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was born on August 17, 1927. Leon Cornfeld had been married once before when he met Sophie, Bernard's mother, in Vienna, and he already had four sons by his first wife. In Istanbul, the family suffered an appalling setback, when Leon fell through a defective pavement grill into a basement. His injuries ended his acting career at once.
        The family removed to America - first to Providence, Rhode Island, and then to New York. Leon began teaching German literature, but died three years later, aged over seventy. Bernard can just remember his father taking him to the Yiddish theatre. Sophie Cornfeld, who was clearly a woman of great character, went to work as a nurse, which in those days required 'working for twenty hours a day and sleeping four'. It was a role that she apparently bore with considerable fortitude, although it was not one for which she was especially prepared by her family background. Her own family were Russian Jews who had enjoyed a moderate prosperity until disturbed by the Revolution.
        Bernard Cornfeld thus belonged by birth to the displaced intelligentsia of Central Europe, not to the wave of immigrants who came to America from a background of real poverty. There is little doubt that Sophie Cornfeld consistently expressed a belief that the Cornfelds were entitled to something rather better than the shabby gentility which they endured in Brooklyn. It is tempting too to guess that Cornfeld inherited important traits of character from his actor father: a flair for taking on whatever role would best enable him to manipulate a situation to his advantage. He can talk like a broker among brokers, a film producer among film producers, a banker among bankers.
        All the four earlier sons of Leon Cornfeld are now dead, one having been killed in the us Navy in the Second World War. One of the sons, Eugene, became sales director of a paint firm in Boston, but both Sam and Albert (who spelled the name Cornfield) were in movies like their father. Quite clearly it was from his family connection that Bernard Cornfeld acquired his life-long fascination with show business. Albert Cornfield became a fairly successful movie executive and an intense conservative in all business affairs, who consistently maintained for many years, that his young relative Bernard was financially crazy. In particular, Albert was horrified by Bernard's famous advertisement in the Paris Herald-Tribune, which asked for salesmen 'with a sense of humour'. But in the end, the old gentleman's scepticism was eroded, and according to his son Hubert, he put some money into IOS not long before his death last summer (1970). 'The crash came as a blow to my father.' Hubert recalls. 'He could have said to Bernie; "I told you so." But he didn't.'
        Bernard Cornfeld grew up as a plumpish boy of rather less than middle height. Probably Sophie Cornfeld's most important influence on her son derived from her powerful devotion, which accustomed him early in life to occupying the centre of the emotional stage. Her political sympathies, which Cornfeld once described as 'czarist', clearly made little overt impression. As a small boy in the Thirties, he claims to have been an avid collector of nickels and dimes to support volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, who were fighting against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War.
        Cornfeld derived his early political coloration from influences outside his home. He grew up in an energetic and attractive Jewish community in which a liberal, frequently socialist cast of thought was accepted as part of the norm.
        The Cornfelds lived in several apartments in Brooklyn, winding up with the ground floor of a house at the corner of Faragut Road and Avenue H. The environment was seedy and depressing, rather than poverty-stricken; Cornfeld recalls taking nightwork in a fruit store to earn money for a bicycle, and spending his weekends selling lollipops at Coney Island. He went first to Public