The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  He also became kinder to strangers. One evening shortly after returning from California, out to dinner at the top-line two-thousand-seat Pavillon Royal restaurant in Valley Stream, Long Island, Fox was nearby when a boy suffered a heart attack. Future TV variety show host Ed Sullivan, then a newspaper columnist, saw Fox “frantically applying emergency measures of aid” and later learned that he visited the boy in the hospital every day and was at his side when he died. “I was never so impressed as I was by William Fox’s tenderness that night,” Sullivan wrote. “I’ve heard a lot of stories about Bill Fox, but he evened everything that night.”

  Meanwhile, Upton Sinclair labored to finish their book. Fox’s spoken narrative had been frequently disjointed and confusing: he had jumped around in time, mixed up key dates, forgotten names, presented seemingly contradictory financial figures, and failed to produce important corroborating documents. Yet, Sinclair was determined to do a respectable job, not only for the sake of his literary reputation, but also because he had so far received only $10,000 of his fee, with the remaining $15,000 due upon completion of the manuscript. According to their agreement, Fox had complete copy approval. If he didn’t like the work, he wouldn’t have to pay.

  At first their long-distance relationship was cordial. On May 27, 1932, just weeks after Fox’s departure, Sinclair sent two copies of the first quarter of his manuscript to Fox Hall. He’d been working on it night and day, he said, and wanted to make sure he was on the right track. Fox replied, “Mrs. Fox and I would rather reserve our opinion of it until after you have completed the entire manuscript.” After protesting weakly that without feedback he hesitated to continue, Sinclair had little choice but to accede. It was nearly the bottom of the Depression. Money was scarcer than ever.

  Throughout June and July 1932, Sinclair bombarded Fox with letters, writing almost daily for clarification, more information, or further comments. At times, Sinclair seemed on the verge of panic, as if he feared that Fox was deranged and had badly distorted the truth. Fox responded with clarity and precision—one of his letters ran twenty-five pages long—and calmed Sinclair down with logical explanations.

  On July 18, 1932, Sinclair sent the complete manuscript to Fox.

  A noticeable chill set in. On August 6, 1932, Sinclair wrote to Fox, “I am troubled at not hearing from you.” Two days later, he sent a telegram: “Are you ill?” More than a week later, Fox advised Sinclair that he and Eva had been revising the manuscript, making “corrections” and suggestions to “materially reduce the number of pages you now have.”

  By now, Fox had lost interest in the book. Telling his story hadn’t unburdened him. It had only crystallized his feelings, and the hostility he had encountered from the Senate banking committee indicated that the public might not easily empathize with a disgruntled multimillionaire. The publishing world’s response deepened Fox’s disenchantment. He had expected clamorous enthusiasm, the sort he was used to receiving in the movie business. Yet Sinclair, who was responsible for finding a publisher, dredged up only scant interest. Who wanted to burden the market with a sob story about someone who had received $18 million for control of his companies? Furthermore, Fox didn’t have much of a public profile. He had always held himself aloof, refusing to give interviews or pose for photos, and parsimoniously meting out only small, rehashed morsels of personal information. His claim to public attention had rested exclusively on cultural power, and he had lost that power.

  Heroically, Sinclair extracted an offer from Liberty Magazine, the second-largest circulation magazine in the United States, to print several early chapters highlighting Fox’s colorful, humble beginnings. Of course the editor didn’t want the later sections about the alleged financial conspiracy—for heaven’s sake, AT&T was one of their principal advertisers. Sinclair urged Fox to accept so they could use the exposure to attract a book publisher.

  “I see no value in this,” Fox retorted. He was sending the manuscript to the Saturday Evening Post, the largest-circulation magazine in the United States, and he wanted the financial conspiracy chapters published. Sinclair knew that was a hopeless cause because surely the Saturday Evening Post ran just as many AT&T ads as Liberty. Fox tried anyway and was quickly rejected.

  Although book publishers didn’t depend on advertising revenue, they had other concerns that were equally odious to Fox. Publication date, for instance. Fox had forbidden Sinclair to publish the book until after November 15, 1932, one week past the presidential election. He didn’t want to hurt Hoover’s chances of reelection, and Sinclair’s text insinuated that by refusing to help the Fox companies in late 1929 and early 1930, Hoover was just another insincere, glad-handing politician. However, basking in the knowledge that he had had lunch at the White House and that his phone calls had gone straight through to the top, Fox believed Hoover had done “everything possible.”

