Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  His initial thought was to become a theater owner. After pricing a few theaters, he assumed that producing films demanded less investment than exhibiting them.

  For the rest of the summer of 1913, Sam Goldfish talked of little but Broncho Billy and the wide-open range of motion pictures. Jesse, still smarting from his experience with the Folies-Bergère, remained skeptical. His former cornet partner had had her fill of show business and offered absolutely no support. Not until the close of the season did Goldfish find somebody who would listen to him—a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law School named Arthur Friend.

  Friend’s German-immigrant father, bored in the clothing business, had gone west in a covered wagon and sold shoes in Sacramento just when gold was discovered. Like most forty-niners, he went bust; then he traveled the country. In Boston, he found a wife, with whom he moved to Milwaukee and had eleven children. Arthur was a young boy when his father suddenly died.

  Friend grew to six feet three inches and had caring, bespectacled eyes. Theatrical yearnings surfaced in college; and almost immediately after graduating from law school he returned to his hometown. Three years later, in 1909, he organized the Friend Players, a company that included Ruth Chatterton, Lenore Ulric, and Lowell Sherman. When his aspirations outgrew the city limits, he moved to New York, where he opened a law practice and fell in with a number of theatrical people. His passion for cards enabled him to meet a number of sharp young Jews who lived on the Upper West Side. Through a dentist, he came to play poker with Jesse Lasky and Sam Goldfish.

  In late summer, the Goldfishes, the Laskys, and the Friends (Arthur had married an actress from Milwaukee) vacationed together in Naples, Maine. Jesse spent most of his time out on Sebago Lake, avoiding Sam’s constant babbling about motion pictures. But Friend paid attention, especially to Goldfish’s idea that a single filmed story could run longer than the present one or two reels.

  Back in New York, Sam kept badgering his brother-in-law. He argued that there were great opportunities for producers who could serve up “something different from Western stuff and slap-stick comedies.... And why should your entertainment have to be so short? If it’s a good story there’s no reason why it couldn’t run through five reels.... We could sell good films and long films all over the world.”

  At last Jesse responded. “I know a business that would be wonderful,” he said, “—tamales. They make them in San Francisco. They are wonderful things. In the East you never hear about them.” Lasky was convinced that if they “tied up the tamale concession in New York we could make a fortune.”

  “That’s great,” Goldfish replied. “Why don’t you do the tamales? I’m going to do this.” Then over lunch at the Hoffman House, a popular Broadway hangout, Goldfish used an old sales trick—“which is to show the other fellow how your idea will be to his advantage.” Goldfish suggested calling the company the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. “That sounds better than ‘Lasky’s Hot Tamales,’ doesn’t it?” he asked. Lasky finally agreed. Now they needed someone who knew how to make motion pictures.

  Goldfish invited D. W Griffith to lunch and put his ideas on the table. Griffith just sat there, his clear blue eyes peering out of his aquiline face in bemusement. “A very interesting project,” he finally offered, “and if you can show me a bank deposit of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars I think we might talk.”

  Goldfish thought they should look elsewhere—for someone whose selfassuredness could compensate for any lack of experience. He and Lasky and Friend had just such a friend in common, Cecil Blount DeMille.

  The de Mille family was already well known in theatrical circles. Cecil’s father, Henry, was an actor turned writer who collaborated with David Belasco for many years. Cecil’s brother, William, also became a successful playwright, and married the daughter of philosopher Henry George. Sometime after Henry de Mille died, his wife, Beatrice, took an office in the Knickerbocker Theater Building on Broadway and became an authors’ representative, one of the leading play brokers of her day.

  In 1910, Jesse Lasky had wanted to produce a musical, and he inquired about William’s availability. Mrs. de Mille explained that he was heavily booked but that her other son was shaping into a good playwright. “Mr. Lasky could never be anything but urbane,” Cecil B. DeMille recalled years later, “and he made it quite clear that he did not want Cecil; he wanted William. But ... mother had a way with her; and mother had her way. When the converstion ended, Mr. Lasky, without quite knowing how it happened, was saddled with Cecil.”

