The Church Mouse

The Silver King. The Fatal Wedding. The Warrens of Virginia. A Good Little Devil. Many of those familiar with Mary Pickford’s life and career are well aware of these and her many other early stage performances, but virtually forgotten—though certainly not unknown—is that Mary returned to the “legitimate stage” on December 22, 1933...  sort of. Signing a contract with Adolph Zukor, Mary returned to Broadway, this time at the Paramount Theatre, in The Church Mouse. While being heralded as Mary’s big stage return, a full Broadway production it was not. In actuality, it was a short one-act playlet, consisting of a brief excerpt from the full play and likewise directed by Melville Burke. The Church Mouse was at the Paramount for Christmas week, opening for the film All of Me—“four performances a day, five on Sunday” (though some sources note “five times a day.”) In early 1934, it hit the stage in a number of other cities including Boston, Brooklyn (well, technically not a city,) Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Toronto, and beyond.

Regarding its opening at the Paramount, the December 23, 1933 issue of the Brooklyn Times Union reported, “Mary Pickford’s all too brief appearance in a scene from ‘The Church Mouse,’ Ladislas Fodor’s well known comedy, is scarcely suffice to provide an estimate of what one may expect from her comeback, but her personality is still vivid.” It's worth noting that a comeback would never come.

Mary herself said, “[The audience] gave me a fine reception. I was a little nervous about doing a speaking part in front of an audience I could see and hear, but everything went well. I think they like it.” Strangely, she went on to say, “This is a new sort of thing for me. Almost everybody on the screen has made personal appearances at one time or another, but I never have. I probably won’t do it again, though I’m having a fine time with it.”

In his syndicated gossip column On Broadway, Walter Winchell described one of Mary's better business moves which happened to involve the playlet: “I like what Mary Pickford did before she opened her abbreviated version of ‘The Church Mouse’ at the Paramount . . . In her playlet there was a robust free ad for a well-known chain of local soda fountain-restaurant places . . . Miss Pickford sent her representative to the company and suggested that they donate $1000 to the Actors’ Dinner club, a worthy group which feeds theatre people gratis daily . . . The firm decided it would give only $200 for the advertisement . . . So Mary jerked the line, for which hurray!”

On October 3, 1934, Mary performed The Church Mouse on the radio with her short-lived Mary Pickford Stock Company—whose other radio plays included familiar titles like Tess of the Storm Country, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Daddy Long Legs, Coquette, among others. (Incidentally, the Radio Guide (Volume IV, Number 19) noted, perhaps hyperbolically or not, “Mary Pickford believes appropriate costumes help her to give a better radio performance. When she broadcast Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm she wore a gingham dress similar to the one used in her silent picture some years ago.”) A digitized copy of the radio performance can be found for download on several websites (such as this one.)