The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  Toll of the Sea succeeded, and the two-color process began showing up in short sequences in such major films as Ben-Hur, The Phantom of the Opera, and The Merry Widow. Jesse Lasky had given it a full-length try in 1924 with the western Wanderer of the Wasteland, now lost. The film made no particular impression, either critically or financially. Technicolor was stalled. It was, in the words of Basten, “a puzzling situation. Hollywood was churning out hundreds of films, but few producers were willing to take a chance with color.” What Technicolor needed, Kalmus felt, was a major personality with sufficient gravitas and reputation to endorse the process. “The fact remained,” Basten wrote, “Technicolor needed a star.”

  Enter Doug.

  Fairbanks was all Kalmus could have hoped for: innovative, fearless, and deep pocketed. After rejecting color for Thief, and not even considering it for Don Q, Douglas Fairbanks had at long last decided to make his pirate picture. And, to his mind, it had to be in color.

  Preproduction work on The Black Pirate began in May. Much of the effort was directed toward Technicolor tests. The challenge was, reportedly, “to take the color out of color.” He did not wish to replicate the effect of Toll of the Sea, which had been filmed to demonstrate the extreme potential of the color process. The film was ripe with plummy reds and jelly bean greens. In Fairbanks’s mind, the color needed to supplement but never distract. If more attention were paid to the effect than the narrative, it would be no more than an expensive novelty. Fairbanks was to later claim that his first response to the idea of color was to think, would you rouge the lips of the Venus de Milo? But then he had a second thought: What was it about color—apart from the early challenges associated with the flickering—that made him leap to that conclusion? And could that phenomenon, once identified, be reversed? “We were afraid that the public might at first be more intrigued by the colors than by the story itself,” he said. “So we decided to practice restraint.”

  They elected to model the film’s coloring on the paintings of the old masters—Rembrandt, in particular. Either out of aesthetics or necessity (Technicolor could not capture blues or yellows), they elected to use a color palate of greens and browns. The task was not simple. Six months of tests were conducted. Dual sets of costumes had to be made, as it was discovered that they photographed differently under artificial lights versus outdoor sets. Even outdoor shooting required supplemental lights to capture colors at the levels desired. Fairbanks had always been bedeviled by a heavy growth of beard—requiring shaves twice a day and occasionally three times during prolonged shoots—and now whenever a five o’clock shadow threatened, his lower face would photograph green. Extra red powder was added to his beard area to neutralize this effect.

  This principle did not just apply to Fairbanks’s beard. Any item would be dyed or otherwise colored so that it came out the proper color on the two-strip Technicolor film, as opposed to the color that it demonstrated to the naked eye. Their efforts paid off: the film had a muted, lovely palate that did not compete with the story. The occasional flash of bright red (as in a bloody sword in the film’s opening sequence) served the narrative function rather than competing with it.

  Casting the film had none of the challenges associated with The Thief of Bagdad. Interested in the possibilities of color as early as 1923, Doug had screened both available color features as soon as he could. Toll of the Sea is the film that brought lovely Anna May Wong to his attention; Wanderer of the Wasteland introduced him to Billie Dove. Dove was a Ziegfeld Follies beauty who had appeared earlier in the year with his son in Paramount’s The Air Mail. Her coloring, he felt, was perfect. She recalled being offered the role by Fairbanks over the phone, without even a screen test.*16

  The George Eastman House has in its archives a lovely and fortuitous piece of film: color footage of Mary Pickford, wearing Billie Dove’s costume and wig. Pickford replaced Dove in one of the final shots of the film, when the hero kisses the heroine. What was an inside joke to the production company—Doug plants a very enthusiastic kiss on the princess, a rare sight in a Fairbanks film—provides succeeding generations the pleasure of seeing Mary Pickford in color in 1925.†*17

  The most engaging part of the casting process, for Fairbanks, at least, was finding the background players to play the crew of the pirate ship. Here was an opportunity to dip into the deep pool of his friendships with boxers, athletes, and grizzled cowhands. Jack Dempsey’s former sparring partner, Jimmy Dime, was among those hired, as well as a boxer named Bob Roper, proud possessor of a broken nose, cauliflower ear, and permanently split lip. “Stubby” Kruger, a member of the 1920 Olympic swim team, joined Fairbanks’s constant trainer and companion, Chuck Lewis, as a pirate. Broncobuster George Holt was hired because his bowed legs suggested scurvy. Fairbanks himself cornered a traffic cop at Santa Monica and Fairfax whom he felt possessed a suitably piratical air, recruiting him to join the motley crew.

