The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  Margaret’s memories of him were both fond and loving, despite the exasperations of dealing with a teenage boy. Maude recalled a production of Virginius in which young Douglas played Icilius, who was to give his lover’s ashes in an urn to her father.**11“Mother had a time getting Douglas to hold the urn up straight,” Maude said. She had to remind him repeatedly that it was his lover’s ashes he was toting, not a football. Years later she teased Fairbanks: “Don’t you remember when your mother used to say, ‘Douglas, Maude takes a bath all over every day. Why don’t you at least let me wash your neck?’”

  On another occasion Margaret found her hyperactive student bounding on a prized leather sofa in her office. “Get off that sofa!” she recalled shrieking. “You good-for-nothing, little black devil!”

  This tickled him. “He seemed to like it,” she wrote, “as he always joked on it and called himself that.” Years later, he would send her a portrait of himself with his infant son and sign it “Yours, Lovingly, your good-for-nothing little black devil.”

  Young Doug made the society columns as well, entertaining at a private musicale at the home of Miss Maude Hunne. After the “dainty refreshments,” the recitations of Master Fairbanks “brought forth much approval from the company, and he kept them in laughter for some time by his dialect recitations.”†*12 The Denver Post reports his March 1898 participation in an evening of “literary and musical entertainment” at the local YMCA involving “Professor Jones’ Mandolin Club.” Further, he played the not-insignificant supporting role of Martin that summer in the Tabor Grand School of Acting’s production of The Two Orphans at Elitch’s Gardens.

  Elitch’s Gardens was the summer setting for Denver theater, and major stars would travel to perform with the stock company there. “I had known him long,” mused leading man Hobart Bosworth after Fairbanks’s death: “Ever since the days of 1898 when he used to run to be the first to open the gates at Elitch’s Gardens in Denver for me to ride my horse into the grounds.”

  The summer of 1898 found the fifteen-year-old participating with other members of the Tabor School in the Wolhurst Fete, an open-air fundraiser conducted on the grounds of the estate of Senator E. O. Wolcott. This was a major social event; ten thousand Coloradans arrived on special train cars from the Denver & Rio Grande and Santa Fe Railroads. Booths provided distractions ranging from palm readers to ice cream. There was a menagerie, a sham battle, a staged gypsy camp, a balloon ascension, and Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Bands and orchestras played, and a thousand Japanese lanterns lit the sky when evening came. Wolcott’s barn was converted to a theater with Tabor School shows, including, on August 26, The Happy Pair, “a comedietta in one act, given by Douglas Fairbanks and Lydia Dixon.”*13

  The show-in-the-barn got some special notice from the Denver Sunday Post:

  Mrs. Elitch’s vaudeville show in the Wolcott barn was a grand card and the little fellow in the brown clothes who stood at the door and did the “barking” was a jewel beyond compare.

  “Oh, come on, come on, and see Corbett and Fitz! Corbett and Fitz! They will fight for blood—oh, come in and see the blood!”

  A little over a month later he was to appear with Hobart Bosworth—the famous actor for whom he rushed to open the Elitch’s gates—in a testimonial performance at the Manhattan Theatre. The one-act play was titled A Duel in Wall Street, and he was third billed, playing the office boy.

  In October 1898 he was seen at Windsor Hall in a performance for the “Newsboy’s Union Masquerade and Entertainment.” He gave a comic recitation and also appeared as “Gumpy” in a skit entitled “The Quiet Family: A Farce in One Act.” This was an early foreshadowing of the sort of charitable theatrical event that would consume much of the recreational hours of Fairbanks’s adulthood. The mayor delivered the opening address, and “newsboys and guests, including some of Denver’s young society people, put on masks and entered the dance.” A month later he was part of a program of special attractions at the Cathedral Fair, providing songs, and the following day he performed his comic dialect speeches at the Children’s Matinee at the Broadway Theatre.

