The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Well, reviewers decided, not really. Most gave better marks to Geraldine Farrar’s performance, which they found more passionate and nuanced than Theda’s “mechanically seductive” rendition. Still, comparing the movies as a whole, many critics preferred the Fox version for its creation of atmosphere, use of character types, and even its fanciful elaboration of the story. “One thing is sure—the Fox production . . . can be classed as one of the best features ever filmed,” raved Variety. “It just misses being a masterpiece.” The public agreed; the movie became a big hit, breaking box-office records in some cities.

  Even Shakespeare—Fox hadn’t entirely given up on that ambition—was pressed into service to advance Theda’s career. In 1916, Fox starred her in Romeo and Juliet, even though at thirty-one, with her “large, bosomy, and rather heavily thighed” figure, she wasn’t quite the picture of an innocent fourteen-year-old. Yet, why not? This was a different sort of Shakespeare—“splendid entertainment if one had never heard of Shakespeare,” commented the New York Tribune. The casting also featured twenty-nine-year-old Harry Hilliard, playing Romeo with a hairstyle that suggested “a remarkable resemblance” to patent medicine queen Lydia Pinkham. Here, once again, Fox couldn’t help interfering with the text. After deciding that the lovers’ death scene needed something extra, “William Shakespeare Fox,” as the New York Times called him, rewrote the scene so that Juliet wakes up when Romeo kisses her after having swallowed poison himself. In their final conversation, Romeo tells a joyful Juliet that he plans to take her to Mantua. Then he dies, and she kills herself. The new scene actually worked, injecting “still deeper gloom when the happy ending that seemed imminent fades away,” the Times critic decided. “It is a pity William Shakespeare did not live to see the movies, for he might have learned about play writing from them.”

  Fans were willing to buy it, perhaps because of the enthusiasm Theda put into the act of dying. As the New York Tribune film critic noted, “She does not die gently and pleasantly, but she emulates Svengali by falling backward over Romeo’s body and facing the audience, with her head upside down, a ghastly stare on her face.”

  Still, every now and then, Fox grew impatient to see if audiences were ready to move on to higher ground. He continued to cast Theda in more non-vamp roles, most notably as the refined Lady Isabel in a 1916 adaptation of the creaky English play East Lynne, in which he had appeared during his teenage amateur acting phase. He also repeatedly attempted to undo Theda’s “seductive sorceress” publicity by issuing press releases pointing out that she was in fact an agreeable person who simply worked very hard at her “art.” It didn’t work. Box-office returns from Theda’s “nice” movies consistently paled next to the profits from even a mediocre vamp picture.

  By the end of 1915, Theda had become a major star. Fox Film had made fifty copies of each of her ten feature films to date, and with all of them in circulation, she drew an estimated daily audience of about eight hundred thousand. One year later, her popularity rivaled that of Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. Fans recited Theda’s lines out loud in theaters, mobbed her public appearances, and swamped the studio with fan mail. “You are a menace to the human race,” one letter writer railed. Passing by Theda’s photo in a frame outside a New York theater, a woman aimed her umbrella and jabbed a hole through the face. They loved her; they hated her; they loved to hate her. By the droves, they bought tickets.

  Despite the time and money he invested in sculpting Theda’s career, Fox never fell in love with his Galatea. Their relationship always remained formal and essentially contractual, with the distance between them measured out in their constant habit of referring to each other as “Miss Bara” or “Miss Goodman” and “Mr. Fox.” As closely as they collaborated on the creation of Theda’s public identity, it was a shared project, a piece of business that averted the gaze of each from the actual fact of the other. No rumor would ever surface about any flirtation between them.

  An affair wouldn’t have been out of the question. Although photos portray him as portly, balding, and homely, although he had a damaged left arm and conspicuously bad teeth, Fox was in his way a powerfully attractive man. In person, his charisma transformed him. He had “an aliveness that made him seem tall and slender,” a female writer was surprised to discover upon meeting him at his office. He exuded confidence but had an engaging, self-deprecating sense of humor. He almost always got whatever he wanted, yet with women he was so chivalrous that he once fired an executive for swearing in front of a female secretary. He was “really a very nice man, kind and considerate,” “not like those fresh guys who would maul you,” commented actress Miriam Cooper, who starred in a number of Fox movies and was married to director Raoul Walsh. Fox was even still relatively young: in 1915, he was only thirty-six to Theda’s thirty.

