The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Fox Film representatives continued to circle the globe, opening new foreign offices wherever possible. U.S. entry into the war on April 6, 1917, complicated matters, but not drastically. During the first fifteen months of American involvement, studios were able to ship film to all Allied countries relatively easily. Then in mid-July 1918, with four months of fighting left to go, the U.S. War Board imposed complicated new rules that increased export restrictions and paperwork. Around the same time, the U.S. Treasury Department began to censor films sent to any country other than Canada. For Fox, the interference was mostly bothersome. That summer, the studio had to uncrate a ready-to-go shipment of five hundred thousand feet of film, show it all to customs officials, and then spend a week repacking it; ultimately, all the footage was approved.

  Pushing ahead, by the fall of 1918, Fox had added new offices in Canada, Britain, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, South America, and Cuba. He also announced plans to replace agency alliances in France, Spain, and Italy with studio-owned offices. Some of the most unlikely places had turned out to be quite profitable thanks to the war. When Europe halted overseas shipments of most of its manufactured goods, countries in Asia, South America, and elsewhere were forced to accelerate their own industrial development. As a result, nations that had been economically backward increased their disposable income and leisure time, two conditions necessary for robust movie patronage. Customizing the merchandise, translators at Fox Film’s home office rewrote intertitles in French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Greek, Chinese, and Japanese.

  During the war years, exports of American movies skyrocketed. During the 1913 fiscal year,* U.S. film producers had shipped out 32 million feet of exposed film worth $2.3 million. During the 1916 fiscal year, those numbers increased to 159 million feet worth $6.8 million. A slight downturn occurred in 1917; nevertheless, by the time of the Armistice in November 1918, the United States had become indisputably the world’s leading movie manufacturer.* European studios would never regain their position. They had missed out on crucial years of creative and industrial growth, and with their national economies devastated by the war, they lacked the resources to make a quick comeback.

  No company had been more aggressive in pursuing foreign customers than Fox Film. In the aftermath of the war, Fox held on tightly. During the first twelve months of peacetime, the studio increased its international business 400 percent, and opened even more branch offices, mainly in the Far East. By mid-1919, Fox Film’s foreign department had seventy-six employees, and to accommodate foreign visitors, the New York headquarters provided desks for foreign visitors and stenographers to take dictation in the language of any country where Fox Film did business.

  Alluding to Fox’s revered Rockefellers, studio publicity boasted, “The creation and up-building of this gigantic system of distribution is unrivaled. Not even the Standard Oil Company and its allied interests cover the globe more thoroughly than does the William Fox organization.”

  CHAPTER 18

  “The Making of Me”

  As Fox Film grew into a major international corporation, Fox had to learn how to be a leader. He knew he needed other people to help build his dream, but he didn’t intuitively know how to manage and motivate them. At first, he made many mistakes.

  Especially troublesome were the West Coast studios, which by 1918 were turning out about half of Fox Film’s output. Because Fox had no interest in moving to California, he appointed as his emissary Abraham Carlos, the “general representative” who had enraged director Herbert Brenon when he went to check up on A Daughter of the Gods in Jamaica in late 1915. Although Carlos’s only relevant experience before joining Fox Film had been managing the one small movie theater he’d owned in the Bronx, Fox felt loyal to Carlos for providing help in the MPPC fight. Equally, Fox believed unswervingly in his ability to remake any man according to his own ambitions.

  Despite a handsome $300 weekly salary, Carlos made a mess of the job. Directors walked all over him, spending as they pleased, cadging unwarranted raises, and venturing off on expensive, unnecessary location shoots. The wastefulness incensed Fox. No matter how good a movie might turn out to be, if it didn’t make money, it could “throw us into bankruptcy.” His financial crisis of late 1914 still haunted him. He would always fear that bankruptcy lurked around the next corner, waiting to pounce on him.

  Carlos’s lax supervision led to systematic thievery. During the summer and fall of 1917, a Fox Film bookkeeper colluded with a former studio film cutter to steal about three hundred thousand feet of film stock worth $9,500. The bookkeeper, who was in charge of all film and film records, destroyed cameramen’s records of the film footage they’d shot and substituted documents with inflated figures. Then the bookkeeper sent the excess film to the former film cutter, who stored it in a warehouse and sold it to a film printing company for about one-third less than the legitimate price. This was the stealing that the company discovered. Fox believed that actual losses were probably ten times greater, around $100,000. He hired a private detective agency to investigate and turned the evidence over to the district attorney’s office, which extracted a guilty plea from the bookkeeper.

