SONNET, WITH HARRY FOX: A RADIO SCRIPTJack FoleyHarry Fox will appear for a month or longer at a large salary with billing that will occupy the front of the theatre in electrics. --Variety (1914) * A friend of mine is in love with a silent film star named Olive Thomas. She is the subject of the first chapter of Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon. Her death (by mercury poisoning) was the very first Hollywood scandal-pre dating the Fatty Arbuckle affair. You can't find much of Olive's work left, but there is one film in which she's utterly luminous: an episode of a 1916 serial called Beatrice Fairfax. The entire serial, in good condition, was placed on video by someone in Ithaca, NY, and my friend was able to purchase it. Olive is featured in an episode called "Play Ball," but the actual stars are Grace Darling, as Beatrice, a well-known Advice to the Lovelorn columnist, and Harry Fox as her "cub reporter" friend. I discovered that Harry Fox was a Broadway musical comedy star at the time he made the serial. (He's mentioned in Gerald Bordman's American Musical Theatre along with Fannie Brice and Nora Bayes. His name first occurs in connection with The Passing Show of 1912, a show which featured early work by George Gershwin and Andy Razaf.) Fox is very good in Beatrice Fairfax, and his acting style certainly suggests musical comedy. Since they were in the same milieu--my father was a tap dancer--Fox might have known my father, and I'm certain my father would have known of him. Fox's star fell. Born in 1882, he was seventeen years older than Fred Astaire--too old to be playing juvenile leads in 30s film musicals. Evidently, he was able to support himself as an actor throughout his life. He died in the old actors' home July 20, 1959. Some of the film roles he played were so small that they were uncredited. He has a bit part in Fred Astaire's Easter Parade (1948), and one supposes that Astaire knew who he was from the old days. Irving Berlin, who composed the songs for Easter Parade, often recycled his own ancient material. One of the songs in Easter Parade is "The Girl On the Magazine Cover." It was originally in Stop! Look! Listen! (1915), a Broadway musical of which Fox was the star. Fox introduced both that song and Berlin's "I Love a Piano." * Harry Fox was the inventor, in 1914, of the Fox Trot. "As part of his act..., Harry Fox was doing trotting steps to ragtime music, and people referred to his dance as 'Fox's Trot.'" He married Yansci Dolly of the Dolly Sisters in 1914-and did an act with them. My father used to tell a story about a brief brush with the possibility of super stardom. He was on the bill with the Dolly Sisters when the man who danced with them fell sick. The stage manager of the show was a friend of my father's and told him, "John, you get out there and replace that man. It will be the making of your career!" Unfortunately, my father had to make a change during the Dolly Sisters' performance: he had never seen the act. Had he seen it, he would have tried: but he had no knowledge of it. This story always struck me as a little suspect. After all, whoever heard of the male partner of the Dolly Sisters? Yet, if the male partner was Harry Fox, he really was somebody. My father would have been replacing a genuine star. Harry Fox: the man my father failed to replace! Harry and Yansci divorced in 1920. *
A four-volume CD, Music from The New York Stage 1890-1920, has Harry Fox singing the song particularly associated with him, "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows." A friend sent me the cover of Nicholas Van Hoogstraten's book, Lost Broadway Theatres, which features a photograph of the Vanderbilt Theatre (West 48th Street, just off Broadway) in New York. On the marquee is "WITH HARRY FOX." The show being advertised is Oh, Look! (1918), the show in which Fox sang "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows." Bordman writes, Stephen Baird (Harry Fox), a young man on the verge of bankruptcy, commands our attention. His friend, Jackson Ives (Frederick Burton), provides him with money until [a] gold mine can begin to produce. The new money brings an assortment of new friends. But they all desert him when the money is found to be counterfeit. Only his girl, Grace Tyler (Louise Cox), remains loyal...Night after night the handsome Fox stopped the show with "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows," adapted from Chopin's Fantasy Impromptu. Though the musical could not satisfactorily fill even the new bandbox playhouse for more than 67 performances, it was revamped for the road with the Dolly sisters as stars and played to packed houses around the country.I played Harry singing "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" several times over tonight. At first I wasn't so sure I liked it; now I'm beginning to find it quite beautiful. The song suited Harry in ways he could not have known in 1918. The lyrics were by Joseph McCarthy (1885-1943), the same person who wrote the lyrics to Irene (which featured "My Sweet Little Alice Blue Gown"and which also played the Vanderbilt Theatre) and such hits as "You Made Me Love You" and "Rio Rita." Since Harry Tierney, the composer of both Irene and Rio Rita, was a close friend of my father's, I'm sure my father knew the lyricist as well, especially since McCarthy was Irish and my father's theater friends tended to be Irish. (McCarthy wrote "Ireland Must Be Heaven Cause My Mother Came From There"!) "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" makes the likelihood of my father's connection to Harry Fox that much