I probably wore the most astonishing costumes ever beheld on the native stage, being fitted out by a well meaning but misguided costume mistress in odds and ends of ancient, modern and medieval garb. So effectively did my costumes succeed in breaking up the actors and actresses who happened to be on the stage whenever I made my entrance, that Mr. Warde released me without visible signs of pain.
Warde, in fact, appeared to grow fond of the boy, giving him progressively larger roles to play as the tour progressed. He recalled the teenager as having a “laughing face, a curly head of hair, and athletic figure, and the most prodigious amount of energy I ever encountered.” One reporter in the 1920s quoted Warde as stating, “Douglas saved him much money for supernumeraries as he could be in so many places at the same time.” He retained his affection even after his pupil’s fame far exceeded his own. Warde visited him on the set of The Three Musketeers, and three years later said of Fairbanks, “He is one of the men whom fortune has not spoiled.”
Another favorite Fairbanksian anecdote centered around the funeral scene in act 1, scene 2 of Richard III, which he claimed afforded him his first speaking line. In the scene, Gloucester is paying impolitic court to Lady Anne at the funeral procession of Henry VI. Fairbanks claimed that he headed up the funeral procession and had but a single line: “My lord, stand back and let the coffin pass.” He was nervous about his first line, he maintained, practicing it for days “with every inflection, every gesture possible; in the street, in restaurants, in railroad stations.” But when the big night came? He boomed loud and clear, “Stand back, my lord, and let the parson cough.”
This is likely as much an embroidering of the truth as his other yarns about those years. Eventually he repeated it often enough that even Warde used it as his go-to story when speaking in public of Fairbanks. But the old man was genuinely bewildered by Fairbanks’s claim of having been so awful that Warde was relieved to see him go: “If he says it was so, it must be true,” he said. “But I do not remember it so.”
In fact, young Fairbanks was singled out for praise as his roles increased in size and importance. By November 1900, he was playing the juvenile romantic lead opposite Warde’s daughter in The Duke’s Jester. “Miss May Warde, as Benetta, and Douglas Fairbanks, as Florio, won the hearty applause of the audience by their capital rendition of a timid lover and a maiden who would wed,” declared the critic of the Fort Worth Morning Register.
Warde was to have a tremendous influence on the youngster. His style of acting survives in a recovered print of 1912’s Richard III. No sound, of course, is available. (By the end of the film, one is grateful for the fact.) Still, it informs us. Echoes of the old man’s style can be seen in Fairbanks’s performances in the 1920s. Was our hero thinking? An index finger planted on the side of his nose told us so. Did his heart ache? One fist balled into the other and clasped to the heart made it clear.
But Fairbanks studied more than his mentor’s performance. Warde was a joiner, an active member of the Elks club who used this association to the advantage of his company. Many stops on the tour were accompanied by local Elks assemblies given in the actor’s honor, and after-dinner speeches were quoted at loving length in the next day’s papers. It was good business—the theater would then be filled with appreciative fellow clubmen and their wives. Further, Warde practiced public good citizenship. Every stop that was longer than a one-night stand was accompanied by the obligatory visit to the local high school, where the (presumably) starstruck youngsters would be sprung from algebra or history and get to sit in an auditorium and hear the Great Man hold forth on Shakespeare or how to succeed in life or some other grand topic.
Fairbanks, young as he was, watched and learned. Within a few years he would become an active member of the Lambs Club, and long before he became famous, his name would pop up in the newspapers in association with some club-related charitable function. And while he did not take up the education of America’s young by way of the lecture circuit, he did publish a series of books directed at the youth market. And his work as a public citizen, through both the Red Cross and the Liberty Bond tours, was prodigious.
The two-year stint was educational in other ways. Warde urged him to learn swordsmanship skills. “Some actors draw a rapier,” he said, “as if it were a toasting fork.” He also urged all the youngsters under his tutelage to take acting seriously. “Some day they will stop lynching horse thieves and start in on bad actors, and nobody will say a word of protest.”
