Tallyho

Many people think that 20th Century-Fox was named for Spyros Skouras. The company's president since 1942, he won his power and kept it by using his celebrated "forest instinct"--sure and subtle as a wild animal, sensing when to dart deceptively out of reach and when, if cornered, to go for the jugular. But last week a pack of hounds got him.

The hounds were the Wall Street interests on Fox's board of directors, who have long been trying to force Skouras out. Bored with his repeated promises to retire, irritated by the company's recent losses they closed in on him at an all-day directors' meeting and put an end in Hollywood to the last of the big-time spendthrifts.

Right of Kings. Skouras, now 69, ran Fox the big way--and the old way. It is, for example, the only company that still pours an average man's fortune into accommodations and hoopla for its traveling stars. Its huge studios and 9,000 employees constitute a small Himalaya in overhead. Only Fox would risk making pictures with Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe simultaneously--the one a $30 million extravaganza, the other canceled at a $2,000,000 loss (TIME, June 22).

Spyros (rhymes with Nero) insisted on control of everything from casting to cutting, on creative authority and fiscal dominance, on the divine right of a movie king. He got to the top by working 20-hour days, and his position was buttressed by his two brothers, who ran 800 movie houses between them.

But he was not just a whip-flicking tyrant like Columbia's late Harry ("White Fang") Cohn. Sentimentally, he kept has-beens on the payroll at enormous salaries. He always called his underlings "big shots," which, in Greco-Skouras, came out "big sots." A flatterer and charmer of the old cheek-bussing school, he was a master politician whose great forte, according to studio hands, was that "he dealt directly with people in a manner that could make even a small hick-town exhibitor think he was God." Under Skouras. Fox turned out such notable pictures as All About Eve, A Letter to Three Wives, The Snake Pit, The Diary of Anne Frank, Gentlemen's Agreement, and Twelve O'Clock High.

Significantly, Hollywood's last king never spent much time in Hollywood.

With his wife Saroula, he has lived for more than 30 years on the Westchester shore of Long Island Sound. Most evenings he would sit in his projection room, surrounded by droppers-in he scarcely knew, sipping Scotch, smoking cigars and watching movies, movies, movies. Loud and affectionate, spraying superlatives into the air in heavy Greek accents, he was tender with his five children, but he also overwhelmed them. A jellyfish once bit his toe, and he went into an epic rage.

At Fox's Manhattan offices, he was a time-motion study in dazzling perquisites. Barbers shaved him while he foamed commands at hovering vice presidents. To save time, two masseurs worked on him simultaneously, one for the left side, one for the right, while a secretary took dictation behind a screen. He had a Turkish bath in his office and a functioning brass spittoon.

Dangerous Declaration. King Spyros was not actually fired last week. He was merely forced to take a giant cut in salary (down to a bony $50,000 a year) and a total loss of power. Who will succeed him? Among the first names circled were Max Youngstein, now working as a vice president of Cinerama, and James Aubrey, president of CBS Television. Aubrey is a cold financial conservative who asks only what he can do for his company, whereas Skouras once declared expansively: "I would like to do for Los Angeles what the Rockefellers did for New York." If Aubrey is not the man, the Fox board wants someone like him.

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