Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  Dialogue and diction coaches were brought in to help Miss Young with her accent, especially in putting g’s on the ends of her gerunds. In her scenes with Colman, she found herself literally tongue-tied, not yet over her childhood crush on him. She got through the part, but Goldwyn saw nothing in her performance to warrant his working with her again. It was almost two decades before he rehired her, and then it was on the eve of her winning an Academy Award.

  The most interesting career to unfold in The Devil to Pay was that of the actress playing Ronald Colman’s rejected girlfriend. The former Myrna Williams from Crow Creek Valley, Montana (another Los Angeles transplant to have lost her father while still a child), Myrna Loy was steadily advancing from vampy Oriental sirens to trampy “other women.” Goldwyn put a blond wig on her and liked her performance enough to ask for her the next time he needed a femme fatale.

  The Devil to Pay cost more and earned less than Goldwyn had expected, not making back its investment until the following year, when the film was marketed worldwide. Big studios with theater chains could afford the occasional film with a short shelf life; they always had two new films to fill their houses the next week anyway. Goldwyn could not afford to waste his stars on pictures that were simply no better or worse than the hundreds manufactured each year. He realized that he could survive only by capitalizing on his smallness, in being sui generis. “He had to make every film special somehow,” noted Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. “It wasn’t enough to produce just a film. It had to be an event.” Determined to become Hollywood’s most prestigious impresario, he turned to the only showman he had ever dreamed of imitating.

  FLORENZ ZIEGFELD’S career had inspired Goldwyn even in his glove days. He marveled at the producer’s zeal, how he was always planning his next show, whether it followed a failure or a success. He admired Ziegfeld’s methods of producing and promoting with dignity—and turning a fancy profit at it.

  Ziegfeld closed out the twenties on one of the most impressive rolls in theater history. Besides the annual Follies, his 1927 production of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Show Boat was instantly recognized as a theatrical milestone. He followed that with the hugely successful Gershwin musical Rosalie and Rudolf Friml’s The Three Musketeers. Then he bought Owen Davis’s play The Nervous Wreck, about a hypochondriac who goes west for his health, only to find himself caught up in the confusion brought on by a group of cowgirls, Indians, and an ingenue whose red-skinned lover happily turns out to be a paleface after all. Ziegfeld brought in William Anthony McGuire and tunesmiths Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson to spin it into a musical for his biggest star, Eddie Cantor. The result was Whoopee!

  Ziegfeld’s irrepressible flair spilled into his offstage life. His love affairs with the greatest beauties of the day—Olive Thomas, Marilyn Miller, Anna Held—were legendary. The day after meeting Billie Burke, he sent not flowers but an entire shop, including the decorative orange trees that had stood in the window. Budgets were for bookkeepers; he was interested in results. Whoopee!‘s dazzling costumes, scenery, showgirls, score, and star made it a smash hit of the 1928—29 season, keeping Ziegfeld on top for another year.

  Then the stock market crashed. Ziegfeld had never discussed his investments with his wife, because she did not have a head for money matters. But Billie Burke could not fail to grasp the gravity of their situation that night in late 1929 when he returned extremely late from the theater to their mansion in Hastings-on-Hudson and “sat down heavily on the edge of my bed looking utterly wretched and weary.” There had been setbacks in the past, from which he had always recovered, but she had never seen her husband like this before. Through great struggling sobs, he cried, “I’m through. Nothing can save me.” He had lost more than a million dollars in what Billie Burke later referred to as “the Wall Street unpleasantness.” But he did have some assets he had not yet fully considered.

  Whoopee! was precisely the sort of property Sam Goldwyn was looking for. A proven hit on Broadway, it boasted the tasteful extravagance with which he liked to associate himself; and it offered the opportunity to present a new star to the talking screen—the eye-rolling Cantor, who could sell a song as well as a joke.

  Ziegfeld was warier of Hollywood than ever. Film producers had already abducted his biggest discoveries: W C. Fields and Mae West were on the verge of their great fame at Paramount; Will Roger’s popularity was soaring at Fox; Fanny Brice was making musicals for Warners.

  Once sound was perfected, “song-and-dance movies” had quickly surfeited the public’s appetite. In 1929, they proliferated so fast that the idea of plotting them was often cast to the winds. Revues, sometimes legitimized by a thin strand of a story, were slapped together. The industry churned out “nightclub musicals” and “Broadway musicals”; the movie capital even turned its cameras on itself and created “Hollywood musicals” —such as MGM’s Hollywood Revue of 1929, in which Buster Keaton, Marion Davies, and a chorus in slickers burst into “Singin‘ in the Rain” alongside Joan Crawford. Hollywood’s Roosevelt Hotel, Goldwyn later recalled, “was filled with refugees from Tin Pan Alley.”

