The First King of Hollywood
Page 7
All for a Girl, however, did not last long. “I played the part of a speedy young chap named Harold Jepson,” Fairbanks wrote later. “I regret to state as a chill and bitter fact that Harold’s speed took him straight off the boards . . . after a brief run of a month.”
Still, Fairbanks used the play thirteen years later as a central point around which to weave a tale related to his then internationally famous smile. He had lunch with a friend on a bright June afternoon, so his story goes. The friend told him a “tremendously funny” story. The story stuck with him, and during the day’s matinee of All for a Girl, at “the one really serious and dramatic moment in this play,” it leaped back into his mind.
He grinned—“a genuine convulsion which spread itself wantonly over my whole face. . . . The more I tried to control myself, the worse I got.” The play was in the dwindles, “and so close to the margin of complete failure that only a little shove was necessary to send it over. I knew I had given it this shove.” But instead of the expected reproaches, his story continued, he received only accolades from his producer. “He wanted to know why I had been holding back on him and concealing this marvelous smile until it was too late to do the drooping fortunes of the play any good. Advertisements were promptly prepared counseling the public to Come and See the Famous Fairbanks Smile.” He continued in a self-deprecating tone: “I now think that the public response to this appeal represented correctly the proper valuation of the smile. It brought in box-office receipts of thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents, and shortly after this the play failed and was withdrawn. But the harm was already done.”
No evidence of such advertisements exists, of course. The play ran for one month in August, so there was no “bright June afternoon.” But what are trifling facts to interfere with glorious myths? Note the charming mixture of self-effacement within the larger portrait of success. His first true starring role was a short-lived fizzle. It was neither such a glorious flop to be worthy of the Hamlet story (“Mr. Warde’s company was bad but worst of all was Douglas Fairbanks as Laertes . . .”) nor a triumph to be reveled in. It was—there is no kinder word—a mediocrity.
But mediocrity was not Fairbanks’s middle name. So in looking back on the experience, he transformed it. It became the launching point—the inadvertent launching point—for the Famous Fairbanks Smile. It became the reason he moved from his plans for grand drama to light comedy. A boy couldn’t help it. Never mind that he had been succeeding in light comedic parts up to this point. Fate, in the form of a remembered joke and a flashing smile, had provided a turning point during All for a Girl. And this is how he would choose to remember—or at least present—his indifferent star debut. But he would have no cause for rationalizations with his next play. A Gentleman from Mississippi was a bona fide smash.
Mississippi was much like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, if Mr. Smith had been a three-hundred-pound, wise old southern widower. The title character was played by Thomas Wise; the celebrated character actor had also coauthored the play with Harrison Rhodes. Fairbanks had the Jean Arthur role: the worldly wise newspaper reporter who takes the senator under his wing and guides him through the corrupt system. Like Man of the Hour, the play had political machinations to spare, but unlike Hour, it addressed them with wit instead of melodrama.
Just as Brady had played on the politics of New York and Tammany Hall by previewing The Man of the Hour in Albany, he premiered Mississippi in Washington, DC, at the New National Theater on September 21, 1908. The press loved it, the crowds roared, and Teddy Roosevelt, nearing the end of his second term, reportedly declared the play to be “Bully!” and “A corker!” Better yet, as far as Doug was concerned, he got to meet his idol when the cast was invited to the White House.
Theodore Roosevelt was his hero, the embodiment of just about everything that Fairbanks was or wanted to be. In many ways, they were identical. In the words of historian Richard Zacks, Roosevelt was “energetic, stubborn, opinionated, with a fondness for manliness—boxing, hunting, military history.” A contemporary of Roosevelt could have been describing Fairbanks when he said of the president: “He was tremendously excitable, unusually endowed with emotional feeling and nervous energy, and I believe his life was a continual effort to control himself.”
