Even people who knew him well often described Fox’s confidence as imperturbable. It wasn’t. It bothered him to be considered a sex merchant, a corrupter of morals, and a danger to small children.
Essential though money was, Fox realized, it would never be enough. As profits flowed in, he thought about the purpose of his life and the nature of the legacy he would leave. Did he want, he asked himself, to live mainly for monetary gain, only to end up “buried under an imposing pile of stone”? No, he decided. He wanted to make movies that would earn his name “the respect and attention of educated, well-bred people for generations to come.” He wanted to develop screen artists on a par with writers such as Galsworthy, Maeterlinck, Dreiser, Wharton, and Gorki.
This was not to say, however, that Fox was prepared to give up his winning formula of sex and violence. For one thing, he still didn’t see what was wrong with those movies. For another, their profits kept Fox Film going. But now he could afford to take chances—the sort of chances that wouldn’t really be chances if he knew his audience as well as he believed he did.
Fox defined the challenge primarily in terms of scale and splendor. To win respectability, he would do as all the great American entrepreneurs had done: impose his vision spectacularly on the landscape of his industry. His great movies would be long movies, lavish-looking movies, magnificently presented movies. They would deal with big, important subjects and would win over even the skeptics who refused to admit that film could ever be an art.
Again, timing benefited Fox. He had entered the industry when it was willing to welcome anyone with a surfeit of energy and enthusiasm, and now the restlessly expanding American economy wanted the movies to be big. By the mid-1910s, movies had become the nation’s fifth-largest industry (after agriculture, transportation, oil, and steel), representing a $500 million investment and drawing a weekly audience of ten million Americans—one-tenth of the population. Nineteen fifteen was the pivotal year when the industry turned away from shorter, two- and three-reel movies and began concentrating on five-reel features that ran at least an hour long.
Nineteen fifteen was also the year of the first great American blockbuster. Premiering in Los Angeles in February 1915 and in New York City the following month, D. W. Griffith’s three-hour The Birth of a Nation became an extraordinary success. Despite its two-dollar top ticket price and relentless controversy over its demeaning depiction of African Americans, the movie packed theaters coast to coast, month after month. “How soon will we have another Birth of a Nation? That little inquiry can be heard rather generally these days,” reported the trade paper Wid’s Daily in November 1915. “There is not so much doubt any more about there being another coming: it is more of a question, ‘Who will do it?’ ”
Actually, for Fox that wasn’t much of a question. He was already at work answering it. To prepare the market, in the spring of 1915 he had ordered all his branch offices not to rent movies to any exhibitor who charged less than ten cents a ticket. As Winnie Sheehan explained, why should a studio invest in a great movie “only to make it possible for a person to walk into a theater by laying down a nickel and see that picture put on the screen to the accompaniment of an orchestra of twelve pieces and a $40,000 pipe organ? It’s all out of reason.”
By the summer of 1915, Fox had begun preproduction on the first of a series of spectacular movies that would trample the industry’s existing boundaries and confirm the “event” movie as an integral element of American moviemaking. He went about it with his characteristic practicality. First, he jotted down a list of the five most successful movies to date, identifying their biggest dramatic moments and most thrilling sequences. Next, he estimated each movie’s budget. Then, studying the information, he resolved to produce a movie that would outdo all of them in cost and scale. His movie, he declared, would be “so gigantic, so immense in scope,” that for at least the next ten years, no one would dare try to rival it.
That movie became A Daughter of the Gods (1916). Fox chose this particular project mainly because of its writer and director, Herbert Brenon, whom he had hired in early 1915 and who had since ably directed four Theda Bara movies (Kreutzer Sonata, The Clemenceau Case, Sin, and The Two Orphans).
Brenon’s talent mattered greatly to Fox, and so, equally, did his personality. Born in Dublin, Ireland, to a wealthy family and educated at King’s College in London, he was the younger brother of noted New York Morning Telegraph music critic Algernon St. John Brenon. Herbert Brenon exuded the sort of polished, cosmopolitan confidence that Fox sought so eagerly to cultivate in himself. In addition to giving Brenon extraordinary professional freedom, such as the power to pay cast and crew members whatever salaries he saw fit, Fox enthusiastically pursued the director as a close friend. He entertained Brenon frequently on his houseboat, the Mona Belle (the former Stop-a-While, purchased from disgraced city chamberlain Charles Hyde), on the Hudson and kept his office door open to him for intimate chats. “It was a friendship almost emotional in its intensity, for the very reason that it seemed a contradiction to exist at all,” commented a mutual acquaintance, journalist and screenwriter Randolph Bartlett. “But Fox recognized Brenon’s imaginative powers, and Brenon appreciated the opportunities Fox gave him.”
Beneath the surface, the two men had a lot in common. Like Fox, Brenon had been wounded by his early family life. His mother left his father, a drama critic, and uprooted her children so she could pursue a not-very-successful journalism career in the United States. Brenon was sixteen at the time, and he soon had to cut short his formal education to go to work as a three-dollar-a-week office boy at a Pittsburgh real estate firm. Like Fox, Brenon adored his mother—a flamboyant figure whose literary salons in Europe had attracted Oscar Wilde, James McNeill Whistler, and Charles Parnell—and deeply felt the absence of his father. But whereas Fox had responded to his childhood unhappiness by becoming the father he thought he should have had, Brenon had found a replacement authority figure in his older brother Algernon. And now Algernon Brenon was dying of kidney disease; he wouldn’t last out 1915. The old loneliness surged back upon Brenon. For his part, Fox had no son to raise as he wished he’d been raised. If a parent-child relationship wasn’t entirely appropriate because Brenon was only a year younger than Fox—well, nature didn’t insist on constantly reminding them of that fact. In 1915, thirty-six-year-old Fox, with his already thinning hair and bottlebrush mustache, could have passed for an older man. By contrast, Brenon, who was short and slightly built, blue-eyed, with wavy brown hair and boyish features, had yet to look his age. “He was Fox’s little baby,” commented Annette Kellermann, who had starred in Brenon’s 1914 breakthrough movie for Universal, Neptune’s Daughter. “He [Fox] would do anything for him.”
