The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  CHAPTER 53

  Prison

  That which is past and gone is irrevocable.

  —FRANCIS BACON, INSCRIPTION OVER A PORTAL AT THE NORTH EASTERN PENITENTIARY, LEWISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

  Fox entered the Lewisburg federal penitentiary on November 20, 1942. Nothing is known for sure about his conduct there. The records from Lewisburg—officially known as the North Eastern Penitentiary, a redbrick compound on 1,014 acres of farmland in the Susquehanna Valley—give only dates, no details or comments. The scant remaining evidence indicates that he accepted his fate and tried to endure it with dignity.

  A week after her husband’s arrival at Lewisburg, Eva put their $5 million art collection up for auction at the Kende Galleries in New York, with all the proceeds to be paid in war bonds. Although the sale had been announced about a month beforehand, and may have been an attempt to demonstrate Fox’s patriotism and keep him a free man, it nevertheless went ahead while he was behind bars. Among some 126 paintings offered were works by Van Dyke, Gainsborough, Rubens, Murillo, Tintoretto, and Reynolds. Also for sale were all the furnishings from Fox’s Park Avenue apartment and many from Fox Hall in Woodmere: one of the world’s finest private collections of china, along with jewelry, a gold service, Venetian laces, Aubusson carpets, furniture, and tapestries. During scrap metal collection drives for the war effort, the family contributed some sixty tons, including two Rolls-Royces, one Hispano-Suiza, a truck, and four thousand feet of ornamental fence from Fox Hall. This was the better side of Fox’s character: the refusal to be broken by circumstances, the determination to demonstrate a higher spirit.

  Certainly prison was a humbling experience. Every day, Fox would have worn the inmate’s standard blue denim uniform and eaten starchy meals in the mess hall, seated on a wooden bench alongside other convicts at a long wooden table, and drinking from an aluminum cup. To fulfill Lewisburg’s requirement of eight hours’ work per day, he must have had some kind of job. Probably it was nothing strenuous. Six weeks into his sentence, on January 1, 1943, he turned sixty-four, and his diabetes remained serious. Perhaps he tended to the dairy cows and chickens on one of the prison farms or worked in the tailor shop or did janitorial work. Or maybe he was assigned to the metal shop, where—true to the prison movie cliché—inmates made license plates along with, as part of the war effort, bomb fins and bomb racks.

  His companions would have been a relatively tame lot. Among Lewisburg’s fifteen hundred inmates, the tough customers were locked up in solitary confinement cells under maximum security, so those in circulation tended to be either West Virginia moonshiners and New York alcoholics or paper-pushing white-collar criminals: income tax dodgers, stock swindlers, embezzlers, draft objectors, and the like. Although Fox arrived too late to see either former federal judge Martin T. Manton, who ended his corruption-of-justice sentence there on October 13, 1941, or Moses Annenberg, the father of future TV Guide publisher Walter Annenberg, two other high-profile convicts remained. One was Howard C. Hopson, perpetrator of a $20 million mail fraud scheme in connection with a midwestern based utility company. The other was Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, the former Republican boss of Atlantic City, serving time for income tax evasion on protection money squeezed from numbers-running racketeers.

  Altogether, imprisonment wasn’t as bad for Fox as it would have been twenty years before. Opened in 1932 in response to the prison reform movement that Fox had championed in his 1917 movie The Honor System, Lewisburg replaced the old, harshly punitive fortress philosophy of incarceration with the new idea of humane and rehabilitative treatment. Except for the twenty-one-foot-high wall surrounding the buildings, the watchtowers, the floodlights, and the bars on the inside of the windows, the Italian Renaissance–style facility reminded many of a university hall or a monastery. Prisoners could talk to one another at meals and play the radio in their cells until 9:00 p.m. Recreation facilities included an outdoor baseball diamond and a gymnasium for handball, basketball, weight lifting, and boxing. Prisoners of a more intellectual bent could patronize the excellent fourteen-thousand-volume library and peruse inspirational biographies of Helen Keller, Abraham Lincoln, and Michelangelo, or practical how-tos such as Rabbits for Food and Fur. Such amenities, some observers grumbled, made Lewisburg tantamount to a country club.

