Another difference was to be found in the level of marketing support provided by Zukor’s Artcraft Pictures Corporation. Take the press book. Triangle had released a two-page “press sheet” with articles and photographs. The campaign book for In Again, Out Again, in contrast, devoted seven pages to eighteen separate press stories, each handily perforated for ease of reproduction. In addition there were sixteen “cuts”—line drawings that could accompany an ad or article—as well as reproductions of all the posters. The poster selection was dizzying. Each film had two one-sheets, two three-sheets, a six-sheet, a twenty-four-sheet (essentially a billboard), as well as a window card and half-sheet. Doug’s face was plastered everywhere, including on the poster boards of some Triangle theaters, which must have given Harry Aitken a case of agita. Triangle theaters were supposed to be showing only Triangle releases, but theater managers didn’t care. It was Fairbanks they wanted, regardless of who the distributor was.
Making his debut in In Again, Out Again was a comically homely, acromegalic, cauliflower-eared mountain of a man by the name of “Bull” Montana. Born Luigi Montagna in Italy, he had labored splitting wood for seven cents a day in his homeland before coming to America. He soon was earning fifty dollars a night as a wrestler. Fairbanks needed an “outstanding pug-ugly” to play a fellow prisoner, and he found that Bull fit the bill brilliantly. He provided not only ready workouts for Fairbanks but also comic relief in several Fairbanks films. He made an admirable foil. Adolphe Menjou recalled:
He was a huge fellow, built like a Sherman tank, with enough muscles for three men. By prearrangement, Montana used to stooge for Doug whenever visitors came on the lot. He would come up to Doug and start an argument in broken English. The argument would grow in fury until finally Montana would make a rush at Doug, whereupon, with a twist of the wrist, Doug would toss him over his shoulder and the big wrestler would land sprawling on the ground. Then he would plead, “Please don’ta hurt me, Meester Fairbank.” Probably Montana could have broken Doug in half, but he loved to play straight man for the boss.
What’s more, the amiable Bull formed part of the nucleus of what was to become the original Hollywood entourage. “Spike” Robinson, an ex-prizefighter who became an all-purpose sparring partner, also returned to Hollywood with Doug after In Again, Out Again was completed. Added to these two was Kenneth Davenport, his actor friend from his days in The Pit, who was brought on as studio biographer, personal secretary, and, among other things, ghostwriter of a series of short inspirational books directed at young adults. Laugh and Live was the first of these, followed in short order by such masterworks as Whistle and Hoe—Sing as We Go and Youth Points the Way. While the language is of the sort found in second-rate youth literature of the time, the ideas are pure Fairbanks. It is evident that Davenport (having survived the case of tuberculosis that had made Fairbanks feel so guilty) was sitting down with his friend and taking notes of his thoughts before hitting the typewriter. The percussive quality of Fairbanks’s speech survives in these little homiletic tomes, as does the simplistic, albeit enthusiastic, advice (Keep on Moving! Marry Early! Laugh! Live!). This steady stream of cheerful doggerel not only was profitable (he netted almost $2,000 in royalties in 1919) but also was an early example of cross marketing. Laugh and Live was distributed free to exhibitors showing In Again, Out Again as a premium for off-hour shows. In return, the theater owner was asked to advertise the book.
Also in the gang was trainer Chuck Lewis, a former All-American from Cornell, and Tom Geraghty, a writer. In later years, columnist Karl Kitchen was added to the mix. From virtually the start, there was also Charles Stevens, a Native American who appeared in every Fairbanks production filmed on the West Coast, from The Lamb to The Taming of the Shrew. While Stevens did not travel with Fairbanks, he was part of a general crew of cowhands and Indians who hung around the studio, and his presence in a film in time came to be viewed by Doug as a sort of lucky charm.
Finally, there was Bennie Zeidman, a pint-size dynamo from Philadelphia whom Fairbanks had brought on as publicist the prior December, when he was not yet twenty-two years old.
