‘On the Waterfront’ writer Budd Schulberg, 95, dies

Published 11:24 pm Thursday, August 5, 2010

Budd Schulberg, 95, who exposed the dark side of American ambition in his acclaimed Hollywood novel “What Makes Sammy Run?” and won an Academy Award for his screenplay depicting the mob-controlled longshoremen’s union in the film classic “On the Waterfront,” has died.

Schulberg, a onetime Communist Party member who was ostracized in Hollywood after naming names before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the early 1950s, died of natural causes Wednesday at his home in Westhampton Beach, N.Y., his wife Betsy told The Associated Press.

In a writing career that spanned more than six decades and reflected a strong social conscience, Schulberg wrote novels, short stories, screenplays, plays, teleplays and nonfiction books.

Among his best-known works:

— The 1947 novel “The Harder They Fall,” a prize-fighting expose that became a 1956 movie, co-written by Schulberg, with Humphrey Bogart in his final role.

— “The Disenchanted,” a best-selling 1950 novel loosely based on Schulberg’s experience collaborating on a film script with F. Scott Fitzgerald.

— The screenplay for “A Face in the Crowd,” director Elia Kazan’s 1957 movie about a singing Arkansas drifter (Andy Griffith in his first movie role) who turns into a power-hungry tyrant after becoming an overnight national TV sensation.

Schulberg’s resume included being a syndicated newspaper columnist, the first boxing editor at Sports Illustrated and a columnist for Fight Game and other boxing magazines.

A lifelong boxing aficionado, Schulberg wrote the nonfiction books “Loser and Still Champion: Muhammad Ali” (1972), “Sparring with Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game” (1995), a collection of his essays; and “Ringside: A Treasury of Boxing Reportage” (2006).

Schulberg’s greatest success came with “On the Waterfront.” His screenwriting Oscar was one of eight Academy Awards the 1954 film won — including nods for picture, director (Kazan), supporting actress (Eva Marie Saint) and actor (Marlon Brando).

Schulberg once said, however, that his proudest achievement was being founder and director of the Watts Writers Workshop. Launched in 1965 after the Los Angeles riots, the workshop lasted until 1971 and spawned workshops in other cities.

“I didn’t want to just hang back and complain about things,” Schulberg later told People magazine. “I thought that we should all do something. I found great poets, great hearts in the ashes of Watts.”

The son of B.P. Schulberg, the powerful production chief of Paramount Pictures in the 1920s and early 1930s, Budd Schulberg burst onto the literary scene in 1941 at 27 with his first novel, “What Makes Sammy Run?”

A vivid portrait of a brash and amoral young hustler from New York’s Lower East Side who connives his way from newspaper copy boy to Hollywood producer, the novel is considered one of the best about Hollywood, and the name of Schulberg’s back-stabbing antihero, Sammy Glick, has become synonymous with ruthless ambition.

Viewed as a savage indictment of the movie business, the novel drew immediate ire from the Hollywood establishment. As Schulberg once put it: “Overnight, I found myself famous — and hated.”

Movie columnist Hedda Hopper, encountering Schulberg in a Hollywood restaurant, huffed, “How dare you?”

A furious Samuel Goldwyn, for whom Schulberg was working as a screenwriter, fired him because of “that horrible book.”

MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer not only denounced the book at a meeting of the Motion Picture Producers Association but suggested that Schulberg be deported. To which B.P. Schulberg said, “Louie, he’s the only novelist who ever came from Hollywood. Where the hell are you going to deport him, Catalina Island?”

John Wayne so despised Schulberg’s negative depiction of the film industry that he challenged the writer to a fistfight when they were both in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The 6-foot-4 Wayne managed to get the much shorter Schulberg into a headlock before Schulberg’s then-wife, actress Geraldine Brooks, separated them.