  Paramount tried to dignify their musicals with the strains of European operetta, thereby creating stars out of Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald; MGM hired a baritone from the Metropolitan Opera, Lawrence Tibbett. Hollywood produced two hundred musicals between 1928 and 1930. “The glut of musicals got so bad,” Goldwyn recalled of 1930, “that some theaters were advertising: ‘This picture has no music.’ The Santa Fe Chief was now crowded with songwriters heading back to Tin Pan Alley.”

  Goldwyn chose that moment to make Whoopee!—his first musical—with Eddie Cantor and a seven-figure budget. The producer had acquired hit properties in the past, but never one this expensive. Goldwyn himself admitted, “I was told on every side that I was ‘insane,’” that the “public is fed up with musicals. You’ll lose your shirt putting that much money into a picture with Eddie Cantor. He was out here in silents, and he didn’t click. They sent him back to Broadway.” Cantor also presented an unspoken ethnic problem. Broadway audiences, a largely Jewish crowd, readily bought Cantor’s act with its throwaway lines in Yiddish; but the moviegoing public had not yet embraced so overtly Jewish a performer.

  Goldwyn reasoned that Cantor had flopped in his silent pictures at Paramount because, as with Will Rogers, “you have to hear him to appreciate him.” Paramount had already approached Ziegfeld, eager to make Whoopee! with Cantor at their Astoria studio, by the time Goldwyn came to plead for the rights. That day, Ziegfeld called the star to his office, and Cantor remembered Goldwyn’s arguing “that if a picture could be made well in Long Island it could be made ten times better in California, where there was greater experience, top technicians, and the natural scenery (horses and Indians) indispensable to a Western—which ‘Whoopee’ in part was.” Goldwyn said he was even willing to film the picture in Arizona, because “you need Indians and there you can get ‘em right from the reservoir.”

  Disregarding the occasional malapropism, Cantor found that Goldwyn “talked with complete confidence and know-how.” The star made up his mind on the spot “that if I was going into talkies, this Goldwyn was for me.”

  Ziegfeld had his reservations. He did not want to relinquish the property without maintaining control over the film, and he knew Goldwyn’s history with previous partners. Goldwyn’s doubts ran just as deep, for he had happily produced on his own since 1923. But each of the producers needed to make the deal.

  It was a simple swap of cash for cachet. Upon the formation ofZ&G Productions, one partner quickly emerged as more equal than the other. Goldwyn gave the desperate Ziegfeld the ambiguous title of co-producer and little else. He agreed to relieve him of considerable financial burden by assuming the contracts of as many Ziegfeld personnel as he could employ. He also paid Ziegfeld for his rights to the play and for his services as producer and he promised him 20 percent of the profits. At that, Ziegfeld would have to take second position as a profit participant—aft
er Eddie Cantor, who was signed to reprise his role as the nervous Henry Williams for $100,000 plus 10 percent of the profits.

  While the Ziegfeld orchard was ripe for the picking, Goldwyn caught his new partner’s latest British import, Noel Coward’s Bitter Sweet, and was thoroughly taken with its star, a blue-eyed blonde named Evelyn Laye. Without even having a property in mind for her, he signed her to a contract. To turn the film debut of Britain’s leading musical comedy star into an event, Arthur Hornblow helped Goldwyn get Louis Bromfield—a best-selling, Pulitzer Prize—winning novelist—to write the story for an operetta. He threw together a trifle in which a flower girl in Budapest masquerades as a cabaret singer, falls in love with a prince, and evades his premarital sexual advances by singing duets with him. Goldwyn’s in-house Pulitzer Prize winner, Sidney Howard, agreed to write the screenplay. Rudolf Friml wrote the music.

  With three Ronald Colman productions for the year also in the works, Goldwyn had reached his loan limits at Dr. Giannini’s Bank of America. He asked Joe Schenck for one million dollars, figuring Art Cinema would bankroll Goldwyn’s productions to keep up UA’s supply of product. For half the profits, Art Cinema agreed to fund both musicals. Then Schenck learned that the Goldwyn budgets demanded close to two million dollars.

