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The Importance of Shooting Doug
Fairbanks proved to be a crucial influence on Fleming, personally as well as professionally. Fans knew him as “Doug.” He was the epitome of the self-created individual—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby on a jungle gym. He almost never spoke of his roots. With a swarthy complexion emphasized by a constant deep tan and gray-blue eyes sparkling under his receding brown hair, “he often enjoyed telling some people he had American Indian blood, others Italian or Spanish, or whatever amused him at the moment,” wrote Douglas junior to Richard Schickel. (His son said that Douglas’s brother Robert was even darker.)
Fairbanks’s real story might have tarnished the world-beating super-straight image he coined long before his screen debut. His father was a Jewish attorney, Hezekiah Charles Ulman, who helped Ella Marsh settle the estate of her late first husband, John Fairbanks, and win a divorce from her second husband, a hard-drinking Georgian. Then Ulman married Ella and moved her to Denver from New York in search of a lucky mining strike. Already the mother of two sons ( John Fairbanks and Norris Wilcox), Ella gave birth there to Robert (in 1882) and Douglas (in 1883). Frustrated at her new circumstances and Ulman’s frequent absences, she eventually threw the man out and took the last name of her first husband for herself and for her younger sons, too. When Douglas turned fifteen, the English actor Frederick Warde stopped in Denver with his troupe, and the plucky teenager, with his mother’s help, talked his way into becoming head of the spear-carriers with the company back in New York.
After two seasons touring with Warde, Fairbanks hung out at Harvard, discovered gymnastics, spent time in Europe, and spun his wheels in odd white-collar jobs. He started acting again at age eighteen and by twenty-two had become a marquee player on Broadway. He married above his actor’s station, to a tycoon’s daughter, Beth Sully. In exchange for her hand he became a soap salesman for one of her father’s companies, but he was soon back onstage, establishing his new persona as a teeth-flashing battler for good—a happy acrobat and laughing champion. He seemed to spring from nowhere and everywhere. He made mysterious public references to experiences at Harvard and abroad, but no reporter could pry much specificity or truth out of him or the two Fairbanks brothers, John and Robert, who became his business partners.
Fleming, who grew to love fine tailoring and workmanship, must have learned something about “class” from Fairbanks—and something about mystique, too. Knowing that people presumed he was half-Indian, Fleming did nothing to dissuade them and in fact may have egged them on. But, more important, Fleming knew that he’d helped Fairbanks invent and sustain a screen personality that tapped into the essence of movie magic. Shortly before Fairbanks’s death in Fleming’s year of triumph, 1939, the director made the star’s credo the title of his studio autobiography. “Douglas Fairbanks believed in the theory of action in pictures, a belief I continue to share with him now. In this business action is the word. By action alone can we show characterization on the screen.”
Of course, Fairbanks didn’t immediately realize his trademark character on the screen. After shooting a test at Famous Players in Long Island in 1914, he signed on to make movies with D. W. Griffith’s company at Triangle–Fine Arts. Griffith wrote in Variety that Fairbanks “has definitely abandoned his old (stage) associations for that time at least.” Douglas Fairbanks Jr. wrote to Schickel, “He went out West as a way of killing time during a summer lull in New York and also because so many of his colleagues and friends were doing the same thing. It was largely an experiment on his part that not only promised to pay well [$2,000 a week!], but would also incidentally satisfy his curiosity about the Far West.” Griffith had agreed to be his director, then basically reneged on the deal. They weren’t a good fit. To Griffith, the grandest gestures in movies belonged to the filmmaker. Although Fairbanks Sr. always respected Griffith (and vice versa), only a few years after he joined Griffith at Triangle, Fairbanks told Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons, “The director is much overestimated. It is the actor and the scenario writer who should get credit for the success of a production.”
