Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  9 Leading Ladies

  BEAUTY HAS BEEN a passport across social borders since time immemorial. Naturally, women who thought they bore it descended upon Hollywood. If they projected an image that enough people wanted to look at, they might become powerful goddesses in their own right. If not, they could still sway men of influence. That writhing between Beauty and Power, as ancient as Aphrodite and Zeus, created the electricity that sparked all of Hollywood.

  “God makes stars,” Samuel Goldwyn declared. “It’s up to producers to find them.” By the mid-twenties, studio moguls could explore the world in search of Beauty without ever leaving their screening rooms. Hollywood was the magnet for every pretty girl who had ever been told she “ought to be in pictures.” Actresses who had made films abroad could be considered for American stardom without their even knowing it.

  In the fall of 1924, Louis B. Mayer left for Rome to salvage MGM’s production of Ben-Hur, then foundering in extravagant chaos. He took his wife and his two daughters, aged seventeen and nineteen, to visit other capitals of Europe as well. One Sunday afternoon in Berlin, the Mayers sat in a projection room to watch The Atonement of Gösta Berling, a new film directed by the Swedish director Mauritz Stiller. A fellow Swede, MGM director Victor Seastrom, had urged Mayer to sign Stiller. “The only advance reservation my father had about him,” recalled Mayer’s younger daughter, Irene, “was the stipulation that he wouldn’t come to Hollywood without his new leading lady, an obstacle my father thought he could overcome.” The protégée was the nineteen-year-old daughter of an unskilled Stockholm laborer named Karl Gustafsson and his plump wife, Anna. Their Greta had dropped out of school, become a latherer in barbershops, then clerked in the millinery department of the PUB department store. Appearing in two promotional films for PUB, she was soon accepted as a scholarship student at the Royal Dramatic Theater’s training school. Stiller saw her and changed her surname to Garbo.

  As her image flickered before Mayer’s eyes, Irene Mayer remembered, “Miss Garbo overcame him in the first reel. It was her eyes. He said, ‘She reminds me of Norma Talmadge.’ There was no resemblance, but what they had in common and what he must have meant was the capacity to convey feeling through their eyes. Dad said, ‘I’ll take Stiller, all right. As for the girl, I want her even more than Stiller. I can make a star out of her.’” Mayer met them both that afternoon in his suite at the Adlon Hotel.

  A few months later, Greta Garbo sailed for New York. Publicity stills were taken of her leaning against the rail of the Drottingholm—“slender, smart, beautifully groomed,” a white cloche hat framing her immortal eyes and sculpted face. “It was,” Mayer’s younger daughter later noted, “the Garbo the world was to know.” The producer cultivated her image, on the screen and off, creating the greatest legend in motion pictures, a singular mystique. She brought to the world a new standard by which beauty was measured. The impact of this new deity on Western culture was not lost on the other motion picture moguls.

  SAM GOLDWYN’S next two films—distributed by First National in May and September of 1924—copied the pattern of his first pair. He selected a dramatic love story—Joseph Hergesheimer’s Cytherea—and another Potash and Perlmutter comedy. Frances Marion wrote both scenarios. Goldwyn took offices at First National’s United Studios at 5341 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, where he assembled a staff to work on his pictures. As soon as Abe Lehr’s contract with the Goldwyn Company expired, he reassumed his position as Sam Goldwyn’s delegate in Hollywood. The producer also hired the dapper little man from Price Waterhouse & Company who had been auditing his books—James A. Mulvey—to run the New York office. Mulvey quickly became his most trusted business confidant. He spent the next forty years working in the wings; and Goldwyn never made a business move without first consulting him.

  In Hollywood with Potash and Perlmutter is the story of two Jewish garment manufacturers trying to be movie producers, who will get financing if they hire the banker’s girlfriend. Nothing unusual happened during the months of preproduction on the picture: The star dropped dead; First National—which had final approval of all Goldwyn’s productions before putting up any money—threatened to withdraw its backing; and only days before shooting, Goldwyn was without a leading lady.

