When Universal's Basketball Team Played in Hitler's 1936 Olympics
When Universal's Basketball Team Played in Hitler's 1936 Olympics
The company team competed in Berlin, an inspired gambit by the studio founder's audacious son. Then the family and business went sideways
Andy Lewis authors The Optionist newsletter about available IP, and recently wrote for The Ankler about JD Vance and Hillbilly Elegy as well as the Academy Museum’s Hollywoodland exhibit about the Jews who invented Hollywood.
It was the best 21st birthday present one can imagine.
In 1928, Carl Laemmle Jr. celebrated that milestone with an early gift from his father, Carl Laemmle, Sr., the founder of Universal Pictures: Senior made Carl Jr. Universal’s head of production. Senior had long doted on his only son, and Carl Jr. had been groomed for the job since being born in 1908, the same year Senior produced his first movie (Hiawatha). At 15, Senior turned a few sketches Junior thought up into The Collegians, a successful serial, and then he turned down the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School to go right to work for his father.
Junior was ambitious and eager to outshine his father’s one-time protege Irving Thalberg, who had departed a few years earlier for MGM. There wasn’t any area of the studio where Junior didn’t involve himself — from upgrading facilities to converting its movies to sound to the creation of . . . an elite studio basketball team.
If that last bit surprises you, well, it should. Carl Jr. did not have ambitions for a company intramural league or even a team to win bragging rights among its rival studios. No, he aspired to have Universal represent the United States at the Olympics.
That dream manifested at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the first Olympiad where basketball became a medal sport. Today, of course, basketball is one of the marquee events for NBCUniversal, the media conglomerate with NBA rights that also broadcasts and streams the Olympics, but Universal’s first connection with the games — improbably and ironically — was as a participant.
How a movie studio came to have a basketball team, how it got into the Olympics and what happened to the team — as well as the studio and the family that owned it — on the cusp of achieving its ultimate goal is a story worthy of its own Hollywood movie. As if that weren’t enough, the tale also features Frankenstein, Adolf Hitler, Nazis, a musical set on a boat, a bank loan gone bad and the lone Jewish-American Olympian who faced the moral dilemma of going to play — or stay at home in protest of the events just beginning to catastrophically unfold in Germany. It also marked the end of a dynastic dream for one of Hollywood’s founding families, and the start of a devastating spiral for its promising Oscar-winning scion.
The Original Nepo Baby
Carl Jr.’s early success was tremendous. He took home the studio’s first best picture Oscar for producing All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930 — at the tender age of 23, by my reckoning still the youngest best picture-winning producer ever. He followed that by helping create the studio’s monster universe, releasing Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932) and Invisible Man (1933). They were all box office hits, and Universal historian Antonia Carlotta (who happens to be Carl Sr.’s great-niece) argues the profits from the monster movies kept Universal afloat during the toughest days of the Great Depression.
Despite these achievements, he was dogged with claims he was a dilettante. “Everyone liked Junior, but we all thought of him as a pampered rich young man who enjoyed bad health and preferred blondes,” wrote gossip columnist Louella Parsons (according to film historian Gregory Mank).
In the eagerness to prove himself, Carl Jr. could be reckless where his father was cautious. One — perhaps apocryphal — story captures both their different temperaments and how Senior indulged his son. One day at the horse track (both men were inveterate gamblers), a man observed Junior at the high-roller window and Senior at the regular betting window making a modest wager. He asked Senior how his son could afford big bets when he couldn’t. To which Senior replied, “Because Junior has a rich father.”
On screen that translated into significant swings — “making big specials rather than pretty good program pictures,” in the words of Universal Weekly — such as his first picture, Broadway, a spectacle about dancers, gangsters and bootleggers that cost more than $1 million ($18.8 million in 2024 dollars) and set a pattern that continued throughout his tenure.
Jack Pierce, Universal’s head of makeup and Junior’s sidekick in all this, effectively invented the look of those seminal horror movies. Frankenstein’s head scar and neck bolts? Pierce. The Bride of Frankenstein’s hairdo? Also Pierce. Dracula’s cape and hair? Pierce. Indeed the collaboration between Carl Jr., Pierce and actors Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi set a monster movie template so enduring that Universal still views them as valuable intellectual property (even if the execution and box office performance of 2017’s The Mummy shelved the idea of more monster movies for now).
