The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  The unsuspecting extra may not have seen the charm of Mr. Fairbanks, but the audience did. The film was a marked success. The only dark spot in its production was a corneal burn that its star suffered when a prop gun was fired too close to his left eye. (“If Mr. Fairbanks had not swung quickly around when he saw the man turning the rifle upon him, he might have gotten the full blast in his face and had his eyes put out,” Pickford reported somewhat breathlessly in her column.) But corneal burns heal quickly,*16 and contrary to modern rumors, he was able to perform all the stunts in the film. In fact, he used the reported injury to his advantage. When he bounded onto the stage on Manhattan Madness’s opening night at the Rialto and, in the words of the New York Times reporter, “with hands in trouser pockets stood smiling at a large audience,” he stated modestly that “he thought the picture was pretty good, that he nearly lost his eyesight during the taking, but that the picture on which he was now working would be better, because he had already been hurt more times than in the former.” Every injury emphasized to the audiences that what was being done was real, not trickery, and what’s more, it was being done by Doug himself.

  The volume of injuries he suffered over the years was imposing. There would be broken bones of his hands and fingers, dislocated bones, torn ligaments, stab wounds, sword slashes, and contusions. His brows and lashes were burned off in the forest fire sequences of The Half Breed. An ankle injury incurred during filming of The Americano sent him to the hospital. Each time, he took the position that the injuries were not only to be borne, but the mere fact of them made the picture authentic and the volume of them spoke to the volume of risks taken. Each injury, he argued, made a better movie.†*17

  It is hard to argue that his next film, American Aristocracy, was better than Manhattan Madness, but no one save the occasional critic seemed to care. The exteriors were filmed at Kenneth Ridge, Beth’s family home in Watch Hill—likely a further opportunity to line her father’s pockets. Moreover, Junior made his first film appearance, playing a bit part as a newsboy. A series of publicity photographs taken at this time shows the little family sitting on the steps at Watch Hill, Beth proud and plump in a white cotton frock, Junior awkward and doughy in a white sailor suit (“no real newsboy ever looked like that,”*18 he was to comment, seventy years later), and Doug, pipe clenched between his teeth, stern-faced, trying to look the role of the paterfamilias. One wonders what each was thinking.

  His son certainly had not yet developed the ambivalence toward his father that would characterize the majority of his life. He was still in awe of the man—when he actually saw him. He wrote, “Dad was absent so often I hardly noticed, although everything, including me, brightened and bustled when he returned.” Junior had the vague sense that he, roly-poly and perpetually dressed in sissy clothes by his mother, was an embarrassment to his athletic father—or worse, of no interest. Richard Schickel quotes Beth’s recollections on the subject: “Senior was perfectly tender and nice, he just did not have the instinct of being a father. . . . He used to come into the house, day-in day-out, and he wouldn’t know the child was there. Unless I asked if he was going up to say goodnight to Douglas or unless somebody wanted to see the child, Senior displayed no interest in him—he didn’t care; he was just bored.”

  This certainly seems at odds with his general approach to children. Triangle had a collection of children about for use in films as the “Triangle Kiddies” or for whenever a stray child was needed for a regular feature. “Fairbanks and his lasso divide their spare time about evenly between a bunch of old-time cowpunchers with a taste for boxing and wrestling and the children,” wrote one witness at the time. “They adore him.” He set up a class in rope tricks, taught them string puzzles, and engaged in boxing matches. “Francis Carpenter and Fairbanks had a boxing bout,” continued the account. “Francis is four, going on five. It was a lively bout. Francis closed in and landed a body blow. His antagonist sank limply to the stage, and Francis stood over him and counted him out. When Fairbanks was up, Francis came back and held out his hand. ‘Mr. Fairbanks,’ he said, ‘I’m willing to call it square, if you are.’” Eunice Woodruff died at ten years of age in 1921, but during Doug’s reign at Fine Arts, was also one of the children on the lot. Her mother wrote that Fairbanks “loved Eunice, then only six years old. He would have the extra boys run a race from the studio to Vermont Ave and Eunice would be on his shoulder and hold the money for the winner.”

