by Jean Stein
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JACK WARNER, JR.: When my father had me fired, the cops who were ordered to throw me off the lot were crushed. But they had to do it, and I said to them, “Okay, fellas, you’re following your orders, now let me buy you some coffee,” and I took them to the drugstore across the street. Then I went to several fine attorneys, and they all said the same thing: “Sure, you’ve got a case, but are you prepared to spend the next ten years and all the money you’ve got?” But the real thing was why would I sue? For what? Hurt feelings? A father has the right to fire his son, even if he has no real strong, honest reasons. What you do is pick up your shattered pieces and get going with something else. Then later Harry got to my father and said, “It’s either you or your son.” So my father said, “All right, bring him back.”
I should never have gone back, because my father hadn’t really changed. He was still married to Ann, and hers was the last voice he heard every night. She hated the idea of two Jack Warners in the world. I would say that my father deserved better, but that’s not true. He was a tremendous failure where it counts. Human relationships: zero. He wanted to be loved, and yet he did so much that was unlovable.
Interestingly enough, throughout my father’s life he would not personally fire anybody. God help you if you left the room he was in, though. Nobody would leave the executive dining room at Warners before my father, because they knew that he would start throwing barbs and jokes about them and demeaning them in front of everyone. And then, when Harry came to lunch, first the phone would ring and Harry’s secretary would tell the headwaiter, “H.M.’s on his way”—“M” was Harry’s middle initial—and then the headwaiter would tell my father, “Your brother’s coming to lunch.” My father would say goodbye and leave before Harry got there. They timed it that way.
What’s that saying? Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I always think of my father when I hear that. He was the man who fights to get up the trail to the mountaintop and when he gets there rolls rocks down the trail to keep other people from joining him. But I can’t say he was ignorant. The company didn’t do what it did with an idiot at the helm. This man knew how to feel the public pulse.
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RICHARD GULLY: Jack just couldn’t bear being the younger brother. He wanted to be president of Warner Brothers and officially he was vice president. When he traveled he got to a point where he never even registered in hotels anymore. He used to wave them away. He said, “I’m too important to sign a hotel register.” But in the early days I remember he would never put “Vice President of Warner Brothers.” He always put “Head of Warner Brothers.”
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DENNIS HOPPER: I was very young in 1955, when Warner Brothers did Rebel Without a Cause—eighteen or nineteen years old. We’d started shooting in black and white, and two weeks into it Jack clearly saw that something was going on with James Dean. He said, “Change this picture to color. The kid’s going to be a star.” He’d found his new Rin Tin Tin.
Then one day, the next year, Jimmy Dean and I were coming out of the commissary on the Warner Brothers set, and Jack Warner came up to introduce the banker Serge Semenenko to Jimmy: Semenenko put out his hand to shake hands, and Jimmy reached into his pocket, threw a bunch of coins at their feet, and walked off. They looked completely stunned. I followed Jimmy like a puppy dog and said, “What the hell was that all about?” So he told me that Jack had convinced Harry that they should sell the studio, and they sold it to Semenenko; then, the day after, Jack bought back in. All he had really done was to buy his brother out. So that was Jimmy Dean’s reply to what Jack had done.
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BETTY WARNER SHEINBAUM: I knew that my father and Jack were getting along so badly that it was absolutely necessary that my father quit. Jack was spending six or eight months at a time gambling in the South of France—he wasn’t minding the store—and it drove my father crazy. Dad was giving himself heart palpitations by going to the studio. His blood pressure was up, and the screaming and yelling were absolutely inhuman. So there was a reason to sell, and the understanding was that the brothers would go their separate ways. But Jack came back as the president of Warner Brothers. He’d wanted that title, and he’d wanted to get rid of my dad. My father went crazy; it was such a betrayal. He didn’t scream or yell this time: he had a terrible stroke. It was too much to bear. If you look at Hollywood now, that kind of thing happens every six months. But they had lasted, what, almost forty years?
