Vanessa: Interior, Jennings Lang's office day. Mr. Lang is a senior executive agent with a four window office at the Beverly Hills headquarters of Music Corporation of America. His suite is several pegs above the glass cubicles of the middle echelon. There's lots of leather and a large desk behind which sits Mr. Lang. He is a tall, handsome man in his middle thirties, a mover and a shaker in the office and a family man at home. The ladder is attested to by a framed photograph showing two boys aged eight and ten in school uniforms. Jay Kanter, one of Lang's junior executives walks in. Lang looks up at him. 

Jennings Lang [Reenactment]: "Jay uh, there's a certain key floating around the office to an apartment, and you know who that apartment belongs to who?" 

Jay Kanter [Reenactment]: "Who?"

Jennings Lang [Reenactment]: "Loyal, cooperative, resourceful, Jay Kanter." 

Jay Kanter [Reenactment]: "Oh." 

Jennings Lang [Reenactment]: "You gonna to deny it?" 

Jay Kanter [Reenactment]: "No, sir. I'm not going to deny it. You have no idea what I've been through with the neighbors and the landlady and the liquor and the key." 

Jennings Lang [Reenactment]: "How do you work it with the key?" 

Jay Kanter [Reenactment]: "Well, usually I slip it to them in the office."

Vanessa: He reaches into his coat pocket, fishes, the key to his apartment. He holds it up. 

Jennings Lang [Reenactment]: "That's good thinking Kanter. Next month, there's going to be a shift in personnel around here, and as far as I'm concerned, you're executive material." 

Jay Kanter [Reenactment]: "I am?" 

Jennings Lang [Reenactment]: "No, put down the key, put down the address." 

Vanessa: Jay lays the key on the desk, uncaps a fountain pen, and starts writing on a notepad. 

Jay Kanter [Reenactment]: "It's on the second floor. My name is not on the door it just says 2A." 

Vanessa: He finishes writing the address and shoves the pad over to Lang. 

Jennings Lang [Reenactment]: "Now remember Kanter, this is going to be our little secret." 

Jay Kanter [Reenactment]: "Yes, of course." 

Jennings Lang [Reenactment]: "You know how people talk?" 

Jay Kanter [Reenactment]: "Oh, you don't have to worry." 

Jennings Lang [Reenactment]: "Not that I have anything to hide." 

Jay Kanter [Reenactment]: "Oh, no, sir. Certainly not." 

Vanessa: Lang and Kanter all but wink at one another as we fade out. 

Karina: Welcome back to Love is a Crime. What you just heard is our version of a scene from Billy Wilder's classic 1960 film, "The Apartment," recast to parallel real life events. Jay Kanter, a junior executive at the Hollywood agency MCA really did give a co-worker with seniority the key to his apartment so that the coworker could use the apartment to have an affair in. The senior co-worker was Jennings Lang. Joan Bennett's agent who Walter Wanger would shoot in the MCA parking lot in December 1951. The junior executive was Jay Kanter who Vanessa interviewed in 2018. 

Jay Kanter: I think that's where Billy Wilder got the idea of the movie with Jack Lemmon called "The Apartment". He never told me but it was quite obvious. 

Karina: In "The Apartment" Jack Lemmon's office underlaying slash lease holder falls in love with Shirley MacLaine's elevator opera. Who happens to be the mistress of the boss who borrowed the apartment for their rendezvous. The ultimate message of the movie is that in mid century America, one had to choose. You could have money, power, corporate advancement, or you could have a soul. When it was released in 1960, it deeply resonated with the public and the industry. It won the best picture Oscar and it arguably helped to kick off the wave of self-reflexive films about American angst that would really blossom in the late 1960s and early 1970s. With movies like "The Graduate," and "Easy Rider." The apartment in "The Apartment" is a symbol of the moral rod of corporate America, and the affair that happens there is totally loveless. That wasn't necessarily the case with the affair that inspired the movie. Today on Love is a Crime, we'll talk to one of Jennings Lang sons and others who knew Jennings about the secret rendezvous that made Jay Kanter's apartment notorious. But also, in order to understand who Jennings Lang was we need to understand MCA, the agency he worked for, which was in the process of remaking Hollywood at the exact moment that Jennings got involved with Joan Bennett. This is the story of how the side business of a Chicago ophthalmologist became one of the most powerful corporations in mid-century Hollywood and America, of how Jennings Lang broke that corporations norms by sleeping with one of his clients and how after taking a bullet for that liaison, Lang not only survive, but thrived. 

