Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  “Believe me the ‘Greeks’ will be outstanding from the standpoint of women’s appeal and interest,” Goldwyn wrote Joe Schenck, with his usual self-confidence. “It will really be different from anything attempted in Hollywood before by way of clothes, sets and women.” But Carole Lombard proved to be the smartest of them all. Except for Joan Blondell, who fell for the cameraman and became the fourth of George Barnes’s seven wives, The Greeks Had a Word for Them added little to anybody’s life.

  Ina Claire so disliked the way Goldwyn had tricked her into the movie, by offering her a part she did not get to play, she asked him to tear up their contract. He agreed—for ten thousand dollars. “It was,” she said, “a small price to be rid of him.” Even the youngest Goldwyn Girl, who had a walk-on in the film, was handed her papers shortly after the film flopped. Except for one last chance in his next musical, Goldwyn saw no future for the teenaged Betty Grable. She hacked around town for most of the decade, before she received a contract from Fox. They borrowed the Greeks’ formula time and again over the years, in such films as Moon Over Miami and How to Marry a Millionaire, often starring Betty Grable, who by then had become America’s number one box-office attraction.

  In his search for a female star, Goldwyn had plainly taken his one leading man, Ronald Colman, for granted. “Goldwyn’s brash, uncouth manner had long grated upon Colman’s natural reserve, despite the valuable intervention of ‘buffer’ Hornblow,” observed the actor’s daughter, Juliet. “Although their business partnership was of unaccountable mutual value over seven years, maintaining a balanced accord throughout required effort and self-control, neither of which Goldwyn supplied in quantity.” By 1931, Goldwyn was casting Colman indiscriminately, settling for any script with a beginning, middle, and end that called for a well-spoken gentleman. That is exactly what he got between producing Street Scene and The Greeks Had a Word for Them.

  On the same New York trip and in the same elevator in which he snared Ina Claire, Goldwyn bumped into Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. The two former Chicago newspapermen had recently teamed up as playwrights and taken Broadway by storm with their first play together, The Front Page. Each of the partners had a celebrated reputation of his own. Hecht was the author of a dozen books of fiction; MacArthur had written several plays and married Helen Hayes. Together, these two hard-drinking buddies were a powder keg of talent and trouble, currently in the midst of another play, Twentieth Century. It was then, Hecht later recalled, that “Charlie and I found ourselves in the ascending company of Sam Goldwyn. The yellow, billiard-ball head, the nutcracker jaws, the flossy tailoring, high-priced cologne, yodeling voice and barricaded eyes that were Sam Goldwyn greeted us en masse.”“You are my two favorite authors,” said Goldwyn. “I have a tremendous respect for your abilities. I really have. You can ask Frances. I want to engage you to write the next motion picture I am going to produce starring Ronald Colman. I intend to make it the finest thing I have done.”

  The two explained that they were not interested in movies just then, but Goldwyn ignored them and offered ten thousand dollars just for hearing a story from them that he liked. “And,” Hecht remembered Goldwyn’s continuing, “I say this in absolute sincerity, you should get another hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars for the kind of scenario you are going to write for me.” Goldwyn had shrewdly scattered numbers big enough into his double-talk to attract the writers’ attention.

  Hecht and MacArthur went to Hollywood and unraveled a hypnotic tale about a gentleman thief hiding out in a North African oasis among a den of thieves. There Colman would fall in love with the beautiful granddaughter of an embezzler. He would manage to steal the old man’s stash of stolen francs out from under the noses of his fellow residents at the Saharan hideaway. Instead of absconding with either the girl or the cash, he nobly puts her on a plane with the money, to return it to its rightful owner, then makes his own getaway with his chum, Smiley. Goldwyn offered Hecht and MacArthur $25,000 to write the screenplay, plus 3.5 percent of the gross of the film. Each side thought it had put one over on the other.

  The writers ensconced themselves in a wooden castle on a hill in Hollywood—“ perched above a hundred pumping oil wells” and 250 turkeys, which the landlord bred. They moved in for an indefinite stay, often joined by their agent, Leland Hayward.