The sad thing was that Jack didn’t have friends. He had yes-men. He loved people who lived like kings. But although he sought out society, he always seemed so uneasy and defensive when he was in it.
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JACK WARNER, JR.: I was supposed to go to Hawaii the day after Harry’s stroke, but I canceled the trip because they thought he might die. When I saw my father at the studio the next day, he said, “Hey, why aren’t you in Hawaii?” and I said, “I couldn’t leave Uncle Harry so sick.” And he looked at me and said, “Why not? He’s not your father.” There was no answer to that.
When Harry died, in the summer of 1958, I sent a priority cable to my father in the South of France, but he never answered. It was a bitter end to the war between them. Then, a few days later, he had a terrible accident. He came out of the casino one night around two A.M., got in his Bentley, and started driving to his house in Cap d’Antibes. Halfway there, he must have fallen asleep, because his car drifted left and hit a coal truck head-on. My father’s door flew open, and he was propelled out onto the pavement. He was in a semi-coma for five or six days. His sister Sadie couldn’t wait to get to him and say, “God punished you.” She actually said it. I don’t know if he threw her out or not, but he never saw her again. She died not long after that, and he wouldn’t even go to her funeral.
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BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: After my father’s accident, everyone really felt he was dying, so they all came to France—including Jack Jr., who wanted to see him for what he thought was going to be the last time. But when my father saw Jack walk into the hospital room he was really disturbed. He said, “I must be in worse shape than I thought, if he came all the way over.” It gave him such a shock that he felt he had to get better. Then Jack Jr. gave a statement to a reporter, saying that my father was close to death, and that was really the end of their relationship. When my father got back to California, he had him fired again from the studio. Jack Jr. probably was rarely welcome at the house.
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JEAN HOWARD: Jack and Ann used to have Sunday suppers at a long table with maybe twenty people. I remember one time—I hadn’t noticed that Ann was the least bit tipsy—all of a sudden Jack, who was at the other end of the table from her, screamed down through all the guests, “Anna, put that drink down!” It was embarrassing, and even if you weren’t drunk it would have made you drunk. Which it did—she fell right on her face. Very cruel. And she was a sensitive woman. What Jack Warner did to Ann destroyed her. I often saw that girl get up from the table and run out of the room crying. I didn’t blame Ann for anything, not even for having a lover, which she certainly did. Jack had his own sex where he wanted and when he wanted.
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BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: I went with my father to Grace Kelly’s wedding because my mother wasn’t feeling well. I was twenty-one or twenty-two and had just married. I wore a Balmain dress made especially for the wedding: cream with big circles of embroidery and a little jacket, and a lovely hat with a cream tulle veil. Father wore a top hat and tails. We had a dinner party at the Hôtel de Paris, and I sat next to Aristotle Onassis. I don’t know if Maria Callas was there at the time, but we had a long conversation about Greek mythology, and he was very sweet and thoughtful. I saw Ava Gardner there, since she and Grace were friends.
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Barbara Warner with her father, Jack Warner, on the SS Liberté.
King Farouk was there, too. Farouk was enormous, a womanizer and an ugly man. He and my father used to gamble together, mostly at the Pal
m Beach casino in Cannes. They both played baccarat. They were pals, but I don’t think they were friends. My father loved gambling. It was a great relaxation for him, and he always lied about what he lost, saying, “I broke even.”
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RICHARD GULLY: Farouk and Jack had a great liking for each other. They were both expert gamblers and were extremely good baccarat players. They didn’t bat an eyelash no matter how great the stakes were. They’d play all night, starting after dinner until daylight, when the three of us would go to breakfast at seven o’clock in the morning. They were both men who liked the good things in life. Jack was an enormously likeable man away from the studio. He could be very tough, mean and disagreeable about contracts and things, but socially he had enormous charm. He was also a little bit of a philanderer, although not as much as Farouk. He didn’t pinch girls; Farouk was really rather vulgar. But they both had an eye for a pretty woman and had that great social joie de vivre. But the main thing that brought them together was gambling; they made a beeline for the baccarat tables.
