Sam Goldfish’s entry into show business was quite accidental. In 1912, when he was admitting to being thirty but may actually have been thirty-three,* he met a young Russian-Jewish girl named Blanche Lasky, who called herself an actress and had been playing at one of the little Catskill resort hotels that lay along Sam’s selling route. Blanche Lasky was half of a moderately successful vaudeville musical team with her brother Jesse. Jesse Lasky played the violin and Blanche played the piano. They also sang and danced, and Jesse Lasky had a tap-dance routine that he performed while warbling on a cornet. The Laskys’ was an up-and-down life of one-night stands, but the glove salesman was immediately stages truck. He married Blanche Lasky later that year, and moved into the apartment that she, her brother, and mother shared in Brooklyn.
One Sunday afternoon not long afterward, Sam and his new wife and brother-in-law went to see a film at a movie house on New York’s Thirty-fourth Street. It was a first for Sam Goldfish. One of the shorts on the program happened to include a pillow-fight sequence featuring a young actress named Mary Pickford. Sam Goldfish found himself captivated by Miss Pickford’s image on the screen, and, simultaneously, by the notion of making his own motion pictures. It was obvious that audiences were delighted with the primitive new medium of the “flicker show.” Among other things, the early movies appealed to immigrants of any variety. The plots were simple, obvious, scary, or funny in a slapstick sort of way, and no language barrier stood in the way of understanding what was going on in the silent shorts. And they were cheap: admission to the movies cost only a few pennies.
That evening, Sam, Blanche, and Jesse went home to his mother-in-law’s house, and sat down with Mrs. Lasky to talk about the possibility of a movie-making venture. Blanche, who had been brought up in a small town in southern California and preferred the climate there, pointed out that more and more movies were being made on the West Coast because of the clearer air and longer hours of sunshine. Also, not having to heat a studio in winter was an important cost consideration.
The next question was money. Sam had saved some ten thousand dollars through his Grand Central banker, and offered to put this in. Jesse Lasky also had some savings, and so did his mother. The kitchen-table meeting in Brooklyn had not even reached the stage of deciding what sort of film they were going to produce when Jesse Lasky asked, “Who will we get to direct?” Sam said, “What about Cecil?”
Cecil was a young and footloose sometime playwright, sometime actor named Cecil Blount DeMille, with whom Sam and Jesse regularly shot craps on Saturday nights at the Lasky-Goldfish home. Cecil DeMille had dabbled in a number of other business ventures, none of them successful, and lived in the shadow of an older brother, William C. DeMille, who, before the age of thirty-five, had written and produced a number of hugely popular plays with David Belasco and was now quite rich. Perhaps, it was suggested, if Cecil DeMille were brought on the team, William DeMille might be persuaded to invest in the venture, since it was known that Cecil had trouble making his rent.
Cecil DeMille had never directed a motion picture, but he was immediately enthusiastic. Futhermore, he proposed that the new partnership should not content itself with making a simpleminded little one-reeler of the sort that were being shown all over town in the vaudeville houses, interspersed with live acts and performing dogs. DeMille wanted to produce a full-length film that told a real story, something that had never been done before. Though none of the three partners had had any experience whatever at making films, they were all charged with enormous optimism. As Goldfish said to Lasky, “We’ve never produced a picture, and DeMille has never directed one. We should be great!”
Together, the fledgling group managed to round up a total of twenty-five thousand dollars, in bits and pieces, with Sam Goldfish supplying the major share, to capitalize their film. Cecil DeMille had asked his brother for five thousand, but William, who had staked Cecil in too many other, fruitless enterprises, declined. (Had he been more foresighted, William DeMille could have become a one-fifth owner of Paramount Pictures, which was what, as a result of later mergers and acquisitions, the Goldfish-Lasky-DeMille organization eventually evolved into.) The group then paid ten thousand dollars—a staggering sum in those days—for the film rights to a stage play called The Squaw Man, and hired a popular young stage actor named Dustin Farnum to play the title role.*
Just before shooting was to start, Goldfish suggested that DeMille take a quick trip to upstate New York, where another film was being made, just to get the hang of how movie directing was done. A last-minute crisis almost prevented DeMille’s trip. It seemed that his grocer was pressing him for a twenty-five-dollar delinquent bill. But Goldfish paid that, and DeMille was off.
