Excerpts from
The Lady and the Law
The Remarkable Story of
Fanny Holtzman

She was an elfin creature, with huge innocent eyes, who stilled the roar of the MGM lion. In her prime, tales of her legal wizardry were whispered from her native Brooklyn to the chancelleries of the Orient. Noel Coward and Eleanor Roosevelt and George Bernard Shaw were her friends; Joseph P. Kennedy her bitter enemy.

She presented many and contradictory images. A sketch by the duchess of Rutland portrayed her as a vision of curly-haired, fawn-eyed defenselessness; to the playwright Moss Hart she was "as helpless as the Bethlehem Steel Company." Louis B. Mayer pronounced her "a female Solomon;" others claimed to detect a closer kinship to Machiavelli.

Fanny Holtzmann was on the set when Garbo's Hollywood career was launched, and with the Churchills at Chartwell for the intimate family celebration of Sir Winston's eightieth birthday. She was instrumental in the prewar struggle to extricate Jews from Europe, and later in the creation of the state of Israel.

The green bus line, ninety minutes out of London, swung off the Hampton Court road at Windsor, rumbled down High Street, and screeched to a halt on the wet pavement before the Town Hall. Fifty yards to the east, scarcely an arrow's flight away, rose the ancient gray battlements of Windsor Castle. The front door of the bus wheezed open, and a lone passenger stepped out into the faint morning drizzle of an English autumn. The visitor was female and small. Long braids of tightly woven black hair ran tiaralike around her head, a gesture toward mature appearance that only emphasized the youthfulness of her pleasant, fresh-complexioned face. Honoring the conventions of the early 1930s, she was dressed against the damp in a knitted woolen pullover and skirt. The heels of her shoes were discreetly low; her neckline as discreetly high, and half hidden by a string of pearls.

Waiting at Frogmore House, a royal retreat nearby, was the Grand Duchess Xenia of Russia, whose daughter wanted Fanny Holtzmann to press a libel claim against the film titan MGM. The Romanoffs could not make a move, however, without the approval of their first cousin and benefactor, King George of England.

Promptly at four the royal party arrived; King George, an old naval hand, observed quarter-deck punctuality. Fanny recognized at once the grave, heavily bearded visage that adorned every English coin. But the king in person seemed less imposing; a frail, smallish man in his late sixties who might have stepped out from behind a teller's cage at Barclay's Bank.

The queen walked a step behind the king, trailed by a retinue of attendants. The former Princess Mary of Teck was encased in a long voluminous black skirt and a neck-high blouse covered with mauve brocade. The grand duchess made the presentations. The king settled into an armchair opposite the visitor. "So you are Fanny Holtzmann!"

"Yes, sir. Did you expect something else?"

The royal lips parted; but no sound came forth. The king was notoriously nervous in the presence of people he considered clever. Finally, "Are you a barrister or a solicitor?"

"I'm a lawyer." The grand duchess leaned toward her cousin. "Fanny," she announced impressively, "has appeared before the United States Supreme Court."

"Really?" The king looked at Fanny. "But you seem so, forgive me, so very young!"

"One need never apologize for telling a woman she looks young."

George smiled, relaxing visibly. "Tell me, Miss Fanny, where did you study?"

"At Fordham University, downtown. Our 'campus' was on the twenty-eighth floor."

"But where did you take your dinners?"

"At the Liggett's Drug Store downstairs." Everything in America, she explained, was geared to the needs of the upward-striving masses. "Italian newcomers built our railroads, Polish country people settled our farmlands. A Jewish storekeeper named Meyer Guggenheim befriended the copper miners, and became a millionaire. Of course, I only know what I picked up crossing so often from New York to Hollywood."

The magic word had been spoken. From the hush that fell over the company, it was clear that everything up to now had been prelude. Fanny was not surprised. After all, what did the royal family read? The New Statesman and Nation? No. The penny papers: Beaverbrook's Express, the tabloid Inquirer. And she had been on the front pages of all of them since the early 1920's.

Queen Mary could not resist the first question: "Did you ever actually see Mary Pickford?"

"Of course. I've dined with her a number of times."

The queen plunged ahead. "What about John Gilbert?"

"He became one of my clients, after I represented his wife, Ina Claire, in their divorce."

"Just what is he like, Miss Holtzmann?"

