Fairbanks’s films were pure escapism, so this did not affect him as it might those filmmakers who were dealing in social issues or pushing other envelopes. Still, he was invested in the debate. His view on how to address the problem was more forward thinking, and in 1924 he proposed the model that would ultimately be adopted forty-four years later:
I have always believed that censorship should be worked out upon a system of signals or guides to the public. Now, when a film is passed, you know nothing about it, except that the censors in your state, if there is censorship, have found it harmless, or according to their ideas, have made it harmless. This does not protect the mother who, because of its name, takes her children to see a film version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. A system of flags or other general warnings that would show into what general class a film belonged would be far more helpful.
Chaplin, who had worked with Arbuckle in 1914 at Keystone, was on his way to Europe when the scandal broke. Doug and Mary had accompanied him to the pier to see him off, and it was there that the old familiar wanderlust struck Doug again. Chaplin was taking the Olympic, the ship upon which the couple had sailed for their honeymoon the year before. “From some mysterious and unknown place in the offing,” Fairbanks recalled, “a still small voice whispered in my mental ear: ‘How would you like a trip to Europe?’”
Mary would have none of it. She “in effect, dragged me by my physical ear into the waiting taxicab and said: ‘Nonsense, we have too much work to do.’” But the siren call was beckoning, and he began to wheedle. “Persistency,” he wrote cheerfully, “is the mother of ocean travel.” It would be easy, he urged. They would get into their car and motor south. Their plans would call for no plans. No fuss, no muss.
Of course, she capitulated. And of course, they were incapable of traveling without fuss or muss. By the time they departed on the Olympic in late September 1921, ensconced in the same suite they had shared on their honeymoon, it was the usual Fairbanksian parade. “If Mary and I had been traveling alone there would not have been so much to do,” he mused. “But we started out like a party on a Cook’s tour.”
On their arrival at Cherbourg, they were met by a boat from an American battleship and invited to visit the sailors. They happily obliged. The sailors gave Doug some of his favorite brand of cigarettes, resulting in a tussle at customs. The French wanted duty paid on the twenty cents’ worth of cigarettes, and Doug, per his norm, had no money at hand. Still, he refused to throw his new gift away. “But it’s always that way with Douglas—he never thinks of money. It just doesn’t seem to enter his life. As a consequence, he never has any when he goes out,” Mary wrote later. “We probably would be gesticulating with the French customs officials yet if I hadn’t found some change I didn’t know I had in the bottom of my bag.”
Such delays would cause a normal person to miss the train to Paris. But they were not normal people; the crew held the train for them. Still, the delay had its costs. By the time they arrived at the Hôtel de Crillon the dining room had closed, and they went to bed hungry.
The next three days were devoted entirely to interviews. Finally they broke for a day’s visit (accompanied by Robert and Charlotte) to Fontainebleau, followed by a trip to the Follies Bergère. Mary was not impressed with the chorus girls. “As I saw them cavorting around the stage with their stockingless legs and cold blue knees, I rather pitied them,” she recalled. “They looked as if they would so much prefer being home, plump and forty, to trying to appear sweet sixteen.”*22
In a fit of nationalistic, albeit cinematically misguided, pride the French refused to let The Three Musketeers be exhibited in their country, instead issuing their own version of the story. But the same did not apply to Zorro, which Doug learned was being shown at sixteen theaters at once in Montmartre. He managed to attend a screening in a small theater in the Apache district.
Chaplin was in town and came to visit. He remained a source of exasperation for Mary. “Poor Charlie—I don’t believe he’d had the fun of a good argument since leaving Hollywood,” she wrote. “‘You’re not having a good time,’ he insisted, ‘the only place you could possibly have a good time is at the studio working.’ Well, I did my very best to convince him but it was no use. Again black was white with Charlie.”