  As much as Fox hated to lose money, Carlos’s fatal mistake lay less in these actions than in his attitude: he stopped seeking orders and began making decisions on his own. That could not continue. In October 1917, Fox reassigned Carlos to the New York office as a “general representative” and substituted twenty-seven-year-old Sol Wurtzel, a former bookkeeper who had been Fox’s private secretary in New York for the previous three years.

  A plain-looking man with a thick head of stiff, dark hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and a habitually dour expression—a colleague would later describe him as resembling “a bad-tempered hedgehog”—Wurtzel had the irresistible virtue of being entirely submissive to the boss. As Fox’s secretary in New York, he had often worked fifteen-hour days and had gladly taken on extra tasks such as reviewing plays and stories for possible adaptation and working on scripts. Wurtzel was also willing to move his family to Los Angeles and become West Coast manager for only $100 a week, one-third of Carlos’s salary. Fox deemed him “highly capable.”

  Wurtzel had no such confidence in himself. He was scared, and it showed. Director Raoul Walsh recalled of his first meeting with Wurtzel, “His handshake was vigorous and I got the impression that he was trying to sell me something—probably himself.”

  Initially, Wurtzel made many of the same mistakes as Carlos. Dazzled by creative talent, he let director Chester (Chet) Franklin take his cast and crew to Truckee, Arizona, to film snow scenes, only to discover that there was no snow in Truckee, not a flake of it. The production had to return to Los Angeles without having shot a single frame of film. Why hadn’t anyone phoned ahead to make sure there was snow in Truckee? Well, Wurtzel hadn’t thought of that. He had also allowed Chet’s brother and fellow director Sidney Franklin to take a movie on location one hundred miles away, even though the same effect could have been accomplished in Los Angeles at far less expense. In a long, scathing letter, Fox blamed both situations entirely on Wurtzel: “You know from past experience that nothing suits a director any better than to hop on a train with his company and go somewhere, no matter where it is, as long as he can get away from the studio.” Even after that, the problem continued with other directors. “With the great facilities that we have in Los Angeles, why do we always keep on going away?” Fox fumed to Wurtzel. “What in the Hell is the use of having a commodious plant in Los Angeles if it is not to make pictures there?”

  Wurtzel also failed to rein in stars’ impetuous behavior, gave his assistant two unauthorized raises, exercised inane judgment about film stories, and allowed unconscionable budget overruns. So said Fox in a lashing blizzard of letters and telegrams. One movie that Wurtzel supervised was “fit for the junk pile.” Another was “a miserable, terrible, rotten affair.” Three others were all “stupid, insipid pictures.” Was Wurtzel in over his head? Fox queried. Or was
Wurtzel no longer the same man whom Fox had known in New York? Fox demanded sarcastically, “If you have changed in any manner, will you please specifically describe in what way, and what caused any change in you since you left here.”

  Wurtzel endured the abuse without protest. His letters to Fox were filled with self-denigrating apologies, obsequious pleading, and general whelping for approval. “I now admit that I was wrong,” he repeatedly wrote in one way or another. He had made a “bonehead” decision because “I wanted to go beyond what I was privileged to do.” He had read and reread Fox’s letters “very carefully” and investigated Fox’s complaints “in every detail.” And no, never should Fox think that he felt overburdened. In fact, Wurtzel wrote, “the more work I have, the happier I am.”

  Psychologically they were well matched, not just because Fox was so adept at ladling out scalding commentary and Wurtzel so masochistically self-abasing. There was more to the relationship than that. They understood each other, and to some extent their dialogue passed between them as genuine affection. Like Fox, Wurtzel had grown up on the Lower East Side, with a stern Jewish immigrant father who had never been able to lift his family out of poverty. Wurtzel didn’t hate his father, a quiet, scholarly man, the way that Fox hated Michael Fox, but he did yearn for the authority of a strong father figure.

