He meant it. Perhaps the strongest declaration of this was when he sold the rights to The Mark of Zorro to Darryl Zanuck at Fox in early 1936. The rumored price was $50,000—almost a third of the film’s original production costs. The gossips murmured that he made the sale reluctantly. He had always expected, it was said, to return again to the Zorro saga.
In truth, it was a surrender to economic realities. There were those who would claim that Sylvia Ashley was cheap (lawyer Cap O’Brien referred to her as “Lady Ashcan”), but none would say that she was inexpensive. Mary had made her own money—a shocking amount of money—and she and Doug had always kept their accounts separate. But now he was maintaining an establishment in London (at 99 Park Lane) and the Santa Monica beach house at a time when his income had plummeted. In 1930 his earnings from films and investments were over $450,000. Five years later this number had been reduced by 75 percent and would keep going down. And still the money went out: to the Ritz, to Harrods, to buy jewels, to buy cars. He had to pay the piper, and he would keep paying until his death, which occurred at the end of a tax year in which, for the first time, he showed a net loss.
Yet even in this, he was a fortunate man. It could have been worse, and for many a fallen silent screen star, subsisting in poverty, or something very much like it, it was. For the last ten years of his life he lived off the cushions built in the 1910s and ’20s by his conservative brothers and advisers. They knew their generous, improvident, impulsive man well and constructed a web of bonds, trusts, and other investments that would protect him from himself and yet permit him to live as he had lived almost his whole adult life: in ease and luxury. Still, he was eating away his principal, and each year saw him selling assets that he had never imagined he would give up. The last year of his life he sold one of his Remingtons.
Other parts of his history were disappearing. A fire swept through Kenneth Ridge, taking the last vestiges of his life with Beth Sully. Sam Goldwyn, now with control of the Pickford-Fairbanks lot at Santa Monica and Formosa, announced plans to tear down the last few sets from Robin Hood, The Thief of Bagdad, and Mary’s second version of Tess of the Storm Country. D. W. Griffith, perhaps still remembering the pain of seeing the Intolerance sets deteriorate a score of years before, raised a public outcry. But Doug said nothing as another bit of his past crumbled and vanished.
He could ignore Goldwyn’s annexation of his studio, but the head-in-the-sand approach did not serve for another aspect of his past: Mary.
It is not that he didn’t try. Mary and Buddy were openly seeing each other now, and marriage rumors were rampant. Doug was breakfasting at a Kansas City train station in the course of one of his frequent national crisscrossings in early 1936 when a newspaperman pointed out that they were very near the Olathe, Kansas, hometown of Rogers. “He shook his head and his face was blank,” the reporter wrote, “as if he had never heard of Buddy.” Privately, he voiced his disbelief to his brother. Mary would never marry that fellow, he told him. She had money, position. She was just “pretending” to make him jealous.
If that had ever been her motive early in her relationship with Buddy, it did not appear to be the case now. They married in June 1937. Still, at some level, he could not believe it. Around this time, one of the UA board meetings was held in Mary’s bedroom, to accommodate the fact that she was under the weather. During the course of a heated debate one partner—very likely Goldwyn—actually shook his fist at her. Doug’s response was immediate. “How dare you talk to my wife like that?” he was reputed to have said to the offender, before pitching him out of the room.
Before dismissing the story as apocryphal, consider the words of one of the UA presidents during this period. Goldwyn biographer A. Scott Berg quotes Dr. Attilio Henry Giannini:
“All my life I’ve been an adventurer, and have been in a lot of tough situations. . . . But let me tell you, I never saw fights like the ones at U.A. board meetings in my life.” He said that “criminations, recriminations, cusswords”—even physical violence—became standard boardroom procedure.
On one level, one can scarcely blame Fairbanks. Mary may have no longer been his wife, but if ever there was a man, in Doug’s mind, asking for a punch in the kisser, it was Sam Goldwyn. He had always been abrasive, but in a May 1937 directors’ meeting, he advanced to toxic. He accused Pickford, Fairbanks, and Chaplin of contributing nothing to United Artists. They should have, he stated directly, the decency to sell out. He offered $500,000 for their shares.
