Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  Within months of each other, both Wyler and Lillian Hellman signed three-year contracts with Goldwyn. The director’s was straight yearly employment at $2,000 per week; the writer’s called for her to write “screen adaptations of five stories, to be furnished and designated by us”—assignments guaranteeing ten weeks at $2,500 per week. Both contracts allowed the artists to work on other projects and at other studios if they did not conflict with Goldwyn’s production plans. But there was one proviso Wyler and Hellman had to agree to, which was nothing short of signing themselves into indentured servitude—the standard clause in motion picture contracts of the day that called for “suspension and extension.” It meant that each was free to refuse a project not to his liking, but the time that would have been given to the assignment would be tacked onto the contract, protracting its expiration date. Wyler’s period of “suspension and extension” would be three months, Hellman’s seven. If a writer or director did not care about the quality of the pictures on which his name would appear, these long-term contracts were extravagant opportunities for steady gainful employment in a depressed economy. An artist signed such documents with the faith that his employer would play fair, because by intentionally offering bad material in anticipation that it would be refused, a producer could legally keep people under contract forever.

  Wyler and Hellman became fast friends, first in their optimism toward their new boss, ultimately to survive the experience. She was “not easy in any respect,” said Wyler of the “strong-minded woman” who would come to serve as a conscience for him. Hellman found Wyler “the greatest American director.” She said, “He had a wonderful pictorial sense—he knew how to pack so much into a shot that I felt I could leave certain things unsaid, knowing Willy would show them. We had to become friends,” she remembered with a laugh, “because we were the only two people in the Goldwyn asylum who weren’t completely loony.”

  In truth, the Goldwyn company was teeming with sound minds, including two of Hellman’s friends from the East. One was George Haight, a young alumnus of Yale, an aspiring playwright. He had become a Goldwyn executive when George Oppenheimer moved on. One of Haight’s schoolmates, Henry C. Potter—“prep-school handsome, respectable, grandson of a bishop, an unexpected man for the world of the theatre or Hollywood”—had also moved onto the lot, as Haight tried to help him make the leap from directing plays to directing movies. A third Yalie, Justus Baldwin Lawrence, known as “Jock,” was the new “bright young man” in charge of Goldwyn’s publicity. Merritt Hulburd, from Philadelphia’s Main Line, rounded out Goldwyn’s staff. A shrewd and handsome gentleman named David Rose, a former business associate of Douglas Fairbanks, became a business adviser and confidant.

  Because of her literary connections, Goldwyn had become obsessed with hiring George S. Kaufman’s wife, Beatrice, as his New York story editor. She had held editorial positions at several publishing houses and magazines in the last few years. Now he wanted her to scout for new material on his behalf—only months after the unpleasant settlement with her husband over Roman Scandals. “The thing to do,” Goldwyn said to Mrs. Kaufman in persuading her to accept a job with him, “is to pretend it never happened. And then it never happened.” With that, Goldwyn turned away, then he turned back again, with wide-eyed innocence. “What’s this about a fight with your husband?” he said to Mrs. Kaufman. “It never happened!” After such a performance, she could not resist the job. But she found that his charm evaporated quickly, and she held the position less than a year. “The truth is,” Goldwyn’s son admitted with hindsight, “he wasn’t interested in developing good secondary people. He was always afraid of too strong an organization, because then he’d have to watch out for them.”

  “Sam has had more fights than any other man in Hollywood,” observed Alva Johnston, who was sent by the Saturday Evening Post to profile Goldwyn. “Because he is a rebel and a trail blazer in the use of the English language, he is the central figure of a great comic legend.” After weeks of research, Johnston found that even “most of those who hate him or laugh at him will say, ‘I admire Sam.”’ Goldwyn’s ability as a producer was sometimes discounted, “on the theory that he buys success.” That was not the whole story, Johnston discovered; there was an essence to Goldwyn’s work:“The Goldwyn touch” is not brilliance or sensationalism. It is something that manifests itself gradually in a picture; the characters are consistent; the workmanship is honest; there are no tricks and short cuts; the intelligence of the audience is never insulted.

