The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  His solution to the crisis was simple, as one reporter discovered when trying to pin him down on the subject:

  “What,” we asked, “should the industry do to meet the yellow newspaper attacks on Hollywood?”

  “Make good pictures,” said Mr. Fairbanks.

  “What about censorship and blue laws in general?”

  “Make good pictures,” said Mr. Fairbanks.

  “What do you think about the business situation?”

  “Make good pictures,” said Mr. Fairbanks.

  The censorship train was still rumbling down its tracks, despite all his efforts to derail it. Since The Three Musketeers was released, New York had instituted a state censorship board, and Robin Hood was not spared. The censor’s cuts mostly related to scenes of Prince John’s minions torturing the sundry townsfolk, but Doug’s beloved scene of Robin Hood breaking Guy of Gisbourne across a stone pillar was also trimmed. “Eliminate actual choking by Robin Hood of Gisborn [sic] where eyes bulge,” wrote the New York State Motion Picture Commission. Its reasoning? Such scenes were “inhuman.” Fairbanks was not pleased. “These atrocities of King John are a part of history, and they should have been a part of the picture,” he grumbled to the New York Times. “And because I could not [show them,] there was a certain force gone out of it that nothing else could replace.”

  But censors or no, Robin Hood was a smash. A second showing was staged at midnight after the New York premiere to accommodate not only the stage actors who could not attend an eight thirty screening but also the mobs waiting on the street. The film, including negative and promotional expenses, cost $961,129.12. The return to the Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corporation was $2,219,478.70. No film he would ever make would gross more, and his net was staggering. It is important to emphasize again that the net return to the producer is a fraction of the rentals a film accrues. Everyone was making profits along the way: the exhibitors, the distributor, even the publishers of the little tie-in Robin Hood books that were sold in the theaters.*19

  The reviews were glowing. Some surly few suggested that the first half—the medieval castle/Crusades story—was a tad too slow and stately. But they seemed to be in the minority. “Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood out-spectacles all that we have seen before on the screen,” wrote the Wid’s Daily critic. “No part that we can think of would fit an actor better than this title role falls about the athletic shoulders of Fairbanks.”

  Doug and Mary returned to Hollywood by way of Chicago. Waiting for them upon arrival on November 28 was a new weekend house, built on a beachside lot in Santa Monica at 705 Ocean Front Drive. It was a four-bedroom dwelling; Wallace Neff designed a private garage and servants’ quarters on the 90-by-150-foot lot. The wide-plank wooden floors had hobnails that evoked the era of Robin Hood, as did the Tudor windows. The house was, in time, to consume as much of his life as did Pickfair. In the end, he would die there. But that sunny Christmas season, the end must have seemed very, very far off.

  Superstitious though he may have been, he took no meaning from the discovery of a suicide victim under the Santa Monica pier two days after their arrival at the beach house. When they thought the man might be resuscitated, they assured the press that they would give the desperate stranger work at their studios. When it was declared hopeless, they left money for flowers.

  Their Christmas cards for 1922 were custom designed and engraved. They depicted crusaders, flags flying, marching past a castle gate into a bold future. Fairbanks had just completed what would be his greatest financial achievement and, with the spoils of this effort, was on the verge of launching his greatest critical triumph: the film, more than any other, for which he would be remembered to this day.

  * * *

  *1. Fairbanks sold his rights to The Virginian in 1923 for $70,875. He sold his rights to Monsieur Beaucaire—purchased for $30,000—the following year for a modest profit.

  *2. † As with the case of Loos and Emerson, Fairbanks never spoke of the quarrel.

  *3. Maid Marian preceded Dwan and Lotta Woods’s creation by centuries and was even present in a 1912 film version of the story. Furthermore, an operatic version of Robin Hood played on Broadway in 1912 just down the street from where Fairbanks was playing in Cohan’s Officer 666, and it also featured Maid Marian. Possibly Dwan was referring to Maid Marian’s elevation to Lady Marian and her placement in Richard’s court.