  After a few weeks, word spread around town that not only were Hecht and MacArthur accepting other assignments but they had hoodwinked Sam Goldwyn. When he heard that MacArthur was showing up at MGM for still another job, Goldwyn demanded the pages for which he had paid. Not having committed a word to paper, Hecht challenged himself to write the entire script in a single day. He hired two stenographers and began dictating. Into the night Hecht rambled, adding the sort of twists and details that come out of desperation or exhaustion: The elderly embezzler became blind, the undercover agent for the local authorities became a sexy female agent. “Our hostelry was filled with European nobility wanted by the law for crimes of all sorts,” recalled Hecht. “The lowest title among our miscreants was a countess. The rest went on up from that to dukes and princes. We figured Goldwyn, who was becoming a man of the world, would like that.” Charlie MacArthur listened to Hecht’s dictation for a half hour before leaving the room. “I can’t stand bad writing,” he said. By the time he awoke the next day, the scenario was complete. Leland Hayward tied a blue ribbon around it and delivered it to Goldwyn.

  Ronald Colman had no choice but to appear in the films Goldwyn assigned, no matter how inferior the material. Arthur Hornblow, Jr., observed that Colman became even more remote toward his employer than usual; but, professional that he was, Colman “entered into the filming in his precise, organized manner—always on time at the studio, always in command of the entire script on the first day. He continued to look casually immaculate and was never anything but polite to cast and crew. Inside, however, he was fuming.” Goldwyn sensibly hired George Fitzmaurice, who would direct Colman for the eighth time. For the embezzler’s granddaughter, Goldwyn hired a brunette with several years of undistinguished experience, Fay Wray, whose hair he predictably bleached. “It was the talk of the studio that Ronnie was not speaking to Goldwyn,” Fay Wray remembered, “and there was something rather admirable in the air he had, the fact that he could be doing pictures for Sam and still not tolerate any communication.”

  The Unholy Garden would forever stand as the worst blot on the records of everyone involved with it. Pare Lorentz, reviewing the film in the New York Journal, was completely bewildered at Hecht and MacArthur’s even putting their names to such hash. John Cohen, in the New York Sun, said it was Colman’s worst performance, his first “really mediocre picture.” Years after its worldwide release, the film was still some $200,000 in the hole, the largest deficit on Goldwyn’s books. It did not destroy Fay Wray’s career altogether. Two years later, she became immortalized as the object of King Kong’s affection.

  In his next Colman picture, Goldwyn attempted to atone for all The Unholy Garden’s sins. He succeeded in every department, except in delivering an appropriate role for his star. It was Sidney Howard who first suggested that a film could be made of Sinclair Lewis’s celebrated 1925 novel, Arrowsmith. Hollywood had not expressed the slightest interest in adapting the book, because of both its style and its substance. An episodic plot such as this—an idealistic doctor trains under a disillusioned but dedicated scientist, then moves to a small-town practice in North Dakota, the health department of a small city, an “Institute” maintained by a wealthy couple, an isolated West Indian island, and a remote Vermont farm—tends to fight dramatic structure. The conflicts were intellectual, nothing at which one could aim a camera. The attitude among Hollywood filmmakers toward such works had long been one often falsely attributed to Sam Goldwyn: “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.”

  Sidney Howard said he could craft a gripping personal drama by truncating most of the story before Arrowsmith became a doctor in North Dakota, then focusing on the dr
amatic differences between his life there, at the McGurk Institute, and, finally, in the tropics, searching for the cure for bubonic plague. Those years would also include his courtship, marriage, and an extramarital dalliance. That Goldwyn might produce another script by his Pulitzer Prize—winning dramatist (an adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize—winning book by America’s only Nobel laureate), that he could immediately rehire the blockful of fine actors who were completing their work on Street Scene, and that Ronald Colman could play the lead, were enough to spark his enthusiasm. While Charles MacArthur was in town, ostensibly working for him, Goldwyn chased his wife.

