Budd the wiser

His hair is snow white and he has a face like fine old leather. He no longer pummels the light punchbag that has travelled with him from home to home over the years, and these days he occasionally uses a cane to assist his progress. He is the man who wrote one of the most famous scenes in cinema history - featuring the 'contender' lines from On The Waterfront , as spoken by Marlon Brando - and much, much more.

Budd Schulberg is a somebody all right and at 88 years old has more class than Park Avenue. Schulberg wrote great movies, including On the Waterfront, for which he won an Oscar, and A Face in the Crowd. A movie brat, the son of studio production head B.P. Schulberg, he produced a seminal novel about Hollywood, What Makes Sammy Run?, and another about the dark side of the fight game, The Harder They Fall. As a writer on his greatest sporting love, he has covered most of the truly major fights in his adult lifetime and contributed an exceptional book on Muhammad Ali. His memoir of growing up in the movie capital, Moving Pictures - Memories of a Hollywood Prince, is a beautifully written, tender recollection of the years up until he was 18. He also became a key figure in the McCarthy-era House Un-American Activities Committee inquiry into Communist activity in Hollywood, when he testified as a 'friendly witness'. He really must get around to bringing his story up to date with a second volume, he says, but there are so many other things to do...

Suddenly Schulberg is once more a main attraction. Two movie projects have been in production. Firstly, a film of What Makes Sammy Run?, piloted by Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks and starring Ben Stiller. Secondly, a script for Spike Lee about the first Joe Louis-Max Schmeling fight in 1936, with the working title Save Us, Joe Louis - Samuel L. Jackson has reportedly been in talks to play Joe Louis. There is also a proposed stage musical of A Face in the Crowd mean he's headlining again. He's hot. 'Yeah, in a way,' he agrees, sitting on the terrace of his house on the Aspatuck Creek at Quoque, on an unpretentious backwater of Long Island, where he lives with Betsy, his wife of 22 years. (Schulberg has been married four times; his third wife, the actress Geraldine Brooks, died in 1977.)

I have sought out Schulberg to talk boxing and anything else that takes his fancy. It transpires that a great deal takes his fancy: his memory is phenomenal and, despite the slight stammer that has accompanied him since childhood, his skill as a raconteur is such that he can transport you ringside, or elsewhere, in a couple of sentences.

A mention of Marlon Brando - who won an Oscar as Terry Malloy, the ex-fighter who could have been a contender, in Waterfront - prompts him to recall how the scene that was to find a permanent home in the mind of every movie buff was almost cut. 'Kazan [Elia Kazan, the director] said, "We're having trouble - Marlon doesn't like the scene with his brother in the taxicab," recounts Schulberg. 'I said, "Jesus Christ! Let's sit down and talk to him." But every time I tried to, [producer] Sam Spiegel would find some way of calling off the meeting - he was afraid it would be volatile and Marlon might walk off the film.

'One day we were on the roof on the tenement [part of the film's location] and I said to Brando, "I don't understand about the taxi scene," and he said, "Well, it doesn't work." Kazan said, "Look, let's finally thrash this out" and we went down to the kitchen. I'm seething. Kazan said, "What's wrong, Marlon, why don't you like the scene?", and Marlon said, "Well, when I say all that stuff about I could have been a contender and Steiger [Rod Steiger, playing Terry's brother] takes out a gun on me, I just can't say the rest of it. I think I'd stop." Then Kazan said, "What if you just reach over and push the gun down while he looks at you?" and Marlon said, "Oh, that's fine. The rest of it I like!" The scene everyone remembers - and it almost didn't make it.'

As a young screenwriter, Schulberg was famously paired with a fading F. Scott Fitzgerald on a film script for Winter Carnival. An alcohol-fuelled cross-country journey to New Hampshire for the 1939 Dartmouth Winter Carnival - Schulberg had attended Dartmouth College - formed the basis of Schulberg's novel The Disenchanted. He recalls the author of The Great Gatsby and The Last Tycoon with affection.