Young Doug had many opportunities to see the hardships of theatrical life firsthand. In Kansas in 1900, the first act of The Lion’s Mouth was interrupted by a sheriff ’s deputy crawling over his box and onto the stage to serve papers on a startled Warde. A disgruntled former actor was suing for $744 in back salary; the box office receipts for the day were attached. This incident may or may not have been related to another that occurred in Kansas, where a bout of fisticuffs became a local theatrical legend. “When I played at the old Willis Wood I got into a fight with a stage hand that was a pip,” Doug admitted to local reporters thirty years later. When told that the man in question had acknowledged starting the fight without provocation and, what’s more, that Fairbanks had won, Doug replied, “That’s sporting of him to say that.” Then, always gracious: “If he’s still around, you might tell him that I met a little guy a couple of weeks later who took most of the fight out of me. I’m still trying to figure out how he did it.”
Douglas, who had never been outside of Colorado, was able for the first time to scratch a lifelong itch for travel. The tour not only covered the country but also crossed the border into Canada. Newspaper articles about upcoming productions in places such as Winnipeg, Manitoba, touted: “Hockey scores will be given between acts.”
Perhaps it was the small towns and the hockey scores between acts. Perhaps it was simply his supreme self-confidence. But after two years, young Fairbanks evidently decided that he had learned all he needed from the experience. He was always impatient, and he felt that it was time to move from the second-highest rung on the ladder to the highest. He was still a teenager, but he saw no need to wait until he reached the grand old age of twenty to begin his climb. He wanted to make it to the top.
It was time for Douglas Fairbanks to take a crack at Broadway.
* * *
*1. This may be apocryphal; he is not listed in Philadelphia City directories for these years.
*2. † It has been written elsewhere that he went to law school. He did not. He “read law” under an attorney and took the written bar examination, a very common practice at the time. His youngest son, Douglas, would briefly attempt the same thing in the early 1900s but would only last a few weeks.
*3. Fairbanks evidently returned to New Orleans for his final days, as records indicate he died there on May 21, 1874.
*4. By 1900 he was a twenty-four-year-old chemist (a term that translated to “pharmacist” in that era) who lived with his wife in Denver. Ten years later he was in the same occupation, but by 1918, he was an office manager at the New York offices of Famous Players–Lasky, the production company to which his half-brother Douglas was signed at the time. Clearly, the job had been provided at Douglas’s behest; Norris went on to work for him at United Artists, living in Buenos Aires during much of the 1920s and overseeing the release of UA product in South America. Norris appears to have worked tirelessly and well for his half-brother (as did half-brother John and full brother Robert) but remained entirely off the public radar. Douglas was to leave a significant bequest to Norris of one-fortieth of his estate; full brother Robert was willed a two-fortieths share.
*5. This is a presumption. Divorce records are not available.
*6. John Fairbanks was listed as his father on his 1939 death certificate.
*7. He was to return to New York City by 1905 and live for a while with his now middle-aged daughters. By 1910, however, he had a third wife, forty years his junior, and was living in Brooklyn, suggesting that he was no ordinary
bigamist but might actually have had three families. He died in 1915, evidently having no further contact with Ella or her children.
*8. This made him virtually the only dry celebrity during the Roaring Twenties, with the possible exception of Baby Peggy and Rin Tin Tin.
*9. † Neither name is listed in the Denver directories in 1885, 1886, or 1887. Not until 1888 does Ella Ulman appear listed, without Charles. All directory entries after 1888 list the name of Fairbanks for Ella and her two youngest sons.
*10. Some of the productions that friends and family recalled for him cannot be confirmed. But On the Bowery indeed played in Denver for the week of November 2, 1896.
*11. * There is no evidence of this production in Denver, although Frederick Warde had produced the play there in 1896. But urns of ashes were common in the theater of the day, and Maude may have simply confused productions. The anecdote rings true.
*12. † History does not contemplate Douglas Fairbanks in terms of dance or mimicry, but evidently he was talented at both. His comic dialects stemmed from listening to the peddlers from the back alley of the house on Franklin Street.
