Brando, Chaplin, Ingels & Case Of Statue 1601

Editor’s note: As author of the true crime book Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin & Scandal in 90210, veteran entertainment journalist and Deadline contributor Scott Huver knows Hollywood history inside out. Huver began his career in 1994 as a reporter at the Beverly Hills Courier, and it was there that he first reported on the bizarre story of a stolen Academy Award that may, or may not, have belonged to Marlon Brando. When an Oscar statuette came up for auction — the sale of an Oscar is strictly verboten — and its owner remained anonymous, an intrigued Huver went to see it for himself. Years later, while researching his forthcoming second volume of Beverly Hills Noir, he re-explored the story, and what emerged is a saga even stranger than the cinematic fiction that spawned it.

---

“The stuff dreams are made of.”

That’s what Humphrey Bogart, improvising a line in character as private eye Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, riffing on a line from Shakespeare, dubbed the titular black bird statuette that proved so maddeningly elusive to obtain. And those words echoed what I was thinking as I took in the first Academy Award I’d ever laid eyes on in person, some 32 years ago.

In Hollywood, an Oscar was, then as now, the ultimate trophy, intensely coveted and freighted with prestige and mystique. And there I was, in the fall of 1994, standing in the sun-dappled Beverly Hills backyard of The Partridge Family matriarch, looking at two nearly identical statuettes, still golden and gleaming, if pitted and a little tarnished by the passage of time.

One of the trophies before me belonged to the mistress of the house, actress Shirley Jones, who’d claimed hers in 1961 for her Supporting Actress role in Elmer Gantry, a decade before her TV turn as Shirley Partridge. But the other, if what I was told was true, had a significantly more colorful, byzantine history.

Some have called it the “Brando Oscar,” but over the decades I’ve come to think of it as “The Maltese Oscar.”

At the time, I was just a few months fresh off the U-Haul to Los Angeles, working as a general assignment reporter at the Beverly Hills Courier, which remains the longest-running local newspaper in 90210. I’d been welcomed into the grounds of Jones’ home on Elevado Drive in the Beverly Hills flats by her husband, the actor-comic-dealmaker-relentless provocateur Marty Ingels.

Ingels was the onetime star of the ’60s-era single-season sitcom I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster, and a familiar TV guest star and commercial and cartoon voice actor (as a Gen X-er, I knew him best from game shows, talk shows and as the titular voice of the Pac-Man cartoon). By the 1970s, craving greater career control, he’d made a lucrative pivot, becoming an agent and middleman specializing in securing celebrity product endorsements for stars like Orson Welles, Farrah Fawcett and Howard Cosell. Married since 1977 to Jones, who was as serene and composed as Ingels was manic and compulsive, they were a seemingly mismatched but mutually devoted Hollywood pairing.

I didn’t know it back then, but Ingels, who never met an opportunity for publicity he couldn’t milk, also had something of a reputation, having been embroiled in numerous lawsuits and accusations of harassment – most notoriously a nasty, very public battle with actress June Allyson, a veteran of Hollywood’s golden age of musicals, over her contract for endorsing Depends undergarments.

Hollywood-crazy, I was always on the lookout for showbiz topics to cover instead of eyeball-glazing city council meetings, and given that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences kept its headquarters in Beverly Hills, I thought Ingels’ story would be of some local interest – but especially my interest. I could not have known that the story would soon make headlines around the world.

“Say something happened during an Oscar show and one of the documentary awards didn’t get picked up. What would happen to it?”

A mystery phone call to the Academy office in 1995

Earlier that week, the paper had gotten a fax from Ingels’ publicist, Edward Lozzi, now a veteran PR executive who was then early in would be a 21-year professional relationship with Ingles. Ingels was claiming he had in his possession an Oscar that had originally been intended for Marlon Brando, for his Best Actor-winning performance as Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Intrigued, I called Lozzi and promptly received an invitation to view the statuette in person.

