Cinema: Producer Sam Spiegel's third wife said he would rather climb a tree than tell the truth, and that's one reason he was so successful in Hollywood, Brecht's "marketplace of lies". Reviewed by Stephen Dixon
To justify his mendacity Spiegel played the Holocaust card without hesitation: "Of course I lied," he was fond of saying. "If I hadn't lied I would now be a bar of soap."
He also cheated and stole - Billy Wilder called him "a modern-day Robin Hood who steals from the rich and steals from the poor". Walking along a Paris street, Spiegel was once kicked hard in the backside; without breaking his stride or turning round to identify his assailant, he said: "The cheque's in the post."
Naturally, his appalling behaviour attracted enemies. Budd Schulberg, screenwriter of On the Waterfront, discovered shaving at 3 a.m. by his wife, explained that he was on his way out to kill Sam Spiegel. In a newspaper interview a couple of weeks ago, Peter O'Toole said "I couldn't bear that man", and went on to describe how he once climbed up the anchor chain on to the producer's yacht and stole all his cigars. And Spiegel's "bar of soap" comment seems reasonable set against the condescension he often faced: "You believe the end justifies the means," David Lean cabled him, "and if the tragic recent story of your own noble race has not made you question your methods and way of thinking, how can my small voice hope to reach you?"
But his instinct for film was impeccable. Isolating ageing Humphrey Bogart and unfashionable Katherine Hepburn aboard a leaky riverboat was a project no other producer would even contemplate, but Spiegel knew The African Queen would work. It won Bogart an Oscar in 1952, and Spiegel himself received Best Picture Oscars for On the Waterfront (1954), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962).
Because of all the lies and reinventions, Spiegel's early life is a little mysterious. He was born in 1901 in what is now Poland, although he liked to claim he was from Vienna. Unlike earlier movie moguls, such as Sam Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer and Adolph Zukor, Spiegel came from a learned family and was well-educated (he had a lifelong love of ballet, opera, great literature, painting and fine food), but he left home at 17 to start a new life in Palestine.
Ducking and diving, building up the kind of debts that were to plague him always, he abandoned his wife and daughter to try his luck in the US, predicting: "I'll either become a very rich and famous man or I'll die like a dog in the gutter."
After being imprisoned for nine months for entering the States illegally, in 1928 he fled to Berlin. Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni's evocation of this period is excellent: Berlin café life involved intellectuals such as William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Anatole Litvak, Joe Pasternak and Robert Siodmak nervously playing endless games of cards while trying to sniff the winds of political change. Just to complete the Casablanca-like ambience, actor Peter Lorre was often around, too.
When Berlin got too hot, the man Arthur Miller called "the Great Gatsby" moved to Vienna, then London, where he insinuated himself into the confidences of Alexander Korda and set himself up as a film producer, trailing unpaid bills wherever he went. In the late 1930s he returned to the US, this time legally, and began the fabulously successful career charted in this sometimes turgidly written account of a fascinating life.
Although Spiegel was an advocate of the positive power of strife - constant interference, disruption and dissension on movie sets - he also inspired great loyalty because he got things done. "He had a lot of guts," said Elia Kazan. "He had raw animal courage."
In spite of being unprepossessing (he looked like Doberman in the Bilko shows), Spiegel was a legendary ladies' man. When he was 80, his 23-year-old girlfriend said: "Sam could have charmed a nun into going to bed with him."
He died at 84 on holiday in the West Indies. On discovering the corpse the distraught hotel manager summoned fellow guest Peter Ustinov and suggested he administer the kiss of life. "Alive or dead," Ustinov allegedly replied. "I would not kiss Sam Spiegel."
Stephen Dixon is an artist and journalist
Sam Spiegel: The Biography of a Hollywood Legend. By Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni, Little Brown, 465pp, £22.50