She was wise enough, or lucky enough, to start at the top: the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, where the then thirty-two-year-old David Wark Griffith was busy turning a novelty into what would become an art form.
She haughtily told Mr. Griffith that she was a Belasco actress. He haughtily told her that she was too little and too fat—but that he would give her a try at five dollars a day, only for those days when she was needed. She insisted she must have a guarantee of twenty-five a week. Pickford biographer Eileen Whitfield eloquently captured the essence of the creature Griffith was attempting to stare down at that moment: a formidable young Mary, “whose face seemed to move from round good humor to unsettling beauty. Her hazel eyes held a melancholy sweetness. Her bones were fine, her build small. Her back fairly dripped with springing curls. She stood up proudly on size-five shoes; the longest finger on her hand was two and a half inches. Yet she spoke with the aim of a torpedo.”
He put her in costume and gave her a trial. By the time the day was over, she insisted on ten dollars a day. (If she had to do something as dreadful as act in motion pictures, they had better make it worth her while!) They settled for a guarantee of forty a week. Griffith knew he had someone extraordinary here.
And she was extraordinary in the Biograph films. She registered on film as had no one else up to that time. She played prostitutes and scrubwomen, ingénues and wives—a range of roles she was never to enjoy again. Under Griffith’s tutelage she gradually learned to shade her performances, to remove the stage mannerisms of the time and adjust to the intimacy of the camera, which, as Griffith matured the form, moved ever closer to the actor. She was not truly the first performer to have a close-up; they are seen in American and European films as early as 1903. But hers was the one many film historians remember.
While working at Biograph, she met and fell in love with a tall Irish actor—twenty-two-year-old Owen Moore. Mama Charlotte did not approve—he brooded, and he drank. She could tolerate the drinking—the Pickfords were a rather wet lot—but she could not abide the brooding. No one liked a mean drunk, and Owen would turn out to be just that. As 1910 moved into 1911, Mary did two things. She eloped with Owen and departed Biograph for greener financial pastures at Carl Laemmle’s IMP Company. She was important enough to successfully insist that her new husband’s employment (as both actor and director) be part of the deal. By the time she moved—briefly—to the Majestic Motion Picture Company, her pay was up to $225 a week. But the production standards were so inferior at these two companies that in January 1912 she took her first, and only, reduction in salary. She returned to Griffith and the Biograph Company for $175 a week. She took the pay cut gladly. Money was important, sure. But, to her discerning mind, so was quality.
It was in the summer of 1912 that a group of Biograph players, along with their director, took a busman’s holiday to see a Broadway play (Mary mistakenly remembered it as A Gentleman of Leisure) and the twenty-year-old laid eyes for the first time on Douglas Fairbanks. According to her recollection a mere four years later, Griffith remarked, “Now there’s a young fellow who will someday make a great impression in pictures.” She agreed: “He was so full of life and expressive pantomime, with health, spirits and a fine athletic figure.”
The world that summer was starting to change. Moving pictures were no longer just for the poor, urban immigrant. Middle-class families were now going to them, increasing the size of the audiences nationally. And everyone, everywhere, was in love with that Biograph Girl: the Girl with the Curls. David Belasco was a shrewd producer who recognized the power of films to create a star, and in November 1912, he lured her back to “the legitimate.” Now Mary Pickford had the lead role in his Broadway play A Good Little Devil. Her last film for Griffith, The New York Hat, was also the first screenplay by an unknown nineteen-year-old writer, Anita Loos.
While the play had a respectable run, from January to May 1913, its star did not go on the usual post-Broadway tour. She had been wooed back to films, this time by producer Adolph Zukor. Now her salary was $500 a week, and she would be making feature films—no more shorts.
She was not yet playing children, although this is how, one hundred years later, most think of her, if they think of her at all. Many hold a vision of some sort of rosebud-lipped, Victorian Valentine of a girl—all mincing goodness. In fact, the appeal of Mary Pickford was that she was very far from this stereotype. She played scrappy, intelligent young women facing adversity with humor and an authentic quality that can best be described as spunk. She could break your heart or make you laugh, but no one ever confused her with the run-of-the-mill heroine that characterized her era. She was unique.
