Boxing writer, novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who died this week, was the only man both to win an Oscar and be inducted into boxing's hall of fame. George Kimballrecalls the sometimes controversial career of a friend of 40 years
BUDD SCHULBERG was 95 years old and had been in poor health for months, so his death was hardly unexpected, but the unsettling moment arrived late Wednesday afternoon when his son, Benn, phoned to tell me his father had passed away an hour earlier. Budd was the only man ever to have both won an Oscar (for On the Waterfront) and been inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, but he was also my dear friend for almost 40 years, and I miss him already.
Budd was 15 years old in 1929 when he sailed to England with his father, Hollywood mogul BP Schulberg. On that crossing, the Schulbergs made the acquaintance of a Georgia boxer who boxed under the nomme de guerreYoung Stribling. Upon learning that both Schulbergs were boxing fans, Stribling promised them ringside tickets for his upcoming bout at the Royal Albert Hall, where he was to fight an ungainly Italian named Primo Carnera.
If watching his father drop what he described as "a casually reckless wager" of £1,000 when Carnera won by disqualification wasn't enough to inspire a healthy scepticism in the younger Schulberg, the result of the return match certainly did. In what appeared to have been a pre-arranged scenario, Carnera and Stribling met again in Paris three weeks later, and this time Carnera returned the favour by getting disqualified in the seventh round. The episode made an impression on Schulberg, who would base his cautionary novel, The Harder They Fall, on the illusory rise and inglorious fall of Carnera.
Eighty years later, Budd returned to London again. In February he flew across the Atlantic for the premiere of On the Waterfront, Steven Berkoff's stage adaptation of Budd's Academy Award-winning 1954 screenplay, at the Theatre Royal in Haymarket.
Benn Schulberg and I were in Madison Square Garden, at the Cotto-Jennings fight, the night his parents were due to return. Benn got a call telling him that his dad had been taken off an aircraft at Kennedy airport and rushed to the emergency room at Jamaica Hospital. Somewhere in mid-flight his blood pressure had dropped alarmingly; he barely had a pulse.
Budd improved enough over the next few days to be moved to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Eventually he was allowed home, but he remained in a weakened state. And then, a couple of months ago, when he was well enough to undergo what was supposed to be routine surgery to repair a hernia, they found the cancer in his belly.
In June he came straight from a chemotherapy appointment to the boxing writers' dinner, where he received a standing ovation. Then, just a few weeks ago, he attended a staged reading of On the Waterfrontin Hoboken. That event featured several cast members of The Sopranos on the turf Schulberg's play had immortalised. "He probably shouldn't have, but at the last minute he told me he wanted to go," reported Benn. "He was in pretty bad shape, and I think everyone could tell that."
I'D READ BUDD in my youth, long before I met him, starting, as most do, with his novel What Makes Sammy Run?, without understanding at the time the bedrock of personal experience underlying that book, or that its publication would, as his father had warned him it might, retard what had been a promising Hollywood career. It didn't kill it altogether, of course. Budd was assigned to co-write a script with another member of the newly fallen, F Scott Fitzgerald, and while that project turned into a disaster – essentially it was an all-expenses-paid drinking binge – it did provide the basis for another splendid book based on the experience, The Disenchanted. But the legacy of Sammywas that Budd afterwards found it a struggle to get his movies, including On the Waterfront, before the cameras.
He straddled the worlds of literature and pugilism without being a dilettante in either. He sparred regularly with Mushy Callahan well beyond middle age. The night of the Frazier-Ali fight of the century Budd started to the arena in Muhammad Ali’s limousine, and then, when the traffic got heavy, got out and walked to Madison Square Garden with Ali. And when push came to shove, he put on the gloves with both Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer and kicked both of their asses.
He was afflicted with a lifelong stammer that grew worse when he became excited or impatient, which wasn’t often. Over the years this probably evolved into an asset to his writing and his unerring ear for dialogue, because most conversations were so one-sided that he became a good listener.
Budd and I had sat together at another Boxing Writers Dinner at least a quarter century earlier. I remember being pretty full of myself, because I’d just come back from a fight in Vegas, where I’d had a pretty good week at the tables as well. I’d won what seemed to me a ton of money, but Budd punctured my reverie long enough to say: “Let me ask you this, George. Could you have afforded to lose $5,000?” He knew I had two small children, and that of course I couldn’t.
He then told me the cautionary tale of his own father, whose gambling put his family on the brink of bankruptcy a couple of times. He told me the story that would later appear in Moving Pictures, the biography of his early days in Hollywood, of the floating poker game that convened at the Schulberg manse just before young Budd was sent to do his homework. When he came downstairs for breakfast eight hours later, BP Schulberg was still at the table, where he was writing out a check for $20,000 to Chico Marx.
BUDD HAD BEEN a Communist Party member in the late 1930s, but had repudiated his ties by 1940. The Hitler-Stalin pact may have been the catalyst, but Budd had by then witnessed first-hand the evils of Stalinism on a tour of the Soviet Union. Although he retained a leftist outlook throughout his life, he was tarred by his agreement to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (Huac) in 1951.
Many of his colleagues who refused were blacklisted, and lives were ruined. Budd was branded a pariah by many of his former colleagues, and his Huac legacy – yes, he named names, although none the witch-hunters didn't already have – made him fair game for the rest of his life, particularly after On The Waterfront, directed by another former party member-turned-witness, Elia Kazan, was released in 1954.
Kazan had earlier worked on a waterfront-themed project called "The Hook" with playwright Arthur Miller. The biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, would later claim that "Miller had refused to turn the gangsters into communists, as the Columbia Pictures mogul Harry Cohn and the Hollywood union bosses wanted him to. The film was later written that way by Budd Schulberg (another self-serving friendly witness) as On the Waterfront." Although this was not presented as a direct quote, it was somewhat deviously dropped into a dialogue with Miller, and the implication was that the sentiment came from Miller himself.
It was an allegation that would have struck anyone who'd ever seen, or read, On the Waterfrontas preposterous. There are no more any bad-guy communists in On the Waterfront than there are in A View from the Bridge, the play Miller eventually wrote from "The Hook". Moreover, Budd had purchased rights to a New York Sun series about labour strife on the Jersey docks in 1947, years before Miller's flirtation with Kazan.
"When I was working on On the Waterfront, I didn't know about Arthur Miller," Budd told an English newspaper this past February. "They were absolutely two separate, if overlapping projects."
Miller died without the two men ever discussing the subject. But in May I was invited to participate in Listowel Writers' Week in Kerry. Another of the invitees was Miller's daughter, the novelist and director, Rebecca Miller. One morning at the Listowel Arms I cited the offending passage from Meyers's book to Rebecca. "That's absurd," she said. "I'm sure my father never believed that. A View from the Bridgeand On the Waterfrontwere always going to be two separate plays. One had nothing to do with the other."
I know I told Benn about that conversation when I returned from Europe. But now it occurs to me that I never got a chance to tell Budd, who would, I suspect, have found it comforting.
This is an edited version of an appreciation that appeared on boxing website TheSweetScience.com and appears here by permission