  His school was beginning to draw national attention. The New York Dramatic Mirror devoted a column to the program in December 1898. “A remarkable thing about the entertainments given by the students of the Tabor Grand School of Acting is their freedom from amateurishness, a distinguishing feature which merits congratulation.” The critic noted that Douglas Fairbanks was “a clever youth whose naturalness is particularly to be commended. He is a trifle self-conscious at times, however, and this detracts somewhat from his otherwise excellent work.”

  The Denver Post wrote that the Tabor students would be performing again on Thanksgiving Day: “Master Douglas Fairbanks has a part which fits him like a glove, and his friends will not be disappointed in him, as everything undertaken by him is well done. . . . Master Fairbanks had an interview with Mr. William Gillette last week and gave several dramatic readings for Mr. Gillette and his manager, who were enthusiastic in their praise. Mr. Gillette presented him with a card, on which was his permanent address, telling him when he wished to secure a professional engagement to write him, and he would place him, as his talent was worthy of it.”

  The tactic he employed with Gillette was adopted more than once. If a Great Man came through town on theatrical tour, Doug would make an appointment, secure an interview, and do some readings. In the end, the Great Man who would serve as his route to fame and fortune was not William Gillette but Frederick Warde. But even here, Fairbanks’s account of events was mercurial. One version was given in 1912, when, secure in his position as a young Broadway star, Fairbanks was conducting a rather tongue-in-cheek interview:

  One day happened to meet an actor man on the street whom I knew. Frederick Warde. He said to me:

  “Douggie—not doggie—what art thou about to do?” I said to him:

  “Go through school, as I should, fair sir,” I answered. He said to me:

  “Wouldst not like to go on the stage?” And I, who all during my younger days had run crazy with my amateur theatricals, which I performed all over the place, leaped up in the air with a glad cry and grasped him warmly about the neck.

  Equally unlikely is the family’s telling of the event: stern doormen blocked the way to Frederick Warde’s dressing room, and there was no way for a youthful actor to get an introduction. But an alley wall, a fire escape, and a window were described as “the simple hurdles in this case.” Warde came into his dressing room to find it occupied by the charming, wheedling youngster—one so beguiling that Warde had to offer him a position with his touring company despite himself.

  Neither account is true. But before understanding how a teenage Douglas Fairbanks got to Frederick Warde, it helps to understand Frederick Warde—and those of his stripe. To one scholar, he was “America’s greatest forgotten tragedian,” a man who trod America’s stages bringing Shakespeare to the masses. He was not on the absolute top rung of the ladder of stage aristocracy, but he represented the first step down in the “legitimate” theater. He was, in the words of scholar Alan Woods, “the touring tragedian, a star actor providing connections between the 19th century tradition and the modern one . . . who kept alive the traditions of [Edwin] Forrest, [Edwin] Booth and [John Edward] McCullough.” His ilk rarely, if ever, appeared in New York City or Chicago, where, if truth be told, they were subject to a bit of snobbish sneering. Instead they toured the rest of the country to great acclaim and respect.*14 When a Frederick Warde or William Gillette or Maurice Barrymore or Edwin Booth came to town, the folks knew that they were going to get ART, not only were going to hear Shakespeare’s immortal lines rattling the rafters but also see the words acted out in the proper style of elocution.

  Elocution is a topic unto itself. Here existed a near universe of gestures and positions of the arms and hands and face, each with a different meaning. The voice itself had a wealth of varying characteristics—modulation, quality (“pure or impure”), pitch, for
ce, speed, emphasis (“radical, vanishing, median, compound”), and inflection (“rising, falling, circumflex, or monotone”). The great actor—the great artiste—would combine these elements with the text of a melodrama or the lines of Shakespeare and could move audiences to tears. Or, at least, to the satisfactory feeling that they had gotten their money’s worth of culture. Besides, all that pinwheeling of the arms made for a dandy view even from the rear of the house—to say nothing of informing a mode of acting employed in the earliest silent films, a style that drives modern audiences to hysterics. But we are reacting with a twenty-first-century eye to a nineteenth-century tradition. These were not bad actors; these were actors engaging in a very formal style, a veritable Kabuki dance in comparison to the naturalistic one that supplanted it.

