Jack Lait: You don't always get remembered for what you want to be remembered for -- Garbo

Last week I began this blog series about the Confidential books by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer. You can find that first post HERE.

Here's one of only two photos of Jack Lait I could easily find. I can't decide if, in the photo below, Lait looks more like a Marvel comics villain or like Sherlock Holmes' nemesis Moriarty. Whichever it is, personally I find it difficult to look at his picture of Jack Lait for long.

 

I know the years change us all, but looking at this younger portrait in which Lait looks friendly and kindly and gently humorous, it's hard to believe it's the same person. I know life wears one down, and the time period matters.

It was areound around 1950 that the Confidential books rose high in the bestsellers lists, it was that noir-ish era. After the Second World War, the U.S. military was back overseas, this time in Korea. Returning veterans found it tough to be back home, as we saw in movies like "The Best Years of Our Lives." 

Scandal and gossips thrive in dark times, and Jack Lait knew what the reading public wanted and would pay for. Having said all that, I still do wonder if there was some kind of Dorian Gray thing going on. How does a man go from looking like the Jack Lait below to the Jack Lait above? Let's look at his career.

 

 

The young Jack Lait was a columnist, through the King Features Syndicate, in the Hearst newspapers. I assume the picture above was his column header image. Lait's column was called "All in the Family," and I don't know what the subject matter was. (It was hard to research online, since the title was the same as the 70s Norman Lear sitcom.) But Iwould imagine Lait wrote about people, as that's what he did the rest of his life. He had so many careers that he came into contact with people in nearly every walk of life.

 For instance, Lait worked in several areas of show business. He was a composer, writing material for Broadway.

 

Lait was also a vaudeville impressario. He managed the careers of stage stars including Harry Lauder, famed as a costumed singer of comic Scottish songs. Here's a YouTube video clip of a Lauder performance.

Lait had success on both coasts. For Hollywood, he wrote scripts for silent films, including some by notorious speakeasy hostess Texas Guinan, whose tagline was "Hello, Suckers!" I also found her on YouTube.

Back on the East Coast now. Jack Lait was a playwright, and he found success with "Help Wanted."  This publicity still gives you the basic plot.

"Help Wanted" was a hit, and it was later novelized.

Outside the realm of stage-and-screen show business, Jack Lait had other creative outlets. For instance, he was a cartoonist, and he did a comic strip called "Gus and Gussie."

Speaking of characters named Gus, Jack Lait wrote a number of Ruyonesque character studies, which were gathered into a book.  You can read Gus the Bus and Evelyn the Exquisite Checker at Google Books because some thoughtful person scanned it in from a 1917 copy, a New York Public Library discard. (This was great for me, as the entry for Gus the Bus in my own state's linked system of libraries says "no copies available" which meant someone, between 1917 and today,  didn't return it.)

 

 

In addition to his writings listed above,Jack Lait was a celebrity biographer, or at least collector and assembler of stories about well-known people. 

 

Lait wrote a number of other books as well. Much of it was not great literature, mind you, but the guy was prolific. 

 

Put on the Spot became the 1931 film "Bad Company."

It's not surprising, I suppose, that Lait would be involved in politics, as journalism and political campaigns go together. What surprised me was just who Lait advised. Despite the columnist's long-time employment by William Randolph Hearst and his close working associations with Walter Winchell and other conservatives, Jack Lait gave Franklin Delano Roosevelt advice. This was around 1930, when FDR was governor of New York. Puzzling.

 Most biographical information about Jack Lait identifies him as a "newspaperman," thoughalso  allowing that Lait was best-known for the Confidential book series done with Lee Mortimer.  I'd use the term "newspaperman" loosely.

 Lait did do some of the gritty journalism we know from films like "The Front Page." For instance, he reported on boxing matches from a ringside seat. But he spent almost all of his working life -- from 1936 to 1952 -- as the managing editor of The New York Daily Mirror, one of the city's competing scandal papers. You know this type of "journalism" well, as the Mirror was eventually absorbed into the infamous New York Daily News.

If you've ever been to The Big Apple, you've seen the sensational headlines, always in the hugest possible font, trying to direct your attention to a news vendor's stall. The Daily News is not quite the technicolor screamer that The New York Post is, but its true-crime stuff has always been intense.

 

 Jack Lait didn't invent tabloid newspapers, of course. Well before the arrival of Lait as managing editor, the Mirror had a reputation for shamelessnessr; its most notorious front page photo was in 1928. it showed the slumped form of Ruth Snyder strapped into the electric chair. Snyder had just been executed at Sing Sing for the murder of her husband

I am not surprised that NYC and beyond had enough readers to have three sensational shocker type newspapers. What surprises me is why a talented person like Jack Lait was drawn to this scuzzy line of work.  He literally could do anything, but what he wanted to do with his life was this.

Here's one of the front pages of The New York Dail yMirror from the era when Lait was managing editor.  Incidentally, I chose one of the more subdued headlines.

 

 

Jack Lait showed so much ability in so many areas. He knew so many people and he could get things done like nobody else. But what he's remembered for is a stack of scandal books. I wonder if he realized that would happen.

 

 

Next week:  The people Jack Lait surrounded himself with