The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Resigned to failure, Michael retreated to coffeehouses frequented by other Hungarian immigrants. There, reminiscing with other displaced souls, he could reclaim his former prestige. According to family rumors, he began a series of extramarital affairs.

  In Fox’s eyes, his father was not only ineffectual, but also distant and disinterested. “All I remember of those early years is my father slurping up Mama’s chicken soup at the dinner table. There was no talking allowed at meals unless my father said something, which he rarely did.”

  The family’s misery multiplied. Anna lost seven of her thirteen children, including two born during her first five years in America, to childhood diseases. Typhus and smallpox ran rampant amid the Lower East Side tenements, invited by poverty and malnutrition and fed by Old Country fears about ruthless officials who would deport anyone who dared ask for assistance. At one point, Fox himself was hospitalized as a charity case. No details of that episode are known—no records remain from various New York Jewish hospitals and aid societies. Along with Fox, two boys and three girls survived in the family. To make up for her husband’s inadequacy as a provider, Anna began to take in work sewing slippers. Fox said, “My mother did the worrying for the family.”

  Young Will watched until he had no more patience. This family needed a leader, he decided. If his father didn’t want the responsibility, then he would take it. In the summer of 1888, a few months after the Great Blizzard thwarted Michael’s stove-blackening business, nine-year-old Will began selling candy on the street. “Lozengers,” the sweets were called. They sold for a penny apiece and had a riddle inside each colorfully wrapped package. He started at the foot of nearby Third Street, where a newly built wharf attracted excursion boat travelers. The following year, when he found he could sell more than he could carry, he recruited a sales team of neighborhood boys to work on commission and transferred his enterprise to Central Park, a five-cent ride away, in order to work a better-heeled crowd. Arrested for peddling, Will was told by a magistrate to stay out of the park. He obeyed as long as the police were watching. His family, which by now included four-year-old Tina and toddler Bess, needed the money, and during the summertime, he could earn ten to twelve dollars a week. It cost him his childhood. He would later say, “I do not remember anything about play because I never remember playing.”

  For the rest of his life, Fox would remain the financial caretaker for most of his birth family. He gave his siblings and in-laws jobs in his companies or arranged for other employers to hire them. He helped find them spouses, subsidized their household expenses, bought them clothing and jewelry and cars, and paid for their children’s education.

  As much as the troubles of Fox’s childhood forged a rage for greatness and instilled the habits and attitudes of success, the past also literally deformed him. At age eight he fell off the back of an ice truck on which he had hitched a ride and broke his left arm in three places. Because his father could not afford a proper doctor, an unskilled local medic—a dentist, Fox said—removed his entire elbow joint. The treatment left Fox’s arm bent at the elbow and virtually useless for the rest of his life. He would take extraordinary pains to disguise his disfigurement. He learned to play one-armed golf and usually kept his left arm angled jauntily into his pants pocket; he had his suit jackets tailored with vertical pocket openings.

  A dentist performed the surgery, Fox said. Had that dentist been his father? Given the family’s hobbled finances, Michael Fox may have decided to treat his son’s injury himself. That would help explain the lifelong humiliation Fox felt about his handicap and would illuminate the bitterness he revealed at his father’s funeral. “Uncle Bill really hated his father,” recalled Angela Fox Dunn, the daughter of Fox’s youngest sister, Malvina.

  This the son could not forgive: Michael Fox had turned away from his obligations to his family and from the opportunities that America held out to him. With results both glorious and tragic, William Fox set out to prove to the world that he was different and to redeem his father’s abandoned promises.

  CHAPTER 2

  Destiny

  William Fox bore none of the cultural burdens that hindered his father. Only an infant when he entered the United States, he had no memories of his Old World birthplace, and the language he learned on the street and in school was neither the German nor the Yiddish of his parents, but the coin of the realm, American English. More importantly, unlike Michael Fox, whose expectations had been shaped by recurrent national failure and shuttered opportunity, Fox grew up in one of the most vibrant, energetic, and hopeful periods in American history.