  Donald Crisp played a sympathetic one-armed pirate in the production but did not direct. This task was assigned to Albert Parker,*18 the villain from American Aristocracy and director of The Knickerbocker Buckaroo and Arizona. Parker, who had known Fairbanks since his Gentleman from Mississippi days, was the definition of a company man—and a staunch admirer. “You don’t know—nobody can know, without working with him—how he is loved and admired by the people he gathers around him,” he told a columnist the following year. “You don’t know the power he has developed by which he can get the best that a group of experts have to give, and yet be able to weld their efforts into a splendid unity which has his own, personal stamp on it. . . . He gets the best work out of people by telling them the result he wants, and then letting them work it out, in their own way.”

  Donald Crisp would later assert that he had been the original director of The Black Pirate but had been replaced by Parker when he and Fairbanks had a falling out. One scholar argues that Fairbanks’s annoyance with Crisp for casting Doug Jr. in Man Bait might have been the source of the change at the helm. There are two problems here. First, Crisp was never at the helm. Albert Parker was identified early in the press as the film’s director and was documented to be in preproduction meetings as early as July 1925. Second, Man Bait could not have been the cause of any staffing change. Junior was cast by Crisp in Man Bait late in 1926, more than a year after preproduction began on The Black Pirate.†*19

  Crisp himself claims that the falling out was over who would do the most famous stunt in the film (and, some argue, in Fairbanks’s career). This is the knife-in-the-sail slide, in which our hero travels from the main topsail yardarm to the main yardarm by means of plunging a dagger into the topsail and slicing his way down. He then repeats the exercise with the mainsail, disabling the ship. Historian Booton Herndon muddies the historical waters in reviewing this stunt, quoting Donald Crisp’s suggestion that it was Chuck Lewis, not Fairbanks, wielding the blade and sliding down the sail.

  This merits discussion. Crisp appears to have developed a Frances Marion–level distaste for Fairbanks late in his life: “He was always striving to be something he was not,” he groused to Herndon. “He would have killed himself showing off.” Crisp had distinct recollections of working with Chuck Lewis on the stunt, running a wire through a plaster cast on his knife arm and chest and pulling him down through the canvas with a wire. Child actor Robert Parrish claimed that Fairbanks showed him the device during filming of The Iron Mask—a baseball bat in lieu of the knife, operated by a pulley behind the sail. Kevin Brownlow in subsequent years deciphered the mechanism of the stunt: the sail was angled at forty-five degrees, with the camera tipped in parallel, to give the illusion that the sail and mast were fully upright. The fabric had been pretorn and loosely stitched together. A counterweight rose as gravity pulled Fairbanks down, thus controlling his rate of descent.

  It is likely that all accounts are correct. Trial and error was a significant part of designing the stunt, and many mechanisms—plaster, wire, pulleys, baseball bats—were likely tried. Simi
larly, much as Richard Talmadge would help Fairbanks design stunts in the early 1920s, Chuck Lewis helped Fairbanks now. “We had a place on the lot where we tried out all these things,” he told Herndon fifty years later. “I did it, Charlie Stevens did it, Doug did it, everybody did it.” Outtake footage shows repeated takes of Fairbanks performing the stunt. And the form sliding down those sails in the final print of the film is also Fairbanks. The cervical kyphosis that causes his neck to jut forward at an anterior angle is distinctly recognizable to the clinical eye.

