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1914-2009  |
Memories of Schulberg
Are Made of These
of TheColumnists.com
Budd Schulberg died Aug. 5 at 95. These come to mind in relation to Schulberg:
Fight weigh-ins; Dartmouth; Sammy Glick; the Un-American House Committee; the first Sonny Liston-Floyd Patterson bout; the Playboy mansion; Ten dollars; Ernest Hemingway; Muhammad Ali; Quogue, Long Island; Spike Lee; Hofstra conference; Roger Donoghue; Tony Galento--and Seymour Wilson Schulberg.
I first met Schulberg at fight weigh-ins at Madison Square Garden in New York in the 1950s. I was pleased to be chatting on equal terms with the unassuming Schulberg because his “What Makes Sammy Run” was a signal book for me as a teen ager in the 1940s. His character, Sammy Glick, was the prototype, scoundrel who clawed his way from newspaper gofer to the top in Hollywood. The novel was based on the producer, Jerry Wald, who eventually produced some good movies, among them “Mildred Pierce,” “Johnny Belinda” and “Key Largo.”
Schulberg went to Dartmouth from 1931 to 1935. My friend, the 95-year-old Marvin Rauch, who was at Dartmouth then, told me, “There were 800 men in our class: 70 were Jews.” We were both radicals. I knew Schulberg, but not well. I admit that I didn’t hang out with his fraternity crowd, and probably resented the big parties he threw.”
Schulberg was an ex-Communist who testified against former Communist associates before the House committee. I think personality conflicts with some dogmatic Communists motivated his actions. It alienated Hollywood friends for a long time but he stubbornly justified his course. He came to admit that the anti-Communist witch hunts were more of a threat to the country than the Communists he had known.
He was part of a spectacular scene at the Liston-Patterson fight in Chicago where writers Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, William Buckley and Schulberg among them, bandied opinions with sports writers and boxing rogues. After the fight, the entourage moved over to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion on the north side where we ogled the bunnies; nobody scored any romantic kayos.
The liquor flowed freely for many, and as we all stumbled out of the mansion at dawn, an embarassed Schulberg asked if he could borrow $10 for cab fare. When I met him again at another fight weigh-in, he immediately sought me out and handed me the $10 with apologies.
Schulberg was a boxing junkie from the time his father came home from the Benny Leonard-Richie Mitchell fight, and his blow-by-blow description thrilled the 7-year-old who adored Leonard. Schulberg came to write “The Harder They Fall, the novel based on Primo Carnera’s rise and fall as a heavyweight champ, and wrote boxing dispatches for newspapers large and small.
At a Hemingway conference I heard him describe his first meeting with Hemingway. At the time a pugnacious Hemingway was jealous about Schulberg's success with “The Harder They Fall” and challenged him on his knowledge of boxing. Schulberg knew of fighters Hemingway never heard of; this infuriated him. The pair almost came to blows.
Early on Schulberg wrote this about Ali: “Cassius Clay is, I’m afraid, the fighter who most clearly reflects the flaws of the middle sixties. He is earning a fortune before he has mastered his trade. He is the perpetrator of the big laugh and the big lie. …Doug Jones exposed him as a rangy boy fast with his hands but totally ignorant of infighting and highly susceptible to a punch on the jaw. Even Patterson could beat him, and to put him in with Liston too soon may stigmatize promoters as accessories to legalized murder.”
Later he came to admire Ali for his boxing brilliance and what he represented for black people. He wrote: “Watching him roll his magnificent black body and bark with laughter like a frolicking young sea lion, who would guess that this would be the same man who was soon to frighten, infuriate, and finally confront the white power structure of America?”
Schulberg lived for a long time in a lovely, rambling home on a sylvan creek in Quogue, a quiet outpost in the Hamptons. I met him there when he was 87, a ruddy complexioned, curly gray-haired, soft-spoken man who spoke with a stammer. He talked about a project with the filmmaker Spike Lee to make a movie about the epic Joe Louis-Max Schmeling rivalry. The movie never came to fruition.
At a conference at Hofstra University on Muhammad Ali last year, I had the assignment of interviewing Schulberg. Despite his stammer, he told some fascinating tales. He talked about his screenplay for the Oscar-winning movie “On The Waterfront,” which includes one of the most famous of all movie lines. Pug Marlon Brando tells Rod Steiger, “I coulda been a contenda.” Schulberg revealed that the line stemmed from the journeyman boxer, Roger Donoghue, once telling him that at best he could only have become a contender.
Even though some of the high literary types (i.e. Hemingway) didn’t esteem Schulberg, I think he was a significant writer for his time, with “Sammy,” “Harder They Fall” and “The Disenchanted”--about his disastrous screen-writing experience at Dartmouth with F. Scott Fitzgerald.
He could spin the word wheel. I liked this line: “Two-Ton Tony Galento used to swing fists, shoulders, head, and knees in the general direction of his victims. Tony even bit ‘em once in a while, and may qualify as the only cannibal now residing in Orange, New Jersey.”
And finally, this: a correction in The New York Times about its obituary on Schulberg noted that “his real name was Seymour Wilson Schulberg; Budd was derived from a family nickname.”
©2009 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted Aug. 17, 2009.
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