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

necessarily great reputations who were expected to be intelligent, responsible and knowledgeable aides, “super-assistants,” day-to-day, hour-by-hour coordinators and executives on the set, but who were also clearly required to follow my father’s instructions. In short, while he encouraged the honest expression of views and welcomed their reactions, he always reserved the right to overrule them.
     
    Fairbanks, however, did permit collaboration in ways his friend Charlie Chaplin didn’t. Dwan considered Fairbanks one of his favorite actors; he guided Doug through swift early melodramas as well as his epic
Robin Hood.
But Dwan said, “You had to keep working with him, he’d lose the character.” Fairbanks would strike a pose with one arm signaling at stars and the other pointed to the ground, and Dwan would ask him, “What the hell was that? What’s in your other hand?” Dwan acknowledged that Fairbanks “did a lot of creating, a lot of the stories, the movements, the gags,” but also insisted, “We all did. Vic Fleming was our cameraman and he used to come up with ideas, too. Sometimes we’d invent them at the spur of the moment.”
    Fairbanks could be temperamental. Dwan called him that “very actorish, petulant, shrewd, creative man.” Even his son admitted, “If something went wrong, he was quick off the trigger. When a dog bit me, he damn near killed it (pause)—matter of fact, I’m not sure he didn’t.” So the members of his entourage both kept him on an even keel, cushioning his down moods and jealousies, and provided invaluable sounding boards. “Douglas Fairbanks was a man who never read
anything,
” said Margaret Case Harriman, daughter of the Algonquin Hotel owner and Fairbanks friend, Frank Case. Fairbanks’s practice “was to glance at [scripts] rapidly and then hand them over to someone more fond of reading than he.” As Dwan noted, his performing demanded constant attention, because otherwise he’d revert to stances he learned from public-school declamation exercises.
    Fairbanks Jr. declared that his father carefully separated his work and home lives, but he also stated that Douglas senior’s closest friends included the screenwriter and script editor Tom J. Geraghty and Kenneth Davenport, an ex-actor who wrote the script for
The Nut,
served as Fairbanks’s secretary, and reportedly ghostwrote some of Fairbanks’s inspirational writings, such as
Laugh and Live.
Fairbanks’s best movies were the happy results of on-the-spot creative teamwork. It’s no diminution of Doug’s talent to say that he had to rely on others to come into his own. They included creative friends like Geraghty and Davenport, Dwan and Fleming, and, of course, Beth Sully Fairbanks. Angel-faced Bessie Love, his frequent co-star and for a time Fleming’s own girlfriend, took notice of Beth’s influence. Love first worked with Doug and Beth on Dwan’s
Good Bad Man
(from Fairbanks’s own scenario), about a cowboy Robin Hood who gives stolen money to illegitimate children because he mistakenly believes he
was
one: “It was no secret that she was not exactly wearing the pants, but [was] the manager. She was a little bit stern, a little bit the manageress. But never mind, she was a good one.”
    Dwan and Fleming shot the pictorially ravishing
The Half-Breed,
written by Loos from a Bret Harte story, “In the Carquinez Woods,” in the big-tree country of Calaveras and Tuolumne counties. Doug portrayed a mixed-blood frontiersman as one of Nature’s noblemen. Beth, determined that her husband not be seen as “a dirty savage,” nudged the director toward opening the film with Fairbanks emerging from a river bath in an Indian thong. Big-star beefcake was born.
    John Emerson and Anita Loos barreled into Fairbanks’s destiny when Emerson rifled through a pile of scenarios gathering mites in Griffith’s studio and tumbled on some sassy work by Loos, full of cutting-edge parody and horseplay. Emerson was