This experience left him rattled, and in his characteristically rash manner he decided to quit the theater. But not quite yet. He joined a group of young actors, including William Courtenay, performing in stock company work in Albany, New York. The only evidence of that summer is a program for Men and Women, a piece performed in July 1903 as a one-night benefit for the Albany City Homeopathic Hospital and Dispensary. The play had a number of major names attached: it was written by Henry De Mille and David Belasco and codirected by beloved character actor Thomas A. Wise. It was heady company for a young actor just discharged from a touring company.
Nothing else turned up. He had brief employment at the Russell and Erwin Manufacturing Company, makers of hardware in New York City.†*4 Next came the law. Possibly inspired by his father, he worked as a law clerk for three months in the firm of E. M. Hollander and Sons, also in New York. But discovering that “it would not be possible to become a brilliant attorney by Christmas,” he claimed to yield to the lure of travel. He would go to the Orient. He would fall in love with a geisha girl. Or at least, this is the version of events he would tell his family and press agents in later years.
There is no evidence via ship manifest or passport application that he went to London that summer, as he alleged. It would be hard to imagine his fitting a term at a hardware company, three months of law clerking, and a trip to Britain into the spring and summer of 1903. This overseas jaunt was likely part and parcel of the series of cheerful half-truths that made up the Fairbanks myth.
At least he spun a good yarn: his plan, reportedly, was to sell the rights to a patent for an electric switch, as a way of raising money to go to Japan. Once in Great Britain, he claimed to have met an English beauty and suddenly felt no need to raise money to go anywhere. He represented himself to her as a successful Broadway actor—a white lie, at worst—playing the part until his funds began to dwindle. Claiming the need to return to the Great White Way to take a part in a play, he left the young woman behind. The fable ends with his fib turning into truth: he was placed under contract to famed producer/manager William Brady, and cast in his production of The Pit.
William Brady was one of those larger-than-life figures that the turn of the prior century seemed to produce. Fairbanks friend Kenneth Davenport said of him, “No orchestra ever played loudly enough to suit him, no mob ever shouted vigorously enough to suit him.” He was forty years old, had made and lost several fortunes, had managed two world heavyweight boxing champions (James Jeffries and “Gentleman” Jim Corbett), and had produced dozens of plays, including the favorite of his generation, Way Down East. He possessed “more charm than was right for any one man to have” and knew how to use it to a showman’s best advantage. He even had—for 1903—a fairly extensive background in motion pictures. He had acted as timekeeper when Thomas Edison filmed the boxing match between James Corbett and Peter Courtenay in his famed Black Maria studio in 1894 and was involved with the filming of subsequent fights during the 1890s. By the turn of the century he was, in association with an ambitious young immigrant by the name of Adolph Zukor, an exhibitor of Hale’s Tours, described by film scholar Edward Wagenknecht as travel films shown in small theaters constructed to resemble railway coaches: “The ‘conductor’ stood on the back platform to receive your ticket, and when you went inside and took your seat you really seemed to be settling down for a journey. Presently the lights were extinguished, the car rumbled and swayed, and on a small screen in the front of the coach, you saw Yellowstone Park or the Yosemite or whatever locality might be on exhibition that day. Since the film had been taken from the platform of a moving train the illusion was complete.”
Films took a great leap forward in 1902–1903, when Edwin S. Porter, inspired by France’s Georges Méliès, began to string a series of successive shots together to progressively construct a narrative. “Porter distinguished the movies from other theatrical forms and gave them the invention of editing,” wrote Lewis Jacobs in 1939. The Life of an American Fireman in 1902 was followed late the next year by The Great Train Robbery and the blossoming, the year after, of nickelodeons. What was a gimcrack novelty suddenly reached a tipping point. Movies learned to tell a story, not simply document movement, and the fuse for what was to become a popular culture sensation was lit.
Accordingly, Brady’s involvement in film would grow over the course of the next ten years, but for the present his main occupation—his prestige occupation—was as a theatrical manager in “the legitimate.” And for “the legitimate,” The Pit seemed to hold promise.
