Death came early and, ironically, during the most festive season of the year in Hollywood sixty years ago this month. Even more unlikely, when producer Mark Hellinger died of a heart attack at only 44 years of age on December 21st, 1947, his relatively young passing inspired more than a pang of concern for one’s own health among the more self-absorbed citizens of Los Angeles. For, unlike the average producer, Hellinger was sincerely mourned, privately and publicly.

Pity the poor average Hollywood producer. Often ruthless, sometimes clueless and occasionally just a son-in-law needing a job. No one is supposed to love a Hollywood producer from the studio era. Most of the time they are caricatured as a one-dimensional figure that is justifiably mocked for some alleged crassness, lecherousness or penny-pinching. Creativity, generosity and imagination as part of package don’t seem to fit the cliché. The old, possibly apocryphal joke, goes that when Harry Cohn, one of the last of the breed from the studio era as the ultimate boogie-man-as-producer who was head of Columbia studios died in 1958, an observer, (supposedly Red Skelton), commented that “it only proves what they always say — give the people what they want, and they’ll come out for it.”

Interestingly, Cohn, in attendance at the Beverly Hills service at All Saints, pulled aside a friend in the church during the Christian service and whispered, “Why isn’t it Jewish?” The irreverent agnostic Mark Hellinger, who was the son of prosperous Orthodox Jewish parents, might have found this moment amusing, since he claimed that he couldn’t subscribe to any formal religion. Ernest Hemingway, who liked Hellinger and had been “somewhat pleased” with the early scenes of the Hellinger produced The Killers (1946), claimed that the hard-living Mark had “death sitting on his shoulder.” Hellinger, who’d suffered at least one serious heart attack prior to his demise, would shrug off many of the concerns about his drinking, working and frantic pace, with a philosophical jest about wanting to see if 16th century Francois Rabelais’ iconoclastic hope that if the end came, he’d soon be “off in search of a great perhaps.” While Hellinger couldn’t in good conscience commit himself to the creed of anyone, not even the faith of his fathers, he could never be accused of forgetting his roots, for wherever he went, whether Hollywood or the South Pacific, he was inimitably a New Yorker.

Public memorials for Mark Hellinger took place on both coasts, at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills in the west and at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home in New York City. Most of his friends and some of his enemies attended. They were a diverse crowd, most of whose names would bring no flicker of recognition in 21st century readers, but a few faces, such as Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, restaurateur Mike Romanoff, baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, mogul Harry Cohn, and actress Ann Sheridan might still interest some. Those who looked at the waxy figure to be seen beneath the glass of the coffin looked away quickly at the Episcopal church, murmuring a sincerely felt “Better to remember him as he was”, as Bogart did when he drew his young wife away from the sight of their friend.

A man of many parts, native New Yorker Hellinger “as he was” included a nationally syndicated columnist for the Hearst tabloid, The New York Mirror, a lively rag created to directly compete with the grittier New York Daily News, that even the management claimed “was 10% news and 90% entertainment.”

As a contributor to this paper, he wrote two columns dealing with the great, the good, the devilish, and the forgotten inhabitants of the city, specializing in sketching vivid accounts of their adventures—some of which were true and others that were composites of a reality that centered on Times Square and Broadway. Beginning in the roaring twenties, “About Town”, which appeared three times a week and a Sunday column called “All in a Day”, made Hellinger‘s reputation and his considerable fortune as it documented the demi-monde world of Texas Guinan, Dutch Schultz and Mayor Jimmy Walker favored by Walter Winchell, Damon Runyon and other newspapermen of the period.

While Hellinger would count as a friend many famous and notorious New Yorkers from this bright, guilty world, his slick writing style was never quite as fluid as his some of his contemporaries, but it would be distinguished by a gruff sympathy for the anonymous men and women who kept the city alive with their hard work and dogged determination to hang onto life in the Big Apple. Janitors, cops, shoplifters, chorus girls and shopkeepers–all mos likely his readers–were as likely to pop up in his column documenting the Great White Way as the dazzling successes. In his own life, Hellinger soon became known as a soft touch. He would carry ten dollar bills folded into the size of a postage stamp with him, just to have something to give to all those who cried out from cabs and doorways, “Hiya, Mark!” when they spotted him on his rounds. Some would repay him when he loaned them money to get by during a rough patch, but most would repay him by giving his later films a juicy bite of reality, by providing him with a wealth of human behavior to draw upon for inspiration and understanding.

Winchell, who could name few real friends among his thousands of acquaintances, would recall the time during Prohibition when both he and Mark were amassing stories and connections that were their real treasure. Sitting together during their long nights in one of numerous speakeasies in New York together, they confided in one another, despite their professional competition. If an occasionally exhausted Winchell ever wondered aloud why they bothered to write about the ephemera of the city’s life, Hellinger, with his patent leather slick black hair, and merry blue eyes sparkling beneath a snap brim hat, would simply remind his friend of their mutual pursuit with the words, “Adventure, Walter. Adventure.”

On top of this he had a radio show for a time called Penthouse Party, and he wrote two books, all the while knocking out 13 screenplays, beginning with 1932′s MGM production of a play he’d written about urban corruption. Night Court(1932), starring Walter Huston as a deliciously corrupt judge, (seen in the photo at the right), outlined the real callousness and injustices of the big city toward the powerless with some passion, a little pathos and some inherent social commentary that never got in the way of good tale. Eventually went on to produce 24 movies, the last of which, Naked City (1948) is so full of his own oddly powerful mixture of cynicism and sentimentality that it may still influence us today.

Having attended an early preview of the film despite his precarious health, Hellinger had what he’d described as a bad cold that he just couldn’t shake. Despite this, just hours before his death, Hellinger was described by his wife, Gladys Glad (a former Ziegfeld showgirl once described as “America’s most famous beauty”), as on the phone at home, screaming into the phone to a minion at Universal Studios, that all the aspects of this police procedural, directed by the talented young Jules Dassin, needed to be tweaked according to the production team’s wishes, despite the fact that the filmmaker was breaking his ties to the studio to form, with his friend, Humphrey Bogart, a new, wholly independent production company. The hope would be that all the stories that Hellinger still had to tell might finally be told without studio interference. The reality was another, more complicated story.

Next time, this column will deal with some of the hallmarks of Mark Hellinger‘s movies and a further look at his fast-paced hunt for adventure in his brief life.

N.B.: Please click here to go directly to Mark Hellinger: The Adventure of One in Eight Million Part II