The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  CHAPTER 12

  “William Fox Presents”

  The Fox features don’t adopt a sugar-and-water attitude towards the facts of existence. They are real pictures of real men and women, not pictures of sweet-scented substitutes for human beings, behaving as no mortal beings ever did or ever will. That is why the William Fox features are so immensely popular. Because they are real, and sincere . . .

  —FOX FILM CORPORATION AD, JULY 1915

  In many ways, these were the best years, the mid- to late 1910s, the most purely enjoyable years of Fox’s life, because this was the time when he got to concentrate almost entirely on making movies. Driven both by his love of the industry and by the awareness, impressed on him by the recent Box Office Attraction crisis, of how easy it could be to fail, he pushed forward with single-minded concentration.

  In the dim gray light of early morning in the heart of the Broadway theater district, one might have seen Fox on the sidewalk outside the Leavitt Building at 130 West Forty-Sixth Street, a tall limestone-and-brick structure next door to Public School No. 67 and across the street from the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. Here, occupying the entire fifth, sixth, and seventh floors, Fox Film had its headquarters. But was Fox about to enter the building or had he just left? It would have been difficult to tell. Many were the days when at 5:30 or 6:00 a.m., after working all through the night, he finally allowed himself to go home for a few hours’ rest. But he could never stay away for long. He always had to turn around and go back as soon as possible. On the brink of middle age—he would be forty before the decade ended, and his dark hair was thinning, his face becoming lined—he felt acutely the pressure of time. “The Man Who Forgets to Sleep,” Motion Picture News called him.

  During these early years, Fox Film operated essentially as a mom-and-pop shop. Fox chose all the stories, sometimes coming up with ideas himself; he collaborated with writers, selected actors, and assigned directors. Every night in the “Little Red Theatre” projection room next to his office, seated in a wicker chair “with hands clasped always about a drawn-up knee, and his back to the electric fan whirring incessantly against the click-click of the movie machine,” he watched the day’s rushes. As images filled the screen, Fox fired suggestions at the stenographer and the film editor, who sat nearby huddled over a small table taking notes in the light of a green-shaded lamp. After that, into the early morning hours, he met at length with each director about reshoots.

  When filming was complete, Fox helped edit the footage, wrote intertitles, and oversaw publicity campaigns. According to Herbert Brenon, a leading Fox Film director during 1915–1916, Fox “has his hand on every detail from that time [when the story was chosen] until the picture ceases to be shown to the public. He is an indefatigable worker . . . the active critic of every detail.” Watching up to fifty reels of film per week, Fox approved every foot of film that the studio released.

  When he needed advice, he turned not to his official second-in-command, general manager Winnie Sheehan, who after all knew even less than he did, but to the one person who had the supreme virtue of being entirely devoted to him—his wife, Eva. Now that their two daughters were adolescents, she had the time; she also understood that this was the best way to stay close to her husband. Although she never received a salary, Fox credited Eva with playing a vital role in establishing Fox Film. “She was in the habit of reading at least a book a day. I could rely on her recommendation of what story would be proper to make into moving pictures,” he said. “All scenarios were finally submitted to her for reading. However, no one knew that was so, for these scenarios in the first five years were sent to the scenario department of our business and every evening I would pack them up and bring them home to her. I remember one story being rejected by her, and the writer of the story then wrote me a letter and said that his story had just been returned, marked ‘Rejected’ and that this was the greatest story he had ever written, and proved that my scenario department was in the hands of incompetents, and he would recommend I immediately dismiss the party who rejected the story. I couldn’t very well do that, for it was Mrs. Fox.”

  Eva also watched rushes and final cuts of the films, offering her opinions with skillful, face-saving diplomacy. Fox recalled, “If there were a half dozen people in the room looking at the picture, as long as I was going in the right direction she would say nothing, but the minute she thought I was off the right direction, she would say, ‘May I see you a minute?’ Then we would withdraw from the room and discuss the matter, and those in the room never knew that we discussed the matter at all.” When, as the final step, Fox wrote the intertitles, Eva pitched in to help. Often she stayed at the office as long he did.

