Jack Freulich, in a photograph given to his brother and sister-in-law, Roman and Katia Freulich, in 1926.

"History is written by survivors, so those who die young often seem to recede into memory, forgotten or ignored as time passed them by." That often heard thought appeared on the Internet in February 2016 in the Los Angeles Daily Mirror.

The article was about Hollywood photographer Jack Freulich, the oldest son of Nisla Halborn and Isaac Frejlich. And it is certainly the case that Jack, whose pioneering career as a photographer was cut off with his early death, was largely unrecognized for years.

The Internet has brought a resurgence of interest in old photographs — particularly Hollywood photographs, and has led to rediscovery of Jack's work. But it has also led to a considerable amount of confusion and mislabeling of some of his fine portraits. Two circumstances have contributed: One is the fact that two other Halborn descendants —Jack's son, Henry, and his younger brother, Roman, were also photographers. Both were hired by Jack in the early 1920s and for years worked side by side with him at Universal Studios. The second is that film studios, in the early days and well into the second half of the 20th century were often careless in identifying the work of the photographers who provided publicity and portrait photos for motion picture productions, and were not always careful to preserve, document and archive those photos. Thus a number of Jack’s fine photographs have been lost and others have been wrongly attributed to his brother or his son. That careless attribution cut both ways and, though not nearly as often, Roman’s and Henry’s photos are sometimes wrongly attributed to Jack, or to each other.

Jack, Roman and Henry were all the direct descendants of our common ancestors, Ankiel and Chasia Halborn. Jack was my uncle, Roman my father, and Henry my first cousin. This article about Jack's career, and articles about Roman and Henry are intended to provide members of the Halborn family with information that will help fill out the family story and will provide a guideline to recognizing the work of these three men, which is appearing with increasing frequency on the Internet.

The best and most comprehensive analysis of Jack’s work appeared only recently in Still, a history of the role of still photography during the silent movie era written by David S. Shields and published in 2013. For the most part, Shields' analysis is accurate and insightful. But even though Jack died when I was only four years old, I remember him and I remember the relationship he had with my father, with my family and with his wife and son. Those memories, supplemented by information from family documents I accumulated over the years, created for me a shade of doubt about some of Shields’ conclusions regarding Jack’s life and death. Not many to be sure, but nonetheless conclusions that are important to our understanding of Halborn family history. This story is intended primarily to outline Jack’s contributions and to fill in, where possible, some additional information. To a lesser degree the story is intended to note the places where my information, or my belief — based upon family knowledge, family photographs and family documents — diverges from the conclusions of Shields and others who have written about Jack or expressed opinions about Jack that have been sustained by repetition on the Internet. With these goals in mind, the story of Jack’s career is illustrated with family photographs as well as examples of his fine professional work.

Isaac Freulich with his son Jack, about 1906.

Coming to America

Jacob (Jack) Freulich was the oldest son on Nisla Mirla Halborn and Isaac Freulich and the first member of the Freulich family to immigrate to the United States. He was born in Częstochowa, Poland on September 11, 1880 and died, a suicide, in Los Angeles, California on October 17, 1936. And he was the first of three Freulich’s to become a Hollywood photographer in the days of silent movies.

Jack immigrated in the first years of the 20th Century. On his 1921 Declaration of Intent to apply for United States citizenship he listed the year of his arrival as 1901, when he was 21 years old. But we have not found any documentation of Jack’s arrival. We can come close only because we have found a 1902 ship manifest that lists his father, Isaac Freulich, arriving in New York on August 18, 1902. The manifest for Isaac, filled out by a ship’s officer, contains a column which requires the officer to note whether the immigrant ” . . . is going to join a relative; and, if so, what relative, their name and address.” For Isaac the column lists his destination as: “son, Jacob. c/o Mr. I.S. Fisher, 223 East Broadway, N.Y.” Jack, in other words, was already in America when his father docked in New York in mid-1902.

