Wilson Mizner (May 19 1876, Benicia, California - April 3 1933,
Los Angeles, California) was an American
playwright, raconteur, and entrepreneur. His best-known plays are The Deep Purple,
produced in 1910, and The Greyhound, produced in 1912. He was manager and co-owner of
The Brown Derby restaurant in Los Angeles,
California, and was affiliated with his brother, Addison Mizner, in a series of
scams and picaresque misadventures that inspired Stephen Sondheim's Bounce.
Life
Wilson ("Bill") Mizner was born in Benicia, California, one of eight children
including brothers William, Edgar, Murray, Wilson, Addison, Henry, and Lansing. Sir Joshua
Reynolds was their great great uncle. Their father, Lansing Bond Mizner was named
Benjamin Harrison's Envoy Extraordinary and Minister
Plenipotentiary to the Central American states, and the family moved to
Guatemala, the brothers spending their teenage years there—robbing churches, they later
claimed.
In 1897, Addison and Wilson, with brothers William and Edgar, travelled north to the
Alaska Gold Rush, which they spent bilking miners rather than looking for gold.
Wilson operated badger games, managed fighters, robbed a restaurant to get chocolate for his
girlfriend "Nellie the Pig" Lamore (saying "Your chocolates or your life!"), and grub-staked prospector Sid Grauman, later of Grauman's Chinese Theatre. He also
met Wyatt Earp, who became a lifelong friend.
Addison and Wilson fled Alaska for New York, where Addison opened a Fifth Avenue shop where he sold Guatemalan relics and colonial-era furnishings at dramatic
markups. Wilson became a New York dilettante, raconteur, and Broadway playwright. He
married Mary Adelaide Yerkes, widow of industrialist Charles Tyson Yerkes, in
1905: while Wilson was penniless (and 29 years old), his new wife, aged 47[1], brought between $2 million and $7.5 million to the marriage, as well as
several artistic masterpieces that Wilson duplicated, selling the copies as originals.
The marriage did not last long. Wilson ran the Rand Hotel, posting signs that "Guests must carry out their own dead" and "No
opium smoking in the elevators." He managed several boxers, fixing the fights to enhance his gambling revenues. When one of his
fighters, Stanley Ketchel, was murdered, Wilson joked, "Tell 'em to start counting ten over him, and he'll get up."
Wilson's playwriting career was undermined by his laziness and an opium addiction that started
when he was prescribed painkillers after an assault. He was arrested in 1919 for running a
gambling den on Long Island. He and Addison then travelled south to
Florida, where a land boom made it possible for the brothers to swindle some of America's
wealthiest men before they were exposed in 1926 by General T.
Coleman du Pont. Their customers began defaulting on their loan payments, and a railroad embargo on building materials led
to the collapse of the brothers' Florida venture, the Mizner Development Corporation.
Leaving Addison behind holding the bag, Wilson returned to California, obtained backing from Jack Warner and Gloria Swanson and bought into, and managed, the
Brown Derby, and wrote screenplays for some of the early talkies. His best known film work is the screenplay for the Michael
Curtiz film 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. Wilson called his
Hollywood years "a trip through a sewer in a glassbottomed boat."
Several of the brothers' friends from New York, including Marie Dressler and
Ben Hecht, helped them in their later escapades. Another friend, Irving Berlin, started, but did not complete, a musical based on Wilson's life.
Wilson Mizner is noted for many bons mots such as "Be nice to people on the way up because you'll meet the same people
on the way down" and "If you copy from one author, it's plagiarism. If you copy from two, it's research."[2] Mizner suffered the same fate as Dorothy Parker: both are better remembered today for their witty repartee than for specific literary
works.
Anita Loos based the leading character in the movie San Francisco on Wilson Mizner, whom she described as "America's most fascinating outlaw".
Alva Johnson wrote:
[Wilson] Mizner had a vast firsthand criminal erudition, which he commercialized as a dramatist on Broadway and a screenwriter
in Hollywood. At various times during his life, he had been a miner, confidence man, ballad singer, medical lecturer, man of
letters, general utility man in a segregated district, cardsharp, hotel man, songwriter, dealer in imitation masterpieces of art,
prizefighters, prizefight manager, Florida promoter, and roulette-wheel fixer. He was an idol of low society and a pet of high.
He knew women, as his brother Addison said, from the best homes and houses.
Writings
Plays
Stories
- "The Discord of Harmony", The All-Story Magazine, November 1908
- "You’re Dead!", Argosy (UK), May 1937
Famous Quotes
- "Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research."
- "I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education."
Notes
- ^ She was not, as is often stated, in her 70s or 80s
- ^ Quoted by Stuart B. McIver, Dreamers, Schemers and
Scalawags, Pineapple Press, Sarasota, Florida, 1994. ISBN 1-56164-034-4
Other References
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
- Alva Johnston, The Legendary Mizners, Farrar, Straus and Young, 1933. (Reissued in paperback 2003, ISBN
978-0-374-51928-5)
- Stuart B. McIver, Dreamers, Schemers and Scalawags, Pineapple Press, Florida, 1994. ISBN 978-1-56164-155-0
- John Burke, Rogue's Progress, New York, 1975, ISBN 978-0-399-11423-6
External links
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