*13. If nothing else, this must have given the young man an opportunity to vigorously scrub his face, as earlier in the day he had been one of seventeen children giving a “fancy dress cakewalk and parade in blackface. All the children will be blacked,” promised the Denver Post by way of inducement.
*14. Even Washington, DC, was perhaps a little too cosmopolitan. The Washington Post wrote in May 1900: “Mr. Warde himself as Romeo acted well, even admirably, but he needs to practice repression.” No other reviewer dared hint at such a thing, but it was likely wise that he and his troupe remained out of New York and Chicago and stuck with hick towns like Los Angeles.
*15. Historians have routinely misstated this date, claiming that his professional debut was in September 1900. This is inexplicable, as countless newspaper articles document Fairbanks’s involvement in the tour a year prior.
*16. In fact, they did not perform Hamlet until November 1900, more than a year after Fairbanks started with the troupe.
2
The Heroine’s Likable
Younger Brother
* * *
THE THEATRICAL UNIVERSE THAT the teenage Douglas Fairbanks encountered was still in the throes of its Big Bang in 1901: large and getting larger. More than forty “legitimate” theaters were in New York City alone, in addition to six top vaudeville houses. Forty “Opera and Extravaganza” companies competed with burlesque, vaudeville, and four hundred dramatic and touring stock companies. It was not an unrealistic expectation for a young actor with two years’ touring history in a major company to believe he could break into Broadway. And he did, with alacrity, being cast in July 1901 in Her Lord and Master. He was paid forty dollars per week.
Her Lord and Master was a four-act “society comedy,” and its New York premiere was on February 24, 1902.*1 The play was the story of a rich young heroine of the strong-willed, untamed variety who marries a British viscount. She does tolerably well subduing her wild American ways until the arrival in Britain of her family and childhood sweetheart (Fairbanks) causes a crisis. She wants to join them at a hotel; her husband wishes her to stay home, as nobility are not seen on Sunday nights at public restaurants. (“I am your guide, your adviser, your superior—in worldly knowledge.”) She goes anyway and disobeys his injunction to return by midnight, and he locks her out of the house. Chastened, she realizes that she loves him as Her Lord and Master, and all is happy by curtain.
Fairbanks’s role as the young American who fails to win the girl was small and not well written. “The most poorly drawn character in ‘Her Lord and Master,’” wrote one critic “is that of Glen Masters, and the actor to whom is assigned this role is entitled to the sympathy of the audience. Douglas Fairbanks struggled manfully with it and did not seem to do it particularly well. But it is a question whether anyone could have done it much better.” Most were kinder: he was “capital as an impulsive, unsophisticated and not very discreet youth,” his “naturalness and refreshing spontaneity” were praised, as was his “boyish audacity.”
As the man who vies with the hero for the heroine, one would suspect an unsympathetic character, but Fairbanks could not, even at this young age, be cast as a villain. “Lord Canning—” his character says, in one scene, “although it’s against my—own interests, I—I wish you luck . . . I shall keep out of the way—I won’t move a step in this matter until I am quite sure the case is hopeless with you.” The loser, perhaps—but ever the gallant.
The play had a good, if not spectacular, Broadway run, closing in April after sixty-nine performances. It was never revived and is today only a footnote in theatrical history. It was too close to the end of the season for Fairbanks to find another play. Theatrical seasons began in the autumn, after the summer’s heat that made packed theaters insufferable had eased. But a young Douglas Fairbanks was scarcely daunted by such a thing. He decided that Wall Street was a way to riches and found work as an “order man” at the brokerage house of De Coppet & Doremus. (“The name Coppet appealed to me,” he later claimed.) A 1916 reporter actually went to the firm to verify the story and came back with a report that “he is still remembered in that office, fondly but fearfully. He did his work well enough; in fact, there are those who insist that he invented scientific management.”
When asked about this later, Fairbanks recalled that this was pure bluff. “For five days in the week I would say, ‘Quite so’ to my assistant, no matter what he suggested,” he said. “On Saturday I would dash into the manager’s office, wag my head, knit my brow, and exclaim, ‘What we need around here is efficiency.’ And once I urged the purchase of a time-clock.”
Dramatic coach Margaret Fealy recalled encountering her former student at this time, shortly after her return from London: “I shall never forget the day I met him on Broadway when I returned. How young and happy and handsome. And how he lifted me off my feet in his greeting . . . bless him!”
Such exuberance was typical of him, as was what followed. “I was seized with a restless spirit,” he recalled later. “If life had some prize package for me, I wanted it tied up and delivered at once. . . . I thought of London. Of course! One could not expect adventure to dwell in this prosaic land. One must cross the Atlantic.” He made good on the decision by quitting his job and working his way across the Atlantic with two companions—football players by the names of “Little” Owen and “Jack” Beardsley—on a cattle boat.*2 They had, he claimed, fifty dollars each. “I walked from Liverpool to London, from London to Dover, from Calais to Paris and even from Paris to Brussels,” he said. “I worked with street gangs, unloaded cobblestones from barges and formed amazing contacts with all sorts of people. By absorbing or at least examining their point of view I corrected and broadened my own.”
Even more, the trip provided fodder for Fairbanks’s acting repertoire. It would be almost two decades before The Three Musketeers was produced, but friend and author Robert Florey claims that it was on this trip that Doug observed and learned to adopt the tics and mannerisms of the Frenchmen he encountered, to hilarious results. But as the call of travel beckoned him, so did that of the theater, and he returned to New York late that summer in time to be cast in his second Broadway play, A Rose o’ Plymouth-Town, which had its New York opening on September 29, 1902, after three weeks on the road.
A work of historical fiction that purported to demonstrate that the Pilgrims were not as staid as rumored, the play was the first starring role for Minnie Dupree, who years later was asked to comment on playing with a young Fairbanks. “I think,” she famously said, “that he was about the nicest case of St. Vitus’s dance that ever came under my notice.” He played the heroine’s likable younger brother—the first of many such portrayals. He won praise as “boyish, natural and interesting,” but the play itself was not well received. Once it reached the Manhattan Theatre, it lasted only twenty-one performances. The only point
of interest in the piece is that the plot involved a sword fight. (Dueling Pilgrims—who knew?) But even then the producers dropped the ball. The man who would become the icon of swashbuckling was not a participant, thus marking the play for posterity as being one large missed opportunity.
Having a play close this early in the season was unfortunate, but Fairbanks found another role quickly. Mrs. Jack was a successful comedy starring Alice Fischer as the recent widow of a millionaire who, in dealing with his estate, is surrounded by the usual assortment of undeserving and scheming relatives. To their horror, she welcomes into her society many of the beneficiaries of her late—and eccentric—husband’s will. When the play went on tour of the Northeast in late November, Fairbanks was in the cast, playing an uncharacteristic role of a cad “with a good deal of judgment,” in the eyes of at least one critic.
But he was not with the show for long. He played in Syracuse, New York, in late November 1902; Jersey City, New Jersey, in January 1903; and Boston, Massachusetts, in early March. By the time the tour reached Washington, DC, on April 13, Fairbanks had departed the company.
The family attributes this rapid exodus to Doug’s high spirits. He was by then “feeling quite at home in the theater,” reported niece Letitia Fairbanks, and was “up to his old tricks.” His lifelong love of pranks began to creep into actual performances. A villain’s hat would be loaded with an eight-pound shot, ruining the man’s exit. Doug would add stage business and improvise lines, much to the chagrin of the play’s manager. “Finally,” his niece wrote, “after an unusually exuberant performance in which he played a whole scene exclusively to a front row of young ladies, the manager ‘called’ him in the presence of the cast. The verbal battle that followed resulted in his resignation and the manager’s immediate acceptance of it.”*3
The First King of Hollywood Page 4