The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Such facts didn’t really matter. Fox knew only that he had lost his last hope for a comeback. He was now, in his own eyes, nobody.

  CHAPTER 50

  Alone

  As Fox’s future disappeared, so did his past. By the spring of 1935, when the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated his Tri-Ergon patents, Fox Theatres no longer existed and Fox Film was staring at doom. Thanks to the disastrous regimes of utilities magnate Harley Clarke and banker Edward Tinker, the studio had lost all the vitality and creative fervor of the Fox era.

  The installation of Sidney Kent, Paramount’s former head of sales, as the new Fox Film president in the spring of 1932 hadn’t made much difference. Kent later said that if he’d known the true state of affairs, he probably wouldn’t have taken the job. Almost immediately, Kent confronted roiling studio politics and was forced to take back Winfield Sheehan, who had taken a leave of absence in late 1931 due to an alleged nervous breakdown. Sheehan had had Fox Film’s director of safety, Joseph Reilly, a former New York City police officer whom he had known during his days at the police commissioner’s office, gather evidence on his behalf. Reilly eavesdropped on conversations of the studio’s new business manager, Donald McIntyre, tapped phone lines, and reported to Sheehan that McIntyre had called him stupid and greedy. Sheehan threatened to sue for criminal libel and breach of contract. McIntyre was fired. On June 15, 1932, Sheehan returned as vice president in charge of production. In December 1932, McIntyre threw himself out the window of a twenty-first-floor hotel suite in New York City.

  Sol Wurtzel, who had been dismissed in early 1932, returned at the same time as Sheehan. Possibly that was Sheehan’s doing. Although they’d been bitter rivals during the Fox administration, Wurtzel was now Sheehan’s best bet for an ally in upper management.

  Three years of strife followed. Sidney Kent, who’d hoped instead to appoint his former Paramount colleague Jesse Lasky as head of production, didn’t want Sheehan, and continually undermined his authority. Kent canceled Sheehan’s unilateral authority over creative matters and required all major decisions to be referred to him or general sales manager John D. Clark. Although Sheehan held on, production fell deeper into disarray. According to Robert D. Webb, then an assistant director at Fox, nobody ever wanted to make a decision: “They would have quite a few stories that somebody would start fooling with and then the picture would be delayed and delayed, never hit the stages.”

  Managerial chaos had a crushing effect on the studio’s creative talent. To get through the much-troubled Walking Down Broadway, in production from August to October 1932, director Erich von Stroheim drank heavily, carrying a quart-size whiskey flask in one of the large pockets of his camel’s hair coat. In November 1932, Fox Film’s most popular romantic actor, Charles Farrell, quit before the end of his contract. He explained, “I am sick of motion pictures and am fleeing from Hollywood with utter disgust.” Farrell’s usual on-screen partner, Janet Gaynor, stuck it out, but one day during filming of State Fair (1933), Sheehan showed up on the set to tell her, costar Will Rogers, and director Henry King that the studio couldn’t make payroll. All three volunteered to defer their salaries so that secretaries and security guards and stagehands could keep their jobs.

  There were some bright spots. State Fair was a hit and was nominated for two 1932–1933 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Cavalcade, based on Noel Coward’s hit play about three decades of life in upper-class London, earned nearly $3 million against a cost of $1.1 million and won 1932–1933 Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director (Frank Lloyd). Fox Film also had steady moneymakers in Shirley Temple, who was an instant sensation in her first starring role in the musical comedy Stand Up and Cheer (1934), and in Will Rogers and the Charlie Chan series with Swedish actor Warner Oland.

  Fox Film president Kent tried hard to revive hope. In mid-1933, he reorganized the company, slashing Class A and B stockowners’ holdings by five-sixths and issuing about two million new A shares, which were given to creditors to cancel $38 million in debt. Then he tried to talk the organization back into prosperity, even going as far as to assert, absurdly, that production was “functioning better than it ever has in the history of this company.” The numbers told a different story. For 1933, Fox Film had a paltry net operating profit of $853,668—which was at least better than the $8.4 million loss for 1932. The following year, while the rest of the industry started to recover, Fox Film earned a net profit of only $1.27 million.

