The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  If Eva fulfilled all Fox’s hopes for a helpmate, however, she never exceeded them. The insularity of her upbringing had instilled a fear of the outside world and Fox’s aggressive personality, along with his old-fashioned ideas about gender roles, meant that she had essentially replaced one male authority figure with another. She always looked to her husband for direction. She never joined any women’s clubs or charitable organizations and never befriended other well-to-do wives in ways that might have helped speed their social inclusion. In fact, Eva never had any close friends or any social life beyond the family circle—she met the people Fox wanted her to meet when he brought them home—and rarely did she accompany her husband to public events. He never complained. Indeed, Eva’s complete submission reinforced his sense of total control over his life.

  Fox’s birth family also got an overhaul. With the exception of his revered mother, who could do no wrong, they were a potential embarrassment: an awkward, undistinguished, lumpish lot, lacking any fire of ambition. Who knew what they might get up to if not taken firmly in hand?

  None objected. After more than two decades with Fox as their main provider, his parents and siblings were used to his management. And certainly it was easier to follow his well-meaning, if intrusive, directions than to try to earn an independent income.

  Fox moved his parents and his youngest siblings, Maurice and Malvina (who, born in 1906, was younger than both Fox’s daughters), into an apartment at the newly built, upper-class Hotel Theresa at 125th and Seventh Avenue, in then largely Jewish Harlem. He replaced his mother’s humble, unadorned cottons and wools with black silk dresses, pearls, and diamond jewelry. Michael Fox, of course, inspired no such feelings of devotion, but duty required that he be included in the largesse. Indeed, now Fox could make his father into the sort of man he should have been all along. He bought Michael expensive three-piece suits, bowler hats, and walking sticks so that, according to Fox’s niece Angela Fox Dunn, Michael started to resemble “an early version of Adolphe Menjou.”

  Fox’s brothers Aaron and Maurice, sixteen and seventeen years younger respectively, presented a particular challenge. Neither the heavyset, homely Aaron nor the boyish-looking, curly haired Maurice had anywhere near the capabilities of their older brother. Aaron was, by all accounts, lazy, incompetent, vain, and hedonistic, while Maurice was mentally unstable and prone to delusions. Fox propped up both his brothers professionally. In the early 1910s, when the teenaged Aaron and Maurice tried to become talent managers, Fox showcased a singing trio they managed at the Dewey Theatre. After that career fizzled, Fox took Aaron into Fox Film and assigned him to work as a production manager with a lesser director. According to a family story, in the mid- to late 1910s, Maurice began attending classes at Columbia University Law School. It’s possible. Although the university has no record of his enrollment, documentation from that era is incomplete. Maurice, then twenty-one, listed his occupation as “student” on his June 5, 1918, draft registration card, and the Hotel Theresa was only a short walk from the Columbia University campus.

  As for his three sisters, Fox settled the two older ones into respectable marriages as soon as possible. Neither woman wanted anything different, and according to family members, neither had the looks or the personality to warrant a highly demanding search for a mate. In 1911, twenty-three-year-old Tina Fox married architect William Fried, a cousin on their mother’s side; Fried would be rewarded over the years with many Fox theater construction projects.

  In the fall of 1915, twenty-four-year-old Herman Livingston, whose family had started the Livingston Oil Company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, presented himself to Fox as a candidate for the hand of nineteen-year-old Bessie Fox, whom he had met in Atlantic City. Livingston was so worried about meeting Fox that when a Tulsa World reporter asked him beforehand about rumored wedding plans, Livingston became noticeably agitated. “I’d rather not discuss the matter. It’s a question which is quite personal, you see, and I do not feel at liberty to talk about it at this time,” he stammered. “From where did such information come?” Livingston actually had nothing to fret about. He came from a millionaire family, owned considerable stock in his family’s business, and, despite his Anglicized name, was Jewish. He and Bessie married in August 1916.

