by Ellen Dawson
November 1918, 607). These were not the first words to appear under the Fairbanks name, however. As early as 1912 he had been publishing stories and articles from his point of view (see “Those Guileless Ruralites,” Green Book Magazine, August 1912, or “Styles in Farce,” Theatre Magazine, January 1913). After the move to Artcraft, the number of essays and columns published under his name steadily increased. Most Fairbanks biographers agree, however, that he could not sit still long enough to read a book, much less write one, and that the articles and books were the work of his trusted sec-retary, Kenneth Davenport (Schickel, His Picture 48; Vance 42).6 Nevertheless, the books provide an even more interesting view of the Fairbanks persona, since now we can hear them as the voice of someone who imagines who “Doug” is. That is, if “Doug” is an entity comprising all the representations of Fairbanks, then the ghostwritten articles and books neatly fit that category.
They also neatly fit the war effort. Indeed, Fairbanks was one of the most prominent and most frequently called-upon celebrities in the effort to stir up money and domestic fervor for an initially unpopular conflict.
Behind this we can count his own enthusiastic patriotism, but also his connection to George Creel, a journalist who wrote an important early feature article on Fairbanks (“A ‘Close-Up’ of Douglas Fairbanks”) and who became one of the chief architects of the domestic propaganda machine in his capacity as chairman of the Committee on Public Information (see also Creel, How We Advertised America). Fairbanks worked especially hard as a fund-raiser for the war, first by sponsoring a number of rodeos around the West designed to raise money for the Red Cross, and second as an active member of the “Liberty Loan” tours, during which he became acquainted with Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo, one of the other principal planners of the domestic effort (see Kennedy 98–106). Fairbanks also made films to advertise the Liberty Loan bond drives: Swat the Kaiser and Sic ’em, Sam (both 1918) were allegorical shorts starring Fairbanks and his crew. In addition, his first Artcraft film, In Again—Out Again (April 1917), toyed with wartime themes (such as pacifism and munitions-factory sabotage), even if it is the only Fairbanks film to do so. So the appearance of Laugh and Live in April 1917 not only coincides with—and is intended to publicize—his
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Artcraft debut; it also coincidentally performs the same promotional work for the entry of the United States into the war that same month.
Or perhaps it was not so coincidental. By April 1917 there had already been an active and public debate about the extent of America’s involvement in the European conflict. Ex-president Theodore Roosevelt, for one, was a vigorous spokesman for military “preparedness.” Indeed, “preparedness” is a prominent theme in Laugh and Live, but not in terms of the military. Instead,
“Doug” argues that if we commit ourselves to “good health and good minds,” then “all we need to do is to go about the program of life cheerfully and stout of heart— for now we are in a state of preparedness” (Fairbanks 19, emphasis in original). “Preparedness” for what? Success, naturally—as in all books of this genre, the actual goals are left vague in order to match those of the reader. But the Fairbanks keys to preparedness and success—“Living in the open air, sleeping out of doors, taking the proper exercise, looking wholesomely upon life, believing in ourselves,” and so on and so on—are also ways to counter fears of degeneration and weakness. According to
“Doug,” “Sturdy qualities are the necessary ones. Over-refinement leads to the softer life and ofttimes to degeneracy. Exalted ego is an indication of degeneracy and may have been inherited” (52–53). Like Roosevelt before him, Fairbanks prescribes “good health,” “vigorous exercise,” and “the will to do” as antidotes to generational decay and feminization (see Herman; Bederman; Dyer, Theodore). If Roosevelt spoke of preparedness in terms of military vulnerability and war or empire as the remedy for decadence, then Fairbanks borrowed this rhetoric for the more modest, but not incompatible, goal of self-improvement. We see this same rhetoric in some of his films. In The Lamb and The Mollycoddle (1920), Fairbanks’s character descends from a long line of stalwarts, which ends, comically, in a whimper of a man. In both films, an encounter with the great outdoors of the West reverses this decline.
