Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  Stanwyck got the part and delivered what most fans, and critics, and she herself, think is the performance of her lifetime—from her social-climbing beginnings to her standing in the rain trying to steal a glance at her daughter’s society nuptials.

  Stella Dallas was one of the great crowd-pleasers of 1937. It grossed more than $2 million, yielding a profit over $500,000 for Goldwyn. Its success gave life to a radio serial based on the characters, which would run on the National Broadcasting Company’s network for close to twenty years. Both Stanwyck and Garbo lost the Oscar that year to Luise Rainer, for her performance in MGM’s The Good Earth.

  For all his nominations, the big studios shut Goldwyn out except in one category, Best Sound Recording—for The Hurricane. The South Seas adventure had been in the works for almost two years before its release, initially slated as a project for Howard Hawks. After clashing with him on Come and Get It, however, Goldwyn searched for another vigorous director who felt at home at sea. Fox’s John Ford had read the Nordhoff and Hall novel three times before wiring Goldwyn from Honolulu during one of his many transoceanic sails, “AM MORE THAN EVER CONVINCED I SHOULD WORK WITH YOU ON IT STOP WISH YOU COULD CONVINCE DARRYL ... REGARDLESS WHO MAKES PICTURE POSITIVE IT WILL BE SUPERB AND REBOUND TO YOUR GLORY.” Goldwyn hired him for $100,000 plus one eighth of the film’s profits.

  Nordhoff and Hall’s novel opens on the wedding day of Terangi, mate of a trading schooner, and Marama, daughter of a great chieftain, on the South Pacific island of Manukura. Their honeymoon is interrupted when the schooner must set sail. In a Tahitian café, Terangi is provoked into striking a white man and is sentenced to six months in prison. Unable to endure captivity, he repeatedly attempts escape, and his sentence is extended to sixteen years. In desperation, he accidentally kills a guard and embarks alone on a six-hundred-mile ocean journey to his home and wife. From the outset, Terangi has had the sympathy of everyone on the island except Governor DeLaage, who is resigned to capturing Terangi and returning him to prison in Tahiti. Just as Terangi reaches the shores of Manukura, so too arrive the first winds of a swelling storm. The villagers scatter in fear, all except DeLaage, fixed on capturing the handsome native boy. Terangi could easily escape in the fury, but chooses to be with his people, lashing his wife and small child to a high tree. As the devastating hurricane reaches full force, Terangi also saves DeLaage’s wife. In the dying winds, he and his family set out in a canoe to seek a new life on another island. DeLaage is reunited with his wife, whom he presumed dead with most of the islanders. As they see the fugitives paddling away, he watches them and says, “It is not Terangi—it is only a floating log.” While Oliver H. P. Garrett was preparing the script for Goldwyn, Charles Nordhoff reread his story and realized he had “made a mistake in not sufficiently emphasizing the fact that the native hero was not a victim of injustice, but a victim of circumstance.”

  When John Ford joined Goldwyn in their first venture together since Arrowsmith, he brought along a screenwriter, a former reporter named Dudley Nichols. They had recently worked together on The Informer, each winning an Oscar. The success of their collaboration lay in the shared conviction that motion pictures should be based more on images than on words, that dialogue should be subordinate to action. Running against the current trend toward a lot of talking on the screen, Nichols’s screenplay for The Hurricane contained about one third less dialogue than the average script. For all its merits, Goldwyn decided just before shooting that the script’s opening and conclusion were weak. “Whenever my father was in trouble on a picture,” said Sam Goldwyn, Jr., “he went to Ben Hecht.” Hecht claimed to have completed his uncredited rewrite in two days.

  Goldwyn had planned all along to star his own handsome beachboy, Joel McCrea. After six times before the Goldwyn cameras, McCrea was thrilled his producer was at last offering him the lead in a picture, but he felt the part called for somebody who looked more indigenous to Manukura than to Malibu. He went to Goldwyn and said, “Look, I think it’s going to be a great picture. But there’s a scene when the character enters, and all the white guys get up from the table. Now I don’t look native. I look like an Irish cop!” Goldwyn said, “I want to tell you something. An actor should be able to do anything—a pimp, a homosexual, anything.”

  “Now look,” McCrea replied. “I never claimed to be an actor. I’m just a guy who rides a horse well.” Goldwyn said, “Well, I’m paying you a lot of money to be an actor.” Then the producer changed tack and asked McCrea who his favorite actor was. The big cowboy selected Leslie Howard. “Well,” Goldwyn said, “he could play this.”