  Furthermore, unlike such other early moguls as Sam Goldwyn or Columbia’s Harry Cohn, who reveled in their bumpkin demeanor if not their downright crassness, Fox aimed for cultivation. He dressed well but not flashily, read literary classics in such spare time as he had, and often attended the theater. He took care to speak well. His public statements were almost always crisp, to the point, and intelligently phrased. “A man of simple tastes, possessing culture as a natural quality, never displaying his wealth,” his friend Detroit businessman David A. Brown would later comment.

  Theda shared those values. Completely unlike her public image, she was, in the words of her friend actor Milton Sills, “a gracious, cultured woman.” For recreation, she liked to read—she could quote from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and also favored Joseph Conrad—as well as listen to music and visit art museums. Despite her stardom, she still lived with her parents and sister and had never had any interest in nightlife or tempestuous romances. She was “timid, shy, precise,” an acquaintance commented.

  She was attracted to Fox, she later admitted. He had “fine eyes,” she said, as well as enthusiasm “like an electric current” and “a personality that is felt—felt even if he is hidden behind a set, watching and unseen.” With his “natural, assertive, vehement swaying eloquence,” he could make anyone believe anything. “After hearing Mr. Fox say ‘fillums,’ you leave him with the firm impression that Mr. Webster’s latest edition is wrong in the given orthodox pronunciation of the word.”

  Especially, Theda was in awe of Fox’s mind, which she described as “keen as a knife.” Time and again, she had seen him quickly retrieve just the right fact from his seemingly limitless memory to settle an argument. “If one could open his brain,” she thought, it would probably resemble “a series of ledgers, perfect in their records.” Balancing that shrewdness and precision, he seemed to have a deep understanding of human nature. Certainly he had understood Theodosia, in some ways better than she understood herself. Despite her own fruitless struggle for ten years, he had instantly found a way to make her a star. With a modicum of encouragement, Theda’s feelings might have developed into infatuation. She had no practical barriers to a romance with the boss, no husband or boyfriend to get in the way. In fact, she’d had virtually no serious experience with men because she had always been so dedicated to her career.

  Fox, too, felt an attraction. Not only was Theda a docile mannequin whom he could dress up to convey his idea of sexual allure, but also she seemed to share his seriousness of purpose. When word came back from the Florida set of A Fool There Was that in order to prepare for her scenes, she often went into a corner to talk to herself, Fox decided, “Well, any girl who does that is ambitious.”

  Over time, the two developed a warm camaraderie. Theda eventually felt comfortable enough to confide in Fox that they had actually met before he hired her for A Fool There Was. That encounter had happened in the summer of 1914, when she’d appeared in an English comedy vaudeville sketch called “Bought and Not Paid For” at his Riverside Theatre on Broadway at Ninety-Sixth Street. “The ‘comedy’ certainly didn’t seem funny to me,” she later commented. And indeed it wasn’t funny. At the opening
performance, “the tomb could not have been more silent.” To try to stir up the audience, Theda began shouting her lines and “finished the act with a voice like a whiskey tenor.” Unfortunately, Fox was in the audience. “He wanted to close at once,” Theda recalled. “But he relented and let us play for three days. Then his patience gave out.” For several years, Theda kept silent about the incident, fearful for her future. Then, established as a star, she confessed. “Mr. Fox remembered the piece clearly—it had been doubtless so flagrantly bad he could not forget it,” she said. “We both had a great laugh.”

  Quietly, willingly, they made sacrifices to please each other. Part of the reason that Fox had cast Theda in “good girl” roles was that she had pleaded with him to do so in order that her work might have variety. He hadn’t wanted to put her in the first one. The Two Orphans (1915) was only her fourth movie,* and she was creating a sensation with her vamp performances; to change course risked confusing and alienating the audience. But Theda insisted, so he agreed. He assigned director Herbert Brenon, then an industry darling previously employed at Universal, and sent the production to film in Quebec. Even after The Two Orphans and several other sympathetic Theda movies stalled at the box office, even after the autumn of 1916, when he announced that henceforth she would appear only in vamp roles, he never could stick to that resolution. He continued, although increasingly intermittently, to cast her in non-vamp roles. Partly, he believed that audiences could be encouraged to grow in their tastes. Partly, he wanted her to be happy.

