Screen and Radio Weekly (Feb 14, 1937)

The Racy of Adolph Zukor, and 25 Years of the Movie Business By Clarke Wales Oh JAN. 7, on the biggest stage on the Paramount lot, there was a radio broadcast. Some thousand or more guests watched and listened to a score or so of stars as they wise-cracked, sang, read Ittle eulogies and ballyhooed the forthcoming Paramount product. Jack Benny was master of ceremonies, and there were Carole Lombard, Fred MacMurray, Gladys Swarthout, Jack QOakie, Edward Arnold, Adolphe Menjou, Martha Raye, Leopold Stokowski leading the orchestra and many others. It was quite a show and afterward most of the guests, including picture exhibitors from all over the Country, milled about a long bar outside the improvised broadcast room and drank free Scotch. Frequently in the broadcast the name of Adolph Zukor was heard. Cecil B. De Mille opened the program with a little. story about him, and some of the actors gave him touching tribute. But Adolph Zukor did not appear on the platform. He was at the moment merely the excuse for a great exploitation campaign. However, it was significant that Adolph Zukor was there at ali, watching a celebration built around his twentyfifth anniversary in motion pictures. He is the only one of the great pioneers to be, at the end of a quarter-century, at the heim of a great picture company. Beswes. Zukor had had his inning earlier in the evening. At a dinner he had been toasted: and Will Hays, whipping boy of the picture producers, had presented him with a big album containing little messages over the signatures of great men all over the world — Mussolini, Baldwin, Roosevelt, the premier of France and hundreds of others. That, too, is significant. For, 25 years and more ago Adolph Zukorcarried in his pocket a little book in which he wrote the names of great men he would like to meet, such names as Kahn the bavker, Frohman the _ producer, James O'Neill the actor (father of Eugene), and Griffith of motion pictures. He met al] those and became master of some; and now he has a book, much too bie to carry, full of the names of great men who would like to meet him. On Jan. 7 Adolph Zukor was 64 years old—very old for this business in which aman can become a king before he is 30 and can work himseif to death, as did Irving Thalberg, before he is 40. But Zukor is not old. His face is still firm. His compact figure (he is not guite five feet four) is straight and alert. He walks briskly. with weight well forward on the balls of his feet, like a boxer. In youth he was an enthusiastic amateur boxer, and even plastic surgery has not removed entirely the traces of cauliflower from his left ear; he always ducked to the right. Zukor has kept young through a life ot work, through years of doing a job into which he was foreed against his will, through struggle for which he was equipped only with an instinct trained to meet necessity as it rises. For 33 years he has been in show business; for 25 the story of his life has been the story of the picture industry. I; IS necessary to go back to the beginning to get the story of Adolph Zukor, back to roots in the soil of Hungary. Zukor was born in Ricse, a village in the Tokay grape cegion. His father had a small store, as nad his father before him and as Adolph was expected to have when he reached 1 proper age. It was a family tradition. Death and dime novels broke the tradition. Zukor became an orphan when he was seven, and thus was cut the strongest tie to small trade. Books about cowboys and Indians, which were as popular in Europe as they were here, did the rest; Adolph Zukor wanted to see this America. There was, though, a struggle. When his mother died, Zukor and his older brother, Arthur, were taken by her brother, a rabbi at Szanto, an even smaller village than Ricse, and then the Zukor boys were expected to follow the religious tradition of the Liebermanns. Arthur. did, and became a famous rabbi at Berlin; Adolph did not, and became a famous millionaire in the United States. When he was 16, after completing a three-year apprenticeship to a storekeeper at Szanto, he sailed by steerage for America, with his share of the Zukor estate, $40, sewed in the lining of his second-best waistcoat. Luxe had friends and relatives in America, and a few days after landing at New York he had a job tacking upholstery on furniture at $2 a week. Then he went to work as errand boy for a fur company, at $4 a week. Two years later he was working at the furrier’s trade, and his salary was doubled again. Adolph was getting along. In 1891 an eighteen-year-old boy could do a lot of things on $8 a week, could even open a bank account. When he went to Chicago shortly. before the great World’s Fair of 1893, he had enough capital to go into business with another young Hungarian furrier, Max Schosberg. Before the end of 1893 the partners had a business in Chicago, another in Peoria, and Adolph had $8,000 in the bank and enough over to take a trip back to Ricse. The years Adolph Zukor spent in Chicago, to about 1900, are perhaps the most s.gnificant of his career. There first appeared the urge for expansion which has characterized Zukor’s business life. As soon as his first shop began to succeed, he saw visions of .a chain of shops, and set out for his goal by opening one at Peoria. A few years later, when he-had invested in the penny arcade business, the expansion urge showed itself again, and when it reached its final flowering in the rush days before the crash of 1929. 