The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  I read “The Message From Garcia” by Hubbard and if I had known Mr. Joseph Henabery, I would say that it was an incident in his life, and I mean an incident. This may sound superlative, but anything Mr. Joseph Henabery says he can do, you may rest assured he can, and I mean this.

  According to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (who had, perhaps, little direct knowledge at the time), his father had been raring to go into active service since the war’s inception. Frances Marion shares the recollection that Fairbanks was avid to stop playacting and go to war. Announcements began to appear in the papers: Doug was joining the Navy! No: Doug was joining the Marines!

  No: Doug was going to Washington. “Dad’s efforts to enlist in one of the nation’s armed services were discouraged on the presidential level,” wrote his son. He was of more service to the nation selling Liberty Bonds. Thus, Fairbanks halted Arizona production mid-shoot to leave for Washington, DC, and participate in the fourth Liberty Loan drive.

  He could not have picked a worse time. The greatest medical holocaust in world history—the “Spanish” influenza—was about to reach its second, and most deadly, peak that autumn. Thirty percent of the world’s population was infected, and 10 to 20 percent of those affected died—suddenly, rapidly, and horribly. Fever would develop, followed by bleeding from the nose, mouth, ears, and bowels. Secondary pneumonia would often ensue—a deadly outcome in those pre-antibiotic days. Those most vulnerable to the virus were young adults between twenty and forty—those who were traveling for the war, in the trenches, or aggregated in large, contagious groups at military camps. The death toll was greater than that of the war itself, killing more people in a year than the Black Death did in a century.

  Places of public assembly were closed. Ten thousand movie theaters—80 percent of the total—were shuttered for a period of one week to two months, resulting in an estimated revenue loss of $40 million. All film production was shut down on the East Coast; in California, 60 percent of production was stopped for four weeks, and along with it salaries. Harold Lockwood, who had been Mary’s leading man in Tess of the Storm Country and Hearts Adrift, died, as did scores of the less famous. Variety started devoting pages to “Epidemic Casualties,” chronicling the deaths of chorus girls, studio technicians, drummers, bookkeepers, theater managers—all young, most with families dead or dying at the same time. Metro star Viola Dana was so ill from her case of influenza that she did not learn of her husband’s death until after his funeral.

  Among those threatened was Bennie Zeidman, Doug’s publicity agent. They left Los Angeles together on October 8, heading to Chicago. The trip was made with scant notice: Treasury Secretary McAdoo wired Fairbanks the day before requesting that he join the fourth Liberty Loan drive—the same date that the Board of Health closed down all theaters in Chicago, where the pandemic was then at its peak. By the time they reached the Windy City, Zeidman was manifesting symptoms of the deadly disease. Fairbanks hustled his staggering friend to Michael Reese Hospital and submitted himself to a blood transfusion—a heroic but likely futile gesture. Blood transfusions, even from the hale and hearty Mr. Fairbanks, did little to stem the course of the illness. (That said, Bennie, after surviving a touch-and-go fortnight in the hospital, demonstrated himself to be the consummate professional by stoutly issuing a press release upon his discharge that credited his survival to his boss’s “lifesaving” gesture.)

  Bereft of his right-hand man, Doug proceeded east on his own. He repeated his fundraising speech-from-the-rear-platform at every stop, with no Mary or Charlie to share the honors. Upon arriving in Washington, he wrote Mary from the Willard Hotel: “I am positively sure that no man could love a woman more than I love you my beautiful—happiness—real happiness Dear is ours—just care for it—watch it and it will grow even more—the idea of counting the seconds or just existing till I see you is positively a truth—I really could be happy if only to look at your beautiful face—to watch your slender body as you moved if even I could not touch you or talk with you—I love you so.”

  He was getting closer to his goal of obtaining her. Beth had agreed to a settlement. It was generous: a $500,000 lump sum payment (in a year when the average family income was $1,500), with full custody of Junior. It represented a large portion of his savings. His gross income in 1917 was $470,000. War work kept his production down in 1918, and his income took a corresponding dip to $391,790.*9 The divorce was obtained quietly, in November. Beth was to gratify his reputation by remarrying a childhood sweetheart the following March, mere days after the decree became final. Mary’s name was kept out of it.