  Already the younger de Mille was trying to step out of his brother’s shadow: William, the intellectual, knew Shakespeare by heart; Cecil used to contend that “the greatest poem in the English language” was Kipling’s “If.” He compensated for his lack of depth with flair, overcoming his insecurities with a flamboyant personality. He took to capitalizing the d in his surname. He was full of derring-do and was willing to attempt anything. His first musical with Lasky, entitled California, was a mild success.

  DeMille wrote a few more operettas for Lasky, and with their mutual “spirit of adventure,” they became fast friends. After several years of Broadway, DeMille was eager for a change. “I was 32,” DeMille recounted, “Jesse a year older. I was, quite seriously, thinking of going to Mexico to join a revolution. I forget what revolution was brewing or boiling at the time there. Any revolution would have done....” Goldfish thought DeMille’s participation in his motion picture venture would keep Lasky’s dying interest alive.

  At the grill at the Claridge Hotel on Forty-fourth Street, DeMille joined the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company as director-general. They outlined the partnership on the back of their menu. “Jesse would head the company,” DeMille remembered. “We were all glad to have his name on it, for his was the only one of our names which meant anything as a theatrical producer. I would make the picture, or pictures, if the company survived the first one. Sam Goldfish would sell them. Arthur Friend would handle the corporate and legal side.”

  A few wrinkles needed ironing out: DeMille had seen but one or two pictures in his life, to say nothing of never having directed; the Lasky Company had no idea what they were going to produce; and Samuel Goldfish was still sales manager for the Elite Glove Company.

  If Goldfish had second thoughts about abandoning the glove trade, they were laid to rest on October 3, 1913. That night, President Wilson signed the tariff bill that the American glove industry had been dreading for a year. If that was not enough to convince Goldfish that it was time to change careers, his boss, Ralph Moses, provided the final stimulus.

  “Sam,” Moses said that fall, according to his son, “you’re not the type of man who’ll be a great man in this business. You want too much too fast. In the glove business, nothing comes that fast.” Despite Goldfish’s phenomenal sales record, Moses said he would never become a partner in the family firm. Furthermore, the entire glove industry was stretched to its limits; it was already divided up among companies that were well established. In some instances, second generations of glove manufacturers were running their family businesses.

  His head reeling over the possibilities of the motion picture business, Goldfish still showed up daily at his fourteenth-floor office on lower Fifth Avenue. There he discovered a way to import foreign gloves without paying duty. Goldfish ordered crates of the finest ladies’ dress gloves from France, but instead of having them shipped in pairs, he requested that they be separated into boxes of right-hand gloves and left-hand gloves, each shipment sent to a different addressee at a different American port. Goldfish planned to let the parcels go unclaimed, leaving them to be auctioned after a few months by the two different port authorities. At each auction he would be the only bidder, for clearly hundreds of gloves for one hand were completely useless without their mates. Goldfish bought them for a song, matched them, and was able to sell highest-quality gloves far below market price.

  Realizing he was never going to be a power broker in gloves, he served not
ice. He would remain with Elite through the end of the year. Moses wished him well in his new career. With some ten thousand dollars’ savings to show for his fourteen years in gloves, the company’s top salesman prepared for what he called his “first really big gamble.”

  Goldfish made an appointment with Thomas Edison himself and drove down to West Orange, where he encountered the inventor fussing in his laboratory in his efforts to synchronize sound with his motion pictures. Goldfish explained that he was about to enter the motion picture production business and he was sizing up the equipment on the market. Because of his deafness, Edison heard little of what Goldfish had to say; but he granted him permission to send his director to the Edison studios to see how films were made.

  DeMille went to 188th Street near Bronx Park and watched an Edison director and cameraman set up a camera and point it toward a stone wall alongside a road. DeMille remembered: “The director called for action. The cameraman cranked. A girl emerged from a hedge, climbed the wall, and ran down the road, looking back in terror from time to time at some unseen pursuer. A man met her, stopped her, and they talked, in pantomime of course, with much emotive gesticulation.” After a day of observation, DeMille reported to Lasky and Goldfish, “If that’s the way they make pictures I think I will be knighted after the first year.” He never returned for another lesson.