A Team-Building Exercise
Studios had long had recreational leagues for employees trying to stay in shape, and there had been a competitive industry league for studios to claim bragging rights over one another. But to understand how a Hollywood studio came to have a basketball team, you need to know just a little (I promise!) about basketball before World War II.
The NBA did not yet exist — it would be founded in 1946 — so the 1930s were the golden age of amateur basketball. Well, not really amateur; more like semi-pro.
The best teams were sponsored by companies who recruited players with nominal jobs. For Universal, that meant hiring them as stagehands — best boys, grips and the like. The auto companies had teams, as did all the oil companies as well as a clothing store in Wichita and a cleaning supply business in St. Joseph, Missouri. The teams would barnstorm: Nationally if they were among the elite, locally for the rest, with the games serving as relatively cheap corporate promotion.
In 1934, Carl Jr. and Pierce hatched a plan to create an elite team — a “varsity” as they called it. This would be the first time that a Hollywood studio would pursue what was then big-time basketball. Both men were hoop junkies: Though just a shade over five feet, Junior fell in love with the game at prep school and early on played guard for Universal in the studio league. Pierce managed the team.
They were in it as much, perhaps more, for the winning than the promotion and brand building. A Hollywood Reporter article — “Junior Laemmle Goes in for Sport on a Big Scale” — emphasized how Universal’s ambitions went beyond just winning the studio league, writing that the team would include “the best amateurs obtainable” and would “meet all comers throughout the nation.” (Junior would not be among the players on this “varsity” squad.)
Junior didn’t leave behind a record of exactly what drove him to form the team — for all his outward showmanship, he’s a bit of cipher who gave few interviews — but it’s easy to surmise that he was rebelling against articles that talked about his baby face, how he looked more like a high school boy than a studio head or that he didn’t earn his position. He was also short and slender in ways that made him feel insecure. In one profile early in his tenure, he bragged about putting on 20 pounds of muscle rigorously playing tennis and basketball. Success with the basketball team would distinguish him from his father and prove his manliness.
It’s likely that Junior and Pierce had their eye on the Olympics from the outset. Certainly by 1935 when they recruited their first player: Charley Hyatt, the Steph Curry of his day. Sam Balter, another of the Universals (as the team was known), recalled in a 1988 interview: “He had heard — the rest of us didn’t know this in ‘35 — that in ‘36 basketball would be put in the Olympic Games.” We don’t know exactly what Junior and Pierce said to Hyatt to jump ship, but whatever it was was enough to convince him that his Olympic dream went through Hollywood and not Tulsa, where he was playing for an oil company team.
It didn’t work out, according to Balter: Nobody liked Hyatt, the Universals underperformed with their star acquisition and he jumped to a new team before the 1935-36 season. (Hyatt never made the Olympics.)
The misstep didn’t deter Carl Jr. and Pierce. The latter put together a killer roster, relying heavily on the ranks of UCLA alumni. This was a surprise because at the time the Bruins were a middling .500 team with a moonlighting lawyer as head coach. But there was talent there, including Balter, an All-American guard who was considered the school’s best all-around athlete . . . until a guy named Jackie Robinson arrived in 1939.
“We were the surprise team of ‘36,” said Balter, who was the lone player who passed on a job to go along with playing for the team (he wanted to be a writer and all they offered was crew work). “There isn’t any question in my mind or anybody else’s, who have seen the two of us play, that Charley Hyatt was a better basketball player. But, our team was better when I played on it.”
Winning was important, but so was promoting the studio. With the team barnstorming through the Midwest when Bride of Frankenstein came out in the spring of 1935, Pierce asked Frank Lubin, the tallest player and another UCLA alum, if he’d play the monster. He’d put the makeup on Lubin, dress him in the costume — raised boots, ragged coat, the works down to the neck bolts. “I'd come out before the games, walk in front of them and [the crowd got] excited,” Lubin explained later. When the game started, “I’d go back to the dressing room and after five or 10 minutes I'd come back out in my regular uniform.”
