Hal B. Wallis, ‘Starmaker’ Movie Producer, Dies at 88

Hal B. Wallis, whose 200 motion pictures chronicled the lives of such diverse human creatures as “Little Caesar” and “Becket” and who was among the final few of the breed of film titans who could write, cast, photograph, edit and then promote their own creations, has died in his Rancho Mirage home.

The veteran producer was 88 and died Sunday of the complications of diabetes. His longtime administrative aide, Marge Giddens, who reported his death Tuesday, said one of Wallis’ last requests was that his death not be announced until after a simple funeral.

His desires were met, Giddens said, and he was buried quietly at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, Glendale, at a service Tuesday attended only by Giddens; his actress wife, Martha Hyer; his son, Brent, from a previous marriage; his accountant and a few other employees.

Donations to the Hal B. Wallis Research Facility that he endowed at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage are requested.

Wallis’ quiet funeral was a distant cry from the distinctive careers that he carved out as film executive and then studio and independent producer.

From those careers he evolved actors ranging from Humphrey Bogart to Elvis Presley and motion pictures that won 32 Oscars.

He titled his 1980 biography “Starmaker,” and if the title seems impudent, the facts are unarguable.

He introduced Loretta Young to movie theaters; found Edward G. Robinson in a New York play and brought him to Hollywood; made Busby Berkeley a terpsichorean shrine and educated the masses with factual, albeit glorified, treatments of Louis Pasteur, Emile Zola and Knute Rockne.

And when he left Warner Bros. in a dispute over who was to accept the Oscars for “Casablanca,” it was to begin a new life with new stars--Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and two young comedians named Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

For nearly 60 years he was for Katharine Hepburn “a delight to know, to work for.” James Cagney, however, dismissed him as “front office.”

But if he did not always make friends, he always made pictures.

They were some pictures.

Chronologically, they ranged from 1930 (“Sally,” “The Dawn Patrol,” “Little Caesar”) to 1975 (“Rooster Cogburn”). Artistically, they included such potboilers as “I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang” (1932) and “My Friend Irma Goes West” (1950).

If the failures have long been forgotten, the triumphs never will. Many of them featured the multifaceted talents of Bette Davis: “Jezebel” (1938), “Dark Victory” (1939) and “Now Voyager” (1942).

And, of course, Bogart.

Stage Role Re-Created

In 1935 Wallis signed the young stage actor to re-create his role of Duke Mantee in “Petrified Forest.” Wallis, in his biography, said another of his Warner stars, a former dancer named George Raft, was tiring of being cast as a hoodlum.

Enter Bogart.

When Raft waffled over assignments in “High Sierra” and “Maltese Falcon,” Wallis beckoned and Bogart blossomed.

When Wallis decided in 1941, at Jack Warner’s urging, to produce a picture similar to the Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr success “Algiers,” he went to an unsolicited manuscript that had landed on his desk five days after Pearl Harbor.

It was a would-be play called “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” and Wallis claimed later that it had been turned down by every studio in town. Its protagonist was a tough American expatriate who ran a nightclub in Casablanca.

But once again Raft did not want to be seen as another hoodlum, and once again Bogart grudgingly agreed.

Wallis talked David O. Selznick into the loan of Ingrid Bergman and a pianist named Dooley Wilson (who, Wallis said, could not really sing or play the piano) and cast Paul Henreid as the underground leader Victor Laszlo.

Paramount charged Wallis $3,500 a week for Wilson, but Selznick collected only $3,000 a week for Bergman.

For some time as the film was being shot around Henreid’s commitment to another picture, Wallis did not know if he would end the film with Bogart and Claude Rains (the Vichy police inspector) staying behind in Nazi-dominated Casablanca watching Bergman and Henreid fly to freedom, or whether he would craft an escape for the two worldly cynics.

Re-Shot Original

He finally re-shot the original version, placing Rains and Bogart on an outgoing freighter, seemingly having cheated the Germans.

But Wallis never had an opportunity to screen that more hopeful denouement.

In November, 1942, Allied forces landed in Casablanca, and by the time the film was put in general release in 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had met there.

The entire country turned out to see the picture of the same name.

