One-Man Studio
(See Cover)
At the far end of a lobby-sized green-and-gold Hollywood office last week, a wiry, high-domed man gnawed a massive cigar, paced briskly back & forth, and spewed memoranda in a loud Midwestern twang. Occasionally, hypnotized by his own train of thought, he ducked briefly into an open anteroom behind his desk, to stalk an idea among the stuffed heads of a water hog and an antelope, the skins of a lion and a jaguar, the sawed-off feet of an elephant and a rhino. Working in relay, three stenographers dashed into the huge office to scribble notes, dashed out again to rush the words down through the hierarchy of the 20th Century-Fox Film Corp.
The memos ranged from a pep talk on meeting the threat of television ("Quality is the only answer") to a query on a line of dialogue ("Can we get by with the word 'louse'? I thought it was taboo"). One memo noted that the titles in a trailer for a new movie were a "trifle too lurid." Another instructed a producer shooting in London not to use fog in any more scenes, "as it is very uneven." Still another suggested putting a new writer on a story in preparation: "It would be a four-or five-week job at the most, but as long as we have such a wonderful plot, let's get a good writer." Studio executives would add the new memos to sheaves that already included orders on casting and admonitions about make-up and wardrobe tests (one actress wore too much lipstick, and another's bosom was "still too exaggerated").
His pale blue eyes hovering over everything from finances to falsies, Darryl F. Zanuck was warming up to another 18-hour day as production boss of 20th Century-Fox and pacesetter for the U.S. cinema. No longer the wonder boy who at 25 ran the Warner lot, Zanuck at 47 is something no less phenomenal. In 142 Ibs. and a carefully measured 5 ft. 6 3/4 in., he embodies what may be nature's ultimate effort to equip the species for outstanding success in Hollywood. Producer Zanuck is richly endowed with tough-mindedness, talent, an outsized ego, and a glutton's craving for hard work. These qualities, indulged with endless enthusiasm for a quarter-century, have not only sped him to the top but have somehow left him free of ulcers and in the pink of health.
Since the war, Zanuck's 20th Century-Fox has consistently led the field in the quality of its films, by the verdict of both the box office and the critics. Last year the company's 24 pictures, costing a total of $43 million, pulled in a gross of $94 million--bigger, Fox executives claim, than that of any other major studio in proportion to the number and cost of movies made. This year the studio is spending $45 million on 30 movies. As in the past, each of them, from story conferences to cutting room, will be shaped in large measure--for better or worse--by the taste and imagination of Cinemogul Zanuck.
New Directions. As a trailblazer, Zanuck has no Hollywood equal. At Warners', he played a key role in the industry's transition from-silent pictures to talkies (The Jazz Singer, The Singing Fool). He sired the cinemusical (Forty-Second Street, Gold Diggers of Broadway). He pioneered and developed the technique of snatching good movie plots out of the headlines (I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang), and injected memorable realism into the gangster cycle of the '30s (Public Enemy, Doorway to Hell). He enabled Producer Louis de Rochemont to launch the semi-documentary (The House on 92nd Street, 13 Rue Madeleine). He set the postwar style of using authentic locations in foreign countries (Prince of Foxes, The Big Lift), and, incidentally, melting Hollywood's frozen funds abroad.*
Most important, Darryl Francis Zanuck, who went no further than the eighth grade, has gone further than anyone in Hollywood in breaking down resistance to serious, grown-up films with controversial themes. A man of courage, physical as well as moral, he insisted on producing such pictures in the teeth of angry pressure groups and, sometimes, to the consternation of his own bosses in the New York office. He lost $2,000,000 on his biggest flop, Wilson (1944), which preached against postwar isolationism, and he fell short of a profit on 1943's The Ox-Bow Incident, a vivid anti-lynching movie which got critics' cheers. But with such films as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), The Snake Pit (1948) and Pinky (1949), he proved that stories based on such themes as unemployment, antiSemitism, mental illness and the Negro problem could pay off on the screen.
