Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

Vilma Banky was not far behind. After her back-to-back pictures opposite Valentino, she was fetching $50,000 per picture for Goldwyn. Gossip about the romantic co-stars ebbed once Pola Negri made her play for Valentino. Frances Goldwyn remembered her husband’s irritation, because he had tried his “darnedest at playing cupid.” To maintain the lease on all that free fan-magazine space, the Goldwyn publicity department churned up romantic stories linking Banky and Colman. They were completely fictitious. Miss Banky had her eye on another of Miss Negri’s former lovers.

  A Chicago-born actor, Rod La Rocque (his real name), had worked for the old Goldwyn Company in Fort Lee. Then DeMille signed him, and The Ten Commandments made him a star; he became Paramount’s second-string leading man. In 1925, Zukor and Lasky could not come to terms with DeMille over his new contract. DeMille signed instead with the Producers Distributing Corporation and bought himself a motion picture lot of his own—the Ince studio in Culver City, which was sold upon the sudden death of the film pioneer. Just when Goldwyn’s contract with First National and his lease at United Studios expired, DeMille asked if he wished to rent office space. Goldwyn moved his base of operations into the new DeMille Studios, a huge white colonial mansion down Washington Boulevard from MGM, where a black man in uniform stood outside the main entrance, ran down the steps to greet every guest, escorted him or her to the front door, then bowed before opening it. Within the walls of this plantation, Rod La Rocque began courting Vilma Banky. “Of course we couldn’t tell Sam Goldwyn at first,” remembered Miss Banky; “he would have killed us. You couldn’t fall in love until he told you to fall in love.”

  Goldwyn unwittingly kept them apart with a project he had found to reunite his two biggest stars—The Winning of Barbara Worth. Harold Bell Wright had written this epic about the Colorado River flood of 1908 and sold close to three million copies. Jefferson Worth is a banker traveling across the desert with a young boy named Abe Lee and a civil engineer who dreams of harnessing the river and making the desert “blossom like a rose.” They survive a devastating sandstorm but discover a family less fortunate. The banker rescues a four-year-old girl, Barbara, and raises her. By the time she is seventeen, the eastern engineering interests have returned to reclaim the land and develop the town called Barbara Worth. Among them is Willard Holmes, an able engineer, ignorant in the ways of the desert. Abe Lee, grown to manhood, has also become an engineer and knows every cactus for miles around. Both men compete for Barbara’s hand, as they struggle to tame the river and the land. “Fifteen years ago I came to the west and this country took me to her heart and was kind to me,” Sam Goldwyn was quoted in some publicity bunkum. “Since then I have always wished for an opportunity to repay. I found it in this story of Harold Bell Wright’s.” It cost him $125,000 for the story rights alone.

  In the first months of 1926, Goldwyn dispatched Henry King to scout locations and told Frances Marion, “MANY CHARACTERS HAVE TO BE ELIMINATED AND LOVE STORY HAS TO BE BROUGHT OUT BEFORE BIG PICTURE CAN BE MADE OF IT.” She cleverly truncated the early years of exposition into a prologue, making the romantic triangle the heart of the motion picture. In addition to a sandstorm and a climactic flood, Miss Marion’s continuity afforded King the opportunity to stage practically every scene before some breathtaking vista.

  “A rock is a rock, and a tree is a tree. Shoot it in Griffith Park!” was a popular aphorism making the rounds in Hollywood, falsely attributed to Sam Goldwyn. In fact, those words were uttered by a producer named Abe Stern—who also said, “Our comedies are not to be laughed at”—and expressed the opposite of Goldwyn’s attitude. After trekking across the sands of California, Arizona, and New Mexico, Henry King found the location he wanted in the Black Rock desert near Oregon, between the towns of Gerlach and Winnemucca, Nevada. The area was so arid that no fauna inhabited it. King believed Goldwyn approved of the distant location only because the director was also a profit participant, not about to fritter money away.

  A spur track was constructed, linking the main line of the Western Pacific to the new city of Barbara Worth, Nevada. A mess hall was built to feed the thousand and more residents of the tent city alongside the movie set. A well was drilled 185 feet below the desert, and a complete plumbing and sanitation system was installed. Goldwyn spared no expense, as his vision of the film surpassed anything common sense might have dictated. “I DON’T WANT TO MAKE COMPARISON WITH OTHER PICTURES,” Goldwyn wired Hiram Abrams in April 1926, “BUT I SEE SOMETHING BIGGER NOW IN BARBARA WORTH THAN I EVER DREAMED OF.” After a week of interior shooting in Culver City, Goldwyn went to inspect the city he had financed and the hundreds of laborers, crew members, actors, and extras.

