Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  Into this world of affluent insecurity entered Goldwyn’s second child. At four-fifteen on the morning of September 7, 1926, Frances gave birth at the Los Angeles Good Samaritan Hospital to an eight-pound son. “Ashkenazic Jews”—those from Central and Eastern Europe—“don’t name their newborns for the living,” explained Rabbi Edgar F. Magnin, who began his career in Los Angeles in 1915, oversaw the building of Los Angeles’s Wilshire Boulevard Temple in 1929, and towered over Hollywood’s religious life for close to seventy years. “It isn’t law. It’s a mystical tradition, because naming after the living casts a kind of evil eye.” But it was a special tribe that brought motion pictures to southern California. Rabbi Magnin said, “They were men who made all that money and realized they were still a bunch of Goddamned Jews. So they looked for other ways to cover it up.” In an industry whose scions already included Jesse Lasky, Jr., Jack Warner, Jr., and Carl Laemmle, Jr., the infant was named Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. He was called Sammy.

  “Los Angeles was different with respect to the Jews, because the show people regarded themselves as different,” observed Rabbi Magnin, a grandson of the clothier I. Magnin. “The city had its downtown Jews, who were merchants and lawyers; and then there was the theatrical community. In other cities the divisions were usually between the German Jews who looked down on the Eastern European Jews, because they didn’t have enough education or refinement; but there was at least some mixing. Not here. This crowd was different ... because they wanted it that way. My mother called them ‘movie kikes.’”

  Although they quickly adopted new ways, the moguls clung to their Old World values. They wanted their sons to be educated and their daughters to marry nice Jewish boys. “What do I have to do?” Louis B. Mayer ranted as his eldest daughter, Edith, entered her twenties with no marriage prospects. “It isn’t enough that I’m L. B. Mayer!” The Laemmles prayed for Irving Thalberg to marry their daughter Rosabelle. The wife of another mogul used to wash her daughter’s hair with eggs and lemon to lighten it, and scrub her skin with bleach.

  Except for broad Jewish stereotypes, clearly designated Jewish roles were generally assigned to Gentile actors. Years earlier, when Sam Goldfish had interviewed Carmel Myers, he insisted he could make the sixteen-year-old a big star but that she would have to change her name. A rabbi’s daughter, she asked why. “Oh, Carmel,” he tried to explain, “there’s so much anti-Semitism in the world. Why play into their hands?” Years later, Carmel Myers admitted, “Sam Goldwyn was just trying to give me good advice. He knew none of the other moguls was about to make a leading lady out of a Jewess named Myers.”

  Rabbi Magnin suggested that the concerted effort of the moguls to closet their Jewishness was more than “just wanting to be good Americans.” The daily busloads to Los Angeles of hopeful starlets reminded them of the most basic reason “to wish they didn’t have to be Jewish.” He said, “Sleeping with a pretty Gentile girl made them feel, if only for a few minutes, ‘I’m half Gentile.’ No wonder they made idols out of shiksa goddesses. They worshipped those blue-eyed blondes they were forbidden to have.”

  As Frances had insisted, upon her engagement, Sammy was hers to raise as a Catholic. It was her small offering to the Church, which she no longer attended, out of shame. She felt she was living in sin, having married a divorced Jew. Sam willingly conceded the boy’s religion; but he had no idea that one afternoon, when he was in New York on business, Frances and her mother would take Sammy to a church and have him baptized.

  Goldwyn’s only say in the baby’s rearing was his insistence on the hiring of Catherine McDonough, the strong Irish Catholic who had been Ruth’s baby nurse. Her presence added untold tension to an already neurasthenic situation for the twenty-three-year-old lady of the house. Her lifelong admirer George Cukor admitted, “Frances was never cut out to be a mother.”

  Within just eighteen months, Frances had become part of the Hollywood community. Yet she always stayed apart, casting a cold eye on the others. In the autumn of 1926, she saw signs that the old order was toppling. Movies were suffering at the box office again, owing in part to the phenomenal growth of radio. In an effort to lure audiences into their resplendent picture houses, producers danced around the Hays Office’s rules of decency. Censorship boards cropped up everywhere, passing local ordinances and waging newspaper campaigns against films. Talk of organized labor kicked up in Los Angeles. Union leaders targeted the motion picture industry, with its high visibility, as the obvious shop to close. Attempts to organize screenwriters and screen actors failed in late 1926; but by the end of the year, nine major film companies had signed a Studio Basic Agreement with unions representing the film business’s blue-collar workers—carpenters, electricians, painters, and stagehands.

