The RMS Olympic brings Pickford, Fairbanks, and archie Leach
TODAY’S GUEST POSTER IS FAYE HAMMILL (SEE BIO BELOW.)
One hundred years ago today … the White Star liner RMS Olympic arrived in New York, bringing Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks home from their European honeymoon. [Editor’s note: We last posted about Pickford back on January 18.]
Fairbanks and Pickford on honeymoon. George Grantham Bain collection at the Library of Congress.
The couple received a rapturous welcome, as the New York Tribune reported:
New York Tribune, 29 July 1920, p. 6. Chronicling America
[Editor: Note the Coney Island advertisements above, and see our post about Coney from July 25.]
It is not surprising that the couple remained in their suite during the crossing, since they had never been able to spend time alone during their trip around Europe. Crowds of fans pursued them wherever they went. On her return, Pickford talked to The New York Evening World about the trip, identifying her strangest experience as one that took place on a visit to a French meat market, where "hundreds upon hundreds of butchers" wanted to shake her hand. Eventually, she recounts, Doug jumped her onto a counter and “we scrambled over the meat and fled.”
The New York Evening World, 30 July 1920, p. 17. Chronicling America
According to Adam Bunch of the “Toronto Dreams Project,” by the time Pickford and Fairbanks returned to the US, “it was clear: modern celebrity culture had arrived.”
Most of the papers reporting on the Olympic’s arrival concentrated on the honeymoon couple, but The New York Times found some of the other passengers more interesting:
The New York Times, 21 July 1920, p. 8. Copyright New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Prince Youssef Kamal was indeed a significant figure: an artist, collector and patron of the arts, who had established the first School of the Fine Arts in Cairo. He was also a great traveller, and collected antiquities from many parts of the world.
Another passenger on the Olympic had long desired to go abroad, and was now making his first voyage. A sixteen-year old English vaudeville performer, he traveled second-class as part of “The Penders” troupe, who were to play in Charles Dillingham’s Broadway revue Good Times. His name was Archie Leach.
Leach was from Bristol, and as a boy, he had volunteered for summer work as a guide and messenger at Southampton’s military docks. He tried to sign on as a ship’s cabin boy, but wasn’t old enough. But in July 1920, he was finally able to travel on an ocean liner. He saw Fairbanks on board and admired his tan.
Archie Leach's stage work: with Queenie Smith in The Street Singer (1930). Wikicommons.
Leach stayed in America, and developed a successful career on the vaudeville circuit. In 1931, he signed with Paramount Pictures and changed his name to Cary Grant. He always sported a sun-tan. Among his many high-profile films was An Affair to Remember (1957), in which the lead characters meet on a transatlantic liner.
In 1920, Archie Leach was at the start of his career, while the RMS Olympic was at the height of hers. She made her maiden voyage in 1911, and by 1916 both of her sister ships, the Titanic and the Britannic, had sunk. This actually added to the allure of the Olympic: almost identical in design to the Titanic, she offered a vicarious experience of that celebrated, doomed ship.
Grand staircase aboard the RMS Olympic (William H Rau, 1911). Wikicommons.
On July 28 1920, the Olympic arrived in New York for only the second time since her post-war refit, during which the boilers had been converted to burn oil instead of coal. The first of the great liners to run on oil, the Olympic inaugurated what the newspapers called an "Oil Age" in shipping. The peak year of her career was 1921, when she carried 38,000 passengers, and she continued in service until 1935.
Sources/Further reading:
Hawley, Brian. RMS Olympic. Stroud: Amberley, 2009.
Hutchison, Pamela. “The Making of Cary Grant,” Sight and Sound, BFI, 20 Jan. 2020. Web.
Whitfield, Eileen. Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood. University Press of Kentucky, 2007.
WRITTEN BY FAYE HAMMILL, JULY 28, 2020.
Faye Hammill is Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is author or coauthor of six monographs, most recently Modernism's Print Cultures (2016), with Mark Hussey. She is the founder of the AHRC Middlebrow Network. Currently, she is working on a project titled “Ocean Liners and Modern Literature.”
TAGS: celebrity, fame, cinema, movies, theater, transatlantic, ships, docks