Culture & Big Game. For a tycoon of such solid accomplishment and recognition (two Oscars and two prized Irving Thalberg Awards), Zanuck for years cut a rather outlandish figure--even by Hollywood standards. He took sophomoric delight in playing such pranks as putting a trained ape into his executive chair, turning the lights down and summoning a new writer. He surrounded himself with court jesters, browbeat his oversubmissive underlings ("For God's sake, don't say yes until I finish talking"). His sycophants vied so earnestly in their assurances of devotion that one whimsical executive, putting an end to the contest, once volunteered: "When I die, I want to be cremated and have my ashes sprinkled on Mr. Zanuck's driveway so his car won't skid."
Zanuck's lack of formal schooling made for some conversational bloopers ("Betterment and correctment"), and gave him an oblique approach to culture. His estimate of Les Miserables, which he filmed in 1935: "It's I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang in costume." A restless traveler who keeps his retinue stepping, he once dog-trotted into Paris' Louvre with the observation: "We gotta be outa this joint in 20 minutes."
Zanuck's enthusiasm for big-game hunting, duck shooting, riding and polo also provided sport for sniggering Hollywood humorists. But these furious pursuits were no joke to the animals whose remains now adorn his office, nor to his helpless subordinates who had to tag along.
Says Warner Director Michael Curtiz: "I had no idea about duck hunting, and neither did anybody else in the studio. But we all had to go. The casting director almost blew my head off. They put us in those damned trenches in the rain early in the morning, three, five o'clock, I forget. But that was the order from Zanuck."
Director William Wellman, now with MGM, grimly recalls a hunting trip with Zanuck in British Columbia: "You had to shake the porcupines out of the trees at night. It snowed. We had to break trail for the horses. We were snowbound for three days. Zanuck chased a grizzly for 30 hours, came back with a sprained ankle. We made 20 separate fords. We lost the horse carrying our medicine. I got blood poisoning. It was the ruggedest, damndest trip you've ever seen. But d'you know what? Zanuck loved it."
Underlings whom the boss drafted for riding and polo suffered many a bruise and fracture, but kept their loyalty intact. As time went on, he replaced the polo casualties with better poloists, to whom he gave studio jobs. Though the team was at first sneered at as the only one "where the horses are better bred than the men," its intense, fearless little captain drove it to win the respect of its opponents and the hospitality of Pasadena's uppity Midwick Country Club. Meanwhile, headlong Darryl Zanuck became a two-goal player at the price of such injuries as a smashed nose and a broken hand.
Virgin & Victim. More staid in his outside activities than he used to be, Zanuck, the one-man studio, still gives a three-ring performance. In a story conference where he plays all the roles of scenes in the making, the bristle mustache suddenly twitches, and the face looks heavenward in horror. The jaw sags until the huge cigar droops from his lower lip like a wet sheet hanging from a tenement window. He leans back across the grand piano in his office. His voice becomes shrill and frightened. This is Zanuck impersonating a virgin in distress.
In a chase scene, he will rush around his office, crouch behind desks, push over chairs, hide in his anteroom and come popping out with an excited summary of the action. Once his conferees were startled on entering the office to find him prone on the floor under his desk. "I've got it!" he yelled exultantly as they entered. "The guy is under the truck. He's fixing a flat-he's like this. And whack! The truck slips off the jack and down onto his neck! It's great! Great!" Re-enacted on the screen by Richard Conte, Zanuck's performance made a grimly effective scene in Thieves' Highway.
Zanuck's leather-lunged chatter during a conference rambles almost as much as his footsteps, and the sessions usually last about 2 1/2 hours. It is Scenario Coordinator Mollie Mandaville'si vital job to take down the jumble of words and translate them into a tight, coherent account that will reach the participants' desks the next morning so that they will know precisely what the boss said. Zanuck is annoyed if a new writer puts some of his ad-libbed dialogue into the script. He thinks in pictorial terms, does not fancy himself as a dialogue writer, intends his ad-libbing only as a guide.
