His Picture in the Papers (1916)

Just two pictures into his movie career, Douglas Fairbanks was already creating a place for himself as one of American cinema’s biggest stars. While in early 1916, he might not have quite ranked alongside Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, he was catching up fast. Fairbanks embodied the breathless pace of early 20th Century American life. The world was changing, casting off its Victorian shackles and marching towards a future filled with promise. Social reform and industrialisation were transforming the country, and at the forefront of change was Fairbanks, an irrepressible powerhouse charging forward, the positive embodiment of healthy masculinity.

Fairbanks’ third film, His Picture in the Papers (1916), helped to crystallise the essence of both the man and the performer – unlike many stars, the two personas were virtually interchangeable. It was written by twenty-six-year-old Anita Loos, a precocious talent who sold her first scenario to Lubin – an unproduced short called The Earl and the Tomboy – while barely out of her teens. Griffith based his 1912 short The New York Hat on her scenario, which Biograph had bought for $25. After working for Biograph, she followed Griffith to Mutual and then to Triangle. There she met her future husband, the director John Emerson.

Loos’ recollections of her early years in Hollywood are notoriously unreliable: she claimed to have sold her first scenario when she was twelve. Film historians have comprehensively discredited many of her claims, and that which has not we must regard with a pinch of salt. In her biography, Kiss Hollywood Good-by, Loos recalled that her future husband happened upon a stack of her un-filmed scenarios and admired what she described as their ‘refreshing impudence’. She continued: “Presently he came across a story that poked fun at our American aristocracy. It had been inspired by Hollywood’s neighboring community of Pasadena, a winter resort for snobbish families whose lineage had been established by brand names such as Heinz Pickles, Smith Brothers’ Cough Drops, and Chalmers underwear.”

Emerson took the script to Griffith, saying he wanted to make it into a picture for Fairbanks. He and the actor were friends; they knew each other when Fairbanks was on Broadway and were both members of the Lambs, a New York theatrical club. The eminent director warned Emerson against it: “If you study it,” he said, “you’ll notice that most of the laughs are in the dialogue which can’t be photographed.” When Emerson asked why Griffith had bought the scripts, the director replied, “Because they make me laugh!” Griffith eventually agreed to Emerson’s request, with a warning, according to Loos, to complete the film before Fairbanks’ option was due, as it was not to be renewed. In fact, Fairbanks had by then already signed a three-year contract with Triangle for $2,000 per week, rising by $500 every six months.

They filmed His Picture in the Papers at Fine Arts’ studio in Yonkers, New York, far from Griffith, who was immersed in making Intolerance (1916). Fairbanks had been keen to return East: Hollywood offered little in the way of nightlife, and he may have sensed that Griffith didn’t like him. He arrived in New York with his wife, Beth, and son Douglas Jr., on Saturday, 2nd October 1915. Emerson also felt more comfortable in New York, away from the Californian heat and surrounded by his friends at the Lambs and the Friars clubs. He once again engaged as an assistant Erich von Stroheim, who had worked as an advisor and assistant director on Emerson’s Old Heidelberg, and took pleasure in introducing the young Austrian to such leading theatrical figures as the Barrymores, David Belasco, George M. Cohan and Charles Frohman. In addition to his role as assistant director on His Picture in the Papers, von Stroheim played a menacing gang member, complete with an eye patch, paralysed arm, and single black glove. With his closely cropped hair and sombre countenance, von Stroheim looked every inch the villain – so much, in fact, that while sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Astor, he was invited to the manager’s office by a plain-clothes detective who had mistaken him for an escapee from Sing Sing! In a letter to his biographer Peter Noble, he later recalled filming the scene in which he was thrown from a train by Fairbanks. Von Stroheim had recruited six artillery men from a nearby munitions factory to run alongside the train with a net to break his fall. Conscious that his name and shaven head often caused him problems while the war in Europe was ongoing, the Austrian bought them drinks to get into their good graces. Unfortunately, the men drank so much that they failed to catch him, and he was knocked unconscious. Emerson insisted on several takes, and von Stroheim told Noble, “I was practically out of action for many days afterwards. Naturally Emerson used only the first take. Directors are such queer people.”