Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  The producer’s take on Roman Scandals far exceeded a million dollars, and Goldwyn received a summons. Sherwood and Kaufman wanted the rest of their salary and their share of the profits. The case slogged through the courts for several years (during which time Kaufman wrote A Night at the Opera for MGM and several more Broadway hits, including Stage Door and You Can’t Take It with You). The writers finally settled their claim for $20,000, most of which was absorbed by legal bills.

  Another lawsuit over Roman Scandals had more drastic implications for Goldwyn’s career, affecting not only his next two Cantor pictures but also his relationship with the film community at large. Ever since hiring Busby Berkeley to choreograph Whoopee!, Goldwyn had known of his late-night carousing. But Berkeley had always bounced back in the mornings. Then Goldwyn began to find him listless day after day and hired private detectives to tail him after work. The gumshoes had to follow him no farther than the Warner Brothers gates.

  In bringing Berkeley from Broadway to Hollywood, Goldwyn had not signed him to a long-term contract. Because there was but one Goldwyn musical a year, it made more sense for both parties to work on a picture-by-picture basis. Goldwyn had loaned Berkeley out to Warners, generously negotiating his deals and reviewing his contracts. Then one day in 1933, Berkeley arrived at Goldwyn’s office, opened the door for his appointment, and just stood there. “I am ashamed to come in,” he said. “I know you will be angry with me.” At last Berkeley entered and blurted, “I have signed a long-term contract with Warner Brothers, and I am to direct pictures.... But I told Warner Brothers I was obligated to do the next Cantor picture.” Warners honored that obligation—to a point. While Goldwyn was making Roman Scandals, they needed Berkeley to direct the dance numbers in Footlight Parade, which they secretly scheduled at night. Berkeley went for weeks on catnaps. Once his mediocre work on Roman Scandals was completed, he became the property of another studio.

  What galled Goldwyn more than losing Berkeley was losing him to the Warner brothers, whom he considered the worst buccaneers in the motion picture business. Goldwyn had long suspected that their stock-market manipulations served only the siblings and not the shareholders; and he found them “guilty of the most reckless star-raiding that the industry has ever known.” Goldwyn hauled Jack Warner before the Association of Motion Picture Producers to explain this pirating of Berkeley’s services. Warner’s only defense was: “What can I do about it?” When Goldwyn found no supporters, he rose angrily from his chair at the meeting and headed for the door. “Gentlemen,” he said, resigning from the organization, “include me out!”

  Busby Berkeley did get his chance to direct at Warner Brothers, then he moved on to slicker productions at MGM, leaving his singular mark on three dozen musicals.

  With 10 percent of his films’ grosses tacked onto his salary, Eddie Cantor became the highest-paid actor in motion pictures in 1934, earning $270,000. (Mae West was the highest-paid actress.) But tempers flared between him and Goldwyn after the release of every one of their pictures together. Each claimed the laurels for its success and declaimed the other’s ingratitude. After months of disagreement over their next joint venture, they settled on the most convoluted Cantor plot yet. In Kid Millions, Eddie Wilson, Jr., inherits $77 million pillaged from Egyptian tombs by the archaeologist father he never knew. A number of heavies also pursue the fortune, including a Broadway song plugger, a colonel from the South, his niece, a shifty sheik, and his dizzy daughter. When Cantor saw the love story in the film again being thrown to a young couple, he pestered Goldwyn for a romantic interest of his own. “Eddie,” Goldwyn said, “you’ve got no sex appeal.”

  “Sam,” Eddie howled. “What do you mean, no sex appeal? How do you think I got my five daughters?”

  Goldwyn allowed the writers to work up a comedy romance between Cantor and the sheik’s daughter. Their committing “tramoratch”—the cursed sin of “kissing a sheik’s daughter while riding a camel”—triggers the film’s denouement. Eddie manages to escape an awaiting vat of boiling oil and winds up happily with his girlfriend, Toots, in Brooklyn, where he opens an ice cream factory. All that, plus a dozen musical numbers—including Irving Berlin’s “Mandy”—would be packed into ninety minutes. Goldwyn hired Ethel Merman to play the song plugger and Ann Sothern, in but her second film, to play the colonel’s niece. Her romantic lead was an amiable song-and-dance man from Broadway named George Murphy, in his motion picture debut.