  Helen Hayes had just finished filming her first talking picture, The Sin of Madelon Claudet. Although she had no following among filmgoers, Goldwyn was convinced Arrowsmith needed an actress of her caliber to put it over with the public. Miss Hayes had liked neither the experience of acting for the camera nor the routine of studio life. “I was bewildered by it all,” she said, looking back. “It was not my way of doing things, and so I was a little leery of doing another, even though everybody was touting Sam Goldwyn as the best producer in town.” It was that letter he mentioned on the Street Scene set, praising himself to the skies, that persuaded her. “He said, ‘That’s how good my pictures are,’” Miss Hayes recalled, “and it just won me over.”

  Goldwyn also got lucky off another studio’s misfortune. In Fox’s upheaval, they had suddenly come up short of projects for their contract director of ten years, John Ford. His agent did not have a difficult time talking Goldwyn into using the brilliant Irishman (born Sean O‘Fearna), then just coming into his own.

  Sidney Howard’s script delivered everything he promised. He compressed scores of the novel’s pages into a few expository scenes; and boy met girl on page eight. Curiously, the very elements that distinguished the screenplay in 1931 are those that eventually dated it. One of the first talking pictures to argue issues, it had its say in the most literal fashion. Almost every scene talked directly about one of the film’s themes, with hardly a subtle or ironic word. Conversations became colloquies.

  Martin Arrowsmith was an attractive hero, charming and intelligent. But forty-year-old Ronald Colman of Richmond, Surrey, was woefully miscast as the quixotic Midwesterner, especially ill-suited in his early scenes as a medical student. The actor knew it. As a result, Helen Hayes found her leading man “curiously distant and phlegmatic.” Colman was always punctual and prepared, but he had taken to grousing about his life under the Goldwyn yoke. “Look at me,” he said one day to Miss Hayes. “What do I do? I just bring the body to the studio and say my lines.” She was “humiliated for him.”

  Colman’s discontent showed up on the screen. He appeared either somnambulistic or stilted, especially stagy alongside the natural Miss Hayes. Myrna Loy played Joyce Lanyon, one of the last of her vampy supporting roles before MGM elevated her to leading-lady status.

  “Then halfway through Arrowsmith‘ I played a dirty trick on Sam Goldwyn,” confessed Helen Hayes. Her MGM picture was completed, and the studio previewed it in the gashouse district of Huntington Park, on a bill with Red Dust. “Here was this audience in leather jackets who had come to see Gable and Harlow,” remembered Miss Hayes, “and then they got ’Madelon Claudet.‘” Her tearjerking story of an unwed mother bombed that night. The studio considered not releasing it, until the leading lady’s husband said the film only needed a new ending, which he would provide. With the star filming Arrowsmith, however, they could not reshoot it—until Helen Hayes said she would secretly moonlight over the next few Sundays. Without any days off, Miss Hayes found herself dragging through her work on the Goldwyn picture. One Saturday night at the Goldwyns’, Sam caught her yawning. When the actress accidentally let fall that she had to get up early the next morning, Goldwyn pounced on the remark and would not let go until she admitted that she had been sneaking out to work on Madelon Claudet. Goldwyn stopped screaming at her only when Charles MacArthur “threatened never to cross Sam Goldwyn’s threshold again. He swore he would never speak to the man.”

  The Sin of Madelon Claudet opened, and the leading lady received raves as well as the Academy Award for Best Actress. She had become a bona fide movie star by the time Arrowsmith reached the theaters. Charlie MacArthur stuck to his word and kept his distance from Sam Goldwyn for several years. Then, one summer day, the MacArthurs and their three-year-old daughter found themselves at Anita Loos’s beach house, next door to the Goldwyns. The whole family ventured out onto the sand, when—Helen Hayes recalled—“suddenly Sam swooped down and grabbed up our child and ran off to his house with her. And we went chasing after him to recover our offspring. By the time we caught him, we were all laughing so hard that ... well, Sam was always very dear after that.”

  Most of the reviews of Arrowsmith commented on the strain in accepting Ronald Colman in the title role but complimented the rest of the film. Richard Day’s sets were lauded, as was John Ford’s direction, which was just starting to find a style of its own at a time when “screen connoisseurs were beginning to wonder whether the medium would ever recover the visual eloquence it once enjoyed.” In shot after shot, especially in Leora’s death scene, observed film curator Richard Griffith, “they saw as beautifully developed a camera passage as any silent films had provided, and a unity of camera treatment throughout which was unknown in that day of shapeless talkies.”

