Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  Each role enhanced his screen stature, as each asked Colman to choose between two women—one always wholesome, the other a scheming vamp. In Tarnish, May McAvoy played a hard-working stenographer in love with her boss, whom she woos away from a gold-digging manicurist. In A Thief in Paradise, Colman played a derelict beachcomber conned into posing as the son of a millionaire; a socialite, played by Doris Kenyon, and a femme fatale, Aileen Pringle, vie for his affections. In His Supreme Moment, Colman played an earnest engineer torn between a caring actress and a carefree silk stocking. He ends up with the former, Blanche Sweet, who later recalled that her co-star used to require a few swigs of liquor before playing his love scenes. Goldwyn never worked with any of the leading ladies again. He put his commanding new leading man under long-term contract.

  Each of the movies was filmed in six weeks, for $250,000. They were marginal successes at the box office, pulling in enough money to encourage A. H. Giannini to extend further loans to Goldwyn.

  In January 1925, Goldwyn left for Europe—alone. He traveled by train from capital to capital, as far east as Germany. Sam had been sending extra money to his mother each year so that she could escape the cold by vacationing in Murano. That winter, she forwent the trip to Italy and met her son in Berlin. “Lange Hannah” Gelbfisz and her daughter Mania and granddaughter Adela journeyed from Warsaw. Sam’s sister Sally crossed the Channel from England to act as interpreter, for the family had heard that Schmuel had become “a famous millionaire who spoke only English.”

  They reunited at the Adlon in Berlin. Sam’s days were filled with business, but he took all his dinners in his mother’s suite. For the better part of a week, Hannah Gelbfisz never once left her room. Young Adela felt resentful that “Uncle Sam was ashamed of us.” Years later, he confided to a therapist that that was not the case. He said he had been trying to protect his mother from her own embarrassment.

  Over the four days, Goldwyn spoke only Yiddish to his relatives. He assured his mother that his three siblings in America—Ben, Bernard, and Nettie—were all happily married and that he looked after them. (Ben, in fact, had been a manager for the old Goldwyn Distribution Company in Denver; and Sam would soon bring him into his new operation.) He sent a generous allowance every month to his sister Sally in Birmingham. During their visit, Mania Lebensold said to her brother that she wanted to move her family from Poland to Palestine, but Sam vetoed the idea. “Your husband will never make a living there,” he insisted, “with all those Jews living together.”

  On his last afternoon in Berlin, Sam went upstairs to the suite where the family was sequestered and handed a roll of money to his sister Sally. In English he said, “Take Mother out and buy her a fur coat.” Hannah received the translation and replied in Yiddish, “I don’t want anything. I just want to sit and look at your face.” Almost every chance she had, Hannah would walk over to Sam and squeeze his face between her palms. Staring tearily into his eyes, she said over and over, “Shayner Yid. Shayner Yid”—“Beautiful Jew.”

  Sam would not be able to dine with his family that night, because he was the guest of honor at a dinner the American ambassador was giving at the hotel. Shortly before the reception, he instructed his mother to put on her best dress. He escorted her downstairs and right up to the ambassador. “Das ist mein mutter,” he said. He promenaded her once around the room, full of important people in evening clothes, then accompanied her to the lobby, where he kissed her on each cheek and instructed a bellman to show her back to her suite. His mother felt as though she had danced at the ball.

  Hannah Gelbfisz returned to Warsaw full of tales about her regal reception in Germany. That May, an intestinal disorder flared up, and she died. Goldwyn hardly ever spoke of the woman again, and then it was only to vilify her. He even invented a story about her having remarried all too hastily upon the death of her husband, which in Goldwyn’s mind justified his loathing for her.

  GOLDWYN left the Adlon Hotel—where the gods did not favor him with a Greto Garbo, as they had Louis B. Mayer just the year before—for Budapest. After a press conference at the Ritz Hotel, he asked a newspaperman to join him for a walk. As they strolled past a shop window that displayed picture postcards, a photograph of one particularly beautiful woman jumped out at Goldwyn. He asked who she was. Employing the Hungarian form of address, in which the surname is given first, the journalist replied, “Banky Vilma.”