  Sinclair tried hard to persuade Fox to publish the book before the election, warning that “your story is getting colder every day.” Fox held firm. Renouncing Hoover would have meant abandoning faith in the highest office of the land; it also would have meant that Fox wasn’t as special or as brilliant as he’d thought, that he’d been played for a fool.

  Liability was another contentious issue. When Sinclair managed to find a publishing company, Farrar & Rinehart, that was willing to wait until mid-November, Fox refused to sign the standard ironclad clause providing indemnification against libel lawsuits. They could just have lawyers review the manuscript and remove the risky parts, he said. Sinclair’s heart sank. “Every lawyer will tell you to stay quietly at home, take care of your money, and run no risks of libel suits,” he chided Fox, emphasizing that there was really nothing to worry about. “The plain truth is that rich men do not sue for libel. The sums of money which can be got are too small to be worth considering, and the publicity and risk are too great.”

  Fox didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no. Farrar & Rinehart kept its offer on the table.

  As time passed, Sinclair began to suspect that Fox did not want the work published at all. Although on August 29, 1932, Fox wrote to Sinclair describing it as “a very wonderful book,” when the first 121 pages of Fox’s revision arrived some two weeks later, Sinclair was appalled. The text had been eviscerated. Gone were all the interesting personal details—among them a description of the New York tenement house that had been Fox’s childhood home, a discussion with Sinclair about religious beliefs, and instances of colorful mispronunciation and tart language. Sinclair saw the amateurish hand of Eva Fox at work.

  Without calculating the risk that Eva would see the correspondence, Sinclair immediately wrote a letter to Fox and two days later wrote another one, both imploring Fox to restrain his wife. She was ruining the book, Sinclair complained. She had dressed Fox up in “store clothes,” combed his hair neatly, polished off the rough edges of his speech, and altogether had replaced a vivid portrait with a dull, lifeless blur. “Please do not let Mrs. Fox do this to my subject—or to me . . . I also have a wife, so I understand exactly how it happens, and I beg you to use your influence,” Sinclair wrote. “Surely you don’t want me to turn you into a wax-work figure or a drawing room person. You are what you are and you don’t have to be ashamed of it.”

  If Fox didn’t bend, Sinclair hinted, he would walk away. He was not going to sully his literary reputation by publishing “trash.”

  Fox did not reply.

  He was, however, too proud to acknowledge any ill will. Instead, a few weeks later, Eva wrote to say that Fox was ill and unable to continue with the book. Sinclair doubted that. In late October 1932, without comment, Fox sent another check—but for only $5,000 of the $15,000 fee balance. It was a clever touch, both a rap on the knuckles and a reward, a gesture that kept the author tied to him.

  It worked for some time, and the effect was renewed on December 3, 1932, when Fox sent another $5,000, but it did not last forever. Around the turn of the year, Sinclair learned through several sources that Fox had shown the
manuscript to one of his adversaries—he had been threatening to sue about 113 people, including all the directors of Fox Film, Fox Theatres, GTE, the Chase Bank, and Chase Securities—in an attempt to coerce a financial settlement. Sinclair felt betrayed. When they had first discussed the project, he had emphasized that he “would not under any circumstances waste my time and energy” and that Fox must be “fully determined.” Now Fox wouldn’t even communicate with him. Since August 29, 1932, he hadn’t answered any of Sinclair’s many letters and telegrams.

  In mid-January 1933, Sinclair wrote to Fox giving him one last chance to sign the guarantee against liability and save the publishing deal with Farrar & Rinehart.

  Eva wrote back, “W.F.’s condition has not improved.” She didn’t know when he’d be better.

  Too ill to sign a piece of paper? Of course he wasn’t. It was all over the newspapers that in December 1932, Fox had finally sold his six old four-story buildings on Sixth Avenue to John D. Rockefeller Jr. for his Rockefeller Center project for about $825,000.

