by Vanda Krefft
Sixteen years after leaving Fox Film, she still held on to the look the studio had created for her. “Black hair piled high, chalk white face pierced with those truly amazing eyes and covered from stem to stern, chin to knuckles by a black chiffon dress[;] under this and enhanced by the shadowy fabric she wore an armor of jewels and on the two inch window ledge near her were more, including a jeweled clock,” recalled a TWA flight attendant who had Theda on a 1935 flight. “She was dramatic, perhaps eccentric, but she stays in my mind, all other descriptions fitting and otherwise aside, as a ‘fabulous being.’ ”
Out of the public eye, Theda kept busy—she and Brabin had no children—doing charity work, tending her rose garden, and carefully preserving her memories. She’d saved many of her Fox movie costumes, wigs, jewelry, and accessories, and by her bedside she kept a copy of Dumas’s novel The Clemenceau Case, the front cover of which bore a photo of Theda from the 1915 movie version. In 1953, seriously ill with the abdominal cancer that would kill her at age sixty-nine on April 7, 1955, Theda gave these mementoes to her twelve-year-old neighbor Joan Craig. Among them was the brown silk tasseled shawl she had worn in A Fool There Was. Craig said, “I remember Theda parading around her house wearing this shawl. It was especially significant to her.”
Too late did Theda realize what she had found at Fox Film: her real self. The plaque on the wall of the mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, where her cremated remains are interred, reads simply, “Theda Bara Brabin 1955,” with Brabin and the year in smaller type.
CHAPTER 20
Exodus
Other important talent jostled Theda Bara to get out the door at Fox Film in 1919. By the time Theda left, Fox’s best chance to replace her was already gone. In January 1919, second-string vamp Virginia Pearson left to start her own company, Virginia Pearson Photoplays, Inc. Four months later, Jane and Katherine Lee, the seven- and nine-year-old sisters who had headlined several of the studio’s “kiddie pictures” and who routinely played small parts in regular features, departed when their contract expired. The girls had been sentimental favorites for Fox, but their mother thought they could do better elsewhere. (They couldn’t, as they would learn during the next few years.)
Two major directors, fed up with Fox’s creative meddling, also quit. A Tale of Two Cities and Les Miserables director Frank Lloyd went to Goldwyn Pictures. Fox regretted this. Despite Wurtzel’s reports that Lloyd had become vain, arrogant, and uncooperative, he liked Lloyd and considered him a genius whose talents had contributed vitally to William Farnum’s success. Also, at the end of 1919, having been held back for two years by contract options, Raoul Walsh was finally free to leave. He handed in his notice and signed on with the Mayflower Photoplay Corporation.
More disruptively, in early 1919, Fox fired director Henry Lehrman, head of the Sunshine Comedies division, on suspicion of stealing one of his own movies. The 1,800-foot negative of A Lady Bell-Hop’s Secret, which was worth $50,000, had been filched either from the Fox lot or from the railway company that was shipping it from Los Angeles to New York. When the box supposedly containing the film cans was removed from an express train in San Bernardino, it was found to contain gravel and dirt. Evidently, the thieves planned to retitle the movie and sell it to distributors or exhibitors. With no one ready to take over for Lehrman, Fox had to shut down the Sunshine Comedies for several months until he hired director Hampton Del Ruth to take over.*
By the end of 1919, Fox Film had only two dependable box office draws, neither one with an expansive horizon. Leading man William Farnum, who turned forty-two on July 4, 1918, was beginning to feel the effects of several decades’ worth of a very physical career. Various ailments assailed him, and he was putting on weight, working his way up to an ungainly 250 pounds. In The Lone Star Ranger (1919), Variety observed, Farnum “waddles more or less like a duck.” Nonetheless, he continued to exert a strong appeal among both men and women. As a Parker, South Dakota, exhibitor commented, “Farnum gets the money for me . . . I wish I could play this star once a week.” Before his contract’s expiration on December 31, 1918, other studios came after the actor.
Desperate to hold on to his most prestigious actor and his screen alter ego, Fox gave Farnum astoundingly generous new terms. For four years, Farnum would receive $10,000 per week, to be paid fifty-two weeks of the year, making him the movies’ highest-salaried male dramatic actor.* The contract was straightforward and simple, consisting of a few typed sentences on one small sheet of paper.
