Socially Fairbanks is just as full of dash as he is on the screen. He is a delightful mimic. He talks well and he talks with great emphasis. Frequently he tosses off a phrase distinguished for verbal nicety or real wit. For it must be remembered that Douglas Fairbanks brings to his profession a much greater educational and cultural equipment than the average screen performer.
Doug likes to surprise by his remarks. Occasionally when listening to him I have had the feeling that he was opening one of those paper favours—first the snap as he tears it apart and then the whimsical paper cap. For example, he once said, “Yes, ‘The Three Musketeers’ was all right, but there were two miscasts. One of them was D’Artagnan.”
Did he really mean it? Perhaps he did; perhaps he really thought, as he afterward explained, that D’Artagnan should have been a “thin, spidery little fellow.” However, that one should have been in any doubt is sufficient comment. Indeed, it must be admitted even by one who has genuine respect for his big achievements and an equally genuine liking for his personality that Doug sometimes has the air of saying things for effect. Certainly he is more self-conscious, more mannered then is Mary Pickford.
To grasp the essence of Fairbanks it seems to me that you must think of “Sentimental Tommy.” As he works out his gigantic historical films he is exactly like Barrie’s boy hero playing with Corp and Shadrach in the den. There is no doubt about it. He thoroughly believes that he is in truth Robin Hood or D’Artagnan. To him, therefore, work is one long engrossing game of make-believe; and if “Sentimental Tommy’s” “methinks”—that one magical utterance which changed the entire atmosphere from the literal to the romantic—sometimes pursues Fairbanks to the drawing-room one can forgive this self-dramatisation to the man who has given us such unforgettable pictures of ages far removed from our own.
Chapter Sixteen
RODOLPH VALENTINO
When in Hollywood about four years ago I learned to know by sight a young man who frequently stood around in the lobby of the Hotel Alexandria. He was very dark and slim, and his eyes had the sombreness of the Latin. I was especially struck by the grace of his walk and of his gestures. Even when he leaned up against a cigar-case he did it with a certain stateliness, and you felt that the column of some ruined temple overlooking the Mediterranean would have been much more appropriate than his present background.
Quite evidently he was looking for a job. In fact, before I was introduced to him I heard him approaching various people in the industry.
“Anything doing to-day?” “Have you finished casting So-and-So?” “When do you start shooting?” These questions, so familiar in the lobby of a Hollywood hotel, were made more touching in his case by a very naïve manner, by a slightly foreign accent. He always looked so eager when he put the question and so disappointed when he got the answer.
Not long ago when I was in Hollywood I saw this same young man at a near-by seashore resort. On this day he was in a bathing-suit, and he was leading three police-dogs. The dogs were not a protective measure, but certainly the scene that day might have warranted some sort of guard. For as the young man walked out toward the waves, as the sun shone on his swarthy skin, the hundreds of women and girls who had come to Long Beach pressed onward for a more satisfactory glimpse of the bather. And as they did so an awed whisper passed through the feminine multitude.