The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  But he must not have been pleased to return to Fantana, on May 4, and his cries of “To Japan, to Japan!” History does not record how long he stayed with the production the second time around (the play was a prodigious success, running 298 performances on Broadway). But it cannot have been long, for by early September, he was in Chicago, in a supporting role in another Brady hit, As Ye Sow.

  As Ye Sow was a New England melodrama, cut from the same cloth as Way Down East, replete with shipwrecks, lost husbands, and stolen babies. Brady knew his stuff: the producer leaned heavily in his advertising on the fact that a minister of the Gospel had penned the story; he even held a special matinee to which he invited every cleric in Chicago. (“The general public will not be admitted.”) Over a thousand men of the cloth bravely overcame their historical aversion to the evils of the stage and attended.

  Doug played Lute Ludlam, once again half of a juvenile pair in a secondary love story—one of the comic New England characters surrounding the long-suffering heroine and her minister-love. The play was a tremendous success in Chicago that fall, and within three days of premiering it was booked into a Boston theater for an indefinite run. It arrived there in late October and was unstoppable. Even the abrupt death of the leading lady (she developed sudden deafness in those pre-antibiotic days and died in surgery in a Boston hospital in late November) did not slow it down, and it stayed for three months.

  On Christmas Day, it opened on Broadway at the Garden Theatre. New Yorkers, however, prided themselves on not being susceptible to “robust fun of the usual huckleberry flavor.” “If the minister portrayed in the play could have been secretly strangled and drowned in some of the real water which fell in the storm scene the whole situation would immediately have gained in sincerity,” was the dry report of one New York critic. Brady’s publicity releases claimed that the crowds at the Garden were the largest in five years, but As Ye Sow ran for a modest thirty-four performances on Broadway.

  Still, a shrewd Brady knew where the money was. He booked the play for an extended road tour of New England. While Fairbanks may have participated in some of the tour, by the summer of 1906 he was back, in a sense, where he started: Denver, and Elitch’s Gardens, where eight years before he used to run to be the first to open the gates for Hobart Bosworth.

  Elitch’s Gardens, a thirty-minute trolley ride from the heart of downtown Denver, was only sixteen years old the summer that Fairbanks played there, but already it was famous for its theater and resident stock company. Tyrone Power, Sarah Bernhardt, and Minnie Madden Fiske had all appeared there—in fact the Divine Sarah came there for the 1906 season after the San Francisco earthquake destroyed the theater at which she had been scheduled to perform that summer, playing Camille in matinees and La Sorcière at night. History is silent on whether Mr. Fairbanks ever met Miss Bernhardt. Cheerful social-climber that he was, it would be surprising to imagine that he would trod the boards with the greatest actress of her generation and say nothing about it.

  But in writing about that summer a decade later, he was diffident in tone: “In my home town I played a number of unimportant parts as a member of the stock company that was a fixture at Elitch’s—a company in which every Denver actor is expected to appear at least once in his career.” Clearly it was a step backward, and it is unclear why it was taken. He had a contract with Brady. He could have continued to tour with As Ye Sow. Perhaps Ella was homesick. Certainly it was an opportunity for reunions; Maude Fealy, his first theatrical compatriot, was playing stock for the summer at Elitch’s, and their adult encounters were always replete with reminiscences and laughter.

  At any rate, a summer of rotating juvenile roles in plays such as The Little Princess, Old Heidelberg, Sherlock Holmes, and The Little Minister appears to have done his career no harm, and by autumn he was back in the East, supporting Grace George (Mrs. William Brady) in her next vehicle, Clothes.

  Clothes, a social comedy, opened in early September. Fairbanks’s part was small—so small, in fact, that when he was briefly needed in late October to fill in for his old role in the still-touring As Ye Sow, his friend Kenneth Davenport was able to step in for him with a single rehearsal. Still, he was noticed by the critics: “Douglas Fairbanks gave his customarily truthful picture of a particularly superfluous American youth,” wrote one. “Douglas Fairbanks . . . played an unimportant part well,” stated another.

