The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  There ensued a considerable strain in father-son relations, scarcely intimate to begin with. But the majority of Fairbanks’s anger was with the executives whom he felt were endangering the future of a thirteen-year-old boy for the purposes of payback. The use of children, in his mind, was not fair play. But here, right in front of him, was young Lasky, already in Arabian garb, having brought himself to the studio. It was too good to resist.

  Company photographers were summoned, and multiple shots of the star and the costumed teenager were taken—and released to the press. Lasky Sr. now enjoyed a taste of his own medicine. The early headlines—DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS JNR. WORKS FOR LASKY; LASKY JNR. FOR FAIRBANKS—required some effort on the part of Paramount to squelch. But Doug had made his point. A soft truce was called.*11

  His son’s first film, Stephen Steps Out, was a failure. “The picture was terrible,” Junior recalled seven years later. Upon its screening, his father, evidently deciding that a public stance against the film would appear churlish, wired his congratulations. Paramount did not hesitate to take out full-page ads in the trade magazines trumpeting the fact.

  Comfortable in the belief that this was the end of Junior’s film career, his position softened, and during the production of Thief his son was a frequent visitor to the set. But the following summer, when Doug and Mary were again in Paris, Junior once more approached his father. “I asked him to withdraw any opposition he had to my becoming a screen player,” he recalled.

  He said he would give me a regular monthly allowance that would enable Mother and me to live properly if I would study art. I declined the offer.

  He told me to go to the devil and I told him to go to hell. He disowned me as a son and I disowned him as a father!

  Two days later I received a message from him, asking that I come to see him, and I went back to his hotel where, in the presence of several newspapermen, like the gentleman he is, he apologized to me. He announced, publicly, that he would no longer oppose my efforts to become an actor, admitted that I was right in my ambition and that he had been wrong.

  Whether Douglas was truly at peace with this or merely bowing to the inevitable is unclear. Mary’s gentle hand may have played a part. But what is evident is that in 1923, his son was no longer out of sight and out of mind but present. Further, what he felt was the boy’s exploitation, by both Beth and Paramount, was very much top of mind.

  Another notable extra in Thief was an extremely tall African American named Sam.*12 He was a striking presence, with a body as chiseled as Fairbanks’s and a turban that added another foot and a half to his height. The two men became friends, and Doug sponsored the extra as a professional boxer. Accounts of set visits at the time often describe Sam, side by side with his boss, playing Fairbanks’s version of follow the leader—a contest that involved a great deal of climbing, swinging, and jumping over gymnastic equipment scattered around the lot.

  Sam was the victim of an unfortunate incident involving his body makeup. Cameraman Arthur Edeson, looking for a certain effect, experimented extensively on Sam with multiple compounds. When no ordinary makeup served his needs, he resorted to varnish. This was a grievous mistake. Sam patiently tolerated its application, but very shortly thereafter studio workers were startled by the sight of a screaming giant, skin gleaming like polished obsidian, running across the lot. He ended up in Fairbanks’s plunge. Soap and water were ineffective in removing the lacquer, and in the end, the unfortunate man had to undergo a benzene rubdown and a vigorous scrubbing with a horsehair brush. His high-pitched cries could be heard across the compound.

  And yet, his personal grit and affection for Fairbanks were such that he was back the next day. Graphite was applied, and varnish was never again suggested as a way to create a photogenic sheen on a black man.

  As with Robin Hood, the studio was open to visitors during filming. The process had evolved: managers of all the major local hotels were provided a limited number of passes. Guides then met the scheduled groups and gave them forty-two-minute tours (someone timed them). This was followed by the opportunity, if they were fortunate, to see Pickford or Fairbanks actually filming. In the end, over twenty-three thousand spectators got inside the studio gates.

  This was not to Raoul Walsh’s liking. “I did not encourage outsiders when I was making a picture—Fairbanks’ love of an audience sometimes irked me,” he wrote. Still, the spectators “appeared to put more snap into Doug’s performance.”