Fairbanks was the genuine personification of Roosevelt’s edict of living the strenuous life. He set many of his films in the West, in part, historian Alistair Cooke was to write, “because it was the best [background] to demonstrate how he felt about the enervating effects of modern plumbing.” Later in life he would attempt big-game hunting in emulation of his hero. And where his history did not match Roosevelt’s, he rewrote it. He claimed to have attended Harvard (Teddy was a Harvard man) and actively worked to present an image of himself as coming from a respectable Protestant family—the sort of family, like that of the Dutch Roosevelts, that was old money and represented all that was traditional and wholesome and good in the eyes of America at the turn of the twentieth century.
He was, as was his idol, the antithesis of a mollycoddle—one of the late president’s favorite terms. Ten years after this meeting Fairbanks would spend the equal of twenty years’ salary for an average American simply to retain the term mollycoddle as a film title. One of the many strains in his relationship with his father-in-law was over Roosevelt. Fairbanks told a reporter at the time that Sully “loves Roosevelt about as much as a newborn kitten adores the Atlantic Ocean.” Still, “I knew ’way down in my heart that I admired him [Roosevelt] more than any man I ever knew.”
Still, at the time of the meeting Fairbanks anticipated the usual platitudes. After all, he and his troupe were merely actors, and this was Roosevelt. “I expected he’d howdy do me and tell me that he liked the show and enjoyed my acting; and that he thought the drama was a wonderful means of expression . . . and all that old stuff,” he recalled. But the president, with his prodigious memory and iron-grip handshake, took him aback. “I never got such a surprise in my life. He knew all about me, every play I had ever been in, all about my family, where they came from, who they were, all about my wife’s family. In fact, he reminded me of things about myself that I had forgotten,” he said. “I’m for him to the end. He’s got them all beat. He’s a wonder.”
From Washington, the company moved to New York City and the Bijou Theatre. Critics were ecstatic. The success of the play was assured, the New York Dramatic Mirror claimed, “before the first act was half over.” All agreed that Fairbanks was not playing a supporting role but that he and Thomas Wise—an odd couple, they—were truly costars. The New York Times critic wrote that Doug’s “fresh, breezy, wholesome way of saying things made just the right foil for the easy-going Senator.” There were twenty curtain calls on opening night.
It remained a smash throughout the winter. Brady started giving out souvenirs for the one hundredth, two hundredth, three hundredth performances. By May, the play was novelized. When the summer season came, and with it time to shut down the dramatic theater, Brady did something unprecedented: he moved the play to the roof garden of the New Amsterdam Theatre. While Ziegfeld and his Follies girls could stage musicals on a rooftop theater, never before had any straight comedy or drama been presented in such a setting. All costumes and scenery were totally revamped, and the company performed under the stars throughout July and early August.
By the time they hit their four hundredth performance, they were back at the Bijou. In late September 1909 the company moved in toto to Boston and the Park Theatre, where they stayed for a record-breaking run, moving to Philadelphia in mid-December.
It was a propitious time to start a family, and Beth gave birth to a nine-pound son, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., on December 9. Her father had advanced the young couple the funds to rent an apartment at the Apthorp, on the Upper West Side; his first grandchild was not going to come home to a theatrical hotel! It was not a wise move for a man whose financial fortunes were crumbling, but it seemed the time for a grand gesture, and his extravagant daughter
(and, in the words of his son, “equally extravagant actor-husband”) were not disposed to decline.
Late February 1910 the play returned to Washington for a week at the Columbia Theatre. By this time at least four touring companies were playing Mississippi around the country. By April, when the original cast was playing in Syracuse, there is evidence that theatrical audiences were recognizing Doug’s unique charms. Three hundred students attended the opening night performance, and after curtain speeches “the student body compelled Mr. Fairbanks to jump over a chair and walk down a flight of stairs on his hands, a feat which was greeted as the top-notch dramatic event of the evening.”
