Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  Goldfish was quickly earning fifteen thousand dollars a year, one hundred times what he had made six years earlier. When he was feeling flush, he took the trolley to Saratoga for a few days of recreation. There he once saw Lillian Russell, in a blue velvet dress, with Diamond Jim Brady, gambling at the Canfield Club. Goldfish himself was steering clear of the gaming tables just then in an attempt to save some money for a future venture. Two personal debts were also weighing heavily.

  Goldfish had long told himself that if he succeeded in America, he intended to give his brothers the same opportunities he’d had to struggle for. In the fall of 1906, he sent Bernard the money to sail—second class—to America; he arrived in Boston that December, via England. One year later, brother Benjamin sailed from Liban, Russia. Each assumed the surname Goldfish. Sam set them up as glove salesmen, turning over to them some of the smaller New England accounts he no longer had time to service. Constantly on the road, the three brothers hardly ever saw each other.

  By December 1907, the Elite Glove Company was expanding from coast to coast, and Goldfish’s territory grew with it. Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Washington were added to his New England territory.

  The following June, he traveled to Europe, to inspect foreign product lines and to visit his mother. Unable to face Poland again, he sent her money to meet him in Karlsbad, where they would take the waters. For several days they visited, almost never leaving their hotel. Years later, Hannah told her granddaughter Adela that she could not believe the change in her son in less than ten years. The most striking proof of his success was his apparel: Sam had become a clotheshorse, fond of snazzy suits and smart shoes. Hannah Gelbfisz was proud.

  Everybody else noted changes in Goldfish as well. The entire industry knew of him. When he returned to Gloversville from the road, he spent the night at the home of his boss, Ralph Moses. If he was staying in the Gloversville environs for a few weeks, he would take a room at Mrs. Jones’s boardinghouse, where the proprietress cooked special meals for him. Goldfish maintained friendships with Charlie Sesonske, who had opened a successful jewelry shop, and Abe Lehr, who ran his own tanning factory, then became vice president of another booming glove company, called Dempster & Place.

  Even women saw Goldfish through new eyes. He still came on too strong, but he had acquired the alluring aura of success. One town resident, Daisy Inch, wrote Goldwyn forty years later, “an evening was not complete unless we had a dance or two with ‘Sammy.’ (Always so full of fun.) At that time you were the best salesman the Elite Glove Co. ever had.” Goldwyn never forgot Miss Inch, but she did not come within a mile of another young lady, with whom he had become smitten.

  Her name was Bessie Ginzberg. A fair-skinned beauty with lustrous eyes, she had a deferential air; around men she turned kittenish. Her father was a Russian émigré who had come to America in steerage at the age of fourteen and sold matches in Maine before making a small fortune in the diamond business. They lived in Boston, where Bessie studied to be a concert pianist. Her mother was the sister of the Moses brothers in Gloversville.

  Sam chased Bessie for months, but she kept him at bay for the same reasons most women did. She found his energy refreshing after her staid Bostonian beaus, but she still hoped to meet somebody more refined. She took up with another glover, a manufacturer named Harry Louis, who went into business with her uncle Joseph at the Bacmo Glove Company. Yet another rejection left Goldfish alone but undaunted.

  In the summer of 1910, Bessie Ginzberg and her mother and Harry Louis were vacationing on Long Lake in the Adirondacks. There she caught the eye of an off-duty performer named Jesse Lasky, who had a cornet act with his sister, Blanche. The children of a shoe salesman who died young, the Laskys had grown up in San Jose, where they developed a decidedly different manner than that of most Jews who were their contemporaries. They were fully assimilated Americans, flag-waving vaudevillians. Their act was a medley of army bugle calls. Jesse, with his sweet and doughy face, had auditioned as a child for John Philip Sousa. Later he sank his father’s life insurance benefits into gold mines in the Klondike, then embarked on a stage career, shanghaiing his sister to be his partner. Jesse’s head was always full of theatrical fantasies and get-rich-quick schemes. While on the road, he began managing acts he liked; in time, he put together his own shows, always thinking big and bigger. He was known throughout his life as the nicest guy in show business.