Further, now her name was on the films themselves, and in the advertising. Now everyone knew who the Girl with the Curls was. The emergence of feature films, the creation of a new type of periodical (the movie fan magazines), and the golden halo of Mary Pickford and her ability to resonate with an audience created a perfect storm. Seemingly overnight, she acquired a level of fame that is hard to fathom. It is often written that more people saw Mary Pickford in one night than had seen Sarah Bernhardt or Eleonora Duse in their entire careers. It matters little if this is apocryphal; the truth is that the tremendous fame that was thrust upon her in her very early 1920s was without precedent until Charlie Chaplin came upon the scene the following year and Douglas Fairbanks the year after that. There was no template for this level of acclaim and very little for the sudden acquisition of the associated wealth. More astonishing than the fact that it happened is the fact that she handled it so well.
Certainly it would be a challenge to any marriage. But here her spouse was a fellow actor; a male in an era when the man was supposed to support the woman; an insecure, bitter, evidently unlikable, handsome drunk. One could hardly blame anyone, much less someone as young and vulnerable as Mary Pickford, for being taken with the prospect of the dashing, charismatic Mr. Fairbanks lifting her into his arms and carrying her to safety.
She was to claim in later years that she didn’t think of the episode in a romantic light (“and I’m quite certain Douglas didn’t either. It was a gesture he would have made to any woman in such a predicament”). But there was no fooling Elsie Janis. They may have started the walk as Mr. Fairbanks and Miss Pickford, she noted. But by the time they returned, they were Mary and Douglas.
Mary continued her attempts at denial. “I don’t recall giving him much thought after that meeting,” she wrote. “I buried myself in my work, and in fact tried to do as little thinking as possible about myself.” She was kidding only herself. Shortly thereafter, Frank Case, the Algonquin’s manager, invited her to a dance he was giving. Her invitation (Case was one of Fairbanks’s best friends) was no accident. Neither was her acceptance. This was the sort of event that she normally would skip. Still, she noted, she “did the unusual thing of accepting.”
Doug, of course, was there and, between dances, shone the full wattage of his charm upon her. She (and Chaplin), he told her, were the two greatest artists of pantomime. “You do less apparent acting than anyone else I know,” he said, “and because of that you express more.” She remembered that conversation to the end of her life. She “hugged the echo of his words for days, repeating them over and over again to myself.” Like so many others, she described Fairbanks in terms of light: “I had been living in half shadows, and now a brilliant light was suddenly cast upon me, the sunlight of Douglas’ approval and admiration.” Smarting under her alcoholic husband’s constant belittling, she could not help but be drawn to this glorious, handsome source of esteem. It was characteristic Fairbanks. Actress Lila Lee said it best: “He was just about the best morale booster I ever ran into.”
Still, there was something else happening here. Mary was the top woman in her industry—the top person, for that matter. “People of attainment fascinated him,” she wrote. “He sought them out, not because he was a snob, but because of his lively interest in how they had made their names; how they accepted
their successes; how it had influenced them.” Actress Bessie Love had a similar recollection of Doug at this time, recalling, “He told me to observe cultured people, how they talked, walked, conducted themselves—not to copy them, just to learn how the other half lived.” Best friend Charlie Chaplin admired Fairbanks’s candor on the subject: “I found him disarmingly honest because he admitted that he enjoyed being a snob and that successful people had allure for him.” That alone might have made Mary Pickford a source of interest. Yet there was more. She was ambitious and hardworking. They were in the same field. They both had strong ties to their mothers. She was vulnerable. She was beautiful.
It was the maternal tie that Fairbanks used as a pretext for their next meeting. Charlotte should meet Ella! It was only natural! (Every sentence he spoke seemed to end in an exclamation point.) He invited Mary and her mother to tea the next day. It was a shrewd move. There were many ways to Mary Pickford’s heart, but the quickest, the surest, the best was through her mother. She gladly accepted. He, of course, had done nothing to clear this with his own mother, but reportedly he showed up the next morning at the Seymour Hotel with the gift of a new sealskin coat in hand and the query “How would you like to have Mary Pickford and her mother here to tea?”
