by Nancie Clare
It was a rare loss of composure for Mary Pickford. She was known for roles as a determined, plucky young woman who used her wits to turn often insurmountable obstacles to her advantage. And to a great extent, that’s exactly who she was: Mary Pickford had been responsible for supporting her sister, brother, and mother for so long she probably couldn’t remember a time when that hadn’t been the case. By the time she met Doug Fairbanks, she was in a deeply unhappy marriage to Moore, who is described as “an insecure, bitter, evidently unlikable, handsome drunk” by Tracey Goessel in The First King of Hollywood, her excellent biography of Douglas Fairbanks.
Doug Fairbanks was by all accounts an athletic, good-looking, good-natured, fun-loving, charming lady’s man who didn’t drink to excess and didn’t gamble. Through the years he had been linked to actresses in a series of affairs. However, it was clear from the very start that Mary Pickford was not going to be a casual fling. After Doug arranged a few, completely proper, meetings that included Doug introducing Mary to his mother, Ella, as well as meeting Mary’s mother, Charlotte, the two went their separate ways, back to their flourishing careers as the biggest movie stars of the time. Mary was temporarily in New York making movies for Paramount and Doug went back to California with its more clement weather to shoot films. His work ranged from playing “Coke Ennyday,” the cocaine-addicted detective based on Sherlock Holmes, in the zany comedy whose display advertising described the movie as the “1916 Cocaine Classic from the folks who brought you Reefer Madness,” The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, to The Half Breed, one of the most serious films in his oeuvre.
Mary and Doug met up again in the summer of 1916 when Doug took the starring role in Manhattan Madness. Conjecture has it that one of the motivating factors for his return to New York was proximity to Mary, who was living at the time in Larchmont.6
Biographers and historians believe that their physical relationship began after the death of Doug’s mother in late 1916; at least that was when the passionate letters from Doug to Mary started. But secrecy, especially for Mary, was paramount. Mary Pickford took her reputation in the popular press seriously—to the point where she “penned” a daily column describing her thoughts and observations that was syndicated and appeared in newspapers across the country. (The columns were in fact ghostwritten, many by pioneering screenwriter and frequent Mary Pickford collaborator Frances Marion.) The double standard of what men and women could get away with in their private lives was very much in force. If word got out that she was a loose woman, not to mention an unfaithful wife, Mary did not believe that being the most famous woman in the world would protect her from the blowback. In light of the public’s reaction to the series of scandals that would plague fellow actors in the near future, her instincts were spot-on. Mary knew that adverse publicity of any magnitude would hit her in her most sensitive spot: her pocketbook. There are stories of Charlotte Pickford chasing Doug from Mary’s dressing room with a gun and of hiring publicists to pay off any witnesses to the couple’s special friendship.
After the wildly successful 1918 Liberty Bond tour, Mary returned to Los Angeles more or less permanently. To maintain secrecy, the couple donned disguises and sneaked around town. They sometimes met at Doug’s brother Robert’s house. And for all anyone knows—because part of its allure from the very beginning was discretion—they may have also met at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
* * *
Mary Pickford was all about her work. She had been at it so long, and had been so successful, that work for her was no longer second nature; it was her purpose. From the very beginning at the theater in Toronto when, as a child of six or seven, she asked for bigger parts and more money, to becoming one of the first actors to form a production company, to teaming up with fellow industry talent to form United Artists in order to maximize their revenue from their films by controlling distribution, Mary was always driven. America’s Sweetheart may have looked like innocence personified, but underneath those blond curls was one of the most astute brains to ever work in the motion picture industry. Mary understood the power of the press and its ability to manipulate public opinion; she for one had utilized it when she took her battle for a fatter paycheck to the broadsheets. The reproving oversight of the studios was a fact of life for her—she was beginning to play roles as children such as Pollyanna and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. But Mary didn’t have a problem with this. She was in the illusion business and understood perception; Mary was not going to do anything to jeopardize her bankability.
