Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  Frances Howard, as photographed in 1924 by Edward Steichen for Vogue. INSET: The budding actress in 1920 (second row, left) sits in front of the great love of her life, George Cukor, then manager of the Lyceum Players in Rochester. Frances’s sister Dede sits in front and their mother, Bonnie, to the right.

  Samuel Goldwyn in the spring of 1925 with his two new discoveries: Frances Howard, whom he would marry, and Vilma Banky, whom he would turn into a star. OPPOSITE: In 1926 Goldwyn gave Gary Cooper his first important role, in The Winning of Barbara Worth.

  On the Nevada set of the film with director Henry King.

  Sam and Frances on their Hollywood terrace in 1926, with their son, Samuel Goldwyn. Jr.

  Ruth. Her father did not speak to her for twelve years after an incident over a baked potato.

  Two Lovers, starring Vilma Banky. The addition of sound quickly killed the Hungarian actress’s career.

  Left to right, Goldwyn, Joseph Schenck, Frances Goldwyn, and writer Sidney Howard in 1929, promoting Bulldog Drummond, the picture that successfully carried Ronald Colman from stardom on the silent screen into the talkies.

  Goldwyn, Florenz Ziegfeld, and Goldwyn’s associate Arthur Hornblow, Jr., on the set of Whoopee! The smash musical made a movie star of Eddie Cantor and marked the end of Ziegfeld’s career.

  Eddie Cantor (right) “serves tea” to Goldwyn, who was consulting with Sinclair Lewis in 1931, when the producer was adapting Arrowsmith for the screen.

  Goldwyn and Eddie Cantor watch Busby Berkeley rehearse the Goldwyn Girls in a number from Roman Scandals (1933). The eager blonde (lower right) is Lucille Ball.

  United Artists stars and partners in 1931. Left to right: Al Jolson, Mary Pickford, Ronald Colman, Gloria Swanson, Douglas Fairbanks, Joseph Schenck, Charlie Chaplin, Goldwyn, and Eddie Cantor. Within a few years Schenck would leave to merge his Twentieth Century Productions with Fox, and all the stars would fade from the screen—except for Goldwyn’s Colman and Cantor, whose films kept the studio alive in the early years of the Depression.

  After closing her season at the Met in Madama Butterfly, Farrar wanted to rest. That the Lasky Company was making all their films in California while Zukor was producing in New York prompted the great soprano to invite Goldfish to her home in Manhattan. Even Lasky knew the idea of luring Geraldine Farrar to make a motion picture “was about as plausible as getting the Statue of Liberty to walk on water.” But, as Lasky later said of his partner’s irrefutable charm, “Sam has a touch of magic to him.”

  Farrar agreed to appear in three motion pictures for twenty thousand dollars. Goldfish knew the fee was ridiculously low, “for she could have got nearly double the amount for a concert tour of the same length of time that it would take to make the films.” But the novelty of silent pictures appealed to her, especially that she could “perform” and still rest her voice. Goldfish promised her a reception in Hollywood greater than anything she had seen in the courts of Europe—including her own railroad car to Los Angeles, a furnished house, servants, and food during her stay.

  Banner headlines followed Farrar’s train as it crossed the continent. Legions of teenage followers, known as “Gerry-flappers,” awaited her at every stop. Goldfish and Lasky were there at the Santa Fe depot in Los Angeles, along with five thousand schoolchildren, who were given a holiday so they might greet her en masse. As Farrar walked the carpet from her private railway coach to the waiting limousine, the youngsters tossed roses at her feet.

  Hollywood was being built up—especially along Prospect Avenue, now Hollywood Boulevard; but, as Goldwyn remembered, it was still “a one-horse town in the West.” For all the sudden fame of movie stars, Angelenos had never seen the likes of Farrar. The night following her arrival, the mayor of Los Angeles held a civic reception in her honor at the Hollywood Hotel—the first time, Goldfish noted, anybody connected with motion pictures had been accorded such a distinction. In a ballroom draped in bunting and reverberating with band music, two hundred specially invited guests paid homage. “I was prouder at that moment than I had ever been before,” Goldwyn recalled years later. “To me, it was the crowning glory of my ‘glorifying’ days. There would, I told myself, be no more pinching and scraping—no more wondering whether we could afford a new star. We were firmly on the road to success.”

