The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  Brady’s recollection of Fairbanks was not always fond, perhaps because of such hijinks. “No doubt Fairbanks’ temperament had a good deal to do with the way he got across to an audience,” Brady recalled twenty-five years later. “But its regardlessness did not make him popular with his coworkers on the stage, which was unhandy for everybody, including me as a manager. It did come in very handy once, however.” Near the end of the play was a tremendous fight. Charles Richman recalled: “The last act was a riot. Folks got so they dropped in for the finale alone. They would fill the house a little after ten.”

  “His big scene was in a market where he jumped out from behind a cabbage wagon and started battling a crowd of supers single-handed, the curtain coming down on the shindy at its height,” Brady wrote. “It was a fine thing, being just Fairbanks’ dish. All the finer because the supers all had it in for him and it was usually anything but a fake fight. Eight times a week they ganged up on him and gave him a good two minutes of brisk battering.”

  Richman elaborated: “In the fight scene he stirred the whole stage up to a fearful pitch. He really fought and one night, the word was passed, ‘This is the evening when Doug gets his.’ It was passed too frequently and Fairbanks heard about it so he want to Columbia College and got three football men to mix in among the stage hands, in overalls. The fight that evening rivaled the slaughter in the sunken road at Waterloo and the scrapping on the pass of Thermopylae. One of the Columbia fellows had his nose broken and had to be taken in an ambulance to the hospital. One of our stage hands was knocked unconscious. Fairbanks was knocked down and seized by the feet, was dragged from the stage, yelling. That ended the riot, for the management sent back word that humor was going a little too far.”

  “Anybody else would have complained to the management, with some justification,” Brady wrote. “But not Fairbanks—he loved it, and gave the supers just as good as they sent all the way.” Richman summed it up best: “There was no holding Douglas Fairbanks down.”

  The play ran the intended four weeks on Broadway, and an extra week in Brooklyn. In the end, it grossed Brady an astonishing $60,000.

  Rehearsals for his next play began on August 3, 1911. A Gentleman of Leisure began life as a novella, The Gem Collector, written by a struggling young P. G. Wodehouse in his pre–Jeeves and Bertie days. The original story featured a reformed jewel thief who had since come into an inheritance. The plot progressed to a Raffles-like adventure complete with a British castle, a dimwitted lord, and a diamond necklace. In 1910 the story was revised—our hero was no longer a thief—and published in book form as The Intrusion of Jimmy. Wodehouse and John Stapleton then converted the story to play form, and Brady snapped it up.

  It is easy to understand why. Once the character was decriminalized, the part seemed custom-made for Fairbanks. The hero was “a young man of medium height, whose great breadth and depth of chest made him look shorter than he really was. His jaw was square and protruded slightly; and this, combined with a certain athletic jauntiness of carriage and a pair of piercing brown eyes very much like those of a bull-terrier, gave him an air of aggressiveness which belied his character.” Wrote Wodehouse, “Jimmy was one of those men who are charged to the brim with force. Somehow the force had to find an outlet.”

  Brady knew how to provide this outlet. In the original text, when the hero encounters a housebreaker, he overcomes him with a single tackle. On opening night (August 24 at Brady’s Playhouse Theatre), “the audience was treated to one of the most realistic fights on a darkened stage the town has seen in a long time.”

  But Fairbanks was not to fight on that particular stage for long. Brady started playing musical chairs with his plays, moving A Gentleman of Leisure to the Globe Theatre in mid-September, in order to make room for his production of a drama titled The Rack. The Rack failed miserably, but Brady did not return Fairbanks to his flagship theater: the producer was saving that space for a play featuring Grace George—his wife. To add insult to injury, by late September it was announced that Gentleman would again have to find a new home, as yet another piece was coming to the Globe.

  Perhaps this is what set off the break. The story Doug told his family went thus: Gentleman was not the success that Brady had hoped for, and “after the final curtain,” Brady summoned Fairbanks to his office and asked him to cancel his contract early, “through no fault of his.” Letitia Fairbanks wrote of her uncle, “It was typical of him that he could always see the other fellow’s side. In a spirit of genuine friendship and good feeling, he stuck out his hand.”

