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FELDMAN Charles K.

Born Charles Gould.

 
Date of birth : April 26th 1904, New York City.

Date of death : May 25th 1968, Beverly Hills, California.

 

Place of living : 2 000 Coldwater Canyon Drive, Beverly Hills :

 

Practise: influential jurist in Hollywood; agent and producer at the Feldman Famous Artists Agency.

 

Portrait : 

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Story

His wife was Jean Howard, actress and well-known photographer. They divorced in 1946.

He was a great collector of paintings, furniture, English antiquities, modern creations; he owned paintings of Chagall, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, and also bronze Buddhas, heads in Ming and Sui stone, horses and Tang and Chou birds.

Among others, he produced the movie of Elia Kazan "A Streetcar Named Desire" at the beginning of the 50's.

In 1951 he received at his home Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller who came to hatch a play written by Miller, "The Hook", which would be directed by Kazan and produced by Feldman.

Kazan was accompanied by Marilyn and that's how she met her future agent who would negociate her second contract at the Fox studio.

In 1953, his colleague Hugh French, took care of the separation between Marilyn and Natasha Lytess, her drama teacher.

In December 1953  he was in Switzerland at Jean Howard's bedside, his ex-wife, who had just had an important surgery.

At the end of 1953 Marilyn signed a contract with him after the end of her contract with the William Morris agency.

 

In 1954  he co-produced with  Billy Wilder "The Seven Year Itch" () and took some parts in "The Big Sleep" (1946), "A Streetcar Named Desire"(1951),"What's New Pussycat?" (1965).

He organized the huge party given in Marilyn's celebration at Romanoff's, the popular restaurant, on November 6th 1954; the presence of the whole Hollywood, gathered for her, was surely particularly pleasant, at a time where she lived big upheavals (divorce with DiMaggio and problems with the Fox studios):

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Feldman's ability to do many things at the same time had certainly rushed Marilyn's decision to be represented elswhere : Feldman's agency, which almost only worked with the the Fox, didn't necessarily defend Marilyn's interests when she fought for the revision of her contract.

On  December 4th 1954, at the Palm Springs Racquet Club :

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Milton Greene her new associate of the Marilyn Monroe Productions, suggested her to give Feldman up and to join the MCA.

The break-up of her contract forced her to pay off the advance of 23 000$ that Feldman had payed her to cover the costs caused by the search of a new contract, Natasha Lytess salary and other professional needs. Feldman took 5 years to recover the sum.

In 1960 he dated Capucine, a French model aged 27, who had come to Hollywood with the hope of becoming a movie star. When the question of giving her some drama lessons came up, Charles Feldman called Natasha Lytess, Marilyn's former drama teacher.

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