Schulberg, Adeline, 1895-1977

Biography

Adeline Jaffe Schulberg was born on April 14, 1895. She married B.P. Schulberg in 1913. In 1918, she and her husband moved to Los Angeles where her husband took a job as a producer at Paramount Pictures while Schulberg became an activist for child welfare, education, woman's rights, and promoting birth control by helping to establish birth control clinics throughout the West. In 1926, she graduated with a B.A. from the University of California and in 1929, helped to found the first progressive school in California based on the principles of John Dewey. In 1932, Adeline founded the Schulberg-Feldman talent agency with Charles K. Feldman which was soon joined by her brother Sam Jaffe and Noll Gurney. After her divorce from her husband in 1933, she established her own talent agency named the Ad Schulberg Agency which represented some of the biggest stars at the time including Marlene Dietrich, Fredric March, and Herbert Marshall.n the 1930s, she sold the agency and then moved to London where she set up another talent agency (she was forbidden to operate in the US due to a non-compete agreement); during World War II, she operated an "underground railroad" that assisted Jewish refugee talent to flee from Nazi-occupied Europe. After the war, she moved back to New York City and worked as a talent scout for Columbia Pictures where she discovered Shelley Winters; she then formed her own literary agency where she represented her son Budd Schulberg, Vicki Baum, Fannie Hurst, Ruth McKenney, Roger Price, Mark Harris, and Rex Reed. Adeline Schulberg died in 1977.

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