Nick and Nora, Minnie and Bill: America’s Favorite (Never-Married) “Husband and Wife”

PLEASE NOTE: I WILL BE TEACHING AN 8-WEEK COURSE ON NICK & NORA AT FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY - BOTH BOCA RATON AND JUPITER CAMPUSES BEGINNING IN EARLY FEBRUARY NEXT YEAR AND EXTENDING INTO EARLY MAY.  THE BOCA COUSE IS DIVIDED INTO TWO 4-WEEK INSALLMENTS AND YOU CAN VIEW THE CLASS ON VIDEO CAPUTURE AS WELL AS BEING IN ATTENDANCE.   IF YOU ARE INTERESTED GO TO THE LIFELONG LEARNING WEBSITE

       Nick and Nora, along with Asta (AKA “Skippy”)

Nearly 6 years ago I posted a Tales From Hollywood & Vine blog titled Cinematic Chemistry: That Certain Something.  In the opening paragraph I wrote about how, from the earliest days of moving pictures, “ . . . producers (originally called “presenters”) have been on the lookout for cinematic couples who possessed that indescribable something called "chemistry.”  That earl post included such long-forgotten couples as John Bunny and Flora Finch, Harold Lockwood and May Allison, Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor as well as Charles Chaplin’s most frequent costar, Edna Purviance, with whom hhe made 30 silent films over just an 8-year period.

Hollywood’s “Golden Age” continued the trend with such favorite teams as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (who made 10 pictures together from 1933-1949); Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, "America’s Singing Sweethearts” (who sang their way through 8 splashy MGM musicals in the 1930s and '40s) and of course, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn who made 9 films together from 1942 to 1967.  Spence and Kate were believed by most outsiders to have carried on a torrid affair throughout all those years; many within “the neighborhood” were aware that theirs was a classic “lavender romance” in which their public partnership was, in reality, a cover for their true private lives. But this is a topic for another posting . . . perhaps.

Over the years, some of the busiest, best and most profitable cinematic “pairings” were comic teams: 

•  Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy who over the same of 30 years (1921 to 1951), made and costarred in an amazing 79 shorts and 27 feature length films including Sons of the Desert (1933), March of the Wooden Soldiers (1934), The Flying Deuces (1939) and A Chump at Oxford (1940).  In real life, they were the best of friends, with Laurel (who came to America as Charles Chaplin’s understudy) being the creative “brains” of the team.

• Bud Abbott and Lou Costello: starting in radio, moving on to Broadway and eventually to Hollywood, Abbott and Costello were one of the most popular comic duos of their time, ranking among the top ten box office stars for most of the 1940s. Their “Who’s on First?” routine is considered one of the greatest comedy bits of all time. From 1940-1956 they made an amazing 36 films.

• Bob Hope and Bing Crosby: The obvious friendship between the comedian and the crooner transferred seamlessly to the big screen.  Over 22 years (1940-1962) they made 17 films, many beginning with the words “The Road to . . .” What made their pictures such audience pleasers was that in virtually every one, they had fun parodying films of the day and poking fun at both themselves and other actors.

• Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney: They became lifelong friends as teens on the set of the 1937 film Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, and then went on to costar in 3 of Roony’s popular “Andy Hardy” films.  But the two are perhaps best remembered for their series of “backyard musicals,” the most famous of which was Babes in Arms.

• Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor: Theirs was a romance that began on screen: 1963’s colossal cinematic bomb Cleopatra, and then continued through 9 more films between 1963 and 1972.  In 13 year’s time, they would become one of the most famous couples in the world, marry and divorce twice, and star alongside each other in ten films, including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,  for which Taylor won a Best Actress Oscar.

One could go on and on with such pairs as stoners Cheech and Chong (12 films from 1978-2013), Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau (11 films from 1966-1998), Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland (9 films from 1935-1942) and of course, “Bogie and Baby”, husband and wife Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who made 5 incredibly literate films in 4 years including 1944’s To Have and Have Not (from a novel by Ernest Hemmingway and a screenplay by William Faulkner) 1946’s The Big Sleep (from a novel by Raymond Chandler and a screenplay by, once again, William Faulkner), and 1948’s Key Largo (based on a play by Maxwell Anderson with a screenplay by both John Huston and Richard Brooks). 

For my money (and that of many, many others), the greatest team of ‘em all was Myrna Loy and William Powell who, over a span of 13 years (1934-1947) played husband and wife so often - and so very convincingly well - that most of the film-going public actually believed they were married to one another . . . both on-screen (i.e. “reel”) and real life.  Beyond the obvious chemistry they shared with one another, Minnie (Myrna’s nickname in Hollywood) and Bill made married life look so much fun and frenzy. And whether they were portraying Nick & Nora Charles in the   6 "Thin Man” films; Jim & Eleanor Wade in 1934’s "Manhattan Melodrama,” headlined by Clark Gable; Florenz Ziegfeld & Billie Burke in the 1936 biopic "The Great Ziegfeld, which captured the Oscar for "Best Film”; or Steve & Susan Ireland in 1941’s romantic comedy “Love Crazy,” they managed to never hit a false note . . . they were just made for each other.

       20-year old William Powell

Off screen, they were great friends and true admirers of one another’s acting talents.  It really isn’t all that surprising that a romance never developed because, as Loy put it many years later, the two were far too alike, and their wisdom in not pursuing a relationship likely contributed to the ease and joy they felt in working together.  Unquestionably, we, the many generations of movie audiences over the past 90 years, are the beneficiaries of that joy.   

William Horatio Powell (1892-1984) was born in Pittsburgh and early in life decided that he wanted to be an actor.  Borrowing $700.00 from a wealthy aunt, he headed up to New York and enrolled as a student at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, which had been founded by a Harvard professor in 1884.  Leaving before his graduation with the class of 1913, he went out on the road, touring with traveling road companies for the next several years. Throughout these years, he played  in dozens upon dozens of comedies, melodramas and classics.    Although he eventually made the cast of no less than 5 relatively inconsequential, long forgotten Broadway plays between 1917 and 1928, he earned much of his living in Silent Films . . . first in New York and then Hollywood.

In his first film, 1922’s Sherlock Holmes, starring the immortal John Barrymore, Powell had a small feature role. From 1922-1928 he was featured in nearly 35 silents, playing mostly in historic costume dramas or crime flicks, where he was regularly portrayed as a cad, rogue or downright villain. The coming of sound was his salvation.  With his mellifluous voice and aristocratic diction, he was a cut above his fellow movie actors.  His first talking film, 1929’s The Canary Murder Case, in which he played detective Philo Vance to the exotic Louise Brooks’ "Canary,” made him a star.  5 years later he would be paired with Minnie . . . 

        Myrna as “Nubi", a Hungarian Gypsy in “The Squall” (1925)

Myrna Adele Williams Loy (1905-1993) was born in Helena, Montana where her father, David was the youngest person ever elected to that state’s legislature.  She spent the first 13 years of her life either on her family’s cattle ranch or in a middle-class neighborhood in Helena, the state capital.  A couple of blocks away lived the British-born Supreme Court Justice Charles Henry Cooper who had two sons: Arthur and Frank James, who was 4 years older than Myrna Williams.  Years later,  Frank’s first name would be changed to Gary (Cooper) and he, like his young neighbor, would become one of the most popular movie stars in the world.   

Following her father’s death in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, Myrna, her mother and the rest of the family moved to Los Angeles, where young Myrna attended the Westlake School for Girls and caught the acting bug. Dropping out of Venice High School before she was 17, Myrna got a job working for a brother-and-sister team called Fanchon and Marco, who were hired to create a prologue at Sid Grauman’s for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.  

In the ‘20s movie prologues were elaborately staged theater productions that would either provide a literal preview of the action in the movie that was to follow or provide a sense of the atmosphere to give the audience members an impression of the movie’s time, place and characters. One night, while dancing at Grauman’s Chinese, Mrs. Rudolph Valantino (Natacha Rambova, nee Winifred Kimball Shaughnessy) took a fancy to the barely 18-year old Myrna and pulled strings so she could get some extra work in Hollywood. Over the next several years Myrna (now named Loy) got bit parts, playing mostly vamps and young vixens and gypsies, like “Nubi” in the 1925 film The Squall.  She had small, uncredited parts in Ben Hur (1925), Don Juan. the first film with sound effects (1926), and The Jazz Singer (1927), mistakenly referred to as “the first talking picture,” and Noah’s Ark (1928), one of the silent era’s greatest spectacles.  Finally, in 1933, after appearing in some 75 pictures, Loy got a break, costarring with Walter Huston and professional boxers Max Baer, Jack Dempsey and Primo Carnera in The Prizefighter and the Lady.  Despite its unpromising title, the film was well-received by both critics and movie-going public alike.  The next year, 1934, she costarred with Clark Gable and William Powell in Manhattan Melodrama . . . a couple was born.  

In this, teiir  first pairing Myrna and Bill joined Clark Gable and the then 14-year old Mickey Rooney in a story about 2 childhood friends who go in opposite directions – one becomes first a D.A. and is then elected governor (Powell), the other a crook and murderer (Gable, playing the memorably-named “Blackie Gallagher"). Originally Blackie’s girl, Loy (Eleanor) leaves him when D.A. Powell (Jim Wade) arrests his childhood friend for murder.  Jim and Eleanor eventually fall in love and marry, as Blackie goes to the chair.  Written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and directed by W.S. Van Dyke (who would direct most of their “Thin Man” films), Manhattan Melodrama drew immediate worldwide attention.  This was the movie that bank robber John Dillinger (“Public Enemy #1”) had just seen before he was gunned down in front of Chicago’s Biograph Theater on July 22, 1934. It turned out to be a press agent’s dream.  It certainly did not hurt that the vast majority of critics found the pairing of Minnie and Bill to be nothing short of inspired.

Ironically, on May 25, 1934, two months before Dillinger was shot to death in Chicago, The Thin Man was released in the United States.   It was that most hoped for of all Hollywood prayers: both a commercial and critical smash hit.  Completed in an amazing 2 weeks with a scant B-movie budget of $226,000, it ended up grossing $1.4 million worldwide and was nominated for 4 Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay (the husband/wife team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett.  This was the year It Happened One Night took home awards for nearly everything in sight, including:

• Best Picture

• Best Actor (Clark Gable),

• Best Actress (Claudette Colbert in a role originally offered to Myrna Loy),

• Best Director (Frank Capra) and

• Best Adapted Screenplay (the husband-wife team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett).  

The critics were absolutely besotted. Take but one review, that of Seton Margrave, movie critic for the Daily Mail, who wrote: “The most attractive feature of “The Thin Man” to me is the charm of the husband and wife as played by William Powell and Myrna Loy. These two people have a glorious time. They are completely in love with each other and with life. They share a marvelous sense of humor.” The anonymous reviewer for The New Republic noted that “The playing of Powell and Miss Loy rates the highest superlatives. It is a dead heat for first honors.” Louella Parsons called it “. . . the greatest entertainment, the most fun and the best mystery-drama of the year.” 

From that point on, Minnie and Bill would make 12 more films together, including 5 more in the Thin Man franchise.  The public simply could never get enough of Nick and Nora’s witty, urbane, gin-swilling husband-and-wife crime solving duo . . . always surrounded by audacious Runyonesque characters, their wire-haired terrier Asta (real name, “Skippy”) and their son Nickie, Jr., played first by 7-year old Richard Hall in 1941’s Shadow of Thin Man), and last by 11-year-old Dean Stockwell in 1947’s Song of the Thin Man, the final outing for Nick and Nora.  The Thin Man oeuvre consists of:

1. .The Thin Man (1934): Newly married Nick and Nora drink their way through a case involving the disappearance of an inventor.    Costarring Maureen O’Sullivan, Nat Pendelton and Cesar Romero.

2. After the Thin Man (1936): Back home in San Francisco for New Years, Nick and Nora (along with Asta and “Mrs.” Asta) reluctantly hunt for the murderer of Nora’s cousin’s husband. Co-starring James Stewart in one of his earliest films.

3. Another Thin Man (1939): Back in New York with Asta and son Nickie, Jr., the couple seeks to find out who killed Nora’s late father’s business partner. With C. Aubrey Smith.

4. Shadow of the Thin Man (1941): While at a local racetrack hoping for a pleasant afternoon, a jockey is killed. Nick and Nora are enlisted to look for the murderer by their friend, police Lt. Abrams (Sam Levene).

5. The Thin Man Goes Home (1945): While on a visit to Nick’s hometown, the local criminals assume he’s there on a case. When a corpse shows up on Nick’s father’s doorstep, the Charles’ vacation turns into yet another case.

6. Song of the Thin Man (1947): Nick and Nora are on a gambling ship where a murder occurs. 2 leading suspects come to them for help. The couple turns them over to the police and then looks for the real murderer.

One of the best things about the series was all the crackling, witty dialogue. Frequently being in their cups, Nick and Nora were capable of some of the most crackling, witty banter ever heard on screen:

• Nick: I’m a hero. I was shot twice in the Tribune.

• Nora: I read you were shot 5 times in the tabloids.

• Nick: It’s not true. He didn’t come anywhere near my tabloids. (The Thin Man)

• Nora: I love to watch you sleep.  You look so cute.  Nicky, have you any pictures of yourself taken as a baby?

• Nick: No.

• Nora: Aww, that’s a shame.  I want to see what you looked like.

• Nick: I’ll have some taken in the morning. (After the Thin Man)

• Nick: I tell you what; you go home, cold cream that lovely face, slip into an exciting negligee.

• Nora: Yes.

• Nick: And I’ll see you in the morning. (Shadow of the Thin Man)

• Nora: Nicky, do you really like cider?

• Nick: Like it? I love it.  Just the pure, natural juices of trhe apple.  What could be better, for instance?

• Nora: A dry martini, for instance.

• Nick: That’s horrible stuff.  It almost took the lining off my stomach.

• Nora: Why do you care? It didn’t show. (The Thin Man Goes Home)

Minnie and Bill made 7 other films together, one of which, 1936’s The Great Ziegfeld was sui generis; it was a non-comedy, their only drama with music biopic; and the only movie they costarred in that captured the Oscar for Best Picture. Powell stars as the legendary Florenz Ziegfeld who went from being a sideshow barker to theater entrepreneur extraordinaire and became known as the man who “glorified the American girl.”  After being married to the Jewish French revue star Anna Held (played by Luise Rainer who won the Academy Award for Best Actress) the non-Jewish Ziegfeld married the famous Broadway star (and future “Glinda, the Good Witch” in The Wizard of Oz), the role played to perfection by Loy. Of Powell’s Ziegfeld and Loy’s Burke, the New York Times’ Frank Nugent wrote: Mr. Powell's portrayal is no less attractive than it is flattering to the original. Miss Loy is a stately Billie Burke, and somewhat lacking, we fear, in Miss Burke's effervescence and gayety. 

The rest of their filmography consists of films well within their comfort zone; roles the film-going public ate up:

1. Evelyn Prentice (1934) in which Powell plays John Prentice, a high-profile New York attorney married to Evelyn (Loy). Evelyn feels neglected by John, who has taken up with one of his clients (played by 27-year-old newcomer Rosalind Russell) and out of boredom, becomes involved with an unscrupulous womanizing poet essayed by the dependable character actor Harvey Stephens.  Evelyn eventually finds herself a victim of blackmail and becomes involved in the poet’s murder.  She begs her husband to defend her.  They fall back in love.  Show over. Evelyn Prentice is best known today as a courtroom mystery . . . a far cry from Nick and Nora.  Nonetheless, Minnie and Bill play off one another with a dramatic dexterity that, in the end, steals the movie.

2. Libeled Lady (1936): A “screwball” comedy in which Warren Haggerty (Spencer Tracy) is the chief editor of the New York Evening Star. He keeps on delaying his marriage with Gladys (Jean Harlow) because of problems his newspapers must face. When a 5 million dollar lawsuit is filed by Connie Allenbury (Loy) for falsely printing she is a marriage-breaker, he plans a marriage in words only between Gladys and the Don Juan Bill Chandler (Powell). The goal is to catch Connie alone with a married man. In real (as opposed to “reel”) life, at the time this film was in production, Powell and Harlow were contemplating marriage.  Regrettably, Harlow would die the following year at age 26.  Powell paid for her $30,000 funeral, and after the coffin was dug up and held for ransom, Powell paid to have it found and then made sure that tons upon tons of concrete covered her burial site. 

3.  Double Wedding (1937): A screwball comedy like none other, Powell plays Charlie Lodge, a bohemian artist who lives in a trailer; Loy is Margit Agnew, who lives with her sister Irene (Florence Rice) and Irene’s long-time fiancé Waldo (John Beal).  Margit, who is a comic example of a person with OCD has planned every aspect of her sister’s and future brother-in-law’s wedding, honeymoon and future married life down to a tee. Problem is, Waldo is a 100% milquetoast and will not stand up to Margit.  After a mind-boggling series of misadventures, Irene marries Waldo and - not surprisingly - Margit winds up with Charlie.  Tightly directed by Richard Thorpe with a screenplay by the Ukrainian-born Jo Swerling based on a play by the brilliant and at times contoversial Ferenc Molnar, production on Double Wedding was shut down for nearly a month due to Jean Harlow’s death. 

4. I Love You Again (1940): Directed by W.S. Van Dyke (Minnie and Bill’s favorite director), Powell stars as Larry Wilson, an upstanding - and mean -teetotaler. While on a cruise he receives a blow on the head, causing him to revert to his old forgotten persona of a suave conman named George Carey.  When he docks in New York, he is met by Kay (Loy) whom he discovers is his wife.  What Larry/George does not know is that she is in the process of divorcing him in order to marry Herbert (Donald Douglas).  As in Double Wedding, a series of misadventures  

5. Love Crazy (1941): Costarring Gail Patrick (who had played Cornelia Bullock in Powell’s 1936 smash hit My Man Godfrey, and would go on to produce the long-running television show Perry Mason in the 1950s and ‘60s).  In this romantic comedy Minnie and Bill played Steve and Susan Ireland, who are about to celebrate their 4th wedding anniversary by reenacting their first date. Susan’s meddling mother interrupts and injures herself. Steve is left to take care of her and when he meets an old flame in the elevator, Susan’s mother takes the opportunity to break up their marriage. She convinces Susan that Steve is cheating on her and urges her to divorce him. Upon seeking legal advice, Steve is informed that the only solution to save his marriage is to pretend he’s insane. Steve goes so far as to dress in drag (minus his famous moustache) to proof that he is bonkers. Both critics and public alike fell in love with this picture. Variety called it “. . . another marital comedy loaded with solid comedy, compactly set up and tempoed at a zippy pace. Love Crazy is a standout laugh hit of top proportions, a happy successor to previous Powell-Loy teamings. 

6. The Senator Was Indiscreet (1947):  Although Myrna Loy only has but a cameo in this, their last pairing, she nearly steals the picture.  And believe it or not, the cast and crew kept her presence in the picture - which occurs at the very end - a secret from William Powell.  In this, the only film that playwright, theater director and producer, humorist and drama critic George S. Kaufman ever directed, Powell plays the dim-witted blowhard United States Senator Melvin G. Ashton, who wants more than anything to be elected President. Ella Raines plays a reporter interested in the detailed diary he has kept for years and years detailing all the political misdeeds of his colleagues. The diary gets stolen and all hell breaks loose. Eventually the diary is found (Sen. Aston believed it had been stolen by Communists) and the Senator and his political bosses, are forced to flee to a South Sea Island, where he becomes chief of the native population.   Loy shows up at the end of the movie in an uncredited cameo appearing as Aston’s wife who, throughout the film we’ve heard about but never seen.  All-in-all, a hilarious though lightweight romp . . .

Although this was Minnie and Bill’s cinematic swansong together, they continued making motion pictures for several more years.  Powell had starring and co-starring roles in an additional 8 films, his swansong being “Doc” in the 1955 delight Mister Roberts, starring warhorses Henry Fonda, James Cagney and Ward Bond, and directed by the greatest of them all, John Ford. By the time the film was shot, Powell was beginning to have trouble remembering his lines and was suffering from Cancer.  Unbelievably, he lived another 29 years, spending the lion’s share of his time in Palm Springs with his 3rd (and longest lasting) wife, Diana "Mousie” Lewis. to whom he was married to until the day he died, March 5, 1984.  (Powell’s 2nd wife was Carole Lombard, his costar in the 1936 screwball comedy My Man Godfrey.  Despite the fact that they had divorced 3 years earlier, Powell demanded that Universal Studios hire her for the role of ditzy Irene Bullock.)  His first wife was Broadway actress. Eileen Wilson, with whom he had his only child, a son named William Powell, Jr.  Young Bill committed suicide at age 43; he had been suffering from depression, hepatitis. and kidney problems.   

Minnie would continue making motion pictures and guest-starring on popular television shows (Ironside, Columbo, The Virginian) until the early 1980s. Among the 31 films and television shows she made, none was better - or more warmly remembered - than 1948’s Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House in which she plays Cary Grant’s wife, Muriel Blandings. In this much beloved films, the Blandings decide to build a home in the country. It turns out to be a whole lot more fraught with difficulties than they ever imagined. In 2000, the American Film Instituted listed this film as #72 of the Top 100 Funniest American Movies.  Myrna Loy was married and divorced 4 times; her most notable husbands were producer Arthur Hornblow Jr. (to whom she was married from 1936-1942.)  He was best known for Gaslight  (1944), The Asphalt Jungle (1950) Oklahoma (1955) and Witness for the Prosecution (1957).  Her, third husband was screenwriter Gene Markey (married 1946-1950), who is best remembered for penning the 1939 The Hound of the Baskervilles, and for also being married to actresses Hedy Lamarr and Joan Bennett.  Myrna never had any children. Myrna Loy died in New York City on December 14, 1993.  She was 88 years young.

Like all truly gifted thespians, William Powell and Myrna Loy, always made their craft look so very, very easy. What made them so exceptional as a cinematic couple, is that the audience knew they were having a grand old time together. Is it any wonder then, that most of the movie-going public believed they were husband-and-wife both on screen and off? They made movie magic by making marriage a glorious gambol.

Nora: Pretty girl.
Nick: Yes, she’s a very nice type.
Nora: You got types?
Nick: Only you darling. Lanky brunettes with wicked jaws.

Copyright 2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

Make Me a Star!

Most die-hard classic movie fans know that John Garfield was born Julius Garfinkle, Edward G. Robinson, Emmanuel Goldenberg, Cary Grant, Archibald Alexander Leach, and Joan Crawford, Lucille Fay LeSueur.  It takes a world-class flicker freak to identify the following (the answers will be found at the end of this piece):

1. Spangler Arlington Brugh

2. Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke

3. Jane Alice Peters

4. Clara Viola Cronk

5. Ruby Stevens

6. William Henry Pratt

7. Alphonso d’Abruzzo

8. Maurice Micklewhite

9. Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko

10. Frederic Austerlitz Jr. & Virginia McMath

11. Dino Paul Crocetti & Jerome Joseph Levitch

12. Melvin Kaminsky & Jerome Silberman

What few fans know is that  during the silver screen's first fifteen years (1900-1910),  the movie-going public had no idea what their favorite stars names were - let alone those of directors, producers or screenwriters; they were either completely anonymous, known by their character names (such as "Broncho Billy," the first cowboy star, born “Max Aronson”) or identified by some physical characteristic. As an example, years before the public knew the name Mary Pickford (Gladys Marie Smith), they were head-over-heels in love with a virginal young actress known simply as "The Girl With the Curls." Similarly, the silver screen's first matinee idol, Maurice Costello, (who would one day become John Barrymore's drinking buddy . . . not to mention father-in-law) was known as  either "The Dimpled Darling," or simply, "Dimples." 

There were two reasons why early movie stars had no names:

1. Early studio owners and producers kept their actors (largely amateurs) anonymous, figuring that if the public knew their names, these nameless amateurs would demand higher salaries. (For the most part they earned $2.50 and $5.00 a day.)

2. Those actors who did come from the legitimate stage didn't want theatre-goers or the fellow thespians to know that they were "slumming."  Most stage actors coming from the thee-ah-ter considered motion pictures decidedly déclassé. They managed to justify their "walk on the wild side" by convincing themselves (and their Broadway colleagues) they were only in it for the money . . . hence the anonymity.

That all changed in February, 1910. 

                  Carl Laemmle (1867-1959) c. 1910

The two people most directly responsible for this revolution were an elfin mogul named Carl Laemmle and a Canadian-born actress known to the public as "The Biograph Girl."  Laemlle, originally from Laupheim, Germany emigrated to the United States as a young man with $50.00 in his pockets and an itch to make something of himself. By the age of 17 he was bookkeeper for the Continental Clothing Company in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.  Armed with an innate genius for self-promotion and a love of spectacle, he wandered into the nascent movie industry and in 1909, on a shoestring, created a production/distribution company with the pixiesque name "I.M.P.," which stood for "Independent Moving Pictures."  Its logo featured a suitably impish logo of a grinning devil wielding a pitchfork. It took guts to create IMP; in so doing, Laemmle would be forced to take on Thomas Alva Edison's "Motion Pictures Patents Trust," which ordained that any company wishing to use an Edison-made camera had to pay his trust a royalty for every foot of film exposed.  Against tremendous odds, Laemlle successfully took on Edison and proved  in court that the Trust was in violation of the Sherman Anti Trust Act.

Step one.

Next, Laemmle decided to enhance both his image and that of his company by stealing away and signing the most popular movie star of the day: the Canadian-born Florence Lawrence, who had been a stage actress since age 6.  Moving over to moving pictures in about 1906, Florence worked first for the Vitagraph Company and then for Biograph, whose director was the great D.W. Griffith.  So taken was the public with this incredibly photogenic young woman with the most expressive face on celuloid, that they flooded the studio, (located at 11 East 14th St. near Union Square) demanding to know her name.  When the studio refused to reveal her name, her hundreds of thousands of fans took to calling her, simply "The Biograph Girl."  Making upwards of three one-reel films a week, Florence made a fortune for Biograph, which paid her a mere $25.00 (about $655.00 in today's money) a week.  Needless to say, Florence was dissatisfied, and surreptitiously, began contacting other studios to find out if anyone might be willing to pay her more.  When Biograph found out about what she was doing, they fired her.  But Florence wasn't out of work for long.

