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The Jim Bishop Collection Mark Hellinger Biography |
FRIEDSAM MEMORIAL LIBRARY Journalism |
Life of Mark Hellinger
by Michael Spencer
Growing Up:
1903-1922
Mark John Hellinger was born March 21, 1903 in New York City of Orthodox
Jewish parents, Paul and Millie Hellinger. His father was a prosperous real
estate lawyer; who very much wanted his son Mark to follow him into the law.
Hellinger had a younger brother, Monroe, nicknamed Buddy, who idolized
his older brother and his brother’s wife. At the end of his life Buddy, who was
slowly dying, came and lived in the Hellinger mansion in
Hellinger decided on standing in opposition to everything his father
stood for when he was a boy, according to Jim Bishop. (Bishop, the chief source
of information on Hellinger’s life, was Hellinger’s protege as a
newspaperman and his lifelong friend.) Hellinger become a non-practicing Jew,
and was utterly disinterested in following his father into a law career. Later
on in his life Hellinger often had difficulties with his superiors, becoming
openly incensed sometimes to believe, sometimes accurately, that he was being
treated with lack of respect.
When he was still a boy, Hellinger decided he would be a writer.
Typically for aspiring writers, he began by producing trivial pieces. Around
1920 he began writing producible plays. And early on he also wanted to be a
Broadway reporter, long before he became one.
Hellinger never finished high school. When he was 15, he organized a
student strike at his school,
Hellinger first worked in 1921 and in the earlier part of 1922 part-time
as a waiter and cashier at the Red Head, a night club in
Bishop provides a rather repulsive physical picture of the young
Hellinger, describing his black, notched teeth. When he was 18, he had all his
teeth pulled out and artificial ones put in instead. His appearance became
appealing, and he showed himself well able to rouse women’s interest during his
bachelor days.
“He had a dark, handsome face with twinkling blue eyes,” Bishop remarks. “He walked with a slightly hunched stoop in an easy
stride and held his head cocked…. His conscious effort was always to sound
hard-boiled, disillusioned. In doing this Hellinger was fighting his own heart,
which was about as rocklike as a pound of butter in a summer sun.”(Bishop, pp.
14-15)1
Broadway: 1922-1937
In 1922 Hellinger began working as a reporter at Zit’s Weekly, a theatrical publication. His mother had pulled
strings through a friend to get this job for her son. Hellinger was there a
year and a half.
And so Hellinger began working as a journalist in
In 1923 one of Hellinger’s acquaintances,
Steve Clowe, helped him get him a job on the
The
Hellinger has an established place in the history of American journalism
as the first Broadway reporter, a role he assumed in July 1925. At that time
Hellinger was given a Sunday column, “About Town,” and he was told to fill it
with Broadway names. However, leaving gossip to his friend Walter Winchell,
Hellinger mainly filled each column with a brief short story, providing stories
dealing with Broadway people, each story ending with an O. Henry twist(Bishop, p. 66). “I stumbled into my short story
formula,” Hellinger later explained. “Somebody would slip me a story about real
people and I’d blow it up and fictionize it and put
in an ironic twist at the end”(Martin, p. 46).2 He would write a great many of these
stories during his career, thousands of them, though everyone provides a
different figure about how many thousand.
However, his employers were dissatisfied over his unwillingness to
dedicate his column to itemized news items on Broadway people, and they would
have compelled him to produce such columns, but fan mail had begun coming in,
and so they relented. In a year his column was the most read feature in the News and was being published across the country(Bishop, p. 66). In 1928 the News also gave him a daily column, which was called “Behind the
News.” Also, Hellinger invented the fake feud to stir interest, in which he and
a supposed rival excoriated one another in print.
