Vanity takes all kinds of shapes. In one of his earliest pictures Gary Cooper played a location scene so well that it was shot in a single take. That night Coop went diffidently to the director’s tent. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to do that scene over again in the morning,” he said. “I seem to remember at one point I picked my nose I was so nervous.”
The director knew better. “Listen,” he said. “You were so damn nervous you were great. You keep acting that way and you can pick your nose into a fortune.” That bit of advice registered with Coop. After he’d belly-flopped trying to dive into the deep end of acting with pictures like Saratoga Trunk, he saw his old director again. “Guess I’ll have to go back to my nose,” he said.
It took an eye doctor from South Bend, Indiana, to set up in the agency business and put the hammer lock on Hollywood; by comparison Myron only twisted arms. Dr. Jules Caesar Stein is the founder and board chairman of MCA, a flesh-peddling octopus with approximately one thousand clients ranging from actors to zither players, before it got rid of them all in a hurry under pressure from Washington’s trust busters. He and his wife, Doris, are also devout collectors of antiques; European furniture dealers used to rub their hands when they saw them coming, but they were soon crying in their porcelain teacups, because Jules had set up his own antique shops.
Dr. and Mrs. Stein have climbed so high since his college days—he worked his way through by playing the violin in little jazz bands—that they are now helping to refurnish the White House. Mrs. John F. Kennedy was pleased to announce last year that the Steins, as a gift to the nation, “will contribute pieces from their collection of eighteenth-century antiques as well as new acquisitions.”
Soon after the Steins moved to California—they now live in a beautiful Beverly Hills hilltop mansion—the good doctor told me at a party: “I’m going to be king of Hollywood one day.”
“You and who else?” I laughed. But I underestimated him. He succeeded, thanks to the shortsightedness of the producers when big stars are in short supply and desperate demand.
Besides Brando, MCA spoke for Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman, Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Dean Martin, Jack Benny. That’s just a sample. Agents used to hustle for salary and billing. Jules Stein’s poker-faced assistants demanded lots more than that. They often weren’t satisfied until they got a fat slice of the picture’s profits for their clients.
The first deal like that was made for Jimmy Stewart, whom I originally recommended to MGM after he and I played on Broadway together with Judith Anderson in Divided by Three. The slice that MCA carved for him out of Universal-International’s Winchester ’73 brought him more than $600,000. Now he’s a millionaire on the investments he made on the advice of a keen-brained business friend from Texas and he’s become a sober-sided industrialist as well as a fine actor.
With Kirk Douglas as a client Jules Stein did even better at Universal. After running up costs of $12,000,000 on Spartacus in which Douglas starred and also produced with Universal’s money, the huge, 400-acre studio fell into a situation where it had to sell out, lock, stock, and acreage. MCA bought the place for $11,250,000 and set to work churning out television series. Now it’s called Revue Productions and it’s the best-run studio in Hollywood. If MCA plans work out now it has beaten the anti-trust suit—it is concentrating on production and stripping itself of the agency business—millions more dollars will be invested in an effort to make Hollywood the movie capital of the world once more.
Once an actor has seen his agent put the pressure on and turn a geyser of cash into Old Faithful itself, the sky’s the limit where his greed for money is concerned. Everything else is forgotten, including, of course, gratitude. William Holden, an MCA prize winner, did mighty well with The Key, though Trevor Howard stole the notices; and much, much better before that from Bridge on the River Kwai, which brought him millions. The producer of The Key was Carl Foreman.