Enter Carl Laemmle.

Laemmle, who as mentioned above, had a flair for self-promotion and publicity stunts, came up with a doozy which he shared with the Biograph Girl.  She agreed to go ahead with it . . . especially since Laemmle agreed to pay her an astounding $125.00 a week (about $3.200.00 in today's dollars. What Laemmle did was to stage a ruse to publicize his new leading lady.  

Laemmle planted a newspaper story in February 1910 that the “Biograph Girl” had been struck and killed by a streetcar, and then took out an advertisement in an industry newspaper to debunk the story. “We Nail a Lie” (see facimile above) declared the IMP advertisement, which blamed rival studios for the deception of its own creation and announced that not only was Lawrence alive, but that she would star in its next film.

       “Theda Bara” (1885-1955)

A star was born.  Shortly thereafter, Laemmle revealed to the public the name of one of the heretofore leading male heartthrobs: King Baggot, the first "King of the Movies."  Before too long, an ever-increasing number of photo-players were known by name and, as the early producers feared, were paid more and more money.  Within four years, a Jewish girl from the North Avondale section of Cincinnati (where yours truly lived while studying to become a rabbi) named Theodosia Goodman, would be renamed "Theda Bara" (supposedly an anagram for "Arab Death”) was turned into a vamp and paid $4,000.00 a week by William Fox (Vilmos Fried), the eponymous founder of everything Fox. (BTW, Theda's $4,000.00 is the equivalent of nearly $95,000.00 per week in today’s money . . . and at a time when there was no such thing as an income tax.)

Lawrence and Laemmle's fortunes would go in opposite directions.  Florence Lawrence would make some 55 pictures for Carl Laemlle's IMP Company over the next year, then move on to the Lubin Company for which she would make another 75 pictures.  By 1916, her career was on a downward spiral; over the next 20 years she would appear on screen (frequently as an uncredited extra) in but 20 pictures for such "Poverty Row" studios as Nestor, Supreme, M.H. Hoffman, and Ben Wilson Productions.  By the end of 1938, Florence Lawrence, the "Biograph Girl" and world's first motion picture star with a name was dead . . . the victim of suicide.  It was depressing when an adoring public did not know her name back before 1910; it became lethally so when the public had entirely forgotten her less than 30 years later . . . 

      Universal Pictures in March, 1915

For Carl Laemmle, things went in the precise opposite direction . . . up, up, up.  In 1915, "IMP" became "Universal Studios," with a 237-acre facility located in an area just outside Hollywood proper, forever known as "Universal City."  At the studio's two-day grand opening (March 15 and 16, 1915) which was attended by the crème de la crème, including Henry Ford and literally thousands of locals, the young John Ford who managed to get his job because he was the brother of then-serial star Francis Fox, then an assistant director, occasional actor and all-round roustabout, managed to burn down an entire Western set which quickly spread to the rest of the studio, nearly burning it to the ground. The quick-on-his-feet, nearly fired Ford (born Seán Aloysius, sometimes with surname O'Feeny or Ó Fearna), claimed that he had done it on purpose in order to get spectacular footage for an upcoming Western film!  He was subsequently hired to direct cowboy pictures . . . and the rest is history.  Within 3 years, Laemlle's Universal Studios had more than 6,000 employees, a vast number of whom were relatives including future director William Wyler and his 18-year old secretary Irving Thalberg, who would eventually become the legendary production manager at MGM.  Indeed, Laemmle had so many cousins, nieces, nephews and children working for him that all Hollywood grew to know the line "Carl Laemmle (pronounced lem-lee) has a big femiy . . ."  And of course today, Universal is as big as ever.

But for all his accomplishments, Laemmle's most important  - and certainly most enduring - accomplishment  may well have been giving stars the right to have names . . .  either the ones they were born with or the ones they were assigned by their studios, agents or publicists.

And speaking of names, here are the Hollywood names of the people listed at the beginning of this piece:

1. Spangler Arlington Brugh: Robert Taylor

2. Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke: Mary Astor

3. Jane Alice Peters: Carole Lombard

4. Clara Viola Cronk: Clair Windsor

5. Ruby Stevens: Barbara Stanwyck

6. William Henry Pratt: Boris Karloff

7. Alphonso d’Abruzzo: Alan Alda

8. Maurice Micklewhite: Michael Caine

9. Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko: Natalie Wood

10. Frederic Austerlitz Jr. & Virginia McMath: Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers

11. Dino Paul Crocetti & Jerome Joseph Levitch: Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis

12. Melvin Kaminsky & Jerome Silberman: Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder

That's pretty much how a Hollywood brat born with the last name "Schimberg," got lawfully "Stoned" when he was 7 . . . 

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 . . .

Meet Dalton Trumbo, AKA Robert Rich

Beginning this Fall (Thursday, October 12 to be precise) I will begin presenting a four-week course at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, on Dalton Trumbo - one of Hollywood’s most talented screenwriters. In a career spanning nearly 45 years and just shy of 80 films, Colorado-born Trumbo (1905-1976) won 2 Oscars for best screenplay (1954’s Roman Holiday and 1957’s The Brave One [both written under assumed names]).  A down-to-earth writer and longtime political activist, Trumbo was known to write most of his screenplays while reclining in a bathtub filled with hot water.  At times a member of the Communist Party, he also wrote some of the most patriotic films during World War II.  As a result of his political affiliations and causes, he became a member of the notorious “Hollywood Ten,” a group of mostly actors and directors, who were imprisoned (and eventually blacklisted).  For actors, being blacklisted meant being out of work; one cannot change their face.  For directors, it meant going abroad to ply their craft - if they were lucky - in  Europe; for screenwriters, it meant penning scripts and then employing a “front” to hand in the completed work . . . often receiving a mere percentage of what they were accustomed to earn.  (In the late 1930s and early 1940s Trumbo earned more than $3,000 a week . . . nearly $65,000 a week in 2023 dollars.  In the 1950’s, his “fronted” screenplays often earned him no more than $250.00 in total. )

Among his 80 screenplays One finds some of the best films of all time, including:

• Five Came Back (1939)

• Kitty Foyle (1940 - for which Ginger Rogers took home the best actress Oscar)

• A Guy Named Joe (1943) starring Spencer Tracy and Irene Dunne)

• Tender Comrade (1943) starring Ginger Rogers and directed by Edward Dmytryk)

• Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) starring Spencer Tracy in one of the best of all WWII dramas.

• Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945) starring Edward G. Robinson and Margaret O’Brien

• Gun Crazy (1950) one of the all-time best noir thrillers

• Town Without Pity (1960) starring Kirk Douglas

• Spartacus (1960) winner of 4 Academy Awards

• Exodus (1960) Kirk Douglas; from the novel by Leon Uris

• Lonely Are the Brave (1962) one of the most intelligent Westerns of all time.

• The Fixer (1968) from the novel by Bernard Malamud

• Johnny Got His Gun (1971) one of the most devastating antiwar films ever, remade in 2008

• The Way We Were (1973) Streisand and Redford; a film close to Trumbo’s heart

• Papillion (1973) Steve McQueen, Dustin Hoffman; one of Hollywood’s best escape films; remade in 2017

As mentioned above, my 4-week course will begin on October 12.  The first film we will screen is the 2015 biopic Trumbo, starring Bryan Cranston as Trumbo, Diane Lane as his wife Cleo, and Dame Helen Mirren as gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, one of the nastiest, most virulent anti-Communists in Hollywood - a woman who hounded Trumbo (among many others) both before, during and after their blacklisting.  The film was well received by both critics and the public alike.  The reviewer for Screen Daily noted “Bryan Cranston creates a potent sense of Trumbo as a reasonable man, full of charm, eloquence and principle and he is surrounded by a string of performances to savour.”

       The 4 “comrades” with their housekeeper 

The other 3 films to be screened and discussed will be, in order, Tender Comrade, The Brave One, and The Fixer.  Tender Comrade, starring Ginger Rogers, Robert Ryan, Ruth Hussey, Kim Hunter (in only her 2nd film) and Patricia Collinge is crucial to Dalton Trumbo’s career; it would turn out to be the one film anti-Communist witch-hunters would use against him the most to “prove” that he was injecting Soviet propaganda into his scripts.  For the most part, they would begin and end their accusations with the very name of the film Tender COMRADE, a term frequently used among Communists.  What was almost unanimously overlooked was the fact that at the very begining of the film . . . before any dialogue or introduction of the stars . . . there was this:  TO MY WIFE - Teacher, Tender, Comrade, Wife, A fellow-farer true through life, Heart-whole and soul-free The August Father gave to me. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

“Tender Comrade” is the story of 4 women, all working at a war munitions factory, as their husbands are off fighting the Nazis and Japanese.  All 4 live in separate apartments and complain how little money they have left over after paying rent.  One day, Jo (Ginger Rogers) suggests that if they pool their salaries, they can afford to rent a house and still have enough to hire a housekeeper.  Jo calls for a vote “It’s a Democracy!”) and they agree to “share and share alike.”  That’s the basic plot.  But for the conspiracists who were beginning to see “Reds beneath the  beds”, that was too much.  What Trumbo saw as good old-fashioned American ideals, the Red-hunters saw as pure Stalinism.  And then there was the matter of Trumbo and director Edward Dmytryk. 

Both of them were already well known in the Hollywood community for their leftist leanings. During filming, Ginger Rogers, a staunch Republican, began noticing what she interpreted to be anti-American speeches in her dialogue. Upon complaining, the speeches were given to other actresses. Here is but one example:

Barbara Thomas (Ruth Hussey): Maybe I'm not so dumb as you think I am. This whole thing would never have happened in the first place if we'd been minding our own business! We wouldn't have to get a government stamp out every time we wanted to buy a piece of butter if they weren't shipping it all to a lot of foreigners! Why, they're rationing gas right here in California where they got more of the stuff than they can haul away! Even the government doesn't know what its going to do tomorrow! They're going to ration this. They're going to ration that. They are. They aren't. Blow hot. Blow cold. He's up. He's down. What kind of business is that, anyway? While we're being pushed around at home, our guys are out fighting in countries they never even heard of! Where a lot of foreigners will turn on us like a pack of wolves the minute its over!

• Doris Dumbrowski (Kim Hunter): Barbara!

• Barbara Thomas: Well its the truth and you know it!

• Jo Jones (Ginger Rogers): You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Do you know where that kind of talk comes from? It comes straight from Berlin! Every time you say, every time you even THINK IT your double-crossing your own husband!

• Barbara Thomas: No!

• Jo Jones: How can we go on minding our own business when somebody blackjacks us in an alley and you've got Pearl Harbor on your hands! And who wants to get slick and fat when half the people in the world are starving to death for things that we can do without! Mistakes? Sure, we make mistakes! Plenty of them. Do you want a country where they won't stand for a mistake? Go to Germany. Go to Japan. And the first time you open your trap, like you have tonight, you'll find a gun in your stomach! You're the kind of people Hitler counted on when he started this war. Talk! Talk! Talk! And never THINK! And that's the biggest mistake any guy ever thought of making. Because there are NOT enough of you and there are plenty of us and by Judas Priest if it takes...

• [Barbara Thomas Doorbell rings]: That's my date.

• Jo Jones: Saved by the bell!

  Ginger Rogers herself was a loyal member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI, also MPA) along with such ultra conservatives as John Wayne, Ward Bond, Walter Brennan, Gary Cooper, Cecil B. DeMille, Robert Taylor, Barbara Stanwyck, Hedda Hopper, Walt Disney and Robert Montgomery.  When the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) began investigating Hollywood, the vast majority of “friendly” witnesses would be members of MPA.  Sadly, most of the people they pointed their fingers at for being “enemies of the state” were Jewish. Opponents of the MPA described it as  as fascist-sympathizing, isolationist, Anti-Semitic, red-baiting, anti-unionist, and supportive of Jim Crow laws. The MPA denied these allegations, with Jewish writer and MPA member (and former Socialist) Morrie Ryskind (A Night at the Opera, My Man Godfrey, Stage Door) writing in defense of his fellow members.  

Interestingly, Ginger Rogers never testified against Dalton Trumbo before the House Un-American Activities Committee . . . nor did he ever say anything publicly against her or her politics. The reason was probably because Trumbo had written the script for Rogers first (and only) Oscar winning performance (Kitty Foyle), which proved to both producers and the public that she could be far, far more than Fred Astaire’s dance partner. Ginger’s mother, Lela, was another story.  After performing in 2 Trumbo-penned scripts back-to-back, Ginger Rogers became the highest-paid star in all Hollywood. 

In researching Trumbo the man and his times, the manner and method of his screenwriting, his films and political activism, I am becoming increasingly aware of how, despite epic changes in technology and the making of movies, there are many haunting similarities between his time and ours. Just as he faced a world fraught with autocracy, uncertainty and intolerance for those who didn’t fit “the idyllic myth” of who we are and should strive to be, so too do we here in second decade of the twenty-first century. Both the age of FDR, the Second World War and its aftermath as well as the time of Trump have had its version of McCarthyism. From Louella Parson and Hedda Hopper to Lauren Boebert and Anna Paulina Luna isn’t just vast expanse. The ability to define precisely what is “Communism” and what is “Woke” is just as hazy for the lazy. The need to place blame upon “the other” hasn’t changed all that much. The biggest difference (thank G-d) is that while in Trumbo’s era they could blacklist and otherwise make the lives of “others” terribly difficult through imprisonment and the loss of employment, today those who are adjudged “enemies of the state” are censured - act “full of sound and fury” and signifying next to nothing.

The greatest symbol of the transition in Hollywood was, believe it or not, Ronald Reagan. When Trumbo was at the peak of his success, the President of the Screen Actor’s Guild was “The Gipper” - the only POTUS who ever led a union. By the time Trumbo and Dmytryk et al stood before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the same Ronald Reagan was one of the loudest voices against them. Simply stated, he found that his future lay not in 3rd-rate films (like Hellcats of the Navy and Bedtime for Bonzo), then in working for General Electric and eventually getting involved in politics. 

                            Kim Hunter

There were three people in Hollywood who would turn out to play the biggest roles in bringing the Blacklist to an end: Actor Kirk Douglas, producer Otto Preminger and Kim Hunter who, ironically played the part of the naïve Doris Dumbrowsky in Tender Comrade. In the case of Douglas, he publicly announced at the Academy Awards ceremony that the winner for best screen play for The Brave One, Robert Rich, was actually a front for Dalton Trumbo . . . and that moreover, he, Trumbo, would write the screenplay for Douglas’ next film Spartacus, under his own name.  Actually, Douglas was beaten to the punch by producer Preminger, who earlier, had announced that Trumbo would write the screenplay for Exodus using his own name.

In the case of Ms. Hunter, who would win the Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress fin A Streetcar Named Desire, she was a longtime political activist, who signed several civil rights petitions and was a sponsor of a 1949 World Peace Conference in New York - which triggered her label of being a Communist sympathizer, for which she was blacklisted in films and TV even though she never even held pro-Communist views. Her testimony to the New York Supreme Court in 1962 against the publishers of "Red Channels" helped pave the way for clearance of many performers unjustly accused of Communist connections.

For anyone who may be interested in being part of my class on Dalton Trumbo, you can always contact Florida Atlantic University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and sign up. You need not live anywhere near Boca Raton. The class takes place both at Friedberg Hall on the Boca Raton campus and online. Their phone number is 561.297.3185. You can also email them at olli.boca@fau.edu.

Copyright©2023 Kurt F. Stone

"The Happiest Married Couple in Hollywood"

    Haines & Shields

   Hollywood’s Happiest Married Couple

During Hollywood’s “Golden Age”  (c. 1920-1955) studios pretty much controlled the lives, destinies, family histories and even names of all the actors they had under contract at any given time. Have an obviously ethnic or unpronounceable name like Mischa Ounskowsky, Naftaly Birnbaum, Jacob Julius Garfinkle, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler or Simone Henriette Charlotte Kaminker? Well, with a mere snap of the finger and a couple of dozen press releases voila! - your studio had renamed you, in order, Mischa Auer, George Burns, John Garfield, Hedy Lamarr or Simone Signoret.  Each star - or star-in-the-making - was assigned a P.R. agent whose job was to keep their name in the movie mags when things were good, and off the police blotters when they wound up in trouble.  The studios also put their newcomers through a rigorous schedule of “schooling” in such varied areas as dancing, fencing, saddlery and, when talkies came in, singing.  

Much of studio “puffery” (a quaint term for “B.S.”) informed the adoring movie-going public that their favorite stars were either descendants of Mayflower families, Ivy League educated, inveterate church-goers, or somehow related to European (most British) royalty. It goes without saying that much of what the public “knew” about these stars and starlets was pure twaddle.   Beginning in the early 1920s, however, a series of scandals hit the film industry, effectively revealing that their idols had feet of clay.  Gossip columnists, particularly those working for Hearst publications, gave a lurid  accounting of the foibles and failings of their heroes.  Soon, “blue-noses” and members of women’s clubs began pushing the studios to institute morality codes for both the people they employed and the  films they made.  Among the things the strait-laced noted and complained about most bitterly was that a vast number of these movie people were piling up marriages and divorces at an alarming rate.  Quelle immoralité !

Truth to tell Hollywood has long suffered from an overabundance of monogamy . . . meaning too many people getting married far too often. Sometimes the marriages last but a few weeks or months; often they ended not in divorce, but in annulment.  Among the marriage champs we find:

• Lana Turner: 8 marriages (Her 1st, to bandmaster Artie Shaw [Arthur Jacob Arshawsky] last 1 day shy of 7 months); Shaw  next married Ava Gardner; that marriage lasted precisely 1 year

• Mickey Rooney: 8 (His first, to Ava Gardner, lasted a mere 26 months)

• Judy Garland: 5

• Rita Hayworth: 5 (including Orson Welles)  

• Clark Gable: 5

• Humphrey Bogart: 4

• Charlie Chaplin: 4 (all of whom were teenagers; in total, 2 of these wives presented him with 11 children; the first in 1925, the 11th in 1957)

•  John Barrymore: 4 (including the “love of his life,” the writer “Michael Strange.”)

As seemingly commonplace as this has been over the past century, there are also Hollywood couples whose marriages lasted far, far longer than most can imagine.  Consider the following:

• Norman and Peggy Lloyd (who was a friend of mine), were married for an amazing 75 years, 65 days.

• Karl Malden and Mona Greenberg were married 70 years, 195 days.

• Bob and Delores Hope were married for 69 years, 5 months.

• Kirk and Anne Bydens Douglas were married 65 years 253 days.

• Cyd Charrise and Tony Martin (Alvin Morris) were married 60 years, 34 days.

• Alan Alda and Arlene Weiss will be celerating their 66th anniversary on March 15.

• Sir Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville, were married for nearly 54 years.

• Dawn Nickerson (my dear friend and student) ) and Richart L. Fox , Sr. were married for 48 years. 

(IT SHOULD also BE noted that our parents, Alice K. and Henry E. Stone were married for 59 years. In many ways bipolar opposites, dad never missed a chance to usher at any of Madame’s performances. They proved how different they were at a 50th anniversary gathering (at the Sportsman’s Lodge), where my father gave a loving, romantic toast to his bride (which had most of the women wishing their husband’s were so articulate) and mom, responding in her 30 megawatt voice proclaiming : “HERE’S TO HENRY. FIFTY YEARS OF MARRIAGE AND NEVER ONCE CONSIDERED DIVORCE. Then, pausing for a perfect amount of time continued . . . “MURDER? MANY TIMES!”).

Returning to the opening paragraphs of this post, it should be noted that in Hollywood - a truly small town in every sense of the term - most everyone knew who their neighbors were in real life . . . behind the silver, P.R.-created curtain of fiction.  We knew who drank too much and who was popping pills, who was gay and who was an uneducated jerk.  And for the most part, it really didn’t matter.  One of the things that made growing up in that world so different (although as kids we did not know it) was how accepting most of us were taught to be.  

Continuing with the “marriage thread,” everyone knew that the actor William (“Billy”) Haines and his lifetime companion James “Jimmy” Shields were an ideal couple.  The two met in New York even before the Virginia-born Billy first hit Hollywood in the early 1920s.  It didn’t take long for Billy to become a major star; the picture which first brought him to the attention of the movie-going public was 1926’s Brown of Harvard. in which Billy played a supremely confident, wisecracking  player on the football team.  This would be the personality - that of a  wise-acre - which brought him to public acclaim.  So much so that by the late 1920s, he was the #1 box office attraction in the United States, making more than $1 million dollars a year and costarring with the likes of Marion Davies, Joan Crawford, Lon Chaney, and  Lionel Barrymore.  His best picture, in my estimation, was 1928’s Show People, costarring Marion Davies (also her best picture) and directed by one of Hollywood’s all-time greatest directors, King Vidor.  In this late silent film, Billy plays movie comic Billy Boone, who is in love with up-and-coming actress Peggy Pepper (Davies) who, taking herself oh-so-seriously, transforms herself into “Patricia Pepoire,” the cinematic ancestor of Jean Hagen’s character “Lina Lamont,” in 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain.

                                  William Haines at His Peak

Unlike stars Ramon Navarro, Greta Garbo, comedienne Patsy Kelley and directors Dorothy Arzner and George Cukor, of whom the movie-going public knew nothing vis-a-vis their proclivities, Hollywood was completely aware - and by a wide margin accepting - of their sexuality. Indeed, for many years, director George Cukor (1899-1983) was well-known in Hollywood for the legendary Sunday afternoon poolside Sunday brunches he would put on at his opulent home at 9166 Cordell Drive in Beverly Hills.  These gatherings included the best and brightest of the Hollywood homosexual underground. In time to come, Billy and Jimmy would serve as the interior designers of Cukor’s home.

The advent of talking motion pictures threw  a monkey wrench into the industry; all sorts of changes began to occur.  Stars like Vilma Banky, Karl Dane and Emil Jannings were let go because their European accents were impossible to understand.  Others, like top-flight stars Clara Bow and Norma Talmadge with their heavy Brooklyn “toidy-toid-and-toid” patois simply could not make it in the talkies. 

Pronunciation aside, MGM head Louis B. Mayer had another problem with William Haines; one which had nothing to do with his pronunciation.  Meyer told Haines, (the first proudly self-outed actor in Hollywood), know in no uncertain terms that if he were to continue earning his millions, he would first have to part company with Jimmy Shields (whom he had been with, by this time for nearly a decade) and enter into a “Lavendar” marriage . . . one with a woman, for the sake of publicity.  Haines refused Mayer’s ultimatum,  thereby forsaking his movie career for the man he loved.  Mayer was one problem for Haines; the other was the Hays Production Code, which in 1930, imposed a set of “moral” guidelines that actors were commanded to obey. One was an absolute  prohibition on "homosexual behavior" - both onscreen and off. At the peak of his stardom, Haines was able to have the clause removed from his contract and continue acting. But when several of his movies didn’t perform well at the box office, - including the overtly “swishy” 1930 film Way Out West, there was mounting pressure to conform.

Winfield House

A few years before being dropped by MGM, Haines had become part-owner of an antiques store on La Brea Avenue. He had an excellent eye and his home at 1712 Stanley Ave. (called the "Haines Castle)  was a designer showcase. He was best friends with Joan Crawford (whom he had nicknamed “Raspberries”)  and welcomed into the inner circle of William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, attending their famous parties in San Simeon.  Thanks to these and many other connections, Haines became Hollywood’s most in-demand decorator. Crawford was one of his first clients, followed by Tallulah Bankhead, Jack Warner, Betsy Bloomingdale, and, as mentioned above, director George Cukor. Without question, the pinnacle of Billy and Jimmy’s decorating career was their 1968 redecorating of Winfield House, the lavish residence of America’s Ambassador to the Court of St. James . . . who at the time was publishing magnate Walter Annenberg.

  Beyond his distinguished clientele, Billy Haines became synonymous with good taste in Hollywood. Gone were the dark, moody interiors, the leopard print rugs, the garish purchases made by rising stars suddenly flush with cash. In their places, he hung hand-painted wallpaper, refined low seating, chinoiserie, and English antiques; all harbingers of what we now call Hollywood Regency. Hollywood directors incorporated Haines’s aesthetic into their films, often literally: Billy and Jimmy’s personal art collection was hung on the walls of Tara in Gone with the Wind. Nancy and Ronald Reagan were also fans, and Haines decorated their home in Pacific Palisades when Reagan became governor of California (after he retired, his protegé Ted Graber decorated the Reagan White House).

It was Joan Crawford who first referred to Billy and Jimmy as “Hollywood’s happiest couple.”  In many respects, like many happily married couples, they were a study in opposites: Billy was always “on,” while Jimmy was quiet.  One was a born entertainer, the other more of a homebody.  And yet, it worked admirably well for nearly a half century.  There are very, very few pictures of the two together - either at home or in public.  What few exist are mostly from their later years . . . with the exception of the rare photo above at the beginning of this post.  

But alas, nothing lasts for ever.  Billy died of lung cancer in Santa Monica on December 26, 1973; he was 73 years old.  10 weeks later - March 6, 1974, Jimmy Shields put on a pair of Billy’s favorite pajamas, climbed into their bed, took an overdose of sleeping pills, and passed away.  His suicide note said, simply, "Goodbye to all of you who have tried so hard to comfort me in my loss of William Haines, whom I have been with since 1926. I now find it impossible to go it alone, I am much too lonely."

They are interred side by side in Woodlawn Memorial Cemetery in Santa Monica, California.  William Haines Designs remains in operation, with main offices in West Hollywood and an additional showroom in New York.  Playwright Claudio Macor created the biographical drama The Tailor-Made Man in the mid-1990s in London, telling the story of Haines' discovery in a talent contest, his movie career, its curtailment by Louis B. Mayer, and Haines' re-invention as an interior designer.  The 50-year marriage of Billy and Jimmy is, of course, a major theme of this work . . . which is only fitting for Hollywood’s happiest married couple . . .

Copyright®2023 Kurt F. Stone

Anybody Interested in Coming to My New 4-Part Film Series at the Boca Raton Museum of Art?

