Charles Lederer

Charles Davies Lederer
Born	December 31, 1910 New York, NY
Died	March 5, 1976 (age 65) Los Angeles, CA
Occupation	Screenwriter, director, producer, author
Spouse(s)	Virginia Welles (1940 - ? ) Anne Shirley (1949 - 1976)

Charles Davies Lederer (December 31, 1910 – March 5, 1976) was an American film writer and director.^[1] He was born in New York City, and was the son of two prominent figures in the American theater – Broadway producer George Lederer and singer Reine Davies (sister of actress Marion Davies). He was married to Virginia Welles, former wife of actor-director Orson Welles. Lederer's second wife was actress Anne Shirley.

He was a child prodigy and was admitted to UC Berkeley at the age of thirteen, but dropped out a few years later to work as a journalist for Hearst newspapers. When he was nineteen, he became friends with Ben Hecht, who introduced him to the New York literati. His friendship with Hecht led to his being hired to write additional dialogue for the film The Front Page. He later moved back to Hollywood to become a full-time screenwriter.

Lederer is recognized for his acerbic adaptations and collaborative screenplays of the 1940s and early 1950s. His screenplays frequently delved into the corrosive influences of wealth and power. Yet his comedy writing was also among the best of the period, and he, along with Hecht and Herman Mankiewicz became major contributors to the film genre known as "screwball comedy".

Personal life

Marion Davies' nephew

After his parents were separated in 1912, Lederer and his sister, Pepi, were raised by his mother's sister, actress Marion Davies. He grew up in Hollywood, spending much time at San Simeon, the "enchanted castle on the hill", where his aunt reigned as publisher William Randolph Hearst's mistress. "Hollywood was home to Lederer, where for most people it was a place they moved to in order to work for the movies. Virtually none of the film community had grown up in Los Angeles, but Lederer had been brought there when he was eleven by Marion Davies, his mother's sister... Lederer thus knew the movie colony inside out as seen from the top and wasn’t impressed ..."^{[2] :146}

Lederer's aunt, Marion Davies

"Everyone close to Marion knew that Charlie was her favorite person after Hearst." ^{[3] :10} "... he was her knight-errant and no one, not even Hearst, ever reckoned with Marion alone from then on; they knew that they were dealing, too, with nephew Charlie." ^{[3] :171}

The close connection with Marion gained Lederer a brief film role in Charlie Chaplin's 1931 film City Lights. Chaplin had met Lederer at San Simeon in the late 1920s, and cast him as a delivery boy in a comedy sequence cut from the final film. The legendary seven minute clip was first publicly shown in the 1983 documentary Unknown Chaplin.

Friendships

He was a close and lifelong friend of screenwriter Ben Hecht, who said Charles was “half Jewish and half Irish.” Hecht wired Rose, his wife, “I have met a new friend. He has pointed teeth, pointed ears, is nineteen years old, completely bald and stands on his head a great deal. His name is Charles Lederer. I hope to bring him back to civilization with me.” ^{[4] :408-410} Hecht's 1963 autobiography, Gaily, Gaily, was dedicated "For Charles Lederer, to read in his tub."^[5]

Hearst Castle at San Simeon

Lederer was famed on both coasts as a sardonic wit and "incessant practical joker," which endeared him to Hecht.^[2]:145 Bennett Cerf's book Shake Well Before Using describes an incident during Lederer's career in the Army during World War Two, when Lederer wreaked revenge on an Englishwoman who had been making rude remarks against Jews. Lederer was also great friends with Marx Brother Harpo Marx and the two constantly cooked up practical jokes at the balls and parties they attended at the estate of William Randolph Hearst such as stealing all the female guests' fur coats and draping them over the statues outside the estate during a heavy snowstorm.