They rebuffed this offer but retired privately to confer. They returned with a counteroffer: $2 million each. It was decided that Goldwyn and Korda could have until December 21 to try to get the money.
This would have been a godsend for Fairbanks. Clarence Erickson, who, with Robert, managed his finances, wrote, “If the deal can be concluded, I feel it is the greatest break Douglas has had in years. . . . Under the present income tax laws, Douglas can realize a net of about $1,450,000.00 after paying income taxes.”
It was not to be. Korda was not in a strong position. His UA releases had, for the most part, not been successful. Further, the construction of Denham Film Studios in Great Britain for London Films was taxing his purse. The pair could only raise $4 million, and Chaplin was adamant: he would take $2 million or nothing. Various compromises were attempted, but none worked.
WE SHOULD NEVER HAVE GIVEN LENGTHY OPTION AND EXPOSED OURSELVES AND UNITED TO THIS PUBLICITY, Doug groused in a telegram to Cap O’Brien. The deal was dead.
Other reminders of mortality hovered near. The most pointed came after the February 1938 visit of Lord and Lady Plunkett. Lady Plunkett, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of three sons, was the daughter of silent film actress Fannie Ward, and a friend of Sylvia’s. The couple vacationed at the Santa Monica beach house as guests of the Fairbankses and then flew from Burbank on William Randolph Hearst’s private plane to the Hearst Ranch up north. Fog intervened, and the plane crashed in flames while attempting to land, killing the young couple. Understandably shocked, a somber and grave Fairbanks arranged the funeral services and took their ashes to London later that spring.
“For a man my age it would have been a blessing,” he told his brother. “There’s nothing that I haven’t done at least twice before and I now look upon death as the only challenge, the only adventure left before me.”
Dramatic words, true, from a man in a self-pitying mood. But he started to act as if he felt his days were numbered. He donated all the films in his legal and physical possession to the Museum of Modern Art. It was the largest film donation to date in the history of the museum.*1
He continued the weary rounds, looking either bored and distracted or smiling a strained smile at such events as Elsa Maxwell’s “Barn Party” at the Waldorf Astoria, complete with a hog caller and a dozen hogs. His extravagances, small and large, continued. He still topped the best-dressed lists and was described as the most extravagant patron of New York’s Pajama Parlor, where the wealthy paid up to eighty dollars for a pair of custom-fitted pajamas. He was found on the slopes of St. Moritz and the sestieri of Venice in season. But he almost never looked happy.
He perked up briefly in April 1939 when Jayar, who had divorced Joan Crawford in 1933, married Mary Lee Epling, a beautiful young divorcee of independent means. Doug’s son, deciding he had no close male friends, asked his father to be his best man. Jayar’s recollection of the circumstance was colored by that ambivalence toward his father that remained decades after the older man’s death. His father seemed pleased, he said. He “at least behaved as if he was happy at the prospect.”
In point of fact, he was delighted, and when, months later, it was discovered that his first grandchild was on the way, he was over the moon. Jayar had been anxious on both accounts, fearing that the best man request and the news of his pending grandparenthood would somehow trigger an angry response. It was an understandable anxiety: his announcement in 1923 that he was going into motion pictures had caused a firestorm of misunderstandings
and overreactions.
In fact, once Jayar was of age and Fairbanks did not think his son was being used for his name alone, he was enthusiastically supportive of his career and proud of his accomplishments.*2 He wired him frequently on the status of his current films†*3and was critical in influencing him to play the villain part in The Prisoner of Zenda. “He listened attentively,” Jayar recalled, when recounting how he sought his father’s advice about taking a supporting role. “When I finished, he burst out with the conviction that I had to accept.” His father declared, “Nobody has played Rupert and failed to steal the show, on either stage or screen! It is so actor-proof, in fact, that Rin Tin Tin could play the part and walk away with it!”
