The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  In his choice of a director, Fox also reacted against memories of A Daughter of the Gods. This time, instead of a hotheaded would-be genius, he tapped the solid, sensible, well-seasoned J. Gordon Edwards, who with his mannerly style and scholarly demeanor—“just as fine as silk,” actress Betty Blythe would recall—was Brenon’s temperamental opposite. Having directed dozens of movies for him, Edwards knew what the boss wanted. He also enjoyed Theda’s warm approval, thanks to his skill at indulging the star’s growing ego. “In all my experience, I have never met so remarkable a woman as Theda Bara,” Edwards told a reporter. “I have watched her work with a feeling akin to awe . . . Miss Bara has developed into one of the foremost artistes of the dramatic and silent stage, and . . . she will go down to posterity as the greatest actress of her time.” Just so had Theda begun to think of herself.

  Fox had also learned his lesson about location shooting from A Daughter of the Gods. It didn’t pay to try to pioneer the film industry in a foreign country. Just like everyone else, he would have to rely on Hollywood. Writing off his investment in Jamaica, Fox would never make another movie there.

  In early 1917, fantastic sets and props for Cleopatra began to appear throughout Southern California. In the desert near the bean fields of Ventura County, Fox Film workers built exact replicas of the Sphinx and the Pyramids. At the Western Avenue studios, they re-created both the interior and exterior of the Roman Senate, complete with huge granite columns. South of Los Angeles, in an inland wetlands area then crudely known as “Nigger Slough”* and usually populated only by wild ducks and jackrabbits, a rendition of Cleopatra’s huge, square stone palace at Alexandria arose at the water’s edge, banked by massive stone steps. On the walls of the building, artists carved figures and painted hieroglyphs in historically accurate bright reds and oranges, even though, obviously, the colors would not register on black-and-white film. From 250,000 feet of lumber, shells were built to transform some eighty modern boats into fighting ships from 31 BC.

  Fox’s opulent investment masked considerable cause for worry. In the buildup to and the immediate aftermath of the U.S. declaration of war against Germany on April 6, 1917, panic seized the motion picture industry. Studios began cutting back on production in March 1917, and not until July would they return to the levels of the previous year. As a result, for 1917 as a whole, the American film industry would turn out 774 fewer reels of film than in 1916. These four fearful months, from March to July, were precisely the time when Fox was shoveling money into Cleopatra. In early May 1917, the studio advertised the film’s budget as $250,000; that number would rise through the summer to settle at $500,000. Some days, expenses ran as high as $75,000.

  Yet, who could predict how much interest would await the movie when it was finished—or even whether it would be finished? There had never been a war on this scale before, and it was immediately clear that it was going to be staggeringly expensive in every possible way. By mid-April 1917, both the House of Representatives and the Senate had unanimously passed a $7 billion bond bill (the largest such measure in world history) to finance the U.S. war effort. Seven billion dollars represented 14 percent of the estimated U.S. annual income of $50 billion and a little less than one-third of the total individual bank deposits, which amounted to $24 billion. What would happen to the motion picture industry amid a suddenly, drastically reconfigured economy? A glance at the experience of European combatant nations was not encouraging. France, Spain, and Italy either shut down or drastically reduced motion picture production in order to concentrate resources on military efforts.

  Despite his native optimism and strong faith in a great destiny, Fox could not escape concern. In February 1917, accompanied by Eva and their teenage daughters, Fox took his first trip to California—in fact, his first trip farther west than Buffalo, New York, where in September 1901 he had witnessed the McKinley assassination. It was a curious fact about Fox that although a great many of his movies were set in foreign locations, he had little interest in actually seeing those places. Travel took too much time, and time was the great enemy of accomplishment. Nonetheless, amid industry speculation that he wasn’t going to be able to pull off Cleopatra, he made the five-day train trip and stayed in Southern California for about eight weeks. He returned to New York in early May 1917, just before filming of Cleopatra began.

