Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  He lived just blocks from his job at Louis Meyers & Son, Glove Manufactory, a four-story stone building. There hundreds of animal skins went through several stages before becoming dozens of gloves. First, a man would “tax” the leather, figuring how many pairs of gloves could be made from a single hide; another would dampen the skins and stretch them; another would lay a pattern over the material and press gently, leaving light indentations of a double-image hand shape; with big, heavy shears, a man then cut around the pricked skin, stamping his identification number on the back; batches were sent into another part of the factory, the “making room,” populated entirely with women, who sewed around the fingers and attached the fourchettes, those strips between each finger, which round them out; stitched gloves were delivered to the “laying off” room, where each glove was slipped over a cast-iron dummy of a hand and steamed; the pressed gloves were then sent to the “finishing room,” where boys sewed on buttons or any other special touches. The gloves were inspected, wrapped in tissue paper, and banded together in pairs of six. Goldwyn’s first job was sweeping all four floors of Louis Meyers & Son. His boss was one of Gloversville’s leading citizens, Albert Aaron, who paid him three dollars for a six-day work week.

  On Tuesday, October 3, 1899, Samuel Goldfish went to the county courthouse in Johnstown to register as a resident of the city of Gloversville and to petition to become a citizen of the United States. Where most applicants indicated what vessel they had sailed on, a clerk wrote: “Arrived in this country Jany ist 1899.” A few lines above that, Samuel Goldfish, in an undeveloped hand, swore that he was twenty years old, born in July 1879. It would be the last recorded time he would stick to those facts.

  THE turn of the century was a good time for the glove business. Fulton County was producing almost half the heavy work gloves made in the United States and 95 percent of its fine dress gloves, then playing an important role in fashion. Job opportunities abounded. It was only weeks before Goldfish left Meyers for a job, as an apprentice cutter at Bacmo Gloves, one of the new, up-and-coming glove concerns in Gloversville, started by Joseph Bachner and Joseph Moses. Cutters were paid by the number of gloves they cut in a given week; the typical wage in 1900 was $1.20 for every dozen pairs. A good cutter could stamp his identification number into three dozen pairs a day.

  Goldfish developed an attitude problem, the result of his frustration at having to work most of his days in silence. Barely able to express himself in English, he made no friends during his first year in Gloversville. At Bacmo, he paid attention to nothing but his work. One of his co-workers, Julia Flansburg, noticed that during his lunch break, Sam would eat out of a brown paper sack, speaking to practically nobody, then hasten back to the cutting room because time was money. Miss Flansburg remembered, “He wanted to find himself a rich girl. He once said he was saving for a fancy vacation, because that’s where ‘the live ones’ were. He had no vices; he couldn’t afford to, because he seemed to have his life all figured out.”

  There was one creeping sin in his life, which he never renounced. The moment Goldfish came into cash, he found it impossible not to gamble. In November 1899, he bet two dollars that Harvard would beat Yale that year in football. The game was a scoreless tie. Goldfish insisted he did not lose the bet, but in the end was forced to make good on it. One Jacob Sandler, then a young boy in town, recounted to Goldwyn many years later, “I overheard you bemoaning the loss of this $2.00 and started teasing you, and you chased me all the way around to the alley of the Windsor Hotel.”

  Inside the cutting room, Goldfish developed a reputation as a bully, a surly loner who pushed around anybody who got in his way. His co-workers did not like him, and they often pulled pranks on him, like gluing the blades of his shears together when he left the room. On a good day, Goldfish could cut only two dozen gloves at best. He was fired.

  New companies sprang up in Gloversville almost every week. Any two people who thought they could mobilize enough workers to produce more gloves than they were producing by themselves on an assembly line invested their savings in equipment, took over some abandoned church or cellar, and hung out a shingle. Goldfish found a job as a cutter at the firm of Lehr and Nelson.

