An heir, a $25 million gift and 30,000 unopened letters

One day in early January 1970, Michael James Brody Jr. stepped off a Pan Am jet at John F. Kennedy Airport and in what would be one of the shortest and weirdest 15 minutes of fame of the new decade.

Brody, the previously obscure 21-year-old heir to a margarine fortune, had returned from his honeymoon in Jamaica and, in a grand romantic gesture, had impulsively bought all the seats on the plane so he and his bride could go home alone. . After landing, Brody, wearing bells and large green sunglasses, told the assembled reporters that he would donate his $25 million fortune to ordinary people to spread love and “solve the world’s problems”. .

Over the next 10 days, the shaggy-haired, dreamy handsome Brody appeared on the front pages of newspapers and on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” where he strummed a Bob Dylan song on a 12-string guitar. Crowds swarmed his rented home in Westchester County and his office in Midtown Manhattan.

And then there were the letters that poured in by the tens of thousands and piled up so fast that the post office threatened to burn them.

Almost immediately, Brody’s checks started bouncing and his life unraveled. Soon he disappeared from the headlines and all but disappeared from historical memory.

But paper has a way of staying. And one recent morning, Thai Jones, curator at Columbia University’s Special Collections Library, picked up a scalpel-shaped letter opener, rummaged through a messy mail box, and took a deep breath.

“Let’s go,” he said before slicing into an envelope with a return address on Queens Boulevard in New York, marked “Personal and Confidential – to be opened by addressee only.”

“Dear Mr. Brody,” Jones began, quickly reading a neatly typed request for $1,000 from a woman whose husband had died and left behind a mountain of bills.

He opened another letter, written in a jagged scribble, from a Brooklyn man who was struggling to support six children on $125 a week. “To prove that I am being honest,” the man wrote, “you can come visit my apartment at any time.”

Next is a postcard advertising a limo service. “The archives,” Jones said wryly, “are full of junk mail.”

It was Jones’ first in-person glimpse of a treasure trove of some 30,000 letters — the vast majority unopened — that were donated by the filmmakers behind “Dear Mr. Brody,” a documentary that is starting to air on Discovery. + April 28. In the film, the letters (some read aloud by their authors, whom the filmmakers tracked down) provide a sometimes emotionally devastating counterpoint to the wild tale of Brody’s Age of Aquarius grandiosity.

They are part message in a bottle, part voyeuristic parlor game, part potential boon to historians.

“It’s very, very unusual to get the stories of everyday people into the archives in a way like this, with thousands of people writing and talking about their lives at any given time,” Jones said.

But the letters also pose scientific puzzles, starting with a fundamental question: how does an archive deal with a mountain of unopened mail?

The Last Flower Child

The letters now at Columbia resurfaced a decade ago, when Melissa Robyn Glassman, a producer of “Dear Mr. Brody,” was sorting through a storage locker belonging to Hollywood producer Edward R. Pressman (“Badlands,” “Conan the barbaric, “Wall Street”), which was preparing to donate its archives to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

On a shelf, she noticed boxes labeled “Brody Letters.” Inside were stacks and stacks of letters, all addressed to the same person, all stamped January 1970 – and all unopened.

“I asked Ed’s wife about them,” she recalled in a joint video interview with Keith Maitland, the documentary’s director. “She said, ‘Oh, I’ve been trying to get Ed to throw them away for years!'”

Pressman had acquired the letters in the early 1970s, along with the rights to a screenplay about Brody, which he planned to turn into a Billy Wilder-esque dark comedy. (Possible title: “The Last Flower Child.”) “I imagined Richard Dreyfuss” as a star, Pressman said in an interview.

Brody’s story, which unfolded in less than two weeks, certainly had no shortage of crazy twists. A few days after appearing on “Ed Sullivan”, he got a recording contract and recorded several tracks, including one titled “The War Is Over”. “I don’t give money,” he told a CBS reporter. “What I give are good feelings for humanity.”