Vanessa: This is Love is a Crime. I'm Vanessa Hope 

Karina: and I'm Karina Longworth.

Music corporation of America was started in 1924 in Chicago by Jules Stein, an eye doctor who had put himself through medical school by moonlighting as a booker of jazz bands and singers for clubs and dance halls. Stein was one of the first agents to send musicians on tour. His clients played one night stands in cities across the Midwest. Business boomed through the jazz age and into the depression. When those who still had any money to spend prioritized escapism and MCA steadily expanded. Stein moved out to Los Angeles in the late 1930s with the idea of expanding beyond bands and one nightstands into other sectors of the entertainment industry. The flashpoint came in 1945 when MCA struck a deal to buy out Leland Hayward, then the biggest agent in Hollywood, so that Hayward could leave his agency and become a producer. In buying Hayward's business, MCA acquired the rights to manage the careers of a bunch of big stars, including Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, and Katharine Hepburn. They'd also represent a number of performers who would become the biggest stars in Hollywood after the war, such as Gene Kelly, Marlon Brando, and Joan Bennett. Stein's most important hire would turn out to be Lew Wasserman, a future mega agent who started out as an usher in Cleveland. 

Vanessa: In 1946, Jules Stein who owned MCA in its entirety, stepped back from the day-to-day business and made Wasserman CEO. Wassermann and agent Taft Schreiber made a fateful mutually beneficial pact with Ronald Reagan. Then an unremarkable actor, Reagan got a deferment from war service thanks to a million dollar deal MCA made for him at Warner Brothers. In return, when Reagan was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild in defiance of norms preventing conflict of interest, Reagan granted his agency a waiver so that they could stay in the business of representing clients while also launching their own production company. This allowed MCA and their clients, including Reagan, to essentially own the just emerging new medium of television.

Karina: This was a huge deal. And it would have major implications for Joan Bennett and Walter Wanger's careers and their lives.

Vanessa: In 1949, Wassermann hired Jennings Lang. A former lawyer from an Orthodox Jewish New York family, Lang had first come out to Los Angeles in the late 1930s with designs on becoming a talent agent. 

Rocky Lang: Well, he'd come here in 1939 with $50 in his pocket looking for a job as an agent. 

Vanessa: This is Rocky Lang son of Jennings Lang. Rocky is a film producer and director and the author of several books about the era of Hollywood in which his father was dominant 

Rocky Lang: I think what motivated my dad to get in the businesses was the allure of Hollywood. Uh, it was a glamorous world, he was an assistant director and college and then a director in college and went to law school and got his law degree and decided, you know, he was going to take his law degree and come to Los Angeles and try to get into the business of making films. And the agency opportunity opened up for him, I actually found a letter from 1939 when he was 24 years old and he applied plying for his first job as an agent, and I could actually see his state of mind as a young man in Hollywood ahead of him. 

Karina: Rocky Lang is the product of Jennings Lang's second marriage. Lang's first wife, Pamela Lang was the mother of Rocky's two half-brothers. Pam had married Jennings near the beginning of his agenting career, and by the time Jennings joined MCA in 1949, his lifestyle had changed. 

Rocky Lang: My dad was a young guy and he was it's a different time and he was a mover and a shaker and is attractive, you know, he had a lot of women interested in him. 

Vanessa: Jennings was a ladies man and a womanizer and Lew Wasserman who hired him at MCA knew of his charms and abilities with wooing women, and he wanted Jennings to steal stars from other agencies and attract clients and keep them. 

Karina: One person who might've wished that Jennings had spent less time attracting clients, was his wife, Pam. 