Algonquin owner and friend Frank Case described the functions some of these friends served:
Douglas, like royalty, seldom or never carried money in his pockets, so one of his staff was a sort of almoner, who complied with all requests within reason. Another of his entourage was a fellow adept at breaking up conversations that threatened to become lengthy or serious. Others were volunteers, who happened to be around and liking to be seen with him, just came along, so that when he started out on foot, he was like a locomotive, as Al Parker said, trailing a string of empties.
This attached posse could be an irritant to Case. “I don’t think Douglas was conscious of their presence, certainly not aware that it was anything unusual,” he wrote, “but to a man of different temperament they were a decided bar to conversation of any degree of intimacy.” Once, when Fairbanks came to visit his friend in New York after an absence of a year, Case was irked to notice that “he brought a squad of five with him.” With cheerful narcissism, Fairbanks assumed that no one minded this. When a few days later Doug called and invited him over for a talk, Case showed up at the Ritz with his engineer, porter, bellboy, and a waiter. When he invited them to draw up chairs, Doug took the point. On all future visits, Case recalled, “the regiment was always bivouacked downstairs in the lobby.”
Men of accomplishment or autonomy chafed under Fairbanks’s assumption that they would be happy to be one of the “string of empties.” Edward Knoblock, author of Kismet, fell into this category. “I disliked the idea of drawing a salary just for playing the companion to a celebrity,” he wrote. “I felt as if I were being kept—which was a new experience to me and somewhat absurd at the age of forty-eight. But he saw things differently. Once the lords of the movie-world engage anyone, they feel they possess them body and soul and cannot understand, no matter how generous they may be, that this sort of attitude ends by proving humiliating to anyone who has been used to disposing of his own time, once his daily work is done.”
But as there are always those happy to fill such positions, Fairbanks had no shortage of followers. Director Ted Reed’s daughter recounted, “Fairbanks was, as my father described him, a sort of vagabond king. He expected his courtiers to follow wherever his sense of adventure took him. This they did gladly because he was so alive, so exciting to be with, and so generous.” Not all were sycophants or court jesters; some, like publicist Bennie Zeidman and writer Tom Geraghty, were men who performed significant functions in the all-encompassing enterprise that was Doug. But all were men who operated best as satellite planets, surrounding their ever-bright, ever-shining personal sun.
In Again, Out Again was a marked success and a strong start for his production company. All attendance records were again shattered for the Rialto,*4 and Variety reported that at the 81st Street Theatre audiences left right after the movie, even though there were two vaudeville acts and a Keystone film to follow. After making the film, Fairbanks remained in New York only long enough to obtain the Manhattan-based shots needed for his next film, Wild and Woolly.†*5He returned to L.A. by way of a reserved train car with a party of seventeen, including Emerson, Loos, Fleming, brother—and now business manager—John, assistant cameraman Glen MacWilliams, the tireless Bennie Zeidman, and a young woman who would become his new leading lady for the rest of the year, Eileen Percy. According to Loos, the presence of Percy constituted the moment “when Fate edged up and nudged me with its elbow.” Describing the blonde Percy as “a Broadway cutie who was being imported to Hollywood for a screen test,” she went on to bemoan:
That girl was a lot bigger than I was, but she was being waited on by every male in our troupe. If she happened to drop the magazine she was reading, several of them would jump to retrieve it, whereas I was allowed to tug heavy suitcases from their racks while those same men failed to note my efforts.
That girl and I were both in the p
ristine years of early youth; we shared about the same degree of comeliness, and mine was less contrived, for she was a quite unnatural blonde. Concerning our mental acumen, there was nothing to discuss; I was the smarter. But there was some mystifying difference between us. Why did she so outdistance me in feminine allure? Could her power, like that of Samson, have something to do with her hair?
