From there the film progresses into surrealism worthy of Buster Keaton. Fairbanks is trapped outside in his underwear,*14 so he trims the number “23” off a large theater poster, tacks it to his back, and jogs past the police as if he were running a marathon. When this fails, he cuts out a life-size suit from a billboard advertisement and attempts to wear it home. At one point in the absurdist events, Fairbanks, for the purpose of a plot too convoluted to explain, hijacks figures from a wax museum. After thoroughly ruining his sweetheart’s fundraising event, he finds himself in the hoosegow, where he frantically begs everyone—jailor, janitor, and fellow inmate—to “Please call up Miss Wynn, Gramercy 35. Tell her I’m heartbroken about this—I adore her—I think she’s wonderful—and—just say ‘honeybunch’ at the end.”
Production was held up for several weeks when Fairbanks once again hurt himself. Shooting a leap through a courthouse window near the end of the film, he caught his foot on the sill and crashed six feet onto the pavement. This time it was his left hand that sustained multiple fractures. That, plus a badly wrenched back and neck, delayed the film’s release from February 22 to March 1.
History has been unfair to The Nut in another manner. Fairbanks’s earliest serious biographer, Richard Schickel, dismissed the film as “one of his few commercial failures,” which has influenced thinking since that time. The film was not a failure. It was as successful as many of his UA modern-dress comedies—beating When the Clouds Roll By—and more successful than any of his Paramount or Triangle films. It returned $506,313.74, for a net profit of $300,231.60. If this was failure, it was the sort of failure any other filmmaker would have given his or her eyeteeth to endure.
Jeffrey Vance is more on the mark when he refers to the “relative failure” of The Nut—relative only to the smash success of Zorro that preceded it. And until the returns came in for Zorro, Fairbanks was still undecided on how next to proceed. While recovering from his injuries, he and his publicist put out feelers as to his next film choice. It would be The Virginian, he said. He purchased the rights from Famous Players–Lasky for $55,000 in December 1920. No, he claimed next, it would be a story called The Melancholiac, written by the team that wrote The Nut. This never came to be.
Hindsight having twenty-twenty vision, his choice to make The Three Musketeers feels inevitable. But in January 1921, this was still a bold decision to make. The industry was in a terrible slump, one that would continue through the entire year. Of the major studios, only Fox and Universal were active that month. “There is a shortage of money,” wrote Variety. “And none of the banks in this section is willing to finance any picture proposition. The interest rate on money is at seven percent at present in the banking houses, but there is not a penny available for anything in films.” Stars were being released from their contracts. Even super-luminary Lillian Gish was abruptly let go by D. W. Griffith, her former lover and lifelong mentor. “You know as much about the high cost of making pictures as I do,” he said to her peremptorily. “With all the expenses I have, I can’t afford to pay you what you’re worth.”
As spring arrived, things worsened. EXTRAS STARVING AS SLUMP GOES ON, headlined Variety in April, adding, “Right now the studio is as much a place of the dead as Hollywood Cemetery.” By July, an industry-wide strike nearly crippled production. “The Ince plant issues a statement Saturday it would close for the next four weeks,” wrote Variety’s reporter. “Yesterday there was not a company working at Goldwyn or at Roaches’ [studios] which completely killed the Culver City end.”
But Variety noted one small bright light in a very dark universe: there was no strike at either the Pickford or Fairbanks operations. They were beloved—and evidently generous—employers. Indeed, Mary was in the midst of production of Little Lord Fauntleroy, and Doug was filming The Three Musketeers. Fairbanks recalled finalizing his decision to go ahead:
I had always wanted to do The Three Musketeers, but I was a little reluctant to undertake a costume film. The impression of the business was that a costume story just would not do.
Every now and then someone of the overhead—I mean someone from the business office—would come in to tell me that an exhibitor, or group of exhibitors, wished to talk to me. Among other things I always asked them how they would feel about booking a period or costume play in their theaters. They were immediately apprehensive. They were sure their patrons, when they saw the billing up in front of the theaters, would walk to the next movie palace. I sent some men out to ask questions and they made a unanimous report against the undertaking. No costume picture need apply.
