*19. The final count was ten to two for acquittal.
*20. † This was a rightful expectation. Any evidence against Arbuckle was later proven to be manufactured by the DA’s office after discovering (too late) that Delmont was not a credible witness. Arbuckle’s innocence is widely agreed to today.
*21. Brownlow describes him looking like a “startled mouse.” Arbuckle biographer Greg Merritt noted that he had “teeth like mixed nuts.”
*22. History has failed to note whether, in later years, she had the insight to see the irony in her words.
11
Prince of Thieves
* * *
FAIRBANKS AT FIRST RESISTED the idea of making what would become the biggest financial success of his career. In the fall of 1921 he was still considering The Virginian, in addition to Monsieur Beaucaire, or a sequel to Zorro.*1 Credit must be given to Allan Dwan, with an able assist from Fairbanks brothers Robert and John, for changing his mind.
Sometime in the prior year or so, Fairbanks and Dwan had mended fences. Whatever disagreements Arizona brought were forgotten.†*2In fact, there had been reports at the time of preproduction on The Three Musketeers that Dwan was slated to direct the Dumas story, causing the director to release a statement saying that while such an arrangement would be a very pleasant one to him, he was tied up with another organization. But by December 1921 he was free and signed a contract to direct Fairbanks’s next film.
Prior to formalizing the contract, Dwan had been directing at the Brunton studio across the street from Clune’s. As previously noted, The Three Musketeers was filmed at both studios, while Mary’s production company was also filming at the Brunton stages. It was this proximity that aided Dwan in interesting Fairbanks in Robin Hood. The idea, when first suggested, met firm resistance. “The spectacle of a lot of flat-footed outlaws in Lincoln Green, a few paunchy friars and a homeless minstrel or two singing a roundelay in the shades of Sherwood Forest did not strike me as anything to make a picture about,” Fairbanks wrote. Dwan, to his credit, saw the problem in Fairbanksian terms: “He couldn’t see any agility in the character,” he observed. But happily, Allan also knew his man.
Dwan persuaded John and Robert to buy archery sets, and he and Jack Dempsey, accompanied by an expert archer, would stroll over to Clune’s at the noon hour to practice. Studiously ignoring Doug, they started shooting. “Well that was a contest, so Doug got interested,” Dwan recounted. “He wandered over and tried a bow.” Untrained, he released the arrow, and “the thong of the bow struck his wrists as they always do if you don’t know how to avoid it—and made it hurt. And he thought: this isn’t so pansy-like after all.”
As with any athletic activity, Doug wanted to learn. The expert worked with him and soon, Dwan recounted, “Doug got better than anybody else and”—more importantly—“whether he did or not, we saw that he did.” As Fairbanks improved, Dwan launched his pitch. An enemy could steal an apple and you could shoot it out of his hand. Or hit him in the pants! Or pin him to a tree! Think of the tricks you could do!
Doug’s eyes, according to Dwan, “sparkled a bit.” Yes, he admitted. That would be great. Dwan pressed his case. “That’s Robin Hood. . . . That’s the guy we want you interested in.”
“I don’t know,” Fairbanks replied. “I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”
Finally, the idea of the Crusades provided the hook. The December visit to the Temple Church had had an effect. Mary reported that Doug “was tremendously interested in the graves of the crusaders.” Fairbanks himself reported:
I came by chance upon some old manuscripts of the period of Richard the Lion-Hearted and the Crusades. The robust, heroic figure of Richard . . . stirred me at once. The period contained every dramatic element: a strong religious impulse, a kingdom undermined by treachery at home while the flower of its knighthood sought adventure in foreign lands, fair maidens won by valor in war or tournament and left behind by their knights . . . all the romance, the chivalry, the color of the adventurous Middle Ages.
That did the trick—almost. He still did not want to play Robin Hood; now he wanted to play Richard the Lion-Hearted. Somehow Dwan talked him out of this but convinced him that they could combine the Richard story with the Robin Hood tale. Fairbanks wrote later that “if, instead of sentencing him to an indefinite term in Sherwood Forest, I could involve him in the stirring history of the period, I would have a real story.” Proof of this sudden burst of enthusiastic creativity, in the form of a one-page scenario, has been reproduced in several prior Fairbanks studies, with good cause. His fountain pen fairly blots with his excitement.
