The Mark Hellinger Story: A Biography of Broadway and Hollywood

By Jim Bishop

Mark Hellinger, beloved newspaperman, whose Broadway column was read daily by 22,000,000 people, and whose years as a Hollywood producer were marked by such outstanding successes as “High Sierra,” “The Killers,” and “Naked City,” died in 1947 in his forty-fifth year. In this book, Jim Bishop, who was his secretary, takes us behind the scenes to live again, the life of a man who “went everywhere, saw everything, and did everything—without exultation or remorse.”

Rich with the nostalgic echoes of a note-too-distant past, THE MARK HELLINGER STORY is a magnificent account of a fabulous era—Broadway of the twenties and thirties, from the colossal glamour of the Follies, Vanities, and Scandals to the trenchant wit and lilting tunes of the Little Shows, with the heady smell of printer’s ink and the roar of the night presses; the vast canvas of Hollywood in the silent days, and its sudden rebirth with sound.

It is the story, too, of a man who crammed into a lifetime more living than most people will ever know. In the words of Jim Bishop, Hellinger “spent time as though he had stolen it and couldn’t find a fence.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789125016

Jim Bishop

Jim Bishop was a syndicated columnist and author of many bestselling books, including The Day Lincoln Was Shot, The Day Christ Died, and A Day in the Life of President Kennedy. Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, Bishop died in 1987.

Book preview

This edition is published by Papamoa Press – www.pp-publishing.com

To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – [e-mail]

Or on Facebook

Text originally published in 1952 under the same title.

© Papamoa Press 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE MARK HELLINGER STORY

A BIOGRAPHY OF BROADWAY AND HOLLYWOOD

BY

JIM BISHOP

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE 5

FOR THE RECORD 7

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 9

Book One—WHO? 10

Book Two—WHY? 19

Book Three—WHEN? 43

Book Four—WHERE? 106

Book Five—WHY? 176

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 272

DEDICATION

This is dedicated,

as Mark Hellinger might have wished,

to the nostalgic moments

it will bring to his friends

He added to the sum of human joy,

And were every one to whom he did some loving service

to bring a blossom to his grave,

he would sleep tonight beneath a wilderness of flowers.

—Robert Green Ingersoll

AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE

I knew Mark Hellinger, I think, better than anyone else. For the last eighteen years of his life, I was his wife. And, when you get to know a man better than he knows himself, it is difficult to feel pleased when someone else puts his life on paper because, no matter how fine the writer, no matter how deep the research, the result never seems to portray exactly the man you once knew.

Still, this book comes as close to Mark Hellinger—the real Mark Hellinger—as it is humanly possible to get. I know. I read it before you. And when the first early chapters arrived, I was amazed at what the author had turned up. And when the later chapters unrolled under my green glasses, I was even more astonished. Things which had happened to Mark and to me, things which I barely remembered—and a few which I had forgotten—were in the manuscript. If anything was wrong with the book, it was that it was too detailed.

I feel a little bit of pride about this particular work because, you see, I engineered the whole thing. My husband had a streak of ham—what husband hasn’t?—in him. It wasn’t offensive ham. He liked to see his name in lights and he enjoyed seeing it on a book or in a newspaper. And so, when he was taken from me, in December 1947,1 decided to keep his name alive in the most fitting way—a biography.

The question was, who would write it? I had my choice of the field, because Mark was universally beloved by writers, and his life was so rich with material, with the very laughter and tears he used in his columns, that I was deluged with suggestions.

Two years ago, I made up my mind. I asked Jim Bishop to do it, not because he was the greatest of the authors—hell tell you himself that he’s a million miles from that goal—but because he knew Mark best, having grown up with Mark as his assistant on the Daily Mirror, and because I knew that Jim would work harder at the research than any of the other writers.

I didn’t try to mastermind what went into the book. I merely gave the author the green light to go ahead, helped him whenever and wherever possible, opened some doors for him when he trekked to California to do the motion picture phase of the book, and kept encouraging him when he ran into rocks.