  And it was this that was foremost to him. As to the money and the risk to his career, he didn’t care one whit. Any cost, in his mind, any risk, was worth it. Anita Loos—never an entirely reliable source—quoted him as saying, “Why shouldn’t I divorce? Caesar did it. Napoleon did it.”

  Grandiose words, if true. And—almost—understandable, given what was happening in his life at that time. In a fundraising publicity stunt, he departed Washington for New York on October 16 on the US Mail plane, tagged as mail, Third Class. He went immediately to Wall Street, hoping to match a million-dollar subscription he had obtained from Barnard Baruch. He got it within five minutes. He visited every large brokerage house, and within short order had the total up to $3 million. From there he went to the Public Library on Fifth Avenue and raised several hundred thousand more from the assembled throng. “Mr. McAdoo then instructed the crowd in a ‘yell’ for Doug, which was given with a will,” wrote a reporter. “‘Douglas Fairbanks, Douglas Fairbanks, Douglas Fairbanks, Fighter! Fighter! Fighter!’ yelled the crowd, in perfect unison, as Doug stood on his hands by way of appreciation.”

  The next day was even more intoxicating. A reporter wrote:

  Fifth Avenue, the great highway of New York, known everywhere of all men who know any highway, uncovered something new under the sun on the afternoon of October 17. Even as this is being written the throngs are filling the famous thoroughfare at Forty-fourth street. The sounds of cheering and handclapping come down the avenue and turn into Forty-third street. . . . Doug Fairbanks is out there selling Liberty Bonds.

  This actor-man came up Fifth avenue as a himself parade—and the town stopped work to see and hear. Fears of contracting influenza through mixing in a crowd apparently deterred none from jamming in around him. Escorting Doug were the full police band and six mounted policemen, the latter in pairs. . . . This was probably the first “one man parade” New York ever witnessed, for Doug was the whole parade.

  One wonders what the effect of this sort of adulation would be on a normal psyche, much less that of one of God’s own happy narcissists?

  He took this heady show on the road, traveling back to Washington and from there to Charlotte, Spartanburg, Greenville, Atlanta, New Orleans, San Antonio, and finally Los Angeles. There he retuned to Arizona—the film, not the state.

  Albert Parker had appeared as the villain in American Aristocracy and In Again, Out Again. He also had directed a number of films, including two with Gloria Swanson. It was as a director that he rejoined the company in late August, directing Sic ’em Sam. He now took over and completed the western. Arizona was ultimately to be a film without a credited director—neither posters nor press books nor news articles ever acknowledged one—leading some historians to mistakenly ascribe direction of the film to Fairbanks himself.

  If the film’s reviews are to judge, no one would want to claim the credit. “That Mr. Fairbanks is alone in the high-speed comedy field—a class by himself, in fact—no one will question. But when it comes to appearing in heavy drama, that is different. Then he is in shallow waters. In the latter case, either the star’s ability to entertain will suffer, or else the dignity of the drama. In Arizona, both suffer,” wrote the Motion Picture News. Critics did not appreciate Fairbanks’s interjection of his own personality into that of a well-known character. “His performance of Lieutenant Denton is not a characterization,” grumbled the Moving Picture
World. “The athletic star has, as usual, put his own personality into the picture, and acts Douglas Fairbanks with his customary life-like perfection. A new breed of United States army officer is the result.”

  Most discouraging of all was a clipping that he kept in his personal scrapbook:

  The truth about “Arizona” is so bad that we have to stop and say our prayers before we utter it. For though we went twice to see what a Fairbanks’ performance of Lieutenant Denton would be like we never did see. It wasn’t there. In its place was just a sort of smear across the film, as if an automobile had shot past and vanished. . . . Time was when he achieved with little conspicuous movement a great variety of expression; now he achieves movement all the time with no expression at all. Finally, to the mania for doing something every moment he has added the mania for doing it so fast that nobody can see what he does do.

