They visited Geneva, Cannes, Paris, and London, where they arrived to no fanfare at all and were able to travel to visit friends in Surrey as anonymously as any other tourist. A young Walter Winchell was among a pack of journalists at their Paris hotel. Mary, Winchell reported, “was brooding over her mother’s death. It was up to Fairbanks to amuse the newspaper men, to answer their questions, to pose for their pictures and to do the stunts concomitant with getting one’s picture in the papers.” Winchell decided that the burdens of being a movie star would have been too much for him to tolerate. “To do this Doug had to beam all afternoon. Although it was raining, although he had not had lunch, although his trunks were not unpacked, although his wife was in another room nursing a headache, the film star had to beam—had to flash two even rows of white teeth. . . . Yes to you, sir. And yes to you, sir. And smile smile smile.”
Mary’s profound grief led her to a nearly irrevocable act upon their return to New York City. Less than a week after their June 16 arrival, she entered a beauty salon on Fifty-Seventh Street and instructed the horrified hairdresser to cut off her trademark curls. It was a move both of wisdom and folly. She was thirty-five years old. She could not continue to play children on film, no matter how convincingly. She stood at risk of becoming a freak show, the sort of character to later come from the overbaked minds of writers of such works as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? And yet to bob her hair, to make the nod to modernity when her core audience wanted her as the last stalwart of old-fashioned virtue in an indecent age, was akin to surrendering to the enemy.
It might have been wiser to simply put her long, luxurious hair up, as she had always done in her private life. The bob did not suit her, and, pushing forty, she was an unlikely candidate as a jazz baby. But she was sorrowing; her mother was dead and her husband possibly unfaithful. She had started to drink. It was not a recipe for wise judgment.
She had told Doug what she was going to do before leaving for the salon. He had been, she claimed, incredulous, not truly believing that she would do the deed. “When I removed my hat and showed Douglas my shorn head,” she recalled, “he turned pale, took one step back, and fell into a chair, moaning, ‘Oh, no, no, no!’ And great tears came into his eyes.”
What is more telling is what she said next. “I had suspected, and probably secretly wished [italics mine], that Douglas would react the way he did,” she wrote, suggesting that in some domestic battles, a barber’s shears may be mightier than the sword. But it is not clear who won this skirmish. It might be argued that she was Samson and had just surrendered her power.
To return to Hollywood in the early summer of 1928 was to return to an industry in a marked state of flux. Was sound a fad? Would pictures be part talking? All talking? How quickly would theaters rewire their systems to accommodate sound pictures? And, if so, which system would be in use? Fortunes hung in the balance, as well as the fate of actors and actresses who had been visions on the screen—silent visions, with no jarring Bronx accents or nasal twangs. By 1929 the dust would settle. The marketplace spoke in no uncertain terms: people would rather see a bad “talker” than the finest silent film available. And there was no mistake about it—early sound films are truly awful. It took seven years before films found eloquence with sound. Early talkies represented a terrible step backward, replete with dull thuds that took the humor out of slapstick; hissing, popping track; static cameras; and, worst of all, static actors, who delivered their lines with pear-shaped tones and rolling Rs.
Mary, in the same spirit with which she cut her curls, went straight at the issue, making her first sound film an all-talking drama, Coquette. The film, in the words of Scott Eyman, “was and is witheringly bad, with performances that derive from the Belasco era of American theater.” It was also a staggering hit. Everyone wanted to hear Mary Pickford talk.
But her husband was not ready for change. He doubled down on silence, investing time and treasure with his favorite character, D’Artagnan, and what he hoped would be his last, greatest film: The Iron Mask.