  He realized that he was too weak ever to become a great glove-cutter. If his forearms were not going to get harder, he reasoned, the skins he was cutting would have to get softer. Goldfish took to arriving early at the factory every morning, so that he could lay his hands on the most buttery skins. If they were sitting in piles for other cutters, he simply exchanged one of his for one of theirs.

  Goldwyn also made a friend at Lehr and Nelson, a son of one of the owners. Abram Lehr was a good-looking young man, Goldfish’s age and even slighter in build. He had a nasal voice and an easy manner. Lehr’s father wanted Abe to learn the glove business from the ground up. He became Goldfish’s benchmate. Not having to prove himself as a glove-cutter and having a benchmate who did, Lehr struck a bargain with Goldfish: He would give Sam some of his hides each day, with the understanding that they were to be stamped with Lehr’s identification number. If Goldfish worked an extra hour or two each day, Lehr could work that much less. Goldfish found the opportunity to earn extra money irresistible. Putting in thirteen-hour workdays, he began making close to twenty-five dollars a week.

  When Samuel Lehr moved his son to another department, he caught on to the scheme and summoned Goldfish to his house. As Goldwyn recalled years later, “He asked me what made a youngster work so hard and what I was after in life. I was surprised that anyone would think of such a question. ‘How can you get ahead, except by working harder than everyone else?’ I demanded.”

  Feeling more secure financially, Goldfish made an effort to meet people. Women intimidated him. He was not especially comely—his hairline was receding, he had large, pointed ears, penetrating gray eyes, beneath dark brows, and a long nose. His surprisingly high-pitched voice knotted up in his larynx; his lips went through great contortions in trying to form words in English. His accent was thick and his manner was brash. He courted only Jewish girls, but he limited himself even there.

  By 1900, Gloversville had a socially active Jewish population and a new synagogue. Goldfish had nothing to do with any of its activities. He was, in the words of Ralph Moses (whose family had participated in Gloversville’s primary industry since the late nineteenth century), “a young man in a hurry.” Goldwyn sensed that any associations at this time—religious or social—would only slow him down.

  Whether Sam Goldfish chose to belong or not, it was part of the Jewish tradition for the community to take care of its own. Even Fulton County had its matchmakers. In 1900, one of these introduced the twenty-one-year-old Goldfish to a girl named Mary Cohen.

  The daughter of a leatherworker, Mary was a tall, pretty girl with a pale complexion and light-brown hair. She had come to Gloversville with her parents from Osmania, a small town outside Vilna. Goldfish went to Mary’s house on an appointed night and fell instantly in love with her. He aggressively pursued her for six months, but she never took to him. Her resistance only excited him.

  The reason Mary Cohen did not fall for Sam Goldfish, said her son years later, “was that he was a more recent immigrant. My mother had come here and gone to school here, and was thoroughly Americanized. She had taken singing and dancing lessons. Here she had grown up in a small community with a relatively small Jewish population, and she was more sensitive to being an immigrant....” His crude speech and manners never appealed to her. “She was a young American, and Sam Goldfish was not.” He asked Mary Cohen to marry him. She refused, and they stopped seeing each other.

  Goldfish decided to better himself. He enrolled in night school at the Gloversville Business College, a converted mansion at the north end of town. Three nights a week, he studied English. He never learned to hold a pen properly—he rested it between the second and third fingers of his right hand—but over the next two years he managed to transform his childish scrawl into penmanship that was quite
readable, even flowery. He also picked up basic American values; such copybook maxims as “Haste makes waste,” “Work overcomes all,” and “Early to bed and early to rise” seasoned his speech for the rest of his life. Goldfish never fully grasped the English language, mostly because he was in such a hurry to implement those tools he had.

