Svengali of the Silver Screen

On the Afternoon of February 27, 1958, in an ambulance headed for a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, Harry Cohn – the last tycoon, the last of Hollywood's one-man studio bosses – died of a coronary thrombosis. In a town and an industry where fear, hatred, envy and vulgarity are sometimes raised to the level of an art form, Harry Cohn was the king of them all. He was, it was said, the most feared, the most envied and the most vulgar man of his time. When the word of his death was circulated around the Columbia lot on Gower Street ("Cohn's Kingdom"), one producer who had made several successful pictures with him smiled and said, "So the sonofabitch is dead? It almost makes you believe in God, doesn't it?"

A huge sound stage (Stage 12) at Columbia was turned, overnight, into a klieg-lighted Westminster Abbey. The walls were banked with flowers. The Art Department of the studio ran up a series of fake stained-glass windows. Appropriate music was piped in over a hastily installed P.A. system. The body was embalmed and placed on view in the most expensive casket available, and every big name in the motion picture industry filed past to pay last respects. Or maybe they just wanted to see for themselves that he was really dead.

If Harry Cohn had been able to count the house he'd have been pleased. No Queen's coronation did this kind of box office.

Somehow, the man in the coffin seemed undressed without the cigar in the corner of his mouth and the riding crop that he always carried in his hand as his symbol of office and authority. Somehow it seemed strange not to hear the string of four-letter words that made up Harry Cohn's normal method of communicating his ideas. The official eulogy was written by Clifford Odets and spoken by Danny Kaye. The unofficial one was spoken, it's said, by writer-producer Nunnally Johnson. "It just proves what Harry always claimed," said Johnson, eyeing the mob scene at the funeral. "Give the people an attraction they want to see and you'll fill the joint."

If Harry Cohn was hated and feared by the industry he'd been a part of most of his life, he won, at least, a grudging respect for his accomplishments. There were 45 Oscars in his office at Columbia. He had kept his organization operating when almost every other studio in Hollywood faced the possibility of being turned into a parking lot. He had created stars like Clark Gable, Jack Holt, Rita Hayworth, Robert Montgomery, Humphrey Bogart and Kim Novak. He had recognized television as, like it or not, part of the entertainment world, and had created the first separate production unit devoted to making pictures for the TV industry, Screen Gems. He turned out such block-busters as It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The Jolson Story and From Here to Eternity. And, as his last official act, he had subdued a storm of scandal, innuendo and gossip that threatened to blow his latest creation, Kim Novak, off the pedestal of stardom he had machine-tooled and manufactured for her.

Harry Cohn made his first picture in 1913, a five-reeler called Traffic in Souls. It cost $5700 and returned more than $450,000. It taught him two lessons he never forgot: "Big money can be made from a small investment" and "The public wants sex." He was to remember those lessons more than 40 years later when he created Kim Novak. He acquired her for the small investment of $125 a week and he manufactured her gold-plated, designed-for-public-consumption sex appeal as carefully as if he had been following a set of blueprints. Seven years after Traffic in Souls, with Joe Brandt and his brother Jack, he founded a motion picture company called CBC, a forerunner of Columbia Pictures, with a $250 investment. In 1929 the Cohns bought out Brandt, and Harry became the president. That was the real beginning of his reign. One of his most cherished possessions was a silver cigarette case given to him by his associates at Columbia. It was inscribed: "To the best President since Lincoln."

What kind of man was this Celluloid Caesar, who ran his studio with the ruthlessness of a dictator and screamed profanity at his employees, (continued on page 116)Svengali (continued from page 45) stars and friends?

He was this kind of man: Harry Cohn, who believed in talent – one associate said he was always willing to kiss the toe of talent – never let anyone forget that he was the supreme boss of the studio. He made the final decisions. He was the final authority. Nothing that came out of Columbia Studios did so without Harry Cohn supervising it, passing on it, in passing, molding its final form. Lunches in the commissary were command performances; Cohn arrived briefed on what was happening on the sound stages and fired questions at his underlings throughout the meal.

No revenge was too petty if Harry Cohn thought someone had slighted him, made fun of him or put one over on him. Producers who had made a wisecrack that rubbed him the wrong way found themselves taken off pet assignments and reduced to office-boy status to work out their contracts. He played one associate against another, keeping them off balance and insecure. One Hollywood doctor who made something of a specialty of ulcers and stomach disorders said, "I used to feel guilty about not splitting my fees with Harry Cohn. He threw an awful lot of business my way."