  For weeks, the singer had been asking Goldfish who was to be her leading man in her first film, Maria Rosa. He kept dodging the question because Farrar was notoriously “difficult,” and he did not want to risk alienating her with an improper choice. Just before the mayor’s banquet, Goldfish introduced her to Wallace Reid, one of the most striking figures in pictures—a twenty-three-year-old, fine-featured actor with blue eyes and a fatal streak of insecurity. For days before her arrival, Reid kept quailing, “What if she doesn’t like me!”

  She did—and so would the public, responding to a hunch that contributed to the evolution of screenwriting. In the stage version of Maria Rosa, the character to be portrayed by Reid had been killed before the curtain went up. Cecil DeMille recalled that his brother “thoughtfully changed all that. Instead of having Andres killed before the story started, he put him in prison, from which, of course, he escaped in time to come on the screen and achieve love’s triumph in the expected happy ending.” Such dramatic license for the sake of accommodating a star’s power became a tradition in the medium, an important element in this collaborative art.

  The greatest difficulty in Farrar’s eight weeks with the company proved to be in adapting her most popular role, Carmen. The opera was considerably different from the Mérimée novel on which it was based; and the rights to the libretto were not available. The solution lay in William de Mille’s rendering the story down to its most basic elements, those story points that were basic to both the book and the opera, thus upsetting neither opera lovers nor lawyers. Geraldine Farrar’s filmed performance of Carmen remained a lifelong memory to the generation that saw it—even though nobody could hear a note of her singing.

  The partners of the Lasky Company paid themselves one thousand dollars a week in salary. They could hardly work fast enough to keep up with the monthly demands of the Paramount Distributing Company. The biggest stars in the world were appearing in Goldfish’s films, and hundreds of the most beautiful women in the world would sacrifice almost anything to be able to say the same. Goldfish’s joy was as unbounded as Midas’s in his first days with his newly acquired power.

  Early in the fourth week of September, after returning from one of his extensive trips to Los Angeles, Goldfish was served with papers announcing the ordering of a referee in the case of Blanche Goldfish against Samuel Goldfish. The plaintiff contended that the defendant “has committed adultery without the consent, connivance, privity or procurement of the Plaintiff,” who was therefore “entitled to a judgment in her favor dissolving the aforesaid marriage....”

  The papers came as no surprise. In fact, the decision to separate had been one of the few matters upon which Sam and Blanche agreed. Goldfish had only one great concern about the pending divorce—that it would jeopardize his business relationship with his wife’s brother.

  On September 23, 1915, the day after Blanche filed, Sam Goldfish and Jesse Lasky appeared in Arthur Friend’s office. Both agreed “not to sell, assign or transfer any interest” in their company stock. Then they deposited all their shares in the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, Incorporated, in a safe-deposit box that required two keys, one belonging to each of them. Samuel Goldfish endorsed the agreement with his flamboyant signature, now bold with big loops and sharp jags.

  It was a simple hedge against trouble in paradise.

  5 Musical Chairs

  HOLLYWOOD was built on a dream.

  In 1883, a real estate developer named Horace Henderson Wilcox moved with his wife, Daeida, to Los Angeles. He had been active in religious circles in his home state of Ohio before heading to Kansas, where he made a killing in land speculation and soapboxed for Prohibition. In Los Angel
es, he bought a ranch eight miles northwest of the city center, flat-land at the foot of easy mountains. He began subdividing his territory in 1887, selling it off in an attempt to create a utopia, a realm of Christian values—tempered by Methodism, steeped in Prohibitionism. The Wilcoxes offered a free parcel of land to any denomination that would erect a house of worship. All purveyors of alcoholic beverages were barred. It was said to be Daeida’s idea to name this community of upstanding families Hollywood, after the country estate of friends back in Ohio.

