Paramount Founder Almost Died at 100th Birthday Bash
The Big Night arrived with one obstacle that could have spelled disaster
Adolph Zukor was born in Risce, Hungary, a small farm town in the prominent Tokay grape-producing district. He was orphaned at eight years old. He sailed from Hamburg, Germany, with $24 sewed into the lining of his quilted vest and arrived in New York City, in March of 1891.
He worked as a sweeper, an upholsterer, and a furrier in his early years in the United States. Fascinated by the moving image, he became a penny arcade, nickelodeon owner, and motion picture exhibitor. The Crystal Hall on 14th Street was his first movie theatre. He further matured into a movie producer, master-showman leading to the founding of Paramount Pictures.
Zukor was one of the first people to garner considerable profits in the movie business.
He understood that the three principal components of the film business were production, distribution and exhibition. He set the stage for the movie business we see today.
In June of 1912, he incorporated and established Famous Players Film Company to become the American distribution company for the feature length French film, “Les Amours de la reine Elisabeth” ( The Loves of Queen Elizabeth) starring the great French Actress Sarah Bernhardt. It was a critical and financial success and this theatrical triumph transformed the slight five-foot-three-inch young man into a soaring mogul.
He was an early champion of longer film format, feature-length motion pictures that would transfix and entertain audiences with wonderful stories starring unforgettable, enchanting actors and actresses to inhabit those stories and myths.
He was unwavering in the notion that Paramount’s screen performers, male and female, should be deliberately, tastefully groomed into “film stars,” so alluring and dazzling, that movie fans would flock to theatres showing their films.
Paramount’s company of “Stars” was imposing. Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, Mae West, Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, W. C. Fields, The Marx Brothers, Olivia De Havilland, Gloria Swanson, Fredric March, John Wayne, Patricia Neal, Claudette Colbert, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Ray Milland, D orothy Lamour, Marlene Dietrich, William Holden, Audrey Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Robert Preston, Paulette Goddard, Charles Laughton, Barbara Stanwyck, Veronica Lake, Maurice Chevalier, Super Duper- Gary Cooper, Martin and Lewis and a silver-haired cowboy named, Hopalong Cassidy aka William Boyd.
From the silents to stereophonic sound, from small-screen to VistaVision. During the 20s, 30s and into the early 40s, Zukor presided over directors, screen-writers, producers, musicians, composers, artists and technicians, many who had immigrated from Europe, who bestowed Paramount’s films with a cosmopolitan radiance and luster. Cinema that conveyed style and finesse.
He built the 33-story Paramount Tower Building at 1501 Broadway that housed the fabled 5,000-seat Paramount Theatre. He created two production studios, one in Astoria, Queens, N.Y., and the second in Hollywood. He assembled and built a 2,000 Paramount movie theatre chain, across the country, to play Paramount films.
He was the most commanding and influential person in the first 25 years of the American motion picture industry.
In early November of 1972, Paramount president, Frank Yablans, had come from a meeting with Gulf +Western Industries Chairman, Charles Bluhdorn. G+W was Paramount’s parent company at that time, and it had been decided to commemorate Chairman of the Board, Emeritus, Adolph Zukor’s 100th birthday with a grand and lavish celebration in Hollywood on January 7, 1973. I was tasked with pulling off this Tinsel Town extravaganza.
Thank goodness I had the help of wonderful professional Paramount people starting with the gifted and enthusiastic Producer, Howard W. Koch, Facilities Head, Bill Ross, and the gallant, plucky men and women of the Advertising, Publicity and Promotion Department on both coasts.
I traveled back and forth between N.Y. and L.A for two months. I would be in New York for a week and then spend two weeks in Los Angeles. I was supervising the marketing efforts of both the feature film and television divisions while immersed in the planning and logistics for Zukor’s Hollywood Birthday Soiree.
LEE MARVIN ONCE TOOK A SWING AT DON RICKLES
There were invitations, invitation envelopes, RSVP cards and envelopes, hold-the-date telegrams, security, guest tickets, dais guest list, press lists, VIP gathering room, floral arrangements, stage theme and ballroom sets to be designed and built, limousines to be reserved, a live show and entertainment Howard would produce, a filmed tribute to Zukor to be created and an opulent banquet dinner fit for royalty.
The Big Night arrived with one obstacle that could have spelled disaster.
JIM BROWN’S JAVLIN THROW LEFT THE CROWD SPEECHLESS
A wooden track had been constructed to accommodate Zukor’s wheelchair to move him unseen from the ballroom floor up to the chamber’s stage. This makeshift passageway paralleled the back of a four-tiered dais supporting 136 film stars, studio heads and celebrity guests.
His wheelchair, precariously perched on this untested wooden route, three feet above the floor seemed unsteady. The right wheel had slipped off the track. I was terrified that this frail centenarian would be mortally injured. He would never know that the 1,400 people jammed into the International Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel, merely inches away, had come to honor and celebrate his life.
Both the Ballroom’s Banquet Captain and I leaped to help the man who had been pushing the wheel hair, to lift that clumsy conveyance and its precious occupant back onto the track. Tricky business, to be sure.
The quick-witted, stately Banquet Captain, dressed in white tie and tails took control. Coolly wearing his formal white gloves, he carefully and firmly guided the wheel chair and its ancient passenger up the track, toward the stage in complete darkness.
He miraculously positioned the wheelchair unseen, by the audience, to the left of the proscenium and a giant movie screen. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect.
A 30-minute filmed tribute to our birthday boy would end just seconds later, as the closing satisfying, reassuring narration spoken by CBS Evening News icon, Walter Cronkite, recited “…And so tonight we celebrate the 100th Birthday of the founder of Paramount Pictures and a true motion picture pioneer, Adolph Zukor, A Man of Our Century.”
I scrambled back, as fast as I could, to my seat on the dais.
The ballroom remained black for 20 seconds and then a pinpoint spotlight fell on the tiny man in the wheelchair.
The spotlight slowly grew, additional stage lighting and the house lights began to fully illuminate the ballroom. The entire audience of 1,400 people rose to their feet, as one, erupting into wild, sustained applause and cheers. Some folks whistled, some shouted, some stamped their feet and others had tears in their eyes, and wept.
The movie stars and film-makers who were in attendance included Barbara Stanwyck, John Wayne, Claudette Colbert, Kirk Douglas, Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, James Stewart, Billy Wilder, Cary Grant, Charleton Heston (Moses in C.B, De Mille’s 1956 Paramount classic, “The Ten Commandments”), Bob Hope, Liv Ullman, Jack Benny, Danny Kaye, Gregory Peck, Alfred Hitchcock, Cybill Shepherd, Fred MacMurray and Michael Caine.
Sitting in his wheelchair, next to a 14-foot-tall birthday cake, Zukor acknowledged the acclamation. Within his scope of interest, remarkably so at 100 years, he was extraordinarily intelligible and coherent.
I was privileged to have witnessed it before, in a spellbinding address, in a private gathering, to Stanley Jaffe, on being named Paramount president on his 30th birthday, in July of 1970.
In 1972, he assured a concerned Frank Yablans, while returning home from a visit to then-L.A. Mayor Sam Yorty’s office, where he had been honored, not to worry that the running time of “The Godfather” exceeded three hours. “If you believe the story is captivating and well told, the audience will never notice the time, and they will never want the film to end and stay forever,” he appeased with a soft smile.
He had outlived all his contemporaries, competitors, friends and enemies.
He was honored that night with, The Presidential Achievement Certificate, from then-President Richard Nixon, presented to him by Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Pictures Association of America.
Diana Ross, the Supreme, Supreme, and the Oscar nominated star of the 1972 biographical drama, “Lady Sings the Blues” and Paramount’s 1940’s preeminent leading lady, Dorothy Lamour, who had traveled from Zanzibar to Utopia with Bing and Bob, serenaded the Chairman Emeritus.
It was his 100th Birthday. It was his night.
“I am thrilled to be here. It is very hard to visualize in advance the heartwarming feelings you get from people you haven’t seen in years. Your emotions happen in a way you can’t mentally prepare for. All the unpleasant things in life that might have happened, are forgotten. This evening makes living to be a hundred, worthwhile,” he proclaimed.
Zukor passed away on June 12, 1976. I attended his services at the Wilshire Temple in Los Angeles.
Charles Glenn is the former worldwide head of marketing for Paramount, Universal, and Orion Pictures. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Screen Actors Guild