The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  In the fall of 1962 Butler and I moved to WBKB to work for Red Quinlan. We were celebrated locally as prodigal sons, and we started to plan new documentaries. It was Red’s idea to do a series about former Chicagoans, to be called Home Again. Quinlan wanted the first one to be about the University of Illinois’s and the Chicago Bears’ legendary running back, Red Grange. Grange lived in Lake Wales, Florida, with Martha, his second wife of many years. They owned a small grapefruit grove. Their entire crop had been wiped out that year as a result of a series of typhoons, so there was an air of melancholy about him when we met.

  We were able to find archival films of Grange in the 1920s, when he used to fill stadiums with a hundred thousand people. Films of his college games showed him regularly scoring four or five touchdowns after running all the way to his left, then cutting back to his right and outrunning the other team’s entire defense. The phrase “broken field running” was coined by a sportswriter after watching Grange in action.

  In 1923 Grange led Illinois to a national championship and became a three-time All American. Then he turned pro, joining the Chicago Bears. He was earning $100,000 a season in professional football when most players made $100 a game. When I met him, he was about six feet tall, and only ten pounds heavier than his playing weight. He was fifty-nine years old. There were no trophies or memorabilia from his celebrated career visible in the modest ranch house, and it was hard to get him to talk about the past. The one event he described with emotion was a heart attack he had suffered while living in an apartment building on the North Side of Chicago a number of years before. He remembered being carried out on a stretcher and into an ambulance, the proud football hero, fallen and vulnerable.

  He agreed to come back to Chicago and let us film his return, along with his recollections of growing up in Wheaton, Illinois. Ranked one of the greatest high school players in the country, he was able to pay his way through college by delivering large blocks of ice he carried on his back. He became known then as “the Wheaton Ice Man.” He told me he learned broken field running from watching a dog cavort in a neighborhood park.

  Home Again: “77 Grange of Illinois” was my second film. No censorship problems this time, but neither did it create much of a stir. Quinlan ran it on WBKB in prime time to a lukewarm reception from critics and audiences. There is no print in existence that I’m aware of, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who remembers it. It was made with more skill than Crump, but lacked passion.

  In December 1962 a hearing was held before the Illinois Parole and Pardon Board, after which they gave a recommendation to Governor Otto Kerner. A few days later, the Governor granted clemency to Paul Crump and sentenced him to life in prison without possibility of parole. It was the first time rehabilitation had been accepted as a cause for clemency. A day after Governor Kerner announced his decision, I received a personal note from him, under the Seal of the Great State of Illinois. He wrote that he had seen my film and was “deeply moved by it.” He said it was a major factor in his decision to spare Paul’s life, “despite the fact that [his] Parole and Pardon Board ‘recommended two to one to send him to the electric chair.’”

  I went to Red Quinlan’s office and showed him the note. He was proud that we had played a role in influencing the governor’s decision, but felt bad that he couldn’t broadcast the film. Nevertheless, it had accomplished its goal for Paul and for me.

  For years, even after I moved to California, I stayed in touch with Paul by mail. He eventually became eligible for parole due to the efforts of Elmer Gertz. Each year for three years in the mid-1960s, at Gertz’s request, I appeared before the Illinois Parole and Pardon Board, seeking to have Paul released to my custody in California. Each year my request was denied. Is it possible they felt Hollywood was not an appropriate place for a convicted murderer? But in 1993, after thirty-nine years in prison, Paul was paroled to the custody of his sister Naomi and went back to the neighborhood of his youth. He couldn’t make it on the outside in that environment. His anger, long suppressed, again turned to violence, and he picked up several assault and battery charges. He was remanded to a mental health center, where he died in 2002 of tuberculosis and lung cancer.