  For weeks, Goldwyn became preoccupied with the film’s “Ice Cream Fantasy”—in which Cantor opens his ice cream factory for poor children. He was going to use the vibrant new three-strip Technicolor process. Almost daily, George Oppenheimer remembered, Goldwyn was on the phone to Dr. Herbert T. Kalmus, the Technicolor pioneer, harping on the same refrain: “The vanilla must look like the vanilla, the chocolate must look like the chocolate, the strawberry must look like the strawberry.”

  “For a month or more I heard this admonition so often,” said Oppenheimer, “that I lost all taste for vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry ice cream.” One Friday night, Goldwyn called a staff meeting. Richard Day led off, exhibiting drawings of his sets; Alfred Newman played some of Kid Millions’s songs—and Goldwyn fell into his cant that “the vanilla must look like vanilla.” With that, he ushered his men into his private projection room to inspect a test Kalmus had prepared. “The lights went out,” Oppenheimer remembered, “and on the screen, against a white background, there appeared a large and luscious Technicolor plate of chocolate ice cream. There was a moment’s appreciative silence, broken by the smacking of Goldwyn’s lips and his comment, ‘Mmmm, strawberry.’”

  Kid Millions opened to good reviews and good box office, but the air of excitement that surrounded the earlier Cantor pictures was gone. Goldwyn claimed that he had stuck to the formula that had proved so successful in the past and that it must be Cantor’s overexposure on the radio that was threatening his popularity.

  “People expect big pictures from us,” an upset Cantor wrote Goldwyn. “True—but girls don’t make them bigger. Neither do the goddamned juvenile and ingenue. Big sets, interesting personalities, good songs, interesting story, new situations are what we need. Half of our time is usually spent on the ‘girl’ lead. Let us concentrate on a story that gives us great excitement. On the stage for years I was and still am considered ‘top man’—radio has accepted me as the head guy. Why do I have so much trouble in pictures?”

  Strike Me Pink, filmed in 1935, would only add to his woes. More than a dozen writers worked the script over, starting from a Saturday Evening Post story called “Dreamland,” set in an amusement park. It was standard Cantor fare, complete with gangsters and a final chase that took Eddie from a roller coaster ride to a hot-air balloon into the net of a troupe of acrobats. Harold Arlen wrote the songs, including a number called “First You Leave Me High, Then You Leave Me Low,” which Goldwyn referred to as “First You Got Me Up, Then You Got Me Down.”

  Cantor felt Goldwyn’s foolish consistency was costing the star everything he had worked for over the last five years. “It’s like Babe Ruth up at bat,” Cantor told Goldwyn. “The fact that he made a hit yesterday has nothing to do with today.” Offering to make all kinds of concessions in his deal, just to “prolong my life on the screen,” the comedian urged his producer to find a part for him that had nothing to do with the old Cantor “formula.”

  Cantor pleaded with Goldwyn to buy the rights to a new play called Three Men on a Horse. It was the story of a timid Brooklynite whose knack for picking winners at the track attracted gangsters of all sorts. The play had no music but plenty of laughs, which Cantor knew he could deliver. Warner Brothers beat them to the rights. When Goldwyn said he would not even consider loaning Cantor out to play the lead, the two stopped speaking to each other. Cracks about Goldwyn—attributed to Cantor—appeared in the newspaper columns. Cantor paid his way out of his contract and for a while forfeited Goldwyn’s friendship. “I was hopping mad,” said Cantor, “and s
o was he.”

  Cantor moved to Twentieth Century—Fox studios—a new company Darryl Zanuck and Joe Schenck created when they merged with Fox Films. He made a few more musicals; but even he conceded, “they never came up to the caliber of the Goldwyn pictures.” Years began to pass between each of his films, until Cantor’s career on screen quietly ended.

  Without Cantor, Colman, and Sten, Goldwyn became desperate. He needed major motion picture personalities in order to survive alongside the major studios, all of which were establishing elaborate star systems.

  Ten years earlier, Goldwyn had created his greatest star when he presented Vilma Banky in The Dark Angel. He believed its heroine, Kitty Vane, was a foolproof role—the “greatest ever written for [a] girl”—rigged with enough melodramatic tricks to put across any pretty face that could work up an eyeful of tears. He decided it was time to remount it, thereby launching another stellar career. Goldwyn had his eye on Madeleine Carroll, an English blonde who had made a picture for Fox. While several studios scrambled to sign her to a long-term contract, another beauty entered the scene, who took Goldwyn’s breath away.

