Jay Kanter, the high-powered Hollywood agent who represented Marlon Brando, Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe and served because the inspiration for Jack Lemmon’s character within the basic Billy Wilder movie The Condominium, died Tuesday. He was 97.
Kanter died at his house in Beverly Hills, a spokesperson for the Unbiased Artist Group introduced. His son Adam Kanter is a associate at IAG.
A favourite of mighty Music Company of America mogul Lew Wasserman, Kanter additionally spent seven years in England within the Nineteen Sixties greenlighting European motion pictures for Common, produced movies together with the Elizabeth Taylor-starring X, Y and Zee (1972) and had a protracted enterprise relationship with Alan Ladd Jr. at Fox and MGM.
When Brando was slumming round Paris after breaking out on Broadway in Streetcar Named Want within the late Forties, Kanter‚ then an MCA junior agent, acquired a name from producer Stanley Kramer saying he wished to rent the actor to make his movie debut in The Males (1950) as a paralyzed ex-G.I.
Kanter was not the budding celebrity’s agent — Edith Van Cleve was — however he picked him up at a prepare station and took him to the house of Brando’s aunt and uncle in San Marino, California, they usually all had dinner. The following day, Kanter drove the actor to a gathering with Kramer, director Fred Zinnemann and author Carl Foreman, then requested him to return to the MCA workplace so he might meet the opposite brokers.
Brando advised him, “‘I don’t have to fulfill anyone, you’re my agent,’” Kanter recalled in 2017.
When Wasserman heard the story, “He actually obtained a kick out of it as a result of he was getting phone calls from Darryl Zanuck and Jack Warner, these heads of studios that wished to fulfill Marlon,” Kanter famous. “And Lew stated, ‘I can’t prepare it, you’d have to speak to his agent.’ They stated, ‘Who’s that?’ And he stated, ‘Jay Kanter.’ They usually stated, ‘Who’s he?’
“Out of the blue I used to be getting telephone calls from all these heads of studios, and that was it.”
A bit later, Kanter gave a key to his Beverly Hills condo to Jennings Lang so the senior MCA exec would have a spot to proceed his affair with one in all his shoppers, actress Joan Bennett. “I don’t assume he was borrowing it to take a nap,” Kanter stated on a 2018 episode of the Love Is a Crime podcast.
After Bennett’s husband, struggling producer Walter Wanger, came upon about it, he confronted Lang and shot him within the higher thigh within the MCA car parking zone in Beverly Hills in December 1951. It was fairly the scandal again within the day.
The Condominium (1960), after all, starred Lemmon as Bud Baxter, who lets his New York insurance coverage firm supervisors (together with Fred MacMurray’s Jeff Sheldrake) use his Higher West Aspect digs to conduct their extramarital affairs. The United Artists movie, additionally starring Shirley MacLaine, gained 5 Oscars, together with the one for finest image.
“I feel [the Lang-Bennett-Wanger incident is] the place Billy Wilder obtained the concept for the film,” Kanter stated. “He by no means advised me. However it was fairly apparent.”
In the meantime, Hugh Wilson based mostly The Well-known Teddy Z, his 1989-90 CBS sitcom a couple of huge star (Dennis Lipscomb) who takes a liking to a mailroom man (Jon Cryer), on the Kanter-Brando origin story.
From left: Jay Kanter escorted Marilyn Monroe to the New York premiere of ‘East of Eden’ in March 1955 and dined with Grace Kelly on the Stork Membership within the metropolis in September 1954.
Courtesy Everett Assortment (2)
Jay Ira Kanter was born in Chicago on Dec. 12, 1926. When he was 9, he got here to Los Angeles together with his mom, Muriel, after his father, Harry, died. At 17, he joined the Navy throughout World Struggle II; following the service, he landed a mailroom job at MCA, then graduated to messenger and assistant to Wasserman.
“He handled me very nicely, he was type of my mentor and would focus on numerous offers on the studios [with me],” Kanter remembered. “Ultimately I drove him round when he would name on completely different studio heads. Then he lastly stated, ‘You higher begin incomes your hold right here, you’re an agent now.’”
