In fact, he was beginning to fear just that. And McAvoy did little to support her own indignation in her description of dinners at Pickfair. “After dinner . . . Mary would take us up to her room. She’d go in the bathroom and take a big slug of something, then rinse her mouth out with mouthwash.”
There were other instances of her drinking—some in public settings. “If the truth were known,” Fairbanks Jr. said, “the Pickford family was the reverse of the genie that comes out of the bottle; they all disappeared into it.”
Doug’s solution came in the form of a story of his own devising. He did not know it at the time, but Mr. Robinson Crusoe was to be the last film that he would personally produce. It was a simple tale of a wealthy yachtsman who, on a bet, spends time on a desert island to see if he can survive. Survive he does, with the aid of his faithful dog (played by Fairbanks’s own mutt Rooney) and a beautiful girl Friday (or, in this case, Saturday).
Tom Geraghty worked up a script from Doug’s ideas. His original treatment is revealing of Fairbanks’s state of mind:
Steve Drexel had grown suddenly tired of bluebloods, of conventions and formalities. Polite society bored him, debutantes annoyed him, and dinner parties distressed him. Steve was a bundle of nervous energy, handicapped by a fortune and a name, stifled by a life of inactivity. Occasionally he had kicked over the traces to become society’s bad boy, but this time he had rebelled, once and for all.
A team was quickly assembled. Fairbanks chartered Joseph Schenck’s yacht Invader and sent it ahead, animals and technicians aboard, to meet him in Tahiti.*2 Fairbanks sailed on February 27, 1932, from San Francisco aboard the Makura, accompanied by Eddie Sutherland, the director; silent film veteran William Farnum; trainer Chuck Lewis; and Maria Alba. The last of these was a Barcelonan beauty contest winner who had been brought to the United States to act in Spanish-language versions of American films.†*3She learned that she had won the role only a day before departing. She recalled that Pickford, whom she met for the first time on the boat, treated her coolly. Her youth and beauty seemed to threaten Mary, though the young actress did not understand why.
The press of Doug and Mary’s mutual fame interfered with their parting. “They would retire to the main salon, and instantly be surrounded by tourists with autograph books,” one observer noted. “They would flee to an upper deck, only to have cameramen pointing at their good-bye kiss. Finally they went into Doug’s stateroom and bolted the door while the captain kindly kept the ship fifteen minutes beyond sailing time to give them a few moments together. When they came out Mary was crying. ‘W-write to me, Doug—you know you’ve p-promised,’ she said.”
There is little evidence that he did so. They telegraphed each other liberally throughout their separation but largely on operational issues related to travel or business.
Alba recalled the trip on the Makura. The cast and crew would dine together every evening, discussing the film well into the night. Fairbanks was “a larger than life personality,” she said. “Everybody gravitated to him.” He was full of energy and never seemed to sleep. He was already on the deck when she arrived in the morning and stayed there past her retiring at night. “His brain,” she said, making spiraling gestures over her ears, “was in constant motion.” Their arrival at Papeete was remarkable only for the avidity of the local celebrations on their arrival. Fairbanks, as was his dapper wont, arrived with forty pieces of luggage.*4 He and Tom Geraghty bunked together at the house built by the recently deceased director F. W. Murnau, despite—or perhaps because—they had been warned by the locals that the place was haunted. After the first night, they discovered various objects had been moved or were missing. Each thought the other was playing tricks. On the second night, both were watchful. “I had a pair of white linen knickers on a chair near my bed,” Fairbanks recalled. “First thing I knew, I heard a slight sound and saw the knickers move. I turned on my flash and the knickers were absolutely quiet. I turned the light off and waited. The knickers made a forward leap and landed on the floor [and] dashed almost to the door.”
They moved out the next day (“because we had to get some sleep”). Ultimately they discovered the cause: rats were coming down from the thatched roofs and scurrying off with items to line their nests.
Rats were not the only natural challenges. An octopus almost killed poor Rooney, and a softball-size spider dropped on Tom Geraghty’s neck and ran down his arm one evening. “I never saw a dinner table deserted so quickly,” remembered one observer. Ever the practical joker, Doug rigged a replica spider out of lamp wicks and peanuts, and lowered it over Geraghty’s bed with a string. Alba, recalling the pranks said, “These men are like children!”