  “Here I am ‘in the great open spaces’ where men are men and the only woman here is Vilma Banky,” Goldwyn wrote from Barbara Worth, Nevada, to the town’s banker in fact, Dr. Giannini. “This is really a remarkable place—I don’t think I have ever seen a desert that has the desolateness and expresses more what Harold Bell Wright calls the palm of God’s hand than the location right here.” The heat was fierce, some days throbbing upward to 130 degrees. Desert sandstorms kicked up regularly at noon for two hours, filling the air with alkali as fine as talcum powder. Production progressed with hardly a hitch.

  Other than a sandstorm blowing away the Barbara Hotel one afternoon before its cue, the greatest mishap in the making of Barbara Worth occurred at Warner Brothers in Hollywood. Ernst Lubitsch ran over schedule on his film The Honeymoon Express and did not release an actor named Harold Goodwin, who was cast in the role of Abe Lee. There would have been a great to-do had Goldwyn’s secretary not ridden to the rescue.

  Valeria Belletti would have quit her job months earlier were it not for the perquisites. She especially enjoyed the premieres she often got to attend and chatting with the stars who dropped in on the office. She was constantly falling for the handsome actors. That summer, while walking on the lot, she caught sight of a cowboy who took her breath away.

  He was six feet two inches tall, weighed a lean one hundred eighty pounds, had a rugged face softened by big sensitive blue eyes, a sensual mouth, and an unruly hank of brown hair. He had been born in Helena in 1901, the second son of a Montana State Supreme Court justice. He later spent several years in England, where his mother convalesced from an illness, then returned to his family’s ranch. In 1921, he entered Grinnell College in Iowa; summers, he was a guide at Yellowstone National Park. In 1924, the young man’s father resigned from the bench to administer the estates of two cousins in California. His son, named Frank, joined him and his mother there.

  After weeks of odd jobs, Frank encountered two friends from Montana ambling down Hollywood Boulevard in cowboy garb. They told him they picked up as much as ten dollars a day riding and performing stunts in westerns. The friends began to take him along on their rounds. They introduced him to casting directors and moseyed around Gower Street in Hollywood—the section called “Poverty Row,” where scores of small motion picture outfits regularly rounded up herds of drugstore cowboys to appear as extras in their cheap two- and five-reel westerns. He did have one great edge over the thousands of other desperadoes who stalked the streets of Hollywood: Women fell at his feet.

  A stunt-riding actress named Marilyn Mills got him cast in a picture she made in 1925, called Tricks. She thought he looked interesting enough to recommend to a woman named Nan Collins, who had worked in studio casting before becoming a motion picture agent. Miss Collins thought she could scare up work for him if he would invest seventy-five dollars in a demonstration reel—a screen test that showed off his equestrian skills. “He came down Poverty Row riding a horse, pulled the horse to a stop, made a very gallant dismount, threw the reins over the post, entered the saloon door, turned around, looked at the camera and walked in,” was the way Henry King remembered it. Because several local actors already shared the cowboy’s name, Nan Collins urged Judge Cooper’s son Frank to adopt the name of her hometown in Indiana—Gary.

  Cowboys were such a glut
on the market, many dreamed of just getting inside a studio, a chance to be seen. Impressing a secretary generally counted for little. But Valeria Belletti used every bit of influence she could to give her crush a break. When she discovered Goldwyn was not interested in her opinion, she worked on everybody else, starting with the women. She raved to Frances Marion and to Frances Goldwyn before going to Robert McIntyre, the head of casting, and finally to Henry King. The director ran Cooper’s audition reel and said to McIntyre, “At least he can ride a horse.”

  Cooper, who had been loitering outside the casting office, got to meet King and said he wanted to play the role of Abe Lee in Barbara Worth. The director explained that the role had been filled but offered to take him to Nevada as one of the background riders. When asked to list his previous credits on the Goldwyn questionnaire he filled out on June 13, 1926, he listed only that he had the “Male lead” in Lightnin‘ Wins. He failed to note that the lead was actually a dog.

