The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  “The Grip of the Demon!” screamed the headline of one ad for The Blindness of Divorce, above a drawing of a huge gorilla holding a woman in one clenched fist and a tuxedoed man in the other. A banner at the bottom read, “Society struggling against a monster evil. A tragedy of womanhood!” Another ad showed a drawing of a giant horned devil pushing apart a bride and groom while a small Cupid stood behind them crying. Yet another ad declared, “The woman always pays.” Fox expected The Blindness of Divorce to create a sensation, but society had moved on. The movie earned only a small profit.

  Fox’s views on personal relationships did make at least one limited concession to the modern era. Why I Would Not Marry (1918) was supposed to offer a “pitiless exposé” of marriage as a cruel, exploitive trap for women, and it did, sort of. Aided by a clairvoyant, the heroine (Lucy Fox, no relation) foresees the horrifying life she’d have with each of four previously appealing suitors, including both the wealthy banker pushed by her greedy father and the poor lad whom she favors. She rejects them all, forswears marriage, and starts a store with her father. That was as far as feminism, as yet, went at Fox Film. The business does poorly and has to be rescued by a clever traveling salesman, whom the heroine marries. Adventurous ideas retreated to territory Fox deemed safe; the movie failed.

  So did almost all Fox’s other movies with a social agenda. This wasn’t his métier. His expertise lay not on an intellectual plane but in the portrayal of intimate emotional connections. He understood the mass audience one by one, as individuals, not altogether as society.

  Only one of Fox’s “issues” movies made money. Believed lost, The Honor System (1917) advocated prison reform, a cause that had gained widespread public attention in October 1916 when Sing Sing prison warden Thomas M. Osborne resigned to protest bureaucratic stonewalling of his attempts to introduce humanitarian policies. At the time, the United States had a regular prison population of about 170,000, some 6,000 of whom were serving a life sentence, and most facilities relied on a “bad seed” philosophy of crime that led to brutal, primitive conditions.

  Fox already had relevant footage. In 1915, based on a story the studio had bought for $250 from former Los Angeles Times theater critic Henry Christeen Warnack, Raoul Walsh filmed an early version of The Honor System, about an inventor wrongly convicted of murder. When another writer sued Fox Film for $50,000, alleging plagiarism by Warnack, Fox shelved the movie. Osborne’s resignation prompted Fox to dust off the film cans, order the addition of new, large-scale scenes, and fight the lawsuit. (He lost, but had to pay only $1,250.)

  Premiering at the Lyric Theatre on Lincoln’s Birthday, February 12, 1917, the expanded version of The Honor System ran for nearly three hours and graphically depicted the horrors of prison life. Scenes filmed in an abandoned prison in Yuma, Arizona, once considered one of the nation’s worst, showed hundreds of inmates “flogged at the stake, thrown into cells reeking with filth, darkness and snakes,” and being forced to eat bread infested with maggots. Rats gnawed, flies buzzed, and large cockroaches crawled along the prison bars. To alleviate their loneliness—and to introduce the touch of humor that Fox believed even the most serious movie should have—prisoners communicated with one another by sending messages on scraps of paper on the backs of the cockroaches. The movie’s ending, filmed at a modern prison in Florence, Arizona, pointed the way toward more humane treatment by showing “light, airy cells” and officials treating inmates, some of them actual prisoners, respectfully.

  The Honor System hit a nerve. At the premiere, loud applause greeted intertitles pleading for prison reform. One read, “Whoever is indifferent to the fate of the unfortunate wards of Society contributes to their misery; for we are our brother’s keeper . . .” Another urged, “Let us discard revenge, let us build a system based on education, opportunity, justice, honor.” After five weeks at the Lyric, where it drew an audience of one hundred thousand, the movie was ready for national release. Aiming to activate a “public conscience,” Fox Film mailed out an elaborate assortment of literature about prison reform, including a twenty-four-page booklet, to a million people—reportedly, the widest diffusion of movie information ever. The studio also arranged to have the movie shown at the American Prison Association convention to some five hundred state governors, prison superintendents, wardens, and other prison experts.