  “Yeah,” said McCrea, “but who would you rather see play Buffalo Bill, him or me?”

  Goldwyn ordered a full-scale talent hunt. Around that time, somebody working at the studio went to fill his car at a nearby service station and thought the strong and swarthy attendant looked the part of Terangi. He was an aspiring actor named Charlie Locher. Like hundreds of others, Locher—about to be renamed Jon Hall—paraded before Goldwyn and Ford and casting director Robert McIntyre; “but he was the first one,” remembered Jock Lawrence, “who didn’t look like an actor.” Goldwyn asked him to remove his shirt and read a scene, then to wait in the anteroom. “I can take that boy and make something of him,” said Ford. He got the part, and Joel McCrea was loaned out to Paramount.

  In exchange, Paramount gave Goldwyn run of their seraglio of actresses to find his sultry Polynesian princess. One of their seventy-five-dollar-a-week contract players had recently gained attention for the fetching way in which she ran around in a sarong in The Jungle Princess. She was born Dorothy Kaumeyer and at seventeen became “Miss New Orleans.” Later she became a singer with a band and got her break as an actress, using the surname Lamour. The group of men casting The Hurricane ran her film. Everyone said she looked “like a tart” except John Ford, who said, “I can do something with her.”

  A crew was sent to Pago Pago, in American Samoa, to film background footage, at a cost of $100,000. Native villages were built in Isthmus Harbor, on Catalina Island, for $150,000, and on the United Artists back lot—complete with a 200-yard-long lagoon—for another $150,000. James Basevi, the special-effects wizard who had devised the earthquakes and locust plagues for MGM’s recent disaster sequences, was hired to create the film’s climactic hurricane. It would cost $250,000 to destroy the sets. Mary Astor, cast as Madame De Laage, remembered weeks in which “we walked against winds, carefully calculated to blow at near hurricane level. Huge propellers kept us fighting for every step, with sand and water whipping our faces, sometimes leaving little pinpricks of blood on our cheeks from the stinging sand.” Hoses and overhead sprinklers provided the great rains. A Variety correspondent spotted a number of native players actually cowering on the set as the storm reached the peak of its fury. Many were Samoans who had survived the islands’ 1915 hurricane, the worst in their recent history. They said Goldwyn’s was worse.

  While filming on Catalina, Ford lived aboard his own 110-foot ketch, the Araner, which he had insisted that Goldwyn charter for him. The cantankerous director, whose prestige had jumped since he had worked for Goldwyn six years earlier, chose to ignore the producer as much as possible. After several weeks, Goldwyn worried that Ford was not making the most of his good-looking leads. So one morning he appeared on the set with Ira Gershwin, who was working on the lot. Ford was perched high above the village, preparing a crane shot. When he noticed Goldwyn, he halted all work and the crane lowered him to the ground. “There aren’t any close-ups,” Goldwyn complained. Ford could hardly believe he had descended to listen to such twaddle. After a moment of their eyeballing each other, Ford poked his boss in the navel and said, “Look, Goldwyn. When I want a long shot I aim the camera here.” Jabbing him a little harder and higher in the stomach, he added, “When I want a medium shot, I aim here. And when I want a close-up,” he said, now thumping away at his chest, “I’ll put the camera here.” Then he pushed Goldwyn toward the door.

 
“Well,” said the producer to Gershwin on their way out, “at least I put the idea in his head.” He did just that. Before the picture was over, Ford shot a number of close-ups of Lamour and happily spliced them into the film. After The Hurricane, Paramount considered her a star and wrapped her in a sarong at every opportunity.

  The film’s fifteen-minute hurricane sequence was so overpowering that most critics and audiences tended to overlook the hour and a half of melodrama that preceded it. The Hurricane became a box-office hit, one of United Artists’ most successful releases in years, despite its nearly two-million-dollar cost. Alfred Newman’s ubiquitous score for the film included a beguiling theme that came to be called “The Moon of Manakoora,” an air widely imitated by other composers of South Seas pictures.

  Goldwyn’s publicity department proclaimed that Hollywood considered The Hurricane the “greatest of even the Goldwyn films because it, better than any other, shows clearly the famous ‘Goldwyn Touch’ of perfection.”

