Paramount's Papa

Paramount's Papa

(See front cover)

In 1925, when American Telephone & Telegraph Co. gave a private showing of sound-pictures of people singing, an orchestra playing, a drummer drumming, officials of the company waited anxiously for the verdict of the man for whom the showing had been arranged--Adolph Zukor, president of Paramount-'amous Players-Lasky Corp.* Mr. Zukor said then: "I think it will be good some day. I'd like to see somebody perfect it. Myself, I can't handle it until it's better." Last week Mr. Zukor said: "From now on at least 50% of our productions will be sound pictures."

It was an important indorsement. During the last two months, Zukor has been popping in and out of all parts of the Paramount studios in Hollywood, often appearing most unexpectedly, examining everything. He had never before been known to be so inquisitive about the making of his own pictures. But the talkie has caused a crisis. First the talkie has greatly increased competition in the cinema business--Fox and the Warner Brothers having taken a talkie lead. Second, if the talkies become dominant, the U. S. may lose its position in foreign markets because U. S. stars can, at best, speak only one language at a time. Therefore, when Mr. Zukor finally pronounced in favor of the talkie, he issued orders for a curtailment of reckless Hollywood expenditures.

Having made up his mind, he returned last week to Manhattan. And everyone of the least importance in his Hollywood plant was left to read a book which he had given them. That book is the story of Adolph Zukor and of the shadowland he dominates.

The cinema, once a suspect-competitor of the nickel sideshow, began its new phase in 1912 when Sarah Bernhardt, old and lame, said "Pictures are my one chance for immortality." At that time, Zukor, a 5 ft. 4 in. Jew from Ricse, Hungary, was running a movie theatre on Fourteenth Street, Manhattan. William A. Brady, his temporary partner, distrusted the new medium; so did most other producers and actors. Most of the theatrical people who, lacking other jobs, worked in pictures, tried out of shame to stay anonymous. Zukor told their names. On a scratch pad one night he wrote a slogan: "Famous Players in Famous Plays."

It was a phrase that ended one struggle, began another. Since getting out of the steamer Russia at Castle Garden, with $40 in bills sewed in the pocket of his second-best waistcoat, Adolph Zukor had been busy all the time. First, for $2 a week, he helped an upholsterer, but he weighed less than 100 pounds then, and pushing down sofa and chair springs while he wove fabric round them was too hard for him. Feeling his strength passing, he got a new job in a furrier's shop, and after working for several years started a little business of his own in Chicago. At the World's Fair of 1893 he paid 5-c- to see an elephant switch its tail in the Edison kinetoscope, the first crude moving-picture machine. Author Will Irwin says: "That five-cent piece was the initial investment which grew into his present fortune."

Untalkative, small, muscular, shrewd, Zukor got along in the fur business. He and his partner, Morris Kohn, understood fur tradition--when a dealer tried to cheat them, one held him by the throat while the other ran to the bank to cash his check before he could stop payment. In 1897, surrounded by a tribal family, he married his sweetheart, Lottie Kaufman, in the Temple, and shortly afterward quit furs and bought a penny arcade in Manhattan. Later, when he had shown a profit running "Hale's Tours," one of William A. Brady's projects, he went home to Ricse for a visit and was received by the Mayor and the Town Council.

Just before going on his holiday he had added to his "Hale's Tours" feature a moving picture he had seen in Pittsburgh, The Great Train Robbery, by Edwin S. Porter. "Hale's Tours" was only a travelog --kinetic scenes of Mont Blanc projected on a screen in a gallery which rocked and swayed to simulate the movement of an observation car--but The Great Train Robbery was a real story that ran for twelve minutes. You saw the bandits riding on their raid, the station agent working in his office. "Hale's Tours" was in debt and Zukor told Brady that moving pictures would make up its losses. Backed by Brady, he started a chain of cinema "palaces" in Newark, Boston, Pittsburgh-- empty stores made into theatres with crude stages and chairs bought second-hand from bankrupt undertaking parlors. He had one real theatre with a piano--the Comedy, in Union Square, Manhattan.

While he had been a furrier Zukor had known another furrier named Marcus Loew and had invested in Loew's subsequent theatre business. The consolidation of Loew's vaudeville houses, solidifying Zukor's investment, had made his fortune, for the time being, secure. He and Loew found that they had common interests. Neither owned enough houses to keep a "feature" busy the whole year. In the new Loew Co. Loew was president and Zukor nominal treasurer. Into it Zukor threw all his cinema theatres except the three he owned with Brady. Zukor said, "I could have cashed in then for between $300,000 and $500,000."

