Showman of the Screen

Joseph E. Levine and His Revolutions in Film Promotion

A. T. McKenna

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780813168715
• eBook ISBN: 9780813168722
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Short, immaculately dressed, and shockingly foul-mouthed, Joseph E. Levine (1905–1987) was larger than life. He rose from poverty in Boston's West End to become one of postwar Hollywood's most prolific independent promoters, distributors, and producers. Alternately respected and reviled, this master of movie promotion was responsible for bringing films as varied as Godzilla: King of the Monsters! (1956), Hercules (1958), The Graduate (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968), and A Bridge Too Far (1977) to American audiences.

In the first biography of this controversial pioneer, A. T. McKenna traces Levine's rise as an influential packager of popular culture. He explores the mogul's pivotal role in many significant industry innovations from the 1950s to the 1970s, examining his use of saturation release tactics and bombastic advertising campaigns. Levine was also a trailblazer in promoting European art house cinema in the 1960s. He made Federico Fellini's 8 (1963) a hit in America, feuded with Jean-Luc Godard over their production of Contempt (1963), and campaigned aggressively for Sophia Loren to become the first actress to win an Oscar for a foreign language performance for her role in Two Women (1960).

Despite his significant accomplishments and prominent role in shaping film distribution and promotion in the post-studio era, Levine is largely overlooked today. McKenna's in-depth biography corrects misunderstandings and misinformation about this colorful figure, and offers a sober assessment of his contributions to world cinema. It also illuminates Levine's peculiar talent for movie- and self-promotion, as well as his extraordinary career in the motion picture business.

1

Barefoot Boston Boy
Becomes Movie Man

When I was little we were in the iron and steel business. My mother did the ironing and I did the stealing. We were so poor I didn’t eat a thing until I grew up.

—Joseph E. Levine

Joseph Edward Levine was born on 9 September 1905 into the horrible poverty of Boston’s West End. His earliest years were spent on Spring Street, where he was born in a small apartment above a fish market. Joe would later joke that as the youngest of six children in a crowded apartment filled with the smell of fish, he had to go into the bathroom if he wanted a breath of fresh air.¹ Joe’s family moved from tenement to tenement in the slums of the West End often during his childhood, at various times living on Hollander Street, Poplar Street, Minot Street, and Billerica Street, among others. But it was Billerica Street he mentioned most often, as if that one street symbolized all the misery of his early years. When he was an adolescent, his family moved to Roxbury, a slightly more comfortable neighborhood, but still rough: “I was a tough kid, but also I wasn’t tough. I hated to fight. But I’d fight. I had to fight a tough kid called Edgy when we moved to Roxbury. Edgy got off the sidewalk the next time we met. Things were better in Roxbury. We had a porch.”²

Joe’s parents were Russian Jewish immigrants. There had been an influx of Jewish immigrants into Boston between 1880 and 1917, and almost all came from Russia. They were fleeing the violence and pogroms of their homeland as well as the anti-Semitic laws instituted during the reign of Czar Nicholas II. In 1880, there were around one hundred Jews living in Boston’s West End; by 1910, this number had grown to around forty thousand. The typical Russian Jewish immigrant family was “a literate male with a skilled trade who arrived with an illiterate wife and illiterate children.”³

Like many Jewish immigrants to Boston, Joe’s father was a tailor and was able to find work in Boston’s thriving garment trade, but he died when Joe was four. His mother remarried to a widower, another tailor who earned four dollars a week, gambled, and brought an additional five children into the household (“years later we used to refer to it as a merger”⁴), but that marriage broke up when Joe was seven. At a meeting of Boston’s West Enders in 1962 at which Joe was the guest of honor, he described a typical day in his childhood, as recorded in Joseph A. MacDonald’s account of the evening:

[Joe] depicted an average day when he was young by saying that after school he would rush in town to Filene’s Corner where he sold papers for “Dummy” Miller. After selling papers he would go over to Schraft’s Bakery where he would buy a nickel’s worth of broken cakes. Then he would go down to Hawley Street where he would collect whatever broken crates and boxes he could take home for the kitchen stove. This was the only fuel that the family had for cooking and heating the flat.

