The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  With box office returns pointing in one direction and critical response in another (much as with The Half Breed, except there the reviews were strong and the box office tepid), what was Fairbanks disposed to do? Shoot for higher financial return or try to make a better film?

  He elected to improve the quality of his films. He evidently felt that he had locked down his formula and did not need the box office to guide him in this instance. He was grateful to Henabery and gave him further opportunities to direct, but he knew the director he wanted to supplement—or possibly replace—Emerson. Even before The Man from Painted Post was released, he had signed Allan Dwan, who had directed four of his best Triangle films. The terms were generous: work with Fairbanks on scenarios and direct a total of five films for $100,000.

  But Loos and Emerson were still on the payroll. Fairbanks was likely furious over their no-show on the titling of Painted Post—a contractual violation. Loos never referred to any of this in her various autobiographies, instead claiming that “worldwide acclaim had made Doug touchy; his male chauvinism had been bruised when the Ladies’ Home Journal published my picture with the caption ‘The little girl who made Doug Fairbanks famous.’”

  This does not jibe with the evidence. In fact, Fairbanks had been actively promoting Loos as the wit behind his muscle. The major fan magazines and the publicists for the top producers in the industry had a naturally symbiotic relationship. Fairbanks, for example, wrote a monthly column for Photoplay beginning in 1917. It was Photoplay that helpfully published the pictures of the blissful Mr. and Mrs. Owen Moore that same year, and it was also Photoplay that featured a full page with Loos, Emerson, and Fleming in March 1917, essentially trumpeting the message that here was the talent that produced the Fairbanks magic. It is difficult to imagine that Fairbanks would object to the Ladies’ Home Journal providing the same message a few months later. This is not even taking into account the many times that he readily acknowledged Loos and Emerson’s contributions in print interviews during this time. As late as the January 1918 issue of Photoplay (which was created in November 1917), he featured a photograph of Loos in his full-page personal column. But if the couple were suddenly failing to contribute—not producing a continuity for The Man from Painted Post and intentionally refusing to title the film—then that was a different kettle of fish.

  Loos did have another story up her sleeve, and this became Fairbanks’s next film. Reaching for the Moon was the last film that the team would make for the star. The title and idea for a Venetian canal–like location was the original work of Henabery. “Then it was decided to let Emerson and Loos take over the next picture,” he recalled philosophically. “They wanted to write their own story, but they liked my title Reaching for the Moon, and they wanted to use the Venetian settings and the gondolas. I knew that it would have been much more expensive for the company to have Emerson and Loos drawing pay for doing nothing rather than me, so I devoted my time trying to get ideas for another Fairbanks story. Hardly anyone outside the movie business can realize how much constant thought and effort is expended in finding or developing scenes for a star like Doug.”

  Anita Loos early in 1918 used Reaching for the Moon to illustrate how the process worked for their particular team:

  The first conference concerning Reaching for the Moon was held in the Fairbanks dressing-room in Hollywood, and began something like this:

  Mr. Fairbanks—“You know, folks, I have always wanted to play the type of young chap who has tremendous ambitions; who wants to go out and conquer the world overnight.”

  Mr. Emerson—“We ought to be able to find a theme that will fit that character, but let’s have one that we can satirize.”

  Miss Loos—“I know! Poke fun at New Thought. That’s not been done yet!”

  Mr. Emerson—“That’s all right, but we must be careful how we handle it, for after all there is something real in this New Thought idea.”

  Miss Loos—“Well, suppose we give this young man a false idea of New Thought and then poke fun at him! ”

  Mr. Fairbanks—“I can see this young chap as a typical American, full of energy and with boundless ambition. I like to see a chap like that put right into the midst of a whirlpool of excitement! Go to it! I’ve got a couple of broncs that have to be broken by lunchtime.”

  Exit Mr. Fairbanks.

