One Lodge, Six Charters / City Lodge No. 408
Raised in City Lodge in 1921, Joe Nadel spent thirty-five years making movies happen, from the old Paramount studio in Astoria to Mae West, D.O.A. and The Jackie Robinson Story.
In the closing weeks of 1950, two notices went to press three thousand miles apart. In Los Angeles, the Times reported the death of a veteran motion-picture production manager at his home on North Citrus Avenue. In New York, City Lodge No. 408 printed its monthly notice, full of the usual news: praise for the brother who had organized a grand ninety-fourth anniversary dinner-dance, a daughter’s engagement, a new baby boy at the Lying-In Hospital. In the middle of it all sat a small boxed line: In Memoriam, Brother Joseph Nadel. Raised June 20, 1921. Asleep November 20, 1950. May his soul rest in peace. Joe Nadel had spent most of his working life in Hollywood, but nearly thirty years after he was raised he was still a brother of City Lodge, and his old lodge still counted him as one of its own.
A Property Man in a Movie Town
He was born in New York City on June 2, 1892, one of a family of brothers and sisters: Harry, Will, Edward and Ann. When he went into the picture business, around 1915, New York was still a movie town. Studios ran in Manhattan, the Bronx, Fort Lee across the river and the big Paramount plant in Astoria, and a bright young man could learn the trade without ever crossing the Hudson.
Joe started at the bottom, as a property man, the fellow responsible for every telephone, teacup and revolver that appeared on camera. It is a job that rewards a good memory and an orderly mind, and by 1921 he had moved up to assistant director on a picture called Out of the Chorus. That June, on the twentieth, he was raised a Master Mason in City Lodge No. 408, a Manhattan lodge then sixty-five years old. That spring also brought the birth of his son, Arthur, on April 25, 1921. It was a full year.
Gems From Life
By the mid-1920s Joe had followed the industry west. In August 1925 a Los Angeles trade column noted that he and Hugh Bennett had formed a company of their own to make a series of two-reel shorts called Gems From Life, starting with one titled Affection. Two-reelers were the filler of the movie program, cheap and quick, and many such companies came and went within a season. What mattered was the ambition. The prop man wanted to make pictures, not just furnish them.
The late silent years kept him busy as an assistant director on features such as Ransom, After the Storm and Virgin Lips, all from 1928. Then sound arrived, and with it a new kind of job. Talking pictures were expensive, complicated and unforgiving, and studios needed men who could plan a shooting schedule to the hour and a budget to the dollar. They called them production managers, and Joe became one of the best.
Back to Astoria
In 1933 Joe came home to New York for one of the most remarkable pictures of the decade. Two young independent producers had leased the old Paramount studio in Astoria, Queens, to film Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, with Paul Robeson in the title role. Joe served as assistant director. The production had hoped to shoot in Haiti; instead, budget limits kept the whole jungle inside the Astoria stages, with a beach scene filmed on Long Island. Robeson’s performance marked a milestone for Black leading actors in American cinema, and the movie made Astoria, for a moment, the center of the film world again. He followed it as associate director of His Double Life in 1934.
Mae West and the Paramount Years
Back in Hollywood in the mid-1930s, Joe was trusted with some of the trickiest assignments a production manager could get. He ran the business side of two Mae West pictures, Go West Young Man and Every Day’s a Holiday. A fan’s history of West’s career, written decades later, pointed out that like Mae he was a native New Yorker, and remembered him as well organized and detail oriented. A Mae West picture meant a star who wrote her own rules, censors watching every line, and a front office watching every dollar. Someone had to keep all three satisfied, and keep the picture moving.
The late thirties read like a revival-house program. Joe managed On Such a Night, Love on Toast and The Girl from Scotland Yard in 1937, and the Bing Crosby musical Doctor Rhythm in 1938. For producer Boris Morros he handled Laurel and Hardy’s The Flying Deuces in 1939, where the credit read simply “Joe Nadel,” and the Fred Astaire musical Second Chorus in 1940. That same year came Beyond Tomorrow, a gentle Christmas ghost story that still turns up on holiday television. In 1942 he was a unit manager on Tales of Manhattan, the all-star anthology that followed a single tailcoat from owner to owner.
O’Neill Again
In July 1943, Joe and Dorothy Nadel’s daughter Evelyn married Captain Herbert Livingston Kehr of the Army Medical Corps at Hollywood Temple. The wedding notice identified the bride’s father as production manager of Samuel Bronston Pictures, then finishing Jack London, the life of the adventurer-novelist starring Michael O’Shea and Susan Hayward.
