The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Accordingly, the family’s focus shifted. Fox’s mother, Anna, began to pin her hopes on her eldest son and encouraged him to save for his future. She took him to the Dry Dock Savings Bank to open his first savings account, which Fox sentimentally kept open even as a multimillionaire. “Many times I would offer her a dollar or two extra which I had earned, but she would give it back with the suggestion that I save it,” he said. If anyone were to redeem the family, he realized, it would have to be him.

  Overwhelmed by his sense of responsibility, Fox turned to religion, a commitment that would grow quietly until it became “the greatest part of my life.” To the boy and then the man, the Bible provided direction, courage, inspiration, and renewal. Ironically, the person whom Fox blamed most for his childhood misery was also the person who provided this means of deliverance. Michael Fox was an Orthodox Jew who steadfastly insisted that his son study Hebrew and religious doctrine at a cheder run by an elderly man in his tenement house basement home. At first, Fox didn’t want to go: the lessons were a waste of time that he could use to make money.

  Religion, however, was the one territory where Michael Fox refused to back down. The boy had to go, so the boy went. His disgruntlement increased when he met his teacher, the ironically named Goodman, a short, stocky, white-bearded tyrant who conducted classes in German and gave students “a darn good rapping with his walking cane” if they missed an answer. A lay Hebrew teacher rather than a rabbi, Goodman was “a very stupid, ignorant man,” Fox would remember, still bristling decades later at the thought of Goodman’s “very severe and very brutal” manner.

  The power of the message transcended the circumstances of its transmission. A turning point occurred at Fox’s bar mitzvah, which, because his boss believed he was older, he had to feign illness to attend. The ceremony “changed my viewpoint entirely,” Fox said. Suddenly, he understood that he could no longer blame his father for the condition of his life. He alone was responsible for shaping his future, but faith would guide him. In his newfound enthusiasm, Fox began to see signs of divine intervention everywhere. Once, having persuaded a neighborhood butcher to give his family some meat on credit, he decided that only God could have impelled a grown man to trust a mere boy to pay him back.

  To later generations, Fox’s explicit belief that God took an intimate personal interest in him may seem quaint or egotistical or possibly even deluded. In that time and place, it was hardly so unusual. Many prominent late-nineteenth-century figures linked material prosperity with divine favor. Famously, John D. Rockefeller Sr. announced, “God gave me my money.” Even Andrew Carnegie, who considered himself an agnostic, invoked religious language to explain his philosophy of moneymaking. In his 1889 essay “The Gospel of Wealth,” Carnegie asserted the “sacredness of property” as the foundation of civilization and declared that obedience to “the true Gospel concerning Wealth” would someday bring “Peace on earth, among men Good-Will.”

  Belief in an unseen realm was essential for Fox. He needed God, at least the idea of God. He had no material advantages—no formal education, no money, no connections, no family members or a neighborhood mentor to instruct him in the ways of success. In a culture that increasingly celebrated surfaces, he was simply a small, shabby-looking boy with a crippled left arm. Faith welcomed his dreams and transformed his ambitions from foolish fantasy into inspired vision.

  Faith also canceled the practical liability of Michael Fox. With an omnipotent divine father watching closely and always ready to instruct him, the young boy no longer needed to look to his sullen, soup-slurping earthly father. Paradoxically, Michael Fox’s one successful assertion of parental authority was also the act that made him completely irrelevant in his eldest son’s life.

  Adolescence stirred Fox to political awareness. With protests rising on the Lower East Side in response to the area’s atrocious living and working conditions, he began to question capitalism and for three years became a socialist. This apostate period began in 1892. He was thirteen, and following his religious awakening, he began to think about the moral dimensions of action.

  That summer, one of the bloodiest episodes in American labor history took place in Homestead, Pennsylvania, about eight miles south of Pittsburgh. The details were widely reported and hotly discussed in New York. At Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead Steel Works, contract negotiations had stalled with unionized iron, steel, and tin workers, who accounted for only about 750 to 800 of the total workforce of 3,800. Union leaders wanted to renew their contract on the existing terms. Carnegie, who felt that in the previous 1889 bargaining session the union had wrung unfair concessions, demanded pay cuts ranging from 18 to 26 percent. Carnegie Steel didn’t need the money. Although net profits had fallen from $5.35 million in 1890 to $4.3 million in 1891, they were still robust and would total $4 million for 1892. At the time of the dispute, Carnegie was vacationing in the Scottish Highlands.