There was little an astonished Ella could do if she didn’t like the idea. But she did. “I knew you would,” Doug is reported to have replied. “They’ll be here in half an hour.” A caterer from Sherry’s arrived with service large enough to feed a platoon. Florists came with bowls of flowers. The tea went swimmingly; the mothers got on famously. By the time the guests departed, Doug turned to Ella and said, “I suppose you know how I feel about Mary.”
She knew. She gave the usual maternal advice. No one could help how they felt. But everyone was accountable for how they acted. He needed to be careful. “Sometimes we pay dearly for the unhappiness we cause others,” she reportedly said, having reason, perhaps, to know.
He had had, it was said, multiple dalliances in the past. “He didn’t smoke or drink much, so he thought he had the right to some kind of vice, so he chose women,” Anita Loos claimed. “He went after every girl who crossed the Triangle lot.” His son wrote that the numbers of his “extracurricular fancies” were “surprisingly large.” Neither individual was an unbiased source at the time they made their statements, and in the case of Fairbanks Jr. this was a case of the very black pot casting aspersions on the kettle’s complexion. Still, one suspects the truth of their claims. The double standard was ubiquitous; actors were raffish, and Fairbanks was wealthy, handsome, and charismatic. Casual affairs were very likely the order of the day.
But this was different and he knew it. This was the type of thunderbolt that could ruin marriages, careers, lives.
And yet, he pursued it. He was heedless, in fact. He next invited Mary to the Netherland Hotel to “meet the family.” This, given the subtext of their attraction, seems a bold, almost callous move, but it made sense. How better to pretend that there was nothing untoward going on—as indeed was the case at this point—than to have Mary meet Beth and “the boy”? This she did, with some apprehension. To the end of his days, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. recalled the circumstances. He was on the floor, playing with toy trains. Upon the introduction, the six-year-old stood and bowed, meanwhile wondering how it was that someone essentially his own size (Mary was five feet tall) could be considered a grown-up and go around by herself. She joined him on the floor with the trains and, in his words, “Mary had made another conquest.”
But the romance, the full-fledged romance, did not begin right away. They were to circle each other throughout 1916, yearning, wishing, longing, but not acting. For now, he and she were to focus on work.
His next film, The Habit of Happiness, brought him a collaborator who was to direct more of his films than any other: Allan Dwan.
Toronto-born, Notre Dame–educated Allan Dwan was two years younger than Douglas Fairbanks. An athlete in college, he trained as an engineer, and it was this training—by way of his work with the Cooper Hewitt Light Company—that first led him to the motion picture industry. He graduated from scriptwriter to director, a task for which he was well suited. He was, in the words of the great film scholar Kevin Brownlow, “a man with a strong dramatic sense whose clear and logical brain and rich sense of humor ensured for his pictures the highest standards of entertainment and craftsmanship.” He and Fairbanks felt a kinship. When asked how he influenced the molding of the Fairbanks persona, he replied, “I was a little bit like that myself when I was young—a restless, athletic type.” And as a college-educated engineer, he was, in some respects, what Fairbanks only pretended to be. He was an important figure in Fairbanks’s history but also a source of obfuscation. The problem is this: the older Dwan got, the more colorful his stories. By the time he was in his eighties and nineties, his tales were getting pretty tall. Film historians and biographers lapped them up. What could be a better way to demonstrate D. W. Griffith’s thinly veiled aversion to his upstart Broadway star than the following? Dwan (he himself claims) and Fairbanks are sitting on the Triangle lot. A lion wanders by, scaring both men into paralysis. Griffith follows, approaches the (tame) lion with the phrase, “Come, little pussy cat!” and thus one-ups the company’s top male star and his rising young director.
