The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  The troops rallied. Chuck Lewis arrived, as did friend Clarence Erickson, Robert’s and John’s daughters, and Sylvia’s sister. Erickson claimed, “They put him to bed, but he was the same old Doug, laughing and joking as usual.” But by Monday, his mood was darkening. Jayar came to visit him that afternoon and found his father in a dimly lit room, grousing angrily (“Can you imagine?” and “Dammit to hell!” were his son’s exact recollections) about not being allowed to follow the war news. Nothing must excite him, the doctor ordered. Nothing could aggravate him more. Jayar read to him from the poetry of Byron and Shakespeare until he fell asleep. The son stared at his father for a bit and then impulsively kissed him on the forehead before slipping down the stairs.

  Later that night, Douglas awoke and spoke alone with Robert. He dreaded invalidism, he said, more than death. If anything should happen to him, he wanted Robert to call Mary for him. He was simply to say, “By the clock.” She would understand. Robert agreed.

  A male nurse was brought in to attend to him, but in the days before defibrillators and cardiac monitors, there was little that could have been done to prevent what happened next.

  At midnight, Doug asked the nurse to open the casement windows that faced the ocean. How was he feeling? “I’ve never felt better!” he barked, and grinned, as of old. Across the distant stretch of beach, where in former days he had sat in the sun with Mary and Zorro, the Airedale terrier, the ocean murmured. Was he still thinking of Mary? Had his mind turned to Sylvia? She had been called home from the hairdresser’s when his heart attack was diagnosed. She had spent much of Monday at a Red Cross meeting. But she was home now, in another bedroom.

  Whatever his thoughts, he was not alone. Marco Polo, his immense Great Dane, slept at the foot of his bed, and the nurse came and went. As he dozed, the catastrophic happened. Medically, the most likely scenario is that his body dissolved the clot in his coronary artery. If the heart tissue beyond the blockage is already dead, this is of no consequence. But it was too soon. The heart muscle was dying, ischemic, irritable. The fresh influx of oxygenated blood caused the tissues of the heart to wiggle erratically, and he suffered a deadly heart rhythm known as ventricular fibrillation.

  It is a quick, painless way to die. Even if he had been awake, he would never have known what hit him. The blood supply to his brain stopped and he lost consciousness in seconds.

  The dog sensed something and growled. The nurse returned to the room and found that his patient had, in the words of the poet, slipped the surly bonds of earth. It was 12:45 AM on the morning of Tuesday, December 12, 1939.

  * * *

  Dr. Sampson was called and confirmed the evident. Sylvia devolved into hysterics, and Jayar was awakened by the sound of her voice over the phone shrieking, “He’s dead! He’s dead!” He and Mary Lee rushed to the house, where he found his father looking much as he had left him. “Except that this time,” he wrote, “when I leaned down I whispered a loving good-bye, and then gently kissed his forehead for the second and last time.”

  In the end, it was Gwynne who called Mary. She and Buddy were at the Drake Hotel in Chicago. The call came at 4 AM, local time, barely an hour after Fairbanks had died. Gwynne had only to identify herself. The hour and the tone of her voice told Mary all she needed to know.

  “Don’t say it, Gwynne!” she recalled saying. “He’s gone, isn’t he?”

  He was. She refrained from tears “out of respect for Buddy” until the following night, when she was alone on a train to New York City. Then she wept. His imprint never left her. In her final years, whether from alcohol or age, she would cry out in the night for him. Often, she would claim to have seen his ghost. Spectral or not, it was clear that Douglas Fairbanks was to haunt her for the rest of her life.

  Back at the Santa Monica beach house, the tears were flowing freely. It was good that the doctor was present: Sylvia required heavy sedation. The body was embalmed at the house and remained there while Jayar and Robert made funeral arrangements.

