Goldwyn’s new potential supporting player was one of those young rogues Hollywood has always had in excess. David Niven had managed to charm his way into the town’s most exclusive circles—Douglas Fairbanks’s steam room on the United Artists lot, Darryl Zanuck’s polo matches at the Uplifters Club, and through a letter of introduction from a friend in London, the home of Sam and Frances Goldwyn. “I asked him if he had ever acted before,” Goldwyn recalled of his first meeting with the $2.50 extra in late 1934; “he told me that he had but that he had graduated from Sandhurst, been commissioned a Lieutenant in the British army and had worked, among other things, as a lumberjack and a wine salesman.” Goldwyn thought he was “a handsome chap,” but “did not see any place in motion pictures for him.” He kept telling him “there was not a chance.”
The cheery twenty-five-year-old continued to make friends—from the Santa Monica beach houses to the studios. British-born director Edmund Goulding introduced him to Howard Hawks’s agent-brother, William, who agreed to represent him. Niven got to make several screen tests, but producers in town were as nonplussed by the actor on screen as Goldwyn had predicted. Irving Thalberg thought there might be a nonspeaking role for him mutinying with Clark Gable on the Bounty. At a Friday-night card game, he dropped the actor’s name as somebody he was thinking of signing.
The next night, Phyllis and Fred Astaire were dining at the Goldwyns‘. “I saw them buzzing around mysteriously with my wife Frances but thought nothing of it,” Goldwyn recalled. “After dinner we adjourned into the living room to see a picture as was the usual custom at my home. The lights went down, but instead of the picture that I had expected to see there came onto the screen a screen-test which had been made a short time before at M-G-M. The test had been directed by Eddie Goulding, and much to my surprise it was of our young friend—and to my much greater surprise I saw that he was quite a good actor.” When the test finished running, Goldwyn asked Astaire to have David Niven come to his office.
“I’m giving you a seven-year contract,” Goldwyn said in his high-pitched voice that Monday morning. “I’ll pay you very little, and I won’t put you in a Goldwyn picture till you’ve learned your job. Now you have a base. Go out and tell the studios you’re under contract to Goldwyn, do anything they offer you, get experience, work hard, and in a year or so, if you’re any good, I’ll give you a role.” Upon learning that he would be receiving one hundred dollars a week, Niven headed for the Ford Motor Company showroom on Hollywood Boulevard, where the new five-hundred-dollar models sat in the window. He pointed and said to a salesman, “I’ll take that one.”
After several years fussing over the script and casting of a project called Barbary Coast, Goldwyn believed he had at last a troupe of players to perform it. The Association of Motion Picture Producers had protested many times at the scandalous elements of this period gangster piece set in the underworld of gold-rush San Francisco. Goldwyn turned to Ben Hecht, who had slid as much past Joseph Breen, the chief censor, as anyone had. Of course, neither Hecht nor Goldwyn had forgotten their experience on The Unholy Garden, so the writer agreed to the assignment only if the producer promised to pay his wages on a daily basis, every afternoon in cash. Goldwyn agreed.
Howard Hawks had successfully directed Hecht’s screenplays of Twentieth Century and (more relevant to the assignment at hand) Scarface. Hawks was a free-swinging man in his mid-thirties. His family had owned paper mills in the Midwest until his mother’s health forced them to move to California. After preparing at Exeter and attending Cornell, he returned to California, where he hung around movie sets. Hawks worked his way up from gathering props to directing one-reel comedies. He had most recently directed Tiger Shark with Edward G. Robinson, the man Goldwyn had just signed as the underworld chief in Barbary Coast. Hopkins and McCrea were cast as the young lovers, and David Niven got the one-line part of a Cockney sailor with a drooping mustache who was thrown out of a brothel window into the mud, only to have the stars, thirty vigilantes, and several donkeys walk over him.
One other bit player got his career rolling on Barbary Coast, a stumblebum who ended up as one of the medium’s most enduring and endearing character actors. Hawks was casting the part of a grizzled barfly called Old Atrocity, when a production man said, “I know somebody exactly like that.” Hawks told him to put the actor, Walter Brennan, into costume and give him some lines. When this scarecrow of a figure walked in, Hawks broke into laughter. The director asked if he was ready to recite his lines, and Brennan asked, “With or without?”
