The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  She was going to return to her first love, the theater. Never mind that the theater hadn’t loved her back during the nine years she spent there before joining Fox Film. Onstage, she would do “worthwhile,” dignified work with “artistic sincerity.”

  Although Theda had recently lost some of her drawing power, she was still Fox Film’s biggest star and the most visible driving force behind its success. Her movies had put the studio on the map, defined its brash, modern identity, and helped finance whirlwind expansion. To many, she was the face of Fox Film. Fox had no one lined up to take her place.

  While it seemed sudden, Theda’s departure had been in the making for several years. Increasingly isolated by her fame and beguiled by her own publicity, she blamed Fox Film not only for the narrow boundaries of her career but also for her bad reviews. The studio gave her such bad scripts that the quality of her movies “was not my fault. I have done my best with them under almost superhuman difficulties.” Salary was another sore point. Hired for A Fool There Was at $75 a week, she had received regular pay increases and ended 1916 evidently earning $1,500 a week. That was paltry recompense, she believed, compared to the vast profits her movies earned for Fox Film. Inevitably, her relationship with Fox himself, once so cordial and respectful, deteriorated.

  A turning point occurred in early 1917. Consulting lawyer Thomas McMahon on a different matter, she asked him to review her new contract with Fox Film. She’d handled the negotiations herself—she’d never had a lawyer before—but was now “a little worried and uncertain.” The studio had turned down her request for a raise and then, she felt, had “intimidated and threatened” her into signing quickly. After reviewing the paperwork, McMahon laughed delightedly. Theda had contracted to work for the Fox Vaudeville Company, which was the parent company of the West Coast studio, but the Fox Film Amusement Company issued her checks. Legally, those were two distinct entities. “You folks don’t have a contract with Miss Bara,” McMahon told the Fox office. “She is left free to go elsewhere.”

  Theda’s timing seemed ideal. With elaborate preparations under way for her to start work on Cleopatra, which had already filmed some scenes in Southern California, and with the United States about to join the war on April 6, 1917, Fox was nervous enough about his investment without having to face the possibility of losing his star. “There was a tremendous flurry of excitement,” Theda would recall. “I was offered almost anything I wanted. As a result, everything was arranged to my entire gratification and I got a tremendous, unexpected raise in salary.” For the year beginning May 26, 1917, she would receive $3,000 per week, and for the following year, $4,000 per week, as well as a percentage of the income from her movies. Her contract also prohibited Fox Film from mentioning the name of any other star in her publicity stories. Finally, she thought, she had her due reward.

  Fox saw the situation differently. He had made her a star, and now, exploiting a minor contractual oversight, she had betrayed his trust. Their relationship, although outwardly still perfectly professional, changed. Theda was an employee now, not a member of the Fox Film family.

  Theda didn’t realize that, and neither did the rest of the world. Fox Film promoted Cleopatra by relentlessly extolling her performance and then spent lavishly on Salome. Fox even let Theda write the script for The Soul of Buddha (1918), which Wid’s described as a “weird, wicked wamp concoction [that] will pull a lot of unexpected laughs.” As long as Theda made money for the studio, no one would see any signs of division. In the summer of 1918, Fox advertised her as “at the top of her profession . . . the foremost screen interpreter of feminine emotions.”

  Her ego grew. During filming of Cleopatra at the Los Angeles studio on Western Avenue, she refused to dress and have her makeup done on the main lot, so Fox Film had to rent a bungalow across the street for her, with a private gate and private guard. She stopped reporting for work in the mornings because of “appalling” inefficiency. “Nothing was ever ready. We would wait for hours and hours until some carpenter had corrected a mistake in the setting. And all about you there is a grinding and a pounding.” Minor infractions incensed her. “She was blind as a bat and much too vain to wear glasses,” Fox recalled. “She used to bump into things all the time on the set. Well, we had this little Jewish electrician, Maurice, and one day he accidentally left a wire right in her path. She tripped and fell, and when she saw Maurice up on a ladder, she screamed at him, ‘Who is the star around here, Maurice, you or I?’ ‘Star, Miss Bara?’ Maurice shrugged. ‘I ain’t even a twinkle.’ Everybody laughed. She wanted me to fire Maurice.” He didn’t.