  Fox wanted the world to know these movies were his. The opening card of every Fox Film release read, “William Fox Presents.”

  Initially, most observers shrugged. New production companies were always starting up, burning through their money, and getting swept out in a pile of ashes.

  In the mid-1910s, following a charmed infancy when sheer novelty had been enough to attract large crowds, the movies entered a phase of bewildered adolescence. What, actually, were the movies? No one could say for sure. A movie might be only fifteen or twenty minutes long. Many producers—among them, Universal founder Carl Laemmle and Essanay president George K. Spoor—believed that audiences wouldn’t pay attention for any longer than that and that they wanted a continuously running, come-and-go-as-you-please variety program. Or a movie might run for an hour or longer. In 1912, Adolph Zukor imported the ninety-minute European film Queen Elizabeth, starring Sarah Bernhardt, and showed it in a Broadway theater with top ticket prices of $2. Although the movie drew large crowds, it’s unclear if Zukor actually made a profit. One rumor held that he lost about $2,000.

  Were the movies a new art form or just a new technology? Probably the latter. That seemed to be the suggestion of an almost slavish reliance on plays, novels, short stories, and opera for material. Then again, original scripts were starting to crop up, albeit usually in the form of three- or four-page synopses. And who should be in the movies? Stage actors, of course, because they were trained professionals. But movie actors didn’t have to speak, and the theatrical style, those broad gestures and exaggerated expressions calculated to reach to the back seats—they seemed to offend the camera’s intimate eye. Maybe lively salesclerks and ambitious beauties would do better. As rival ideas battled to answer these basic questions, even the industry’s lexicon wouldn’t stay in place. Directors were often called producers, and producers were called directors or manufacturers or managers. In fact, the movies weren’t even decidedly “the movies,” but just as often “motion pictures,” “moving pictures,” “screen dramas,” “photo-dramas,” “silent drama,” and “photoplays.”* Amid the confusion, fools rushed in and investment capital, eager for profit, ran after them.

  At first, Fox seemed like just another one of the herd. “My friends regarded me as one might a man who was setting sail on an utterly unseaworthy craft,” he would recall. “But having set my hand to the oar, I was not going to backwater.”

  Fox never intended to shake up the movie industry. At heart, he was and would always be a social conservative who wanted to change nothing except his own status from outsider to insider. He loved America, its values, its processes, its definition of culture. Consequently, in starting Fox Film, he aimed to create a respectable image by translating high-minded literary and stage plays into motion pictures and by continuing to hire the best established talent that money could buy.

  Some of his brightest hopes settled on Betty Nansen, the top female star at the Theatre Royal of Copenhagen and the longtime muse of the late Henrik Ibsen, for whom she had originated the role of Hedda Gabler onstage. Considered a sort of second Sarah Bernhardt, the regal-looking forty-one-year-old actress had impressive film experience, having starred in nine big-budget movies for Scandinavia’s Great Northern Film Company.

  To lure Nansen to America to star in �
�classic works of masters,” Fox reportedly agreed to pay her $25,000 a year (two and a half times his own 1915 salary) and to let her direct a movie. He may also have hoped to get his hands on some Ibsen plays. On the voyage over, Nansen was bringing several manuscripts she’d inherited from the reclusive “master of the modern drama,” including his mysterious “missing manuscript,” the unfinished, never-published play, supposedly a sex drama, that he was working on at the time of his death in 1906. To greet her ship’s arrival at New York Harbor on December 26, 1914, Fox assembled a twenty-five-member welcoming committee that included the Danish consul general and various literary intellectuals, and he had a large, brightly lit Christmas tree set up in Nansen’s honor at the pier entrance. After the actress paraded off the ship wearing a sable cape from Czarina Alexandra and trailing a retinue of servants who carted forty-six trunks containing $50,000 worth of costumes, the whole group headed off to a Fox-sponsored reception at the Plaza Hotel.

