The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  To be fair, the film had its modest virtues: Doug’s character (Sunny Wiggins) is introduced in a tight iris shot, sleeping soundly in bed. The iris widens, and we see that there is a vagrant snoring peacefully on either side of him. He awakens, and instead of being startled, he looks delighted. Subsequent shots demonstrate that both bedroom and bath are full of homeless men. He forces them to bathe, herding them into the bathroom like a Japanese subway pusher, before bringing them downstairs and feeding them breakfast at a table set for his sister’s society friends. (Loos’s title tells us that the Wiggins family “have risen to the plane where they are snubbed by all the best people in town.”) Alistair Cooke proffered a theory: Fairbanks’s screen character was such a close fusion of his actual personality “that it was no longer possible to say where ‘Doug’ began and Fairbanks ended.” The Habit of Happiness may serve as an example of this. Margery Wilson, a fellow performer at Triangle in these years, later recalled, “He was once in a Chicago hotel that faced a park where old men sit about on the benches waiting, waiting, no one knows for what. Fairbanks watched them until he could no longer stand the thought of their hunger and cold. He sent his brother over to collect them to eat as his guests.” Was Fairbanks emulating his movie character or was the character written to reflect the man?

  It can be argued that once he had control of his scripts—and he began to have control by his third film—he inserted for his character those feats he had never accomplished, or those he hoped to. It was unlikely a coincidence that the hero of The Americano was a “breezy American mining engineer” (to quote the publicity) who attended the Massachusetts School of Mines, as Fairbanks falsely claimed to have done at its Colorado counterpart. Similarly, he had traveled little farther than the civilized parts of London and Paris, but his heroes donned pith helmets and strode confidently through the jungle, native guides forming a train behind.

  This is not to say that he was merely playacting his life—he would turn some of those visions into reality in later years, although admittedly these were more of the pith helmet than the academic variety. Like Sinclair Lewis’s Dodsworth, as a young man he envisioned himself “riding a mountain trail, two thousand sheer feet above a steaming valley; sun helmet and whip cord breeches; tropical rain on a tin-roofed shack; a shot in the darkness as he sat over a square-face of gin with a ragged tramp of Noble Ancestry.” And once he had the wealth, and the luxury of time, he would get there. But not yet. His destination now was back to Los Angeles.

  A visiting reporter captured the essence of Fairbanks at this juncture. He was in his suite of rooms in his hotel unwrapping parcels: a rake, a hoe, a lawn mower, a bushel of seeds, a trowel, garden gloves, a hat, and even overalls. “I’m going to have a bungolaoh [sic] and be a bungaloafer,” he was quoted as saying. The reporter could not resist the obvious question: why buy everything in New York and end up paying the freight charges to California? “Somebody in the next room gave an approving sniff of scorn,” he wrote. “It was quite evident that this subject had already been thoroughly discussed in the Fairbanks family.” His first wife was not, evidently, as indulgent of his boyish whims as his second would turn out to be.

  Whatever Beth’s feelings, it is clear that he had become popular with the gang in Hollywood. He returned to Los Angeles in late January, met at the station by an enthusiastic group of his peers anxious for news and gossip of Broadway. (“What the actor didn’t know, he promptly made up,” said one source. “And thanks to its being a very hilarious party, no one was any the wiser.”) Both Dwan and Emerson were among the group. It was Dwan who was slated to direct his next film, The Good Bad Man. Seventeen-year-old Bessie Love was selected as the leading lady, reportedly at the behest of Beth.

  Beth’s influence as her husband’s manager extended beyond mere casting decisions. Her father, his fortunes continuing to decline, decided to get involved in his son-in-law’s career—at least to the extent of cashing in. Beth got Daniel on the Majestic payroll.*3 Buried deep in the ledgers of the US Majestic Motion Picture Company is a page titled “H.E. Aitken Special a/c (D. Sully).” The “salary” Sully collected monthly varied, typically being $1,200 and rising some months as high as $2,500. (For context, consider that the average annual family income in this decade was $750.) But it was not to last. This particular chicken was to come home to roost within the year.

