Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  Several of the first Goldwyn Girls quickly found their ways out of the chorus—Virginia Bruce, Claire Dodd, and Ernestine Mahoney (who, as Jean Howard, became one of the town’s famous beauties and married a young, handsome agent, Charles Feldman). One other girl, with extremely shapely legs—only sixteen and living with her mother—was picked. Busby Berkeley saw Betty Grable as the first face to appear in the Stetson number. She stood out as a little more determined than the rest, already bent on stardom and compensating for her inexperience with hard work. Young Betty practiced dance routines alone in the rehearsal halls long after the other girls had gone home. “We all had that kind of energy,” Jean Howard said, recalling those early days of the Depression, when Hollywood seemed to be the world’s last oasis of luxury. “And, of course, we were all so grateful just to be working.”

  Most of the personnel at the studio at Santa Monica Boulevard and Formosa Avenue was suddenly new. Fresh faces of actors in their twenties had all but replaced the gods of the silent screen. In the three and a half years after the collapse on Wall Street, the four United Artists stars produced a total of six films—Gloria Swanson’s last two, forgettable films for the company; two feeble talkies with Douglas Fairbanks (including his valedictory Private Life of Don Juan); Mary Pickford’s final screen appearance, Secrets, in 1933; and Chaplin’s City Lights, in 1931.

  There were important changes behind the scenes as well. Goldwyn hired a thirty-five-year-old Canadian-born art director, a captain from the world war who had broken into movies as a set painter, then worked with von Stroheim. His name was Richard Day. His versatility and sharp eye for realistic detail would make him one of the most indispensable members of the Goldwyn production team. He worked on all but one of Goldwyn’s next thirty films, contributing as much as anybody to the understated elegance endemic to Goldwyn pictures. The United Artists music department, under the direction of fifty-one-year-old Hugo Riesenfeld, also needed new blood. A transfusion came from New York in February 1930, which affected every one of Samuel Goldwyn’s films for the next decade and the very nature of music in films for generations to come.

  Alfred Newman was born in 1900 in New Haven, Connecticut, the eldest of ten children of two Russian-Jewish immigrants. His father was a produce dealer; his mother, a cantor’s daughter, encouraged her firstborn to study piano. One day, she sold Alfred’s dog to make the weekly payment on the Emerson oak upright.

  By the time he was eight, Alfred revealed prodigious talent at the keyboard, and several teachers offered him scholarships. He made his musical debut in 1916 and received auspicious notices. At the time of the birth of their tenth child, Luba and Michael Newman separated, leaving eighteen-year-old Alfred the family’s breadwinner. Concert halls did not offer the quick financial returns of theaters, so Alfred took a job at the Strand, playing piano in brief pop concerts before nightly features and in the pit accompanying the films. At twenty, Newman had become the musical director of George White’s Scandals of 1920. Revues gave way to bigger musicals, and through the twenties, Newman was conducting and arranging musicals by no less than the Gershwins, Harry Ruby, and Jerome Kern.

  In November 1929, Rodgers and Hart’s Heads Up opened, with Newman at the podium. The show was hardly into its run when Joseph Schenck offered him a three-month job as music director on Irving Berlin’s projected new musical for United Artists, Reaching for the Moon. Berlin—who had led the caravan of Broadway composers from New York—was familiar with Newman’s stylish arrangements and had recommended him.

  Reaching for the Moon was in complete disarray when Newman arrived in Hollywood. The future of the film in doubt, producer Joseph Schenck offered Newman’s services to Sam Goldwyn, who was looking for his own man to oversee Ziegfeld’s music director.

  Goldwyn appreciated music but knew absolutely nothing about it. That Irving Berlin, his gin rummy and backgammon partner from New York, liked Alfred Newman was enough recommendation for Goldwyn to hire him; that Newman had conducted the works of Gershwin made him in Goldwyn’s eyes a genius. Newman agreed to work on Whoopee!, then stayed to work in Hollywood for another forty years.

  Whoopee! was ready to film except for the hiring of the two female leads. Goldwyn claimed to be no longer interested in any of Ziegfeld’s opinions, but at the last minute he engaged two actresses from the Broadway production. Ethel Shutta (whom Ziegfeld had proposed from the start) was signed to repeat her role as the comic love interest, and Goldwyn promoted Eleanor Hunt from the Ziegfeld chorus to leading lady. Players from the stage version filled the rest of the picture’s featured roles.