Fairbanks came to Griffith as a matinee idol wielding a sizable contract. On Broadway he had crafted a persona as a virile blithe spirit puncturing the banality of office routines and uptight social politesse. He’d established a preference for scoring laughs and gasps with physicality. He had his own way of turning a set into a circus ring for comic-dramatic calisthenics and making his jumps over buffets or banisters seem thrilling and spontaneous. A walk upstairs on his hands, a pull-up on the rim of a balcony, a leap over a wall—these were his stock-in-trade. The opposite of a baggy-pants comic, Fairbanks was an impeccably turned-out comedian, and his targets were both boorishness and foppishness. He had a perfect combination of gifts and personality for the popular art of the movies. Only his future actor-partners in the creation of United Artists—Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford (who became Fairbanks’s second wife)—would rival him in audience affections. Ultimately, his pop-culture influence would dwarf theirs: he inspired not only musical stars like Gene Kelly, comedy stars like Cary Grant, and action stars like Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, Burt Lancaster, and Jackie Chan but also the creators of Superman and Batman.
The history of comic-book superheroes starts with Fairbanks’s Zorro. And as far as traditional adult fantasies go, the greatest of all male romantic leads, Cary Grant, modeled himself on Fairbanks. Grant wrote touchingly about being on the same boat as Doug and Mary Pickford when Grant made his first voyage from London to New York in 1920: “Once even I found myself being photographed with Mr. Fairbanks during a game of shuffleboard. As I stood beside him, I tried, with shy, inadequate words to tell him of my adulation. He was a splendidly trained acrobat, affable and warmed by success and well-being. A gentleman in the true sense of the word . . . It suddenly dawns on me as this is being written that I’ve doggedly striven to keep tanned ever since, only because of a desire to emulate his healthful appearance.” The longtime New Yorker critic Pauline Kael noted how much Grant and Fairbanks had in common—from “shattered, messy childhoods, and fathers who drifted away and turned to drink” to their mix of part-Jewish backgrounds with Christian upbringings. “And, though they represented different eras, they were loved by the public in similar ways—for their strapping health and high spirits, for being on and giving out whenever they were in front of an audience, for grinning with pleasure at their own good luck. Grant’s later marriage to Barbara Hutton—Babs, the golden girl, ‘the richest girl in the world’—had a fairytale resemblance to the Fairbanks-Pickford nuptials.”
In 1915, that adulation was out of reach for Fairbanks. With the director Dwan, the cinematographer Fleming, a young screenwriter named Anita Loos, and an actor just turning director, John Emerson, attached to Griffith, the key influences were almost in place to ratchet Fairbanks up a notch. But they were still darting all over the map. Dwan and Fleming were going back and forth between Hollywood and New York. Fairbanks had moved to Hollywood, hoping to be supervised by Griffith, only to find a director who had his hands full with Intolerance. Loos, a self-schooled wunderkind from San Diego who’d been selling scripts by mail to Griffith since 1912, showed up in Hollywood newly divorced from a brief marriage. Pleased, Griffith put her to work—writing the titles to Intolerance.
Harry Aitken was the executive who had hired Fairbanks for Griffith’s company, along with a few dozen other Broadway stars for the Triangle units, including Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Under the guidance of Aitken and a Griffith production man, Frank Woods, Fairbanks emerged as the smashing success of Triangle’s blanket sign-ups of Broadway talent. The Lamb, a comic adventure suitable to Fairbanks’s satiric daredevilry, was Aitken and Woods’s idea. (The director was Christy Cabanne; Griffith concocted the story and received a supervisory credit.) It was the first in a succession of Fairbanks sagas about dandies who find their inner he-men in the West—though, given his characters’ youthful high spirits, they should be called
he-boys. The New York premiere of The Lamb drew such political and cultural bigwigs as Mr. and Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, Rupert Hughes, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, and the director of the Metropolitan Opera, Otto Kahn. In Action, Fleming recalled attending it: “We were all at high tension because Triangle was about to introduce an unheard of innovation to motion picture audiences. On September 23, 1915, The Lamb opened at the Knickerbocker Theater at $2 a seat. It seemed to me that all the celebrities in New York were there that night, although they appeared to be as curious as I was.” Part of their curiosity came from Triangle’s innovation of triple-billing productions from their three individual units: “not only The Lamb, but full side dishes of The Iron Strain [from Ince], with Dustin Farnum and Enid Markey, plus My Valet [from Sennett], with Raymond Hitchcock.” The Lamb was the hit of the evening. And Fleming felt he’d seen the future of the movies.