  When the union held its ground, Homestead plant manager Henry C. Frick, who had sold a half share in his Frick Coke Company to Carnegie in 1882 for $1.5 million, responded mercilessly. First, he built a twelve-foot-high, barbed wire–topped fence around the property. Then, in late June 1892, before the union’s current contract had expired, he abruptly shut down the plant and locked out all the workers, who represented about one-third of Homestead’s total population. To guard the property, Frick imported three hundred Pinkerton armed guards at five dollars a day each. Shortly after they arrived in two barges on the Monongahela River on July 6, the shooting began. It was never determined which side fired first, but twelve hours later ten workers and two Pinkerton guards were dead.

  The following day, Carnegie cabled Frick from Scotland. Sacrifice the mill if necessary, he instructed. “Never employ one of these rioters. Let grass grow over the works. Must not fail now.” Six days later, the governor of Pennsylvania declared martial law and sent eight thousand state militiamen to protect the Homestead Steel Works. By the end of July 1892, Frick had reopened the plant with one thousand nonunion workers. By November, the union was hopelessly crushed and decided to allow its members to go back to work. Fifteen months after the strike, a McClure’s magazine reporter found the residents of Homestead festering in sullen despondency. (Carnegie never regretted his actions, describing the Homestead episode in his 1920 autobiography as merely a “really serious quarrel” and blaming the workers for having been “outrageously wrong.”)

  What was the proper relationship between labor and capital? Certainly not this, Fox decided. He joined the Socialist Party in New York, then led by Daniel DeLeon. Fox said, “I knew him very well and was his follower . . .”

  DeLeon was no scruffy, wild-eyed radical. Born to wealthy Jewish parents in the Dutch colony of Curaçao, he attended schools in Germany and the Netherlands before earning his law degree at Columbia College (now Columbia University) in 1878. He practiced law for a few years in Brownsville, Texas, and in New York, then became a lecturer at Columbia’s School of Political Science. He quit the Columbia faculty in 1889 because, due to his left-wing views, the school refused to offer him a professorship. In 1892, the year Fox met him, DeLeon had just become editor of The People, the Socialist Labor Party’s weekly newspaper.

  Fox was probably attracted as much by DeLeon’s elitist pedigree and personal polish as by his politics. Erudite and well mannered, with a distinguished-looking white beard, DeLeon had an “essentially genteel orientation,” according to his biographer, L. Glen Seretan. He could quote the Old Testament and recite events of ancient Greek history as well as works by Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens. Fluent in French and German, he would eventually translate Karl Marx’s writing as well as nineteen novels by Eugène Sue, a wealthy mid-nineteenth-century French writer with socialist leanings.

  In DeLeon, Fox found a father figure, a role model who could show him what strength looked like far better than the ineffectual Michael Fox could. Yet DeLeon was also another version of Fox’s father, a man who faced the same central psychological pr
oblem. According to biographer Seretan, “the determining force in his life was a quest to overcome an oppressive sense of isolation by finding a sense of place, a sense of belonging, in the rapidly evolving universe of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose disruptive effects had been the source of his travail.” DeLeon seemed to be succeeding at this personal challenge while Michael Fox was sinking anonymously.

  To support causes endorsed by DeLeon, Fox stood on soapboxes and made impassioned speeches before elections. “I was satisfied that the system then in operation was wrong, and that the proper social system of the world should be socialistic. I despised both capital and capitalists,” Fox said. “Of course, this was during the period when I had as yet not been able to save a single dollar, and my earnings were just sufficient from hand to mouth.”

  As time passed, irksome observations occurred to Fox. For one thing, he realized, he was speaking one philosophy and living another. He wanted more money. Around age fifteen, he left D. Cohen to take a higher-paying job at another cutting room firm, G. Lippmann & Sons. A year later, he briefly took a side job as an American District Telegraph messenger, wearing a blue uniform with brass buttons and a cap bearing the company’s initials. Once, after managing to save ten dollars, he knew that as a good socialist, he ought to share the money with his friends. But he couldn’t—the money was his, he had earned it, so he put it in the bank instead. When his balance reached one hundred dollars, “I couldn’t make as fine an address on a soap-box.”