  Years later, the other partners all credited Goldfish with charting the course their company should follow. The four men agreed their films should stand for quality, that they should not simply grind out two-reel sausages. “We determined to make it a policy of our company that all our pictures would be, as we called it, feature-length,” said DeMille, “long enough to tell a real story, with the same elaboration of plot that an audience could expect from a stage play.”

  The company was severely undercapitalized at fifteen thousand dollars—half from Goldfish and half from Lasky; Friend was a partner by dint of his role as legal counsel, and DeMille because of his willingness to take a flier. Each drew one hundred dollars a week in salary. Lasky remained active in vaudeville—“and I didn’t blame him,” Goldwyn recalled—pro—ducing acts for the Keith-Albee circuit. It behooved Goldfish and DeMille to find a property to film. They turned to Broadway, hoping to get a minor stage success—one whose story had proved itself sound but whose film rights would come cheap.

  DeMille thought The Squaw Man, a hit play by Edwin Milton Royle a few seasons back, suited them perfectly. It was a western with a love story, an infallible combination in Goldfish’s mind because it would appeal to women as well as men; and it could be filmed outdoors, no small consideration to a band of gypsy filmmakers without a studio. One afternoon at the Lambs Club, Royle agreed to sell the rights for some four thousand dollars, a figure within their means.

  Fortune smiled again, as Lasky and DeMille were able to lasso the matinee idol Dustin Farnum, who had triumphed on Broadway in The Virginian . This was no small stroke of luck, because Farnum was generally booked in a play, and few successful legitimate actors would appear in motion pictures, for fear of tarnishing their reputation. “Even unemployed actors would not consent to appear in films unless you guaranteed not to disclose their names on the screen or to the press,” Lasky recalled. As company bursar, Goldfish pushed the idea of Farnum’s working for shares in the company instead of salary. The actor was willing, as long as they stuck to the original idea of filming in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River, where many one-reel westerns were shot. Plans changed because it was becoming well known that the Motion Picture Patents Trust had goon squads to bust up small, independent productions. Lasky, who realized that he had to maintain DeMille’s interest in the project, urged moving the production to the real West. Farnum said he wanted to be paid in cash, up front, two hundred fifty dollars a week for five weeks.

  The Lasky Company got Oscar Apfel, a young director who had worked for the Edison company, to watch over DeMille’s shoulder. He would serve as both technical adviser and shotgun against any intruding members of the Trust. Albert Gandolfi was hired as cameraman. The only major decision still unresolved was the location for shooting the picture. They needed someplace out of town—far enough from the clutches of the Trust and western enough to suit the story’s setting. Lasky, traveling with one of his vaudeville acts, Hermann the Great, had once seen some Indians in Flagstaff, Arizona.

  In December 1913, DeMille, Apfel, Gandolfi, Farnum, and his dresser, Fred Kley, boarded a train for Flagstaff. Arthur Friend still had a lucrative law practice; Jesse Lasky had his career as a Broadway producer; Cecil B. DeMille, who had been feeling restless anyway, could always fall back on playwriting. As for Sam Goldfish, then thirty-four, his entire future was packed onto that train. Virtually his entire nest egg for the support of his wife and almost two-year-old baby was gone, putting an already shaky marriage in further jeopardy.

  Sam went to Pennsylvania Station to see off the entourage. Cecil, with all his gear, arrived by chauffeur-driven car; the rest of his family regarded this venture, his niece Agnes recalled, as “the purest folly.” At the last minute, the partners had tried to induce Cecil’s brother, Bill, into investing five thousand dollars; but, as Cecil recalled, “he said he thought he had better keep his money to pay my fare home from the West when, as he confidently expected, the company folded up.” Lasky was supposed to board the train but at the last minute backed out. As he recalled, “I had no great personal faith in the project and I couldn’t see myself wasting time in Arizona when I had business to look after in the East. So I said good-by to the rest of them at the train and promised Cecil I’d come out if he needed me.”

