#50: Manny: Far, Far More Than Meets the Eye

                   As Caesar Enrico “Rico” Bandello (1931)

During its first half-century, Hollywood studios had almost complete control over an actor’s name, biography, destiny, and frequently, even their public image. Although Edward G. Robinson (nee Menashe Goldenberg), a Romanian-born Orthodox Jew, was responsible for changing his name (the “G” was in remembrance of his family name), his public image was largely that of a hard-bitten, take-no-hostages, gun-toting gangster who spoke out of the side of his mouth. Although this image served him well through more than 115 films from 1916 to 1974 and an additional 30+ roles on Broadway, “Manny” was his own bipolar opposite. In truth, Manny Geldenberg was so gun-shy that when it came to firing a tommy in Little Caesar (the 1931 film that made him an overnight star), he couldn’t keep his eyes open; the problem was solved by having the makeup department tape his eyes open with transparent surgical tape.  

Morris and Sarah Goldenberg already had 4 sons before Manny (Menashe ben Yeshayahu Moishe) was born in Bucharest on December 12, 1893.  Before leaving for America some years later, a 6th son was added to the family. Although far from destitute, the Goldenbergs packed 9 people into a small apartment (Morris, Sarah, the 5 boys, and Sarah’s mother).  Arriving at Ellis Island, the Goldenbergs moved into an apartment in the Bronx, and Manny, who would soon become bar mitzvah, began his American schooling.  Already speaking Yiddish (his 1st language), Hebrew, Romanian, and German (the civil language in Romania at the time), Manny had little problem picking up English.  In later years, Robinson could not recall ever having spoken English with any other than a “slight New Yorkish” accent.  Upon arrival, his father first worked for a battery company, but soon bought into a candy store.  The one lesson his father taught him that Manny would religiously follow for the rest of his life was “Always live beyond your means.  That will make you work even harder.”

                      The Newly-Named Edward G. Robinson at Age 20

Manny began his education at PS 137, and then moved on to PS 20, a school from which such luminaries as George and Ira Gershwin, Jacob Javits, and Paul Muni also graduated.  As a teenager, the young Goldenberg engaged in a bit of street-corner speechifying on behalf of liberal causes.  It began to dawn on him that not only did he have a knack for public speaking, but that he could likely make a difference; help improve the human condition.  While attending City College, he abandoned his father’s dreams of him becoming either a rabbi or a lawyer, and took up acting.  Spotted by a recruiter from the prestigious American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1911, Emanuel Goldenberg was awarded a scholarship.  He began working in stock . . . but under the new name Edward G. (for Goldenberg) Robinson. 

Many people believe that because Robertson was a New York actor who was also a native Yiddish speaker, he must have performed on 2nd Avenue - the “Yiddish Broadway.”  In fact, he only appeared in a single Yiddish play, Rudolph Schildkraut’s Number Thirty-Seven, as a short-term replacement who had but a single line.  He chose the name “Edward Golden” for this play, because it sounded far more Jewish than “Robinson.” (Rudy’s Schildkraut’s only son, Joseph (known as “Pepe”), would be one of Eddie’s longest and dearest friends, along with fellow Jewish actor Sam Jaffe.  It is interesting to note that among the 3 biggest male stars on Warner lot in the 1930s - Paul Muni, James Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson - both Muni and Cagney performed in far, far more Yiddish plays than Eddie.  (Despite his Norwegian-Irish heritage, Cagney frequently performed on Second Avenue, and in one of his early films (1931’s Taxi), Cagney had a scene in which he spoke fluent Yiddish).

 In 1929, Manny, along with co-author Jo Swerling, wrote a Broadway comedy called Kibitzer. It would run for 120 performances (Feb. 18, 1929 - Jun. 1929) and put the Yiddish words kibitz and kibitzer into the compendium of American slang. Manny would never take up the pen again, although the rights to the play were sold to Paramount and made into a long-forgotten 1930 film starring Harry Green, Mary Brian, and Neil Hamilton.  In the Broadway production, Robinson starred as Lazarus, a cigar-store owner on Amsterdam Avenue who feels life is passing him by. The character (played by the company member John Plumpis) tells his daughter and anyone else he can corner just how frustrated he is to be bursting with insight — backed not by hunches, but by “statistics,” as he puts it — all while lacking the few dollars it would take to demonstrate his genius to others. “That’s the tragedy of my life,’’ Lazarus declares early in the play. “No capital.” 

(Swerling, who would become best-known for writing The Pride of the Yankees, It’s a Wonderful Life, Lifeboat and Guys and Dolls, also wrote the screenplay for an early Robinson comedy (to be directed by John Ford), The Whole Town’s Talking.)

Manny became an “overnight star” in his 10th picture, Little Caesar. From there he started making, on average, 4 films a year for Warner Brothers, becoming known for such classics as Five Star Final (1931), The Whole Town’s Talking (1935), Confessions of a Nazi Spy 1939), Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940), Brother Orchid 1940), The Sea Wolf (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945), The Stranger 1946), Key Largo (1948), The Ten Commandments (1956), Cheyenne Autumn (1964), and his last, Soylent Green (1973). In his 117 movies, Manny starred - or was featured - as a gangster, a bookkeeper mistaken for a gangster, an FBI agent chasing Nazis, a Norwegian farmer, a scientist, an insurance agent, a corrupt ship’s captain, and a Biblical figure.  Few of his movies ever received a rating below 4 (out of 5) stars.  He also made money hand over fist and was generally among the greatest box-office draws in the industry.  He was that rarest of combinations: a great actor who was also a first-class movie star.

910 Rexford Drive, Beverly Hills (That’s Manny Stading in the Drive Way)

Manny never forgot his father’s sage advice to “. . . live beyond your means.” He did just that. Beginning with the first significant money he earned on Broadway, he began investing in art - paintings of the great masters, to be precise. Over the years - from Broadway to Beverly Hills - Manny purchased works such as Paul Cézanne's The Black Clock, Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of Père Tanguy, Grant Wood's Daughters of the Revolution, Edgar Degas’ Dancer Leaving Her Dressing Room, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Jane Avril Dasant, Paul Gauguin’s Horsemen on the Beach, Henri Matisse’s Dinner Table, and Amedeo Modigliani’s The Zoave and Portrait of a Woman. Eventually, he would be forced to sell many of his pictures and bronze pieces as part of his 1957 divorce settlement from his first wife, Gladys Lloyd. Over the next 16 years (Manny died on January 26, 1973), he did everything he could to restore his collection. But at its peak, Robinson’s personal art collection was likely one of the most extensive in the United States.

Of course, he needed a place to display his art.  And so he commissioned architect Samuel Marx to build him his dream home, a picturesque Tudor-style mansion at  910 Rexford Drive in Beverly Hills. Just before designing the Robinson estate, Marx had completed his own masterpiece, the May Co Department Store at Fairfax and Wilshire Blvd.  (Today, that building houses the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.)  For untold years, dignitaries from the worlds of academia, politics, the arts and sciences, when visiting Hollywood, could expect a handwritten invitation to come over to Manny’s home, where he would give them a special tour of his personal art museum.  Of course, to build up such a superior collection of art meant a lot of traveling back and forth to the art capitals of the world.  At least once - even twice - a year, Manny and Gladys (and then his second wife, Jane Adler Robinson) would go off to England, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy to purchase and then ship back home more masterpieces to adorn the walls of Rexford Drive. On occasion, when a new purchase did not seem to have an appropriate spot to be hung, Eddie (or Manny) would redesign and then rebuild a room to remedy the problem. 

Far from being the gutter-raised, semi-literate meanie he portrayed in so many movies, Edward G. Robinson was an immaculately turned-out, well-read collector of artistic masterpieces and vintage wines who also possessed one of the film industry’s most fully developed social, civil and political consciences. His contributions - via speeches, appearances and hard cash - to causes ranging from anti-Fascism and equal rights to opening American borders to endangered European Jews would one day get him into a peck of trouble.  

