Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  From the moment he established his new company, Goldfish relied strongly on the art of advertising. He asked an adman named Philip Goodman to design a trademark for the Goldwyn Company. Goldfish was in the market for something impressive, more along the lines of the Paramount summit than the Pathé rooster or the Metro parrot. Goodman passed the assignment on to his newest hireling, Howard Dietz—a Columbia University dropout. The Goldwyn offices overlooked the gleaming pink marble pair of recumbent lions that guarded the entrance of the New York Public Library, but Dietz forever maintained that he got the idea for a mascot from the lion cavorting on the cover of his former campus satire magazine, The Jerter. Dietz did, however, dignify the lion by posing him like the library models and surrounding him in a crest of film proclaiming, in Latin, Ars Gratia Artis—Art for Art’s Sake.

  Under the lion’s protection, Goldfish assembled his own “exploitation” department, to feed pictures and stories about the films to the media and to invent ideas that would lure “traffic” off the street and into theaters. Dozens of creative young men trained in Goldwyn’s publicity offices over the years; but the company president always set the tone of all their advertising. That was never more plain than the day a young staff member in exploitation was summoned to Goldfish’s office with photographs of their stars. Goldfish looked at them, then out of an oracular reverie uttered a single adjective for each star: Maxine Elliott was “dignified”; Mary Garden was “elegant”; Jane Cowl was “soulful”; Madge Kennedy, “winsome”; Geraldine Farrar, “glamorous”; Mae Marsh received a three-word appellation, “the whim girl.” From then on, Goldfish wanted all their movies and the attendant advertising to promote those qualities.

  Some of the actresses were in real life exactly as Goldfish saw them. Madge Kennedy, for example, was as winsome and sweet as the titles of her light Goldwyn comedies suggest: The Perfect Lady, Baby Mine, Our Little Wife, Nearly Married, Day Dreams. As for most of the other stars, extremely fictive minds were required to create stories that would live up to Goldfish’s images.

  The star whose press needed the most cosmetizing was the “vivacious” Mabel Normand, whose chemical dependencies were viewed by those who knew of them as the cause of her troubled life more than the effect. She was simply considered talented but irresponsible. One interview for a family magazine went very well until the reporter asked her hobbies. “I don’t know,” Mabel replied. “Say anything you like but don’t say I like to work. That sounds like Mary Pickford, that prissy bitch. Just say I like to pinch babies and twist their legs. And get drunk.”

  Mabel was also absolutely unreliable. Her paychecks went uncashed for months at a time, totally throwing off the books of the Goldwyn Company. In the middle of shooting a picture, she often disappeared for hours, sometimes days. Her vulnerability made Goldfish’s heart race.

  In the summer of 1917, Mabel Normand hid out in Great Neck, Long Island, as much as possible. Hedda and De Wolf Hopper lived there and used to see a lot of Mabel—and her new constant suitor. “Wearing a man’s sweater over a one-piece bathing suit—you’d have thought she had nothing on under the sweater—she rode a surfboard attached to Caley Bragg’s high-powered boat around Long Island Sound,” Hedda Hopper recollected. Miss Hopper also recalled one Sunday when Samuel Goldfish motored all the way to Great Neck to take Mabel to dinner. She had canceled the date in her own mind, thinking if she blocked it out she would not have to go through with it. By the time Goldfish arrived, Mabel had locked herself in a second-floor bedroom, refusing to descend the stairs. Goldfish sent one message after another, entreating her to come down. She kept refusing, ultimately telling him to go home. Around midnight, Sam left.

  Mabel was Goldfish’s companion at public functions for months. She avoided private encounters. He remained oblivious of her feelings for him, not knowing that when he was beyond earshot, she often performed a wicked impersonation of him, capturing the heavily accented, high-pitched words that got mangled in his throat. Anita Loos recalled a Christmas Eve party in Manhattan to which Mabel arrived late, without Sam, her hair mussed and her stockings ripped. Mabel “told the girls that she’d gone to St. Patrick’s Cathedral and got roughed up in the crowd. She’d gone to pray to St. Anthony, she said, to please give Sam a good nose job for Christmas.” He still looked the other way at her worsening drug addiction.

