The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  Ella gave birth to a son, Norris, on February 20, 1876. According to her family, it was shortly after the birth that she contacted the only attorney she knew: H. Charles Ulman. She was desperate to get a divorce—so desperate to get away that she willingly turned the newborn over to Wilcox’s sister, Lottie Barker, and took little John to New York City. Norrie, as the baby was called, was supposed to be fetched by his mother once her situation stabilized. That day never came. In 1879 she was living with six-year-old John at 203 West Fifty-Second Street in Manhattan. The following year’s census documents four-year-old Norrie still living with Lottie in the Georgia home of her cousin, Julia Jones. The intervening century (and the fire that destroyed most of the 1890 census) leaves the rest of Norris’s youth a mystery, but it is of note that he eventually made it to Denver and forged some relationship with his jigsaw puzzle of a family.*4

  But before young Norris Wilcox could arrive in Denver to reunite with his mother, Ella herself had to get there, and her route was by way of her divorce attorney. Clearly, impulsiveness was one of her characteristics; having extricated herself from one bad marriage*5 she entered another. Most surviving photographs of Ella were taken later in her life, when she was as redoubtable a figure as Mary Pickford’s Mama Charlotte, her counterpart in the stage-mother universe: stout, heavy browed, formidable. But a picture taken in her youth reveals a woman who was quite lovely, by the standards of both her era and today’s. Her skin was flawless, her eyes wide spaced and clear, her mouth full, her nose classically perfect, her gaze direct. It is not hard to imagine that she would attract three spouses in her life and sire a matinee idol. Ulman, evidently, was besotted. In 1880 he abandoned his family and home and set up housekeeping with Ella and little John in Orangetown, New York. There was a slight hitch in the proceedings: there is no evidence Ulman obtained a divorce from his first wife.

  After selling his interest in his Broadway-based law firm (Ulman & Remington), he decided to pull up stakes and move to Colorado. There was money to be made in the silver rush, certainly. But the fact that Ella was now pregnant, and that he was not in a position to divorce and remarry before this inconvenient fact would become evident to local society, might have contributed to the decision. It would be near impossible to take on a new wife in the state where he was already married. But the distant West? Anything was possible there. They would go to Denver.

  They had no way of knowing, of course, but they could not have chosen a better town from which to launch Douglas Fairbanks. Denver in the 1880s possessed that mix of characteristics that its most famous citizen came to personify: a blend of the wild and the civilized. It was a town that still harbored old pioneers and wide-open spaces, a place where a boy could learn to rope and ride, to explore abandoned mines and to camp under the proverbial blanket of stars. But it was also a town of mansions, of Molly Brown (later the “Unsinkable” of Titanic fame) and Horace Tabor, who built the city’s opera house. It was a city with social pretensions. Their famous son was to carry with him these opposing characteristics, that of the city and that of the wilderness. This charming polarity was a significant contributor to his success in the following century.

  Ella likely had no knowledge that her husband was still married when she exchanged her vows with him on September 7, 1881, in Boulder, Colorado. But then again, perhaps she suspected that something was wrong—they exchanged vows twice. Marriage records show that they were also married three weeks earlier, on August 14, 1881, in Nebraska. Robert was born in March 1882; Douglas Elton Thomas Ulman followed in 1883 on May 23.

  The earliest claim about Douglas Fairbanks is that as an infant he was very dark skinned. The assertion came from one source: Fairbanks himself. “I was the blackest baby you ever saw,” he told family members. “I was so dark even my mother was ashamed of me. When all the neighbors came around to look at the new baby, mother would say ‘Oh, I don’t want to disturb him now—he’s asleep and I’d rather not.’ She just hated to show such a dark baby.”

  This is, of course, stuff and nonsense. Not only did his mother and aunt vehemently deny this story (he delighted in teasing them with this tale), but also photographs reveal that there was no truth to the claim. Ella Ulman may have had to suffer straitened circumstances throughout her third marriage, but she never stinted on having her boys professionally photographed. Baby pictures—multiple baby pictures—exist of infant Douglas, documenting a round little head, a killer stare, and perfectly pale baby skin. He had the ability in adulthood to acquire a stunning coat of tan—to the point of appearing shellacked. But there was no evidence of this when he was an infant.