  Optimistic puffery aside, the studio had taken too bad a beating to recover. The spirit of enthusiasm and enterprise that Fox had instilled was gone. Hopelessness, lethargy, anger, and fear prevailed. The mother of a Fox Film extra, who decided to visit the studio to see what kind of place her daughter worked in, found herself pushed off the property with a warning to “get the hell out of here.” The same woman, who owned one-and-a-fraction shares of Fox Film stock, later attended a shareholders meeting and, on her way to the meeting room, saw porters and attendants with their feet up on desks and stenographers smoking and chatting with them. She said, “The only active gentleman I saw in the building, I rushed over and shook hands with. He was in the tax department—the only department working. I never saw such shameful waste.”

  In early 1935, studio management began looking aggressively for a solution. No one even suggested bringing back Fox. The idea was unthinkable. Neither Fox nor the Chase Bank, which in the 1933 reorganization had replaced General Theaters Equipment as Fox Film’s largest shareholder, had any worse enemy than each other. Instead, Sidney Kent went hunting for a merger partner. He found only one suitable candidate: tiny, two-year-old Twentieth Century Pictures.

  It was an odd match—one of the oldest film producers with one of the youngest; one of the largest with one of the smallest—yet the courtship made sense. Fox Film didn’t want to pair up with any other major studio, which would have brought along a parcel of expensive real estate. Fox Film, with its nearly one-hundred-acre Movietone City and its eight-acre Western Avenue lot, already had what were widely considered the best physical facilities in the industry. Twentieth Century owned no land, but rather, made all its movies at United Artists, which also handled distribution. The real selling point, however, was that Twentieth Century had what Fox Film most needed: strong, effective leadership. Run by chairman of the board Joseph Schenck and production chief Darryl F. Zanuck, Twentieth Century had, since its start in 1933, made twenty features, only two of them flops and minor flops at that. On average, Zanuck’s movies earned 2.5 times their average negative cost, the best record in the industry. As a result, the two companies had roughly equal annual earning power: $1.7 million for Twentieth Century versus Fox Film’s $1.8 million. In many ways, thirty-two-year-old Zanuck was another William Fox—energetic, decisive, interested in all facets of production, and keenly attuned to audiences’ tastes—with the distinct advantage of not actually being William Fox.

  Negotiations took place so quickly and secretly that when the deal was announced on May 27, 1935, the news hit the industry like a “major bombshell.” Although Fox Film shareholders still had to give formal approval at an August 15 special meeting, no one involved doubted the outcome. Even Sheehan recognized a fait accompli. On July 16, he resigned in exchange for nearly $430,000 to settle the remaining seventeen months of his contract and for giving Sidney Kent an irrevocable proxy to vote his 13,000 Fox Film A shares in favor of the merger.

  It was time to forget the past and start fresh. Under the terms of the merger, Schenck, the brother of Nicholas Schenck who had arranged the 1929 sale of the Loew family’s shares to Fox, would be Fox Film’s new chairman of the board. Kent would remain as president. Zanuck would take charge as head of production. Rumor had it that the new team intended to drop the Fox name altogether.

  Fox couldn’t let go. To try to block the merger, he filed two lawsuits. Nine days before the shareholders meeting, he sued Fox Film, Fox Theatres, General Theatres Equipment, Chase National Bank, and Chase Securities f
or $21 million, alleging that they had repudiated their agreements with him and committed “unlawful acts.” Several days later, on behalf of his wife and the holding company he’d created for his assets, he asked the New York state courts to stay the merger on the grounds that Fox Film’s price for Twentieth Century’s assets was “recklessly exorbitant.” (The merger involved a multi-faceted stock swap. While the new preferred stock was allocated to reflect the fact that Fox Film had a net worth of about $36 million and Twentieth Century a net worth of only $4 million, the common stock was to be evenly divided between Fox Film and Twentieth Century shareholders.) Fox got nowhere. A judge ruled that the court had no authority to review business decisions as long as they were made honestly and in good faith.

