The Birth of a Nation ran forty-four consecutive weeks at the Liberty Theater in New York, at an astronomical two dollars a head. Queues were so long that four other theaters were needed to accommodate the overflow Close to one million people stood in line to see the film in that city alone. The picture stayed just as long in Boston and Chicago ... and it played even longer in the South—twelve years continuously in some places, according to one source. By conservative estimates—for even then theaters and distributors tended to underreport actual box-office takes—The Birth of a Nation grossed at least $50 million in its first run, possibly 20 percent more than that. The motion picture industry was no longer nickels and dimes.
The business entered a period of natural selection—mergers, takeovers, buyouts, wildcatting, and raids—that would ultimately rid it of the weak. Those who remained would be the power brokers. The draconian Trust still loomed over the landscape, but all its production companies were falling prey to the new breed.
William Fox, among the first to fight the Trust, expanded his film distribution business and his chain of theaters. While The Birth was the talk of the nation, he produced A Fool There Was, based on Kipling’s poem “The Vampire,” in which Theodosia Goodman of Chicago played an unscrupulous seductress. The Fox publicity department transformed her into a woman of great mystery who had been born on the burning sands of the Sahara, Theda Bara. The film became a huge success, treading into taboo areas that motion pictures had previously dared not enter. Scores of local censorship panels united behind the aegis of the Trust; in 1909, a watchdog panel had been named, the National Board of Review.
While Theda Bara “vamped” in forty pictures over the next three years, displaying the immorality of women, Gilded Age America flocked to the ever-innocent Mary Pickford’s monthly offerings in even greater numbers. In 1916, Zukor signed her to a million-dollar contract. Chaplin kept pace; and Harold Lloyd would soon follow.
D. W Griffith, Thomas Ince, and Mack Sennett—the three undisputed masters of long-format motion pictures in drama, westerns, and comedy, respectively—formed the Triangle Film corporation and established two new stars: William S. Hart appeared in thirteen feature pictures and became the most celebrated cowboy in the world; Douglas Fairbanks would soon undo audiences completely with his cocky athleticism, playing pirates, swordsmen, adventurers, and lovers. Lewis Selznick of Universal suddenly resurfaced at World Special Films, having snatched Clara Kimball Young from Vitagraph. A distributor from Pittsburgh named Richard Rowland built Metro Pictures Corporation. The secretary of the new company was the successful Massachusetts theater owner Louis B. Mayer. After grossing close to one million dollars off the New England states’ rights to The Birth, Mayer, too, decided to enter that select company of men, mostly in their mid-thirties, who ran motion picture production companies. He began with a serial starring Francis X. Bushman.
As salaries, admission prices, and the films themselves enlarged, so, too, did the exhibition halls. One colossal edifice after another was erected, completely dwarfing America’s seventeen thousand small theaters. By 1915, over two dozen motion picture palaces had been built in the United States. The Exeter Street Theater in Boston could accommodate 900 patrons; the Orpheum organization built the Palace in Los Angeles for 1,950 patrons. The Strand opened in New York City with plush seats for 2,985. A motion picture’s success could depend on the theater manager, the screen impresario. Foremost among them was Samuel Rothapfel, known to the world as “Roxy.”
Starting at the Strand, Roxy raised motion picture exhibition to extravagant heights. In such “temples of the silent drama” as the Rialto, the Rivoli, and the Criterion, Roxy presented an entire program of entertainment, complete with music, built around a feature-length motion picture. Composers were hired to create elaborate scores for the films. Without a word being spoken, the art form of motion pictures became as complete—and as voiceless—as ballet.
“While we were burning Joan of Arc at the stake,” Cecil DeMille recalled of the hot summer of 1916, “another and more explosive fire was growing in the New York offices.” It sparked up from the friction between Sam Goldfish and Adolph Zukor. “A chairman of the board,” Zukor recounted, “does not ordinarily concern himself with the day-to-day details of operation,” not in Zukor’s mind anyway. He had, in fact, created the sinecure just to keep Goldfish out of his way. But wherever Sam saw an inch of latitude, he took a mile. He liberally interpreted his title as license to rule over all aspects of the company’s business.
