THIS RECENT ACTION OF YOURS WITH WAY DOWN EAST IS MOST UNFAIR. IT SEEMS TO ME THAT IF YOU HAD APPLIED A SENSE OF JUSTICE TO A MATTER WHERE HONOR HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH IT YOUR ASSOCIATES WOULD HAVE GOTTEN A BETTER DEAL. I SEND YOU THIS TO LET YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL AND THAT IT MIGHT HAVE SOME EFFECT ON YOUR FUTURE.
Griffith did not budge.
Well and good. What was good for the goose, Fairbanks reasoned. . . . He and Mary would road-show their productions, and did so, from The Three Musketeers onward. And when Chaplin was finally free of his First National contract, he could do the same. What Griffith lost and his partners gained, by the different level of profitability of their films during the first half of the 1920s and the lost revenue to UA—revenue that they would have shared equally—certainly was one of the factors contributing to D. W. Griffith’s ultimate financial collapse. That collapse meant little to him in material terms—he had always lived modestly. But it had tremendous repercussions in terms of costing him his creative freedom, something he prized dearly. By shortchanging his partners, he learned the consequences of having them shortchange him.
By 1924, Griffith’s financial situation had worsened. The high overhead involved in his studio in Mamaroneck, New York, was on the verge of bankrupting his production company. He was largely the agent of his own destruction, but he did not have the insight to see this. Instead, he engaged in the very human practice of choosing to find fault elsewhere.
He shared the partners’ dissatisfaction with Hiram Abrams’s sales techniques, but for different reasons than theirs. He felt that Chaplin, Fairbanks, and Pickford formed a California triumvirate and were getting preferential treatment from the UA sales department. Mary, at least, whose Little Lord Fauntleroy was kept out of most large cities for two years because of Abrams’s standoff with exhibitors, begged to differ. She argued that Griffith, with his East Coast studio, had superior access to UA’s home office, and if anything he got preferential treatment.
Each side had instances that they could point to. Griffith argued that The Love Flower yielded better exhibitor returns than Mary’s Suds, an argument skewed by his selection of one of Mary’s few underperforming films. Fairbanks countered that Griffith’s Broken Blossoms had been sold on more favorable terms than Fairbanks’s His Majesty the American. In truth, it all had to do with the quality of the product. Films such as Griffith’s The Love Flower and Dream Street sold for less because of free market forces, forces that the bickering partners could, and did, use to quote examples in both directions.
Regardless of who had the moral high ground in this argument, trouble was brewing. Within a week of Doug and Mary’s February arrival in New York to promote the premiere of Thief, news of Griffith’s dissatisfaction had been featured in a Variety article. An annual UA stockholders’ meeting was held two weeks before their departure for Europe, and on March 28, 1924, a reassuring, jointly signed press release resulted. All four partners, to quote the release, “unanimously decided to not only carry out their existing contracts, but to renew and extend their contracts for a period of three years, except Charles Chaplin who has 8 pictures still to deliver.”
Griffith, evidently, did not consider his vote at the stockholders’ meeting or his signature on this document to be binding. While Doug and Mary were touring Europe, and Charlie was in Los Angeles filming The Gold Rush, he was conducting secret negotiations with Adolph Zukor. He signed a $250,000 deal to produce three features.
This was too much. Fairbanks certainly made his feelings clear in a sharply worded telegram. Deeming Doug’s wire “antagonistic,” Griffith wired back, in part:
HAVE FELT FOR SOME TIME THAT I WAS IN A HOPELESS MINORITY. . . . IT HAS BEEN SPOKEN THROUGH UNITED ARTISTS BOOKING OFFICES THAT GRIFFITH PICTURES WERE NOT EVEN PRICED AS HIGH AS SOME OTHERS. . . . KNOWING WHAT I CAN DO WITH MY OWN PICTURES, WOULD LIKE VERY MUCH TO WITHDRAW ENTIRELY FROM UNITED ARTISTS.
