The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Clever and highly ambitious, Rogers proceeded to win a stunning victory by challenging the wording of the penal code section under which motion picture theater employees had been prosecuted. Entitled “Public Sports,” Section 265 prohibited outdoor exhibitions such as football and baseball games, horse racing, wrestling, and any “public show” on Sundays. Law enforcement had counted on the phrase “public show” to cover movie theaters. No, Rogers argued. Section 265 defined public shows as a subset of “outdoor exhibitions,” but motion pictures weren’t shown outdoors. Neither were they a sport or a horse race. Therefore, they weren’t prohibited. On Saturday, December 28, 1907, New York Supreme Court justice Samuel Greenbaum agreed, granting a highly unusual omnibus injunction that protected all five-hundred-plus of the city’s movie theaters, nickelodeons, and penny arcades from police action on Sundays. The following day, all opened for business. The war wasn’t over yet: a final battle remained to be fought a year later. Still, thanks to Fox, many of his colleagues and competitors gained the financial means and the fighting spirit to stay in business.

  On a national level, Fox’s bold activism won him praise as a potential industry leader. The trade journal Views and Films Index, noting that other New York City exhibitors had become “panic-stricken” during the battle over Sunday closure, commented, “It is indeed gratifying to know that somewhere in the trade there is somebody who is continually watching the various city departments which have to do with the government of the moving picture theatres; a vigilante whose movements, while they mean something to him, mean still more to others who sleep while he works . . . With a William Fox in each city where the departments give trouble, a great change would soon be noticed.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Necessary Expenses

  Do we Americans really want good government?

  —LINCOLN STEFFENS

  As he built the foundation of his motion picture career, Fox ran right into “the most powerful, efficient, corrupt political machine in the history of urban America”—Tammany Hall. By the early twentieth century, Tammany had come to rule New York City politics so thoroughly, to have its hands on all the important levers of power, that it effectively controlled the growth and development of the city. If there were money to be made here, Tammany would have its share. Even the rich and powerful had to tip their hats to the so-called Tammany tigers; an ambitious small-time entrepreneur such as Fox had little choice except to shake hands with the devil.

  Headquartered in an ornate three-story marble-and-redbrick building on Fourteenth Street between Irving Place and Third Avenue, Tammany Hall was the local Democratic Party organization, governed by thirty-five leaders elected by registered Democrats in the assembly districts of Manhattan and the Bronx. Tammany’s purpose was to win elections and to win them by any means possible, because winning meant open access to the city’s enormous treasure chest of taxpayer revenue. Eyeing all that money, regularly collected, for which one did not necessarily have to provide any product or service of commensurate value—and all those steady city jobs that could be handed out as favors or sold to the highest bidders—Tammany leaders astutely discerned that, requiring only an abeyance of conscience, the easiest way to get rich in America was to fleece a trapped herd of trusting taxpayers.

  The organization had never been honest. Formed as an anti-Federalist social club on May 12, 1789, less than two weeks after George Washington’s inauguration as president, the Society of St. Tammany had built a robust power base among the immigrant groups that began flooding into New York City during the mid-1800s. In contrast to earlier generations of largely self-sufficient members of the middle class, these newcomers tended to be the beleaguered cast-offs of Old World society: Irish potato famine victims, Italian peasants, persecuted Jews. Tammany’s simple strategic genius had been to perceive the influx not as a disruptive social threat but as a golden political—that is, business—opportunity. Embracing the ragged masses, Tammany leaders got them jobs and housing, shepherded them through the citizenship process, and gave handouts of food and clothing to the needy. In return, Tammany asked only for Election Day loyalty. Especially to those who’d had little or no experience with participatory government in their homeland, a vote here and there seemed a small price to pay. And wasn’t there a stabilizing efficiency in the arrangement? Some apologists have maintained that Tammany helped manage a period of explosive population growth that might have caused New York City’s official government structure to collapse.

