A Hollywood Ending for the Wheeler Oscar Saga

For the moment, the brightest star on Hollywood Boulevard is William Kaiser, a 41-year-old former hospital administrator from Tuxedo Park, N.Y.

In a private awards ceremony Friday in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel--the location of the first Academy Awards ceremony 61 years ago--Kaiser surprised 84-year-old art director Lyle Wheeler by reuniting him with the Oscar he won in 1959 for “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

Wheeler was assisted to the podium by his son, Brook, and he graciously accepted the award for a second time, on this occasion from actress Terry Moore, who worked with Wheeler on eight films, including “Daddy Longlegs” (1955) and “Peyton Place” (1957).

“I didn’t believe I was ever going to see even one of these again,” Wheeler said, looking down with moist eyes at the golden statuette--now worn and pitted by time--clutched tightly in his hand.

When asked what he planned to do with the Oscar, Wheeler evoked laughter and a warm applause from the small crowd of friends, family and press when he said, “Well, I want to put it someplace where it won’t be stolen.”

Meanwhile, Kaiser stood proudly and silently behind, letting Wheeler soak up the attention, while realizing a personal dream of his own.

Kaiser, who flew into Los Angeles only three days earlier, depleted most of his savings account of 16 years to come up with the $21,250 necessary to purchase the Oscar from a Long Beach couple who stumbled across Wheeler’s 24-karat plated statuette--and four more just like it--three years ago at a storage facility auction.

Wheeler, considered the “dean of art directors,” has worked on more than 400 films and was nominated for 29 art direction Academy Awards over his 50-year career. He won five of them, his first for “Gone With the Wind” in 1939.

After financial setbacks forced Wheeler out of his home and into a Santa Monica hotel room, he packed his belongings--including all five of the Oscars--into cardboard boxes and placed them in storage. As Wheeler plummeted deeper into debt, his storage bill soared to more than $30,000, until the storage facility finally auctioned off his goods to pay his bill.

Kaiser was having dinner with his wife, Joan, when he heard on the evening news that Wheeler’s Oscars were in the possession of the Long Beach couple who were planning to auction them off.

Sitting in his room at the Orchid Hotel in Hollywood Tuesday night, Kaiser recalled the moment with a trembling voice: “I couldn’t believe it. My wife turned to me and said, ‘Oh, do you know who he is?’ ‘ Know who he is? Every other movie on television has his name on it!’ All kinds of emotions flooded me: I was angry, I was depressed, I was moved. But mostly I felt very bad.”

Kaiser, whose words run together faster and tighter than thoroughbreds rounding a turn at Churchill Downs, is a man with a boyish face that lights up when the theater lights go down. He is an encyclopedia of movie trivia who worked as a film librarian for a year before earning a nursing degree to make ends meet.

“It was unbearable to think of Lyle reduced to the situation he was in without his Oscars,” he said. “Tears came to my eyes. I decided right there to act, to do everything I could within my power to restore those Oscars to him.”

Kaiser tracked down Malcolm Willits, an acknowledged Hollywood artifact expert who conducts monthly auctions from his Collector’s Book Store, one of the world’s largest collections of Hollywood memorabilia, on Hollywood Boulevard at Vine Street. Since last March, Willits has auctioned or sold six Oscars for an average price of $12,000. Willits was to auction the “Anne Frank” Oscar on March 7 on behalf of the Long Beach couple until a temporary restraining order was issued to Willits by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The Los Angeles Superior Court order was intended to prevent February’s scheduled auction of a duplicate of producer Mike Todd’s 1956 best picture Oscar for “Around the World in 80 Days,” put up for sale by his grandson, Cyrus Todd. (The original is reportedly locked in a Swiss bank vault belonging to Elizabeth Taylor, Todd’s wife when he received the award.) Oscar recipients sign an agreement upon acceptance that requires them or their heirs to offer the gold-plated statuettes back to the academy for the sum of $1 before ever attempting to sell or dispose of them.

Until the Todd matter was settled, Willits decided to pull the “Anne Frank” Oscar off the auction block. But he did not remove it from private sale.

“The academy bylaws were not carried down from Mt. Sinai by Moses, and they’re not constitutional,” said Willits, who received a 20% commission for sale of the “Anne Frank” Oscar. “They’re forcing people who want to sell Oscars to skulk in back alleys, where real values can’t be established. I don’t like the academy telling us what we can and can’t sell. We’ve never coerced anyone into selling an Oscar. They come to us. It’s a free market, and I’m an auctioneer.”

(In a judgment Friday, the restraining order was upheld and Willits was issued a permanent injunction, effectively barring the further sale or auction of the Todd Oscar. Willits is considering an appeal.)

“I do not condone the sale of Oscars,” Kaiser said. “In fact, I’m adamantly opposed to them. In this case, I think it was a necessary evil (to participate in the purchase). It was the only avenue I had available to restore Lyle’s Oscar to him.”

Although the academy has gone to great lengths recently to prevent the sale and auctioning of statuettes, executive administrator Bruce Davis said: “Any arrangement that results in the return of Lyle Wheeler’s Oscars to the hands of their rightful owner is justified with the academy.”

In the meantime, there is a move afoot by a group of older Academy members to grant Wheeler an honorary Academy Award during Oscar ceremonies Wednesday night. “We feel that Lyle has been maligned by the academy,” said actress-journalist Vanessa Brown, 61, a longtime academy member. “We feel he deserves to be honored with a humanitarian award while he’s still living.”

At press time, the academy had no plans to present its Gene Hersholt Humanitarian Award this year, a spokesman said. The board of governors, which selects recipients for the award, last met Feb. 13, two days before the Oscar nominations were announced, he said.

The bounty paid for the “Anne Frank” statuette is the most ever for an Oscar. Kaiser, who earned about $37,000 a year as a hospital administrator and nurse before he quit his job in December, used the money he and his wife had been saving since their marriage 16 years ago to honor Wheeler with the award.

“I’m not upset where the money is going,” said Joan Kaiser Wednesday from her home in Tuxedo Park, as she prepared to fly the couple’s two children to California to be with their father. “We’re not taking food out of our mouths. It was savings we had in the bank. Bill has always loved movies, and this is just a natural extension of his passions. I always knew he would end up in Hollywood somehow.”

“I think Bill is just an extremely generous movie fan who feels that an injustice has been done,” said 31-year-old Brook Wheeler, who plans in April to move his father into the Motion Picture and Television Country Home and Hospital, a retirement home in Woodland Hills for indigent and ill people from the entertainment industry. “We can’t understand why he’s doing this, but that’s because we’re so jaded out here. I sort of wondered why other members of the entertainment industry, who are aware of this situation, haven’t come forth to reckon with it.”

Davis reported that since Wheeler’s story was made public last month, a number of former award winners have contacted the academy to inform him they are making arrangements to bequeath their Oscars back to the academy upon their deaths. Wheeler, too, has stipulated that the “Anne Frank” Oscar will be returned to the academy when he dies.

One Oscar purchased in a Willits’ auction was returned this month. Universal Studios theme park in Florida paid the previous record, $17,715, for Thomas Little’s 1941 black-and-white interior-decoration Oscar for “How Green Was My Valley.” When the parent company in Universal City got wind of the purchase, it reacted quickly.

“I returned the Oscar personally to (academy president) Richard Kahn on behalf of MCA,” said David Weitzner, Universal’s president of worldwide marketing. “We’re more sensitive to these issues on the West Coast. I’m an academy member and take my membership very seriously. If we had known that it was being purchased, we never would have approved the sale.”

The Long Beach couple, Sherry, 42, and her live-in companion, Tom, 31 (they do not wish to reveal their surnames), say they have no immediate plans for the remaining four Wheeler Oscars. The couple are reportedly going to use their share of the $17,000 they received for the “Anne Frank” Oscar to remodel their home.

“If we could afford to give up something so valuable, we would,” said Sherry in a telephone interview she initiated Wednesday. “We couldn’t be happier that the Oscar is going back to Lyle. And people are happy for us, too. They say, ‘Congratulations, you deserve it.’ We’re not bad people. But the press has turned us into monsters.”

By purchasing the “Anne Frank” Oscar and returning it to Wheeler, Kaiser said he hopes to kill the market for future Oscar sales. Willits, who recently put his entire memorabilia collection up for sale, has not made it clear whether he will give up Oscar auctioning if his store sells.

“People sit there in their easy chair and say, ‘Oh, if I had those Oscars I’d give them back,’ ” Sherry said. “But they wouldn’t. It’s human nature. Money isn’t what life is all about, but it’s important. It’s what we need to survive.”

“There’s too much talk of money,” Kaiser said. “There’s a moral issue involved. A human issue. People have to think more about other people. You can’t put a dollar sign in front of everything. There are some things that just don’t have a monetary value.”

Kaiser quit nursing three months ago to pursue his dream of working in film or television production. When asked if the purchase of Wheeler’s Oscar was a publicity stunt to launch his career, Wheeler’s shining eyes went blank.

“I may be naive, but when I called Willits, I figured he probably had already received 100 offers just like mine,” Kaiser said softly. Willits told The Times that he had received no other offers to purchase any of Wheeler’s Oscars for return to him. “I suppose I didn’t know what I was doing,” Kaiser said. “I just knew what I had to do.

“I feel good. Yeah, I feel good about this whole thing. I’m just glad I was able to get the Oscar and return it. I felt like if I could just hand the Oscar to Lyle and see a smile on his face, that would be enough. If nothing else comes of it, I will always carry this feeling with me--what I was able to do for somebody else.”