What, then, is the character that actually marks the American—that is, in chief? . . . It is, in brief . . . social aspiration . . . The American is a pusher. His eyes are ever fixed upon some round of the ladder that is just beyond his reach, and all his secret ambition, all his extraordinary energies, group themselves about the yearning to grasp it.
—H. L. MENCKEN, 1920.
As he changed the motion picture industry, Fox also changed himself. He was a sort of early Jay Gatsby, already successful, wealthy, and happily married in the late 1910s when Fitzgerald’s hero was wearing army khakis, but still with the same unquestioning faith in the possibility of transformation, the same inner eye fixed on the green light at the end of the pier.*
Like Gatsby, of whom Fitzgerald wrote, “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart,” Fox continued to believe in America as a meritocracy. In this respect, he differed significantly from the other early American motion picture studio founders. In An Empire of Their Own, Neal Gabler contends that all the first-generation studio founders, recognizing that they were “proscribed from entering the real corridors of gentility and status in America,” set about creating “a new country—an empire of their own.” According to Gabler, these “Hollywood Jews” constructed Southern California social life as an accessible alternative to the eastern Protestant establishment.
However well the stereotype may fit the other early moguls, the facts of Fox’s life resist such generalization. Fox wasn’t a Hollywood Jew. By the sights of the world, he was a New York Jew who ran a movie studio, and by his own sights, he was an American who happened to be Jewish and who ran a highly successful major corporation. Fox always kept both his family home and his business headquarters in New York, close to the center of financial power. He never owned a home in California, preferring to stay in hotels there, and he never socialized with the “Hollywood Jews” except in connection with business.
Fox had no interest in settling for a second-best “empire of their own.” He wanted a place at the very top in the pantheon of industry leaders. He was confident that America would allow him to earn that status.
He still had a lot of rough edges. He knew that. It was obvious. Screenwriter Frances Marion, who interviewed at Fox Film for a job during this time, recalled a spartan, dour atmosphere where Fox’s outer office “resembled a small courtroom” with a “liverish secretary at a desk that faced two rows of aspirants.” As she wrote in her memoirs, Fox himself rattled her nerves with his constant “pistol shot” interruptions as she was trying to explain herself. Yet, she liked him well enough. He wasn’t the “ogre” she’d expected. Reporters also found him inscrutably aloof. He was, one wrote, “black-eyed . . . a profound cigar smoker, and silent.”
Fox could easily handle the visual aspects of his demeanor. Images were, after all, his business. By the mid-1910s, he had moved his wife and two daughters from Mount Hope in the Bronx to a town house at 316 West Ninety-First Street, on Manhattan’s fashionable Upper West Side. That was convenient, but hardly expansive enough. He had lived his whole life in one of the most crowded cities in the world, and in this environment, the ability to command space, especially by using it decoratively and to create distance from neighbors, had become a hallmark of power. Many in the upper class were moving to sumptuous estates on Long Island, which since the recent completion of the Long Island Rail Road had enjoyed relatively quick, dependable, and comfortable transportation to and from Manhattan. Between 1900 and 1918, some 325 houses with twenty-five or more rooms were built on Long Island.
The richest of the rich (the Morgans, Chryslers, Fords, Vanderbilts, Guggenheims, William Randolph Hearst, Nelson Doubleday, Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, and Louis Comfort Tiffany) headed for Long Island’s North Shore, the so-called “Gold Coast.” Fox, not yet in that league, settled on the less fashionable, less palatial South Shore. Here, by 1916, he had rented an ivy-covered, gray flagstone mansion at the corner of Pond Lane and Woodmere Boulevard, in Woodmere. The house, owned by German immigrant silk merchant Arthur Emmerich, was relatively modest. With sweeping rooflines and dormers, it belonged to the “shingle style” of architecture that aimed for a cozy, cottage-like sense of enclosed space rather than stately magnificence. A gravel path led from the street to the front entrance; in the backyard were rosebushes, a privet hedge, and a small garden.
Fox intended this “country home” to be an escape from the past, but not from the present, which he brought with him. At the back of the house, he installed a one-room, fireproof building from which a projector beamed movies onto a huge waterproof screen about thirty or forty feet away, on the lawn. On summer evenings, sitting in a wicker chair in a “wheelable” room that had wire netting walls to keep out the mosquitoes, Fox watched movies with his wife and daughters. Sometimes, even after midnight, he might head back to Fox Film’s Forty-Sixth Street headquarters for a meeting. A chauffeur drove him. After getting several speeding tickets, Fox no longer trusted himself behind the wheel. On weekends, sitting at a lawn table underneath a striped umbrella, he smoked cigars and read scripts.