  Days before the Barbara Worth company moved to Nevada, Henry King had to film a scene between Barbara Worth and Abe Lee that required at least the body of the actor. Harold Goodwin still had not shown up. King put Gary Cooper in Abe’s costume. “All you have to do,” he told the cowboy, “is to keep your eyes on Vilma Banky.” From eight in the morning until noon, no matter where Vilma Banky went—“whether we were shooting or not”—his eyes stayed glued to her. Cooper played a few more scenes with his back to the camera, until King thought to himself, “if he can do the scene at the hotel—where he rides across the desert for twenty-four hours to bring the news to Mr. Worth—then I’m not going to wait on the man from Warner Brothers.”

  King met Cooper on the set the next morning at seven and rehearsed him for his first big scene:... the first thing I did was talk to the boy. I wet his face and covered it with fuller’s earth, and I walked and I talked. Tired—tired—tired. That was my subject. Tired—tired—tired. I walked around with him and I talked about how one feels when one is exhausted. Why I wasn’t exhausted, I’ll never know. I kept him walking between scenes, then I’d go back on the set. When I’d rehearsed those people, I’d go back to him. I worked with him for an hour before I asked him on the set.

  Just as King was about to shoot the scene, Irving Sindler, the property master, announced that Mr. Goldwyn—who respected the set as the director’s domain—wanted to see him. King went to the other side of a huge black curtain he had mounted to block off the playing area. “Henry,” the producer said, “when you’re spending a dollar of my money, you’re spending a dollar of your money. You’re going to put that damn cowboy in one of the biggest parts in the picture.”

  King said he had no choice. They had finished every scene up to their leaving for Nevada, and waiting for another actor would only cost more money than the attempt with Cooper. “This is a big dramatic scene,” Goldwyn insisted, “and no damn cowboy can play it.” He buzzed off, “mad as a hornet.” King called for “action” on the set and signaled Sindler to tap Cooper off camera. “I didn’t think he was going to make it,” recalled the propman more than fifty years later. “Cooper could barely knock on the door. The knock was so quiet they could hardly hear it on the other side.” Then Colman stood up, opened the door, and revealed what the director called “the most pathetic case I’ve ever seen in my life.” The actor gasped his line as he fell for the floor. Colman grabbed him, just inches from smacking his face. King called “Cut,” and for George Barnes and his assistant—a twenty-one-year-old named Gregg Toland—to move in with their equipment right away for Cooper’s close-up.

  Irving Sindler popped onto the set, announcing that Mr. Goldwyn wished to see the director again. In exasperation, King walked around the huge black mantle. “Henry,” Goldwyn said, “you’re always trying to tease me. Why didn’t you tell me that man was a great actor?” King said, “Because he isn’t. He’s a cowboy from Montana.”

  “Henry,” Goldwyn disagreed, “he’s the greatest actor I have ever seen in my life.”

  “How do you know,” King asked.

  “Because I was peeping through a hole in the curtain.”

  Goldwyn would later cut the scene for fear of Cooper’s overshadowing Colman—but only after raising his pay to sixty-five dollars a week and offering him a five-year contract. Before papers were drawn, word that Cooper was no ordinary cowboy was already spreading.

  In the next month, Cooper heard that Sam Goldwyn was casting somebody else for the second male lead in his next picture. Nan Collins began shopping her client around town. Paramount signed him with the promise of putting him in a western immediately. On that lot, another woman succumbed to his charms and got him out of his western gear.

  Paramount’s leading ingenue fell head over heels for him. A pert little beauty from Brooklyn, Clara Bow proved to be the screen’s quintessential flapper. The studio was about to promote her around the world as “The IT Girl,” the embodiment, said Elinor Glyn, of everything the word stood for. She met Cooper at a studio party, and they launched into a torrid romance. She urged the Paramount bosses to slot him between his westerns into her pictures—Children of Divorce, IT, and William Wellman’s aerial spectacular of World War I, Wings. Goldwyn would not have a crack at casting Cooper again for another nine years. By then it would cost him more each week than it would have cost to have him for the entire year of 1927.

  The struggle between Ronald Colman and Gary Cooper in Barbara Worth proved to be over more than Vilma Banky’s affections. Two different schools of acting squared off against each other. Colman was a starchy successor to the leading man that had evolved in motion pictures from the matinee idols of the nineteenth-century stage. “Coop was the new idea,” recalled Henry King. “Everything about him was natural—the way he acted, the way he walked, the way he stood there.” As Goldwyn put it: “He is an unintentional actor. He never gives the impression of giving a performance.”