  Eleven years older, Fox could meet that need. Like Wurtzel, he had been the disappointed son, but he had also become his own father and had raised himself to success. He was willing to do the same for Wurtzel. Behind the wounding comments, alongside the untempered annoyance and frustration, was a genuine desire to make a man out of Wurtzel. Fox goaded and needled and chastised, but he also took the time to write long letters with specific, detailed instructions, and once in a while he tossed in warm words of encouragement.

  “All of the above is written to you in a spirit of friendship and affection,” he assured Wurtzel midway through one marathon letter of criticism, “and in spite of everything that I may have said above, you are still to be congratulated upon having risen to the size and heights to be able to have conducted my business in the manner that you have.” Elsewhere he wrote, “I want your unbiased opinion . . . I welcome your criticism, for we can only improve by being criticized instead of complimented, when we are entitled to criticisms” and “I want to say that I am highly pleased with your conduct and I look forward to great results through your efforts.” Such words, Wurtzel replied, “will only make me work for better and greater results in the future.” Before the end of the first year, unbidden, Fox gave Wurtzel a fifty-dollar-a-week raise. They rarely saw each other. They didn’t need to. As a reminder that he was always watching, Fox had a large portrait of himself installed on the wall behind Wurtzel’s desk.

  As for the deposed Abraham Carlos, Fox now so little trusted him that he ordered Wurtzel not to give Carlos any information about West Coast business and even to fire any employees who might still be in touch with Carlos. “Play the game dead safe,” Fox advised.

  Carlos couldn’t stay out of trouble. In early March 1918, he cavalierly lied to a Cleveland News columnist that he had discovered Theda Bara at Churchill’s restaurant and cabaret on Broadway at Forty-Ninth Street and hired her for thirty dollars a week to star in A Fool There Was. Her performance in that movie was considered so lackluster, Carlos added, that Fox Film dropped her once filming was complete. Now at the height of her fame, with Cleopatra packing theaters nationwide, Theda hit the ceiling. In an irate telegram to Sheehan, she labeled Carlos’s comments “slanderous” and “the most insulting innuendo I ever read.” Demanding a retraction, she fumed, “[T]his matter cannot admit of delay.” About a week later, the Cleveland News acknowledged only that Theda had denied Carlos’s statements.

  Although the story appears to have gone no further than Cleveland and did no damage to Theda’s career, she was Fox Film’s biggest moneymaker, and she wasn’t happy. A few weeks later, Carlos resigned and started his own production company, the Carlos Film Corporation, with financial backing from the son of a former Tammany Hall boss. Had Fox finally fired Carlos? If so, his anger didn’t last long. Carlos’s company made no movies, and by June he was back at Fox Film running the studio’s Paris sales office. There, at least, Carlos couldn’t cause any damage to the U.S. business. He would hold on to the job for four years.

  Dealing with creative talent, the organization’s lifeblood, Fox often stumbled. He reacted emotionally, impulsively, and without much regard for the damage he could inflict as the all-powerful boss. Director Herbert Brenon had been the first to suffer that side of Fox’s character when the two argued over A Daughter of the Gods in 1916, but his career would survive. Not so fortunate was Jewel Carmen, a beautiful blonde young actress who might have become one of early film’s great stars but whose name has virtually disappeared from history as a result of her fight with Fox.

  In October 1916, intending to build her up as the leading lady of his biggest male star, William Farnum, Fox hired Carmen away from Triangle Studios, where she had played opposite Douglas Fairbanks in several movies. Fox doubled Carmen’s salary to $100 a week and, in July 1917, signed her to two consecutive contracts covering the next four years. In short order, she appeared with Farnum in three high-budget movies, A Tale of Two Cities (1917), The Conqueror (1917), and Les Miserables (1918), and played top-billed roles in smaller movies that showcased her dramatic range. In The Kingdom of Love (1917), which Fox described as “a little picture I love,” Carmen played a nice girl forced to work in an Alaska dance hall. In The Girl with Champagne Eyes (1918) she was a shipboard pickpocket, and in The Bride of Fear (1918), a suicidal, poor young woman alone in the big city. Moving Picture World commented, “Few actresses have a greater natural ability to seemingly take on soul-shaking emotions and to pass at once from joy to sorrow as Jewel Carmen.”