  When I see The People vs. Paul Crump today on VHS, the only medium in which it’s still available, whatever power it may have had in 1962 has evaporated, like a prizefighter once feared, now frail. The film reeks of its own incompetence. But was Paul in fact innocent? He had to make a full confession to be paroled. Was it that the state wanted its pound of flesh, or was he in fact guilty of murder? I tend to believe now that he was, but in 1962 I had to believe he was not, and there is plenty of reasonable doubt in a situation where innocent people, especially black men, were routinely beaten to confess by the Chicago police. A more troubling question for me is whether I would have made the film if I knew then that he was guilty. I was looking for a subject to film; he was looking for a get-out-of-jail card. I don’t dwell on the question because it would mean we both gamed the system. Paul got his freedom, I got my career.

  A man with thick bushy hair and a mustache, a prominent nose, and a laid-back sense of humor came into my life. His name: Tony Fantozzi. His job was booking nightclubs in the Midwest for the William Morris Agency out of Chicago. He’s convinced he was hired by the Morris office because he was Italian, and in those days “the boys” owned and operated all the nightclubs. Tony was instrumental in changing my life.

  He joined the New York office of William Morris in 1958, fresh out of the Air Force. He’d made serious money shooting craps in Korea, then moved to Las Vegas. In Vegas he reconnected with Pearl Bailey, a star performer who remembered him from Korea, where in addition to his duties as a soldier he used to book acts for the officers’ clubs. Pearl called Abe Lastfogel, head of the William Morris Agency, saying, “There’s a kid here that would make a great agent.” The Morris rule was that you had to have graduated from college, and then start in the mailroom before you could become an agent. Tony had been there only six months when he was transferred to the Chicago office. He was making $150 a week, and they gave him a rented car. His territory was everything east of Vegas and west of New York City. Typically a top performer like Jimmy Durante would play New York, then go on the road, and Fantozzi would book him and accompany him across America as far as Vegas. They’d play Chicago, St. Louis, Omaha, and Houston.

  Tony had a chic apartment on Michigan Avenue in a courtyard above a restaurant called Le Petit Gourmet. The living room was dominated by a full set of drums, which he used to play to relax. One afternoon, after reading about my Paul Crump documentary in the Chicago press, he called Red Quinlan and asked to see it. Why? He has no idea; but he went to the station, screened the film, and thought it was wonderful. “Who the hell did this?” he asked.

  Red gave him my phone number, and he called me. Tony had no idea what to do with me at that time, but on a hunch he asked if I’d meet him for lunch.

  He convinced me that I could only go so far in Chicago. If not for him, and the fact that he liked me, I would probably never have made it out of there. He asked me to sign with the Morris office, and I became one of his first clients. A master of hype and hyperbole, Tony was moving up at the agency and getting into the movie business, as well as booking nightclub acts.

  I liked Fantozzi, though I had no idea what the hell an agent did. We had a few meetings, and he started to talk about me to television producers and other clients of the Morris office who were passing through Chicago. One was David Wolper, who was making documentaries for all the networks. Fantozzi brought up my name and the notoriety around the Paul Crump film, and Wolper said, “Great, I’d like to meet him.”

  When Tony was transferred back to the New York office, then Los Angeles, we kept in touch. He kept prodding Wolper, who by then had seen the Paul Crump documentary. They agreed that if I wanted to come to Los Angeles, Wolper would make a spot for me in his company. Tony began to sing my praises to the networks in Hollywood. “Here is
a great young talent,” he’d tell them. “Maybe he could shoot an episode of this or that.” There was no blueprint, but a snowball effect started to occur, created by Fantozzi out of whole cloth. There started to be a “Friedkin buzz,” people in the film and television business talking about “this kid from Chicago.” Tony was getting calls from studios and production companies: “Who the hell is this guy? Where’d you dig him up?” The other agents at the Morris office got on the bandwagon, and because of their hype I became a hot property on very little substance. The agents were sending inter-office memos to each other, saying, “Why don’t you get Friedkin a meeting at this place or that place?” and I was getting the meetings, and the interest continued to build.

  “So even if you didn’t know how to point a camera, you became hot,” Fantozzi says. True. I would have stayed in live television in Chicago forever, but in Los Angeles I got into the film world fast and started to learn how to direct. After a while it became easier for Fantozzi to sell me. The thing that surprised him most was how quickly I caught on. “You understood editing, music, everything, all that stuff,” he told me, as though it had been preordained.