  Flappers still wanted their “sheiks” sleek. Proof came less than two weeks after the Barbara Worth company had dismantled its tent city on the sands of Nevada. In mid-August, peritonitis struck Valentino down. Movie fans anxiously stood by as he lay in New York’s Polyclinic Hospital. “BOTH MRS. GOLDWYN AND MYSELF ARE HOPING FROM THE BOTTOM OF OUR HEARTS FOR QUICK RECOVERY AND EVERYONE IN HOLLYWOOD FEELS SAME GOD BLESS YOU,” Sam wired the patient. Five days later—on August 23—he instructed James Mulvey in his New York office to send fifty dollars’ worth of flowers to Valentino. Before placing the order, Mulvey wired back, “VALENTINO DIED AT NOON.” Over 100,000 people paid their respects at Frank Campbell’s funeral parlor in New York City. The headlines could not but make his last picture, released in the hysteria of his funeral, a titanic hit, grossing in the millions. Most moviegoers’ last romantic vision of Valentino was as the Son of the Sheik, his arms around Vilma Banky. On August 26, Goldwyn announced that he was insuring his leading lady for $500,000 with the Morrison Insurance Company of Los Angeles.

  Three of Goldwyn’s next four films were tandem vehicles for Banky and Ronald Colman—European costume melodramas. In each of them —The Night of Love, The Magic Flame and Two Lovers—Colman presses himself upon her, then must plot against a tyrannical duke and correct several misunderstandings before he and Vilma Banky can unite in true love. (Goldwyn’s fourth offering that year was The Devil Dancer, a silly tale set in Tibet, built around the stunt casting of Gilda Gray, a Polish-born dancer who popularized that year’s dance craze, the Shimmy.)

  Colman and Banky became one of the most successful teams in screen history, “good chemistry” that rivaled MGM’s mating John Gilbert with Greta Garbo and Fox’s pairing Charles Farrell with Janet Gaynor. United Artists very likely would have gone under had Goldwyn not supplied one third of their product of the preceding two years. Joe Schenck’s plan of bringing outside producers such as Goldwyn into United Artists salved their problems, but it would not solve them. They were still a small-time distribution company without dibs on a single major first-run theater in the country.
Meantime, the major motion picture corporations kept building their empires on theaters, through acquisition and construction. Zukor’s Publix Theatres Corporation had amassed one thousand theaters; Loew had one hundred fifty to his name; Fox’s West Coast theaters numbered eight hundred; and the Warner brothers were scraping money together to buy shares in First National.

  In 1926, Goldwyn teamed with Pickford, Fairbanks, and Schenck to create United Artists Theatre Circuit, Inc. (Chaplin was not interested in investing.) Realizing they could never compete against their larger rivals, they tended to enter into partnerships with other companies. In Louisville, for example, they bought a half interest in a Loew’s theater; in New York, they bought into the Rivoli and the Rialto. In Hollywood, they partnered with Sid Grauman at his Chinese Theater.

  To defray the costs of its expansion, United Artists floated stock in a finance company called Art Cinema Corporation. Goldwyn subscribed. When Art Cinema moved onto the Pickford-Fairbanks lot, another subsidiary corporation acquired a ten-year lease on the land and invested one million dollars in building stages, dressing rooms, and an administration building. Goldwyn found himself part owner of the rechristened United Artists Studio.

  Goldwyn offered to buy a block of preferred stock if he could, at last, be made a partner of the struggling company. He had successfully insinuated himself in its workings since his arrival, and his films continued to open regularly and earn money. The Fairbankses still balked, but they were at least willing to listen.

  All Goldwyn’s recent corporate investments had been heavy gambles beyond his means, as his profits still remained more on paper than in his pocket. Stella Dallas, for example, was his highest-grossing silent film, his company’s take amounting to $1,110,134.85. From that, almost $700,000 worth of production costs had to be deducted. Goldwyn had to lop off royalties to his profit participants—25 percent for Henry King, 10 percent apiece to Abe Lehr and Dr. Giannini. Finally, Goldwyn had to pay off the interest on his bank loans. By the time he had cleared his debt on one picture, he was in hock on the next. He was eating caviar but living hand to mouth.