The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  *18. The director of American Aristocracy must have agreed. Contrary to Junior’s memories, he wore overalls for his actual scene in the film.

  *19. Files at the Margaret Herrick Library and USC Warner Archives indicate that she was paid $500 for her story and script.

  *20. † The incident never fails to get a laugh, even today, much as does the scene in the first Indiana Jones film where Harrison Ford, braced to engage in a sword fight with a villain, pauses—exasperated—then simply pulls out his pistol and shoots.

  *21. He would go on to direct Mary Pickford in Pollyanna, but this was one of her least favorite films. He was largely known as a competent studio hand but little more.

  *22. In the film the location is moved to Central America.

  *23. A trick he first demonstrated on stage in Hawthorne of the U.S.A.

  *24. † Intolerance was released as a “road show” picture—traveling from major city to major city, orchestra and publicity in tow, much like a major theatrical production. The timing, for Griffith, was unfortunate. A paean to pacifism, it came out just as America’s isolationist leanings toward the Great War were turning. It took an achingly long time to break even. Griffith ended up signing a distribution deal with Adolph Zukor at Paramount.

  *25. Curiously, when it came time for the legal filings, Fairbanks took the opposite tack. It was hard to prove that he wasn’t being supervised, and easier to point out that Griffith had left the company, so his once-critical supervision was now absent.

  *26. † In a 1923 affidavit related to a tax case, Mayer asserted that the “deponent is familiar with the earnings of the pictures of the leading stars during that period—among whom he considers Douglas Fairbanks—and he is of the opinion that $25,000 per week would not only have been a fair and reasonable compensation for Douglas Fairbanks to have been paid during the years of 1917 and 1918, but that as a producer, he would have enjoyed a substantial profit under such a contract.”

  *27. Not so with Artcraft Pictures, however. Aitken pursued this case until losing at the appeal level, when Judge Learned Hand wrote, “Nobody has ever thought, so far as we can find, that in the absence of some monopolistic purpose every one has not the right to offer better terms to another’s employee, so long as the latter is free to leave.”

  6

  Triangle (as in Love)

  * * *

  JUST BEFORE HIS TRIP to New York in December 1916, Douglas Fairbanks stopped by Charlie Chaplin’s studio to bid him farewell. They clutched each other for the cameras, Chaplin in full tramp costume, his left arm around Doug’s shoulder, his right clamping Doug’s left forearm, his head drooped on Doug’s chest. Fairbanks, in turn, had his normally irrepressible smile turned upside down into a mock expression of grief. Photoplay would soon publish the picture under the title “A Couple of Wall Nuts.”

  But in very short order, Fairbanks was to find his faux grief turn into the genuine article. On his train trip east, on the day before Christmas Eve, he received a telegram telling him that Ella was dead of pneumonia. Ella, whose favorite he had always been; Ella, who sold her jewelry to fund her move to New York from Denver when he wanted to be on Broadway; Ella, from whom he had recently been gently, though decidedly, estranged.

  The issue had really been between wife and mother. Both were strong-willed women, and each prized what they felt to be their influence on Doug. This competition—over some long-forgotten issue—had grown to a head over the course of 1916. The outcome suggests a maternal source for Fairbanks’s lifelong struggle with the bête noire of his existence: jealousy. “Ella’s natural instinct to hold on to her son caused her frequent pangs of jealousy when other things and other people came between them,” observed Letitia Fairbanks. “Inevitably, Beth revolted.” Ella, who had a strong a sense of the dramatic, gave her son an ultimatum: choose between them.

  Douglas Fairbanks was many things: impetuous, impatient, impulsive. But he was no man’s fool. He sided with his wife. In the words of his niece, “He wasn’t a mother’s boy and her apron strings bound no one but herself.” It wasn’t a complete estrangement; there were frequent wires and presents, and he telephoned often. But what he said at the time of the breach—“I can get along without you, Mother. But I can’t get along without Beth”—must now have added to the complexity of his feelings. For, of course, the separation from Triangle was proving just the opposite, at least as far as his wife of nine years was concerned. He had chosen wife over mother, and now mother was irretrievably gone. And did he even want his wife?

