Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  It was Duke’s third day on the lot when Goldwyn asked to meet him. The producer, his left arm in a sling, said, “Sit down, Duke,” then discoursed for three minutes on the task before him. He stressed the “honor of working on the greatest musical film of all time.” Duke silently wondered if this really was the Goldwyn of legend, until the producer asked, “What songs did you write?” Duke dropped a few titles, and Goldwyn said, “Oh, yes, the song about April.” Then he added, “That’s good, but you won’t get a firm footwork on the film industry until you’ve worked for me. Good-by, Duke.” The new employee shook hands with the man he then knew was Goldwyn. Duke was told that Goldwyn’s other hand had been injured while he bawled out his staff, banging his fist on the table. In truth, the producer had broken his forearm in a fall down the stairs of his Santa Monica beach house.

  That afternoon, Duke’s presence was requested on Stage 2. George Balanchine was about to unveil his “American in Paris” ballet. For weeks, Balanchine had been rehearsing the first full-length ballet created expressly for the screen, in privacy so strict that even Goldwyn had been prohibited from entering the dance studio.

  Goldwyn perched himself in a high director’s chair. Balanchine had small groups of three or four dancers in modernistic poses scattered about the stage. Off in a corner, the rehearsal pianist started to play “An American in Paris,” and Balanchine began to narrate the story of the ballet, leading Goldwyn from his chair to the first cluster of dancers. Indicating his injured arm, Goldwyn said he preferred sitting in the chair, but Balanchine insisted that the producer accompany him through the ballet, step by step. “Goldwyn gave in,” remembered Vernon Duke, “... and it was a rare sight to see the man piloted by George, made to crouch and squat, the better to view a couple wriggling on the floor or peer straight into a dancer’s navel—‘that’s where camerra vill be shott!’ George would exclaim triumphantly. With every succeeding episode, Goldwyn’s face got redder and angrier; he complained loudly about his arm hurting after so much crouching and squatting, and refused to peer into any more navels. ‘Bott I have more, Mr. Goldveen!’ George exclaimed aghast. ‘That’s all right, George, I get the idea,’ the producer said.” He walked out, asking Balanchine to report to his office.

  Goldwyn told Balanchine that his ballet was all very “artistic,” but “that the miners in Harrisburg wouldn’t understand it.” Balanchine said, “I’m not President Roosevelt—what do I care about the miners in Harrisburg.” Then the ballet master thought for a second and added, “Besides, there are no miners in Harrisburg; I know, because I’ve been there.” Goldwyn just laughed and said he was sorry, that the “American in Paris” ballet was out. Balanchine stormed back to his apartment and prepared to return to New York City. When Vernon Duke caught up with him an hour later, Balanchine said if the dance was out, so was he. Duke called Fred Kohlmar, Goldwyn’s assistant on this picture, who raced over to appease the dance-master. Kohlmar explained that Goldwyn still wanted a ballet for his Follies, just one less abstract. Balanchine realized that he had done his work too well, choreographing not just the dancers but every camera angle—none of which Goldwyn wanted to see or hear about. He had simply walked onto the soundstage that afternoon expecting to sit through an enjoyable few minutes of ballet. Goldwyn was more intent than ever, Balanchine was told, on including ballet in his Follies. In fact, his heart was set on it.

  Sam Goldwyn had fallen hopelessly in love with Vera Zorina. Still barred from the studio where Balanchine rehearsed his dancers, he used to sneak glances at her through the doorway whenever he could. He had countless tests made of her, which he watched over and over. He ordered a small mark on her face removed surgically and one of her teeth filed down and capped.