  And the likes of Frederick Warde should not be made light of. To get to the second-highest rung of the theatrical ladder was no small accomplishment, and it was the Frederick Wardes of the world who were doing the heavy lifting: taking the long, weary, grinding tours for nine months of every twelve, bringing professional theater to the great majority of Americans who would never see New York City or Chicago. And he followed a model of civic duty as well—many of these city stops were accompanied by lectures to local high schools or civic groups on such topics as “Shakespeare’s Women” and “Eloquence as Illustrated by Shakespeare.” It was one such lecture in the spring of 1899 at Denver East High School that provided the almost-sixteen-year-old Douglas his opportunity. Warde was to recall:

  While in Denver, Colorado, I made an address on the study of Shakespeare to the faculty and students of the High School. On the following day of [which] a very youthful student of the school called on me and expressed a desire to go upon the stage. Such applications were not uncommon, but this applicant, little more than a boy, had an assurance and persistence in spite of my discouragements, that attracted me. He replied frankly to all of my questions, realized the gravity of the step he desired to take, told me the conditions of his life and referred me to his mother for consultation.

  Here was a move of near genius. Very few youngsters hoping to run away and join a theatrical troupe would have the wit to provide their mother for a reference. And few young men had such a redoubtable ally as Douglas did in Ella. She did not originally support his thespian ambitions. But here is where Father O’Ryan again enters the story. Young Douglas wanted desperately to go into theater, and he confessed as much to the priest. But his mother was doggedly opposed. What to do?

  The good Father shrewdly posited another career. There were savages in remote Africa, he suggested, who needed converting. Of course, there would be adventures, wild beasts—much for an energetic young man to overcome in the course of saving those souls . . . Doug, reportedly, took the bait. “Within a few weeks,” his niece Letitia wrote, “Douglas was wearing his most somber clothes and his face was a mask of studied benevolence. He began going to mass weekdays and from time to time dropped a word or two about the desperate plight of the unbaptized savages.” Ella, bedeviled by visions of her darling baby skewered on a cannibal’s spit, capitulated. The stage might be bad, but it could not have the dangers of darkest Africa. Accordingly, when her son asked, she visited Mr. Warde.

  The lady called on me the next day, indorsed all that her son had told me, approved of the boy’s ambitions and the result was I engaged him for my company for the following season, to lead the supernumeraries and to play such small parts as his capacity and appearance would permit.

  The youth was of rather less than average height but of athletic build, with frank attractive features and his name was Douglas Fairbanks.

  He was to start the following season, September 1899.*15 Which was just as well. Between the time of his Warde introduction and this heady day, he managed to get himself expelled from high school.

  Here is another example of how he managed to manipulate his narrative. Douglas fully owned the mischief of his youth, and tales abound of his harmless hijinks. Water snakes were released in a streetcar; one boy threw a rock through a classroom window from the inside, while Fairbanks picked up a second rock from under his chair, proclaiming innocently, “Here it is, teacher!” He and a group of friends disconnected neighbors’ electric doorbells, then charged them for budding electrician Robert to repair. His how-I-was-expelled story falls into this gentle category: it was Saint Patrick’s Day, and as the student body entered the assembly hall, they were met by the customary busts of history’s great men sporting green hats and ties. Young Fairbanks was found out as the culprit, and that was the end of his academic career.

  Schools were strict in the 1890s, true, but this hardly constituted an expellable offense, even then. The truth was more damning. When the students filed in for that particular assemblage, one of the teachers struck a chord on the piano for the holiday march. The room resonated with silence. Someone had cut the wires on the piano. There was a cluster of boys to whom the sight of the mute piano elicited undue hilarity, and it evidently did not take long to determine who was the guilty party in what was a very destructive and expensive prank.

