You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood's Golden Age

by Wagner, Robert J

  In 1947, Elizabeth Gordon of House Beautiful called Cliff’s #3 “the most significant ranch house in America,” an honor I had no concept of when I bought the place. I just thought it was an ideal place to raise my kids after a terrible tragedy, and I was proved right.

  We rode horses there; we had countless meals there; we healed there. Jill and I were married there; my daughters, Natasha and Kate, and my son, Peter Donen, were all married there. It holds a special place in all our memories and always will.

  It was less than a mile off Sunset Boulevard, but it felt as if you were a million miles away from the hurly-burly of Hollywood. I lived in Cliff May House #3 very happily for twenty-five years. Cliff once told me that people who don’t live in ranch houses “don’t know how to live.”

  There was an interesting way of determining social standing in the parties of that era. Contrary to cynical popular belief, if your box office popularity fell off, you weren’t suddenly dropped from A-list parties; once you were in the group, you were in the group. If you were coming off a long list of flops, you might not be seated at the A table, but you’d still be in the A group. In that respect, I don’t think the movie business is really much different from any other business.

  The great hostesses of Hollywood were more domestic entrepreneurs than they were chefs. Very few of them would spend much time in the kitchen; most contented themselves with planning and executing their soirees, or perhaps making a special hors d’oeuvre that they knew they could do well.

  But there were a few exceptions. Connie Wald, Jerry Wald’s wife, did most of the cooking for her parties herself, and Jerry took a lot of pride in his wife’s abilities in the kitchen. Jerry, of course, was a huge promoter, and had a great ability to put the pieces of projects together.

  Jerry didn’t make great pictures, but rather commercial ones that were solid entertainment. He was supposedly Budd Schulberg’s inspiration for What Makes Sammy Run?, although that implies a guy with more hustle than talent, and I always found Jerry to be a genuine hands-on producer. Connie, who was always at his side, lived to a very ripe old age, and when she died in 2012 she left instructions that she didn’t want a funeral; instead, all the people who loved her were to have a great dinner—at Connie’s expense.

  Another couple who were among the greatest party givers of that period were Bill and Edie Goetz. After World War II, as a young producer Bill Goetz started a production company called International Pictures. A few years later, he merged International with Universal and became a wealthy man.

  From the outside there was nothing special about the Goetzes’ house. It was two stories, was painted a light gray, and had a wrought-iron porte cochere—just another house in Holmby Hills with interiors by William Haines, one of dozens in the neighborhood.

  It was only when you stepped inside the house that you realized you were someplace special, for the walls were covered with the most spectacular display of Impressionist art outside the Musée d’Orsay. Bill and Edie had one of the finest private art collections in America. That was why Edie always entertained at home—it gave guests a chance to appreciate the collection, and it gave her a chance to show it off. Bill and Edie’s attitude toward their extraordinary assemblage of art was low key. They weren’t so presumptuous as to offer a guided tour, but if you had half a brain you’d ask them about some of the paintings—and how they’d gotten their hands on them. They wanted to share their objects of beauty with people.

  The living room alone featured Cézanne’s La Maison du Pendu, Bonnard’s Portrait of a Young Woman, Manet’s Woman with Umbrella, Renoir’s Nature Morte, Fleurs et Fruits and Picasso’s Maternité. A Degas bronze ballerina sat on a table. I remember touching its skirt with awe, and hoping nobody noticed me.

  In the sitting room over the fireplace was Van Gogh’s Étude à la Bougie, and the dining room contained a Sheraton table and Georgian silver. The walls featured Degas’s Two Dancers in Repose and a Bonnard called Le Dejeuner. Another wall featured a Monet, a Sisley, and, if I remember correctly, a Toulouse-Lautrec, which were all mounted on a wall that rose to reveal the projection room that was a standard feature for producers of Bill’s stature.

  William Goetz seated with a portion of his art collection.

  Courtesy of Victoria Shepherd—Bleeden

  It was the screening room that drove people up the wall—to raise a Monet to watch a crappy movie, or even a good movie, struck some as the height of nouveau riche behavior. Irene Mayer Selznick, Edie’s sister, would tell everyone what poor taste she thought it reflected, even though the art itself was beyond reproach—well bought, and well displayed.

  Edie and Irene were the daughters of Louis B. Mayer and they never really got along, mostly because they were extremely competitive. Each of them married an aspiring producer—Irene to David Selznick, Edie to Bill Goetz. David achieved greatness, Bill achieved success. There was, needless to say, a great deal of tsuris in the family, of jostling and unease.

  Irene would eventually divorce David over his affair with Jennifer Jones, while Edie and Bill stayed married—quite happily, I believe. I met Irene only once or twice, just long enough to sense how very different the sisters were. To put it in a nutshell, Irene was intellectual and Edie was social. Each of them understood the movie business backward and forward, although in different ways—Irene creatively, Edie in terms of politics and power.

  I found Edie to be a very open person—if she liked you. If she didn’t, she simply didn’t bother with you. But it would be unfair to call her a snob; I always found her to be a gracious and generous woman, in attitude as well as spirit.

  Frankly, with the art the Goetzes owned, the food and the company could have been drawn from Skid Row and it wouldn’t have diminished my appreciation. But Edie and Bill were strictly A-list—their guests were the Gary Coopers, the Jimmy Stewarts. Edie’s invitation would tell you whether the event was black tie or just to wear a business suit. The atmosphere was formal but not stiff. That is to say, if you knew Edie and the other guests, you’d be fine. If you didn’t, I imagine it would have been intimidating.

  Edie’s staff was up to the standards of her guests. She always let it be known that her butler had once buttled for the Queen Mum at Buckingham Palace. Edie always had the finest of everything—food, wines, crystal, china.

  Edie Goetz was the hostess of her generation—her only true competition was Rocky Cooper, Gary’s wife—and the women who came to Edie’s parties knew it. The women would trot out their best clothes, predominantly from couturiers. I remember a lot of Jimmy Galanos dresses, and I remember a lot of stunning jewelry—the real thing, not replicas.

  Edie and Bill’s house was no place for false fronts. The paintings were real, the success of the guests was real, and so were the accoutrements of that success. The women wore their finest because they were part of an evening of special people, and they were proud to show off their best. (In line with that, drinking was rarely a problem at A-list parties of this period. People were expected to know their limits and behave accordingly, and if they didn’t, they would very quietly be steered in a different direction or, in extreme cases, steered home. Unseemly behavior was rare.)

  Bill Goetz was a funny, jolly man, with a deep, throaty voice like Ben Gazzara’s. He was a Democrat, although politics wasn’t what drove the wedge between him and his ardently Republican father-in-law. In 1952 Bill cosponsored a fund-raiser for Adlai Stevenson with Dore Schary, who had deposed Louis B. Mayer from MGM, the studio he had founded and that carried his name. Mayer begged his daughter to intervene and prevent what he felt to be further crushing humiliation at Schary’s hands, but she felt she had to remain loyal to her husband.

  Mayer never forgave either of them. By the time he died five years later, he’d cut Edie and her children out of his will.

  After that, the temperature between Irene and Edie never got much above freezing; it was the divided hal
ves of the Warner family all over again. These men could forge empires, but the forging of functional families did not seem to be in their skill sets.

  Bill Goetz died in 1969, and Edie hung on for nearly twenty years after that, although the parties gradually dried up. When Edie died in 1988, most of her estate consisted of the art collection on the walls. It was auctioned off for eighty million dollars—more than the estates of her father and sister combined.

  Today, just one of those paintings would bring eighty million dollars, or close to it. I shudder to think what the entire collection would bring, not that anybody but a Silicon Valley entrepreneur could afford it. Today the major art collections in Hollywood tend toward the modern, filled with still living or recently dead artists whose work costs much less. Amassing a collection like that is more of a gamble, and I would wager it’s not as much fun.

