What else but anxiety explains the apparent double identity of a man like, say, Samuel Bronfman—out of his immediate business element a shy, introverted, lost-looking, and uneasy little fellow, but hell on wheels in his office? If Meyer Lansky was the Little Caesar of the Underworld, Bronfman was the Little Caesar of Distilled Spirits. His fits of temper were legendary. A specially reinforced telephone had to be installed for him, because of his habit—whenever he heard something he disliked or disbelieved—of first holding the receiver away from his ear, snarling at it like an enraged wildcat, and then slamming it into its cradle with such force that a number of ordinary instruments had been shattered. He also not infrequently threw the entire telephone across the room, or at a visitor, yanking the cord out of the wall as he did so. Once he hurled a heavy paperweight at an employee, who managed to duck, and only a metal sash prevented the object from flying through a window and out into a busy street below. Trying to make light of this incident, his staff prepared a plaque to mark the point of the paperweight’s impact, in the wistful hope that such an outburst might not occur again.
He had a habit of pouncing into his employees’ offices unexpectedly, with questions for which he demanded immediate answers. Woe betided the person who didn’t know the answer or, even worse, who pretended that he did, and tried to fake it. Mr. Sam had an impressive vocabulary of abuse, and when aroused to fury, he would string his epithets together so that a son of a bitch would become “that lousy, no-good son of a son of a son of a bitch.” One Seagram executive likened his nature to a tiger’s, but a more apt analogy would have been to a man-eating shark. After one particularly blistering outburst, at a dinner meeting, Sam had started throwing his food, and eventually his plate and all the crockery in sight, at a beleaguered associate, and then fired everyone in the room. Later, he was asked if he oughtn’t to worry lest his tantrums brought on an ulcer. He growled in reply, “I don’t get ulcers. I give them.” He had a point.
No foe to nepotism, he employed a number of members of his family in his company. Yet there was no question but that Sam was in absolute charge. A nephew might address Sam’s brother as “Uncle Allan,” but Mr. Sam was always “Mr. Sam.” And relatives were fired with the same furious abandon as nonrelatives when, in Mr. Sam’s opinion, they failed to measure up to his own rigorous standards. He was a notorious penny pincher, and the salaries he paid were among the lowest in the liquor business, yet when anyone complained, he lost his job. Sam was equally reluctant to pass out titles as rewards for loyal service, and a number of valued associates who, in another situation, might have expected to have been made vice-presidents never achieved such rank in the Bronfman organization. Occasionally, however, he begrudgingly conferred a title, if it meant an alternative to a raise—as happened with one man who asked if he didn’t deserve the title of general manager. Sam agreed with a wave of his hand, but a few months later the man was fired. “The damn fool … started to act like a general manager,” Sam explained. “I am the general manager.”
His attitude toward money was peculiar, to say the least. Once, when he was fixing his first drink of the day, which was around ten in the morning, a visitor commented that the Schweppes soda water he was using had probably cost more than the whiskey. Horrified, Sam buzzed for his secretary and told her not to buy any more Schweppes. “It’s expensive!” he bellowed. “Thirty-five cents a bottle!” And yet, hard by his office, there was a fully equipped kitchen staffed with a full-time chef, whose chief duty was to prepare lunch for the boss. Much of the early portion of Mr. Sam’s working day was spent planning his midday meal, and he would go over menu selections at length with his secretary, discussing seasonings, sauces, entrées, desserts. For some reason, he called his stomach “Mary,” and when he had settled on a combination of dishes that pleased him, he would rub this part of his anatomy and say, “Mary, you’re going to be well fed today!”
