The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Fox would later charge that Western Electric had treated the Warners unconscionably and illegally, but at the time, he saw only that the mighty phone company was on his side. He thought that meant they were his friends.

  The rest of the motion picture industry was bewildered. As of early 1927, there were three main motion picture sound systems vying for adoption: the Western Electric–Warner Bros. Vitaphone sound-on-disk system, the Western Electric–Fox Movietone sound-on-film system, and RCA’s Photophone sound-on-film system. Ultimately, the decision would be up to the studios, because there was no point in theater owners buying equipment for which no one was making movies.

  The studios couldn’t decide. To buy time, the so-called Big Five, representing the uncommitted major companies—Paramount, M-G-M, First National, Universal, and Producers’ Distributing Company—appointed a committee to study the matter and then signed a contract among themselves agreeing to a one-year moratorium, beginning February 17, 1927, on all negotiations for sound licenses. They would all move together in the same direction at the same time. A place in history was at stake, and Fox meant to win.

  CHAPTER 29

  All for Fox Films

  Fox Films for all; all for Fox films.

  —FOX FILM SLOGAN, 1925

  As Fox surged ahead professionally during 1925 and 1926, taking Fox Film public and starting Fox Theatres and the Fox-Case Corporation, his personal life shrank. Family and social relationships were more complicated than business ties, less tractable by ambition, slower to show progress, and sometimes pointlessly cruel.

  Fox had always exalted the innocence of childhood, so two young deaths in the family must have struck him especially hard. On August 22, 1925, two-year-old Adolph Livingston, the son of Fox’s sister Bessie and her Oklahoma oilman husband, Herman Livingston, died of unknown causes only hours after being admitted to Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Hospital. He was buried in the Fox mausoleum at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, New York, near his grandmother, Anna Fox, who had died only three months earlier. Then, in early 1926, Fox’s grandson, Belle’s child William Fox Jerome Schwartz, died in his crib. He was only ten months old. There were no newspaper death notices about the baby’s passing, and his burial site is unknown. In November 1926, Belle gave birth to her second child, also a son, whom she also named William Fox Schwartz. All Fox’s money and position had not been able to avert these tragedies.

  Neither had Fox been able to rescue his younger brother Maurice from mental illness. Once seen as the family’s great intellectual, and now stashed in a minor clerical position in the Fox enterprises, Maurice was never going to get better. Nothing is known about the exact nature of his trouble, but some family members suspected schizophrenia. It was probably in the course of seeking help for Maurice that Fox met and developed a friendship with Dr. Menas Gregory, director of the psychiatric department at New York’s Bellevue Hospital. A Turkish immigrant educated at Albany Medical College, Gregory held enlightened, optimistic views and believed (no doubt appealingly to Fox) that many symptoms of mental illness were simply remediable nervous responses to the high stress of modern life.

  It’s not known if Gregory treated Maurice, but even if he did, the patient didn’t improve. What Fox couldn’t do for his brother, he tried to do for others less financially fortunate. Bellevue Hospital was then an ancient, overcrowded, Bedlam-style facility, and for many years Gregory had pleaded unsuccessfully with politicians to authorize funding for a new psychiatric hospital. “I will see that it is done,” Fox promised him.

  In 1925, he went to see Jimmy Walker, then a New York state senator who had just decided to run as the Tammany Hall–backed candidate in that year’s New York City mayoral election. Fox knew Walker well, both through Tammany Hall connections and because in recent years Walker had served as national counsel to the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America. Fox offered to finance Walker’s entire campaign up to $500,000, in exchange for just one favor—that if elected, Walker would accompany Fox on a visit to Bellevue’s psychiatric ward.

  Of course, he couldn’t accept, Walker replied. Tammany Hall had been in the business of buying politicians for a long, long time, and it wasn’t about to relinquish the privilege. Fox recalled, “He told me to make my usual contribution and let it go at that.”