The Road to Berlin
The season culminated in April 1936 with the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) national championship tournament. (Like we said, the highest echelon of basketball was more semi-pro than capital-A amateur.)
The Universals cruised through the early rounds of the 54-team tournament, advancing to the final to meet the tourney favorites, the McPherson Globe Refiners, in the finals. The Kansas-based oil company’s squad was billed as “the tallest team in the country” because of its twin towers of 6’7” Joe Fortenberry and 6’8” Willard Schmidt, the inventors of the dunk. (Fun fact: New York Times sportswriter Arthur Daley coined the term “dunk” after watching Fortenberry play, describing the move as “much like a cafeteria customer dunking a roll in coffee.”)
In the championship game, the Universals jumped out to a 25-15 halftime lead, controlling the game with deliberate pass-oriented offense and tough defense, hallmarks the team lacked when it was led by one star player. But in the second half, the Refiners took over with their fast break attack, going on a 17-2 run late in the second half to secure a 47-35 victory.
But finishing second came with a prize for the Universal team: An invitation to the Olympic selection tournament in New York City in two weeks.
The American Olympic Association’s (today known as the U.S. Olympic Committee) idea was to invite the best eight teams in the country — the two AAU teams, the top five college teams and even the country’s YMCA champion (hailing from Wilmerding, Penn.) to a tournament at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The winning team would represent the USA in Berlin.
The format had a mercenary intent: AOA hoped to earn enough from ticket sales to cover the cost of sending the entire American Olympic team to Germany. The Germans pitched in, with its national tourism operation (run by a lovely guy named Joseph Goebbels) taking out the biggest ad in the program. But attendance was a bust: Just 5,000 turned out for the final, less than one-third of the Garden’s 18,500 capacity. After expenses, the AOA didn’t even have enough money to get the basketball team to Germany, let alone the entire U.S. delegation.
Both the Universals and the Refiners cruised through the opening games en route to a finals rematch of the AAU championship game. This time, the Refiners withered under the Universals defense, shooting a shockingly poor 16 for 90. Still, the Universals just squeaked out a one-point victory, winning 44-43.
To fill out a full roster — Olympic rules allowed each country 14 players — AOA officials built the 1936 equivalent of a Dream Team, assembling a squad of seven Universals, six Refiners and one college player. The Universals’ tournament win earned it the extra player.
To Go or Not To Go
Dark clouds hovered over the celebration. The very day that Universal Weekly, the studio’s in-house newsletter, trumpeted the team’s Olympic tournament victory, it ran a headline right below, “Charles R. Rogers Takes Charge of Production at Universal City.”
Not only was Junior out but Senior was being forced to sell the studio.
The beginning of the end for the Laemmles came when Junior gambled on Show Boat, an expensive musical featuring Paul Robeson and Irene Dunne. To make it, he convinced his father to borrow $750,000 from a British firm named Standard Capital. The loan came with a poison pill: If it wasn’t paid back in time, the Brits could buy Universal for $5.5 million ($126 million in 2024 dollars).
As creatively successful as Junior was, he couldn’t be trusted to balance his own checkbook. His inability to control budgets on his productions was a recurring problem according to film historian Farran Smith Nehme in a 2016 article in Film Comment. It wasn’t one bad decision that doomed Universal but a series of small ones. “Where a mid-range, no-great-expectations film used to cost $200,000 at Universal, under Junior it cost $30,000 to $80,000 more.”
True to form, Junior couldn't get Show Boat done on time or on budget. It ultimately cost about $1.2 million, or roughly one-quarter of the entire value of the studio. In March 1936, the financiers called in the loan.
Just like that, the Laemmles were out.
Indeed money was so tight in 1936 that the studio hadn’t even paid for the team's trip to the qualifying tournament in New York — or the trip back. They had to rely on donations, including from Dunne, Frankenstein and Show Boat director James Whale and notably one from Junior, ever the basketball fan, to fund the trip.