He was a petty tyrant who made even his top executives punch a time clock. Anyone leaving the studio at what Harry Cohn considered to be an early hour was reprimanded like a 20-dollar-a-week office boy. If he had a gripe against somebody on the Columbia payroll, he rarely brought it up in private. He always waited until he had an audience and humiliated the victim by dressing him down in foul terms in front of his friends and associates. He equated terror with power and once told a friend, "You don't have to fire somebody to make him get back in line. You just have to make him think you might fire him. That'll straighten him out. Frighten them and they won't give you any trouble." He is also the only man in history whose profanity was sanctioned by a Federal court. Charles Vidor, the director, once tried to get out of a contract because he couldn't stand Cohn's language. The Federal court dismissed the suit, ruling that such language was part of Cohn's speaking vocabulary, used by him as superlative adjectives.

A few years before his death, he had his portrait painted by an artist who was the current toast of the Hollywood art set. When it was unveiled, it turned out to be a glorified portrait of a young Greek god that bore only the faintest resemblance to its subject. Nobody pointed this out. Everybody praised the likeness. "What's the matter?" asked Cohn. "Are you all blind? I know goddam well I don't look anything like that. But one of these days I'm going to kick off. You think I want my grandchildren to look at a picture that really looks like me?"

He was also this kind of man: when Rita Hayworth, the love goddess that he had created, wanted to quit in 1953, he smashed his riding crop on the desk and said, "When you came here, you were a nothing. A nobody. All you had were those two big things and Harry Cohn. Now you just got those two big things."

When he was snubbed by the pro-prietor of one of New York's most expensive and exclusive restaurants by being made to wait 15 minutes for a table, he bought the building and forced the restaurant to move.

He is said to have had every office at Columbia bugged with hidden microphones and justified it by saying, "I'm the boss. I gotta know what's going on."

At the sneak preview of a new Columbia picture he held forth at great length to his sidewalk court on what a waste of time previews are. "Who the hell needs a bunch of idiots in Encino to tell me whether my picture is any good or not? I got the best indicator in the world. My ass. If I sit still, everything's fine. If I start squirming, something's wrong."

"Good God," said producer Herman Mankiewicz. "Imagine! The whole world wired to Harry Cohn's ass!" Mankiewicz was fired.

He was this kind of man too: he outbid most of the other major studios for the screen rights to C. S. Forester's best seller The Good Shepherd. He thought it would make a wonderful vehicle for Humphrey Bogart. Before the picture could be put into production, Bogart became ill. It was common knowledge in Hollywood that Bogie was a dying man. Cohn called him regularly and told him to stop faking and get out of bed and get to work on The Good Shepherd. The script became a kind of talisman to Bogart in his final days. He never really believed he was going to die. "Listen," he said. "I can't really be sick. If I was going to die that bastard Cohn would have cast somebody else in the picture. As long as he holds it for me, I must be going to get better."

When a studio chauffeur had to have a leg amputated, Cohn paid all the bills, and when he came out of the hospital, Cohn gave him the concession rights to a very valuable lunch counter location on the lot.

The man Ben Hecht dubbed "The White Fang" was also like this: somebody suggested The Odyssey as a picture possibility. Cohn read a treatment of it. "It's about a lot of goddam Greeks," he said. "Who wants to see a picture about a lot of goddam Greeks?"

Robert Rossen, who put some of those Oscars on Cohn's desk with All the King's Men, was involved in a bidding duel with John Huston for the screen rights to Tom Lea's novel The Brave Bulls. The price went up in five-thousand-dollar jumps and finally Rossen, who was to produce and direct the picture as an independent production for Columbia, went to Harry Cohn to get an OK to make the final offer. "For God's sake, what the hell is this book all about?" Cohn asked. Rossen recognized the impossibility of explaining the subtleties of the moment of truth or the lore of the bullring to Harry Cohn. "Look Harry," he said. "It's Body and Soul... with bulls."

"Should make a helluva picture," said Cohn. It did.

Rossen, like a lot of the other men who worked with Cohn, respected him as a movie-maker. "He was the greatest better on talent I've ever known," said Rossen. "If he thought you had it, he gave you your head. He once told me this, 'Go ahead, do it your way. It's your picture. But if it falls on it's face, it's your tail too.'"

