This Chapter is from Emeralds in Tinseltown: The Irish in Hollywood, written by Steve Brennan and Bernadette O'Neill, and published by Appletree Press Owen Moore and Mary Pickford Fairbanks By 1914 Pickford was earning the phenomenal salary of $2,000 a week and she constantly overshadowed Moore’s career. But something else was happening which should have worried Moore even more. A young lion had appeared and his name was Douglas Fairbanks.       By now the picture industry’s creative adjunct had moved almost entirely to the West Coast. And it was here that Fairbanks, a handsome and athletic stage actor, made his first moving picture under the direction of D.W. Griffith. The Lamb brought instant stardom for the jaunty young actor. Moore could have no idea the role that Fairbanks was about to play in his life.       A seemingly innocent cocktail party at the home of an actress friend of Moore and Pickford set the stage. It was there that Pickford, now estranged from Moore, was introduced to Fairbanks who was accompanied by his young wife Beth. Pickford was apparently smitten with the handsome young Fairbanks. Subsequently Pickford’s mother chaperoned her daughter to ‘teas’ at the home of Fairbanks’s mother-in-law’s New York home. At Fairbanks’s own home in Hollywood Pickford became a regular visitor at the invitation of Beth Fairbanks.       Pickford and Fairbanks began to meet secretly in Hollywood hideaways, often disguising themselves elaborately to avoid detection. Moore, meanwhile, was drinking more heavily. Life for Moore and Pickford was becoming a sordid melodrama played out from coast to coast. Pickford demanded a divorce in 1919 that would free her to marry Fairbanks who was also separating from his spouse. Moore responded to the divorce petition by threatening to shoot “that climbing monkey”.       But the divorce went ahead regardless. On March 1st 1919 Mrs Owen Moore (Mary Pickford to the world) climbed into a witness box in a Nevada court and told a judge that she had been abused by a drunken Irish husband, concluding, “I was a wife and not a wife.” The divorce was granted and she returned to Hollywood to marry Fairbanks.       Moore was on the sidelines now as his former wife and her new husband came to be known as ‘the king and queen of Hollywood,’ founders with Charles Chaplin of the film company that would become United Artists, supreme stars known and adored across the world. Moore would re-marry and continue to make films until 1937, when in something of an irony he played a movie director in A Star is Born. But the place he craved on Hollywood’s golden list was denied him. The story of this dreamer, tortured by his own ambitions, would play out its final act amid circumstances that truly belong in the scripts of those dramatic melodramas of the silent screen in which Moore once shone so brightly.       Mary Pickford sat one evening later in her life listening to her Irish maid tell of the predictions she saw in the tea leaves that remained at the bottom of a cup that Pickford had just used. ‘I see that someone close to you and not yet close will die,’ the maid confided. ‘I don’t see you crying.’ Owen Moore died that night of June 12th 1939, from a massive cerebral haemorrhage. Six months later, to the very day, Douglas Fairbanks died on December 12th. This was the day Owen Moore would have been celebrating his birthday. 'Emeralds in Tinseltown - The Irish in Hollywood' by Steve Brennan and Bernadette O'Neill, published by Appletree Press.

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