For the trip to El Tovar, Fairbanks was accompanied by his wife and son. Beth had elected to remain in New York and do some shopping after the Manhattan trip for exteriors for Reaching for the Moon. A bad cold had progressed to pneumonia, and for a while it seemed to be touch and go. Upon hearing the news, Fairbanks had rushed back from California to be at her bedside. Guilt, perhaps, or a newfound solicitude caused him to bring his family along on location for Musketeer. This, combined with the fact that Owen was in residence with his wife in Hollywood, made communicating with Mary difficult. Still, he managed to get one note out in early November. It was written on El Tovar stationery, and he used the expedient of getting someone else to address the envelope to Mrs. Owen Moore so that his handwriting would not be recognized—an uncharacteristic act of discretion. “Leaving here for the Painted Desert tomorrow,” he wrote. “Be back in Hollywood one week from today—I wonder if you have changed—if I could only hear one word . . . I would be so happy. Will not be possible to communicate after we leave here—please please please Dear—I am just as you want me to be—forever and always.”
The heroine in this film was played by Marjorie Daw, who had recently been featured with Mary Pickford in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Daw, who was turning sixteen, was to replace Eileen Percy as Fairbanks’s leading lady for the majority of his pre-swashbuckler films. Several years later she would serve as Pickford’s bridal attendant upon her marriage to Fairbanks—one of the few present at the ceremony. Fairbanks Jr. cast a curious aspersion on her in passing when describing the wedding in his autobiography, referring to her as “Dad’s once or twice leading lady, rumored to have been, at an earlier time, ‘a great and good friend.’”
This is the kind of report that shakes one’s faith in Junior as a source. He gets the location of the wedding wrong—placing it at Pickfair—as well as most of the guest list. And Daw costarred with Fairbanks in nine films—more than any other actress—hardly making her a “once or twice leading lady.” And while it is true that she was Mary’s witness at the 1920 wedding, her earlier presence as Fairbanks’s leading lady suggests less an illicit affair (as Junior implies)*24 than the possibility that Daw was enlisted as a sort of “beard” for the love affair between Doug and Mary. Her employment as Fairbanks’s costar made this plausible and convenient. In a 1921 interview, Mary identified Marjorie Daw as “really the only intimate [woman] friend I have.” She and Doug hosted Daw’s 1923 wedding to director Eddie Sutherland at their home. And it is unlikely—highly unlikely—that Fairbanks would have had a fling with her before his affair with Mary began. Apart from the fact that this would have made her a highly implausible choice as maid of honor, Daw was fourteen in 1916 and still playing children’s roles. (She makes a very convincing twelve-year-old in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm for this very reason; she was not far removed from twelve herself.) Fairbanks and Chaplin shared many interests in common, but an attraction for underage girls was not among them.*25
Daw, one suspects, was grateful for the work. However, she learned very quickly that working for Fairbanks had its risks. Production on the film was delayed when, astride a horse in the Canyon de Chelly, she suffered a collision with another rider, seriously injuring her knee and requiring weeks to recover. Worse, Daw’s mother died within twenty-four hours of her stretcher-bound daughter’s arrival in L.A.
It was likely these calamities that resulted in the casting of a different leading lady, Katherine MacDonald, for his next feature, Headin’ South. Here we do have a candidate for a prior romance. MacDonald had been a prominent model in New York City in the 1910s and could very well have had a relationship with Fairbanks at that time. Also, she was to appear in two Fairbanks films but was his romantic interest in only one, qualifying her as a “once or twice leading lady.” But this is speculation and, in the absence of hard facts, will remain so.