  They settled on services at the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather chapel at the Forest Lawn cemetery. Sylvia’s prostration delayed the event until Friday the fifteenth. Thousands lined the driveway leading to the chapel, which had a capacity of only 140 seats. The official claim was that there were no invitations, as the family did not wish to offend any of the “old timers who worked with Fairbanks.” But with Joseph Schenck in charge of security, the family, the powerful, and the occasional intimates were able to pass through the filter. Those in the chapel included Murray Silverstone, Darryl Zanuck, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Mack Sennett, Tom Mix (in his best black cowboy outfit, suitable for mourning), Harold Lloyd, Kay Francis, Elsa Maxwell, Eileen Percy (his costar in most of the Artcraft films of 1917), Cap O’Brien, Lewis Milestone, Fred Astaire, Ted Reed, Norma Shearer, Walter Wanger, Allan Dwan, Gwynne Pickford, Raoul Walsh, D. W. Griffith, Ronald Colman, Cecil B. DeMille, George Fitzmaurice, Samuel Goldwyn, Raymond Griffith, William Cameron Menzies, Marlene Dietrich, Myron Selznick, and Arthur Hornblow Jr. and his wife, Myrna Loy. Victor Fleming skipped the world premiere of Gone with the Wind to attend.

  Standing silent on the lawn, after a three-hundred-mile drive in from the desert, were Bear Valley Charlie, “a full-blooded Indian”; Jim Bell, a cowhand; and the faithful, grieving, cauliflower-eared Bull Montana.

  Rev. Neal Dodd read the short service. There was no eulogy. Chico De Verdi, violinist, conducted the old Fairbanks studio quartet—piano, violins, and bass cello—in a medley of “La Violetera,” “Te Quiero Mucho,” “La Paloma,” “Brahms’s Lullaby,” “Andante Cantabile,” “Ave Maria,” and, of course, Doug’s favorite, “Cielito Lindo.” To an outsider, it must have seemed a strange musical choice for a funeral, but for many there, the strains of Ay, ay, ay, ay . . . must have evoked a sudden, potent memory. The smiling, climbing, leaping Doug was, to this crowd of insiders, irrevocably linked to that humble little song. None could help but see him in their mind’s eye as the music filled the church: youthful, brimming with enthusiasm, smile ever flashing, body ever young, and never, ever still.

  It was still now. Douglas Fairbanks, “the symbol of romance and eternal youth, who set out to learn what Fear was and never found it,” would embark on no more adventures. He was clad in a frock cutaway coat, morning trousers, white waistcoat, and white tie. Carrying his coffin were Joseph Schenck, Charlie Chaplin, Sid Grauman, Tom Geraghty, Clarence Erickson, and Chuck Lewis. Chaplin arrived and departed alone, looking as though he had lost his best friend.

  The United Artists office in New York City closed for the afternoon. Business was suspended at the UA exchange in Los Angeles for the duration of the service. At the studio—now the Goldwyn Studio—the flag was at half-mast. A private memorial service was held in Doug’s old dressing room and gymnasium. At least three hundred took part. Here he was mourned—genuinely mourned by the unsung: the plant superintendents, the construction men, the property men, the painters, the hairdressers, the dining room servers, the laborers.

  Afterward the floral tributes were all carefully listed by a secretary, in order that acknowledgments and thanks could be sent. William Randolph Hearst sent a wreath of gardenias and orchids. Mr. and Mrs. Irving Berlin sent yellow roses, gardenias, and carnations. Fred and Phyllis Astaire sent a spray of gardenias and roses on an easel. There were 149 deliveries in all. Doug Jr.’s card had the quote from Hamlet, act 1, scene 2: “He was a man, take him all in all. I shall not look upon his like again.” Sylvia provided a spray of pink roses, with the words “Love. Sylvia.”

  There was one, however, that the secretary couldn’t place. Possibly, it was never acknowledged. It was a large wreath of gardenias and lilies of the valley. The card had one word: FRIN.

  * * *

  *1. Unhappily the organization did not prove to be responsible custodians of the gift, and many of the films he donated are, as of this writing, considered lost, among them He Comes Up Smiling, The Knickerbocker Buckaroo, Bound in Morocco, Arizona, Headin’ So
uth, and Say! Young Fellow. Others exist only because they—or portions of them—have been found in other archives.

