Irene Diamond, a Hollywood story editor turned New York philanthropist who donated more than $200 million to AIDS research, minority education and the arts, died Jan. 21 at home in New York City of a heart attack. She was 92.

Her strong opinions about social issues led her to support gun control, AIDS education and free condoms for high school students and an end to the death penalty. Her most prominent contribution went to medical research.

She first outlined the plans for the Aaron Diamond Foundation in 1984 with her husband, Aaron. The couple took an unusual approach to philanthropy. They decided to give away their total endowment of more than $200 million in 10 years and then go out of business. Typically, foundations expect to continue indefinitely, and they donate a small percentage of the total fund each year.

“We both had a feeling that, if we stuck with our priorities and really hit hard with the money, we would probably be able to make a difference,” she said.

Aaron Diamond was a real estate developer who built high-rise offices in midtown Manhattan and redeveloped Roosevelt Island. The couple lived in a Park Avenue apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side for most of their married life.

“Aaron had made his fortune in New York, so he wanted to leave his money to the city,” Diamond told Vanity Fair magazine in 2000.

Just as they were about to activate the foundation, Aaron Diamond died of a heart attack at 74. She continued on her own.

Irene Diamond saw her most ambitious project realized in 1991 with the opening of the [Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center] in lower Manhattan. At the time it was the largest AIDS research laboratory in the world. The city of New York and New York University Medical Center were other sponsors of the center.

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She recruited [Dr. David Da-i Ho (born 1952)], a 38-year-old research biologist on the faculty of the UCLA School of Medicine, as the founding director, after his work in drug-resistant strains of the AIDS virus caught her attention.

“Irene wanted a great research institute in New York, the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in this country,” Ho told The Times. “She was a maverick, she chose me despite my young age. She was focused on the younger generations.”

Five years after he was appointed, Ho was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year. He and his colleagues had discovered a new strategy to flush out the virus that causes AIDS.

Ho and Diamond became close friends. He often dined at her sprawling, informal Park Avenue apartment. The diminutive hostess, who was hardly more than 5 feet tall and who preferred to cut her own hair at home rather than waste time in a beauty parlor, served “a simple, good meal,” Ho said. Afterward, they talked for six or seven hours, with Ho doing most of the listening about everything from medical research and gun control to ballet and classical music.

Medical science and minority education each accounted for 40% of the Diamond endowment program. The other 20% went to the arts. Two years before the Aaron Diamond Foundation was spent in 1996, Irene Diamond launched her own charitable trust, the Irene Diamond Fund, with no time limit attached. She made slight adjustments in the original foundation’s program by expanding her priorities to include human rights projects.

In recent years the Juilliard School’s minority scholarship program, the Dance Theater of Harlem and the Human Rights Watch have received multimillion-dollar grants.

“The arts were part of Irene’s life: She saw how they helped explain the human experience,” said Joseph W. Polisi, director of the Juilliard School in New York City, which received $10 million from the Diamond foundation in 1992. The money helped build the enrollment of African American, Latino and Native American students at the school.

As a young girl in Pittsburgh, Irene Levine’s Russian-immigrant parents provided piano lessons for her. But she dreamed of becoming an actress. After high school, in the early 1920s, she moved to New York City, changed her name to Irene Lee and studied repertory theater.

In 1933 she was invited to Hollywood for a screen test but changed careers after she met producer Hal Wallis, who offered her a job as a story editor.

“I lived and breathed writing,” Diamond said of those years. She found scripts and plays that Wallis could adapt for the screen. Among her discoveries was the play that later became the movie “Casablanca.”

The version she read, “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” was an unproduced play with several rejection slips attached to it. Wallis paid $20,000 for it. Diamond later complained that Wallis never gave her credit for her part in the deal.

In the book “Round Up the Usual Suspects” (1992), which was about the making of “Casablanca,” author Aljean Harmentz quoted Julius Epstein, one of the scriptwriters. “Irene Lee deserves the credit,” he said about the discovery of the play. “She was much smarter than Hal Wallis. She was the one who assigned us to write it.”

Despite the rift, Diamond worked with Wallis until he closed his office in 1970.

In 1942 she married Aaron Diamond and they had one daughter, Jane, in 1944. Irene continued to work for Hollywood from New York. Over the years she purchased more than 30 scripts. Several became movie classics.

Diamond became sensitive to human rights issues during the McCarthy era of the 1950s, when a number of her Hollywood friends were accused of being Communists. She too was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify on whether Hollywood producers were putting Communist propaganda on the screen. “It was the height of McCarthyism -- such a time of fear and intimidation and censorship,” she said later.

She went to Washington, but spent the day waiting in the hall outside the hearing room. She was never called to testify.

In 1988, after 15 years on the board of Human Rights Watch, Diamond pledged $30 million to the organization, at $2 million per year for 15 years. At the time, the group’s annual budget was about one-tenth that amount.

“Irene made it possible for Human Rights Watch to go from a group of concerned volunteer citizens to an institution,” said the group’s director of communications, Carroll Bogert. The group attracted Diamond’s attention in the early 1980s when it challenged President Ronald Reagan’s claims that U.S. allies in El Salvador and Nicaragua were not violating human rights.

“Irene Diamond liked that we were such high-profile critics,” Bogert said.

Diamond received honorary degrees from at least five major colleges and universities, including Rockefeller University and the Juilliard School. Her awards included one for leadership in the arts, awarded by President Bill Clinton in 1999.

Diamond is survived by her daughter and two grandchildren.