  Goldfish assigned Abe Lehr to watch over and reprimand Mabel when necessary, anything to avoid having to scold her himself. Goldfish absolutely refused, Lehr remembered, “to help me keep her in line”—even though her habitual tardiness often kept an entire company and crew standing idle for hours. One day, Mabel picked up a troop of soldiers in her limousine so they would not be AWOL at Camp Merritt. Another time, her whereabouts were not known for days, until her name appeared in the newspapers under a Paris dateline. After her mood had swung, she would bubble forth, completely undoing Lehr’s censure with charm.

  As Goldfish noticed her fast living taking its toll on her natural luster, Lehr was instructed to monitor her nightlife. She accused him of spying. But on Lehr’s next birthday, Mabel sent him an expensive watch with a humorous note. “Dear Mr. Leer,” she wrote. “Wishing you many returns of the day. And now, damn you, you and your dicks can tell just what time I come in. Love, Mabel.”

  Goldfish had no way of knowing that his giving Mabel the big rush, as Mack Sennett had before him, only drove her to hide. Her unavailability made her more desirable.

  Goldfish could think of no better way to prove his love for her than by glorifying her. He bought her private lessons in “charm”—manners and poise and other social graces. The lessons pleased her at first, recalled the scenarist Frances Marion, “then they began to irk when he curbed her natural instinct to stand spraddle-legged, rocking with laughter, and tossing in a few words usually scrawled on fences.”

  Goldfish wanted Miss Normand’s first picture for him to be a serious drama, to prove she was a serious actress. In the spring of 1917, with American doughboys heading to Europe, he starred her in a drama about women on the home front, called Joan of Plattsburg. Once Goldfish’s salesmen gave the film a disapproving look, he realized his heart was getting in the way of his mind. He postponed its release indefinitely, and retreated to the formula pictures that had served her in the past.

  As if Goldfish did not have enough on his hands, Woodrow Wilson summoned the presidents of several American film companies to come to the aid of their country. A National Association of the Motion Pictures Industry was organized to help the war effort however it could. Pickford, Fairbanks, Chaplin, even Mabel Normand, toured the nation on behalf of Liberty Bonds. President Wilson invited Goldfish and two other motion picture company presidents to the White House and told them that “France was bleeding to death and that Russia was ready to give in,” Goldwyn recalled of the meeting, “—that American efforts weren’t understood in Europe. Wilson wanted a motion picture of American war efforts to be rushed to Europe to set aside fears that we weren’t doing much.” With but a few days to “prepare the documentation of America’s great war effort,” Goldfish sent his crews to capture the mobilization of the Red Cross and munitions industries on film. “The following Friday,” Goldwyn recalled, “our films were on a boat, headed for Europe. They had a big morale effect when they were shown to Allied troops in the field.”

  In a less obvious but more profound way, so did the Goldwyn Company’s feature films. All American products were gratefully received in Europe, especially motion pictures. The Allies and the neutral nations could not get enough of Charlie Chaplin and Norma Talmadge. Even in Germany, American movies drew vast audiences, sometimes playing on the same bill with anti-American propaganda. Shortly after Americans began fighting over there, motion picture companies could no longer procure space on ships to move their products, and the European market was closed off.

  Business life on the home front got even tougher. The Goldwyn Company grew shorthanded because of the depletion of manpower. Governmental
restrictions on fuel and electricity beset studios further. In order to conserve resources during the coal famine, commercial use of electric light was curtailed. To a business that in just a decade had grown dependent on artificial light, energy rationing spelled disaster. In December 1917, motion picture studios were ordered to work only half days through the winter. Without a hit picture, the Goldwyn Company would never survive; its only hope was in maintaining its present level of production.

