The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Conversely, when director Raoul Walsh tried to leave around the same time, because—even after giving the studio such hits as The Regeneration (1915), Carmen (1915), and The Honor System (1917)—he wasn’t allowed to choose his own projects or do the final editing, Fox wouldn’t let him go. Walsh had signed a long-term contract with Goldwyn Pictures, evidently on the assumption that if Fox Film thought so little of him, it wouldn’t exercise its option to continue his services. But nobody left Fox Film without William Fox’s approval. Despite having no great plans for Walsh, Fox insisted on keeping him. Walsh, otherwise a brash personality, returned contritely and admitted that the situation had been a misunderstanding that was all his own fault.

  In learning how to be a leader, Fox had to confront his own inadequacies. He was not, as he preferred to think, universally competent. Several prominent failures during these early years showed him that.

  He wanted to be funny. Although he knew from his failed Schmaltz Brothers act with Cliff Gordon that he had no talent as a comedian, he valued laughter as “one of the most precious things in the film world.” In mid-1916 he started the Sunshine Comedies division in Los Angeles, with plans to make two-reel slapstick movies modeled after Mack Sennett’s popular Keystone comedies. “I am going to make the best comedies in the world,” he boasted. He didn’t care what they cost. “I am going to be first in the field.”

  Of course, he did care what they cost, especially when he discovered that because humor depended so much on timing and nuance, directors sometimes had to shoot as much film for a two-reel comedy as for a five- or six-reel feature. Comedies, used to augment the main attraction, couldn’t command the same prices as features. Especially, unfunny comedies couldn’t. And the Sunshine Comedies, which were released every two weeks beginning November 11, 1917, tended to rely on broad, hackneyed antics. They never caught on like the Keystone comedies and were soon only a minor part of Fox Film operations.

  Fox also wanted to make high-quality movies for children. He believed that he had a special understanding of children because, having missed out on childhood, he still felt those emotional needs. As of the mid-1910s, few producers had given much thought to children’s entertainment, and those who did made primarily low-budget, poorly promoted movies on the assumption that there was no point in spending a lot of money on an audience that wouldn’t appreciate it.

  Fox intended to change that. He would make first-class movies for children with all the leading roles played by children—movies “that would amuse them, stimulate their imaginations, and help their little minds to grow.” His children’s movies would also offset the continuing, profit-scourging criticism of movie theaters as dens of sin that were leading innocent souls astray. Children would “leave the theater with a mind filled with pure and clean thoughts.”

  Fox gave the first of “Fox Kiddie Features,” the ten-reel Jack and the Beanstalk, a deluxe opening at the Globe Theatre in New York City on July 30, 1917. Codirected by Chester and Sidney Franklin, the same Franklin brothers who would soon vex Sol Wurtzel by trying to run away for location shooting at every possible opportunity, the movie starred five-year-old Francis Carpenter and four-year-old Virginia Lee Corbin and had only three adult actors, most notably the eight-foot-six Jim Tarver as the giant. Fox had always loved the tale of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” interpreting it as a story about the miraculous potential of a child’s hopes and prayers and, ultimately, the triumph of innocence over evil. He claimed to have spent $500,000 on his film version, as much as he had on Cleopatra. The figure was probably an exaggeration, but not outlandishly so. Sets included a child-size walled city with small-scale homes, churches, stores, and schools, and the supporting cast included hundreds of children, most under the age of ten. Special effects showed growing beanstalks, fairies in trees, and a hen that laid golden eggs.

  Audiences for the most part welcomed Jack and the Beanstalk, and critics hailed it as a landmark in entertainment. The movie was “more beautifully produced than one would believe possible,” said the New York Tribune, “the most artistic picture William Fox has ever produced,” even better than A Daughter of the Gods. The trade publication Motography called Jack and the Beanstalk “surely one of the biggest film events of the year.”