Rocky Lang: What I know about Pam is that she was a very nice woman, loved her children, loved my dad, and it didn't work out and from what- everything that I know it become a business marriage. It was not a happy marriage. My dad was running fast in the business doing very well and by the time that my brothers were born and everything else, he was moving pretty fast. He had a lot of clients, he was making his way up the ladder. I don't think that he probably had much time for her. I know from what my brothers say, he was not the father to them as he was to me cause he was very present in my life and he was a young man trying to make his way. He ultimately uh, you know, making money and being successful and becoming powerful was, uh, it was attractive to him. I think he liked that. 

Michael Gruskoff: He was a very good looking man. Very slick, smart. He got it. He knew the business.

Vanessa: This is Michael Gruskoff, an agent who went on to produce films like "Young Frankenstein," and "My Favorite Year." 

Michael Gruskoff: And business out here is like a game. You know, you get up in the morning and you see, as a producer or as an agent, you try to put pieces together. The first phone call could be a punch in the stomach or a karate shop on your neck. And one thing leads to another and hopefully there's a day off. 

Karina: Jennings Lang was one member of the new crew of up and coming MCA agents. Another was Jay Kanter. When he first arrived in Los Angeles, Jay had little sense of how the entertainment industry works. But then he rented an apartment near the offices of MCA, and when he'd walk by the agency's office building, what he could see from the street sparked his interest. 

Rocky Lang: He'd see these figures at night, like walking back and forth in the, in the windows and he was like, what, you know, what's going on in this place? These men walking back and forth, and it was late at night, he didn't know what it was. And so he, one day walked in and he says, you know, what is this place? They said, oh, this is an agency. The first thing he thought was, oh, this is like a secret agency or something like that, I'm really interested in this. So he applied for a job and he got in the mail room very quickly realized that they were, you know, a motion picture, writer, director, I think mostly an actor's agency at the time, talent agency. And, um, and he wound up being the low man and then he actually wound up getting onto Wasserman's desk. 

Jay Kanter: I was a messenger at MCA, 

Karina: This is Jay Kanter again. 

Jay Kanter: And then I became an assistant to, uh, and a secretary to Lew Wasserman. And, uh, he, uh, treated me very well and he was kind of my mentor and, um, would discuss various deals at the studios. Eventually I used to drive him around when he would call on different studio heads and, uh, and then he finally said, well, you better start earning your keep here you're an agent now. 

Rocky Lang: Jay was a dear friend of my father's. I love Jay. He's very passionate about the work that he does, and he's always dressed as impeccably and he's very soft-spoken and pretty much he probably knows where all the bodies are buried and no one will ever know.

Karina: Around 1950, Kanter began to make a name for himself. When Marlon Brando took a liking to him, Jay became the Brando whisper setting up his first Hollywood film, Fred Zinnemann's, "The Men" and fielding calls every day from the emotional actor. Jay would become one of the most powerful 'guy behind the guys' in town. In 1951, even with Brando in his pocket, Jay was still building his career. At MCA, Lew Wasserman was king and Kanter was several rungs below him within a corporate culture that encouraged junior partners to serve their superiors. 

Jay Kanter: One of the senior agents at the agency, Jennings Lang, one day he said, you mind if I borrow your, the key to your apartment? And I said, uh, no here. 

Vanessa: I asked Jay if Jennings had told him why he wanted to borrow the apartment, 

Jay Kanter: Yeah, I guess I don't think he was borrowing it to take a nap.

Rocky Lang: Jay had this apartment, so that is where Joan and my dad met on afternoons. 

Karina: Jennings was taking a big risk with these rendezvous. Certainly not many MCA agents were having affairs with their clients as Michael Gruskoff explains, 

Michael Gruskoff: Oh no, no, it's, uh no because most agents keep away from that because it's their meal ticket and it's a dangerous thing, but Jennings Lang probably you know, it was a gambler and he got a big rush out of it. You don't, if you're representing a movie star and you don't want to have any flirtations... that's a big gamble if you it's like somebody's- Jennifer Lawrence's agent and something goes wrong, they lose somebody who's making $20 million a movie. You know, it's, it's a dangerous area. So yeah you know. So you, you don't want to go tread that water. 

Vanessa: So why did Jennings tread such dangerous water? I asked Rocky Lang to tell me what he knew about how his father and my grandmother got together. 