Still, Jayar’s mixed feelings were justified. For a brief period in the mid-1930s, he had lived in the guesthouse adjacent to the Santa Monica beach house where Doug and Sylvia lived. This put the son in a bit of an awkward spot: he resented Sylvia as “the instrument that finally broke up my father’s celebrated marriage . . . and also dislodged him from the pedestal on which he stood as a universally adored figure.” More to the point: “What I resented was what I took to be her schemes to get another jewel or expensive present.” (Sylvia preferred Rolls-Royces and got them.) In order to hide his dislike, he went out of his way to treat her warmly.
This, given Senior’s pathologic jealousy, was a strategic mistake. Fairbanks decided that his son was flirting with his wife, and with his characteristic inability to face conflict or perform an unpleasant task himself, he sent an embarrassed Kenneth Davenport to deliver the eviction notice. He wanted Jayar out of the house, and he wanted him out of the house immediately.
It was not a wise move, on many levels. He could use every friend he could get, and there were few left. Old friends, including the beloved Tom Geraghty, were no longer in the inner circle, replaced by Sylvia’s fast, late-night crowd. Even his old trappings were gone: as his son wrote, “He no longer had a large studio with a great suite of offices, a gymnasium, a Turkish bath, and a lounge-dressing room; there were no more luxuriously uncultivated foothills, gardens, panoramic views, and creature comforts of Pickfair; gone too were the private screenings of new films after dinner and a domestic staff that catered to his many whims. There was no Albert as Major Domo, and even Rocher had left very soon after Pete’s marriage to Sylvia.”
This last was indeed a blow to both men. Rocher wrote Jayar “to think of the past years at his service is to live again the happiest time of my life.” It is likely the converse was also true.
Douglas’s new acquaintances were not always worthy creatures. Perhaps he can be forgiven for being at a house party on the French Riviera with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Why, he was queried, didn’t he go back into the movies? “I got out just before the public got wise to me,” he replied. The Duchess of Windsor jerked her thumb over her shoulder at her husband and said, “You mean just as he did.”
Less understandable, although perhaps more useful, was an instance in August 1939 when he was pictured in conversation with the occupant of the adjoining cabana at his beach retreat in Venice—none other than Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Goebbels told him, enigmatically, that Germany would “go ahead with its program.” What this program was he evidently failed to clarify. Publicly, Fairbanks stated that he doubted there would be a European war because “Britain is so ready, and [the Nazis] know it.” (His timing was particularly bad, given the Labor Day weekend invasion of Poland that immediately followed.) Privately, he scrambled to get Sylvia, her sister, and her sister’s children on an already-overcrowded ship to the United States. Unable to find passage for himself with his family, he remained behind, only to catch a boat to the Caribbean. A quick run on the Dixie Clipper brought him to Long Island ahead of Sylvia, and he was there to greet them as they arrived. He would never return to Europe again.
But if he missed the European conflict, Sam Goldwyn’s private war against United Artists served as a substitute.
Shortly after Mary lost the distribution rights to Walt Disney’s films to RKO, Dr. Attilio Henry Giannini replaced her as chairman of the board. There were advantages to this appointment: the good doctor had a track record of loaning money to the film industry through his brother’s bank, the Bank of America. But Goldwyn wanted someone more favorable to his interests at the helm. When his attempt to buy out the partners failed, he moved in March 1938 to have Murray Silverstone put in charge of distribution.
This did not bode well for the founding partners. Neil McCarthy (formerly Howard Hughes’s lawyer when he released through UA) wrote to Doug, “Silverstone will be subservient to Sam. . . . If Sam gets control of the company he will use it for his own selfish interests, regardless of the returns to the company. . . . He resents the fact that you and Mary and Charlie receive earnings from the distribution of his pictures.”
