The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  Snowy was hired to wield the whip for the close-ups of shots like the one where a cigarette is detached from a surprised face, but Doug would always say, “Let me try, Snowy. Then if I can’t, you do the next take.”

  Feeling an impulse to show off one day, and wanting to please my “star,” I refused a “double” for a scene in which Doug was supposed to teasingly crack the whip and let it slither around the girl’s shoulders when she was not aware of his presence—a strictly Fairbanksian method of saying “BOO!” . . . Of course Mother objected, and there were conferences, and I insisted that I was not afraid; and Doug beamed and reminded us that it would be much more effective if we could get the whole sequence in one shot. Finally it was left up to me, and I said I wanted to do it. So I did. Two takes went uneventfully; the leather slid harmlessly around my shoulders, I was properly startled, and Doug leaped to untangle me. But Doug wanted “just one more”; it had to be perfect. And Doug miscalculated. After all, the whip was twenty feet long, and I don’t see how he ever did calculate. But this third time I heard the crack, and knew it was too close to my head, and then I felt a sharp burning pain as the whip lashed around my neck. Doug was incoherent in his remorse; doctors were fetched; there was a chaos of noise and confusion. Donald Crisp, the director who was also acting in the picture, suffered the same accident at Snowy Baker’s hands a few days later, and the edict went out, “From now on we stick to dummies.”

  Besides learning the whip, Fairbanks became the student of what was, for him, a new discipline: dance. Dance is something that few associate with silent film, but in truth the fusion of music and movement was very much a part of the medium. Dancing scenes were surprisingly common. Valentino’s tango in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse four years earlier had created a sensation. But Fairbanks was not—at least at this time—looking to generate any sexual energy with his dance. While he did a few tango steps,*3 most of the dancing scene was broken up by expository shots of action in the café or demonstrated the irrepressible Doug clicking his heels boyishly, hopping up on the table and dancing a solo jig, leaving his Latina partner to her own devices. It is of interest that this sequence was the very first to be shot for the film, suggesting the possibility that he just wanted to get it over with.

  Filming began on January 26 and was completed by late April—a brisker shooting schedule than any of his earlier swashbucklers. Even Donald Crisp’s broken foot midproduction (he was stepped on by a horse while filming the castle sequence) did not cause delay. They soldiered on, taking only close-ups and midshots and working back to the long shots later. Work on exteriors in the San Fernando Valley was delayed by a day when a nearby wildfire required all in the production to aid in extinguishing the flames. Still, it seemed that filming had scarcely begun before Doug was celebrating the production’s end, photographed sunnily wielding an oversize knife at a large cake sculpted to look like the head of a bull.

  His sense of urgency, his desire to turn around a quick hit, was understandable. The last thing he wanted was the perception that he was slipping. After all, pretenders to the throne were encroaching. Columnist Herbert Howe, who returned to Hollywood in 1925 after a long absence, noted some weather changes:

  For years the pioneers held the claims. Mary Pickford, Mabel Normand, Douglas Fairbanks, Chaplin. . . . This old order is rapidly fading, and the past year has seen the greatest shakedown. Mary Pickford now acknowledges that the crown has passed to Gloria Swanson. It’s the popular decree written in the indisputable letters of the box-office. Of the men, Harold Lloyd is the acknowledged champion. . . . Fairbanks has kept going only by the Herculean effort of endeavoring to make each picture better than the preceding. He has passed beyond close-ups, and he realizes that his place in the sun can be maintained only as a producer.

  Harsh words for a man who, in the winter of 1925, was forty-one years old and about to produce a film less lavish than his last. Small wonder, then, that interviews began to appear that claimed just the opposite. DON Q TO SURPASS THIEF OF BAGDAD, barked one headline, the article quoting Fairbanks: “From the standpoint of costly production, this picture is very apt to more than rival The Thief of Bagdad.” It was far from true. Don Q’s cost was $834,589*4—less than half that of Thief.