  Goldwyn’s second film that year was Cytherea, the scorchy story of a love-starved man in his forties. It was controversial source material for a motion picture, especially then, what with Will Hays looking over producers’ shoulders. Women’s clubs throughout the country waged a letter-writing campaign against Goldwyn. “TAKE NO CHANCES ON DOING ANYTHING THAT SEEMS CENSORABLE,” Goldwyn wired George Fitzmaurice. Frances Marion managed to expurgate some of the spicier sections without losing the central story of passion and fantasy. Goldwyn further distracted the film’s detractors by promoting its great scientific and artistic innovation. In several dream sequences, Cytherea dissolved into a new process called Technicolor. The eight-reel drama (which featured Constance Bennett in her first Hollywood role, as a vampy niece) was a modest success at the box office and impressed most critics with its sophistication.

  At age forty-five, Sam Goldwyn was playing out his own version of Cytherea. He was forever auditioning pretty girls. Since Mabel Normand, he had not fallen seriously in love with anyone, but he courted many beautiful ingenues. In the early twenties, Sam Goldwyn was known in New York for being at every important opening night. He was caricatured more than once in the pages of Vanity Fair as one of the celebrities always apt to be on view at premieres among the show business four hundred. He was just as well known for taking unbridled liberties with women on first (and usually last) dates.

  Goldwyn’s clumsy manhandling of women especially amused Charlie Chaplin. One day in New York, he conspired with theater owner Sid Grauman on an elaborate practical joke. Charlie told Sam he had a beautiful girl to whom he wanted to introduce him, someone rich and pretty but quite shy. Chaplin suggested a carriage ride around Central Park that evening. He and his mystery lady, wearing a dark veil, picked Goldwyn up at his new apartment at 125 East Sixty-third Street. In the warm evening, the three of them rode in the hansom cab through Central Park, the girl saying little. Goldwyn kept trying to loosen her up by putting his arms around her. When he started to nuzzle her, she threw back her veil, revealing Sid Grauman in drag. Grauman and Chaplin never forgot the incident. Neither did Goldwyn. He turned crimson whenever Chaplin retold the story, which he seemed to do at any dinner party at which Goldwyn was present.

  In 1924, the object of Goldwyn’s desire became the dark-eyed Florence Vidor, who in the words of her recently divorced husband “was beginning to be known as ‘the first lady of the screen.’” Sam Goldwyn fell for her “stateliness.” He came on strong, showering her with gifts. They were seen together for a few months. “I know Sam wanted to marry her,” said King Vidor years later; “but Florence could never have taken Sam seriously as a lover.”

  Goldwyn was looking hard for love. At Easter, he sent a twenty-five-dollar basket of lilies to the twenty-eight-year-old Miss Vidor; and he instructed his secretary at United Studios to “send my baby ... a nice basket for about $10.” Once Miss Vidor realized the seriousness of Goldwyn’s intentions, she stopped seeing him. The sole surviving recipient of Goldwyn’s love remained his “baby”—Ruth, who was suddenly twelve.

  Her father had in five years hardly set eyes on her, as Ruth became a sore reminder of the love that was missing in his life. Smart and pretty, the square-shouldered girl grew to be the tallest pupil in her class at the Hollywood School for Girls—a private school that taught Edith and Irene Mayer, Agnes de Mille, Harlean Carpenter (who would later act under her mother’s maiden name, as Jean Harlow), and a few boys, including Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Joel McCrea. Ruth instinctively distanced herself from her father a little more each year. Being his child, she commented years later, “was like playing a game in which nobody told you the rules: There would be the great proclamations of love, then off with your head. And you never
knew what word would set him off. He’d cry at corn and laugh at pratfalls—the perfect audience. But those feelings were only skin deep, because when it came to people—to real emotions—he knew nothing.... You could be dying of a broken heart, and he wouldn’t ever know.”

  Ruth’s elementary school years were peripatetic. Her stepfather, Hector Turnbull, traveled constantly between the two branches of Paramount Studios. As a child of divorce, she was often ostracized by her schoolmates. They derided her for all her surnames—Goldfish, Lasky, Goldwyn, Turnbull. Fortunately, she grew up in a loving environment, surrounded by supportive relatives. From the time of the divorce, Blanche never mentioned Sam Goldwyn’s name; to Ruth, she would refer to him as “your father.”