The dinner party last May was, to put it mildly, very impressive—a gathering of about 70 of the most influential and creative men and women in New York, including Agnes Gund, president of the Museum of Modern Art; Aryeh Neier of George Soros’s Open Society Institute; Joseph Polisi, president of the Juilliard School; Jonathan Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation; Nobel laureate Dr. Torsten Wiesel and his wife, the writer Jean Stein; former mayor of New York City David Dinkins; New York City Ballet director Peter Martins; arts educator Jacques d’Amboise; Susan Wadsworth, director of Young Concert Artists; and choreographer Martha Clarke. They had converged in the elegant home of investment banker Peter Kimmelman and his wife, Elbrun, to toast Irene Diamond on the eve of her 90th birthday. The finest champagne bubbled in twinkling crystal as they raised their glasses to the guest of honor.

Diamond, a trim, petite lady with dark, penetrating eyes and a cloud of snow-white hair that she still cuts and styles herself because “beauty parlors take up so much time,” sat quietly at a table at the far end of the baronial dining room, refusing to take center stage. For years a Hollywood talent scout, she gave Burt Lancaster and Robert Redford their first breaks, and she was also famous as the story editor at Warner Bros. who found the play that became the film classic Casablanca. Now she’s one of the most innovative philanthropists in the country, but as Dr. David Ho, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, says, “she is an unrecognized hero in our society, considering what she and her foundation have done.”

In a remarkable decade of giving, the Aaron Diamond Foundation (named after her late husband, a wealthy real-estate de- veloper) gave away a whopping $220 million to 700 New York City projects, including more than $51 million for AIDS research and prevention. After the Aaron Diamond Foundation shut down in 1996, Diamond moved from quarters in Rockefeller Center to smaller ones in the Seagram Building, where she and Vincent McGee, her right-hand man, now administer the Irene Diamond Fund with money from her personal fortune. One of her ongoing gifts is a $2-million-a-year contribution to Human Rights Watch, to strengthen its global work. The defense and protection of free thought and expression are central tenets of her philanthropy, at least partly because censorship and intimidation shadowed her during the McCarthy years, when she and dozens of her Hollywood friends were subpoenaed to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (huac) as to their political beliefs.

Everyone in the Kimmelmans’ home that night, as well as the organizations they represented, had been affected by Diamond’s largesse, but none of the speeches they made mentioned the word “money.” “Because the party wasn’t about money,” Jacques d’Amboise said. “We were there to celebrate Irene’s spirit, her zest for living, her belief in young people and their future.”

Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, added, “Irene just wants to make sure that she can really make a difference for people who are struggling to accomplish something.”

This idea of making a difference for people who are struggling to accomplish something was repeated over and over in the months I followed Irene Diamond, interviewing her about her life and work. She keeps a schedule that would exhaust someone much younger—meetings at the Diamond AIDS Research Center or at the Human Rights Watch office, a trip to Washington, D.C., to receive the National Medal of the Arts from President Clinton. She rarely accepts an invitation to lunch—preferring to eat a sandwich at her desk—and permits herself few luxuries: an occasional massage and a car and driver. To relax, she spends weekends at her house in the country, tending her orchids and catching up on her reading. Sometimes she has a quiet dinner and a game of Scrabble with choreographer Eliot Feld. Diamond has long funded Feld’s Ballet Tech School, which provides gifted students in the public-school system with free ballet classes, including everything from slippers to transportation

“I’ve always had an enormous amount of energy,” she tells me. “When I was a young woman, I had a hard time channeling it. Now I don’t have enough time in the day to do what I want to do.”

One of her priorities is gun control. She started keeping a file on gun fatalities in the early 90s. “I couldn’t stop thinking about the power of the gun lobby. The gun lobby was refusing to even consider gun-law reform when shootings kept increasing all over the country.”

In 1998, Diamond was approached by representatives of billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Institute with the idea of reforming gun laws, and together they founded the Funders Collaborative for Gun Violence Prevention. “Irene and George agreed to each give $5 million, and we were on our way,” says Nancy Mahon, who was director of the public-safety effort at the Open Society Institute at the time. The collaborative has advanced the campaign against gun violence not only by financing litigation against manufacturers but also by funding projects such as a Harvard School of Public Health study of gun- related injuries and by providing support to gun-regulation-advocacy organizations.

“Irene has been incredible,” Mahon goes on. “Passionate and outspoken. At one meeting she even advocated banning handguns, something nobody else would consider. Irene kept saying, ‘Tony Blair did it in England. Why can’t we?’ She is absolutely fearless.” Diamond comments, “Once you’re my age, you stop being afraid of anybody and anything. What’s the point?”

Eventually Diamond sought the advice of friends such as Agnes Gund, Vartan Gregorian (president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York), and Marion Wright Edelman (head of the Children’s Defense Fund). She contacted former surgeon general C. Edward Koop, who had taken on the tobacco industry, and he told her he thought gun violence should be treated as a major health issue, like smallpox, since so many thousands of teenagers were being maimed in gun battles. He told Diamond to educate the public with statistics.

“And that’s what we’re trying to do,” Diamond says. “Licensing and registering of guns is a commonsense solution, but it’s been stalled by the gun lobby, even though most Americans favor it.”

Diamond briefly thought that the collaborative should have a celebrity spokesperson, a role Charlton Heston fills as president of the National Rifle Association (N.R.A.), but she dropped that idea after Jesse Jackson, Colin Powell, and Mario Cuomo all said no. “Mario actually asked me, ‘Are you kidding?’ They all told me they wouldn’t touch the issue with a 10-foot pole. It was a political time bomb.” The N.R.A., after all, is a powerful lobby group with more than four million members and an annual budget of $160 million.