  Schenck told Goldwyn he never would have agreed to both pictures had he known their costs would run so high. He asked Goldwyn to excuse him from one of the films. Within two weeks, Sam chose one and arranged for the Bank of America to back the other. The financial plan confirmed that Goldwyn’s primary goal in making Whoopee! was prestige more than proceeds. Even if the film recouped its negative costs, any profits beyond Cantor’s and Ziegfeld’s shares now had to be split with Joseph Schenck.

  From day one, Ziegfeld and Goldwyn argued over every detail of the film’s making. One claimed expertise in mounting musicals, the other in making motion pictures. The project became an education for each of them. “Sam listened humbly to the Great Ziegfeld,” writer Alva Johnston noted; “but when decisions were made, the Great Goldwyn made them.” To make matters worse for Ziegfeld, one company executive explained, “Goldwyn is the kind of man who, if he understands what you tell him, thinks he thought of it himself.”

  While a small army was being assembled for the production of Whoopee! , Arthur Hornblow sent Goldwyn a detailed memorandum proposing a plan of “elemental military organization,” which “if adhered to by everybody in the organization from the top to the bottom, will not only insure an orderly and prompt disposition of many technical problems, but also insures your being personally kept completely informed and in command of everything.” It called for all aspects of the film to be assigned to one of five divisions—motion picture direction, art direction, dance direction, costume direction, and musical direction. The five division heads would meet every day, passing the notes of their sessions on to the commander in chief. In the three pages of single-spaced strategy, Florenz Ziegfeld’s name was never mentioned.

  Only the ampersand in Z & G Productions held the two partners together through the making of Whoopee! The tension of working with Goldwyn and the opening of a new show on Broadway led to Ziegfeld’s being ordered by his doctor to go to Florida for a short rest—“to prevent a complete nervous breakdown.” Even that did not stop the partners from bickering on all five production fronts. Western Union’s wires burned for weeks. The arguments started when Ziegfeld suggested which women might co-star in Whoopee!—all big talents from the New York stage, including Lillian Roth, Adele Astaire, and Ruby Keeler. Goldwyn dismissed them all out of hand, insisting his partner’s ideas were only causing “delays and heartaches.”

  “NOW FLO,” Goldwyn wired when Ziegfeld announced he was on his way to Los Angeles, “AS TO YOUR COMING OUT HERE YOU KNOW I HAVE UNLIMITED RESPECT FOR YOUR TALENTS AS A PRODUCER BUT WHETHER YOU REALIZE IT OR NOT YOU ARE ENTIRELY UNFAMILIAR WITH MOTION PICTURE REQUIREMENTS AND PROBLEMS STOP WHAT IS SCARING ME IS THAT WHEN I ANALYZE YOUR SUGGESTIONS I FIND THAT THEY ARE MADE WITHOUT ANY REGARD TO SCREEN REQUIREMENTS.” Turning the casting into a crisis was just a gambit on Goldwyn’s part. Many telegrams later, he revealed his real point: “YOU ARE ACCUSTOMED TO FOLLOW YOUR OWN IDEAS IN PRODUCING AND SINCE I CANNOT ACCEPT DIVIDED AUTHORITY I CANNOT IN ALL FRANKNESS SEE HOW YOUR COMING OUT OFFICIALLY AS A COPRODUCER COULD WORK OUT STOP THERE ARE MY HONEST FEELINGS CONCERNING YOUR PARTICIPATION IN THE MAKING OF WHOOPEE.” Still, Goldwyn said, he would love Flo to make the trip—“NOT AT THE EXPENSE OF THE PRODUCTION BUT AS MY PERSONAL GUEST AND AS AN OBSERVER WITHOUT ANY RESPONSIBILITY ON YOUR PART.” Ziegfeld returned to New York instead.

  To mollify his partner and prove he was handling the material properly, Goldwyn arranged for his script writers to meet with the impresario. “I AM READY AND WILLING TO HELP YOU IN ANY WAY THAT I CAN,” Ziegfeld wired Goldwyn on March 5, “BUT WHEN YOU BROUGHT ME THE TWO FELLOWS TO MY OFFICE AND THEY READ ME THEIR CONCEPTION OF WHOOPEE FOR A PICTURE ELIMINATING EVERYTHING IN IT THAT WAS ANY GOOD AND CONVINCING ME WITHOUT ANY QUESTION OF A DOUBT THAT THEY KNEW NOTHING ABOUT A MUSICAL SHOW I KNEW THEN THAT IT WOULD BE HUMANLY IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO GET MY CONCEPTION OF WHOOPEE ON THE SCREEN AND PUT IN A CAN THE SENSATION THAT I HAD PRODUCED FOR THE STAGE.”

