Writers in Hollywood have never been given their due. You probably don’t know his name, but his words and the shot of gritty language and cynical attitudes he injected into movies and popular culture are quite familiar and are with us still. Snappy patter, wise guys and gals, con artists of every stripe, and fast paced sarcasm are the stuff of early ’30s films.

If you’ve ever enjoyed the bittersweet romance of One Way Passage, the hard and funny look at political shenanigans in The Dark Horse, the tough guy patois of the cons and sharp cookies in 20,000 in Sing Sing or Hard to Handle, the deep-dyed cynicism of Heroes For Sale or The Mind Reader, you’ve encountered vintage Mizner on the screen. Even Damon Runyon and Ben Hecht, who may have profited the most as highly successful and influential writers selling their wares in the studio era, well known for striking the toughest pose of them all in such great films as The Front Page or His Girl Friday, may be said to have cut their teeth on the well-placed mots juste they learned to hone under the tutelage of Wilson Mizner as well as on the streets of American cities.

Slowly dying in 1933, just as Roosevelt was inaugurated, the banks closed for a needed “holiday”, and California endured a powerful earthquake, Wilson commented that it was really “too much melodrama at once” and this confluence of events really wasn’t dramatically credible, which gives you some idea of the detachment he could strive for, even when his own life was what hung in the balance. His own life teemed with the elements of melodrama, though perhaps his latent artistic streak was wont to acknowledge it at times. He certainly found ways to streamline his often unsavory moments in his life into entertainingly stylish fictions on stage and off.

He didn’t live long enough to fully see how Cagney, Robinson and even Bogart‘s tough and forcefully articulate manner helped to change film and drama. Without Mizner‘s helping to jimmy open the door of the American theater and later American talking pictures with his popular dramas, and allowing a breath of real air into them a generation before, who knows if and when the modern American treasures would have broken through the polite veneer of society that Wilson Mizner longed to escape. Nor would he have wanted anyone to know that he cared.

To highlight this piece with some surprisingly familiar, often misquoted aphorisms that the silver-tongued Wilson Mizner dropped during his waltz through life, I’ve placed several of his choicest sayings throughout this blog. Here’s one:
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“Don’t talk about yourself; it will be done when you leave.” ~Wilson Mizner
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Born, “to [his] embarrassment…in bed with a lady” in 1876 in Benicia, California, Wilson Mizner was the beloved if scandalous scion of a large, very well connected Northern California family (among whose ancestors was the British painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds, who might have had fun trying to capture his great nephew’s “grand style” on canvas) . He packed enough into one lifetime for several movies, and enjoyed careers as, among other things, an entrepreneur during the Alaskan Gold Rush, an antiques dealer on Fifth Avenue, a Broadway playwright in the first years of the 20th century, and took part, with his talented architect brother Addison Mizner, in the development of Florida. In his last years, Wilson became one of the founders of The Brown Derby restaurant and a rather successful screenwriter at Warner Brothers. That’s his official résumé.

Unofficially, he was also a con man on a grand scale, a thief, (of filthy lucre as well as creative credit and several foolish hearts), a major toss-pot and a dreamy opium eater. Wilson Mizner had so many gifts, except patience, that he soon concluded that “Life’s a tough proposition, and the first hundred years are the hardest.”

To this day Wilson Mizner is compelling enough a figure to fascinate a talent such as Stephen Sondheim, who pondered the dichotomy of Addison & Wilson Mizner for fifty years before attempting to fashion their unruly lives into a musical production co-written with James Weidman. Composer Sondheim said that he saw the boys’ adventures as representing “two divergent aspects of American energy: the builder and the squanderer, the visionary and the promoter, the conformist and the maverick, the idealistic planner and the restless cynic, the one who uses things and the one who uses them up…” In other words, in a Highlights Magazine world view that baby boomers might understand well, Wilson would definitely be the perennial “Goofus” to Addison‘s only slightly more circumspect “Gallant”.
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“God help those who do not help themselves.”
~W.M.
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The germ of Sondheim‘s idea stemmed from a lively chronicle published by a former reporter and writer for The New Yorker Magazine, Alva Johnston as The Legendary Mizners in 1953. The boys proved to be just as slippery in mythic form in a musical as they had proved in life, though eventually Sondheim and Weidman had a succès d’estime in the musical Bounce, which had a 2003 run for a month at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

