Little Lord Fauntleroy was performed on the stages of U.S. cities and London beginning in 1888, and though the casts varied, the “little lord” was usually played by an actress. This tradition continued with the 1921 silent film, starring America’s sweetheart Mary Pickford as both Cedric and his “dearest” mother. The 1936 movie, which brought so many out to the movies, bucked the trend by casting the popular child actor Freddie Bartholomew as Cedric, stripping him of the trademark curls and suit.
This change was likely a response to the growing sense that Little Lord Fauntleroy, with his androgynous clothing and saccharine manners, was no longer in step with modern conceptions of boyhood. The Canadian Windsor Star praised the “completely de-sissified” look, enthusiastically greeting “an old friend in a new guise.” But many had already soured on their old friend altogether. Pop culture in the 1930s reflected a general uneasiness with “sissy” figures because, as the film scholar Vito Russo writes in his 1981 book The Celluloid Closet, “whenever elements of sissyhood were present, the suspicion of homosexuality emerged.”
The little lord fit neatly into this panic. “Little Lord Fauntleroy” became shorthand for a snobby, fussy, or maybe just well-dressed man, an insult uttered in such varied movies as 42nd Street and Sylvia Scarlett. He was also derided in the press. In a 1937 column, Marian Mays Martin warned that Little Lord Fauntleroy was “no model for any self-respecting small boy.” She elaborated that “boys of today are not the Little Lord Fauntleroy type. They may be sweet, but not sugary. They are reasonably good, but not priggish, and they are capable and enterprising enough to take on all manner of grown-up occupations.” The mayor of New York even joined the chorus of jeers. At a massive Boy Scouts of America show held in Madison Square Garden, in 1936, Fiorella LaGuardia “applauded the Boy Scouts’ denial of Little Lord Fauntleroy as their hero,” and praised the group’s “continued virility and healthy growth.”