One day in early January 1970, Michael James Brody Jr. from a Pan Am jet at John F. Kennedy Airport and landed in what would become one of the shortest, weirdest 15 minutes of fame of the new decade.
Brody, the formerly obscure 21-year-old heir to a margarine fortune, returned from his honeymoon in Jamaica and, as a grand romantic gesture, had impulsively bought every seat on the plane so he and his bride could fly home alone. After landing, Brody, wearing wide legs and big green sunglasses, announced to gathered reporters that he would be giving away his $25 million fortune to ordinary people to spread love and “heal the world’s problems.”
Over the next 10 days, the shaggy, dreamy handsome Brody appeared on the front pages of newspapers and “The Ed Sullivan Show,” strumming a Bob Dylan song on a 12-string guitar. Crowds flocked to his rented Westchester County home and office in Midtown Manhattan.
And then there were the letters — pouring in by the tens of thousands, piling up so quickly that the post office threatened to burn them.
Almost immediately, Brody’s checks began to bounce and his life unraveled. He soon disappeared from the headlines and virtually disappeared from historical memory.
But paper has a way of sticking around. And one recent morning, Thai Jones, a curator at Columbia University’s special collections library, grabbed a scalpel-like letter opener, reached into a box of jumbled mail, and took a deep breath.
“Here we go,” he said before cutting an envelope with a return address on New York’s Queens Boulevard marked “Personal and Confidential – Open only by the addressee.”
“Dear Mr. Brody,” Jones began, quickly reading a neatly typed $1,000 plea 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 struggling to support six children on $125 a week. “To prove I’m honest,” the man wrote, “you can always come and visit my apartment.”
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Next up was a postcard advertising a limousine service. “The archives,” Jones said dryly, “are full of junk mail.”
It was Jones’ first personal glimpse of a hoard of some 30,000 letters – the vast majority unopened – donated by the filmmakers behind “Dear Mr. Brody,” a documentary airing on Discovery+ on April 28. In the film, the letters (some read by their authors, who were tracked down by the filmmakers) provide a sometimes emotionally devastating counterpoint to the wild narrative of Brody’s greatness in the Aquarian age.
They are part message in a bottle, part voyeuristic parlor game, part potential benefit for historians.
“It’s very, very unusual to get ordinary people’s stories into the archives this way, with thousands of people writing and talking about their lives at one point or another,” Jones said.
But the letters also pose some scientific conundrums, starting with a fundamental question: how does an archive actually deal with a mountain of unopened mail?
The last flower child
The letters now in Columbia resurfaced ten years ago, when Melissa Robyn Glassman, a producer of “Dear Mr. Brody,” searched a closet belonging to Hollywood producer Edward R. Pressman (“Badlands,” “Conan the Barbarian, “”Wall Street”), who was preparing to donate his archive to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
On top of a shelf, she saw some boxes marked ‘Brody letters’. Inside were piles and piles of letters, all addressed to the same person, all postmarked January 1970 – and all unopened.
“I asked Ed’s wife about it,” 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 envisioned for a Billy Wilder-style black comedy. (Possible title: “The Last Flower Child.”) “I imagined Richard Dreyfuss” as the star, Pressman said in an interview.
Brody’s story, which unfolded in less than two weeks, certainly had no shortage of twists and turns. A few days after appearing on “Ed Sullivan,” he landed a recording contract and recorded several songs, including one called “The War Is Over.” “I’m not giving money away,” he told a CBS reporter. “What I’m giving away are good feelings for humanity.”
But the story took a dark turn. A DailyExpertNews article the morning after his performance with “Ed Sullivan” quoted Brody as saying he announced his big giveaway “while stumbling on drugs.”
“What a joke I have played on the world!” he said to the reporter. (A bank official called his claims about the size of his fortune “gross exaggerations”.)
News footage in the documentary shows him waving the bird to the crowd outside his window, bitterly disapproving of the sometimes terrifying hordes asking for money. “They are sick,” he told an interviewer. “They don’t need money. What they need is food, shelter and love.”
In an interview featured in the film, a friend of Brody’s described going along as he attempted to land a chartered helicopter on the White House lawn in an attempt to pay Richard Nixon and the North Vietnamese government $1 billion to end the war. to end.
Initially, Glassman wanted to reinvigorate the attempt to make a feature film. But what continued to attract her were the letters, which she began to take home in the evenings. “I became obsessed,” she said. “I started opening them together with my mother.”
Maitland, the husband of an old friend she’d hired to take pictures of them, had a similar reaction. “It wasn’t one story,” he said of the Brody story. “It was a million stories.”
And the letters in Pressman’s filing cabinet, 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 more, who had been stashed in a tool shed and then rescued by a screenwriter who had also attempted to make a biopic.
The paradox of a countercultural era
“Dear Mr. Brody” features kaleidoscopic photos of envelopes richly decorated with doodles and stickers. Most of the unopened letters in Columbia are more prosaic, though plenty of peace signs have been drawn over the seals.
An hour and a half of opening resulted in many stories of debt, illness and despair. But there were also plenty of kids asking for money for toys, pleas for help with tuition or a down payment, requests for money for “a hard rock radio station in a college town” or an off-the-grid newspaper in Alaska — or just to 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 make love!”
In the documentary, the filmmakers delve into heartbreaking individual stories, such as the mother and daughter who each wrote letters, unbeknownst to each other. But they also discovered some striking clusters that point to broader themes. A group of letters written as a school assignment from the children of migrant farm workers in Immokalee, Florida, bluntly describes the violence and alcoholism prevalent in their town.
One envelope contained an elaborate pitch from a black film producer proposing to start an all-black film studio with a dozen craftsmen, complete 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 appear to have ever been made, he said, and the aspiring filmmakers, all now dead, left few traces.
And then there were the pure larks. Maitland learned through a colleague that young Paul Stanley, the future guitarist of KISS, had written Brody a letter.
“We never found it,” he said. “It could be in Columbia.”
It remains to be seen how historians will use the vast treasure — or 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 did not permeate very deeply into society.
Brody, who Jones described as “hyper-privileged,” had access to “all the most beautiful things, including this beautiful shiny idea that you could use wealth to literally solve all the world’s problems,” the curator said. “But what he got back, and what I feel shocked him, is how little of that touched the lives of the vast majority of people.”
Donating the letters to an archive, the filmmakers said, was a goal from the start. Several archives were interested, but with one condition: if the letters were donated unopened, they would have to remain so.
Jones said he could envision getting interested parties together for “an opening party” to make a dent in the overwhelming pile. “But in the day-to-day use of the reading room,” he said, “we’re going to have to take a more buttoned-up approach.”
Opening the letters may be magical, but it’s also exhausting. After an hour and a half, Jones said he felt empty.
But it was also hard to stop. “There is a rule with archive research,” he said. “The last thing you open is the best.”
