Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  In the spring, the cast was called for a rehearsal at Tuxedo Hall, on Madison Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, in preparation for their opening in Syracuse. That day, Frances Howard met the stage manager of the upstate theater and they fell in love.

  “We had to rehearse in another hall,” recalled that stage manager, who had been stagestruck since childhood, “and my job was to tell the actors to proceed to another hall over on Sixth Avenue. Suddenly this dazzlingly pretty girl walked in—she was very pretty and very friendly. ‘I’m here,’ she said. In fact, she was the prettiest girl I had ever seen—a beautiful figure, lovely face, and beautiful skin. And there was something very respectable about her, very elegant. She was soignée.”

  The stage manager volunteered to accompany the actress across town. During the course of their two streetcar rides, he discovered that she was “really intelligent and had a rather cultivated way of talking, as though she paid attention to every word that came out of her mouth.” By the time they arrived at Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue, they had become “fast friends.”

  At first glance, George Cukor was not an especially attractive man. He was short and pudgy, with a prominent beak, thick lips, and spectacles. But he had a razor-sharp wit and a way of throwing his whole body into his every fast-spoken word. A second-generation American of Jewish-Hungarian descent, he was the most sensitive and knowledgeable man Frances Howard had ever met. His enthusiasm was matched by his generosity in sharing what he knew about theater and literature and music. They spent all their time as part of the Knickerbocker Players (which included Florence Eldridge) in Syracuse together, living down the hall from each other in a boardinghouse. Cukor, a lonely outcast who was picked on by most of the company, delighted in the attentions of somebody so beautiful. He became the first person to get Frances to question the way she had been raised; he said she should start living for herself and less for her family. “How do you put up with all these terrible people?” he asked, referring to Bonnie and one of the daughters, who was growing up with many of the same superficial values.

  For the next two years, Frances Howard was almost never out of work. She moved on with her stage manager to Rochester, where he became manager of the Lyceum Players and began directing. Other work came up for her—acting in a play under Gilbert Miller’s direction in Toronto, modeling for such photographers as Edward Steichen and Baron de Meyer in New York. Home again became Rochester, where she played ingenues in Cukor’s plays. They lived in neighboring rooms in another boardinghouse.

  Their feelings for each other were profound—it was the greatest love of either of their lives. Several of his friends later insisted that Frances was the only woman he ever truly loved. He even asked her to marry him. But George Cukor was homosexual, at a time when such a fact could only be whispered. He was not the answer to Frances Howard’s prayers.

  Professionally, good fortune struck both the young actress and the director, four years her senior. Their apprenticeships in Rochester—where Louis Calhern and Miriam Hopkins were part of the company—led to bigger success in New York. Frances introduced Cukor to Gilbert Miller, and almost overnight he was directing the likes of Ethel Barrymore, Laurette Taylor, and Dorothy Gish in plays by Zoë Akins and Somerset Maugham. Frances snatched the lead in The Best People, playing another flapper. She suffered from stage fright, and her performances were wooden; but Jesse Lasky, who was part of the opening-night audience at the Lyceum Theater, was so impressed with her beauty that he signed her to a five-year movie contract.

  Living with her family on West Eighty-fifth Street, Frances turned over most of her money to support them. She made two films at Paramount’s Long Island studios before getting the lead in The Swan, the story of a girl groomed to marry a crown prince. She busied herself outside the family apartment as much as possible. George Cukor, living on the East Side, often rescued her—“anything to keep her away from that ass of a mother ... and that crappy beauty cream!”

  Frances dated tentatively. She went occasionally to the theater or a nightclub with a young art director she had met at the Paramount studio; and Curt Gerling, a Rochester boy who was attending the University of Pennsylvania, pursued her. He would take the train to New York for weekends, even though he knew he would have a lot of free time while Frances was onstage. He spent it with Mrs. McLaughlin, stirring up gin in the basement. Frances did not become seriously involved with anybody—except George Cukor, her mentor and protector. “She was never highly sexed,” he said; “and I’m absolutely certain that the night Sam Goldwyn first danced with her, he danced with a virgin.”