  Yet Fox’s sincerity impressed Walker, who won by a landslide and took office on January 1, 1926. In the early evening of February 24, 1926, Walker, Fox, and Board of Aldermen president Joseph V. McKee toured the Bellevue psychiatric ward for about ten minutes. Among more than fifty inmates, Fox saw “the most terrible sight my eyes had ever beheld.” Because there weren’t enough beds, patients lay on mattresses on the floor; there was only one bathroom, with a bathtub half the size of a normal tub. McKee fainted and had to be taken away. Walker was also horrified. He would later describe the facility as “the most dilapidated, unsanitary and unhealthy building” he had ever seen and “the most terrible calumny ever visited upon” New York City. Walker assured Fox he would build a new psychiatric hospital.

  But this wasn’t the motion picture industry, where whole worlds could be created within months and preserved on film forever. For years, nothing happened. Not until June 18, 1930, would ground be broken for the new $4.3 million Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital at Twenty-Ninth Street and First Avenue, and not until May 1933 would the eight-story building open.

  In real life, good intentions moved slowly while human suffering went on and on. All the effort Fox had put into the wartime relief campaigns nearly a decade earlier and all the money he had continued to give—of course it had been worthwhile, but it hadn’t solved any problems. Charities were still trying to clean up the ravages in Europe. Fox was growing weary. When philanthropic leaders Felix Warburg and Louis Marshall asked him to serve as the New York City chairman of the 1926 United Jewish Campaign (UJC) to benefit the seven million eastern European Jews still suffering amid catastrophic conditions, Fox at first said no. Then something changed his mind. Perhaps it was the death of his grandson, which appears to have occurred in early February 1926. By February 12, Fox had accepted the UJC’s New York City chairmanship.

  He rallied to the job. After insisting that the national goal be raised from $15 million to $25 million and that New York City’s goal increase from $4 to $6 million, he delayed a trip to the West Coast studio to make personal visits to prospective donors. He raised $6.8 million in New York City, and his personal contribution of $300,000 ranked third nationwide, after $1 million from Sears, Roebuck chairman Julius Rosenwald and $500,000 from Felix Warburg. (Famous Players–Lasky head Adolph Zukor gave only $3,000.) It was not a return to form, but a grand finale. Fox would never again lead a major fund-raising drive for any cause.

  A close friend might have helped keep Fox anchored in the wider world, someone with whom he wouldn’t have to play the role of boss or husband or father—someone, as he’d written to director Herbert Brenon ten years earlier, “who is not afraid of me and in whom I have confidence, so that I can have a heart to heart talk with him and review all my present acts and all my future acts.” Philadelphia real estate tycoon and banker Albert Greenfield was a trusted friend, but emotionally guarded. Furthermore, the intermingling of their business affairs would have made it risky to disclose vulnerabilities. Fox kept looking.

  The latest candidate for friendship was Alfred C. Blumenthal, the unreliable Los Angeles real estate agent who had brought the West Coast Theaters deal to Fox in the summer of 1925 but who had greatly exaggerated the owners’ eagerness to sell. Astutely, Blumenthal appealed to Fox’s self-image as a father figure to those in need. Around the time of the West Coast Theaters negotiations, Blumenthal confided to Fox that he was broke. A recent real estate downturn had wiped him out, and now his small creditors—people to whom he owed $10, $20, $30 or $50—were harassing him so much that he felt he had to leave Los Angeles.

  Mutual friends had warned Fox about Blumenthal’s unsteady character. But Fox wanted to like Blum
enthal, so “in my own mind, I made excuses for him going broke.” To rehabilitate the wayward would-be son, Fox provided the $50,000 that Blumenthal needed to pay off his debts. Then, on November 27, 1925, he and Blumenthal formed a real estate partnership, the Foxthal Realty Corporation. Blumenthal would handle all real estate deals for the Fox companies over the next five years and would split the commissions fifty-fifty with Fox Theatres.

  Fox thought he had given Blumenthal a tremendous gift. Blumenthal would be working on high-dollar deals for a major company that was buying aggressively, and he wouldn’t have to solicit clients or explain his past mistakes. Fox began to think of Blumenthal as more than a friend. He invited Blumenthal to come to his home for meals as often as he liked, and Blumenthal began to address Eva as “Mother,” even though he still had a perfectly good mother of his own. Fox believed he had saved Blumenthal. “He was no longer the runaway,” Fox said. “Fox was behind Blumenthal . . . Fox was paying his debts.”