His family by then consisted of eleven children and a boarder and providing for all was a problem.⁵

His other activities around this time included shining shoes and hanging around the train station area insisting to travelers that they wanted their bags carried in exchange for a small fee. “As a kid I never had time to think about what I wanted to become,” Joe told Gay Talese. “I went around Boston shining shoes, selling papers and carrying people’s bags. I used to pull those suitcases out of their hands and say ‘Let me carry your bag mister, oh, let me carry your bag!’ ”⁶

In addition to the legitimate and semilegitimate ways Joe had of earning a few bucks, he also indulged in some petty larceny. “We were in the iron and steel business,” he would joke. “My mother did the ironing and I did the stealing.”⁷ In Albert and David Maysles’s documentary Showman (1963), which covers some of the Boston West Enders dinner in 1962, Joe tells his staff a story about his friend Hilkey Alpert. Joe considered him a “rich kid . . . he had shoes, y’know?” On a mission to steal firewood, Hilkey began to cry. When Joe asked him why he was crying, Hilkey said he was cold. Joe was puzzled: “It never occurred to me to be cold before . . . so I started crying too!”

At the dinner, Joe spoke warmly of Hilkey and said he would very much like to meet with him again. Fortuitously, Hilkey was there, as Joseph MacDonald recounts:

[Joe] asked if his old friend Hilkey Alpert was present and a voice in the rear of the hall said “Here Joe” and he stood up. Dramatically Joe Levine became the little boy from Billerica Street in the West End and he told Hilkey that he had been wanting to see and talk to him for over forty years and he was glad he had found him. He said “Hilkey, your troubles are over. I’ll take you to Hollywood and put you in my next picture!”

This was a tense and human moment when two boys who had shared their youthful experiences met after many years. The entire group felt that they were part of this drama and applauded loud and long. Horatio Alger had come to life at this dinner.⁸

In Showman, Joe speaks movingly and sincerely about Hilkey and his wish to meet him again, having received a letter from him some time earlier. The moment they were reunited after so many years was undoubtedly an emotional one. But when Joe and Hilkey met later that evening in a more intimate setting, the meeting was awkward. Neither knew quite what to say to the other.⁹ They were living in different worlds.

Joe was the living embodiment of the American Dream. He came from nothing and rose to accumulate enormous wealth, influence, and power. Rags-to-riches tales demand a romanticization of the rags as a necessary precursor to the riches, but Joe never, ever romanticized his poverty-stricken childhood, though he did have a dark sense of humor about it: “I can remember dinner: one bagel and a piece of baloney. But I always knew what I weighed. They were weighing me at school because I was undernourished.”¹⁰ He would sometimes jokingly request a violin when talking about his past: “Have you got a fiddle? Have you got a hearts-and-flowers record?”¹¹ But beneath the jokes, he was defiantly unsentimental about his childhood: “I remember the stink of it. When they had a pogrom in Poland, we’d have one on Billerica Street the next week. . . . I remember nothing good about Billerica Street.”¹²

On the streets and within the institutions of Boston (as well as of the United States as a whole), anti-Semitism was rife. One resident of Boston, Isaac Goldberg, recalls his childhood friends at the turn of the century thus: “We were a cosmopolitan gang. . . . There were Italians, Scotch, Irish, Bohemians, Jews and nondescripts. . . . We knew nothing of racial prejudice. . . . Later our education would be completed by our parents; we would learn to hate each other as befits members of a Christian civilization.”¹³ The tensions caused by the mixing of different groups would later be replaced by tensions from Boston’s Balkanization as different ethnicities created their own neighborhoods or demarked their own territories. Later still came the Depression and ethnic resentments intensified by hopelessness and the scapegoating of Jews. “The man who fully exploited these tensions,” writes Jonathan D. Sarna,

and in the process attracted a large local following was Father Charles E. Coughlin, a demagogic radio priest. . . . His call to “drive the money changers from the temple,” his scurrilous attacks upon New Dealers, and his fulminations against “International Bankers” struck sympathetic chords in Catholic Boston. . . . In 1935, Coughlin was a guest of Boston City Council . . . a year later his Union Party ran stronger in Boston than in any other American city. Thereafter, beginning in 1938, his anti-Semitism became increasingly overt and raucously strident. He linked communism and atheism with “Jewish internationalism,” reprinted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and embraced fascism. He also established the Christian Front, a quasi-military pro-fascist organization . . . The brutal attacks on local Jews that took place in Boston over the next five years were frequently carried out by Christian Front members.¹⁴

“Being Jewish is like being black,” Joe once told Peter Dunn of London’s Sunday Times. Dunn further writes: “it is a subject he never mentions in his interviews with American writers,” observing, “For so garrulous and joyously indiscreet a man it is perhaps a mark of how deeply it hurt him.”¹⁵

