The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  So, it appeared as if he would have to return to the variety stage. This was not likely to endear him to Cohan & Harris, who at last account were “unalterably opposed” to any of their stars appearing in vaudeville. But Fairbanks had not only a wife and child to consider but increasingly dependent in-laws. Since the failure of the soap company in the spring of 1908, Dan Sully had been reduced to renting out his estate in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, as a high-end boardinghouse. Fairbanks assembled a company and, with a production called Dollars and Sense, started the weary rounds of the New England variety circuit: Springfield, Massachusetts; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Boston. He was undoubtedly a headliner, and a matinee idol as well: in Boston the handsome star drew audiences that skewed heavily female, three women for every man. But it was a relief—a significant relief—when producer Joseph Brooks, in association with Klaw and Erlanger, tapped him for a revival of the famed play The Henrietta. Fairbanks was so eager to return to the legitimate that he began rehearsals while still under contract for his vaudeville engagements. The Henrietta company rehearsed in the mornings and early afternoons, with Doug “jumping back and forth” to make his vaudeville appearances.

  The Henrietta was a storied success from the moment of its premiere in Union Square in 1887. The tale was that of a father and son: the father, a crusty multimillionaire, and his son, Bertie (a.k.a. “the Lamb”), a tepid milquetoast. The father, played by William H. Crane, cuts the ineffectual Bertie off with a mere five hundred thousand and trusts his business affairs to an unscrupulous son-in-law. While the father is off on a yacht wooing a widow, the son-in-law engineers the old man’s ruination on the stock market—until bumbling Bertie wanders onto the trading floor and throws his half a million dollars into the fray to save the family fortune.

  Bertie had only ever been played by one man, Stuart Robson. After the long Broadway run, he purchased rights to the play and became as closely identified with the part as Maude Adams was with Peter Pan. When he died in 1903, so, it seemed, did the role. Accordingly, there was much curiosity (and preemptive knife sharpening) on the part of critics to see what Fairbanks would do with the part in the revival, now named The New Henrietta. After all, he had built his career and his reputation on, as one wrote, “his own very virile, positive personality.” How could anybody, but especially this handsome young live wire, step into the shoes of the late Mr. Robson? It “seemed almost a sacrilege.”

  In the end, there was no need for cutlery. Both in out-of-town tryouts and at the Broadway premiere at the Knickerbocker Theatre, Fairbanks garnered the best reviews of his theatrical career. He “surprised even his most intimate friends with the excellence of his performance.” It was “the best role the popular young actor has created.” Seeing a Crane-Fairbanks collaboration along the lines of the Wise-Fairbanks one during the spectacular Gentleman from Mississippi run, producer Brooks announced that Fairbanks and the elder veteran would partner on the stage. They would play The Merry Wives of Windsor, Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals, and Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. The partnership, he declared, would run for at least five years.

  Except, of course, for the fact that the play, despite rave reviews, was a financial disappointment. The New York engagement was scheduled as a limited run, and the play closed on Broadway on the last day of January 1914. It toured through the winter: Boston, Syracuse, Baltimore, Washington, DC. But by mid-March the theatrical pages were announcing that the play was being withdrawn, and Mr. Crane would be at leisure until next season. Mr. Fairbanks would return to vaudeville. There was no more discussion of a Crane-Fairbanks partnership.

  Fairbanks gritted his teeth and completed the contracted touring engagements through April and May, appearing in such venues as St. Louis and Detroit. The New Henrietta seems to have been more successful as the company moved to the center of the country, and Klaw and Erlanger decided to renew the tour in the fall. Fairbanks was not to join them. George M. Cohan might have nothing for him, but manager A. H. Woods did, and by mid-May 1914 Fairbanks announced yet another change in management. He would premiere He Comes Up Smiling in the fall season. The hero of the play is a voluntary hobo, cheerfully wandering the romantic roads until a mix-up with a suit of clothes and a swimming hole has him impersonating a reigning “Cotton King.” Fiction being fiction, he soon falls in with a traveling party consisting of the competing Cotton King and his beautiful daughter. The party whose suit he is wearing has evil designs on Daddy’s fortune, but all ends well with our hero cornering the cotton market and—surprise!—winning the girl.