  Estelle Merle O‘Brien Thompson was the barely legitimate daughter of a coal-black nurse’s assistant and an Irish mechanical engineer who had worked on the railways in India. In 1914, three years after her birth in Bombay, her father left his family to fight in the Great War. He died in the battle of the Somme. On the streets of Bombay, then Calcutta, Merle grew up quickly, developing into a teenager of exotic beauty. Beneath her dark hair and high forehead, two huge almond-shaped eyes illuminated her tawny skin. She had an inviting full mouth, a curvy figure, and velvety skin. A night with her was said to cost one hundred dollars. Through a series of liaisons, she found herself stepping out in European society, which had come to glitter with motion picture people.

  In 1931, she fell in with Alexander Korda, another jackdaw strutting in peacock’s feathers. Born Sándor Kellner in the heartland of Hungary, he journeyed first to Budapest. There he wrote for an independent daily newspaper, using the nom de plume Sursum Corda (Lift Up Your Hearts), then he graduated to a weekly cinema magazine. At twenty-five, he was directing his own films and running his own small studio. After stops in Vienna and Berlin, he made it to Hollywood, where his career screeched to a halt. Arriving in 1926, he discovered that an earlier generation of moguls had laid claim to all the territory. He directed several films under contracts to various studios, but only The Private Life of Helen of Troy had any impact, though it was considered too “European” to be much of a success. The cosmopolitan Korda never felt at home in Hollywood, where he found that the citizenry asked only two questions: “What did it gross?” and “Do you like orange juice?” His departure caused no more of a stir than his arrival.

  After short stays in Paris and Berlin, he settled in London, where he set out to build his own empire. While his search for contract players was at its most fevered, he met the exotic Estelle Thompson, who had made a few appearances in moving pictures and was known alternately as Queenie Thompson, Estelle O‘Brien, and Merle O’Brien. Korda signed her to a contract, announcing his conquest as Stella Merle. She pleaded to use the surname O‘Brien, but Korda thought it too common. When she came up with the variant Oberon, he agreed.

  In 1933, Korda produced The Private Life of Henry VIII, in which Merle Oberon played the small role of Anne Boleyn. The success of that one film practically righted the course of the British film industry, putting Korda at its helm. Almost every producer in Hollywood wanted to hire the beheaded queen.

  Just before leaving the presidency of United Artists, Joe Schenck proved most ardent. A bachelor on the loose since his divorce from Norma Talmadge, he suddenly placed a large diamond ring on Miss Oberon’s finger and announced their engagement. United Artists signed a sixteen-picture deal with Korda’s London Films.

  Korda cast her next in The Scarlet Pimpernel, never foreseeing that she would fall in love with the married leading man, Hungarian-born Laszlo Stainer. As an effete romantic figure known as Leslie Howard, he was becoming one of the screen’s heartthrobs. Although Korda held the ultimate power in determining what her next projects would be, Miss Oberon’s moods were strong enough to sway decisions one way or another. After The Scarlet Pimpernel, he reluctantly agreed to let her go to Hollywood to film Folies-Bergère for Twentieth Century. She urged Howard to accept the part he had just been offered in Robert Sherwood’s Petrified Forest, so he could join her there.

  By the time she arrived in California, Merle Oberon’s engagement had been called off and her diamond ring returned. At the start of 1935, she heard that Sam Goldwyn was looking for his lead in The Dark Angel. The original had been one of her favorite films as a child, and she immediately saw how the part could launch her in the States. Goldwyn was impressed with Merle Oberon and thought the remake would prove a strong showing for her and Leslie Howard. Back in England, Korda was entertaining the offers of several big producers for Oberon’s services, Selznick among them. The star made it clear where her sentiments lay. “I CANNOT IMAGINE ANYTHING MORE WONDERFUL FOR ME IN MY CAREER THAN TO HAVE PICTURES PRODUCED BY YOU AND GOLDWYN,” she cabled Korda that January. A few weeks later, she added, “DARK ANGEL GREAT FOR ME.... I WOULD DIE IF CARROLL GOT PART.”

  It was not hard to read Goldwyn’s influence between the lines of Oberon’s urgent messages. Korda received a cable from Goldwyn himself offering to “PRODUCE ONE MORE PICTURE WITH HER THIS YEAR FOLLOWING DARK ANGEL STOP ALSO RIGHT TO MAKE TWO PICTURES WITH HER DURING EACH SUCCEEDING YEAR SHE IS UNDER CONTRACT TO YOU.” After several months, Korda and Goldwyn agreed upon a five-year contract that called for three pictures per year between them; the actress would start at $60,000 per picture and escalate to $100,000. The entire plan was designed to yield the former dance hostess over one million dollars by 1941.

