To get away from this solidity, we painted our buildings darker at the top than at bottom. This seemed to make them less solid and heavy at the bottom. We also built upon a highly polished black floor that had reflections. The vertical line of a house meets the horizontal line of the ground and ends there. Our polished floor reflects the building lines and lifts our city. And this black floor caused considerable extra work. There was endless brushing and polishing week after week.
Indeed, those floors were a constant source of worry. One visitor to the set recalled: “The whole scene immediately lifts us from the commonplace to the ethereal heights of the futurist influence in art. But we are brought back to earth by the most plebeian of notices which reads: ‘Are your feet clean?’ Whereupon, before we go on the set an attendant hands us a pair of loose-fitting sandals which we slip on over our shoes.”
John’s stroke had resulted in Doug’s temporary assumption of the position of general manager,*3 a daunting task in itself. Still, he was tireless. “It isn’t easy to work with Doug,” director Raoul Walsh wrote wryly. “First, you have to find him. He’s doing a thousand things at the same time. He’s banging at a typewriter; he’s on his gymnastic rings like some school kid; he’s with the Art Director. . . . When he goes from office to office, he jumps over everything in his way. . . . If he does stop for a second, it is to bill and coo with ‘our Mary.’” Walsh went on to describe the experience of finally pinning his boss down for a meeting. In the middle of an intense discussion of how to best punish the story’s villain, Fairbanks suddenly jumped up and started playing with the light switches. Another visitor to the studio during production remarked, “While he was dressing, Doug was constantly in motion. He paused, dressed as Adam, to see if he could jump a high-backed chair. He could.”
Edward Knoblock (with Lotta Woods) again played a major role in creating the scenario, which in the end wasn’t produced as a shooting continuity so much as it was a working grid—a spreadsheet conveyed by way of a large cork bulletin board. In the “Set Plot” grid, the sets were listed across the top in columns, with the actors’ names in a left-sided row. If an actor was to appear in a scene on that set, the corresponding cell had an X in it. Running in parallel with this was a tightly worded “Shooting Schedule,” which defined, scene by scene, only the minimum necessary to explain the action. In the words of historian Rudy Behlmer, “Of course, breakdown boards and sheets, along with shooting schedules (both still in use), were not a Fairbanks innovation, but his application of the system was unique.” Fairbanks, as in Robin Hood, provided the general settings and theme (“Happiness must be earned”), but it was left to the likes of Knoblock and faithful Lotta Woods to iron out such niceties as the plot.
Casting in The Thief of Bagdad would turn out to have more pitfalls than that of any other Fairbanks film. Evelyn Brent, who had acted in Selznick and Metro productions, was signed as Fairbanks’s leading lady. Early publicity emerging from the studio declared that Mary had helped make the selection and that Evelyn was “a perfect type of screen beauty.” She was originally hired in contemplation of the pirate film, but as winter advanced into spring and still no production was underway, Brent began to get restless. She was living at the time in a house across the street from the Chaplin studios, with her fiancé, Bernie Fineman. “I just didn’t like the part of the princess in Thief of Bagdad,” she recalled years later. “I remember going to Bernie and saying, ‘I cannot do that part.’ After I had been in the studio and talked and done still pictures with Fairbanks holding me up in one hand and all of that silly stuff. I just didn’t like the setup.” She asked to be released from her contract.
This would have caused no particular fuss, except for a squib in Screenland, one of the lesser fan periodicals.
There seems to be a difference of opinion over why Evelyn Brent took her make-up box and left the Fairbanks lot. Evelyn said that she had signed with Doug to work in pictures, and that so far she had been the world’s champion rester.
Doug said that his Thief of Bagdad had to be an airy, ethereal sort of picture, and that Evelyn was a bit too voluptuous to match the picture.
But Dame Gossip says that Mary put her pretty little foot down and told Doug to get another leading lady. For be it known that Doug has an appreciative eye for feminine pulchritude, and Mary knows the weakness of sex.
The same thing is said to have happened when Doug was casting for Robin Hood. Marguerite de la Motte had been eminently satisfactory to the public, and to Doug, and Fairbanks expected to retain her for Robin Hood. But Marguerite had been announcing fondly in print that all she was and all she hoped to be she owed to Douglas Fairbanks, or words to that effect. So Mary changed his mind and picked out Enid Bennett, a lady who was safely in love with her own husband.