She must have been glad to be quit of him, as they left Paris bound for Basle on the Swiss frontier, with a stop at Dijon. “In Switzerland,” Fairbanks recalled later, “everything looks as if it were put away at night and spread out in the morning.” In Lucerne, they encountered the same landlord from the year prior, when Doug had bought a new car. They visited Mt. Pilatus, the Lion of Lucerne, and, best of all, went to a circus.
“Douglas was a school-boy again,” Mary said. “One of the acrobats did some stunts that immediately won his admiration, and at the close of the performance he went to the dressing-tent and prevailed upon the performer to teach them to him. Probably he would be traveling with that circus now if I hadn’t dragged him back to the hotel by main force.” The pattern of mischievous schoolboy and loving, scolding mother was to repeat itself many times.
On they progressed. They visited a hotel at Interlaken for a quiet and—it was hoped—anonymous lunch, only to discover that their waiter was from the Algonquin Hotel. He “immediately decided not only to reveal our identity but to turn the hotel upside down in our honor as well,” Mary recalled. “We appreciated his kindness, of course, but just the same we wished he had stayed in New York.” They motored through St. Gotthard Pass and stayed several days in Lugano. They sent the car ahead to meet them in Florence and took a train to Venice.
In Venice, they encountered the same old problem: Doug didn’t carry money and counted on someone else to handle details. “We stayed at the Grand,” he recalled later. “But to vary things we went to luncheon one day at the Danelli. All went well until it was time to pay the check. . . . Robert, who was the family banker, was ‘out on location,’ so to speak. And I hadn’t the slightest idea where. The only thing I could think of was to order more coffee. Undoubtedly the waiter wondered how I could drink it all, and if he had kept a close watch he might have noted the simple and deft twist of the wrist with which I pitched it into the canal below our balcony. . . . Finally I left Mary to stand off the waiter while I went in search of Robert. In due time—which was about an hour and a half—I located him in an obscure restaurant experimenting with a new brand of spaghetti. He rendered financial aid, and I departed to rescue Mary. But when I asked with a grand flourish for the check the waiter said, ‘That’s perfectly all right, Mr. Fairbanks, you don’t have to pay the check. You see, the Grand and the Danelli are under the same management so the check will be charged on your bill.’”
From there: Rome. They toured as many highlights as could be fit into four days and left, as he said, with “a shamed feeling of sneaking away.” Even more fascinating was Naples, where they were permitted access to freshly excavated portions of Pompeii not yet open to the public.
Next, they took a steamship from Naples Harbor to Palermo, Sicily. From there they sailed to Tunis. Why Tunis? Mary had the answer: “Camels!—he was crazy to see camels.” But Tunis brought him more than that. It planted early seeds in his mind for what would become The Thief of Bagdad. They stayed in an older, less modern hotel. “The architecture of the building itself was a feast for the eyes, with its mosaics, its Moorish windows and its fantastic Oriental designs,” Mary wrote. “We were constantly being treated to sights that were strange combinations of street carnivals and scenes from the Arabian Nights.”
Scenes indeed. At the bazaars in Tunis, their guide offered to take Mary into a harem. If this wasn’t discomfiting enough, he stared fixedly at her pearls. Nervous, she slipped them off and handed them to Doug, who tucked them away in his pocket.
The ruins of Carthage were “an anticlimax” after Pompeii. More gratifying was the motor trip to Constantine, Algeria, where at last Doug encountered his desired camels. He was enchanted with them—and w
ith all things Arabian. From Constantine to El Kantara to Biskra; everything served to enthrall. “We visited all the places of romantic interest,” he wrote afterward. “But I think I enjoyed the wonderful nights under the starry heavens more than anything else. Because of the peculiar quality of the atmosphere more stars are visible here than anywhere else in the world, and a night in the desert is an unforgettable experience.”
The opening shot of The Thief would reflect this, with the wise man telling a tale to a child in the desert at night and the stars combining to spell out the moral of the tale: Happiness Must Be Earned. It is likely that Doug opened and closed his film with scenes of the starry skies in the desert at night because of the effect these nights camping in the desert had had on him. But even the desert near Biskra “was too close to civilization to give me the thrill I longed for.” He vowed that the next time he came, he would “go far up the Blue Nile and camp out on this wilderness of sand for many days.”
