The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  So, Fox concentrated on proving his value to Big Tim. At the Dewey, with Eva’s brother Joe Leo as the manager, he implemented a combined bill of vaudeville and motion pictures for ten cents a ticket and focused on the details that made a difference. Despite overhead expenses that were more than twice those of a nearby competitor, Fox hired some fifty employees, including twelve red-uniformed ushers, three sign painters, and two projectionists, and introduced various innovations. For instance, as a result of chaotic conditions among film manufacturers and distributors, films often arrived at theaters without a frame showing their title. Fox came up with the idea of having a card boy stand off to the side of the stage and, before every film,* place a title card on an easel that was lighted by a shaded lamp similar to those on music conductors’ stands. To facilitate the speedy entry of crowds, Fox began using strip tickets instead of brass tokens that had to be inserted into a counting machine.

  Forward thinking paid off. On Thanksgiving Day 1908, the Dewey sold twelve thousand tickets, yielding a box-office take of $1,200, which was believed to be a motion picture theater record. Variety commented, “Altogether, the Dewey comes close to being about the best run and most profitable moving picture place in New York.”

  Before the year was out, Big Tim’s political support had helped Fox significantly boost his public profile. Despite the injunction that Fox’s lawyer Gustavus Rogers had gotten in late December 1907 protecting New York City movie theaters, the Sunday-closing controversy had never died down. Instead, various clergy members had continued to sermonize on the subject and to hound Mayor McClellan through letter-writing campaigns and visits to his office.

  Worn down, stung by charges that he was weak and indecisive, McClellan finally acted. On December 24, 1908, after a five-hour public hearing the previous day that had been thronged by irate clergymen, he issued an order revoking and annulling the licenses of all the city’s 551 “common show” movie theaters (those with fewer than three hundred seats) effective at midnight. The closure would last indefinitely.

  McClellan cited concerns about physical safety. He personally had visited many firetrap movie theaters, he explained, and believed he was “averting a public calamity.” That was an excuse, but it played upon the public’s well-justified terror of fire: every year, New York City suffered more than twelve thousand blazes, with associated losses of $7.6 million. Movie theaters were especially vulnerable. Still prominent in public consciousness was the horrific disaster that had occurred on January 13, 1908, at the Rhoads Opera House in Boyertown, Pennsylvania, a town of 2,500 about fifty miles northwest of Philadelphia. There, a movie projector suddenly exploded and sent a wave of roaring flames toward the horrified audience. Among a crowd of about 400, some 169 people died—either burned by the fire, choked by smoke, or crushed underfoot in the stampede to get out.

  Backed by Tammany, Fox immediately challenged McClellan’s order. On December 26, lawyer Gustavus Rogers got a temporary injunction, and by 8:00 p.m., most movie theaters had reopened. They stayed open. In January 1909 the injunction became permanent when a New York Supreme Court judge ruled that the mayor had no right to close a theater arbitrarily without specific evidence that it had violated the law. The episode proved such an embarrassment to McClellan that he would not mention a word about it in his autobiography. Fox’s triumph was noted by newspapers around the country.

  CHAPTER 7

  “The Next Napoleon of the Theatre”

  Impressed by Fox’s ambition and determination, Big Tim invited his protégé into two large building deals. In May 1909, Fox joined Big Tim, Little Tim, and George Kraus in organizing the City Theatre Company to build a new twenty-five-hundred-seat theater on Fourteenth Street, next to Luchow’s restaurant between Third and Fourth Avenues. Then, in the spring of 1910, Fox, the two Tims, Kraus, and Fox’s nickelodeon partner Sol Brill formed the Phoenix Amusement Company to build the eighteen-hundred-seat Washington Theatre in Washington Heights, at the northeast corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 149th Street.

  On both projects, Fox supervised construction and hired fledgling architect Thomas W. Lamb, a Scottish-born former New York City building inspector who would soon become one of the world’s premier movie palace designers. Although the $225,000 Washington Theatre project appears to have proceeded smoothly, the City Theatre turned into a massive headache. The enterprise rested on a cockeyed financing scheme that Big Tim had set up with a contractor named Mahoney to adjust for the fact that the four partners had only a fraction of the estimated $300,000 building cost.