At this point the royal attendants apparently stopped breathing. The Delphic oracle itself, about to pronounce judgment on the fate of empires, could not have commanded more attention. But then, what did the Delphic oracle know about John Gilbert, the great screen lover of the twenties?

Fanny chose her words carefully. "Mr. Gilbert is very charming."

"Did you see him up close?"

"Close enough," Fanny was tempted to reply, "to be nearly bowled over by his breath." But even crowned heads were entitled to their illusions.

One of the ladies-in-waiting murmured something to the queen, who turned to her husband. "The afternoon is wearing on, Majesty."

"Well, let it, let it."

"But Majesty", Fanny was reminded of the way physicians' wives in Brooklyn always addressed their husbands as "Doctor", "don't you think you ought to rest?"

"I can rest this evening," the sovereign grumbled. His parting words were an invitation to Fanny to visit Windsor Castle.

It had been a long climb for Fanny. The inept goose in a brilliant immigrant family, she had battled her way into night law school, meanwhile eking out a clerking job in Times Square.

One noontime she was alone in her tiny office, munching on a lox sandwich brought from home, when the door burst open and "in walked this dazzling man."

Edmund Goulding at twenty-nine was dazzling indeed. He had played the title role in a British musical production of Oscar Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Gray. He had the cool, chiseled beauty for the part, and also the dissolute charm of Wilde's wastrel. He vibrated with what would later be called charisma.

Fanny tucked the remains of her sandwich into a drawer. Goulding was one of a half-dozen debtors of her bosses to whom she had been telephoning offers of help. Mechanically she accepted a huge box of flowers, wondering if they had been paid for [they hadn't; there was a court summons from the florist a month later] . . .

Goulding had already pulled up a chair. He had been simply swamped with deadlines, obligations: a movie script to finish, a Broadway opening, a weekend party, if he could work things out with his tailor . . . Fanny managed to sort out some specifics. There were bills to be paid, chiefly for back rent at the Algonquin.

Professionally he was performing well, yet faring miserably. His revisions on a script for Mae Murray had been highly praised; yet his cash payment had been only $250, and his screen credit nil. By contrast, the original author received $10,000, and could take all the bows for Goulding's ghost work

It was obvious that Goulding was being subjected to cavalier treatment. It was equally obvious that the man was a torrent of creativity.

Fanny took Goulding in hand, calming his creditors. Goulding took Fanny to the famous Round Table at the Hotel Algonquin where he introduced her to Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and Clifton Webb as "the greatest lawyer in the world." The Table assemblage, it turned out, all had problems rivalling Goulding's, and would be delighted to dump them in the "greatest lawyer's" lap; Fanny had a battery of prospective clients before she had a law degree. Goulding came up with an idea for an epic sea movie. "More money," Fanny told him, "in doing it as a book first." She locked him in a hotel room until he produced a novel on whose wings she floated him out to Hollywood, where within a few months he was directing Greta Garbo.

With a boost from Noel Coward, she had just sold his Cavalcade, Fanny expanded her practice to England. Trailed by the British press, practically adopted by the duchess of Rutland, she was soon a collector's item on the castle circuit.

Next in line for Fanny were the Romanoffs, and their complaint against MGM. The movie company had made a picture in which Rasputin, a wily Siberian peasant-healer, was shown seducing one "Princess Natasha," identified as "a niece of the Czar." But Czar Nicholas had only a single niece, his sister Xenia's daughter, Princess Irina Yousoupoff. Ergo, "Natasha" had to be the virtuous Irina, publicly defiled before legions of moviegoers.

Fanny conveyed the princess's distress to Bob Rubin, the MGM general counsel, suggesting a modest settlement. Rubin laughed at her.

A London judge and jury did not. After a week of testimony, the court returned a judgment against MGM for $125,000, the highest libel award in England since the Duke of York bested the anti-Catholic conspirator Titus Oates in 1684. But that was only in England. The picture had already been shown in half the countries of the world, with each projection constituting a separate libel.

Louis Mayer begged for mercy. Fanny settled globally for a million dollars, a vast victory party mingling, as the Paris Herald-Tribune reported, "more than a hundred members of the English aristocracy and the Hollywood screen world," and, most importantly, the satisfaction of knowing she had created a landmark in defamation law. Books and films would henceforth be preceded by the disclaimer that "any resemblance to living persons" was unintentional.

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