*17. † At the only public screening of the footage, at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the audience made an audible gasp when she appeared.
*18. Director Hugo Ballin claimed that he was offered the post ahead of Parker but was not able to free himself from his Paramount commitments.
*19. † This is not to say that Junior’s casting by Crisp wasn’t a source of strife. Letitia Fairbanks reports in her biography of her uncle that he angrily told Crisp, “There’s only one Fairbanks.” It is possible, if not probable, that Crisp was her source for this tale.
*20. Complete with expletive.
*21. † The ship snapped her hawsers during an early winter storm, damaging much of the equipment and necessitating multiple tugboats to save it as it drifted out to sea. Steel cables replaced the rope hawsers, and, off camera at least, twentieth-century ship safety replaced that of the nineteenth. A miniature of the Morse, about the size of an automobile, was constructed for a sequence in which its powder magazines were set on fire and it exploded and burned. In addition, a stranded lumber schooner, the Muriel, was redressed to resemble a seventeenth-century galleon and was blown up for the cameras.
*22. ‡ He named the galley the Yo-Ho and christened it with a bottle of bay rum. Parker recruited men who had participated in the Pacific Fleet boat races in order to find men able to handle its oars.
*23. Schenck formed a business entity in combination with Pickford and Fairbanks to lease out space, sets, props, and equipment from their jointly owned studio in order that the plant and facilities could continue to generate revenue during their down times. Soon Goldwyn would be leasing space from them. Many of his classic films were shot at this location.
*24. Film critic Robert Sherwood recalled overhearing one patron at The Black Pirate’s premiere remark, “I never saw a movie that taxed the intelligence of a ten-year-old boy.”
*25. Hart sued UA for inadequate promotion, a suit that was not resolved in his favor until after Fairbanks’s death.
*26. † It is possible, too, that Chaplin’s judgment was clouded by his antipathy for Louis B. Mayer, with whom he once engaged in fisticuffs in the lobby of the Alexandria Hotel.
14
Death . . .
* * *
FAIRBANKS STARTED 1927 IN a frenzy of activity. Possibly this was simply his way, but even by Fairbanksian standards, he was feverishly occupied. He may have required distraction; the Saturday before Thanksgiving 1926, John suffered a second stroke and died the next day. As he escorted his brother’s body back to Colorado for burial, Doug might have suspected that the worm was about to turn. Perhaps not. His was not a reflective nature.
He spent the early months absorbed in his latest project, one that would ultimately be known as Rancho Zorro. He had had the full-blown vision for it as early as 1925. He would buy land, thousands and thousands of acres, and stock it with herds of cattle and expanses of fruit trees. There, like the grandees of old, he would build a majestic estate: adobe-walled, “behind which life will drowse along as it used to be, to the drone of browsing cattle, the round-up song of the vaquero, the thrum of guitar and banjo in the near casas of the Mexican and Indian retainers.”
Beverly Hills, he claimed, was getting crowded. In 1920 Pickfair had been the only property in the area. Now it was surrounded by houses of other movie stars, and curious fans trying to scale the walls. Recently, they had shooed a hot dog vendor away from their front gates. But Fairbanks was not planning simply to construct a remote getaway. Ever the producer, he planned a miniature world. “I like the colorful life,” he claimed. “When I plan anything I want it to be romantic.” The house would be lit by candlelight (“Candle light is so beautiful. Electricity is modern and harsh.”) The only nod to modernity would be in the plumbing—the faithful Mexican and Indian retainers, living in small adobe huts scattered around the Casa Grande, might don the studio-designed native costumes but would presumably balk at emptying chamber pots. No automobiles would be permitted. Guests would arrive via a specially constructed airfield, and the cars that ferried them to the property would be abandoned outside the gates. They would travel the rest of the way on horseback or in oxcarts. “The whole place will have a Spanish tang,” he declared cheerfully.
He, Robert, and Ted Reed searched for over a year and, in late 1926, settled on property that was, in their minds, perfect. The nine-thousand-acre Rancho Santa Fe had been deeded more than a century before by the king of Spain to Don Juan María Osuna. The property was beautiful—gently undulating acres of what was to become San Diego County, picturesquely placed between ocean and mountains, sliced into delectable green valleys by the San Dieguito River. It was protected by the surrounding lands so as to be cool in the summer and warm in the winter. The soil was rich. Upon the death of Osuna’s childless son, the deed passed to the Santa Fe Railroad and thence to the Santa Fe Land Improvement Company. Doug, seeing property that had well-developed roads, water, sewage, and even a pending telephone exchange, pounced. He bought 847 acres in late 1926, quickly followed by 160 acres of adjoining land, then, for $125,000, another 2,700. Before he was done, he owned Black Mountain, visible from Escondido.