  That’s the way Bill and Edie Goetz would have looked at it.

  Very few stars’ houses were as grand as the Goetzes’. Jimmy and Gloria Stewart’s Tudor-style house on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills was quite homey and unpretentious. Jimmy did what I thought was a very classy, not to mention telling, thing: he bought the house next door, tore it down, and planted a garden. He and Gloria would be out there all the time, supervising the gardeners or harvesting flowers and vegetables.

  Inside the house, the piano in the living room was covered with pictures of family and friends, only some of whom were famous. Other than that, it was a comfortable home, with splashes of orange in the furnishings, but otherwise unremarkable. It could have been the home of a banker in Chagrin Falls.

  The only room that told you who owned the house was the library. There was a niche that held Jimmy’s Oscar, as well as his certificate from the New York Film Critics Circle for Best Actor of 1939 for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. There was a citation from the air force—Jimmy flew many combat missions during World War II—and lots of photos. Oh, and one other thing—there was a small statue of a rabbit in there as well: Elwood P. Dowd’s old friend Harvey.

  Some of the photos were stills from movies, although interestingly they weren’t necessarily shots from films regarded as classics—there was nothing from Rear Window or Mr. Smith, for instance. Instead, Jimmy featured shots from Winchester ’73, The Stratton Story, and The Glenn Miller Story. The others were simply family photos: Jimmy’s beloved twin girls; Jimmy’s father’s hardware store in Indiana, Pennsylvania; Jimmy visiting Vietnam. In that sense, the house was a true reflection of the man Jimmy was: a family man who was as much a product of Pennsylvania as of Hollywood.

  Toward the end of his life, Jimmy and I were shooting a promotional film for St. John’s Hospital, the charity to which Jimmy devoted so much time and energy. After we finished the scene, we were walking away from the camera crew when an old wino staggered down the street and saw who was coming toward him.

  “Hey, Jimmy,” he said. “Where’s Harvey?”

  And without missing a beat, Jimmy, with his inimitable stutter, said, “Why, H-H-Harvey’s everywhere!”

  In his will, Jimmy named me to replace him as a director of St. John’s, and I’ve continued on the board down to the present day. It’s the least I can do to show my love and gratitude to such a great actor, such a superb human being.

  When people think of beautiful Hollywood women, they think of movie stars, but there were extravagantly lovely women who were not actresses. Billy Wilder’s wife Audrey, for instance, was one of the chicest women I’ve ever seen in my life.

  When I knew them, Billy and Audrey had an apartment on Wilshire that was overflowing with his splendid modern art collection—Schiele, Klee, Braque, Miró, Balthus, Picasso—all the artists that Billy had admired when they, and he, were starting out in Europe but that he didn’t have the money to buy until he became successful in Hollywood. There were also a couple of comparative latecomers to Billy’s collection—Saul Steinberg and David Hockney—but they were friends, so they were in on a pass.

  A few years before he died, Billy decided to sell off some of his art, and made more than thirty million dollars at auction—more than he’d ever made in the movie business. Not only that, but Billy said that the art was a lot more fun than the movie business, which is always like pushing a huge boulder uphill.

  The Wilders’ apartment wasn’t really big enough to entertain more than a handful of people, so most of Billy’s parties took place at Chasen’s or at L’Escoffier at the Beverly Hilton. When Billy and Audrey threw a party, it was a particularly delicious affair, because their level of taste and style was so high. These affairs were strictly black tie, and they tended to be centered on Billy’s or Audrey’s birthdays or their wedding anniversary. There would be a small orchestra, and the guest list always included Jack Lemmon and his wife, Felicia Farr.