As usual, his wife was a far more hesitant traveler. “Mary had her first and last camel ride,” he recalled. “Certainly the camel enjoyed it far more than she did.”
They retraced their route to Constantine and from there went to Algiers. The passage to Marseilles on the Timgard was the roughest the ship had ever experienced, and instead of a single day’s voyage, they spent two days of misery aboard. The waves swept away most of the lifeboats, and they were driven almost to the coast of Spain. “I ate very little on that trip,” Doug recalled philosophically. “In fact I might say, ‘On the contrary.’ As for Mary, I know she will never trust the Mediterranean again.”
Paris was far more civilized. Mary got to visit her couturier, Jeanne Lanvin. More amusing for Doug was the process of buying perfume. “The perfumes are brought out to you in tiny samples and placed on the show tables like precious jewels. The vendeuse draws out the stopper, waves it in front of you, and with a long drawn out ‘a—a—a—ah!’ steps back to note the effect,” Mary wrote. “They fascinated Douglas and every time he went out he bought me a bottle of perfume.” It was not just for his bride that he obtained fragrances. His dressing room at home was a veritable bottle shop of aftershaves and pomades.
After ten days, they went to London to arrange for the premiere of Musketeers and Fauntleroy. Doug and Robert flew across the English Channel, while Mary and Charlotte, more prudent, took a boat. The starstruck pilot let Doug take the controls for part of the flight. Ever boyish, he tipped and dipped the plane with abandon, until finally Robert passed a note to the cockpit: “If you don’t care anything about yourself, please remember that I want to get back to Hollywood.” Fairbanks later confessed that watching Robert’s face during this experience was his favorite part of the trip.
Fairbanks rented Covent Garden for the two premieres, stirring up, to quote Mary, “considerable commotion . . . all because this fine old place had in the past been sacred to opera and royal entertainments.” More interesting than this fuss, to Doug, was his visit to old Temple Church, where several crusaders were buried. He had not yet settled on Robin Hood for his next film. In fact, when he left for this trip, he had decided against it. But the sight of these graves moved him. Perhaps, he thought, if the Crusades could be worked into the story . . .
They spent the final days of the trip in Paris. Mary caught a cold en route, and by the time she was in their hotel, she was suffering from a fierce case of tonsillitis. Still, she soldiered on. They visited Versailles and the Little Palais at Trianon, as well as Malmaison. Lottie’s four-year-old daughter, Gwynne (still called “baby Mary” at this point), was rightfully indifferent to these spectacles but loved the Punch and Judy shows in the parks along the Champs-Élysées.
Finally, they sailed from Havre on the City of Paris. “Whoever selects a ship because of the excellence of the cuisine makes a grave mistake. It is much better to examine how soft the couches are,” Doug wrote of the return journey. “The French deck scrubbers are so expert that they can almost miss a person with a bucket of water every time they throw it.”
They arrived in New York City with a case of indigestion. Two weeks at the Ritz were spent, in his words, in “conferences, conferences, conferences. Lawyers, interviewers, authors, interviewers, actors, interviewers, photographers, interviewers, members of our own organization, interviewers, prize-fighters, and more interviewers—always interviewers.” The city began to chafe, as did all big cities for him. “They cramp me, give me a sensation of being handcuffed,” he wrote.
They decided enough was enough. They would go home for Christmas, and Doug would finalize the decision on his next film at the New Year. Nineteen twenty-two would bring him much: his biggest commercial success, Robin Hood, and with it the wherewithal to create his greatest artistic achievement—The Thief of Bagdad.
The sun was shining brighter.
