Free Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) by Michael Sragow

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,
Trian gle’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