Fleming deemed Shakespeare inferior to Fairbanks as cinematic material—“As beautiful as Hamlet’s soliloquy is in literature, it couldn’t be adequately filmed.” When he used Shakespeare as a point of comparison, he was licking an old wound. After Intolerance, Triangle’s most prestigious item was the Emerson-Loos production of Macbeth starring Tree. Loos always stated that Macbeth was her first collaboration with Emerson, and she invariably said that her credit embarrassed her: “Macbeth, directed by John Emerson and written by William Shakespeare and Anita Loos.” Her script sheared the drama to the bloody essentials of the corrupted lord and his corrupting lady, and honed down the verse to compact inter-titles. But Tree insisted on delivering the play complete. So Emerson employed two cameras—a dummy that stayed trained on the star while he orated, and a real one that caught only the action that Loos extracted from the full text. The weightier challenges for the moviemakers included a night victory celebration for Macbeth’s army shot with banks of lights. Tree himself found “this nocturnal scene deeply impressive.” On at least one occasion, though, the “curse of the Scottish tragedy” that has doomed many a theatrical production threatened this screen version, too. Emerson followed Elizabethan tradition to the extent of casting the three witches with padded men; then, in an ambitious stroke of special effects, he had their fingers wired so that when they intoned, “Double, double, toil and trouble,” a lightning bolt would blast from each of their hands. On shooting day, one bolt set a witch aflame. According to Loos’s biographer, Gary Carey, the burning witch howled, “My tits! My tits are on fire!”
The film did a nosedive at the box office. The very name of Shakespeare, wrote a New York Times reporter, “bears the taint of highbrow-ism, and because one has been inveigled into the theater at some time to sit through a badly staged and acted performance of one or more of the cycle of dramas, the mere mention of a movie ‘Macbeth’ conjures up memories of tedious hours.” Whether Fleming shot Macbeth (the film and most of the credits are lost), he knew its sorry history, and the lesson he gleaned couldn’t have been clearer: “Motion pictures should meet the requirement of that qualifying adjective”—they should always be motion pictures.
In a trumped-up quotation that is often used and never footnoted, Fairbanks declared, “D.W. didn’t like my athletic tendencies. Or my spontaneous habit of jumping a fence or scaling a church at unexpected moments which were not in the script. Griffith told me to go to Keystone comedies.” The source is an identical third-person passage from a 1929 Photoplay history of Hollywood: “Griffith was not pleased with the new star’s athletic tendencies. Fairbanks seemed to have a notion that in a motion picture one had to keep eternally in motion and he frequently jumped the fence or climbed a church at unexpected moments not prescribed in the script. Griffith advised him to go into Keystone comedies.” All of this may derive from Fairbanks’s disastrous attempt to make a Keystone-style farce in 1916’s Mystery of the Leaping Fish. In reality, Griffith never tried to fob off Fairbanks on Mack Sennett. A month before the opening of The Lamb, Griffith said that his new star “has already proven himself of such great worth in pictures that we have engaged him for an exclusive three years’ contract.” After the opening of The Lamb, it’s possible—as Allan Dwan thought—that Griffith, a ladies’ man himself, grew to envy Fairbanks’s masculine charisma. That’s why Dwan figured Griffith assigned his great new star to Dwan’s unit. At any rate, that master of Victorian melodrama, Griffith, was not the man to nurture a twentieth-century eternal adolescent like Fairbanks.
Better suited to harnessing his roiling energy were rugged craftsmen like Dwan and Fleming, who’d joked and improvised their way with eclectic casts through countless unforgiving locations and didn’t let Broadway stardom stymie or intimidate them. Their challenge was formidable: modulating Fairbanks’s constant motion, loosening his emphatic poses, and keeping the expressions he developed for live theater—always smiling, and always with the high beams—from scaring away the up-close movie audience. Fairbanks Jr. somewhat snobbishly noted:
The fact of the matter is that none of my father’s directors had really very much autonomy in any department. They were in effect directors of good but not necessarily great reputations who were expected to be intelligent, responsible and knowledgeable aides, “super-assistants,” day-to-day, hour-by-hour coordinators and executives on the set, but who were also clearly required to follow my father’s instructions. In short, while he encouraged the honest expression of views and welcomed their reactions, he always reserved the right to overrule them.