  In 1901, after only two years in America, Sam Goldfish thought he had saved enough money to start his own glove business. He found a partner in his new friend Charles Sesonske, who was from Kiev and just Goldfish’s age. Sesonske had apprenticed in this country to a jeweler, who then sent him to Albany to learn how to fit eyeglasses. A short time later, Sesonske had struck out on his own to Gloversville, where he worked as both a jeweler and an optician. He, too, had some money that was burning a hole in his pocket. The two speculators rented a few rooms in a building at 148 South Main Street, about a mile from Sam’s residence at 148 North School Street. They hired a few cutters and a few women to sew and “lay off.” For an initial investment of one hundred dollars, they could buy enough leather from an independent local tanner to get started. “Goldfish and Sesonske” lasted only a few months. The two partners had thought through the production phase of their business but not the distribution. They lost their entire investment. Sesonske went back to being a jeweler, and Goldfish—broke—cast about for a new job.

  Just then the Elite Glove Company needed a foreman in its cutting department. Goldfish met the two owners—the brothers Ralph and Isaac Moses—and talked himself into the job. With only two years of cutting experience, Goldfish was suddenly overseeing a department of one hundred cutters, most of them older than himself. He moved into a slightly better rooming house, at 104 South Main Street.

  Ralph A. Moses had a vision about his business. While most glove manufacturers would willingly make any kind of glove for any buyer, Moses wanted to produce only high-fashion gloves of the best leather. “My father wouldn’t have the Elite name in second-echelon stores,” noted Ralph Moses, Jr. The founder preferred to take pride in everything he produced. Goldfish saw how Moses had turned a new company into one of the most successful in Gloversville, how Elite Fitwell Gloves were earning a national reputation. The concept of “making fewer, better” stuck with Goldfish for the rest of his life.

  The twenty-two-year-old foreman performed well, running his department with an iron hand. Part of Goldfish’s job was to watch for new talent in town—an especially fast glove-cutter or seamstress or (what with America producing more ladies’ gloves) a designer.

  Even the lowliest employee lived decently in Gloversville. Bungalows rented for five dollars a week, and boardinghouses offered food and a room for as little as three dollars. There was little class distinction, and crime was virtually nonexistent. Gloversville had nine public schools, a public library, and two newspapers. The Littauer family built a hospital. The city also boasted a twelve-hundred-seat opera house—almost never dark, because of traveling companies—and a smaller legitimate theater. A new hotel dominated the skyline.

  The Kingsborough Hotel, of brick and brownstone rising five stories above the center of town, was the most modern building for miles around. On the ground floor, five large arches with awnings faced Main Street—two big windows flanking each side of the main portal. A few steps led up to the magnificent mahogany lobby, which gave way to a café-bar overlooking the street. Potted palms and big leather chairs sat on marble floors; shiny brass spittoons were conveniently placed. At the far end of the building was the dining room, which, for the extravagant tariff of one dollar, reputedly served up the finest dinner in central New York. Each of the one hundred five guest chambers was an outside room, complete with the latest conveniences—steam heat, hot and cold water, electric lights, and a telephone. Forty-eight of the rooms were connected with baths.

  Sam Goldfish walked by the Kingsborough often. What impressed him most was not the grandeur but the sight of “drummers”—the traveling salesmen—who used to sit with their feet up on the window ledge in the café, obviously on expense accounts, drinking whiskey and smoking cigars.

  On Wednesday, April 13, 1904, Samuel Goldfish went to neighboring Johnstown and formally applied to become a citizen of the United States. He was told to return on the first Monday of the following month with someone who had known him for the past five years and who could vouch for his residency.

  He reappeared on May 2, 1904, with Harry Galinsky, a retail merchant in Johnstown who had once worked for Isaac Moses. Two thirds of the way down a long sheet of paper, Samuel Goldfish signed an oath of allegiance to support the Constitution of the United States of America. A county judge signed the bottom of the document, thereby ordering “that the said Samuel Goldfish be and he is hereby admitted to be a Citizen of the United States of America.”

  AFTER five years, Goldfish had “taxed” the glove business. He figured that of the thousands in the industry, only the six or seven major producers were taking big money out of it. A dozen successful smaller producers, the independents, were making a little less. Everyone else took home small change. Everyone except those drummers who sat with their feet up on the windowsills of the Kingsborough Hotel. They worked on commission, and the sky seemed to be their limit. Goldfish realized that he had traveled as far as he could within the factory walls of the Elite Glove Company. If he wanted to get anywhere in the business, it would not be by moving up in Gloversville. He would have to move out into the world.

