The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

Material gifts weren’t a substitute for affection or an apology for emotional distance: they were affection, and Fox had nothing to apologize for. According to his friend David A. Brown, Fox’s love for his family was “a driving force within him, his desire to make and keep them happy . . . an objective that he has always had before him.”

  Was there something a bit odd about all their togetherness? Neither Eva nor either of the girls appears to have had any close friends outside the family, and in their 1922 passport photos, Mona, twenty-one, and Belle, eighteen, wore identical windowpane checked dresses and similar hairstyles. When the family traveled to Europe in 1922, they celebrated July 4 by themselves in their hotel in Berlin, eating hamburgers “and waving little American flags.” Yet, Fox and Eva had grown up in such different circumstances, and they had no one to show them the way that wealthy people managed their relationships.

  Control was another means by which Fox tried to express love. He decided that his daughters needed husbands. The “girls” weren’t going to attend college or embark on careers. While Fox respected women who had to work—his own mother had been one—he scorned men—his father was the paramount example—who made them do so when they had the power to prevent it. As Fox movies had clearly shown, a woman’s highest calling was marriage and motherhood. He would guide his children. He would not be, as Michael Fox had been, offhand about the course of their lives.

  Neither of the Fox girls was unattractive, but both had drawn lesser genetic cards, inheriting their father’s sturdy, prominent features rather than their mother’s neat, delicate symmetry. Mona was the more challenging of the two. Fox described her as having a “romantic” nature, but she was actually impulsive, highly emotional, and childishly dependent. Surely love would strengthen her as it did characters in Fox movies. For Mona, Fox found a suitable mate in Douglas N. Tauszig, the younger brother of the late wife of his former lawyer, Gustavus Rogers. Seven years older than Mona, the handsome, dark-haired, brown-eyed Tauszig had an outgoing, fun-loving personality as well as a respectable family background. His late father had been a retail druggist, and his maternal grandfather was furniture manufacturer Joseph Wolf, a founder of Temple Rodeph Sholom. If the young, Dartmouth-educated Tauszig didn’t display much focused ambition—a few years earlier, he’d worked as a farmer in the Adirondacks and now he was a New York City silk merchant—that could be remedied. Mona was smitten with him, and Fox Film could always use another executive. The couple married in a small religious ceremony on May 27, 1923, at her parents’ Manhattan pied-a-terre at 316 West Ninety-First Street. For their honeymoon, Fox sent them on a cross-country trip to San Francisco, followed by a cruise to Japan on the SS President Lincoln. Waiting for Tauszig upon their return was a comfortable berth as an assistant to Fox Film vice president Jack Leo, Eva’s brother.

  Belle Fox insisted on choosing her own husband. Less than a year after her sister’s wedding, during a visit to Yosemite National Park with her parents, she found twenty-four-year-old lawyer Milton Jerome Schwartz and presented him as her fiancé. Fox was not pleased. The couple had known each other for only a few weeks, and Schwartz had pursued the courtship ardently. A gold digger? The two may have threatened to elope. Something gave their newfound romance such urgency that Fox was willing neither to oppose it nor to try to delay it. In Fox movies, fathers never prospered by standing in the way of relationships their children considered love.

  A wedding was hastily arranged for the evening of April 2, 1924, Belle’s twentieth birthday, in a private suite of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, with Rabbi Edgar Magnin, the so-called rabbi to the stars, officiating. Tension pervaded, especially for the groom. Right after the ceremony, he fainted. Yes, quite possibly a gold digger. Although Schwartz lived in Los Angeles and although Fox Film certainly had room for him there, Fox announced that after a “brief” honeymoon—no deluxe trip to Japan for them—“our young people” would live in New York. Schwartz became an executive at Fox Film’s Manhattan headquarters, where, as with Tauszig, Fox could watch over him.

  Fox had an infinitely sadder matter at hand in managing his mother’s situation. Anna Fox was now ravaged by stomach cancer and in such acute pain that she remained bedridden. Fox knew what he ought to do. If he had been the good son of Over the Hill, he would have kept her at home amid her family’s love.

