The Man Who Made the Movies Read online

  PART I

  BEGINNINGS

  1879–1903

  CHAPTER 1

  Promises

  In many ways, the father’s failures were father to the man. Publicly, William Fox always spoke tolerantly and even with amusement about Michael Fox. Privately, he detested him. At his father’s funeral at New York’s Mount Hebron Cemetery in January 1936, Fox spat on the casket and muttered, “You son of a bitch.” Then fifty-seven and long a multimillionaire, he could not forget, nor would he choose to forgive, what he always viewed as the unnecessary deprivations of his childhood. His fierce, unrelenting ambition to succeed reflected not only an enchanted passion for the movies, but also an elemental desire not to repeat his father’s apathetic indolence and capricious irresponsibility, a fervent wish not to be Michael.

  A photo of Michael, probably from the late 1920s, shows him sitting stiffly on a horse, wearing a suit with a white shirt and a bow tie, smiling slightly as if he were doing his best to play the part assigned to him. He looks sad and awkward, a somewhat ridiculous figure aware of his own ridiculousness.

  Michael Fox never felt at home in America.

  Born in Hungary in 1856, he uprooted his wife and firstborn infant son in 1879 to pursue dreams that quickly turned to dust. The Fuchses—the family name was changed to Fox at New York’s Castle Garden immigration station—were not lacking, luckless peasants with everything to gain and nothing to lose by leaving their homeland. They lived in the agricultural town of Tolcsva,* some 124 miles northeast of Budapest in the thriving Tokaj wine region, then the most densely populated part of Hungary. An area of gently rolling hills with rich alluvial soil and a microclimate especially suited to viticulture, Tokaj had for two centuries produced some of the world’s finest wines. The climate was pleasant, offering warm summers and long, sunny autumns, and the population was a peaceable, diverse mix of immigrants from Poland, Germany, Slovakia, and Greece. Unlike traditional fortified western European settlements, Tolcsva was a “field town,” with agricultural plots interspersed among its shops, churches, and offices.

  According to Fox, Michael operated a general merchandise store in the town, which was one of the more important centers of Tokaj. Fox did have a tendency to invent a cheerful past when he believed that no records existed, and to regard facts as trifling obstacles that could easily be trampled in the rush toward an entertaining story. Nonetheless, his claim about his father’s occupation is plausible. Although the Fuchses were Jewish and although, elsewhere in eastern Europe, anti-Semitism had exiled Jews to remote, squalid shtetls and severely restricted employment, Hungary offered exceptionally fair treatment. The 1782 Edict of Tolerance issued by Emperor Joseph II of Austria (which had ruled Hungary since the late seventeenth century) allowed Jewish children to attend public, formerly Christian-only schools, opened new professions to Jews, and ended humiliating clothing distinctions. While anti-Semitism was not extinct, by the latter half of the nineteenth century, Hungarian Jews had achieved a “swift, and, to all appearances, successful assimilation and equalization,” with a social position “infinitely more favorable, infinitely less impaired by discrimination” than that of Jews in nearby nations. Jews were especially active in commerce, and Michael’s father, Jacob, had been a money broker. Michael, the second-eldest son among ten children, likewise preferred town life. According to family stories, as a young man he affected dandyish airs, wearing his hat cocked to one side and strutting with a walking stick.

  Fox claimed that back in the old country, his father developed a sideline business as a dentist, specializing in painless tooth extraction. According to Fox, who claimed to have seen his father’s dentistry instruments when he was five or six, “The patient would sit in the chair and strip himself to the waist. Just at the crucial moment, someone would touch the patient with a red hot iron on the back and that would be so painful that at the time of extraction, the patient felt no pain from the tooth.”

