would always tinge their relationship she added, “Mary has always been ‘Little Mother’ to the whole family. She was constantly looking after our needs. I always used to think that she imagined Jack and I were just her big dolls.”32
Mary and Frances were inordinately disciplined, arriving at the studio early every morning and staying until long after dark. They reviewed the work of the night before, went over that day’s script, and checked the costumes and the sets. It was the hardest work they had ever done, but the freedom they felt was exhilarating. There was no one they had to cajole to get their way and Mickey Neilan became more like a partner in crime than any director either of them had known before; casual, relaxed, and unthreatened. Even though Frances had carefully scripted Rebecca, they created as they went along and Mickey happily layered in their “spontaneous combustion.”
They were working with a new cameraman, Walter Stradling, and the baby spot Mary had discovered during The Poor Little Rich Girl was used to the extreme in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Yet overall there was an atmosphere of equality and their genuine affection was reflected in their nonsensical nicknames for each other; Mickey referred to Mary as “Tad” and Frances started a lifetime habit of calling her “Squeebie.” They had the time of their lives and with Mickey twenty-six, Frances twenty-eight, and Mary all of twenty-five, they were the kids who had taken over the candy store.33
If the threesome ever wanted to be reminded of what “normal” filmmaking was, they only had to look over to the next set, where Cecil B. DeMille was directing the Metropolitan Opera diva Geraldine Farrar as an Aztec princess in The Woman God Forgot. Pyramid temples and gilded, feathered costumes made their gingham dresses and the barnyard set pale in comparison and DeMille looked on them with disdain tinged with pity.34
It is difficult to imagine two directors more different in style and content than Cecil DeMille and Mickey Neilan. While both men began in the business as actors, DeMille created a flamboyant air that included dramatically capitalizing the first letter of his last name, in contrast to the rest of his family. His official title at Famous Players Lasky was “Director General” and his office featured stained-glass windows and a beamed roof reminiscent of a cathedral. DeMille stomped around his sets in knee-high boots with his megaphone, used up to a dozen portable telephones, and an entourage followed in his wake to meet any need that might arise.35
Mickey would often first appear on the set after lunch suffering the effects of a bender the night before. If Mary and Frances were initially irritated, he soon had them laughing at his excuses and in one short afternoon, he could accomplish what would take another director days.
“Mickey was one of the most delightful, aggravating, gifted, and charming human beings I have ever met. There were times when I could cheerfully have throttled him,” Mary claimed forty years later. “But I can truthfully say that no director, not even the great D. W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille, could wring the performance from me that Mickey did.” Mary would always respect DeMille as a great craftsman and he admired her as a “good trouper,” but the choice she had made was obvious.36
Frances decided DeMille was “either intensely disliked, with an element of fear thrown in, or looked up to with blind loyalty.” If she was in awe of anyone, it was his scenarist Jeanie Macpherson. Five years older than Frances, Jeanie had been born in Boston and studied opera in Paris before acting on the stage and in films for Griffith. It was suggested at the time that the love letters she sent to him were the cause of the breakup of Griffith’s first marriage. A dark, red-haired beauty, Macpherson had acted in and directed several films for Universal when DeMille cast her in The Rose of the Rancho in 1914. She started writing for him shortly thereafter and her affair with the married director was common knowledge, seemingly accepted, if not condoned, by everyone, including DeMille’s adoring wife, Constance.
Jeanie and C.B. had adjoining suites at the studio and unlike other writers who worked on the lot or in unadorned offices, hers was paneled in redwood bark to resemble the seclusion of a mountain cabin. Yet there was never any inference that Jeanie was hired because of their affair and not her talent; DeMille would have many mistresses, but few scenario writers.37
Frances was unlikely to condemn any relationship. Besides, when it came to affairs with married men, Mary Pickford was almost glowing with happiness over her relationship with Douglas Fairbanks.
Chapter 6
By the summer of 1917, Douglas Fairbanks had skyrocketed to fame. It had been a year and a half since he had met Mary and while he had been immediately taken with her, she was attracted slowly as they saw each other at various functions, often in the company of their respective spouses. They shared a unique experience in their mutual stardom and Doug sought Mary’s advice about dealing with Zukor and Lasky, but it had not been until Doug’s mother died in December of 1916 that the relationship changed from friendship to intimacy.
Doug was heading east on the train when his mother passed away in New York. They had been estranged at the end and he walked numbly through the funeral, unable to express any grief or emotion. Mary sent him a sympathy note and he called and asked if they could talk. They drove through Central Park and during their conversation, he broke down and sobbed in her arms.
How much this experience with Douglas, as Mary always called him, had to do with her burst of suicidal depression a few weeks later is speculative at best, but Mary had now seen this strong man vulnerable and she was enraptured. She would soon learn he too was the product of a fatherless family with a desperation for the limelight.1
He had been born Douglas Elton Thomas Ulman in Denver, Colorado, in 1883, the fourth and last of Ella Marsh Fairbanks Wilcox Ulman’s sons. He was her second son by her third husband, H. (for Hezekiah) Charles Ulman, the lawyer to whom she had turned while seeking a divorce from husband number two, Judge Wilcox of Georgia. Ulman left a wife and a law practice in New York to move to Denver and marry Ella, but he had traveled and drunk his way out of her life by the time Doug was five. Ella took back the last name of her first husband, John Fairbanks, who had died of tuberculosis shortly after the birth of her first son, and gave all the other boys his name as well.
Relatively dark-skinned at birth and an embarrassment to his mother, Doug learned early the joys of the attention that resulted when he recited verse, showed off his athletic abilities, or took parts in school plays. At the age of sixteen, he signed with the Frederick Warde stock company and toured the country for almost two years. In 1906, Ella joined her youngest son in New York, where he was an established actor with his name on marquees. That same year he met nineteen-year-old “plump, pretty, blonde” Beth Sully, who, as the daughter of “The Cotton King of Wall Street,” lived the lifestyle to which Doug aspired and Ella had always believed they deserved. A year later, Doug and his shy, adoring Beth were taking their honeymoon in Europe, a wedding present from her parents.2
Doug was working successfully on the New York stage when he was approached by Harry and Roy Aitken to appear on the screen. The Aitken brothers had taken the fortune they made financing The Birth of a Nation and formed the Triangle film company, uniting the popular directors D. W. Griffith, Mack Sennett, and Thomas Ince all under one roof. They combed Broadway for talent and had already signed De Wolf Hopper, Billie Burke, and Weber and Fields when they approached the lesser-known Fairbanks with an offer of $2,000 a week for ten weeks.3
He had made a dozen films since, most of them directed by John Emerson from scripts written by Anita Loos, and there was no denying his star quality. Loos and Emerson created situations that allowed him to jump and run and swing, giving vent to his natural athletic abilities and buoyant personality. In January of 1917 Doug formed his own company under the Lasky-Zukor banner and when Mary and Frances returned