  *4. Any inconsistencies between this rendering of Florey’s story and those in other accounts relate strictly to differences in translation. The source is the same.

  *5. He appears to have been comfortable with public nudity—as long as there were no women within hailing distance. Multiple photos have surfaced of him sunbathing in his birthday suit in secluded and shielded sections of yachts or in native waters in remote lands.

  *6. † Evidence of the interior staircase—torn out sometime in the years after his death—can be seen beneath the first floor of the building fronting Santa Monica Boulevard. Fairbanks could descend the private staircase to the trench entrance, shed his garb, conduct his run, and return to his offices with staff none the wiser. A portion of the trench survives to the present day, befuddling those few who stumble across it.

  *7. A painted glass matte made it appear taller yet for distance shots. The castle was not a single set piece but a series of interlocking pieces that could be arranged as needed. It was the largest physical set built in the silent era, outstripping that built for the Babylonian sequence in Intolerance.

  *8. Sitting still in a courtroom was challenging for Fairbanks. While present and accounted for during the critical testimony, he reportedly spent much of the proceedings out in the hallway, sitting on a radiator, smoking cigarettes, and watching the New York skyline. He had been reluctant to make the New York trip just as Robin Hood was taking shape, and only his love for Mary could separate him from the project.

  *9. I choose this number as an average. The height of the balcony seemed to increase ten feet with every retelling. In fairness to Dwan, it was very high.

  *10. † It is of significance that Dwan biographer Frederic Lombardi agrees that Dwan’s later version of events was a fabrication.

  *11. His advice was taken. Note that in the case of Musketeers, the competition was a retitled five-year-old film. But the risk of simultaneous releases of films with identical titles and plots was not a new one. Dual versions of Carmen and Romeo and Juliet had duked it out just a few years before.

  *12. Not all agreed with Menjou. Ralph Faulkner, who visited Doug on set the following year, wrote: “He is delighted when they beat his records. It spurs him to greater efforts. . . . I’d hate to be the man who would try to get in right with Doug by throwing one of these contests.”

  *13. † George Westmore had worked with Fairbanks before. In the 1910s he had devised for him what was then a novel haircut—layered so that it would not flop over his eyes during his stunts. Westmore’s sons became heads of the makeup departments of major studios in the 1930s and ’40s.

  *14. Dwan had misremembered the chain mail costumes as painted burlap in his interview with Brownlow for The Parade’s Gone By. Leisen, in a later interview, set the record straight.

  *15. † Case identifies him only as “Benny,” making the victim possibly the long-suffering but amiable Bennie Zeidman. If Bennie could be thrown in a pool and almost drown, a bear going after his nether regions might have seemed like just another day at the office.

  *16. Hosts of family albums in the 1920s were graced with photos of children and maiden aunts smiling shyly as they pose in front of the sets. The luckiest were able to snap Fairbanks, Dwan, and the production team huddled for an impromptu conference on King Richard’s throne or strolling the village of Nottingham. These turn up periodically in online auctions, providing an intimate glimpse of the experience, almost one hundred years later.

  *17. † In the end, Dwan elected to break this up into three separate shots.

  *18. In case one should doubt the story
and still suspect the stunt to be doubled, Ladies’ Home Journal had a special photographer on the set that day to take a photograph for the September 1922 issue. The man halfway up the drawbridge chain is unmistakably Fairbanks.

  *19. Fairbanks’s return on the Robin Hood booklets was $2,160.09 in 1923.

  12

  The Fairy Tale

  * * *

  BY MANY MEASURES, 1923 was the best year of Douglas Fairbanks’s life. Robin Hood was road-showing its way through the major metropolises, spinning off money and accolades for its creator at a prodigious rate. The intelligentsia had weighed in: the smiling, jumping cavalier had created Art with a capital A.