  Fox and Eva didn’t bother to vote their stock at the August 15, 1935, meeting. There was no point. The Chase Bank owned about 72 percent of the total 2.42 million Class A shares outstanding; the other large shareholders were the investment firms of Hayden, Stone and White, Weld & Co. To no one’s great surprise, more than 2 million Fox Film shares were voted in favor of the merger and fewer than 2,000 against it.*

  “This is the finest deal ever put together in the industry,” Kent declared at the meeting, which drew fewer than one hundred shareholders and their lawyers. No one mentioned all the milestone achievements of the William Fox era or the fine reputation that Fox Film had once enjoyed. Yes, the company name was going to change, not as drastically as Fox might have feared, but with the small, upstart company given precedence over the major pioneer. In explaining the choice of “Twentieth Century–Fox,” Kent said, “There has been a bad smell about Fox in the past. Some of it still persists. It will be an asset to the company to send new product out under a new label.”

  It was a mean world. In his personal life, too, a swarm of hostile forces beset Fox.

  In late March 1934, a letter signed “Dillinger’s lieutenant” and decorated with a pair of crudely drawn skull-and-crossbones, arrived for Eva at Fox Hall threatening to kidnap the two Fox grandsons unless she paid $50,000. The text, in neatly printed capital letters with “an excess of punctuation marks” and many misplaced periods, warned that the junior William Foxes, now nine and seven, could be taken “as easy as young Lindbergh was got.” A week later, a postcard arrived repeating the demands.

  Fox hired a round-the-clock detail of private guards, changed the Fox Hall phone number three times, and called in the FBI. Although a trap was set, with Eva leaving a purported ransom package (containing wadded paper instead of $50,000 in cash) at midnight at the Culluloo Monument in a secluded section of Woodmere, and with armed federal agents dressed as gardeners posted nearby, the trail went cold. No one showed up all night to collect the package, and no further communications were received.

  But someone had to be punished. In the summer of 1934, federal agents arrested Maurice Monnier, a diminutive, soft-spoken, thirty-five-year-old unemployed chauffeur. In late July—four months after Eva received the extortion letter—Monnier had gotten into a fistfight with the Fox Hall gatekeeper. He had come to apply for a job, bearing a letter of introduction to Eva from his former employer, the head of a Wall Street brokerage. When the gatekeeper told him to go away and tried to push him off the property, Monnier punched him in the nose. That assault constituted half of the state’s case against Monnier. The other half arose from his use of wide loops when writing a capital M, just as the letter writer had, and his tendency to misplace periods.

  In a Fox movie, it would have been obvious that Monnier was being railroaded, but no one in the Fox family could see very clearly. Smartly dressed in a black silk dress, fur cape, black-and-white turban, and amber-colored glasses, Eva testified for the prosecution in October 1934. The jury deadlocked, voting seven to five in favor of conviction. At a second trial two months later, Monnier was exonerated. Nobody got justice. Monnier had spent three months in a federal detention center because he couldn’t afford to pay the $25,000 bail, and the real culprit was never found.

  More bizarrely, Fox found himself stalked and harassed for money by an aging, ailing feminist and world peace activist who believed he had publicly disgraced her. Rosika Schwimmer had once been known as the most powerful woman in the world. At the turn of the century she organized an association of feminists in her native Hungary, and in 1915 she persuaded Henry Ford to finance a “peace ship,” the ocean liner Oscar II, which traveled in December from New York Harbor to Norway to promote a speedy end to the world war. Afterward, Schwimmer’s life went downhill. The peace ship flopped, and Henry Ford, who reportedly spent $500,000 on the expedition, turned against Schwimmer. Some blamed her for his subsequent anti-Semitic rants in the Dearborn Independent. By the late 1920s, no one wanted to book her for a lecture or publish her articles.

  Schwimmer’s obsession with Fox stemmed from a casual reference he’d made to her in Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox. Fox had mentioned that while trying to round up support for the peace ship, she called his New York office and promised him that if he sponsored the project, he could sell twenty times as many movie tickets. Arguably, it was a flattering portrayal in that, even though he turned her down, Fox presented Schwimmer as astute enough to speak to him in his own language. Schwimmer, however, was furious. Claiming that she and Fox never met and that the book depicted her as “an arch-hypocrite” who was only after money, she filed a $100,000 libel lawsuit against Fox and Sinclair. A judge dismissed the case without a trial.

