The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Rather than cancel the film’s release, Fox had editors cut out seventy-five of Fagin’s scenes. The movie now made no sense. “It is Dickens’ Oliver Twist with all the beauty and sympathy left out,” Variety reported. “What’s the use of spending money, time and energy for such a purpose?” Worse, the Jewish intellectual community, whose approval Fox keenly sought, sent an avalanche of protests to Fox Film. Within weeks, a humiliated Fox recalled every print of Oliver Twist, Jr. from circulation in the United States.

  Ignoring the fact that he had approved the movie in the first place, Fox took no responsibility for the debacle. “You have heaped upon my shoulders an embarrassment that is inexplicable,” he raged at Wurtzel. “You have permitted an insipid, narrow-minded, bigoted director [Millard Webb] to undo in a single picture all that I have striven to build up in the past ten years. An irreparable injury has been done both to myself and to the corporation.”

  Some months after the failure of Oliver Twist, Jr., Fox tried to reach across the religious divide. Announcing plans to film the Oberammergau Passion Play, depicting the life and death of Christ, he described the project as a purely philanthropic enterprise, for use by churches rather than commercial theaters, yet done on “the most lavish scale” and suffused with “an atmosphere of extreme reverence.” Several Philadelphia ministers agreed to serve as advisers. Nonetheless, Dr. John Roach Straton, the firebrand pastor of New York’s Calvary Baptist Church on Fifty-Seventh Street, wrote a public letter denouncing the project as “crass commercialism” motivated by “the lust for gain.” Quoted extensively in the New York Times, Straton accused Fox of “monstrous inconsistency” in proposing to tell the story of Jesus after having made so many sensational movies and implied that, as a Jew, Fox was unqualified for the task. When other religious conservatives joined in the protest, Fox gave up on the project.

  The malevolent atmosphere of early 1920s America unnerved Fox. He didn’t understand it: such meanness and narrow-mindedness violated his basic assumptions about the national character. The audience he understood had turned its face away from him.

  Amid confusion and uncertainty, Fox did what he always did when he didn’t know what to do: he remembered what he already knew.

  He knew that real estate could generate easy money. A decade earlier, after he built the row of ground-floor retail space at the Academy of Music, the rents had subsidized the entertainment programs. Now, in the early 1920s, he invested heavily in commercial property in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other major cities. Mostly he was looking for downtown sites where he could construct office buildings to house deluxe theaters, but he also bought properties for quick, speculative turnaround.

  Fox also believed that directors were the most durable key to success. In 1920 he borrowed twenty-six-year-old John Ford—or Jack Ford, as he was called then—from Universal, where the director had been grinding out assembly-line Westerns with scant appreciation from management. Fox assigned Ford to make Just Pals (1920) with second-string cowboy star Buck Jones. The wandering, leisurely story of a friendship between a man and a young boy who help each other grow up impressed Fox as “one of the most artistically done pictures that I have reviewed in years.”

  The following year, Fox hired Ford away from Universal with a long-term contract that boosted his salary from $13,618 to $27,891 for 1922. That increase probably wasn’t strictly necessary, as evidently no one else was after Ford, but it was the sort of open-handed gesture Fox liked to use to convey confidence and high expectations. Ford lived up to it, briskly turning out an assortment of small, well-crafted gems. Among them were Silver Wings (1922), another Mary Carr “mother love” tearjerker in the tradition of Over the Hill, which Ford codirected with Edwin Carewe; Cameo Kirby (1923), with John Gilbert as a kind-hearted gambler; The Face on the Barroom Floor (1923), set in the Bowery; The Village Blacksmith (1922), based on the 1842 Longfellow poem; and North of Hudson Bay (1923), a tale of the Canadian north featuring angry wolves and a canoe chase over a waterfall. Ford worked quickly, economically, and with an instinct for the heartfelt emotion Fox prized. Already, said cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg, “this John Ford knew his business so well.”

  Humble and cooperative, Ford did willingly whatever he was asked. To try to save the disastrous Nero, the director, although not credited, shot additional climactic scenes. Fox wanted big crowds, with one hundred fifty horses and visual tricks, but there was precious little money left, so Ford had to work cheaply and quickly. Film editor Hettie Gray Baker used almost every inch of the sequence as Ford sent it. For 1923, Fox increased Ford’s salary to $44,910.