  Fox’s third sister, Malvina, was too young for such summary handling. Anna Fox’s last child, born two years after Fox opened his first movie theater at 700 Broadway in Brooklyn, Malvina was the only member of his birth family whom Fox was able to rescue completely from poverty. Almost obsessively, he made sure that Malvina enjoyed every luxury. Blessed with pale skin and auburn hair that she wore in ringlets, she was the prettiest of the Fox sisters. He bought her silk dresses, sent her to a private school, and paid for portrait sessions with society photographers. According to Malvina’s daughter, Angela, “Uncle Bill protected, guided, and supported her life from birth.”

  Of all Fox’s siblings, Malvina probably paid the highest price. The others had all grown up while Fox was still struggling to get ahead, so each had developed some independent sense of identity to hold on to while playing the assigned role. Malvina never had a clear field to discover herself. Since her birth, Fox’s money had dominated and distorted the family structure, stripping Michael Fox of paternal authority so completely that he was more like a brother than a father to Malvina.

  Yet “Brother Bill,” as Malvina called Fox, didn’t just play the role of a substitute father figure. He also expected Malvina to be the person he thought he would be if he were in her position. In the late 1910s, when chronic illness began to keep Anna Fox in bed for days at a time, when little brown bottles of medicine appeared on her bedside table, Malvina had to become her mother’s nursemaid. Fox could have hired a professional, but Anna wanted Malvina, only Malvina, to care for her. Although she loved her mother dearly, the constant need to stay at Anna’s side compelled Malvina both to grow up too soon and not to grow up at all. Her peers were exploring the world and having fun; she always had to hurry home from school to listen for Anna’s summoning bell. Amid her anxiety and confusion, she developed a guttural lisp that would require years of speech therapy to correct.

  Eva’s brothers Jack and Joe Leo also got swept under Fox’s paternalistic wing. In the early years, both men had managed Fox theaters, and after the formation of Fox Film, both became studio executives. Jack, the sharper of the two, first oversaw the processing laboratories and, in July 1917, became head of the scenario department. Grateful for his good luck, he carried out orders with alacrity, avoided conflict, and above all displayed fervent loyalty to the boss. Somewhat less steadfast, Joe Leo had left Fox in the early 1910s to run his own vaudeville booking agency, but returned to serve first as a business manager for various Fox movies and then, beginning in late 1917, as assistant to the general manager of the Fox circuit of some twenty theaters.

  Just as if real life were a movie, Fox was telling a story to the world, creating images of a happy, harmonious, prosperous family.

  An early Fox Film publication described Fox as someone who, “with the drive and push that is typically American, goes out and goes after what he wants.”

  Astutely, Fox discerned that the fastest way to gain social status in 1910s America was through philanthropy. That strategy had worked wonders for both Andrew Carnegie, who was well on his way to giving away $350 million before his death in 1919, and John D. Rockefeller Sr., who, after starting the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, had donated $100 million to “promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” Once the most demonized industrialists of the Gilded Age, Carnegie and Rockefeller were transforming themselves into saintly public benefactors.

  Fox’s image problems weren’t quite as bad as those of Carnegie and Rockefeller, but the movie industry still had a markedly disreputable aura, and his own public profile, thanks to Fox Film’s continuing emphasis on sex and violence, remained controversial. In the public mind, good works signaled good intentions. Fox understood their power to alter
the perception of past acts.

  He began on familiar territory. For years, he had quietly but generously supported Jewish charities, frequently loaning his New York City theaters for children’s events sponsored by Young Judaea and the YMHA. Now in December 1917, Fox volunteered for the Jewish War Relief’s two-week fund-raising drive to benefit an estimated five million Jewish victims in occupied territories in Europe. The need was dire. “Conditions indescribable. One million people perishing from hunger and cold,” representatives in Poland and Lithuania cabled to the group’s New York headquarters. “America practically sole help.”

