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On This Day
June 11, 1976

Adolph Zukor Is Dead at 103; Built Paramount Movie Empire


Adolph Zukor, who made entertainment history in 1912 when he offered the American public its first feature-length film, died at his Century City apartment in Los Angeles yesterday. He was 103 years old.

Mr. Zukor "took a nap and died at 4 o'clock in the afternoon," according to a spokesman for the Paramount Pictures Corporation, of which Mr. Zukor served as chairman of the board emeritus after helping to build the film empire. The death was attributed to natural causes.

Adolph Zukor was the completely atypical movie tycoon--unflamboyant, deliberate, mild-mannered, predictable, almost self-effacing.

While other pioneers in the motion picture industry, such as D.W. Griffith, Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer, with their well-publicized feuds, rages and personal eccentricities, became celebrities almost as well-known as the stars who appeared in their films, Mr. Zuker could have been mistaken for an ordinary businessman, like the fur merchant he once was, or perhaps a banker.

But Mr. Zukor, who preferred to work from behind the scenes, was a true visionary who shrewdly saw, well before most others did, that the motion picture could become the great mass entertainment and artistic medium that it is today.

His fascination with and confidence in the movies went back to a day in 1901, when he stood on tiptoe (he was 5 feet 5 inches tall) in front of a penny arcade peepshow machine and viewed his first movie, a two-minute reel called "Fun in a Boarding House."

In 1903, scarcely a decade after the motion picture had been invented, Mr. Zukor invested in a Union Square penny arcade featuring movie peepshows, and in 1912 he made entertainment history when he daringly offered the American public its first feature-length film, "Queen Elizabeth," staring Sarah Bernhardt.

By the mid-twenties, Mr. Zukor had become president of the giant movie production and distribution empire known today as the Paramount Pictures Corporation.

'Look Ahead a Little'

It was his policy as he put it, to "look ahead a little and gamble a lot" on the future of the movie business. As recently as 1953, when he was 80 years old and Hollywood was morbidly worried that its most feared enemy, television, would put it out of business, Mr. Zukor sounded a confident visionary note.

"Rather than lose the public because television is here," he asked, "wouldn't it be smart to adopt television as our instrument?" Which, of course, is precisely what happened in the next decade.

Mr. Zukor's view of his success was disarmingly simple. "I had vision--calculated vision--and the circumstances were fortunate," he said late in 1968 in an interview for this article. "I wanted to be a merchant when I was a boy. And that is what I am now and always have been--a merchant."

Had he not wanted so much to be a merchant, Mr. Zukor might very well have become a rabbi. "I had the devil of a time persuading my uncle, Kalman Liebermann, who was a rabbi himself, that I wasn't cut out for the theological calling," he said.

Mr. Zukor was born in Riese, Hungary; on Jan. 7, 1873. His father, Jacob, who operated a general store in the small village of thatched-roof huts, died when he was a year old, and his mother, the former Hannah Liebermann, died when he was 7. Adolph and a brother, Arthur, who did become a rabbi, went to live with their Uncle Kalman.

Started at $2 a Week

When he was 16 yeas old, and with $40 sewed into the lining of his overcoat, Adolph Zukor arrived at the immigration center at Castle Garden in New York Harbor. His first job was sweeping the floor in a fur store and he was paid and he was paid $2 a week, but he soon learned to be a fur cutter and was making $4.

In 1892 Mr. Zukor bought a $10 railroad ticket to Chicago, where he went into the fur business with a New York acquaintance, Morris Kohn. Then, as in later life, Mr. Zukor was a bit on the shy side, preferring to stay in the shop to do the cutting while Mr. Kohn solicited orders for furs.

The business prospered. While in Chicago, Mr. Zukor met Lottie Kaufman and married her in 1897. They had two children, Eugene, who became a Paramount executive in 1916, and Mildred.

The Zukors and Mr. Kohn moved their fur business to New York in 1900 and in 1903 joined with Mitchell Mark in the operation of a penny arcade in a former butcher shop on 14th Street at Union Square. The Automatic Vaudeville Company, as it was called, soon opened branches in Philadelphia, Boston and Newark, with new capital furnished by Marcus Loew, another fur merchant, who eventually was to become president of Loew's Inc., parent company of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures.

The penny arcades offered a variety of entertainment machines, including phonographs with individual listening devices and movie peepshows that featured brief, storyless films.

Mr. Zukor, becoming increasingly fascinated with anything having to do with motion pictures, began, in 1906, plowing his profits from the arcades into Hales' Tours, a venture that proved disastrous. In small theaters built to simulate railroad coaches, travelogues were projected on a screen, accompanied by recordings of train whistles, rumbling wheels and ringing bells.

"The illusion was created among the spectators that they were traveling through the country they viewed on the screen," Mr. Zukor recalled years later. "It was a good business for a time, but the novelty soon wore off, and we lost a lot of money--myself and some friends in the fur trade. I eventually reimbursed all of them."

The touring cars were converted into nickelodeon theaters, which, because they offered longer, larger moving pictures than the penny arcades, were becoming increasingly popular.

"You have to understand," Mr. Zukor explained years later, "what was happening in this country to see why movies were catching on. From 1900 to 1910, about nine or ten million immigrants poured in, and because nickelodeon movies were new, cheap, silent and set up no language difficulties, they became a popular pastime."

As treasurer of Loew's Enterprises, Mr. Zukor helped forge a chain of about two dozen nickelodeon houses, and the company expanded into actual theater operations by converting fur shops, bakeries and clothing and other stores into movie exhibition halls. The films available for the movie houses were severely limited, both in number and in quality, however, because the motion picture industry at the time was controlled by a trust. (It was not broken, in fact, until 1915, through Sherman Act litigation.)

