The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Rockefeller Jr. wasn’t even present that evening. Fox was certain, though, that once he turned in the full $1.1 million, his hoped-for friend would realize what he had done. That seemed to be the case when, soon afterward, Rockefeller Jr. sent him a handwritten congratulatory letter. Rockefeller Jr. might have written similar letters to all the Red Cross team leaders, but Fox chose to believe he’d been singled out specially. He also chose to believe that Rockefeller Jr. understood Fox’s motives—that is, he understood how much Fox admired the Rockefellers and that he had no desire to surpass them in public glory.

  Rockefeller Jr. was not the open book that Fox thought. Like his father—vilified as an unprincipled predator in Ida Tarbell’s 1904 best seller, The History of the Standard Oil Company—the son had a complex, contradictory character. In the eyes of some, Rockefeller Jr. had blood on his hands. In September 1913, miners had gone on strike at the Ludlow, Colorado, camp of the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. Although five of their seven demands simply called for the company to recognize rights already afforded by state law, Rockefeller Jr. refused to negotiate. Seven months later, angry because the miners still hadn’t returned to work, he pressured the governor of Colorado to send in two hundred state troopers armed with machine guns. For fourteen hours on April 20, 1914, the militia sprayed bullets at the miners’ canvas tents, set them on fire, and detonated dynamite. Women ran from the burning tents with their clothes on fire. By the end of the day, the Ludlow camp had been reduced to charred debris and forty-five people, more than two-thirds of them women and children, were dead. In August 1915, the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations blamed Rockefeller Jr. for the “massacre” and described him as dangerously “autocratic and anti-social.”

  Fox ignored those well-publicized facts. He also ignored the insult when Rockefeller Jr., who was organizing the New York division of a final wartime fund-raising effort, the United War Work Campaign of November 1918, asked him to serve on the entertainment industry team under George M. Cohan. Fox politely refused and got the position of team chairman only after Cohan declined it. Fox believed he could change Rockefeller Jr.’s mind about him. Taking over an entire floor of a West Forty-Second Street office building, he put three hundred people to work around the clock, and raised nearly $1 million. Diplomatically, his team came in third, behind one led by a Rockefeller Jr. cousin and another by the son of one of Standard Oil’s original investors. For years, Fox would continue to try to curry favor with the Rockefeller family, and for years, he would continue to trust that his efforts were well appreciated.

  Further to prove himself a great American, Fox put Fox Film in service to the war effort. After the United States declared war in April 1917, Fox ordered studio writers to add patriotic scenes to current productions and he set in motion the first of about a dozen pro-war movies made in close cooperation with the U.S. Committee on Public Information, the federal government’s wartime propaganda agency. With President Wilson having recognized films as “the very highest medium for the dissemination of public intelligence,” committee chairman George Creel formed a film division. Fox Film, Creel said, “very generously” placed its entire organization at the government’s disposal. (Creel would return the favor in late 1917, by defending Theda Bara’s Russian Revolution movie, The Rose of Blood, against Major Funkhouser’s censorship attempts in Chicago.)

  Although none of the Fox propaganda movies are known to have survived, reviews indicate that most of them were densely packed melodramas riveted with sex interest and shaped by simplistic, even cartoonish, notions of patriotism. “Ridiculous . . . very cheap junk,” Wid’s labeled Fox’s first propaganda movie, The Spy (1917), “apparently being aimed only to prove Germans boobs and brutes.” Scenes showed a handsome young American spy (William Farnum’s brother Dustin) strolling into the Berlin home of the German secret service chief without anyone trying to stop him and later being tortured and shot against a stone wall by a German firing squad.

