by Jean Stein
1801 Angelo Drive, Beverly Hills
Credit 2.1
Barbara Warner with her father, Jack Warner, 1942.
ARTHUR MILLER: Jack Warner’s generation invented what turned out to be the major world culture—not just American, but a world culture. The world’s dream is to escape the dreadful, ordinary, industrial, technological life. And you can understand how it happened if you think of where they came from, a place where there was absolutely no chance for anybody to do anything. They were living in a mud hole, but here the dreams were absolutely feasible. If you could think it, you could do it. It was magic. And they filled the movies with that magic. George Cukor told me once, “Our object was to escape reality. We were quite conscious of all that.” It was a never-never land, a construct. These immigrants, these Jews from Eastern Europe, had developed this dream that had blond hair, blue eyes, and a straight nose. It all had to be beautiful. This was a fairy tale, because they were immigrants who saw this country as a fairy tale. It was incredible: it captured the whole country.
—
DAVID GEFFEN: Jack Warner was a great character, like all of them. They were remarkable guys, but they were monsters. The movie business is a hard business, and you had to be a monster to create this industry.
—
CY HOWARD: Nobody cares now, but they did. They really liked their business. It was an exciting business, and they cared for it. They loved to get out and hustle. They didn’t do it for the money; money was just a by-product. Now, they also loved to get away from the house in the morning, to be around people with perfect tans and straight noses from Texas who’d dance around them and say, “It’s so nice to be here!” The studio was the family, and someone like Loretta Young was the wife. Not a bad wife. Wouldn’t you like to think, This is my wife, Ginger Rogers, rather than the wife at home? So they had it both ways.
But I don’t know why some new mogul feels he has to move into an older mogul’s house. He should have his own identity. I can see why the old moguls came out and needed a new persona. After all, General Motors and Wall Street had not invited any of them in, so they started a new business. They made the rules. But I don’t see why a new generation needs a persona from the Old World.
—
DAVID GEFFEN: One time, a friend and I were driving past Jack Warner’s house on Angelo Drive. We noticed that the gates were open and we actually drove in, but guards showed up and stopped us from looking at the house. When I read Ann Warner’s obituary in The Hollywood Reporter in March 1990, I thought, Hmm, I’ll say I want to buy the house just to get a look at it. This time, I was ushered in. It was so grand and so Hollywood. It was a bigger statement than Louis B. Mayer. It was a bigger statement than David O. Selznick. It was the biggest statement that any of the figures of that era had made. It was an homage to an idea about the way people lived in Hollywood. I got caught up in the whole gestalt and I bought it. What’s really interesting, though, is that I paid more for the house than Jack Warner sold his studio for in 1956. I think he sold it for thirty-eight million and I bought it for forty-seven.
—
JACK WARNER, JR.: After he had the success of The Jazz Singer in 1927, my father bought some land next door to Harold Lloyd’s house. It was wild, filled with wheat and grasses, and they moved in with horses and men with shovels. He built this oppressive Spanish house—what we used to call the Spanish clunker—but a gorgeous one. It was designed and dressed by the studio art department; they were great on building sets, lousy on homes. The studio didn’t build the house itself—my father had an architect and a contractor—but the studio did the interior design. They must have had a lot of old Spanish furniture they wanted to get rid of, ugly and uncomfortable, heavy stuff. It was like living in a museum, with magnificent pieces of furniture that should be in a gallery somewhere. Or over in the prop department, which is probably where they came from. But parts of the house were magnificent, with flooring from Europe and paneling from England.
My father added a nine-hole golf course, but I don’t remember it being used much. Once I brought home some kids, friends of mine from USC’s golf team, and my father bawled the hell out of me for mussing up the greens, making divots and so on. He didn’t want it touched for golf, but it was a golf course. The only time it really got used was a housewarming party. Harold Lloyd and my father got together—the one and only time they did—and put a bridge over the wall between their houses, and people went back and forth.
