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ZUKOR PLOTS HIS FUTURE 141
Now, Zukor seemed to have reached a safe and pleasant haven. “I could have cashed in for between three hundred and five hundred thousand dollars,” he says. Better than that, he sat securely at the centre of an expanding business. At his death in 1927, Marcus Loew left a fortune of about ^25,000,000. Some of that came from his later enterprises with moving-picture production; but the pith and fibre of it was the chain of “ vaudeville-and-picture theatres” which he stretched in the next fifteen years across the United States. Had Zukor transferred all his eggs to that one basket and kept them there, he would have acquired in the course of years a fortune beyond the dreams of an orphan emigrant from sleepy little Ricse.
So much for the externals. But the factor important to this story is what Adolph Zukor’s mind was doing in the period between 1907, when he cleaned up the indebtedness of the Hale’s Tours Company, and 1912, when he threw dramatically on the table his hazard of new fortunes.
Having entered the moving-picture business with full belief in its future, he set about to learn it in all its departments. When, timidly and apologetically, he asked Griffith if he might watch his casts and cameramen work, the mechanics and extras about the studio thought that he was merely another fascinated loafer, come to look at the pretty girls. As unobtrusive as a piece of studio machinery, he loitered day after day on the out