  Vilma Banky, a twenty-seven-year-old blonde with enormous violet eyes, had been born in Nogyrodog, not far from Budapest. She had creamy skin, a heart-shaped mouth, and pronounced cheekbones—definitely more Pickford than Garbo. Goldwyn learned that she was a motion picture actress, with experience in Austria and at UFA in Germany; she was currently working at a small studio across the Danube. The reporter said he could arrange for them to meet on the set the next day.

  “I appeared,” Goldwyn remembered, “...and was met by all the studio dignitaries—such as there were—by the Mayor of the city and by an assorted group of other officials. But the real object of my visit—Banky Vilma—was not present.” Goldwyn’s inquiries regarding her whereabouts were evaded.

  As they left the studio, the journalist told Goldwyn, “If you will be at your hotel tonight, I will bring Banky Vilma around to see you.” Goldwyn canceled his appointments for the evening and waited at the hotel, but the actress never showed up. He was scheduled to depart from Budapest the next morning at eight o‘clock but, upon leaving the hotel, was informed that he had not yet received the necessary police permit. “I was much annoyed and started raising a certain amount of fuss with Budapest officialdom,” Goldwyn later recalled. The permit came through, delaying his departure to two o’clock that afternoon.

  When word reached the eager newspaperman that Goldwyn was still in town, he phoned to say he was sure he could line up Banky Vilma for lunch.

  12:00 o‘clock came, no Banky Vilma; 1:00 o’clock, still no Banky Vilma; 1:30, ditto. Finally, disgusted with everything about Budapest I left for the train, [Goldwyn recalled].

  I arrived five or ten minutes before train time and while I was on the platform watching my bags go on I saw the little newspaperman come pounding his way towards me. He reached me breathless. “I’ve got Banky Vilma outside at the gate,” he said. I answered, “Tell her to go home—I am busy and leaving on this train in ten minutes.” The little newspaperman looked as down-hearted as anyone I have seen. “Please,” he begged, “if you can come for just a minute and say hello you would do me a great favor. It would embarrass me terribly, after all I have gone through, if you would not do even that.” I did not feel much like doing this but I agreed to go down to the gate to say hello—but that was going to be all.

  Goldwyn missed his train. “I needed only one glimpse at Banky Vilma to know that this was one of the great beauties of the age and that she would be a great star,” he recounted. Her current producers, fearful of losing her, had crossed all the wires to prevent their meeting. Goldwyn did not leave Budapest without committing her to a five-year contract. He instructed her to go immediately to Paris, where money would be deposited with a couturier to outfit her properly. Then he wanted her to sail to America. From that moment on, Vilma Banky later admitted, “I never knew what hit me.”

  Goldwyn already had her debut vehicle picked out, the filming of a hit play by Guy Bolton. The Dark Angel is a lachrymose melodrama about Hilary Trent, an Englishman blinded in the war, who nobly prefers that his fiancée, Kitty Vane, think him dead. On her wedding day, Kitty learns that Hilary is alive and seeks him out. Not wishing to burden her with his tragedy, he memorizes his surroundings and convincingly performs as a perfectly sighted person who rejects her. In leaving, Kitty extends her hand, which he cannot see. Confused, she is intercepted by Hilary’s secretary, who reveals the man’s blindness. Kitty rushes back into his arms. The role of Hilary seemed tailor-made for Ronald Colman. He would receive top billing for the first time. Goldwyn already saw his dark, handsome looks complementing the fair lovel
iness of Vilma Banky.

  Between her arrival on the S.S. Aquitania at Ellis Island on March 10, 1925, and the commencement of photography on The Dark Angel one month later, Goldwyn wished to make Vilma Banky known nationwide as the greatest star ever to arrive on American shores. He wanted her available for any number of interviews and photographic sessions. Unfortunately, his Hungarian star spoke not a word of English and was by European standards zaftig; by Goldwyn’s, she was ten pounds overweight.

  Goldwyn met Miss Banky stateside and was appalled at the dowdy clothes she had selected in Paris. Before presenting her to the press, he sent her to a dressmaker to whom he used to sell gloves and ordered her to “dress her properly and to burn the clothes she’s brought.” Then, as though instructing a parrot, he gave Vilma Banky (whom he called “Wilma”) four words of English, the only words she was to speak until she reached Hollywood. Goldwyn thought it would create a cute publicity hook and help her reduce if all she could say was “Lamp chops and pineapple.”

