Douglas Fairbanks and the American Century

John C. Tibbetts, James M. Welsh

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781626741478
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Douglas Fairbanks and the American Century brings to life the most popular movie star of his day, the personification of the Golden Age of Hollywood. At his peak, in the teens and twenties, the swashbuckling adventurer embodied the new American Century of speed, opportunity, and aggressive optimism. The essays and interviews in this volume bring fresh perspectives to his life and work, including analyses of films never before examined. Also published here for the first time in English is a first-hand production account of the making of Fairbanks's last silent film, The Iron Mask,/i>.

Fairbanks (1883-1939) was the most vivid and strenuous exponent of the American Century, whose dominant mode after 1900 was the mass marketing of a burgeoning democratic optimism, at home and abroad. During those first decades of the twentieth century, his satiric comedy adventures shadow-boxed with the illusions of class and custom. His characters managed to combine the American Easterner's experience and pretension and the Westerner's promise and expansion. As the masculine personification of the Old World aristocrat and the New World self-made man--tied to tradition yet emancipated from history--he constructed a uniquely American aristocrat striding into a new age and sensibility.

This is the most complete account yet written of the film career of Douglas Fairbanks, one of the first great stars of the silent American cinema and one of the original United Artists (comprising Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith). John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh's text is especially rich in its coverage of the early years of the star's career from 1915 to 1920 and covers in detail several films previously considered lost.

Part I

ODYSSEY OF A SPRING LAMB

In youth … the prospect seems endless, because we do not know
the end of it. We think that life is long, because art is so, and that,
because we have much to do, it is well worth doing.

—WILLIAM HAZLITT

Young Fairbanks ready to take on the movies.

Chapter 1

“Windows Are the Only Doors”

The First Films (The Lamb, 1915, and Double Trouble, 1915)

Power ceases in the instant of repose: it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Experience

In the spring of 1915, Douglas Fairbanks left the New York stage and traveled west to the newly formed Triangle Film Corporation in Los Angeles. On the strength of his credentials as a lively and engaging light comedian, Triangle boss Harry E. Aitken promised him the impressive fee of $2,000 per week, with a $500 increase every six months. The leading director of the day, D. W. Griffith, was to personally supervise all of his films (although this promise was not to be fulfilled). The story of how Fairbanks left a successful career as a light juvenile on the New York legitimate and variety stage for the movies in California is yet to be told in detail. What we have so far has suffered too much hearsay. As recently as Jeffrey Vance’s biography (2008) we still find the tired, oft-repeated anecdote that Fairbanks was spotted one day in Central Park by a motion picture cameraman and, after some mugging for the camera, was contacted by Aitken with a contract offer.¹ This is difficult to credit. Surely, Fairbanks had already been eyeing the promise of movies for years and was already known for the sorts of roles he would bring to the screen in the middle-teens. “Instead of the classic roles, I played modern young men,” he recalled in 1922, “young men about town and alert young reporters …” Moreover:

For five years I went from one play in New York to another. I had had enough of the road. And the lines that I had studied with the hope that I might one day declaim them in the theater have proved very useful to paraphrase for adaptations and titles in the making of my film plays.²

Many of the stage producers with whom he had either worked or known, notably William A. Brady, David Belasco, and Klaw & Erlanger, had themselves been dabbling in film production with an eye to bringing prominent Broadway stars to the screen, and it’s likely that either he or they would have been considering the possibilities.³ Writing in December of 1916, George Creel suggests there had been nothing “accidental” about Fairbanks’s deserting the stage for the movies.

Nothing was more natural than that the movies should seek such an actor … “Come over to us,” they said, “and we’ll let you do anything you want.… The sky’s the limit”.… The movie magnates got what they wanted, and Fairbanks got what he wanted. For the first time in his life, he was able to “let go” with all the force of his dynamic individuality, and he took full advantage of the opportunity.⁴

We await further research into this crucial period in Fairbanks’s career.⁵ For our purposes, suffice it to say, that in just two years, Fairbanks would emerge among the stage stars imported to Triangle as one of the few who would go on to rank as an A-list film star.

What does require our immediate attention here are the first hints on film of the aggressive and mobile Fairbanks masculine persona that he had already crafted with much success on the stage. Although The Lamb and Double Trouble (both 1915) are rarely seen today and languish among his least appreciated efforts, they confront us immediately with what cultural historian Gaylyn Studlar describes as Fairbanks’s “transformative masculinity,” which reconciles several binaries—the working and upper classes, eastern tradition and western promise, and urban and rural contexts.⁶

The Lamb, directed by Christy Cabanne and “supervised” by D. W. Griffith, was released on September 23, 1915. The precise identity of its source text has proven elusive. The copyright submission of the film declared that its basis was a novel by Granville Warwick (D. W. Griffith) called The Man and the Test. Griffith may have written the film’s scenario, but it is unlikely, according to the AFI Catalogue of Feature Films, 1911–1920, that such a novel was ever published.⁷ Meanwhile, to further complicate things, the screen credits pronounced Cabanne, not Griffith, the author of the story. Flying in the face of this is an allegation that was first voiced by biographer Ralph Hancock in 1954 and that has surfaced repeatedly ever since: “[The Lamb featured Fairbanks] in the role of Bertie, ‘the lamb,’ which Douglas Fairbanks had played in The New Henrietta on Broadway.”⁸ Fairbanks did indeed play a character nicknamed “The Lamb” in The New Henrietta in 1913, which justifies Hancock’s comment. “W. H. Crane, Amelia Bingham, Patricia Collinge and I had played in a modernized version of Bronson Howard’s old play, The Henrietta,” confirmed Fairbanks. “Crane acted his familiar role of the owner of the famous mine, and I was Bertie, ‘the lamb.’”⁹ When examined, however, the parallels between the play and the film are few.