Despite these (and other) warnings, the board approved the change, as well as others demanded by Goldwyn. Distribution fees were decreased from 30 percent to 25 percent. The Los Angeles office was closed. A fund was established to permit the producing partners to share in company profits.*4
And still, Sam Goldwyn was not content. At the January 1939 meeting, he demanded full and sole voting rights for the company. Anything less and he would veto any proposals. One of these proposals (which he promptly vetoed) was made by Fairbanks, for a new production company. Goldwyn’s stance was that Fairbanks’s company’s “pictures would not be good enough to give them the privilege of sharing in profits.” The minutes reflect Doug’s astonishment and despair. “Sam,” he said. “I’ve been your friend for many years, and now that I ask this thing, you attach this condition? Surely you don’t mean it?”
Goldwyn’s reply: “Yes I do.”
Fairbanks, it is reported, left the room in silence.
In March, Goldwyn went to court to attempt to win a judgment that would get him out of his distribution contract with United Artists. It bounced from court to court until December 27, when the US District Court in Delaware dismissed the suit. There was jubilation in the offices of United Artists. But Doug was not there to share it.
On Saturday, December 9, he and Sylvia attended the USC-UCLA football game. A photographer snapped a picture of him leaving the game with friend Kay Francis by his side. It was to be his last photograph. No newspapers picked it up for publication.
That night, he and Sylvia dined with the then-pregnant Mary Lee and Jayar to celebrate his son’s thirtieth birthday. He had sent Jayar a telegram that afternoon wishing him many happy returns of the day.†*5“We played games and were frightfully gay,” Mary Lee wrote two weeks later. Jayar’s recollections of the dinner conversation were more elegiac. “A good hour or more of which time he devoted to recalling ‘the old days’ in New York, and his experiences in the [Lambs] Club,” he recalled. “He was particularly pleased that I had joined.”
Not all of the evening involved reminiscing. Doug was planning to see a Lunt and Fontanne play on Tuesday. The war in Europe was also on his mind. “We talked of you both,” Jayar wrote to Lord and Lady Mountbatten, “and the conversation led us to discussing plans to come to England next summer to produce a film which might help the allied cause.”
Then came the toasts. “When my turn came,” Jayar recalled, “I impulsively broke my lifelong habit of manly undemonstrativeness toward my father. This time, after a few light quips, I directed a brief, but affectionate toast ‘to Dad.’ Everyone appeared to be rather touched, but he most of all.”
But warning signs were on the horizon. One of Douglas’s nieces, Margaret Mary, noticed him close his eyes and rest his head against the back of his chair. Was he all right?
“I’m tired,” she reported him replying. “So tired.”
The next morning, he woke at his usual time:*6 6 AM. But the day brought a new sensation—a feeling of tightness in his chest. Worse yet, he was short of breath. Lying or even sitting worsened his breathlessness, and he foun
d himself standing repeatedly in front of an open window, trying to relieve the air hunger. He did not know it, but he had an occluded coronary artery, and the left ventricle of his heart—the part that pumps blood through the aorta to the rest of the body—had begun to fail. Fluid was backing up in his lungs. He was experiencing congestive heart failure.
Assistant Arthur Fenn arrived two hours later to work in the back bedroom that served as the vestige of the once-mighty Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corporation. Doug complained to him of indigestion, but Fenn sensed something more serious was afoot. He called Robert. Robert was already concerned. He usually spoke with Doug shortly after six, and this morning had brought no call. A drive to Santa Monica and a quick look at his dyspneic brother was all it took to call in a cardiologist.
Dr. J. P. Sampson came, and with him came an electrocardiogram. The diagnosis was not hard to make: an acute occlusion of a coronary artery had resulted in what is now called a myocardial infarction, or as it was known at the time, a “coronary,” or a heart attack. He was given a narcotic, likely morphine, which served to not only ease his pain but also dilate his blood vessels and relieve the symptoms of heart failure. He was put in bed and instructed that he was to remain at bed rest for weeks—possibly months.
The First King of Hollywood Page 54
