THAT very month, Miss McAvoy was filming The Jazz Singer. After George Jessel walked out on the project, the Warner brothers had approached Al Jolson—a rabbi’s son, born Asa Yoelson. He was willing to take the role for very little cash, investing the bulk of his fee into the production and in Warners stock.
Jolson, who had never appeared before a motion picture camera, was privately coached by May McAvoy. She reminded him that in his silent dramatic scenes he did not have to “play to the second balcony.” When it came to the musical numbers, however, there was no holding Jolson back. After an exuberant rendition of “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face!” the irrepressible Jolson could not keep himself from blurting out a few unscripted words to lead him into his next number. “Wait a minute, wait a minute!” he ad-libbed. “You ain’t heard nothing yet! Wait a minute, I tell ya, you ain’t heard nothing. You want to hear ‘Toot, Toot, Tootsie’? All right, hold on.”
The final version of the film included a few other improvised speeches between several Jolson numbers. After the gala opening of The Jazz Singer at the Warner Theater in New York on October 7, 1927, May McAvoy could not help sneaking into theaters day after day as the film was being run. She pinned herself against a wall in the dark and watched the faces in the crowd. In that moment just before “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” she remembered, “A miracle occurred. Moving pictures really came alive. To see the expressions on their faces, when Joley spoke to them ... you’d have thought they were listening to the voice of God.”
ON October 11, 1927, a telegram informed Goldwyn that he had been made a director of the United Artists Corporation. “I LOOK FORWARD WITH REAL PLEASURE TO A LONG ASSOCIATION WITH YOU AND AS I HAVE OFTEN TOLD YOU YOU WILL FIND ME A LOYAL LIEUTENANT,” he wired Joe Schenck in reply to the news. No future in motion pictures seemed more secure than Goldwyn’s, now financially linked to the foremost screen pantomimists of the world—Pickford, Fairbanks, Chaplin ... and his own Ronald Colman and Vilma Banky. From where he sat—in his manor house in Hollywood, with his beautiful wife and a son to perpetuate his name—he could see only palmy days ahead, nothing to disrupt the dynastic dreams he had worked most of his forty-eight years to build.
PART TWO
11 Interregnum
FOR YEARS, Frances Goldwyn would flirt with the idea of writing a novel about Hollywood, a murder mystery. Her opening scene was going to be the Los Angeles premiere of The Jazz Singer. George Cukor remembered Frances’s calling that night “the most important event in cultural history since Martin Luther nailed his theses on the church door.”
All of Hollywood turned out that Wednesday evening, December 28, 1927, the Goldwyns (attending with the Irving Thalbergs) among them. After the eighty-nine-minute film had run, the audience sat stunned. They were less spontaneous than the New York premiere audience, which had leapt to its feet and applauded for several minutes.
As thunderous clapping finally brought the houselights up, Frances looked around at the celebrities who had become her friends over the last two years. Afterward she swore she saw “terror in all their faces”—the fear that “the game they had been playing for years was finally over.” There was a great buzz of excitement in the lobby, but she was sure there was dead silence in every car driving home. “I know there was in ours,” she told Cukor.
Only recently, D. W Griffith had insisted, “Speaking movies are impossible. When a century has passed, all thought of our so-called ‘talking pictures’ will have been abandoned.” Mary Pickford had said, “Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo.” King Vidor had believed “talking motion pictures would never take the place of silent film. It was unimaginable to some of us, because silent pictures were an art form complete unto themselves.”
The “Bible of the business,” Variety, recorded the gradual spread of The Jazz Singer’s influence. The twenty-two-year-old weekly tabloid was already becoming renowned for its reporting show business news in esoteric lingo composed of snappy abbreviations and slangy metaphors. The Jazz Singer never commanded one of its bold banner headlines. It was just another film that had opened during the second week of October 1927, with only its gimmick of synchronized songs and a Broadway star making his motion picture debut to boast of. The handwriting on Hollywood’s wall became visible over the next three months in the fine print of Variety’s pages that tallied the film’s grosses as it opened across the country.
