Low and behold, I was introduced to the game, Trivial Pursuit, my freshman year in college. Back then, I had two sets of friends. There were my “jock” pals, who I hung out with while I worked on the softball side of my college experience, the thing that was paying for my tuition. We spent a lot of time together on the field, in the gym, in the weight room, and on. Without the help of softball, I wouldn’t have gone to college.
The other group of friends was my cerebral pals. The brainiacs. The sharp tacks. The quick whips. I am not sure how I happened into this group, as I paled in comparison to their swift IQs. But we hung out frequently in our dorm rooms. One of our favorite things to do, besides drinking and smoking, was playing Trivial Pursuit.
The game had been created a couple of years before, on December 15, 1979, in Montreal, Quebec, by Chris Haney. It was just making its debut in the United States about the time I showed up at Butler University.
We were hooked. We played every chance we got. And when we didn’t know an answer? We had “the standard answers.” They were:
1. New York
2. Three
~ and ~
3. Mary Pickford
Whenever I hear Mary Pickford’s name, I am thrust back through time to the dorm rooms of Schwitzer Hall and all the great memories that went with it.
As it happens, today is her birthday. Yes, Mary Pickford came into this earth as Gladys Marie Smith, on April 8, 1892. The city was Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
It is funny that she hailed from Canada because, for a long, long time, she was known as “America’s Sweetheart.” It seems that a surprisingly large number of people from Canada were filling the screens of early Hollywood. They included her brother Jack Pickford, Norma Shearer, MGM co-founder Louis B. Mayer, Marie Dressler, and Fay Wray.
America sure has known its fair share of acting dynasties, like the Baldwins, the Arquettes, the Douglases, and more. But before them were the Pickfords. Mary, Lottie, and Jack toured the U.S. with their mother. They worked in some companies that weren’t that great. In other words, they had a lot of crappy jobs. But, in 1907, Mary made a declaration. She said if she didn’t land a role in a Broadway play by the end of the year, she would quit acting to find a better job. She got a job on Broadway that summer.
Her success began scaling upwards. By 1909, Pickford was appearing in more than 50 films a year. By 1910, she had signed a contract with Biograph Studios. She made sure her brother and sister were signed on the bill too. Jack was only 14-years-old, and her sister Lottie was 17. Mary was a year older.
She looked out for her siblings. When Mary signed her first $1 million contract in 1917, she again made sure her family got their own contracts as well. But tragedy would eventually come around to them. Jack died at the young age of 36 from “multiple neuritis” which attacked all the nerve centers. Her sister Lottie suffered a very unexpected heart attack and died at the age of 43.
Mary lived a long life. She died May 29, 1979, at the good age of 87. The cause of her death was a cerebral hemorrhage.
I’ll have to write a whole other blog on Mary Pickford’s life. Little things, like the fact that she was Joan Crawford’s mother-in-law. “No more wire hangers!” I bet that made for some neat-o Christmas gatherings.
Nonetheless, her name brings back a world of memories for me, even though I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her in a movie. And that is how memories go. They come and go, in and out of our minds, and we can never be sure what the next memory might be. It all depends on the spark.
And that is my standard answer.
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“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”
― John Banville, The Sea
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“Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.”
― L.M. Montgomery, The Story Girl
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“When the remembering was done, the forgetting could begin.”
― Sara Zarr
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Memory? Or standard answer. Mary P.
