The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  Here was the flip side of fame’s virtues, if, indeed, fame has virtues. Talent and charisma did not necessarily come with wisdom or mature political judgment, yet the opinions of celebrities on matters of governance were sought by an avid press. Mary would harden in her conservatism, praising fascism and Mussolini even into the late 1930s. Fairbanks gave it far less thought. He was simply drawn, as the proverbial moth, to fame. The inherent contradictions in admiring Benito Mussolini as he did Teddy Roosevelt never occurred to him. He was intelligent but neither literate nor prone to careful thought on issues outside his immediate sphere. He recognized the many responsibilities that came with fame (no one was a more sober corporate citizen than he), but speaking out on political issues of which he knew little was a serious omission in judgment—one repeated by celebrities ever since.

  They met Mussolini—Il Duce gave them a thirty-minute audience—and Mary was suitably cowed, hiding her autograph book behind her back and later declaring him the most interesting person she met on their trip. Doug was more generic in his praise: “He’s a great man and we had a most delightful visit with him.” One wit, at least, saw the event for what it was worth: “When Douglas Fairbanks met Premier Mussolini, it was not exactly two Greeks getting together, but just the same they both know their publicity onions.”

  They better served the interests of their nation in Germany, where they attended the Berlin premiere of Little Annie Rooney. The orchestra played “The Star-Spangled Banner” for the first time since the war’s end, and the German audience stood and applauded. “Tonight I am not Douglas Fairbanks,” he told the cheering crowd. “I am Herr Pickford.”

  Things were stickier in Spain. There was general objection, it seemed, to the fact that the villain in Don Q was a Spaniard. Of course, all the characters in the film (the hero excepted) were Spaniards, but this did not seem to matter. Neither did the fact that no one in Spain had seen the film yet. The artists, the government declared, “surely had no intention of slandering the Spanish people by means of exaggerations and buffoonery, but merely displayed bad taste in a desire to bring out the picturesqueness of Spain.”

  Still, they somehow survived this diplomatic crisis (Mary helpfully pointed out that the film was very popular in Italy, due to the fact that the main character wore a black shirt, just as did the fascisti) and moved on to Paris. An automobile tour through Great Britain followed; then it was back to Berlin, and to Warsaw, as the entry point to a long-anticipated visit to Russia.

  To visit Russia in the 1920s constituted a major event. American films were wildly popular there, albeit heavily edited. Any reference to or depiction of wealth was either entirely cut or retitled to fit the “worker versus parasite” theme the government espoused. Gloria Swanson, she of the designer gowns and DeMille glitz, was scarcely known in the country. Doug, however, was—in the words of a foreign correspondent—“nothing short of a national hero.” The Thief of Bagdad was a phenomenon. Motorcyclists raced across Moscow, shuttling the reels back and forth so a single print could run simultaneously in multiple theaters. Critic Alexander Wolcott wrote, “At last accounts, the movies taken under the auspices of the Soviet Government were unfolded nightly to empty benches but it was hard to buy seats, even in the eighteenth month, for The Thief of Bagdad.” Both Doug and Mary had the Soviet government stamp of approval. “He typifies not only physical prowess but a type of joyous abandon which they like their people to see,” wrote one scribe. Mary, of course, typically played poor, plucky youngsters, often in rags—in perfect keeping with the Soviet proletariat.

  Still, there was some degree of trepidation. Mary recalled that two mysterious men came to Warsaw to warn them that the trip was too dangerous to undertake. Fairbanks, with his characteristic mix of the pragmatic and the dramatic, made arrangements with Floyd Gibbons, the Chicago Tribune’s war correspondent, to stage a rescue mission by air if the couple had failed to return by a certain date and time.