  Unfortunately, Jack and the Beanstalk was Fox Film’s only successful children’s movie. Its successors—Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp (1917); Babes in the Woods (1917), based on “Hansel and Gretel”; Troublemakers (1917); Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1918); and Treasure Island (1918)—fell flat at the box office. As early as December 1917, Fox began to suspect he was headed down a wrong road. Having expected his children’s movies to cause “a sensation all over the world,” he now commented, “I have since learned my mistake.”

  In fact, because Fox had never had a childhood, he didn’t understand children at all. His movies portrayed them as small adults in an often-terrifying world. In a letter to the editor of the New York Tribune, one woman protested that at a recent screening of Jack and the Beanstalk, children throughout the audience were sobbing desperately: “the realism in many places struck terror to their souls . . . Blood streaming down people’s faces is no sight for children.” Commenting on Fox’s decision to have children play adult roles, a New York Tribune critic wondered, “Do these babies really understand such emotions as love, jealousy and despair? Certainly they portray them, but how is it possible for them to realize what they are doing?” By 1920, Fox Kiddie Features was defunct.

  Even Fox’s skill at creating stars turned out to be unreliable. He believed that just as he had invented Theda Bara, so he could invent her screen opposite: a happy, virtuous ingénue. In early 1916, he sent six talent scouts out to find “a natural, graceful, pretty girl without affectations or mannerisms, a girl who is winsome, happy, who lives with her parents or is off studying somewhere in a girls’ school.” The winner was seventeen-year-old Massachusetts high school student Helen Elizabeth Lawson*, a petite blonde with gray-blue eyes and fair skin. Lawson’s entire acting experience consisted of having substituted for Mary Pickford at a World Series baseball game in Boston, where she was wildly cheered by thirty thousand fans who never suspected she wasn’t Pickford.

  Fox renamed her June Caprice, brought her to New York, and took over her life. The studio required her to study with two academic tutors, take daily acting lessons, and wear clothes chosen for her. Fox wanted Caprice to represent the sort of girl whom mothers would want as a role model for their daughters or an ideal girlfriend for their sons.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy to create a star. Everyone tried very hard. Fox starred Caprice in a barrage of movies, advertised them vigorously, and gave her a big publicity buildup. She complied with all of his requirements and, by all sights, truly was a nice girl. Her first movie, Caprice of the Mountains (1916), in which she played a backwoods heroine looking for love, flopped. So did all the others. She couldn’t act, critics complained. She kept trying too hard, they said, annoyingly so. As Wid’s lamented in a review of Caprice’s A Small Town Girl (1917): “Here was more money spent on a boss’ (sic) effort to carry out his promise—or should we call it a threat?—to make a little lady a star . . . artificial from start to finish, with repeated camera-conscious attempts to be cute . . . Mr. Fox’s threatened star . . . is pretty near hopeless as a real box office attraction.”

  Faced with his inadequacies, Fox did not delegate power. Control over his destiny was too important. He had ceded power to the New Jersey investors in the February 1915 formation of Fox Film, but he had been forced to do so by the nation’s financial crisis. No more. Instead, he began to invent himself as a larger-than-life character who ruled by mystery and charm as well as by competence. During the late 1910s, he drew the outlines of a public persona that was both more of him and more than him. It was, he said, “the making of me.”

  Toward the goal of magnification, he continually asserted that William Fox was the sole, indispensable driving force of Fox Film’s su
ccess. “The final judgment with reference to any picture made by the Fox Film Corporation, you ought to know, is left with me,” he snapped at Wurtzel in an early 1918 letter. “I never followed the policy of consulting a director when I thought a scene should be eliminated. If I had done that, the Fox Film Corporation would have been on the rocks long ago. The only reason the Fox Film Corporation has made progress is because the power as to what will or will not remain in the film has been entirely left with me.”