  That was one way to look at the arrangement. There was another. Why, for the sake of a $50,000 advance, should Blumenthal be compelled to give away 50 percent of all his commissions for the next five years? He would still have to do 100 percent of the work. Wasn’t Fox taking unfair advantage of Blumenthal’s vulnerability?

  Right from the start, tensions arose. Courtland Smith, the head of Fox News, noticed that Fox and Blumenthal were always fighting, always “in and out” with each other, and everybody who knew them knew it.

  As personal sorrows and disappointments accumulated, Fox increasingly focused his energy on the one area of his life where he had been most effective—running the Fox enterprises. Through them, he had made people happy, and had made significant, unique contributions. That was the William Fox he wanted to be.

  With seemingly unlimited possibilities at hand in the mid-1920s, Fox continued to build up the outward trappings of a man of great affairs. In mid-1925 he took out life insurance policies totaling $6.5 million, which made him the second-most heavily insured person in the world after Philadelphia department store magnate Rodman Wanamaker, who had $7 million in insurance. (Fox commented that even if no one else were to grieve his death, “I can at least depend upon the president of every large insurance company in the world.”) At Fox Film’s Tenth Avenue headquarters, Fox’s once-plain office—previously he had simply used a long table as a desk—was now furnished “like the interior of Westminster Abbey,” with an atmosphere “just about as cozy.”

  In 1925 Fox bought more land to expand his Fox Hall estate in Woodmere, Long Island, and the following year, he completed extensive renovations. The property now included a large private theater with brocaded walls, tapestries, and rows of Louis XV chairs; a two-story boathouse; a duck pond; a pentagonal teahouse ringed by ornamental bushes; and marble benches, urns, and classical statues throughout the gardens. A few years before, John Ford’s wife, Mary, had described Fox Hall’s ambiance as “real, real rich kind of living.” It was even richer now.

  In perspective, though, Fox’s projected self-image was relatively modest. His home wasn’t anywhere near the size of Adolph Zukor’s eight-hundred-acre Mountain View Farm in Rockland County, New York, with its eighteen-hole championship golf course designed by A. W. Tillinghast. Nor did it approach the splendor of Pembroke, Marcus Loew’s eighty-two-room, sixty-thousand-square-foot French neoclassical mansion in Glen Cove, on Long Island’s “Gold Coast” North Shore. Fox never had Gatsby-style parties, only small, private entertainments, and he didn’t succumb to the flashy egocentrism that gripped so many Jazz Age motion picture personalities. He wasn’t, for instance, Louis B. Mayer, who, as Harrison’s Reports publisher Pete Harrison wrote in 1926, spent every Sunday morning “on horseback parading through the streets of Beverly Hills, puffed up like a pouter pigeon, and inviting eyes to look at him, the handsome Prince Charming.” Fox’s pride was in his position, not his person. According to philanthropist David A. Brown, Fox “could walk down the streets of any City in this Country and pass as the average citizen.”

  CHAPTER 30

  The Roxy

  One event formally ushered Fox back into the motion picture industry’s inner circle. On the evening of Friday, March 25, 1927, he announced to a group of reporters gathered in his Tenth Avenue office that he had bought the world’s largest movie theater, the $10 million, 5,920-seat Roxy, which had opened with great fanfare exactly two weeks before at Seventh Avenue and Fiftieth Street.

  With its gold-domed circular lobby supported by gigantic green marble columns, its two-ton, crimson-and-gold oval chenille rug, its Heywood-Wakefield red mohair upholstered seats, its 110-piece orchestra and 125 blue-uniformed ushers, the Roxy was not only a riotously ostentatious trophy property but also a sensationally successful business. On opening night, so many spectators had thronged the sidewalks that the city had to send 125 police officers to keep order. During its first week, the Roxy had taken in $127,000—more than one-quarter of the $500,000 total receipts at all eighteen Broadway district theaters that played movies. The Roxy’s featured attraction, Gloria Swanson’s The Love of Sunya, made by United Artists, wasn’t even a particularly good movie. Audiences didn’t much care. The real entertainment, the reason they’d paid their money, was to experience the Roxy’s unparalleled splendor. And now this “Cathedral of the Motion Picture” belonged to Fox.

