Producer, Director, Actor John Houseman Dies at 86

John Houseman, the dramatic arts’ suave, indefatigable man-for-all-seasons, died Monday morning at his home in Malibu at the age of 86.

The actor, producer and venerated teacher of things theatrical, who was awarded an Oscar for his portrayal of Prof. Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. in the film “The Paper Chase,” had been suffering from cancer for several months.

A memorial service is pending, said his longtime friend, Judi Davidson.

As versatile as he was tireless, the unflappable Houseman ranged across almost all levels of the entertainment world for more than half a century and he left his own unique imprint wherever he ventured. No matter whether he was in the public eye or far removed from it, as was often the case, Houseman’s creativity was boundless and his flair matchless.

He was a producer, a director, a writer and, finally--when he turned 70, at an age when most men’s juices have run dry--an actor. And not just an actor. But an actor acclaimed both by captivated fans and by peers who saluted his skill as a performer by awarding him the Academy Award in 1973.

He won his Oscar as the gruff, forbidding but eternally honest professor in a movie that inspired a subsequent television series with Houseman as the commanding centerpiece.

As an actor, he had a knack of capturing the spirit of the moment for film and television watchers with a subtle gesture, a blink of his pale blue eyes or a twitch of his aristocratic eyebrows. When he spoke, his deep, resonant voice transfixed audiences.

That voice and his mobile features also transformed him in recent years into one of television’s most sought-after and generously paid pitchmen, a circumstance that, friends said, he found not only ironic but depressingly amusing. He once alluded to this in an interview by saying:

“We are in an unbelievable slump of mediocrity, timidity and greed in business, in politics, in television, in film, in publishing--it’s the same everywhere. The preoccupation with profits is base, an appalling threat to our culture. Show business and the auto business are going down the same rat hole. . . . We are creating a populace that swarms mindlessly like bees.”

Despite that, he probably became best fixed in the public consciousness for a single utterance: “They make money the old-fashioned way. They earn it.” The word “earn” came out as an inimitable roar: “EAAARNN,” and it was contained in the last phrase of a television commercial he did for the investment counseling firm of Smith-Barney, Harris Upham & Co.

Houseman was born Jacques Haussmann in Bucharest, Romania, two years after the turn of the century. His father was a Jewish-Alsatian grain speculator and his mother an English national of Welsh-Irish descent. The parents met in Paris, became lovers and moved to the Romanian capital because of the father’s business interests. They did not marry until after their only child’s fifth birthday, and the boy was reared speaking the French of his father, Georges, the English of his mother, May, the German of a governess and the Romanian of his fellow countrymen.

His childhood was a nomadic but culturally expansive one. Because of the whimsical nature of his father’s livelihood, he would recall, the family alternated from “riches to ruin and back again.” In one of the three autobiographies he completed in the 1970s and 1980s, he wrote that his parents lived one day in fancy hotel suites and the next in furnished rooms in various cities on the Continent, depending on the mercurial nature of Georges Haussmann’s bank account.

His formal education began at age 7 when his parents, by then in robust financial health, sent him to England to attend public schools. While he was at Clifton College, he developed the two great passions that would become the emblem of his success in later years, a love of writing and for the theater.

Upon graduation in 1918, he won a scholarship in modern languages to Trinity College, Cambridge University, but because of what he has described as “financial reverses and family problems,” he turned it down. Instead, at his mother’s insistence (his father had died when he was 15), he accepted an offer from a merchant friend of the family to travel to Argentina and learn the grain business. He stayed there 18 months before returning to England and signing on as an apprentice in an international wheat brokerage firm. Meanwhile, he wrote a series of short stories about his experiences in Argentina that were published in the New Statesman.

In 1924, North America beckoned and he heeded the call, accepting a job with a New York City grain firm before forming his own exporting company. He wheeled and dealed throughout the big grain markets, earned a then-princely income of $25,000 and met a Broadway actress, Zita Johann, who three years later became his wife.

