The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  The cost cutting showed. In The Web of Chance (1919), a Motion Picture News reviewer noticed, “There are only about five sets used in the picture and the balance is taken up with subtitles or exteriors. Miss [Peggy] Hyland wears the one dress through the picture excepting for the few minutes spent in a riding habit.” In William Farnum’s The Man Hunter (1919), lead actress Louise Lovely wore one dress when she went down with a sinking ship but another when she was dragged to shore, and although the ship’s name was Asia, its life preservers were labeled “New York.”

  Were Fox’s best days behind him? In mid-1918 he started rereleasing movies from the studio’s first few years. He stooped low enough to include among them The Nigger, the racially offensive 1915 drama that starred William Farnum as a Southern governor whose life falls apart when he learns he has mixed blood. Civil rights advocates pleaded with Fox not to do it. An open letter to him published in the Philadelphia Tribune admonished, “It was a mistake to make the picture in the beginning. It offended thousands of Negro patrons of the theatre, and in more than one occasion disturbed the public peace, and increased race friction. Granted it was purely a business proposition. Is that your only desire, to make money?”

  Fox did not reply. His only concession was to reissue The Nigger under its alternate title, The New Governor. Money wasn’t his only desire, but right now it had to be his first desire.

  On the public stage, Fox exuded confidence. On May 27, 1919, declaring Fox Film to be “the greatest film organization in the world”—no one else saw it that way—he announced plans to build a $2.5 million state-of-the-art movie studio in Manhattan. It would be the largest movie studio in the world, occupying the entire eastern length of Tenth Avenue between Fifty-Fifth and Fifty-Sixth Streets, a virtual “film city” for five thousand employees.

  Fox had long wanted a major East Coast studio. In late 1915, several months before Fox Film’s first anniversary, he had bought sixteen acres of land at Corona, Long Island, and begun leveling the ground in preparation for building a $1 million headquarters. Designed by theater architect Thomas Lamb, this, too, was to be a “film city,” comprising five studio plants, a two-story administration building, an equipment manufacturing factory, a film lab, a small hospital, a lake, and natural gardens; on adjacent land, Fox planned to build homes for two thousand employees. Before construction began, however, he learned that the borough of Queens had the right to build a street through the property and would be able to demolish some of the planned buildings. Although, by November 1916, Queens officials had redrawn the map to eliminate the street, Fox dropped the plan.

  Instead, he had bought the Western Avenue property in Los Angeles. But he had never gotten the West Coast studio firmly under control, not only because of all the inefficiency of doing business cross-country, but also because Los Angeles didn’t entirely like the movie industry. Many landlords refused to accept motion picture employees as tenants or charged them exorbitant rents; stores often added a 10 percent premium to their prices to studios, and the Los Angeles County assessor appraised movie cameras, light machinery, and electrical equipment at a rate 5 percent higher than that applied to the equipment of other businesses. In the fall of 1917, activist neighbors at Western and Sunset tried to get Fox Film to leave by complaining to the City Council that it was annoying nearby residents and causing the value of adjacent properties to depreciate. New York, with its longer history as a major city, could better absorb a new studio, especially in the area Fox had chosen. The Tenth Avenue site had been previously occupied by old one-story buildings and a coal yard, and was surrounded by a raffish assortment of tenements and warehouses.

  In the late 1910s the movies’ return to their original American home made sense. The end of the war had eliminated the coal restrictions that had helped drive movie production westward, and improved technology, especially better arc lighting, offset some of Southern California’s natural advantages. Other industry leaders saw the logic. In the spring of 1919, around the time Fox announced his plans, Adolph Zukor started building a $2 million studio for Famous Players–Lasky in Long Island City. Also joining the reverse migration that year were producer Lewis Selznick, who built a four-story, 120,000-square-foot studio in Long Island City; D. W. Griffith, who moved his operations to a 28-acre estate in Mamaroneck, New York; and Goldwyn Pictures. In February 1920, Metro began renovating its Manhattan studio at 3 West Sixty-First Street, which it had closed during the war, and announced plans for a $2 million studio on Long Island.