Zukor had just completed a contract with Jack Pickford, Mary’s actor brother, for five hundred dollars a week. Arbitrarily and unilaterally, Goldfish canceled it, asserting that the figure was too high. “His post didn’t give him authority to do that,” noted Zukor. “But ... rules meant little to Sam when he was excited.”
Within weeks of the merger, it was clear to everybody at Famous Players—Lasky that Goldfish was inventing pretexts to bring the matter of his jurisdiction to a head. He was almost methodical in booby-trapping all company business. Mary Pickford was keenly aware of the new strains the merger had put on Zukor. She had previously thought of Famous Players as her second family, and she called Zukor “Papa.” Now, with all the problems of a large corporation filling his head, “he had become a house divided within himself,” she observed. “In that strained atmosphere I now became involved in a rather unsavory issue”—the payment due on her new million-dollar contract.
“I went to see Mr. Zukor,” Mary Pickford wrote in her memoirs, “to remind him of our agreement. In the discussion that ensued I saw Mr. Zukor put his hand under the desk and, I supposed, press a button.” An office boy appeared, announcing that Mr. Goldfish wished to see Mary in his private office. “What’s all this nonsense?” said Goldfish as, annoyed, she walked through the door. “It’s not nonsense at all, Mr. Goldfish,” she replied. “I made an agreement with Mr. Zukor that I scarcely think concerns you. I was put under contract by Famous Players. Mr. Zukor and I will decide it, if you don’t mind—”
“Now you listen to me,” he interrupted.
“And the next time,” Pickford proceeded, without batting an eyelash, “please don’t send the office boy for me. If you wish to see me, come yourself.” She turned on her heels, thus initiating a lifelong relationship of intense mutual antipathy. One day shortly thereafter, Goldfish saw Miss Pickford in the street, coming into work. “My God,” he said. “Ten thousand dollars a week and she’s walking to the set yet. She should be running!”
Having successfully alienated his company’s president and biggest star, he buried a land mine under the desk of his oldest colleague in the business. One day that summer, while Jesse Lasky was conferring with Mary Pickford about her picture Less Than the Dust, Sam appeared and blurted out, “Jesse, don’t let Zukor butt in on this picture. He’s okay as an executive, but we’ve always made better movies than Famous Players, so see that you keep the production reins in your hands!”
Lasky went to Canada for a vacation in August 1916. Upon his return, Zukor approached him with an ultimatum: Either Goldfish must leave the company or Zukor would. “I’ve never had a harder decision to make, and I had to make it alone,” Lasky remembered. He hardly closed his eyes for the next forty-eight hours.
Although he believed Goldfish (“the one who had goaded me into the picture business in the first place”) was a “brilliant strategist,” Lasky wrote DeMille in Hollywood that Zukor was “an all around better businessman—has better foresight—is a better financier and has a broader and bigger grasp of the picture business ... he is considered the biggest man in the motion picture industry and ... his reputation for honesty and integrity is remarkable.” Lasky felt that Arthur Friend worked more efficiently with Zukor than with Goldfish. And so, Lasky concluded, “I feel that we couldn’t have a better man than Zukor as president of our new corporation.”
Once Lasky rendered his verdict to Goldfish, his former brother-in-law surrendered so willingly as to suggest he knew perfectly
well what he had been doing over the last three months.
Goldfish did not completely detonate his relationship with Famous Players—Lasky until he had constructed new plans for himself. On September 14, 1916, he resigned as chairman of the board of directors and also as a member of the executive committee of the corporation, but he still held stock and remained on the board.
“I have contemplated retiring from the active management of the Famous Players—Lasky corporation for some time in order to mature certain personal plans which are of great importance to me, and which I could not mature if I continued as one of the executives of the company,” he told a reporter from Motion Picture News.
