1. Script of What's His Name , USC. George Bart McCutcheon, the author of the novel, also wrote the best-seller, Brewster's Millions , adapted successfully for the stage, and for film by DeMille and Apfel as the Lasky Company's second release.

2. Daniel Horowitz, The Morality of Spending: Attitudes toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875-1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 88; these figures are for the year 1912.

3. I refer to private, or domestic, and public spheres as concepts that have informed American women's history. See Linda K. Kerber, "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History," Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 9-39. For a reconsideration of Habermas's concept of the public sphere in Enlightenment France with respect to American working-class film attendance, see Miriam Hansen's Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). On women's political practice in relation to Habermas's theory, see Mary P. Ryan, "Gender and Public Access: Women's Politics in Nineteenth-Century America," in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 259-288; Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

4. Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), 24.

5. On the social history of the middle class, see Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chaps. 4, 5; Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Horowitz, The Morality of Spending ; John S. Gilkeson, Jr., Middle-Class Providence, 1820-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 , 2d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); Cindy Sondik Aron, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle-Class Workers in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Peter Stearns, "The Middle Class: Toward a Precise Definition," Comparative Studies in Society and History 21 (July 1979): 392-393; Arno J. Mayer, "The Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem," Journal of Modern History 47 (September 1975): 417-418. See also C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), xvi-xvii; Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), chap. 13.

6. New York Telegraph clipping, 10 April 1913, in Cecil B. DeMille scrapbook, RLC, LMPA; Beatrice DeMille, "The DeMille Family in Motion Pictures," NYDM , 4 August 1917, 4; Agreement. . . between the John W. Rumsey Co . . . . Cecil B. DeMille and M. Beatrice DeMille, Cecil B. DeMille cage file, LMPA. Beatrice DeMille was Jewish, a lineage her son de-emphasized, but she converted to her husband's Episcopalian faith.

7. Interview with DeMille, 24 September 1957, in Mother folder, Personal: Autobiography files, DMA, BYU.

8. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class , 51.

9. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 1-13; T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), chap. 3, part 3; John Higham, "The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s," in John Weiss, ed., The Origins of Modern Consciousness (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965), 25-48; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class , chap. 4; Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class , chap. 5; Richard Sennett, Families against the City: Middle Class Homes of Industrial Chicago 1872-1880 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).

10. See Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture ; Lears, No Place of Grace .

11. See Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1990); Katherine C. Grier, Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery, 1850-1930 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); Kenneth L.

12. Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), chap. 15; David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 33-34; Henry C. DeMille, in Diary folder, Family, DMA, BYU; The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille , ed. Donald Hayne (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1959), 24; A. Nicholas Vardac, Stage to Screen: Theatrical Origins of Early Film: David Garrick to D. W. Griffith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949; New York: DaCapo, 1987), 144; Bernard Hewitt, Theatre U.S.A. 1665 to 1957 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 253; Oscar G. Brockett and Robert R. Findlay, Century of Innovation: A History of European and American Theatre and Drama since 1870 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 51.

13. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women , chaps. 3-6; Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1959), Conclusion. See also Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). On character versus personality, see Warren Susman, "'Personality' and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture," in Culture as History (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 271-285. Richard Wightman Fox argues that Susman is too schematic because personality was informed by nineteenth-century, concepts of character, in "Character and Personality: The Cult of Liberal Protestantism 1850-1930" (Paper delivered at SUNY Brockport, April, 1988). I focus on character and personality as constituting polarities in order to interpret a specific DeMille text.

14. Gilkeson, Jr., Middle-Class Providence , 219-220: Francis G. Couvares, The Remaking of Pittsburgh: Class and Culture in an Industrializing City, 1877-1919 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 101.

15. For a discussion of inattention to novels and theatrical work in studies of film adaptations, see Rick Altman, "Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today," South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (Spring 1988): 321-359.

16. See Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1977).

17. Brockett and Findlay, Century of Innovation , chaps. 1-6.

18. David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture 1800-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 65.

19. Programs for The Wife and Lord Chumley , in scrapbook, Theater and Business, DMA, BYU.

20. Brockett and Findlay, Century of Innovation , 183; Hewitt, Theatre U.S.A ., 257.

21. On melodrama as working-class entertainment, see Vardac, Stage to Screen , 1-2; Michael Booth, English Melodrama (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1965), 13, 52, 187; Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), xii. On melodrama, see John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular

22. Frank Rahill, The World of Melodrama (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967), 268.

23. Rahill, The World of Melodrama , chap. 28, 261-263; James Smith, Melodrama (London: Methuen, 1973), 43.

24. Robert Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), 94-97.

25. Lise Lone-Marker, David Belasco: Naturalism in the American Theatre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 78-114; Vardac, Stage to Screen , 129-135; Brockett and Findlay, Century of Innovation , 12.

26. "Review of the Week," New York Clipper , 1 September 1888, 393.

27. Henry C. DeMille, The Wife , in Robert Hamilton Ball, ed., The Plays of Henry C. DeMille Written in Collaboration with David Belasco (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 117. This collection of plays is volume 17 in the series, America's Lost Plays , which also includes William C. deMille's The Warrens of Virginia .