  Still, it is possible that there was a grain of truth in his story. Infants are inefficient at breaking down bilirubin and can acquire a yellowish skin tone for the first few weeks of life (“yellow jaundice of the newborn”). In severe cases, the children can appear a darker, almost orange color. It is certainly possible that Ella might have had a certain level of embarrassment over a baby that, for a few weeks at least, resembled a ripe squash.

  Why he made his claim has been grist for armchair psychologists ever since. It is one of the many challenges of undertaking the subject. Fairbanks would knead, stretch, and compress his story until it was crammed into the mold that he desired. “Almost anyone who begins to take up his past in a serious way, becomes, it seems, an inveterate liar,” he acknowledged. “Or, to use more polite language, he becomes not a historian but a mythologist. . . . It is very much like asking a man to name his ten favorite books and expecting him to tell the truth.” Fairbanks had an engaging tendency to understate his youthful accomplishments. But he had a corresponding habit of polishing the tales of his earliest years until they acquired a sheen of respectability that had never been there in the first place.

  Case in point: his version of his childhood included a proper household with a mother and father. The father was never, ever identified as the Jewish H. Charles Ulman. No, his father was John Fairbanks—a lie he clung to until his death.*6 But he gave “Father” Fairbanks many of the traits that characterized his biological father: he was a lawyer, he claimed, and a great student of Shakespeare. Further, Dad had many, many friends in the theatrical line—fine, great names such as Edwin Booth and Frederick Warde. These men would come to the house whenever they were in town, Fairbanks asserted, and the young acolyte absorbed the words of the Bard by listening to their long parlor conversations. Ella had no problem propagating the family line. “Mr. Fairbanks was a splendid Shakespearean scholar, an intimate friend of Booth . . . and would have gone on the stage himself but for family objections,” she declared in 1916, presumably with a straight face.

  Mother, he claimed, had been a southern belle—sometimes from Virginia, sometimes from New Orleans. His home life was stable, of course. They lived at 61 South Fourteenth Street, he averred, but Denver had grown, streets were renamed, and by the time he was famous, the address had changed to 1207 Bannock Street. Fan magazines were provided photographs of a two-story brick building with a sloped shingle roof and a gingerbread front porch on a leafy, tree-lined street. He had a nurse, certainly. Other servants were implied but never specified.

  To be fair, there were authentic elements of respectability in his youth. They were, for example, a churchgoing family. The boys were baptized together in the Catholic Church; infant Douglas was a little over four months old and Robert was nineteen months. The external veneer was maintained; their loving mother routinely dressed them to the nines: dapper matching tam-o’-shanters, skirted woolen coats, flowing neck scarves, and high button shoes. They outdid Little Lord Fauntleroy, as young Patrick McGovern was to discover on the first day of classes at the Corona Grade School. Doug was inordinately proud of his modish and elegant dress—a weakness that was to remain with him for all his days—and could not abide the fact that Patrick’s mother not only dressed him in the black velvet Fauntleroy suit with white lace collar but further adorned his head with the requisite Fauntleroy ringlets. A class photogra
ph revealed little Patrick to be not so little at all, half a head taller than Douglas and brother Robert, and looking like he weighed more than the two of them put together. But this did not stop an indignantly jealous Doug from tugging at his curls, and earning a solid pop in the nose as payment. The photograph suggests that the battle was an ongoing one; McGovern sits between the two Ulman brothers, scowling miserably. Robert is leaning back, his head at an angle, the beginnings of a cocky grin on his face. Little Douglas is staring ahead fixedly.

  Douglas and Robert were “even then as close as peas,” according to Robert’s daughter Letitia. “He was so taciturn that he rarely spoke to anyone. . . . Only with Robert would he bubble away and seem at ease. With anyone else he shut up like a tight little box.” His father speculated that Douglas would likely grow up to be a judge, as “he had never known one yet to be born with a glimmer of humor.”

