The First King of Hollywood

by Tracey Goessel

  Still, by early 1915 it was clear that he was going to be snapped up by someone. Stars from “the legitimate” were being signed by film companies throughout the spring. It was a matter of matching the man to the company; through luck or planning, Fairbanks started at the top. He signed a contract with Harry Aitken.

  Wisconsin-born Harry Aitken was thirty-seven years old in the summer of 1915 and had been in the film business for ten years. He was the owner of thirty-five film exchanges (entities that would purchase short films from producers and rent them to theaters) and had, in the words of historian Richard Schickel, “a quick mind and a ready tongue.” What he lacked, in Schickel’s view, was patience. “He loved new beginnings but was bored by the day-to-day business of managing his creations.” He had been, until May, president of the Mutual Film Corporation. His most famous accomplishment to date: wooing D. W. Griffith away from Biograph and helping fund The Birth of a Nation. This was done without the consent of Mutual’s board of directors, on whose behalf he had pledged $40,000—forcing him to take out loans against his Mutual stock and provide the money himself. The fortune this made him turned out to be ephemeral. He was constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul. “[His] financial affairs were sufficiently complicated to baffle a team of certified public accountants,” Triangle historian Kalton Lahue recounted. “He owned many pieces of various organizations on paper, but then again, he really didn’t—one had been mortgaged to buy another which in turn was used as collateral for a third and so on.”

  But this was not known at the time. What was known was that in departing from Mutual, Aitken had signed the production companies of D. W. Griffith, Mack Sennett, and Thomas H. Ince to form the three points of a production and distribution entity to be called the Triangle Film Corporation. Sennett had his collection of slapstick comedians, Thomas Ince had cowboy star William S. Hart, and Griffith had a homegrown stock company populated with such luminaries as Mae Marsh, Bobby Harron, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, and Owen Moore—husband of Mary Pickford. But for Griffith’s Fine Arts unit, Harry Aitken wanted only the best. He wanted Broadway stars. Until this point, only those actors who could not make it in “the legitimate” were reduced to appearing in motion pictures; only for the past few years had cast member names even been listed on the films or in the advertising. Actors had been ashamed to be known as “movies” (the term applied to the performers before ultimately settling on the films themselves). But stars emerged from anonymity, led primarily by Mary Pickford and, within the past year, by a young British comedian by the name of Charles Chaplin. To be a star in moving pictures was no longer a shameful thing but was, in fact, quite lucrative. Mary Pickford was paid $2,000 a week, with a $10,000 bonus for each film completed. Chaplin made $1,250 a week at Essanay and by the end of the year was to sign a contract with Mutual for almost ten times that amount. Such salaries tempted even the haughtiest Broadway talent to take a flier in the flickers, and Aitken in short order had signed DeWolf Hopper, Raymond Hitchcock, Eddie Foy, Billie Burke, Weber and Fields, and Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Thus, while the Triangle Film Corporation would ultimately fail (in large part because of the desertion by Griffith and Fairbanks in the following year), it stood, in 1915, as a credible threat to such companies as Paramount and Universal. It had the top directors in the industry and was now recruiting the top stars of stage.

  The terms Fairbanks (or, more likely, his wife) negotiated were excellent: $2,000 a week for ten weeks and first-class transportation to and from the West Coast for not only him and his family but also his domestic staff. The return trip was to be via San Francisco (so they could visit the Panama-Pacific International Exposition); work-related travel expenses were to be covered; and scripts were to be in keeping with Fairbanks’s “talents and professional standing.” Most important, direction of his films was to be supervised by D. W. Griffith.

  He could not have been launched on better terms. It could be truthfully said that he started at the top and went up from there. Still, he hedged his bets. Journalist Gilbert Seldes encountered him that spring, walking down Broadway. Yes, Doug acknowledged, he was going to Hollywood. But he didn’t want it to get around. “I don’t want my reputation spoiled,” he said. “I want to come back next year.” Given how long and carefully he tried to get into the moving picture industry, one cannot but think that this was a case of a man who doth protest too much.

