![On the set of The Gunfighter, Fox Studios '52 [click]](fredlmn1.jpg)
May 20, 1987
Mr. Mel Gussow
THE NEW YORK TIMES
229 West 43rd Street
New York, N.Y. 10036
U. S. A.
Dear Mr. Gussow,
I have just finished reading your biography of Daryl F. Zanuck DON'T SAY YES UNTIL I FINISH TALKING, in the 1971 edition, which I borrowed from the Danish Film Museum library, a book I wanted to read as research into my childhood family life. I enjoyed your book and its feeling of admiration, even veneration, for that remarkable man and reading details and chronology of his life and career. I read with fond amusement your description of the barber shop, the steam room, the pool, etc., in the basement under the Boss's office at 20th Century Fox Studios. For my Grandpa Fred Leemans, my mother's father, worked and practically lived there from the 1930s until his death in 1953. Sam Silver may have been the barber, but the masseur was Fred Leemans.
I have enclosed Xerox copies of three letters from Grandpa Fred, the second one I have transcribed on the typewriter. As you may infer from the letters this person had considerable influence on my development.
Fred Leemans was an amazing man. He was born in Rotterdam, Holland, the son of an insurance agent, and early on acquired something of an active social consciousness. When a youth he left Holland by getting a berth on a merchant ship – purportedly in order to escape prosecution for lese-majesty and refusing military service – and then jumped ship in the United States – I think it may have been in Norfolk, Virginia. He then made his way to the west coast where he met and married a curly carrot-top named Eythyl Hurley, the daughter of Irish Okies. They were musically gifted people who also had a natural gift of healing. As a matter of fact they were osteopaths of the electrical apparatus school. I remember my mother's aunt and uncle Toots and Ronald Hurley, a marvellous couple, hard-drinking and earthy, gipsy osteopaths. But they truly had a gift of healing by the laying on of hands, which is how they had sustained themselves in the penury of Okiedom. It was with these people that Grandpa Fred learned the art of massage, for he too had healing in his hands. And he had the strongest hands I have ever seen on a man. Once in a while he would playfully demonstrate them on us grandchildren. His forearms were the size of Alley Oop's or Popeye the Sailor's. Maybe this Dutchman was the model for them. In any case, Grandpa Fred became masseur at The Los Angeles Athletic Club, and that was where Daryl Zanuck got to know him. Zanuck had always been an apostle of physical fitness and that was why he brought Fred Leemans to the new 20th Century Fox Studios. Another person Zanuck headhunted from the Los Angeles Athletic Club was U.S. badminton champion Jess Willard, who became my uncle. Fred Leemans was your archetypical card player and raconteur, and I'm pretty sure it was he who dominated the card room under Zanuck's office. He also had his own room adjoining the massage room and pool.
I can tell you that there were always blocks of ice floating in the water of the little swimming pool in Zanuck's workout room. Grandpa Fred himself told me that fact once when my sister Carolyn and I were visiting the Studio. That was the time I was introduced to Spyros Skouras, who was sitting in the barber chair. Zanuck was there too, with his Havana cigar and his sharp shoes. That was in 1952, when I was fifteen, and I have a very clear recollection of the event. I think I met Zanuck once on an earlier visit as well. I remember Grandpa Fred took us upstairs and through Zanuck's office, the private recesses of which were definitely not included on the daily itinerary of a Studio cleaning lady. The innermost sanctum resembled a jumble shop full of items from various films, such as a designer's watercolor sketch for the projected set (an oasis at night) of a scene from "David and Bathsheba" which Grandpa Fred mentions in the letter. There was a spacious desk and a comfortable swivel chair, of course, and an ambience of the kind of place where a man could withdraw and think his own thoughts. I also got one of the lifeboats from the model of the Titanic used in "A Night to Remember." I was also on the set of the Titanic – a huge construction, promenade deck and salons, the boat deck, and an enormous ship's funnel looming up into the cavernous rope loft of the soundstage – the whole thing mounted on a movable suspension with huge hydraulic pistons on either side to impart the movement of a ship at sea. I have also visited the set of "The Robe" – I have stood on Golgotha. This was at the very moment the Studio was changing over to CinemaScope.
The shoes Grandpa Fred mentions in the letter were, naturally, Zanuck's. At one time I had two or three pairs of his shoes in the closet of my room in Fresno. They were too small for me, but I wore a pair of them once when playing a barker at the Fresno High carnival. The attraction consisted of a booth with a wooden track slanted across the back curtain. One of us would roll old 78-rpm records down the track (everybody had stacks of 78s lying around then during the transition to LPs) and the customers would try to hit them with baseballs. This was my idea, but such a waste of collector's items. As the barker I had on a bowler hat, a mustache, a green vest, had a megaphone and a cane, and was wearing Mr. Zanuck's alligator shoes.
Many famous people passed beneath Fred Leemans's hands, in fact only the famous, the top directors and stars, Betty Grable, Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck, Marilyn Monroe. He probably even massaged Shirley Temple when she was Zanuck's only star. Whenever he came up to Fresno he took a couple of film scripts with him to read from and discuss with the family during the all-night card games. I remember one of the scripts he brought up with him was "The Razor's Edge." Another was "Saratoga Trunk." But for all the Hollywood glitz Grandpa Fred was the most unpretentious man I have ever known. His car, the one he drove up over the Ridge Route every third weekend or so, was a jalopy of a '37 Studebaker sedan, which I inherited from him and which was the only car I have ever owned.
Fred Leemans never wore a tie. Mr.Zanuck would invite him along to film premieres at the Pantages Theater and Fred Leemans would show up wearing an open shirt and a sports jacket.
A few years ago one of my friends in the Danish film industry (producer Nina Crone) invited me to the premiere in Copenhagen of a film for which I made the English subtitles. Everybody showed up wearing the most deliberately casual attire – I believe the mode was "guerrilla." I came wearing a tuxedo.
Mr. Gussow, in another letter I am going to send you pictures of Fred Leemans and copies of more of his letters to me. I don't know whether Mr. Zanuck, in your interviews with him, ever mentioned Fred Leemans. My grandfather was a loving, keenly intelligent, widely-read and articulate man, and a dedicated humanist. He was an intimate friend of Daryl Zanuck's from the earliest days at Twentieth Century Fox, his intellectual sparring partner and privy to his problems and triumphs.
With best wishes,
--Kenneth Tindall