When Hollywood Had a King

by Connie Bruck

  Whatever else Stein may have provided Petrillo, he clearly made him the beneficiary of his political instincts and clout—strategizing to keep Petrillo in power, seeing to it that he was elevated when the time came. Stein did this quietly, however, moving almost imperceptibly behind the scenes. He had watched as a conflict began to fester between Petrillo and the aging Weber, who had held the position of international president for nearly two decades. It was plain to Stein that Petrillo would eventually challenge Weber for the presidency; in the resultant turmoil, Stein worried, other candidates would inevitably emerge and one of them might beat Petrillo. What Stein wanted was a smooth, controlled succession. In 1938, the conflict burst noisily into the open. Weber, who had grown tired of hearing Petrillo refer to himself as “the tail that wags the dog,” wrote a front-page editorial in the union newspaper charging that Petrillo was not “the big cheese” in the union and that all the benefits he claimed he had won for the musicians were “pure bunk.” Stein stepped in. He knew that Weber was dependent on the income from his job to survive, and also that the AFM had no pension plan. He approached Weber and asked him whether—if Petrillo would support a resolution of compensation to Weber and his wife for the rest of their lives—Weber, in turn, would not run for reelection and would designate Petrillo his preferred successor. Weber agreed. Next, Stein went to Petrillo, who quickly saw the wisdom of avoiding an open conflict on the floor of the convention (and, probably, of passing a resolution that would one day benefit him in his retirement as well). At the AFM convention in Asbury Park, New Jersey, in 1940, therefore, Stein watched as Weber stepped down and his anointed successor, Petrillo, was elected by a resounding majority.

  “Everything was carried out as planned,” Stein declared.

  Stein had gravitated to the entertainment business from the time he was a boy, but there was nothing wide-eyed about this fascination; he approached entertainment in the same clinical, dispassionate way he did investing—studiously analyzing the past and present in an attempt to identify those patterns that would enable him to exploit the future. And by the early thirties, he had concluded that it was time to diversify from the traveling band business. For while its rate of increase had been tremendous through the twenties, and had even persisted after the onset of the Depression, by 1931 the road business had changed. Only famous orchestras could draw large crowds, and less important groups were harder and harder to book; if promoters couldn’t have a top orchestra, they tended to use local bands instead. Many of the smaller traveling bands were going out of business. The dollar volume of bookings for MCA was nevertheless high, due to the success of the top orchestras, strongly amplified by radio; and that volume would even reach a new peak when the swing era began in 1935, and bands like the Dorseys, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Harry James, and Casa Loma became great hits on the road. But Stein knew that—however resolutely upward its dollar trajectory—the one-night business he had essentially invented would eventually be obsolete.

  He had expanded to booking floor shows—and even providing liquor, and quietly owning an interest in nightclubs; but these were mere sidelines (rather déclassé for something as grandly named as the Music Corporation of America) and dangerous besides. In the aftermath of Capone’s reign there was so much gang factionalism that it was harder to chart a safe course. Stein had, after all, been threatened with kidnapping. His friend Petrillo had been kidnapped, and several years later had narrowly escaped assassination. When the business agents had muscled Stein at the French Casino, apparently in an attempt to reach Petrillo, there were several different gangs trying to move in on Petrillo, according to Marovitz. Perhaps they were trying to move in on Stein as well. And it could not have pleased Stein, who so coveted prestige, that he was identified in the press in 1935 as an owner of the French Casino. Stein was intensely secretive about his business dealings—whether it was the mailing list of MCA customers or his interest in the Chez Paree—but Chicago (where he was known as “Julie” Stein) was in many ways like a small town, in which within a certain milieu everyone knew everyone else, and their business, too. Secrets were hard to keep.

