The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  That movie became A Daughter of the Gods (1916). Fox chose this particular project mainly because of its writer and director, Herbert Brenon, whom he had hired in early 1915 and who had since ably directed four Theda Bara movies (Kreutzer Sonata, The Clemenceau Case, Sin, and The Two Orphans).

  Brenon’s talent mattered greatly to Fox, and so, equally, did his personality. Born in Dublin, Ireland, to a wealthy family and educated at King’s College in London, he was the younger brother of noted New York Morning Telegraph music critic Algernon St. John Brenon. Herbert Brenon exuded the sort of polished, cosmopolitan confidence that Fox sought so eagerly to cultivate in himself. In addition to giving Brenon extraordinary professional freedom, such as the power to pay cast and crew members whatever salaries he saw fit, Fox enthusiastically pursued the director as a close friend. He entertained Brenon frequently on his houseboat, the Mona Belle (the former Stop-a-While, purchased from disgraced city chamberlain Charles Hyde), on the Hudson and kept his office door open to him for intimate chats. “It was a friendship almost emotional in its intensity, for the very reason that it seemed a contradiction to exist at all,” commented a mutual acquaintance, journalist and screenwriter Randolph Bartlett. “But Fox recognized Brenon’s imaginative powers, and Brenon appreciated the opportunities Fox gave him.”

  Beneath the surface, the two men had a lot in common. Like Fox, Brenon had been wounded by his early family life. His mother left his father, a drama critic, and uprooted her children so she could pursue a not-very-successful journalism career in the United States. Brenon was sixteen at the time, and he soon had to cut short his formal education to go to work as a three-dollar-a-week office boy at a Pittsburgh real estate firm. Like Fox, Brenon adored his mother—a flamboyant figure whose literary salons in Europe had attracted Oscar Wilde, James McNeill Whistler, and Charles Parnell—and deeply felt the absence of his father. But whereas Fox had responded to his childhood unhappiness by becoming the father he thought he should have had, Brenon had found a replacement authority figure in his older brother Algernon. And now Algernon Brenon was dying of kidney disease; he wouldn’t last out 1915. The old loneliness surged back upon Brenon. For his part, Fox had no son to raise as he wished he’d been raised. If a parent-child relationship wasn’t entirely appropriate because Brenon was only a year younger than Fox—well, nature didn’t insist on constantly reminding them of that fact. In 1915, thirty-six-year-old Fox, with his already thinning hair and bottlebrush mustache, could have passed for an older man. By contrast, Brenon, who was short and slightly built, blue-eyed, with wavy brown hair and boyish features, had yet to look his age. “He was Fox’s little baby,” commented Annette Kellermann, who had starred in Brenon’s 1914 breakthrough movie for Universal, Neptune’s Daughter. “He [Fox] would do anything for him.”

  Truly anything. In early 1915, Brenon pitched Fox the idea of making a bigger, better version of Neptune’s Daughter, the fantasy love story he had filmed for Universal in Bermuda with a cast of more than two hundred. That seven-reel movie, which had played more than six months in New York and Chicago, was one of the most successful productions of its day. Not the least of its attractions had been the shapely Kellermann, an Australian-born swimming champion known as “The Diving Venus,” in a flesh-colored body stocking that made her look naked. He’d get Kellermann again, Brenon promised Fox, and together they’d all make a movie so magnificent that it would conclusively establish the artistic legitimacy of film.

  Someone in a more rational frame of mind might have balked. The projected costs of Brenon’s proposal were staggering, and in early 1915, Fox Film had not yet generated a positive cash flow. Moreover, Fox had no experience with fantasy movies; this wasn’t his kind of project. Brenon’s charm dissolved all of Fox’s financial caution. Instantly, he agreed to make the movie, promising to provide as much money as necessary. “If any other director would have written a synopsis of this kind and asked me to spend $25,000 on it, I absolutely would refuse to do it,” Fox later wrote to Brenon. “But with you, my dear Herbert . . . I naturally put my judgment entirely aside.”