  Instead of dropping the matter, Schwimmer became obsessed with the idea of meeting Fox to hear him repeat his story face-to-face. She even sent an acquaintance to spy on him at the Woodmere Club. Fox refused all contact, but was not unsympathetic. Aware of Schwimmer’s money troubles, he offered to pay all the court costs entered against her if she would simply sign a general release of claims. She refused, and brooded that Fox “should be shut up in an asylum where he cannot do harm to decent people.” What did she want so badly from Fox? Perhaps just kinship and commiseration. They had both been born in Hungary—Schwimmer was only sixteen months older. Both were Jewish. Both had once had worldwide influence, and both had lost it. Fox had the wisdom to keep his distance. No good would come of their meeting.

  In the broader frame, a spirit of malevolence threatened the values of tolerance and inclusion that girded Fox’s vision of America. Not only in Europe was anti-Semitism mobilizing as an aggressive menace. Close by Fox Hall, hate groups were active with impunity. On August 25, 1934, an evening parade organized by the local chapter of the Friends of New Germany, a reputed Nazi organization, traveled through Long Island’s South Shore communities. Some sixty cars festooned with Nazi swastika flags carried about two hundred men and women who wore red, white, and blue armbands emblazoned with a swastika and who raised their hands in a Nazi salute. Escorting the procession were “husky uniformed county motorcycle police officers.”

  Five years of futile effort had left Fox weary, disillusioned, and sad. At Fox Film, he had had unlimited horizons. Now his main social activity was to go next door to play golf at the Woodmere Club. Often his companion was psychiatrist Dr. Menas Gregory, with whom he sometimes had a sandwich on the porch. According to the country club president, Fox was “always gruff” and rarely spoke to anyone else.

  His family, too, had been badly damaged. A rumor circulated that Eva, Mona, and Belle were now so paranoid that, once, they all fled to separate corners of a room, each with a gun, ready to shoot the others. This was probably an exaggeration, but it was true that they were rarely seen outside Fox Hall and appeared to have no social contacts beyond the family. The home that had once provided peaceful, restorative rest for Fox had become a fortress with the drawbridge raised.

  CHAPTER 51

  Revenge

  The big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from wit
hin—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, “THE CRACK-UP,”

  ESQUIRE, FEBRUARY 1936

  Severed from the glory of his past, fifty-six-year-old Fox broke down psychologically. Try though he had to overcome the loss of his companies, he could not. Following the announcement of the Twentieth Century–Fox merger, he wanted revenge.

  The triggering event was a $297,412.91 judgment entered against him on July 18, 1935, by the Capital Company of California for unpaid rent on the San Francisco Fox Theatre. Nine years before, when he had gone in with the Capital Company, a subsidiary of A. P. Giannini’s Bank of America, to build the theater, the arrangement had been that the Capital Company would own the land and the building, while Fox Theatres would pay annual rent of $235,000. At Giannini’s insistence, Fox had personally guaranteed the rent for the duration of the twenty-five-year lease.

  Harley Clarke’s acquisition of Fox Theatres in 1930 hadn’t voided that obligation. Neither did the terms by which one of Fox’s new real estate companies, Pacific Theatres, agreed to take over the San Francisco Fox in March 1933. The theater had closed down five months earlier, a financial failure due to Clarke’s larcenous mismanagement, the Depression, and a local market overbuilt with extravagant movie palaces. Although Fox got the rent lowered to $200,000 annually, the theater continued to lose money, probably because it played independent movies for a top ticket price of twenty-five cents. The Capital Company refused to renegotiate the lease. In March 1934, Fox stopped paying the full rent and instead remitted all the theater’s income beyond operating expenses. In December 1934, the Capital Company sued Fox, and seven months later, it won its judgment. Fox refused to pay. As he saw it, he was doing the best he could with the theater while the Capital Company refused to be reasonable.