  Despite ample evidence to the contrary, Fox continued to believe he had a great destiny. Consequently, on May 5, 1923, he paid $300,000 for one hundred acres of undeveloped land in West Los Angeles and announced plans to build a $5 million studio there. It was an outlandish action. Only three years earlier, Fox had opened his $2.5 million studio on Tenth Avenue in Manhattan, and he still had his eighteen-acre Western Avenue studio. What did a subpar outfit like Fox Film need with such extensive additional space? The West Los Angeles acreage wasn’t even readily available for development.* The land had been leased until November 1923 to a farmer. Then paperwork from the Los Angeles City Planning Commission and the City Council approving Fox’s construction plans got lost. Then city officials changed their minds and zoned the area for residential use only, requiring Fox to apply for an exception. Then University of California bureaucrats, who intended to build a new UCLA campus a few miles away, objected to the prospect of an unsavory industrial neighbor. It would be several more years before Fox could clear away all the obstacles—and find the money to build.

  “Fox was . . . a great gambler,” commented cinematographer Ruttenberg. “You know, he would take terrific chances in business, whether it was a chance that he might be a great success or go broke.” To Fox, they weren’t chances. He knew where he was going. “Forward with Fox” was the studio’s slogan during the early 1920s.

  His frustrations during the early 1920s—his inability to find his way back to making first-class movies—accentuated Fox’s dual nature. On the one hand, he became more imperious, callous, and ruthlessly opportunistic. He lost his temper frequently, and naturally the insecure, submissive Sol Wurtzel caught the worst of it. By now, Fox was blaming Wurtzel for bringing Fox Film to the brink of “disastrous destruction.” One step further, Fox wrote to Wurtzel, and all the employees who “have given not only their energy, labor and best efforts, but have given part of their very lives to the success of this company” would find themselves out on the street, with all their work rendered meaningless.

  The constant vilification and bombardment with abuse drove Wurtzel to a nervous breakdown in 1921. He left the studio for thirteen weeks, and Fox’s brother-in-law Jack Leo came from New York to replace him. Leo might well have kept the job. However, probably from a combination of sympathy and a reluctance to risk standing in the same line of fire, he urged Fox to reinstate Wurtzel. For the rest of his life, Wurtzel would remain grateful to Leo. (Wurtzel’s daughter, Lillian, refused to believe that version of events, told to her by Leo. After speaking with her father’s private secretary in 1967, she concluded, “Dad never had any breakdown; it was all in Fox’s head—thought too much money was being spent!” Leo’s account, based on firsthand experience, is more credible. Wurtzel himself, in a November 1919 letter, acknowledged that his worries about displeasing Fox were “enough . . . to make a man go off his mind.”)

  As for exhibitors, Fox abandoned his former policy of viewing them as friendly partners. Now he arbitrarily canceled contracts, refusing to deliver certain movies as promised and then reoffering them at higher prices. Theater owners might have sued, but who had the time, money, or fortitude to go up against an experienced litigant like Fox? Fox sales representatives acquired a reputation as “some of the most unjust and autocratic men that have ever engaged in any industry.” For a while, prints went out “in a mo
st deplorable condition—worse than the films from any other distributor,” and complaints abounded of greasy film and damaged sprocket holes. Likewise with competitors, Fox mercilessly exploited every weakness he could find. When D. W. Griffith stalled on buying the British and continental European film rights to Orphans of the Storm (1921), Fox scooped them up for $15,000, blocking Griffith’s ability to show his movie there, and then, in exchange for permission, extorted $85,000 in cash from Griffith as well as preferential terms for showing the movie at Fox theaters in the United States. Griffith thus lost estimated revenue of $100,000.