  Fox didn’t intend to abandon West Coast filming. In fact, in the fall of 1919, he began to expand the Western Avenue studio by building a large new stage and more laboratories and dressing rooms. Los Angeles would be fine for lesser, routine movies, the sort that a frightened former bookkeeper like Sol Wurtzel ought to be able to manage. New York would host the prestige projects that Fox intended someday to get back to making.

  Embodying that ambition, the new Tenth Avenue headquarters, a massive three-story redbrick building, would have the best of the best. On the third floor would be room for twenty companies to film simultaneously, with the roof supported by flying trusses so that no pillar or post would obstruct set design. The other two floors would house administrative offices, film processing labs, thirty-five fireproof and waterproof film vaults, and twelve projection rooms designed as mini-theaters, each with its own piano and upholstered seats on a sloping floor. According to The Scientific American, which ran a feature article on the building in June 1919, never had any movie studio been so well organized or so scientifically planned.

  Equally, the building’s design reflected Fox’s strong paternalism. All would be safe under his roof. Blueprints called for firewalls to extend throughout the whole building at frequent intervals, so that any section could be cut off and the spread of fire quickly contained; no employee would ever be more than one hundred feet away from an exit. In case of a greater emergency, an innovative system of inclined runways, averaging twenty-five feet wide and made of steel and concrete, led from each of the three floors to the street, so the entire building could be evacuated in only sixty seconds. The building also had a $70,000 sprinkler system, supplied by a fifty-thousand-gallon water tank on the roof. Medical staff would be on duty at all times, and an ivory-and-white cafeteria would serve nutritious meals at cost to all employees. Believing that problems such as “irritability, nervousness, inaccuracy and illness” often arose from physical causes, Fox ordered an in-house gymnasium and a sophisticated ventilation system that would “wash” all the air in the building clean every five minutes.

  Backbiting chatter arose within the industry: how foolish to locate the studio in Manhattan, when real estate was so much cheaper in New Jersey; and how much more foolish to start construction now, when the prices of building materials were still exorbitant because of wartime disruptions. Disregarding the naysayers, Fox scheduled an elaborate cornerstone-laying ceremony for June 6, 1919, about a month after his return from Europe. Workers built a grandstand in front of the construction site and covered it with American flags; a band was hired to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” and arrangements made for a dozen police officers to cordon off that block of Tenth Avenue.

  Fox didn’t attend, allegedly because of a “slight illness.” His absence wasn’t particularly remarkable; he rarely made public appearances. Presiding instead amid drizzling rain were Fox Film treasurer John Eisele, Manhattan Borough president Frank Dowling, a Catholic priest, and a Jewish rabbi, along with Eva, Mona, and Belle Fox. After Dowling laid a large slab inscribed “1919” in the southwest corner of the building, eighteen-year-old Mona placed into the cornerstone a time capsule box* containing a film of the ceremony, various newspaper clippings, photos, and press books from Cleopatra, Salome, Les Miserables, and A Daughter of the Gods. The greatest moments of the studio’s past were thus embedded in its future.

  Four months later, Fox introduced another major project. On October 11, 1919, Fox News began twice-weekly releas
es of global news and feature stories. It wasn’t the world’s first newsreel. That had been the Pathé Faits Divers, launched in France in 1908 and exported to the United States on August 1, 1911, as Pathé’s Weekly. Neither was Fox News the most comprehensive service. The Hearst International News, which had absorbed Universal News in an estimated $1 million deal at the end of 1918, came out daily. Fox News did, however, promise to provide a uniquely entertaining perspective by offering “the new, the different, the strange, the odd, the unique, the most wonderful things of human life and human ingenuity” from all countries “civilized or barbaric.”

  Fox himself had come up with the idea for Fox News during the summer of 1919, both to generate more income and to bolster the studio’s faltering reputation. In only three months, he arranged an exclusive affiliation with United Press and assembled a staff of sixty cameramen in major cities around the globe. Promising that Fox News would devote itself to promoting world peace, Fox extracted letters of endorsement from five U.S. senators, the governors of Arkansas and Iowa, and even President Wilson, who wrote on White House stationery, “I congratulate the Company upon its public-spirited plans.”