  *2. After Fairbanks’s death, one young fan of the son wrote to him of his father: “When I think of him I always think of that day in 1932, in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. He was in golfing knickers, and standing in the sun with Mr. Grauman and others. He positively shone! He had that way of shining in the sun. Everyone was looking at him. . . . Mother hated me to stand and gape at the stars, so she said to me, ‘Come, Betty. Don’t stand and stare.’ And I replied, ‘No. I want to see Douglas’ father.’ Everybody within hearing distance laughed. Mr. Fairbanks looked at me and grinned from ear to here—that divine smile that he so nicely and generously lavished on everyone—and he said to me, ‘That’s one of the nicest things I’ve ever heard. Hello, there. How are you?’”

  *3. † A sample: JUST HEARD FROM SILVERSTONE SUCCESS OF YOUR PICTURE STOP. YOU GIVE ME ONE OF THE BIG THRILLS OF MY LIFE STOP. I WON’T BE PATERNAL AND SAY I AM PROUD OF YOU BUT AS MY FRIEND AND ASSOCIATE I HAVE NEVER BEEN SO HAPPY HURRAH FOR US.

  *4. This was established by what became known as the Silverstone Plan. The first $250,000 of profits was paid as dividends to the stockholders. The second $250,000 went into a producer bonus fund, a sliding scale rebate based on grosses during the year. All profits after the initial $500,000 were assigned fifty-fifty between the two groups.

  *5. † The telegram, which Jr. kept until his death, read simply: MANY MANY MANY MANY.

  *6. Accounts vary in different sources as to which day Fairbanks suffered the attack. The physician’s notations on the death certificate make it clear. Fairbanks incurred the infarct on the tenth, lived through that night and the day of the eleventh, and died shortly after midnight the morning of the twelfth.

  Acknowledgments

  * * *

  When one is in the midst of writing a book, it feels like a very solitary project. But in pausing to contemplate the formidable list of those who have helped along the way, one discovers that one was never alone.

  My greatest thanks must go to Kevin Brownlow. In the summer of 2009, he patiently gave me three days of uninterrupted time in his flat, fishing out every single index card, interview, or reference to Fairbanks from his lifetime of study and firsthand interviews. A wealth of never-before-published material comes from his years of hard work. Any other scholar would have kept that good stuff to himself; Brownlow instead shared it all, gladly.

  Generous help from archives and libraries was provided by Ned Comstock at USC; Jenny Romero and Barbara Hall of the Margaret Herrick Library; John Johnson of the Gottlieb Center at Boston University; James Layton at the George Eastman House; and Karen Pedersen, Library Director, Writers Guild Foundation Library.

  Dave Del Prete, head of security at the Lot, the site of the Pickford-Fairbanks Studios, spent a full day with me, generously letting me cover every nook and cranny of the offices and the studio lot. It is one thing to say that Fairbanks had a steam room; it is quite another to go into the present-day incarnation (where it seems to be a storage space for outdated computer equipment) and sit on the mint-green tiles where Doug and Charlie once sat.

  I owe a debt to Dick Nelson, president of Alumni and Friends at East High School in Denver. Doug’s grades are still missing (the search continues), but the story of the cut piano wires, which has been part of the oral history of the organization for over a hundred years, is now preserved in print. Karl Thiede is also deserving of thanks, for sharing with me his extensive collection of trade magazines of the era and patiently explaining just how one should report the financial return of a film in the 1910s and ’20s.

  I also owe thanks to Melissa Schaefer, who generously shared photos and interviews with her grandmother, Maria Alba; and Bob Birchard, who let me scan many of his fabulous Fairbanks photographs.

  Elaina Archer and Jeffrey Vance, both of the Mary Pickford Foundation, were tremendously helpful. Elaina provided me with never-seen footage of Doug and Mary’s travels, and the worth-a-thousand-words footage of the costume test from The Taming of the Shrew. Jeffrey, himself the author of a Fairbanks biography, shared press books and generously and patiently answered questions. “Look harder into those early years,” he urged me, and he was right. There was undiscovered gold there.