  While reason rested, hope soared. Collaborating closely on the script, which Fox named A Daughter of the Gods, he and Brenon sketched out an aquatic, action-adventure romance about two young lovers struggling against tremendous odds to find each other in an exotic Eastern kingdom. Bad witches, good fairies, mermaids, and gnomes abounded. Fox seemed so much in awe of Brenon’s imagination that, by contrast, Annette Kellermann felt he treated her and her husband, Jimmie, “like imbeciles.” It wasn’t that Fox didn’t admire Kellermann. He agreed to pay her $1,500 a week, twice Brenon’s salary. Nor was it that he didn’t care about her. “It sounds entirely too dangerous to me,” he fretted, drawing blue lines through a scene Brenon had written that called for her to dive off a waterfall with her hands and ankles bound. (When she insisted she could easily handle the stunt, he reinstated it.) But as “a very prosaic, matter of fact, and businesslike person,” she lacked the sense of enchantment necessary to enter their private world.

  Literally, Fox set no boundaries for Brenon. “Cast your eyes about the world and decide upon the spot where you can get from nature the things this picture demands,” he told the director. “Forget about New York, forget about . . . the business end of this industry.” Brenon settled on Jamaica—a seemingly odd choice when so much of the rest of the industry, also seeking sunshine and warmth, was heading toward California. At the time, though, Jamaica appeared to have a number of strategic advantages. In addition to offering a lush landscape and unusually clear water for underwater filming, the island urgently needed money. As a British possession that had been under martial law since the outbreak of war in Europe the previous summer, Jamaica had suffered a steep decline in tourism and in foreign trade because of a shortage of ships to export its sugar, rum, tobacco, coffee, and cocoa. Furthermore, the first five hundred of an eventual ten thousand able-bodied Jamaican men were due to leave soon for overseas combat.

  Desperate to avoid economic collapse, local British military and civil authorities offered to help Fox Film in every way possible. Jamaica also had a cheap native labor force unlikely to be as picky about conditions as the increasingly unionized U.S. workforce. Indeed, Fox Film would pay only $1.50 a day each to the seven hundred Jamaicans who toiled in pelting rain to install water systems, electrical power, and telephone equipment. And as an island colony ruled by a distant nation with more urgent concerns elsewhere, Jamaica wasn’t apt to have any officials keeping a sharp eye on alterations to the natural terrain. There would be major changes. During the summer of 1915, a Fox Film cadre of engineers, electricians, and sanitarians began to overhaul the island’s topography by clearing away acres of raw jungle, diverting the Roaring River to create a waterfall, and razing a range of hills to make room for a battlefield.

  By the time Brenon and the Daughter cast and crew arrived in Jamaica in late August 1915, Fox money had built two elaborate location sets. One was a pristine, ten-acre, all-white Moorish city capable of housing twenty thousand. Built on the cleaned-up swamp grounds of the abandoned Fort Augusta, near Kingston, this featured a Taj Mahal–style sultan’s palace, a huge slave market, mosques, minarets, battlements, and fortifications. The other set was “Gnome Village,” located some sixty-five miles across the island, in the virgin rainforest at St. Ann’s Bay. There, carpenters and masons had created a miniature village of giant toadstools and miniature thatched huts where some one thousand local children would play a race of small people. (The inspiration for Gnome Village may have been the popular “Dwarf City” attraction at the late Big Tim Sullivan’s Dreamland amusement park, which was populated by one thousand little people dressed up as shopkeepers, police officers, firefighters, musicians, and Chinese laundry workers, with small-scale buildings, miniature horses, and bantam chickens.) In Kingston, for interior scenes, the studio took over an abandoned King Street movie theater and built its own photo lab with a $5,000 ice plant to ensure the pro
per water temperature for film processing.

  Whatever Brenon wanted, Fox gave him. Soon after arriving in Kingston, the director decided he needed to take over the entire Rose Gardens resort hotel. Fox officials signed the lease. Brenon also wanted the entire Osborne Hotel at St. Ann’s Bay, near Gnome Village. He got that, too. He had even been allowed to bring along a seven-piece orchestra and a conductor. For a silent film? Of course. The emotional power of music, Brenon believed, stimulated his imagination and helped inspire actors. Locally, he hired a wardrobe team of twelve hundred native women, who commandeered every available sewing machine on the island and began stitching more than ten thousand garments, which included wild animal costumes, richly embroidered silk and brocade robes, pearl-trimmed Indian gowns, and more than two hundred metallic mermaid tails. By the first payday, Brenon had run through his entire supply of gold coins—$200,000 worth, brought along because of the difficulty of getting money while in Jamaica—and had to use confusing local currency. Fox immediately shipped down more gold.

