The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Although he had bought and furnished the homes that Malvina’s family lived in, Fox never came to see them. Once, he did leave the Ambassador Hotel to inspect a small playhouse that he had rented so that Malvina, who had given up her acting ambitions because he disapproved, could run a drama school. Briefly, he was his former self again. Dunn recalled, “He had ordered the curtain, the chairs, and the carpeting himself, and he thoroughly inspected everything, tested the seats for comfort, and ran the curtain up and down from a little booth in the balcony.”

  Malvina and her daughter’s visits ended when Fox needed to lie down. Dunn recalled, “Fatigue began to show in the sad face. He would walk us to the elevator while Aunt Eva remained in the suite and just before we parted, he would press a folded hundred dollar bill into my hand with the stern instruction, ‘Don’t call and thank me!’ ”

  Even with his two grandsons, money stood in for a personal connection. George Mitchell recalled, “I was walking with W.F. out at Fox Hall on Long Island one day—you could walk for an hour and not see the whole place—and one of the grandsons approached us. I think it was the older one, but they were both called William Fox, William Fox II, and William Fox III. Never knew their father’s names. Well, the boy must have been about twenty, and he just walks along. He doesn’t do anything. All of a sudden W.F. stops talking to me, and he glares at the kid.

  “ ‘Bill, you’re forgetting something,’ he says, pointing to his cheek. Finally the boy walks over and gives his grandfather a peck on the cheek. And I see W.F. slip his hand into Bill’s coat and leave a hundred dollar bill in there. That was for the kiss.”

  In casual social encounters, Fox used money to distinguish himself. Mitchell said, “He took me to the racetrack one time, and he had a whole pocketful of hundred dollar bills. He wouldn’t go up and take his seat in the grandstand. He stayed down in the paddock, talking to the, you know, the roustabouts down there, asking which was a good bet, and passing out bills for the tips.”

  In exile, Fox found his way back to religious faith. In 1946, after an eleven-year absence, he and Eva rejoined Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El. They would remain members for life. His understanding of God had changed, though. He no longer believed in an all-powerful being actively involved in human affairs, guiding and protecting the righteous. Instead, he had come to view God’s plans and purposes as, finally, opaque and unknowable. It was best to accept that. His niece Angela once asked how he could still worship a God who had let his enemies win. He replied with a story about a child who boasts to a friend that God has answered his prayers for a bicycle, a pony, and roller skates. “Well, so where is the bicycle, where is the pony, and where are the roller skates?” the friend demanded. The first child said, “The answer was ‘No!’ ”

  As another step toward rehabilitation, in late 1946, Fox applied for a presidential pardon. He wanted, he said, to restore his place among his fellow men and to regain a secure and honorable position for his family.

  Following standard procedure, FBI agents investigated Fox’s behavior since his release from prison and heard only positive reports. Colleagues at Mitchell Camera described him as hardworking, a “dynamo,” and unlike most others in the film business—that is, as having “the highest type of morals.” The assistant manager of the Marguery Hotel and Apartments at 270 Park Avenue, where the Fox family had lived for more than twenty years, said they were excellent tenants who had never caused trouble, always paid the rent promptly, and behaved very courteously. A neighbor in Woodmere said that during the nineteen years she’d lived there, she’d never heard any derogatory gossip about the Fox family. Neither had the Fox Hall caretaker, an employee of twenty-four years, who was interviewed under a pretext so he would speak freely. Former New York governor Herbert H. Lehman submitted a character affidavit, describing Fox as a straightforward, patriotic family man who thoroughly deserved restoration of his rights.

  Even Gerald A. Gleeson, the U.S. attorney who had initially opposed Fox’s attempt to withdraw his guilty plea and stand trial after the dismissal of charges against Davis and Kaufman, went out of his way to help. Gleeson wrote a three-page letter to the Justice Department’s pardon attorney on behalf of Fox. He also tried to get Judge Guy K. Bard, who had sentenced Fox to prison, to write a supportive letter. Bard refused, but at least he did not oppose Fox’s application.