“We had nothing real to go by,” Fairbanks wrote, “except in the one case a loved character and the knowledge of the period he lived in and certain deeds and exploits which incidentally I had done again and again in modern guise.” Today audiences are accustomed to the idea of Robin Hood associated with evil Prince John and the return of rightful power to Richard the Lion-Hearted. Dwan claimed that none of this existed at the time. “There were just tales of the man who robbed the rich to feed the poor. We invented all the knighthood, invented the fact that he was off on the Crusades and had to come back to save the throne for King Richard from his brother John.” This may or may not have been true (Dwan seems to have conveniently forgotten Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe), but with his characteristic loose grip on the facts, Dwan went on to state: “Lady Marian was invented.”*3 Biographers frequently quote a Fairbanks observation that many people complained that the film’s story wandered too far from that of the book: “If these critics know what book they are talking about, they have a distinct advantage over me.” Doug, as previously noted, was never one for reading. The book all were referring to was Howard Pyle’s 1883 The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, a staple for every little boy in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras.
Fairbanks saw other challenges to overcome. Paris-born Robert Florey was to become a journeyman director in the studio system of the 1930s and ’40s, best known for directing the Marx brothers in The Cocoanuts. In the 1920s he was a film journalist and Fairbanks publicist, writing for French-language magazines about the movie industry. He was close to Fairbanks, and his contemporary reports often serve as a more reliable account of events than do the later, embellished memories of others. He recalled Fairbanks raising the specter of further obstacles: “The sets worried him in particular. Where would one find a feudal castle in California? Robin Hood meant moving the whole unit to Europe.”
As late as Christmas Fairbanks still favored The Virginian. A week later, on New Year’s Day, things were different. Smoking nonstop, lighting one cigarette from the remains of the last, he addressed his assembled team at Pickfair.
“I’m going to make Robin Hood. We’ll make all the sets in Hollywood. I’ve made up my mind!”
The energetic delivery of this phrase by Douglas will always stay with me. His fist pounded on a small table and everyone was quite silent while he explained at length . . . “We must buy a new studio where we will all work together; I have in mind the old Jesse Hampton Studio on the Santa Monica Boulevard—round the studio are fields and nothing but fields. There we will build enormous sets: Nottingham as it was in the 12th century, Richard the Lion Heart’s castle, a Palestine town, Sherwood Forest, the bandit’s cave. Inside the studio we will build all the interiors and in the big field to the south we will set up the Crusaders’ camp in France. We’ll have several thousand costumes designed from contemporary documents, we’ll order shields, lances and sabers by the thousand, we’ll restage a tournament, we’ll . . .”
“How many thousands of dollars will we spend?” interrupted John Fairbanks.
“That doesn’t matter,” Doug went on. “Robin Hood should be made lavishly or not made at all.”*4
Preparations for the film began at the old Clune studio. Twenty-two hired experts assembled a 250-volume reference library. Fairbanks reportedly lingered hours at a time with the books—an uncharacteristic b
ehavior. Florey reported that Doug even let his regular training slide: “I can recall the broken-hearted expressions of Bull Montana or Jack Dempsey or even ‘Kid’ McCoy waiting in vain for their friend at the running track.” Wilfred Buckland, art director of many of Fairbanks’s Artcraft productions, made models of all the proposed sets. Florey recalled that “Douglas decorated his personal apartment with them, and the man who was generally so restless would stay peacefully seated for hours at a time looking at [them].” Fairbanks doodled little drawings of crusaders and their horses, the latter, in Florey’s words, “looking like horned beasts. Fortunately the cross he drew on his knights’ chests got the idea across.”