  After Blanche’s remarriage, Goldwyn let most of a year go by without making a single child support payment.

  When in 1921 the Turnbulls had planned a trip to Europe with Ruth, Goldwyn had agreed to her being gone for three months. Upon reconsideration, it occurred to him, as he wired his lawyer, “THAT I HAVE NO ASSURANCE THEY WILL RETURN BY THAT TIME AS TURNBULL IS JUST AS LIKELY TO REMAIN THERE FOR A YEAR AS HE IS FOR THREE MONTHS.” He did not want to see Ruth; he simply did not want to lose her. The lawyer had advised taking no action until Goldwyn cleared up his support payments. He did neither.

  In July 1923, Goldwyn wrote Ruth that he hoped to get to Los Angeles in September to see her. Until then, he asked her to send a picture of herself, “as I am very anxious to know what you look like now. You seem to change so much every time I see you.” In August, he wrote Ruth a long paragraph about the joys of his vacation in Saranac Lake and repeated his request for a picture.

  By the end of September—after sending her books and asking if she wanted a new Kodak—Goldwyn’s patience had been exhausted:In my last letter I wrote you about some pictures of yourself but up to now I have not received any answer. I wish you would go to the photographers at the very earliest time you can and have some pictures taken. As I wrote you I am very anxious to see how you look as I have not seen you for such a long time that it seems like years.

  He suspected sabotage in his crumbling relationship with Ruth. September 28:Do you open every letter that I send to you, or does some one else open the letter before you read it? ... Darling, this is the first time I have asked you to definitely answer my letters and unless I receive an answer I might have to bring you on to New York and spend a few months with me here so as to make sure that you realize that Father loves you and is anxious to look after you and do everything in the world for you.

  Ruth sent her father a snapshot of her with her dog—“as I don’t care about having a big photograph taken as they are never any good as I always look to [sic] self-conscious.” She explained that she tried to answer all his questions, “but it is hard work to write such long letters so often when I am going to school and having to practice every afternoon after school beside music and tennis lessons. You don’t seem to think that I ought to play.

  “I got the three books you sent,” Ruth added, “but I had already read one of them and the other two were too grown up for me, and anyway I don’t need any books.” If her father could not read her sentiments between the lines, her next paragraph spelled it out: “I see all of your letters but of course I like to show any letters I get to Mother as we have no secrets and all children have their letters opened for them.”

  “I am in receipt of your letter and judging by the tone of it you are no longer the sweet, wonderful little girl of mine that you have always been,” he dictated, in a tone that meant business.I am surprised that you would write a letter like this to your Father, whom you know loves you better than anything else in this world.... Of course I want you to play and have a good time; I would do anything in this world to help you have a good time, but I am sure that you want me to be happy also, and I can only be happy if I hear from you often and know all about the things you are doing.

  Goldwyn called her “negligent” for failing to remember him on his last birthday. And he still wanted a proper photograph.

  Ruth not only held her ground, she gained some, calling her father on his neglectful behavior.I realize that I should have come out to see you oftener than I have [he replied], but unfortunately I have had to work very hard within the last year and it has not been easy for me to leave New York....

  I am sure that when we spend a few months together (which I expect very shortly to be able to arrange) you will find out for yourself that I am just as nice a Father as you used to think I was.... Please, dear, do not write to me the way you have; you hurt my feelings when you do that and I am sure you do not want to hurt me as I would rather do anything in the world than hurt your feelings.

  The photograph was never mentioned again.

  Goldwyn spent the Christmas holidays on the West Coast. A single moment during that visit affected the future of their entire relationship. It occurred over lunch, when Ruth’s fork punctured the skin of her baked potato in the dining room at the Ambassador Hotel. The potato seemed undercooked to Goldwyn. He called the waiter over, then the headwaiter, and finally the maitre d‘, carrying on for fifteen minutes over a potato that Ruth found perfectly edible. The whole incident proved so “upsetting and embarrassing” that from then on she wanted him at arm’s length.

