Last Leap

Cinema's peculiar virtue as an art is that it conquers the limitations of stage and life, ranges wherever man's imagination takes him, unrestrained by time or space or experience. Nobody in the movie business ever realized cinema's possibilities more completely than elusive, gay, acrobatic Douglas Fairbanks, son of a Denver lawyer and Shakespearean expert.

Fairbanks was an ordinary young ham, except for his superior muscles, until one day on the stage in a serious moment he recalled a gag another actor had told him offstage a few minutes before. Against his will, irresistibly, he grinned. The effect was electric. Irresistibly Doug Fairbanks grinned and leaped his way to stage success as a bounding Lothario, a leaping Lochinvar who made love on the bounce. Hollywood gave him higher walls to scale, longer ropes to swing on, scores more swordsmen to engage in single-handed combat. His first picture, The Lamb, jumped his first ten-week contract, under puttee-wearing Director David Wark Griffith, from $2,000 a week to a three-year contract at $4,000 a week, typed him for life as an acrobatic comedian. Grinning, he slashed, sprang and flew through such cinema classics as Robin Hood, The Thief of Bagdad, The Three Musketeers, The Black Pirate.

Lover, duelist, cowboy, playboy, musketeer on the screen, his private life was as romantic as his public. He traveled everywhere. His second wife was Mary ("America's Sweetheart") Pickford. Even when he was past 50, he leaped fences rather than go through gates, married the divorced wife of a British nobleman (a onetime mannequin), 20 years younger than himself.

Last week at his home in Santa Monica, next door to Norma Shearer's, Fairbanks was in bed, resting after two mild heart attacks. He had been to a football game two days before, then to dinner at his son's home. His male nurse heard the Fairbanks mastiff, Marco Polo, growling beside Fairbanks' bed, entered to find that Death, as it must to every man, had come to restless Douglas Fairbanks, 56.

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