  Sinclair rebelled and decided to self-publish the book. “I didn’t say a word to Fox. I had a carbon copy of the manuscript, and I just bundled it up and sent it to my printers in Hammond, Indiana, and told them to put that into type and make it into a book.” Although Fox had refused to indemnify a publisher, he had in their initial agreement indemnified Sinclair, so the author was the one and only person in the world who could publish the book without liability. Sinclair ordered ten thousand copies, slapped on Fox’s choice for a title, Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox, and while the book was being bound, mailed ads to the trade and to his list of subscribers.

  No sooner had he done so than he began to panic about the consequences of baiting Fox, who even in the soundest frame of mind, as he was not now, was usually suing somebody for something. “He might fly off the handle and raise Cain,” Sinclair fretted in a letter to Ernest S. Greene, his former secretary and now his New York sales representative. “Watch the newspapers carefully and see what Fox says. Keep me informed by telegraph.”

  One day before the book’s scheduled publication on February 14, 1933, Sinclair wrote to Fox officially informing him of the event. After a three-month delay beyond their agreed-upon publication date, Sinclair said, “I decided that it was my public duty to publish the book at once.”

  “And then I got a perfectly frantic telegram from Fox,” Sinclair would recall. “He threatened me terrors. I didn’t answer. I just went ahead.”

  Sinclair was actually in a gray area because Fox was entitled to final approval of the manuscript and he had never given it. To reinforce his position, Sinclair rushed to collect endorsements.

  “It should go forth by the hundreds of thousands. It tells just what everybody should know, explicitly, convincingly, and so interestingly,” gushed Sinclair’s friend Lincoln Steffens. “This will look good in an ad,” Sinclair commented.

  “It’s an extraordinarily valuable document, brilliantly handled,” added John Dos Passos.

  Not all his literary colleagues were so enthusiastic. In a copy that Sinclair may well have sent to him, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in pencil on the back flyleaf, “Am somewhat appalled by his hymn to old money-bags.”

  In fact, the book read like what it was, a halfhearted pen-for-hire effort. Reviews were mixed. The Nation called the book “one of the most important and devastating” works of the Depression. The North American Review found the story “tremendously exciting.” Life suggested that Sinclair might get the Nobel Prize. On the other hand, blaming Fox for his own downfall, The Saturday Review of Literature dismissed the work as “a demonstration of one-man control gone wild” while H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury scorned Fox as a vulgar purveyor of junk movies to “the enraptured booboisie” and faulted Sinclair’s writing as facile and schematic, with “villains in plug hats and gun-metal mustaches.”

  Initially, Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox sold well in New York and Los Angeles. Sinclair heard a rumor that the book was so popular among Fox Film employees that management posted a notice on the bulletin board that anyone found with a copy would be fired immediately. The rest of the country ignored the book.

  At least Fox hadn’t made good on any of his threats. In the rather desperate hope that his subject was secretly proud of the work, Sinclair wrote to ask him to pay for full-page ads in newspapers nationwide. Fox could use the last $5,000 still owed on the fee, Sinclair suggested. He himself didn’t have the money. He had published the book on credit from the printer, and sale proceeds would take months to arrive. Sinclair promised to keep quiet about the source of the advertising money, advising Fox, “You can trust me.”

  Fox didn’t reply. In early March 1933, assuaging his worst fears, Eva sent Sinclair a “very nice” telegram.

  Sinclair would later claim that Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox caused “a tremendous sensation” and sold fifty thousand copies, but his correspondence at the time presents a different picture. Only five weeks after publication, the book’s sales in Los Angeles stores were dead, and in New York, with newspapers ignoring it, prospects looked similarly dismal. Sinclair considered having sales representative Greene buy five or ten shares of Fox Film stock, which were then selling for about 75 cents each, in order to gain the right to ask for a list of stockholders to whom they could send an ad. He soon abandoned that idea. By early May 1933, retailers had started to return hundreds of unsold books.

  Although he still wouldn’t speak to Sinclair, Fox had always had a soft spot for writers. On April 10, 1933, he sent the last $5,000 of Sinclair’s fee.

