The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Increasingly, though, in trying to be a good father to his professional family, Fox became the absent father—always away on business, always busy with activities that most of his dependents would learn about by reading the papers, if they learned about them at all. He never came by a movie set anymore. Even Janet Gaynor, Fox Film’s most valuable star in the late 1920s, had virtually no contact with Fox: “I only met him to say how do you do. He didn’t seem to have anything to do with the running of the studio. This may not be true, but at least it was so as far as I knew.”

  Fear of the distant, volatile, all-powerful boss permeated the studio’s West Coast management. As head of production, the second-most-powerful position at Fox Film, Winfield Sheehan puffed himself up into the image of a high-living, gregarious studio sultan. He built himself a mansion on a wooded hill at 1197 Angelo Drive in Beverly Hills and outfitted it with a ballroom, tapestry-covered walls, and a library ceiling imported from Spain. For his frequent parties, he often hired an orchestra and set the table with gold dinner plates and gold goblets.

  Still, Sheehan knew that his position was precarious: his future depended entirely on maintaining Fox’s favor. To distract himself from this unalterable fact, he drank too much and had affairs with pretty young actresses—one was Madge Bellamy, sixteen years his junior and psychologically vulnerable because, a short time earlier, she had been raped on a first date;* another was Fifi D’Orsay, twenty-one years younger. To debilitate potential usurpers, Sheehan fought with anyone in danger of getting too close to Fox.

  Directors, whom Fox viewed as the main creative force in filmmaking, represented a vulnerable category. Among them, Sheehan antagonized three of the studio’s top names. He and John Ford hated each other. During filming of The Black Watch (1929), a wartime drama set in India starring Victor McLaglen and Myrna Loy, the two argued so vehemently that Ford went on a furious drinking binge. Howard Hawks mocked Sheehan’s police department background by having a policeman thrown into the water in A Girl in Every Port (1928) and openly scorned the “dialogue director,” a former burlesque comic, forced on him for The Air Circus (1928). After that, Hawks recalled, “I didn’t make a picture for a year and a half.” Raoul Walsh described Sheehan as a “sawn-off ramrod” and called him “Little Caesar.” According to Walsh, “Arguing with Sheehan never did much good. I had known him to agree with me and then do what I objected to anyway.”

  Sheehan directed the worst of his attacks toward his closest rival, Western Avenue lot superintendent Sol Wurtzel. Wurtzel had been overseeing production for Fox Film since 1917, nearly a decade longer than Sheehan, and had formed strong ties with two of Sheehan’s enemy directors. John Ford considered Wurtzel a close friend and, in 1927, appointed him as the guardian and executor of his estate. Ford also hired Wurtzel’s brother Harry as his agent. In return, said Wingate Smith, Ford’s assistant director, “Sol protected him, got him out of many a jam.” Howard Hawks also got along well with Wurtzel. If Sheehan were to slip in Fox’s esteem, Wurtzel might move forward.

  No sooner had Sheehan arrived as head of the West Los Angeles lot (later Movietone City) than he began fighting with Wurtzel. In the spring of 1927, when Wurtzel left on a vacation (his first in fifteen years, a six-week trip to Cuba, Florida, and New York), a rumor circulated that he wasn’t coming back. Sheehan pressured Fox to fire Wurtzel. Fox may have been tempted. He had considered the idea a few years before, when Wurtzel had a nervous breakdown. At that time, Fox had sent Jack Leo out from New York as a possible permanent replacement. Now, in August 1927, Leo arrived again at the Western Avenue lot on a two-month assignment to assess Wurtzel’s job performance. No, Fox couldn’t do it. Later he said, “Of course, I wouldn’t.”

  Fox disregarded Sheehan’s treachery. It was easier to believe that having started Fox Film together in 1915, they shared an unbreakable bond of loyalty. Besides, Fox needed Sheehan, who on the whole was doing a good job as head of production and who had strengths to compensate for Fox’s weaknesses.