  He didn’t. In 1923 he sent his mother to the Battle Creek Sanitarium, an internationally famous hospital and health spa run by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, whose younger brother Will founded the Kellogg cereal company. The ne plus ultra of fashionable health resorts, comprising a six-story Beaux Arts brick building adjoined by a tropical garden, the “San” catered to a wealthy clientele that included Fox’s hero John D. Rockefeller Jr. and promoted a regimen of “biologic living,” combining outdoor exercise, hydrotherapy, and a strict Seventh-Day Adventist–based diet. It was supposed to be a place “where people learn to stay well,” but it had become also a place where hopeless cases went to die comfortably.

  Did Fox really believe that the “San,” with the best medical care money could buy, might alleviate his mother’s suffering? Or did he want to avoid the grotesque reality of an incurable disease, the inevitable decline, the sight of anguish that wasn’t just playacting?

  Anna Fox went away without protest. As Fox said, “She was always a lady.”

  With Anna Fox gone from New York, a new problem arose for Fox: what to do about his youngest sister, Malvina, who had lived with and cared for their mother. As with his daughters, there was really only one solution. Although still a teenager, Malvina had to be married off.

  Fox needed to look no farther than his outer office for an acceptable candidate. There was his elegant private secretary, Henry K. Dunn, who had taken over the job in late 1919 after a similar stint with noted Broadway producer and theatrical booking agent Marc Klaw. Always impeccably groomed, with his dark hair slicked back, Dunn wore expensive suits and shoes that he brushed and polished after every wearing, and he spoke with an upper-class English accent.

  What was such a refined person doing working for William Fox? He wasn’t. Almost everything about Henry K. Dunn was a fake. His last name was really Barenstein, and his family wasn’t Irish but had emigrated from Russia. The “K” stood for nothing. According to Henry and Malvina’s daughter, Angela Fox Dunn, “My father added the middle initial because he thought it made him sound distinguished.” Henry’s parents ran a shoe store, and after dropping out of high school, he had attended secretarial school, where he acquired the skills that qualified him for the job at Fox Film. As for the English accent, Henry had picked that up by attending the theater. He had never traveled outside New York City.

  Henry’s ambition, however, was authentic. He had first spotted Malvina at age fourteen, when she came to the office to visit her eldest brother. Seeing an attractive, naïve, unattached younger sister to the boss, “Henry thought, ‘Fourteen’s a little too young. They won’t let her go at fourteen. I’ll just wait,’ ” said Angela Fox Dunn. Twelve years older, Henry turned on the charm and waited for Malvina to grow up. They married on Henry’s twenty-ninth birthday on August 4, 1923, a few months after Malvina turned seventeen. Fox sent them to Los Angeles, with a job lined up for Henry at Fox Film.

  They all seemed happy: Eva with her splendid home, and the girls with their new husbands, and the new husbands with their new jobs. At a time when the movie industry wasn’t particularly interested in his leadership, at least in his personal life Fox could play the hero.

  CHAPTER 25

  The Iron Horse (1924)

  Fox’s anxious penny-pinching paid off. By late 1923, Fox Film had built up sufficient reserves to take another run at making an expensive, important movie. The national economy was beginning to rally, and Fox understood that if he made a truly great movie, even theaters allied with rival studios would want to book it in order to share in the profits. The project he chose was The Iron Horse, an epic about the building of the transcontinental rai
lroad in the 1860s.

  As director John Ford told the story decades later, after he had become one of film’s old masters, his great talent inspired the studio to transform the movie from modest proportions into a cinematic spectacle. “We had started doing an ordinary picture, and then we got snowbound. We had nothing else to do, so we shot film and gradually the story developed,” Ford said in 1966, describing the location shooting in Dodge, Nevada, in early 1924. A few weeks into production, Ford recalled, Sol Wurtzel showed up to assess progress and, amazed by the quality of the work, sputtered, “Jesus, we’ve got a big picture here. Take all the time you need.”

  A fine story that was, but very little of it was true. In fact, The Iron Horse began as a large-scale, artistically ambitious project that was designed to allow Fox to make up for the biggest missed opportunity of his career. A few years earlier, amid the dark days of the postwar recession and fearful uncertainty about the movie industry’s future, he had been offered a story about the migration of covered wagon settlers to the American West in the mid-1800s. He had wanted to make the movie (with Buck Jones, the cowboy actor he’d hired to throw a scare into Tom Mix) for about $40,000; however, budget forecasting indicated that the cost would likely reach $200,000. Unwilling to spend so much money on one movie, Fox turned down the project. Famous Players snapped it up and spent nearly $800,000 to make The Covered Wagon (1923) on a grand scale. The movie broke box-office attendance records in the United States and Europe, earning $9 million in gross receipts and profits of about $3 million.