  His worries turned out to be unfounded. They were treated, literally, as royalty. Upon reaching the Russian border, they were removed from the Polish train and transferred to a car on the wider-gauge Russian tracks. It was the private coach of the late czar and czarina. The mob that awaited them when they reached Moscow the following morning was estimated to have been over a hundred thousand people. As Mary was strong-armed through the crowd by a pair of bureaucrats, Doug singlehandedly tried to push his way through the throng behind them. The officials passed through the wooden gate of a government building just in time for the doors to slam shut on Doug. Frantic, he scaled the gate (likely to the delight of the crowd) and made a blind leap over the top, landing directly into a car full of flowers and strawberries. It made for a good story after the fact, but at the time it was a harrowing experience.

  In Russia, they got to meet young Sergei Eisenstein, whose Battleship Potemkin they had just seen in Berlin. Fairbanks had been dazzled by his work and actively promoted the film upon his return to the States. “The finest pictures I have seen in my life were made in Russia,” he declared. “They are far in advance of the rest of the world.” He arranged for the picture to be screened for critics and the press and relentlessly promoted the young director. “I used to think I knew something about movement in the films,” he said. “I used to think I knew a lot about conveying emotion through movement. But when I saw Eisenstein’s work, I realized I hadn’t begun to learn.” He announced that Eisenstein had been signed to direct a film for United Artists.

  It was not his first foray into adopting artists. In 1925 Charlie Chaplin was taken with the fledgling effort of a young Josef von Sternberg; he convinced Fairbanks to buy a quarter interest in The Salvation Hunters and distribute it through United Artists. Fairbanks, a purveyor of the joyous and light, had an honest appreciation for those whose work he thought reflected a deeper form of art. In the case of the lugubrious Salvation Hunters, he saw what the industry as a whole would not recognize for another half decade—the visual genius of von Sternberg. In the case of Eisenstein, of course, it was the brilliant editing of the Odessa steps sequence: the mis en scène and the visual montage—terms that would very soon become common currency in cinema studies, a field that he would help pioneer a few years later with the founding of the first bachelor’s program in film studies at the University of Southern California. Both von Sternberg and Eisenstein would become the staple of film curriculums.

  There is irony here. The life and career of Douglas Fairbanks is a topic that is never taught in film schools. There is no hesitation to cover the somber and the dramatic, and no one begrudges the hours that are devoted in some quarters to Biograph’s 1909 short A Corner in Wheat. The past fifty years have even seen academic respectability conferred on the world of slapstick; there is no lack of literature on the existential meaning of Buster Keaton or the anticapitalistic impulses of Chaplin’s Tramp. But academics ignore Fairbanks. One can make an argument of elitism. Using the universe of literary criticism as a parallel, it would be as if critics were devoted to deconstructing Ulysses while ignoring Twain or Dickens. There is something too popular about Fairbanks, too appealing to the multitudes.

  Certainly the Russian populace knew which films they preferred. Potemkin made no impression on the Soviet masses, but Doug and Mary did. In fact, newsreel footage of their visit, combined with a shot of Mary kissing a young comedian, was woven into a Russian film released under the title A Kiss from Mary Pickford. The second half of the story dealt with the consequences of the kiss—the hero is pursued everywhere by people wanting to see the lipstick on his cheek. But the first half told the tale of the hero as a humble movie usher whose sweetheart, like every other woman in Russia, was mad for Douglas Fairbanks. Portions of The Mark of Zorro were included in the film, as was a sequence where the hapless hero attempts to replicate Fairbanks’s insouciant pose on the film’s poster. The Russian newsreel footage of Doug and Mary documents Fairbanks, tanned as black as he ever would be, wearing a native headdress, drinking coffee,
running, jumping, and posing up in a tree, looking, as always, as if he is having the time of his life.

  Mary was enjoying things far less. The strain of travel was wearing her down. Her husband would eat eyeball of yak with gusto; she could hardly choke down an aged saltine. He offered little consolation. “If you are taken ill in a foreign country, the best way to get well is to eat the same sort of food the natives of that particular land do,” he lectured. “You’ll keep your liver right—and consequently your disposition.” Her liver must not have been right; nervous exhaustion drove her to stay in their room at the Metropole while he toured the Kremlin. He finally had to find a translator to ask the mobs outside their window to please be quiet, as “Marushka” needed rest. The crowd applauded silently, by bringing their hands together without touching, and tiptoed away.