Without Universal's support, the team also had to scramble to raise the money to make the return journey east to catch the Olympic Team boat. Donations from a few stars, including Karloff, his Frankenstein co-star John Boles and animator Walter Lantz (the creator of Woody Woodpecker), got them started and they made up the rest barnstorming across the country. Team members weren’t convinced they’d make it on time, with Lubin at one point along the way telegraphing to his wife and father who were already in New York: “Don't get on the boat to go to Berlin until you see us there.”
Beyond the Universal drama, the question loomed, Would there even be an Olympics to attend? The rise of Hitler and the Nazis spurred talk of a boycott. Jeremiah Mahoney, the head of the AAU and probably the most powerful amateur sports figure in the U.S. at the time, pushed hard for a total American boycott of the Berlin Games. He argued that sending an American team would hand Hitler a PR victory by condoning Nazi bigotry and run afoul of Olympic rules against bigotry. On the other side was Avery Brundage, Mahoney’s predecessor at the AAU and the new president of the AOA. During a 1934 trip, Brundage had been bamboozled by Nazi propaganda into believing the Germans treated Jewish athletes fairly.
Brundage deployed the hoary Olympic paean that the games were above politics to nefarious effect, urging American athletes not to take sides in the “Jew-Nazi altercation.” He wasn’t above a little red baiting, either, claiming that a “Jewish-Communist conspiracy” was behind the boycott push. (If there's a villain in this story — not only this story but the Olympic story — it’s Brundage, who also served as the head of the IOC from 1952 to 1972 and made the decision not to pause the Olympics after the Munich massacre.)
Notably, Jewish voices were peripheral to the talk of a boycott. The question of whether to go or not revolved more around the treatment of Black athletes here and in Germany during the Games rather than the treatment of Jews. Many Black Americans viewed boycott supporters as hypocrites, unwilling to make the same criticism of American racism as they did of German antisemitism, and they relished the chance to prove their worth to both American and German audiences.
The boycott question came to a head in December 1935 with an AAU vote on whether to participate in the games or not. Despite Mahoney’s opposition, Brundage pulled strings in his old organization to win a close vote in favor of going. While the question of an individual athlete’s decision to participate or not would come up many times over the next eight months, the U.S. was sending a team to the Berlin Olympics.
Carl Sr., a German-Jewish immigrant who emigrated to America in 1884, was adamantly opposed to the team going to Berlin, and one of the Universals — Lloyd Goldstein — quit during the qualifying tournament. Most of the players saw his leaving as the result of Senior’s intervention. “He could have gone but the studio convinced him not to go,” recalled his teammate Art Mollner. “He reaped the benefits of that. He became [Universal’s] head electrician,” and as Mollner noted in 1988, Goldstein ultimately became a millionaire thanks to his lofty position and retired in Palm Springs.
All the pressure fell on Jewish Sam Balter to make the personal choice about whether to go or not. “I got a lot of love mail and a lot of hate mail, about 50-50 — ‘You have earned the right to compete’ or ‘Your religion should not keep you from this great honor,’” Balter recalled in 1988. Others wrote, “You should be ashamed of yourself to subject yourself to playing in Hitler's Germany.”
Balter, who was 26, mostly felt alone and wasn’t sure what to do. “I had nobody helping me out to reach a decision. ‘We represent the so and so,’ . . . like the Senate or the Congress or the White House,” Balter recalled. As he reminded an interviewer in the 1980s: “In ‘36, we knew nothing about ovens. We [just] knew of restrictions against Jews.”
It was “four months of hell” for Balter. “I was torn,” he said. “In the end I decided to do nothing, and that meant I was on the team and played . . . In retrospect, I think I was right.”
Denying Hitler that propaganda victory was foremost in his mind. “As it turned out — and I had no conception that it would be that way — I was the only Jewish member of the United States Olympic team total, not just basketball. Five-hundred twenty strong, and I’m the only one. Just think of what Hitler might have been able to say as a propaganda ploy.”
The Olympic Dream?
The Olympics themselves were an uneasy mix of fun and foreboding about the Nazis — and a comically disorganized basketball tournament.