  I had mixed emotions about leaving Chicago, my mother, and longtime friends. With the death of my father, and my move to Los Angeles, my mother went back to fulltime nursing. I had a final emotional dinner with Quinlan and Butler. We promised to stay in touch and hopefully work together again.

  I knew nobody in Los Angeles and had not met Wolper or any of his staff. With only three 16 mm. documentaries to my name, I thought I’d fail quickly and come home. I promised my mother I would bring her to L.A. if by some miracle my ambitions panned out.

  2

  MR. DOCUMENTARY

  The Wolper Company was making successful documentaries for the networks, as well as smaller-budgeted shows for syndication to local stations. Their crowning achievements were documentaries they produced for CBS, adapted by Theodore H. White from his best-selling Making of the President books. The first was about the Kennedy-Nixon election in 1960, and Wolper crews had exclusive access to both candidates, resulting in more personal, humanistic portraits. The book and the TV shows won numerous awards. That was followed by the Johnson-Goldwater campaign from The Making of the President 1964, with comparable results. I felt like a freshman trying out for the varsity.

  The Sunset Marquis at that time was a modest motel where weekend fathers stayed with their children, and where singles could stay in a no-frills room with a kitchenette and one bath. Two single beds in a corner at right angles to one another doubled as couches. The furniture was cheap and utilitarian. There was one twelve-inch television set on a stand. The three-story pale stucco hotel was a rectangle surrounding a swimming pool. Each apartment had a small balcony that looked out over the pool. There was a garage, but no bar or restaurant, just a soft drinks machine. I lived there for two years because it was a block down the hill from Wolper Productions at the corner of Sunset and Alta Loma, on the quiet eastern tip of the noisy Sunset Strip.

  I checked into the Sunset Marquis on a Friday, and I wasn’t due to meet Wolper and his staff until the following Monday. Apart from the Morris office agents in Beverly Hills, I had only one other contact. Before I left Chicago my friend Irv Kupcinet, columnist for the Chicago Sun Times, told me to call a man named Sidney Korshak if I needed anything—anything—in Los Angeles. I called him.

  A call came back, inviting me to meet Mr. Korshak at a restaurant on Canon Drive near Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, the famous Bistro Garden. I later learned that Korshak was the owner. I didn’t realize at the time that he was one of the most shadowy figures in the history of Hollywood and Las Vegas. He was the lawyer for the Teamsters’ Union and the Chicago mob, and looked after their West Coast interests. That he controlled the unions and could strike the studios or prevent a strike at any time made him the power behind the throne in Hollywood. Everyone had a “Korshak story,” and he was either loved or feared by most of Hollywood. A family man, he was often seen in the company of starlets. It’s been reported that he negotiated Jimmy Hoffa’s release from prison after donating a million dollars of Teamster money to John Mitchell, former U.S. attorney general and head of the Committee to Re-Elect President Nixon in 1972. Korshak is said to have given Mitchell his word that if Hoffa was released, he would never again seek union office. Shortly after Hoffa broke that promise, he was never seen again.

  Mr. Korshak was at a table in the back of his crowded restaurant in the late afternoon, finishing a conversation with a very attractive woman who turned out to be the actress Jill St. John. He was a trim six-foot-three in his late fifties, an immaculate dresser with a shock of white hair. Though I knew little of his reputation, he had an aura of power, yet he was friendly and generous.

  “Call me Sidney.” He had a slight lisp. A waiter brought a fresh pot of tea and two cups. During our conversation, various familiar faces came over to shake his hand or whisper in his ear. This was met with a casual word or a nod. “Irving [Kupcinet] tells me you’re a talented young man,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “Don’t be modest,” he said. “What are you doing out here?”

  “I’m going to do documentaries for the Wolper Company.”

  “Dave Wolper?” he asked. I nodded. “You have an agent?”

  “The Morris office.”

  He was slightly impressed. “Born in Chicago?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir, this is my first time out here.”

  “Where’d you go to school?”