  This does not smack of the truth. Brady’s final attitude toward Fairbanks, as expressed in his autobiography, was not that of a man in debt to an actor who graciously ended a contract early. It was that of a producer with a nettlesome star, likely a valuable star, who had left him in the lurch early in the run of what was, up to then, a successful play. Both Brady and Fairbanks remained diplomatically mum on the subject, but by early October a split was announced. Brady, from the Playhouse, stated that he and Mr. Fairbanks were still the best of friends. (The reporter unhelpfully failed to note if this statement was produced through gritted teeth.) Mr. Fairbanks, from his dressing room at the Globe, echoed the sentiment. He simply wished other opportunities. A change in management might do him good. He was considering offers. Cohan & Harris were interested, very interested. But they didn’t have a play ready for him on such short notice. Then there was Charles Frohman. He had a piece, Jack Spurlock, Prodigal, “prepared with him in view.”

  So the pattern that Brady and Fairbanks had established for themselves (split, reunion, split) played itself out for the third time since their initial breach during The Pit. One suspects that there were even more near misses within those seven years. In January 1909, for example, very early in the run of A Gentleman from Mississippi, Fairbanks had announced that “Western capitalists” were planning to build a theater for him. Every detail was announced: the location, the architect, the opening play, the seating capacity. These Western capitalists were, no doubt, his brothers.

  He was, even at this early stage of his career, developing a view of show business that gave equal weight to the business of the show. It was said that he hung around the counting room, “anxiously watching the till fill up.” He was exasperated by the concept that the public owed its attention to the struggling arts. “The public owes no more toward the theater than toward grocery stores, canning factories or livery stables,” he said. “The theater with theatergoers is a matter of what Falconbridge calls ‘commodity’ and nothing else; it has never been anything else and never will be.”

  Nothing more was heard of the plan—likely it was a negotiating tactic with Brady—but his confidence here is evident. He felt himself, even at that early stage of his career, capable of not only production but also theater ownership—what was, in a sense, the whole ball of wax in the world of live theater and what would become, in time, two parts of the holy trinity of the film business: production, distribution, and exhibition. In less than a decade, he would come to revolutionize this model with the formation of United Artists.

  But this was yet to come. By early October, Fairbanks had given his last performance in A Gentleman of Leisure and still had no contract signed. Without the charismatic actor, the play lasted only another two weeks. As short as its run was, whatever his role had been in killing the play early seemed to cause no resentment on the part of its author. Wodehouse was later to republish The Intrusion of Jimmy under the title of A Gentleman of Leisure. He dedicated the book to Fairbanks.

  Ultimately, Fairbanks signed with Cohan & Harris, but it was not a smooth transition. George M. Cohan was all of thirty-two years old in 1911, but he already wore the mantle of “the man who owned Broadway.” A vaudevillian since childhood, he had been a superstar since Little Johnny Jones in 1904. With partner Sam Harris he produced more than fifty plays and musicals in the years leading up to 1920. He was one of the few individuals in that century who could legitimately enter
into competition with Fairbanks as a force of nature. On paper, it looked like a brilliant shift of management. As it was, Cohan & Harris would produce only one play with Fairbanks, and his theatrical career was never quite as stable after he left Brady’s management.

  Initially, things looked promising. Though the producer team did not have anything immediately at hand, Cohan pledged that they would have a piece for him ready to open by Thanksgiving: “The typical young American, winning fame, fortune and female over insurmountable odds,” he promised. It sounded perfect. There was just one hitch: Cohan did not produce the script.

  Inactivity did not suit Fairbanks well. He manifested a behavior that he was to repeat throughout his life. Whether at loose ends or at wit’s end, he got out of Dodge. “I got the wanderlust so bad that I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I just ‘beat it,’” he recalled. “I took a steamer to Cuba and walked across the island from Havana to Batabano, about one hundred and twenty miles.” With him was friend and costar (in both The Cub and A Gentleman of Leisure) Elmer Booth.

