The former part was readily cast. Fairbanks invited director Edwin Carewe to an impromptu lunch, but Carewe declined: he had to see a screen test first. Doug sat in on the screening and decided Eve Southern was ideal for the part of the sainted shepherd girl. The timing was fortunate for her: she had been in Hollywood for over ten years but had a history of her performances ending up on the cutting room floor. The tale provided suitable grist for the studio publicist’s mill: taking Fairbanks’s quip and running with it (Fairbanks’s weakness for bad puns was exceeded only by his love of practical jokes), articles appeared claiming Southern was “lunched” to fame.
The role of the spirited mountain girl was originally intended for Dolores del Rio but he was to learn that what Edwin Carewe giveth, he taketh away, as the director cast the actress in Ramona. Enter Lupe Vélez.
Vélez, later known as “the Mexican spitfire,” was a few months shy of nineteen when she won the role. Her career to date consisted of Mexican vaudeville and a few Hal Roach comedies. She was charming, vivacious, peppery, and the first feminine lead in a Fairbanks film to give him a true run for his money.*7
The cameo role of the Virgin Mary could be played, of course, by no one but Mary Pickford. The rest of the cast were Fairbanks regulars, and cameras were ready to roll by June 1.
He had commenced his usual fastidious preparation, undergoing tutelage in the ways of the Argentine gaucho. As he had learned the Australian bullwhip for Don Q, he now worked to master the bola—a woven leather rope upon the end of which were suspended three weighted balls. The proper throw could wrap the rope around the hind legs of a steer. It could also disable a human opponent, as one poor studio technician could attest. His job was to run across the lot wearing quilted padding and a fencing mask, while Fairbanks would attempt to lasso his feet. And on the subject of steer: six hundred longhorns were shipped in from Mexico for use in the film. Hundreds more miniature, dollsize cattle filled in the background of the stampeding herd.
Color was contemplated for The Gaucho, but the experiment with The Black Pirate had been costly. Further, projectionists were reporting trouble: the two strips cemented together resulted in “cupping” as the film ran through the projector, moving the image in and out of focus. Exhibitor complaints poured in. While color tests survive of the religious sequences with Mary as the Virgin, in the end Fairbanks elected to bypass Technicolor.
As in Don Q, dance was featured. Fairbanks sat for hours, his fingers planted firmly in his ears, watching demonstrations of different Latin folk dances. He wanted to see how the dance registered on the eye in the absence of hearing the rhythmic click of heels on the floor. “It is not always easy to distinguish between those steps that look well, and those which merely sound well,” he stated. Fairbanks took his dancing lessons for the tango sequence with Vélez from Henry Brasha. He claimed that he intended the dance to “symbolize the wild life of the South American frontiers during the last century.”
In fact, it was to connote that which he had avoided his entire career: sexuality. It was overtly sensual, symptomatic of one of the many ways The Gaucho was atypical. Fairbanks’s hero was vulnerable, with an underlying wounded quality to his outward cheer. His failings were not the charming ones of his Earl of Huntington; this bandit king was not a’feered of women but clearly enjoyed them rapaciously. He drank. He stole. He scoffed at God. Here, for the first time in a Fairbanks film, was a hero in need of reform.
Also for the first time, here was a star experiencing criticism—the sort of cruel kicks usually reserved for a man already down. Two visiting writers from Great Britain were granted access to the studio during production. They had the thin decency to not identify their host when they wrote:
Already the famous agile star showed visible signs of Time’s fatal advance. In normal dress he was fuller in the face than we had anticipated, and when made up for acting a close examination revealed a subtle reddish tint covering the area between the chin and the throat. This red was less photographic than the rest of the make-up and thus camouflaged the slight bulge which was already beginning to coarsen his profile. He was clearly not the man he had been; the amazing feats of strength and skill which had so delighted the audiences of the world were performed less easily. Once we watched him try to mount his horse with a comrade on his back. Another man would have used a dummy. Not he. Nevertheless the trick did not come off; he strained a muscle, and at last three workmen had to urge him upward, the camera, with nice adjustment, cutting off the long lever inserted under his lower foot.
