![]() ![]() Partly because he himself never held any great illusions about his skills as an actor, it is too easy to write off his stage career on the strength of a leading lady’s remark that he seemed like ‘a bad case of St. He appeared infrequently in later years, embarrassed to have to ask for help from his son, by this time an established stage star. Drink hastened the decline of his fortunes. When Douglas was five, his father abandoned the family. The restlessness that was later in his son afflicted him. Marriage to a divorcée client was bad for his legal career, however, and he went to Denver to prospect, taking the family with him. ![]() Ulman (born 1833) had seen service as an officer in the Civil War, and later became a distinguished lawyer, a founder and President of the U.S. Her second marriage to Edward Wilcox ended in divorce. The first, John Fairbanks, had died leaving her with a son, John. Charles Ulman, was his mother’s third husband. Still, family circumstances were not entirely propitious to a normal ideal of a happy childhood. Henceforth, athletic vigour and smiling good humour became a pattern of living for him…’ His son, Douglas Fairbanks Jnr., is inclined to discredit the stories of his taciturnity. ‘The emotional release he felt in his laughter was soon followed by the realisation, young though he was, that people preferred smiles to gloom. From this moment on, daring adventure was to be an outlet for over-abundant emotions and was to determine all the important moves in his life. ‘Obviously it was a moment of hysteria and most children of his age would have cried, but he found emotional release in laughter because the fall was a new and exciting experience. When he came round (continues Letitia) he could not stop laughing. A traumatic change came one day when (already an incorrigible climber) he fell off the roof and knocked himself out. Interestingly, his niece and biographer, Letitia Fairbanks – who presumably had her information from Fairbanks’ elder brother, her father – alleges that as a child he was so taciturn and solemn that his mother, already, as a Southerner, bothered by his dark complexion, thought he was in some way subnormal. It is hard not to respond to the grin, the verve, the ridiculous energy, the whole personality, just as his first audiences did and you recognise that when writers of the 1920s called him ‘a tonic’ they were using no loose figure of speech. After the first two or three films the magic seems to renew its potency.
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