1. Ad in MPN , 14 January 1922, 455.

2. Script of Old Wives for New , USC.

3. See Karen Halttunen, "From Parlor to Living Room: Domestic Space, Interior Decoration, and the Culture of Personality," in Simon J. Bronner, ed., Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 157-190.

4. Theatre , February 1919, in Cecil B. DeMille scrapbook, RLC, LMPA.

5. See Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

6. The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille , ed. Donald Hayne (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1959), 212-213. Since DeMille himself did not write his autobiography, I refer to it only when I have corroborating evidence from other sources. Donald Hayne, the only compiler to receive credit, stated in a memo to the director, "The difficulty—or should I say impossibility . . . is in trying to write autobiographically about things that I have neither witnessed nor discussed with you in sufficient detail." See James V. D'Arc, "'So Let It Be Written . . .': The Creation of Cecil B. DeMille's Autobiography," Literature/Film Quarterly 14 (1986): 1-9. William deMille gives his brother more credit than he deserves for starting the cycle of sex comedies and

7. Lasky to DeMille, 6 January 1917; Carl H. Pierce to Lasky, memo attached to Lasky's letter; Lasky to DeMille, 5 March 1917; Lasky to DeMille, 10 August 1917; Lasky to DeMille, 27 November 1917; Lasky to DeMille, 27 December 1917; in Jesse Lasky 1917 folder, Lasky Co./Famous Players-Lasky, DMA, BYU.

8. Lasky to DeMille, 26 March 1918; Lasky to DeMille, 6 November 1918; DeMille to Lasky, 23 January 1919; Lasky to DeMille, 23 May 1919; in Jesse Lasky 1918 and 1919 folders, Lasky Co./Famous Players-Lasky, DMA, BYU.

9. David Graham Phillips, Old Wives for New (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1908), 100.

10. Script of Old Wives for New , USC.

11. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929), 256. According to the Lynds, twenty-one out of twenty-six families who owned a car were without bathtubs. See also Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), part 7.

12. See Thomas Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama," Monogram 4 (1972): 2-15; reprinted in Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 43-69.

13. Kenneth McGaffey, "The Excellent Elliott," Motion Picture , January 1919, 35; W. K. Hollander, untitled article, Chicago News , 21 January 1919, in Gloria Swanson scrapbook, RLC, LMPA.

14. Phillips, Old Wives for New , 43.

15. See John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1990), 166.

16. On cosmetics, prostitutes, and changing styles, see Kathy Peiss, "Making Faces: The Cosmetics Industry and the Cultural Construction of Gender, 1890-1930," Genders 7 (Spring 1990): 143-169.

17. Script of Don't Change Your Husband , USC.

18. See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966), chaps. 7-9.

19. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1977), 5; T. J. Jackson Lears and Richard Wightman Fox, The Culture of Consumption (New York: Pantheon, 1983), x. On hegemony, see Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory," Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 31-49; Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), chap. 8.

20. See Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Industry in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Francis G. Couvares, The Remaking of Pittsburgh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984); Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); John S. Gilkeson, Jr., Middle-Class Providence, 1820-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

21. DeMille to Lasky, 12 January 1924, in Jesse Lasky 1924 folder, Lasky Co./ Famous Players-Lasky, DMA, BYU.

22. DeMille was allegedly a foot fetishist; his vision of the consumer culture included an extraordinary number of close-ups of women's footwear.

23. Why Change Your Wife? script, USC; Why Change Your Wife? stills file, AMPAS.

24. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs 1 (1975): 1-29; reprinted in Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America . (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 53-76.

25. On reification, see Georg Lukács, History and Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics , trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971).

26. For further discussion of these films, see Charles Musser, "DeMille, Divorce, and the Comedy of Remarriage," in Paolo Cherchi Usai and Lorenzo Codelli, eds., The DeMille Legacy (Pordenone: Edizioni Biblioteca dell'Immagine, 1991), 262-283; Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 205-214; Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Random House, 1975), 91-97. An expanded version of Musser's article will appear as "Divorce, DeMille, and the Comedy of Remarriage," in Henry Jenkins and Kristine Karnick, eds., Classical Film Comedy: Narrative, Performance, Ideology (forthcoming, Routledge/AFI). Musser's research has shown that DeMille invented a genre that later became popular not only in film but on stage, further proof of my argument that the director became a trendsetter in the 1920s.

27. William deMille, Hollywood Saga , 242; Garth Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art (Boston: Little, Broaden, 1976), 188; Richard Koszarski, An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture 1915-1928 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990), 30; Gaylyn Studlar also cites the latter statistic, touted in fan magazines and trade journals, in "The Perils of Pleasure? Fan Magazine Discourse as Women's Commodified Culture in the 1920s," Wide Angle 19 (January 1991): 7.

