Fairbanks, Douglas, Sr. (1883-1939)

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Fairbanks, Douglas, Sr. (1883-1939)

The silent-screen star who would become famous for his tireless energy and all-American attitude was born Douglas Ulman in Denver, Colorado, in 1883. Commentator Vachel Lindsay described Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.'s on-screen persona in terms of two key concepts: architecture-in-motion and sculpture-in-motion. In the 1910s and 1920s, the star's acrobatic stealth and extroverted performance style appeared to mirror the flickering electricity and seemingly endless possibilities of the newly emerging form of moving pictures. Always known for his insistence on maintaining a good deal of control over his films, Fairbanks was one of the founders of United Artists with Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith.

After leaving his mother and stepfather behind in Colorado when he was a teenager and surviving a brief stay at Harvard, Fairbanks tried his hand on the New York stage and soon made it to Broadway. In 1907, he married Anna Beth Sully and attempted to transform himself into her father's protege, first working as an executive in the family's soap company and then as a broker on Wall Street. The couple had a son, actor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in 1909. After a handful of years trying to conform to his wife's wishes for him, Fairbanks returned to Broadway, achieving a successful comeback in He Comes up Smiling (1913).

Informed by his prejudice against the nascent industry of films, the star begrudgingly signed a contract with Triangle-Fine Arts in 1915 and made his debut in The Lamb, playing a wealthy, idle, relatively effeminate fellow who is disenchanted with life on Wall Street but decides to build himself up for the woman he loves. Fairbanks would develop this theme throughout his films of the teens, both with director Allan Dwan in films such as The Half Breed (1916) and Manhattan Madness (1916), and with director John Emerson and screenwriter Anita Loos in His Picture in the Papers (1916) and The Americano (1916).

His screen stories reinforced the philosophies he espoused in fan magazines and advice manuals (such as Laugh and Live in 1917 and Making Life Worthwhile in 1918), which followed Theodore Roosevelt's emphasis on clean living and hardy individualism. Fairbanks became a role model for young boys everywhere, evangelically touting, "To be successful you must be happy … to be happy you must be enthusiastic; to be enthusiastic you must keep mind and body active." His intense love of activity was probably easier to read about in articles or watch on screen than to confront personally. Foreign dignitaries and royal guests were obligated to accompany the star to his private gymnasium on the studio lot and endure a "basic training" which left many of them crawling to the steam room.

In 1917, Fairbanks signed on as his own producer with Artcraft films, a subsidiary of Famous Players-Lasky. There, he continued his tradition of gymnastic stunts and masculine transformation in films such as Wild and Woolly (1917), Reaching for the Moon (1917), and A Modern Musketeer (1918). He then made a move which gave him full reign over his films when he cofounded United Artists in 1919. He starred in The Mollycoddle (1920) and The Nut (1921), among others, while beginning to make the transition to the swashbuckler, a genre for which he became famous. These costume dramas, such as The Mark of Zorro (1920), The Three Musketeers (1921), and The Thief of Bagdad (1924), offered him a formula by which he could continue his traditions of physically demanding stunts and chases but tailor them for his maturing persona.

Fairbanks has been congratulated for being a star auteur, one of Hollywood's first actors to exercise control over the development and production of his films. He participated in the scripting of many of his early films under the pseudonym Elton Thomas. By the middle 1920s, he demonstrated a keen understanding of the importance of publicity, going so far as to finance a New York City screening of The Thief of Bagdad in which he reportedly had the female ushers dress in harem costumes, serve Arabian coffee in the lobby, and waft perfumes from inside the auditorium.

Fairbanks married "America's Sweetheart" Mary Pickford in 1920, and, together, they reigned over Hollywood in their palatial Pickfair estate for more than a decade. His interest in overseas travel and international celebrity associations meant that the couple made a number of renowned world tours throughout the 1920s. Later, Pickford preferred to remain settled in California, and her husband would embark on these trips with comrades and often stay in Europe for months or years at a time.

Fairbanks was relatively successful in talkies (making his sound debut with Pickford in The Taming of the Shrew in 1929), and he was named the president of the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Sciences in 1927. But, because of his international interests, he came to be viewed as something of an expatriate by 1930. The star lost public favor to an even greater extent when he was named co-respondent with British noblewoman Lady Sylvia Ashley in a divorce suit filed by Lord Ashley in 1933. An ex-chorus girl, Lady Ashley had been married three times by the time she was romantically linked with Fairbanks. The crumbling marriage of two of Hollywood's most famous stars played out turbulently in America's national press, with tabloid newspapers intercepting their private telegrams and publishing them as headlines. Pickford and Fairbanks divorced in 1936, after which he quickly married Lady Ashley and relocated to his house in Santa Monica, California. Though many of his friends said Fairbanks was content in his third marriage, it also was reported that the star spent many an afternoon sitting by the pool at Pickfair repeatedly mumbling his apologies to Pickford.

Once middle age required him to curtail his acrobatic characters, Fairbanks starred in a couple of travelogue-inspired films, Around the World in 80 Minutes (1931) and Mr. Robinson Crusoe (1932). His final film, The Private Life of Don Juan (1934), was directed by Alexander Korda and parodied the romantic image of hero Don Juan as he came to terms with his age and receding popularity, a commentary on the fleeting nature of fame notably coinciding with its star's own downward spiral.

Fairbanks died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-six. The prevailing consensus at the time was that Fairbanks had pushed his body so hard for so many years that his muscles literally turned in on him and caused his organs to degenerate.

—Christina Lane