Truly anything. In early 1915, Brenon pitched Fox the idea of making a bigger, better version of Neptune’s Daughter, the fantasy love story he had filmed for Universal in Bermuda with a cast of more than two hundred. That seven-reel movie, which had played more than six months in New York and Chicago, was one of the most successful productions of its day. Not the least of its attractions had been the shapely Kellermann, an Australian-born swimming champion known as “The Diving Venus,” in a flesh-colored body stocking that made her look naked. He’d get Kellermann again, Brenon promised Fox, and together they’d all make a movie so magnificent that it would conclusively establish the artistic legitimacy of film.
Someone in a more rational frame of mind might have balked. The projected costs of Brenon’s proposal were staggering, and in early 1915, Fox Film had not yet generated a positive cash flow. Moreover, Fox had no experience with fantasy movies; this wasn’t his kind of project. Brenon’s charm dissolved all of Fox’s financial caution. Instantly, he agreed to make the movie, promising to provide as much money as necessary. “If any other director would have written a synopsis of this kind and asked me to spend $25,000 on it, I absolutely would refuse to do it,” Fox later wrote to Brenon. “But with you, my dear Herbert . . . I naturally put my judgment entirely aside.”
While reason rested, hope soared. Collaborating closely on the script, which Fox named A Daughter of the Gods, he and Brenon sketched out an aquatic, action-adventure romance about two young lovers struggling against tremendous odds to find each other in an exotic Eastern kingdom. Bad witches, good fairies, mermaids, and gnomes abounded. Fox seemed so much in awe of Brenon’s imagination that, by contrast, Annette Kellermann felt he treated her and her husband, Jimmie, “like imbeciles.” It wasn’t that Fox didn’t admire Kellermann. He agreed to pay her $1,500 a week, twice Brenon’s salary. Nor was it that he didn’t care about her. “It sounds entirely too dangerous to me,” he fretted, drawing blue lines through a scene Brenon had written that called for her to dive off a waterfall with her hands and ankles bound. (When she insisted she could easily handle the stunt, he reinstated it.) But as “a very prosaic, matter of fact, and businesslike person,” she lacked the sense of enchantment necessary to enter their private world.
Literally, Fox set no boundaries for Brenon. “Cast your eyes about the world and decide upon the spot where you can get from nature the things this picture demands,” he told the director. “Forget about New York, forget about . . . the business end of this industry.” Brenon settled on Jamaica—a seemingly odd choice when so much of the rest of the industry, also seeking sunshine and warmth, was heading toward California. At the time, though, Jamaica appeared to have a number of strategic advantages. In addition to offering a lush landscape and unusually clear water for underwater filming, the island urgently needed money. As a British possession that had been under martial law since the outbreak of war in Europe the previous summer, Jamaica had suffered a steep decline in tourism and in foreign trade because of a shortage of ships to export its sugar, rum, tobacco, coffee, and cocoa. Furthermore, the first five hundred of an eventual ten thousand able-bodied Jamaican men were due to leave soon for overseas combat.
Desperate to avoid economic collapse, local British military and civil authorities offered to help Fox Film in every way possible. Jamaica also had a cheap native labor force unlikely to be as picky about conditions as the increasingly unionized U.S. workforce. Indeed, Fox Film would pay only $1.50 a day each to the seven hundred Jamaicans who toiled in pelting rain to install water systems, electrical power, and telephone equipment. And as an island colony ruled by a distant nation with more urgent concerns elsewhere, Jamaica wasn’t apt to have any officials keeping a sharp eye on alterations to the natural terrain. There would be major changes. During the summer of 1915, a Fox Film cadre of engineers, electricians, and sanitarians began to overhaul the island’s topography by clearing away acres of raw jungle, diverting the Roaring River to create a waterfall, and razing a range of hills to make room for a battlefield.
By the time Brenon and the Daughter cast and crew arrived in Jamaica in late August 1915, Fox money had built two elaborate location sets. One was a pristine, ten-acre, all-white Moorish city capable of housing twenty thousand. Built on the cleaned-up swamp grounds of the abandoned Fort Augusta, near Kingston, this featured a Taj Mahal–style sultan’s palace, a huge slave market, mosques, minarets, battlements, and fortifications. The other set was “Gnome Village,” located some sixty-five miles across the island, in the virgin rainforest at St. Ann’s Bay. There, carpenters and masons had created a miniature village of giant toadstools and miniature thatched huts where some one thousand local children would play a race of small people. (The inspiration for Gnome Village may have been the popular “Dwarf City” attraction at the late Big Tim Sullivan’s Dreamland amusement park, which was populated by one thousand little people dressed up as shopkeepers, police officers, firefighters, musicians, and Chinese laundry workers, with small-scale buildings, miniature horses, and bantam chickens.) In Kingston, for interior scenes, the studio took over an abandoned King Street movie theater and built its own photo lab with a $5,000 ice plant to ensure the proper water temperature for film processing.
Whatever Brenon wanted, Fox gave him. Soon after arriving in Kingston, the director decided he needed to take over the entire Rose Gardens resort hotel. Fox officials signed the lease. Brenon also wanted the entire Osborne Hotel at St. Ann’s Bay, near Gnome Village. He got that, too. He had even been allowed to bring along a seven-piece orchestra and a conductor. For a silent film? Of course. The emotional power of music, Brenon believed, stimulated his imagination and helped inspire actors. Locally, he hired a wardrobe team of twelve hundred native women, who commandeered every available sewing machine on the island and began stitching more than ten thousand garments, which included wild animal costumes, richly embroidered silk and brocade robes, pearl-trimmed Indian gowns, and more than two hundred metallic mermaid tails. By the first payday, Brenon had run through his entire supply of gold coins—$200,000 worth, brought along because of the difficulty of getting money while in Jamaica—and had to use confusing local currency. Fox immediately shipped down more gold.