  Mahoney had agreed to accept promissory notes for half the monthly installment payments and to keep renewing the notes as often as Big Tim needed. A week before the first $10,000 note was due to the Colonial Bank, Mahoney was nowhere to be found. Don’t worry, Big Tim said, the problem was Mahoney’s because it was Mahoney who owed the money to the bank. Unconvinced, and frantic that the note would go to protest and his credit would be ruined, Fox scraped together $2,500 to cover his one-quarter interest and, on the final day, went to see Colonial Bank president Alexander Walker. Setting the money on Walker’s desk, Fox asked that his name be removed from the note.

  “Walker pushed a bell and a man in a gray uniform with a night stick in his hand appeared,” Fox recalled. Walker wanted only the entire $10,000 and swept Fox’s cash onto the floor. “I picked it up and was gently led out by the man in uniform.” From outside, Fox phoned. As soon as he heard Fox’s voice, Walker slammed down the receiver. Fox went back to Walker’s office. “He yelled, ‘Get out!’ at the top of his voice and this time two men came in and just threw me out.” For the next hour or so, Fox stood outside Walker’s window, occasionally tapping on it “to let him know I was there.” When the clock struck three, ending the banking day, it seemed as if the default “would destroy my whole possible career.”

  The next morning, Mahoney materialized and cheerfully renewed the note. The bank didn’t protest the one-day delay. That was Big Tim’s way of doing business. Rules were flexible.

  After eleven months, the City Theatre was finally finished. It was magnificent. Built in the same French Renaissance style that the Astors and Vanderbilts had favored for their mansions, the theater had a twenty-five-foot-square lobby, twenty-five-hundred leather-backed mahogany seats, a proscenium arch finished in gold leaf, and a silk-embroidered drop curtain depicting a scene from the Versailles gardens.

  Making a profit, however, was a problem. Although Fox had intended to run the City as a motion picture theater and had told Lamb to leave room for a projection booth, Big Tim insisted on live theater. As a result, the City opened, on April 18, 1910, with Miss Innocence, starring Broadway musical star Anna Held. “It was a loss from the first day it was open,” said Fox. They tried eight different plays in about two months, then began renting the place out to theatrical booking companies such as William Morris and Klaw & Erlanger. Fortunately, Big Tim was interested only in money, and in late November 1910 he agreed to give Fox a twenty-one-year lease on the City for $75,000 a year. Now solely in charge, Fox changed the fare to a combination of vaudeville and movies. With another of Eva’s brothers, Ben Leo, as its manager, the City began to make money, soon yielding annual profits between $42,000 and $45,000.

  Elsewhere around the city, Fox bought, built, and leased at such a furious pace that theater impresario and author Robert Grau called him the “next Napoleon of the Theatre.” Fox made decisions swiftly and (another hallmark of his career to come) often led with a stunning offer. One morning in early February 1909, for instance, he spent only eighteen minutes before deciding that he had to have the Family Theatre on 125th Street. Previously operated as a modest vaudeville house, the Family was just down the street from Fox’s Gotham movie theater, which he had rented seven months earlier from Big Tim Sullivan. At 10:00 a.m., watching rival exhibitor William Gane gesturing grandly to a workman in overalls in front of the Family, Fox understood that he was about to face tough competition. Indeed, the previous midnight,
Gane had signed a seven-year lease to take over the Family and had announced plans for a $20,000 renovation. At 10:18 a.m., Fox walked over and proposed to take over Gane’s lease, offering to reimburse all Gane’s costs and pay him a $10,000 bonus. A $10,000 profit in less than half a day: Gane accepted on the spot. Fox made no improvements to the Family Theatre and ran it as a five-cent movie theater, so as not to dent business at the Gotham, which offered the “split pea” film-and-vaudeville format for ten cents’ admission.

  Other properties that Fox swept up included the Star Theatre at Lexington and 107th Street; the Nemo Theatre, an 1,100-seat former café and music hall, on the southeast corner of 110th and Broadway, which Fox bought in 1911 for just under $500,000; the New York Roof Theatre, on Broadway between Forty-Fourth and Forty-Fifth Streets; the 2,000-seat Folly Theatre, on Debevoise Street in Brooklyn, where Fox took a ten-year lease at $35,000 annually; and the 3,000-plus-seat Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street at Irving Place.