He became punctilious about his personal appearance. The boy who once put cardboard in the soles of his shoes still couldn’t bring himself to spend a fortune on clothes, but he held to strict standards of cleanliness and tidiness. He wore only white socks because he believed dyed garments were unhealthful next to the skin, and he shaved twice a day. To avoid looking scruffy after late-night meetings, he had a standing appointment with his barber, Gus, at 1:00 a.m., in the private barbershop in his office, which was hidden behind a secret panel in the projection room.
He also began to cultivate the habits of the wealthy. With the Woodmere Club across the street from his Long Island home, he took up golf, which had become fashionable as an upper-class sport—both presidents Taft and Wilson were enthusiastic players—and which was then being promoted as a means of sharpening leadership skills. A Variety article from this era described golf as “a contest, a duel or a melee calling for courage, skill, strategy and self-control” that “affords the chance to play the man and act the gentleman.” Despite having to swing one-handed due to the childhood accident that had mangled his left arm, Fox developed considerable expertise. One acquaintance told a reporter, “He plays golf as he works and plans—alone.”
Eva Fox kept pace with her husband’s social ambitions. Because of her father’s protectiveness, she had avoided most of the meanness of Lower East Side life and had never acquired its coarse habits. While Fox himself would always retain a street accent—films were “fill-ums,” and he pronounced Les Miserables as “Lah Miserable”—Eva might have come from anywhere or any class. She learned quickly how to dress fashionably but not flashily, how to groom their daughters to act as nice young ladies, and how to keep the pleasant, orderly, loving home that was so essential to Fox’s ability to concentrate on work.
If Eva fulfilled all Fox’s hopes for a helpmate, however, she never exceeded them. The insularity of her upbringing had instilled a fear of the outside world and Fox’s aggressive personality, along with his old-fashioned ideas about gender roles, meant that she had essentially replaced one male authority figure with another. She always looked to her husband for direction. She never joined any women’s clubs or charitable organizations and never befriended other well-to-do wives in ways that might have helped speed their social inclusion. In fact, Eva never had any close friends or any social life beyond the family circle—she met the people Fox wanted her to meet when he brought them home—and rarely did she accompany her husband to public events. He never complained. Indeed, Eva’s complete submission reinforced his sense of total control over his life.
Fox’s birth family also got an overhaul. With the exception of his revered mother, who could do no wrong, they were a potential embarrassment: an awkward, undistinguished, lumpish lot, lacking any fire of ambition. Who knew what they might get up to if not taken firmly in hand?
None objected. After more than two decades with Fox as their main provider, his parents and siblings were used to his management. And certainly it was easier to follow his well-meaning, if intrusive, directions than to try to earn an independent income.
Fox moved his parents and his youngest siblings, Maurice and Malvina (who, born in 1906, was younger than both Fox’s daughters), into an apartment at the newly built, upper-class Hotel Theresa at 125th and Seventh Avenue, in then largely Jewish Harlem. He replaced his mother’s humble, unadorned cottons and wools with black silk dresses, pearls, and diamond jewelry. Michael Fox, of course, inspired no such feelings of devotion, but duty required that he be included in the largesse. Indeed, now Fox could make his father into the sort of man he should have been all along. He bought Michael expensive three-piece suits, bowler hats, and walking sticks so that, according to Fox’s niece Angela Fox Dunn, Michael started to resemble “an early version of Adolphe Menjou.”
Fox’s brothers Aaron and Maurice, sixteen and seventeen years younger respectively, presented a particular challenge. Neither the heavyset, homely Aaron nor the boyish-looking, curly haired Maurice had anywhere near the capabilities of their older brother. Aaron was, by all accounts, lazy, incompetent, vain, and hedonistic, while Maurice was mentally unstable and prone to delusions. Fox propped up both his brothers professionally. In the early 1910s, when the teenaged Aaron and Maurice tried to become talent managers, Fox showcased a singing trio they managed at the Dewey Theatre. After that career fizzled, Fox took Aaron into Fox Film and assigned him to work as a production manager with a lesser director. According to a family story, in the mid- to late 1910s, Maurice began attending classes at Columbia University Law School. It’s possible. Although the university has no record of his enrollment, documentation from that era is incomplete. Maurice, then twenty-one, listed his occupation as “student” on his June 5, 1918, draft registration card, and the Hotel Theresa was only a short walk from the Columbia University campus.
As for his three sisters, Fox settled the two older ones into respectable marriages as soon as possible. Neither woman wanted anything different, and according to family members, neither had the looks or the personality to warrant a highly demanding search for a mate. In 1911, twenty-three-year-old Tina Fox married architect William Fried, a cousin on their mother’s side; Fried would be rewarded over the years with many Fox theater construction projects.