Money would not be a problem. Fox Film announced that it was prepared to spend $1 million on Brenon’s movie. “And understand me, I mean a million and not a couple of hundred thousand dollars,” Sheehan told the trade press in mid-September 1915. No one had ever spent $1 million on a movie before. The industry’s reigning extravaganza, The Birth of a Nation, had cost an estimated $110,000 to $300,000. A million dollars: in 1915, that was almost 1,500 times the average U.S. worker’s annual income of $687, and it would have bought 312 brand-new homes with some spare change left over. Although it’s certainly true that most movie producers exaggerated wildly, it’s also true that toward the end of his life, with nothing to gain by telling a lie, Brenon acknowledged that Fox had spent at least $800,000 on A Daughter of the Gods.
At first, Brenon gave every appearance of appreciating Fox’s generosity. He gushed to a reporter, “I cannot say enough in grateful appreciation of William Fox. I regard him as the greatest genius in the motion picture field.” Naturally, he added, he would be happy to follow Fox’s “wonderful” advice regarding A Daughter of the Gods. Brenon trusted Fox so much that he hadn’t bothered to get a written contract and, on the strength of a handshake deal alone, had agreed to direct the movie for $750 a week.
The idyll didn’t last. It couldn’t. For one thing, Brenon was in over his head. Who wouldn’t have been? Fox expected him not only to turn out a masterpiece, but also to establish a permanent winter studio for Fox Film in Jamaica and to supervise several other directors who were also shooting there. Brenon soon became frightened, depressed, and overwhelmed. Come down and help me, he pleaded in a letter to Fox. You have to, it’s your duty. But Fox had too many other responsibilities to hold Brenon’s hand. Thousands of employees depended on him “every minute of the day,” he wrote back. He had to remain available to all his directors and, right at the moment, he also had to salvage three subpar movies that were sitting on the shelf. But he had complete confidence in Brenon, Fox insisted. And there was nothing that he, Fox, wouldn’t do for him from a distance. “I want you to believe me, my dear Herbert, that I am straining every nerve and every muscle in my body to keep you pleased,” he wrote. “I have and I intend to comply with almost every wish and whim as it strikes you.”
It wasn’t enough. Feeling abandoned, Brenon angrily reassessed their relationship. He had never felt comfortable in his subordinate role. On those houseboat cruises with Fox along the Hudson, during their intimate chats, he had often felt ill at ease, “rather small.” He worried that Fox would “get under the surface and discover the REAL ME and I never thought I was really so hot!” Rebelling, Brenon decided that if Fox wanted him to take charge, he would do so with a vengeance. Calling himself “Director General,” Brenon now tossed aside the script that he and Fox had labored over in New York and, with his imported seven-piece ensemble playing in the background, he dictated a new synopsis to his secretary. Then he set that synopsis aside as well. He would rely on artistic intuition instead. His process for making A Daughter of the Gods, he later explained, was to “absorb” the essence of the story and then “begin with the great moment. From that big scene I radiate towards the tributary scenes. I let my imagination absolutely run wild with every particular sequence.” Mentally, Brenon reduced Fox to the role of a mere money supplier and dismissed the importance of that function by continuing to spend as if money were actually quite easy to come by.
For months, Fox failed to detect Brenon’s change of heart. He saw what he wanted to see, which was that his “dear boy” had recovered his characteristic enthusiasm and optimism. And he remained convinced that Brenon was going to surpass D. W. Griffith, who, Fox gleefully noted, was so busy supervising other directors at Triangle–Fine Arts that he had neglected his own work. Intolerance, Griffith’s follow-up to The Birth of a Nation, wasn’t going to be a great movie, Fox predicted, and that “leaves the field entirely open to us.”
A million dollars. Brenon raced toward that number. He wanted exotic animals. Fox promptly tracked down eight lions, six leopards, four elephants, and five camels and offered to send the entire menagerie to Jamaica at a rental cost of $200 a day. “When ordering your animals, don’t be influenced by any streak of economy if you think that a larger number are required,” Fox wrote to Brenon. “I leave the matter entirely to you for you to use your own judgment.” Swans? Brenon wanted twelve. “Shipped today eight swans. Difficult to get twelve,” Fox cabled Brenon. “Wire if you want other four.” Yes, Brenon did want the other four. But New York didn’t have four more swans for rent, so Fox found them in Philadelphia and put them on the next available boat. The movie’s nonhuman cast would eventually include thousands of Jamaica’s fastest and best-trained horses, ten alligators, fourteen swans, ten camels, two thousand head of cattle, eight hundred sheep, one thousand donkeys, two thousand lizards, twenty-five hundred toads, and a flock of sparrows imported from New York.
Brenon even got to dictate staff choices at the New York City headquarters. He didn’t like the Fox Film publicists Goldfrap and Selig, who had come up with the Theda Bara vamp campaign. In September 1915, Fox dismissed the entire department and hired Fred Warren, a close friend of Brenon’s brother Algernon, as the new head publicist. “Have instructed him [to] do everything in his power to help you. Please stop worrying,” Fox cabled Brenon. After Fox required Warren to submit all A Daughter of the Gods publicity material to Brenon every week for approval, Warren began writing sentences that described Brenon as “the greatest living genius in the field of film drama.”
Did a director ever have it so good? “Tell me, Herbert dear, ain’t I like a fairy Godmother: just wish for anything, and when the next boat gets to Kingston, it is there,” Fox wrote.