They weren’t the first to find themselves flummoxed and bewitched by a Mizner. Pioneer composer Irving Berlin, a friend of Wilson Mizner, tried to construct a musical around the man, but gave up after several reported tries. The splendid fantasy writer, Jack Finney, included a sequence re-imagining the opening night of one of Mizner‘s Broadway plays in his 1995 book, From Time To Time (a sequel to his time travel classic, Time and Again), and Sondheim is still occasionally rumored to be trying to re-work the material from Bounce once again. Once Mizner gets a hold on your imagination, it might prove difficult to shake him. It has proved impossible for pop culture in the 75 years since he left us.

Left little cash but an unsullied name by his diplomat father, Wilson arrived in Alaska in the 1890s, along with three of his brothers. Wilson and Addison Mizner remained linked throughout their picaresque lives and checkered careers, though another brother would become a Episcopal priest, and still another seemed to spend most of his time covering up for the larcenous pair back home.

They soon started to bilk miners, “accidentally” spilling a bit of the gold dust onto the carpet each time they helpfully weighed the substance for the prospectors. The rug, looking quite dusty after a week or so, was then burned to unlock the precious mineral in its threads, supplementing the enterprising Wilson‘s income by the thousands. Never one to let his energies go to waste without several irons in a fire, he also worked as a boxing manager, trainer and promoter, badger game operator, (using his girlfriend, “Nellie the Pig” Lamore in the appropriate situation), and even robbing a store calling out to the clerk, “Your money or your chocolates!” when Nell had a craving. When not honing his criminal tendencies under the Northern Lights, he also made lifetime friends of the already legendary Wyatt Earp and Sid Grauman, (as in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre), reportedly even lending them money when they needed it. Wilson may not have been honest, but he was never stingy.
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“Always be nice to people on the way up; because you’ll meet the same people on the way down.” ~W.M.

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Abandoning Skagway at an appropriate moment–when their “pal” Soapy Smith, the dean of all American con men, met his inevitable end shortly after a dispute over the legitimacy of a three-card monte game–Wilson and Addison landed on their feet in New York City, setting up an art emporium specializing in separating the surviving nouveau riche who’d acquired their riches during the Gilded Age from their money. Even if many of the “antiques” and “originals” they sold them were clearly of dubious origin, the Mizner brothers could have charmed the birds from the trees. No Antiques Roadshow existed back then to help verify if someone might have been rooked on nationwide tv.