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Jack Warner (left) and Richard Gully (right) on their way to Grace Kelly’s wedding in Monaco, 1956.
When we first met, Farouk was still a good-looking man. He wasn’t overweight or as gross as he became in his later years. As a young man he was very good looking, and even when he was middle-aged he was presentable. He was very sharp-witted, intelligent, with a keen analytical mind. He was an interesting man. He was still on the throne when we first knew him, and he always had some kind of lord in waiting with him. Later, after he was kicked out of Egypt, he dismissed the aide, so although he always had a chauffeur he was really by himself. Not even a bodyguard. It was extraordinary.
He never visited Hollywood. The only one who ever visited Jack was the shah of Iran, of whom Ann was very fond. We did entertain Queen Nazli of Egypt, Farouk’s mother. She was a very beautiful woman. When he went into exile, she came to Hollywood and even had a house in Beverly Hills for a while. But he never came. Theirs was strictly a gambling friendship. I don’t think Ann Warner ever met him. She never went gambling or to the casino, and she didn’t want to encourage Jack. But she couldn’t stop him. There was no way you could stop Jack Warner gambling. Jack Warner and Charlie Feldman and Zanuck were absolute inveterate gamblers. All three of them were very close friends when they were in Europe.
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PATRICK FOULK: I met Ann Warner in New York when I was on leave from the air force—through a friend whose husband was a director. I took one look at her and said, “I don’t believe this.” That’s the way she looked. Ann and I just hit it off, and after that we never looked sideways much. I’ve met a lot of people, but I’ve never seen one like her. She was Miss Mercury: she was electric. Some people felt that her magnetism was an affectation, but it wasn’t. Anybody who knew her recognized how unusual she was. Even Elsa Maxwell told me, “I’ve met them all, and there’s nobody like Ann.”
Our relationship was quite strange. Hardly anyone knew about it, except for Jack. We kept it that way. Jack understood it; he endured it because he didn’t want to lose her. As a matter of fact, on two occasions he offered me a writing job. I sure didn’t want to work for him. Nonetheless, he and I had a kind of mutual respect, because I would not take any of that Warner balderdash from him. When I first met him, he would do anything to put Ann down. He was jealous of her, but he adored her basically. She was the only human being he trusted.
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RICHARD GULLY: By 1958, Jack and Ann had grown apart. She had no interest in gambling and loathed listening to the baseball games he’d have running through dinner. The three of us would have dinner together about five nights a week at that point, but it was no party. I was the buffer, the referee between them. It had been a great love story for years, and then Ann withdrew.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like people—she talked on the phone for hours. Basically it was vanity. When you’ve been a raving beauty and you suddenly begin to put on weight…She was also bored. She’d say, “I gave great parties for twenty years, and I’ve done enough entertaining.” She wasn’t born to be royalty. To be Mrs. Jack Warner was like being royalty. The Warner house was Buckingham Palace, and she was the queen. But she wasn’t born to be a queen, and she certainly wasn’t trained. Members of the royal family are trained every day of their lives, for it’s a very difficult position. Besides, the world had changed, and Mrs. Warner was really one of the first people to see that.
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JACK WARNER, JR.: She never came down then. No one ever saw her. It was strange: a big group would be at the house with hamburgers, and Rocher, the butler, would bring out drinks and we’d play tennis. And my father would look up toward the house at the upstairs drapes, which were closed—she was there. It was peculiar. I came to visit once and drove up that big circular drive and looked up over the front door to a small window that was in her dressing room. It opened and she looked out, saw me, and pulled it shut. That was it. That was all I saw of her.