  His light halved, he doubled his space, renting the Norma Talmadge Studio on West 48th Street and the West End Studio on 125th Street. “GOLDWYN SURMOUNTS DIFFICULTY ... Goldwyn Resourcefulness Won Out,” read the headline of one trade magazine of the day.

  The tide turned. In one film after another, Mabel Normand charmed the public. Dodging a Million was followed by The Floor Below, a quintessential role for her. She played Patsy O‘Rourke, a copy girl in a large newspaper omce—“a slave to duty and an ally to the spirit of mischief”—who is sent after a gang of burglars and six reels later ends up in the arms of handsome Tom Moore. In May 1918, Goldfish ordered the release of Joan of Plattsburg. Opening to a country engaged in the serious issues of war, the film became the company’s first big hit. Mrs. Woodrow Wilson appeared at a screening of the film in Washington, sharing the stage with Mabel Normand.

  Other Goldwyn stars caught on as well. Madge Kennedy scored in The Kingdom of Youth, the story of two newlyweds getting over their petty jealousies. Tom Moore starred in the film version of a successful play called Thirty a Week. “The plot of this picture is simply an every day occurrence, such as you have seen in real life yourself or read in newspapers,” commented Motion Picture News. “Not one point is exaggerated. He is the chauffeur, she the daughter of his wealthy boss.” Moore’s co-star—in her second film—was the innocent-looking daughter of Alabama’s senior senator, Tallulah Bankhead.

  ONE of the first lessons Goldfish learned in show business was to make friends with the press. Beginning in 1914, Photoplay magazine, which began as a theater program and swelled almost overnight to a glossy magazine with a circulation of more than a half million, satisfied the nation’s new mania for any chat about moviemaking, especially stars. Stacks of imitators followed. Most major newspapers began featuring photoplay departments. What began in the press as film criticism led to motion picture news. One writer at the Chicago Record-Herald had a new idea: Mae Tinee on the rival Tribune was writing a successful column reviewing motion pictures; “Why couldn’t the Herald—with me, of course—go a step further and branch off into bits of gossip?” wondered Louella Parsons. In no time, Mrs. Parsons found herself, as she remembered, “in a nice little Seventh Heaven as a newspaperwoman covering the movie ‘beat.’ No longer did I have to be nice to the spoiled darlings of the sets and the front offices. They had to be nice to me. Ah, the power of the press was never sweeter!”

  She was born Louella Oettinger, unhappy practically from birth. Her father died when she was very young, leaving her mother with little money. Forever fighting her weight, Lolly was a sad girl whose family laughed at her early literary aspirations. She secretly carried the shame of her family’s skeleton—an alcoholic grandfather. When she was seventeen, she married an older man named John Parsons, but the relationship hardly lasted. Soon thereafter, the Chicago Herald was sold and Louella found herself without a job; she and her infant daughter moved to New York, where the Telegraph gave her the opportunity to continue her writing about the motion picture community. Louella Parsons’s reporting evolved into tattling. The woman who confessed in her memoirs, “The first person I ever cared deeply and sincerely about was—myself,” turned all her inner torment outward, on that growing colony of rich and beautiful people. The scoop became both her tool and her weapon: How much one revealed to her affected how much she would reveal to the public.

  Sam Goldwyn was among the first to curry her favor. He met Louella Parsons at a luncheon the motion picture critics gave him in Chicago, when she was still writing there. He found her, as he admitted years later, “a most dynamic person with a genuine homey touch. She is a very down to earth human being who gives a great deal as a friend and who would never betray a confidence.... Her ‘power,’ if you want to call it that, comes mainly from the friendships she has made and kept over the years.” Goldwyn was always careful to stay on her good side.

  But not the support of columnists or all the advertising in the world could help Goldwyn Picures in its first year. Their overambitious investment in properties and stars mounted daily, far exceeding their returns. While war had failed to smite Goldfish, pestilence looked as though it would. A worldwide outbreak of influenza spread at last to America in the fall of 1918, killing hundreds of people a week. In some towns, public gathering places were padlocked; most patrons avoided theaters even where they were kept open. Ticket receipts dropped everywhere.

