Sam Jaffe; Pioneer Movie Producer, Manager, Agent

Sam Jaffe, the agent who once obtained life insurance on Humphrey Bogart when the actor’s wife threatened to kill him, the production manager who saved financially troubled Paramount when he invented “shooting night for day,” the sometime producer who lifted the human spirit with “The Fighting Sullivans” and “Born Free,” the man who walked away from Hollywood for 20 years, only to return and reinvent himself as an “authority on retirement,” has died. Jaffe was 98.

The industry sage, sought out by biographers as a source on such early Hollywood icons as Fritz Lang and Harry Cohn, died Monday in Los Angeles.

To the public, the agent Sam Jaffe was often confused with the actor of the same name, Sam Jaffe, who played the title role in “Gunga Din,” the High Lama in “Lost Horizon” and Dr. Zorba on television’s “Ben Casey.” The actor died in 1984.

But within the motion picture industry, and among those who sought to learn more about it, no confusion existed.

When Jaffe the production man and future agent stepped off a train in Los Angeles in 1923, everything west of the Beverly Hills Hotel was winding dirt roads, vacant lots and lush vegetation. He shot tropical scenes on the county’s beaches. He was only 22 and already a movie mini-mogul.

“We worked on Saturdays. Our days started at 9 a.m. and ended at midnight or when the actors started falling down,” Jaffe said in a 1995 Times interview. “We had to finish a picture in 18 days, so we worked those long hours.”

Jaffe worked for Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer and Cohn, and represented not only Bogart, but also actors Fredric March, Zero Mostel, Mary Astor, Barbara Stanwyck, Lee J. Cobb, Lauren Bacall, Jennifer Jones, David Niven and Richard Burton, and directors Lang, Raoul Walsh and Stanley Kubrick.

Born May 21, 1901, in New York’s Harlem to Russian Jewish immigrants, Jaffe dropped out of high school to take an office boy’s job offered by his brother-in-law, B.P. Schulberg, at the Paramount-Famous Players-Laskey studio in New York.

He rose quickly in the burgeoning new industry and soon moved to Hollywood, where he became Paramount’s production manager, supervising 52 films a year. Among those were “Shadows,” starring Lon Chaney, and “The Plastic Age,” starring Clara Bow.

Jaffe negotiated the purchase of the studio’s famed location on Melrose Avenue and shortly after was credited by many with saving the studio.

On Jan. 16, 1929, as renovation was completed on soundproofing stages for the new talking pictures, an electrical fire razed the developing complex. Zukor, after taking a train West to inspect the damage and hearing from Jaffe that reconstruction would take a minimum of five months, gasped, “We’re ruined!”

But Jaffe, driving home at midnight after watching a movie a couple of nights later, noticed that the streets were quiet.

“I thought, ‘Suppose we shot at night? Then we could use all our stages,’ ” he told The Times in 1995. “So the next day, all the actors and crew were told we would start at 8 p.m. and end at 5 a.m.”

Jaffe’s idea--dubbed “shooting night for day” production, enabled Paramount to continue financially in the black and move on from silents into pictures with sound.

Urged by his wife, Mildred, to start his own business to support his family free of the uncertainties of the studios, Jaffe opened the Jaffe Agency in 1935.

One of the myriad anecdotes from his serial career stemmed from working with a favorite client, Bogart. The actor’s then-wife, Mayo Methot, had threatened to kill the actor if he left her.

That was 1942, and Jaffe and agent Mary Baker had negotiated a major contract for Bogart with Warner Bros. But suddenly losing their star, the studio feared, might prove costly to production. So Jaffe took out an insurance policy that would pay Warner Bros. $100,000 if Bogart got shot during shooting. He lived, and the film, “Casablanca,” became a classic.

Jaffe, a successful agent, returned to motion picture production only when the spirit moved him:

* In 1944, to do “The Fighting Sullivans” after he read a newspaper article about the death of five Waterloo, Iowa, brothers who went down together when their destroyer was sunk in the Pacific.

* In 1966, to tell Joy Adamson’s true-life story of raising Elsa the lioness in “Born Free,” a film that helped popularize documentary subject matter and picked up a couple of Oscars for its music.

* In 1973, teaming up with his old friend and fellow art collector Vincent Price to do the fictional “Theater of Blood,” about a Shakespearean actor killing his critics in death scenes described in the Bard’s plays.

As Jaffe gained financial success, he became a renowned collector of African and Indian artifacts and modern works by such painters as Pablo Picasso and sculptors Henry Moore and Alexander Calder. He often exhibited pieces of the art collection at UCLA.

Jaffe had many clients involved in the McCarthy anti-Communist hearings in the 1950s, including the writer Lester Cole.

“I got into trouble and I lost a lot of business (he estimated 50%) when all those people got ostracized,” Jaffe told The Times. “Why did I have so many radicals? I don’t know. But I guess being a liberal, I attracted those people.”

Jaffe, Hollywood’s early wunderkind, was burning out in the 1950s. “One day I went to a concert. At the intermission I said to my wife: ‘I didn’t hear the music. I was in another world. It was wasted,’ ” he recalled a few years ago.

So he retired and moved to London in 1959, where, except for the Adamson and Price films, he eschewed the motion picture business for studies at Cambridge and art collecting.

When he returned to Los Angeles in 1985, Jaffe looked around for something to do.

“I didn’t want to be a celebrity, I wanted to be one of the many,” he told The Times in 1986. “I didn’t want to talk about the past, I wanted to learn about from now on.”

He joined UCLA Extension’s Plato Society (an acronym for Perpetual Learning and Teaching Organization) and became the oldest and one of its most enthusiastic 250-plus retirees studying for the sheer pleasure of it.

“We talk about worldly events and interesting things that affect our lives,” he said. “I’ve made a pool of friends I can call up and go to lunch with.”

But in spite of himself, Jaffe was understandably asked to talk about the past--particularly by writers.

* Interviewed by Patrick McGilligan for his 1997 book “Fritz Lang--The Nature of the Beast,” Jaffe said: “I only knew the nasty side of him.”

* Sylvia Shorris and Marion Abbott Bundy interviewed him for their 1994 “Talking Pictures With the People Who Made Them.”

* Feminist writer Betty Friedan talked to him for her 1993 book “The Fountain of Age,” which identified the mentally active, elderly Jaffe as “a consultant authority on retirement.”

* Asked by The Times and other news media to recall early Hollywood’s titans, Jaffe mused that Bogart “was wonderful”; that Clara Bow “was my girlfriend, but had no sense of value . . . gambling . . . with the Mafia”; that W.C. Fields suggested skipping the romance in his films and concentrating solely on his jokes; that Cohn “was very smart but a very demanding man [who said] ‘I don’t have ulcers, I give ulcers!’ ”; Jack L. Warner “was a detestable man”; and Irving Thalberg “was a wonderful young man, modest, brilliant.” And he sadly talked of the downward spiral of some, including his own friend and mentor Shulberg, “who by 1949 put ads in the trade papers pleading for jobs.”

Jaffe, a widower, is survived by three daughters, Naomi Carroll and Barbara Kohn of Los Angeles, and Judith Silber of Chevy Chase, Md.; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.