Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  Mabel Normand’s career began wasting away at an accelerated pace. Even the posed stills from her pictures indicated the ravages of drugs—her weight fluctuated wildly and there was a deadness in her once vibrant eyes. Goldwyn asked Abe Lehr to dine with her at least once a week.

  Mabel was losing her timing, but at the moment she was the company’s salvation. Goldwyn summoned her to New York. After her next three pictures, Upstairs, Jinx (in which the twenty-four-year-old Mabel played a circus orphan half her age), and Pinto, he acknowledged the change in her. Renting space at the Erbograph Studios at 146th Street and Seventh Avenue, Goldwyn starred her in The Slim Princess.

  It was another “Cinderella” picture, of which the public was tiring. Photographs from the production reveal that Mabel had taken the title to unhealthy extremes; she looked drawn and emaciated. Goldwyn followed that with What Happened to Rosa?, the silly story of a hosiery clerk who believes she is the reincarnation of a famous Spanish dancer. Then she made Head Over Heels, a film so muddled that Goldwyn could not even release it. Her cocaine addiction had sucked her completely into its vortex.

  Men were still in her thrall. Actor-director William Desmond Taylor pursued her. She was seen in the company of matinee idol Lew Cody, known around town as the Butterfly Man, because he always dressed so beautifully. And Mack Sennett, who had not given up the chase, went to see Sam Goldwyn. Sennett was desperate to spring Mabel Normand from the remaining eighteen months of her contract and to make one more Cinderella story. “I thought if I could get her for ‘Molly O’ I could keep her forever,” Sennett later admitted. “She’s a pretty expensive luxury, isn’t she?” he said to Goldwyn. “Mabel Normand is the most valuable property in Hollywood,” Goldwyn replied. But he let her go for $20,000. Over the next few years he saw drugs, scandals, and poor health bring her career to its knees.

  One by one, the residents of Goldwyn’s “old ladies’ home” were laid to rest. Only Chaplin, Fairbanks, and Pickford (pushing thirty and divorcing her husband, Owen Moore, but still playing the title roles of Pollyanna and Little Lord Fauntleroy) seemed to hold the audience’s interest longer than a few years. Public taste kept changing, constantly demanding new and different types. At the Goldwyn studios, the burden would have to be borne by the cowboy from Oklahoma.

  Will Rogers arrived in Los Angeles “rearin‘ to go.” Over the next three years, he appeared in a dozen pictures, most with the same basic plot: An amiable fellow, usually a cowpoke in the South or the West, is thrust into a situation in which he must overcome his faintheartedness.

  Rogers did not draw at the box office. Women made up the majority of moviegoers, and they preferred strong, handsome types. The titles of Rogers’s next two years’ motion pictures reveal Goldwyn’s attempt to put across the charm of his character with the suggestion of romance for the ladies: Jes’ Call Me Jim, Cupid the Cowpuncher, Honest Hutch, Guile of Women, Boys Will Be Boys, and An Unwilling Hero. As with the early cinema’s operatic stars, the success of some performers was as much auditory as visual. For all Will Rogers’s charm, his pictures fell flat without the benefit of his voice.

  In its descending spiral, the Goldwyn Company could not seriously compete against the other studios by chasing the same stars. Rex Beach suggested that people went to the movies—above all—to see stories, not stars. So instead of currying “famous players,” Goldwyn established a new division of his company: Eminent Authors.

  “Just classy writers,” Arthur Mayer remembered the barely literate Goldwyn telling a cadre of salesmen. “Goldwyn’s got just classy writers.” Rex Beach culled the list: Gertrude Atherton, a California novelist and the great-grandniece of Benjamin Franklin, who wrote romantic and historical novels; Gouverneur Morris, the great-grandson of one of America’s founding fathers, who wrote action dramas; Rupert Hughes, a novelist and short-story writer (whose brother established a successful tool company that would be handed down to Rupert’s nephew Howard); Mary Roberts Rinehart, best known for her detective fiction; Basil King, a Canadian-born novelist and the rector of Christ Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and short-story writer Leroy Scott. They were all among the most popular writers of their day.