  All the writers seemed to talk about was “motivation”—that every song or dance had to grow organically out of plot or character. All Ziegfeld could see of the screenwriters’ work was that “WHEN THEY GET ALL THROUGH THEY HAVE MOTIVATED EVERYTHING THAT WAS ANY GOOD IN THE SHOW RIGHT OUT OF IT AND ALL THEY HAVE LEFT IS MOVING PICTURE TECHNIQUE.” Of the original sixteen songs from Whoopee!, little more than the title song would make it to the screen. Several new tunes were written, including the infectious Charleston “My Baby Just Cares for Me.” Sung by Cantor in blackface—unmotivated—it stands out as one of the most spontaneously joyous moments ever preserved on film.

  When one of the writers pruned some of the stage-tested comedy routines, Goldwyn heard from yet another of the film’s participants. “BELIEVE IT BEST FOR SUCCESS OF PICTURE THAT I HAVE A HAND IN WRITING OF SCRIPT,” wired Eddie Cantor from Chicago, where he was touring in Whoopee! Goldwyn sent the writers to Chicago.

  After considerable debate with Ziegfeld, Goldwyn finally agreed to another of Cantor’s suggestions, his choice for the film’s dance director. Thirty-four-year-old William Enos had recently choreographed Earl Carroll’s Vanities and, using the toe-tapping moniker Busby Berkeley, had danced in several Shubert productions. Goldwyn was hesitant to hire Berkeley because of an alleged drinking problem, but he did.

  The night Whoopee! closed in Cleveland, Cantor and Berkeley went to Child’s restaurant, where the choreographer sketched designs for the major dance numbers on the back of a menu. The next day, they boarded a train along with Conselman and director Thornton Freeland for Hollywood, where the young dance director was, in Cantor’s words, “to revolutionize the making of musical films.” They talked their way across the country, “for there were many changes to be made in transposing ‘Whoopee’ to the screen.”... the choreography had to be changed completely. Present a line of thirty-two girls on the stage and you have something highly effective. Present the same line on the screen and the camera has to move so far back the girls become inch-high midgets.

  Berkeley already had in mind several techniques that were to become his trademarks, including the use of chorus girls making kaleidoscopic patterns when filmed from overhead. He had also dreamed up an ingeniously simple way of showing off the beauty of his dancing girls in their opening Stetson-hat number: The camera would hold on just one of them in close-up, and she would fall away, revealing another pretty girl, and so on down the line.

  Ziegfeld came to Hollywood that April. “For Flo it was a letdown,” observed Eddie Cantor. “Here was a man who was a potentate, who had created a domain and ruled it. Now, suddenly, he had little to do. But the advent of talkies had interested him in Hollywood as he had never been interested before—to the extent that he allowed me to call in a frie
nd of mine to act as his agent and help promote a position for Flo in a major studio. Any studio would have engaged him save for one thing—they feared his fabulously expensive tastes.” Ziegfeld realized that his Goldwyn connection was, in fact, the best he could get, even if that required kowtowing. Once Goldwyn realized that Ziegfeld had knuckled under, he assured him in a telegram: “DONT WORRY I WILL DO EVERYTHING IN MY POWER TO MAKE YOUR TRIP HERE AS PLEASANT AS I KNOW HOW.” The Goldwyns introduced the Ziegfelds to the Hollywood community; but at work, Sam used Flo only for publicity purposes, starting with a big reception at the train station.

  The Ziegfelds moved, at first, into a cottage in the Outpost Estates of Hollywood, in the hills above the Goldwyns. But Flo, recalled his wife, “with his sure instinct for the lavish, immediately discarded this” in favor of a house just across the tennis court from Marion Davies’s oceanside mansion. “Daddy and Mr. Goldwyn would talk for hours about show business,” remembered Ziegfeld’s daughter, Patricia, “but they were worlds apart in their outlooks. Mr. Goldwyn had his eye on the penny, Daddy on the effect, and they never managed to agree.”

  Ziegfeld did teach Goldwyn a lesson he would carry for the rest of his career, one of the secrets behind the success of the Follies: Women enjoyed looking at beautiful women in beautiful clothes, the glorification of their gender. Goldwyn decided to assemble his own chorus line, which he christened the Goldwyn Girls. He told the press his criteria were beauty, personality, talent, self-confidence, and ambition. “They must have one other characteristic,” Goldwyn later told an interviewer. “I have always insisted that every Goldwyn Girl look as though she had just stepped out of a bathtub. There must be a kind of a radiant scrubbed cleanliness about them which rules out all artificiality.”