Worse was to follow. “Our experience at Kyoto was the most terrifying of our experience,” Mary wrote. The crowd milling at the station could not be controlled by police, and only Doug’s quick action kept Mary, who had fallen, from being trampled. They staged a hasty retreat and found themselves scrambling through a window into a small storeroom, where they hid until the stationmaster found them. A couple of enterprising photographers, hoping to capture a shot of their general dishevelment, followed them through the window, but they were quickly dispatched by the burly Chuck Lewis.
Japan must have seemed a repeat of China, with its exhausting rounds of studio tours, special performances, and honorary lunches and dinners. Doug received six samurai swords along the way, and saw his first (but not his last) geisha girl. “They are purely decorative entertainers—exquisitely feminine, and like many of our professional beauties, the highest product of uselessness,” he commented later, with uncharacteristic dryness. He climbed the base of the Buddha at the Kosuga shrine, and fed the deer at Nana. The crush at the Tokyo station caused another delay, and he resorted to the now-habitual act of carrying Mary on his shoulders to get her through the station safely. Their social schedule in Tokyo was, if anything, even more hectic. Modern Tokyo, Doug felt, was not Japan—“at least not the Japan one travels thousands of miles to visit.” They were spent. “Neither Mary nor I could have remained another week in any part of the empire without suffering a complete physical collapse,” he wrote. Both were glad to board the ship to Hawaii.
They celebrated two Christmases, by virtue of crossing the international date line. Mary thought it a strange holiday, for the crowds had obliged them to board the ship early, canceling a planned shopping day. There were no presents. The second Christmas Day was even less typical, as the ship held a sukiyaki party and they found themselves eating Christmas dinner sitting on mats on the deck, wielding chopsticks.
Honolulu dazzled them both. Of all the places they visited on their trip, Mary wrote, Honolulu was “the most beautiful and alluring.” Doug agreed. “To think we traveled 22,000 miles to find this!” he exclaimed. “Why didn’t we ever come here before?” They took surfing lessons from five-time Olympic medalist Duke Kahanamoku. Here Mary’s competitive edge stood out. “At least I was able to stand up long enough to get the thrill of the sport,” she wrote. “And when I saw how many times Douglas lost his footing, I did not feel that I had acquitted myself so poorly.”
Perhaps her pique is understandable. It was now almost the New Year, and she had wanted to be back in Hollywood and working on her next production months before. Instead, she had agreed to a lengthy (and expensive) trip around the world. It was a valiant attempt to rescue a floundering marriage, but it wasn’t enough. Each was asked, when will you take another world tour?
Doug’s reply: “Next year.”
Mary’s reply: “Never.”
Both were correct. They boarded the Asama Maru for the mainland, never to travel extensively together again.
* * *
*1. A Woman of Paris lost money. The Gold Rush and The Circus were the two successful films.
*2. Original preview prints also listed the stars as “Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks.”
16
Mischief and Music
* * *
THE COUPLE RETURNED TO Pickfair with the essential questions unresolved. Mary was determined to get back to work. “Four months is long enough to stay away from this fast-moving business of pictures,” she told a reporter shortly after their return. And Doug’s opinion on the matter? It was difficult to determine. He was out playing golf.
By 1930 his passion for the game had turned into a mania. He had always been a skilled golfer,*1 but now he was an obsessed one, referring to himself as “the original, Simon-pure, dyed in the wool golf nut.” He played almost daily, up to thirty-six holes a day. “Golf is great fun,” he said. “What attracts me is that it is so different from the other sports I have followed. Sports which call for quick, instinctive reaction to shifting situations, as in polo, are easy for me. Golf, on the other had, is a deliberate game. A certain rhythm, and a certain harmony of mental and physical action are required to excel in it. . . . Golf is really an art.” Mary had tried gamely to keep up, buying clubs and practicing, but found it impossible. “His pace is too much for me,” she said. “He goes 90 miles an hour, whereas when I am at full speed I only do 45.”
But Mary volunteered a response to the reporter’s query. “Doug has decided that he wants, sometime in the future, to spend half his time each year in London and half on his ranch down near San Diego.” She did not say our ranch. Equally suggestive: they might sell Pickfair (“which is a huge house”) and, on an adjoining lot, build a smaller place: English provincial, white brick, black roof. She had clearly given it some thought. Could it have been envisioned for herself alone?
They were not yet ready to make a decision. After all, there was much to occupy them in the opening months of 1930. Jack Pickford, suffering from tertiary syphilis, was hospitalized again. Calvin Coolidge came to town to see how talkies were made, and Doug and Mary hosted a luncheon for him. Mabel Normand died of tuberculosis and heartbreak, and Fairbanks joined D. W. Griffith, Mack Sennett, and Sam Goldwyn as an honorary pallbearer. And by late February Lady Mountbatten had arrived for a visit. Then came their tenth wedding anniversary. A special celebration was held for them at the studio, and Mary had two sixteen-cylinder cars sent out on approval, so that Doug could take his pick.
He had commissioned the customization of an antique music box. PICKFAIR was embedded in ivory on the cover, along with portraits of each. Doug’s was a shot from The Black Pirate. Mary’s was a photo taken around 1916, featuring her full head of curls. Inside was a silver plaque on which was engraved:
Dearest Mary
That is my favorite image of you.
When you hear this music, please
Think of how very much you mean to
This old pirate
Happy 10th Anniversary
Doug
March 28, 1930
Both wrestled with what films to make next. Doug was changeable. At first he planned to remake The Mark of Zorro in sound. Equally appealing, for a time, was a film he titled Days of ’49. He would play Murrieta, “a bandit and a glamorous historical figure.”
But it was not to be. He abandoned his plans, releasing his production and office staff—even those old stalwarts whom he had carried on the payroll for years. This hosted a storm of rumors that he intended to retire. He just couldn’t figure out a good template for talking films, he argued. “Mary and I looked at a silent picture yesterday,” he told Louella Parsons, “and there was no comparison between the way it was produced and some of the talkies we have been seeing. The silent film was so much better that it left me wondering if we hadn’t all better find a solution before we went blindly ahead.” Worse, he wasn’t sure that sound played to his strength. “I find in talkies I can’t be active on my feet and talk at the same time.”
He couldn’t decide on a film, and they couldn’t decide on the marriage. His characteristic impulse to travel, to distract, to escape kicked into gear, and this time Mary dug in her heels. She would not go. Thus came a trial of the unthinkable: a time apart.
Their unwillingness to be away from each other had been the stuff of legend. Both had come to abolish location shoots to avoid overnight separation, building elaborate worlds within the confines of their studio.*2 They had slept apart only once in the ten years, when business forced Mary to return from a visit to Agua Caliente a day sooner than Douglas. The first time they dined apart was six years into their marriage, when Fairbanks joined a Masonic lodge. A mere two years earlier, Mary had been quoted as saying, “One thing I don’t believe in is marital vacations. If a marriage needs separation to help it along it isn’t much of a marriage.” Now she would have to swallow her words or at least hope that they had been forgotten.
It was decided that he would sail on the
Mauretania to see the Walker Cup tournament in England. Mary, who had decided on a script, would work on Forever Yours—which included a location shoot in the desert.
On the eve of his departure, they held a press tea at Mary’s studio bungalow. Ever media savvy, they knew that their first separation would cause a firestorm of speculation. One columnist wrote that the event was “just for the purpose of telling them that there wasn’t going to be any divorce.” Doug suggested that golf was an excuse to get to London and New York to see new plays. He didn’t like the current stories he was working on. He would be gone only a few weeks—back before Mary finished her film. “I can’t let her get more than one picture ahead of me,” he claimed. “I am already accused of doing all the playing for the family while Mary does all the work.”
He left the night of April 25 from Pasadena. She wired him at every conceivable train stop: Seligman, Ash Fork, Williams, Winslow Gallup, Albuquerque, La Junta, Dodge City, Newton, Emporia, Chicago. She was an addict, suffering withdrawal after a ten-year binge.
He was the same. “I just live from one telegram to another,” he wrote her from Kansas. “They buoy me up—I get very depressed take a nap and Rocher wakes me up with a wire from my baby. We are getting in Kansas City in a few minutes—usually I would come in the stateroom and say ‘come on Baby we only have a minute if you want to get out and walk’ and now I have no baby with me. Oh Frin-Din-Din!”
He had trouble sleeping without her: “I only seem to sleep in fits—wake up so often and look for my girl—do this all day as well—seem to feel rested but am sleeping as a dog does,” he wrote. He began to recognize the role she played in their lives: “Oh Baby—poor little Duber—he did not know what to do—I did not realize how very much you were a part of my everyday life till now—the many decisions you made for me the words of encouragement—your thousand smiles of sweet understanding.” Perhaps, he thought, the insight would be good for their marriage: “You have spoiled the Duber and this is going to be good for him and her.”
And he missed other benefits of the marriage: “Oh—how I miss the Pull ins! So glad the last night was all pull ins—”
At first, he communicated obsessively. He wired or wrote daily, handing one letter to the tugboat pilot as the Mauretania was pulled out of port. “I am going to be happy because I know you would want it and be happier yourself,” he wrote. Then, referring to himself in the third party: “But he ain’t going to do this again—I am glad I did. It has given me a truer value of things—and I want you to know that I love you with all my heart.”
On the ship, he claimed he read, napped, took bridge lessons, and even tried to follow her on her spiritual path. “You will be happy Dear to know that I am taking up Christian Science—I am declaring the truth every second,” he wrote. But, he said, he wasn’t enjoying the voyage. Although alcohol—the good stuff, not bootleg hooch—was available to all, Doug remained abstemious. “This would have been a good time for me to take up drinking,” he wrote. “But I am enjoying my misery.”
Still, the ocean voyage was not a total ordeal. He rose early every morning and received impromptu golf lessons from Bobby Jones, superstar captain of the Walker Cup American Team.*3 And his mood continued to brighten after arriving at the Hyde Park Hotel in London on May 5. “I am so busy here with golf—shopping—[UA executive Murray] Silverstone—telephone—etc—that I don’t get a chance to think—London is wonderful,” he wrote, quickly adding, “—but I want my baby. I come home to her and talk to her in my room & get all choked up.”
He called her nightly. But even this had challenges. “Our conversations probably would have been better,” he acknowledged, “if every operator in the United States and England had not listened in.” He wrote Mary after one call: “Tonight on the phone you seemed so near. It was most comforting but most aggravating. . . . I get flashes of joy and the next moment flashes of gloom.”
In time, the joy started to outstrip the gloom. He went with the American golfers to the Royal Albert Hall to watch a boxing match and was the guest of honor at a dinner party studded with lords and ladies, counts and duchesses. His claims to be in search of a story were hollow; there is no evidence that he saw a single play, either in New York or London. Mary picked up the change in tone in his telegrams and teasingly wired him, DON’T HAVE TOO GOOD A TIME WITHOUT THE FRIN.
She had cause, but she didn’t know it yet. There was, perhaps, one too many ladies of title at the dinner party. Or it could be that he met Lady Sylvia Ashley at another time and place; the details of their meeting have never been clear. But within a month of his return, rumors began to circulate. A woman—a titled Englishwoman—had caught Doug’s fancy.
Sylvia Ashley, born Edith Louisa Sylvia Hawkes, was twenty-six years old in 1930. Her father had been a stable hand before opening a pub. Her mother worked as a barmaid. She was tall, lean, and beautiful, and possessed a sort of haughty languor that suggested a wealth she did not have. She had worked in her father’s bar, then as a model, then in the chorus at the Winter Garden Theatre’s Midnight Follies. There she was clad in “a garment so sketchy that it was hardly a garment at all.” A featured role in The Whole Town’s Talking followed at the Strand. She caught the eye of one young Lord Ashley, who evidently was a living example of the somewhat dim species of titled Englishman that routinely emerged from the pen of P. G. Wodehouse. His father was the Earl of Shaftesbury; his mother was Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Mary. He married Sylvia in 1927, despite a madcap chase to the church on the part of his parents to prevent the disaster. His sister, Lady Dorothy Ashley-Cooper, moaned to the press: “Such an alliance is unthinkable.”
It did not take long for the young lord to figure this out. Within a year he advertised in the papers that he would no longer be responsible for debts contracted by his wife. Nevertheless, someone was paying her bills in the subsequent years, when she (and her décolletage) had little visible means of support. She was on the social circuit and, evidently, on the prowl. Doug, with his love of titles, and his marriage shaky, was attractive—and possibly willing—prey.
Curiously, it can be claimed that Mary had indirect warning. At the beginning of the year, she had a horoscope cast for her husband. She kept it until her death. It said of him:
You have an intensely emotional nature, [such] that you will have much attraction for the opposite sex, but may be somewhat unfortunate in the type of women who fascinates you. Because of your sex lure, you will have many temptations and peculiar experiences with women who are not worthy of you and who would not prove loyal to you. You are more in love with love or a certain type than with the individual. While the physical attracts you strongly, the only woman who can hold you for any length of time would be one who plays the part of a chum or companion, and with whom you are congenial on many planes. . . . You have, however, an almost hypnotic influence upon married women or those older than yourself. Unless you are very discreet and exercise a great deal of self-control, you will find yourself in compromising situations with the opposite sex.
Neither discretion nor self-control was Fairbanks’s strong suit. While there is no direct evidence that this is where or when the affair began, his letters and wires home dropped off. By the time he returned on the Europa, he had decided that the experience was not as soul crushing as he had feared. He had discovered, he revealed to reporters upon his return, just what he wanted to be: a bum. “But it’s no use trying,” he confessed. “Mary won’t let me.”
Mary, meanwhile, was having her own struggles. Her film was stalled, and she was at a crisis point in deciding whether to try to fix it or abandon the project. Doug was—one hopes—unintentionally ironic in describing her woes to the press. The story, he said, was of a woman’s life between seventeen and seventy. “Mary got about as far as the thirties and got stuck.” Sam Taylor—he of The Taming of the Shrew fame—was brought in to try to rescue the film. He advised shelving the project. Doug, on the other hand, liked the film and advised her to finish
it.
Mary sided with Sam. Two weeks from the completion of Forever Yours, now retitled Secrets, she stopped production and released the staff, including director Marshall Neilan. The decision cost the ever-frugal Mary almost half a million dollars.
Much more could have been lost early in the morning of August 4, when Fairbanks faced down a trio of burglars in their Santa Monica beach house. He and Mary had returned late from a visit with Maurice Chevalier. She was in bed; he was descending the stairs to check the lock on the door. There he encountered a young man with a mask and a gun. Behind him were two compatriots.
He switched on a light, and the young thief caught a glimpse of his face. “Gee, you’re Fairbanks, ain’t you?” he exclaimed, then, embarrassed: “I’m sorry to do this, but I need the money.” Then, unable to resist (and clearly a fan), he asked, “Where’s Mary?”
Mary was upstairs, Doug explained. Appealing to their gallantry, he asked them not to frighten her by looting the house and making noise. He had no money in his pockets but said, “You wait down here, boys, and I’ll go up and see what Mary has.” The young thief followed him as he went upstairs and unearthed one hundred dollars. They took it, continuing to apologize as they got into a car and drove away. His quick thinking saved them from losing thousands of dollars in jewelry. But his image had been built on action, not thinking.
The response to this disconnect was revealing. Fans wrote in to movie magazines expressing dismay: why hadn’t Doug swung from the balustrades and knocked the villains out? “The least Doug Fairbanks could have done was not report the robbery so he could have remained, in our thoughts, the dark, handsome, strong, fearless man as we movie fans pictured him in our minds,” complained one. Will Rogers quipped: “So Doug burgled Mary for one hundred bucks. Came downstairs and turned over $90, keeping 10 percent for commission and overhead. Burglars made arrangements with him to come back as soon as Mary had anything else.”
The First King of Hollywood Page 47