  They granted Goldwyn the motion picture rights to any works they might write during the term of the contract. He (and his partner in this venture, Rex Beach) would have ninety days to decide whether or not they wanted to film the work. If they did, the author would receive a $10,000 advance against one third of the film’s earnings. With most Goldwyn films costing $80,000 apiece and hit pictures earning in the high six figures, the authors easily stood to become even more affluent than eminent.

  The first week of July, the Goldwyn advertising department heralded Eminent Authors in a thirty-two-page brochure that was stapled into Motion Picture News and Moving Picture World. Goldwyn took pride in its being “the largest and most elaborate insert ever used in the industry.” (Zukor responded to the announcement by signing Somerset Maugham, Arnold Bennett, Sir Gilbert Parker, and Elinor Glyn, a glamorous redhead from England, whose personality was as sensational as her novels.) To make good on all the claims in his advertisement, Goldwyn had to put his entire portfolio of stock (including 11, 148 shares of Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, then valued at $100 per share) down as collateral against $200,000 worth of loans.

  Most serious authors proved unsuccessful in silent films. The language of books simply was not that of motion pictures. Few prose writers ever got the hang of it. Once a studio owned the rights to a story, there was little more for the author to do. Studio executives told Mary Roberts Rinehart of “the vast gulf between the picture audience and the reading public,” then passed one of her books on to the scenario department to translate into a motion picture.

  One by one, the Eminent Authors came to Hollywood to try, in Mrs. Rinehart’s phrase, to “beat the game”; but just as quickly they returned to their typewriters at home, where they could be masters of their literature, not slaves to illiterates.

  Of the original Eminent Authors, only Rex Beach and Rupert Hughes delivered both the prestige and the audiences Goldwyn sought. One of Hughes’s efforts, a soapy mother-love melodrama called The Old Nest, earned nearly a million dollars for the Goldwyn Company. Goldwyn salesman Arthur Mayer was instructed never to sell that film without “wrapping around the exhibitor’s neck” three or four Will Rogers features. The Goldwyn Company posted a third-year loss of $82,937. 10.

  “I am not in a very good humour these days,” Goldwyn wrote Abe Lehr on June 9, 1919, “as I have been very nervous but I have never allowed it to get the best of me.” In fact, Goldwyn was assembling a “big deal” to resuscitate his company—one that was “liable to give us the exclusive rights to every famous success produced on Broadway.”

  That summer, the Goldwyn Company refinanced itself by negotiating deals with a handful of the most industrious producers on Broadway. Lee and J. J. Shubert, Sam H. Harris, and Al H. Woods (who specialized in “comedy cheapies”) each bought into the company for $125,000. For shares of voting stock, they granted exclusive options to the picture rights of their plays. If Goldwyn chose to film any of the plays, he and the respective producer would agree on the purchase price. Goldwyn’s company was still undercapitalized and lacked outlets for its product; but for the first time, he had preemption on most of the major hits on Broadway. The price for this infusion of money and material was high. Each new partner subtracted from Goldwyn’s power.

  An even bigger investor was standing in the wings. Al Woods’s wife had a cousin who was about to change the fate of the Goldwyn Company.

  Frank Joseph Godsol was a darkly handsome man-about-town, a fabled character who first hit New York just before the war. Tall and trim, he exuded so much confidence that people were inclined to overlook his checkered past. Since 1912 he had been making deals for the Shubert organization at home and abroad. In addition to his interests in an Italian studio, he owned and managed several theaters on the Continent. But word had it that Go
dsol (born Goldsoll, in Cleveland) had promised the French army dozens of healthy horses and delivered spavined mules. He had also promoted a product called Tecla pearls, which he insisted were so “much superior to the original” that he never advertised their being artificial. He was currently under review of the French Council of War. People saw in Godsol what they wanted to see. Goldwyn discerned a self-made man with aspirations and a taste for luxury, someone in many ways like himself.

  Godsol drove a Hispano-Suiza, smoked large coronas, traveled with a retinue of valets, maids, secretaries, a bookie, and always a beautiful actress. He played bridge for a dollar a point; and he was, noted one observer, “willing to wager on any proposition.” His pockets literally bulging with money, he was looking for a new business venture, a vulnerable motion picture company he could raid. He beguiled Goldwyn with two magic words: theaters and money.