  In 1936, Stein decided to shift the major focus of his talent agency to the movie industry. If there was a past he wanted in some measure to leave behind, Hollywood was the place for that. It was a movie colony, a still embryonic, highly fluid society, where even the most prominent—Eastern European moguls and movie stars from Dubuque—tended to shed old skins. And it fairly radiated opportunity. The movie industry was young (talkies had come in just a few years earlier), but it was already the nation’s eleventh-largest, producing about four hundred new movies a year. The studios had weathered a downturn during the Depression but were recovering nicely; much of their strength derived from the fact that they were run as a cartel, controlling not only production and distribution but also exhibition, through their own movie theater chains—and their power over independent theaters as well. (Stein, with his promotion of exclusives and packaging, could appreciate the virtue of being able to control the buyers of one’s entertainment.) And money flowed freely in Hollywood—most freely to the studio executives (Louis B. Mayer, the president of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, would be the highest-paid in the country in 1937, with a salary of $1.3 million), but also to the stars, on whose sizable salaries Stein would be taking commissions. There was a major national talent agency rooted in Hollywood—the William Morris Agency, headed by Abe Lastfogel—which had started in vaudeville, and now had several hundred actors on its roster; but Stein had already proven that he could defeat his competition. The largest studio was Warner Bros.; the richest and most powerful, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; but the most complex and far-flung of the eight major studios, and the one Stein knew best, was Paramount Pictures. Stein’s good friend, Barney Balaban, had sold two thirds of the Balaban & Katz theater chain to Paramount in 1926, since then becoming one of Paramount’s largest stockholders. The company had gone through a six-year epic of mismanagement and a wasting bankruptcy. During that process, Stein had become a major shareholder, acquiring a great deal of stock at a very cheap price. In July 1935, Paramount had emerged with a new corporate structure; one of the powers behind that restructuring was another good friend of Stein’s, a lawyer from Chicago named Edwin Weisl, Sr. When the dust had cleared, Weisl was head of Paramount’s executive committee; he brought in Balaban to be Paramount’s president in 1936, but in the coming decades no major decision would be made at Paramount without Weisl’s approval. Stein concluded the timing was right for him, too, to move to the new frontier of show business; his plan was to begin representing the talent in movies, and—as he had done with musicians and radio programs—eventually to move into production as well.

  Primitive though it was, Hollywood already had the patent on glamour in this country. This was an added bonus. For while Stein was not enthralled by glamour, his wife certainly was. In 1928, Stein had married Doris Jones Oppenheimer, a divorced mother of two from Kansas City. That description, however, evokes far too matronly an image of Doris—a strikingly beautiful brunette, with a heart-shaped face and coquettish look, who no doubt felt as stymied by the confines of Kansas City as Jules had by South Bend. They had first met when she was not quite fifteen and the twenty-year-old Stein was playing with his orchestra at the Muehlebach Hotel. At the time, however, Stein was seriously involved with another Kansas City girl—he was said to have intended to marry her—but she died a short time later. When Doris and Jules met again, it was in 1927, at a dance in Kansas City during the Christmas holidays; by this time, Doris, twenty-six, had been married and divorced. A tightly controlled man who instinctively kept his emotions at bay, Stein was a thoroughgoing romantic when it came to Doris. Seeing her at this dance, he later recalled, “I realized how attractive and beautiful she was. She was dressed in a tight long dress with a black velvet bodice covered with orchids, beautifully groomed and most appealing. We danced together several times and much to my surprise she told me she was going to New York early
the next month for a few weeks or longer.” Stein was spending most of his time there, too, since he had just opened MCA’s office in New York, on the top two floors of the new Paramount skyscraper at Times Square. He was there to meet her train at the New York Central station, and Doris never went back to life in Kansas City. She remained in New York, taking a job in the handbag department at Bergdorf Goodman, and introduced the sober Jules to delectable new pleasures (including shellfish, forbidden in his parents’ kosher household). Doris was Jewish, too—her father’s name was Jonus before it was changed to Jones—but it was not something she generally acknowledged. Jules was mesmerized by what he saw as her exoticism and joie de vivre (deriving, he told himself, from her French and Portuguese ancestry)—“I was the introvert, she, the extrovert,” he commented—and in November of that year they were married. On their wedding night, they sailed on the Île de France for a month-long honeymoon in Europe.