Of course, it could have been Brando’s. The actor had never accepted his award: It was an offer he could and did refuse. He famously and controversially boycotted the 45^th Academy Awards ceremony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on March 27, 1973. In his stead, Brando asked Sacheen Littlefeather, an actress and activist, to attend. When presenters Roger Moore and Liv Ullman offered Littlefeather the statuette before a television audience of 85 million viewers, she formally refused it in protest of Hollywood’s dismissive treatment of Native American people.

The gesture caused ripples throughout the live telecast, prompting both boos and applause, and especially rankling some traditional screen cowboys: Presenter Clint Eastwood quipped “I don’t know if I should present this award on behalf of all the cowboys shot in all the John Ford Westerns over the years,” while an infuriated John Wayne reportedly had to be restrained by security backstage. The move was much dissected in the days that followed – Charlton Heston called it “childish,” Jane Fonda called it “wonderful”, and the Academy banned future proxies from accepting – but today, Brando’s sentiment is viewed as being far ahead of its moment.

That day in Ingels and Jones’ backyard (I wasn’t invited into the house), with trademark raspy, unfettered bravado, Ingels told me this was that very same trophy, and that since that fateful night two decades earlier, it had remained out of sight and in the hands of his anonymous “client.”

And it was for sale.

The mystery client had, it must be presumed, somehow absconded with the statuette. They had then “kept it in a drawer for 21 years,” Ingels said. But the client was now facing a downturn in his fortunes and wanted to auction it off. The proceeds – minus his personal percentage and, it must also be presumed, a cut for Ingels – would be going to charity. Ingels insisted he was “doing the right thing” and was seeking the blessing of the reclusive Brando, who’d co-starred with Ingels’ wife in 1964’s Bedtime Story. The plan was to benefit the Leukemia Society – a suggestion of his client’s – or, in what Ingels’ envisioned as a perfect finale to the saga, the Native American people Brando “was trying to call attention to.”

Ingels had reached out to Brando’s representatives, hoping for a letter or other documentation to authenticate the award. Brando had recently admitted in his memoir, Songs My Mother Taught Me, that he had no idea of the trophy’s whereabouts, writing, “The Academy may have sent it to me, but if it did I don’t know where it is now.”

I was allowed to inspect the Academy Award alongside Jones’ Oscar, as well as snap some photos with the Courier’s embarrassingly cheap, banged-up point-and-shoot camera. It certainly looked authentic in every meaningful respect. Unlike Jones’ statuette, it did not have the name of any winner engraved on the stylized film reel that comprised the trophy’s base. But like Jones’ award, the underside of the base was stamped with a serial number: No. 1601.

Days later, Ingels insisted he must have use of the newspaper’s photos to share with national news outlets — a demand refused by my publisher March Schwartz. Then came a nonstop barrage of telephone calls and hand-delivered, handwritten letters informing us that we were, in essence, the lowest of lowlifes.

By that point, the story was already taking on a life of its own. “It was all orchestrated from my office,” says Lozzi today. “Marty already had a plan in his head, and I was going to be the enforcer of it as the official publicist – he knew in advance that this was going to be an explosion.” Concocting the idea of putting the side-by-side Oscars before the press, Lozzi garnered an onslaught of media attention, everything from local news stations and the Los Angeles Times to national outlets like CNN’s Larry King Live and the New York Post and even international agencies across the globe.

The story took a turn for the truly bizarre when I contacted the Academy for their response. I was certainly expecting some indignation: Since 1951 it has been expressly forbidden for Oscar winners, their heirs or estates to sell their trophies for profit, charitable or otherwise – indeed, recipients sign a contract upon acceptance to that effect, outlining that the statuettes are merely on loan, with a provision that allows the Academy to buy the trophies back for $1. That an unclaimed Oscar had wound up in the hands of a third party muddied the issue, but that seemed like something for lawyers to untangle.

For what it’s worth and for whatever the man’s own intentions for it, Mr. B., I have urged him many times to take it out of the drawer and do something positive and constructive and yes, lucrative.

Marty Ingels, in a fax to Marlon Brando

What I was not expecting was for the Academy’s then-communication chief John Pavilk to tell me that the organization was, in fact, in possession of Oscar No. 1601, the intended Brando award, and always had been. The Academy even offered a rather detailed chain of custody.

