The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Big Tim had a lot to lose from Rosenthal’s testimony. Over the years, he had loaned thousands of dollars to Rosenthal, including $12,500 to equip the Hesper Club, and had helped shield Rosenthal from arrest. Big Tim’s brother Patrick was president of the Hesper Club. According to Becker,* Big Tim was “worried to death” that a grand jury investigation of police corruption would reach into election fraud and ruin him. Also according to Becker, Big Tim offered him $25,000 to silence Rosenthal. Plausibly, Big Tim contracted the murder to Becker, who subcontracted it to Lower East Side gangsters.

  Big Tim certainly acted as if he had a tormented conscience. He had been complicit in many crimes before, but never, apparently, murder. In late September 1912, some two months after the killing, Big Tim entered a mental hospital, Dr. G. F. M. Bond’s Sanitarium, at 960 North Broadway in Yonkers. Although some suspected that this was a ruse so he could avoid interrogation, his longtime physician, Dr. Herman Reis, insisted that Big Tim truly was ill and needed to be “kept away from influences or persons that could possibly remind him of things that have passed which he wishes to forget.” Big Tim had reportedly lost 60 pounds from his former 220-pound frame.

  Old friends who visited Big Tim at Dr. Bond’s Sanitarium brought back stories of a haunted, ruined man: Big Tim staring out of a screened second-floor window or mumbling prayers and pleading for forgiveness; Big Tim jammed into a “restraining sheet,” which was a modified canvas straitjacket laced up at the back like a corset; Big Tim tied to his bed for an hour or more at a time.

  Tammany tried to revive Big Tim’s spirits—and get him out of town—by having him elected to Congress from the Eighth District in November 1912.* Still confined to Dr. Bond’s Sanitarium, Big Tim was unable to campaign or even vote for himself. He won by a landslide.

  Big Tim’s illness nearly ruined Fox’s plans. In early 1913, as costs escalated unexpectedly, he found himself $400,000 short on his two biggest construction projects to date, the $2.5 million Audubon and the $650,000 Crotona in the Bronx. It was “absolutely impossible to borrow money,” Fox would recall. Although he never explained the reason, the timing is strongly suggestive. Big Tim, locked up at Dr. Bond’s Sanitarium with his arms in a straitjacket, could not reach into his pocket to help Fox. Unless Fox paid his contractors, “all of the work I had was to be destroyed. If I didn’t find the money, my career was at an end.”

  Fox soon learned a lesson that would stay with him, mostly, through the rest of his film career. Less than two weeks before the due date of the last round of construction bills, the plaster contractor showed up at Fox’s office saying he was broke and needed money. Fox thought he wanted an advance on his remaining payment, but the plasterer didn’t want cash—just a four-month promissory note against which he would be able to borrow elsewhere. Fox recalled, “I felt as if there was no ceiling over the room I was sitting in. I didn’t know where he was going with this note, but I didn’t care as long as he gave me a receipted bill.”

  Soon after the plasterer’s visit, most of the other contractors on the two projects also called on Fox to ask for a similar arrangement. As a result, Fox was able to defer his entire $400,000 obligation for four months. The Audubon and the Crotona got finished and opened successfully. The course of events remained a mystery until one contractor called on Fox and asked him if he knew Mr. Walker, the president of the Colonial Bank. Yes, Fox said. Walker was the banker who’d thrown him out of the office when he hadn’t been able to find Big Tim’s friend Mahoney to renew a note on the City Theatre building project. The contractor suggested that Fox visit Walker again.

  This time, Walker received Fox cordially and asked about his business. Fox explained that the four-month notes from the contractors were about to come due and he still didn’t have the money to pay them. Where were the notes? Walker asked. Fox didn’t know. Walker rang a bell, and a young man brought in an envelope. “Here are $250,000 worth of those notes. I knew you were in trouble and sent those contractors to you,” Walker said. “The other $150,000’s worth are with the Nassau Bank.”

  Why had he done that? Fox asked.

  Walker explained, “Anybody that will come in here and fight as hard as you did to keep his name from going to protest, I consider a darn good risk and I wasn’t going to let you fail. Take your time, and pay it back when it is convenient for you to do so.”

