Earle Foxe: Of Reginald and Regimentation

Earle Foxe (1891-1873) made his mark in two completely different callings.

Originally from Oxford, Ohio, he followed his older cousin Robert T. Haines into the acting trade, gaining his first experience at Ohio State University before touring with the Garrick Stock Company. By the early teens, he was in New York and had signed with the Kalem Company acing in silent films opposite Alice Joyce,Tom Moore, and others. In 1914 he made his Broadway debut in Dancing Around with Al Jolson, Kitty Doner, et al, and briefly married a vaudeville performer named Maybelle Meeker a.k.a. “Dainty Marie”. Throughout his New York period he continued to appear in movies directed by the likes of James Kirkwood, D.W. Griffith, and Cecil B. DeMille. By the early ’20s, once again a bachelor, he was living at the Lambs Club, and appeared in the Broadway shows Come Seven (1920, in which the entire cast was in blackface**), and Prince Virtue (1921), staged by Leon Errol.

In 1922, Foxe moved to Hollywood, where he initially appeared in features like Sam Goldwyn’sVanity Fair (1923) with Hobart Bosworth, George Walsh, Harrison Ford, and Mabel Ballin. In 1924 he starred in The Last Man on Earth with Gladys Tennyson, whom he married the following year. Also in 1924, Foxe signed with Fox (it was meant to be!), starring in a series of comedies penned by Richard Harding Davis in which he played a character named Reginald Van Bibber. His costar in the series was Florence Gilbert. True to advertising (above), these comedies were popular, for Foxe starred in them through 1927. In 1928, he returned to features, appearing in some of the early silent films of John Ford.

At this juncture, Foxe added another very different credit to his resume. In 1928, he became the first President of the Black-Foxe Military Institute, a private school whose alum included many sons of actors including Harry Carey Jr,Charles Chaplin Jr,Larry Hagman, Alan Hale Jr, and Gary Lewis (Jerry Lewis’s son, who later founded the rock group Gary Lewis and the Playboys). Future actors Robert Wagner and Gene Wilder both attended, although the latter wrote of gross mistreatment at the school due to anti-Semitism. Foxe continued acting in minor parts in Hollywood films over the next decade, including John Ford films like The Informer (1935) and Mary of Scotland (1937). In 1940 he played a version of himself in Military Academy (1940), an independent feature clearly based on Black-Foxe. He returned to the screen for a bit part in Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), the last of his over 160 films.

The Black-Foxe Institute finally collapsed during the Vietnam era, when military schools were distinctly out of favor. Foxe passed away just shy of his 82nd birthday, a half century ago this year.

**Obligatory Disclaimer: It is the official position of this blog that Caucasians-in-Blackface is NEVER okay. It was bad then, and it’s bad now. We occasionally show images depicting the practice, or refer to it in our writing, because it is necessary to tell the story of American show business, which like the history of humanity, is a mix of good and bad.

For more on silent comedy and film history please see Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.