There is an absence of a different sort in the discussion of Headin’ South—the film itself. It is, as of this writing, lost. A small fragment survives in a Paramount documentary from the early 1930s, The House That Shadows Built, but it only serves to tantalize. The story was a variant on The Good Bad Man, in which Fairbanks portrays a bandit who joins a gang headed by Frank Campeau. By the end, it is revealed that our hero is actually a Canadian Mountie in disguise. The film was directed by Arthur Rosson, another Triangle refugee, who had been originally brought on as Dwan’s assistant director. Henabery was now the director who would alternate projects with Dwan, but he was tied up writing and planning what would become Say! Young Fellow. This left Dwan stretched, so he worked on the script and acted in a supervisory capacity to Rosson, who was promoted for this film to principal director. In the last week of January 1918, he shepherded eight passenger and twelve freight cars to bring over two hundred men and horses to Fort Lowell, near Tucson, Arizona. Included with the cowboys were future western stars Art Acord (a champion bulldogger) and Hoot Gibson (a champion broncobuster). Ginger, one of Fairbanks’s Alaskan malamutes, came along as the company mascot—a move that might have made some cast members leery, considering the dog had bitten Eileen Percy on the arm during the filming of Down to Earth.*26
No leading ladies were harmed during the making of this film, but a Sioux Indian chief by the name of Eagle Eye was, when he fell from his horse and broke his leg during filming. Because the man was deemed permanently disabled from this injury, Fairbanks readily pensioned him for the rest of his life. The gesture loses a little of its dramatic punch with the knowledge that Eagle Eye was, at the time of the injury, in his ninety-ninth year.
Henabery recalled that Fairbanks requested his help postproduction. “He said ‘Go down and look at that and tell me . . . see what to do with it.’ I went down—and he had piles of good action, piles of good material out of Rosson, who was a very good man, but I mean they had unfortunately, a jumbled up story. . . . So I said this is going to be a big trouble because we’ve got to cut out one faction in here because to start with nobody knows who’s chasing who. I can’t tell. We have to simplify the story—get out some of the junk, you know, to point up some of the gags a little bit. . . . I didn’t shoot anything new for it at all. Just re-edited and simplified it.”
Even so, as in The Man from Painted Post, the critics were beginning to demonstrate some discrimination. “The Fairbanks smile is carrying a load under which it almost collapses,” wrote the usually sycophantic Photoplay. “With anyone else in the leading role, this would be a reversion to the wild west picture of five years ago.” The Motion Picture News wrote, “Whereas A Modern Musketeer was the perfectly balanced combination of comedy and melodrama, Headin’ South has too much of one and too little of the other, regrettably to the detriment of each element.”
Once again, audiences didn’t care. Grosses on the film were excellent, although because of cost overruns, the profits for Fairbanks were the weakest to date. Transporting and housing two hundred extras did not come cheap (“Mr. Fairbanks is prodigal in this respect,” commented Variety), and it was time for a retrenchment.
He and Dwan did so quickly with what was to be his least expensive Artcraft production, Mr. Fixit. Mr. Fixit was a studio-based, modern- dress film with a plot that had Fairbanks’s character stepping in and impersonating an Oxford chum with his American family—a bunch of elderly stuffed shirts. Because, until the last reel, there are no large action sequences, it is a film of small charms, but these are worth watching for.
Fairbanks is typically seen in terms of the large gesture, be it the broad ones of the late theatrical style or the grand ones of his swashbuckling greatness. In this, modern audiences often miss the small movements he makes. This is easy to do—particularly for the post-1930 eye, accustomed to voice, sound, and music to provide a cue as to when to pay particular attention. Fairbanks’s films are full of small, quick gestures that are full of delight. In Flirting with Fate, he runs to the police department, frantic to notify the authorities that he has hired an assassin to kill him. Blink and you will miss
him drink from the inkwell on the sergeant’s desk. He meets Bessie Love in The Good Bad Man and, in a flash so quick one might not notice it, punches a hole in her hair ribbon with his pilfered conductor’s punch. He attempts to kiss the heroine’s hand as it rests on a table in Wild and Woolly, only to have her pull it away at the last second, leaving him to smooch the tabletop. Mr. Fixit was rife with such moments. And if Fairbanks was largely restricted to the set that comprised the family manse, audiences still could find pleasure in counting the number of ways he elected to descend the central staircase (skipping with five children on his back, on his belly like a snake, walking on his hands, jumping clear over the balustrade, and in a full log roll down its length).