'It was a terrible movie, really a horrendous, terrible movie,' he says, 'but I came away liking him [Scott Fitzgerald] very much and I remained friendly with him.' He walks me to his study to see, hanging on the wall, Fitzgerald's social security certificate. 'I don't understand how I got it, I really don't,' he says. 'When we got off the train in Springfield, Mass[achusetts], he sort of fell over and lost everything - things fell out of his pockets. Years later, I mean 20 years later, I find the damn thing in a bag - how did I have this? And by that time he had died, so I had it framed.'

Of course, as a writer and a boxing fan, Schulberg also has a Hemingway story. The two met at a party in Paris in 1947. 'He was there on the patio, coming at me like a mad bull,' Schulberg told Kurt Vonnegut in an interview for the Paris Review. 'He was almost bare-chested, and was wearing ragged shorts... and the first words I ever heard from him were: "You're Schulberg the book writer?...What the fuck do you know about prizefighting, for Christ's sake?" That was the first thing I heard from this great literary figure. Then he put me through a fistic catechism. He asked me if I'd ever heard of this fighter and that fighter, Leo Lomski, Leo Houck, and I'd say, "Yes, yes. But, Ernest, the fighters that you're asking about are all very well-known." I said that about two or three times, and he just wouldn't stop. And he pushed me. Every time he asked me a name he'd push me. He didn't punch me, just hit me hard enough in the shoulder to make me take a step back. It was cocktail time, except his cocktail time had started at about 9am. Finally, after about five more names, he got to Pinkie Mitchell and he hit me hard. I took a deep breath and told him how, when Pinkie Mitchell was a junior welterweight champion, he came out and he fought our friend Mushy Callahan in Vernon, California. Mushy won the championship from Pinkie Mitchell and after the fight Mushy gave me the gloves he won with - I had them on the wall behind my bed. I thought that would do it, but instead of saying, "Hey, you really knew Mushy Callahan," he hit me harder. By this time I was ready to kill him... And I just hit him back the way he had been hitting me. He looked at me, spun around and walked away. Didn't say a word. I was leaning back against that white stucco wall of their terrace, just seething. I'd been too nice to him. He really deserved to be punched in the goddamn nose. While I'm seething, my friend Toby Bruce comes hurrying back to me, and brings me a drink. He says, "Budd, Papa's in the kitchen, and he says he likes you." I said, "Toby, tell Papa I admire him but from now on I plan to admire him from as far away as I can get."'

Schulberg's addiction to fights and fighters was inherited from his father, who knew and revered 'The Great Benny Leonard', as the world lightweight champion was always referred to in the Schulberg household. Schulberg swears he could spell Benny's name even before he could read. Growing up in New York City, Schulberg's ambitions were to one day see him in action and then to become a world champion like The Great One.

When Schulberg was seven his father took him to see Leonard defend his title against Ritchie Mitchell - 'I was so excited, I couldn't go to school that day' - but a guard barred them from entering Madison Square Garden. 'It's 80 years later, but I can still see the guard,' recalls Budd. 'He looked 12 feet tall, staring down at me and saying to my father, "What's the matter with you? You can't take that little kid in here."' B.P. hailed a taxi, returned the wailing Budd home and sped back to the Garden. 'Late that night,' remembers the son, 'he sat on the edge of my bed and I saw the fight through my father's eyes.'

It was many years before Schulberg realised one of his ambitions and saw The Great Benny in the ring. Only he wasn't Great any more: 'He'd retired, but lost all his money in the crash of '29 and had to come back. He was fighting a very good young welterweight from Belfast, Jimmy McLarnin, but poor Benny was just a shadow of what he had been. McLarnin knocked him out.'