  Fox saw his peers making different decisions with their money. They spent freely; he constantly scrimped. “Then it occurred to me that we were not equal, that they could also have saved some money, and I began to see the distinction between these different people.” Capitalism, Fox decided, had the great virtue of rewarding wise financial choices.

  He may also have detected some flaws in DeLeon’s character. To avoid taking the entrance exam for Columbia University’s law program, DeLeon had lied on his application, falsely claiming that he had earned AM and PhB degrees at Leyden, in the Netherlands. Furthermore, DeLeon didn’t really like the common man. In theory, of course laborers deserved strong support, but in reality they often seemed like thick-skulled boors. A “hopeless, helpless grasping after straws” characterized most of the working class, DeLeon wrote, while many other labor leaders were “empty-headed, ominous figures.”

  By age sixteen, Fox was through with socialism. “I saw that capital was what I needed. It seemed that there were only two courses left, to work for someone else all my life, or to fight for independence.”

  Independence required money, so he became even more frugal. “I can recall going out with boys when I was 16, 17, or 18 and [I] would have liked to have done the things they did. I longed for them . . . I would check up what the cost would be and I denied myself it. I knew when the soles of my shoes had holes in them that that was the time to have them repaired[,] but I delayed. By putting pasteboard in them to save the half-soling[,] I saved them for a while longer. I probably saved four or five pairs of shoes that way.” He didn’t feel aggrieved or self-righteous. “During that period I don’t say that I envied anyone, because I could have done as well, nor did the thought come into my mind that he would be sorry for spending this money and that I was wise in saving. But what did enter my mind very definitely was that I wanted to be in a business for myself and not work for anyone else. I wanted this business just as soon as I could save enough money to be something for myself.”

  After quitting night school to try to supplement his daytime earnings, Fox decided to go onstage. It was a choice of the heart, inspired by his mother’s lively storytelling: “As a kid of eleven or twelve, I took part in every show given in my neighborhood, and I loved it. There was something about the theater and theatrical performances which was part of my blood . . . it was the strongest urge in my makeup.” For five or ten cents, as often as he could, his only indulgence, he bought one of the tickets that shopkeepers received in exchange for displaying a theater ad in their window. Others shook their heads. “I was warned time and again by my employer to cease my practice of sitting in theatre galleries at night. No good could come of it, I was repeatedly told.” He began to read Shakespeare, hiding in the aisles of secondhand bookstores on the East Side and turning the pages surreptitiously to avoid buying the book.

  With his friend Cliff Gordon, a fellow ADT messenger, Fox created a comedy act called the Schmaltz Brothers. Modeling themselves after the successful vaudeville team of Weber and Fields, the teenagers played German-accented immigrants eagerly trying to adapt to American life. For five or ten dollars a night, they appeared in the New York area—wherever Fox, as the business manager, could arrange a booking—usually as part of a dance hall entertainment program. They couldn’t have been truly terrible, because the Schmaltz Brothers managed to last two years and Cliff Gordon went on to become a successful solo vaudeville comedian known as the German Politician. One observer would later recall that Fox and Gordon played Clarendon Hall on East Thirteenth Street as “prime favorites.”

  Fox, however, chose to remember the worst aspects of the experience. According to him, theater managers complained that the Schmaltz Brothers was the worst act they’d ever seen. As evidence, he cited a typical routine:

  FOX: Someone wanted to buy my blind horse.

  GORDON: No one would buy that.

  FOX: Why do you say that? Ikey offered me $200 for him yesterday.

  GORDON: Why, he hasn’t got two cents.

  FOX: I know, but wasn’t it a good offer?

  Circulating in the shabbier precincts of show business, the boys sometimes didn’t get paid. Once, after an event promoter skipped out early, they found themselves stranded after midnight in Bayonne, New Jersey. “We’d had just enough money to reach this place,” Fox recalled. “I remember walking with [Cliff] from Bayonne to Jersey City, arriving there about 6 a.m. We had a stretch of water between us and our homes . . .” Sacrificing honesty to necessity, Fox wrote “Blind” on a piece of cardboard and hung the sign around Cliff’s neck, so the two could panhandle. “The fare was two cents at that time, and when we had four cents, we got on the ferry and went across.”