  Especially important was the fact that Sheehan got along well with actors, whom Fox generally considered overpriced and empty-headed necessities. Janet Gaynor called Sheehan “one of my greatest friends” and a “very devoted” confidant: “He was absolutely wonderful to me, because he gave me very good advice . . . I could go in and discuss anything with him.” Scouting for new talent, Sheehan had a keen eye. In 1928, he hired thirty-two-year-old Austrian-born actor Muni Weisenfreund after seeing him on Broadway and brought him to Hollywood to star in his first movie, The Valiant (1929), about a murderer who confesses to his crime but refuses to reveal his identity. After watching a reel and a half, Fox wanted to shut down filming because he thought Weisenfreund was too homely to appeal to female viewers. Sheehan persuaded him to finish the movie, which became “a Cinderella success,” and won the male lead, renamed Paul Muni, a Best Actor Academy Award nomination. A former reporter, Sheehan also handled the press well and spoke comfortably on behalf of the company, a task Fox detested.

  That was the Winfield Sheehan whom Fox preferred to see, the one who had successfully transformed himself from grubby beginnings into a competent and dependable corporate second-in-command. Fox rewarded that version of Sheehan. He gave him a home theater as a housewarming present when Sheehan moved into his Angelo Drive mansion, and for 1929 nearly tripled Sheehan’s annual salary from $45,000 to $130,000 (equivalent to $1.85 million in 2017), with a $50,000 to $75,000 expense account. Fox didn’t glimpse, as those in close proximity did, that Sheehan hadn’t entirely cast off his former self. “I can see Winnie Sheehan always chewing tobacco and spitting. He would spit in the aisle in the projection room,” assistant director Wingate Smith recalled years later. “God, what a crude man.”

  While Sheehan managed mostly to maintain a self-confident façade, stress took a visible toll on Sol Wurtzel. He had never become the man Fox wanted him to be, and Sheehan’s fears notwithstanding, he was probably never going to be. He was still in the job he’d had since 1917, overseeing the Western Avenue lot, which was now the poor relation to Sheehan’s Movietone City fiefdom. And there was no handsome raise for Wurtzel in 1929. At $50,000 a year, he was earning less than two-fifths as much as Sheehan.

  Years of mistreatment had twisted and toughened Wurtzel. The facial tic he had developed in response to Fox’s harassment now curled one side of his mouth up into the appearance of a smile, but only at great risk might anyone assume it actually was a smile. More often, the tic signaled rage. There was only so much Wurtzel could take, and he’d already had one nervous breakdown. If he had to suffer abuse, so would his subordinates.

  One day in early 1929, a director was screening the first rough cut of his movie in a private projection room for Fox, Wurtzel, and a film editor. In between reels, on a matter unconnected with the movie, Fox suddenly tore into Wurtzel, “insulted and shamed him.” Soon after, Wurtzel fired the director. “Wow,” the director told studio publicity director Victor Mansfield Shapiro. “Sol doesn’t want my face around to remind him that I was present during his humiliation.”

  Around the same time, Fox Film staff screenwriter Arthur Caesar, known as “the wit of Broadway,” was asked to create a vaudeville sketch for a publicists’ dinner. Aware that Wurtzel had recently taken up polo, Caesar wrote a skit called “From Worse to Wurtzel, or from Poland to Polo in One Generation.” Wurtzel fired him.

  Not even a remote echo of derision would be tolerated. Wurtzel was “hyper and super” sensitive, said publicist Shapiro, who found himself under suspicion one day when Wurtzel buzzed the intercom between their offices and called him in for a talk. “He took off his glasses, cleaned them slowly, put them back—he scowled or smiled. I didn’t know which. Obliquely and bluntly he said, ‘I hear you’ve been giving me publicity.’ I thought he was kidding,” Shapiro recalled. But Wurtzel wasn’t kidding. He accused Shapiro of mocking him at a party at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Shapiro was able to absolve himself only by finding a witness, a young wom
an who’d also attended the party, to corroborate his denial. Wurtzel then fired the person who’d told him the story.

  Yet Wurtzel—at five foot nine, a homely, dour-looking man with a dark complexion, dense black hair, thick glasses, and a square jaw—kept trying to be the person Fox wanted him to be. He emulated Fox’s habits of smoking cigars and playing golf. He became president of the congregation of the new Temple Israel in Hollywood. He worked on his vocabulary and learned “all the four, seven, and eleven syllable words.” From time to time, Fox still tried to help him. Whether out of guilt or tangled affection for their long shared history and their common beginnings amid Lower East Side poverty—in many ways, Wurtzel represented the person Fox used to be—Fox gave company stock to Wurtzel, his wife, and his son and daughter and advised him on investing.