Loos pulled out her yellow notepad and started to scribble furiously. From this seed was to ultimately sprout one of the defining novels of the Roaring Twenties: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
But she did not, evidently, produce the plot for Wild and Woolly. The story was attributed to Horace B. Carpenter, which is curious, as Carpenter was a bit player at Famous Players whose credits include such memorable roles as “Mexican Henchman” and “Talkative Old Timer.” The script is Loos through and through, and since she was contracted to provide the stories as well, one suspects that either this was a Fairbanksian practical joke or the actor actually said something to suggest the plot.*6 Regardless of where the story originated, it formed one of Fairbanks’s best early films, and—for a long time being one of the few pre-swashbucklers available for public view—also shaped much of the critical discussion of the themes of his films. In Wild and Woolly, Fairbanks’s character, a Manhattan son of wealth who has taken to heart every cowboy dime novel written, finally gets the chance to travel to Arizona. Decked out like an extra in a Hoot Gibson nightmare, he heads west, where the local townspeople, anxious to get his approval on an extension of his father’s railroad line into nearby mines, camouflage themselves and their town to look like the West of the 1880s. In the course of the phony events, a corrupt Indian agent creates real dangers for the good townsfolk, and Doug ends up saving the day. He does so by way of some dazzling new stunts, including more lariat work, which he had been avidly practicing even while in Manhattan. (One reporter described finding him, in full dinner dress, idly lassoing the doorknob at the Algonquin while waiting to go out.) Ed Burns, who had served for seven years as foreman at “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wyoming ranch, was hired to cull the authentic cowhands from the pool of aspiring extras.
Burns also contributed to the current and future productions by selling to Fairbanks a stunt horse named, appropriately, Smiles. In Wild and Woolly, the animal received a good indoctrination into what it meant to be owned by Fairbanks. Doug made several leaps onto the horse, including a standing vault from the rear that has been copied in scores of westerns since. He also dove off the animal with aplomb, once to tackle hapless Charlie Stevens and once to board a moving train. He even shot his gun while hanging from the side of the horse at full gallop, Indian-style.*7 Smiles was never featured as a cowboy costar, à la Trigger or Tony (there was only one star in a Fairbanks film, after all), but remained stabled and much-cosseted at the studio and employed by him in multiple films, skillfully and cooperatively participating in sudden leaps and falls, the firing of blanks near his ears, and the slinging of villains and maidens across his willing back. He even would stand still for the Photoplay photographer while Doug performed a headstand in the saddle. Smiles, it can be argued, was the original white horse that young boys for decades associated with the good guy.†*8
Wild and Woolly also saw the addition to the company of Joseph Henabery, a Griffith stalwart who was best known at that time for portraying Lincoln in The Birth of a Nation. He was functioning initially as an assistant to John Emerson and proved invaluable on several fronts. For Wild and Woolly, he recalled of the script, “I could see that it was being written without much consideration for cost. Emerson, like many directors from the legitimate stage, was not very concerned about the technical side of picture making. . . . I began to think about using an existing small town that we could transform into an Old West town, then restore it to its modern state. . . . To cover the modern oil pavement, I would have to bring in truckloads of earth.”
He selected the little-known town of Burbank, in the San Fernando Valley. The mayor, fortunately, turned out to be a Fairbanks fan, and that, combined with a judicious $500 contribution to the local library from Doug, bought them the right to turn downtown Burbank into the Old West for a week.*9 Henabery also directed several sequences in the film. This stemmed from the need, per Henabery, “to produce pictures more quickly to fulfill the contract. . . . Emerson confined himself to shooting with Fairbanks, while another director helped plan production and shot episodes in which Doug did not appear. Later, such jobs were called second-unit directors.”
He recalled that Fairbanks especially liked making westerns. “Doug loosened up more with the fellows who worked in Westerns than he did with the ordinary breed of actor,” he wrote. “We had used many Western riders in . . . Wild and Woolly, and he had become acquainted with some of them when he worked at the Fine Arts Studio. Most of these people had been born and raised in Western cattle country, and they were tops in their lines. Some had specialties such as bronco riding, some were trick riders, and others were expert ropers. Many had ridden with Wild West shows and rodeos. They could tell tales by the hour.” The feeling was clearly mutual. One of these cowboys was arrested for shooting a man who had the gall to claim that Fairbanks did not do his own stunts. “The judge was amused by his loyalty,” went the news report of the time, “and, being a Fairbanks fan, dismissed the case from court.”
