Modern Screen (Dec 1937 - Nov 1938)

A TALL young man was on the Blue Train Express, going from Paris to Monte Carlo. He lounged along the corridor of the car, smoking, contemplating the familiar contours of the Maritime Alps. A compartment door was open and through it wafted an intriguing scent, faint but nostalgic; mysterious, even mesmeric. The young man glanced discreetly into the compartment. A lady sat there, lovely. She smiled. Pretty soon they were talking of many things. Thei-e was dinner, a deux. The Blue Train Express rolled into Monte Carlo. The tall young man said goodbye to the lady. He didn't know her name. She didn't know his. They didn't meet again. It was adventure, unsought, brief. The young man was Douglas Fairbanks, Junior. The lady must be to us, what she is to him, nameless. "My life is exciting," says Douglas. This is why. Excitement is a glaze laid lightly over matter-of-fact, over habit, over repetition and routine. Douglas takes care not to scratch the glaze. He is restless, nervous. He moves from place to place. He makes movies, writes and tears up what he has written, the fire of creation being sufficient unto itself. He has been in love. He handles life deftly, never asking too much or too little. In Hollywood now, he will not plan to stay there indefinitely, will not buy a house, strike roots, will not marry soon. "I never want to stay in any one place long," he told me. "I am restle.ss and, after all, if you want to keep in tune with the rhythm of life you will keep moving. "Am I bored with life? Never! I do try to avoid repetition of things a second touch would kill. But there are other things. I've crossed the ocean thirty times and I never feel a ship pull out of port that I don't get mistyeyed. I never catch a 'first' glimpse of land that it isn't really the first to me, and I choke up. I've been in the air I don't know how many times and I never see a plane take off that it doesn't grip me by the throat. "I never start a picture that we don't have to do retakes on the first three days' shooting, because I'm so jittery that I muff things. Invariably I have the feeling that I've never faced a camera before. I NEVER want to lose this sense of 'first experiences'," said Douglas. "It seems to me that to meet every adven HIS LIFE'S EXCITING DOUG, JR. HAS HAD MORE ROMANCE, TRAVEL AND ADVENTDRE AT TWENTYEIGHT THAN MOST OF HS EVER RATE BY FAITH S E R V 1 C ture as though it were for the first time is to keep the savour of life sweet and strong on your lips." "But' is a person just born that way," I said, "or do you have to work for it?" "I have to work for it, in part," said Douglas, "because you have to prod yourself into awareness of how curious everything is and once you are properly curious, you are alive ! There are men, I suppose, born Casanovas, who believe that the only experiences worth having are romantic experiences. They seek for them and, of course, to seek for experience in romance is to lose it, I feel sure. Though there isnothing so presumptuous as to lay down rules and regulations about love. When I read articles in which actors define love, tell others how to 'nianage' love, to find it or keep it, I feel nauseated. How the devil do they know how to tell others about love, what they should do about it?" "You've been in love, haven't you?" I asked. "How should I know?" countered Douglas. "I've thought so, yes. Infatuations, perhaps. Love, perhaps. But whether there is one love in a man's life, or which love of many is the real love, I wouldn't be so presumptuous as to guess." Douglas is not bored with life. He sees to that. And thereby I lost my bet, which I had placed on the nose of Boredom. For I had remarked to Douglas that I should suppose he would be satiated, "too, too weary to fight stagnation," as his friend Noel Coward warbles. I had, I felt, good grounds for my assumption. For Douglas has had, in his twenty-eight vivid years, more large hunks of life, and love and adventure than befall most men when the age numeral is reversed and they are eighty-two. Long the young Crown Prince of Hollywood, son of his famous father, only son of the House of Pickfair, to the portals of which came princes and poets, explorers and socialites, inventors and eminent authors the boy, while still a boy, could take a Prince without a genuflection, could prattle unselfconsciously to a Lindbergh or an H._G. Wells, could and did parry thrusts of wit with the britebrains of two continents, or three. HE KNEW the forcing-house of domestic upheaval, the divorce of his parents, the {Continued on page 78) Doug used to write for publication, but now it's just for iun. 36