  Vandalism on this scale did not fit well into his gently mischievous story line, and Fairbanks managed to keep this particular misdeed covered up. He continued with temperate fibs about his educational history: his parents sent him for a while to the Colorado School of Mines (they did not); he took a short “special course” at Harvard after the two-year Warde tour (he did not). Occasionally he would throw in Princeton, for good measure. But this was rare.

  The Colorado School of Mines yarn had deeper meaning. He readily admitted, of this fictional turn, that he was an academic failure, that he had no patience for the finer points of trigonometry and such. But the mere fact that he placed himself there (and later, in film roles, would cast himself as a mining engineer) may have stemmed from a high school crush. “His English teacher there was a young lady with blond hair, fair skin, and a happy disposition who measured up to all his ideals of feminine appeal,” wrote his niece. “He spent hours every morning grooming himself before he dashed off to school.” The teacher was taken with Lord Byron, so he grew his hair out accordingly, “carefully brushed and nurtured with olive oil from his mother’s kitchen. . . . He rarely smiled and for hours on end sat brooding or verbally rebelling against ‘conventions.’”

  His dream was crushed, alas. The lovely young teacher became engaged to—of all things—an engineer. Somehow, he was just at that stage in his youthful development where this hit a psychological sweet spot. He would become one of the most famous men in the world, certainly among the most acclaimed and beloved. He would marry, in turn, three beautiful blondes. And yet he would always claim that he almost became a mining engineer. On behalf of mine safety, it is a fortunate thing that he was a good actor. Or at least good enough for Frederick Warde’s touring company.

  The offer to tour for a year with the troupe (it would ultimately stretch to two full seasons) was a tremendous opportunity for the sixteen-year-old. It served as a lesson in the realities of the professional actor, and what his future would be for the next sixteen years, as even Broadway stars would tour with their productions. The company consisted of twenty-five people, including Warde. Some of the actors additionally assumed administrative functions. In his second season, Fairbanks was the assistant stage manager. This was no small job: the production traveled with a sixty-foot baggage car for its scenery and costumes and performed a rotation of plays, both Shakespeare (Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Othello) and those dramas suited to Warde’s age and history (The Lion’s Mouth, The Duke’s Jester, Virginius). They were on tour every day from mid-September to early May, starting in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast during the steamy late summers and autumns, moving up the West Coast of the country as the new year arrived, and spending the brutally cold winters in the upper West, Midwest, and Canada. Many nights were spent sleeping upright in trains as they moved between smaller towns for one- and two-night stands. For large
r cities, where stays could be longer than a week, nights were spent in theatrical hotels or boardinghouses. He made thirty dollars a week, out of which he needed to pay his expenses.

  Curiously, Fairbanks spent his entire career downplaying those two critical years. He was just a glorified extra, he would claim. “The school boy Douglas was no more,” he said in 1912. “Instead there blossomed forth a youth with large hands and feet who carried spears in Shakespearian plays and thought he was the mainspring of each and every show.” His favorite anecdote about that time was the Hamlet-in-Duluth story, which makes up for in charm what it lacks in veracity. His story went like this: He had been plugging along, the ultimate spear-toting supernumerary, when his Big Chance came. The actor who was to play Laertes in Hamlet ended up on the wrong side of a Minnesota jail cell. Doug stepped into the role and, “to make a long story short, I played the part so well that it only took about ten years more to become a star on Broadway.” He never tired of quoting the purported theatrical review: “Mr. Warde’s company was bad but worst of all was Douglas Fairbanks as Laertes.”

  This canard was debunked long ago. The troupe never played Hamlet in Duluth, and there were no bad reviews.*16 It was but a single thread in the tapestry he wove about those years. He made himself a comic figure of incompetence: