It was a sad, absurd claim in a sad, absurd drama. And once Mary actually filed for divorce, the ever-variable Doug let it be known through back channels that he was open to reconciliation. Thus began a series of communications that were conducted not only by letter and telegram but also by headline. Mary, smiling to reporters, stated, “I cannot affirm or deny any reports that, well, that there may be stockings above the mantel-piece at Pickfair on Christmas Day.” Stopping in Chicago en route to New York, she preached, “Women ought to learn that kindness is sometimes the most devastating and weakening influence. Wives especially make this mistake. There ought to be a school where women are taught how to be reasonably selfish. It is the unselfish ones who ruin themselves and everyone depending on them.” They cabled each other at Christmas. She wired him at New Year’s that columnist Karl Kitchen would carry a letter for him across the Atlantic. He wired back that this was an excellent idea. She sent him his 1934 horoscope. He sent Joseph Schenck from London to Los Angeles with the message: “Kiss Mary and tell her that I am coming to America just to see her.” (Schenck reported with some poignancy that Mary’s “face lighted up and while she made no reply . . . I felt that she was drinking in every word and that in her heart she still loves Douglas.”)
The delicate long-distance dance was brought up short when Lord Ashley, he of the drooping Sandhurst mustache and the missing chin, suddenly appeared on the scene. Initially he claimed no knowledge of “Miss Pickford’s husband” having any acquaintance with his wife. But less than two months later, in February 1934, he filed suit for divorce, naming Fairbanks as the correspondent.
Doug received notice of the papers at quarter to three in the morning, while escorting Lady Ashley to her home in the Mayfair district of London. The press was in wait. He beat a retreat on foot to his own hotel suite, his only recorded words being “Very embarrassing.” The next morning he was to be seen, his face hidden by an old hat and a turned-up collar, dodging a phalanx of journalists and driving his Rolls-Royce to the home of his solicitor. There he was observed through a front window frantically pacing back and forth for the next three hours. “Frequently,” one journalist wrote, “he put his hands to his head in a gesture of distraction and appeared greatly distressed.” He wired Mary: HIPPER DEAR PASSING THROUGH WORST PERIOD I HAVE EVER KNOWN TRYING TO PULL MYSELF TOGETHER TO START PICTURE LOVE DUBER.
Yet still, he stood a chance. Mary told the ever-paternal Schenck that, “if Doug would woo her all over again there was every possibility their difficulties could be patched up and their marriage resumed without a divorce.”
Schenck was not alone in his efforts. Tom Geraghty scuttled back and forth with messages. And Doug began a series of transatlantic calls. He was near Barcelona, scouting exteriors for Don Juan, when he visited boxer Max Schmeling’s training camp. Schmeling’s manager, Joe Jacobs, showed no hesitation in giving the press his opinion:
It’s in the bag. How do I know? Say, Doug come over from London to Schmeling’s training camp near Barcelona, and spent three days with us. Didn’t I see him dashing for a phone to call her up? Twice he calls her in New York and once in Detroit and when he’d get her, boy, how he would talk. The rate to New York was $34.50 for 3 minutes and it was $32 to Detroit, but he didn’t watch the clock. When a fellow spends that much dough to talk to a woman he just has to be in love with her. At first, Mary was going to go over there, but Doug said “no.” He said that people would think she was chasing him. So he’s going to come back in June—just as soon as he finishes with his picture work over there.
He was described as happy and cheerful as he returned to England for studio shooting—“a new man [who] apparently has forgotten about the Lady Ashley affair.” Said another insider: “It is just a matter of time now. . . . The Ashley incident only caused strained relations for two days. The first fury quickly subsided and now the situation is even better than it was then.” Doug, it was said, had given up plans to stop working. Mary would withdraw her divorce petition.
But he would not have been Doug if he had been stable. As he got closer to reconciliation, he undercut himself. For the filming of Don Juan, he rented an enormous estate on over a thousand acres in North Mimms Park in Hertfordshire. There were eighty-two bedrooms—so many that Tom Geraghty got lost one night trying to find his and was reduced to changing clothes in the hall. With this many sleeping chambers, one might have hoped that Fairbanks would have had the discretion to place that of Lady Ashley, when she visited—and she visited continuously—a little farther away from his own. Their chambers, however, were adjoining—a point Lord Ashley was happy to make in a supplemental petition to the court in July.
Mary responded in kind. She started having frequent—and public—dinner dates with Buddy. Still, her signals were positive. “Men are like naughty little boys,” she told a reporter (presumably for her husband’s consumption). “When they are tired of being naughty they are glad to come home.”
Perhaps he was tired of being naughty. Filming finished, he gave up North Mimm’s Park, as well as his Alford Street town house. He went to the south of France with Sylvia, but still kept up his calls to Mary. It was from there that he abruptly boarded the SS Rex half an hour before sailing, leaving Sylvia without so much as a by-your-leave. Informed by reporters of his departure, she could only speculate that her errant lover might disembark at Gibraltar.
He did not. He arrived in New York City in mid-August, temples and mustache a little grayer after his fourteen-month absence but grinning broadly. The smile continued as he crossed the country, disappearing only for his appearance at the Colorado funeral of his sister-in-law Margaret, John’s widow, who died while he was en route. A private train car brought him to Los Angeles, where Robert’s daughters met him. With them were reporters. He refused, they said, to discuss his marital affairs. But he was smiling the Fairbanks smile.
He wasted no time. He met Mary in Beverly Hills, getting into her car and driving her for hours, with his own car and driver trailing behind. They were reported to be joking and laughing. They dined together at Pickfair that night and then went for another long drive in the moonlight. He was there bright and early the next morning, and the pattern repeated. By the weekend, they had retired to their respective corners—Mary at Pickfair and Doug at Rancho Zorro—to think things over. He brought her there on Monday, and they inspected the gardens and discussed locations for the proposed ranch house. He had, the newspapers reported, “his old-time zest.”
When Mary reconstructed this period for her autobiography, twenty years later, she portrayed herself as resolute. Her heart wept for him, she said, but her mind was made up. She was adamant. But memory and pride are tricky things, and the evidence is that she wavered mightily. When in late August 1934 reporters were asking her about a reconciliation, she replied coyly, “I won’t deny it.” A matter of weeks later, things were different. She shortened her hair—Doug hated her hair short—and announced that she was not going to be “rushed into any decision.” And by the time of the UA directors’ meeting in late September, things seemed worse. They smiled distantly at each other but only spoke perfunctorily. The photographer asked for a picture of the two, but Doug shook his head and motioned for Schenck to sit between them. In the photo, they looked strained and glum.
By October, things had warmed up again. They telegraphed frequently when apart: he was her “Darling Duber”; she was his “Darling Hipper.” He would send her gardenias and call her from distant airstrips, stuffing coin after coin into the payphone, before making yet another of his dashes to Pickfair for dinners with Mary and the likes of Kay Francis and the Countess Di Frasso. They may even have resumed sexual relations. In one telegram Doug wrote: HIPPER DARLING I MISSED YOU SO MUCH DEAR CERTAINLY MISSED THE LITTLE FRIEND LOVE DOUGLAS. In fact, he missed the little friend so much that he proposed following her to New York. She wired back: DUBER DARLING THINK IT WOULD BE IN VERY QUESTIONABLE TASTE . . . UNPLEASANT AND GRUELING ENOUGH AS IT IS LOVE YOU HIPPER.
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br /> He announced that he was selling his holdings in London Films and would make movies only in the States. At a Kansas train stop, Mary reportedly told a friend that she and Douglas “were reconciled—happily reconciled.” By the time she arrived in Chicago, she denied the story as a rumor. The laconic Robert was asked his opinion and could only offer: “Well, they’ve been running around together a lot.”
Still, there were strains. Sylvia’s divorce was coming up, and it was uncontested. Sylvia herself seemed to have lost no time and was reported to be hobnobbing with a young, wealthy Warwickshire peer.
Fairbanks was conspicuous by his absence at the Don Juan premiere in Hollywood in late November.
The film, a failure at the time, is little short of a painful revelation. Either Fairbanks had a strong sense of irony or Korda had a brilliant sense of casting. Perhaps both. But no stronger statement had been made to date on the effects of age and the thousand petty stings that come with a fall from celebrity. Substitute “movie star” for “famed lover” and the tale is that of Fairbanks, enacted by Fairbanks. It is subtly played and rueful, both superbly entertaining and heartbreaking to watch.
His introduction in the film is gradual: first we see him only by shadows, throwing roses to lovely women on their balconies. We progress to just his shapely leg, having its reflexes tested by a doctor. The doctor wishes to know his age. He won’t give it. His problem? “When I sit down to a quiet game with a lady, I’m no longer sure of holding the cards.”
At one point Korda holds the camera in for a close-up of Fairbanks, looking handsome yet world weary, his face showing the early sagging indignity of the years. He delivers his speech with none of the pressure or fist-waving urgency of his earlier sound performances. He speaks simply, with subdued pain. “I want to rest,” he says. “To lead a simple life with simple people. Not to be a celebrity for a while. To be unknown. No women, and alone. To eat what I like, to do what I like.” It is either a brilliant performance or a man stating an actual belief.
The film is relentless. At one point a jealous husband kills a Don Juan imitator, and Don Juan’s adviser urges him to let well enough alone. “Leave off while they still think of you as you were . . . ten years ago. Before these wrinkles, these lines, these gray hairs.” Don Juan tries to convince the mob that he still lives. He interrupts a biographical stage performance. He is Don Juan!
The crowd hoots him down—painful documentation that no man can live up to the illusion he has created. The illusion outstrips him, and the audience, worshipping the fantasy, destroys the frail form behind it. Better to be a large, grand shadow casting roses than a mere man upon the stage, too short, and perhaps not as broad in the shoulders as everyone thought.
The world was not ready for such irony. Viewers still wanted their protagonists triumphant and not stumbling into old age. Or perhaps they did not wish to see the hero of their childhood tales in a story so amusingly jaded and ironic. Alistair Cooke, one of the many who, as a child, adored Fairbanks, wrote indignantly of the film, “There is hardly a clue to the undoubted fact that Fairbanks is a truer artist than any of the more pretentious ones who surrounded him.”
It mattered not. The film was a failure.
And in the life-imitating-art category, the details on the Ashley divorce did nothing to help. The entire hearing lasted only eight minutes, but that was long enough for such salacious testimony as that of Lady Ashley entering Fairbanks’s bedroom at the Hyde Park Hotel, with instructions from Doug that they were not to be disturbed, or that they were both living in the Dorchester Hotel the prior September, with Doug leaving the bedroom in his dressing gown and pajamas and the good lady being noted therein “bareheaded.” The divorce was quickly granted, and Fairbanks was ordered to pay the $10,000 expenses.
This brought out the Hearst press, and for Doug it was the equivalent of poking a bear. He wired Mary: HIPPER DEAR LOUELLA IS AT IT AGAIN THINK IT IS TERRIBLE ABSOLUTELY UNFOUNDED.
Some exchange of words—likely never to be known—followed, and the situation worsened. HIPPER DARLING POOR DUBER FRIT FRIT, he wired. Her response: DARLING WAS SORRY TO HAVE UPSET YOU BUT AM WARNING YOU BECAUSE I LOVE YOU.
By Christmas week it all came to a head. He was in New York City, running from reporters and autograph seekers by hiding in restaurant kitchens. She was at Pickfair, her second Christmas alone. It was Christmas Eve. They spoke on the phone. It did not go well.
After he had hung up on her, she sat down with a pencil and two pieces of thin, cream-colored paper. Her handwriting was steady, although her use of pronouns was not. She wrote:
In case in after years you may seek to blame me—make me unhappy and miserable because of what has happened I want to write down while it is still fresh in my mind some of Duber’s remarks on the telephone tonight. He was unfortunate in being found*6 and threatened Frin that things would be different when it was known what Frin was doing—that she was alright since she had good publicity being such a good friend of Hearst’s—he couldn’t see why he shouldn’t go to London since Hipper saw that*7fellow†—what did I expect him to do—he wanted to go—he was surprised and annoyed with Allen.‡*8He was going mad not having anything to do—although he had just spent that evening with a nineteen year old “flirt”. He could see no harm in his going over there and said I was taking it much too seriously—when I asked him please not to go he said I had no right to—that he had made no demands upon me for seven years, which is a plain damned lie—I can’t remember the exact words he used about the publicity and Hearst, but it was very insulting and made me cry—He ended our conversation by hanging up. Although I told him it was the last time I would ever speak to him—had he been willing to talk things over with me and plan our joint future things might have been so different—I was willing to forgive and forget—I know I’ve been far from perfect and not entirely blameless but the Duber preferred to discuss our personal affairs with all our friends but never with me. The innuendos about all the young girls, what transpired in the living room after he had put me in the car and sent me to work should prove (if any further proof is necessary) that our future together was absolutely hopeless—I simply could not pick up and go with him on a boat for a year—leave Gwynne, a young girl just emerging into life, my business also needs my attention—besides I know that [I] could never have stood the sea sickness and misery of living and travelling on that small boat.
Well! Hawkes*9 (and believe me she’s well named) is welcome to it—I shall be interested to watch their union—they should be able to vie with one another in seeing who will be the most inconstant. Will she be willing to undergo the hardships of travel that I have suffered? Be as self-effacing and considerate of his every whim? Well, I pray God he won’t be too unhappy. I love him and probably will as long as I live—and I certainly don’t want him punished. God give me strength to go through these next few weeks and wipe all bitterness and condemnation out of my heart—make me grateful for the good that has been ours, and forget all else.
She sealed the note in an envelope and wrote on the outside:
Private and Personal
Written December 24, 1934
She placed it in a small cardboard box that contained every love letter, note, and card that Douglas had sent her since 1917. The note was torn open, roughly, at some later date. One wonders: by whom? Mary herself in later days, when drinking and age had trapped her in her own bedroom for months, years? A curious Buddy, or his last wife? Or was it an employee of the auction house that ended up with the little cardboard box seventy years later, leaving the letter open to the coarse hands of dealers looking to buy for resale?
We shall never know. But we do know what Mary did that night. She wired Douglas Fairbanks at the Waldorf Astoria. His Christmas gift was a telegram: DARLING I UNDERSTAND IT IS TOO BAD THE WHOLE SORRY BUSINESS LOVE YOU HIPPER.
* * *
*1. It does not require a rhyming dictionary to deduce the expletive Fairbanks was going for here.
; *2. † Ditto Pickford.
*3. There is no evidence that this was true.
*4. William Randolph Hearst.
*5. Likely Lloyd Wright, one of Mary’s divorce attorneys.
*6. Found out in his infidelity, as opposed to Mary, who was not.
*7. † Buddy Rogers.
*8. ‡ Likely Allen Boone, a family friend who dined with them at Pickfair during the reconciliation attempt.
*9. Lady Ashley’s maiden name.
20
A Living Death
* * *
DOUG BOOKED PASSAGE ON the Isle de France just before sailing, and boarded, in the words of one reporter, “deaf to all queries.” He drank little and exercised compulsively on the voyage. He appeared worn upon arrival at Le Havre, France. Sylvia Ashley was waiting. They went to Paris, then St. Moritz, Fairbanks steadily refusing to make any personal statements. They were dancing until four in the morning the day his divorce was filed.
Mary went to court on January 11, 1935. Two days before, she had sent him a telegram: DEAR DUBER AM NOTIFYING YOU PERSONALLY HAVE DEFINITELY DECIDED AGAINST CANCELLING OUR CONTRACT IN JANUARY HAVE INSTRUCTED OUR RESPECTIVE ATTORNEYS TO THIS EFFECT KINDEST REGARDS HIPPER. It was over in a matter of minutes, and she was only required to say the word yes a few times. Still, her voice faltered and broke. When the judge granted the decree, she gave a small start and her eyes filled with tears. The divorce would be final in a year.
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