  The Honor System unveiled a new compassionate side of Fox’s worldview. Previously his movies had condemned criminals harshly because their stories looked mainly at the victims. Now the camera swung around to examine society’s responsibility toward the accused. Of course, it helped that the film’s hero, Joseph Stanton, was innocent—and also the sort of person who would, as he did, literally crawl back to the barbaric prison because he’d promised to do so. Still, according to the movie, all prisoners were potential Joseph Stantons, potentially trustworthy—and so were all people. The broader message, studio materials said, was that individual “love and faith” would triumph “in the struggle against the horrible oppression of the social order.” For that “sincerity of purpose,” Variety called Fox “a benefactor of mankind as well as an artistic producer.”

  Shortened to eight reels, or about two hours, for general release, The Honor System earned about $500,000 in rental fees. Fox’s other, failed social commentaries had preached. The Honor System tried to understand and forgive.

  One subject that Fox wasn’t willing to touch again was racism, even though the problem had intensified since he’d made The Nigger in 1915. A growing “nativist” movement in the United States identified “original Americans” solely as whites of Northern European heritage and targeted all other groups as inferior and unwelcome. Allegedly inferior races included not only African Americans, but also “Hebrews,” whom the U.S. Immigration Commission had described in its 1911 Dictionary of Races of Peoples as a distinct subgroup of the Caucasian race. In 1916, Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race became an instant best seller by arguing that only Aryans had built great civilizations and that the United States’ “suicidal” policy of accepting “the sweepings” of European jails and mental asylums would “produce many amazing racial hybrids and some ethnic horrors.” Grant was a New York City lawyer educated at Yale and Columbia.

  Not only was Fox unwilling to use his movies to protest these ideas, but he sometimes reinforced malignant racial stereotypes. In The Liar (1918), an expectant mother (Virginia Pearson) is terrified that her child will be born black. One scene showed the image of a white baby dissolving into that of a black baby. In The Conqueror, an African American “mammy,” asked by her owner to relay a simple message containing the word constrainedly, mangles it unintelligibly, and a male slave named “Old Jumbo” speaks simpleton lines such as, “Ol’ massa, he done send me to bring yo’ back.” Only occasionally and only peripherally did Fox movies hint about the dignity of other races and the danger of persistent oppression. In the climactic scene of Betrayal (1917), a group of African American U.S. Cavalry troopers saves the day by defeating a band of Mexican border raiders. In Theda Bara’s Heart and Soul (1917), a cruel Hawaiian sugar plantation owner who had started a revolution against the U.S. government is killed not by American soldiers, but by a slave boy who has come to hate him because of his brutality.

  The reason for Fox’s caution was, as usual, money. Despite all the studio’s income during its first two years, he worried constantly about going broke. Even one movie could ruin a producer: D. W. Griffith was on the ropes financially in the aftermath of Intolerance, and Thomas Dixon had been forced to sell his new Los Angeles studio on Western Avenue to Fox in mid-1916 after the failure of The Fall of a Nation, which Dixon had directed as a sequel to Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. In a letter to the West Coast studio, Fox fretted, “I do not want to make any pictures with anyone whom the exhibitors do not want and which we cannot readily sell.”

  Off-screen, Fox did what he could. Believing that economic power drove social change, he went out of his way to emplo
y minorities in ancillary positions. For the 1916 run of A Daughter of the Gods at the Lyric Theatre on Broadway, he hired young African American women as usherettes—the first time in the Lyric’s history that had been done. Soon, African American usherettes were working at all the major Fox theaters. On Fox movie sets, the atmosphere was notably egalitarian. A journalist visiting the restaurant at a Fox studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1917 remarked, “It seemed the melting pot of the races with a vengeance . . . here was no color line drawn, and blacks and whites mingled freely.”