4ukor had taken in all the picture companies he could use, had a radio chain and was buying theaters by the hundreds. Also in Chicago he learned that success can fade as fast as it can risé, and that it can rise again. His $8,000, plus all he could borrow from the banks, went into the furrier’s annual gamble on styles. He guessed wrong, found himself with an unsaleable stock of shoulder capes in his little factory. But refusing to go into bankruptcy he got extensions from his creditors, and by the beginning of 1897 had paid off his debts and could afford to get married to Lottie Kaufmann, daughter of a clothing desler who, a few years before, had em‘zrated from Hungary to a sod hut on a Dakota homestead. ZL anors marriage established associations which were to last through his rise to fame and wealth. First he became a partner of his wife's uncle, Morris Kohn, in the fur business and later in the penny arcades. Her brother, Al Kaufmann, and Emil Shaver, related by two marriages, became powers of the Zukor motion picture dynasty, and other relatives followed along to such extent that later creditors charged that nepotism was partly to blame for the disaster which came to the tremendous Paramount enterprises. The fur house .of Kohn & Co. prospered. About 1900 its operations were transferred to New York. In 1904, when Zukor was 31 years old, he was worth between $100,000 and $200,000—and his real career was only about to begin. At that time one of the Zukor-Kaufmann-Kohn clan, Max Goldstein, borrowed $3,000 from Kohn and Zukor to invest in the new penny arcade business. Either to protect the loan, or because they were enthusiastic over the arcade prospects, the partners put in more money and actively engaged in_ the _business. In 1905 they sold the fur Sarah Bernhardt is shown (at top) in a scene from the French version of “Queen Elizabeth,” which Zukor bought to establish the fame of his Famous Players Film Co. Center, Zukor ran early travelogs in a day coach, which jiggled realistically. Zukor is pictured with his sen Eugene and daughter Mildred in the early, perilous days of Famous Players, when the New York studio (below, right) looked like this, in 1915. Out of this grew Paramount. company to devote all their energies to sprinkling penny arcades all over the East. They took in other partners, including Marcus Loew, whose son married Zukor’s daughter and whose investment of a few thousand dollars ballooned into $25,000,000. There were, in fact, so many partners that friction was inevitable; somebody had to get out. Loew and Zukor left, Loew to ge into the theater business, Zukor to take another step away from furs and into celluloid, PF uKon came out of the areade venture with nearly $200,000 and no exact idea of how he was going to put it to work. Says Will Irwin in his biography of Zukor: “He began to look around for a good opening in the pusiness of showmanship. For to that he found himself committed. He liked the game— its gayety and glitter and movement, its sociability, and the sense of standing host to the world.” Possibly Irwin dramatizes the situation a bit, for Zukor had had little opportunity to feel gayety or glitter. More likely he was sold on the possibilities of show business. It presented chance for quick rise and expansion. Zukor, said one of his partners, was “always in a hurry.” At any rate, Zukor was soon in partnership with William A. Brady in a venture called Hale’s Tours, an amusement fad for which Brady had Eastern rights. In a replica of a railway car, a one-reel motion picture taken from the rear of a train was projected on a screen over the observation platform, while machinery jiggled and rattled the car and made a noise like that of wheels on rails. The “passengers” in the car got the illusion of a scenic tour. The fad had brief success and then, because Paramount Chief's Rise from Hungary to Movie Capital its only virtue was novelty, it died. To save the venture, Zukor started showing narrative films after the ‘tour’ was over... First he showed* ‘The Great Train ‘Robbery,’ which Edwin S. Porter had made despite generai opinion that anybody was crazy who would try to produce a picture that would run as long as 1° minutes. Others followed. Finally the Hale’s Tours cars were junked and the lecations turned into “store shows,” nickelodeons. Thus Zukor found the “good opening in the business of showmanship” for which he sought. When he had put the partnership venture with Brady on its feet, he started opening houses of his own, combination picture and vaudeville shows. In 1910 he merged his houses with Marcus Loew, largely because they needed a chain big enough to keep vauceville acts busy the year around. This was the venture which made Loew, another former fur trader, a multimillionaire. A DIFFERENCE of opinion separated Zukor and Loew. To Loew vaudeville was the important thing; movies were just fillers on the program. To Zuker, movies were the great venture; vaudeville was just a filler, to be used only until pictures