Fairbanks devoted most of the spring and summer of 1918 to production of just what the doughboys wanted: more films. Joseph Henabery provided the script for the first.
Say! Young Fellow is another lost film. Contemporary reviews suggest that the loss is acute. Fairbanks played a cub reporter who was guided at critical moments by a miniature version of himself who would appear on his shoulder and give advice (always prefaced by the film’s title). Assistant cameraman Glen MacWilliams recalled, “There was a lot of ‘trick stuff’ to do. Doug’s character had an alter ego, a ‘hunch’ personified by a tiny figure of Doug. This tiny miniature man would advise him in times of problems or indecision. In these scenes the little guy would tumble out of Doug’s ear, advise him, and then dive back into his ear, tumbling and somersaulting all the while. We worked out a system of double-exposure using black velvet and a matte.”
Henabery created the character not only for comic purposes but also because he felt that Fairbanks films should all have a moral theme. “Hunch” was prone to such pearls as “Stick to what you’re doing and what you’re doing will stick to you” and “Never miss an opportunity if you would win success.” Success and the hero’s desire for it were visualized “in a kind of allegorical way,” in the words of one contemporary critic. “It shows a chasm the sides being formed by steep mountain walls with the word ‘success’ in the distance and Mr. Fairbanks after it.” The film also had its climactic action sequence in a factory, with Fairbanks battling the villains while whirling around on pulley belts and perched over flywheels. One yearns to see it.
Henabery recalled that during the shoot, “Doug was as happy as I’ve ever seen him.” The worst, it seemed, had happened, and his world had not come to an end. He was fortunate in his era. A mere fifty years later, the cozy relationship between the print and the film media would never withstand such an interesting scandal. The top male star separates from his wife, who names the top female star? The press would have a field day. But after the first week’s flurry of press—nary a mention. It is possible that Doug and Mary’s critical importance to the war’s fundraising activities resulted in subtle pressure on the part of the government to avoid the topic. That, or Charlotte Pickford’s abilities with a well-placed bribe were underrated. Whatever the reason, the storm passed, and Fairbanks was, evidently, as popular as ever. No more was he a nervous wreck: on the last day of filming, which took place on a set adjacent to the Lasky pool (the same pool he had taken a dunk in while boxing Kid McCoy), Fairbanks cried, “I double dare you!” and ran, fully clothed, into the drink. Henabery and the rest of the crew followed suit—all except Bennie Zeidman. This was soon corrected by Doug and the gang, who threw him, protesting, into the water. They were then required to fish him out, as the poor publicist did not know how to swim.
The schedule was so close to the bone that Henabery was still editing the print on the night of its premiere at Sid Grauman’s Million Dollar Theatre. He brought the film in with the last three reels unscreened, fresh from the cutter’s. Fortunately all went well; the picture opened to rave reviews. Henabery, who lived to eighty-eight, cherished the clippings until the end of his days.
Dwan directed Doug’s next film, Bound in Morocco. This picture is also, as of this writing, lost. It was a vehicle designed for Fairbanks’s comedic skills: at one point, to rescue the American heroine who has been kidnapped for a sultan’s harem, Doug disguised himself as a veiled attendant. The film contained the usual quotient of Fairbanksian stunts, but it was the ending that caused comment in most critics. Fairbanks had rescued the girl and her mother, and they rode off in a cloud of sand. A title then appeared: ONE HUNDRED YEARS LATER. It was followed by a shot of tombstones in the corner of a graveyard.
Buster Keaton was to do the same thing ten years later in College, and in his hands the message was sardonic and bittersweet—a nod to the futility of all our comic thrashings in life. Critics did not read the same moral from Fairbanks. Framed by his sunny heroics, the graves suggested rather that boy and girl stayed together to the end of their days. Doug—or his cheery popular image, at least—did not brook anything approaching irony.
His nose to the grindstone, he had produced two feature films in short order that spring and summer. But he experienced a setback on Independence Day. A stray firecracker thrown onto the roof of the editing room at the Famous Players–Lasky studio caused a fire. Fairbanks’s dressing room burned, along with the Scenario Department. The blaze destroyed a print of Bound in Morocco—and, worse, the European negative of Headin’ South. The negative for Swat the Kaiser was also lost.