  However, Tammany leaders always made sure to get more than they gave. After installing their protégés in influential offices with large budgets, Tammany politicians looted the city treasury on public works projects, sold municipal jobs to unqualified applicants or gave them away to relatives and cronies, and colluded with the Police Department to run extortion rackets that protected organized gambling and prostitution. New York City government was, according to Presbyterian minister and social activist Charles H. Parkhurst, “a lying, perjured, rum-soaked libidinous lot.”

  During 1905–1912, the early boom years of the motion picture business in New York City, the real power behind Tammany wasn’t any city office holder, but the towering figure of state senator Timothy D. Sullivan. All but forgotten by later generations, the six-foot-one, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, blue-eyed “Big Tim” was then New York City’s most charismatic and most forceful political figure. According to Munsey’s Magazine, he held “more absolute individual political power than any other American of his generation.”

  Master of six East Side districts, Big Tim controlled an estimated one-sixth of the Democratic vote of Manhattan. Because New York was then about equally divided between Republican and Democratic voters, this influence was often sufficient to swing municipal elections as well as the city’s choices for state legislators and congressional representatives. When he went off to Albany to do his official job, first as an assemblyman and then as a state senator, Big Tim kept a direct hand in city government through his younger acolyte cousin, Timothy P. “Little Tim” Sullivan, who led the Board of Aldermen and chaired its all-important finance committee.

  Big Tim had acquired and maintained his power not only through the force of his personality—which was a beguiling mixture of rascality, benevolence, humor, humility, empathy, and warmth—but also through ruthless venality. On the one hand, the people “wondered and adored him.” Every year since 1896, he had sponsored a free Christmas dinner at his Timothy D. Sullivan Association headquarters at 207 Bowery, where crowds as large as five and six thousand feasted on turkey, mashed potatoes, chicken, bread, pies, beer, and coffee. “Guests,” as Big Tim called them, included drunks and professional beggars, along with out-of-work laborers; some were one-legged, one-armed, blind, deaf, deformed, or crippled. Upon leaving, each unfortunate received a new, boxed pair of sturdy black shoes and warm socks, paid for by Big Tim. Although many recipients immediately took their new shoes and socks to the nearest pawnshop—some “practically ran down the stairs, to dispose of them to the quickest bidder” for as little as twenty-five cents—Big Tim continued the practice without restriction. It was his tribute, he said, to an elementary school teacher who once helped him get a much-needed pair of new shoes. Throughout the rest of the year, he reportedly gave away at least twenty-five thousand dollars a year to the poor, helping indigent families buy food and pay rent, kept four lawyers on call around the clock to forestall evictions, and paid the wedding fees for young couples who otherwise couldn’t afford to marry.

  On the other hand, Big Tim was ruthlessly selfish. Born in 1863 and raised by an alcoholic stepfather on the Lower East Side, in a neighborhood of “beer dives, basement groggeries and brothels, sailors’ dance halls with unprintable names,” Big Tim developed underworld contacts through whom he allegedly ran all New York City’s gambling dens and prostitution houses and controlled all the prizefights in Manhattan and upper New York State, netting himself estimated illegal profits of $175,000 to $200,000 per year. Am
ong Big Tim’s close associates were Max Hochstim, whose benign-sounding Max Hochstim Association was one of the city’s largest organized prostitution rings;* Monk Eastman, the leader of a murderous Lower East Side gang of gunmen, burglars, and drug addicts; Kid Twist, head of a group of extortionists, killers, and blackmailers; and Paul Kelly,* the well-dressed, multilingual founder of the fifteen-hundred-member Five Points Gang, whom the New York Times would describe in 1912 as “perhaps the most successful and the most influential gangster in New York history.”

  Notably for Fox, Big Tim had also gotten involved in show business. In 1903 he had partnered with Seattle showman John W. Considine to form the Sullivan and Considine vaudeville circuit, which grew to include some 140 theaters nationwide. In New York, Big Tim and former alderman George Kraus operated the smaller Sullivan & Kraus chain of burlesque houses and music halls. Big Tim had just the sort of influence, and money, that Fox urgently needed.