The boys really started to pursue this tack in earnest after Addison introduced the 29 year old Wilson to Mary Adelaide Yerkes, the still quite spry 47 year old millionaire widow of the robber baron, Charles Tyson Yerkes. As I was amused to discover in The New York Times archives from the early years of the twentieth century, the newspaper of record wasn’t so gray or so concerned with being very good back then. Their reporters feverishly documented the adamant denial of the scandalous Mizner-Yerkes nuptials, followed by the admission that they were “just friends,” and the announcements of both their odd union and it’s ultimate dissolution in minute detail worthy of Us Magazine and TMZ of today, all way back in 1905-1906. In this period, nary a day seemed to pass without Wilson answering a question for the newshounds with his sparkling witticisms, often giving them the feeling that they were getting an inside scoop. Mizner, who instinctively understood the possibilities of publicity, soon became just as well known for his remarks as for his adventures. Around this time, taking on the mantle of a boxer’s manager as well as heavy bettor on sporting events among his other responsibilities, he was said to have remarked when his fighter, Stanley Ketchel, a former opponent of Jack Johnson, was murdered over a girl, to “Tell ‘em to start counting ten over him, and he’ll get up.” Later in his life, in 1926, hearing that a girlfriend, actress Pauline Armitage, had thrown herself from the 14th floor of a New York hotel, he picked up his coat and reportedly said in a calm voice “Fourteen? Sounds like a good number to bet on.” A bit cold, even savage and grisly, that, but good copy for the press boys–if it’s true. Privately, he was known to weep copious tears at the mention of his mother’s name, though she had died decades before.
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“It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found”.~W.M.
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While they were married, Wilson, disappointed to learn that debts and death duties that had eaten up much of Yerkes‘ wealth, and his blushing bride appeared to be down to her last million or two, the romantic swain had most of her classic art collection carefully copied. He then proceeded to sell the copies as the real thing, or was it the other way around? Several sources are fuzzy on this phase of his career.
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“I’ve had ample contact with lawyers, and I’m convinced that the only fortune they ever leave is their own.” ~W.M.
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Not so fuzzy however, is Wilson Mizner‘s other activity of that period, managing the somewhat disreputable Hotel Rand in New York. So conscientious was he in this capacity that he posted signs in the lobby stating that “Guests must carry out their own dead”. In the elevators, the manager, who was known to indulge in a bit of recreational drug use from time to time, carefully notified residents: “No opium smoking in the elevators.” I suppose Mizner had this activity in mind the time that he commented that “Most hard-boiled people are half-baked.”

Sometime during this period, in pursuit of these various pastimes, Wilson Mizner began to be known as someone with serious gambling and underworld connections. After a grim, physical encounter with someone from this milieu who didn’t appreciate his betting strategies, he was hospitalized and went from being a recreational opium user to a full blown morphine addict, a habit that would take his 240 pound frame down to a shadowy outline of his former healthy self. As seen in the picture that begins this article, though once considered quite a handsome fellow, after his “illness”, his charitable friends might persist in describing their pal as resembling “a Fred Astaire type”. A more jaundiced eye might buy the comparison only if one were talking about the great dancer plus a serious case of pernicious anemia—and only then, if you saw Mizner in the right flattering light. Wilson himself would describe with a laugh himself as “a tubercular greyhound”. He continued to pursue his pleasures as before, but now, with an even more pressing need for cash, he turned to playwriting as his next path.

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A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.~W.M.

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Knocking off three hit Broadway plays in rapid succession, The Only Law (1909), The Deep Purple (1911) and The Greyhound (1912), written with co-writers who received little credit from publicity hound Wilson, were filled with the then daring language of the streets, reflecting the author’s friendship with such real life criminals as Arnold Rothstein, (who was instrumental in the 1919 Black Sox scandal). Calling prison “stir” and young women “broads” from the stage, they helped their middle and upper class audiences feel daring, and were sometimes hailed as realistic and highly “playable,” even in repertoire. Still, after the initial hubbub died down, Wilson the dilettante came to the surface again.

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Gambling: The sure way of getting nothing for something.~W.M.

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Inevitably returning to his old haunts among gamblers and lowlifes while maintaining a smooth surface in society, Wilson’s problems with various addictions took all his money and his now perilous health. That seemed to end for a time when he was arrested for running a gambling house on Long Island in 1919; after which, Wilson took his brother Addison‘s advice and decamped for the promised land his brother had already found: Florida in the 1920s.

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A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while, he knows something.~W.M.