  The Academy of Music was a particularly perilous venture. A jewel of the late-nineteenth-century New York landscape, loosely modeled after the Berlin Opera House, the property had always struggled financially and was now a frowsy white elephant with “half-demolished and moldy furniture” and an undistinguished stock theater company tromping through a new play every week. Fox first made an unsuccessful low-ball offer. Then, after learning that rival exhibitor Marcus Loew was close to acquiring the property, he panicked. Loew was an able showman who would undoubtedly siphon off business from Fox’s two theaters nearby on Fourteenth Street, the existing Dewey and the under-construction City. Big Tim intervened and swung the deal to Fox on similar terms to those Loew had proposed. In February 1910, Fox signed a ten-year, $100,000-a-year lease on the Academy and paid an upfront security deposit of $100,000 in cash.

  For nearly two years, Fox lost money at the Academy, a total of $380,000. Reluctant to compete with himself by showing movies there, he started out presenting low-cost plays. That idea failed. So did opera. So did boxing matches. Not until he renegotiated his lease in order to undertake a $118,000 renovation—the main feature of which was the creation of retail store space along the Fourteenth Street side, previously occupied by a brick wall and an iron fence—did the Academy’s fortunes turn around. When Fox reopened the theater in the summer of 1912, the rent from the stores exceeded his lease payment, and over the next decade he earned back all his prior loss.

  Yet even when the Academy of Music was bleeding cash, Fox continued to spend extravagantly. No one was more determined to advance New York City’s trend toward movie theater magnificence. In March 1911 he began building the 1,800-seat Riverside Theater on the northwest corner of Broadway and Ninety-Sixth Street, spending $900,000 on land and construction costs. Ten months after opening day in December 1911, Variety reported, “Rain or shine they jam, push, elbow and literally force their way into William Fox’s Riverside theatre. The audience at the Riverside looks like class.”* In June 1912, he leased the adjacent property, which stretched to the southwest corner of Broadway and Ninety-Seventh Street, and there built two more theaters: the Riviera at ground level and, stacked on top of it, the Japanese Gardens. He now controlled the entire city block, worth an estimated $2 million.

  Simultaneously, in February 1912, Fox began his most daring project yet: the Audubon Theater, an immense entertainment complex on Broadway between 165th and 166th Streets. Only two years before, the area had comprised a disreputable collection of shabby frame houses, and according to the New York Times, “had anyone suggested building a good-sized theatre in the locality, it would have been regarded as an evidence of boldness bordering on insanity.”

  Fox, however, saw signs of change: the American League baseball park across the street, the subway station two blocks away at 167th Street, and, most important, the migration of middle-class families into the Washington Heights neighborhood. Spending $1.2 million for the land and construction, he built the block-long Audubon, “as bright and shiny as a new coach,” with an enameled brick exterior ornamented with protruding fox heads. Inside were a 3,000-seat theater opulently decorated in red and gold; a $12,000 oil painting of the Continental Congress; a roof garden theater; the Danse d’Hiver ballroom, and about twenty-five stores. Although some observers predicted that the area’s population wouldn’t catch up for another five years, “the Audubon started off like a race horse and has not stopped,” Variety reported six weeks after the complex opened on November 27, 1912. Farther north, in the Bronx, Fox built the 2,500-seat Crotona Theatre on Tremont Avenue between Park and Washington, which opened in late 1912 as part of a $650,000 L-shaped office and loft building.

  Fox also began to expand regionally. In Newark, New Jersey, he took over Proctor’s Bijou Dream, renaming it the Washington Theatre. In New England, announcing that he intended to create a regional theater chain, he leased the Grand Opera House in New Haven, Connecticut, and the Nelson and the Gilmore theaters in Springfield, Massachusetts. In Connecticut, he took over theaters in New Britain, Waterbury, and Bridgeport, renaming each one “Fox’s Theatre.”

  By early 1913, Fox had fourteen movie theaters in the New York City area. In the space of four years, he had spent more than $4 million on land and construction costs.

