Albert Emanuel Marten

Hesbed (eulogy) by Richard Marten:

"Good Men do not need monuments. Their deeds remain their shrines." So says the Talmud.

My father Albert Marten possessed an innate goodness, a kindness and decency, integrity, a cleanness of spirit that were extraordinary. As long as I knew him, people wanted to be around him, to bathe in his exceptional vitality, magnetism, and optimism. He was totally original, crafting his life as he saw fit, rather than by any dictate of convention. He had a disregard – even an inherent distrust -- of all authority, whether political, social or religious. Yet he had a genuine love for not only humanity, but for human beings. His 52-year relationship with my mother, Jacqueline, was unparalleled. The loyalty, devotion, mutual respect that they have for one another is beyond description.

Albert Marten was born in Harlem in 1921, but his formative years were spent growing up in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of New York’s equivalent to Virginia Beach: Coney Island. It was there that my father’s entertainment career began. When he was a baby, Frances, my grandmother, engaged an African American woman to take care of baby Albert during the day while she worked. This woman, to whom my father was extremely attached, moonlighted as a singer in a speakeasy at night. Killing two birds with one stone, she would bring her charge to the cafe when she rehearsed. Apparently, he soon caught on because one of his earliest recollections is of her placing him up on the piano while he imitated her version of Al Jolson’s “Mammy”.

Despite his lack of a conventional religious education, Al knew where he came from. In those first generation days in America, it was hard not to be aware. On his first day of school, my grandmother, who liked to emphasize her refinement, dressed my father up with a little French beret on his kepele. A big Italyener came up to him and enquired: “Hey, you Jew?” When the innocent Albert nodded his head affirmatively, the Italian kid punched him hard in the nose. That was it for the beret, and from then on Al’s childhood creed in the rough Brooklyn of Abe Reles and Murder Inc. was “Do unto them before they can do it to you!”

It was an interesting place in which to grow up. Aunt Cornelia, who had the bootlegging concession for the neighborhood, was married to a former riverboat gambler. From his Uncle Russ, Al learned to play and manipulate the cards. Years later, his poker winnings in the army would pay for law school. I remember my Dad – not having picked up a deck of cards in years – allowing me to shuffle the cards and him still picking out four aces. When I asked him how he did it, he shrugged and said that the cards just kind of stuck to his fingers. Once on a business trip to Texas, some oil clients insisted he join them in a late night poker game. He won so much of their money that he finally cheated in order to lose just so he could go to bed. He ultimately brought these clients to Israel just after the Six Day War to conduct some of the first oil explorations of the newly-conquered Sinai.

Undernourished, precocious, high-strung, and in those days possessed of a nervous kinetic energy, around the age of 13 or 14, my father had to be sent to the New Jersey countryside for rest and recuperation. Apparently, his precocity extended to areas other than just the intellect. During the R & R, Al was befriended by a retired navy Admiral who had served in the Orient. The Admiral taught my father jiu jitsu, a martial art which he honed back in the ghetto. Later, in the army, Al would teach unarmed combat. The self-confidence this gave him propelled him through an incredible career that could have been written for the movies.

Even though many of you have heard it before, I can’t talk about my Dad’s childhood years without telling this story. In Depression-era Coney Island, everyone was poor and looking for the instant score that would make it all better. So all the people would buy tickets for the famed Irish Sweepstakes whose zillion-to-one-shot winnings could propel them out of poverty -- and out of the ghetto. Anticipation ran high as the big moment approached. The day the winners were to be announced was like standing in front of the $100,000 slot machine in Vegas with two oranges locked in place and the third cylinder about to show. One year, Al and his gang decided to have a little fun. From the public phone booth in the malt shop, they telephoned a neighbor in the building, a woman by the name of Mrs. Shlumchik. (Why they phoned her in particular, I don¹t know. My father the mimic, in his best Oxford British accent asks: “Is this the residence of Shlumchik?”

Like a Jewish parrot, she answers: “VOT? VOT IZ?”

“Madam. I have the honour of informing you that you have won the Grande Prix in the Irish Sweepstakes…”

Her shrill geshrai was heard from four stories up: “I VUN! I VUN!!!” Mrs. Shlumchik comes flying down the stairs like a streak of lightning, bursting into the shop. “MAXIE, I VUN. SET ‘EM UP! MALTIDS FOR ALL DE BOYISS!”

By evening, reality had, apparently, set in and Mrs. Shlumchik knew she¹d been had. In walks her husband, nebekh, from a hard day¹s work. Start flying the plates and cups and saucers, forks and knives. But somebody finked. A week later Minnie -- the Shlumchik daughter built like a linebacker -- came up to Al on the sidewalk, hauled off, and smacked him into the middle of the following week. Thereafter, whenever he encountered Mrs. Shlumchik, she would look at him wistfully, shake her head in perpetual disbelief, and sadly say: “Pee-Vee, you little mamser.”