“I don’t think most Americans have any idea what a stranglehold the N.R.A. has on Congress,” President Clinton told Katie Couric on the Today show last March, after he had failed to get a trigger-lock law passed in spite of a terrible tragedy in which a six-year-old boy shot and killed a five-year-old girl in a classroom near Flint, Michigan.

Diamond goes on: “Donna Dees-Thomases came to see me. She had had this idea to send thousands of mothers to the nation’s capital to pressure our congressmen to enact tougher gun legislation, because everybody was so fed up. Donna had been talking to mothers around the country, and she thought it was women who could spread the word and fight the fight to preserve their families.”

The Funders Collaborative eventually put $300,000 into what became the Million Mom March (M.M.M.), complete with a Web site and an agenda for change. The march itself, in Washington, D.C., and other cities around the country, was a tremendous success. Hundreds of thousands of mothers, many pushing strollers, others wearing T-shirts emblazoned with portraits of their dead children, achieved their goal of gaining publicity and making politicians notice them.

It was Diamond who supported Dees-Thomases when she established M.M.M. as a nonprofit group. Today, the organization has more than 225 chapters in 46 states, lobbying for better laws. “M.M.M. is doing the kind of grassroots organizing that made the N.R.A. so powerful, training volunteers, raising money to help get out the vote,” says Diamond. “It will take maybe 10 years to re-educate the public about guns. We have to make them realize that licensing and registration won’t take guns away from people, but it will assure basic safety training and make it harder for guns to fall into the hands of children or criminals or men and women who are mentally ill. America leads the world in children being killed by guns, in teenagers shooting themselves or each other. Every day, 10 children in America are killed by guns. This has got to stop. The bottom line is: this is about saving our children.”

Diamond has always given generously to projects directed at children. Years ago the Aaron Diamond Foundation supported children’s-advocacy groups. More recently the Irene Diamond Fund gave $10 million to the Juilliard School, intended to build up aggressive recruitment of gifted minority students and minority faculty members. “What Irene has done has had a pervasive effect on the school,” says Joseph Polisi, its president. “She has the unique ability to shape a project and see it realized.”

Vartan Gregorian adds, “Irene is a great philanthropist. She is a determined idealist and hugely generous; her range of giving is enormous. She is very smart about what she gives to. She thinks through her gift giving, something some philanthropists don’t always do. Everything she does has a purpose. She is a class act

An example: In 1991 the foundation gave $450,000 for New York City schools chancellor Joseph A. Fernandez to put toward teacher training and other AIDS- prevention programs, including the distribution of free condoms to students in New York City high schools. “Fernandez had put out a call for help, and nobody else offered him any money, so we did,” Diamond says. “The school board was outraged. They threw every obstacle in our way. It took months of consultations with parents, school administrators, teachers, students. And we won. I stood next to Mr. Fernandez at the press conference when he announced that every kid who asked for condoms would get them. I was called the Queen of the Condoms. And Fernandez was eventually fired in 1993 for his efforts. Boy, was he brave! And not only that, the foundation also funded an improvisational-theater group that brought actors into the schools to perform skits dramatizing the need for teenagers to take precautions. Let’s face it: adolescents have a powerful sex drive. They’re going to have sex whether we like it or not. Why shouldn’t they be protected, with a disease like AIDS around?” Diamond first got involved with AIDS when it was considered a gay disease. “Homophobes would say, ‘Why should I care about AIDS when it could never happen to me?’ They were proven so wrong. Everyone can catch AIDS, women and babies and straight men. I’ve always been interested in medicine. Three of my uncles were doctors. I began reading about this mysterious disease in the newspapers sometime in 1985. There was very little research being done, I noticed. The first programs the foundation funded were research programs for AIDS in labs at Memorial Sloan- Kettering and New York University. But nobody seemed to want to get very involved. Certainly our government didn’t.”

In 1988, Diamond remembers, “Steve Joseph, New York City health commissioner at the time, called me one day and asked me if I would come down and talk to him about AIDS.” Diamond went to see Joseph with Lewis Thomas, the scientist who wrote The Lives of a Cell and who sat on the foundation’s board. They were joined by Vincent McGee. “While we were there,” Diamond continues, “Steve said he felt a lab just for AIDS was needed in this city. Hospitals had small labs, but there wasn’t any real attention.” Joseph wanted Diamond to persuade other foundations to come together to finance a lab. Diamond recalls, “On the way home in a cab, I said to Vinny and Lewis, ‘You know, if we try to do it with other foundations it will take several years, so I’m gonna do it on my own.’”

Diamond financed both the lab and the research program to make sure no one would have scientific control over the lab. “Look,” she goes on intensely, “if I’d been conventional and given only $6.5 million and let the Department of Health seek out other foundations to come up with the balance, it would have taken years.” The foundation also funded a $21 million program for postdoctoral fellowships to support research into AIDS, drug abuse, and the connections between them.

The Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, located in Manhattan in the city’s public laboratory building, opposite Bellevue Hospital, is affiliated with Rockefeller University. On two floors of the building, nine labs are arranged around a U-shaped corridor. Floors are linked by a staircase that serves as a kind of rialto, where researchers often bump into one another and discuss their findings. “It’s like the United Nations,” Diamond says proudly. “We have people from every part of the world. We have people from Africa, India, China, and Japan.”