  Publicist Bennie Zeidman was with him on the trip and reported to his family that Fairbanks remained locked in his drawing room until the train arrived in New York City. The funeral services were held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on the day after Christmas. Once they were over, and with nothing left to do, he found himself trapped with his thoughts—never a comfortable situation for a man who preferred action. Robert later related that Douglas “paced up and down his room at the Algonquin like a caged animal” before suggesting, unexpectedly, that they go to the theater.

  Robert was shocked: how would it look? His younger brother replied, “Tutu would understand.” And so they went, slipping in after the lights were darkened and leaving before they came up. To the end of his life, Douglas would never remember having gone to a play that night. But he would never forget what came shortly thereafter.

  Mary Pickford heard, through mutual friends, that he was grieving. She sent a note of condolence to his hotel. Here, depending on the source, the story varies in detail, but not in essence. He asked if they could meet. Either she picked him up with her car and driver or he drove to fetch her. It was evening—perhaps later. The vehicle ended up in Central Park. He spoke of his mother and, under the influence of her sympathy, finally broke down into hoarse, racking sobs. From here authors often extrapolate. His hands clutched her curls, one will write, forgetting that she never wore her hair down except when making a film. She discreetly stared out the window while he cried, another will claim, having no direct knowledge of just what exactly happened in those minutes. Did the moment climax in a kiss, or a declaration of love? We shall never know and perhaps should not speculate. Even for the most public of public figures, some things are private. Certainly Pickford was not explicit in her account of the event forty years later.

  But all versions—those from Mary and those from Doug, by way of his family—agree on this one thing: After the sobs diminished, they both chanced to look at the automobile’s clock. It had stopped—stopped at the moment of his breakdown, by all accounts, and at the very hour and minute of Ella’s death, by some others.

  That moment for them came to be summarized by the expression “by the clock.” It was used by one to the other in speech, in letters, in telegrams for the rest of their lives. The phrase was one of the last to ever pass his lips before his death. It came to mean all that they meant to each other and, to his mind, was a sort of passage of the care of his soul from his mother to Mary. After this, it was clear that there was no going back. Whether spoken or unspoken, their love for each other had now been declared.

  A year later, he would send her a note on his personal stationery. They were in the midst of their secret love affair at this point, with all its associated ups and downs, guilt and raptures. He had taken scissors to a family portrait, cutting out Beth and Junior and leaving only himself and Ella, and enclosed the trimmed piece in the letter. “Don’t be blue,” he wrote. “I love you as I never loved you Dear. I will do anything you want . . . so do be happy Dear, especially on this day. Remember mother left you to me. I worship you.”

  Exactly when their love extended to a physical affair is also a source of speculation, and pursuit of an exact date is likely unnecessary, and even unseemly. Suffice it to say that the love affair began around this time and that time failed to perform its usual task of causing an emotional attachment to diminish in intensity. It only grew.

  Letters and notes—and even telegrams—came to he
r often. He was improvident and reckless, leaving what would have been a very damning paper trail had any of these missives been discovered. She was his “little nearly-an-armful.” Her voice on the phone was like heaven. “A mere thought of you stimulates as nothing else can,” he wrote. “You have grown sweeter—lovelier—bigger. . . . I can’t tell you how thrilled I am at all times—your intelligence, your beauty—your kindness, your sense of justice—oh I am simply wild about you. I feel positively sure that no man could love a woman more than I love you my beautiful—”

  He poured his heart out on the pages. It was passion, pure and simple. In the current era, when romantic communication seems to the jaded eye to consist largely of scantily clad selfies and more-explicit-than-we-want-to-see sexting, his words evoke a different form of nakedness, having no qualifying irony or detachment. “I want you to know how wonderful I think you are—how beautiful, how sweet—how fine—how womanly and how dearly I love you,” he wrote, “—a love that can never die Darling and will last in the life beyond.”