  The Gilded Age, Mark Twain titled the 1873 novel he wrote with his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner, and the term has stuck to describe the lavish excesses of the closing decades of nineteenth-century America. Forceful historical currents converged to create a feverish obsession with material prosperity: the closing of the Western frontier, which historian Frederick Jackson Turner claimed was completed by 1890; the Industrial Revolution; the consolidation and expansion of the railroad system; and a massive influx of immigrants who provided a cheap labor force. Together these changes shifted the American spirit of adventure from a confrontation with the wilderness to the new task of global economic domination. Between 1860 and 1894, the United States rose from fourth to first place among industrial nations, and the value of goods manufactured annually in American factories increased from less than $2 billion in 1860 to more than $11 billion in 1899. Cities expanded while farming communities and small towns shrank as dreamers and opportunists rushed to seek their fortunes among the crowds. In 1860, some 83 percent of the U.S. population lived in communities with fewer than twenty-five hundred residents; by 1900, that proportion had dropped to only 60 percent. Swiftly and irreversibly, post–Civil War America shed its agrarian, modest income identity to become a commercial, increasingly urban, and astonishingly wealthy nation.

  “Gilded,” not “golden”: Twain’s eye caught the moral hypocrisy of much of the glittering development. Rapacious acquisitiveness, with little regard for the depth or duration of negative consequences, drove the transformation. “What is the chief end of man?” Twain mused. “To get rich. In what way? Dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must.”*

  Greed invaded every field of enterprise. One of the most visible symbols of the newly emerging national culture and marketplace, the railroad system, had been built largely through ruthless financial manipulation. Between 1860 and 1890, U.S. railroad track mileage multiplied more than fivefold, from 31,000 to 167,000. Yet, the most successful of all the railroad entrepreneurs, Jay Gould, who by 1882 would own 15 percent of the national trackage, was driven not by a vision of the public good but by a merciless desire for personal magnification. Gould bought up western railroad lines, inflated the value of their stock, cashed out at the peak, and then reaped extra profit by short-selling as stock prices bolted back down to rational levels. “One of the most sinister figures that ever flitted batlike across the vision of the American people,” commented newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer. Gould was no anomaly: the business history of late nineteenth-century America reads like an encyclopedia of fraud and predation. As Ida M. Tarbell observed in her 1904 exposé, The History of the Standard Oil Company, “That is, ‘it’s business’ has to come to be a legitimate excuse for hard dealing, sly tricks, special privileges. It is a common enough thing to hear men arguing that the ordinary laws of morality do not apply in business.”

  The chaotic brawling for dollars buffeted the American economy to and fro, causing frequent financial panics that desolated many lives. The Panic of 1873 launched five and a half years of gloom known as the Long Depression. During that time, half of the nation’s railway companies went into receivership, some 54,000 U.S. businesses defaulted on more than $1.3 billion, and unemployment estimates reached as high as three million: The terms “tramp” and “bum” entered the American vernacular. A few years of relative stability intervened before the stock market crash of 1884 paraly
zed banking investments and caused the failure of more than 10,000 companies nationwide. The worst was yet to come. The Panic of 1893 ranked as the country’s most serious economic crisis to date. Some 500 banks failed, as did a number of major railroads and another 15,000 companies. Although recovery began in 1896, the U.S. economy continued to seesaw uncertainly for the rest of the decade.

  Amid the donnybrook, government shrugged. Often outpaced intellectually, and drawn mostly from the privileged classes—“the millionaires’ club,” the U.S. Senate was called—Gilded Age legislators and judges tended to stand by passively while industrialists hammered out profits from the working classes, the environment, and the more timorous among their competitors. Dishonesty compounded the problem of incompetence. Bribes and kickbacks circulated so freely during the late 1800s that some cynics believed the only honest politician was the one who stayed bought.