Check it out: Motion Pictures: The World’s Most Collaborative Art

Lecture Series

With the possible exception of constructing a medieval cathedral, there is no more collaborative art form than a studio-made motion picture. Besides all the actors on the screen, there are hundreds – even thousands – of artists and artisans behind the scenes writing, composing, painting, sculpting, decorating, orchestrating, editing, coaching, cooking, dubbing, sewing, lighting…you name it.

In this 4-lecture series, Kurt Stone, a “Hollywood Brat” with an encyclopedic knowledge of his hometown’s greatest industry, takes us behind the screen for a fascinating look at its early history and deconstructing several of its most famous collaborations.

1. 1. Did the Jews Really Invent Hollywood? A Fascinating History
   Wednesday, October 12, 2022 | 3-4pm

1. 2. Descending From Mt. Sinai Not Once, But Twice: DeMille’s 1923 and 1956 Versions of The Ten Commandments
   Wednesday, October 19, 2022 | 3-4pm

1. 3. Starting at the Very Top: Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane
   Wednesday, October 26, 2022 | 3-4pm

1. 4. Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Brilliance of Casablanca
   Wednesday, November 2, 2022 | 3-4pm

Kurt Stone’s passion for film is, he says “genetic,” having been born in Hollywood, CA, and raised both in and around the movie industry. Stone is a multi-disciplinary man who has also written well-received books on Congress, published nearly 900 essays, is an ordained rabbi, and earns his living as a medical ethicist.
 

If you are interested (and are in the area), please contact the box office at 561.392.2500 ext. 228.

A Woman of Great Consequence (#30)

How’s this for a mind-blowing historic fact? Both William Shakespeare - arguably the greatest writer in the English language - and Miguel de Cervantes - arguably the greatest writer in the Spanish language - died on the same day: April 23, 1616. (n.b. While Shakespeare and Cervantes did both die on the 23rd of April in 1616, back then, the April 23rd of Spain was ten days earlier than the April 23 of England—Spain had already adopted the Gregorian calendar, and England was still using the Julian calendar . . . she wouldn’t adopt the Gregorian until 1752. But the coincidence is too chilling and great to engage in silly nit picking.) One wonders if Cervantes’ death in Madrid (likely from cirrhosis at age 68) received any mention in the English press, or if Shakespeare’s passing in Stratford-upon-Avon at age 52 (from unknown causes) would have been noted by what passed for the Spanish press. In any event, it is almost as eerie as both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams passing away on the 4th of July 1826, the 50th birthday of their greatest creation . . .

One can add to these historic serendipities the date of November 22, 1963. Instantly recognized as being the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, it was also the date upon which two gifted writers passed: Aldous Huxley and Clive) Staples (C.S.) Lewis. Had it not been for the murder of J.F.K. the passing of either (or both) of these dazzlingly brilliant and accomplished men would have captured front-page headlines all over the world, instead of (in Grandpa Doc’s great expression) “ . . . on page 56 just beneath the truss ads”). Huxley is best known for the novels Point Counter Point (1925) The Doors of Perception (1954 - from which the rock group “The Doors” took their name) and his most famous, Brave New World (1932), one of the greatest dystopian novels of all time. Lewis, of course, is best known for the seven-volume children’s fantasy work, The Chronicles of Narnia and the satirical The Screwtape Letters. Huxley was also a much lauded, highly-paid Hollywood screenwriter, who penned 1940 Pride and Prejudice (1940), starring Lawrence Olivier and Greer Garson, and 1944’s Jane Eyre, starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine.  (There is actually a third-rate novel about the deaths of JFK, Huxley and C.S. Lewis by the writer Peter Kreeft entitled “Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death.” Originally published in 1982, the novel has the three meeting in Purgatory and engaging in a philosophical discussion on faith.)

And yet, neither man’s obituary appeared for a full 24 hours after their deaths.

                         Marsha Hunt at 103

We can now add to this the blacklisted Hollywood star Marcia Hunt, who passed away just hours before Queen Elizabeth II at her home in Sherman Oaks, California at the age of 104. Understandably, the passing of the longest-reigning monarch in British history pushed any mention of Marsha’s death off the front pages of the world’s press. And mind you, although she was no Queen Elizabeth, she lived an even longer and just as consequential a life. Even our hometown rag, The Hollywood Reporter didn’t publish an obit until nearly 36 after her passing.

Marsha was born in Chicago on October 17, 1917, which means that next month she would have turned 105. She died from what we in the Stone family refer to as “terminal longevity.” In a movie/stage/radio/television career that spanned nearly 75 years (she made her first picture in 1935, and her last in 2008), she was variously a star, leading lady, character actor and even an occasional extra. Marsha was a strong consideration for the role of Melanie Hamilton in Gone with the Wind (1939), since the studio's first pick, Olivia de Havilland, was having trouble being loaned out by Warner Bros. In fact, the film’s producer, David O. Selznick selected Marsha to play the role at one point but the following day the loan-out worked itself out and Olivia was handed the role.

Marsha Hunt’s best-known films were Hollywood Blvd. (1936) Pride and Prejudice (1940) from the screenplay by the above mentioned Aldous Huxley; The Human Comedy (1943)'; The Valley of Decision (1945) and her last, 2008’s Empire State Building Murder. In total, she was in 116 films and television shows. Although she never hit the heights of stardom, she was constantly employed and always turned in a stellar performance.

Outside of her many film roles, her career had been greatly defined by the blacklisting she faced from Hollywood executives for protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although she never joined the Communist Party, she was a fervid believer in the First Amendment’s guaranteed right to freedom of speech and assembly. In 1947, she joined the likes of Myrna Loy, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye, Paul Henreid, John Garfield, Katherine Hepburn, Frank Sinatra, Robert Ryan among many others, in creating the Committee for the First Amendment, which flew to Washington, D.C. (aboard a charter flight paid for by the Bogarts) to voice their protest over the House Un-American Committee’s (HUAC) hearings into “the Communist takeover of Hollywood.” She was also one of those who voiced loud and persistent opposition to the guilty verdicts (and eventual imprisonment) of “The Hollywood Ten” - a group of 10 directors and screenwriters who refused to “name names” in order to keep their jobs.

In the early 1950s, Marsha’s name appeared in Red Channels, a McCarthy-era publication that "exposed" alleged Communists and "subversives.” Anyone whose name might appear in this rag could expect to lose work; producers became increasingly fearful that anyone with this “mark of Cain” on their back would be rejected by the public. And thus Marsha Hunt, who had put her name on numerous liberal petitions in the 1930s and 40s, became all but unemployable. But it did not stop her . . .

In the spring of 1952 she was signed for the Stanley Kramer-Columbia film production of “The Happy Time.” After the contract was settled, she was asked to sign a loyalty oath and instructed her agent to give the Kramer company a copy of the non-Communist affidavit that had been distributed throughout the radio-television industry. The agent did this, but Marsha was nevertheless asked by Sam Katz, chairman of the board of the Kramer Company, to sign another statement prepared by the company’s legal department. Katz told her, “You don’t have to sign to make this picture, but you’ll never work again in films if you don’t.” The statement included a paragraph which declared she was sorry she had participated in the political activities cited by Red Channels (mainly copies of petitions she had signed), that she was guilty of bad judgment, and would show more discretion in the future.

She refused . . . but offered another of her own which said: “If any of these activities furthered the cause of communism, I regret have done them.” Although it was acceptable to Katz, representatives from Columbia Pictures demanded that she take out an advertisement in the trade papers saying she was not a Communist and expressing regret for her previous political activities. It was not enough never to have been a Communist, the Columbia executive told her. “There is a time for expediency, not integrity.”

Once again, Marsha Hunt said no. She told the people from Columbia she would have no objections to the Kramer company’s buying such an ad, but would not do it herself. Columbia paid for the ad. The picture did well, got good reviews and was not picketed. Nonetheless, Marsha Hunt wouldn’t find work for another several years . . . except in radio and on Broadway.

She leaned harder into her activism efforts in her later years, supporting the United Nations and delivering lectures for the World Health Organization. One of her later television efforts included a documentary that she wrote and produced in 1960 called “A Call From the Stars,” which was about the plight of refugees. She was a very active member of both the Hollywood Democratic Committee and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and donated her time and money to many liberal causes (such as the creation of the United Nations and the Civil Rights Movement) and political candidates (including FDR, Henry Wallace, Adlai Stevenson, JFK, RFK, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama.

She was also the longtime honorary Mayor of Sherman Oaks, California where she and her late husband, the screenwriter Robert Presnell, Jr. (1914-1986) purchased a house in 1946 at 13131 Magnolia Blvd. (at the corner of Fulton Street), where Marsha lived until the day she died. Her house was within walking distance of ours; for a short while I delivered a thrice-weekly newspaper (the long defunct Valley Times) to her. Years later, when I was doing research on the Hollywood Blacklist - a lifelong passion with me - I got to interview her on several occasions. At the time I decided to seek an interview, I asked our mother if she had Marsha’s phone number. I remember Madam smiling and handing me the White Pages. “You can look it up yourself; she’s listed.”  (Madam was certainly correct; Marsha’s number was (818) 994-9695.

Even though she had lost a great deal of sight, her memory and recall were all but total. More importantly, she harbored precious little anger or resentment towards those who had put the ultimate stumbling block in her artistic path. During one interview I mentioned this to her and asked the obvious question: “Why?” Her answer was both honest and straightforward: “Life’s simply too short, and I’m too busy trying to heal the world to engage in such utter nonsense.”

Wow!

Marsha Hunt would wind up outliving just about everyone she ever knew and all but a few of those she ever acted with.  She even outlived all the costars of her last movie, the aforementioned Empire State Building Murder: Ben Gazzara, Kirk Douglas, Mickey Rooney, Cyd Charisse and Anne Jeffries.

Like HRH Queen Elizabeth II, whose death kicked Marsha off the front-page, she lived a long life of great consequence. And like the Queen, she will always be remembered . . . so long as there are movie fans and Hollywood Brats, humanitarians and people who prize integrity above all.

Break a leg Marsha!

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

#29: "Zany Sophisticates" - Great Screwball Comedies

Starting on August 25, I will be leading a six-week film course at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, where I’ve been teaching since 1998. This course features six of the greatest screwball comedies of all time. As ever, my classes are on Thursday; this semester from 3:00-5:00 at Friedberg Hall on the Boca campus. Don’t worry if you don’t live in the area; many of the students “attend” class via Zoom.  And, there is always the option of watching a video version of the 6 classes from the comfort of you home . . . regardless of whether you live locally or anywhere on Planet Earth!

If, after reading the course perspective below, you are interested, you can contact the Osher Lifelong Learning office at FAU either by phone (561-297-3185 or 561-297-3171 for automated information) or via email (olliboca@fau.edu). I hope you will consider joining us, whether it be in person or via the internet, and have a great time as together, we laugh ourselves silly.

KFS (a.k.a. “The Hollywood Brat”)

                                                                                                                    ZANY SOPHISTICATES:

6 GREAT SCREWBALL COMEDIES

Kurt F. Stone, D.D.

Recipient of the 2004 Excellence in Teaching Award

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION: In baseball, the term “screwball” denotes a pitch that breaks in the precise opposite direction of the curve. In Hollywood, “screwball” connotes a film genre peopled with characters who act the opposite of what one might expect. Often defined as “sex comedies without the sex,” screwball films are frequently set in high society, where eccentric behavior is perhaps more tolerable. Screwball comedies, which were a Hollywood staple between roughly 1934 and 1946, are known for their antic characters, improbable plots, overlapping dialogue, and language that can often be as dizzy as the characters themselves.

 During this series, we will view screen six screwball comedies, which, in f Dr. Stone’s opinion are, or at least should be, classics in the genre.

 LECTURES/FILMS::

 1. "Twentieth Century" (1934) - Directed by Howard Hawks, starring John Barrymore and Carol Lombard. Simply one of the funniest films ever made.

 2. "Bombshell" (1933) - Jean Harlow at her best as a glamorous film star who rebels against the studio, her pushy press agent, and a family of hangers-on.

 3. "Theodora Goes Wild" (1936) - Irene Dunn is the author of a controversially racy best-selling book who tries to hide her celebrity status from her provincial,  small-town neighbors.

 4. "Stand-In" (1936) - Leslie Howard stars as a stuffy, bookish Brit sent to take over the reins of floundering Colossal Studios who finds the film community eyeing him with thinly-veiled amusement. Co-Starring Humphrey Bogart.

 5. "The Devil and Miss Jones" (1941) - Jean Arthur and Robert Cummings: A tycoon goes undercover to ferret out agitators at a department store, but gets involved in their lives instead.

 6. "Love Crazy" (1941) - Wm. Powell and Myrna Loy: A wife suspecting infidelity starts divorce proceedings, so the husband pretends to be insane in order to delay the divorce and clear up the misunderstanding.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION: Kurt F. Stone, D.D., is now in his 24th year with Lifelong Learning. His passion for film is, he says, "genetic," having been born in Hollywood, CA, and raised both in and around the movie industry. Stone is a multi-disciplinary sort of man who has also written two well-received books on Congress, published nearly 900 essays, is an ordained rabbi and earns his living as a medical ethicist.

 Time: 3:00 pm -5:00 pm 

 Dates[ : Thursdays, August 25; September 1, 8, 15, 22, 29

 Location: Friedberg Auditorium, Lifelong Learning Building

 Fees: : $ 90/member; $ 120/non-member | Video Catch-up

#28 . . . "Casablanca": The Best Movie to Watch on the Fourth of July

There’s never been a question in my mind that Casablanca, the movie that captured the Best Picture award at the 1944 Oscars, is unquestionably the best film of all time. Period. I have also long believed that it contains the single-most emotional and patriotic 2 minutes in the history of motion pictures: to wit, the scene where the Czech freedom-fighter Victor Laszo (actor Paul Henreid) leads the in-house orchestra and all the escapees from Hitler’s Germany in the playing and singing of La Marseilles, in stunning counterpoint, drowning out the Nazis officers’ singing of Die Wacht am Rhein (“Watch on the Rhein”) at “Rick’s” café. At one point, the camera focuses on Yvonne, Rick’s former girlfriend/mistress (played by French actress Madelaine Lebeau) who has a real, honest-to-God tear rolling down her cheek while she sings her country’s National Anthem.  As a result of this one scene, she forever became the face of the French Resistance. 

There can be no question that her tears were real and not the product of typical movie magic -  spraying either glycerin or menthol into the eyes.  In matter of fact, most everyone in that scene -  the vast majority of whom were (mostly Jewish) escapees from Hitler’s Third Reich felt overwhelmed during its filming. Ironically, Conrad Veidt, the Berlin-born actor who played the utterly detestable Major Heinrich Strasser likely felt it more than most.  A virulent anti-Nazi, the well-known actor (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Man Who Laughs) claimed on both his c.v. and his German exit visa that he was Jewish  . . . as a sign of solidarity to his Jewish-born wife, Lily Prager.  He would die the year after Casablanca’s release from a sudden heart attack while playing golf in Los Angeles; today, his ashes are interred in a niche of the columbarium at the Golders Green Crematorium in North London, the  most Jewish section of that great city. 

In real life, Mme. Lebeau (that’s her, above) was married to fellow actor Marcel Dalio (born Israel Moshe Blauschild) who played the croupier Emil, the man who handed handed Capt. Renault (Claude Raines) his casino winnings just 5 seconds after announcing “I’m shocked!  Simply shocked to find out that there’s gambling going on here.”  At one point before fleeing Vichy-era France, the Germans, who had found some publicity stills of Dalio, displayed them throughout the city with the caption 'a typical Jew' so that citizens could more easily report anyone suspected of unrepentant Jewishness. Eerily following one of Casablanca’s major plotlines, Dalio and Lebeau fled Vichy and made their way to Portugal, where eventually, they wound up in Hollywood. Sadly, they divorced the year after Casablanca won the Oscar, and she made her way back to France at war’s end.  She would die in Malaga, Spain, in 2016, the film’s last surviving credited cast member. 

Let’s spend 2 minutes watching this most  heartfelt scene.  To this day - and after a minimum of 175 viewings, it still brings tears to my eyes:

As with most national anthems, La Marseillaise speaks to the proudest, most patriotic and courageous emotions within the Gallic genome. The first of its seven verses and refrain are sung in Casablanca.

                   Allons enfants de la patrie,                                        Let's go children of the fatherland                                                 

                   Le jour de gloire est arrivé!                                        The day of glory has arrived!
                   Contre nous de la tyrannie                                         Against us tyranny's
                   L'étendard sanglant est levé ! (bis)                              Bloody flag is raised! (repeat)
                   Entendez-vous dans les campagnes,                         In the countryside, do you hear
                   Mugir ces féroces soldats ?                                         The roaring of these fierce soldiers?
                   Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras                              They come right to our arms
                   Égorger nos fils, nos compagnes!                               To slit the throats of our sons, our friends!

                                                                                              Refrain:

                             Aux armes, citoyens !                                                     Grab your weapons, citizens!
                             Formez vos bataillons !                                                  Form your battalions!
                             Marchons ! Marchons !                                                  Let us march! Let us march!
                             Qu'un sang impur                                                          May impure blood
                            Abreuve nos sillons !                                                      Water our fields!

As originally intended by the film’s producers, Hal B. Wallace and Jack L. Warner,  La Marseillaise was supposed to be sung in counterpoint to Die Horst Wessel, the barely 12-year old anthem of the Third Reich.  (In comparison, La Marseillaise had been written in 1792).  Horst Wessel was a young Nazi who was shot in 1930, and shortly thereafter made into a martyr for the “state that would last for no less than 1,000 years.” The Warner Bros. legal department soon learned that the copyright to “Horst Wessel” was controlled by a German publisher. If they used the song, the studio would be able to show Casablanca in countries at war with Germany, but copyright restrictions would make it impossible to show the film in neutral countries, which included most of South America.  And so, Warners decided to replace Die Horst Wessel with a far, far older song, Die Wacht am Rhein, the singing of which went totally against the principles of the Nazi Party.

                     The Watch on the Rhine:                                                         The Horst Wessel
The cry resounds like thunder's peal,                                          The flag is high, our ranks are closed

  Like crashing waves and clang of steel:                                      The S.A. marches with silent solid steps.

  The Rhine, the Rhine, our German Rhine,                                     Comrades shot by the red front and reaction

   Who will defend our stream, divine?                                              March in spirit with us in our ranks.

    Dear fatherland, no fear be thine,                                             The street is free for the brown battalions)

   Dear fatherland, no fear be thine,                                              The street is free for the Storm Troopers.                                       

   Firm and True stands the Watch, the Watch at the Rhine!          Millions full of hope, look at our swastika

   Firm and True stands the Watch, the Watch at the Rhine!          The day breaks for freedom and for bread

 They stand, a hundred thousand strong,                                         For the last time the call will now be sounded

 Quick to avenge their country's wrong,                                           Soon will fly Hitler’s banners over every street

 With filial love their bosoms swell                                                    Our slavery will last only a short time longer   They shall guard the sacred landmark well.                                    The flag is high, our ranks are closed

At the 100th anniversary of the Eiffel Tower in 1989, the great French chanteuse Mireille Mathieu, accompanied by a full orchestra and chorus, sang the French National Anthem at the statue’s base. According to reports at the time, "Mathieu sang the anthem of France so grandly and shrewdly that tears welled up across the country, many patriotic citizens even needed medical treatment." Ten years later, she was awarded the Medal of the French Legion of Honor.   I share it with you to give but a small impression of what kinds of emotion can raised and felt on a day like today:

The average American citizen, I would imagine, only hears - let alone sings - the Star Spangled Banner at the beginning of sporting events.  And then, as the last few words are about to be sung the crowd begins to cheer . . . not so much for the spirit of the anthem, but for the future victory of their home team.  And as for our national heroes - Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and Lincoln - they are trotted out as spokespeople for sales campaigns rather than as symbols of our ideals.  Whenever I feel the need to reach some sort of emotional climax on the 4th of July, I watch anew the great musical 1776, and marvel at how this country came into being.  For as with a classic motion picture - such as Casablanca, the greatest of them all - its success is the more the product of its numerous close encounters with failure, than the absolute genius of its creators.

One of the things that has always drawn me to watching Casablanca on the Fourth of July is the incredibly emotional, patriotic vision it gives to one of its central characters: The United States of America. For to the refugees and émigrés of that North African city, America is a refuge . . . man’s last, greatest hope . . . the land of the open arms and willing hearts. One gets the sense that those who manage to escape Casablanca and finally land at Ellis Island, they will become wonderful, grateful additions to the American family. It is an image - and a reality - which is at root, the very meaning of the Fourth of July.

Yes, we are truly blessed to be citizens, residents, refugees or asylees of this great nation.  But at the same time, our blessings should never be taken for granted . . . especially in times like these when there are growing segments of the nation who do not consider those who have different opinions, different heroes and heroines or different backgrounds to be traitors, deviants or even worse.  Our motto, so far as I recall, has long E Pluribus Unam, which is Latin for "Out of many (comes) one.”  Alas, for so many of our fellow citizens - especially those who haven’t the slightest idea of what our national motto is . . . let alone where it comes from - this nation is not (in the words of Woody Guthrie) "made for you and me.” How sad it is that when it comes to observing the Fourth of July, we are no longer memorializing or drinking a toast to the same nation as others. 

Ironically, many of us of a certain age were considered "Communists,” "Socialists” or "Anarchists” a half-century ago when we wore our hair long, went without bras and,  as the  terminology of the day had it  "let our freak flags fly.”  Today, I consider our ilk - now in our sixties and seventies - to be far more patriotic, more in tune with the historic purpose of America, than those who seek to delimit freedom, see enemies  behind every crack and crevice, and reread history to the point that it suits their dishonorable purposes.  I for one would love nothing more than tearing up whenever I hear the Star Spangled Banner, like I do when La Marseillaise is sung at Cafe Rick’s in Casablanca, circa 1942.   

Undoubtedly, that is the main reason why I watch it every Fourth of July.

Copyright, ©2022 Kurt F. Stone

Hollywoodland: Bringing Zukor and Goldwyn, Cohen, Mayer, Fox, Warner and Laemmle Back Home

September 25, 2021 was a very special day. For not only did it fall on the Jewish Sabbath (shabat) in the midst of Hag Sukkot, (the Fall harvest festival), but, after more than 17 years of planning, fundraising and meticulous craftmanship the long-awaited Academy Museum of Motion Pictures held its grand opening. The mammoth project was, to a great extent, the brainchild of Sid Ganis, a former president of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) and an award-winning producer of, among other films, Akeelah and the Bee.  I’ve known Sid and his wife Nancy for many years . . . ever since I officiated at the funerals of Sid’s parents in South Florida. The Academy Museum, housed in a magnificent structure located at 6067 Wilshire Blvd, is well-known to native Angelinos and Hollywood Brats alike as “The old May Company building.”  It is but a hop, skip and jump from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the La Brea (Spanish for “tar”) Pits, billed as “A paleontological gateway back to the Ice Age, right in the heart of L.A.”

The Academy Museum’s opening exhibitions included, in the words of museum director Bill Kramer, “ . . . moments devoted to The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, Spike Lee, Hayao Miyazaki, costume design, visual effects, sound design, pre-cinematic storytelling and so much more.”  Early visitors widely praised the  museum for its design, the quality of its exhibits and its vast assortment of cinematic memorabilia.  However, before too long, a question began growing among patrons and visitors: “What happened to the Jews?” For it turned out that a museum devoted to an industry largely birthed by the likes of Samuel Goldwyn (Szmuel Gelbfisz), Adolph Zukor (Paramount) Fox’s William Fox (Wilhelm Fuchs), Carl Laemlle (Universal) the brothers Warner and Harry and Jack Cohen (Columbia) were all AWOL.  And to make matters even more confusing, the overwhelming role played by Jews in the creation of the Hollywood film industry was being housed in a structure whose major financial backers were themselves Jewish: media mogul Haim Sabin and producer/director Steven Spielberg. 

Before too long, articles began appearing in Jewish papers like The Algemeiner, and The Forward, not to mention the Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone and eventually the New York Times.  In their own way, each writer asked the same exact question: What became of the Jews? Why weren’t they included in the museum? One writer noted “ . . . scant mention of Jewish trailblazers,” with the exception of “Sunset Boulevard” director Billy Wilder, and that “One of the six Oscars won by Wilder is displayed with a small placard stating that he fled Nazi Germany due to his religion.”  

My mostly-Jewish film students at Florida Atlantic University (which bills me, their instructor, as “The University’s resident ‘Hollywood Brat’”) – began asking me to explain the museum’s glaring oversight, and then wanting to know what “You, Dr. Stone, are going to do about it.”  Truth to tell, I had no answer to their first question, but promised to look into it and see what I could do . . .

Then, on January 18, 2022, my phone rang.  The name on the I.D. was that of my friend Sid Ganis.  I naturally assumed that the call dealt with a project we were working on - one which had virtually nothing to do with the  museum.  But to my amazement, there he was, on the line, asking me if I would be interested in becoming part of an advisory panel whose purpose was to create a permanent exhibit on the role that Jews  played in the creation of the film industry. It took me a nanosecond to say “Yes!”  Within five minutes, I was on the phone speaking to the museum’s director, Bill Kramer. In all honesty, my first thought was how proud our recently-deceased mother (“Madame”) would be to know that her youngest had received the invite.  

And so the work began . . .

        Jesse Lasky, Adolph Zukor, Sam Goldwyn and Cecil B.De Mille

To “Hollywood Brats” and historians of Hollywood in general (which was originally pronounced “holly-WOOD”), its Jewish involvement is a given. Prior to the West Coast, the majority of films were made in New York City . . . except for Westerns, which were made almost exclusively in New Jersey. That all changed, in 1913-14 when the Hungarian Jewish furrier Adolph Zukor, along with the San Franciso-born vaudevillian Jesse Lasky, Lasky’s brother-in-law the Hungarian-born glove salesman Szmuel Gelbfisz (Sam Goldwyn) and actor/playwright Cecile B. DeMille, the son of a Jewish-born Brit named Helena Beatrice Samuel, spent a minor fortune to purchase the rights to a Broadway play called “The Squaw Man” for the sole purpose of making a photoplay out West. When the tortuous heat of Arizona proved to be totally inhospitable (their film melted), they pushed on to the Pacific Coast, rented a barn at the southeast corner of Selma and Vine Streets, and shot their picture. It cost about $15,000 (about $245,000 in 2022) to make, and earned the partners nearly a quarter million dollars - just under $6,000,000 in today’s dollars.  (The picture was so successful that its director, Cecile B. DeMille, remade it 2 more times: a second silent version 1918 and a talkie version in 1931).

