Eugene Zukor and Roosevelt

Your factual obituary (Dec. 23) on lifelong Paramount film executive Eugene Zukor, 97, masks a vivid career hidden by Gene’s overwhelming modesty. Gene was a small, quiet man, but was assigned by the World War I Navy to explosives. So ably did Petty Officer Zukor inventory ammunition and arm ships, he was assigned to report directly to the undersecretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Shortly after World War I, Roosevelt wrote a screen treatment about a naval hero and sent it to young Zukor. The treatment was weak. Paramount officials “lost” it. But Roosevelt hounded Zukor about it, and Zukor had to write an apology, still preserved at the F.D.R. Hyde Park Library.

Years later, Roosevelt was President and spotted Gene at an Oval Office press conference. The President interrupted the action to call him forward and to again ask about the treatment. Gene artfully told his President that it was not rejected; it was “in limbo.”

An important stock investor, Gene feared the speculative fever of the 1920s and sold out before the ’29 crash. He left the East for Hollywood where he assisted his father Adolph in guiding Paramount out of receivership.

Gene remained active with the Navy and was transferred in World War II from its Los Angeles public relations office to the Bureau of Personnel in Washington. There, this man of integrity was consulted on commissioning Hollywood people for film and PR assignments.

Gene knew so much inside information that my father, producer Sol Lesser, arranged publication for Gene’s writing an authentic history of Paramount. But Gene balked. He would not reveal sleaze he had learned in confidence.

This man, who chose to live and die here, left a pattern other Angelenos can admire.

JULIAN (BUD) LESSER

Los Angeles