  Although that chance was gone, nothing prevented Fox from making a historical sequel to The Covered Wagon—with different characters and situations—about the next phase of territorial expansion, the post–Civil War extension of the railroad to California. Surprisingly, it was Sol Wurtzel, whom Fox generally credited with having nothing more on his mind than the utter ruin of the studio, who suggested the idea. They already had a basic story outline, Wurtzel pointed out, a synopsis for The Arizona Express, a planned low-budget railway melodrama with a romance angle.

  In September 1923, “after careful consideration,” Fox authorized Wurtzel to adapt The Arizona Express story into a pioneer days railroad movie with “Indian fights, Pony Express, et cetera,” and a budget limit of $150,000. That was about twice the cost of the industry’s average feature and several times as much as Fox had been accustomed to spending during the past few years. Fox believed that “if carefully planned and executed,” the movie would be “an outstanding sensational success.” Naturally, Fox couldn’t leave Wurtzel with the unfettered satisfaction of having had a good idea. Wurtzel was too close to being the sort of cultural maladroit that many people thought Fox was, and that Fox sometimes still was. For that, Wurtzel had to be punished. In a telegram, Fox chided, “I charge you with the responsibility for a thrilling high class play developed logically along romantic lines without decorating your male characters with whiskers and fake mustaches.”

  Ford, who hadn’t yet handled a large, complicated production, was not an automatic choice to direct. Wurtzel had to push for him. Aligned by mutual interest, the two were on their way to becoming close friends. Ford viewed Wurtzel as “very hard boiled and tough, but very compassionate. Very just,” and much preferred him to Fox Film general manager Sheehan, “a smooth talking Mick” who was trying to maneuver his way out of sales and into production. Wurtzel, on the other hand, needed Ford to reinforce his own position. The director’s expertise at making popular movies efficiently and his natural affinity with Fox’s outlook made Wurtzel look good with the boss, and in that arena Wurtzel could use all the help he could get.

  Fox agreed to Ford, but knew the value of the gift he was giving. In a telegram to Wurtzel, he commented, “I consider Jack Ford has the opportunity of a lifetime.” Ford knew it, too. Wurtzel replied to Fox, “Ford very enthusiastic and grateful for opportunity. Feels he can make sensational success of this subject.”

  Contrary to Ford’s fanciful account of a mostly impromptu, mostly one-person creative accomplishment, months of expensive preparation went into The Iron Horse—at first called The Iron Trail—with many hands involved. From the Fox Film library in New York, Sheehan culled old photos of railroad equipment, character types, and locations, as well as thirty to forty books about the transcontinental railroads. Particularly useful was Edwin L. Sabin’s 1919 popular history, Building the Pacific Railway, which describes the May 10, 1869, joining of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific tracks at Promontory Point, Utah—the movie’s climactic event. The Union Pacific railway opened up its entire library in Sacramento, California, and sent a librarian to Los Angeles as a consultant to the movie; an Oregon railroad provided old-time locomotives, shovels, ties, and other equipment. From that mass of information, writer Charles Kenyon hammered together a script with input from Wurtzel and Ford.

  All three contributed to the story, which wove together an account of the difficulties of laying tracks through the wilderness with a fictional romance between young Pony Express rider Davy Brandon and his childhood sweetheart, Miriam Marsh, whose father oversees the Union Pacific work. Wurtzel suggested the prologue dedicating the movie to “Abraham Lincoln, the Builder,” who in 1862 signed the first Pacific Railroad Act authorizing construction of a transcontinental railroad. As the movie’s musical cue, Ford proposed “Drill, ye tarriers, drill,” which his uncle Mike Connelly, who had worked for the Union Pacific, used to sing. Ford also offered colorful tales from Uncle Mike and other relatives who had worked on the railroad, “Indian fighting and all that sort of stuff.” Kenyon shaped the romance angle, adapting and expanding ideas from The Arizona Express synopsis.

