The Happy Hack

"There is nothing wrong with being a hack writer," says self-styled Hollywood Hack Leslie (The Marriage-Go-Round) Stevens. "I would point with pride to the inspired hacking of Shakespeare, Michelangelo--you can go through a big list. I am a firm believer in Hollywood's golden future, and thumb my nose at those who cry 'Twilight in the Smog.' "

Commanding a null income at 35, pudgy, archangel-faced Leslie Stevens is one of the hottest writer-tycoons in or out of the smog. He is also one of Hollywood's new breed: the curious combination of corporation executive and creative artist that is taking over the town. On Broadway, Stevens' Marriage-Go-Round, with Charles Boyer and Claudette Colbert, is spinning briskly into its second season. The pilot shows for a couple of TV series are ready for production. The Pink Jungle, his new, Broadway-bound comedy about the cosmetics industry, is in rehearsal. And last week he was busy editing the film of Private Property, his first movie. Written and directed by Stevens, Property was produced in Stevens' own Hollywood backyard, has Stevens' actress wife (Kate Manx) as its star, cost only $60,000, and has already brought bids of more than $300,000--although the movie has yet to win Hollywood's Production Code seal of approval.

Profit on Property. Chances are only fifty-fifty, Stevens admits, that Property will get the code's approval. It is the story of two switchblade hoodlums and their step-by-step seduction of a sex-starved housewife. Murder (at the bottom of the Stevens swimming pool), sadism, and an uncommonly forgiving husband are all crammed into the script.

Stevens confidently expects to turn a profit on Property. "There's been a firm connection between writing and money in my head," says he, "ever since I was ten and my father* paid me a penny a line for learning Shakespeare."

To learn the writer's craft, he ran away from a Washington, D.C. high school to tour with Orson Welles (a truant officer brought him home from Philadelphia); he put in a couple of years in stock, went to Yale Drama School. Then he moved hopefully to Broadway. "As a playwright," he remembers, "I achieved the rank of hotel night clerk at 22, nightward attendant in a psychiatric hospital at 25, a magazine copy boy at 28." It was while he was a copy boy (at TIME) that his play Bullfight became an off-Broadway hit.

A couple of Broadway turkeys slowed him hardly at all. He moved to Hollywood, began to grind out TV shows, a movie script and, finally, The Marriage-Go-Round. Everything he touched turned to money. And as he tried to fend off the tax collector, his corporate complex became as complicated as any in the New Hollywood, where tax angles are more important than camera angles.

Realized Abilities. Today, Stevens' Daystar Productions--which he shares with a shrewd former talent agent named Stanley Colbert--has a contract to make three movies for 20th Century-Fox. (For each of these movies, besides Daystar's cut of the profits, Stevens can get $50,000 as writer, another $25,000 as director. Colbert draws $75,000 as producer.) Daystar also has a TV production contract with Fox, has an ambitious plan for pilot films. Daystar is also one of the financial angels for a personal management firm that Stevens expects will "bring many young people more rapidly toward the realization of their abilities." Star client: statuesque Kate Manx Stevens. There are deals in the works with Movie Mogul Joe Schenck, and there are plans for a publishing house, Daystar Press. First book: a hard-cover novel version of Marriage-Go-Round. Author: Leslie Stevens.

* The late Vice Admiral Leslie C. Stevens, onetime U.S. naval attache in Moscow and author of the bestselling Russian Assignment.

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