  He built a new dressing room for her, an apartment so complete that she wondered why she even had to rent a house. He ran movie musicals for her, pointing out that for all Eleanor Powell’s tap-dancing ability, she was a cold performer. “You gotta have warmth, he kept telling Zorina. And he had new dance numbers created for her. The first was a Romeo and Juliet story in which the rival families would be the jazzy Montagues and the square Capulets. Vernon Duke was also asked to write music for a second piece, called ”Waternymph,“ in which Zorina could show off her dancing ability as well as what Duke called her ”superhuman beauty.“

  Goldwyn was always on his best behavior with her. He tried to impress her in the nicest ways, dropping hints that he was a man of culture. One day he raced excitedly onto the set to tell her that he had just seen One Hundred Men and a Girl in which Deanna Durbin tried to persuade a great symphony conductor to form an orchestra of unemployed musicians. “It has that great music director—Dostoevski,” he said proudly. “You mean Stokowski,” Zorina gently corrected. “No, no,” said Goldwyn, sure of himself, “Dostoevski”; and Zorina liked him for that. But all his subtle expressions of love for her were totally lost on the twenty-year-old ballerina. “My interests were somewhere else,” she explained forty-five years later, when she first realized that Goldwyn had been tripping over himself to be near her. “I was falling in love with Balanchine. Not only did I love him, he was becoming my everything.”

  Goldwyn became a lovesick calf. One afternoon, Lillian Hellman saw him trot down the back stairs of his office and into a waiting taxi, only to return a few minutes later. The next day she observed the same unusual occurrence, this time realizing that his departure came just seconds after Zorina had driven off the lot. Word spread among the writers and executives in the building. After a week of this behavior, there were enough spectators to form an office pool. Each one chipped in a dollar, the pot going to whoever guessed the precise minute that Goldwyn’s cab passed before the studio gate. This carried on several days a week for the better part of a month. One day, George Haight tailed Goldwyn’s taxi, all the way to Zorina’s little house in Beverly Hills. Haight reported that Goldwyn’s cab had pulled to the curb a few doors down, and Goldwyn had craned his neck to watch her enter. Once she was inside, he returned to his office. Goldwyn’s yearning was a secret only to Zorina, who had no idea she was being pursued.

  Even Frances Goldwyn knew. She had no evidence of a love affair but plenty of signs of her husband’s lust. Ever since the reaffirmation of their marriage contract—he vowing never to stray and she to stay—she had kept an eye out for any indiscretions. She never bothered to investigate the occasional peccadilloes she had heard about; but now she had something much more serious to deal with, worse than any infidelity: She had every reason to believe her husband was in love with Zorina. Sam constantly brought up her name in the most flattering way; Frances would catch him daydreaming; he came home with expensive trinkets for no special reason. She convinced herself that there was a love affair, and when she challenged her husband head-on, he protested far too much. Sam Goldwyn, Jr., remembered, “The only fights I ever remember my parents having with each other, real fights in which my mother threatened to leave him, were over Zorina.”

  The “affair” could not have come at a worse time. Frances was feeling overworked and underappreciated. Just recovering from the heavy burdens of Sam’s illness, she was still supervising every detail of his domestic life. Zorina remained oblivious of the Goldwyns’ family drama.

  One night, Sam’s dinner arrived at the table. Mushrooms were not on his prescribed diet, and the sight of them on his plate convinced him that Frances was out to poison him. She burst into tears at his accusations and fled upstairs, where she telephoned George Cukor to say she was leaving Sam. “She told me she could not take one more day with ‘that man,’” Cukor recalled. Frances hung up and began emptying her closets and drawers, while Sam brooded in his bedroom at the far end of the hall. Within a few minutes, her bags were packed and she was descending the circular staircase at 1200 Laurel Lane. The doorbell rang. It was Cukor. He took one look at Frances and said, “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Cukor pointed her back upstairs, and Frances retreated, stifling her sobs all the way up. H
e joined her in her bedroom and helped her unpack. “And,” said Cukor decades later, “that night was never mentioned again.”

  Frances bottled up her hysteria. From then on, if she even saw Sam defer to an attractive woman, she suspected the worst. Over the next few months, Frances started a private list of celebrated women she made herself believe were intimate with her husband. After Zorina, she enrolled Averell Harriman’s wife, Marie, and Lillian Hellman. The playwright later swore, “I never wanted to sleep with Sam, and he didn’t want sex from me. All he ever wanted was another good script.”

  Miss Hellman remembered telling Goldwyn to “go fuck himself” when he insisted she try writing The Goldwyn Follies. In truth, she took a crack at it, getting no closer to a cohesive story than her many predecessors. At last, Goldwyn turned to his usual standby.