  Up at Long Lake in the summer of 1910, there was nothing fainthearted about Jesse Lasky. In front of her mother and Harry Louis, he asked Bessie Ginzberg to dance and literally swept her off her feet. Over the next few days, they spent as much time together as possible. Harry Louis withdrew to Gloversville. The following December, Jesse and Bessie married in Boston. Unlike most of his former inamoratas, Bessie Ginzberg Lasky remained in contact with Sam Goldfish, even after she and her groom set up house in New York City.

  The Elite Glove Company was moving to Manhattan too. After years of temporary offices in the city, they opened permanent sales headquarters there. Sam Goldfish was the leading candidate for the position of sales manager. The job would mean less travel, more prestige and money. He would become a stockholder in the private company and supervise all the East Coast drummers. All Sam Goldfish needed to complete the picture of success he had envisioned for himself was a wife.

  On one of his next visits to New York City, Bessie Lasky invited Sam to dinner and introduced him to Jesse’s sister. After years on the road playing cornet with her brother, Jesse noted, his sister was “becoming weary of theatrical activities, although she didn’t hate the production end as she had the performing. Still, she frequently voiced a desire to marry a solid, staid businessman and have done with the frantic pace of show business.” Upon meeting this sweet, dark-haired woman with sad eyes, Sam—almost completely bald and wearing a pince-nez—fell instantly in love. The only difference this time was that Blanche responded positively.

  Each desperately yearned for the solace of marriage. For the thirty-one-year-old Goldfish it would end his years of solitude; for the twenty-seven-year-old Blanche Lasky it meant an end to the crowds. After years of constant rejection, Sam Goldfish had found somebody to love. He told everybody he knew of his good fortune.

  The Laskys had mixed feelings. Jesse knew Blanche was anxious about being unwed, still having to live with her mother and brother and his wife; but he had always imagined someone who would adore her as he did. Lasky asked around about Sam Goldfish. His theater-owning friend Louis B. Mayer, up in Massachusetts, had encountered Goldfish and told Lasky he must break up the wedding plans at all costs, that Sam Goldfish was no husband for any man’s sister. Blanche told her fiancé of Mayer’s advice; and four weeks after their announcement, she broke off the engagement.

  Never one to take no for an answer, Goldfish sold himself to Blanche as he had never sold before. As Jesse Lasky, Jr., observed years later, “Sam Goldfish could be the most charming man in the world when he wanted to be.” On May 8, 1910, Rabbi Rudolph Grossman married Blanche Lasky to Samuel Goldfish before the few immediate family members. The ceremony was performed in the newlyweds’ large brownstone at 10 West Sixty-first Street, far from the crowded slums Sam Goldfish had first encountered in New York.

  3 Synapsis

  IT WAS a marriage of inconvenience, in trouble from the start.

  Blanche never loved him, and Sam knew it. Except for their mutual desire to be married, they had almost nothing in common. Each strong and stubborn, toughened by years on the road, they were severely mismatched. Years later Goldwyn admitted to a therapist, “She couldn’t stand the sight of me.”

  After years of living by himself, Sam was uncompromising in his ways, and he expected his wife to surrender to his demands. She craved affection, which he was totally unprepared to give. Blanche spent most of her days with her mother, a few blocks away, crying. This bad situation worsened in January 1912; on the twenty-fifth, a child, named Ruth, was born. “I was an accidental daugh
ter,” she affirmed many years later. “I know she didn’t want my father’s baby.”

  The Goldfishes’ social life revolved around the Laskys and a few of their theatrical friends. Jesse and Bessie, also new parents, proved to be the best buffers between Sam and Blanche; but Sam always found Jesse Lasky a little foolish and never really liked him. Lasky fell further in Sam’s estimation with his latest investment, his most extravagant theatrical venture yet, a production of the Folies-Bergère. “I lost everything I had accumulated—about $100,000—” Lasky recounted, “salvaging only the framed first dollar taken in at the box-office.” For all the Goldfishes’ marital contention, Blanche at least took comfort in being rid of show business.

