The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Fox’s outward compliance masked his true response. He was incensed that, as he saw it, Rothafel intended to betray the Roxy Theatre’s “poor stockholders”—the “servant girls, barbers, bootblacks, truck drivers, bookkeepers and many others of similar occupation” who had listened trustingly to Rothafel’s radio program and, on his say-so, had bought $5 million in Roxy Theatre stock. Fox knew that their investment would be wiped out if a new, larger theater opened next door. After buying the land, Fox told Rothafel that if someday the times justified it, perhaps he would build a larger theater—but only as a joint enterprise with the Roxy Theatre, so that the existing stockholders would be fully protected.

  Then he punished Rothafel. Summoning Allvine into his office, Fox ordered, “Tell that bastard who calls himself a major that if he isn’t out of his office within twenty-four hours I will send Major Zanft over to throw him out of the theater.”

  John Zanft was Fox Theatres’ general manager. Actually, neither he nor Rothafel had ever been an active-duty major. Rothafel had served for seven years in the U.S. Marine Corps, rising to the rank of corporal, and in 1925 he had been sworn in as a major in the Marine Reserve, a position with almost no responsibility. Zanft was merely an honorary major, so named because of his patriotic work in the entertainment industry during the world war.

  “Delivering this message was the saddest and most embarrassing chore that I executed for either Fox or Sheehan,” Allvine would recall. “I sensed Roxy’s emotional turmoil as he paced his monogrammed rug, woven just for him, past the Arthurian mantelpiece with its mementos of esteem from those who loved him, as he realized that all the grandeur he had created was now to fall into the hands of such barbarians as Zanft and Fox.” In short order, Fox took over Rothafel’s office for himself.

  Around the time of the Rothafel contretemps, the Metropolitan Theatres deal, involving the purchase of some 175 to 200 independent New York area theaters, nearly fell apart from neglect. The process was more complicated than Fox had anticipated. Many of the theaters did not have clear titles and were burdened with mortgages, liens, back taxes, and various attachments. In some cases, auditors’ reports showed that owners had overstated earnings and property values. Fox didn’t have the time to renegotiate. As of April 1, 1929, three or four months after making the deals, he had taken title to and paid for only five of the independent theaters.

  This was no small inconvenience for the owners of all the other properties involved in the Metropolitan Theatres deal: during the interval, they’d been unable to sign contracts to book new movies or to retrofit their theaters with sound equipment. On April 1, 1929, the owners of two theaters in Queens and one in Brooklyn sued Fox for $1.8 million in New York State Supreme Court, alleging breach of contract. According to Samuel Schwartz and Herbert Muller, Fox had persuaded them in December 1928 to postpone the closing of their leases until March 22, 1929, and then on that date refused to make the payments and began to ignore their sale agreement. Schwartz and Muller believed that Fox had never been serious about buying their properties but had merely used them as bait in the Loew’s negotiations—that is, in order to induce the Loew family to sell their shares to him, Fox had assembled the appearance of a strong competitive circuit in New York, and then, after he got the Loew’s shares, he lost all interest in buying the independents.

  Schwartz and Muller were wrong about Fox’s intentions. He really did want the New York independent theaters. Days after the lawsuit filing, he and two associates were seen as they “clambered over balconies and through orchestras on an inspection tour” of about 150 of the independent theaters. He then began to complete the deals.

  Instead of delegating authority to manage the situation amicably, Fox slammed his fist down harder on the table. In the summer of 1929, all the managers of the Metropolitan Theatres division were fired and told they could reapply for their jobs. Those who were rehired had to take a substantial reduction in salary and were assigned to theaters other than those they had previously managed. One person was in charge here. Let no one forget that.

  Worst of all, during the months following his purchase of the Loew family’s stock, Fox heedlessly antagonized his two main creditors, Harry Stuart and John Otterson. Having loaned Fox $12 million, Stuart believed that his firm, Halsey, Stuart, was entitled to handle the entire refinancing for the planned Fox-Loew’s merger. At an 8 percent commission rate on debt that ballooned to $93 million after the Gaumont theaters purchase, the fee at stake was $7.4 million. Without consulting Stuart, Fox gave a piece of the deal away to one of Halsey, Stuart’s rivals.