The existing records for Jack’s early years in America are scant. They indicate that by 1906 he had married, had a son and was beginning to prosper economically. Jack and his wife, Helene, lived at 99 1/2 St. Mark’s Place on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in a slightly more upscale neighborhood than his first New York residence. Jack’s occupation, in his son's birth record, is listed as “artist” — a term that sounds pretentious for a photographer today but one that was in common usage for studio photographers in the early years of the 20th century.

Other documents indicate that Jack was steadily able to improve his living conditions and to put money aside for passage to bring family members to America. In 1902 he paid the steerage class fare to bring his father to America — and then to return him to Europe. In 1904, he brought his brother Hersz David into the country, again steerage class. A year later, in 1905, Jack was able to pay a second class fair for his father’s second trip to New York and his return, a second time, to Europe. Then, on Isaac’s third and final trip, in 1913, Jack paid three second class fares: his father had finally decided to remain in America and had traveled with his two youngest children — Paulina, age 17, and Roman, age 15.

Underwood and Underwood

In the United States Census for 1910, Jack’s profession is listed as “photographer”. He works in a “studio”. No regular employee salary is listed in the census: the studio was clearly his own.

Sometime after 1910, probably not long after, Jack was hired by Underwood and Underwood, a large New York based company that produced and distributed photography for use by private individuals as well as by newspapers and magazines. The Underwood company had been founded in the early 1880s in Ottawa, Kansas. The two Underwood brothers began their careers selling stereoscopic pictures from door to door. They moved to New York in 1891and built their business into one that dispatched photographers on assignment around the world and then sold news and feature photographs — everything ranging from world events and natural wonders to individual portraiture. Stereoscopic images continued to be the main product of the company for several decades but as the demand for print ready photography for newspapers and magazines grew and new types of equipment came on the market Underwood made room for new techniques.

The dates of Jack’s tenure at Underwood and Underwood are not documented, nor is the record of the photographic work he produced for the company. The use of a photographer’s signature on photos — a common practice at the time for independent photographers — was not permitted by the company and if any records were kept they have not been preserved. All photographs were attributed simply to “Underwood and Underwood”. Additional information seems to have been limited to the names of the subjects plus details about places, dates and, in the case of theater or films, the names of productions.

During part of his tenure at Underwood, according to David Shields’ book, Still, Jack was sent by Underwood to Washington, D.C. where he was primarily charged with taking portraits of bureaucrats and political leaders— all of whom during that era where men, all of whom wore the same fashionable, well tailored, dark suits, stiff collars and ties and all of whom seemed to require the same stuffy, unsmiling three quarter, profile or full face head shots.

The timing for Jack’s stay in Washington is not clear. He is listed in the 1910 United States census as living at 886 Kelly Street in the Bronx borough of New York City. And in the manifest for the ship that brought his father, younger sister and younger brother to New York in mid-July 1913 he is still listed at the same address. Moreover, we know from Roman Freulich’s recollections of his time living at that address that Jack, who was 18 years his senior, was available to guide Roman in finding his way in his new country during much of the time before he joined the British Army in 1918, during World War 1. Because of his father's long absences from Poland while Roman was growing up he always considered Jack the main fatherly influence in his life.

Because of Underwood’s policy of attributing photographs only to Underwood, we cannot even date Jack’s Washington stay by the titles of bureaucrats he photographed. But we do know that sometime between 1910 and 1915 — Jack was asked to return to New York to organize and head a new still photography department for Underwood to service the publicity needs for the dynamically growing theater and film industries.

The new department attracted and served a variety of celebrities, from already famous theater and Ziegfeld Follies stars to new would-be silent film actors and actresses as well as the production companies that were hoping to profit from new films and new faces.