  But before then, it was back to vaudeville. There would be no summering over the Atlantic; Europe was no place to be in 1914. At least he had the consolation of playing at the top: New York City’s Palace Theatre. Most vaudevillians spent their entire careers in hopes of playing the Palace, and Fairbanks opened his new sketch there in mid-May. It was titled All at Sea and was a curious mixture of A Regular Businessman and The Henrietta, set in the wireless room of a ship. The constrained setting and single act gave little room for Fairbanks’s “peppery maneuvers,” and within a month he was back to his Regular Businessman standby. June and August found him at theaters in such towns as Atlantic City and Brighton Beach.

  Rehearsals for He Comes Up Smiling started in late June. Out-of-town runs were prolonged by script doctoring, but it finally premiered on September 16 at Broadway’s Liberty Theatre to favorable reviews. The New York Times referred to the “whole-souled sunniness of a manner which is neither of town or country. Mr. Fairbanks brings an infectious affability to his new role, but he brings something more. He brings a great deal of spirit and a lively sense of comedy.” The only objection was to the final act. The original book had the hero retain his hobo ways. “But in the play the knight of the road has ‘made good’ by playing the cotton market and he comes up wealthy.” It was, in the view of the critics, “not true to the blithe spirit of the people and the story of the play.” True, no doubt. But to have the hero end up in a dinner jacket “with no end of money in his pocket and the girl of his heart in his arms” was truer to the mixed bourgeois/bohemian spirit of Fairbanks.

  Smiling, like Henrietta, was not the success that the insiders felt it should have been. It did better than most new plays on Broadway that season, but that was saying little. The European war, combined with an economic downturn and an autumn heat wave, resulted in an almost unbroken line of failures that season. Even if houses were full, the sales came through half-rate ticket agencies.

  By early November the play was pulled, and after a week’s run in Brooklyn, Woods decided that the play did not have the legs for a road tour. Back again—for the fourth time!—Fairbanks returned to vaudeville. It was the same old rounds with A Regular Businessman. The tour took him from Maryland to Pennsylvania to New York throughout November and December, and early in the latter month he shared the bill with Fanny Brice. No one seemed to mind seeing the same material; reviewers noted that Doug added some additional acrobatic antics and noted that he “can easily go over the same route a second time, through his very breezy playing.” Happily, this was a short interlude before his final Broadway production was to begin.

  Doug’s last play began its existence as The Spotlight Man, migrated to In the Limelight, and finally premiered on the last night of 1914 as The Show Shop. It was a backstage comedy, telling the tale of a young millionaire who is in love with an actress. The stage mother will not let them marry before her daughter has appeared on Broadway, so the hero conspires to front the worst possible play and, to better ensure its failure, is cast in the lead. Just as in The Producers, sixty years later, the flop is so terrible that it is a runaway hit.

  The Show Shop was itself a hit, but paradoxically this did not mean that it was a financial success. The Broadway that the play satirized was a Broadway that was vanishing. The world of the legitimate was being changed by two forces.

  The first was the aforementioned cut-rate ticket agencies, selling what were indelicatel
y termed “Those Moe Levy tickets.”*5 By the tenth week of the play, such cut-rate “People’s League Tickets” and “Special Play-goers’ Vouchers” were being offered for nine Broadway theaters from the basement of the Fitzgerald Building. By the end of April, the number of theaters was up to twenty. Fairbanks observed the phenomenon and didn’t like it. “We are doing that awful thing—” he groused in private correspondence. “Selling cut rate tickets which cause our house to sell out the last part of [the] week.” Ticket prices were as low as twenty-five cents.

  At the same time, one theater was enjoying the opposite experience. The Liberty Theatre (where he had starred in Smiling a few months prior) was attracting capacity audiences every night and matinee. Originally just the box seats were to be offered at the peak two-dollar rate, but demand was so strong that the greater part of the floor seats could also be offered at the full fare and be sold out every performance. Better yet, the management had little cost beyond the lease of the hall. There were no actors to pay, no sets to maintain, no costumes to rent.