  It didn’t work. Sol Wurtzel was still Sol Wurtzel. Attempting to project authority, he “sounded splattered, like a discharge from an instrument for crushing pebbles,” commented New Yorker writer S. N. Behrman. “You couldn’t really have a conversation with Sol. Remarks erupted from him without preamble or contextual balance; they were islands in a stertorous silence.” Secretly, people laughed at his pretentious big words. And they laughed about his habit, when approached by a stranger on the golf course, of handing over a card that read, “Sorry, if you want a job at the studio, see your agent.” Summing up Hollywood’s majority opinion, actress and writer Salka Viertel, whose husband, Berthold, worked with F. W. Murnau on the screenplay for Sunrise, described Wurtzel as “incredibly boorish.”

  It took someone with the sensitivity of John Ford to understand Wurtzel. Said Ford, “He was a good friend and I liked him very much.”

  The tension of studio politics, combined with Fox’s remoteness, jeopardized relationships with creative talent. Everyone knew that only his opinion really mattered, but it was difficult to tell what his opinion was. Janet Gaynor used money as a measure, and despite her friendship with Sheehan, she felt unappreciated and exploited. On Sunrise, she had earned only $200 a week, and by late 1927, after the release of both 7th Heaven and Sunrise and while filming Street Angel, she had received no significant pay increases. “All about me people were telling me I should demand more money. I will admit that I was influenced,” said Gaynor. Reportedly, the studio offered her $1,000 a week, while she wanted at least $3,000. Only twenty-one, she threatened to leave Fox Film and hired a lawyer, even though previously she had handled all contract matters herself. She felt terrible about the conflict, later describing it as “a sad, a sickeningly sad, occurrence.” To have done with it, in January 1928 she signed a new five-year contract with graduated pay increases.

  Not so fortunate was Madge Bellamy, who walked off the lot in 1929 and didn’t come back. For her, the issue wasn’t money but respect. A few years earlier, she had been replaced by Gaynor as the female lead in 7th Heaven. Although she had then received her starring role in Mother Knows Best, that had been a castoff—the studio had originally assigned Gaynor. Now Sheehan refused to let Bellamy choose the director of her next movie. An offer of a raise didn’t lure her back.

  Gone were the days when it was possible to appeal directly to Fox. Tom Mix, who a dozen years earlier had won an audience with Fox by leaning on a telegraph pole in a loud costume, recognized this. Perhaps Fox might have found something else for Mix to do after business during 1927 indicated that the Western genre was “all shot to pieces.” Having made nearly one hundred movies for Fox Film, Mix was still easily the most popular and best-earning cowboy star in Hollywood. Yet when his contract expired around April 1, 1928, there was no discussion of renewal. Mix accepted his fate graciously, saying simply, “It is with sincere regret that I am concluding my pleasant business relations with Fox Films and its executives.”

  There was no staying past one’s time and no coming back once gone. Not even William Farnum, Fox’s former on-screen alter ego and his most popular and prestigious star during the 1910s, received any sentimental consideration. Farnum had left Fox Film in 1923 and had faltered in an attempted comeback at Famous Players–Lasky and on the New York stage. After a mysterious illness that caused two long hospital stays on the East Coast and an extended convalescence, he returned to his Hollywood Hills mansion and waited for the phone to ring. Months passed. Did he have a leading role in John Ford’s Hangman’s House? Farnum thought he did. However, when filming started in early 1928, the younger, more robust Victor McLaglen had been cast instead.

  By the late 1920s, it took an emergency to command Fox’s attention. Then the old William Fox reappeared. In early October 1928, during filming of the studio’s first outdoor sound movie, In Old Arizona, in Bryce Canyon, Utah, director Raoul Walsh suffered a severe eye injury in a freak car accident. A jackrabbit dashed out into the road and, before Walsh’s driver could avoid it, smashed into the windshield, sending shards of glass into Walsh’s right eyeball and lacerating his face. Fox Film sent a team of doctors to treat Walsh, and Fox personally called Walsh’s father to tell him about the accident. Then Fox arranged an appointment for Walsh with New York City’s best eye surgeon, Dr. Carlton Wells. Fox, along with his friend and real estate scout A. C. Blumenthal, met Walsh’s train at Grand Central Station and drove him to the Plaza Hotel, where Fox had filled his room with flowers. In a drawer, despite Prohibition, Fox had put a bottle of twenty-five-year-old brandy. The following afternoon, Wells removed Walsh’s right eye. It wasn’t the end of the world. Irving Cummings finished directing In Old Arizona and shared credit with Walsh, who would soon be back at work at the studio.

