Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [35]
Before dinners at Pickfair, Fairbanks would take their male guests for a Turkish bath at the studio. Evening entertainment was often a movie; Douglas’s little mongrel might perform tricks. Despite its extravagance—Pickfair introduced Hollywood to “a land of vintage wine and caviar in iced swan boats, glittering jewels and French chefs, aviaries and peacocks in formal gardens”—there was very little drinking and no “jazzing.” “You couldn’t take off your shoes and dance” there, said one friend. Mary herself danced sedately only with her husband who was notoriously jealous. After their marriage he said firmly that, from now on, America’s Sweetheart would just be his sweetheart.
Douglas Fairbanks was unusual in Hollywood in that his family background was middle-class although, like Mary, his father had abandoned his mother when he was a small child. After more than a decade acting on Broadway Fairbanks moved to Hollywood in 1915 where, working with the writer-director team of Anita Loos and her future husband John Emerson, he quickly became a star. Like Pickford he was an astute operator, making it his business to understand movies inside out. On screen Fairbanks gave off an almost tangible physical radiance that was a projection more of his genuine exuberance and virility than of any acquired acting skills. Tall, strong, athletic, darkly tanned, glowing with health, Fairbanks always appeared decent and honorable, and never took himself too seriously.
United, Pickford and Fairbanks were an even bigger draw than they had been as individual stars. When they traveled to New York and Europe in the months following their wedding, vast and uncontrollable crowds formed at their public appearances. In Paris, two butchers saved Pickford from being crushed by the mob at the market of Les Halles by locking her into a meat cage until the gendarmerie arrived to escort her to safety. Even English aristocrats were in thrall to their glamour: the leaders of the rich bohemian set, the Earl and Countess of Milford Haven and their younger brother and sister-in-law, Lord and Lady Louis Mountbatten, who honeymooned at Pickfair, wooed the Fairbankses on their visits to London. Their friend Charlie Chaplin said their manner with the “exalted” was wonderful.
In Hollywood their status was assured: Mary and Douglas were “Hollywood royalty.” People instinctively stood up when Pickford entered the room. As the film actress Joan Crawford put it, although the newspaper magnate W. R. Hearst was richer than the Fairbankses and his California estate, San Simeon, far larger and more opulent than Pickfair, Marion Davies (Hearst’s mistress) “was always just one of the gals, and Hearst put the catsup bottle on the table, but Mary was a queen and everyone knew it.”
But despite the majestic image she projected, the reality of Mary Pickford’s life was far from serene. Her mother had a decided weakness for whisky; her sister Lottie (whose great friend was Dutch Talmadge) was a party girl who dabbled in cocaine and eventually married four times; her brother Jack was a charming boozer. Once her marriage with Fairbanks broke down in the early 1930s, following revelations of his affair with a British model and actress, Sylvia Ashley, Mary finally surrendered to her genetic inheritance; she would struggle with alcoholism for the rest of her life. This contrast between a carefully controlled public image and a chaotic private life was far from rare in twenties Hollywood.
Behind the Zenith-like façade of respectability cultivated by Pickford and Fairbanks, Hollywood was alive with easy money, sex, bootleg liquor and drugs. In many ways Los Angeles was still a frontier town. Charlie Chaplin remembered hearing coyotes howl at night in Beverly Hills when he first arrived there in the mid- 1910s. Violence was commonplace. Screenwriter Elinor Glyn was shocked to hear isolated shots and cries ringing out in the balmy night air. After dinners