Thursday was the 115th anniversary of the birth of Howard Dietz. He’s a largely forgotten figure now and you may well wonder why anyone would want to remember a guy whose day job was that of publicist. Ah, but Dietz was no ordinary publicist. He was the most successful in the role that anyone has ever been in Hollywood. Here’s how.
Dietz got his first job in publicity with Samuel Goldfish. Goldfish was one of the many chancers and would-be entrepreneurs who showed up in the newly established film colony in the early years of the 20th century. It didn’t hurt that his wife’s brother, Jesse L Lasky, was in the same business. With Oscar Apfel and Cecil B DeMille, the brothers-in-law founded the Jesse L Lasky Feature Play Company. Their movie, The Squaw Man, under DeMille’s direction, is now officially designated the inaugural Hollywood feature. The barn in which they shot it houses the Hollywood Heritage Museum.
A succession of mergers led to the creation of Paramount Pictures but Goldfish fell out with the new boss, Adolph Zukor, and he left. In 1916, he set up a new company with the Selwyn Brothers, sometime theatre producers, under the combined title of Goldwyn. Because he liked the sound of it – and of course it made it sound as if the whole company was his – Goldfish changed his own identity from the literal translation of his Polish name to Sam Goldwyn.
This is where Dietz comes in. He dreamt up a logo for the company, using a short piece of footage of a lion, whom Dietz dubbed Leo. He also proposed a fancy Latin slogan to go round the lion’s head: Ars gratia artis (Art for art’s sake). It was probably Dietz himself who first glossed the company philosophy as “Money for God’s sake”.
In 1923, the Selwyns forced Goldwyn out of the company and their new partner Lee Shubert (whose Organisation is still a potent force in American theatre) soon sold the whole outfit to the cinema chain Loew’s. In turn, Marcus Loew went into partnership with Metro Pictures and Louis B Mayer’s company and so – to supply Loew’s with product – MGM was born: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Sam Goldwyn himself never had any role in or dealings with MGM.
But Howard Dietz did. He became LB Mayer’s right-hand man for more than thirty years and the logo he had created for Goldwyn was adapted for MGM and was soon the most famous studio image in the business. That in itself ought to bestow immortality upon him.
MGM hit the ground running because Mayer and Dietz picked up the silent epic Ben-Hur, then in production and financial purgatory, and turned it into a public relations triumph. From then on, Dietz could do no wrong in Mayer’s eyes. He was a meticulous hoarder of paperwork – a man after my own heart – and his archive of MGM’s publicity machine is the largest of any kind in New York’s Public Library for the Performing Arts,
But Dietz was also a wit of legend – he was welcomed onto the Algonquin Round Table, the ultimate accolade for a humorist at that time. Here’s a sample. Hollywood’s most hated man of the age was Harry Cohn, the boss of Columbia Pictures. No would-be actress got her starlet break at the studio unless she first succumbed to Cohn’s voracious and brutal appetite (Rita Hayworth was a brave exception whose working life Cohn made a misery). Minions got fired for daring to look at him and it was widely believed that he spied on them all. Writer Ben Hecht nicknamed him White Fang.
When Cohn died suddenly, his funeral was the biggest in Hollywood since that of Valentino. Dietz swept his arm across the massed studio executives and declared: “See? Give the public what they want and they turn out for it”.
But Howard Dietz had another string to his bow. For thirty years, he wrote lyrics for musicals, most regularly with the composer Arthur Schwartz. Their most famous remains The Band Wagon, originally a stage revue for Fred Astaire and his sister Adele in 1931 but far better known in its movie version made 22 years later, also with Astaire. For the movie, Schwartz and Dietz wrote some new numbers including ‘That’s Entertainment’, a notably witty lyric that in time became a much-loved anthem of showbiz.
I am playing the album of another of their shows as I write. The Gay Life was based on stories by Arthur Schnitzler and has a charming score, much of it sweetly sung by a young Barbara Cook. The show has been revived since its opening fifty years ago come November at the Shubert Theatre (yes, that Shubert), but under a new title – The High Life. Language evolves, after all. The original book of Show Boat (the leading man of which is called Gaylord Ravenal) had the line “Gay’s a little queer today”, but – surprise – you never hear it in modern revivals.