“With or without what?” Hawks inquired. “Teeth,” said Brennan, and the part was his. He was supposed to work three days, but Hawks kept him around—dentureless—for a month. He would turn up in nine more Goldwyn pictures.
The moment Barbary Coast wrapped, Goldwyn walked his two romantic leads through wardrobe and into a neighboring soundstage. In Splendor, Joel McCrea, decked out in white tie and tails, played the scion of Manhattan aristocrats on their uppers. Instead of marrying the heiress his family has picked, he falls in love with Miriam Hopkins, a poor but principled girl. The pressures of their different backgrounds pull the couple apart, but he comes to his senses and takes a lowly job on the staff of a newspaper. In a rainstorm, he pours out his love and promises her a humble but honest married life together. “Darling,” she says, beaming, “that would be such splendor!” The picture was not. It flopped critically and commercially.
Barbary Coast performed better on both counts, but not as much as the screenwriters would have liked. When Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur saw the liberties Hawks had taken with their screenplay, they pleaded to “be absolved from the responsibility of authorship.” Goldwyn kept their names in the credits, and it did not hurt their reputations any. They won the Academy Award for best screenplay of The Scoundrel that year ... and they would be back working for Goldwyn just a few years later.
In the mid-thirties, many considered the latter the greater honor. Much of the Hollywood community had come to consider the Academy Awards bunk—capricious voting of apples against oranges. There were accusations of fraudulent tabulating and of too many foreign films and stars being honored. The major studio chiefs ordered their employees to vote strictly for the home product, and they campaigned for votes with advertisements in the trade papers. What had started as a family affair honoring their own was turning into a business event, which many guild members chose to boycott that year. The gold statuettes handed out as prizes were being referred to derogatorily by the pet name a librarian at the Academy, Margaret Herrick, pinned on them. She said they resembled her uncle, Oscar Pierce.
To stem the tide of unfavorable industry sentiment, the Academy turned the 1935 awards banquet—held in March 1936, at the Biltmore Hotel—into a testimonial to D. W Griffith, who had retired to Kentucky. It also hired the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse to conduct the balloting. A number of stars did not show up, but most realized that the event still meant good publicity. For Sam Goldwyn, who had reached the top echelon of quality producers, the evening was an opportunity to stand alongside those men who produced ten times as many films as he did. He sat proudly with Merle Oberon, who had been nominated as Best Actress for The Dark Angel. Several Goldwyn craftsmen were also nominated that year, but Richard Day’s art direction was the company’s only winner. A few days later, Day made up a replica of his “Oscar,” which he presented to his boss.
Goldwyn was touched, but it was a hollow consolation prize. The producer knew that the quality of his pictures had slumped in the last few years, and except for the Cantor pictures, so had his box-office receipts. His few stars under contract still offered only potential. He wanted a Bette Davis (that year’s Best Actress winner), or a Claudette Colbert (who had won the year before), or a Katharine Hepburn (winner the year before that). Stuck in the horse latitudes, he wished for someone with “that little something extra.”
For months, Joel McCrea had been trying to persuade Goldwyn that his beautiful new wife
, who had played Meg in Little Women, was just such an actress. A couple of other parts led to her starring in a Jesse Lasky movie at Fox, a modern-day Cinderella tale. After arguing her case and getting nowhere, McCrea simply brought a print of that film to the studio and ran it for his producer. With McCrea by his side, Goldwyn sat in delight through all of The Gay Deception, starring Frances Dee.
And Sam Goldwyn’s life was never the same again.
15 “The Goldwyn Touch”
HE COULD NOT HAVE BEEN less interested in Frances Dee.
When the lights came on in the projection room, Sam Goldwyn turned to Joel McCrea and asked, “Who directed this?” McCrea told him, “A funny little guy named Wyler.”