Unruffled by the on-air theatrics at the 1973 ceremony, presenter Roger Moore – his film debut as James Bond still a few months away – had coolly retained the Oscar after Littlefeather refused it, carrying it off-stage with him after the segment. With no one attempting to collect it from him, and not knowing what else to do with it, he toted the trophy throughout the remainder of the ceremony and beyond, to various afterparties, cheekily accepting faux-congratulations late into the night, until he finally retired to 007 producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli’s Beverly Hills mansion above Sunset Boulevard, where Moore and his family were staying.

Years later, I asked Moore himself about that night. He chuckled as he recalled, “My daughter saw the Oscar and said, ‘Oh, Daddy, that’s wonderful – you won the Oscar!’ I said ‘No, I didn’t win it,’ and told her what happened. She said ‘Oh, well then, why don’t you give it to Michael Caine?’ Because Michael was nominated that year too.”

Moore said he had toyed with the notion of taking the trophy home to London and auctioning it off for a children’s charity, but instead, after two weeks, had his publicist Jerry Pam inform the Academy of its whereabouts. An armored car had been sent to retrieve it (years later, when the Ingels story broke, Moore, who’d been cornered for comment at LAX by Entertainment Tonight, even faxed a similar explanation directly to Ingels and Jones).

I was told by the Academy that, had Moore not held onto No. 1601 that night, it most likely would’ve been immediately placed back into circulation and potentially handed out to another winner later in the ceremony. And if the nascent 007 hadn’t alerted the Academy, the trophy might actually have vanished, untraceable.

But from there, the unclaimed statuette rejoined the Academy’s pool of undistributed Academy Awards. It sat idle until 1976 until it was loaned out to the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York as a display sample in a long-term exhibit of songwriting trophies. It remained there for nearly two decades until being returned to the Academy just a week or so before the bombshell appearance of Ingels’ doppelganger “Brando Oscar.”

With the story of Ingels’ claims snowballing, the Academy’s then-president Arthur Hiller, director of Love Story and The In-Laws, even swiftly went before news crews with the rediscovered statuette in hand, displaying an identical “1601” stamp engraved on its base. Pavlik told me, “We can’t explain at this point why [Ingels] appears to have an Oscar with a similar serial number.” At the very least, it seemed that the award in Ingels’ possession was not a counterfeit, and the Academy was determined to puzzle out where it came from. Pavlik also took pains to note that they did not regard either 1601 statuette as belonging to Brando.

But one person did: Brando himself.

As the story got picked up by the national press, the screen legend – from whom I giddily but unsuccessfully had sought comment – finally sent a pointed fax from his secluded Mulholland Drive compound directly to Ingels, informing him that he was now ready to take possession of the prize he’d snubbed two decades earlier. “Please return it as quickly as possible to Karl Malden,” the missive instructed. Malden was Brando’s friend and co-star in On the Waterfront, as well as a member of the Academy’s board of governors and immediate past president.

Irked that Brando was allegedly ignoring his own people’s advice to go along with the auction plan, Ingels fired back with his own flurry of fax pages. He indignantly reminded Brando that his chance to claim the trophy had long passed and that his down-on-his-luck client presented a golden opportunity that would benefit everyone — including burnishing Brando’s own already prodigious legacy amid all the hype.

“For what it’s worth and for whatever the man’s own intentions for it, Mr. B., I have urged him many times to take it out of the drawer and do something positive and constructive and yes, lucrative,” Ingels faxed back. “In my view, it was serving nothing and no one in that anonymous grave, and I felt its project potential was enormous.”

“Marlon Brando never wanted that Oscar, and he’s always made that very clear,” Ingels told trade reporter Robert Osbourne, who was also a Turner Classic Movies host and the Academy’s approved historian. “I just want the right thing to be done and in this case I’m not sure it’s right for Brando to be given that Oscar when he’s shown no concern about it, or concerns about the Academy, all these years.”

Perhaps sensing a battle he didn’t need, Brando backed off with a final fax: “I will turn the matter over to the Academy. I am sure they will come to a fair and sensible decision as to what course to follow.” He also sent his warmest regards to Jones, recalling they had laughed together more during the making of Bedtime Story than on any other film he’d made.