The Germans tried to present their superiority wherever they could. Take the Olympic Village, an innovation the Germans copied from the L.A. Games four years earlier. “In Los Angeles they lived in little camps,” recalled Lubin, who had been in L.A. for those games. “But there we lived in wonderful” stucco bungalows. To further prove the superiority of Nazi Germany over the United States, the Germans imported a leftover L.A. bungalow so the world could see the difference.
At night, the Germans had cultural events for the athletes. Balter saw the Berlin Symphony do a private outdoor concert in the Olympic village. What the Americans didn't see were the Romani (gypsies) removed from the city or the anti-Jewish signs Hitler ordered hidden for the Games.
A few of the Universals had a chance encounter with the Fuhrer himself while lounging outside their Olympic bungalow. Hitler, Eva Braun and his small entourage approached them and made small talk for a few minutes. After inquiring about their Olympic experience, he gave a small Nazi salute and moved on, leaving the group momentarily stunned.
For all the effort the Germans put into the Olympics, though, the basketball was a bit of a mess. The Germans themselves barely fielded a team and seemed to know little about the sport. The ball itself had been reworked from another sport — maybe soccer — and they played outdoors on repurposed tennis courts.
Other countries kept trying to tinker with the rules to neutralize the Americans. The most radical idea — limit players to 6’5” and under — was shot down. But substitutions were like soccer: Once a player came out, he couldn't reenter the game. The center jump after each basket was also eliminated. Finally, even though teams were composed of 14 players, only seven players could suit up for each game. That last change forced the Americans to divide their team into two squads, which worked out given that it had been cobbled together from two teams. The Universals were known as the sure passers for their style of play and the Refiners dubbed the wild men and they would alternate games.
The Spanish Civil War caused Spain to forfeit its opening game against the wild men, so the Universals took the court first, beating Estonia 52-28. One win got the U.S. into the quarterfinals where the wild men — in borrowed uniforms because someone had stolen the team’s red, white and blue silk uniforms — beat the Philippines 56-23. That put the Universals back on the court for the semi-finals against a hard-defending Mexican team. Still the Americans won the low-scoring game comfortably, 25-10.
That meant that the wild men would play the Canadians in the gold medal game. The Universals lobbied that the honor of the gold medal game should go to them as winners of the qualifying tournament, but they lost that argument. All but two of them watched the game from the stands.
Rain greeted the teams on the morning of the final game. The Americans wanted the game postponed, but German officials said that if soccer can be played in the rain, so could basketball.
It hardly mattered to anyone but the players themselves. All eyes — including those of Hitler, Goebbels and president of the Reichstag Hermann Goering — were on the eight-man rowing finals, where the underdog American crew (of Boys in the Boat fame) would defeat favored Germany and Italy to win gold.
At tip off, the court was a muddy mess, and the stands were nearly empty. The Americans went up 15-4 at halftime. Then the drizzle turned to a downpour, and the court became basically unplayable. “It poured! There were two inches of water on the court,” recalled Lubin. “You couldn’t dribble. It would just splash in the water.” Only eight points total were scored in the second half, four for each team, as the Americans cruised to a 19-8 victory, in the lowest-scoring and probably weirdest game in Olympic basketball history.
When it came time to drape the gold medals on the winning American team, only those who played in the game were allowed on the medal stand.
Most of the Universals would get theirs in the mail a few weeks later.
No Hollywood Ending
When the players returned home, Universal dissolved the team and fired the players from their studio jobs. The new regime didn’t think basketball was a good investment.
Not that that prevented Universal from milking the publicity from the Olympic gold as best it could. Despite cutting funding and pressuring the players not to go, it still touted the team’s success in its in-house newsletter and basically every article in the L.A. Times on the players’ return noted the studio connection. (Ironically, the Refiners folded after the Olympics as well, another casualty of Depression economics.) The era of company teams in the Olympics would be one and done.
Junior tried to keep the team together on his own dime under the newly formed Laemmle Studios banner (and managed by a moonlighting Jack Pierce), drawing an array of stars — Karloff, Dunne, Harold Lloyd, Gloria Stuart, Buck Jones — to its opening game against the Goodyear team. But neither the studio nor the team associated with it lasted beyond the next season. Most of the players then jumped to the 20th Century Fox squad, where they captured the AAU national championship in 1941, the first and only studio to claim that title.