His reasoning reflected that, as a businessman, D. W. Griffith was a very fine director of motion pictures. (It can be argued that even in this arena his skills were beginning to ossify.) It was naive to expect films such as One Exciting Night or The White Rose, with their smaller budgets and lesser leading players, to command the sort of prices from exhibitors as super-productions such as Robin Hood or The Thief of Bagdad. And Griffith’s recent attempt at an epic, America, was a flop. Even Adolph Zukor would not have charged theaters as much for a Griffith programmer as for expensive studio productions such as The Ten Commandments.
Abrams, Fairbanks, Pickford, a Chaplin representative, and Griffith’s lawyer, Albert Banzhaf, met at Doug and Mary’s suite at the Ritz to attempt to thrash out the issue. (Griffith had conveniently escaped to postwar Berlin to film Isn’t Life Wonderful.) Stern words were exchanged over the topic of Griffith’s 20 percent stock ownership. In the end, a public statement was released, over the vehement protests of Banzhaf, stating that United Artists considered Griffith’s signature on the March 28 pledge to be a binding contract.
They had just cause to adopt this stance. The company was not consistently profitable. UA’s problem continued to be a lack of films to distribute. Chaplin took so long to fulfill his First National contract that he had, to date, made only A Woman of Paris for UA release—a drama in which he did not appear except in an unrecognizable cameo. The film was a critical darling but a financial failure.*20 They needed Griffith’s steady stream of product. His films may have made no money for him, but they did for UA. And now Griffith was going to fly the coop. Something would have to be done or Doug and Mary would find themselves back in the arms of a Paramount or First National.
Help came in the form of Joseph Schenck. Schenck was approaching forty-six years of age in the autumn of 1924 and was that rarest kind of Hollywood mogul: a beloved, honest, and trusted figure. A Russian Jew who immigrated to New York City at the age of fifteen, Schenck, with his younger brother Nicholas, began by running concessions at the Fort George Amusement Park. With entrepreneurial skill and tenacity, and financial help from theater owner Marcus Loew, the brothers bought the Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey. From there their paths diverged. Nick stayed on the exhibition side, going on to head Loew’s Inc. and the merged entity now known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Joseph became an independent producer, luring Roscoe Arbuckle away from Keystone in 1917. He also produced dramatic features starring his wife, Norma Talmadge, and light comedies starring her sister, Constance. A young Buster Keaton was such a success supporting Arbuckle that Schenck gave him his own production unit upon Arbuckle’s departure to Paramount in late 1919.
Since 1920, UA had been trying to woo Schenck into the fold. The partners had always had a warm and fruitful relationship with him, and as an independent producer he shared many of their aspirations and challenges. Early in 1923, a brief skirmish occurred in the larger war of the two models: the studio system/factory model of film production versus the cottage industry/independent producer model. The battle lines were drawn over the effectiveness of Will Hays in his role as head of Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. The independents did not think him worth the money. Fairbanks led the charge in January 1923 with a statement: “Mr. Hays has nothing whatever to do with the art or morals of the motion picture industry. He is simply the hired intermediary or ‘fixer.’ He has done wonderful work in straightening out the censorship tangle, but that, and only that, is his function. . . . The public ought to be informed that ‘moral uplift’ was not his role.” Zukor and the large studio heads fell into line supporting Hays. Schenck joined the ranks of Fairbanks. The dust settled quickly on this scrap, but allegiances were defined.
Further, as a director of the Bank of Italy, a major source of financing to filmmakers in the 1920s, Schenck helped Pickford and Fairbanks that same year. A side venture, Associated Authors, established to provide content to UA, had stumbled and was under threat of loan foreclosure by the bank until Schenck stepped in. Thus it was perhaps inevitable, and certainly fortunate, that he would come to join
United Artists. The negotiations and announcement came in November 1924. Schenck was made chairman of the board and admitted as a full partner with a thousand shares. In return, he would deliver six Norma Talmadge films a year for UA to distribute, with the option to provide six more with other stars, on the condition that UA would provide half the financing. It was an extremely happy turn of events and likely saved the company.
