The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  In late 1928, shortly after Movietone City opened, the studio began work on Hearts in Dixie. The immediate impetus appears to have been that, at M-G-M, director King Vidor was preparing to make an all-black musical, Hallelujah. Vidor, however, had had to fight for the project and got approval only after he promised M-G-M that he would invest his guaranteed salary as 50 percent of the budget. Although Hallelujah had already been in production for a few weeks when Hearts in Dixie started shooting in Bakersfield, California, on November 25, 1928, Hallelujah would be released several months after Hearts in Dixie.

  Viewed from a later vantage point, Hearts in Dixie seems painfully clichéd and full of demeaning racial stereotypes. Set in the post–Civil War South, the story focuses on a rural three-generation African American family consisting of the elderly, dignified farmer Nappus (Clarence Muse), his hardworking daughter, Chloe (Bernice Pilot), her lazy and irresponsible husband, Gummy (Stepin Fetchit), and Chloe and Gummy’s young son, Chinquapin (Eugene Jackson). After Chloe and her infant daughter fall ill and die, Nappus must take charge of his grandson’s future. There isn’t much more to the plot than that, so filling up the time are scenes of field laborers in tattered clothes singing and joking as they pick cotton, Gummy’s extended comic buffoonery, dancing, and more singing. In ads for Hearts in Dixie, Fox Film would emphasize “[a]ll the happy-go-lucky joy of living, laughter and all-embracing gusto of plantation life below the Mason and Dixon line . . . cake walks, folk dances, native jazz orchestras.”

  In its own time, however, Hearts in Dixie was actually quite daring. No one was asking for this movie to be made, and there were many good reasons not to make it. Theaters in the Southern states were legally required to be segregated, so that blacks, to the extent that they went to the movies at all, attended small, down-at-the-heels venues that couldn’t afford to pay the sort of film rental fees required by major studios. And it was highly unlikely that large, luxurious, prosperous Southern theaters catering to whites would be interested in offering their patrons any reminder of the outcome of the Civil War. So frightened was Hollywood of losing business in the South that when Universal made Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927), director Harry Pollard decided to rewrite history (and the message of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s incendiary novel) by portraying greedy Northerners as the true instigators of racial strife. In advance publicity, Pollard said, “The true Southerner was and is—and the Negro will be the first to bear me out in this—kindly, considerate and, in short, the Negro’s best friend.” Uncle Tom’s Cabin offended many whites in the South anyway. Bookings in Atlanta were canceled under pressure from the mayor, and in Birmingham, Alabama, censors banned it. Although the movie did well in foreign markets, overall it failed to earn back its costs.

  Even in supposedly sophisticated areas of the North, an all-black movie would be risky. On the evening of November 6, 1928, nineteen days before Hearts in Dixie started filming, an incident took place that Fox could not have overlooked. It was Election Day, and on Long Island, in the Woodmere-Hewlett district where Fox Hall was located, the voters elected the entire GOP slate and gave presidential candidate Herbert Hoover a three-to-two margin of victory over Democrat Al Smith. A local newspaper reported, “Woodmere Klansmen celebrated the Republican victory by setting off a huge fiery cross, perhaps 12 feet in height, in the vacant lot opposite Woodmere Fire Hall. The cross was discovered almost immediately after the results were announced.” No one denounced the event as an expression of racial prejudice, but the Woodmere fire chief was upset about the danger to nearby buildings.

  Fox didn’t turn back. Although Hearts in Dixie didn’t have a deluxe budget like 7th Heaven or Four Sons, the studio did hire accomplished personnel. Star Clarence Muse was one of the most respected African American actors of the 1920s, a founding member of the Lafayette Players who had acted in Harlem with that company and with the all-black Lincoln Players. Stepin Fetchit was a well-established vaudeville comedian* who’d had a prominent role in the M-G-M movie In Old Kentucky (1927), and under his real name, Lincoln Perry, he wrote an intelligent, thoughtful column for the Chicago Defender. Muse especially was glad to get the work in Hearts in Dixie. Having earned a degree in international law in 1911 from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he had been aghast to discover African American lawyers with “patches all over their clothes, chasing ambulances and hustling hard to make a buck.” Acting seemed a more decorous occupation. Also hired for Hearts in Dixie was the sixty-voice, all-black Bilbrew Chorus, and to direct, Paul Sloane, who was white but who in mid-1928 had been the first film director to graduate from RCA’s two-month motion picture sound training program. (By contrast, M-G-M’s Hallelujah used all unknown performers; female lead Nina Mae McKinney had been a chorus girl in the hit Broadway musical Blackbirds of 1928.)

