by Nancie Clare
And so it went for Pickford and Fairbanks and Chaplin. While Doug and Charlie did well in the Midwest and South, respectively, often addressing crowds in the tens of thousands, Mary handily outsold them. In one hour in Chicago, she sold $2 million worth of bonds, approximately $32.5 million in 2017 dollars (the total included $15,000 for one of her curls, which she auctioned). In Pittsburgh, it’s reported that Mary’s bond sales were $5 million, which would be more than $81 million in 2017 dollars. Judging by her autobiography, Pickford was well aware of the impact of her efforts. She acknowledged the accomplishment in Pittsburgh, but it was in the wake of a marathon-selling session in Baltimore, working from nine o’clock in the morning until midnight in what she termed “the most arduous if not the most productive day of all,” that it began to dawn on Pickford that it was her presence that was fueling the sales.9 “I sold only $450,000 in bonds, but they were almost entirely in small denominations of fifty and one hundred dollars.”10 People from all walks of life, including those who could only afford bonds in the smaller denominations, listened to her and acted on what she said.
Across the country the press went crazy. From the moment the train, dubbed “The Three Star Special,” left Los Angeles on April 1, 1918, with the trio of film stars (and Charlotte Pickford) aboard on its way to Washington, until the tour wrapped up weeks later, there were front-page stories preceding their arrival and extensive coverage of the events, complete with multiple photographs and follow-up articles on the results of the rallies. And it’s easy to understand why the press couldn’t get enough: It was a twofer—positive reporting on the war effort wrapped up in celebrity coverage.
In the end, the Liberty Bond tour was an enormous success for the government, but it came with high costs for the stars who made it happen. For one, the tour was exhausting. All three of them had been working up until the moment they boarded the train in Los Angeles. (Chaplin had reportedly been up for more than two days editing A Dog’s Life.) Before they reached Washington, at each of the train’s whistle-stops, one of the three would address the crowds that had gathered at the station. There were also legal tangles lying in wait: As soon as each of the three stars arrived in New York, they were served with lawsuits. Pickford’s was from a woman who wanted a commission for purportedly helping her secure a contract; Chaplin was served by his previous studio, Essanay, for moving to Mutual; and Fairbanks was sued by Scribner’s Publishing, who claimed that his movie The Americano was based on The White Mice, by Richard Harding Davis, and not Blaze Derringer.11 There might not have been anything unusual in this—lawsuits were becoming an ever more frequent companion to the stars’ success and were immediately handed over to the lawyers—but they were annoying nevertheless.
For Douglas Fairbanks’ wife Beth, though, the overwhelming publicity the tour generated, specifically about Doug and Mary traveling together, was the breaking point for her marriage. Douglas’ actions didn’t help much, either. According to biographies of Douglas Fairbanks, supported by the actions he took, the actor preferred obfuscation to confrontation. Late in 1917, Fairbanks and his wife exchanged telegrams through which he denied that he was having an affair. There had been no official separation, but by 1918 Beth and Douglas Jr. were living in New York City at the Algonquin Hotel, ostensibly so the boy could go to school. However, the situation reached critical mass when Fairbanks arrived in New York from the Washington, D.C., rally. Instead of going to the Algonquin, where his wife and son were waiting for him, he checked in to the Hotel New Netherland, the predecessor to the Sherry Netherland Hotel. Eventually Douglas did go over to the Algonquin. He had two purposes in mind: to pick up his son to accompany him to the rally on Wall Street, and to confess to Beth that he and Mary Pickford were in love.12 When Douglas left New York to continue on the Liberty Bond tour, Beth spoke to the press, announcing her separation from her husband, confirming that Douglas had confessed that he had fallen in love with someone else and that all the rumors had a basis in fact. It’s worth noting two things, though: In the published interview Mary Pickford’s name is not mentioned, and Beth said there would not be a divorce. Suddenly the press had two agendas when it came to Fairbanks: covering his participation on the Liberty Bond tour and relentlessly asking questions about his marriage. After initially claiming the news about the separation from his wife was pro-German propaganda, Fairbanks became frenetic, visiting as many locations as possible with a seemingly inexhaustible press corps on his heels. By the middle of April, Fairbanks, who usually couldn’t get enough attention from the press, was unable to stand the