  Within a year, Fox had paid off the entire debt.

  As long as he relied on personal integrity, Fox realized, he could survive without Big Tim.

  It was a lesson learned just in time. Big Tim did not last much longer. Released from Dr. Bond’s Sanitarium in late March 1913, he never recovered sufficiently to take his seat in Congress. Instead, he went to live with his brother Patrick, on Eastchester Road in the Williamsbridge section of the Bronx. Escaping occasionally from the male nurses whom Patrick had hired to watch over him, Big Tim rode taxis around his old Broadway and Bowery neighborhoods. Once, he hopped a freight train. Another time, he was found wandering around the Hudson River docks. When a month-long trip to England in mid-1913 failed to restore him, he returned to his brother’s home and remained in seclusion under round-the-clock care.

  Finally, Big Tim’s mental instability became too risky. With frosty efficiency, Tammany permanently discarded its former stalwart. In the early morning of Sunday, August 31, 1913, wearing a hat with a nametag that read “F. J. McClosky,” Big Tim got run over by a freight train on the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad just north of Pelham Parkway near Westchester, New York. The impact cut him in two. Several observers insisted that Big Tim, dressed in a tailor-made salt-and-pepper gray suit and a white shirt with black stripes and diamond-studded gold cufflinks, had been dead before the accident. According to the train conductor, no steam or vapor arose from the body, as usually happened when a live person was run over. Still, no autopsy was performed, and the death was officially ruled an accident.

  For an astonishing thirteen days, traveling among three morgues, Big Tim’s body remained unidentified. He was in a plain pine box on his way to Potter’s Field for an anonymous burial when a policeman, opening the coffin lid to take a last look as required by law, recognized the face from newspaper photos. “Why, it’s Big Tim!” he shouted. “Big Tim!”

  Murder followed by a cover-up? Probably. At an official inquiry into the coroner’s system in November 1914, two medical experts speculated that Big Tim had been walloped on the back of the head with a blackjack (an instrument favored by professional hit men because it usually left no outward mark), slugged with a sandbag,* or poisoned before being dumped on the railroad tracks. As for the official ruling of accidental death, the New York City Coroner’s Office was notoriously corrupt.

  Without a foul play scenario, Big Tim’s near fortnight of anonymity becomes incomprehensible. “Why, even the dogs in the streets know him,” his half brother Larry Mulligan protested. In its rounds of the morgues, the body had been viewed by hundreds of people, some of whom had known Big Tim well for years. Although covered with dust, his face had remained virtually unscathed. At the very least, the name in the hat should have provided an easy clue: Francis J. McClosky had been one of Big Tim’s caretakers on the night of his death. Ironically, Big Tim was saved from his worst fear, eternal anonymity, by the one characteristic he detested most in a police officer: honesty. The patrolman who recognized him was a twenty-year veteran with a clean record.

  Despite his sad demise, Big Tim got a hero’s funeral.* The event taught Fox another valuable lesson. To the mass audience, heart appeal was all that really mattered.

  A crowd estimated at 75,000 to 100,000—the people from whom Big Tim had stolen but whom he had comforted and entertained—turned out in the streets in tears to watch his final journey. Pallbearers carried his mahogany coffin, covered with three thousand American Beauty roses and two thousand white chrysanthemums, from the Timothy D. Sullivan Clubhouse at 207 Bowery to the St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral on Mott Street. Mourners included “p
oliticians, prizefighters, Judges, saloon-keepers, actors, and gangsters,” and they were not only Big Tim’s fellow Irish Americans but also people of German, Italian, French, Scandinavian, Chinese, Spanish, and Turkish descent. After a one-hour requiem Mass, Big Tim was buried in Calvary Cemetery in Queens alongside his beloved cousin Little Tim Sullivan.

