I can’t claim to have known Arnold Beichman well, but he was terrific company, and had the best stories. JPod mentions his early days as a press agent at Warner Brothers. Back then, when requests came in for celebrity interviews, the publicity department often provided the answers to the questions without bothering to check with the actual movie star. One day, for a feature piece on James Cagney, Arnold entertained a whimsical flight of fancy and responded that, although Mr. Cagney spent his days shooting people and shoving grapefruits in ladies’ faces and so forth, when he got home of an evening he was a tender, sensitive soul who liked nothing better than a quiet night in listening to his real love — classical music, especially the violin.

Arnold left Warner Bros and years later ran into Cagney again. “You’re the guy who invented that business about me loving the violin!” he said, and launched into a tirade about how he was still getting X number of begging letters per week from mothers pleading for him to put their little prodigies through conservatory. Well, there are a lot of violin cases in his movies.

By the way, that business of studio flacks inventing the stars’ views out of whole cloth: A propos the public pronouncements of Danny Glover, Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, etc, Arnold thought Hollywood might usefully reinstitute the system.

A great man. I was honored to be included in a Cold War anthology he put together for Hoover a few years back, in the wake of the wretched Jeremy Isaacs/CNN moral-equivalence wallow.