A few years ago, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington invited Stanley Colbert to lecture on the role of a producer. The invitation was no accident: Some years earlier, after a 50-year career in publishing, TV and film, Colbert and his wife Nancy had retired in nearby Wrightsville. In no time at all, he was teaching at UNC and had started a new program - in creative writing and publishing. That, plus cooking meals every week for the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary. So much for retirement.
"I'm here," he noted, "because I always enjoyed being a part of making things happen. That's the closest I can come to defining what a producer is, and what a producer does."
In fact, Stanley Landau Colbert, who died Sept. 21 in Toronto from heart and kidney failure, age 82, was a producer par excellence. In a career that moved from the literary salons of New York to the TV and film studios of Hollywood and Miami, to the then-cloistered world of Canadian publishing, the man was indefatigable.
In film and television alone, he produced more than 200 films - dramas, comedies, ballets on ice, Shakespeare, operettas, rock and jazz concerts, and TV series about cops ( Sidestreet), skydivers ( Ripcord), circus performers ( Greatest Show on Earth), dolphins ( Flipper), bears ( Gentle Ben), Fraggles and Doozers (the Emmy award-winning Fraggle Rock). He wore other creative hats as well, writing original screenplays and teleplays, rewriting the work of others, and, on occasion, directing as well.
As a producer, Colbert never waited for things to happen. A case in point: John Fraser's book, The Chinese, based on his years as a Globe and Mail correspondent. Just as Fraser was returning from China, reporter Fox Butterfield was about to embark, reopening the New York Times' Beijing bureau after a long absence. Already a big name, Butterfield auctioned a book he intended to write when he returned; the apparent winner was Summit Books.
But then the Times announced that its own books division would publish it; otherwise, Butterfield wasn't going to China. As Colbert's son, David, a former partner in the family literary agency, recalls, "Stan heard about this and said to Nancy, 'This Fraser guy is a better writer. Call him, get a proposal, and you can sell it to Summit at any price you name, because they'll be able to kill Times Books.' " Fraser's subsequent book became a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection and sold all over the world. "And it all began with Stan liking Fraser's writing and saying, 'He oughta write a book.' Pretty obvious when you think about it, but rare enough that Stan was way ahead of the pack."
Recalling memorable career moments for his Wilmington lecture, Colbert cited directing orange juice commercials with Anita Bryant and Annette Funicello, and films selling Florida swamp land with Ed McMahon and Eddie Albert, as his low points. Working with kids and animals in the same film - or with actor Jack Palance in anything - was a nightmare. His most satisfying experience? Making films for the CBC, where "sponsors weren't allowed to read the script, set foot on the set or see the finished show until it appeared on the air."
"Stan loved Canada, all of it, " says David Colbert. "Living here and working here. The living here part was for the people and the progressive, multicultural society. The attraction of working here was the lack of showbiz and corporate nonsense."
Some of the eulogies that followed Colbert's death were at once generous and hedged. They acknowledged his contribution to Canadian letters. After all, he, Nancy and later David had effectively pioneered the business of literary agency in Canada, and had built the Colbert Agency into the largest in the country, with 300 writers under contract and annual sales that, in some years, eclipsed $5-million. Later, from 1988-93, as co-heads of Harper Collins, they laid the foundations for a solid program in Canadian publishing. But the kudos carried a kind of subtext - asides alluding to how obstreperous the New-York born Colbert could be, about his American brashness and unseemly, aggressive style.
"Stan always knew better than anybody else," said Harper Collins editor Phyllis Bruce, who worked under the Colberts in the early 1990s. "He wanted to do things differently, be entrepreneurial. He had an opinion about everything. And he didn't mind irritating people, especially when he turned out to be right about something."
But Colbert's assertiveness has to be measured against the genteel, paternalistic publishing culture he encountered when he came to Canada in the mid-1970s. Publishers simply weren't accustomed to dealing with agents so aggressively championing authors' entitlements. "He and Nancy committed themselves to Canadian writing," said writer Rick Salutin. "They pumped out energy for it. They often showed the confidence in us that we lacked in ourselves."
"It's not unfair to call him abrasive," says his daughter Melanie, who became a successful agent for children's books. "I just don't think it's bad. They were very good at what they did and good for the industry. They stood up for people who needed standing up for."
Calling Colbert "one of the least passive people I've ever known," Salutin remembers editing Maria, his TV movie about union organizing. Colbert, just hired as executive producer of film drama, came in "barking suggestions. I, of course, reacted to his obvious Americanness and thought he'd been sent in to torpedo the politics in the script. I said, 'Wait a minute, who is this guy?' But Stan wasn't deterred. His thick skin served him well. And many of the suggestions, cum orders, made the film stronger."