  Still, at the end of the day, such fibs were unnecessary. Everyone, audiences and critics alike, welcomed enthusiastically what they felt was a return to form. “Without doubt one of the best that Doug has had in some time from an all around entertainment and picture house standpoint,” wrote Variety. Photoplay added: “It is guaranteed to drive little boys into frenzies of stunts until they break an arm or a new fad comes along.”†*5The verdict was clear: while many saw much to admire in Thief, what they really wanted from Fairbanks was to enjoy him. The grand settings, the thousands of extras, the glorious costumes were all well and good. But Don Q, everyone seemed to feel, was just more fun. “If Don Q, Son of Zorro is not as good a picture and better than The Thief of Bagdad,” insisted one small-town critic, “Bull Montana is the queen of Siam.” The film returned $1,616,872 to Fairbanks’s production company’s coffers, independent of its return to UA. Only Robin Hood had a greater profit.

  And, indeed, the film is a lot of fun, draped though it is under a fairly heavy load of sets and costumes. But our boy was peeking out from underneath the finery, wooing the fair lass, whipping his whip, and in general raising sunny hell.*6 The film’s pace and pep went a far way toward squelching the “he’s getting too old for close-ups” argument. One reviewer, who had written, “As the years pass and age begins its inroads, Douglas Fairbanks becomes a little too strenuous at times for this admiring onlooker,” now rhapsodized, “Doug has never leaped so high, moved so quickly or kept in such constant motion so long before. The man isn’t human, that’s what he isn’t. He’s perpetual youth, a three-ringed circus, the personification of all juvenile heroes, all rolled into one. . . .”

  The film’s New York premiere broke precedent on two fronts. First, it took place in the summer. Historically, summer was the worst time to open a film; audiences did not want to sit in sweltering theaters in an era when few had air conditioning. But Don Q packed the house in the eight weeks it was at the Globe Theatre, which had no cooling plant. The run was intentionally short, with the general release date set for August 30. This was for the benefit of United Artists. The departure of Griffith and the arrival of Schenck changed the dynamic within the partnership. Members began acting for the good of the organization, not simply themselves, and the early handoff of what was to become his second-most-profitable film to date was a good faith gesture to the new leadership. But even this abridged Broadway run was agreed to only after what Variety deemed “a stiff fight.” After all, no Fairbanks film was going to go straight into general release.*7

  Further, Fairbanks did not attend the New York premiere. This was a significant break in pattern. It is easy to be lured into seeking meaning where it may not exist: his cycle of swashbuckler/Broadway premiere/trip to Europe was broken for the first time, one might assert, in the interests of getting more product out. And, one is tempted to argue, this also represented a power shift from East Coast to West. The Broadway premiere was becoming less the imprimatur denoting the legitimacy and importance of a film. Hollywood would serve just fine.

  Fairbanks had a different explanation. Mary was editing Little Annie Rooney, he claimed, and he was not going to leave her, declaring, “If I had five pictures opening there on the same night, I would not go without Mary.” But none of these explanations reflect the truth. In fact, there was a kidnapping plot afoot, and Mary was the intended victim.

  It was early May. Mary remembered being alone at Pickfair when Douglas called. Where was she? “Rowing down Hollywood Boulevard in a golden gondola,” she replied wryly.

  No, he insisted impatiently, his sense of the dramatic never failing him. This was important. “Call the butler and the gardener and tell them not to leave the house. Go immediately to your own room and lock the
door. Do you hear?”

  She obeyed, with no little curiosity. When she unlocked her door fifteen minutes later, it was not only to her husband but the chief of detectives, George Home. The police, through a combination of a helpful informant and some timely keyhole peeping,†*8had discovered a scheme. Kidnappers, dressed as conventioneering Shriners, were to waylay Mary’s car as she departed the studio. Counting on the transfer of their victim to look like general merrymaking, they would abduct her and hide her in a cabin in the mountains. They wanted a $200,000 ransom from Doug. They had considered nabbing little Jackie Coogan or the grandchildren of a local oil magnate or even Buster Keaton, but they settled on Pickford as the easiest to snatch. Yet an arrest could not be made, the detective asserted, until the kidnappers made their move.

  Thus began a tense two weeks. Mary had a bodyguard on the set, but in traveling to and from Pickfair, she needed to present the appearance that she was ripe for the picking. She drove in her two-seater Rolls-Royce (“the last word in daintiness”) and waited. Her film double, Crete Sykle, would don Mary’s hat and coat and drive periodically about town during the course of the workday in an attempt to lure the kidnappers to strike.