  Crisp may have resented Fairbanks in later years; certainly in 1925 he had just cause to feel jinxed in working with him. Barely recovered from Don Q’s whip burn and foot fracture, he proceeded to dislocate a finger filming The Black Pirate. He was hardly alone in his misfortune. Production manager Ted Reed broke his leg when he fell down a ship’s hold, and Anders Randolf, who shaved his head for the role of the evil pirate captain, suffered both sunstroke and a blistering scalp burn after his first day’s filming. Fairbanks himself separated a rib from his sternum in early October while lifting Billie Dove to the roof of the ship’s cabin. He also experienced an accidental slice to his arm shooting a fight sequence with Randolf and received another gash perilously close to his left eye while filming with fencing master Fred Cavens (who stood in for his opponents in over-the-shoulder shots). Outtakes reveal Doug scowling in annoyance at the first injury;*20 for the second, however, he had an audience. Sailors from the HMS Capetown and HMS Patrician were studio guests, and upon the scene being halted, he turned to the visitors and cheerfully exclaimed, “Pirates always were a bloody lot.” The public Doug never scowled.

  While preproduction lasted six months, filming took only nine weeks, five of which were devoted to exteriors. Fairbanks purchased and had restored an 1877 clipper ship, the Llewellyn J. Morse, to house the cast and crew by night and double for one of the film’s ships by day.†*21The Morse wasn’t the only ship in the shoot—a reproduction Spanish galleon was built, as well as a one-hundred-foot-long galley (this latter being Doug’s “particular brain child”).‡*22Mary came along for three weeks of the location shooting—the location in this instance being twenty-five miles off the coast of Catalina Island. They declined the offer of the use of a yacht (likely Joseph Schenck’s), instead taking up quarters in a cabin constructed especially for them on the Morse. Two tugboats served as supply ships from the shore, and speedboats carried actors and directorial commands from ship to ship. Evenings and lunch breaks were spent enjoying boxing and wrestling matches conducted between members of the pirate crew. They returned in time for the company to spend Christmas Eve with their families.

  Doug and Mary had each produced two features that year and survived a kidnapping scare. As far as Fairbanks was concerned, they had earned a holiday. Mary hoped to start yet another film but saw the writing on the wall. “Right here at Christmas time I am going to begin a new picture and Douglas will have nothing to do; and I will have this big boy of mine on my hands, with nothing to do—wanting me to play with him all the time,” she said. She would rather have remained in California; she hated travel. “I love my home, and I really want to stay in it,” she admitted. “But of course I want more than anything else to please my husband.”

  And so Doug’s wishes prevailed. They leased their studio to Joseph Schenck for the upcoming year and scheduled $2.5 million in improvements to be made during their absence. Norma and Constance Talmadge moved into Mary’s bungalow, and Schenck himself took over Doug’s quarters.*23 The couple would spend a year abroad, they announced. Perhaps two. They would travel through Europe, Russia, Siberia, and possibly the Far East, perhaps even making a film together. They would depart, they declared, on February 2, accompanied by Robert and his family, Charlotte, little Gwynne, and their usual retinue of retainers.

  But then came the first cloud on the horizon.

  Charlotte was ill. A tumor in her breast had been discovered. Mary, in the mode of the firstborn child who assumed responsibility for all, blamed herself. Her mother had been looking for black fabric for a mourning dress for Mary’s character in Little Annie Rooney. The trunk lid fell on her, striking her breast. In fact, this was a serendipitous accident that caused her mother to discover the mass, but in the 1920s, there was a prevalent folk belief that trauma could cause a tumor. Charlotte kept the news largely to herself throughout 1925, resisting the advice of physicians to have the lesion removed. Finally, shortly after Christmas, she consented to an operation. Doug and Mary delayed their trip.

  Fairbanks occupied himself playing host to the adult children of Lord Asquith—Elizabeth, now Princess Bibesco, and Anthony, soon to become a film director of considerable visual power. The princess briefly made headlines when she fell from a horse while riding on the Pickfair grounds. No one seemed surprised. Doug and Mary were always entertaining minor royalty, it seemed. It was remarkable that more of them hadn’t fallen off horses or into the swimming pool by sheer force of bumping into each other.