“Another twice daily entrant made its presence felt at Warner’s, where ‘The Jazz Singer’ premiered Thursday and got $9,900 in two and a half days,” reported the October 12 edition of the trade journal. MGM’s The Big Parade, in its third week at the Capitol Theater in New York, Paramount’s Wings, in its ninth week at the Criterion, King of Kings, entering its twenty-fifth week at the Gaiety, and even Goldwyn’s The Magic Flame at the Rialto, in its third week, all posted higher numbers. The following week, however, “Goldwyn’s romantic opus” fell off 18 percent, while The Jazz Singer held its own.
“MAGIC FLAME LOOP’S REAL PUNCH ... The Colman-Banky necking team is no flash in the pan,” observed Variety when Goldwyn’s film opened in Chicago. As in New York, it followed the pattern of most pictures: It was strongest in its first week, attendance dropped steadily over the next two weeks, and it closed within the month. Meantime, The Jazz Singer proved to have what became known in the trade as “legs,” the ability to run a long time. The Warner Brothers film repeated its pattern when it opened in Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Seattle, and Tacoma. Vitaphone may have started out as a novelty, but there was no stopping the film’s word of mouth.
Other events knelled a new era in Hollywood. Sam Warner, the brother most responsible for his family’s buying into Vitaphone, died at forty on September 5, two days before The Jazz Singer opened in New York. His brothers Harry, Albert, and Jack had rushed to be at his deathbed, but were on board the train out of New York when he died, and were present at neither the birth of talking pictures nor the death of the man behind the occasion. Rabbi Magnin conducted the funeral services.
On September 6, Marcus Loew died at fifty-seven. Memorial services for the motion picture business’s first trailblazer were held on a studio stage. Louis B. Mayer fought back tears in describing Loew as “Christ-like,” then introduced Rabbi Magnin. Will Rogers later observed that what he always liked about Marcus Loew was his basic attitude about motion pictures: “He made more money out of them than anybody.... But he always said, ‘I don’t know what they are all about, and the more I learn about them, the less I know.’”
HOLLYWOOD retooled. By the summer of 1928, most major film companies had signed an agreement with Electrical Research Products, Incorporated (known as ERPI), a subsidiary of American Telephone and Telegraph. In order to obtain sound equipment, each studio had to pay ERPI a royalty on every negative film it produced, then distribute its pictures only to theaters “wired for sound” by Western Electric, another AT&T subsidiary.
Having already fought one great patents war, Hollywood drew battle lines anew. The Radio Corporation of America developed with General Electric and Westinghouse laboratories its own sound system, called Photophone. RCA’s David Sarnoff merged his Photophone with the Keith-Albee-Orpheum circuit of vaudeville theaters and the Film Booking Office of America, a distribution company run by Joseph P. Kennedy.
Germany’s electric companies declared war on the United States, claiming their patents had been infringed upon. Within two years, lawsuits had been filed around the globe. In 1930, ERPI, RCA, and the German combine signed an armistice known as the Paris Agreement, forming a cartel and dividing the world among themselves.
Goldwyn went along with the rest of his United Artists partners and signed ERPI’s Recording License Agreement. He listened at length to a young scientific whiz named Gordon Sawyer, whom Schenck had hired to install their studio’s sound system. Sawyer, a quiet man with a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from the University of California at Los Angeles, had recently trav
eled around the country, supervising the building of radio broadcasting studios. Over the years, he would develop such ingenious innovations in sound as planting small microphones on the actors’ bodies as well as the traveling microphone boom. He ended up in Goldwyn’s employ for the next forty years; but it was months before Goldwyn knew what to do with him.
Sam Goldwyn maintained his policy of watchful waiting, as he prepared to split up his successful love team of Vilma Banky and Ronald Colman—an attempt to reap twice the rewards. Two Lovers, the last of their films together, was ready for release, and a new project for each of them was on the drawing board. Goldwyn had no plans to convert them into talking pictures. Even if he completely believed in the changing art form, twenty thousand theaters in the country (10 percent of which were under Zukor’s aegis) still had to be refitted for sound, and film producers were obligated to them while making the changeover. “By the fall of 1920)—two years after The Jazz Singer,” Zukor remembered, “—only about one-fourth of them had managed it. Therefore we continued to produce silent pictures.”
