AMERICA AT LARGE: The only man to have both won an Oscar and been elected to the International Boxing Hall of Fame led a long and remarkable life
IN THE week since his father’s death at 95, Benn Schulberg informed me a couple of days ago, well over 500 tributes have appeared in various publications around the world. Most of them included a recitation of the essential accomplishments of a life so long and richly lived – Budd Schulberg was not only the only man to have both won an Oscar and been elected to the International Boxing Hall of Fame, but at the age of 27 had published What Makes Sammy Run? his Hollywood exposé that not only remains in print 68 years later, but retains a place on many lists of the most significant American novels ever written.
He was intimately acquainted with almost every significant boxer of the past 80 years, from Benny Leonard to Sugar Ray Leonard. Muhammad Ali was a close friend, and, even in his final years, Schulberg cultivated friendships with younger fighters he admired.
He had written what might be the definitive story of Oscar De La Hoya, and the last time we were in Vegas together Budd had spoken by phone with Diego Corrales, the 29-year-old former lightweight champion. The two arranged to meet the following day. Corrales was killed in a motorcycle accident that night.
And at the time of his death Budd was involved in a project with the filmmaker Spike Lee to produce a drama rooted in the politically-charged atmosphere surrounding the 1938 rematch between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling.
Most of the reflections composed in the past week have included a summary of another episode central to Schulberg’s life: his decision, more than half a century ago, to testify before the McCarthy-era House Un-American Activities Committee.
A debate over the merits of the issue would seem misplaced here, but few of those who have used the occasion of his death to revive the hot-button issue bothered themselves with exploring Schulberg’s own view.
Yes, he “named names” though not any names the committee hadn’t already received from other “friendly” witnesses. But what always struck me was that the same leftist idealism that had led him to join the American Communist Party in his twenties remained essentially unchanged for the rest of his life.
In Budd’s view, he hadn’t abandoned the party; the party had abandoned him. And make of it what you will, the three reasons he cited for turning on his former friends seem like pretty good ones to me:
(1) The Hitler-Stalin pact had placed the CPUSA in the seemingly untenable position of endorsing the Nazis, (2) The purges and pogroms undertaken by Stalin had resulted in the imprisonment and extermination of several Russian writers he had met in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and (3) the apparatchiks had tried to order him to rewrite What Makes Sammy Run? to conform to the party line.
But half a century later Schulberg, who served for decades on the board of the Writers Guild of America, was, at the age of 91, out walking a picket line and joining in on a chorus of Joe Hill during a WGA strike.
And he did so without a trace of embarrassment despite the presence of a prop The New Yorker’s account of that day’s activities described as “a familiar labour mascot, a fifteen-foot-tall inflatable rat, on loan from the Musicians Union Local 802”. Although most turncoat communists lined up behind one-time HUAC member Richard Nixon in 1968, Budd Schulberg not only actively campaigned for Robert F Kennedy, but on the night of the California primary was in the pantry of the Ambassador hotel.
Seconds after the shots rang out, Budd had his arms wrapped around Sirhan Sirhan. What must have been the most terrifying five seconds of his life would have been more frightening still had Schulberg realised that pistol Sirhan clutched in his hand (it was so tiny that Budd assumed it to have been a toy gun) was the weapon that had just killed Bobby Kennedy.
A week of rioting in Los Angeles ghetto of Watts in the summer of 1965 left 34 dead, thousands homeless, and resulted in a chorus of liberal guilt and the establishment of committees to investigate the root causes. Schulberg’s approach was more hands-on.
He founded the Watts Writers Workshop to encourage aspiring minority writers, and served as its director for the next decade. (He had taken Robert Kennedy to visit the workshop a few days before the ’68 primary.) Throughout his life Budd was uncommonly generous to young writers. (Including, once, this one, though there eventually came a time in his life when all the writers he knew were younger.)
Fittingly, then, a memorial scholarship in his name is being contemplated for the Film School at New York University, where an old Schulberg friend, Pete Hamill, is the Distinguished Writer in Residence, and Martin Scorsese holds a similar position with the Film Department.
Budd also has to be the only man to have had created the same dialogue for two Academy Award-winning films: the ‘taxi scene’ from his Oscar-winning On the Waterfront screenplay was reprised (by Robert DeNiro as Jake LaMotta) in Scorsese’s Raging Bull.
Not that his advice to young writers was always accepted. Over dinner a couple of years ago he recounted his experience with the late Tom Heggen. Sixty years later he was still wondering if he could somehow have made a difference.
Heggen was an aspiring young writer who’d never published anything of note prior to his service as a Naval officer in the Pacific during the Second World War, but his uncle, Wallace Stegner, was so impressed by his humorous sketches of life aboard his cargo ship that he passed them along to a publisher, and Heggen was mustered out just in time to see his novel, Mister Roberts, become the best-selling book in the United States.
Heggen then collaborated with Joshua Logan on a dramatic adaptation that would run on Broadway for more than three years and win a Tony for its star, Henry Fonda.
Schulberg had never met Heggen, but they had a mutual acquaintance. Budd had co-written a screenplay with Dorothy Parker and her then husband Alan Campbell; now divorced, Campbell was sharing bachelor digs with Heggen.
“Tom phoned up out of the blue and asked to meet with me,” recalled Schulberg.
“When we did, he spilled out his problem. Between the book and the play he was the toast of New York, invited to the best parties. He owned three tuxedos and needed a clean one almost every night.
“The most important people in town admired him, and of course beautiful women just threw themselves at him.
“The problem came, he told me, when he sat down to work on his next book. He’d put a fresh page in his typewriter to begin the morning, and when he knocked off to go to the next party that night, the blank page would still be there, without him having written a word. He asked if I had any suggestions.”
Schulberg thought it over and replied, “I think you should go on a long cruise – not on a liner full of people but on a tramp steamer with room for just a few passengers, with a cabin all your own.
“Find one that’s going to places you’ve always wanted to visit, but more importantly, to places where people have never even heard of Tom Heggen.”
Budd’s hope was that the stimulation of travel and the enforced periods of solitude might overcome Heggen’s writer’s bloc. It certainly seemed wonderful advice to me, and apparently it did to Heggen, who told Schulberg he’d start making arrangements right away.
“But several weeks later I wandered into ‘21’ one night,” said Schulberg.
“And there was Tom Heggen, with a blonde on each arm and several bottles of champagne on the table. He hadn’t been able to tear himself away.
“It wasn’t long after that that Tom was found dead in his bathtub,” Budd recalled to me that night. “They ruled it an accidental drowning, but of course I knew better. Even today I wonder whether I somehow let him down.”