There were other trials. Sound equipment failed. A tropical storm nearly foundered the yacht on a coral reef, also wreaking havoc on the sets. A native drowned soon after eating a hearty meal provided by the company. Fairbanks himself encountered difficulties. In one shot, he was to scamper up a palm tree. He fell, and the company laughed good-naturedly. He tried repeatedly but kept falling. In the words of Maria Alba, he became “so furious!” The crew, normally encouraged to mirth and good humor, was reduced to stifling their smiles not to frustrate him further.
His body had never failed him before. It was failing him now.
His reputation took another hit the day he was to film a high dive from the mast of the yacht. The natives had taken to calling him “the Man the Devil Fears,” by virtue of not only his movie escapades (the Papeete theater had yet to be wired for sound) but because mosquitoes did not bite him. Hundreds turned out to see him take the dive, lining the shore and surrounding the yacht in their canoes. The activity attracted a number of sharks, however, and Fairbanks, spying the dorsal fins, started to descend the rigging. This disappointed the crowd, who let up a howl for him to jump. He was the Man the Devil Fears, they exclaimed. No shark would hurt him!
He was forced to demur. The devil might fear him, true, but there was a strong possibility that no one had thought to inform the sharks. The sequence was delayed to another day.
Still, most of the shoot was a delight. Alba recalled Fairbanks as “very gracious, very patient during filming.” The company enjoyed two days’ festivities when the chief of Fairbanks’s technical staff married a Tahitian princess. Alba remembered Fairbanks pulling her out into the group and charming her into joining the dancers. Never, she said, had she laughed so hard in her life. Her private photos show a bare-chested Fairbanks, a wreath of flowers jauntily askew on his head, dancing with the natives as cheerfully and enthusiastically as he had done during the filming of The Mollycoddle with the Hopi, a dozen years before.
Others have suggested that Fairbanks and Alba had a “discreet affair” during the shoot. She adamantly denied this on direct questioning. He was married; she was heavily chaperoned. Further, charisma aside, he was “very full of himself.” The evidence supports her story: they had never met before her audition; she only saw him upon their return for studio shoots and sound dubbing and at the film’s premiere. Of the Polynesian beauties and their conquests, director Eddie Sutherland said, “That wasn’t Doug, that was me. The girls there were very friendly, which meant most of them had the clap. I made friends with the doctor, and he told me which ones didn’t. All Doug did was walk on the beach and look at the sunset with them. Doug was too square to fool around.”
The film is a minor charmer, very close in situations to the other stranded-on-a-desert-island film Fairbanks made, Down to Earth. The problem, of course, was the intervening years. He was not making films every six weeks now but every year or two. Audiences had come to expect major films from Fairbanks the producer, and there was no going back. It did not do well.
This also applied to the journey. The trip home to San Francisco was, to Maria Alba’s mind, not nearly as much fun as the journey out. There seemed to be tension coming from Fairbanks. Perhaps, she thought, he and William Farnum were not getting along. Since Doug served as best man at Farnum’s weddi
ng shortly after their return, this may not have been the case. More likely, the strain rose from the mere fact that he was going home.
Upon his arrival in early May at San Francisco, he met Mary with the misbehaving monkey on his shoulder by way of a gift.*5 He returned to life at Pickfair. Sound dubbing and studio shoots (about 30 percent of Robinson Crusoe was produced in Hollywood) distracted him for May, and the Los Angeles Olympics kept him busy in June. The expansion of Pickfair provided room to host guests for the games, among them Amelia Earhart, the Prince of Wales, and the king of Siam.
Doug seemed to need busyness, noise, to keep him diverted. He frightened the locals on the Fourth of July by firing a thousand blank rounds from a Thompson machine gun with George M. Cohan. Mary and others joined in the cacophony with sawed-off shotguns and Doug’s vintage .45s.