Harry Cohn's last creation was a chubby little Chicago model named Marilyn Pauline Novak, and Cohn knew he could carry it off in a breeze. "If you wanna bring me your goddam wife or your aunt we'll do the same for her," he said later. The creation of his final star was forced on him. In 1953, Harry Cohn's earlier creation, Rita Hayworth, walked out on her contract at Columbia, after a monumental argument with Cohn over money. The argument bore out to Cohn the truth of one of his most repeated quotes, "I have never met a grateful performer in the picture business." Black-listing Rita Hayworth or putting her on suspension or even punching her off a couple of walls wouldn't solve any of the problems her walkout created. Cohn, it was said, was willing and able to do any of these if they would help. When Miss Hayworth left, she left behind her a pile of expensive properties Cohn had bought for her. With the departure of his only operational love goddess, Cohn was boxed in. The side of his desk took the beating from the riding crop that Miss Hayworth might have absorbed if she had been around. His court waited for the word from Mount Sinai. "So we don't have another dame with big boobs on the lot," he said. "So what. We ain't got a star? We'll make one!" The whack of the riding crop on the desk punctuated his decision.

The lightning struck the daughter of a claim clerk for the Milwaukee Railroad. Marilyn Novak, Chicago born, had drifted out to the coast after winning a contest as "Miss Deep Freeze." Stranded in San Francisco, she headed for Hollywood and was working as a model and an occasional extra at RKO. Max Arnow, Cohn's chief talent scout, spotted her in the office of agent Louis Shurr and arranged a screen test. The screen test had Marilyn standing against a prop fireplace, throwing her chest at the camera and murmuring "I want love!"

Harry Cohn's reaction: "She mumbles. I can't understand a goddam word she's saying." He offered to sign her to a $100-a-week contract, a peon's wage in Hollywood, and almost let her go when her agent demanded $125. Cohn threw in the extra 25 with all the interest of a man putting a quarter in a beggar's cup. "She ain't got it," he said. "She's fat, she mumbles and she ain't even got what Hayworth started with." The Cohn search for a new face continued and Marilyn Pauline Novak was thrown into the hopper as just another $125-a-week contract player. The casting department put her in a quickie called Pushover and she got a fair amount of audience mail. As a result of the interest she was put into something called Five Against the House and the mail poured in. Harry Cohn never argued with an audience and he forgot his misgivings about the girl's possibilities. For better or worse, Marilyn Pauline Novak became a "property" and his answer to Hayworth's walkout. The first and most obvious step in the creation of his star was a change of name. Marilyn had to go. Miss Monroe had a prior claim to it. After searching his soul and beating the furniture with the riding crop, he made a command decision again. Novak would stay. "It's reverse English." he said. "Who the hell ever heard of a glamor girl named Novak? It's the god-damdest thing. I like it." For two days she was called Kit Novak. "It'll remind people of kittens," said Cohn. "And that's the right image we want for this one, relaxed but with big claws." Miss Novak hated the name Kit and she cried on the shoulder of publicity director George Lait who arranged a meeting with Cohn. She emerged from the office smiling. Kit had disappeared. Kim Novak was born. This visit to Cohn's office had some historical interest. It was the first time she had used tears as a weapon. She used them, with no noticeable success after that first visit, so often that Cohn's nickname for her was "The Cryer."

With the name settled, Cohn went about creating his new star with all the efficiency of a master sculptor. Like any other artist beginning a new work, he had to decide on the overall basic theme. He recognized that Marilyn Monroe had cornered the market on the "Let's put all our cards and some of our clothes on the table" school of sex appeal. Jayne Mansfield was the unchallenged queen of the "If you got 'em, show 'em" school. He decided on something a little more subtle, a little more old-fashioned. Kim Novak was to be the promissory note of sex. Her voice was to be low and insinuating. To hell with her mumble. She was to purr where others growled. She was to be half bitch, half baby. She was to have a sexy sweetness, a virtuous voluptuousness. That, according to a close associate, was Harry Cohn's masterplan. He turned the specialists loose on her. Her teeth were straightened, leveled, whitened and, where necessary, replaced. She was put on a rigid diet, pounded in the studio gym and given acting lessons. "For God's sake." said Cohn, "get rid of the mumble. I still can't understand a goddam word she says." The studio's entire publicity force was assigned to her with Harry Cohn personally calling the shots. No story or publicity still went out without his approval. Her hair was bleached and lavender became her trademark. The legend was born that she was discovered by agent Louis Shurr riding a bicycle – a lavender bicycle – through the streets of Beverly Hills. She was photographed in a lavender bedroom in lavender slacks with three lavender buttons open on her blouse. Just before the cameraman took the shot, Kim, with the instinct of a former "Miss Deep Freeze," opened a fourth button.