  When the “movies”—as participants in motion picture making were called—first arrived, Hollywood was still a natural wonderland. The bunches of red berries on the pepper trees swelled big as grapes, tufts of orange pansies and clusters of mariposa tulips dotted the hillsides. One afternoon, a sprightly Agnes de Mille counted seven different varieties of lupine, in gorgeous shades of pink and yellow and blue. Within a few years, much of that exotic foliage would disappear, never to be seen there again. Only the fittest would survive in Hollywood; the Wilcoxes’ ideas for a model township never took root.

  In 1916, only one out of nine marriages in America ended in divorce. On the fourteenth of March, one of Hollywood’s future residents appeared at the County Court House in New York, where Judge Robert Wagner legally dissolved the wedlock between Blanche and Samuel Goldfish. Most terms of the decree were standard, including that which deemed it unlawful “for the said Samuel Goldfish ... to marry any other person until the said Plaintiff shall be actually dead.” He could always sidestep the law by crossing the state line to marry.

  Custody of four-year-old Ruth was awarded to Blanche. Sam was granted permission to see her “on any reasonable occasion” until her tenth birthday, at which time he could “have her with him for a period of three months in each year for the purposes of travel,” provided that period did not conflict with school. The alimony and child support payments were sufficient to command newspaper space in 1916, though, in fact, Blanche and Ruth were awarded a pittance of Goldfish’s earnings. He was ordered to pay his ex-wife $100 “each and every week” during “her natural life” and the further sum of $2,600 per year “so long as the Plaintiff lives and remains unmarried.” Yet another $2,600 was to be paid for Ruth’s “use and benefit” until she reached the age of ten, at which time payments were to double. At age twenty-one, Ruth was to receive $5,000 per year in quarterly payments, due on the first of January, April, July, and October “of each and every year during the natural life.”

  Blanche reverted to her maiden name. She and Ruth remained at West End Avenue and Ninety-ninth Street until the following year, when all the Laskys packed up and moved into a large apartment ten blocks south. Sam had returned to his former bachelor quarters at 10 West Sixty-first Street.

  It was only a matter of time before Goldfish spatted with the remaining Lasky in his life. He resented the title card “Jesse L. Lasky Presents” that introduced each of the company’s features; and he realized he had spent the last three years building up his ex-brother-in-law’s name. After one blowup between them, Arthur Friend intervened and drove Sam around Central Park to help him cool off. When his rage persisted, Friend just kept driving. “Why do you always fight?” Friend asked him somewhere on a road in the middle of Long Island. “Theodore Roosevelt taught me that a man has to fight,” Goldfish replied, explaining his understanding of rugged individualism. “But you fight even when people agree with you,” maintained Friend. “Yes,” Goldfish agreed, “but Roosevelt teaches that the only things worth having are what you fight for.”

  Well into its third year, the Lasky Company was proving unable to contain the expansive egos of all its partners (except for Arthur Friend, who continued to practice law on the side). After another of Goldfish’s outbursts, Lasky called a secret meeting and proposed his ouster. DeMille was a weak vote against, putting the balance into Friend’s hand. “I’m willing to vote Sam out, if you will promise to stick to it,” he said; “but I won’t vote him out today and then vote him back in tomorrow. I know he’ll break your hearts and you’ll vote him right back.”

  The partners overthrew Goldfish that night and informed him the next morning. By dusk, he had bemoaned his way back to his desk in their new offices at 485 Fifth Avenue (at Forty-first Street). The company continued to prosper, boosted by the great box-office success of a racy “society picture,” The Cheat, with Fanny Ward and a Japanese actor, Sessue Hayakawa, and of The Arab, which starred its playwright, Edgar Selwyn. Only Paramount’s advances, skimpy alongside the rising costs of story material and stars, hampered the Lasky Company.

  For months, Goldfish thought Zukor could be a way out of this quagmire. If their two companies joined forces, they would have the power to dictate better terms to Paramount. At first, Zukor did not see any advantage to pooling his greater assets; he just quietly continued buying Paramount stock. In the spring of 1916, Zukor suddenly told Goldfish he was willing to enter into the arrangement on a fifty-fifty basis—fully recognizing the Lasky Company’s superior filmmaking and fully prepared to give his new partners complete access to his array of talent, notably Mary Pickford. On June 28, the merger with Zukor’s Famous Players was complete. The truth was, Zukor had a hidden agenda.