combined stress of the Liberty Bond tour and the scrutiny of his personal life anymore. He had reason to be worried. There was nothing new about marital infidelity, but no one knew what the ramifications of a highly publicized breakup would be for Douglas Fairbanks’ movie career, which was, after all, only two years old. Conventional wisdom of the era decreed that infidelity followed by a divorce would be a death knell to his career. In mid-April, Fairbanks canceled the balance of his tour and returned home to Los Angeles. By May, Fairbanks was back at work. He worked throughout the rest of the spring and summer of 1918 on films that supported the war effort. For a man who lived to be in the limelight, that spring and summer Fairbanks did a remarkable job keeping a low profile, only emerging for in-person appearances in support of the war. Even when Mary Pickford joined the rest of the Hollywood power elite to found the Motion Picture Relief Organization in June 1918, Fairbanks passed on attending the inaugural meeting, sending a telegram with his regrets. The organization elected him vice president in spite of his absence.13 Fairbanks also found new digs, leasing Silsby Spalding’s fifteen-acre estate in Beverly Hills. According to those who were working with him at the time, Fairbanks was back to his happy and outgoing self by midsummer.
In fact, Fairbanks was as popular as ever, especially with the soldiers overseas who were being entertained by his films. The press blowup that had accompanied the end of his marriage had been mercifully brief and was in the rearview mirror; Fairbanks emerged from the ordeal with his career intact. Considering how important Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were to the war effort, it’s entirely possible that George Creel’s CPI exerted pressure on the press to tread lightly.14 Fairbanks and Pickford, often in disguise, continued their relationship. Keeping the affair under wraps was probably helped along by Creel’s CPI leaning on news outlets as well as Charlotte Pickford’s prowess bribing witnesses who threatened to expose the lovers.
After Beth Fairbanks’ interview with the press was published, the Liberty Bond tour was no picnic for Mary Pickford, either. Unlike Doug, though, she completed her schedule of stops throughout the Northeast before returning to Los Angeles. Owen Moore, Pickford’s husband with whom she hadn’t lived for years, started to make rumblings. There were rumors that Moore was going to sue and that he had threatened to shoot Fairbanks. To Mary it didn’t matter what her husband said, or said he was going to do; it was all nonsense, and she abhorred negative publicity. When Pickford was asked for a quote following Beth’s interview, she prevaricated, saying she had no idea why her name was being mentioned in a matter between husband and wife. After she had returned to Los Angeles and was preparing to go back to work at the studio, she was asked if she planned to retire from making movies. Pickford’s reply was directly on point. She admonished the press to look over the studio’s fence the following morning and there they would see her working. Follow-up questions on the subject were not encouraged. As added insurance, Photoplay magazine was invited into Mary and Owen’s home for an “Our Mary and Her Owen” photo shoot of the stars at home.
Beth Fairbanks had taken the reins of the financial side of her nonconfrontational husband’s career, but Pickford, who was hands-on in the negotiations of her own studio contracts, had little doubt of their financial clout in their industry. In spite of the fact that Pickford had no formal training in business—indeed, she had very little formal schooling at all—from the beginning of her career at the age of fi
ve years, she quickly developed a keen sense of her worth to her employers. More importantly, once she determined her worth, she was able to communicate the remuneration to which she thought she was entitled. In the autobiographical articles and books she wrote over the years, she often proclaimed that she strove constantly for more money because she figured every year in the entertainment business would be her last. Mary Pickford knew she and Douglas Fairbanks were rich, she knew they were famous; what she learned from addressing crowds across the country during the Liberty Bond tour was that she and Doug were influential far beyond the world of moviemaking. And being the astute student of life experiences that she was, she would remember this like she remembered all of her lessons. The combined experience of being on tour to support the war and encourage the purchase of Liberty Bonds and having their personal lives discussed openly in the press had to have been profoundly instructive to Pickford and Fairbanks. What Mary also learned was that money, fame, and influence could not guarantee privacy; however, assistance from a sympathetic government could. The mechanics of avoiding unwanted scrutiny was still a work in process.
5
Veni, Vidi, Vici
Douglas Fairbanks was the first of the “picture folk” to set up housekeeping in the young city of Beverly Hills. His first home was Grayhall, Silsby Spalding’s estate, which he rented in 1918. It was indeed a house for a star: situated on fifteen acres of prime land that included tennis courts, an outdoor pool, stables, dog kennels and a view of the Pacific Ocean.1 Fairbanks settled right in to the house and the neighborhood. He filmed parts of He Comes Up Smiling, written by Frances Marion, on location at the home. In an early indication of his civic commitment to the city, after the volunteer Beverly Hills Fire Department doused the flames of a fire that broke out in a living room chimney at Grayhall (which resulted in $20,000 in losses, including the damage to and destruction of several Frederic Remington paintings from Fairbanks’ budding collection of the Western artist’s works), Fairbanks treated the firemen to dinner in another room of the estate.2
Because he had landed in such grand digs, it might seem a bit counterintuitive that Fairbanks was in the market for something else in the neighborhood, something secluded. It was Stanley Anderson of the Beverly Hills Hotel who, in 1919, pointed Fairbanks to a rustic six-room hunting lodge north of the hotel on Summit Drive that lacked both running water and electricity. Fairbanks bought the house overlooking the Beverly Hills Hotel for $35,000. While it’s true Fairbanks had a grander plan for the eighteen acres that surrounded the small structure, initially the lodge served the purpose of a secluded hideaway for the star.
The point wasn’t necessarily to move his official domicile—at least not yet. He was looking for a remote, private spot out of the public eye where he could woo his paramour. Remote and private being the operative objectives because Douglas Fairbanks needed to keep his affair with Mary Pickford, the most famous woman in the world, who happened to be married to someone else, a secret.
Douglas Fairbanks had come a long way, literally and figuratively, on the journey to Beverly Hills, California. He was born Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman on May 23, 1883, in Denver, Colorado. His father, Charles Ullman, was the son of German Jewish immigrants who had settled in Pennsylvania. His mother, Ella March, was a Catholic Southern belle. Both of Fairbanks’ parents had been married multiple times, not necessarily waiting until the previous marriage had been legally terminated before embarking on their next set of nuptials. In fact, it’s possible that Charles Ullman’s previous marriage had not been legally terminated when he wed Ella. Ella herself had been married twice before marrying Ullman. Her first husband, John Fairbanks Sr., had died and her second, Edward Wilcox, was an alcoholic whom she divorced. Charles Ullman had been her lawyer. Eventually Ullman discovered that Ella had a wandering eye and, when confronted with his wife’s adultery, left her and their two sons, Douglas and Robert. Ella retaliated by assuming the last name of her first husband, by whom she also had a son, John Fairbanks Jr., for the entire family.
By all accounts, Douglas Fairbanks had been a showoff and a ham from childhood. He took to acting early in amateur and summer stock in the Denver area. By the time he was in high school, where he was once suspended for putting costumes on the campus statues, he was in demand as an actor in the area. In 1900, before completing his senior year of high school, he left Denver as part of a traveling acting troupe bound for New York and a life on the stage. He never finished high school and did not, as he is reported to have claimed, attend the Colorado School of Mines, Harvard, or Princeton. After arriving in New York, Doug worked in a hardware store and as a clerk on Wall Street while waiting for his break on Broadway, which came in 1902. He rose to fame on the boards. In 1907, Douglas Fairbanks married Beth Sully, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. By 1915, the year he met Mary Pickford in New York, Doug was working in Los Angeles for D. W. Griffith. The physicality of his performance was not to Griffith’s taste, but it caught the attention of Anita Loos and John Emerson, respectively the young industry’s top screenwriter and director. The pair would go on to write and direct many of Doug’s signature romantic comedies over the next few years.