  Having caused no trouble, Fox became eligible for parole on March 16, 1943, and was released on May 3 after serving five months and seventeen days of his year-and-a-day sentence. He left quietly, wearing a seasonal suit issued by the prison. Eva and Belle collected him in their chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and took him back to Fox Hall. For the rest of his life, even among close family members, he never spoke about Lewisburg.

  PART V

  ACCEPTANCE

  1943–1952

  CHAPTER 54

  Exile

  Back home at Fox Hall with Eva, their two daughters, and two grandsons, Fox had to face reality. At sixty-four, he was a has-been, an ex-convict. He would have to learn to be someone other than the person he had always wanted to be.

  No one offered him a helping hand back into the movie industry. None of his former colleagues—and there had been many who genuinely liked and admired him—phoned or stopped by for a visit to ask his advice, even if just for old times’ sake. Everyone knew how proud William Fox was. It would have been impossible to ignore the events of the past thirteen years.

  “When you look at me you see my father. He was my size. I am a counterpart of him,” Fox had told Upton Sinclair in 1932. Now he became his father. He gave up on lofty ambition.

  Quietly, Fox set about rebuilding his life. As he had during the early years of his career, he worked with the resources at hand. After his release from prison, he immediately resumed his role as general manager of the Glendale, California–based Mitchell Camera Company, which he had retrieved some years earlier from the wreckage of the Fox companies. Now owned entirely by the Fox family, Mitchell Camera had, since Pearl Harbor, devoted itself to making special motion picture cameras for the U.S. military. Fox personally handled the government contracts and, according to federal agents, tried to assist the war effort in every possible way. One proud achievement was Mitchell’s development of high-speed shutters that made low-altitude photography possible. Used by the U.S. Army Air Forces to map attack routes, the invention allowed American troops to take Italy’s Mount Maggiore and Mount Camino on November 28, 1943, with only one casualty—instead of the feared fifteen thousand deaths.

  Briefly, the old dream flickered again. In the spring of 1944, Fox announced plans to start a new studio. It was going to be “the greatest of all motion picture companies,” built from the ground up on a 1,500-acre plot of land he’d optioned on the outskirts of Los Angeles. He was going to run it on revolutionary principles. The future Fox Pictures Corp.—or maybe it would be called the William Fox Studio—would be entirely owned by its directors, stars, writers, and cinematographers and by franchised exhibitors. No bankers would be involved at all. Fox was going to produce and distribute twenty-five or twenty-six features a year. He would hire the finest creative talent in the business.

  He spent two months in Los Angeles making preparations. Then, in early April 1944, he greeted a succession of reporters at his newly leased New York office on the seventh floor of the Lefcourt Building on Fifth Avenue at Forty-Third Street. The lettering on the door read simply, “William Fox.” The first room, a reception area, was almost completely empty. Next came a large room with several beat-up looking desks and tables, but no telephones or typewriters. Finally, at the far end of the suite, occupying about one-third of the entire space, was Fox’s private office. The first few press interviews took place in the middle room. After the New York Times reported the shabbiness of the furnishings, with Fox using “a battered telephone table” as a desk, he took visitors to the office area, outfitted with several padded leather chairs and “a very new mahogany desk.”

  Other than Fox, the company so far had only three employees: Herber
t Leitstein, Fox’s longtime bookkeeper; Fox’s young relative Teddy Altman, who had previously managed the parking lot Fox owned behind the Roxy Theatre; and auditor Joseph Hart.

  Reporters described Fox as looking “remarkably fit and vigorous” and considerably younger than his sixty-five years. “I feel better now than when I was forty,” he boasted. The years he’d been out of the business didn’t matter. “I started with nothing and I’m not afraid to try again . . . imagination and courage are still the essential elements for success.” Yes, but what about all the chatter in Hollywood that said it would be impossible for anyone to start a major new studio at that point in the industry’s history? The old Fox confidence, or the ghost of it, rose to answer: “I have never been more serious about anything in my life. Those who are betting I won’t do it will lose.

  “Perhaps I am dreaming,” he allowed.

  He was dreaming. His plans were always just about to happen, but they never did. He never bought the 1,500-acre proposed studio site, the exact location of which he never divulged, and he never signed any creative talent or executives or exhibitors. He evidently never even filed incorporation papers. After about fifteen months, the mirage of a comeback dissolved. Fox stopped talking about it, and the press stopped asking.

