Bart Lytton

Bart Lytton (1912–1969) was a "brash, colorful and controversial" Los Angeles financier, Democratic Party fund-raiser and philanthropist who called himself "the most successful businessman in this decade in the U.S.", declaring "The only ism for me is narcissism".

Lytton was born as Bernard Shulman in New Castle, Pennsylvania, the son of an attorney who was murdered in 1915. When he reached the age of five, his mother remarried to a respected Russian-born physician in New Castle. Bernard and his brother Yale were raised, with two stepbrothers, in an upper middle-class Jewish family.

After graduating from the University of Virginia in 1934, Bernard became a writer in New York City, where he worked as a playwright and briefly joined the Communist Party. In 1940, he moved to Hollywood and, maintaining his Communist connections, wrote magazine articles before breaking into the movie industry, writing scripts or story treatments for four films produced between 1942 and 1945. During this time, he adopted the name Bart, as well as his wife's stepfather's last name, and became Bart Lytton.

Lytton gave up screen writing at the end of World War II, in part because of disagreements with his former Communist comrades, and, after some years of unemployment, went into business as a mortgage broker, with his aunt who owned a small mortgage company in east Los Angeles. (His aunt, Faye Roberts, founded Lynwood Savings and Loan Association, later changing its name World Savings and Loan Association, later taking World public under the name of Transworld Financial Corporation, which later merged with Golden West Financial Corporation).

Then he became a home builder and real estate developer, his occupation in 1953, when, at the height of the Cold War, he publicly testified to the House Committee on Un-American Activities about his Communist experiences in New York and Hollywood.

Lytton formed his first savings and loan association in California in 1954, but his rapid financial rise began in Las Vegas, Nevada, two years later. By 1958, when he became active in Democratic politics through a connection with Jesse Unruh, the "boss" of the California State Assembly.

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