So there’s three stories. You pay your money and you takes your choice.
This, Brent recalled, caused the predictable response from the Fourth Estate. “One morning I went out horseback riding about 6:00 in Griffith Park and I came back and the house was surrounded by reporters. I was living there, they said, because it was near Chaplin’s studios and Fairbanks could go to the studio ostensibly to see me. It was absolutely untrue. There was no basis to it at all. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even like him! But have you ever tried to deny a story to a bunch of reporters who are looking for a headline?”
The response of Pickford and Fairbanks was swift. They notified Cap O’Brien to file suit against the magazine and made certain that every journalist in the country was apprised of the fact. Not only did such gossip harm their brand (although the term in this context was not in use at the time), but it also appears to have been authentically untrue. In later years—and not so much later, at that—there would be rumors of infidelities, rumors that were ultimately authenticated. The response at the first sign of these rumors was a retreat into a wall of no-comments and denials. But no lawsuits. Here the indignation was real, as well as the desire to go to open court and face the wagging tongues. (On a lesser note, the supposed charge that Fairbanks let Brent go because she was too zaftig for the role made him appear ungallant—a point of pride.)*4
“And what started it I don’t know,” Brent said years later. “That thing followed me for ages, and people would not believe me. I had three personal contacts with them—one at the Algonquin, one when I came out here and they asked me to come to some story conference or something, and Mary was not there but he was . . . among the executives and Mary’s mother and the whole bit! Then I was told to come and make the still pictures. Those were the only contacts I had with him.” Brent in later years remained friendly with Mary and saw her often when Pickford was visiting the Motion Picture Home (officially the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital, cofounded by Mary herself) to see director Mickey Neilan. Mary, she reported, was warm, “but we never discussed it.” Brent remained puzzled to the end of her days about the episode. “You don’t know what starts these things,” she said ruefully. Willowy Julanne Johnston, who had originally tested for the slave role played by Anna May Wong, replaced her in the part.
Anna May Wong went on to greater fame than any other of the film’s supporting cast. The daughter of a Chinatown laundryman, Wong was only eighteen during production, but her appearance as the duplicitous slave girl made a huge impression, and she became the first female Asian American star—Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa having preceded her on the male side by almost ten years. Fairbanks had seen her in the first two-strip Technicolor feature, made as a demonstration project by the Technicolor Corporation. There had been some discussion of filming The Thief of Bagdad in color, and Doug, always keeping up with technical developments, was fascinated by the process but rejected it for his film. Yet the young actress impressed him, and he insisted a part be found for her. According to Wong biographer Graham Russell Gao Hodges, “He had to get past Wong Sam Sing first.” After promising her father that he would personally keep an eye on the young beauty, Doug received permission for her
to appear in the film.
Another casting attempt was to prove even more disastrous, although not generally known to the public then, nor to film scholars today. Fairbanks was looking for unconventional casting and was intrigued by the prospect of having Japanese German poet and critic Sadakichi Hartmann in the film. He arranged a test for him in the relatively minor role of the Indian prince, one of the suitors for the heroine’s hand in marriage.*5 He tested well. Fairbanks declared, “You have the eyes of a saint; the rest of your face is that of a villain,” and offered him the far larger role of the Mongolian prince. Hartmann, an asthmatic with tuberculosis, thought the work would not be too taxing, and he accepted.
Thus the troubles began. Shooting started in mid-July. Production required Hartmann to arrive at nine and stay until five o’clock—eight hours! (“I did not fancy it. . . . To obey the whims of some director is an imposition.”) He was not asked to participate in the conferences with writers, director, and star. No one listened to his unsolicited advice. (“When there isn’t any needle’s eye, thread is not of much use.”) His costume was too heavy (“What is this, I demanded to know, something to advertise linoleum?”); his hat was too small; his shoes were too high. He didn’t want to shave his head.
Furthermore, all the costumes were in bright colors. What was the point of that? Also, the costumes of the extras were too “pretentious and conspicuous”; they shouldn’t compete with those of the leading players! (Read: his costume.)