  Condé Nast’s party in March 1925 was Frances Howard’s first “big social affair.” For the occasion she bought an elegant white crepe dress for $310, a great extravagance for a twenty-one-year-old more comfortable in a hair shirt. Before the night was over, Goldwyn asked Miss Howard if he might see her again. She thought he had “a diamond-in-the-rough charm” and said she would be delighted. Vilma Banky remembered leaving Condé Nast’s that night with Sam Goldwyn absolutely aglow. “I thought it was because of me,” she said decades later, “because I had done so well.”

  The next day, Miss Banky left for Hollywood, a whistle-stop tour that received all the press coverage Goldwyn had dreamed of. Even with his obsession to make a star of Vilma Banky, the producer could not get Frances Howard out of his head. The night after Condé Nast’s party, he took her to a nightclub, the Golden Eagle, where he wasted no time. “I don’t believe in beating around the bush,” he said. “You and I must be married.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Frances told him. “I don’t know you at all. We’ve only met once, and briefly. Besides, I’m going to Hollywood to be in the movies.”

  “Good,” he said. “But first we should get married, because if we’re not married, anyone as young and beautiful as you running around Hollywood with me, well, people will take it for granted that you’re my ... girl. ... You don’t know what evil minds people in Hollywood have.” Without hesitating, he proposed again. She said she needed time.

  For most of his life, Sam Goldwyn had considered himself (as he admitted to a therapist) physically unattractive. This hard assessment fueled his powerful professional drive; but it also rendered him virtually sexless—the one aspect of his character about which he always felt defensive. After years of scaring women off in response to their scaring him, he was not about to lost this rare beauty—who radiated her own weak sex drive. Feeling at ease with her, he became insistent. “You don’t have to think about it,” he said, “because that is what you are going to do. You are going to marry me.”

  “Sam was ambitious, engaging and forthright,” was Frances’s assessment. He dismissed his first marriage by saying, “When a picture is over, it’s over. The same with a marriage.” He confessed that he was “lonesome and needed a wife, someone he could trust and confide in.”

  “Right off the bat,” Frances later confessed, “I thought to myself, Why not?”

  The next morning, she raced crosstown to tell George Cukor about the preceding forty-eight hours. “You know,” she hemmed, “I’ve met Sam Goldwyn.” Cukor was impressed. He said it would not be long before she was mingling in Hollywood’s inner circles. “Sam Goldwyn wants to marry me,” she added. He fell silent. “What do you think?” she asked.

  He paused for a moment and said, “Marry him, Frances. You’ll never get a better part!”

  “I didn’t think she was a very gifted actress, and she certainly never thought much of herself as an actress,” Cukor related many years later. “Frances was ambitious and enormously practical,” he said. “Everything she could see about him, she admired enormously, and what she could not she thought she could live with. I always thought it would be a ‘proper marriage.’ Not a romantic one, but one that would work. And I think Frances thought the same.” As she occasionally admitted to a handful of intimates, “I have a cash register where my heart should be.”

  Frances accepted Goldwyn’s prop
osal, but both thought it best to keep silent about the engagement. After a week, he got cold feet and tried to back out, citing the difference in their religion as just one of many problems. Frances would not hear of it. “You asked me to marry you, and you’re going to,” she said. “So just make up your mind to that.” She insisted their children would be raised as Catholics. The next day, Goldwyn slipped an engagement ring on her finger.

  “Then we told Mother,” Frances remembered. “This meant I faced disbelief, logical opposition, tears and an explosion.” Sam—almost exactly Bonnie’s age—received most of the fallout, but he stood fast. “Even if you do marry,” Frances’s mother insisted, “it won’t last.” Frances said it would. Sam said he hoped it would. “Well, it won’t,” Bonnie kept repeating. Frances sat down and tuned her mother out by cocking her head skyward, drumming her fingers, and chanting, “Wait and see.”

