8
United
* * *
The Alexandria Hotel was not yet thirteen years old in January 1919, but with its luxurious Palm Court ballroom, it was considered the destination for anyone visiting downtown Los Angeles. On the sixth of that month fourteen men of note entered its lobby.
They were all white and middle aged. Most were stout. Harry Schwalbe of Philadelphia was secretary-treasurer of the group. A toupee perched, hatlike, on his very, very broad forehead with the jaunty assurance of two gerbils kissing, countering the suggested gravitas of his pince-nez. Aaron J. Jones of Chicago bypassed a hairpiece in favor of a comb-over, which did little to distract from the uncomfortable fact that he was pop-eyed. Their president, Robert Lieber, was a graying gentleman from Indianapolis of serious mien and long upper lip. The Los Angeles representative, T. L. Tally, had the weathered face and walrus mustache of an aged cowboy. They constituted the board of directors of the First National Exhibitors Circuit, the second-most-powerful entity in the film business.
They were in town for a general convention but had arrived early. They spent the following three days huddled in Parlor A on the mezzanine floor, a guard at the door. The meeting, it was said, had been called suddenly, leaving the town, in the words of one wag, “full of rumors, conjectures and hand-woven and fancy embroidered guesswork.” The organization, an association of independent, first-run theater owners, had been founded a mere year and a half before. As with so many activities in the early days of motion picture history, the very existence of this company was the result of the actions of Mary Pickford. Her spring 1916 contract with Famous Players required Adolph Zukor to merge his firm with Jesse Lasky’s production company to form Famous Players–Lasky. This combination then became the largest provider of films to the distributor known as Paramount—which it then acquired.
Because of this, Paramount stood as the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the industry. Cecil B. DeMille and Jesse Lasky ran production, Hiram Abrams handled distribution, and Zukor ruled above all. In mid-1917 he was able to boast having Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and star director D. W. Griffith under contract. Having Griffith meant having his stock company, which included Lillian and Dorothy Gish. In addition Paramount distributed the comedies of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, featuring an up-and-coming Buster Keaton, and had fan favorites such as handsome Wallace Reid under contract.
This near monopoly of top talent (only Chaplin was excluded, still releasing through Mutual in 1916 and 1917) meant that Zukor could jack up rates to exhibitors. Partially this was not his fault; stars such as Mary and Doug were essentially setting their own price, and their price was what the market could bear. Further, the cost of their productions was going up; while a Triangle Fairbanks feature cost less than $30,000 to produce in early 1916, an Artcraft Fairbanks film from 1917 and 1918 averaged over five times that amount. There was an essential tension of conflicting incentives: Producers such as Pickford and Fairbanks wanted to make longer and better films. Distributors such as Zukor and Paramount wanted a larger volume of films, inexpensively made. But needing the stars to fill the seats, Zukor signed the Pickfords and Fairbankses and simply passed on the extra costs to exhibitors, while managing his financial risk by block booking the rest of his studio product.
The more astute exhibitors saw where this was going. If Zukor had no reasonable competition on the distribution side, they were going to be in trouble.*1
The answer seemed clear: the major exhibitors of first-run theaters throughout the country should combine and form their own distribution firm. This entity, in turn, would negotiate with the major stars. They still might pay top dollar, but they would enjoy the profits of distribution, instead of merely bearing the costs. It was perhaps inevitable that a competing entity would be formed, as the First National Exhibitors Circuit was, in the spring of 1917.
They started with a bang, snagging Charlie Chaplin in the summer of 1918. Chaplin was contracted to provide First National with eight two-reel comedies for a total of $1 million. Additional reels within a film (Chaplin had ambitions for three-reel and longer comedies) were to be compensated at the paltry rate of $15,000 a reel.
In November 1918, First National scored a second major coup, wooing Mary Pickford with a three-film contract. She was to receive $675,000 base pay, with 50 percent profit sharing and full authority on her films, from script to final cut. The separation from “Papa” Zukor was a monumental event in both of their lives. He had served as a father figure and mentor to her, while her films had been the cornerstone of his company. In her autobiography, Mary quotes a Zukor adviser: “Let her go to First National; I guarantee you it will deflate her swelled head, destroy First National, and bring her back to you on her knees.”