  Aitken, more than Griffith, was an astute judge of male star quality. Alistair Cooke famously quotes him as saying, “We picked Douglas Fairbanks as a likely film star not on account of his stunts, as the majority think, but because of the splendid humanness that fairly oozed out of him.” It was a pick both shrewd and fortunate, as Aitken was staking the Fine Arts portion of the Triangle Film Corporation squarely on Fairbanks’s broad shoulders. Cooke and many subsequent biographers have fostered the argument that Aitken signed so many major Broadway stars that Fairbanks was, in effect, an also-signed. The fable continues with the claim that The Lamb, his first feature, was considered second-rate stuff by the studio but went to the theaters because there was no other film yet available from the Fine Arts division. At its premiere, the story continues, it was an unexpected hit.

  This is as much a Fairbanks fable as the disastrous Duluth Hamlet or the break-in to Frederick Warde’s dressing room. Aitken had several Fine Arts features in the can before Fairbanks completed his first film, including The Martyrs of the Alamo, a film frequently misattributed to Doug but which had finished production before his arrival in Los Angeles. The reality is that Fairbanks was Triangle’s highest-paid performer and Aitken was banking Triangle’s fortunes on the strength of The Lamb and its young, muscular star.*3

  By the summer of 1915 Douglas Fairbanks bore little relation to the thin, wiry nineteen-year-old who had stormed New York thirteen years before. He was five feet nine inches (give or take), broad of shoulders, and slim of waist.†*4His torso resembled a pyramid balancing on its point: the ideal build for a gymnast, or an acrobat—strong with a low center of gravity. His hair was brown, his eyes a light hazel. His gaze was sharp and his smile dazzling. His gait was so unusual—a widespread, almost straddling walk, with arms swinging and palms pointing to the rear, chest concave, and chin extended to meet the world—that young men were imitating it before it was ever recorded on film.‡*5He exuded strength, charm, youth, confidence, and—here he was differentiated from the normal run of leading men—a loopy sense of humor.

  He arrived in Hollywood the last week of July 1915 replete with enough extra luggage to incur an additional $52.44 in baggage fees. D. W. Griffith was not there to meet him. He too had a hankering to visit the Exposition in San Francisco and, having finished principal filming on The Mother and the Law,*6 elected this week to do so. This would characterize the relationship between “the Master,” as his acolytes called him, and the charismatic stage star for the duration of the Triangle contract—and perhaps beyond.

  Perhaps it is understandable. Griffith, a failed stage actor, had been instrumental in the explosive growth, both financially and artistically, of the new medium of films and had done so with a stock company of fellow stage refugees. Having created an original and powerful art form, and having created stars—film stars—out of the very people who were rejected by “the legitimate,” he was now being told by Harry Aitken that the secret to Triangle’s success would be through the costly recruitment of stars from the Broadway stage. “It is an interesting question whether ‘legitimate’ stars or the so-called ‘stock stars’ of film organizations will prove the more serviceable in making the highest quality of pictures,” Griffith said at this time. It was clear where he thought the answer would lie. The stock star “has the advantage of having been trained in all the niceties of the new art. Generally he has years of experience in picture making to his credit. He has nothing to unlearn. . . . It would seem that artists like Mae Marsh, Lillian and Dorothy Gish and Robert Harron are on a par with the best sent us from the theatrical world.” In the short te
rm, Griffith was proven right. His band of youngsters had, under his progressive tutelage, developed a naturalistic style of acting that was ideally suited for the intimacies of the screen. The stage giants, of course, arrived on the scene and, unschooled in this new universe, continued for the most part to play to the rafters. To be fair, Griffith’s actors did the same in 1908, and he and they learned together. But now it was 1915, and he was at the peak of his powers. His treatment of these theatrical “greats” over the next year would reflect this ambivalence, and Fairbanks was no exception.

  Doug seemed to take no notice, or at least no offense. He stayed at the Alexandria Hotel until he could lease a two-story California-Japanese bungalow on North Highland Avenue, and he settled into the new town. Hollywood in 1915 was a new town indeed, or at least a town in the midst of transition. A mere five years before, it had been a sleepy village of retirees and orchards, acres of fruit trees cross-hatched by dirt roads, interrupted by the occasional cottage. D. W. Griffith had come out to Los Angeles for winter shooting beginning in 1910, and the Hollywood hills and the surrounding valleys made for scenic backdrops for such one-reel films as Ramona, with Mary Pickford.

