Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  Chaplin, Pickford, and Fairbanks maintained their preeminence for the better part of a decade; but with the concupiscent fervor sweeping the nation, their virginal antics had lost some of their allure. A new image stole the breath of the public—a tall, swarthy Italian with slick black hair and fiery almond-shaped eyes. His tango in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse set hearts aflutter. In The Sheik, he was decked out in dashing desert garb; and when he swept Agnes Ayres off her feet and into his tent, his nostrils flaring, women in the audience swooned. In the words of Chaplin, “no man had greater attraction for women than Valentino.”

  “By this time,” observed Anita Loos, who had been in Los Angeles writing since the arrival of the first big motion picture companies, “the stars were moving out of the Hollywood Hotel and beginning to live in their own private houses with servants, most of whom were their peers in everything but sex appeal—which pinpoints the reason for the film capital’s mass misbehavior. To place in the limelight a great number of people who ordinarily would be chambermaids and chauffeurs, give them unlimited power and instant wealth is bound to produce a lively and diverting result.” It became the wonderland through the looking glass: Gardeners, acrobats, and hat models strutted as kings and queens. In no other arena did rewards so vast come so fast. Few could adjust to the sudden wealth and fame. Infidelity and bootleg liquor went with the territory.

  The world accepted Charlie Chaplin’s marrying seventeen-year-old Mildred Harris and divorcing her two years later, then marrying a sixteen-year-old, Lita Grey. Movie fans quickly got over the respective divorces of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, noted Mary’s friend Carmel Myers, “because it was what everybody wanted. The world got the happy ending they had been rooting for.” But the press could not ignore the nearly dead body of pretty Virginia Rappe found in Fatty Arbuckle’s suite at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco in 1921. A jury completely exonerated him of the young actress’s subsequent death, but public opinion kept Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky from releasing three completed films or from hiring him to act thereafter. Without appearing before a camera again, Arbuckle died in 1933 in ignominious oblivion.

  Drugs suddenly took the life of Wallace Reid. After Zukor’s press department vainly tried to conceal the truth, they admitted that the star had been addicted to morphine. Abe Lehr wrote Goldwyn that their former star Tom Moore was flat broke and no longer hirable because of booze. The same was true for Jack Pickford. His wife, a bright young Goldwyn star named Olive Thomas, killed herself in 1920, as did Robert Harron, the handsome juvenile in many of Griffith’s landmark films.

  For years, Hollywood’s misbehavior had titillated the public. Now all the backsliding disgusted them. Many fans boycotted anything that came out of that slough. Box-office figures plummeted between 1921 and 1923—precisely when Goldwyn was most desperate for business.

  Filmmakers wondered how to woo patrons back to their theaters. They could clean up their acts by reverting to the sappy melodramas that had long been boring audiences, or they could throw more logs on the fires of passion and produce films that presented life as it actually was. By depicting sin in all its evil they thought they could have it both ways, pandering and preaching at the same time. Cecil B. DeMille wielded the mightiest double-edged sword of all. In his 1923 biblical epic, The Ten Commandments, he presented saturnalia at its most salacious, all under the punitive gaze of the Lord. In 1921 alone, legislators introduced nearly one hundred censorship bills in thirty-seven states. One day, Louis B. Mayer confided to King Vidor, “If this keeps up there won’t be any motion picture industry.”

  Hollywood decided to clean house. There already existed a National Association of the Motion Picture Industry; but the heads of the largest film companies recognized the need for somebody outside the industry to regulate its activities. Lewis Selznick—who had been demoted in the business to distributing a biweekly newsreel—proposed an unlikely candidate for the job, a member of the Harding administration.

  “Beyond the fact that I had arranged for the newsreels to have proportionate coverage with the press during the campaign, I had never been identified with any phase of motion pictures,” recalled Will H. Hays, an unsuspecting jug-eared Hoosier. “I was an Indiana lawyer who had become Republican national chairman, then Postmaster General. Just that.” Hays had been born in 1879 in Sullivan, Indiana. To his parents, he later recalled, “the Christian life meant the Ten Commandments, self-discipline, faith in time of trouble, worship, the Bible, and the Golden Rule.”

