Les Ziffren reads his nightly
broadcast to the United States, "Spain by Day."
He was the United Press correspondent in Spain from 1933-1936.
November 12, 2007
NEW YORK - Lester Ziffren, who reported the start
of Spain's 1930's civil war, created and solved mysteries for
film detective Charlie Chan and represented the United States
government in South America, died November 12th after a brief
illness.
He was 101. The cause of death was congestive heart failure.
In a wide-ranging career that took him from his hometown
newspaper in Illinois to New York, Buenos Aires, Madrid,
Hollywood, Santiago and other Latin American capitals, Mr.
Ziffren went from foreign correspondent to screenwriter to film
industry agent, diplomat and public relations executive.
He was born April 30, 1906 and grew up in Rock Island, Ill.
An opportunity to cover golf for the local newspaper led him to
seek a career in journalism.
At his 1927 graduation dinner from the University of Missouri
School of Journalism, he took the opportunity to ask for a job
from the visiting president of the United Press. He got one.
A year later he was in Buenos Aires and covered South American
revolutions throughout the late 1920's.
After working on UP's foreign desk in New York for several years,
he was sent to Madrid in 1933, just as Spain was becoming an
early indicator of the turmoil that would engulf Europe and much
of the world later in the decade.
"Ziff," as he came to be known, became friendly with
the likes of author Ernest Hemingway and the U.S. ambassador,
Claude Bowers.
"Deadline Every Minute," a 1957 history of United Press
by Joe Alex Morris, recounted a puzzling message Mr. Ziffren sent
from Madrid to the UP European headquarters in London on July 17,
1936:
"MOTHERS EVERLASTINGLY LINGERING ILLNESS LIKELY
LARYNGITIS AUNT FLORA OUGHT RETURN EVEN IF GOES NORTH LATER
EQUALLY GOOD IF ONLY NIGHT " .. continuing in a
similar and seemingly nonsensical way.
The agency's London staffers eventually concluded the message was
in code ... with the real meaning revealed by the first letter of
each word:
"MELILLA (a Spanish seaport in Morocco) FOREIGN
LEGION REVOLTED MARTIAL LAW DECLARED."
That was the first word to get through Spanish censorship that
parts of Spain's military had revolted.
And it meant the start of Spain's bloody civil war.
Elements of the army, supported by Fascist Italy and Nazi
Germany, fought to overthrow the government of the Spanish
Republic.
Some of the savagery of the fighting set the stage for similar
tactics employed by the Nazis when Germany began its campaign of
aggression not long thereafter.
In addition to his newspaper dispatches, from 1934 on, Mr.
Ziffren provided nightly broadcast reports for United Press to
the United States and South America on the run up to the war.
He wasn't there to see its end: the 1939 victory of the rebel
military faction known as the Nationalists.
By late 1936, Mr. Ziffren had managed to run afoul of the
Nationalist leader, General Francisco Franco. Threatened with
harm and feeling the threat itself compromised his objectivity,
he decided to leave Spain. Months later, he said "even now I
have violent nightmares and wake up in a cold sweat; when I start
talking about Spain, I start weeping for no reason at all."
Franco ruled Spain for the next four decades.
Turning down a UP offer a job in Rome, Mr. Ziffren wound up in
Los Angeles, meeting up with Edythe Wurtzel, whom he had met
earlier in Madrid. She was connected to the film industry through
family members who worked at Twentieth Century Fox and her
father, a Hollywood agent.
Mr. Ziffren married Ms. Wurtzel and joined Fox as a scriptwriter.
After working on a handful of films in the late 1930's, he was
assigned to the Charlie Chan detective series that Fox had been
turning out for about a decade. The films were very popular and
Fox decided to continue them after the 1938 death of actor Warner
Oland, who originally played the role.
Sidney Toler took over the role of Chan and Mr. Ziffren was among
the writers credited with creating a half dozen early 1940's
murder mysteries the enigmatic and philosophical Chan was called
upon to solve with the dubious help of various less intuitive
offspring.
Among the films were "Charlie Chan in Panama" and
"Charlie Chan in Rio," whose Latin American backdrops
became hints of Mr. Ziffren's next career.
After the American entry in World War II, Mr. Bowers, the former
U.S. ambassador to Spain, asked for Mr. Ziffren's help in his new
post as ambassador to Chile.
Mr. Ziffren and his wife moved to Santiago and he worked for the
U.S. government's Inter-American Affairs Department.
After the war, he returned to Los Angeles and took over his late
father-in-law's Hollywood agency for several years, where he
represented famed director John Ford and Merian C. Cooper, who
was a frequent collaborator of Mr. Ford's, but who was perhaps
best known as the producer of "King Kong" and its
sequels.
But in 1952, he went back to South America as a diplomat, with
State Department postings in Colombia, and Chile.
There, he later became head of public relations for Braden
Copper, the Chilean subsidiary of giant Kennecott Copper.
Moving to New York in the early 60's, he became public relations
director for Kennecott.
Mr. Ziffren helped set up and headed the North American-Chilean
Chamber of Commerce and was the recipient of the highest
decoration the Chilean government gives to foreigners, "The
Order Of General Bernardo O'Higgins."
Until his recent illness, "Ziff" remained active and
was an avid consumer of his earliest profession, reading several
daily newspapers.
Well into his 90's, he remained involved in Chilean-American
economic affairs and attended gatherings of former United Press
colleagues and their UPI successors.
Before his death, he was believed to be the oldest surviving
employee of the once legendary news agency.
Edythe Wurtzel Ziffren died in 1977.
Survivors include his daughter, Didi Hunter, herself a former
staffer with United Press International's onetime television news
service, and her husband Andrew, a visiting professor at Cornell
University in Ithaca,NY.
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