He was an inveterate clipper of money-saving coupons from newspapers and magazines, and was forever entering contests that offered cash prizes, though he never won anything to anyone’s knowledge. The last few minutes of every business day were spent turning out all the office lights to save on electricity costs, though he tipped Pullman porters with hundred-dollar bills. Once, on a shopping trip to New York with his wife and one of his sisters, Saidye Bronfman admired a hat in a millinery shop. The hat cost fifty-five dollars, and Sam told Saidye that she couldn’t buy it. Later, back at their hotel suite, Sam told Saidye to telephone the shop and order the hat. When Saidye asked him why he had changed his mind, he said, “I don’t want my sister to know I’d let you spend that much for a hat.”
And yet, for all his crotchets and tyrannical ways, Mr. Sam occasionally revealed a gentler side. He was fond, for example, of Tennyson’s poetry, and could quote it at astonishing length from memory. He also had a pungent sense of humor. Asked once what he considered mankind’s greatest invention, he snapped back, “Interest!” And asked what he felt was the secret of his success, he said, “Never fire the office boy!” It was true that, particularly among the lower echelons of his organization, he had built up a cadre of employees who would lay down their lives for him.
No less a despot was Helena Rubinstein, who, having made her first fortune, almost by accident, in Australia, having added to it substantially with Maisons de Beauté in London and Paris, had now made New York her headquarters for a cosmetics empire that would expand throughout the 1920s until it included a hundred countries. Throughout the 1920s, too, her feud with the older, established beauty queen, Elizabeth Arden, would escalate. At one point, Miss Arden hired the entire Helena Rubinstein sales staff away from her. Madame Rubinstein quickly retaliated, and hired Miss Arden’s ex-husband, Thomas J. Lewis, as her sales manager, crowing at the time, “Imagine the secrets he must know!” (It turned out that he didn’t know many, and Lewis was let go not long afterward.) After divorcing her first husband, Helena Rubinstein married a Georgian prince, Archil Gourielli-Tchkonia, for whom she created her House of Gourielli line of men’s toiletries. (Rumored to have been a former Parisian taxi driver, Gourielli nonetheless played a mean game of backgammon, which had helped him climb in French society. And, some twenty years Helena Rubinstein’s junior—no one knew exactly, since her age was as closely kept a secret as Miss Arden’s and their respective beauty formulas—he was still a prince.) Miss Arden retaliated by marrying a prince of her own, Prince Michael Evlanoff. Though the two women were never formally introduced, they had frequent glaring contests across the rooms of fashionable New York restaurants, where Maître d’s were careful never to seat them too close together. Refusing to dignify her competitor by name, Madame Rubinstein always referred to Arden as “the Other One.”
Madame Rubinstein’s rages were as famous as Sam Bronfman’s, and she was always shouting “Dumkopf!” “Nebbish!” “No-good bum!” “Liar!” “Cheat!” and “Thief!” at cowering employees in her loud, whiskey-tenor, heavily accented voice, which could be heard from one end of her offices to the other. New employees were advised by old-timers, “Try not to let her notice you.” Once, a new secretary—all the secretaries were imperiously addressed as “Little Girl” by their employer—was looking for the ladies’ room and actually opened, by accident, the door to the facility that was Madame Rubinstein’s private toilet. There was a raucous scream, and the luckless girl was fired on the spot.
Even her own two sons never learned how to deal with her, so violently did her opinions of them swing from day to day. Her relationship with her son Horace was particularly explosive. “Horace is a genius!” she would exclaim one day. “Horace is gaga!” she would announce the next. But there was no doubt that she was as shrewd as she was tough. When a thirty-room triplex penthouse at 625 Park Avenue, one of the avenue’s most luxurious buildings, became available, she wanted to buy it, offering cash. She was advised that the cooperative building’s board of directors did not want Jewish tenants. So Helena Rubinstein simply bought the building.
A great many members of her large family were on her payroll in one capacity or another, but even kinship did not protect her relatives from the vagaries of the boss’s quixotic personality or high-handed business tactics. When her sister Stella, who was in charge of Rubinstein’s French operations, was about to be married, Madame Rubinstein asked for a thousand dollars of company funds to buy Stella’s wedding present. When asked to whose account these funds should be charged, she replied, “Stella’s, of course!”
