Curtains down on a swashbuckling era

DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS Jr.'s recent death turns the final page on one of the great chapters in movie history - the era of the swashbuckler.

A scion of Hollywood royalty, Fairbanks became, before he was 40, a matinee idol, a respected star of major films, a decorated hero of World War II and an accomplished producer.

Then, in the early 1950s, after starring in several films of diminishing quality, he turned his back on motion pictures and became a powerful executive in the then-new medium of television.

Fairbanks may not have attained the legendary stature of his actor father, Douglas Fairbanks, the silent screen's first and greatest swashbuckler but he was a more versatile performer and certainly a better businessman.

He was also easy to make friends with, as I found early in 1980, when I drove from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to North Palm Beach for an afternoon interview.Fairbanks, wearing white canvas shoes, yellow slacks and a blue blazer, greeted me warmly with a pitcher of iced tea and two glasses.

As we talked, he guided me around his small estate on the inland waterway - ``The Vicarage,'' built in the 1920s by grateful parishioners for their local pastor. We settled by his swimming pool, and began the formal interview.

I arrived girded for battle, my mind filled with the minutiae of Fairbanks' career, the result of three days' cramming at the local library.I was in for a surprise. No one, I soon learned, knew the Fairbanks family history - in and out of Hollywood - better than Douglas Jr. himself.

I would occasionally get a film's release date wrong, or forget whether it was in colour or black-and-white.This was, of course, in the days before home video made classic movies readily available. When I made a mistake, Fairbanks would gently correct me.I asked him question after question, pressing for more details than I could possibly include in a Sunday newspaper feature.

He was inexhaustible, rattling off one anecdote after another with such vividness that the films we were discussing seemed to have been made only a few years before, rather than several decades hence.

Nearly every reference Fairbanks made to his life and work was self-deprecating. He talked candidly about his four-year marriage to Joan Crawford in the late 1920s (``We were both young, but she already had this great career going, while I was scarcely known ... it could not have lasted''); his early successes, notably 1939's ``Gunga Din'' (``It was a great ensemble - Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen and me - with no one of us more important than the others''); and the career interruption for naval service, which resulted in his receiving the Silver Star,Britain's Distinguished Service Cross, and France's Legion of Honour (``I went off to win World War II single-handed, and fortunately was not killed'').

He delighted in debunking apocryphal Hollywood stories. When acquaintances would tell him that, in the course of their world travels, they had passed by the location in India where ``Gunga Din'' was shot, Fairbanks would politely inform them that, in truth, the entire picture was filmed in Arizona.

In his later years, Fairbanks was active in corporate and charitable pursuits, and like most successful men, he did not suffer fools. I was afraid he might consign me to that category because I did not know as much about his movies as he did.

But that was not to be. My article, titled ``Last ofSwashbucklers'', appeared a few weeks later, and it was written from the point of view of a film buff who is not as clever as he thinks he is. Fairbanks, whose writing included a two-volume autobiography, read the article with great amusement.

The day after it was published, he called me. ``That's very inventive, writing it at your own expense that way,'' he said. ``I think you have got a bright career ahead of you.''It turned out I was not the only beginner whose professional ambitions were encouraged by Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

As my friendship with British actor Christopher Lee grew through the ensuing decade, I learned how important Fairbanks was to him at a crucial time. ``From 1952 to 1956, when I was just starting out, Douglas cast me in a dozen, maybe more, episodes of his syndicated TV series, `Douglas Fairbanks Presents,''' recalled Lee, who recently returned from shooting ``Lord of the Rings'' in New Zealand.Fairbanks was an Anglophile - he served under Adm. Lord Louis Mountbatten, who introduced him to Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II - which endeared him to Lee, when more-brusque American producers barnstormed through Britain in the post-war years.

In 1983, Fairbanks wrote the introduction to a book devoted to Lee's film work up to that time. Characteristically, Fairbanks asserted that if he had not ``discovered'' Lee and put him on TV, some other enterprising producer would have.

``Well, that was Douglas,'' offered Lee. ``He was nothing if not gracious.''

Last fall, he made his final ``official'' appearance at a New York screening of one of his best films, Max Ophuls' ``The Exile'' (1948). The movie was produced by Fairbanks' own company, but legal entanglements have kept it out of circulation for decades. The 35 mm nitrate print shown at the retrospective was provided by Martin Scorsese. Fairbanks, seated at the rear of the theatre in a wheelchair, managed a smile and a wave of enthusiasm to the crowd before the lights went down. That was the last time the public saw him.

BILL KELLEY

New York Times News Service

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