Abortions in the pre-antibiotic era could often lead to infertility. Now that she was finally in the position to have a baby with the man she loved, Mary was unable to conceive. It was heartbreaking for her. She wanted children: “Not less than four babies—two boys and two girls—is the ideal family,” she said. She did not want to be childless. “An old age without children about is horrible,” she told a reporter that year. “The loneliness of it all.”
Doug tried to comfort her. Over and over, he left her notes: she was his “darling little baby girl” and “my own darling baby.” He needed no baby as long as he had her. And, in marrying him, she did get her own Peck’s Bad Boy to scold and indulge. That, and the shared care and raising of Lottie’s Gwynne, would have to do for now.
But June also brought good news—Mary had won the first round in the Nevada divorce wars. The appeal court justice ruled that the state could not properly attack the divorce, as it had missed the opportunity to do so at the time of the awarding of the original decree. Friends gathered at Pickfair to congratulate the couple. Fairbanks issued a statement that his bride “was very much gratified,” while the Nevada attorney general, in turn, vowed to appeal to the state supreme court. He did, and the following June, Mary triumphed a final time.
The first bullet neatly dodged, they traveled to New York City in late August to premiere their respective films. Fairbanks optimistically leased the Lyric Theatre (site of his long-ago musical performance in Fantana, as well as The Pit) for an unprecedented eight weeks. Still, there were challenges. One came with the reissue of a 1916 Thomas Ince Triangle film D’Artagnan, retitled The Three Musketeers. This was opportunistic poaching, pure and simple. Worse, the Alexander Corporation, which had acquired the rights to the film in the wake of the demise of Triangle, took the unprecedented stance that since it had copyrighted all 515 scenes of the 1916 film, Fairbanks’s version was in violation of copyright if it contained any similar action. More audacious yet, Alexander filed suit in federal court to restrain exhibition of the Fairbanks film.
This argument, a pugnacious example of the best defense being a good offense, did not fly. The story was public domain, and while the images and performances were copyright protected (film piracy was a lively practice even in the first years of the industry), the portrayal of the narrative was not. Cap O’Brien brought the case to the Federal Trade Commission. The issue hinged on the failure of the distributors of the 1916 film to advertise it as a reissue, which the FTC had required since 1918. (Reissues needed to be clearly labeled as such in all billings, which was not the case with the Ince film.) The commission ruled in Fairbanks’s favor.
This turned out to be a minor distraction in what was a triumphant premiere. Chaplin, present for the event, recalled:
The crowds were gathered for several blocks on every side of the theater. I felt proud that I was in the movies. Though on this night with Douglas and Mary I feel that I am trailing in their glory. It is their night.
There are cheers. For Mary. For “Doug.” For me . . . We get out of the car and the crowds swarm. . . . “Doug” takes Mary under his wing and plows through just as though he were doing a scene and the crowd were extras.
Chaplin had viewed a screening of Musketeers the day before at the orchestra rehearsal. He felt that the film needed some severe edits: “Charlie found at least five places in the picture which he thought ought to be out; the fight in front of the Luxembourg ran too long; there was too much of the scene where D’Artagnan asks Buckingham for the jewels; and there were many other glaring faults,” Mary recalled. “Charlie would say to me, ‘Mary, that scene must come out, it will ruin the picture. Whatever you do, don’t let Douglas run it that way. Take your scissors and go right up into the projection room and see that it is taken out.’”
Chaplin acknowledged this. “I suggested a few changes and several cuts which I thought would improve it,” he admitted. “I always do. They listened politely and then let the picture ride the way it was. They always do.”
He recanted fully upon seeing the film with the audience on opening night. “When the pandemonium of the audience was at its height at the end of the first duel, Charlie put his fingers in his mouth, boy-fashion, and whistled so shrilly that it hurt my ears,” Mary wrote. “And when the show was over, he was generous enough to admit that he had been entirely mistaken about the cuts,—that in his judgment the film was perfect.”