Wallis could not have promoted it any better himself. And promote himself is what Harold Brent Wallis could do almost as well as he could make films.

Wallis, his sisters and mother had come to Los Angeles from Chicago in 1920.

He was born there as Harold Walinsky in what he would say only was “near the beginning of the century” (it was 1898, according to most sources.)

He quit school at 14 to help support his mother and two sisters after his Russian Jewish father deserted them. He made $5 a week in an office.

He also ushered--for free--at the Orpheum Theater to see Sophie Tucker and W. C. Fields and all those other “magician entertainers,” as he called them in his book.

His mother contracted tuberculosis, forcing the family West, where his sister, Minna, found work as a secretary for Jack Warner, the dominant film brother. Warner needed a manager for the Garrick Theater at 8th Street and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, and Minna suggested Hal.

It was there Wallis learned about booking films from an exchange on Olive Street. He also learned to write the glowing publicity hyping those films.

Met Sam Warner

Minna, who died last August, next introduced him to Sam Warner, the technical innovator who was becoming intrigued with the idea of talking pictures.

Embellishing on his limited experience, Wallis succeeded in landing a job as publicity director of Warners, replacing Darryl F. Zanuck, who moved up to chief writer.

The man who was soon to hire some of the most glamorous stars in the history of Hollywood was assigned his first client--a dog.

Rin-Tin-Tin was then Warner’s biggest attraction, and Wallis became the German shepherd’s personal publicity agent, taking it on national tours. The dog’s co-star proved far more interesting, however.

She was Louise Fazenda, one of the silent screen’s classic faces. Although her friends argued against the brash press agent’s ardent courtship, the persuasive Wallis soon made her his wife.

In 1925 Wallis quit tending to Rin-Tin-Tin and penned a piece of publicity that said, “Warner Brothers will enter a policy of talking pictures.”

Two years later “The Jazz Singer” opened using a Vitaphone process that had patches of dialogue and song. Though not an “all-talking” picture, it was enough to whet America’s ears, and its financial success enabled Warners to take over the First National studios in Burbank.

Its new production chief was Hal Wallis, age 30.

At First National, Wallis started weaving a professional insignia that he continued to refine for the next 47 years--a mixture of music and adventure.

There was “Sunny” with Marilyn Miller, “Kismet” with Loretta Young and “Dawn Patrol” with Richard Barthlemess and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. In the latter, Wallis found himself competing for vintage airplanes with another young producer, Howard Hughes, who was filming his “Hell’s Angels” that same year (1929).

Independent Producer

To direct his stars, he found Mervyn LeRoy and Michael Curtiz, and by the time the court had approved a consolidation of Warners and First National, Wallis had become the lot’s biggest independent producer, answering to Zanuck.

But then Zanuck and Harry Warner fell out over proposed pay cuts in the early days of the Depression, and Zanuck left to join Joseph M. Schenck at 20th Century Productions (soon to become Twentieth-Century Fox).

Wallis stayed and was put in charge of the 40 to 60 pictures that Warners made each year.

Wallis did two things to keep Warners atop the film industry. He dressed down his stars to make them more meaningful to a nation with 12 million unemployed. And he off-played the economic gloom with the magic--the Berkeley musicals, like “Wonder Bar” with Al Jolson and Dick Powell.

The concept and Wallis prospered.

He bought 80 acres in the San Fernando Valley, 60 in Encino and 20 at Ventura and Sepulveda boulevards.

He began to take risks.

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” directed by Max Reinhardt with a cast that included Cagney as Bottom and Mickey Rooney as Puck, was judged an artistic, if not commercial, success.

The same year Wallis brought Bogart to films, he also brought to Warners a young Tasmanian actor he had seen in a few British films.

Errol Flynn’s “Captain Blood” (1935) was followed by “Charge of the Light Brigade” and “Adventures of Robin Hood.”

And then the biographies.

“The Story of Louis Pasteur” (filmed despite Jack Warner’s quoted concern about “who wants to see a picture about a milkman?”); “The White Angel” (Kay Francis was Florence Nightingale); “The Life of Emile Zola” and “Juarez,” both with Paul Muni; “Knute Rockne, All-American” (the first of the genre of athlete-as-hero films with Pat O’Brien and Ronald Reagan), and Gary Cooper as “Sergeant York.”