In the fall of 1915, twenty-four-year-old Herman Livingston, whose family had started the Livingston Oil Company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, presented himself to Fox as a candidate for the hand of nineteen-year-old Bessie Fox, whom he had met in Atlantic City. Livingston was so worried about meeting Fox that when a Tulsa World reporter asked him beforehand about rumored wedding plans, Livingston became noticeably agitated. “I’d rather not discuss the matter. It’s a question which is quite personal, you see, and I do not feel at liberty to talk about it at this time,” he stammered. “From where did such information come?” Livingston actually had nothing to fret about. He came from a millionaire family, owned considerable stock in his family’s business, and, despite his Anglicized name, was Jewish. He and Bessie married in August 1916.
Fox’s third sister, Malvina, was too young for such summary handling. Anna Fox’s last child, born two years after Fox opened his first movie theater at 700 Broadway in Brooklyn, Malvina was the only member of his birth family whom Fox was able to rescue completely from poverty. Almost obsessively, he made sure that Malvina enjoyed every luxury. Blessed with pale skin and auburn hair that she wore in ringlets, she was the prettiest of the Fox sisters. He bought her silk dresses, sent her to a private school, and paid for portrait sessions with society photographers. According to Malvina’s daughter, Angela, “Uncle Bill protected, guided, and supported her life from birth.”
Of all Fox’s siblings, Malvina probably paid the highest price. The others had all grown up while Fox was still struggling to get ahead, so each had developed some independent sense of identity to hold on to while playing the assigned role. Malvina never had a clear field to discover herself. Since her birth, Fox’s money had dominated and distorted the family structure, stripping Michael Fox of paternal authority so completely that he was more like a brother than a father to Malvina.
Yet “Brother Bill,” as Malvina called Fox, didn’t just play the role of a substitute father figure. He also expected Malvina to be the person he thought he would be if he were in her position. In the late 1910s, when chronic illness began to keep Anna Fox in bed for days at a time, when little brown bottles of medicine appeared on her bedside table, Malvina had to become her mother’s nursemaid. Fox could have hired a professional, but Anna wanted Malvina, only Malvina, to care for her. Although she loved her mother dearly, the constant need to stay at Anna’s side compelled Malvina both to grow up too soon and not to grow up at all. Her peers were exploring the world and having fun; she always had to hurry home from school to listen for Anna’s summoning bell. Amid her anxiety and confusion, she developed a guttural lisp that would require years of speech therapy to correct.
Eva’s brothers Jack and Joe Leo also got swept under Fox’s paternalistic wing. In the early years, both men had managed Fox theaters, and after the formation of Fox Film, both became studio executives. Jack, the sharper of the two, first oversaw the processing laboratories and, in July 1917, became head of the scenario department. Grateful for his good luck, he carried out orders with alacrity, avoided conflict, and above all displayed fervent loyalty to the boss. Somewhat less steadfast, Joe Leo had left Fox in the early 1910s to run his own vaudeville booking agency, but returned to serve first as a business manager for various Fox movies and then, beginning in late 1917, as assistant to the general manager of the Fox circuit of some twenty theaters.
Just as if real life were a movie, Fox was telling a story to the world, creating images of a happy, harmonious, prosperous family.
An early Fox Film publication described Fox as someone who, “with the drive and push that is typically American, goes out and goes after what he wants.”
Astutely, Fox discerned that the fastest way to gain social status in 1910s America was through philanthropy. That strategy had worked wonders for both Andrew Carnegie, who was well on his way to giving away $350 million before his death in 1919, and John D. Rockefeller Sr., who, after starting the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, had donated $100 million to “promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” Once the most demonized industrialists of the Gilded Age, Carnegie and Rockefeller were transforming themselves into saintly public benefactors.
Fox’s image problems weren’t quite as bad as those of Carnegie and Rockefeller, but the movie industry still had a markedly disreputable aura, and his own public profile, thanks to Fox Film’s continuing emphasis on sex and violence, remained controversial. In the public mind, good works signaled good intentions. Fox understood their power to alter the perception of past acts.
He began on familiar territory. For years, he had quietly but generously supported Jewish charities, frequently loaning his New York City theaters for children’s events sponsored by Young Judaea and the YMHA. Now in December 1917, Fox volunteered for the Jewish War Relief’s two-week fund-raising drive to benefit an estimated five million Jewish victims in occupied territories in Europe. The need was dire. “Conditions indescribable. One million people perishing from hunger and cold,” representatives in Poland and Lithuania cabled to the group’s New York headquarters. “America practically sole help.”
Heading the Jewish War Relief campaign were two businessmen who occupied the position in American life to which Fox longed to ascend. National chairman Jacob H. Schiff was the senior partner of the Wall Street banking firm Kuhn, Loeb & Co., and the campaign’s second-in-command was Schiff’s forty-six-year-old son-in-law and Kuhn, Loeb associate, Felix M. Warburg. Proudly Jewish, both were well assimilated professionally, socially, and culturally. At seventy, Schiff had amassed a $50 million personal fortune and owned a palatial home at 965 Fifth Avenue, while the dandyish, opera-loving Warburg was widely admired for his generous philanthropy. Certainly, having been born into wealthy German families, Schiff and Warburg had had an easier time than Fox. Still, they were the most relatable figures on the landscape; with them, he at least shared the bond of religion.