Floridly emotional, some of Fox’s letters to Brenon took on an uneasy, almost suffocating intensity. “Nothing would please me better now than to fondle and caress you as though you were my own boy, for I don’t think there ever was a man who loved you more than I love you,” Fox wrote to Brenon in early November 1915. A week later, he added that if he had known Brenon would remain on location for so long, “I think I would have hesitated, not because of the expense, but only because I hardly would want to have you away from me for any such length of time knowing it in advance. And believe me, I miss you and miss you very much.”
Although to contemporary readers such language may raise eyebrows, it’s unlikely that any physical relationship occurred. No evidence suggests that Fox ever dabbled in homosexual behavior at any time in his life or that Brenon, who was married, did, either. Rather, Brenon was the first close friend Fox had ever had. Fox’s relationship with Marcus Loew, one of warm admiration, was always circumscribed by their professional rivalry. Sheehan, upon closer examination, had been cut from morally cheap cloth. With Brenon, all of Fox’s suppressed longings for male companionship came tumbling out. They seemed to be equals in spirit, and Fox yearned “to sit down with someone who is not afraid of me and in whom I have confidence, so that I can have a heart to heart talk with him and review all my present acts and all my future acts.” With so little experience in defining emotional boundaries, starved for friendship, Fox unleashed a torrent of pent-up feelings.
For months Fox sustained his adulation of Brenon purely on faith. As of mid-November 1915, some two and a half months into filming, Fox still hadn’t seen a single frame of A Daughter of the Gods. “You can imagine how great the suspense is with me sitting here and craving to see some of it, and being told that it is being shipped on this boat and on that boat and on the next boat,” he wrote to Brenon. “But, really, my dear Herbert, I am anxious to see some of the film.” Still, he continued to trust Brenon completely. “You know best what to do,” Fox wrote. “I would rather take your judgment in place of my giving any suggestions.”
Unknown to Fox, however, Brenon kept going further and further off the rails. Shouting instructions through a five-foot megaphone that was almost as tall as he was, the director kept six cameramen filming every big scene from different angles. He might not know in advance what he wanted, he reasoned, but surely he would recognize it when he saw it. He also took foolish chances with the safety of his star. Intent on realism, Brenon ordered Kellermann to dive into a pool containing six crocodiles (five of them watching her with open mouths and the largest one measuring fourteen feet long) and swim around for a while. Fox had thought Brenon would use props, and even when he saw the footage, he refused to believe the animals were real. “Gee, those dummies are wonderful!” he exclaimed. Brenon also had Kellermann, with her arms bound by heavy ropes, get thrashed against a ragged coral headland by twenty-five-foot waves. As a result of that ordeal, she suffered cuts from her shoulders to her waist, and three times had to be dragged unconscious from the water. In other scenes, the actress dived 103 feet off a lighthouse tower into the ocean, nearly got burned at a stake, and while wearing a suit of armor and riding a horse, fought a sword battle on a seawall before toppling into the water with the horse, which immediately began scrambling and kicking at potentially fatal proximity. Even in Gnome Village, Kellermann wasn’t safe. Athough the child actors were no older than nine, they took to their work vigorously, throwing stones at her and beating her with sticks. Kellermann insisted on doing all the stunts herself: “I had no sense of danger. I really didn’t.” Brenon later conceded that it was a miracle she had survived A Daughter of the Gods.
Eventually, inevitably, Fox’s curiosity turned to worry. Would A Daughter of the Gods be ready for a Christmas 1915 release as originally planned? Go over and take a look, Fox instructed J. Gordon Edwards, who was also in Jamaica, directing A Wife’s Sacrifice. The quiet, gentlemanly, forty-eight-year-old Edwards kept such a low profile that some years later Brenon couldn’t remember his visit. Brenon did, however, heatedly recall the appearance slightly later of Fox Film general representative Abraham Carlos, who would soon become head of Fox’s West Coast studio. Showy, self-important, sporting a straw hat and a jaunty smile in his publicity photo, Carlos had little common sense and a tendency to throw his weight around. Brenon, who was constitutionally short on patience—stupidity enraged him “just as a red rag does a bull,” commented a journalist—argued violently with Carlos and ordered him off the set.
Christmas 1915 came and went. Grievously behind schedule as 1916 began, Brenon sent word to New York that he wouldn’t be finishing anytime soon.
“All of a sudden they [Brenon and Fox] were fighting like cat and dog,” Annette Kellermann remembered. Kellermann believed the precipitating factor was Brenon’s mother, whom the director had, as usual, brought along on location while leaving his wife, Helen, at home. According to Kellermann, “Herbert Brenon’s worst enemy was his mother. She was one of those mothers. She went everywhere with him and everything that Herbert did was just right.”
Brenon did have legitimate grievances. It wasn’t easy making the world’s biggest movie on a backward tropical island, especially when almost all of the supposed advantages had turned sour. Balmy weather? Heavy rains plagued the first few days of production in early September 1915. Then, on September 25 and 26, a hurricane hit Jamaica, causing substantial property damage. Abundant natural wonders? On the first day, crew members noticed shark fins racing across the inlet to St. Ann’s Bay. It turned out that the waters were infested with blue-nose, white, gray, tiger, and hammerhead sharks—hundreds of them—some as long as fifteen feet and most weighing between 230 and 350 pounds. To protect the mermaids, who could hardly swim away quickly with their legs bound by their fishtail costumes, Brenon had to hire both a motorboat patrol to explode dynamite at the entrance to the bay and a crew of local men to harpoon any of the more venturesome beasts. As for the relaxed, languid local culture, it was too much so. Stores were open only from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a half-day on Wednesday, limiting the availability of supplies to a movie crew that worked every day, usually from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m.