Based on a major novel, The Pit dealt with the Chicago Board of Trade and the risks of commodities speculation. Brady’s plans for it were ambitious. Sets were elaborate: transportation of scenery for the pre-Broadway run in Philadelphia, Jersey City, and Chicago took four train cars, in an era when most major productions required only one. There were fifty speaking parts and four grand opera singers. Most notable: the two hundred to five hundred extras for the climactic scene in “the pit”—the room where brokers traded and fortunes were made and lost. Brady would plaster the town in advance with posters asking for “500 men of good appearance to take part in the wheat scene.” This had the happy effect of generating advance publicity, as well as a built-in audience of wives, mothers, and sweethearts.
The play toured through the fall and winter of 1903. Its Chicago run was at the New Garrick, a block from the Iroquois Theatre, the site of the worst theatrical fire tragedy in history. Brady describes how on that fateful day (December 30, 1903) he left The Pit to check out the competition, leaving the doomed Iroquois mere minutes before the fire broke out and hundreds of patrons—mostly parents with small children—were killed. It was during the matinee performance. An arc light sparked, a cotton curtain ignited, and within a shockingly short time a wall of flame and smoke roared into the auditorium, killing patrons in their seats. Hundreds more were killed by being crushed at tight exits with locked or inward-opening doors.
It was a horrendous demonstration of the effects of fire, and the cast and crew of The Pit were witness to the devastation. Bodies were piled like cordwood on the street; improvised first aid stations were set up in nearby restaurants and shops. The smell of burned flesh, the scores upon scores of dead children, the general scenes of terror and grief—all potent reminders to every actor and stagehand present that they worked every day in wooden firetraps, that what had happened to Eddie Foy and the Mr. Bluebeard company could happen to them and their audiences at any time. Fire was to remain a constant hazard throughout Fairbanks’s career, even after he left the theater. Every few years he would find himself fighting yet another one, and with each he must have remembered that cold December day in Chicago 1903. He never spoke of it.
The mayor of Chicago shut down all theaters, and Brady responded by having the Chicago company take over the schedule of a planned second company, moving through towns such as St. Louis and Milwaukee. Despite this major setback, the play did well, arriving on Broadway in February 1904. By this point the pit scene was so successful that within a week of the play’s arrival at New York’s Lyric Theatre, it was being burlesqued in a sketch at the Green Room Club, with The Pit’s star, Wilton Lackaye, as referee and Brady as leader of the bulls.
And in the midst of all this mayhem was Doug, cast as Landry Court. While not the lead, his was a major character in both the novel and the play. Author Frank Norris’s description of the character makes Brady’s casting decision clear:
This was Landry Court, a young fellow just turned twenty-three. . . . He was astonishingly good-looking, small-made, wiry, alert, nervous, debonair, with . . . dark eyes that snapped like a terrier’s. He made friends almost at first sight, and was one of those fortunate few who were favoured equally of men and women. The healthiness of his eye and skin persuaded to a belief in the healthiness of his mind; and, in fact, Landry was as clean without as within. He was frank, open-hearted, full of fine sentiments and exaltations and enthusiasm. Until he was eighteen he
had cherished an ambition to become the President of the United States.
Brady got it right. Reviews of Fairbanks’s performance were positive, noting that Doug played “with refreshing spirit.”
The Pit was to provide Fairbanks with a lifelong friend, a fellow player fated to become the first member of his entourage. Kenneth Davenport lent Doug his coat one frigid night and, the story goes, caught a chill himself when he had to go out without it. This led (at least in Fairbanks’s guilty mind) shortly thereafter to a diagnosis of tuberculosis, and from that point forward Doug felt responsible for the man. It would be a number of years before he was in a position to employ anyone, but once he was, Davenport became his secretary-companion and, eventually, his ghostwriter.
“After a season of what I thought was a very successful work in this vehicle,” Fairbanks was later to claim, “Mr. Brady decided to reduce my salary, but I assured him that this could be avoided by the simple expedient of detaching me from the payroll, which he did.” Brady’s recollections were less politic: “There were some stormy aspects in the handling of Mr. Fairbanks. On one occasion I tore up his contract in front of him.”