  Subsequent releases barreled down the same track. The Prussian Cur (1918)* portrayed an “invisible embassy” of German undercover agents burning U.S. factories, sabotaging trains and aircraft, fomenting labor rebellions, and stealing U.S. military secrets. Stuffed about two-thirds full of newsreel cut-ins, the movie otherwise had no discernible story. Kultur (1918) purported to reveal the salacious truth about the war’s inciting event. That is, Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand was murdered not by a political fanatic but by an admirer of a beautiful courtesan (Gladys Brockwell), whom the archduke had banished for fear of her influence over his lecherous old fool of a father, Emperor Franz Josef. “It might be expected that if anyone was going to pull such a thing, it would be Bill Fox,” commented Wid’s Daily. “Bill certainly runs wild sometimes.”

  Conversely, Allied soldiers were champions of honor and freedom. In mid-1918, as literally the picture of positive thinking, Fox made Why America Will Win, a film “biography” of General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe. To coincide with the movie’s release, studio publicists prepared a thirty-five-thousand-word biography of Pershing to run in one hundred newspapers nationwide and ordered one million copies of a sepia-toned portrait of Pershing, “suitable for framing.” In the same flag-waving spirit, advance advertising for Fox Film’s recruitment movie, 18 to 45 (1918), made after Congress voted to increase the upper age limit of the draft to forty-five, showed five handsome Allied soldiers with bayonets pointed downward at cowering, wild-eyed, gargoyle-featured Germans with jagged teeth and gnarled hands.

  Fox’s hyperemotional portrayal of the war reflected his pragmatic assessment of the industry’s financial reality. As always, movies were expensive products that could ruin a studio if unpopular, and audiences had made it clear that they didn’t want somber realism. In a March 1918 article titled “Cut Out the Sobs,” the trade publication Motography quoted exhibitor after exhibitor along the lines expressed by an Ann Arbor, Michigan, theater owner: “People certainly do not want so many depressing, tragic stories when the whole world is one great tragedy. People go to the movies to gain a little respite from the awful gloom that hangs over the world.”

  Besides, everybody was going overboard. One of the most successful World War I propaganda movies, The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin (1918), produced by the Renowned Pictures Corporation and distributed by Universal, presented the Kaiser as a vain, strutting, physically deformed egomaniac who was terrorizing the world. An introductory title card noted that the facts had been “treated with dramatic license.” Even D. W. Griffith made Hearts of the World, which remained a lifelong embarrassment for him and star Lillian Gish, who found its depiction of German brutality absurd: “Whenever a German came near me, he beat me or kicked me.”

  Off-screen, Fox participated enthusiastically in Liberty Loan campaigns, making substantial purchases on behalf of his companies and personally subscribing for $400,000 worth of the bonds. From the stages of all Fox theaters, employees sold Liberty Bonds, “many times much to the annoyance of our patrons who came there to be entertained and not reminded that there was a war.” He also sent Fox movies to Allied troops in war zones; messengers on motorcycles carried film cans to dugouts behind the trenches in France. According to the Community Motion Picture Bureau, which provided entertainment to American troops under the supervision of the War and Navy Departments, Fox movies far outnumbered those of any other studio.

  At the Western Avenue studio in Los Angeles, Fox formed four Home Guard companies (with himself as a major) and ordered uniforms from the Western Costume Company. Every night, the entire force drilled for one hour; and every day, three squads were excused from work to go to target practice at an Eagle Rock firing range. Even stars got into the act. Brothers William and Dustin Farnum, both yachtsmen, bought a fifty-one-foot boat that they planned to use to help guard Los Angeles Harbor. Fox outfitted the craft with two machine guns. By mid-May 1917, Fox Film’s volunteer companies included more than 500 employe
es in Los Angeles and another 275, supervised by Royal Canadian Mounted Police veteran J. Gordon Edwards, at the Fort Lee studio. All employees who left for military service were guaranteed to find their jobs waiting for them upon their return.

  In a display of jingoistic fervor, Fox threatened to fire anyone who wasn’t “100 percent American.” At Fox Film’s annual national convention at the Biltmore Hotel in New York in June 1918, he called on all branch managers to submit confidential reports about staff members suspected of pro-German sympathies. The reports would be thoroughly investigated, Fox promised. However, no evidence indicates that any employee was even accused, much less dismissed, as a possible traitor.

