The great film and stage producer David Brown died yesterday at the Manhattan apartment he shared with his wife Helen Gurley Brown.
He was 93 and enjoyed an incredible career that included co-producing some of the biggest hits of all time, including “Jaws” and “The Sting.”
It was Brown and his partner Richard Zanuck who launched Steven Spielberg’s big-screen career with “The Sugarland Express” in 1974. Even though that movie wasn’t a box-office hit, Zanuck and Brown were knocked out by the young Spielberg’s talent and decided to gamble on him by giving the filmmaker “Jaws” which opened the following year.
The producing team stuck by Spielberg when costs went through the roof – mostly due to problems with the mechanical shark – and the studio pushed the duo to bring someone else in. They backed their director, and the rest is Hollywood history.
Brown and his wife more or less created the modern woman’s magazine when she took over the moribund Cosmopolitan in the 1960s and turned it into a huge (and continuing success). David wrote many of the sexy cover teasers that made the magazine irresistible to the young women of the 1970s and 1980s.
I met Brown once when his film “Deep Impact” was about to open in 1998 and found him to be one of the wittiest and most direct movie people I’ve ever met. He laughed when asked about “Myra Breckinridge” (below), the X-rated 1970 disaster that led to him and Zanuck being fired from their production chief jobs at 20th Century Fox. ”I still like that movie!,” he said, with a wry grin that acknowledged his minority view.
Yesterday, the Esquire Website re-posted a terrific Cal Fussman piece from 2001 in which Brown shared some of his life lessons. Here are a few of the wiser nuggets:
Work yourself to death. It’s the only way to live.
I’ve never loved a dumb woman. The brain, combined with moderate good looks, is an overwhelming aphrodisiac.
Exercise is pushing away from the table.
The screenwriter George Axelrod advised that when you were breaking off a love affair, always do it in a restaurant. He thought that most women would be constrained. I wouldn’t count on that.
It doesn’t comfort me to know that with my passing there will be no pain. I don’t want to leave the party.
Marriage to a woman more successful than you can work, provided you take pride in her achievements and are secure in your own. For years I was known as Helen Gurley Brown’s husband, and, frankly, I loved it.
Good health is beautifully boring.
When you visit the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History and you realize the enormity of the universe and the insignificance of Earth and all who live on it, it’s hard to conceive of a god in our own image.
Never sleep with anyone who has more trouble or less money than you have.
The most unlikely women are the most explosive lovers.
Bad news is rarely exaggerated, and first reports of disaster can always be trusted.
A man’s attitude toward money is indicative of his meanness or generosity of spirit.
If you’re going after mass circulation, you must have mass appeal.
I once took Mae West to a restaurant. Nobody bothered her. When we left, there was a standing ovation. That’s respect. That’s love. It’s overdone now.
Never be the first to arrive at a party or the last to go home, and never, ever be both.
If you’re broke, you’ll live forever. If you’re rich, you’ll die tomorrow. To confound the fates, live it up, but little by little.
Success is a man who has the love and trust of a woman, a job he likes, and an abiding sense of humor. Success is a man whose children love him and have made him proud of them. Success is a man who dies at home in his sleep after a good life.
Eat just enough to fill out facial wrinkles.
What do I love about Helen? Her infinite configurations. Like a cat. No expression, movement, or phrase is ever quite the same. She’s loving and funny and infinitely caring and has a work ethic that is admirable. She has a great laugh. What I love about her is everything. Everything.
Marriage is a lottery. I had been married twice when I met Helen. I had no belief that a marriage would work at that point. I was attracted to Helen sexually. I didn’t know she was a wonderful woman. That’s the luck of it. It’s forty-one years now, nearly forty-two. There isn’t a day when I don’t smile when I think of her. We’re still lovers. My great anxiety is that one of us is going to lose the other at some point, and it’s a thought I can’t bear to dwell on.
The biggest tip I’ve ever given? 100 percent. I always keep my hand over the bill so that Helen can’t see it. She says, “How can I submit this bill on my expense account with this tip!”
I get good tables.
After seventy, if you wake up without pains, you’re dead.
R.I.P.