improved. So while Loew went on, content with what he saw was a great business, Zukor was hammering at the doors of the movie trust, trying vainiy to persuade producers to make longer and better films. When he failed, he did what Adolph Zukor always has done—solved the problem himself. And in the struggle to get established as a picture producer, he was forced to sell his Loew stock: Even his wife’s jewelry went into the pot to meet payrolls of the early Famous Players company. When Zukor went into picture producticn, he had a definite goal, as much information as he could pick up haunting other studios and a partner who made the venture respectable. When Zukor coined the trade mark ‘Famous Players in Famous Plays,” he knew that he needed an associate established in the theatrical world if he was to make the slogan mean anything. He got. Daniel Frohman. Zukor put up the money; Frohman put up his name. Zukor could not get famous players or famous plays; a Frohman could. Into the new company Zukor took Al Kaufman, that member of the clan who had been managing Zukor’s first theater, as production manager; Frank Meyer, a film distributor, as mechanical manager; Edwin Porter, who had made “The Great Train Robbery” as director; Ben Schulberg, later chief of production for Paramount and now independent producer, but then a $50 a week advertising agent, as press agent. Meanwurz, to establish the name Famous Players and to prove that the public would go for long films, Zuker bought American rights to a four-reel French film, “Queen Elizabeth,” with Sarah Bernhardt. Bernhardt was the greatest name on the world stage; the vehicle was her last great play; the picture was shown, not in nickelodeons, but in houses hallowed by. theatrical tradition; it was a success. Then; through Frohman, Zukor got James O'Neill, who had been playing “The Count of Monte Cristo” on the stage for 30 years; James K. Hackett, who had just finished a long run in “The Prisoner of Zenda’; Minnie Maddern Fiske for “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” her most popular stage hit; and then Mary Pickford, who had gained anonymous fame as the Biograph Girl and success in a Belasco play, “The Good Little Devil.”. He paid Mary $20,000 a year to start; later he paid her half the profits of her pictures, with a guarantee of $10,000 a week. But before Mary became America’s Sweetheart, Zukor had to struggle. First there was the opposition of the picture trust; he won that fight by ignoring the trust, which fell apart because it had not advanced with the industry. There was the struggle to meet payrolls until his first pictures could return profits; he won that right by selling nearly everything he owned and by a $50,000 loan from Frohman. The first Famous Players release was “Zenda,” then O'Neill in “Monte Cristo.” F ROM that point the Zukor enterprise grew like a stout balloon on a compressed air tire pump. Even destruction by fire cf his studio did not stop him. In 1914 he incpired the orgenization of Paramount Picture Corp. as a distributing agency and two years later, when he saw that he must control or be controlled, he took Paramount in. At the same time, 1916, when he saw Jesse Lasky, Cecil De Mille and Sam Goldwyn making better: pictures than he @id, the Lasky company was merged, along with Bosworth, the Oliver Morosco Photoplay Co. and some others which had dealt with Paramount. At this time, four years after Zukor had started with three or four hundred thousand dollars, it was reported that the combined organizations represented $25,000,000 and that Mary Pickford had been guaranteed $10,000 a week. -In 1919 the annua} financial report of Famous Players-Lasky showed a corporation value of $37,000,000. In 1826, 10 years after the merger, the figure was $149,000,000 and there seemed to be no limit in sight. However— Just as, in 1916, Zukor saw _that the producer must control distribution, at the beginning of the 20s he saw that he must also bring exhibition into the fold. Theater chains were springing up, exerting more and more power. So Zukor went into real. estate, buying theaters and theater partnerships until, when Paramount-Publix, colossus of the industry, was formed, the combine controlied more than 1,200 houses, dotting the United. States and spreading over the world. -At the head of all this stood Zukor, the little Hungarian Jew from Ricse. aan came the ebb. Many of the theater purchases were secured with stock guaranteed in some cases as high as $85 a share.. After the debacle of 1929 and in the dismal depths of the depression, the stock was worth only a few dollars a share; at one time it was quoted at $6. The result was inevitable—receivership; bankruptcy. To Zukor bankruptcy had been a bugaboo, a mark of shame. He had fought it off in his first years as a fur dealer when he was told he had no other course to follow, and again when Hale’s Tours turned into a fiop. But now he was helpless. Too much money and too many interests were involved. The balloon had to be defiated and mended. In this period control passed into the hands of, financial interests. After the reorganization there was a succession of usurpers. At one time John Hertz, who had made his millions in Chicago taxicabs, was at the