by Vanda Krefft
Exhibitors clamored to rebook the movie, so that it often circled back to the same theater for several repeat engagements. By May 1917, still doing healthy business, A Fool There Was had become the first feature film to make $1 million in profits. Even the critics applauded. “It is bold and relentless; it is filled with passion and tragedy . . . shot through by the lightning bolt of sex,” enthused the New York Dramatic Mirror; “[P]owerfully absorbing in all its parts. No six-reel picture witnessed by the writer has surpassed it in its gripping and tenacious qualities,” added Motion Picture News, which proclaimed the movie “exceedingly excellent.”
Astounded, Fox initially dismissed the success of A Fool There Was as an aberration. For Theda’s follow-up role, he cast her as the second female lead in Kreutzer Sonata, based on the Tolstoy short story, and gave the main role to stage star Nance O’Neil. In crafting Theda’s public image, he borrowed the traditional stage-world assumption that audiences would measure value according to the distance between an actor’s “real” self and the performed character. Trumpeting Theda as a great actress, Fox Film press releases claimed she’d been the leading lady of the Théâtre Antoine in Paris, celebrated for her “marvelous interpretations of extremely difficult roles,” and that she’d won similar acclaim in Berlin and Vienna. Publicity photos from early 1915 showed Theda in stylish but demure clothing, with subdued makeup and warm, friendly expressions. She was an artist, the Fox forces insisted. It was all nonsense. According to Theda’s biographer Eve Golden, no evidence indicates that Theda had ever traveled to, much less worked in, Europe, and she had never been famous anywhere. Fox later admitted, “I was never able to find out what she did in the theater before that time.”
Movie audiences wanted none of this—not because it was nonsense, but because it was the wrong kind of nonsense. Asserting control through ticket sales, they grabbed Theda’s image and shaped it according to their own desires. No, Theda was not a supporting player. Viewing Kreutzer Sonata, in which she appears as the main character’s husband-stealing sister, they cheered her on so enthusiastically that, mirroring the Fool events, theater owners ignored Nance O’Neil, whose contract called for sole billing, and promoted Theda instead. Yes, The Clemenceau Case, her third movie, that was more like it. Billed as the star, Theda played the “pantherish” Iza, who ruins her loving husband and nearly does the same to his best friend, a talented sculptor, before her husband stabs her through the heart. No and no again: ticket buyers shunned The Two Orphans and Lady Audley’s Secret, two mid-1915 movies with Theda in non-vamp roles. In the former, Theda played a chaste French orphan who endures various persecutions while trying to rescue her beloved blind sister from kidnappers; in the latter, she is an English aristocrat suffering from hereditary mental illness. The movies didn’t need another sweet, sympathetic star like Mary Pickford or Lillian Gish. They needed an antidote.
In another curious development, many moviegoers didn’t want the story to end when the lights came up. Film wasn’t theater. Film was a spy, moving surreptitiously in other worlds and sending back reports, mesmerizing viewers with the illusion of authenticity. And if the characters were true, then they ought to be so in the real world, too. As a local exhibitor told Alabama’s Montgomery Advertiser in August 1915, his average customer preferred to believe that Theda wasn’t acting. He explained, “[T]here are women in Montgomery whom I have heard refer to her as ‘a buzzard.’ ”
Fox was listening, but not quite ready to hear. As revenue flowed in from Theda’s movies, he directed profits back into his original conservative strategy. Hastily buying up more talent, he targeted primarily directors and writers because he considered them to be the brains of the business and more important than actors in determining success.
Typical was the case of director Raoul Walsh, who acknowledged, “Fox money bought my loyalty.” Walsh had been rather happy with his forty-dollar-a-week job directing low-budget Westerns for D. W. Griffith’s company, Triangle–Fine Arts. Then, in the spring of 1915, Winnie Sheehan arrived in Los Angeles and, on orders from Fox, took twenty-eight-year-old Walsh to dinner at the Alexandria Hotel. Name your price, Sheehan said. “Four hundred. Weekly,” Walsh replied, never expecting to be taken seriously. After all, even the great Griffith was reportedly pulling down only about $100 a week. Sheehan didn’t flinch. The next evening, over another dinner at the Alexandria, he casually tossed a contract for $400 a week in front of Walsh, who was so stunned that the words blurred in front of his eyes. The following day, a still-incredulous Walsh showed the signed contract to a Triangle–Fine Arts colleague, who asked, “Who’s backing them—God?”