  Money would not be a problem. Fox Film announced that it was prepared to spend $1 million on Brenon’s movie. “And understand me, I mean a million and not a couple of hundred thousand dollars,” Sheehan told the trade press in mid-September 1915. No one had ever spent $1 million on a movie before. The industry’s reigning extravaganza, The Birth of a Nation, had cost an estimated $110,000 to $300,000. A million dollars: in 1915, that was almost 1,500 times the average U.S. worker’s annual income of $687, and it would have bought 312 brand-new homes with some spare change left over. Although it’s certainly true that most movie producers exaggerated wildly, it’s also true that toward the end of his life, with nothing to gain by telling a lie, Brenon acknowledged that Fox had spent at least $800,000 on A Daughter of the Gods.

  At first, Brenon gave every appearance of appreciating Fox’s generosity. He gushed to a reporter, “I cannot say enough in grateful appreciation of William Fox. I regard him as the greatest genius in the motion picture field.” Naturally, he added, he would be happy to follow Fox’s “wonderful” advice regarding A Daughter of the Gods. Brenon trusted Fox so much that he hadn’t bothered to get a written contract and, on the strength of a handshake deal alone, had agreed to direct the movie for $750 a week.

  The idyll didn’t last. It couldn’t. For one thing, Brenon was in over his head. Who wouldn’t have been? Fox expected him not only to turn out a masterpiece, but also to establish a permanent winter studio for Fox Film in Jamaica and to supervise several other directors who were also shooting there. Brenon soon became frightened, depressed, and overwhelmed. Come down and help me, he pleaded in a letter to Fox. You have to, it’s your duty. But Fox had too many other responsibilities to hold Brenon’s hand. Thousands of employees depended on him “every minute of the day,” he wrote back. He had to remain available to all his directors and, right at the moment, he also had to salvage three subpar movies that were sitting on the shelf. But he had complete confidence in Brenon, Fox insisted. And there was nothing that he, Fox, wouldn’t do for him from a distance. “I want you to believe me, my dear Herbert, that I am straining every nerve and every muscle in my body to keep you pleased,” he wrote. “I have and I intend to comply with almost every wish and whim as it strikes you.”

  It wasn’t enough. Feeling abandoned, Brenon angrily reassessed their relationship. He had never felt comfortable in his subordinate role. On those houseboat cruises with Fox along the Hudson, during their intimate chats, he had often felt ill at ease, “rather small.” He worried that Fox would “get under the surface and discover the REAL ME and I never thought I was really so hot!” Rebelling, Brenon decided that if Fox wanted him to take charge, he would do so with a vengeance. Calling himself “Director General,” Brenon now tossed aside the script that he and Fox had labored over in New York and, with his imported seven-piece ensemble playing in the background, he dictated a new synopsis to his secretary. Then he set that synopsis aside as well. He would rely on artistic intuition instead. His process for making A Daughter of the Gods, he later explained, was to “absorb” the essence of the story and then “begin with the great moment. From that big scene I radiate towards the tributary scenes. I let my imagination absolutely run wild with every particular sequence.” Mentally, Brenon reduced Fox to the role of a mere money supplier and dismissed the importance of that function by continuing to spend as if money were actually quite easy to come by.

  For months, Fox failed to detect Brenon’s change of heart. He saw what he wanted to see, which was that his “dear boy” had recovered his characteristic enthusiasm and optimism. And he remained convinced that Brenon was going to surpass D. W. Griffith, who, Fox gleefully noted, was so busy supervising other directors at Triangle–Fine Arts that he had neglected his own work. Intolerance, Griffith’s follow-up to The Birth of a Nation, wasn’t going to be a great movie, Fox predicted, and that “leaves the field entirely open to us.”

  A million dollars. Brenon raced toward that number. He wanted exotic animals. Fox promptly tracked down eight lions, six leopards, four elephants, and five camels and offered to send the entire menagerie to Jamaica at a rental cost of $200 a day. “When ordering your animals, don’t be influenced by any streak of economy if you think that a larger number are required,” Fox wrote to Brenon. “I leave the matter entirely to you for you to use your own judgment.” Swans? Brenon wanted twelve. “Shipped today eight swans. Difficult to get twelve,” Fox cabled Brenon. “Wire if you want other four.” Yes, Brenon did want the other four. But New York didn’t have four more swans for rent, so Fox found them in Philadelphia and put them on the next available boat. The movie’s nonhuman cast would eventually include thousands of Jamaica’s fastest and best-trained horses, ten alligators, fourteen swans, ten camels, two thousand head of cattle, eight hundred sheep, one thousand donkeys, two thousand lizards, twenty-five hundred toads, and a flock of sparrows imported from New York.