  In 1877, twenty-one-year-old Michael married sixteen-year-old Anna Fried, a good-humored girl with deep-set blue eyes, a round, doll-like face, and a pale, delicate complexion. Anna’s family had a ninety-nine-year lease on a piece of farmland in Tolcsva. Probably the Frieds (who, like the Fuchses, were German-speaking Jews) did not oversee a major expanse: more than half Hungary’s landowning population held less than five jochs each (about 5.35 acres). Still, by having anything at all, the Frieds were comparatively fortunate. In an overwhelmingly agrarian society—as late as 1910, only 22 percent of Hungary’s population lived in urban areas—some 1.5 million people had no land at all.

  Although Anna would turn out to be the mainstay for her children, hardworking and long suffering through many miseries, as a young woman, she dreamed of romance. Known for her red leather boots and the bunches of ribbons she braided through her auburn hair, Anna managed to visit Budapest twice before her marriage. There, she dined in a restaurant, saw a play, and had a tintype portrait made of herself. On one trip, she fell in love with a Gentile. Showing more courage than wisdom, she told her father. He responded by striking her for the first time in his life and then hiring the local matchmaker to find her a suitable Jewish husband. The search produced Michael, whom Anna had no choice but to accept.

  In addition to the roughly equal financial status of their families, Michael and Anna would have enjoyed a cultural advantage because they both spoke German as their first language. Hungary had three main languages, and delineations of social status often followed the divisions of speech. German was the language of power, the language of the ruling Austrian House of Habsburg and that of Hungary’s nobility and its small bourgeoisie. German was also the language of economic strength. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Germany served as Europe’s tent pole economy, supporting the prosperity of the rest of the continent. German was the language of official documents, the arts, and scholarship. Hungary’s second language, Latin, belonged to the church and, more broadly, to spiritual life, as most Hungarians were Roman Catholics. Last, the ragged stepchild of the group, was Hungarian, which was spoken by the great masses of peasants.

  As often happened among Orthodox Jews of that era, Michael Fuchs and Anna Fried met only once before their wedding. On that occasion, Michael called on the Frieds carrying a huge basket of fruit. The couple did not instantly take to one another. They were too different and each one too strong willed to change easily. Michael was a restless dreamer who always believed, wherever he was and whatever his circumstances, that life had to be better somewhere else. Anna was a realist who loved her home and her family: wherever she was, there she became rooted. She loved the Hungarian culture. As a young girl, she spent hours listening to the stories of the gypsies who camped on the perimeter of her family’s land. These ancient tales she energetically told and retold throughout her life. Fox would recall, “Through some of these overly sentimental stories you could almost hear the plaintive cry of gypsy violins!” If Michael was the wind, Anna was the earth.

  Despite the couple’s lack of passion for each other, Anna quickly settled down to the business of keeping a kosher household and starting a family. The birth of their first child, Wilhelm (a name he would never use), on January 1, 1879, appears to have precipitated a crisis for the twenty-two-year-old father. Suddenly, Michael decided to try to find his brother who had moved to the United States ten years before and who, after eight years, had stopped writing home.

  Perhaps, in yearning to leave, Michael feared his new responsibilities and acted on instinct. Perhaps he wondered how his son would see him as the boy grew up. Michael was proud and wanted to project authority. Hungary, however, offered no hope for individual advancement. Centuries of baleful history made sure of that.

  The national heritage was one of doomed, lonely struggle in a hostile world. Ever since its founding around 896 by Arpad the Conqueror, Hungary had tried and failed to align itself with the progressive traditions of western Europe. In the thirteenth century, a Mongol invasion killed off the House
of Arpad dynasty and decimated the Hungarian population. Hungary rebuilt itself, only to get trounced again, in 1526, at the Battle of Mohács, where Turkish leader Suleiman I the Magnificent slaughtered fifteen thousand Hungarian troops and began one hundred and fifty years of rule by the Ottoman Empire. When the empire collapsed in the late seventeenth century, the Austrian House of Habsburg took over. Hungarian nationalists tried to assert independence via a revolution launched in March 1848, but fifteen months later, Russian troops, invited by the Austrians, swept in and helped crush the upstarts. The compromise of 1867 established the partnership of Austria-Hungary, but still fell short of the goal of national self-determination.

