Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  By the end of the evening, everyone in the room had shrunk in her eyes to a mere mortal. She felt something less than that. “A man was talking about a barbecue he had been to the Sunday before,” Frances never forgot; “another man asked who’d been there. A string of names was mentioned. Half were stars; half, though I didn’t particularly notice it at the moment, were male names.... Then in a throw-away tone, came the addition, And some wives, a‘course.’” During the rest of dinner, nothing registered with her except a voice inside saying, “You’re not Frances Howard, who was going to be a great actress on the stage—the real stage, where you have to be a good actress to be a quarter as famous as these people here. You suddenly up and got married. You chucked what you’d been working like a beaver for ever since you were fifteen. Yes, you did! And you can’t pretend you didn’t agree to stop being an actress to become a—just a wife, any more than you can pretend you didn’t help Sam along to proposing to you. Because you did—both. So now you’re what you wanted to be. You’re just another—‘some wives, a’course.‘” Her ego, she later admitted, shriveled “to nothing.”

  After her first night in Hollywood, two women rushed to Frances’s aid. One was Margaret Talmadge, the wisecracking mother of Norma and Constance, an abandoned wife who had become the most successful stage mother in motion pictures. Known to the Hollywood crowd as Peg, she responded to Frances’s no-nonsense attitude and unclouded desire to make good. The other booster was Sam’s devoted employee Frances Marion, the town’s most celebrated scenarist and cook. They taught her the responsibilities of being a Hollywood hostess.

  She started by learning how to keep a menu book, lists of all her company and the meals served. It saw that people would get the same dish twice only if it had been noted as a special favorite. Each guest’s cocktail was recorded, so a return visitor never had to order it. She learned where to shop for clothes and flowers and food. “And while I was still trying to learn the difference between shoulder, rack and leg of lamb, brisket of beef and filet, the price of peas versus asparagus,” Frances later wrote in the Woman’s Home Companion, “before I discovered how to get wet glass marks off table tops, before I had sense enough to be nervous or hesitant—already I was giving dinner parties, half of which were thrown at me on wickedly short notice.”

  Frances had barely settled into her new life when Sam arrived home from the nearby United Studios and casually announced that he had invited an extra man—the former ambassador to Spain—to a dinner Frances had been planning for weeks. She flew into a tizzy but pulled off the entire evening to her husband’s great satisfaction—until the women retired to the living room for coffee. From the dining room, Frances heard a stentorian voice boom, “Sam. The dinner was all right. But, if you’d have spent five cents more, I could have had a good cigar.” For years, Sam would caution Frances before each party not to buy any more cigars from a drugstore.

  In this most private enclave of the pampered nouveau riche, where everybody was out to impress everybody else, the rise or fall of a dessert could eventually affect the culture of the world. Or so it seemed. “Tonight’s wink across a room could be tomorrow’s star,” said King Vidor. “The way Colleen Moore wore her hair at a party in Hollywood would change the way women across America would wear theirs in two years.” Frances Goldwyn understood the solemnity of her position. “She smoothed Sam’s rough edges,” remembered Carmel Myers, a rabbi’s daughter recently back from Rome, where she played Iras in MGM’s Ben-Hur.

  There seemed to be some celebration in Hollywood every night, each event more extravagant than the last. Many of the Hollywood parties in the spring of 1925 were given in Sam Goldwyn’s honor—to meet his new wife and his new Hungarian discovery. Within weeks, Frances knew the entire crowd, having bumped into the same people everywhere. On June 26, 1925, Chaplin’s Gold Rush premiered at Grauman’s Egyptian Theater; and Goldwyn challenged his bride with the task of throwing an after-screening party in Chaplin’s honor. Less than two months in Hollywood, and this twenty-two-year-old former ingenue found herself inviting Pickford and Fairbanks, William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, Norma Talmadge and Joe Schenck, Constance Talmadge, the Buster Keatons, John Barrymore, Gloria Swanson and her marquis, Sid Grauman, Louella Parsons, Fred Niblo (about to direct the climactic chariot sequence of Ben-Hur in Culver City), George Fitzmaurice, and Florence Vidor to her house. Goldwyn’s secretary ordered the liquor from the bootlegger, “$300 worth of stuff.”