Most vulnerable during this transitional period were the silent players. As if an actor’s life was not tough enough already, a recent census revealed that there were 120 motion picture directors available to work at the various studios, “requiring if all are actively engaged, a daily maximum of 1,200 players.” By the end of 1927, the movie colony was home to 4,000 principals, each wondering whether he would survive the reformation.
Early sound equipment tended to render voices slightly higher and thinner, thus favoring the deep-toned. When young Jean Arthur listened to the playback of her voice test, Adolph Zukor recalled, she cried in despair, “A foghorn!” But Zukor recognized a likability to that “foghorn quality which made her a greater star than she might have become on the silent screen”; her voice was her most salient feature. Upon hearing his voice, William Powell bolted out the door, shouting that he “planned to go into hiding.” Again, the addition of sound would only enhance his screen presence.
Most silent-screen stars did not fare so well. B. P. Schulberg’s son Budd remembered the tragedy of his father’s great discovery, Clara Bow. Not only did the stationary sound cameras stifle her charming, impromptu movements but, as he remembered, “Millions of adoring fans heard for the first time the flat, nasal Brooklynese we who knew her had always associated with her.” The Talmadge sisters suffered similarly; after but a few attempts at talking pictures, they bowed out gracefully.
If a regional twang could kill a career, a foreign accent was sure to toll disaster. Adolph Zukor was desperate about the future of Pola Negri; Carl Laemmle worried about Conrad Veidt; Louis B. Mayer had Ramon Novarro to consider, as well as his stunning Swede. Along with Chaplin, Garbo remained the most conspicuously silent star. In one MGM film after another, Mayer kept her from speaking. In The Single Standard, Garbo shambled through the rain and a title card spoke for her: “I am walking alone because I want to be alone.” The public imagined how the mysterious actress might utter the line.
Sam Goldwyn lost plenty of sleep, his entire career resting on the shoulders of a bashful Englishman and a Hungarian whose English was barely intelligible. He deliberated a full six months (during which time Variety reported the consistently rewarding grosses of pictures with sound) before committing himself to the future.
Having pocketed one million dollars from his Banky-Colman pictures, Goldwyn was ready to borrow again, this time to invest in establishing separate followings for his two stars. Frances Marion found time between the five scenarios she did for MGM that year to write a story for Sam Goldwyn’s first film in which Banky’s name alone would be billed above the title.
The Awakening, as Variety reviewed it, was “a pinch of ‘The White Sister,’ a seasoning of ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ a large chunk of all the war pictures since 1918, and several slices of small-time baloney.” The story of an Alsatian belle torn between the French fiancé she does not love and the German officer she does, strained credibility at every turn. It revealed just how far silent-screen plots had been stretched in order to hold an audience. Through it all, Vilma Banky held her own as a star. Its sound track included the singing of “Marie,” written by Goldwyn’s friend Irving Berlin, which became a hit tune. The Awakening cost $762,000, and after deducting costs of distribution, prints, and advertising, Samuel Goldwyn, Inc., pocketed a $50,000 profit from the film’s run—hardly the six-figure grosses Banky and Colman used to pull in together, but enough to encourage Goldwyn to develop another film for her—a talking picture. Ironically, Goldwyn encountered more resistance to “talkies” from his other star, that reedy-voiced Englishman with impeccable diction.
Abe Lehr had recently sent a brief legal document to all Goldwyn contract actors, an amendment covering sound pictures. “I would rather not sign this,” Ronald Colman replied on August 5, 1928. “Except as a scientific achievement, I am not sympathetic to this ‘sound business.’ I feel, as so many do, that this is a mechanical resource, that it is a retrogressive and temporary digression in so far as it affects the art of motion picture acting,—in short that it does not properly belong to my particular work (of which naturally I must be the best judge).”