Mainly, I felt that this would be a monument to Mark. He would want a monument. I know. He sleeps now in a mausoleum, as he wished, within sight of the Hudson River. But that wouldn’t satisfy him. As proof I offer the fact that, in 1944, he wrote to his publishers, Rinehart & Company, that he planned to write his own autobiography I Meet a Lot of People. It was never written, but this book will do nicely, in its stead.

I sat with Jim through the long night hours, trying to recall dates and events while his sound recorder swung in silent circles. Some of those recollections were painful. But if you don’t mind, I’ll do a little bragging: I only wept once. That was when I was asked to give, in detail, the final day of Mark’s life, from the moment he woke up in the morning and grabbed for the phone, until he was taken away from me in the early hours of the following morning. I don’t think that’s a bad record for a dame. It wouldn’t be a bad record for a man either.

My big hope is that you’ll enjoy this book. If you like the story of a man who was big, and was still a boy, and who was small and frightened and yet courageous, who was hospitable, gracious, irritating, noble, a great storyteller and a great producer, a perfect louse when it came to arguments with me, a sentimentalist who could spoil a wife with consideration and love, a man who never lived a dull moment and who wouldn’t permit his wife to, either—then perhaps you’ll get a chuckle or two out of this. Maybe a tiny tear too.

One thing I know: Mark would have got a boot out of it. That’s why I had it written.

FOR THE RECORD

A hard subject, this Mark Hellinger. Very. You can write about Mike Romanoff or Toots Shor or Darryl Zanuck or Polly Adler and when, like the detective you are, the scores of thousands of facts drop into your notebook you will find an admixture of bright and shiny ones balanced against the dark and evil ones and it is the dark ones which make the portrait. But when you do one on a man like Mark Hellinger you are given none but the bright ones and, if you are not careful, you find yourself using white paint on a white canvas and you have no portrait at all.

Another factor which mitigates against a good portrait is that the writer knew him well and loved him deeply. He also knew the beautiful Gladys Glad before she married Mark Hellinger and has a long-standing affection for her. These things too can hurt a full-length portrait; in truth, old memories can handcuff the painter. He forgets—or doesn’t want to jot the nasty nuances. He remembers the jaded smile of the guy who often lent him a hundred and refused to accept repayment, but he is sickened to learn that the same man died embittered, lonely, suspicious and afraid.

It was difficult, yes. And it was a labor of love too. As much as possible, this book has chased the truth and nailed it down in the forty-four years and nine months that Mark Hellinger lived. Not all of the truths, of course, because many of them were dull, and, as Mark said in his own twilight of time, I’ve lived a hundred and forty-four years. It wasn’t said boastfully. It was murmured by a man with his eyes closed to slits by weariness. It was said by a man who had been everywhere, seen everything, and done everything—without exultation or remorse. He spent time as though he had stolen it and couldn’t find a fence.

Hellinger loved people and people loved Hellinger, so the book is as much a story of the people around him as it is of the roan. It is a story of Broadway and a story of Hollywood; a story especially of the people he cherished so much that he fell from carrying all of them—and many more—in his heart. Some walked off slowly into the mist before he did—Jimmy Walker and Texas Guinan and Charlie Sherman and Marks parents and beloved kid brother, Buddy, Nora Bayes and Red Dolan and Frank Carson and Tom Cassidy and Florenz Ziegfeld and Sime Silverman and Nick Glad and Eddie Foy and Billy LaHiff and unremembered little hoods with big cannons and an unremembered cop who always touched his night stick to his cap; a stagehand, a printer, and a sweet little writer named Jack Singer who went out the hard way, and Immogene Wilson and Father Duffy and many that you and I would not know by name.

He was a very big man. And a very small one. In my time, no man was more generous with money and loyalty. Also in my time, no man could stoop to meaner practical jokes or take such deep and abiding umbrage at small slights. He loved you or he didn’t know you. Perhaps his greatest grief was that he wanted to be what he called a real writer and it would hurt him beyond healing to know that he will be assessed in future as a third-rate O’Henry and a first-rate motion picture producer. Yes. That would cause him to wince and so I hope that the people in the Azure Attic have the good sense to keep this book away from him.

