The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  GOT MAD AT HIM IN THE STATION FRIT*1 DUBER.

  The second was more specific:

  FEEL TERRIBLY ABOUT ROONEY MUCH WORSE ABOUT FRIN HURRY O [sic] LOVE YOU.

  Mary’s response demonstrated her fury:

  JEALOUS ROONEY AND MAD AT THE DUBER FRIT†*2ON ALL DOGS TWELVE FOOT STREAM ON ROONEY LOVE HIPPER.

  But her answers softened as he continued to cross the country. As he boarded a ship in New York City in early February, he spoke to reporters about his hopes that Mary would join him abroad. “She’s got to come along,” he said. “I couldn’t get anywhere without her to make the plans. . . . She has the head and I have the feet.” Indeed, she did plan on joining him, embarking on a train east later that week. He wired her from St. Moritz: BON VOYAGE DEAR COME ON AND PLAY DUBER.

  He was in a mood to conciliate. He wired Chuck Lewis’s wife, traveling with Mary aboard the Italian-bound SS Rex, that he was going to board the ship at an earlier stop to surprise her. Surprised she may have been, but it is clear that on this reunion they were to ultimately to be disappointed. If he had fostered expectations that they would return to their pattern of travel together or that she would suddenly find sobriety, or if she had nursed the illusion that he would give up this new woman and return to Pickfair, they were to find their hopes mutually dashed. She wrote in later years that it was on this trip that she learned about Sylvia, although the telegrams suggest otherwise. Perhaps it was here that the misdirected bracelet brought the message home. In any event, she was steaming home on the Rex in a matter of weeks. Upon arriving in New York, she headed straight to Chicago, where actor/musician Buddy Rogers’s orchestra was playing.

  Douglas spent March and April in Biarritz, Monte Carlo, Paris—golfing in tournaments and wiring Mary about his travels as blithely as if there had been no strain at all between them. Her replies were more somber. In early April she wired him: ADVISE YOUR CURBING YOUR EXPENSES AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE LOVE. His reply came from the most expensive hotel in Biarritz: DON’T WORRY REASONABLE CURBING EXPENSES CAN WEATHER PRESENT CONDITIONS . . . OUTLOOK CHEERFUL LOVE. He then left for Spain to see a bullfight.

  No wonder, one is tempted to say, that the poor woman drank.

  He returned briefly in early May, being photographed leaping over the railing of the Aquitania before rushing home to celebrate his fiftieth birthday with Mary. She asked if he planned to stay. He assured her he did. But she found steamer tickets that told another tale, and without warning she departed the night before his birthday on a train to New York City.

  He was left opening gifts in strained silence as Kenneth Davenport, Chuck Lewis, and friend Earle Browne stoutly attempted to keep up the celebratory chatter. By the time Robert arrived at the house, the chauffeur was loading the car for a trip to the airport. Doug asked him to come along. Robert’s recollection of the conversation was distinct. “Mary didn’t tell me she was leaving,” Doug said to him. “She’s never acted like this before.”

  Robert pointed out the obvious cause, adding, “One trouble, Douglas, everybody’s been talking too damn much.”

  “You’re right,” was the reply. “If they’d all shut up and just leave it to Mary and me! Well this time we’ll talk everything out. That’s all we need, just a good talk.” He demonstrated a dogged inability to assume accountability for his own actions. “That woman doesn’t mean a thing to me,” he continued. “And I’m not going to stand in the corner with a dunce’s cap on my head because of a simple emotional binge. I’ve got it out of my system and that’s that.”

  But he hadn’t. He caught up with Mary in Albuquerque, as he planned, and managed to charm his way into her compartment on the train for the remainder of the trip east. Mary claimed that he continued to vehemently deny the rumors about Sylvia. Before sailing on the Queen Mary, he asked Mary her intentions. Would she wait for him to return? “I replied that I would do nothing and that, while he was hurting me cruelly, he was like a man with a high temperature and even if he struck me in his delirium I would not blame him, knowing he was not responsible.”

  High-sounding words. Her recollections are colored, of course, by her need to preserve and craft her own image. Given the fact that she was herself conducting an affair with Buddy Rogers at the time, this reply is a little too calculated, too saintly, perhaps. One suspects that she said something far more to the point.