David Shields notes that Jack’s “relief at being free from polishing the dignity of male officialdom can be registered in the exuberant experimentation of his portraits of Valeska Suratt and Theodora Bara.” (Still, page 164)

Jack Freulich . . . shot the most important portrait sitting of the 1910s in the estimation of motion picture publicists. In 1916, Freulich took a series of stills of Theda Bara as a female vampire that excited newspaper editors across the country. They drove the publicity campaign that transformed minor theatrical personality Theodosia Goodman into the most notorious celebrity in the entertainment world — “The Wickedest Woman in the World.” Theda Bara’s elevation would be the greatest demonstration of the star-making power of motion picture publicity in the 1910s. Freulich, who photographically channeled Theda Bara’s dangerous femininity would be courted by every New York and New Jersey motion picture studio for almost three years before agreeing to become head of Universal’s portrait galleries in 1919, becoming the first salaried film studio portrait and still photographer to receive credit regularly. (Still, page 5)

A search of the Internet for Underwood and Underwood during the 1910s, with or without Jack's name, reveals a number of photographs that are probably Jack's work. The photographs, below, of Theda Bara taken in 1915 for the film Sin are undoubtedly his.

Moving West

On January 1, 1919, the Film Flashes column of The New York Clipper newspaper announce that “Jack Freulich, of Underwood and Underwood, has arrived at Universal City .” Carl Laemmle had tempted him away from New York and from Underwood and Underwood.

Carl Laemmle, who like Jack was an Eastern European Jewish immigrant, had begun his film career by buying and running a string of nickelodeons. After a time he tired of paying royalties to the producers of nickelodeon film strips and began his own production company. And as silent films and film theaters grew, so did Laemmle’s company. Probably Laemmle met Jack while he was at Underwood and Underwood. And probably Laemmle used Jack's services to publicize some early Universal films.

By the second decade of the 20th century Laemmle had moved his company to Los Angeles and had built Universal City on ranch land he purchased in the San Fernando Valley. Within that studio he envisioned something new — the first in-house production still and portrait department in the nascent film industry. Jack was the first person hired by a studio to lead such a department. He was also the first to bargain, before he accepted the job, for full control over hiring, over the release of stills from the department and for the right to use his name on the photographs he produced:

The executives knew the old truism of the theatre box office: if you’ve got a name, you get more pay. The fewer people on the payroll that required hefty salaries, the better. One breaks the anonymity, granting a name to a creator, only when extraordinary skill or promise justifies violating the standard protocol. It took the granting of name credit to lure photographer Jack Freulich to Universal Pictures in 1919. He would be the first salaried motion picture still photographer to have his signature appear on every image he produced: his last name — Freulich — in legible script. (Still, p 163)

According to Jack’s 1924 naturalization petition, he arrived in Los Angeles in November 1918 and lived in the city continuously from that time on. He had arrived with his wife, Helene, and his 12 year old son, Henry and settled near Sunset Boulevard at the northern rim of Los Angeles. By January 1919 Jack was ready to take on his new role at Universal City.

The move to California required a whole new life style for the family. Jack could no longer commute to work by train or subway. He had to purchase an automobile and learn to drive to his new job at Universal, across the Hollywood Hills, about eight miles north of Los Angeles. Henry, who was just 12 years old when the move took place, would find himself in a new school. And Helene had to adjust to the sprawl of the rapidly growing Los Angeles area and had to make her way in a very different, far more diverse community.

The 1920 United States Census lists the family as living in a small unit — probably a cottage — on Las Palmas Avenue. A few years later they were able to purchase an elegant home on Odin Street near the Hollywood Bowl, an outdoor amphitheater that is still in operation today.

Jack continued to live at 6834 Odin Street until his death in 1936. As the film industry grew, the neighborhood increasingly became one of studio employees — writers, actors, studio executives. That home, and several blocks of Odin Street no longer exist — overrun by a widened and relocated Highland Avenue and the Hollywood Freeway that replaced the meandering road that once connected Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley through the Cahuenga Pass.

Jack Freulich pictured in the 1920s with Universal Studio executives and Polish pianist and independence advocate Ignacy Paderewski, on a visit Paderewski made to the Universal lot in San Fernando Valley, probably in the late 1920s. Jack stands in the center back.