  His mother had been right. The past was a wall against one’s back. No matter how strong the yearning, one could not return.

  It wasn’t only that Fox lacked the stamina to start over. By the mid-1940s, the motion picture industry was transferring into the hands of a new generation, one that wanted a more polished and professional image. Although some rough-hewn old-timers held on—Zukor at Paramount, Mayer at M-G-M, and the Warner brothers—those not agile enough to adapt or tough enough to fight for their professional lives risked extinction. With their old-fashioned tastes and methods, they looked increasingly like expensive nuisances.

  That was the fate of the two top production executives who had worked under Fox. In March 1944, Twentieth Century–Fox chairman Joe Schenck decided to get rid of Sol Wurtzel, who had run the Western Avenue studio since 1917. “He [Wurtzel] has not been doing any work and he costs us a lot of money at the studio,” Schenck grumbled in an interoffice memo, noting that in 1942 and 1943, Wurtzel had spent $428,000 on writing projects that upper management subsequently rejected. “The only trouble is that the parade has passed him by.”

  Wurtzel’s employment contract was terminated on May 15, 1944. Acknowledging that Wurtzel had been “honest and loyal” to the company for more than twenty-five years, Schenck felt bad about the dismissal, probably about as bad as it was possible to feel without changing his mind. To “give Sol a break,” Schenck had the termination agreement provide that the studio might hire Wurtzel as a consultant or adviser. No one ever called on him in either capacity. Later, realizing that they did actually need the low-budget B movies at which Wurtzel excelled, Twentieth Century–Fox agreed to help finance Wurtzel Productions in exchange for distribution rights. Wurtzel, however, had to make all his movies off the lot.

  Worse was the degradation of Winnie Sheehan. After resigning as vice president of production following the 1935 Twentieth Century–Fox merger, Sheehan married Czech-born opera singer Maria Jeritza, went on a two-month honeymoon to Europe, and returned to find no studio interested in hiring him. Ultimately, he produced only two movies independently, and neither did well: Florian (1940), for M-G-M, about a white Lipizzaner stallion whose story mirrors that of the Austrian Empire, and Captain Eddie (1945), for Twentieth Century–Fox, about heroic World War I fighter pilot Eddie Rickenbacker. Bitter because he had never again held the same power that he’d had under Fox, Sheehan was frequently ill with an unspecified abdominal illness. On July 25, 1945, he died at Hollywood Hospital at age sixty-one. He and Fox had never reconciled.

  The habits of a lifetime saved Fox from redundancy and despair. He had always worked. Once he let go of the idea to start a new motion picture studio, he devoted all his energy to Mitchell Camera, spending about three months of each year in Southern California to oversee the transition from war work back to commercial manufacturing. As the supplier of 85 percent of the world’s motion picture cameras, with more than six hundred employees at its six-acre plant in Glendale, Mitchell Camera had a large backlog of movie studio orders.

  He was still fascinated by motion picture technology. George Mitchell, the self-taught inventor who had sold out his interest in the company to Harley Clarke but whom Fox had brought back as a consulting engineer, recalled, “He used to sit in my office and just watch me. It would just drive me nuts. You know, a guy sitting there, and you’re trying to do something. And every move you make, he was watching to see what you’re doing.”

  They became friends. “Mr. Fox, he was a funny man, but I liked him very much,” said Mitchell. “He was always kidding me, saying, ‘Mitchell, you’re not a businessman and you’ll never be a businessman.’ ” Mitchell would reply, “As long as you’re around, Mr. Fox, I’m all right.” Mitchell later reflected, “They say he was a man mad for money, but that wasn’t really true.”

  Fox also busied himself with his investments and with buying and selling real estate around the country. It was a muted life, distant from the power in which he had once reveled. Months after his release from prison, the press reported him as dead.

  Yet Fox didn’t want to go back to believing in the kind of illusions that would have been necessary to reach again for glory. In May 1945 he wrote to his teenage niece Angela Fox Dunn, “I am not so sure that ‘ignorance is bliss,’ nor am I sure that ‘[i]t is folly to be wise,’ even though it has been quoted many times . . . I rather like the proverb, ‘One is never too old to learn,’ and that goes from the cradle to the last sleep. When one thinks he is too wise, it might be that he does so in ignorance. Such ignorance, and only such ignorance, is bliss. I would prefer to commit the folly of being wise than be contented with being ignorant, to enjoy the bliss.”