  He boarded the ship with Tom Geraghty and Doug Jr., and by June he was back in London with Sylvia. He remained, he wired Mary, to see the Ryder Cup matches. He wanted to buy some suits. He was up to his neck, he claimed, in tailors.

  He was up to his neck in other troubles as well. Sylvia, it seems, required a medical procedure. That she was pregnant is conjecture, true, but it is not an unreasonable one. She was young; he was fertile. A showgirl in that era could have multiple “appendectomies”—a medical anomaly that disappeared with the advent of reliable birth control. And in Fairbanks’s next action there is a hint of—what? Panic? Obligation toward Sylvia? It is hard to say. But whatever the motive, he wired Mary stating that he was staying in England and that if she wished to remain at Pickfair, she would have to assume full financial responsibility for it.

  This was hitting her where she lived: in the heart and the purse. She showed the telegram to Frances Marion. Frances, in turn, convinced her to show it to columnist Louella Parsons.

  And so an inky explosion ensued. Every newspaper carried the story on the front page. Doug and Mary were separating!

  Sympathy was universally with Mary. “I love my husband—divorce from someone you love as dearly and tenderly as I have loved Douglas for sixteen years is an almost unbearable thought,” Louella quoted her as saying—adding for effect that Mary spent hours at home weeping.

  In the first days of the scandal, Sylvia’s existence was only hinted at. “Mary is said to have been displeased by Doug’s liking for the English nobility, by whom he has been extensively entertained,” Louella hinted slyly. But soon the word was out, and Sylvia’s seedy origins were recounted at length. She belonged to a London society composed “principally of ex-actresses [whom] hotheaded young lords had wedded into the English nobility.” She was of the sort that would go anywhere for free food and drink. Unlike our dear Mary, Sylvia had hair that was dirty blonde. And she was a terrible smiler. She had a lithographic smile, it was written. “A prop smile sterilized of all real mirth. The smile of the blonde in the second row end.”

  The press—particularly the Hearst press, happy publishers of Louella Parsons’s delicious scoop—was even harder on Doug. The gloves were off, and the schadenfreude was gleeful. He was a jolly old bounder who was tremendously flattered by royal names, the only short man anyone had seen Mary Pickford dance with. He wasn’t really as large and powerful as he had appeared to be in films; he had merely surrounded himself with shorter men. He was going to give up his citizenship and become a British subject. He was so unpopular that United Artists had to remove his name from all UA publicity material, including the stationery.*3 He was rumored to have acquired a monocle, “which Mary Pickford now can put first among her reasons for wanting a divorce.”

  Mary, on the other hand, the scribes wrote, “has met her problems with a dignity that has made those who know her marvel at her courage.”

  It was a public relations disaster. Robert attempted to stifle the flames. It was “all a tempest in a teapot,” he said, “and will blow over.” Doug avoided the press but was finally caught at a London hospital, visiting the recuperating Sylvia. Exclaiming, “I don’t want to say anything,” he beat an ignominious retreat down a fire escape. He did not aid his cause by going to Italy when Sylvia went there to convalesce.

  Fairly or not, he was exasperated. The press had taken Mary’s side, and he had no retort. He could not even imply his wife’s infidelity or her alcoholism without being an unbearable cad and scoundrel. His moral code may have been remarkably elastic, but it did not stretch that far.

  This was never better demonstrated than
in the “exclusive” that Motion Picture Magazine ran in March 1934, a putative provision of both Mary’s and Doug’s sides of the story. Mary provided a personal interview. She was philosophic, and she couched her words carefully. “I believe that a great deal of love, so-called, is selfishness. Mere possessiveness,” she said—perhaps remembering the incident on her honeymoon when her husband abandoned her in their German quarters. “It is the ME and not the YOU that matters. I think we do not learn this philosophy—this acceptance of life as it is and not as we would like to have it, childishly petulant, while we are very young. . . . All of which means that Douglas is a child-spirit. He is perpetually young, you know. His eager enthusiasms, his abounding vitality, his interests that fly the world around are young. The very pictures he makes are indicative of the boy in him.” Mary, in her version of events, was an old soul. Douglas was not. “I took the final step between Douglas and myself because I believe it to be for the good of both of us,” she continued. “I wanted to set him free, not only for myself, but for him. It will define our positions clearly.”

