Initial production on the film was delayed a few weeks. Schenck was once again working on a merger plan, this time with Warner Bros. The deal was again a favorable one. Warner would buy a 50 percent stake in United Artists for $20 million. The UA stockholders were guaranteed $1.4 million annually, divided on a pro rata basis according to the volume of stock held. There would be cost efficiencies in merging the distribution exchanges, and the problem of the low volume of UA releases would be obviated by combining the Warner product in the distribution mix. Once again, this would have been of immense benefit to the shareholders of UA, and once again Chaplin nixed the deal. He could have been outvoted, but friendship and loyalty kept Mary and Doug from voting against him. This was a particularly generous gesture on the part of Fairbanks: Chaplin had been very explicit with Variety about the differences in their respective grosses. Black Pirate and Gaucho had grossed $4 million each domestically, he claimed, whereas his film The Circus grossed $6 million. Who, then, Chaplin demanded, was the better businessman? Of course, he failed to point out that he had produced only two profitable features for UA in the ten years since the company’s formation.*1 Fairbanks had provided twelve. Doug and Mary made a quiet run to New York City in an attempt to save the merger, but in the end it was hopeless. “There is no chance of the deal going through,” he told the press upon his return to Los Angeles.
If it was generous on Doug’s part to yield to his best friend, it must have been vexing beyond words for Mary. Her affection for Charlie Chaplin was far, far less than her husband’s. She must have dearly wanted the acquisition to go through; it would represent millions for the pair, in an era when a million dollars really meant something. But if Doug was not going to vote against Charlie, she could not be seen as voting against Doug. She was trapped. It is very likely that words were exchanged in the weeks before Shrew filming began in June, words that strained the uneasy equilibrium they had maintained throughout 1928. From this point, things only got worse.
Lucky Humberstone was still functioning as an assistant director at the studio when they entered production on the film.
Now [Doug and Mary are] not talking to one another!
We had a director by the name of Sam Taylor who had directed Mary in a couple of pictures. . . . He was one of the nicest men I had ever met. For some strange reason Douglas Fairbanks took a tremendous disliking to Sam Taylor. . . . You could say that Sam was a very dull man because he didn’t have a sense of humor, even though he was a comedy director. He was just a perfect, quiet gentleman and Doug Fairbanks was a happy-go-lucky—he loved life, and, well—they just didn’t go.
So now I’ve got a director that doesn’t get along with one of the stars, but is talking to Mary. It puts me in a position where anything Sam Taylor, the director, wants done he has to tell me, and I have to go tell Doug what to do with the scene; Doug won’t talk to him. So Doug will say to me, “What’s Mary gonna do?”
I wouldn’t know and I’d have to find out, so then I’d go over to Mary and all I could say was, “Mary, you know what this scene is all about. You know what you’re supposed to do, right? You’ve talked to Taylor.”
And she says, “Yes, but what is Doug going to do?”
“Well,” I said, “that’s the same question he asked me.”
So then I’d go back to Doug and then I’d talk to Sam. Doug would generally say, “Well, that’s alright with me. I’ll do my scene and she can do her scene and we’ll get it all right.” Fortunately, they came out. But it was a very trying situation. . . . Let’s say there was friction, a lot of it throughout the picture. It was probably the toughest job I ever had to do in my life. . . . Through the whole bloody picture, everybody on that set was tense all the time because of the friction, and you could feel it.
Doug’s lack of fondness for Taylor may have been related to filming the scene in which Mary was required to heave a three-legged stool directly at Fairbanks’s head. There were no Foley sound effects artists in those days; sound was recorded directly from the set onto the film. Her aim was true, the stool hit its mark, and the microphones recorded the woody thunk. But upon playback, Taylor decided that the sound was not right. It didn’t sound like a stool hitting a cranium should. Several more takes were attempted, with Doug’s skull serving as a sounding board each time. Finally, he could take no more. “Believe it or not,” Fairbanks declared, “the noise we heard in the playback is the sound of stool hitting head whether it sounds like it or not and that is the way it is going to stay.”