Downstream from Farnum, former rodeo performer Tom Mix turned out consistently profitable Westerns that played mostly in neighborhood theaters. Mix had been a shrewd bet for Fox, the sort of low-risk, high-payoff chance he was always looking for. When Fox hired him in 1916 to make two-reel films, the thirty-eight-year-old actor was “up against it,” reduced to wearing a lop-eared cowboy hat and down-at-the-heels boots after losing his job at the Selig studio. A few months later, Fox again saved Mix’s career when bumbling studio manager Abraham Carlos saw no talent there and wanted to fire Mix without releasing any of his movies. Fox, visiting Los Angeles in early 1917, noticed Mix leaning on a telegraph pole outside the Los Angeles studio door day after day, “always in a different costume, each one louder than the last.” Fox agreed to speak to Mix, who insisted his movies would sell. “He made a very strong impression,” Fox said. “We finally sent the two-reel pictures out and Tom was right—the audience did like them.” Within months, Fox promoted Mix to feature films.
Mix’s movie plots were nothing special, mostly white hat/black hat formula Westerns. His stunts were the real attraction—daredevil feats he performed flawlessly, allegedly without a stunt double. In Fame and Fortune (1918), he leaped through a window and did a somersault before landing on his horse. In Rough Riding Romance (1919), he rode at full speed alongside a passenger train, lassoed a fixture on top of one of the cars, and swung himself up onto its roof. In Hell Roarin’ Reform (1919), he rode his horse through a real plate-glass window. Even the habitually crotchety Wid’s was impressed: “That boy Tom Mix sure don’t care what happens . . . he really pulled the stunts without any camera tricks or soft stuff to land on.”
Briefly, Fox thought about trying to make more of Mix. Then he thought better of it. There were, he realized, two Tom Mixes. Unlike his public persona, the off-screen Tom Mix drank heavily and had a volatile, sometimes violent personal life. During April 1917 divorce proceedings, Mix’s third wife, Olive Stokes Mix, whose father had owned the Oklahoma ranch where Mix once worked as a cowboy, testified that he had given her a black eye. The following year, at age forty, he married his fourth wife and frequent costar, twenty-two-year-old Victoria Forde.
By early 1919, Mix had become “a vastly different man than when you knew him,” Sol Wurtzel warned Fox. Mix argued frequently with directors, so that even the one director he liked asked not to be assigned to work with him. He was also getting sneaky. While Fox was away in Europe in early 1919, he wheedled a $2,500 loan from the studio out of Wurtzel, which predictably brought a torrent of wrath down on Wurtzel’s head. Fox didn’t object to the loan having been made to Mix, but he was furious that Wurtzel had acquiesced without getting approval from Fox Film’s Board of Directors, as required by New York State law. Fox’s response must have made Wurtzel quake: “Your attitude in this matter assumes a proportion far beyond anything that Carlos dared to do during his regime . . . I am warning you never to do it again.”
Mix had further exploited Fox’s absence to get Wurtzel to let him direct one of his movies, a request that Fox said he would not have approved. While ultimately it was Wurtzel’s responsibility to know how to do business, Mix had asked the person who couldn’t say no to him and he had asked at a time when that person couldn’t easily ask anyone else for advice. Fox had told Wurtzel not to discuss sensitive business matters with anyone except him. Fortunately for Wurtzel, Fox recognized Mix’s underhandedness and assured Wurtzel that he considered Mix’s conduct “dirty, damnable
,” and “nothing short of a disgrace.”
Such feelings were not to interfere with business judgment. In November 1919, Fox approved a new five-year contract for Mix, a generous deal that forgave the actor’s $2,500 debt and provided for annual increases of $500 per week. Although he personally wanted to punish Mix by offering only a renewal of the existing terms, he recognized that the enhancements were in “the best interests of the Fox Film Corp.”