  From there he took a ship for the Yucatán Peninsula and walked from Progresso to Mérida. History does not record whether he was foot-sore or tanned and rested on his December arrival in New York, but he returned to the news that Cohan had still not produced the promised play. “I’ve got the young man in the drawing room and I can’t get him out,” Cohan reportedly offered by way of excuse.

  Never patient, or perhaps in need of money (he had already returned his family to their former digs, the Algonquin Hotel), Fairbanks next did the unexpected: he signed with Arthur Klein, a vaudeville manager. At first glance, this seems astonishing. Fairbanks had been in “the legitimate” since 1902. Even as a teenager on the touring circuit, he had never set foot on a variety stage. But theater historian David Mayer clarifies the issue:

  It was not uncommon to find . . . major stars playing cut-down versions of their vehicles to vaudeville audiences. Sarah Bernhardt, for example, contrived to make a vaudeville sketch from a medley of roles in which she had formerly toured American legitimate houses. To appear in vaudeville was not a descent from the lofty heights of the legitimate stage to the degradation of the itinerant variety artiste which some film and theatre historians might imagine. Rather, stepping into vaudeville was, in the closing years of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, a conventional tactic for prolonging the life of a stage play whose popularity was marginal or visibly waning. It was a favored way of earning a theatrical livelihood when the national economy, and with it, the legitimate stage, experienced fallow periods. Actors of stature—the entire Drew and Barrymore clan . . . moved their dramas onto variety circuits when business slackened, then returned to the theatre when conditions improved or new roles beckoned.

  Such appears to have been the case with Fairbanks. February 17, 1912, initiated what was billed as “Star Week at the Fifth Avenue.” Both Fairbanks and his Mississippi costar Thomas Wise premiered sketches at the theater, in what Variety called the “first instance of record where two ‘names’ have made their metropolitan debut simultaneously.”

  Fairbanks was in a twenty-five-minute sketch titled A Regular Businessman, playing “a young lawyer, with nothing but debts and a pretty stenographer.” The opening was a hit, and as Doug was taking his bows at the conclusion, the elder Wise joined him on the stage, patted him on the head, and informed the audience, “He’s the greatest kid in the world.” No one demurred, and plans were made for an extended run, to be followed by a tour. But it was not to be. The powers-that-be at Cohan & Harris huddled and decided to send Fairbanks west to Chicago, to star in the Chicago production of their Broadway hit Officer 666.

  Officer 666 was a step up from two-a-day back to the legitimate, but it did not represent a full return to his starring days on Broadway, suggesting again that his departure from Brady was made with more haste than consideration. True, the production was the inaugural show for George M. Cohan’s Grand Opera House in Chicago. But it was a second unit for a play already running on Broadway, and Fairbanks was second billed.

  He played a role very similar to that in A Gentleman of Leisure, a bored millionaire “who finds his money a nuisance and hungers for a thrill.” Nearly stealing the play from Fairbanks was John Miltern, playing the suave thief who has assumed the identity of Fairbanks’s character. Literally stealing the spotlight one matinee was Doug Jr., sitting in a box with his mother. (“I was about three then and a dumpling of a boy,” he recollected later.) He suddenly noticed his father in a moonlit love scene and shrilled, “Oh, Mummy! Look what Daddy’s doing with that lady!”*4 It took some time for both audience and players to recover.

  The play had a long, successful run in Chicago, and Fairbanks remained with it until August, when he assumed the part—second billed—in the New York production. Cohan announced at the same time that his star would stay with the production only until his next play, Hawthorne of the U.S.A., was ready for rehearsals.