  Ben Hecht’s script for Goldwyn was devoid of inspiration except in its send-up of the producer’s recent “secret romance.” An impeccably dressed Hollywood producer (to be played by Adolphe Menjou) named Oliver Merlin considers that his recent films have been failing at the box office because he no longer has his finger on the public’s pulse. A naive girl from the country (Andrea Leeds) enters his life and observes that the great Merlin’s films have lost the “common touch.” He is so grateful for this diagnosis that he hires her as a private consultant, a confidante he calls Miss Humanity. He falls in love with her. But she is completely oblivious of his amorous intentions because she pines for a handsome singing hamburger slinger, whom she helps break into the movies. Merlin’s pictures regain sudden popularity, and at a big cast party, he intends to announce his engagement to his unsuspecting inamorata, the woman behind his renewed success. When he discovers her love for the young singer, he turns the party into their celebration. “I’m so glad you and Hollywood turned out so nice,” Miss Humanity tells Merlin at the end of the film.

  The Goldwyn Follies of 1938 proved to be such a folly that the producer never again attempted a revue. It cost $1.8 million and ended up $727,500 in the hole, the most Sam Goldwyn had ever lost on a single picture. The Technicolor production contained several memorable moments, but they never added up to more than that.

  The highlight for Goldwyn and the public alike was the “Waternymph” ballet, in which Zorina, swathed in a gold lame tunic, rose from the bottom of a fountain that was the centerpiece of a stunning Richard Day set. It was a dazzling debut. Shortly after the film opened, Vera Zorina married George Balanchine, and she was in constant demand on both stage and screen. Sam Goldwyn loaned her out to other studios and permitted her to appear on Broadway, but he never worked with her again. The question of why a man so fervent to hire her would never put her in another film haunted Zorina for the rest of her career. It had been “humiliating” for this young, dedicated ballerina to think she had not performed adequately. Something so far removed from her dancing as the preservation of a marriage had never even occurred to her.

  WHILE the ties that bound Sam and Frances Goldwyn tightened, his professional ties were slowly dissolved. After a year of Dr. Giannini’s provisional government at United Artists—during which time Goldwyn produced one third of their American output—the company’s firebrand staged a coup d‘état. At a particularly testy directors’ meeting, Goldwyn pounded his fists and exclaimed that Chaplin, Pickford, and Fairbanks were contributing next to nothing to the company and should renounce their interests. Goldwyn offered to buy each of them out, for $500,000 apiece. The once omnipotent monarchs of the silent era laughed at the offer but retired to another room to consider it. They returned to the table willing to accept $2 million each. Goldwyn could not afford that, so he sought an ally in the company’s other leading supplier of films, Alexander Korda. According to UA’s counsel, Charles Schwartz, “Sam persuaded Korda that he was being rooked, and that the two of them should band together to get the parasites out.”

  For the rest of the year, Goldwyn and Korda tried raising the money on two continents, putting the bite on such important investors as the Lehman brothers, the Rothschilds, and John Hay Whitney, the prominent New York socialite who had recently become president of Selznick International Pictures. They raised as much as $4 million, but Pickford, Fairbanks, and Chaplin stuck to their price, foreclosing further debate of a buyout.

  If Goldwyn could not shake the partners down for their interests in United Artists, he would try to shake them up. He installed one of his cronies, Murray Silverstone, as head of distribution. This action, attorney Neil McCarthy wrote Douglas Fairbanks, “would indicate that Sam is in charge of the distribution of the company’s pictures, whether or not he says that is true; and whether or not Sam states he would not want any man to favor his pictures over those of another, the men themselves are human beings.”

  Fairbanks and Chaplin never trusted Goldwyn, but there had always been some unspoken consanguinity; Pickford had long loathed him. In trying to get his way, Goldwyn knew he had to work on her. As he had in so many crises in the past, he persuaded Joe Schenck to work on his behalf. Even though Schenck was several years removed from United Artists, he took it upon himself to send a long letter to Mary Pickford. “A producer who spends between eight and nine million dollars a year has a perfect right and good reason to be apprehensive if he thinks the company, through which he distributes, is not properly managed,” he wrote Mary Pickford in a long letter on March 16, 1938. He asserted that “Dr. Giannini does not concern himself intimately enough with the distributing end of the business as it cannot be done from Hollywood.” Schenck said that “knowing United Artists as well as I do and knowing Sam as I do, I am convinced that he has no ulterior motive in what he wants to bring about.”