  In 1904, Sam Goldfish went to Ralph Moses and announced his desire to be a glove salesman. The request was so brash, it took Moses a moment to compose himself and say no. “I know gloves inside out,” Goldfish argued. “I’ve made them. I can sell them. I don’t want any money except enough to travel from town to town. I’ll go on streetcars instead of trains and I’ll stay at YMCAs instead of hotels.” Moses was not interested until Goldwyn said, “Give me the company’s toughest territory—where it has never sold gloves before.”

  Moses gave him a list of small New England towns, starting with Pittsfield, Massachusetts. “The leading store there has never carried our goods,” he explained. “If you can sell them, you can sell anyone, and I’ll make you a regular salesman.”

  The next week, Goldfish rode interurban trolleys forty miles to Albany, and another forty miles due east, across the state line into the little city of Pittsfield, in the Berkshires. When he arrived at the target store, a secretary informed him that the buyer was out. Goldfish returned the next day and received the same message. Goldfish returned a third day, and the buyer finally met with him. He explained that he had done business with another firm for twenty years and that the Elite representative was wasting his time. “Maybe I am,” Goldfish told him, “but I intend to sit here until you look at my gloves. You don’t have to buy them, but you shouldn’t turn me down without seeing what I’ve got to sell. You may be missing a bargain.” Inside the office, Goldfish opened his sample case.

  “Is this the way they will look when they are delivered, or is this just a special?” the buyer asked. Goldfish explained every detail of the gloves’ construction and said that if the man did not like what he received, he could send them back. The buyer began by ordering six pairs of ladies’ elbow-length gloves (which sold for twenty-four dollars a dozen). Goldfish left the store with orders for another three hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise.

  Ralph Moses made Goldfish Elite’s salesman for New England and upstate New York and advanced him part of his salary for immediate travel expenses. That night, Goldfish walked to the Kingsborough Hotel. Upon entering the main corridor, he turned left into the high-ceilinged front room, where the drummers played poker. Feeling lucky, he sat down at one of the tables. When he rose a few hours later, he did not have a cent to his name.

  A number of other rough-and-tumble Jewish-Americans like Goldfish were looking for instant returns on their money. A small group of them shared one vision in particular; and within a few years, several made career moves in the same direction. In 1903, fu
rriers Marcus Loew and Adolph Zukor met and talked of investing together. They had their eyes on the lines of people who stood ready to drop coins into nickelodeons. They chose to invest in their dreams separately, buying into penny arcades with facilities for projecting motion pictures.

  That same year, the Warner brothers had the identical vision in Ohio. In 1904, William Fox saw it in Brooklyn. In 1907, Louis B. Mayer bought a former burlesque house in Haverhill, Massachusetts, called the Gem, known locally as “The Germ”; he changed its name to the Orpheum. In Chicago, Carl Laemmle slapped a fresh coat of paint on a building he bought cheap and called his emporium of entertainment White Front.

  It was only a matter of a few years before these new theater owners would discover each other. A similarly self-confident Lewis Selznick moved his jewelry business to New York City and was soon trafficking among them. And on his new route in New England, Sam Goldfish was inevitably to run into the hard-nosed Louis Mayer, and soon the others.

  “THESE are certainly Glove Days,” read the first page of the July 1906 issue of The Glovers’ Review, the monthly trade magazine published in Gloversville. The new young salesman for the Elite Glove Company—“Men and Women’s Fine Gloves: chamois, cape, glace, and mocha” (an especially soft leather made from the pelts of Arabian goats)—could not have taken to the road at a more propitious moment. And by all reports, Goldfish sold gloves in New England towns where they had never sold before. He turned the loneliness of the road into high-horsepower sales drive. He compensated for his limited vocabulary by being relentlessly enthusiastic, persistent, and blunt.