Mark Hellinger sleeps now in a mausoleum, built by his widow, at a place called Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, a score of miles north of Times Square. In his will, he said he wanted to be buried within sight of the Hudson River. If you look to the west through the elms and the copper beeches, you will see little irregular eclipses of blue. That’s the Hudson. And, looking the other way, through the bronze doors to the crypt with the almost illegible by-line on it, that’s Mark Hellinger.

JIM BISHOP

Teaneck, N. J.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Mark poses with his beloved Millie on his fifth birthday, March 21, 1908.

The young reporter of 1922 was undressed unless a copy of the American Mercury stuck out of his pocket.

The great triumvirate of the roaring Twenties—Walter Winchell, Texas Guinan and Mark Hellinger.

On his around-the-world tour, the columnist discovered a rarity—a Balinese maiden who smokes.

Louis Sobol, of the Journal-American, Leonard Lyons, of the New York Post, Dan Parker, sports editor of the Daily Mirror, and Mark Hellinger, of King Features.

Producer Mark Hellinger, star Jack Benny, and director Raoul Walsh during the filming of The Horn Blows at Midnight.

Mr. and Mrs. Hellinger pose on the grounds of their Hollywood home with four of the 27 dogs they owned at one time or another.

Story conference on the set of High Sierra.

As a war correspondent, Hellinger met old friends in the South Pacific, including Melvyn Douglas.

The Mark Hellingers on their thirteen-acre estate in the hills of Hollywood.

The Hellingers with their favorite find, Burt Lancaster, on the set of Brute Force.

Mark Hellinger posed in Havana with his favorite author, Ernest Hemingway, in January of 1947.

The chase scene of The Naked City was set for shooting at this moment

Book One—WHO?

Now the medal began to cool. It hung, gleaming with the hard brightness of solid gold, on the molasses-colored chest. It knew, better than the doctors who flanked the bed, that the heart had stopped. Saint Christopher, old and impassive as he carried the Infant, was pushed rudely aside by the doctor who bent to listen. The medal then hung almost under the right arm. Around the filigreed perimeter of the medal was the name, Mark Hellinger. It cooled imperceptibly. The doctor stopped listening. The man was dead. The body lay almost diagonally on the bed, the face falsely fat and not at all in repose, the mouth gritted tightly against a pain now gone. The straight jet hair, flecked with white, was still neatly parted and the patches of white made his face look younger, rather than older. The oxygen tank, the taped nostril holders, looked ridiculous in the face of a superior enemy.

The interne wrote: Exp 1:45 A.M. Dec. 21, 1947. He shrugged and looked at the older doctor. We have no luck on Saturdays, he said softly. First Lubitsch. Now Hellinger. The older doctor tossed the stethoscopes on the bed. The big psychological job lay ahead. How do you tell a widow that her man is dead? How do you start? Mrs, Hellinger, I’m awfully sorry but... Or, Mrs. Hellinger, you must realize that some things are for the best and... Or, Now, now, Mrs. Hellinger, I want you to be brave about this... Or, in the cathedral tone, He has gone to his reward...

The older doctor was in luck. He didn’t have to say anything. She knew. She knew before he knew for certain. She stood for a moment, tall and blonde and incredibly beautiful, looking down through dark green glasses at the man on the bed, knowing him as no one ever knew him, loving him as no one ever loved him, hating him at times as all wives hate their husbands, laughing with him, adoring, despising, hoping, dreading, sympathizing, arguing, mothering, drinking, surprising, kidding, worrying. She was trying to say three single-syllabled words: He...is...dead, and she found that she could say them, but they were mouthed words, not mental words. They meant nothing. Then the tears came and she sat suddenly and the slender shoulders sloped and the older doctor put an arm around her and, wisely, he permitted her to cry awhile before be led her from the room. She pulled her dark glasses up and she wiped her eyes and she rubbed the handkerchief across her nose and the doctor tried to explain the nature of a coronary thrombosis but all she could understand was that he had a bum ticker and, to her, the medical terminology was silly. A bum ticker is a bum ticker.

In a way, the tears were a concession because Gladys Glad Hellinger was never a soft, feminine girl. She had seen death before; seen it at first hand and she was unafraid of it She had seen a lot of life too, and she felt that it held a lot more terrors than death. By an ironic quirk of nature, she had been given a body called The Most Beautiful In The World, but the mind had come out of the hard canyons of the Bronx tenements. So had the voice, which was thrummy and peremptory and which sounded as though it came out of someplace near Broadway, which indeed it had.