The next year brought Joe a promotion to associate producer, and a familiar author. Producer Jules Levey was making The Hairy Ape, from Eugene O’Neill’s play, with John Loder and Dorothy Comingore. Eleven years after The Emperor Jones, Joe was back with O’Neill, this time with his name higher on the screen.
The postwar years were among his busiest. As production manager he steered René Clair’s sly adaptation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and Lewis Milestone’s infantry drama A Walk in the Sun, both released in 1945, and the Western Abilene Town in 1946. For Levey and director Arthur Lubin he managed New Orleans in 1947, a musical remembered today for Louis Armstrong and his band and for the only feature-film appearance of Billie Holiday. Lubin would soon figure in Joe’s story again.
Home on Citrus Avenue
At home, the Nadels lived at 307 North Citrus Avenue, a comfortable address in a working Hollywood neighborhood. It made the papers in November 1946 for a less happy reason, when a burglar forced the side door and got away with about $2,400 in jewelry, including a diamond-and-sapphire bracelet and a platinum engagement ring. The news items identified Joe as production manager for Harry Popkin’s pictures.
He also gave his talents to good causes. In February 1946 he served as chairman of entertainment for the third annual all-star dinner-dance of Mount Sinai Free Hospital and Clinic at the Biltmore Bowl, with Jack Haley as master of ceremonies and a bill that included the Andrews Sisters and Red Skelton. A man who could schedule a movie could certainly schedule a show.
Father and Son in the Credits
By the late 1940s Joe was associate producer on a run of pictures for the Popkin brothers and others: My Dear Secretary in 1948, the Mickey Rooney racing drama The Big Wheel and the thriller Impact in 1949, and then D.O.A., the film noir in which Edmond O’Brien plays a man who has been fatally poisoned and spends his last hours hunting his own killer. In 1950 came Ronald Colman’s quiz-show satire Champagne for Caesar and the drama The Second Woman.
Those credits hold a family story. The film editor on My Dear Secretary, Impact and D.O.A. was Arthur H. Nadel, Joe’s son. Father and son worked on the same pictures, one planning the shoot and the other cutting the result into a movie. Arthur went on to a long career directing television, from The Virginian to Saturday-morning favorites like Shazam! and Jason of Star Command, and directed the 1985 feature He-Man and She-Ra: The Secret of the Sword.
The Talking Mule That Got Away
In September 1948 the Hollywood columns announced that Joe, producer Robert Stillman and director Arthur Lubin had bought the film rights to David Stern’s novel Francis, about an Army mule who talks. For a moment there was a scramble, with Mickey Rooney’s company claiming the property too. Lubin took the project to Universal, where it was made with Donald O’Connor and released in 1950, with Universal’s Robert Arthur as producer. Francis became one of the biggest hits of the year and launched seven films. Lubin later turned the idea into Mister Ed. Joe’s name did not appear on the screen, but he had been one of the men who bought the mule.
Safe at Home
His last finished picture as associate producer may have been the one he would most want remembered. The Jackie Robinson Story began shooting on February 10, 1950, at the Motion Picture Center, with Robinson playing himself, Ruby Dee as his wife and Minor Watson as Branch Rickey. Eagle-Lion’s employees put up much of the money themselves, and in the end they earned back about five times what they had invested. Joe served as associate producer to Mort Briskin, and Arthur Nadel edited the film. When it opened at Grauman’s Chinese that summer, Los Angeles reviewers praised its simple, direct telling of Robinson’s fight to play, and the Times named Joseph H. Nadel among the men behind it.
Fade-Out
Joe died of a heart attack at home on November 20, 1950. He was fifty-eight. Services were held the next afternoon at the chapel of Hollywood Cemetery, and he was buried in its Beth Olam section, the cemetery known today as Hollywood Forever. Dorothy was laid beside him in 1959.
Two days after his death, O. C. Stratton of Paramount’s West Coast studio wrote to Joe’s brother Harry at the Paramount Building on Times Square. He was shocked at the news, sorry that Harry probably could not get west in time for the funeral, and enclosed the Variety obituary as a tribute to his brother’s accomplishments. The work went on without him for a while. His name appeared in 1951 as production manager of Joseph Losey’s The Prowler and as production supervisor of The Well.
A Brother From the Old Lodge
City Lodge’s notices of 1950 were full of men who counted their membership in decades, and Joe Nadel was one of them. He had been raised there as a young assistant director in a New York movie business, carried the lodge with him across the country, and stayed on its rolls through Mae West and Laurel and Hardy, Paul Robeson and Billie Holiday, D.O.A. and Jackie Robinson. Hollywood remembered him in a few lines of agate type. His lodge remembered him the way it remembered its own: raised in 1921, asleep in 1950, and still a brother.