—
BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: Our house was originally built in a Spanish style, but my mother hated it. My father had lived there with his first wife, and Mother was always after him, saying, “Let me just change a few things,” but he kept saying no. Then one day Father came home and found that she had arranged through someone at the studio to have a bulldozer tear down the façade of the house. Anything that looked Spanish was gone. So he finally let her redesign the whole front. She was very taken with Monticello and went to study it before they built. With some help from the Hollywood decorator Billy Haines, the house became the Southern antebellum mansion of her dreams. She had grown up in Ferriday, Louisiana, and she had wonderful memories of the plantations down there.
There were big wrought-iron gates at the street entrance and there was always a guard from the studio posted by them. You’d come up the driveway, under a canopy of sycamore trees that were illuminated at night by soft hidden lights, then around a graceful fountain in the brick courtyard. Then you’d pass through a pair of mahogany doors into an entrance hall that had a curved staircase, a large crystal chandelier, and a Versailles parquet floor, which Mother had found in France. Downstairs, there was a theater with a massive screen that rose out of the floor and, in the next room, a bar with a pale oak counter and leather wall panels. The dining room on the ground floor had Regency chairs and an English dining table that could seat twenty-four. And there was a ladies’ room, where the women would go while the men smoked their cigars after dinner, which had a pink-veined marble floor and Venetian blackamoors. In the pantry, there was an old-fashioned telephone switchboard that only the butler could work. My parents’ quarters were upstairs, complete with a steam room, and my little bedroom and sitting room, which were done in deep pink—to this day I’ve hated pink—and lots of chintz. I’d never been particularly attached to the house—I’d always wanted to get out. To this day, I don’t completely understand my feelings about it.
—
JEAN STEIN: Our house seemed modest compared to the Warners’. Theirs was like the Parthenon, complete with golf course and waterfall. The scale of it was dazzling. Barbara’s birthday parties were major productions, dozens of children seated at an elegant banquet table. I remember at one party, Mr. Warner stuck his head in when the cake was being brought in. “Happy Birthday, Bunky!” he shouted. And then he quickly shut the door again.
—
BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: Only about ten days after my mother died, an executor for the estate said, “I have someone who might be interested in the house.” It was David Geffen. He came over a few days later, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and a nice jacket: he looked like someone you would meet at a beach party. He could have been a friend of mine. I thought it would be nice to sell it to someone in the entertainment business, and my mother might have liked him, though my father would have disapproved. But David said, “I could never live here. What would I do in a place like this?”
Then he came back again. This time, he said he thought he was very interested. My father had a brother named David who had died of sleeping sickness shortly after the First World War, and I said, “David, that’s wonderful. Maybe you’re the fifth brother come back.” He looked at me as if this had clinched the deal.
He showed the house to friends: Steven Spielberg and so forth. In the office, there was a collection of original leather-bound scripts embossed with “From the Library of Ann and Jack Warner.” Spielberg saw one that dated from around the time he’d first come to Hollywood: Rebel
Without a Cause or East of Eden. And he said, “Do you think I could touch it?” David asked if he could give it to Spielberg. He hadn’t bought the house yet, but he took me so much by surprise that I replied, “Of course, go ahead.” They were like children in a candy store. And I felt the mystique for the first time. Here were people I respected who were enthralled. It was a very odd feeling, as if I were living in a wax museum.
Escrow on the house closed just six weeks after Mother’s death. It was so fast, but David kept saying, “Why can’t this go faster?” He wouldn’t take no for an answer. He wanted it now and yesterday.
—
DAVID GEFFEN: After I bought the house I took my interior designer to see it, and I showed her all the original furnishings. I said, “See this floor? This floor was a gift from Napoleon to his sister.” My designer said, “Really? You think people give floors as presents to their family?” We walked into the dining room, and I said, “This wallpaper was from the imperial palace in China.” She said, “This is French wallpaper from 1870 or 1880.” I pointed to another piece and said, “This is a Chippendale.” She said, “You’re not going to scream at me, are you?” I said, “What do you mean, scream at you?” She said, “The original is a Chippendale and is in the Victoria and Albert Museum. This was made at Warner Brothers.”
