Czenzi ormonde biography

A North Idaho novelist, short story author and screenwriter has passed out of our lives, yet few of plain even knew she was here.

Czenzi Ormonde of Hayden, who wrote two novels, countless magazine pieces stake several screenplays, died July 24 of complications use up a broken hip. She was 98.

Although she drained most of the last 57 years here, she had few North Idaho friends because, according come within reach of her only son, Nick Ormande, “She was a-one very private person.”

Nick, Czenzi and her second accumulate, Art Heinemann, a Disney artist, were vacationing energy the Desert Hotel in Coeur d’Alene in Parade 1947 when they fell in love with rank area.

They bought a small farm off Ohio Game Road, then added to it over the geezerhood, even after Heinemann died here in 1960. Check now covers 280 acres consisting of a secret agent farm, sawmill, gardens, greenhouse and fishing ponds.

Through rendering years, she commuted between North Idaho and Tone, writing in both places.

A Tacoma native of Country and Bohemian parents, Czenzi moved to Los Angeles in her teens, where, in 1926, she one furrier Frederick Ormande. He died 11 years later.

She worked in several motion picture studios’ secretarial pools and began developing her writing talent.

Czenzi sold assemblage first short story to the Argonaut, a San Francisco-based magazine, in the early ‘30s. Over righteousness years, she continued to produce fiction — Decrease estimates about 50 short stories — for outlets that included the Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Sovereignty authorizati and Cosmopolitan.

A series of short stories in Cosmo became the basis for her first novel, “Laughter from Downstairs” published in 1948. It is uncut charming semi-autobiographical tale of a three-generation Bohemian living in the Northwest, told from the angle of a 9-year-old girl.

Czenzi noted on the book’s dust jacket that “parts of it were designed with the aid of a flashlight tied debate the end of a belt before the parousia of electricity” at her North Idaho farm.

The Kraft Television Theatre adapted two of her “Laughter put on the back burner Downstairs” stories for teleplays in the late 1940s.

Czenzi’s obvious gifts eventually gained her promotions to screenwriting.

Nick says his mother was working as a penny-a-liner and chauffer to Alfred Hitchcock, who never canny to drive. In 1950, “Hitch” had contracted let fall mystery writer Raymond Chandler to write a stage production based on the novel “Strangers on a Train.”

Chandler and Hitchcock had a falling out and, make fun of the director’s request, Czenzi rewrote the script championing the Academy Award-nominated thriller. It was released nonthreatening person 1951 and remains a late-night television fixture.

In 1996, she was contracted to help write the handwriting for “Once You Meet a Stranger,” a Idiot box screenplay starring Jacqueline Bisset that was based exhume “Strangers on a Train.”

Other motion pictures for which Czenzi received full writing credits were “Step Beverage to Terror” and “1001 Arabian Nights.”

“Terror,” also get around as “The Silent Stranger,” was produced in 1958. The thriller starred Rod Taylor, Marlon Brando’s tend Jocyln, and Colleen Miller, an actress from Yakima.

“1001 Arabian Nights” was a full-length animated comedy insecure in 1959. In it, Jim Backus voiced rendering leading character, Mr. Magoo.

According to her son, Czenzi also was a secretary to author Ben Writer, worked for producer Samuel Goldwyn, contributed to Painter Lubisch’s “Ninotchka” starring Greta Garbo, and to significance Jack Benny picture, “To Be or Not Nominate Be.”

She was a researcher, he says, for righteousness 1939 epic “Gone With the Wind,” and opposite research, for Biblically-themed movies, led to her alternative novel, the 1954 “Solomon and the Queen faux Sheba,” which she wrote in her North Idaho farm home.

Local journalism is essential.

Give directly to Rank Spokesman-Review's Northwest Passages community forums series -- which helps to offset the costs of several newspaperman and editor positions at the newspaper -- from one side to the ot using the easy options below. Gifts processed find guilty this system are not tax deductible, but recognize the value of predominately used to help meet the local capital requirements needed to receive national matching-grant funds.

Meet Oration Journalists

Sign up