As an idea man, however, he is probably unsurpassed in Hollywood. His mind is a storehouse of plots, story angles and gimmicks, and with an extraordinary, freewheeling inventiveness he reworks them endlessly into different patterns. He is also a merciless story critic. Respecting talent, he has a knack for channeling it and knows when to leave it alone. For all his autocratic belligerence, he can quickly drop an idea of his own when someone else comes up with a better one.
Love Points the Way. Darryl Zanuck made his movie debut playing an Indian maiden on an early lot at $1 a day. That was just eleven years after his birth on Sept. 5, 1902, in Wahoo, Neb. (pop. 3,300). Worried about his health, his Methodist parents--Frank Zanuck, an Iowa-born hotel clerk of Swiss parentage and Louise Torpin Zanuck, a Nebraskan of English stock--moved to Los Angeles when Darryl was six. His mother cut his early movie career short as soon as she caught sight of him in Indian costume.
Not long after their arrival in California, his parents were divorced. When his mother remarried unhappily, Darryl began spending his summers back in Nebraska with her father, Henry Torpin, a well-to-do grain processor and landowner who could spin eyewitness tall tales about an Indian massacre. In letters to his grandfather, the scrawny boy soon outdid the old man's stories with lurid imaginings of what might be seen from his train window.
Not quite 15, Darryl enlisted in the Nebraska National Guard after taking the braces off his teeth so that he could lie more convincingly about his age. He spent almost two years in service, on the Mexican border and in France, dispatching more letters to his grandfather. A veteran at 17, he lost patience with school and determined to be a writer, like O. Henry. Meanwhile, he sold shirts and newspaper subscriptions, worked as a rivet catcher in the shipyards and a poster tinter in a theater lobby. Writing furiously, he sold a story called Mad Desire to Physical Culture. (The subtitle: "Determined to die in a futile effort to make amends, love points him a better way and rekindles his desire to live.")
Living in Glamour. At 20 (and looking younger), unrestrainedly ambitious and insufferably cocksure, Zanuck set out to conquer Hollywood. He quickly became the nuisance of the Los Angeles Athletic Club, which was then home to such important personages as Charlie Chaplin, Mack Sennett and Fatty Arbuckle. "I'd have given my right arm to be in the picture business," he recalls. "Living in the glamour of it, hearing stories about it all day long and not being a part of it, hurt."
What also hurt was the snubs and ruthless practical jokes with which most of the club members liked to torment him. Zanuck, who has never lost the fervor for practical joking that he acquired as a constant victim of it, recalls that the pranks were "not always too pleasant, too nice."
Two of the club members, William Russell and Raymond Griffith, who were big stars of the day, treated Zanuck tolerantly. Russell called his attention to a play that Eager-Beaver Zanuck was able to buy, rewrite for the movies and sell to Universal for $525--his first movie sale. After that, he flourished briefly at selling his stories to the films until, in 1923, the studios suddenly decided to have no truck with writers unless they had literary reputations. Getting nowhere, he turned for advice to Griffith, who casually counseled: "Do a book."
Cloth-of-Gold Style. Zanuck did. In his first real stroke of Hollywood genius, he persuaded the manufacturer of a hair tonic called Yuccatone to pay for the job-printing of a volume called Habit, which is now a collector's item. Zanuck sent engraved cards to the studios announcing the publication of his "novel." Actually, Habit consisted of three of his rejected scenarios in narrative form, plus an elaborately disguised, 100-page testimonial to Yuccatone. Filled with hopheads, gunrunners, the U.S. Cavalry, good women and bad grammar, the stories were written, as one discerning reader put it, in "the cloth-of-gold style and unbending grand manner of a half-educated adolescent." In all four stories, the heroes were dwarfed by the villains, invariably men of uncommonly larger size. The heroes had to endure extreme abuse before they triumphed in a burst of vengeance and vindication.
Ever since Habit, there's been no stopping Zanuck. He sold every story in the book, and, though the long Yuccatone blurb somehow defied efforts to put it on the screen, the other three pieces were eventually filmed. He also used the book to impress petite Virginia Fox, an actress he met at about that time on a blind date. He sent her a copy the next day, followed it up daily for six months with flowers until she consented to marry him. Hollywood, pro-and anti-Zanuck, knows Virginia Zanuck today as an unusually gracious woman without airs, who has a strong influence for the best on her husband.