       1947: The Committee for the 1st Amendment Invades Capitol Hill

Shortly after the close of WWII, elements within Congress and a growing right-wing movement put Hollywood actors, writers and directors in their crosshairs. Their claim: that Hollywood was filled with Commies, bent on inserting dangerous propaganda into their films and providing unlimited amounts of money in an attempt to take over the country.  In addition to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Tenney Committee, the popular name for the Joint Fact-Finding Committee of Un-American Activities directed by California State Senator Jack B. Tenney, the composer of Mexacali Rose and author of a series of Anti-Semitic books including Zion’s Trojan Horse and Zion’s Fifth Column.  Opposing HUAC and the Tenney Committee were a Hollywood-based group called HICCASP - the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, and the Committee for the First Amendment. Hollywood’s 1940s version of antifa, its members included Humphrey Bogart, Charlie Chaplin, Ronald Reagan, Walter Huston and Edward G. Robinson. 

(For those wondering how future POTUS Ronald Reagan could have been a leading member of this group when today he is best remembered for being an ultra-conservative Republican, remember that Reagan had no strong political convictions.  He was, however, ambitious.  Having been relegated to B pictures before the war, he yearned to be on the front line.  He was also moving up the hierarchy, and SAG (the Screen Actors’ Guild) was led by the conservative George Murphy and the equally conservative Robert Montgomery.  He chose their course, no doubt partly as a career move.  When HICCASP refused to condemn Communism, Reagan was one of the first – and the most vocal – to leave.  He openly criticized in detail the comments of those who stayed. Reagan gained sympathy for himself and his cause by advertising that he had been forced to seek police protection for his home and family because of death threats.

Among those who got into Reagan’s crosshairs was Manny.  Reagan, along with the self-appointed “expert anti-Communist Hunter" Adolphe Menjou, made sure Manny was called and grilled on several occasions by the members of HUAC (including then-California Senator Richard M. Nixon).  Always, the question was the same: “Are you now - or have you ever been - a member of the Communist Party?”  Furious yet dignified, he refused to plead the Fifth, to “name names” of other supposed “Commie Pinkos” or engage in heated conversation as to whether or not the committee was infringing upon his 1st Amendment rights (i.e., Freedom of Speech/Assembly).  As a result, Manny, a person who had always been at his best - or  worst - an ardent New Deal liberal who gave unstintingly of his time, talent, and financial resources, found himself being “outed” in the pages of “Red Channels,” which carried the subtitle “The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television.” What seemed to bother ardent witch-hunters the most was that Robinson had sinned by being what they called a “Premature anti-Fascist.” Indeed, he made his first virulently anti-Nazi film, “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,”  in 1939. Then too, he never hid either his love of being Jewish or his extreme hatred of all things Nazi.

Suddenly, the phone stopped ringing.  Manny couldn’t find a role to save his life.  To add even greater pressure and disconsolation to his life, his wife Gladys, who had long suffered from bouts of depression and schizophrenia, was now seeking - and not for the first time - a divorce, and his son, Edward G. (“Manny”) Robinson Jr., was already a juvenile delinquent. 

But there was always his art, his newly acquired skill at painting, doing voiceovers on radio, and of course, the stage.  In a sense, Broadway - aided by his friends playwright Paddy Chayevsky and Producer/Director Joshua Logan saved his life with a play entitled “Middle of the Night,” in which he starred as “The Manufacturer.”  It would run for 477 performances between Feb. 8, 1956 (our mother’s 32nd birthday) and May 25, 1957. By the time the play concluded, he found himself invited to play the role of Dathan in one of the biggest hit films of all time: The Ten Commandments, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, and starring Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brynner as Rameses.  It wound up being nominated for a remarkable 13 Oscars. Although he himself never received so much as a single Oscar nomination during his long career, Robinson did win an honorary award in 1973 for “Achieving greatness as a player, a patron of the arts, and a dedicated citizen . . . in sum, a Renaissance man. 

                                             Dr. Paul Ehrlich

In the latter part of his life, whenever Manny was interviewed, he would naturally be asked which of all the movies he ever made was his absolute favorite.  Without missing a beat, the answer would invariably be the same: Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, originally released in 1940.   This film, directed by William Dieterle from an Academy Award-nominated original screenplay by the then 34-year-old John Huston,  Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet told the story of German biochemist Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915),  who, among other things, created what eventually would come to be known as chemotherapy as he was in search of a drug that would cure syphilis.  On the surface, this might not seem like great subject matter for a Warner Brothers film in 1940 - and for 2 reasons: first the subject of syphillis would be pretty much verboten in the eyes of that era’s censorship boards, and second, the underlying subtext of the medical community’s treatment of the Jewish Dr. Ehlich at the hands of that group’s inherent anti-Semitic feelings . . . and the fact that Ehrlich, who shared the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, had a highly loyal research staff made up of doctors and scientists who were anything but Aryan.  Considering what was happening in Europe at the time this film was written, produced, and distributed, it is all the more remarkable.  It goes without saying that this film was not screened in any town, city, or country under the control of the Third Reich. How much the more so the  Brothers Warner deserve kudos for their bravery and what might be called their “cranky idealism.”

Even though Manny was definitely not a “Method Actor” (that school of acting had yet to be created or perfected), he prepared for his various movie roles as if he were Lee Strasberg’s finest disciple. He threw himself into Dr. Ehrlich - both the man and the scientist - perfecting his outer physical appearance and the zeitgeist of his particular place in time.  Dr. Ehrlich was a remarkable man.  In 1906, he prophesied the role of modern-day pharmaceutical research, predicting that chemists in their laboratories would soon be able to produce substances that would seek out specific disease-causing agents. He called these substances “magic bullets.” Ehrlich himself met with signal successes in the emerging fields of serum antitoxins and chemotherapy. Serum therapy was for Ehrlich the ideal method of contending with infectious diseases. In those cases, however, in which effective sera could not be discovered, Ehrlich would turn to synthesizing new chemicals, informed by his theory that the effectiveness of a therapeutic agent depended on its side chains. These “chemotherapies” were to be the new magic bullets.

In Frankfurt, Ehrlich turned from his work on serum therapy to chemotherapies and dyes. First targeting protozoa known to cause diseases such as sleeping sickness, he and the Japanese bacteriologist Kiyoshi Shiga synthesized a dye called trypan red as a highly effective cure for the disease. The researchers, now including an organic chemist, Alfred Bertheim, and a bacteriologist, Sahashiro Hata, broadened the targeted microorganisms to include spirochetes, which had recently been identified as the cause of syphilis.

                                     Manny Portrayhing Dr. Paul Ehrlich

Beginning with an arsenic compound, in three years time and 606 syntheses later—for that day an amazingly large number—they discovered Salvarsan (1909). Salvarsan was first tried on rabbits that had been infected with syphilis and then on patients with dementia associated with the final stages of the disease. Astonishingly, several of these “terminal” patients recovered after treatment. Additional testing revealed that Salvarsan was actually more successful if administered during the early stages of the disease. Salvarsan and Neosalvarsan (1912) retained their role as the most effective drugs for treating syphilis until the advent of antibiotics in the 1940s.  The movie accurately reflects Dr. Ehrlich’s (Manny’s) arrest because some of the clinical test subjects died.  The film clearly shows that each test subject volunteered their participation and was informed of the potential adverse events (bad side effects) that might ensue . . .  today, the hallmark of standard ethical practice in all clinical trials - whether they be for drugs, medical devices, or procedures.    

