Emerson’s putative direction is another source of interest. Bessie Love’s albums note that Christy Cabanne was the initial director on the film and that Emerson replaced him after the film was completed, necessitating that the film be reshot from scratch. Triangle financial records offer little in the way of clues. Fairbanks features were costing between $25,000 and $30,000 as a rule, or $5,000 to $6,000 per reel, on average. Fish had negative costs of roughly $12,600—or $6,300 a reel. While this is slightly over the norm, it does not suggest that the entire film was reshot, even with the possibility that sets were reused. The greatest expense on any Fairbanks Triangle film was that of the star’s time, and this would have doubled had the film been entirely reshot. Further, Cabanne was hardly banished to the Fine Arts doghouse—he went on to direct Fairbanks’s next film, Flirting with Fate.
Flirting with Fate was a screwball comedy before the genre had been officially invented. Fairbanks played August Holliday, a starving artist. He falls in love with Gladys, the standard-issue heroine, wooing her with such claims as “The play of light on your hair and nose remind me of the works of Rosa Bonheur at her best.”*10 In short order, his world collapses: the heroine rebuffs him over a misunderstanding, his prized painting is stolen, and the rent is overdue. In despair, he does the only logical thing: he hires a paid assassin to kill him when he’s not looking. Soon, however, fate rectifies every catastrophe, and he now has to dodge the killer—who, of course, has since been reformed by the Salvation Army.
It was on such gossamer plot threads that Fairbanks began to string the pearls of his stunts. Flirting contained several of what were to become fixtures in his films: extended chase sequences. In this one, Fairbanks performed a forward somersault into a moving car before leaping from that vehicle into another. He climbed several buildings, in one instance ending up on the top by impromptu catapult, and in another by pulling himself up by a drainpipe. While this particular chase was conducted by a lone, somewhat stout policeman, the motif was to evolve. Over the course of the years, the pursuers would grow into various hordes: soldiers, lynch mobs, cannibals. The pursuers mattered little; the joy was in watching Fairbanks elude them. Richard Schickel put it best: “To see Doug at bay and fighting off his enemies the while casing the joint for possibilities—that staircase there, that balcony yonder, that chandelier above, how can I put them together to befuddle these fools?—this was the moment of high deliciousness in all his work.” Flirting with Fate was, like most of the Triangle films, a modest endeavor—“melodramas decorated by acrobatics,” in the words of Alistair Cooke. But Fairbanks looked like he was having a hell of a good time throughout, and audiences found this quality infectious. The film was, as were all its predecessors, a solid hit.
To the surprise and dismay of all in the organization, however, his next film, The Half Breed, was a rare failure. On the surface, it is easy to see the cause for astonishment. Much time and effort had been invested in the movie, and it showed. The source material was Bret Harte’s story “In the Carquinez Woods.” In February 1916, Houghton Mifflin publishers were paid $1,000 for the story rights.*11 Allan Dwan was assigned to direct, and the entire production was filmed on location in Calaveras County, including in the nearby redwood forest, where the company staged a forest fire. The film’s cost was $22,906, almost double that of Flirting with Fate.
The results justified the expense. Even today, the film is an absorbing story of racial discrimination in the American West. (Fairbanks played the title character, whose mother was a Native American.) The intertitles were intelligent and incisive, the two female leads played characters who were complex and nuanced—an unusual event in any era—and the settings and photography were, in the words of cameraman Victor Fleming’s biographer, “pictorially ravishing.”
And yet the returns were a disappointment. “We, who had a hand in its making, regarded it as a ‘knockout,’” wrote Fairbanks two years later. “But the public . . . couldn’t see it.”
The problem was this: as interesting, deserving, and well made a film as The Half Breed was, there was no Doug in it. Bret Harte’s hero is stoic, literal, and stolid—the opposite of the star’s natural traits. Fairbanks elected to communicate these (and, evidently, all other Indian qualities) by the frequent folding of his arms. His famous grin was rarely seen. Stunts were few. The Motion Picture News noted, “There is also less than the usual footage given the star.” The film’s weakness (or strength, depending on your point of view) was that its engaging, complex story rose above the charms of its leading man. And it was these charms that the audience had paid to see. As an indictment of racism, as a retelling of a Bret Harte tale, and as a narrative of two complex women, the film succeeds. The fact that it failed at the box office was because it was none of the things that it should have been to serve the Fairbanks persona. Audiences recognized this; word of mouth spread, and they stayed away. Alma Rubens said it best, two years after the film’s initial release: “Douglas Fairbanks in a heavy dramatic role! Can you imagine that today?”