By June 1915, Fox had eight of the industry’s most capable directors under contract* and claimed to have spent $1 million for the movie rights to famous plays and novels. Yet, as Fox made his plans, events continued to push in another direction. The refined Danish import Betty Nansen had little appeal for American audiences. None of the five movies* she had made for Fox by the summer of 1915 earned much money, even though Fox had given her all the advantages he could. For three movies, he’d paired Nansen with his most trusted director, J. Gordon Edwards. He had paid for expensive sets and location shooting—her Anna Karenina went to a Montreal resort to film ski-racing scenes—and he’d persuaded Columbia University professor Alexander Delaney to write a press release touting her “magnificent” performance in A Woman’s Resurrection, also based on a Tolstoy story. A Fox Film ad campaign promoted Nansen as “The Queen of Emotional Acting” whose work “marks a new epoch” in filmmaking.
It’s impossible to know what went wrong. All Nansen’s movies for Fox have been lost. Perhaps her acting style was too understated. “There are no wild sobs, no desperate throwing of arms,” one critic commented. Certainly it didn’t help that Nansen wasn’t willing to hustle the merchandise. She didn’t make personal appearances, didn’t cooperate with the Fox Film publicity department, and barely deigned to acknowledge her fans. Pressed repeatedly to explain her character in A Woman’s Resurrection—Nansen played a naïve young woman who gets seduced and betrayed by a Russian prince, then becomes a prostitute and gets tossed into prison before experiencing spiritual rebirth in snowy Siberia—she always replied with the same three words: “She is human.” In other words, figure it out yourself. But audiences, having plunked down their hard-earned dimes and quarters, didn’t care to.
A similar fate met Fox’s plan to develop a highbrow male star. During his Theda-fueled buying spree of brainy talent, he had signed Robert Mantell, the so-called “dean of Shakespearean actors,” whom he hoped to star in deluxe motion picture adaptations of Macbeth and Othello. How about it? Fox asked in a nationwide poll of first-run theater owners. Don’t bother, came the chilly response from 71 of the 102 exhibitors who wrote back. As one of the more diplomatic correspondents explained, “[W]hile we appreciate that Mr. Mantell is a great actor, and a very well-known one, we do not think that even he could make Shakespeare a success in motion pictures.” There it was already, the enduring central dilemma of the American movie industry: art or commerce?
Given the frightful expense of moviemaking, the inscrutability of the mind of the audience, the capriciousness of popular taste, and the incomparable allure of this business—once in it, one longed to stay—there could really be only one answer. Fox would not spend much time debating the question. In fact, he had already told the world, told himself, what he was going to do. In mid-March 1915, with Fox Film barely six weeks old, he had announced that he intended to become the “monarch of the movies,” equal in stature to “lumber kings, wheat kings, coal barons, cotton kings, steel magnates, railways magnates.”
Now, in the summer of 1915, recognizing that audiences didn’t want what he wanted them to want, he revised his strategy. “The truth of it is, Brother, we aren’t making money YET . . . How’s that for a frank admission?” a Fox Film trade ad acknowledged. But make no mistake about it, “we WILL make money. It is a case of the survival of the fittest.”
Fortunately, audiences wanted what Fox had thrown in for free: his highly sensational view of life. So, bidding farewell to Nansen,* who was ready to leave anyway for some stage jobs in northern European countries not affected by the war, Fox turned his attention primarily to Theda and began a major renovation of her image. Out went the “serious actress” story. Now he understood. The movies had had other sirens, even some called vamps, but always they had been rather like John Schuyler in the car passing his wife and child: afraid and ashamed. No actress had yet claimed the bad girl image as her own. Theda would become the screen’s first brand-name sex symbol.