  Fox touted his pro-war cooperation as the result of his immense gratitude to the United States for all the opportunities it had given him. No doubt it was that, but he also had a number of urgent practical motives.

  There was, first, the inconvenient fact of his German background. Fox had been fortunate that upon his family’s arrival from Hungary, immigration officials had anglicized their surname Fuchs, fortunate also that he had grown up in the United States and had no foreign accent. However, he spoke German fluently because that had been the language of his childhood home.

  His background placed Fox at risk. In early 1917, as the United States prepared to enter the war, some employers began to fire German and Austrian workers, and talk of internment camps surfaced. A high tide of immigrants poured into court offices nationwide to apply for U.S. citizenship. Social position and education were no barriers against fear. On October 1, 1917, Columbia University sacked two professors on grounds of treason and sedition because they had urged opposition to the war.

  While Fox was in no danger of being fired, it would have been quite easy to go astray inadvertently. The case of Robert Goldstein provided a signal example. Between mid-1916 and early 1917, first-time director and cowriter Goldstein, president of the Goldstein Theatrical Costuming Company, reportedly spent $200,000 to film The Spirit of ’76 as a “historical romance” about the American Revolution. In late March 1917, just before the United States declared war, Goldstein advertised that his movie had been “happily completed in time to help rouse the patriotic spirit of America.”

  Unfortunately, Goldstein had included scenes showing British soldiers stabbing a baby with a bayonet, carrying a young woman into a bedroom, and dragging women by the hair. To U.S. officials, it didn’t matter whether such images were historically accurate, only that they were not at all convenient at a time when the federal government was desperately trying to recruit millions of American men to fight enthusiastically alongside British troops.

  Premiering in Chicago on May 7, 1917, The Spirit of ’76 was, predictably, banned after a few performances by film censor Major Funkhouser. It took Goldstein six months to arrange another booking, in part because creditors had seized the movie for nonpayment of debt. The Spirit of ’76 next showed up at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles on Tuesday, November 27, 1917. Two nights later, U.S. Justice Department officials seized the film, arrested Goldstein on charges of violating the Espionage Act of 1917, and tossed him into the Los Angeles County Jail. Unable to make the $10,000 bail, he remained behind bars for months.

  On April 15, 1918, a jury convicted thirty-five-year-old Goldstein of two counts of treason. Two weeks later, as Goldstein stood visibly shaking, a judge denounced him as a despicable liar and traitor, fined him $5,000, and sentenced him to ten years in prison. Three months later, Goldstein’s wife divorced him. Although, in 1919, President Wilson would commute Goldstein’s term and order him released, his career and personal life had been ruined.

  As Fox knew from The Nigger, he, too, was capable of making a movie with one set of intentions only to find it interpreted in an entirely different way. Nothing necessarily prevented him from becoming another Robert Goldstein. Wide-ranging cooperation with the war effort, however, could shield him from suspicion.

  Additionally, Fox, along with all the other studio heads, needed to protect the motion picture industry from the sort of severe restrictions that had crippled the European film studios. As late as the spring of 1918, the U.S. government still considered movies a nonessential industry. That jeopardized not only important personnel, who were in danger of being poached for military service, but also the availability of raw materials: the same chemicals were used to manufacture both base celluloid and many forms of explosives, and metals such as iron, steel, and tin were needed both for the war effort and to make and repair film projectors. Fox briefly lost one of his most valuable assets in mid-1917 when director Raoul Walsh was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army Signal Corps and began editing documentary war footage. Had Fox, who had tried to dissuade him from volunteering, pulled strings in Washington? Walsh suspected so because, after less than a month’s service, the army discharged him with a commendation signed by President Wilson so he could return to Fox Film.