Fairbanks, however, did permit collaboration in ways his friend Charlie Chaplin didn’t. Dwan considered Fairbanks one of his favorite actors; he guided Doug through swift early melodramas as well as his epic Robin Hood. But Dwan said, “You had to keep working with him, he’d lose the character.” Fairbanks would strike a pose with one arm signaling at stars and the other pointed to the ground, and Dwan would ask him, “What the hell was that? What’s in your other hand?” Dwan acknowledged that Fairbanks “did a lot of creating, a lot of the stories, the movements, the gags,” but also insisted, “We all did. Vic Fleming was our cameraman and he used to come up with ideas, too. Sometimes we’d invent them at the spur of the moment.”
Fairbanks could be temperamental. Dwan called him that “very actorish, petulant, shrewd, creative man.” Even his son admitted, “If something went wrong, he was quick off the trigger. When a dog bit me, he damn near killed it (pause)—matter of fact, I’m not sure he didn’t.” So the members of his entourage both kept him on an even keel, cushioning his down moods and jealousies, and provided invaluable sounding boards. “Douglas Fairbanks was a man who never read anything,” said Margaret Case Harriman, daughter of the Algonquin Hotel owner and Fairbanks friend, Frank Case. Fairbanks’s practice “was to glance at [scripts] rapidly and then hand them over to someone more fond of reading than he.” As Dwan noted, his performing demanded constant attention, because otherwise he’d revert to stances he learned from public-school declamation exercises.
Fairbanks Jr. declared that his father carefully separated his work and home lives, but he also stated that Douglas senior’s closest friends included the screenwriter and script editor Tom J. Geraghty and Kenneth Davenport, an ex-actor who wrote the script for The Nut, served as Fairbanks’s secretary, and reportedly ghostwrote some of Fairbanks’s inspirational writings, such as Laugh and Live. Fairbanks’s best movies were the happy results of on-the-spot creative teamwork. It’s no diminution of Doug’s talent to say that he had to rely on others to come into his own. They included creative friends like Geraghty and Davenport, Dwan and Fleming, and, of course, Beth Sully Fairbanks. Angel-faced Bessie Love, his frequent co-star and for a time Fleming’s own girlfriend, took notice of Beth’s influence. Love first worked with Doug and Beth on Dwan’s Good Bad Man (from Fairbanks’s own scenario), about a cowboy Robin Hood who gives stolen money to illegitimate children because he mistakenly believes he was one: “It was no secret that she was not exactly wearing the pants, but [was] the manager. She was a little bit stern, a little bit the manageress. But never
mind, she was a good one.”
Dwan and Fleming shot the pictorially ravishing The Half-Breed, written by Loos from a Bret Harte story, “In the Carquinez Woods,” in the big-tree country of Calaveras and Tuolumne counties. Doug portrayed a mixed-blood frontiersman as one of Nature’s noblemen. Beth, determined that her husband not be seen as “a dirty savage,” nudged the director toward opening the film with Fairbanks emerging from a river bath in an Indian thong. Big-star beefcake was born.
John Emerson and Anita Loos barreled into Fairbanks’s destiny when Emerson rifled through a pile of scenarios gathering mites in Griffith’s studio and tumbled on some sassy work by Loos, full of cutting-edge parody and horseplay. Emerson was “basically an actor and ninety percent bluff,” in Dwan’s estimation. “Anita had the ideas. He milked her.” The show-off wit of the titles was a turnoff to Griffith, but Emerson realized they could be the perfect complement to a live-wire presence like Fairbanks’s. This star’s brand-name vigor and continuous smile italicized his acting anyway, and the robust tenor of his performing punctured stuffed shirts and deflated pretension. Enlisting Fleming behind the camera, the team had a photographer nimble enough to follow this actor-acrobat wherever he might roll—and daring enough to inspire some amazing stunts of his own. Within a few months, this new team would pool their skills and turn Fairbanks into the glorious embodiment of a burgeoning, cantankerous America. His Picture in the Papers (1916), the first Emerson-Loos-Fairbanks film, about the meat-eating heir to a publicity-hungry health food tycoon, hit the mark. It established its leading man as a wholesome rapscallion who could be summarized in a Loos title from Fairbanks’s 1916 vehicle The Americano as “an all-around chap, just a real American.” Fleming worked on a fistful of these movies as well as several more that Fairbanks did with Dwan, and made his directing debut after World War I with two of Fairbanks’s smartest, fizziest comedies, When the Clouds Roll By (1919) and The Mollycoddle (1920).
Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Page 6