By then the family had moved to California and Budd was a regular fight fan, going with his father every Friday to the shows at the Hollywood Legion Stadium. Because his father was head of Paramount, fighters would tend to accept invitations to the Schulberg home. 'So we got to know many of them very well. I became very friendly with Fidel La Barba, who became world flyweight champion [1925-30]. And Tony Canzoneri [world champion at three different weights] - I was in awe of Tony.'

From his father he heard mostly negative things about film stars. 'They were demanding, difficult and selfish. So even the biggest, Gloria Swanson and the rest, we didn't really respect.' Boxers, by contrast, they revered. 'The people we looked up to were people like Tony Canzoneri.'

Schulberg says that he and his father were 'ethnically influenced' when following boxers. 'We would pull for the Jewish fighters, like Mushy Callahan, who in spite of his name was one of those.'

On a 1929 trip to Europe on the Ile de France, the Schulbergs met up with the Striblings. Young Stribling, the American heavyweight who knocked out 125 opponents before dying in a motorcycle accident in 1933 at the age of 28, was on his way to fight Primo Carnera and allowed the teenage Budd to spar with him. 'That trip planted the seeds of my novel, The Harder They Fall, because we went to see him in London and Carnera won on a foul in the fourth. My father and I, being pretty knowledgeable fans, felt the fight was not exactly kosher.' Then about a month later, he and his father were in Paris when Stribling fought again and won on a foul in the seventh. 'It was very, very much arranged.'

The Harder They Fall, memorably filmed with Humphrey Bogart, was about racketeering in the fight game. Does the fix still go in? 'I don't think fights are fixed any more the way they used to be,' says Schulberg, 'where it was choreographed for somebody to fall down. Now it's more in the fixing of the judges.

By contrast, Frankie Carbo, the 'mob's unofficial commissioner for boxing, controlled a lot of the welters and middles,' says Schulberg. 'Not every fight was fixed, of course, but from time to time Carbo and his lieutenants, like Blinky Palermo in Philadelphia, would put the fix in. When the Kid Gavilan-Johnny Saxton fight was won by Saxton on a decision in Philadelphia in 1954, I was covering it for Sports Illustrated and wrote a piece at that time saying boxing was a dirty business and must be cleaned up now. It was an open secret. All the press knew that one - and other fights - were fixed. Gavilan was a mob-controlled fighter, too, and when he fought Billy Graham it was clear Graham had been robbed of the title. The decision would be bought. If it was close, the judges would shade it the way they had been told.'

Schulberg's s enthusiasm for the game remained and remains undiminished. 'I've never lost that feeling about going to the big fights, even though the fight game has gone downhill a bit - there aren't as many magic matches as there used to be. But every once a while - I think we all felt it at the first Evander Holyfield-Tyson fight, when Tyson was exposed - there is a feeling just before it starts that it will really change their lives. I don't think any other sport does that - it can define them for the rest of their lives, it can destroy them or make them legends. Even recently in the Lennox Lewis-Tyson fight, when you could see almost from the beginning that it was a mis-match, there was a moment when they were facing each other, before the bell rang, when you wondered what would happen. Would it be the [re]making of Tyson, or the final breaking of him?'

He feels that the key problem today is that excellent boxers like undisputed light-heavyweight champion Roy Jones Junior and middleweight Bernard Hopkins have few decent opponents. 'In the old days there would be eight or nine serious contenders, now there are none.' Jones's legacy, he feels, has been damaged by the standard of his opponents. 'And while corrupt boxing officials don't fix the fights now, they fix the standing of the boxers. They say a champion must fight the number one contender or be stripped of his title, but then these fighters often fight people who are unknown and untested because standards are so low that they have been manipulated into the position of number one contenders.'

Lennox Lewis needs three or four real challengers to test him, Schulberg argues. 'And there is hardly one. He has the makings, he boxes well, moves well and has a very good jab and if he'd gone through six or eight hard fights he might have proved to be something. But he's getting towards the end of his career and who has he fought? Tyson when he's over the hill. I'm afraid the boxing has sadly deteriorated.'