The heart of the facility is the Irene Diamond Bio-Safety Level 3 Containment Laboratory. Behind windows framed with brushed stainless steel and red birch, lab technicians work with the virus. The center is run by Dr. David Ho, a Taiwanese-born virologist who attended M.I.T. and Caltech as a physics and biology major and earned his doctor’s degree at Harvard Medical School. Before moving to New York, he was on the faculty of the U.C.L.A. School of Medicine.

In 1996, Time magazine named Ho Man of the Year after he and his colleagues at the center discovered a new strategy for flushing out the virus that causes AIDS. Ho prescribed drugs called protease inhibitors in combination with standard anti-viral medicines. Unlike other doctors, Ho gave this so-called combination therapy to patients in the first weeks of infection. (Its success rate is lower but still quite impressive for patients in the late stages of the disease, and so far no vaccine will prevent H.I.V. infection.)

“I took a lot of flak for choosing him,” Diamond says. “Everybody thought David was too young—he was 37 when he was chosen—and had very little administrative experience. But my instincts told me he could do it. He is a brilliant scientist who is an expert at detecting H.I.V. in places no one else has looked. He was the first to isolate the virus in the nervous system and in semen. He also showed that kissing can’t transmit the infection—there’s not enough virus in saliva.”

Dr. Ho keeps Diamond thoroughly informed about what he and the center are doing. The two of them have spent a lot of time talking since Ho’s return from the XIII International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, this past July. Diamond says, “There are now an estimated 23 million Africans who are living with H.I.V. The AIDS problem is not only a scientific problem, it’s a political, economic, and social problem—a terrible, terrible plague. Ninety percent of people with H.I.V. live in developing countries, and most Africans can’t afford the drugs that have cut back the AIDS death rates in richer countries. An entire generation of children is going to be wiped out.”

Diamond has contributed $10 million to Jazz at Lincoln Center’s new complex, which is being built on the former site of the Coliseum. A unit within the building will be named the Irene Diamond Education Center.

Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director, composed music for a piece Peter Martins choreographed in honor of Diamond, which was performed in 1999 as part of the New York City Ballet’s 50th-anniversary season. Diamond has also funded a program—known as the Diamond Project—to provide opportunities for new choreographers for the company. “Irene is a great catalyst,” Marsalis says. “Her belief in artists is truly healing.” Virtuoso violinist Scott Yoo, 29, calls Diamond “my cheerleader.” She has followed his progress ever since he won the 1989 Young Concert Artists International Auditions. An active chamber musician who is the music director of the Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra, which he co-founded in 1993, Yoo subsequently decided he wanted to become a conductor and asked Diamond’s advice. “Lots of people were saying I’d ruin my career. Irene said to go for it.” From September 1998 through May 2000, Yoo served first as associate conductor and then as senior associate concertmaster of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.

“Irene is my golden girl, my diva!” exclaims Jacques d’Amboise. “When you’re with her, you think there’s hope for the world.” D’Amboise’s exuberant National Dance Institute programs reach out to more than 1,800 New York City public-school students in grades four through seven. D’Amboise met Diamond in 1989, on a plane to New York from the Sundance Film Festival. “We’d been there to do stuff with Robert Redford. I started talking about my work using dance as a catalyst in education. She asked me if I’d ever taught homeless kids in shelters. I said, ‘What a great idea!’ She said she’d like to fund something along those lines, so we did, down near the East River—a grubby little place. Only about eight or nine kids showed. One afternoon I came in to give a class and there’s Irene. I said, ‘Irene, what are you doing here?’ and she said pleasantly, ‘Just want to see where my money is going.’ Unfortunately, the program didn’t work, because those poor shelter kids are always moving. But after that Irene began funding the National Dance Institute, and she’s never stopped. Sometimes when I have a problem, I just go to her and she’ll write out a check. She is so easy to talk to! She radiates energy, and she is so open and trusting she invites intimacies. I invariably tell her things I wouldn’t tell another living soul.”

Most of our talks take place in Diamond’s office high up in the Seagram Building, a light, airy place filled with personal mementos—an inscribed photograph from Leonard Bernstein, another from Robert Redford, which reads, “Dear Irene, I owe you so much on many levels, Love, Bob.” In a phone interview, Redford has told me, “Irene tried to support me against the odds of people who were not interested. She kept bugging me to take on offbeat projects like the life of Frank Lloyd Wright.” When I report what Redford said, Diamond scoffs, “Bob hemmed and hawed. Celebrity has made him cautious.”

She shifts her attention to a portrait on her desk of Aaron Diamond, her husband, looking tanned and handsome. “Actually, it’s his desk, the one he worked on in his real-estate office.” Above the desk hangs a delicate porcelain cherub. “That was Aaron’s.”

She admits that she is lonely. “It’s been 16 years, and I still haven’t recovered from the loss. You never get over that kind of loss. You just get used to the pain. We loved each other completely.”

She pauses. “Aaron and I planned the Diamond Foundation together, back in 1984. We were walking on the beach near our place in Key Biscayne. We were totally in sync, as we usually were. We didn’t want the foundation to be grandiose, but we did want it to make an impact. Aaron had made his fortune in New York, so he wanted to leave his money to the city, which is a great city, but with many needs.”

That day on the beach, the Diamonds solidified the plan for their foundation: 40 percent of the money would go to medical research, 40 percent to minority education, and 20 percent to the arts. “We would be a spend-out foundation. We would give all the money away in 10 years. That was definitely Aaron’s idea—to give away at least $150 million. We were very excited about the prospects for the foundation and about working on it together.”