1914’s The Squaw Man put Hollywood on the map. 

As Jewish producers began creating their nascent studios in and around Hollywood, they hired Jewish directors - mostly from Europe - and began making stars out of Jewish actors and actresses.  But hardly anyone in the growing movie-going public had the slightest idea that directors like Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg or Lewis Milestone; superstars such as Sarah Bernhardt (Henriette-Rosine Bernard), “Broncho Billy” Anderson (Maxwell Aronson) Theda Bara (Theodosia Goodman), Alla Nazimova (Miriam Leventon), Douglas Fairbanks (Douglas Elton Ulman) or Edward G. Robinson (Emanuel Goldenberg) were Jewish as well.    

And then, moving into the early talkie era, Jewish producers made stars out of such Jewish actors (again, whom most of the public hadn’t the slightest idea were Jewish) like Paul Muni (Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund), Ricardo Cortez (Jacob Krantz), Sylvia Sidney (Sophia Kosow), Al Jolson (Asa Yoelson), Peter Lorre (László Lowenstein), Bert Lahr (Irving Lahrheim) and Ed Wynn (Isaiah Edwin Leopold) to name but a few.

When it came to producing films with Jewish content, the Hollywood moguls showed distinct discomfort.  While it is true that the cash-strapped brothers’ Warner released one of early Hollywood’s most overtly Jewish-themed films (1927’s The Jazz Singer starring the Lithuanian-born Al Jolson, who, in real life was the son of a cantor) many believe that the reason they added sound (“You ain’t heard nothing yet!”) was to insure its profitability all across the country . . . and  not just in New York, Chicago or Hollywood.  (It should be noted that the Warners’ casting office chose the Swedish-born Warner Oland [nee Johan Verner Öhlunda, a future Charlie Chan] to play the part of Jolson’s father the Cantor).

Two years later, Warner Brothers released Disraeli, starring the distinguished British actor Mr. George Arliss (who had made a career of playing the late Jewish-born P.M. in both London’s West End, on Broadway, and in a 1921 silent version); one would have had to listen very closely to discover that the lead character was Jewish.  In 1932, the 30 year-old David O. Selznick teamed up with Pandro Berman at RKO to release the ironically-named (and now largely forgotten) Symphony of Six Million, based on a a story by the one of that era’s most popular writers, the Jewish-born Fannie Hurst.  Starring Ricardo Cortez (Jacob Krantz) as the Lower-East Side-born Dr. Felix “Felixel” Klauber, the film told the story of a young Jewish physician who rose from his humble Lower East Side roots to the top of his profession and how the social costs of losing his connection with his community, his family and the craft of healing led  to a crisis of conscience. The film never mentions the word "Jew" or specifically points out that the characters are indeed Jewish. But it does include Jewish prayers, such as the Shema, recited in Hebrew, and incorporates a Pidyon Ha-Ben, the Jewish ritual Redemption of the First Born.  

                                    The  Wilshire Blvd. Synagogue Sanctuary

Two additional Jewish-themed films of the 1930s: Universal Pictures’ Counsellor at Law (1933), starring the unbelievably miscast John Barrymore as Jewish attorney George Simon.  The film was adapted from a play by Elmer Rice (Reizenstein), produced by Carl Laemmle, Jr., and directed by William Wyler (a cousin of Universal’s founder Carl Laemmle). Then, in 1937 Warner Brothers’ classic The Life of Emile Zola starring two distinguished actors from the Yiddish theater, Paul Muni as the writer Zola and Joseph Schildkraut as the French Captain Alfred Dreyfus (both of whom received Oscars for their performances), who was falsely accused of giving over French  military information to the Germans. Based on one of history’s most notorious anti-Semitic conspiracies, nowhere in the script does one find the word “Jew” or “Jewish.” When asked about this in later years, Jack Warner said that it was done on purpose in order to make the picture’s “message” more universal. For their efforts, Jack Warner did walk away with the Best Picture Award for 1937.

Although the original moguls were both uncomfortable and intensely private when it came to being Jewish, they did build one of the most opulent Reform Synagogues in the world: the Wilshire Blvd Temple, located 24 blocks away from where the new Academy Museum sits. Completed at a cost of $1.5 million in 1929, the Temple was built largely through the donations of Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, and the Warner brothers. In keeping with its Hollywood roots, the sanctuary’s magnificent murals were created by studio artist Hugo Ballin.

The “other” synagogue in Hollywood, Temple Israel on  Hollywood Blvd., was founded in 1926 by seven men, five of whom were prominent in the film industry, including Sol M. Wurtzel, Isadore Bernstein, and Edward Laemmle.  From the time of its founding, the temple was well-known for its “Midnight Show,” a series of fundraisers which over the years saw such Jewish and non-Jewish stars as Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and Lena Horne headline on behalf of the Temple.

In an article written for the March 21 , 2022 edition of The Hollywood Reporter Bill Kramer, director and president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of ADL (Anti-Defamation League) wrote a front-page essay noting the absence of any reference - let alone exhibit - dealing with the immigrant Jewish experience as it related to the creation of Hollywood. As they noted, throughout the industry and among museum stakeholders, a single question was being repeatedly asked: “Where are the Jews?”

As it turns out, answering that question was not nearly as important as doing something about it. In their article, Kramer and Greenblatt noted that when the museum opened this past September, there was “ . . . a two-month screening and panel series on Viennese émigrés, many of whom were Jewish, who helped to define the classical Hollywood era, including Max Steiner, Billy Wilder, and Hedy Lamarr.” After numerous discussions and a great deal of what the authors referred to as “self-reflection” (which is something as deeply Jewish as Manishewitz, kvetching und kvelling), it was decided to create a permanent exhibit on this utterly crucial aspect of Hollywood history.  The working title for the exhibit is “Hollywoodland,” named after the original sign adorning the hills above my home town.  (First erected in 1923, the sign was meant to serve as an advertisement for a 640-acre real-estate development which never came to fruition due to the Stock Market Crash of 1929; the last 4 letters would be removed in 1949, which happens to be the year of my birth.)

Again, the reason or reasons why the Academy Museum opened without a permanent exhibit dedicated to the role immigrant Jews played in creating one of the most vibrant industries on the planet, really isn’t that important . . . and most likely unknowable.  Perhaps it lay in the genomic make-up of the founders; being Jewish but neither comfortably nor obviously so.  Then too, most of them had fled the anti-Semitism of Central and Eastern Europe and wanted nothing so much as to become 100% American.  That they entered the world of nickelodeons, kaleidoscopes and celluloid isn’t, when stops to think about it, all that surprising.  After all, this was a brand new endeavor; one which had few if any historic barriers or prejudices at its core.  Then too, coming from such endeavors as gloves, coats, dresses and small dry goods stores, the future moguls possessed a collective innate sense of future trends and fashions . . . a marvelous asset for the making of motion pictures for the fickle masses.  Three examples: Max Aaronson (Broncho Billy) foresaw the Western Film craze long before Tom Mix and William S. Hart arrived on the scene; Wilhelm Fuchs (William Fox) saw a future fortune to be made in the making of films centering around “vamps” before anyone else, and made Theda Bara, the daughter of a Jewish tailor, a  star of international import within less than a year; Universal’s “Uncle Carl” Laemmle understood that the public would be far more excited about going to see movies over and over again when they knew (or thought they did) the names of their favorite stars as opposed to merely their nicknames  such as "The Girl With the Curls” (Mary Pickford); "The Dimpled Darling” (Maurice Costello) or "The Biograph Girl” (Florence Lawrence).     

The Academy Museum board, its officers, advisors and curators are looking to create and finish the “Hollywoodland” project within a year.  I for one am terribly proud to play a role (small though it might turn out to be), and anxiously await the day when Meyer and Goldwyn, Zukor, Cohen, Warner and Laemmle can finally receive the tribute they so richly deserve.

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

Welcome to the Family, Hedy Lamarr Stone

                                Hedy Lamarr Stone

(As regular readers of The K.F. Stone Weekly know, we had to send our beloved 13-year old pup and service dog Fwed Astaire Stone “across the Rainbow Bridge” two weeks ago.  We have now brought a new star into the family, a 5-year old Beagle we named “Hedy Lamarr Stone.”  She is, like her namesake, beautiful and quite loving.  She is already showing signs of being a star.  And so, as a welcome to the newest in a line of unique canines which extends all the way back to Buster Keaton (a tri-colored Collie who was my great love in grad school), Ginger Rogers (a Chocolate Lab whom many of you knew) and Eleanor Roosevelt (a pug who looked a lot like the late First Lady), it is my pleasure to say a few words about Hedy’s eponymous ancestor, an Austrian Jewish beauty born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler).

Of the scores of stars who graced the silver screen during Hollywood’s “Golden Era,” it is likely that the most beautiful and alluring of all was Hedy Lamarr . . . who was named for the silent star Barbara La Marr, who, in her day was known “the girl who is too beautiful” But unlike Barbara Lamarr, who most lamentably died in 1926 from tuberculosis and nephritis at the tender age of 31, this Lamarr lived to the ripe old age of 86, and was far, far more than just another pretty face. Indeed as early as 1931, her first director, the great Max Reinhardt (Max Goldmann) referred to her as “the most beautiful woman in the world” And for my money, he was clearly correct. Far from being a world-class actor (in all honesty, she was fair at best), Hedy was nonetheless one of the smartest and most accomplished stars of all time . . . both on and away from the silver screen.  When she entered a scene or a room, all eyes were upon her.  When she entered her lab, she was capable of changing the world.

Born November 9. 1914 in Vienna to Gertrude (Lichtwitz), from Budapest, and Emil Kiesler, a banker from Lember, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler the future Hedy Lamarr was raised in a cultured upper-middle class Jewish home in the city of Döbling.  It was a small and accomplished family. One of Hedy’s cousins, the avant-garde theater designer and architect Frederick Kiesler (1890-1965) became best known for his “Shrine of the Book,” a wing of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the repository for the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Inextricably drawn to theatre and cinema, Hedy dropped out of school in her teens in order to study with the great theater director Max Reinhardt (Maxmillian Goldmann – 1873-1943) in Berlin.  While studying and working with Reinhardt, Hedy (pronounced Hady) befriended such future luminaries as Otto Preminger, Sam Spiegel and Peter Lorre.

Acting at first in minor theatre roles and German-language films, she became internationally famous in her 5th film, Ecstasy, in which she appeared in the nude.  Now mind you, this was 1933, when films featuring nude women were not screed in first-rate movie palaces.  Ecstasy is believed to have been the first non-pornographic film to depict a woman having an orgasm.  Barely making it past the censors in Europe it was spirited to America and quickly banned by the notorious Breen Office.  After a particularly nasty trial in Federal Court, its American distributor simply ran off 3 dozen new prints, and started screening the film in America’s most open-minded cities.  Although it  quickly became a sensation in Europe, it did not receive a full American release until 1940. By then her name had been changed to Lamarr and she had become the exotic apple of every movie-goers’ eye.  

Shortly after making Ecstasy, Hedy married a man named Fritz Mandl, the Catholic son of a Jewish munitions merchant. Known variously as ”Austria’s Munitions King” and the “Merchant of Death,” Fritz was a martinet who hid his Jewish background by becoming an ardent Nazi supporter. Indeed, prior to leaving Germany, he made a deal with the Nazis allowing him to keep his non-Austrian holdings.  In return he allegedly carried Nazi funds belonging to Göring, Ribbentrop, and other high-ranking party members to invest in Argentina. The marriage didn’t last long; by 1937, Hedy had divorced him; feeling the angst and utter discomfort of Hitler and the Nazis, she set sail for England, were she happened to meet MGM’s Louis B. Mayer who told her that as soon as she could find her way to Hollywood, he would sign her to a major contract. As mentioned above, it was Mayer who would change her name to Hedy Lamarr. 

Although she was only one of many Europeans who found refuge in Hollywood, Hedy was one of the few high profile women to have done so on her terms, rather than as the wife or daughter of a more famous man or as the protégée of an established director. Her continued insistence on doing things on her own terms was equally remarkable, even if it contributed toward making her the difficult individual she was.  She arrived in 1937 and was immediately signed to an MGM contract starting at $550.00 a week. The 5’7” Lamarr was also told that she must immediately take off a minimum of 15 pounds.

It turned out that before Mayer could put her in a picture, she was lent out to independent producer Walter Wanger (Feuchtwanger) who immediately cast her in the remake of the 1937 French gem Pepé lo Moko, directed by Julien Divivier and starring the marvelous Jean Gabin. In this new, translated version, entitled Algiers, Hedy, playing a character named Gaby costarred alongside French heartthrob Charles Boyer. Algiers is a moody melodrama revolving around Pepé (Charles Boyer), a charming fugitive from the law and his battle of wits with Slimane (Joseph Calleia), the police chief dedicated to luring him from the relative safety of the Casbah. Costarring in her first Hollywood-made film, Hedy Lamarr was never better cast than as Gaby, a faintly shady adventuress. She scored big in her love scenes with the newly emergent sex symbol Boyer.

With her marvelous notices, Hedy Lamarr was quickly cast in a series of films opposite some of the most popular and dashing stars in the Hollywood firmament:

• 1939: Lady of the Tropics (Robert Taylor)

• 1940: I Take This Woman (Spencer Tracy)

• 1940: Boom Town (Clark Gable)

• 1940: Comrade X (Clark Gable)

• 1941: Come Live With Me (James Stewart)

• 1941: Ziegfeld Girl (James Stewart)

• 1941: H.M. Pulham, Esq. (Robert Young)

• 1941: Tortilla Flat (John Garfield)

• 1942 Crossroads (William Powell)

• 1942: White Cargo (Walter Pidgeon)

• 1944: The Heavenly Body (William Powell)

• 1944 The Conspirators (Paul Henreid)

• 1946: The Strange Woman (George Sanders)

• 1949 Samson and Delilah (Victor Mature)

• 1950: Copper Canyon (Ray Milland)

• 1951 My Favorite Spy (Bob Hope)

In total, Hedy Lamarr appeared/starred in 35 films.  In the early part of her career, she generally was cast in exotic roles, most notably Tondelayo in 1940’s White Cargo.  The only well-above  average films associated with her are her first, Algiers (with the famous line (“Come with me to the Casbah!”) and her own personal favorite, Samson and Delilah, directed by C.B. DeMille.  Nonetheless, her films were, for the most part, box-office successes and kept the public coming back to see her in films for nearly 15 years.

Her private life was filled with ups-and-downs, to say the least.  Six times married and divorced, her most famous husbands were former co-star John Loder and screenwriter Gene Markey, known more for having also been married to Myrna Loy and Joan Bennett than for any particular screenplay.  

Hedy’s greatest contributions however, had nothing to do with acting: she literally changed the world through her brilliance as an inventor.  Her scientific mind had been bottled-up by Hollywood but Howard Hughes (then a  movie producer/director) helped to fuel the innovator in Lamarr, giving her a small set of equipment to use in her trailer on the set. While she had an inventing table set up in her house, the small set allowed Lamarr to work on inventions between takes. Hughes took her to his airplane factories, showed her how the planes were built, and introduced her to the scientists behind the process. Lamarr was inspired to innovate as Hughes wanted to create faster planes that could be sold to the US military. She bought a book of fish and a book of birds and looked at the fastest of each kind. She combined the fins of the fastest fish and the wings of the fastest bird to sketch a new wing design for Hughes’ planes. Upon showing the design to Hughes, he said to Lamarr, “You’re a genius.”

Lamarr was indeed a genius as the gears in her inventive mind continued to turn. She once said, “Improving things comes naturally to me.” She went on to create an upgraded stoplight and a tablet that dissolved in water to make a soda similar to Coca-Cola. However, her most significant invention was engineered as the United States geared up to enter World War II.

In 1940 Lamarr met George Antheil at a dinner party. Antheil was another quirky yet clever force to be reckoned with. Known for his writing, film scores, and experimental music compositions, he shared the same inventive spirit as Lamarr. She and Antheil talked about a variety of topics but of their greatest concerns was the looming war. Antheil recalled, “Hedy said that she did not feel very comfortable, sitting there in Hollywood and making lots of money when things were in such a state.” After her marriage to Mandl, she had knowledge on munitions and various weaponry that would prove beneficial. And so, Lamarr and Antheil began to tinker with ideas to combat the axis powers.

The two came up with an extraordinary new communication system used with the intention of guiding torpedoes to their targets in war. The system involved the use of “frequency hopping” amongst radio waves, with both transmitter and receiver hopping to new frequencies together. Doing so prevented the interception of the radio waves, thereby allowing the torpedo to find its intended target. After its creation, Lamarr and Antheil sought a patent and military support for the invention. While awarded U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 in August of 1942, the Navy decided against the implementation of the new system. The rejection led Lamarr to instead support the war efforts with her celebrity by selling war bonds.   

Lamarr’s patent for her frequency hopping device expired before she ever saw a penny from it. Estimates of its current value start at $30 billion. While she continued to accumulate credits in films until 1958, her inventive genius was yet to be recognized by the public. It wasn’t until Lamarr’s later years that she received any awards for her invention. The Electronic Frontier Foundation jointly awarded Lamarr and Antheil with their Pioneer Award in 1997. Lamarr also became the first woman to receive the Invention Convention’s Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award. Although she died in 2000, Lamarr was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the development of her frequency hopping technology in 2014. Such achievement has led Lamarr to be dubbed “the mother of Wi-Fi” and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth.

Lamentably, Hedy Lamarr spent the last years of her life living in penury in Casselberry, Florida, where was twice arrested for shoplifting.  Her name eventually came back into headlines when, in 1974, Mel Brooks gave actor Harvey Korman the name “Hedley LaMarr” in his classic Western spoof Blazing Saddles.  In many scenes, cast members would refer to Korman’s character as “Hedy Lamarr,” to which he immediately - and angrily - responded “That’s Hedley.”  Ms. Lamarr eventually sued Mel Brooks for an undisclosed sum and settled out of court.

Annie and I are delighted to name our newest family member after a truly gifted, unique and beautiful creature.  We are  happy to report that she is already beginning to respond to her new name, and like her “ancestor” of old, is not at all adverse to applause . . . 

Could autographs be far behind?

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

Rosebud

On March 17, 1941, just a couple of days after the world premiere of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, novelist/movie critic John O’Hara (often referred to as “The Rodney Dangerfield of American literature”) wrote a review of the movie for Newsweek Magazine. O’Hara began his review in the following manner:

It is [with] exceeding regret that your faithful bystander reports that he has just seen a picture which he thinks must be the best picture he ever saw.

With no less regret, he reports that he has just seen the best actor in the history of acting.

Name of picture: Citizen Kane.

Name of actor: Orson Welles.

Reason for regret: you, my dear, may never see the picture.

O’Hara’s reasons for the last line were multitudinous; it said as much about Hollywood’s feelings for the then 26-year old Welles, as it did about the Hollywood establishment itself.

[George] Orson Welles (1915-1985) claimed that the first words he ever heard while still in the cradle came from Dr. Maurice Bernstein (the Welles’ family physician), who proclaimed the infant a prodigy, “a genius in the making.” It turned out, of course, to be true.  (Years later, Welles would immortalize the good doctor by naming John Foster Kane’s business manager “Mr. Bernstein” in Citizen Kane. (The character, whose first name was never mentioned, was played by the venerable character actor Everett Sloane.)

Julius Caesar with Orson Welles and Martin Gabel as Cassius.

By his mid-teens, Orson Welles had convinced the manager of Dublin’s Gate Theatre that he was an important American actor, and starred in several of that legendary theatre’s productions. After about a year, he returned to America before his 19th birthday and created both the “Mercury Theatre on the Air” on radio and Broadway’s “Mercury Theatre,” the former of which scared much of the East Coast with his Halloween broadcast of H.G. Welles’ (no relation) “War of the Worlds.” Welles also became radio’s “The Shadow,” and went on to both produce and star in a modern-dress version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (as  an anti-Fascist, anti-Mussolini drama); it turned out to be one of the 20th century’s most compelling versions of a Shakespearean play.  He also produced and starred in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes and Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, among many, many others. And mind you, by this time he was barely twenty.

Working alongside his producer, future Oscar winner John Houseman, Welle’s Mercury Theater even had its own “Declaration of Principles,” - a statement which vowed that the company would cater to patrons “on a voyage of discovery in the theater,” who wanted to see “classical plays excitingly produced.” Fans of Citizen Kane will recognize in this the “Declaration of Principles” that John Foster Kane created for his first newspaper . . .

Not surprisingly, Hollywood came courting.  What was surprising, were the terms that RKO Studios offered the younger-than-young Welles: $150,000.00 ($2.8 million in today’s money) for each of two films of his choice, for which he could act as producer, writer, director and screen star, as well as having virtual complete control of the final film Prior to this earth-shattering contract, the studio chiefs maintained nearly complete control over a film’s destiny, including its script, casting, production budgets, assignment of technical staff, and the editing of the footage into a final print.

Nonetheless, no one, save Charlie Chaplin (who was using his own money) had ever received such an offer; heretofore, writers wrote, directors directed, producers produced and actors acted. But there was just something about Orson Welles. Even before Welles and his Mercury Theatre troupe detrained at the Pasadena Station, people in Hollywood were dubious, envious and wickedly  jealous of the boy genius.  As one biographer would note, “Welles radiated the physical presence of a movie idol long before he set foot in Hollywood.” Resentment and distrust were compounded when Welles arrived in Hollywood proper, sporting a beard [left over from his aborted production of Five Kings – an ambitious compilation of five of Shakespeare’s plays about British monarchs that Welles still hoped to produce after he completed a stint in Hollywood] . . . the beard served to alienate some . . . and amuse others.  According to an article in The Hollywood Reporter, “Errol Flynn sent Welles the perfect Christmas gift for a whiskered actor: a ham with a beard attached to it.”

Upon his arrival at RKO studios, Welles - accompanied by his future cinematographer Gregg Toland - went over virtually every square inch of the lot, with Welles drinking in every facet of film-making. When asked by the press what he thought about the studio, Welles likened it to “the best electric train set any kid ever had!” At night, he began contemplating his first film . . . but what would it be?  His first inclination was an adaptation of British writer Eric Ambler’s Journey into Fear (which Welles would make right after “Citizen Kane.”) The studio turned him down flat: Welles’ proposed budget for Journey was around $1 million; his contract permitted no more than $500k per picture.  Welles countered with Nicolas Blake’s espionage thriller The Smiler With a Knife. This too was rejected due to cost. In the meantime, Welles also watched plenty of films plenty of times.  These included John Ford’s Stage Coach,  Charles Chaplin’s City Lights and a minor 1933 film, The Power and the Glory, whose screen writer, Preston Sturges, would become the next great writer/director/producer.  This picture, which starred a young rising Spencer Tracy and former silent superstar Colleen Moore, told the story of a man’s life . . . beginning with his funeral and then working backwards to his extreme youth.  Welles loved the “life-told-in-reverse” concept; it eventually became the storytelling lynchpin of Citizen Kane.

Screen writer Herman Mankiewicz (whose grandson Ben is a host on Turner Classic Movies), who was recovering from a severely broken leg was sent away from Hollywood with John Houseman and a secretary to begin work on a screenplay originally entitled “American,” then “John Citizen, U.S.A.” Mank officially went on the RKO payroll ($1,000 per week) on February 19, 1940. While Mank wrote and Houseman kept the isolated screenwriter from drinking, Welles was back in Hollywood doing his initial pre-production work with cinematographer Toland.  What Welles and Toland came up with was a work of sheer genius.  Many of their scenes would be shot with ceilings.  For the most part, no one used ceilings . . . that’s where lights are hung.  So instead, they shot upwards, often digging holes in the floor for the camera to be encased.  They were able to film what appeared to be immense gatherings, while through ingenious movie magic, there were actually only had 15-20 people in the scene. The most famous of these are shots of Kane’s campaign speech . . . which contain only a few players in any individual  shot; the overall impact is one of thousands of people appearing in a whirlwind of action.  The ‘audience’ in the meeting hall is actually a matte painting, pricked with holes so light would shine through and give the illusion of motion to the ‘crowd.’” 

Then too, there is the brilliant scene where Kane’s 2nd wife, Susan Alexander (played by Dorothy Comingore) is about to make her operatic debut:  the screen seems filled with mobs of frenzied people from the staff and company of the opera production; the impact is achieved by carefully plotting the rushing of actors across the stage at five different distances from the camera – some only a few feet from the lens, blacking out the scene.  What seems like hundreds of people filling the frame is no more than twenty; the resulting visual impact of the intricately choreographed small groups of actors provided a far more stylized look to Citizen Kane than would more traditional surgings of teeming mobs. Susan appears to be performing before a full house; in reality, there is no one in front of her.  By shooting from behind the diva into the lights, the mind of the cinema-goers fill in the house through suggestion . . . thus saving tens of thousands of dollars.

          Deep Focus Photography at it’s Very Best

But the most fascinating thing Welles and Toland did in Citizen Kane was to employ a cinematic technique called “deep focus photography,” in which front, mid-range and back set could be filmed clearly all at the same time. Generally, when someone is right in front of the camera and speaking to someone at a distance, the moment the person being spoken to responds, they become the clear-eyed focus of the camera while the one who originally spoke becomes blurred. In deep-focus, everyone remains in focus. In fact, there is one scene in Citizen Kane which, although adding little to the story, is used in order to show off what Toland and Welles were doing. This is the scene where Welles is about to sign over his corporate ownership rights to the bank. Kane (Welles) gets up from the table where Mr. Bernstein and their longtime banker, Mr. Thatcher (played by George Coulouris) are seated. Kane walks and talks until he reaches the back of the room . . . which is far more distant that at first it appears to be . . . and then returns to the table. The only reason for this set-up is to show the magic of deep-focus. By far, the greatest - and most difficult - of all deep-focus shots came when Kane broke into his wife Susan’s bedroom soon after she had tried to commit suicide. Even the still shows the door, Kane and the bottle of poison in perfect focus . . . a prodigious feat of cinematography.