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Addison Mizner , (the quieter brother), whose extravagant architectural style, called Spanish Revival, which owed much to the rococo period and the fantastic illustrations of contemporary illustrator Maxfield Parrish, became landmarks as his apparently long hidden design gifts bloomed in the tropical heat of Florida. For the first time there, especially in the wealthy area around Palm Beach, Boca Raton and Sea Island, Georgia, where he designed the beautiful The Cloisters hotel, a legitimate pursuit earned a Mizner lad a fairly honest buck. Celebrated in a new book by by Caroline Seebohm called Boca Rococo: How Addison Mizner Invented Florida’s Gold Coast, the gifted and imaginative architect is not believed to have had any formal design training. Seebohm‘s interest in the character began after discovering a garbage bag in a basement of a former associate full of his drawings and even a previously unknown diary. To see the kind of over the top buildings that the elder Mizner brother constructed of stylish elements such as barrel roofs, stucco and chutzpah, please click here. While Addison rubbed elbows with the very rich in Florida and tried to resist spoiling a good thing by his inherent larcenous impulses, Wilson, joined by largely unwitting theatrical acquaintances and bon vivants such as Ben Hecht, Marie Dressler and Richard Barthelmess, all engaged in promoting the purchase of the hottest real estate in the country. Too bad some of it, especially those pieces of the American Dream marketed so cleverly by Wilson, turned out to be the proverbial “steal” that was actually swamp land. Though healthier than he’d been in some time, Wilson as well as Addison were eventually part of the real estate market crash once the economic pendulum began to swing the inexorable “other way.” This dramatic turn was precipitated in part because Addison and Wilson couldn’t resist attempting to swindle General T. Coleman DuPont, one of the nation’s wealthiest and most influential men in 1926, triggering his extreme enmity and the not so coincidental collapse of the boom some months later.

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All anger is not sinful, because some degree of it, and on some occasions, is inevitable. But it becomes sinful and contradicts the rule of Scripture when it is conceived upon slight and inadequate provocation, and when it continues long.~W.M.

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The final destination for Wilson was, not surprisingly for such as fabulous con man, Hollywood. A few silent movies based on some of Wilson Mizner‘s works had been made, including a 1920 feature of The Deep Purple, directed by a young Raoul Walsh, and some scenarios crafted by Wilson Mizner that were supposed to chronicle the official stories of the Secret Service. Most reviewers of these films, including Photoplay magazine, felt that “the crook stuff is lightened with” more comedy than realistic drama, though they noted that in titles like “The Silkless Banknote”, “Outlaws of the Deep” and “The Five Dollar Plate” there “were many scenes of unpretentious pathos” rather like O. Henry stories.

Encouraged by his Hollywood friends Jack Warner and Gloria Swanson, with his tail between his legs, around 1928, just when words became more important to the movies, and clever writers were needed, Wilson appears to have struck out for Hollywood and a kind of celluloid immortality. Warner and Swanson also helped to set the broke Wilson up as one of the partners in the new restaurant on Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles, across from the Ambassador Hotel. This was The Brown Derby, destined to become the most readily recognizable symbol of Hollywood to most Americans in the years to come. Though there would be several Brown Derby restaurants to come, in Wilson’s time, this was the only one shaped like a hat. Seen briefly in the early George Cukor movie, What Price Hollywood (1932) and the charming Leslie Howard-Humphrey Bogart spoof of Hollywood, Stand-In (1937), it soon became a novel landmark. Mizner, once he became ensconced there, met regularly with pals such as the writers Gene Fowler and Anita Loos. Even though he’d installed glass in the windows of the restaurant that allowed him to see who was coming, (without the person on the outside seeing in), Wilson was often the target of those who were down on their luck. Knowing how it felt, he often slipped them cash before they could ask, though he also ducked some of the more persistent. While he dwelled in LA, Wilson Mizner also found time to take on the not terribly onerous task of writer under contract to Warner Brothers, even though it meant putting up with Jack Warner in his less generous moments.

According to The Warner Brothers by Michael Freedland:

“One of Jack’s main targets was Wilson Mizner, a brilliant raconteur whom Warner was convinced was single-handedly robbing the studio tills of every penny taken at the box office. Mizner never seemed to produce anything, Jack announced one day – and it was partly true, except that he came out with the best gags at the story conferences. “I don’t pay anyone five hundred dollars a week for ad-libbing,” he declared. “Do some work.” Mizner’s office was directly opposite Jack’s. The day after the summary chastisement he could be seen sitting in the bright sunlight outside the office sharpening at least a hundred pencils. That, after all, was work.”