  EVER since film found its voice, the major studios had been producing revues to spotlight their contract players. After the first wave of musicals with Broadway backgrounds in the early thirties, movies turned for inspiration to that great new arena of popular entertainment—radio. In 1932, Paramount produced The Big Broadcast, in which Bing Crosby, Kate Smith, and Burns and Allen saved a failing radio station. The studio served up a similar smorgasbord three years in a row in the middle of the decade, catering to the tastes of all audiences. The Big Broadcast of 1938 featured Bob Hope in his movie debut, warbling “Thanks for the Memory” right after Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad thundered Brünnhilde’s battle cry. In 1937, Warner Brothers produced Hollywood Hotel, a story revolving around the town’s celebrated radio program of the same name. It introduced what became movieland’s anthem, “Hooray for Hollywood.”

  Upon the death of Florenz Ziegfeld, Goldwyn took it upon himself to uphold the tradition of producing an annual lavish revue. Announcements about The Goldwyn Follies began appearing as early as 1932. After discussing the project for five years with such talents as George Jean Nathan, Dorothy Parker, and Anita Loos, Goldwyn had settled only on a vague idea about a producer trying to hook a millionaire into backing a show. In time, the venue got changed to Hollywood. With that, Goldwyn chased the most colorful array of talent ever mounted in a single film.

  He first approached Irving Berlin. But Berlin had been cheated at Goldwyn’s card table enough times to know better than to get involved with him in this big a production. Selling him the occasional song was one thing; working through an entire picture was another. After Berlin gracefully bowed out, Goldwyn hired George and Ira Gershwin. No theatrical event had ever moved Goldwyn so much as their recent Porgy and Bess; and Goldwyn knew that the prestige alone of the Gershwin name was worth the tens of thousands of dollars he would pay them for a score.

  From the radio, Goldwyn drafted comic Phil Baker, Jack Benny’s tenor, Kenny Baker, and a new ventriloquist with his formally attired dummy, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. In exchange for Joel McCrea’s services, Twentieth Century-Fox offered Goldwyn an option on either Jack Haley or the Ritz Brothers. Goldwyn chose the three zanies. From the world of opera, he hired the Metropolitan’s Helen Jepson and Charles Kullmann to sing arias from La Traviata.

  The film’s greatest distinction promised to be the inclusion of ballet. Goldwyn had attracted the Gershwins to his Follies by assuring them that the most celebrated new force in dance, the Russian émigré George Balanchine, would choreograph a ballet sequence for the film. George Gershwin intended to compose a new piece for the occasion. When the symptoms of apparent fatigue—headaches and vertigo—slowed him down, the idea shifted toward the creation of a ballet of his 1928 orchestral tone poem, “An American in Paris.”

  The star of the dance sequences would be a gifted ballerina (half-German, half-Norwegian) with a strong face and a sensational figure. Born Eva Brigitta Hartwig, she had debuted at the age of six and danced with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at seventeen. In 1936, at age nineteen, she performed in the London production of Rodgers and Hart’s musical On Your Toes, using her stage name, Vera Zorina. On the strength of her reputation, her photographs, and the sales pitch of her agent, Louis Shurr, Goldwyn signed her to a seven-year contract.

  “All I knew of Samuel Goldwyn was that he was the most distinguished producer in America,” remembered Vera Zorina years later; “but there was only one reason I signed with him: George Balanchine was going to do the choreography. Otherwise, I’d never have gone to Hollywood.” Upon reflection, she was impressed that Goldwyn had even heard of Balanchine and his small, budding ballet troupe, the Metropolitan Opera’s American Ballet Company. “I think that’s where Goldwyn’s greatness as a producer came in,” said the ballerina. “He was aware or at least well-advised. And he knew good advice when he heard it. That takes talent—to surround yourself with great talent and not be threatened.”

  Lacking only a screenplay to bind all the disparate elements of his Follies, Goldwyn called for his new favorite writer. In June 1937, George Haight’s secretary ordered Lillian Hellman to report to the studio immediately for a conference about The Goldwyn Follies. Her working on that picture had never even been mentioned, so Hellman had no idea what she was in for.

