The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  For William Fox, there was only Eva Leo. “A very beautiful woman,” he continued to call her, even after age and illness had blurred her youthful freshness into shapeless, pallid, gray-haired matronliness. Theirs was a remarkable love story. Childhood friends, they shared a devoted partnership that spanned more than fifty years. Each was the other’s only serious romance, and although many other accusations of character flaws would eventually assault Fox, there was never any rumor that he was unfaithful to Eva. Publicly, Fox always spoke of Eva in glowing terms, often going out of his way to praise her contributions to the Fox film empire. Unilateral and often dictatorial in business, he became solicitous and deferential at home. Fox’s friend Detroit businessman and philanthropist David A. Brown would later comment that he had never met a more devoted husband: “[D]uring the most trying periods of William Fox’s life, I have never heard him say an unkind word or raise his voice to any member of his family . . . he is the gentlest of gentlemen, always a thoughtful and considerate husband.”

  Only a few images of Eva survive. For a family that made its fortune in pictures, this was a curiously unphotographed group. Descendants have inherited only a handful of candid shots, none of them showing Fox and Eva together. Perhaps that wasn’t so strange. For Fox, visual images were items of commerce to be retailed as broadly as possible. Family, on the other hand, was an intensely private preserve, the borders of which he guarded carefully. As for press photos of the couple and their children, the supply is extremely scant. In addition to the fact that the Fox family rarely attended flashbulb-friendly events, they were the wrong type to attract coverage. They were Jewish and too recently risen from their shabby immigrant origins to have had all their rough edges polished off. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, society pages belonged to old-guard names such as Astor, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt.

  Among the remaining images of Eva is a larger-than-life-size painting, probably from the mid-1920s, when she was in her forties. She wears a delicately sequined evening gown with a gossamer chiffon overlay and stands in front of a painted pastoral background. Her features are small and neatly proportioned, marked by a high forehead, wide-set dark eyes, and thin lips. It’s a pleasantly attractive face, but hardly stunning, and her posture (head held back stiffly and hands clasped in front) suggests diffidence if not downright wariness. Underneath all the finery, Eva was a rather ordinary-looking woman, uncomfortable with even this degree of public disclosure.

  Fox knew instantly he was going to marry Eva. His mother had given a costume party on Thanksgiving Day at the Fox family’s railroad apartment above the butter-and-egg store on Rivington Street. He was fourteen or fifteen. Eva was nine or ten, the daughter of a tailor, Max Leo, whose family lived on the ground floor. According to Fox, the other guests wore hired costumes as knights and courtiers and Spanish grandees, while he’d dressed up as a bootblack, in ragged clothing and with a dirt-smudged face. The story seems retrospectively embellished—it’s unlikely that slum children could have afforded such elaborate costumes—yet it conveys Fox’s sense of romantic enchantment. According to Fox, he resolved then to win over Eva. She was sitting quietly in a corner, so he went over to shine her shoes. She “paid little attention to me. In fact, I remember when I courted her, I evidently bored her to death.” Later, while trying to advance his cause by chatting with her father, he turned around and saw that Eva had slipped out of the room.

  Of course she fled. She was still a child. But he had nothing yet to offer her anyway. So, for five or six years, he waited, contenting himself with watching for her in the street. Despite the fact that these were biologically ardent years, adolescence racing into adulthood, he never let his romantic interest wander. “I decided I had found the one.”

  The fierceness of Fox’s commitment to Eva probably arose largely from practical circumstances. The Lower East Side was then a cauldron of vice, and a young man who wanted an innocent partner would have faced a short slate of options. These were times when the poor had very few legitimate avenues for advancement, when “honest” work meant exhaustive toil for abysmal wages, and when the emerging urban industrial culture inflamed a desire for getting and spending. Many Lower East Side youths logically turned to crime. Boys became gamblers, pimps, and thugs. Girls—some of whom had been sent out at a very early age to work in miserable jobs so their brothers could stay in school—fell into prostitution not only because of the money but also because recruiters lured them in, often at dances or other social events, with the only glimmer of special attention they’d ever received. Investigating the long-standing, flagrant debauchery, a citizens group, the Committee of Fifteen, reported in 1902 that Lower East Side brothel owners “openly cried their wares upon the streets, and children of the neighborhood were given pennies and candy to distribute the cards of the prostitutes.” With many police officers on the take, decent folks lived under a “virtual reign of terror” by the vice industries.