  Seated in a throne-like chair at the head of his office conference table, “visibly pleased,” Fox told reporters that he had been trying for two years to acquire the Roxy: “We were determined to have the largest theater in New York.” No one had quite expected this. There had been talk during the past few months that Fox was negotiating for the Roxy, either for a partnership with Herbert Lubin, the small-time independent producer who had built the Roxy, or for some kind of preferential booking arrangement. Fox had always vigorously denied the rumors, and after all, it was difficult to believe that anyone except Famous Players or Loew’s could pull off such a deal. Now, in a single leap, Fox had vaulted over all his competitors to become the foremost movie exhibitor in New York.

  Of course, the subject of money arose. How much had he paid? He never liked those kinds of questions. It wasn’t anyone else’s business. Tersely, he replied, “Many millions.”

  But it was the reporters’ business. He had mentioned that the deal was worth $15 million—had he paid $15 million? Fox relented, “Yes, you can say that that is what we paid and more.”

  It was a startling figure because just two weeks before, the cost of the Roxy’s land and construction had been given as $10 million. But, Fox explained, there was more involved in the transaction than just this one theater. He had also gained control of all future Roxy siblings, including two planned four-thousand-seat theaters in Manhattan. Ground was now being broken for Roxy’s Mansion on Lexington Avenue between Fifty-Eighth and Fifty-Ninth Streets, and soon to follow would be Roxy’s Midway at Seventy-Fifth and Broadway. Other Roxy theaters were planned for Brooklyn, Detroit, St. Louis, Newark, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Kansas City (Missouri), and Washington, DC. Perhaps, Fox suggested, he would even expand the chain internationally.

  Odds for the future had shifted. Commenting on the Roxy sale, the New York Mirror summarized the industry’s majority opinion: “The deal puts Fox in an important strategic position in the great war now being waged for leadership in the film business.”

  “I have no vanity in the thing,” Fox said at the press conference. Perhaps he had a little. He had, after all, made the reporters sit through another fairly lengthy set of reminiscences about his destitute childhood and early business struggles. Nonetheless, it was true that he hadn’t bought the Roxy solely for the prestige. The purchase was an overdue business necessity, one that addressed the most obvious flaw in Fox Film’s marketing organization: the lack of a Broadway theater that could draw national publicity for a major movie.

  Previously, Fox said, Fox movies had been like “a man in evening clothes who does not know what to do—is
all dressed up and no place to go.” Every other studio had its own Broadway venue. Famous Players controlled the Rialto and Rivoli, and on November 19, 1926, had opened its flashy 3,664-seat Paramount Theatre in Times Square. First National had the Strand, M-G-M had the Capitol, and Warner Bros. had their Warners’ Theatre. Fox had always been forced to bid for attention by renting one of the district’s large legitimate theaters such as the Lyric or the Broadhurst or the Sam Harris, customarily losing as much as $250,000 per movie on an engagement. He had hoped that his new Academy of Music, opened just five months earlier, would compensate, but its Fourteenth Street location was too far from the brightly lit action and too close to the scruffy Lower East Side to generate the necessary national excitement. Now, with the Roxy at his disposal, Fox could make more large-scale, artistically ambitious movies.

  The Roxy also had the potential to help Fox launch the talking pictures revolution. The theater had been designed for optimum acoustics—not because Lubin and flamboyant theater manager Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel had any strong faith in sound movies, but because they intended stage shows and orchestral accompaniment to constitute a major part of the entertainment program. Rather than being square or rectangular, with the back wall parallel to the proscenium, the Roxy’s stage was built in the shape of a triangle, with the two side walls coming to a point behind the center of the stage. The design eliminated lateral sound pockets and turned the fan-shaped auditorium into a giant megaphone. With his Western Electric alliance to develop sound-on-film technology under way as of January 1, 1927, Fox believed the change was imminent. He told the New York Times, “No producer in five years will think of making anything but talking pictures.”