Fairbanks clearly spent a fair amount of time with the broncobusters, who trained him for the sequence in which the hero daydreams himself into a painting and rides a bucking bronco. “You might hang on if you could grip the pommel of the saddle like grim death and think of nothing else, or if you were permitted to keep both feet in the stirrups. But that wouldn’t be ethical,” he recalled. “You have one foot in the stirrup and with your free foot you keep on scratching your mount’s ribs with the spur. At the same time you fan his ears with your sombrero with one hand, and with the other gripping the rein, you try to hold his head up. I was pretty well discouraged by my semi-aeronautical bronco busting attempts, until a cowpuncher came along and took me in hand.”
Perhaps the most impressive stunt was when Fairbanks, trapped in a room, leaps, grabs a ceiling beam, and repeatedly chinning himself, kicks a hole through the ceiling to the room above. The continuity, as written by Loos, demonstrates a rare attempt by her to insert a stunt into the script instead of creating the situation and letting Fairbanks and his director develop a solution. But instead of using his feet, she has the hero use his head to butt through the flooring.*10
It was around this time that he started to collect western art, including paintings and bronzes by Frederic Remington and paintings by Charles Russell. His fascination with the West was to remain with him his entire life, although he would stop making westerns before the decade was out. There were some who would mourn this fact. Russell himself sent Fairbanks a hand-painted letter shortly after The Three Musketeers was released in 1921, depicting himself in cowboy gear and waving his hat to Doug, who is dressed in musketeer garb. “I know that D’Artagnan’s name will fit you as well as his clothes. But Doug don’t forget our old west,” he wrote. “The old time cowman right now is as much history as Richard The Lion Harted [sic] or any of those gents that packed a long blade and had their cloths [sic] made by a blacksmith. . . . The west had some fighters, long haired Wild Bill Hickok with a cap and ball colts could have made a correll [sic] full of King Arthurs men climb a tree.”
Russell’s entreaties were in vain: Fairbanks’s last western was in 1919. And while he was to make other westerns after Wild and Woolly, none ever quite matched it. This was the western that set the typical western on its ear, and it would remain the archetype of the comic anti-western that was to be found later in such films as Destry Rides Again and Blazing Saddles.
He was in his prime that spring. On his thirty-fourth birthday, Beth arranged a surprise party for him. “The wily Douglas through some mysterious channel kept in touch with the plans of the conspirators,” wrote one reporter. “Hence when he walked into the �
��trap’ he reversed the surprise by distributing handsome gifts to every person present.” He was given a pair of heavy silver spurs upon which his smiling face had been engraved. Bull Montana declared it a very “suspicious occasion.”
He was enjoying stardom immensely. No complaints came from him about irksome intrusions on his privacy or the burden of answering fan mail. In fact, he answered a prodigious amount of it personally and, until he hired a secretary, did so without the aid of a typewriter. A letter from the summer of 1916 serves as a charming example. One young female fan was evidently worried that a request for a signed photograph might result in a stamped photo—a common and time-saving practice at the time.*11 A small cabinet photograph with a slightly smudged signature accompanied the following, which had no introductory greeting:
Did you ever see a self respecting autograph stamp which blotted instead of dotted its “i-s”? My secretary chains me to a chair and I proceed to indulge in a general attack of autography—And does my secretary open up my mail? She’s much too busy taking my pipes and rucksacks to be mended and tracing things I’ve left behind to think about the mail. Now are your questions answered?
Douglas Fairbanks
His passion for automobiles was given free rein in the open streets of Hollywood. A local teen wrote his father in 1916: “We . . . saw Douglas Fairbanks in his little Mercer Raceabout. He was racing a green Abbot Detroit. He pooped all over it. He looked like a darn nice guy. He didn’t have any hat on and he was in his shirt sleeves and had his shirt open at the neck.*12 He looked like an Indian he was so brown but he sure could whirl that little Mercer wheel.”
He was tireless. As a fundraiser for the American Red Cross, he autographed ten thousand photographs to be given to donors. Not content to merely sign, he took the time to write on each, “Yip! Come across for the Red Cross!”†*13He was one of the few stars, along with Mary Pickford, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, and William S. Hart, who did not request money to cover expenses when a fan requested a photograph.
The First King of Hollywood Page 18