  One evening in late May, the couple began the drive home in the little Rolls, Fairbanks at the wheel. Mary noticed a convertible a few blocks back, storm windows up, suspicious faces peeking through the curtains. The car followed them as they moved north from Santa Monica Boulevard and proceeded west on Sunset. The Rolls, being of British make, had the driving wheel on the right side of the car. As they accelerated, the convertible did the same, pulling up to the right. Between Doug and Mary’s seats rested a sawed-off shotgun and a Colt .45. She recalled her husband’s voice as feverish. “If the shooting starts, Mary, drop to the floor of the car!” Pickford, being of a plucky bent herself, secretly resolved to do no such thing. She would grab that .45 if trouble came and get in a lick or two of her own.

  We were now doing all of eighty miles an hour. I kept telling Douglas not to get ahead of the other car, but he was frightfully excited, and evidently didn’t hear me. Douglas swerved sharply to the other side of Sunset Boulevard ahead of the convertible, and in so doing cut directly into the path of a shining brand-new Ford, set, like all other Fords of that period, high from the road. I saw it rock perilously from side to side, and for a moment I was sure it would capsize.

  He pulled into the driveway of the Beverly Hills Hotel, followed by the convertible, and leaped out of the still-rolling car. Mary recalled him as “bathed in perspiration and white as death.” Cocking the shotgun, he stood between their pursuers and Mary, shouting, “Throw up your hands!” The occupants did so. They were, however, the police. The kidnappers were in the Ford that had almost overturned.

  Enough was enough. “I will not subject my wife to any more of this danger,” he declared. Hollywood was a fiefdom, and the police were wise enough to know who ruled. The next day, when the kidnappers turned up outside the studio and planted themselves to watch and wait, the detective walked up to their car, peremptorily knocked the driver unconscious with the butt of his gun, and enquired politely of the others, “Will you take it the hard way or will you come quietly?” They went quietly. It was a different era.

  Justice came quickly. Fairbanks testified before a grand jury the following week, and conspiracy indictments quickly followed. The trial began on July 22, and he attended faithfully.*9 The first day he sat quietly with the prosecuting attorneys, assisting, when necessary, those ladies who required drinks at the nearby water cooler. The run on thirsty damsels drove him in following days to working in the judge’s chambers. When finally his turn came on July 29, he was on the stand for twenty-five minutes, testifying to having seen the defendants loitering near the studio grounds on several occasions.

  When the men were convicted and condemned to ten years to life at San Quentin, neither Fairbanks nor Pickford had any sympathy to give. “I think in sentencing them the law was lenient in the extreme,” Mary wrote a quarter century later. “The public has no idea of the things that we and others were subjected to before those men were arrested,” Fairbanks told reporters the day of the conviction. “I am anxious to have an example made of this case.”

  It wasn’t simply the fear he had felt for her safety. When reports of the plot first came out, some cynics claimed that the story was nothing more than a publicity stunt. It took denials from the police department, the stars, and even the Shriners*10 to overcome this skepticism. By the time the perpetrators were sentenced, reporters were obliged to acknowledge that the couple’s vindication was on more than one front.

  This episode was not their first brush with the criminal element, nor would it be their last. Eighteen months earlier, in the final months of production of Thief of Bagdad, Fairbanks received several threatening letters from a man who had been turned away from work at the studio. Harry Dunlap was the disgruntled job seeker, an ex-convict now wanted for stopping automobiles by the ruse of a police badge, raping the female occupants, and then robbing and sometimes killing the men.

  Doug took to toting a sawed-off shotgun (very likely the same one he carried in the Rolls) and offered a reward for the “Badge Bandit.” By January 1924, he and Mary were accompanied everywhere by armed guards. The criminal was traced to Beverly Glen but eluded the local posse.†*11Ultimately he was captured in Detroit and returned to Los Angeles, where he received a 214-year sentence. Two murders and thirty-seven rapes suggested that Fairbanks’s attachment to his shotgun was not unreasonable. “Mary and I have decided that we are the target for all the nuts who come to Los Angeles,” he said, and stepped up the security at the studio and Pickfair.