Rocky Lang: I do know that he was her agent for a number of years, and from what I'm told, they had a very good working relationship and at some point they started to see each other on the side and as the story goes from my point of view and keep in mind, this was way before I was born, but from what I understand is that, um, my dad, you know, really flipped for her and, you know, and he had a very, he had a bad marriage at home. Apparently Joan had a bad marriage with Walter. One thing led to the other, and it wasn't just a one-time thing. They met many times. They traveled together from what I'm told a few times. And, uh, they had this you know, full on affair happening. And it was pretty intense. And from what I'm told is my, from my brother is that, uh, my dad wanted to leave his marriage.

I don't know if she thought it was anything more than a roll in the hay because her marriage was not great. I don't know what was in her mind. I don't know if she loved him. I don't know if she saw a future with him. I don't know any of that. I know that my, from what I can gather from my mom and my brother is that my dad really, you know, had a thing for her. In those days in the fifties, it was hard to get divorced. Pam might've been miserable with my dad. She also might still have loved him and she may have loved her family, maybe Joan and Walter stayed together for their reasons. Clearly, neither were happy. 

Karina: To Vanessa, it's not so clear that Joan Bennett had an affair with Jennings Lang because her marriage wasn't happy.

Vanessa: Not all affairs happen because marriages are unhappy. I can't say whether Joan was or wasn't happy in her marriage. I can say the odds were in her favor, that Jennings had a more traditional setup where he was out earning the money and his wife was home raising their sons and he was sleeping around with impunity and enjoying a double standard. You know, Walter did some of that too, but at the same time, he and Joan had a very progressive marriage. They shared a deep professional respect and creative partnership. Both were working and earning money and both were parenting their children. So I think that shared intellectual companionship and humor and passion can act as a buffer in hard times.

But Walter went through the most extreme rough patch imaginable and his professional life was completely draining his confidence. I think it was hard on him that Joan was earning more than he was, and that made him feel somewhat worthless and emasculated. So I think in the case of Joan and Walter and the affair, Joan wasn't necessarily totally unhappy in her marriage. But she was struggling and Walter was having the worst time ever. So she might've potentially been seeking more autonomy and control and someone who was appreciating her for her at a time when I think Walter was definitely neglecting her. 

Matthew Bernstein: I think the shooting resulted from the shame and humiliation. He felt at his business failures. 

Karina: This is Walter's biographer, Matthew Bernstein. 

Matthew Bernstein: I mean, if you look at his overall life, he'd, he'd lived a charmed life through the late 1940s. He made films with some of Hollywood's greatest directors and stars, and he'd been very public, speaking of the Academy, about leading the industry and boosting its reputation among the public and around the world because there are always people ready to pounce on Hollywood and criticize it. And he made it a campaign, a personal campaign to sell Hollywood in the best light. So he was a major public figure, and then he felt tremendous pressure. Pressure of failure of going from being the second highest paid member of the film industry in 1944 to someone who could not draw a salary or get a film made and from a promiscuous producer to a cuckolded husband. 

Karina: In our next two episodes, we will talk about the many, many factors that led Walter Wanger to shoot Jennings Lang. For now, while we're still talking about Jennings as a cog in the machine that was MCA. Let's skip ahead a bit to talk about what happened after the shooting, how MCA hopped into action to protect their own and how after Jennings recovered from his wound, he and his agency steered the entire entertainment industry into new directions. Let's get one thing out of the way, Walter Wanger did not actually shoot either of Jennings Lang's balls off. 

Vanessa: We know that the bullet did not hit Jennings in the testicle, but in the upper thigh, and unfortunately I think it hit an artery and there was a lot of blood because of that, but he did fully recover within a year and he went on to a second marriage and had a third son.

Karina: And yet within hours, an urban legend had spread throughout the company town. Van Johnson, a closeted mid century leading man wrote a catty note to his fellow, 1940s star, Rosalind Russell. "Did you know that Walter got one of his balls," Johnson wrote, "yup right in the old crueler." From that point on, people began to repeat this embellished version of the story as fact. Even when they knew it was more like a metaphorical truth. 

Vanessa: I think the rumor became that Jennings got his balls shot off because it's a much sexier, rougher, romantic, macho spin on the story. And it means that he got hit right in the place where he threatened Walter the most, the seat of his masculinity and his potency so to speak. 