28. The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille , 214-215; the quote is from a memo by Berenice Mosk, in Northwest Mounted, Old Wives for New, Plainsman folder, Personal: Autobiography files, DMA, BYU. DeMille claimed during a court case years later that Lasky attempted to block release of the film and to write it off as a loss. Although Lasky received in-house instructions to cut the film, I doubt he would have prevented the release of a project that was initially his idea and that he persuaded DeMille to undertake. See United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the North Circuit. Commissioner of Internal Revenues, Petitioner, vs Cecil B. DeMille Productions, Inc., Respondent. Transcript of the Record. In Three Volumes. Upon Petition to Review an Order of the United States Board of Appeals (San Francisco: Parker Printing Co., 1936), 319-320.

29. Adolph Zukor, "Zukor Outlines Coming Year's Policies," MPN , 29 June 1918, 3869.

30. Old Wives for New , Paramount Collection, AMPAS. On film censorship, see Francis G. Couvares, "Hollywood, Main Street, and The Church: Trying to Censor the Movies Before the Production Code," American Quarterly 44 (December 1992): 584-616; Couvares, "Contexts and Solidarities: Thinking about Movie Censorship and Reform in the Twentieth Century" (Paper presented at The Movies Begin: History/Film/Culture, Yale University, May 1993).

31. Memo to Al Lichtman, General Manager of Famous Players-Lasky, 28 June 1918, in Jesse Lasky 1918 folder, Lasky Co./Famous Players-Lasky, DMA, BYU.

32. R. E. Pritchard, "Old Wives for New," MPN , 8 June 1918, 3453-3454; Frederick James Smith, MPC , August 1918, in Northwest Mounted, Old Wives for New , and Plainsman folder, Personal: Autobiography files, DMA, BYU; Edward Weitzel, "Old Wives for New," MPW , 8 June 1918, 1470; " Old Wives for New," Variety Film Reviews, 1907-1980 (New York: Garland, 1983), 31 May 1918; "Exhibitor to Exhibitor Review Service," MPN , 8 June 1918, 3400.

33. Frederick James Smith, "The Celluloid Critic," MPC , April 1919, 44; " Don't Change Your Husband., "Variety Film Reviews , 7 February 1919; "Special Service Section on 'Don't Change Your Husband,'" MPN , 1 February 1919, 728; "DeMille's Film Breaks Some Records," MPN 9 March 1919, 1353; Frederick James Smith, ''The Celluloid Critic,'' MPC , April/May 1920, 50; Ad, MPN , 20 March 1920, 2609.

34. "Grauman's Rialto Gets Business by Use of Novelties," MPN , 1 May 1920, 3837; "What Brown Did for DeMille's Special," MPN , 10 July 1920, 403; Ad, MPN , 22 May 1920, 4245; Lasky to DeMille, 19 April 1920, in Jesse Lasky 1920 folder, Lasky Co./Famous Players-Lasky, DMA, BYU; "Famous Players-Lasky Plans Big Campaign," MPN , 24 January 1920, 1083; "Getting the Woman Appeal," MPN , 7 December 1918, 3358; "The Affairs of Anatol," MPW , 24 September 1921, 446. On the cultural wars of the post-World War I decade, see Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday (New York: Harper & Bros., 1931); William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-32 (Chicago: University' of Chicago Press, 1958); Paul A. Carter, Another Part of the Twenties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973); Stanley Coben, Rebellion against Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Lawrence W. Levine, "Progress and Nostalgia: The Self Image of the Nineteen Twenties," in The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 189-205. Daniel H. Borus offers a revisionist interpretation in "New Perspectives in the 1920s in the United States" (Paper delivered at SUNY Brockport, April, 1991). On film exhibition during this period, see Koszarski, An Evening's Entertainment , chap. 2; Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), chaps. 3-4.

35. See Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars ; Peiss, Cheap Amusements .

36. "Why Change Your Wife?" MPN , 8 May 1920, 4062.

37. Famous Players-Lasky ad, MPN , 26 June 1920, 4.

38. Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1933), 90; Report of the President's Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933), 694; William L. O'Neill, Divorce in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 20; Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 51, 87; Glenda Riley, Divorce: An American Tradition . (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 133; " Don't Change Your Husband, "New York Times Film Reviews (New York: Arno Press, 1970), 3 February 1919; Lynd and Lynd, Middletown , chap. 10; William H. Chafe, The American Woman : Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920-1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), chap. 2.