  Filming proper began with a quick run to New York City to pick up a few location shots. To bring wife, child, and twelve company members on a ten-day round-trip journey to spend only three days shooting exteriors might seem extreme, but Fairbanks said, “One thing you can’t reproduce with scenery is New York City.” His press agent was along for a day’s shooting and gave a flavor of the cheerful chaos as the team shot an exterior scene:

  Just as the Czar of Russia, the Minister from Argentina, a Prussian spy, a French monsieur and a Swedish masseur alighted from a big closed car in front of a mysterious-looking house*19 and prepared to steal up to the door, a yellow racing car dashed up the street and spoiled the whole picture. Then from the yellow car alighted a man who rushed up to Mr. Fairbanks and, seizing him by the hand, cried: “Doug, when did you come East?”

  “Only yesterday,” replied Doug.

  “Why didn’t you let me know?”

  “Well, you see, I came in a hurry.”

  “You haven’t changed a bit, Doug. Say, you look good to me.”

  “So do you,” countered Doug with his most hospitable smile.

  “Say, let me get in your picture, will you?”

  “Well, we’re not doing much today, but come around to-morrow, and we’ll fix something up.”

  “All right, and you look me up tonight, won’t you?”

  “Sure I will. Where are you now?”

  “Same place. Haven’t moved. So long; I’ll see you to-night,” and the yellow racer was off.

  Douglas turned to John Emerson for enlightenment. “Say, who the devil was that?”

  The press agent also noted that Emerson, like Henabery, had to keep an active eye on his star. “The front of this mysterious house was decorated with little stone ledges and during the afternoon Douglas cast longing glances at this edifice, but said nothing. Finally . . . he said, ‘I’m going to climb that house.’ To which the director unfeelingly replied: ‘You’re going to do nothing of the sort. You’re going down to Rector’s and take those tea scenes.’”

  The filming also included shots at the Plaza Hotel in what was then the Champagne Porch. One observer noted, “One ‘close-up’ which he did yesterday was merely to walk out of the Plaza Hotel and smile. By the time he had repeated this two or three times a crowd had assembled, and some shouted, ‘Let’s see you do some of your stunts!’ So ‘Doug’ obligingly leaped up eight steps, striving to please, with the camera wasting perfectly good film on the exhibition, which was not required by the scenario.”

  As to the scenario: Loos and Emerson took Henabery’s title and location and worked up a story about an ambitious button factory employee who learns that he is really a king. As Loos intended, the story had good fun with the concept (which evidently recycles as a vogue every fifty to one hundred years) that if you concentrate upon a goal, it will materialize. Once our hero reaches his kingdom of Vulgaria—which has a minister named Badinoff (suggesting that some jokes don’t take a hundred years to recycle)—he is subjected to multiple assassination attempts. This gives Fairbanks free rein to clamber and jump over the buildings and canals of Venice, California, site of the location filming. Most critics thought the film delicious satire, although Variety grumbled that it was “a series of fist fights. Mr. Fairbanks must be running out of scenarios.”

  One who had no objection to the fisticuffs was assistant cameraman Glen MacWilliams. He was dutifully cranking his camera that autumn as Fairbanks staged a fight with Bull Montana, “Strangler” Lewis, Spike Robinson, “Kid” Fleming, and the other usual suspects. A young woman watching the action fainted. MacWilliams abandoned his camera, unbeknownst to the comba
tants, to attend to the lady in question—who was reportedly very pretty. The actors were not pleased to have the shot missed, but evidently Miss Marie Campbell of Minneapolis was quite appreciative. The young couple became engaged the following February, with plans for Fairbanks to serve as best man and his band of Vulgarian assassins as ushers.

  But Doug’s marriage with the team of Loos and Emerson was coming to an end. On December 1, each signed a termination agreement, giving them their contracted percentages on all Artcraft films up to and including Reaching for the Moon—even The Man from Painted Post. “When John asked for a cancellation of our contracts, Doug was relieved to be rid of us,” Loos wrote years later.

  Herein lies a challenge. With Loos, especially in later years, one has to keep one’s saltshaker close at hand. Fairbanks would die at fifty-six, and history fails to record that he had anything to say about the matter. This does not appear to stem from restraint; it simply appears not to have been a grudge that he nursed. He had higher mountains to climb. Anita Loos would also progress to massive fame with the publication of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. But, for the purposes of film history, the last person one might wish to offend is the one with the scathing wit, for wit is a more effective weapon than venom alone. In this department, Loos was well armed.

