The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  Yes! How proud I was, sitting in the cariage [sic] with Mrs. Fairbanks, Mr. Fairbanks sitting atop the hood, 6-8 newspaper men hanging with their teeth on the running board.

  Photographs capture the moment: the car is pulled up to the Ritz to release its precious cargo. Mary, in a white Jeanne Lanvin dress and hat, her kid gloves halfway up her forearms, is standing in the rear of the open, flag-draped roadster. She is waving—not the restrained “queen’s wave,” where the back of the hand faces the crowd, but palm up and out, as if she would grasp them all if she could. Douglas is on the running board by her side, his left arm in perfect parallel to hers, holding aloft his straw boater. The July sunshine is beaming on them as they bask in it, and in the warmth of the adoration around them. They are—remarkably—both exultant and relaxed. They have gambled everything, their reputations, their fame, even their careers, to be together. They have gambled, doubled down, and won.

  Their marriage would assume, in a way, biblical proportions, at least in the sense of Pharaoh’s dreams of kine and corn. There would be seven rich years, seven years in which everything went from good to better, seven years of success and acclaim and gratification of every wish. Then would come the seven lean years—the emotional and career famine, seven years of follies and slow failure.

  Fairbanks did not have the wisdom of a Joseph, did not know how to store the corn from the years of plenty to carry them through the years of fasting. This is not literal—there was never to be any shortage of money for either husband or wife. But they would spend their emotional capital, and when the hard times came, they found that their prior fame and success ill equipped them for the storms ahead.

  But in July 1920 there was only sunshine.

  * * *

  *1. He survived censure by a vote of 699 to 422 and remained on the executive committee.

  *2. Mary recalled that John Fairbanks stood in as best man, though most accounts (and the marriage certificate) claim it was Robert. Knoblock was not yet working for Fairbanks, and Bennie had recently resigned his position as publicist. Knoblock writes nothing in his memoirs about attending the wedding, making his presence less likely than that of Zeidman, who was along for portions of the honeymoon. Most contemporary accounts claim that Jack and sister Lottie learned of the marriage when the news broke in the press.

  *3. He did, however, manage to create further inconvenient headlines for her by failing to pay his attorney’s fees. Possibly he expected her to pick up the tab, which was an outrageous $15,000 (curiously, exactly 15 percent of the settlement, suggesting that Moore engaged them on commission). The attorney filed suit against Moore in July, putting Mary back in the headlines.

  *4. In her autobiography, Pickford recalled the visit to the Isle of Wight as preceding the disastrous garden party. Contemporary accounts reverse the order.

  *5. † There were only two accounts to ever suggest that Fairbanks was jealous of Pickford’s greater fame: the Frances Marion anecdote described here and an Anita Loos account that Fairbanks once asked her at a premiere if the cheering was louder for Mary than it was for him. Loos, as already discussed, had an axe to grind with her former boss. Also, she was not attending premieres with Fairbanks when he was publicly escorting Pickford.

  *6. This might, of course, be a case of a man who was being coy. He certainly did not have that complaint upon his first visit to the City of Lights.

  *7. Contemporary newspaper accounts give the motorcycle count at six. In the excitement of the moment, it probably felt like six hundred to Madam Bodamere.

  *8. † The good lady probably meant “holiday,” but it can be argued that with the worship of celebrity coming to full bloom, she may have had it right, at that.

  10

  “Having Made Sure I Was Wrong, I Went Ahead”

  * * *

  The couple lingered in New York City long enough to enjoy a Friars Club dinner in their honor, and to see themselves portrayed in a Ziegfeld Follies number, before boarding a westbound train for home.

  It was on this return trip that Doug finally read a story that his team had recommended. Mary, ever inclined to do homework, even when it wasn’t hers, had read the serialization during the voyage to England, liked it, and urged him to consider it for his next film. He trusted her judgment; without even looking at it, he wired instructions to buy the property. They were still in Europe when the trades reported that The Curse of Capistrano would be his next production.