One does not know whether to attribute Fairbanks’s behavior to extreme confidence or extreme temper. It cannot have been a wise thing for a twenty-one-year-old novice to engage in a battle of wills with one of the top producers on Broadway. Whether due to an excess of self-assurance or self-will, the breach occurred. He had to find other work. The Pit stayed at the Lyric until late April, when it moved to the Academy of Music. Just when the rift with Brady occurred is not clear, but Fairbanks’s next play, Two Little Sailor Boys, opened at the Academy of Music on May 2.
This was a revival of a British comic melodrama, featuring two young ladies (variably described to skeptical critics as being between twelve and fifteen years of age) as the nautical lads. Doug played the character role of “Jack Jolly, able seaman” and was, in the view of the New York Dramatic Mirror, “boyish, roistering, likable.” The play had a dramatic rescue at sea, effected with the aid of the members of the Fort Hamilton Division of the United States Volunteer Life Saving Corps, who nightly performed the act of pulling the drenched “boys” from a large tank of water. But neither the charms of wet costumes clinging to teenage girls nor the roistering likability of Douglas Fairbanks made the play a decided hit, and it closed after thirty-two performances.
The early summer of 1904 was idle, from a theatrical standpoint. “Discouragement isn’t the word that expressed my feelings at all,” Fairbanks claimed later. “I didn’t know what to do. And in those days whenever I was in doubt, I always went to London, so I took passage on the first cattle boat out.”*5
He was likely to have been telling the truth in claiming that on this trip he met Lee Shubert, who engaged him for Fantana. He returned to New York City late in August 1904, where he joined rehearsals for Shubert’s musical spectacle, which had started four weeks earlier. Ever since The Mikado, Japanese-themed operettas had been all the rage, and Fantana was another in this species. “In the first act the entire dramatis personae go suddenly mad on the subject of Japan and decide to emigrate en masse to ‘That fair island of Asia,’” wrote Douglas’s niece of such productions. “Somebody conveniently has a yacht and it seems the most logical thing in the world for the entire population of Newport to embark upon it.” Family myth describes Fairbanks as merely a member of the male chorus in this production—his niece recalled his claim that he was “one of the most emphatic in voicing the cry ‘To Japan, to Japan!’ but after that line he would get hopelessly off key and flounder around in a maze of other people’s melody.”
While the description of Doug’s singing may have been correct, the designation of his role was understated. He was again the heroine’s brother. His name was prominently placed in the cast listings, and he was noted not only for an unusually fine voice but to have “acted with distinction and had more than the usual share of manly good looks.” What’s more, he sang a solo, “Just My Style,” directed at the play’s ingénue, and he was featured in the cast portraits on the sheet music that was issued with the musical’s success.
Evidently it was something more than the “manly good looks” that caught the eye of Grace George, wife of producer William Brady, when she saw the production after its New York premiere in mid-January 1905. (The play had had a successful pre-Broadway run in Chicago in the fall.) “He’s not good-looking,” she is reported to have told her husband. “But he has a world of personality—just worlds of it. His name is Douglas Fairbanks.”
The story, one suspects, is just a little too pat—the sort of theatrical myth that artistic personalities like to construct. Brady liked what he saw, plucked the youngster out of the chorus, signed him to a personal contract, and gave him a starring role in his next production: A Case of Frenzied Finance. In fact, Fairbanks had already played an important role in Brady’s The Pit, and Brady was very familiar with the actor’s virtues and flaws. And he was more than a mere chorus boy in Fantana. But the essentials are true. Brady acknowledged that it was his wife’s influence that caused him to once again sign Fairbanks, and it was Brady who was to play a major role in the next phase of his theatrical career. Brady cabled Fairbanks to offer him a contract. Fairbanks, recalling the Sturm und Drang of their last encounter, thought it a practical joke. He wired back to ensure that Brady was serious. He was. Fantana went on to a long run, but Douglas Fairbanks was not to run with it—at least for a while.