  Goldwyn knew that the quickest way to spread Vilma Banky’s name was to give an exclusive to Louella Parsons of the Hearst syndicate. In exchange for the scoop, Goldwyn told Miss Parsons, “I would be grateful indeed if you handled this from a standpoint of news for the news columns, rather than as a motion picture story.” He urged her to “surround the idea with an air of secrecy,” taking details he gave her (which included the actress’s spuriously noble birth) as facts she had dug up. Several days after Louella’s news article, Goldwyn and his press team blanketed the country with stories and photographs. Every major fan magazine ran a story and awaited an interview.

  Goldwyn spent two weeks in March squiring Vilma Banky around town. They were seen somewhere different every night. One evening over dinner at the Colony, magazine publisher Condé Nast could not help stopping at Goldwyn’s table; he playfully chided him for not having responded to the invitation to his next party. Goldwyn said he would be there with Miss Banky.

  Condé Nast had two months earlier moved into a spectacular apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, a penthouse at the corner of Eighty-fifth Street. In almost half a dozen parties already, Nast had broken in his thirty-room urban palace, gathering the most brilliant lights from the worlds of theater, literature, and society. A paragon of elegance, the host graced all his soirees with an abundance of young beauties.

  It was a typical evening at home for Nast that last week in March when Sam Goldwyn arrived with Vilma Banky. Among the few hundred milling guests were Gloria Swanson and her husband of two months, the Marquis de la Falaise, playwright Marc Connelly, and two of that year’s new beauties, the red-haired Howard sisters.

  The host’s son, Coudert, had been courting the younger sister, nineteen-year-old Constance; and Condé Nast himself was said to be interested in marrying twenty-one-year-old Frances. After dinner, on the dance floor with Vilma Banky, Sam Goldwyn caught a glimpse of her. “I saw a stunning redhead dancing with some man,” Goldwyn recalled more than forty years later, “and I quickly cut in and made him dance with Banky Vilma.” Goldwyn felt at once that “opportunity” was tapping him on the shoulder. And, he said, “I did not have to be tapped twice.”

  In fact, it was not the first time he had seen Frances Howard. A few years earlier, she had screen-tested for the Goldwyn Company in New York, and Goldwyn had admonished his casting director for having wasted the time and money on her. Shortly thereafter, Goldwyn bumped into Miss Howard, who had snipped her ginger tresses for a part. “You used to be fairly good-looking,” he said. “Now that you’ve gone and bobbed your hair, you’re terrible.”

  Under Condé Nast’s crystal chandeliers, however, Sam Goldwyn saw Frances Howard in an entirely new light. Whether it was the shrewdness he detected in her cerulean eyes (set closely together), the authority with which she carried her slim figure, or just knowing that Condé Nast was smitten with her, Sam Goldwyn fell instantly in love. He did not know yet that, like him, she was a survivor. Rumored to be one of the Howards of Virginia, a daughter of the American Revolution, an heiress who had turned to the stage, Frances—like the man looking her over—was in the process of inventing herself.

  She was born Frances Howard McLaughlin on June 4, 1903, in Omaha, Nebraska, the eldest of four children. Her mother, Helen Victoria Howard (known as Bonnie), was the youngest daughter of well-heeled Kansas land-owners living just outside Wichita. They were not one of America’s first families. The favorite niece of thirteen uncles, Bonnie was constantly fussed over—becoming, in the words of one of her granddaughters, “a spoiled brat and troublemaker.” When she debuted in Chicago, her parents hired one of the city’s most celebrated cultural figures to make the arrangements, Florenz Ziegfeld, father of the future impresario.

  Bonnie had many gentleman callers, but she chased one of her older sister’s suitors, the handsome Charles Douglas McLaughlin, from Batavia, New York, just outside Rochester. His mother was a daughter of the Irish nationalist Daniel O‘Connell; his father’s clan were landed gentry and horse breeders, with a weakness for alcohol. Bonnie had been raised a Quaker, but she converted to Catholicism for her fiance. When she married, her uncle William lavished china and furniture, then stocks and bonds, on her, a dowry worth close to one million dollars. She insisted on luxury, and always wanted everything to be, as she said, “perfect—fine as silk.”