The encounter with Wayne was but one of many memorable incidents in Schulberg’s life — one that included coming to near blows with Ernest Hemingway in Key West, Fla., when Hemingway challenged Schulberg’s knowledge of boxing; playfully sparring with Muhammad Ali in Zaire, and accompanying Sen. Robert F. Kennedy into the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the night Kennedy was assassinated.

Schulberg was born on March 27, 1914, in New York City. His father moved the family to Hollywood in 1922 when Schulberg, the eldest of three children, was 8. Schulberg’s mother, Adeline, became a leader of Hollywood society and later a literary agent.

Schulberg was a timid child who stuttered, raised homing pigeons and wrote from an early age.

But he was a true child of Hollywood’s elite whose playground included the studio stages and back lots of Paramount and MGM.

Schulberg captured those early days in “Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince,” his 1981 memoir of life with his film-pioneer father.

But Schulberg grew contemptuous of Hollywood, which the public may have viewed as the glamour capital of the world but which “B.P.’s little boy,” as he was referred to, saw as a company town.

“If you were raised in Hollywood, it wasn’t too difficult to get pretty angry at the world around you,” Schulberg told People magazine in 1989. “People would come up to me when I was a little boy — 11, 12, 13 — an actress would want some favor from my father; a writer would urge me to say something about him. That was all around me. When they fussed over me, I knew why.”

Schulberg’s golden life tarnished in 1931 when his father, a gambler and philanderer, moved out of the house to live with his latest discovery, actress Sylvia Sidney.

By then, 17-year-old Schulberg was working in the Paramount publicity department, writing fictitious biographies of the studio’s stars.

After earning a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., in 1936, Schulberg returned to Hollywood, where he spent the next three years as an apprentice screenwriter for producers David O. Selznick, Walter Wanger and Goldwyn. Among his assignments: writing additional dialogue for “A Star Is Born” and collaborating with Fitzgerald on “Winter Carnival.”

Schulberg already had published short stories in magazines when he moved to New Hampshire in 1939 to write “What Makes Sammy Run?”

In his later years, Schulberg lamented that “What Makes Sammy Run?” had become “a handbook for yuppies,” who seemingly had come to embrace Sammy’s credo of success at all cost: “Going through life with a conscience is like driving your car with your brakes on,” Sammy says at one point in the novel.

Serving in the Navy during World War II, Schulberg was a member of director John Ford’s documentary unit. After Germany’s surrender, Schulberg spent six months examining secret German films for evidence of war crimes.

Schulberg was a member of the Communist Party from 1936 to 1939. He later said he had become disillusioned with it at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact and quit after party members in Hollywood tried to dictate how he should write “What Makes Sammy Run?”

During his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951, Schulberg named 17 people he had known in the Communist Party.

“It’s not a pleasant thing,” he said of the experience in a 2000 interview with the Hollywood Reporter. “My own feeling was that while I didn’t like the committee being so right wing, I didn’t think it was healthy having a secret organization trying to control the Writers Guild. I felt it was wrong and undermining democracy.”

Many felt that the “On the Waterfront” plot in which a longshoreman (Brando) courageously testifies at a waterfront crime commission public hearing against the vicious mobster who controls the dockworkers union was an allegory for Kazan and Schulberg’s friendly testimony during the committee’s investigation into Communist influence in Hollywood.

Kazan did not refute the parallel, writing in his autobiography, “I put my story and my feelings on the screen, to justify my informing.” However, Schulberg strongly denied that “On the Waterfront” was his apologia for testifying.

“It’s total, total nonsense,” Schulberg told the Chicago Tribune in 1994, saying he had welcomed the opportunity to renounce the Communist Party before the committee.

In writing “On the Waterfront,” he said, “I was interested in social conditions on the waterfront and drawing a truthful story, not in justifying my position. Can you imagine Kazan asking me to write something that would justify our friendly testimony? It’s a shame that an inaccuracy like that has become a ‘fact’ when it simply couldn’t be more wrong.”

Schulberg is survived by his fourth wife, Betsy. Information on other survivors was not immediately available.