This use of deep-focus was as much a product of good timing as anything. From Toland’s point of view, Citizen Kane was not only well-timed artistically, but technically as well.  New developments in both lighting and film – in particular the release of Kodak’s new Super XX black-and-white film stock in 1938 – opened vast new horizons for cinematographers, allowing them to shoot with less light and achieve greater contrast and depth to the image. And although the movie-goer does not necessarily understand what they are seeing, it nonetheless leaves a lasting impression.

In addition to writing, directing and rehearsing his cast, Welles was also the star of the film, which meant often having to be in make-up by 3:00 in the morning. During the making of Citizen Kane, the makeup department created a total of seventy-two assorted face pieces for Kane – among them sixteen different chins alone – as well as ears, cheeks, jowls, hairlines, and eye pouches . . . aging him from twenty-five to seventy-eight. In one of the film’s most famous scenes - showing the dissolution of Kane’s marriage to Emily across the breakfast table - Welles decided that it would be best to film the scenes in reverse. He reasoned that it take far less time to strip away a layer of makeup and wigs - going from oldest to youngest - than doing the opposite. As such, Welles and Ruth Warrick were able to accomplish this vignette in a single day’s shoot. (n.b.: Welles always wore a prosthetic nose whenever he was on-screen or on-stage; he felt that his own was too small for his face.)

One question the public asked when they first saw Citizen Kane was where Welles had found all the great unknown actors who filled the various major roles: people like Joseph Cotten (Jed Leland), Agnes Morehead (Mary Kane), Ruth Warrick (Emily Norton Kane), George Coulouris (Walter Parks Thatcher), Ray Collins (“Boss” James Gettys), the aforementioned Everett Sloane (Mr. Bernstein) and Paul Stewart (Raymond, Kane’s butler) . . . all of whom would go on to long careers in Hollywood. The answer is simple: Welles merely moved his Mercury Theatre players out west to RKO.

        Charles  Foster Kane and Susan Alexander

Herman Mankiewicz and John Houseman originally thought about modeling their main character on millionaire inventor/pilot/filmmaker Howard Hughes, but soon settled on publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. Unlike Hughes, who was too young and not exciting enough in real life, Hearst presented a character and appetites were truly larger than life. The public never had to be told that Charles Foster Kane was based mostly on Hearst, nor that Kane’s other-worldly estate “Xanadu” was undoubtedly based on Hearst’s castle (which the magnate simply referred to as “the ranch”) in San Simeon. Did it then follow that Susan Alexander, Kane’s second wife whom he tried desperately to turn into a operatic diva, was modeled after Hearst’s longtime mistress, movie actress and former Ziegfeld Girl Marion Davies? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. Personally, I have always seen Susan as an amalgam of at least 3 famous (or infamous) 20th century courtesans:

• Ganna Walska (1887-1984), who was married to publishing heir Harold McCormick (fourth of her six husbands), got him to finance an opera career for her; problem was, she couldn’t sing a lick;

• Kodak chairman Jules Brulatour (who also founded Universal Pictures) funded his 2nd wife Dorothy Gibson’s film career, and then his 3rd wife Hope Hampton’s aspirations in grand opera; Hampton, like the fictional Susan Alexander, did not fare very well. Hampton married several other multi-millionaires and became known as ““The Duchess of Park Avenue”

(A future “Tales from Hollywood & Vine, tentatively entitled Who Was Susan Alexander? is already being researched and outlined. It should be ready for posting within the next 8 weeks.)

It goes without saying that Hearst was furious with both RKO in general and Orson Welles in particular. He decided that if Welles and RKO released the picture, he would destroy them. No one, he bellowed, had the right to satirize, demean or make a fool of either him or his beloved Marion. At one point, Hearst attempted to buy up the rights to Citizen Kane with the idea of destroying the master print. Welles threated to sue RKO; RKO told Hearst to take a hike.

Welles did, however, relent on one scene in which he had Susan Alexander, Kane’s increasingly alcoholic second wife have an affair with another man. Hearst was livid; he adored Marion, and even though he never divorced his wife to marry Miss Davies, he refused to have anyone suggest - even on film - that Marion was anything but faithful to the man she frequently and lovingly referred to as “Old Droopy Drawers.”  This is not to say that Marion was a vestal virgin. Back in 1924, word got around Hollywood that Marion was carrying on with Charlie Chaplin. On one occasion, when Charlie and a bunch of Hollywood bigshots went out on Hearst’s yacht, the Oneida, Hearst caught Chaplin and Miss Davies canoodling in the latter’s cabin. Chaplin escaped, went out on deck and hid under the tarp of a life saving boat. Hearst, armed with a pistol chased Chaplin and fired at a man standing in front of him. It turned out that the man he hit was not Charlie Chaplin, but rather famed producer/director Thomas Ince, who actually looked quite a bit like the silent comedian. Ince died several days later at his Beverly Hills home from his gunshot wound. Louella Parsons, the Hearst writer covering Ince’s death, reported that the director had died from a heart attack. For her loyalty to Hearst, Parsons was rewarded with a lifetime contract and eventually became Hollywood’s most fearsome gossip columnist. And as long as W.R. Hearst lived, Parsons would do his bidding . . . up to and including panning any picture produced by RKO or Orson Welles. This had a lot to do with the financial failure of Citizen Kane.

In the end, Charles Foster Kane died alone, surrounded by his art and at a loss for friends or mourners.  As the collectibles and detritus of an opulent life are consigned to a furnace, the one question asked (by a young, uncredited actor named Alan Ladd) is what did his dying word - “Rosebud” mean?  We discover during the final frame that it was the name emblazoned on a cheap sled he had been given as a child.  So perhaps it was an expression of longing for his age of innocence - the last time he had felt truly happy or secure.  So far as the story of Charles Foster Kane goes, that works about as well as anything.  However, in the backstory that is Citizen Kane, “Rosebud” does have a purpose and a meaning.  According to those who knew Hearsts and Davies well “Rosebud” was Hearst's term of endearment for Davies’ pudenda, to employ medical terminology, or “honeypot” to a bit raunchier.

Today, Citizen Kane is largely considered to be the greatest film ever made.  And although it failed at the box office and received less than stellar distribution in its first year on the circuit, it did receive 8 Academy Award nominations, won for best original screenplay (Welles/Mankiewicz), and earned the praise of many, many respected critics, including John O’Hara, whose pithy remarks opened up this post.

But Welles, Hollywood last spectacular wunderkind wound up having the last laugh.  Despite a 40-year career as an actor, writer director and producer, he would have many ups-and-downs, gain a ton of weight and spend much of his time raising funds for his next picture.  But throughout it all, that initial contract with RKI remained a living, breathing entity.  When, in 1986 Turner Entertainment Company, which had obtained the home video rights to Citizen Kane in 1986, announced with much fanfare on January 29, 1989 its plans to colorize Welles’ masterpiece, there was an immediate backlash with the Welles estate and Directors Guild of America threatening legal action.  Turns out, the contract which Welles had signed with RKO back when he was no more than  a youngster, gave him - and his heirs - the rights to  the film.  As such, no changes could be made without the express written consent of Welles, his children, grandchildren or assignees.

Rosebud!

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone 

Round Up the Usual Suspects

Hello Dear Friends:

It’s been some time since I last sent out a “Tales From Hollywood and Vine” blog. This doe not mean that I’ve ceased being your favorite “Hollywood Brat.” Far from it! In addition to spending an inordinate amount of time vetting COVID-19 research protocols and writing tons of political essays, I’ve also become part of a new film venture: EDIFY. There is a new online lecture service called “EDIFY,” sponsored by Florida Atlantic University . . . one of the places I do film classes. Months and months ago they asked if I would create a filmic version of one of my “Behind the Silver Screen” lectures . . . complete with yours truly and lots of clips and photographs. They came to me first as sort of a test case to see if it their idea could work. I said yes and then went to town on a lecture about the making of “Casablanca.” Well, after months of filming and editing, its up and running!

I am delighted to inform you first. You can find it online at edify.fau.edu Once you get to the site, you can go to “about,” and “subscribe” and then on to my lecture. Please note, this is a subscription site that contains dozens upon dozens of lectures in a whole host of disciplines. A subscription is a mere $10.00 a month, and you can cancel at any time you wish.

I hope you will get a chance to see my lecture. It was a pleasure to make and - in my humble opinion - turned out really well. If you have any questions or difficulties, you can always contact the creators of this website at edify@fau.edu or give the office a call at 561-297-3185.

Please let me know if you get a chance to see my lecture . . .

KFS

February 2, 1914

August 2, 2020

February 2, 1914

Sir Charles Spenser Chaplin in my library

The other day I officiated at the funeral of a dear friend. At the time of her passing she was 106, and had been, up until a few days before her death, about as healthy as anyone I knew. Selma shared a birthday with “Madame,” my mother Alice . . . except that Selma was precisely 10 years older than mom. Every February the 8th, she (Selma) would ask to be remembered to “that young lady” and send along her birthday wishes. Like Madame, Selma was a fine, fine artist; she worked largely in oils where Madame spent a lifetime as a gifted pointillist . . . pen and ink being her “weapon” of choice. Unlike Mom, Selma was never an actress, but like mom, was a gifted dancer.

In preparing for Selma’s service, I did quite a bit of research . . . most of it dealing with the year 1914. In the year of her birth, Woodrow Wilson was president, the only Roosevelt most Americans could identify was Theodore, and Babe Ruth had yet to hit his first home run. (For baseball aficionados, that year, the all-time record for home runs was one Roger Conner (1857-1931) who held the all-time record: 138 dingers. In February 1914, one could purchase a 3 bedroom home through the Sears catalog for $825.00; the vast majority of American veterans had served during the Civil War, a Ford Model T cost $440.00 (approximately $11,231 in current dollars) and the most popular movie star in the world (at least as of February 1st of that year) was a zaftig Jewish maiden named Theodosia Goodman, who who acted under the name “Theda Bara.” (Mom would parody Miss Bara about 45 years later in a sketch called “We Never Learned to Twalk (sic).”

“Making a Living” (February 2, 1914)

On February 2, 1914, a mere 6 days before Selma’s birth, the world be forever changed. For on that day, a 25-year old Cockney vaudevillian named Charles Spenser Chaplin was first seen on screen in a 1-reel short ironically entitled “Making a Living.” Appearing sans baggy pants, tight threadbare coat, derby hat and over-sized shoes (which wouldn’t come about until his next picture, “Kid Auto Races in Venice”). Film reviewers immediately understood that the first genius of the screen had arrived. The anonymous reviewer for Motion Picture World wrote about the unnamed actor in Making a Living: “The clever player who takes the role of the nervy and very nifty sharper (Chaplin) in this picture is a comedian of the first water, who acts like one of Natures’s own naturals. . . . “ 

One week later - on the very day Thelma was born - came Chaplin’s second picture: a half-real short entitled “Kid Auto Races at Venice.” In this picture, Chaplin somehow managed to throw together the costume that would almost immediately make him the best-known, most beloved character on planet earth.  In this split-reel film (the other half being an educational short called Olives and Their Oil), Charlie, a stranger from “Who Knows Where,” makes his  first appearance as “The Tramp.”  He laughs with the children at the auto race, mimics them, and flies into rages which soon pass. Already, reviewers sensed that this as yet unnamed actor was someone very, very special:  the reviewer for The Cinema wrote “Kid Auto Races struck us as about the funniest film we have ever seen.  When we subsequently saw Chaplin in more ambitious efforts, our opinion that the Keystone Company had made the capture of their career is strengthened.  Chaplin is a born screen comedian; he does things we have never seen done on the screen before.” 

“Kid Auto Races at Venice” (February 8, 1914)

By May 13, of that year, Chaplin had made an additional dozen pictures for Keystone.  On May 4, 1914, Keystone released the first film written, directed by - and starring - Charles Chaplin: “Caught in the Rain.” Within 3 months, “The Little Fellow” - as Chaplin would forever after refer to him - had learned just about everything he would ever need to know about the art/business of cinema.  He would never entrust any aspect of a Chaplin film to anyone else for the rest of his career.  By the time Caught in the Rain hit the theaters, his initial director at Keystone, Henry "Pathé", Lehrman had left Mack Sennett, understanding full well that Chaplin already knew far, far more about the art of cinema than the Ukraine-born Lerhman (1881-1946) could ever hope to know.  Within two more years, Chaplin (whom Sennett paid $150.00 per week in 1914), would be  making $10,000 per week (plus a $150,000.00 signing bonus) for a contract to write, direct and star in films for Mutual.  Within another year, he would be making more than $ 1 million a per as a founder and major stockholder of United Artists.  (n.b. In 1919, upon hearing that Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and the revered director D.W. Griffith had gone into business for themselves forming a company they called “United Artists"  in order to protect their work and control their careers, Richard Rowland, then head of Metro Studios, famously remarked that "the lunatics have taken over the asylum".  That’s where this witty bon mot came from.)

After making “The Kid” (Chaplin’s full-length picture for U.A., he would take more and more time between pictures, turning out such immortal classics as “The Gold Rush,” “The Circus,” “City Lights,” “Modern Times,” “The Great Dictator” and “Limelight,” among others.  Over the years, reviewers, while frequently castigating and finding fault with his politics (decidedly progressive) and personal life (he had a penchant for marrying younger women) never ceased to acknowledge his God-given brilliance as a filmmaker.  

On occasion, I would chat with Selma about Chaplin, whom she considered a consummate genius. She fully understood that to be an artistic genius did not necessitate being either a saint or a paragon of virtue.  Without question, Sir Charles Chaplin left an indelible legacy as a cinematic artist, world-class director, peerless composer, first-rate writer and clown.  I hope that the next generation will come to understand that Chaplin was and is to cinema  what the Beatles were, are and ever shall be to Rock ‘n Roll, and Dickens to literature: the best there ever has been.  And unlike just about any other person in the history of the so-called “Seven Arts” (Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Literature, Music, Performing and Film) Chaplin was the only whose brilliance was universally proclaimed on day one - February 2, 1914 - a mere 144 hours before my friend Selma’s birth.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone 

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

Baby Peggy: The Last Silent Star

Long before Shirley Temple, arguably Hollywood’s greatest and most talented child star; even before “The Jackies” - Cooper and Coogan, there was Peggy Jean Montgomery . . . known to the world as “Baby Peggy.” Born in San Diego, California on October 29, 1918, Baby Peggy’s father Jack worked as a cowboy before entering the movie business as a stunt man and stand-in for the great Tom Mix. At 19 months, Peggy was “discovered” while visiting her father at Century Studios, located in Hollywood at 6101 Sunset Blvd. A director named Fred Hibbard (neé Moishe Fishbach) cast her in a short (“Brownie’s Little Venus”) alongside “Brownie the Wonder Dog.” When it proved to be a success, she was signed to a long-term contract. From 1921 to 1924 Peggy appeared in nearly 150 comedy shorts for Century. These films, the vast majority of which are now lost, often parodied popular films of the day with Peggy satirizing popular stars of the day. In 1923, Peggy began to appear in dramatic features for Universal Studios. These films were “A” pictures, dubbed “Universal Jewels,” the studio’s designation for its top-flight productions. Baby Peggy became so popular that even before moving on to Universal, she was receiving more than 1.2 million fan letters a year. She had 5 full-time secretaries who did nothing but send autographed photos to her legions of fans.

In addition to her films - the most famous of which was 1924’s “Captain January” - remade a dozen years later starring Shirley Temple - she had a line of dolls, dresses, books, sheet music, stuffed animals and even milk. Universal sent her on national promotional tours. In 1924 she served as “mascot” for the Democratic National Convention and was photographed standing next to then-New York Gubernatorial candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Before turning 5 she was earning more than $30,000 a week, 52 weeks a year.  Sadly, Baby Peggy’s parents - like those of Jackie Coogan, who had shot to international fame at age 6 starring opposite Charles Chaplin in the 1921 feature film The Kid - Peggy’s spent virtually every penny their daughter earned, putting virtually nothing away for the family’s breadwinner.  

Play Captain  January”

(When Jackie Coogan became old enough to control his own finances, he learned, to his horror, that his parents had, like Baby Peggy’s parents, spent almost every penny of the millions their children had earned during their time on the silver screen. Coogan learned, much to his astonished chagrin, that his parents had purchased mansions, jewels, employed a coterie of servants and invested in a Rolls Royce dealership, leaving their son with virtually nothing. Coogan fought back, hiring a lawyer and eventually having enacted into law The so-called “Coogan Law,” which forced parents of children who were actors to put aside a minimum of 15% of their gross earnings into sheltered accounts. Moreover, no child could be employed until the parent(s) had given certified proof of an account opened specifically for that purpose. That law is still on the books today . . .

In 1925, the 7 year old’s career came to a sudden and screeching halt when her father (who also served as her manager) cancelled her contract with Universal Pictures over a salary dispute.  As a result, Peggy was essentially blacklisted from the industry. Peggy was somewhat successful in vaudeville, which paid her but a fraction of what she had been earning in films.  After playing a couple of small uncredited parts in pictures made in the mid- to late-1930s, her performing career came to an end - much to her parent’s dismay and Peggy’s relief.  For like many child stars, it was not something she enjoyed . . . much less understood.  As Peggy explained to an interviewer many, many years later:

“I remember when I was 4, I was in bed at night and I was thinking how I was always aware that people who were my fans loved that little girl on the screen. But it wasn't me. That wasn't who I was. The real me was the little girl I went to bed with every night.  I remember reading something Jackie Coogan told a reporter about the days after his star had faded: ‘If I went into a restaurant and I was not surrounded by people asking for my autograph, I felt alone and unwanted.’  When I read (Coogan) saying that, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Anything that came as praise, he couldn't deal with it. He couldn't accept it. He was waiting for that child, Jackie, to come back. The real identity that he had, he suppressed.”

Fortunately for Baby Peggy, she chose that ‘second child’ - the identify of the real Peggy Jean Montgomery.  In another interview, Peggy (by then long known as “Diana Serra Cary”) said “Later, I made peace with her [Baby Peggy]. That's what every child actor should do. I'm so grateful I made that choice.

Cary would go on to become a well-respected freelance writer, the author of the memoir Whatever Happened to Baby Peggy? a fascinating look at the Hollywood her father knew (The Hollywood Posse: The Story of a Gallant Band of Horsemen Who Made Movie History), a well-received biography (Jackie Coogan: The World’s Boy King: A Biography of Hollywood's Legendary Child Star) and a seminal work about the “Hollywood Child Star Era” (Hollywood’s Children: An Inside Account of the Child Star Era.)  Unlike almost every child star whose career (and in many instances, their very lives) fell apart when they reached a certain age, Baby Peggy/Diana Serra Cary lived to be 101; she died less than a month ago in Gustine, California on February 24, 2020.  And, as a gift to herself, she celebrated her 99th birthday by publishing her first  - and only - novel, The Drowning of the Moon,  “a vast panoramic novel whose major characters are drawn from the aristocracy of 18th-century Mexico.”

For all the supposed glitz, glamour and fame that comes with being a successful actor, there is also a ton-and-a-half of heartache, insecurity and utter rejection.  If there is one thing I’ve learned growing up around actors, writers, musicians and the like, its that once the curtain goes down or the lights go  dim, you’re back to square one.  Talent, looks, intelligence and luck are certainly important.  The most telling ingredients, however, are sell-knowledge and the ability to accept rejection.  Baby Peggy certainly had these latter  qualities where so many, many other child  actors did not.  Perhaps that is why she succeeded so grandly at such an early age, had an enormously successful career which lasted only 5 or 6 years, and then went on to live an even more highly successful and gratifying life for an additional 95 years.  She is the last of the  silent  movie actors . . . she who at one time was one of the very best.

Copyright, ©2020 Kurt F. Stone

DeMille X 2: The Ten Commandments (1923 & 1956)

In Hollywood, remaking classic movies more than once has a long and venerable history.  Consider that such classics as “The Mark of Zorro,” “The Prisoner of Zenda,” “A Star is Born,” “Huckleberry Finn,” and “Stella Dallas” have all been made more than once – and using the same title.  Occasionally, a film will be remade under a different title, such as “The Shop around the Corner” (1940) morphing into a 1949 musical called “In the Good Old Summer Time. Then there is 1939’s “Love Affair,” starring Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne being remade under the same title by Warren Beatty in 1994, and also filmed as “An Affair to Remember” (starring Cary Grant and Debra Kerr) in 1957 and “Sleepless in Seattle,” (starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan) in 1993.

It is indeed rare when a director will remake a movie he’s already shot. In 1933, the young Frank Capra turned a Damon Runyon short story called “Madam La Gimp” into the hit film “Lady for a Day” starring Warren William and May Robson. 28 years later, in what would turn out to be the last film he ever directed, Capra remade the film as “Pocketful of Miracles,” starring Bette Davis and Glenn Ford.  Rarest of all is when a director will remake one of his pictures using the same title.  Such is the case with Cecil B. DeMille, who both directed and produced The Ten Commandments twice: in 1923 and then, 32 years later, in 1956 .Both were blockbusters; both were immensely profitable; both bore the unmistakable fingerprints of DeMille whose genius lay not so much in directing films as in being a master-level showman.

It was DeMille’s first big biblical feature, and it forever changed the direction of his career and his legacy as a director.

Prior to 1923, DeMille had become known for sex and society films with titles like Old Wives for New (1918), Don’t Change Your Husband (1919), and Why Change Your Wife? (1920). A particular DeMille trademark was scenes involving naked women in bathtubs. So when he held a contest in 1922 for fans to name the theme of his next film, it was a bit of a surprise when he chose the suggestion, “If you break the Ten Commandments—they will break you” as the guiding quote for his new epic. Many wondered if DeMille was the proper director to create a film about a scriptural story held sacred by both Jews and Christians.

In order to drive home the point of the continuing importance of the Decalogue, DeMille and his scenarist, Jeanie MacPherson created a two-part story in which the Israelite Exodus acts as a frame for a modern morality tale about two brothers, their pious mother, and their differing views on the relevance of the Commandments in the Roaring Twenties.

In a 90-minute feature, this meant DeMille had no time to spare, with about 45 minutes to tell the story of the Exodus and Moses’ receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. So the 1923 version is missing many classic scenes from the 1956 film, like the basket on the Nile, the burning bush, and Moses’ discovery of his Hebrew origins. (Not to mention the love triangle between Moses, Rameses, and the throne princess Nefretiri.) The story picks up at the plagues and jumps quickly to the Exodus and the parting of the Red Sea.

Theodore Roberts plays Moses, locking horns with Charles De Rouchfort as Pharaoh. At age 60, Roberts plays a considerably older prophet with a long Father Time beard, but still pulls off a dynamic performance. DeRochefort is beefy and formidable, but possesses none of the Oriental androgyny and cold arrogance of Yul Brynner. In this version Moses’ sister Miriam (Estelle Taylor) conspires with Dathan( Lawson Butt to build the golden calf—an unfair narrative invention which negates Miriam’s role as a woman-hero of the Old Testament. In the orgy scene, DeMille lets loose his lady-in-the-bathtub fantasies, filming Miriam writhing on the calf idol as the Israelites descend into graphic decadence.

The outdoor scenes in “Egypt” were filmed on a massive set built on the Guadalupe-Nipomo dunes(18)about 80 miles north of Santa Barbara County. For the weeks of filming on the California coast, DeMille constructed a tent encampment of 3500 actors, technicians, and extras, divided into 14 companies of men and 7 companies of women, and governed by strict rules against alcohol, gambling, fraternizing, and coarse language. Among the extras were 225 Orthodox Jews, hired to “look like their ancestors.”  DeMille, who himself was the son of a Jewish mother – the British Mathilda Samuel – thought the Orthodox Jews would make “the most authentic Israelites.”  Hollywood legend has it that on their first day on set, the extras were forced to fast because the commissary served ham for dinner.

DeMille’s exterior set for the Pharaoh’s city was 750 feet wide by 109 feet high, and included an avenue of 21 plaster sphinxes. He ordered 250 chariots for the chase scene to the “Red Sea,” along with the horses to pull them, and stables to include 5,000 donkeys, sheep, goats, and camels.

DeMille’s enormous ancient Egypt sets has become a Hollywood legend.  The construction of four 35-foot-tall statues of the Pharoah Ramses, 21 five-ton sphinxes, and city walls over 120 feet high was all constructed on the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes. When filming ended DeMille simply had this entire Egyptian city set bulldozed and buried. In DeMille’s autobiography he stated:

“If 1,000 years from now, archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe, I hope that they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization extended all the way to the Pacific Coast of North America.” – “The Autobiography of Cecil B.

The cost of shooting the film quickly spiraled out of control, nearly causing Paramount to pull funding from the film. One desperate missive from producer Adolph Zukor in Los Angeles was sent to “Camp DeMille” by telegraph:

“C.B.—You have lost your mind. Stop filming and return to Los Angeles at once.—A.Z.”

The Ten Commandments was the first studio film to use Technicolor. In order to get in on DeMille’s epic, Technicolor(23) offered to shoot sections of the Exodus scene alongside the regular black and white cameras for free. If DeMille didn’t like the footage, he didn’t have to use it. The Technicolor footage was edited into the mostly black and white film, along with traditional toned tinting and the Handschliegl process of hand-coloring elements of a scene frame-by-frame.

The special effects of the fiery pillar and the parting of the Red Sea are enjoyable for their low-tech innovation. The “pillar” of fire was more of a curtain – actual flames superimposed on the screen through double exposure. The parting of the Red Sea was accomplished by use of molded gelatin set on top of a metal table, melted by gas jets. Running the film in reverse in fast motion achieved the sense of the waters parting and standing at jiggling attention. Certain low-budget effects and anachronisms, like the Children of Israel holding staffs with Stars of David (King David didn’t come along until centuries later) and toy horses and chariots sinking in a shallow tub of water after being “drowned” in the Red Sea, only add to the charm of the feature.