In both real life and the Warner Bros. film, Dr. Ehrlich was acquitted of any ethical, legal, or scientific wrongdoing. As a result of this - and his heavy workload - Paul Ehrlich's health rapidly deteriorated. During a cure in Bad Homburg, he died after a heart attack at the age of 61 on 20 August 1915.  32 years after Ehrlich’s death - and precisely 7 years after the film’s release- the so-called “Doctor’s Trial” concluded at Nuremberg.  This famous trial considered the fate of 20 German physicians and 3 non-physicians who either participated in the Naxz program to euthanize persons deemed “unworthy of life” (the mentally ill, mentally retarded, or physically disabled) or who conducted experiments on concentration camp prisoners without their consent.  The trial lasted 140 days. Eighty-eight witnesses testified, and almost 1,500 documents were introduced.  Sixteen of the defendants charged were found guilty.  Seven were executed.  Between the reality of Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s research into a cure for syphilis.  As a result of both Edward G. Robinson’s cinematic version of Ehrlich’s sterling achievement, and the findings of the Doctor’s Trial at Nuremberg, a new academic field was born: Medical Ethics.  Henceforth, all medical/scientific research on human subjects would be carefully monitored to protect the integrity of procedure and the absolute safety, scrutiny, and foreknowledge of anyone participating in the various stages of medical study.  For those of us who labor in this crucial field, we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Hippocrates, Dr. Paul Ehrlich, Edward G. Robinson, and judges Walter B. Beals, Harold L. Sebring, and Johnson T. Crawford.  

Is it any wonder that Manny always considered Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet to be the high point of his professional career?  With that one role, he bequeathed a lasting legacy to humanity.  I urge anyone with an internet connection to watch the film (Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet)

                        Manny and Modliani’s “The Zouave”

In Manny’s final film, 1973’s Soylent Green, a nightmarish futuristic fantasy about the controlling power of big corporations, he played detective Sol Roth, who is partnered with Thorn (Charlton Heston) to investigate a murder, apparently by a burglar.  But of course, it turns out to be much, much more. During the shoot, Heston, knowing that Manny was dying, brought his costar a variety of wines and cheeses from all over the world each day Robinson was on set for his scenes, which were all shot first. Robinson died at age 79 on January 26, 1973, four months before the film's release in May 1973. 

I find it very fitting that Manny’s last film turned out to be “much, much more” than what appeared on the surface.  How emblematic, when one considers how much of a bipolar opposite the private Emanuel Goldenberg was to his public persona of Little Caesar. Far from being the punk, the gangster, or immoral ruffian he played so very often, Manny was a bespoke gentleman of the highest order; a man who knew his wines, had a great tailor, managed to assemble one of the finest private art collections in America, rellaxed at the end of a long day immersed in a tome from his fabulous library of first-editions, suffered in silence and made the world a better place.  He really did live up to his father’s sage advice: "Always live beyond your means; it will make you work even harder.”  

#39: A Paper Route to Beat the Band

Kurt Franklin Stone #39: A Paper Route to Beat the Band

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                         Milburn Stone (1904-1980)

Shortly before I turned 11 (1960), I got an urge to find a job. Sharing the aim with my father, he sweetened the pot by promising that for every $5 I earned at whatever it was I was going to do, he would match it and then put the combined $10 in an account at the local savings and loan. After scouring the want ads, in the local paper it dawned on me that becoming a paper delivery boy was ideal. And so, I was hired by the local rag - called the Green Sheet due to its front page being a kind a muted lime green color - picked up my canvas bag, box of rubber bands plastic bags and twist ties (for those rare rainy days) and went into business for myself. Back in 1960, the Green Sheet came out 4 times a week and cost (if you chose to pay) a whopping 65¢ a month. Even if you chose not to pay, you still got the paper.  It was up to the paper boy (no girls in those days) to go door-to-door once a month and collect the 65¢ (of which we got 30¢ minus tip . . . if we were so lucky.)  

After learning the ropes - but before going out on my first monthly collection run - I decided it might make for better business if I were to knock on every door along my route (#2739), introduce myself and convince my customers that the paper was well worth 65¢.  And so, unstrapping the canvas bags from the handlebars and back fender of my black Schwinn, and scrubbing the printer’s ink off my hands, I went down the street.  As luck would have it, no one was home at the first 8 houses I visited.  The 9th house, which was within a stone’s throw (pun intended) from ours, I knocked and a kindly looking gentleman answered.  Being a Hollywood Brat, I wasn’t terribly bowled over by the fact that he was Milburn Stone (no relation), who played “Doc Adams” on Gunsmoke. 

At the time, all I knew was that the customer living at 6013 Allott Avenue was named Stone.  I was all prepared to begin my sales-pitch by asking him if we might be related.  (I knew we weren’t: our name was legally changed from “Schimberg” to “Stone” only 3 years earlier).  He turned out to be everything you’d expect Doc Adams to be off-screen: not terribly tall, a tad irascible, but with a delightful twinkle in his eye.  I was amazed that for a shortish (5’7”) man he had a really, really deep voice.  At the end of about 10 minutes of chit-chatting he handed me a dollar, said “keep the change Mr. Stone,"  gave me a wink and put out his hand.  Shaking it I grinned and said “Thanks Doc.”  He would turn out to be my favorite client . . .

(By the time Milburn Stone became “Doc Adams” in 1955 . . . and would go on to play for 605 episodes . . . he had already been in nearly 170 pictures for a quarter century.  His most famous [uncredited] role was that of Stephen A. Douglas in the 1939 Henry Fonda/John Ford-directed classic “Young Mr. Lincoln.”) 

                              Herschel Bernardi (1923-1986)

Pedaling down Allott Avenue, the dollar bill burning a hole in my pocket, I came to a house about 400 yards away on the other side of the street.  Ringing the door bell, a fairly tall, clean-shaven man with not a lot of hair answered the door.  He looked familiar . . . very familiar.  Suddenly it dawned on me where I had seen him.  “Good afternoon,” I said, “my name is Kurt Stone, and I am your Green Sheet delivery boy.  Aren’t you Lieutenant Jacoby, the guy who works with Peter Gunn?”  He chuckled and said “The very same, although when I get home from work my name is Mr. Bernardi . . . Herschel Bernardi.  Do you like the show?”  Swallowing hard, I said “I really do, especially the music and the way Peter Gunn dresses.” (Note: Even as an 11 year-old, I had an eye for good tailoring . . . an inheritance from my father.  And as for the music, Peter Gunn was probably the first show in the history of television to have a “cool jazz” score coupled with one of the most memorable opening themes of all time . . . composed by the then up-and-coming Henry Mancini.) 

On the few occasions I would happen to meet up with Mr. Bernardi, he always struck me as being a happy man. Years later I learned why: back in the late 1940s Bernardi was blacklisted for alleged Communist sympathies. He couldn’t find an acting job to save his life for nearly a decade. When I met him, he was as happy as a clam: he had a steady, well-paying job on a hit television show created by Blake Edwards that earned Bernardi his lone Primetime Emmy nomination (Best Supporting Actor [Continuing Character] in a Dramatic Series.) He wound up losing to Dennis Weaver, who, of course played “Chester” in Gunsmoke. Herschel Bernardi was from a Yiddish theater family, much like the Adlers (Jacob, Luthor and Stella), Paul Muni and the young Sidney Lumet.) 

By the time he was 3, he was known along 2nd Avenue (the Yiddish Theatre District) as a ווונדער קינד (vunderkind), a “child prodigy. He made his film debut at age 13 costarring in one of the greatest of all Yiddish films, גרינע פֿעלדער (Green Fields), an adaptation of a classic Yiddish play by writer Peretz Hirschbein, often called “the Yiddish Maeterlinck.” Bernardi’s strong Yiddish theater upbringing and resonant singing voice would serve him well in later years; he took over for Zero Mostel as Tevye the Milkman in the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, eventually earning a Tony nomination. Over his career he had roles in 95 films and television shows. From 1970 to 1972, he was the star of his own show, “Arnie.” In 1976, a decade before his death, he played blacklisted producer Phil Sussman in the former black-listed Martin Ritt’s bittersweet memorial to the Hollywood Blacklist, The Front, written by the Blacklisted Walter Bernstein and starring Woody Allen along with former black listees Zero Mostel, Lloyd Gough and Joshua Shelley. From 1961 until the year of his death (1986) Herschel Bernardi was the “Ho-Ho-Ho’ voice of the Jolly Green Giant commercials as well as the voice of “Charlie the Tuna” for Star-Kist.