  Gradually the venue of these revolving galas shifted to a remote outpost of baronial mansions several miles to the west of Hollywood. It was accessible only by the unpaved extension of Sunset Boulevard, which snaked its way to the sea. The 4,500 acres of the original land parcel deeded by the governor of Mexico was named El Rancho Rodeo de las Aquas—The Land of the Gathering Waters—its borders having been carved by the winter rainwater that streamed down Benedict and Coldwater canyons into the flats below. By the arrival of the twentieth century, the land had passed through several owners, never attracting much of a population. In 1906, Burton S. Green drilled for oil and came up with water; forming the Rodeo Land & Water Company, he began selling off parcels. He named the hilly terrain after a town President Taft had recently visited in Massachusetts.

  Green knew he needed a lure to Beverly Hills, some sign of civilization. At Sunset Boulevard, in the delta where the two canyon riverbeds met, he built a three-story hotel in 1912—a huge T-shaped mission-style edifice of thick stucco, which he painted pink. For years, the Beverly Hills Hotel stood alone in the wilderness, a folly. It began to draw Angelenos eager to hide away or cut up on Saturday, away from the public glare. A nearby town tried to build itself up. “In those days Beverly Hills looked like an abandoned real-estate development,” recalled Charlie Chaplin. “Sidewalks ran along and disappeared into open fields and lampposts with white globes adorned empty streets; most of the globes were missing, shot off by passing revelers from roadhouses.”

  In the scrubby, coyote-filled hills, on a knoll high above the back of the hotel, an attorney built a weekend hunting lodge. As the neighboring population swelled to six hundred, he sold that two-story bungalow atop Summit Drive to Douglas Fairbanks, who built a stately home around it. The four-story mansion, Tudor in influence, had its own screening room, billiard room, and bowling alley. After Mary Pickford married Fairbanks, they moved into his bachelor pad, for which the press found a euphonious sobriquet in the first syllables of their last names.

  Pickfair became the social hub of the world, attracting such titled houseguests as the King of Spain, the Queen of Siam, and the “Sultan of Swat.” Hollywood nobility flocked to its doors as the reigning stars began building their own dream palaces in its backyard. Gloria Swanson bought a “Renaissance” palazzo down Crescent Drive near Sunset Boulevard. Will Rogers moved his family and animals to several acres on Beverly Drive. Chaplin built an estate on Summit Drive, as did cowboy Tom Mix. By 1925, the population had risen to 7,500. Lots that had sold for $500 in 1920 were fetching $70,000. Just before moving into the Compson house on Hollywood Boulevard, Sam Goldwyn had tried to rent a place in Pickfair’s shadow, on Lexington Road, but Marion Davies’s mother grabbed it for herself and her daughter.

  The Spanish-style house was a place for Marion to hang her hat when she was working. Between pictures and on weekends, she played hostess for William Randolph Hearst and as many as fifty guests at his castle at San Simeon, California, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. By the mid-twenties, she was also holding court on the sands of Santa Monica, at her three-story colonial mansion.

  Within a stone’s throw of the Davies beach house—at the foot of the steep palisades, along Ocean Front—was a tract of twenty far more modest houses. With the lure of its prime shoreline and the frequent presence of Mr. Hearst himself, this quarter-mile strand became the summer haven of the Hollywood elite.

  In the first years of their marriage, the Goldwyns rented a place at the beach every summer. Their neighbor
s included the Jesse Laskys and the Louis B. Mayers. Any given weekend in the summer was sure to draw, it seemed, every Hollywood star to the beach. Watching over the proceedings—between heated card games and ocean dips—was a minyan of moguls, men who controlled most of the lives and fortunes of the guests at play. There, on a quarter-mile strip of ancient sand by a pacific sea, lolled a handful of tribal chieftains. Little more than a quarter century earlier, most of them had been wretches living within five hundred miles of each other in Eastern Europe, strangers destined to be forever bound by their common dreams. Surely this was the promised land.