She patted the older doctor’s arm. Okay doc, she said in a throaty whisper. You did your best. The elevator slid noiselessly down the rails and she got off and walked out to the curb. Outside, the night air of Los Angeles had cooled a little. The coconut palms trembled slightly in the first breeze in days. She turned and looked back once at the high straight pale columns of Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. Then she stepped into the long black Cadillac and told the chauffeur to take her home.

Home was almost directly east, across the plain of neat bungalows called Los Angeles and on up into the steep rise of Beverly Hills to electrically controlled gates and on into a private road called La Brea Terrace and then into the main house.

There was so much to do. So very much. She sat with her elbows on her knees, rubbing her fingertips lightly against her temples. She called the children’s nurse. Item number one. When Mark and Gladys wake up, tell them nothing. I’ll tell them in good time, but don’t you say a word. Understand? She looked up half belligerently, a characteristic when she was worried or hurt. The nurse nodded. Let them play in their room in the morning. I’ll do the telling. Another servant brought her a drink. She smiled a terse thanks, set it on a glass coaster, and forgot it. Another time, it would have been welcome. Very welcome. But right now there was so much...so very much...

She sat for a while and then she looked at her watch. Two A.M. That would be 5 A.M. in New York. Mrs. Hellinger stood, put her purse on her arm, and walked slowly up the curved stairway to her husband’s den. It was a luxurious place for a name so defiling. Bookshelves ran from floor to ceiling around the walls. Most of the volumes were specially bound in leather. The chairs and desk were as rich as natural rosewood. She took a little brass key from her purse and opened the center drawer of the desk. As the mistress of this estate, she had access to every doorway and everything behind every doorway except this one drawer. Mark Hellinger had said, not once, but many times, to keep away from it. And she had. If and when I go, he said, you can look in it. Now he had gone and now she fitted the key, turned it quickly, and opened it. She frowned when she saw nothing but an old envelope. Then she picked it up and held it under the desk light. It was addressed to her, but it was scrawled over and erased. One date, still legible, said February 1944. Another said April 1944 and she remembered numbly that that was when he had gone to war. But that too was scratched over and the date at the bottom read September 1946. That would be when they got home after he had the heart attack at the Sherry-Netherland in New York. She opened it.

DEAREST HONEY:

The only time you will get to read this is when I’ve gone. I just want to say that I’ve always loved you, often not as well as you deserved, but as well as I could. When I go, honey, I want you to remarry. I mean this from the heart. You and the children will be happier, and better protected, if there is a good man close by. If you aren’t certain about the man, just ask yourself one question: Would Mark like him? If the answer is yes, that’s the man. The reason I say that is not for vanity’s sake, but solely because I feel that if he was the kind of a guy I’d get along with, you won’t be going too far wrong. Take good care of the children.

All my love. Always....

MARK

Then she wept. She really wept. Now, for the first time, the three single-syllabled words hit her mind with stunning impact and she knew that Mark Hellinger was gone, gone irrevocably and forever.

She picked up the phone, the one with the fifty-foot extension wire, and she called Toots Shor in New York. There was much to do and it had to be done quickly. Mrs. Hellinger was patient and competent now. She waited and she heard the phone on Park Avenue ring and ring again. She waited. Then came the voice of the benevolent bum.

Hello

Toots. Our boy has gone.

What’s that? This Glad?

Our boy has gone.

Jesus Christ! When?

An hour ago.

Jesus, Glad. Through the miasma of sleep, the news filtered, half dream, half truth. Mark?

Yes Toots. Her voice regained control.

Silence. Mark gone? Heart attack?

Yes Toots.

You don’t know what this is doing to me. His voice broke. Mark gone? What do you want me to do, Glad? Name it. Want me to take the next plane out? You’ll need help. Oh God, the guy I loved best in the whole world has left us.

Call me when you get a chance, she said. There’s so much to do.