After Wanger shot Lang, Wasserman despatched Kanter to work in MCA’s New York workplace so the L.A. district legal professional couldn’t interview him. “I went to New York for what I assumed was a few weeks,” he stated, “and I ended up staying there for 9 years.”
He obtained the relative newcomer Kelly $750 every week for a assured six weeks of labor in 1951 on the Kramer-produced, Zinnemann-directed, Foreman-written Excessive Midday, in line with Donald Spoto’s 2010 e book, Excessive Society: The Lifetime of Grace Kelly, and repped her when she signed a seven-year take care of MGM in 1952.
In 1953, Kanter married his second spouse, Judy Balaban — the daughter of Barney Balaban, the president of Paramount Footage from 1936-64 — at The Plaza in New York, the place Kelly and singer Rosemary Clooney had been bridesmaids and Brando was the very best man.
(He had first met Balaban when she was at a New York nightclub watching her then-boyfriend, singer Merv Griffin, carry out. She would later function a bridesmaid at Kelly’s 1956 marriage ceremony to Prince Rainier of Monaco and write a e book about it.)
Kanter spent his first few days repping Monroe driving alongside the Pacific coast together with her after she didn’t wish to report back to the studio proper manner. (His different shoppers included Paul Newman, Jerome Robbins, Laurence Olivier, Warren Beatty, Ronald Reagan and Terence Rattigan.)
After MCA was dissolved in 1962 in an antitrust ruling, Kanter turned a movie manufacturing exec at sister firm Common. He signed director Michael Winner to a six-picture deal and spent a reported $30 million on British movies — 1967’s Charlie Bubbles, starring Albert Finney and Liza Minnelli, amongst them —however by no means had successful.
All the time impeccably dressed, Kanter turned to producing within the ’70s, engaged on such movies as X, Y and Zee; Villain (1971), starring Richard Burton; Winner’s The Nightcomers (1971), starring Brando; Worry Is the Key (1972), starring Barry Newman; and Massive Truck and Sister Clare (1974), starring Peter Ustinov.
In 1975, he segued to Fox to affix Ladd, who would quickly give Star Wars (1977) a inexperienced mild. The pair additionally labored collectively at The Ladd Co. — motion pictures beneath their watch included Chariots of Fireplace, Physique Warmth and Blade Runner) — MGM/UA (the place Kanter was accountable for MGM) and MGM-Pathe. He arrange his personal impartial manufacturing firm in 1994.
Over time, Kanter spoke about his relationships with Kelly, Monroe, Ladd and Brando — he and producer Mike Medavoy had been the executors of the actor’s property — in a number of documentaries.
After he and Balaban divorced in 1961, he was married to Package Bennett from 1965 till her 2014 demise.
Within the Nineties, Mel Brooks and Kanter organized a weekly lunch of their shut associates. Firstly, the meals included a circle of former Fox execs and filmmakers from the ’70s, amongst them Ladd, Richard Donner, Paul Mazursky, Freddie Fields and Michael Gruskoff; later, Jeff Cohen, Tim Deegan, Jay Cooper, Richard Benjamin, Fred Specktor and Ben Mankiewicz joined in.
The lunches have continued each Friday for greater than 35 years, together with final week on the common location, Porta Through on the patio in Beverly Hills, and Kanter was there.
Along with his son Adam (and his spouse, Brooke), survivors embrace his different kids, Dustin (and Debra), Tom, Cydney, Bernard, Amy (and composer Bob Thiele) and Michael (and Erica); and his grandchildren, Jason (and Andie), Matthew, Owen (and Jared), Sophie, Charlie, Hannah, Package, Cleo, Grayson and Ryan. Victoria, his different daughter with Balaban, died in 2020.
A personal service is ready for Friday. Donations in his reminiscence might be made to the Movement Image & Tv Fund or the UCLA Stein Eye Institute.