Universal City

Jack Freulich’s career at Universal spanned more than 17 years -- the period during which the silent film industry blossomed and then gave way to the new sound motion picture era.

Portrait sessions in Jack’s gallery, Shields notes, were often accompanied by classical music, an aid in “distilling an attitude” in the actors who were his subjects. A careful examination of Jack’s work reveals some distinctive features that sets the work apart. He opted always for capturing facial expression. His best work is marked by an absence of props and a lack of busyness.

Backgrounds were most often plain, either dark or textured by the use of lighting or simple fabric backdrops. Actors costumed for a production seem enough for Jack to draw out the personality of each actor in each role played. He was not afraid of shadows and, especially with male actors in character makeup, not afraid of wrinkles and imperfections.

Like the two portraits of Mary Philbin and Francis X. Bushman above, the only photographs that can be attributed to Jack with 100% confidence are those where he signed his name on negatives, assuring that every single print that was not cropped bore his signature. Relatively few of these photographs still exist — though recently, more and more have surfaced. A few more photographs with Jack's distinctive signature can be seen below. All were found on the Internet and are, therefore, of random quality.

Photo Attributions

Unfortunately, that signature has not always assure correct attribution. Today, on the Internet, Roman Freulich's name pops up with great frequency as the man who took dozens of signed portraits of the silent film stars and early talking picture stars. But those attributions are all to frequently based on the signature "Freulich" which is, when one carefully looks at the timing of the photographs, clearly the distinctive signature Jack Freulich placed on negatives of photographs he particularly liked. I have even seen one auction site which offered a photograph of Boris Karloff, with a letter of provenance from the Karloff estate. The letter guarantees that the photograph is the work of Roman Freulich, and as proof offers the fact that the photograph is "signed by photographer Roman Freulich in black ink in the lower right corner." The signature, of course, is that of Jack Freulich -- a signature I recognize very well. And Roman never signed photographs directly on the negatives, though he sometimes placed his name on the border of a print, though with a very different signature than Jack's. I hope the articles on this web site about the Freulich photographers will untangle some of the confusion and assign credit where it is due.

Portrait of Boris Karloff by Jack Freulich, auctioned as the work of Roman Freulich.

Unfortunately, for the bulk of Jack's work, no positive identification is possible. Even if Jack kept copies of his work at his home, as many photographers did, those copies disappeared at the time of his death. And in addition to the general lack of care and the increasing volume of work turned out by Universal there is another reason: as Jack added to the number of photographers on his staff, he made sure most had the opportunity to do portrait sittings and specialized publicity work. Adding to the confusion, both Jack and other photographers often took pictures of the same stars for the same productions. For example, both Jack and Roman Freulich worked on the two Frankenstein films produced by Universal during the 1930s. Many of the stills and portraits from those films are widely available on the Internet today and the photographer for most cannot be uniquely identified. But this does not stop Internet users from assigning the photographs to one or another of the two Freulich brothers.

So far, I have only been able to identify a single example where the two photographers shot portraits of a single star in a single film. It is from the 1928 production of the Victor Hugo story, The Man Who Laughs, starring Conrad Veidt and Mary Philbin. The story and the signatures made this single example possible. Conrad Veidt played two roles in the film: both a father and his son. The first photo, below, was taken by my father, Roman Freulich, who covered production as well as some portrait photography for the film. The second is one of the rare remaining signed photographs taken by my uncle, Jack Freulich.

I have found no other clearcut examples, though both Jack and Roman Freulich often produced stills and portraits for the same films. One can only make guesses.