  And she lived a very long time. During those years, she took her history with Douglas Fairbanks and reworked it, shaping the details of the story, altering events, combining scenes, and in general constructing what would have been a very fine film script. It was a script in which John Emerson (“a pimp”) was blasted and Fairbanks emerged largely as the creature of her creation. (“We made Douglas Fairbanks,” she once told Kevin Brownlow.)

  Griffith was going to fire Fairbanks in the early days, she would claim. Or, worse, turn him over to Keystone. Enter John Emerson, who stumbled across a veritable goldmine of clever scripts that Loos, then working at Fine Arts, had submitted. Griffith knew they could never be made into films; he just liked to read the funny titles. Loos and Emerson then took Fairbanks in hand and filmed His Picture in the Papers. (Her contributions to The Lamb and Double Trouble were conveniently forgotten.) The story got even better from here. His Picture in the Papers was thought to be a stinker, until it was accidently shipped to the Roxy Theatre in New York City*20 and the hall “fairly rocked with laughter.” A star was born. She implied that she wrote all of Fairbanks’s early films from that point forward, and that Emerson directed them all. Allan Dwan is written out of her history of these years. But, then, she tells us, things changed. Doug didn’t want to share the credit. So they left. He was getting snooty, anyway. Took himself too seriously. Started eating off gold plates.

  Certainly her explanations when Fairbanks was alive were quite different. “One always dislikes giving up associations that are pleasant,” she told an interviewer in March 1918. “But Mr. Fairbanks decided to get away from satirical comedies and try a new type of play. We do our best work in satirical comedies. That’s our specialty, so naturally we ventured forth to pastures new.” Emerson gave a different reason: “Of course we liked Mr. Fairbanks and regretted leaving him, but the real reason, speaking for myself, was that I wanted to get away from California. I never felt well there. I was never myself. ‘Perpetual sunshine’ sounds very poetical, but it isn’t—it’s too hot to be poetical.”

  Almost everyone in the film industry, Fairbanks included, shaped his or her narrative. Whether it was Fairbanks’s false modesty and his habit of disguising his own origins, Dwan’s colorful exaggerations, or Loos’s thinly veiled resentments, small lies would be told over and over until it is likely that all participants came to honestly believe them. While historians have uncovered many of Loos’s misrepresentations, the fact is that a witty female pioneer of the industry who was still giving interviews into her nineties was a challenging force to overcome.

  And she was critical to Fairbanks’s early career; no one should take that away from her. But Fairbanks was looking for more. He had ideas that did not jibe with those of his first creative team—more action, fewer laughs from the titles but more from the situations. In less than three years he would take his career in such a different direction that it is hard to imagine Loos wanting to write his sort of films. He would stumble down a few blind alleys on his way to his swashbuckling future, and there are many who would argue that the early films of 1917–1919 are as good—or even better—than the later works. But that is a matter of taste. And the taste that counted was his—the funding producer and star. The rift began when he wanted a western and his creative team did not. He was the master of working with a team, a talented collaborator, but at the end of the day, his was the only vote that counted. So they parted ways. Loos had the satisfaction of channeling her wit into a great comic novel, and Fairbanks had to console himself with being, for a heady decade, the King of Hollywood—the original swashbuckling icon of the century. Neither lost, if seen in those terms. Their lines were not parallel and crossed for only two and a half years. But while they did, they created real magic. It is unfortunate, then, that the accomplished Anita chose, in small ways, to act as a sore loser.

  She and Emerson were still on staff when Allan Dwan arrived in the fall of 1917 to shoot Fairbanks’s next film, A Modern Musketeer. Here Dwan’s history of tall tales returns to challenge the historian. According to him, Owen Moore’s threats impelled Fairbanks “to get away from Los Angeles and that embarrassing situation.” Dwan was on a westbound train when he received a telegram from Fairbanks: IMPERATIVE MEET ME IN SALINA KANSAS AND WE WILL RETURN TO NEW YORK. Dwan disembarked, met Fairbanks on the next eastbound train, and retraced his route. “Between Salina and New York,” he recalled, “we cooked up the idea of A Modern Musketeer.” Dwan described the main character: “A young fellow who’s very restless in his little Kansas hometown. He dreams of riding out like D’Artagnan on a horse . . . he gets into a series of adventures we invented as we went along.”