  The train trip from New York to Los Angeles was a long five days, and this enforced captivity aided Mary in her attempts to get her book-adverse husband to sit still long enough to read.*1 Even then, she had to promise to play two games of Hearts with him before he would tackle the task. Finally, he settled in to see what, exactly, his money had bought. The Curse of Capistrano was a story written for a pulp magazine—one of those monthly journals that furnished the young and the working class simple tales of escapism and adventure. Many of his earlier successes had come from such sources.

  The resulting film would, as movies do, undergo many name changes before production was finished. It was known as The Curse of Capistrano, then The Black Fox. Finally Fairbanks decided on the ultimate title of the film that would, for him, become a career changer: The Mark of Zorro.

  Much has been written about the transition that Fairbanks made from “coat and tie” films to swashbucklers in the 1920s. Scholars, running the gamut from Alistair Cooke in 1940 to Jeffrey Vance in 2008, all agree that the postwar psyche called for a new form of escapism. And although costume films after The Birth of a Nation had largely been financial failures, they also point to a small but meaningful renaissance in the genre with the successful release of the German films Madame DuBarry and Anna Boleyn.

  But here the logic gets circular: the former was not released in the United States until December 1920 and the latter was not seen on American shores until April 1921. It is certainly possible Fairbanks had screened the films, or knew about them by reputation, before making the leap into his first full costume picture. But he did not have the reassurance of the American box office—his major source of revenue at this point in time—to bolster him. In fact, it might be argued that the success of Fairbanks’s first costume film contributed to the American willingness to give the Ernst Lubitsch films a try, and the tail, in this instance, ended up chasing the dog.

  But this discussion is academic and, when trying to retrace the decision-making process of Douglas Fairbanks, likely futile. With Doug, intellect took second place to intuition. He demonstrated a pattern of following his gut, and happily for his reputation and bottom line his gut was to be a reliable measure of the vox populi for the decade ahead. The scholars tell us why his decision was right for his time. But they do not tell us how he got there.

  Vance and Herndon both provide one tantalizing clue: a letter from Cap O’Brien outlining exhibitor complaints. There was not, they said, enough romantic love interest in Doug’s films. Women populated matinee audiences, and women wanted romance. This was a valid observation; Fairbanks had a horror of love scenes. Anita Loos spoke of his sex appeal and his aversion to addressing it: “He had ‘that thing’ when he was in pictures, yet he never played love scenes. I used to travel with him, with the company, and his fans virtually tore him to pieces if he dared appear on the street. Yet he’d come to me and say: ‘Look Anita, don’t write any mush in there for me.’” When he did play love scenes, he would often do so for comic effect.

  It is true that The Mark of Zorro contains more love scenes than do his earlier films.*2 But this is no explanation for the change in genre, unless one is to make the leap from romance (as in wooing) to that of the romance (as in tales of distant lands and times). O’Brien’s suggestion may have triggered this line of thinking, but we have little evidence one way or the other.

  Certainly, Fairbanks had known for some time that a change was in order. When The Lamb was released, it took only a simple leap from a low slanting roof and a few fisticuffs to enchant
audiences and critics. He had developed and enhanced the level of stunts in successive outings, and the production value of his films had increased tenfold—now floods and avalanches rained down upon the protagonists. But what had dazzled before was insufficient now. He had been aware of this at least since the reviews came in for Arizona.

  Some missed the satiric touch of Anita Loos. “Since parting company from Miss Loos, his comedies have lost their magic touch,” groused Photoplay in 1918. “His plays now consist in jumping off roofs and climbing porches.” A year later, the same source continued its dire warnings: “Douglas Fairbanks has not ‘slipped’ in personal appeal, but he has slipped tremendously as a reliable purveyor of dramatic amusement simply because of his vehicles and his manner of playing. . . . Most of his other pieces in the year 1919 have not been satisfactory entertainment, and unless Mr. Fairbanks follows a different line he will lose steadily.”

