The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  Fairbanks began to be photographed with Mary. These were always publicity shots—they were, after all, working on the same lot and both distributing through Artcraft. And usually in the picture was his best pal, Charlie Chaplin. Photoplay referred to them as “the golden triplets.” But it did not take long for everyone in town—Mrs. Fairbanks excepted—to be in on the secret of the romance. The Moving Picture World published a photograph of Doug, Mary, and Charlie in early June 1917. Charlie, in tramp costume, is smiling at the camera. Doug is doing the same. He is leaning in toward Mary, who is looking up at him as if he were the only man on earth. The accompanying note stated, perhaps a tad archly: “Taking it by and large, it sure is a most interesting picture, one possessing almost limitless possibilities in the way of speculation—taking that last word in any old sense you like.”

  This must have raised concern. Up until this point, Owen had been kept out of the picture. Mary was starting to portray children now, and Zukor enforced a very youthful persona: she was never to be seen with a drink in her hand; a pencil or a piece of chalk could be mistaken for a cigarette; her nails must be kept short. But now Owen was allowed back and moved into the house she shared with her mother. It is unlikely that he was allowed to share her bed. Pickford biographer Scott Eyman writes of an episode when Owen rented a suite at the Biltmore Hotel: “Charlotte surveyed the suite, nodded and said, ‘Very fine, Owen. You take that room in there and Mary and I will sleep in here.’” Mary was either giving the marriage one last try or diverting suspicion away from her relationship with Fairbanks. One suspects the latter. Photoplay featured a photo spread: “Our Mary and Her Owen.” They were photographed in front of their car, playing golf, and lounging on the porch swing. It was clearly staged—their clothes are unchanged in each circumstance—and the body language is telling. Mary leans away from Owen or is turned away. Neither is smiling. But they were together, and the public was permitted to see that “Our Mary” had a husband.

  Certainly Owen knew what had been going on. Pickford quotes him as telling her, “I’m going to kill that climbing monkey.” And conversely, Fairbanks’s jealousy was infamous.

  Mary was up in Pleasanton, California, filming Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm when Doug began his next film, Down to Earth. In mid-June, he went to Yosemite to catch some mountain-climbing shots for the film but also ostensibly to have a peak named in his honor.*14 He evidently managed to sneak in an overnight with her before arriving at the park. The next day brought a letter in his usual telegraphic style, speaking not only to the heights his passion was reaching but also the jealousy that was eating at him.

  My Darling—Just two million thoughts are running madly through my brain—I can’t begin—it is so jumbled—but it all means I love you and you alone. Darling girl I felt so near to you last night—I have never known such happiness—I mean just that—I have never known such happiness. I do hope that soon I will be normal and that I will cause you no more disturbing moments—these petty jealousies etc. I am so sorry Dear—and don’t think me silly Dear the way I behaved this morning—I was rather ashamed—when I had left you—please forgive me—

  I am so utterly miserable and lonesome for you tonight—I can’t think—I want to tell you many things but I can’t seem to collect myself—perhaps you would like me with a bit more poise—I can’t help it—really honey I am indulging entirely in self pity tonight and rather enjoy it—I have just read over this letter and it is not a practical [sic] the way I want it—can’t you understand, don’t you feel dear what I want to tell you—you seem so many miles away my heart aches—I feel so desolate. You must never leave me again it is not right—the rest of the world means nothing to me—here I am in the midst of one of God’s most beautiful gardens and it means nothing to me without Mary my Mary—you just you I want—some may say that memories are sufficient in our lifetimes but it is not true—I must be with you my own and when you die I wish to go to [sic]—you have so completely taken possession of me—I cannot live without you—I feel sure Darling I can make you happy—do write me often—if you feel it—do think of me—know that I love you only—believe me my soul belongs to you Mary and you must love me in return before heaven—

  Please take care of yourself & go to bed early—and be very careful of your food—don’t worry—be nice to your dear mother—work hard—and think of me once in a while because every beat of my heart is for you my dear and forever and ever

  Good night

  Douglas

  Down to Earth featured a story of Fairbanks’s own creation and Anita Loos’s execution. It was a five-reel Fairbanksian sermon for Teddy Roosevelt’s “Strenuous Life,” the famed 1899 lecture in which Roosevelt proclaimed, “Those who do not embrace the strenuous life . . . do not live meaningful lives.”