The $4,875 Raise. In 1924, Zanuck settled at Warners' as a writer assigned to Rin-Tin-Tin, the dog star. After twelve pictures, he frantically set up a special department to devise new and more astounding things for the dog to do. "He was the most brilliant bloody animal that ever lived," says Zanuck, who managed nevertheless to keep a jump ahead of the beast. Zanuck graduated finally to pictures with human stars, piled up 19 screen credits in one year until exhibitors protested that the Warners were charging too much for their movies when they had only one writer--"this" Zanuck"--on their payroll. At the Warners' instructions, he began writing under three pseudonyms as well, including "Melville Crossman," a writer M-G-M admired and tried, without success, to hire. He also found time to haunt the cutting rooms ("That's where I really learned the business") and to berate directors so shrilly for ruining his scripts that they had to bar him from their sets.
One night in 1927 the Warners summoned him. Starting the next day, they told him, he would be the studio's executive producer, with a salary jump from $125 to $5,000 a week. As he left the office, an old doorman whispered that the incumbent production boss had been let out, and wondered who would get the job. "Me," said Zanuck, who now recalls: "He got hysterical, he thought it was so funny."
Zanuck pampered his mustache, put more bite into his voice, began turning out flamboyant, exciting pictures at low cost. He had stuttered for years, but by 1930, as he grew into confident authority, the stutter disappeared.
Zanuck broke with the Warners three years later. He had committed the studio to restoring, by a certain date, a 50% industrywide pay cut. When the time came, Harry Warner insisted that he would not resume the full pay scale until a week later. Though his contract still had five years to run, Zanuck quit rather than go back on his word.
Kick in the Pants. For advice on his next move, he went to canny Joseph M. Schenck, an industry pioneer and boss of United Artists. Before he left Schenck's apartment, they had written out a longhand contract to form 20th Century, and Schenck has been Zanuck's nominal boss* ever since. In 18 months with 20th Century, Zanuck made 18 pictures--17 of them successes. The bustling little company developed an earning power roughly equal to that of the huge Fox Film Corp., whose assets were nine times as large. Fox needed the production vitality of a Zanuck; 20th Century could use Fox's theaters and distribution setup. While Zanuck hunted bear in Alaska, Joe Schenck bagged a prize at home: a merger creating 20th Century-Fox.
Under Zanuck, the studio boomed from 108 acres to 284, from five usable sound stages to 16. Its employees now total 4,000 at peak strength. Not so much a starmaker as a moviemaker, Zanuck never built his constellation to the size of MGM's or the brightness of Paramount's, but it is now bigger & brighter than ever: Betty Grable,* Jeanne Crain, Gregory Peck, Clifton Webb, Linda Darnell, Paul Douglas, Tyrone Power, Dan Dailey, Anne Baxter, Gene Tierney. Zanuck's producers, who include perennial Court Jester George Jessel, have a hard time shining in his shadow. He employs some of Hollywood's best directors: Elia Kazan (Pinky), Henry King (Twelve 0'Clock High), Joseph Mankiewicz (A Letter to Three Wives'), Anatole Litvak -(The Snake Pit).
World War II matured Zanuck, both as man and moviemaker, sent him back to the studio bursting to produce films of ''real significance." As a lieutenant colonel in the Signal Corps, making training and combat documentary movies, the commander in chief of the Fox lot chafed under discipline and hostility, has since decided that "It was a great thing to get a kick in the pants at that stage of your career." The kick was sometimes well deserved, notably when he let himself be photographed in attitudes of bravery under fire in his Technicolor documentary of U.S. landings in North Africa. In the middle of 1943, after service for which he won the Legion of Merit, he tore into his studio job again.