  The Good Bad Man was to be one of Doug’s strongest Triangle entries. It was a gently comic western, in which Fairbanks’s protagonist commits sundry nonviolent robberies and distributes the take to fatherless children. “He makes a specialty,” one character tells another, “of helpin’ kids that’s born in shame.” The theme of illegitimacy haunts our hero, whose belief (mistaken, as the unfolding story reveals) that he is among those unfortunates causes him to declare, “There’s no decent place for me in the world ’cause I never had no father.” In the end, of course, he learns that his mother and father had been married and that his father was murdered, and before his character rides off into the sunset with sweet Bessie Love, this crime is avenged.

  It is easy to read too much into the theme of this story, except for one fact. While Fairbanks never had the patience to actually sit and type a scenario, he crafted the plot of the film.*4 It became common for him to work with his team to create a story line. He would sketch out themes that he wanted the narrative to contain, and a scenarist would write the script. During the course of the filming, Fairbanks would then develop the action sequences as both the setting and the story permitted. The Good Bad Man is the first documented case of this method being employed by the star and his director. He had a significant say in the making of this film, and it shows.

  There is, of course, the risk of proposing the auteur theory prematurely. Sometimes a film has no great meaning in an artist’s canon; people are given stories to film by their superiors, after all, and often have no say in the matter. To use the Freudian metaphor, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Still, in this case there is a suspicious amount of smoke.

  The theme of the absent father, the fear of illegitimacy, the hero’s internal redemption in learning that all was fine and proper and the way it should have been—all play conveniently as a form of wish fulfillment. We will never know if Fairbanks knew that his mother’s marriage was invalid, that his father was a bigamist, that he was, in the technical sense, as illegitimate as the film’s hero believes himself to be. But we do know that his father was absent for almost all of his childhood and that he spent his adult life working to cover up this inconvenient fact. He hid his mixed (by nineteenth-century standards) parentage and the fact that his father was Jewish by attempting to blend with the WASP standard of the upper crust. His dinner jackets (one would never call them tuxedos) were bespoke, not off the rack; his stationery was custom engraved, not plain foolscap; his name was Fairbanks, not Ulman.

  But this is speculation and has nothing to do with the fact that audiences who saw the film had a grand time. Both Dwan as director and Fleming as cameraman were at the top of their games, and the movie, filmed in Mojave, California, is as engaging as it is beautiful to watch. The critic from Variety stated, “In his writing for the screen Mr. Fairbanks discloses a fine sense of what the public wants in pictures and he gives it to them.” The New York Times critic was more specific: “The Good Bad Man might have been designed by Penrod Schofield*5 with flashes by a sentimental chambermaid, but it is full to the brim with Fairbanks. His expressive face, radiant toothsome smile, immense activity, and apparent disposition to romp all over the map make him a treasure to the cinema. No deserter from the spoken drama is more engaging in the new work than Douglas Fairbanks. May his shadow never grow less.”

  The film was the opening picture for the Rialto Theatre in New York City—a trivial fact, but for a bit of symbolism. The Rialto was built on the site of the late Oscar Hammerstein I’s Victoria Theatre in Times Square. It was, the New York Times noted, “a motion picture house, pure and simple.” Unlike the Knickerbocker, a
legitimate theater converted for film exhibition, or the Strand, a movie theater built with the ability to be converted to stage performances (should the film craze run its course), the Rialto had a screen placed plumb against the back wall of the building. “Built,” the Times concluded, “in the conviction that the American passion for movies is here to stay.” Fairbanks, like the Rialto, also had made an irrevocable commitment to motion pictures. And he, too, was here to stay.

  This was not the case with most of the luminaries who had been recruited from the Broadway stage by Aitken. Near the end of filming The Good Bad Man, Fairbanks hosted the farewell banquet for the esteemed Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. The great thespian’s inability to tone down the theatricality of his performance for the intimacy of the camera became the stuff of legend among the crew at the Fine Arts studio. He had come at a steep price tag, but it was clear to all that genius in one medium did not necessarily translate to genius in another. Beerbohm Tree—and most of his peers—had been a costly mistake for Aitken, all the more reason to keep Fairbanks, and Beth, happy.