Shortly before her death, Rubens revealed more about her experience making the film. She attributed her casting to the fact that Doug “apparently had liked me ever since our trip to Balboa. This,” she added primly, “despite the fact that I had not encouraged him in the least.” The company was quartered in shacks in a mountain resort, she recalled. She was in bed at 2 AM, quavering under the covers at the sound of coyotes, when there was a tap at her window. “I heard a husky whisper from the outside: ‘Alma, Alma . . . Open the window and let me in.’” Quite logically, she demanded to know what he wanted at that hour. “We’ve got to talk over the story” was the improbable reply.
She opened the sash. He flew in feet first, and, in her words, “wasted little time talking about The Half Breed, offering me, instead, the opportunity to accompany him back to New York where he was to play the lead in Manhattan Madness. He painted a glowing picture of my future, in this event. ‘Six months in New York,’ he explained, ‘and you’ll be made. Your name will be in the electric lights along Broadway. You’ll have jewels, gowns, a Rolls-Royce—everything. I’ll make you the leading woman in every picture I play in. You’ll be getting a thousand a week.’” Of course, the lady in question may have been exaggerating. But one can almost hear the percussive quality of Fairbanks’s voice as he painted this verbal portrait of fame and wealth. These were things he valued.
Her response (be it verbal or physical) Rubens discreetly left for her audience to imagine. But a proposal of a permanent costarring role made to Alma Rubens in her bedchamber at two o’clock in the morning was a different kettle of fish from the far more proper (yet similar) offer he made to Bessie Love. Love (or her mother) either declined or, being under contract to Triangle, was in no position to accept. She recalled: “I didn’t know of any difference between the standing of one actor and another in the whole theatrical business. (Once my mother asked Douglas Fairbanks if he’d been cast yet for another picture, and poor Doug almost had a stroke.)” One suspects his motive in the latter case related to Love’s size and frailty helping him look large and heroic on screen. His motive in the case of Miss Rubens may have been less seemly. We shall never know.
What we do know is that the reviews of The Half Breed were glowing. Photoplay declared that it was “Up, above the ordinary level of mere narrative. Up, above ordinary pictorial beauty. Up, in sheer daring of caption and situation. Up, in the way it gets you.” And there was still some Doug that crept through all the stoicism of the character. The New York Times commented that his tree-trunk-dwelling character “looks rather more like Peter Pan than not.”
Fairbanks’s tracking of the varying box office receipts for his Triangle films was as careful here as in his theatrical days. Noting that the far more modest Reggie Mixes In (“It didn’t look good at all and we dreaded the coming of the verdict”) was a tremendous success when The Half Breed failed, he wrote, “We were beginning to get an idea as to what the public wanted to see me
in.” To the extent that the miscalculation was his (and this is unknown), he would not make it again. For the next decade and more, his films stuck to a formula. The flavor of the formula varied—now a modern Loos screwball comedy, now a western, now a Ruritanian romance—but the rule was the same, going forward: the story served the star, not the star the story.
His next film—Manhattan Madness—shot largely in New York,*12 again directed by Dwan, was a prime example of how to get the formula right. But before Doug’s departure east, there was another event of note.
This was his participation in a one-night, cast-of-thousands outdoor production of Julius Caesar. Staged in Beechwood Canyon on May 19, the play was a benefit fundraiser for the Actors Fund of America. Tyrone Power, DeWolf Hopper, Theodore Roberts, Tully Marshall, William Farnum, and other theatrical heavyweights appeared. Originally Fairbanks was slated to play Octavius, but his packed work schedule evidently intervened, so he appeared in the smaller role of young Cato. Forty thousand spectators attended as the five thousand actors and enthusiastic extras staged battle scenes over the open acres. Fairbanks did not know it at the time, but it would be his last major live performance.†*13It is fitting, perhaps, that it was conducted on a stage of epic scale. No mere proscenium arch could hold him anymore.