But she was getting advice, too. Doug wrote her from Washington, pleased about the deal. “I am really very happy about Zukor because with the forming of your new company to produce you will have enough worries,” he wrote. “Again it argues my little sweetheart’s value of which I am most proud.”
Fairbanks’s own contract with Artcraft and Zukor was coming up for renewal in February 1919. The trade magazines of the time indicated that Fairbanks was in as much demand as he had been in late 1916: “A dozen different representatives of film concerns are hanging around the Fairbanks studio endeavoring to secure his name to a contract,” wrote Variety on January 15. But Chaplin recalled a darker picture. He had gone to the First National board that week to make a plea for additional per-reel compensation for longer comedies. He met a room full of cold shoulders. “Exhibitors were rugged merchants in those days,” he wrote, “and to them films were merchandise costing so much a yard. . . . I might as well have been a lone factory worker asking General Motors for a raise.” This confounded him. “I could not understand their attitude, as I was considered the biggest drawing card in the country.”
Chaplin’s brother Sydney put the finger on the rumors associated with the First National convention. Just what were the board members doing in L.A., anyway? Speculation was rampant. They were meeting to sign D. W. Griffith! (Griffith issued a denial.) They were planning to sign Douglas Fairbanks! (Fairbanks did not address this rumor directly.)
The most interesting—and, to the stars, troublesome—rumor of all was that First National was in town to vote on a merger, possibly with Paramount. This, as far as the producer-stars were concerned, would be disastrous. If First National and Paramount were to merge, all the major and midsize exhibitors would be tied up as neatly as a Christmas package with a silk ribbon—but there would be only empty stockings for the artists.
Anxious to determine if the rumors had a basis in fact, Chaplin and Fairbanks agreed to engage the Pinkerton Detective Agency to get to the bottom of the matter. Chaplin’s account of hiring “a very clever girl, smart and attractive-looking” who engaged the interests of a major production executive, “a glib braggart in an esurient state of libido,”*2 sounds too theatrically perfect to be true. But Chaplin biographer David Robinson, with full access to the actor’s papers, was able to document that this is indeed what happened, even sharing the typed reports of “Operator 8.”†*3
The report, according to Chaplin was sobering. “[Zukor] and his associates were forming a forty-million-dollar merger of all the producing companies and were sewing up every exhibitor in the United States with a five-year contract. He told her they intended putting the industry on a proper business basis, instead of having it run by a bunch of crazy actors getting astronomical salaries.”
This would never do. Something would have to be done—but what?
One answer lay with Hiram Abrams, Adolph Zukor’s head of distribution, and Benjamin “B. P.” Schulberg, Zukor’s publicist and personal assistant. Will Irwin’s 1928 account is the closest we have to the events in question:
From the first, the aggressive Abrams and the dominant Zukor worked badly in harness; by 1918 came friction so severe that it began to burn out the bearings. Zukor took the extre
me course: he discharged Abrams. Now Schulberg, as he says himself, is a one-man dog. In old days he had been fiercely loyal to Zukor; serving under Abrams, he transferred his allegiance. He sat half that night in Zukor’s house, quarrelling with the Boss.
“If he goes, I go,” he said.
“Very well, Ben,” replied Zukor, at the end of his persuasiveness, “but you’ll come back some day.”
. . . Burning for eminence and revenge, Schulberg and Abrams sat for days analyzing the motion-picture business in its larger aspects, looking for an opening. “And we found one as wide as the Grand Cañon,” said Schulberg.
The idea? United Artists (UA)—a company that would be owned by the stars and which would serve as the distribution arm for their production companies. The pair sat up through the night, typing up a manifesto entitled “Eighty-Nine Reasons for United Artists.” They then bundled up their respective families, loaded them on a westbound train, and headed to Los Angeles—the same week as the First National convention was meeting. They had five superstars in mind; the “Big Five,” as they termed them, were D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and William S. Hart, the western star who followed Fairbanks’s path from Triangle to Paramount.