28. Nym Crinkle, "The Charity' Ball," Theatre , November 1889, in scrapbook, Theater and Business, DMA, BYU.

29. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination , 16, 20.

30. See Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women ; Kasson, Rudeness and Civility ; Sennett, The Fall of Public Man .

31. "About a Certain School of Plays," The Illustrated American , 4 March 1893, Henry C. DeMille clipping file, LMPA.

32. Ibid.

33. Henry C. DeMille, The Wife , 59.

34. New York Sun , 20 November 1889, in scrapbook, Theater and Business, DMA, BYU.

35. "About a Certain School of Plays," LMPA.

36. New York Daily Tribune , 2 November 1887, in scrapbook, Theater and Business, DMA, BYU.

37. The Spirit of the Times , 25 August 1888, in scrapbook, Theater and Business, DMA, BYU.

38. Tid Bits , 12 November 1887, in scrapbook, Theater and Business, DMA, BYU.

39. Craig Timberlake, The Bishop of Broadway: The Life and Work of David Belasco (New York: Library Publishers, 1954), 133.

40. Brockett and Findlay, Century of Innovation , 8; Vardac, Stage to Screen , xx. On realism represented in a romantic mode, see also Lone-Marker, David Belasco , 76, and Michael R. Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, 1850-1910 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 74; Gledhill, "Speculations on the Relationship between Soap Opera and Melodrama," 103-109. On realism and representation, see Roland Barthes, "The Reality Effect," in Tzvetan Todorov, ed., French Literary Theory Today , trans. R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 11-17.

41. The Spirit of the Times , 25 August 1888; The World 20 November 1889, in scrapbook, Theater and Business, DMA, BYU.

42. Graphic , 25 August 1888, in scrapbook, Theater and Business, DMA, BYU; Brockett and Findlay, Century of Innovation , 183; Hewitt, Theatre U.S.A ., 261.

43. New York World , 24 November 1889, in scrapbook, Theater and Business, DMA, BYU.

44. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 126.

45. New York Mirror , 30 November 1889, in scrapbook, Theater and Business, DMA, BYU.

46. Once a Week , 17 December 1889, in scrapbook, Theater and Business, DMA, BYU.

47. Minnie Maddern Fiske was courted by Lasky's rival, the Famous Players Company. Unfortunately, DeMille's adaptation is the only silent film extant about the theatrical life that was his family legacy. Wild Goose Chase , based on William deMille's play about rebellious young lovers who join a traveling troupe, has not survived.

48. "Max Figman in 'What's His Name,'" MPW , 26 September 1914, 1778.

49. Hanford C. Judson, "What's His Name," MPW , 7 November 1914, 792.

50. Script of What's His Name , USC.

51. Henry Seidel Canby, The Age of Confidence: Life in the Nineties (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934), 50; see also Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 7.

52. Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), chap. 13.

53. Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 42.

54. Acting became a more respectable profession for women in the late nineteenth century. See Christoper Kent, "Image and Reality: The Actress and Society," in Martha Vicinus, ed., A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 94-116.

55. "Lasky at Los Angeles," MPW , 10 July 1915, 239. In 1918, DeMille trained Anne Bauchens to be his editor, and she worked in that capacity until the end of the director's decades-long career.

56. Hanford C. Judson credits Buckland "for having made the scenes" in his review, "What's His Name," in MPW ; the art director is not credited in the film.

57. Interview with DeMille, 28 June 1957, in The Squaw Man folder, Personal: Autobiography files, DMA, BYU.

58. See Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 65-73. Arnheim titles this section "Artistic Uses of Lighting and of the Absence of Color," but Lasky releases were all color tinted. See also Peter Baxter, "On the History and Ideology of Film Lighting," Screen 16 (Autumn 1975): 96-98; David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 223-227; Lea Jacobs, ''Lasky Lighting," in Paolo Cherchi Usai and Lorenzo Codelli, eds., The DeMille Legacy (Pordenone: Edizioni Biblioteca dell'Immagine, 1991), 250-261.

59. Interview with DeMille, 3 July 1957, in What's His Name folder, Personal: Autobiography files, DMA, BYU.

60. Script of What's His Name , USC.

61. See Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class , chap. 4; Sennett, Families against the City , part 3.

62. The Henry C. DeMille School for Girls Founded in 1893, Henry C. DeMille clipping file, LMPA.

63. "What's His Name," NYDM , 28 October 1914, 32; untitled Hartford Current review, 30 October 1914, What's His Name clipping file, LMPA.

64. See Susman, "'Personality' and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture."

65. Clyde Griffin, "The Progressive Ethos," in Stanley Coben and Lorman Ratner, eds., The Development of an American Culture (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 129. See Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class , chap. 4; Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class , chap. 5; Sennett, Families against the City , part 3.

66. Horowitz, The Morality of Spending , chaps. 5, 6; Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class , 185-186; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class , 200-201.

67. Judson, "What's His Name," 792.