  The heroine of the tale rejects the hero at the beginning of the film in favor of a jaded urbanite. While he deals with his heartbreak by cutting through jungles and climbing mountain peaks, she, laced with caffeine and cigarettes, suffers a nervous breakdown. Fairbanks’s character comes to visit her at a sanitarium. There he discovers a place full of self-absorbed, comic neurotics whose ailments are clearly all in their heads. He buys the place, lock, stock, and barrel, and takes its entire population out on his yacht (Fairbanks used his own boat). He then stages a shipwreck on a “desert island.” Here the patients must learn to chop wood, find food, and live Teddy Roosevelt’s “strenuous life.” Of course, in short order they are cured.

  The film’s release was delayed by the death of a cast member, Variety reported—the unfortunate having fallen off Doug’s yacht and drowned off the coast of Catalina. It was a cast member, true, but the player in question was a small spotted dog. While he may have dog-paddled to shore, an extensive search failed to turn him up. Equally bad, he was a rather distinctive-looking mutt, and since no matches could be found to substitute for him, the sequences in which he appeared needed to be reshot.*15

  The film was probably the best example of Fairbanksian wish fulfillment. In it he is a college football hero, a polo player, the owner of a Wyoming ranch, a mountain climber, and a jungle explorer. Even more to the point, it is the embodiment of the Fairbanks philosophy, that there are no ills that cannot be cured by a healthy dose of exercise and the great outdoors. The film had very little in the way of stunts, which the critics were quick to note. “But the producers have looked to his off-cited personality to hold the interest, which is like using the Rock of Gibraltar for the foundation of a house,” wrote the critic from the New York Dramatic Mirror. Others were equally effusive. “Book it, Mr. Exhibitor,” Variety wrote, “and if it fails to draw, it will just about be time to hail a few carpenters and make a garage of your place.” Only a few voices in the wilderness suggested that the film was not up to his most recent standard. “If we are to look closely at the story and judge it from the standpoint of a dramatic critic, we will, no doubt, say that something is lacking,” wrote the Motion Picture News. “It isn’t a masterpiece in this respect. But it must be remembered that Douglas Fairbanks’ strong points do not include Shakespearian repertoire. They are comedy, thrills, smiles and personality.”

  It was with Down to Earth that early cracks began to appear in his relationship with Anita Loos and John Emerson. Of his first three independent productions, Loos provided the story for only the first. This is not to say that she didn’t provide script proposals; Loos’s papers reveal, among other treasures, a script in which Fairbanks is a peppermint-eating product of divinity school who is sent out by a reformed dissolute to take the latter’s fortune and right all the wrongs he (the dissolute) has committed. One longs to see what the team would have made of this tale, but to Loos’s probable frustration, it was never to be. A staff writer must yield, one supposes, if the producer wants to provide the story, and there was likely a marketing argument that could be made for the fact that Fairbanks not only starred in a film but also created the plot. But to have the screen credits and all advertising for Wild and
Woolly attribute that film’s story to an unknown bit player must have been galling.*16 Fairbanks also made alterations to her scripts beyond merely improvising and developing the stunts. As heretofore mentioned, Down to Earth was an especially egregious example of Loos’s casual racism, and scenes such as one where the villain, in search of faux cannibals, asks a black waiter, “Where can I find some niggers?” were possibly never filmed,†*17and the cannibals were replaced by a single white actor.

  This, evidently, was beginning to chafe. In May of that year, Loos gave a lecture at Columbia University. One journalist reported that she claimed “the leader [series of introductory titles] was of utmost value in photoplay work and suggested in effect that the action could be used to advantage merely to lead up to a succession of clever titles.” In a later issue, an editorialist grumbled about “Miss Anita Loos, who appears to believe that the Fairbanks comedies are rather clever illustrations for her decidedly clever leaders.”