Although now a rich exhibitor, he had nothing to do with making pictures to be exhibited, an industry which had developed from Edison's kinetoscope to a small, tight trust consisting of ten producing companies. Zukor, looking for new attractions for his houses, had been thinking of production when he wrote the slogan that afterward became the name of his company--the Famous Players. Gambling all his money on his belief that there would be profits in advertising cinema actors like "legit" actors, he fought to break the trust. While his wife sold her jewels and friends loaned their savings, he moved into a new apartment, bought an automobile, rented offices in the Times Building, Manhattan, and presented Sarah Bernhardt in Queen Elizabeth at the Lyceum Theatre.

From Mr. Irwin's report of what happened after that, you learn that Mary Pickford's girlhood ambition was to earn $20.000 a year before she was 20, that Samuel Goldwyn's real name is Goldfish, that David Wark Griffith was once a reporter, Cecil B. De Mille a writer of vaudeville sketches, and that Playwright Eugene O'Neill's father, James O'Neill, acted in Zukor's first pictures. You learn how Ben Schulberg and Hiram Abrams. after the latter had been discharged by Zukor, organized United Artists; how Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, David Wark Griffith came to fame, how Zukor bought Paramount and parted from Mary Pickford and how the War, wiping out foreign competition, made the whole world a market for Famous Players.

The fantastic expansion of the company from its shaky start to its present commanding position as Paramount-Famous-Players-Lasky Corp. was not achieved without crises. Zukor came near going broke twice in the first year--Daniel Frohman saved him the first time with a loan of $50,000, his life savings; the second time was when his studio caught fire and burned down without, however, destroying the rolls of celluloid film in a fireproof safe. Zukor spent $7,000 making The Prisoner of Zenda, a record price in 1912; by 1916 even an ordinary program picture cost $40,000; soon he was to make films that cost $1,000.000.

As his prosperity grew positive, and, finally, prodigious, his way of life changed too--he had always liked to live expansively. When comparatively poor, he had hired a maid, put his children in private schools, and learned to play tennis. Now he bought a thousand acres on the Hudson River and built a house with a private golf links, tennis courts, greenhouses, herds of purebred cattle, a swimming pool surrounded by gardens and a theatre for private projections of his new pictures. In the summer he travels to Manhattan every day in a power boat, and in the spring and fall in one of his cars. In the winter he goes abroad or lives in a hotel.

The Paramount Building in Times Square, Manhattan, 30 stories high, is the capstone of his career.-- Now 56, he is still a shrewd and exacting overseer of his vast businesses and he still looks a good deal like the furriers with whom he used to compete. His face, at once courageous, sly and stern, is set in hard lines curving downward. He has small hands and feet, a cauliflower in his left ear, and the skin of his face is traced with the faint scars left by a skin disease that bothered him badly when he was younger. He speaks fluent, correct English in an accent derived partly from Hungarian and partly from his youth in Chicago and East Side Manhattan.

Aside from the talent for stabilizing new ideas, which is responsible for his success in business, the quality in Zukor that out weighs all his other qualities is his loyalty to ties of blood, race, nationality. "He has always," says Irwin, "had a kind of mania for helping his relatives . . . half of Ricse corresponds with Adolph Zukor; some times one trans-Atlantic mail brings him 40 or 50 letters. He keeps for his Ricse correspondence a special drawer of his desk. . . . Sometimes he sits at the head of the great table in the dining room with forty relatives-in-law strung out before him. There is, too, the nursery, where play the four babies presented to him by those satisfactory children, Eugene and Mildred. A delegation of European moving-picture producers, coming to Zukor for a conference of international importance, found him on the lawn, fifth member of a game of tag. . . . His studios and offices have sensed the growth of this paternal and patriarchal quality; and his office nick name -- behind his back -- is "Papa Zukor."

*Paramount-Famous-Players Lasky Corp. is the recognized leader of the industry's & Big "Four" closely followed by Loew's, Inc., Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. and Fox Film Corp. Chief strength of Paramount and Loew's are powerful distributing and exhibiting organizations, Paramount operating nearly 400 theatres and Loew's owning some 50 varied companies. Chief strength of Warner Bros, and Fox are the vitaphone and movietone processes, now installed in about 1,000 theatres. Warner Bros., further clinched its lead in the "talkies," last month, by securing an exhibition outlet, buying Stanley Co.'s 255 theatres. Latest earnings figures follow: Paramount (9 months ending Sept. 30) $5,974,000; Loew's (40 weeks ending June 3) $6,377,000; Warner Bros, (quarter ending Nov. 30, estimated) $2,900,000; Fox Film Corp (9 months ending Sept. 30) $4,016.000.

/-THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT--Will Irwin--Doubleday, Doran ($3.50).

*To vie in size with Zukor's Paramount building may be the projected William Fox's Vox Theatres Corp. building, to be erected at an anticipated cost of $10,000,000 on Broadway at 47th Street.