Make no mistake, however, this spectacular telling of a biblical narrative was like nothing anyone had ever seen at the time. According to reports of the New York premiere in the Times, the audience applauded at the parting of the Jell-O sea. The Hollywood opening, held, fittingly, in Grauman’s Egyptian Theater, complete with a Vaudeville-style live prologue, “A Night in Pharaoh’s Palace” must have only added to the spectacle.

With false modesty, DeMille dismissed the film’s unheard-of cost of 1.5 million as the “cheapest picture that was ever made.” As he said in a December 23, 1923 article in the New York Times:

“This spectacle will show people that we have an obligation to the public and that motion pictures can be more than mere stories […] The reason for the spectacle in ‘The Ten Commandments’ is to bring force to the picture […] The idea of the spectacle as it is presented is worth a million.”

Then there is the second part of the movie: the modern tale.  This part shows the usefulness of the Ten Commandments in modern life, based off a story of two brothers fighting for the love of one woman.

 John MacTavish (Richard Dix), Dan MacTavish (Rod La Roque) and a waif of the streets Leatrice Joy whom the MacTavishes have taken in.  Dix, a carpenter, is much under the influence of his Bible-reading mother, (played by Edythe Chapman), but La Roque, who worships the golden calf of quick millions, decides to leave the religious atmosphere of her house, taking Miss Joy with him as his wife. Sally Lung, played by Nita Naldi and described as a “Eurasian adventuress,” wheedles costly baubles from Dan MacTavish, who has grown rich and neglectful of his wife, Miss Joy.  Only the audience knows that Miss Naldi has escaped from the leper colony at Molokai.

 John MacTavish tells his brother Dan that the sustaining fibers he intends to use in constructing a new cathedral are shoddy, but the latter scoffs. When Mother MacTavish visits the new cathedral, it collapses upon her and kills her.

Meanwhile, Dan, who has contracted leprosy from Miss Lung, shoots her and flees.  Temporarily hidden from the police in his wife’s bed, Dan is later killed in a speedboat accident as he races for the Mexican border.  The repentant Miss Joy is lectured by John MacTavish on the folly of breaking the Commandments and worshiping the Golden Calf.  She learns her lesson and the film ends with the two embracing atop a building he is constructing.  Fade Out . . .

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The 1956 version, of course, consisted of only one story.  In many ways, DeMille used this movie to spread an anti-Communist message. In an extraordinary gesture left out of the television version, when the curtains parted, DeMille himself appeared on the screen. "The theme of this picture is whether men ought to be ruled by God's law or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator like Rameses. Are men the property of the state, or are they free souls under God? The same battle continues throughout the world today." In the midst of the Cold War, DeMille's message was clear: Moses represented the United States; the pharaoh represented the Soviet Union. To drive home his point, DeMille cast mostly Americans as the Israelites and mostly Europeans as the Egyptians.

Politics even entered the matter of the Ten Plagues. DeMille depicted three: turning the water into blood, hail, and the killing of the first-born sons. For the blood, he used a garden hose with dyed water. For the hail, mothballs were considered too fragile, so he used popcorn. The tenth plague was often portrayed as an angel with a bloody knife, but DeMille thought the image wasn't scary enough. He chose a green fog that swooped down out of the sky. In the age of duck-and-cover drills, the fog was meant to evoke a nuclear cloud.

As part of his plan to spread biblical values, DeMille persuaded Paramount to pay for granite monoliths of the Ten Commandments to be placed in public squares across the country. Over 4,000 were made. One of these monuments, in Austin, Texas, became the basis for the Supreme Court decision in 2005 that allowed the Ten Commandments on public property if they had a secular purpose. A publicity stunt for The Ten Commandments became the basis of landmark U.S. law.

De Mille put together a first-class cast

Charlton Heston, who had previously worked for DeMille in The Greatest Show on Earth, won the part of Moses after he impressed DeMille (at an audition) with his knowledge of ancient Egypt. Interestingly enough, though Moses most likely lived sometime in the early New Kingdom, it was Old Kingdom Egyptian facts Heston used at his audition that won him his legendary role. Heston's newborn son, Fraser (born February 12, 1955), appeared as the infant Moses and was three months old during filming.

The part of Nefretiri, the Egyptian throne princess, was considered "the most sought after role of the year" in 1954. Ann Blyth, Vanessa Brown, Joan Evans, Rhonda Fleming, Colleen Gray, Jane Griffiths, Audrey Hepburn, Jean Marie, Vivien Leigh, Jane Russell, and Joan Taylor were considered for the part. DeMille liked Audrey Hepburn but dismissed her because of her figure, which was considered too slim for the character's Egyptian gowns. Anne Baxter (who was considered for the part of Moses' wife) was cast in the role.

Judith Ames, Anne Bancroft, Anne Baxter, Shirley Booth, Diane Brewster, Peggie Castle, June Clayworth, Linda Darnell, Laura Elliot, Rhonda Fleming, Rita Gam, Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Green, Barbara Hale, Allison Hayes, Frances Lansing, Patricia Neal, Marie Palmer, Jean Peters, Ruth Roman, Barbara Rush, and Elizabeth Sellers were considered for the part of Sephora.[17] Grace Kelly, DeMille's first choice, was unavailable.[17] DeMille was "very much impressed" with Yvonne De Carlo's(39) performance as a "saintly type of woman" in MGM's Sombrero.[18][19] He "sensed in her a depth, an emotional power, a womanly strength which the part of Sephora needed and which she gave it."[20] Sephora is the Douay–Rheims version of the name of Zipporah.

Merle Oberon and Claudette Colbert were considered for the role of Bithiah before DeMille chose Jayne Meadows (who declined) and finally cast Nina Foch (40), on the suggestion of Henry Wilcoxon, who had worked with her in Scaramouche.

For the role of Memnet(41),Flora Robson was considered and Bette Davis was interviewed (DeMille's casting journal also notes Marjorie Rambeau and Marie Windsor)[23] but DeMille chose Judith Anderson after screening Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca.)

DeMille was reluctant to cast anyone who had appeared in 20th Century Fox' The Egyptian,[24] a rival production at the time. Several exceptions to this are the casting of John Carradine and Mimi Gibson (in credited supporting roles) and Michael Ansara and Peter Coe (in uncredited minor roles), who appeared in both films.

For other major roles, DeMille cast Yul Brynner as Rameses, Debra Paget as Lilia, Sir Cedrick Hardwicke as Sethi, John Derek as Joshua, Edward G. Robinson as Dathan, Douglas Dumbrille as Jannes, Vincent Price as Baka, and Martha Scott as Yochabel.

There were, for the time, some spectacular special effects. The illusion of the Red Sea parting was achieved by large "dump tanks" that were flooded, then the film was shown in reverse. The two frothing walls of water were created by water dumped constantly into "catch basin areas" then the foaming, churning water was visually manipulated and used sideways for the walls of water. A gelatin substance was added to the water in the tanks to give it more of a sea water consistency. Although the dump tanks have long since been removed, the catch basin section of this tank still exists today on the Paramount lot, directly in front of the exterior sky backdrop, in the central portion of the studio. It can still be flooded for water scenes, but when not being used in a production, it is an extension of a parking lot.

As with the 1923 film, the sets(52) for this production were also immense(53).Remember, even the most intimate scene in a movie has anywhere between 35 and 50 people standing behind the camera and around the set.  It is anything but intimate.The chief of the special effects department,William Sapp was not involved with creating the burning bush; instead it was handled by one of his assistants. Sapp was critical of the result, pointing out that it was not a "burning" bush at all, but a glowing one. He claimed had he crafted the bush it would have burned on-camera. For the rest of his career in Hollywood, Sapp was bitter about that effect.

The Infant Moses was played by Charlton Heston’s 3-month old son Fraser Clarke Heston.  Now 65 years old, this is the only film in which Fraser appeared on screen.  He has gone on to have a fairly successful career as a producer/director, and has been married to the same woman for 40 years . . . rare by Hollywood standards.

A few factoids:

1, 644 publications referred to by Henry Noerdlinger in research for the script. These sources included: the Midrash Rabbah, an ancient compilation of rabbinic commentaries; the Qur'an; Philo's "Life of Moses;" and the writings of Josephus and Eusebius.

Five years in the making: 1951-1956

161 days of production: 44 days in Egypt.

One year in post-production, editing special effects; editors worked 16-hour days, seven days a week.

5,000 camels, 5,000 water buffalo, about 4,000 oxen, 2,000 geese and 2,000 ducks were used during the Egypt shoot.

8,000 to 14,000 extras were used in the movie.

The Exodus from Egypt was shot in three 10-minute takes, each using one reel of negative film; it took two hours to reassemble all the extras back to the starting point after each take.

200,000 gallons of water a day used on location in Egypt; wells were drilled on the site.

12 of Paramount's 18 sound stages were used.

A giant 200,000-cubic-foot pool was built in the middle of the Paramount parking lot, with 12 smaller tanks on either side. They sequentially released a total of 360,000 gallons of water to create the parting of the Red Sea sequence.

25,000 feet of film was shot using four specially made VistaVision cameras.

DeMille was 73 years old when they shot on location in Egypt. He lost 21 pounds during that shoot. He was 75 when the movie finally premiered. He suffered two heart attacks during the making of "The Ten Commandments."

$13.2 million to make. Initial box offices receipts were $64 million.

The movie was previewed in only one location, Salt Lake City, in August 1956.

The Ten Commandments received 7 Oscar nominations: for best picture, best color cinematography, best art/set direction in color, costume design, editing and sound.  Despite all the nominations, it received but a single Oscar: for best special effects.  (The Best Picture Oscar went to Michael Todd’s “Around the World in Eighty Days”)

DeMille was 73 years old when undertook the enormous responsibility of both directing and producing the Ten Commandments.  He would continue working on the picture for more than 2 years, He suffered two heart attack during filming, and yet was only away from the set for 3 days.  It would turn out to be the last picture he directed.  He died two years later, on January 21, 1959, having created what at the time was the second most successful motion picture in history.

"West Side Story" - Shakespeare Meets Bernstein and Robbins . . . and Spielberg Too

Without a doubt, the 1961 production of West Side Story is one of the all-time great movie musicals.  Winner of an incredible 10 Academy Awards, it represents one of the most unique artistic amalgamations in the history of both Broadway and Hollywood.  Based in part on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, it blends the musical genius of Leonard Bernstein, and choreographic brilliance of Jerome Robbins all under the watchful eye of Robert Wise, who directed a first-class script by Ernest Lehman and lyrics by one of the century’s truly great talents, the then 30-year old Stephen Sondheim.

Of course, even before it was an award-winning film, West Side Story was a tremendously successful Broadway musical.  On Broadway, the original cast included Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence as Tony and Maria, Chita Rivera and Ken LeRoy as Anita and Bernardo, and William Bramley and Arch Johnson as, respectively, Shrank and Office Krupke.  The Broadway production received 6 Tony Award nominations, winning two: Oliver Smith for Scenic Design and Jerome Robbins for Choreography.

When it came to casting the film version of West Side Story, few if any of the original Broadway folk were hired; there is a huge difference between performing on stage and in front of a camera. 

Many theater-goers who'd loved that 1957 Broadway musical were miffed that Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence weren't even considered to reprise the roles of Tony and Maria in the movie. But the producers wanted a cast that looked young enough to be teenagers, and the Broadway leads were both about 30. Nonetheless, while they ended up casting two 23-year-olds in the leads, most of the gangbangers and gals they hired were indeed close to 30.

   From the perspective of nearly 60 years, it is hard to believe that Elvis Presley was approached to play Tony.  However, Col. Tom Parker, Presley’s agent and alter-ego turned the studio down, favoring the anodyne musicals his client was already making over one that would have had him wielding a switchblade. (Though he'd already played a street kid driven to violence in such movies as 'Jailhouse Rock' and 'King Creole.'15) If Elvis had done the movie, he'd have ended up playing opposite Natalie Wood, with whom he’d engaged in a torrid affair in the mid-1950s.

Others who almost (16) played Tony: Marlon Brando & Tab Hunter, Anthony Perkins & Russ Tamblyn, Burt Reynolds & Troy Donahue, Bobby Darin & Richard Chamberlain, Dennis Hopper and Gary Lockwood. Hunter (age 30), Reynolds (26) and Chamberlain (26) were all considered too old. The versatile Darin was too busy. Brando wanted to do it but figured that, at 34, he was way too old. Tamblyn, of course, ended up with the role of Jets leader Riff. Warren Beatty was co-director Robert Wise's first choice, and he even tested with his then lover/'Splendor in the Grass' co-star Wood. Ultimately, the filmmakers went with the little-known 23-year old Richard Beymer.

Then there was the question of who was going to play Maria. Among the actresses considered for the part were Audrey Hepburn and Barbara Luna, Jill St. John and Valery Harper, Diane Baker, Elizabeth Ashley and Suzanne Pleshette. Hepburn dropped out when she became pregnant.

Natalie Wood really wanted to do 'West Side Story,' but she knew if she turned down Warner Bros. forthcoming melodrama Parrish, set to star Claudette Colbert, Troy Donahue and Karl Malden, studio chief Jack Warner would never loan her to the rival United Artists. So she faked a bout of tonsillitis. That trick got her out of 'Parrish,' but it backfired when she contracted a serious case of pneumonia and almost had to drop out of 'West Side Story' as well. (Her part in Parrish went to Connie Stevens. Fortunately, Wood recovered in time to make West Side Story. (Pneumonia also struck cast member Eliot Feld, who played Baby John, during the New York shoot.) Feld was one of several veterans of the Broadway production who landed roles in the film.

Stefanie Powers, then going by the stage name Taffy Paul, was hired as a chorus dancer but had to drop out because she was underage and would have required an on-set tutor and a shorter work schedule. Years later, of course, she would co-star with Wood's husband, Robert Wagner, on TV's 'Hart to Hart.'

“Cool”

The scope of the project was so large that the studio decided to split the workload between two directors. Jerome Robbins, who directed and choreographed the Broadway show was hired despite never having directed a film before. Veteran movie director Robert Wise was hired despite never having made a musical. It was decided that Wise would handle the drama scenes and Robbins the musical numbers. But Robbins' perfectionism began to drag the movie down. His exacting demands and endless rehearsals took a toll on the dancers. ("They didn't dance out of joy, they danced out of fear," said music supervisor Saul Chaplin.") Soon the movie was behind schedule and $300,000 over budget. Wise defended Robbins, but he was soon asked to finish the movie by himself. Robbins' choreography remained, but the only completed numbers he shot that remain in the film were the prologue, 'America,' 'Cool,' and 'Something's Coming.'

Robbins worked Wood 16 hours a day, until she begged to be fired from the film. She also wanted Beymer fired, complaining about his lack of singing and dancing chops (even though her song-and-dance skills were - when all was said  and done -  just as limited). Eventually, she figured out how to get along with both Robbins and Beymer, while the directors figured out how to shoot around her dance limitations.

As for the stars' vocal limitations, most fans know that Wood's singing voice was dubbed by Marni Nixon (who would do the same for Audrey Hepburn three years later in 'My Fair Lady'). Wood herself didn't know, however. She had assumed her own singing voice would be used, at least for the lower-register parts, and didn't learn she'd be dubbed until the shoot was over. Beymer was dubbed by Jimmy Bryant.

There was other vocal doubling going on as well. Tucker Smith (“Ice”) also sang Tamblyn's part in 'The Jet Song,' though Tamblyn's own voice is heard during 'Gee, Officer Krupke' and 'Quintet.'The stage lyrics for the song "Gee, Officer Krupke" are "My father is a bastard, my ma's an s.o.b. My grandpa's always plastered..." The lyrics had to be changed for the movie to: "My daddy beats my mommy, my mommy clobbers me, my grandpa is a commie..." Also, the stage lyric was, "Dear kindly social worker, they say go earn a buck, like be a soda jerker, which means like be a schmuck." For the film, the lines were changed to "Dear kindly social worker, they say go get a job, like be a soda jerker, which means I'd be a slob." Remember. the movie was produced in the last days of the movie code when absolute Puritanism still held sway over the industry.

 George Chakiris was the only one of the main characters to not be dubbed. This was because he had no hard solo songs to sing.

 As Anita (Bernardo's sister and Maria's confidante), Rita Moreno sang on 'America,' but Betty Wand  was hired to dub her lower notes on 'A Boy Like That.' On the day the vocals for 'Quintet' were recorded, however, both Moreno and Ward were sick, so Marni Nixon stepped in, singing for both Anita and Maria. So on film, the song was really a quartet. For her work dubbing Moreno's vocals, Ward went uncredited on the album. She sued the film's producers and the CBS record label for $60,000 in damages. The suit was settled out of court.  Marnie Nixon was also denied royalties as well. She finally got some when Bernstein agreed to give her a portion of his percentage.
 

'West Side Story' was the No. 2 box office hit of 1961, behind only Disney's '101 Dalmatians.' The film, which cost $6 million to make, has earned back $43 million at the box office over the course of multiple releases through the years.

In 1962, the film won 10 Oscars, a record for a musical that stands to this day. Among the honors: Best Picture (a prize that went to Wise, as a producer), Best Director (shared by Robbins and Wise, who insisted that his fired collaborator remain credited as co-director), Best Supporting Actor (Chakiris) and Best Supporting Actress (Moreno). The only Oscar it was nominated for that it didn't win was Best Adapted Screenplay (Ernest Lehman). Wise and Robbins were the first pair ever to share a directing award (and the last, until Joel and Ethan Coen won for 2007's 'No Country for Old Men.') Robbins is the only director ever to win an Oscar for his sole feature directing credit; he never directed another film. Wise, however, went on to repeat his feat four years later, winning Best Picture and Best Director for 'The Sound of Music.'

Rita Moreno, the only actual Puerto Rican among the principal cast, became only the second Hispanic performer (after fellow Puerto Rican José Ferrer a decade earlier) to win an Oscar. But it didn't help her career the way she expected. "Ha, ha. I showed them. I didn't make another movie for seven years after winning the Oscar," she recalled in a 2008 interview. "Before 'West Side Story,' I was always offered the stereotypical Latina roles. The Conchitas and Lolitas in westerns. I was always barefoot. It was humiliating, embarrassing stuff. But I did it because there was nothing else. After 'West Side Story,' it was pretty much the same thing. A lot of gang stories." Today, Moreno is one of only 12 people who've won the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) grand slam of competitive entertainment awards and is the one who did it in the shortest span of time (16 years).  The others are Richard Rogers, Helen Hayes, John Gielgud, Audrey Hepburn, Marvin Hamlisch, Jonathan Tunick, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Whoopie Goldberg, Scott Rudin and Robert Lopez.  In addition, Moreno has received the SAG Lifetime Achievement Award.

These days, Russ Tamblyn is better known as the father of Amber Tamblyn, of the 'Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants' movies and TV's 'Joan of Arcadia' and 'House.' Richard Beymer, who most recently played Benjamin Horn in 6 episodes of Twin Peaks (2017), is going on 82 and lives in semi-retirement in his native state, Iowa.  George Chakiris, now 85 years old, made his last movie (Last of the Summer Wine) in 1996 and has been a jewelry designer for over 25 years.  Rumor has it that a movie he appears in (Not to Forget) is in post-production and will make its bow in early 2020. 

Throughout the movie, Natalie Wood wears a bracelet on her left wrist, not for any aesthetic reason, but because she had injured her wrist in the scene of 1949’s The Green Promise when she fell on the bridge that collapsed during the severe rainstorm, causing an unsightly bone protrusion on her wrist. She wore the bracelet to hide the injury. It became her trademark in all of her movies.

Contrary to popular belief, the prologue of West Side Story was not filmed where Lincoln Center is currently located (which is between 62nd and 66th streets). Rather, it was filmed in what is now an area called Lincoln Center Towers - a group of large residential towers - which is north and west of Lincoln Center, stretching between 66th and 69th Streets (filmed on west 68th street to be more specific). The street itself, west 68th between west end avenue and Amsterdam Avenue, no longer exists). This area was condemned and the buildings were in the process of being demolished to make way for Lincoln Center Towers. The demolition of these buildings was delayed so that the filming of these sequences could be completed.

The original stage version of Maria's song "I Feel Pretty" included the lyrics "I feel pretty and witty and bright / And I pity / Any girl who isn't me tonight." In the film this night scene was changed to the daytime, and presumably for this reason, the rhyming words "bright" and "tonight" were changed to "gay" and "today."

Richard Beymer later confessed in an interview that he wasn't happy with how his performance came out, saying that he wanted to play Tony as rougher and tougher, more like an actual street kid who used to run around with a gang starting fights for fun, but Robert Wise made him play Tony as the nicest guy around, which Beymer felt didn't mesh with the character's back story. He also said he had trouble saying some of his lines with a straight face, namely the more romantic lines. He even reportedly walked out on the London premier of the film - even though it ended up being his most famous role.

The stage version was originally planned as a story about a Catholic boy falling in love with a Jewish girl. The working title was "East Side Story.” After a boom of Puerto Rican immigration to New York in the late 1940’s and 50’s, the story was changed, and the show opened on Broadway in 1957 as "West Side Story.” The working title of 'East Side Story' was later used as the title to Mexican-American rapper Kid Frost's second album released in 1992 - with the placement of the 'East Side Story' title reminiscent of the West Side Story movie posters.

In 2010, Stephen Sondheim (who wrote the lyrics) told "Fresh Air" interviewer Terry Gross that while he was writing the stage musical, he originally wanted the show to be the first one in Broadway history to use the words "fuck" and "shit" in its song lyrics. He wanted the end of the song "Gee, Officer Krupke" to be "Gee, Officer Krupke/Fuck you!" (instead of what it became, which is "Gee, Officer Krupke/Krup you!"), and he wanted the lyrics in "The Jets Song" to be "When you're a Jet/If the shit hits the fan" instead of "When you're a Jet/If the spit hits the fan". However, the show's writers were informed that if the Original Cast Album contained those profanities, it would have been illegal to ship the record across state lines. So Sondheim made the substitutions for those words that appear in both the stage show and the movie.

During the Prologue, the Jets take a basketball from two kids and play with it. Before they walk away, Riff throws it back to one of the kids. That kid is Christopher Culkin, father of the Culkin brothers who were in movies of the 1990’s and 2000’s.

With its win of 10 Academy Awards, this became the biggest Oscar-winning musical of all time, beating the record Gigi (1958) set three years before with its nine Oscars.

"Cool" was such a demanding number for the performers, that the actors ritually burned their kneepads upon wrapping the scene.

The song "One Hand, One Heart" was written for the earlier musical "Candide," but later discarded by Leonard Bernstein and revived for "West Side Story."

Robert Wise wanted the film to have a single rising line of tension, with no light moments after the rumble. Therefore, "I Feel Pretty" was moved earlier, and the positions of "Cool" and "Gee, Officer Krupke" were reversed. Those who feel that the sassy, lighthearted tone of "Gee, Officer Krupke" is out of place following the deaths that end the first act prefer the film's ordering of the numbers. The placement of "I Feel Pretty" and "Gee, Officer Krumpke" after the Rumble in the stage version was meant to help cheer people up after the deaths of Bernardo and Riff, as audiences were not used to death occurring in Broadway musicals. This issue is still heatedly debated among the film's fans.

In December of next year, a West Side Story remake will hit the silver screen.  Directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Tony Kushner, this new version stars Ansel Egort as Tony, Rachel Zegler as Maria, Ariana DeBose as Anita, David Alvarez as Bernardo (a far, far less important role than in the original version) and Mike Faist as Riff and Brian d’Arcy James as Officer Krupke (played by Simon Oakland [Isidor Simon Weiss] in the original). And, as a capstone to a long, long career, Rita Moreno will play “Valentina,” a cameo created specifically for the purpose of luring her into the remake.

Now in post-production, this will be Spielberg’s first musical.

Glimpses Behind the Silver Screen: "Some Like It Hot"

   In the spring of 1958, Billy Wilder (Samuel Wilder, aka “The Viennese Pixie”) ran into Jack Lemmon at Dominick’s, a restaurant at
8715 Beverly Blvd, West Hollywood which,  by the way, was the place where lots of people went for “Sunday night suppers. “I have an idea for a picture I would like you to play in,” Wilder said to Lemmon. “Sit down,” said Lemmon.  “I haven’t got time now,” Wilder responded, “but I will tell you what it is about.  It’s about two men on the lam from gangsters, running for their lives, and they dress up in girls’ clothes and join an all-girl orchestra.”

“If anybody else had said that,” Lemmon said after the picture was released to tepid reviews but great, great box office, “I would have run like a jackrabbit.  Go in drag?  Since it was Billy Wilder, I said, ‘Fine, I’ll do it if I’m free to do it, and if I’m not free, I’ll get free.”

Wilder and his writing partner, Iz Diamond (Itek Domnici), had been meeting every day in Billy’s office on the Sam Goldwyn lot since at least the beginning of the year, trying to work out the plot of the farce they wanted to make for their producers, the Mirisch brothers.  It would be based on a 1951 German film, Fanfaren der Liebe (“Fanfares of Love”), a film that neither Wilder nor Diamond liked all that much.  What they didn’t like was the film’s execution. What attracted them, however, was the film’s basic premise: two hungry musicians resort to a series of disguises in order to find work: first they dress as gypsies and join a gypsy band; then they put on blackface for a jazz ensemble; finally, they don dresses, wigs, and makeup and join an all-female orchestra.  As Izzy Diamond later recalled, Fanfaren der Liebe was “heavy-handed and Germanic.  There was a lot of shaving of chests and trying on of wigs.  When one of the musicians is seen sneaking into his room in men’s clothes, the other girls beat up his roommate because ‘she’ has disgraced the honor of the band.”