He, an artist, had already planned out the action of his first scene to be shot—a sequence late in the film in which the villain enters a fishing village, buys a magic healing apple, and has a fisherman poisoned to test its efficacy. He would be on the prow of the ship, pointing at the town. The townspeople would all gather in silent awe as he approached. But the director! The director wanted a shot from the point of view of the villain in the back of the boat, in which he gestures for the sail to be lowered, revealing the town.*6 That ridiculous town which “would have made a great chop suey restaurant in some world’s fair.”
The director, art director, scenarist, costume designer, and even humble extras begged to differ. Fairbanks remained above the fray—in fact, Hartmann couldn’t get his way, he claimed, unless he complained to Doug. “Sadakichi Hartmann was not very cooperative,” Julanne Johnston said, in an understatement. “Fairbanks humored him.” Hartmann did not know that his boss couldn’t bear to be perceived as unlikable and relied on his team to do any tasks involving unpleasant confrontations.
Robert Fairbanks was more than happy to help and did so in a style worthy of Machiavelli—or of the prankish Fairbanks brothers of Denver. He “seemed to have a strange predilection for the delicate art of poisoning as an occasional luncheon topic,” Hartmann recounted. Food was often sent as gifts to the studios, tempting Mary, but she was not permitted to eat any, Robert said lazily. After all, the foodstuffs could be poisoned by mad fans. Then there were the postage stamps. Fans could send a request for a picture, along with the required postage. But the stamps could be poisoned so that when the star licked them to mail the picture, well . . .
With the word poison ringing in Hartmann’s ears, the next act was staged. Some “play-all” actor,†*7“an old standby of Fairbanks’s productions, a veritable crack-a-jack in losing his identity in minor parts,” came up to Hartmann and offered him a bottle of rum. He was forced, for politeness sake, to take a swig or two before quickly deciding that it was no good. Bootleg booze in the 1920s often was methanol, which could lead to blindness and death. (“Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!”) Next, another bottle of hooch was brought to his home by a studio employee, courtesy of the film’s wigmaker, who happened to run a side business as a bootlegger. To Hartmann’s suspicious mind this too was bad whiskey. It likely was spiked but with little more than vinegar.
The deed was done. Hartmann departed in a huff. The scheme, if scheme it was and not merely an unfortunate series of coincidences, has all the earmarks of the practical jokester Douglas rather than the far more phlegmatic Robert. Still, it is likely that any and all were delighted to participate in getting rid of the troublesome artiste a mere three weeks into the production. Sôjin Kamiyama (billed simply as “Sôjin”) stepped into the role, playing in all but the fishing village sequence. Frame blowups document that Sôjin is missing a front tooth whereas Hartmann is not, and the hated hat (“such as some Chinese Pavlova may wear”) is propped high on Hartmann’s dome but sags down over Sôjin’s ears. The fishing village sequence was abridged to minimize Hartmann’s appearance; for ninety years few noticed that the lead villain in Douglas Fairbanks’s most famous film was played by two different men.*8
Happily, the remainder of the casting was uneventful. Snitz Edwards, the silent film era’s most ubiquitous character actor, rejoined Fairbanks as his companion in crime. (Edwards had first appeared with Fairbanks in The Mark of Zorro as the timorous barkeep.) His daughter recalled the scene where first Doug, then Snitz, climbed a clinging vine over forty feet up the wall of Bagdad’s castle:
My father adored Douglas Fairbanks—thought him the most genial, good-natured, unaffected, down to earth man. Snitz was very athletic, too. They told them “stunt men will do this.”
“Ridiculous—we’ll do it!” and they climbed up the creepers up the wall. . . . It was like a game.
Unable to find a stout male actor to satisfy him, Fairbanks cast a rotund Frenchwoman, Mathilde Comont, in the role of the Persian prince.*9 He had seen Comont that winter as she played Mary’s mother in Rosita, directed by Ernst Lubitsch.