  Despite Cleopatra, Salome, A Tale of Two Cities, and Les Miserables, junk movies still abounded on the Fox Film release schedule. They more or less had to. By 1917, the studio was operating on a production schedule of at least one feature film per week. Even if it had been possible to turn out one spectacular after another at that pace, the industry structure wouldn’t have supported the plan. Many exhibitors still operated relatively small theaters and changed their program every two or three days. They needed films, lots of them, that could be rented relatively cheaply and shown for ten to twenty-five cents a ticket. To serve that demand, Fox churned out bread-and-butter movies with $20,000 to $30,000 budgets and shooting schedules of about three weeks. A great many of his customers rented these on a contract basis, signing up and paying in advance for a year’s worth.

  Here, consequently, were the same slapdash melodramatic plots, the same women in distress, the same bad fathers causing trouble, the same drunks and gamblers and cheating husbands. Many titles during Fox Film’s 1917–1918 season shrieked their lurid intent—The Soul of Satan, One Touch of Sin, The Price of Her Soul, A Branded Soul, The Forbidden Path, Her One Mistake, Other Men’s Daughters, Sister Against Sister, and When a Woman Sins—while production values lapsed into a cheap “hurry up, who cares” spirit. In Tangled Lives (1917), for instance, one set showed “a lot of three-cent wall-paper with abominable figures in it slathered over the walls of what was supposed to be the home of an heiress.” As the trade publication Wid’s Daily observed, “It must be that there is a market for this sort of wild-eyed junk, because Mr. Fox persists in making it.”

  Indeed, there was such a market, and so the mirror of Fox Film reflected two visions: one of the movie audience as Fox wished it to be—cultured, discerning, eager to learn—and the other as it largely kept telling him it was—unthinking and sensation-seeking. Without the second vision, Fox believed, there would be no money for the first.

  CHAPTER 16

  “All His Secret Ambition”

  What, then, is the character that actually marks the American—that is, in chief? . . . It is, in brief . . . social aspiration . . . The American is a pusher. His eyes are ever fixed upon some round of the ladder that is just beyond his reach, and all his secret ambition, all his extraordinary energies, group themselves about the yearning to grasp it.

  —H. L. MENCKEN, 1920.

  As he changed the motion picture industry, Fox also changed himself. He was a sort of early Jay Gatsby, already successful, wealthy, and happily married in the late 1910s when Fitzgerald’s hero was wearing army khakis, but still with the same unquestioning faith in the possibility of transformation, the same inner eye fixed on the green light at the end of the pier.*

  Like Gatsby, of whom Fitzgerald wrote, “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart,” Fox continued to believe in America as a meritocracy. In this respect, he differed significantly from the other early American motion picture studio founders. In An Empire of Their Own, Neal Gabler contends that all the first-generation studio founders, recognizing that they were “proscribed from entering the real corridors of gentility and status in America,” set about creating “a new country—an empire of their own.” According to Gabler, these “Hollywood Jews” constructed Southern California social life as an accessible alternative to the eastern Protestant establishment.

  However well the stereotype may fit the other early moguls, the facts of Fox’s life resist such generalization. Fox wasn’t a Hollywood Jew. By the sights of the world, he was a New York Jew who ran a movie studio, and by his own sights, he was an American who happened to be Jewish and who ran a highly successful major corporation. Fox always kept both his family home and his business headquarters in New York, close to the center of financial power. He never owned a home in California, preferring to stay in hotels there, and he never socialized with the “Hollywood Jews” except in connection with business.

  Fox had no interest in settling for a second-best “empire of their own.” He wanted a place at the very top in the pantheon of industry leaders. He was confident that America would allow him to earn that status.

  He still had a lot of rough edges. He knew that. It was obvious. Screenwriter Frances Marion, who interviewed at Fox Film for a job during this time, recalled a spartan, dour atmosphere where Fox’s outer office “resembled a small courtroom” with a “liverish secretary at a desk that faced two rows of aspirants.” As she wrote in her memoirs, Fox himself rattled her nerves with his constant “pistol shot” interruptions as she was trying to explain herself. Yet, she liked him well enough. He wasn’t the “ogre” she’d expected. Reporters also found him inscrutably aloof. He was, one wrote, “black-eyed . . . a profound cigar smoker, and silent.”