One wants to believe such tales. They embody everything about Griffith’s antipathy toward Fairbanks, or any strong male. And while there were no lions in Intolerance, a trained lion was used at that time at the Fine Arts studio for a DeWolf Hopper comedy. Griffith was even photographed with it. So it might have happened.
Still, such a story sounds too good to be true. One struggles to separate fact from creatively embellished fiction. The Habit of Happiness is a case in point. Filmed in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the movie was an attempt to capitalize on Fairbanks’s growing reputation as “Old Doc Cheerful.” It was a slight story of a millionaire’s son whose egalitarian instincts drive him to a New York flophouse to teach its inhabitants how to laugh. It was Dwan’s assertion (then echoed by others, including Adolphe Menjou, who was an extra in the film) that the Bowery bums who were bused in for the scene would not laugh at Doug’s jokes on camera. Upon Dwan’s urging, Fairbanks advanced the smuttiness of his stories until they were quite blue. Finally the men demonstrated the proper mirth. A reasonable enough tale and likely true. The problem comes with the denouement. According to Dwan, the lip readers in the audience objected to the scenes. “We had to call the picture back and make different shots of Doug,” he claimed. “And that’s how I learned to be very careful about what actors said even in silent pictures.”
As appealing a tale as this makes, there is no documentation in the financial records of the Triangle Film Corporation to support it. There were no reshoots, no change in negative length, no evidence that this was anything but a fable.*1
Perhaps Dwan was simply trying to milk an interesting story line out of what was essentially a very minor film. The Habit of Happiness was studio-bound and—except for a brawl in the last reel and a sequence where Fairbanks slings the solidly built actor George Fawcett over his shoulders and runs him up a flight of stairs—short on physical action. Loos’s titles helped (she collected another twenty-five dollars for her efforts), but there was really no disguising the thinness of the plot. The critics concurred. Photoplay’s critic wrote, “My criticism is leveled . . . against the growing habit of making Mr. Fairbanks—who happens to be one of the very finest young actors on our platforms—depend wholly on his strong chin, chortling ivories, belligerent movements and snappy eyes.”
The Habit of Happiness was the first of many films that director and star would make together, and the association was to prove fruitful. Dwan was a skilled and sensitive director, although he was never truly considered an auteur. But for Fairbanks, this was one of his strengths. He was cooperative, creative, and collaborative. Kevin Brownlow noted in 1962, “Douglas Fairbanks, Senior employed a number of directors, almost all of whom m
ade their best pictures under his control. But once away from Fairbanks they were never really able to repeat this success.” These are strong words; even stronger are those of his son: “My father had great respect for directors of other pictures, but none for those of his own. These were largely friends who would carry out exactly what he wanted.”
This does, perhaps, a disservice to men like Victor Fleming*2 and Allan Dwan—particularly, perhaps, to Dwan. What Dwan brought to Fairbanks was the idea that his stunts should not demonstrate the extreme of what the star was capable of accomplishing but that they should look unforced. “When Doug did any of his stunts, he was essentially graceful. That’s one thing he struggled for and I insisted on: there was never to be any evidence of an effort on his part,” said Dwan. “He floated through the air, and everything we did was based on measurement of his reach. Heights of tables, heights of stair rises; we had stairs specially built so he would gracefully go up and down them. . . . He could take three of them without effort and anybody else would be stretching.” Dwan, an engineer, would help Fairbanks design the setup for the stunts so that his leaps would become graceful arcs across space, almost balletic in their control. “Stuntmen have tried to imitate him and it always looks like a stunt when they do it. With him, it always looked very natural.” In time, this tendency would grow, reaching its apogee in The Thief of Bagdad, where the star’s movements were dancelike throughout the film, not merely in the stunts.
But this was to come. Fairbanks was still learning. “At Triangle, he was studying the business, finding his errors, watching what was being done, choosing what he thought was good, eliminating what wasn’t and planning for the future,” said Dwan. “Dreaming up things he ought to do.” The dreams caught hold. He would soon make much better films than The Habit of Happiness.
The First King of Hollywood Page 12
