Background

Pearl White was born in Greenridge, Mo. Christened Pearl Fay, she was the third daughter and youngest of five children of Edward Gilman and Lizzie G. (House) White, of Irish, English, and Scottish ancestry. Her father was a farmer who later went into real estate and insurance in Springfield, Mo. , and served for a number of years as deputy assessor of Greene County.

Education

Pearl attended public schools in Springfield, entering high school there in 1903 but not completing it.

Career

Despite widely credited stories to the contrary, she had no experience in the entertainment world until, when about sixteen, she began playing small parts at the Diemer Theatre in Springfield. At eighteen she left home, against her father's strong objections, to perform in a series of stock and traveling companies. Having failed to crash Broadway, she was appearing in stock on the east coast when her voice began to fail and she decided to turn to the then silent motion pictures. Early in 1910 she started with the Powers Film Company in a converted livery stable on 2416t Street in the Bronx, New York City. Later she went briefly to the Lubin Company in Philadelphia and then did leads for Pathé Frères, who had opened an American studio in Jersey City. In the fall of 1912 she began a year and a half of pie-slinging roles in slapstick comedies, at the rate of one a week, for Crystal Films in the Bronx. At the beginning of 1914 she returned to Pathé and achieved fame as the heroine of The Perils of Pauline. Although this was not actually the first motion picture serial, its tremendous success quickly established it as the most celebrated one. Sponsored by the Hearst newspapers as a device to increase circulation, in imitation of the Chicago Tribune's profitable alliance with Selig's The Adventures of Kathlyn (the first true example of this new film genre), it received elaborate publicity; each of its twenty installments appeared simultaneously in the press and on the screen from the early spring to the close of 1914. During the next five years Miss White starred in several other serials for Pathé: The Exploits of Elaine, The Iron Claw, Pearl of the Army, The Fatal Ring, The House of Hate, The Lightning Raider, and The Black Secret. All followed the same pattern of action and suspense, usually in fifteen weekly episodes of two reels each, largely shot outdoors, with the blonde (and bewigged) Miss White jumping from flaming yachts at sea, adrift in balloons, changing airplanes in mid-air, trapped in rising water, falling into live volcanoes, and leaping from trains, until she became internationally identified with intrepid agility in response to danger. Each installment left her in apparently inescapable jeopardy, with the means of her last-minute escape not revealed until the following week. Though not nearly as athletic as was supposed, Miss White was eager to perform all these stunts herself, and it soon became a matter of proud publicity that she always did. But while she did do everything not involving actual danger, even being tied hand and foot and hung upside down, she soon became too valuable a property to take serious risks, and her later contracts with Pathé therefore required that doubles (usually male, costumed in her blonde wig and a duplicate dress) be used for anything hazardous. Even so, accidents occurred, the most serious being a fall down a flight of stairs while making The Perils of Pauline which left her with a permanent spinal injury and may have contributed indirectly to her relatively youthful death. Meanwhile, press agents arranged such public exploits as when, in April 1917, lashed to a steel girder, she was lifted to the twentieth floor of the Bush Terminal Building, then being erected on West 42nd Street, while she cast tiny American flags and recruiting circulars to 5, 000 astounded spectators below. The great popularity of these serials coincided almost exactly with the years of World War I, but whether they constituted a form of escapism from a world in travail or perhaps instead gave a sense of vicarious participation in the dangers of the day has been disputed. The fact that so many of her audiences were children and that suspense had long been a staple of popular fiction perhaps makes these sociological explanations unduly elaborate. More significantly, the fact that women were the heroines of these strenuous adventures may have been a reflection of the growing independence and resourcefulness of the American woman in that period. In any case, by enthralling millions of youngsters, and often their parents as well, both in the United States and abroad, Miss White became one of the best-known movie stars of her day. Longing for more dramatic roles, she signed with the Fox Film Corporation in 1919 and during the next two years starred in ten undistinguished feature films. After returning to Pathé for one last serial, Plunder, in 1922, she left the United States at the close of that year and for the rest of her life made her home in France. Having earned an estimated $2, 000, 000 between 1914 and 1924, she proceeded to enjoy life, dividing her time between Paris, a villa at Rambouillet, the Riviera, Deauville, Biarritz, and Cairo. She died of a liver ailment at the American Hospital in Paris at the age of forty-nine and was buried with Roman Catholic rites in Passy Cemetery.

Achievements

• Dubbed the "Queen of the Serials", White was noted for doing the majority of her own stunts in several film serials, most notably in The Perils of Pauline. Often cast as a plucky onscreen heroine, White's roles directly contrasted those of the popularized archetypal ingenue. Pearl White's place in film history is important in both the evolution of cinema genres and the role of women.

Works

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• book

  • Pearl White: Queen of the Serials

    (A look at the career of Pearl White through her early fil...)

Personality

A shrewd, determined, and hard-working woman, she was also frank, friendly, warm-hearted, humorous, and at times flamboyant. She was never a great actress, but the accident of being on hand when the vogue of serials started, combined with her willingness to tackle whatever was expected of her, won her permanent fame as the symbol of one era of the motion pictures.

Connections

On October 12, 1907, Pearl White had married Victor C. Sutherland, an actor from McCombs City, Miss. She divorced him in 1914. Her second marriage, to another actor, Wallace McCutcheon, about 1919, likewise ended in divorce, in 1921. She had no children.

Father:

Edward Gilman White

Mother:

Lizzie G. (House) White

Spouse:

Wallace McCutcheon

Spouse:

Victor C. Sutherland