  Among his family, Fox could still be the great patriarchal benefactor. With his wife and daughters, the only people who really knew him, the bond was one of great love. With all other relatives, money stood in for emotions he couldn’t express directly.

  Angela Fox Dunn, who lived with her mother, Malvina, in Los Angeles, recalled the drama that invariably surrounded Fox’s visits to the West Coast. Every year, the telegram, sent by Fox’s accountant Herbert Leitstein, arrived at their home a month in advance. Typically, it read, “Dear Malvina—W.F. arriving West coast early November—Will call you—Sends his love to you and the children.” Malvina always sighed with relief as she read the telegram. Then, absorbing its meaning, her hand began to shake and she went “into her usual panic.”

  On the one hand, the news of her adored older brother’s trip west meant that Malvina was still in favor with him. Angela said, “Uncle Bill paid for everything—our homes, our food, our servants, all our needs—but no one ever saw the money. If my mother wanted a new fur coat, Uncle Bill would fly her to New York, meet her at the furrier’s, select the coat himself, charge it to his account, and fly her home.” Fox had also arranged jobs for Malvina as an acting coach at Warner Bros. and, beginning in December 1948, at Twentieth Century–Fox where she believed he was secretly paying her $150-a-week salary. On the other hand, because Fox paid for everything, the family’s survival depended on maintaining favor with him.

  After Fox’s telegram arrived, frantic preparations began. First, they had to buy some trinket to appease Eva. Then Malvina had to hunt for her shoeboxes crammed with the canceled checks, receipts, and invoices that Fox would expect to see. “They all had to be found, every single one of them,” said Angela. “The contents had to be spread out on the living room rug, sorted, and stacked in piles.” While Malvina shuffled papers and fretted about missing items—“Your report card, where is it? W.F. will ask to see it!”—she began to worry about whom to inform when. Some people had to be told right away. Some people could wait a week. Motion picture people should never
be told at all. But who belonged in which category? Malvina didn’t know, but she couldn’t ask because the fact that Fox hadn’t told her meant that she was supposed to know. “Then, of course, we feared for his safety for the whole four weeks.” What if his plane crashed?

  Because there was so much at stake, tension permeated the visits to Fox’s suite at the Ambassador Hotel. “We took the chance of being cut off economically every time we opened our mouths,” said Dunn. While Fox, “hospital pale,” sat in a chair puffing a cigar, “I huddled on the floor at his feet, and Mother, sitting close to him and usually holding his hand, perspired a lot. The conversation ran from his failing health to my schoolwork to Mother’s expenditures and finally to the reminiscences I loved to hear.

  “He could go on and on, topping one tale after another, for more than an hour if Aunt Eva didn’t stop him. She would put her hand on his shoulder and suggest a meal. But we never went out to a restaurant or even down to the hotel dining room. Instead, Uncle Bill called for room service, and a shaky waiter wheeled in a tray of food.”

  Throughout the visits, Fox rarely showed any sign of warmth in his face. Instead, he expressed affection primarily through lavish spending. At the little shops at the Ambassador Hotel, he bought armloads of clothes for his sister and niece. Dunn recalled, “Coats, dresses, suits, shoes, nightgowns, slippers, whatever caught his eye—we rarely tried anything on. He counted out bills from the huge roll of cash to pay the bill, and we carried out our packages, uncertain about what exactly he had bought us. It was always a surprise to come home and open the packages.”

  Major purchases were conducted just as hastily. Once, when Eva was out of the room, Malvina ventured, “Would it be possible, Brother Bill, to trade in the Packard on a new one?” Fox immediately called a cab. Dunn said, “The three of us went to the first dealer we could find on Wilshire Boulevard. Uncle Bill looked over the showroom and quickly selected a blue car, one to match Mother’s eyes. ‘Do you like it, Mal?’ he asked. Mother was speechless, but there was nothing to discuss anyway. Uncle Bill had made his decision, and we never even sat in the car, much less drove it around the block, before he had paid cash on the spot and ordered it delivered to our home. The whole transaction didn’t take more than fifteen minutes.”