Goldwyn did not push his leading man into talking pictures. He cast him instead as a traditional silent hero in an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Rescue. At a cost of $800,000, it became the first film with Ronald Colman’s name above the title to lose money. The Rescue did far less business than Vilma Banky’s The Awakening.
Filmmakers and their audiences alike suffered through two years of Hollywood’s identity crisis. Most of the films released in 1928 and 1929 were in fact hard on the ear. Many were an equal strain on the eyes, as established methods of acting metamorphosed awkwardly. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks played out their own marital strife in a talking version of The Taming of the Shrew. It was an unfortunate wedding of Shakespearean acting and the broad pantomime they had practiced so successfully for fifteen years. Gloria Swanson was trapped in an overwrought production called Queen Kelly, which producer Joseph Kennedy shut down in mid-filming when the budget reached $800,000. The plot about a convent girl’s love affair with the consort of the mad queen of Cobourg-Nassau wrecked the career of everybody involved. The star and the director, Erich von Stroheim, were practically banished from the screen.
Miriam Hopkins, Helen Morgan, Jeanette MacDonald, Tallulah Bankhead, and Kay Francis paraded before microphones at Paramount’s studio in Astoria, in hopes of making the grade. So did Walter Huston and the Marx Brothers. Any number of famous voices from the stages of New York—Ethel Merman, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Ginger Rogers, Charles Ruggles, George Jessel, Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, Lillian Roth, Ruth Etting, and Rudy Vallee—acted in a series of one-reel sound shorts, also made on Long Island. Goldwyn’s most promising test for a new leading man during these years of frantic auditioning was of twenty-four-year-old Robert Montgomery. The reports from New York were favorable but warned Goldwyn that the young man’s neck was too long. Goldwyn saw the tests and decreed, “His neck is not too long; his collars are too short.” He ordered new shirts for the actor and new tests as well. Unfortunately, MGM saw the second test and signed Montgomery to a contract before Goldwyn’s people had drawn one up.
Producers felt that talking actors required a new kind of director, and so they combed theaters for those who had thus far steered clear of Hollywood. Rouben Mamoulian, a thirty-year-old Russian émigré, had been staging opera in Rochester before Paramount lured him to the West Coast. On his recommendation, Jesse Lasky hired George Cukor to direct one-reelers; and Frances Goldwyn proudly introduced him around town. “There was a great demand in Hollywood for anyone who knew anything about the theater, who could help the actors speak the ‘titles,’ as they called the dialogue at first,” recalled George Cukor years later. “A whole bunch of us was transported to California.” Cukor later summed up his theatrical experience as little more than the strategic planting of Ethe
l Barrymore’s whisky bottles onstage, so that she could sip her way through a performance. But in 1929 he let Hollywood believe he was a seasoned man of the theater. Within months of his arrival, he advanced from dialogue director on All Quiet on the Western Front to directing features at Paramount. For the first few years of her marriage, Frances Goldwyn had constantly urged her husband to bring her friend to Hollywood. Sam extended genuine offers and Cukor repeatedly dodged them. “I knew better,” he confessed, “than to let working for Sam ever get between Frances and me.”
Even successful directors fell by the wayside along with the scores of discarded actors. In the middle of this transitional period, Cecil B. DeMille filmed a morality tale, The Godless Girl, which not even the addition of a sound track could save. Having lost his studio, he signed a contract for three pictures at MGM. The last of them was a talking remake of The Squaw Man. When that flopped at the box office as badly as his last silent picture, DeMille found himself unemployable in Hollywood, “washed up.” He left for Europe and considered looking for work there.
For two years, Hollywood went topsy-turvy with hirings and firings. The most conspicuous rising star was Harry Cohn, twelve years younger than Sam Goldwyn and cut from even coarser cloth. After breaking away from song plugging into movies, as Carl Laemmle’s secretary, Cohn, his brother Jack, and Joseph Brandt formed the CBC Sales Corporation on Poverty Row. Their low-budget shorts and two-reel comedies earned their studio the nickname “Corned Beef and Cabbage.”
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