  He tried to overcome her hesitations. She was married, after all, and a new industry and a new era had combined to create of her an accidental icon of virtue and purity. She took this reputation and its implied social responsibility seriously. It was not that she had been living the life of a plaster saint before he arrived on the scene. She had consoled herself during her intermittent separations from her abusive husband in the arms of fellow actor and director James Kirkwood. Mama Charlotte had hired a former vaudevillian named Edward Hemmer as a “fixer” for these situations: in 1915 he reportedly pulled Mary out of Kirkwood’s apartment in the wee small hours, at Charlotte’s behest.

  And it appears that Kirkwood was not her only source of consolation. Of the personal correspondence that she held until her death, most was from Doug. But a single letter from a different man was retained. It was written from New York City in March 1917, when her affair with Fairbanks was in full throttle, and after both she and he had left New York to film in California. It was unsigned. The handwriting was not that of Kirkwood, nor Fairbanks, nor that of her favorite director Marshall “Mickey” Neilan, who wrote on his deathbed that he had been so in love with Mary during these years that he finally had to quit directing her.*1 Still, she kept it, suggesting that she had more than just a bad marriage to untangle in the face of her new and all-encompassing relationship.

  Darling

  Just a few lines in a hurry. Please forgive me for not writing you before this but you know I am afraid you will not receive my mail and I cannot write you as I feel and think for fear some one else may read my letters. This is Sunday afternoon. It is snowing and miserable almost as blue as myself. Nothing to do but think of you and feel that I am the most lonely creature in the world. It seems like you have been away as many years instead of weeks I miss you sweetheart more than I ever have before. I am like one shipwrecked always thinking and wondering when you are going to rescue me from this awful solitude. Have been trying to settle up my afairs [sic] so I could take a little trip out to see you if only for a few days, yes even for a few hours just to see you and hear you say you are happy to know I love you and are pleased to think I had made that long journey just because I had been miserable for the sight of you. Love if I do not see you very soon I will die of too much Mary. The proposition I have in view for making two reel comedies looks very bright. Everybody is very keen about it. Bowman thinks I would be a big hit, am trying to interest Kauffman as he would be a big help with his standing. He is trying to get out of his present position. But darling I can’t think clearly or do much until I have seen and held you in my arms once more. I would sacrifice everything love to be with you a short while. That is mostly all I think of these days.

  Are you happy and do you like the studio? Don’t allow them to do anything with [sic] you do not want. Everybody says The Poor Little Rich Girl is wonderful, the best you’ve done. I feel so badly because I can’t go see it tonight. Have had a long previous engagement to go to the Lambs Gamble [sic].*2 However there is that much happiness to look forward to all day tomorrow. Oh, I supposed I will go more than once. Will wire when I see it.

  I hope you will get this letter but am not sure. Am at the Biltmore. Was too unhappy to return to Algonquin.

  You beautiful darling you are all and every thing to me. Have been thinking things over since you left. What is the use of worring [sic] and struggling for all this power and ambitions. Life is quite wonderful if we would only try to find the secret instead of conquering it. Am feeling fine and taking very good care of myself. Kiss me sweetheart until we meet again. I love you.

  Your lonely man

  Handwriting and circumstances aside (he was not a man wanting to make two-reel comedies), it is clear that these are not the words of Douglas Fairbanks. He would not worry about struggling for power and ambitions—ambition was his cheerful stock in trade. And he never hesitated to write what he thought and felt for fear it would be discovered. The identity of this poor, soon-to-be spurned lover may forever remain a mystery, which, given the outcome of his grand passion, may be considered a mercy. Clearly Mary dealt with him, and he suffered his broken heart quietly, never to emerge as a source of heartburn to Mama Charlotte, or income to Edward Hemmer.

