Mr. and Mrs. Pouglas Fairbanks Jr.

Vanity Fair, February 1932

Meet the crown prince and princess of Hollywood, as Steichen met them, pictureperfect, on Malibu Beach. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. looks a little less comfortable with his place in the sun than does his wife, Joan Crawford. Their somewhat strained symmetry held out for only another year, but even now, after everyone has dumped on Joan dearest, he remains chivalrous: she "let nothing stop her admirable though humorless dedication to professional advancement." Elsewhere, fortunately, his new autobiography, The Salad Days (Doubleday), gets franker. After a youth spent buckling swash, he also wrote and sketched (contributing to V.F. in the thirties), took an early stand against Nazism, became an F.D.R. envoy, and was decorated in W.W. II. A confirmed Anglophile (intimate, naturally, with the royal family), Fairbanks has lived mostly in London with his wife of fifty years, Mary Lee. And, at seventy-eight, he is still an officer and a gentleman, and a prince.