The accompanying sketch (provided by one of the authors) was less kind, revealing the struggling hero in gaucho costume to be unmistakably Fairbanks.*8
These were not the only slings and arrows he was to endure. He was slashed on the leg by a dropped saber in the first week of the production. The injury caused no delays, but that was not the case when Vélez took ill, with an ailment variably described as peritonitis or malarial fever. Her hospitalization held up production for two weeks. The hospital admission was not, as one might reasonably suspect in that era, for termination of a pregnancy. Vélez was a Catholic, albeit one with generous sexual morals, who later committed suicide due to the shame she felt over an unwanted pregnancy. Evidently abortion was not on her list of options.
Normally the question of a costar’s health would be of minor note. But with Lupe Vélez one approaches a biographical quandary. The seven good years of Douglas Fairbanks’s marriage were about to end. Conventional wisdom as to why centers on the two young costars engaged by Mary and Doug in the late spring of 1927. For My Best Girl, which was filmed on a schedule partially overlapping that of The Gaucho, Mary had borrowed from Paramount a promising young actor, Charles Rogers. The son of a Kansas judge, “Buddy,” as he was known, was genial, gentle, and not yet twenty-three years old—thirteen years Mary’s junior. He had jet-black hair (the first thing she noticed about him), Bambi eyes, and was intensely, flatteringly infatuated with her. There were those in the studio who noticed that Mary and Buddy were spending a lot of time rehearsing a kissing scene, staged in a wooden shipping crate. Fairbanks was among them.
Meanwhile, eighteen-year-old Lupe was a dynamic force to be reckoned with. It was clear that if Fairbanks’s role had an element of sexual chemistry, that chemistry was with Lupe. Outtakes of the banquet sequence document Fairbanks, after a fluffed take, laughing, grabbing Vélez, tipping her backward, and planting a comic romantic kiss directly on her lips. This from the man who would typically go out of his way to avoid kissing any heroine on camera if he didn’t have to.
Studio tongues began to wag.
“Lucky” Humberstone, assistant director on both The Gaucho and My Best Girl, recounted the version of events generally accepted by most biographers:
If Mary did have or was inclined to like Buddy at the time, she had every right to and a reason for it because she knew, I knew, everybody knew that Doug, her husband, Doug Fairbanks, had been having an affair on the picture he had just finished which was The Gaucho and his leading lady was Lupe Vélez. Everybody knew that Doug and Lupe [were], let’s just sum it up by saying fooling around, which if I knew it, Mary knew it. So maybe that’s why Mary decided to fool around with Buddy Rogers.
The challenge is to determine if this was, indeed, the case. Up until this point in Fairbanks’s marriage, there is no evidence that he had strayed. He and Mary were gloriously happy, glued together like two sweet, warm pieces of toffee. Candid photographs demonstrate the body language of genuine and familiar love—his arm draped protectively over her shoulder, hers around his waist, each leaning into the other.
But in 1927, something changed. The intimacy, the authentic smiles, the unconscious warmth—gone. It might be the power of suggestion; it might be hindsight. But an argument can be made that after 1927, his smiles for the camera never again seem genuine. He was weary, sad, diminished. A trust had been broken, and despite the intervening years and multiple attempts at repair, it was never whole again.
So, one asks: who cheated first—and why?
The true answer might be sadder than the popularly accepted one. In fact, it might have been both—and neither.
Consider the evidence: Lupe Vélez was never shy about trumpeting her sexual conquests. She had many lovers, and the world knew about them. Yet she never laid claim to Fairbanks. Years later, Mary may have realized this; she let then-husband Buddy Rogers costar with Vélez in a series of comedies. Vélez was also invited to dine at Pickfair when Doug and Mary were still married. But if studio gossip conflated a flirtation between Fairbanks and Vélez, it is entirely possible that, at the time, Mary had an authentic belief that there was mischief afoot.