  During their negotiation, Goldwyn hired a director for The Dark Angel —Sidney Franklin, an Anglophile from San Francisco, who had become Norma Shearer’s pet director in recent years. Goldwyn had two writers adapting the screenplay, working from Guy Bolton’s original play and Frances Marion’s silent-screen scenario. One was an Englishman named Mordaunt Shairp. The other was a former reader for Broadway producer Herman Shumlin and MGM, who had recently written a hit play, The Children’s Hour. Her name was Lillian Hellman. She had accompanied Dashiell Hammett, who was writing the successful “Thin Man” series for MGM, to California and grabbed the offer to work on The Dark Angel. She and Shairp stuck close to the original story of the blind man returning from the war and trying to conceal his infirmity from his fiancée so that she will get on with a happier life married to his best friend. Even to a playwright with aspirations as serious as Hellman’s, the job was irresistible, because it meant “easy money and easy hours.” Work on the project—which Hellman referred to as an “old silly”—ambled into the spring.

  By then Leslie Howard had returned to his wife, and he had no interest in the film. Goldwyn hired the stalwart Fredric March to play the wounded Alan Trent and Herbert Marshall to play the other man. When Sidney Franklin picked up bits of this casting news, he fired off an angry telegram to Goldwyn, then at the Waldorf-Astoria. “AM I TO UNDERSTAND THAT YOU ARE NEGOTIATING TO GET MERLE OBERON WITHOUT HOWARD STOP I CAN UNDERSTAND OBERON WITH HOWARD BUT I CANT VERY WELL UNDERSTAND OBERON ALONE STOP WITHOUT HOWARD AND WITH MARCH I WOULD WANT A GIRL THAT COULD GIVE ME A GREAT PERFORMANCE BY ACTING ABILITY AND EXPERIENCE STOP THE SOLE REASON I THOUGHT YOU WERE NEGOTIATING WITH OBERON WAS IN ORDER TO GET THE OTHER PERSON WITH HER.” Further opposition came from Goldwyn’s own staff—James Mulvey, Freddy Kohlmar, and a new story editor who had worked at the Saturday Evening Post, Merritt Hulburd. They felt, as one memorandum revealed, “that the leading girl for ‘The Dark Angel’ must depict a definite virginal quality, and that Merle Oberon does not and could not give a true impression of that quality. They think she is too exotic and sexy and if given the lead in ‘The Dark Angel,’ might destroy the essential qualitie
s of that role.”

  Goldwyn thought them all wrong. So far as he was concerned, the men in the film were merely to support Merle Oberon. He thought her glamorous heat could be tamped down. While the producers of Oberon’s other pictures always accentuated her features and figure, Goldwyn muted them. He saw to it that she was always dressed simply, usually in collared outfits; her hair was unlacquered, brushed back off her forehead; he ordered makeup that would lighten her coloring and do nothing to emphasize the slight slant in her eyes. In the words of one director who would later work with her, “Goldwyn wanted everything clean about Merle, as though she were the all-American girl.”

  Within months of Merle Oberon’s signing with him, Goldwyn went on his biggest safari for stars since pictures started talking. He quickly bagged another leading lady, a leading man, and an extra with possibilities as a supporting player. The first was Miriam Hopkins, a vivacious blonde from Georgia with stage experience and five years of hits and misses in Hollywood to her credit. Mamoulian and Lubitsch had directed her in her best work—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Design for Living, and Hollywood’s latest adaptation of a classic novel, Becky Sharp, the first all-Technicolor feature film. The haphazardness of her career appealed to Goldwyn, showing him the range of her talents and her potential for stardom if properly guided. Joel McCrea—an alumnus of the Hollywood School for Girls who used to ride around town on horseback—had become a strapping six foot two, with the wide-open good looks of the all-American boy. After attending Pomona College, he picked up cowboy roles, then got leads in such diverse RKO productions as Bird of Paradise, The Most Dangerous Game, and Sidney Howard’s The Silver Cord. As with Miriam Hopkins, his versatility as much as his promise prompted Goldwyn to sign him to a long-term contract. Goldwyn thought his name was Joe McCrail.