  Ziegfeld was present during the prerecording of songs and the filming of Whoopee! in his capacity as “technical adviser,” but Goldwyn never solicited his advice. Even so, the film increasingly reflected Ziegfeld’s taste, as Goldwyn absorbed his thoughts and made them his own. Whoopee!’s cast, costumes, and scenery all revealed the Ziegfeld touch. When the co-producers quarreled again about the importance of color to the production, Goldwyn heeded Ziegfeld and ordered the daring use of two-strip Technicolor, one of the earliest examples of the technique on film.

  Although Whoopee!’s budget was an extravagant million dollars more than that of the average musical, it was so well rehearsed that director Thornton Freeland filmed it in forty-three days, $150,000 under budget. As one of the few Broadway musicals of the twenties to be adapted to the screen, Whoopee! remains one of the most telling fossils of that extinct genre—with all its nonsensical convolutions of plot, unexplained comedic star turns, and burstings into song. “‘It’s a Ziegfeld production, only better,’ Goldwyn liked to say,” recalled assistant director Lucky Humberstone.

  Whoopee! also created a major movie star. Eddie Cantor became one of the few Broadway musical performers ever to attract a following onscreen. In presenting a goodhearted little chap (slightly better off than Chaplin’s tramp) whose innocence leads him into life-threatening scrapes, he instinctively scaled down his performance once he stepped before the camera. His famous eye-rolling and hand-clapping became simple gestures, tossed off with ease. When the hypochondriacal Milquetoast pulled off his spectacles and strutted into the show’s title song, Cantor seemed to pop right off the screen. His contagious optimism and charming self-deprecation suffused him with star power.

  It pained Goldwyn to share the credit for Whoopee!‘s success with Ziegfeld. The more he spoke of the film, the less frequently he mentioned his partner’s name, until finally it never came up at all.

  “THE critics in far away England who had condemned Hollywood with the labels of Sex, Sin and Divorce had named its problems without understanding their cause,” observed Evelyn Laye, the star of Goldwyn’s other musical that year. “You had to live among it to begin to understand.” To an outsider like Miss Laye, the wealth and power Hollywood offered seemed so far beyond life as lived in the rest of the world that those who attained it were suddenly “a little apart, a little different from everyday people.” What made it all interesting, she said, was that “neither the public, nor the film artists themselves, were used to this golden life which the moving camera and the synchronized microphone had opened up.” Miss Laye found that everyone in Hollywood lived in fear of losing everything tomorrow, that the next picture was always one’s last.

  That was certainly the case at the Goldwyns‘, where marital and monetary strains were almost never discussed but could not be denied. He worked almost all the time, to the point that his house on Camino Palmero became little more than a place to sleep—in a room apart from Frances. His Sundays were spent in the pavilion behind the swimming pool, playing cards with Joe Schenck, MGM’s Eddie Mannix, Zeppo and Harpo Marx, Sid Grauman, and Eddie Cantor. Trays of sandwiches were constantly refilled, while the men played gin rummy and poker and bridge for very high stakes. Goldwyn cheated shamelessly in every way possible; and when losing badly, he was known to hold the other players captive until dawn if necessary, until he was even again. One day Goldwyn won $155,000, and two week
s later he dropped $169,000. Frances never knew such amounts were changing hands, and she preferred not to know. “My mother was always afraid my father was going to gamble everything away,” Sam Goldwyn, Jr., later recalled. On Sundays, she never set foot in her own backyard.

  Come May, the game moved to the beach, along the “gold coast” down the street from Marion Davies’s beach house. At 602 Ocean Front, in a house that would not have looked out of place on Cape Cod, the Goldwyns summered. The sturdy two-story home (with separate servants’ quarters) had one large, shady patio between the coast highway and the main house and another on the ocean side. A white picket fence sat in the sand, staking out the Goldwyn property. Cards were dealt regularly on Sundays and any other day Goldwyn and at least one other shark played hooky. The Irving Berlins came to California every summer, and Irving became a regular. Frances, with her milky skin, never cared for the beach house. She spent most of her time sitting on the shady terrace under a straw hat, facing east, reading.