  For Fox, it had taken nearly five years for the world to spin back on its proper axis. The same suppressed rage that had erupted when the MPPC pushed him too far seized him again. In January 1913, after Big Tim’s relatives had him officially declared incompetent and took control of his estate, Fox stopped paying rent on the Dewey and Gotham Theatres. Shortly afterward, he abandoned both theaters because of their physical condition. When Big Tim’s conservators sued on behalf of Sullivan & Kraus to recover the overdue rent of $3,641, Fox spoke up publicly for the first time about his former landlords’ dishonesty. Charging that Sullivan & Kraus had defrauded him by passing off the Dewey as legal when it had always been “illegal and unlawful,” he claimed that the firm had obtained its licenses and building permits through “connivance, fraud, and collusion” with corrupt city officials.*

  After Big Tim’s death in August 1913, Fox repudiated the whole Sullivan clan. Big Tim had owed Fox $31,554 from a loan he never repaid, and although Fox had gotten a court judgment in his favor, the executors, who were Big Tim’s brother Patrick Sullivan and his half brother Larry Mulligan, stalled on repayment. Admittedly, Big Tim’s estate was a chaotic jumble. He’d made a wide range of investments—in addition to his theater concerns, he’d had financial interests in a construction company, a racetrack, a cemetery, a Philadelphia bus company, and the Maryland State Fair Association—but he hadn’t kept any books or financial records and had left scarcely any notes about the deals. Further complicating the picture, alleged creditors filed a flood of claims against the estate. Some were probably fraudulent; many were rejected, and those claimants immediately sued. And then there were the questionable heirs who needed sorting out. These included a vaudeville showgirl who claimed to be Big Tim’s adopted daughter but probably wasn’t, and a seventeen-year-old girl who claimed to be his biological daughter and probably was.*

  Knowing the Sullivan style all too well, Fox suspected that Larry Mulligan and Patrick Sullivan were siphoning off the estate’s assets and planning to address his claim only when there was no money left to pay it. By May 1914, Mulligan and Sullivan had whittled the estate’s value from an estimated $2 million to $970,000. Fox had Mulligan and Sullivan arrested and placed in the custody of their lawyer until they filed an accurate inventory of assets. Then he hired a private detective, who trailed Mulligan to the Empire City racetrack and found him soliciting bets in front of the grandstand. With that information, Fox got an injunction preventing either Mulligan or Sullivan from spending any of Big Tim’s money without the permission of a court-appointed receiver. By 1915, Fox finally had his loan money back, but as late as 1922, he would still be involved in other litigation against Mulligan and Sullivan.

  The five years Fox had spent yoked to Big Tim changed him profoundly. He lost a large part of his optimism: the boy who once believed there were no mean people in the world now knew how cruel and corruptible others could be. Never again would he be willing to share power.

  Yet, like Big Tim himself, who stole with one hand and gave freely with the other, Fox’s apprenticeship to him conferred ample benefits. Because of Big Tim, he had been able to build several landmark movie theaters in New York City and had started to expand regionally. He had also forged a number of important business connections, especially with lawyers Gustavus Rogers and Samuel Untermyer. Perhaps most importantly, Big Tim had given Fox the opportunity to study at close range one of the greatest showmen of his time. With flair and humor, drama and passion, Big Tim had touched the hearts of his followers so deeply that, in the end, their love for him covered all his sins. This was the same audience that Fox would seek for his movies. As a film producer, he would in many ways emulate the best of Big Tim Sullivan’s instincts.

  CHAPTER 10

  Justice

  As Fox dealt with the consequences of Big Tim Sullivan’s deteriorating mental state, he simultaneously took on a central role in the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against the Motion Picture Patents Company. In January 1913, six months after Herman Rosenthal’s murder and seven months before Big Tim’s death, pretrial hearings began at New York’s Hotel McAlpin. During this critical phase of the case, the purpose of which was to gather evidence and lay out the claims of both sides, Fox testified for the prosecution, recruited other witnesses, and helped finance an investigation that generated massive amounts of useful information.

  Assigned to prosecute the case, thirty-six-year-old assistant attorney general Edwin P. Grosvenor came from the opposite end of the social spectrum from Fox. He was a cousin of President Taft and the twin brother of National Geographic Magazine editor Gilbert Grosvenor, who was Alexander Graham Bell’s son-in-law, and he had finished Columbia University Law School at the top of his class of four hundred. Nonetheless, aware that he didn’t know much about the motion picture industry, Grosvenor welcomed Fox’s participation. Reciprocally, Fox remained discreetly in the background, stepping forward only when called upon, so that Grosvenor and Attorney General Wickersham could claim full credit.