  One potential snag occurred. A presidential pardon, which is a sign of forgiveness but not vindication, usually requires that the applicant accept responsibility and show remorse for the crime. Fox, however, still insisted that his $27,500 payment to Judge Davis had been a loan rather than a bribe.

  The government overlooked this irregularity. After all, Fox had never gotten anything back for testifying against Davis and Kaufman, even though he had been in poor health and the process had exposed him to vicious personal attacks. Although Davis and Kaufman weren’t convicted, Fox’s information had enabled the Justice Department to have the two removed from positions of legal influence and, in Davis’s case, from the public payroll.

  On August 18, 1947, President Truman granted Fox a full and unconditional pardon.

  Yet Fox could not forget the past. He was not at peace. Angela Fox Dunn recalled, “He was restless, tense, odd-tempered, emotional, explosive. He could be pensive and sad for long periods as we sat with him, then suddenly stirred to brief outbursts of demonstrative affection. Abruptly, he would break the silent meditation, bestowing a quick kiss or patting mother’s hand with a ‘God bless you’ or ‘Be in good health, dear.’ It was impossible to tell if he was pleased with what we said because he never smiled.”

  Secretly, he drank. Hidden in the hotel bathroom’s medicine chest was a bottle of Teacher’s Scotch.

  Fox’s inner turmoil affected everyone in the family. More than ever, Eva became her husband’s protector. With her short gray hair cut in “a rather mannish style, well-groomed but no beauty salon glamour,” she usually wore beige pants and a silk shirt, never a dress, and stood stiffly behind Fox’s chair or paced the suite during the Ambassador Hotel visits from relatives. As much as ever, she disapproved of his hand-outs to members of his birth family. That was the reason that the shopping expeditions for Malvina and Angela took place without her and the reason that Fox’s hundred-dollar bills had to be folded up and passed quickly during good-byes at the elevator door. When Eva didn’t accompany Fox on trips to California, he called her every night.

  Later generations paid a high price for Fox’s psychological wounds. Mona and Belle, in their mid- to late forties, still lived with their parents and had few outside social contacts. Neither had remarried since their divorces during the 1930s, Mona’s from her second husband, diamond merchant Joseph Riskin, and Belle’s from her only husband, Milton J. Schwartz. Neither had any sort of a career, Belle never having pursued one and Mona having abandoned her half-hearted jewelry designing effort. Fox and Eva made no attempt to nudge their daughters from the nest. Perhaps it would have seemed heartless, when there was no practical reason, to push them out into a world that they knew could be irrational and spitefully cruel.

  Yet they were intelligent women, still in the prime of life. Their energy had to go somewhere. Belle’s muscle disorder, which appears to have started sometime in the early 1930s, when her marriage was dissolving and Fox was losing his companies, became a major preoccupation. She began using a wheelchair—Malvina Fox Dunn always believed there was nothing physically wrong with her legs—and spent much of her time seeking a cure. For a while, she staked her hopes on the controversial methods of Sister Elizabeth Kenny, the Australian nurse who pioneered the field of rehabilitation medicine by using heat packs and gentle exercise to treat polio victims. In early 1946, Belle (accompanied by Mona, who didn’t need treatment) went to the Sister Kenny Institute in Minneapolis to stay for several months.

  Right away the Fox daughters made themselves “very much beloved” by the institute’s staff and “fit in nicely” despite living conditions conside
rably less luxurious than their usual standard. Belle made remarkable progress. As Sister Kenny wrote to Fox after only six weeks, “many muscles that were apparently non-functioning have been restored to a certain degree of functionability, which is most encouraging.”

  Across the distance, Fox and Eva couldn’t let go. Every night, they phoned. After nearly two months, it was clear that the interference was impeding progress. The institute’s chief therapist, Valerie Harvey, explained in a letter to Fox, “Miss Fox is very easily worked up to a state of tension and just the fact of expecting a call every night is enough to excite her condition.” Fox and Eva agreed to scale back the phone calls to twice a week, but a massive outbreak of polio in Minnesota in the summer of 1946 caused the “girls” to return to Fox Hall before Belle had completed her treatment. At home, she regressed. They hoped to return once the epidemic ended, Mona and Belle wrote to Kenny. They loved her, “dearest wonderful one,” and missed her “beautiful face” and “sweet voice.” They never did return. However, for years they sent gifts to Kenny and appeared with her at events to promote acceptance of her methods and to try to start a worldwide chain of Kenny clinics.