A fund-raising novice, Fox was assigned to work as one of twenty lieutenants under “Captain” Harry B. Rosen, a leading insurance seller specializing in the entertainment business. It was a lowly, shoe-leather-to-the-pavement position, but Fox threw himself into it. When the campaign began on December 3, 1917, he walked away from Fox Film for the entire two-week duration, even though the studio was about to release Cleopatra nationwide and was in preproduction on Salome and Les Miserables. Night after night, trudging through snow and sleet, Fox stayed out as late as 3:00 a.m. making speeches in cafés, restaurants, and other public places about the war victims’ plight. He personally gave $40,000—the second-largest amount of the campaign, exceeded only by Jacob Schiff’s $200,000—and made additional donations on behalf of Eva and their daughters. When the New York campaign ended, meeting its $5 million commitment toward the $10 million national goal, “Captain” Rosen’s team placed first among the city’s fifty-four teams, with a total of $329,127. “Lieutenant” Fox had raised most of that sum.
A few weeks later, Fox agreed to help lead another campaign. This one aimed to raise $4.5 million for the Federation of Jewish Philanthropic Societies, which Felix Warburg had founded the previous year as an umbrella organization for seventy-six Jewish charities in New York City. At his own expense, Fox set up an office in the Hotel Claridge at Broadway and Forty-Fourth Street and—to introduce novelty and enthusiasm, because they would be approaching the same people who had donated to the Jewish War Relief campaign—recruited five thousand children to do most of his team’s canvassing. The young volunteers, aged twelve to sixteen, quickly signed up twenty-six thousand new Federation supporters toward an overall total of fifty thousand. It was, said philanthropist David A. Brown, “the most spectacular and fastest moving campaign in the history of New York up to that time.” (Collecting the money was another matter. Some of Fox’s juvenile workers made up names and addresses or wrote them down incorrectly. Others submitted pledges from real people who later denied having agreed to contribute. Although Fox set up an organization to speed collection, the Federation ended up having to reach out to traditional funding sources to cover the deficit.)
Fox might have turned his new philanthropic status toward greater personal advantage. His bosses on the two Jewish fund-raising campaigns, Schiff and Warburg, ran one of Wall Street’s leading banking firms and had access to tens of millions of dollars. Fox appears to have made no play for their money, and two years later the firm would become the bankers for Fox Film’s chief rival, Famous Players–Lasky. Through his charitable activity, Fox was after a different kind of reward, the secret desire of all his ambition: the chance to prove himself a leader of American society.
On Sunday, February 24, 1918, the entertainment industry sponsored a formal-dress dinner in the grand ballroom of the Hotel Astor to honor Fox for both his charitable work and his leadership in the motion picture industry. More than 1,200 people, a wide-ranging assortment of public figures, attended. Among them were Schiff and Warburg; Henry Morgenthau, the former U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire; and Fox’s entertainment world competitors Adolph Zukor, Nicholas Schenck, George M. Cohan, and Lee Shubert. From political circles came the city’s fire commissioner and police commissioner, New York lieutenant governor Edward Schoeneck, and federal judge Martin T. Manton. The New York Morning Telegraph commented, “[N]ever before have so many men of different stations of life gathered together to do honor to one who simply styles himself a motion picture producer.”
Speech after speech praised Fox’s generosity and public service. At the end of the dinner, presented with an inscribed gold tablet, Fox rose to thank the group. Before he said a word, the audience gave him a standing ovation.
From his start in Jewish fund-raising, Fox made his way into the broader philanthropic community. In March 1918, invited by Knights of Columbus leaders, he helped raise money to benefit Catholic servicemen—and as a condition of his participation, he persuaded the organization to double its original goal to $5 million. If the Jews could raise that much money, he said, so could the Catholics. The only non-Catholic among one hundred Knights of Columbus campaign workers, Fox promised to raise $150,000 from New York City’s Jewish community. That turned out to be more difficult than expected. Although he gave $5,000 himself and pressed Fox Film stars and directors to contribute, almost no one else wanted to help. Some Jews told him they resented being approached on behalf of a Catholic cause. Goodwill from his previous two campaigns saved the situation. Convinced that Fox was “doing this most unselfishly,” Felix Warburg increased his planned contribution from $1,000 to $5,000 and wrote to his friends asking them also to give generously. Fox met his quota, the Knights of Columbus reached its $5 million goal, and Church authorities called Fox to their residence to bless him for his help.