And by the way, Mr. Bernardi always gave me an 18¢ tip.

Being that I had school, homework, piano lessons and Little League baseball (among other endeavors) to take up my life, I could only devote an hour or so to my end-of-the-week collections.  I met and introduced myself to “Doc Adams” and “Lt. Jacoby” on the first day.  It wasn’t until 3 days later that I was working Buffalo Avenue.  On the corner of Buffalo and Collins St. was the home of my best friend, Peter Hirsch.  His father, Dr. William Hirsch was founder and principal of the Loman Street School in North Hollywood, the first public school dedicated to educating children with physical disabilities.  He was a great, great man.  A couple of times a year our “Woodcraft Ranger” group (the “Sundown Tribe”), would go to the school located on Saticoy, to visit and play with the children.  It added so much to our human sensitivity and spirit of volunteerism to be with these children with special needs . . . decades before that term was created and popularized. 

Getting Dr. Hirsch to pay his 65¢  was a no brainer . . .

                         Jack Elam (1920-2003)

Across the street and 3 or 4 houses down there was a man who, quite frankly, scared the living daylights out of me. He was over six feet tall, had bulging eyes and an unmoving left eye, was almost always unshaven, and generally had a scowl on his ugly punim.  I found it hard to describe him to my folks.  Many, many years later, in reading a short-story by Edna Ferber entitled The Man Who Came Back (published in a collection called "Butter Side Down,” published in March 1912, I came across the following which described my customer’s fearsome face to a T: “Birdie had a face that looked like a huge mistake.”  In Hollywood, the expression would be having “a face made for radio.” He undoubtedly knew that I was scared of him and, as I was to learn sometime later, played up his gruesomeness to the hilt.  That gruesomeness, as it turned out, would make him one of Hollywood’s most recognizable - though least known - character actors, playing tens of dozens of ghoulish psychopaths and head cases until many years later, actor James Garner, seeing the comic possibilities, turned him in a western sidekick with few brains but a heart of gold. 

His name was Jack Elam.     

 Hailing from Miami, Arizona, William Scott “Jack” Elam served in World War II and then became both a bookkeeper at the Bank of America and a manager of the Hotel Bel-Air.  Elam went to Santa Monica City College and studied accounting.  Eventually he became an independent auditor for Samuel Goldwyn and an accountant for Hopalong Cassidy Productions.  Unfortunately, all the examining of financial records (usually in small print) put too much strain on his already poor vision, and he had to quit what had become a pretty lucrative gig.  Someone suggested that perhaps he could earn a few dollars by becoming a movie extra . . . and a half-century career was born.

I of course had no idea that “Mr. Scary,” as I called him came from such a benign background and was, in matter-of-fact, a warm-hearted husband and father.  I  had my doubts about ever going back to his house.  Then I happened to be watching an episode of The Twilight Zone in which Mr. Scary had a major role as - what else? - a crazy man called “Grandpa Avery,” stranded at a diner in the middle of nowhere.  It was definitely Mr. Scary, but he actually smiled and made jokes!  Then it dawned on me: perhaps he was just playing a part when he answered the door.  He must have sensed my fear . . . and just played off that.  And so, the next time I went to hopefully collect my 65¢.  I had a smile on my face.  And it worked, for when he opened the door he broke out into a big grin, stuck out his hand and said “welcome sonny . . . so nice to see you!”  What a character.

That first month with the Greensheet I made about $17.00 in subscriptions and nearly $5.00 dollars in tips.  True to his word, Dad doubled my earnings and I was able to put $34.00 into the local S&L and have almost $5.00 in my pockets.  To me, that $34.00 (nearly $365.00 in 2024 money) was a fortune.  I would continue delivering the paper, adding subscribers and banking my earnings for the next year or so.  The year after I “retired” from being a newspaper boy we moved about 5 miles away to a new, bigger home on Addison Street.  I would eventually go back to delivering and soliciting for a different paper and meeting other members of the acting community.

But that’s a tale for an upcoming post.

Wishing one and all a happy, healthy New Year!

Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

#35 Adolph Zukor (1873-1976): Architect of Hollywood

In his 1953 autobiography, The Public is Never Wrong, the then 80-year old Adolph Zukor wrote:

My supreme faith was in the public.  I was convinced that audiences would create stars of its own.We built the modern movie industry on the star system, but the public made the stars.  All the skill of directors and all the booming of press-agent drums will not make a star.  Only the audiences can do it

There was a group at Shanley’s Restaurant at Forty-third Street and Broadway. It was a theatrical rendezvous, much like Sardis would become years and years later.

Included in the “group” were William A. Brady, who had managed heavyweight boxing champions “Gentleman” Jim Corbett and Jim Jeffries and Adolph Zukor.  The early, early movie industry owes much to brothers: Charles and Daniel Frohman, Jake and Lee Schubert (their brother Sam was killed in a train accident, otherwise there would have been three of them), Joe and Nick Schenck. A couple of the younger regulars – Jake and Lee Schubert –- had come down from Syracuse, and were fighting Klaw & Erlanger, the legitimate theatrical syndicate. 

The Schencks had moved from the drugstore business in the Bronx to management of an amusement part, which occupied only part of their time. Joe booked vaudeville acts and Nick devoted most of his time to theater management.

Thus seven of the round-table regulars were in the business end – Brady, the Schuberts, the Schencks, Marcus Loew and the elfin Adolph Zukor. With the exception of William Brady, the regulars were all children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, with only Loew having been born in New York.   

Of these, Loew and Zukor would become the most important to the development of the motion picture industry – literally taking it from what most believed to be a passing fad to a multi-billion dollar industry.  And although the name “Loews” is still well-known and “Zukor” largely forgotten, it is the latter who was, by far, the more important of the two in terms of the industry.  Part of the reason is that Marcus Loew, he whose holding company would be the parent of MGM, died young – at age 57 in 1927 – Zukor, despite being merely 3 years younerg than Loew, would live for another half-century, finally dying of old age at 103.

So just who was Adolph Zukor?

He was born Adolph Cukor in the village of Ricse in Hungary on Jan. 7, 1873. He lost both of his parents - father Jacob, who ran a general store, and his mother, Hannah - before he reached the age of 10, and along with his brother Arthur, were sent to live with their uncle, Kalman Liebermann, a rabbi who hoped Adolph would follow in his footsteps. In his autobiography, Zukor noted: "I had the devil of a time persuading my uncle … that I wasn't cut out for the theological calling." His brother, Arthur, did, in fact, become a rabbi.

Zukor was an unexceptional student. At the age of 12, he was apprenticed to a store owner for whom he swept, ran errands, and did chores. He attended night school twice a week. Zukor got paid nothing for his work, but received clothes and shoes from an orphans' fund. Learning of America from letters sent by immigrants, Zukor decided that he wanted to travel there. In 1888, he asked the orphans' fund for money to travel to America. He received enough for a steamship ticket and $40.

In 1889, at the age of 16, he immigrated to America. In New York City, Zukor found work as an apprentice in a fur shop for $4 a week. Zukor stayed there for two years. When he left to become a "contract" worker, sewing fur pieces and selling them himself, he was nineteen years old and an accomplished designer. But he was young and adventuresome; three years later, the 19-year-old Zukor bought a ticket to Chicago, IL, drawn there by the 1893 Columbian Exposition, which commemorated Columbus' arrival in the New World.  (The  fellow who directed the exposition’s so-called Midway Plaisance its amusement section, which contained the world’s first Ferris Wheel – was a 23 year old San Franciscan named Sol Bloom, who would go on to have a storied career including nearly 30 years as a member of Congress.)