  On Broadway, in a legitimate theater, these seats were being filled by a motion picture: D. W. Griffith’s epic The Birth of a Nation.

  Fairbanks was not blind to this—nor to its implications. In The Show Shop, a failed producer could proclaim, “I guess I’ll tackle the ten cent movies. If I can’t be the Erlanger of the drama, I’ll be the Woolworth.” But Griffith’s film, for all its considerable moral flaws, was a compelling argument that motion pictures could be art and could command full prices. Broadway, on the other hand, might produce art, but its potential for financial return did not have the scalability of motion pictures. The Birth was breaking records not just in one theater but in hundreds. On Broadway, returns were diminishing.

  Fairbanks would claim ever after that it was seeing The Birth that convinced him to try motion pictures. He would also paint an elaborate trail of coy reluctance to enter the world of the flickers. But the truth is that Douglas Fairbanks and the movies had been circling each other cautiously since 1912—and they were about to embrace.

  * * *

  *1. Fairbanks Jr.’s self-description.

  *2. The plot device of eager reporter and cynical editor would be lifted by Fairbanks nearly a decade later for Say! Young Fellow.

  *3. In the cast as one of the feuding clan members was a young actor roughly the same age as Fairbanks—Elmer Booth. He would appear with Fairbanks in future plays and vaudeville acts, but he is best remembered for his brief contribution to film. Although he was to die in an automobile accident in 1915, his immortality was assured by his performance as the Snapper Kid in D. W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley in 1912. In 1910, he was a second-string performer who, in between stage engagements, sought employ in the flickers. He must have felt a case of déjà vu that same year, when Griffith cast him as—little surprise—a member of a feuding clan in A Feud in the Kentucky Hills. It differed from The Cub in every other way. This being Griffith, the story was not a comedy. And the lead was a young woman, herself on the brink of fame and fortune: Mary Pickford.

  *4. It is possible that Fairbanks Jr. has melded two separate events together. The play description sounds more like Hawthorne of the U.S.A., which also played in Chicago when Junior was three.

  *5. After Moe Levy, whose advertisements for cheap suits were part of the New York landscape for decades.

  4

  Triangle (as in Company)

  * * *

  THE VERSION OF “HOW I Got into the Movies” that Fairbanks proffered for family—and, through them, to all subsequent historians—was simple. He was walking through Central Park one day in 1914, family in train. A motion picture cameraman just happened by and took some footage of Doug obligingly hopping over park benches. He, of course, forgot all about the incident until (continuing the tale of happy coincidences) Harry Aitken, producer for D. W. Griffith and president of Triangle Films, just happened to see the footage. He approached our hero. Would he care to star in motion pictures? (The myth conveniently ignores the fact that Triangle was yet to be formed, and thus Aitken was hardly recruiting Broadway stars at this juncture.)

  Would he? Well, perhaps. The money was good, true. But, oh—to enter the flickers! Every biography quotes his exchange with good friend and Algonquin proprietor Frank Case: “A short time later Fairbanks told me he had an offer of $2,000 a week to go to Hollywood but did not know whether to accept or not,” wrote Case. “Two thousand dollars was very much more than he could possibly hope for in the theater; moreover, the employment and salary were to be continuous, fifty-two weeks in the year, not for an indefinite season as in the theater. When I pointed out to him that $104,000 was a handsome amount of money, he said, ‘I know, but the movies!’”*1

  Of course, our hero relents, and the history of motion pictures is changed forever.

  An alternate version that Fairbanks offered during the height of his fame had him grasping the potential of the new medium immediately: “The night that I saw The Birth of a Nation I knew that I wanted to be in the pictures. I had much the same sort of vibration or thrill that I had when I saw the Grand Cañon for the first time. . . . Both left me wordless. Accordingly, when D. W. Griffith offered me a ten weeks’ contract I was quite willing to leave the stage for a while.”