Then came the crash of 1929, and Houseman’s career as a tycoon went bust and his first marriage soon would follow it down the tubes. For a time, he said, he was “a frightened and ruined young man.”

But years later, he would say of that time, “To my enormous gratification, I went bankrupt. After momentary embarrassment, I finally got to do what I’d always wanted, go into the arts.” Through his actress wife, he had met many prominent figures in New York’s vibrant theatrical fizz of the early 1930s. Even before that, while still a young business whiz, he had begun translating French and German plays into English as a hobby. A combination of these, and his own natural bent, led him first into collaborating on plays then into producing and directing in Manhattan.

He quickly acquired a reputation with a string of successes, his first substantial recognition coming as director of the Broadway production of the Gertrude Stein-Virgil Thomson opera “Four Saints in Three Acts” with an all-black cast.

Nevertheless, with typical candor he years later would say of his early days in the theater: “I went into directing when I didn’t know anything about anything. . . . I was directing mature actors I had no right to direct. . . . I have a theory that nobody should be allowed to direct who has not been an actor.”

In 1934, Houseman (who by then had had Anglicized his name) met Orson Welles. It was the beginning of a legendary partnership that stirred the American theater to its very roots during the pre-World War II years.

They founded the famed Mercury Theatre, which was responsible for some of the most innovative productions in the history of drama in this country, including the landmark modern-dress version of “Julius Caesar” in 1937 with Welles appearing as Brutus and Welles and Houseman producing.

Then came the Mercury Theatre on the Air and with it an episode generally considered the single most famous radio show ever broadcast, “The War of the Worlds,” based on H.G. Wells’ 1898 fantasy about invaders from Mars who landed in England. The scene of the Martian landing was changed from England to New Jersey and, despite a disclaimer before the broadcast began, listeners nationwide, thinking invaders from outer space actually had landed on earth, panicked. Houseman in later years would refer to the show as “The Men from Mars” and describe it as a “nefarious joke”.

(The last accolades he may have heard came hours before his death when several radio stations across the country rebroadcast the “nefarious joke” on its golden anniversary. In accompanying commentaries, many commentators chose to single out Houseman’s brilliant influence on the Mercury Theatre.)

The relationship between Welles and Houseman was a stormy one, punctuated by gargantuan quarrels. But they remained amicable long enough to develop a motion picture that is considered by many as the craft’s finest: “Citizen Kane.” Houseman collaborated with writer Herman Mankiewicz and acted as script editor and general adviser on the preproduction of the memorable 1941 film in which Welles played the starring role.

Shortly after, Houseman and Welles went their separate ways, the former joining David O. Selznick Productions as vice president, a job he held only briefly. Within days after Pearl Harbor, he joined the Office of War Information as chief of programming for overseas radio operation.

Upon returning to Hollywood in 1943, Houseman produced a series of movies during the next 20 years that set a standard for others in the film-making business to follow. They won 20 Academy Award nominations and seven Oscars and included such classics as:

“The Bad and the Beautiful,” which alone won five Oscars, Raymond Chandler’s “The Blue Dahlia,” “Lust for Life,” a biographical film about Vincent van Gogh, and “Julius Caesar,” which not only had an impressive cast headed by Marlon Brando, John Gielgud and James Mason but won widespread critical acclaim.

Between films, Houseman also achieved major successes in television. During the so-called “Golden Age” of TV he served as executive producer of the prestigious “Playhouse 90” series and conceived, prepared and produced the Sunday afternoon programs, “The Seven Lively Arts.”

From time to time, he also indulged his love of live theater by directing or producing stage shows both here and in New York. Among them: “The Lute Song” with Mary Martin and Yul Brynner, “Beggar’s Holiday” with a score by Duke Ellington and Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo” with Charles Laughton in the title role.

During these fertile years, Houseman also acquired a deserved reputation as an all-conquering ladies’ man. The story goes that while having lunch in an expensive restaurant, Houseman complained to his companion: “I must leave. I’ve slept with six women (who are) in this room.”