  During the months of silence when Sinclair feared that Fox was preparing to pounce on him, Fox was in fact absorbed in other matters. Along with his far-flung business interests and various lawsuits, he was busy sorting out his daughters’ lives. Belle Fox needed settling back into the family nest. In late August 1931, she had filed for divorce from her husband of five years, Milton J. Schwartz, whom she accused of infidelity with a prominent but unnamed film actress. Fox provided a guesthouse on the Fox Hall estate for Belle and her son, now called William Fox III.

  Money could buy respite from marital trouble, but not from random chance. In early October 1932, a speeding taxi darted out from the intersection of Forty-Ninth Street and Queens Boulevard in Queens and smashed into the car in which Mona and Belle were riding. Jolted against the windshield, Mona suffered deep cuts to her lips, nose, and cheeks, and lost consciousness for more than an hour. Plastic surgery repaired what it could, but the diminution of her good looks—Mona was the prettier Fox daughter—added to the humiliation of her scandalous divorce of three years before. She became distant and sad, relatives said. Tepidly, she tried a career in jewelry design. That led to her second marriage, in April 1933 at the Fox winter home in Miami, to Russian-born New York diamond merchant Joseph Riskin, who, at forty-five, was thirteen years her senior. The relationship soon failed, and Mona secluded herself at Fox Hall.

  Some good did come from Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox. Fox got another chance to tell his story to the U.S. Senate, this time in a more open-minded atmosphere. The opportunity arose thanks to Sinclair’s resourceful self-promotion. After U.S. representative Thomas Brooks Fletcher wrote to him that there was a long waiting list at the Congressional Library for the book, Sinclair took another look at the stacks of unsold books that retailers were returning to him. By early May 1933, he had about two hundred of them. Many were too shopworn to send back out to bookstores, but the thrifty author decided, “[T]hey are all right for gifts.” He shipped a copy to each member of the House and Senate.

  Fox once again became a topic of interest for the Senate Banking and Currency subcommittee on stock exchange practices as it continued to investigate the stock market crash. Fortunately for Fox, William A. Gray, the hostile bulldog Philadelphia lawyer who had been the subcommittee’s first counsel, had been replaced in January 1933 by former New York assistant district attorney Ferdinand Pecora, a scholarl
y, low-key lawyer who had successfully prosecuted many financial crime cases.

  In late November 1933, Fox was subpoenaed to appear before the subcommittee. He had mixed feelings. On the one hand, he knew he would have to open up his wounds again, and he wanted to move on. On the other hand, maybe people were finally willing to hear what he’d been trying to tell them for the past three and a half years. There was a lot more evidence now to support his claims that he’d been targeted by a corrupt conspiracy. Harley L. Clarke had been kicked out of the Fox companies, and his General Theatres Equipment, which had taken over Fox Film and Fox Theatres, was bankrupt. So was Fox Theatres, and so, as of February 27, 1933, was the once highly desirable Fox West Coast Theaters chain. Fox Film was nearly dead.

  As for the once-august banking establishment, it was in the process of being exposed. On November 22, 1933, the day before Fox’s scheduled appearance, Chase National Bank president Winthrop W. Aldrich had made a shocking disclosure to the Senate subcommittee: since Clarke’s takeover in April 1930, the Chase Bank and its affiliate Chase Securities had loaned a staggering $89.3 million to the Fox companies and General Theatres Equipment. Of that sum, Chase had already written off $69.6 million as a total loss. The investment had been an utter disaster.

  So, early on Thursday morning, November 23, 1933, Fox appeared at the subcommittee’s chamber bristling with energy. “He seemed so full of the information that he wanted to give,” subcommittee counsel Pecora would recall nearly thirty years later. “He was very articulate about it, and very dramatic in his expression . . . he literally held that hearing entranced.”

  That day and the next, Fox poured out his story. Wearing glasses, smoking a cigar, gesturing expressively, and often speaking rapidly, he veered across a wide range of emotions. He made wisecracks that drew hearty laughter from the senators and the large gallery of spectators. He frowned and looked worried. He sounded paranoid, referring to “unseen hands” and “cataclysms.” He knew he sounded paranoid. “I am not foolish enough not to realize that to establish a conspiracy is a very, very, very difficult thing,” he said. “I mean, what can anyone know, or what could I know in advance, supposing that a group of men have made up their minds to conspire against me? Why, I wouldn’t know that until it actually took place.”