Deciding that the market could use a Middle Eastern–flavored star, Fox turned the specifics over to his publicity department, which was headed by Al Selig and John Goldfrap, two former New York World reporter colleagues of Winnie Sheehan. One can only imagine the laughs Selig and Goldfrap must have had as they cooked up a story about Theda as a real-life “Vampire Woman” who’d been born in Egypt to an Italian sculptor and painter named Giuseppe Bara and his French actress wife. Her alleged résumé expanded to include a stint at Paris’s macabre Grand Guignol theater, and her purported interests encompassed green jade, elephants, odd jewels, incense, orchids, music, ginger beer, classical dancing, and feminism. Although she would later deny it, Theda probably participated in the creation of her own legend. Reportedly, when Fox PR foot soldier Bill Thompson asked her where she was born, she replied offhandedly, “You might just as well tell them I was born on the desert of the Sahara.” The desert was a pretty big place, Thompson suggested; could she be a little more specific? “Oh, very well, make it two blocks from the Sphinx,” Theda supposedly said.
Was it all too ridiculous? To find out, Fox held a press conference where Theda, dressed up in an Arabian costume, followed orders not to say a word lest she betray her Ohio origins. Fox recalled wryly, “The newspaper men left that day and said that the Fox Film Company had discovered the greatest living actress in the world.”
So it was then. With the business of movie stardom just beginning, no one knew yet how to balance imagination with fact in the creation of a marketable personality—but probably it was better to err on the side of imagination. The popular press wasn’t about to complain. For one thing, the whole Theda story was so preposterous that Fox could hardly have expected to deceive anyone. Besides, this was entertainment; no spoilsports allowed. “I put my fingers in my eyes and wink my ears,” wrote a Photoplay reporter who interviewed Theda for a September 1915 profile. “I wish to believe, I am going to believe, I do believe . . . that Bara is Bara.”
From that point on, Theda’s image began to tilt more and more toward the occult, the arcane, and the just plain weird. Press reports referred to Egyptian astrology, Greek dancing, a walk in a cemetery before every new role, and pets that included a whistling frog, a green cat from Peru, and a sleep-walking orangutan.
Theda didn’t understand it, especially all the fuss over her sex appeal. “My shape is not beautiful enough. I am too slender,” she protested to director Frank Powell. “What do you want?” he replied. “Fat legs like a haus-frau?” Buoyed by a sense of humor that she called “the saving grace of baffling experiences,” she gamely posed for publicity photos in flimsy costumes with snakes, skulls, bats, mummies, and even a human skeleton.
As her movies became increasingly lurid, Fox virtually assaulted the market with them, releasing eighteen Theda features by the end of 1916. Sometimes she finished one project and started another the same day. No matter: The stories were all—mostly—the same anyway.* “My heart is ice, my passion consuming fire,” she declares in The Devil’s Daughter (1915). “Let men beware.”
That was the spirit. But of course the men didn’t beware, and for that matter, neither did Theda’s characters, who, having escaped retribution in A Fool There Was, more often than not came to a bad end now. In Sin (1915), her trampy Italian country girl accompanies a callow Italian aristocrat to the United States. Her love-struck ex-fiancé follows, steals the jewels of the Madonna from a church altar, and then kills himself on the altar steps. Discarded by the Italian aristocrat, Theda’s character goes insane and gets attacked by an angry mob that blames her for the desecration of their church.
On to pre-revolutionary Russia for The Serpent (1916). In that movie, Theda’s trampy Russian peasant girl gets raped by a grand duke, who tosses her a wallet full of money and tells her to leave the country. She goes to London, where she becomes a wanton but successful stage actress. Then, during the war, she enlists as an army nurse in order to seduce and marry the grand duke’s soldier son—just so she can arrange to have the son find her in the arms of his father, a sight that leads the son to shoot himself, which she knows is the worst injury she can inflict on the grand duke. Then she falls out of bed in Russia and realizes it was all a dream. There is no such backtracking in Gold and the Woman (1916), which ends with an image of Theda, amid glowing light and sulfurous vapors, transforming into the devil.
Betty Nansen in Tolstoy, she wasn’t. However, to suggest, as film histories tend to, that Fox merely tossed Theda into a series of cheap, tasteless potboilers misrepresents both the complexity of the situation and the character of the man. As he built up Theda’s career during the first two years, Fox displayed considerable ambivalence. Pragmatically, he knew he had to meet audiences where they were. Idealistically, he kept trying to push them forward. All eighteen Theda movies that Fox released during 1915 and 1916 had pedigreed source material. The Devil’s Daughter, for instance, was based on the play La Gioconda, by Italian writer and politician Gabriele D’Annunzio; Sin came from Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s opera The Jewels of the Madonna, which had been performed by New York’s Century Opera Company. The Galley Slave (1915) was adapted from a perennially popular 1879 play by Bartley Campbell.
Fox saw no impenetrable barriers among art forms, no reason not to appropriate highbrow classics for his most popular star. A good story was a good story—and many works were copyright free. Carmen was an especially ambitious early Theda movie, started in mid-1915 after Fox learned that the Lasky Company planned to make its own version starring opera great Geraldine Farrar. Cutting and pasting a script together in less than a week from the original Prosper Mérimée novel and the Bizet opera, with liberal dashes of his own imagination, Fox had a $30,000 Spanish city set built in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and assembled a cast and crew of five thousand. The movie was finished in only eighteen days.
Although Theda wore low-cut, sleeveless dresses, and tempestuous expressions, director Raoul Walsh made the mistake of filming the traditional ending where Don José runs into the woods and fatally stabs himself after killing Carmen. “Hold it!” Fox’s voice boomed toward the end of a prerelease screening at Fox Film headquarters. Holding up his hand from the back of the darkened room, he blocked out the image on-screen of the dying Carmen. “Raoul,” Fox snapped. “Who wants to see such an ending?”
Actually, Walsh explained, probably a lot of people, because Carmen was a famous opera and that finale was pretty well known as the story’s outcome.
“Are we working for love or for money?” Fox demanded. It wasn’t really a question. They both knew that money had lured Walsh to Fox Film in the first place and that without it he wouldn’t stay. To his credit, Fox didn’t insist on a happy ending for the lovers. Instead, he allowed Walsh to substitute a spectacular, tragic “big moment”: Don José racing on horseback over the edge of a cliff and falling eighty-three feet to his death. A former Barnum and Bailey horse named Toreador and stuntman Art Jarvis made the leap at Ausable Chasm in the Adirondacks. Horse and rider turned two complete somersaults in the process, with Jarvis never leaving the horse’s back until they hit the water below. Although the film is lost, a still photo shows the team whirling in midair. (Motion Picture News commented, “There is no fake about it.”) Miraculously, Jarvis suffered only a broken leg and a few bruises, while the horse swam ashore unharmed. (The authorities weren’t amused. Jarvis and
four other Fox Film employees were fined for animal cruelty.)
Determined to make a first-class star out of Theda, Fox promoted the movie furiously. With both versions of Carmen opening in New York on Sunday, October 31, 1915, Fox battered his rival with a relentless advertising blizzard. While the Lasky Company premiered its movie at just one theater, the 2,989-seat Strand, built just the year before at a record cost of $1 million, Fox doubled the bet by opening his Carmen at his two best theaters, the Academy of Music, on Fourteenth Street, and the Riverside, at Ninety-Sixth and Broadway. For the Riverside event, Fox hired a sixty-piece orchestra and had a police detail manage the crowds that gathered outside the theater to watch Theda’s arrival. After the theaters closed that first night, Fox learned that his Carmen had sold 22,300 tickets at the Academy of Music alone, compared to 20,067 for the Lasky version at the Strand.
When Theda’s Carmen rolled out to the hinterlands, Fox kept up the assault. In Terre Haute, Indiana, although both Fox Film and the Lasky Company took out extra-large newspaper ads and hired automobiles to drive around with placards, Fox went further, plastering posters on seemingly every available space in the city. In Seattle, Fox Film hired two men dressed as bullfighters to parade a bull through the streets to tout Carmen’s bullfighting scenes. To drum up enthusiasm among exhibitors, trade publication ads shamelessly extolled the Fox movie as “supremely and resistlessly alone and unrivalled . . . Theda Bara’s life triumph,” and “an epoch in moving pictures” for which “Imitation [is] preposterous and futile.”