  Many critics cited Goldwyn for his courage in producing the picture and thanked him for elevating the medium. The New York Times called him a man with “a desire to lead the public rather than follow it.” Nobody believed the praise any more than Goldwyn himself. “The success of ARROWSMITH means as much to you as it does to me,” Goldwyn wrote Irving Thalberg, whose proficiency and prosperity he admired more than anyone else’s, “because you are continually trying to do the better things on the screen, and ARROWSMITH’S success will ultimately encourage every producer of motion pictures to attempt the better things, instead of continuing to flood the country with so many of the bad pictures that are now being shown.” The film broke even.

  For the first time, Goldwyn found himself named as the producer of one of the year’s best pictures. He did not win. But for Goldwyn, even this much recognition—placing him alongside King Vidor for producing The Champ, Adolph Zukor for Shanghai Express, Ernst Lubitsch for One Hour with You and The Smiling Lieutenant, Hal B. Wallis for Five Star Final, Winfield Sheehan for Bad Girl, and Irving Thalberg for that year’s winner, Grand Hotel—was an honor he had long awaited. He would not be content until an Academy Award was his.

  Goldwyn’s next attempt further alienated his leading man. The protagonist of the hit play Cynara seemed at first glance as right a role for Ronald Colman as Arrowsmith had been wrong. “There are two things in the world you can trust—the Church of England and Jim Warlock,” insists Clemency Warlock in describing her husband, a staid London barrister, seven years into his marriage. In his wife’s absence, however, Jim Warlock drifts into innocent conversation with a shopgirl, only to find himself ensnared in an affair that results in her suicide. Throughout the ensuing scandal and inquest, Warlock adheres to his gentlemanly code. Instead of dredging up the girl’s racy past, he silently suffers for his own transgression, sacrificing his career and marriage. He exiles himself to South Africa. As his ship sets sail, Clemency rushes aboard to be with him. The play’s title was borrowed from a line of Ernest Dowson’s poem “Cynara,” then popular, which read: “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.” The Goldwyn advertising department noted in all its promotion that the title was pronounced “SIN-ara.”

  Therein lay the trouble. “Ronnie was not more difficult to cater for than other big stars,” recounted Arthur Hornblow, Jr., but he wanted only “romantic, attractive roles to suit his image.” The idea of Colman’s playing an adulterer appalled the actor, as it did Goldwyn. But almost ten months had passed after the filming of Arrowsmith, and the producer was desperate to make the most of the final two years on his star�
��s contract. “Finding material” seemed to be all Goldwyn talked about. One day, in fact, Harpo Marx came to the Goldwyns’ house and found Sammy deep in the funny papers. “What are you reading, Sammy?” he asked. Said the boy, barely school age, “I’m looking for a Ronald Colman story, Mr. Marx.” Goldwyn hired Frances Marion and King Vidor, who had just collaborated on The Champ, to write and direct Cynara. In his seventeenth picture for Goldwyn, Colman had never felt more ill at ease in a role. He believed his fans “were not willing to accept him as an actor if it detracted from his personality as a star.”

  One day during the filming of Cynara, Goldwyn’s publicity chief, Lynn Farnol, was talking to movie columnist Sidney Skolsky. Farnol let slip that Ronald Colman often took a nip of liquor before performing his love scenes. He got carried away and said, “He believes that by getting more than slightly drunk, he plays love-scenes-well, more in love.” Skolsky stretched that and wrote, “He feels that he looks better for pictures when moderately dissipated than when completely fit.” Colman stormed into Goldwyn’s office when the story appeared and demanded Farnol’s firing. “I told him that I thought it was a mistake that the publicity man had made but that I did not think it was a thing that ought to cost a man his job and that I was not going to fire him,” said Goldwyn. “As a matter of fact I knew that my publicity man, with whom Ronald had raised cain before he stormed into my office, had apologized to Ronald and offered to do anything within his power to correct the story.” Days passed in silence, during which time Colman conferred with an attorney.