Most exasperatingly, the cheap native labor force turned out to be no real bargain at all. Many of the factors that made workers cheap also made them unreliable, inefficient, and discontented. Every day, Brenon had to supervise an average of 7,600 employees, most of them drawn from the diverse local population of whites, Hindus, Jamaican natives, and “maroons,” the latter being runaway slaves who inhabited the nearly inaccessible island interior and who had survived largely through a staunch distrust of whites. None of the locals had any film experience, of course. Yet as extras, they were armed with battle-axes, spears, swords, and other weapons. During the first day of filming, forty people were injured and the following day twenty-seven. After that, injuries tapered off to an average of twenty per day. The locals were also less than charmed by this latest foreign invasion—possibly they’d had enough of imperialism of any sort—and began pilfering items, often pieces of their military costumes, from the sets. The losses became so frequent that an incensed Brenon arranged to have Kingston’s chief magistrate hold court every day at 5:30 p.m. on the steps of the Moorish mosque set, with Brenon acting as the prosecutor. Following the end of each day’s session, several culprits usually got tossed into jail, some for offenses as mild as swearing.
Fox tried hard to heal the breach with Brenon. With so much of his money and reputation staked on A Daughter of the Gods, he really had no choice, and in general he didn’t like to argue because “where there is dissension, there cannot be great success.” So he continued to send money, sometimes as much as $34,000 a week, and every week, a United Fruit Company steamer brought more provisions down to Jamaica. Altogether, Fox Film would ship more than a thousand tons of supplies to A Daughter of the Gods. Fox also continued to indulge Brenon’s flights of fancy. In January 1916, even after the arguments started, he paid $7,000 to have ten camels shipped down to Jamaica on a chartered steamer from their winter quarters in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The camels did five minutes’ worth of work. For another scene, Brenon got one hundred boats with custom-made Oriental sails dyed dark red to harmonize with the landscape. The boats appeared on-screen for eight seconds.
Alas, Brenon wasn’t willing to be cajoled back into friendship. Signaling his rage, in the spring of 1916 he burned to cinders the $250,000 Moorish “white city” set at Fort Augusta. Fox Film later claimed it had meant to do so all along, but that wasn’t true. “I have never seen much value in a fire of destruction. I always thought that it was a waste of money,” Fox had written to Brenon in November 1915, adding that he hoped to use the scenery for other movies. “It is therefore my positive idea that this city should not be destroyed, and if you have any burning to do, do it somewhere else in some other way to get burning effects.”
Rather than quelling his anger, the flames seemed to consume Brenon’s last measure of restraint. Literally, he began to advertise his rebellion. While still in Jamaica, in late March and early April 1916, he took out full-page ads in all the major trade papers announcing, “I draw the attention of the exhibitor and the public to my forthcoming production of A Daughter of the Gods.” My forthcoming production? Yes. “The scenes and situations in A Daughter of the Gods, written and produced by me are fully copyrighted . . . Any person infringing upon my rights will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” Signed, in large type, Herbert Brenon. Beneath his name, in much smaller letters, appeared, “Management William Fox.”
Management William Fox. For $1 million . . . or at least $800,000.
Nonetheless, when A Daughter of the Gods finally wrapped up in April 1916, after nearly eight months of filming—the average feature at this time took only four or five weeks to make—Fox still hoped for a reconciliation. Upon Brenon’s return to New York, he went down to the wharf to meet the ship and, after embracing the sunburned director with open arms, told the press that the two of them would spend the next four weeks editing the movie together. In early May, Fox put out word that he was delighted with Brenon’s work. Allegedly, during one private screening, Fox “grasped the director’s hand and then caught him up in an embrace.”
Under better circumstances, the relationship might have healed. According to mutual friend Randolph Bartlett, “so deeply embedded were the roots of this friendship that the slightest touch of mutual understanding” would have dissolved the differences. But Brenon was exhausted, his nerves worn so raw that on the trip back he had snapped at Kellermann, savagely telling her she was through in movies. Kellermann, “really heartbroken” because she had considered Brenon a friend, would never see him again.
Beneath his cheery public exterior, Fox was simmering with anger over Brenon’s repeated insubordination and his failure to live up to expectations. Instead of a coherent masterpiece, Brenon had toted back some 223 reels of film. That was more than any filmmaker had ever shot before. It was 223,000 feet, more than forty-two miles, nearly fifty-six hours of film. Even the great The Birth of a Nation hadn’t dared exceed a completed length of fifteen reels. Two hundred twenty-three reels—how in the world was Fox going to find a story in there? Was there even a story in there?
Fox and Brenon managed to work together editing the footage for about a month. Then, in June 1916, their fragile detente collapsed. Leading a New York Times reporter around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brenon discussed paintings and sculpture that had inspired A Daughter of the Gods but gave no thanks at all to Fox. Fox responded by ordering head publicist Fred Warren to cut back significantly on credit for Brenon. If he meant that as a warning, it was too late. Brenon was already putting together his own $1 million production company, the Herbert Brenon Film Corporation, and in early July he sent Fox a letter giving two weeks’ notice.
As Brenon explained to the press, he had decided that he could “do better justice to myself by being my own employer.” Surely it was easy to be a movie producer. All one had to do was find a first-class director, but he already was a first-class director, so he was bound to succeed.
That did it. As Randolph Bartlett would recall, Fox’s ego had now suffered too many “tortures of humiliation,” and so he “retaliated in an entirely human but intensely cruel way.” In a letter that arrived on Brenon’s intended last day, Fox fired him and refused to pay him for the last two weeks. Then he ordered publicist Warren to rewrite all the promotional material for A Daughter of the Gods—about one hundred pieces—eliminating all references to Brenon and wherever possible substituting his own name. Now the movie became William Fox’s “great imaginative dream,” a story he had envisioned in every detail and then had directed via daily telegrams from New York. Herbert Brenon, according to the new version of events, had been a mere errand boy following orders and not a particularly good one at that. Press releases dropped hints about the director’s “spasmodic” and temperamental work habits and suggested that the movie had cost so much because Brenon wasted money extravagantly, often postponing production because he lacked “inspiration.”
