Engulfed Page ii Blank ? Engulfed The Death of Paramount Pictures and the Birth of Corporate Hollywood BERNARD F. DICK THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Copyright © 2001 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508–4008 05 04 03 02 01 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dick, Bernard F. Engulfed: the death of Paramount Pictures and the birth of corporate Hollywood / Bernard F. Dick. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8131-2202-3 (cloth : acid-free paper) 1. Paramount Pictures Corporation–History. 2. Title. PN1999.P3 D53 2001 384'.8’06579494 00012276 This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials. Manufactured in the United States of America. Contents Preface ix 1 Mountain Glory 1 2 Mountain Gloom 44 3 Barbarians at the Spanish Gate 85 4 Charlie’s Boys 109 5 The Italian Connection 126 6 The Diller Days 149 7 Goodbye, Charlie 189 8 Sumner at the Summit 206 Epilogue 242 End Titles 245 Notes 247 Index 259 Photo insert follows page 125 Page vi Blank For Katherine Page viii Blank Preface In Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie (1977), Sid Caesar nearly has a heart attack when he learns that a megaconglomerate called “Engulf and Devour” has designs on his little studio. Insiders would have associated “Engulf and Devour” with Gulf + Western, the corporate octopus that entangled Para- mount Pictures in 1966 and added one more tentacle to the creature that Charles Bluhdorn, “the mad Austrian,” had constructed out of auto re- placement parts in the 1950s. By the time Silent Movie was released, Gulf + Western had acquired other appendages such as sugar, beef, fruit, met- als, natural gas, paper, and cigars. Why, then, not a movie studio, especially since Paramount was in jeopardy, having become a gerontocracy where the average age of the board members was seventy and its president, Adolph Zukor, was pushing ninety? Once Paramount was one of Hollywood’s most venerable studios. It was the studio that made Wings (1929), the first Academy Award win- ner for Best Picture. In the 1920s, it was the studio of Cecil B. DeMille, who combined sex, sand, America, and God in a formula that paid off at the box office; it was the home of matinee idols (Ricardo Cortez, Rudolph Valentino, Ronald Colman) and love goddesses (Gloria Swanson, vamp Nita Naldi, and the “It Girl,” Clara Bow). In the 1930s, it was Mae West’s reduction of the double entendre to a level where only one meaning was possible that led to the enforcement of the Production Code. During the Golden Age of Radio, Paramount provided the faces that went with the voices coming over the air by featuring such radio personalities as Jack Benny, Fred Allen, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and Bob Hope in the “Big Broadcast” movies of the 1930s. The 1940s were the decade of Preston Sturges’s screwball comedies, the Bing Crosby–Bob Hope–Dorothy Lamour “Road” series, Paramount’s film noir debut with Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), and an atypi- cal foray into social realism with Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (1945). At the x Preface end of the decade, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis joined the Paramount family, as did Elvis Presley in the mid-fifties. As the 1950s were coming to an end, so was the studio system. One by one, the studios fell to conglomerates, starting with Universal in 1962. Four years later, it was Paramount’s turn. Engulfed is not intended as a history of Paramount Pictures; a com- plete history would have to be in two volumes: volume 1, the studio; volume 2, the subsidiary. However, it is impossible to write about the death of a studio without first describing its birth. Thus, I have devoted the first chapter to an account of Paramount’s formation in an attempt to show how the studio evolved and how it became identified with a par- ticular kind of film—comedy with an operettalike quality, frequently in- terspersed with musical numbers, so that the result was not musical comedy but comedy with music. To see Paramount in its glory days is to see a true studio in operation; to see it as the sun was about to set on the star- spangled mountain that was Paramount’s proud logo is to see a studio about to expire. I am privileged to have been the first to use the George Weltner Collection at the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center. I have worked with archival materials in the past, but this collection of the memos and letters of George Weltner, Paramount’s last president before the Gulf + Western takeover, is the most revealing I have ever seen. Weltner may not have known it, but he was documenting the end of a studio as well as the end of an era. Since the collection is not accessible to many readers, I have cited specific memos I thought were especially pertinent. Biographical information, unless otherwise indicated, derives from the incredibly complete files of the Center for Motion Picture Study (CMPS) in Los Angeles. Unlike Blanche du Bois, I have never depended on the kindness of strangers, only of friends. I have also been fortunate to be able to draw on the knowledge, and in some cases, patience, of others: Kristine Krueger of the National Film Information Service (NFIS); the entire CMPS staff, especially Barbara Hall and Sandra Archer; my wife and partner in re- search, Dr. Katherine M. Restaino; Fairleigh Dickinson University refer- ence librarians Judy Katz and Laila Rogers; and Peter Bart, editor-in-chief of Variety; also Bill Mechanic; Martin Nocente; Dr. James Pegolotti; Henry Seggerman; the late “Buddy” Silberman; American Heritage Center ar- chivist Matt Sprinkle; and, finally, Dr. Jack Weltner, who had the foresight to make the fruit of his father’s experience available to others. Mountain Glory 1 1 Mountain Glory t is a truism to call the American motion picture industry the cre- ation of Central and Eastern European immigrants and their sons. IFor the most part, the statement is correct, but it fails to acknowledge the contributions of Nebraska-born Darryl F. Zanuck, the creative force behind Twentieth Century–Fox, and the quartet that founded United Artists: Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith, and Douglas Fairbanks, who hailed, respectively, from England, Canada, Kentucky, and Colorado. It might be more accurate to call Hollywood the creation of former glove cutters, store managers, fish peddlers, jewelers, junk dealers, furriers, vaudeville performers, arcade owners, and pulp writers. There was a time when there were no departments of cinema stud- ies where students could specialize in any of the fields comprising the art of moviemaking. At the turn of the century, movies were the equivalent of internet service providers—first, with the East Coast as Silicon Valley, then the West, and now anywhere. Others provided the technology; the entrepreneurs provided the vision and money. Carpe diem was the phi- losophy, even of those whose knowledge of Latin was limited to Roman numerals. But if they knew Latin, they might have amended the phrase to read, Carpe rem: Seize the thing at hand, or, more prosaically, “Go for it.” And that is what Adolph Zukor did, not knowing when he emi- grated from Hungary in 1888 that he was destined to found a company that would undergo a number of permutations until it became a studio whose name resonates throughout film history: Paramount Pictures. Adolph Zukor was born on 7 January 1873 in Risce, a village in Hungary’s wine-growing district.1 Like so many future studio heads, Zukor came from origins that almost discouraged greatness. His father, Jacob, 2 ENGULFED was a storekeeper; his mother, Hannah, a rabbi’s daughter. Jacob Zukor died from blood poisoning a year after Adolph was born. Although Hannah remarried, she never recovered from her first husband’s death. Her own occurred seven years after his. Adolph was then eight. Although Adolph had siblings and relatives who rallied when he decided to emigrate to America in 1888, he grew up thinking of himself as an orphan. That was certainly how he was treated. During his appren- ticeship to a storekeeper, Adolph read dime novels that mythicized the American West and encouraged rags-to-riches thinking. At fifteen, he took a hard look at himself. He would never be a scholar like his brother Arthur. And in Risce, what future was there for a five-foot, four-inch, hundred–pound clerk except to follow in his father’s footsteps and per- haps experience a similar fate? Adolph was determined to emigrate. The problem was his age. As a minor and, legally, an orphan, he persuaded his uncle to intercede for him with the Orphans Bureau so that he could draw on his parents’ estate to pay for his passage. With the consent of the Orphans Bureau, the fifteen- year-old Adolph left Risce in autumn 1888 with forty dollars in Ameri- can currency sewn into the lining of his vest.