  There were limits, however, to the extent that Fox could embrace high culture. Stamped by past experience, he knew what he knew. Stubborn and opinionated, he couldn’t not know it. From his hardscrabble Lower East Side childhood and his years in the shadow of Big Tim Sullivan, he had witnessed sides of life that were anything but polished and refined. That knowledge, those truths, indelibly shaped his aesthetic perspective.

  His first hit movie came as a complete surprise to him. In January 1915, while he was putting the finishing touches on the deal to incorporate Fox Film and preparing to star Nansen in her debut Fox movie, The Celebrated Scandal, adapted from a play by Nobel Prize–winning Spanish playwright José Echegaray, one of his run-of-the-mill releases jolted forward and became a huge success. Fox had had only modest expectations for A Fool There Was. True, he did assign big-name director Frank Powell, whom he’d hired away from the prestigious Pathé studio, and true, he did send the Fool cast and crew by chartered yacht to film in Florida at the end of 1914. True also, this story of a millionaire Wall Street lawyer ruined by a sex-mad “female vampire”* (a term quickly shortened to vamp) had been a hit play that ran for two years in New York, including a two-week stint in 1910 at the City Theatre on Fourteenth Street, the venue Fox had built with Big Tim Sullivan.

  However, Fox budgeted only a low-end $25,000 for the entire movie, and he hadn’t even been willing to hire a female star. He’d thought about it, having considered several well-known Broadway actresses. Then he talked to the play’s producer and star, Robert Hilliard. Don’t do it, Hilliard shuddered. Six times he’d hired a star and six times he’d had to find a replacement after each one developed an outsize ego and became unmanageable. Let the part make the star, Hilliard advised. The advice made sense to Fox, who in general didn’t think much of actors and never would. As he later commented, “[N]inety-nine percent of the performers who appear in motion pictures are nothing more or less than mannequins. They contribute nothing to the screen. They simply portray the part which is created in the brain of the author, and the director, in carrying out that which the author intended, develops the character so that a public sympathy is aroused for him or her.”

  As a result, Fox accepted director Powell’s suggestion to cast a struggling actress named Theodosia Goodman, whom Powell had used in a bit part as a gangster’s moll in his most recent film for Pathé, The Stain. Fox didn’t bother to meet her beforehand, but merely looked into the room where she was talking with Powell. At first glance, thirty-year-old Theodosia had little to recommend her. With her broad, flat face, asymmetrical features, strong jawline, and thick-waisted, chubby-legged figure, she looked mostly like what she actually was: a middle-class, Jewish tailor’s daughter from Cincinnati, Ohio.

  But Theodosia’s dark, deep-set eyes did have an intriguing intensity; and, more importantly, she was desperately ambitious. Having dropped out of her sophomore year at the University of Cincinnati a decade earlier to come to New York to pursue an acting career, she so far had managed to land only small parts in undistinguished plays and stints out on the road with low-paid touring companies. Most people looked right through her. Cecil B. DeMille, for instance, later admitted that although she had often come to his office pleading for work, he “failed to take much notice” and never hired her. Recently, her luck had worsened. Her mother, who lived with her, had caught pneumonia; a stage job that was supposed to last a whole season had ended after just a few weeks; a fire in her apartment had destroyed most of her possessions and the insurance company had paid only a paltry settlement. The rent problem, she would recall, had become “heartbreaking.”

  Cautiously, Fox gave Theodosia only his standard beginner’s contract of seventy-five dollars a week for three months. If she didn’t make good, he would let her go. When footage from A Fool There Was began to come back to New York from the set in Florida, he was impressed with her performance, but not enough to overcome a sense that the film was doomed. “Look where my good money’s going!” he cried to Powell.

  Having been started, the movie had to be finished. However, aside from a few striking costumes worn by Theodosia’s character, it looks as if it were made on the cheap. In one early scene, the actress wears a nightgown several sizes too large for her, with the distracting result that the straps keep falling off her shoulders, first on this side and then on the other, while she’s trying to discard her current besotted lover in order to set out after lawyer Schuyler. The scene should have been reshot, but it wasn’t. (Those images would torment her when she first saw them: “I could hardly keep myself from rushing up and telling myself about it.”)