She called the Pierce Brothers Mortuary and a man came up and she made arrangements. She called others in Beverly Hills and Studio City and Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks and Malibu and Bel-Air and to each she said; Our boy has left us, until it began to sound like a sorrowful litany. The newspapers began to call on the other phone and there was no sleep and no thought of sleep.

International News and United Press and the Associated Press leafed through their morgues—Halsey, Hanley, Hedson, Heller, Hellinger. That’s it. Hellinger, Mark. 1903— The rewrite men sat under shaded lights and digested the clips and scratched themselves. Then they rolled the blank sheets into the battered typewriters and slugged the story HELLINGER. At 1:45 this morning, Mark Hellinger, noted producer and columnist, died at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital of a coronary thrombosis. He was forty-four and leaves a wife and two adopted children. That’s it, kids. Get it all in the first paragraph because Lord knows who’s going to read the second. The typewriters chattered and the wire service machines began their even monotonous clatter and night desk men yawned and said, I hear this Hellinger was one hell of a guy. They say he’d stake anybody. How old was he? Forty-four? Christ, I got him by five right now.

Now it was like a pebble in a still pool. The waves were widening and editors in Albuquerque and Tuscaloosa and Salt Lake City were running through the stock cuts trying to find a nice one-column cut for page one. Mark Hellinger was dead and Mark Hellinger was the newspaperman they all wished they were. The hell with Hollywood. The man was born and bred a newspaperman and he only went to Hollywood to get some fat sucker money. Deep down he was one of us and let’s give the poor bastard a final salute. Right on page one. Okay.

The ripples went wider and wider and the pink and green of winter dawn was coming up in New York when the wave of news flashed over the town and left it gasping. For, if there was any town anywhere that belonged to Mark Hellinger, this was it. This was his. Here, the hard-boiled sentimentalists were stunned so that they spoke little and drank much. Here, the cab drivers cruising slowly through dead streets leaned out to yell to other cab drivers: Mark Hellinger is dead. Yeah. Just came over the radio. Here the people or the late spots and the early spots and all the spots between sat numbly and mumbled: Why, only three months ago, Mark said to me...

It isn’t that he wasn’t sorrowed for in Peoria and Pittsburgh and Pueblo. He had friends in those places too. And many in Hollywood wept bitterly that Sunday morning. But New York was Mark Hellinger’s New York and they knew him and they loved him in that out-of-the-corner-of-the-mouth way and he was as much one of them as Jimmy Walker had been. Or Al Smith. Or Owney Madden.

Toots Shor sat near the phone in his Park Avenue apartment. He sat so long that his wife, Baby, got out of bed.

What’s the matter? she said. He looked at her and the words wouldn’t come so he turned his head down and twisted his hands together. I heard you say Mark, she said. He nodded dumbly. The affection between Hellinger and Shor was extremely close, even for a man like Hellinger who had no trouble loving everybody. The words came suddenly. Mark is dead, Mr. Shor said and tears rolled down his cheeks. He pulled his pajamas up and stumbled into the bar and poured a drink. He asked Baby to dial Bill Corum’s number. She did. Toots took the phone. Hello? Bill? Mark just left us. Corum, in bed, wasted no time on words. I’ll be right over, he said. And he was.

It was then that the wakes began. Few men, even presidents of this republic, have had so many going at one time. They had a certain Irish characteristic to them in this respect: They were mostly composed of men, of bottles, of tears, and they were often split by laughter. But it started with Mr. Shor and Mr. Corum, and the laughter, which came later, was not desecration, but rather the antithesis of tears. Minute by minute and hour by hour, the friends of Mark Hellinger drifted into the Shor apartment. Corum, a fine sports columnist with the manner and the compassion of a Hellinger, came in before the sun permitted the darkness to leave the sidewalks.