  This ruinous struggle with belligerent foreign powers prevented Hungary from evolving toward democracy and industrialization along the course of its neighbors and promoted a huge gap between the aristocracy and the commoner. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hungarian nobles clung so tightly to the feudal system that the country might as well have been living in the Middle Ages. Among a population of 12.9 million, some 540,000 nobles held all the political power because only they could hold office. Nobles also controlled almost all the national wealth, owning four-fifths of Hungary’s land, yet paying no taxes—that latter privilege fell to the lower classes, resulting in an upside-down situation where those least able to do so had to carry the entire financial burden of running the state.

  Commoners such as Michael Fuchs had no chance to get ahead. Buying land was next to impossible. To protect their holdings, Hungarian nobles had adopted a system of entailed land known generally as mortmain, or “dead hand,” which meant that some twenty-five million acres of large estates could not be sold but had to remain under the control of individuals, families, trusts, or religious or state organizations. Neither could one prosper greatly as a merchant. Because of mortmain, land could not be pledged as security for the loans necessary to undertake modernization and achieve greater agricultural efficiency. Although wheat was the country’s main crop, and although peasants worked in the field “from blind darkness to blind darkness,” by 1880, exports had dwindled to a standstill. Even factoring in transportation costs, other European countries found it cheaper to buy wheat from overseas than from Hungary. Control by “dead hand” choked industrial development as well. In 1840, although Hungary constituted 55 percent of the Austrian monarchy’s land, it provided only 7 percent of the industrial output. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Michael Fuchs was a young man contemplating his future, his homeland seemed to be sinking under the weight of its pernicious past.

  Improvement was highly unlikely. So thought the leading mid-nineteenth-century Hungarian intellectuals whose work influenced the outlook of Michael’s generation. On Easter Sunday in 1860, four years after Michael’s birth, the beloved nationalist hero Count István Széchenyi suffered a mental breakdown and fatally shot himself. Watching the revolution begin to go bad in the summer of 1848, Széchenyi had written in his diary, “I can read the stars: blood and blood everywhere. Brother kills brother, nationalities massacre each other implacably and insanely . . . Roaming troops devastate everything we had built.” Another revered figure of the 1848 revolution, poet Sandor Petofi, despaired, “We are the most forsaken of all peoples on this earth.”

  In the 1850s the exodus began. Between 1871 and 1913, an estimated 1.9 million Hungarians, including entire villages, would transplant themselves to America. Adventurous young men, Michael’s aforementioned brother among them, saved their money to buy passage and then wrote letters home about plentiful factory jobs, decent wages, social equality, ample food, and lack of surveillance by the government. Many also sent back money, gold pieces sometimes. “America fever” began to burn contagiously among this energetic but beleaguered population.

  When his brother stopped writing, Michael may have imagined that he was too busy, too successful, too rich to bother anymore with his Old Country family. What one brother had obtained, surely another could, too.

  Michael and Anna began to save, and when they had enough money for one third-class fare to the United States, Anna bought a ticket for Michael. The couple stayed up all night talking, planning, and studying a map.

  Michael sailed for New York in the spring of 1879, and that September, eighteen-year-old Anna and nine-month-old Wilhelm followed. The journey was undoubtedly terrifying and would have begun with a wagon or train trip to a port city, probably Hamburg, Germany, from which most Hungarians left for America before 1890. Possibly Michael never expected his young wife to leave her beloved homeland. Sentimental ties to the past and suspicion of change permeated Hungarian culture. Michael had left Anna the general store; she decided to sell it in order to come to America after he made it clear he would not return. If Michael had hoped to start over by himself in the New World, he underestimated Anna’s devotion to her family. Michael was not only her husband but also the father of her child, and to Anna that meant they all belonged together.

