The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  When the movie’s scheduled opening on August 19, 1918, at the Casino Theatre on Broadway had to be scrapped at the last minute due to a labor dispute, Fox wasn’t willing to postpone its release. Instead, he moved Salome about as far away from New York as possible, premiering it in late August 1918 at the two-thousand-seat Orpheum Theatre in Seattle. He then quickly rolled the movie out to more than a thousand theaters nationwide, delaying a New York booking until early October 1918. He seemed to believe the movie wasn’t worth trying to fix and that it would be better to redeem his investment before trade publication reviewers examined it.

  Against the inevitable outcry over indecency, Fox put up only a weak defense. He took no legal action, as he had for Cleopatra, to keep the movie intact, and he allowed editors to cut out offending portions. In San Francisco, the Chronicle reviewer complained that the story had been “scrambled and completely disinfected.” The Dance of the Seven Veils, which ought to have been a centerpiece scene, appeared “only for a moment” and had been whittled down to four veils, with the last three remaining on Salome. (It may not have been Theda who performed the dance; because of the gracefulness, some wondered.) Instead of speaking up himself to defend the film, Fox had Theda and Edwards do so.

  Buoyed by the sheer amount of money lavished on it, Salome garnered widespread praise among reviewers for its “pomp and pageantry and tinsel.” Still, visual effusion couldn’t disguise hollowness at the center. As a New York Tribune critic commented, “The only flaw is that it appeals always to the eye, but never to the heart.” Typically, Theda’s performance drew mixed reviews. While some critics thought that Salome represented her best performance yet, the London trade publication Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly found Theda’s Salome “utterly and triumphantly inhuman . . . repulsive.”

  Visual splendor and Theda’s popularity carried Salome at the box office. Although revenue information from this era is always highly suspect because it came from the producers themselves, Fox’s claim that Salome out-earned Cleopatra is plausible. New movie theaters were continuing to open throughout the country and the audience kept growing larger. Salome did well enough that in early 1919, Fox was able to close a deal with an Athens-based company to distribute the movie to some five hundred theaters in fifteen foreign countries; the contract was reportedly one of the most extensive ever made for one film.

  Overall, though, it wasn’t enough to copy the past and simply throw money at the screen. Fox’s mistake had been that he hadn’t had anything to prove with Salome the way he’d had with A Daughter of the Gods and Cleopatra. His heart hadn’t been in the movie, and it showed.

  CHAPTER 15

  Mirror of the Movies

  With Theda Bara well established by the end of 1916, Fox was able to turn his attention back to William Farnum, the stage actor he’d hired in late 1914 as his intended top male star. Mollified by a $40,000 annual salary, Farnum had been soldiering through a series of “red-blooded” action-adventure roles in otherwise undistinguished movies. Now it was his turn for the full-scale movie star buildup.

  In defining Farnum’s screen image, Fox attempted to answer the central question of his own life: what did it take to be a great man in modern America? Having turned thirty-eight on January 1, 1917, he still didn’t really know. His father, Michael, had proved useless as a source of information, and Fox had never found an appropriate substitute role model. Socialist leader Daniel DeLeon, his boyhood hope, offered a philosophy that didn’t match Fox’s desires, while Big Tim Sullivan, who had shown him the brutal processes that underlay the getting and keeping of power and money in America—indeed, the extent to which money was power and power was money—had ended up raving mad and cut in half by a train on the railroad tracks.

  Film offered Fox a mirror in which he could experiment with identity. By manipulating the image of the handsome, robust, agile William Farnum, he could create an idealized version of himself, confident that the camera’s eye would always select him as the hero while the screen would magnify him to glorious proportions. To Fox, Farnum was more than just “the greatest living motion picture actor.” As he told the press, he had a “profound admiration” for Farnum’s “manliness.”

  The big movies Fox now made with Farnum centered on the conflict between public duty and private happiness. How much was the great man obliged to serve history and to what extent of personal sacrifice? This was a dilemma that Fox would never entirely resolve in his own life. He was always uncomfortable at the blurry border between his on-display persona and his inner self—that was the reason he hated press encounters and almost never allowed himself to be caught in candid photos. The one time he had tried to fuse the two sides of his identity, in his friendship with A Daughter of the Gods director Herbert Brenon, the result had been humiliation. He would not repeat that mistake. Instead, he sought answers on-screen through the proxy figure of Farnum.