Young Budd Schulberg was not yet five years old when his father walked the family into the lobby of the Alexandria Hotel, but he remembered the moment. “How vast and grand it seemed,” he recalled. “From that crowded, overly ornate lobby sprang the new spirit of the new industry being born before our eyes.”
Schulberg and Abrams set their sights on Chaplin first, “because he was the best combination of artist and money man,” according to the younger Schulberg, whose father clearly had not dealt extensively with Charlotte Pickford. Chaplin was more than happy to meet with two former Paramount executives. The idea intrigued him, and he brought it to Pickford and Fairbanks. (Schulberg approached Griffith separately, hinting at the dynamic that would serve Griffith ill for the next decade. The aloof “Master” was always somewhat of a lone child in this particular sandbox.)
It was around the time of this meeting—whether just before or just after is unclear—that the group of entertainers staged a little guerrilla theater. “We decided that the night before their convention we would appear together in the main dining room of the Alexandria Hotel for dinner, and then make an announcement to the press,” wrote Chaplin.
On that night Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith, W.S. Hart, Douglas Fairbanks and myself sat at a table in the main dining room. The effect was electric. J.D. Williams unsuspectingly came in for dinner first, saw us, then hurried out again. One after another the producers came to the entrance, took a look, then hurried out, while we sat talking big business and marking the tablecloth with astronomical figures. Whenever one of the producers appeared in the dining room, Douglas would suddenly talk a lot of nonsense. “The cabbages on the peanuts and the groceries on the pork carry a great deal of weight these days,” he would say. Griffith and Bill Hart thought he had gone mad.
Private detectives, secret (and not-so-secret) meetings—Fairbanks was having the time of his life. These were the sorts of shenanigans that appealed to the perpetual boy in him. Reporter A. H. Giebler wrote of visiting Fairbanks at his studio when the negotiations were at their peak: “Doug was sizzling around like a bottle of old-fashioned soda pop.” But Fairbanks could be serious, as well. When a meeting was scheduled at Mary Pickford’s residence (she had come down with influenza), he demonstrated the essential duality of his nature. “While our lawyers haggled out legal technicalities, he would cut capers like a schoolboy,” recalled Chaplin, “but when reading the articles of incorporation he never missed a comma.”
Certainly there were forces attempting to woo them back to Paramount, or to First National. “One night I was up against Zukor,” Fairbanks recalled. “When he had me going and I felt like crying, I would go out into the hall and read over my copy of the Eighty-nine Reasons until I got a grip on myself.” Hart was ultimately to decide against the risk and remain with Paramount.
The “Eighty-nine Reasons” may have helped Fairbanks hold firm against the blandishments of Adolph Zukor, but in the end they were not to serve Hiram Abrams significantly or B. P. Shulberg at all. Fairbanks and his fellow artists felt that Abrams and Schulberg’s request of 20 percent ownership for the idea was excessive. Abrams was granted 2 percent, as the resident expert in distribution, and offered the position of general manager. Schulberg was offered a salaried position as assistant general manager—but no ownership. Stunned, he accepted, but by April he had resigned.*4
For president of the new entity, Fairbanks wanted his friend from the bond drives, William Gibbs McAdoo. McAdoo was not only head of the Department of the Treasury and director general of railroads but also President Wilson’s son-in-law. He, with his wife and daughter, was wintering in Santa Barbara at the time. Doug kept the bread of his friendships with the rich and powerful carefully buttered.†*5He had met McAdoo at the train station with a brass band and, hearing that the former secretary was fond of mountaineering, sent him two climbing ponies.
The national prestige, the links to the very office of the presidency—these seemed to Fairbanks’s mind more appropriate attributes for the leadership of the company handling the four top luminaries in the industry. After all, Fairbanks reasoned, B. P. Schulberg had been merely a publicist and personal assistant, whereas McAdoo had run the railroads during the Great War. To say nothing of the Treasury Department, saving the national economy when European nations were liquidating their American assets and converting them to gold. “The railroads and the treasury were at best only a two-star combination,” opined Photoplay, “but now he has four.” McAdoo, in the end, did not accept the presidency of the organization but proposed Oscar Price, his former assistant, assuming for himself the position of general counsel.
