Landon LeBlanc

Landon LeBlanc
Public Advocate of New York
In Office:	10 October 1962 - 29th October 1952
Preceded by:	N/A
Succeeded by:	Theodore R. Caldwell
Personal Details
Phone Number:	69420
Nicknames:	N/A
Born:	27 October 1914 Rhode Island, United States
Died:	TBD
Relatives:	N/A
Education:	N/A
Military Service
Allegiance:	N/A
Branch::	N/A
Years of service:	N/A
Rank:	N/A
Notable Awards:	N/A
Signature

Providence, 1914–1935

Friedrich Stahlhart was born on 27 October 1914 in Providence, Rhode Island. His father, Walter Stahlhart, was the evening voice of a Providence radio station. In a town where people knew his voice better than his face, he was famous enough to be greeted on the street. His mother, Margarethe, had come over from Bavaria as a young woman. She sang to her son in German and raised him in it.

The Depression took the sponsors, then the programme, then the money. The family did not take it well. They kept the front rooms furnished for visitors and sold off the rest piece by piece. Walter wore his good suit to job interviews that never came to anything. Friedrich learned that appearance is the last thing a man sells. He also learned that a man unseen is a man finished. He would spend the rest of his life making sure he was seen.

Hollywood, 1935–1938

At twenty he went west and signed a contract with Meridian Pictures. The studio liked his face and disliked his name: Stahlhart sounded like a steel mill. It renamed him Landon LeBlanc and gave him a vaguely Southern, vaguely French biography to go with the name. He played the second man in a love triangle, the one the heroine nearly chose. Second Chance in Havana (1936) did respectable business. He was a dependable B-list romantic lead, and he knew it was the ceiling Meridian had set for him. Berlin, 1938

The Lantern on Harbor Street (1938) found an audience America had not given him. German distributors bought it, German critics singled out LeBlanc over the picture’s star, and Meridian sent him to the Berlin premiere because he was the cheaper man to send. The crowd outside the Kurfürstendamm picture palace chanted his name. Inside, three thousand people stood for him. For the first time in his life he was not the second man.

On his first night, a host from the film ministry left a volume of Konstantin Wolkow’s writings at his hotel. LeBlanc read it through until morning. He found in it what Hollywood had never offered him: the idea that a man becomes great by giving himself to something greater; that the small private life was ending; that history had an Author and a stage, and parts written for those willing to play them. He had come to Berlin for a week. He stayed six. He publicly declined offers to make German pictures. Privately, he agreed to serve.

The War Years, 1942–1946

LeBlanc went back to Meridian as a working actor and a believer. When America went to war, he turned his work into the Party’s work, quietly. He chose scripts that dignified European culture and pushed rewrites that made disorder ugly and order noble. In his films, the wise characters counselled peace with the inevitable. The studio’s censors flagged him more than once, but never for anything they could name. Through German-American clubs and a Party handler, he kept the faith and kept in touch.

By 1946 the federal investigators were closing in. LeBlanc left through Lisbon with a touring stage company and reached Berlin, where he performed for German audiences and broadcast to America by radio. His wife, Dorothy, refused to follow him. She took their son, Thomas (born 1940), to her family in Chicago, and the divorce followed.

Tour of Berlin, 15 April 1947

On the night of the surrender, LeBlanc was on tour in Berlin. The news reached the theatre at the interval. He stepped out before the curtain, still in costume, and announced it to the house himself. He has never treated that day as a defeat for America. To him it was the moment America was spared its own smallness: arms decided the war, but the spirit decided the victory. He has spent every year since teaching that distinction. The Protectorate, 1947–1962

LeBlanc returned with the new order. The face Americans remembered from matinees became a face that reassured them, first in pictures, then on radio, then on television. He rose through the Party as its most natural voice. By 1962 he is the Public Advocate of New York and the Councillor for Truth, and he hosts On the Record with the ease of a man who spent twenty years learning exactly where the camera is.

The Protectorate, 1947–1962

LeBlanc returned with the new order. The face Americans remembered from matinees became a face that reassured them, first in pictures, then on radio, then on television. He rose through the Party as its most natural voice. By 1962 he is the Public Advocate of New York and the Councillor for Truth, and he hosts On the Record with the ease of a man who spent twenty years learning exactly where the camera is.