  The Jewish community’s emphasis on religious values provided little hedge against the allure of crime. In his 1897 book The American Metropolis, former New York Police Board president Frank Moss claimed that the pimps who supervised the Lower East Side’s “herd of female wretchedness” were “a fraternity of fetid male vermin (nearly all of them being Russian or Polish Jews), who are unmatchable for impudence and bestiality.” By the early 1900s, according to muckraking journalist George Kibbe Turner, the neighborhood had become “the chief recruiting-ground for the so-called white slave trade in the United States, and probably in the world,” with the most vulnerable targets being young Jewish girls because, as the most recent immigrants, they represented “the greatest supply of unprotected young girls in the city.” Jewish girls as young as thirteen worked as prostitutes.

  Against this backdrop, Eva must have shone like a rare jewel. At age ten, she’d had no time to be corrupted, and she also had a strong, watchful father and several brothers to fend off threats to her virtue. Conversely, compared to all those loutish, leering loafers on the street, Fox must have looked like a prince. He had a steady job that he performed willingly; he supported his family; he looked for extra ways to earn money honestly; he even scrubbed the apartment stairs for his mother.

  Eva’s personality also meshed well with Fox’s psychological needs. Like his beloved mother, Eva was her family’s caretaker. Her mother had died when Eva was nine, and as the eldest girl, she had taken over the domestic responsibilities for her father and five brothers and sisters. She showed no desire to blaze an independent career. Like Fox’s mother, but more energetically than the physically worn-down and emotionally eroded Anna Fox, Eva saw herself as a supporter and an encourager.

  Additionally—and this was a considerable advantage—Eva’s family was much more assimilated. When Fox met Eva, his mother still spoke German almost entirely—she never would learn to speak much English—and his father was continuing to erase himself into a ghostly presence. By contrast, Max Leo occupied a solid position in the United States. His tailoring business was growing steadily, and he could advise Fox on the garment industry career the ambitious young man then thought he was going to have.

  After five or six years of waiting for Eva, twenty-year-old Fox decided to make his move. He bought a box of good cigars, rehearsed his speech for a week, and called on Eva’s father. He had good prospects, Fox declared, and his intentions were entirely serious. Max Leo approved. The couple began dating, and one cold winter night, on their way home from the theater where they’d seen The Liars, starring John Drew (of the Barrymore acting dynasty), they found themselves stranded for two hours in a stalled streetcar. Fox proposed, and Eva accepted.

  So, on December 31, 1899, twenty-year-old Fox married fifteen-year-old Eva at the Chrystie Street Synagogue in Manhattan. It was a big wedding by standards of the place and time, with some forty to fifty guests. For Fox, money measured caring: he would later boast, not complain, that Eva’s father had insisted on “a very fine public wedding” and that t
he ceremony had reduced Fox’s bank account from $675 to $325. Their friends pooled a wedding gift fund of about $100, which the couple used to buy furniture. They moved into a five-room, eleven-dollar-a-month railroad apartment at 1055 Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn, just doors away from Fox’s parents and siblings, who now, conveniently, lived at 1063 Myrtle.

  Eva Leo? Fox’s birth family was aghast.

  “This was my choice, not my parents’,” Fox acknowledged. He was too young, his mother Anna protested. How could he know for sure that he loved Eva? Or was there some other reason, his mother wondered, that they had to get married?