Two months later Fox helped lead the Red Cross’s $100 million wartime fund-raising drive. They hadn’t wanted him. By the time he read about it in the New York Times while on vacation with his family in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the campaign had already been organized into teams according to industry—with none for entertainment. Fox rushed back to New York to ask millionaire Cornelius N. Bliss Jr., head of the local Red Cross effort, for permission to lead another team. Bliss refused. They had already printed the stationery, and they weren’t going to pay to have it redone. Bliss changed his mind when Fox handed him a personal check for $750,000 and promised that if he didn’t raise at least that much, the Red Cross could take the shortfall from him.
As head of the newly created Allied Theatrical and Motion Picture Team, Fox entered a glittering circle of wealth and social position. Other Red Cross team leaders included J. P. Morgan Jr., John D. Rockefeller Jr., American Tobacco Company president Percival S. Hill, Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt, and Mrs. Edward H. Harriman, who had inherited $70–$100 million upon her railroad tycoon husband’s death in 1909.
One name had a special allure. Rockefeller Jr., five years older than Fox, seemed to epitomize the best aspects of American success. The son of the richest man in the world, and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University, he had gone to work at the New York headquarters of his father’s company, Standard Oil, but hadn’t flaunted his advantages. “Junior,” as they called him around the office, was known to be at his desk every morning at nine and to stay every day until five, taking only a quick lunch break at a popular-priced neighborhood restaurant. A churchgoing Baptist, he was happily married to his college sweetheart, Abby Greene Aldrich, the daughter of Rhode Island senator Nelson W. Aldrich, and by 1918, when Fox met him, the couple had six children. To Fox, Rockefeller Jr.’s life looked like what money was supposed to be able to buy.
Fox was acutely aware of Rockefeller Jr.’s presence at Red Cross events. At a planning meeting at the Delmonico Hotel, when called upon to address the large group, Fox noticed that “Rockefeller turned around and faced me and looked me square in the eyes.” For that to have happened, Fox must have been watching him. Fox sensed an instant sympathy. When he began speaking, even though others in the room snickered, he saw that Rockefeller Jr. didn’t. He was sure he knew what Rockefeller Jr. was thinking—that for both of them it was “a privilege and honor” to aid such a good cause.
Eager to build on this sense of kinship, Fox made an astonishing personal sacrifice. He desperately wanted to come in first among the thirty-one Red Cross teams and, working virtually around the clock, had arranged a tornado of glamorous fund-raising events for the weeklong campaign in late May 1918—among them, appearances by stars every night at all 1,250 of New York City’s theaters, a seven-match “boxing carnival” at Madison Square Garden, a Metropolitan Opera House concert featuring Enrico Caruso, and a gala ball at the Hotel Astor. Referring to the campaign’s last day, he told a reporter, “If you hear an ambulance clanging next Tuesday, and at the same time you learn definitely that Team No. 7 has not the biggest total, then you may be sure I am dead inside that ambulance.”
His team did come in first, with $1.1 million. However, at the closing dinner ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Fox underreported his total so that Rockefeller Jr., with $1,026,000, could get top recognition.
Rockefeller Jr. wasn’t even present that evening. Fox was certain, though, that once he turned in the full $1.1 million, his hoped-for friend would realize what he had done. That seemed to be the case when, soon afterward, Rockefeller Jr. sent him a handwritten congratulatory letter. Rockefeller Jr. might have written similar letters to all the Red Cross team leaders, but Fox chose to believe he’d been singled out specially. He also chose to believe that Rockefeller Jr. understood Fox’s motives—that is, he understood how much Fox admired the Rockefellers and that he had no desire to surpass them in public glory.
Rockefeller Jr. was not the open book that Fox thought. Like his father—vilified as an unprincipled predator in Ida Tarbell’s 1904 best seller, The History of the Standard Oil Company—the son had a complex, contradictory character. In the eyes of some, Rockefeller Jr. had blood on his hands. In September 1913, miners had gone on strike at the Ludlow, Colorado, camp of the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. Although five of their seven demands simply called for the company to recognize rights already afforded by state law, Rockefeller Jr. refused to negotiate. Seven months later, angry because the miners still hadn’t returned to work, he pressured the governor of Colorado to send in two hundred state troopers armed with machine guns. For fourteen hours on April 20, 1914, the militia sprayed bullets at the miners’ canvas tents, set them on fire, and detonated dynamite. Women ran from the burning tents with their clothes on fire. By the end of the day, the Ludlow camp had been reduced to charred debris and forty-five people, more than two-thirds of them women and children, were dead. In August 1915, the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations blamed Rockefeller Jr. for the “massacre” and described him as dangerously “autocratic and anti-social.”