William Wyler was born in Alsace-Lorraine in 1902, in a town called Mulhausen or Mulhouse, depending on which government laid claim to the territory that year. After the world war, Willy entertained the notion of studying business in Paris, anything to escape selling neckties in his father’s haberdashery. He dreamed of America, the setting for fantastic tales he kept hearing about his mother’s cousin Carl Laemmle. Not only had “Uncle Carl” miraculously turned his clothing business in Chicago into a film empire in Hollywood, but he had also taken it upon himself to sponsor people from the old country.
When her famous cousin next returned to Europe, Melanie Wyler met him in Zurich with her eighteen-year-old Willy in tow. “Uncle Carl” asked the youth, “Do you have ambition?” When he heard the kind of enthusiasm he had hoped for, he offered him passage to America and a twenty-five-dollar-a-week job, from which he would dock five dollars until the boat fare had been reimbursed. Wyler was “thunderstruck,” because “in those days it was like making a trip to the moon!” Shortly after setting foot on American soil, he stopped a passerby and asked directions to the “street paved in gold.”
Wyler shared quarters in a rooming house on East Eighty-sixth Street with another Laemmle protégé, a Czechoslovakian named Paul Kohner. The two worked as office boys in Universal’s New York headquarters, on Broadway. With their working knowledge of several languages, they eagerly took it upon themselves to translate Universal’s press releases from the Coast into German, French, and Czech, and they sent them to newspapers abroad. A few months later, Carl Laemmle caught sight of several articles about his company in these foreign journals and traced the deed back to Wyler and Kohner. He summoned them to his office, ready to deport them for ringing up these unauthorized expenditures. When he learned that the European market in fact wanted to pay them for more material, Laemmle put them in charge of Universal’s new foreign publicity department.
After a year cooped up at 1600 Broadway, the adventurous Wyler told “Uncle Carl” that he wanted “to be where the action was.” Laemmle made him an office boy at Universal City and advanced him the train fare, which also got paid back at the rate of five dollars per week. Wyler’s expansive personality was right at home in the boom-town atmosphere of early-twenties Hollywood. He was an avid gambler, and he loved to tool around the city at top speeds on his motorcycle. He quickly moved out of an office on the lot into the prop room, then up the ladder of assistant directors. His primary task on Universal’s production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with Lon Chaney, was to herd several hundred extras, shouting to them at the appropriate moment, “Pull up your tights and light your torches!” When the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer company made Ben-Hur and needed assistants, Wyler performed similar duties in their Culver City colosseum. Back at Universal, Wyler asked for a chance to direct a two-reel western. His competence at that first twenty-minute formula picture earned him the right to make twenty more in their “Mustang” series. Each was filmed in a week and budgeted at two thousand dollars apiece, sixty dollars going to the director.
Winning those spurs led to six of Universal’s “Blue Streak” five-reel westerns. “In those days it was like a school,” Wyler said of his training ground. “I learned a great deal making little westerns because they all demanded action and the basis of motion pictures is really action.” The framing of shots intrigued him from the beginning. “I used to spend nights,” he remembered, “trying to think of new ways of getting on and off a horse.”
Five-reelers gave way to feature films, and when sound came in, Wyler was one of the most experienced directors on the Universal lot. In 1933, he got to direct John Barrymore in Elmer Rice’s Countellor-at-Law. Although Wyler never completely lost his foreign accent, his hearing was sensitive to even the most subtle nuances in his adopted language. An inarticulate perfectionist, he frustrated performers because he could never state precisely what was lacking in a specific take, only that he wanted it “better.”
In late 1934, Wyler was given the opportunity to direct Universal’s budding new star, the sandy-throated Margaret Sullavan, in a Molnár play adapted by Preston Sturges, called The Good Fairy. He and the leading lady quarreled furiously on the set almost every day, and privately made up at night. A “handsomely homely dynamo,” as Bette Davis later described him, he had a rapid-fire laugh that often gave way to a gap-toothed grin many women found irresistible. He and Margaret Sullavan married in November 1934.