In his first two years at the CBC, Colbert developed more than 40 screenplays - all of them written, produced, directed and acted by Canadians. But it puzzled him that Canada had no star system. His theory was, that "any person or institution of stature becomes fearful for Canadians. That includes prime ministers and actors and everyone except hockey players. It's as if our survival depends on bringing everything down to one size."
Born in 1927 in what became New York's Greenwich Village, Colbert grew up in a happy, secular Jewish home, though "from an early age," he wrote in a brief memoir, "I found it impossible to accept the concepts pertaining to God and gods, or heaven and hell."
When his father lost his accounting job in the Depression, the family moved to a cold-water flat, leaving the oven door open in winter to heat other rooms. "School was a place to escape from all this." A straight A student, Colbert skipped grades, entered prestigious Stuyvesant High School at 12, and graduated at 15.
Inspired perhaps by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, he learned tap-dancing and performed in a local bar. "It was a short professional career, " he recalled in the memoir, written for his grandson. "The police raided the bar for gambling and threatened me with juvenile court for working underage." Year later, though, he kept a tap dance board in his CBC office and would occasionally assay a soft shoe.
At 15, Colbert enrolled in the least expensive university he could find - Chapel Hill, in North Carolina. Holding down three jobs to pay his living costs, he edited the student newspaper (ultimately switching from pre-med to journalism) and, in a gesture hard to imagine happening today, wrote home to his parents seeking permission to smoke. His mother objected; his father sent him a pipe and tobacco. Colbert never finished university (though in 1999 UNC conferred an honorary degree). Instead, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and spent the next two years writing for Air Force Magazine. Discharged at 20, he went to New York and, though he sold a short story to Esquire, eventually set up a literary agency with Sterling Lord. His major achievement there: selling a mammoth manuscript that became Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
One summer on Fire Island, Colbert made spaghetti marinara - cooking and fishing were deep-seated passions - for a new acquaintance - young Nancy Samuels, a smart, attractive Bostonian. They married a year later, the start of a five-decade life and professional partnership. "There'd have been no Stanley without Nancy," says David Colbert. "She shared his willingness to take a risk. When it came to a choice between safety or a new adventure, she not only backed him up, she occasionally reminded him that there wasn't really any choice at all, for either of them. That confidence flowed the other way, too. In the early years of Nancy's agency - which began at Stan's urging - Stan was right there with the reassurance Nancy needed."
Offered $600 a week to be a William Morris literary agent, he went to Los Angeles and, at 26, found himself dealing with John Frankenheimer, Arthur Penn, Gore Vidal, Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable. Soon, he was packaging and writing his own screenplays. When a friend, Ivan Tors, offered to make him head of studio production, the Colberts - now with three young children- moved to Florida - commencing the Flipper and Salty the Sea Lion phase of his career. He knew its limitations.
One day, as he was lecturing on the importance of film as a medium for social change, a student asked him, "then how do you justify making the junk you do?"
"That's a good question," Colbert replied, "and I don't have a glib answer. Let me think about it." A week later, he resigned from the studio and started a new company to make educational documentaries. Staffed largely by his former students, the company made films that taught migrant farm workers how to open checking accounts and buy used cars, smuggling prints onto the farms to be shown. "Nancy was the breadwinner those years," recalls David, "playing the stock market and renting out 461 Ocean Boulevard." The latter was a Colbert-owned oceanfront property in north Miami, where the Bee Gees, Eagles and Eric Clapton, among others, stayed during recording sessions. In fact, Clapton's album, 461 Ocean Boulevard, has a photo of the house on the cover.
Lured to the CBC with the promise of creative independence, Colbert eventually joined Nancy in the agency, When media mogul Rupert Murdoch merged two publishers to form HarperCollins in 1989, the Colberts bought majority control of the Canadian arm, HarperCollins Canada - although not before a three-year review by Investment Canada about whether the new arrangement met guidelines for foreign ownership. Again, marketing innovation was the Colbert theme, even if it offended traditionalists. They stayed five years. Retiring to North Carolina, Colbert - slowed by arthritis and other ailments - returned to Toronto a few years ago.
"He wanted to reinvent," says David. "Whether that meant a new kind of educational film or a new way of fulfilling orders at a publishing house. His knowledge of the history of film and television and publishing, which was extraordinary, was all in service of what was happening at the moment."
His career aside, Colbert was a committed family man. "He always encouraged us to explore, be creative, try new things, says daughter Melanie. "And wherever he is now, his knees don't hurt, the food is good and the fish are jumpin.'"