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246 THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT
bade her look up and tell him what she saw. Down the front of the theatre opposite ran her own name in electric lights — the announcement of her promotion from Class B to Class A. She was to be a great star now, advertised and exploited on a parity with Mrs. Fiske and Hackett. “ I suppose there were tears in both our eyes,” says Mary Pickford.
Personal feelings, however, did not in the least cramp their style when it came to bargaining and trafficking, any more than it would have hampered them in a friendly game of cards. Otherwise they would have esteemed each other less. When Mary Pickford’s star began its rise, she was under contract to Adolph Zukor at ^20,000 a year. Shortly other firms were paying lesser luminaries more than that. This she told Adolph Zukor. “All right, let’s be happy,” said he; and he made it $1,000 a week. Again, after The Good Little Devil began sweeping the world, he advanced it to $2,000 a week and then in January, 1916, to $4,000. This was an unprecedented salary for the stage — a third again as much, remarked the newspapers, as we were paying our President; for in that age of comparative innocence we still applied the old measuring rod to incomes.
In the summer of 1916, Mary Pickford’s contract with Famous Players-Lasky expired. The whole motionpicture business knew that; the greater companies, then at that stage of existence when a corporation struggles for a sure foothold, prepared for a spirited contest in