Meanwhile, Ingels – a voting member of the Academy himself – refuted the organization’s timeline, insisting to Newsday that videotape of the ceremony would show Littlefeather leaving the stage with the award, where backstage his mystery client – now slightly more sketched-out as “a well-known Hollywood agent” – offered to take it off her hands. “The Academy is embarrassed,” he faxed the Academy’s executive director Bruce Davis. “The Academy is confused. The Academy is stumped. The Academy is angry. And finally, the Academy is lying.”

But what the Academy was actually doing, as Ingels’ relentless war of words eventually died down, was sleuthing.

In early February 1995, just days before the nominations for the 67^th Academy Awards were to be announced, I got a call from Pavlik, who offered me an exclusive on the inside story behind the twin trophies. And what he told me was a twisty plot to rival the biggest contenders for that year’s Best Picture, with the whipsawing timeline of Pulp Fiction and a surprise Forrest Gump-esque cameo.

The first surprise in the Academy’s internal report: the trophy offered to Brando was not, in fact, No. 1601 – it was actually No. 1616. That was the serial number of the trophy that Moore returned to the Academy.

Enter the Little Tramp.

A year prior to Brando’s Godfather victory, Charlie Chaplin – long in exile in his native England after his politics made him a pariah persecuted by the U.S. government – made a joyous, emotional return to Hollywood, complete with a 12-minute standing ovation, to accept an honorary Academy Award for his masterful, pioneering achievements in film. The whole occasion was so moving that, a year later in 1973, Academy voters felt compelled to award Chaplin again, this time with his first competitive Oscar victory for Best Original Dramatic Score for 1952’s Limelight. Due to its delayed qualifying Los Angeles release 20 years later, the film had become newly eligible thanks to a rules loophole.

The octogenarian Chaplin had not made another trip to attend the ceremony, so his award had been sent to him in London, only to be damaged in transit. So, right around the time Brando’s Oscar had been retrieved from Moore, Chaplin’s family had requested a replacement. The blank statuette returned by Moore, fresh on hand, was engraved in Chaplin’s honor and sent across the Pond, this time arriving intact.

Thus the “Brando Oscar” became the “Chaplin Oscar.” An ironic endgame, given that Brando famously loathed his experience being directed by his onetime idol Chaplin on A Countess from Hong Kong in 1967. “I still look up to him as perhaps the greatest genius that the medium has ever produced,” Brando later wrote. “But as a human being he was a mixed bag, just like all of us.”

Brando, the Academy offered, was welcome to accept his own engraved statuette for The Godfather at any time, should he so choose. Today, the Academy declines to comment on whether the screen legend, who died in 2004, ever privately accepted.

Even more bizarrely, Brando’s first Best Actor Oscar, which he accepted for 1954’s On the Waterfront, also went mysteriously missing, passing through the hands of various black-market collectors over the years, until scandal-plagued Malaysian film financing company Red Granite Pictures purchased it for approximately $600,000 and gifted it to Leonardo DiCaprio in 2012. Following a federal investigation into Red Granite, DiCaprio turned over the trophy to Department of Justice officials in 2017, and it was presumably returned to the Academy.

But that still left the conundrum of Oscar No. 1601.

Reviewing the video tape of the 1973 ceremony, one thing became obvious: Sacheen Littlefeather never laid hands on the trophy at any point. As she exited the stage alongside Moore and Ullman, the Oscar was still clearly clutched in Moore’s grip, making Ingels’ claim that Littlefeather handed it off to his client more dubious.

“Every single player in this incident had a different story on who gave what to who, at what time and when and where,” says Lozzi, still staunchly convinced the Academy fabricated its narrative. Today, he offers a slightly amended version of the tale: The mystery client, then a young up-and-comer in the industry, was backstage when Moore appeared, holding the Oscar and haplessly asking, “What do I do with this?” Ingels’ client said, very businesslike, “I’ll take care of that,” relieving the star of the trophy and eventually secreting it out of the ceremony.

The man later became an agent specializing in booking celebrities for personal appearances, as well as a significant collector of Hollywood memorabilia who helped his clients sell their own mementos. He was also, Lozzi affirms, “one of Marty Ingel’s rare best friends.”