Thus, one can argue, she engaged in tender, prolonged rehearsals of a love scene with her young worshipful costar—rehearsals that Fairbanks saw, as she perhaps intended. What was a better way to prevent a husband from straying, in the mind of one schooled in happy-ending film plots, than a warning shot across the bow?
There was, of course, a fatal flaw to this strategy. Fairbanks was pathologically jealous. “I have never known a man to read so much as he did into a simple look of masculine approval,” she recalled. Each knew the other to be capable of marital infidelity—after all, had that not been the origin of their romance? Given this, he very likely interpreted her actions as signifying more than they actually did. Then, to his furious mind, all bets were off. From that point forward, if the cat was away, the mouse was definitely going to stray. All sources are adamant that he had manifested none of this behavior before that point; all are equally specific that by the early 1930s he had become a discreet rake. The ball, he told one friend, was out of bounds. He would play another.
It will probably never be known with whom or exactly when Doug first paid Mary back for that which she had not yet done.*9 But misbehaved he must have, and around this time. Mary retained all her letters from Doug, but there was only one upon which she marked a date: August 11, 1927. The note was scribbled on his studio stationery and used their common nicknames for each other:
My own darling little baby with a slim-cute figure that looks the vogue in a bathing suit as well as a street dress—my little Frin that has many burdens but also many joys—people love her—Duber worships her—she has great talent—great beauty—she can build a nest as no bluebird can—she speaks French—is going to speak German—she is going to do anything she wants to do—but with it all she has a little Duber.†*10
He had written to her of his love often in the past, especially in the earliest years of their passion, when they were often separated. But during the first seven years of the marriage, his notes to her had been loving but more domestic in nature: location shooting was going to run long; he had overslept and would come meet her at the studio; did she want to screen a particular film that evening? A listing of her virtues without context was an anomaly. There was something about this missive that sounded strained, even craven. Had he been caught, conclusively caught, being unfaithful?
One can get lost in conjecture and still never land on the truth. But the overriding certainty remains: at this point in the marriage, each lost faith in the other. They had some form of confrontation over this—in 1934 Mary was to write that Fairbanks claimed “that he had made no demands on me for seven years—which is a plain damned lie.”
To lose one’s love is to remove one of the soul’s critical underpinnings. The possibility of professional decline threatens another. His spirits were likely tamped down as he attended the November premiere of The Gaucho at Sid Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where he and Mary had so recently planted their footprints and signatures in the cement. Lotta Woods recalled that as late as August 31, Fairbanks was displeased with the film. “He was not thrilled,” she wrote. “Had not seen the eleven reels before.” But his mood improved within twenty-four hours, when he starting trimming. By Friday of Labor Day weekend, she tentatively wrote that the film had a “favorable prognosis.”
Still, he was right to fret. The reviews were mixed. The New York Graphic wrote, “A queer combination of pictorial heights, reached in several sequences, smooth direction, amazing spectacles, thrilling moments and occasional banalities make this latest Fairbanks film an uneven accomplishment.” The Herald Tribune sighed, “It is a tale partly barbaric, partly religious, for only half the time does the agile and smiling star act himself.”
More cruel yet: “Maybe Douglas Fairbanks’ ardent fans will find him interesting in it as he used to be, but he looked to me like the oldest alumnus trying to get back in the spirit of things at a reunion.”
Time, or audience maturation, has since been kinder to The Gaucho. One can argue at length as to what was Fairbanks’s finest film, but few would dispute that The Gaucho was his most mature work. Revisionist thinking now places it at or near the top of his swashbuckling films. The very qualities that audiences did not want from Douglas Fairbanks—a wounded, jaded cynicism; moral ambivalence; character failings—are now the prerequisites of the modern antihero.*11
If nothing else, The Gaucho stands as a counter to the claim that Fairbanks could not act. There is a wounded subtlety in his character, a depth beyond his normal performance. Film historian Scott Eyman recently commented that he saw Fairbanks as the “paradigmatic American man of the twentieth century, perpetually outward bound, avoiding any reflection but his own in the mirror.” Something about The Gaucho suggests that, at least this once, he reflected more deeply. And looking in the mirror, he did not like what he saw.