  1200 Laurel Lane, Beverly Hills, California, 1938.

  Mrs. Irving Berlin and her daughter Mary Ellin, the closest friends of Mrs. Samuel Goldwyn and her son, Sammy.

  Goldwyn in 1932 with his “greatest discovery,” Anna Sten.

  The United Artists family in 1936: producers Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Chaplin, Goldwyn, John Hay Whitney, David O. Selznick, Walter Wanger, Jesse Lasky, Douglas Fairbanks, and Roy Disney surround Mary Pickford.

  Goldwyn watches William Wyler direct Bonita Granville and Merle Oberon in These Three, the first of seven classic films on which producer and director would collaborate over the next ten years. Cameraman Gregg Toland looks on from the left.

  Sam recovered from a near-fatal illness in 1936 by spending the Christmas holidays with Frances in Sun Valley.

  Goldwyn in 1937 with violinist Jascha Heifetz, around whom he created the film They Shall Have Music. Mrs. Heifetz was the former Florence Vidor, whom Goldwyn had courted in the 1920s.

  , Lillian Hellman, Gregg Toland, and William Wyler—the core of Goldwyn’s creative team in its heyday—on the set of Dead End (1937).

  Goldwyn surveys the set of The Hurricane shortly before it was subjected to one of Hollywood’s most spectacular displays of special effects.

  Barbara Stanwyck performs a scene from Stella Dallas with Alan Hale, in 1937, for director King Vidor.

  Vidor and Goldwyn. After directing Stella Dallas, Vidor wrote a four-word note to himself, which he kept in his desk drawer for thirty years: “No more Goldwyn pictures.”

  Goldwyn on the court at Laurel Lane, playing with champion Frank Shields, whom Goldwyn hoped to turn into a movie star. “Tennis you know,” Goldwyn would yell at him. “Practice acting!”

  RIGHT: Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., age nine, a cadet at Black-Foxe Academy, 1935.

  With the director Henry Potter, whose first picture was Beloved Enemy, 1936.

  With his new stars Merle Oberon and David Niven, who were acting in Beloved Enemy and involved in a secret love affair, 1936.

  George Gershwin and music director Alfred Newman await Goldwyn’s approval as he listens to music for The Goldwyn Follies. Some weeks later, after writing “Love Walked In” and “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” Gershwin died.

  Goldwyn (left) and Lillian Hellman on the lot.

  The Goldwyn Follies also boasted the talents of choreographer George Balanchine (leaning on barre) and ballerina Vera Zorina.

  Goldwyn’s infatuation with Zorina almost broke up his marriage.

  Zorina rehearsing the “Water Nymph Ballet” sequence.

  Zorina (right) had eyes only for Balanchine., whom she married the following vear. Left to right: Balanchine, Goldwyn, Helen Jepson, and Zorina.

  Eleanor Roosevelt on the Goldwyn lot with Goldwyn and her son James, then vice president of Goldwyn’s company, 1939. Goldwyn was fond of saying, “The son of the President of the United States works for me.”

  : On the set of Wuthering Heights, 1939. One of the few harmonious moments—a celebration of Mere Oberon’s birthday—in the midst of what was an ordeal for everybody involved.

  Laurence Olivier, David Niven, and Donald Crisp on the steps; behind them, Merle Oberon talks with Gregg Toland; farther back and to the right, Will
iam Wyler sits behind the camera.

  Goldwyn’s manpower-director William Wyler and Gary Cooper on the set of The Westerner, 1939.

  Clockwise. Cooper (at the head of the table), Goldwyn, Walter Brennan, and Gregg Toland. The film was the last Goldwyn production to be distribured by United Artists.

  On the set of The Little Foxes (Goldwyn’s first picture for RKO), 1941. Left to right: Herbert Marshall, Bette Davis, and property master Irving Sindler.

  : The same year, Goldwyn produced Ball of Fire. Left to right: Gary Cooper, Howard Hawks, Oscar Homolka, Barbara Stanwyck.

  The set of The North Star, photographed by Margaret Bourke-White, 1943. Goldwyn would joke afterwards, “Whenever Stalin got depressed, he ran that picture.”