  In the aftermath of the war, however, popular taste shifted. Eager to leave the past behind, audiences began to perceive Theda’s vamp image as ludicrous. To some extent, of course, she had always been ludicrous, but now she was obsoletely so. Ticket revenues dropped off, and by late 1918, Fox no longer had any interest in helping Theda move her career forward. He tossed her either moldy stories such as The Siren’s Song (1919), in which she played the daughter of a cruel, bigoted French lighthouse keeper who becomes a Paris singing sensation, or anemic nonsense such as A Woman There Was, which cast her as a free-spirited princess in an imaginary kingdom in love with a missionary. The latter movie, Variety sputtered, was “so obviously and tiresomely a poor picture . . . so carelessly devised, so poorly directed, and so sloppily cut and strung together . . . it is stupid and unattractive.”

  Fox even took away her favorite director, J. Gordon Edwards—who, by the end of 1918, had directed Theda in twenty-two movies—and in early 1919 he reassigned him to work with William Farnum. Simultaneously, as few failed to notice, Fox cut back on her movie budgets. Reviewing The Light (1919), in which Theda played “the wickedest woman in Paris” in love with a blind sculptor, Wid’s commented, “[F]rom nearly every photoplay standard this is a cheap production catering to the least worthy element among picture fans.”

  Amid the new iciness of her relationship with the studio, Theda began to rely on lawyer McMahon for career guidance. Genial and outgoing, he assured her that her performances were brilliant and that the public loved her. In early 1919, she stood up to the studio to demand more varied roles. As she recalled, “I went out on strike and I stayed ‘struck’ until I had my way. I refused to vamp another single, solitary second unless I was first given the opportunity to prove I could be good just as easily as I was bad.” As a compromise, Fox agreed to let her make Kathleen Mavourneen (1919), based on an 1837 Irish song about a young woman who dreams that she marries a rich man she doesn’t love in order to save her parents from poverty, but whose heart belongs to the village blacksmith. In the title role, thirty-four-year-old Theda wore torn cotton dresses, clumsy shoes, and pigtails; she milked cows and danced a jig. She was ecstatic: “I could run and jump and skip and be happy.”

  She also demanded a raise to $5,000 a week. Fox refused. Taken aback, she stalled for a while and agreed to continue working in exchange for the studio’s putting more money into Kathleen Mavourneen.

  But Fox still would not give her $5,000 a week. He wouldn’t even renew her contract at $4,000 a week. She wasn’t worth it anymore.

  The money itself didn’t matter that much to Theda, who had discovered that “as one’s income increases, one’s expenses mount accordingly, and . . . you really are not any further ahead at double and thrice a former salary.” But if, after all she had contributed, Fox so little respected her that he wasn’t willing to pay her $5,000 a week, then she preferred to leave. The final parting was, she later said, “brusque” and “unkind.”

  Despite widespread rumors, neither side formally acknowledged the break for months, probably because Fox Film still had several of her movies to release, and Theda stood to share in rental fee revenues. Fox advertised the final three as “super-productions” and Theda as “the Bernhardt of the screen.”

  At its August 19, 1919, premiere at New York’s Forty-Fourth Street Theatre, Kathleen Mavourneen became an instant failure when patrons w
alked out before the end. “Can you fancy Theda Bara as an Irish colleen? No, neither could we,” commented the New York Tribune. “Long and tiresome,” added the New York Times. In a rare sympathetic review, Moving Picture World judged that while Theda’s work was technically “excellent,” her vamp persona overshadowed her performance so thoroughly that it was impossible to believe.

  Beyond New York, the response was worse. Ethnic prejudice flared up to protest the fact of a Jewish actress portraying an Irish heroine. In San Francisco, a mob of young men—“pigs in the parlor,” said Variety—tore up the Sun Theatre, damaged movie projectors, and stole or destroyed reels of film. Although the theater manager vowed to continue the engagement, he soon changed his mind. Kathleen Mavourneen wasn’t worth the risk.

  Theda’s final two movies for Fox Film, released in the latter half of 1919, did nothing to restore her reputation. La Belle Russe, an adaptation of a David Belasco play in which Theda played an artist’s wife who happily becomes a ballet dancer to supplement her beloved husband’s meager income, came across as “ancient” and “obvious.” In The Lure of Ambition, as a demure public stenographer, the daughter of an alcoholic father, who is betrayed by a heartless wealthy Englishman and gets revenge by becoming a duchess, she seemed listlessly disengaged. Wid’s Daily noted, “Theda herself is getting tired of such stuff. Her facial contortions expressing hate and disgust and then her vamping sure did lack the pep of former days.”