Pavlik told me that, as for those identical serial numbers, a close examination of the Academy’s meticulously kept trophy logs, entered by hand in the pre-digital age, provided another unexpected bombshell. While at first glance, it appeared to verify that No. 1601 had indeed been loaned to the New York exhibit, there was another entry just above it, covered in white-out. Held to the light, another notation was visible: “1601 – disappeared during the 45th Awards Ceremonies.”

“It became a hot potato. Marty found that he wasn’t going to make any money on it. It was too many people involved, too many people watching.”

Ed Lozzi, Marty Ingels’ publicist

From there, Academy researchers offered a fresh series of twists, having spotted a second errant award: the producers of the Dutch film This Tiny World, Charles and Martina Huguenot van der Linden, were not on hand to accept the Best Documentary Short trophy from presenters Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner, who set it aside to segue into the Best Documentary category. As the ceremony went to commercial, This Tiny World’s Oscar remained unattended and unclaimed on the podium. This, the Academy believed, was the one I’d examined in Ingels and Jones’ backyard, purloined and smuggled away at some point during the ceremony.

The Academy suspected that the doctored entry was most likely made by a representative of the now-defunct Dodge Trophy Company that supplied the awards and was responsible for overseeing them during the ceremony, hoping to cover up the embarrassment of a missing Oscar. Then, a second statuette with the same serial number was constructed and placed in the Academy’s pool, which was later sent to the New York Songwriters Hall of Fame.

As far as the Academy was concerned, the mystery was solved. In acknowledgment of its now-notorious nature, Oscar No. 1601 was sealed away and preserved in the Academy’s vaults. But there was still that pesky doppelganger, informally redubbed No.1601 (A), my Maltese Oscar, out there in the wind.

In 2016, Bruce Davis revealed one last strange detail. Retired from a two-decade-plus tenure as the Academy’s executive director, he wrote in an industry trade essay that as the investigation was winding to a close in 1995, an Academy staffer had fielded a phone call from a person calling themselves “Ron Forrester.” To the staffer’s ears, “Forrester” had sounded suspiciously like the ubiquitous voice of so many animated series and commercials: Ingels. “Say something happened during an Oscar show and one of the documentary awards didn’t get picked up,” the caller asked. “What would happen to it?”

If Ingels disagreed with the Academy’s conclusions, he was uncharacteristically quiet about it. I would occasionally spot him around town over the years but would never speak with him again. He died in 2015. Lozzi says today that after the initial furor about Ingels’ claims faded, the mystery agent client quietly withdrew the trophy, presumably returning it to whichever bottom desk drawer that had previously housed it for so many years in his home office in West Hollywood just off the Sunset Strip.

“It became a hot potato,” says Lozzi. “Marty found that he wasn’t going to make any money on it. It was too many people involved, too many people watching, too many roadblocks, and this guy wanted to remain anonymous, no matter what.”

That hard-lucked agent ultimately became gravely ill and died young not long after. Lozzi doubts that the Oscar ever found its way back to Ingels, whom he believes would’ve immediately relaunched the auction campaign with redoubled fanfare. “I really don’t know where it is right now,” Lozzi insists. “Could be in [the client’s] casket.”

That leaves the current whereabouts of Oscar No. 1601 (A) unknown — a mystery that has tantalized me for more than three decades.

In The Maltese Falcon, after the villainous, avuncular antiquities dealer Kasper Gutman, played with oily relish by Sydney Greenstreet, recounts the centuries-long history of the priceless black bird he’s spent a considerable portion of his life pursuing, he muses to Bogart’s Sam Spade that while technically the statuette may have once belonged to the King of Spain, “I don’t see how you can honestly grant anybody else clear title to it — except by right of possession.”

For whomever currently holds claim to Oscar No. 1601 (A) – although really, isn’t “The Maltese Oscar” a far more exotic and evocative designation for a trophy with this much accumulated intrigue? — the very fact of its possession, despite no winning performance or inspiring speech, may feel like prize enough. And the Oscar goes to them. For now.