Big Day. Before breakfast at his home on the beachfront in Santa Monica, Zanuck begins a chain-smoking day with one of his eight-inch cigars--the first of 20--and a phone call on his private wire to the studio to find out how movies--his own and competitors'--are grossing around the country. After a shave by Sam ("The Barber") Silver, who comes out from the studio, Zanuck drives his green Cadillac ten miles to the lot, attacks production schedules, mail, memos and telegrams until 1 p.m. Then he takes a sawed-off polo mallet, which he uses as a sort of swagger stick, trots over to the executive dining room, and starts monopolizing the conversation before he has sat down.
After lunch he charges back to his office, holds a story conference, sends more wires to Fox outposts. (Cracks his longtime pressagent Harry Brand: "If one of our pictures grosses as much as Western Union does on it, we can all retire.") By 3:30 or 4 p.m., he darts to his projection room for a look at rushes, wardrobe and make-up tests. By 4:30 he calls up his children--Richard Darryl, 15, Susan Marie, 16, and Mrs. Darrilyn Zanuck Jacks--for a fatherly chat.
At 6 p.m., after a rubdown from the studio masseur, he takes a nap in a soundproofed chamber off his office. Awakened at 8, he dines at the studio, sometimes with Mrs. Zanuck or his French tutor (he has been studying French on the run ever since he was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 1936), sometimes alone, staring grimly at a television set. At 9, he is looking at more rushes or rough-cut complete films. Then he gives instructions to cutters, producers and directors who join him in relays into the night. He sees everything that is put on film at the studio, and the whole output of every major competitor. His working day ends some time between 2 and 4 a.m.
Served With Skill. Zanuck breaks up this grueling routine with three-day weekends, occasional flights in season to Sun Valley, where he skis expertly, and four-week vacations on the Riviera mingling with the international set ("They're freaks to me, and I'm a freak to them").
Except during the summer, when he bakes himself to a burnished mahogany on Santa Monica's beach, he weekends at his Palm Springs estate, 100 miles from Los Angeles, where the Zanucks usually entertain 12 to 16 guests. Among the regulars: Elsa Maxwell, Restaurateur Mike Romanoff, the Louis Jourdans, the Reginald Gardiners, Clifton Webb, Agents Charles Feldman and Fefe Ferry.
Zanuck runs the weekend party with the same steely control he uses at the studio. He refuses to play any game at which he does not excel. Since Playwright-Scripter Moss Hart introduced him to croquet, he has made it a cult, has turned his lawn into one of the world's best-kept croquet courts, complete with floodlights.
With the box office sagging and television on the rise, Zanuck finds "less time for practical jokes these days." What movies need more than anything else, he believes, is "subject matter that can appeal to the intellectual and yet not alienate the masses." He adds: "People will accept enlightenment if it is skillfully served to them. They will not go to the theater for enlightenment alone." Confident of the future, he will spend $5,000,000 in the next few years to add five new sound stages to the 20th Century-Fox lot.
A Few Lousy Bucks. Insured by 20th Century-Fox for $900,000 (all it could get), Zanuck last year signed Hollywood's longest-term contract. It calls for him to work ten more years at his old salary of $260,000 a year, with an option to go on for another ten as an adviser at an annual $150,000. As the largest individual stockholder, he has 100,000 shares in the company, plus 30,000 in trust for his children (total current value: $2,616,250). Last year his income from salary and dividends, before taxes, came to $465,000. After taxes, it did not meet his expenses.
"I have gone into the red every year since the war," he says. "I manage only by going a few thousand dollars into my savings each year. I won't change my way of living to save a few lousy bucks. I have a philosophy about it: the only thing you get out of life is living. I'm not working as hard as I do to turn around and deprive myself."
But for zealous Moviemaker Zanuck, the best part of living is his work: "It's silly to say money hasn't meant anything --but it has never been the primary consideration. Actually, nothing has ever given me the genuine satisfaction of taking pictures, seeing them through and then getting wonderful reviews. I love what I'm doing."
* This week 20th Century-Fox is shooting pictures in England and the Philippines, planning others in Germany, Mexico, Israel, Newfoundland, Australia, Sweden and Argentina.
* Another nominal boss: 20th Century-Fox President Spyros Skouras.
* Whose current Wabash Avenue, Zanuck hopes, will recover some of the $3,000,000 lost by a box-office slump in her last two films.
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