  Superfluous. Unimportant. These are not the characteristics of a role that could contain his boundless, youthful energy. It had to emerge, and it did. Noting that the set included a long staircase (handy for casting villains down to their fates), William Brady wrote, “During rehearsals, which always wore everybody else to a frazzle, Fairbanks’ idea of resting up was to walk up and down that flight of steps on his hands. He was an instantaneous success.”

  So was the production, running over one hundred performances. Again, Fairbanks did not stay for the run of the play. By early October 1906, Brady announced that Doug was cast in The Man of the Hour.

  The Man of the Hour was a political drama, and Fairbanks once again played the part of the heroine’s brother. Initially, Brady sandwiched the production into the Manhattan Theatre, where Clothes was still playing, by running it at matinee performances. The play premiered in New York City on Sunday, October 28, before an invited audience (“the simplest way,” commented the New York Times, “to avoid any infringement of the Sunday law”), a day after a single performance in Albany. It played briefly in Trenton, New Jersey, before finding its rightful home and formal opening at the Savoy on December 4. Reviews were generally strong; they demonstrate that the Fairbanks persona was starting to be recognized. The New York Sun’s critic wrote that Fairbanks “had the audience with him from the time his smile first appeared,” and the Times critic noted, “Douglas Fairbanks played his now familiar, breezy, attractive youth.”

  Contemporary photographs suggest his charisma. In the midst of gesticulating actors in costumes of the period, Fairbanks stands out, modern and natural. Brady must have recognized this unusual quality and planned to capitalize on it. By the third week of December, he had contracted with George Sandhurst, The Man of the Hour’s author, to write a play specifically for Fairbanks. There would be no more heroines’ brother parts for Doug.

  It was at this point that the love-hate relationship between actor and producer hit another major bump in the road. By December 30, 1906, Doug announced that he was leaving the stage—for good. He was in love. What’s more, he was engaged.

  Her name was Anna Beth Sully. She was soft, plump, and fair of skin, in an era when these attributes were closely linked with the definition of beauty. She was born in 1886 in Rhode Island. She had not been born to great fortune, but by the time she was a teenager her father, Daniel Sully, an iron-willed speculator of the robber baron variety, had cornered the market in cotton and become a multimillionaire nearly overnight. The family built a sprawling summerhouse in Rhode Island (named Kenneth Ridge, after an older brother who died young) and occupied a mansion off Fifth Avenue in New York. She had the trappings of wealth. In the words of her son, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., “She epitomized that upper-class world in which he felt very much at ease, and which his mother [Ella] had always thought their due.”

  The exact circumstances of their meeting are in dispute. Fairbanks Jr. believed that they met after Beth saw him during the Boston run of The Man of the Hour. Since the show didn’t play Boston until early 1908, this is unlikely. The version that played in the popular press at the time of their marriage was that father and daughter attended a matinee of The Pit. If so, it was a case of art imitating life, for two days later, it was said, the cotton market collapsed—and with it much of Daniel’s fortunes. In fact, by the time he gave his consent to their marriage, Papa Sully’s establishment was running on fumes.

  But this was not evident to the young couple, who were determined to wed. Daniel could posture that a family of his status could hardly have an actor join their fold, and Fairbanks
was either too politic or too uninformed to point out that the Sully fold was very much of the nouveau riche. And perhaps not so riche at that. He became ardent in his pursuit, and Beth’s father began to soften. In one contemporary account: “Opposition to the suit aroused the fighting blood in Mr. Fairbanks and Mr. Sully loves a fighter.” Sully would reconsider his refusal—if Fairbanks would come to work for his current business venture, the Buchan Soap Company. Doug agreed. But Daniel was only half of the equation. Brady had Fairbanks locked into a five-year contract, and this would have to be broken.