  The “employment” of Daniel Sully served the purpose for Mrs. Fairbanks, but not for her husband. Walter Green, the president of the Artcraft Pictures Corporation, later stated that Sully had been meddling in his son-in-law’s business affairs, to the latter’s disgruntlement. Harry Aitken likely shared his feeling. But as Fairbanks’s films were keeping the studio alive, he paid the piper.

  What Doug required was family—his family. He was waging a campaign to convince Ella to move to California, as her health had been failing. In this he never succeeded, but he was edging toward victory on another front. His oldest brother John was a guest at Sir Herbert’s banquet, the result, to quote niece Letitia, of “persistent phone calls and telegrams—plus the fact that no one in the family could ever deny Douglas anything he wanted for very long.” It was a jolt for John to contemplate leaving the Morey Mercantile Company of Denver and take a flier in what must have seemed a very fly-by-night prospect of working with his young brother in motion pictures. He had worked for the Morey family since he was nine. But he was just what Douglas needed: a sober, dispassionate business mind who had his brother’s best interests at heart. For even at this early stage of the game, Douglas Fairbanks had an idea. But he wasn’t going to act on it until his conservative brother had kicked the tires.

  In the meanwhile, there was work.

  Reggie Mixes In (produced under the working title The Bouncer) was his next project, and again it costarred Bessie Love. Although she was young and inexperienced (one critic wrote, “She should learn that panting in a close-up doesn’t resemble deep emotion”), Fairbanks contemplated using her as his permanent female costar. The diminutive Love stood only five feet in heels. “So next to me Mr. Fairbanks looked six foot tall,” she recalled. Indeed, the image of the petite Bessie, her arms looped around his neck, her trusting face looking up to his, was so appealing that it was exploited in posters and publicity for their films together.

  But she was to costar with him in only one more film. Perhaps this was because of the woman who played the bad girl in Reggie. Alma Rubens was to die at thirty-three years of age from complications of addiction to cocaine and narcotics. At this point, however, she was nineteen years old, clear-eyed and healthy, with dark hair and sultry eyes. She made the perfect screen villainess, exotic beauty, or tempestuous Spaniard. She recalled location work on Reggie: “a trip to Balboa, during which the ever-agile Doug, apparently smitten by my charms, tried in every way to impress me.”*6 Fairbanks may have been besotted with Mary Pickford, but (at this stage, evidently) this did not prevent him from attempting to captivate other young actresses. While Rubens implied that he did not succeed, there was more to come.

  Reggie Mixes In (“who but Mr. Fairbanks could mix in with the name of Reggie and get away with it?” queried the New York Times) was certainly one of the minor Triangle films. Directed by the less-than-stellar Cabanne and largely filmed in the studio, it was the slight tale of a rich playboy who fell in love with a poor young woman who was reduced to working as a “café hostess” to support her mother. While there was little in the way of interesting stunts, the major attraction was a knock-down, drag-out fight between Fairbanks and the film’s villain. Here Aitken was working to exploit the reputation Fairbanks had established on the stage in such productions as The Lights o’ London, A Gentleman of Leisure, and Hawthorne of the U.S.A. The fight is short but brutal—even by modern standards of Hollywood violence—and well choreographed. Audiences who had been dazzled by Wallace Reid’s fight as the blacksmith in The Birth of a Nation were suddenly recognizing the difference between theatrically staged blows and—what at least appeared to be—the real thing. In fact, it seemed to be the real thing, squared. Take the fall-across-the-table gambit, a standard in any movie barroom fight. Here there were two tables. In a single spring, Fairbanks leaped over the first, which was between him and his opponent, tackled the man, and drove him backward in a joint somersault over the second. No less a source than the New York Times wrote of this scene: “It is quite probable that if there were many more like Mr. Fairbanks in the movies the Boxing Commission would be made film censors and the sporting department sent to write about them. Never was such a fight seen on the screen. The audience fairly gasped.”