  Mary Pickford, Goldwyn’s enemy of twenty years, buried the hatchet long enough, in 1944, to help publicize the opening of Up in Arms at a makeshift theater in Reno, where Goldwyn dramatized the struggle of independent producers against the major studios’ theater chains.

  Goldwyn and his star Danny Kaye, whom he hailed as “the new Chaplin,” with the original Chaplin.

  Private Sam Goldwyn, Jr., with his parents—one of the happiest moments of their lives, 1944.

  The most unsettling talk of the town was over synchronization of sound with motion pictures. There had been crude attempts at such an invention ever since Edison first tinkered with sound cylinders. In 1906, Dr. Lee De Forest invented a three-filament, gas-filled Audion tube. Western Electric purchased the rights, and with further development, produced equipment able to amplify sound 130 times its original volume. The Bell Telephone Laboratories experimented with large disks that reproduced sound.

  The Warner brothers, like all independent filmmakers, went to great lengths to get their product into theaters. In search of some novelty to rescue their sinking company, they joined forces with Western Electric and Bell in forming the Vitaphone Corporation. The company would produce sixteen-inch disks with prerecorded music to accompany their reels of film. Vitaphone debuted on Friday, August 6, 1926, at the Warner Theater in New York City. Will Hays appeared on screen, and his voice could be heard as he welcomed the audience; seven musical selections followed, then John Barrymore in Don Juan, with a complete musical accompaniment. Reviews hailed this experiment in sound. Its success suggested that first-class music could accompany films everywhere, even into remote theaters where an upright piano had passed for an orchestra. “The Vitaphone premiere passed off without accident,” noted Will Hays, “but it didn’t set the world on fire.” Adolph Zukor sat down in front and said, “It’s a fad, it won’t last.”

  While the Warner brothers perfected their gizmo, William Fox bought a German process of recording sound directly onto the film. He tried it on his Movietone newsreels. On May 21, 1927, he sprang his invention on the American public. The day before, he had sent one of his crews with sound recorders to Roosevelt Field, to film the takeoff of a shy Minnesotan in his flying crate. By the time the “Spirit of St. Louis” had landed at Le Bourget Airport in Paris, Fox had his newsreel of the departure ready to exhibit. Thousands jammed into the Roxy that night, where they not only saw the plane take flight but also heard the coughing of Lindy’s motor. They cheered wildly.

  Still, Vitaphone emitted more noise than music; and the conversion of a theater to accommodate Fox’s Movietone was thought to cost $20,000. “I have no fear that scraping, screeching, rasping sound film will ever disturb our peaceful motion-picture theaters,” wrote Louella Parsons. “The industry is too wise to spend fortunes for machines, new equipment, and soundstages to project noise that the customers do not want to hear. The public has no intention of paying good money to be so annoyed!”

  Movies were trying to talk. Terry Ramsaye observed in his 1926 history of the silent cinema “that the average motion picture of 1909—1910 contained only eighty feet of titles per reel of a thousand feet. The same screen footage today requires ordinarily close to two hundred and fifty feet of titles. The screen story of today cannot all be told by the camera.” Mary Pickford’s 1926 release, Sparrows, had five writers collaborating; her 1927 offering My Best Girl (in which Charles “Buddy” Rogers gave Mary her first grownup onscreen kiss) required the audience to read almost as much as watch. Screenwriters could no longer get away with merely writing continuity to string pictures together. They had to write convincing dialogue.

  While the motion picture industry’s adolescence was at its most painful, Goldwyn received a telegram from nine of Hollywood’s godfathers—including producers Schenck, Schulberg, and Thalberg. It was an invitation, which read in part:A NUMBER OF REPRESENTATIVE MEMBERS OF THE MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY ARE ORGANIZING A CLUB TEMPORARILY KNOWN AS THE MAYFAIR FOR THE PURPOSE OF ESTABLISHING A SOCIAL ORGANIZATION TRULY REPRESENTATIVE OF THE BEST ELEMENTS IN THE INDUSTRY AND FOR THE FURTHER PURPOSE OF MAINTAINING CERTAIN SOCIAL AND PROFESSIONAL IDEALS AND OF RECOGNIZING AND PAYING TRIBUTE TO SPECIAL TALENT AND ACHIEVEMENT IN EVERY DEPARTMENT OF PICTURE ACTIVITIES.