Karina: The shooting instantly became a huge scandal involving at least two MCA employees and Lew Wasserman didn't like scandal. But to the surprise of many in the MCA inner circle, he didn't fire either of the agents involved. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting he used the enormous power of MCA to protect them.

Vanessa: This is Michael Gruskoff again. 

Michael Gruskoff: Well, it's one of the most prominent agents in the industry at that time and producer at that time and movie star. And it's a very weird thing of somebody being shot in the balls, you know, and at a parking lot in Beverly Hills and it was a scandal and I always felt this is real LA confidential.

The real confidential LA and Lew Wasserman being as smart as he was and loving Jay, like he did said, okay, this could be trouble. We'll take care of it. And let's move on. Go to New York. 

Jay Kanter: Wasserman said to me, listen, you, you, uh, you always wanted to go to New York, so why don't you go? And th- the reason he said it was he wanted to get me out of town so the district attorney couldn't interview me regarding my apartment in the connection with Jennings and so I went to New York, I thought for a couple of weeks and I ended up staying there for nine years. 

Vanessa: The plan worked. The Beverly Hills police didn't bother to track Jay down in New York. And when he returned to Los Angeles, almost a decade later, they no longer cared. 

Jay Kanter: By that time the whole thing had cooled off. 

Karina: In the fall of 1952, Pamela Lang, who had been dealing with an overactive thyroid suffered a fatal heart attack. Just a few months after he had recovered from Walter's bullet, Jennings Lang was now left to raise his two young sons, alone.

Rocky Lang: And, you know, I guess if you wanted to look for the Hollywood Babylon angle, you could say, oh my God, she was, you know, so affected by this affair that, you know, her stress level was so high and she had a heart attack. I don't buy into that. I buy in, she had a heart attack and she died. 

Karina: It had been a bad year or so for Jennings Lang. But he recovered quickly in more ways than one. He met a singer named Monica Lewis and married her in 1956 and his career more than bounced back. 

Vanessa: I wonder if the shooting actually helped Jennings career because once you're the guy who got his balls shot off and you live to tell the tale and not only that, but then you married, sired, more children continued to have this reputation as a guy about town, then it becomes like you got a ball shot off, but the ball that's left is very large. I mean, it gave him special status and notoriety that worked in his favor because Jennings ultimately took over the studio where Walter had his great success and heyday at Universal in the forties. Jennings became a big wig in the sixties, and Jennings was at the largest agency the world has ever known, MCA. And they were known as the octopus. And eventually they started taking over other industries like television and Jennings was on the rise with that. 

Karina: As we've discussed, the entire structure of power in Hollywood began to shift in the late 1940s. The legacy movie studios had been dealt a major blow in 1948 when the Supreme court forced them to sell their movie theaters in order to break up the vertically integrated monopoly that had been so key to Hollywood's unprecedented profits. Things really started to change in the years after the shooting. Over the course of the 1950s, the movie studios started to lose their grip on a culture increasingly drawn to rock and roll and television. By 1958, most studios were in financial disarray, but the problem was especially acute at Universal, the studio where Walter, Joan and Fritz Lang had started their production company. And where Wanger had produced a number of hits that had kept the studio thriving through the 1940s. One company in late fifties Hollywood, that was totally flush was MCA. They became experts at shuttling big stars of the past with lost their big screen luster, such as Judy Garland, into lucrative TV deals. As for their clients from previous decades who were still in demand on the big screen, such as Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, MCA struck innovative profit sharing deals so that the stars would become more wealthy than actors ever had before, while the desperate studios bled cash just to get them. MCA had bought Paramount's film library and were raking it in on the TV rights to classic films starring still working names from the thirties like Grant and Marlene Dietrich. MCA's television production branch review had more shows in production than they could find space to shoot. Universal sound stages were virtually vacant, so MCA made a deal to lease them cheap. Eventually at the end of 1958, Wasserman struck a deal to buy the entire Universal Studios lot. This allowed the agency to move even further into production. 

Rocky Lang: 1950s, were evolving as in many decades are both culturally, socially, and in the film business is in a new crop of directors and producers coming in. The agencies were becoming incredibly powerful. 