One planted in Chicago, Zukor joined a fellow former New Yorker, Morris Kohn, in a successful fur business. Zukor, who was somewhat shy and retiring, worked in the shop while Kohn handled the sales and customer relations. In the second season of operation, Zukor and Kohn's Novelty Fur Company expanded to twenty-five men and opened a branch factory. It was while on the road that Kohn first met Marcus Loew, then also a furrier, a dandy in a high hat and fur-lined coat.

 Over the next 2 years, Zukor saved several thousand dollars. Around age 21, he returned to Hungary for a visit and saw some of Europe. He married Lottie Kaufman, also a Hungarian immigrant, in 1897. The couple would have two children, Mildred and Eugene.

After their firm, renamed Kohn & Company moved to New York in 1900, Zukor lived across from the Loews at 111th Street and Seventh Avenue, and were soon warm friends.  The two started dining at Shanley’s with the rest of the impresarios. Zukor’s first serious interest in show business came through the conversation of a cousin, Max Goldstein, who in 1903 approached him for a loan to invest in exhibition pioneer Mitchell Mark's penny arcade business. Zukor joined forces with Mark to open the Automatic Vaudeville Company which featured Thomas Edison's phonograph recordings, as well as early motion pictures. The company soon expanded into Philadelphia, Boston and Newark thanks to another furrier, Marcus Loew.

Their penny arcade featured phonographs and short movies, as well as peep machines, a shooting gallery, punching bags, stationary bicycles, and candy. Zukor built his penny arcade business, the nucleus of his cinema empire, with the money he had made from inventing a patent snap for furs. The business did very well, bringing in $500 to $700 a day. Zukor decided to get out of the fur business and devote all his time to the arcade.

As Zukor tells the story in his autobiography, The Public is Never Wrong: At that time the center of show business in New York was at Fourteenth Street.  In time, the conversation got around to the possibilities of a penny arcade in that section.  Such a venture would cost a lot of money.

          The total cost, the three partners estimated, would run to $75,000.  We leased a building on East Fourteenth Street.  A hundred or more peep machines were installed. about 60% of them phonographs and the rest motion pictures. The phonographs were more popular because changes of records were available.  Sufficient film was hard to get.

Other slot machines delivered peanuts, candy, and the like.  Everything cost a penny, a penny to get in and a penny a look, a listen, or a handful of food.

          From the beginning the enterprise was a success.  The daily take ranged from five hundred to seven hundred dollars.  By the end of 1903, we were expanding to Newark, Philadelphia, and Boston, with the result that Kohn and I decided to close out our fur business to devote full energies to the arcades.

Marcus Loew, hearing us talk about the arcades, wanted in.  Our next step was to convert the floor over the Fourteenth Street Arcade to a motion picture theater.  In 1904 the Crystal Hall, as we named the theater, was ready

Crystal Hall patrons got a fifteen-minute show for a nickel.  Some better material was arriving from France.  Among the most popular films with the penny-paying public were the works of the Frenchman Georges Méliès.  They were absolutely remarkable for their time.

 In 1903, the first “story” picture, Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, caused an absolute sensation.  The most important film of its time was less than a reel in length, with a showing time of less than ten minutes.  Porter showed great talent and skill in telling his simple story, using flashbacks and a careful organization of scenes.  It was a revolutionary film.

At the end of the film – which for the first time told a story from beginning to end – a lone gunman faces the camera and fires.  People ran in fear for their lives; no one had ever seen anything like it . . . and they told their friends.  With that one pistol shot, flickers – or “chasers” were quickly coming out of their infancy.  Zukor, among others, sat up at took notice.

 As a sideline to his promotion of Gentleman Jim Corbett and other ventures, impresario William A. Brady had bought the New York rights to the Hale’s Tours, developed by George C. Hale, ex-chief of the Kansas City fire department.

Hale had built a motion picture theater in the shape of a typical railroad coach of the day. As the film ran, the “car” moved back and forth, giving the feel of movement.  In its time, it was as exciting as any ride at Disneyland. Zukor decided to go into Hale’s Tours with Brady.

Zukor's fascination with the growing field of motion pictures led him to create Hales' Tours, a simulated train ride that featured travelogue footage and elaborate sound effects. The venture failed, but Zukor rebounded after joining Marcus Loew's growing company as its treasurer. Nickelodeons were its stock and trade, but the public's desire for more motion pictures soon led them to purchase more businesses to convert into movie theaters. But he soon tired of the brick-and-mortar aspect of the business, and left Loews in 1912 to strike out on his own.

A perceived obstacle to his ambitions was the fact that movies, or "flickers" as they were then known, were very short, usually no more than 12 minutes. Others in the industry felt that American audiences would not want to see anything longer. Zukor felt that audiences would sit through a movie for an hour or more, if it had a good story. Zukor tested his theory by paying $40,000 (worth approximately $1.25 million in 2023 dollars) for the rights to a three-reel European religious movie, The Passion Play. Zukor described the audience's reaction in his autobiography: "The scene was one of the most remarkable I have ever witnessed. Many women viewed the picture with religious awe. Some fell to their knees. I was struck by the moral potentialities of the screen." The film had a good run and proved to Zukor that Americans would sit through longer pictures.

Soon afterward, Zukor learned of a French producer, Louis Mercanton, who wanted to make a four-reel movie starring the famous French actress Sarah Bernhardt, in her successful play Queen Elizabeth. Mercanton's project was being delayed for lack of funds. Zukor, in partnership with Daniel Frohman, advanced Mercanton $40,000 to secure the North American rights to the movie. It was the first test of his theory that American audiences sit through a film of this length.

On July 12, 1912, the movie premiered and their investment paid off when New York society elites attended the premiere at the Lyceum Theater.  Historians consider this to be the first full-length film ever shown in America.

Zukor and Frohman also launched a road-show by touring the country with the film, which amassed some $200,000 in ticket sales. The pair used the proceeds to establish their own production company, Famous Players Film Company, with which Zukor hoped to create filmed versions of full-length classical plays. They rented the top two floors of the old Ninth Regiment Armory at 213-227 West Twenty-Sixth Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.

For their publicity man they chose a smart young fellow named Ben P. Schulberg. In late 1912, the Connecticut-born Shulberg was in his early twenties, a newspaperman who recently had been doing publicity for Edwin Porter’s Rex Company. 

Al Kaufman, who would become the Famous Players-Lasky studio manager, spent a good deal of his time hanging around outside the Lambs’ Club, buttonholing actors.  He had no easy time hiring players. Zukor’s salary offers of from fifty to two hundred dollars a week ($1,500 to $6.000 in today’s money), according to the size of the role, worked a number of wonders.

Their first production was 1913's The Prisoner of Zenda, starring the famous Shakespearian stage actor named James K. Hackett.  Zukor signed Hackett for $1,200 a week for 4 weeks work. The total budget for the film was estimated at forty thousand to fifty thousand dollars (upwards of $1.5 million in today’s money).

Though tiny compared with the multimillion budgets of today, it was three or four times the sum ever spent on a picture in America.  Most one-reelers were ground out on a budget of a few hundred to a thousand dollars. The fact that each of their five reels would run nearly ten times, the top figure shows how much above the average they were paying for cast, authorship, scenery, costumes, and the rest.

The Prisoner of Zenda wound up reaping a sizable box office reward. The following year, Zukor and a former San Francisco-born vaudevillian named Jesse L Lasky went into business together, forming the Jesse L. Lasky's Feature Player Company.  Zukor and Lasky quickly signed deals with Paramount Pictures Corporation to distribute their films throughout the United States. Lasky and his brother-in-law, Samuel Goldwyn, had just released "The Squaw Man" (1914), directed by a former stage actor named Cecil B. DeMille.