For the bulk of Jack's surviving work no infallible attribution is possible. Nonetheless, as with his career at Underwood and Underwood, a few unsigned photographs have been generally acknowledged as his work. Some, like the photograph of Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis, and Margaret Sullivan in the selection below, are credited to Jack in the film magazines of the 1930s. A few generally acknowledged as Jack's work appear in photo collections such as John Kobal's book The Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers. A few others have been added that are almost surely the work of Jack Freulich during his 17 year tenure as Universal Studio's chief photographer. They have been selected from the Internet — our only source for Jack's work or likely work. Some are identified on the Internet as the work of Roman Freulich. Others are identified simply as "by Freulich." But all reflect Jack's style and all fall within the proper timeframe — between early 1919, when Jack first came to Universal and late 1936, when he died.

Poland — 1928 and 1930

In Still, David Shields writes that Jack re-visited his native Poland three times — in 1924, 1928 and 1930. Shields’ assertion made it necessary for me to re-examine my own narrative of Jack’s travels. I had always assumed that, since his immigration to America, Jack traveled only once to Europe and that his trip took place in 1928. The truth probably lies in the middle — two trips.

Reexamining the family photos and documents I have accumulated proved eye opening. As Shields notes Jack obtained an American passport in the spring of 1924, and stated in his application that he planned to travel to Europe within a few months. But, though I had found the passport application in my searches, I have yet to find any documentary evidence of actual travel to Europe in 1924. The first record of a trip to re-visit his family I can find is in a 1928 manifest for the return of the Mauritania from Cherbourg, landing in New York on April 29, 1928.

I have a half dozen or so photographs of Jack and his son, Henry, with family in Poland. And until I read Shield’s book I assumed that all were taken on a single trip in the spring of 1928 — a trip that can be confirmed by that Mauritania manifest. And I had assumed that Jack had taken his wife Helena and his 22 year old son Henry with him so that they could meet his aging mother. But neither is listed on that return trip manifest for the Mauritania.

Then, as I revisited the on-line records for passengers entering the United States, I found two more manifests. The first, dated May 6, 1930 was for the S.S. Europa, arriving in New York from Bremen. Either that manifest was not available online during my initial search, or I had overlooked it. But Jack is listed on the manifest — he had clearly made another trip to Europe in the spring of 1930. Neither Helena nor Henry appear on the Europa manifest. But the second manifest I found was a record of Henry returning to the United States on August 10,1930 from Yokohama, Japan, aboard the SS President Pierce.

There are currently very few searchable ship manifests online for outbound ships leaving New York for Europe. But with two 1930 manifests confirming return travel to the United States —Jack from Bremen and Henry from Tokyo — it is easy to conclude from the return manifests that Henry did accompany his father to Poland in 1930 and that he then continued his travels while his father returned to his California home and his job at Universal. In fact, we also found an article Henry wrote for International Photographer about his six month journey around the world.

I then returned to the family photographs I had always assumed were taken during one trip, in 1928. A careful examination revealed a single photograph that differed clearly from the rest. It was a formal portrait of Jack with his mother. The photo had a Polish inscription on the back — an inscription I had previously overlooked: “To Romanek [a Polish diminutive for Roman], my dear son I give this picture of mine. Mother, M Freulich, Łódź, May 24, 1928.”

The photo was sent from Łódź, a month after Jack’s 1928 visit. But it had a commercial stamp on the back with the name and address of a photographer who worked in Częstochowa. It had not been taken in Łódź, but at a photo studio in Częstochowa.That one photograph proved beyond doubt that Jack had been in Poland in 1928, before his mother sent a copy to her youngest son. Most likely Jack had taken his mother on a short train trip from Łódź to Częstochowa to revisit the town where both of them were born and most likely she had asked that they have a portrait of the two of them made while they were there.

The remaining photos of this group were just as clearly taken in Łódź during Henry and Jack's visit. They were taken in the courtyard of the apartment where my grandmother and her one remaining unmarried daughter lived or a park, one block from my grandmother's apartment. These photographs all included Henry. My assumption that Jack and his son, together, had taken one trip to Poland and that the trip took place in 1928 was simply wrong. Jack and Henry, together, had traveled to Poland in 1930.

