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By Root 4008 0

politicians “Big Tim” and “Little Tim” Sullivan to run the City Theatre on East Fourteenth Street. Fox, of the firm of Fox, Moss & Brill, was struck by the fact that the Sullivans never had any trouble with fire regulations, and the connection he made was to Sheehan. Indeed, when Waldo was moved to the position of police commissioner in 1911, Sheehan followed as general factotum and bagman. He was dragged before a committee of the Board of Aldermen on more than one occasion, but they never could make anything stick until a whorehouse madam testified that she had paid graft to an agent of Sheehan’s at the rate of one hundred dollars a month. Forced to resign, Sheehan went to work for Fox, who understood and valued his connections. In 1916 Sheehan attained the position of vice president and general manager of the newly established Fox Film Corporation.

“The Sheehan influence on Fox production began there at the beginning with an approach reminiscent of the New York World’s Sunday supplement,” the industry’s first historian, Terry Ramsaye, later wrote. “The pictures were addressed at the masses with alarming and successful precision, from the vampiring roles of Theda Bara and Virginia Pearson to such classics as Bertha the Sewing Machine Girl… That did not, however, represent Mr. Sheehan’s ceiling of taste or capacity. He was affected both by the market and by William Fox, who was able to cry at his own emotions in the making of Over the Hill, his own version of Will Carleton’s sad fifth reader poem of ‘Over the Hill to the Poor House.’ ”

Blue-eyed and rosy-cheeked, Sheehan was a supremely cynical little man, an Irishman and a Roman Catholic in an industry dominated by Jews. Fox was a big thinker when it came to exhibition, a man who built the world’s most lavish movie theaters and filled them with widescreen and sound. And while it was Fox who gave the world Movietone, the sound-on-film miracle that became the industry standard, it was Sheehan who produced the pictures that made Movietone matter. Winnie Sheehan came west in 1926, assuming charge of the Fox plant on Western Avenue in Los Angeles. What Price Glory?, 7th Heaven, Mother Machree, Sunny Side Up, and The Cock-Eyed World were all made on Sheehan’s watch. Raoul Walsh, Frank Borzage, and John Ford prospered at Fox, as did Janet Gaynor, Warner Baxter, Edmund Lowe, and Victor McLaglen. Sheehan put Will Rogers in talkies, made the first western feature with dialogue, and won five of the first twelve Academy Awards.

Sheehan, who was personally responsible for the company’s European distribution network, often seemed more focused on foreign markets—which accounted for roughly 33 percent of Fox’s revenue—than he was on the domestic market. Distracted, he could find time for no more than a dozen pictures a year and relied on an ever-shifting group of associate producers to take up the slack—men like Ralph Block, Ned Marin, George Middleton, and James Kevin McGuinness, none of whom had the creative chops to make great or even consistently good movies. All were presided over by Sheehan’s superintendent, a tough, humorless character named Sol Wurtzel, who had started with Fox as a stenographer and knew about as well as anyone how to get an incoherent picture shot in twelve days.

Wurtzel tried all genres but rarely did any well. When a good movie got made at Fox, it was more the result of leaving a director like Ford or Borzage or William K. Howard alone. Sheehan announced forty-eight to fifty-two pictures a season, then left it to Wurtzel to figure out how to deliver on the promise. Sheehan himself inhabited a vast Beverly Hills mansion with sunken gardens and a library ceiling imported from Spain. Though he usually had a half-chewed cigar rolling around in his mouth, his meals were grandly served on golden plates with golden goblets at their side. He had the Irish gift of conviviality, but could also be a ruthless son of a bitch.

Louise was taken house hunting by Mary Ford. “I was appalled at the rents,” she said, “especially in Beverly Hills. Mary said I now was connected