The Christy Corp. When Paramount offered Nunnally Johnson his first Holly wood job, in 1932, he had ended more than a decade of newspaper work (on the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Post) in order to devote all his time to fiction.
But the palmy days of Smart Set were over, and the depression-ridden Saturday Evening Post no longer had much room for his stories. Johnson had to borrow money to get to the Coast. He is unlikely ever to have to borrow money again.
He wrote Bedtime Story for Maurice Chevalier and Mama Loves Papa in collaboration with Arthur Kober; for 20th Century he wrote The House of Rothschild and Moulin Rouge, both highly successful pictures. By 1935, when Fox merged with 20th Century, Johnson was already regarded as a fairly important asset. By the time he decided to go independent, last year, he was Fox's highest-priced writer ($3,500 a week), was doing the lion's share of the studio's most important pictures, and was privileged to turn down the most desperately fat contract Hollywood has ever offered a writer—a flat five-year contract, for 52 weeks a year without options, at $4,500 a week, with six weeks' vacation at full pay.
Instead, Mr. Johnson is now incorporated as the Christy Corp. (named after his two-year-old daughter), which is to write and produce two pictures a year for International. Like Gary Cooper, also under exclusive contract as actor-producer, he will get 49% of the profits from every picture he produces. At the moment he has taken ten weeks off on a private deal to write a script which Cooper will produce and act in—again for International. For this side order he is getting a flat $125,000.
Writers v. Directors. Although he is regarded around Hollywood as something of a genius himself, Nunnally Johnson loathes geniuses. Once, after producing a picture whose director was an alleged genius, he explained: "It isn't worth all the extra trouble you have to go through to get a worse picture." He does not think very highly of directors in any event, as compared with writers. Once he said that the most important function of a good director is to see that the actors don't go home too early. He is, nonetheless, one of the best-liked men in Hollywood.
Johnson mots have become legendary around Hollywood and Manhattan. When Walter Winchell met Johnson at the opening of Tobacco Road, he sneered, gently: "That's all about your kind of people, isn't it, Nunnally?" Replied Columbus, Georgia's native son: "Hell, where I come from we call that the country club set." Thrice married, twice divorced, Johnson once told friends: "I always insist on the custody of the mother-in-law."
Johnson also originated the prototype of the famous remark about Thomas E. Dewey credited, curiously enough, to his friends.*A friend of Johnson asked him of a mutual acquaintance: "Isn't he an awful jerk?" "You don't know what an awful jerk he is," Johnson replied, "until you get to know his better side."
CURRENT & CHOICE
Arsenic and Old Lace (Gary Grant, Priscilla Lane; TIME, Sept.11).
Hail the Conquering Hero (Eddie Bracken, Ella Raines, William Demarest; TIME, Aug. 21).