  This behavior was not restricted to children around the studio. Assistant cameraman Glen MacWilliams once pulled into Fairbanks’s driveway for a meeting, carefully leaving his children in the car so as not to disturb his boss. Learning that they were out there, Fairbanks would have none of it. He brought the children into the house and proceeded to romp, chase, and conduct imaginary sword fights up, over, and around the furniture, giving them a memory that they would cherish to their graves.

  So these recollections are difficult to square with those of Beth. Junior was clear that he enjoyed mightily the “jolly and vigorous but infrequent” presence of his father. “His home appearances were rarely anything but pleasant. He would come, to my secret delight, and go, to my secret regret, and rarely seemed to be more than vaguely aware of my presence. . . . He was never unkind or unjustly stern with me. . . . But alas, I was too shy, too plump and awkward, and he was such an evanescent sprite.” He was not only shy around his father, he was a little afraid, as timid children will be. True, his mother was more prone to explosions of rage and thus more frightening to him. But Doug, too, would occasionally have an outburst. The difference, his son noted, “was that it was always a summer-like thunderstorm followed quickly by grumpiness and then his personal rainbow.”

  And his father might not have been as neglectful as he thought. Jesse Lasky Jr. recalled being seven years old and working feverishly with a friend to assemble a “coaster” for a race down La Brea scheduled for the next day. His father approached him with a request that the boys include a new boy, Doug Jr., in their activities. Junior was the son of a dear friend and neighbor, he said.

  The boys protested. The race was the next day! Doug Jr. wouldn’t have a coaster! Lasky, according to his son, pondered the problem. He would pass this information on to Junior’s father. The next morning, the boys were assembled for the race.

  Then our ears caught a suspicious sound. A small sputtering like a motorcycle, a chugging up the hill. We strained in horror to watch the approach of a coaster. But no ordinary affair like ours, stuck together from boards, sheet metal, and old wheels. This was a small automobile with its own gasoline engine, snorting up the steep incline under its own power. Behind the wheel, Doug, a scant year younger than I, but by right of ownership of such a vehicle, far elevated in social status. It was the unlikely start of a beautiful friendship.

  The father, evidently, was working behind the scenes in the interest of his child.

  Junior remembered worshipfully watching his father shave his heavy beard in the morning, using a straight razor and singing:

  I’m so—goll-darned tough,

  I’m so—goll-darned rough,

  That I—shoot—

  My goll-darned

  Whiskers off!

  And he recalled that during the filming of American Aristocracy, Senior was “sport enough” to permit Victor Fleming to shoot a short film starring Junior and his playmates.

  American Aristocracy was, according to his son, also partially the product of his father’s creative hand, being, in his words, “a fluff-weight fable concocted by Anita Loos and Dad.” While Loos got the sole authorship credit,*19 an argument can be made that both contributed to the plot: the film was essentially two movies—the first an incisive caricature of America’s bean-can nobility, the second a spy adventure. The two, in the minds of the critics, did not mesh. They universally loved Loos’s contribution. “Satire is an advanced form of literature,” commented Photoplay. “Her satire on Newport Society (‘American Aristocracy’) is perhaps the g
reatest stride movie literature has made.” Indeed, Loos’s titles remain as sharp and funny today as they did one hundred years ago.

  But the second half of the film came in for much critical ennui. “It drivels out into a mere vehicle,” griped the Moving Picture World. “Would it not be possible to give Mr. Fairbanks more opportunity as an actor and less as an acrobat?” Photoplay agreed. “Mr. Fairbanks is being completely eaten up by his jumping ability. He leaps into his chairs, over his motors, onto his horses, out of his difficulties, like a godson of St. Vitus. Acrobatics and agility are good, but in this picture they are driven into the ground, to the exclusion of much better stuff of which he is entirely capable.”