  Another Fairbanks author who has demonstrated tremendous generosity is John Tibbetts, of the University of Kansas. He shared the manuscript of Douglas Fairbanks and the American Century when it was still in galleys, and was even so generous as to dedicate the book to me and the future generation of Fairbanks scholars. Along the same lines, Allan Dwan biographer Fred Lombardi sent me his Fairbanks chapters while still in the manuscript stage and was available to answer questions about the specifics of his research at every step of the way. Michelle Vogel, Lupe Vélez’s biographer, shared many details about the filming of The Gaucho and clearly defined all the reasons that Doug and Lupe’s relationship was a flirtation, and nothing more. Michael Sragow, at the time a fellow Baltimorean, gave me cost information on Around the World in Eighty Minutes, obtained while writing his wonderful Victor Fleming biography. Hugh Munro Neely shared Pickford telegrams with me, and Marc Wanamaker spent hours with me at the old Clune studio.

  Help also came uninvited, and from unexpected quarters. Les Hammer heard me speak at the ninetieth-anniversary screening of The Thief of Bagdad and later that week mailed me a 1924 Picture Play article by fencing master Ralph Faulkner about a visit to the Thief set. Patrick Musone found the music box Fairbanks gave to Pickford for their tenth wedding anniversary at the Rose Bowl flea market. Not only did he provide this treasure, but he later turned up the silver vanity set Doug gave Mary for her birthday in 1929.

  Rob Byrne of the Film Preservation Society and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films, and Céline Ruivo of Cinémathèque française were integral in the restoration of The Half Breed and The Good Bad Man, permitting me to write about those films in more detail than has been available before.

  Some were brave enough to read the manuscript in its rawest form. Donna Hill and Bill Ndini merit my grateful thanks for the time and patience it must have taken to read Doug’s story as I produced it—in jumbled order. Melissa Fairbanks read portions as well and, though she never knew her famous grandfather, was able to provide insights about the family and her equally famous father.

  J. B. Kaufman was tremendously helpful in sorting out the Civil War record of Fairbanks’s father; Russell Merritt provided equally valuable insight in interpreting the D. W. Griffith period at Triangle, and beyond.

  Leonard and Alice Maltin gave me calm and informed advice on seeking an agent and a publisher. Of immeasurable help in this capacity was Scott Eyman. One would expect a major author, preoccupied with his book riding the top of the New York Times bestseller list, would have little time for a fellow film scholar—especially one with no track record. Instead he guided me on my agent search, recommended the irreplaceable Eric Myers, read generous portions of the book, and provided an incalculable amount of support and encouragement. Speaking of Eric, he got this book placed in a matter of weeks and communicated with me every step of the way. Any author would be extremely fortunate to have an agent such as he. Or an editor such as Yuval Taylor, who demonstrated impeccable taste and judgment every step of the way.

  So too did Cari Beauchamp, another author familiar with fame and biographic success. Twenty and more years ago, I read her article in the New York Times about Italy’s annual silent film festival in Pordenone. It led me to Pordenone, and a family of scholars as dear to me as my own kin. Never did I imagine that, decades later, she would also read my manuscript and provide invaluable advice about Frances Marion, Mary Pickford, and even Frank Case’s daughter, Margaret. Until she called and told me the book was good, I didn’t really believe it.

  I am in debt to my dear friend Patty Tobias, whose suggestion it was that I write the book in the first place. It has been a t
en-year journey and it was all her doing.

  I owe a debt to my children, Molly and Sam Doyle, who had to put up with their mother periodically disappearing over the past ten years to spend time in yet another library or archive. But since they grew up not realizing that talking films existed until they were old enough to be taken to a movie theater, I know that they will forgive me.

  Finally, I owe a debt to my husband, Robert Bader. When he saw that I was unhappy with my research to date on Fairbanks’s antecedents, he dove into genealogy records with such verve that shortly I had more data than I had dreamed of getting. He made the book better in many ways: from finding Dorothy Parker’s poem in The Nonsense of Censorship to providing me with a 1903 book full of firsthand accounts of the Iroquois Theatre fire. He even knew the term “those Moe Levy tickets” referred to the seller of cheap suits (since 1896!) in New York City. (He claims that his grandfather had a closet full of them.)

  I have never met Richard Schickel, but I owe him a debt. I was so taken with his American Heritage article on Douglas Fairbanks in 1971 that I checked it out of the library and typed it up, every word, in order that I could retain a copy. If any of my phrasing mimics his, it was not intentional. He opened my eyes to this remarkable personality and stimulated an adolescent desire to learn more.