  Yet, as Fox became more ruthless, he also showed greater empathy toward those whose lives had gone adrift. In late 1921 he hired back, of all people, A Daughter of the Gods director Herbert Brenon. After their rancorous split five years earlier and Fox’s subsequent sabotaging of Brenon’s independent production company, Brenon had gone overseas to make movies for the British army with the rank of major. Afterward, he had fallen on hard times. First, he was kidnapped by bandits at Mount Etna, Sicily, and held for ransom, although his captors released him unharmed after learning that the U.S. government was in pursuit. Then the Italian film company that hired him to make movies and oversee sales to U.S. distributors refused to pay him about $28,000 in commissions and profit sharing. Returning to the United States to work for producer Joseph M. Schenck in early 1921, Brenon made several flops. In May 1921, with Prohibition in full swing, he was arrested after a patrolman saw him throw a package containing a bottle of Scotch onto the sidewalk on West Forty-Sixth Street and start running away. The case against Brenon was dismissed at arraignment, but not without newspaper articles suggesting that he was a down-and-out souse.

  Months after that incident, Fox hired Brenon at $1,000 a week. Rather than humiliate him with minor assignments, he gave his onetime protégé some of the studio’s best projects and best talent. If Fox still believed Brenon could be useful, that didn’t so much detract from the act of kindness as it did define it. No one else had such faith in Brenon.

  Fox, however, had not forgotten the past. “He kept his ‘threat’—I never went into his office again—during that period, and only a ‘nod’ would I get, if we passed in the corridor. We didn’t even see ‘rushes’ together,” Brenon would recall. Instead of speaking directly to Brenon, Fox sent messages through his Tenth Avenue studio manager, Julius Steger. Within a year, the relationship had fallen back into its old pattern. Brenon, feeling unappreciated by Fox, quit. Then Fox, angry at Brenon’s apparent ingratitude, refused to pay him his last week’s salary. Nonetheless, years later Brenon acknowledged that his second term at Fox Film helped him significantly. Although none of the five movies he made during this time did particularly well commercially, after leaving, “I got my second wind and went ‘soaring.’ ” Brenon joined Famous Players–Lasky, where he directed Peter Pan (1924) and The Great Gatsby (1926), and then made the highly acclaimed Sorrell and Son (1927) for United Artists.

  Director Emmett Flynn also benefited. Although Flynn had directed such prominent Fox movies as A Connecticut Yankee and Monte Cristo, he was also a notorious drunk who could not always stay sober while working. When Flynn started sliding downhill, Fox tried to pull him back up. Assigning Flynn to direct the 1922 remake of A Fool There Was, which seemed to have great promise, Fox met with Flynn to outline how he thought the story ought to be updated and to tell him that while he would approve the casting choices and Wurtzel would determine their salaries, Flynn could set the overall budget. That way, Fox said, Flynn could prove to himself that he still knew how to make a profitable movie.

  Even personnel further down the line warranted personal attention. After his daughter was born in 1922, cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg sent a birth announcement to Fox. One day, “standing on an apple box and grinding the camera by hand,” Ruttenberg smelled cigar smoke and turned around to see Fox. “I had to look down at him. He says, ‘Your memorandum has been answered.’ He continued to smoke.” Fox had given Ruttenberg a twenty-five-dollar-a-week raise. More raises followed regularly, “every time he saw something nice.” Some fifty years later, Ruttenberg still recalled the way that Fox’s generosity gave him “some kind of a feeling I was going places.”

  Fox Film was a business—woe to anyone who forgot that—but it was also a family whose members ought to take care of one another.

  CHAPTER 24

  “Humanity Is Everything”

  Humanity is everything, in everything, not alone motion pictures . . . There is nothing in life but humanity . . .

  —FOX FILM PUBLICITY, SILVER WINGS (1922)

  Others in the motion picture industry drank, gambled, had affairs, divorced their wives, tormented their children, and made public fools of themselves when their careers went off the rails. Fox did none of that. Pressed back in the pursuit of his ambitions during the early 1920s, he used his personal life as an arena to renew the better side of his character.

  He continued his charitable activities, helping to lead fund-raising campaigns for, and making large donations to, causes as varied as a new police hospital in Brooklyn and assistance to European countries still suffering from the ravages of war. In early 1920, Fox Film made at least twenty short films promoting New York State’s Lockwood-Donohue Bill to boost the salaries of public school teachers, who earned even less than window washers and who were thus in such short supply that, every day, thousands of schoolchildren had to be sent home because there was no one to teach them. That April, the Lockwood-Donohue Bill passed the state legislature.

