The New Movie Magazine (Jan-Sep 1935)

Mrs. Fox's $780,000,000 {Continued from page 23) out their patents in Germany for the photo-electric cell process of recording sound on film. Then they brought their patents to the United States and Fox welcomed them with open arms and a check for $60,000 for the North American rights. Thereupon he established the American Tri-Ergon Company, with himself owning ninety per cent of the stock. He also brought himself years of litigation— with the United States Patent Office and with individuals representing great corporations and business interests determined to obtain the Tri-Ergon rights. npHEN came his financial re■*■ verses, due in part to the tremendous ambition of the man to dominate the motion picture world, and due in even larger part to the general financial panic and the depression which followed. There were times, many times, when he was so hardpressed for cash to stave off bankruptcy that he was forced to hypothecate about everything he owned, including much of his personal fortune. And the time came when in exhaustion of body and soul he sold his voting stock control of his companies. But the Tri-Ergon patents? Never! Some inner voice counselled him to hold on and hold on, come hell or high water. And a very important outer voice, that of Mrs. Eve Fox, his wife, spoke with even more emphatic tone. This lady, who of a family of nine. Karloff is the family name on his mother's side; on his father's side all the men were members of the British consular and civil services. His father Boris does not remember at all. He died. Boris was brought up by two older brothers. In his father's death lies the first instance of the tragedy which has marked his life, for if his father had lived he might have understood the boy. As it was, Boris grew up under the domination of the two brothers who, with the best intentions in the world, led him a crueller life than he would have led in prison. Prison was what his boyhood was. He wanted to be an actor. But acting, to his narrowminded Victorian brothers, was on a par with stealing. It wasn't "gentlemanly." They forced him into the University of London to prepare for the consular service. It made him so miserable that he felt the only thing for him to do was to say good-bye to his family, his home, all that he knew, and disappear from them forever. For a boy of twenty-two, that is bitterness indeed! Boris somehow scraped enough money together to buy a cheap passage to Canada. He caught a ship and said good-bye to England. And then began the series of hopeless adventures that were to go on for twenty years — adventures which included a few jobs in stock companies, many at manual labor. had been, as one might say, his right-hand man in his whole struggle to the top from East Side days, who had worked with him long nights in the making of early pictures, who had been, indeed, his chief aide and lieutenant in a thousand battles, looked forward to the day when the TriErgon patents would be the great instrument for her husband and herself to revolutionize the world of education and culture as well as the world of entertainment. Little by little the interests which came to be associated with Fox raised their bids for the patents until, in 1929 an offer of $25,000,000 was made and refused. But the most dramatic story in all these offers concerns the proposal made to Fox in 1930, at the time he was about to sell out and quit the game. A GOOD friend of his came to ^* him with an urgent appeal to him to sell the patents to the interests he had been fighting. The friend took the attitude that the patents were valueless and that Fox might as well throw them into the pot with the rest of the properties he was selling. Weary of the struggle, perhaps, doubtful himself, by then, that he could make his ownership stick in the courts, he was almost on the point of giving in when Mrs. Fox stepped into the picture, head high, chin up. She said she had started in an apartment renting for eleven dollars a month and was willing to go back to an eleven-dollar hallroom if she could take those patents with her. And a little later, as William Fox himself told the story to Upton Sinclair, in the biography of Fox entitled: "Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox" this drama was enacted. "Greenfield was persisting that the transaction be closed, and that the Tri-Ergon patents be surrendered. Mrs. Fox was in the doorway, with only a curtain between us, listening to this conversation. She came into the room and went into a rage of a kind I would never like to see her or anyone in again. It resulted in a terrific expression of frenzy and she finally dropped to the floor and passed out. For a while I thought she was dead. It took us half an hour to bring her to again. It was then that Greenfield realized that he must never again mention the Tri-Ergon patents, and that if ever there was to be a sale (a sale of the Fox picture and theater properties) it would have to be done without those patents." U*OR nearly three years the quesA tion of ownership of the patents was in the courts, slowly working its way up to the court of final jurisdiction and to a victory for Fox. And now with victory arises the question of what now and in the future those patents may be worth to the man