Swat the Kaiser was a Liberty Loan film made for the third bond drive. While the second Liberty Loan had only five associated fundraising films, the third drive, that spring, had thirty-five. Much as he had chosen to use the powers of Hollywood for in-person fundraising in the spring of 1918, McAdoo elected to ramp up the bond film program as well. He asked all seventeen thousand theaters in the nation to run the half-reel trailers at every screening. By the fourth drive in the autumn, every theater had a new four-minute film every three days. Fairbanks’s contribution to the spring drive was an allegory in which burly Bull Montana represented Prussianism; Tully Marshall, Death; Helen MacKern, Justice; Frank Campeau, the Devil; German Gustav von Seyffertitz, Uncle Sam; and Doug, Democracy. It was set “in the boxing ring of humanity” and asserted that every Liberty Bond purchased represented a blow to the Kaiser. Joseph Henabery directed the film, which was released to theaters during the April bond drive.
In the fall of that year, for the fourth bond drive, Fairbanks produced Sic ’em Sam. This was also an allegory but one more elaborate in nature, with a set labeled THE HOME OF NATIONAL LIBERTY. Prussianism (again, Bull Montana) attacked Liberty while Propaganda distracted Democracy (Doug). Prussianism then set fire to the house, and it wasn’t until Doug telephoned the world to enlist the Allies as firemen, and thrashed Bull for good measure, that Liberty was rescued.
The Victory Drive in 1919 also yielded a film: Knocking Knockers. It picked up where Sic ’em Sam left off. Prussianism, having seen Liberty rescued, hid in the Hall of Justice. Doug as Democracy jumped through a skylight, attacked him, and, seizing a fire hose from one of the Allied powers, washed Prussianism down the sewer. He then did battle with those peacetime foes Dissension, Seditious Propaganda, and Brute Ignorance, defeating them in typically Fairbanksian ways.
It is inevitable, perhaps, that Douglas Fairbanks would represent democracy in these little parables.*5 He had come, to many, to embody America with a capital A. Even before the war, Photoplay wrote of his on-screen persona, “The good-bad loveable chap Douglas Fairbanks always plays does represent America and the biff-bang Americanism for which we are justly and unjustly renowned.” George Creel, head of Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information during the war, was quoted in 1918 as saying of Fairbanks: “He is what every American might be, ought to be, and frequently is not. More than any other that comes to mind, he is possessed of the indomitable optimism that gives purpose, ‘punch’ and color to any life, no matter what the odds.” Edward Wagenknecht, perhaps, said it best: “He was the Yankee Doodle Boy whom George M. Cohan had put on the stage when the eagle screamed more lightheartedly than he does today, but he performed on a larger stage than was ever available to Cohan.”
Chaplin was British; Mary, “America’s Sweetheart,” was Canadian. So the mantle of Americanism during the nationalistic fervor that engulfed the country during the Great War lay principally on Doug. He wore it easily, as if born to it. Whether it was his actor’s narcissism that permitted this or a sense of patriotic duty is a matter strictly of opinion.
By July, he had increased his public presence, acting as the grand marshal at a Los Angeles event dubbed “the Big Parade.” But the requirement to make films for Artcraft as well as the sundry public service split-reel creations for the government kept him largely in the studio. He brought on his brother Robert in mid-July as an “efficiency expert
.” Robert would spend the next twenty years managing Doug’s finances and studio operations. He was deemed a “technical director” until John was disabled by a stroke in the mid-1920s, at which point Robert assumed the position of general manager. Both brothers were reliable anchors to their younger sibling’s flights of enthusiasm, providing a level of prudent, disinterested advice that most film stars of the era lacked. Charlotte served the same function for Mary, whose luck in relatives was otherwise scant. Brother Jack and sister Lottie (now also bearing the name “Pickford” both personally and professionally) were infamous good-time Charlies and a financial drain.