  According to Muse, the atmosphere on the Hearts in Dixie set was respectful and uplifting. As he wrote in the Chicago Defender, “There is an ardent desire of the heads of the firm that not one word or action that tends to ridicule or burlesque the Afro-American is to be used in the production. The heartfelt interest in the care of the artists, both important and small, is beyond human realization . . . I want you to know that each and every person on all the sets and locations had the ‘soul of the black folks’ in their hearts.”

  Beneath the gloss of the movie’s lighthearted, fast-stepping entertainment lay a subtly subversive message: education is the way out of oppression. Nappus sees this clearly after his daughter and granddaughter die because the superstitious Gummy, instead of calling in the knowledgeable and willing-to-help white physician, has summoned “the voodoo woman.”* Clutching his raggedy hat in both hands, Nappus sadly observes, “We didn’t know. We just didn’t know.” He loves his grandson too much to let him remain in this culture of ignorance. Selling his farm and his mule and suppressing his deepest longing for the boy’s company, Nappus sends Chinquapin north for an education.

  Fox loved Hearts in Dixie, watching it over and over alone in his office projection room and in Fox Hall’s home theater. Beginning in March 1929, he gave the movie a first-class presentation at Broadway’s Gaiety Theatre, with tickets priced at the prestige level of two dollars. Critical response was divided. Mainstream daily newspapers generally cheered, describing the movie as “[t]he most delightful entertainment in all New York,” and “a touching picture of simple humanity that is immensely affecting and honestly amusing.” In the African American press, reviewers debated the merits of commercial compromise versus moral idealism. Maurice Dancer, reviewing the movie for the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading African American newspaper, sneered at Muse’s portrayal of Nappus as an Uncle Tom “good, good, good ole darky” who was so kind and good “that he allowed the kind ole voodoo lady to kill his kind daughter.” Dancer wrote, “Mr. Sloane had at his command thousands of dollars and the opportunity to pick the world’s best authors, composers, and artists, instead of that he preferred to adhere to the old tradition that the American public loves to see our people singing in the cotton fields and dancing in the sand barefooted.”

  On the other hand, NAACP secretary Walter White, who was black, decided to accept some progress as better than none. At least Hollywood was interested in making a movie, any movie, about African American life. Hearts in Dixie might be a “minstrel show,” White conceded. “That, however, does not seem to me important. With the vast amount of race prejudice in America and particularly because the producers of moving pictures must depend upon a nation-wide distribution which includes the South, it is almost impossible to start off with the presentation of anything but the old stereotyped concepts of the Negro.”

  Despite its compromises, Hearts in Dixie failed commercially. Although Fox Film reported cheery results for the movie’s first full week at the Gaiety, alleging box-office revenue of $10,276, about $1,000 above the theater’s average weekly take, that number was suspect. Income for each of the next two weeks fell below $9,000, and by the fourth, final week, business was so bad that th
e studio refused to disclose the receipts. In Los Angeles, where Hearts in Dixie opened on March 6, 1929, at the United Artists Theatre, promoters tried lowest-common-denominator marketing with “a colored mammy in the theater lobby, serving pancakes and coffee in southern style.” Ticket sales were not appreciably better. For the movie’s nationwide release, ads touting alleged sellouts continued for a short while, then disappeared. Bluntly, crudely, a sign of the times that such language would be printed in a respectable publication, Motion Picture News had predicted that “rank and file” white audiences would never accept Hearts in Dixie: “To them it’ll be just a lot of jigs jigging.”