  Her husband met her every whim, for a while. With his brothers, Charles McLaughlin established a successful business in women’s shoes. At the turn of the century, he oversaw the building of their plant in Omaha, where his first child, Frances, was born. After a few years, the McLaughlins moved to Chicago, where Charles directed the door-to-door distribution of their product. Frances attended an unmerciful Catholic boarding school there. She was allowed to bathe but once a week, and then she had to enter the tub clothed, peeling off her frock only as she immersed herself in the water. When she began to develop physically, the nuns bound her chest and cautioned her to eat less. They inculcated her with the belief that the Jews killed Christ.

  While barely in her teens, Frances moved with her family—there were three other children: Mary Virginia (who went by the name Dede), Christine Helen Victoria (Constance), and a son named for his father—to Rochester, into a large white Victorian house, which sat behind a picket fence. Charles provided his wife with servants and tried to smooth over their difficult marriage with furs and jewels. His brothers had been operating their business out of the nearby village of Brockport, and they seemed to be running it into the ground. In truth, they were embezzling, and they left Charles holding the bag. McLaughlin struggled to make good on a raft of bad debts. In an effort to save the family name, he let go of the staff, the furnishings, the house, his wife’s entire legacy. “We had everything,” Bonnie stated years later, “then nothing.”

  McLaughlin took to liquor and often to the road. Starting in the morning, he would imbibe at least a bottle of whiskey a day. His once-pampered wife had worked up so much resentment against what he had done to her, she made it impossible for him to come home. Bonnie made the girls assume her maiden name, and she overtly neglected her ill-yclept son. (She had long resented him anyway, because he was born with a defective ear.) Frances always looked forward to her father’s coming home, but a few years later he died—drunk, broke, and alone—at the age of forty-seven.

  Frances came to realize that her father was less emotionally disturbed than her mother. Most people had long dismissed Bonnie’s extreme vanity as simply odd behavior. When her husband “stole her fortune,” something snapped inside. Bonnie’s looks began to go, and she took to concocting beauty creams and cabbage-juice tonics. She pitted her daughters against each other and banished her son from the house as soon as she could. She could not bring herself to utter the word “Jew.” She called them “Orientals.”

  Unable to cope, Bonnie reverted to a second childhood. All the girls were sent to work—even eleven-year-old Constance, who had to dodge truant officers so that she could peddle her
mother’s beauty creams. Bonnie’s dementia was hardest on Frances, leaving deep emotional scars. She teased the child with feathers to the point of cruelty, and Frances grew up with a lifelong dread of birds; Bonnie once locked her in a room of a burning house, which made Frances pyrophobic. Frances felt guilty about ever enjoying herself too much—she regarded even food as more a luxury than a necessity. She had a nervous desire to see that everything was “perfect—fine as silk”—if only on the outside. She lived in mortal fear of “losing everything.”

  Even more than Schmuel Gelbfisz, who had also been rushed into adult-hood, Frances became the family caretaker. She needed to be needed. Despite her conflicted feelings, she put upon herself all responsibility for the welfare of her mother and sisters, whatever the cost, for the rest of their lives.

  Bonnie McLaughlin depended on the kindness of strangers. Moving her family into a small apartment in a brownstone boardinghouse on West Eighty-fifth Street near Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan, she called on the Ziegfeld boy to see if he could not help her children with their careers. Ziegfeld got sixteen-year-old Frances a part in the road-show chorus of a musical entitled Oh! My Dear. After its run, Ziegfeld asked her to be in the chorus of another musical, but she refused. She said she wanted to act. Ziegfeld’s wife, Billie Burke, was about to open in a Booth Tarkington comedy, Intimate Strangers. The small part of a pretty young flapper had not yet been cast.

  Billie Burke took a shine to Frances Howard. She helped get her the role in the fall of 1921 and got her over her fear of bobbing her hair, as the part required. The show ran a respectable ninety-one performances and was scheduled to go on the road.