Karina: In fact, the agencies were becoming so powerful that MCA became the target of an antitrust investigation. There has long been gossip that Robert Kennedy, attorney general, during his brother's presidential administration went after MCA, because his girlfriend, Marilyn Monroe, was so unhappy with the agency's treatment of her. Actually a federal trust prosecutor had been investigating MCA for two years by the time the Kennedy's came into power. In any case, in June 1962, MCA was pressured into dividing their agency business from their film and TV production company.

Rocky Lang: And my dad left the agency business at that point and became an executive for Universal and the television department. And then when he went to Universal he really built Universal television department. 

Karina: After that Jennings further pioneered the concept of movies made for TV with "Columbo." Peter Falk had been reluctant to commit to a TV series, but Lang worked out a special scheduling block, which he called the wheel. The network would air one "Columbo" movie each month, allowing Falk to work on other things in between shooting episodes, and on the other three weeks, the network would alternate between other series of specially produced movies. 

Rocky Lang: And then he transitioned into being a film producer. He gave Clint Eastwood his first directorial debut with "Play Misty For Me." He gave Steven Spielberg his first directorial job. My dad was I think, uh, in his heart, in some ways was like your grandfather and that he was attracted to more important material, but given the nature of where he was in his life, he had to turn a profit. And so most of his films were, you know, how can we, how can we make movies that make a lot of money? And so he balanced that, those movies with earthquake in the airport movies with movies that didn't do as well. 

Michael Gruskoff: He wound up being the head of Universal Pictures. In other words, you want to make a movie you wanna... he'll, he'll give you a green light, which if you have the green light control in this town, you know, it's a very important job. And plus it was Universal. They had a lot of money at the time. 

Karina: The irony of course, is that in the 1940s, Walter Wanger had been one of the more lucrative producers for Universal. By the early 1960s while Wanger was in Europe trying to save his biggest and last production, Jennings Lang was running the studio Wanger had called home. Walter had shot a man who he thought was trying to replace him in his bedroom. Just about a decade after the shooting, the guy who took the bullet had taken over Walter's former professional kingdom. In 1951, Jennings Lang could have died. 

Michael Gruskoff: Seven years after that he was the king and, you know, living in Beverly Hills, family and you know, playing tennis, he had a tennis court, he had the whole thing you know.

Vanessa: There were three people involved in what happened in that parking lot in December 1951. Jennings Lang took the bullet, but his life and career continued otherwise unscathed, and he went on to have the greatest fortune of them all, becoming the head of a major studio. As we'll see, my grandfather mounted a major comeback, but it wouldn't last long. And my grandmother, 

Karina: We will discuss what happened to her in due time. But first, next time on Love is a Crime we'll talk about all the forces conspiring against Walter Wanger circa 1951 to push him to the brink.

Vanessa: Love is a Crime is a Vanity Fair presentation in partnership with Cadence 13. Executive produced, created, written, and hosted by Vanessa Hope and Karina Longworth. Starring Griffin Dunne as Jennings Lang and Noah Segun as Jay Kanter. Our executive producer is Chris Corcoran and our showrunner is Jacquelyn Jamjoom. Production support provided by Nico Steele, Julia Doyle, Tony Mantia, and Lindsey D Schoenholtz. Location sound by Caleb A. Mose, Hope Hall, and Alaric S Campbell. Theme music composed by Lionel Cowen and Vybbes, audio produced and supervised by Shelby Comstock Britten and mixed by Gintas Norvilla and Rainhouse. Special thanks to Katey Rich from Vanity Fair and Julie Shen and Kelly Bales from Condé Nast 

Karina: Love is a Crime was written by Vanessa Hope and Karina Longworth who consulted the following published sources in researching this episode. "The Bennetts: An Acting Family," by Brian Kellow, published by the University Press of Kentucky, used by permission from the University Press of Kentucky. "Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent," by Matthew Bernstein, published by the University of Minnesota Press, used by permission from University of Minnesota Press. "The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and the Hidden History of Hollywood," by Dennis McDougal published by De Capo press. This episode includes interviews with Rocky Lang, Michael Gruskoff, Jay Kantor, and Matthew Bernstein. Fact checking by Laura Bullard.