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	An Interview with David Brown By David Finn

David Brown is a well-known producer of famous motion pictures and Broadway plays. He is also a long-time friend of mine. For many years we have both been members of "Book Table," a luncheon that takes places in a private room at the restaurant 21, where about twenty- five people who are in the publishing world get together once a month. When David turned 90, I felt it was time to interview him for MOVE!.

DAVID FINN: I'm interested in what people think when they get older, and now that you're 90, you are qualified to be an expert! Of course we always know that life is unpredictable, but when we come toward the end, perhaps we have a different -- and maybe even a wiser -- point of view. How do you feel about that?

DAVID BROWN: I don't think much about it at all. Maybe I practice denial. My wife is 85, and she works seven days a week, and I do the same. I know that anyone at 90 would be lucky to get another seven, eight or ten years. I expect to get those, but I simply don't dwell on it. I dwell more on the present.

DF: Are you in good shape physically?

DB: Moderately. My legs have been giving out on me and I can't walk very far. I use a cane. Apart from that and a slight malfunction of my kidneys, I'm ok.

DF: How about your memory?

DB: My memory is perfect; not only can I remember what I did yesterday, I can tell you what I did 60 years ago. Sometimes names are tough to recall but they're usually recent names. My doctor says my memory is a marvel!

DF: Tell me about your name, Brown. My father's name was Finkelstein. He was a writer and he wanted to have a pen name. So he changed in the 1930s from Nathan Finkelstein to Jonathan Finn. That's how my name became Finn.

DB: My name has always been Brown. My birth certificate said Baby Brown because my mother and father forgot to give me a first name. I had to go and provide it years later, at the Department of Vital Records of New York City. My father was Edward F. Brown, he was a colonel in the American Army in WWII. He was Chief Liaison Officer with the Russian Army and the American Army. I never knew my grandfather because my father left me when I was two years old, when my mother and father were divorced. I didn't meet him again until I was 17 years old. DF: Where did you go to school?

DB: I went to Stanford University, class of 1936. As a student I was a drama critic and reviewed movies and plays for the Stanford Daily. So I was always interested in drama. I went to my 70th reunion this year. I got my masters degree at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

DF: Then what did you do?

DB: My first job was at Women's Wear Daily as a copyeditor and second-string drama critic. After Women's Wear Daily I went to Street and Smith, the oldest publishing company in New York. From there I went to Liberty magazine, where I became editor-in-chief when I was only in my twenties. Then I went into the army for four years, where I was in military intelligence. After the war I took a job as a lobbyist for the American Medical Association. I left when they tried to condemn Harry Truman for terrorizing doctors, who were not in favor of health insurance. Then I decided I wanted to work for the magazine Cosmopolitan, which was run by Herb Mayes. The way I got that job was to send Herb a table of contents of four issues of Cosmo that I would have created if I was there. Afterwards we had a great conversation and he hired me on the spot. I became associate editor and later managing editor. Then one day I got a call from Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of Twentieth Century Fox. He said he wanted to hire the best editor in New York and I had been recommended as the top candidate for the job. I got on the Santa Fe Chief and went to the studio in Pasadena, met with Zanuck. His idea was to run Fox like a national magazine, with a managing editor and bureaus all over the world. So he hired me, and I became executive story editor presiding over story departments in Rome, Paris, London, New York and Los Angeles. I stayed there on and off for about 30 years.

DF: How high up in the company management did you come?

DB: I became a member of the Board of Directors. Then Zanuck and I both got fired because of a political dispute. We went to Warner Brothers, and after that we decided to go out on our own. We formed the Zanuck Brown company, and produced some great motion pictures, including The Sting, (which we presented), Jaws, Macarthur, and Sugarland Express, which was Steven Spielberg's first movie. Then I split off and formed The Manhattan Project, where I made The Players, A Few Good Men and many other pictures.

DF: I know you have been a successful writer as well as a producer. Can to you tell me about some of your publications?

DB: I've written articles for Reader's Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, Town and Country and many others. I've also written books. The last book is Brown's Guide to the Good Life Without Tears, Fears or Boredom. I also wrote The Rest of Your Life is the Best of Your Life: David Brown's Guide to Growing Gray Disgracefully and Let Me Entertain You.

DF: Are your books autobiographical?

DB: Yes. They are all about me and require very little research, I write longhand on big yellow pads and I give them to Doris, my secretary. She puts them on the computer.

DF: Do you do a lot of editing when you write books?

DB: I edit like crazy. Remember, I was a copyeditor on a newspaper, and I never changed. I find it difficult to write. I find it a boring process compared to being a producer. It requires a lot of energy. But I have written quite a lot.

DF: Of all the different things you've done in your life, what do you like to do most?

DB: Believe it or not, I like to watch the news. I'm a news junkie. After all I started as a copyeditor and I've once written for newspapers, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. I covered the religious beat for the New York Times every Monday when they published all the sermons from the city's churches. I was one of stringers who went to the churches and got the handouts.

DF: Do you travel a lot?

DB: Yes, but not as much as I used to. This year my wife and I lectured on the Queen Mary II and spent a week in London. As you know, my wife, Helen, is the editor of the International Cosmopolitan. I have been all over the world with her -- we've been to China, Indonesia, and Australia, all of Latin America. Her magazine is sold in almost every country of the world. It will probably be distributed in Vietnam soon.