Fox couldn’t find any big stars to replace his losses. In January 1919 he reportedly bid aggressively for Douglas Fairbanks, whose contract with Paramount-Artcraft was due to expire that spring. Fairbanks preferred to become a founding partner of United Artists, along with Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith. According to film historian Kevin Brownlow, Fox also tried to hire Buster Keaton in 1919, offering him a salary of $1,000 a week. Loyally, Keaton decided to stay with producer Joseph M. Schenck, who paid him only $250 a week. All Fox could get were a few novelty names and a revolving door of undistinguished newcomers. Pearl White, the enormously popular star of the Perils of Pauline serials for Pathé during the past five years, signed with Fox in June 1919. Fox intended to transform her into “a dramatic star of power and charm,” but she had made her fortune already. Settled into a twenty-acre estate at Bayside, Long Island, and recently married to musical comedy performer Wallace McCutcheon Jr., she would appear in only a handful of Fox movies per year.
More oddly, Fox tried to make a star out of Evelyn Nesbit, the onetime Florodora Sextette showgirl whose wealthy husband, Harry K. Thaw, had famously and fatally shot architect Stanford White three times in the head at the Madison Square Garden roof theater on June 25, 1906. Fallen on hard times after Thaw was committed to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Nesbit refashioned herself as a cabaret and vaudeville singer and dancer and also appeared in several small movies. In 1918, Fox gave her a six-month contract. At Fox Film, she made half a dozen movies with suggestive titles such as I Want To Forget (1918), Thou Shalt Not (1919), and A Fallen Idol (1919). All failed, burdened not only by what Variety called “the heavy handicap of Miss Nesbit’s ‘acting,’ ” but also by her lazy, unreliable work habits. As Wid’s reported, “Evelyn Nesbit has a way of evading her directors. When they want her for a scene, they always have to hunt the studio over for her. Her favorite trick is to climb on top of a table and go to sleep.”
Among top-drawer directors, Fox Film had only one left. Psychologically, Fox clung tightly to J. Gordon Edwards, praising him as the “dean of motion pictures . . . an indefatigable worker” who “epitomizes all the best that is embodied in Fox productions.” Even while attacking the creative decisions and spending habits of other directors, Fox spared Edwards. As he wrote to Wurtzel, Edwards “does not spend a single penny more than he has to, for he, as you know, has my explicit faith and confidence. . . . I am not now finding fault with the cost of any of the pictures made by Mr. J. Gordon Edwards.” Finding new recruits was difficult. In an era when many directors aspired to unfettered creative control, Fox literally advertised his intention to interfere. A full-page ad in Motion Picture News in November 1918 announced, “The Fox director is not the final authority.” At Fox, every movie underwent “critical and minute reviewing . . . again and again, after every change” by Fox himself.
Death also took a toll, removing two of Fox’s closest associates at the New York headquarters. James E. MacBride, the former president of New York City’s Municipal Civil Service Commission, who had started in July 1918 as an assistant to Winnie Sheehan and became chairman of Fox Film’s executive committee, died in August 1919 of heart disease. He was only thirty-eight. Five months later, on January 15, 1920, John J. White, the former New York City alderman and “confidential man” of the two Tim Sullivans, also died of heart disease. He was in his fifties.
All these departures, Theda’s foremost, coincided with a number of revenue setbacks for Fox. Although the studio would turn a profit in 1918 and 1919, the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, took him by surprise. He had expected the war to last at least until 1919 and had planned production on that basis. Additionally, the Spanish influenza outbreak of 1918, which would end up killing 675,000 Americans, had forced delays in his releasing schedule, increasing the risk to time-sensitive material. Fox Film was one of the eighteen movie studios and distribution companies that agreed to suspend all production and release no new movies for a four-week period beginning on October 14, 1918. Health authorities had already ordered about 75 percent of the nation’s movie theaters, which were considered breeding grounds for the disease, to shut down until the epidemic abated. In Los Angeles, theaters would remain closed for thirty-seven days, from Friday, October 11, until Monday, November 25, causing a loss of about $6 million.
By the time studios resumed releasing new features, peace had arrived. Fox tried to reposition his war-themed movies as dramas of postwar adjustment that would “epitomize American thought and ideals and point the way of triumphant American progress.” Why America Will Win, the flag-waving biography of General John J. Pershing, became Land of the Free. Raoul Walsh’s pro-draft propaganda movie 18 to 45 became Every Mother’s Son, advertised as “a tremendous epic of the American woman’s part in the World War—the heroism, the suffering, the supreme sacrifice of the millions of mothers who gave their sons to their country.” It didn’t work. Audiences recognized stale merchandise and shunned it.