Lubin’s Lithuanian heritage also got him playing and coaching for that country’s national team, leading them to two European titles before WWII and becoming known as the godfather of Lithuanian basketball.
Balter quit basketball for broadcasting. Famously, he announced the end of World War II on the air with Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth and Marlene Dietrich, who all happened to be at the station, looking over his shoulder as he read the teletype reporting Japan's surrender. Later he would become known as “the voice of UCLA football and basketball.”
The sale of Universal left Carl, Sr. a very wealthy man, and he used that money to get as many Jews as he could as he could out of Germany, mostly people with a loose connection to the Laemmles, via blood or hometown. American policy discouraged Jewish immigration from Europe, so to get visas approved Senior promised financial support, housing and jobs. He got more than 300 people out before he died on Sept. 24, 1939, three weeks after the start of World War II.
Jack Pierce never had the same relationship with his new bosses that he had with the Laemmles, and he was fired in 1947. When he died in 1968, few remembered his pioneering monster makeup work and none his role in America’s first basketball gold medal.
Life was unkindest of all to Carl Jr., who is probably more responsible than anyone for the Universal team. Pierce recruited the players, but he did it with Junior’s backing. He even dug into his own pocket to get them to the qualifying tournament when his father and the studio wouldn’t pay.
The basketball team wasn’t the reason that the Laemmles lost control of Universal, but it was emblematic of all that was good and bad about Junior. Forming the team was a gamble that required boldness, creativity and an eye for talent — all characteristics Junior possessed. It was also a distracting lark at a time when his whole attention should’ve been focused on getting Show Boat in on time and on budget.
He could never get his life on track after 1936. By the 1950s, severe hypochondria turned him into a recluse, though others say he developed multiple sclerosis in the 1960s. He still had a few famous friends — John Huston and All Quiet on the Western Front star Lew Ayres among them — and they’d visit him at his mansion on Tower Grove Drive above Beverly Hills.
But by the 1970s his social circle had dwindled to just his German housekeeper and his companion Evelyn Moriarty, Marilyn Monroe's one-time stand-in. At the end, the fortune was gone, the house was in disrepair and even his Oscar for All Quiet on the Western Front was missing.
Junior disappeared from the public imagination as well, never giving another interview after leaving Universal. He’s rarely mentioned in discussions of successful Golden Age studio executives. Even those who have written about the 1936 Olympic basketball team overlook his role, mostly crediting Senior to the extent that any executive is mentioned.
But in Junior’s later years, he would respond to film buffs, especially younger ones. In the early '70s, a bedridden Laemmle Jr. invited over a twentysomething fan to talk to him. When he recounted his achievements, the last thing he told the guy was this: “I formed the Universal Pictures basketball team.”
A note on sources:
Universal and Olympic players Sam Balter, Frank Lubin and Art Mollner contributed oral histories to the LA84 Foundation. You can read short bios on them and the rest of the players in comedian Jeffrey House’s essay on the team, which also includes links to some news accounts of the day. There’s also Antonia Carlotta’s video history on YouTube.
Andrew Maraniss wrote Games of Deception, a YA history of the team that’s a good start. For accounts of the 1936 Olympics there’s Daniel James Brown’s Boys in the Boat as well as Jeremy Schaap’s Triumph, about Jesse Owens, and Deborah Riley Draper’s Olympic Pride, American Prejudice. Michael Socolow’s Six Minutes in Berlin is an especially interesting account of how the games were broadcast back to America for the first time.
Carl Laemmle, Jr. didn’t leave behind much of a paper trail. Farrah Nehme Smith’s piece in Film Comment provides a nice summary of his life. Gregory Willam Mank wrote about Junior more extensively in his book The Very Witching Time of Night, his account of classic horror. Rick Atkins, the twentysomething film buff, memorialized his meeting with Junior in Guest Parking 2. The trade press at the time covered Junior and the Universal basketball team pretty extensively. You can search this fantastic archive of old Hollywood magazines here to read contemporary accounts of the Laemmles, Universal and the team.
 | A guest post by
|