Fox ignored those well-publicized facts. He also ignored the insult when Rockefeller Jr., who was organizing the New York division of a final wartime fund-raising effort, the United War Work Campaign of November 1918, asked him to serve on the entertainment industry team under George M. Cohan. Fox politely refused and got the position of team chairman only after Cohan declined it. Fox believed he could change Rockefeller Jr.’s mind about him. Taking over an entire floor of a West Forty-Second Street office building, he put three hundred people to work around the clock, and raised nearly $1 million. Diplomatically, his team came in third, behind one led by a Rockefeller Jr. cousin and another by the son of one of Standard Oil’s original investors. For years, Fox would continue to try to curry favor with the Rockefeller family, and for years, he would continue to trust that his efforts were well appreciated.
Further to prove himself a great American, Fox put Fox Film in service to the war effort. After the United States declared war in April 1917, Fox ordered studio writers to add patriotic scenes to current productions and he set in motion the first of about a dozen pro-war movies made in close cooperation with the U.S. Committee on Public Information, the federal government’s wartime propaganda agency. With President Wilson having recognized films as “the very highest medium for the dissemination of public intelligence,” committee chairman George Creel formed a film division. Fox Film, Creel said, “very generously” placed its entire organization at the government’s disposal. (Creel would return the favor in late 1917, by defending Theda Bara’s Russian Revolution movie, The Rose of Blood, against Major Funkhouser’s censorship attempts in Chicago.)
Although none of the Fox propaganda movies are known to have survived, reviews indicate that most of them were densely packed melodramas riveted with sex interest and shaped by simplistic, even cartoonish, notions of patriotism. “Ridiculous . . . very cheap junk,” Wid’s labeled Fox’s first propaganda movie, The Spy (1917), “apparently being aimed only to prove Germans boobs and brutes.” Scenes showed a handsome young American spy (William Farnum’s brother Dustin) strolling into the Berlin home of the German secret service chief without anyone trying to stop him and later being tortured and shot against a stone wall by a German firing squad.
Subsequent releases barreled down the same track. The Prussian Cur (1918)* portrayed an “invisible embassy” of German undercover agents burning U.S. factories, sabotaging trains and aircraft, fomenting labor rebellions, and stealing U.S. military secrets. Stuffed about two-thirds full of newsreel cut-ins, the movie otherwise had no discernible story. Kultur (1918) purported to reveal the salacious truth about the war’s inciting event. That is, Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand was murdered not by a political fanatic but by an admirer of a beautiful courtesan (Gladys Brockwell), whom the archduke had banished for fear of her influence over his lecherous old fool of a father, Emperor Franz Josef. “It might be expected that if anyone was going to pull such a thing, it would be Bill Fox,” commented Wid’s Daily. “Bill certainly runs wild sometimes.”
Conversely, Allied soldiers were champions of honor and freedom. In mid-1918, as literally the picture of positive thinking, Fox made Why America Will Win, a film “biography” of General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe. To coincide with the movie’s release, studio publicists prepared a thirty-five-thousand-word biography of Pershing to run in one hundred newspapers nationwide and ordered one million copies of a sepia-toned portrait of Pershing, “suitable for framing.” In the same flag-waving spirit, advance advertising for Fox Film’s recruitment movie, 18 to 45 (1918), made after Congress voted to increase the upper age limit of the draft to forty-five, showed five handsome Allied soldiers with bayonets pointed downward at cowering, wild-eyed, gargoyle-featured Germans with jagged teeth and gnarled hands.
Fox’s hyperemotional portrayal of the war reflected his pragmatic assessment of the industry’s financial reality. As always, movies were expensive products that could ruin a studio if unpopular, and audiences had made it clear that they didn’t want somber realism. In a March 1918 article titled “Cut Out the Sobs,” the trade publication Motography quoted exhibitor after exhibitor along the lines expressed by an Ann Arbor, Michigan, theater owner: “People certainly do not want so many depressing, tragic stories when the whole world is one great tragedy. People go to the movies to gain a little respite from the awful gloom that hangs over the world.”
Besides, everybody was going overboard. One of the most successful World War I propaganda movies, The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin (1918), produced by the Renowned Pictures Corporation and distributed by Universal, presented the Kaiser as a vain, strutting, physically deformed egomaniac who was terrorizing the world. An introductory title card noted that the facts had been “treated with dramatic license.” Even D. W. Griffith made Hearts of the World, which remained a lifelong embarrassment for him and star Lillian Gish, who found its depiction of German brutality absurd: “Whenever a German came near me, he beat me or kicked me.”
