Star Struck

Film producer Martin Jurow '35 on the set of The Great Race with Natalie Wood in 1962

If this script had been pitched to Martin Jurow '35, he would have sent it to the slush pile: "Young man graduates from Harvard Law School. Produces films of great international acclaim. After box-office success, moves to Dallas to fight crime as a 60-year-old rookie assistant district attorney." No one would believe it. Except the story is true, and it's Jurow's.

His autobiography, Marty Jurow Seein' Stars: A Show Biz Odyssey (Southern Methodist University Press, 2001), as told to and written by his friend Philip Wuntch, chronicles a life in film encompassing silver-screen legends from Kirk Douglas to Frank Sinatra to Jack Nicholson. Now 90 and retired, Jurow spent nearly seven decades working as executive, agent, and producer of such films as Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Pink Panther, and Terms of Endearment.

But this show business impresario was also once an impressionable--and poor--law student. Jurow entered Harvard Law School following his brother Irving, who had graduated in 1929. In his last year, Jurow told Dean Roscoe Pound 1889-1890 that he was unable to afford the $400 necessary to complete his final year. Pound stared at the young man from beneath his green visor and marched him to his library, whereupon he announced, "I'm establishing a scholarship right now, and interestingly enough, it's for $400." Jurow later established a scholarship himself.

Always interested in show business, Jurow worked after graduation as an assistant to Nathan Burkan, an entertainment lawyer whose clients included Al Jolson and Charlie Chaplin. He later became an apprentice to legendary film producer Hal Wallis and met many of the greatest actors of the era. Katharine Hepburn "became a mentor to me, hotshot Harvard Law School grad." He describes Kirk Douglas as having had a "bombastic ego." And then there was Natalie Wood, who noticed that the telephone cords of her costars in The Great Race, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, were slightly longer than hers, so she demanded Jurow give her a cord of equal length. "In all things," she said, "I want to be on the same level as Jack and Tony." In one of Seein' Stars' most dramatic passages, Jurow is chased by actress Shelley Winters with a kitchen knife, only to be saved at the last minute by an enraged Anna Magnani, waving a broken Paisano bottle: "You kill Martin, I kill you!"

Jurow eventually became a much-sought-after producer, perhaps best known for his work on Breakfast at Tiffany's, the film that made Audrey Hepburn an international star. He was also responsible for resurrecting Frank Sinatra's career by suggesting he be cast as Maggio in From Here to Eternity.

Jurow came full circle to the law after his career in film. In 1971, he moved to Dallas at the suggestion of George Ray '35 and passed the Texas Bar. (Upon completion of the exam, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Texas asked Jurow for his autograph.) He then worked as an assistant district attorney before returning once again to the movies, where he coproduced the Jack Nicholson/Shirley MacLaine film Terms of Endearment. Which are what Jurow uses to describe his days in the limelight.

--Flynn Monks

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