  The New York Times took to listing the feats of derring-do: “He vaults a dozen walls and fences, swings like a Darwinian ancestor from the top branches of trees, plunges headlong down embankments, drives an automobile at wild speed, flies in a hydroaeroplane, and performs other feats of athletic skill and prowess.” The critic also noted evidence of Fairbanks’s puckish humor in the course of this film: after scaling innumerable walls, “he makes ready to leap at a window ten feet above the ground, and then suddenly opens a basement window and climbs in easily instead.”†*20

  The critics might have felt that American Aristocracy was a “nondescript vehicle” for Fairbanks, but audiences overruled them. The box office at the Rialto, where the film premiered in New York City, recorded the highest weekly take the theater had ever seen. Hundreds milled outside in the cold November rain, waiting to get in. Nobody seemed to think that Doug was jumping too much. They enjoyed watching him use the world as his personal playground, and the film was a solid success.

  He returned to California in late October, wiring Harry Aitken on the day of his arrival “that he craved two boons—first, that John Emerson act as his director; second, that Anita Loos . . . write the titles for his plays.”

  He got one out of two. Loos wrote the script, but his next film, The Matrimaniac, was directed by Paul Powell, who was famed for nothing in particular.*21 Still, as always Fairbanks had fun during the film’s hasty construction and production. When some exteriors were shot near the Lillian Way studio, where Charlie Chaplin was producing his Mutual comedies, Chaplin interrupted his own shoot to rush out, sit on the curb, and watch his friend. “Now make me laugh, Doug,” he was reported to have said. “I’ll be your audience.”

  They had met earlier that year. Constance Collier, who was Lady Macbeth in Sir Herbert’s Triangle production, had been talking up Fairbanks to Chaplin. “From Constance I had heard much about Douglas Fairbanks’ charm and ability, not only as a personality but as a brilliant after-dinner speaker. In those days I disliked brilliant young men—especially after-dinner speakers,” he recalled drily. Still, she persisted and arranged an introductory dinner at Fairbanks’s house in Hollywood. Chaplin came prepared to fake a headache and leave early. Fairbanks, uncharacteristically nervous, retreated to the billiard room the moment the doorbell rang. “That night,” Charlie wrote fifty years later, “was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.” In the other, each found the perfect complement. Fairbanks’s warmth and extraversion drew the diffident Chaplin out of his shell. “He had extraordinary magnetism and charm and a genuine boyish enthusiasm which he conveyed to the public,” Charlie said. He summed up the relationship with an almost poignant cynicism: “Doug Fairbanks was my only real friend and I was a showpiece for him at parties.” Chaplin meant far more to him than that, of course. For many years they were inseparable, whether there was a party or not. And Fairbanks was a trusted sounding board. He would laugh with unfeigned delight as his friend worked out new routines—no matter how many times repeated and no matter how many subtle variations. “Sweet Douglas,” Chaplin said. “He was my greatest audience.”Chaplin was happy to return the favor.

  This is not to say that every aspect of The Matrimaniac was unabashedly joyful. Anita Loos reports that Doug was confounded by one simple scene. The opening sequence required him to stick a hat pin into the tires of a car. This, she wrote, brought out “an incredible cowardice in Doug; he tried over and over to do the stunt and finally said, ‘I can’t do this scene, Nita; I’m scared.’” If this was the case, it doesn’t show on film, where he stabbed the tires with apparent aplomb. And at this juncture, at least, she found no other cause for complaint. “Douglas Fairbanks,” she said, “could conquer any living space. . . . He never sat when he could stand, never walked when he could run; and, to Doug, chasms were built to jump over.”

  It was fortunate that he enjoyed running, for The Matrimaniac is essentially one extended chase scene. The heroine’s father and his suitor of choice chase Doug and the delightful Constance Talmadge as they elope on a train; Doug and a minister (whom he has plucked out of his bathtub) chase the train with the bride on board; injunction servers and the young woman’s father chase the groom over hill, dale, fences, and buildings, all attempting to prevent the ceremony. “It would have made a whopper of a two-reel Keystone,” the Variety reviewer commented drily.

  Thrills aside (and Fairbanks stepped up the stunts to an astonishing degree in The Matrimaniac, in one instance walking across telephone wires, slipping and almost tumbling to the ground in the process, then slowly, carefully regaining his position on the wiggling lines and continuing his progress), the film had comic appeal. Fairbanks’s behavior throughout the crazed proceedings remained impeccable: he assiduously left IOUs for every item stolen or borrowed, and took tender care of his abducted minister throughout the chase. No matter the obstruction, he remained doggedly cheerful.