Still, the association of McAdoo’s name removed any raffish associations with the endeavor. “McAdoo’s reported connection with the industry is entirely consistent with my conception of the dignity and importance of the business,” wired one exhibitor to Wid’s Daily in early February. “Fifteen thousand motion pictures theaters could elect a Presidential Ticket composed of McAdoo and Fairbanks.”
The United Artists train picked up speed. Variety provided the first hints on January 24, writing of the rumors: “The air is filled with bombs and when the stars’ barrage is lifted, there may be an explosion that will rock the film world.” The following day, the Big Five announced their plan to form United Artists: “We believe this step necessary to protect ourselves, as well as the exhibitors who play our pictures, from injurious combinations between the various producing concerns now operating and to protect the exhibitor from having poor pictures forced upon him.”
This was a bombshell indeed. It produced two schools of thought, the first embodied best by the famous phrase “The inmates have taken over the asylum.” A sizable number refused to believe that any group of artists could pull off such an endeavor. “There is certain to be tremendous jealousy in any ‘all star’ combination and no one believes the film stars will stick together,” wrote a Variety reporter. Samuel Goldwyn, for one, was openly disgusted. “The star is the cause of more trouble in this business than all other troubles combined,” he said. Others speculated that the founders’ existing contracts would make a new company impossible to get off the ground. Pickford owed First National three films and Chaplin owed the company five, while Griffith owed Zukor two. Further, each one’s current contract expired at a different time.
The second school of thought ran along the lines of How can I get on this gravy train? There were reports (only some of which were denied) that Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan, and the du Pont family were all interested in providing capital investment. William Randolph Hearst telegrammed each of the owners, trying to land distribution rights through his International Film Service Company. Indeed, Chaplin asserted that the dinner and public announcement in late January had simply
been a ploy, that there had been no real intention of forming a distribution firm. They had simply hoped to scare the major combines from merging. But the positive reaction caused them to, in essence, call their own bluff.*6
It is unlikely that Fairbanks saw it as a ploy. When the agreements were signed, he defined the event to the press as “legalizing their emotions.”
The memorandum of agreement was signed on January 15, 1919, and the full articles on February 5. The signing was restaged on February 6 at the Chaplin studio, on a set dressed to look like an office. The four were then filmed by photographers outside Griffith’s studio, yielding a series of images that are now irrevocably linked to the organization: Chaplin in tramp costume; Griffith in a snappy fedora and tweeds; Mary with her curls pinned up, a fur collar and pearls speaking to quiet wealth; Doug in a light-colored double-breasted suit.†*7While Griffith stood back and maintained his dignity, Doug lifted Charlie in the air repeatedly for the cameras. Occasionally Mary stood at his side as he lifted Chaplin. They looked like a quartet at the peak of success. But they were not. Improbably—and happily—each had greater heights to scale, although Griffith would be the first to take the painful tumble into the depths. In fact, even at this point, his position was the most tenuous.
For one thing, the United Artists were funding themselves. Each of the four was to subscribe to one thousand shares of stock at one hundred dollars per share to cover start-up costs—20 percent of this sum due every month for the first five months.‡*8Second, there would no longer be a Harry Aitken (unreliable though he may have been) or an Adolph Zukor to finance their films. Each would have to fund their productions with monies earned on the returns of prior films—a process that often took one to three years.
A mere week after signing the agreement in principle to cofound UA, Griffith signed a three-picture deal with First National. “Movie producers are liars,” he told columnist Karl Kitchen at this time, and, given his prior denials, his partners could hardly beg to differ. This could not have been anything less than exasperating to them. They were reaching into their own coffers for the seed money to fund their stock and their future productions. Griffith could not. Lacking the resources, he increased his outside commitment from two films to five, significantly delaying his ability to contribute films to the fledgling firm.
The First King of Hollywood Page 25