Outraged, publicly suggesting that his former boss was envious of his talent, Brenon sued Fox for $500,000 in damages as well as the missing $1,500 pay. He also asked the court to forbid Fox Film to release A Daughter of the Gods unless his name appeared as writer and director. This was war. Brenon began to plunder Fox Film’s workforce, hiring away all the department heads who had worked on A Daughter of the Gods.
Poor Herbert Brenon. If he’d thought to check his contract, he would have remembered that he didn’t have a contract, only that handshake deal whereby Fox had agreed to pay him $750 a week to direct the movie. Fox stood by quietly for eleven days until a New York Supreme Court judge issued his ruling, which said what Fox knew it was going to say: in the absence of a written contract to prove otherwise, Fox had no obligation to provide publicity for Brenon. Fox’s letters to Brenon promising publicity were just that, letters, with no legal force. Now the hapless Brenon had to stand by and watch as Fox began a $300,000 advertising campaign that mentioned his name nowhere.
The invitation-only premiere of A Daughter of the Gods took place on October 17, 1916, at the 1,370-seat Lyric Theatre on Forty-Second Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, a Shubert Brothers venue that usually presented plays. The event might have reminded Fox and Brenon of how much they’d foolishly thrown away. They might have stood together on the sidewalk, under the huge electric sign depicting Kellermann’s diving figure, greeting guests such as Theda Bara, Norma Talmadge, Thomas Dixon, William Randolph Hearst, Adolph Zukor, Jesse Lasky, Diamond Jim Brady, and Ethel Barrymore. They might have nodded knowingly—told you so—as they listened to the throng of hopefuls pleading unsuccessfully at the box office to buy standing room tickets. And surely both would have gloried in the $10,000 in refurbishments that Fox had paid for at the Lyric: the curved colonnade of Greek pillars, topped by Corinthian capitals, that flanked both sides of the stage; the new curtain showing a classical landscape, the orchestra pit lowered and doubled in size, the new screen and new projectors, and the lobby walls decorated with oil paintings of scenes from the movie.
Instead, hostility scarred the evening. Reportedly wearing a false beard, the uninvited Brenon sneaked into a second-row seat. Although Fox had cooled down enough to give him screen credit as director, he hadn’t been able to resist taking a few more stabs by failing to acknowledge Brenon as the author and by listing J. Gordon Edwards as the movie’s “supervising director.”
Still, edited down to ten reels that ran for two and a half hours with an intermission, A Daughter of the Gods transcended all the rancor of its making. “Let us return to our mother’s knee tonight,” the introductory title card read, “and be as little children to enter a heaven of rich enjoyment.” Out of Brenon’s 223 reels, Fox and his film editors had fashioned a story about the beautiful Anitia (Kellermann) and the handsome, noble prince Omar (William Shay), who, having been separated by premature death in their former life as a canary and a sparrow, try to redeem their lost promise of love.
Naturally, for a Fox movie, the chief villain is the young man’s father, the “Mad Sultan,” who buys the horrified Anitia for his harem and tries to harass her into submission. Realizing he has no chance with Anitia as long as his son is alive, the Sultan chains Omar to a rock in the sea and leaves him to die. Anitia manages to escape captivity by diving off a 103-foot tower and then raises an army to liberate the oppressed kingdom. In the meantime, Omar has been freed and mistakes Anitia’s soldiers for an invading enemy. With their visors down, Anitia and Omar battle one another and, echoing their tragic past-life destiny, Omar kills Anitia. At least that was the official plot summary. It’s impossible to tell exactly what showed up on the screen because no known copy of A Daughter of the Gods remains, and reviewers at the time, baffled by what one described as an “almost kaleidoscopic swiftness” of the scenes, gave widely divergent accounts. Adding to the confusion, Fox Film released several versions of the movie.
In any case, plot was hardly the point. Far more important was the movie’s stunning cascade of images: Anitia, reincarnated in human form by a fairy queen of the sea and carried to shore on a giant shell by mermaids; Anitia and the gnomes playing in a pool of water on a swing hung from the sky; a graceful “Nocturne Dance” of sea nymphs, their figures silhouetted against a blazing sunset and reflected in the shimmering water; Anitia narrowly escaping the jaws of a huge shark—apparently a real shark, its fin cutting the water just behind her; long shots of Anitia’s twelve hundred warriors riding on horseback toward the city, and then that final giant inferno, majestic in its horrific beauty, that destroys the White City, with buildings collapsing amid a swirl of smoke and flames.
Arrogant, obstreperous, and profligate, Brenon had done what Fox had asked. He had made a groundbreaking masterpiece. In an era when many directors relied heavily on indoor scenes, Brenon had filmed A Daughter of the Gods almost entirely outdoors, planting his six cameras right in the middle of nature’s wild, insistent, overmastering beauty. Brenon boasted, “What is going to smash you in the face when you see my picture is my beautiful natural setting.” Waves repeatedly splashed up over the camera lens. Shots lingered on trees swaying in the wind, hair tossed around a woman’s face, the surf breaking on the shore, painterly sunsets and billowing clouds. Some scenes had even been tinted to create the impression of natural color. Yet Brenon had also used motion picture technology to reveal the truths hidden behind appearances—to show that however things seemed, they might yet be otherwise through imagination. In “perfectly done” dissolves and double exposures, crocodiles transmuted into swans, and Anitia’s troops, who had started out their march to the Sultan’s city as a crowd of gnomes, changed along the way into strong young men on sleek, handsome horses. The camera saw more clearly than the unaided eye, saw and told of beauty evident but overlooked, beauty latent and trembling for discovery.
At the Lyric, the first-night audience responded with frequent gasps of awe and outbreaks of applause. Critics likewise were overwhelmed by the movie’s “stupendous . . . pageantry” and “shower of magic.” Moving Picture World wrote, “We are beguiled, we are bewitched, we lose the perception of time.” The New York Journal added, “Its stupendousness is almost appalling.”
