Budd Schulberg, Boss of the Brando Waterfront

Marlon Brando’s in the back seat of a taxi with Rod Steiger. One man is a dockworker and former prize fighter, the other his older brother Charley. “Remember that night in the Garden?” Brando says. “You came down to my dressing room and you said, ‘Kid, this ain’t your night. We’re going for the price on Wilson.’ You remember that? ‘This ain’t your night’! My night!? I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors on the ballpark and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville! You was my brother, Charley, you shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit so I wouldn’t have to take them dives for the short-end money.” Steiger says, “Oh, I had some bets down for you. You saw some money.” And Brando replies, “You don’t understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I could’ve been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. It was you, Charley.”

Budd Schulberg was most certainly a somebody who did a lot of writing over a career that spanned Hollywood’s golden age and ended Wednesday with his death at 95, but none of his words packed a punch quite like that legendary exchange from On the Waterfront, the 1954 dockside drama he wrote for director Elia Kazan. In 2005, the “contender” line was chosen as No. 3 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest movie quotes, right after Clark Gable’s “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” from Gone With the Wind and Brando’s “I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse” from The Godfather. In an earlier AFI poll, On the Waterfront was named the eighth greatest American movie of all time.

(Read: “All TIME 100 Movies: On The Waterfront.”)

On the Waterfront was seen as both a bold exposé of racketeers and a defense of those film people, such as Schulberg and Kazan, who had named former colleagues as Communists before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The film won eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Director and Actor (Brando) and Schulberg himself would win one for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay. He was the second-generation moviemaker and self-described “Hollywood Prince” whose most memorable work anatomized corruption in the more rapacious forms of entertainment: boxing (The Harder They Fall and it should be noted that Schulberg was former chief boxing correspondent for Sports Illustrated), TV and radio (A Face in the Crowd) and the movie business itself (his 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run?). Two 1940s books and a few ’50s movies may seem a small canon of work for a writer who lived so long, but Schulberg’s oeuvre had an immediate impact and a lasting legacy.

Budd Wilson Schulberg was born in New York on March 27, 1914, the son of Benjamin Perceval (B.P.) Schulberg, who became the production boss at Paramount, the most glamorous of the young studios. For Budd, as he wrote in the memoir Moving Pictures, Hollywood “was Home Sweet Home, a lovely place to play with lions and alligators, to ride my bike down lanes of pine and pepper trees, and to make lemonade from my own lemon tree.” While B.P. rode herd over Cecil B. De Mille and Ernst Lubitsch, Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich, the teenage Budd enjoyed the attention of his father’s sexy stars. Clara Bow, the It Girl of silent pictures, ran her fingers through the boy’s hair and even suggested they go out partying.

(Flashback 1973: TIME Cover — Marlon Brando)

B.P. and his wife Adeline Jaffe, a literary agent, were rare New Deal Democrats among conservative moguls like Louis B. Mayer and unreconstructed primitives like Harry Cohn; and Budd extended their liberalism into membership in the Communist Party. After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1936 and returning to Hollywood, he was placed on the board of the new Screenwriters Guild to agitate for Party causes. He also worked on some B movies. On Winter Carnival (1939), a fictionalizing of the annual Dartmouth frolic, his co writer was F. Scott Fitzgerald, cadging for jobs in California after the drying up of his first act as the chronicler of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald would die in 1940, leaving his Hollywood novel The Last Tycoon famously unfinished. Schulberg took the inside-movies notion, ran with it and produced What Makes Sammy Run?

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In Moving Pictures, Schulberg slammed Fitzgerald’s early novels and B.P.’s movies, charging that both were “stricken with a double vision and a double morality, glorifying the society they were so heatedly exposing, exposing the society they could not resist glorifying.” He wrote the character of Sammy Glick, his novel’s screenwriter antihero, as such a crass schemer, appropriator of other men’s work and trampler of decency that no one could possibly mistake him for a role model. Yet Sammy became just that for many a brash entrepreneur in Hollywood and on Wall Street. Schulberg later said he was pained that Glick, reputedly based on writer-producer Jerry Wald, had become a template for go-getter corporate America. The novel did not endear Schulberg to Mayer, who told B.P. that Budd should be deported. “He’s a U.S. citizen,” B.P. supposedly answered. “Where the hell are you gonna deport him? Catalina Island?” Sammy remains one of the few popular Hollywood novels never to have been turned into a Hollywood movie.

While serving in the Navy during World War II, Schulberg was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), where he worked with director John Ford’s documentary unit. Schulberg created photo documentation for the Nuremburg trials and personally arrested German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl at her chalet in Kitzbühel, Austria. Following his military service, Schulberg wrote the fight-racket novel The Harder They Fall and had no more movie credits until he and Kazan teamed up for On the Waterfront, for which John Garfield, Frank Sinatra and the young Paul Newman were touted for the Terry Malloy role that Brando made his own. The project brought out the best in Schulberg’s muckraking temperament, and served as an apologia for informing on fellow (Daily) workers. On naming names, Schulberg later said: “I felt that what the Party was doing secretively was very wrong; it could have been the Ku Klux Klan or the American Nazis. And nobody came out and said that Stalin was killing more people than Hitler.”

The Oscar platform Schulberg had mounted for Waterfront proved a soapbox in A Face in the Crowd (1957), another Kazan film with Andy Griffith as Lonesome Rhodes, a singing hobo who becomes a multimedia demagogue. (The character was said to be fashioned on folksy radio and TV host Arthur Godfrey.) Lonesome’s derisive description of his audience is pure Schulberg: “Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers — everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle. … They’re mine! I own ’em! They think like I do. Only they’re even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for ’em.” Of course it was Schulberg who was doing the thinking for moviegoers.

After 1958’s Wind Across the Everglades, which dramatized the mission of the Audubon Society to protect Florida’s plume birds, Schulberg decided he was done with Hollywood. He wrote several volumes of memoirs and adapted Sammy, Waterfront and his Fitzgerald novel, The Disenchanted, into Broadway shows. By the 1970s he had retired to Westhampton, L.I., as the grizzled grandee of American fiction, page and screen.

Yet his old, immortal works kept pursuing Schulberg. Just a week ago before his death, he attended a staged reading of On the Waterfront in Hoboken, N.J., where it was set and filmed. Among the players were Vincent Pastore (Big Pussy on The Sopranos) as the mob boss Johnny Friendly and Jason Cerbone (Jackie Aprile, Jr., also a Sopranos alumni) in the Brando role. The 55-year-old script still had the fresh stench of local corruption. Hoboken’s new mayor, Peter Cammarano, had recently been arrested in the sweeping federal indictment of Jersey politicians; he would resign two days after the reading. A part of Schulberg must have been pleased at this latest criminal evidence of the society he kept exposing but never glorified.

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