Wilson, who once said that “Hollywood is a sewer with service from the Ritz Carlton” tried to take the money and run, but even he was getting a bit tired after all his crowded years of frenetic living.

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I’ve spent several years in Hollywood, and I still think the movie heroes are in the audience.~W.M.

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Back on the west coast at last, and realizing that his body was at last winding down, Wilson’s health began to deteriorate, and he was especially sad to learn of the death of his closest brother and bankrupt partner in stylish crime, Addison, in 1931. Still, Wilson went on for a time, peppering several of the memorable films mentioned earlier in this blog with his deft, realistic touches and funny way with a line and a telling gesture. This gift for adding something real and bittersweet to the louche characters in the script of One Way Passage(1932), which Wilson is credited with co-writing with Robert Lord, is especially evident. Though Lord described having to wake up a constantly dozing Mizner throughout the writing process to ask for solutions for several scenes, he credited Wilson with helping to craft a memorable piece of cinema.

At one point in the movie, when a proper waiter brings the very formal Countess Berilhaus (Aline MacMahon) a silver tray laden with glasses, a bowl of ice, tongs, spoons and a bottle of the best gin, he leaves after being dismissed. The Countess approaches the tray, daintily removes the cap from the gin, and, takes a swig directly from the bottle. Without a word, we have learned that the lady, ahem, is no lady. One Way Passage can be seen on TCM on Sept. 4th at 10:30pm EDT and Sept. 22nd at 11: 15pm EDT as part of the Kay Francis Star of the Month celebration. Here’s a sample of the spell of this film in the trailer, which features a nice moment with “The Countess”:

In 1933′s Hard to Handle, the star James Cagney embodies the kind of chiseling public relations man that Mizner understood very well, especially since he had often engaged in such unabashed flummery, milking trends to a fare thee well. Cagney, who obviously enjoyed Mizner, had a great time playing the fast-talking character of Lefty Merrill opposite the wonderful character actress Ruth Donnelly and ingenue Mary Brian as a mother-daughter pair determined to avoid being conned. Delighted to be working with the screenwriter despite the actor’s constant squabbles with the Warners behind the scenes, Cagney said fondly: “Some people are called characters and don’t really merit the designation. Wilson Mizner was a genuine character, and great raconteur. We would go in for a story conference, but there’d be no conference. Everyone would just sit and listen to Wilson – and all of it was delightful.”

The film, which occasionally airs on TCM, is lightning fast-paced fun, and is just one example of Warner’s topical style, enriched by Mizner‘s touch:

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On his time in Hollywood: “It’s a trip through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat.”~W.M.

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Cheering Depression era audiences when Hard to Handle opened in February of 1933, Wilson Mizner was dead less than 2 months later. A few years later, his friend, Anita Loos, who was always a little in love with him, (he returned the compliment and did her a major favor by keeping their relationship platonic), undertook the creation of Blackie Norton, a lovable rogue on the Barbary Coast, to be played by Clark Gable in San Francisco (1936). Her model for the character? Wilson Mizner.

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Popularity is exhausting. The life of the party almost always winds up in a corner with an overcoat over him.~W.M.

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He was only 57 when he finally slept for good. We won’t see his kind again, needless to say. The noted writer of our time, William Goldman, who can also tell some good Hollywood stories, once said something that seems to apply to the fabulous life of Wilson Mizner as well as the popular entertainment world he helped to shape: “Whatever you call it, the thing that characterizes popular theater is this: it wants to tell us either a truth that we already know or a falsehood we want to believe in.”

Sources:
Freedland, Michael, The Warner Brothers, St. Martin’s Press, 1983.
Johnston, Alvah, The Legendary Mizners, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986.
Seebohm, Caroline, Boca Rococo: How Addison Mizner Invented Florida’s Gold Coast, Clarkson-Potter, 2008.