  Yet in the occasional seconds—all funereal—when his head is still enough for us to see his face, that face is crossed by none but the most obvious changes and few enough of those. The comic and serious elements of his Denton form not a blend but a sandwich. The seriousness he plays as solemnly as he would Othello; he does the lighter scenes as if he were a mechanical toy. And not only do the mechanical toy and Othello never blend into one, but no communication ever takes place between them; they live in absolutely separate air-tight boxes.

  What to make of this? He did not know. There was no immediate change in the essential nature of his movies. But it was around the time of Arizona that he began to rethink his films. It would be understandable if after Arizona he had simply drawn the conclusion to stay away from the classics, to revert to form. After all, the three films prior to Arizona had been critical darlings. And critics aside, Arizona performed as well as the others at the box office.

  But there was something in his nature that could not accept this. “Success, particularly if easily won, is a very dangerous quality which only a strong constitution can survive,” he wrote years later. “I would rather be what the world calls a failure and be making vigorous motions to get along than the kind of success who has come to a stand-still.” It was the negative clippings of Arizona that he kept, and, one suspects, it was the negative clippings of Arizona that he mulled over. If there was one thing that Douglas Fairbanks never did, it was stand still.

  Neither did the country. The war was now over. It was not of long duration, but it had changed the American people. The calendar may have claimed that 1918 was turning into 1919, but as far as the national psyche was concerned, the Roaring Twenties were about to begin.

  To many, of course, Fairbanks embodied America—its rash, bullyboy, jingoistic patriotism, its cheerful youth and strength and essential goodness. But the simple mirror analogy—Doug reflects America—does not work. Nor does the reverse: America reflects Doug. Rather, America in the decade ahead was to become a house of mirrors, with multiple characters—gangsters, bootleggers, chorines, ballplayers, movie stars, preachers, police—all bouncing about in the funhouse that was the Jazz Age.

  He was to measure the pulse of the country as often as he was to set it, but in the end he was to transform his image in that decade to the one by which he is best known today: not a mere swashbuckler but the swashbuckler—the mold from which all others were cast.

  But not quite yet. His first film after Arizona was The Knickerbocker Buckaroo, the last of the lost films. Albert Parker again directed. At first glance, this film appears to be cut of the classic cloth: an enthusiastic easterner (once again named Teddy) heads west on a program of planned generosity. (“Teddy decided to go out and do something for other folk, hoping to develop an interest in life thataway,” declared the press book.) He swaps clothes with a hunted bandit and ends up in hoosegow, where he meets the beautiful heroine, who has been jailed on a trumped-up charge by a corrupt sheriff. He rescues the fair maiden and restores to her and her brother the fortune the sheriff was trying to steal. The film had new stunts, including one where Fairbanks pulled himself out of the window of a speeding train, ran along the top, jumped onto the swing-arm of the water feeder, and landed on the back of his horse.

  Making his first film appearance was future superstar director William Wellman. Fairbanks had noticed him back in his theater days, when one of Doug’s productions was having its Boston run. The teenage Wellman, who, like Fairbanks, had been expelled from high school, was playing professional ice hockey. The handsome athlete caught Doug’s attention, and they formed an acquaintance. When the war began and young Wellman joined the Lafayette Flying Corps, Fairbanks followed his exploits in the newspapers. He wired Wellman that when he returned, a job in Hollywood was waiting, at $250 a week. (“Hell, I would have committed murder for that kind of money,” Wellman claimed later.)And while the second lead in a Fairbanks picture is a redoubtable start, Wellman discovered that he hated acting. He was, however, taken with directing. That he succeeded is clear: within ten years his production of Wings would win the first Oscar for best picture.

