Ernest Lehman; Writer For Films

Ernest Lehman, 89, who died July 2 in Los Angeles after an apparent heart attack, was a Hollywood screenwriter of astonishing range: embittered drama ("Sweet Smell of Success"), sophisticated suspense ("North by Northwest") and the fearlessly sentimental ("The Sound of Music").

After four Academy Award nominations for his writing, he won an honorary Oscar in 2001 -- the first for a screenwriter -- for a "body of varied and enduring work."

Early in his career, Mr. Lehman was a Broadway press agent, journalist and short-story writer. His first screenwriting credit was for "Executive Suite" (1954), a tale of corporate intrigue so taut that the director, Robert Wise, did not need a musical track to heighten the tension.

Wise used Mr. Lehman on "Somebody Up There Likes Me" (1956), in which Paul Newman plays the thuggish boxing champ Rocky Graziano, and the musicals "West Side Story" (1961) and "The Sound of Music" (1965).

He adapted a string of Broadway successes, among them: Rodgers and Hammerstein's "The King and I" (1956); Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966); and the Jerry Herman musical "Hello, Dolly!" (1969).

Despite working from polished productions, Mr. Lehman said he made invaluable contributions to restructuring the plots.

He was credited with imagining the opening montage that sweeps over a mountain range in "The Sound of Music" and the sequence with a crop-dusting plane that terrorizes Cary Grant in "North by Northwest" (1959), one of his rare original scripts.

In the Alfred Hitchcock thriller, Grant played a much-divorced advertising executive with a flexible credo: "In the world of advertising, there's no such thing as a lie. There's only expedient exaggeration."

Falsely accused of murdering a diplomat, Grant goes on the run and meets a mysterious blonde played by Eva Marie Saint. One of Mr. Lehman's disappointments was that the censors would not let Saint tell Grant, whom she has just met in the train's dining car, "I never make love on an empty stomach."

The result was "I never discuss love on an empty stomach." And Mr. Lehman later said he found the change silly. "Now it would be nothing," he said. "It would appear on a kiddie show."

Ernest Paul Lehman was born Dec. 8, 1915, in New York. His parents were in the garment business.

At City College of New York, he studied creative writing because, he said, "I couldn't get myself to go out into the world of people and look for a job."