When they purchased the Hampton Studio at the corner of Santa Monica and La Brea for $150,000, they acquired not only studio space but also a large back lot. The modest plant underwent extensive improvements to meet the requirements of the two superstar producers. Assistant director Bruce “Lucky” Humberstone, who worked at the studio in the later part of the decade, recalled, “Mary had a complete bungalow that not only had an enormous living room, [but] a dining room, two bedrooms, a library, a kitchen and service porch. And she kept servants on the lot all during production. We always went to her bungalow for lunch, and it was like dining at home. . . . You had a butler that would serve you luncheon that was cooked by her cook or chef in her own kitchen, and we’d sit down like ladies and gentlemen.” Doug, instead of a bungalow, occupied a third of the first floor of the administration buildings facing Santa Monica Boulevard. He had an office, dressing room, barber shop, makeup room, playroom, bar, and a saltwater plunging pool. A gymnasium was in a separate building perpendicular to the administration complex, backing up to Formosa.
There was a reason behind his willingness to headquarter in the long, barracks-like administration building. Fairbanks, it seems, liked to emulate the earliest Olympians and run in the nude.*5 This, of course, was impossible in a busy town—but he found a solution. Workmen built a concrete-lined trench running parallel to Santa Monica Boulevard—over six feet deep, almost two city blocks long, and wide enough for Fairbanks to turn around in, enabling him to run multiple laps. It was isolated from view both from the street by a solid wall and from office windows by a trellis. An interior staircase within the building provided him access to his private running track.†*6
The only other nudity at the studio occurred in the steam room, located at the east end of the administration building. Here Fairbanks would sit in mint-green-tiled splendor, joined by friends and whatever stray (male) royalty was in town, demonstrating that to the democratic Douglas at least, cowboy and king were all the same under their skivvies.
The studio yard provided a ready source of exercise as well. It was littered with rings, bars, wooden horses, and sundry other fitness paraphernalia. “I never cross the yard without improvising and overcoming some obstacle,” he said.
His company moved into the newly christened Pickford-Fairbanks Studios on February 11. Nine days later, he and Mary departed for New York City. “We went with him to the little station at Pasadena and as the train was moving off his last words were still instructions about Robin Hood,” recalled Florey.
The following day, John Fairbanks brought in more than five hundred workmen, masons, and carpenters to start building the sets, which would ultimately take up a full acre of the twenty-acre back lot. By February 23, wooden scaffolding outlined the castle and village. While the castle foundation consisted of blocks of rock, the walls were not stone. Two hundred workmen constructed panels of four-inch-thick molds for the “stone” of the walls. Into these molds were poured 252 tons of liquid plaster mixed with wood shavings and cement. Another 125 tons were required for the village of Nottingham.
The statistics continued to pile up and were staggering. One million feet of lumber. Thirty tons of nails. Twenty thousand yards of “heavy velvets and rich cloths.” Each of the eight castle towers had a capacity of 276,000 gallons of water. The stock of three tanneries was needed to make the shoes. In the end, it is enough to say that everything about the production was big—and the castle was biggest of all.*7 Its main facade was 620 feet long, with a steel-framed drawbridge and a thirty-foot moat. The plaster stones were painted to give them age; moss and ivy were then planted in the crevices. Work continued into the nights, aided by large searchlights and impeded by the mosquitoes they attracted. The inner banquet hall (an outdoor set) was larger than the waiting area of New York’s Penn Station.
Doug saw none of this. He was in New York, providing moral support to Mary as she testified in court on a case that had been dogging her for four years.*8 (“This suit’s been going on since Grant was a cadet,” Fairbanks said, waggishly.) The civil suit, for which she had been served papers that long-ago day when she, Doug, and Charlie arrived in New York for the war bond drive, was finally coming before a jury. Cora Wilkenning, an agent, claimed that Mary pledged her a 10 percent commission—over $100,000—if she could get competing offers from studios during her 1916 negotiations with Adolph Zukor. Both Mary and Mama Charlotte testified indignantly that this was not the case. Since it was a she said/she said situation, the jury took less than a day to side with America’s sweetheart, and the Fairbankses were free to return home. They arrived in Hollywood on March 9. “The train was on time, and Douglas on the platform in one leap,” Florey recalled. “His first words were ‘Well, then?’”