* * *
Ultimately Doug’s hunting lodge on Summit Drive solved the problem of ensuring the couple’s privacy before Mary’s divorce and their marriage. The humble six-room lodge that would eventually evolve into Pickfair marked the beginning of a beautiful, permanent friendship between a city and its famous residents.
On March 2, 1920, Mary Pickford divorced Owen Moore in Reno, Nevada. On March 28, 1920, she married Douglas Fairbanks. Six weeks later the couple left for their honeymoon. The trip would hold more than a few revelations for the newlyweds. Their Liberty Bond tour in 1918 proved they were popular. This trip would prove that the public’s reaction to the couple’s fame transcended popularity with a sort of grand hysteria that was something altogether different. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford’s fame had gone global in a way that was completely new. There had never been anything quite like the pandemonium they caused wherever they went. As they traveled across the continent to New York to catch the boat to England, their train was swamped. Thousands waited to greet them in New York and see them off; thousands greeted them when the ship docked at Southampton. Fairbanks would have to extricate his terrified bride from the throngs that reached into the open cars in which they traveled to touch America’s Sweetheart. In one instance, Fairbanks had to place Mary on his shoulders to separate her from the adoring-yet-crushing crowd. English fans almost loved Mary to death.
But the couple soon discovered that lack of recognition was just as disturbing in its own way as an overabundance of attention. Douglas and Mary thought it might be nice to seek out some quiet alone time, so while they were in Holland, the pair drove to Germany, where their films had not been shown during World War One. According to a recollection of the trip by Mary, during a day of shopping and sightseeing, the couple did not see a flicker of recognition on the faces of any of the people they encountered. When Fairbanks asked if she liked being left alone, Mary responded that she “definitely” did not and wanted to go back to where they were known. After one day she had “had enough obscurity for a lifetime.”
After that brief interlude of anonymity in Germany, the world for Douglas and Mary returned to spinning the right way and the couple were met with adoring crowds throughout the rest of their European tour, which included stops in Switzerland, Italy, and France.
But it was the return to New York that was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. Having heard about the couple’s reception in England, American fans, who felt ownership of the pair and would not be outdone in over-the-top adoration, pulled out all the stops. There were competing bands set up on platforms to greet the ship when it docked on the west side of Manhattan and a police motorcycle escort through a phalanx of fans lining the route to the couple’s hotel on Fifth Avenue.
* * *
When Mary and Douglas returned home from their honeymoon late in the summer of 1920, Beverly Hills would provide a respite not just from what their lives had been, but also from what they had become.
And the home to which they returned, Pickfair, was something to behold. The house was designed by Wallace Neff, California’s first homegrown star-chitect. In no way a provincial, Neff came from an extremely wealthy family; he was the grandson of Chicago printing tycoon Andrew McNally (of Rand McNally fame), who had moved to Southern California to found Rancho La Mirada with Neff’s father, Edwin. When he was nine, Neff moved to Europe with his family, returning to the United States in 1916 at age nineteen when war broke out. While Neff is credited with de
veloping the “California style,” a mash-up of Spanish Colonial Revival and Mission with touches of Tudor and Gothic, his education was with Ralph Adams Cram, the revered New England–based architect who specialized in collegiate and ecclesiastical buildings designed in Gothic Revival style.
The mock-Tudor mansion that Neff devised was perched at the top of a hill, surrounded by eighteen landscaped acres, complete with stables, an in-ground swimming pool large enough for Doug and Mary to paddle around it in a canoe, tennis courts, servants’ quarters, automobile garages, and a guest wing. Inside it had frescoed ceilings, parquet wood floors, rooms and hallways paneled in mahogany and bleached pine as well as decorative niches embellished with gold leaf and mirrors. There was an Old West saloon complete with an ornate burnished mahogany bar. Even though Doug almost always abstained from alcohol, the saloon made a great setting for his collection of Frederic Remington paintings and sculptures.