Mary recalled vividly that her husband would show up on the set late—sometimes hours late—and did not know his lines. The former issue is in dispute. As to the latter, Doug fully admitted as much the following year when a friend praised him on his “line readings” in the film.
“That is exactly what I do—read them,” he replied. “I couldn’t remember them, so I have them written on a blackboard. When I had a line to speak, a stagehand held the blackboard up out of camera range. In one scene a dog kept getting between me and the board. The dog was in the picture, so couldn’t be chased away, but we had to shoot that scene a dozen times.”
This was beyond exasperating to Mary. Before filming began, she had been very politic. “I am going to be Douglas’ leading lady in this picture [as opposed to the star] because I think the man should be at the head of things,” she said demurely. But she was as experienced a producer as he, and far, far more careful with her money. Humberstone recalled:
Mary, in real life . . . was a hell of a business woman. She knew every move that was made on that set from a financial standpoint. . . . On many occasions she would question me. “Well, Lucky, what did this cost? How many electricians have you got up today? Do you have to have that many electricians? And if I happened to say “Well, we’ve got twelve,” she’d say, “Well, couldn’t we have done it with ten?”
Not everyone saw the shoot through the Pickford/Humberstone lens. Soundman Edward Bernds recalled, “There were undoubtedly cross-currents of ambition, resentment and jealousy on the Taming of the Shrew set, but I was engrossed with the demands of my job and . . . was not aware of them. . . . Doug and Mary worked hard to make Taming of the Shrew a good film. There was no self-indulgent coming to the set late, unprepared, and leaving early. They tried hard, but the film had flaws.”
One of the challenges of Shrew was, of course, that both were financing the film but each had widely disparate management styles. Fairbanks wanted a happy set and paid no attention to the dollars. Pickford also wanted a happy set but watched every nickel. Original plans had been for the film to be in color, but that was nixed, on the grounds of either cost or aesthetics. A color costume test survives, demonstrating Pickford pointedly ignoring her husband and Fairbanks looking as though he would rather be anywhere but where he was.
At the end of the day, Fairbanks had less cause to look miserable than did his wife. The role of Petruchio played to his boisterous strengths. Worse from Mary’s perspective (she was, after all, an actress and as sensitive to reviews as the next person) was the fact that the press did not hesitate to point this out. “Fairbanks is truly capital,” claimed the Motion Picture News. “He loses not one bit of the personality that his public likes. He is full of devilment and tricks. He rides, leaps and when the occasion offers he shouts and roars. His entire performance has that vigor for which he has long been noted.” More galling, “he outdistances Mary, perhaps largely because the part gives him that opportunity.” And another: “Doug walks away with the whole show. As the swashbuckling Petruchio he is a heroic figure, romantic and picturesque, and dominates every scene, even those with Mary.” It could not have been good for their marriage. “I have always thought that he and Mary would never have parted if it were not for Taming of the Shrew,” mused Herbert Brenon. “I watched them on the set and that was the beginning of the parting of the ways.”
All agreed that their version of the story was Shakespeare-lite. One surly wit suggested that the question of authorsh
ip—Bacon versus Shakespeare—could simply be resolved by digging up both men and seeing which had turned over in his grave. This was unfair; the condensation was expert, based on a script used by the Stratford-on-Avon Company in its Los Angeles performances earlier in the year, albeit shortened further by elimination of most of the Bianca subplot. For years the story has circulated that an original title card for Shrew stated that the play was “By William Shakespeare / With additional dialogue by Sam Taylor.” This seemed so pat an indictment of Hollywood’s anti-intellectualism that it has been generally accepted as apocryphal.
It was not. Original preview prints indeed carried the infamous title card, but its inclusion was, supposedly, intended to be tongue in cheek. “The studio later became convinced that audiences out about the country might not accept this jesting division of authorship in the joking way it was intended,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle. Mercifully, the offending credit was removed before the film’s general release.*2
Audiences were indifferent to the final product. That the film’s release coincided with the stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression did not help. Those who were curious about the stars’ voices had already satisfied themselves with Coquette and The Iron Mask.