  He thought he had to. In the spring of 1929, two partners from Dillon Read and Company, the previous banking firm for Loew’s, Inc., came to see Fox to complain about having been shut out from the sale of the Loew family’s 400,000 shares. Not that they were making any threats, one of the men said. They simply thought Fox ought to know. Also, some Loew’s stockholders—many, actually, including the Dillon, Read firm—who hadn’t been given the chance to sell their shares at $125 were planning to sue Fox and hold up the Fox-Loew’s merger.

  “That I had not anticipated,” Fox said. He offered to let Dillon, Read handle a share of the merger refinancing and make up their profits that way. In exchange, the Dillon, Read partners agreed not to cause trouble. In the small world of high finance, the news must have traveled quickly to Stuart, who was already irked that Fox still hadn’t written the letter he’d agreed to write in the summer of 1928 promising Halsey, Stuart an extra $1 million for past services.

  ERPI president Otterson, too, was unnerved by Fox’s apparently ungrateful behavior. Otterson had been in Europe in late February 1929 when his boss, Western Electric president Edgar Bloom, finalized AT&T’s $15 million loan to Fox. Upon learning that Fox had not surrendered his Tri-Ergon sound-on-film patent rights as part of the deal, Otterson became alarmed. On March 7, 1929, he cabled back to the home office that he feared Fox was planning to develop the Tri-Ergon patents independently and challenge Western Electric’s near monopoly on motion picture sound equipment. As yet, Otterson’s worry was hypothetical: Fox hadn’t yet received official validation of the patents. Nonetheless, to forestall trouble, the following month Otterson visited Fox Hall.

  How much did he want for his Tri-Ergon patent rights, Otterson asked. Ten million, Fox said. Otterson offered $5 million in cash. Fox said he would think about it.

  Fox sought advice from no greater authority than his brother-in-law and Fox Film vice president Jack Leo. Considered by Fox relatives to be a know-it-all who actually knew very little at all, Leo had sat in on the meeting with Otterson and “violently objected” to the sale. According to Leo’s reasoning, if the Tri-Ergon patents were basic, controlling patents, then $5 million was inadequate, but if they weren’t basic, controlling patents, then why was the telephone company offering Fox $5 million?

  The matter wasn’t really that simple. While it was true that ERPI used the flywheel mechanism in the equipment it was selling, other sound-on-film technologies had been invented to circumvent the flywheel. If Fox’s price were too high, ERPI might look for some other means of achieving the same effect. Alternately, ERPI might just plow ahead and ignore Fox’s claim. It was one thing to own patent rights, quite another to collect on them—as Fox might well have remembered from the industry’s early days, when film producers widely flouted royalty demands from the Motion Picture Patents Company.

  Fox listened to Leo, and several days later he rejected Otterson’s $5 million offer.

  On May 21, 1929, Otterson’s fears intensified when the U.S. Patent Office granted Tri-Ergon a patent for the flywheel component of sound-on-film technology. Used in both sound movie cameras and projectors, the flywheel advanced the film at a uniform speed and ensured sound fidelity.

  With both Stuart and Otterson, Fox believed he was justifiably defending his own interests. He didn’t consider the resentment he might be arousing in these two creditors. Insulated from anyone who might have pointe
d out the broader perspective, Fox chose to believe that he, Stuart, and Otterson were all good friends and that they wanted him to rule the motion picture industry just as much as he did.

  Many viewed the cyclonic force that drove Fox as insatiable, self-seeking ambition. Journalist Allene Talmey, in a July 1929 profile of Fox evidently written without his cooperation, described him as tormented by “his relentless lust for power.” According to Talmey, “It is absurd to say that he is conceited. It is too puny a word. Megalomania afflicted with elephantiasis, that is the state of his self-esteem.”

  Extraordinary ambition Fox certainly had, but Talmey’s conclusion that he found a perverse thrill as a snarling, “slashing master” missed the mark. By his own account, Fox didn’t enjoy the intense, unceasing pressure of his life. It was a mistake, he said, to think of the empire builder as selfish: “He is not making it easier for himself, but harder. He would be more happy and contented if his ambitions did not run so high. He is not getting anything out of it; in fact, he is giving out of himself every time he enlarges that plant.”