Having made sure I was wrong, I went ahead. I felt that if there was enough good melodrama the interest could be held in spite of dress. Also the people must be kept human. Costumes change, but customs do not to any great extent.
The production was to be his grandest to date. Not only the Clune studio but also the Brunton studio, essentially across the street, were rented to accommodate all the sets the film required. (The Clune studio was at the site of the present Raleigh Studios. In 1926 Paramount would relocate to the site of the Brunton studio, where it remains to this day.)
Edward Knoblock (the playwright responsible for Kismet) was hired in March to write the adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas novel, spending many a day and night at Pickfair. “Nothing could have exceeded the happiness of Mary and Doug,” he recalled of that time. “They were both full of ambitions and plans for better things to be done. They lived a quiet life, devoting themselves almost entirely to their work and a little intimate circle of friends.” Britain’s Lord Mountbatten, in his later years, said of it, “Pickfair was about—certainly, the most, best taste house, I should think, in Hollywood, and run very much on English country house lines. . . . In fact, they really kept court there. It was like Buckingham Palace in London; it was the house that everyone wanted to go to. . . . To be asked, they would have to be more or less passed certain standards of behavior generally. Things were very proper and correct.”
Indeed, they were happily settled in Pickfair. And they were not alone. The 1920 census reveals a host of live-in servants even before Mary arrived with her retinue: two maids, a butler, a majordomo, and an Irish stableman to care for the horses. This did not include the day help who lived off-site—gardeners, cooks, handymen. Japanese valet Tanaka had been replaced by Rocher, a faithful manservant who would attend Doug for the next decade and more. Tanaka had vanished one day, and all attempts to locate him failed. His disappearance was perhaps understandable: keeping up with Doug’s exploits required both infinite patience and nerves of steel. (A year prior he had found himself surrounded by a swarm of rattlesnakes while setting up camp for Fairbanks in the mountains and had to be rescued by his boss.) When they finally located the misplaced manservant, he was in Japan, working for the Teikoku Motion Picture Corporation, having parlayed his experience in Hollywood into becoming a full-fledged movie magnate.
Mary may have been as wealthy as her husband, but Victorian sensibility reigned when it came to who paid the bills. Doug covered all operating expenses related to Pickfair. “He’s old-fashioned enough to want to do this without aid from his wife,” Pickford said. The estate was comfortably furnished in American walnut and overstuffed floral chintz sofas. Fairbanks’s private suite included bedroom, bath, large walk-in closet (his wardrobe was prodigious), hall, and sleeping porch. Mary’s suite was in lavender, with dull green furnishings. It included a bathroom and sleeping porch. Two additional guest rooms were on the second floor; one dubbed “the rose room” was reserved for Charlie Chaplin, who slept over several nights a week. The table was set every night for fifteen, as the staff never knew just how many cowpokes or visiting dignitaries their impulsive boss was going to bring home to dinner. A bronze casting of Adolph Weinman’s Rising Sun was on the lawn—a birthday gift from Mary to Doug.*15 It was under this statue that Knoblock, Fairbanks, and scenarist Lotta Woods were photographed, basking in the spring sunshine and pecking away at a typewriter. (It might
be more proper to say that Knoblock and Woods were writing. The photographic evidence suggests that saddle-shoe-clad Fairbanks spent a lot of time atop tables, brandishing a sword in various cheerfully heroic postures.)
Knoblock worked on the continuity of Musketeers for five weeks, turning in what he felt to be a version extremely faithful to the original book. “Although D’Artagnan figured throughout as the hero, I had also developed the story of Milady,” he wrote. “The famous scene of branding her on the arm I had naturally retained. But this Douglas discarded.”
At the time, Knoblock was livid. He felt that he had been employed as an artist; he had no sympathy for the notion that the motion picture industry was an amalgam of commerce and art. He also had no understanding at that time of film censorship. But Fairbanks did. The heroine Constance was now the niece of the innkeeper, not his wife. And there would be no sexual congress with, much less branding of, the villainess Milady. With tincture of time, Knoblock cooled down. “He may have been right,” he wrote ruefully. “He certainly carved from the novel a part and a story which suited his own particular personality.” The author spent the rest of the production helping the costumers and the art director, which, curiously, he found more gratifying than writing for the film.