  The end came when they got booked at New York’s Arlington Hall for a show benefiting Spike Hennessy, a prizefighter who had allegedly developed consumption. “When I got in front of the building, I noticed a big three-page picture of Spike in his prime. I turned to Cliff and said, ‘If this bird is in here, we are going to get licked,’ ” Fox recalled. To reassure him, Gordon, who’d gotten paid that day by the telegraph company, gave Fox his five-dollar fee in advance. After a “worse than usual” performance, Fox slipped out of the building in full stage makeup and costume. “I don’t think Spike’s lungs were bad because when Cliff said who he was, Spike said, ‘You ruined the whole show,’ and punched him in one of the eyes. When Cliff arrived home with one black eye and no money, he told his father what had occurred and his father proceeded to black the other eye.”*

  Having gone onstage “purely to find out whether or not I could earn some money from it,” Fox now had his answer. After the Arlington Hall fiasco, he quit the Schmaltz Brothers and relegated his interest in performing to a hobby. Joining a small amateur dramatic society, he first appeared as the hero in East Lynne. “My performances in the dramatic show were equally as bad as when I was a comedian,” he admitted. “I also played Uncle Tom in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I think the people enjoyed it thoroughly when they learned I was no longer to appear in these shows.”

  Perhaps his talent lay in sales. As a young boy, he had done quite well with his father’s stove-blackening polish. Now he learned that selling could be more difficult. Once, he bought a stock of umbrellas and on rainy nights sold them to theater patrons who had gone out unprepared—but it couldn’t rain every night, so he gave up that idea. Then, when New York City threw a parade on September 30, 1899, to celebrate Admiral George Dewey’s victory over the Spanish fleet at
Manila Bay, twenty-year-old Fox withdrew $500 from his $580 savings account and bought refreshments to sell to spectators. He had expected a warm day. Overnight, the weather turned chilly. Instead of Fox’s cold sodas, the crowds wanted hot coffee; strong winds coated his unwrapped ham-and-cheese sandwiches with dirt. All Fox could hope to sell were his pretzels. Desperate to save his $500 investment, he went ahead of his dozen or so helpers and told parade-goers that his pretzels contained a special Admiral Dewey souvenir. They didn’t, but by the time customers discovered the fraud, Fox and his group had disappeared into the crowd.

  He was young. He was learning. He was filled with hope. Looking back in his fifties, Fox commented, “I want to say this, that if I had my life to live over again, I would want to live it just that way. I don’t remember any part of my life that I enjoyed more than the part from the time I was eight years old to the time I was married . . . I knew I was searching for a goal and I enjoyed every minute of it.”

  As for the darker side of the human heart, the callous predations that lay behind much of the Gilded Age’s progress—he didn’t see it. “I couldn’t think of anything mean that anybody did to me. I would always find a justification for it and would most times conclude that I must have been in the wrong,” he said. “In my early days, I didn’t think there were any mean people.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Eva

  Sam Goldwyn cheated on his first wife, the plain-faced, dumpling-shaped Blanche, who was the sister of his business partner Jesse Lasky; after their divorce, he married the beautiful, slim, redheaded actress Frances Howard and cheated on her, too. Louis B. Mayer, annoyed that his longtime wife, Margaret, suffered from deep depression following a hysterectomy, went out dancing at nightclubs several times a week and divorced her after several hospitalizations failed markedly to improve her mood. Jack Warner began stepping out on his first wife, Irma, soon after their wedding. Before he turned forty, he had abandoned her and their teenage son to move in with beautiful, married, bit part actress Ann Page Alvarado. Warner then delayed more than three years after Ann’s divorce to marry her. As for Harry Cohn, founder of Columbia Studios, and his string of coarse, exploitive relationships with women, the less said the better. “His Crudeness,” director Frank Capra called Cohn. Cohn once sexually attacked his friend’s teenage daughter when she went to his office in a dirndl skirt and peasant blouse to talk about a potential acting job. “You’ll never work in this town again!” Cohn shrieked as the terrified girl ran for the door. (That actress, Geraldine Brooks, didn’t listen and went on to a busy career in movies and television.)