  It was tidy and dignified, and it was an adept portrayal of her generosity of spirit. How was one to counter this?

  He could not, would not, speak directly. Not only would it be ungentlemanly, but it would only make him look worse. Instead, he sent a friend to tell his side of the tale. It was likely Tom Geraghty. Whomever the anonymous interview subject was, he handled the case as deftly as could be done. First, he told the reporter, Fairbanks would never speak on the subject. “His parting words to me were, ‘Don’t defend me! I must keep silent!’” But, the source said, he must deliberately break this promise. His regard for Fairbanks was too deep to “stand idly by while Hollywood and the whole world viciously attack him.”

  First, he planted the hint of Buddy. “The trouble between Mary and Doug started in the latter part of 1927 when she was making My Best Girl with Buddy Rogers. Vaguely, Doug and Mary suddenly realized that their perfect accord was slipping in spots because her interests had suddenly turned away from Douglas.”

  He covered Charlotte’s death, and the bobbing of Mary’s curls. “She had new ambitions—new plans for a greater fame than had ever before been hers. But Douglas was tired of their monotonous life—circumscribed, as it was, almost entirely by work. He pleaded with Mary that now was their time to play. . . . Mary refused to entertain—even for a moment—the suggestion of retirement.”

  It was subtle but potentially effective. Mary had developed an interest in another man, and her ambitions were thwarting the simple boyish desires of her husband to play. Now he moved in closer to the issue at hand. He hinted at her drinking.

  “Then, very suddenly, Mary became the center of a lively bunch of youngsters who were beginning to make their mark in pictures,” he continued. “She entertained frequently and gaily. It was like a second youth to her.” The source did not note the apparent contradiction: mere moments before, the complaint had been that Mary only wanted to work and did not play. Now, it seems, she was playing too much—and with the wrong crowd. “Doug tried desperately to enter into the fun of Mary’s new friends. Always keeping in superb physical condition, he had never taken a drink before. But now, so that he might not feel an outsider, he drank with the rest of them. And he hated it.”

  Then, according to the confidant, a deal was struck. Doug would stick around Hollywood for six months of the year, doing as Mary wished, as long as the other six months she would travel with him, “doing the thing closest to his heart!” The first half of 1929 was thus devoted to The Taming of the Shrew. Here, the informant said, it was apparent to everyone that something was wrong. The tension on the film set was evident throughout the entire shooting schedule. Then came the second half of the deal: a half year of travel. “I don’t believe that either one of them doubted for a moment that the trip would set aright whatever was amiss with them.”

  But again, according to the source, the problem lay with Mary. She was a poor traveler. She got seasick often. It was Doug who was invited everywhere, while Mary remained in her suite at the hotel. Then came Doug’s first solo trip to the golf tournament. The source made no whisper of any possible infidelity on Fairbanks’s part. There was no English lady leading him astray. Instead, the narrative took us directly to Doug’s “jaunt to the Orient” and Mary’s refusal to go along. Fairbanks made Around the World in Eighty Minutes, claimed the source, to stem the tide of gossip and protect his wife’s pride. His solo trip was clothed as a location shoot.

  By the time he was filming Mr. Robinson Crusoe, the informant said “both of them now knew definitely that their romance was over. . . . He hated Hollywood society; and she hated his restless feet.”

  Now, he went in for the kill. While Doug was manfully making his tropical comedy, Mary was “favoring Buddy Rogers’ constant attentions.” This “hurt Doug frightfully. Doug was not a man to be brought back to a woman’s side by jealousy. He was like a little boy who had been slapped. He was too bewildered to think coherently. Doug,” the source said, “was fed up!”

  He tried to win her back. She tried to win him back. “But a divine spark can never be rekindled,” the source said resignedly. “Mary made gestures to prove to him that her life could go on without him. She entertained lavishly. She became a familiar figure at the popular restaurants. At premières she was escorted by Buddy Rogers. . . . Don’t blame Doug entirely for this smash-up.”

  It was a valiant effort, but it failed. The world saw Mary as the victim, and their hero became their former hero.