  Bonnie had every intention of busting up this engagement as soon as possible. Not only was Sam Goldwyn twice her daughter’s age, but he was an “Oriental,” who had already been married. Frances had met enough Jews in the theater (including George Cukor) to realize they did not have horns; she subscribed instead to the more positive stereotypes of the day, which made Goldwyn most appealing—Jews were good with money and they did not drink. He made Frances feel that she might never have to worry about losing her house again, and that he could help provide for her sisters and Bonnie. He certainly seemed formidable enough to protect her from her mother. A few days later, Sam and Frances and Bonnie went to Jersey City to obtain a wedding license. Mrs. McLaughlin never once acknowledged Goldwyn’s presence. Above the rumble of the train as it tunneled beneath the Hudson, she could be heard murmuring, “My daughter will not marry Sam Goldwyn.”

  Goldwyn set their wedding date for Thursday, April 23, 1925—four weeks from the night they had met. He asked Edgar Selwyn to stand as his best man and swore him to secrecy because he did not want the event to be a circus of publicity. Selwyn agreed not to breathe a word.

  The night before their wedding, Frances asked Sam to pick up a copy of The New Yorker for the limousine ride to New Jersey. Between his present residence at the Ambassador Hotel on Park Avenue and Frances’s apartment, Goldwyn thumbed through the tenth number of the smart new periodical, which was becoming the rage of the young artistic crowd in Manhattan. In the “Motion Pictures” column was a disparaging review of Goldwyn’s latest offering, His Supreme Moment, with Ronald Colman.

  Closer to the front of the magazine, on page thirteen, came a more shocking discovery. One of the first of The New Yorker’s celebrated “profiles” was entitled “The Celluloid Prince.” Staring out from the center of the page was a caricature of Goldwyn himself, casting a shrewd, squinty eye straight ahead, while the other eye looked off to the side, beneath a skeptical, high-arched brow.

  He did not know at the time that his own press agent, Carl Brandt, had planted the story. The two-page article called him “a great man,” noting: “There are so many stupid people in the movies who cannot see beyond their noses, narrow-minded and timid little men, that Mr. Goldwyn stands out from among them a dramatic figure—an inspired buccaneer.” The rest of Goldwyn’s fairy-tale rise from glovemaker to “a great Prince of the Movies” was not the sort of thing a man would want a bride with butterflies in her stomach to read on her way to their wedding.Now he has a valet and dresses and looks like a gentleman, but to hear him speak is a shock. He shouts in a vocabulary of ten words—words used by a prize fighter who has gone into the cloak and suit business and upon whose nodular tones an expressman has let fall a half ton case of goods. If after an interview you are a bit raw, he won’t know it....

  ... In the matter of pictures he has the master’s instinct for reaching at the heart of humanity, but he often loses his way. His own intuitions are crystal clear, but with a mind capable of deduction he has no confidence in his own convictions and will swallow verbatim the logic of others. Thus he will make up his mind and change it simultaneously, and since like all geniuses his intuitions are his best bets, he is, so to speak, his own worst enemy.

  When Goldwyn arrived at West Eighty-fifth Street, he hid the magazine. Frances entered the car, and he apologized for not having been able to get hold of a copy. Frances detected his dissembling and demanded to see it. She read the piece in silence all the way to Jersey City. Her mother and George Cukor rode in a car behind them.

  “We’ve got to stop this,” Bonnie said to George, who she had hoped would be her son-in-law. “It’s going to be all right,” he kept assuring her. As the long car pulled up to the city hall, a horde of reporters and photographers swarmed around the couple. Edgar Selwyn worked his way through the crowd and said, “Hey, Sam, I thought you didn’t want any publicity.” Goldwyn sheepishly replied, “Can I control the press?” Frances let out a whoop of laughter, and the two of them marched into the chambers of Judge Leo S. Sullivan; the best man, the mother of the bride, and Cukor trailed.

  After the vows were recited, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Goldwyn and their small wedding party returned to New York. Twenty guests toasted the bride and groom at a champagne breakfast at the Ritz Hotel, then the beaming benedict took his bride to his office on Madison Avenue. He proudly showed her off and bade his office staff farewell. There were hugs and tears all around, as Frances looked on. Then they caught their train. “Mr. Goldwyn,” the Jersey Journal stated, “is going to Hollywood to make one or two pictures.”