“Fortunately, the changes I suggested were not made and the picture is a tremendous success,” Chaplin admitted.
Tremendous, indeed. The film returned $1,358,259.03 to the Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corporation, a profit of $609,490.27. Its success was critical as well as financial. One reviewer wrote, “The Three Musketeers with Douglas Fairbanks is not only a great picture—it is stupendous. It is no child’s play to lift a story of this magnitude out of its atmosphere of four centuries ago and transfer it with its multitudinous scenes and its daring action to the screen. Yet that is what the Fairbanks forces have done; and they have done it without an anachronism and with a completeness and fidelity to the book that is amazing.” Another wrote: “Search high and low and you will find no actor better suited to the role of D’Artagnan. He is the hand; the role: the glove.”
Critics also noted that Fairbanks had made anticipatory changes for the censors. “Liberties have been taken with the original Dumas story, it is true,” wrote Motion Picture Magazine, “but in these days of censorship there was no choice in the matter. Mr. Fairbanks and his assistants undoubtedly felt that it was wiser to eliminate certain colorful episodes themselves—eliminate them carefully and cautiously—than to have them boldly lifted from the high points in the story by censorial shears.” Fairbanks acknowledged later that this was the case. “There was one whole phase of the book, one of the most interesting and significant phases, that was hardly touched on in the screen adaptation. It had to do with the relationship that existed between men and women in that day. . . . If I had tried to reproduce conditions as they existed the film would have landed in the scrap heap.”*17
By 1921 the issue of film censorship was acute. The first municipal censorship board was established in Chicago in 1907. On Christmas Eve 1908, New York mayor George B. McClellan (son of the Civil War general) closed all motion picture theaters in the city. In the words of historian Kevin Brownlow, “His excuse was safety; his true concern, public morals.” Emergency injunctions reopened the theaters, but then the city council banned all children under sixteen from attending motion pictures unless accompanied by an adult.
This sufficed to put a proper fright into producers, distributors, and theater owners, and they initiated a move to police themselves. In early 1909 the New York Board of Censorship of Programs of Motion Picture Shows was formed. According to Brownlow, this board “acted as an enlightened censor in the hope that the more vicious variety might be neutralized by its existence. . . . Exhibitors could show a film rejected by the board, but they risked arousing the wrath of the local authority (thereby losing their license) or the exchange (losing their supply of films). On the whole, they toed the line, because the board was liberal—far too liberal for many people.”
Attempts to overcome censorship by way of the courts failed in 1915, when the US Supreme Court rendered a decision that First Amendment rights did not apply to motion pictures.†*18Motion pictures were “a business pure and simple . . . originated and conducted for profit, like other spectacles, not to be regarded . . . as part of the press of the country or as organs of public opinion.”
The country was full of reformers at the turn of the century. They had successfully pushed through prohibition, and now they were setting their sights on motion pictures. When the New York Board of Censorship demonstrated itself to be too enlightened for their taste, the clubwomen and reformers adopted another tactic, demanding state censorship. Four states passed censorship laws in 1916. Pennsylvania was especially rigorous. Mothers-to-be could not even be shown knitting booties. “The m
ovies are patronized by thousands of children who believe that babies are brought by the stork,” claimed the board, “and it would be criminal to undeceive them.”
This was a nightmare for film producers. Their prints would travel the circuit, subject to the shears of every regional censor, each of whom had a different bête noire. One would cut scenes of drinking; another any that implied sex. Police could not be shown in a comic light in some areas; crime could not pay in others. Fairbanks was not immune. One Chicago exhibitor wrote of Headin’ South: “A sure money-getter. Douglas performs some great stunts in this, but the local censor board cut it somewhat, I’m sorry to say.”