  Two weeks earlier, at a stockholders’ meeting of the Paramount Picture Corporation, Zukor had replaced founder W. W. Hodkinson with his own man, Hiram Abrams. Zukor himself became president of this mighty distribution company and the newly merged Famous Players—Lasky Corporation. He allowed the first vice presidency of the production company to be filled by an officer of the Lasky Company. It was a bone both Goldfish and Lasky intended to fight over, and it fell upon DeMille to pull them apart. “I sympathized with Sam’s position,” DeMille recalled.For three years he had been slaving successfully at the unglamorous job of selling the pictures directed by Cecil B. DeMille and presented to the public by Jesse L. Lasky. He and all the world read in the trade press about the “Lasky elegance” and about “DeMille as the foremost photo-dramatic producer in the world.” Even if those lush phrases came from his own publicity department, Sam could not help feeling that his light was being hidden under a bushel, however elegant. Nor was this presumptuous vanity on his part. Sam knew his worth. So did I, and I did not hesitate to tell him so.

  Goldfish, promptly interpreting this back-patting as support, wired DeMille that he did not intend “to give Jesse his way on this” and urged Cecil to telegraph his vote immediately.

  “If the election of First Vice President is a reward of merit purely then I consider that I am entitled to it!” DeMille wired the next day in jest. Then he added, “I believe the First Vice Presidency is offered to the Lasky Company because of the merit and efficiency of the company and not because of the value of any one member and that therefore the position should go to the President of this company and Jesse as such will have my vote. We entered into this deal as a unit and should continue as such ... with a solid front and in the same ratio of positions as now exists.” Zukor appeased Goldfish by naming him chairman of the board, which sounded powerful. Meantime, Zukor began buying theaters; he would soon be heading a full-service operation that manufactured, wholesaled, and retailed motion pictures.

  For the next few weeks, each of the officers of the new company thought he had scored a great coup. Goldfish especially felt like the cock of the walk and dressed for success. Into fall, a chesterfield coat and homburg hat replaced his linen suits and straw boater; he added spats and chamois gloves to his wardrobe.

  The executives all had adjoining offices overlooking Fifth Avenue. Lasky and Zukor agreed that their films made in the East would carry the screen credit “Adolph Zukor Presents” and those made in California would give Lasky billing. Goldfish was not long content. Zukor believed that Goldfish “disagreed many times only for the sake of argument,” that his board chairman “liked operating in a turmoil.”

  The company stayed on an even keel through the summer, mostly because Goldfish went west. DeMille was d
irecting Geraldine Farrar in Joan the Woman; at $300,000, it was the company’s costliest production to date. Jeanie Macpherson, a former actress with Biograph, wrote a scenario that sought to “emphasize the humanity of Joan of Arc rather than project the conventional, and so frequently false, image of a saint.” This telling of the story would serve as the model for many epic films DeMille would direct in the ensuing decades—“an absorbing personal story against a background of great historical events.”

  Viewing the “rushes” of a crowd scene one day, Goldfish felt something was wrong, but he could not put his finger on it. He asked that the film be screened a second time and noticed what had thrown him. Several extras, dressed as medieval soldiers, were chewing gum—an anachronism that had gone unnoticed during the filming. Goldfish ordered the day’s work redone. It was.

  A new no-nonsense, businesslike spirit suddenly charged the sets of motion pictures everywhere, as though a switch had been thrown. That juvenile sense of the adventure in filmmaking turned adult. “Summer camp was over,” remembered Broadway actress Ina Claire, who had signed with the Lasky Company in 1915. She said it was because of The Birth of a Nation, whose influence affected everybody even tenuously connected to motion pictures.

  For months, there had been rumors about Griffith’s twelve-reel production in the works. Its success would lift all restraints of running time on a film. On February 8, 1915, Samuel Goldfish had been part of the premiere audience at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles roaring its approval.