DeMille spent an hour or so lurking around the shooting location, and returned to New York to tell his partners that his crash course in filmmaking had shown him that there was nothing to it. All one needed was a pair of riding boots, jodhpurs, and a megaphone. Then Goldfish, Lasky, DeMille, their star, and their script boarded a train and headed west.
The making of The Squaw Man was as confused and haphazard as the creation of the little company. They had planned to shoot the film in Flagstaff, Arizona, which no one had told them was in the mountains. Arriving in Flagstaff in the middle of a blinding blizzard, they quickly reboarded the train and continued to Los Angeles. En route, DeMille had hired, as his assistant director, a man who sold Navaho jewelry along the aisles of the Santa Fe trains. Once in California, the group rented a barn in Santa Monica for a studio (today, ironically, the giant CBS Television studios occupy the site), and, to save money, DeMille cast both his wife and his young daughter in the picture.
The initial results were not “great,” exactly. When the first print of The Squaw Man was shown, the images jumped chaotically all over the screen. The actors seemed to slide off the edges of the frames. Reshooting was out of the question. All the money was gone, and Dustin Farnum, whose final paycheck had bounced, was threatening to sue. In desperation, Sam Goldfish carried the print back east with him to a Philadelphia filmmaker who thought he might be able to fix it. Repairs were made, which involved trimming the edges of the frames, even though this meant that, in certain scenes, actors’ arms and legs and even faces had to be cut off.
Sam Goldfish then arranged a publicity campaign for the film’s opening in New York. On opening night, however, both he and Lasky were too nervous to make a public appearance, and instead sneaked into the theater near the end of the picture. To their amazement and enormous relief, the audience was laughing and cheering. The Squaw Man was a hit, and during its run would earn more than twice the amount of money the partners had put into it. The crazy gamble had paid off.
The Squaw Man would also earn a place, of sorts, in motion picture history. Though D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation is usually cited as being the first “long” movie ever produced, The Squaw Man, which came to the screen in 1914, predated The Birth of a Nation—or any other American film of four reels or longer—by more than a year.
The success of The Squaw Man brought the Goldfish-Lasky group to the attention of another newly arrived West Coast filmmaker, Adolph Zukor. By 1914, both Adolph Zukor and Samuel Goldfish were reasonably rich and successful film men. Like Goldfish and Lasky, Zukor was an Eastern European Jew, born in Hungary in 1873, who had come to America in the usual fashion, by steerage, with forty dollars sewn into the lining of his second-best waistcoat for safekeeping by his thrifty mother, which amount was to stake his future in the New World. Zukor, too, had got into the movie business almost by accident. He had made his way to Chicago, where he had gone into the fur business with a man named Morris Kohn. By 1899, Kohn and Zukor had prospered sufficiently in furs to open a branch office in New York. There, Zukor’s principal contact was another furrier, Marcus Loew, whom Zukor knew from many fur-selling trips between New York and the Midwest. Zukor and Kohn, figuring that it would be politically prudent to discuss their New York move with Mr. Loew—whose territory they w
ere in a sense planning to invade—sought him out. Loew was surprisingly helpful. He not only offered to initiate the two Chicagoans into the New York fur fraternity, but he also helped the two men and their families find apartments in the city. Mr Loew found an apartment for Mr. Zukor in the same block as his own, and the two men and their wives became friends—for a while, at least.
In the meantime, while the Zukors and Kohns were moving to New York, one of Morris Kohn’s cousins was pestering his family and friends for money to open a penny arcade. He had found one financial backer in a former peddler from Buffalo named Mitchell Mark, who had branched into the penny arcade business and owned two arcades in Buffalo and one in Harlem. In 1899, a vacant dairy kitchen on Fourteenth Street near bustling Union Square—then one of the chief shopping areas of of the city (Tiffany’s was right down the street)—had caught Mr. Mark’s eye, and he was eager to turn it into yet another arcade, in which he would offer one-reeler flicker shows. But the owner of the Fourteenth Street property was leery of leasing his store in such a high-class neighborhood to a man of unproven worth—and credit—like Mitchell Mark. So, using Morris Kohn’s cousin as an intermediary, Mark persuaded the two “respectable furriers,” Kohn and Zukor, to be his front men in the deal, with their presence providing at least psychological reassurance that the rent would be paid. In return for this favor, Zukor and Kohn were given a share in the business, which they named the Automatic One Cent Vaudeville Company. The long, narrow arcade was lined solidly on both sides with machines where, for a penny, the viewer could catch primitive little movies with such titles as “A Ride on the ‘L,’” “Creeping Jimmie,” and “French High Kickers.” Thus, the two furriers found themselves in show business. Soon the fur business would be no more than a memory.