If the ever-wholesome Fairbanks was suffering cuts, nothing was sacrosanct. “In the early June pea that the censor fondly refers to as his brain, the principal idea seems to be that film producers are a bunch of vicious, depraved chumps, who spend large sums of money in an endeavor to put themselves out of business by making productions that no decent person will patronize,” groused Variety in late 1917. “Imagine pinheads like these daring to try to edit the work of master craftsmen like David Griffith, William Brady, the DeMilles, Thomas Ince or Lois Weber, or to pass judgment on the humor of a Sennett, a Fairbanks or a Chaplin?” Even Dorothy Parker entered the fray, penning a poem in 1922 that went (in part):
There are the Movie Censors,
The motion picture is still in its infancy,—
They are the boys who keep it there.
If the film shows a party of clubmen tossing off ginger ale,
Or a young bride dreaming over tiny garments,
Or Douglas Fairbanks kissing Mary Pickford’s hand,
They cut out the scene
And burn it in the public square.
Fairbanks, as the touchstone of all that was wholesome and respectable in films, had a dog in this fight. He took a strong public stance against censorship, going so far as to participate in a film titled The Non-sense of Censorship produced between The Nut and The Three Musketeers. He was the only actor to do so: all other participants in the film were authors and playwrights, including Rupert Hughes, Edward Knoblock, Samuel Merwin, Thompson Buchanan, Rita Welman, and Montague Glass.
The film was a series of vignettes. Most featured the famed authors voicing their disgust for censorship. “The moving picture is about 15 years old,” wrote Rupert Hughes for the camera, after setting down a booklet entitled The Rules of the Censor. “Sin is somewhat older than that, yet the censors would have us believe that it was not Satan, but Thomas A. Edison who invented the fall of man.”
Samuel Merwin’s contribution read, “This censorship, if applied to literature, would destroy Shakespeare, Dickens, the Bible itself. It is stupid, ignorant, vulgar. It puts an intolerable limitation on workers in the new art of the screen. Carried only a little further, it will abolish free speech in America.”
Fairbanks’s piece came at the end of the film and was more visual than verbal, according to Variety:
Douglas Fairbanks walks in on a cue from “Abe’s: Bank Robbers,” and entering from the opposite side strolls on a tough looking individual who bumps into Fairbanks with teeth-rattling force, but the athletic “Doug” makes no effort to retaliate. The tough then proceeds to shove “Doug” all over the lot, and finally Fairbanks musters a sickly grin, swallows hard, and says:
“Say, I’d like to mop up the floor with this bird, but the censors won’t let me fight.”
The producer/censor impasse might have remained static for years were it not for a series of events that, in the words of Brownlow, “burst like depth charges in the very heart of the film world.” The first was Mary’s divorce from Owen Moore and rapid remarriage to Doug. Because of the public’s enchantment with the union, opposition never progressed much beyond stern Sunday sermons. The second was also, indirectly, in the house of Fairbanks. But the death of Olive Thomas faded from the headlines after the coroner ruled it an accident.
The third scandal was a torpedo that almost sank the ship of the industry. It occurred on Labor Day weekend of 1921. As Doug and Mary were in New York City, basking in the glory of their dual premieres for The Three Musketeers and Little Lord Fauntleroy, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was in San Francisco, checking into the St. Francis Hotel for a long holiday weekend. Arbuckle was the former Keystone/Triangle comic who was now the leading comedy star at Paramount. On Monday, September 5, he and his friend, director Lowell Sherman, held a daylong party in their three-room suite. Among the guests consuming large volumes of bootleg liquor was a minor actress, Virginia Rappe. Accompanying her was a woman named Maude Delmont, among whose many accomplishments were bigamy and blackmail.
All the elements for disaster were in place, and sure enough, fate cooperated. As the party was at its peak, Arbuckle went to his bedroom to wash and change for an appointment. Per his court testimony, he discovered an intoxicated Rappe on the floor in his bathroom, vomiting. He wiped her off and put her on top of one of the twin beds in his room. Shortly thereafter she began clutching her abdomen, tearing her clothes, and screaming. The entire party spilled into the bedroom and administered the sort of home remedies one might expect from a room full of drunks. She was dangled by her ankles, had an administration of ice to her private parts, and was dunked in a cold bathtub. She failed to improve (although hanging by her ankles did serve to stifle her screams somewhat). Ultimately a separate room was engaged for Rappe and Delmont, and the party continued.
