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Smooth Blend. Just how 37-year-old Wald does it rankles his detractors, who cultivate the legend that he is one of the Hollywood comers who sat for the composite portrait of the fast-rising heel in Budd Schulberg's novel, What Makes Sammy Run?. Like Sammy, he broke into the movies as a hack scripter. Like Sammy, Jerry has stoked his career with a singleminded ambition, a glib tongue, monumental speed and endurance, a flair for opportunism and an enormous talent for picking other men's brains and putting the pickings to work. Whether a credit to Wald or a reflection on Hollywood, these qualities blend smoothly into the makeup of a first-rate movie producer.
As an 18-year-old New York University sophomore, Brooklyn-born Wald landed a job as radio columnist for the old New York Graphic on the strength of sample columns written with the help of a CBS office boy. A free-lance fan magazine piece about the late Crooner Russ Colombo won him a Warners' writer contract when he was 20, and his career began in earnest. As a producer, after nine years of scripting, he quickly displayed a knack for grabbing story ideas out of the headlines (Action in the North Atlantic, Destination Tokyo), and for hastily getting aboard profitable trends. Example: no sooner had Paramount proved that a spicy James M. Cain story like Double Indemnity could be put on the screen than Wald got to work on Cain's Mildred Pierce.
Austere Wage. Wald modestly denies that his weekly production feat is a one-man job. "That's a crazy idea. How could one man—even me—do so much? I get the best writers and directors in the business and I let them do their jobs. I just supervise and advise them." Actually, his "supervision" calls for a ten-hour day of directing his writers, writing his directors, casting his actors, cutting and editing film, reviewing musical scores, sets and costumes, compromising the clashes between the commercial mind and the artistic temperament. Most of his spare time, with his wife and two children, is uncluttered by Hollywood's social excesses or such private indulgences as drinking and smoking. He spends it in a tireless hunt for story material in 70-odd publications a month, plus novels, plays and synopses.
For his pains, Wald gets only $2,700 a week, about half of what he is worth to a top Hollywood studio at the going rate for production geniuses. Even on a living scale modest for Hollywood bigwigs (a ten-room house without swimming pool or tennis court), he moans that he can save little of it after agents' fees and taxes. Though tied to his handsomely austere wage by an optionless long-term contract that runs through 1951, Wald gets some comfort from recognition. He flirts occasionally with another studio to learn how much he is really worth, and does not object to pressagents trumpeting his praises. Recently, when Jack Warner ordered a publicity blackout on Wald, ostensibly to cut down demands on his prize producer's valuable time, Wald put up a fight and got the order reversed.
But apart from money and prestige (and unlike Sammy), Wald is a man who genuinely likes his job. Says he: "I want to make every kind of picture there is."