The antique guns may have been what put him in mind of his western memorabilia collection. By the end of the month he and Mary parted ways again, she to New York City to confer on a story (she was always conferring on stories around this time, but not filming any), he to New Mexico to look for artifacts of the West. His attempt to buy an old western bar failed, but he conceived a plan to purchase a store where Billy the Kid had staged a gun battle. Further, he announced to the press his plans to start a movement to preserve such relics. “If something isn’t done,” he announced, “all these famous landmarks will go to looters like myself, and I wouldn’t think of buying them if they were not being allowed to go to ruin.”
He never bought the store. He never started the movement. Mary was the one to follow through, purchasing enough western relics to furnish a full bar in the basement of Pickfair. She had it assembled, complete with brass spittoons and a Wooton desk, as a Christmas surprise.
But Christmas was four months away when he announced he would be off on another adventure. This time his motive for escape may have included jealousy. Magazine articles were getting bold, noting “rumors were current that linked Mary’s name with Buddy Rogers, Johnny Mack Brown and a number of others.” Never mind that in the same paragraph, Doug’s name was associated with Lupe Vélez, a Hawaiian princess, a British peeress. A man could not stand to be cuckolded, regardless of his own sins.
And by this point, it was clear indeed that this is what was happening. Shortly after his return from filming Crusoe, Paul O’Brien (Cap’s son) reluctantly told Fairbanks of an incident made public during his absence. Mary and Buddy had been boating on the Hudson River. They were alone. This quiet indiscretion would never have been noted but for the failure of the boat’s engine and the embarrassing need to be towed to shore.*6 O’Brien stated that Doug simply “laughed like hell.” Knowing his jealousy, one suspects that the laugh was hollow. Or, perhaps, brave.
He appeared to have kept his own counsel on the subject. Upon departing, he left behind fifty handwritten notecards to accompany flowers that he had arranged to greet her each morning. As with his other correspondence, she kept every scrap, and there is poignancy in reading them with the benefit of hindsight. Was he desperate to keep the marriage whole? Or placating a wife from whom he was escaping?
One can only guess. His words remain for more intuitive minds to interpret: “For my sweetheart,” “I want my Frin,” “A thought in every petal,” “To the boss,” “Birdeens on the neck,” “Look at your picture 100 times a day dear.”
And so the wandering hero wandered again. His claimed intent was to go to Tibet to hunt longhaired tigers, but he had departed in such a rush that he forgot to pack his gun. He spent more time on Asian golf courses. It was from Shanghai that he wired advice on Mary’s next (and ultimate) film. She had posed the question: should she take another try at Secrets? He replied: LIKE IDEA SHANTY TOWN OR IRISH STORY STILL STRONG FOR SECRETS UPSETS SOMETIME BEST THING WORK MORE INTENSIVELY YOUR BACK AGAINST WALL STOP IF YOU REALLY FEEL COULD HELP WILL RETURN PRESENT CONDITION HISTORY OF MANY YOUR BEST PICTURES ALL LOVE.
Her reply is lost, but in any event he did not return. He golfed, then traveled again: Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, Bali, Ceylon, Cairo, Venice. By December he had decided his next destination: London. He would go there to buy clothes, he wired her.
Perhaps that was his intent. He was an inveterate clotheshorse, after all. He was routinely listed on the top-ten best-dressed lists with such contemporaries as the Prince of Wales.*7 Ten years earlier his valet had defined his wardrobe:
He possesses 60 to 70 suits of clothes, 35 overcoats (he has a special fondness for this garment and anyone can sell him any sort of new one),†*850 pairs of shoes, to say nothing of outside footgear such as sneakers, slippers and boots, 8 to 10 dozen shirts, 19 dozen handkerchiefs, 300 neckties and many dozens of garments of even more intimate character which it is not necessary to fully describe here.
His wardrobe had only grown since then. But clothing may not have been the only temptation. Sylvia, after all, was in London. Whatever the cause, he lingered there so long that he ended up having to make another hasty scramble to be at Pickfair in time for Christmas. There he was met with a door decorated like a Christmas package. Behind it was the western bar that Mary had had so carefully assembled and installed in his absence. One cannot imagine that he could have been anything but pleased—perhaps even touched.
But it would be the last Christmas they would spend together.