Property improvements began immediately. Wells were drilled, and the largest private dam in the country was built, creating an eleven-acre lake. A pump house was constructed at the base of the dam to provide irrigation for the 125 acres cleared for cultivation. Fifteen thousand Valencia orange seedlings were installed in the new nursery, and eight thousand mature trees were planted. The overhead sprinkling system was said to be the largest installation of its kind in California. Apart from the land costs, improvements on the property were reported to be $250,000.*1
Plans for the house were worked on variably by George Washington Smith, Carl Jules Weyl (later famed as the art director of such Warner Bros. classics as Casablanca and The Big Sleep), and Wallace Neff. It was not going to be cheap. “It has been planned to have the house, which will serve as our home, cost something better than $150,000,” he told a reporter. “But if the ideas of Mrs. Fairbanks and myself are carried out that sum, I fear, only would be a starting figure.”
He was more right than he knew. The place was a money sieve. Dollars poured into it—irrigation systems, farming implements, rodent control, trucks—but scarcely any came out. His magical dream of a great self-sufficient ranch with a glorious hacienda staffed by cheerful peons was just that—a dream. The golden house was never built;†*2and the ranch ran in the red every year but one.
Still, the dream seemed viable in the early months of 1927. Money was plentiful, and Fairbanks never hesitated to spend it in the name of quality. When varying builders quarreled over who should be compensated for subcontracted work on the sprinkler system, he simply wrote a check for $11,810.14 and gave it to the court to disperse as its judgment determined. The check was written from his house account. “He didn’t have to draw on his regular account—he just took this from the sum he sets aside monthly to pay the grocer and the meat man,” the deputy county clerk declared, holding the check up for the admiration of the suitably awed crowd.
The first half of the year was consumed not only with Rancho Zorro but also with a wealth of other activities, each in itself sufficient to serve as an obituary header for any normal man. In May, he participated in the cofounding of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The organization was not his brainchild; Louis B. Mayer conceived the idea at a January 1927 get-together with director Fred Niblo, actor Conrad Nagel, and producer Fred Beetson. But he was in the room a few days later when thirty-six industry leaders met at the Ambassador to hear of the idea. As with just about every other institution created by the entertainment industry to foster civic good, Doug was elected president. Although the Academy is known today primarily for its annual awards ceremony, its purpose was (and is) multifold, with stated goals of not only the bestowal of awards for excellence but also the union of the different branches of the industry: actors, producers, writers, directo
rs, and technicians. Fairbanks headed up the inaugural banquet for the organization on May 11, 1927, taking in enough $100 subscriptions (with $5 per month in membership fees pledged thereafter) to put more than $25,000 in the organization’s coffers. Will Hays led the speeches, warning the members that “dishonorable or unethical conduct, or the commission of any act involving moral turpitude, shall be sufficient cause for expulsion from the academy.”*3
The organization served a useful function during the summer of its inaugural year, when producers threatened an industry-wide 10 percent pay cut. The proposal was a continuation of the struggle that dated back to 1919 and the formation of United Artists: producers loathed paying astronomical star salaries. Jesse Lasky led the charge, declaring that the industry had “been making pictures at ridiculous prices for high-priced and unreasonable stars and directors whose names were a mirage rather than a reality. No longer will we be dazzled by the very names we have created. We can tell them to deliver our way or get out.”
On the opposite side of the battlefield were the actors, directors, and writers. They began joining the Actors’ Equity Association and fostered a few demands of their own, including eight-hour days and closed-shop contracts.
Fairbanks, under the auspices of the Academy, assembled a series of meetings throughout July between the producers and the other specialties to brainstorm cost-saving measures. “The Academy . . . has been organized primarily to unify the various branches of the motion picture industry, so that if at any time any particular branch should be confronted with difficulties we shall be able to confer among ourselves,” he said. “As is the case now, producers feel that the cost of production has reached its highest peak and, being an actor and writer as well as a producer, I am in a position to know this, but our first and most important obligation is to try to improve the quality of pictures at all times. This we owe to the public.”
It was difficult to argue with this. He could, and did, see things from the point of view of each party, having assumed each role in turn—and often simultaneously. Compromises were reached, and announced at a July 27 Academy meeting at the Biltmore Hotel. Producers agreed not to cut salaries. Actors, in turn, had to promise to indulge in no more fits of thespian temperament. They would respond to studio calls promptly, they pledged, even if shooting was scheduled for the middle of the night or early in the morning. And none would disparage their producers by referring to them publicly as “button-hole makers.”*4
The Academy continued to work behind the scenes to improve conditions for its rank and file. Under Fairbanks’s oversight, work was begun to develop a standard contract for freelancing workers in the industry. Actors wished to be paid from the point at which they reported to the set in makeup, not when cameras began rolling. Further, they wished also to be paid without deductions for those days when they were not called for filming and to be compensated for a six-day workweek.
And it was under the mantle of the presidency of the Academy that Fairbanks worked to found the first academic film curriculum at the University of Southern California. He even gave the inaugural lecture, on “Photoplay Appreciation.” One can almost hear his voice in the press releases: “Courses in acting for the screen are not what the Academy has in mind. . . . Men and women [need training in] chemistry, optics, art and architecture, with particular bearing on the chemistry of motion pictures, the optics of motion picture camera work, the artistic and structural elements of motion picture set design, and elements of motion picture writing. In other words, schools of motion picture engineering and art comparable to the schools of mining, civil engineering, architecture and the like.” Only Fairbanks, one feels, would draw a comparison of a film school to a school of mining. Reflecting his pragmatism, night courses were set up at USC in order that already-employed industry workers could improve their skills and knowledge.