Mr. Fixit was made on the fly, and all shots involving Fairbanks were interiors or taken on the back lot in order that the company could work days and into the nights. He was in a hurry and needed to finish the film in a very short time. The country was at war—and Uncle Sam wanted Doug.
* * *
*1. He wrote: “Mary I was so stuck on you I couldn’t see straight and I knew I simply had only one way to keep things straight and that was go east so east I went.”
*2. He is referring to the Lambs Club event called the Lambs Gambol.
*3. Rutherford, New Jersey, ultimately provided the scenes for the location shoots. A short newsreel was made of the mayor and the local theater owner meeting Fairbanks and Emerson. The film was shown in local theaters and is, at this writing, presumed lost.
*4. The Rialto alone grossed $17,880 the first week, against a rental cost of $3,000.
*5. † Originally titled A Regular Guy.
*6. Another clue is suggested by a Motion Picture News review: “One is easily able to understand why Mr. Fairbanks picked Wild and Woolly to star in, even though submitted anonymously. It is, however, extremely difficult to draw any line between the work of Horace B. Carpenter, author of the story, and that of Anita Loos, who did the scenario.”
*7. He had previously done this stunt in The Good Bad Man.
*8. † Zorro, of course, rode a black horse, so the villains rode white ones, but that was the exception, not the rule.
*9. The town leaders decided to welcome filmmakers from that point forward, leading, perhaps, to the “beautiful downtown Burbank” (as Johnny Carson used to so aptly phrase it) of today.
*10. She did not attempt to script any stunts after this endeavor, instead sticking to story and titles.
*11. As was having an assistant do all the signing, a practice that Fairbanks disdained.
*12. Doug popularized informal dress in an era when men wore celluloid collars and even hoboes wore jackets.
*13. † These turn up on eBay periodically, documenting that each is uniquely written, not stamped.
*14. This appears to have been a publicity stunt and not an official act of the government.
*15. It may be that they were reshot with no dog instead of a substitute. There is a dog in the film. He is seen as Fairbanks rescues him and brings him on the yacht and later gets him to land on the “desert island.” From there he simply disappears from the story.
*16. Curiously, Henabery never demonstrated the least bit of resentment when Fairbanks was credited in all print advertising as having written the script for The Man from Painted Post. Apart from publicity value, it is not clear why Fairbanks took the credit here. The handwritten notes on file at the Margaret Herrick Library document that the work was entirely done by Henabery.
*17. † As was the corresponding scene where Fairbanks’s character actually was to say (in the proposed title), “You niggers come down here,” to learn that the villain had hired them. One must be careful, however, in drawing the conclusion that the sequence had not been shot. The original script has the sequence. The press book plot summary does not. But the six-sheet poster for the film shows Fairbanks being held at gunpoint by the film’s villain, who is backed up by a group of “cannibals.” The sequence might have been in the film at some point. Existing prints have a relatively abrupt jump from the villain’s plotting to hire the faux cannibals to his encounter with Fairbanks on the beach, at which point Doug thrashes him. (To make it fair, Fairbanks elects to do so with one hand tied behind his back.)
*18. The Riverside Ranch, which was on 160,000 acres of land thirty miles from Laramie.
*19. These were actually the ministers of “Vulgaria,” the fictitious country of the story. Erich von Stroheim, if you look closely, is among them.
*20. The Roxy, of course, didn’t even exist until twelve years later. But Sam Rothafel (the original “Roxy” in question) did book Fairbanks films in his New York theaters in the teens. Loos was characteristically loose with her facts.
*21. A contract was made with Eugene P. Lyle for $250 for his story, which appeared in the September 1912 issue of Everybody’s Magazine. The contract was dated October 19, 1917. The fact that the issue was five years old seems to contradict Booton Herndon’s claim that Fairbanks and Dwan found the story in a pile of magazines that John Fairbanks had brought on the train, suggesting instead a conscious search for appropriate material in older publications. Things were more organized than Dwan suggests.
