Mary Pickford's Nightmare Honeymoon

Pickford & Fairbanks on their honeymoon

UK TOUR DAY THREE (LONDON): It was 1920. Mary Pickford was the most famous woman in the world. She'd been born in Toronto in the late 1800s: on University Avenue — where Sick Kids is now — and made her stage debut as a young girl at the prestigious Princess Theatre on King Street. Her early days here launched a career that took her all the way to Broadway and then to Hollywood where she became one the greatest silent film stars of all-time. She was at the height of her career in those early days of cinema when the movies were redefining what it meant to be famous. Her golden curls became a global icon. One columnist went so far as to call her "the most famous woman who has ever lived".

Now, Pickford had fallen in love with another one of the most famous movie stars ever: Douglas Fairbanks. They were married in a small, private ceremony outside Los Angeles. Their honeymoon would take them to England and to Europe. And it would be unlike anything the world had ever seen.

At first, the couple was worried about what people might think. Pickford had recently been divorced — a scandal back in those days. But they needn't have worried. The world was longing for good news after the horrors of the First World War. The idea of a real-life fairytale love story would do quite nicely.

It was raining when their ship docked at Southampton. But that didn't stop a huge crowd from gathering to greet the newly weds. It started before they even got off the boat. Airplanes flew by overhead, parachuting garlands of roses and sacks of fan mail onto the decks below. When the couple disembarked, it was chaos. Fans threw flowers. The stars were welcomed onto a dais with the mayor. An escort of 30 police officers was needed to get them safety through the crowd and into their waiting train. 

That was nothing. London was up next.

It was a near riot when the train pulled into Waterloo Station. The crowd pushed through the barricades and surrounded the couple's carriage. When it finally did break free and made it all the way to Piccadilly — to the Ritz Hotel where Pickford and Fairbanks were staying, and where I left a dream for her during the Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour — it was the beginning of a siege. Thousands of people crammed into the streets around the hotel, hoping to catch a glimpse of the couple. Traffic was staled for miles in all directions. They say even King George couldn't get by; his limousine had to wait a full twenty minutes before it could push through the crowd. The newly weds did their best to give the people what they wanted. They waved out their window to their fans. Fairbanks even climbed out onto a balustrade and straddled it like a hero. 

The Ritz Hotel

But things were quickly getting out of hand. That night, Pickford and Fairbanks went to a play in the West End. They were delayed by the crowds and were late arriving. When they did finally get there, the play was interrupted by a ten-minute standing ovation for the Hollywood couple. Fairbanks was forced to give a speech from their seats in the Royal Box before the play was allowed to continue.

They say Fairbanks seemed to be enjoying himself, but Pickford was starting to get tired of it all. So at one point, on the advice of a doctor, they took a brief break from London, heading to a friend's house in the country. Even that didn't work. When Pickford opened her window in her nightgown, there was a crowd of admirers perched on the wall outside. They broke into applause.

Things finally came to a head at the Theatrical Garden Party. It was an annual event held in London on the grounds of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea. Celebrities were invited to organize tents, selling their wares for charity. Famous film stars told fortunes or sold hats or made tea to raise money for an orphanage.

But Pickford and Fairbanks were a whole new kind of famous. Never mind running a tent, they could barely even get out of their car. When they pulled up to the party in their Rolls Royce convertible, they were mobbed yet again. This time, as Pickford shook hands with her fans, they nearly pulled her from the vehicle. She lost her cloak. Fairbanks had to grab her by the ankles to keep her from being swallowed up and crushed. They were, said The New York Times, "besieged by all sides. Well dressed women seemed suddenly to have lost their heads... all mad to shake her hand... There was a frightened look on her face as the mob became more and more pressing in its attentions, and for a brief second or two she appeared to have been pressed down to the ground." As the police fought off the mob, Fairbanks swept in and lifted his new bride into his arms, up onto his shoulders, and rushed her inside the Garden Party.

The frenzy still wasn't over; the crowd followed them. In her Pickford biography, Eileen Whitfield describes the scene: "As hundreds of rioters crashed the turnstiles, Mary, to her horror, saw a branch approaching. She was winded by a limb and scratched before Fairbanks, on whom she perched, swooped down. Next, in a rare ungraceful moment, he crashed into a tent serving buns and jam and the canvas came down around their ears. Fairbanks emerged again, holding his bewildered bride..." They raced back to their car and sped off to safety. "Fans threw themselves at the hood, the doors, and the dashboard as they drove away."

Fairbanks later called it "a lynch mob — except that it was smiling." Pickford tried to be more diplomatic: "You British people are so wonderful," she said. "You don't do things by halves."

London was stunned. And embarrassed. As the newly weds headed off to continue their trip, letters flooded in to the city's newspapers. Editorials struggled to understand the new phenomenon. "Imagine," one wrote, "if at the heyday of Charles Dickens's popularity, when an impatient public waited eagerly for each instalment [sic] of his stories... all the humble heroines of his creation had suddenly come to town. Well, that is what has happened now."