  Similarly, Theda set aside the prerogatives of her power as a star. Once, assigned to a movie that she found “inferior,” she protested that she didn’t want to do it. “However, Mr. Fox urged me, saying there was no other script ready and promising that if I didn’t like the picture upon completion, he would burn the film,” Theda recalled. “The picture was anything but satisfactory to me when done, but I did not ask Mr. Fox to keep his promise, as this would have been more than one could expect, meaning a loss of $30,000 to $40,000.”

  Some people thought the two belonged together. Theda’s mother once overheard two women in a movie theater discussing whether Theda was Fox’s wife. That an affair didn’t happen testifies, ironically, to the extraordinarily close match of their needs. Fox wasn’t simply indifferent to the idea of marital fidelity: he wasn’t a John Schuyler, happily married unless a convenient enough opportunity came along. He needed to be faithful to prove the steadiness of his character and to differentiate himself from his father, Michael. He kept a safe distance from Theda, waiting until about three months after the release of A Fool There Was to meet her. In her presence, he was often silent. She felt he had “an actual film drawn over his expressive eyes, drawn over or drawn away, as a woman lets down or lifts a veil over her face.” Ultimately, she found him inscrutable, “as enigmatic as the proverbial noncommittal demeanor of the Sphinx . . .”

  Just as Fox had never really stopped being that thirteen-year-old boy who had awakened to a new sense of himself at his bar mitzvah, so Theda would always remain Theodosia, a nice Jewish girl from a nice middle-class, Midwest home. Once, a woman wrote a letter accusing her of breaking up happy homes. Theda wrote back, “I am working for a living, dear friend, and if I were the kind of woman you seem to think I am, I wouldn’t have to.”

  Fox had found his ideal flagship female star in Theda, but that was only half the story. Through her movies he had started to define his first primary theme: what to do with all the passions unleashed by prosperous modern society? Yet, the question needed an answer. What kind of man could master the modern world?

  That issue had long been a central preoccupation of Fox’s own life. To answer it, he turned to former stage star William Farnum. If thirty-eight-year-old Farnum didn’t provide a fully adequate response in real life—Fox was dismayed to find that the actor sometimes behaved like “a big boy”—nonetheless, he had all the raw material from which a satisfying answer could be fashioned on-screen.

  Visually, Farnum must have struck the upward-striving Fox as especially apt. His chiseled features, wavy brown hair, gray-blue eyes, and ruddy complexion drew from the same Northern European heritage that overwhelmingly characterized the American elite of wealth and power. Farnum was also physically strong. In his debut movie role as an Alaska gold mine owner in The Spoilers (1914) for the Selig Company, the tall, muscular “Big Bill” had taken part in a saloon fistfight scene that set a standard for screen violence that would endure for several decades. He was charming, too. With his easygoing good humor, sunny disposition, and Everyman humility, Farnum won people over easily. Altogether, he seemed naturally blessed on the outside in the way that Fox—short, homely, with a crippled left arm—tried so hard to be on the inside.

  Farnum also had a genuinely impressive résumé. The Boston-born son of two actors, he had been on the stage since age ten and as a young man had toured the country for five years as the star of Ben Hur. After a brief stint at Famous Players–Lasky following The Spoilers, Farnum had joined Fox’s Box Office Attraction production company in late 1914.

  At first, Fox cast Farnum in a variety of roles that showcased his dramatic range. Then, after catching on to the notion of screen types via his experiences with Theda, he took a more purposeful hand in shaping the actor’s image. Money, the strongest language Fox knew, signaled the importance of the project. In the spring of 1915, before Fox Film officially started to show a profit, Fox gave Farnum a two-year contract at $1,000 per week with at least forty weeks of work per year. That was four times Fox’s own annual salary for 1915, and considerably more than Theda was earning, although Fox had increased her paycheck from the initial $75 per week. Chauvinism? Possibly. While Fox understood that many women had to work, he would never fully grasp that some might actually prefer a career to marriage and motherhood. On the other hand, he wasn’t in the habit of overpaying for anything, and he may simply have viewed Farnum as a more durable, more versatile commodity than Theda.