After ditching two or three incidents from Fanferen der Liebe, Wilder and Diamond had to decide what kind of tone their comedy would take. It wouldn’t be some sort of Teutonic “men in drag,” but rather a lighthearted farce with sexual tension and a lot of dirty jokes – in short, sublime but filthy.  They were concerned about motivation in Fanfaren der Liebe: the two musicians were spurred by hunger, but Wilder and Diamond realized that if poverty were their own characters’ sole incentive, they could just take off the dresses once they had enough to eat and move on in men’s clothes to another gig.  Diamond and Wilder understood precisely what it would take to force American men even to play at being a woman in the 1950s: the threat of death. Diamond killed the second bird with the same stone by suggesting that they make the comedy a period piece; his theory being that “when everybody’s dress looks eccentric, somebody in drag looks no more peculiar than anyone else.” Thus Americans of the repressed 1950s were disguised in Roaring Twenties, Jazz Age clothing.

“The next morning,” Diamond recalled, “Billy came into the office and said, ‘I was driving home last night thinking about what you said, and I think I have the solution: 1929, Chicago, the St Valentine’s Day massacre.’ That was the breakthrough, and suddenly we had a wealth of material to work with – speakeasies, bootleggers, Florida millionaires.  We started writing.”

Some Like it Hot’s casting is the Rashomon of drag comedy.  Everybody has a slightly different tale to tell about who’d be wearing skirts for Billy Wilder.  According to Tony Curtis, United Artists (which distributed the film for the Mirsch Company) originally pushed the idea of casting Bob Hope and Danny Kaye as the two musicians, with Mitzi Gaynor (Francesca Marlene de Czanyi von Gerber, who at age 89, is still performing) in the role of Sugar Kane.  Wilder is said to have rejected all three suggestions, choosing instead to sign Curtis (Bernie Schwartz) right off the bat, believing that the dazzlingly handsome actor could play either male role.  Wilder first knew Curtis when he was starring in Houdini for Paramount in 1953.

Tony Curtis was fine as far as UA and Walter Mirisch were concerned, but they still felt strongly that there had to be at least one very big star in this film. Their suggestion: Frank Sinatra.  As I.A.L. (which stands for “International Algebra League”) Diamond recalled, Billy Wilder made a lunch date with Sinatra, but Sinatra didn’t bother to show up, and that was the end of the matter. According to Diamond, too, there was no need for a big star on the order of Sinatra once Marilyn Monroe signed on and filled the bill herself.

Sinatra was more central at the time. And Monroe’s appearance didn’t obviate the need for “Ol’ Blue Eyes” – at least not in the beadier eyes of either Walter Mirisch or United Artists.  In late March, UA’s Arthur Krim was told that the film (still referred to as Fanfares of Love) would start shooting in July and would probably star Sinatra, Curtis, and Monroe. The Mirisches were budgeting Sinatra and Monroe at $200,000 each, plus a quarter of the film’s profits.  (Monroe ultimately got 10% of the gross, which turned out to be slightly over $4 million.) Curtis would get $100,000 against 5% of the gross - over $2 million.  As for Billy Wilder, he’d be getting $300,000 plus 17.5% of the gross, above two times the cost of the negative.  If the film grossed $1 million after the break-even point, Billy’s take went up to 20%. It was a very sweet deal, to say the least.

 Another young actor was also approached, and he remembered Sinatra’s importance as well.  According to Anthony  Perkins, “Billy Wilder stopped by my dressing room [in New York where Perkins was appearing in Look Homeward, Angel] and asked if I’d star in a movie with Frank Sinatra.  I told Billy I’d committed myself to Mel Ferrer for Green Mansions, and couldn’t go back on my word.”  Sinatra was apparently going to play Joe, while Perkins would have been given the Jerry role.  Tony Curtis had similar memories: “It’s you, Marilyn, Sinatra, and Edward G. Robinson and George Raft as the gangsters,” Curtis remembers Wilder telling him.

Wilder and Sinatra were buddies, though the friendship was strained.  For instance, Sinatra supposedly screamed at Wilder over Love in the Afternoon.“He was quite adamant about it,” Wilder remembered – “so vehement that he made my wife cry.  He said he didn’t like the picture because he thought it was immoral for an elderly man to make love in the afternoon to a young girl.” This must have struck Wilder as peculiar, given Sinatra’s own notorious womanizing. Indeed, in 1966, the then 51-year old Sinatra would marry twenty-one-year-old Mia Farrow. Wilder also reported, years after Sinatra stood him up for lunch, that he never cast Sinatra precisely because of the performer’s unreliability: “I’m afraid he would run after the first take – ‘Bye-bye kid, that’s it.  I’m going. I’ve got to see a chick!’  That would drive me crazy.”

Still, Wilder loved the way Sinatra looked and acted on-screen.  In any event, Jack Lemmon landed what started out as the Tony Curtis role, and Curtis took over Sinatra’s.  As for Monroe, Diamond remembered that while he and Billy were still writing their first draft, Billy got a letter from Monroe telling him how fondly she recalled their work together on The Seven Year Itch, (1955) and hoping they’d be able to work together again. This was amusing, given the tsouris he’d endured with her. But as trying as that film had been for Wilder, he’d always loved her performance.  Besides, as Wilder himself put it in 1959, Sugar was “the weakest part, so the trick was to give it the strongest casting.” When Wilder read her a few passages of the script, she agreed to appear in Some Like it Hot. She liked Wilder well enough, and she liked Curtis, too, having been friendly with him when they were both aspiring actors.  Curtis even claimed to have had an affair with her in the early 1950s.

Wilder and Monroe

The relaxed bonhomie between the stars and director dissipated all too quickly. At a 7:00 p.m. dinner party Harold Mirisch threw to welcome Marilyn Monroe back to Hollywood after an absence of two years, Monroe didn’t show up until nearly 11:30. Then her husband, playwright Arthur Miller, put his arms around both Wilder’s and Diamond’s shoulders and patronizingly began to lecture the two literate screenwriters on the essential differences between comedy and tragedy. They rolled their eyes in irritation. Monroe, watching the interaction, became tense.

Jack Lemmon, who claims to have literally fallen off a couch laughing when he first read the script, didn’t yet realize that he’d been cast in the role of a lifetime by a director who would become one of his closest friends and most devoted employers. Wilder knew what Lemmon didn’t: “Within three to four weeks after the start of production,” Wilder reported, “Diamond and I had decided that this was not to be a one shot thing with Jack. We wanted to work with him again.”  Lemmon himself didn’t quite see it.  As he later noted, his girlfriend, Felicia Farr (whom he’d just begun dating and would be married to for nearly 40 years), “kept asking me what I thought of Wilder and I told her, ‘I guess he’s okay’ she’s never let me forget that one.” Wilder described his friend with genuine affection – which is to say with a put-down: “Lemmon had to be an actor.  I doubt he could have done anything else, except play piano in a whorehouse.”

Tony Curtis

Wilder understood quickly, and Lemmon eventually, that the two men could forge a rare kind of bond between director and actor.  Tony Curtis, meanwhile, was able to lend glamour to the character Wilder and Diamond wrote for him, but his persona was essentially foreign to Billy.  He was a pretty boy. Curtis was known for wearing exceptionally tight clothes, some of which he designed himself, all the better to show off his pinup, classic 1950s “veal cake” physique.  As Wilder once said, “Tony’s pants look as though someone dipped him in India ink up to his waist.” One day on the set of Some Like It Hot, Curtis raised a fuss over whether or not his name would or would not appear in the large-size type his contract specified.  He approached Wilder and launched into a lengthy remonstration.  Wilder listened patiently and then slid the knife in: “The trouble with you, Tony, is that you’re only interested in little pants and big billing.”

 With his pants off and his flapper skirts and wig on, Curtis was ill at ease when filming began he walked onto the set markedly discomposed.  Lemmon, however, clomped on to the set waving happily to the crew and introducing himself with “Hi, I’m Daphne!”  “You create a shell and you crawl into it,” is the way he later described it.

 The shells he and Curtis created in Some Like It Hot were designed in part by one of the twentieth-century’s preeminent drag artists, Barbette, whom Billy fondly remembered from his own days in Berlin and Paris, and was lured out of semi-retirement (at Wilder’s behest) to teach Lemmon and Curtis how to effectively transform themselves - not into women, but into drag queens. Wilder flew Barbette in from Texas to train Lemmon and Curtis in the art of female impersonation.  It wasn’t just a matter of seeing to it that their chests were properly shaved, their eyebrows plucked to the correct degree, their hips padded just so.  Barbette’s lessons were those of a performance artist, not a costumer.  She taught them, tried to teach them, how to walk: about how you cross your legs in front of each other slightly, which forces your hips to swing out, subtly but noticeably, with each step.  Tony Curtis was a perfect student as far as Barbette was concerned.  Under her tutelage, Curtis’s Josephine was a model of classic, discreet femininity.  Lemmon, however, couldn’t be taught.  Daphne was a disaster. Lemmon wouldn’t follow Barbette’s rules. 

Throughout the first half of 1958, Wilder and Diamond wrote together on their usual schedule – from 9:00 in the morning to 6:00 in the evening, Wilder having been up for three hours already at the start of his weekday.  When filming began in early September, they continued the same schedule and added evening rewrite sessions as well from 8:30 to 11:00 P.M.  More than any other film to date, this was a Wilder movie that demanded to be written concurrently with its filming.  Drag comedy was dicey, he knew, so he and Diamond saw what worked and what didn’t and developed the screenplay organically on that basis.  David O. Selznick told Billy it was impossible from the start: “You want machine guns and dead bodies and gags in the same picture? Forget about it, Billy.  You’ll never make it work.”  But by growing it slowly and essentially by constructing each piece on its own, he did precisely that.

Along with the sexual drive of this comedy, a certain Judaism emerges in this, the second script Wilder wrote with Diamond; the writers are having fun being themselves.  Listen to the booking agent Sig Poliakoff (played by Billy Grey, born Bill Giventer) on the phone trying to round up some “girl musicians”: “Gladys! Are ya there?  Gladys!” (He hangs up.) Meshuggeneh!  Played a hundred and twelve hours in a marathon dance, how she’s in bed with a nervous collapse!”  When Poliakoff tells Joe and Jerry about a gig, he inflects his declarative statement with the eastern European lilt of a question: “At the University of Illinois they’re having (you should pardon the expression) a St. Valentine’s dance?”  even Geraldine’s line “We spent three years at the Sheboygan Conservatory of Music” sounds like a Catskills routine (or a Columbia Varsity Show written by a Jewish boy from Brooklyn.)

   The final preliminary budget called for a total cost of $2,373,490.  When filming began, Monroe was up to $300,000; Curtis and Lemmon each got $100,000.  Diamond got $60,000, and Wilder $200,000.  Filming began in September 1958 at the Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood – off the corner of Formosa and Melrose, where the Mirisches rented space, and on location at the Hotel Del Coronado near San Diego. United Artists’ Arthur Krim gave the go-ahead but was nonetheless a little worried. This was going to be an expensive picture, and he wanted to protect his company against the big loss he thought Some Like It Hot might incur simply because of its high salaries.  Early on, there was also the problem of the film’s title.  If they wanted to call it Some Like It Hot, they’d need to get a waiver from MCA – the Music Corporation of America – which owned the rights to a 1939 Paramount film of the same title starring Bob Hope.  This turned out to be fairly easy: Wilder was represented by Lou Wasserman, who happened to own MCA.

The script called for a Miami resort Hotel, the Seminole-Ritz, but by the late 1950s, very little was left of the Roaring Twenties Florida, the magnificent old resorts having been pulled down to make room for the rococo gloss of postwar beach development.  Instead, they decided to shoot at the Hotel Del Coronado.  It was perfect: a grand 1887 hotel with turrets, a big veranda, and a wide white beachfront.

(On a personal note: It so happens that the four Stones - Mom, Dad, my “slightly older sister” Erica and yours truly - were in residence at the Hotel Del Coronado during filming. At that time, it was a purely wooden hotel and had a double-Olympic-size swimming pool filled with saltwater. As I recall, it also had a pinball machine or two in the basement.

As fairly typical “Hollywood Brats,” neither Erica nor myself were all that overwhelmed by the stars who were - at least for the nonce - our neighbors. I do recall walking up to actor Joe E. Brown [who played millionaire playboy Osgood Fielding III] and saying to him “I know who you are . . . you’re the man with the big mouth!” He smiled. but, much to my regret did not open his mouth. I became far more impressed with him after my father informed me that Mr. Brown, in addition to being a longtime actor who specialized in comedic baseball films back in the early to mid-thirties, was also general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. To my 10-year old way of looking at the world, THAT made him royalty! I followed him around like a puppy dog, wondering if perhaps he had an autograph of Roberto Clemente or Bill Mazeroski in his pocket. I never found the nerve to ask . . .)

At the Goldwyn studio, filming continued in fits and starts.  Wilder and Diamond were piecing the film together as they went along.  Monroe was characteristically late to arrive in the morning, and when she did show up, she had a tendency to mess up even the simplest of lines. Then a minor catastrophe occurred.  In the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre scene, in which Spats Columbo (George Raft) rubs out the diminutive Toothpick Charlie (George E. Stone - born Gershon Lichtenstein) and his gang before Joe’s and  Jerry’s horrified eyes, Wilder insisted that Raft perform a final indignity upon the bullet-riddled corpse of Toothpick Charlie – namely to kick the toothpick out of Charlie’s mouth.  Raft couldn’t bring himself to kick him so close to his jaw.  Two takes, three takes, five, ten. .  .Wilder was getting frustrated.  It was bad enough that Monroe was constantly requiring multiple takes to speak the simplest of lines.  Now George Raft was using up film stock as well, and Wilder couldn’t take it any longer. Finally, after all his pleading and cajoling failed, Wilder marched over and demonstrated it himself, missed, and kicked Stone right in the head.  The actor had to be rushed to the nearest hospital. 

 Marilyn Monroe was, of course, a bigger problem than any character actor’s broken jaw could possibly have been.  She cost more.  Things didn’t start off badly.  “I want the world to know that Marilyn’s not only on time, she is three hours early,” Wilder told the press when Some Like It Hot went into production in August.  By September, some tension surfaced when Monroe declared that Wilder wanted her to lose weight – eight pounds, to be exact. She refused. “Don’t you want your audience to be able to distinguish me from Tony and Jack?” she claimed to have asked Wilder.  “Besides,” she supposedly said, “my husband likes me plump.”

There are many tales about the number of takes it took for Monroe to get a scene – sometimes consisting of no more than three words – to get it right.

Iz Diamond recalled, “One morning a couple of hundred extras waited on the set while reports kept filtering in on Marilyn’s progress – she was in makeup; now she was in hairdressing; finally, at eleven o’clock, she walked on the stage carrying a copy of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man under her arm.  Without a word of greeting or apology, she crossed to her dressing room and locked herself in.  Billy waited another fifteen minutes, then sent the assistant director to fetch her.  The A.D. knocked on her door and called, ‘We’re ready for you, Miss Monroe.’  From inside came the answer: ‘Drop dead.’”

After each scene, Monroe would call out to her secretary, ‘May! Coffee.’  And May Reis would bring her a thermos bottle.”  It contained not coffee, but vermouth.”

  Every day, Monroe’s acting coach, Paula Strasberg, would seat herself in a place where Monroe could easily see her.  Strasberg earned $1,500 a week to flutter around her neurotic boss, whispering suggestions in her ear and holding a big black umbrella over her head, always urging Monroe to “relax, relax!” 

In the early days of doping out the script, Wilder decided he wanted to have lots of old-time actors who had either played famous gangsters costarred in classic gangster films: Pat O’Brien and James Cagney, Paul Muni and George Raft, as well as Edward G. Robinson. Cagney wasn’t available, although he would star in a Wilder film – (One, Two Three) - in 1961.  Muni, who had just finished filming The Last Angry Man decided to retire.  O’Brien and Raft signed on, and Robinson took home a copy of the script. Wilder wanted him to play “Little Bonaparte. ”It looked like he was set. Then he pulled the rug out from Wilder; he sent Wilder a note saying that under no circumstances would he do the picture. Little Bonaparte would be played instead by Nehemiah Persoff.

Although Robinson didn’t say why, everyone knew what the problem was. It went back seventeen years: a 1941 Warner Bros. picture they’d made together called Manpower, directed by Raoul Walsh.  Turns out that while Raft and Robinson were making Manpower, they both got an itch for the film’s leading lady, Marlene Dietrich.  Raft and Robinson became rivals. There was tension on the set. One day it blew up, and they came to blows. Unfortunately, it was the same day that the publicist had a Life magazine photographer there.  He caught the fistfight.  Life ran the picture.  There wasn’t a thing that Warners could do about it. Robinson vowed he’d never work with Raft again.

In 1958, Wilder either didn’t know about Robinson’s attitude toward Raft or thought he’d get over it. In order to curry favor, Wilder had even hired Edward G. Robinson, Jr. for the tiny part of gangster Johnny Paradise.  When Robinson sr. pulled out, Wilder was furious – and stuck with Robinson, Jr.

Made for $2.9 million, Some Like it Hot earned an amazing $40 million in its first run. Nominated for 10 Academy Awards, it came away with but one: Best Costume Design - Black and White. Today, it is considered to be one of the greatest comedies of all time. In a poll conducted by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 2017, Some Like It Hot was selected as the best comedy of all time in a poll of 253 film critics from 52 countries.

So who remembers Fanfaren der Liebe?

Behind the Silver Screen: The Making of Chaplin's "The Great Dictator"

Quite apart from any particular merits of the film, The Great Dictator remains an unparalleled phenomenon, an epic incident in the history of mankind.  The greatest clown and best-loved personality of his age directly challenged the man who had instigated more evil and human misery than any other in modern – if not all of human – history.

 There was, to begin with, something uncanny in the resemblance between Chaplin and Hitler, representing opposite poles of humanity. And of course the fact that they had been born but 5 days apart in April, 1889. On April 21, 1939, a year and a half before the release of The Great Dictator, an unsigned article in the Spectator noted:

 Providence was in an ironical mood when, fifty years ago, this week, it was ordained that Charles Chaplin and Adolf Hitler should make their entry into the world within four days of each other . . . Each in his own way has expressed the ideas, sentiments, aspirations of the millions of struggling citizens ground between the upper and the lower millstone of society; the date of their birth and the identical little moustache (grotesque intentionally in Mr. Chaplin) they well might have been fixed by nature to betray the common origin of their genius.  For genius each of them undeniably possesses.  Each has mirrored the same reality – the predicament of the ‘little man’ in modern society.  Each is a distorting mirror, the one for good, the other for untold evil.  In Chaplin the little man is a clown, timid, incompetent, infinitely resourceful yet bewildered by a world that has no place for him.  The apple he bites has a worm in it; his trousers, remnants of gentility, trip him up; his cane pretends to a dignity his position is far from justifying; when he pulls a lever it is the wrong one and disaster follows.  He is a heroic figure, but heroic only in the patience and resource with which he receives the blows that fall upon his bowler.  In his actions and loves he emulates the angels.  But in Herr Hitler the angel has become a devil.  The soleless boots have become; the shapeless trousers, riding breeches, the cane, a riding crop; the bowler, a forage Reitstieffeln cap.  The Tramp has become a storm trooper; only the moustache is the same.

 There were even those who believed that Hitler had at first adopted the moustache in a deliberate attempt to suggest a resemblance to the man who had attracted so much love and loyalty in the world.

The famous Jewish short story writer Konrad Bercovici a close friend of Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, brought a plagiarism suit against Chaplin, claiming that he had first proposed that Chaplin should play Hitler in the mid-1930s.  The case was settled, with Chaplin paying Konrad Bercovici $95,000 in 1947. In his autobiography, Chaplin insisted that he had been the sole writer of the movie's script. He came to a settlement, though, because of his "unpopularity in the States at that moment and being under such court pressure, [he] was terrified, not knowing what to expect next."

Bercovici was represented in his plagiarism suit by attorney Louis Nizer . In his book, "My Life in Court," Nizer goes into detail about Bercovici v. Chaplin: "The claim was that Chaplin had approached Bercovici to produce one of his gypsy stories as a motion picture and in the course of those friendly negotiations Bercovici gave him an outline of "The Great Dictator" story about a barber who looks like Hitler and is confused with him. Chaplin denied ever having negotiated for the gypsy story and also denied the rest of the claim...One day, upon my continuous inquiry, Bercovici suddenly had a flash of memory. He recalled that he had met Chaplin in a theater in Hollywood and that Chaplin had pointed out a Russian baritone in the audience whom he thought might play the leading role in the gypsy story. Bercovici believed that they spoke to the singer that evening and that he might possibly be a witness." Nizer tracked down Kushnevitz, the Russian baritone at issue: "He [Kushnevitz] recalled the incident vividly, for this, as he put it, was one of the great moments in his life - the possibility that he would star in a Chaplin picture. Chaplin had called him down the aisle of the theater and had given him his private telephone number. He pulled out a little black book from his back pocket and he still had the number written in it. He was a perfect witness in view of Chaplin's denial of any interest in Bercovici's gypsy story."

 A good many newspaper cartoonists, notably David Low, might equally have claimed the idea as their own; after all, it was inevitable.  Much later Chaplin admitted, ‘Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator; I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis. Hitler, true, turned out to be no laughing matter; but there was nothing light-hearted in Chaplin’s deeper intentions in making the film.  He suffered very real and acute pain and revulsion at the horrors and omens of world politics in the 1930s.  In a 1931 diatribe against the myth of patriotism, he foresaw with dread another war. A Far East tour he undertook in the mid-1930s had made him more alert than most to the perils of the so-called “Marco Polo Bridge Incident” of July 1937 and the escalation of the Sino-Japanese conflict.  Also known as the “Lugou Bridge Incident,” or the “July 7 Incident,” it was a battle between the Republic of China’s National Revolutionary Army and the Imperial Japanese Army, often used as the marker for the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, which occurred between 1937 and 1945.

Chaplin was no less disturbed by events in Spain.  In April 1938 the French film magazine Cinémonde published a translation of a remarkable short story by Chaplin himself, entitled “Rhythme.” It describes the execution of a Spanish loyalist, a popular humorous writer.  The officer in charge of the firing squad was formerly a friend of the condemned man; ‘their divergent views were then friendly, but they had finally provoked the unhappiness and disruption of the whole of Spain.’ Both the officer and the six men of the firing squad privately hope that a reprieve may still come.  Finally, though, the officer must give the rhythmic orders: ‘Attention! . . . Shoulder arms! . . . Present arms! . . . Fire!’ the officer gives the first three orders.  Hurried footsteps are heard: all realize that it is the reprieve.  The officer calls out ‘Stop!’ to his firing squad, but,

   Six men each held a gun.  Six men had been trained through rhythm.  Six men, hearing the shout ‘Stop!’ fired.

   The story at once embodies those fears of seeing men turned into machines which Chaplin had expressed in Modern Times (8), and looks forward to some grim, ironic gags in The Great Dictator.

 There is more evidence of Chaplin’s feelings about Spain in a poem which he scribbled in a folio notebook among some memos on the development of Regency, presumably in the winter of 1936-37.  The poem was quite clearly never meant for publication, or even for other eyes.  It was a private attempt to express his sentiments.

To a dead Loyalist soldier

On the battlefields of Spain

Prone, mangled form,

Your silence speaks your deathless cause,

Of freedom’s dauntless march.

Though treachery befell you on this day

And built its barricades of fear and hate

Triumphant death has cleared the way

Beyond the scrambling of human life

Beyond the pale of imprisoning spears

To let you pass.

There was, he said euphemistically, ‘a good deal of bad behavior in the world’. Feeling as deeply as he did, he felt impelled to do whatever he could to correct it, or at least to focus attention upon it. His only weapon, as he knew, was comedy.  Of course, he had attacked war with comedy in 1918, with his scathing satire Shoulder Arms (that’s Charlie and brother Syd on his right below), in which he had also played a soldier who is mistaken for leader of the Huns . . . except that in this case it was all a dream.

   In the latter part of the 1930s Chaplin was very friendly with the director King Vidor and his family, and it was through the Vidors, sometime in 1938, that he met Tim Durant.  Like Harry Crocker who, for many years, was Chaplin’s personal assistant, Durant was a tall, good-looking patrician, university-educated young man: Chaplin seemed to have a penchant for this type among his friends and assistants.  Durant had the added merits of being sympathetic, amusing, discreet, and very good at tennis.  Through Durant he was introduced into the society of Pebble Beach and Carmel, one hundred miles south of San Francisco.  Chaplin called Pebble Beach ‘the abode of lost souls.’  He was fascinated, charmed and attracted by the collection of California millionaires who still made their homes there, and no less by the abandoned mansions that now lay in decay.  The more Bohemian colony at nearby Carmel, a section of coast much favored by artists and writers, had a different but potent attraction.  He was especially pleased by his meetings there with the famous California poet Robinson Jeffers, who coined the term “inhumanism,” the belief that mankind is too self-centered and too indifferent to the "astonishing beauty of things."

 Tim Durant remembered that at first Chaplin was reluctant to become involved with the Pebble Beach set:

I knew a girl who was married to one of the Crockers in San Francisco, and she heard I was there and called me up and asked me to come over for dinner and bring Charlie.  But Charlie said to me, ‘Listen, Tim, I don’t want to get into this group at all . . .’  I said, ‘Look, Charlie, will you do this just as a personal favour – I don’t ask you to do anything.  Will you just go over and have dinner with them, and we can say honestly that we have to get back and do some work, and you can leave immediately.’

 He said, ‘All right, Tim; but get me out of there, remember; don’t let me spend the evening there.’

 So we went over there.  We walked in and everybody congregated around him, you know, and he was a hero.  He had an audience, and he couldn’t leave – wanted to stay until three o’clock in the morning.  After that he wanted to go out every night, because they accepted him and he entertained them, and we went out all the time.  He wrote many stories – I took notes of stories about the characters there.  He had an idea of making a story about the people there.’