He paused long enough to clown for photographers, putting the hook of a walking cane over his bent arm, flexing his biceps to make the cane jump, then catching it midair. But it was clear that he was impatient to get to the studio.
What happened next has become part of silent film folklore—possibly true, probably not. We come to the Fairbanks-almost-shelved-the-film myth. Allan Dwan immortalized the story by repeating it to Kevin Brownlow, whose seminal The Parade’s Gone By dedicated an entire chapter to Fairbanks’s Robin Hood. The tale, now oft told, goes like this: Fairbanks saw the huge sets and, overwhelmed, told Dwan that he was canceling the project. “I can’t compete with that,” Dwan reported him as saying. “My work is intimate. People know me as an intimate actor. I can’t work in a great vast thing like that.” By the time Dwan was retelling his story to Brownlow a few years later for the Hollywood series, Fairbanks never even got into the studio. “He got as far as the gate of the studio and he told the chauffeur to hold up and he took a look in through the gate at these big sets and he backed the car off and he said ‘Take me home.’ And he told his brothers who followed him, ‘You can forget it,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t go near those damn things. . . . They’d swamp me.’” Dwan, by his account, took a day or two, asked him to come back to the set, and won him over with a tapestry-covered playground slide and a trampoline. He showed his star how, trapped on a balustrade forty feet in the air,*9 he could escape Prince John’s encroaching troops by sliding down a long drape. (“He did it a thousand times—like a kid,” Dwan claimed. “He jumped off that balcony ’til he practically wore out the burlap.”) He could appear at a remote window by vaulting a moat (thus the trampoline) and climbing up vines placed on the castle wall. “These were the things that finally made him buy Robin Hood,” Dwan concluded. “But it wasn’t easy to get him to do it.”
Dwan little suspected that his own version of the tale to students at Columbia University in the fall of 1922 would survive him. And he forgot, or never knew, that Robert Florey had also provided a contemporary account. The reality, it seems, was less dramatic than Dwan would have us believe.†*10
It is true that the trip to the studio from the station was planned so that the sets would hit Fairbanks’s eye all at once. Every account agrees: they took Highland Avenue to Hollywood Boulevard, then La Brea to Santa Monica, thence to the corner of Santa Monica and Formosa. Dwan told the Columbia students, “I purposely engineered it so he would not see it until, when we drove around a corner, the set would loom up. He looked at it for nearly a minute. I said, ‘What do you think of it?’ He said, ‘He
avens, you have taken me seriously.’” And that, it seems, was all there was to the story when Dwan recounted it in 1922.
But Florey was also in the car. His recollection was that upon seeing the castle, Doug’s eyes widened and he exclaimed, “Gosh!” followed by “Ah! Isn’t it wonderful?” The rest of his account in no way suggests a man daunted by the size of his sets:
Without even wasting his time changing his traveling suit, Douglas rushed onto the set to get a closer look at the huge construction. Everyone followed him. . . . For more than an hour Douglas walked about among the sets; he was interested in everything and looked in detail at the work on each one; he questioned the workmen who, greatly flattered, replied in great detail. At last, around 3:30, Douglas made his first appearance at his offices, but he was much too excited to take note of the mass of personal mail waiting for him, and he kindly, but firmly dismissed the army of secretaries who were waiting for his orders and ready for him to sign a pile of letters.
The great star sat in an armchair near the bay window which looked out on the castle façade, and started to talk to his devoted collaborators. During the New York trip, Douglas had given a lot of thought to his scenario and was already thinking about making certain slight alterations. He explained all the new stunts he’d thought up during the last five days’ train trip.
He had even already rehearsed a scene with Paul Dickey who was to play the part of the villain Guy of Gisbourne, and showed his audience the way in which he intended to kill Guy of Gisbourne in the last part of the film. “I shall break his back, like that, against one of the castle pillars,” he explained. “Look—his body goes round the pillar; with one arm I hold his throat; with the other his heels and I slowly break his back.”
The First King of Hollywood Page 33