  The same cannot be said for Doug. He kept Mr. Hemmer busy. Eighteen months into the affair, Charlotte paid him to go to Denver to convince (read: pay off) local newsmen not to write of Doug and Mary’s “friendship.” In another instance he reportedly chased Doug from Mary’s dressing room with a gun. Fairbanks escaped by sprinting over the studio fence. But most of the time the lovers successfully met in private, either by wearing improbable costumes (dusters and driving goggles, floppy hats, and, on his part, the occasional prop beard) to drive up into the Hollywood Hills or by meeting at brother Robert’s or publicist Zeidman’s house. Between illicit rendezvous, dodging henchmen and donning disguises, it is remarkable that either of them found time to make motion pictures—but they did.

  Fairbanks started his first independent production before he had even officially formed his production company. In Again, Out Again was scripted by Loos and directed by Emerson and was a redoubtable virgin effort. Not only was it the sharpest and funniest film Fairbanks had been in to date, but also it documented how firmly the star had his fingers on the American pulse. Filmed in January and February 1917, the story poked fun at pacifists; its late-April release—mere weeks after America’s entry into the First World War—was a publicist’s dream, and the mirror image of what D. W. Griffith had experienced with his epic Intolerance. Artcraft played up the relevance of the film’s plot with full-page ads in which Uncle Sam congratulated Fairbanks on “his great patriotic picture . . . the most timely feature in months, teeming with action, patriotism, thrills and laughs.”

  The major plot of the film—to the extent that such a light froth can be burdened with plot—involved Fairbanks’s character (named Teddy, in a clear nod to his favorite president) being jailed for public intoxication and falling in love with the jailer’s daughter. Through a series of events, he is released early and spends much of the film comically trying to get back into jail. Stunts were notched up to a new level of creativity; almost every reviewer wrote about the sequence where Fairbanks, trapped on a roof by a lynch mob, grabs a rope, lassoes a telegraph pole thirty feet away, swings onto a wagon, and from there deposits himself in a coal chute. (“The single stunt,” wrote the Moving Picture World reviewer, “is worth all the hours he has spent in rope rehearsal.”)

  The plot also involved terrorist bombings of domestic munitions factories, and here we find the involvement of art director and location scout Erich von Stroheim.*3 Von Stroheim was to later claim that the combination of his German name and the fact that he was scouting for munitions factories created suspicion, and that “I was discharged on account of Doug’s apprehension about having a man with a German name in his employ when even German-fried-potatoes had to be rebaptized ‘Liberty’ potatoes.”<
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  It is possible that von Stroheim’s recollections, over the years, were muddled. He was not discharged from the company—far from it. He returned west after completion of production, working on both Wild and Woolly and even appearing in Reaching for the Moon. His association was with John Emerson, however, not Fairbanks, and his tenure did not outlast that of Emerson. The episode he recalls more likely occurred later that same year when he was working as an assistant director and performer in Sylvia of the Secret Service with director George Fitzmaurice. Cameraman Arthur Miller distinctly recalled that it was in the production of this film, involving Germans dynamiting an ammunitions dump, that von Stroheim got into trouble. He “went to New York to research the names of the different explosives to be painted on cases stored at such a place. . . . Between his appearance and the sort of questions he was asking it was no time at all before he was in the clink,” Miller said.

  The film demonstrates the remarkable progress Fairbanks had made once in charge of his own productions. Contrast the drunk scene from Double Trouble with that in In Again, Out Again. The quality of Fairbanks’s performance is essentially the same—he made a very comic drunk. But the staging of the sequence, the sets, the quality of direction, as well as the very nature of the script (in the later film, Doug and character actor Frank Lalor, playing the helpful pharmacist who provides the hooch, alternate throwing raw eggs at every advertising poster of women in the place) are worlds apart, although little more than a year separated the staging and filming of the sequences.