Circumstances almost deprived everyone of the opportunity to see the film at all. A fire and explosion at the Consolidated Film Industries laboratory wiped out the original negatives of many films. Initial reports included Howard Hughes’s Hell’s Angels and the Pickford/Fairbanks Taming of the Shrew among them. Fairbanks placed an anxious (and expensive) call from the London offices of UA to learn that, fortunately, the negative had been moved to an off-site vault shortly before the disaster.
They were in London that October en route to Lausanne, Switzerland, with plans to put Gwynne in a boarding school. Mary expected a short visit to Italy and England and then to return home. Doug had different thoughts. “We must go to India,” Mary recalled him insisting. “It will be a great adventure.” His enthusiasm, as usual, was contagious—or, perhaps, overwhelming. Whatever the motive, she agreed to go. Knowing her growing hatred of travel, she deserved ample credit for this.
Never was the saying “Give him an inch, he’ll take a mile” so applicable. If they were going to visit India, they might as well go to China and Japan, he reasoned. Once in Japan, “we’ll have only to cross the Pacific and we’re home.” Mary was reluctant. Shrew was having its first showings—she needed to get back to Hollywood, to get back to work. But, “Douglas could talk of nothing but tigers and elephants, the climate of the Tropics and the possibilities of adventure in China,” she said. Perhaps, she suggested, they could postpone their trip for a year? Linger a little longer in northern Italy? But Doug had his heart set on Egypt and the Orient.
She succumbed to yet a further extension of the itinerary. They would visit Greece, Egypt, Singapore, China, Japan, and points in between. Doug cabled for Chuck Lewis and Albert Parker to join them in Paris. Jack Pickford was already there and game to be included. In London (hosted by the Mountbattens) Doug purchased “enough Jodhpurs to equip the household of an Indian Rajah.” Mary noted with some chagrin that the volume of their luggage had doubled and that “we seemed to be preparing for a year’s sojourn in an uninhabited country instead of a four months’ trip around the world.”
The journey proper began on October 26—three days before the stock market crash of Black Tuesday. A special train car—the largest and finest available—was attached to the Orient Express. As the added weight of this car exceeded the pulling capacity of two engines, a third train engine had to be dispatched to help them over the mountains. The resulting six-hour delay in arriving in Athens did nothing to dim the enthusiasm of the crowd at the station; more than two thousand stayed past midnight to cheer the couple’s appearance.
For Doug, the anticipation in travel would often exceed the actual event. “I conjure up such mental pictures of the places I plan to visit that instead of finding enjoyment I often experience a slight twinge of regret,” he wrote later. But the Parthenon was an exception. He stood, holding Mary’s hand, “drinking in the beauty of the scene in a silence of mutual understanding.” Finally, he claimed, Mary, overcome by emotion, sank to a sitting position against one of the pink marble columns. An American woman approached. “I understand, dearie,” she said. “My feet hurt, too.”
They saw the sights of Athens until they had had their fill and then took a small mail steamer to Alexandria. The trip was interrupted when, one hour out of port, they discovered a stowaway hidden in one of the cabins—a young Greek woman who had come aboard to interview Mary.
Cairo, they discovered, was full of flies. Flies and Egyptians. The mob swarmed the streets up onto the running boards of their car, blowing out three of the four tires. “Not content with autographs,” Mary recalled later, “some of the men asked Douglas to write his name on the back of their hands and ears in order to have it tattooed on for all time.”
Giza and the Sphinx followed. Doug, treating the world as his playground, “scrambled part way up” the rugged side of the Pyramid of Cheops. Even more exciting was a personal tour of the Egyptian Museum conducted by Howard Carter, who had discovered of the Tomb of Tutankhamen. Fame had its privileges. Carter offered—if they would only stay an extra few days in Cairo—to join them on a tour of the tomb itself. But Doug, ever impatient, wanted to start a camping trip. They toured Luxor without Carter, and then headed out, complete with a caravan of camels and tents. Fairbanks’s wish for a longer sojourn in the desert, active since their 1921 trip to Tunis, was at last to come true.