Jesse Lasky and his sister Bess had been traveling vaudevillians. When Bess quit the act in order to marry a prosperous, cantankerous glove salesman named Samuel Goldish (Gelbfisch), Jesse decided to become an agent.  As with many, he began thinking about getting into flickers. In 1914, Jesse and Sam, with the financial backing of Adolph Zukor, who would distribute their first film through his Paramount Distribution Company, hired the young Cecile B. DeMille to direct their first picture . . . whatever it may be.  DeMille had never directed a film. In matter of fact, it was his brother, William C. de Mille that Famous Players really wanted.  They wound up paying a hefty sum for the rights to a tried-and-true Broadway play called “The Squaw Man.” They also agreed to pay $5,000 to the famous actor Dustin Farnum to star in the film version of the play he had made famous on Broadway.  

A small crew traveled out west to make the picture.  Before this time, 95% of all Westerns were filmed in Ft. Lee, New Jersey.  Owing largely to the fact that Famous Players was going to be haunted – and hunted – by members of the so-called “Trust” – the hand-picked group approved of by Edison to make films – they decided to go out west. The “trust” was reaching for a strangle hold, beginning in 1910 with the Patents Company and following with the General Film Company. 

The moment an “outlaw” piece of equipment or film appeared in a movie house, the license was withdrawn and the supply of “trust” pictures cut off.  As an additional weapon, the “trust” contracted with the Eastman Kodak Company, major supplier of raw film, to sell stock only to licensed companies.

The companies involved in the trust were Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Essanay, Kalem, Selig, George Kleine, and the American branches of Pathé and Méliès.

The first person to challenge the Trust – and win – was Carl Laemmle, who headed up a conglomerate called “IMP” – the Independent Motion Pictures.  IMP would eventually coalesce into Universal Studios.

Laemmle plays a very important role in the history of motion pictures.  Heretofore, actors weren’t identified by name.  The feeling was, that if the public knew the names of the people appearing on the screen, they, the actors, would demand salaries in excess of the $10 per week they were earning at the time.  Instead, the public only knew them as “the girl with the curls” (Mary Pickford), “the man with the dimples” (Maurice Costello) or “the fat Man” (John Bunny).  (Bunny, by the way, was at the time of his death in 1915, the most popular film comedian in the world.  Within a year of his death, he had been completely forgotten.  The reason?  Charlie Chaplin had taken the world by storm.)

Laemmle changed all that via a ruse.  About the time Zukor was becoming interested in motion pictures, the most popular – though unnamed – actor on screen was a woman known as “The Biograph Girl” – Florence Lawrence.  The Biograph Company paid her the munificent sum of twenty-five dollars a week.  Laemmle made arrangements to hire Lawrence at double her salary.  Here’s where the ruse came in.  Laemmle released an anonymous story to the press stating that “The ‘Biograph Girl’, whose real name was Florence Lawrence, was killed in a street car accident yesterday.”  Laemmle then waited twenty-four hours while the horrific news quickly traveled across the country.  The public was devastated to learn that their favorite star – whose name they now knew – was dead.  Then, Laemmle held a press conference at which he denounced who ever had released the information, saying that it must’ve been done by his enemies, because Florence Lawrence, the former “Biograph Girl,” was now to be employed by IMP, in a one-reel film to be entitled, ironically, “Never Again.”  From that point on stars, began making real money.  Within 6 years Adolph Zukor would be paying Mary Pickford $20,000 a week, 52 weeks a year.

 When DeMille and his crew arrived in Arizona to begin filming, they quickly came to realize that 100+ degree temperatures were no good for their film stock; it quickly melted.  And so, they traveled further west until they came to a small town called Hollywood (pronounced in those days HollyWOOD). There, for $75.00 they took out a 3-month lease on a stable at the southeast corner of Selma and Vine.  And that is where they shot their picture.  Made at a cost of slightly under $20,000, the film grossed nearly a quarter of a million; Lasky, Goldfish, DeMille and Zukor were on their way to fame and fortune.

The picture drew the attention of Paramount Pictures Corporation, a distributor in search of features. The Paramount Pictures Corporation was not founded by Zukor, though he was partly responsible.  The organizers were a group of film exchange men led by W.W. Hodkinson, who represented exchanges in the Far West.  Its purpose was not to make pictures but to distribute them. Famous Players and Lasky signed an agreement to allow Paramount to handle their pictures, but quickly realized that they could reap bigger profits by controlling the distribution as well as the production. So Zukor purchased a large majority of Paramount stock to take control of the company, and in 1916, it was folded into a larger entity, the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, with Zukor as its president and Lasky its vice-president. Goldwyn initially settled for vice-president status, but was eventually forced out; he would later help to establish Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer before launching one of the most successful independent producing careers in Hollywood history.

After consolidating his numerous subsidiary companies, including Paramount, Realart Pictures and the George M. Cohan Film Corporation, under the Famous Players-Lasky umbrella, Zukor set out to streamline his business. He signed many of the top stars of the period, including Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson. In doing so, he required that any exhibitor who wished to screen their films also had to purchase a year's worth of other Famous Players-Lasky releases, often sight unseen. This practice, known as "block booking," drew the ire of numerous exhibitors, including the First National Exhibitions Circuit, who boycotted Famous Players-Lasky in 1919. Faced with the loss of nearly 600 nationwide theaters, Zukor then began purchasing theater chains. Within a few years, he had snapped up hundreds of movie houses, making Famous Players-Lasky one of the largest theater owners in the world.

In 1921, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) caught wind of Zukor's plan and charged Famous Players-Lasky and its subsidiaries with conspiracy and restraint of trade, which violated their anti-trust laws. Theater owners testified about the company's strong-arm tactics, which included building movie houses across the street from theaters that refused to accept block booking and even outright physical intimidation. In 1927, the FTC ruled that block booking was an unfair trade practice, and filed a cease and desist order against Zukor and his company. But Zukor had built his company into a formidable entity that could withstand such threats, even from the government. The profits he drew from his box office hits allowed him to make several significant purchases, including a hefty share of the Columbia Broadcasting System and the Balaban and Katz theater chain, which allowed him to expand his theater holdings to over 2,000 screens across the United States. He had also built a West Coast studio for production, which would eventually become Paramount Studios. An animation department, headed by Max and Dave Fleischer, was also presentin serious competition for Walt Disney's product. When faced with the FTC's charges, Zukor simply denied them. His stance was regarded as arrogance by both the media and the government, which responded with a massive anti-equity suit in 1929, charging Famous Players-Lasky and nine other studios of monopolizing 98 percent of domestic distribution. The following year, the Supreme Court declared the 10 studios guilty of violating anti-trust law.

Zukor had an interesting relationship with Mary Pickford, to say the least. There has never been anything just like the public adulation showered on Mary.  It caught Zukor by surprise.

                                                       Mary Pickford in 1916

In 1916 Mary was twenty-three, had been married for several years, and was being paid more money than the President of the United States.  Yet to the public, she was a little girl somewhere between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Zukor did nothing to discourage the illusion.Pickford had started out on Broadway acting in David Belasco’s “The Warrens Of Virginia,” and then went on to do dozens of one and two-real pictures for DW Griffith at Biograph Studios.  With Zukor, she had a sometimes father-daughter, sometimes employer/employee relationship.  Every time Charlie Chaplin would get a raise, she’d march into Zukor’s office and ask for at least one dollar more than the little tramp was getting.  At one time her salary demand was so excessive that Zukor offered her a quarter of $1 million – $250,000 a year for five years – to not make pictures.  Pickford, who always played a little girl despite being in her twenties, responded that she wasn’t getting any younger, and to stay away from the screen, would effectively end her career.  Eventually, Pickford – along with Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and DW Griffith – would go into business for themselves as United Artists.  Zukor was fond of saying that Mary Pickford had a cash register for a brain.

At one point, in order to keep Pickford in line, brought in an exquisite actress by the name of Marguerite Clark to play a role similar to Mary’s.  Curiously though, Marguerite did not care to be a star.  She did not dislike acting.  She was merely indifferent to fame.  For a couple of years she was just a step behind Mary Pickford in terms of national popularity.  But Clarke retired from the screen in 1921, shortly after Pickford had left to found United Artist.  Zukor had no other choice but to find another second string Mary Pickford.  This time he chose a teenager named Mary Miles Minter.  Minter rose to the crest of fame but less in than two years, was out of pictures for good; at age 20, she was prominently named in his scandal in which the famed director William Desmond Taylor was found murdered. 