  “My earliest memories are of him kissing me,” remembered Sam Goldwyn, Jr. “Little Sammy” recalled most vividly his birthday on September 7, 1930. At seven o‘clock in the morning, he tore down the stairs of the Ocean Front house, screaming, “Daddy, I’m four years old!” Sam, already at the game table, halted him, saying, “Just a minute ... till I finish this hand.” A moment later, he yelled, “Goddamn it,” threw all his cards down, then swept the boy into his arms and kissed him. “Actually,” amended Sam Goldwyn, Jr., “my earliest memories are all of my father playing cards.”

  Joseph P. Kennedy, during his occasional forays to Hollywood, noted that except for Herman Mankiewicz, Sam Goldwyn was the only man “in Hollywood with a true family life.” Kennedy did not see enough of the Goldwyns to perceive Frances’s uneasiness over Sam’s gambling and philandering. “Sam Goldwyn was not a fellow to make a pass in public,” said Goldwyn Girl Jean Howard; “he had too much taste for that.” But Lucky Humberstone stumbled into Goldwyn’s office during the making of Whoopee! and discovered the producer in a compromising position with a girl who did not even get into the picture. Most of the girls on the lot had heard about Sam Goldwyn’s “casting couch”; most of the men heehawed about it. Frances pretended not to know. Humberstone averred what most people said about Goldwyn, that “he really wasn’t interested that much in fooling around, because he just didn’t have the time for it. It was more like something he felt he had to do, because he was a mogul.” He apologized to his beautiful young wife with expensive trinkets.

  Frances forgave, but she could not forget, as her own childhood terror of abandonment and destitution was refueled. She talked of reviving her aborted acting career and went as far as making a screen test with Ronald Colman, but no farther. Instead, Goldwyn consciously included her more in his business. Frances had a good eye, and Goldwyn started to make use of it, allowing her to oversee the costumes on his pictures, then the sets; in time, she was reading scripts. He always felt he could trust her. “There was never a word of gossip about the Goldwyns,” noted Irene Mayer Selznick. “They were a united front against the rest of the town, and Sam never had any better protection.”

  Frances even took to studying the budgets of her husband’s films. Making herself hysterical over his constant indebtedness to the banks, she turned 1800 Camino Palmero into a madhouse whenever he had a film in production. Sammy never forgot his mother’s “great sigh of relief” every time his father paid off a loan on one of his pictures. Her face would suddenly relax, and, for a few days anyway, she would rest assured that her house would not be taken from her.

  Frances had good reason to be nervous in 1930. Her husband had more than $2 million tied up in three Ronald Colman pictures, and that much again in his two musicals, Whoopee! and One Heavenly Night. Goldwyn had gambled on the latter’s making him the most money, because his profits on Whoopee! had to be parceled out so many ways.

  That particular crapshoot cost him a fortune. Most of the critics mustered up some kind words for Evelyn Laye, but few could do the same for the rest of the production. The reviews were the worst Goldwyn had ever received, and One Heavenly Night incurred his biggest loss since his entering the business—over $300,000.

  Whoopee! was a sensation. After two years of play dates, United Artists reported gross rentals on the film in excess of $2.3 million. Z & G Productions received 70 percent of that. After deducting the film’s costs, and Cantor’s and Ziegfeld’s royalties, $216,000 profit remained, half of which went to Art Cinema, which had put up the money in the first place. The remaining half was profit for Goldwyn. That plus his Colman pictures gave Frances Goldwyn good reason to sleep soundly. Her husband had netted another million dollars that year.

  Whoopee!, Goldwyn later noted immodestly, “brought the musical film back.” After its success, all the studios renewed their search for musical performers who—like Cantor—could project their stage talents on the screen with effortless energy.

  “The Ziegfeld of the Pacific” was a new title conferred on Goldwyn after Whoopee! A year earlier, the sobriquet would have flattered him; now it flustered him. Goldwyn swore to himself never to take on another partner. Except for bookkeeping, Z & G never did business again.