But England was only the first stop on the honeymoon. Pickford and Fairbanks headed from there to the Continent, where in France and Italy and Switzerland, it was all the same. In Paris, Pickford had to hide among the carcasses in the freezer of a butcher shop to avoid being swarmed. She eventually had to climb out over the cages of meat. The newspapers compared the riots in France to the storming of the Bastille. Finally, the film stars gave up on daylight altogether. They did the rest of their sightseeing under the cover of darkness.

By the time they returned home to Beverly Hills, it was clear: modern celebrity culture had arrived.

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A dream for Mary Pickford at the Ritz

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Read more posts about The Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour and the connections between the history of Toronto and the United Kingdom here. 

You can read some of Eileen Whitfield's Pickford biography, Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood, on Google Books here. You can buy it here or borrow it from the Toronto Public Library here.

There are lots of great photos to accompany this post, but I haven't included them above because the places that have posted them have watermarked them and claim they own the copyright (although I'm pretty sure that's bullshit): at the Garden Party, the crowd outside the Ritz, waving from their window at the Ritz (which is exactly where I left the dream), arriving in London, in their car, plus the house where Mary Pickford was born on University Avenue, her with her family in Toronto, and her during her very first year performing in Toronto.

You can read newspapers reports from the honeymoon by The New York Times, The Daily Express, The Malborough Express and The Galveston Daily News. The New York Times also more about their time in Europe here. 

I've got another post about Mary Pickford's life and career here.

This post is related to dream 04 The Silver King Mary Pickford, 1900

Elizabeth Taylor's Love Nest

Cleopatra was a BIG movie. It had lavish sets. Elaborate costumes. Thousands of extras. It was the most expensive film ever made. It ran more than four hours long. It won four Oscars, earned more money at the box office than any other movie in 1963 and still managed to lose tens of millions of dollars. But nothing about it was as big as its stars. Elizabeth Taylor, hailed as one of world's most beautiful women (um, see left), became the highest paid actress in Hollywood when she signed on to play the title role. And starring alongside her as Marc Antony was one of the most respected thespians of his time: Richard Burton.

To the joy of paparazzi everywhere, the two fell in love. They were gorgeous, tempestuous, alcoholic, entertaining. Their director said working with them was "like being locked in a cage with two tigers." Every twist and turn in their relationship became international news.

The whole thing was a little less fun for their spouses. Burton had been married for more than a decade; Taylor, 28, was already on her fourth husband. Neither marriage would last much longer. When Burton's wife saw the way he acted with his co-star on the set of Cleopatra, she fled—not just the set, but the entire country. They were divorced by the end of 1963.

But this was back in the days when divorces were super-hard to get, so they'd had to go to Mexico for it. And Taylor's was taking even longer. That was a problem. Burton, you see, was returning to the stage in a John Gielgud-directed production of Hamlet. It was debuting in Toronto at the O'Keefe Centre. Which meant that since the two lovers didn't want to be away from each other, they would be living here. Together. For eight weeks. In sin.

They arrived in January of 1964 and took over a five-room suite on the eighth floor of the King Edward Hotel. (Good luck finding a newspaper article that doesn't refer to it as a love nest.) And oh man, did some people freak out.  There was no shortage of religious nutjobs back in the early 1960s. The Vatican had already denounced Taylor's "erotic vagrancy". Judgmental teenagers showed up at the hotel with signs saying creepy things like "Drink not the wine of adultery" and "She walks among your children". A congressman in the States even suggested that Burton's U.S. visa should be revoked.

Taylor & Burton at the King Edward Hotel

But the prudes were fighting a losing battle. There were more fans than picketers. The Star even ran an editorial defending the couple. And then one day, when Taylor came down from their suite to meet Burton for lunch, there he was, sitting at their usual table in the Sovereign Ballroom. It was strangely deserted; he'd reserved the entire room so that he could propose.

Nine days after Taylor's own Mexican divorce was finalized, the couple were married—in Montreal, since Ontario wouldn't recognize their quickie, foreign divorces. A couple of days later, they were back in Toronto showing off their wedding rings. The minister who performed the ceremony would be getting angry phone calls for weeks.

A few days after they got back, Taylor and Burton were off to the States; Hamlet opened on Broadway. Over the course of the '60s, they'd make seven movies together and drink and fight and write passionate love letters declaring their undying love. He called her "a poem", "unquestionably gorgeous", "extraordinarily beautiful" and also "famine, fire, destruction and plague". They divorced in 1974. Remarried in 1975. Then divorced again in 1976. That would be for the last time; a few years later he was dead.

When she came home from the memorial service, there was one last love letter waiting for her in the mail. He'd written it three days before he died, asking her to give him one more chance. In one of the last interviews she gave before she died in 2011, she said it was still there, where she kept it, in the drawer beside her bed.

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Crowds gawk at Taylor & Burton in their car outside the King Edward (via the Toronto Archives)

 
I cobbled most of this story together from articles in the Toronto Star and on the CBC, which you can read here and here and here. And there's more about them (with more passionate quotes) here and here and here.
  

"The Best Known Woman Who Has Ever Lived"

Mary Pickford

In the days before University Avenue was extended south of Queen, there was a row of buildings where there's now the intersection at King Street. One of them was the Princess Theatre. Built in the late 1800s, the Princess was the first prestigious home for "legitimate" theatre in Toronto—and the only one until the Royal Alex opened down the street almost twenty years later. It brought all the biggest plays and most famous stars to the city. And in the year 1900, the Princess was showing a melodrama called The Silver King, which featured a small role for a young girl played by one Gladys Smith. It was the first time she had ever appeared on stage, but before too long, she'd be the most famous actress in the world.

She'd been born just a few years earlier and just a few blocks away, in a modest house on University, where Sick Kids is now. Her father died when she was four and her mother was talked into letting her children act as a way to bring in a little more money. She was hesitant—acting wasn't considered a respectable profession—but her daughter Gladys fell in love with it. She appeared in plays around Toronto before touring the States as a teenager and eventually landing in New York City on Broadway. It was there that a producer convinced her to change her name to Mary Pickford.

And it was there that her rise to fame really got started. She caught the attention of D.W. Griffith, a film director who would soon prove to be one of the most important men in the history of cinema. In a few years, he would make his "masterpiece", the unbelievably racist The Birth of A Nation, a silent epic about the founding of the KKK, whose members are portrayed as heroic figures battling a bunch of people in blackface. It was the highest grossing movie of all-time and such a landmark in the history of film technique that film schools still force students to sit through all three painful hours of it.

Griffith and Pickford made a powerful team. They produced 42 films together. In their first year. They helped prove that feature-length films could make money and though Pickford wasn't credited at first (no actors were back then), people were soon talking about the girl with the golden curls. As the popularity of film soared, and cinemas sprang up not only across the United States but the globe, her popularity  and power soared with it. Frustrated by the studios' stranglehold on the industry, she, Griffith, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks teamed up to form their own distribution company for independent films: United Artists. The very next year, Pickford would divorce her abusive, alcoholic husband. She and Fairbanks were in love. They got married and became Hollywood's first celebrity couple.

By then, Pickford was already one of the most famous people in the entire world—as far as actors go, they say only Chaplin rivaled her popularity. They called her "America's Sweetheart". One overzealous reporter even declared that she was "The best known woman who has ever lived, the woman who was known to more people and loved by more people than any other woman that has been in all history." Her honeymoon in Europe with her new husband caused riots when they were spotted in London and Paris. And when they returned home to the States, taking the train back across the country to Hollywood, huge crowds gathered to watch them go by. They say that after that, when foreign heads of state came to the White House, they also asked if they could visit the Pickfair estate in Beverly Hills, where Pickford and Fairbanks were playing host to dinner guests like Albert Einstein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Amelia Earhart, Noel Coward and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

But then came the talkies. Sound films left countless silent stars behind, as they couldn't, or wouldn't, adjust. And for Pickford, who believed that adding soundtracks to movies was "like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo", it was a disaster. It didn't help one bit that she picked that very same time to pull a Keri Russell—cutting her beloved blonde curls in favour of a short bob. It was front page news in the New York Times. Her popularity plummeted.

In 1933, with her films making less and less money, she retired from acting. And three years after that, she and Fairbanks were divorced. (He'd had an affair with an English actress with a thing for rich and famous men—her other husbands included a baron, an earl, a Georgian prince/race car driver and Clark Gable.) Pickford kept producing movies, remarried and adopted children. But she was a cold and distant mother, became an alcoholic and died in 1979.

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Despite all that "America's Sweetheart" business, Pickford was still a Canadian at heart. She called herself "a real Torontonian" and fought to regain her Canadian citizenship later in life—although it turned out she'd never lost it. You can hear her talking about her memories of growing up in the city (and her love of biking downtown—take that Ford!) in a radio interview she did with the CBC in 1959, here. "At least once a month I dream I'm back again in Toronto, up in Queen's Park, High Park, up north on Yonge Street..."

You can watch clips from some of her silent films here, on the PBS website. And some of my favourite photos of her are here (with a bear cub), here (with a kitten) and here (with her short hair).

You can read more about the Princess Theatre and the fire that destroyed it in one of Jamie Bradburn's Historicist columns for Torontoist, here. Or about the theatre's rivalry with the Royal Alex, here.

If you're interested, you can watch a particularly offensive six-minute clip of The Birth of A Nation, here. And if you're really masochistic, you can watch all three hours of racist bullshit, here.


Update: Silent Toronto just published a post about the reaction in Toronto to The Birth of A Nation here. (Hint, apparently the Star's headline read: “Colored people appear to be only opponents of the film”. Ugh.

This post is related to dream 04 The Silver King Mary Pickford, 1900