For Whom the Wedding Bells Toll
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Elinor Fair shot to stardom as the leading lady of Cecil B. DeMille's The Volga Boatman in 1926. She and her co-star William Boyd fell in love, and they married that same year.
The stardom was short-lived, though, and subsequent films drew little attention. The marriage ended in 1929. By that time, her career was quickly fading.
She made headlines in December 1932, when she abruptly eloped to Yuma, Arizona, with former naval aviator Thomas Daniels. The marriage was her reaction to a quarrel with her real fiancee, a stunt pilot named Frank Clark. "Miss Fair and I were to be married," Clark informed reporters, speculating that she "merely made a little mistake. I know why she did it." He declined to elaborate.
The next day, Fair filed for an annulment. "I was blue after I quarrelled with Frank Clark, my sweetheart," she said, "and I thought I'd show him how smart I was. It was just a big mistake." She also indicated that her engagement to Clark was on again. Meanwhile, the dejected Daniels was arrested and charged with paying for their elopement flight to Yuma with a bad check. The divorce was granted on January 17. According to Daniels, Fair had left him five hours after their wedding.
Later that year of 1933, it was reported that "Elinor Fair, who only a few years ago was a popular leading woman," appeared as an extra in the Claudette Colbert film Torch Singer.
Surprisingly, in July 1934 Fair and Thomas Daniels got married again. The following March, she filed for divorce, charging that her husband was in the habit of staying away from home for "three or four days at a time."
Life began falling apart. The Associated Press reported in September 1936 that the former star was destitute and ailing, and that she and her mother had come within one hour of being evicted from the Hollywood apartment they shared, when Elinor's ex-husbands came to the rescue. Daniels appeared with enough money to keep the roof over their heads, and William Boyd, now known to a new generation as Hopalong Cassidy, arranged for her medical care.
But the spiral continued. Three months later, she was found by police some distance from home, dazed and wandering about at five o'clock in the morning, unable to give her name or tell how she'd gotten there. She was taken to the hospital, where she seemed to regain her senses after a few hours. Dr. E. E. Carroll told a reporter, "When we asked her for her address, she said, 'It doesn't matter anyway, the rent will be up at noon.'" She made a few phone calls, then slipped away from the hospital.
There was a new marriage in August 1941, to actor-bodybuilder Jack White, but it was all over in December 1943. White was granted an annulment after charging that his wife spent their marriage continuously intoxicated.
Elinor Fair passed away in April 1957, just 53 years old.
(Oakland Tribune, December 28, 1932 and March 12, 1935; Sheboygan Journal, December 29, 1932; [Jefferson City, Missouri] News and Tribune, August 27, 1933; Modesto Bee and News-Herald, May 30, 1934; LaCrosse Tribune and Leader-Express, September 24, 1936; Modesto Bee and News-Herald, September 25, 1936; Ogden Standard-Examiner, December 14, 1936; [Canandaigua NY] Daily Messenger, November 8, 1941; Billings Gazette, January 2, 1944.)
Move over, Britney and Lindsay. Elinor Fair got here first.
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In the space of just a year or so, the movies sent a lot of mixed signals to the marriage-minded, judging by titles like:
Please Get Married (1919)
Don’t Ever Marry (1920)
Don’t Change Your Husband (1919)
Why Change Your Wife? (1920)
Why Leave Your Husband? (1920)
Marry My Wife (1919)
(American Film Institute, Catalog of Feature Films, 1911-1920, and the Internet Movie Database.)
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Mary Astor wed film supervisor Kenneth Hawks in 1928. The groom was 31 years old, his bride 21.
The brother of director Howard Hawks, Kenneth became a director himself the following year.
It would be a short career. On January 2, 1930, three small airplanes left Clover Field (now the Santa Monica Airport), and flew out over the Pacific. Two of them were camera planes, equipped to shoot footage of the third plane in mid-air. Hawks was in one of the camera planes, his assistant director Max Gold in the other. Their planes were flying into the late-afternoon sun, one closely above the other, and evidently the pilots didn't realize how close together they were. When one plane banked toward the right and the other banked to the left, their wingtips touched.
Observers in a boat below saw what happened. The two planes were somehow locked together at the point where the wings touched. One plane swung in mid-air, pivoting sharply on its wingtip and crashing head-on into the other plane. Instantly there was an explosion, and the machines plunged into the sea. There were no survivors.
Hawks' body was recovered about 300 feet down, beneath a wing of one of the wrecks.
On January 8, his ashes were scattered at sea over the location of the crash, as Mary Astor watched from the palisades along the shore.
The film that he'd been directing was nearly finished when the accident happened. It was released only a couple of months later as Such Men Are Dangerous.
(Woodland [California] Daily Democrat, January 3, 1930; [Helena, Montana] Indpendent, January 9, 1930.)
A happier day: February 23, 1928.
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The Bells Are Ringing
The wedding day of Pola Negri and Count Eugene Dombski, 1919. Considering their less-than-thrilled expressions, you won't be shocked to know that the marriage lasted only a couple of years.
Jean Harlow marries writer-producer Paul Bern, July 2, 1932. It ended with a gunshot on September 5 of that year. It may have been suicide; it may have been his disturbed ex-wife.
The wedding day of Jobyna Ralston and Richard Arlen, January 28, 1927. She divorced him on September 4, 1945, charging that he'd left her on August 15, 1938.
Bebe Daniels' wedding day, June 14, 1930. Her marriage to Ben Lyon lasted a lifetime, until her death on March 16, 1971.
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Well, a blog is nothing if not a place for crackpot opinions, so I may as well reprint a post I wrote this week over at www.SilentComedians.com.
Harry Langdon's self-produced films released through First National (1926-1928) have long been the subject of debate, because the early ones (with Frank Capra on board) have been acclaimed so highly, whereas the later ones (after Capra's dismissal) seem to please just the Langdon buffs, and sometimes not even them. The easiest conclusion to jump to is that Langdon was lost without Capra, that he went from Comedy Genius to Miserable Failure overnight. But I think there's a lot more to consider, and this was my take on it:
Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd were completely independent, and could spend as much time and money producing a film as they wanted to. Buster Keaton was less independent, but he could still destroy a locomotive if that's what it took to make a scene work.
Langdon was locked into a contract with First National that required him to deliver a certain number of films meeting certain conditions. Lacking the wealth of a Chaplin or a Lloyd, he was dependent upon fixed cash advances from FN in order to finance those films.
When his early features ran over budget, there were correspondingly smaller advances with which to make the later ones. To me, THE CHASER looks like the perfect example of a film that was made too quickly on too small a budget. But there was no other way it could be made.
It's still got more laughs in it than all the Johnny Hines films I've seen put together (and I like Johnny Hines), but there was no chance that it was going to be on a par with TRAMP TRAMP TRAMP, any more than Buster Keaton's 1950s TV show was going to compare with SHERLOCK JR. Having Capra or Harry Edwards on board wouldn't have made much of a difference.
The only thing that could have saved those later Langdons was if the earlier ones had scored huge grosses. But First National was in trouble by late 1927. Not only were there fewer dollars in the box office, there were fewer box offices! Paramount was poaching many of the strongest theaters in First National's chain, which forced the company first to cut loose all of its independent producer-stars, and then to sell itself out to Warners.
Here's a surprise for you. In December 1927, FN announced that within six months it would release only its own films, dropping those produced by the independents who'd been releasing through that company. But it also announced that *one* of those independents would continue to release through First National. That one independent who escaped the chopping block wasn't Constance Talmadge, or Ken Maynard, or Johnny Hines... it was Harry Langdon.
Now, whether that was because of the company's confidence in him (in spite of LONG PANTS), or because of contractual obligations, I don't know. But Harry was the last survivor of a ten-year legacy of producer-stars that had begun with Chaplin and Pickford.
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And that'll do it for this week. Thanks for reading... see you again next weekend!
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