Florence Lawrence, the first movie star, was murdered by her producers. But Florence Lawrence was resurrected after a few days, which was great news for the box office.
Her brothers called her Floie, but she was Queenie to her mother and, for some reason, Mike to her husband. Florence Lawrence, whose real name was Florence Annie Bridgwood, was known in many different ways throughout her life, one of the richest and most interesting in that proto-Hollywood whose foundations she helped lay.
In the year 2000, film historian William J. Mann published The Biograph Girl, a curious mixture of fact and fiction that presents more than one interesting parallel to the work done by Joyce Carol Oates in her controversial Blonde, which appeared practically at the same time. In a sense, Lawrence's and Marilyn Monroe's are parallel lives, although the former can be considered the original mold from which the dream factory (or, if we are to listen to Oates, nightmares) would manufacture all its subsequent stars.
Born in Ontario back in 1886, this precocious acting phenomenon made her stage debut at the tender age of three, when her mother, a vaudeville actress, invented a choreography to show off both of them. Soon after, posters for her family show began announcing her as “Baby Flo, the Child Wonder,” the first of her many stage names. After temporarily leaving the theater for school, Florence Lawrence found herself in the right place, New York, and at the right time, as the fledgling film industry offered a world of possibilities for a twenty-something veteran actress. It is necessary to take into account that, around 1905, the movie business had just declared war on Thomas Edison and his monopolistic practices, so it was not difficult to find a production company in the Big Apple willing to pay between two and five dollars an act in front of a primitive cinematograph camera.
Thus, Lawrence shot almost forty single-reel short films for Vitagraph Studios, one of Edison's main rivals, while she convinced herself that she was only doing it to pay the bills while she waited for her big break on Broadway. After several failed attempts in half-baked musicals, some of which forced her to go on a tour of the provinces in undesirable conditions, the actress decided that her future was in the cinematograph. Vitagraph welcomed her back with open arms, especially after she told her bosses that she knew how to ride a horse: from then on, almost all of her roles for the company were in adventure films where there was never a shortage of narrative excuses to make. practice her riding skills.
In those early days, movies still didn't have anything remotely resembling opening credits. Audiences couldn't care less who was responsible for what was still considered cheap and fleeting entertainment, so director D.W. Griffith, set to be one of the medium's first auteurs, had to do some real detective work to find out. cast Florence Lawrence in his western The Girl and the Outlaw (1908). Since Griffith worked for Biograph Pictures, a competing studio based in the Bronx, the deal was carried out with the utmost discretion, although Vitagraph knew it had lost its biggest asset the moment Lawrence had a deal on the table. offer of, attention, 25 dollars per movie. It was the beginning of a fruitful professional relationship with Biograph, with whom she came to shoot around a hundred films in less than a year and a half. One of them, entitled Resurrection (Griffith, 1909) and inspired by Tolstoy's novel of the same name, became so popular with the public that the studio's offices were flooded with letters from her admirers. They claimed to know the identity of "the Girl from Biograph", as she came to be known at the time, but her bosses felt that it was better to keep it a secret: on the one hand, many of her colleagues were so ashamed that they had lowered themselves to acting in films that they preferred total anonymity; on the other, there was the danger that Florence Lawrence would start to think that 25 dollars were not enough.
Of course, it was like trying to plug a crack in the Hoover Dam with your finger. After Resurrection, The Girl from Biograph began to be stopped on the streets of New York, which prompted her to ask for better salary conditions. They guaranteed it to her, but later she and other performers under contract with the company organized to demand more freedom when choosing projects. Biograph Pictures fired them on the spot. It was then that a young businessman of European origin named Carl Laemmle decided to take advantage of the situation to lure Lawrence to his newly founded Independent Moving Pictures with the promise of accrediting her in all the films she made for him. By the time he did, it was clear what her next step must be: kill her.
In early 1910, Laemmle leaked to the press a rumor that Florence Lawrence, the famous Biograph Girl, had been hit by a car. Her fans (the first fans any movie actress had ever had) were absolutely devastated: they finally knew the name of someone they were unfortunately never going to see action again. A few days later, the producer bought an advertisement in the country's main newspapers. "We have slipped you a lie," she stated about the illustration of a smiling brick: Lawrence was not only alive and kicking, but she had just signed an exclusive contract with IMP, a new studio where she would finally enjoy the recognition she always had. deserved. Since much of the public did not know which of the two versions of the story to believe, Carl Laemmle decided to organize, in March 1910, a meeting between his star and the good people of St. Louis, Missouri. When Florence Lawrence's train pulled into the station, the actress thought that these citizens were really anxious to get to their respective jobs on time, since they kept shouting and jumping on each other.
"No, Miss Lawrence," replied the head of IMP that Laemmle had hired for the occasion. "They are like this to see you."
What happened that day in St. Louis marked the birth of the fan phenomenon. When Laemmle learned that an angry mob tore the actress's coat to pieces, everyone wanting to touch her to make sure she was really alive and there, his response was to double the number of scheduled public appearances Florence Lawrence had over the next few weeks. , exaggerating the reactions of the crowd in each of them. By the time IMP released its first film with the actress, whose name appeared on all the billboards for the first time, the concept of the star system was already a reality that the film industry took with it as it moved to the West Coast. Lawrence instead decided to settle in New Jersey, where she founded her own company, Victor Studios, with her husband, actor-director Harry Solter. However, things did not take long to go wrong between them to the point that, at the end of 1912, Lawrence made the decision to retire as a measure to save her marriage.
Two years later, Laemmle formally acquired Victor Studios to integrate it into the structure of Universal Pictures, his ambitious new production city in Los Angeles. She also managed to persuade her co-owner to return to acting, although things never went as well for her as in New York. A filming accident caused him severe burns, psychological scars, and a lot of medical bills that Universal decided not to take responsibility for. If we add to this the depression in which she had been sunk since her problems with Solter began, as well as the decline in her popularity in favor of the new faces that fed the star system, we understand why the former "Telegraph Girl" was gradually disappearing from the screen from 1920. Nine years later, she would lose most of her fortune with the stock market crash and, therefore, would be forced to return to Hollywood from time to time to make uncredited appearances in whatever Louis B. Mayer, president of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, had for her. Chronically ill and inveterately lonely, Florence Lawrence was 52 years old when she was diagnosed with an incurable bone disease. It was December 28, 1937, the same day that she, already tired of everything, wrote a note addressed to her only remaining friend before ingesting an overdose of medication.
