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Research at the Ransom Center:
Miss Universe, Mr. Uris,
and The Archive
by Ira B. Nadel
Miss Universe and Leon Uris seem at first an unusual
couple. But from research in the Uris archive at the Ransom Center,
the unexpected connection is clear.
As one of America’s most popular writers from 1953 until his death in
2003, Uris received numerous honors, awards, and praise, although
he liked to introduce himself as a “12-time Pulitzer Prize loser.”
Nevertheless, in pursuing details of this remarkable writer’s life for
a forthcoming biography, I came across an unusual set of items in
his scrapbooks: airline tickets, passports, hotel receipts, press clippings,
and the program for the 1975 Miss Universe contest held in El
Salvador. Uris was a judge, joining Peter Lawford, Susan Strasberg,
Sarah Vaughan, Ernest Borgnine, and Olympic skier Jean-Claude Killy.
Background sheets on each of the twelve finalists accompany a copy
of Uris’s itinerary and program for the final judging. It was to take
place in the redecorated National Gymnasium of El Salvador, transformed
into a gigantic Mayan pyramid. Scrapbook photos show the
judges—Uris in a white tuxedo with frill shirt—hard at work jotting
down comments and responses before selecting Miss Finland, Anne
Marie Pohtamo, as the winner.
Uris’s autographed program from the event contains amusing remarks
from his fellow judges: the actress Susan Strasberg wrote “If I only
had a larger social conscience.” The journalist Max Lerner offered
“To Jill and Leon—beauty and the beast—each of you with great
powers,” while the skier Jean-Claude Killy exclaimed “from one skier
& great one to another skier & better one!” Such colorful remarks are
irresistible in an account of the novelist’s life.
The Miss Universe contest is only one of numerous discoveries in the
Uris archive, which first arrived at the Ransom Center in 1997. Among
the more interesting items included is an outline and research notes
for an unwritten novel about immigrants in the lower East Side of
New York and a completed but unpublished children’s story entitled
“Secrets of Forever Island.“ Vivid letters written to his stepsister and
parents during his Marine Corps training in 1942—Uris dropped out
of high school to enlist only weeks after Pearl Harbor—reveal details
of his military life, which provided source material for his first novel,
Battle Cry. Other discoveries include criticism from the Israeli
Foreign Office of errors in an early draft of Exodus, the actual transcript
of his 1964 English libel case, which he would turn into QBVII,
and a copy of his first fan letter. An added bonus are hundreds of
photographs he took as part of his research for novels Exodus
and Trinity.
Secondary material can provide additional insight about a subject,
and for Uris one of the most interesting early events in his career was
the world premier of the 1955 movie Battle Cry. Press accounts of
Ransom Edition : :
Ira B. Nadel, Professor of English at the University of British Columbia
and research fellow at the Ransom Center, works with materials from
the Leon Uris archive in the reading room.
the gala in Baltimore, Uris’s home town, detail the support of the entire
city. A wonderful letter by Uris’s wife, Betty, to her parents with her
impression of the event supplements the public record. The presence of
movie stars Dorothy Malone, Mona Freeman, the director Raoul Walsh,
plus the young heartthrob Tab Hunter, meant a sellout of the 2,800-seat
Stanley Theatre. Uris stayed on, but the stars left for the opening the
next day in New York. Capitalizing on his skyrocketing appeal, Warner
Bros. had Tab Hunter appear at the 8:30 a.m. show to hand out pairs of
nylons to the first 100 female guests.
The archive charts Uris’s development as a writer from juvenile efforts
as a dramatist to his detailed research for his massive novel about
Ireland, Trinity. His travel for novels like Mila 18 and Armageddon
are thoroughly documented, as are his unsuccessful attempts to bring
Exodus to the stage as the musical Ari and efforts to write filmscripts
for his major novels. Further riches include the record of his philanthropic
activities and correspondence with his readers. Asked to name
the most influential books in his life, he cites the work of Steinbeck.
Asked when he planned to take up golf, he responds, “after my first
heart attack.” Asked his favorite passage from his own work, he
replies, “the end.”
From such disparate material, the personality of the writer emerges.
Access to such material is invaluable, and biographers can never
have enough of it.
Ira B. Nadel, Professor of English at the University of British Columbia and
frequent visitor to the Ransom Center’s archives, is the author of biographies
of Leonard Cohen, Tom Stoppard, and Ezra Pound. A Dorot Fellowship
supported his work at the Ransom Center.
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Learn more about the Leon Uris archive at
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/ransomedition.