—
CY HOWARD: After David bought the house, Barbara and I went to the cocktail party the lawyers gave there. David and I greeted each other, and he said, “I don’t know why the fuck I bought it. What is a Brooklyn boy doing here?” I said, “You don’t always have to be from Brooklyn. You’ll enjoy yourself. You can afford it. You’ll have a new persona.” He said, “You know how Brooklyn is: we sit on the stoop, all huddled together, friendly. How can I make this friendly?” I said, “David, you can make this Brooklyn. You open up two candy stores, and you bring in five Hasidic rabbis and three Koreans to picket. You bring in cops to beat everybody up. Then, for the climax—this might be expensive, but I think it should be done—you build an El, so that you can sit there shivering as the train goes overhead. Then you’ll have Brooklyn.” Barbara grabbed me and hustled me away and I wasn’t allowed to speak anymore.
—
BETTY WARNER SHEINBAUM: My grandparents were people from the old country, from Krasnocielc, Poland. My grandmother Pearl Warner was a childbearing machine: she had twelve children, seven of whom survived. She wore a long black silk dress every day, and she had no interests that I knew of. She hardly ever spoke. My grandfather was the boss, and she obeyed. He wanted to have a new life in the New World, but at the same time he was not equipped to do anything other than what he had done in the Old World. He was a butcher, then a cobbler, then he ran a store. They wanted better things for their children, and they themselves had no education. But their children weren’t able to have much of one because they had to work to keep the family eating food and clothed.
They were constantly moving, changing, taking on new businesses to try them out, see if they would work. At one point, they took horses and broke them and made them tame. They diversified in a desperate search to find something that they could really make a living at and that was going to make them better off than they were in the old country. The streets were not paved with gold. The kids all had to go to work immediately. They did anything they could do that was available to them, and they worked very hard. Harry, my father, was the oldest son and became the patriarch, the tribal head. The mantle fell on him from day one, and he never knew anything else. He talked about how serious his life was from age seven. Jack, because he was the youngest and the baby, never went through that. And he was cute and funny and wanted to be in show business: he was a pest from the day he was born. Sam—the brother in between—kept peace in the family because everybody loved him. And Albert was a slow-paced sort who avoided as many problems and as much trouble as he could.
—
JACK WARNER, JR.: I don’t think my father found any real warmth in the family as a little boy. They were too busy surviving. It’s an old, old story from way back. Plus he had older brothers who tormented him. They didn’t intend to be mean, but he interpreted it that way, and it sowed the seeds for what followed.
Harry and Albert and Sam all took after their father. I don’t know who my father took after—he was a street Arab, if you want to call it that, a kid who grows up on the streets and gets tough. Today you’d call him a juvenile delinquent. He never went to school and was even thrown out of religious training at Hebrew school. When his teacher rapped him with a ruler because he was a rough little cookie, he yanked the teacher’s beard and took off. And that was the last formal education. Harry could read Hebrew. Albert had a knack for figures, so he handled the funds. He could also take a racing form and analyze everything on it. Sam was good at everything: mechanical things and working with his hands, but also had creative ideas and worked with his mind. And he didn’t have to try to be liked and loved, he just was. It came to him. Had he lived I think so much history would have been different.
My father took the name of a minstrel he liked—Leonard—as his middle name. And he wasn’t really Jack, he was Jacob, and the last name wasn’t Warner. I asked my father once, “What was the real family name?” and he said, “Jack, get me a cigarette.” Then he let the smoke curl up, and he looked at me and said, “I don’t remember.”