  Fox also started a policy whereby any church, orphanage, hospital, old age home, or other charitable institution could get Fox movies for free, with the studio paying the shipping charges both ways. Years later, an elderly retired priest would visit Fox at his Tenth Avenue office. “I noticed he was rather shocked and drew back as he came in,” Fox recalled. “I said, ‘I know why you draw back. You have pictured Fox to be Catholic—I am Hebrew, and it is all right.’ ” The priest explained that forty years earlier he had built a small parish church in South America and had prayed for a way to pay off the mortgage—but his prayers remained unanswered until he received Fox Film’s letter offering free movies. By playing the Fox fare twice a week, the parish church raised enough money to retire its debt. “Now I can die in peace,” the priest said. “I thought I ought to come in and thank the man that made it possible.” There was no need for thanks, Fox assured his visitor. That was Fox Film’s policy, and he was glad the priest had used it to full advantage.

  In addition to these public activities, beginning in the early 1920s, Fox privately gave some $250,000 every year to the poor. Eva distributed the money. According to Fox, this was “the greatest joy and thrill of her life,” and it was “not unusual to find her climbing three and four flights of stairs of the tenements in New York to discover where this money [could] be put to the best use.”

  Eva was more than an emissary. She was also an inspiration. Amid the financial depression of 1921, Fox decided to buy her a $40,000 Russian sable coat and asked the furrier to send it to his home on approval. The coat fit, and Eva liked it, so Fox proposed to send a check to the furrier the next day. No need, said Eva, if Fox gave her the check, she would deliver the payment. “A week later I met the furrier and he said he was sorry my wife didn’t like that garment,” Fox recalled. “I said, ‘Didn’t like it? What do you mean, didn’t like it?’ He said the coat had been returned. When I got home that night, I said, ‘What is this I hear about you returning that Russian sable coat? Will you please return my check?’ ” Eva refused. She had bought another coat for about $1,500. “I asked for the return of the difference, and she said, ‘Do you suppose I am going to walk around with a coat costing $40,000 with all the agonies and misery that is now going on around in our charitable institutions in New York? Just so you won’t be going around looking at sable coats any more, I wish to advise you I have distributed the difference between the original price of that coat and t
he coat I bought. You can stop looking at Russian sable coats for me.’ ” Fox loved that story and told it often.

  Sometimes he went back to the Lower East Side to visit the homes of childhood friends and neighbors. He didn’t go empty-handed. “See this watch? He sent that to me last Christmas. It’s got my name engraved in it and his’n,” an elderly Rivington Street cobbler told a newspaper columnist in 1921 while repairing worn-out shoes in a basement shop underneath a grocery store. “All his boy days he wanted a watch and never had enough money to buy one. Now he has sent nearly everybody around the East Side a gold watch. That’s just his way.”

  Stinging memories of Michael Fox’s shoulder-shrugging indifference still haunted Fox, and he continued to express his devotion to his dependents through his favorite language: money. If Eva didn’t want a Russian sable coat, he would buy her items that were non-returnable. In December 1922, at an auction of the personal possessions of actress Lillian Russell, Fox spent $34,600 for four pieces of jewelry: one was a pearl-and-diamond cloverleaf broach in a gold-and-platinum setting; another was a diamond-studded Maltese cross pendant on a platinum-and-diamond chain. The following year, he bought the Woodmere estate they had been renting for years and named it Fox Hall. Their daughters were not overlooked. Belle Fox said, “There was never anything that we ever asked him for that we didn’t get.”

  The ostentation didn’t extend to Fox himself. “He is not the moving picture magnate of popular imagination—the sartorially perfect Beau Brummell with platinum lined limousine, 27-jeweled, steam-heated, diamond studded wrist watch,” wrote syndicated columnist O. O. McIntyre. “His clothes were neat and well-fitting, but obviously not the handiwork of the Fifth Avenue tailors whose shops are cached in sign-less magnificence.”