Show Notes

When Bonnie Siegler found the movie film that her grandfather Jules Schulback, a successful Manhattan furrier and amateur filmmaker, had taken of Marilyn Monroe while in New York doing the famous blown skirt scene from "The Seven Year Itch," she knew she had something.
It turned out to be more than just a fascinating piece of cinema history (the only surviving footage of that legendary night in 1954) but a book, "The American Way," that Siegler co-authored with Helene Stapinski.
Her pursuit of details about her grandfather led to a remarkable piece of forgotten history bridging old Hollywood, the birth of the comic book, and the Holocaust.
Schulback escaped from Nazi Germany but as Stapinski and Siegler state, getting out of Germany was difficult and dangerous enough but getting his family into America posed another challenge.
Jewish people needed a financial sponsor to be admitted to the United States at that time. Stepping up to assist Jules and his family was a character by the name of Harry Donenfeld, a publisher of “girlie” magazines who really struck gold when he started publishing comics.
That led to yet another icon in "The American Way": Superman. While Donenfeld cashed in as publisher,  the creators of the cartoon, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, who signed over all rights to the "Man of Steel," were left frustrated in their efforts to take advantage of the comic's incredible success.
Other luminaries that are also part of "The American Way" include Billy Wilder, the director who made "The Seven Year Itch" along with classics like "Double Indemnity," "Sunset Boulevard" and "Some Like It Hot." Like Schulback, Wilder, who came to the U.S. with fellow countryman and actor Peter Lorre, also left a family in Nazi Germany.
While Siegler's grandfather was able to get his family out of Germany, Wilder never knew what happened to his mother until Siegler's own research pinpointed where she had been murdered by the Nazis.
The book, while focusing on a number of celebrities, has a serious side, following how Jewish citizens in Germany lost their freedom, then their businesses and finally their lives through the 1930s. Siegler points to parallels with rights that have been steadily eroded in the United States in recent years.