  Douglas may have shown little humor in his earliest years, but this stolid front was soon replaced by a well-developed sense of mischief. The principal of the Wyman School, one of many he attended as the family moved throughout the city, “had to walk home with Douglas nearly every night to carry a tale of wickedness to his mother,” stated Letitia. While he was to claim his entire life that his interest in Shakespeare stemmed from the visits of his father’s famous actor friends, his niece’s version of events was more probable: teachers made him memorize Shakespeare passages as penance for his misdeeds. This punishment must have been administered often: “By the time he was nine, he was undoubtedly the youngest and peppiest Hamlet on record.” Critic Burns Mantle, who lived nearby when young Fairbanks was a mere teenager, famously stated that he “would recite you as fine and florid an Antony’s speech to the Romans as you ever heard. With gestures, too.” Fairbanks was candid about his academic performance. “Schooling as such didn’t appeal to me a bit,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t stop fooling.”

  His mischief was not confined to the classroom. Summers were spent—until H. Charles’s desertion—out of the city, in various mining camps, the most remote (and primitive) of which was in Jamestown, forty-five miles northwest of Denver. “They were my first glimpses of the wild country that I love,” he remembered. “We’d often spend two or three weeks at a camp; those were high times for me.” One particularly beloved fixture of the camp was an old prospector nicknamed “Hardrock,” who was particularly fond of children. He once damned up a local creek to create a pool for the brothers to swim in. Unfortunately, a local matron caught the boys splashing about in their birthday suits and gave Hardrock a piece of her mind for aiding and abetting such unholy activities on the Sabbath.

  And here the troubles began. Hardrock, unthinking, commented, “That old biddy acts as if she had a heap of gold in her privy.” Young Douglas took him at his word. Mrs. Jessup was hiding gold! In her outhouse! He and Robert initiated a stakeout in the latrine in question to await the good lady’s arrival.

  What followed was a scatological comic opera, complete with a half-undressed matron, lots of shrieking, and a thrashing that was stopped only when Hardrock brought his mule whip down on Mrs. Jessup’s shoulders. The matron screamed in outrage; Ella, arriving late on the scene, fainted. Young Douglas possibly tucked the incident away for Don Q, Son of Zorro thirty-five years later. The boys’ father, who had to discipline them for their misdeeds, might have welcomed the brouhaha as a distraction. He had learned just that morning that his last silver mine was worthless. Shortly thereafter, he left his second family as he had his first, ostensibly to become a hired speaker for the presidential candidacy of Benjamin Harrison. When Harrison was elected in November 1888, Ulman did not return. Letters and checks stopped arriving. Robert was six; Douglas was five.

  The path of H. Charles Ulman after he deserted Ella and her sons was erratic. While the family claimed that he returned to Colorado on business only once in the subsequent years, the 1890 census documents that he was living in Denver as a lodger. Perhaps they were trying to spare the feelings of his youngest son. One morning, when Douglas was twelve years old, he encountered his father on the street. Ulman pulled his son into a nearby hotel bar for a reunion. Doug, evidently delighted to see him, drank sarsaparilla. Ulman drank whiskey. After he had fortified himself with enough liquid courage, he let his son bring him home to see Ella. The reunion, not surprisingly, did not go well. Ulman skulked out, never to darken their proverbial door again.*7

  Ella’s outrage then turned to Douglas. She was not upset that he had brought his father home, but she was livid that he had spent the morning in a saloon. The sight of her husband, cuffs and collar frayed, alcohol on his breath while the sun was still high in the sky, inspired her to action. She took her youngest straight to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and had him sign the pledge of temperance. Surprisingly, it took hold. He was abstemious for most of his life. For the last ten years he might indulge in a mild cocktail but remained very modest in his intake.*8

  Poor Ella probably could have used a stiff drink now and again. Ulman’s departure had put her and her children in a tight squeeze. The family claimed to have lived in only two places in Denver: the house where Fairbanks was born (Bannock Street) and the house that they were required to move to after Ulman departed (Franklin Street). This assertion hid a tale of peripatetic desperation. Even when Ulman was with the family, addresses were changeable things. In 1882 and 1883, the family lived at 333 Tremont Place. The city directory in 1884 places the family at 61 South Fourteenth Street, the house that managed to mysteriously change its address along the way to 1207 Bannock.