Knoblock contributed to the casting as well, suggesting the then little-known Adolphe Menjou to play Louis XIII. “Working in a Fairbanks picture was quite an experience,” Menjou recalled. “In some ways it was like going to a Hollywood masquerade party instead of to work. The set was always crowded with visiting celebrities and Doug’s friends. Between shots Doug was likely to feel the need of a physical workout, so he would hold an impromptu gymkhana with some of his athletic buddies.”
Menjou’s first day of filming was one of the later scenes in the film—the scene where the cardinal is poised to expose the queen’s affair to the king. Multiple takes were ruined as actors felt themselves being suddenly stung by some unseen insect. Finally, Menjou discovered a small lead pellet at his feet—and laughter from the overhead rafters revealed Jack Pickford. He had been shooting birdshot at them from between his teeth.
Jack Pickford, Mary’s ne’er-do-well younger brother, was no stranger to trouble. During his service in the war, he had barely avoided a court marshal and dishonorable discharge when he was part of a scheme to get rich young men who wanted to avoid battle to pay for slots in the naval reserves. Strings were pulled from on high; Jack turned state’s evidence against his coconspirator, and the government was spared the embarrassment of having headlines besmirching the name of Pickford during the period when Mary was one of its top fundraisers.
Six months before America’s entry into the war, Jack had eloped with Olive Thomas, a beautiful showgirl who at twenty-two was already a divorcée and one of Florenz Ziegfeld’s many conquests. She moved into motion pictures, making films for Paramount, Triangle, and Lewis J. Selznick Productions Inc. The marriage of the beautiful Olive and the ferret-faced Jack would seem an odd combination at first, but he apparently had charms beyond those evident when he was fully clothed. They spent the next four years happily practicing the usual vices while trying to invent new ones. Thus it was that they found themselves, drunk and tired, returning to their Paris hotel room in the early hours of September 6, 1920. The exact sequence and nature of the events that followed will never be fully known. Either by accident or intent, Olive ingested mercury bichloride, a toxic chemical used in that pre-antibiotic era for topical treatment of the sores associated with syphilis. Despite immediate hospitalization, she died a few days later of renal failure.
Coming on the heels of Mary’s contested divorce, this was a scandal that neither the family nor the industry needed. The newspapers had a brief heyday—Was it suicide? Just what was that mercury doing in the medicine cabinet?—until the French authorities labeled the case an accidental ingestion and the press had no choice but to accept the improbable claim that the chemical had been a cleaning solution left in the bathroom by the hotel maid.
Now Jack was back in Hollywood, delaying production on his brother-in-law’s most expensive film to date,*16 and acting very unlike a man in mourning. Ostensibly, he was codirecting Mary in Little Lord Fauntleroy, but he was off on drinking binges as often as he was in the director’s chair.
Menjou argued that the horseplay did the production no harm. “Doug invariably got the very best performance out of his actors,” he wrote. “I think that was because they were relaxed and having a good time. And the spirit of fun that prevailed at the studio always seemed to show up in Doug’s pictures. There was a tongue-in-cheek, devil-may-care sort of quality in all his films that nobody else has ever been able to duplicate.”
Doug knew that in wedding Mary, he was marrying her hard-drinking, hard-living family as well. Mary’s younger sister, Lottie, was to wed four times. Her first marriage produced a daughter in 1915, but her wild ways ill suited her for motherhood. Grandmother Charlotte legally adopted the child in 1920 (while Mary and Doug were in Europe on their honeymoon tour), changing her name from Mary Pickford Rupp to Gwynne Rupp. Mary and her mother shared the childrearing duties while Lottie partied through the 1920s.
Mary recalled that during this time, “Sometimes we worked so late at the studios that we would come home in our make-ups and our household became quite accustomed to seeing Fauntleroy come bounding up the stairs, followed by D’Artagnan in all his plumed glory. And when we had company I used to wrap D’Artagnan’s velvet cape around me in deference to my guests and it made quite a respectable train.”