stronger. Oh, Look! was the first show to play the Vanderbilt Theatre. It opened on March 7, 1918. A contemporary review describes the show as "A Cheerful Musical Version of James Montgomery's Farce, 'Ready Money.'" "The Seemlier Sort of Show," the review goes on, "Once More Gives Promise of Succeeding": There really seems to be something in this new school of musical comedy, beginning with an Oh and ending in an exclamation point or two. "Oh, Look!" is as decent in dialogue and seemly in costumes as the Oh! plays at the Princess. [Oh, Boy! opened at the Princess Theatre on February 20, 1917.] It has a real plot, which consists of the indestructible residuum of James Montgomery's farce, "Ready Money." There are plentiful neat verbal twists, happy little tricks in stage business, tuneful tunes, and lilting lyrics. The audience which assembled to witness the opening of the Vanderbilt Theatre and packed it to the doors, seemed amused even while it was growing palm callouses in behalf of its friends on the stage. * This is the plot, as summarized by Hal Erickson, of the 1945 film, The Dolly Sisters: The Dolly Sisters is the heavily Hollywoodized biopic of Jennie and Rosie Dolly, Hungarian born entertainers who took Broadway by storm in the early 1900s. Betty Grable plays Jennie [Yansci] and June Haver plays Rosie [Rosika]; their uncle is the inevitable "funny foreigner" S.Z. Sakall, who manages their career from childhood. Passing an important audition for Oscar Hammerstein, the Dolly girls become international stage headliners, but in so doing they find that their private life is strained. Jennie in particular is perplexed by the dilemma of devoting herself to a career while still finding time to romance handsome composer John Payne. The Dolly girls are separated permanently when Rosie is fatally injured in an auto accident, but Jennie finds lasting happiness with her composer. Despite the pre World War I ambience of the film, both Grable and Haver show off a lot more skin than would have been permissible in earlier times. But Dolly Sisters producer George Jessel knew what he was doing, and the Technicolor film was a major hit in 1945. - Hal EricksonThe "handsome composer" character played by John Payne is called "Harry Fox," who was not a composer-though, like my father, he may have written a few songs. Fox certainly didn't write the songs in the movie. The Harry Fox character does sing "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows," as the real Harry Fox did. Harry isn't in the film and actually sued the producers for representing him as a "lowly songwriter": he felt it was part of Rosie's "conspiracy to injure him." His suit was unsuccessful. Erickson's summary of the film is not quite accurate. The John Payne character, like the real Harry Fox, is a vaudeville performer. In the film, as in real life, it isn't Rosie but Jennie who has the automobile accident. Moreover, she is not "fatally injured": she survives the automobile crash more or less intact-looking exactly as she did before and still able to dance, as she does in the final scene in which she and her sister are reunited with John Payne on the stage. The real Jennie had an automobile accident in 1933. "For the next six weeks," writes Max Pierce, "she [underwent] over 15 painful and unsuccessful plastic surgeries to restore her beauty, later cursing the doctors for saving her life. This necessitated the sale of most of her jewelry"-a fact included in the film. "Never recovering mentally or physically from her 1933 auto accident, Jennie described herself to friends as 'a broken shell.'" She committed suicide in 1941. Rosie sold the film rights to their story in 1943. One of her stipulations was that her sister's suicide not be mentioned. Rosie attempted suicide in 1962 but died of a heart attack in 1970. * The movies annihilated vaudeville, then used it as colorful subject matter. * I'M ALWAYS CHASING RAINBOWS ....................................................................... In vain, Harry We barely see your face in Easter Parade barely hear your voice Did Fred Astaire acknowledge your dancing? Did he remember you? In vain, Harry What does it mean to be always chasing rainbows? Your "expressiveness of manner" your "infectious smile"-- were they a comfort, later, when you failed but kept on? Did your name ever again "occupy the front of the theatre in electrics"? Did you wake and wonder and "look and find the rain"? Did you ask whatever in heaven happened? In vain, Harry, in vain What tenderness I feel as I think of you or see you move and smile young in the movie always In vain that brilliance In vain that tenderness In vain that sweet power of charm And when you died did you see rainbows still a young man on a screen a sweet life a man the leading lady kissed In vain those kisses Good night, Harry, dancer, sweet man, singer, honey-sweet * NY TIMES July 21, 1959 HARRY FOX IS DEAD AT 76 Stage and Movie Comedian Acted with Dolly Sisters ___________ Special to The New York Times. HOLLYWOOD, Calif., July 20 --Harry Fox, oldtime stage and movie comedian, who once was married to Yansci Dolly, of the Dolly Sisters, and to Evelyn Brent, film actress, died today at the Motion Picture Rest Home. His age was 76. Mr. Fox for many years toured vaudeville circuits and then joined the Dolly Sisters in an act on Broadway. He later entered motion pictures and worked at Warner Brothers and Twentieth Century-Fox studios. * And now, Harry Fox singing "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows," a recording made in 1918.
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Jack Foley