After him came Quentin Reynolds, as big and burly as Shor. Mike Romanoff, owner of a restaurant in Hollywood and one of the few to be invited to the Hellinger home on Thanksgiving Day, came in. Then John McClain, who used to be a good ship news reporter, Joseph DiMaggio, center fielder of the New York Yankees, Horace Stoneham, owner of the New York Giants—it was mid-morning now and they were coming fast and they were going to stay for three days—Louis Sobol, columnist, who, of all present, seemed to realize with a quicker consciousness that a very dear friend was gone forever. Charlie Berns of Twenty One came over. So did Ted Husing, one of Hellinger’s oldest friends. James A. Farley dropped in for a while. Then Pat Harrington, the Canadian comic, and Ed Flynn, boss of the Bronx, and trainer Ray Arcel and James J. Braddock and matchmaker Al Weill and heartsick Mike Jacobs and sports columnists Frank Graham and Jimmy Cannon, who knew Hellinger the longest, and jockeys Sammy Renick and Eddie Arcaro, and Barney Gallant, another old friend from Greenwich Village, and Nicky Blair, nightclub owner, and Dan Parker, who worked with Hellinger on the Mirror, and, by noon, practically every saloonkeeper in New York City. Among the newspapermen and actors and the Broadway crowd it was considered almost a betrayal of Hellinger not to be at that wake.

It was a wake of a type that would be frowned upon by most of the solid citizens of the United States, but these were super-solid citizens and they knew the type of wake that Hellinger would have appreciated, and so they held it. They came in wide-eyed, stunned and sick. Each in turn was told that, in honor of Hellinger, only brandy would be served. So they drank brandy. And some got drunk and some got maudlin and some got silly and some sat in a corner of the bar and cried.

Slightly to the north of all this, another old friend and fine writer sat down to his typewriter. He had been reading the obituaries and he was troubled. This was Paul Gallico.

A funny epitaph they wrote the guy when he succumbed to a heart attack at the height of his success as a writer, journalist and moving picture producer, he wrote. They wrote him up as a big tipper and a picker-up of tabs and dinner checks. It was true enough but there were so many more things to say of Mark Hellinger when he died. He was sweet. He was kind. He was gentle. He was honest and he was good. He worked hard. He never double-crossed his friends. He was rich in talent and with his talents he enriched his times. Before he died he had pulled himself aloft by his own bootstraps from a nobody to a national figure. When he died, he left too large a hole to fill in the hearts of many, including my own.

That Sunday night and Monday morning, practically all the better-paid writers began to sob in eight point type. The Hearst press grabbed George Frazier to do the Hellinger life story in six installments. Bill Corum, paid to write sports, tapped: We wouldn’t like living with our-self if we didn’t say that no nicer gentleman ever passed this way. Louis Sobol wrote: This is the time to put into the simplest of words what weeps out from the heart, sincerely and truthfully, Mark Hellinger, my friend, is gone. One writer, who didn’t rate a by-line on his story, wrote: If O. Henry was reincarnated as Cecil B. DeMille, that would be Mark Hellinger. Earl Wilson, columnist, said; He loved to live and he loved to work and he spent his life as though it were merely money. Jimmy Cannon said: Always he frisked a man’s character for a trait he could respect.

On Tuesday Walter Winchell devoted his entire column to a moving and beautiful tribute to his friend Mark Hellinger. For many years, these two had been known as the Damon and Pythias of Broadway. In the days of Prohibition, they had sat out the long nights in the small clubs, trusting and confiding in each other as they trusted and confided in no one else. And no matter where they set out to go, Hellinger, with his black slick hair, snap-brim hat, and twinkling blue eyes, always murmured: Adventure, Walter. Adventure.

Mark Hellinger is dead....We covered the Texas Guinan beat together back in 1924. We had a pact then that I would write his obit notice, if I survived, and he would write mine, if he survived. We promised each other we would omit none of the virtues—because those who love life too much are not without fault...But a man’s deeds live longer in the hearts of his friends than words that come forth from a typewriter...So I’m considering my bargain fulfilled when I say that I’m leaving Mark to the love in people’s hearts that he himself created....

And so a guy is gone who made an art of friendship...People who hardly knew him liked him. And those who knew him loved him...No man could have a better friend than Mark—and no man had more of them...Mark Hellinger went out in the style in which he lived and in the style in which he wrote—the O. Henry magic—the Damon Runyon touch...It was a typical Hellinger script. A tug at the heart—a lump in the throat and a sudden surprise ending.