  Did Fox and Eva need their daughters too much to allow them their freedom? Was the point not to find a cure but to keep looking for one together? Their daughters’ lives gave order to their own. Eva wrote to family friend Albert M. Greenfield, “The years would slip away unnoticed if it weren’t for our children growing up about us.” By 1950, Fox was investigating the possibility of sending Belle to the Institute for Muscle Research in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, which was headed by Dr. Albert Szent-Györgyi, the Hungarian-born Nobel laureate who discovered vitamins C and P.

  As Belle occupied center stage in the drama, older sister Mona faded into a supporting role. With her emotional nature and her once-pretty face disfigured by her 1932 car accident, she was, said Angela Fox Dunn, “just plain strange.” Often she sat by a window at Fox Hall doing needlepoint.

  The two Fox grandsons were similarly stunted. One of them—George Mitchell thought it was Mona’s son, William T. Fox—tried to escape, first by enlisting in the army. Mitchell said, “You know, they wouldn’t take that kid in the service, not that W.F. would have let him go. He had these spells all the time. He went up to Boston and bought a major’s uniform and put it on, and went parading around in the street having a good time impersonating Major Somebody. And they picked him up, and Mr. Fox had to go get him and straighten him around again. Then he went down to New Orleans and did the same thing. He was a little bit off some place. Neither of those boys ever amounted to anything.” The other young William Fox, Belle’s son, had cerebral palsy. He enrolled at New York University but, despite the Fox money, didn’t last beyond a few semesters.

  Elsewhere, the family was crumbling. Despite Fox’s efforts to provide care and protection so that he could remain in society, his sensitive, intellectual, mentally ill brother, Maurice, had been institutionalized since the late 1930s, and it was unlikely he would ever get out. The last time Malvina had visited him, in 1939, he hadn’t recognized her. Fox’s other brother, the black sheep Aaron, remained estranged, as did Aaron’s ex-wife, Alice, whom Fox had refused to support. Aaron and Alice’s two children grew up hating Fox. Their son, yet another William Fox, changed his name one rainy night in Milwaukee in the mid-1940s while on leave from the army. Weary of the past, he stepped into a phone booth, opened the phone book at random, closed his eyes, and pointed three times. The third time, he came up with a last name he liked, one he would use for the rest of his life: Devereaux.

  In Woodmere, Fox tried to keep up appearances. “Every holiday season the family would send a card with a photograph of Fox Hall on the cover, with the snowflakes falling on this imposing mansion,” recalled Angela Fox Dunn. To look at the image, however, was to recall the whole tragic story and its morbid outcome. “It looked more like a Charles Addams drawing than the Hearst Castle.”

  CHAPTER 55

  Fade to Black

  The end came slowly and ignominiously. In 1951, Fox suffered a stroke and spent most of the next year at Doctor’s Hospital in Manhattan, often in critical condition. He died there on Thursday, May 8, 1952, at the age of seventy-three.

  Suddenly, a flurry of interest swept him back into the public eye. Across the country, newspapers and trade publications ran detailed obituaries, and effusive praise poured forth from people who for years had done their best to ignore him. Sol Wurtzel, who had changed his phone number in 1937 to avoid speaking to Fox and who never had any further communication with him, told the Los Angeles Times, “He was a great man and a wonderful pioneer in the industry.” Twentieth Century–Fox took out full-page ads in trade publications titled simply, “William Fox.” They showed a drawing of a slump-shouldered man in a black suit and tie, holding a black hat at his side, his head cast down sadly. “Twentieth Century–Fox Film Corporation bows in grieving tribute to one of the outstanding pioneers of the industry,” the text read. “Those who knew him best will long mourn his passing.” Flower arrangements and letters and telegrams of condolence inundated the family.