DF: Your wife is 85, I'm 85, and you're 90. We seem to be living longer than our parents did. Why do you think that is?

DB: My mother died young. My father died in his mid 80s -- but he retired and had nothing to do. When you retire you lose your zest for life. I work all the time. At the moment, I'm working on three new Broadway shows and three new movies. They take forever. One of the movies is Appointment in Samara, by John O'Hara. Another is Mike Romanoff's The Royal We. A third is with Brad Pitt called Peace Like a River. Those are the three of the most active projects I have in film. I'm also doing a Broadway musical with a score by Candor and Ebb called "All About Us" based on Thornton Wilder's "Skin of our Teeth." I'm also working on a play about Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. And the third play is called "Mr. Adam."

DF: With all your long experience in the theater did you ever have public relations people work for you?

DB: I never had a publicist. Whenever the press called me, I talked to them. My wife, Helen, does the same thing. USA Today is currently doing a major piece on both Helen and me. Recently there was a piece in the New York Post about us. Whenever reporters call us, we talk to them. After all, being a journalist for so many years I don't have a concern about reporters. I have never been victimized by the press. If I ask reporters not to print something, I tell them and they respect me, I have always been upfront with them. When a reporter calls, I don't put a spokesman on to represent me. I talk to them directly.

DF: What do you think of the situation in the world today?

DB: When I got out of college we were in a hopeless depression, which I thought would never end. When I was in the army, I never thought World War II would end. But even at the depth of the war, when it wasn't clear if we would win, I never felt as uncertain as I do right now. At least we knew what we were doing. There wasn't a human being in the U.S. or any of the allied countries who didn't know what we were doing or why. But that's not the case today. Now we have a war none of us can understand. People are being killed, and we don't know why. I think it's awful. There's a civil war and it's chaotic. I think we should get out of that war right away. Seventy percent of the Iraqis don't want us there and none of the parties in the government want us, so what are we doing there?

DF: I have a feeling we always tend to think that the problems today are worse than those of the past. But in World War II we faced the possibility of a conquest by Nazis and the Japanese. Wouldn't that have been worse than anything that might happen today?

DB: You're right, World War II was a war in which we could have been extinguished. But I must confess I felt better then than now. Somehow or other I felt that men like Eisenhower and Bradley, Montgomery, Churchill and Roosevelt, would enable us to prevail. I believed in them even though at times it was shaky. I don't feel our current leaders are anything like them. That's why I'm much more depressed today than I was when I was twenty-five. I don't feel that age has corrupted my brain, I don't think I am more depressed because I'm old. I am more depressed because of what's happening in the world that I think is wrong and because our young people are being killed for nothing.

DF: Speaking of being old, I must say that when I think about my age, I feel that the time I have now is a gift. Many people don't have that gift. You must have many friends as I do who died at a younger age, which is always heartbreaking.

DB: Every death is inexplicable to me. I can't imagine a human being with a personality, a spirit and a voice, suddenly becoming a zero, no longer existing. I would like to believe in reincarnation but I have no faith in it. The fact of death, the fact of immediate cessation of all life, haunts me when I think of it. When a friend of mine dies a period of mourning doesn't help. I just can't believe my friend is no more. I had a friend die yesterday and today I don't have that friend anymore. My friend is gone. It's unbelievable.

DF: A dear friend of mine died recently. She wanted to be cremated and her husband spread her ashes on the ground. Somehow when that happens, everything seems to be gone. And yet I feel she is still here with us somehow.

DB: I feel the same way. It's strange. Sometimes I read a book about people I knew but now they're dead. They were friends whom I worked with and talked to daily. It's painful and inevitable but we have to accept it. I don't like to dwell on it or even face it. I also don't like to go to doctors either, although I go every four to five weeks

DF: I see a lot of books in your office. What kinds of books do you especially enjoy reading?

DB: Mostly I read novels as part of my profession, books that might make movies. But my personal enjoyment more than anything in the world is reading non-fiction. Reading such books is what I do all the time. At home before I go to sleep, sitting in a chair in my den reading. It's my great pleasure. I also like television.

DF: What kinds of books have you read recently that you enjoyed?

DB: I have read books on history, on politics, on Hollywood, on the Holocaust. Books that described what happened at Auschwitz and other concentrations camps are unbelievable to me, and I keep reading them. I look at the pictures of a little boy with his hands up and the Nazis around him, loading him into a freight car. I can't imagine anything more horrifying. I'm sure Darfur is horrifying, I'm sure Iraq is horrifying. But the thought of a civilized country like Germany that would kill 6 million human beings is unbelievable. A civilized country, a country of Bach, of Einstein. Anytime there is a book on the Holocaust I read it.

DF: I know you have written several books, including the bestseller The Rest of Your Life is the Best of Your Life: David Brown's Guide to Growing Gray Disgracefully. But I'd like to end our conversation with a quote from your latest book, Brown' s Guide to the Good Life. At the end you ask "Is it worth living so long?" and your answer is, " You bet. By keeping active and committed, you can indeed realize the truth of the best is yet to be." You're a wonderful example of that belief, and your experiences should be an inspiration to all who look forward to what life can be like in one's later years.