His arrival in New York City on June 15 to begin East Coast production was typically Fairbanksian. With no particular explanation, he wired the studio manager at Fort Lee: ARRIVE AT 9:40A.M. MEET ME WITH SEVEN TAXICABS. FAIRBANKS. While Doug’s predilection for excess baggage was well known,‡*14even he couldn’t bring this much. Still, the staffer knew better than to question the instructions. The seven cabs were waiting. Fairbanks arrived with twenty people: assistants, actors, cameraman Victor Fleming—to whom he had taken a fancy—and director Allan Dwan. Within a day the entourage was at Fort Lee working on the film. The decision to relocate and house so many members of a production crew to shoot in the East would at first seem like an expensive impulse, especially in light of Doug’s recent declarations to the press that he would remain in the West indefinitely for filming, both for reasons of weather and for the varied exteriors. But the script of Manhattan Madness cried for shots of the big city; indeed, an entire sequence was written contrasting the allures of the East and the West. Audiences were treated to the sight not only of their hero breaking a bucking bronco and driving a stagecoach across the desert but also of him atop a Fifth Avenue bus and galloping through Van Cortlandt Park. Of course, it is entirely possible that there was another reason why Fairbanks was willing to cross the country to shoot his next two films. Mary Pickford was in New York.
She was living in Larchmont, a village north of New Rochelle, while she filmed at Famous Players’ East Coast studio. Nearby was Broadway songwriter/performer Clifton Crawford, a friend of Fairbanks. Thus it was that Doug and Beth elected to summer in a cottage nearby. It is likely that this happy coincidence was abetted by the fact that John Emerson was then directing Pickford in Less Than the Dust and perhaps mentioned to Mr. Fairbanks where his star was summering. The lady in question certainly seemed surprised and pleased to discover that the Fairbanks family would be close at hand.
She first caught a glimpse of him when she accompanied Elsie Janis and a group of friends to see Reggie Mixes In at the Rialto. “A pleasant surprise took us quite off our feet as we turned away from the theater. It was Douglas Fairbanks himself, just returned from California,” records her daily column.*15 “What attracted our attention to him were the remarks passed by a group of people who were pushing their way past us. A voice said ‘Ssssh! Look at that man over there in the corner! Surely it isn’t Douglas Fairbanks!’
“‘Douglas Fairbanks! I should say not!’ replied one of the ladies. ‘That fellow’s as black as an Indian—why, for land’s sake! I do believe he is an Indian!’” A vigorous debate among the crowd was not resolved “until he smiled—and no one has had or could ever have just such a smile as Douglas Fairbanks.”
She and Elsie teased the smiling Mr. Fairbanks about the case of mistaken identity. He was unapologetic about his unfashionable coat of tan. “He had just come from God’s own country, where he had lived in the out of doors like a real western cowboy,” she wrote. He was never happier in his life, he told her. He had bought a small yacht that carried nine. He loved being in the movies: “The only thing about them is that I hate to call them work—I enjoy every minute.”
And he (and she) seemed to enjoy every minute of the summer. There were boating trips on Long Island Sound. On one stormy day the sailboat capsized; the ladies were dunked, and the picnic basket lunch was lost. (Mary recalled hearing Doug cheerfully cry, “Let’s hope the mermaids enjoy it,” before she ended up in the drink.) There were dinner parties at Elsie Janis’s Tarrytown estate, games of charades with the likes of Billie Burke and Florenz Ziegfeld—Mary put on pants and portrayed Charlie Chaplin. It was all perfectly proper, always with starstruck Beth and others making up the company. There were long conversations. Doug confessed (“with a twinkle in his eyes”) that he had urged Mary and Elsie to take that long muddy walk the prior November because he knew Mary had qualms about her dainty new footwear.
