In Theda Bara's Tent (as Reviewed by Publisher's Weekly)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The trade papers told us that Loews estate was worth thirty million dollars.

His wife believed that the empire her husband built depended upon his genius, that without Loews attractive personality, Loews Incorporated would lose value. Her twin sons agreed that they should cash out, and they instructed Schenck to find a buyer. His commission would be ten percent, more than he could ever earn as president of Loew’s Incorporated. The timing was perfect because Schenck at forty-six had come through a messy divorce and was newly married to a young show girl named Pansy. His commission on the sale would allow him to retire, and there was nothing he wanted more than leisure time to spend with his new bride.

The Warner brothers offered to buy and so did Paramount, but Mr. Fox trumped them by offering to pay double the price that Loews stock was trading at on the open market. Shareholders were eager to sell. The cost to Mr. Fox for the entire block of Loews stock was fifty million dollars.  If the sale went through, Fox would acquire hundreds of movie theaters here and abroad plus the valuable real estate they sat on, a sixteen-story office building in Times Square, a sheet-music company, a record company, and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio with stars Joan Crawford, Buster Keaton, Norma Shearer, Lon Chaney and the newest sensation, Greta Garbo. Mr. Fox would become Louie’s boss.

The negotiations for Loew’s Inc. were not secret. We all knew that Mr. Fox imagined himself king of a global entertainment empire. I was probably the only one in the office not wholeheartedly rooting for him because of my allegiance to Louie. The two men were much too egotistical to get along. Also, there was something giddy about the way Mr. Fox was borrowing money to expand his theater empire even before acquiring Loew’s. He bought twenty houses in New England, brought his holdings in New York to one hundred thirty and invested fourteen million in cash to buy the Gaumont chain of three hundred theaters in Great Britain.

I had the apartment to myself a lot because Kenny was photographing Herbert Hoover on the campaign trail. He shot Hoover in every town and village. “How many babies do we have to see recoil from him? Kenny said, but we realized the answer. Mr. Fox was setting up Hoover, and when he won the election, it would be payback time. So when the Justice Department declared that Fox could not merge with Loew’s because it would create a monopoly, Mr. Fox went to Washington to remind President Hoover that he wouldn’t have won the election if it weren’t for all the favorable exposure he had received in Fox newsreels.  We heard that Hoovers attorney general had promised Mr. Fox that the Justice Department would not turn its antitrust guns against the merger.

While Mr. Fox believed his backing put Hoover in the White House, Louie believed he himself had done it. Hoover was a favorite with movie executives because he said government should not interfere with private business. When he was secretary of commerce under the Harding Administration, Hoover refused to let the federal government censor motion pictures. Nor would he interfere in the clashes between theater owners and distributors, film crews and producers, artists and studios. Hoover insisted that the film industry police itself.

Louie campaigned vigorously for Hoover, gave after-dinner speeches and organized fund raisers. He believed that with enough publicity, he could turn Hoover into the biggest star of all. To show his appreciation, Hoover invited Louie and his family to the Inauguration in 1929 and to the White House for dinner. Louie stopped in New York on his way back to the Coast, and we met at Lindys for cheesecake. I expected a description of the White House dinner and a long sermon about the wonders of America, that an impoverished boy like himself, with no education, could dine at the White House with the President of the United States. Instead, there was Louie with a rash across his cheeks, furious, not because Schenck planned to sell the company out from under him but because he had not been told in time to sell his own stock to Fox for twice the market price.