Off-screen, Fox participated enthusiastically in Liberty Loan campaigns, making substantial purchases on behalf of his companies and personally subscribing for $400,000 worth of the bonds. From the stages of all Fox theaters, employees sold Liberty Bonds, “many times much to the annoyance of our patrons who came there to be entertained and not reminded that there was a war.” He also sent Fox movies to Allied troops in war zones; messengers on motorcycles carried film cans to dugouts behind the trenches in France. According to the Community Motion Picture Bureau, which provided entertainment to American troops under the supervision of the War and Navy Departments, Fox movies far outnumbered those of any other studio.
At the Western Avenue studio in Los Angeles, Fox formed four Home Guard companies (with himself as a major) and ordered uniforms from the Western Costume Company. Every night, the entire force drilled for one hour; and every day, three squads were excused from work to go to target practice at an Eagle Rock firing range. Even stars got into the act. Brothers William and Dustin Farnum, both yachtsmen, bought a fifty-one-foot boat that they planned to use to help guard Los Angeles Harbor. Fox outfitted the craft with two machine guns. By mid-May 1917, Fox Film’s volunteer companies included more than 500 employees in Los Angeles and another 275, supervised by Royal Canadian Mounted Police veteran J. Gordon Edwards, at the Fort Lee studio. All employees who left for military service were guaranteed to find their jobs waiting for them upon their return.
In a display of jingoistic fervor, Fox threatened to fire anyone who wasn’t “100 percent American.” At Fox Film’s annual national convention at the Biltmore Hotel in New York in June 1918, he called on all branch managers to submit confidential reports about staff members suspected of pro-German sympathies. The reports would be thoroughly investigated, Fox promised. However, no evidence indicates that any employee was even accused, much less dismissed, as a possible traitor.
Fox touted his pro-war cooperation as the result of his immense gratitude to the United States for all the opportunities it had given him. No doubt it was that, but he also had a number of urgent practical motives.
There was, first, the inconvenient fact of his German background. Fox had been fortunate that upon his family’s arrival from Hungary, immigration officials had anglicized their surname Fuchs, fortunate also that he had grown up in the United States and had no foreign accent. However, he spoke German fluently because that had been the language of his childhood home.
His background placed Fox at risk. In early 1917, as the United States prepared to enter the war, some employers began to fire German and Austrian workers, and talk of internment camps surfaced. A high tide of immigrants poured into court offices nationwide to apply for U.S. citizenship. Social position and education were no barriers against fear. On October 1, 1917, Columbia University sacked two professors on grounds of treason and sedition because they had urged opposition to the war.
While Fox was in no danger of being fired, it would have been quite easy to go astray inadvertently. The case of Robert Goldstein provided a signal example. Between mid-1916 and early 1917, first-time director and cowriter Goldstein, president of the Goldstein Theatrical Costuming Company, reportedly spent $200,000 to film The Spirit of ’76 as a “historical romance” about the American Revolution. In late March 1917, just before the United States declared war, Goldstein advertised that his movie had been “happily completed in time to help rouse the patriotic spirit of America.”
Unfortunately, Goldstein had included scenes showing British soldiers stabbing a baby with a bayonet, carrying a young woman into a bedroom, and dragging women by the hair. To U.S. officials, it didn’t matter whether such images were historically accurate, only that they were not at all convenient at a time when the federal government was desperately trying to recruit millions of American men to fight enthusiastically alongside British troops.
Premiering in Chicago on May 7, 1917, The Spirit of ’76 was, predictably, banned after a few performances by film censor Major Funkhouser. It took Goldstein six months to arrange another booking, in part because creditors had seized the movie for nonpayment of debt. The Spirit of ’76 next showed up at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles on Tuesday, November 27, 1917. Two nights later, U.S. Justice Department officials seized the film, arrested Goldstein on charges of violating the Espionage Act of 1917, and tossed him into the Los Angeles County Jail. Unable to make the $10,000 bail, he remained behind bars for months.
On April 15, 1918, a jury convicted thirty-five-year-old Goldstein of two counts of treason. Two weeks later, as Goldstein stood visibly shaking, a judge denounced him as a despicable liar and traitor, fined him $5,000, and sentenced him to ten years in prison. Three months later, Goldstein’s wife divorced him. Although, in 1919, President Wilson would commute Goldstein’s term and order him released, his career and personal life had been ruined.
As Fox knew from The Nigger, he, too, was capable of making a movie with one set of intentions only to find it interpreted in an entirely different way. Nothing necessarily prevented him from becoming another Robert Goldstein. Wide-ranging cooperation with the war effort, however, could shield him from suspicion.
Additionally, Fox, along with all the other studio heads, needed to protect the motion picture industry from the sort of severe restrictions that had crippled the European film studios. As late as the spring of 1918, the U.S. government still considered movies a nonessential industry. That jeopardized not only important personnel, who were in danger of being poached for military service, but also the availability of raw materials: the same chemicals were used to manufacture both base celluloid and many forms of explosives, and metals such as iron, steel, and tin were needed both for the war effort and to make and repair film projectors. Fox briefly lost one of his most valuable assets in mid-1917 when director Raoul Walsh was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army Signal Corps and began editing documentary war footage. Had Fox, who had tried to dissuade him from volunteering, pulled strings in Washington? Walsh suspected so because, after less than a month’s service, the army discharged him with a commendation signed by President Wilson so he could return to Fox Film.