Virginia Rappe received physician visits and nursing care in her hotel room—including a glass tube catheterization of her bladder—until Thursday, when she was transferred to a maternity hospital. She died the following day. An unauthorized autopsy was performed, revealing a ruptured bladder. Her reproductive organs were removed and destroyed, making it impossible in retrospect to rule out a missed tubal pregnancy or venereal disease.
Delmont went to the papers, claiming Virginia was raped and brutalized by Arbuckle. San Francisco’s district attorney, his eye on the mayor’s race, issued an arrest warrant.
The result was absolute chaos. This was the first international scandal, one that was far more interesting to the average American than was the Teapot Dome imbroglio in Washington. Politicians, after all, were far away. But people went to the theaters and paid a visit to Roscoe Arbuckle every six weeks. And this involved whiskey, women, jazz music, and, best of all, sex. It was irresistible. The newspapers—particularly the Hearst papers—ran with it.
Scandal was not then so ubiquitous that the public would respond with a world-weary cynicism. Box office receipts plummeted. Women’s clubs and the clergy revolted. Paramount saw its stock drop from ninety dollars to forty dollars a share. Within a week of the event, Arbuckle’s films were banned in six hundred theaters in New York, as well as statewide in Missouri, Kansas, and Pennsylvania.
Republicans in Congress fronted a proposal to set up federal regulation and censorship of films. It was a move prompted more by loss of taxes on liquor sales than anything else, but it was conveniently timed to ride the wave of public indignation over the Arbuckle scandal.
Even Variety, an industry booster if ever there was one, fell on the side of outraged virtue:
For several years now the name of Hollywood has been a stench in the minds of the decent people of the screen . . . those who must band together now, immediately, without delay and clean up thoroughly, wash out back alley and avenue, studio, lot, apartment, home and house.
If they do not, some Hercules from the outside will cleanse these Augean stables and cleanse them good. The lion of popular indignation is aroused, the innocent will fall with the guilty, the patiently schemed fabric of a great industry will rock and crack in the mighty hands of its patrons, for these patrons have been fed by a hundred sob-sister written fan publications with ideas of the sanctity of home-life in pictures, the chastity of the heroine, the chivalry of heroes, and finding themselves mistaken, their emotions will blow ruinously the other way like a fire caught up and flung back by an unex
pected wind on those who started it.
Arbuckle’s first trial (there would ultimately be three before he was exonerated) came quickly, in November. The jury repeatedly voted eleven to one for acquittal, the lone holdout being a woman whose lawyer husband was associated with the DA’s office.*19 Hollywood had expected—needed—a quick acquittal.†*20When it did not happen, the effect was overwhelming. There were forces in the film industry who believed, truly believed, that it was possible the entire industry could vanish or be banned. If this seems improbable a century later, recall that nationwide theatrical exhibition had existed as such for less than twenty years. The product was ephemeral, and the business might be as well.
Four days after the first Arbuckle trial ended with a hung jury, the studio heads took a page from Fairbanks’s book and looked to raid Washington for a solution—or a figurehead, depending on your point of view. Will Hays was then postmaster general, and despite having a face that only a mother could consider being fond of in an era when, for the first time, being photogenic mattered (see Warren G. Harding), he was a master politician.*21 He was hired to be the head of the newly formed Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA—more readily known as “the Hays office”). As such, he created a model of self-censorship within the industry. This bought everyone time and survival, but, in the words of Brownlow, “by restricting subject matter so that many of the vital topics of the day could not be touched upon, by rejecting scripts which were ‘too provocative’ and by anesthetizing anything political, Hays ensured that American film stories would suffer from arrested development. Had he been in office a decade earlier, there might have been no Birth of a Nation, no Intolerance.”
The First King of Hollywood Page 31