who Karloff the Uncanny {Continued on page 27) Commentators have talked a lot about one episode in Boris' life. Of how he trundled 300-pound casks of putty from the warehouse to his truck, drove twentyfive miles, unloaded them, and went back again for another load. They don't know that it was only one job in twenty like it — that the same sort of things, and worse, had been going on for fifteen years ! Nor do they know of the incident which occurred while he was driving the truck, which would have broken his heart if his heart had not already been broken a dozen times over. They miss the whole point. It wasn't the work. Boris was used to work, and he had muscles like a stevedore. But he wanted to act! It was the not being given a chance to act! When he was carting casks of putty and sacks of cement around, no less a producer than Richard Walton Tully called him and offered him a chance to play the lead in a silent picture version of "Svengali" — and then took the job away from him because he wasn't well enough known. Not well enough known! Didn't Boris know it? For fifteen years he had been begging for a chance to show what he could do, to become well known. And then to have the chance to become known offered to him and simultaneously taken away from him because he wasn't known! What irony ! How many men would have gone on, after that? And yet he can say, today, "People go through life magnifying small, unpleasant incidents. One should forget them just because there are so many of them. One should look at the happiness which may lie in the future, never dwell in the past." That is the saving philosophy that carried him through. No wonder Boris thinks that one of the great immortals is the doctor who invented anaesthetics for hospitals. "Years ago there used to be an expression, 'to bite the bullet,' " he says. "A wounded soldier, brought in to have his leg cut off, was given a bullet during the operation and told to bite down on it, to keep him from shrieking in agony. The man who first taught surgeons how to use anaesthetics is immortal, to me, because he has saved us pain." Is it any wonder that Boris should talk so much of pain? He knows what pain is — mental pain — the pain of knowing you have a job to do in life, knowing that you are cut out for an acting career, when the only work anyone will give you is swinging a shovel ! "Things can only hurt you as long as you let them stay with you," is another of his sayings. "The thing to do is dismiss them. Don't build up and dwell on them. "Some people think of me as a mystic," he once told me. "My mysticism lies in the one word, 'tomorrow.' Do your best today and clung to them with such desperate grip. He is on record with figures that stagger the mind. He figured $20,000,000 a year from theaters. He figured $3,600,000 a year from motion picture producers. That's for the present. And looking to the future he sees a revenue from churches and classrooms of $325,000,000 a year from those two fields when fully developed. And then he visions the day when 15,000,000 homes will be equipped for sound pictures, at a royalty charge of $1 a week for every home, or the enormous sum of $780,000,000 a year. Fantastic, one may think, but even five per cent of this calculation would realize more than $50,000,000. ELIMINATING the future, disre-L' garding the day when schools and churches and homes may be equipped for sound pictures and required to pay royalty, these patents would seem to represent the biggest pot of gold ever turned out of the crucible of the United States Patent Office. Fox says that he is not even sure that he will exact royalty from schools and churches, and that the great thing is to benefit education of mind and soul in classroom and church. And Mrs. Fox is very much back of him in that. Editor's Note: Since the preparation of this article the Supreme Court of the United States has voted to reconsider its decision on which the article is based. tomorrow will take care of itself. I know that now. But — never think of yesterday. Yesterday is gone. Yesterday is dead." Boris is not able to let himself think of yesterday because yesterday, for him, always has been too horrible. If he remembered it, if he let himself think of it, he might not be able to go on. Yet — whether he has let himself think of it or not — yesterday has marked him. It put those deep lines in his cheeks. It put those shadows under his deep-set eyes. Bitterness, and tragedy, and long failure, as the years rolled by, chiselled and etched his face into a stark sculpture, giving it character, giving it power, giving it a mysterious inner compulsion. Today Boris is happy. He is preparing "The Return of Frankenstein." He lives in Katharine Hepburn's old home in Coldwater Canon — an old Spanish house with walls a foot thick, rambling over three acres of sunny hillside planted to apricots, avocados, and flowers. He is married, to a tall, statuesque, lovely wife — blond and charming and understanding. His tragic life has taught him not to ask for much. He doesn't want to be rich, he doesn't want any limousines or servants or luxury— he just wants to work in pictures and putter in his flower garden in between times. He raises terriers and chickens as a sideline. He is at peace. 50 The New Movie Magazine, January, 1935