More than Sam’s natural instinct to turn adversity into advantage drove him to think immediately of a new situation for himself. Over the preceding few years, anybody with enough drive could have dubbed himself president of a motion picture company. Now all the baronies were being parceled out, and one by one the thrones were being removed. If he wished to sit at this Round Table of film producers, he would have to assess his resources, cash in his stock, invest in properties and personnel, and establish a company. With Carl Laemmle at Universal; Adolph Zukor at Paramount and Famous Players—Lasky; Griffith, Ince, and Sennett at Triangle; Lewis Selznick at World, Louis B. Mayer, Marcus Loew, William Fox, and the Warner brothers already knighted; and Chaplin, Pickford, and Fairbanks reigning at their respective studios, Goldfish was obliged to make his decisions posthaste.
6 A Name for Himself
THE THEATER has long provided a home for misfits—adventurous strays and loners who find asylum in each other’s company. It is not just the common search for fame and fortune or even fantasy that draws them all together. It is also the need for family.
A census of the motion picture industry’s earliest population would reveal an inordinate number of victims of broken homes. Alcoholism coursed through their family trees. Griffith stars Mae Marsh, Blanche Sweet, Robert Harron, and the Gish sisters were all raised without fathers. Mary Pickford’s father died when she was four; Douglas Fairbanks‘s—a half-Jewish lawyer named Charles Ulman—abandoned his wife when their boy was five; Charles Chaplin’s—an itinerant vaudevillian who Charlie’s brother Sydney insisted was a Jew originally named Kaplan—took to the road the year after Charlie was born. Griffith was ten when his father, a Civil War veteran, died; DeMille was twelve when he lost his. A promenade of fatherless actresses would continue across the decades. “From the very beginning,” observed Lucille Ball, who would come to Hollywood a generation later with her mother, “the studios gave us Papas.”
Almost to a man, the Hollywood moguls were Jewish immigrants with an instinct to surround themselves with family. It was a way to help one’s own and protect oneself. Wherever possible, these men brought in their relatives: Adolph Zukor hired his wife’s brother to manage his studio; Jack Cohn, upon leaving Universal as a film editor, ushered in his brother Harry, a song plugger, to serve as “Uncle Carl” Laemmle’s secretary; the Warners worked as a team during their early days of film production. Two Russian immigrant brothers, Nicholas and Joseph Schenck, first operated a drugstore on Third Avenue, then ran an amusement park in Upper Manhattan called Paradise Park. They attracted the attention of Marcus Loew, who incorporated them into the management of his expanding organization. Mispoche—family—was an unspoken want of the pioneer generation of movie people, especially the studio heads who had forsaken their fatherlands.
Except for Goldfish. Until he had created his own identity, he was too self-absorbed for family affairs. He had been an uncaring husband, and with each passing day he showed as little concern as a father. He almost never communicated with his family in Poland; and except for a $2,500 loan to each of them, he had little to do with his three siblings in America. The notion of an extended family through business (curiously, all his former partners—DeMille, Lasky, Friend, and Zukor—had grown up without fathers) seemed impossible unless Goldfish could be in absolute control, an undisputed paterfamilias.
The creation of a motion picture company was no longer a one-man job of opening a storefront operation. In fact, while Goldfish was plotting his future, “Papa” Zukor was expanding his motion picture interests. He appealed to Otto Kahn, head of the banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, for a loan of $10 million, all for the stock issue of a company that four years earlier had not even existed.
Toward the end of 1916, Goldfish redeemed his stock in the Zukor-controlled companies for $900,000. The cash settlement took some of the edge off his search for an entry into the industry, but it did not provide the open sesame. And it did nothing to lessen his anger toward those who had ousted him. For the rest of his life, Goldwyn could never let go of the feeling that Zukor was a “rat” and that Jesse “sold him out.”
He moved into a new apartment at 255 West Eighty-fourth Street, only blocks from where Ruth was living with her mother and the rest of the Laskys; but he almost never took advantage of his visitation rights, consumed as he was with his career. “The secret of this man,” Ruth said, “is that he always did what he wanted. Once he saw what he wanted to have next, he went in an absolutely straight line to get it.”
That autumn, Goldfish reached out to two candidates for partnership—a pair of brothers with enough Broadway connections to make him forget about sole billing. Edgar Selwyn was born in Cincinnati in 1875 to a merchant who moved his family to Toronto, where another son, Archibald, was born. Both his parents died before Edgar was sixteen. He tramped to Chicago, where he saw no future. One winter night he jumped off a bridge into the Chicago River—actually, onto the river, for he landed on ice. Reaching the shore, he felt a gun at his head and was given an option of his money or his life. Selwyn said, “My life.”