Such acclaim did nothing to soften relations between Fox and Brenon. For his part, Fox didn’t need Brenon anymore now that the movie was finished and needed only to be sold. He knew he could do that better than anyone else. For the first six weeks or so, he played A Daughter of the Gods only at the Lyric and at one theater apiece in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. This strategy was common in early motion picture history. By compressing and focusing demand for a film, producers aimed to generate success stories that would motivate exhibitors nationwide to book it. In December 1916, two months after the premiere—with the Lyric still taking in an average of $15,000 per week—Fox began to roll out the movie to the rest of the country in a style reminiscent of The Birth of a Nation. Except that Fox did it more grandly: while The Birth of a Nation had had only twenty-five touring companies, Daughter had forty, each one consisting of a manager, two publicists, a conductor and musicians, and a stage crew. Many theaters treated the movie’s arrival as a special event, accepting advance seat reservations and charging up to two dollars per seat—even though the average movie ticket nationwide cost about ten-and-a-half cents, with the usual highest price being twenty-five cents.
Fox’s promotional campaign was equally aggressive. Motion Picture News called A Daughter of the Gods “probably one of the best advertised pictures in America.” Many ads featured Kellermann’s nude figure, artfully draped by her long dark hair, and touted her figure as the perfect female body. Lobby displays flaunted images of her in her then-revolutionary one-piece bathing suit. Aiming also for the family trade, Fox insisted that A Daughter of the Gods was a “clean and refined spectacle.” He said, “I believe every mother in the world will wish her sons and daughters to see the picture . . . It will make boys develop manliness and teach girls to acquire and hold their beauty.”
As evidence of the movie’s “sweetness and goodness,” Fox got full approval from the National Board of Review censorship agency, which he had consulted frequently during the editing process. Probably not coincidentally, it was in November 1916, just a few weeks after Daughter’s triumphant New York premiere, that the Board began to pressure Fox Film for a $400 monthly contribution to its “educational” fund. As further reinforcement of respectability, the studio arranged for President Woodrow Wilson and his wife to attend the movie’s Washington, DC, premiere at the Belasco Theatre on their first wedding anniversary. It was the first time Wilson had seen a movie in a public theater. He described the film as unusually beautiful.
Reviews around the country were uneven. “A meaningless hodge podge of pseudo-allegorical absurdities as . . . in a nightmare or conceived in a madhouse,” groused the Boston Transcript. A staff reporter for the Tucson Daily Citizen walked out during the intermission because of the movie’s “lasciviousness.” Still, A Daughter of the Gods built up an impressive track record, playing forty weeks in New York, twenty-two weeks in Chicago, eighteen weeks in Philadelphia, and fourteen weeks in Boston. On the extravagant big-city road shows, Fox made a profit, after production and distribution expenses, of about $150,000. That was a disappointing figure in view of his massive investment, yet he had never meant to make his real money from the road shows. Their purpose was to show off the movie and enhance its value in wide release.
While revenue figures aren’t available for the movie’s performance in regular movie theaters, it’s safe to assume they reached rich heights. Fox kept A Daughter of the Gods in circulation for two years, refusing to allow it into any theater that had fewer than a thousand seats or that charged less than a dollar as the top admission price. In the spring of 1917, A Daughter of the Gods began to travel the world. First it went to England, where it did well despite wartime conditions—the movie was the first ever reviewed by the London Times. Eventually, A Daughter of the Gods even went into the interior of China, thanks to a Chinese American entrepreneur who bought the rights from Fox in 1918 and planned to spend five years touring the largely non-electrified country with a custom-made dynamo* that ran off the engine of his truck.
Triumph wasn’t enough for Fox. He had set aside his professional demeanor with Brenon. Instead of a boss, he had tried to be a friend, a mentor, and a father figure. He had loved Brenon and had told him so. Humiliated by the failure of their relationship, he had to see his former “dear boy” fail.
Brenon had started Herbert Brenon Productions so confident of success. With partners Lewis J. Selznick, the founder and former general manager of World Film, and Stanley Mastbaum, owner of a prestigious chain of more than forty Philadelphia-area theaters, he had signed a five-year lease on the brand-new Ideal Studios and Laboratories, in Grantwood, New Jersey. In early August 1916, about a month after leaving Fox Film, he began work on the company’s debut production, an adaptation of the hit play War Brides, starring Russian stage actress Alla Nazimova, whom he had reportedly agreed to pay $30,000 for thirty days’ work. On the stage walls, Brenon tacked up a notice: “This studio means as much to the artist as the church does to the devout worshipper.”
Hastily, Fox threw together The War Bride’s Secret, aiming to create confusion in the marketplace and siphon off Brenon’s audience. “A rotten trick,” Brenon’s former secretary Minola De Pass would write to Brenon decades later, “A grave blow to your first independent venture.” Again Brenon sued Fox, this time claiming copyright infringement of both the title and the story line, and asked the court to enjoin Fox from releasing The War Bride’s Secret.
Again Brenon lost. A judge ruled that there was no evidence that Fox Film intended any deception. Furthermore, it wasn’t clear that titles could be copyrighted, and the two movie plots were substantially different. War Brides told the story of a young widow in an imaginary kingdom who kills herself and her unborn child to protest a new law requiring unmarried women to marry soldiers going off to war. Fox’s The War Bride’s Secret, which starred Theda Bara look-alike Virginia Pearson, was essentially a domestic drama about a young farm wife in Scotland struggling to cope with her greedy father’s demand that she marry a rich man after her beloved husband is reported as a battlefield casualty.