  Billy was an adorable man, a combination of the acerbity of Berlin, where he worked as a newspaper reporter in the Weimar era, and of the far more benevolent Vienna—he was born in Austria. If you asked him, he would talk about his old pictures, but you had to ask him. When he did discuss them, it was with a remarkable level of objectivity, probably because he wasn’t the sort of man who dwelled in the past.

  Billy didn’t go through his long life wondering about why one picture was a hit and another picture was a flop. Maybe he should have used Cary Grant instead of Gary Cooper, maybe the problem was the script, maybe the problem was the director (both jobs often filled by Wilder himself). He would shrug his shoulders and say, “The hell with it!”—about success or failure alike. Although, like anybody else, he found the successes lots more fun and a lot more lucrative.

  Billy had copies of his scripts, but he didn’t read them, and he didn’t have 16mm or 35mm prints of his films. If they were shown on TV, he didn’t watch them, and he evinced only polite interest if you watched them and wanted to talk about them.

  He once explained to me why he was able to maintain an emotional distance about his movies. It involved one of the pictures he made in the 1960s. He had assembled his first choice in every area—I. A. L. Diamond had written the script with Billy, and Billy had gotten his first choice of cameraman and composer. The cast was just what Billy wanted.

  After having spent nearly two years of his life working on the film, it was finally ready to be shown to the public for the first time. The preview was in Westwood, and Billy was understandably nervous. Anxious to get firsthand reactions, he hovered in the lobby as the show was breaking, and fell in step behind a young couple who were leaving the theater.

  “What did you think?” asked the young woman.

  The young man sighed and said, “Where do you want to have dinner?”

  For Billy, that was an eye-opener. He’d had great successes and great failures, and he would always insist that he had worked just as hard on the failures as he had on the successes—The Spirit of St. Louis was one of the biggest financial disasters in the history of Warner Bros. Why some pictures soared from their first day while others sputtered, strained, and dropped was one of the mysteries of the universe, and Billy didn’t pretend to understand it.

  All that work . . . And as far as the audience was concerned, it was just a diversion, something to fill the time before dinner.

  I think Billy was always subtly embarrassed by critics theorizing about him, whether for or against, because so much of what he did—what any creative person does—derived from a passion for the material. And how do you analyze passion? You feel it or you don’t. Billy didn’t like being ignored, but he didn’t like being taken too seriously, either.

  Like so many of the truly creative people in Hollywood, Billy was focused on the next movie, not the last one, so his enforced retirement must have been very tough on him. Not that he ever let on—he didn’t want sympathy. He knew his career had been close to unparalleled, and he wasn’t given to self-pity.

  After Billy died, Audrey carried on, through years of declini
ng health, until her death in 2012. Because Billy was a famous filmmaker, the world knew how special he was—not just as an artist, but as a man. But a man like Billy had to have a special woman, and Audrey was truly that.

  Someone once asked my wife Jill why she thought Billy and Audrey’s marriage had worked.

  “Because they loved each other,” she said.

  And that says it all.

  By the 1950s, tastes had definitively changed, and the vast Spanish and Italianate mansions seemed permanently passé. They were also incredibly expensive to run, so it became cheaper to tear them down, as was the case with Marion Davies’s great beach house at Santa Monica. The destruction of the great mansions sped up over the succeeding years. Even Pickfair, the original movie mansion, was leveled in 1990.

  The years of the great parties were beginning to fade as well. There were many reasons for that. I had usually hung out with a crowd that was ten to fifteen years older than I was, so as those people aged they had less to celebrate. Some died, and some just left Hollywood, so the nucleus got smaller and smaller. And the business got more diversified. TV people worked much more and longer hours than movie people, so they tended to go to bed earlier. Finally, the great restaurants that had hosted so many great parties began going out of business.

  It was a classic generational shift.

  It was a lesson to me that nothing lasts forever. Except the movies.

  From its inception, the movie business attracted extremely ambitious, type A personalities for whom the making of motion pictures was an all-consuming activity. This meant that blowing off steam in between films or on weekends became even more important than it would have ordinarily been.