  Also aiding performances were the set musicians. Ever since stage star Billie Burke had used a violinist on set to help her overcome her camera fright, small musical ensembles had come into general use during filming. Each had its own particular repertoire; Mary requested “Roses of Picardy” when she needed to draw tears. Doug had employed his particular ensemble of bass, piano, and violin (named, of course, “the Fairbanks Trio”)*13 since 1921. The group, which would come to Pickfair often to play for screenings and social functions, was headed by a Miss Douglas, who reported that Fairbanks preferred peppy tunes, favoring especially the Spanish folk song “Cielito Lindo.” Whether he was in fifteenth-century France, Sherwood Forest, or the streets of Bagdad, cheerfully anachronistic strains of “Ay, ay, ay, ay / Canta y no llores” would follow him.†*14Unless, that is, Raoul Walsh had his way. Upon reading the script for Thief, Miss Douglas had purchased seventy-five dollars worth of what she deemed “Oriental music”—only to find that Walsh would request “Mother Machree” or “My Wild Irish Rose” to evoke the mood he wanted. Because Mary’s brother Jack was also filming on the back lot, an elaborate set of signals were developed so that one company’s mood music would not conflict with the other’s.

  Whatever the music, there is no doubt that Fairbanks’s performance was akin to dance. The naturalism of the Douglas Fairbanks of the prewar films was entirely gone, replaced by broad, flowing movements and figurative gestures that even the earliest silent films never demonstrated. This is particularly evident in the opening scenes of the film. If he was hungry, the flat of his hand rotated in broad circles over his belly. If astonished, both arms went straight up, feet kicked outward. He was trying to make a film as universal, as primarily symbolic, as dance.

  It was, without doubt, his boldest move—bolder yet than the staggering investment in sets and costumes. The naked torso, the flowing harem pants, the lyric, fluid gestures—only an actor with a reputation as masculine as Fairbanks’s could have pulled this off and not been the butt of crude jokes. But pull it off he did; the critics were largely in agreement about that. One wrote of “the new grace which has crept into the movements of Douglas Fairbanks, a sort of dancer’s grace of rhythm and line, a mimicry of movement such as the old harlequins used to boast.” There have been, of course, dissenters—particularly in the intervening years, when the last vestiges of stage dramatics died with talking films. “Fairbanks’ stage training never counted much until the period of the costume films, when he relied too often on an acting style that a younger ‘Doug’ had once lightly tossed out of the movies,” Alistair Cooke groused in 1940, adding that the film “suffocated the old beloved sprite in a mess of décor,” and “the more theatrical convention of acting which he had restored to his costume character froze the gaiety of ‘Doug’ into stage cameos.”

  Filming was completed in early January 1924, with the complicated trick shots of the various fantasy effects filmed last. Then it was time for the annual trek east for the New York premiere. Doug and Mary arrived on February 15, accompanied by the appropriate royal retinue: Mary’s mother, maid, and secretary; little Gwynne (now six years old) and her governess; Kenneth Davenport; and Rocher, Doug’s faithful valet. They stayed this time at the Ambassador Hotel,*15 where the couple was photographed seated companionably together on a sofa, fully absorbed in a daunting pile of correspondence, separated only by little Zorro.

  The film opened in New York, at the Liberty Theatre on March 18. By now the ritual was becoming familiar. Throngs blocked Forty-Second Street, bringing out p
olice for crowd control. Showman Morris Gest handled the road show presentation of the film, complete with the appropriately extravagant quota of harem girls, oriental carpets, and incense. The film was chosen the best picture of the year by a Film Daily poll of critics—like the Photoplay Medal the year before, a singular honor in the pre–Academy Award days.

  And yet. There was a hint in the reviews, a sense that while Fairbanks had again outdone himself and created not simply Art with a capital A but ART with all caps, things were somehow just a little less fun. Worse, historians as early as 1931 were claiming that Thief was in some measure a disappointment.