  Fox’s confusion, his lack of even a viable hypothesis about how to balance competing impulses, was evident in the first “super de luxe” movie he made with Farnum, The Price of Silence (1917). Farnum played U.S. senator Frank Deering, who becomes an anti-child labor crusader after meeting a crippled boy in a factory* and then is offered a bribe to betray the cause and save the family of the woman he loves from financial ruin—even though the woman doesn’t love him and plans to marry another man. Selfless public service or romantic love?

  The movie can’t make up its mind and ends up collapsing into maudlin, sloppy sentimentality. Deering takes the money, then casts the deciding vote against a child labor bill. Overcome by guilt, he confesses his crime and goes to prison, where he consoles himself that he has been completely misunderstood. It didn’t make much sense. The Price of Silence did poorly.

  The Conqueror (1917), with Farnum portraying Sam Houston, the so-called “liberator of Texas,” was similarly confused—not because of internal illogic but because in telling the story Fox wanted to tell, the movie bumped up against historical facts. Directed by Raoul Walsh, The Conqueror (presumed lost) presents Houston as a heroic adventurer who is inspired primarily by love. According to the movie, the young, poor, illiterate Houston is dazzled by the highborn Eliza Allen in Nashville, becomes inflamed with ambition, and pursues a life of public service. In real life, Houston was an alcoholic, a slave owner, and a reputed philanderer, and soon after their wedding, nineteen-year-old Eliza left the thirty-five-year-old Sam because she didn’t love him. Houston went on to have two more wives. The studio tried to dismiss its departures from the truth with a title card stating that liberties had been taken, and with comedy scenes that struck one reviewer as excessive and distracting—nervous laughter, perhaps, masking an uneasy awareness of the distortion of the Houston biography.

  In the precincts of great literature, Fox found a surer footing. Faithfully following stories by Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo, he made two large-scale movies with Farnum that clearly defined a vision of the great man’s position in history. Both stories emphasized the duality of human nature and both presented the hero struggling, as Fox felt himself to be, to achieve nobility in a fallen world.

  It was no wonder that Fox had long admired A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens’s classic novel about the divided soul. Its motifs of rich against poor, one national culture in contrast to another, the strong versus the weak—all these oppositions had marked Fox’s rise from his impoverished, immigrant childhood. Metaphorically, he was both main characters, the lonely, inner-focused, melancholy Sydney Carton and the optimistic, confident, compassionate aristocrat Charles Darnay. Although Fox’s A Tale of Two Cities would have none of the facile allurements of Cleopatra or Salome or A Daughter of the Gods—no scanty, sparkling costumes and no exotic locales—he gave it a monumental setting. At the Western Avenue studio, workers spent two months building gigantic sets of the dual locations: Paris, with a 125-foot-tall replica of the Bastille surrounded by a 20-foot moat and three-foot-thick walls; London, with reconstructions of Fleet Street, the Old Baile
y, banks, and alehouses.

  Farnum gave an appropriately grand performance as look-alikes Carton and Darnay. Although the actor had played dual roles in several earlier Fox movies, A Tale of Two Cities, which still exists, called for extraordinary precision. Farnum’s two characters walk down the street arm in arm, and toward the end, the actor appears in a close-up with himself when Carton bends over Darnay to chloroform him so he can take Darnay’s place at the guillotine. Farnum pulled off the trick by counting as he moved and fitting each action to a certain beat so that the two sides of the film would fit together smoothly. One reviewer commented: “I do not remember of ever having seen a film with as many perfectly timed and photographed ‘doubles’ as there were in this.” Psychologically as well as technically, Farnum’s portrayal was deft. Directed by Frank Lloyd, he created two characters so distinctly different, without the help of any makeup tricks, that it’s difficult to believe the parts aren’t played by two different actors.

