, which paired brief biographies of film stars with a photographic portrait of each performer. Pickford’s Stars of the Photoplay biography noted that she was ‘known in this and other countries as “America’s Sweetheart”’ and ‘recognized as one of the greatest screen stars’ (Photoplay Magazine, 1924, n.p.). See Figure 4 for Pickford’s Stars of the Photoplay portrait.

Figure 4. Mary Pickford in Stars of the Photoplay (Chicago: Photoplay Publishing Company, 1924), n.p. Photograph by Kenneth Alexander.

4. Pickford’s racial masquerade in orientalist films such as Madame Butterfly (1915) undoubtedly reinforced gendered perceptions of racial whiteness, allowing the circulation of what Yiman Wang describes as an ‘exotic femininity’ that leaves audiences ‘assured of the fundamental American universal’ (2010, 165). Nonetheless, Pickford’s later abandonment of these characters poses a representational problem as well, demonstrating the extent to which those earlier roles were nothing more than costumes that could be donned and then discarded when it became more gainful for the actress to promote herself as a symbol of white feminine innocence. Thank you to the anonymous reviewer who helped me clarify this point.

5. For more on whiteness and female film stardom as documented in 1920s fan magazines, see Frymus (2017).

6. I consulted copies of San Quentin’s Bulletin held at the California State Library in Sacramento, and there is a gap in the library’s holdings (and perhaps in the periodical’s publication) from 1925 to December 1931. The last film reviews published in the Bulletin appear in its May 1925 issue. 1925 is also the year that Johnston stepped down as the prison’s warden and was replaced by Warden Frank Smith. The last extant copies of the Bulletin are from 1936, and journalism was apparently dormant at San Quentin until 1941 when the first issue of a new publication, the San Quentin News, was released under Duffy’s wardenship.

7. For more on film exhibition in carceral spaces from the early- to mid-twentieth century, including the unequal power relations that shaped carceral spectatorship, see Griffiths (2016), Mitchell (2020), and Watabe (2021).

8. Houdini also had an important friendship with Warden Lewis E. Lawes of New York’s Sing Sing Prison, and Alison Griffiths shows that the magician performed escape tricks for an imprisoned audience there in 1924 (2016, 41).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joshua A. Mitchell

Joshua A. Mitchell is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His writing has previously appeared in Film History and American Periodicals.