The film was an amalgam of several Dumas stories, including Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later, the third volume of which is most commonly known in America as The Man in the Iron Mask. The adaptations were loose—very loose—but formed a tight, cohesive narrative followed in all subsequent versions of the tale. While in France, he wheedled famed illustrator Maurice Leloir to come to America to supervise the film’s art direction and costume design. Leloir recalls that he and Fairbanks got off to a rocky start. Doug made the assumption that the elderly Leloir had been friends with Dumas père, the author of The Three Musketeers, when in fact he was friends with his son, Alexandre Dumas fils. (He would have had to be very ancient, indeed, to have befriended Dumas père. Fairbanks was never strong on literary history, or any form of dates, for that matter.) But once Leloir corrected Fairbanks (“Why not D’Artagnan [as my friend]?” he asked, a little grumpily), he fell under the sway of Doug’s charm. “That devil of a man, with his frank and cheerful eyes, his smile so fetching, his aura so wholesome and energetic!” he bemoaned, before succumbing entirely. He was seventy-four years old and had never left Paris. Still, he found himself on the Isle de France at its next sailing.
Leloir wasn’t the only marquee name Fairbanks brought to the film. He engaged his best director and most frequent collaborator, Allan Dwan. Not only was Dwan the visually strongest of all of Fairbanks’s prior directors, but also he knew just how to work with the happy-go-lucky producer/star. Assistant director Lucky Humberstone remembered, “It wasn’t unusual for Doug to call in the morning and simply say, ‘Don’t count on me today, Lucky. I’m going to take off with the boys. And, possibly tomorrow too. You can figure out something to keep the company busy, can’t you?’ ‘Oh sure, Doug, don’t worry about a thing, I hope you break 70 today.’ What else can you say to the boss?” To Humberstone’s recollection, Dwan “just took it as though he sort of expected it, having directed Doug before in Robin Hood,” and improvised sets and filmed scenes that did not require the star’s presence.
Humberstone acknowledged, when pressed, that this happened only two or three times over the course of an eighty-day shoot, but once a visit from British royalty caused another delay and demonstrated Fairbanks’s affection for lower forms of physical humor:
One day he came to me . . . and he said, “Well, I’ll tell you, next weekend I have a couple of very prominent guests that are going to be at Pickfair . . . the Prince of Wales and his brother,*15 and naturally, I want to bring them on the set . . . and amuse them in some way. . . . Have the courtyard ready, have at least fifty horses in there, but you know, get my regular boys in, all those goosey boys [extras who would leap and shriek in a gratifying manner upon being “goosed”] that we put on salary, all those goosey cowboys and you have them here. And so, that day when the Prince of Wales comes out and his brother, and I have them up in the balcony, at a given time, all I let you know when, just have all those cowboys bend over their saddles standing on both feet, bending over with their head in the saddle, and you know what I’ll do, the usual routine, I’ll just take my stick and run down the aisle real fast and goose every one of them off, and you know what’ll happen, they’ll all take off and yell and scream and the horses will fly in every direction and possibly it’ll be a little amusing for the Prince and his young brother. So that’s the schedule for next Monday and Tuesday we’ll have to figure out something else for them.”
. . . We got out the files and figured out all the guys, and marked down the ones that are goosey and the ones that aren’t goosey. . . . Whether the Prince was just acting or what, I don’t know, but he and his brother apparently enjoyed it tremendously, got a big boot out of it, [and] laughed like hell.
Humberstone’s is not the only account of filming. Papers reported the usual scrapes: a runaway carriage broke some expensive equipment; Lady de Winter dislocated Constance’s pretty jaw while filming their fight scene. Best of all, Maurice
Leloir’s five-month visit to the West Coast produced a charming little volume entirely self-illustrated by the bemused yet alert and observant Frenchman. It provides a wry, insightful look at the backstage experience—Constance and the cardinal both trying to find relief in their heavy woolen skirts by walking the back lot with them raised above their knees; the Mother Superior, cloaked in cross and habit, sitting on the transport bus and smoking a cigarette; a monk with his arm around a makeup girl; actors costumed for the sixteenth century gathered around a radio to listen to a football game or lined up on stools at the lunch counter at a nearby drug store.