“But there are only eight women in the room,” the friend observed.

“I know,” Houseman is said to have replied.

Wrote of Affair

Neither Houseman nor actress Joan Fontaine ever disguised their lengthy and impassioned relationship. As a matter of fact, both wrote about their affair in separate memoirs.

“She was an adorable mistress,” said Houseman in the second of his autobiographies, “Front and Center,” adding: “Miss Fontaine has graciously testified that she found me a satisfying lover. I take this opportunity to return the compliment.”

But in time, Houseman, a distinguished-looking, 200-pound 6-footer and an earthy and witty conversationalist, met the stylish and beautiful Joan Courtney, the estranged wife of a French nobleman. They married in 1949 and remained happily wed until his death. The union produced two sons, John Michael, an anthropologist, and Charles Sebastian, an artist.

Houseman gradually began to redirect his enormous energy as he grew older, to the dismay of some of his friends. When he was 53, for instance, he quit Hollywood to work at a fraction of his normal salary as artistic director of the new American Shakespeare Festival Theater and Academy in Stratford, Conn., where he exercised his skill as an interpreter of the Bard, showcasing young actors in what he described as “bold, imaginative productions of unfamiliar, contrasting plays,” such as “King John” and “Measure for Measure.”

Capstone of Career

Here in Los Angeles, he served five years as artistic director in the early 1960s for the Theater Group of UCLA, which became the nucleus of a drama company at the Mark Taper Forum.

Then in 1967, Houseman, while keeping his hand in as a professional director, joined the Juilliard School of Performing Arts in New York as head of its newly organized drama division, a post he held until 1976. While there, he undertook what he would proudly aver later was the capstone of his long career in the lively arts: He founded the Acting Company, a permanent repertory troupe staffed mostly by Juilliard drama graduates, in 1972. Beginning with limited seasons at the City Center in New York, the troupe soon progressed to national tours and its members included such formidable talents as Patti LuPone, Christopher Reeve and Robin Williams. Said Houseman of his creation: “It’s the closest thing we have to a national repertory theater.”

Asked to Play Role

About the same time the Acting Company came into being, Houseman received a telephone call from James Bridges, who had worked with him more than a decade earlier at UCLA. Bridges said he was directing a movie and that James Mason, who had been scheduled to play the role of an irascible, imperious Harvard law professor, had to drop from the cast because of another commitment.

“Would you like to play a professor in ‘Paper Chase’?” Bridges asked.

“Don’t be a horse’s ass,” Houseman replied.

But within a month, Houseman--who had made a single fleeting film appearance once before as an admiral in the 1964 political thriller “Seven Days in May”--was in front of a camera instead of his customary role on the other side of one. He was an instant smash as a movie actor and he followed that with roles in such films as “Three Days of the Condor,” “St. Ives,” “Rollerball” and “The Cheap Detective.” His successes in the long-running TV “Chase,” a small-screen extension of his hit movie, and in the cleverly performed and off-beat television commercials, of course, were so much frosting on the cake.

No Plans to Slow Down

As recently as last month, although his health had betrayed him, Houseman said that he had no plans to slow down from a career that included involvement in scores of stage, screen and broadcast productions. “I have tapered off a little, but I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I retired,” he said three days before his 86th birthday. “I still have something to offer, even though the roles these days are usually small.

“But I’m 85 years old. I am not going to be offered the role of Romeo anymore, or Juliet, for that matter. Yet the limited range I do play, I play well. My range is that of an old man, but what do you expect from someone who started acting at the age of 70?”

In the last of his three-part autobiography, Houseman wrote a final sentence which could stand as an epitaph, albeit an overly modest one, for the largely talented man who died Monday.

“Not everyone gets the chance to live his life twice over or has the good fortune to be born into a world of such violent motion as the one in which I have managed to survive for more than 80 years.”

Even he couldn’t go on forever. Calendar, Page 1.