 One of his hosts was D. L. James, who lived in a Spanish-style mansion perched on the cliff-edge in Carmel, one of northern California’s architectural monuments.  (James’ parents actually had him baptized ‘D.L.’ with the idea that he could choose names to suit the initials when he grew up.  In fact, he remained simply ‘D.L.’ though occasionally he intimated that he might consider ‘Dan’ as a first name.) At the James house Chaplin met D.L.’s son Dan, who was then twenty-six, an aspiring writer and ardent Marxist, who was at the time rather unsettled; “My writing was getting nowhere; I was separating from my wife; and I was just then thinking of going to New York.’  They met on several occasions and Dan would hold forth on films and about the war against Fascism.  Chaplin in turn outlined his ideas for a Hitler film.

   When Chaplin returned from Pebble Beach to  Hollywood at the end of the summer, Dan James took a chance and wrote to him saying that he was enthusiastic about the idea of the Hitler film, and would be very happy to be able to work on it in any capacity.  ‘I went on packing my bags for the East, though.’  Somewhat to his surprise a telephone call came from the Chaplin studio a few days later, and he was invited to call and see Alf Reeves, Chaplin’s longtime studio manager.  Reeves warned him that Chaplin was very ‘changeable,’ but that he liked him and was prepared to employ him at a salary of $80 a week, and to put him up at the Beverly Hills Hotel until he could find somewhere to live.  ‘My first evening he took me to  Ciro’s Trocadero Oyster bar; then we dined and he told me the outline of the story.  The next day I went up and started to make notes . . . I think Charlie took me on because of my height, because my family had a castle out here, and because he knew pretty quickly I was a declared Communist, so that my background and political preoccupations would keep me from selling him out for money.’

 For three months James reported daily to Chaplin’s Beverly Hills mansion – known as “Breakaway House” – where he would make notes as Chaplin discussed ideas for the plot and gags.  From time to time James would go to the studio to dictate the notes to Kathleen Prior: the first of these dictation sessions seems to have taken place on October 26, 1938.  During these three months James was able to assess Chaplin’s own political thinking:

 He did not read deeply, but he felt deeply everything that happened.  The end of Modern Times, for instance, reflected perfectly the optimism of the New Deal period; already by 1934 and 1935 he had a sense of that.  He had probably never read Marx, but his conception of the millionaire in City Lights is an exact image for Marx’s conception of the business cycle.  Marx wrote of the madness of the business cycle once it began to roll, the veering from one extreme to another.  Chaplin presents a magnificent metaphor.  Whether he was aware of the social meaning of this I do not know, but he got it.

He had a sixth sense about a lot of things.  In 1927 and 1928, for instance, he began to feel that the stock market was going mad, and he took everything he had and put it into Canadian gold.

Charlie called himself an anarchist.  He was always fascinated with people of the left.  One of the people he wanted to meet was Harry Bridges of the Longshoremen’s Union.  I fixed up a meeting, and they took to each other immediately. 

 Whatever his exact politics, Charlie had a position of revolt against wealth and stuffiness. He had a real feeling for the underdog.  He was certainly a libertarian.  He saw Stalin as a dangerous dictator very early, and I had great difficulty getting him to leave Stalin out of the last speech in The Great Dictator.  He was horrified by the Soviet-German Pact.

 When it came to Hitler it is easy to say, with hindsight, that Chaplin made too light of him.  You have to remember that the film was conceived before Munich, and that Chaplin had undoubtedly had it in his head a couple of years before that.  And the thought then was that this monster was not so awe-inspiring as he appeared.  He was a big phony, and had to be shown up as such.  Of course, by the time the film appeared, France had fallen and we knew much more, so that a lot of the comedy had lost its point.

   The Great Dictator marked an inevitable revolution in Chaplin’s working methods.  This was to be his first dialogue film, and for the first time he was to begin a picture with a complete script.  The old method had been to work out each sequence in turn, alternating periods of story preparation with shooting – changing, selecting and discarding ideas as the work proceeded.  Now these processes had to be transferred to the preparatory period, the work of a definitive script.

   The original and basic premise was the physical resemblance of the Dictator and the little Jew. All the early treatments of the story begin with the return of Jewish soldiers, many maimed, from the war to the ghetto. They are all welcomed back by wives and families, except ‘the little Jew.’  He ‘is alone walking down the ghetto street.  In his hunger for companionship he embraces a lamppost.’

   One early idea was for a flophouse sequence which can be used for the setting of our inflation material. (This may have been suggested by D.W. Griffith’s Isn’t Life Wonderful) The little Jew will return to pay a bill.  The sign will read, ‘Beds, $1,000,000 a night – baths $500,000 extra.’  Someone will send out for a package of cigarettes: ‘You’ll have to carry the money yourself,’ or perhaps the little Jew goes out balancing a huge basket of currency on his head. $10,000,000 for cigars.  The tobacco dealer insists that the money be counted.  It is all in $1.00 bills. 

Never willing to waste a good comedy idea, Chaplin planned to use a flea circus routine . . . something he had been toying with for more than a quarter century. It stayed in through several successive treatments, but was finally abandoned.  Having been frustrated in his efforts to introduce the business into his 1928 picture The Circus, and The Great Dictator, Chaplin would eventually manage to squeeze it into Limelight in 1952.

Chaplin early conceived the idea of two rival dictators competing to upstage one another.  He was to abandon an idea for the Great Dictator’s wife, a role intended for the famous Jewish comedian Fanny Brice.  A scene was sketched out, with a lot of revision in Dan James’ handwriting, indicating the kind of relationship Chaplin had in mind, and suggests that it might have encountered serious problems with the Breen Office and other censorship groups:

SCENE: Mrs. Hinkle alone – boredom and sex starvation with Freudian fruit symbols.  Enter Hinkle from speech.  She’s mad at him – orders him about.  He’s preoccupied about matters of State.

 Mrs:   I’m a woman.  I need affection, and all you think about is the State! THE STATE! What kind of state do you think I’m in?

Hinkle:     You’ve made me come to myself. I’m not getting any younger. Sometimes I wonder . . .

Mrs:     Life is so short and these moments are so rare . . . Remember, Hinkle, I did everything for you.  I even had an operation . . . on my nose.  If you don’t pay more attention to me I’ll tell the whole world I’m Jewish!

Hinkle:       Shhh!

Fanny:        And I’m not so sure you aren’t Jewish too.  We’re having gefilte fish for dinner.

Hinkle:       Quiet! Quiet!

Fanny:        Last night I dreamt about blimps . . .

Hinkle:       Blimps?

Fanny:       Yes, I dreamt we captured Paris in a big blimp and we went right through the Arc de Triomphe. And then I dreamed about a city full of Washington monuments.

                    (She presses grapes in his mouth, plays with a banana.

  By December 13, 1938, Chaplin had decided on much of the story, including the idea of the ending. Charlie and the father of the Girl from the ghetto with whom he has fallen in love are put in a concentration camp.  They escape, and on the road run into Hinkle’s troops, preparing to invade the neighboring country of Ostrich (which would, in the final cut, become Osterlich, the real last name [although spelled differently] of Fred Astaire). The general in command mistakes Charlie for Hinkle.  Hinkle himself, out shooting ducks while trying to make up his mind about the invasion, is meanwhile mistaken for Charlie and thrown into prison.

Charlie and the Girl’s father are carried along on the invasion of Ostrich and finally find themselves in the palace square of Vanilla, the capital.

Hinkle’s soldiers are drawn up before the platform from which the conqueror is about to speak.  Charlie walks out on it.  He can’t say a word.  The Girl’s father is at his shoulder. ‘You’ve got to talk now! It’s our only chance! For G-d’s sake, say something.’ Herring (Hinkle’s P.M.) first addresses the crown – and through microphones the whole world, which is listening in, he calls for an end to democracies. He introduces Hinkle, the new conqueror, who must be obeyed or else. In the crowd we show dozens of Ostrich patriots ready to kill Hinkle.  Charlie steps forward. He begins – slowly – scared to death.  But his words give him power. As he goes on, the clown turns into the prophet. [The following video capture - long known as the “Look Up Hannah speech” - is, in my humble opinion, great bit of writing and acting in the history of motion pictures.)

By the middle of January 1939 Chaplin clearly felt confident with his story, though it was to undergo much subsequent revision.  Dan James was set to adapt it into a dramatic composition in five acts and an epilogue, in order to register it for copyright.  Copyright was also sought in the title The Dictator, but it was discovered that Paramount Pictures and the estate of Richard Harding Davies already owned the title and were unwilling to relinquish it. In June, therefore, the title The Great Dictator was registered, but Chaplin was not entirely convinced that it was right; having already registered Ptomania, he subsequently registered as alternatives The Two Dictators, Dictamania and Dictator of Ptomania.

The Chaplin Studio c. 1917

 After January 16, Dan James no longer went to the Beverly Hills house, since Chaplin now worked at the studio, where he could supervise preparations for shooting. The stage was being soundproofed; there were contracts to be negotiated with outside organizations like RCA who were to be responsible for the sound; and work was already in hand on miniatures for special effects.  Now the daily script conferences took place in Chaplin’s bungalow on the lot.  On January 21, Charlie’s brother Sidney returned to work at the studio for the first time in almost 20 years; with conditions in Europe as they were, he and his new French wife, Gypsy, had decided that they were likely to be safer in America. The daily script conferences were now augmented, as Sydney and Henry Bergman (who had been with Charlie ever since the beginning of his film career at the Sennett Studios) joined Chaplin and Dan James.

By the late summer of 1939 when the script was finished and Chaplin was ready to start shooting, he was able to reassure Sydney: “This time, Syd, I have the script totally visualized.  I know where every close-up comes.”  Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way.  It rarely ever does . . . especially with a filmmaker like Chaplin.

During the weeks of preparation, Chaplin ran films for his staff in the studio projection room, among them Shoulder Arms and the mysterious The Professor - a likely unfinished and definitely unreleased Chaplin film from c. 1919). He also screened all the newsreels of Hitler on which he could lay hands.  He later returned often to a particular sequence showing Hitler at the signing of the French surrender. As Hitler left the railway carriage, he seemed to do a little dance.  Chaplin would watch the scene with fascination, exclaiming, “Oh, you bastard, you son-of-a-bitch swine.  I know what’s in your mind.”  According to Tim Durant, “He said, ‘this guy is one of the greatest actors I’ve ever seen’ . . . Charlie admired his acting.  He really did.” Dan James commented nearly a half-century later, “Of course he had in himself some of the qualities that Hitler had.  He dominated his world.  He created his world.  And Chaplin’s world was not a democracy either.  Charlie was the dictator of all those things.”

The script, which was completed by September 1, 1939, remains one of the most elaborate ever made for a Hollywood film.  It runs to the extraordinary length of almost 300 pages (the average feature film script varies from 100 to 150 pages).  It was divided into twenty-five sections, each designated by a letter of the alphabet and separately paginated; through shooting every take was identified by the letter and number of the relevant script page.  Despite the doubt Dan James cast on Chaplin’s assertion that everything was visualized, the system seems, to judge from the shooting records, to have served pretty well in the 168 days of a very complicated production.

Throughout the spring and early summer of 1939 Chaplin was collecting his crew around him. Henry Bergman was nominated “co-ordinator.” Dan James was joined by two more assistant directors. One was Chaplin’s half-brother Wheeler Dryden, who arrived at the La Brea Blvd. studio in March, overjoyed to be given a job on Chaplin’s permanent studio staff.  Wheeler had continued to pick up a living as an actor and in 1923 had had a play, Suspicion, produced at the Egan Theatre in Los Angeles.  He was to remain at the studio until Chaplin’s departure from the United States in 1952.  A slight man, Wheeler retained the air and diction of an old-style stage actor.  Though he adored Charlie, Wheeler could sometimes madden him as well as the rest of the studio staff with his finicky attention to detail.

The amusing and devil-may-care Robert Meltzer, another assistant director, like James an avowed Communist, was in striking contrast to the solemn and nervy Wheeler.  He had also been recruited in Pebble Beach.  During the summer there the gossip writers had linked Chaplain’s name with several women, notably the sugar heiress Geraldine Spreckels and a striking young red-headed actress named Dorothy Comingore, whom Chaplin saw on stage in Carmel. Comingore was then living with Bob Meltzer, and when Chaplin convinced her that she should try her luck in Los Angles, Meltzer came too.  In the end it was Meltzer who worked for Chaplin and not Miss Comingore, who joined Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre and made her most striking impact as Susan Alexander – the role transparently based on Marion Davies – in Citizen Kane.  After The Great Dictator Meltzer himself was to work briefly with Welles. With the outbreak of hostilities in 1941 he volunteered for service with the paratroops and died in the Battle of Normandy at age 31.

Chaplin’s staff was astonished when Chaplin engaged Karl Struss as director of photography.  After 23 years as Chaplin’s senior cameraman this was a cruel blow to Rollie Totheroh, who could never afterwards completely forgive his beloved boss.  Chaplin had grown dissatisfied with Rollie’s camerawork for reasons which were never quite clear.

Part of the problem for a director making only one film every four or five years was that in the interval conditions in Hollywood had changed.  Each time Chaplin made a film he found himself bedeviled by new technical people whom he neither understood nor needed.  He had a running feud with the script girl – a personage hitherto unknown on a Chaplin film.

   The role of Hannah was all along intended for Paulette Goddard, who reported for work at the studio on July 29.  She and Chaplin had spent a good deal of the previous year apart.  While he went to Pebble Beach in the early half of 1938, she flew to Florida, and during most of the rest of the year she was at work in Hollywood, while he stayed away from the studio. Already in March, while hardly finished with marriage rumours, the newspapers talked of impending divorce.  Paulette’s contract with the studio expired on March 31, 1938, and she had sought an earlier release to sign with the Myron Selznick agency.  She was hired for The Great Dictator at $2,500 a week; Chaplin was furious when she brought her agent (probably Selznick himself) to demand bigger billing.

She and Chaplin continued to live together in the Summit Drive mansion throughout the production of the film.  As Chaplin nicely expressed it, ‘Although we were somewhat estranged we were friends and still married.’ To the Chaplin sons, now mischievous early teenagers, and to casual acquaintances, their relationship seemed much as before. At the studio, the staff were however aware of the change.  You either belonged to the Paulette faction or to the Charlie faction.  You couldn’t be both.  Chaplin would work very hard with her; sometimes he would make twenty-five or thirty takes.  He would stand in her place on the set and try and give her the tone and the gestures.  It was a method he had been able to use in silent films; it could not work so well, of course, in a talking picture.

The final stenciled copies of the script were completed on Sunday September 3, 1939 – the day that Britain declared war on Germany.  Three days later Chaplin began to rehearse and on September 9 shooting began on the first ghetto sequence.  Filming was to continue with hardly a day’s break apart from (most weeks) Sundays until the end of March 1940.  By that time Chaplin would have shot most of the 477,440 feet of film which were eventually to be exposed. The length of the finished picture was 11,625 feet.

 It is interesting, but perhaps not too surprising, to discover that Chaplin kept the shooting of his two roles quite distinct.  First, until the end of October, he worked on the scenes of the ghetto, in the character of the barber. With the bulk of those completed, November was spent on the more complicated action and location scenes, like the war scenes, particularly those involving Reginald Gardiner and the crashed plane.  Chaplin had devised some very funny business with the airplane.  Taking over the controls, Chaplin manages to turn it upside down without either himself or his companion (Gardiner) being aware of it. They only notice with some concern that the sun is shining up from below them, that a watch released from a pocket leaps (apparently) into the air and sways there on its taut chain, and that they are passed by flocks of upside-down seagulls.  Reginald Gardiner suffered much more than Chaplin from the experience of being strapped upside down, and only managed his lines and air of insouciance with great difficulty.

There were interludes and distractions in the work at the studio that November.  Not all were welcome: a plagiarism suit brought by writer Michael Kustoff on account of Modern Times came to trial in federal court and kept both Chaplin and studio manager Alf Reeves busy. Chaplin himself was in court on November 18 when the case was decided in his favor.

On November 15, 1939 Douglas Fairbanks and his new wife, Sylvia, the former lady Ashley, visited the location in Laurel Canyon where Chaplin was filming.  Chaplin thought he looked older and stouter, though he was still as full of enthusiasm. He had always been Chaplin’s favorite audience, and as so many times before, Chaplin showed Fairbanks his sets and expounded his plans.  Although he was filming in the Barber’s concentration camp costume, Chaplin put on his Hynkel uniform to show his visitors, and wearing it, was photographed with them.  They all lunched together.

Chaplin & Fairbanks: the final photo

It was the last time he saw the man whom he later said had been his only close friend.  At four o’clock in the morning of December 12, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. telephoned Chaplin to tell him that his father had died just over three hours earlier, in his sleep.  There was no shooting at the Chaplin studio on the day of his funeral, December 15.  “It was a terrible shock,” Chaplin later wrote, “for he belonged so much to life . . . I have missed his delightful friendship.”

   As December came, Chaplin began his Hynkel scenes.  The supreme actor, Chaplin always became totally subsumed into the role he was playing, as colleagues throughout his career have testified. When, for the first time, he adopted the uniform and role of an autocratic and villainous character, even he was momentarily disconcerted by the effect.  Reginald Gardiner remembered that when Chaplin first appeared on the set ready to shoot in his Hynkel uniform, he was noticeably more cool and abrupt than when he had been playing the Jewish barber.  Gardiner recalled further that when he was driving with Chaplin – already in uniform – to a new location, Chaplin suddenly became uncharacteristically abusive towards the driver of a car that was obstructing them.  He quickly recovered himself, and recalled with laughter an earlier discussion about the false sense of superiority a uniform can produce.  ‘Just because I’m dressed up in this darned thing I go and do a thing like that.’

 Although work on The Great Dictator proceeded on a much tighter schedule and pre-set plan than any previous Chaplin film, there was no fixed daily routine in the studio. Much, of course, depended upon Chaplin’s own somewhat unpredictable time of arrival, although for the first time he appears to have delegated considerable responsibility for preparation and in some cases shooting to his assistants.

 Just before Christmas, Chaplin shot the scene which remains the most haunting and the most inspired of the film: Hynkel’s ballet with the terrestrial globe.  The first hint of a symbolic scene of this sort is a random story note dating from February 15, 1939:

SCENE WITH MAP: Cutting it up to suit himself, cutting off bits of countries with a pair of scissors.

The dance with the globe was to go far beyond this elementary notion.  While the gibberish speech appears so precise and planned that it is surprising to discover that it was improvised, the dance with the globe seems to soar so freely in its inspiration that it is hard to imagine that it could be written down.  Yet it was.  In the complete version of the script, the description of Chaplin pas seul occupies four pages, opening,

 HYNKEL GOES TO THE GLOBE – and caresses it – trance-like.  Soft strains of Peer Gynt (in the outcome the Prelude to Lohengrin proved more appropriate) waft into the room.  Hynkel picks up the globe, bumps it into the air with his left wrist.  It floats like a balloon and drops back into his hands. He bumps it with his right wrist and catches it. He dominates the world – kicks it viciously away.  Sees himself in the mirror – plays God! Beckons, the world float into his hand.  Then he bumps it high in the air with his right wrist.  He leaps up (on wire), catches the globe and brings it down. 

The particular attention that Chaplin was to give to the balloon dance indicates that he was well aware that it would remain one of his great virtuoso scenes.  He spent three days on the main shooting in the days just before Christmas, and then made some retakes in early January. The first three days in February seem to have been entirely taken up with running and rerunning the material, and on February 6 and again of the 15th Chaplin did further retakes.

Carter De Haven, who plays the Bacterian Ambassador in the film, was later to attempt to get into the plagiarism game by claiming the ballet with the globe was his idea.  Any doubt, however, was finally put to rest when Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, preparing their Unknown Chaplin film series, unearthed some forgotten home movies (39) of a party at Pickfair in the early 1920s. Chaplin, in classical Grecian costume and crowned with a laurel wreath, performs a dance with a balloon which is the unmistakable prototype for The Great Dictator. No doubt Chaplin was remembering his party trick of nearly twenty years ago when he noted in the script description of the globe ballet, ‘Then he slides to the table top to perform a series of Greek postures’ and ‘Gracefully he leans back over the desk and gets very Greek about the whole thing.’

In January 1940 Jack Oakie joined the cast to play Benzino Napaloni, the Dictator of Bacteria. When Chaplin first proposed the role to him, Oakie questioned the suitability of casting an Irish-Scottish American in a caricature of Mussolini.  What, asked Chaplin, would be funny about an Italian playing Mussolini? Chaplin did perceive a problem however when he discovered that Oakie was at the time dieting to lose weight. According to Charles Chaplin Jr., his father brought his own cook, George, to the studio and had him tempt Oakie with the richest and most fattening dishes he could devise.  When he found his strategy was succeeding, and that Oakie was increasingly growing to resemble Mussolini in stature, he cheerfully nicknamed him ‘Muscles.’

Charles Junior considered that ‘one of the pleasantest things about the new film was the affable relationship between Dad and Jack Oakie.  Jack had a tough hide and was able to take Dad’s drive in stride.  Dad, on his part, has always had great admiration for Jack.’  Others on the set observed that working in his scenes with Oakie brought out a certain competitive spirit in Chaplin  It was not jealousy: rationally, Chaplin knew that his supremacy was unassailable.  Rather it was Chaplin’s legacy from his early training with Karno and Keystone: the essential and driving motive for a comedian must always be to outdo the rest.  Chaplin’s own script for The Great Dictator often gave the better comedy business to Oakie.  Chaplain’s professional instinct still drove him to top it with his own comedy. He would sense the reaction of the unit, and he played the comic game with the same intensity as he played tennis.  As with tennis, he did not like to lose: finishing a scene in which he felt that Oakie had scored the biggest laughs from the bystanders, he could hardly conceal his irritation. Charles Junior, a very reliable witness, despite his youth at the time, recalled one day when Oakie had tried every trick he knew to do the impossible and steal a scene from Chaplin.  In the middle of the scene, Chaplin grinned and offered advice: “If you really want to steal a scene from me, you son-of-a-bitch, just look straight into the camera.  That’ll do it every time.”

Chaplin undoubtedly found these duels of comedy nostalgic and stimulating.  He was less happy with some of his actors from the legitimate theatre.  In particular he found it very hard to work against Henry Daniell’s measured timing. “He developed a hatred for Daniell,” recalled Dan James. “He really thought Daniell was trying to sabotage him.  The trouble was that he had a respect for Daniell because he was a real stage actor, and couldn’t bring himself to explain what was wrong.  Poor Daniell knew that Chaplin was not pleased with him, but he never understood why.  On the other hand he was crazy about Reggie Gardiner, though once he had got him, he never really gave Reggie any funny stuff.

By the middle of February practically all the studio scenes had been shot. Chaplin moved out onto location to shoot the First World War scenes for the opening of the film and the scene of Hynkel being arrested while out duck shooting, filmed at Malibu Lake. The war scenes involved a series of gags with Chaplin and the enormous Big Bertha gun, and for one day’s shooting the Chaplin children were taken to watch.  Fourteen-year-old Sydney was so overcome with mirth at his father’s antics following the explosion of the gun that he laughed out loud.  When he discovered who had wrecked the sound take, Chaplin flew at him in fury, saying ‘Do you know your laugh just cost me fifteen thousand dollars?’

‘In a twinkling, from being the funniest man alive, Dad had become the most furious.’ The two boys feared some awful retribution; but then Chaplin began to laugh, and proudly called out to the crew, ‘Even my own son thinks I’m funny.’ To Sydney he added, ‘Well, it was fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of laugh, but if you appreciated it that much, it’s all right . . . Just don’t let it happen again, son.”

One series of scenes shot during this period was destined never to be seen.  Chaplin’s first idea for the final scene of the speech, in which (in the words of the early treatment) ‘the clown turns into a prophet’ was extremely ambitious.  He intended the speech to be laid over scenes supposed to take place in Spain, China, a German street and a Jewish ghetto in Germany.  As Chaplin’s speech came into heir consciousness, a Spanish firing squad would throw down their arms; a Japanese bomber pilot would be overcome by wonder, and instead of bombs, toys on parachutes would rain down on the Chinese children below; a parade of goose-stepping German soldiers would break into waltz-time; and a Nazi storm-trooper would risk his life to save a little Jewish girl from an oncoming car. A couple of days were actually spent shooting material for the sequence, but it was discarded.

 By the end of March 1940, the main shooting was all finished, the laborers were already beginning to clear the studio, and Chaplin had a rough-cut of the film ready to show to a few friends such as Constance Collier in early April. The climactic scene, the final speech made by the little barber who has been mistaken for the Great Dictator, remained to be shot.  Moreover Chaplin was to polish and tinker with the film more than with any other that he had ever made. During the next six months he would suddenly decide to put up a set again; and he was still doing retakes of the ghetto scenes in late September, after he had already previewed the film.  Redubbing of the sound went on practically until the premiere on October 15, 1940.

From April to June Chaplin labored over the text of his big speech, between working on the editing of the film.  His two young Marxist assistants were of no help to him.  The Utopian idealism and unashamed emotionalism of the speech evidently offended their Communist orthodoxy.  Others were anxious about the speech on more pragmatic grounds. When told by his film salesmen that the speech might lose him a million dollars in sales, Chaplin reportedly said, “I don’t care if it loses me $5 million . . . it’s my money, and it’s worth it.

That final speech, which the political right felt smacked of Communism and the left suspected of sentimentality, seemed not to embarrass the larger audience.  It was widely quoted and reprinted.  Chaplin’s old friend Rob Wagner devoted a page to it in the November 16 issue of his magazine Rob Wagner’s Script; Archie Mayo, mainly remembered as the director of The Petrified Forest, used it as his Christmas card for 1940, comparing it to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; and in England, the Communist Party put it out as a special pamphlet.

The Great Dictator was nominated for 5 Oscars, including best actor, best supporting actor, best screenplay and best original music for Meredith Wilson. Although it did win the New York Film Critics Award for Picture of the Year, Chaplin refused to accept it.  It wound up being his most profitable picture, earning him slightly more than $5 million.  It is also one of the first films named to the National Film Registry.  

Throughout his career, people assumed that Chaplin was Jewish. After all, he was probably a Communist (so they believed) and weren’t a majority of Hollywood Reds Jewish? Throughout most of his life, Chaplin did not address the issue. Towards the end, however, a writer posed the question for perhaps the thousandth time. Chaplin’s response?

“I’ve never had that honor.”

Enjoy the film . . .