In his third Artcraft film, Down to Earth, he plays a regular fellow whose beloved has a taste for the cloistered life of high-society parties. After she has a nervous breakdown and checks into a sanitarium, Fairbanks buys the clinic (!) and tricks the patients (all with such “modern” ailments as neurasthenia or hypochondria) into a trip to a “desert island,” where he forces them to sleep out of doors, take the proper exercise, and so forth until they are cured. Fairbanks was practically the poster boy for the anti-degeneration crusade.
During the Artcraft era, certain aspects of the Fairbanks persona were adjusted and became prominent. His youthfulness and athleticism were adapted to stress good health, exercise, and clean living, while his optimism was easily translated into good humor in the face of obstacles. This was
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accomplished mostly in print. A series for the Los Angeles Times, titled “I’ll Tell You How to Live,” explained his philosophy of exercise and cheerfulness. Timed to coincide with the third Liberty Loan tour, the series promotes the tour and implores the reader to “meet your troubles with a smile”
(1–4 October 1918, 14, 15, 15, 14). Another feature presents Fairbanks as
“A Shining Example of the Value of Exercise” at a time when, reportedly,
“Uncle Sam [is] turning down five out of every six would-be volunteers because of inability to pass the physical examination” ( Los Angeles Times, 8
May 1917, 3:1). It is remarkable how easily his persona could be accommodated to the wartime emphasis on hygiene, determination, and sacrifice.
✩★
✩★
✩★
✩★
✩ United Artists
The Liberty Loan tours also prepared the American public
for events other than the war: the union of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, on one hand, and on the other, the union of those two and Charles Chaplin in a business venture called United Artists. These three had been connected in the press by virtue of their enormous celebrity status and even more enormous salaries (see, for example, “Three Film Stars Get $1,000,000 a Year Each,” New York Times, 27 May 1917, 62). Chaplin and Fairbanks had been good friends since Fairbanks arrived in Hollywood, and Doug and Mary were becoming notoriously closer—the third Liberty Loan drive in April 1918 was marred by Beth Sully’s unexpected announcement that she and Fairbanks were separated, citing an unnamed woman whom anyone over the age of ten could probably name ( Chicago Tribune, 12 April 1918, 10). Sully received a divorce from Fairbanks by the end of the year ( Los Angeles Times, 1 December 1918, 15), and his Artcraft contract expired in early 1919, so Doug could look forward to new ventures in the coming decade (Curtis; Vance). The immediate impetus for United Artists was the rumor of a merger between two industry giants, the First National exhibitors circuit and Famous Players–Lasky, which was the largest producer of films (and would later become Paramount). After ten years of the star system, industry leaders were troubled by high salaries and rising production costs; they were eager for an industry realignment that would put executives back in control (see Balio 3–29). Such a merger would have limited opportunities for production and distribution, so these three, along with D. W. Griffith and, at first, William S. Hart, banded together to protect their interests and autonomy; they signed the agreement on 15 January 1919. From the beginning, Fairbanks was instrumental in the formation of the alliance. Not only was he a mediating influence between Pickford and
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Chaplin, Fairbanks, Pickford, and Griffith sign the United Artists articles of incorporation.
Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Chaplin, who were always rather cool to one another, but his Liberty Loan connection brought William McAdoo aboard as company counsel and McAdoo’s long-time assistant, Oscar Price, as the company’s first president.
The McAdoo-Price experiment failed after one year, but as Chaplin later admitted, they were brought in to lend prestige and legitimacy to the company, not film industry savvy (Balio 35). He also carried United Artists for its first year; because the other three were still tied to contracts with other companies, Fairbanks made the company’s first films in 1919, His Majesty the American (released in September) and When the Clouds Roll By (December).
United Artists was, in many respects, the next logical step for “The Big Four,” since each had been taking strides toward greater autonomy. For Fairbanks, this autonomy and success brought changes in his persona as well. On one hand, in the immediate postwar era, his status as an icon of Americanism was completely secure. For example, in January 1919 Fairbanks received a telegram from the Office of the President and the Liberty Loan people asking him to make another film that would be “used as propaganda to stem the tide of popular criticism” of the administration after the
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war. Fairbanks was instructed to be a “foolkiller,” who would give critics “a lecture on real Americanism and then wallop them as you did the Kaiser [in 1918’s Swat the Kaiser]. . . . This request goes to you alone” ( Los Angeles Times, 10 January 1919, 2:8). This was to be one in a series of pictures by Fairbanks that would boost morale and promote four principles: “‘Purity of purpose,’ ‘cheerfulness,’ ‘steadfastness,’ and ‘willingness to sacrifice’” ( Moving Picture World, 25 January 1919, 456). There is no indication that these pictures were ever produced, but the government’s faith in Fairbanks’s image was clear. Even His Majesty the American was initially planned to extol President Woodrow Wilson’s famous 14 Points for prosecution of the im-pending armistice, but that plan was changed in production when the Sen-ate refused to ratify U.S. membership in the League of Nations (Vance 78).
All this led one fan magazine writer to remark, “Restless endeavor, energetic ambition, indefatigable energy, whether for work or play, pictures or politics, humanity or himself, these are the things Douglas Fairbanks typifies. He is typically American—the Fairbanks scale of Americanism is 100
per cent perfect” ( Motion Picture Magazine, February 1919, 32).
But his first films for United Artists also hint at changes to his persona that would become dominant in the 1920s. With the reputation of the new company on the line, Fairbanks spared no expense to mount the largest productions of his career to date; His Majesty cost $175,000 to produce, for example. When the Clouds Roll By included the most spectacular effects and set pieces in his films so far, such as a scene in which Doug walks on the ceiling of a room (à la Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding [1951]) and a conclusion that featured an actual flood! These two films were only tastes of what was to come—in the 1920s, Fairbanks’s films would become larger, more expensive, and more grandiose, to the point that the discourse on Doug as producer almost eclipsed the discussion of his star persona.
In the same way, His Majesty the American hints at a new trend in the Fairbanks persona: Doug’s aristocratic leanings. Like Reaching for the Moon, His Majesty tells the story of an energetic American who finds that he has blood ties to royalty in a fictional Balkan state. Looking forward, this fascination with nobility is a strong theme in his films and persona of the 1920s. After his marriage to Pickford, they were crowned Hollywood royalty and their home was often a way station for visiting dignitaries and aristocrats. His swashbuckling characters of the later films were usually noblemen intent on helping the common man. In fact, it could be argued that the tension between aristocracy and Americanism that the title of His Majesty the American implies has always been in the Fairbanks oeuvre in some form or another. After all, nearly all his characters from the teens are
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comfortably middle or upper class. In the 1910s, Fairbanks negotiated this tension in a uniquely American way. Just as nineteenth-century western heroes achieved manliness by being “like” their Indian counterparts while remaining unmistakably white, the Fairbanks character achieves a democratic effect by being “like” his plebian compatriots while remaining unmistakably noble. He replaces the racial politics of the western hero with class politics, while maintaining the familiar pattern of “simultaneous kinship and superiority” (Bederman 173). In the 1910s, Fairbanks put considerable effort into maintaining this kinship. In His Majesty, his highborn character goes out of his way to entertain the chambermaids and smoke a cigar with the hansom driver, actions perfectly in keeping with the character’s “American” roots. But as the 1920s wore on and Fairbanks became the unrivaled “King of Hollywood,” this democratic kinship would give way to something more like noblesse oblige. Making only one huge film a year, traveling around the world for months at a time, greeted by crowds of fans the world had never before witnessed, it would be harder and harder for Douglas Fairbanks to pretend to his audience and to himself that he was just a “regular fellow.”
N OT E S
My thanks to The Alumnae of Northwestern for a research grant; to Alla Gadassik for her thorough and timely research assistance; to Jeffrey Vance and Mary Francis for a pre-publication copy of Vance’s important biography of Fairbanks; and to Val Almendarez, Barbara Hall, Doug Johnson, Matt Severson, and the rest of the staff of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California.
1. In an 1899 speech, Theodore Roosevelt advocated “the strenuous life” as an antidote to individual and national “over-civilization” and effeminacy. Roosevelt contrasted “timid peace” with the “virile qualities” required for the nation to take its place on the global stage.
Hence “the strenuous life” was originally linked with Roosevelt’s imperialism, but by the mid-1900s it had become more broadly associated with any ambitious masculine endeavor.
See Roosevelt Strenuous, and “Mr. Roosevelt’s Views on the Strenuous Life,” Ladies’ Home Journal, May 1906, 17.
2. The range of abilities in stories such as this may also be another Rooseveltian influence, since Roosevelt was often portrayed as a “renaissance man” of many talents. In any case, as Vance notes, “Doug” was an invention—even Douglas Jr. said of his father, “He designed the living of his life, almost from the start, coloring it as he went along. He did it so successfully that his best friends and biographers were seldom able to see him accurately”
(Vance 6). We should look at all Fairbanks stories, interviews, and films equally as fiction—
not as a judgment on their validity or truth value, but as works to be read for unifying patterns.
3. In her autobiography, Loos claims that she and Emerson split with Fairbanks because Doug was jealous of the critical attention they were receiving (Loos 178). There may be some truth to this, since critics did indeed lavish praise on Loos’s contributions, especially, and lamented her later absence from Fairbanks’s films.
4. For an interesting discussion of Wild and Woolly as an example of early Hollywood narrative, see Bordwell 166–68, 201–04.
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5. Fairbanks also published Youth Points the Way in 1924 in association with the Boy Scouts of America. Some historians have listed other titles, such as Taking Stock of Ourselves, Initiative and Self-Reliance, or Profiting by Experience, but these were merely excerpts from Laugh and Live reprinted and sold in pamphlet form.
6. Fairbanks is also credited with a number of scenarios for his films, which no one disputes, since his films were very collaborative ventures and he was acknowledged to be the guiding hand behind them. For a humorous parody about his scenario-writing skills, see
“‘Doug’ Writes Plays,” Los Angeles Times, 19 August 1917, 3:3.
11 ★★★★
★★★★★★
✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩
Charles Chaplin
The Object Life of Mass Culture
JENNIFER M. BEAN
If the state of being “known” determines the scale of stardom, then Charles Chaplin’s superlative status emerged early. In 1916, a mere two years after his first appearance before the Keystone camera, a reporter for the Chicago Daily Tribune known only as Mae Tinnee sighed to her readers: “It is not much use to try to tell you anything about Charles Chaplin. You know all about him . . . enough has been printed to start a Chaplin encyclopedia well on its way” (“Right Off the Reel,” 28 May 1916, D3). By now, that comprehensive compendium of information has been written several times over, each incarnation flush with a reverent nod of praise. “Charles Chaplin is arguably the single most important artist produced by the cinema,” observed film critic Andrew Sarris, “certainly its Charles Chaplin. Courtesy of Photofest.
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most extraordinary performer and probably still its most universal icon”
(45). George Bernard Shaw lauded him as “the only genius developed in motion pictures,” while James Agee honored him as “the first man to give the silent language a soul. . . . His rivals,” Agee added, “speak of him no more jealously than they might of God” (see Schickel, “Charles” 17; Agee,
“Comedy’s” 18–19). Deities of sundry sorts might have been jealous too, given J. Hoberman’s recent estimation of the clown as “the most popular man on earth, the icon of the twentieth century, Jesus Christ’s rival as the best known person on earth” (Hoberman 37).
In the reverences quoted above, one cannot help but notice a slippage between Chaplin’s status as a “man” and the popularity of an “icon,” an inde-terminate ontology of sorts, somewhere between what it means to be a person and what it means to adopt a persona. What makes Chaplin’s startling ascension to global stardom in the 1910s truly unique, as critic Gilbert Seldes aptly assessed in the early 1920s, is “that unlike many excellent and many second-rate people who played in the movies he was not playing himself ”