The presence of radio on the set was symptomatic of its rise as a national phenomenon. Joseph Schenck had worked to take advantage of this on behalf of UA by staging a nationwide radio broadcast in late March that featured the company’s stars. They gathered in front of a six-foot microphone in Fairbanks’s quarters. D. W. Griffith (back in the fold after his three-picture deal with Paramount produced three flops) spoke on love and marriage; Barrymore performed Hamlet’s soliloquy; Chaplin did dialects; Dolores del Rio sang; Norma Talmadge lectured on fashion; and Doug, who served as master of ceremonies, gave his usual brisk homily on athletics.*16 Exhibitors nationwide protested—the people who stayed home to listen to a radio broadcast would cost each theater an average of fifty dollars! Radio was poised to become so popular that it might threaten motion picture attendance! Was Schenck giving over to the enemy?
He was yielding to reality. Will Rogers and Al Jolson (Jolson!) had scored a big hit in January with an hour-long radio broadcast, and Schenck was loath to fall behind. But while the broadcast was judged a success (“the transmission of the program was almost flawless”), Schenck learned his lesson. His customers were not the public but the theater owners. He could not afford to offend them again and pledged no further forays into radio.
But perhaps the achievement of the radio broadcast softened Fairbanks’s view on sound for The Iron Mask. It had already been decided that the film would have a musical score, but while in Europe, Fairbanks announced that it would also have human speech. The talking would not be between characters, however—it would be from the players direct to the audience, almost, he proclaimed, a Greek chorus effect.
There were two short sound sequences, the first filmed on a theatrical proscenium and featuring the four musketeers. Fairbanks steps forward from the group, tosses aside his hat, swishes his sword, and begins a speech written by Edward Knoblock:
Out of the shadows of the past
As from a faded tapestry
Of Time’s procession slow and vast
I step, to bid you bear with me
The while your fancy I engage
To look upon another age . . .
This continues for several more stanzas. After the intermission, Fairbanks again appears in a sound sequence, alone this time. Twenty years have passed in the tale, he tells us. But the musketeers will have one more adventure together: all for one, and one for all! Preview prints also had Fairbanks speaking over the final scene, as a voice-over. This was possibly removed before general distribution of the film, as most reviews do not reference it.*17 Preview audiences heard the voice-over:
And thus it was in France of old
In fiery days when hearts beat high
When blood was young and hate was bold
And sword crossed sword to do or die.
For love and honor gloried then
When life was life and men were men.
Soundman Edward Bernds was present during the filming of the prologue and recalled that multiple attempts were required to shoot the long speech. “Finally, we got a complete take, and, as was the barbaric custom in those days, we played it back,” he recounted. “When we made that playback for Doug, we had a ‘runaway’ on the wax playback machine, just fast enough to give Doug a girlish falsetto. I was standing near him when that mincing gibberish came from the loudspeaker. He turned, not pale, but green.”†*18
In fact, his voice was serviceable, roughly the pitch and timbre of a Ronald Colman (though without Colman’s accent). Fairbanks’s delivery was another matter. It was highly theatrical—not entirely anomalous for a period piece, though one wonders if the period in question was the 1890s. One can almost imagine that one is hearing the stentorian tones and rolling Rs of Frederick Warde.
Assistant art director Laurence Irving has provided an account of this time, a description that has been used as a coda for the end of the silent era by historians as diverse as Kevin Brownlow in Hollywood and Scott Eyman in The Speed of Sound.*19
While we were about halfway through The Iron Mask I noticed that instead of the splendid, bronzed Californians who were surrounding us . . . some strange, pale harassed people began to be seen about the studio and in comparison looked like people from outer space. Of course these were the advance guard of the Western Electric Company. . . . One day Douglas came into my room and said “Let’s go down and look at one of these sound stages.”
. . . The doors of the studio were wide open, rather like an airplane hangar, and it was dark inside—pitch dark in contrast to the rather joyful and light atmosphere that we were accustomed to working. The place was hung with blankets; no lights; the floor covered with serpentine cables and then these things on stands—these menacing microphones . . .