His main passion may be boxing, but he loves most sport. 'The drama is something no [other] drama has. I mean, if you watch a play, you begin to get a sense somewhere along the line of how it's going to end. But with sports, you don't really ever know what's going to happen. It can be so explosive and I find that fascinating.'

In On the Waterfront, his exposé of trade union corruption in the docks, Schulberg was able to combine several sporting passions with the deep-rooted sense of injustice instilled in him by his liberal mother, Adeline. (His father, an inveterate gambler, died broke in 1967, aged 65.). 'I got along with Brando pretty well,' recalls Budd. A week before we started [shooting] I walked with him through the Hoboken area and he was wearing his Terry Malloy outfit. He walked through the entire town as Terry Malloy. I didn't think he could do it, I thought people would recognise him, but, I'll be damned, we walked through the entire town, we went into bars and we walked past a girls' school. The girls were coming down the steps and I thought, young people, surely they'll know him? But Marlon just went on being Terry Malloy and they thought he was a longshoreman.'

Schulberg, lionised by longshoremen after the film was released, has always been politically aware. He was a member of the Communist Party from 1936-1940, having in 1934 travelled to Moscow and met, among others, Maxim Gorky. He came to regard the Soviet Union as a murderous regime - Gorky and several of the writers he had met were either killed or disappeared - and quit the Party. Much criticised by the Left for co-operating with the House Un-American Activities Committee, he remains unapologetic - 'I was a premature anti-Stalinist,' he says - and an energetic liberal activist. He is also heavily involved in encouraging young writers at Harlem's Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Centre.

Such is Schulberg's clarity of recall - especially when discussing boxing - that you'd swear he's back in his seat alongside his father B.P. at the Hollywood Legion, cheering on the Jewish boys and beginning to create an unparalleled personal ring record book that even included, for a while, managing a fighter, a top 10 heavyweight named Archie McBride. 'He was knocked out by Floyd Patterson at the Garden and Nino Valdez beat him, although I thought he was robbed. And [Tommy] Hurricane Jackson beat him, but a judge confessed on his deathbed to having taken a $500 bribe.'

It's time to challenge the master: who's the best you've ever seen?

Ali in his prime has to be in there, he muses. 'I would have given him a very good chance of outpointing Joe Louis, because very good boxers always gave Joe trouble.'

What of Rocky Marciano?

'The great trainer Cus D'Amato talked about "fistic character" and refusing to lose and if anybody ever had that it was Rocky - it was unthinkable for him to lose. You could knock him down but you simply couldn't keep him down. At the same time, I think with some of the bigger fighters [post-Marciano's tenure as heavyweight champion] he might have been cut up very badly and had trouble with referees stopping the fight.'

The best pound-for-pound fighter?

'I would pick Ray Robinson over Ali and Louis, because he could box as well as Ali - he was so fast - and for his weight could punch like Joe Louis. He was the perfect combined boxer-puncher.'

The greatest fight you've ever seen?

He pauses. 'That's a tough one. But one was the first Billy Conn-Joe Louis fight [1941], in which Conn was really beating Louis. After 12 rounds he had sort of mastered Louis and then got knocked out in the 13th. It was tremendously dramatic. Conn was leading and had only three more rounds to go and his corner was telling him to stick and move, stick and move, you can't lose if you stick and move. And Billy's saying, "Nah, I'm going to knock him out." And he came out in the 13th and started to mix it with Louis and down he went. And in his corner - it's a classic - the manager's saying, "Goddammit, Billy, didn't we tell you to stick and move?" And Billy, lying there on the ground, says, "What's the use of being Irish if you can't be stupid?"' And Budd Schulberg chuckles.

The sun is dipping low over Aspatuck Creek as I drive away. He stands in his driveway, courteous to the last but anxious to get back to work - 'I have a tendency to do too much,' he says.