In the summer of 1916, Famous Players merged with the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. Goldfish became chairman of the board, De Mille director-general, Lasky vice-president, and Zukor president.

A short time later Zukor put on his hat and started for the door.  Lasky and Zukor had gotten along fine.  De Mille made things    hum efficiently in Hollywood. Every hour on the hour, and sometimes the half hour however, Goldfish sent a shock through the organization.

Zukor became convinced that Goldwyn disagreed many times only for the sake of argument.  He liked operating in turmoil. Zukor, on the other hand, liked to move with greater care.  His aim was the building of a large and wide-flung organization, while Goldwyn operated in the moment.

Things became so tense and unmanageable that in 1916 Zukor, Lasky and DeMille, decided to buy out Goldfish for nearly $900,000.  With that money, he and Edgar Selwyn (Simon), a prominent actor and impresario, formed Goldwyn Pictures.  The name “Goldwyn” was an amalgam of the first syllable of Sam’s name (“gold”) and the second syllable of Edgar’s name (“wyn”).  The partnership was not to last; several years later Sam who was again tossed out on his ear – but not before receiving yet another $900,000 with which he started Samuel Goldwyn Productions, and purchased the old Thomas Ince Studios in Inglewood, which would eventually become the home of MGM.  And even though Sam Goldwyn never had anything to do with MGM, he did own the land and buildings they used.  Sam eventually legally changed his name to Goldwyn, and at the time a pundit quipped, “he took the wrong syllables.  He should have taken the first syllable from Edgar’s last name and the second syllable from his, thereby becoming Samuel Selfish.”

One of the high points in the twenties for Zukor was the dedication, in 1926, or the Paramount Building, occupying the Broadway block between Forty-third and forty-fourth streets in Times Square – including the site of the old Shanley Restaurant.  The building was thirty-three stories high and contained the vast Paramount Theatre. The structure cost seventeen million dollars.

The 1930s saw Paramount develop into a movie factory, turning out 60 to 70 films per year. It boasted a stable of talent as impressive as its roster of silent stars, including Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Bing Crosby, Carole Lombard and the Marx Brothers. Zukor himself oversaw many of Paramount's best films of the decade, including "The Cocoanuts" (1929), the Oscar-winning "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1931) and "The Milky Way" (1937). Other hits films to spring from the corner of Melrose and Gower were "Morocco" (1930), "Duck Soup" (1933), "She Done Him Wrong" (1933) and "Beau Geste" (1939). Its animation department also found great success with two of its creations, Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor, which would go on to become iconic figures in cartoon history. Zukor managed all of these various entities with a calm, avuncular manner that belied the accepted notion of the studio chief as tyrant, as put forth by such notorious martinets as Harry Cohn, Louis B. Mayer and his former partner, Samuel Goldwyn.

Zukor was, first and foremost, a businessman. He retained only as much interest in the artistic side of Paramount motion pictures as was necessary, preferring instead to work behind the scenes to ensure his company's financial stability. When required to deal with his stars, he was a shrewd negotiator who sought to resolve contract disputes and other issues as swiftly as possible. He quashed a feud between squabbling stars Gloria Swanson and Pola Negri by moving Negri, a Polish-born sex goddess, to Hollywood while keeping Swanson, an all-American flapper, at his home base in New York. At one time he soothed Mary Pickford's aggressive stage mother by building a clause into her daughter's contract that gave her $25,000 a year for "moral support."

A tiny man, the five-foot,  one-inch Zukor had a knack for disarming people with his serene demeanor, a quality that earned him the nicknames "Sugar" (which was the literal translation of his surname in Hungarian) and "Uncle Adolph." And if he was occasionally ruthless with business partners or potential adversaries, he did it in a manner that made it clear that the conflict was strictly part of business, and not a personal vendetta. Zukor saved his energies for card-playing and golf, both of which he pursued with such a passion that he built an 18-hole course at his estate in Rockland County, NY.

But as many moguls who came to power in the 1920s soon discovered, the old ways of making movies were gradually rendered irrelevant in the 1940s and 1950s. Paramount, in particular, suffered considerable losses during these decades. The long-dormant specter of block booking returned with a vengeance in 1948, when the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department reopened their anti-trust case against the five major studios. The Supreme Court eventually sided with the government, as seen in the 1948 decision of United States vs. Paramount Pictures Inc., which barred movie studios from owning theater chains. The ruling not only forced Paramount to cut back on production at the height of its popularity - when stars like Bob Hope, Alan Ladd, Dorothy Lamour and Betty Hutton were on their payroll, all earning upwards of $20,000 per week - but also signaled the end of the studio system . . essentially, the deregulation of Hollywood.

Paramount went into a decline as a result of the court decision. They released their players from the contracts, and produced most of their projects through independent entities. Attempts to break into the television market through the DuMont Network and a pay TV service called International Telemeter also failed, further plunging their finances into disarray. With his empire now in tatters, Zukor decided to avoid the fate of many of his peers who had been ousted by the studios they had built, and retired in 1959. The respect he had earned from his employees allowed him to be named Chairman Emeritus, a position he held until his death at the age of 103 on June 10, 1976.

His wife Lotte had died in 1956 at age 80

They had two children: Mildred (1900-1986) who married and divorced Arthur Loew, the son of Marcus Loew, and son Eugene (1897-1994) who was an entertainment executive and film producer.  He produced a handful of films including "The Island of Lost Men," "The Way of All Flesh" and "Women Without Names."

Towards the end of his life, Zukor, when asked why so many Jewish people were involved with creating the motion picture industry, succinctly stated:

Those of us who became film producers hailed from all sorts of occupations--furriers, magicians, butchers, boilermakers--and for this reason highbrows have often poked fun at us. Yet one thing is certain: every man who succeeded was a born showman. And once in show business he was never happy out of it

The man knew what he was talking about . . .

Budd Schulberg: Mostly Unknown But Still the Best of the Best

Except for dyed-in-the-wool movie buffs and multi-generational “Hollywood Brats,” the name “Schulberg” is largely forgotten or unknown. But one need not be either of the two - a dyed-in-the-wool movie buff or a Hollywood Brat - to be familiar with the films “On the Waterfront,” “The Harder They Fall,” or “A Face in the Crowd,” or the novels “The Disenchanted” or What Makes Sammy Run?  the latter likely the greatest Hollywood novel ever written.  Born in 1914, Seymour Wilson “Budd” Schulberg was the son of B. (Benjamin) P. (Percival) and Adeline (Adler) Schulbeg).  His father, who started out as a movie publicist (he was the fellow who tagged Mary Pickford “America’s Sweetheart”) rose to become one of the most powerful men in the business in the 1920’s as head of production at Paramount Studios. He also discovered Clara Bow, perhaps the most popular movie star in the history of motion pictures. Budd’s mother, Adeline (1895-1977), who divorced his father when he left her for starlet Sylvia Sidney (Sofia Koskow [1910-1999]) went on to form one of the largest and most powerful talent agencies in Hollywood.  Young Budd went to Dartmouth, where he was assigned the near-impossible task of tagging after writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, trying to keep the famous writer sober during the writing of a the film called Winter Carnival. Schulberg eventually turned that episode into one the best-selling novels of 1950, entitled The Disenchanted.