In 1912 Mr. Zukor resigned from Loew's Enterprises because, he said, "I was restless and impatient to produce full-length classical plays, which I believed would be the real future of films."

Edison's Aid Enlisted

He interested Daniel Frohman, a Broadway producer, in the idea. Mr. Frohman persuaded Thomas Alva Edison, a member of the film trust, to get the trust's assurance that no legal obstruction would be erected to prevent Mr. Zukor and Mr. Frohman from exhibiting a feature-length film.

Having learned that American rights to "Queen Elizabeth," starring Sandra Bernhardt, at the time the most famous actress in the world, were available for a $35,000 investment in the production of the French-made feature, the two partners closed the deal and rented the Lyceum Theater to present the film.

The night of July 12, 1912, was a historic one for the motion picture industry. The elite of the theater world and society figures who would not have been caught viewing a movie, then considered a vulgar form of entertainment, attended the premiere of "Queen Elizabeth."

The movie lasted only 40 minutes, but it has been considered the first feature-length film to be shown in America. It was of incredibly poor quality, and the camera was not kind to the aging Miss Bernhardt, who had to hobble through her scenes on a wooden leg. But if Bernhardt was willing to make movies, the fashionable crowd apparently concluded, then movies had arrived. The Lyceum resounded with cheers. Mr. Zukor's gamble had paid off.

"Queen Elizabeth" was the first film to be shown around the country on a "roadshow" or reserved-seat, basis, and it made about $200,000 for Mr. Zukor and Mr. Frohman, who formed the Famous Players Film Company to produce, according to their motto, "famous plays with famous players."

'Monte Cristo' a Success

The company's first picture, in 1913, was "The Count of Monte Cristo," starring a rather corpulent James O'Neill. It was a huge success, and the feature picture sweepstakes, with new companies sprouting up almost daily, was on.

The first of the new companies to merge with Mr. Zukor's was the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Picture Play Company, which had produced the first made in Hollywood movie, "The Squaw Man," directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Shoved out of the merged concern in the process was Samuel Goldwyn, later to become a legendary Hollywood producer.

Mr. Zukor continued to engineer mergers and consolidations. The Paramount Pictures Corporation was formed to distribute films made by Famous Players-Lasky, and a dozen smaller companies pulled into Mr. Zukor's corporate giant. The consolidations led to formation of a nationwide film distribution system. And in 1919, the company bought 135 theaters in the Southern states, making the producing concern the first that guaranteed exhibition of its own product in its own theaters.

Theater Chain Grew

Mr. Zukor, by then turning out 60 features a year, made deals to show them all in theaters controlled by Loew's Enterprises, and he continued to add more theaters to his own chain. By 1920 he was in a position to charge what he wished for film rentals and he developed the concept, now the accepted practice in the film industry, by which the distributor charges the exhibitor a percentage of box-office receipts.

Over objections of his board of directors, Mr. Zukor bought a huge plot of ground at Broadway and 43d Street to build the Paramount Theater and office building, a 39-story monument to himself that had its grand opening in 1926. His private of-[MISSING TEXT]

Mr. Zukor was, primarily, a businessman. He did not take the same personal, down-to- the-last-detail interest in the making of his movies that producer-executives such as Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer did. He spent most of his time in New York, but made at least one long trip annually to Hollywood to take a look.

He was a tiny, birdlike man, lean-faced and sharp-eyed, with a strong chin, a firm mouth, an aquiline nose. His hands were long and bony, and he waved them about when he spoke. He never quite lost his [MISSING TEXT]

Mr. Zukor was an inveterate and accomplished card player--bridge, pinochle, poker, all appealed to him. He was said to have kept associates playing pinochle nonstop during train trips between New York and Los Angeles. His devotion to golf was so complete that he had an 18-hole course laid out on his 760-acre estate, the Dells, north of New City, N.Y., in Rockland County. He lived there for 30 years, until shortly after the death of his wife in 1956.

Variety of Nicknames

Around Paramount, Mr. Zukor was known by a variety of nicknames, ranging from "Sugar" (which Zukor means in Hungarian) to "Uncle Adolph" to "Creepy," the last- named because he moved so lithely and silently that he tended to startle people.

Mr. Zukor had a deft way of handling artistic temperament. In the mid-twenties, for example, when Gloria Swanson was Paramount's reigning star, he imported the popular Polish-born actress Pola Negri. The two prima donnas loathed each other. Mr. Zukor solved the problem, he said years later, "by keeping the two ladies a continent apart-- Swanson at the studios in Astoria, Queens, and Negri in Hollywood."

For years Mr. Zukor was forced to renegotiate Mary Pickford's contract every time Miss Pickford heard that Rudolph Valentino, who starred for Mr. Zukor in "The Sheik," had gotten a salary raise. At one point Miss Pickford told Mr. Zukor: "You know, for years I've dreamed of making $20,000 a year before I was 20, and I'll be 20 very soon."

"I could take a hint," Mr. Zukor recalled wryly. "She got the $20,000, and before long I was paying her $100,000 a year. Mary was a terrific businessman."

Miss Pickford had a stage mother who could upstage all stage mothers, and on one occasion Mr. Zukor had to write into a Pickford contract a clause that provided the star's mother $25,000 for her "moral support." It was worth it, he said later, because "little Mary made us some millions."

Mr. Zukor became Paramount's board chairman in 1935 but in recent years, had the titles honorary chairman and chairman emeritus. He never lost interest in making--and saving- -money for Paramount.

In recent years Mr. Zukor spent the winter months in Hollywood, where his son, Eugene, lives. He maintained an apartment at 24 West 55th Street in New York, in the same building as his daughter, Mildred, the divorced wife of Arthur Loew, Marcus Loew's son.

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