As an undergraduate student at City College, Al enlisted in the army, eventually retiring after the Second World War as a Captain in Intelligence. Those years left an indelible impression on him, one not particularly salutary. But the hand of fortune that throughout life would always guide him and come to his aid in time of need began to manifest itself. He busted out of officer candidate school after getting into a fight with an anti-Semitic soldier. Al was boarding a troop transport to Europe when, at the last moment, he was called off the ship for special assignment because of his college background in psychology. En route to Europe, that ship was torpedoed and sank with the loss of thousands of lives.

He told us of the two sadistic sergeants in basic training – Sergeant Strange and Sergeant Fly – who hated Yankees, college kids, and Jew-boys. One of them had him scrubbing a filthy latrine with the proverbial toothbrush for 36 straight hours. When the sergeant came back to criticize his cleaning technique, Al broke. He picked up the pail of caustic lye and dumped it over the sergeant’s head, severely burning him. As he was being carted off to the hospital, the sergeant told him: “Moet’n, I’se goin’ ta kill you. If it’s the last thing I do, I swear I’se goin’ ta kill you.” My father holed up in a supply room with trip-cans to wake him up if he dozed off, his rifle cocked and ready. Before he had to use it, he received orders transferring him to another post. While in the army, a gypsy tea leaf reader predicted he would, among other things, have four sons.

Coming out of the military, Al was charged with boundless energy and momentum. He earned three degrees within three years – his undergrad degree from CCNY, a Master’s in Social Psychology from Columbia University, and his law degree from New York Law. As the student body President of the united colleges of Columbia University, he rapidly became a rising star in New York City politics, becoming chairman of the speaker’s bureau for Franklin Roosevelt Jr.’s congressional campaign and escorting Eleanor Roosevelt to rallies. At the time, he saw his future in politics and only gave it up after he was offered a plumb appointment for doing a political favor. But the favor requested went against his conscience. He turned down the bribe and ended his budding political career.

Al’s independent law practice began in a cubbyhole in downtown Manhattan which he shared with three other attorneys. When one of them had a client, the others would leave the office and go out for coffee.

Al ultimately became a prominent theatrical and entertainment attorney, representing numerous clients, including movie star Errol Flynn, Oscar-winning director Herb Klein, producer Edward R. Pressman, author Harold Robbins, and Allied Artists Distribution Company. But we knew our Dad was a really important guy after came back from one of his commutes to Hollywood, having bumped into Moe Howard of the Three Stooges and brought us back invitations to visit the Stooges during filming.

A pioneer of the post-WWII film industry, he evolved the concept of motion picture completion bonding for the film industry in the United States. While he arranged financing for over 150 feature films, television series, and Broadway productions, Albert Marten’s fondest credit was having arranged the sale and distribution of Ed Wood’s "Plan 9 From Outer Space", a film once voted the worst film ever made which has since become a cult classic. But the story behind it is even more classic. One day a theatre owner from Georgia walked into his office carrying several canisters of film, and, as they all used to say, opened with: “I hear you’re a big theatrical lawyer, Mr. Marten. I own this here film and all I want is the $40,000 I invested out of it. Anything on top of this, you can keep the rest. The picture was a sci-fi starring Bela Lugosi, so my Dad figured it couldn’t be too bad. He called up a friend at DCA, Distributors Corporation of America, who owed him favor and said he had a picture he wanted them to screen. They set up a screening that evening. The lights go out, the picture comes on, and Al, who of course hadn’t seen it yet, can’t believe what he’s seeing. You can see the strings on the flying saucers; in the middle of the picture, Bela Lugosi, a tall, sinister Hungarian, had to go into a sanitorium for morphine addiction, and was replaced by the theatre owner, a short, squat southerner, who in Lugosi’s vampire outfit, pranced up and down the graveyard pointing at the sky exclaiming: “Lordy, Lordy, look at them things!” Al sinks down lower and lower in his seat as the picture runs on; he can’t believe how absolutely awful it is. He’s sure they’ll throw him out on his ear. The lights come on. Irv turns to him and says: “I like it. What do you think Sy?” “Not bad, Al. How much do you want for it?” My Dad perks up, says he’ll take $70,000 and I think they settled on $60,000. The picture won a Golden Turkey Award as the Worst Film Ever Made and went on to earn DCA nothing but money.

http://www.ethanmarten.com/albert-e-marten-saves-plan-9-from-outer-...

In addition to his participation in the entertainment industry, over the course of his extensive career, my father was involved in many diverse fields, including real estate development, oil and gas exploration, and international banking and finance.

Moving to Virginia in the early 1980s, he was a catalyst for the fledging Virginia film industry as founder and chairman of Atlantic Film Studios in Suffolk, Virginia, which was inaugurated in 1988 by Governor Gerald L. Baliles.