But try as he might, Schenck could not save Griffith. Even before he took the helm, he tried, offering to secure loans to take the heat off the embattled director. But Griffith was getting business advice from his brother, Albert Grey. Of Grey, Griffith biographer Richard Schickel wrote: “Perhaps the younger man had an unconscious desire to wreck his brother’s career. Or maybe the captaincy of a derelict ship struck him as better than no captaincy at all. Or perhaps he was simply an idiot.” Many argue that Schickel’s third theory applies. The offer was rebuffed. Griffith’s Isn’t Life Wonderful and the Paramount-funded Sally of the Sawdust were distributed by UA. Then Griffith left the organization, his stock in escrow, the path of his downward spiral now irreversible.
He would not be the only founder to take this ride. Of the four, Chaplin was the most fortunate. Like Mary, he would retain his riches, but unlike her, he died surrounded by a loving family and with a reputation that was, after the furor of the 1950s, once again brightly burnished. Mary lived long—terribly long—as an alcoholic and a recluse. Douglas, loved by both, would take an intermediate path down the mountain of success, one not as humiliating as Griffith’s impoverished end as a washed-up has-been or as long and painfully sustained as the slow, dreadful demise of his beloved Mary. But down he was going to go.
He would not have believed this in the late autumn of 1924. Things at United Artists were turning around, and he had plans for his next film. Don Q, Son of Zorro was going to whip—literally, whip—things into shape.
* * *
*1. He settled for ermine, which she politely tried on but sent back to the furrier. No Peggy Hopkins Joyce, she.
*2. The spelling of Baghdad has, for the sake of consistency, been changed to match that used at the time of the film—Bagdad.
*3. Robert ultimately assumed the job long term.
*4. And Mary seemed to have no problem with Marguerite de la Motte, who reprised her role as Constance in The Iron Mask, although Fairbanks recast two of the three musketeers.
*5. Stills of Hartmann in the Indian costume remain and are often misidentified as representing him playing the court magician, the role that the final cast list claims for him—a misrepresentation that acknowledges his presence in the film without having to answer sticky questions about his departure.
*6. Raoul Walsh, of course, got his way. This is exactly how the sequence plays on film, and it is very effective. The town was reworked from the Nottingham set in Robin Hood.
*7. † Likely Charlie Stevens.
*8. Sôjin and other Japanese members of the cast suffered some frantic hours in late September when a major earthquake struck Tokyo. It took days to hear by cablegram if family and friends were safe.
*9. Three extraordinarily corpulent gentleman who appear to have tested for the role were instead used as eunuchs guarding the princess’s bedroom, to wonderful comic effect.
*10. Try though he might, the sixteen-year-old could not grow one for the part.
*11. Curiously, he and Lasky Sr. remained friends.
*12. Multiple references are made to this gentleman during this period, but none give him the dignity of identifying his last name.
*13. Other sources claim it was a quartet: Euretta Wolf Douglas, violin; Elizabeth Mason, violin; Berniece Neale, cello; and Ruth Chambers, piano.
*14. † Those of a certain generation will recall the song best as a Fritos jingle in the early 1970s: “Ay ay ay ay / I am the Frito Bandito . . .” The character, and the song, were withdrawn later in the decade on grounds of cultural insensitivity. On the flip side, the song was used to great emotional effect in 1943’s The Human Comedy.
*15. Perhaps the association of the bow and arrow incident and the roof of the Ritz was too painful.
*16. † Hiram Abrams negotiated brutally high rental fees with a requirement for upfront advances on both Thief and Robin Hood, causing many exhibitors to barely break even. Still, they booked the films, not wanting the competition down the street to get their hands on them.
*17. The king and queen of Spain, upon arriving in that city a few days before Doug and Mary, received a much lesser reception. It was reported—although impossible to prove—that this contrast was too painful to the royal egos, and the stars were asked to move on to a different city, which they promptly did.
*18. An anecdote that, for Fairbanks, never got old.
*19. The film ultimately returned $1 million to Griffith. Broken Blossoms is excluded from this discussion as while it was distributed by UA, it was originally produced under the 1917 contract he had with Paramount.