  This feeling was not universal, of course. The editorial writer at Motion Picture Magazine opined:

  Now some of the critics are beginning to hop on Douglas Fairbanks because of his “sameness.” In other words, they want him to cover up the personality which has endeared him to millions. Don’t do it, Doug. Stick to your smile and your personality, old boy! We have plenty of actors on the screen and not enough personalities. . . . Your stories could be better, old top, but yourself, never!

  It was clear that he was aware of the issue. He wrote of it later—satirically, and a tad ruefully:

  I admitted freely that when it came to the matter of smiling I could give anyone else a couple of teeth and win, going away. I smiled . . . through twenty-one screen productions [but] when I wanted to attempt a different sort of part, which would give my face a rest and give me an opportunity to be serious again, friends, producers and associates laughed at me. I might not be much of an actor, they as much as hinted, but as a smiler I was a knockout. The public, I was told, wanted to see me go on smiling, and I must do it however gloomy it made me feel. I do not know that I can seriously blame the public for their unconscious cruelty, for it was something I had started myself. So the ghastly thing went on. I kept on smiling. Measured by film length, I have smiled over twenty miles. And I feel as if I had smiled twenty thousand.

  The same, it seemed, applied to acrobatics:

  I found that I had once more started something I couldn’t stop. If the public wanted acrobatics, I decided that I would give them what they wanted. I would show them what I really could do if I tried. I quite forgot, myself, why I had started all these tricks. They began to possess me, almost as completely as the smile. . . . I romped, jumped and skylarked through one play after another.

  All of this smiling, and all of this jumping, was in his mind a substitute for what he really wanted to be doing. He didn’t want to be just a personality; he wanted to be an actor. And the role he wanted to play, more than any other, was D’Artagnan of The Three Musketeers. He spoke of it constantly while on his honeymoon in Europe. The film must be made in France, he said. He would make two other films back home and then return to Europe to film it.

  But a period piece—a famous one, at that—would be both expensive (if done right) and risky. Accordingly, he took a careful, intermediate step. “I was a little timid and did not wish to risk The Three Musketeers, so I put out as a feeler another costume play, The Mark of Zorro,” he wrote two years later. Zorro’s location was Southern California. It would be no more costly to create sets for it than it had been for The Knickerbocker Buckaroo.*3

  Zorro would not be a total departure from his earlier films; it had romantic elements but also comedic ones. Fairbanks’s Don Diego, the Zorro alter ego, is a prime example. He is not so much effeminate or fey as he is gently sleepy. Nothing will rouse him. Even the broad corduroy of his suit suggests nothing so much as striped jammies with footies. His silly, gentle magic tricks with his handkerchief (“Have you seen this one?”) interest no one but himself.†*4

  But for Zorro, the caped avenger of the oppressed native Indian, the jokes are always on the other fellow. He will carve his trademark Z (an invention of his own devising) on his opponents’ cheeks—both facial and posterior, so to speak. He is a figure of romance and adventure, a newer, higher level of hero.

  Production began that summer at the Clune studio, with location work in the San Fernando Valley. Fairbanks had included fencing in his general training regimen since A Modern Musketeer but went to the additional effort of hiring Belgian world fencing champion M. Harry Uttenhover. Uttenhover had trained him for A Modern Musketeer and would now train not only Fairbanks but also Robert McKim and Noah Beery Sr., his film opponents. New to his company was director Fred Niblo. He was no Allan Dwan yet he was competent at staging the action and keeping Fairbanks in the frame. Marguerite De La Motte had her first turn as his leading lady, and she fit the bill splendidly.*5 The clever script, Fairbanks’s dual performances, and the engaging action sequences did the rest.

  Zorro was to outlive his creators in the American psyche. The idea of the double-identity hero was not original to The Mark of Zorro, having first been seen at the turn of the century with The Scarlet Pimpernel. But a young Robert Kahn (later Bob Kane) had never seen the Pimpernel play or read the book. Still, like all little boys, he did go to the movies, and like all little boys he worshipped Douglas Fairbanks. It was The Mark of Zorro, with its subterranean hideout and dual identities, that served as his inspiration for the creation of Batman.†*6Superman, too, sprung from the influence of Fairbanks, although here it was an amalgam of his swashbuckling heroes, not just Zorro. In 1933 Joe Shuster adopted Fairbanks’s “hero stance”—legs apart, elbows out, knuckles on hips, cape flying—in his early versions of Superman.*7

  Zorro got everything right. The blend of humor and heroics remains the benchmark that other action films try to reach. The climactic chase was the epitome of the Fairbanksian series of escapes from the befuddled collective constabulary, and it is extracted in film compilations even today.†*8

  Fairbanks introduced the new persona to filmgoers with care. Every variant of movie poster had not only an image of Zorro in costume but also a large oval portrait of the star in modern clothes. United Artists wanted no confusion as to who that masked hero was. They needn’t have bothered.

  Audiences adored the film. Fairbanks could not have asked for a more emphatic vote on his change of tack. In its first week, Zorro broke all attendance records at New York’s Capitol Theatre, with over ninety-four thousand tickets sold in that theater alone. The film returned $725,035.02 to his production company, for a net of $458,825.74.

  The profits were none too soon for the struggling UA. Far from achieving the original goal of three films per year from each founder, the organization was starving for product to release. The year 1919 saw only three films: two from Fairbanks and Broken Blossoms from Griffith.‡*9

  Things were just as tight in 1920. Mary had fulfilled her First National commitment and released Pollyanna for UA in January, but the organization was forced to go outside its ranks and pay Mack Sennett a $200,000 advance guarantee for distribution rights to Down on the Farm. The only other non-Pickford/Fairbanks releases of 1920 were The Love Flower, a minor Griffith effort, and the “Griffith-supervised” drama Romance, which was a flop. Thus 1920 saw only seven UA films, with the triumph of Zorro coming very late in the year, on December 5.

  Having so few releases made it hard to get exhibitors to commit to bookings. UA historian Tino Balio writes:

  UA’s product could not be sold a season in advance of production, as was the output of the larger corporations using the block-booking method of distribution. Because pictures were sold to exhibitors separately on an individual contract, not only was a greater effort required of the sales staff, but also it took longer to exhaust the market for each picture. A UA producer could be well into his third picture before he could hope to recoup his investment on the first. In short, the owners did not have unlimited capital with which to furnish the compa
ny its requirements.

  One approach to the problem was to ask the exhibitors for pay for the full rental fee at the time of booking. This was an undue burden to most theater owners, who were accustomed to paying 25 percent down on booking and the remaining 75 percent a week before the first screening date. The reluctance of most exhibitors to sign up for this plan, Balio states, meant that “in its early days, UA’s pictures played in many second-rate theaters. In some areas of the country, the company was shut out completely”—making the resounding returns of the Pickford and Fairbanks features even more remarkable.*10

  UA was to provide each of its artists with $200,000 of seed money per production. A mere three years earlier this was considered a lavish sum, but now both Fairbanks and Pickford had grander ideas.*11 Accordingly, Abrams changed negotiating tactics with the exhibitors. Instead of asking for the full rental fees up front, he structured deals in which the exhibitors paid a base rental rate with a split of returns above a predetermined figure.†*12

  One thing was clear early in the life of United Artists: McAdoo and Price were expensive superfluities. By the summer of 1920, both men had resigned from the organization, and Hiram Abrams was moved into the presidency. He was to remain in that position until he died of a heart attack in November 1926.

  Fairbanks did not have the luxury of waiting for the response to Zorro before starting his next production. Conservatively, he reverted to his former model, and The Nut would become his last silent “coat and tie” comedy. Its ectopic placement between Zorro and The Three Musketeers contributes to the neglect it suffers today, which is a pity, for it represents an unusual genre in the silent era: a screwball comedy. The film starts out with a sequence of its inventor-hero being tossed out of bed, tipped into his bath, and guided by a series of Rube Goldbergesque machines through his toiletries and into his clothes.‡*13Modern audiences get half the joke, for the bit stands well on its own. But contemporary audiences got the full point: Fairbanks was spoofing the elaborate bathing sequence that Cecil B. DeMille constructed for Gloria Swanson in Male and Female.