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BETTY WARNER SHEINBAUM: Jack Sr. was a weak man, that was the worst part about it. I don’t think he hated Jack, but he never behaved like a father. He would tell Jack to shut up or go away or stop writing, things that were really very hurtful. And all his life Jack tried to show that he was willing to make up with him. But Jack couldn’t do it. Every once in a while, they’d ride together in a car; Jack speaks of that as a highlight of their relationship.
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JACK WARNER, JR.: I was Jack’s only boy. And he named me Jack. But I never felt that I was to be the heir apparent. Growing up I wanted to be like my father: if he ran a studio, I wanted to run a studio. A surgeon’s son wants to be a surgeon. It’s a normal thing—except for us, it wasn’t normal. This virus crept in, and she influenced the brothers, the sisters, and me. I hate like hell to make Ann the villainess in everything, but so much of this happened because he wanted peace at any price. He once said to me, “Look, I’m sorry. When I come home, I’ve got to have peace in my house.” Whenever Ann was in the South of France, I would often be up at the house, but soon as she came back into the country, I would be given notice by him to stay away.
When Albert Warner died, I flew to New York for his interment. I went to the temple and my father came in and sat in the front row. There was a vacant seat next to him, and I said to myself, “You’ve got to move.” So I walked right over and sat next to him and he kind of acknowledged me. After the funeral, he went out and got into a car. No one said anything to me, so I got right in and sat next to him. I figured, Look, nothing’s gonna come to you, you’ve got to chase after it and grab it. I thought my problem was I didn’t do enough of that earlier, that I was afraid of banging into things. He said to me, “Feel like a drink?” and I say, “Sure, I could use one.” He owned two floors of the Sherry-Netherland tower with a gorgeous view, and the two of us sat there overlooking Central Park. It was winter and snowy, and we had Chivas Regal. We sat there and didn’t talk about anything important. He was very warm and friendly. He said, “How are you getting back home? I’m going out tomorrow morning on TWA.” And I said, “I’ll change mine.” I got the seat next to him and flew back with him. I had been writing him letters saying, “Let’s work this out,” but it was a labor of Hercules. He said to me on the plane, “Will you quit writing me those fucking letters?” and the closer we got to Los Angeles, the more I could sense a coldness. I said to him, “Look, I have my car. I’ll drive you home,” but he said, “Forget it, no, no, no, I’ve got a studio car.” We got to the airport, and he said goodbye, goodbye. I left the terminal and looked back and then he came down on his own, got in the car, and was gone. She was there, of course, at home.
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RICHARD GULLY: Jack was a man with a great zest for living, and he wasn’t going to live alone. In 1958, he started seeing this Englishwoman and staying at her suite at the Beverly Carlton hotel instead of going home. Mrs. Warner was staying in their apartment at the
Sherry-Netherland in New York, but she obviously knew he had this mistress, and she was waiting to see how serious it would get.
So one weekend Jack went through the motions, as he always did—“Oh, I miss you so much, darling. Come back soon”—hoping she wouldn’t come back at all. And she said, “Oh, no, I’m getting a new dress here. I can’t possibly get back until Tuesday.” Then she came back, deliberately, in the middle of the night two days early, and there was no one in the house. When I arrived at the studio Monday morning, my secretary said, “A lady’s been calling you, and I think it’s Mrs. Warner.” So I called Jack urgently at the Beverly Carlton and he said, “Pretend you’re at the dentist or something. Don’t talk to her until I get to the studio. And then come up to my office.”
Jack didn’t get to the studio until eleven o’clock. When I went in, the studio manager had an envelope full of money, and he said, “Give the girl this money, put her on a plane, and get her out of the country as quickly as possible.” She put up an argument, and it took me the whole goddamn day to get her out of town. By then, Mrs. Warner was livid with me for not taking her calls. She had no intention of divorcing Jack, so she held me responsible for the mistress, which was totally unfair, but she had me fired.
There were ten days where I was almost suicidal because I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had no job, and no one was going to antagonize Jack Warner by employing me, let me tell you. I thought the end of the world had come.