  Ziegfeld complained about all the deductions in overhead and distribution from his checks, and he unsuccessfully tried to wangle 20 percent shares out of future Goldwyn-Cantor productions. Such sums would not have helped him regain his professional standing. He produced a few more shows, but he soon faced both fiscal and physical ruin. For the first time in more than twenty years, there was not a Ziegfeld opening on Broadway. Influenza and pneumonia got the better part of him; creditors got the rest. From his sickbed, he took to sending Goldwyn friendly but rambling telegrams, the subtext of which was his need to secure work for his wife in the movies. “I FEEL IT IN MY BONES SHE WILL BE A BIG HIT SHE IS A REAL COMEDIENNE,” he wired Goldwyn in March 1932, complaining about the dearth of decisionmakers in the industry. Even after all they had gone through together, Ziegfeld wished Goldwyn would sign Billie Burke, because, he added, “YOU SEEM TO BE ONLY LIVE WIRE IN HOLLYWOOD.” Goldwyn simply did not have a part available for her. The Ziegfelds’ resources dwindled to little more than the royalty checks from Whoopee!

  Frances had a private chat about her former patroness with George Cukor, who in his first years in Hollywood had created a stir as the director of such films as The Royal Family of Broadway and What Price Hollywood? David Selznick, who had been most instrumental in the early career of the quick-witted Cukor, signed him to direct A Bill of Divorcement, which had the role of a mother. Cukor called Billie Burke and offered her the part, which saved the house and the maid and enabled her to keep her invalid husband in some comfort. The Ziegfelds took the train to California—they occupied a private railway car. (On the same train sat yet another Hollywood-bound hopeful, Katharine Hepburn, whom Selznick had cast as the ingenue in his film.) Within a few weeks Florenz Ziegfeld died.

  Friends rallied to Billie Burke’s side, Sam Goldwyn the first among them. Ziegfeld had often talked of wanting his ashes scattered over the Amsterdam Roof, so Goldwyn immediately offered to provide a private railroad car to return Ziegfeld to New York. In the end, the widow chose a simple crypt at Forest Lawn. Will Rogers wrote the obsequies, saying, “Good-by, Flo, save a spot for me. You will put on a show up there someday that will knock their eye out.”

  Sam Goldwyn paid tribute in his own way to the man whose style had influenced him so strongly. Even though he still had no role to offer her, he put the widow Ziegfeld under personal contract. “Billie,” he said, “let me act as your agent and your clearinghouse. I will get you parts in pictures and look after you, and whether you are working or not I will give you $300 a week so you won’t have to worry.” In fact, he ended up casting her only once. But he loaned her out over the years, raking in much more money—all of which he gave to her.

  For a while, everyone assumed the nation’s financial crisis would never affect mot
ion pictures, that even in the darkest hours, the public would want their stars to brighten their lives. But movie attendance began to fall off, the studios suffered, and the parent companies were being hit as hard as the rest of America’s industries.

  Hollywood became, more than ever, that place for only the toughest dreamers who believed in themselves.

  13 Coming of Age

  HOLLYWOOD was going belly up. Loew’s stock dropped to a quarter of what it had been, as MGM’s $10 million annual profits halved. RKO stock shriveled from 50 to 1⅞, and the company was forced to recapitalize. Universal suffered a similar fate. Fox Films, in the throes of reorganizing, stripped its founder of all power; within two and a half years, the stock, once traded at $100 per share, bottomed out at ¼. Warner Brothers barely held on. When Jesse Lasky went to cover some stock he had bought on margin, he discovered that $1.5 million worth of Paramount paper was worth only $37,500. He was banished from the lot and soon went bankrupt. Paramount fell into receivership.

  United Artists had remained primarily a distribution company and prospered. Now, without a large studio and theater chain, it faced specializing itself out of business. Pickford, Fairbanks, and Griffith had all but retired, the last wallowing in drink and debt. Even the industrious Joe Schenck had become preoccupied with corporate business, as well as the dissolution of his marriage to Norma Talmadge. Without a steady flow of product, the company’s profits tumbled in 1930 from $1.3 million to $300,000. United Artists’ only rampart against doom was Art Cinema Corporation, the fund that had been established to keep them supplied with pictures.

  On November 20, 1930, Schenck handed the Art Cinema checkbook to Goldwyn. Art Cinema would own the productions it financed, but the arrangement allowed Goldwyn to continue producing films under his own banner as well, thus making him most responsible for United Artists’ earnings over the next year or two. With this power of the purse, Sam Goldwyn virtually controlled the company’s product line.