The following week, Aaron Diamond died.

At age 74, Irene was suddenly faced with running the foundation on her own. Vincent McGee, a former seminary student and onetime chairman of the Amnesty International U.S.A. board, soon became her man Friday. Diamond says, “Vinny is absolutely terrific at what he does. He is dedicated and informed and he has a conscience. I depend on him.” She adds, “We’ve always had a lot in common. We were both committed to civil liberties. We’d both been against the Vietnamese War.” (As a war protester, McGee had burned half of his draft card and sent the other half to President Lyndon Johnson, a gesture that got him convicted of draft resistance.)

But even though she was working very hard, Irene remained devastated by Aaron’s death. The composer David Diamond (no relation), an old friend who still speaks to Irene on the phone nearly every week, says, “Aaron was a remarkably good-looking man, and he was so in love with her. It was the real thing

She still lives in the apartment they shared, a simple, comfortable floor-through on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The living room is furnished with soft couches and chairs, piles and piles of books, and a gleaming piano, which Diamond occasionally plays. “When I was a little girl,” she tells me, “I studied music. My parents wanted me to teach piano when I grew up. I remember practicing in the living room while my brother sawed away on his violin upstairs. What a racket! We practiced relentlessly. There was very little money, but my mother and father were determined we were going to be cultivated.”

She was born Irene Levine, in Pittsburgh on May 7, 1910. Her parents were Russian Jewish immigrants from just outside Odessa. Her father, Horace Levine, worked at the Duquesne Light Company as head of the complaints department. Her mother, Leah, who had strong opinions about everything, caused Irene considerable unhappiness. “My mother loved my brother more than anybody else.”

Irene tried to run away more than once. She remembers herself “as a rebel, as wanting out from home.” She escaped into books—Dickens, Tolstoy, Maupassant—reading until all hours with a flashlight under the covers. She also saw plays and hid out in movie theaters.

As soon as she finished high school, she informed her parents she was going to New York to become an actress. Once in Manhattan, she changed her name to Irene Lee and started studying at Eva Le Gallienne’s repertory-theater school. “I hadn’t known the place was a hotbed of lesbians. It was an eye-opener for me. I was such an innocent.”

It was the late 1920s. On Broadway there were new plays by Eugene O’Neill and Robert Sherwood, and Helen Hayes was the reigning star. After making the rounds of producers’ offices, Diamond got cast in a couple of shows. She also did some modeling and worked as an outside reader for Warner Bros.

In 1933, Fox brought her out to Hollywood to test for a movie called Cavalcade. She didn’t get the part, but she auditioned for others. Her career did a turnaround after she was introduced to Mervyn Le Roy. “A short, dynamic guy, very driven, who’d directed I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, with Paul Muni.… Mervyn decided he wanted me for a movie, and he gave me the script to read and asked my opinion. I told him exactly what worked and what didn’t, and he looked at me as though he’d just discovered oil. He said, ‘You really have a hell of a good story mind.’” When Diamond told him she wanted to be an actress, she recalls, he said, “Well, you’re just not an ingenue. I don’t think you’d be very happy doing that. Whereas, there are very few women in the business who can do what you can do.” She continues, “He called up Hal Wallis, who was running Warner Bros.… Mervyn was driving me down to the beach one day, and he said, ‘You stick with me. I’m going to make it.’ And then he added, ‘I’m going to marry Doris Warner.’ He took me to Hal Wallis, and Wallis said he would take me on as an assistant story editor, and that was a great time. They call that the golden era.”

Except for a short period when Diamond worked in talent agent/producer Leland Hayward’s East Coast office, she continued to work for Hal Wallis, for more than 25 years, overseeing 32 readers, including the writer Dalton Trumbo. “I realized that that was totally for me. I’d had no training for it at all. My idea of heaven was to read a novel, report on it, get Hal to buy it, then assign a writer to do a script, and then later sit with Hal in a darkened projection room watching rushes

“I lived and breathed writing. Every day I’d have lunch in the Warner’s commissary and sit at the writers’ table with Ring Lardner Jr., the Epstein twins, Robert Rossen. They had wisecracking contests and played practical jokes. We had such fun. I met John Huston. He had just written the script based on Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, and he was dying to direct it.” Irene read the script. “It was sensational. I brought it in to Hal and convinced him to give John the chance, and he d

“Hal was a truly great producer. He produced all the great Warner’s movies of the 1930s—not Jack Warner, who gave himself all the credit. Hal worked on an average of 50 pictures a year. He was the best executive I ever knew—the hardest worker, the first person in the studio in the morning, the last to leave at night. If he knew you knew what you were doing, he left you alone. Some of the books I argued for had themes that had been forbidden, like the cancer theme in Dark Victory or the inherited-madness theme in Kings Row, which starred, God help me, Ronald Reagan. Hal approved these purchases.

“Hal was a very complicated man; a lot of people thought he was cold. Actually he was very cool and self-contained.”

For a while Diamond went out with Ernst Lubitsch, who had been a great success in Europe working with Max Reinhardt and directing such pictures as Madame Du- Barry, with Pola Negri, and who was then making films in Hollywood starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. “I learned an enormous amount about film, and I never laughed so much. He was one of the funniest men I’d ever met. He’d been a comedian in Germany. I met everybody with him—George Gershwin, Garbo, Richard Rodgers. I wasn’t the least bit in love with him, but he was one of the most civilized gentlemen I’ve ever met, a truly joyful, romantic spirit.”

