Douglas Fairbanks, junior

AP

AS FAR as known, Douglas Fairbanks, junior, acted in 79 films, the first when he was 13 years old, the last when he was 72. Yet it is difficult to name a single one. What about “The Mark of Zorro”? Sorry, good try, famous film. But “Zorro”, Hollywood's big hit of 1920 (and since remade several times), starred Mr Fairbanks's father, Douglas, senior.

So Mr Fairbanks will not be remembered particularly for his acting skills. He was content to dismiss them lightly. He said he played “big roles in little pictures, and little roles in big pictures”. Nor was he a tycoon, as he was sometimes portrayed. He was clever with his earnings and people assumed that he was far richer than he was. Perhaps he never got over the shock in the early 1920s of seeing his mother race through the $500,000 ($4.3m in today's money) she received in a divorce settlement. He stuck to a wide range of sensible business interests, among them hotels, ballpoint pens and property. He was on the boards of numerous companies. The Financial Times accorded him a four-line obituary. Then again, he fancied himself as a writer, and his words were indeed his own, not ghosted. His two books, “The Salad Days”, his autobiography, and a collection of stories of his wartime adventures in the American navy, are both readable, but perhaps not enduring.

What Douglas Fairbanks excelled at was being famous. He was the most graceful and lasting of celebrities. Fame is a demanding mistress if it is to last longer than Andy Warhol's 15 minutes, and Mr Fairbanks worked hard at it. Being good-looking helped. He flattered Britain by being excessively fond of it, and for many years had a splendid London house in Kensington. Queen Elizabeth, who had made him a knight for fostering Anglo-American relations, sometimes came to dinner. The queen is easily bored at dinner parties and tends to leave for home once the pudding is disposed of. Douglas Fairbanks always kept her interested with his stories. His films may have been duds, but he had known Garbo, Hepburn and Dietrich and all the others in Hollywood's classic era. He was good company, and not just to queens, but to everyone who knew him. This was his real métier as an entertainer.

Founding a dynasty

He was born famous. Baby Douglas was photographed in the arms of his father. The elder Fairbanks perhaps felt he was founding a dynasty when he bequeathed his own first name to his son: it does seem to be an American custom. Perhaps Douglas, junior, would become a brain surgeon, perhaps even carry the name to the White House. Irritatingly, he decided to be an actor like his father. Well, not quite like him. The hero of “Zorro” was as much a gymnast as an actor. There were no fast cars on the screen in those silent days, but in the much favoured costume dramas there were fast swordsmen, and the elder Fairbanks was the fastest; and, according to contemporary accounts, the bravest. He never used a stand-in, however alarming the stunt. He became the most popular star in Hollywood, and with Mary Pickford as his wife, was reckoned to be the luckiest man in America.

Doug Junior, as he came to be called, did not feel brave. He was a disappointment to directors who wanted him to perform the sort of madcap adventures associated with the Fairbanks name. But he bravely, or obstinately, defied his father's efforts to make him give up acting. He grew into a clone of his father, tall, debonair, with even the same thin moustache. He was already starting to look the gentleman. Don't look so old, said the elder Fairbanks. “Remember I'm still in pictures.”

He had a point. The Fairbanks name was being exploited, but young Douglas was probably under pressure. His brief marriage to Joan Crawford seems to have been the idea of a publicity man: Douglas said she was humourless and spent her time knitting. Douglas could have pursued the genuinely independent career he claimed he wanted by changing his name, a common practice in Hollywood, and dropping the stupid “junior”. Fairbanks was not the family name. It was Ulman. But his father had once told a reporter that he had “no more paternal feelings than a tiger for his cub”, a careless remark that may have festered in the son's mind. Letters that young Douglas wrote to his father were merely acknowledged by a studio clerk. “I never kissed my father until he was on his death bed,” Mr Fairbanks later recalled in one of the few published remarks that revealed a private regret in what he portrayed as a blissful life.

Because of Hollywood's reputation as a city of sin, anyone closely identified with the place is assumed to be a sinner. Mr Fairbanks was said to have had affairs with Dietrich, Garbo and Gertrude Lawrence, among others. Mandy Rice-Davies, who was involved in a British sex-and-politics scandal in the 1960s, said he slept with her. He was said to have been the unidentified man with a naked Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, in a photograph produced in a divorce case.

Mr Fairbanks, who was married, apparently happily, to one woman for 50 years, neither denied nor confirmed the affairs. To have taken either course would hardly have been gentlemanly.