For the role of D’Artagnan, Fairbanks grew a mustache that he was to keep for the rest of his days. Until then, all film heroes had been clean cut; only villains had facial hair. But, as with his tan skin, Fairbanks’s appearance was broadly influential. Soon heroes like John Gilbert and Antonio Moreno were sporting mustaches. Eventually even desperado John Dillinger (who reportedly idolized Fairbanks) grew one.
The film’s narrative developed at a leisurely pace, establishing the story of the queen, her jealous king, her ardent lover Buckingham, and the scheming cardinal. Fairbanks’s D’Artagnan does not even appear until the second reel. He makes a suitably comic first impression: britches too high, boots too low, scraggly feathered hat atop, and bony buttercup-colored horse beneath. His performance is funny and fierce, and very French. French film historian and Fairbanks friend Robert Florey attributed this to Fairbanks’s 1901 visit to Paris:
Thus Douglas had learned to know France and to like the French. An observer both fine and subtle, he quickly adopted some tics and manners of the French for his future repertoire. At the present time it is not unusual to see him imitate a street vendor, or a Parisian omnibus conductor. In these imitations he surpasses the boundaries of the height of comedy. He dangles a cigarette butt on his lower lip, looks at the end of his feet, rolls up his moustaches with a back of hand, then buries his hands at the far end of his pockets and begins relating a story in which he inserts the French argot that he knows.
There is an enhanced theatricality to his performances in the costume films: he will tap the side of his nose and sniff the air in an “I smell a rat!” gesture when he detects betrayal; his stance is broader, and his arms are flung in wide arcs of acting. The artificiality of his performances would increase over the course of the 1920s—the grander the film, the broader is our hero’s performance. Knowing the naturalism of which he was capable, it is clear that this was done with intent. It is an impish theatricality, not of the formal, Frederick Warde variety. A case in point: in escaping from the cardinal’s guards in the film, he not only slides down a bannister like a ten-year-old but actually gives a little skip as he beats them to the forecourt of the palace. By the time he portrayed Robin Hood, he and all his merry men hop about like rabbits drunk on ragtime.
Still, not all acting was easy. Fairbanks was to claim that he was unable to generate proper tears for the scene early in the film in which he is not permitted to join the musketeers (“We had to resort
to the good old glycerine squirter”). The final print demonstrates no tears at all: D’Artagnan barely has time to give a hard swallow before noticing his archenemy (“The man from Meung!”) outside the barrack window. Menjou recalled that Fairbanks “went completely unorthodox” during the fencing sequences, despite Uttenhover’s training. “He was all over the set, jumping over chairs and on top of tables, slashing away with his rapier as though it were a broadsword. The fencing instructor . . . tore his hair. Never had he seen such an exhibition.”
This makes the fight sequences sound more boyish and impromptu than they actually were. Outtakes from Fairbanks’s swashbuckling films document that every movement of the blade and leap upon or over furniture was carefully choreographed to prevent the actors from being sliced to ribbons. It is worth noting that the individual shots within the fencing sequences were sustained in length. Most Hollywood films keep sword-fighting sequences to a maximum of three moves per shot: thrust, parry, counterparry. More than this and untrained actors can get hurt. But the Fairbanks sword fights not only involve glorious and creative fight choreography but the sustained clash of blades that can come only from continual and painstaking rehearsal. Menjou, it seems, was weaving a good tale.
Filming took place in the spring and early summer of 1921. They were dogged throughout the spring by printed reports that Mary was pregnant and due to deliver in the fall. Fairbanks, after repeated denials, finally labeled the rumors as “untrue and unkind.” This confounded reporters: “Untrue, perhaps, but why unkind?” one asked. They had no way of knowing, but Mary was now sterile. While married to Owen Moore in her teens, she had become pregnant. Rumors of an abortion have tantalized biographers for years and were ultimately confirmed by Owen’s nephew Thomas, who was a welcome guest at Pickfair in the 1960s, when time and scotch had loosened Mary’s tongue. “Her mother made her get an abortion,” he recounted. “She [Charlotte] didn’t want any part of Owen Moore, not even as a grandchild.”
The First King of Hollywood Page 30