  Lillian Hellman worked through the summer of 1935 adapting The Children’s Hour to the screen, using the working title “The Lie.” Goldwyn and his story department considered the finished script one of the finest they had ever read. No other writers were brought in to polish it. In fact, the bulk of the script’s editing was based on suggestions by Wyler, who found some of the scenes too wordy. The opening sequence of the film, for example, was several pages of dialogue revealing the friendship and backgrounds of Martha and Karen as they graduated from college. Wyler told Hellman how he could express the same information more effectively in just a few shots, hardly calling for a word to be spoken. The story department compiled lists of possible titles; it was not until the film was shot that Goldwyn selected These Three.

  Goldwyn’s trio of stars—Miriam Hopkins, Joel McCrea, and Merle Oberon—were bunched into their first film together and handed to the director. After testing dozens of children, Wyler did get to cast a terrifying twelve-year-old named Bonita Granville as Mary, the little liar. Except for her, he was unfavorably predisposed to his cast. All he had seen of Joel McCrea was of his running around in outdoorsy pictures; Miriam Hopkins’s fabled temper scared him; and Merle Oberon herself knew she had never played a part that relied more on character than on costume.

  Besides the added tension of working with the most challenging material of his career, Wyler felt that he was on trial. With this, his first dramatic film since leaving Universal, he was auditioning not only for Goldwyn but for the rest of Hollywood. Goldwyn understood why Wyler kept trying to postpone the start date of the picture.

  For all his eschewal of his role in expanding the reach of the cinema, Wyler’s motion pictures began to plumb new psychological depths. Lillian Hellman said he showed “that character could be action. He’d hold the camera on an actor’s face for what seemed like forever, and then suddenly you’d see some look of recognition in an actor’s eye or somebody would step out of a shadow into the light and you’d be shocked out of your seat.” Many moments in These Three benefited from Wyler’s interesting staging, particularly the scene in which Martha confesses to Karen her own love for Dr. Cardin. Wyler situated the camera at Miriam Hopkins’s back, so that she might, in truth, have been revealing her love for Karen. The camera dwells instead on the reactions.

  The thirty-three-year-old director worked with a crew entirely new to him, except for a film editor he had brought from Universal, Daniel Mandell, a former acrobat and strongman with the Ringling Brothers circus. Wyler found his cameraman, Gregg Toland, noticeably distant; and after several days Toland announced that he wanted to quit. The problem stemmed from Wyler’s never having worked with a photographer who was anything more than a technician. He was in the habit of telling his cameramen where to place the equipment, how to move the camera, and how to light each scene. Here was a man who had learned at the feet of George Barnes and for years had been experimenting with lighting and camera technique of his own. (Goldwyn funded his development of new equipment.) Once Wyler understood Toland, he got him to stay, and the two developed one of the most extraordinary partnerships in Hollywood. “When he photographed something,” Wyler said, “he wanted to go beyond lights and catch feelings.”

  The production went slowly. “I had always had somebody breathing down my neck telling me to move faster, that there was no time to get it right,” said Wyler. “And one thing I have to say about Goldwyn is he wanted me to get things on film the way I wanted them.” Wyle
r would shoot as many as forty takes with the same camera setup, printing but two or three of them. Another problem with Wyler, Joel McCrea recalled, was that “he tended to look out for one or two actors in a picture, and he would shit on the rest. He was crazy about the little girl, and Miriam knew how to take care of herself. But Merle didn’t have that much experience and she started to panic.”

  She tried to convince McCrea and Hopkins that Bonita Granville was stealing the picture. “Merle came to me and we started talking about it,” McCrea recalled years later, “and we agreed I should say something to Goldwyn.... Now, of course, Goldwyn never listened much, but I started to explain what I was doing up in his office. Goldwyn got awfully exasperated, and finally said, ‘I’m having more trouble with you stars than Mussolini is with Utopia!’” McCrea returned to the set, forgetting why he had gone up in the first place.

  After a week of filming, Wyler came to McCrea’s dressing room. McCrea had already sensed the director’s disappointment at his not being more of an actor. Before Wyler could get a word out, McCrea said, “Look, if I were directing this picture, I’d rather have Leslie Howard too.” Wyler said, “Really?” McCrea assured him it was all right to feel that way, that he would still give it his all. Moved by the actor’s candor, Wyler confessed, “You didn’t know it, but I wanted Leslie Howard.” McCrea said he did know; Goldwyn had told him.