Marriages

Lederer married Orson Welles’s ex-wife Virginia Nicholson Welles, in 1940, at San Simeon. “She got a divorce [from Welles] early in December 1939, and in the spring of 1940 she married Charlie… coming back to the Lederer home on Bedford Drive [in Los Angeles] with her young daughter, Chris, Welles’ first-born child.” ^{[3] :306}

"After Rita [Hayworth] threw him out, Orson installed himself in a beach house next door to the palatial Marion Davies estate, where his first wife, Virginia, and her husband, Charles Lederer, were living. In the past, earnestly trying to protect the best interests of Virginia and, particularly, of Christopher [daughter], Lederer had angry run-ins with Orson, whom he accused of not living up to the divorce settlement. Now, in the unlikeliest of turnarounds, Orson and the witty, intelligent Lederer became great chums. … ‘I liked them together,’ says Orson of the Lederers, with whom he entered into a friendly relationship that he describes as a ‘strange design for living at the beach.’" ^{[6] :343-344}

Final years

Charles Lederer "isolated himself in his last years, contorted from arthritis, addicted to narcotics."^[7]:317

Screenwriting career

Career friends

He was also friends with screenwriters Joseph and his brother Herman Mankiewicz, co-screenwriter of Citizen Kane: "Herman told Joe to come to the office of their mutual friend Charlie Lederer ... " ^[7]:144 Herman “saw Hearst as ‘a finagling, calculating, Machiavellian figure.’ But also, with Charlie Lederer, … wrote and had printed parodies of Hearst newspapers ...” ^[7]:212-213

As described by Pauline Kael, “Mankiewicz found himself on story-swapping terms with the power behind it all, Hearst himself. When he had been in Hollywood only a short time, he met Marion Davies and Hearst through his friendship with Charles Lederer, a writer, then in his early twenties, whom Ben Hecht had met and greatly admired in New York when Lederer was still in his teens. Lederer, a child prodigy, who had entered college at thirteen, got to know Mankiewicz ... Lederer was Marion Davies’s nephew – the son of her sister Reine ... Marion was childless, and Lederer was very close to her; he spent a great deal of his time at her various dwelling places, and took his friends to meet both her and Hearst.” ^{[8] :254-255}

According to Hecht biographer, William MacAdams, "When Hecht began looking around for a new collaborator ... he thought of Charlie Lederer, whom he had met on one of his first trips to Los Angeles....In a letter to screenwriter Gene Fowler, Hecht called Lederer 'a sort of poisonous bud -- very tender soul -- a Peter Pan weaned on distilled cunt and with a moonbeam for a cock.' ... Charlie captivated the New York literati just as the other Charlie (MacArthur) had a few years earlier."^[2]:145

Leading screenplays

His friendship with Hecht led to his being hired, in 1931, to write additional dialogue for the film version of the 1928 play The Front Page. In 1933, he made contributions to Hecht's screenplay for Topaze without being credited.

From 1940 to 1943 Lederer worked at MGM where he wrote a series of light comedies, usually centering on mismatched couples. Comrade X (1940), written in collaboration with Ben Hecht and directed by King Vidor is the story an American in Russia (Clark Gable) who falls in love with a streetcar conductor (Hedy Lamarr). He penned the screenplay for the classic 1951 science-fiction/horror film The Thing from Another World, directed by Howard Hawks and co-wrote the original 1960's Ocean's Eleven. Lederer wrote or co-wrote screenplays (notably with Ben Hecht) for Howard Hawks's production of His Girl Friday (a remake of The Front Page) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and the Lewis Milestone remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando. His Girl Friday has remained his most popular and critically acclaimed screenplay. ^[9]:209 At the suggestion of the films' director, Howard Hawks, Lederer changed the sex of the lead character in the play, Hildy Johnson, from male to female.^[9]

With Ben Hecht, he co-wrote the original Kiss of Death which was to feature the actor Richard Widmark's chilling debut as the psychopathic killer with a giggle. In addition, he directed the 1959 film Never Steal Anything Small, an adaptation of a play by Maxwell Anderson and Rouben Mamoulian, starring James Cagney. The Spirit of St. Louis was Lederer's last significant film work. The films that followed that were primarily vehicles for established stars.

Lederer was valued as a Hollywood screenwriter who produced lively, acerbic adaptations and worked well in collaboration with others. He was also a member of another circle of writers, on the East Coast, which included Moss Hart, George S. Kaufman, Howard Dietz, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and the editor Harold Ross. These writers were to become the nucleus of the Algonquin Round Table.

Awards

In 1954, he won three Tony Awards for the Broadway Musical Kismet, as Best Producer (Musical), as Best Author (Musical) with Luther Davis, and as co-author of the book who, with several collaborators, contributed to the Best Musical win.

Filmography

Writer

Director

• Never Steal Anything Small (1959)
• On the Loose (1951)
• Fingers at the Window (1942)

Actor