—
BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: The kids grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, where my grandfather had a butcher shop. He kept kosher meat in front and nonkosher in back, and my father used to swap the kosher steaks for the nonkosher ones because they tasted better. They had a horse and buggy to deliver the meat to different clients, and the horse knew the route well enough to stop on its own at the right place. They lived in a Polish neighborhood, and there was some anti-Semitism there at the time. Kids would come by and look in the window, laughing and wanting to see if Jews really had tails.
—
JACK WARNER, JR.: My parents met in San Francisco, where my mother’s father was an attorney. When they married, he was just a young kid from Youngstown, Ohio, who had a film exchange, and her family wasn’t happy about him. They were a very well-to-do German Jewish family from way, way back, who’d come across the Isthmus of Panama and up the coast right after the Gold Rush. They’d been there for several generations, and then along came this young squirt one generation out of Poland. My mother, Irma, had never eaten kosher food or heard Yiddish spoken, and suddenly she’s propelled into my father’s family.
—
BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: Her family was not taken with my father. He had a fifth-grade education, and she came from very educated people. He was very young, twenty-one, and she was pretty, with blond hair and a little bit cross-eyed. But he was very strong, and they got married. After, he took his bride back to Youngstown, Ohio, to meet the family, and it was a disaster. She was very sheltered and hadn’t really met people like that. They had a butcher shop, and his mother spoke only Yiddish. If my father was the most refined of them, you can imagine. So right from the beginning things didn’t go too well.
—
JACK WARNER, JR.: My mother was a sweet, warm woman, interested in life with a large circle of friends. She didn’t have any specific talent, but she could cook pretty well and run a house nicely. She was a good mother, and I often wondered why they didn’t have more children, but I think my father had already had one large family and he wasn’t ready for another.
My father was married to my mother for twenty years. In the early years of their marriage, when he was struggling to move up in the movie industry and his big job was to get the actors out in the morning and be sure the cameraman wasn’t drunk, my father was a happy guy. The brothers were not yet such wealthy men, and many of their later problems hadn’t developed.
—
BETTY WARNER SHEINBAUM: Once the brothers had founded the studio in L.A. in 1923, Harry went back to New York to work on distribution with Albert and to deal with the banks—he was one o
f the few Jewish entrepreneurs the bankers trusted in that era. Sam and Jack were left to establish the business, although Harry had to approve whatever they did. Somehow or other they all worked well together. Then Sam died of a cerebral hemorrhage after an operation to relieve a sinus infection, the day before the opening of The Jazz Singer, in 1927. He had been responsible for bringing sound to the movies—with another man who worked at Warner Brothers, an army engineer who was a genius with electronics called Major Nathan Levinson.
—
JACK WARNER, JR.: My father was a lot of fun to be with before he hit it big. In the silent picture days, he would take the companies out and direct. He’d get behind a camera and do everything but act—which is what he wanted to do most of all. Once in a while, you’d even see his back in a shot. He was a ham from way back, a frustrated thespian—although he’d think “thespian” was a dirty word. He shot one-reel and two-reel comedies to start, no scripts. This was before their first big hit, Rin Tin Tin. If he needed a crowd, the extras would be friends and family. They’d all be told to bring along overcoats and hats and mufflers and wigs if they owned them. The crew would set up the cameras early in the morning, usually up Sunset Boulevard or on the beach or in the hills where Dodger Stadium is now, and they’d stage chase scenes. The extras, who were paid with a box lunch, would race by the camera and circle around behind it, where they’d change hats and race by again, then change coats or put on a wig and race by another time. When they edited the film later, they’d figure out how it all fit together. When I was eleven or twelve, I was one of the ones running around and around.
We lived close enough at that time that we could walk to the studio together, and those are my happiest memories. I remember walking to the studio one day, and my father was dancing half of the way there. The studio then was in Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard, but before that, they had a crummy little studio in a place called Poverty Row. These were offices really, because you didn’t shoot on a stage then, you went out on location. Those were poor days, but they were happy.