  Indeed, she had lost all enthusiasm for the movies. In the summer and fall of 1919, she published several articles in magazines and newspapers detailing her unhappiness with the “dreary monotony” of filmmaking and the “hideous” burden of her public image. Describing the average movie studio—by which she had to mean Fox Film, as it was the only movie studio where she had ever worked—as “a chamber of torture to the girl whose imagination is tainted with the flavor of artistic ideals,” Theda wrote that her screen career had caused her “much bodily affliction” and had at times thrown her in with “the sordid filth of humanity.” She was quitting “definitely and permanently,” throwing off “the shackles of oppression” and asserting “my rights as an American citizen.”

  Fox would never comment directly about Theda’s rebellion, but more than a decade later, he seemed to have her pointedly in mind when he spoke about actors who become ruinously intoxicated by fame: “Men and women in all parts of the world write letters telling this boy or girl how wonderful he or she is. First they themselves don’t believe it, but soon this mail becomes voluminous and soon their poor little heads are turned. They have a new vocation in life—they must answer these letters to their fans, and in writing their replies, they misconceive their entire purpose in life and within a short space of time they honestly believe that they are superboys and supergirls, that they were intended to become great artists.”

  Then, Fox said, sycophantic employees push the star further into delusion. “Soon the secretary or manager or boy or girl insists upon reading the story before they will appear in it and insists upon making corrections. They know the author is wrong, and the director . . . no longer understands the performer.” And so the star begins to turn out movies completely bereft of charm. “From then on, just as they rose on the straight line, so do they begin to descend on the way down . . . I have seen them go from nothing all the way up, and then all the way down.”

  All the way down. Although Theda had hoped for a stage role of the caliber of Nora in A Doll’s House, the best play offered to her was The Blue Flame, about an agnostic doctor who accidentally kills his fiancée in a laboratory experiment and restores her using a “resurrection ray.” Unfortunately, he disregards her soul, which rises to heaven in a blue flame. Theda agreed to play the girlfriend who changes from a ribbons-and-ruffles ingénue into a cocaine-using thief and murderer. Although the character wasn’t unlike a typical Fox Film vamp, Theda insisted that the role would be a “stepping stone” for her. She had to be enthusiastic. The play’s producer, A. H. Woods,* needed to sell tickets: he had spent $40,000 to prepare for opening day. Theda, too, needed to sell tickets: her contract guaranteed her $1,500 a week, plus 50 percent of the net profit.

  How could it fail? As an employee in Woods’s office pointed out, “William Fox spent $2,000,000 to make Theda Bara the best-known picture actress in the world. The result of that now is being reaped by Miss Bara.” At tryout performances in Washington, Pittsburgh, and Boston, tickets consistently sold out. At Boston’s Majestic Theatre, police reserves were called out to manage the crowds, and Theda had to abandon plans to arrive in a coach drawn by white horses. After her performances, hundreds of fans mobbed the stage door area, applauding and shouting and pushing to get a closer look as she left. During one week in Boston, she made $6,000.

  Great excitement awaited the play’s sold-out New York opening at the Shubert Theater in March 1920. “Ermine evening cloaks, elegant coiffures and mammoth ostrich feather fans were much in evidence” among first-night ticket holders, who included Norma Talmadge, Fox Film child stars Jane and Katherine Lee, and vaudeville luminary Eva Tanguay. In the gallery seats were dozens of Theda look-alikes, “with hair slicked back, who had come to get some pointers and behold their favorite of the screen in the flesh.”

  Within a few hours, Theda’s future turned upside down. According to New York Times reviewer Alexander Woollcott, “the audience lost control of itself and shook with laughter.” Woollcott commented that although Theda had “a very pleasant voice,” she delivered her lines “rather like a young girl at a high school commencement exercise.” Heywood Broun, writing in the New York Tribune, had no obliging words at all: “Miss Theda Bara played the role without violating any of the city ordinances, but she was not so very good either.” At the end of the third act, Theda’s character said that God had been very kind to her. “Probably she referred to the fact that at no time during the evening did the earth open and swallow up the authors, the star and all the company,” Broun commented. “Jonah was eaten by a whale for much less.”