  His head was still swimming with the glories of Russian cinema when they arrived back in the States in late August. His impulsiveness extended to his tongue: “In Russia, the moving picture is controlled by the government, which is a good thing. The plan could be followed in the United States, and would mean that we would have good pictures to educate our children,” he said—odd words from a man who had been a vigorous opponent of censorship boards. These comments, foolish and impetuous, were received with all the merit they deserved. “Does Mr. Fairbanks hold the opinion that the United States government is equipped in any sense of the word to design or advance or regulate or in any manner supervise any art product, or that it ever will be so equipped?” wrote one editorialist. “Doesn’t he know that the government is no more qualified to control the movies than it is to control the theater? . . . Mr. Fairbanks was either seeking publicity, which he does not need; or he was heralding his retirement, which is not to be believed; or he was just talking, which is the only plausible explanation. A man making several hundred thousand dollars a year can’t believe in Sovietism or Bolshevism.”

  Fortunately for Fairbanks, his comments were lost in the general hullabaloo over the death of Rudolph Valentino at age thirty-one, which occurred while they were en route home. They said all the proper things at the time—Fairbanks even served as an honorary pallbearer. But Mary later recalled Valentino as yet another source of her husband’s ungovernable jealousy. “One day Rudolph Valentino made an unexpected appearance on the Pickfair lawn, which, in the warm months, was our outdoor living room,” she wrote. “I never saw Douglas act so fast, and with such painful rudeness, as he did in showing Valentino that he wasn’t welcome.”

  Valentino’s untimely demise did affect their travel plans. They canceled their trip to the Far East and settled in to provide more product for United Artists.

  Multiple efforts had been made to add more producers to the core group at UA. Negotiations with Cecil B. DeMille stalled early in 1925, but in March of that year they finally lured William S. Hart into the fold. This, unfortunately, was late in the arc of the fabled cowboy’s career. The flashy Tom Mix films had replaced the authentic westerns of Hart, and Tumbleweeds, his swan song, did indifferent business.*25 Schenck signed John Barrymore, and he even conferred with Erich von Stroheim, whose terms were so onerous that Schenck broke off negotiations. Of more consequence was the affiliation with Samuel Goldwyn, the independent producer of fine taste and irascible temperament.

  It was Goldwyn, working behind the scenes, who scuttled Joseph Schenck’s next plan: a merger of the distribution arm of MGM with UA. This would increase the distribution volume to UA by a robust fifty films a year and would wipe out the company’s current debt. Even better, the merged entity would be able to charge distribution fees of 35 percent. From a business standpoint, it was brilliant. “It is almost certain to go through,” Fairbanks stated. “They have said what they wanted and we have said what we wanted. I believe the agreement can be reached, and within a few days.”

  He did not count on Samuel Goldwyn getting Charlie Chaplin’s ear. UA historian Tino Balio argues that Goldwyn feared losing preferential treatment if films to distribute were plentiful, and he worked his influence on Chaplin, who, in turn, went public with vehement objections. To sign such a deal, Chaplin claimed, would be to form a trust—the very thing that UA was founded to prevent.†*26

  The deal could have gone ahead without his vote. But at the inception of the company, the four partners had agreed that all major decisions would be unanimous. This incident caused the first—and probably only—strain in the friendship between Fairbanks and Chaplin. Doug, according to Balio, was livid and called Charlie a “kicker.” Charlie returned fire by calling him nothing but a “jumper.”

  But they seemed to have gotten over it quickly. Nothing could really break the friendship between these two. Chaplin never required an invitation to Pickfair, where he stayed so long and so often that he had his own assigned bedroom. “He was always welcome to come and play with us, and we were just as happy to have him as he was to be with us,” Mary recalled. “The two of them would romp all over Pickfair like ten-year-olds. I couldn’t count the number of times I stayed behind to entertain one or another of Charlie’s wives, while they would go wandering up and down the surrounding hills.”

