Aside from his bookie, his barber and his tailor, no one even got on the lot to see EZ Shelupsky unless Alma gave them a four-digit code number which had to match one of the numbers she left at the gate every morning. Shelupsky hardly needed to have his secretary go this far — leaving just a name at the gate would do — but even for a studio head Shelupsky was known for a stubborn megalomania; unlike the others, this was rivaled by a kind of pig-headed magnanimity. Though he didn’t have to, he paid his players pretty much what B-movie white actors got, and treated them with an off-hand respect that confused them as much as it pleased.
A bundle of prickly contradictions, Shelupsky had in his decade in Hollywood created so many legends that the jokesters at Chasen’s practically choked over their Beef Belmont (braised short ribs and matzah balls — Hollywood on a plate) and claimed he had Alma write his personality quirks out on index cards so he could remember them all; less pleasantly, they claimed he had his shvartze actors wear name tags because they all looked alike. One thing about EZ: no one looked like him.
The other Jewish studio heads had sharp Eastern European features, distinct noses, jutting chins, chiseled eye sockets, even sculpted ears, but everything about EZ was rounded; though his 5-foot-8-inch frame didn’t carry an ounce of fat, he seemed to be composed of a complete set of fully integrated knobs. After the war I played tennis with him regularly, and he was all muscle, but even this was rounded, as though he had been stuffed with tennis balls in his arms and softballs in his legs; his shoulders were like volleyballs. When he pursed his thin lips in concentration, it was as if his chin and nose had decided to mate — they were that congruent. His hair was prematurely gray and thinning on top; he kept it short, which further rounded him off. If he’d worn anything but the best custom-made suits he might have looked like a stack of bowling balls, but the elegance of his dress, always in an unexpected color or an unusual stripe or windowpane check set off by a brilliant white shirt, gave him a smooth, unflappable look. He was hardly unflappable. Too many writers and directors and moviehouse owners had seen him in full flap.
From everyone else he demanded consistency, particularly in grooming (“Maybe you can’t tell a book by the cover”—this from a man who admitted he had never read one — “but it’s a good start”) and the ability to turn crap into cash (“You know why Hamlet don’t make a movie? Not enough tap dancing”), but when it came to himself he insisted only on the kind of radical contradiction that defied expectation, keeping his colleagues and employees perpetually off-balance and amusing the studio boss no end. A staunch capitalist, Shelupsky was nevertheless a student not of Dale Carnegie, whose How to Make Friends and Influence People became a bestseller in ’37 and stayed popular into the 50s, but of Joseph Stalin, EZ having recognized in the Soviet dictator the focused ability to scare the bupkes out of anyone who so much as heard his name. Of course Stalin did not share Shelupsky’s signal weakness.
When he had first come out to the coast Shelupsky visited Santa Anita almost every day. For the 1937 Kentucky Derby, in which EZ had a horse, he’d had a dedicated phone line installed on his desk, directly connected to Churchill Downs where War Admiral had, unfortunately, won. The other studio heads liked horses — Shelupsky loved them. As a boy in Poland he had used to ride Friesians, big plow horses with hooves as big as his head — “A regular sheigetz, they called me!”—but when he came to an urbanized America he’d had to give this up until he became rich enough to own thoroughbreds. Only one thing was wrong. They — the blueblood trustees of the Turf Club that ran Santa Anita — would not let an EZ Shelupsky in as a member. It wasn’t personal. He could run horses there, he could practically live in the clubhouse, he could throw his money around and hire the best trainers and jocks, but at membership a line was drawn. Once they let the Shelupskys in, they might as well let in the Japs and the greasers and the shines. In EZ’s words, “They anti-semitted me out.” Which is why Shelupsky and Jack Warner and the other studio heads, along with a few featured players like George Jessel and Al Jolson, and several of the bigger agents, started Hollywood Park — it was the Jewish track. “Fuck the goyim,” was so much the Shelupsky motto it might as well have been emblazoned on his jockeys’ silks. In fact it was: his horses ran under the blue and green colors of FTG Stables.
Paradoxically, his feeling for the other half of the gentile species was altogether different. “Shiksas got refinement,” he would say to his casting directors, as though there was a chance in hell they might mistakenly cast a colored Jewess. “Let the other guy have a million Fanny Brices — give me a Claudette Colbert every time. Your high-class shiksa she don’t even shit. Maybe pees a little.” In 1936 he divorced his first wife, who apparently was too often in the powder room engaging in smelly Hebraic physicality, and took up with the platinum-haired princess of Hollywood, Nora Bright. Not only was she no semite, but she loved horseflesh, loved the track, loved betting, and just adored being Mrs. EZ Shelupsky. For one thing, the roles got better — every studio head in Hollywood was her husband’s best friend. For another, EZ worked so hard he bothered her for sex only once a week — it wasn’t that she didn’t like action, but her tastes, it turned out, were identical to her husband’s: along with the ponies, she had a fondness for the ladies. Either way, she would have understood: EZ was tired at night for good reason. He gave at the office. And on the set. Sometimes in his marvelously capacious Brewster towncar on the way to the track. But never there. Horse racing was his religion. EZ avoided synagogues. His temple was the track.
In the depths of the depression, Shelupsky’s horses ate better than 99 % of the American people, and he spent more on his ponies on any given day than was needed for a month’s care and feeding of the average American family. By 1939 FTG Stables carried forty-eight thoroughbreds, and his trainer was none other than Ozzie Hirsch, whose horse had almost beat out War Admiral in the Derby. Though Ozzie would train a pot-bellied pig if an owner required it, Hirsch liked leggy, short-coupled horses with tight conformation and good manners, which was pretty much EZ’s taste in actresses, one of which — a striking octoroon with an aggressive set to her chin; like so many of the new wave of actresses, if you cut her hair and taped her breasts she could pass, á la Marlene Dietrich, for her own leading man — was just leaving when Alma buzzed me in. “Mr. S, Laurence Bellringer coming through.”