  Pickfair had, by this time, assumed a character and status of its own. An invitation there was more prized in some circles than a summons to the White House. Mr. and Mrs. Fairbanks were excluded from Southern California’s social register, true, but it scarcely mattered. They made blue books irrelevant. Theirs was the hardest invitation in town to get. Fairbanks remained a cheerfully unrepentant snob about hobnobbing with the rich and famous. They needn’t even be dukes or princes—in keeping with the new century, he recognized the ability of fame and fortune to drape upon those lucky few the mantle of de facto royalty. He and his wife, after all, constituted one of the best examples of this phenomenon in the new century—this postwar century, where democratic values and the power of a meritocracy began to outweigh those of the aristocracy. He would be seen playing tennis with a Vanderbilt or dining at the Park Avenue apartment of Condé Nast as often as he was pictured with a Lord Mountbatten or the Prince of Wales. “He drew successful people to him wherever he went,” Mary recalled. “In fact he almost seemed to be collecting them.” But much as he relished his time with Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, and other members of the meritocracy, he harbored a special soft spot for royalty.

  Between her procrastination and surgeon’s squabbles, Charlotte’s surgery did not take place until late February 1926. Fairbanks stayed by her side during the procedure (sterility practices being, evidently, looser in those days), while Mary paced outside the operating theater. When, in the first week of March, the patient was declared to be out of danger, he could wait no longer. He and Mary departed for New York, arriving just in time to attend the premiere of The Black Pirate.

  The film was another triumph. Columnist Karl Kitchen declared, “The Black Pirate is everything one has come to expect from a new Fairbanks picture. In addition it is the most beautiful photoplay that has yet been made. This briefly sums up the consensus of opinion regarding this new picture, which came to the Selwyn theater last Monday night.”

  “Up to now, the Technicolor process has never been particularly successful, due to its insistence on the more violent reds, oranges, yellows and greens,” wrote Life critic Robert Sherwood. “The Black Pirate marks a definite advance in the development of this new movie medium. Its tints are deliberately subdued, so that the most brilliant color in the entire film is the glowing bronze on Doug’s well tanned skin.” Another critic summed up the color experiment with a succinct headline: DOUG GETS AWAY WITH IT.

  The normally reserved critic from the London Times perhaps said it best: “He can have nothing of boyhood surviving in him who has no pleasure in The Black Pirate.” For color or no, a film still lived or died by its story, settings, and performances. And here the film also excelled. The Black Pirate enjoyed a tight story that contained every archetype of pirate tales without an overly complex plot. Only seventy-eight intertitles were required to tell the story.*24 But this was part of the film’s strength. It was a fable, pure and simple, a Howard Pyle–inspired tale of buried treasure chests and heroes fo
rced to walk the plank. It was, perhaps, Doug’s last truly joyous production.

  Before leaving the country, Fairbanks and Pickford attended an event at Madison Square Garden. Mary (along with forty-eight other professionals) was elected an honorary member of the American Women’s Association. Speaking to the assembly, she acknowledged that she was indeed a businesswoman and a professional. Still, she managed to straddle the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by suggesting that her husband also be inducted, as she “never went anywhere without him.”

  At this, Doug was thrust before the crowd of twelve thousand women and induced to say a few words. He tugged nervously on his mustache at the prospect but managed to rally. “I am married to an organization, you know,” he acknowledged modestly. “But when I married I insisted on retaining my maiden name.” This served to charm one and all. He was elected the group’s sole male member.

  They departed for Italy in early April on the Conte Biancamano. Charlotte, unwell from her cross-country train trip, had to be carried aboard. Mary, worried her thirty-four years would show, was reluctant to pose for the newsreel photographers. “Sunlight in films makes one look so old,” she lamented. She had no such complaints upon their arrival in Genoa, where both posed for the cameras wearing the colors of Italy’s flag in their buttonholes. The usual crush of the crowds blocked their automobile, and police were required to get them from the port. They attended the premiere of Little Annie Rooney in Rome and decided that Italy had improved under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. “We met Mussolini at every corner,” Mary said. “Not personally—I mean we encountered evidences of the extraordinary changes he had wrought in Italy. . . . Everywhere we went we were made to realize the tremendous force for good this comparatively young man of 43 years of age had become.” Fascism was not yet a bad word to the politically naive. Many—Doug and Mary among them—were impressed simply because the trains ran on time. “I would like to see the Prime Minister Mussolini,” Fairbanks said, when asked, apparently unaware that his title had already been changed to “Dictator”: “I would like to express the changes I’ve found in Italy’s national progress. The people are full of American ‘pep’!” They were photographed, gracious guests always, giving the fascist salute.