  For the climactic scenes, Fox—who, as he had shown in tinkering with Carmen and Romeo and Juliet, did not necessarily regard an author’s text as sacrosanct—mostly left Dickens alone. In the movie as in the book, the dissipated and despondent Carton recognizes that he is not worthy of his beloved Lucie Manette and so sacrifices his life in order that Darnay may return to England to marry her. The final scene shows Darnay and Lucie with their young son, named Sydney Carton in honor of the family hero. It was a good enough answer for Fox: the great man was the one who gave up his life to history and lived on through the life he gave to others. Released in March 1917, A Tale of Two Cities was widely praised as an artistic masterpiece and established Fox Film as a studio capable of first-class, serious work.

  The following year, Fox explored adjacent thematic territory in an adaptation of Les Miserables (1918): how does the great man absorb the wounds of history and still lead an exemplary life? Hugo’s novel about Jean Valjean, the peasant who emerges in brutish condition from nineteen years’ imprisonment for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family, was a passion for Fox.* He considered Les Miserables the greatest story next to the Bible, “the epic of a soul transfigured and redeemed, purified through heroism and glorified through suffering.”

  Already an unusually hands-on producer, Fox outdid himself with Les Miserables. After persuading a very reluctant Frank Lloyd to direct, he imported Farnum and other West Coast–based stars to film in northern New Jersey, so he could keep a close watch. At a reported cost of $750,000, Les Miserables spared no effort to achieve authenticity. The main set was a meticulous reconstruction of nine city blocks of the San Antoine district of Paris, with cobblestones shaped to show the ruts and erosion of heavy carts and colored to simulate age. For scenes involving money, gold and silver coins from the era were rented from collectors. During several months of filming, the cast and crew often worked up to eighteen to twenty hours a day.

  Fox personally oversaw the editing, ultimately reducing Lloyd’s director’s cut by about 35 percent. He had to. Lloyd had turned in thirteen thousand feet of film—thirteen reels, at a time when the average feature film ran for only five. Exhibitors would never book a thirteen-reel movie, Fox knew. They needed to rotate audiences in and out of the theater more frequently than that in order to make a profit. Fox first pared the movie down to fewer than ten reels (about two and a half hours’ running time) for its December 3, 1917, premiere at the Lyric Theatre, and then for wide release the following month to about eight-and-a-half reels. The process was, Fox said, “one of the most difficult and heart-rending tasks ever imposed on our organization.”

  Although no known copies of Fox’s Les Miserables remain, reviews and production articles indicate that Fox distilled the massive, multifaceted novel into a portrait of Jean Valjean as the ideal father figure. This was the story he most wanted to tell: that of Valjean’s restoration to humanity by the bishop’s act of kindness, and Valjean’s subsequent adoption and devoted care of Cosette, the orphaned daughter of a prostitute. The camera so favored Valjean that, according to one reviewer, “the other figures seem rather pale in comparison.” At long last, Fox had found not only an answer to all the bad fathers in previous Fox movies and to Michael Fox, but also reassurance about ethical lapses: sins would be forgiven as long as one took care of others.

  Critics unanimously praised Les Miserables as “a blaze of film glory,” and “without doubt one of the greatest melodramatic screen triumphs ever done.” It had something for everyone. Yale University English professor William Lyon Phelps wrote to Fox, “I wish every one in America could see this picture.” The socialist newspaper the New York Call applauded the movie’s “spirit of revolt . . . a spirit which is at its highest in the world today.”

  As shaped by Fox, Farnum’s persona introduced a new kind of screen hero. Other top male movie stars of the time all specialized according to outward appearance or actions: Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in comedy; Douglas Fairbanks—a lawyer’s son who had attended Harvard—in roles showcasing his athletic grace and easy, debonair charm; Francis X. Bushman as a romantic leading man; and William S. Hart as the archetypal sun-baked, dust-covered Westerner. Farnum’s appeal was more fluid and adaptable, based essentially on inner character traits. Constantly battered by events in a wide variety of circumstances, he could neither physically defeat trouble nor escape it through luck or charm. Instead, his victory had to be a moral one, that of doing the right thing whatever the cost. Farnum thus became the American movie industry’s first rugged loner hero. It was a prototype that later generations would develop through the images of John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Humphrey Bogart.