For all his craftsmanship, Wyler had had little opportunity to develop his artistry. Married to a rising movie star, he became painfully aware of the professional quagmire in which he was stuck. He left Universal—“to become a bigger director, to get my teeth in big, important pictures, and become,” he confessed, “as big as Maggie.” Careers came first for each of them, and they were constantly at each other’s throats. The marriage was not helped any when Wyler gave the first real indications of his directorial powers in The Gay Deception for Fox. By the time it opened, he and Sullavan had separated.
Wyler could have received no call more welcome than that from his agent, Leland Hayward (who soon married Margaret Sullavan), reporting that Samuel Goldwyn wanted to meet him. Goldwyn needed a director immediately for a property he had just purchased. “He couldn’t have been more charming,” Wyler remembered of their first meeting, in the summer of 1935, “but I thought he had lost his mind. He told me he wanted to make ‘The Children’s Hour.”’
In a 1930 anthology of true-crime stories called Bad Companions appeared William Roughead’s “Closed Doors; or the Great Drumsheugh Case,” a tale of a girls’ school in Edinburgh that was forced to close because of a rumor that the owners were lesbians. Dashiell Hammett brought it to the attention of Lillian Hellman and suggested there might be a play in it. After several months, she had fictionalized the case into the three-act play The Children’s Hour. Lee Shubert, who owned the Broadway theater in which it opened, sat in on a rehearsal of the confession scene—“the recognition of the love of one woman for another”—and said, “This play could land us all in jail.” Instead, it made everybody connected with it rich, as it enjoyed a run of almost seven hundred performances. But there was not even an indication of the really big money that film rights brought. Article II of the Hays Office’s Production Code—“Sex”—could not have been more explicit: “Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing.” Subsection 2 said, “Sex perversion”—as lesbianism was certainly considered in 1934—“or any inference of it is forbidden.”
Lillian Hellman liked Sam Goldwyn. Remembering the time when she was writing The Dark Angel, she later said, “I think our early days together worked well because I was a difficult young woman who didn’t care as much about money as the people around me and so, by accident, I took a right step within the first months of working for Mr. Goldwyn.” After The Children’s Hour proved to be a solid hit on Broadway, she discussed its film possibilities with him, only to have him “laugh right in my face.” Then she explained to him that “nobody wanted to touch the movie rights because they all thought the play was about lesbianism.” In fact, she said, “the play was about the power of a lie. The substance of the lie itself is of secondary importance ... it could be anything powerful enough to stir up the drama of the play. When I wrote
The Children’s Hour, I simply thought lesbianism was the most insidious lie the child could spread.” Goldwyn became the only bidder for the film rights, offering $40,000.
Upon hearing the news, Will Hays himself discussed the purchase with Goldwyn. Because of the widespread notoriety of Hellman’s play, he ruled that the producer was:a. Not to use the title, THE CHILDREN’S HOUR;
b. To make no reference, directly or indirectly, in either advertising or exploitation of the picture to be made ... to the stage play THE CHILDREN’S HOUR;
c. To remove from your finished production all possible suggestion of Lesbianism and any other matter which is likely to prove objectionable.
Miss Hellman altered the play into a more conventional love triangle. In the screen version, Karen and Martha, two teachers who have been best friends since college, decide to open a private school for girls in an old New England house, only to fall in love with the same man, young Dr. Cardin. He has eyes for Karen; but one of the students spreads the malicious rumor that he is having a secret affair with Martha. The future of the school, the women’s friendship, and Karen’s marriage to Dr. Cardin are all threatened, until the gossipmonger is brought to justice.
Once Goldwyn explained how he intended to present The Children’s Hour, Wyler leapt at the opportunity to direct it. “Don’t forget,” Wyler recalled many years later, “Sam Goldwyn’s name stood for something, for quality. I had been making second-class pictures, and Goldwyn was making first-class pictures, so it was a good step for me.”
Just before offering a contract, Goldwyn had second thoughts. He hit it off remarkably well with Wyler, who was twenty-three years his junior; but he had seen only one of his pictures. He went to Irving Thalberg, who had known Wyler from their earliest days in the picture business, when they were both at Universal. Thalberg told Goldwyn that throughout those years of Wyler’s apprenticeship, he was known on the lot as “Worthless Willy.”
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