  Eva Leo! For decades afterward, Fox’s siblings would continue to mock Eva’s Russian Polish heritage as culturally inferior to their own German background. “Without any real evidence, my mother insisted that Max Leo had been the janitor in their building and not a tailor or a clothing manufacturer as Uncle Bill used to say,” noted Angela Fox Dunn, the daughter of Fox’s youngest sister, Malvina, who was born six years and two months after Fox’s marriage. “Every Fox hated every Leo. My mother used to say that if you saw someone scratching from lice, it was probably a Leo. She called Eva ‘the witch’ and described Eva’s brothers Jack and Joe as lewd, crude, and loathsome roughnecks. I was brought up to detest the whole group.”

  The Foxes’ scabrous response to Eva expressed their rage at a rival for scarce resources. Seventeen dollars a week—that was all Fox was earning at a Lower East Side cutting room* when he married Eva. Yet Anna Fox’s health was failing, and Fox’s four younger siblings (fourteen-year-old Tina, seven-year-old Bess, five-year-old Aaron, and four-year-old Maurice) needed to be clothed and fed. Michael Fox was virtually useless as a provider. He had been unemployed for at least a month at the time of Fox’s marriage, and six months later, he still hadn’t found a job. Michael didn’t even have a fixed occupation, describing himself variously as a machinist and a silver polisher. Fox had to support them all.

  But seventeen dollars a week—how could that stretch to support two households? What if Eva demanded a say-so in her husband’s spending? And—a calamitous thought—what if the couple decided to have children soon? Fox’s birth family would become destitute if he were to abandon them financially. With acid emotions, his parents and siblings tried to dissolve the bonds that threatened to alienate their one dependable source of income.

  The Fox family’s fears about Eva had some foundation. Eva did try to curtail Fox’s spending on his siblings, whom she considered lazy and parasitical. And she never made peace, or much effort to make peace, with his mother. Eva quickly claimed the upper hand in that contest. After his wedding, despite the proximity of their homes, Fox rarely found time to visit his mother. And in August 1900, some eight months after his wedding, he formally separated his finances from his parents’ household by opening his first bank account in his own name.

  Generally, though, the Fox family was more wrong than right about Eva. Fox didn’t withdraw his support of his parents and his siblings, and with one exception (a brother who he felt had betrayed him), he would continue to support them and their children until the end of his life.

  In the beginning, Fox responded to the added responsibility of marriage by pushing himself forward. Dissatisfied with his salary at the cloth-shrinking firm, he asked boss Edward S. Rothchild for a raise to twenty dollars a week. Twenty dollars? erupted Rothchild, who would go on to head the Chelsea Bank in New York. But Fox wasn’t even worth seventeen dollars per week!

  At that, Fox decided to go into business for himself with another employee. Their company would serve as an intermediary between the fabric mill and the garment manufacturer by examining the cloth for flaws and preshrinking it. Fox was sure they’d make a lot of money: the business would require very little start-up capital and very little space, and their former employer had promised to use their services.* With a partnership agreement scribbled out on a piece of brown paper, Fox, 21, and Benjamin S. Moss, 22, started the Knickerbocker Cloth Examining and Shrinking Company in early April 1900 and rented space on the ground floor of the ten-story Decourcy Building at 572–576 West Broadway. Moss,* who had done the cloth examining for their former employer, became the senior partner in charge of operations, while Fox took responsibility for soliciting business.

  Adversity hounded the company. In mid-June 1900, two and a half months after Knickerbocker’s launch, an after-hours fire destroyed the top three floors of their ten-story building, blackening exterior walls, breaking windows, and leading to water damage for all businesses in the building. Officials estimated the property loss at $100,000.

  Six months later, on Saturday, January 19, 1901, Fox and Moss nearly got murdered by an angry ex-employee. A day earlier, fifty-nine-year-old sales agent Nathan May had persuaded Fox and Moss to advance him twenty-five dollars against forthcoming commissions. He needed to buy medicine for his sick wife, May explained. Skeptical, Fox had May followed—and indeed, the supposedly dutiful husband went directly to Washington Square Park, where he met a middle-aged woman who wasn’t his wife. The couple then stole away to a nearby house, where May remained until the early morning. No doubt sensitive on such matters because of the rumors about his father’s infidelity, Fox fired May on Saturday morning.