  “Despite doubts and dogmas; despite demagogues and defamers; despite bugaboos and bugbears, business is better and improving,” reported The Glovers’ Review in the July 1912 issue. For Goldwyn’s money, all those dangers to the prosperity of the glove business were wrapped up in one man—Wbodrow Wilson. The President’s solution to the rising costs of business was to lower tariffs, thereby promoting the importation of foreign goods. At noon on April 7, 1913, a special session of the Sixty-third Congress, called by President Wilson, convened. Congressman Oscar W. Underwood, of Alabama, introduced in the House of Representatives H.R. 10—a comprehensive bill to reduce tariff duties. It specified rates for each style and hide of glove, in some cases 60 percent reductions from existing duties. Sam Goldfish considered this a sop to big business and the first step toward stamping out scores of small concerns in Gloversville. He thought it paved the way for the largest glove manufacturers to become little more than glove importers.

  On April 14, 1913, Gloversville and Johnstown, New York, shut down for the day in protest against the Underwood bill. Stores, offices, factories, and mills in the twin cities closed so that the employees might join in a “monster parade.” Several thousand workers and merchants took to the streets, marching in sections behind large banners bearing their companies’ names, all “in the common cause of striving to avert what they believe would mean disaster to the industry upon which the fifty thousand inhabitants of Fulton county are practically entirely dependent.” The House passed the Underwood bill without changing a comma in the scheduling on gloves. There would be a summer’s grace before the Senate doubtless passed the bill, thus clearing its enactment into law.

  Goldfish worked through the season in the new Elite offices in Room 1405 at 100 Fifth Avenue, between Fifteenth and Sixteenth streets. Even in the summer torpor, he liked to walk home to his apartment. One especially hot, muggy afternoon that August, Goldfish altered his routine. He chanced into the Herald Square Theater on Thirty-fourth Street, which showed “flickers.”

  “Going into a nickelodeon wasn’t considered in entirely good taste,” Goldwyn remembered years later. Upon entering, he knew why. Inside the darkened theater, he was almost overcome by the heavy odor of peanuts and perspiration. For five or ten minutes at a time, images—cops and robbers and barroom slapstick—fluttered around on a crude idea of a screen. A cowboy on horseback, identified as “Broncho Billy,” suddenly appeared, jumping onto a moving train.

  Goldfish left the dingy three-hundred-seat theater and walked uptown. By the time he had reached the southwest corner of Central Park, his mind was made up. The same lightning bolt that had struck Zukor and Laemmle and Fox and Loew and Mayer and the Warner brothers now electrified him. He could not get that image of Broncho Billy out of his head. It had, Goldwyn pinpointed years later, “brought me into a whole new, exciting world and I wanted to be a part of it.”

  THOMAS EDISON was not the first to experiment with animated pictures. Several Europeans had played with sequential photography of an action in progress and with a novelty item called the zoetrope, or “wheel of life”—a small cylinder with pictures that depicted movement when revolved on a vertical spindle. In 1881, a young Englishman named William Kennedy Laurie Dickson suddenly appeared in Menlo Park, New Jersey, and convinced Edison to take him on as an assistant. On October 17, 1888, their work had advanced to the point where Edison could state, “I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion, and in such a form as to be both Cheap practical and convenient.” He called it a Kinetoscope.

  In April 1894, motion pictures moved from the realm of science into industry. Twenty-five Kinetoscopes were shipped to Atlantic City and Chicago and to a New York storefront at 1155 Broadway. Edison had not worked out the synchronization of sound with the pictures, so the fifty-foot loop of film passed before the viewers’ eyes in silence, except for the groans of the machinery. The price for sixteen seconds of “monkeyshines” was twenty-five cents, the equivalent of a skilled worker’s hourly wage. The machines earned $120 their opening day.

  The demand for motion picture projectors, film, and cameras was on, and the supply kept pace. Once the novelty of their inventions wore off, the film pioneers realized it was not the machinery that would lure audiences so much as the images they could offer. William Dickson left Edison to start the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company; and, in 1896, one of his machines projected on a screen footage of the Empire State Express rounding a curve; the audience screamed in terror as the great New York Central locomotive barreled toward them. Edison responded to Biograph’s films with such displays of action as Sea Waves at Coney Island and Fire Engines Responding to an Alarm. One of Edison’s cameramen, Edwin S. Porter, began creating such “story pictures” as The Great Train Robbery. Countless imitators followed.