  One has to be careful not to label Thief as a box office failure. Quite the contrary. The return to the Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corporation was $1,803,640.77—two and a half times that of Zorro and a third more than The Three Musketeers. As far as the audience, United Artists, and most exhibitors were concerned, the film was one of the smash successes of the decade.†*16It was to Fairbanks the producer that the film was barely a break-even project. The total cost of The Thief of Bagdad was $1,701,630.23, meaning that the net to his production company was $102,010.54. This was less than his share of the profit on the modest Mr. Fixit. While his average Artcraft release had a profit of $62,000, he had averaged more than six of those films a year. Now with Thief, and a larger fixed cost in the form of studio overhead, he had created a masterpiece, but one with a very thin profit margin. In order to do as well as he had done with Robin Hood, the film would have had to have twice Robin Hood ’s return. Only one or possibly two films in the decade even matched Robin Hood, and they had distribution networks far superior to that of United Artists. To double that film’s returns was impossible. He had pushed the envelope as far as he could without taking a loss. Now he knew his limits.

  There were no immediate concerns. He had been averaging $734,000 in profits per year since 1920. Robin Hood had provided a significant padding with its $1.2 million margin. He was not going to starve. In fact, his personal income in 1923 and 1924 was as high as it was in the 1917–1919 era—likely higher, in fact. In those early years of personal income tax, his accountants and attorneys were—as the rest of the nation—trying to figure out what was acceptable in the way of deductions. By the mid-1920s, they were more aggressive in skinning that particular cat. Therefore, while his taxable income looked the same between these two periods, his actual, pre-deduction income was higher.

  But the Thief returns would not be fully known for another year. Now it was time to celebrate what appeared to be yet another triumph. In keeping with their 1920s pattern of make a movie/go to Europe, Pickford and Fairbanks departed for London on April 13. As they embarked on the Olympic, Doug merrily told reporters there was no doubt as to whose star shone brightest in the family. “When I get on the other side,” he declared, “they all say, ‘Oh, there goes Mr. Pickford!’” Their arrival in London must have felt familiar: the mobs, the royalty, the acclaim. They were hosted by Lord Mountbatten and enjoyed balls and receptions thrown in their honor by the likes of the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland and Sir James Barrie.

  A hot industry topic that summer was the casting decision on Paramount’s Peter Pan. Author James M. Barrie was widely rumored to want Mary to play the role—a choice popular with the public at large. She had already played a little boy to perfection in Little Lord Fauntleroy, and had she been willing to make a film for a production company other than her own—something that she had not done since 1916—she would have been a shoo-in for the part. Jesse Lasky was at that moment en route to London, bearing with him the Peter Pan screen tests. He was careful enough to hedge when pressed by reporters, given that Mary had held several conferences with Adolph Zukor in the weeks before she sailed. “From the first we decided that Peter Pan need not be selected from within our own organization—but the choice rests entirely with Sir James.” Could this signal a merger of United Artists and Famous Players–Lasky? Could Peter Pan and Mary Pickford be the fulcrum upon which yet another industry shift occurred? Zukor was anxious to bring Doug and Mary back into the fold. Speculation was rampant, but no answers were yet to emerge.

  Next came Paris, where the now familiar drama of Doug saving Mary from the surging throngs was enacted, as was his private quarrel with his son over the latter’s proposed acting career. Perhaps he was particularly cranky because of having to stay in bed for a few days with a case of la grippe. As Mary nursed him back to health, they contemplated a visit to Copenhagen. Their press agent worked with a local newspaper to contact the Danish royal chamberlain to see if they could meet with the king. “Who are Fairbanks and Pickford?” demanded the functionary, thus ruffling American feathers. “Quite sufficient cause for war if we didn’t have a presidential election coming on,” groused the Daily Register Gazette, demonstrating that the good people of Rockford, Illinois, at least, knew the real royalty from that fancy-pants European kind.