  Although Congress did pass the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 to appease voter anxiety over the influence of big business, for the next dozen years the law had little effect because of lenient enforcement, narrow interpretation by judges, and slap-on-the-wrist penalties. Huge business trusts continued to appear. The American Tobacco Company, upon its creation in 1890 by five large manufacturers, controlled 90 percent of the U.S. cigarette business. In 1891 the American Sugar Refining Company arose to replace the now illegal Sugar Trust and by the next year had captured 95 percent of the national market. Between 1894 and 1901, hundreds more trusts were formed, with an aggregate capitalization of $4 billion. In theory, monopoly promoted efficiency and lower prices for the consumer. In practice, no one benefited more than the owners. Although before the 1830s the United States had only a few millionaires and most of those were landowners, by 1880 the nation counted at least two thousand millionaires. In 1916 the Final Report of the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations would conclude that much of this narrowly concentrated wealth had been “largely the result either of the exploitation of American workers through the payment of low wages or [of] the exploitation of the American public through the exaction of high prices . . .”

  William Fox understood none of this. Instead, he saw the opulent surfaces and heard the beguiling myths of America as an open-handed, warmhearted meritocracy eager to reward all according to the value of their contribution. And nowhere was the lure to participate more enticing than on the streets of New York City.

  During Fox’s childhood in the 1880s and 1890s, New York became the nation’s premier showplace of prosperity. Drawn by the concentration of the investment banking, legal, and advertising firms, corporations rushed to relocate their headquarters there. Rockefeller moved from Cleveland in 1884, building a ten-story headquarters for the Standard Oil Trust at 24–26 Broadway. About the same time, W. Duke and Sons Company, soon to become the mainstay of the American Tobacco Company, moved from Durham, North Carolina, to Manhattan and opened a huge factory at First Avenue and Thirty-Eighth Street. The Armour meatpacking business moved its headquarters from Chicago; Carnegie came from Pittsburgh. By the late 1890s, New York City had more than three hundred buildings with nine or more stories.

  To accommodate the wealthy industrialists and their social aspirations, magnificent residential palaces materialized, many of them near Central Park, where Fox sold his penny candies. Stately, imposing edifices testified to a new kind of aristocracy, one based on entrepreneurial acumen rather than hereditary privilege. “These houses have about them a species of conscious publicity; they have been put together and adorned in order to make a brave show—as if their owners were very well aware that people were watching them,” commented Desmond and Croly in their 1903 book Stately Homes in America. Huge houses expressed the specious logic of the American parvenu: if royalty lived in palaces, then the inhabitants of palaces must be royalty.

  Fox would have seen many marvels. On the west side of Fifth Avenue, stretching the entire block between Fifty-First and Fifty-Second Streets, was the enormous brownstone “Triple Mansion” of William Henry Vanderbilt, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s favorite son, who had started construction in 1879, the year of the Fox family’s arrival in New York, and had kept seven hundred laborers working around the clock to complete the structure in only eighteen months. Opposite, on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Second Street, stood the home of William Henry’s son William Kissam Vanderbilt: a $3 million, Indiana limestone imitation of a sixteenth-century Loire Valley chateau, complete with fleurs-de-lis decoration, Gothic stained-glass windows, and a copper-crested blue-slate roof. Other notable residences of the era included Caroline Astor’s French Renaissance double mansion on the northeast corner of Fifth and Sixty-Fifth Street; Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s 137-room French Renaissance palace at 1 West Fifty-Seventh Street, and the nearby hotel-sized homes of sugar king Henry O. Havemeyer and railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington. “Two miles of millionaires,” Munsey’s magazine labeled the stretch of Fifth Avenue from Murray Hill to Eightieth Street, “more wealth than can be found in any other residential two miles of any city in the world.”

  Witnessing such ostentation, Fox developed an obsession with wealth that would last his whole lifetime. Money became for him not only the key to freedom, but also the primary way of measuring courage, character, commitment to relationships, and self-development. Fox’s niece Angela Fox Dunn commented, “He didn’t want money for pleasure or for egotistical display. He wanted money because he believed it gave him control.”