  Financial disappointment always brought out the worst in Fox. He had evidently anticipated it—at least he didn’t feel strongly enough to intervene when, several weeks before Hearts in Dixie opened, West Coast executives told star Clarence Muse that they would not exercise his contract option for further services. Muse had given an outstanding performance and had been professional and cooperative with publicity. Now he tried to salvage what he could. He believed the studio had promised him a $500 option fee. Although he hired a lawyer, wrote letters, and sent telegrams, Sheehan and Wurtzel refused to pay. The actor eventually gave up and settled for transportation expenses to Chicago. It’s not known if Muse tried to reach Fox directly, but given his dignified temperament and Fox’s aura of inaccessibility, it seems unlikely. Muse accepted his fate and chose to remember his experience at Fox Film in a positive light. Decades later, writing to Fox’s niece Angela Fox Dunn, he praised “the genius of William Fox and his unwritten compassion for entertainment” and made no mention of his unseemly dismissal.

  It must have stung Fox to see Hallelujah, released by M-G-M on August 20, 1929, become a commercial success. That movie relied far more on damaging racial stereotypes than Hearts in Dixie did. In Hallelujah, characters speak lines such as “I sure is going to eat myself plenty of cornbread and chitlins here tonight” and “Seems like the devil’s done took a hold of me,” and generally presents African Americans as so driven by lust that spiritual ecstasy merges with sexual desire. Sex, violence, jazz, and a voyeuristic look at the black community’s flamboyant revival meetings: those were the main lures of Hallelujah. Fox certainly knew how to use salacious story elements to hook an audience, but with Hearts in Dixie he chose not to. His movie’s mind was on the higher potential of an ill-treated race. Still, it was Hallelujah that made the money.

  To support his movies, Fox pushed ahead aggressively to expand Fox Theatres. Following his March 1927 purchase of New York’s Roxy Theatre, he made two other major acquisitions that transformed the company into one of the nation’s largest exhibition circuits.

  First, in January 1928, Fox bought the remaining two-thirds of the stock of the West Coast Theaters chain, the portion that had eluded him in the summer of 1925 when Sol Lesser and the Gore brothers ran out of his office without their hats and coats. After Lesser and his First National colleagues sold out to the Hayden, Stone & Co. banking firm, Hayden, Stone had packaged the West Coast Theaters shares with stock in a midwestern theater chain to create the Wesco Holding Corporation. Hayden, Stone then put the new company up for sale and—even though this was precisely the outcome that Lesser and the Gores had tried to avoid—began negotiating with Fox. Naturally they did. Hayden, Stone was in the money business, and Fox had money. Fox agreed to pay $16 million for Wesco, gaining an additional 300 theaters in seven western states and raising Fox Theatres’ total of fully controlled properties to 340.

  His second major purchase took place about six months later. On July 22, 1928, Fox announced that he had bought the twenty-theater Poli circuit in New England for $25 million, with another $1 million budgeted for renovations and conversion to sound. The Poli chain was the oldest privately owned circuit in the United States and one of the few remaining large, well-operated independent theater groups. Together, Wesco and Poli provided important, new guaranteed outlets for Fox movies and bargaining tools with other studios’ theater chains.

  Fox also pushed ahead with construction. In January 1928, concurrent with the Wesco purchase, he announced a two-year plan to build twenty-five Fox theaters seating five thousand or more. Construction costs would average $6 million, for a total estimated outlay of $150 million. Fox understood the importance of place: one didn’t just go to see a movie; one also went to be in a theater. As leading theater interior decorator Harold W. Rambusch wrote, “The vast majority of those attending our theatres are of very limited means. Their homes are not luxurious and the theatre affords them an opportunity to imagine themselves as wealthy people in luxurious surroundings . . . In our big modern movie palaces there are collected the most gorgeous rugs, furniture and fixtures that money can produce. No kings or emperors have wandered through more luxurious surroundings.” Sumptuous theaters also offered a way to offset the growing economic frustration of the lower orders amid the boom of the late 1920s, the feeling that everyone else was getting ahead faster. Rambusch commented, “In a sense these theatres are the social safety valves in that the public can partake of the same luxurious surroundings as the rich and use them to the same full extent.”