  Motion picture exhibition was about to undergo a great transformation, and Fox knew it. A bellwether event occurred in late May 1908, when the Bijou Theatre on Broadway became Manhattan’s first dramatic first-class house to play motion pictures. The nickelodeons were on their way out, Fox understood. The future would belong to those with the vision and courage to take large-scale action.

  So far, other than the Comedy Theater in Brooklyn, Fox had only a string of five-cent theaters. To move forward, he had to get large venues in Manhattan. That presented a formidable challenge. Both the Building Department, which regulated all construction in the city, and the Bureau of Licenses ran notoriously rich graft operations, largely because the municipal building code did not yet specifically address movie theaters, and officials therefore had virtually unlimited discretion. As the industry’s prospects for wealth increased, more hands reached out. In January 1908, the Department of Gas, Water, and Electricity began to require every movie theater manager to submit a written application and every projectionist to take a qualifying exam. Additionally, the Fire Department now did compliance inspections. To navigate the corrupt bureaucracy, Fox needed a protector, a sponsor.

  Never inclined to do anything by half measures, he aimed for the top. In late June 1908, he found his opportunity in the declining health of George Kraus, who had run Sullivan & Kraus on a day-to-day basis. Kraus was no longer up to the job: he’d just had his diseased left eye removed and was heading toward a nervous breakdown in 1910. Fox approached Kraus with an offer to take a long-term lease on Sullivan & Kraus’s Dewey Theatre, which seated nearly one thousand, on Fourteenth Street. Fox had been renting the Dewey since the end of May on a ten-week lease for $50 a day, presenting a profitable program of movies and light vaudeville. Kraus set up a conference with Big Tim, who insisted that Fox take over not only the Dewey, but also another Sullivan & Kraus theater, the Gotham, on East 125th Street, for a combined annual rental of $90,000, with $50,000 paid up front as security. That large deposit would ensure Fox’s serious commitment and would also make the deal instantly profitable to Sullivan & Kraus, which was paying only $14,000 annually for the Dewey and which planned to use part of Fox’s deposit to buy the Gotham. Fox signed a lease for both theaters eight days later, and by July 15 he had handed over payments totaling $50,000.*

  Although Fox and Big Tim evidently hadn’t met before these negotiations, several connections linked them. Gustavus Rogers, Fox’s business and personal lawyer since at least early 1907, had long been an ally of Big Tim. In 1896, as a nineteen-year-old City College student, Rogers had served as a Tammany Hall district leader, and shortly after earning his law degree from New York University, he had been rewarded with a plum city job as assistant corporation counsel. Rogers had also been Tammany Hall’s corresponding secretary and legal counsel. Additionally, Big Tim undoubtedly knew about Fox via his well-publicized run-ins in 1906 and 1907 with Police Commissioner Bingham over the Sunday-closing laws. Yes, Big Tim must have realized, Fox was someone he could trust.

  Fox got a rude introduction to business as usual with Big Tim. By leasing the Dewey and the Gotham to Fox, Sullivan & Kraus had broken a ten-year contract (which still had eight years left to run) entitling the Empire Circuit burlesque booking company to present its shows at both theaters. Although Big Tim offered to pay damages, on August 10, 1908, Empire Circuit sued Fox and Sullivan & Kraus in federal court to try to force both theaters to present only its burlesque shows. Fox had no intention of doing that, and Empire Circuit dropped the lawsuit within a few weeks, probably accepting a financial settlement because, after all, Big Tim was Big Tim. Nonetheless, the lawsuit temporarily threw Fox into a panic because it would have been impossible to rent other theaters in Manhattan for another year.

  Around the same time as the Empire City lawsuit, Fox began receiving repeated demands from the Fire Department and other city agencies to make safety alterations to the Dewey that threatened to cut its thousand-seat capacity by 40 to 50 percent. It turned out that Sullivan & Kraus had fraudulently finagled licenses to operate the theater, which did not have either a sprinkler system or the kind of fire exits required by the building code. Although his lease had explicitly stated that both the Dewey and the Gotham would be brought into full compliance with all municipal and state laws before he took possession, there was really nothing Fox could do. Sue Big Tim Sullivan? He might as well go out of business. Instead, he would have to rely on Big Tim’s protection from interfering officials and hope to avoid a disaster.