  Eager to get ahead, Fox found school ploddingly dull. Math was the only subject at which he excelled because it was the only subject he believed he truly needed. At age ten, he dropped out of the third grade to take a job at a small clothing firm, D. Cohen and Sons at 25 Lispenard Street, about two miles from his family’s home on the Lower East Side. Anna Fox was horrified. She had given her eldest child the Hebrew name Melech, meaning “king,” and she’d hoped he would become a doctor or a lawyer.

  To get the job at D. Cohen and Sons, Fox had to lie about his age because the state Factory Law of 1886 prohibited the employment of children under fourteen. Possibly he forged one or the other of his parents’ signatures on the certificate required to verify the date and place of the child worker’s birth. Given his parents’ estrangement from American culture, they might well have been unaware of the law. Additionally, dishonest notaries were so commonplace that Fox would have had little trouble finding one willing to certify a false date and a false signature in exchange for about twenty-five cents. Unable to oppose her son’s strong will, Anna extracted from him a promise to take night classes, which he would do until about age fourteen.

  Fox’s impatience with formal education was typical for the era and easily rationalized because among the titans of industry, very few had anything resembling substantial classroom experience. Andrew Carnegie quit school at age thirteen to take a $1.20-a-week position as a cotton mill bobbin boy. Thomas Edison left school after only three months and was educated at home by his mother. Henry Ford dropped out at seventeen to become an apprentice at the Dry Dock Engine Works. John D. Rockefeller also didn’t finish high school, although he later completed a six-month business course at Cleveland’s Folsom Mercantile College in three months. Within this crowd, J. P. Morgan stood out as something of a scholar because he had studied for two years at the University of Gottingen in Germany.

  Entering the garment industry, Fox simply pursued the most readily available opportunity. Following the Civil War, when the demand for uniforms led to the standardization of clothing sizes and efficient mass production, an increasingly urban population began to shun custom-tailored and home-sewn garments in favor of inexpensive, ready-made wearables. U.S. clothing manufacturing firms multiplied: between 1870 and 1900, capital investment increased from $54 to $169 million, and the value of goods produced rose from $162 to $437 million. New York City led the way. By 1890, Fox’s first year of full-time employment, the city produced some 44 percent of all ready-made clothes in the United States.

  D. Co
hen and Sons, where Fox would work until age fifteen, was a family-run clothing business housed in a small three-story building. Fox would recall his time at D. Cohen and Sons fondly, describing his boss and the boss’s two sons as “three of the finest men I knew then and that I have ever met since that time.” The father, Fox remembered, was especially kind, a tall, somewhat stooped man past sixty, who always went through the factory saying good morning to all his employees. They liked him, too. Within two years, Fox was promoted to foreman, overseeing twelve men and boys who cut linings on the third floor. Still, the job was physically punishing. Fox worked eleven hours a day from Monday through Friday and another five hours on Saturday, with only a half-hour lunch break each day. Because the building lacked an elevator, goods had to be hauled up a hatchway by a rope. To and from work, Fox spent an hour walking the two-mile distance. Moreover, the garment industry was a breeding ground for disease, especially respiratory ailments. Poor ventilation, flurries of cloth particles and dust, poisonous gases, and the steam from the pressing machines caused such a frequent incidence of tuberculosis that the condition became known as the “tailor’s disease.” For all this, Fox took home eight dollars a week.

  Still, he was earning money, making progress. That sense of forward momentum accentuated Michael Fox’s failures in the eyes of his son. Fox said, “I didn’t like the progress that my father had made. I didn’t think he had accomplished that which life affords.”

  Taking over as the family’s steady provider, Fox soon usurped his father’s decision-making authority. Fox’s earnings allowed his family to move to a six-room railroad apartment on Rivington Street, still on the Lower East Side and over a butter-and-egg store, but “a much better type house,” one with a water pump in the hallway rather than in the yard below. He insisted that his mother stop taking in work sewing slippers, and to further ease her burden, twice a week he scrubbed the stairs from his family’s floor to the landing below, as was each tenant’s responsibility. As the son increased, the father decreased. Fox recalled, “The less he cared about working, the more I had my nose to the grindstone.”