Shortly after graduating from Dartmouth, Budd Schulberg returned to Southern California, where he found employment as a “gofer” for director Cecil B. DeMille. In his time with the legendary showman, young Schulberg got a first-row knowledge of the industry into which he had been born. In 1941, the then 27-year old Budd Schulberg wrote and published a novel that is still in print nearly 80 years later: What Makes Sammy Run?” Recognized by many (myself included) as hands down, the greatest Hollywood novel ever put to paper (and to Broadway and television), What Makes Sammy Run? tells the story of Brooklyn-born Sammy Glick who, through a mixture of guile, dishonesty, naked ambition and unbridled chutzpah, works his way up from being a teen-aged copy boy for a cheap New York tabloid to the top-of-the-heap as a highly successful Hollywood producer. Along the way, he uses people like expendable sheets of Kleenex, plagiarizes the work of others and, despite making millions and remaking himself as anything but a Lower East Side Jew, can never find happiness, security or satisfaction.

Despite its huge readership and long, successful run – and numerous revivals - as a Broadway musical – What Makes Sammy Run has never been made into a movie.  Yes, there have been two television versions made long, long ago:

• First it was presented as a live television drama starring José Ferrer on April 10, 1949, on Philco Television Playhouse;

• On September 27 and October 4, 1959, on NBC Sunday Showcase, Larry Blyden starred as Sammy Glick in a two-part television broadcast on NBC-TV Also Blyden’s costars were John Forsythe, playing Sammy’s “Bosworth” Al Manheim, Barbara Rush as Kit Sargent, one of Sammy’s writers, and Dina Merrill as Laurette Harrington, the unobtainable Blue Blood Sammy desires as a bauble for his bracelet.

Even before What Makes Sammy Run hit the bookstores in 1941, most of the major players in the film industry had read its galley proofs . . . and had concluded that it would never be turned into a film. Why? Because these moguls - most of whom were Eastern-European Jews - thought the novel would be fatal fodder for all the well-bred anti-Semites who firmly believed that these moguls were all part of a conspiracy to undermine American morals and the greater good. In Goldwyn: The Man Behind the Myth, author Arthur Marx revealed that Sam Goldwyn offered Budd Schulberg a lot of money to not have it published because Goldwyn felt that the author was "doublecrossing the Jews" and perpetuating anti-Semitism by making Sammy Glick so venal. In 2001, DreamWorks paid more than $2.5 million to acquire the rights to the novel from Warner Brothers for a proposed movie version starring and/or directed by Ben Stiller. Nothing ever came of it. When asked several years ago if he thought What Makes Sammy Run? would ever be filmed, Steven Spielberg told an interviewer that in his opinion it never would be because it was “too anti-Hollywood.

There has long been a question about who Budd Schulberg used as his model for Sammy Glick.  Although no one knows for certain, and the author never said who he based Sammy on, many believe it was Brooklyn-born writer/producer Jerry Wald (1911-62), best known for producing “Mildred Pierce,” “Key Largo,” and “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” and writing “They Drive By Night,” “The Roaring Twenties” and “Brother Orchid.” According to his nephew (and my lifelong friend) Alan, whose father, screenwriter Malvin was Jerry’s younger brother, Sammy couldn’t have been based on Jerry . . . his uncle was simply too nice and, unlike the fictional Sammy, Uncle Jerry was widely respected. Sammy could never have won a Thalberg Award (given by the Academy’s Board of Governors to “creative producers whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production”), Jerry did . . . in 1948.

Like many Hollywood writers, directors and actors, Budd Schulberg was a leftist.  And, like many Hollywood leftists, he found himself having run afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).  In order to keep from being blacklisted, Budd Schulberg, like others in the same dire straits, decided to “name names” before the committee.  What the committee was after was more an act of contrition than learning about heretofore unknown members of the so-called Communist Conspiracy.  Schulberg did go before the committee, but did not reveal a single name they were unaware of.  Another Hollywood lefty who did the same thing, director Elia Kazan, would find himself employable but reviled.  Somehow, Budd Schulberg escaped that additional punishment; both his reputation and employability would remain intact.  Ironically though, writer Schulberg and director Kazan would find themselves working together as writer and director on two of the very best films of the 1950’s: On the Waterfront (1955) for which both won Academy Awards, and 1957’s A Face in the Crowd, one of the very best political movies ever made in Hollywood.

A Face in the Crowd, is based on Schulberg’s short story Your Arkansas Traveler from his 1953 collection Some Faces in the Crowd. Starring Andy Griffith (in his first film), Patricia Neal, Lee Remick, Walter Mathau and Anthony Franciosa, tells the story of an Arkansas drifter named Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes who becomes an overnight media sensation. As he becomes drunk with fame, fortune and power, industrial tycoons and political power-brokers start flocking his way, getting him to endorse their products, school their candidates in how to come across as “just plain folks”;' within the blink of an eye, he becomes a narcissistic, ego-maniac. As he is on the verge of creating out of whole cloth the next POTUS (played by Marshall Neilan, who in real life was a famous director of the silent era) “Lonesome’s” train to glory is derailed by the woman who created him in the first place: After his weekly television show (called “A Face in the Crowd”), the woman (played by Patricia Neal) keeps the sound going during the credits. Lonesome, who has finished the show with his now famous sign-off “The family that prayers together stays together',” is unaware that everything he says can be heard by his fans and acolytes coast to coast. They hear him deriding and contemptuously mocking both Senator Fuller, the man he is molding for President, and the so-called “Fighters for Fuller” a bunch of idiots. He brags says that they are all so stupid that they actually believe whatever he says about America, morality, and religion . . . all the while swigging a bottle of booze and laughing it up with the hillbillies who make up his backup band.

In the time it takes for Lonesome to get from the studio to his penthouse where he is about to throw a black tie banquet for Senator Fuller, an entire nation has come to understand that their idol is nothing more than a fraud. He arrives home only to discover that his advertisers had left him, his fans have abandoned him, and he is about to be unemployed. Even his manager (played by Anthony Franciosa in one of his earliest roles) has sold a new crooner to the advertisers to replace the Arkansas Traveler. The film ends with Lonesome screaming out “MARCIA! MARCIA! MARCIA!” at the cab carrying the woman who created him, now traveling off into the future . . .

Many say that Budd Schulberg “borrowed” the demise of Lonesome Rhodes - the mike that remained plugged in - from the legend of “Uncle Don” Carney, a popular children’s radio show host. Don Carney broadcast 5, sometimes 6 days a week on radio station WOR in New York City from 1928-1947. His kiddie show included segments called the "Healthy Child's Club" and the "Talent Quest,” and always ended with him telling his young fans “Good night little friends . . . good night.” It was a wholesome show, to say the least. According to legend, one night at the conclusion of a broadcast Carney thought he was off the air and exclaimed, "There! That ought to hold the little bastards"—but his microphone was still live, and his comment was broadcast to his radio audience. The legend goes on to state that public outrage caused Carney's termination from radio. For years, people truly believed that Schulberg mimicked this in order to bring down Lonesome. Turns out, the Uncle Don episode was an urban legend which persists to this very day. . .

In addition to arguably written the greatest Hollywood novel of all time, Budd Schulberg may well have also written the most politically prophetic screenplays of all time. And to a great degree, What Makes Sammy Run? and A Face in the Crowd share a great deal. They both have central characters who have public personae at odds with their private selves and highly acquisitive, ego-driven personalities that push them ever higher . . . regardless of who they step on. Both works are, at best, black satires on the medial; both present dire warnings about mass media and the power it has to shape a gullible public. Ironically, during the height of Glen Beck’s on-air career, radio and sports host Keith Olbermann started calling him “Glenn ‘Lonesome Rhodes’ Beck.” While it didn’t do that much harm to Beck’s on-air success (that would take place, but be largely of Beck’s own making), it did wonders for sales of A Face in the Crowd.

Budd Schulberg would continue writing books and screenplays until age 93, his last credit being for 2007’s Nuremberg: The 60th Anniversary Director’s Cut. Budd Schulberg died two years later of natural causes at age 95. During his long life he was married 4 times (most notably to actress Geraldine Brooks) and fathered 5 children.

Budd Schulberg may be gone, but he is definitely not forgotten. Simply stated, he was is and always shall be one of the most important writers of the past 80 years.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone