by Vanda Krefft
At the huge Lyric Theatre, on Forty-Second Street, The Queen of Sheba recalled the extravagance of Cleopatra, with a cast of more than ten thousand and beautiful, dark-haired, barely clad Betty Blythe in the title role. Decorating the lobby were twenty-four large bronze lions from the set of Sheba’s palace. During the premiere, D. W. Griffith stared “with smoldering eyes” at the centerpiece scene (shot by director J. Gordon Edwards with cameras on revolving pillars) of horse-drawn chariots racing abreast around a 150-foot-wide oval track. The Queen of Sheba, Fox declared, represented the culminating triumph of his career.
A cavalcade of other extravaganzas was supposed to follow. In late spring, Fox announced, the studio would begin filming a series of epics in Europe: Nero and a biography of Francesca da Rimini (a real-life Italian aristocrat whom Dante portrayed in his Divine Comedy) in Italy; Joseph and His Brethren in Egypt; a life of Alexander the Great in Greece; and Mary, Queen of Scots in England and Scotland. A few months later, launching the 1921–1922 season, Fox Film planned to roll out twelve “special super features,” each with a Broadway premiere followed by specially selected long-run bookings at first-run theaters in large cities.
At Fox Film’s new Manhattan studio at 850 Tenth Avenue, which officially opened on May 24, 1920, ten different features might be filming at once. To accommodate more activity, Fox had leased a new four-story building a block away, on Fifty-Fourth Street near Tenth Avenue. Fox News, as it continually added staff around the world, made headlines itself in 1920 when it shot the first-known film footage of V. I. Lenin, who appeared genial and laughed frequently at his own jokes.
In the realm of exhibition, Fox also displayed renewed vitality. To overcome his biggest obstacle, lack of access to first-run theaters, in January 1920 he announced plans to build a nationwide chain of large, elaborate theaters. The first would be a $1 million, 3,500-seat, Italian Renaissance–style theater in Springfield, Massachusetts. He was also rumored to be merging his vaudeville enterprises with the Shubert circuit, possibly to show movies there, and with himself in charge. He even tried to become a boxing promoter, bidding $550,000 in early 1920 for the right to present a match between world heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey and European champion Georges Carpentier. Although nothing came of the latter two ventures—the Shuberts already had ties to Goldwyn Pictures, and the Carpentier-Dempsey match went instead to seasoned boxing promoter Tex Rickard—all the activity signaled that Fox was still a force to be reckoned with.
Observing Fox’s apparent resurgence, even competitors cheered. In August 1920, Associated Producers Inc., an organization of leading independent producers and directors,* took out a full-page ad in Wid’s Daily headlined “Congratulations to William Fox.” Acknowledging that they competed with Fox “at a thousand points or more” and that they disagreed with him about many issues, the independents praised Fox as “the first great independent producer and distributor” and applauded him for using his “gigantic imagination” rather than Wall Street money. In an astonishing gesture of support, the group announced that its one hundred sales agents were encouraging exhibitors to book Fox movies in addition to their own.
Buoyant appearances belied the truth. In fact, all three of Fox’s supposed hits at the Broadway theaters in the spring of 1921 were nearly drowning financially, overwhelmed by expenses and faced with grim prospects for national rollout. In fact, that nationwide chain of Fox theaters was yet a distant vision. It would take time and money to build them: large, centrally located plots of land would have to be acquired, plans drawn up, permits acquired, and financing arranged. In fact, Fox News was still losing money.
Altogether, the 1920s were off to a terrible start for Fox.
“Life is what you make it. I know of no condition in life that is hopeless,” Fox told syndicated columnist O. O. McIntyre in 1921. “To me, our existence is a great adventure. We have only need of hope and courage.”
Optimism was by now less a spontaneous emotional response for Fox than a deliberate choice. He had learned how forcefully the world could oppose his plans and buffet him to the brink of failure. Yet, gloom was pointless. Instead of giving up, he set about redeeming his three troubled bellwether movies, and with them his future.
Fox was particularly anxious to save Over the Hill, his most personal movie to date. He had discovered the story at a poetry reading when he heard an actor recite Will Carleton’s maudlin 1872 poem “Over the Hill to the Poor House,” about a young man who, drunk on whiskey, steals a horse and gets sent to jail, but reforms because of his mother’s tearful prayers. The “black sheep” son then goes west, makes a fortune, and returns to rescue his mother after learning that his five siblings have abandoned her to the poorhouse. The theme of generational obligation resonated deeply with Fox. As much as he shared the hero’s veneration of his mother, he also understood the other children’s desire to live independent lives. Although he continued to support them, his Hungarian immigrant parents had receded to the periphery of his life. He had hoped his wealth could remake them into Americans, but it could only make them look, not think or act, like Americans. More or less bemusedly, each had gone along with the charade: Michael Fox dressing up like a dapper society gentleman and with his name listed as an officer of several small Fox Film subsidiaries, but doing no useful work at all; Anna Fox, in her silks and lace and pearls, inviting neighborhood ladies over for morning coffee and chattering away with them in Yiddish. In mind and heart, both still belonged to the old country. They were, to their eldest son, often an embarrassment.
Over the Hill thus offered Fox a chance to assuage his filial guilt while exploiting a problem that seemed to lie at the profitable center of modern life. Assigning capable but malleable director Harry Millarde (who’d had the doomed task of trying to make June Caprice into a star and whom he would marry in 1923), Fox took over the production and made it, as he told cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg, the story of his own life. The poem’s whiskey-drinking horse thief thus became a high-spirited and fun-loving young man who must sacrifice himself to compensate for his father’s shiftlessness. Once again, Fox couldn’t resist the chance to punish Michael Fox on-screen. Now it was the father who had stolen a team of horses, with the son taking the blame to avoid disgracing the entire family. In an early scene, the cowardly father watches silently in the courtroom as the young man is convicted and sentenced to three years in prison.
For the key role of the forsaken mother, Fox chose matronly, gray-haired Mary Carr and dressed her up to resemble Anna Fox. Fox claimed that he picked Carr out of “a small army of stage mothers” and that for her performance, he “dictated every pose, every move she made.” In fact, Carr was already an accomplished stage actress and minor film star, having played the title role in Famous Players–Lasky’s Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1919). The actress, however, went along with the ruse, pretending that she had sidelined her professional ambitions to care for her six children. “Domesticity takes precedence over career,” she said. “Besides, what career can compare with that of motherhood?” Conveniently, four of her children also got parts in Over the Hill.
Remarkably, director Millarde never saw a completed script. Instead, every morning, Fox told him what he wanted from that day’s work but never explained the overall plot or the themes. In the summer of 1920, after about two-and-a-half months of filming, Fox whisked the movie away from Millarde, began editing, and called Millarde back now and then for more retakes and shot inserts. Millarde got the credit, but it was really Fox who, from his office at the Tenth Avenue headquarters, had directed the movie.
With so much of himself invested, Over the Hill had to become a hit. For the first night’s showing, at Broadway’s Astor Theatre on September 17, 1920, Fox offered free admission and, afterward, stood in the lobby scanning the faces of departing patrons. “One of the last persons to come out was a man whom I wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night alone,” Fox recalled. “He had the hardest face of any man I had ever seen. He was lighti
ng his pipe and I asked to have a light from his pipe for my cigar.”
What did he think of the picture? Fox asked.
“I liked it very much, lad,” the man replied with a Scottish accent and then went on to explain that after running away from home at age ten, he had spent forty years at sea, never sending any word back to his mother. “Ah, but tomorrow I buy me a ticket to go home to Scotland—I am going to see my mother again . . . I am going home to Scotland and if she be dead, I am going to kneel at her grave and ask her to forgive me.”
All well and good with that segment of the audience: the balcony seats, which cost as little as twenty-five cents, filled up regularly. However, during Over the Hill’s first week at the Astor, the box office sold fewer than three hundred of the higher-priced, orchestra tickets. Fox called in leading show business publicist Harry Reichenbach, a white-haired, slouching, amiably outgoing figure in his late thirties who specialized in sensational publicity stunts, which he called “wish news,” or “news so thrilling, melodramatic and heart-gripping that every city editor wishes it were true.” A decade before, Reichenbach had worked for Fox promoting plays at the Academy of Music, but quit after Fox refused to raise his weekly salary from $50 to $75. According to Reichenbach, he vowed never to work for Fox again for less than $1,000 a week. “I don’t want you back till you’re worth that much,” Fox replied. “And if you’re worth it, I’ll be glad to pay it!”
