In love with this picture
I am a woman.
Happy birthday to Douglas Fairbanks, who was probably Chaplin’s closest friend in Hollywood.
Below is a recollection from Mary Pickford of their friendship:
I think that the most moving and human memory I have of Charlie is his grief over Douglas’s passing in December 1939. I had called him in Los Angeles from Chicago … never dreaming that he would come to the phone … To my great surprise Charlie answered the phone himself … We talked about an hour. Charlie reminisced warmly and volubly about the happy days the three of us had spent together. I realized then, perhaps as I had never before, how very deep the friendship of Charlie and Douglas had been.
“I’ve lost the inspiration and incentive to make pictures, Mary,” he said.
“You mustn’t say that, Charlie. Douglas would be furious with you.”
“You know how much I depended upon his enthusiasm. You remember how I always showed my pictures first to Douglas.”
“Yes, Charlie, I can still hear Douglas laughing so heartily he couldn’t look at the screen. Remember those coughing fits he’d get at that moment?”
“More than anything else I remember this, Mary: whenever I made a particular scene I would always anticipate the pleasure it would give Douglas.”
It all came back to me how Douglas used to treat Charlie like a younger brother, listening patiently and intently, hours on end, to his repetitious stories, which frankly bored me to extinction. Charlie had a way of developing his scenarios by repeating them over and over again to his most intimate friends – testing them privately on people he had faith in. Only then would he put them on film … I heard a catch in Charlie’s voice.
“Mary, I couldn’t bear to see them put that heavy stone over Douglas.”
(An excerpt from “My unpredictable partner” by Mary Pickford)