  Fox knew about Carmen’s sordid past. He knew that in 1913, under the name of Evelyn Quick, she had been the lead witness in a sensational sex scandal in Los Angeles. Claiming to be fifteen, she had accused William LaCasse, the middle-aged sales manager of the local Studebaker Automobile office, of statutory rape. Quick had evidently been working as a prostitute and, after getting swept up in a vice raid, had traded her testimony for immunity. After two trials failed to yield a conviction because Quick couldn’t prove her age, she disappeared briefly and then reappeared at Triangle in May 1915 under her new name.

  Having made so many movies about personal redemption, Fox wanted to believe Carmen had changed. He thought he was helping her, as Sol Wurtzel put it, to raise herself “out of the gutter.” Real life, however, was more complicated than a Fox movie. Carmen hadn’t so much changed as adopted a disguise that began to slip as soon as she felt secure. In late March 1918, about six weeks into the successful release of Les Miserables, she walked out on production of The Fallen Angel and vanished. Although private detectives hired by Fox Film tracked her down in New York and persuaded her to return, she fought back. First, she presented a doctor’s certificate stating that she could work only two hours a day. No one believed that. She looked perfectly healthy. She stuck to her story, though, causing the cost of The Fallen Angel to increase from $15,000 to about $23,000. Then she spread false rumors that Wurtzel and his assistant, Lewis Seiler, had sexually propositioned her. Then, in early July 1918, she disappeared again.

  Carmen was trying to get fired. During her visit to New York, ignoring the fact that her Fox Film contracts still had three years left to run, she had signed a much more lucrative agreement, with Frank A. Keeney Pictures Corporation. Echoing her actions in the LaCasse case, she claimed she had been underage when she signed with Fox Film and hence those contracts were invalid.

  Fox was beside himself. Having undertaken “tremendous expense” to make Carmen a star, he believed she was trying to steal the studio’s due rewards and sell them to a competitor. Fox threatened to sue Keeney, who suspended Carmen’s contract without pay, pending a legal determination of rights. In return, Fox i
ndemnified Keeney against any damages should Carmen sue him. In the fall of 1918, Carmen sued Fox instead, for wrongful interference in her contract with Keeney. The legal battle would continue for nine years because Fox, who lost in federal trial court in June 1919, would not let go.

  He didn’t consider that Carmen might actually have been telling the truth about her age, that she might have been only twenty when she signed the Fox Film contracts, instead of twenty-one, as required by New York State law. There was no proof either way. Carmen was born Florence Lavina Quick in tiny Blaine, Oregon, which didn’t keep birth records, and no doctor was present. In fact, as U.S. Census documents would reveal much later, she was born in July 1897—and thus had been barely twenty when she signed the Fox contracts and only fifteen at the time of her relationship with LaCasse. Nor did Fox contemplate what sort of early circumstances might have led Carmen into teenage prostitution. He wouldn’t have had to look far for clues. Her relatives who showed up for the legal proceedings were a sorry lot: Carmen’s father had deserted the family several times, and her mother and older sister depended on her as their sole financial support. All that mattered to Fox was that Carmen had betrayed his trust. As his only concession to compassion, he never publicly mentioned her tawdry history.

  The case finally ended in February 1927, when, after a switch to the New York State court system, the Appellate Division ordered Fox to pay Carmen $59,406.21 in damages. By then, her career was in shambles. After leaving Fox Film, she made only a handful of movies, none successful. She also failed at stage acting and even tried a singing career, which lasted all of three days in upstate New York. Stubbornly, willfully, Fox had ruined her chance to make something of herself.

  Even those who didn’t blatantly defy Fox’s authority could feel the sharp sting of his temper. Gladys Brockwell, a hardworking “emotional” actress whose performances consistently won critical praise even in poorly made movies but who hadn’t managed to achieve major stardom, began grumbling in late 1917 about the studio’s choice of directors for her. “She means nothing to the Fox Film Corporation,” Fox barked in a letter to Wurtzel. “The company has put up with pranks long enough, and it is satisfactory to me not to make another picture with her; in other words, ‘give her the gate’ or ‘tie a can to her.’ ” Brockwell would remain with Fox Film, but was never given first-class starring roles.