  His marriage was still in an endless honeymoon phase. Mary couldn’t even sit for a portrait without interruptions every ten or fifteen minutes from her besotted swain. He wanted to buy her everything—jewels, furs, cars. (“But Douglas,” the portrait artist recalled hearing her say over the phone, “I have enough pearls now. . . . Yes, I know, dear, but where would I wear a chinchilla coat?”)*1 “That he is very deeply in love with Mary no one who sees them together can doubt for an instant,” Samuel Goldwyn wrote at this time. “Not by any means a self-effacing person, he is nevertheless always trying to turn the spotlight upon her and her achievements. Of the latter he is inordinately proud.”

  Further, his bromance with Charlie Chaplin continued, abated only by the comedian’s current mad affair with Polish film star/diva Pola Negri—a source of much amusement to most in the press, and likely to Fairbanks as well. Chaplin purchased a lot adjoining the one on which Pickfair stood in late September 1922, telling his aide de camp Tom Harrington, “I’ve just bought a hill. Get me a house.”

  And having hit the sweet spot, the magic trifecta of critical, financial, and personal success, Fairbanks was then emboldened to take his greatest leap ever, both financially and artistically. He would, he decided, top himself. He would make a film greater than Robin Hood.

  In a way, he had little choice. One astute columnist wrote, “In the case of Douglas and Mary, it is a plain case of weeping for more worlds to conquer. They can’t very well back down from big pictures to little pictures, and they don’t know where to go on from pictures like Robin Hood.” But it wasn’t the critics’ voices he heeded. It was his inner voice, that part of his nature that urged him ever onward to better work, to greater things. It was that same hypomanic, cheerleading-through-a-megaphone voice that wouldn’t let him reduce the costs on his early Artcraft productions simply to increase their profit, the same rousing call that was shouting inspirational phrases to him as surely as “Hunch” had done years before in Say! Young Fellow. For all his flaws—and there would turn out to be too many before his days were done—it was this sturdy enthusiasm that made him neither a run-of-the-mill star nor an ordinary producer. It was a part of his greatness.

  It was a greatness that would run its course in a mere fifteen years, true, but it can be argued that he exercised it within the confines of an art form that existed for barely more than twenty. Every force that encouraged him to continue to reach beyond his grasp was at its peak in the early winter months of 1923, and Douglas Fairbanks did not require much prompting to stretch his arms wide and try to grip all that the world could offer. No soul seeking fame, wealth, or even the more laudable aim of creating true art ever really gets as close to the goal as desired. But Fairbanks’s reach in 1923 would be farther than he would ever again achieve.

  Part of this related to his self-proclaimed, cheerful narcissism. “I’ll tell you about me,” he confessed to a reporter, tongue only partly in cheek:

  If I had my way about it, I could make myself very happy all the time. My big ambition is to pack up and take Mary to the Riviera. There I would like to step out for a stroll around about 8 o’clock in the morning and hear everybody say: “There he comes now; that’s Fairbanks, the great motion picture star!” Then I’d go right in, change my suit and come out again. They’d say: “Why, there’s Fairbanks, the famous cinema actor; here he comes now!” And I’d like to change my suit once an hour all day long and hear them say: “Here he comes now!” until I got sleepy. Then I would like to go to sleep and get up in the morning and have it all over again.

  In considering an actor, perhaps, this should not astonish. Many a leading man had more than a healthy dose of self-absorption. But none were willing to invest as much, risk as much, as was Fairbanks. This may have constituted courage, or it may have come from the fact that he had suffered little in the way of failure along the way. He had been climbing that metaphoric mountain with nary a misstep for two decades; why should he not climb higher? It is easier, perhaps, to not fear cliffs if you have never fallen off one.