  Fox could easily handle the visual aspects of his demeanor. Images were, after all, his business. By the mid-1910s, he had moved his wife and two daughters from Mount Hope in the Bronx to a town house at 316 West Ninety-First Street, on Manhattan’s fashionable Upper West Side. That was convenient, but hardly expansive enough. He had lived his whole life in one of the most crowded cities in the world, and in this environment, the ability to command space, especially by using it decoratively and to create distance from neighbors, had become a hallmark of power. Many in the upper class were moving to sumptuous estates on Long Island, which since the recent completion of the Long Island Rail Road had enjoyed relatively quick, dependable, and comfortable transportation to and from Manhattan. Between 1900 and 1918, some 325 houses with twenty-five or more rooms were built on Long Island.

  The richest of the rich (the Morgans, Chryslers, Fords, Vanderbilts, Guggenheims, William Randolph Hearst, Nelson Doubleday, Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, and Louis Comfort Tiffany) headed for Long Island’s North Shore, the so-called “Gold Coast.” Fox, not yet in that league, settled on the less fashionable, less palatial South Shore. Here, by 1916, he had rented an ivy-covered, gray flagstone mansion at the corner of Pond Lane and Woodmere Boulevard, in Woodmere. The house, owned by German immigrant silk merchant Arthur Emmerich, was relatively modest. With sweeping rooflines and dormers, it belonged to the “shingle style” of architecture that aimed for a cozy, cottage-like sense of enclosed space rather than stately magnificence. A gravel path led from the street to the front entrance; in the backyard were rosebushes, a privet hedge, and a small garden.

  Fox intended this “country home” to be an escape from the past, but not from the present, which he brought with him. At the back of the house, he installed a one-room, fireproof building from which a projector beamed movies onto a huge waterproof screen about thirty or forty feet away, on the lawn. On summer evenings, sitting in a wicker chair in a “wheelable” room that had wire netting walls to keep out the mosquitoes, Fox watched movies with his wife and daughters. Sometimes, even after midnight, he might head back to Fox Film’s Forty-Sixth Street headquarters for a meeting. A chauffeur drove him. After getting several speeding tickets, Fox no longer trusted himself behind the wheel. On weekends, sitting at a lawn table underneath a striped umbrella, he smoked cigars and read scripts.

  He became punctilious about his personal appearance. The boy who once put cardboard in the soles of his shoes still couldn’t bring himself to spend a fortune on clothes, but he held to strict standards of cleanliness and tidiness. He wore only white socks because he believed dyed garments were unhealthful next to the skin, and he shaved twice a day. To avoid looki
ng scruffy after late-night meetings, he had a standing appointment with his barber, Gus, at 1:00 a.m., in the private barbershop in his office, which was hidden behind a secret panel in the projection room.

  He also began to cultivate the habits of the wealthy. With the Woodmere Club across the street from his Long Island home, he took up golf, which had become fashionable as an upper-class sport—both presidents Taft and Wilson were enthusiastic players—and which was then being promoted as a means of sharpening leadership skills. A Variety article from this era described golf as “a contest, a duel or a melee calling for courage, skill, strategy and self-control” that “affords the chance to play the man and act the gentleman.” Despite having to swing one-handed due to the childhood accident that had mangled his left arm, Fox developed considerable expertise. One acquaintance told a reporter, “He plays golf as he works and plans—alone.”

  Eva Fox kept pace with her husband’s social ambitions. Because of her father’s protectiveness, she had avoided most of the meanness of Lower East Side life and had never acquired its coarse habits. While Fox himself would always retain a street accent—films were “fill-ums,” and he pronounced Les Miserables as “Lah Miserable”—Eva might have come from anywhere or any class. She learned quickly how to dress fashionably but not flashily, how to groom their daughters to act as nice young ladies, and how to keep the pleasant, orderly, loving home that was so essential to Fox’s ability to concentrate on work.