  Griffith was not alone. Several film companies discovered the virtues of Southern California at that time, not only for the climate and the near-continuous string of sunny days but also for the distance from the Motion Picture Patents Trust and its camera-wrecking crews. The following year, Hollywood saw its first year-round studio, when the owners of the Blondeau Roadhouse, suffering from a recent ordinance that made Hollywood a dry town, leased their Sunset Boulevard building to the Centaur Film Company. The Nestor Studios, as it was named, was soon joined by a host of others: Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops began their antics in nearby Edendale, Thomas Ince’s production unit was based in Culver City, and Universal opened a studio in the valley. Griffith, upon leaving Biograph in 1913, set up production at 4500 Sunset Boulevard, where Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards meet.

  It was the work of these pioneers in the intervening years that resulted in the boom that was turning Hollywood into Hollywood. The influx of the production companies and the creation out of whole cloth of an entirely new industry resulted in the growth of a supporting social infrastructure. The Hollywood Hotel, on Hollywood Boulevard between Highland and Orchard Avenues, frequently housed peripatetic actors until they rented or—if truly successful—built homes. The Alexandria housed no less than D. W. Griffith, who preferred its food to any other in town. Cafe Nat Goodwin dangled over the Pacific Ocean on a wooden pier in Santa Monica, competing with places like the Sunset Inn and Baron Long’s at the Vernon Country Club for the likes of Wallace Reid, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, and Charlie Chaplin to fill their tables. Bungalows, such as that leased by Fairbanks, no longer dotted the landscape but started to fill up blocks. All those property men and carpenters and cameramen had to live somewhere, and they found that Hollywood fit the bill. Growth was rampant.

  Take Griffith’s Fine Arts studio, where the phenomenal success of The Birth of a Nation resulted in an influx of cash. A new open-air stage, 190 by 70 feet, had been constructed on the lot. Cotton cheesecloth was hung overhead to diffuse the sunlight and soften the shadows on actors’ faces. Men who served as assistant directors under Griffith were now directing features on their own under his supervision. The stage was crowded with various sets, each with its own director, assistant directors, cast, and cameraman, all filming simultaneously—the competing sounds of production (and construction) serving as no problem in the world of silent movies. Fairbanks loved it. “Hollywood is a world being made,” he said later. “Topsy-turvy. Bums, college athletes, prize-fighters, professors; all out there; all tossed together as if by an eruption, by a volcano.”

  The year and a half that Douglas Fairbanks was to spend at the Fine Arts studio would be pivotal. He entered this world with no more knowledge of motion picture production than the experience described above, but in less than eighteen months he would master his medium. He starred in thirteen films, shooting on both coasts. He established a template for his characters and a successful formula for his stories; he learned the elements of production and identified individuals who could optimally write, direct, and film him to full advantage. He determined what genres were to be avoided. He initiated business relationships that would permit him to obtain financing for his own production company and engage in a profitable distribution arrangement. He also found his best friend in Charlie Chaplin, and met the woman who would become the love of his life, Mary Pickford.

  A busy time, indeed, and it started with The Lamb, which began production immediately upon his arrival. Billy Bitzer, Griffith’s cameraman, claimed in later years that the film’s crew resented the intruders from the Broadway stage and therefore plastered Fairbanks with enough white paste makeup to make him look like a corpse. Most historians have since discredited this story, with good reason. Bitzer, like many a film veteran, was never afraid to let the truth get in the way of a good yarn.*7 Also, there is no difference in Fairbanks’s face makeup in any of the early Triangle features. He looks unnaturally pallid in all of them, but so did every other leading man of the time.†*8The gradual move to more natural coloring, followed by the other extreme, the tanning craze, was a direct result of the choices that Fairbanks was to make over the course of his film career. In time, leading men would look tanned and hearty, but in 1915, at the tail end of the era when only the proletariat were brown, silent film players were lily white, with black kohl lining their eyes.