  “I told him not to!” Wyler cried.

  “That doesn’t make any difference,” said McCrea. “I was at his house for dinner, and—”

  “I haven’t been invited to his house for dinner!” protested Wyler. After discussing the point that had brought him into the dressing room, he asked, “What’s it like?” McCrea looked puzzled. “At the Goldwyns‘?”

  McCrea described his evening atop Laurel Lane. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard had been there, along with Paramount executives Y. Frank Freeman and Stanton Griffis, “and two or three other wheels.” Sometime late into the meal, as though he just could not hold it in any longer, Goldwyn had said, “What is it with Willy Wyler? He must have an interest in some company that makes film or something. He does thirty-six takes and he prints one and six.” Wyler felt safe enough with McCrea to confide why he worked that way. “I’m not sure of myself,” he admitted.

  Wyler’s insecurity manifested itself in other ways as well, as his fears of permanently preserving mistakes became chronic. He developed stomachaches; he began to insist that his brother Robert or some trusted friend be hired on his films, if not to rewrite pages then to stand by his side to discuss them; he would approach each scene by shooting a loose master shot, then cover the scene by shooting every character from every possible angle.

  Notwithstanding, Goldwyn’s continual pleasure with the first rushes on These Three emboldened Wyler to stand up for what he believed. Goldwyn had the strength of character to change his mind, but never, Wyler observed, “until he saw you burst every blood vessel in your head. Even if he agreed with you, he’d intentionally disagree just to see how hard you’d argue your case.” A rapport developed between the two men, partly because of their near-equal inability to express themselves. Deeper than that, after years of working almost exclusively with Gentile directors, Goldwyn had at last found a fellow European Jew with similar artistic aspirations.

  “Mr. Goldwyn,” as Wyler called him throughout his tenure, always kept the upper hand, but he harbored his own insecurities. In an early scene of These Three, Joel McCrea appeared as an apiarist, outfitted in protective mask and gear. Wyler filmed the scene as hundreds of bees were let loose, one of them attacking him. The next day, he was stunned to discover that the publicity department had released a feature story to Variety about the bees on the set of These Three and how one of them had stung Samuel Goldwyn.

  From that moment on, competition between Wyler and Goldwyn steadily grew. “The big difference between them,” said Danny Mandell, “was that Goldwyn could never admit that he was wrong.” Wyler and Goldwyn had recently gone weeks barely speaking to each other because of the director’s unusual staging of that “confession” scene, in which Miriam Hopkins stood with her back to the camera. Where Wyler believed he had cleverly captured multiple interpretations, Goldwyn saw only obfuscation. One Sunday while he was still in a rage over the problem, he forwent his usual card game and went to the studio to run the film over and over with Wyler until they could reach some solution. He brought Sammy along. For the better part of an hour, Goldwyn shrieked at his director, as Wyler insisted that the scene was perfectly clear. When he could stand no more, Wyler turned to the boy and said, “Sammy, do you understand what this scene is about?” Goldwyn’s son explained in precise detail everything that the scene was meant to convey. Goldwyn simmered in silence until he blew his top and sputtered, “Since when are we making pictures for nine-year-olds?”

  “He had an uncanny sense of knowing if something was wrong with a picture,” Mandell said. “Then he’d drive everybody crazy until someone came up with what it was.” The day after These Three previewed, his staff realized that Goldwyn had tossed all night over something he could not put his finger on. Wyler knew the trouble—a scene he wanted to shoot over, in which Mary blackmails another schoolgirl into being her conspirator. It showed how truly evil she was, thereby strengthening her as a villain. Wyler had underplayed it; but he did not say a word to Goldwyn, knowing the producer would disagree reflexively. Instead, Wyler conspired with Mandell. When they ran the film the next day, Mandell interrupted the screening right after the scene had played, according to plan. “I stopped the film, Mr. Goldwyn,” Mandell said, “because of my integrity as a member of your staff. As an editor I can tell you this is the only weak scene in the entire picture.” Goldwyn weighed this carefully, considering that the only solution for such a problem would be reshooting. “What do you think, Willy?” Goldwyn asked. “I think Danny has a point,” he said, struggling to keep a straight face. The scene was reshot.