  From 1927 through 1929, Fox would open seven palatial new Fox Theatres in Brooklyn, Detroit, Oakland, St. Louis, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Washington, DC. Spanning a wide range of architectural styles, all shared a love of staggeringly ostentatious display. No dollar was spent but that it shouted for attention, no surface remained unadorned lest it connote a lack of means to fill it. The $5 million, 5,200-seat St. Louis Fox, designed to resemble a Hindu temple in India, ranked as the second-largest movie theater in the country after the Roxy. Its slightly smaller architectural twin, the Fox Detroit, had a two-ton stained-glass chandelier that measured thirteen feet in diameter, and its Wurlitzer organ was the second largest in the world. Dominating the auditorium of the $3.5 million, 3,400-seat Oakland Fox was a large bronze Buddha, decorated with emerald-and-ruby-colored jewelry and sitting in front of a green silver ornamental grille. The $10 million, 5,000-seat, Gothic-style Fox Theatre in Brooklyn was topped by a twelve-story office building.

  Altogether it was quite a story, one over which Fox continually marveled. Twenty-five years before, he had been a nobody. Now he was shaping American culture.

  CHAPTER 34

  Storm Signals

  As the Fox empire expanded at full tilt during the late 1920s, the corporate atmosphere changed. It had never been exactly a happy family, and at heart it was still a family, but with so much more at stake, tensions escalated and relationships became more labyrinthine, rivalrous, and fearful. Behind the sturdy redbrick façade of the Tenth Avenue headquarters and the cheery gardens and welcoming Spanish-style architecture of Movietone City and the Western Avenue lot, the studio became known as “an organization with a temper.” According to one journalist, Fox Film “specializes in executives who pound the table. All of them stop fighting only because of exhaustion.”

  That tone was set from the top. Fox was more wound up and more prone to impulsive, caustic eruptions. “In temperament Fox is dynamic, often explosive, and this doesn’t mean maybe. Once to have seen him roused to wrath is a thing never forgotten. When most angry, at first he often appears to be embarrassed. This has often misled people, who didn’t know him, to their rue,” observed trade journalist Merritt Crawford. “When once Fox begins to stutter, get ready for the riot call. Or make your exit by the shortest route. It is an unerring storm signal.”

  It wasn’t that Fox cared less about his employees than before, but rather that he continued to care about them with a level of responsibility that was no longer feasible. He tried to hold on to a close-knit spirit. At the Fox Film annual sales convention in Atlantic City in May 1927, he encouraged the sales staff to bring their problems to him and other executives so that management could “learn at the feet of the men who have the closest contact with the exhibitors.” To those who had recently joined Fox Film and who were used to a different type
of boss, “Fox’s intimate talk and request for information from the floor was a revelation.”

  Sometimes he was accessible, setting aside his own concerns to solve others’ problems. In mid-1927, when a theater seating contractor who had refurbished the Fox-Locust Theatre in Philadelphia was having difficulty collecting his bill of more than $16,000 from Fox’s friend Albert M. Greenfield, Fox intervened. The work was all “in perfect working order,” he chided Greenfield in a letter, yet Greenfield’s company had ignored the contractor’s repeated pleas for payment. “I am embarrassed,” Fox wrote. Greenfield fobbed the matter off on an underling, who tried to settle the bill by offering the contractor shares of stock in Greenfield’s companies. An even-more-annoyed Fox wrote again to Greenfield to point out the obvious: “Of course this man would not know what to do with those securities. All the work he has done for us has been paid for in cash and he expects to be paid in cash in this instance.” Write a check now, Fox instructed. Greenfield did. Several months later, when the manager of the Fox Film branch office in Atlanta died, Fox sent a personal check for $5,000* to the widow and then had the company buy life insurance policies for 861 employees in the U.S. and foreign offices. Fox Film paid the full premium and allowed each employee to name his or her beneficiary.

  Once, Fox even forgave the worst of all possible crimes: stealing from the company. A studio executive, returning from a trip to Europe, excitedly told Fox he had learned that the manager of the Fox Film office in Berlin, evidently Julius Aussenberg, was routinely pilfering funds. “You have to fire him,” the executive insisted heatedly. No, Fox replied calmly, that was exactly what he wasn’t going to do. “This man already has a nice home and a nice automobile and jewelry and furs for his wife,” Fox explained. “A new man would have to start stealing from scratch.” He didn’t fire the Berlin office manager.