To Be in the Race Is to Be a Winner

We place too much value on first place. How bad is second place?

The Oscars are coming. Each category gets five nominations. The first place gets an Oscar. The four others are declared losers. Why? To be voted one of five in any category should make you a winner.

In 1956, I was nominated for my performance in “Lust for Life.” At the time of the Oscar presentation, I was in Munich working on another picture, “Paths of Glory.”

Before Oscar night I had been told by my friend, the producer Michael Todd, that he had confidential information that I was the winner. Apparently many others thought so too because, on the night of the Oscars, the lobby of the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten was swarming with photographers and journalists. They were there to catch my smiling face just at the moment that I was announced as the winner.

I was ready. But the photographers and journalists staggered out of the hotel in the wee hours of the night when they heard the announcement from Hollywood that Yul Brynner was the winner for “The King and I.” I heard it too, and was unable to use the winning smile that I had been practicing. I lay there glumly in my bed listening to the receding noise of the departing journalists. When all was silent, I heard a knocking on my door. I got out of bed and opened it. Standing there was the concierge with what looked like an Oscar in his hands. He presented it to me and closed the door. It was a mock-up of an Oscar with the inscription “To Our Daddy, You Rate an Oscar with Us Always”; it was signed by “Stolz,” the name I gave my wife, Anne, and my son, Peter. I tell you, that changed my whole mood.

Anne had been in the Academy audience with a prepared speech of acceptance on my behalf. But she believes in insurance and had arranged to have her Oscar presented to me in the unlikely event that I didn’t receive the Academy’s award. I went back to bed, looking at my Oscar in the early dawn light.

I didn’t feel like a loser. I was a winner.

Years later, when I finally got a golden Oscar, I put it in my wife’s office, and there it stays. The Oscar she sent to me in Munich is in my home office. And there it will always stay.

So I say to all the nominees in every category: Whatever happens, you are all winners. Just to be one of the five nominees is a victory. Keep that in mind as you sit in the audience with a weak smile, applauding someone else who has won your Oscar.