  During a 1:00 a.m. conference at his office, he reacted sharply when brother-in-law Jack Leo, then head of the story department, told him that a script he didn’t like was nearly all his own. “Very well,” Fox commanded, “make it all mine.” He then advised a director, “I want to see every foot—understand, every foot.” He had to know everyone’s job, watch over them constantly, and remind them of all the details. And they had to know that he knew. At that same late night meeting, he chastised the London branch office manager for submitting an incomplete report: “You have skipped seventeen British theaters, in the cities and towns of Manchester, Glasgow, Aldgate, Plumstead, Aldersot, Bournemouth—see me in the office tomorrow.” Then he told the Fox theater circuit manager to install a new projector in one theater, spend $2,476.38 at another, and build another on a particular street corner. “All over, gentlemen,” he concluded. “I’ve got to go to work.”

  Yet, Fox also understood that he needed to learn to get along better with other people. Leadership couldn’t be dictatorship. The best employees, he knew, would leave if he didn’t offer them a sense of connection and belonging.

  There was no way better to learn that skill than from the movies. “I cultivated a habit—all I had to do was to put myself in the place of that character, figure out what I would be thinking about if I were in that particular predicament,” he said. “I later used that habit in a business way. . . . After a business wrangle some day, I would go home and place myself in the other man’s position, and many times I found I was wrong.” That being so, “I would promptly get in touch with the other man and tell him he was right and I was wrong. I developed that part of myself in the motion picture business where I had to be the character I was trying to portray.”

  Primarily, Fox fashioned himself as a father figure. He believed he was building a good professional home to provide jobs, personal growth, and respectability. That was why money was so important. Without it, the studio would have to close and the Fox Film family would disband. He wasn’t tight-fisted, insisted Theda Bara. “Mr. Fox is extremely generous,” she would write some years after leaving the studio. “Yet while he would give away thousands with one hand, with the other he would probably dicker about a few cents, not because he is small or petty, but [because] it is part of his peculiar financial genius. With him, it is not so much a matter of money as a battle of wits.”

  Toward theater owners, Fox saw himself not as an adversary according to the old business paradigm established by the Motion Picture Patents Company, but as a helpful partner. “I want exhibitors who show William Fox pictures throughout the world to prosper,” he said. Happy customers would return; prosperous customers could pay higher rental fees. Fox repeatedly offered to help: if exhibitors weren’t sure how to promote Fox movies, all they had to do was pick up the phone and call Fox headquarters for free advice.

  In day-to-day business, the force of Fox’s persona distilled into an idiosyncratic, highly arbitrary management style that Theda Bara labeled “a mixture of Machiavellianism, Fabianism, and William-Foxism.” To those he liked, Fox granted countless indulgences, forgiving their mistakes and handing out extravagant favors. Understandably, those employees tended to love Fox.

  Max Steiner was one of them. One of the greatest film composers of the twentieth century, nominated for twenty-six Academy Awards and winner of three, Steiner wrote the scores for hundreds of movies, including King Kong; The Informer; A Star Is Born; Jezebel; Gone with the Wind; Casablanca; Now, Voyager; The Big Sleep; The Treasure of Sierra Madre; The Searchers; and A Summer Place. In 1914, however, newly arrived in New York after fleeing wartime Europe, Steiner was a nobody. And a broke nobody: he had only thirty-three dollars in his pocket.

  At first, no one cared that Steiner came from a distinguished Viennese theatrical family, that he had studied at the Imperial Academy of Music and with Gustav Mahler, or that he had conducted at the London Opera House. The only job he could find was as a piano player for vaudeville acts. Then Fox hired him as the conductor at the upscale Riverside Theatre at Broadway and Ninety-Sixth Street. Many years later, interviewed by The Real Tinsel authors Bernard Rosenberg and Harry Silverstein, Steiner vividly recalled the course of events after he told Fox he wanted to write original music to accompany William Farnum’s The Bondman (1916).

  “You’re nuts,” Fox replied. At the time, movie scores were usually slapped together hastily by a theater’s musical director as a mishmash of existing compositions.

  “I’m not,” Steiner insisted.