Fairbanks finally left the play that summer, arriving in Great Britain in late May with Beth and their new baby, staying in Bourne End, on the Upper Thames. By all accounts, Doug was a proud new father. He was photographed with the billiard-ball-bald infant*1 almost as often as was Beth, who shared Ella’s mania for portraits of her son. One charming photograph of Junior during his first summer shows the exuberant father lying on his back on a British lawn, feet in the air, his delighted baby held straight into the sky. They enjoyed a rented Tudor cottage, the International Horse Show, and the revived London social season. (They were just in time for the relaxation of official mourning for King Edward VII.) Mississippi had increased Fairbanks’s newsworthiness: their international comings and goings were being reported for the first time in the Times—as were Fairbanks’s heroics.
On Derby Day, welching bookmakers robbed visiting Americans—among them, A. G. Vanderbilt—of thousands of dollars in winnings. But the day was not totally lost, for the press reported that “Douglas Fairbanks, the actor, chased a ‘bookie’ across the field and made him disgorge.” There would be many more rescues and spontaneous acts of athletic heroics in following years, but in the age of press-agentry and ballyhoo, it is difficult to separate fact from fiction. Fairbanks was at this point not yet a world-famous figure, and this report smacks of truth. He wanted for neither physical courage nor impulsiveness. What he lacked was a press agent. That would come with Hollywood.
At any rate, there appear to have been no other colorful incidents while abroad, and the family returned to the States to enjoy Connecticut in August while Fairbanks entered rehearsals for his starring role in The Cub, which previewed in Boston in mid-September 1910.
The Cub was a farce based on the Hatfield-McCoy story, demonstrating a typical Kentucky feud, in which twenty-one mountaineers lost their lives over a quarrel about a pig. Fairbanks played a cub reporter, “fresh from college . . . sent by his editor to ‘cover’ the feud . . . because his boyish enthusiasm and supreme confidence in his own abilities strike his editor as fitting the requirements of the assignment—those of being just plain ‘fool.’”*2
Fairbanks’s entrance into the Kentucky hills was comically inauspicious: he arrived, Quixote-like, astride a donkey with a license plate above its tail. Inevitably, he falls in love with a beautiful mountain girl—who prevents, in the dry words of a critic of the time, “the further progress of the ass.” Ultimately the feud is settled on the $1.50 pig by the payment of $1.37, the remaining cents being waived in exchange for one of the clans getting the opportunity to thrash our hero reporter for falling in with the wrong side.
Producer Brady remembered this production as the first in which he recognized Fairbanks’s athletic ability. (Presumably he’d been absent during curtain calls for Mississippi, and for purposes of the narrative he conveniently forgot that his star had walked down steps on his hands between acts in Clothes.) “In one scene he had to run upstairs in a two-level set and save somebody’s life—probably the heroine’s,” he recalled years later. “Run?” he quoted Fairbanks as asking. “What’s the matter with jumping?” Brady was dubious. There was a “twelve-foot gap between stage floor and upper floor.”
Fairbanks declared this no challenge at all. “Why, that’s simple,” he said. He “took a little run, caught the edge of the flooring by the stair-opening and pulled up as easy as an alley-cat taking a fence.” Curiously, Brady claimed to have missed the appeal of this thespian approach. “That made a tremendous hit with the audience, but I didn’t get the idea,” he claimed. “I never did see what an asset Fairbanks’ acrobatics were until the movies pointed it out to me.”
Perhaps his claim of an inability to recognize Doug’s particular charms related to his personal dislike of the actor. The relationship between the two men was often stormy; Brady claimed he did not take Fairbanks back after his turn in the soap business until “my lawyers had made sure of him.” But evidence argues that Brady was making great hay out of his star’s physical skills. (Once Brady was quoted as saying, “Put him in a death scene and he’d find a way to break the furniture.”) By the time The Cub was touring, advance publicity was playing up this angle heavily. “It requires the physical endurance of a trained athlete to do the stunts demanded in the part,” read one article. “In his contact with the feudists Steve [Fairbanks’s character] is handled roughly, and in the last act he makes a dive into a bed that is not only an acrobatic wonder, but also that looks like he must break an arm or suffer some injury. It is a dive few actors would care to take eight times a week.”