Douglas, Mary wrote, “was so delighted with the trip he wanted to engage another caravan to visit the Fayoum.” Here she put her foot down. She must have felt that she was the constant naysayer on the journey: At one point Albert Parker found a Nubian bartender who was so good at making New Orleans fizzes that he wanted the man added to the entourage. “With two secretaries, two valets and a maid, we had enough difficulties, without the addition of a Nubian whose only claim to distinction was his ability to shake up a gin fizz,” sniffed the ever-practical Mary. The bartender was left behind.
They took the Cathay from Port Said (“one of the few places we visited on our trip . . . which we left without regret,” Doug commented) through the Suez Canal to Ceylon. At this point his characteristic impatience started to emerge. One day at sea was much like another, he groused. The singing of the dockworkers at Port Sudan was charming, until it kept him up all night. The planned trip to India could not be fitted in with the available sailing dates and had to be replaced by a motor trip through the Federated Malay States. He had been looking forward to riding elephants and hunting tiger—and was thwarted. Yes, Kandy had beautiful scenery, but “one is perhaps more fortunate if he leaves before the novelty of these exotic surroundings has worn off.” Feeding the black crows that were considered the scavengers of Colombo quickly lost its charm. The native vendor “soon ceases to be amusing.” The native dinner at Kuala Lumpur was “a tactical error we all regretted later in the evening.” The crowds along the stations on the night train to Singapore made sleep impossible. The famous Raffles Hotel was noisy.
They finally found quiet, and respite, on the ship to Hong Kong. Mary thought the colony fascinating but did not enjoy the elaborate meals of sharks’ fins and hundred-year-old eggs (“I would have preferred a dish of chop suey”). Doug, ever exasperating in his good cheer, ate with his usual relish, using chopsticks like a native.
Shanghai, according to Fairbanks, was “seething with excitement” the day they arrived—not because two movie stars were in town but because the nearby antigovernment forces had caused the city to be placed under martial law. But Doug and Mary were not to worry, their hosts assured them. “Aside from the danger of being kidnapped, a European was as safe in Shanghai as in Chicago.” This did not serve to comfort. Also unsettling was a movement to impose a boycott on Fairbanks films because of the scene in The Thief of Bagdad wher
e the villain was strung up by his pigtail. The issue was larger than The Thief, of course. Many Chinese were rightly offended by their depiction in most American films.
Doug was all indignant innocence. True, some American screenwriters were misrepresenting the Chinese, he agreed. But not he! After all, the villain in The Thief was a Mongolian! This seemed to satisfy his hosts, who probably felt that their point had been made, and the threatened boycott was called off.
That crisis averted, Fairbanks then engaged in a custom-tailoring shopping spree. He bought silk shirts, dressing gowns, and pajama sets by the dozen. “One can have a dozen shirts made to order within twenty-four hours,” he reported happily. “Chinese labor is cheap and expert.”
But again his timing was off. By the time those words were published, as part of a ten-part syndicated series on their world tour, the stock market had crashed and the Great Depression had begun. Doug did not sense that the unemployed would not be eager to hear about a movie star’s silk shirts and world travels. Ever the glad narcissist, he would continue to share his adventures with the public until two years later, when the failure of Around the World in Eighty Minutes would demonstrate the Depression-era indifference to these goings-on.
The rest of the Chinese portion of the journey was taken up with touring a local film studio and visiting all the available Great Men in town. At the end of six days, Mary told Doug, “This Shanghai hospitality is rapidly undermining my health.” The trip to Kobe, Japan, did little to improve it, as the North China seas were high and the voyage was rough. Equally challenging was their arrival. Mary noted: “The pier was black with people. More than 10,000 thronged the nearby streets.” After finally making it to their car, they found themselves trapped in the backseat of the limousine for more than an hour, unable to progress, surrounded by a mob who beat their hands against the car windows “until every moment I thought the glass would break.”
The First King of Hollywood Page 46