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If Douglas Fairbanks began his life in straitened circumstances, Mary Pickford—born Gladys Louise Smith in Toronto, Ontario, on April 8, 1892—marked her early years with increasing degrees of poverty. Also of mixed religious background—her father, John Smith, was the son of a Methodist minister and her mother, Charlotte Hennessey, was a Catholic of Irish descent—Mary’s early life was full of death, disease, and despair. Her father yo-yoed in and out of the family home and, when Mary was six, died of a head injury sustained at his job with Niagara Steamship. After her husband’s death Charlotte worked in a grocery store during the day and took in sewing at night. Frequently the family’s neighbors provided food for the young brood, which included Mary’s younger sister and brother, Lottie and Jack. At one point Charlotte contemplated letting a wealthy doctor and his wife adopt Mary. But after a visit to the couple’s luxurious home, where Mary learned that the offer of adoption was for her alone and didn’t include her brother and sister, she adamantly refused. By some accounts it was then that Mary felt the full burden of responsibility for her family.3 She didn’t quite know how she would accomplish it, but she was determined to take care of her mother and siblings.
Her introduction to acting came via the stage manager of a theater company, whom Charlotte Smith had taken in as a boarder. He suggested that the two sisters, Mary and Lottie, appear in the company’s next production, which debuted on January 8, 1900. After eight performances, the girls each earned $10, which they gave to their mother. A star—and a stage mother—was born.
By 1906, after performing with touring stock companies throughout the United States, traveling by rail and staying in cramped rooming houses along the way, Mary Pickford and her family landed in New York. It was there, when she appeared in a supporting role in a play written by William C. deMille, brother of Cecil B., that the play’s producer, David Belasco, insisted Gladys Smith create a stage name. They settled on Mary Pickford, cobbled together from Marie, the middle name she had been given when Charlotte had her baptized as a Catholic when Mary was sick with diphtheria in 1896, and the middle name of Charlotte’s father, John Pickford Hennessey. Charlotte kenned quickly that Mary was destined for big things: The entire family changed their last name to Pickford. In May 1909, Mary did a screen test for D. W. Griffith at the Biograph Company and by the end of the same year had done fifty-one films, mostly one-reelers, for them. She reasoned that if she worked hard, performed often, and appeared in as many films as she could, she would create a demand for her work. It was an excellent plan. In fact, considering Mary was just seventeen at the time she made it, it was an extremely well-thought-out plan. In short order, Mary Pickford had negotiated a rate of $10 a day with a $40 weekly guarantee from Biograph. In January 1910, Mary traveled to California to shoot more films. In those ea
rly days, film actors went unbilled. Mary Pickford was known as “The Girl with the Golden Curls” and “The Biograph Girl.” She returned briefly to the Broadway stage in 1912, but found that she missed working in film. By 1913, she had returned exclusively to making movies. All along the way, with every change of studio, Mary banked on her fame and ability to draw audiences when she negotiated deals with producers, the frameworks of which were not only models for other actors of the era, but are still in use to this day (guaranteed salaries with a percentage of the gross). By the middle of the second decade of the twentieth century, Mary Pickford was among the highest-paid—by some accounts, the highest-paid—actor working in film.
She married the handsome Irish actor Owen Moore in early 1911, against her mother’s wishes. By all accounts, Charlotte’s instincts about Moore were on target: He was an abusive alcoholic and jealous of his wife’s growing fame and his lack thereof. At the end of their marriage, Mary would settle with Moore for $100,000, a fortune for the time.4
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Although they had certainly known of each other through their work—Mary had seen Doug on Broadway in 1912 with a group of fellow Biograph Company actors—Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks didn’t actually meet until November 1915 at a party in Tarrytown, New York, thrown by a mutual friend, Elsie Janis.
Both were there with their respective spouses, Doug with his wife Beth and Mary with Owen Moore. During the afternoon the two couples took a walk with their hostess through the late autumn chill. Jokes were made about women’s shoes being ruined, but the two wives soldiered on. Beth eventually turned back, but Mary persevered. Then, while crossing a log over a frigid stream, Mary lost her nerve and froze. It was Douglas Fairbanks to the rescue when he literally swept her off her feet and carried her to solid ground.5