  Still, there were early warning signs that there might be stumbling blocks on the trail ahead. Wallace Reid, Paramount’s handsome leading man who had risen to stardom at the same time as he, became hooked on morphine provided by a studio doctor for an injury. In late January 1923, he succumbed to endocarditis. “The motion picture has sustained an irreparable loss,” Fairbanks told reporters, acting, as always, as the industry’s de facto spokesman. Less than a week later John Fairbanks suffered a devastating stroke. John had always been the strong, sensible brother, the first Douglas had called upon when it was clear that he was going to make a life and business in the film industry. While Robert had been his peer in age and his youthful coconspirator in mischief, John had been the male adult figure in the household. As such, he had been made general manager of the Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corporation, to Robert’s production manager. The stroke robbed John of much of his speech and motor function, and he was to die within four years, at the age of fifty-three. Robert’s daughter related an anecdote in which Doug took his stricken brother out for an airing in the car. As they passed a cemetery, John pointed with his left arm (the stroke had totally paralyzed the right side of his body) and said, “Jack there.” Normally ebullient, Doug was nevertheless prone to periods of gloom—his “black dog.” This incident depressed and demoralized him.

  Whenever sorrow threatened, he did not find his succor in contemplation but in motion. “When I keep moving I’m in harmony with the force that drives the world,” he said. “When I stop, the brunt of that power hits me. If I stopped long it would destroy me.” And so he hastened on, planning his next epic.

  When in New York, he was still convinced it would be Monsieur Beaucaire. By the time he had reached Chicago, he had declared that it would be a pirate film. He seemed certain this time; Mary even gave him an antique replica of a pirate galley for Christmas. He started growing his hair long and set his team to work on creating a script. The draft that resulted was a cumbersome story, bearing a closer relation to 1927’s The Gaucho than to The Black Pirate, which was to be filmed in 1925. It also included elements of an Arabian tale: the protagonist was a descendant of Moorish kings, whose personal philosophy of vengeance was based on his reading of the Koran. But this heavy-handed jumble of slave revolutions, burning plantations, coups d’état, and piracy was quickly abandoned.

  There followed a brief and heady period when he contemplated a toga tale. “There hasn’t been a good picture showing ancient Rome since Cabiria!” he declared to Robert Florey. “Last night I thought up a great story that happens during Caesar’s time. Can’t you see the chariot races? The battles? That great old Roman architecture?”

  Pictures of pirate galleons came down from the walls of director Raoul Walsh’s office. Up went images of the Roman Forum and Pompeii. The team buckled down to this epoch, until the day when Fairbanks popped his head into a staff meeting and declared, “Let’s do an Arabian Nights story instead!”

  Scenarist Lotta Woods described the researcher’s job on a Fairbanks production as being that of “a graduate engineer who charged fifteen cents for starting a stalled motor and $499.85 for knowing how.” Robert’s daughter claimed: “Doug never heard any complaints; his staff simply swept everything into the wastebasket and started afresh. It wasn’t the
first time the boss had changed horses in midstream and it wouldn’t be the last.” Kenneth Davenport had warned Florey that this would happen during the Roman craze. “You’ll see,” he said. “This devil will change his mind three times—if not more—before we start shooting.” Even the press reflected this confusion; some early news accounts described The Thief of Bagdad as a pirate story inspired by Captain Kidd and Captain Blood.

  But the Arabian Nights idea stuck. (“I had to find a picture to fit my hair,” Fairbanks said with mock seriousness.) The project he envisioned was to be grand in scope. A ten-acre tract of land behind the studio was acquired to expand the back lot. The walls of Bagdad,*2 incomparably designed by the twenty-six-year-old William Cameron Menzies, were erected on the stone foundations of the Robin Hood castle. All the settings in the film remain a marvel today. Undoubtedly, the production’s art direction was heavily influenced by the German expressionist films of the time. Shades of Paul Leni’s Waxworks can be seen throughout. But Menzies had a gorgeous visual sense of his own, and it can be argued that the work of the Germans served merely as a starting point for his genius. Fairbanks recalled:

  A special problem that faced us for The Thief of Bagdad was my desire that a dream city should not look too well anchored on its foundations. It is easy enough to make a thing fantastic and unreal, but I wanted it to seem light in addition. By using a somewhat weird design, by painting trees and branches black even when we had real ones, by the use of light backgrounds instead of the customary dark ones which are thought to bring out the figures more clearly, by confining our colors to gray, gold, silver, black and white for everything except the actual costumes, we obtained an unusual effect; but sets built on the ground will look as if they were.