  With the public relations detritus coming down around his ears, Doug tried to turn back to work. Issuing a flat denial (“all nonsense!”) that he intended to become a British subject, he toured an English film studio with the Prince of Wales. He had seen The Private Life of Henry VIII before its release and had been so impressed with Alexander Korda’s film that he wired UA, suggesting the film be distributed in the United States. By mid-August, a joint deal between UA and London Films was announced for a production unit in London, with Fairbanks at its head. Doug would become a shareholder in London Films and star in a film about Don Juan. (One can only wonder what went through his wife’s mind at the latter news.) Other stars, he claimed, would be brought into the company: Leslie Howard, Herbert Marshall, Colin Clive, Boris Karloff—possibly even Charlie Chaplin and Charles Laughton.

  The plan made sense, from a business perspective. The British market represented nearly 80 percent of UA’s foreign profits. In the late 1920s the British government had passed the so called Quota Act, which required that 5 percent of exhibitors’ films and 7.5 percent of distributors’ films in Great Britain be of British origin. UA had signed a contract with Herbert Wilcox in 1932 to produce twelve pictures a year for the following three years. In 1933 the company signed Alexander Korda to a sixteen-picture contract. The success of Henry VIII contributed to Korda’s joining UA as a partner in September 1935.

  To Mary, he sent mixed messages, to which she responded with the sensitivity of a tuning fork. Signals were negative: he gallivanted publicly with Sylvia and booked a suite at the London hotel where she stayed; she put Pickfair on the market. Then signals were positive: he telephoned, claiming that he did not want a divorce; she took the house off the market.

  They would seesaw thus for the next two years.

  Having waited five months to file for divorce, she sent a letter to one of her lawyers making her frustrations clear:

  You are probably wondering why we have all taken so long in going through with the legal proceedings but, in self-protection, I wanted to leave no stone unturned. I can honestly say I have done everything that anyone could expect of me and now I am ready next Monday to start proceedings.

  . . . Once before we started to negotiate for the house and told Robert Fairbanks our intentions of filing suit, which information he transmitted to Douglas. Five hours after Robert had sent the wire, Douglas called me long distance. He said he had heard a report from several sources whi
ch he hoped was not true. I replied that it was true and he asked if I would reconsider. That evening I received a telegram from him saying that he, personally, did not desire a divorce and unless I had a special reason for wishing one he hoped I would not go through with it. Having heard nothing from him since although I answered his wire very fully, setting forth my reasons and more or less leaving the door open to him to reply and tell me what his plans for the future were and what he expected of me. I did not hear from him; however, I did receive a cable from Tom Geraghty who, as you know, has been with him ever since he left New York, stating that Douglas was crushed and terribly upset about the continued attacks of W.R.*4 upon the ridiculous question of his becoming a British subject and that he would never love anyone but me.

  To me the whole affair continues to grow more puzzling. Up to the time I heard from him on the telephone I was convinced he wanted his freedom. Now I don’t know what to think. Robert assures me that Douglas will return after the completion of his next picture but that seems an eternity away and, in the meantime, Mr. Wright*5 fears something might happen that might prove injurious to me.

  Knowing Douglas’ temperament as I do, I realize that he would not fail to come to me or at least communicate with me if I were of any importance to his future happiness or if he included me in his plans. It is quite possible that those close to him have convinced him that a divorce at this time would not be to the interests of his picture; however, I may be doing him an injustice.

  The “next picture” to which she referred was to be his last. But there were miles to go before The Private Life of Don Juan would be screened. Mary officially filed suit on December 8, 1933, citing what Fairbanks Jr. described as his father’s “gypsy foot” and his public pronouncements “that he had no interest in life except travel.” This, Mary’s filing pointed out, “destroyed the legitimate ends of matrimony.” As of 1930, she stated, he “disregarded her wishes and assumed an attitude of indifference toward their marital status.” When the press asked her attorney what Miss Pickford meant in the claim that Mr. Fairbanks “lacked consideration for her feelings and sensibilities,” he was forced to hedge politely, finally claiming that Doug “stole the show” in The Taming of the Shrew. What could be more thoughtless, he implied, than upstaging your wife?