  Whatever he had promised, whatever he had believed himself capable of accomplishing, Michael had in fact little to offer his young family in New York. Collecting his wife and child, he took them back along the path of so many other newly arrived immigrants to settle into tenement housing on the Lower East Side, which was then a frightful accretion of poverty, dirt, disease, and crime. Between 1800 and 1880, the year after the Fox family’s arrival, the city’s population exploded from 60,515 to 1.2 million, making New York the first U.S. city with more than a million residents. To accommodate the flood of newcomers, most of them impoverished and uneducated, landlords and real estate agents had chopped up once-fashionable houses into smaller and smaller quarters in order to pack in as many tenants as possible. In what had previously been back gardens, rickety wooden buildings went up. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Lower East Side had become, according to journalist and social activist Jacob Riis, “the most densely populated district in all the world, China not excluded . . . packed at the rate of 290,000 to the square mile.” Most tenement apartments consisted of a few tiny rooms, with the kitchen doubling as the living room. Sanitation facilities, if they existed at all, were poor and grossly overburdened; enforcement of minimal health and safety regulations lapsed due to inadequate funding and widespread city government corruption.

  The first home that William Fox remembered was a dark, almost airless four-room rear apartment on Stanton Street between Columbia and Sheriff in the Jewish quarter. The building had no indoor plumbing, so family members had to carry water up in buckets from a pump in the yard; nearby was the fetid East River, reeking of garbage. As bad as the Lower East Side was in general, Jewtown, as it was called, was worse. Crowding reached unimaginable proportions here. Riis saw a small two-room apartment that somehow accommodated a couple, twelve children, and six boarders. On these unpaved, litter-strewn streets, buildings were taller—six or seven stories compared to the average of five elsewhere—so that the poorest of the poor had an even more exhausting climb up narrow, foul-smelling stairways to get home. Jewtown alleys were packed with dirty children, mothers scrubbing laundry on washboards, and tramps looking for a place to flop. In doorways and on dark corners, prostitutes trolled for business.

  Michael found work as a machinist. His lack of experience was no obstacle because in the post–Civil War blaze of industrialization, American factories were desperate for laborers. He never stayed long in any job or exerted much effort to work consistently. Once, in a burst of entrepreneurial energy while unemployed, he began manufacturing stove-blackening polish in the family’s apartment. Will (as his mother called him), then seven, was deputized to sell five-cent cans of polish door to door. The business folded after two years when, during the “Great Blizzard” of March 1888,* steep snowdrifts prevented the boy from traveling his sales route. After that, Michael’s ambition died. According to Fox, his father’s annual income never exceeded a thousand dollars, and he never cared about being out of work. Fox recalled, “When I came home and told hi
m that the butcher and baker had refused to trust us any more during the period he was out of work, he was sure that tomorrow would be all right, or that the butcher and baker would most likely change their minds.”

  What Fox interpreted as his father’s blithe indifference was more likely thinly disguised despair. Michael must have sensed a bitter irony in the bargain he had made. Having given up his business and his network of family support in Hungary, having traveled so far, enduring so much chaotic strangeness, he had only sunk lower in comfort and status. He lived amid filth and squalor; the sunshine and open spaces of his childhood had been replaced by a gritty, gray, cacophonous landscape. And although in Hungary Jews had long been integrated as a small, stable minority of the population, here in the United States, and especially in New York, their recent sudden influx often provoked contempt and suspicion from the Protestant majority. Yet, Michael could not afford to go back to his native land. It had taken all the money he had to bring his family here, and his earnings were meager. As for the brother who had preceded him, the only relative they had in the United States, Michael never found him or even learned what had happened to him. Fox said, “I remember my father searching for him until I was about sixteen years of age, and then he gave it up.”

  The weight of his homeland’s history, all those centuries of defeat, bore down on Michael with crushing hopelessness. He had failed to improve his lot. Wasn’t that always the way? We are the most forsaken of all peoples . . . Perhaps Michael had pulled his family as far forward as he had the strength to. “The Eastern European is far more attached to the past than the Western European,” journalist and historian Emil Lengyel has written. “Those who came to America from Hungary are creatures of the past. Their children may be redeemed, but their own natures are fixed in inexorable casts. Hungary’s Arpad the Conqueror and the Mohács disaster have molded their lives, even though their historical knowledge is slim.”