  In fact, Fairbanks’s arrival was heralded by the crew with a minor flurry of excitement. “I swear that during my first week here I signed over a hundred photographs,” he recalled in early 1916. “Every one in the place from the office boy’s assistant to the chief mixer of scenery paint has given me the old, old story of me being their favorite actor and all that tommyrot, and ended it up with the old plea for a picture—signed. . . . I sprained my right hand in the first scene of the ‘Lamb’ and it’ll never get well if I don’t steer clear of the pen and ink.”

  The Lamb was originally conceived as a two-reel film titled Blood Will Tell. Playing off Fairbanks’s acclaimed performance as Bertie the Lamb in The New Henrietta, The Lamb recast its lead as a milquetoast named Gerald. The plot bore no relation to the original (nor was it supposed to, no rights having been paid for the stage play). Still, the production company worked to associate the piece with the play, including publicizing photographs of Fairbanks and director W. Christy Cabanne on the Fine Arts lot entertaining its author, Winchell Smith. Anita Loos collected twenty-five dollars for writing the intertitles and thus provided the irreverent tone that was to characterize Fairbanks’s films for the next five years. Cabanne, one of Griffith’s serviceable assistant directors, was assigned to direct.*9 William Fildew was the cameraman. Filming began in the studio, with a sequence in which Fairbanks’s character, having shamed himself before the heroine by an act of cowardice, now determines to learn boxing and karate. The last two weeks of production were spent on location work in the Mojave Desert. Cast and crew stayed at the Porter Hotel in San Fernando. Perhaps here is where Bitzer’s recollections have some basis in fact. The cowboys hired for the cavalry parts were prepared to treat the Broadway actor with derision. But they quickly learned that Fairbanks was no tenderfoot. His skills as a horseman had been honed not only by his years in Colorado but also by many a bout of polo with the Rhode Island set—and “he rode and shot with the best of them.” The nights were reportedly filled with moonlight coyote hunts and tall tales around the campfire. Fairbanks returned to the studio, by one contemporary account, “brown as an Indian, lively as a grasshopper and excited as a small boy can be.” He was delighted to have met authentic cowboys. “Probably there never will again be such a bunch of real, veteran punchers together,” he enthused. “It was a taste of the life that every kid dreams about and that people say has passed and wasn’t true anyway. It is true and I’ve seen it.”

  The La
mb was one of three Triangle films to premiere at the Knickerbocker Theatre in New York City in late September 1915. The program contained one film from each of the production units of Triangle. With it came Harry Aitken’s gamble on the future of motion pictures. Certainly he and Griffith had proven earlier in the year that a grand epic of the scale of The Birth of a Nation could command two-dollar seats at a major theater. But epics like The Birth could not be produced weekly. Could a weekly program of more modest films do the same? “No event of the season has been so fraught with interest from the exhibitor as the test of ‘two dollar pictures’ on the New York public,” opined the editorial staff at the Motion Picture News. And not just New York: Aitken had extended his gamble to theaters such as the Studebaker in Chicago and the Chestnut Street Opera House in Philadelphia. The program consisted of Dustin Farnum in The Iron Strain, Raymond Hitchcock in My Valet, and Douglas Fairbanks in The Lamb, each with an orchestral score composed by William Furst. Usherettes had pantalets with triangle-shaped lace visible beneath their skirts, coordinating with the triangular hats tipped across their brows. The audience was padded with a proper quota of names: William Randolph Hearst, James Montgomery Flagg, and Ignace Paderewski were among the throng.

  And the verdict? Apparently, it was Fairbanks by a blowout. The other films were proclaimed perfectly satisfactory, but critics fell over themselves in praise of The Lamb. It was no Birth, acknowledged Photoplay; nothing could be. Still, it was “a rollicking, typically American melodrama, presenting Douglas Fairbanks, one of America’s best known, best liked and most continually agreeable stage personalities.” The Motion Picture News wrote: “The Lamb . . . is by far the high spot of the program. . . . An excellent actor on the spoken stage, transplanted to the screen [Fairbanks] becomes a delight to the eye.”