  Fox’s desire to rule the motion picture industry seems better understood as a picture of the prison of the past. The desperate, desolate circumstances of his childhood had forged an iron will to escape, to transcend the realm of constant struggle, and that will had been reinforced every time opposition compelled him to decide whether to give up or go on. So close to realizing his dream, he could no more stop to relax than he could walk back to the beginning and start over.

  CHAPTER 38

  Fate

  I think the thing that plays the greatest pranks in our lives is Fate.

  —WILLIAM FOX

  Around 10 a.m. on Wednesday, July 17, 1929, Fox set out from Fox Hall for the Lake View Country Club in Great Neck, Long Island, where he planned to meet with Paramount head Adolph Zukor. Now that Louis B. Mayer had agreed to undo the damage he claimed to have done, Fox and Zukor were going to resolve what Fox believed was the last remaining obstacle to the Justice Department’s approval of the proposed Fox-Loew’s merger: the sweetheart deal between Paramount and Loew’s, whereby each company favored the other over the rest of the studios when booking movies for its theaters. The arrangement, which had originated in the 1920 marriage of Zukor’s daughter, Mildred, to Marcus Loew’s son Arthur, was a roadblock because it established a financial tie between Loew’s and Fox on the one hand and Paramount on the other. If these three huge companies cooperated rather than competed, they might demolish the rest of the industry.

  Zukor had tentatively agreed to abrogate the preferential contract with Loew’s—as long as Fox didn’t interfere with Paramount’s planned merger with Warner Bros. The two giants would then rule the industry together. That suited Fox. Fox-Loew’s would be a little larger than Paramount–Warner Bros. and the race to the top would end.

  To buffer any tension with Fox, Zukor was bringing along fifty-year-old actor Thomas Meighan, Paramount’s top male star, whom Zukor considered a personal good luck charm, and Loew’s president Nicholas M. Schenck, who had brokered the Loew family’s stock sale to Fox. As his aide-de-camp, Fox had enlisted his Fox Hall next-door-neighbor, Jacob L. Rubinstein, secretary and treasurer of the Namquit Worsted Company. Rubinstein had more than a sporting interest in the outing: he owned 10,000 Class A shares of Fox Theatres stock.

  The day was sunny and clear, with little traffic as Fox’s chauffeur drove Fox’s green Rolls-Royce west on the lonely, rural Old Westbury Road. “Fear?” Rolls-Royce advertised in 1929. “The thought never enters your head. You instinctively sense that this car is safe.” With Rubinstein beside him on the backseat, Fox drifted off into thought. “I was dreaming of the perfect conclusion. Life had just begun. This was to be the greatest stepping stone of my career.”

  Around 10:50 a.m., as the Fox car passed by the blinking traffic beacon, a small Chrysler sedan tooted its horn twice and then hurtled out from the thickly wooded, high-banked intersection of Roslyn Road.

  Fox’s chauffeur saw the other car and swerved away sharply. It was a bad decision. The sudden jerk of the steering wheel destabilized the Rolls-Royce, so that when the Chrysler dealt merely a glancing blow to the rear wheel, the large luxury car spun around 180 degrees. Then it soared into the air and smashed down on its left side in a ditch.

  Fox’s driver, thirty-six-year-old Joseph W. Boyes, was killed instantly when the Rolls-Royce landed on top of him and crushed his skull. He wasn’t Fox’s regular driver. He had been filling in for his brother, who had taken the day off.

  Pitched forward by the collision, Fox and Rubinstein tumbled about violently in the backseat while the windscreen surrounding the tonneau completely broke apart—shatterproof glass was not yet standard in cars—and shards of glass slashed Fox severely about the face and cut a deep gash in his head. Covered in blood, he crawled out and saw that Boyes was dead.