  In early December 1921, Selznick and Saul Rogers, William Fox’s lawyer, circulated a round-robin letter among the heads of a dozen motion picture concerns. In it, Samuel Goldwyn (while still president of Goldwyn Pictures), along with a dozen other company heads, requested that Hays ask the President to relieve him of his present duties so that he might head a “national association of motion picture producers and distributors.”

  On December 17, Hays met the signatories at Delmonico’s in New York. He wanted the holidays in Indiana to ponder the offer. Christmas morning, Hays made up his mind. Sitting at breakfast, he overheard an argument among his six-year-old son and two cousins who were trying on the cowboy outfits Hays had bought them. “I want to be William S. Hart,” cried young Bill Hays. “No, I’m going to be him!” contradicted one of the cousins. “No, I am!” yelled the other. “You can be Doug, and Bill can be the bad guy.” Hays realized “that the great motion picture industry might as easily become a corrupting as a beneficial influence on our future generations.” On January 14, 1922, he agreed to serve as president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. Quipsters called him “Czar of all the Rushes.”

  While the MPPDA began to heal the wounds of Hollywood—establish—ing fair contracts between distributors and theaters, setting standards for films, overcoming local censorship movements, and wiping up after the major scandals—Samuel Goldwyn withdrew into solitary exile on West Seventy-seventh Street, seeing nobody except his servants. Miss Lipnick set up a makeshift office in his apartment. “I’ve got some thinking to do,” he explained to the few granted admittance to his bedroom, then he would wail that all his competitors were “going after a sick man.”

  Goldwyn instructed Miss Lipnick to scout the summer real estate rentals on Long Island—among the thousand-dollar-a-month estates. He settled on a mansion at Elm’s Point in Great Neck, which he would share with Broadway producer Arthur Hammerstein.

  The most terrible aspect of the Goldwyn ouster was the swiftness with which Godsol had acted. Even though business had been poor, Goldwyn had been negotiating in good faith with several promising filmmakers up to the eleventh hour. Marshall Neilan, the successful director of such Mary Pickford hits as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Daddy Long Legs, was about to sign with him to direct his wife, Blanche Sweet, in Tess of the d‘Urbervilles; Goldwyn was closing a deal with Erich von Stroheim, an Austrian actor-writer-director, who wanted to transform Frank Norris’s novel McTeague into an epic motion picture called Greed; and he was obtaining the rights to General Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur—A Tale of the Christ.

  Goldwyn sought the counsel of Max D. Steuer, the prominent theatrical attorney. He informed Goldwyn that the recent overthrow sounded illegal and that if Goldwyn wanted to force the board to hold another election, it could probably be done. Even so, Goldwyn realized he had few allies. He received letters from but a handful of employees—Harry Alexander, Arthur Mayer, Howard Dietz; they would move on with the Goldwyn Company and in time to other careers. (Dietz led a dazzling double life—for years the chief of publicity and advertising for MGM, all the while writing Broadway musicals, including the charming lyrics to such standards as “Dancing in the Dark,” “That’s Entertainment,” and “By Myself.”) Only Abe Lehr was constantly there for Goldwyn, assuring him, “YOUR SITUATION IS NOT AS DARK AS YOU PROBABLY FEEL IT TO BE.” But Lehr was also still part of the Goldwyn organization. He had no option but to ride the wave that had carried him to t
he Pacific coast. As for Sam Goldwyn, he would have to determine his future as he almost always had—by himself.

  Goldwyn decided not to challenge the election; it was best to divorce himself from the company altogether. “I can make more money being foot-loose than I could ever hope to make out of the Goldwyn situation,” he wrote Lehr. His 9.5 percent interest—then worth some $600,000—would be plenty of seed money.

  Having devoted most of his motion picture career to sales, Goldwyn now realized that the production of films was “just too important to leave to others.” Twice burned by his desire to expand, he also saw the advantages of keeping things as small as possible. “There are two kinds of producers,” he recounted years later: “One is a film manufacturer who turns out many pictures, some of them good, more of them not so good. I once tried being a film manufacturer but I didn’t like it. There were too many pictures going out under my name which were not satisfactory to me. Since then, I’ve tried to be the other kind of producer, making fewer pictures but each one the best I could make it.”

  Unfortunately, the industry was finding little room in those days for the producer of quality films who did not want to work within a studio. To bankers and exhibitors, the word “independent” was becoming synonymous with “fly-by-night.” Once Goldwyn realized no “big personalities” were rushing into business with him, he decided to sit out the summer. His ambition was to redefine the reputation—if not the role—of the independent producer.

