In retrospect, it is hard to see how this modest effort produced such an enthusiastic response. But here the advantage of hindsight handicaps us. Knowing what Fairbanks was to produce so soon after The Lamb makes his first feature a pale shadow of what is to come. But even that shadow was, to the contemporary eye, new and arresting. The audience, expecting to see a Griffith drama, separate and distinct from the Sennett Keystone on the bill, instead got this strange new hybrid of comedy-drama, with a hero who invited our laughter as much as our awe. There is, of course, the pleasure of seeing the stage performance of Fairbanks as Bertie being replicated as he enacts the part of Gerald. The series of hesitations and fumbles and the constant apologetic little cough are understated—even delightful—and quite unlike the usual gesticulations of the stage or even the screen of the time. It is to a typical performance as a miniature is to a mural.
But we don’t see the timid Gerald for long. Following an act of cowardice (he hesitates, and his rival beats him to the punch and rescues a drowning woman),*10 we get the reformed Gerald—a different creature altogether. Taking boxing and jujitsu lessons, he is enchanted to discover that he has earned a black eye. He shows it in triumph to his mother, his butler, and anyone else who will look at it. In pursuing his sweetheart west (another leitmotif that would be replicated in these films—the physical journey from east to west paralleling the spiritual journey from fop to hero), he is lured away from his train by Indians selling trinkets. No respectable hero in 1915 would be caught buying a trinket. But Fairbanks’s hero is, evidently, an exception. He purchases a cheap necklace, and when later in the story he is captured by banditos, it is torn from his neck by the chief kidnapper. This will not do. Pettishly, Doug steals it back. Granted, all of these acts may have been scripted, not improvised by the star. Still, a strong argument can be made for Fairbanks’s contribution to the scenes. This sort of tomfoolery was only to increase as Doug’s control over his pictures grew. And in instances where the shooting scenarios survive, they document that such moments were often unscripted. His son told film historian Kevin Brownlow that “The Lamb was his first picture, and in this he was unsure of himself. But even then there was this dominating leadership complex.” This resulted in the leading man evincing behavior unlike that of a standard hero—particularly a Griffith hero.†*11
But hero he was in the last reel of the film. His heroics were minor by the standards that he himself was to establish in the next few months. But the reviewer for the Motion Picture News waxed rhapsodic: “One incident which is ‘sure fire’ is a jump by Fairbanks from a thatched roof, onto the shoulders of a Yaqui pursuer, and the disarming of the belligerent.”
It was not a particularly high jump. And he disarmed but a single Indian in the course of it. But with that single leap, the audiences and critics sensed that there was something different about this performer. “Transplanted to the screen he becomes a delight to the eye,” continued the reviewer. Others agreed. “Columns of praise would not do justice to The Lamb,” wrote Variety. It is no wonder the Triangle people signed up Fairbanks for a period of three years at any salary within reason. They would even have been justified in stretching a point to secure Douglas. He ‘registers’ on the screen as well as any regular film actor that has ever appeared in pictures and more strongly than most of them.”
This issue of “registering” on film is not a minor one. Those traits that would serve a performer across the arc lights of a stage were not, as Aitken was to learn, the same as those that worked on the screen. Mary Pickford is a case in point. As early as her Biograph films for D. W. Griffith in 1909, she demonstrates this quality. She may be part of a crowd; she may be standing alone. It matters little. The eye is drawn to her. In fact, one finds oneself looking at no one else. It is inexplicable: there is something about her that the camera loves.
So it was with Fairbanks. Something about his cheerful face, his engaging personality, his exuberant willingness to look foolish one moment and throw his body off a roof the next, made all the other pasty-faced leading men up to that time seem like anemic fops.
Aitken, if not Griffith, recognized this. He signed Fairbanks to a three-year contract before The Lamb even opened, with salary increases of $500 per week every six months for the duration of the term. Fairbanks missed the premiere, not only being in the midst of moving his family to a larger rental on La Brea Avenue but also having begun production on his second feature in the third week of August.