  Heading the Jewish War Relief campaign were two businessmen who occupied the position in American life to which Fox longed to ascend. National chairman Jacob H. Schiff was the senior partner of the Wall Street banking firm Kuhn, Loeb & Co., and the campaign’s second-in-command was Schiff’s forty-six-year-old son-in-law and Kuhn, Loeb associate, Felix M. Warburg. Proudly Jewish, both were well assimilated professionally, socially, and culturally. At seventy, Schiff had amassed a $50 million personal fortune and owned a palatial home at 965 Fifth Avenue, while the dandyish, opera-loving Warburg was widely admired for his generous philanthropy. Certainly, having been born into wealthy German families, Schiff and Warburg had had an easier time than Fox. Still, they were the most relatable figures on the landscape; with them, he at least shared the bond of religion.

  A fund-raising novice, Fox was assigned to work as one of twenty lieutenants under “Captain” Harry B. Rosen, a leading insurance seller specializing in the entertainment business. It was a lowly, shoe-leather-to-the-pavement position, but Fox threw himself into it. When the campaign began on December 3, 1917, he walked away from Fox Film for the entire two-week duration, even though the studio was about to release Cleopatra nationwide and was in preproduction on Salome and Les Miserables. Night after night, trudging through snow and sleet, Fox stayed out as late as 3:00 a.m. making speeches in cafés, restaurants, and other public places about the war victims’ plight. He personally gave $40,000—the second-largest amount of the campaign, exceeded only by Jacob Schiff’s $200,000—and made additional donations on behalf of Eva and their daughters. When the New York campaign ended, meeting its $5 million commitment toward the $10 million national goal, “Captain” Rosen’s team placed first among the city’s fifty-four teams, with a total of $329,127. “Lieutenant” Fox had raised most of that sum.

  A few weeks later, Fox agreed to help lead another campaign. This one aimed to raise $4.5 million for the Federation of Jewish Philanthropic Societies, which Felix Warburg had founded the previous year as an umbrella organization for seventy-six Jewish charities in New York City. At his own expense, Fox set up an office in the Hotel Claridge at Broadway and Forty-Fourth Street and—to introduce novelty and enthusiasm, because they would be approaching the same people who had donated to the Jewish War Relief campaign—recruited five thousand children to do most of his team’s canvassing. The young volunteers, aged twelve to sixteen, quickly signed up twenty-six thousand new Federation supporters toward an overall total of fifty thousand. It was, said philanthropist David A. Brown, “the most spectacular and fastest moving campaign in the history of New York up to that time.” (Collecting the money was another matter. Some of Fox’s juvenile workers made up names and addresses or wrote them down incorrectly. Others submitted pledges from real people who later denied having agreed to contribute. Although Fox set up an organization to speed collection, the Federation ended up having to reach out to traditional funding sources to cover the deficit.)

  Fox might have turned his new philanthropic status toward greater personal advantage. His bosses on the two Jewish fund-raising campaigns, Schiff and Warburg, ran one of Wall Street’s leading banking firms and had access to tens of millions of dollars. Fox appears to have made no play for their money, and two years later the firm would become the bankers for Fox Film’s chief rival, Famous Players–Lasky. Through his charitable activity, Fox was after a different kind of reward, the secret desire of all his ambition: the chance to prove himself a leader of American society.

  On Sunday, February 24, 1918, the entertainment industry sponsored a formal-dress dinner in the grand ballroom of the Hotel Astor to honor Fox for both his charitable work and his leadership in the motion picture industry. More than 1,200 people, a wide-ranging assortment of public figures, attended. Among them were Schiff and Warburg; Henry Morgenthau, the former U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire; and Fox’s entertainment world competitors Adolph Zukor, Nicholas Schenck, George M. Cohan, and Lee Shubert. From political circles came the city’s fire commissioner and police commissioner, New York lieutenant governor Edward Schoeneck, and federal judge Martin T. Manton. The New York Morning Telegraph commented, “[N]ever before have so many men of different stations of life gathered together to do honor to one who simply styles himself a motion picture producer.”

  Speech after speech praised Fox’s generosity and public service. At the end of the dinner, presented with an inscribed gold tablet, Fox rose to thank the group. Before he said a word, the audience gave him a standing ovation.