The Gaucho was a financial success, but this is largely forgotten today, for as the premiere approached, events conspired. Sound pictures were coming, and Fairbanks’s kingdom was about to vanish. There was no precedent for such a loss. Only once in history has there been an art form that was created, developed to perfection, and then, while at its peak, completely abandoned—all within the span of a lifetime. Yet with the onset of talkies, this is exactly what occurred. The glorious silent world where Fairbanks ruled would disappear within two short years.
The typical shorthand in film history for the onset of sound in motion pictures is to reference the October 1927 premiere of The Jazz Singer as the single bullet to the heart of silent films. It is more accurate to say that it was the knockout punch in a progressive series of blows—the culmination of more than two decades of attempts to marry image with sound. There had been a parade of Kinetophones, Cameraphones, Chronophones, and Synchroscopes, most emerging from the inventors’ laboratories and sinking without a trace. But someone was inevitably going to crack the nut, and that someone was Warner Bros., with the Vitaphone process.
It was not that he did not know it was coming. Doug and Mary were in the audience in August 1926, when Warner Bros. staged a collection of Vitaphone shorts—featuring speech and music—in conjunction with the premiere of John Barrymore’s Don Juan, which boasted a synchronized Vitaphone score.*12 A little over a year later, Warner released The Jazz Singer. Audiences couldn’t get enough of it. It was a game-changing success. Why did it succeed when all prior efforts failed? The answer is partially technical—the earliest efforts were rife with flaws—but only partially.
The Jazz Singer was actually a silent film with a musical score, punctuated by some sound sequences of the dynamic stage star Al Jolson singing (and, in one instance, chatting extemporaneously). As a silent film, it was less than mediocre. But even if it had been a masterpiece of the silent art, the crazy quilt of sound and silence did the latter in. There was a veritable jolt, a cognitive dissonance that occurred, not when the film moved to the human voice but whenever it would jerk back to silence. The brain processes the spoken word differently than it processes the combination of image and music. One enters a near-hypnotic state if closely attending to a silent film. Once lurched out of the state, it is nearly impossible to return. In the words of historian Scott Eyman, “Talkies were not an evolution, but a mutation, a different art form entirely.”
It is not that Fairbanks was opposed to progress. He had ex
plored 3-D technology in the mid-1920s. He embraced color. It was during promotion of The Black Pirate that he proclaimed, “In the course of a decade or so I really believe that all pictures will be made in appropriate colors and probably synchronized with a machine for reproducing the exact voices of actors and actresses.”*13
Yet he can be excused if he did not follow the continued advancement of sound in the industry as 1927 waned and 1928 dawned. In mid-November he and Mary moved in with her mother at her beach house and began the long, slow process of watching Charlotte die from metastatic breast cancer. Mary would not leave her side, recalling, “There I remained for eighteen weeks, every day of it, from early morning till late at night, in her company.”
When the terminal moment came in late March 1928, Mary went briefly mad. “I was like a wild animal in the jungle,” she said. “I am deeply remorseful and ashamed of what I said in that frenzy of anguish. . . . I have a few fitful snapshots of sanity that come back through that maddening cloud of grief: being amazed, for example, at Douglas’ lips being as white as they were.”
Her grief hung so heavy that she announced that she would make no more films. He issued a denial (“The report is idle street talk”), stopped preproduction on his next film, and, almost literally scooping her up, hustled her off to Europe. In such a hurry was he that he left town forgetting that he needed to appear in court on a traffic charge—his propensity for speeding tickets was renowned—and a bench warrant was issued by the municipal court for his arrest.†*14
The First King of Hollywood Page 43