She was a woman who, seeing an ad for manufacturer’s seconds of hosiery at Bloomingdale’s, would send her secretary out to snap up as many pairs of stockings as she could carry at ninety cents a pair. At the same time, she was amassing a million-dollar collection of paintings (a number of them portraits of Madame herself), and another spectacular collection of African art. She claimed to care little about her personal appearance, and indeed her mascara was often smeared and her lipstick streaked. But she spent another fortune on clothes and other personal adornments—diamonds, rubies, sapphires, ropes of emeralds, and yards of pearls. She scavenged wastebaskets for reusable paper clips while, at the same time, buying houses and estates all over the world and filling them with antiques. Soon, in addition to the Park Avenue triplex, there was a town house in Paris on the Île Saint-Louis, a country place at Combe-la-Ville, a town house in London, and an estate in Greenwich, Connecticut. She often held business meetings in her bedroom while she sat in bed, munching on a chicken leg.
One of her most brilliant business coups occurred in 1929. Had she somehow foreseen the great stock market crash that would occur later that year? In some uncanny way she may have, because early in 1929 she arranged to sell her American business to the banking house of Lehman Brothers for eight million dollars. She then repaired to Paris, where she planned to concentrate on her European operations. Then came the Crash, and Helena Rubinstein stock tumbled along with everything else. Meanwhile, she expressed dissatisfaction with the way Lehman Brothers was running her American company. They were taking her products “mass market”—into small groceries and drugstores, whereas previously they had been sold only through prestigious department and specialty stores. She decided to buy her American company back. She did this by writing thousands of personal letters to small Rubinstein stockholders, most of whom were women, asking them if “as one woman to another” they thought that a bunch of Wall Street bankers could run a woman’s cosmetic business as well as a woman could. If they agreed with her, would they please give her their voting proxies? Meanwhile, she bought back as much Rubinstein stock as she could at bargain-basement prices. Thus, within a year, she had enough stock and votes to force Lehman Brothers to sell the company back to her at her price, which was somewhat under two million dollars. Her profit: over six million dollars. “All it took,” she would shrug, “was a little chutzpa.”
“I make a rule for you,” Sam Goldwyn would say—it was one of his favorite expressions, and he was always “making a rule,” usually jabbing a stubby forefinger into the chest of an opponent as he made it. When asked why the sets of his motion pictures were always the scene of so much strife, turmoil, and dissension, he replied, “I make a rule for you. A happy company makes a bad picture.” He may have had a point because a number of good and profitable pictures did emerge from production companies that were famously unhappy.
He was unquestionably a most difficult man to work for. He had a theory, for example, that writers and directors were not good for one another, and that on any picture they should be kept as far apart as possible. This meant that any writer-director collaboration that took place had to be done on the sly. Goldwyn insisted on having a hand in every phase of his studio’s operation, and was forever interfering with other people’s jobs. King Vidor, at one point, refused to direct a Sam Goldwyn picture unless it was stipulated in his contract that Goldwyn remain off the set throughout the shooting of the film.
But Goldwyn paid very little attention to contracts. In the paramilitary structure of the early studios, the producer was the supreme commander in chief, and at the very bottom of the pecking order were the writers, the privates. When Sam Goldwyn at one point wanted Anita Loos to write a picture for him, he called Miss Loos in and offered her a year’s contract at five thousand dollars a week, which she quickly accepted. Later, an associate gasped, “My God, Sam! That’s two hundred and sixty thousand dollars a year!” Goldwyn replied, “Don’t worry. I can get out of the contract when I’m through with her.” And, to be sure, he did.