  “College, you mean?” He nodded. “I never went to college. Graduated from Senn High School.”

  “North Side?” I nodded. “You have family?”

  “Just my mother—my father died about ten years ago.”

  “You take care of your mother?”

  “Yes, sir—she works as a nurse at Northwestern University Hospital, but I plan to bring her out here as soon as I can.”

  “You go to synagogue?”

  “I was bar mitzvahed at Agudas Achim.”

  His eyes flashed to the ceiling for a split second, “That’s near Argyle Street,” he said.

  “Argyle and Kenmore,” I said.

  He nodded, sipped the freshly brewed tea, and said, “I grew up on the Westside. Lawndale. I’ve got a brother who lives in Hyde Park.” His brother Marshall was then head of the Illinois Department of Revenue. His next question took me by surprise. “How much are you making at Wolper?”

  “Five hundred a week,” I answered proudly.

  “That enough to send money to your mother?”

  “Yes, sir—I never made more than two hundred in Chicago.”

  “Well, it’s a little more expensive to live out here.” He smiled, leaned forward, and wrote something on a small card, then said in a soft voice, “If you ever need anything, call me at this number. You’re a friend of Irving’s, which means you’re a friend of mine.”

  Fantozzi took me to meet Abe Lastfogel, head of the William Morris Agency. Several of his top agents were also in Lastfogel’s spacious, antique-filled, paneled office. He had been the boss for over forty years. He was a jovial man, no more than five-six, with curly gray hair. His height belied his power, but his energy and positive attitude reinforced it. His office was elegant and understated. I had signed with Fantozzi in Chicago, where the Morris office was a single room in Tribune Tower. After the notoriety of The People vs. Paul Crump, Tony sent the film to agents in the Beverly Hills office, and now I was meeting with the head of the agency and his top guys in their three-story headquarters. I was nervous and had no idea what to expect. Mr. Lastfogel had baby blue eyes and thick-lensed glasses. He spoke softly, almost imperceptibly, so that you had to strain to hear him. He led me to an easy chair by a fireplace and sat on a small couch next to me.

  “My people tell me you’re a fine young director,” he said.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I haven’t seen your film, but I trust my partners’ judgment
.” He gestured to the other agents, who nodded in agreement. “I want you to know that now that you’ve signed with us, you’re part of our family. We think you’ll have an important career, and we’re going to help you build it, but you must never take an assignment, whether it be a picture or a television show, that you don’t have a passion for. Never take a job just for the money. I don’t know if you’ve managed to save anything while you were in Chicago.”

  “I have six thousand dollars in the bank,” I said proudly.

  Lastfogel leaned closer. “If you ever have money problems, as long as you’re a client of this office we’ll give you a loan, interest-free, up to a hundred thousand dollars.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. The others in the room nodded and smiled. We shook hands.

  Later I met Dave Wolper and a few of his staff. I was impressed by the size of the offices on Sunset Boulevard. There were at least two hundred people, all busily involved in editing, sound mixing, story meetings, and screenings. Everyone had a secretary or an assistant, and they were all laid-back, California style. I expected Wolper Productions to be a small company; instead, it was a factory, and some of the giants of documentary film worked there: Mel Stuart, Alan Landsburg, and Jack Haley Jr. Wally Green (who later wrote The Wild Bunch for Sam Peckinpah, and Sorcerer for me) was a staff writer. Kent MacKenzie, a quiet, studious man who directed Exiles, a much-lauded film about American Indians, was a staff director. Jim Brooks, who later created some of television’s most popular series, including The Simpsons, and went on to direct Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News, was then a researcher at Wolper.

  I was greeted by the head of business affairs, a muscular suntanned man with a toupee who ushered me into his office. After the pleasantries, he said, “By the way, your deal is for five hundred a week, but we’re going to give you six.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It’s more expensive to live here than in Chicago. We want you to be happy.” Korshak! He went on, “Dave has an exciting new series of hour shows for the ABC network. They’re being sponsored by the 3M Company. He’s going to talk to you about doing one of them right away.”