39. Media Mistley, "Why Husbands Leave Home," MPC , July 1918, 54-56.

40. Hazel Simpson Naylor, "Master of Mystery," MPM , November 1919, 1261 "How to Hold a Husband," Photoplay , November 1918, 311 Elizabeth Peltret, "Gloria Swanson Talks on Divorce,'' MPM , December 1919, 74; "Editorial: Cinema Husbands," MPM , September 1920, 29.

41. "What Does Marriage Mean As Told by Cecil B. deMille to Adela Rogers St. Johns," Photoplay , December 1920, 28-31. DeMille's more well-known liaisons included relationships with Jeanie Macpherson and Julia Faye. The director also owned a ranch in the San Fernando Valley that was called Paradise for reasons other than its idyllic location.

42. Adela Rogers St. Johns, "More about Marriage," Photoplay (Max, 1921): 24-26, 105.

43. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality , vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 37.

44. See Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979); Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Catherine E. Kerr, "Incorporating the Star: The Intersection of Business and Aesthetic Strategies in Early American Film," Business History Review 64 (Autumn 1990): 383-410. On female subjectivity as constructed by fan magazine discourse, see Gaylyn Studlar, "The Perils of Pleasure?" 6-32.

45. Swanson on Swanson: An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1980), chaps. 7-8; Lasky to DeMille, 3 January 1919, in Jesse Lasky 1919 folder, Lasky Co./Famous Players-Lasky, DMA, BYU; Smith, "The Celluloid Critic," 44; Hazel Simpson Naylor, "Across the Silversheet," MPM , April 1919, 72.

46. Frederick James Smith, "The Silken Gloria," MPC , February 1920, 161 Delight Evans, "Don't Change Your Coiffure," Photoplay , August 1919, 73; "She Changed Her Coiffure," Photoplay , September 1920, 33; untitled article, Variety, 7 December 1919, in Gloria Swanson scrapbook, RLC, LMPA; Hazel Naylor Simpson, "Piloting a Dream Craft," MPM , April 1921, 87. Although costume design credits for DeMille's films are difficult to ascertain, Alpharelta Hoffman is cited as the designer for Old Wives for New in Northwest Mounted, Old Wives for New , and Plainsman folder, Personal: Autobiography files, DMA, BYU. MPN cites Margaretta Hoffman (the first name is an error) as the designer for Don't Change Your Husband in ''Cecil B. DeMille's New Feature Is Started," 23 November 1918, 3084. Possibly, Mitchell Leisen, who began his career designing costumes for the Babylonian sequence in Male and Female and became DeMille's art director later in the 1920s, may also have been involved in costume design. See David Chierichetti, Hollywood Director: The Career of Mitchell Leisen (New York: Curtis Books, 1973), 22-28.

47. See Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (New York: Viking Press, 1975). See also Mary Louise Roberts, "Samson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Women's Fashion in 1920s France," American Historical Review 93 (June 1993): 657-684. French reaction to changes in women's clothing and hairstyles, which were seductively but disturbingly unisexual, was comparable to consternation expressed in American society. Roberts fails to mention that fashion had become an international phenomenon partly as a result of the influence of motion pictures. Paul Iribe, who illustrated Art Deco fashion plates for couturier Paul Poiret, not coincidentally, became DeMille's art director in the 1920s. See also Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Allen, Only Yesterday , chap. 5; Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity , chap. 9. See also F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," in Flappers and Philosophers (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), 116-140.

48. The Affairs of Anatol , Paramount Collection, AMPAS; Anatol: A Sequence of Dialogues by Arthur Schnitzler; Paraphrased for the English Stage by Granville Barker (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1911).

49. A 16-mm print at UCLA Film and Television Archive preserves the beautiful colors of this process. Unfortunately, the George Eastman House print is in black and white, incomplete, edited out of sequence, and titled in Czech.

50. Telegram, Lasky to DeMille, 9 October 1920; telegram, DeMille to Lasky, 8 January 1921; Lasky to DeMille, 4 October 1921, in Jesse Lasky 1920 and 1921 folders, Lasky Co./Famous Players-Lasky, DMA, BYU; The Affairs of Anatol , stills file, AMPAS. On the recession, see Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prospeirty , 179; John Izod, Hollywood and the Box Office, 1895-1986 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 52.

51. Morning Telegraph , 12 December 1920, Wilfred Buckland clipping file, AMPAS. The reasons for Buckland's exit during a recession are unclear. In 1946, he shot his mentally ill son and then himself, leaving his modest estate to his landlady and to William deMille.

