Grandpa’s movies were playing in Grandpa’s theaters all over Vienna the day I was born. In Vienna’s coffee houses, beer halls, and parks, people were humming and whistling tunes from Grandpa’s latest hit film. A few nights before, Mother and Father had attended yet another grand opening—mingling easily with the beautiful people of society and having an extended chat with Marlene Dietrich.
But by the time I was six months old, Grandpa and his brothers were on their way to Buchenwald concentration camp. Father was dead, and Mother was preparing for our escape to America. Grandpa’s movies were banned, and the Nazis were showing propaganda films in Grandpa’s theaters.
The story of how Grandpa became a movie mogul is as unlikely as its ending was abrupt.
The scene opens in Pistyń, a shtetl in Galicia, regarded before 1918 as part of Poland, in the last years of the nineteenth century. Grandpa, in the traditional manner of the first born, had inherited the modest family gold and jewelry business, which he managed conservatively, budgeting not only for his wife, but also for his younger brothers. With Grandpa’s financial help, Julian was studying law in Vienna. Richard, an adventurous, amorous young adult, was cavorting in America on an allowance reluctantly granted by Grandpa.
Richard dabbled in New York’s burgeoning photographic industry and wrote home enthusiastically about its possibilities. After a misstep or two, an emergency appeal to Grandpa for funds enabled Richard to board a ship to Europe a step ahead of the bailiff. He returned with the new century and with a head full of strike-it-rich schemes involving “moving pictures,” to which Grandpa turned a deaf ear.
In the wake of the pre-World War I pogroms (anti-Jewish riots), Grandpa moved his family, including Uncle Richard, to Vienna, where Julian was practicing law. Like some other Jewish immigrants, Grandpa started trading in gold and diamonds. Richard landed a job as a projectionist in a neighborhood movie theater.
Richard waited until Grandpa was conscripted and sent off to war to appeal to Grandma for a loan. By leasing a film produced in Germany and distributing it to Austrian theater owners, he assured her he could turn a quick and handsome profit. Grandma, a soft touch, gave Richard the money.
In a short time, she had the money back and Richard had two films. The two became four and the profits became a down payment on a theater of his own.
By the time Grandpa returned from the war, his little brother was surrounded by servants and hangers-on. Chauffeur-driven touring cars carried Richard and a succession of beautiful women to his country villa. Grandpa resumed his diamond trading. In the 1920s, Grandpa put his profits into blue-chip stocks, scorning Richard’s periodic entreaties to invest in his increasingly lavish moving-picture enterprise.
Although Richard’s lifestyle devoured his accumulating capital, he decided in the early 1930s to refurbish and enlarge his theaters, confident that he could finance the project out of increased patronage. But the unsettling impact of Hitler’s ascendancy in Germany curtailed the supply of films from Berlin. Moreover, many Austrians—particularly Jews—found themselves easily able to resist the allure of films produced in Nazi Germany.
Richard’s cash flow was sharply reduced, and he was unable to pay his contractors. His creditors’ increasingly clamorous demands overwhelmed his financial footwork. He faced not only bankruptcy, but also prison.
Once again, Richard and the entire family turned to Grandpa. His brother Julian, by now a prominent attorney, was increasingly embarrassed by Richard’s highly publicized problems and urged Grandpa to buy Richard out. For 33 cents on the dollar he could settle with the creditors, save Richard from jail, and take over the still-valuable business. As head of the family, Grandpa had no choice. And so, virtually overnight, the gold, diamonds, stock, and cash accumulated over his lifetime of conservative business and investment decisions were gone—converted into the majority ownership of a foundering movie business.
Grandpa’s first major decision was that, instead of forcing German films on Austrians, the path to solvency was to produce Austrian movies based on Austrian themes. Grandpa hired a director, commissioned a writer, and set out to romance one of Europe’s best known opera tenors, Leo Slezak. After months of cajoling, Slezak agreed. One big name attracted others and one successful film begot another. Soon homegrown productions filled the Austrian movie houses.
Grandpa understood that the future of film was “talking pictures,” ignoring Julian’s solemn advice that the Austrian public would never put up with “all that noise.” Opera stars and cabaret chanteuses regaled all of Austria in Grandpa’s productions, and became regular visitors at his home.
In the spring of 1938, Hitler marched into Austria, I was born, and soon Grandpa’s silver-screen empire lay in the debris of Kristallnacht. From time to time over the years, I’ve found myself imagining what my life would have been like as the scion of a European version of the Zanuck, Selznick, or Warner family. But 86 years later, after struggling for survival, gaining a foothold in the new world, and establishing my own family and professional life, that picture seems more like Hollywood fiction, than one of the six million might-have-beens.