Douglas Fairbanks and the American Century

Introduction: The Choreography of Hope

3 introduction: the choreography of hope [He was] an individual standing alone, self- reliant and self-propelling: ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his unique and inherent resources. —R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam At the height of his career in the early 1920s, Douglas Fairbanks was the most popular film star in the world. Since his arrival in Hollywood in 1915, he had quickly vaulted from his former status as a stage star to the power and prestige of a captain of the film industry. Playwright Robert E. Sherwood pronounced his films “the farthest step that the silent drama has ever taken along the highroad of art.”1 His sermons of hope and optimism pulled high fives with the spirit of the young progressive American century and claimed its privileges. His leaps and bounds devoured space and time. “He is boy enough to want to be a boys’ hero forever,” noted poet Vachel Lindsay.2 But that was his tragedy. Puck didn’t know how to grow old. By 1930, gravity was nipping at his heels. When his limbs faltered and his pace slowed, Fairbanks had no immunity systems to protect him from the infirmities of age, the strain of a divorce from his beloved Mary Pickford, the challenge of talking pictures, and the growing realization that his son, Douglas Jr. was now a handsome rival for the public’s attention. “Jayar,” as Senior called him, was already at that time an intelligent, talented, and experienced twenty-year-old actor. He was also an acute observer of his father: “He is a man of great ego but little conceit,” he wrote at that time, “a man to whom success comes easily, but failure hard. Success is to him a habit, and he is intolerant of reverses.”3 Senior’s last movie, The Private Life of Don Juan (1934), featured a poignant confrontation between the reality of an aging Don Juan and his Introduction 4 legend, forever young. After that, his acting career finished, Douglas did the only thing he knew how to do: run harder. He traded the arrows of Robin Hood for the golf clubs of the tourist and left Hollywood. Once impatient to be a part of all things, he now lacked the patience to be part of any one thing. “Why should I spend my life in a narrow little village when there’s a whole world to amuse myself in?” he said in 1934.4 He fled the long, mocking reach of his shadow and dodged the youthful images implacably fixed on his films. But he couldn’t outrace them, and he died on December 11, 1939, at age fifty-six, his flight come to ground and his image already starting to fade. After that, for more than a decade . . . nothing. It seemed as if the American century, whose quick and energetic spirit he had embodied and promoted so strenuously all his life, forsook him. If the Fairbanks legacy were to be remembered at all, it would have to be through the revival of his films and the actions of that redoubtable keeper of the flame, his son, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. He brought the Fairbanks American century to its close, with his death in 2000. That story is in this book, too. Those of us who grew up in the 1950s didn’t know very much about Douglas Fairbanks Sr. How could we? Only a handful of modest booklength commentaries and biographies had appeared to fill the void. A gossipy, anecdotal little book from 1927 was Allene Talmey’s Doug and Young Fairbanks in pensive mood. Introduction 5 Mary and Others, which offered a collection of brief Hollywood celebrity profiles. Doug and Mary were already enjoying a mythology of their own, private as well as public, which Talmey gently debunked, writing, “Doug, the king at ease, home from the studio, and Mary, the grave queen, home from a cornerstone laying, slip back their haloes and chew peanut brittle.”5 Far more substantial in its way was another slim volume, Alistair Cooke’s Douglas Fairbanks: The Making of a Screen Character. It appeared in 1940 under the auspices of the Museum of Modern Art. Although it would prove to be highly influential to future scholars, it had been long out of print; copies were difficult to find until a facsimile edition was published in 2010. Appearing a little more than a decade later, Ralph Hancock ’s Douglas Fairbanks: The Fourth Musketeer...