  Despite its Cohan-esque title, Hawthorne of the U.S.A. was an adaptation of a British play. In it the hero, now a true-blooded American, travels to a European kingdom, where he falls in love with a beautiful woman—who, of course, turns out to be the princess. He saves the kingdom from a revolution, mostly by way of fisticuffs; restores a grateful king; and ultimately wins the hand of the fair maiden. It was in time to serve as a template for some of the Fairbanks films to come and to be virtually copied for one: His Majesty the American. Fairbanks himself referenced it often in the course of interviews—frequently misremembering Brady as the producer of the play but always recalling the climactic fight scene. “I made my first appearance by vaulting a wall, and at the end of the third act I sprang from a balcony to the throat of the villain,” he said later. “It went all right, but an actor can’t put up as good a fight every performance of a play as he can for the movies, where he can afford to take a chance on being laid up for a while.”

  Out-of-town tryouts began in late September in Washington, DC. By the time the production reached Philadelphia, trouble was becoming apparent. Preview audiences were not up to expectations, and the show was pulled for revisions by play doctor Winchell Smith. The company returned to Washington, where puzzled critics noted that the revised fourth act was “most-ill-advisedly written in American slang,” and was almost a transcript of the last act of another Cohan play, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford.

  But Fairbanks himself was garnering praise. The adjectives came flowing: buoyant, breezy, daring, agile, enthusiastic, intensely earnest, peppery, live, wide-awake—the play may have been lacking, but its star was not. Burns Mantle of the Chicago Daily Tribune even coined a phrase for the occasion. Doug, he wrote, was “one of the most skittenish and happy of our younger stars.”

  The opening night on Broadway on November 4, 1912, went well. The house was packed, and “a tumultuous greeting was accorded the young star.” Fairbanks had a large and loyal following, and they turned out in droves. They were not disappointed. “No matter who condemns the piece or praises its entertaining qualities,” wrote Variety’s critic, “one will admit that the power behind the throne is Fairbanks. He has the pep, ginger and dynamic force to back up a personality that hits any audience straight between the eyes.”

  But a star, skittenish or not, is not enough to keep an indifferent play running for long. The play was pulled from the Astor Theatre the first week of January and began a peripatetic existence for the next three months, moving from the Grand Opera House to the Montauk Theatre in Brooklyn and then, mid-January, to Cohan’s Grand Opera House in Chicago.

  To be fair to Cohan, he was aggressive in promoting the piece. Newspapers carried tales for the credulous of Fairbanks’s injuries during the fight scenes (“to date the young star has been badly wounded twice with a sword; dislocated his wrist once; thrown both shoulders out; is never without a broken finger and has just escaped water on the knee several times”). Cohan’s team mailed HAWTHORNE, U.S.A. postcards to theatergoers and pri
nted special foldout paper suitcases with photos advertising the play.

  But business was still shaky. A month into the Chicago run, Variety reported that the house was still top-heavy—selling cheap seats in the balcony but not the higher-priced ones on the main floor. Fairbanks reportedly started making bets with the house manager on the house take for the week. By the end of February, the actor playing the king left the cast abruptly, due to a quarrel with the star. A week later, Variety stated that Fairbanks would close his season in two weeks. “There is said to be a straining of the entente cordiale between star and management.”

  Strain or no, the company went on, playing short stays in St. Louis; Columbus, Ohio; and finally, in early April, Boston, where the play closed and was released for stock companies. To add insult to injury, George M. Cohan finally got the hero of his long-promised play out of the drawing room but gave himself, not Fairbanks, the role. Cohan’s Broadway Jones was a hit, running 176 performances on Broadway.

  Cohan was vague about a follow-up to Hawthorne. In late April there was a brief trial of a play titled Cooper Hoyt, Inc. in Atlantic City. It was a tale of a “popular chap who is not successful financially”—until his friends incorporate him. But by the time the reviews hit the paper, Fairbanks and family, including Ella, were already on the Olympic sailing for Europe. He announced various plans: He would play London vaudeville in A Regular Businessman. He would travel around the world.

  In the end, he simply haunted the theaters in Paris and London, trying to catch every show possible. When he returned in mid-July, plans were announced that he was to enter rehearsals for Cooper Hoyt, Inc. Nothing came of this. Two weeks later, Cohan announced that his star had been reassigned and was now to be in a piece titled Something for Nothing. Nothing was all that resulted.