  One contemporary reviewer tried to characterize this phenomenon. “Fairbanks represents physical agility and temperamental optimism, and it is really the latter quality that wins. His leaping and climbing feats would soon pall if he did not perpetually demonstrate that life is good and growing better, in spite of all pessimistic claims to the contrary. Therein lies the true charm of Fairbanks.” Alistair Cooke should be credited for preserving a quote from an obscure French critic who said it best: “Douglas Fairbanks is a tonic. He laughs and you feel relieved.”

  Fairbanks’s last film for Triangle (although the company did not know it at the time) was The Americano. Anita Loos (and, reportedly, John Emerson) adopted the plot of Blaze Derringer, a 1910 novel by Eugene P. Lyle, an author who specialized in western adventures. Here the original story was the tale of a wealthy young man who had run through the money allotted to him by his father and thus was tempted by a $100,000 reward to free the deposed emperor of a fictitious South American country.*22 In the original the hero is accompanied by a pair of notorious jail breakers. In the Loos rewrite, all distasteful elements of the plot are removed: Fairbanks’s unnamed character—he is known to the audience only as “the Americano”—is motivated not by money but by love for the captive’s daughter. It is no longer an emperor they are freeing but a republican presidente. This being Doug, he cannot be accompanied by professional jail breakers; he performs his heroics with the aid of an elderly minister of the deposed government and a splay-footed, rabbit’s-foot-clutching employee of the mining company, played in blackface by Tom Wilson. And, instead of being a college dropout, our hero is a graduate of a mining school. Other than the main setup of the plot—the need for a jailbreak, and the prisoner’s daughter—no plot elements of the original text remain in the film. This scarcely seems to matter; as source material, it is pretty weak stuff. Fairbanks was learning that in his sort of movie, the more intricate the plot, the more screen time wasted on exposition, and the less to let him play. Adapting Bret Harte had taught him this lesson.

  The exteriors were shot at the San Diego Exposition, which served as a picturesque stand-in for the fictional Latin American country of the story. The film was a cheery little spy story, with a moderate amount of stunts. Fairbanks, for the first time in a film, incapacitates a villain by engaging him in a scissor lock between his legs.*23 As in American Aristocracy, he spends a fair amount of time scaling ta
ll walls. Still—and this may be hindsight only, of course—there remains a sense that he is phoning it in, not fully engaged with the making of this cloak and dagger feature.

  If this is indeed the case, it is understandable. It was December 1916, and he was contemplating his exit from the Triangle Film Corporation. He had been with the company less than eighteen months.

  D. W. Griffith had departed earlier in the year, having bought Aitken and Triangle out of their ownership stake in his epic Intolerance.†*24Aitken’s house of cards was starting to totter. Fairbanks would later tell of a dinner meeting Aitken arranged for him and John Emerson with a certain Mr. Parker, of the American Radiator Company. Parker, Aitken hoped, would put money in the company. The radiator man, however, was more interested in the creative side of the business. He produced two paperback books, “saying that these were the money-making things,” Fairbanks later stated in an affidavit. But Doug had no interest in advice from a radiator manufacturer. Normally polite to a fault, he cracked. This was absurd, he told the man. He might just as well expect Fairbanks to suggest ideas about radiators as for Parker to suggest ideas about screen productions. The books, Fairbanks said, “were unadulterated bunk.” There is no record of whether Mr. Parker stuck around for dessert.

  Then Aitken had hired an efficiency expert to trim waste around the studio. “All the actors and actresses who had been selected by Fairbanks were let out and inferior ones procured,” reported the Exhibitor’s Trade Review. Wilbur Higby, “who usually played the parts of bartender, gunman and rough neck was chosen to play the part of a modern millionaire.” Actors wore their own clothes for modern roles at that time, and Higby’s dress pants were patched. This became evident during a scene in The Matrimaniac where the actor, playing Constance Talmadge’s outraged father, was required to descend a ladder. The patch showed, and the take was ruined. Worse—at least in Doug’s mind—the car with the tires that required puncturing was eight years old. Own an eight-year-old car? “No modern millionaire would do that!” he groused.