* * *
*1. Some theaters would not take the film; others put it as the bottom bill of a double feature. Ultimately the film would turn a profit due to its very low costs, resulting essentially in a tax-deductible world tour for its star. But this was not yet evident in January 1932.
*2. The crew had a brief scare when Ga-Ga, a trained monkey brought for the filming, left a ship’s bathtub faucet running, draining most of the freshwater for the trip. A timely tropical storm saved the day, and technicians and translators arrived in Tahiti safely.
*3. † Dubbing had not yet been developed, and studios were obliged to film alternate-language versions of their major films.
*4. Still, when he learned that local Chinese tailors would produce a linen suit for only three dollars, he could not resist. He gave the tailor one of his most expensive Savile Row outfits, with instructions to reproduce it exactly. This the man did, right down to duplicating a cigarette burn in the sleeve.
*5. Ga-Ga the monkey lived at the Pickford-Fairbanks Studios, until he shinnied up the side of the administration building and burst in on Samuel Goldwyn in the midst of a story conference. Goldwyn was not amused. Ga-Ga was donated to an Albuquerque zoo shortly thereafter.
*6. In Booton Herndon’s 1977 biography, O’Brien claims this event occurred before Fairbanks left to film Around the World in Eighty Minutes. O’Brien’s memory was understandably imperfect, given the passage of years. Contemporary news accounts place it shortly after Mr. Robinson Crusoe.
*7. In 1930 Edward Knoblock provided him a reference to one of the top Savile Row tailors, Anderson and Sheppard. There his records are still kept, along with the notations (“double pleats, high”) that characterized his taste. He in turn passed on the favor for friends such as Victor Fleming. His son ultimately ended up getting his bespoke suits from the same source, although not on his father’s referral but on that of Noël Coward.
*8. † According to a former managing director at Anderson and Sheppard, he “had a fetish for overcoats: we made him so many that we had to keep a large book with cloth cuttings so he did not duplicate them.”
19
“Felt Terribly Blue . . . Although I Was Laughing”
* * *
THE YEAR 1933 BODED ill for Doug and Mary both, but she received the first blow—literally. Shortly before New Year’s Eve, a falling studio light struck her on the head. Doug was on the set at the time, and she came back to consciousness in his arms, badly bruised but otherwise none the worse for wear.
Far more serious was the figurative blow she was dealt a few days later. Jack had been in a Paris hospital since the prior October, in the final stages
of neurosyphilis (or, as the papers more politely termed his condition, “progressive multiple neuritis”). Doug had visited him during his return from Asia, but Mary had not seen her dying brother in months. A New Year’s Day telegram brought the news that Jack was in a delirium.
Mary was the consummate professional. No one would have known her worries the next day, when she served as the first female grand marshal of the Tournament of Roses Parade. She rode in a coach drawn by two white horses, leading a four-mile procession that carried the theme “fairy tale in flowers.” Doug at her side, she smiled through her time in the reviewing stand and at the luncheon in her honor.
Her brother died the following day.
Doug stayed in Southern California long enough for Jack’s body to arrive and, grim faced, to escort the grieving Mary and Lottie at the Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale. But before the month was over, he was on a train to New York City. His wire to Mary from the first stop was to define his remaining years: GOOD NIGHT DEAR FELT TERRIBLY BLUE WHEN I LEFT ALTHOUGH I WAS LAUGHING.
He had reason to be blue, but so did she. It is not clear exactly when she learned that another woman had tempted her husband. It was said that a bracelet intended for Sylvia was mis-delivered to Mary. Some accounts claim that she gave him an ultimatum during his Christmas visit.
There is indirect evidence that the issue of Sylvia erupted during this time. Telegrams between Doug and Mary had always, by necessity, been coded; in later years Sylvia Ashley was referred to as “McLaren.” In their telegraphic exchange as he traveled east in 1933, Sylvia may have been assigned the name of Fairbanks’s mongrel dog, Rooney, while Mary retained her nicknames “Frin” and “Hipper” and Doug was once again “Duber.” In the first of several messages, Fairbanks (referring to himself, as he often did, in the third person) gives a clue to their parting scene:
The First King of Hollywood Page 50