  Goldfish put on his best corporate face. “Our second year of Goldwyn is GOING TO BE THE VITAL YEAR—THE TURNING-POINT YEAR—of this company’s existence,” he announced in his annual message to company employees. He had hoped to spread these encouraging words at a central convention of all the Goldwyn branch managers, to be held in New York City. But there simply was not enough money in the till for such a junket. In nineteen pages of mimeographed inspiration, he said, “war-time conditions make it urgently imperative that every Goldwyn manager and every Goldwyn man be on the job in the territory every minute of the time.” Most of the surviving pioneer companies—World, Mutual, Essanay, Selig, and Pathé—barely kept their heads above water. Dozens of smaller companies sank that year.

  Goldwyn’s weekly payroll was $90,000. “How to meet it, here was the question which tortured every waking hour,” he revealed years later. The largest single stockholder in the company, Goldfish was responsible for loans amounting to almost $900,000. He was dumbfounded one summer day in 1918 when Mabel Normand entered his Fifth Avenue office and handed over a long envelope containing her Liberty Bonds. “There are only fifty thousand dollars’ worth of them,” she said, “but if they will tide you over you may have them.”

  Madge Kennedy said, “Mabel was always giving everybody gifts”—a hundred-dollar beaded bag for a stenographer, a fur coat for the wife of a production assistant who got laid off—“she just wanted everyone to like her.” But Goldfish viewed this grand gesture as a display of affection. He believed his weakness had attracted her in ways his strength had not.

  For weeks, Goldfish moaned about his business; and this time when he pressed Miss Normand to spend a weekend alone with him, she agreed to go through with it. He chose Saratoga, the beautiful summer retreat in the Adirondacks, just outside Gloversville. Harry Alexander, a special assistant to Goldfish, said the boss’s giddiness overtook the generally tense spirit of their offices.

  The evening of their departure, as Goldfish waited at Pennsylvania Station for Mabel to arrive, he was no doubt braced for her canceling yet another rendezvous. This time she showed up, in what appeared to be a state of excitement. They scurried to make the train, met in the dining car for dinner, then went to Mabel’s berth. In his hurried way, he began kissing her. Mabel pulled herself up and excused herself for a moment. When she returned, her ardent suitor had trouble even recognizing her. Mabel’s entire mood had been altered; everything about her seemed speeded up. She appeared amorous toward him for the first time, but there was so much frenzy to her behavior that it was frightening. She looked at him with glazed eyes. Goldfish pulled back, retiring to his own berth. Mabel spent the entire weekend completely high on drugs, locked in her room most of the time. They returned to New York City in silence. From that weekend on, Mabel never looked the same to Goldfish. His feelings for her changed from satyric to sympathetic.

  A few weeks later, Goldfish broke his ankle playing handball at the New York Athletic Club.

  Predawn, when he invariably awakened from a restless sleep, was Goldfish’s favorite time to think, to solve problems that would present themselves later in the
day. Being laid up in bed gave him extra time to salvage the Goldwyn Company in his mind. One day, as he lay with his tarsals rigged up in a sling, his business partners came to call—bearing nothing but bad tidings. Bankruptcy at last seemed inevitable. Goldfish, in his hospital bed, just listened to his partners spell out their company’s demise. “Gentlemen,” he finally said, pressing his fingertips together, “I see nothing but roses.” In his insomnia, Goldfish had dreamed up a plan. Before his partners arrived, he had summoned Erich Schay, the controller of the company, and asked how much ready money was sitting in each of their thirty branch offices. By pooling petty-cash accounts from each city, the Goldwyn Company would be able to scrape together the payroll money.

  “And how about next week?” Schay asked. Goldfish merely shrugged his shoulders, confident that “something had to happen.”

  On November 7, 1918, word reached New York that Germany had accepted the Allies’ terms of surrender. Four days later, in a railroad car in a forest north of Paris, the armistice was signed ... and the Goldwyn Company was given a temporary stay of execution. Shipments of film sailed to Europe almost immediately.