The Fourteenth Street arcade was an immediate success. It did not, as might have been expected, add a touch of sleaziness to a fashionable shopping district. On the contrary, it had the atmosphere of a well-run toy store and attracted a well-heeled clientele. Matrons who lived on Murray Hill could leave their children there, with pocketfuls of pennies, while they shopped the “Ladies’ Mile,” or Broadway from Twenty-third to Eighth streets, at Airman’s, Arnold Constable, Lord and Taylor, and Siegel-Cooper. The automatic Vaudeville featured, as a free attraction, a clever little contraption that had been Morris Kohn’s brainchild. This was a miniature electric train that circulated among the various coin machines. As it passed, the pennies from the hoppers of the machines were automatically dumped into its freight cars. As many customers lined up to watch the little train as did to play the machines, and the constant clatter of falling coins added the kind of excitement usually associated with a gambling casino.
One of the men who came to see the train at its work was Marcus Loew. Later, Loew would admit that the sight of all that money tumbling in made him also decide to get out of furs and into penny arcades. He decided it was time for Zukor and Kohn to repay the favor that they owed him. He wanted a piece of the Automatic One Cent Vaudeville Company.
Since Zukor, Kohn, and Mark had already embarked on ambitious plans to expand their operations into Philadephia, Boston, and Newark, they were delighted by the possibility of a new injection of capital and quickly agreed to let Loew buy shares in their enterprise. At first, it seemed a winning combination. But once all four men were in partnership together there was trouble. As in any all-cash business, employee theft was a constant problem. The men who operated the flicker shows and the toy train had to be watched like hawks, and presently the four partners were all snooping on one another. Each began keeping his own set of books, and needless to say, no two sets agreed. By 1904, Loew and Zukor were bickering over the ledger sheets, accusing each other of stealing from the company, and disagreeing about who deserved what share of the burgeoning business. Both had agreed that twenty-five hundred dollars a year was a reasonable take-home pay for each, but, as Loew put it later, “Adolph didn’t think I was worth twenty-five hundred a year, and I had the same opinion of him.” Loew, who had been the last to join the quadrumvirate, became the first to withdraw his investment. In 1905 he opened his own arcade, which he called People’s Vaudeville, in what had been a vacant storefront on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Twenty-third Street.
Next to pull out of Automatic Vaudeville was Morris Kohn, taking his electric train with him. He, too, set up shop elsewhere. Mitchell Mark, meanwhile, was considered a foolish dreamer. He foresaw a far more dazzling future for motion pictures than any of the others did, and insisted that customers for movies, instead of standing in front of glass-windowed boxes in penny arcades, would one day settle themselves into plush-covered seats in front of giant screens in movie palaces with golden carved cherubs on their ceilings. He withdrew from Automatic Vaudeville in 1905 to concentrate on building theaters. The culmination of his dream, which was not far off, was the opening of the Mark Strand Theatre at Broadway and Forty-seventh Street, a thirty-three hundred seat showplace in the heart of the theater district.
That left Adolph Zukor with what was left of Automatic Vaudeville, which, with its principal crowd-pleaser, the train, removed, was not much. The five-year collaboration also set a pattern for internecine warfare and distrust that would dominate the motion picture business—which would become an almost exclusively Eastern European business—for the next half-century and more.
For a while, Adolph Zukor operated a nickelodeon, next door to the old Fourteenth Street location, which did well enough—as did anything, it seemed, that offered the magic flicker shows. Then, with more breezy self-confidence than anything else, he formed what he called the Famous Players Company, the purpose of which, according to Zukor’s slogan, was to produce “Famous Plays and Famous Players.” His windy press releases, however, failed to mention that he owned no famous plays, nor did he have any famous players under contract.