*22. Lip readers will note that Fairbanks literally says, “Yes, it’s me.” This was not the first time that Dwan had Fairbanks walk straight up to the camera, break the fourth wall, and wink at the audience. He did the same in Manhattan Madness, in which Doug reveals himself to be the “bad man” of the story within the story.
*23. The children included his son and brother John’s two daughters. Here, still photographs reveal Junior to be in the sailor suit that he recalls from American Aristocracy, suggesting that the sequence was filmed. Their pay was donated to the Red Cross.
*24. He is the only source, incidentally, to imply such a thing.
*25. To say nothing of the fact that Daw spent three years of her adolescence in a body cast for scoliosis, making her an improbable candidate, even if someone had been interested in an underage seduction.
*26. Dogs were always a significant element in his life. In addition to Ginger, he had Rex, a prizewinning malamute. By 1920 he had a full kennel with at least five of the same breed. He bought a pricey Airedale for Mary (Zorro) and through the 1920s had a Saint Bernard named Robin, after Robin Hood. There was no end of studio mutts that he adopted, one of whom, dubbed Rooney after the Pickford film Little Annie Rooney, costarred with him in Mr. Robinson Crusoe. His final dog was a Great Dane named Marco Polo.
7
Citizen Doug
* * *
THE YEAR 1918 WAS like no other for Fairbanks. It would represent the peak of his endeavors, not as a movie star but as a public citizen. Ever since Frederick Warde had established the template for civic duty for him two decades before, he had been involved in organized good deeds. The causes demonstrated no discernable pattern; the Federation of Jewish Charities in Brooklyn was as likely to be supported as the Irish Parliament Party Fund. Building funds, funds for out-of-work actors, fundraising drives for widows of dead actors—if it had the word fund in its name, he was there. At the Actors Fund Fair in 1910—an event opened by no less a personage than President Taft—he donned overalls and clerked at the “Country Grocery Store” booth alongside Jack Barrymore.*1 When he wasn’t performing, he was buying tickets or, once flush, whole boxes to charity events.
If he was not at a fundraiser, he was joining an organization. He was a lifelong joiner—a cosmopolitan Babbitt before the character had sprung from Sinclair Lewis’s pen. He was an avid member of the Lambs Club—participating in all of their Gambols, which in no way prevented him from also attending Friars Club events. And if there wasn’t an organization to join, he founded one. In February 1914 he was a founding member of the Sixty Club, a society of theatrical stars formed largely for the purpose of holding dances every Saturday night at the Hotel Astor. He covered vaudeville as well, cofounding the Fortnight Club the same week.
His energy was boundless, and
when the War to End All Wars finally came to the United States in April 1917,*2 he devoted a tremendous portion of it to the cause. As with many of his charitable acts, it was somewhat of a scattershot affair at first. Still, as 1917 turned to 1918, Fairbanks found his energies directed increasingly to two areas: the Red Cross and the sale of Liberty Bonds. His efforts on both accounts were prodigious.
It began in the summer of 1917. Fairbanks was one of the celebrities at a fundraising concert for the Red Cross. A woman in the audience held out a check for one hundred dollars, saying that she would donate it if Doug jumped from the roof of the bandstand. He promptly shimmied up the supporting pole and made the twenty-foot jump. (“Five dollars a foot,” reported one contemporary. “Doug says he is glad the lady didn’t offer a thousand dollars.”) He was one of the four men (also including industry pioneer Edwin S. Porter) composing the imposingly titled Committee of the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry Cooperating with the Red Cross. They prepared and distributed one thousand trailers to theaters nationally to recruit members to the organization. He spent a day in San Diego, twenty-five Red Cross nurses and fifty Boy Scouts trailing him in ten automobiles, traveling between department stores, movie houses, and major street corners, selling Red Cross memberships. He personally bought memberships for the newsboys in town.
The First King of Hollywood Page 21