  May took the news quietly, then insisted that only Moss, the senior partner, could dismiss him. Told by Fox that Moss wasn’t there, May waited outside the building for several hours before setting off on the route that Moss usually walked to work. Confronting Moss at the corner of Fourth and Wooster and hearing that he had indeed been fired, May pulled a gun out of his hip pocket and shot the fleeing Moss through the brim of his hat.

  Having followed May, Fox saw the shooting and tried to intervene. May fired at him, too, but missed. Shouting that he would kill them both and aiming the smoking gun in their direction, May chased his former employers down West Broadway. The incident ended moments later in front of Knickerbocker’s building when May, surrounded by a policeman and about twenty-five spectators, shot himself in the head. May’s distraught twenty-five-year-old son later vowed revenge upon Fox and Moss.

  Nothing came of that threat, but Fox and Moss were sufficiently worried to move their offices to another location. The next year, that building’s boiler broke, and during the three months that the landlord took to replace it, the steam pressure was so weak that the partners couldn’t do all their work. They lost $3,000 in business.

  The catalogue of troubles took a toll on the partners’ relationship. “We just barely made a living out of it. [Moss] was accustomed to drawing $25 a week and I $17, and for the first year I don’t believe we made $42 a week,” Fox recalled. Although income began to pick up in Knickerbocker’s second year, unpredictable cash flow created tension. One Saturday, the final rift occurred when Moss presented Fox with some checks for countersigning. Fox recalled, “I refused because there was no money in the bank. My partner insisted that on Monday I could go out and collect enough money to cover the checks and deposit it in the bank before the checks went through, but I said that was no way of doing business.”

  Fox agreed to buy out Moss’s share of the business. While applying for a $1,000 loan from the German Exchange Bank, he learned a lesson he would never forget. “I bought myself a whole new outfit of clothing in order to make a good impression so the bank would lend me the money,” Fox said. The strategy backfired. “You are broke now. What made you go out and buy all those clothes?” bank president Michael J. Adrian admonished him. “When the bank lends money, it wants to feel that it is lending it to someone who will save money and be able to pay it back someday.” Fox got the loan anyway and became the sole owner of Knickerbocker.

  Having had enough experience with failure not to take it personally, Fox weathered his misfortunes resiliently. For Eva, the going must have been more difficult. A teenage newlywed from a sheltered background, she had to cope simultaneously with carping in-laws who always had their hands out, with her husband’s long absences, and with the
repeated assaults on their plans by bad luck and ill intent. Instead of questioning her husband’s choices, she devoted her energy to taking care of him. It was the first time anyone had ever really done that.

  “From the beginning, Mrs. Fox made our home, no matter how simple, a heaven for me; her artistic fingers made everything she touched beautiful,” Fox said. Decades later, he would still remember in detail the décor of their first apartment, on Myrtle Avenue, the “dainty Swiss curtains and cretonne hangings at the windows, with cushions here and there to match, and beautiful panels, reproductions of great masterpieces given away with coupons of Babbit’s soap, which she had framed to adorn our walls.”

  By creating a peaceful refuge, Fox said, Eva became his partner in building the Fox enterprises. “Mrs. Fox hasn’t just been a wife to me and a mother to my children, but the mainstay of my career. You can well understand that no man could stay away from his family eighteen hours a day, every day, every week, etc., unless he had a tolerant wife. She helped me to reach my ambition. She deprived herself of all good times women like in order to help me—she did her job and did it well. I have never seen her equal, if in no other respect, in this respect—to keep all cares and worries away from me.” He always believed he had made the right choice. “I was well rewarded, because she has not only been a wife to me, but a companion. I don’t think I could have gone through all the things I have without her. I know I couldn’t.”