In some past posting here, I mentioned that my family had some wealthy friends when I was a kid — the Zukors, Ben and Betty. They did some wonderful, important things for me and before I get to them, let me tell you how they came to be family friends.
My father's best buddy for a time was a fellow named Leo Young who worked in the same office. Leo was a great guy. As I've noted, my father used to always get mistaken for a member of President Kennedy's cabinet named Abraham Ribicoff. Leo Young used to always get mistaken for the composer Meredith Willson. I was present once when a stranger came up and complimented him on The Music Man. Depending on his mood, Leo might correct such folks or just say thanks. He told us that one time, a man on the street insisted on singing him about eight bars of "Shipoopi."
Short story about Leo Young. Leo had an 85-year-old father in a nursing home in Florida. Every week, Leo would write a brief letter in longhand to his father and get one back. That was how they stayed in touch. Then Leo died from a sudden heart attack. He was around 60 and I don't recall my father ever being as upset over anything as he was over the death of his friend Leo.
His widow Ann consulted with her father-in-law's doctors and it was decided not to inform him of Leo's passing. He was close to death himself and I guess the thinking was, "Why put him through that grief?" The problem, of course, was those weekly letters from his son. If they stopped coming, he'd know something was wrong. I had an odd skill that was the answer to that problem.
When I was younger, I had this uncanny ability — and it really came out of nowhere — to forge handwriting. I'm not very good at it anymore. Ever since my life began to revolve around working on a computer, my skills at lettering and drawing have atrophied and now I'm lucky if my own signature looks like I wrote it. But I used to be able to create not just bogus autographs but whole pages in someone else's penmanship. So after Leo died, the letters to his father didn't have to stop. Each week, Ann Young would ghost-write a letter from Leo to his father and I would recopy it in Leo's handwriting, then she'd send it off. The father lived another six months or so and when he finally departed, he never knew that his son had predeceased him.
Anyway, Ann Young's sister was Betty Zukor and that's how my family came to know the Zukors, back when Leo was still with us. The Zukors lived in a huge house in Beverly Hills that's a few doors from where Jay Leno now lives. So that should give you some idea of the kind of money we're talking about here. The first time I was taken there, they sent me off to play with a visiting Zukor niece who was but a year or two older than me.
I think I was ten, maybe eleven. I do not remember the girl's name but I do remember that we put on swim suits and went into the Zukors' pool, then we toweled off and went into a little cabana room to play board games. While the adults in the house thought we were peacefully engrossed in Chutes & Ladders (or something of the sort), the niece took off her swim suit, paraded about naked, then told me, in not precisely this phrasing, she'd never seen male genitalia in person and would like to view mine. I was terrified she wanted to do more with it than look but I gave her a quick peek just to be polite, then we returned to our board games. She didn't seem to be impressed by what she saw and I didn't think to suggest she check back in a few years.
This kind of thing happened to me repeatedly with female playmates before I hit puberty. Unfortunately, not after.
The Zukors' wealth came from a small network of small department stores. You can see a smidgen of one in the above photo, which was taken by the great Ansel Adams. The Owl Drugstore you see there was located in downtown Los Angeles at the corner of Broadway and 6th, and a Zukor's is next door. Both chains are long gone. Shortly after the Zukors' niece and I played "show and tell," my family and I were at a brunch with the Zukors and I was introduced to one of the owners of the Owl Drugstore chain. I actually took the opportunity to complain to him about how the Owl Drugs near my home didn't do a great job of stocking and tidying their comic book rack.
Anyway, that's what you need to know about how we came to know the Zukors. They did many nice things for our family. My father made it clear he would never accept money from them but we got invited to a lot of fancy dinners and such. We also got some nice leftovers. The Zukors were supporters of the arts and had tickets for everything. They had tickets for a special charity screening of the then-new movie It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World for the evening of Saturday, November 23, 1963. Due to the events of Friday, November 22, they didn't feel like going…so they gave us their tickets.
So it was because of the Zukors that I got to see what instantly became one of my favorite movies and in some ways, a life-changing experience. Oh, I probably would have seen it a few weeks later but a few weeks later, the film was seriously trimmed. I got to see it in the longest version that ever played in a theater.
Some years later, the Zukors had tickets to a production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum that was playing at the Ahmanson Theater in Downtown Los Angeles. It starred Phil Silvers, Larry Blyden, Nancy Walker, Lew Parker, Carl Ballantine, many other wonderful folks and a superb, gorgeous dancer named Charlene Ryan who is now married to the noted cartoonist, Sergio Aragonés. Because they were donors to the Ahmanson, they had six terrific seats — second row center! — to the second performance, which took place on October 13, 1971. Two of them were occupied by my father and me.
So it was because of the Zukors that I got to see what instantly became one of my favorite musical comedies and in some ways, a life-changing experience. If not for them, I might not have seen it at all…and certainly not from such great seats.
The Zukors were members of the Hillcrest Country Club, an establishment that was built back when other country clubs in this town wouldn't let you join if you were poor and/or Jewish. Every so often, Ben and Betty invited us to brunch or dinner there and I got to see from not-too-afar, stars like Jack Benny, George Burns, Danny Kaye, Milton Berle and so many others. On one particularly memorable afternoon that I've written about, I met and spoke with Groucho Marx.
So it was because of the Zukors that I got to meet one of my favorite comedians and that was, of course, a life-changing experience.
There were other things they did for us but I'm thinking now of just one. When I was around twelve, Mr. Zukor gave me a gold watch. I believe someone had given it to him and he already had nine or so so he gave it to me. It was very handsome and it looked very expensive and I wasn't sure I should touch it, let alone wear it. Around that time, my mother needed to have a watch of hers repaired so they took along the gift Mr. Zukor gave me and had it appraised. The man at the store said it was worth about a thousand dollars…and this was 1964 when a thousand bucks could do more than fill your gas tank twice.
He offered us two deals for it on the spot: $350 cash or he'd sell it for us for a 50% commission. He said, "What I'd do is place it in my display case with a price of $1,500 on it. I'll bet that within a year, maybe six months, someone will walk in and offer me $1,000 for it and we'd settle somewhere around $1,250." With my okay, my father turned down both options. As I said, he'd always declined to accept money from Ben Zukor and to turn around and sell the watch felt too much like taking money. Also, it seemed like a sound investment. Who knew? Maybe by the time I was ready to go to college, that watch could pay for it!
I certainly wasn't going to wear a watch worth that kind of money. I actually don't like wearing watches at all and before I gave 'em up, I busted or lost a lot of $9.99 Timex ones. So we put the watch in the family safe deposit box and I forgot all about it. Recently when my mother passed away and I sold her house, I needed to visit her safe deposit box to get some papers and I decided while I was at it to empty it out and move anything important in there to mine. That's when I came across the watch. I'd been into that safe deposit box before that but this was the first time I really paused to consider what to do with it.
If it was worth over a thousand bucks in '64, what might it be worth now? I'm not sure since I haven't had it appraised but I searched on eBay and found watches that look identical selling for around $150…and no, I didn't accidentally type too few zeroes in that amount.
I put it away in my safe deposit box. Maybe someday, I'll have it professionally appraised and I'll find out that this model is amazingly rare or that the gold is gold or that it once belonged to Gable. Right now, it's precious because it reminds me of Ben and Betty Zukor and how nice they were to me and my family.