52. The Affairs of Anatol, MPN , 27 September 1921, 166. See Victor Arwas, Art Deco (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980), chap. 1; Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne H. Pilgrim, and Dickran Tashjian, The Machine Age in America, 1918-1941 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986); Diane Chalmers Johnson, American Art Nouveau (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979); Bernard Champigneulle, Art Nouveau , trans. Benita Eisler (Woodbury: Barron's, 1976); Peter Selz and Mildred Constantine, eds., Art Nouveau: Art and Design at the Turn of the Century , rev. ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1975).

53. Quoted in T.J. Jackson Lears, "From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930," in Lears and Fox, eds., The Culture of Consumption , 21.

54. As Roland Marchand observes in Advertising the American. Dream , a French maid was a real sign of conspicuous consumption because domestic servants were overwhemingly ethnic in origin (202).

55. Wilson, Pilgrim, and Tashjian, The Machine Age in America , 29. According to the authors, John Marin painted the bridge in the 1910s, and Frank Stella, Walker Evans, and Hart Crane celebrated it in their work in the 1920s.

56. Schnitzler, "A Question of Fate," Anatol . A physician as well as a playwright, Schnitzler had published on the subject of hypnotism. See Paul F. Dvorak, ed. and trans., Illusion and Reality: Plays and Stories of Arthur Schnitzler (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), xvii.

57. In fact, DeMille discusses this particular film in relation to the trilogy and Male and Female . See Pratt, "Forty-Five Years of Picture Making," 139.

58. Walter Lippman, A Preface to Morals (New York: Macmillan Co., 1929), chap. 14, 288; Lynd and Lynd, Middletown , chap. 10; Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful , 69. For studies on sexuality and marriage during this period, see Gilbert Van Tassel Hamilton, A Research in Marriage (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1929), 80-82, 383; Robert L. Dickinson and Lura Beam, The Si n gle Woman: A Medical Study in Sex Education (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1934), 101, 145; Lewis M. Terman, Psychological Factors in Marital Happiness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1938), 320-321, 367; Katherine B. Davis, Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1938), 14, 38-39. On the history of contraception, see Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Grossman, 1976). See also John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).

59. Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 76. The Ladies' Paradise is the translated title of Zola's novel, Au bonheur des dames .

60. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown , 82.

61. DeMille to Lasky, 22 September 1922, in Jesse Lasky 1922 folder, Lasky Co./Famous Players-Lasky, DMA, BYU.

62. Unidentified article, Photoplay , October 1915, in Cecil B. DeMille scrapbook, RLC, LMPA.

63. Martha L. Olney, Buy Now, Pay Later: Advertising, Credit, and Consumer Durables in the 1920s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), chaps. 1-2, 95; Lynd and Lynd, Middletown , 137; Borus (Paper delivered at SUNY Brockport); Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal , chap. 3; Daniel Horowitz, The Morality of Spending: Attitudes toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875-1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), chap. 7. See also Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods (New York: Basic Books, 1979); Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Jean-Christophe Agnew, "Coming Up for Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective," Intellectual History Newsletter 12 (1990): 3-21.

64. Marchand, Advertising the American Dream , 198; Barrett C. Kiesling, "The Boy Who Lived in the Haunted House," MPC , November 1925, 29; Gladys Hall and Adele Whitely Fletcher, "We Interview Cecil B. DeMille," MPM , April 1922, 93.

65. Marchand, Advertising the American Dream , chaps. 1-7; Olney, Buy Now, Pay Later , 139-152; T. J. Jackson Lears, "Some Versions of Fantasy: Toward a Cultural History of American Advertising, 1880-1930," Prospects 9, 384; Christopher P. Wilson, "The Rhetoric of Consumption: Mass-Market Magazines and the Demise of the Gentle Reader, 1880-1920," in Fox and Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption , 39-64; Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 47. See also Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976); James D. Norris, Advertising and the Transformation of American Society, 1865-1920 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1990); Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon, 1989); Lynne Kirby, ''Gender and Advertising in American Silent Film: From Early Cinema to the Crowd," Discourse 13 (Spring/Summer 1991): 3-20.

66. Cecil B. DeMille, "The Heart and Soul of Motion Pictures," NYDM , 12 June 1920, 194-195; Frederick James Smith, "How Christ Came to Pictures," Photoplay , July 1927, 118.

67. DeMille's impressive and costly collection of furnishings and objets d'art was on display before a Christie's auction in New York in 1988. See Property from the Estate of Cecil B. DeMille (New York: Christie's East, 1988).