  Fox’s wife and daughters buried him in a quiet private ceremony at Salem Fields Cemetery on Long Island. No one from the motion picture industry attended because no one from the motion picture industry was invited.

  The family never really recovered. Eva Fox became a sort of Miss Havisham, allowing Fox Hall and her final Manhattan home at 4 East Seventy-Fifth Street to fall into neglect—throughout were worn carpets, soiled draperies, damaged furniture, and chipped artworks—before her death in December 1962. Mona and Belle and their sons drifted to Switzerland and the Bahamas; none became involved in motion pictures. Fox’s youngest sibling, Malvina, who died less than three months after he did, summed up their collective state of mind: “Brother Bill is gone. All is lost.”

  Fox died believing himself a failure. In the late 1920s, he had said, “The only thing worth while [sic] in this world, aside from the love of God and family, is honorable achievement. And to be entirely successful, in my opinion, a man must keep on achieving until the end.” He hadn’t done that. His motion picture career had lasted only twenty-five years and left him two more decades to go on without a purpose.

  He had also failed to live up to his own standards of integrity. In 1932 he told Upton Sinclair that, at his funeral, he hoped the rabbi would say, “He wasn’t a bad man. He lived a righteous life.” But he later committed a serious crime for which he was imprisoned, and although Truman’s pardon lessened the social stigma, nothing could erase the stain on his character.

  What went wrong? If Fox wasn’t—as film history has portrayed him—a coarse, greedy egotist, neither was he—as he tended to think of himself—entirely a victim of hostile, conspiratorial forces. While the facts do show that after the stock market crash, he was targeted by a financial alliance that forced him to relinquish his companies, he had made himself vulnerable. He had misunderstood history. He had seen himself as a heroic captain of industry and believed that because he’d been able to build his empire in sole command, he would be able to hold on to it even while Wall Street finance capitalism increasingly subsumed the nation’s entrepreneurial functions. He would not share the power he had worked so hard to earn. He didn’t believe he would be required to. He had believed that the ruling elite would enforce a code of fair play—that following the stock market crash, bankers would lend money to help his profitable companies weather the crisis; then, that the courts would shut down the underhanded receivership lawsuits; and finally, at the very least, after he sold out, that Harley Clarke and the Chase Bank would let him have a hand in running the Fox companies rather than allow them to go to ruin. He had believed in a vision of America that was never as true as he’d wanted it to be.

  He had seen plenty of evidence, dating back to the 1901 McKinley assassination, of the flaws in the system. He had chosen to ignore it. He wanted too much to love his adopted country.

  It might
not have been the wrong choice. Had he not believed as ardently as he did, he might never have accomplished all that he did.

  Of course, Fox’s life wasn’t a failure. The thriving existence of the studio testifies to that. So, too, do Fox’s less immediately visible achievements: instigating and championing the legal action to dismantle the Motion Picture Patents Company, which laid the foundation for the Hollywood studio system; the creation of the movies’ first brand-name sex symbol, Theda Bara; pioneering the development of Hollywood’s foreign markets; leading the commercial development of sound-on-film, which ensured a rapid transition to talking pictures; the countless creative careers he encouraged; and his many heartfelt, soaringly ambitious movies whose influence shaped the contours of the emerging art form—among them, A Daughter of the Gods, Cleopatra, A Tale of Two Cities, The Iron Horse, What Price Glory, 7th Heaven, and Sunrise. No one in his generation, or arguably thereafter, matched him in the breadth and depth of his contributions to the motion picture industry. If the title can be given to anyone, it belongs to William Fox: the man who made the movies.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  So many people contributed significantly to this book and I am deeply grateful for all the assistance, direction, and encouragement so generously provided. My thanks go first to the late Angela Fox Dunn, to whom this book is dedicated, for sharing her vivid memories of “Uncle Bill” and most especially for our twenty-year friendship. Anyone fortunate enough to have known Angela will recall her indomitably optimistic spirit, her keen sense of humor, her courage, and her compassion. A light in this world went out when Angela passed away in 2005.