  But even home was not safe, as they were to learn four months after the kidnapping scheme. On the morning of September 25, Tony Vanera, the Pickfair night watchman, came across two men attempting to pick the lock on the front door. Vanera, a former immigration agent who went by the nickname “Black Tony,” was armed. A shot—either very skilled or very lucky—took the flashlight from his hand and bullets began to fly. It was later estimated that twenty-five rounds were exchanged. Doug, gripping his .45 revolver, emerged on the scene through a window—demonstrating that what he lacked in prudence, he made up for in dumb physical courage. He and the watchmen chased the two men, who eluded them by virtue of a getaway car and driver. Vanera was confident that he wounded at least one of them; a blood trail was found on the lawn. Doug’s contribution to the kerfuffle was to almost shoot Mary’s little Airedale Zorro, who was hiding in the bushes.*12

  Nothing was lost in the episode, except more of the dimming innocence of the early days of Hollywood. Fame now began to require isolation. Stars retreated to their homes and double-locked the doors.

  Not that home was such a bad place to be, as Fairbanks discovered one morning that year when he popped out for his morning swim. There, on the bottom of his pool, was a strange round container. He dove in to investigate and discovered an aquarium cum miniature pirate city. It was then that he recalled the date: May 23. Upon emerging, he noticed new lawn furniture, pirate’s heads custom-carved into the arms. His birthday surprises from Mary were not over. When he arrived at the studio, he was met by an eight-foot-tall pirate crafted of wooden planks, accompanied by a set of throwing knives.

  She had misjudged when, in Christmas 1922, she gave him a model galleon, but this time she was on target. He was finally going to make the pirate film. What’s more, he was going to cross another frontier. He was going to make it in color.

  Fairbanks’s encounters and uses of color photography did not, of course, begin with The Black Pirate. After all, his first film appearance was in a Kinemacolor actuality in 1913. Kinemacolor was the first truly photographic color process. All earlier color had been rendered on film by way of stencils, tinting, and toning, all labor intensive—particularly the stencil process, which required work on portions of each frame of film. The Kinemacolor process used alternating frames of green and red, which were then
projected through a rotating color filter onto a custom “color fixed” screen. But Kinemacolor was not the ultimate color solution. The images flickered to the point that the audience could endure only short viewing sessions. Eyestrain became associated with color film and would haunt its reputation for the next fifteen years and more.

  Fairbanks’s films up to this point were not truly black and white. Almost no films were. Feature films were “tinted,” which is to say the developed film was washed in chemical baths to give overall colors to different scenes. Nighttime scenes were typically tinted blue, outdoor daytime scenes were soft yellow, and fire sequences were often red.

  A later, more sophisticated technique that came in use around this time was one developed by an engraver, who would, in the words of Technicolor historian Fred Basten, “etch, print or hand block a ‘register print’ of the portion of the film selected for color treatment.” A color plate would be created, much as color plates were created for use in the stone lithographic printing of posters. Because of the expense and the labor involved, this process only worked for short, relatively static portions of films. It was used in Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance and in DeMille’s Joan the Woman. Fairbanks reportedly employed it for a sequence in The Three Musketeers.*13

  Then came Technicolor. Herbert Thomas Kalmus was only thirty-three years old when he founded the fledgling Technicolor Corporation in 1915, but he already had degrees in physics and chemistry from MIT and a doctorate from the University of Zurich. He was methodical, organized, unusually deft at business for a scientist, and doggedly persistent. Working with a small team, initially out of an old rail car that served as a laboratory, he had—after some fits and starts—devised a two-color process that did not require special projection equipment. The colors captured were reds and greens, each recorded by a camera that would split the optic beam, permitting separate exposures of each color to register onto separate filmstrips. In 1922, the company invested in its first full-length demonstration film.*14 Filmed in Hollywood, Toll of the Sea was made with the cooperation of Joseph Schenck, who lent Kalmus the production facilities, cameraman, director, and actors.†*15The lead actress was the then-unknown Anna May Wong.