Yankee Doodle on the Rand

In a movie deal in London last week, it looked to the casual reader as though a minnow was teaming up with a whale. To get dollars to expand elsewhere, United Artists sold its 50% common stock interest in Odeon Cinema Holdings. Ltd., the holding company that controls Odeon Theatres, Ltd., parent company of Cinemogul J. Arthur Rank's vast movie empire. The buyer was little-known African Theatres. Ltd., a subsidiary of South Africa's Schlesinger Organization. For a reported $6,300,000, African Theatres' Chairman John Schlesinger got a part-interest in a movie domain that controls more than 600 British and overseas movie houses, is Britain's largest film producer and one of its biggest makers of theater and film-making equipment.

But Schlesinger is anything but a minnow. In South Africa, 30-year-old Johnny Schlesinger is almost as famous as Diamond King Sir Ernest Oppenheimer (TIME. May 5, 1952). His 60 companies are worth an estimated $175 million. They include: 150 movie houses from Cape Town to Nairobi; insurance companies, which insure one out of every six white South Africans; a 13-sq. mi. citrus grove with nearly 1,000,000 trees, the world's largest; chains of hotels, restaurants, amusement parks, milk bars and candy kiosks in 100 African towns.

The American Look. But even with such deals as the one with United Artists, Johnny Schlesinger will have a hard time matching the pace set by his father, who built the family empire and turned it over to him in 1947, two years before he died. South Africa had seldom seen a hustler like Isadore William Schlesinger, who was born on Manhattan's Lower East Side, and arrived penniless in Cape Town in 1896 to take part in the gold rush. Schlesinger never got to the goldfields. Instead he took a salesman's job, switched to life insurance as an agent for the U.S.'s Equitable Life Assurance, was soon earning $30,000 a year in commissions.

While others went looking for gold and diamonds, Schlesinger started his own insurance company, began making himself one of South Africa's biggest landlords. He started by promoting real estate subdivisions in the path of Johannesburg's growth, eventually put up $560 million worth of buildings and gave South African cities an American look.

North of Johannesburg he bought 16,000 acres of barren bush, dammed two rivers, built 200 miles of concrete flumes, and planted half a million orange trees. He bought confiscated German lands in Tanganyika after World War I, and became one of Africa's biggest sheep ranchers. When the flickering "bioscopes" caught on, he built a chain of theaters across South Africa and produced his own films. In remote regions, Schlesinger traveling vans still carry Wild West and Charlie Chaplin films to native villages and compounds. He introduced the chain store, the cafeteria, and the American-style drugstore. Through all this he never gave up American citizenship, had his stationery emblazoned: "I. W. Schlesinger, American Citizen."

Northward Ho! Johnny Schlesinger, who gave up his U.S. citizenship in 1947, is determined to expand the empire he inherited. He began a $67 million program to build new hotels, office buildings, restaurants and theaters. A onetime Harvard baseball player, he also has tried to introduce professional baseball to South Africa, and a nightclub to Johannesburg. Neither caught on, and Schlesinger was forced to move his fancy Casbah cabaret to Lourengo Marques, Mozambique, where the Portuguese are more appreciative of it.

Schlesinger is putting a big part of his expansion money into east and central Africa. In Salisbury, capital of Southern Rhodesia, he is putting up a $2,000,000 hotel, theater and office block, and similar projects are under way in other Rhodesian and Kenyan cities. He is also experimenting on films for central African natives, who he thinks will give him a vast new market. Behind these moves is Schlesinger's hunch that "long before anybody now thinks possible, there will be a great African federation south of the equator. That's the thing I'm planning for."

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