His running feud with Louis B. Mayer at MGM became legendary. Once, during an altercation in the locker room at the Hillcrest Country Club, Mayer, who was much smaller in size than Goldwyn, managed to back the larger man into a corner and then pushed him into a laundry hamper full of wet towels. By the time Goldwyn had clambered out of the hamper, Mayer had disappeared. The feud occasioned one of Goldwyn’s choicest Goldwynisms. When a friend chided him about the amount of bickering and fighting that went on between the two men, Goldwyn looked shocked and surprised. “What?” he cried. “We’re like friends, we’re like brothers. We love each other. We’d do anything for each other. We’d even cut each other’s throats for each other!”
In the office, Sam Goldwyn was given the code name “Panama”—for the large white Panama hats he often wore—and he was referred to as “Panama” in secret little interoffice memos that circulated about the studio. “Panama’s on the warpath!” a scribbled note might say, and that inevitably meant that he was on the warpath, and when on the warpath he was abusive to his staff as well as to his household servants. Dinners at the Goldwyns’ were often punctuated with explosions from the head of the table, at the butler, the maid, or the cook. “Take back these peaches!” he would roar, and Frances Goldwyn, in her role as peacemaker, would quietly explain to the cook, “These canned peaches aren’t Mr. Goldwyn’s brand.”
At the studio, invitations to Mr. Goldwyn’s table in the executive dining room were naturally command performances. Once, when Goldwyn had invited an associate named Reeves Espy to join him for lunch, Goldwyn startled Espy by appearing at Espy’s office door to pick him up. It was usually done the other way around. At the time, Goldwyn had been feuding with an art director named Richard Day, and Mr. Day, who had had his fill of Goldwyn, was threatening to quit. Now Goldwyn further startled Espy by saying, “Call Dick Day and ask him to come along for lunch.” Espy was quite sure what Day would think of the invitation. The problem was that interoffice communication was by intercom, and if Espy got Day on the intercom, Sam Goldwyn would be able to hear everything Day had to say. But Espy did as he was told, rang for Day’s station on the intercom, and to the voice that answered said quickly, “Dick, Sam Goldwyn wants you to join us for lunch. Dick, Mr. Goldwyn’s standing right here!”
At Goldwyn Pictures, it became a tradition that every departing employee was given a farewell lunch by the boss, and at Goldwyn Pictures people came and went with some frequency. At these lunches, most of the hour was consumed with speeches extolling Sam Goldwyn, and at one of them, producer Fred Kohlmar said, “Sam, this is the fifth of these lunches we’ve had in a month. Can we have one when y
ou leave?”
He was redeemed, perhaps, by the famous Goldwynisms. Each new example of fractured English was passed around Hollywood, chuckled at, and embellished. As a result, a few of the celebrated utterances are apocryphal, but most are true. He really did say, “Let me sum it up for you in two words—impossible!” And he did say, on a number of occasions, “Let me pinpoint for you the approximate date.” But though a number of his people took the Goldwynisms to mean that the boss was a little soft in the head, there was always a certain germ of truth and sense in most of them. When he said, “Include me out,” it meant that he wished to be included among those who were out. When he said, “A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on,” he was absolutely right—it isn’t. When he said, “I took the whole thing with a dose of salts,” one had to admit that a dose was as good as a grain. And when, proposing a toast to the visiting Field Marshal Montgomery, he rose, lifted his glass, and said, “A long life to Marshal Field Montgomery Ward!” one could understand his confusion. When he said, “Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is named John,” he had a point. And a touch of sarcasm could not be ruled out when Edna Ferber mentioned that she was writing her autobiography, and he asked her. “What’s it about?”
Even Hollywood’s favorite Goldwynism turned out to be laced with truth. The occasion was when Sam and Frances were about to embark on a cruise to Hawaii, and his studio staff came down to the dock to see the Goldwyns off. While the staff stood waving at him from the pier, Sam stood at the ship’s railing, waving back, and calling, “Bon voyage! Bon voyage! Bon voyage to you all!” Sure enough, a few days after his return from his holiday, most of those same well-wishers were sent voyaging off into the choppy seas of unemployment.
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