And then Douglas looked at this after a while and he turned and he laid his hand on my arm, and he said, “Laurence, the romance of motion picture making ends here.”
And it did, for him.
When the end of the silent era and the beginnings of that of sound are documented, there are three go-to scenes. The first, of course, is Jolson at the piano: “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” The second is Garbo—the last silent star (except Chaplin) to be heard—“Gif me a viskey.” The third is Fairbanks—not his first scene in sound, but his last in silence. There is an elegiac quality to the final sequence: Fairbanks’s D’Artagnan, now an aged hero, is stabbed in the back, the only way any lily-livered villain could defeat him. He staggers to the rear of the palace, dies alone, and joins the ghosts of the three musketeers to greater adventures beyond.
The trilogy of clips plays as a cohesive narrative. The new order was coming, and with it much richness. But the old order was being lost, and with it its treasures. The universal language was about to disappear, and this was the language in which Fairbanks had a remarkable fluency.
He had suggested that The Iron Mask would be his penultimate film. Yes, he would probably make a single picture together with Mary, but that would be it. Columnists scoffed at this suggestion, and they were, of course, right. He did not quit. Yet, for the sake of his status as an icon, it would have been a brilliant strategic move.
It is a sad fact of Hollywood that in terms of establishing reputation, timing is everything—including the timing of one’s exit. There might not be a Valentino cult if he had died a narcissistic old has-been, thick of accent and hair grease, a relic of the 1920s. It was written in the 1970s that if Chaplin had died after making City Lights, Hollywood would be riddled with gold statues of him, rather than left bristling (as it was for a decade or two) with resentment.
A similar thought springs to mind about Douglas Fairbanks and The Iron Mask. Perhaps it is hindsight that makes one argue that this film was his last hurrah. There is no evidence that he skimped on his subsequent effort (although after The Taming of the Shrew the value of his investments as a producer declined precipitously). Rather, it seems that this was the last film about which he cared. He never again made an emotional investment in his films.
In all its particulars, to say nothing of its glorious sum, The Iron Mask was his last great work. The production values were immaculate and, when seen on a large screen today, still staggering. It was his final return to D’Artagnan—the only character he would play three times—and the on-screen death of his character represents an epochal moment. If he had died after making this film, his death would have coincided with—and likely s
ymbolized—that of the medium in which he excelled; he would have been seen by the world as dying happily married to the love of his life, a wealthy and beloved man.
In terms of establishing his shining spot in history, it would have been perfect timing. And perfect timing had always been his stock-in-trade.
But it didn’t happen that way. He was a human being, not the icon he represented. He kept living. And, for the first time in his life, his impeccable timing failed him.
* * *
*1. Rumors were more extreme than the facts. In 1927 his cost for improvements was slightly over $89,000. Still, he reached that higher sum eventually. Improvement costs in 1928 were $44,000 (excluding depreciation); 1929 cost $72,000 against the property-produced income of $14,000; 1930 cost $85,000 against the property-produced income of $17,700.
*2. † At least in his lifetime. A front facade for a ranch house was sketched for Fairbanks by Neff in 1928. Architect Peter Choate followed Neff’s sketch and constructed a version of the house decades after Fairbanks’s death.
*3. By some miracle, the room did not immediately empty.
*4. Sam Goldwyn started out as a glove salesman, William Fox worked in the fur and garment industry, and Adolph Zukor was a furrier’s apprentice. The “button-hole makers” crack hit home.
*5. Presumably “Ray Griffith” was silent film comedian Raymond Griffith.
*6. The pseudonym was formed from Fairbanks’s middle names and served for all of the collective scripts generated by his team through the 1920s.
*7. Rumor claimed that Fairbanks felt the actress too tame for the part during initial tests, until a stagehand plucked her Chihuahua from her arms. Then, the story (possibly the product of a publicity agent) went, she threw a tantrum for the ages, and Fairbanks changed his mind.
The First King of Hollywood Page 44