When Lubitsch was directing Garbo in Ninotchka, Irene begged him to introduce her to the star. He agreed to invite Garbo to dinner, but warned that she wouldn’t speak to anyone. He said she’d hide out in the kitchen with the housekeeper. “Which was true. Garbo did stay in the kitchen most of the night.” Diamond says she sneaked in to look at her. “She was very remote, and she never came into the living room. She was very strange.

“Sure enough, Ernst just had a couple of people [that night]. He had Vicki Baum [who’d written Grand Hotel], and somebody else. But the irony is that then I met Rouben Mamoulian and fell violently in love with him, and he had just split with Garbo [whom he had directed in Queen Christina]. Mamoulian was much more intellectual than Lubitsch, better read.

Diamond remembers starting to get involved in politics when most of her friends were involved in anti-Fascist committees. She remembers going to a benefit where André Malraux and Ernest Hemingway made speeches to raise money for a film Hemingway was producing about the Spanish Civil War.

One night Mamoulian took Diamond to a dinner party at the home of Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures. “He was the meanest, crudest man in the business. Everybody hated him. I was talking about Roosevelt, who was one of my gods. Of course, not many of the women were talking about Roosevelt, because in Hollywood those days women would go to one end of the room, and the men would go to the other.

“The next morning I went to work, and I got a call that Harry Warner wanted to see me. I’d never met him. I went over, and he said to me, ‘Harry Cohn called me and said I had a Communist working for me.’

“‘What do you mean?,’ I asked.

“‘He said, “This girl was there last night and she was a Communist.”’”

“I thought very quickly, and I said, ‘I certainly am not a Communist. I was talking about Roosevelt and how much I admire him. And by the way, Cohn said that he thought you were an idiot.’

“What I’d done took a lot of nerve. I was scared to death I’d lose my job, but I was infuriated. This big, powerful guy, Cohn, was trying to get me into trouble after he’d been bad-mouthing Harry Warner behind his back. I think Warner knew I was telling the truth, because after a couple of minutes he just let me walk out of his office, and we never spoke again. I worked at his studio for 10 years. I decided later those two bastards probably hated each other’s guts and enjoyed playing games with each other.”

In mid-1941, Diamond went to New York to cover the Broadway scene, and she found an unproduced play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s, by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. She was struck by the story, about an archetypical American—tough on the outside and idealistic underneath—who runs a bar in Casablanca and turns heroic for the love of a woman.

For a week she tried to persuade Wallis to buy the play. “I really had to fight for it,” she says. Wallis wasn’t interested at first. However, shortly after Pearl Harbor he gave her the go-ahead, and she bought the play for $20,000. He thought William Wyler should direct, but Wyler wasn’t interested. Wallis thought of Ann Sheridan to play the female lead. “That was when Ilsa was going to be an American girl,” Diamond recalls. “The Epstein twins changed it to a European woman—much more interesting.” Wallis was negotiating with the French actress Michele Morgan, but eventually Ingrid Bergman got the role. George Raft was considered for Rick, the male lead, but from the start Wallis wanted Humphrey Bogart.

“There were three sets of screenwriters,” Diamond recalls. She brought in Julius and Philip Epstein, who had recently adapted two other plays, Arsenic and Old Lace and The Man Who Came to Dinner. They were responsible for much of the irreverent dialogue in Casablanca, and Howard Koch, another studio writer, was responsible for emphasizing the anti-Fascist politics. The Epsteins then produced another draft, and Casey Robinson, one of Wallis’s favorite writers—he had just worked on Now, Voyager for Bette Davis and Paul Henreid—wrote some of the Paris flashback scenes for Bergman and Bogart. As usual, Wallis was involved with every phase of the production, which cost a mere $1,039,000. He also thought up the title Casablanca. By the time the movie was released nationally in 1943, the Americans had landed in North Africa, and Roosevelt and Churchill had held their summit in Casablanca, so that city was in all the headlines.

Casablanca won Academy Awards for best director and best picture, and went on to become one of the most admired movies of all time.

“Hal always took total credit for discovering Casablanca. He barely mentioned me in his autobiography. When Casablanca came out and was that tremendous hit and I had bought it for so little money, I spoke to Hal and said, ‘Don’t you think I ought to have a bonus?’

‘That’s what you’re here for,’ he said.”

Diamond recalls her attempts to learn the technical side of film production and the way women were often treated in Hollywood. “I was in a meeting one day and I said that I would like to be a producer, and you would have thought that I should be taken out and shot.”

In Aljean Harmetz’s definitive book on the making of Casablanca, she quotes Julius Epstein as saying, “Irene Lee deserved the credit [for finding Everybody Comes to Rick’s]. She was much smarter than Hal Wallis. She was the one who assigned us to write it.

Not long after Casablanca finished shooting, Diamond took another trip to New York. “I was essentially alone. I’d broken up with Mamoulian. I was 32, and I started thinking, I don’t want another disaster. I had a very self- destructive streak as far as men were concerned. I wanted to get married. I wanted to have a child. I was subletting Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich’s lovely apartment on Central Park West—they wrote The Thin Man, remember? One day a girlfriend of mine called and said, ‘I have this guy I want you to meet: Aaron Diamond.’ And then she added, ‘You can’t push him around. He’s not one of your Hollywood types. He’s a wonderful man.’ She’d already told him about me, and he’d said, ‘I don’t like career women.’ And she’d said, ‘Irene Lee is a career woman, but you’ll like her anyway.’ So he phoned. I was having a massage, and he asked me to have dinner with him that night. I said I’d already had dinner. He said, ‘Well, you can sit with me while I have mine.’ I liked the sound of his voice. I was intrigued. Later, he kidded me because I ate half his meal.

