Who Am I? April 2022

I was born in NYC at the turn of the last century to Lithuanian-Jewish parents and was raised on the upper West Side. Dad was a successful contractor and developer until he fell on hard times during the Great Depression. I wasn’t much of a student but found a way to both get into Tufts and graduate from Brown. Being a Jewish student at Brown negated any chance for me to pledge to a fraternity but I befriended a guy name Sidney there who later married my sister. Sidney went on to be a noted American humorist and screenwriter who penned short pieces for years at The New Yorker.

I had aspirations of becoming a writer and so I went off to Paris which was ground zero for writers in the 1920’s. I ran into financial difficulties upon my return and worked at construction for my dad. I was also employed as a night manager for a couple of family-run Manhattan hotels which afforded me some quiet time to write. It was there that I encountered many after dark denizens of Manhattan which inspired my writing. I also gave struggling writers lodging at reduced rates. I could count Quentin Reynolds, William Carlos Williams (from Rutherford, NJ!), Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald among my friends and colleagues.

Eventually I got the Hollywood bug and bounced back and forth from NYC and Hollywood. I worked as a screenwriter, scriptwriter and scenarist for Columbia Pictures and later for RKO. I am probably better known today as a lyric novelist.

I do have some N.J. bona fides. Acclaimed author John Sanford spotted me on the greens of a N.J. golf course in 1927. Also, a collection of critical essays about me by author Jay Martin was published by Prentice-Hall in Englewood Cliffs.

I chose to write about the seamier side of life based on the characters I encountered both in Manhattan and in Hollywood. In one of my best known novels I wrote about an advice columnist offering counsel to people living on the margins of society and beset by personal problems. That columnist became too pers- onally involved with his readers. My source material for this novel was a column published on the women’s page of the Brooklyn Daily Times. My other best known work was a novel written about the fake glamour, nihilism and self-delusion of the people who trekked to Hollywood to seek fame and fortune. I got little recognition in my lifetime but both of these novels were lauded and made into films after my untimely death.

I enjoyed hunting which I did in the Adirondacks and in Mexico. In fact, while I was duck and quail hunting in Mexicali I heard of the passing of my friend, Scottie Fitzgerald, and decided to head back to the U.S. to possibly attend his funeral. I was driving my Ford “Woodie” station wagon with my recent bride when I blew through a stop sign in El Centro, CA and crashed into another car. My wife and I were killed on the spot and only my pointer dog, Julie, was the sole survivor in my car The other car was driven by produce pickers returning from Yuma, AZ to El Centro.

That’s me in the photo below. I think you know me by now.

(1a)Who Am I? (1b)Who did I befriend at Brown U. that later became a humorist for The New Yorker and married my sis? (1c)What was my nickname? Ironically, it was given to me because I was lazy! (2a)What was the name of my wife? (2b)Why was she famous in her own right? (3a)What was the name of that column in the Brooklyn Daily Times that served as an inspiration to me? (3b)What was the name of that novel based on that Brooklyn Daily Times column? (4a)What was the name of my Hollywood novel? (4b)What was the name of the other driver in my fatal crash and what kind of car was he driving? (4c)What does a named character in my Hollywood novel have in common with a long-running animated American TV sitcom?