  It wasn’t simply Loos—it was Emerson as well. “Emerson and Doug were a little bit at loggerheads,” recalled Joseph Henabery. “Since I was not concerned, I kept my nose out of the business.” But unaware though he may have been, he soon became involved in the drama. Doug wanted to make another western. Emerson and Loos were trying, at his behest, to create a scenario based on “Silver Slippers,” a Jackson Gregory story published in the November 1916 Adventure magazine. They “were getting nowhere, but Doug was really enthused about the West and he urged them not to give up.” After a trip to see the Cheyenne Rodeo in Wyoming, he returned to discover that they had made no progress. Since he had just made arrangements for most of the rodeo’s contestants to appear with him in this now-unscripted western and had contracted to use a Wyoming ranch*18 for the locations, “this caused some friction,” Henabery recalled. “Even earlier, things had not been as smooth between Emerson and Doug as they could have been. In some way, Mrs. Fairbanks was involved.”

  She was, indeed. Beth had begun to suspect her husband was having an affair. Long, late “story conferences”—a ready excuse, apparently—turned her suspicions to Anita Loos. “Anytime that Douglas and Mary wanted to see each other I had to stay home and pretend I was working in case Mrs. Fairbanks would do any—er—detective work,” Loos recalled decades later. “And this went on for quite a while and we used to giggle over the situation.” The puckish Loos recalled, “I would notice when we happened to meet, I would get a very frosty reception; and I finally went to Douglas and said ‘No, look, this has gone far enough.’” Fairbanks appealed to her loyalty. “‘Listen,” Loos recalled him saying, “‘you’re the only one I’ve got that I can depend on. You’re my main alibi; you’ve got to stand by,’ and so I did.”

  But Beth was a born manager (or meddler, depending on one’s perspective) and decided to pull some strings behind the scenes. “I was surprised to be asked to her home for a talk,” recalled Henabery. “She was a very refined, nice woman. She began by telling me how much they liked my work, and then she got down to the point. Doug wanted to make the Western picture Emerson and Loos were struggling with, but John Emerson was not happy about it. Mrs. Fairbanks said that Doug had made up his mind to do the story in Wyoming, and she questioned me about taking over.”

  Henabery had already accompanied Fairbanks on his trip to Yosemite for Down to Earth and had obtained the shots of Doug climbing the “Alps”—his first time directing any footage with the star. He discovered that shepherding Douglas Fairbanks was memorable, but it could be terrifying as well. “The publicity man for the company wanted some still photographs to show Doug’s athletic ability,” he recalled. “I was arranging a camera setup below, and when I climbed back to our base, I saw Doug doing a handstand on the edge of the famous Firefall Rock. Firefall Rock is about 3,500 feet above the valley below. I was afraid to yell or shout, so they got that picture, but no more.”

  But now he was being asked to write the script for, and direct, an entire Fairbanks feature. And he was asked to do it on the fly, as the lease on the ranch was active. Two Pullmans and three freight cars brought cast and crew—including Smiles and twenty additional horses—to Laramie, but the company still had no scenario.

  “All the movie people were to sleep on straw in the loft of a massive barn made of logs. . . . The mosquitoes were terrible,” Henabery recalled. “I had no story except the Western tale in magazine form—a story not designed to fit Doug’s style. What was more, I had no time to develop a new one.” He started to write, shooting “sequences that offered few problems” by day, and working on the scenario at night. Fairbanks occupied himself for two full days during this time, signing the ten thousand pictures for the Red Cross. Henabery’s story notes survive, scribbled over several pages of blank daily report sheets, a testament to the frantic haste with which the film was put together.

  It is a measure of Fairbanks’s impetuosity that he would lease an entire ranch and hire every trick roper, broncobuster, and champion rider of the West without confirming that he had a satisfactory script. It certainly was a demonstration of his anger over Loos and Emerson’s failure to have one ready for him that he would assign both direction and script to a largely untested assistant director. Still, he had a habit of taking people and advancing them beyond their original roles: under his management, Victor Fleming went from cameraman to assistant director to full director. Future luminaries such as Howard Hawks and William Wellman also got their starts on Fairbanks sets.