The publicity department did its work well. Long before the public had seen Kim Novak on the screen she had become a personality. Her name and face were known through thousands of stills and hundreds of picture layouts in fan magazines and Sunday supplements. She was cast in a bit part in Phffft! It was a trial run. Cohn was ready to shoot the dice for the big stakes. He cast her in one of Columbia's most important properties, the stage hit Picnic. Joshua Logan, with the Broadway laurel wreaths still on his brow, arrived to direct the picture to discover that somebody named Kim Novak, by order of Harry Cohn, was his female star. "Sure he balked," said Cohn later. "But he knew he took Novak or he got off the picture. He did fine with her. He found out all he hadda do was pinch her a couple of times to make her cry. I coulda told him that. One thing she can do is cry."

When Picnic was released, the studio publicity department moved into high gear. Surprisingly enough, pinches or no, Miss Novak got decent reviews for her work. Somebody had certified Harry Cohn's blank check on Marilyn Pauline Novak. The publicity stories painted a sure-fire canvas of the new star. She preferred to live in a $20-a-week room at the Studio Club, a residential club for aspiring actresses, rather than a Beverly Hills mansion. She was still dating her old pre-stardom boyfriend, Mac Krim. She loved pizza pies, didn't drink or smoke and preferred sweaters and slacks (lavender) to mink.

Picnic was followed by The Eddy Duchin Story, The Man with the Golden Arm, Pal Joey and Jeanne Eagels. Harry Cohn had accomplished his purpose. He had created, out of some rather unpromising material, a 20-million-dollar property and in the process he had even managed to hedge his bet financially. Kim was loaned by the studio to Otto Preminger for The Man with the Golden Arm for $100,000. At the time, the studio was paying her $750 a week. Like Miss Hayworth before her, Miss Novak demanded a bigger salary. Harry Cohn screamed. Miss Novak emerged from the meeting and announced, "I didn't cry at all. I was very dignified and, you know, it was the best talk Mr. Cohn and I ever had." It was, too. She got the advance in salary she'd asked for.

Miss Novak hadn't hurt her case any by holding a press conference before her meeting with Harry and telling the reporters that she was paid so little that she had to go to the studio to get her hair done and borrow a dress whenever she went to a party. "Don't say things like that," Cohn told her later. "It makes me sound cheap."

Now that she was getting the salary of a star, Miss Novak began to act like one. At least she began to act like the kind of star she'd read about in the fan magazines when she was a chubby little girl back in Chicago. On the set she was known to fluctuate between tears and tantrums. She discovered Freud and sprinkled her self-revelations during interviews with words like "emotional tensions based on sibling rivalries." She talked about her "basic insecurities" and paraded anecdotes about her childhood with the assurance that comes only to a beautiful girl who can get away with boring her listeners by talking about herself in the third person. Like the queens of another era in Hollywood, she frequently had mood music played for her on the set. During the filming of Jeanne Eagels she kept an accordionist gainfully employed for weeks playing Poor Butterfly to get her in the mood for a series of scenes involving the hootchy-kootchy and a midnight skinny dip with co-star Jeff Chandler. She didn't feel the studio was really interested in her progress as a serious actress and is said to have paid for her own dramatic lessons.

To Harry Cohn, all of this was an old story. He had seen countless other Cohn creations behave the same way. He had solved the only major problem, a salary dispute, and his studio again had a Cohn-created love goddess in residence. What he didn't know was that he was on the threshold of his final fight, a fight that some Hollywood sentimentalists contend killed him, a fight that certainly contributed to the coronary thrombosis that proved to be fatal. In a minor way, Harry Cohn was responsible for the whole thing. Miss Novak, insecure and frightened by the build-up, did prefer staying at the Studio Club among the girls she considered her peers. She was afraid of the Hollywood parties and the whoop-te-do of the Beverly Hills, Bel Aire, Brentwood social axis. Cohn ordered her to go out socially, to be seen in the right places and to get her name in the columns. So she started being seen at Hollywood parties.

At one of the parties she met Sammy Davis, Jr. They became friends and saw each other again. And again. Then they fell in love. Blind items began to appear in some of the gossip columns, starting with Dorothy Kilgallen's, and Harry Cohn began to get restless. Miss Novak made several command appearances in the Throne Room at Columbia and, on these occasions, she had reason to cry in the presence of her creator. The affair reached its apogee in Chicago in December 1957. Sammy was appearing at the Chez Paree and Kim was in town to spend the holidays with her family. Word reached Cohn that the two of them planned to be secretly married. He had to move fast, and he did, with all the awesome influence and pressure at his command.

For the record, it should be said here that Harry Cohn's reaction to the romance between his new star Novak and Negro entertainer Davis had nothing to do with prejudice or bigotry. "Say what you will about Cohn," an associate told me. "He was an intolerant s.o.b., but not about that kind of thing. He didn't give a damn what color you were; where, or if, you went to church. He was interested only in what you could do for Columbia Pictures and Harry Cohn!"