  Doris and Jules in 1928, shortly before they were married. Courtesy of Jean Stein

  Upon their return, they lived in Chicago and also New York. Their daughter Jean was born in 1933, and Susan two years later. (“I wanted girls,” Jules said, “since I was concerned that no boy would have lived up to my expectations.”) Doris was very eager to mingle in New York society, but found it unreceptive. Hollywood, however, was far more open. There was really no significant social establishment there, and at the moguls’ mansions—where many guests made an art of pretending to be what they were not—Doris and Jules were eminently acceptable. “Here in Hollywood,” Jules declared, “is where Doris came into herself.” Richard Gully, a well-born Englishman who arrived in Hollywood at about the same time as the Steins, recalled meeting them at a party at Mary Pickford’s estate. Pickford, who had been the nation’s biggest box office draw for many years, had married Douglas Fairbanks in 1920; the marriage was seen as a union of Hollywood royalty, and their estate, Pickfair, was legendary. When the Steins arrived in 1936, Pickford had just divorced Fairbanks, but the aura of Pickfair had not dissipated. “It was like being invited to the White House,” said Gully. “Everyone else there knew each other, there were all these great stars—and Doris and Jules and I were the three unknown people, huddled in a corner.”

  Gully, who became Jack Warner’s assistant (and a lifelong confidant of Doris’s), continued, “Doris made up her mind in the very beginning that she had to be in the social swim. The three most famous hostesses at that time were Mary Pickford, Mrs. Jack Warner, and Mrs. Sam Goldwyn. Most of the great movie people at that time had a court jester—at Pickfair, the jester was Sonny Chalif. So Jules Stein employed him as an agent at MCA—and from then on, the Steins were always included at Pickfair.” Jules, who had been a good dancer since his years as a young orchestra player, especially loved to dance with Pickford, and they became lasting friends (he eventually arranged for their plots at Forest Lawn cemetery to be adjacent, saying that he imagined himself dancing with her there on moonlit nights). And, over the next ten years or so, Doris so excelled as a hostess that she ultimately surpassed her role models. “People think being a hostess is having money and giving a party,” sniffed Gully, who missed the glamour of Hollywood in its golden age. “But it’s much more than that. Doris had an instinct for who had social prestige, who had glamour, who had flair. Doris,” he added, “had flair from the word go.” Even before she had the wherewithal, she had an eye for style (that was, in part, what Jules had noticed); and now its presentation—in Jules’s offices, in their homes, in herself—became her specialty. A fashion columnist, describing Doris on a visit to her hometown of Kansas City, wrote, “And speaking of rubies and diamonds—did you see the bracelet worn by Mrs. Jules Stein of Hollywood. . . . Necklace, earrings and rings repeated the diamond and pink ruby theme. Her platform-soled sandals were of pink ruby satin, silver bound. The glittering tunic gown of lame alternated pink ruby and true blue stripes, and was run through with soft pink ruby bands at neckline and waist. . . . Her satin bag matched her slippers; even the orchids pinned to it were of just the right shade.”

  MCA had opened an office in downtown Los Angeles in 1930, but now Stein decided to build a headquarters worthy of his ambitions—and not on Sunset Strip, where most agents’ offices were, but in Beverly Hills. He had believed from the start that a well-appointed office was key; it presented one’s face to the world. And it reflected, too, his determination to professionalize this most denigrated occupation—there were notable exceptions, but talent agents in Hollywood generally occupied the lowest rung on the social ladder, perceived as poorly educated, vulgar, obsequious, venal. Stein’s agents broke the mold; like him, they had to dress conservatively, in dark suits; as a rule they were college-educated; and they were not to wear their venality on their sleeve. To Stein and his men, the Randolph Street office had seemed the height of tastefulness; but Doris—who came on the scene after the office had been decorated—disapproved, deciding that Stein’s heavy, dark Flemish and Spanish furniture should be replaced. She had gone to New York (to the store that would become Stair and Company, their eventual partner) and found an eighteenth-century English Chippendale desk. It cost $900. (This was in the midst of the Depression; it had sold for $2,900 several years earlier.) Jules had been pleased with this desk (and, no doubt, the bargain), so Doris had returned to New York and bought an eighteenth-century English breakfront for $1,800, which also was shipped to the Randolph Street office.

