Jay Kanter, the high-powered Hollywood agent who represented Marlon Brando, Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe and served as the inspiration for Jack Lemmon’s character in the classic Billy Wilder film The Apartment, died Tuesday. He was 97.
Kanter died at his home in Beverly Hills, a spokesperson for the Independent Artist Group announced. His son Adam Kanter is a partner at IAG.
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A favorite of mighty Music Corporation of America mogul Lew Wasserman, Kanter also spent seven years in England in the 1960s greenlighting European movies for Universal, produced films including the Elizabeth Taylor-starring X, Y and Zee (1972) and had a long business relationship with Alan Ladd Jr. at Fox and MGM.
When Brando was slumming around Paris after breaking out on Broadway in Streetcar Named Desire in the late 1940s, Kanter‚ then an MCA junior agent, received a call from producer Stanley Kramer saying he wanted to hire the actor to make his film debut in The Men (1950) as a paralyzed ex-G.I.
Kanter was not the budding superstar’s agent — Edith Van Cleve was — but he picked him up at a train station and took him to the home of Brando’s aunt and uncle in San Marino, California, and they all had dinner. The next day, Kanter drove the actor to a meeting with Kramer, director Fred Zinnemann and writer Carl Foreman, then asked him to come to the MCA office so he could meet the other agents.
Brando told him, “‘I don’t have to meet anybody, you’re my agent,’” Kanter recalled in 2017.
When Wasserman heard the story, “He really got a kick out of it because he was getting telephone calls from Darryl Zanuck and Jack Warner, these heads of studios that wanted to meet Marlon,” Kanter noted. “And Lew said, ‘I can’t arrange it, you’d have to talk to his agent.’ They said, ‘Who’s that?’ And he said, ‘Jay Kanter.’ And they said, ‘Who’s he?’
“Suddenly I was getting phone calls from all these heads of studios, and that was it.”
A bit later, Kanter gave a key to his Beverly Hills apartment to Jennings Lang so the senior MCA exec would have a place to continue his affair with one of his clients, actress Joan Bennett. “I don’t think he was borrowing it to take a nap,” Kanter said on a 2018 episode of the Love Is a Crime podcast.
After Bennett’s husband, struggling producer Walter Wanger, found out about it, he confronted Lang and shot him in the upper thigh in the MCA parking lot in Beverly Hills in December 1951. It was quite the scandal back in the day.
The Apartment (1960), of course, starred Lemmon as Bud Baxter, who lets his New York insurance company supervisors (including Fred MacMurray’s Jeff Sheldrake) use his Upper West Side digs to conduct their extramarital affairs. The United Artists film, also starring Shirley MacLaine, won five Oscars, including the one for best picture.
“I think [the Lang-Bennett-Wanger incident is] where Billy Wilder got the idea for the movie,” Kanter said. “He never told me. But it was quite obvious.”
Meanwhile, Hugh Wilson based The Famous Teddy Z, his 1989-90 CBS sitcom about a big star (Dennis Lipscomb) who takes a liking to a mailroom guy (Jon Cryer), on the Kanter-Brando origin story.
Jay Ira Kanter was born in Chicago on Dec. 12, 1926. When he was 9, he came to Los Angeles with his mother, Muriel, after his father, Harry, died. At 17, he joined the Navy during World War II; following the service, he landed a mailroom job at MCA, then graduated to messenger and assistant to Wasserman.
“He treated me very well, he was kind of my mentor and would discuss various deals at the studios [with me],” Kanter remembered. “Eventually I drove him around when he would call on different studio heads. Then he finally said, ‘You better start earning your keep here, you’re an agent now.’”
After Wanger shot Lang, Wasserman sent Kanter to work in MCA’s New York office so the L.A. district attorney couldn’t interview him. “I went to New York for what I thought was a couple of weeks,” he said, “and I ended up staying there for nine years.”
He got the relative newcomer Kelly $750 a week for a guaranteed six weeks of work in 1951 on the Kramer-produced, Zinnemann-directed, Foreman-written High Noon, according to Donald Spoto’s 2010 book, High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly, and repped her when she signed a seven-year deal with MGM in 1952.
In 1953, Kanter married his second wife, Judy Balaban — the daughter of Barney Balaban, the president of Paramount Pictures from 1936-64 — at The Plaza in New York, where Kelly and singer Rosemary Clooney were bridesmaids and Brando was the best man.
(He had first met Balaban when she was at a New York nightclub watching her then-boyfriend, singer Merv Griffin, perform. She would later serve as a bridesmaid at Kelly’s 1956 wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco and write a book about it.)
Kanter spent his first few days repping Monroe driving along the Pacific coast with her after she didn’t want to report to the studio right way. (His other clients included Paul Newman, Jerome Robbins, Laurence Olivier and Terence Rattigan.)
After MCA was dissolved in 1962 in an antitrust ruling, Kanter became a film production exec at sister company Universal. He signed director Michael Winner to a six-picture deal and spent a reported $30 million on British films — 1967’s Charlie Bubbles, starring Albert Finney and Liza Minnelli, among them —but never had a hit.
Always impeccably dressed, Kanter turned to producing in the ’70s, working on such films as X, Y and Zee; Villain (1971), starring Richard Burton; Winner’s The Nightcomers (1971), starring Brando; Fear Is the Key (1972), starring Barry Newman; and Big Truck and Sister Clare (1974), starring Peter Ustinov.
In 1975, he segued to Fox to join Ladd, who would soon give Star Wars (1977) a green light. The pair also worked together at The Ladd Co. — movies under their watch included Chariots of Fire, Body Heat and Blade Runner) — MGM/UA (where Kanter was in charge of MGM) and MGM-Pathe. He set up his own independent production company in 1994.
Over the years, Kanter spoke about his relationships with Kelly, Monroe, Ladd and Brando — he and producer Mike Medavoy were the executors of the actor’s estate — in several documentaries.
After he and Balaban divorced in 1961, he was married to Kit Bennett from 1965 until her 2014 death.
In the 1990s, Mel Brooks and Kanter organized a weekly lunch of their close friends. At the start, the meals included a circle of former Fox execs and filmmakers from the ’70s, among them Ladd, Richard Donner, Paul Mazursky, Freddie Fields and Michael Gruskoff; later, Jeff Cohen, Tim Deegan, Jay Cooper, Richard Benjamin, Fred Specktor and Ben Mankiewicz joined in.
The lunches have continued every Friday for more than 35 years, including last week at the regular location, Porta Via on the patio in Beverly Hills, and Kanter was there.
Very sad news today. I’ve known a lot of nice people in my life, but nobody nicer than Jay Kanter. If you knew him, you loved him. He was more than a legendary agent. He was a loyal friend, always there when you needed him. I know it’s a cliché but in Jay’s case it is just so…
— Mel Brooks (@MelBrooks) August 7, 2024
In addition to his son Adam (and his wife, Brooke), survivors include his other children, Dustin (and Debra), Tom, Cydney, Bernard, Amy (and composer Bob Thiele) and Michael (and Erica); and his grandchildren, Jason (and Andie), Matthew, Owen (and Jared), Sophie, Charlie, Hannah, Kit, Cleo, Grayson and Ryan. Victoria, his other daughter with Balaban, died in 2020.
A private service is set for Friday. Donations in his memory can be made to the Motion Picture & Television Fund or the UCLA Stein Eye Institute.
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