Douglas Fairbanks and the American Century

Epilogue

331 epilogue “Films satisfy my desire to keep in motion in a constructive way,” he had once said in 1922. “I had always been interested in stunts and in games and had always worked at them; at first because of mere energy and vitality and the desire to keep in motion, and then because I found that the work was good for me.”1 Now, his films and his youth behind him, the prospects that his high-flying, self-propelled trajectories would continue unabated— like those optimistic prophecies of speed, science, and technology that launched the American century—are in question. The years of ceaseless travel, the many stillborn movie projects, the ongoing tensions with his second wife, Mary Pickford, and the allure of a third wife, Lady Ashley, left him frustrated as an artist and unfulfilled as a husband. (See Douglas Fairbanks Jr.’s remarks about these tensions in the Appendix to this volume .) Any chance of a “perfect” geometry was gone. Life had once seemed long because his art was so. However, as William Hazlitt appositely said in his classic meditation on youth and age, we become less sanguine about these prospects as we approach the end at last: “It is not the despair of not attaining, so much as knowing that there is nothing worth obtaining, and the fear of having nothing left even to wish for.” What remains “is to stagger on the few remaining paces to the end of the journey, to make perhaps one final effort.”2 But there were to be no more films. No final effort. Less than a decade of more travels and career confusions remained to him before his death on a Sunday in early December 1939. Mary Pickford followed him in 1979, after spending her last years at Pickfair married to Buddy Rogers. The stories of the dreary last years of Doug and Mary have been recounted in detail elsewhere. It is not our intention to repeat all that here. As we said at the beginning of this book, we are not presuming to write a biography of Douglas Fairbanks—a definitive volume still awaits. We hope to have presented instead a series of interlocking commentaries and Epilogue 332 appreciations of the Fairbanks century. Meanwhile, more details of his life and work are being disclosed; more films are coming to light. Fairbanks himself would doubtless have approved our own, ongoing, restless—certainly Quixotic—quest of the man and his work. “He opened up his life, that rich good life, to the public,” wrote Richard Schickel, “and invited them to participate in it, enjoy it with him.”3 And so we leave the Fairbanks century—and this book—open-ended. Ultimately, it mattered not where he was going, or why. His was the boundless choreography of a life that was most intensely felt in the moment. Fairbanks’s art and his life were like that, caring for nothing outside itself, going its own way, rejoicing. He was the labyrinthine man—he never sought the truth, just his Ariadne. ...