  Motion pictures packed in audiences everywhere. It seemed that anybody who invested in a storefront and projection equipment—like Zukor or Loew—could make a killing. Harry Warner and his brothers opened a theater in Newcastle, Pennsylvania. Its ninety-nine seats were rented by the day from the local undertaker. In 1905, nearly one hundred “nickelodeons” opened in Pittsburgh alone. These small operations gobbled up product on an almost daily basis, purchasing films outright. After they had saturated their audience, theater owners wanted to trade their films for others. Carl Laemmle established a “film exchange.” It soon dawned on producers that they stood to make more money renting their pictures than selling them.

  A number of Chicagoans realized the gains to be made at the front end of the business. Small-time actor G. M. Anderson (born Aronson) had made his bow in Porter’s Great Train Robbery, then began to produce his own pictures. William N. Selig, who developed his own projector, also produced films, right in the Chicago tenderloin. On October 24, 1907, a local judge ruled that William Selig’s camera had infringed on the Edison patents. Fearing subpoenas, several other filmmakers met at lunch in Chicago to discuss an arrangement they all might make with Edison.

  An unexpectedly harmonious meeting in New Jersey resulted in the formation of the Motion Picture Patents company, by which all picture-makers could be licensed under the Edison patents in consideration of royalty payments. This “Trust” controlled most motion picture production through its participants’ pooling of patents. They exerted as much strength over exhibition by threatening to cut off their supply of films to any theaters that bought outside product.

  As the appetite for films increased, new cameras claiming new patents appeared. Pirating continued and independent film exchanges sprang up. In the summer of 1909, Carl Laemmle, finding it hard to keep his exchange adequately fed, decided to produce films himself. The Independent Motion Picture company—IMP, as the company was known from the start—got an immediate boost when Edwin Porter left Edison to produce its pictures.

  The larger companies nurtured their output under greenhouse conditions, indoors. The Edison company built a studio in the Bronx; Biograph set up shop in a brownstone at II East Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. A procession of actors appeared regularly outside their doors, looking for work.

  Among these ranks was a tall and lanky Kentuckian. David Wark Grif fith had escaped his impoverished ch
ildhood by joining a traveling theater company as an actor and a hopeful playwright. He landed the part of a woodsman in Edwin Porter’s Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest at the Edison studios. Finding the door open to him at Biograph, he acted in the odd picture and sold several scenarios. In 1908, Biograph found itself shorthanded in filling its orders and assigned a film to the thirty-three-year-old Griffith.

  Griffith understood the intensity achieved by moving the camera close to an actor’s face. He demanded a more naturalistic style of acting from the phenomenally gifted group of players that was at his disposal. Their names did not matter, because screen actors were not given billing. In time, however, certain performers appeared and reappeared in similar roles, and their faces began to register with an adoring public.

  At first, only one thespian at the Biograph studio had distinguished herself from the rest of the chorus—Florence Lawrence. She was known only as the “Biograph Girl.” In 1909, Carl Laemmle lured her away. After staging a publicity ruse about her alleged demise, he announced that the “Biograph Girl” was not dead but simply reborn as the “Imp Girl.”

  The next actor to command “movie fans‘” attention was Florence Lawrence’s successor as the “Biograph Girl,” a Canadian named Gladys Smith. The public fell in love with this goldilocks of breathtaking innocence, who played a character known as “Little Mary.” She had adopted the Christian name early in her stage career and traded in her surname for a family appellation, Pickford. Just as popular, at first, was G. M. Anderson, the bit player in The Great Train Robbery. After forming Essanay Productions, he starred in a series of weekly motion pictures—376 of them—portray—ing the American screen’s first western hero, Broncho Billy.

  SAM GOLDFISH walked directly from the nickelodeon on Thirty-fourth Street to his brother-in-law’s apartment, passionate about launching a career in motion pictures. In those days of continuous vaudeville shows, theater owners used to run “flickers” every so often just to shoo patrons out of the theater; motion pictures were known in the trade as “chasers.” Lasky asked how long Sam had been contemplating this idea. “About a half hour,” Goldfish replied; “as long as it took me to get home. I’ve made a decision.”