  Where did all the money come from? To explain his feverish spending spree, Fox usually said that he mainly used profits from his existing theaters, taking for personal use only as much as he and his family required for necessities. Indeed, the Foxes lived comfortably but not lavishly. As of 1910, he, Eva, nine-year-old Mona, and six-year-old Belle lived at 272 East 200th Street in a then-fashionable section of the Bronx with a live-in servant, nurse, and chauffeur. However, they rented rather than owned the home. Two years later, his personal financial profile remained relatively modest. He wasn’t even mentioned when, in December 1912, Variety compiled an informal list of the wealthiest people in show business. Among his peers, Marcus Loew showed up with an estimated $1.5 million, and Big Tim’s Sullivan and Considine partner, John Considine, was reportedly worth $2 million. Still, it’s unlikely that reinvested profits could have completely covered Fox’s expansion costs. His ticket prices were mostly in the ten-to-fifty-cent range, and every theater had substantial operating expenses.

  Fox also referred to having loans from several banks. That explanation, too, falls short. Small banks wouldn’t have had sufficient resources to stake him to the full extent of his vision, and large banks, which then had highly conservative lending policies, almost certainly wouldn’t have been willing to finance such speculative enterprises. Considerable turmoil prevailed in the motion picture industry. Intense competition and expansion among exhibitors had caused both a shortage in the supply of good films and an excess seating capacity. By 1912, many New York show business leaders frankly admitted that they considered the market to be overbuilt with movie theaters.

  Furthermore, as a credit risk, Fox remained doubtful. He had conspicuously failed at the outset with the City Theatre and the Academy of Music, and his plans for the Audubon Theatre initially seemed financially reckless. Around this time, he also had serious labor troubles. In late November 1911, twenty musicians and fifty stage employees, all members of the American Federation of Labor, had gone on strike at four of his theaters (the Academy of Music, the City Theatre, the New York Roof, and the Family Theatre) after Fox refused to pay the New York Roof musicians extra for working on Sundays. Fox handled the situation poorly. He ignored letters from the musicians’ union asking for an amicable settlement and, to replace the striking workers, he hired street musicians and imported stagehands from Canada. Then, after the union newspaper The Call reported on the dispute, he filed five libel lawsuits for $100,000 each on behalf of five of his theaters* that he thought the paper had maligned. In May 1912, several employees at the Fox-leased Orpheum Theatre in Jersey City walked out after management tried to lay off one worker. Years later Fox would learn to cool down and accommodate other points of view, but he hadn’t done
so yet.

  Despite all these difficulties, Fox displayed a curious ease about finances. When the Vaudeville Managers’ Protective Association, where he served on the twenty-five-member board of directors, proposed in December 1911 to impose a $200-per-head tax on its members to help him in his fight against the striking union workers, he refused to accept. He didn’t need the money, he said. And in acquiring so many large theaters in such a short space of time, he never hesitated. Somehow, he always found all the money he needed.

  The third part of Fox’s explanation about funding, while the area of his scantest public comment, was probably the most important: his relationship with Big Tim Sullivan. Years later, Fox would explain his decision to partner with Big Tim by saying, “I had a lot of theaters behind me at this time, but no cash.” Cash, of course, was something that Big Tim had abundantly. In addition to his vast illegal income, Big Tim reportedly traded political influence for access to some of the city’s legitimate fortunes—“the doors of the great were open to him; and that meant that their coffers were open to him when he needed money.” As an underwriter for Fox’s nascent film empire, Big Tim had a unique, vital advantage. He could provide large amounts of cash instantly with no paperwork to fill out and no further approval needed.

  Every now and then, Fox had to step in closer to Tammany Hall’s web of corruption. In May 1911, New York City chamberlain Charles H. Hyde, who was responsible for safeguarding some $500 million in annual municipal revenues, was indicted by a grand jury for bribery. Two of the banks where Hyde, a Tammany stalwart, deposited city money had gone bust under highly suspicious circumstances. Additionally, Hyde had evidently helped organize and distribute a $500,000 bribery fund to defeat the Hart-Agnew anti-racetrack gambling bill in the state legislature. To pay for Hyde’s defense, Tammany passed the hat among “all of the boys.” Fox did his part. For $10,000, he bought Hyde’s thirty-five-foot houseboat, the Stop-a-While, even though he had little time for such recreation.