The New Henrietta’s lineage goes back to The Henrietta by Bronson Howard (1842–1908), a four-act comedy-drama of family intrigue on Wall Street, which began its successful run at the Union Square Theater on September 26, 1887. Playwright Howard was much admired by theater historian Montrose Moses as a pioneering champion of a new generation of American playwrights—ranking with contemporaries Clyde Fitch and James A. Herne—devoted to what he called a truly “American Dramatic Literature.”¹⁰ As reported by The Bookman, it was a big success in its day:

The Henrietta was the earliest attempt to exhibit the dramatic elements in American business life, and to this day remains a better drama than any of the host of plays which have been devised in imitation of it. In it, the evils of Wall Street can be seen extending to the household.¹¹

The plot revolved around efforts by “Bertie” van Alstyne (Stuart Robson) to thwart the attempt by an unscrupulous older brother to destroy the family wealth. The venerable W. H. Crane portrayed Nicholas van Alstyne, the patriarch of the family.

On December 22, 1913, a new, updated version opened on Broadway, retitled The New Henrietta, adapted by Winchell Smith and Victor Mapes. William H. Crane returned to the role of Nicholas van Alstyne, and now Douglas Fairbanks appeared as his son Bertie, “the lamb.” The modern version differed from the original in several respects. The soliloquies and asides of the earlier text were cut, and a contemporary setting including telephones and motorcars was incorporated. A new character, Mark Turner, van Alstyne’s son-in-law, became the villain, while Bertie retained his status of hero. A quick synopsis of the plot confirms how little of the play is present in The Lamb. Nicholas van Alstyne is smitten by the widow Updike. He has a rival, the Reverend Murray Hilton. To get her away from him, he takes her for a cruise on his yacht. Meanwhile, the son-in-law, Turner, tampers with the Henrietta stock. Bertie, who had earlier been given a million dollars and turned loose to sink or swim, finds himself in an important position when his father’s stock is all but declared worthless. Bertie proves himself a man and gives his father a check for all the money he has left. Van Alstyne saves the day and Bertie makes a pile.¹²

That Bertie’s new characterization was a good thing for Fairbanks is evident in a notice in Theater Magazine a few months later:

Fairbanks is whimsical and unctuously humorous. As the son who is equal to the emergency … he is so entertaining that criticism must be silenced … with all his overcharged vacuity he has the saving grace of infinite comedy.¹³

The phrases “unctuously humorous” and “overcharged vacuity” uncannily predict the naïve and curious energy that Fairbanks would bring to many of his early films. About the only parallel between the play and the film is that Fairbanks’s character of “Gerald,” like Bertie, is a rich young idler who never had to earn a living but who eventually proves himself to be a man of character and enterprise.¹⁴ Fairbanks himself recalled that during the production of The New Henrietta, he had been eyeing the advantages that the film medium held out for his athletic tendencies:

Oftimes the question of why I deserted the speaking stage for the films has been hurled at me. Because of the possibilities and the outdoor life. Three years ago when I played with W. H. Crane in The New Henrietta we often spent our time between shows seeking vivid melodramatic pictures, especially Western subjects. We were amused by the primitive emotions and active life in the West.¹⁵

At any rate, after two more Broadway successes in 1914, He Comes up Smiling and The Show Shop, Fairbanks was on his way to Los Angeles to report to Triangle’s Fine Arts Studio, supervised by D. W. Griffith. The Lamb premiered at the Knickerbocker Theater on September 23, 1915, as part of Triangle’s grand plan to unveil its inaugural triple bill, including Thomas Ince’s The Iron Strain and Mack Sennett’s My Valet. The occasion was, according to all accounts, quite spectacular and, according to Motography magazine, the talk of the entertainment world:

That something new had reached Broadway was evident as soon as the capacity first-night audience stormed the lobby and were admitted to an auditorium completely altered and redecorated to meet the requirements of the productions of Triangle.¹⁶

Too often, received opinion from historians has held that The Lamb was an “unexpected” hit and that it was a last-minute inclusion in the first program. Gaylyn Studlar, as recently as 1996, reported that “unexpectedly, there was an overwhelming response to The Lamb and to its star.”¹⁷ Yet advance publicity made it clear that Fairbanks was among Triangle’s highest-paid performers, and The Lamb was not only regarded as the anchor of the program but also a promising debut for Fairbanks.

For our purposes, as we have suggested, The Lamb marks the first time Fairbanks performed on film what he had already specialized in stage in productions like Hawthorne of the U.S.A. (1914)—a masculine examination of the uniquely American duality of eastern experience/tradition and western promise/freedom. If the film is little known today and of limited interest, however, one might blame in part its quaint, faintly archaic style of diction in the title-writing, which is quite outmoded today. Too little study has been devoted to title-writing and how titles inflected the visual narrative in the silent film. Here, as we shall see, their identification of situations and characters becomes quickly annoying. For example, consider this opening title:

This is the story of a Lovesick Lamb, whose Dad, an Old War Horse, had died, clinching his Teeth in a Wall Street Bear, leaving the Lamb to gambol around on the Long Green.

Thankfully, in just a few months, as we shall see in the next chapter, the sharp and satiric scenarist Anita Loos will join the Fairbanks team and save his next films from this sort of floridly rhetorical embarrassment. For the moment, however, the unfortunate practice of archaic capitalizations, generic characterizations, and precious tone was routine. D. W. Griffith was himself particularly guilty of this sort of thing: We think of character labels in Intolerance as “Brown Eyes,” “Princess Beloved,” or, simply, “The Girl.” Later, in The Lamb, we find “Bill Cactus” referred...