Pickfair was meant to be a palace and was described accordingly. The house was dubbed by Life magazine as “a gathering place only slightly less important than the White House … and much more fun,” which is probably a statement that’s more fancy than fact. In truth, while an invitation to Pickfair was coveted—receiving one meant that you had “arrived”—the idea of visiting could be much more fulfilling than the actual event. Contemporaries of Doug and Mary were effusive in their descriptions of the house, its interiors, and the fetes that took place there. In a 1980 interview with Kevin Brownlow recorded for the documentary TV series Hollywood, Lord Louis Mountbatten recalled that Pickfair was “certainly, the most, best taste house, I should think, in Hollywood, and run very much on English country house lines.… It was like Buckingham Palace; it was the house that everyone wanted to go to.…”7 But behind the dramatic mock-Tudor exterior walls of Pickfair, much of the furnishing was prosaic and pedestrian, and the parties dull and dry, as in little to no alcohol was served. Although there were antiques scattered throughout the house, most of the furniture was “solid department-store copies of European styles such as Babbitt himself might use to adorn his new house in the Midwest.”8 The dinner parties, at which no wine was served, ended promptly at ten so Doug and Mary could go to bed in order to get up early the following morning and go to work. Two conclusions could be drawn from these descriptions: that, in spite of the grandeur in which they surrounded themselves, Doug and Mary were at heart parvenus; or the couple—who were very aware of how they were perceived by the public and whose lives were lived very much in a fishbowl—chose their furnishings and adopted an entertaining style as a calculated decision to remain well within the accepted norms of middle-American values, “a way of not moving too conspicuously beyond the taste of the millions of fans who also bought their furniture at department stores and went to bed early on week nights so as to be at work the next morning on time.…”9
The carpets, sofas, tables, and chairs may have reflected the tastes of their millions of less well-heeled fans, but Doug and Mary set themselves up in style. Each had their own suite of rooms: Doug’s included a bedroom, bathroom, a walk-in closet large enough to house his extensive wardrobe, a hall, and, because this was before the advent of air-conditioning, a screened-in sleeping porch. Mary’s suite is described as being painted lavender with dull green furniture. In addition to her bedroom, she also had her own bathroom and a sleeping porch. After his morning exercises, Fairbanks chose what he would wear that day from “fifty pairs of shoes, thousand shirts, seventy suits, thirty-five coats and thirty-seven hats.”10 At six, Mary and Doug met in the ivory-colored breakfast room to sip tea from a silver service and plan their respective days.
It wasn’t the furnishings, quotidian or not, that set Pickfair aside, it was the people who crossed the threshold. Charlie Chaplin was at his best friend Doug’s house so often, the so-called Rose Room was reserved for him. Other guests who graced their dinner table and attended screenings of not-yet-released movies included cultural royalty Greta Garbo, George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, H. G. Wells, Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Noël Coward, Pearl S. Buck, Arthur Conan Doyle, old friends Lillian and Dorothy Gish, and, to show there were no hard feelings about dodging his patent enforcements, Thomas Edison. Actual royalty were frequent guests, too, including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Duke and Duchess of Alba, and the King and Queen of Siam. Oh, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
(Some things in industry social gatherings haven’t changed much, such as screenings. Invariably, Doug would fall asleep, only to wake at the end of the film and proclaim it the best he had ever seen.)