Double Trouble, rarely seen today, stands as a curiosity. Because Fairbanks essentially found his formula by his third film (His Picture in the Papers), Double Trouble provides a chance to see Fairbanks enacting the part of a character other than what would become his norm—two separate characters, in fact. The story was of the knocked-on-the-head dual-personality variety, an aging trope even then. Still, it affords the fascinating opportunity to see Fairbanks play a villain, albeit a comic villain. Here he channels his recently deceased friend Elmer Booth.*12 He is all swagger and proto-Cagney, tipping his hat forward and elbowing his compatriots in the ribs. As his opposite, Florian, Doug is in full flutter: wrists extended, pinky-biting, Sunday school–teaching, woman-fearing prissiness.†*13Neither performance is subtle (Fairbanks would be far more understated—and thus more comic—suggesting unmanliness as Don Diego in The Mark of Zorro), but each is intriguing. We will never see them again. Once Double Trouble is in the can, we shall see Fairbanks stray from what will become his sure-fire character only once more, in The Half Breed.
The film was quickly made. Fairbanks’s time on the production amounted to twenty-two days. Cabanne, again directing, took over the small town of Santa Ana, incorporating the fire and police departments, as well as the municipal band and polling booths for the election parade sequences. Anita Loos again collected twenty-five dollars for writing the titles. Better yet, when by mid-October Fairbanks was preparing to go east to film his third feature, the clever twenty-two-year-old Loos was not merely punching up the titles. She had written the entire story.
His Picture in the Papers was a gem of a little film, one that got everything right and would serve as a model for Fairbanks comedies for the next five years. It not only had Anita Loos’s witty script, which poked fun at vegetarians and commercial food manufacturers but also had her future husband, John Emerson, as director and—of all people—Erich von Stroheim as both art director and featured performer. The cast and crew arrived at Triangle’s studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in early October, filming exteriors ranging from Riverside Drive to Atlantic City.*14 A boxing match was filmed at the Sharkey Athletic Club, and Broadway’s leading performers cheerfully went “slumming it” as extras in support of their friend. Famed boxer Terry McGovern did a cameo as a referee. Cartoons of Fairbanks in boxing shorts and gloves were featured in the New York papers.
Doug starts the story as a lovable goof, the sort of man who hides his martini mixings in his desk drawer and his olives in the earpiece of his telephone. His father (“a self-made man who adores his maker”) is the manufacturer of twenty-seven varieties of vegetarian food products. Fairbanks, as Pete Prindle, is a meat eater. Loos retained the film’s original script until her death, a fine documentation of both her sparkling wit and Fairbanks’s improvisational skills. In one sequence, as originally scripted, the heroine was to spot Fairbanks from her window, then rush outside to hand him an umbrella. Doug, who never saw a house without giving thought to how to climb it, evidently felt the sequence could be more interesting. He clambered up the side of the building for the cameras in a single, uncut shot, meeting the young woman at her second-story window and retrieving the umbrella there. It was not simply stunts that he improvised. After intentionally crashing his recently acquired junker of a car (“Take me home for $83.99!”), Fairbanks not only stages himself in the scene per the screenplay’s instructions but also places the sign prominently on his chest—another bit not included in the script. Thanks to his contributions, the film was full of stunts, creati
ng a hero who was undeniably a screwball and yet capable of performing remarkable feats of prowess at the same time. Audiences and critics were dazzled. “His personality is so all-pervading,” wrote one, “that he is like the sun when it rises in a sky of morning stars, the light by which some of them glow, the light which causes them all to fade. His is apparently in a class all by himself, at once an athlete of resource and daring, and a subtle interpreter of the amusing side of human nature.” Critics at the Knickerbocker premiere noted that the crowd applauded with his first appearance on the screen.
Of equal note is what was in the script that Fairbanks, his power growing, left out. Anita Loos was a brilliant, funny, accomplished woman who would go on to do great things, but she was also a creature of her time, complete with its ugly biases. The script has such unsavory references as “a coon pushing a wheelchair” and even goes so far as to have an intertitle state “I am Peter Prindle. I was raised on Prindle’s Products and I have just licked five coons.” Fairbanks, for this film and many films going forward, eliminated all such references. This is not to say that there were no occasional “Yassuh” Stepin Fetchit characters in his movies (his last film for Triangle, The Americano, has a particularly painful example), but all references to “niggers” and “coons” that were in his scripts were removed and the characters replaced by whites or simply played by African Americans with no particular comment on their race.*15 It is to Fairbanks’s credit that he used his influence in this manner. He made no particular point of his liberalism; in fact, he was of the era before actors and politics mixed. But he was of a uniformly democratic bent, as affectionate and welcoming to a table of cow herders one night as he was slavishly devoted to a household of royalty the next. “He had a varied assortment of friends, ranging from cowboys to kings, and found interesting qualities in them all,” wrote Charlie Chaplin fifty years later. He respected accomplishment and would back a black extra on The Thief of Bagdad to become a prize fighter with no more thought to his race than that of the Native American to whom he lent money or the white family of child actors at Triangle whom he helped support during the Depression years.
His Picture in the Papers was completed before autumn turned to winter, and when Doug and Beth found themselves with a free weekend in November 1915, they decided to accept an invitation for a weekend house party in Tarrytown, New York, at the estate of friend and fellow theater star Elsie Janis. Janis was a sparkplug of a woman, the sort of friend who would tie her skirt in a knot and match Fairbanks in hand-walking in the lobby of the Algonquin.
En route, the Fairbankses were passed by a staid black limousine. Inside, in strained silence, sat Owen Moore and his wife, Mary Pickford, headed to the same party. Pickford recalls seeing the “low-slung foreign car with a half top” and the couple within, “a leopard rug over their laps.” Her first memory was of disapproval. The car was showy. The lap robe was flamboyant. When Mary and Owen’s chauffeur lost his way, their car stopped at a crossroads and Owen got out to look at the signs. The roadster pulled up and “a very agile young man jumped down and joined Owen,” Pickford wrote. “I saw them beam in recognition and shake hands.” Owen brought Fairbanks over and made the introductions. That crossroad, she was to say later, “was also a crossroad of my life.”
Once at the estate Mary found herself settled in a corner with a magazine, her eyes gazing periodically at “a laughing huddle in the center of the large reception room . . . I found myself disapproving heartily of the exuberant Mr. Fairbanks.”
Janis recalled events a little differently. “Miss Pickford thinks Mr. Fairbanks will do wonderful things in films,” she wrote later, using the present tense. “Mr. Moore echoes, ‘Wonderful.’ Mrs. Fairbanks thinks everything Mr. Fairbanks does is wonderful.” The hostess, on the other hand, nursing what she termed a “pash” for Doug “that dates back to Fantana,” was scheming how to get alone with him. Finally, she suggested a walk, expecting only Fairbanks would be willing to go out in the dismal weather. She was wrong. Doug and Owen were both game to go. Unwilling to leave their spouses in the clutches of the estimable Miss Janis, Beth and Mary followed suit. Doug elected a route to discourage any woman in fashionable shoes, and Mary, in a black velvet hobble skirt and kid leather Russian boots, qualified. Doug cast a glance at both Elsie’s and Mary’s footwear. “Humpf!” he said. “Women are just about as companionable as a pipe without any tobacco in it!” (“Of course,” Mary recalled, “this rather piqued us, so without even glancing down at our shoes, which were destined to be ruined, we assured him in one breath we were quite equal to any athletic feat he would propose.”) The puckish Doug not only proposed but “he disposed of us with equal alacrity, for he dared us until we had walked through muddy pastures, passed the brambles and had climbed over barb-wire fences.” Beth dropped out when the group reached a crossing of the Pocantico River that required crossing stepping-stones and a log. It was too cold; she for one would return to the house. Mary persisted. As she placed her first foot on the log, Elsie taunted her: “You’ll ruin those beautiful new shoes of yours!”
“What’s a pair of shoes to losing a husband?” Mary retorted, and took a few cautious steps. But midstream, she froze. Her panic was rising when she saw Douglas Fairbanks on the log, smiling at her. “Do you mind?” he asked succinctly. No, it seemed. The lady didn’t mind a bit.