Just one thing more...Back in the old days, the two biggest things in our lives were our typewriters—and the Morris Plan. Mark would sign as my co-maker and I’d sign as his...Our greatest subject of common interest was the interest on each other’s notes....Well, Mark’s note to Fate has been called without notice—but not even Fate itself can call the note he struck in the hearts of his friends. There are hundreds of people who could certify to his Great Maker—that he was first in the hearts—as they were in his—of his humble co-makers—here on earth.

Adventure, Mark, Adventure.

By Sunday morning the ripple of shock had completed its cycle. It was no longer news that The Man Nobody Hates was dead. In Shanghai, a bearded Capuchin monk who used to sign his letters to Hellinger the priest to whom you are so very kind, knelt and did what he could for an old memory. In Bali, a convivial Dutchman named J. M. Minas, owner of the Minas Tourist Office, slowly spun a gin and tonic in his hand and muttered vaguely about the inconsistency of God, who seemed bent on beckoning to the wrong people. A purser who used to work the old S.S. Reliance mopped his face in the stickiness of Port Said and smiled a little. There, he said to a subordinate, was a really great son of a bitch. Those who had been on the Hellinger private payroll were not only shocked, but dismayed. A few felt angry at him for not taking better care of himself.

In Hollywood, the things that had to be done were being done.

The services took place on Christmas Eve. The temperature in Los Angeles was 94. The chapel was dark and cool. Up front, Mark Hellinger lay in an expensive casket, under glass. He had, as François Rabelais once said, gone to seek a great perhaps. To those who knew Hellinger, he was not in the casket. James V. Kern took one look and turned away and went outside for air. The face in the casket was bloated; the skin pulled back tight toward the back of the head and the neck. It was like a bland Oriental mask. Under the shirt, known to no one, the Saint Christopher medal had been removed by Mrs. Hellinger, and the one with her name now hung around his neck.

Outside and inside was quiet bedlam. There were film stars and film fans, friends, flimflammers, bootblacks, beauties, moguls, and moochers. Selznick, Zanuck, Blumberg, Warner, O’Brien, Wald, Blyth, Fitzgerald, Lancaster, Horwits, Siodmak, McFadden, Rosenbloom, Brooks, Sheridan, Graf, O’Dwyer, Walsh, Smith, Goetz, Bogart, they were all there. They filed in slowly, deferentially, and the expressions they wore could be read less as sorrow than fright. Some moved up front to look down into the casket. Others sat down in the rear, or stood.

The services were about as simple as they could be and still be called services. There were no pallbearers, no soloist, no real eulogy. Hellinger, a Jew, went out with an Episcopal minister making the Sign of the Cross over him. The only memorable thing that the Reverend Neal Dodd, rector of St. Mary of Angels Church, said, was closer to the target than many of the written comments of the publicans: Mark, the man, was a modern apostle of faith in the worthiness of all men, each in his own way, frequently understood only by Mark.

When it was over, the glass lid was pulled back for a moment before the casket was wheeled up the aisle and outdoors. It was then that Hedda Hopper arrived. She came in the door just in time to see a giant of a man leap out of the crowd, grab the body and plant a kiss on the face, and then run screaming and crying up the aisle and out. Miss Hopper had to be assisted outdoors.

In New York, a second service was going on at Campbell’s Funeral Parlor at the same time as the one in California. This one was a send-off that Hellinger might have understood. He would have loved it. This one was executed with great hearts and high hangovers. Toots Shor took the tab for it. The chapel, about the size of a country church, had banked flowers and a whole front wall of flowers. There was organ music, a eulogy, and the sobbing of women and men. The wake at Shor’s had ended at midnight on Tuesday and all hands solemnly agreed not to take another drink until after the services on Wednesday. This pact imposed undue strain on many of the mourners, some of whom were stepping around as though they weren’t quite sure Campbells had a floor.

In the room reserved for the next of kin, Mr. Shor and Baby, a lovable person in mink, took charge of last-minute arrangements and changes. Johnny Broderick, perhaps the greatest roughhouse brawler the New York Police Department ever boasted, stood with four fingers of each hand jammed in his coat pockets, studying the floor gravely. He rocked back and forth on his heels and growled: He was gonna make my picture next. Jeez. What a guy. Phil Regan mopped his brow and wanted to know whether he should sing How We Miss You Dear Old Pal before or after the eulogy. It was before.