  “I never knew what ‘the Goldwyn touch’ was,” said Danny Mandell, who ended up editing practically all of Goldwyn’s films for the next twenty-five years. “I think it was something a Goldwyn publicist made up.” Said Wyler, “I don’t recall his contributing anything other than buying good material and talent. It was all an attempt to make a name for himself as an artist. But as far as being creative, he was zero.” And yet every decision as to which scenes were reshot or included in the picture required Goldwyn’s approval; not a word of the script reached the screen without Goldwyn’s okay; none of Richard Day’s sets was built or Omar Kiam’s costumes sewn until Goldwyn permitted; the successful Americanization of Merle Oberon was solely the result of Goldwyn’s vision. The morning after one of the last previews of These Three, in February 1936, Goldwyn received an urgent memorandum from Alfred Newman, complaining about two places in which Mr. Wyler “rather whimsically, arbitrarily, and very vaguely” insisted that the music be cut. Goldwyn ruled that the music cues should stay. And whenever Danny Mandell was ready to quit working on a scene that still did not play right, Goldwyn could wheedle him into giving it one more attempt.

  These Three gathered notices the likes of which Goldwyn had not received before. In language more thoughtful than the usual Hollywood superlatives, they treated the film with artistic respect, especially the demanding English critics. Graham Greene, who had become the regular film critic for the Spectator, wrote: “After ten minutes or so of the usual screen sentiment, quaintness and exaggeration, one began to watch with incredulous pleasure nothing less than life.”

  These Three was the fifth Goldwyn picture in the past ten United Artists releases. Ever since Joseph Schenck had resigned from United Artists in May 1935, Goldwyn’s influence at UA had increased in other ways as well. Schenck’s stockholdings were sold back to the company, giving Goldwyn a share equal to those of the rest of his partners. But Schenck sold Twentieth Century’s stock in the United Artists Studio to Sam Goldwyn for $250,000. That meant that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks sti
ll held the real estate of their studio, but Goldwyn became the sole owner of everything that sat on it, including the stages and equipment.

  Schenck’s abdication also left a vacancy in power at United Artists, subjecting the company to a rapid succession of presidents. Al Lichtman was the first to find himself exposed to Goldwyn’s constant attacks over the selling of their product. When he could stand the badgering no longer, he left, and Mary Pickford assumed the throne. She found Goldwyn no more of a friend in her court. After a few months, a compromise candidate, Dr. Giannini, was given the office, but Goldwyn did not even let up on his banker, rendering him but a caretaker until a real leader could take over.

  “All my life I’ve been an adventurer, and have been in a lot of tough situations,” Dr. Attilio Henry Giannini later reminisced. “But let me tell you, I never saw fights like the ones at U.A. board meetings in my life.” He said that “criminations, recriminations, cusswords”—even physical violence—became standard boardroom procedure.

  All fingers pointed at Goldwyn. Giannini said that once “he puts his name to a deal the deal is good.” The problem with Goldwyn was that “out of 20 deals he starts, 18 will be frustrated.” UA’s counsel, Charles Schwartz, said that Goldwyn “nagged over everything.” Regardless of who was right in any matter, Goldwyn would frustrate his opposition into submission. At one meeting, he called Douglas Fairbanks a crook, whereupon the retired swashbuckler vaulted across the table and grabbed Goldwyn by the throat. Giannini had to separate them. He took Goldwyn outside to calm him with a shot of whiskey. Moments later, Goldwyn returned to the meeting to make amends. “I can’t prove anything,” he said, “so I apologize.”

  The meetings always ended in a row—somebody against Goldwyn. The partners were angered because they felt they had established Samuel Goldwyn in the business, and that even if they were not making pictures anymore, “they were entitled to their fruits of ownership.” Chaplin—who had endorsed Goldwyn’s entrance into the company with a $150,000 loan—stopped showing up at meetings if Goldwyn was to be present. Soon the other owners sent proxies as well. When Goldwyn’s contract with UA came up for ratification, he began demanding new terms, including a shorter contract with the company. When Giannini sided with the other partners against such preferential treatment, Goldwyn turned against him and proceeded to oppose any Giannini decision. The powerful banker became a lame duck.