1. Wilson Mizner was an American playwright, raconteur, and entrepreneur.
20 Facts About Wilson Mizner
1. 2.
Wilson Mizner's best-known plays are The Deep Purple, produced in 1910, and The Greyhound, produced in 1911.
3.
Wilson Mizner was manager and co-owner of the restaurant The Brown Derby in Los Angeles, California, and was part of the failed project of his older brother Addison to create a new resort in Boca Raton, Florida.
4.
Wilson Mizner was born in Benicia, California, one of eight children, including brothers William, Edgar, Murray, Addison, Henry, and Lansing and sister Mary.
5.
Wilson Mizner claimed later that he operated badger games, managed fighters, robbed a restaurant to get chocolate for his girlfriend "Nellie the Pig" Lamore, and grub-staked prospector Sid Grauman, later of Grauman's Chinese Theatre.
6.
Wilson Mizner claimed to have met Wyatt Earp, who became a lifelong friend.
7.
In Skagway, Alaska, Wilson Mizner met Jefferson Randolph "Soapy" Smith, whom Wilson Mizner considered his mentor.
8.
Wilson Mizner followed gold seekers to Nome, Alaska when the Nome Gold Rush started in 1899.
9.
Once Addison had established himself in New York, Wilson Mizner joined him, and became a New York dilettante, raconteur, and Broadway playwright.
10.
Wilson Mizner married Mary Adelaide Yerkes, widow of industrialist Charles Tyson Yerkes, in 1906.
11.
Wilson Mizner then made his living by gambling on luxury liner boats between New York and London, until the companies prohibited it.
12.
Wilson Mizner then managed the Rand Hotel on West Forty-ninth Street in New York, posting signs that read "Carry out your own dead" and "No opium smoking in the elevators".
13.
Wilson Mizner managed several boxers, fixing the fights to enhance his gambling revenues.
14.
Wilson Mizner was convicted in 1919 for operating a gambling den on Long Island, and received a suspended sentence.
15.
Wilson Mizner's best known movie work is the screenplay for the Michael Curtiz movie 20,000 Years in Sing Sing.
16.
Wilson Mizner called his Hollywood years "a trip through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat".
17.
Wilson Mizner began but did not complete a musical based on Wilson's life.
18.
Wilson Mizner was an idol of low society and a pet of high.
19.
Wilson Mizner knew women, as his brother Addison said, from the best homes and houses.
20.
That Wilson Mizner was a ballad singer, medical lecturer, "general utility man in a segregated district", songwriter, and roulette-wheel fixer are all undocumented except in his own unreliable words.