His office was always full of interesting, exotic, or eccentric people – movie stars, producers, writers, Texas oilmen, foreign government officials, an expatriate Russian aristocrat who offered to grant him a noble title – in lieu of a legal fee of course, even a few equivalents of Tony Soprano, one of whom was my brother Jonathan’s self-appointed godfather. My father’s life was never dull; his career was never boring. It was always flush or broke, hardly ever in between. Yet, as perilous as things sometimes got, it appeared as though some force always protected him. Not many people are sucked up in the vortex of a violent tornado to be deposited safely in a nearby field! Early in his career, while still in the army reserves, he contracted viral serum hepatitis from an infected needle used on hundreds of the same recruits. Many of them died. Dad collapsed at a closing and was on his back recuperating for a year. When he came back, he had to start his law practice from scratch. The condition was very debilitating. A couple of his clients – writer for Arthur Godfrey – used to play pranks to cheer him up. One day, he comes back from lunch and receives strange stares from the other lawyers. Wondering what’s going on, he walks into his office to find Zippy the Chimp sitting in his chair, wearing roller skates, a cigarette in one hand, a sign “Marten” around his neck, talking into the phone: “Oo oo oo oo oo…” Shortly after this, a big tall fellow dressed in stetson and cowboy boots walks into the office, again with the introduction “Mr. Marten, I hear you’re a big theatrical lawyer. I want to buy a Broadway show and I want you to represent me. What size retainer would you require?” Dad assumes this guy is right out of central casting – it’s another gag. Playing along, he says: “$10,000.” That was big dough in the 1950s. The cowboy scratches his head and says: “Well my oil royalties come due every month. Would it be all right if I gave you five postdated cheques for $2,000 each? And I want you and your lovely wife to join me for dinner tonight at Ciro’s” – a popular nightclub. My father, knowing it’s all a joke ushers him out of the office. He was about the throw the cheques in the garbage when, just for the heck of it, he called his bank and asked them to verify funds. Bear in mind, he had just come back from a year of convalescence and had practically no money. The banker called back and said: “The cheques are good as gold, Al. If you want, I’ll cash them for you.”

My father had his neuroses, idiosyncrasies, and faults, a temper which mellowed with age, but these just made him even more interesting. From the Coney Island days, he had a deep and abiding love for the ocean. It was his medicine, his spirituality. His humor was legendary and I’ll tell you a joke he liked very much – it’s one of the cleaner ones:

Buyers for the circus had come to Africa to capture wild gorillas. After making enquiries, they were directed to the Great Hunter who told them to meet him at dawn with just a rifle and cages. He would take care of the rest. The next day at dawn, the Great Hunter shows up with a pack of dogs and nothing else. They proceed into the jungle until they spy a large fierce-looking gorilla high up in a tree. The Great Hunter climbs up, engages the gorilla, giving him a karate chop that sends the gorilla sailing out of the tree onto the ground where the dogs proceed to emasculate it (my father didn’t tell it exactly that way). Then the now-docile animal is put in a cage. This procedure goes on until they have about four or five gorillas in cages. Finally, they see the biggest one, a monster -- what must be the king of gorillas -- high in a tree. The Great Hunter climbs up, does his number, BAM, POW, karate chop. The gorilla just looks at him, snickers, flicks his giant paw, knocking the hunter out of the tree. And, as he’s falling, the Great Hunter yells: “Shoot the dogs….”

My Dad believed wholeheartedly in exercise and fitness. Through his mid-70s, he looked years younger than his age and a stiff 5-mile walk was a piece of cake. He could relax and function under extreme pressure. Supremely logical, he yet had a highly-developed intuition, experiencing a number of precognitive dreams. It was he who insisted that my brother Jonathan – born with rare and serious congenital heart condition – would be fine. When the condition miraculously disappeared overnight, the doctors were utterly confounded and astounded. The case was written up in medical journals at the time.

Towards the end, even in the diminished state of body and mind, his purity of spirit continued to touch people who responded time and again. All his life, he had done things for others. In his last years, he elicited the kindness in so many who wanted to help him.

My father particularly loved children. Even towards the end, he would always stop and smile at little children and babies. And they responded to him. In one such moment not long ago, it suddenly struck me that beyond the mortal form of the body, beyond even the mind, this was the mutual recognition by two spirits of their essential purity and innocence

We come from the light and return to the light. And there are those individuals whose light shines brightly while they are here, illuminating the lives of others. It was a privilege to have had him as a father and as a friend. Albert Marten was a mentsh in the truest sense of the word.

At the conclusion of Thomas Berger’ great novel, “Little Big Man”, an aged Indian ascends to the peak of a mountain to lay down his body. Addressing the Great Spirit, he declares: “Thank you for making me a Human Being! Thank you for helping me become a warrior! Thank you for all my victories and for all my defeats! Thank you for my vision, and for my blindness in which I saw further. I have also been hungry and I thank you for that and for the added sweetness that food has when you receive it after such a time. I am going to die now, unless Death wants to fight first, and I ask you for the last time to grant me my old power to make things happen!”