His anger at the Novak-Davis coupling was simple to explain. Harry Cohn was in the movie business. Kim Novak was his top star, and any publicity that threatened to cut down the box office appeal of Miss Novak's pictures with any segment of the public had to be destroyed. Insiders claim that Harry Cohn, who manipulated the gods of publicity with inspired skill in building Miss Novak into a star, really performed his greatest feat in silencing the stories about her and Sammy. Even the peephole magazines were muffled until many months after the affair – and Harry Cohn – were dead. Whether Cohn used bribery, threats, persuasion or fear of reprisal to silence the gossip may never be known.

What is known is that the romance and marriage were successfully thwarted. Sammy suddenly announced that he was going to marry a nightclub performer of his own race. Those close to him insist that Sammy's sudden marriage to a girl he'd never dated was "arranged" and that – in fact – it was his only "out." The marriage ended in divorce six months later with a hassle over a supposed prenuptially promised settlement.

Just what sort of pressure could be applied against one of the biggest names and talents in show business today, that could force him to not only stop seeing the girl he loved, but marry someone he hardly knew? The trade paper Hollywood Close-Up started, "It has been regarded as an open secret within Hollywood that Davis was alleged to have been threatened by hoods in Las Vegas, acting at the instigation of the head of a major studio, that if he didn't get married 'by Saturday' to 'anybody,' he 'would be taken out in the middle of the desert and we will plug out your other eye.' " Sammy had previously lost an eye in an automobile accident.

It worked. The storm abated. The scandal, the gossip died. Shortly after Sammy's marriage, Kim was linked romantically with some of the biggest, most acceptable box-office names in Hollywood; romances, cynics claimed, that were made on Gower Street rather than in heaven. Columbia Pictures, which was another way of saying Harry Cohn, gave Miss Novak a $100,000 home in Bel Aire, presumably as a bonus for signing a new contract.

With order again restored to his kingdom, Harry Cohn went to the desert resort in Arizona to rest up. Dorothy Kil-gallen, who had probably done more to raise Mr. Cohn's blood pressure in the last months of his life than any other columnist by printing the most frequent and most transparent blind items about the Novak-Davis situation, had the last word, after his death.

"Harry Cohn's Hollywood friends," she wrote, "were shocked but not surprised by his sudden death. They believe he would have been alive today if he had been able to maintain a more philosophical attitude a month ago when his biggest star, Kim Novak, was threatening to make headlines he considered undesirable. At the time the movie tycoon was described by intimates as apoplectic over the situation. It's ironic that after going to great lengths to straighten out Kim's life, he forfeited his own."

The residue of hatred and fear Harry Cohn left behind him has dissipated somewhat in the year and a half since his death in that ambulance in Phoenix, Arizona. Today, most people preface their stories and anecdotes about him by saying, "I know he was a bastard, but I kinda liked him." Clifford Odets' eulogy put it in slightly more literary terms:

"We have felt his anger, his defiance, his stubbornness, his pride, but many of us have felt his warmth, his understanding, his gentleness and, some of us, even his love. Cohn was an individualistic and independent man who had a true sense of being what you are, let the chips fall where they may." Pointing to the transformed studio where Cohn's body lay, Danny Kaye recited Odets' final words, "This was Cohn's cathedral."

It was the final irony that the author of that eulogy is the same man who wrote the Broadway play, The Big Knife (later made into a movie), about the clash and conflict between a film star and a diabolical studio head, who some felt bore a striking resemblance to Harry Cohn. The ruthless movie mogul in Knife stopped at nothing, including murder, to coerce his star into signing a new contract.

Hollywood, a town that can (and has) sentimentalized even an Adolf Hitler, has a short memory. The backbiting, the fear and the humiliations are, if not forgotten, rapidly becoming amusing qualities of a legend. The 45 Oscars, the world-wide grosses of The Jolson Story, Picnic and From Here to Eternity and the continuing stardom of Harry Cohn's last creation, Kim Novak, carry a lot of weight in a town that worships success and accepts it as the justification for almost anything. Harry Cohn, retroactively, is being measured for sainthood.

How that infallible indicator of his would have squirmed at that!

The pictures at top and bottom are of Marilyn Novak, young Chicago model — pretty, ambitions and unknown. At the right is the finished product of Harry Cohn's alchemy — Kim Novak, internationally famous movie star.

The pictures at top and bottom are of Marilyn Novak, young Chicago model — pretty, ambitions and unknown. At the right is the finished product of Harry Cohn's alchemy — Kim Novak, internationally famous movie star.