  “The Goldwyns, recently married,” recalled Louis Mayer’s daughter Irene of those days on the beach, “were forbidden fruit. My father detested Sam and Sam detested my father. My father thought Sam’s wife, Frances, was a marvelous woman; her only defect was her lack of judgment in marrying Sam.” Both Mayer girls—but a few years younger than Frances—forged their own private friendships with the Goldwyns. Louis B. gently approached the new member of the innermost social circle.

  “In the first few years after I arrived in Hollywood,” Frances remembered, “Sam and I would sometimes meet Mr. and Mrs. Mayer at a social or industry occasion. Sam and Louis would ignore each other, but Louis would talk to me. Once he said, ‘Frances, Sam will have nothing to do with me. But I’d like to know you better. Why don’t you come to the studio and have lunch with me?’” Frances agreed if she could get her husband’s permission.

  Everyone stared that afternoon when Frances Goldwyn walked into the MGM dining room by Mayer’s side. “They couldn’t believe I was there because the whole town knew about the feud between my husband and Louis.” The lunch was nothing more than civil, the conversation polite. “All during lunch Louis complained about Hollywood,” she recalled. “Mostly he complained that it was too chilly at night. I suggested he wear an overcoat. When I got home and told Sam that my conversation with Louis had been superficial and nonsensical and that Louis’ prime worry was the weather, Sam laughed and shook his head. He said, ‘Now I realize more than ever the secret of becoming a success in this business. No partners!’”

  Except for Frances. “She had a mind of her own and was correct in thinking she would have her hands full as Sam’s wife,” Irene Mayer Selznick later wrote in her memoirs. “She catered to him, but she also took him in hand and started to mend some of his broken fences, even to the point of inviting my parents to dinner, short-lived as those occasional truces would be.”

  More and more, Sam included Frances in his activities. At first, he did not solicit her opinion. It was frustrating, as Frances later revealed in a letter to him: “I would go to the studio with you many a morning, see the rushes—just to see them, not to be asked what I thought. Then I’d run off to the market, be shown a cut of beef, but again not be able to criticize.” In private, Frances had her husband’s ear. Once he realized that her instincts for her survival were synonymous with his, he listened. “Frances became Sam’s protector,” said George Cukor. “She had a built-in device that detected crap. She knew just who to let into his life and who to keep out.” In the words of one longtime observer of the Goldwyn marriage: “Frances made the trains run on time.”

  She promptly adopted his schedule. From the beginning of her marriage, Frances knew that her husband wanted a male heir. Although she had little interest in bearing children, Frances found herself pregnant after eight months of marriage. The day she went to the gynecologist to confirm her suspicion, she asked Louella Parsons to accompany her. Frances was a quick study.

  “EVERYBODY is so temperamental and childish in this business, that in order to get on I suppose I shall have to adopt an attitude of complete indifference, and develop a tough hide so that all their words will roll off and leave me entirely uneffected [sic],” wrote Sam Goldwyn’s new secretary. And she had not even met her boss yet. In the early spring of 1925, Valeria Belletti had lucked into the job while he was in Europe. She wrote her best friend back in New York:Mr. Lehr ... told me that as Mr. Goldwyn’s secretary I would have to look very smart and dress well. He told me that if I needed any money for this purpose, he would be glad to give it to me, and pay him back when I could.... Really, it is astounding how free people are with their money here.... Of course, I have to keep my hair marcelled, but in view of the salary I’m being paid, I can easily do it.

  At the end of the first week in May, her first week with her new employer, Miss Belletti wrote her friend, “Well, Mr. Goldwyn hasn’t ‘jumped down my throat’ yet. I don’t particularly like him, but I don’t think he’s any worse than the others.” After a few weeks, though, she was ready to quit. Frances changed her mind. “I think it’s terrible the way he comes in in the morning and doesn’t even say ‘Good morning’ to you,” she said to Miss Belletti one day. Then she assured the secretary that her husband was extremely pleased with her work, even though he had not said so. Frances left her feeling so good, she thought of hitting her boss up for a raise.