  10 Canaan

  ONLY FOUR DAYS out of New York, the honeymoon was over. As they crossed the Arizona desert, Frances’s new husband confessed, “There’s one thing I want you to know ... I’ve had two failures in business, and I haven’t got any money. But with you at my side, I’ll make some.” Goldwyn’s financial picture was not as bleak as he painted. While most of his money was tied up in his new company, he did have five-figure savings accounts in several Giannini banks, an active portfolio of stocks, and a few hundred thousand dollars’ profit on paper from his most recent productions. To prove that his greatest assets would always be the films that lay ahead, he described how he had survived the treacherous road behind him. “I was,” he said, “on the brink of an abscess.”

  Frances, with her chronic fears of “losing everything,” listened nervously. Her mind wandered to that week’s New Yorker, which had called her husband “the epitome of the movies, and heir apparent to its great future achievements.” Now when he said, “In this business it’s dog eat dog, and nobody’s going to eat me,” she believed him. She resolved to stand behind her man.

  About noon on the last day of April 1925, the Goldwyns stepped off the Chief downtown at the Santa Fe terminal. It was a hot, sunny day. Frances looked in awe at everything around her—first noticing the distant mountains “crouching on one side, spikes of oil wells poking up on the other.” Orange trees, practically growing alongside the tracks, perfumed her walk along the platform to the entourage of business associates awaiting them. “Lots of people smiled at me,” she remembered. “Then we got into a car and drove miles and miles over the slickest cleanest pavements I’d ever seen.”

  Frances’s first glimpses of the city between the depot and her new home were as fantastic as her childhood fantasies of the place. Amid the boxy office structures and tile-roofed stucco dwellings, a fanciful skyline was developing, a potpourri of architecture in this vast conglomeration of loosely connected communities. The mid-twenties occasioned a boom in the building of motion picture palaces—in the styles of Spanish missions, Egyptian and Mayan temples, even a Chinese pagoda.

  As the Goldwyns’ car headed west on Hollywood Boulevard, off to the right, looking like a tiara across the forehead of Mount Lee, thirteen letters, each four stories high, spread the distance of a city block to announce a new real estate development—HOLLYWOODLAND. Many show business personalities were building sumptuous houses and swimming pools right into what were being called the Hollywood Hills. The noontime crowd down along the flat boulevard was as nonch
alant as it was outlandish: “Bathing beauties, extras in evening attire, Indians in full war regalia, Orientals, Biblical characters poured out from near-by studios to snatch a hasty luncheon before returning to the impatient cameras.” Frances’s head was spinning. Sam told her they were invited to a dinner party that night.

  She hardly had time to consider the significance of the evening when their car crossed La Brea Avenue. Hollywood Boulevard suddenly turned residential and quiet. Along both sides of the street dwelt many families unassociated with motion pictures, though within the boulevard’s heavy scent of eucalyptus and orange blossoms lived Joe Schenck and Norma Talmadge, Pola Negri, and the Jesse Laskys. On what Irene Mayer Selznick remembered as “the perkiest corner” of this neighborhood, the northeast corner of Hollywood and Camino Palmero, the mother of actress Betty Compson owned a house that had more character than any other on the street. This quasi-Norman farmhouse, with an imitation thatched roof, sat a dozen steps above street level; “it was lovely and tidy,” recalled Irene Selznick, “giving the impression that the people who lived there weren’t being grand, but were prosperous in a conservative way.” Sam Goldwyn rented the house and lived there with his bride for the next few years.

  Frances had barely arrived, it seemed, when she was standing in her best dress—pink chiffon embroidered with tiny imitation shells—in the doorway of Richard Rowland, the head of First National. “My fingers were icy,” Frances remembered. “So, incidentally, were my toes. And my throat had gone dry. Indeed, I felt exactly the way I always did just before my stage entrance on an opening night—only worse.” Sam poked her hard in the back. “I was me again,” she recalled twenty-five years later, “wild to meet and know Hollywood and be liked by it. Getting to know it was to take long. But I certainly met a lot of it, all in one glittering burst”: Constance and Norma Talmadge, Pola Negri in a silver lame turban; John Gilbert, Ernst Lubitsch, and Sam’s former crush, Florence Vidor. The new Mrs. Goldwyn’s biggest thrill came when she discovered that one of her dinner partners was Earle Williams, the “dream prince” whose photograph she used to clip from Photoplay and keep in a candy box during her grammar school days.