  They really were public-spirited plans. Early issues of Fox News bore the stamp of Fox’s idealism. Here was the self-styled father figure dispensing advice to parents: the inaugural Fox News release included a feature about a free clinic that taught mothers how to care for their children correctly. That was the first in a “Better Babies” series edited on a volunteer basis by Dr. Josephine Baker, head of the Bureau of Child Hygiene in the New York City Department of Health. Later installments showed Chicago beer trucks, idled by Prohibition, delivering milk to poor mothers and children, and a professional clown teaching hygiene to children in a New York City public school.

  Here also was the optimist, the believer in a solution to every problem. A Fox News “Who’s Who in America” item showed the sixty-nine-year-old inventor of smokeless powder playing tennis, boxing, and canoeing—even though he had accidentally blown off his left arm. And here, finally, was a sign of remorse for having made The Nigger. That first Fox News segment about the free clinic for mothers pointedly included an African American baby with a title insert that read, “Science draws no color line.”

  Fox News lost money right away. Fox kept it going. One day it would be profitable, he believed. As a November 1918 Fox Film ad explained, “Any man is bound to win out, who is clever enough to know what the public wants—and wise enough not to haggle about the cost of giving it to them.”

  Perhaps it hadn’t been a slight illness that prevented Fox from attending the Tenth Avenue cornerstone-laying ceremony on June 6, 1919. Around that time, Fox’s younger brother Maurice, the intellectual of the family, who supposedly attended Columbia University Law School, began to experience symptoms of a mental breakdown. The situation may have gotten out of hand while Fox was abroad earlier in the year, and their parents, with whom twenty-two-year-old Maurice lived at the Hotel Theresa, may not have been able to handle it. If he earned a degree, Maurice would never practice law. Instead, Fox took him into Fox Film in a low-level clerical job, where he was insulated from the stresses of the outside world. Fox’s mother’s health was also declining. The medicine in the little brown bottles on Anna’s bedside table didn’t work. Fox called in stomach cancer specialists. They had no answers.

  Or perhaps it really was Fox who needed attention. At some point, he began taking time off twice a year to rest at a sanatorium. For all his show of confidence and strength, the truth was that Fox Film was threatened with oblivion by broad forces over which he had no control.

  CHAPTER 22

  A Visit from Royalty

  At forty, Fox had too much success behind him and too many years ahead to abandon his ambitions. Rallying, he staged an event to show the world who, despite his sinking circumstances, he really was. In the summer of 1919, as soon as the twenty-five-year-old Prince of Wales, Edward Albert, announced plans to make his first visit to North America, Fox had his London office request a spot on the royal schedule. It was quite an act of nerve. The handsome blond prince, heir to the British throne, was the most famous social celebrity of the day, and many people far more conventionally respectable than Fox were clamoring for a portion of his time.

  The pretext of Fox’s invitation to the prince was flimsy. On October 12, 1860, the prince’s late grandfather Edward VII, then the Prince of Wales, had attended an opera performance at the Academy of Music. Wouldn’t the current prince like to stop by the Academy to see how much progress American entertainment had made in nearly fifty years? Then again, everyone knew it was only a pretext. The facts were too awkward to be stated bluntly. Fox Film did a lot of business in Britain, employed a lot of people, bought a lot of supplies, and promptly paid all its bills. Britain was trying to get back up on its feet after the war.

  Yes, of course, the prince would be glad to stop by on his second day in New York. The date was set for the afternoon of Wednesday, November 19, 1919.