  “To lend dignity to the institution,” the telegram of October 7, 1926, stated further, the club was establishing an honorary board of governors, on which they hoped to seat Goldwyn. Within weeks, the notion of the Mayfair Club had developed into that of a formal institution, an organization that could bind potentially warring factions within the industry in crises of labor, technology, and censorship.

  On January 11, 1927, three dozen actors, directors, writers, producers, and technical personnel convened at the Ambassador Hotel and founded the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Sam Goldwyn did not attend, Henry King later suggested, because “he wasn’t a joiner. He was a professional hold-out.” Among the original committees formed in May 1927 was one to create annual awards of merit. It was another two years before their first awards were presented.

  Until then, all of Hollywood royalty flocked to many celebrations in honor of their own. King Vidor married Eleanor Boardman in an MGMFAMILY ceremony at Marion Davies’s Beverly Hills house. Irving Thalberg married Norma Shearer, and subsequently named their firstborn Irving Thalberg, Jr. Lewis Selznick had recently gone bust, and his son David had moved to Hollywood to ennoble the family name. At a Mayfair dance—“those glittering affairs held periodically for the Hollywood elite in the Biltmore ballroom”—ringing in 1927, he met Louis B. Mayer’s daughter Irene. They were married in 1930, one month after another producer, William Goetz, walked Edith Mayer down the aisle.

  In the spring of 1927, Goldwyn turned a potentially ruinous situation into the nuptials of the season. Vilma Banky had fallen in love—not with Ronald Colman, as Goldwyn’s publicity department ballyhooed, but with Rod La Rocque. At a small dinner party at the Abe Lehrs‘, the couple announced their desire to steal away to Santa Barbara and marry in the mission. Actress Bebe Daniels excused herself from the table and called Louella Parsons.

  “How could you do this to me?” Goldwyn demanded of his star the next morning. “I brought you to this country. I acted like a father. I protected you. What are you, ashamed? You want to go someplace and hide, disappear?” Goldwyn calmed down when she agreed to let him throw the wedding. He was determined to make it Hollywood’s grandest bridal ceremony.

  “The wedding of Vilma Banky and Rod La Rocque at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills on Sunday, June 26, will be a film affair,” read the first of the formal newspaper announcements, after two months of gossip and feature stories about the wedding. Constance Talmadge, Bebe Daniels, Mrs. Harold Lloyd, Rod La Rocque’s sister, Mildred, Abe Lehr’s wife, Ann, and Frances Goldwyn made up the bridal party. George Fitzmaurice and actors Donald Crisp, Jack Holt, Victor Varconi, Harold Lloyd, and Ronald Colman were ushers. Vilma Banky’s parents would not be journeying from Hungary, so Goldwyn would give the bride away. He asked Cecil B. DeMille to be best man, even though La Rocque and his producer-director were in the middle of a contract dispute. Sam pointed out that because the wedding would be on a Sunday, neither man’s legal position would be jeopardized for t
hose few hours.

  Six hundred guests were invited to the church on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Bedford Drive that fourth Sunday afternoon in June. Goldwyn had ordered scaffolding so that news cameras could capture on film the arrival of every notable. Thousands of fans lined the streets of Beverly Hills to catch a glimpse of the guests. Traffic stopped when Tom Mix, in a purple cowboy outfit, drove up in his own open carriage behind a team of four horses.

  The church was bedecked with thousands of dollars’ worth of flowers for the ceremony. A fifty-voice choir sang. After the service, Goldwyn had arranged for the wedding party to pose for photographs on the steps of the church, while throngs cheered from behind police-enforced cordons. Vilma Banky looked radiant, wearing her lace cap and wedding veil from The Dark Angel. It had to be returned to the Goldwyn wardrobe department after the wedding.

  Those who witnessed the ceremony met another six hundred guests at the Beverly Hills Hotel. For decades thereafter, it was rumored that Goldwyn had only prop food on display at the reception. In fact, guests in the Crystal Room filed past huge buffet tables marked by spotlights shining down on two papier-mâché turkeys. In front of them was an endless supply of turkey and salads and lobster and shrimp—“an abundance of everything,” recalled La Rocque. There was dancing to Dr. Louis Furedi’s society orchestra, adding another hundred dollars to what Goldwyn estimated was $25,000 out of his pocket. Pretty May McAvoy, who soon married a United Artists executive and remained in Hollywood for the next half century, said of her hometown’s glamour, “After the Banky-La Rocque wedding, it was all downhill.”