  Here Doug reverted to a tactic that had worked for him in the past. Much as he sent Ella to plead his case with Frederick Warde, he now sent Beth to do the same with Brady. Her backbone was of the same quality steel as her father’s. “At the conclusion of the conference, manager Brady retired, wearing the expression of a martyr and the five years’ contract torn to tatters reposed in the wastebasket,” went one account. “He had agreed to release Fairbanks at the conclusion of the present season.”

  So Fairbanks did double duty starting in early 1907—evenings and matinees on the stage, and all other working hours at Buchan Soap’s Brooklyn plant. The prospect of a rising young Broadway star working in a soap factory for his ladylove roused some interest in the press, and contemporary photographs show him in crisp white coveralls, his hair getting progressively more mussed as he doggedly worked his way through all the steps in the manufacturing process. He could never do anything halfway; rumors abounded that during his time on the sales force, he would cheerily take a bite out of the soap to demonstrate its purity.

  The June wedding was timed to the end of the theatrical season. The sun parlor at Kenneth Ridge, banked with maidenhead fern and daisies, was arranged to represent a miniature chapel. Two hundred seats formed a central aisle. The bride wore white princess satin and carried orange blossoms. The groom—perhaps to tweak his father-in-law—had Broadway star Vincent Serrano as his best man. A simple Episcopal service was followed by a reception in the living room. The couple left for a European honeymoon. It could not have been more proper.

  Film historians often claim that Fairbanks returned to the stage upon the collapse of Buchan Soap. But Doug did not wait nearly that long. Perhaps he was persuaded by Brady’s plea (“I think you are making a great mistake abandoning a professional career which indicates so bright a future for you for any other occupation or career,” he wrote Fairbanks at the time). Or perhaps he had never planned to leave the stage but waited until the marriage was a fait accompli. More charitably, it may be that the family’s dwindling assets were becoming evident. Whatever the reason, he returned to The Man of the Hour, still chugging along at the Savoy, on September 2, 1907. His agreement with Brady called for him to remain in the play throughout its New York run; in exchange, Brady would produce a new play specifically for him, and “he will be launched as a full-fledged star on or before September 1, 1908.”

  * * *

  *1. Not that the play had spared him the touring circuit. Her Lord and Master had been touring since September, hitting the hinterlands circuit of such cities as Vincennes, Indiana, and Janesville, Wisconsin.

  *2. Normally, this is the sort of claim that would make the most gullible of biographers suspicious, and the paucity of crew manifests for this period makes the date impossible to confirm. But history has strange ways of providing proof, and for Fairbanks (and us) it came on his honeymoon voyage in 1920. Upon landing in Southampton, England, he was greeted not only by the international press but also by a sweaty but stalwart stoker who recognized him from the cattle boat trip nearly twenty years before. Cameras recorded the happy reunion, and one myth, at least, was confirmed as fact.

  *3. Fairbanks would later soften his memory of this period and claim, incorrectly, that he had played a supporting role in Mrs. Jack for “a whole year.”

  *4. † Nineteen years later, at the height of his fame, he got a letter. Someone had unearthed his 1903 employment card from the company. It revealed little beyond his signature, his salary (he was paid five dollars a week), and his address: 119 West Ninety-Fifth Street. Was it the same Douglas Fairbanks? A studio employee dutifully replied, confirming that yes, it was the same man, adding, “Mr. Fairbanks wishes to thank you for your very kind inquiry, and says he is sure no one in your organization would remember him if it depended upon his ability along hardware lines.” Kenneth Davenport, as unofficial studio biographer, would later write: “He had thought to become a captain of industry and had enlisted as private, donning overalls—picturesque ones, you may be sure,—and learning all about the manufacture of bolts, nuts and hinges. But the rewards of the particular captain that came within his range of vision did not seem alluring enough to warrant Doug’s continuance in the hardware regiment. Certainly if one is to leap there must be something worth leaping for.”

  *5. Except, of course, the “cattle boat” was a passenger ship, and his mother was along. But it sounds less than heroic to say that you went with your mother to London.