As with The Pit, the theme of A Case of Frenzied Finance dealt with the financial markets and the “reigning craze for watering stocks and getting rich quick.” Indeed, the term frenzied finance carried as much weight in 1905 as irrational exuberance would a hundred years later. The story was a comedy, and plans for its opening were announced in mid-March. It was a modest production, requiring nothing like Fantana’s nine weeks of rehearsal, and opened at the Savoy Theatre on April 3.
Fairbanks was the lead: an ambitious bellboy at the Van Billion Hotel who has, in the words of the New York Times reviewer, “made up his mind to be a power in the world, and who reiterates that fact at every opportunity with face upturned to the gallery and clinched fist extended skyward.” The gesture—hackneyed even in 1905—was one that the world was to see many times ahead. As Zorro, cajoling the caballeros from atop a table, his right fist would extend upward; as Robin Hood, it would be clutched, pointing upward, always upward, from thousands of brilliantly colored stone lithograph posters. Even twenty-five years later, in the early talkie Reaching for the Moon, it is still there, surrounded by ticker tape, its owner older, perhaps, but no less determined.
This reaching, this grabbing for success, this declaration that it would come, it must come, was emblematic of Fairbanks through most of his life and for his entire active career. He doodled the word SUCCESS on scratch pads the way others drew random squiggles. He relished the fight: “When there were no natural obstacles in my path, I used to create them, just to get used to going over them,” he wrote twenty years later. A brazen ambition but somehow a likable one as well. Even the Times critic grudgingly admitted that Doug was “pleasing when he was not spouting platitudes.” Others wrote of his “fervor and enthusiasm.”
It seemed to be paying off. He was not yet twenty-two, was signed by a major theatrical producer for fifty dollars a week, and had his first leading role on Broadway. He rented a carriage and drove his mother slowly past the theater so they could relish the sight of his name up in lights. And who could blame him?
Still, it was good that he did so on opening night. The play, for all its topicality, was too broad a comedy, badly staged, and with a spotty cast. The farce, wrote one critic, “shows the hurried pitchfork in its construction.” Brady moved the production from the Savoy to the Princess Theatre after its first week, shortening the title to Frenzied Finance in an attempt to save it. “I think the play is one of the best comedies we have had in years,” he declared, “and I am willing to back my judgment.�
� It was a losing bet. It lasted only until late April. Little remains of this play—even the script is missing from the Library of Congress, suggesting that Brady did not consider it worth the bother of registering. But one trifle has washed up on the shores of history: four pages from a young theatergoer’s album. The young lady attended the April 10 performance. The cast list from the program is on the first page. Douglas Fairbanks’s name is underlined seven times. A cabinet photo of Fairbanks in costume on the second page is followed by a production still. Finally, a page of written criticism: The leading lady, it seems, was “too old.” But Doug? The young woman was a fine judge of star power: “Douglas Fairbanks,” she wrote succinctly, “simply great.”
She was not the only one who felt this way. One astute critic captured the essence of Doug’s engaging cheerful narcissism: “Douglas Fairbanks . . . did excellently when he was not obliged to spout of his ambitions, the ‘spirit of the age,’ and his love for an heiress whose name he had not learned,” the Morning Telegraph reviewer wrote wryly. “The audience liked Mr. Fairbanks. Mr. Fairbanks liked himself, and everybody was satisfied.”
The short life of his first leading role did not appear to discomfit him. By mid-April he was announced as the romantic lead in the upcoming revival of Trilby at the New Amsterdam. Trilby, the story of Svengali and his beautiful, hypnotized victim, had been a great success ten years earlier, and Brady’s plans were for a two-week revival with the original cast. The original romantic hero was not welcome, however, by virtue of having divorced the leading lady two years prior, and young Douglas Fairbanks appeared an opportune substitution.
But it was not to be. Perhaps he was too young for the star’s comfort. Whatever the reason, when the play premiered on May 8, 1905, Fairbanks was not in the role of Little Billee. He was silent on the subject, never mentioning the play, or his proposed part in it, in any interviews or autobiographical writings about his theatrical career. Perhaps it was a sore point. Or perhaps it was of little importance to him.
The First King of Hollywood Page 5