It was a courtship, of a sort. He was hardly pitching woo, it is true, but he was exposing her to a healthy dose of Doug. And she found, perhaps against her will, that this was irresistible. He began to pop up in her daily column more and more. “The man of him has never lost sight of the boy of him,” she wrote in one. She recounted a tale Beth had told her. Having finished The Good Bad Man, Fairbanks had invited the participating cowhands to a farewell dinner at the town’s hotel. The cowboys were stiff and awkward in the unfamiliar social setting. Doug saw this, and immediately started dining as if he were on a roundup. He ate from his knife. He dropped his bread into his soup. He picked his teeth and cheerfully planted his elbows on the table. This did the trick; the cowboys relaxed, and the meal was enjoyed by one and all. Mary was enchanted. “There are so many stories to tell about Douglas Fairbanks one scarcely knows where to begin: of his generosity, his kind heart and his love for humanity, which is reflected in that genial smile of his,” she wrote. With Beth’s unintentional help, she was starting to fall in love with him.
The cowhand’s banquet served, in a way, to document the theme of Manhattan Madness. The dynamic between the East and the West, between the civilized and the wild, was to govern Fairbanks’s career for its first five years, and, some would claim, defined his appeal. Those of a more sociologic bent make the argument that as the nation was changing its essential character from rural to urban, there was a fear that there would be an associated diminution of its vigor and hardiness. The West had been settled, the cowboys of a mere generation before were a dying breed, and the modern man was increasingly to be found wearing a coat and tie instead of chaps and bandana. There was, it is said, a certain level of national angst over this in the first years of the past century. Modernity, it was feared, was making America soft.
Douglas Fairbanks was a one-man antidote to this ailment. With effortless grace he carried—as did his adored Theodore Roosevelt—the opposing characteristics of the city and the wilderness. He was as competent a cowboy as one could wish. Yet at the same time he was the white-tied citizen of Broadway, the man who would come to live in New York and London, who would mix easily with presidents and kings. He was no everyman but rather an über-man, one who reassured Americans that to be an eastern elite did not equate with being effete and that there were, at the same time, still plenty of cowboys out there who could pack a punch. Very few stars were able to cross this divide, falling more usually into either the eastern (think Cary Grant) or the western (think John Wayne) mold. Fairbanks spanned it routinely, usually with an engaging wink or an impish grin. George Creel wrote in Everybody’s Magazine of his popularity, “It is a good sign, a healthful sign, a token that the blood of America still runs warm and red, and that chalk has not yet softened our bones.”
In Manhattan Madness, Fairb
anks’s character (a western rancher appropriately named Steve O’Dare) is stoutly of the opinion that the merits of the East are nothing to those of the West. He returns to his college club in New York and drives his friends to distraction extolling the virtues of the western lands. One perspicacious pal bets him $5,000 that within a week New York will offer thrills to equal those of Nevada. The bet is taken, and adventures ensue at a mysterious mansion. The estate used for the shoot served as a cautionary tale to any young celebrity. It had belonged to theater star Clara Morris for thirty-seven years, until blindness and poverty forced her to sell. Now its mansard roof and windowsills served as a virtual jungle gym for Doug to play upon.
And play he did. The level of the stunts in Manhattan Madness was ramped up to a degree not yet seen. He climbed up the home’s three stories; he climbed down, in and out of windows, running along the rooftop, firing guns, leaping to nearby trees, down to the ground, and back up the building again—all while wearing an absurd little bow tie at formal odds with his open, free clambering. He performed various standing leaps: onto the back of a horse, over a chair, over a group of men. He ran across the top of a moving train, rode a bucking horse, and in general demonstrated, in the words of one reviewer, “that as an all-around athlete Douglas Fairbanks puts Jim Thorpe way back stage.”
One wonders if his athleticism may have become tiresome to his fellow actors. Art director Ben Carré was asked by Dwan to create the interior of a Fifth Avenue club for the sequence where Fairbanks reunites with his friends. “The set was ready; plenty of actors were standing in it having been placed there by an assistant director,” Carré recalled. “I saw Douglas Fairbanks all dressed up in evening clothes but with a five gallon hat on his head, not yet on the set. He came over to speak to Allan Dwan who, in answer to his question, said ‘Go to it.’ Fairbanks went on the side of the set to make his entrance. Dwan called ‘Camera’ and Fairbanks made a quick entrance, saw a man walking and dived to tackle him. The man went down with a surprised face.”
The First King of Hollywood Page 14