  On May 15, Goldwyn moved into his mansion in Long Island. “To keep busy,” he wrote Abe Lehr nine days later, “I conceived the brilliant idea to write my memoirs of the movies, which is practically my reminiscences of the last ten years, and giving a description of the different stars and authors and my various experiences with them.” The idea of writing an autobiography probably originated with Goldwyn’s former fellow board member at the Goldwyn Company, publisher George H. Doran, who agreed to print it. When Arthur Hammerstein heard that his housemate, already famous around town for his slips of the tongue, was going to write a book, he asked, “Who’s going to translate it for you?”

  Goldwyn had the last laugh. On top of the book advance, Pictorial Review, with its two million circulation, agreed to serialize it, paying a thousand dollars for each of six installments. They recommended a writer named Corinne Lowe to write the book. “Feel certain that I can make enough money to keep the wolf from the door for a while,” Goldwyn wrote Abe Lehr.

  Lehr tried to talk Goldwyn out of the memoirs, not realizing that Behind the Screen was another phase in Goldwyn’s process of self-invention. The book would not only allow him to appear publicly as a literate, even literary, figure; it would also enable him to rewrite his history, expunging the mistakes of his past.

  Goldwyn contributed little to his 263-page autobiography. He supplied Miss Lowe with half-truths or glamorous stretches of fact, shedding just enough light on himself to cast Horatio Alger’s shadow across the entire book.

  The stars he knew were discussed only in superlatives, all to burnish his own reputation. Such celebrities as Valentino and child favorite Jackie Coogan, with whom Goldwyn had little or no connection, had whole chapters written about them—gilt by association. An autographed picture of Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks served as the book’s frontispiece, suggesting an intimacy that did not exist.

  Behind the Screen, one of the first “histories” of the infant art form, sold a respectable seven thousand copies. It even received pleasant notices—all of which added an air of legitimacy to Goldwyn’s new gentlemanly mien.

  Great Neck had become Broadway’s playground—summer home to Lillian Russell, George M. Cohan, and the Ziegfeld crowd. For Goldwyn it was the workshop where he added the finishing touches to his character. He bought a seven-year-old chestnut gelding and became a fair horseman; he learned to swim in Long Island Sound; he picked up a little tennis. During the season, he became better acquainted with his idol, Florenz Ziegfeld, and with the newest Follies star, Eddie Cantor. He played backgammon with newspaper magnate Herbert Bayard Swope; and he took up golf with Harpo Marx, who had just moved onto the Swope estate, after his struggling vaudeville act with his brothers had at last scored on Broadway.

  Without the legions of employees he was used to ordering, Goldwyn unleashed his temper on his valet and chauffeur. He did not know how to operate an automobile, but he was a vociferous backseat driver. One day that summer, after all the yammering he could stand, the uniformed chauffeur drove Goldwyn to the middle of nowhere on the Jericho Turn-pike, in the outback of Long Island. He stopped the car, got out, announced that he was quitting, and ran off, leaving Goldwyn alone. Goldwyn learned to drive that summer, all but rounding out his self-portrait as the complete country gentleman.

  “Being down here and having an opportunity to think a great deal about my future,” he wrote Abe Lehr in August 1922, “I have come to the conclusion that the thing for me to do is to either get a star that is good for three or four pictures a year ... or get a great director and make about three pictures a year with him or get a real big story and start off by doing a big picture ... unless something else should come up in the meantime that would also yield money.”

  Goldwyn could put together a production easily enough, but he would need somebody to distribute it. The concept of United Artists—an association of small independents who made “special” films—appealed to him. He knew they desperately needed product, what with Chaplin still under contract to First National and the remaining founders coming up with but two pictures a year. He tried to horn his way into a deal Fairbanks was making with Jackie Coogan. It all fell apart because Mr. and Mrs. Coogan wanted nothing to do with Sam Goldwyn. Neither did Mrs. Fairbanks.