  3

  Stage Stardom

  * * *

  THE SUMMER OF 1908 was significant in the theatrical world, and not because it was the summer when Douglas Fairbanks was launched as a stage star. Rather, it was because one of theater’s greatest failures took up a new profession.

  David Wark Griffith was seven years older than Douglas Fairbanks, born in 1876 in rural Kentucky. He wished to become a playwright, so he left home at the age of nineteen to become an actor and learn the trade. He failed in both professions. He knocked about the world of Victorian melodramas and starving stock companies until 1907, when he was in such a diminished state that he was forced to seek work in moving pictures. He tried to sell a screenplay to the Edison Studios.

  He failed again. But he was hired for a day or two as an actor in an Edwin S. Porter film, Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest, wherein he rescued a baby and fought a stuffed eagle (whose wires were readily apparent) against the painted theatrical backdrop typical of the earliest films. From this experience he moved into the universe of the unsuccessful actor, supporting himself in “the flickers.” One of the studios at which he found work was the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, known to his peers as “the Biograph.” The company was in a creative slump, producing story films of no particular merit. The director, Wallace McCutcheon, had a drinking problem. Not that it mattered much; no one thought that directors were important—they just told the actors what to do. It was the cameraman who counted, and one of the company’s two cameramen (Arthur Marvin) was the boss’s brother, the self-described “Captain of the Good Ship Take-it-Easy.” In fact, so unimportant were directors in the relative scheme of things at Biograph that when the studio head decided they needed a second one, he took a flier on one of the hammier actors in their stable: Griffith.

  It turned out to be a brilliant choice. Griffith may not have been able to act to save his life, but he changed the face of motion pictures. Over the course of the next five years he directed over 450 short films, one- and two-reel melodramas and comedies (far more of the former than the latter). Revisionists enjoy quarreling today to determine who else might have come up with any particular innovation first, but few disagree that whether alone or in parallel with others, Griffith developed the essential grammar of film as film—the fluidity of shot placement, staging, editing, and performance that remains the blueprint of movies up to the present day. He fought for innovations in camera placement (close-ups were rare in 1908) and creative use of lighting, including backlighting. He fought vehemently for films longer than ten to twenty minutes, realistic sets (as opposed to painted stage flats), and location shooting. Under his influence, films evolved from essentially filmed stage performances to true cinema.

  It would take seven and a half more years for the cinematic explosion to occur at a complete societal level with the release of his Birth of a Nation in early 1915. Still, the introduction of D. W. Griffith as a film director in the summer of 1908 was akin to
lighting the fuse.

  Fairbanks, about to be launched as a theatrical star—on Broadway, no less—was of course unaware of this development. It had taken almost a year from the time of Brady’s announcement, but rehearsals for All for a Girl began August 3, 1908. All for a Girl was an improbable romantic vehicle, even by 1908 standards: a wealthy heiress, weary of male gold diggers, impersonates a poor secretary on holiday. The hero, an upright young man, meets the girl, falls in love, and the predictable comedy of mistaken identities ensues. It was a tepid endeavor. Still, Fairbanks’s qualities were increasingly recognized. “Another star burst forth in the theatrical firmament on Saturday evening August 22,” the New York Clipper critic commented. “And although the glare resulting therefrom was not a blinding one, Douglas Fairbanks, the young man in question, may console himself with the comforting reflection that he landed solidly.” The Washington Post was a little warmer: under the subhead DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS MADE A STAR the critic wrote that Fairbanks “is extremely clever in the personation of everyday, good-humored, sharp-tongued, boyish young fellows.” Most perceptive of all, perhaps, was the New York Times critic, who wrote, “Mr. Fairbanks is not beautiful. He has, however, the very pleasant personality. Fortunately for his own future and for those who will have occasion to sit in judgment on his future efforts, he has something more.”

  This was the essence of the matter: Doug may not have been the handsomest matinee idol treading the boards, but he had something more.