  His preparation and oversight paid off. Production of Cleopatra proceeded with remarkable efficiency, economy, and goodwill. Although Edwards had the incalculable advantage of a nearby company town, with experts available to solve nearly any problem, he still had to manage a movie that was significantly larger in scale than A Daughter of the Gods and that had logistical challenges of equal complexity. Edwards’s cast numbered twenty-five to thirty thousand, compared to Brenon’s twenty-one thousand; and every day, he had to supervise ten to eighteen cameramen instead of six. Cleopatra’s script called for chariot races across the sand, multiple military invasions, and battles on both land and water. Calmly and methodically, undistracted by the thousands of spectators who showed up on location to watch, Edwards “drilled and rehearsed, rehearsed and drilled.” He refused to posture with a megaphone as Brenon had, instead gesturing with his arms to communicate instructions over a far distance. Everyone, it seemed, liked him. Crucially, he didn’t argue with Fox. So, in nine weeks instead of eight months, shooting three thousand scenes, Edwards finished filming Cleopatra in late August 1917 at a relative bargain price. Assuming that if Fox exaggerated budget figures, he did so in a consistent manner, Cleopatra’s $500,000 expenditure represented only half as much as the studio had paid for Brenon’s A Daughter of the Gods.

  Beyond Hollywood, current events marched on. The spring and summer of 1917 had been full of astonishing news. German spies, posing as businessmen, had infiltrated the United States, obtained military secrets from sources at important army and naval stations, and were sending the information home via a secret mail service through Scandinavia. Suspected enemy agents were everywhere: a doctor in Boston; three Hindu steelworkers in Gary, Indiana; a New Jersey print shop owner; a midwestern farming machinery plant foreman. According to the U.S. War Department, the threat of attack was so dire that the country needed $2.5 billion worth of fortifications. On June 5, 1917, draft registration began, and by early August more than eight hundred thousand Americans were under arms. In mid-June, General John J. Pershing led an advance guard of the U.S. Army into France. “There is no longer a European war,” declared Sen. William E. Borah (R-ID). “It is an American war.”

  With so much drama reported on newspaper front pages and touching deeply into daily life, who would want to see a movie that was, literally, ancient history?

  Friends noted that when Fox became nervous or upset, he tended to shout. The shouting on behalf of Cleopatra began early. While the movie was still being filmed, Fox launched a massive advertising and publicity campaign designed not only to appeal to existing movie fans but also to stimulate curiosity among a broad range of other interest groups.

  Outside help was needed. Following the declaration of war, five Fox Film publicity executives enlisted for military service. To handle advance publicity for Cleopatra, Fox hired the future “Father of Public Relations,” Edward L. Bernays, who was then one of the bright lights of Broadway theatrical publicity and a self-proclaimed expert on crowd psychology.

  Bernays was the sort of person whose endorsement Fox would always seek: the cultural aristocrat embedded in a network of distinguished connections. Vienna-born, the double nephew of Sigmund Freud—his father, Ely, was the brother of Freud’s wife, Martha, and his mother, Anna, was Freud’s sister—Bernays had an Ivy League education (albeit via an agriculture degree from Cornell University) and had represented Enrico Caruso and the Russian Ballet. Only twenty-five, he may have stirred Fox’s hopes for a new father-son relationship to replace the one recently lost with Herbert Brenon. Fox personally sought out Bernays, phoning him to say he’d read about his work on Broadway and agreeing insta
ntly to Bernays’s salary demand of $150 per week.

  Bernays started off promisingly. After viewing Cleopatra footage, he wrote a long memo to Fox praising the movie as “big and powerful . . . glorious and splendid.” And he certainly did a competent job. Aggressively confronting the movie’s two main challenges of timely relevance and audience reach, he devised a campaign to modernize and “emotionalize” Cleopatra. The first-century BC ruler now became “Egypt’s Vampire Queen,” who sounded little different from a lively, upbeat, fun-loving, contemporary girl next door. “She was a woman whom men might easily love, for she was active, plucky, high-spirited and dashing. She viewed life with a light heart, except toward the end, having a greater familiarity with laughter than with tears,” one ad read. Bernays also reinterpreted great historical turning points from, naturally enough, the perspective of sex-based Freudian psychology. Ads that asked, “Why did Caesar leave Rome?” and “Why did Antony stay in Egypt?” found their answer in images of Cleopatra in seductive poses. Bernays even went so far as to suggest direct parallels with current events by devising daily newspaper ads that urged readers to ponder, “Who Is the Cleopatra of Today?” and “Is There a Cleopatra in Berlin?”