It is true that Joe rarely mentioned in interviews the anti-Semitism he had encountered as a youth and young man, but he was proud of his background, and his Jewishness was a key part of his public persona as well as of his personal and professional life. He often peppered interviews with Yiddish words and Jewish stories and humor. But concern about how his Jewishness might be interpreted by the unsympathetic was in part responsible for his suppression of the documentary Showman. Later, he discontinued the booking of his favorite suite in London’s Dorchester Hotel when it was taken over by a consortium of Arab businessmen in 1977, and his decision to pull out of the production of Gandhi (1982) was, suggests Richard Attenborough, in reaction to the Indian government’s diplomatic recognition of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1981.¹⁶

The years of hardship in Boston’s West End helped to form the man Joe became, something he duly recognized. He once joked that if Hercules had come from the West End, “he would have been a stronger and better hero.”¹⁷ As a child, Joe showed enormous energy, holding down various jobs, learning ways to hustle an extra dollar, and developing the chutzpah that would mature into his defining gift for self-promotion. His upbringing was tough, and alongside the charm and persistence he developed during this time came other more defensive characteristics. The unforgiving nature of his formative years would manifest itself in his less-attractive side, wherein he was abrasive, scheming, unscrupulous, and unpleasant.

These years also shaped Joe’s attitude to money. Bernard F. Dick argues in his book about the producer Hal Wallis, Joe’s contemporary, that Wallis’s poor background explained his nervousness about spending money, whether his own or others’, on movie budgets and in his personal life.¹⁸ Joe was the opposite. He kept a reasonably tight control of movie budgets and sought to make many, many cheap films, but his promotional budgets were notoriously lavish, and in his personal life he was massively ostentatious to the point of recklessness. Joe threw money around and did so with joy. “The way I operate,” he told Gay Talese, “I gotta think of money as chips. If I think about it as money, I’m lost.”¹⁹

“My mother always called me the brategiber—the bread giver,” Joe told Talese. “When I reached fourteen, I was finally able to quit school.”²⁰ Joe then drifted between jobs. His first job was as a floor sweeper and general errand boy in a dress factory, and then he went on the road as a dress salesman, an experience he did not care for: “I was shy and I hated standing around with my hat in my hand waiting for some jerk to decide if he would talk to me.”²¹ He also sang in choirs and performed as a drummer. Within a few years, he was able to go into business with two of his brothers, opening up a dress shop called Le Vine’s (“a sort of French name”²²). Business was good enough for them to open up two more shops, but Joe grew restless. Selling his share to his brothers, he went to New York City, where he worked briefly as a driving instructor and ambulance driver.

An introduction to showmanship came through a sculptor friend who enlisted Joe to help him sell statues of the evangelical preacher Daddy Grace in New York’s Harlem. Daddy Grace was the enormously flamboyant founder of the United House of Prayer for All People. He wore loud, colorful suits, shimmered with jewelry, performed faith healings, and preached with gusto to a largely African American congregation. Joe was impressed: “Oh they loved Daddy Grace. He used to baptize them and afterward sell them everything from tooth paste to jock straps. He made millions. When he died he left millions. His long hair flowed over his shoulders and his fingernails were long like Fu Manchu’s. What a fascinating son of a bitch he was . . . we sold a lot of statues.”²³

Upon returning to Boston in the 1930s, Joe became part owner of the Cafe Wonderbar on Massachusetts Avenue. “The restaurant business is a funny racket,” he said of the Wonderbar. “At 8 p.m. a nicely dressed man comes in and says ‘Hi Joe, howaya?’ And at 1 a.m. he’s drunk and calling me a dirty Jew bastard. Funny business.”²⁴ Nonetheless, the experience was a positive one: “it taught me a lot about meeting the public. I liked meeting the public.”²⁵ It was at t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: An Unfettered Hustler
• 1. Barefoot Boston Boy Becomes Movie Man
• 2. Investing, Exploiting, Saturating
• 3. Monsters and Man-Gods
• 4. The Flim-Flam Man
• 5. The Showman in the Art House
• 6. The Showman on the Screen
• 7. Bad Taste in Hollywood
• 8. Hollywood Undermined
• 9. The Scattergun Approach
• 10. Graduating Class
• 11. Selling Up and Winning Trophies
• 12. The Corporate Gadabout
• 13. New Haven, ’Nam, Nichols, and Nazis
• 14. Joe’s Baby
• 15. Leaving the Exploitation Business
• Epilogue: A Peculiar Talent
• Acknowledgments
• Select Filmography
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index