  And Fairbanks would never, ever be anything less than a lifelong cheerleader and booster for his best friend. Chaplin cameraman Roland Totheroh recalled for Chaplin biographer David Robinson:

  Charlie was always so proud when he was building a set. We had the lousiest looking sets I ever saw, a side wall and a back wall. He’d build something with a little balcony or something and he’d get ahold of Doug Fairbanks or somebody and say, “I want you to see this set I’m building.” . . . Fairbanks had the most spectacular sets of anybody. And Doug used to say, “Oh, gee, that’s swell Charlie.” He always wanted to encourage Charlie in whatever he did.

  Mary, on the other hand, was less inclined to forgive and forget. She recalled arguing with Chaplin: “But Charlie, you know Schenck is a good businessman.” “I’m as good a businessman as anybody else!” was the retort. Her conclusion: “Of course poor Charlie was no businessman at all.”

  Very soon—a matter of less than a few weeks, actually—none of this would seem important. Fairbanks was about to enter a dark period in his life. The single cloud on the horizon had been joined now by others, and they were about to merge.

  * * *

  *1. An exception might be the Tarzan films with Elmo Lincoln.

  *2. Valentino signed a three-picture deal with United Artists early into the filming of Don Q but lived long enough to make only two. Later accounts claim the contracted number was five films.

  *3. It was reported that he took tango lessons for four weeks.

  *4. This figure is “all in,” representing production costs as well as negative and print costs, publicity, and contingent commissions.

  *5. † A young Marion Morrison, later John Wayne, was among the juvenile set who worshipped Fairbanks. He tried to emulate him by jumping out a second-story window, clinging to a grapevine. “I ruined a beautiful grape arbor,” Wayne biographer Scott Eyman quotes him as saying.

  *6. Today most prefer The Mark of Zorro to its successor. A plain backdrop, it can be argued, best set off the form of the hero and his stunts. And Don Q suffers from an association that would have been impossible to predict at the time. Fairbanks’s wig, waved and combed straight back, suggests the style later adopted by Richard Nixon. This, combined with the fact that the only available copies are badly damaged 16mm prints, has deprived the film of much of its luster.

  *7. And none did, until The Iron Mask.

  *8. † The detectives actually used a stethoscope to listen through the walls of a hotel room.

  *9. Mary was still filming Little Annie Rooney and was in court only when needed for testimony and for the verdict.

  *10. Fairbanks held nothing against the organization and even staged a rodeo for their conventioneers within two weeks of the arrests.

  *11. † Led by film cowboy Tom Mix.

  *12. Many at the studio would not have m
inded had he plugged the little dog. Zorro, it seems, was a biter.

  *13. The search for an extant tinted print of the film is ongoing.

  *14. It is of note that there were competing color processes at the time. The Glorious Adventure, filmed in Prizma Color in Great Britain the same year, was the first feature film to use a subtractive color process, and it featured blues and reds.

  *15. † A 1917 film, The Gulf Between, had been filmed by the Technicolor team using an earlier process. A small portion of Griffith’s Way Down East was also produced in the two-color process, but the color sequences are believed lost.

  *16. Multiple camera tests were taken of Dove after she was cast, as part of the Technicolor testing. And there is evidence that many screen tests were taken of other hopefuls, so the good lady’s recollection might not be complete. Rudy Behlmer, in his definitive write-up of the production, states that Fairbanks reviewed Dove’s color tests as well as Wanderer of the Wasteland before casting her. The idea of an actress being cast for simply looking good in Technicolor is not as odd as it sounds. Certain performers—think Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich—photograph better in black and white than in color. The angularity of their faces, the ravishing planes and shadows, disappear or are minimized with color photography. Conversely, other faces were found, as three-strip Technicolor came into broader use in the 1940s and ’50s, in which the opposite rule applied. Rhonda Fleming and Maureen O’Hara fell into this category, the latter carrying the nickname “the Technicolor Queen.” Even at this stage, Dove was being touted as “the Color Girl of the Movies.”