  Regarding the problem of filling movie theater seats at a time when many regular patrons were likely to be preoccupied with war work, Bernays had ideas, lots of them, none too far-fetched to be pursued. High school students were still going to be around and so were their teachers: why didn’t they invite high school principals to see Cleopatra on the basis that the movie offered “a classic way to teach ancient history”? And women would still have to buy clothes, and fashion would always change, so why not pitch the movie to milliners and dressmakers as “an inspiring source of new ideas”? Even intellectuals didn’t escape attention. To them went the appeal, “You have read Plutarch and Shaw about Cleopatra, now see Theda Bara and Know.” With constantly changing illustrations and text as well as an unprecedented scope, Bernays’s campaign itself drew industry attention. Potentially revolutionary, Moving Picture World called it. According to Bernays, Fox was heartily pleased.

  No friendship ever developed between Fox and Bernays, however. It couldn’t. Having always known privilege, Bernays was a fearsome snob who regarded his low-born, uneducated employer with contemptuous sangfroid. Despite a number of meetings, Bernays took so little notice of Fox that he had no clear memories to draw on when writing his 1965 memoir, Biography of an Idea. The muddle he made of the facts revealed his prejudices. Describing a conference at Fox’s home in Mount Vernon, New York, Bernays wrote that Fox greeted him at the door wearing an undershirt and red suspenders and then led him to a dining room table filled with dirty breakfast dishes. Fox didn’t live in Mount Vernon in 1917, and it’s inconceivable that, otherwise so prideful about decorum, he would have greeted a professional colleague in such a slovenly manner. Bernays also wrote that at the time of his hiring, Fox had been “rapidly increasing the number of his storefront movie houses” when Fox by then owned some of the city’s largest, plushest theaters. And Bernays claimed to have visited Fox in his office in a “seedy-looking building” on West Forty-Ninth Street. In 1917, Fox Film headquarters were located in the smart, relatively new Leavitt Building, at 130 West Forty-Sixth Street. Bernays, who went on to work briefly for Sam Goldwyn, appears to have conflated Fox with others in the motion picture industry, which he regarded as “a crude, crass, manufacturing business, run by crude, crass men.” (Bernays’s sense of superior refinement did not prevent him, several decades later, from promoting Lucky Strike cigarettes to women as “torches of freedom” or from taking a $100,000 annual fee during the 1950s from the United Fruit Company, which was then helping to finance Central American dictatorships.)

  It was too much, to continue working for someone who reminded him of “a saloon keeper” and who had relegated him to the supervision of the bustling, thoughtless Winnie Sheehan. Despite the prominence of the opportunity, Bernays lasted only a few months as Cleopatra’s publicist. Then, after Sheehan kept him waiting a few times for half an hour, he quit. “I told Fox that no one was paying me for waiting time,” Bernays recalled testily.

  Fox scheduled the premiere of Cleopatra for Sunday, October 14, 1917, at the Lyric Theatre, three days before the one-year anniversary of the opening of A Daughter of the Gods there. By now, the motion picture industry had calmed down enough to realize that war wasn’t likely to decimate business. To the contrary: after six months’ involvement, Americans needed diversion more than ever. The initial excitement and idealism of a war to end all wars had given way to the day-to-day reality of death, sacrifice, loss, and grief. “This is no war for amateurs,” President Wilson had warned in May. “It means grim business on every side of it.” And it probably wasn’t going to end soon. A military strategist quoted by the New York Times predicted “enormous losses” to both sides through the end of 1917, and added that because of Germany’s reserves of manpower and material, an Allied victory might take until late 1919. Even though Broadway theater attendance declined sharply, low-priced tickets allowed the movies to hold steady.