  She knew best to wait. Goldwyn was about to sink over half a million dollars into his next year’s slate of pictures, aimed largely at building up Vilma Banky into his first female star, someone to share the marquee with Ronald Colman. Miss Belletti also smelled a crisis brewing between Goldwyn and his distributor.

  After Goldwyn’s first years of steady success, First National relinquished their creative control over the properties he was adapting, but they would not let him near their financial books. He had hardly seen a cent of profit, because of First National’s overhead charges and delayed payments. When A Thief in Paradise became one of the year’s top ten box-office attractions and First National’s accounting of the film’s profits did not square with Goldwyn’s, he sued over the $75,000 discrepancy. He was, in fact, willing to settle out of court and strike a new deal with First National.

  First National did not want to continue distributing Goldwyn’s films. Even cooking the books, they found too little money to be made off a man who produced so few films. Neither of the companies he helped establish—MGM and Paramount—was interested in his product, nor was Fox. He turned to United Artists, who did not especially want him but were as desperate as he was.

  After more than five years in business, United Artists still seemed an idea whose time had not come. Since completing his own contract with First National in 1923, Chaplin had released only one picture through United Artists; Pickford and Fairbanks had delivered but one picture apiece per year; D. W Griffith—whose last two productions, America and Isn’t Life Wonderful?, were financial disappointments—pulled out of the company and signed with Paramount. United Artists’ grosses were a fraction of those of the major distributors, and they were operating at six-figure losses. The three remaining partners were on the verge of folding up their enterprise.

  In late 1924, they succeeded in bringing the dynamic Joe Schenck into the company as a stock-owning partner and chairman of the board. He promised to deliver at least six Norma Talmadge pictures, but he knew he needed more product. He signed Gloria Swanson to produce a block of films, and he gave a contract to Valentino, who had temporarily retired from the screen after the disappointing results of Blood and Sand and Monsieur Beaucaire. To help save United Artists, Chaplin urged Joe Schenck to consider doing business with his friend of almost ten years, Sam Goldwyn.

  In fact, Schenck had been one of the first people Goldwyn called when his contract with First National expired. That May, Sam and Joe dined, and as Goldwyn reported to his attorney, “I told him that I was ready to talk business with United Artists.” He said he could deliver them two Fitzmaurice productions, a Potash and Perlmutter comedy, and two films directed by Henry King. In return, he wanted a unit of stock and to become a director of the corporation. A week later, Schenck informed Goldwyn that “there was no chance of getting the stock as the directors were opposed to it.”

  Each of the united artists had veto power, and Mary Pickford exercised hers. She could not forget those early days when Zukor
and Goldwyn were associates. Schenck promised Goldwyn he would raise the matter again in the near future. Goldwyn sought the advice of his chief backer. “Now just a parting word, Sam,” Giannini wrote on May 22, 1925. “Do not be too anxious to make too good a contract.... If you can tie up with United Artists, do so immediately. If you cannot do that and First National is willing to take you—even on the old terms, I would suggest that you return.” When Goldwyn’s lawyer informed him that the First National dispute would consume time and money for years, the producer pulled out for $150,000, a pittance for eight pictures that had grossed several million dollars.

  Goldwyn told Schenck he would settle for a compromise offer from United Artists, but that he hoped Joe would still campaign for the directorship as well. Schenck brought all his partners around on the matter of distributing Goldwyn’s films. They even granted him the right to approve the exhibition contracts. On the vote to extend a directorship, Mary Pickford used her blackball.

  Sam Goldwyn’s contract with United Artists was drafted in the summer of 1925. It called for him to supply at least two and no more than five pictures per year. The splits of the gross receipts were on a par with those of all the United Artists partners (75 percent going to the producers and 25 percent to the corporation). He was also accorded the right to control the advertising for his films. Samuel Goldwyn still did not have the power of the United Artists superstars, but to the eyes of the world, it looked that way.