  No business had flourished during the four winters of war so much as Du Pont of Delaware, manufacturers of munitions and gunpowder. The company earned over one billion dollars in gross income between 1914 and 1918, profits close to sixty million dollars each of those years. The company established a Development Department, investing in plastics, enamels, rubber, dyes, paints, varnishes, and heavy chemicals. Just when Goldwyn was considering buying only Du Pont raw film, Godsol interested two members of the du Pont family in motion pictures.

  Godsol catalyzed a deal, and the Goldwyn Company entered the world of big business. He directed an immediate increase in its capital stock to one million shares. With Godsol and the du Ponts came barons from Wilmington, the president of the Chase National Bank, and an officer of the Central Union Trust Company. The turn of a page, and the Goldwyn Company books went from tens of thousands of dollars in red ink to five million in the black.

  Even with so august a board, Goldwyn was not about to fall again into the ceremonial position of chairman. He demanded a voting trust agreement that gave him veto power over any further consolidation or mergers involving the Goldwyn Company, and he was named president of the company. Godsol accepted the ceremonial title. The two men were to receive identical salaries—one thousand dollars a week. Godsol said he would serve his first year for one dollar.

  On December 17, 1919, Goldwyn wrote Abe Lehr:The last deal we made has placed us in the position where everyone in the industry envies us. The Goldwyn Company stands as solid as the rock of Gibraltar in the eyes of the public, as well as in the banks. We have today $5,000,000 in cash in the banks, which is more than any picture company in the world has laying in the banks, and that balance puts us in a position where we have a credit of like amount. In other words, if we needed $10,000,000 cash tomorrow, we could get it, and further, it is understood should we need $10,000,000 or $15,000,000 more the DuPont and Chase people will find it for us.

  Security became him, brightening his entire outlook. “You and I are integral parts of the Fifth greatest industry in the world,” Goldwyn wrote his employees in his fourth annual message. With visions of grandeur, Goldwyn articulated his credo, watchwords by which he lived for the rest of his professional life:Every picture we make is intended to be a Big picture. We feel when we start that it will be a knockout—and we strain every nerve to make it a hit. But in creative work it simply can’t be done and never will be done. If out of sixty pictures we get six or seven big hits we pat ourselves on the back. If out of these hits we get two or three knockouts you can’t hold us. So when you see a Goldwyn picture no matter how you like it just consider that a lot of hard working men and women put all they had in it to make it successful and if they failed it is only human. But one thing we certainly try mighty hard to do [Goldwyn emphasized], and that is to make every Goldwyn picture, clean, [and] “classy” ...

  For $50,000, Goldwyn purchased twenty acres adjacent to the Culver City studio. He commissioned architect Stephen Merritt to design a new administration building, and all around it a complex of edifices and avenues. The cozy studio was transformed into an Olympian mill. Behind Ince’s Corinthian columns rose a walled city, running almost a half mile along Washington Boulevard, a make-believe world in miniature. Within two years, the Goldwyn lot contained forty-two buildings; Russian, southern, Alaskan, Spanish, French, Chinese, western, and New York streets were reconstructed; J. J. Cohn, who was brought to Culver City and managed the lot for the next four decades, exaggerated only slightly when he said, “Rome was built in a day.”

  With more money on hand, Goldwyn believed he could bring greater luster to his notion of Eminent Authors. After Kipling and Shaw, Maurice Maeterlinck was possibly the most honored writer alive. Known primarily for his fantasies, melancholy legends, and works of natural history—The Blue Bird, Pelléas and Mélisande, and The Life of the Bee—Maeterlinck arrived in New York at the start of the new decade for a nationwide lecture tour. He could not speak English, so his speeches had to be written out phonetically. Before a packed house at Carnegie Hall, the Belgian appeared, his script in hand—with “ainded” written for the word “ended,” and “ichou” for “issue.” Halfway through the lecture, Maeterlinck got as confused as his audience and walked off the stage.

  A concert impresario from Boston named Henry Russell entered Maeterlinck’s life, determined to make the most of the situation. He thought the universal language of film might be just the idiom for him and that Sam Goldwyn, famous for hiring “just classy writers,” seemed the right studio head. Russell became Maeterlinck’s agent and brought him to Goldwyn’s office; the latter had summoned his publicity man Howard Dietz (who could speak some French). As Dietz recounted, “Goldwyn listed the stipend of his eminent authors in order to give Maeterlinck the feeling that he would share the rarefied atmosphere of American literary lights and American substantial terms.” As Goldwyn reeled off the roster of his eminences, from Gertrude Atherton to Booth Tarkington, he drew a blank stare from Maeterlinck. “What is he,” Goldwyn asked Dietz, “a dumbbell?”