The other major source of support in Mary’s life was her dear friend and frequent screenwriter Frances Marion. Marion was smart, beautiful, talented, successful—and one of the few people in Hollywood who did not like Douglas Fairbanks. Her distaste was enhanced as the years progressed and the Pickford-Fairbanks union caused anguish to her beloved Mary. Near the end of her life, she was to say of Fairbanks, “He was more spit than fire. He was artificial—phony—social climbing. A cheater. He loathed the fact he was a Jew. Minute the door was closed he went limp. He was such a toady to people with money—title crazy.”
A scathing indictment, managing, with a writer’s skill, to find every weak point in Fairbanks’s psyche, real or perceived, and sum them up in a mere forty-one words. And there is no denying that there was truth in some of her observations. The issue of Jewish roots is the simplest to confirm. While officially he would not be considered Jewish, as the lineage was not from his mother’s side of the family, by the racially insensitive standards of the era, any Jewish blood made you a Jew. And to be a Jew was only a step up from being a person of color. Even immigrants—Christian immigrants, that is—were higher on the social scale. His son wrote:
My father, though not in the least religious in a formal sense, sometimes found it useful to recall, even boast about, his Roman Catholic baptism and upbringing. He was embarrassed by whatever amount of Jewish blood he had. Both my mother and stepmother Mary told me (on separate occasions years apart) that there were days of spiritual agony before he could bring himself to “confess” to his mixed-up ethnic origins. Both Mother and Mary tried, but failed, to persuade him either to be proud of his roots or, alternatively, not to be so ridiculously self-conscious about them.
But Frances Marion’s distaste for Douglas Fairbanks was not yet at its peak in July 1918, when he hired her to write the screenplay for his next project: He Comes Up Smiling. This was the first and only film he made that was based on one of his stage productions. He paid $10,000 for the rights—an impressive sum for the time.*6 Two of the five reels of the film exist as of this writing and document the scenarist’s considerable skills in “opening up” the stage production. In the play, Fairbanks exists from act 1, scene 1 as a voluntary hobo—a man who has given up the world of the desk and pen for the joys of the road. But Marion devotes one reel of the film’s five to show us how he got there.
The opening shot is of Fairbanks in a human-size birdcage. Sparrow-like, he hops from perch to pen and back before pulling the bars apart and emerging from his prison. But it was all a vision; the next shot demonstrates that our hero is still trapped in the cage of a bank teller. But the birdcage is not entirely a figment of his imagination: his elderly boss has a beloved canary in the bank, and Doug is put in charge of it.†*7He puts the bird through a series of “Swedish exercises,” sings for it (using the chain link gates in the bank as an impromptu harp), plucks it free of fleas, gives it a shower, and air towels it dry. All is going well until he is distracted by a customer and the bird escapes.
A mere three minutes into the film Fairbanks is in full flight: scaling buildings, jumping from roof to roof, popping into and out of windows, and launching himself from the top of a ladder. When he finally catches his prey, he is out in the country. There he meets an elderly hobo who convinces him that both bird and bank clerk need their freedom. From here the story proper begins. Fairbanks’s house at the time, set on a fifteen-acre lot in Beverly Hills, served as the film’s Country Club setting. The estate featured tennis courts, an outdoor pool, stables for horses and kennels for dogs, a “war garden,” and a view of the Pacific Ocean. It predated Pickfair, which was to be a simpler house. Allan Dwan’s property in the Sierra Madres was also used in the film when the plot required a hunting lodge. This portion of the film remains lost.
Also missing from the existing reels is footage of a remarkable set. Akin to a large dollhouse, it showed four rooms and two hallways simultaneously, through which Fairbanks chased various characters. Buster Keaton was to employ a similar device two years later, when he filmed The High Sign, but because He Comes Up Smiling has been lost for decades, most are unaware that Fairbanks beat him to the punch.*8
The critics of the time were enraptured. The Motion Picture News labeled it “a knockout—and then some.” Wid’s Daily declared it “the fastest and funniest thing Doug had ever done.” He had hit the last three films out of the park. Perhaps it was the law of averages, or simply a confluence of circumstances, but things did not go well with his next, Arizona.