  Despite all he had—money, power, a happy marriage, dutiful daughters, reasonably good health, and work he loved—Fox wasn’t content. He seemed unable either to control his restless, simmering, explosive anger or to step back from the pressures that drove him to it. He was not yet who he wanted to be. He had not left the past behind. This was clear when, on March 29, 1927, he addressed Harvard Business School students as part of an eleven-session motion picture industry lecture series organized by alumnus and Film Booking Offices of America president Joseph P. Kennedy. It should have been a proud moment. Fox was supposed to discuss the industry’s foreign development, which he had pioneered. Instead, for about fifty minutes, he mainly reminisced about his hard-won triumphs, using language suffused with class resentment. He mocked the “hatred” with which the cultural elite (educators, lawyers, and newspapers editors) had greeted motion pictures, and he scorned the way he thought those pooh-bahs would have considered it “a sacrilege” for him to appear at Harvard. It was the have-nots, he emphasized, poor foreign-born men and women scraping together their coins to buy movie tickets, who had financed the growth of this wonderful new industry, and these privileged students ought not to forget that.

  The most visible symbol of Fox’s conflict between past and present was his father. Michael Fox had always blamed his failure to provide for his family on the difficulties that America set up against the immigrant outsider. Still, he seemed neither to acknowledge the burden he’d placed on his son nor to appreciate the rewards of his son’s efforts. For as long as Fox could remember, his father had rhapsodized about the quaint and cozy life they’d left behind in Tolcsva, Hungary. All the luxuries that Fox provided hadn’t stemmed the flow of nostalgia. In his late forties, with his father’s reminiscences amounting to a passive-aggressive dismissal of all his achievements, Fox had had enough.

  He would not say one contrary word to the old man. Instead, around 1927, he sent a Fox News camera crew to Hungary to film scenes of village life. He must have ordered the reporters to look only for the most wretchedly impoverished scenes, because the footage that came back showed small, miserable huts, unpaved roads, idle bodies, and dirty faces with vacant expressions. The better dressed among the inhabitants wore rags; many others had no clothes at all.

  One evening at Fox Hall, Fox escorted his father and other family members into the estate’s private theater, with its red damask–upholstered Louis XV fauteui
ls lined up in rows, its tapestry-covered walls, and long red-velvet draperies. “Here is your village,” he told his father, indicating the screen. “Just as you left it.” As the gruesome images cascaded onto the screen, Michael Fox shrank into his chair. When the segment ended, he stood up and walked out silently. It was ruthless of Fox to shatter the one idea that, although a delusion, gave his father a sense of dignity. Ruthless, but effective—Michael Fox never again spoke to anyone in the family about his beloved homeland.

  It was an empty victory. Fox could silence his father but not the thought that seemed to hover behind his father’s attitude. Fox’s anger suggested the extent to which he himself believed it: all that he had accomplished was not yet enough.

  CHAPTER 35

  Lone Master of the Movies

  A man’s worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.

  —T. H. HUXLEY, 1876

  In the transformation of William Fox, one more step upward remained: to ascend into the elite tier of American industrialists and to dominate his industry the way that Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan had dominated theirs. He was entitled to do so, he believed. “I have put my soul into motion pictures—have devoted my life to them.” In his view, no one else loved the movies more, had done as much for them, or was better qualified to lead them into the future.

  Two deaths cleared a path for Fox’s ambition. First, on April 7, 1927, longtime Fox Film treasurer John C. Eisele died suddenly at age sixty-six. After chairing a board of directors meeting of Newark’s Washington Trust Company, still at the table and talking to one of the other directors, Eisele suddenly groaned and slumped back unconscious in his chair. By the time a doctor arrived, he had died of heart failure.