THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 167 FEBRUARY 28, 2018
Queens, that had been erected during the 1950s
for members of the electricians union. It wasn’t
luxury, but it was safe.
Growing up here, Harvey (born in 1952) and
Bob (born in 1954) have said they idolized
their father. It was Max who introduced them
to the movies, Max who taught them the rudi-
ments of business, Max who sat them down
one day and told them they must stick together
through thick and thin, and Max who occa-
sionally gave them a “butt-whipping” when
they got out of hand.
But Max was frustrated. Spending his life
“literally and figuratively grinding out a liv-
ing to support his family,” as Bob recalled, he
wanted to be one of the big boys “who con-
trolled his own destiny, could call the shots
for himself and had status.” Twice, he tried
to break free. First, he opened a store selling
diamonds and jade that lasted two or three
years, but it collapsed in the face of competi-
tion. A few years later, he opened another store,
this time selling synthetic diamonds under
the brand name Diamonair, an endeavor that
also foundered. Modest success was followed
by crushing failure, creating an uncertainty
that became the boys’ norm.
Max may have stressed family solidarity, but
he wasn’t above deviating from it at least once,
as Bob discovered when he asked his father for
$9,000 in back pay after months working in his
shop — money he was counting on for college.
Max told his son he’d spent it to buy new equip-
ment for his business.
The betrayal devastated Bob. And, he noted
later, “[Max] didn’t feel one ounce of guilt.”I
f Max was a significant influence on the
boys, their Uncle Shimmy was another.
Shimmy (Sallbarry Greenblatt) lived
in the same tower at 96-50 160th St. Compact
and pudgy, with a curving mustache and
gray hair, he owned a shop that sold refrig-
erators, washing machines and electronics.
A natural raconteur with a knack for exag-
geration, he was also a skilled salesman. He
struck Adler’s father, who adored him, as
a New York hustler straight out of a Damon
Runyon story, Adler recalls. If a customer
asked about a fridge, Shimmy would shout
to his assistant: “Hey, Murray! How much we
gonna sell this for?” “Four hundred bucks,”
Murray would yell back. Then Shimmy would
turn to the customer with a conspiratorial
wink. “Three hundred,” he’d whisper, and the
customer would leave, happy, not realizing
he’d been played.
“Uncle Shimmy was a bit of a shyster,”
says Adler. “He had a supply store, and he
ripped off black people. But Harvey really,
really adored him. He would sit at Shimmy’s
feet and listen to these stories. Harveydidn’t respect his dad that much. It wasn’t
Max who was his real role model, it was
Shimmy Greenblatt.”
Inspired by Shimmy, Harvey learned to
wheel and deal, and also perhaps that honesty
mattered less than success, a lesson reinforced
during the summer after seventh grade.
Obtaining some discarded Boy Scout uniforms,
he and a friend bought hundreds of boxes of
cookies wholesale and, wearing the uniforms,
went door to door selling them for $1 a pop,
more than twice the 39 cents they’d paid —
pocketing the money themselves. “They each
made 800 bucks that summer,” marvels Adler.
“We thought it was funny and didn’t make
much of it. But that was all Shimmy. That was
his brain at work.”
Neither Shimmy nor Max had quite the
impact of the boys’ mother, a polarizing figure
who drew different reactions from people who
knew her. Born in Brook lyn in 1926, Miriam
was the daughter of a butter-and-egg merchant
and worked as a secretary. Those who met her
when she was a fixture at Miramax remember
her being “very put-together,” in the words of
one executive. “As a Jewish kid from Brooklyn,
I felt I was meeting a relative. I always got the
feeling Bob and Max loved Miriam, but were
also annoyed by her.”
To their childhood friend Adler, she was a
hovering, constant presence, “shrill and bossy,”
endlessly drilling a sense of inadequacy into
the boys. “She was overbearing,” he notes,
“saying things like, ‘You’re fat. Go outside and
play.’ ” As a teenager, he says, Harvey some-
times called her “Momma Portnoy,” a reference
to the domineering matriarch in Philip Roth’s
Portnoy’s Complaint, published in Harvey’s
senior year of high school. One of the novel’s
memorable scenes depicts the mother hec-
toring young Portnoy while he masturbates
behind a bathroom door.
Adler describes Miriam as humorless,
but her brusque exterior may have concealed
a more comic and subversive side. Her tomb-
stone, in the New Montefiore Jewish cemetery
in West Babylon, New York, reads: “I don’t like
the atmosphere or the crowd.”
“Every time Bob and Harvey had a major
falling out, their mother would get them
together and yell at them,” notes one longtime
agent who had dealings with the Weinsteins.
“They would comply and make up. They were
terrified of their mom. When she died [in
November 2016], that’s when this whole thing
went to shit.”
Certainly, their relationship with her was
more complicated than either has revealed. “On
the one hand, Harvey involved his mom in the
company [Miramax was named after Miriam3