* * *
*1. Margaret Case (daughter of Frank) wrote, “Douglas Fairbanks was a man who never read anything. Even his method of deciding on scripts was to glance over them rapidly and then hand them to someone more fond of reading than he. . . . Douglas would do anything to get out of reading the printed word. It was not lack of intelligence or intellectual curiosity that prevented him—simply the fact that he couldn’t bear to sit still long enough. Father once said to me, in a bewildered kind of way, ‘I don’t know how I can be so fond of a man who has never read a book.’”
*2. Enid Bennett, who was later to play Maid Marian in Robin Hood, was married to Zorro director Fred Niblo. In 1967 she told historian Kevin Brownlow, “Doug was timid about doing a love scene. The first time he had a love scene was in The Mark of Zorro. Fred insisted, and got it out of him.”
*3. Less, in fact. Buckaroo cost $292,442.26, while Zorro cost $266,209.28.
*4. † It is not the first time he used this device. In Mr. Fixit he is sitting next to the woman his family has arranged him to marry. She, being in love with someone else, is in a woeful state. Trying to roust her into a smile, he pulls out his handkerchief for a trick and says, “Have you seen this one?” He loved practicing magic tricks, and tales of him doing so at Hollywood parties go back to 1916, the same year he demonstrated his affinity for them in The Good Bad Man.
*5. Orphaned at sixteen, she had been dancing at Grauman’s downtown Los Angeles theater (the Chinese and Egyptian theaters were yet to be built) when she was seen by Fairbanks. This led to her first film role, in Arizona. (Marjorie Daw had the female lead in this lost film.) De La Motte was to serve as Fairbanks’s feminine lead more than any other actress during his swashbuckling years. The suicide of her first husband by drowning has been said by some to be the inspiration for A Star Is Born.
*6. † He also credited the 1930 film The Bat Whisperers.
*7. Clark Kent, however, was based on Harold Lloyd.
*8. † Most recently, large portions of it were used in 2011’s The Artist, with actor Jean Dujardin cut in for close-ups, substituting for Fairbanks.
*9. ‡ This last was a bit of a fluke. It originally was produced for Adolph Zukor and Artcraft, but Zukor thought that the film’s tragic ending made it noncommercial. He didn’t want to release it, yet he had the product-hungry UA over a barrel. Still smarting from the loss of his top stars, he charged them $250,000 for the distribution rights. The joke ended up being on him, since Broken Blossoms was a smash hit, ultimately netting $700,000 for the organization.
*10. Michigan exhibitors organized, refusing to pay the high rentals on Robin Hood. They came to regret it. Hiram Abrams simply negotiated with the Masons and the film was shown in Masonic lodges in the state. The theater owners missed out on one of the highest-grossing films of the decade.
*11. Griffith, too, wanted bigger budgets. He attempted to skin the cat by going public, forming D. W. Griffith Inc. in the summer of 1920, a tactic that would ultimately fail him.
*12. † Because this figure would vary by film, theater, and city, it remains a challenge to determine the total box office grosses of the films. We can discuss
the revenues only in terms of the return to the Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corporation as a taxable entity.
*13. ‡ F. Scott Fitzgerald, evidently a fan, lifted this sequence almost whole and put it in his short story A Diamond as Big as the Ritz.
*14. Publicity for the film trumpeted that audiences should come to see Fairbanks running down Broadway in his BVDs. The makers of BVDs lodged a protest—the underwear Fairbanks was wearing was a different brand.
*15. It is not clear if this was the actual bronze that topped the fountain at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco, as was claimed in the press at the time. Weinman cast multiple bronzes of the image, many of which are in museums today. Similarly, the china that Fairbanks gave Pickford was popularly believed to be that which Napoleon gave to Josephine. The auction of Pickfair furnishings early in the current century proved that it was the identical pattern but not the actual china of the emperor and empress.
*16. Fairbanks’s investment in the film was significant: $748,768.76. His publicist, of course, claimed it was a million.
*17. He was likely referring to D’Artagnan having sex with Milady under a false identity.
*18. † Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio. This ruling was not reversed until 1952.
The First King of Hollywood Page 32