  Further to Fox’s vexation, Big Tim made it clear that he intended to use their shared enterprises the way he used city government, as a patronage tool. Although Fox already had a perfectly good accountant, Big Tim insisted that he replace him with a compulsive gambler who had been in jail three times. Fox protested—a criminal? “Yes, those are the only kind to employ,” Big Tim explained. “But before you employ him, tell him you know he is a convict and that you are trying to give him a new chance in life. If you tell him that, he will never cheat you. He may cheat others around him, but he will never cheat you.”

  For a while, Fox was pleased. “I never employed a man more intelligent, efficient, and studious than this one. He had a wife and two children, a girl and a boy. They were gorgeous children.” Then the man failed to show up at work for three days, and on the evening of the third day, he arrived at Fox’s home to confess that he had stolen $5,000 from the cash drawer and gambled it away. He was no good, the man wailed, and now, with the .44-caliber pistol he had with him, he was going down to the river to shoot himself. If the gunshot didn’t kill him, he told Fox, then at least he would fall into the water and drown because he couldn’t swim.

  Fox recalled, “I took it as a joke and asked him to illustrate how he was going to do it. He said his back would be toward the water. I told him that was wrong—he would fall forward when he fired this shot and would land on the dock. He said, ‘Thank you very much. Perhaps you are right. I suppose that is the way to do it.’ ”

  A moment after the man had left, Fox was stricken with remorse. “I asked myself what had I done—I had advised him how to commit suicide.” He sent his secretary after the accountant, and when they returned, Fox said he had reconsidered.

  “How much a week do I pay you?” he asked.

  “A hundred dollars,” the man replied.

  “How much could you live on if you didn’t gamble?”

  “Sixty dollars.”

  Then give me the gun, Fox said, and go back to work for sixty dollars a week.

  The man got down on his knees and kissed his employer’s hands. Then he went back to the office, stole another $3,000, and disappeared for good.

  The next day, Fox told Big Tim the whole story. As overseer of the city’s vice dens, Big Tim knew exactly how to fix the situation. A short while later, the owner of the gambling house where the accountant had lost the first $5,000 showed up with eight $1,000 bills, which Big Tim gave to Fox. When the gambling house owner had argued that he had received only $5,000 of the stolen money, Big Tim s
aid, “I know, but you had no right to let him gamble in your house. You knew he was working.”

  Spending habits were another area of annoyance. After so many years of denying himself to save to get ahead, Fox wanted to know exactly how his money was being spent and to get good value for it. Big Tim, with so much to hide, kept almost all his accounts in his head. Correspondence files? As soon as Big Tim had read a letter, he tore it up “as if it contained the most terrible secret in the world.” And as a compulsive gambler who favored the racetrack and card games, Big Tim spent money recklessly and emotionally—sometimes tossing a coin with thousands of dollars at stake and squandering twice as much as he’d won to celebrate the fact of having won. He was equally casual with business income and tended to use his theaters as private banks. Before Fox took over the Dewey, for instance, Big Tim made a regular habit of dipping into the box-office receipts. Once, after he extracted an inch-thick stack of bills from the desk on his way out the door, the theater’s treasurer asked him how much he’d taken. “Oh, about half a pound,” Big Tim replied. Variety commented, “It requires an expert accountant with skill as a clairvoyant to make up the balance sheet of the Dewey Theatre when Timothy D. Sullivan happens around.”

  There was no point, however, in complaining. As time went on, Fox needed Big Tim more, not less. The race to dominate New York City movie exhibition with large, ostentatious theaters was escalating furiously, and more and more city government departments were getting involved in regulation. By the spring of 1911, New York City movie theaters needed approval from seven different city departments: the Health Department; the Police Department; the Fire Department; the Bureau of Buildings; the Department of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity; the Mayor’s Bureau of Licenses; and the Tenement House Department. Lacking Big Tim, Fox would have had to contend with, and probably pay off, employees in all seven departments.