Partly this was related to the source material. Arizona first made its appearance the same year that Doug set foot on stage with Frederick Warde, arriving on Broadway as Warde entered his twentieth, and Fairbanks his second, theatrical season. It was a drama set on a military base at the time of the Spanish-American War. In it the hero takes the blame for a jewel robbery in order to protect the reputation of his beloved commander’s wife, who has been having an affair with the villain. He is drummed out of the military until circumstances of the plot (and a few heroics) restore his good name. The play had legs and was a standard in the American repertoire. Frank Campeau, the all-purpose Fairbanks villain, was as well known for playing the heavy in Arizona on the stage as he was for the role of Trampus in The Virginian. The play was revered as serious drama. Doug, having learned his lesson from The Half Breed, worked with Allan Dwan to add comic elements to the script. The play’s author, Augustus Thomas, asked Fairbanks in November of that year how they were “getting on with his drama.” Fairbanks’s cheery response: “Fine! You won’t recognize it when we’ve finished.”
This must have been discomfiting to Thomas. Something—likely we shall never know what—was also bothering director Dwan. In the middle of the production he quit—or was fired. Columnist Karl Kitchen hinted at the atmosphere on location when he visited the Fairbanks set during the filming of Arizona:
When he was not “kidding” his unhappy director or teasing his pet bear, he was playing tricks on the former Mexican Generals who were now working for him. The great joy in Fairbanks’ life is to play jokes. He will shove a six-shooter into the pit of your stomach and fire another gun behind his back, with the result that you need a flatiron to keep your hair down for the remainder of the day.
Just what was making Dwan unhappy is not clear. But his unhappiness must have been acute to cause such a break. Dwan biographer Frederic Lombardi suggests that the decline of Dwan’s marriage combined with the workaholic hours caused Dwan to quit. Certainly these were contributing factors, but Lombardi also points to evidence of a personal rift. Photoplay reported: “The parting of star and director was such that not even a Wilson speech at a Versailles conference could ever bring them back—except as combatants.”
One suspects that the offender in this dispute was Fairbanks. Dwan was of an easygoing nature, patient with his rambunctious, effervescent, practical joker boss. But patience, even that of Dwan, is not infinite, and Fairbanks was not of a temperament to back down in the face of a quarrel. Possibly there was a dispute in front of cast and crew, much as the time in 1903 when the Mrs. Jack stage manager called out Fairbanks for his pranks in the presence of the whole company. If, as an unknown neophyte with everything to lose, he was willing to quit rather than endure such an indignity, it is probable that once at the top of the heap, he would be even more unwilling to back down under s
imilar circumstances.
Dwan and Fairbanks would heal the breach within a few years—each needed the other more than he needed his pride. But as of September 1918, Dwan signed an early termination letter with the Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corporation.
The date of September is of note, for this was the month of the third and final draft registration for the war. All men aged eighteen to forty-five were eligible, and for the first time, Fairbanks fell into that category. He had already seen his production company go one by one in the earlier drafts: director Joseph Henabery to Fort McDowell, cameraman Harry Thorpe to the Aerial School of Photography, editor Billy Shea to Camp Kearny; even burly Bull Montana ended up training men at a submarine base.
Fairbanks had been active in getting his men placed, if possible, where they could do the most good. Joseph Henabery serves as a good example. Fairbanks worked to get Henabery his heart’s desire of joining the photographic division; on July 2 he sent a telegram to Al Kaufman in DC:
JOE HENABERY WHO HAS JUST SIGNED A CONTRACT WITH YOUR COMPANY, THE GOVERNMENT, IS VERY ANXIOUS TO GET INTO YOUR DEPARTMENT. BELIEVE ME, I COULD NOT RECOMMEND ANYBODY THAT I KNOW, IN ANY CAPACITY, MORE THAN I CAN RECOMMEND HENABERY. I WOULD ESTEEM IT A GREAT PERSONAL FAVOR IF YOU WILL DO YOUR UTMOST TO HELP HIM.
He also wrote Henabery a general letter of recommendation that was typically Fairbanksian in tone:
Believe me, it is a tough job, this saying anything about anybody else, because when you do, you lay yourself open. I mean by this, that should I be wrong, I get the brunt of it. If the party you say is all right, is not all right, then you are not all right. But here is a man that I truly, at the moment, think I can go the limit on.
The First King of Hollywood Page 23