Excerpt from HOLLYWOOD BE THY NAME:Someone may place a wreath on your grave, but the headstone will remain unmarked, for only your children can write the epitaph. What momentos will you leave to record your passing?
- Los Angeles Times, 13 April 1967 It is said that Georgie Jessel, long noted for his many eulogies at funerals of the Hollywood famous, was so certain that he and only he could handle the oration at his own service, he prerecorded a long and glowing tribute to himself. No doubt others have written the epitaphs to be carved on their headstones, such as the one attributed to W.C. Fields: "Frankly, I'd rather be in Philadelphia," and the one more to the point by an unknown decedent which read, "See, I told you I didn't feel well!" All this shows that contrary to the quotation above, it is possible to bypass your children in the writing of your epitaph -- but such was not the case with the Warner Brothers.
In a certain sense, this book is the epitaph written by their children and grandchildren about unique forebears who left a bittersweet legacy of triumph and tragedy.
It is difficult to think of these men as having been brothers, so different were they one from the other. Harry, the oldest, so serious, moralistic, hopeful that movies would be used primarily to educate and uplift humanity. Sam, full of fun and ever seeking to win friends and be where he could make things happen. His early death, and that of Harry's son, Lewis, changed the brothers' course. Abe, easygoing and calm in storms, was perhaps the brother who most enjoyed life. Henry, David and Milton were all struck down before they could leave a firm imprint.
Then there was Jack, the most complex and confounding of all the brothers. For years I have tried to find the keys to the labyrinth of my father's mind, but it remains now what it was throughout most of his lifetime: boxes within boxes, rooms without doors, questions without answers, jokes without points, scenarios based on contradictions, omissions and deceit. His was the anguished story of a man driven by fear, ambition and the quest for absolute power and control -- the little brother telling the big boys he saw as his tormentors to go to hell.
If ever two people were born on a collision course, Harry and Jack L. Warner were those men. Some time at the midpoint of their lives their basic moral outlooks took violently opposite turnings, and the most talented scriptwriters could not have created a more tragic plot. This almost biblical drama of brother against brother and how it played out in its final lamentable episodes is the story told here.
You will read of the sons of immigrants at first closely bound together, achieving impossible dreams as they began to produce films on what Hollywood then called Poverty Row. Through the years of absolute trust in each other, blind faith that they would achieve what they went after, and the brutally hard work it took to achieve those dreams, they finally assembled one of the world's great motion picture production, distribution and exhibition enterprises, whose crowning achievement was the marriage of sound to image -- the first commercially successful sound picture.
Then, engaging in the most terrible kind of warfare, the battle of brother against brother, they transformed the great company they had created and nurtured into the betrayal of a dream.
While Harry Warner, like his brother Abe, seemed to be one man, devoted to his family and friends, charity and honest relationships, Jack L. Warner was many different men. He could be a likeable fellow, telling jokes to relax and entertain an audience, then suddenly, as he grew in years and power, turn unbelievably cruel in debasing those absent or unable to respond. He would mouth maxims and philosophies counseling great deeds, the triumph of good or evil, and the furtherance of a beneficent moral humanity, sounding even at times like Benjamin, his father, whose warmth of heart and soul were never questioned. Then, without warning, from the dark recesses of his psyche, he would shock listeners with vulgarity and foul language he would never permit from others in his presence.
Jack's ego, which he pretended didn't exist, was actually enormous. When he parried arguments with his famous question, "Whose name is on the water tower?" he was ramming home the fact that he and he alone ran the studio, and that the symbol of his name high in the sky was like holy confirmation. Although his name was indeed on the Warner tower, his older brother Harry, president of the company, had the corporate position and power to overrule him, and it was his name too on the water tower, though he never mentioned it. This was the seed of discord that would grow into a choking vine of disaster.
Now they are gone, but the great company they started lives on, reincarnated in another body. It's a pity that Jack L. Warner did not live to come into contact and conflict with those who eventually took what had once been Warner Brothers Pictures Inc. and threw it into the pot with other ingredients to meld and merge into Time-Warner, the world's greatest media corporation. No water tower exists large enough to hold the names and egos of these men. I can almost smell the smoke rising, feel the heat and flame of that imagined confrontation, with J.L. screaming: "Time-Warner! What bastard gave us second billing? Warner-Time -- that's the way I want it! Reshoot the main title!"
Many years ago Warner Brothers Pictures adopted a motto lifted out of a New York Times review: "Combining Good Citizenship with Good Filmmaking." The tragedy of their story is that a more descriptive motto for the company and its founding brothers might better read, "United they stood -- divided they fell."
- Jack Warner, Jr., co-author