During his time as a reporter in
Hellinger was always remarkable for his wealth of friends and
acquaintances, a fact due to his own personal warmth and no doubt also due
partly to the fact that he became a celebrity as a newspaperman. His very wide
variety of friends at this time included Walter Winchell, who he usually met
some time each day, Florenz Ziegfeld, the greatest
American musical producer of all times, and Texas Guinan,
a very colorful and well-known nightclub hostess during Prohibition. Hellinger
also cultivated the gangsters of the time, and knew, for example, such figures
as Dutch Schulz and Legs Diamond, in fact sometimes acting as a mediator to
calm murderous disputes among them(Bishop, p. 95).
One time he was in the hospital because of a broken kneecap. His
hospital room had a bathroom, and he filled the bathtub with ice and imported
beer, and filled the rest of the bathroom with alcohol too and put a slot
machine in his room. His room filled with people he knew, sometimes some of
them standing in the hall for lack of room(Bishop, pp.
203-4).
Hellinger, who was famous throughout his life for his generosity,
sometimes gave away his entire income. Bishop reports that customarily before
he left work for dinner with a friend around 6:00 P.M., Hellinger would fold up
two dollar and five dollar bills and put them in his coat pocket, and then as
he walked outside “every down-and-out actor, every ex-Broadway hoofer, every
ex-con, was waiting in doorways for them to pass,” and Hellinger would covertly
slip them money. At dinner he would pay for the tab for the various people he
knew when he saw them there(Bishop, pp. 147-9). And as
some writers remark, he was legendary as a check-grabber when he was with
others at dinner.
In 1926 the News sponsored a
beauty contest as a circulation gimmick. Hellinger was one of the judges. The
winner was a Ziegfeld showgirl, Gladys Glad (her real name), a very beautiful
woman with a very practical mentality. She won the contest and a sedan, though
she was then too young to drive. On July 11, 1929 Hellinger married her. He wanted
his friend mayor Walker to perform the ceremony, but since the mayor was in
In November 1929 his superior at the Daily
News sent Hellinger a letter telling him to abandon his column as it existed
and to fill his column with news items. This obviously was a misjudgment, and
Hellinger, a very popular columnist, moved on to a rival tabloid, the
Hellinger was always notable for his occupational drive and
restlessness, and while continuing as a newspaperman, he pursued other lines of
endeavor as well. He wrote some of the sketches for the Ziegfeld Follies during
its final year, 1931, and then some of the sketches for Ziegfeld’s 1932 show, Hot-Cha. 3 He showed talent as a vaudeville actor, going
on the circuit more than one year. He wrote plays, and published magazine
articles. He tried out various types of columns. Some of his stories were made
into movies for
In 1932 his wife Gladys walked into a bedroom during a party and found
him in a compromising situation, according to Bishop(Bishop,
p. 191). Because of this and some other difficulties in their marriage, she
divorced him. However, after a year, which included solicitations to her in his
newspaper column, they remarried in 1933, on the same date as their first
marriage, July 11. There was no sign of serious trouble in their marriage after
this.
By the time he was 25, Hellinger was a well-known columnist, syndicated
nationally. In 1933 he was only 30, and it is very surprising to realize how
much he had accomplished by this age.
Hellinger was a
very hard worker. For example, in 1935 on his own initiative he offered to do
an entire Sunday page himself, making it out of jokes, stories, opinions of
shows, cartoons, and other material. In 1937 this page was appearing in 174
newspapers with 18,000,000, or perhaps rather, according to varying estimates,
20,000,000 or 25,000,000 readers(Bishop, p. 234).
During the next phase of his life, in
His writing was “glib, superficial, conversational, as smooth and
translucent as a sheet of glass,” Bishop remarks(Bishop,
p. 206). However, while outstanding in his line of work as a newspaperman, he
himself regretted never becoming “a real writer,” so Bishop reports.
He was “a third-rate O’Henry,” Bishop concludes,
“though a first-rate motion picture producer” (Bishop, p. xii).
Hollywood , 1937-1947
With the end of Prohibition in 1933, the Broadway Hellinger knew, that colorful, fascinating district, died. Hellinger remained on for a few years after this, but Bishop believes that the end of this era of Broadway was a fundamental reason for Hellinger’s departure. Another reason for his departure was his perennial occupational restlessness—Bishop explains that typically after Hellinger achieved success in something, he lost interest in it. This can be instanced by the way his scope of activities as a newspaperman grew over the years. While some of his efforts failed, such as his attempt on the radio, his efforts also led to new areas of success.