  The writer also observed the first use of a stunt that Fairbanks was to deploy in the future: “Once when he sees a gangster coming down a passageway to get him he dodges back around the corner, darts up the wall of a building like a fly, and hangs suspended above the door till his prey comes beneath him, when he pounces upon him with the swiftness of a tiger.” Cabanne may have been a pedestrian director, but he let Fairbanks choreograph the action, which was all, in this instance, the film required.

  Released on the same bill as Reggie was Fairbanks’s next film, The Mystery of the Leaping Fish. This two-reel farce was one of the strangest films of Fairbanks’s career—or of any career, for that matter. Normally the Triangle release schedule consisted of one film each from Ince, Griffith, and Sennett. Substituting for the Sennett slot, The Mystery of the Leaping Fish was dubbed a “Triangle-Komedy.” The sudden and unexpected provision of short comedies from the Fine Arts division, as opposed to the Keystone arm of Triangle, came about as a result of exhibitor complaints that the biweekly Triangle program lacked variety. Griffith historian Russell Merritt wrote:

  Patrons complained of undiluted Keystone shorts, when other theaters added the spice of newsreels, cartoons, hand-colored travelogues, and sing-alongs. . . . As theaters began to break away from Triangle, Aitken desperately strove to revamp and modify his plan. He shortened the overall weekly program, ordered one-reel shorts from both Ince and Griffith to help offset the steady Keystone diet, and contracted with the A. W. McClure company for a seven part series called The Seven Deadly Sins—one sin per week.

  The film became a cult classic in the 1960s and ’70s, much as did Reefer Madness and other drug-related films. Fairbanks plays a Sherlock Holmes type dubbed “Coke Ennyday.” Sporting an overcoat with monstrous black and white checks (curiously, an exaggerated version of a checked coat he wore in Reggie) and a huge mustache, he injects himself frequently with drugs drawn from a syringe-loaded cartridge belt. A large can labeled COCAINE is prominent on his desk. Fairbanks’s character is in fact so hopped-up that he spends the last half reel conducting his fights and rescues in a continuous state of dance—a strange, skittering, wild flinging of the legs associated with a rigidly held upper body that makes him look like Michael Flatley on steroids.

  His was hardly the first film to spoof illegal drugs, nor would it be the last—Chaplin famously did so in Easy Street a year later, sitting accidentally on a loaded needle and, after a series of comic twitches and jerks, acquiring superhuman powers. Other elements of Leaping Fish would also be co-opted—most famously the apparent wall safe that is really the office exit, used by Buster Keaton to great comic effect in Sherlock Junior.*7 In what was clearly meant a
s a tongue-in-cheek spoof on Reggie, seen in the same bill, the film climaxes with Fairbanks and the villain entering a darkened room to have a fight to the finish over lovely Bessie Love. Sixty years later Love would recall that “Mr. Fairbanks was a perfectionist: ‘I can’t seem to get the right voice for this character!’ he would say in his quick, breathy way—in spite of the fact that it was a silent film.”

  Because it was bundled with Reggie on the distribution and exhibition schedule, it is difficult to assess what would have been the success or failure of this odd little film had it been on its own. But one thing was clear: Fairbanks would spend the rest of his days disavowing the end product. This was not simply an assertion of good taste (although that alone could be argued as just cause). In time he was to claim in a legal forum that he had never made any two-reel films.

  This claim related to an episode in the 1920s, when a distributor by the name of Hyman Winik reissued Fairbanks’s Triangle films as two-reel comedies. Chopping each five-reel feature down by 60 percent, he rewrote the titles and took extreme liberties with the plots of many.†*8Fairbanks sued, and since he had no ownership of the Triangle releases, he based his legal argument on the premise that he had made only feature films. To be associated with two-reel films, he maintained, was detrimental to his reputation. The mere existence of The Mystery of the Leaping Fish wiped out his argument, so he conveniently chose to forget the film’s existence.‡*9

  One can hardly blame him, although some critics were kind. The Motion Picture News deemed the film “refreshing nonsense, farcical to the last degree.” Variety was more direct, stating, “John Emerson staged the travesty.” While we may presume the term was used in the sense of “farce,” it may be argued that it works both ways. In the words of Bessie Love, the film “didn’t quite come off.”