Out front sat Gene McHugh, white-haired and now night editor of the New York News. Hellinger had hundreds of close friends, but he had only a few triple-distilled close friends, and McHugh was one. Also out front was Leonard Lyons, onetime Brooklyn law student who kept contributing to Hellinger’s column until he got one of his own; Jimmy Cannon, fat and acidulous; James A. Farley; Joseph Nunan, Collector of Internal Revenue; all the regulars who had attended the wake; and there were strangers who feel a sense of personal victory in the presence of death; cab drivers who remembered those long green tips; Hellinger pensioners; Hellinger worshipers, and some who felt that it was cold outside.

The real star of the day, though, was Quentin Reynolds. He not only knew the dead man well; he was also an excellent public speaker and eulogist. He had, ten years before, delivered the eulogy over the remains of young Monroe Hellinger; now he was prepared to do as well for his dear friend Mark.

Reynolds is a big man physically, and the writers in the crowd had respect for his mental keenness, but by the time the organist started the soft slow thunder of Bach, they were wondering aloud how anyone could survive three days of mourning at Shor’s and still stand up to speak. But he did. And if Hellinger had edited the copy himself, it could not have been more Hellingerish in context.

Today, he said in the deep melodramatic tone he uses, we begin our long homage to our friend, Mark Hellinger, and our hearts will look upon his name with pride until the end of our days. The grin he wore; the laughter in his eyes; the chuckle in his voice—these have left us. But there is left with us something that makes the death of our friend Mark seem a fact not yet proved—a fact never to be proved. For no man can be dead who has left behind so much love in the hearts of others. It was Mark’s destiny to give. All the gaiety and energy and wisdom and affection that made up our friend Mark kept pouring out of him as though there were no end to what a man could do for others. He gave and gave and gave and finally he gave it all away. And there was an end.

In every sense, it was a spectacular death with repercussions bordering on the fantastic. There were minor wakes everywhere that newspapermen and people of the world of entertainment congregated. There were grief-stricken groups at the New York Mirror, King Features, the News, the Ziegfeld Theatre, in San Francisco, the Chicago Herald-American—it would require a roster of newspapers and theatrical hangouts to complete the list.

Mark Hellinger’s impact on the affections of those whom he met is beyond analysis. Competent reporters called him great when they must have known in their hearts that Hellinger would never be better than a marked-down copy of O. Henry. In Hollywood, the writers, the extras, many of the actors and practically all the stagehands and electricians thought he was the great white hope among producers. And yet Hellinger himself pointed to a protégé, Jerry Wald, and said: He has more ideas for more good pictures than all of us combined, So he wasn’t great as a writer, great as a producer—he wasn’t anything great except a great guy.

Physically, Mark Hellinger was five feet ten inches tall and weighed one hundred and seventy pounds when he was in shape. He had a dark, handsome face with twinkling blue eyes. The eyes told one and all, at all times, that he wanted to be naughty. The lips were a bit too well shaped and were thinly feminine. They moved against each other in a sensual way all the time. His hands were long, tapering and delicate—never intended for pick or shovel, hammer or nail. They curled and uncurled as he talked and many of his friends were embarrassed to find that they watched his hands rather than his face.

He walked with a slightly hunched stoop in an easy stride and held his head cocked. His voice was jaded and tough. When he called you kiddie or pappy it was in the tone of a tired, benevolent gangster. When he spoke, his conversation was swift and nervous, not because it was natural to him, but rather because that was the way he believed busy reporters should talk. 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.

Probably the only item which did not reach the newspapers was that, three years later, on the producer’s forty-eighth birthday, March 21st, 1951, he was placed in a granite mausoleum at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, a score of miles north of New York City, within, as the will stated, sight of the Hudson River. No reporters were invited. Gladys Glad, accompanied by Vera Winkler, her maid of many years and also her friend, and Toots Shor, Jerry Lewis, Nick Glad Jr., and this writer, were present.

When the will was read, it turned out to be a document of hope and of despair. Mark Hellinger, the great spender, the big tipper and tab-lifter, had left an aggregate of about a million dollars. He died three months to