Close to Wallis’ Heart

There was another, one particularly close to Wallis’ heart.

In 1938 Adolf Hitler said publicly that “a scientific discovery by a Jew is worthless.”

In 1940 Wallis brought to the screen--over the objections of censors--”Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet,” with Edward G. Robinson as the Jew who had discovered a cure for syphilis.

When the world again went to war, Wallis abandoned the biographies for military adventures: “Dive Bomber,” “Captains of the Clouds” and probably the greatest military musical of all time, Irving Berlin’s “This Is the Army.”

But there was one musical, one that “front-office” Wallis chose to gloss over most of his life, even if critics and fans did not. It was “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” with Cagney as George M. Cohan.

It became a favorite of audiences in all places for all times even though Wallis dismissed it with a few paragraphs in “Starmaker,” probably because of the ongoing feud with Cagney.

By now Wallis was becoming somewhat restless. And angry.

At the Academy Awards ceremony of 1943, “Casablanca” captured three Oscars, and Wallis received his second Irving Thalberg Award for high quality productions (the first came in 1938.)

But as Wallis stood to accept a production Oscar for the film, Jack Warner literally raced--and beat--him to the podium.

At war’s end Wallis--still incensed at that betrayal--and an old friend, Joseph Hazen, formed a production company and moved to Paramount, where they would produce films until 1970.

The stars necessary to make those films profitable were under contract elsewhere, however, and Wallis needed a new crop.

He found them in Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Wendell Corey, Martin and Lewis, Shirley MacLaine and, later, a gyrating singer he had seen briefly on television--Elvis Presley.

The Wallis-Hazen efforts at Paramount Studios reflected a post-war degree of sophistication absent in Wallis’ earlier pictures--”Sorry Wrong Number,” “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers”--and even a foreign star, Anna Magnani in “The Rose Tattoo.”

Moved to Westerns

Wallis transferred that sophistication to the time-honored Western.

In the classic shoot-out in “Gunfight at the OK Corral,” there is an 11-minute scene in which nothing is heard but the occasional cry of a bird made hysterical by the sound of bullets.

He bid against John Wayne for the rights to a film “True Grit,” and when Wayne lost, Wallis offered him the part of the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn. It brought Wayne his first Oscar.

Wallis was back to his old tricks--giving audiences something to cheer for and something to think about.

He made “Becket” with Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole and had cast Burton for “Anne of the Thousand Days” when a Paramount executive with an old grudge against the actor refused to honor the contract.

That forced Wallis’ third and final move--to Universal, where Burton and “Anne” (Genevieve Bujold was Anne Boleyn) proved one of 1970’s most successful films. Burton was nominated for an Oscar but lost to the competing Wallis actor, Wayne in “True Grit.”

Another British epic, “Mary Queen of Scots,” added to his reputation in Europe, and he was made a commander of the British Empire.

He put Presley in a series of highly forgettable films, starting with “Loving You” in 1957 and ending with “Easy Come, Easy Go” in 1967. Presley said they all embarrassed him. Wallis did not comment.

Louise Fazenda died in 1962, and in 1966 Wallis married Martha Hyer, an aspiring actress he met on an airplane.

In 1975 he completed his last major work, a sequel to “True Grit” called “Rooster Cogburn.” In it were two stars who had been around almost as long as their producer--Wayne and Katharine Hepburn.

That was the last hurrah.

Final Credit

The man who had matched stories and actors for nearly three decades was finished. The man who chanced on an actor with a pronounced dimple in his chin, put him in lead roles and saw him become the screen force that is Kirk Douglas had wrapped his final credit.

Like the rest of his breed--the immigrants and sons of immigrants who were never wrong and who made “film mogul” part of the language--Wallis took as much exception to criticism as he took delight in flattery.

Walter Seltzer, his longtime press agent and later a producer, liked to tell of handing his boss unfavorable film reviews, only to have Wallis shove them back across the desk, hollering, “I don’t want it. . . . I don’t want it. . . .,” as if the clippings did not exist.

He undoubtedly would have rejected this clipping, too. Given a choice.