My own favourite Howard Dietz writing is for a little ballad called ‘Confession’, too risqué for most singers of its vintage (the only contemporary recordings I know are by Mabel Mercer and Judy Holliday, both of whom could do faux naïf convincingly, but differently). This is the lyric in its entirety, set to a deceptively simple up-and-down Schwartz melody:
“I never kissed a man before.
Isn’t that a shame?
I never kissed a man before –
Before I knew his name.
I never got a taste for wine.
Isn’t that a sin?
I never got a taste for wine –
It can’t compare with gin.
It’s nice as nice can be,
My faith is at last restored,
To know that vice can be
Its own reward.
I always go to bed at ten.
Isn’t that a bore?
I always go to bed at ten –
But I go home at four”.
In the 1970s, I worked successively on the film section of Time Out, as the assistant editor of Plays & Players and then as Time Out’s television editor, so for a few years I frequented screenings, openings, receptions, launches and other kinds of industry bash. One ran into all sorts of interesting people at these beanfeasts. A particular aspect of cultural history contributed to the mix among these circles. The investigations of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee – otherwise known as the McCarthy witch-hunts – had propelled a number of leftish Americans from Hollywood and New York to London in the late 1940s and the 1950s. By the ‘70s, although there were no longer blacklists (formal ones, at least), many of that generation had elected to see out their days here. They liked London.
One face I saw around quite often – and knew to say hello to – was that of Howard Dietz’ old partner Arthur Schwartz. I don’t recall that we ever had an extensive conversation – I should have shown more gumption – but I seem to think that he very readily sat down at the piano, as composers are apt to do. I do remember that he was a little man with big glasses and a fine head of hair, the jet-blackness of which must have been enhanced (he was in his 70s).
Another figure on the scene then also connects to Dietz. Jesse L Lasky Jr was (of course) the son of Samuel Goldfish’s brother-in-law and an accomplished figure in his own right. He had forty-odd screenplays to his credit (eat your heart out, Joe Eszterhas), of which the most famous was also the best-known to be directed by his Dad’s old colleague Cecil B DeMille – The Ten Commandments.
I retain a strong mental image of Lasky, a dynamic little man brimming with good cheer and inquisitiveness. His chin beard and flyaway sweep of hair strongly resembled Charles Dickens, a resemblance I do not doubt that he cultivated.
Another vivid memory is of two fabulous ladies from the dawn of Hollywood who could be seen on the ’70s London scene. Long a London resident, Bessie Love appeared in masses of silents and early talkies (Griffith put her in both Birth of a Nation and Intolerance). She was still occasionally appearing on the London stage, including in Harold Rome’s doomed musical version of Gone with the Wind at Drury Lane. Anita Loos had a long and vibrant career but secured her immortality by writing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as long ago as 1926. I cherish an image of them yakking together at some event, both got up in the style of their youth – wafty, brightly-coloured silks, cloche-like hair, startling makeup. I don’t think this is fantasy. The faces in the image are those of palpably old but feisty dames. Still fabulous, though.
But my fondest memory of Hollywood in 1970s London came about when I wrote of The Philadelphia Story. George Cukor’s elegant high comedy was playing at one of the revival cinemas – the Everyman, perhaps, or the Starlight – and I thought Time Out’s standard listing was weak so I rewrote it, mentioning the Oscar-winning screenplay. On publication day, I got a phone call. An American voice came on the line, quavering and drawling: “This is Donald Ogden Stewart. I wrote the screenplay of The Philadelphia Story and I just wanted to say that that’s the nicest thing anyone ever wrote about the movie”. As you may imagine, I was dumbfounded. However, we got talking, I established that he lived in London and he readily agreed to do an interview. I rounded up my chum Geoff Brown, who knew a lot more about vintage Hollywood than I did, and we went over to the house.
Don and Ella lived in a fine pile hidden behind trees on the road called Frognal near the Finchley Road in north London. The house, we learned, had belonged to Ramsay MacDonald at the time that he became Prime Minister in 1924. The first-ever Labour cabinet meeting was held in the library. We stood in the room and “felt the vibes” – no doubt the phrase we used at the time.
The house was fascinating. Ella was a determined collector of art and objets and you couldn’t stick a postage stamp on any wall or flat surface because the space was all taken. She too was festooned with heavy decorations around her neck. It was no wonder that she was apt to stoop.
She and Don entertained us for hours. In many ways, Don deferred to her for indeed her story was the more compelling. As Ella Winter, she had been quite an adventuress. Born in 1898 of German parentage in Australia (I only just discovered that), she studied at the LSE and then worked in the States. She became a friend and trusted confidante of a well-connected woman, Eleanor Roosevelt (Eleanor was Ella’s own full name). In 1924, she married a famous American. Thirty-two years her senior, Lincoln Steffens was an investigative reporter at a time when his trade was known as “yellow journalism” and “muck-raking”. Steffens had visited Soviet Russia within eighteen months of the October Revolution of 1917 and upon his return he made a remark that became legend: “I have seen the future and it works”. During their marriage, the Steffens visited the USSR but they could not sustain his earlier enthusiasm.
Steffens died in 1936. Don Stewart was among those who attended the memorial. “I knew the widow was going to speak and I expected some old dame but … well … out steps this sex object,” he declared in his Jimmy Stewart-like drawl. “So I thought I better marry her”. He had a good ear for the evolving use of language. I could listen to him for hours. A skinny beanpole and physically frail at nearing 80, he kept a lively mind, much stimulated by Ella’s combative style. He covered an inability to remember anyone’s name by calling everybody Toots (rhyming with Schutz).
Geoff dropped out of the picture but I kept up the relationship and was a pretty regular visitor to the house. On one occasion, invited to tea, I arrived horrendously late, having completely neglected to allow for the nightmare of getting across north London by public transport on a Sunday afternoon. I was met with a small gathering seated around the tea and the perfectly evident response of Don and Ella that they hadn’t the faintest idea who I was.
It didn’t matter. There were further visits. At one social event, I enjoyed a long and absorbing conversation with Kenneth Tynan in the famous library. Another gathering revived a tradition, as Don explained, that they’d pursued back in California. The guests would all sit around in the library with tea and cake and there would be an invited speaker who, ensconced in a fine leather armchair, would hold forth on a current topic. On this occasion, the topic was the Ellsberg Papers, an issue of public disclosure in Washington that exercised the chattering classes at the time.
After the talk, I went to pick up my glass of mulled wine that Don was doling out in the conservatory. “So, Toots” he demanded. “What did you think of the speaker?” He quickly read my face and, before I could summon an intelligent sentence, went on recklessly loudly: “Yes, I know what you mean. I knew that guy’s father and – can you imagine? – the father was just as boring as he is”.
Don died in August 1980, Ella a few short weeks later. Anita Loos died in 1981, Arthur Schwartz in 1984, Bessie Love in 1986 and Jesse Lasky in 1988. All the other London-based Hollywood ex-pats driven out by the blacklist – Carl Foreman, Joseph Losey, Cy Endfield, Sam Wanamaker, Larry Adler, Betsy Blair, Alexander Knox – have passed too.
But one remains. She was not in flight from HUAC but rather from a meteoric career that abruptly fizzled out. On January 12th next year (if she is spared, but she was interviewed on radio as recently as February so we can hope), London will celebrate the 102nd birthday of Luise Rainer. Her Hollywood period ran for just three years, but after she picked up her second successive best actress Oscar (for The Good Earth in 1937), public expectation was so high that the producers didn’t know what to do with her.
To get a sense of how old Rainer is, contemplate that she was once married to Clifford Odets, a figure who seems preserved in truly ancient history. Nevertheless, she was a lively presence around London well into her 90s. Somehow having Gwyneth Paltrow, Michael Brandon and David Soul in residence doesn’t seem quite as magical.
PS: After I posted this blog entry, I noticed that Sunday’s Observer had included in its Review section an extract from a 1957 interview with Charles Chaplin. By a remarkable coincidence, the piece was written by Ella Winter. Sadly, it does not appear in the on-line edition of the paper.
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