Beginner’s luck had run out. So had youthful enthusiasm. On January 1, 1919, Fox turned forty. All signs indicated that his best years were behind him.
CHAPTER 21
Everything Changes
The makeshift days are gone. Organizations and organization made pictures will rule the market.
—MOTION PICTURE NEWS, AUGUST 1919
Far more disturbing to Fox than the studio’s internal upheavals were the changes taking place in the motion picture industry’s financial foundation. In the mid- to late 1910s, Wall Street came calling. Previously, investment bankers had sat on the sidelines, waiting to see whether motion pictures would be a passing novelty or a permanent cultural fixture. Now they decided. In late 1915, the Harriman National Bank, one of New York’s most conservative financial institutions, praised motion pictures for their “graphic illustration of the power of the nickel, the dime, and the quarter” and described the industry as having probably the fastest growth rate in American history.
The deal considered to have marked the entrance of big financial interests into the movie business was an odd alliance. In May 1916, Thomas F. Ryan, a principal stockholder of the American Tobacco Company and a Tammany Hall denizen who had made a fortune in the development of the New York City public transportation system, put together a deal to reorganize J. Stuart Blackton’s Vitagraph Company by issuing $25 million in new stock. (None of the new stock was put up for sale, but was either given to the company’s previous owners or kept in the treasury to fund expansion.) A former street railway company president joined Vitagraph’s new board of directors, as did American Tobacco Company vice president Benjamin B. Hampton and Ryan’s son. The affiliations did make some sense: cigars sales and public transportation were small-change, large-volume businesses, just like the movies. By the fall of 1917, J. P. Morgan & Co. had reportedly earmarked $100 million for investment in the industry.
Following the Armistice, the trend accelerated rapidly, with Wall Street acting like “a sort of hysterical Santa Claus” to the movie industry. The momentum was irresistible. Having discarded their shabby, disreputable image in only a decade, U.S. movie studios were now turning out more than one billion feet of film a year for fifteen to sixteen thousand theaters nationwide. Between 1918 and 1919, gross box-office receipts were expected to jump from $675 million to $800 million. In the words of Wid’s, motion pictures looked like “the softest melon in the field today.”
Two other factors intensified the lure. First, the end of the war had made capital much more fluid, and capital naturall
y sought investment. Second, Prohibition, which loomed after the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified on January 16, 1919, promised to divert a large swath of social drinkers out of the neighborhood taverns and into the next most alluring entertainment venue, the local movie theater. (Prohibition was, however, a delicate subject for the motion picture industry because many of the organizations behind the anti-alcohol movement were also those that advocated film censorship. Some feared that the reformers’ success with Prohibition would reinvigorate their efforts to regulate motion picture content.)
Of all the early movie moguls, no one understood these fundamental structural changes more quickly or more incisively than Adolph Zukor, head of Famous Players–Lasky (later Paramount Pictures). Zukor would become Fox’s chief rival, the one to catch up with and overtake, the only other studio head whom Fox considered his equal in intelligence.
A former furrier, six years older than Fox and born in the town of Risce in the same Tokay grape district of Hungary as Fox’s Tolcsva, Zukor was all shrewd, precise intellect. He had long been at the industry’s forefront. Co-owner of Automatic Vaudeville on Fourteenth Street where, in 1904, watching the miniature train cars go around and collect pennies from the machines, Fox had been inspired to enter the entertainment business, Zukor had gone on to partner with Marcus Loew in a chain of nickelodeons. In April 1912, sensing that the future lay with feature films, he formed Famous Players to import Sarah Bernhardt’s Queen Elizabeth and later to produce movie versions of “famous players in famous plays” with stage stars such as Tyrone Power, John Barrymore, and soon-to-be Fox star William Farnum. Once he’d started, there was no stopping Zukor. In 1914, he scored a landslide success by presenting Mary Pickford in her feature film debut, A Good Little Devil.