  From his start in Jewish fund-raising, Fox made his way into the broader philanthropic community. In March 1918, invited by Knights of Columbus leaders, he helped raise money to benefit Catholic servicemen—and as a condition of his participation, he persuaded the organization to double its original goal to $5 million. If the Jews could raise that much money, he said, so could the Catholics. The only non-Catholic among one hundred Knights of Columbus campaign workers, Fox promised to raise $150,000 from New York City’s Jewish community. That turned out to be more difficult than expected. Although he gave $5,000 himself and pressed Fox Film stars and directors to contribute, almost no one else wanted to help. Some Jews told him they resented being approached on behalf of a Catholic cause. Goodwill from his previous two campaigns saved the situation. Convinced that Fox was “doing this most unselfishly,” Felix Warburg increased his planned contribution from $1,000 to $5,000 and wrote to his friends asking them also to give generously. Fox met his quota, the Knights of Columbus reached its $5 million goal, and Church authorities called Fox to their residence to bless him for his help.

  Two months later Fox helped lead the Red Cross’s $100 million wartime fund-raising drive. They hadn’t wanted him. By the time he read about it in the New York Times while on vacation with his family in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the campaign had already been organized into teams according to industry—with none for entertainment. Fox rushed back to New York to ask millionaire Cornelius N. Bliss Jr., head of the local Red Cross effort, for permission to lead another team. Bliss refused. They had already printed the stationery, and they weren’t going to pay to have it redone. Bliss changed his mind when Fox handed him a personal check for $750,000 and promised that if he didn’t raise at least that much, the Red Cross could take the shortfall from him.

  As head of the newly created Allied Theatrical and Motion Picture Team, Fox entered a glittering circle of wealth and social position. Other Red Cross team leaders included J. P. Morgan Jr., John D. Rockefeller Jr., American Tobacco Company president Percival S. Hill, Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt, and Mrs. Edward H. Harriman, who had inherited $70–$100 million upon her railroad tycoon husband’s death in 1909.

  One name had a special allure. Rockefeller Jr., five years older than Fox, seemed to epitomize the best aspects of American success. The son of the richest man in the world, and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University, he had gone to work at the New York headquarters of his father’s company, Standard Oil, but hadn’t flaunted his advantages. “Junior,” as they called him around the office, was known to be at his desk every morning at nine and to stay every day until five, taking only a quick lunch break at a popular-priced neighborhood restaurant. A churchgoing Baptist, he was happily married to his college sweetheart, Abby Greene Aldrich, the daughter of Rhode Island senator Nelson W. Aldrich, and by 1918, when Fox met him, the couple had six chil
dren. To Fox, Rockefeller Jr.’s life looked like what money was supposed to be able to buy.

  Fox was acutely aware of Rockefeller Jr.’s presence at Red Cross events. At a planning meeting at the Delmonico Hotel, when called upon to address the large group, Fox noticed that “Rockefeller turned around and faced me and looked me square in the eyes.” For that to have happened, Fox must have been watching him. Fox sensed an instant sympathy. When he began speaking, even though others in the room snickered, he saw that Rockefeller Jr. didn’t. He was sure he knew what Rockefeller Jr. was thinking—that for both of them it was “a privilege and honor” to aid such a good cause.

  Eager to build on this sense of kinship, Fox made an astonishing personal sacrifice. He desperately wanted to come in first among the thirty-one Red Cross teams and, working virtually around the clock, had arranged a tornado of glamorous fund-raising events for the weeklong campaign in late May 1918—among them, appearances by stars every night at all 1,250 of New York City’s theaters, a seven-match “boxing carnival” at Madison Square Garden, a Metropolitan Opera House concert featuring Enrico Caruso, and a gala ball at the Hotel Astor. Referring to the campaign’s last day, he told a reporter, “If you hear an ambulance clanging next Tuesday, and at the same time you learn definitely that Team No. 7 has not the biggest total, then you may be sure I am dead inside that ambulance.”

  His team did come in first, with $1.1 million. However, at the closing dinner ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Fox underreported his total so that Rockefeller Jr., with $1,026,000, could get top recognition.