  Also making a cameo in the film, as one of the clubmen at the East Coast setting, was Ted Reed, scenario editor and future Fairbanks director. Fairbanks met him on the third Liberty Loan drive, when Reed was a reporter for the Detroit Free Press. They struck up an immediate friendship, and Reed joined the actor on the remainder of the tour. From there Fairbanks offered him a job in Hollywood. He readily agreed, moving his wife and three children away from the land of cold winters and wartime coal rationing. He wrote titles and edited scripts, progressing to assistant director and, ultimately, director of Fairbanks’s last silent modern-dress comedy, The Nut.

  The Knickerbocker Buckaroo was different from all the other Artcraft releases, however. It was the only one to lose money. Paradoxically, it had the highest gross of any of Fairbanks’s productions to date. The answer, of course, lay in the cost of production. Fairbanks spent a lot of money on this film. He built an “idealized Mexican village” on the side of a hill, rather than use the studio back lot. This alone cost $40,000. Five weeks were devoted to the script—normally the entire allotment of time for script and production. The press book, the official source of studio publicity, quotes John Fairbanks as saying Knickerbocker cost over $200,000—more than twice the normal cost for a Fairbanks Artcraft film. In fact, it cost almost $300,000, while the normal Artcraft productions hovered around the $150,000 mark. Although the returns were greater, the net result was that Fairbanks took a $50,000 loss on the production, his first as a producer.

  The film with the greatest profit of the thirteen he filmed from January 1917 to April 1919 was Mr. Fixit. This is not because it had an impressive gross; rather, it was because it was filmed so quickly and cheaply in advance of his Liberty Loan tour. It would have been entirely understandable if he had reviewed the financials of his first baker’s dozen of productions and elected to reduce costs, retain his formula, and increase profits. But he did not. He was to do the opposite: invest more in productions and ultimately change his formula. Moreover, he would change or, rather, enlarge his job description. By the time he finished filming The Knickerbocker Buckaroo in April 1919, he was well down another path. He was now going to not only produce but also distribute. He, his best friend Charlie Chaplin, his best girl Mary Pickford, and the industry’s founding director, D. W. Griffith, joined to form United Artists.

  * * *

  *1. They also conducted the barn dance, but no photographs are known to exist, thus depriving history of the surreal prospect of the Great Profile in denim overalls, square dancing with Douglas Fairbanks.

  *2. Europe, of course, had been embroiled since 1914.

  *3. In the Davis novel, the hero is a mechanical engineer; the captive is rescued by way of a tunnel and even communicates the existence of the tunnel via the same code used in the film.

  *4. Chaplin and Fairbanks were together on the day in question. Pickford made a solo appearance at the Treasury Building two days later.

  *5. It is likely that there were others. The surgeo
n general asked him in February 1918 to make a film to communicate to the recruits that “clean living and physical fitness are, after loyalty and obedience, the prime requisites of the soldier.” Fairbanks pledged to do so, and he and Allan Dwan worked on the project. There was a bond film for the fifth Canadian Victory Loan Drive, which occurred at the same time as the fourth Liberty Loan in the United States (possibly some variant of Sic ’em Sam), and a film made at the request of Herbert Hoover, who was then functioning as the US food administrator. He was also asked to make a “pep” film for the cantonments in the summer of 1918 and “morale pictures” in the early postwar months of 1919.

  *6. In contrast, the rights for Arizona, a far more famous play, cost $5,000.

  *7. † The little canary was one belonging to Marion, who trained birds as a hobby. She employed another one of her aviary friends in 1926’s The Scarlet Letter.

  *8. This is not to disparage Keaton’s genius. All the great comics of the silent era played variations on sundry leitmotifs, and to see a device pop up here versus there was not considered plagiarism. It was more akin to hearing different jazz musicians performing a riff on a theme. The melodies may be the same, but the result is unique to each. Maurice Tourneur was said to have used the same device in a film two years prior to He Comes Up Smiling, although it is unknown if Fairbanks’s creative team was aware of this.

  *9. An additional $1,872 came from sales of his books, enough to support an average family of four in 1918, but of little consequence in his overall finances.