Perhaps that story was true, perhaps not. It was difficult to tell with Reichenbach, who had opened his own public relations agency, staffed by him and “one bold, brash young woman,” and who was staging ever-more-shameless publicity hoaxes. Just before signing on to Over the Hill, for instance, Reichenbach had promoted Numa Pictures’ The Return of Tarzan by hiring an actor to check into the posh Hotel Belleclaire as “T. R. Zann,” accompanied by a pet lion. Reichenbach was neither a shyster nor a dolt, just knowledgeably cynical about the media. As he told former Cleopatra publicist Edward L. Bernays, who wanted to make the profession more respectable, as long as newspapers themselves played fast and loose with the truth—ignoring shoplifting stories to protect advertisers and refusing to criticize corporations in which their owners owned stock—he would, too. Besides, did everything always have to be so serious? “I can’t see what harm a good fake does to anybody,” Reichenbach said. “And if there is a law against slipping misinformation to newspapers in New York, what’s the matter with going over to New Jersey and doing it there?”
Perhaps at a salary of $1,000 a week, perhaps not, Fox hired Reichenbach to promote Over the Hill for thirty-three weeks. The most successful stunt was a street spectacle where some two-dozen movie extras posed as well-to-do, husband-and-wife theatergoers. Pausing in a crowded place, each couple would debate, loudly, whether to see some other show or Over the Hill, which the woman would insist was the best in town. “They could never reach a decision until a policeman broke through the crowd and pleaded, ‘For God’s sake, go some place and loosen up the traffic!’ ” recalled Reichenbach. “Then they went to the next corner and repeated the act.” Sometimes, the extras went to a ticket broker and asked to buy a block of ten to sixteen seats together. When the ticket broker called the box office, the theater manager recognized the signal and apologized for not having that many tickets left. It was simple crowd psychology, but it worked. Everybody wanted what everybody else seemed to want. Soon, Over the Hill routinely filled even the orchestra seats.
Because Fox didn’t control any Broadway theaters, and because a long Broadway engagement could significantly boost appeal to the national market, he “played a game of checkers” with Over the Hill, moving it five times to different Broadway theaters, wherever space was available, during the next few months. Audiences followed. Still, Fox kept losing money because of high theater rentals and promotional expenses. In early 1921, nearly four months after the premiere, he sent Over the Hill out to short-term bookings in four other test markets. A one-week run in Hartford, Connecticut, did well enough (with ticket sales of $13,000), but engagements in Baltimore, New Haven, and Washington, DC, flopped.
Had he been wrong? Fox kept going back to the theater in New York, kept hearing the gasps of emotion, kept seeing the tear-stained faces. Over the Hill, he decided, simply needed time to build an audience. He kept the movie on Broadway and continued to pay high theater rental fees and high advertising costs. He talked about the movie whenever he could; he personally signed many of the newspaper ads. He still lost money.
Finally, in the summer of 1921, the tide turned. Approaching its first anniversary of continuous run on Broadway with crowds still lining up, Over the Hill had an impressive track record, and other New York exhibitors wanted in. Although Fox needed the money, he insisted on unprecedented terms that rankled many of his colleagues. Rather than the standard arrangement of renting the movie per day or per week, he required exhibitors to pay a large, one-time fee for the right to show Over the Hill indefinitely—for one day or two years or, theoretically, forevermore. The longer that theater owners kept the movie playing, the higher their profit percentage would be. In effect, they had to believe in the movie as much as he did. It was a dicey deal, one that piled all the risk up front, and many exhibitors balked.
As if those terms weren’t difficult enough to accept, Fox also violated the usual gentleman’s agreement of confidentiality between buyer and seller. After the first group of New York exhibitors submitted bids for Over the Hill, he showed the numbers to rival theater owners to boost the price. The powerful Theater Owners’ Chamber of Commerce unanimously condemned his action as “inequitable, unfair and unjust.” Fox didn’t care. No one had to book the movie if they didn’t want to. But they did. In Manhattan, the 600-seat Jewel Theatre, on 116th Street, agreed to pay $6,000, while both the 500-seat Majestic, on Second Avenue, and the 1,600-seat Halsey, in Brooklyn, took the movie for $5,000.