  Well and good, except that Fairbanks showed no evidence of hiding from Moore. He hosted a banquet for Dwan upon the latter’s arrival in Los Angeles. (Loos and Emerson were pointedly absent but had wired their felicitations.) And the film was scarcely made up on the fly. A full scenario exists in the Joseph Henabery papers at the Herrick Library documenting a well-laid-out story, based on the short story “D’Artagnan of Kansas” and scripted, evidently, well in advance.*21 But Dwan was correct when he asserted that the story of the film bears no relation to the story that inspired it. Fairbanks and Dwan appear to have taken all their inspiration from the title, and the film shares only the hero’s given name (Ned), his Kansas origins, and the fact that his mother drew prenatal inspiration from The Three Musketeers. The story is, like so many Fairbanks films of this period, two different tales, the first being a delicious comedy of a chivalrous young man who goes to great ends to play the gallant and protect women, and the second an action story staged at the Grand Canyon and the Canyon de Chelly, involving Fairbanksian heroics.

  The film, long lost, has been largely recovered and restored in the past decade. It is a fortunate find—A Modern Musketeer is a formidable entry in the Fairbanks body of work. As the (perhaps hyper-caffeinated) Photoplay critic wrote, “Fairbanks makes the Dumas swashbuckler seem a popinjay, a milksop, a wearer of wrist watches in times of peace, a devotee of the sleeve handkerchief, a nursery playmate, an eater of prune whip, a drinker of pink lemonade, a person susceptible to hay fever, a wearer of corn plasters, an habitué of five o’clock teas, a reader of Pollyanna.” It is well known as being the first film in which Fairbanks appears in swashbuckling garb: he walks straight up to the camera in the opening sequence in full D’Artagnan regalia, strokes his mustache, fingers his curls, and gives us a wink, as if to say, “Don’t worry, folks. It’s me underneath all this horsehair.”*22 The sword fight that follows is an over-the-top, joyous romp of a battle involving not only rapiers but also a lot of throwing of furniture and climbing of walls.

  Fairbanks was so please
d with the result that after an initial screening of the film he gave Dwan a Twin Six Packard. Being his usual prankster self, he did not simply present the car but instead suggested that he was considering its purchase and asked Dwan to give it a test drive. Dwan complied but was pulled over by a police officer—a Fairbanks plant. When the “cop” demanded license and registration, Dwan had to confess that the vehicle wasn’t his. The faux policeman then checked his records and informed the director that the car was indeed registered to Allan Dwan. Doug then emerged from hiding, and Dwan got the point. The same point presumably was not lost on Anita Loos and John Emerson. They were still working with Fairbanks at this point, but there were no new cars for them. One wonders if they regretted their behavior during The Man from Painted Post.

  A review of the Musketeer script reveals sequences that appear to have been filmed but that are lost from the restored print. There was a set piece of a ten-year-old Ned (Fairbanks’s character) beating a bully for dipping a little girl’s hair in an inkwell. Further,there was a sequence of Ned as bank teller, holding up the line while he wipes silver dollars: “There is a lady on every dollar—she represents the spirit of Liberty. I tremble to think what filthy hands she may have encountered,” he says. (An impressed customer wipes his hands before taking a coin.) Ned then leaves the line to carry bundles home for a girl (existing stills reveal that this was ZaSu Pitts, whose unexplained appearance later in the Kansas sequence now makes sense). After he is rebuffed for trying to carry kindling for an elderly lady, Ned returns to his bank, where he moves women and children to the front of the line.*23

  The script also documents those elements that were constructed post-scenario. The sequence where Ned, learning that he is going to finally get out of Kansas, climbs to the top of a church steeple was not defined in the script, which called simply for “a stunt” to demonstrate his joy. And Fairbanks clearly did some improvising on location at the El Tovar Hotel at the Grand Canyon. Where the script calls for him to enter the building to speak with the heroine’s mother, Fairbanks instead jumps off his horse and scrambles up the side of the structure to meet her on a second-floor porch.