  Fox would recall, “I got up and shook one leg after the other to see that nothing was broken, and then my left arm, and finally I swung my right arm and found it too was all right. Then I said, ‘Okay, if I get over this, I will still be able to play golf.’ ” Rubinstein suffered only minor injuries: a sprained knee, some bruises, and superficial cuts.

  About twenty feet away, the Chrysler remained upright, with hardly a scratch. None of its occupants—not the driver, thirty-six-year-old Dorothy Kane of Manhattan, nor either of her two sisters, nor the dog riding with them—was hurt.

  The Kane women urged Fox and Rubinstein into their car to go to the hospital, but the Chrysler wouldn’t start. The three sisters started crying hysterically.

  Stunned, Fox could only wait by the roadside for someone to come along and help.

  Within minutes, Glen Cove, Long Island, lawyer Reginald Moore stopped at the scene, followed by several other motorists. After the men jacked up the Rolls-Royce and removed Boyes’s mangled corpse, Moore drove Fox and Rubinstein, holding handkerchiefs to their wounds, the five-mile distance to Nassau Hospital.

  Somehow, Adolph Zukor learned about the accident before Eva, and although he had never met her before, he went to Fox Hall to deliver the bad news and take her to the hospital.

  Fox’s injuries were much more serious than he realized. Initially, doctors told reporters that he had fractured his skull and was suffering from a severe hemorrhage. Chief attending physician Dr. Wilfred M. Post said, “I am certain that he is badly hurt . . . critically hurt.”

  A rumor circulated that Fox had died. Fox Film’s share price immediately fell from 92⅜ to 87.

  That could not continue. As weak as he was, Fox took control and had his bankers throw buy orders into the market during the afternoon to stop the slide. Fox Film’s share price turned around and ended the day at 88¼, off only 2¾ points from the previous day’s close. A decline in Fox Theatres was also stemmed.

  Simultaneously, the Fox publicity machine roared into action. The press had zeroed in on the story, with some New York daily newspapers putting out extra editions. Fox directed an employee to tell the Associated Press that he had suffered only a slight abrasion of the scalp and would be out of the hospital in two days. Fox Films head of sales, James R. Grainger, fired off a telegram to all the branch offices: “Mr. William Fox not seriously injured. I have just talked to him in person.”

  Allegedly, although Fox had been ready to leave the hospital right after his wounds were dressed, he had agreed to stay for observation to placate the doctors. Allegedly, he was conducting business from his hospital room, taking calls from the West Coast studio, and receiving a steady parade of visitors. In midafternoon, as reporters crowded the porch outside the hospital, Fox joked, “Does a bricklayer get all of this attention, too?”

  Eva played along. Getting into her car around 10:00 p.m. on Wednesday to leave the hospital, she commented, “He seems to have suffered chiefly from shock and needs quiet more than anything else.”

  That night, Fox required a transfusion of one pint of blood. By now, all the hospital personnel ha
d been brought into line. Chief attending physician Post told reporters that the transfusion had been given not because of “unfavorable symptoms,” but only as a “safeguard,” and that “Mr. Fox laughed and talked all through the operation.” On Thursday morning, Dr. Post reported that Fox had awoken full of energy and after a light breakfast, immediately asked to see his mail. Contradicting his previous statements, the doctor now said there was no evidence of a skull fracture or brain injury.

  In fact, Fox’s condition was dire and remained so. On Sunday night, July 21, he ran such a high fever that his doctor suspected brain damage. Zukor, who stayed by the side of the potential grieving widow, suggested that Eva call in a brain specialist to do tests. Eva, knowing her husband well enough, refused. If he had suffered brain damage, there would be no remedy, and if such information became public, the Fox companies would almost certainly suffer. It was better not to know.

  Word slipped out—perhaps true, perhaps not—that Fox had suffered a severe heart attack on Sunday night. By Monday morning, however, his fever had cleared and no brain specialist was ever consulted. If he had sustained a brain injury, he didn’t know about it.

  One person whose name was not on the approved visitors’ list was Fox’s father. If anyone could have single-handedly sent Fox over the edge just by standing at his bedside, it would have been the frail, seventy-one-year-old Michael Fox. Evidently, no one even told him about his son’s accident. He had gone on vacation to upstate New York.