  A shrewd businesswoman—“and a tough little Mick,” said David Rose, a lifelong friend of both Goldwyn and Fairbanks—Mary Pickford also liked her whiskey. When she drank too much, she often turned anti-Semitic. “That’s the Jew in you that’s saying that,” she would cry whenever Fairbanks tried to defend any of the Jewish moguls. She spoke of Sam Goldwyn as Shylock. Even with such million-dollar hits as Griffith’s Way Down East, Fairbanks’s The Three Musketeers, and Pickford’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, the infant United Artists looked as though it might never get to its feet, so dire was its need for product. But remembering Goldwyn’s behavior with Adolph Zukor, Mary Pickford promised herself to avoid doing business with him at all costs.

  If anybody could help him, Goldwyn thought, it was his friend Chaplin, with whom he frequently double-dated. Chaplin had, in fact, met his first wife through Goldwyn, whose beach house he continued to use as a trysting place. If Chaplin could not get him into United Artists, he might at least put in a good word at First National. Goldwyn asked Abe Lehr to suggest nonchalantly that Chaplin give Goldwyn a dinner some night, inviting important people in distribution. Lehr discouraged the idea. He said Chaplin was engrossed in an intense love affair with actress Pola Negri that “USES UP ALL OF HIS TIME AND MAKES HIM EVEN MORE UNRELIABLE AND ERRATIC THAN FORMERLY.” In spite of Chaplin’s affection for Goldwyn, Lehr also let fall, “PERHAPS YOU ARE NOT AWARE THAT ... HE FREQUENTLY ENTERTAINS DINNER PARTIES WITH BURLESQUE OF YOUR SPEECHES AS TO FUTURE OF INDUSTRY. ETC.” Goldwyn got the message.

  To anyone who would listen, Goldwyn insisted that there was a “conspiracy” against him. In fact, it was nothing so melodramatic. He had not made that many enemies in his ten years in the motion picture business; and a lot of people liked him. Quite simply, nobody wanted to work with him. “My name,” Goldwyn later imparted to his analyst when speaking of this standstill in his career, “was Sam Mud.”

  If nobody who entered the business with him required his expertise, he would turn to people who did. Fortunately, the motion picture colony was swarming with a new generation of fresh talent. In a medium with no old masters—Edwin S. Porter had quietly disappeared from the scene, directing his last film in 1915; and Griffith, as beset by financial woes as ever, struggled to make one picture
a year—the job of capturing action on celluloid was about to be placed in the hands of a few dozen men practically born with the century, mostly rough-and-ready Gentiles (many of them hard-drinking Irishmen), who would get on-the-job training.

  Some had been actors—Frank Borzage, John Ford, George Marshall, Raoul Walsh, and Henry King, all born around 1890. William Wellman from Boston had recently been in France with the Lafayette Flying Corps. On leave in Paris one night, he wandered into a café, heard noises in a back room, and barged in on General Pershing dining with two high-ranking officers. After the war, he married a Goldwyn ingenue, Helene Chadwick, and was holding down a lowly production job the day Pershing came to visit the studio. Pershing happened to remember him, and they had a brief chat in front of all the studio personnel. What Goldwyn mistook for their intimacy led to a promotion for the handsome man in his mid-twenties. Wellman was made an assistant director.

  Almost all the others of Wellman’s generation of directors had a similar lucky break. They were men in the right place at the right time. Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, and Gregory La Cava got onto movie sets because of an ability to write scenarios, then worked their way into directors’ chairs. Lewis Milestone could edit film. Victor Fleming, the oldest of the new wave of directors—born in 1883—knew how to operate a camera, as did George Stevens, born in 1904. While Stevens trained under Hal Roach, Frank Capra, a Sicilian born in 1897, apprenticed to Mack Sennett, directing Harry Langdon comedies. Sam Wood was an assistant to DeMille. Clarence Brown went from being an electrical engineer to directing Valentino in The Eagle.

  No sooner had his flivver arrived in Hollywood than King Vidor was poking around D. W Griffith’s enormous set for Intolerance, a Babylonian square surrounded by palaces and massive walls. He made friends with the guards and got to watch “the great D. W” at work. He began at Universal as a company clerk for twelve dollars a week. “Men who had never been inside a studio,” Vidor realized, “were given directing assignments on pure bluff. They wouldn’t have the slightest notion of what a camera could do. Some of these ne‘er-do-wells would turn out several pictures before being discovered; by the time busy executives got around to viewing their initial efforts they would be well into their third film.”