Bart Wars

“I’ve been in just about every business imaginable,” Savage says. “It’s amazing the goals you can achieve — mostly from sticking to something. I never stuck with anything. Maybe it’s because I had the ability of always thinking of the next thing.”

The son of Hungarian immigrants — a father who was a bootlegger, union organizer and amateur inventor; a mother who came over from Europe as an indentured servant — the former Solomon Szabo was born in Highland Park, New Jersey, in 1921. The family made its way to Los Angeles in 1936 with hopes of improving the elder Szabo’s health. It wasn’t soon enough; Savage’s father died less than a month later. His older brother got into the business of selling monogrammed athletic goods to local high schools, but Savage is the one who perfected a way to modify the silk-screening process to mass-produce logos on T-shirts. When a GI from the gunnery school at Nellis Air Force Base, north of Las Vegas, appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1941 wearing one of Savage’s creations, the T-shirt industry was suddenly born (no doubt replacing the undershirt industry that Clark Gable had killed off two years earlier by appearing without one in It Happened One Night).

After the war, in 1948, Savage invented the first automated car washes, the largest of which was located at Wilshire and Fairfax, where the Petersen Automotive Museum stands today. (Savage was ostensibly looking for a better way to realign brakes on a conveyer belt.) And then, in 1952, in partnership with George S. J. Lanier, a multimillionaire UCLA professor who started one of the first computer companies (Benson-Lanier), Savage established General Leasing Corp., the first leasing company for manufacturing equipment. Suddenly, the brand-new electronics and aerospace industries could transform the means of production into a tax-deductible item.

“One of the biggest leasing companies was started by Howard Hughes for his own equipment,” says Savage, “because he recognized early on what was going on. He was a brilliant guy. He started his company in 1956.”

T-shirt logos — the tribal drum of youth culture. Car washes — the handmaidens to automobile culture. And equipment leasing — the foundation of everything from microprocessors to satellites to film culture. All of them predicated on Savage’s handiwork. Try imagining Southern California without them.

Today, Savage is dressed in a dark jacket, pressed black jeans, cowboy boots, and an ascot and matching handkerchief. He looks like a slightly older Al Pacino. He was married to his last wife for 22 years (she passed away several years ago), but before that, he was a social fixture in 1950s Hollywood — drinking with Lee Marvin, escorting Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor, and prowling for local beauties with Andre de Dienes, the photographer who discovered Marilyn Monroe. And, as it turns out, equipment leasing wasn’t the only unexplored territory he made it into just ahead of Howard Hughes.

“I was responsible for making two girls very famous,” he says, basking in the glow of reminiscence. “Anita Ekberg, by taking her to Andre de Dienes, the famous photographer, and Piper Laurie, who I introduced to [agent] Herb Brenner.

“Howard Hughes used to keep Anita in a house up here in Sunset Plaza; she had to sneak out the window because he had two guys out front protecting her. I met her at a party in Hollywood in 1952. Her first comment was — in this heavy Swedish accent — ‘Are you a face man?’ She was right.”

When this revelation is greeted with a blank stare — face man, that’s like a leg man or a breast man? — Savage kindly elaborates. “She was asking me if I was a cunning linguist. She had a problem having an orgasm — about the only way she could do it is if you were a face man.”

Savage’s storied life also includes owning the second McDonald’s franchise in Los Angeles (at Washington and Central Avenue), taking the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas public, and publishing a book on the Sonderkommandos, or Jewish concentration-camp workers, to help a friend of 50 years find some closure. He credits vitamins, exercise and meditation with his longevity.

“My gift was the ability, for some reason, to be able to look into the future,” he says. “Carrying out — I’m not the best at. Coming up with the idea? I am the best at.”

—Paul Cullum

Goodbye Midnight (1970–2004)

Hungry man, reach for the book, it is a weapon.

—Bertolt Brecht,
and motto of Midnight Special

A faithful throng congregated in the back room of Midnight Special Bookstore last Friday for a valedictory evening of stories, songs and testimonials. Authors, artists and patrons — Robbie Conal, Mike Davis, Luis Rodriguez and Michelle Shocked among them — paid tribute to the store, as they always had: browsing the shelves, gathering books in their arms, and lining up at the cash register all the way to the front door. After 34 years as a refuge for the literary and politically minded of L.A., Midnight Special — which took its name from a story about a train whose light was said to emancipate prisoners — will be closing its doors in July.