  Indeed, there were limits to Fox’s patriotism. When the federal government proposed a war tax on movie tickets, Fox led the opposition. It was one thing to give voluntarily, another matter entirely to have the government meddle in his business. Publicly, Fox kept his protest low-key, stating only that “it was the proper move in the best interests of the exhibitor.” The effort failed, and in late 1917, the War Revenue Act imposed a tax of one cent on each ten cents or fraction thereof of an admission price. Nobody liked it, especially not film producers and distributors, whom the federal government expected to pay the tax. Soon, though, everyone got used to it, even Fox. He and most of the other major studio heads issued a statement of compliance that concluded, “War is hell. We’ve got to go through hell and taxes before we can expect to reach peace and pleasure.”

  As a result of its cooperation with both propaganda and fund-raising activities, the motion picture industry succeeded in getting classified as an essential industry by the War Industries Board. As of August 23, 1918, movie studios gained priority status to obtain raw materials and their staff members, including performers, were exempted from the draft. In exchange, the industry had to promise to discontinue all “non essential production,” eliminate “wasteful methods,” produce only “wholesome pictures,” build no new theaters for the duration of the war, and repair rather than replace equipment whenever possible. It was a small price to pay to stay in business.

  Altogether, war—and war fund-raising—turned out to be good for the movies. Millions of dollars, much of the money coming from very wealthy people who had kept it stashed in the bank, flowed into Liberty Bonds, war savings stamps, and various war charities. As the U.S. government began to spend that money on the war effort, money circulated again, and ample amounts cascaded down to the average worker. “Now, everybody jingles cash in their pockets,” Fox announced in August 1918, just before he raised ticket prices at all his theaters.

  At heart, Fox later admitted, the war horrified him. Some fifteen years later, he would still recall the sense of tragedy he’d felt that so many American men, “the flower and the youth of the country, were now to devote their time not to build, but to destroy.” He saw war as “murdering and slaughtering” and lamented the loss of all the constructive contributions that those men might have made. He never explained how he managed to quiet his conscience during all his pro-war clamoring. Probably he did what by now he had a habit of doing: not thinking about matters that it didn’t profit him to think about.

  As Fox pushed forward, the past pulled him back. As a press release from the time read, “William Fox has no desire to forget, or have others forget, his beginnings.”

  Old places still held an allure. Leaving his office after 1:00 a.m. in early May 1916, Fox led a reporter to an amusement arcade three blocks away at Forty-Ninth and Broadway. “Been a long time since I’ve done any of this,” he said, lifting a shooting gallery rifle onto his shoulder and taking aim at the ducks that glided over the target as a mechanical lion leaped toward them. His first shot sent pieces of the duck scattering
. He kept staring ahead, kept shooting in rapid succession, and missed for the first time on his twenty-fifth shot. A bystander muttered, “Gee, but that bird can shoot.”

  Old ties still bound. Between 1916 and 1918, he hired two municipal government insiders, John J. White, the former Giovanni Bianchi who had been a “confidential man” of both Big Tim and Little Tim Sullivan; and James E. MacBride, former president of New York City’s Municipal Civil Service Commission, who became an assistant to his longtime close friend Winfield Sheehan. Possibly, in addition to their political influence for his business, Fox wanted personal guidance. In the spring of 1918, he was reportedly considering a run at the 1918 Democratic nomination for governor of New York. Some weeks after the Hotel Astor dinner honoring him, he gave a dinner for influential politicians, and the subject of Albany was tossed around the table.

  It was a fool notion. Fox would no sooner have tolerated Tammany’s management than Tammany ever would have believed he could be managed. Indeed, when talk of the election got under way at Tammany’s Fourteenth Street headquarters, “someone put a spoke in the wheel of fame” and sent Fox’s political ambitions cartwheeling into a ditch. Instead, Al Smith got the 1918 Democratic nomination and the governor’s mansion.

  Occasionally, Fox forgot all about the future and the past and lived simply in the present. A reporter visiting him at his Long Island home in the late summer of 1916 observed, “Out in Woodmere, in a few odd moments before breakfast or on a Sunday or holiday, Mr. Fox goes bug hunting and killing among his rose bushes and in his garden or throws a twelve-pound medicine ball about.” Occasionally, when friends came to visit, “he will be as merry as a boy as he drives out a one-base hit to a group of friends in short right field.”