Indeed, there were limits to Fox’s patriotism. When the federal government proposed a war tax on movie tickets, Fox led the opposition. It was one thing to give voluntarily, another matter entirely to have the government meddle in his business. Publicly, Fox kept his protest low-key, stating only that “it was the proper move in the best interests of the exhibitor.” The effort failed, and in late 1917, the War Revenue Act imposed a tax of one cent on each ten cents or fraction thereof of an admission price. Nobody liked it, especially not film producers and distributors, whom the federal government expected to pay the tax. Soon, though, everyone got used to it, even Fox. He and most of the other major studio heads issued a statement of compliance that concluded, “War is hell. We’ve got to go through hell and taxes before we can expect to reach peace and pleasure.”
As a result of its cooperation with both propaganda and fund-raising activities, the motion picture industry succeeded in getting classified as an essential industry by the War Industries Board. As of August 23, 1918, movie studios gained priority status to obtain raw materials and their staff members, including performers, were exempted from the draft. In exchange, the industry had to promise to discontinue all “non essential production,” eliminate “wasteful methods,” produce only “wholesome pictures,” build no new theaters for the duration of the war, and repair rather than replace equipment whenever possible. It was a small price to pay to stay in business.
Altogether, war—and war fund-raising—turned out to be good for the movies. Millions of dollars, much of the money coming from very wealthy people who had kept it stashed in the bank, flowed into Liberty Bonds, war savings stamps, and various war charities. As the U.S. government began to spend that money on the war effort, money circulated again, and ample amounts cascaded down to the average worker. “Now, everybody jingles cash in their pockets,” Fox announced in August 1918, just before he raised ticket prices at all his theaters.
At heart, Fox later admitted, the war horrified him. Some fifteen years later, he would still recall the sense of tragedy he’d felt that so many American men, “the flower and the youth of the country, were now to devote their time not to build, but to destroy.” He saw war as “murdering and slaughtering” and lamented the loss of all the constructive contributions that those men might have made. He never explained how he managed to quiet his conscience during all his pro-war clamoring. Probably he did what by now he had a habit of doing: not thinking about matters that it didn’t profit him to think about.
As Fox pushed forward, the past pulled him back. As a press release from the time read, “William Fox has no desire to forget, or have others forget, his beginnings.”
Old places still held an allure. Leaving his office after 1:00 a.m. in early May 1916, Fox led a reporter to an amusement arcade three blocks away at Forty-Ninth and Broadway. “Been a long time since I’ve done any of this,” he said, lifting a shooting gallery rifle onto his shoulder and taking aim at the ducks that glided over the target as a mechanical lion leaped toward them. His first shot sent pieces of the duck scattering. He kept staring ahead, kept shooting in rapid succession, and missed for the first time on his twenty-fifth shot. A bystander muttered, “Gee, but that bird can shoot.”
Old ties still bound. Between 1916 and 1918, he hired two municipal government insiders, John J. White, the former Giovanni Bianchi who had been a “confidential man” of both Big Tim and Little Tim Sullivan; and James E. MacBride, former president of New York City’s Municipal Civil Service Commission, who became an assistant to his longtime close friend Winfield Sheehan. Possibly, in addition to their political influence for his business, Fox wanted personal guidance. In the spring of 1918, he was reportedly considering a run at the 1918 Democratic nomination for governor of New York. Some weeks after the Hotel Astor dinner honoring him, he gave a dinner for influential politicians, and the subject of Albany was tossed around the table.
It was a fool notion. Fox would no sooner have tolerated Tammany’s management than Tammany ever would have believed he could be managed. Indeed, when talk of the election got under way at Tammany’s Fourteenth Street headquarters, “someone put a spoke in the wheel of fame” and sent Fox’s political ambitions cartwheeling into a ditch. Instead, Al Smith got the 1918 Democratic nomination and the governor’s mansion.
Occasionally, Fox forgot all about the future and the past and lived simply in the present. A reporter visiting him at his Long Island home in the late summer of 1916 observed, “Out in Woodmere, in a few odd moments before breakfast or on a Sunday or holiday, Mr. Fox goes bug hunting and killing among his rose bushes and in his garden or throws a twelve-pound medicine ball about.” Occasionally, when friends came to visit, “he will be as merry as a boy as he drives out a one-base hit to a group of friends in short right field.”
Even as he reached upward for the next rung on the social ladder, Fox could be happy right where he was.