  Of course, the MPPC knew that Fox was the principal instigator, and it attacked him mercilessly. Seeking to discredit his testimony, J. J. Kennedy, president of the MPPC’s General Film Company subsidiary, portrayed Fox as one of his worst customers, a liar and a cheat who had routinely violated his contract. As for Fox’s claim that the MPPC had canceled his rental exchange’s license because he refused to sell the company to them, Kennedy dismissed that as a vile fabrication. In fact, Kennedy alleged, the GFC never wanted Fox’s exchange. To the contrary, he said: Fox had approached the GFC, lied about the condition of his company, and unloaded it on the GFC for $90,000. Upon learning the truth, Kennedy said, the GFC backed out of the deal.

  Behind the scenes as well, the MPPC continued to try to ruin Fox. About a week before he was scheduled to begin testifying at the pretrial hearings, the MPPC again canceled his rental exchange’s license. In addition to losing revenue from his customers, Fox faced the prospect of having nothing to show at his fourteen theaters, which depended on MPPC films because they were still the best ones around. He appealed to Grosvenor, who got a court order requiring the MPPC to supply Fox with films pending resolution of the antitrust lawsuit.

  Next, the MPPC tried withholding its “special releases.” Very popular with exhibitors, these were usually two- and three-reel films covering topical events such as former president Roosevelt’s hunting trip to Africa. Not only did the MPPC refuse to deliver specials to Fox’s exchange, but when theater owners doing business with Fox tried to rent them from the GFC, they got turned down. GFC employees told Fox’s customers that they could get the specials only if they canceled their contracts with Fox and shifted all their business to the GFC. Again, Fox turned to Grosvenor, who brought the MPPC manufacturers into line by threatening them with further government action.

  The MPPC was not so easily thwarted. Biograph, widely considered the most important of the ten licensed film manufacturers, kept slipping back into bad behavior, withholding film deliveries. Fox would go to court to get an injunction; Biograph would comply for a while and then stop the deliveries again. His customers’ patience frayed. They liked Fox, but could suffer only so much. “Personally I would not care if such [Biograph] pictures never existed, as I am ignorant of their attractiveness but the patrons demand them and I receive inquiries every day asking why I don’t show them,” the manager of a second-run theater in the Bronx wrote to Fox, explaining why he might have to stop renting from Fox. “Sincerely regretting that I have to take this course . . .” Other MPPC manufacturers devised other means of sabotage, suddenly requiring Fox’s rental exchange to pay cash, allegedly for fear of bad cred
it; making late deliveries; and shipping defective copies of films. Fox suffered not only as a film distributor but also as an exhibitor. Poor-quality films, or none at all, were an embarrassment in the large, lavish theaters he was building.

  The tension wore on him. During pretrial cross-examination, he squabbled frequently with the opposition and occasionally exploded. When an MPPC lawyer threatened to have him punished for not giving a straight answer, he shouted back that they wouldn’t be able to do so quickly enough to suit him. At times, he reverted from polished speech to the rough locutions of his Lower East Side childhood. “He is an officer, ain’t he?” he said, and “I seen Mr. Kennedy . . .” and “That is what he done.”

  Yet, Fox stayed the course and fought back in the marketplace. In the spring of 1913, he won an important victory for exhibitors. Challenging the MPPC’s rule prohibiting licensed exhibitors from showing independent films, a contract stipulation that had ensured an exclusive market for the MPPC’s manufacturers, Fox signed a contract to have Kinemacolor projection equipment installed in all his theaters. Kinemacolor was a rudimentary “color” technology where black-and-white film was photographed and projected behind alternating red and green filters. After ensuring that Grosvenor would back him up, Fox told the MPPC, “Gentlemen, you can all do your worst, I am going to run Kinemacolor.” On July 10, 1913, the MPPC and GFC backed down, issuing a bulletin advising licensed theaters that they could show independent films without the threat of license cancellation. That was the first step toward an open market for the motion picture industry.