And in that moment, Douglas Fairbanks quite literally swept Mary Pickford off her feet.
* * *
*1. Case had it wrong. Fairbanks’s original contract was for ten weeks.
*2. Of note is the fact that D. W. Griffith, in his early days after departing Biograph for Harry Aitken and the Mutual Film Corporation, directed some of these films. It is unlikely that he directed this episode, however.
*3. Star director D. W. Griffith, by comparison, was collecting $400 a week at this point, although he had a profit-sharing clause.
*4. † His height is based on what he declared on his passport. Comparisons to Chaplin suggest that he was an inch or more shorter.
*5. ‡ One 1914 story by author Edna Ferber has the heroine’s likable younger brother tell his mother: “They call it the juvenile jump, and all our best leading men have it. I trailed Douglas Fairbanks for days before I really got it.”
*6. This film would ultimately grow like Topsy with the addition of three additional stories and become Intolerance.
*7. He famously claimed, for example, that The Musketeers of Pig Alley was shot in the tenements of New York City, confounding film historians for years until Russell Merritt proved in 2002 that it was staged on the then-bucolic streets of Fort Lee, New Jersey.
*8. † Film historian Kevin Brownlow explains that this white paste makeup was necessary because of the qualities of orthochromatic film. “If you wore none, orthochromatic film, over-reacting to red, made you look ‘colored.’”
*9. Joseph Henabery, an actor on the Fine Arts lot at this time, and later a director himself, characterized Cabanne years later as “a good fast director; the type that would be in demand by anyone that had to make ’em quick and cheap.”
*10. Paradoxically, this is the most outrageously overacted portion of the film. Fairbanks mugs tremendously, throws his arms in the air, and flings himself upon the sand after his fiancée accuses him of cowardice.
*11. † No less an authority than Russell Merritt wrote in 2004 several arguments in favor of The Lamb having been actually supervised by Griffith, before concluding: “But that was before I actually saw the film. Now I’ve looked at it and I’m ready to recant.”
*12. Booth died in an automobile accident in Los Angeles weeks before Fairbanks’s arrival.
*13. † Although women make him sneeze involuntarily, the character is not gay, as demonstrated in a scene where a homosexual bellhop makes a proposition and is rewarded by a kick in the seat of the pants, a surprisingly candid scene for 1915.
*14. Triangle used both the Willat-Triangle studio in Fort Lee and another facility in Riverdale. I
t is unclear which studio Fairbanks used at any particular time, but historian Richard Koszarski is confident that portions of His Picture in the Papers were shot at Fort Lee.
*15. Down to Earth and an early treatment for the sound version of Reaching for the Moon are the most painful examples of utterly casual racism in early film scripts.
5
Mary and Charlie
* * *
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO state how extraordinary Mary Pickford was—both as a person and as a phenomenon. She was, in the words of one scholar, “the focal point of an entire industry.” It was more than that. For a decade and more in the nascent commerce of cinema, she was the center point of the world’s affection.
She was born Gladys Marie Smith in Toronto in 1892 to an alcoholic father and a fiercely loving mother. Her father deserted the family when Gladys was three and died a few years later of a blow to the head. There were three children now: Gladys, Lottie, and the youngest, Jack, and all ended up in touring theater companies to keep the wolf from the door. Little Gladys was the most talented of the brood, and, as they endured frequent separations and the grim hardships of the road, she became, in a sense, the father of the family as well.
At fifteen, her talent and tenacity got her an audition with David Belasco, the great Broadway impresario. He renamed her Mary Pickford and gave her a supporting role in The Warrens of Virginia. While newlywed Douglas Fairbanks was playing in The Man of the Hour and All for a Girl, teenage Mary Pickford was playing Betty Warren both on Broadway and on tour. She made twenty-five dollars a week and lived on five, using the rest to support her mother and siblings. But by the time the company returned to New York City and Doug was in his long, triumphant run of A Gentleman from Mississippi, seventeen-year-old Mary Pickford was unemployed and contemplating how to feed the family. Desperation drove her to motion pictures.
The First King of Hollywood Page 11