  According to attorney Charles Schwartz, Goldwyn “harassed and annoyed the bejesus out of Giannini, and finally persuaded Mary and Doug to throw Giannini out.” Chaplin would not vote to remove him; in fact, he stopped talking to Goldwyn for instigating the ouster. Giannini resigned, and Silverstone was hired as general manager of United Artists. His first important assignment was to design a profit-sharing schedule. The Silverstone Plan included a record $500,000 dividend to be split among the five partners—enough to assuage Chaplin, Pickford, and Fairbanks—and a producers’ fund from which bonuses would be paid according to the success of each picture—thus rewarding Goldwyn and Korda and such nonstockholding producers as Wanger and Selznick.

  Goldwyn remained contentious, never content. With the three former giants of the company shoved into the background, he started to make life difficult for Alexander Korda (then struggling to keep his British film empire afloat), voting down propositions that might be to his advantage. Silverstone would be his next target.

  The virulence with which Goldwyn dealt with his United Artists partners was one sure sign that he had fully recovered from his recent ailments. Another was the vigor with which he began discharging the bright young men around him. Over a period of months, he set traps for all his assistants so that they would plead to be set free. George Haight, for example, was the victim of subtle demotion. Goldwyn gave him increasingly demeaning tasks to perform and moved his office farther down the corridor of assistants until Haight was literally working out of what had once been a closet. When he could put up with no more, he went in for what he described as his “final surreal meeting” with Goldwyn. “How did it actually end?” Garson Kanin asked his colleague that day. “Did you shake hands, finally?”

  “No,” said Haight. “We shook fists.”

  For a year, Sam Marx had worked as Goldwyn’s story editor, on the promise that he would be allowed to produce pictures. Goldwyn turned down practically every project Marx brought to him and excoriated him for every successful picture that other studios made. “Why haven’t we got that?” he would ask.

  “Part of the problem,” Sam Marx remembered, “was that Goldwyn did not make many movies, so he was really not interested in developing material. He only wanted sure-fire stuff.” Ernest Hemingway told Marx he would sell Sam Goldwyn the rights
to his next work, about the Spanish Civil War, for $25,000. Marx was jubilant, only to have Goldwyn dismiss this piece of literary history in the making. “What are you trying to do—rob me? $25,000 for a book that isn’t even written!”

  One day at a production meeting, Goldwyn verbally attacked Marx for incompetence. The patrician Merritt Hulburd quietly excused himself. Goldwyn moved toward Marx and railed that all the writers and agents in town could not stand him, and that was why Marx had been unable to secure material for the company. Finally, he found the gall to say that the only reason Irving Thalberg had kept Marx on at MGM was that he felt sorry for him. The overt lie gave Marx room to breathe easy. He smiled. At the end of the week they met again and agreed to tear up their contract. After making one phone call to Harry Cohn, he reported for work at Columbia on Monday.

  Merritt Hulburd postponed his appointment in Samarra simply by quitting. He returned to his desk at the Saturday Evening Post in Philadelphia, only to suffer a fatal stroke a short time later. Several of his friends attributed the death to his years of “shock treatments,” sitting at the other end of Goldwyn’s squawk box. Fred Kohlmar also walked out and would come into his own as a producer in the fifties, with such celebrated pictures as Picnic, Pal Joey, and The Last Angry Man.

  Garson Kanin, too, realized that Goldwyn was not helping him attain his ambition. “I wanted to be a director,” he recalled. “I had said so to Goldwyn five or six hundred times—so many times, in fact, that he had stopped listening.” After several months, Abe Lastfogel of the William Morris Agency obtained a job offer for Kanin to direct a “B” picture at RKO, the bottom half of a double feature. They went to Goldwyn to secure Kanin’s release. Goldwyn looked hurt when he heard the news. “Well,” he said, “you’re not the first one who stole money from me.” For the chance to direct this one picture off the lot, Lastfogel said, his client was willing to pay back all the money Kanin had received in the past year. An insulted Goldwyn refused the offer and ultimately let Kanin go. Saying goodbye, he refused to shake “Tallboy”’s hand.