  For months, Fox prepared. Ordering the Academy stripped of many of its modern furnishings, he had the lobby redecorated with old-fashioned dove-gray wallpaper with images of birds and installed large oil paintings of the prince; his father, King George V; and his grandfather. Fox Film staff members located the high-backed, canopied chair the prince’s grandfather had sat in—maybe it was the same chair; “I didn’t guarantee it,” Fox hedged—and had it reupholstered in purple plush. To help greet the prince, he recruited fifteen young society women, who agreed to wear 1860-style costumes of crinolines, bustles, pantalettes, and bonnets, and he arranged for a U.S. Marines honor guard to present arms and the U.S. Navy Recruiting Band to play “God Save the King.” Some 2,200 formal invitations went out, not only to all the people who were supposed to matter in New York, but also to about eighteen old-timers who had attended the 1860 event—no small effort it had taken to find them—and a group of war heroes. For several days before the royal visit, Fox was briefed on protocol by representatives of the prince’s reception committee.

  When November 19 arrived, complete with biting winds that blew sand onto the city streets, Fox was ready. Outfitted in a morning coat and top hat, and surrounded by a profusion of floral bouquets and potted plants, he waited for his big moment in the Academy of Music lobby. Punctually at 2:15 p.m., the prince came bounding up the steps of the Irving Place entrance.

  Fox was supposed to welcome the prince with a courtly bow, gently place his hand in the royal hand, and address his guest as “Your Highness.” Nonsense. Fox’s young guest, with his boyish friendliness and winning smile, “looked like the average sort of chap”—albeit a very elegant one, wearing a double-breasted gray overcoat, gray tweed sack suit, and black derby hat and carrying a light cane. “Prince, I am happy to meet you,” Fox said, grasping the young man’s outstretched hand with a firm shake.

  They got along famously. Although the prince’s schedule had allotted only fifteen minutes for the visit, he stayed an hour, and although Fox was supposed to leave after escorting him to the royal box, the prince insisted that Fox stay and keep him company. As for that large, supposed grandfather’s chair—well, no. Tossing off his overcoat, the prince sat down in it for a moment, then sprang up, shook his head, and asked for one of the modern gold chairs that everyone else had. Seated side by side with Fox, he laughed loudly and chatted with his host throughout the program.

  The prince had asked for comedy, and comedy he got. A series of short films began with the Mutt and Jeff cartoon, Sound Your A, with the orchestra playing lively jazz music. Then came the two-reel Sunshine Comedy The Yellow Dog Catcher, in which all the parts, about fifty of them, were played by dogs. What were the names of the dogs? the prince asked. “As I didn’t know them any more than he did,” Fox recalled, “I would make up the names until I ran out of them.”

  Concluding the program was a Fox News segment about the prince’s arrival in New York the previous day. At the sight of himself on-screen, t
he prince “fidgeted uncomfortably.” All the more to his credit, Fox decided. “He was just as human as any ordinary boy that came from one of our American families. He had no airs, but was just a simple, fine lad.”

  It wasn’t merely Fox’s perception that the visit had gone well. The Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger reported that of all the prince’s activities that day—which included trips to the New York Stock Exchange, the top of the fifty-four-story Woolworth Building, a horse show at Madison Square Garden, and a high-society ball in his honor—“the hit of the day for him was the ‘movies.’ ”

  For Fox, the event was all expense and no income. That didn’t matter. Only the result did. Royalty had sat next to him, treated him like a friend, enjoyed his work, hadn’t wanted to leave. It seemed clear. He belonged at the top.

  CHAPTER 23

  Eclipse

  I know of no condition in life that is hopeless.

  —WILLIAM FOX, 1921

  In the spring of 1921, Fox appeared to have made a comeback. He had three movies playing at big theaters on Broadway, charging elite ticket prices of up to two dollars. At the Broadhurst, on Forty-Fourth Street, was Over the Hill, a sentimental family drama about a long-suffering, saintly mother whose children have abandoned her to the poorhouse. “Wonderful it was—brought tears and rapture—kept first-night spectators in their seats after final curtain applauding,” reported the New York Tribune. Two blocks over, on Forty-Second Street, the Selwyn was showing Fox’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which updated Mark Twain’s 1889 satirical novel to modern times. Life magazine called it “undeniably laughable,” and crowds had lined up from the start.