  The truth manages to be more prosaic and more interesting at the same time—a neat trick. Fairbanks was not an unwilling recruit nor a sudden convert to motion pictures. He had been studying the industry and trying to break into it for a number of years. While his personal narrative always made everything he did seem effortless, in truth he engaged in as much advance preparation and study for entering the film industry as he did with his stunts.

  In late December 1912, while still appearing in Hawthorne of the U.S.A., Fairbanks made a late-night “sightseeing” visit to the studios of Carl Laemmle’s IMP (Independent Motion Picture) Company. “It has grown to a fad almost, for parties to watch the manufacturing of a movie,” reported Variety. Accompanying the article describing the visit is a photograph of Fairbanks, dapper and complacent in a white tie, sitting, arms folded, in the front row. He is surrounded by the IMP stock company and their director, Herbert Brenon (later famous for directing such films as Peter Pan and Beau Geste). Brenon later recalled, “I went along [directing] as usual and he watched and he asked me if I was ‘of the theatre.’ I told him I was. He asked many questions and was fascinated by what he saw.”

  His interest continued into the summer of 1913, when he encountered Brenon on the Olympic. “We had many chats,” Brenon said. “And he was then fully determined to take a ‘fling.’”

  By the fall of 1913, he had progressed to filming a screen test, directed by J. Searle Dawley, who was at the time directing Mary Pickford in Caprice. Using one of the film’s sets and a script devised by Dawley, Fairbanks was filmed at a game of cards with two other men. Doug entered the room, leaped over the back of an empty chair, and started dealing. Dawley’s widow, Grace, recalled that Mary Pickford watched the test being filmed. This is possible, but if so, the lady in question had no recall of the event. Adolph Zukor offered Fairbanks a contract on the basis of this test. “I know nothing about business,” Fairbanks was said to have replied. “You’d better discuss it with my wife. She manages all my business affairs.” This was true. Beth, both bossy and intelligent, was handling her husband’s career and finances. From the moment she stormed William Brady’s office in 1907, she had been decidedly in charge—a sore point with mother-in-law Ella. Although Zukor’s offer was said to be tempting, it was not tempting enough for Mrs. Fairbanks, who decided that her husband should continue on the stage.

  Still, Fairbanks remained fascinated. “My many questions must have bored everyone at the studio, but they all humored me,” he recalled. “When they photographed what is technically known as a ‘test’ and I first saw it projected, I pinched myself to see if I were awake. The idea of seeing myself on the screen seemed uncanny. Of course I had seen many Motion Pi
ctures previous to this test; but it was the idea of seeing myself walk around, fumble my coat nervously, and try to grin—with a number of people looking on.”

  His first public film appearance was in early November 1913, during the run of The New Henrietta. He and the other lead Henrietta cast members appeared in a Kinemacolor film depicting the cast “in their social hours.” While the prospect of seeing a thirty-year-old Douglas Fairbanks in color is tantalizing, the film is currently considered lost. Kinemacolor did not have wide distribution, and it is unlikely that many saw the film, even in 1913.

  By the fall of 1914, with He Comes Up Smiling playing to dwindling audiences, he tried again. Victor Eubanks of Essanay Studios approached Fairbanks. “He agreed to come with Essanay on any sort of a contract I agreed to make,” Eubanks wrote. “I wired [company head] Spoor at Chicago and received the following reply: ‘Don’t want Fairbanks now. Can you find a good scenario writer?’ Imagine my embarrassment when I had to tell Fairbanks the fatal news.”

  Undaunted, Fairbanks continued putting out feelers. His agent contacted film company Bosworth Inc., to no avail. Jesse Lasky and Sam Goldwyn, of Famous Players, contemplated signing him for a film version of A Gentleman of Leisure. Nothing came of this, but by November he appeared in a short produced by the Mutual Film Corporation: chapter 47 of a weekly series titled Our Mutual Girl. His appearance in this film, Our Mutual Girl Sees the Yale-Princeton Game, amounted to little more than a celebrity cameo.*2 The heroine is driven to the game by Fairbanks “in his racing runabout.” He has a matinee, however, and leaves her to fend for herself for the rest of the short film.