  As Farnum brought to life (and profit) Fox’s ideas of manhood, the two formed a strong personal bond. It wasn’t exactly friendship. There were none of the heated conversations or florid declarations of love that had characterized Fox’s relationship with Herbert Brenon. Instead, Fox signaled his affection for Farnum by relaxing his otherwise autocratic demeanor. He never socialized with actors and rarely even with any employees unless they were also close relatives. Yet, during his early 1917 trip to Southern California, he joined Farnum on a fishing trip to Catalina Island. He never stopped worrying about studio expenses—yet, fretful letters to West Coast headquarters exempted Farnum’s movies from the usual rules of cost cutting.

  Farnum reciprocated the affection. Because Fox didn’t have enough ready cash in mid-1916, Farnum loaned him money to complete the purchase of the new Sunset and Western studio property. And when, following the success of Les Miserables, director Frank Lloyd threatened to leave Fox Film and to take Farnum with him if he didn’t get higher movie budgets and complete creative control, Fox didn’t worry. He knew Farnum would “stand by me.” Farnum didn’t leave—and neither, for that matter, did Frank Lloyd.

  Farnum was the right kind of personality to get along with Fox. He was a born performer: both his parents and his two brothers, Dustin and Marshall,* were actors, and from his earliest days he had learned to enjoy being what others wanted him to be. Although he would at times resist Fox’s efforts to make him work nonstop, mostly he was amiable and cheerful. Additionally, like Fox, Farnum revered his mother: he kept a photo of her at the center of his dressing table. And echoing the significance he’d found in mentally reversing F. W. Woolworth’s first two initials, Fox did not overlook the fact that he and Farnum shared the two letters in the right order this time.

  During Fox Film’s first two years, Fox had made movies that primarily reflected the world as he knew it: a harsh environment full of melodramatic passions and events. Now, in relative prosperity, he began to make movies that mirrored the world as he thought it ought to be. Stories acquired a dimension of social consciousness and commented more explicitly on timely issues.

  Mindful that much of the movie audience was female, the studio paid special attention to women’s issues. In the Fox Film universe, those concerns were centered in domestic life and arose from the conflict between traditional valu
es and modern freedoms. Specifically, the contemporary woman’s problem was not that her role as a wife and mother had become obsolete, but that modern society had eroded respect and honor due to her.

  A golden opportunity to make this point seemed to arrive with headlines about the murder of John L. de Saulles, a thirty-eight-year-old wealthy real estate developer and popular former Yale football captain. On the night of August 3, 1917, de Saulles was shot five times at close range as he sat on a couch on the front porch of his country home near Westbury, Long Island. The killer was his twenty-three-year-old ex-wife, Bianca, who had been enraged when de Saulles disregarded a court order to turn over custody of their young son. Found by police hiding behind a hedge at the back of the house, the beautiful Chilean heiress declared, “I killed him and I am glad I did it. He refused to give me my child.”

  Just so did Fox understand the maternal instinct. Rushing into production with Woman and the Law, written and directed by Raoul Walsh, he barely smudged the facts. The movie couple was named La Salle, and Walsh’s actress wife, Miriam Cooper, who bore a remarkable resemblance to Bianca de Saulles, played “Blanquetta.” John de Saulles, dead and thus beyond the risk of filing a libel claim, became Jack La Salle, a “notorious Broadway character” who was having an affair with a dancer and frittering away his wife’s money. In real life, de Saulles had put his son to bed instead of turning him over to his mother. In the movie, La Salle kidnapped the boy and told his ex-wife she would never see him again. In both real life and the movie, the young mother was acquitted when the jury decided that the killing was justifiable homicide.

  Although Woman and the Law failed to draw a large audience, Fox pushed ahead with his campaign to shore up the family. It was a peculiar paradox that having made his fortune selling modern themes to the modern mass audience through the modern age’s premier art form, he also fervently longed to return to an old-fashioned way of life. In early 1918, stepping forward to promote The Blindness of Divorce, he explained that he wanted “to arouse the public against this curse to men, women and innocent children” because having seen “a good many divorce cases . . . I am convinced that there was not one in ten that was justified.” Perhaps he was thinking about Fox Film general manager Winnie Sheehan, who on a business trip to London in May 1916 had married twenty-three-year-old Ziegfeld Follies showgirl and former Erie, Pennsylvania, telephone operator Kay Laurell. In July 1917, Laurell left Sheehan and filed for separation on grounds of cruelty.