But the story took a darker turn. A New York Times article the day after he appeared on “Ed Sullivan” quoted Brody as saying he announced his big giveaway “while on drugs.”

“What a joke I made to the world!” he said to the reporter. (An official at his bank called his claims about the size of his fortune “gross exaggerations.”)

Newsreel footage in the documentary shows him knocking the bird down on crowds outside his window and bitterly denouncing the sometimes terrifying hordes demanding money. “They’re sick,” he told an interviewer. “They don’t need the money. What they need is food, shelter and love.

In an interview in the film, a friend of Brody’s described following him as he tried to land a chartered helicopter on the White House lawn, in an attempt to pay Richard Nixon and the northern government $1 billion. -Vietnamese to end the war.

Initially, Glassman wanted to jump-start the effort to make a feature film. But what continued to attract her were the letters she began to take home at night. “I became obsessed,” she said. “I started opening them with my mother.”

Maitland, the husband of an old friend she hired to photograph them, had a similar reaction. “It wasn’t a story,” he said of Brody’s story. “It was a million stories.”

And the letters in Pressman’s storage locker, it turned out, were just the tip of a very large iceberg. The filmmakers tracked down Brody’s son, who turned out to have about 100,000 others, who had been found hiding in a tool shed and then rescued by a screenwriter who also tried to make a biopic.

The paradox of a counter-cultural era

“Dear Mr. Brody” features kaleidoscopic shots of envelopes lavishly decorated with doodles and stickers. Most of the still unopened letters to Columbia are more prosaic, though many have peace signs drawn on the seals.

An hour and a half opening gave rise to many tales of debt, illness and despair. But there were also lots of kids asking for money for toys, asking for help with school fees or a down payment, asking for money to start “a hard-rock radio station in a college town” or an off-the-grid newspaper in Alaska – or just live like Mr. Brody.

“Let’s face it,” wrote a 24-year-old woman in the East Village, “we too would love to go to an island and have sex!”

In the documentary, the filmmakers focus on heartbreaking individual stories, like the mother and daughter who each wrote letters, unbeknownst to each other. But they also discovered striking clusters that point to larger themes. A group of letters from children of migrant farmworkers in Immokalee, Florida, written as part of a school assignment, candidly describe the violence and alcoholism plaguing their town.

One envelope contained an elaborate pitch from a black film producer offering to join a dozen artisans and start an all-black film studio, along with a detailed business plan and scripts for four projects.

“They said, ‘We’re just looking for someone who believes in us enough,” Maitland said. None of the films seem to have ever been made, he said, and the budding filmmakers, now all dead, left few other traces.

And then there were the pure larks. Through a colleague, Maitland learned that young Paul Stanley, future KISS guitarist, had written a letter to Brody.

“We never found it,” he said. “It could be at Columbia.”

It remains to be seen how historians will use the vast treasure – or how they will even know what to look for. For Jones, a 1960s scholar, the letters illustrate the paradox of an era defined in popular memory by a countercultural ethos that has not penetrated very deeply into society.

Brody, whom Jones described as “hyper-privileged,” had access to “all the finest things, including this beautiful, brilliant idea that you could use wealth to solve literally all the problems in the world,” the curator said. “But what he recovered, and what I feel shocked him was how little it touched the lives of the vast majority of people.”

Giving the letters to an archive, the filmmakers said, was a goal from the start. Several archives were interested, but with one stipulation: if the letters were given unopened, they should remain so.

Jones said he could imagine bringing interested parties together for “an opening night of letters,” to break through the overwhelming pile. “But in day-to-day use of the Reading Room,” he said, “we’ll have to take a more buttoned-up approach.”

Opening the letters can be magical, but it’s also exhausting. After an hour and a half, Jones said he felt drained.

But it was also hard to stop. “There is a rule with archival research,” he said. “The last thing you open will be the best.”