*20. Chaplin still would not have fulfilled the original 1919 nine-film requirement by the time of Fairbanks’s death in 1939. The partners had agreed to decrease the requirement for the number of films from Chaplin, as he had moved from two-reelers to features during this decade. But the fact remained that once releasing through UA, he moved to a “genius schedule,” making films at a glacial pace.
13
Buckling Down
* * *
NINETEEN TWENTY-FIVE WAS THE year that Douglas Fairbanks got back to work. Company coffers needed refilling, and United Artists required a turnaround. No small order. Still, it was a merry grindstone to which he returned, producing two major swashbucklers in a twelve-month period. One was a pioneering effort that saved the nascent Technicolor Corporation, the other a tremendous financial and critical success that is all but forgotten today.
Don Q, Son of Zorro, the forgotten blockbuster, was announced as a project in January 1925. It would combine his recent fascination with Spain with the surefire box office draw of his Zorro character. He had been toying with the idea of a sequel to Zorro as early as 1921, but each time the opportunity arose, he would instead elect a more novel idea. At that time sequels were largely unheard of—certainly for big-budget productions with major stars.*1 But the safety of a sequel—a concept Hollywood would ultimately come to embrace ad nauseam—seemed just the ticket. Thief was finally working its way to the smaller cities and towns as the year dawned, and it was becoming clear that the film’s rural returns were not going to match those of Robin Hood. “The Thief of Bagdad is one of the biggest things in the movies, but it is surprising to learn of the great number of people, especially in the small cities, who would have none of it,” wrote one Philadelphia columnist. “We of the big cities fail to take the likes and dislikes of the small cities and towns into consideration.”
Neither he nor Mary was going to repeat that oversight. Mary, having stretched herself with two adult-role costume dramas, Rosita and Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall, elected to return to young girl roles that year, filming Little Annie Rooney and Sparrows in succession. Doug’s return to Zorro reflected the same conservatism. They were artists, true, but also businesspeople, each an intelligent and thoughtful producer willing to invest and risk but, unlike Griffith, not to the point of ruin.
Fairbanks’s character in Don Q was, of course, not Zorro but his son. The film gave him an opportunity to play both parts on the screen, repeating Mary’s brilliant split screen work from Little Lord Fauntleroy and anticipating Valentino’s final film, 1926’s The Son of the Sheik.*2 The story was not Johnston McCulley’s but was derived from the pulp novel Don Q’s Love Story, written by one Hesketh Prichard, a British explorer and wartime sniper with a weakness for boys’ adventure fiction. The character of Zorro was simply shoehorned by Fairbanks into the plot as the hero’s American father. Fairbanks had a requirement that his films’ themes be simple enough to be summarized in a single sentence. For Don Q it was: “Truth crushed will rise again—if you have th
e yeast to make it rise.” Donald Crisp, a stalwart favorite in the industry as both an actor (Broken Blossoms) and a director (The Navigator), was chosen not only to play the film’s villain but also to direct. Nineteen-year-old Mary Astor, who had costarred with John Barrymore in 1924’s Beau Brummel, was tapped for the female lead. She was, to put it delicately, a young woman of sensual interests, then embroiled in a torrid affair with Barrymore. She found the happily married Fairbanks unsatisfactory on this front: “I looked forward to meeting this man who was something of a legend around Hollywood, but I found the man himself to be less exciting than the legends. For one thing, I was put out by his attitude toward me. He was nice to me, in the way a sophisticated man about town would be nice to a small and reasonably well-behaved child. I felt that I merited more attention than that!”
Still, she liked him. It was hard not to. “It was all fun for him,” she recalled near the end of her life. “He wasn’t an actor at all. To me, he was an effect; he was a wonderful effect.” She recalled particularly his intense training on the Australian bullwhip with expert Snowy Baker—six weeks of unceasing practice. “While I was making up in my dressing room . . . I could hear the repeated swishshshsh—SMACK of the whip,” she recalled. “He could soon do all the tricks with the bull whip, and he was boyishly proud of his accomplishment.” Proud, indeed. He would delight to show his hand calluses to anyone who would take the time to admire them.
The First King of Hollywood Page 38