That fall, Over the Hill went into nationwide release. Having cost $100,000, it grossed more than $3 million. Everywhere, audiences left the theater sobbing, among them many young people. Interviewed several years later by sociologist Herbert Blumer for his book Movies and Conduct, an eighteen-year-old high school senior admitted that Over the Hill was the only movie he’d ever seen that had made him cry: “This picture would make anybody cry, even if you are a brute who can’t cry or an easy going chap who cries at almost nothing.” A twenty-year-old female college sophomore added, “I had two handkerchiefs drying on my lap, while I used the third.” According to Fox, two years after the movie’s release, a U.S. government survey showed that 30.5 percent of residents of old folks’ homes had been reclaimed by relatives and friends. Fox would always remain as proud of Over the Hill as of any other movie, not only for its commercial success and social impact but also because of the studio’s untiring efforts to promote it. He later commented, “We sweated blood for those tears.”
If Over the Hill mined Fox’s emotional history, A Connecticut Yankee arose from his desire to bolster his public standing. It was embarrassing how quickly everyone had forgotten his artistic triumphs. “Tell me,” remarked one of the Bloomingdales—Fox couldn’t remember which one—when he and Fox sat next to each other at a dinner event in 1919, that year of When Men Desire, The Love That Dares, The Forbidden Room, and The Man Hunter. “Why don’t you some time produce a good picture and not always a bad one? You make the worst pictures of any company I know.”
“It’s not as if we aren’t trying,” Fox replied. At Bloomingdale’s suggestion, the next morning Fox joined the bidding for the movie rights to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and kept at it till he won. Although the film version changed Twain’s main character from a nineteenth-century arms factory superintendent to a modern milquetoast millionaire, and although Fox Film staff writer Ralph Spence rewrote the intertitle cards after verbatim quotes from Twain drew no laughs, somehow it all worked. Opening on March 14, 1921, at the Selwyn, the movie did strong business of nearly $10,000 d
uring its first week, and ticket sales rose steadily during the next two weeks.
Then tragedy struck. On the Friday night of Easter weekend, the two teenage children of Hartford, Connecticut, physician Thomas N. Hepburn went to see A Connecticut Yankee at the Selwyn. Early on Sunday morning, April 3, at the Manhattan home of the family friends with whom they were staying, fifteen-year-old Thomas Hepburn used strips of cloth to hang himself from a ceiling beam in a corner of his room. His thirteen-year-old sister, future actress Katharine, found him and, hoping he might still be alive, lifted his body and held him clear of the floor until a doctor arrived. Their distraught father first suspected murder, then sudden “adolescent insanity,” then finally decided that his eldest son, “a normal healthy boy,” had been induced by a death scene in A Connecticut Yankee to try to fake suicide to amuse his sister. With newspapers reporting the incident in detail, the movie lost its humorous appeal. Box-office receipts plummeted by 25 percent in the week after the boy’s death, and fell further the next week.
Simultaneously, Fox’s third offering on Broadway in the spring of 1921, The Queen of Sheba, suffered from the handicap of not being a particularly good movie. The characterization was muddy, the story meandering, and worst of all, Betty Blythe lacked the fire and cultural resonance of Theda Bara, whom she was clearly meant to recall, while demonstrating just as little acting range. According to Life magazine critic Robert E. Sherwood, Blythe “starts out with a querulous expression on her countenance, and holds it with bulldog tenacity throughout the entire performance.”
While not as personally attached to these movies as he was to Over the Hill, Fox pushed them just as aggressively. He kept A Connecticut Yankee and The Queen of Sheba on Broadway for months, even though they devoured thousands of dollars every week in exhibition expenses and daily newspaper advertising fees. By the summer of 1921, he had spent about $200,000 on all three movies in New York. Some competitors protested that he was just bluffing, that these movies weren’t worth the big buildup. Fox proved those claims wrong a few months later, when he sent them into wide release. Playing in some cities for up to $3, the same ticket price as a stage play, Sheba earned $1.1 million and became Fox’s second-highest-grossing movie of the year after Over the Hill. A Connecticut Yankee also turned a handsome profit. Carl Sandburg, then a critic for the Chicago Daily News, described Fox as “one of the canny guessers in moviedom on what the public wants next.” What modern audiences wanted, Fox understood, was not simply entertainment, but also the strong testimony of faith implicit in large-scale advertising and promotion. In a time of disintegrating shared values, it was something, at least, to be able to believe in someone else’s belief.