  “I kept looking at the desk and breakfront in my Chicago office,” Stein said many years later, “and I realized how much more beautiful they were than what I used to have. I became infatuated with English antique furniture. I found it was not only beautiful, but also comfortable and utilitarian. I have come to love these pieces so much that I have a terrible time disposing of them. I like to buy them, but I hate to sell them. It’s the way some people feel about disposing of beautiful paintings. We are known to have one of the largest collections of En-glish eighteenth-century furniture in the world.” From the start, too, Stein had been struck not only by the antiques’ beauty and utility, but also their tax benefit. Always searching for an edge, Stein scoured books on finance, reports on tax legislation; this was his idea of reading for pleasure. And he concluded that antiques had a singular advantage: one could buy them for one’s offices, depreciate them at a rate of 10 percent a year for ten years—thus, the government paid about half their cost—and they would go up in value all the while! As if that were not enough, he leased the furniture—which, eventually, would fill all MCA offices—to the company.

  Doris and Jules decided to create this office together, supervising the design, construction, and decor from the ground up. The result was quite remarkable. Situated on a large piece of property in the center of Beverly Hills and designed by architect Paul Williams (whose neo-Colonial mansions were becoming a distinctive town feature), the MCA building was a white, columned mansion with black-shuttered windows and a bell tower. Seeing it for the first time, one might have taken it for a small museum, or perhaps a diplomatic consulate—never, a talent agency. As Stein said, “It was the only time in history that a building that looks like a Colonial mansion was constructed to be an office building.” A huge Irish Waterford crystal chandelier hung above a sweeping double circular staircase in the entry hall (a competitor later recalled how cowed he felt when he drove by the MCA building at night and saw that blazing chandelier through the windows). Jules’s office was an eighteenth-century pine-paneled room from London that had then been used as a background for selling antiques in Wanamaker’s in New York; when Wanamaker’s went out of the antiques business, Jules bought the room. And on a shelf behind his desk was something he would keep there always, which must have reminded him of his youth and, perhaps, his ancestry: a Middle European music box in which violinists and other instrumentalists played, and dancers (one wearing a powdered wig) turned slowly to the music.

  The furnishings throughout the building were, of course, English antiques—dark-paneled offi
ces were filled with partner’s desks, breakfronts, bookcases, leather club chairs, hunting prints—and Doris selected everything, from upholstery to picture frames. One problem with the abundance of breakfronts and bookcases in the MCA offices was that they demanded books. Leather-bound books. Initially, Stein bought a few thousand books in England—“furniture books,” they were called—for about a dollar apiece. But then, having exhausted his source, he advertised for such books in the British newspapers, and soon he was inundated with them. He filled every breakfront and bookcase and still had an overflow of about forty thousand books, which he stored in the basement of a building he owned in Manhattan. (After a visit to his MCA agent, Tennessee Williams is said to have told friends, “When you go to MCA, take a book. They’ll never miss it.”) Stein had of course wanted to gentrify the image of an agent, but this building was so grandiose (and so at odds with the reality of the business it housed) that it had all the integrity and verisimilitude of a Hollywood stage set. The only clue to what went on inside was the MCA symbol over the front door—a globe with music running around the world (better designed but conceptually unchanged from that first letterhead). At the opening of the building, Jerome Kern approached the entrance and, looking at the MCA insignia, remarked, “There is a sour note in ‘Home Sweet Home.’ ” Stein, however, seemed impervious to any detractors; he took such evident pleasure in his showplace that the producer David O. Selznick dubbed him, sardonically, “The Curator of the White House.”

  With his inveterate formality, passion for English antiques, and medical training, Stein was a rarity in the talent business—but instead of trying to adapt to his environment, he underscored whatever set him apart. And he was convinced, oddly enough, that his medical training was a particular asset when he got to Hollywood where, he said, he viewed his artists as a doctor does his patients. “A doctor’s attitude is one of understanding the patient,” Stein said. “He must be able to analyze their reactions, make suggestions and recommendations; mollify them when they have tantrums. He must never show emotion.