* * *
In some ways, the grand honeymoon complete with adoring crowds in attendance was the final step in a long journey that was both literal and metaphorical for Mary and Douglas. With their triumphant return to Beverly Hills both demonstrated how far they had come: for Mary, from Toronto, through grueling years of poverty and an abusive husband, and for Doug, from Denver, possible illegitimacy and knowing he was half-Jewish—something that would haunt Fairbanks throughout his life. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks had arrived; they had transcended the cold shoulders of so-called proper society. Through their wits, determination, and talent, without much formal education or well-heeled, socially connected families, as individuals the couple had climbed to the top of the world. Now, with their honeymoon to Europe behind them, the couple returned home. And home in Beverly Hills was a safety zone where the past did not weigh on the present and where not being listed on the Social Register was immaterial. Beverly Hills was where they could bask in a place where everyone knew their names and they were the undisputed king and queen of all that they surveyed. Their marriage to each other was exponentially more than two of the world’s biggest stars as husband and wife. It was the stuff of dreams and legends and it had set up shop in the young city of Beverly Hills. Douglas and Mary reigning from Pickfair became a magnet for their fellow stars and successful people of all occupations. They were the model that the stars of the new medium wished to emulate; Douglas and Mary had pioneered the path to what fame in the motion picture industry looked like and where it lived. Motion picture stars did not have to chase their public; the world, including presidents, kings, queens, princes; and princesses, would flock to them.
It’s possible that had Douglas Fairbanks not been the first star to decamp to Beverly Hills, the migration might have shaped up much differently. Doug was larger than life in almost every way; he was both a natural leader and organizer and a tastemaker. If Doug Fairbanks was doing something, if he had either joined or founded an organization, wore his hair a particular way, drove a certain car, or moved west to a new city, it struck those who knew him as the right thing to do. And not only did he move to Beverly Hills, he brought Mary Pickford with him. About that same time Charlie Chaplin, who along with Fairbanks and Pickford was one of the world’s biggest stars, also moved to Beverly Hills. After Fairbanks, Pickford, and Chaplin, a tsunami of movie stars, directors, screenwriters, and producers followed, including Gloria Swanson, Tom Mix, Carl Laemmle, Ronald Colman, John Barrymore, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Fred Niblo, Will Rogers, Jack Warner, Clara Bow, Rudolph Valentino, and the Gish sisters. Everyone wanted to be as close as they could be to the gods of the motion picture industry, and their Mount Olympus was undisputedly where Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford lived: Pickfair in Beverly Hills.
* * *
Beverly Hills was no longer a faraway whistle-stop on Henry Huntington’s Dinky line. As of late 1920, it was now the center of the universe.
6
The War Against Hollywood and the Lasting Legacy of Bad Behavior
World War One had forged an inexorable link between the federal government and the emerging motion picture industry. The experience of the partnership during the war had taught a few important lessons to Hollywood’s emerging power elite, especially Adolph Zukor, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, chiefly that there was a potential for re
ciprocity. Mary and Doug had shown that their celebrity quotient had been the secret sauce in a successful Liberty Bond campaign; Adolph Zukor and his fellow studio, distribution, and exhibitor executives had proved themselves an invaluable resource in creating targeted content. Or, in other words, with the right incentive they would jump on the propaganda bandwagon. Certain government officials had been quick to see the advantage of enlisting these newfangled celebrities and the movie business executives in selling causes and raising money.
In spite of the fact that Hollywood and the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson, especially Treasury Secretary William McAdoo, had a fruitful and successful partnership during World War One, in the 1920 presidential elections Hollywood’s power players looked at the field and decided that the Republican candidate, Warren G. Harding, was their man. Zukor had received assurances that Harding’s administration wouldn’t interfere with the moviemaker’s business practices. Now, Harding is almost always named as one of the worst presidents of all time, his name inexorably linked to the suitcases of cash that changed hands between oilmen and government officials for leases on oil reserves during the Teapot Dome Scandal (which had its own Beverly Hills connection through oilman Edward Doheny, who provided one of those self-same suitcases). However, at the time of his nomination, Harding presented himself as pro-business, anti-organized labor, anti-Bolshevik, and an advocate of lower personal income taxes who was keenly interested in new technologies like automobiles, aviation, radio, and motion pictures. What’s perhaps most telling of all is that Harding appointed the Republican National Committee chairman Will Hayes to a succession of government posts, before Hayes was lured by the motion picture industry chieftains to be their handpicked censor in chief. Hayes knew the players in Hollywood and, more importantly for the studio honchos, they knew him.