  “Go ahead and do whatever you want,” Fox said, authorizing Steiner to put together a 110-piece symphony orchestra from the ten-member bands at the various Fox theaters. Although Steiner recalled that his assemblage initially sounded “like a hundred banjos,” he soon had it tuned up to perform like “Sousa’s Brass Band.” Fox began calling Steiner “Professor” and promoted him to a position overseeing music in all the theaters showing Fox films, about eighty of them, in the greater New York area.

  On Christmas Day 1917, Steiner answered the doorbell at his apartment on Forty-Third Street, and a man “with a cap on like a policeman” handed him a letter from Fox. Come along, the man said, “I’ve got a car for you downstairs.” The two clambered down five flights of stairs, and there indeed was a car for Steiner. “It turned out that Fox had bought me a car so I could get around to the different theaters in the winter.”

  Fox was, Steiner told Rosenberg and Silverstein, “one of the finest men the world has ever known. He was a truly wonderful person . . . the sweetest man.”

  There was really only one way to work for William Fox, and that was to run as fast as he did, but to run behind him, listening, learning, and always, always deferring to his decisions. Given a humble attitude, one could truly make something of oneself at Fox Film. Hettie Gray Baker, for instance, had been a county law librarian in Hartford, Connecticut, when she decided to try her hand as a film editor. Fox chose Baker to help him with the massive job of editing Herbert Brenon’s A Daughter of the Gods in 1916. Afterward, he promoted her to chief film editor, a position that required her to view every inch of every movie released by the studio. Hers was a position of remarkable power and prestige for a woman in early Hollywood. Baker credited Fox with showing her how to do the job: “William Fox is the best film editor I have ever known. Sitting . . . in the dark projection room and puzzling over the tangled reels of a mishandled subject, I have personally seen Mr. Fox save many a picture for his own directors; and they don’t know yet how some misfit features became ‘best sellers’ when screened, and were hailed by the picture critics as well as the public as masterpieces.”

  Fox wanted others to succeed. That goodwill was at the heart of his charisma, and it radiated well beyond his physical presence. “That an organization reflects its head is true of the Fox organization, and this is patent to an amusing degree,” Theda Bara would write in her unpublished autobiography. “Mr. Fox is so much the head of his organization that long ago he came to be called ‘Governor.’ To such an extent do all the others ape Mr. Fox that each lesser man calls the one higher ‘Governor,’ so that the camera-boy calls the camera man ‘Governor,’ while the camera man calls the director ‘Governor’ and so on up through all the minor principalities to the highest ‘Governor.’ ” Because every man was “Governor” to someone else, Theda observed, the atmosphere at Fox Film was both a well-defined hierarchy and a democracy of “the most awesome civility.”

  CHAPTER 19

  The End of Theda


  In the summer of 1919, Fox Film sustained the biggest jolt of its history so far. Theda Bara quit.

  Although she would later look back with great affection and appreciation for her time at Fox Film, after four and a half years and forty features, she was exhausted. She was tired of playing “absurdly exaggerated” vamp roles that led people to slather her personal reputation “with mud.” She was tired of the brutal pace and working conditions—twelve- and sometimes fifteen-hour days under lights as “hot as Dante’s Inferno”—and tired of the demands of beauty that required her to fast, take cold baths, and trade social life for sleep. Especially she was tired of the crassness and indignity of the movies themselves, which she described as an “art of lies” made up of “primitive impulses” and “barren emotions.”

  She was even tired of many of her fans. When a newspaper reporter attempted to soothe her by reminding her that the public had loved her as a vamp, “and that, after all, is your mission,” Theda, red-faced with anger, strode over to a table and from a packet selected a note that she thrust at the reporter. “There, read that,” she insisted. The letter began, “Please pardon for addressing honorable self, but will so kind send honorable portrait of honorable self, as honorably naked as possibly.” The reporter smiled. Theda did not. “How is any girl going to inspire such requests and keep sane?” she demanded. “It can’t be done . . .” She felt “heavy, depressed” and “on the verge of a collapse.”