  Spurned by every woman in his life, Goldwyn was not about to let go of Ruth. “I am determined to have her live with me if it is only for sixty days,” Goldwyn instructed Nathan Burkan, who had been Blanche’s divorce lawyer but whom Goldwyn had dragooned into acting as counsel on several business deals. On his next trip to California, in February 1924, Goldwyn found Ruth distant to the point of near total absence. “She has been just as mean as she can possibly be,” Goldwyn wrote Burkan. “She always has something to do that is more important than seeing me, and I am so disgusted that I feel there are only two things for me to do: One is to entirely ignore the child, to feel that she does not belong to me and I am not to see her—the other is to insist on my rights.”

  Europe had become an important market for Goldwyn again, a place to sell his growing list of films and shop for talent—another undiscovered Garbo. He had also received a letter from his mother (sent in English by a professional letter writer), who reminded him that they had not seen each other in years. Her son’s two hundred dollars a month allowed Hannah Gelbfisz to live in some luxury in Warsaw; but since the war, she had suffered from cardiopulmonary disorders and “general nervous disease.” “Do not forget that I am not young already ... and that my greatest and only desire now, when, thanks to you, my existence is assured, is to see you,” she told her son.

  At his next reunion with Ruth, at the Astor Hotel in Times Square in New York, Goldwyn mapped out his plans to take her abroad. As he spoke, Ruth could only think of “weeks of ‘baked potatoes.’” After hearing out the offer, she looked up and said, “No, thanks.” Ruth would never forget her father’s turning “apoplectic.” He threw the twelve-year-old girl out of the Astor Hotel and resolved never to see or speak to her again. From that moment, all legal actions toward spending time with her stopped, his support payments ceased, their correspondence ended.

  FOR the better part of the year, Goldwyn had been negotiating for the rights to his biggest property yet, Stella Dallas, a contemporary American melodrama built around the growing crisis of broken homes. Olive Higgins Prouty’s best-selling novel was a shameless tearjerker about a mother’s love and the extremes of self-sacrifice: Stella Martin marries a dejected Stephen Dallas, her social superior. They have a daughter, Laurel, the only joy in their doomed relationship. Stephen drifts to New York, leaving Stella to raise the girl alone. Years later, he returns to ask for a divorce. He wishes to marry his former sweetheart, socialite Helen Morrison, and raise Laurel, offering her all the advantages Stella cannot. For her daughter’s sake, Stella agrees; but the girl refuses to leave her mother. Out of devotion to her, Stella marries a boor, to drive the girl into her father’s arms. After a few years in societ
y, Laurel becomes embarrassed by her mother’s common behavior. She does not even invite her to her wedding to the handsome Richard Grosvenor. Instead of barging in on the occasion, Stella Dallas stands in the rain, behind an iron gate outside the house where the wedding is taking place. She watches through the window ... as a policeman pokes her along on her way. The themes of love lost reverberated doubly for Sam Goldwyn—the selfless mother he never had, the daughter he had discarded.

  Once the rights were his, Goldwyn found George Fitzmaurice and Frances Marion so eager to make the film that they offered to forgo their salaries and share in profits. Before that, Miss Marion wrote three scenarios for Goldwyn (at $10,000 apiece), which Fitzmaurice would direct, in 1924 alone. They were all part of Goldwyn’s burning desire to establish a leading lady.

  Goldwyn had purchased three serious dramatic properties as vehicles for three beautiful young actresses. For the leading man in the first of them, Goldwyn was impressed with the stolid good looks of the young actor opposite Lillian Gish in The White Sister, Ronald Colman. Not even aware that Colman had played a bit part in his own Eternal City, Goldwyn in New York wired Fitzmaurice in Hollywood about the little-known actor: “PERSONALLY THINK HE LOOKS VERY FOREIGN BUT THEY CLAIM HE CAN SHAVE HIS MUSTACHE AND LOOK THE JUVENILE PART AS HE IS ONLY THIRTY YEARS OLD.” Fitzmaurice thought Colman was an excellent choice. “I HAVE NO OBJECTION TO HIS FOREIGN LOOKS OR MUSTACHE,” Fitzmaurice added. “AS YOU KNOW FOREIGN LEADING MEN VERY POPULAR IN AMERICA.” Colman ended up starring in all three pictures.