  Of all the creative sources, history—at least, what Kenyon, Wurtzel, and Ford understood to be history—had the greatest impact. The plot’s central problem of finding a direct pass through the Wyoming Black Hills to avoid an expensive, two-hundred-mile detour—that really had been a major obstacle to the transcontinental railroad. The scene of Indians trying to rope a train actually happened, as did the Abilene Trail cattle drive from Texas to feed the railroad workers, and the “hell on wheels”—and it really was called “hell on wheels”—transportation of the frontier town, complete with gambling and dancing girls on flatcars and horse-drawn wagons to keep up with the track laying. Several characters had real-life prototypes. The movie’s villain, wealthy landowner Deroux, was based loosely on Thomas Clark Durant, the vice president and major stockholder of the Union Pacific who cheated the railroad and routed the tracks through his own property. In the movie, Deroux bribes an engineer to tell the Union Pacific that there is no Black Hills pass. In real life, Durant was accused of hiring a consulting engineer for a similar purpose. The Judge Haller character, who runs a combined bar and courtroom, was a transposition of a real-life figure associated with building the Southern Pacific Railroad.

  Even the unifying themes of The Iron Horse were largely ordained beforehand. As ever with Fox movies, looming over the planning stage was the fearsome specter of Fox’s supreme authority. Everyone knew the script would have to go to New York for approval, and everyone very much wanted to please the boss. Accordingly, the story captured many typical Fox Film—that is, many typical William Fox—values and motifs.

  The film begins in Springfield, Illinois, with Davy Brandon’s surveyor father gazing dreamily toward the west, envisioning “rails that’ll reclaim that wilderness out there.” Miriam Marsh’s well-to-do father indulgently dismisses him as a crank, much in the way that Fox always felt that his grandest dreams had been belittled by those who were supposed to know best. It’s Springfield, Illinois, for a reason: a young, clean-shaven Abe Lincoln looks on approvingly at the Brandons and helps young Davy onto his horse as father and son set out west, impelled “by the strong urge of progress.” Mr. Brandon is that rare specimen in a Fox movie, the good father, but not for long: a two-fingered white man masquerading as an Indian murders him just after he has put out their campfire. Davy, who witnesses
the fatal ax blow, appears to be about ten, not far from the age at which Fox psychologically dispensed with his father by deciding at his bar mitzvah to take complete responsibility for his own life. Memories of his father guide Davy, just as Fox’s ambition was fueled by childhood perceptions of his father. Similarly, the romance between Davy and Miriam mirrored Fox’s notions of ideal love. The two are innocently attracted to each other in childhood, echoing the way that Fox decided on Eva at a young age. Their feelings develop as they participate in the same nation-building dream, just as Fox and Eva founded their marriage on a shared vision of creating Fox Film as a lasting cultural institution.

  Altogether, the story celebrated Fox’s favorite values of bold vision, the builder’s courage, pure romantic love, hardworking perseverance, and optimistic American expansionism. He quickly approved it.

  Then came casting. Ford oversaw that process, subject to Fox’s agreement. The selection of unknowns didn’t reflect any sort of directorial vision, but rather, two simple facts. First, the studio’s roster had no stars to offer except the inappropriate Tom Mix. Second, given his disdain for overblown star egos, Fox certainly wasn’t going to hire any stars. To play the adult Davy Brandon, Ford wanted twenty-four-year-old newcomer George O’Brien, a decorated navy war veteran whose father was the San Francisco police chief. Although O’Brien’s tall, strapping physique and Northern European–derived good looks recalled the physical type of the recently exited William Farnum, Fox was skeptical because the young actor had so far appeared in only a handful of small roles. Warning that O’Brien would have to be willing to do a scene “ninety times if it was necessary,” Fox gave him a lowly, option-based contract starting at $125 a week. O’Brien was thrilled: “Gee, I got a job! Gee whiz, I got a job.”

  It was an inspired choice: O’Brien would go on to become one of the most popular performers of the era. So would Madge Bellamy, the petite, dark-haired beauty whom Fox Film borrowed from the fading Ince Studios for the role of Miriam Marsh. In late December 1923, the whole caravan set off to film in Nevada. It was hardly the shoestring operation of Ford’s later description. Bellamy recalled traveling by train “with ox carts, tents, Indians, Chinese, hundreds of cowboys, electricians, cowgirls, horses, cattle, actors and actresses.”