  Blanche Lasky Goldfish was not among the well-wishers at the station. She wanted no part in this wild-goose chase. Throughout these last few weeks of frenzied preparation, the retired vaudevillian kept her distance and held her tongue. As the Santa Fe pulled out of the station, Sam Goldfish held his breath. His marriage and his career were riding on the boxcars rolling westward.

  4 Dramatis Personae

  I HAVE SINCE wondered whether a little more knowledge would have deterred them,“ mused William de Mille many years after his kid brother and the rest of the crew boarded the Arizona-bound train. ”I am inclined to think not. Youth they had to a pronounced degree, and energy—ye gods! what energy!“ De Mille’s daughter Agnes thought it was more than that. Even as a child, she felt that what fired the hearts of the men in that enterprise was unmitigated greed—”pure lust for money and power.“

  By the time Cecil DeMille left New York, he had viewed several motion pictures and was “beginning to talk as an expert.” Heading into the Arizona desert, the director-general and Oscar Apfel penciled twenty pages of script that combined Apfel’s knowledge of motion pictures with DeMille’s knowledge of dramatic construction. They hoped to get it typed in Arizona.

  What DeMille encountered as the train pulled into the station in Flagstaff has been described as a siege of everything from rainstorms to blizzards to all-out war between cattlemen and sheepmen. In fact, it was a beautiful day—sunny and clear. The problem was that when he stepped off the train, he looked around and saw only dull flatlands, nothing like the West of his imaginings. He suddenly remembered tales he had heard of moviemaking in California. Before the train had watered up and whistled, DeMille and company were back on board. Through the “red and orange Indian mountains,” they headed into the setting sun, until they reached Los Angeles.

  It was like coming into Eden—temperate air, fragrant with orange blossoms, eucalyptus, and jasmine; palm trees here and there fanning the blue skies; geraniums, bougainvillea, roses, and poinsettias growing wild; the snow-capped San Gabriel Mountains looming over desert on one hand, valleys of citrus and grapes on the other, and yielding to the gentle slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains; then an unobstructed vista for miles, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Three hundred thousand people called this loosely connected archipelago of communities home, four hundred square miles of land that he
ld a century of avaricious history, brazen desire for the land and all its potential—gold, oil, water, railroads.

  Upon arrival at the old Santa Fe depot, DeMille and crew took taxicabs to Los Angeles’s finest hotel, the Alexandria, downtown at 210 West Fifth Street. They immediately attracted the attention that motion picture people and their equipment continue to draw. Two men in particular took special interest in the Easterners. L. L. Burns and Harry Revier owned and operated a small laboratory ten miles outside the city, near some space they thought might double as a studio. Burns and Revier drove DeMille through a great expanse of open country down a thoroughfare called Prospect Avenue, to “a broad, shady avenue” called Vine Street. There stood the “studio.”

  It was a barn—a large, L-shaped building of dark-green wood, stained with the droppings of pepper bark. It ran south on Vine and east along Selma Avenue, reaching back into a citrus grove. The owner of the barn, Jacob Stern, was willing to rent the space so long as he could garage his carriage and horses there.

  Just when the New York office of the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company assumed DeMille was capturing Arizona on film, a telegram from Cecil arrived, stating, as Lasky remembered: “FLAGSTAFF NO GOOD FOR OUR PURPOSE. HAVE PROCEEDED TO CALIFORNIA. WANT AUTHORITY TO RENT BARN IN PLACE CALLED HOLLYWOOD FOR $75 A MONTH. REGARDS TO SAM.”

  “Sam,” Jesse remembered, “hit the ceiling.” Lasky immediately defended DeMille’s decision despite his own halfhearted belief. Goldfish insisted on calling the company home. Such unilateral decisionmaking was unacceptable; Goldfish had never liked the notion of their filming so far beyond his purview; and DeMille had a tendency toward excess that always troubled Goldfish. Then Sam realized the return trip would only cost additional time and money. The license to stay offered at least the chance of a film being made. “AUTHORIZE YOU TO RENT BARN,” read the return wire, “BUT ON MONTH-TO-MONTH BASIS. DON’T MAKE ANY LONG COMMITMENT. REGARDS. JESSE AND SAM.”