That wasn’t enough for Fox. In early October 1916, only about a week before Brenon planned to start sending out publicity material in preparation for the November 1 opening of War Brides, Fox sued Brenon for $100,000. He claimed that Brenon was perpetrating fraud through his advertising campaign. In a slew of consumer press and trade publication ads, and on the masthead of his new company’s stationery, Brenon claimed credit not only for A Daughter of the Gods—“conceived, written, and produced solely by him,” one ad asserted—but also for all his other Fox movies. By listing the titles of the works along with the names of their stars, Fox alleged, Brenon was intentionally deceiving the public into thinking that he owned the rights to those movies and that he managed those actors.
One hundred thousand dollars wasn’t all that Brenon stood to lose. On October 13, Fox got a temporary injunction prohibiting Brenon from publicizing his Fox Film credits. The director now faced the possibility of having to spend $90,000 to reprint all his promotional literature, including billboards and lobby exhibits, and to delay the opening of War Brides.
Fox didn’t really want to ruin Brenon. He showed this when, in settlement talks, he quickly agreed to let Brenon take credit for writing and directing his Fox movies as long as he didn’t claim to have produced them. As a result, War Brides was able to open more or less on schedule, on November 12, 1916, at the Broadway Theatre at Forty-First and Broadway, just one block away from A Daughter of the Gods. Mainly, Fox seems to have wanted to abase Brenon to regain the ascendancy he regretted having given away.
Brenon’s War Brides wasn’t a bad movie. The New York Herald deemed it greater than The Birth of a Nation, and the trade paper Wid’s Daily predicted a huge hit. Conversely, Fox’s The War Bride’s Secret wasn’t an especially good movie. “Old stuff,” critics said, unoriginal and slow moving. Still, Brenon’s movie foundered while Fox’s thrived. In addition to having a much larger marketing organization and far greater sales expertise, Fox had more accurately gauged public sentiment. Amid growing evidence that the United States would sooner or later join the war in Europe, Brenon’s movie argued that all wars are bad. By contrast, The War Bride’s Secret allowed that some wars are necessary, even noble, and it reassured audiences that families could be put back together afterward. The heroine’s presumed-dead husband returns home, and the young couple lives happily ever after.
It got worse for Brenon. Weakened by the stress of the previous year and a half, he became critically ill with typhoid in January 1917. Then, after the United States declared war on April 6, 1917, federal authorities denounced War Brides as unpatriotic and urged state and local censors to ban it as harmful to recruitment efforts. In October, Brenon suffered an attack of appendicitis and required an operation.
Somehow Brenon managed, despite all these troubles, to direct his next big production, The Fall of the Romanoffs. Reportedly, he spent $250,000 in the hope that it would become the definitive American movie about the Russian Revolution, then a topic of great interest in the United States. He had joined forces with a hotheaded, thirty-seven-year-old Russian émigré named Iliodor (actually, the former Sergei Trufanov), who had been a sidekick to the mad monk Rasputin and a rival for the favor of Czar Nicholas. After failing in his plot to murder Rasputin, Iliodor repudiated the whole Romanoff clan, became a revolutionary, and in June 1916, fearing for his life, hotfooted it to the United States, where he pitched his story to the movies and threw himself into the bargain as an actor. Given Iliodor’s darkly handsome looks and his proven ability to charm a crowd, Brenon cast him in a lead role as the saintly “Father Iliodor,” who saves Mother Russia from the drunk, illiterate Rasputin and the corrupt, oppressive czar.
Fox still didn’t want Brenon to get back up on his feet. Assigning J. Gordon Edwards to direct from a script by Metropolitan Opera stage director Richard Ordynski, Fox cast Theda Bara in The Rose of Blood (1917), as a Russian peasant girl whose unhappy marriage to a despotic prince causes her to become a revolutionary; it was a film complete with bomb plots, poisoned wine, and sultry sex appeal. Naturally, Fox and Brenon weren’t the only ones to recognize Russian history’s dramatic potential. William A. Brady, head of the World Film Corporation, beat both of them to market with Rasputin, the Black Monk, which opened in New York on September 12, 1917, eleven days ahead of Brenon’s movie* and about two months before Fox’s.
Fox’s movie proved the most successful of the three Russian Revolution movies. He had simplified history for mass consumption, representing it as a maelstrom of human passions in which the sex instinct reigned supreme. One ad for The Rose of Blood asked, “Did a woman totter this Russian throne? Ask Theda Bara, she tells everything in this picture.” Some exhibitors paid record fees to book The Rose of Blood, as much as $1,000 for a three-day run in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Overshadowed, Brenon’s movie languished. It was sabotage, Brenon’s secretary, Minola De Pass, decided. She never would forgive Fox.
After the failure of The Fall of the Romanoffs, Herbert Brenon Productions fell apart. It wasn’t all Fox’s fault. Brenon was a terrible businessman, far too absorbed in creative matters to keep an eye out for all the industry’s fast shufflers. Calamitously, he had hired Alexander Beyfuss, a young, handsome, seemingly capable go-getter, as his business manager. Beyfuss promptly overextended the company’s financial commitments, and when the bills came due, he disappeared.* Narrowly avoiding bankruptcy, Brenon dissolved his company in early 1918.
It felt like “the END of everything,” Brenon would recall. Curiously, although Fox helped derail Brenon’s career at what might have been its greatest height, the director ultimately refused to blame his former friend and employer. The rift had been his fault, too, Brenon acknowledged in a letter to his nephew in 1951, seven years before his death in Los Angeles. He had been arrogant about his work, dictatorial on the set, uncooperative with authority. And others had helped precipitate his fall, he believed: “underlings and the jealous sycophants” such as Abraham Carlos had alienated Fox from him in order to enhance their own power.
Over the years, Brenon forgave Fox. He missed their friendship. It had been the real thing, Brenon realized, complicated but also full of genuine affection. No one else had ever had such faith in him or had given to him so generously. Toward the end of his life, too late to do any good, Brenon acknowledged his true feelings. Always, Brenon wrote to his nephew, “I DID respect and even loved Fox.”