The two desperate men got to talking; and by dawn, the mugger had agreed to pawn his revolver and share half the proceeds with his intended victim. Selwyn left for New York, where he became an usher at the Herald Square Theater (the very place where Sam Goldfish would see his first motion picture) for fifty cents a night. Suddenly Selwyn had found his place in the world. “The theater strikes the Peter Pan in us all,” he later said of his new career, speaking for himself and all the lost boys who found their way into it; “to make believe is the most glamorous thing on earth.”
Selwyn grew to be a handsome five-foot-ten-inch man with black hair and brown eyes. He knocked about Broadway as an actor, picking up occasional supporting roles and doubling as assistant stage manager. He began to write plays. His brother Arch joined him in New York, and by 1912 they had gone into business together, the younger man looking out for Edgar’s interests.
Edgar became a successful actor, starring mostly in his own works. He hobnobbed with the likes of H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett. The Selwyns began to produce plays, one of which netted a million dollars in 1912. Edgar married a beautiful playwright named Margaret Mayo, who for years boasted that she was the only woman to have had a play produced in every spoken language in the world. Mary Pickford had offered sixty thousand dollars for the film rights to her hit romance Polly of the Circus.
Sam Goldfish had come to know the Selwyns when the Lasky Company starred Edgar in his play The Arab. Sam proposed a partnership. With his modest library of readily adaptable plays, Edgar Selwyn was interested; but Goldfish’s reputation made him think twice. He went to Adolph Zukor and asked if he could give any reason why he should not enter into business with Goldfish. “As far as his honesty and integrity are concerned, there is none,” Zukor stated. “But if you do, you’ll be a most unhappy boy.” Selwyn asked why. “Sam is like a Jersey cow that gives the finest milk,” Zukor explained, “but before you can take the bucket away, he has kicked it over.” The Selwyns called off the deal.
Goldfish railed for days but made little headway. Then, looking for the weak link, he approached Margaret Mayo and tried the ploy that had always worked for him in the past, a pitiful plea for basic human compassion—what Jews call rachmones. He pathetically descri
bed how he had created his first enterprise, all the while building up somebody else’s name, only to have his powerful creation turn on him. Now here he was, alone and anonymous. To wring the last drop of pathos out of his jeremiad, Miss Mayo reminded Goldfish years later, “you ... told me of your determination not to be defeated by those whom you had helped to succeed.”
He gave the performance of a lifetime; but beneath the histrionics lay the secret to Goldwyn’s charm. His boundless enthusiasm—fueled by supreme self-confidence—created a sense of excitement, which made people want to be around him. “I altered my life’s activities, and induced others to do likewise,” Margaret Mayo recalled further. She got her husband and brother-in-law to go along, and they attracted another young, successful producer, Arthur L. Hopkins. Goldfish got each of the partners to invest $75,000. Margaret Mayo threw in Polly of the Circus and another play, for which she had been offered $75,000.
The biggest point left to decide was the name of the new association. Goldfish fully intended to promote his own name, and yet even he recognized that it was laughable. More often than not, he heard some wisecrack upon being introduced to somebody for the first time. Only recently, Sam had arrived late one night at a cabaret and was seated behind a glass partition in the rear of the house; he protested but was silenced by a man who said, “Behind glass is the place for a Goldfish.” The gag quickly made its way into the Broadway columns.
The partners realized that several portmanteau words could be formed from the names Goldfish and Selwyn. They paired the more fortunate syllable of each, producing a company name that chimed with confidence. On November 19, 1916—two months and two days after the ax fell at Famous Players—Lasky—Goldwyn Pictures was incorporated in the state of New York. The company was capitalized for three million dollars, all of the hundred-dollar shares of stock being held by its founders. Goldwyn Pictures took offices at 485 Fifth Avenue, in the same L-shaped building the Lasky Company had started in. At first, Goldfish spent most of his time there, while the Selwyns kept up their play-producing business on Broadway. For years, show business wags joked about the abandoned syllables of their surnames.
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