“Aaron was so handsome. The Epsteins used to call my husband Hal Wallis Jr. He did look a bit like Hal. Low-key manner. He was from Chattanooga, Tennessee, one of nine children. His mother had died when he was one, and he’d been raised by his oldest sister, Lena, whom he later took loving care of in New York, and we became very close. Aaron had gone to the University of Tennessee and then got a scholarship to Harvard Business School. He was the head of the rug department at Abraham & Straus and had just joined the navy. By the end of the evening he asked me to marry him. I thought he was pulling my leg. Two days later I came home from my office and he’d moved into my apartment. I said, ‘How the hell did you get in here?,’ and he said, ‘I told the super we were getting married.’ I suggested, ‘Why can’t we live together for a while?’ I was scared stiff. He said, very calmly, ‘No, I want us to get married.’ That was that. Eight weeks later, in August of 1942, we were married. I had never met anyone like him before. He was so self-contained. I was enormously attracted to him, but I wasn’t in love with him when we got married. About a month after we married I was more in love with him than anyone I’ve ever been with.”

After her marriage, Diamond kept on working in the movie business, for producer Sam Goldwyn in New York. “But I hated working for Sam. He never said one intelligent thing the entire time I was with him.

The Diamonds had a daughter, Jean, born in 1944. After the war, Diamond went back to work for Hal Wallis in New York. Later he was an independent producer at Paramount Pictures, and she ran an office for him in the Paramount Building.

“I bought properties like Sorry, Wrong Number for Barbara Stanwyck, and Come Back, Little Sheba—Shirley Booth won an Oscar when she re-created her role in the movie version. I had also become a talent scout. I discovered Burt Lancaster—he was a circus performer, you know—and a tough-talking, handsome young actor named Mickey Knox. I’d seen him on Broadway. Hal signed him to a personal contract, along with Kirk Douglas and Lizabeth Scott.

“I was making much more than Aaron was. He’d gotten out of the navy and gone into the construction business. He always told me if it hadn’t been for me he wouldn’t have been able to do what he did, which I don’t really believe, because he was brilliant. I may have offered a certain security.”

“During the war, he and a friend started buying up sailors’ hotels,” their daughter, Jean, says. “And then later he began constructing a lot of housing and developments in the suburbs.”

When the old El came down in the 1950s, Aaron Diamond began putting up apartment and office buildings on Third Avenue. “He had a wonderful reputation,” Irene says.

By then the Diamonds were living in a large apartment on Park Avenue. “There were lots and lots of parties,” Jean remembers. “By the 50s, I think my father was finally unfazed by all the celebrities.”

“I think the marriage was very hard on him,” Irene admits. “In the beginning, he had this wide-eyed thing about celebrities, never having come into contact. He got over that.” She recalls an evening when the eccentric novelist Carson McCullers dropped by. McCullers, who was bisexual, took one look at the Diamonds and drawled, “I don’t know which one I want more, Irene or Aaron.”

Irene Diamond met the late great Italian actress Anna Magnani when she bought Tennessee Williams’s play The Rose Tattoo as a movie property for Magnani, who won an Academy Award for her performance. “I visited her whenever I went to Rome. She’d always give me a party. I met Fellini and Visconti at her place. Her apartment was filled with cats and strange paintings. Anna was an earthy, passionate woman who loved good food and good wine. But, like all great stars, she was also paranoid. She could be very difficult and temperamental.

“Anna Magnani was known for her stormy love affairs. She fell in love with Burt Lancaster while they were filming The Rose Tattoo. Then when she made Wild Is the Wind with Anthony Quinn and Tony Franciosa, she tried to seduce Quinn. Then she went after Tony.

“But her experience with Marlon Brando was the worst. Anna was crazy for Brando.” Diamond visited them on location in upstate New York when they were filming Tennessee Williams’s The Fugitive Kind. “Anna kept throwing herself at Marlon. Marlon would be hyperpolite, almost obsequious, and between takes he’d go off with the crew and play cards. Anna couldn’t stand that kind of rejection. She was absolutely miserable. Finally I said to her, ‘Oh, Anna, you should just settle down and get married.’ And she glared and said, ‘Who’d marry me? I’m a monster!’”

In the 1950s, during the blacklist years, Diamond says, she and Hal Wallis had many arguments, “because he thought I was very left-wing, which I was. But he stood by me when I was subpoenaed to go in front of huac in 1953.” Diamond knows that my father, Bartley Crum, was one of the lawyers for the Hollywood 10, the first group of actors and screenwriters called to testify as to whether they had ever been members of the Communist Party. Charlie Katz, another of the lawyers for the Hollywood 10, she continues, said, “‘They’re going to call you, because you were a story editor at Warner’s, and you can testify as to whether or not they really did put Communist propaganda on the screen.’ I remember sending a telegram to Hal explaining what was going to happen. I thought he’d fire me, but all he did was wire back, ‘I told you you were seeing the wrong people.’

“I’d never joined the party back in the 30s. All my left-wing friends, like [the director] Robert Rossen and [the screenwriter] Waldo Salt, were accused and had a terrible time when they refused to answer questions.

“So [producers] John Houseman and Dore Schary and I went to Washington. And we sat in a hall all day long, and we were never called. What an anticlimax! But I was terrified of what was happening in the country. It was the height of McCarthyism, such a time of fear and intimidation and censorship. Everybody I knew had either been subpoenaed or gone to jail, like [screenwriters] Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr.