  Devastated, Theda made excuses. She’d had a bad cold and was very nervous; that was why she couldn’t speak properly. Besides, the house had been set against her: “Many of those in the audience were people who hated me. I don’t know why they hate me, but they do. They do not know me personally and I haven’t done anything to them, but they hate me.”

  The show held on in New York for several weeks, but according to Variety, about four-fifths of the patrons were die-hard movie fans who showed up only to see Theda and who otherwise never attended live theater. They couldn’t have cared less about the quality of the play or about the artistic merits of her performance.

  Citing health reasons on her passport application, Theda sailed with her sister on June 10, 1920, for a two-month vacation in England, France, and Italy.

  Returning, she thought she had regained her strength. In late September, she took The Blue Flame to Philadelphia’s Adelphi Theatre. Ridiculous, judged the Philadelphia Inquirer, which called Theda’s vamping “as open-faced as a dollar watch, pre-war prices.” Again, audiences laughed. In Chicago, the play also flopped.

  Derisive rejection was the last thing in the world Theda had expected. She blamed Fox. He had ruined her career and her reputation with all those cheap, melodramatic movies. Passing him on Randolph Street in Chicago one day in November 1920, she didn’t speak to him. At the end of the year, she left The Blue Flame.

  Professionally, she was alone now. The mentor with whom she had replaced Fox, the affable lawyer McMahon, had retreated as soon as it became clear that Theda would have no more big paydays. During her waning days at Fox Film, she asked him to attend the premiere of one of her movies on a Sunday night at the Academy of Music. She was worried about it and wanted his honest opinion. A few days later he called to say, “What are you kicking about? Why, that is a wonderful picture.” He had seen it on Sunday night? Yes, he assured her of that several times. But she herself had gone to the Academy of Music on Sunda
y night, only to discover that at the last minute her movie had been pulled and another one substituted. Soon afterward, Theda fired McMahon. In late 1919, he sued her for $10,000 in alleged unpaid fees.

  Theda traveled again to Europe in early 1921 and, shortly after her return, on July 2, 1921, just before her thirty-sixth birthday, she married Kathleen Mavourneen director Charles Brabin in a civil ceremony in Greenwich, Connecticut. She kept talking about returning to the movies, but it took her years to do so, and then, perhaps, she shouldn’t have. She hated her first comeback effort, The Unchastened Woman (1925), produced by the Chadwick Corporation, in which she played a woman who goes to Italy and becomes a vamp in order to save her marriage. The following year, she made her last screen appearance, in a two-reel comedy, Madame Mystery, codirected by Stan Laurel for Hal Roach’s new “Star Comedy” series. In the film, which still exists, Theda seems frozen in the past, reprising the same expressions and gestures that made her famous at Fox Film, but that no longer fit either her maturing beauty or the tone of the rest of the movie. “It is a bit bizarre to see the voluptuous arrogance of Theda Bara set to the antic pace of hilarious comedy,” commented Long Island’s Nassau Daily Review. “One had the feeling . . . of something painfully reluctant in her, and not yet relaxed to the demands of the new medium.”

  “Once you reach the sky, you don’t want to come down again,” Theda said in 1919 after her first airplane ride. She felt the same way about her career.

  For the rest of her life, she kept trying to regain the heights of stardom she’d known during her five years at Fox Film. In the fall of 1929, she put together a vaudeville act, a fifteen-minute dramatic sketch in which she played a Russian spy trying to capture a Bolshevik leader, and for a few months toured mostly in New York State. “It’s utterly ridiculous,” commented Variety. “What a pity! That Theda Bara should be detached from all the glamorous connotations of her name and seen in surroundings so devastatingly stupid.” In the early 1930s in Beverly Hills, where she and Brabin lived, she appeared in two little theater productions; her 1934 performance as a “vampirish” adventuress was deemed a vanity project, “of interest only to her friends.” She tried radio, hoping to revive her film career. “I’m considering an offer now, running through scripts and ideas,” she told the host of the Lux Radio Theatre in 1936. “Oh, I just hope everyone will be as happy about another Theda Bara picture as I am.” Nothing came of it. Her literary efforts also failed. She wrote two books, one titled What Women Never Tell and the other an autobiography. Neither sold to a publisher. Two planned movies about her life were never made.