  “It was pure Alice in Wonderland,” Hellman discovered upon arrival. Goldwyn sat at the far end of his office, presiding over an assembly of some of the greatest talent of the century. George Haight stood at his side, reminding Miss Hellman of the Mad Hatter’s dormouse. Art director Richard Day was sitting alone on a long leather couch up against one of the walls, totally absorbed in his sketchpad. In a very large chair next to Goldwyn’s desk was a very short man, whom she immediately recognized as Balanchine. Seated in two matching smaller chairs in the middle of the room were George and Ira Gershwin, their backs to everybody else. When Miss Hellman entered the room, not only was nobody speaking to anybody else, no two people were even looking at each other.

  Static electricity charged the room. Goldwyn bobbed his head from artist to artist and then at the ceiling, as though he expected lightning to strike. By the time she had greeted each of the other guests, the host turned to Lillian Hellman and asked, “What are you doing here?” She pleaded ignorance. “Well, as long as you’re here,” he said, “why don’t you write ‘The Goldwyn Follies’?” Hellman caught on to his game and politely refused.

  “Then what are you doing here?” Goldwyn asked. George Haight said that he had sent for her. “Well, that’s fine,” said Goldwyn. “You’ll learn very nice, very quick. You’ll write a great musical.” She said she did not want to learn. “You’ll get a raise,” Goldwyn promised. “You’ll like the Gershwins.” George Balanchine started to hum an atonal ditty. ‘And it sure is wonderful to have a genius,“ said Goldwyn, leaning back in his chair, his hands locked behind his head, indicating Balanchine. With that, Richard Day looked up from his pad, and the Gershwins turned in their chairs. ”I mean a bunch of geniuses,“ Goldwyn amended. ”But all this modern music ... it’s so old-fashioned.“

  The Gershwins turned back around and muffled their laughter; Richard Day chortled into his sketchpad; Lillian Hellman bit her lower lip. Goldwyn instructed George Haight to take Balanchine to a screening room and run some Busby Berkeley musicals for him. “Who? Who?” Balanchine inquired eagerly. “Busby Berkeley,” said Goldwyn. “Don’t you know who Busby Berkeley is?” While George Haight described Goldwyn’s former choreographer to his present one, Lillian Hellman pulled a chair alongside the Gershwins. In a low voice, Ira leaned over and told her that he and his brother and Balanchine had had a meeting at Goldwyn’s house just the day before. They had all arrived and were in the living room, waiting for Sam to descend the stairs. After several minutes, Goldwyn appeared at the staircase in his bathrobe. “Hold on, fellas,” he yelled down. “I’ll be right there. And then we’ll get into a cuddle.”

  Hellman exploded with laughter, prompting Goldwyn to dismi
ss everybody from the room. “You call yourselves geniuses?” he said as his talented team marched to the door. “I call you dumbbells!”

  For the next week or two, George Gershwin jangled Goldwyn’s nerves the most. The composer always seemed tired and dizzy. Goldwyn heard that he had been secretly keeping late nights with former Goldwyn Girl Paulette Goddard. Still, Gershwin showed up at his office on the lot to labor over two love songs, “Our Love Is Here to Stay” and “Love Walked In.” Ira’s lyrics were necessarily generic, because there was still not enough of a script to demand more specific sentiments. At this point, Goldwyn told Gershwin only that he wanted “hit songs you can whistle,” just like the ones his friend Irving wrote.

  One morning in late June 1937, George complained of a headache so severe that his brother had to phone him in sick. When this news reached the head office, Goldwyn ordered him off the payroll until his return.

  Gershwin never made it back to the studio. What had been suspected were the results of fatigue (or possibly psychological malaise) proved more grave. He often lost his coordination, and he stumbled into moments of irrationality. With neuralgic pains on the right side of his face and an occasional ache at the top of his head, he took to bed. Playwright S. N. Behrman visited him, and Gershwin complained, “I had to live for this, that Sam Goldwyn should say to me: ‘Why don’t you write hits like Irving Berlin?’” On July 9, he fell into a sleep that deepened into a coma. At last the symptoms suggested a brain tumor, and emergency surgery was ordered. It was too late to remove the growth in the right temporal lobe. On Sunday, July 11, George Gershwin died.

  For about a day, noted one observer, Goldwyn carried on as though he had lost his best friend. He talked of producing Gershwin’s life story. Then he sprang right back to business. Because the Gershwin score was only half completed when George died, Ira recommended Vernon Duke, a Russian-born composer with a classical background, to complete the score. Goldwyn was not interested until he heard that Duke had written the hummable “April in Paris.”