helm, At another the Westinghouse interests, whose Electric Research Products, Inc. (better known as Erpi) had come into the scene after the advent of sound, made John Zukor, Mrs. Zukor and Miss ‘Jane Loew, at the Silver JubiJee dinner which honored Zukor’s twenty-fifth anniversary as a maker of popular screen entertainment, Otterson president. And there were others. These financiers tried to make motion pictures, and failed. Otherwise _ this story would not be written. But when the factional tangle had been. straightened out, Zukor, who had been functioning as adviser, became chairman of the Paramount board and boss of the stu dios, the only one left of the group which took the great balloon ride. After two decades of doing a job which he got into perforce and which he could not escape, managing money, he is doing what he wanted to do in the first place— making pictures. His name still heads every Paramount picture — “Adolph Zukor presents”’—and it means something. So far as Hollywood and the public are concerned, he is Paramount. So much for Adolph Zukor, business man. The story is essential because business has taken up most of Adolph Zukor’s life. But there is also the human story of the immigrant who married, had a family, traveled, learned to play golf, "Terry RAMSAYE, self-styled official historian of the screen, wrote several years ago of Zukor: “On his desk are one or two framed pictures, family pictures, a bronze cast of one of the first shoes that Buddy, a grandchild, wore. “That baby’s shoe immortalized in bronze is something of a clew and symbol. It reveals the deep sentimentality of Zukor, whose outward commercial career has been as barren of sentiment as the icy sheerness of his desk top. It reveals his only major purpose. Adolph Zukor, master of the motion picture, is after all just: a hardworking man trying to take care of his wife and family.” This is the other side of Adolph Zukor. That portion of his life which has not been devoted to business has been devoted to his family. When through the years he has had time for vacations or has had to rest, he nas taken his family on trips to Europe or some other place, or has stayed with them at home. At the big radio broadcast on Jan. 7 he sat with his wife on one side, a granddaughter on the other. Some years ago he bought a home and a thousand acres at New City, on the west side of the Hudson near New York. And in the easy days of the '20s, when it seemed that the business struggle was over, he spent much of his time there, directing landscaping and the building of a golf course, and playing golf with his son. Litton has always been an athlete. In the first New York days there was boxing; in Chicago he learned to play baseball; later there was tennis, which he played well, and since then golf. And always he has walked. Sometimes he walked to save carfare. Other times he walked to think. Now he walks through the studio. pausing to watch a scene photographed, moving on to another set. In his six months or so in Hollywood he has become better known on the Paramount lot than most studio heads become in years. He listens much more than he talks. Men his size are usually blusterers whose words mean little or quiet men whose words mean much, When Zukor does speak, his voice is soft Perhaps his reserve is partly a hangover from the days when he was struggling to learn a new language. In the fur business he worked mostly behind the scenes, cutting and sewing skins and later designing patterns; he was slow. in acquiring English. Whatever the cause, it is seldom that he talks at length. Not long ago he sat on a sound stage and talked for about 20 minutes, telling about his job, his ideas on pictures and his methods. Later he said to the publicity man on the set: “I suppose that newspaper man thought I was awfully talkative:” Zukor is a meticulous man, meticulous in his speech, in his mind, in his clothes. He dresses conservatively and perfectly, most often in dark blue. Good clothes were a habit when he was young; at times when he could buy only one suit at once, and that not very often, he paid $100 a suit. if QUOTED Ramsaye as saying that in business Zukor is as unsentimental as “‘the icy sheerness of a cleared desk,” but I think that is only partly true. Often he has had to be unsentimental; it has been a case of the devil take the hindmost, lick or be licked. At times when it is possible to be sentimental, he is. He takes an interest in young players which has in it something more than avarice for the dollars they may some day bring to the boxoffice. Periodically he sits at his desk and runs a pencil down the studio contract list. He will stop at a name and say to his son Eugene who is Zukor’s minister without portfolio: “Gene, this girl—I haven’t seen her in a picture for quite a while. What’s the matter? [I'd like to see her on the screen.” And within a ‘few days the girl will have a role. For such reasons as this he is held in affectionate regard by the players, people who as a class spend all their rainy evenings and afternoons off cursing the boss. As a man Adolph Zukor has an ingratiating charm which makes people like to do things for him, which years ago in the New York offices started his employees calling him Papa Adelph.