Thus Doug began to distinguish himself from all the other light comic leading men in the field. The combination of remarkable physical skills with the willingness (Why, that’s simple!) to subject himself to the nightly risks and bruises made him stand out. But even without his athleticism, he was garnering glowing reviews. A New York critic wrote, “The audience was kept almost continually in laughter every time he spoke. His winning smile and dashing manner made him a favorite before the play was half an hour old.”
The Cub ran for three months in New York, shuffling between theaters as Brady’s requirements dictated.*3 In early April 1911, Brady announced that Doug would be starring in A Gentleman of Leisure, but first his entire stable of stars would be featured in a limited-run revival of The Lights o’ London.
The Lights o’ London had been a tremendous hit when it premiered in 1881. It was an early entry in what was then the latest theatrical craze: melodrama. Thomas Wise (still soldiering on in The Gentleman from Mississippi) had portrayed the villain in a touring production in 1884. Brady himself played the policeman in the same production. It was the sort of play of which everyone had fond, nostalgic memories. F. W. Bert, Brady’s right-hand man, treasurer, and confidential adviser, had been the first to produce the piece in the States, and it was he who urged Brady to put it on as a revival. After all, it was “the prize melodrama of 30 years . . . time-proof.” Brady assembled a formidable cast, including Fairbanks, Thomas Wise, and a young Marguerite Clark, and premiered the revival at the Lyric Theatre on May 1.
Perhaps, somewhere in the annals of theater history, there was a more disastrous opening night. After all, the theater didn’t burn down around the patrons’ heads. By the end of the evening, however, Brady might have wished it had. The audience came expecting to bask in the glow of warm memories. Instead, they discovered that youthful memories weren’t what they used to be: what was great then was suddenly old-fashioned now. Where they should have gasped, they laughed.
Circumstances did nothing to help. The opening curtain went up too early, revealing nonplussed stagehands. The villain was to murder the elderly uncle in the dark so as to lay the blame on the hero. The stage lamp stubbornly refused to darken, and the hapless uncle was murdered in bright light. At one point, the troublesome curtain came down on a cluster of extras dressed as policemen, leaving some inside, some out, and the remainder entangled in the folds. Brady himself was backstage, assisting in the setup of the large set for the London Bridge, when part of it dislodged, striking him on the shoulder. He took his curtain call with an arm in a sling. His actors were taken aback by the cheerful hisses for the villains and laughter for the rest of the cast. They threatened to quit, without the customary two weeks’ notice. Brady held them back by promising to update the script.
And then something happened. Brady made touches here and there, cutting down some of the more emphatic Curse hers. But that isn’t what did the trick. The actors decided to have fun with the piece.
Fairbanks, ever the masterful practical joker, led the charge. His character was offstage for the climax of the play, a dramatic rescue in which the hero leaped off the London Bridge and, clinging to a spar with one hand, held a rescuee by the other. In one performance, Doug armed himself with a basket of fish, opened a trap door behind the hero, and “one after another, sent a perfect shower of fish over the two actors. From the front it looked as if flying fish were leaping out of the water.” Not only did the audience explode in laughter, but the actors, too, had trouble keeping straight faces to finish the play.
In the finale, Fairbanks was posed nonchalantly leaning against a fence while the hero and heroine embraced. The clinch was a prolonged one, made worse for the hero by the fact that on one particular night, Doug rigged up a small rubber tube attached to a faucet. Just as the hero clutched the heroine, Fairbanks put the tube down the back of his collar. The actor “was not to be balked, but certainly played a very damp love scene that evening.”
That is not to say that Fairbanks didn’t get as good as he gave. Doug played Philosopher Jack, a costermonger. In a reverse twist on the eight-pound-shot-in-the-villain’s-hat trick that he played during the run of Mrs. Jack, some wag filled his basket of potatoes with paving stones. When it came time to lift the basket, he couldn’t. The line of the man playing opposite him was “What have you there, my good man?” His reply should have been “Potatoes.” “But this evening,” Charles Richman, the play’s villain, reported, “without a waver, he looked cunningly at the innocent inquirer and answered, simply: ‘A little ’eavy ’umor, Sir.’”