And, in keeping with his vision of the Academy as a professional organization, the first banquet held by the organization to confer honors was not the May 1929 affair at which the then-novel statuettes were distributed but an April 1928 event at the Roosevelt Hotel in honor of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers. Fairbanks stood before the assemblage and cheekily stated a universal truth rarely acknowledged:
Those of us who get our names in electric lights are inclined to forget the debt we owe you. It is by such means as you have provided that the film was discovered and enabled many of us to leave the one night stands, the barber chairs, and the fur business, and amass a fortune sufficient to allow us to take our yearly trips to Europe. And so we bow our heads and pay homage.
But his activities with the fledgling Academy and USC were, in essence, white noise in the cheerful din that was his life. It was time to start another film.
He used the site of Rancho Zorro to huddle with his creative team over his next project. As always, he struggled to find a story and setting that were original and that would play to his strengths. At first, he overreached. This would happen often; he would climb a metaphoric cliff impossibly high, before cooler heads talked him down. While at the end of the day he would temper his reach to not exceed his grasp, it still both instructs and amuses to review some of the wilder preliminary stretches.
First, he announced, he would make a film about the progress of civilization since the birth of Christianity. It would be called The Brotherhood of Man. He appears to have retreated from this idea by January, as Lotta Woods’s diary for 1927 documents that he was by then contemplating a science fiction story. “First mention to me of Martian idea—following Mr. F’s talk to Ray Griffith,” she wrote on February 4. Two days later Griffith gave a formal pitch for a story titled Trip to Mars at Pickfair.*5 It must have been underwhelming: “Disappointed to find there was no story as yet,” Woods wrote philosophically, and that appeared to be the end of the idea.
Consideration was given to a modern-day version of A Houseboat on the Styx, a thirty-year-old novel written by humorist John Kendrick Bangs and involving the encounters of famous people in the afterlife. Robert Florey proposed the idea to Joseph Schenck: what if he were to cast all of the UA luminaries—Barrymore, Fairbanks, Pickford, the Talmadge sisters, Gloria Swanson, and Charlie Chaplin—as versions of themselves? This would have been the first true all-star feature. Lotta Woods’s diary reflects that the story was being worked on by Emmett Flynn at the same time that Griffith was promoting his Martian tale, but there is little evidence that Fairbanks or Pickford took the idea seriously. Half a decade and more would pass before MGM would score big with the all-star concept when the studio produced Grand Hotel.
Doug gave serious deliberation to another story about the Crusades. Robin Hood had whetted his appetite for the theme, and he sent his team back to the thirteenth century to explore the history of the Children’s Crusade. The story was based on varying legends, each centered on a shepherd boy inspired by a holy vision and leading a band of followers south to peacefully convert Muslims. Doug was to be “a devil-may-care Mohammedan who becomes converted to Christianity.” The pending release of DeMille’s King of Kings was the reported reason for his abandoning this idea; it is likely that the tragic outcome of the tale—the children were reportedly drowned or sold into slavery—might have had more to do with it. One can scarcely imagine a Fairbanks film where he does not save the day, and a host of little dead Christians was not likely to send 1920s audiences home feeling happy.
Perhaps inspired by his vision of Rancho Zorro, he then announced that he would film a version of Captain Cavalier, a romance of early California by Jackson Gregory, who had written the story on which Fairbanks had based The Man from Painted Post ten years prior.
But historic California had already been covered in The Mark of Zorro, and he prized originality. He continued to circle around a larger, religious theme. One influence was The Miracle, which Max Reinhardt had directed on Broadway in 1924. In the first week of 1927, Reinhardt came to California at Fairbanks’s invitation to see the West Coast production of the play. The story
, as its title suggests, was faith themed, the tale of a nun who ran away from her convent. In her absence, a statue of the Virgin Mary came to life nightly to perform her duties. While Fairbanks had no interest in producing a film version of the play, the idea of a religious miracle was added to his thematic pot. In the end, he combined the various elements—the Virgin, a miracle, a religious conversion of a cheery reprobate, and a vaguely exotic, nonspecifically historic remote setting—into the stew that would become The Gaucho. The plot, as were so many of his stories, was a collective effort of his go-to team: Tom Geraghty, Lotta Woods, and Ted Reed. Together, under the pseudonym Elton Thomas, they built a coherent story line around their boss’s wild flight of ideas.*6
One important element to the narrative was the result of an observation of Pickford’s: his films never seemed to have strong female characters. This was irrefutable: the passive, lovely damsels of his efforts to date were largely interchangeable, and they were scarcely memorable. Mary convinced him that his heroines should have “stronger character and bolder relief.” And heroines it was to be, as, for the first time, Fairbanks would have two female leads in a film, a virginal saint figure—the adult version of the shepherd child who has a Fatima-like vision at the film’s beginning—and the good-bad girl to provide the romantic and comic interest.
The First King of Hollywood Page 42