1936

During 1935, Universal produced its second version of Showboat. The first production, released in 1926, was a silent film starring Joseph Schildkraut, Laura LaPlant and, Stepin Fetchit. The second, released in early 1936, starred Irene Dunne, Allan Jones and Paul Robeson, and was a sound film, complete with the now famous version of Ol’ Man River, sung by Robeson.

Carl Laemmle placed his son, Carl Laemmle, Jr. in charge of production for the 1935 version of Showboat, the first venture Universal made into class A films. It was a move that many in Hollywood believed led to Laemmle’s downfall: Carl, Jr. was widely believed to be a spendthrift.

The senior Laemmle had taken out a $750,000 loan to produce the film — a ludicrously small amount by today’s film standards. But in the spring of 1936, with the film $300,000 over budget, the loan was called in. Laemmle could not produce the cash. On April 2, 1936, just a month before the film was released — to great success and large profits — Standard Capital took over at Universal.

Six months later, on October 17, 1936, Jack Freulich committed suicide.

The conclusion of several Hollywood photographers whose interviews appeared years later on the Internet was that Standard Capital had conducted a “purge” of Laemmle relatives as well as all the “Eastern European Jews” at Universal and that the house cleaning had included Jack, who was quickly fired and replaced by his assistant, Ray Jones. In these interviews, Jack’s fellow portrait photographers widely and simplistically speculated that his suicide was a direct response to the loss of his job.

In Still, David Shields partially accepts this conclusion but augments it with a secondary cause: Jack had become concerned, and then depressed by his family’s situation in Poland and by the rising threat of Fascism in neighboring Germany. The loss of his job became the final blow that drove him over the edge.

But both the simple job loss theory and Shields’ amplified theory are problematic. It is true that Laemmle had employed large numbers of relatives. And it is true that many of Laemmle's relatives were no longer on the payroll after the change of ownership. But there remains this simple fact: after the supposed purge of European Jews, quite a number of European Jews continued to be employed at Universal. Henry Freulich was not among them because he had taken a job at another studio a decade earlier. But Roman Freulich was. One must ask how it is that one Freulich, a man at the height of his career and a leader in Hollywood portrait and publicity work, was “fired” for being of Eastern European Jewish heritage while his brother, another Freulich of Eastern European Jewish heritage remained at the studio for almost another decade.The opinions of others, some of them competing portrait photographers, amount to little more than idle speculation.

Moreover, Jack’s suicide did not occur at the time of the Standard Capital takeover — it occurred more than six months later. And, even more notable, the death certificate issued by the Los Angeles county coroner states that Jack was a photographer and that he had worked in “Motion Pictures” until four or five months after the “purge”. (The certificate includes a line stating the “date deceased last worked” The month has been overwritten and is somewhat obscured: Jack's last date at work was either “8/19/36” or “9/19/36”.)

The second factor that Shields asserts — that the political situation Jack found when he traveled to Europe deepened his depression — appears to be an overreach. Even later in the 1930s, as Hitler grasped total power, the idea that all of Europe’s Jews were in danger, or that a Holocaust was imminent, was for the most part unthinkable. And it is notable that Jack did not return to Europe after 1930, when the atmosphere was growing more toxic and the cause for concern turned more urgent.

If one wants to speculate, there is a third factor — one that his fellow Hollywood photographers did not know. Jack’s relationship with his wife was a troubled one. It is of little value to go into the details. But it is notable that Helene, who was born in Warsaw, had family there, and loved to travel, did not accompany Jack on his two known trips to Poland, but that, within months of his death, she had sold their home and was on her way to Europe again. She returned from that extended trip in July, 1937. A second extended trip followed, cut off only by the outbreak of war — she left Bordeaux aboard the SS St. John on October 14, 1939, six weeks after the German invasion of Poland.

The truth is that none of us can speculate on what caused Jack Freulich to become so depressed that he took his own life — It is always an oversimplification to do so. No one can know everything about the heart and mind of another.

Jack Freulich, pioneer