“That whole period was extremely difficult for me,” she says. “I knew so many actors who had informed. With Bob Rossen, it was especially painful, because he was such a talented man. He came up to see me before [he testified for huac]. He said he had to name names because he just couldn’t take it anymore. It was pitiful, because in the past he’d been very intolerant of anyone else who’d informed. He’d sit outside producers’ offices for hours, and he just couldn’t get any work.

“After our conversation, Aaron and I had dinner with Helen and Sam Rosen, who lived next door to us. They were Paul Robeson’s best friends. They’d saved his life during that terrifying riot outside of Peekskill when Paul was supposed to give a concert [and a mob went after him]. Anyway, my husband and I had dinner with the Rosens and Dashiell Hammett. He was living in the Rosens’ guest cottage. I told them what had happened with Bob, and that I was very upset, and Helen snapped, ‘I wouldn’t allow Rossen to come onto my porch!’

“‘Now, just a minute,’ Dash broke in. [Hammett had recently ended a six-month prison term for refusing to testify about his political beliefs.] ‘There are people who can endure anything mentally, but they fall to pieces physically. I’m in that category. Stick a pin in me and I’d scream out every secret. But mental torture I can take. You never know what makes a person crack. So all judgments are off.’”

After the Hollywood 10 got out of jail, Ring Lardner Jr. remembers, he and his wife, Frances, left California and moved back to New York, where they went to a lot of parties at Aaron and Irene Diamond’s. “She knew everybody. There’d be every important writer. She knew them all,” Frances says. Irene knew Julie Harris, Moss and Kitty Hart, Tennessee Williams, Leonard Bernstein, and Arthur Laurents.

“Sometimes Lillian Hellman would be there,” the late Helen Rosen recalled, “even though Irene didn’t like her. And Lillian didn’t like Irene. The women shared a cordial animosity. They were both tough, smart little numbers, except Irene was beautiful and Lillian was ugly. Lillian was furious because her ex-husband, playwright Arthur Kober, had a yen for Irene. He kept mooning over her, and Lillian was jealous.”

“The Diamonds were wonderful hosts,” Ring Lardner says, “extremely generous. Good food, great wine. Once, we were talking about what our various children were doing with their lives, and what they wanted to be when they grew up. One wanted to be a singer, a dancer, or a writer. Aaron said, ‘Why doesn’t anybody want to be a rich Jew builder anymore?’

“Incidentally, we had no idea how successful Aaron was,” Lardner continues. “He and Irene had never lived ostentatiously. I thought she might give some of the money away, but I didn’t know she was going to make such a life’s work out of it.”

By the 1960s, Aaron Diamond had built many buildings and developed most of Roosevelt Island. By the 70s he had started donating openly to charity with a gift of $150,000 to Lincoln Center. But when his name was listed as a donor, he was embarrassed. “He didn’t like that,” Irene says.

In 1970, Hal Wallis left Paramount, and Irene Diamond was without a job. Jean remembers, “My mother felt lost. She adored her job; it meant everything to her. She’d say to me, ‘People treat me differently now.’ It was really hard on her. She needed a new place for her to channel that phenomenal energy of hers.”

The Diamonds increased the time they spent traveling. They went around the world and took vacations in Mexico, Italy, China, and Africa.

In the late 70s, Aaron had a heart attack. He recovered and seemed to be perfectly fine. He tried to explain to Irene some of the complexities surrounding his finances, but she wouldn’t listen to him. “What a mistake!” she says now. “I was so sure everything would be all right, and that he would take care of me. But I didn’t want to talk about it, because it reminded me of his vulnerability, his mortality. Every time he’d bring it up, I’d say, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ Once he mentioned that the people who were handling his money, he really didn’t like. ‘Then why are you letting them handle your investments?,’ I asked him, and he said, ‘They’re the only people who really know my business.’”

After Aaron’s death, Irene did have difficulties taking control of the foundation. According to Margaret E. Mahoney, writing about trustees in the Commonwealth Fund 1994 Annual Report, “As the foundation was getting underway, serious management problems arose. . . . At risk had been Mr. Diamond’s stated intentions to limit the foundation’s lifetime and to direct its substantive focus on New York City.”

Ultimately, Irene Diamond won the struggle to control the foundation, but she prefers not to talk about her past travails. “It was a nightmare, but now it’s over. It had a lot to do with greed. I’m not very fond of lawyers.”

At the moment, Diamond is very involved in watching the progress of the N.A.A.C.P.’s lawsuits against manufacturers, importers, and distributors of handguns, which come on the heels of several suits filed against the industry by cities, including New York and Chicago, which charge that a glut of guns in states with lax laws has fueled an illegal market in states with stricter laws. Recently, Diamond met with N.A.A.C.P. president Kweisi Mfume, who told her that, rather than seek financial damages, the association would press for injunctions ordering the gun industry to make changes in distribution and marketing practices.

Diamond tells me that her primary concern is still AIDS, and current and future research projects that David Ho will oversee at the Diamond AIDS center.

Her work and her curiosity keep her going. “I’ve never lost interest in life. It’s so fascinating, so full of paradoxes and coincidences and twists and turns. I don’t want to miss out on anything, and so far I haven’t.”

“Do you have any regrets?,” I ask her.

“Oh, yes,” she says. “I regret that my husband, Aaron, was not able to work on all of these important projects with me.”

Would he have done things differently?

She smiles. “He might have been a little more cautious with his money.”