It was another gamble. But the gambler must allow for luck, and in 1911 Luck reached out and touched the shoulder of the thirty-eight-year-old Adolph Zukor. A French silent film, called Queen Elizabeth, had been exhibited with success in Europe. It starred “the divine” Sarah Bernhardt, the most famous actress in the world at that time. Its subtitles were in French, which was the only language Miss Bernhardt could perform in, and this fact had persuaded American impresarios that Queen Elizabeth was not exportable for American audiences. The American rights to the film were therefore both available and cheap. But Zukor knew that, on earlier American tours, Bernhardt—speaking in French in such stage vehicles as Camille and Fedora—had left audiences cheering and standing on their seats at the end of her performances, even when no one had understood a word she had said. The French subtitles could easily be redone in English. Would it matter that the words on the screen would not exactly coincide with the movements of the Divine Sarah’s lips? Zukor decided not. The audience would be paying more attention to Bernhardt’s exaggerated gestures, the wild tossing of her head, the beating of her breast, and to her famous blazing eyes.
Zukor acquired the rights to Queen Elizabeth, and the subtitles were translated. He then arranged for a celebrity-studded premiere in the summer of 1912 in a first-rate legitimate theater—the Lyceum on Broadway. The offering was a huge critical and popular success, and Adolph Zukor was hailed as a production genius. And so, when Zukor approached Goldfish and Lasky in 1914 and proposed a merger, it sounded like another wonderful idea. It would be a pooling of both talent and money. The resulting company was named Famous Players–Lasky. Zukor was president of the new company, Goldfish was chairman of the board, and Lasky was vice-president.
Almost immediately, however, Zukor found Sam Goldfish as difficult to deal with—as stubborn, temperamental, and unpredictable—as any of his previous partners. The two men couldn’t agree on who was running the company, or who was to make decisions. The movie business had become—as it remains today—a curiously bifurcated business, with a certain basic clumsiness built into it. It operated on two coasts, the East and the West. Production
was all done in California. But the largest audiences were in eastern cities, along with the newspapers and critics that mattered the most. Even more important, the banks and investment houses, upon whom the movie companies relied for financing, were all in New York. Everything that was done in Hollywood, then as now, was predicated on “what New York says.” Then as now, motion picture producers were constantly having to shuttle back and forth between the East Coast and the West.
When Sam Goldfish was in New York talking to the money men, and Zukor was in California trying to grind out movies, Goldfish took over policymaking. And when Goldfish was in California, and Zukor was in New York, the opposite happened, and Goldfish took over production—and even the direction—of the films. The limbo periods—those four or five days it took to travel across the continent by train, and whoever was traveling was incommunicado—were worst of all, when each man was convinced that the other was scheming diabolically behind his back.
To make matters even worse, Sam Goldfish and Jesse Lasky were crossing swords. The problem was Blanche Lasky Goldfish’s complaints about her husband. Blanche, it seemed, even though she now had a young daughter to care for, felt very much pushed into the background by the two most important men in her life, her brother and her husband. She felt, with some justification, that if it had not been for her, the two men might never have come together in their filmmaking venture. Now she was being ignored on the sidelines of their mounting success. “If I hadn’t suggested the flickers that afternoon in New York, where would they be?” she complained. Blanche also considered herself a performer, and whereas men like Cecil B. DeMille put their wives and other relatives into their films, Blanche had never been cast in a single Goldfish picture. On top of it all, she suspected that now that Sam was in show business, he had formed a fondness for younger showgirls, and she may have been right. Sam’s office door was often locked while he conducted lengthy interviews with aspiring actresses. On his transcontinental trips, he was frequently accompanied by female “secretaries.” And there was no doubt that Sam Goldfish was fond of beautiful women. His film “discoveries” were invariably female, and he spent a great deal of time fussing over his actresses’ hairstyles, makeup, and dress. Blanche was developing a full-scale case of classic wifely jealousy. There were the customary bitter accusations, recriminations, scenes. Sam Goldfish, meanwhile, a big, barrel-chested man with a bullet-shaped head, the wide, square jaw of a fighter and a temper to go with it, was not the sort of man to be bothered by the whinings of a mere woman. The more Blanche complained and demanded, the more he cut her off with a door slammed in her face.
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