  But before Denmark, they stopped in Berlin, followed by their first visit to Spain. The outpouring there was tremendous; five thousand were on hand when they arrived in Barcelona.*17 A mounted troop had to be called for crowd control. Their personal photo album shows them on the balcony of their hotel, smiling down at the multitude, and provides a striking point-of-view shot of the people below, thousands of them, necks craned in symmetry, staring back. Other pictures document the couple, dapper and gorgeous (Fairbanks could pull off a pair of spats as few could), touring, attending bullfights, hobnobbing with royalty. This last incident occurred at the American embassy in Madrid, where the king of Spain most famously satisfied his curiosity as to whatever had become of “Fatty” Arbuckle,*18 and all present insisted that Doug and Mary make their next pictures there.

  It was unlikely that Fairbanks would do this—his well-oiled machine at Santa Monica and Formosa was not to be discarded lightly, and the contretemps that Metro was suffering that summer in the Italian shoot of Ben-Hur was widely known. But he was not averse to Spain as a setting. The idea of bullfights intrigued him. His next film, indeed, would draw from his experience during these weeks in San Sebastián, Madrid, Seville, Toledo, Granada, and Barcelona.

  They went next to Copenhagen, where the mobs that greeted them disrupted the tramway service, proving that the people of Denmark knew more about motion picture stars than did their royal chamberlain. Then it was back to Paris, to enjoy the 1924 Olympic Games. There Doug was awarded a medal by the French government—the Palme d’Or, an award making him an officer of public instruction. (Charlie Chaplin had been given the same award three years earlier.) No amount of ribbons could help him shortly thereafter when he, Mary, and the American ambassador to Spain were stranded in an upscale restaurant, flummoxed by Doug’s habitual inability to remember to carry money. After waiting an hour in the hopes that someone they knew would happen by, they made a plea to the waiter—could they not send a check? They were Doug! And Mary!

  The waiter was underwhelmed, replying, “Tell that to Sweeny”—the French equivalent, apparently, of “Tell it to the marines.” Finally, an exhaustive search turned up a stray twenty-dollar bill in the ambassador’s possession. The waiter gave them a usurious exchange rate, and they escaped with their hides—and another tale for their press agents to feed to their adoring public.

  Their return to America on the Leviathan was made eventful by their fellow passengers, movie diva Gloria Swanson and violinist extraordinaire Jascha Heifetz. Pranksters both, they disguised themselves as a steward and stewardess and entered Doug and Mary’s stateroom while they slept. Speaking in garbled faux French, they noisily began to clean the room until the sleeping couple (Swanson rather cattily noted that Mary was wearing a chin strap) awoke and got the joke.

  As they gathered for an impromptu breakfast, Mary told Gloria that she really (in Swanson’s words) “had it in for Paramount because they hadn’t given her Peter Pan,” but that Zukor would only give it to her if she signed for two additional pictures.

  This wasn’t the only complaint they h
ad upon their return to New York City on July 20. The Peter Pan rumors vis-à-vis Mary were still filling the trades, not because Zukor or Pickford had said anything to confirm this (the part, in fact, would ultimately go to a luminous teenage Betty Bronson) but because D. W. Griffith had just signed a three-picture deal with Paramount.

  If ever there was an exasperating partner, it was Griffith. His sins against his partners had been ongoing. When he released Way Down East in the fall of 1920, he did not immediately hand the film’s distribution, with its 20 percent fee, to UA. Instead he elected to road-show the picture—renting legitimate theaters, providing a full orchestra score, going from city to city with publicity and premieres, and garnering 100 percent of the profits for himself and his production company. Way Down East was a blockbuster—the only one he would have during these years,*19 and one the fledgling company needed badly. Fairbanks at that time wired Griffith an angry and direct message: