The Fairbanks album

This book, writes Richard Schickel in his Introduction, is an attempt to show through the visible record of two linked lives "what it was like not just to be Fairbankses (interesting enough), but what it has been like to be famous in our age. There is much pleasure and some pain in these pictures - and nearly all of them are conditioned by the avidity with which we followed these lives.... We are the photographers as well as the viewers of these pictures, and we, it seems to me, bear a share of responsibility for the life-styles recorded in them." The author sees the elder Fairbanks and his second wife, Mary Pickford, beloved "Doug-and-Mary," as the first celebrities of the media age. Through his Introduction and Narrative, and the pictures themselves, he shows what fun it was to be famous, to have entree into every circle of an interlocking, international aristocracy of talent and wealth - but also what a great burden that fame imposed: the pressures, the fear of time, and finally the emptiness at the end of the senior Fairbanks' career. The life of the younger Fairbanks is seen as both a parallel and a conscious contrast to his father's - beside the glamorous movie star there is the serious-minded man who found another way to shape a satisfying life. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. reports in his Foreword that a strong streak of squirrelism runs through his family. Fortunately, for from his and his family's mountainous accumulation of Fairbanks photographs, clippings, film stills, and letters, and from the Pickfair papers (lent by fond stepmother Mary Pickford), he has culled an extraordinary collection of images that create a vivid, amusing, sometimes poignant picture of the life and times of the two Fairbankses and those close to them. Filmographies of both Fairbankses are included. -- from dust jacket.