  With little hope that anyone would pay attention, Fox decided to have some fun with A Fool There Was by inserting several inside jokes. After Schuyler gets appointed to an overseas diplomatic mission, he receives telegrams from Secretary of State “Sheehan” (the real incumbent was William Jennings Bryan). Later, when Schuyler’s shameless carrying-on in Europe with the vamp gets reported in a “Town Tattler” newspaper gossip column, the film frame also shows a boxed article signed by Samuel Untermyer, Fox’s friend and one of his legal advisers on the MPPC antitrust case. Echoing Fox’s teenage infatuation with socialism, the text reads, “There is no reason why labor should not have the same right to combine to meet such combinations of capital, yet it has been denied that right by the construction placed upon the law, which it is now sought to correct.”

  Offhandedly, Fox tossed A Fool There Was out into the marketplace in January 1915 with a no-frills advertising campaign. Although he had changed the actress’s name to Theda Bara because “Theodosia Goodman” “didn’t quite have the theatrical feeling,” initially he did nothing else to play her up. Small, plain newspaper ads touted the story’s roots in Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 poem “The Vampire,” and lead actor Edward José’s impressive theater credentials. At best, it seemed, the movie would hop around the country, playing a day or two at a time in neighborhood theaters before tumbling into oblivion.

  Instead, crowds stampeded into theaters everywhere. A Fool There Was sold 4,900 tickets in just one day in Kansas City and also set box-office records in San Francisco, Seattle, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Portland, and Dallas. At the center of the frenzy was Theda’s performance. With last-chance ferocity—“I was scared to death,” she later commented—she had seized the part of “The Vamp”* and shaken every possible passion out of it. Her character was shamelessly sexual, even though the most graphic scene shows her lifting her skirt to reveal an ankle in order to seduce John Schuyler on board the ship to Europe. She slinks, she smolders, she glares, she rages. She does not repent. The movie gave her that latitude and never took it back. In the final scene, when Schuyler’s wife and young daughter come to his disheveled New York town house to plead for his return—wreck that he is, they still love him—he briefly considers going home. Then Theda storms back onto the scene and simply stands there, breaking his will with her gaze and compelling him to cling to her. All is lost. Drunk, disgraced, and thoroughly miserable, Schuyler slumps
down onto the floor and dies. Theda scatters rose petals over his corpse and grins.

  It was the right performance for the moment—defiantly, sensationally modern—and context is probably the consideration that Fox missed in his initial assessment of the movie’s prospects. Beneath its glossy prosperity, mid-1910s America was a restless, anxious place. “We are unsettled to the very roots of our being,” Walter Lippmann wrote in his 1914 book Drift and Mastery, about the country’s ongoing feverish push toward impersonal, industrialized, urban life: automobiles and skyscrapers rather than horses and villages; the telephone, electric lights, concrete playgrounds; “the symbols and shadows of events” rather than events themselves. “We have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves. And so we are literally an eccentric people, our emotional life is disorganized, our passions are out-of-kilter.” The war in Europe, six months old by the time of the movie’s release, intensified the distress. As James Truslow Adams would later explain, “[W]e had almost all of us forgotten that such a horror could raise its head in our modern world . . . Suddenly the whole of Western European civilization appeared to have burst into flames.”

  A Fool There Was caught the country’s raw, nervous energy and offered a visceral symbol of protest. “Why did you act afraid and ashamed?” Theda’s vamp lambastes Schuyler after their open-air car has passed that of his wife and daughter on a busy New York City street. “You should have bowed and smiled as I did.”

  Out on the road in early 1915 to drum up business for Fox Film, general manager Sheehan found exhibitors stripping Edward José’s name off the bill and highlighting Theda’s. “You can’t do that,” Sheehan told them. Fox Film’s contract called for José to get top billing. “I don’t care anything about your contract,” one theater manager replied, “I know who brings the money to the box office window.” Theda was the right symbol for the times. As Sinclair Lewis would write in his 1920 best-selling novel Main Street, “a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest.”