  The Man from Painted Post was the first appearance in a Fairbanks film of theatrical star Frank Campeau. Campeau, best known for playing the evil Trampus in the stage production of The Virginian, was to spend the next several years ably serving the same function of villainy for Fairbanks. He was soon to discover that film acting had its challenges. Unaccustomed to riding a horse, he chafed his legs raw and was reduced to making a nightly thirty-mile run into Laramie to lubricate his woes. Henabery found himself acting as an impromptu fire marshal, getting the lantern out of Campeau’s drunken grip every night to prevent him setting the barn ablaze.

  Joseph Henabery was never to be a star director, but he was a competent one who got the job done. Time was of the essence after principal photography on Painted Post was completed. Henabery and the company’s editor, William Shea, booked two compartments on an eastbound train and used the five-day trip to edit the film. The arrangement had been that Loos and Emerson would meet them at the Paragon Film Laboratory to review the edited print and to write the titles. They were a no-show and, in a sort of sit-down strike, made certain that they could not be found. “I had to write them myself,” Henabery recalled. “Writing titles is not simple at any time. Further, when you’re under pressure on account of a release date, it’s very hard to do an acceptable job.” As a screenwriter, he was no Anita Loos—no one was. The titles are traditional, stilted and formal, in the manner of Henabery’s original mentor, D. W. Griffith. Fleming biographer Michael Sragow summed it up when he wrote, “It’s the sort of square Western that the hero of Wild and Woolly would devour; it’s as if Fairbanks made his revisionist Western comedy, then decided to do the straight version. But it’s a well-paced shoot-’em-up, and a feel of fresh air courses through it.”

  Critics at the time recognized this as well. An unsourced clipping in Fairbanks’s personal scrapbooks states of The Man from Painted Post, “What we get is a ranch and ‘rustler’ picture, no better than dozens of others of its general kind and not nearly so good as some. Without Fairbanks it would attract no particular attention. With him, the thought is inevitable that he is having difficulty in living up to past achievements. It seems that Fairbanks wrote and helped direct this photoplay himself, as he did his previous one, Down to Earth. Both prove that he should leave authorship and direction to others and pay attention closely to his own knitting. He can’t do it all.”

  When it comes to critical reviews of his films, Fairbanks’s personal scrapbooks are enlightening. His tendency was to include reviews only when they were n
egative. Much like the financial returns at the box office, this was something that he tracked closely—and from which he continued to learn. With The Man from Painted Post, the messages were decidedly mixed. “It was made in a hurry, without the aid of a worked out scenario—just made up as we went along,” Fairbanks wrote the following year. “Yet according to the financial boys, it’s probably the best money maker of all those I’ve done for Artcraft. And the verdict of the ‘fan mail’ has been generally favorable.”

  Returns of early films are impossible to determine by modern methods. Today we get automated reports on box office returns, essentially telling us a film’s gross. How the money is divided after that is of little interest to anyone outside the industry. But for a film one hundred years ago, the data of individual box office returns is unavailable. We may know the producer’s cut, and what his return is from the distributor. We even may know, without having to divide the producer’s return (by 0.725 in the instance of Fairbanks’s deal), what the distributor collected. But the distributor may have had a patchwork of deals, leasing the film on a geographic basis (state’s rights) or renting a film by the week for a flat rate to a theater (as described above for In Again, Out Again, where a single week at the Rialto returned over $17,000 to the theater owner against a rental fee of $3,000). And if there were negotiated “splits” of the box office take, which was rare at this point, there was nothing to prevent the exhibitor from underreporting his box office returns.

  Thus, for the Fairbanks Artcraft films, we have only the records of the Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corporation to guide us. The “financial boys” were correct; The Man from Painted Post was the most profitable Artcraft release until 1918’s Mr. Fixit.