  Because he hadn’t given in to fear, hadn’t scaled back his investment or delayed the production until the market looked more promising, Fox had a movie that was ready to meet the moment. With a running time of two hours and five minutes and a five-minute intermission, Cleopatra offered both magnificently absorbing, escapist entertainment and comforting reassurances about the underlying nature of contemporary world events. History was not a storm of angry, incomprehensible forces that tossed individual lives around carelessly and meaninglessly. History was an epic pageant that, even when it entailed tragedy—perhaps especially when it entailed tragedy—conferred dignity upon the participants. Cleopatra’s last spoken words (given by the final title card) were, “Cleopatra triumphs in death.”

  It was easy to see the truth across the distance of time and place, Cleopatra suggested. History was personal. The movie made that point right away. An opening panoramic shot, showing the desert outside Alexandria with the Sphinx and two pyramids in the distance, quickly gave way to a close-up of the Sphinx, which slowly faded into the features of Theda as Cleopatra. History was passionate. Exiled from her royal palace by the invading army of Julius Caesar (and forced to camp out on the sands with her loyal army), Cleopatra schemes to meet Caesar (Shakespearean actor Fritz Leiber) by having herself wrapped up in a rug and carried before him. Instantly seduced, he becomes her love slave, and together they plan to conquer the entire civilized world. After Caesar is murdered in Rome, Cleopatra eagerly latches onto Marc Antony as a substitute ally, wins him over with sex, and sails back triumphantly with him to Alexandria.

  History was also spectacular. After Caesar’s adopted son, Octavius,* who is also the brother of Antony’s abandoned wife, invades Egypt with imperial plans of his own, the combined forces of Cleopatra and Antony confront him in the world’s first-known major naval battle, the Battle of Actium. The climactic sequence, filmed at night on Newport Bay, showed warships equipped with catapults lobbing fireballs at one another until almost all the vessels caught flame, and a tremendous blaze lit up the black sky.

  Most importantly, although history might bring emotional anguish, in that pain was proof of life and love experienced to the fullest. This was the message with which Cleopatra sent audiences back out into the real world. At the end of the movie, believing her true love, Antony, to have been killed in the Battle of Actium, Cleopatra returns to Alexandria and sinks into fathomless despair. She cannot go on without him and reaches for the deadly asp. In a plot twist like the one Fox added to his version of Romeo and Juliet, Antony isn’t actually dead. However, once he learns of Cleopatra’s suicide, he, too, kills himself from grief. These two larger-than-life characters sought and lost the world, but even worse, they sought and lost each other. On that intimate level, history made sense in a way that everyone could understand.

  Moreover, the visual splendor of Cleopatra spoke to an audien
ce whose world had turned gray amid the unrelenting sacrifices of wartime. Up on the movie screen, in a theater where darkness shut out the gloom of the real world, extravagance repeated itself in every direction. Fanciful furniture captured the Ancient Egyptians’ obsession with animals: Cleopatra’s throne was shaped like a lion; lounges followed the contours of swans; tables and chairs reiterated a Sphinx motif. Rich rugs and opulent wall hangings decorated the background. Out of doors, Cleopatra traveled in style on a huge barge outfitted with magnificent banners, carvings, canopies, and cushions. Grandly and exotically, Cleopatra remade the world into a place of enchantment.

  Especially eye-catching were Theda’s costumes, reportedly made by a team of ten seamstresses. In the first half of the movie, the actress wore a different outfit in every scene; altogether, her wardrobe consisted of fifty elaborate ensembles, each with its own headdress and set of jewels. Glittering, diaphanous fabrics, strategically ornamented with beads, swirled around her figure. One dress, according to press information, had been made from all the feathers of a large peacock; another allegedly had been created from a real leopard skin. (In an era that took a primitive view of animal rights, the studio had no qualms about claiming to have killed both creatures for the purpose.) Most famously, Theda’s Cleopatra wore a top consisting merely of slender, chain-link shoulder straps attached to two thin metal snakes that coiled around her breasts. Completing the ensemble was a long skirt slit at the front on both sides up to the waist. Although press releases insisted that the costumes were historically accurate, the designs were modern enough that, as a Trenton Evening Times writer suggested, the average female viewer might easily muse, “How well I’d look in that” and “I wonder whether I can afford it.” Glorifying surface and sensation, Cleopatra offered vicarious pleasure to viewers: to see was almost to touch.