Cinema: The Showman

“I’m so happy I sometimes get scared,” Mike Todd said last month. “I get damned scared I can’t last; the law of averages is being just a little too good to me.”

Todd’s optimism was always somewhere outside the law of averages. While others brooded over the recession and mourned the future of the cinema, he was committing millions to the filming of Don Quixote, his latest project. He glibly claimed that his 1957 Oscar-winning Around the World in 80 Days, which has already grossed $33 million, “will be the first movie ever to make $100 million.” Said Todd: “I don’t know where I’m going to spend it all.” But no one who knew of his big-spending sprees and worldwide princely junkets with his wife, Cinemactress Elizabeth Taylor, doubted that Mike would find a way.

Dames & Comedy. Too much money was not always a problem; Mike Todd’s personal finances, like an anesthetist’s bag, alternately puffed and collapsed. Fifty years or so ago in Minnesota, when he was Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen, son of a Polish rabbi, the family was poor. But before he was 20, he and his brother Frank had made and lost nearly $1,000,000 in Chicago real estate ventures. His later success as a Broadway producer (“I believe in giving the customers a meat-and-potatoes show. Dames and comedy”) brought in big money almost as fast as Todd got rid of it. The Hot Mikado (1939), Star and Garter (1942), Mexican Hayride (1944) and Up in Central Park (1945) were so successful that by 1947 Todd’s creditors numbered more than 100 and sued him for more than $1,100,000.

He recently said: “I’ve never been poor, only broke. Being poor is a frame of mind. Being broke is a temporary situation.” He began to straighten out the temporary situation of 1947 with As the Girls Go, which opened-a scant year after bankruptcy-on money provided by angels whose faith in Mike was unshaken. Todd invested early in Cinerama, sold out and invested in Todd-AO, sold his interest in this successful process to help finance 80 Days. He wanted everything to be big, fast, spectacular. On the first anniversary of 80 Days, he threw a party for 18,000 friends in Madison Square Garden that was a spectacular flop. “Well,” shrugged Mike, “you can’t say it was a little bust.”

A Flash Like Lightning. Actress Taylor, mother of Todd’s infant daughter, was running a 102° temperature and gave up plans to go with her husband on his flight to New York last weekend. Bound for a Friars Club dinner honoring him as the showman of the year, Todd took off from Burbank in his twelve-passenger Lockheed Lodestar with Pilot William Verner, 45, Copilot Tom Barclay, 34. and Art Cohn, 49, a film scriptwriter and biographer who was writing The First Nine Lives of Mike Todd. Over the badlands of the Zuni Indian country west of Albuquerque, the twin-engined Lucky Liz was caught in a fast-moving storm. One of the pilots radioed for permission to climb because of icing, got it, radioed back when the plane was at 13,000 feet. Minutes later, a flash like lightning was seen in the hills southwest of Grants, N. Mex. Mike Todd and all aboard were dead.