Hellinger had already
become appreciated in a publicity-conscious
Hellinger had
been ready to drop his nationally-distributed weekly page along with everything
else when he went to
When he came to
The Hellingers moved into a thirteen-acre
estate which his wife Gladys picked out, staffing it with nine servants. After
Warner promoted him to associate producer in 1938 he got $130,000 a year. His
salary at Warners after the war was $200,000 a year.
These were very much larger amounts of money than they seem even now due to the
inflation which has occurred since then.
The movie High Sierra (1941)
fully established his reputation. Hellinger had fought to make Humphrey Bogart
the lead though Warner insisted that this actor was unsuited for this. However,
Hellinger was right, and this film established Bogart as a leading
Another film,
Hellinger could be quite abrasive with his superiors at Warner’s,
feeling, and sometimes with some justification, that he wasn’t being treated
with respect. Sometimes his name didn’t even appear among the credits.
According to Bishop, in time he and his immediate superior at Warner’s “got
along like a pruritic tiger and an ulcerous
ringmaster”(Bishop, p. 247) Not surprisingly, Hellinger moved on, going to
Twentieth Century-Fox, though afterwards he went back to Warner’s.
Finally, he went to Universal
Pictures in 1947 as independent producer, this studio financing and
distributing his films; there he was in charge of his own unit, pleased now to
have no superiors in his work.
Over the years in
The Killers was based on one
of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories. Hemingway liked this movie, and agreed to
let Hellinger make movies out of his other short stories too, which provided a
valuable opportunity for him, in view of Hemingway’s immense reputation then.
Hemmingway and Hellinger became good friends, and in fact Hellinger made his
last trip before he died to visit Hemmingway in
In 1947 Hellinger produced what was usually considered his finest film, The Naked City, which he called his
celluloid monument to
The Naked City is a detective
story, based on a murder from the
During the Second World War II Hellinger determinedly tried to enlist in the service. They wouldn’t take him because of the health problems the examining doctors uncovered, but, at last, in 1944 Hellinger arranged to go to the war for four months as a Hearst war correspondent. Hellinger went into the Pacific theater, taking a leave of absence from Warner’s.
But the medical examinations he had while trying to enlist turned up
health problems which made it clear that he was not due for a long life.
Hellinger wasn’t happy during his last years. One of his screenwriters
wrote that “when I first met Mark (in the summer of 1945) he was worried. He
was worried and apprehensive till the day he died.”4
His biographer, Jim Bishop, likewise writes that Hellinger “died embittered,
lonely, suspicious and afraid”(Bishop, p. xi). Some of
this unhappiness, at least, was due to the pressure of his work and to his poor
health towards the end, and to his bitterness over his experiences with
superiors in
In 1947 Hellinger had a heart attack while he was producing The Naked City. Hellinger lived just
long enough to preview the finished film. On December 21, 1947, he died of
coronary thrombosis in Cedar of Lebanon Hospital in
Conclusion
The course of Hellinger’s career makes it clear that he was
extraordinarily able. While still in his twenties in
One of Hellinger’s great loves was writing, and so even after he
went to
Hellinger’s doctor in
Some biographical
reference sources say that Hellinger wrote an autobiography, I Meet a Lot of People. He did work on this book, but it never
reached publication. In 1949 the Mark Hellinger Theater in
When he died Hellinger was just entering his heyday. As time went on, he was coming out with better and better movies (interspaced with ones with lesser merit), and he made his best movie, The Naked City, shortly before he died. At the very end he was establishing his own studio, Mark Hellinger Productions, its offices to open the day after he died. Producers and directors would have worked for him. Humphrey Bogart and Burt Lancaster, for their part, were going to make moves for him every year. What would he had achieved if his life hadn’t been cut short at 44?
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Last updated: 27 October 2008