Endnotes and Sources
Lodge Records
- City Lodge No. 408, F. & A.M., lodge notice, late 1950: “In Memoriam, Brother Joseph Nadel, Raised June 20, 1921, Asleep November 20, 1950,” with news of the lodge’s ninety-fourth anniversary dinner-dance.
Newspapers
- Los Angeles Evening Post-Record, August 1, 1925 (Nadel–Bennett Productions, Gems From Life).
- Los Angeles Evening Citizen News: July 8, 1943 (Nadel–Kehr wedding); August 16, 1944 (The Hairy Ape); February 22, 1946 (Mount Sinai benefit); November 19, 1946 (burglary); September 24, 1948 (Francis); February 25, 1950 (The Jackie Robinson Story in production); November 21, 1950 (funeral).
- The Los Angeles Times: November 24, 1943 (Jack London review); September 24, 1948 (“Studio Briefs”); July 15, 1950 (Edwin Schallert review of The Jackie Robinson Story); November 21, 1950 (death notice and obituary).
- Daily News (Los Angeles): November 19, 1946; September 28, 1948 (Francis rights dispute).
- Valley Times (North Hollywood), July 15, 1950 (review of The Jackie Robinson Story).
- The Dunsmuir News, November 17, 1944 (The Hairy Ape).
Letters and Family Records
- O. C. Stratton, Paramount Pictures West Coast Studios, letter to Harry Nadel, November 22, 1950 (offered for sale on eBay).
- Hollywood Forever Cemetery records: Joseph Nadel (1892–1950) and Dorothy Nadel (1893–1959), shared plot.
Online Sources
- [Joseph H. Nadel filmography, Turner Classic Movies](Watch Turner Classic Movies on TCM.com
Watch Turner Classic Movies on TCM.com Turner Classic Movies presents the greatest classic films of all time from one of the largest film libraries in the world. Find extensive video, photos, articles, and archival content from some of the best movies ever made only at TCM.com.
- Joseph H. Nadel, IMDb.
- The Jackie Robinson Story, AFI Catalog and Wikipedia.
- Not an Easy Tale to Tell: Jackie Robinson on the Page, Stage, and Screen, Society for American Baseball Research. [See SABR’s Jackie Robinson research collection](Jackie Robinson 75: Baseball’s Re-Integration – Society for American Baseball Research
Jackie Robinson 75: Baseball’s Re-Integration – Society for American Baseball Research
- The Emperor Jones (1933 film), Wikipedia.
- New Orleans (1947 film), Wikipedia.
- Francis (1950 film), Wikipedia.
- Arthur H. Nadel, Wikipedia.
- Motion Picture Production Encyclopedia (1952), via Lantern (D.O.A. credits).
- “Mae West: Joseph H. Nadel,” Mae West blog, November 20, 2011.
A Note on the Sources
- With a birth date of June 2, 1892, Nadel was fifty-eight at his death; the Los Angeles papers gave his age as fifty-seven.
- The 1925 trade item prints the company name as “Vade-Bennett Productions,” almost certainly a misprint for Nadel–Bennett.
- Every Day’s a Holiday is dated 1937 in some sources and 1938 in others, reflecting its December 1937 release.
- Paul Robeson had appeared in films before The Emperor Jones, including Body and Soul (1925) and Borderline (1930). The reference here identifies him as the film’s title-role performer, not as making his film debut.
- A web page on the history of Hollywood Temple Beth El mentions a “Joseph H. Nadel” credited with rescuing Jews during the Holocaust, but that passage describes a London-born graduate of a rabbinical college and appears to concern a different man. It has been left out pending confirmation.
- The obituary’s “Arthur Howard Nadel” and the film credits’ “Arthur H. Nadel” are the same son; online biographies give his birth as April 25, 1921, in New York City.
Continue the Story
Joe Nadel’s career carried a City Lodge brother from New York’s movie studios to Hollywood. These related histories explore another connection between the lodge and entertainment, and the Astoria community where part of his working life unfolded.
- Brother Abram J. Dittenhoefer of City Lodge No. 408 — Meet the charter member and past master whose legal career connected City Lodge to actors, playwrights and the American stage.
- Astoria Before the Skyline — Explore the Queens neighborhood to which Nadel returned for The Emperor Jones.
Explore the Film Credits
[Browse Joseph H. Nadel’s filmography at Turner Classic Movies](Watch Turner Classic Movies on TCM.com
Watch Turner Classic Movies on TCM.com Turner Classic Movies presents the greatest classic films of all time from one of the largest film libraries in the world. Find extensive video, photos, articles, and archival content from some of the best movies ever made only at TCM.com.