The story of the sly, witty Lubitsch, fresh from Germany, and his trials working with Mary Pickford have been meticulously detailed elsewhere. Both Fairbanks and Pickford were enthralled with his German film work (and Chaplin, as previously mentioned, was equally enamored with his former star, Pola Negri). But the early months were an uncomfortable fit for the director and his female producer. He was accustomed to telling actresses what to do, not reporting to them. Language and temperament were barriers between two otherwise very vital, creative, and engaging people. Before settling on Rosita, Lubitsch and Pickford were divided on what film to make together. Mary wanted him to direct Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall. Lubitsch wanted to make Faust. Mary claimed that her mother nixed the plan because the tragic female lead commits infanticide. This is highly probable. But Lubitsch claimed another reason. In his mind there was only one man to play Mephistopheles: “Mephisto must have humor and charm,” he told a columnist. “Douglas Fairbanks would be the greatest Mephisto who ever played the part. He has humor and lightness and vivacity; yet he has dramatic power. He would go through Faust like a stroke of lightning—flashing dangerous, vivid and intense, yet brilliant. . . . Ach lieber Gott, he would be such a wonderful Mephisto.” Both she and Lubitsch went so far as to urge him to take the part, Mary claimed, but “he always countered with ‘Can you imagine anyone taking me seriously as the devil?’”
He was right. America’s Sweetheart was not going to strangle a baby, and her dashing husband was not going to depict Satan. By the time Thief was in production, Mary had completed Rosita and was filming Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall with a different director. The plump Frenchwoman was the only remnant of the Lubitsch experiment to carry over into The Thief of Bagdad.
One cast member was a mere extra—and a teenager at that—but his presence on the set had resonance for Fairbanks. A stunt that had required months of preparation and practice was a scene in which Fairbanks (with the aid of hidden trampolines) leaps into and out of a series of huge jars. It required perfect timing and placement, yet on the day of filming, one of the takes was spoiled when a young extra failed to pull his camel out of the shot in time and—worse yet—the camel managed to soil the precious black floor.
An assistant director was giving the boy holy hell when Fairbanks bounded over. With a start, he recognized the youngster underneath all the body paint. It was Jesse Lasky Jr., slumming as an extra to pick up some pock
et money.
Nothing could have made him happier. According to Lasky, “He threw back his head and spilled laughter upward.” Here, in the form of a gangly youth, was poetic justice. Young Lasky’s father had recently created a firestorm in the Fairbanks household by hiring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. to star in a film for Paramount.
The problem was this: Beth and her son were living in Paris, where the American dollar stretched very far, not so that Junior could study art and learn French, as she claimed, but because they were nearly broke. The large sum that Doug had settled upon her was gone, wasted in bad investments by her second husband, James Evans. Jewels were pawned and then sold, and, according to Junior, they had started skipping meals. When the offer for $1,000 a week for six weeks’ work came, they felt that they had little choice. Also, Junior noted, “I think Mother saw at once a way that she could again supervise a career and involve herself in business.”
Fairbanks had learned of the plans by way of a letter from Lasky and was livid. Lasky and Zukor both had been stung by Pickford and Fairbanks’s departure from Paramount, and Lasky acknowledged that hiring Junior constituted “sort of a minor revenge on the senior Fairbanks.” He would, Junior recalled, “be bound to be embarrassed to have his overgrown thirteen-year-old son around as an All-American boy with similar athletic ability.”
A few years later, as his son shot up in height and even wore a glued-on mustache for the final scene of 1926’s Stella Dallas,*10 Fairbanks was concerned about the prospect of appearing old in comparison. But in 1923, this was not the issue. Junior at that point was still outgrowing his plump, awkward stage, and the only threat he constituted was of embarrassing them both. Fairbanks was vehement. His son was being used for his name and—worse—was abandoning his education. Beth used the dubious strategy of sending Junior alone to the Hôtel de Crillon to thrash it out with Senior during Doug and Mary’s Paris stay in the autumn of 1921. There father and son had a vituperative argument. Senior, in authentic belief that his ex-wife and son were very comfortably provided for, wanted him to go to Harvard (as he himself claimed—falsely—to have done) and then on to Cambridge. (“I often thought back on that idea,” Junior recalled, “and had reason to wish it had worked out. I think I would have liked it.”) His son, armed with strict instructions not to reveal their financial straits, instead stubbornly clung to the line that he could do as he chose. The quarrel escalated, and for the first time in his life, Junior was actively rude to his feared and revered father. He would later confess that he had behaved so “because I was more afraid of Mother’s reaction if I lost the day than I was of my father’s.” Once the deal had been signed, Doug sent Beth a telegram demanding that the boy continue his schooling, adding tersely: DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS’ SON WILL HAVE SUFFICIENT MONEY TO LIVE ON WITHOUT WORKING IN THE MOVIES.
The First King of Hollywood Page 36