  Brenon even got to dictate staff choices at the New York City headquarters. He didn’t like the Fox Film publicists Goldfrap and Selig, who had come up with the Theda Bara vamp campaign. In September 1915, Fox dismissed the entire department and hired Fred Warren, a close friend of Brenon’s brother Algernon, as the new head publicist. “Have instructed him [to] do everything in his power to help you. Please stop worrying,” Fox cabled Brenon. After Fox required Warren to submit all A Daughter of the Gods publicity material to Brenon every week for approval, Warren began writing sentences that described Brenon as “the greatest living genius in the field of film drama.”

  Did a director ever have it so good? “Tell me, Herbert dear, ain’t I like a fairy Godmother: just wish for anything, and when the next boat gets to Kingston, it is there,” Fox wrote.

  Floridly emotional, some of Fox’s letters to Brenon took on an uneasy, almost suffocating intensity. “Nothing would please me better now than to fondle and caress you as though you were my own boy, for I don’t think there ever was a man who loved you more than I love you,” Fox wrote to Brenon in early November 1915. A week later, he added that if he had known Brenon would remain on location for so long, “I think I would have hesitated, not because of the expense, but only because I hardly would want to have you away from me for any such length of time knowing it in advance. And believe me, I miss you and miss you very much.”

  Although to contemporary readers such language may raise eyebrows, it’s unlikely that any physical relationship occurred. No evidence suggests that Fox ever dabbled in homosexual behavior at any time in his life or that Brenon, who was married, did, either. Rather, Brenon was the first close friend Fox had ever had. Fox’s relationship with Marcus Loew, one of warm admiration, was always circumscribed by their professional rivalry. Sheehan, upon closer examination, had been cut from morally cheap cloth. With Brenon, all of Fox’s suppressed longings for male companionship came tumbling out. They seemed to be equals in spirit, and Fox yearned “to sit down with someone who is not afraid of me and in whom I ha
ve confidence, so that I can have a heart to heart talk with him and review all my present acts and all my future acts.” With so little experience in defining emotional boundaries, starved for friendship, Fox unleashed a torrent of pent-up feelings.

  For months Fox sustained his adulation of Brenon purely on faith. As of mid-November 1915, some two and a half months into filming, Fox still hadn’t seen a single frame of A Daughter of the Gods. “You can imagine how great the suspense is with me sitting here and craving to see some of it, and being told that it is being shipped on this boat and on that boat and on the next boat,” he wrote to Brenon. “But, really, my dear Herbert, I am anxious to see some of the film.” Still, he continued to trust Brenon completely. “You know best what to do,” Fox wrote. “I would rather take your judgment in place of my giving any suggestions.”

  Unknown to Fox, however, Brenon kept going further and further off the rails. Shouting instructions through a five-foot megaphone that was almost as tall as he was, the director kept six cameramen filming every big scene from different angles. He might not know in advance what he wanted, he reasoned, but surely he would recognize it when he saw it. He also took foolish chances with the safety of his star. Intent on realism, Brenon ordered Kellermann to dive into a pool containing six crocodiles (five of them watching her with open mouths and the largest one measuring fourteen feet long) and swim around for a while. Fox had thought Brenon would use props, and even when he saw the footage, he refused to believe the animals were real. “Gee, those dummies are wonderful!” he exclaimed. Brenon also had Kellermann, with her arms bound by heavy ropes, get thrashed against a ragged coral headland by twenty-five-foot waves. As a result of that ordeal, she suffered cuts from her shoulders to her waist, and three times had to be dragged unconscious from the water. In other scenes, the actress dived 103 feet off a lighthouse tower into the ocean, nearly got burned at a stake, and while wearing a suit of armor and riding a horse, fought a sword battle on a seawall before toppling into the water with the horse, which immediately began scrambling and kicking at potentially fatal proximity. Even in Gnome Village, Kellermann wasn’t safe. Athough the child actors were no older than nine, they took to their work vigorously, throwing stones at her and beating her with sticks. Kellermann insisted on doing all the stunts herself: “I had no sense of danger. I really didn’t.” Brenon later conceded that it was a miracle she had survived A Daughter of the Gods.