Enigma

NYT - January 11, 2007
Comedy Writer, Litigant, Frog Lover
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
A man is more than the sum of his eccentricities, but the equation for Jack Winter is particularly complicated. For someone who spent hours a day talking on the phone, had an enormous range of acquaintances and wrote a memoir (“The Answer to Everything,” self-published), he was, to many, an enigma.
Even now, after Mr. Winter’s death on Dec. 29 at 64 from a series of health complications, his friends are rather hard pressed to explain exactly what it was he did day to day.
His early achievements — heading The Harvard Lampoon, writing for “The Jackie Gleaso Show,” winning a Writers Guild award for the first script he wrote, an episode of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” — were remarkable. But after he left a hot career in Los Angeles in his late 20s and moved back to his hometown, New York, the résumé more or less ended and the anecdotes began.
Mr. Winter lived a spartan existence in a huge, 10-room apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which for years was nearly bare except for a piano, a couple of chairs, a bed, a television, piles of rugs and hundreds of frogs, which he collected and kept in a shower stall.
He traveled extensively, often to remote parts of Africa, and came back with stories about meeting the Pygmies and singing to hippopotamuses. But otherwise, what did he do all day?
“I never asked, but I had no idea,” said the writer Cheryl Bentsen, a longtime acquaintance.
Several friends said that his work polishing scripts, for which he would travel to Hollywood on occasion, was more than enough to pay the bills. Comedy writers and directors like Albert Brooks and Penny Marshall would sometimes bounce ideas off of Mr. Winter, and he worked a lot more than his few credits — like those on Ms. Marshall’s films “Big” and “Awakenings” — led one to believe.
Mr. Winter, an insatiable sports fan who kept a regular tennis date with the former Knicks star Earl (the Pearl) Monroe, was said by one friend to have supported himself for a year by placing bets on basketball games. Then there was his business importing and selling Turkish rugs.
But his real dream, ever since he left Los Angeles, was to write a play. Which he did, for the better part of a decade.
By 1979 Mr. Winter considered his play, “The Easy Way Out,” a comedy about an older man who tries to persuade a despairing younger woman not to kill herself, good enough to bring to the stage; he also decided that he would direct and produce it.
The play’s investors included such disparate notables as James L. Brooks, the Hollywood writer and producer, and Joseph N. Onek, the deputy counsel to President Jimmy Carter. But Mr. Winter took so long lining up his stars — first Dustin Hoffman, then Peter Falk, then Jack Nicholson — that one of the largest investors wanted out.
“It was a good play,” Ms. Marshall said. “But he was so meticulous that he wouldn’t settle for this person or the next person. It wasn’t the easy way out with him, I’ll tell you.”
Heated legal wrangling followed, and ultimately Mr. Winter was ordered to return all of the money to his investors. He had managed the money so well that they received their investment with a considerable amount of interest.
“He probably is the only one in history who returned a profit to his investors for a play that never opened,” Mr. Brooks said.
But then Mr. Winter turned on his lawyers. And from that point on, said Robert Muse, who described himself as the only lawyer who worked for Mr. Winter who was not later sued, he became “a world-class amateur litigant,” going after doctors, lawyers and colleagues.
As someone who often represented himself, Mr. Muse said, Mr. Winter did pretty well. He was a daunting intellectual sparring partner and an obdurate sermonizer on every subject. (Those who valued their peace of mind knew not to take his calls during the O. J. Simpson trial.)
Mr. Winter grew up in Queens; his father was a violinist for the NBC Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini and also played in the orchestra for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” where Jack would first be introduced to comedy writers.
He went to Harvard at 16 and studied math and philosophy, two subjects that would influence his dogmatic approach to everything from comedy to politics. His dream was to join the Lampoon, and he was quickly recruited by a group that included later-prominent names like John Berendt and Christopher Cerf.
After college he began his professional comedy-writing career, cutting his teeth on Jackie Gleason and then moving to Hollywood, where he would write for television series like “The Monkees” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and direct an episode of “The Odd Couple.” But he never liked Hollywood, once telling the film designer Anton Furst, “The excitement isn’t worth the uncertainty.”
A series of back problems slowed Mr. Winter down in the early 1990s. He was in constant pain, though he continued to make lengthy phone calls and fax around his comedic essays, a few of which showed up in publications like The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal.
In 2001, Mr. Winter married Ekram Fadlelmola (known by her nickname, Moon), a Sudanese woman he had met in Katmandu, Nepal, in 1986 and had proposed to repeatedly. He sold his Manhattan apartment, and they bought a house in Canada, where she lived. But his health troubles intensified, said Ms. Fadlelmola, exacerbated by the 16-hour days he spent lying on his side writing his memoir. He died of lung failure after three months in a hospital in Victoria, British Columbia, she said.
“He never struck me as an eccentric person,” said Mr. Berendt, who had kept up with Mr. Winter since college. “He was a more or less conventional man who fell in love with Pygmies and frogs and went to odd places for his vacation.”