"I always wanted to get into the major leagues, and I knew my secret: luck and timing. I had a small and narrow but very, very sharp talent, and inside it, I'm as good as it gets." - George Axelrod

During the 1950s until the mid-1960s, writer/director/producer George Axelrod was at the top of his game. His plays The Seven-Year Itch and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? had become successful Hollywood films (although he was not happy with the results), he was nominated for an Academy Award for his adaptation of Truman Capote's novel Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), and had adapted Richard Condon's novel The Manchurian Candidate (1962) into a film starring Frank Sinatra.

Axelrod was born in Manhattan on June 9, 1922 to Herman Axelrod and his wife, Betty Carpenter, a former movie starlet who had appeared in silent films (including Rupert Julian's World War I propaganda film The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin, 1918). As Tom Vallance wrote in his obituary of Axelrod, "Herman Axelrod, had attended Columbia University where he edited the college magazine The Jester, but gave up dreams of a writing career to join his family's property business. "I had no respect for my father whatsoever because of that decision," said Axelrod later. His parents were divorced when he was young, and he was raised by his mother, who "had a series of gentlemen friends who contributed to her general well-being". Expelled from high school, Axelrod never went to college, but later became a voracious reader "to make up for my formal lack of education"."

At the age of eighteen, Axelrod went to Massachusetts where he worked as an apprentice at the Cape Playhouse. While there he briefly dabbled in acting but knew that he wanted to become a writer. His promising career writing radio scripts was interrupted by the Second World War (where he spent three years in the Signal Corps) but upon returning he went back to radio where he wrote for shows like The Grand Ole Opry, The Shadow and Midnight before branching off into the new medium of television which he entered in 1947. Between then and 1952 he wrote regularly for The Colgate Comedy Hour, The Peter Lind Hayes Show, The Boris Karloff Mystery Playhouse as well as the comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. During this time he was working on a play which was to become The Seven-Year Itch.

The play opened on Broadway in November 1952, ran for over a thousand performances and cemented Axelrod's fame as a writer. In 1955 director Billy Wilder worked with Axelrod to adapt it into a movie starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell. From the beginning they ran into opposition from the Production Code Administration who governed what could and could not be shown on screen. Axelrod later said, "The premise is that a guy has an affair with a girl while his wife is away and he feels guilty about it. And the guilt is funny. In the movie, he couldn't have the affair, but he felt guilty anyway; so the premise didn't make any sense...We didn't really make a very good picture. In addition to having a horrible Production Code problem, the play just didn't adapt. The claustrophobic element of the play is what makes it work - the guy trapped in the little apartment, his imagination soaring out of the apartment. When you open the play up, it loses its tension." 20th Century Fox's adaptation of his play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? angered him to the point that he never saw the film because Fox "never used my story, my play or my script."

Axelrod did have the opportunity to use his own script for the 1954 film Phffft! starring Jack Lemmon, Judy Holliday and Kim Novak. While not the hit that The Seven-Year Itch was, it did respectable business.

In the early 1960s Axelrod scored big with his adaptation of Truman Capote's novel Breakfast at Tiffany's (for which he was nominated for an Academy Award) and for a film which was pulled from distribution in late 1963 after the assassination of President Kennedy, The Manchurian Candidate. Axelrod had read and bought the rights to Richard Condon's novel about a soldier brainwashed to become an assassin. Axelrod had trouble getting a studio interested until he brought the project to his friend, Frank Sinatra. "There was a lot of resistance. It was everything the studio didn't want - political satire, worse than regular satire. Sinatra made it possible. I had known him for years and we were close friends. He agreed to play the lead and that's the only way United Artists would let us do it." Axelrod considered Sinatra one of the best actors of his generation, saying "He's magic. Like Marilyn [Monroe]. But you have to understand how he works. When he won't do many takes, it's because he can't. He has no technical vocabulary as an actor. Something magical happens the first time, and sometimes he can do it a second time. After that, it's gone...He never tries to change a line. He has enormous respect for the dialogue. "

Axelrod's career began to slip in the late 1960s. Like many writers of his generation he came to symbolize a specific period of time. As Tom Vallance wrote, Axelrod's work was "redolent of the era of cool jazz and the wet bar. His ear for showbiz talk was as good as S.J. Perelman's and his gift for elegantly phrased lechery rivaled Terry Southern's. "I want to end my days lying on the golden shores of Malibu, my head cradled in the lap of a sun-kissed starlet, sipping vin rosé and dictating long, thin movies to fit long, thin screens."" The problem was that the era of cool jazz and wet bars was over and Axelrod couldn't relate to the age of the hippies. He left Hollywood for a ten year stint in England writing scripts and returned to the United States where he spent time at the Betty Ford clinic for an alcohol problem he had developed because of his writers' block. During the last two decades of his life he occasionally worked on screenplays like a remake of The Lady Vanishes (1979), The Holcroft Covenant(1985) and The Fourth Protocol (1987). He did live long enough to see The Manchurian Candidate re-released after twenty-five years and hailed as a classic.

George Axelrod died in his sleep at his home in Los Angeles on June 21, 2003 and was survived by his children from his two marriages.

by Lorraine LoBianco

SOURCES:

Tiffany Talent: George Axelrod (1922-2003): It was good to know he was out there, taking it easy for all the rest of us. by Richard von Busack

Obituary: George Axelrod, The Independent, London. by Tom Vallance. June 23, 2003

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www.nytimes.com