  Once Goldwyn began to talk money, Maeterlinck showed signs of comprehension. The poet-playwright agreed to the basic Eminent Authors contract. One unique clause reflected Goldwyn’s second thoughts. The “dumbbell” was to submit a rough sketch of his story to the producer before proceeding to a final script. If Goldwyn could not get a shootable scenario out of the Nobel Prize winner, he would only be out the initial $5,000 advance. Goldwyn intended to get at least that much back in publicity, starting with a whistle-stop train trip across the country.

  Goldwyn was in Culver City to greet Maeterlinck and to meet his every need. This included a house on a sunny hilltop. “I feel proud to have allied to the production forces of my organization, the brain and inspired pen of Maurice Maeterlinck and to establish as a policy of Goldwyn the desire to secure the greatest creative brains from the world’s literati,” Goldwyn announced to a group of exhibitors.

  One of early Hollywood’s chestnuts is that Maeterlinck’s first screenwriting was an adaptation of his Life of the Bee and that upon its submission, Goldwyn ran out of his office screaming, “My God, the hero is a bee!” But Howard Dietz remembered Maeterlinck’s going two months before getting a page written, and that was an abstract story entitled “The Power of Light.” All Goldwyn remembered of the author’s first scenario was that it was a useless notion about a little boy and a mattress and a lot of blue feathers. Still, Goldwyn liked having Maeterlinck on the lot. He made a point of introducing him to all the press and any visiting dignitaries as “the greatest writer on earth. He’s the guy who wrote The Birds and the Bees.”

  Goldwyn urged Maeterlinck to watch some movies. Day after day, the Belgian sat in projection rooms, absorbing action pictures. His next scenario, Goldwyn recalled, started with “the lid slowly rising from a sewer in a street of Paris; up from the sewer came the face of a gory and bedraggled female Apache with a dagger gripped between her teeth.” Maeterlinck’s Hollywood career “ainded” there. Goldwyn accompanied the writer to the train station. On the platform, Sam patted him on the shoulder and said, “Don�
��t worry, Maurice. You’ll make good yet.”

  Goldwyn sailed to Europe on the Mauretania on March 23, 1920, for almost two months of business. He hated to leave with so many irons in the fire—especially his pending offer to buy the opulent five-thousand-seat Capitol Theater in New York—but the trip was necessary. The Continent had reopened as a major film market, and he could not trust anybody else to close these deals, which would serve as boilerplate terms for many years to come. His representative was stuck in negotiations with William Maxwell Aitken, better known as Lord Beaverbrook—the newspaper tycoon, British minister of information, and controller of 80 percent of England’s first-run cinemas. Goldwyn also had every intention of visiting the greatest living playwright in the English language. He was cheered to learn that his publicity director was a friend of the novelist Hugh de Selincourt, who was a friend of George Bernard Shaw ... and that Mr. Goldwyn had been invited to tea.

  Shaw—sixty—four years old, between Heartbreak House and Back to Methuselah —had rejected out of hand the offers of countless motion picture people. Goldwyn’s entreaties appealed to him. Mr. and Mrs. Shaw entertained Goldwyn at their apartment on Adelphi Terrace and struck him as “contented and settled as a hardware merchant of Topeka and his wife.”

  “To my surprise,” Goldwyn recalled, “I learned that he was a picture enthusiast. He told me that there were two people whose films he never missed—Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford. Regarding the former, he was especially enthusiastic.” Goldwyn assured Shaw that he would treat his plays with velvet gloves, that their integrity would be preserved at all costs, commercial considerations be damned.

  The precise words at their parting were known only to the two of them, but the next day a newspaperman called on Shaw to learn the outcome of his conversation with the American film magnate. “Everything is all right,” Shaw reported. “There is only one difference between Mr. Goldwyn and me. Whereas he is after art I am after money.” Both men dined out on the epigram for years. Shaw had not heard the last of Sam Goldwyn. He would be back every few years to press his case.