  During 1915 and 1916, preoccupied with Theda as well as all the other business of establishing a movie studio, Fox had time only to sketch the outlines of Farnum’s persona. Ads hammered away with adjectives such as virile, red-blooded, courageous, and manly, while various roles exemplified loyalty, risk-taking, and forgiveness. In his most prominent movie from this time, The Bondman (1916), Farnum addressed the seminal problem of Fox’s own life, playing a dual role as both remote father and resentful son. In the movie, after the failure of his marriage to the daughter of a provincial governor in Iceland, irresponsible vagabond Stephen Orrey (Farnum) abandons his son, Jason (Farnum), and starts another family with a wanton drunk. The younger man must not only raise himself but also overcome intense anger toward his father, whom he wants to kill for making his mother suffer, and jealousy toward his illegitimate half brother. The story’s ending offered Fox a plausible strategy for his own life. Doing the right thing even though he doesn’t feel like it—rescuing his hated half brother after a mine explosion, then physically dying but metaphorically dying to his former self—the hero cleanses himself of base feelings through action and self-sacrifice.

  If none of Farnum’s movies during his two $40,000 years became a major hit, he nonetheless proved himself a good soldier worthy of further investment. For the mine explosion scene in The Bondman, amid dense fumes from lycopodium smoke pots, Farnum ran one hundred feet up a cliff while carrying the actor playing his half brother over his shoulder. At the top, overcome by chemical vapors and fatigue, Farnum keeled over. During filming of Battle of Hearts (1916), off the Santa Cruz Islands in California, he nearly drowned after rough waters overturned the boat that he and three other men were rowing. Wearing a fisherman’s costume that included a heavy raincoat and tall sea boots, Farnum swam the long distance to shore. Then, exhausted and soaked, he had to wait in the cold night air for several hours until crew members could get dry clothes for him. He didn’t complain. “A fine, decent gentleman,” Fox decided.

  Fox so adm
ired Farnum—or at least the image of Farnum he was creating—that he used the actor as an off-screen stand-in when it came time to face the question of relocating operations to California. Fox really didn’t want to establish a studio a five-day train trip away. It would be extremely difficult to keep an eye on production the way he wanted to, and he had to stay in New York because that was where the money was. But California had become inevitable. By 1916, nearly 80 percent of the world’s movies were produced in Southern California, with twenty production companies in the region employing twelve thousand people regularly. Three studios operated exclusively in Los Angeles: those of Thomas H. Ince and D. W. Griffith, and the thousand-acre Universal City, which had opened on March 15, 1915, after two years of construction and had its own mayor, police, fire, street cleaning, and educational departments.

  Reluctantly, Fox leased the former Selig Polyscope studio in the Edendale area, northwest of downtown Los Angeles, and in December 1915 he sent several dozen actors and executives west by a special train. Sheehan went along, but wouldn’t stay; as Fox Film’s general manager, he traveled constantly, overseeing the branch sales offices nationwide. Abraham Carlos, a former New York City movie exhibitor who had helped Fox in his lawsuit against the MPPC, would become the West Coast manager, but press releases didn’t mention him. Instead, Farnum’s name got pushed to the forefront as the leader of the mission. Fox had big plans for the actor—soon, just not right now.

  With Theda and Farnum as the guiding stars of his dream, Fox accelerated his pace. In September 1915, after only seven months in business, Fox Film began turning out a feature a week, a schedule that put the studio on a par with industry leader Famous Players–Lasky.

  Gone were the self-doubting impulses that had led Fox, when he was making his first movie, Life’s Shop Window, to buy the rights to a racy novel and then drain all the zest out of the story. Now he tore into material looking for passion. Two rules guided him. First, the story had to hit hard. If, after reading a ten-to-twenty-page synopsis, he couldn’t repeat the plot without stopping to think, he dropped the idea. Second, he had to care deeply about the characters—to find them “natural and human” rather than “mere puppets”—and to believe that their lives illustrated some “impressively dominant theme” of the human experience.