  It must have been clear early on that Ulman would never return. Ella changed her and her sons’ name to Fairbanks in 1889.†*9After this, the little family moved frequently: 1539 Arapahoe Street in ’88 and ’89; 634 Pearl Street in ’90; 2119 Stout in ’91 and ’92 (when circumstances forced them to move in with older brother John, who was working as a traveling sales representative for the Morey Mercantile Company); 1333 Stout Street in 1893; then, for two years, the Glenarm Hotel; followed finally in 1896 by 1629 Franklin Street, where they remained for two years.

  It is possible that Ella spent the years in the hotel while her sons were away at the Jarvis Hall Military Academy in Montclair. It has been speculated that her sister may have helped her with the tuition, but given Belle’s widowed state, it is just as likely that hard-working, quiet older brother John was contributing. John moved out of the house and boarded with the nearby grocer when he was a mere nine years old, so toxic were his relations with his step-father. He had worked for the company ever since, sacrificing his own education so his younger brothers could get theirs. It is unlikely that young Douglas understood his half-brother’s sacrifice at the time, but he made certain to pay it back in adulthood. But no matter what largesse he tried to give to John and his family—and he shared generously—it could never equal the debt. John continued to provide his weight in gold in advice and management until his untimely death.

  It is unlikely that young Douglas was encumbered by a sense of obligation in these early years. His only recollection from his time at Jarvis was that he enjoyed the uniforms. In the same vein, he enjoyed performing his duties as an altar boy, which, per his niece Letitia, he did “with customary—but dramatic—solemnity.” Still, when the sacramental wine was spiked with vinegar and—more creative yet—the candles were doctored so that when fellow altar boy Robert tried to light them they fizzed out dramatically, good Father O’Ryan knew just where to look. But he did the unexpected and punished Robert, not Douglas, for the crimes.

  This had the intended effect. Douglas could not bear to see Robert take the blame for his misdeeds, and he went to the priest to confess. “I knew you were the culprit,” replied the Father. “Your penance, Douglas, is watching your brother absolve your blame.” Doug’s churchgoing decorum, recalled the family, “was remarkably spiritual from that day on.” It was this same wise priest who was later to help Douglas foster his dreams of the stage.

 
The earliest evidence of this theatrical passion survives as a handwritten program, penned by Douglas himself in 1896. An amateur production was staged in the backyard of one Frank Hall—an all-male cast in The Man from the Mountain. D. Fairbanks was fifth billed, as “John Wilson—an old miner.” Robert, who later was to find work as an electrician’s apprentice, wired the stage with footlights and spotlights. History has not recorded the reception this masterpiece received, but clearly young Mr. Fairbanks felt encouraged to try for something on a larger scale.

  He himself was to claim that his first appearance on the professional stage was unknown to his family. Steve Brody was a celebrity working his way through the American theater mill by virtue of his claim of having survived a leap from the Brooklyn Bridge. He toured the country with a play purporting to document this adventure: On the Bowery. The thirteen-year-old Fairbanks staked out the dressing room door until he could get an audience with the star. “I braced him and told him I could recite a piece in Italian dialect,” he recalled. He got the job and for a week played a newsboy, saying his little speech nightly, just before Brody leaped off the stage bridge. Uncharacteristically, he did not let his family know of his debut until the show had left town.*10

  In the fall of 1896, he danced both a gavotte and a hornpipe with Miss Mary McCarron at a local production of Kirmess “under the direction of one Professor A.B. Mills.” January 1897 saw him at the Masonic temple, providing humorous recitations shoehorned between speeches by the Eminent Commander and a soprano solo by a Mrs. Frederick C. Smutzer.

  The family album contains a program for an 1898 Children’s Matinee staged by the local public schools. Douglas, billed as a student of the Tabor School of Acting, gave a dramatic recitation. And, indeed, by the time he was fifteen, young Fairbanks was an enthusiastic pupil of tutor Margaret Fealy and her young daughter Maude. Margaret had been the leading lady for Sir Henry Irving in London and had appeared with William Gillette on the American stage—impressive credentials. Young Maude was also experiencing professional success. Their school, on the third floor of the Tabor Theater building, was to yield many renowned students. Fairbanks and Margaret Fealy remained close until his death, and financial records document him quietly sending her funds through the Depression. He answered each letter she sent.