Shortly after Kanin’s film, A Man to Remember, had opened, to respectable notices, he ran into Goldwyn at a party honoring William Wyler and his new bride, a beauty from Dallas named Margaret Tallichet. Goldwyn approached Kanin and said, “You dirty little bastard. You dirty, double-crossing little son of a bitch.... Why didn’t you ever tell me you wanted to be a director?”
Wyler explained to Kanin that Goldwyn believed with all his heart that Kanin had never once mentioned his ambition. To think otherwise was to concede that he had blundered. “He’s used bad judgment,” Wyler elucidated, “so rather than admit this, he convinced himself you never mentioned it. I think it may be one of the main reasons for his success. To himself, he’s never wrong. He’s a god. Not a bad thing to be, especially if you live on earth.” Kanin asked Wyler, “What makes you think he lives on earth?”
AFTER twenty-five years in the motion picture business, Goldwyn had the public believing he was someone special. Ben Hecht wrote that Goldwyn as a collaborator was inarticulate but stimulating, that he “filled the room with wonderful panic and beat at your mind like a man in front of a slot machine, shaking it for a jackpot.” Alva Johnston, in his four-part Saturday Evening Post profile in the spring of 1937, wrote:
Patiently, diligently, he reaches into and searches $3000-a-week brains and $5000-a-week brains in the hope of finding something worthy of Goldwyn. He is a Flaubert—with the exception that the French genius tirelessly explored his own intellect for the perfect effect, while Goldwyn tirelessly explores the intellects that he has under contract. The results over a long period have justified Sam’s methods.
William Wyler remembered reading Johnston’s The Great Goldwyn, which Random House published after its appearance in the Post. It amused him and annoyed him. “Tell me,” he asked in 1980, only half-joking, “which pictures have ‘the Goldwyn touch’ that I didn’t direct?”
16 Annus Mirabilis
THE FEBRUARY 1, 1938, issue of American Vogue ran an article by Frank Crowninshield called “The New Left Wing in New York Society.” It was about Manhattan’s “Café Society,” a “newly formed, colourful, prodigal, and highly publicized social army, the ranks of which are largely made up of rich, carefree, emancipated, and quite often, idle people.” Bordering the opening two pages of the piece was a pen-and-ink montage by Cecil Beaton. On one side he sketched symbols of old money—a manor house, portraits of ancestors, classical music, volumes of Shakespeare and French poetry; on the other he drew satirical nightclub scenes, a blaring jazz band, scandalous newspaper headlines, and Walter Winchell’s column. At the bottom of that page, in minuscule handwriting, Beaton’s marginalia trespassed into vulgarity.
“M. R. Andrew ball at the El Morocco brought out all the damn kikes in town,” read the microscopic caption to his cartoon of a magazine society page; and in print just as fine, he wrote “Party darling Love Kike” on a Western Union telegram. Then on some cards and telegrams in and around a box of orchids—legible only by turning the magazine upside down and putting one’s nose to the page—Beaton wrote, “Why is Mrs. Selznick such a social wow? Why Mrs. Goldwyn etc. Why Mrs. L. B. Mayer?”
Walter Winchell learned of Beaton’s act of veiled anti-Semitism as the first copies of the magazine were hitting the street, and he took Vogue to task in his column. Until then, publisher Condé Nast had not known of Beaton’s cryptic comments. Some 150,000 copies had already been shipped, and nothing could be done about them; the remaining 130,000 were reprinted with the objectionable lines expunged. Cecil Beaton—one of Vogue’s standard-bearers—was discharged, his work banned from the pages of all Condé Nast publications. Privately, Beaton referred to the incident as “a wretched little foible,” a joke; three months later, he asked Nast to reinstate him. Three years would pass before Nast relented.
The incident blew over most of Hollywood virtually unnoticed. At 1200 Laurel Lane, however, it caused a cyclone of irrational behavior. The reason, said Sammy, was that “Mother realized that as far as the world was concerned, she was a Jewess.”
Quite sensibly, Frances had recently discharged one of her household maids, Senta Schmidt, when she learned the German woman had been filling Sammy with pro-Hitler propaganda. Having had this “fifth column” living in her own home, Frances was now convinced that Nazis were everywhere. She accepted both her and Sam’s having been publicly branded with Stars of David; but as Hitler began to overrun Austria and Czechoslovakia, she was determined that he would never get hold of her son. She prepared for a Nazi conquest of America by devising a scheme that would allow Sammy to assume a second identity. Her plan was to bring some of her son’s clothes to the beach and let them wash on the shore, establishing that he had drowned. He would reappear, using another name, in Mexico, where money would be waiting for him—enough to last a lifetime if necessary. Sammy’s father, most of whose relatives still lived within Hitler’s reach, tried to reason with Frances, but on this subject there was no getting through to her. Like most American Jews then, on the subject of religion Sam Goldwyn silenced himself because “he didn’t want to make waves.”
The movie industry found its own way to respond to the rising tide of fascism. At the start of 1939, Will Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, held a meeting in New York of representatives of leading educational institutions, religious and civic groups, women’s clubs, youth organizations, and some of the members of the MPPDA’s Public Relations Committee. They spoke of films as though they were part of the national archives, powerful symbols of the nation’s strength, forceful weapons. The conferees called for: “the continuance and increase of those ... treatments which have made the American motion picture a true product of democracy, by emphasizing in popular entertainments mankind’s long struggle for freedom and the hopes and aspirations of free men everywhere.” Will Hays himself sent a copy of the resolutions of that meeting to every important motion picture producer in the country, including Sam Goldwyn.
Few had profited more from the nine years of depression than the titans of Hollywood. They met a public demand, feeding the values of the American Dream to 80 million Americans a week. The business of movies alone employed 280,000 people and kept 17,500 theaters operating in more than 9,000 cities. The motion picture industry paid the federal government $100 million a year in taxes. Among the motion picture community’s new contributors was a generation of European filmmakers, such refugees as Fritz Lang, William Dieterle, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, and Russian-born Anatole Litvak. They found themselves in the same town as Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, Lion Feuchtwanger, and composer Arnold Schönberg—Jews who did not come to work in films ... but mingled with members of the movie colony, imbuing Hollywood with an international flavor and intellectual fervor.
The Jews who ran Hollywood found new purpose in manufacturing their product. They poured their restless religious feelings into some six hundred films that year—infusing the very best human values, as spelled out in Will Hays’s President’s Report. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would be translated into tragic love stories, heroic adventures, and uplifting comedies tooled by craftsmen of the highest order. Nineteen thirty-nine-and a few monthly calendar leaves on either side—was a year of masterpieces, the greatest burst of creativity in Hollywood’s history.
Leo, the MGM lion, was king of the Hollywood jungle. Harry Brandt, president of the powerful Independent Theatre Owners of America, had recently bought newspaper advertisements in which he labeled Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Kay Francis, Edward Arnold, Fred Astaire, and Katharine Hepburn “poison at the box office” and urged studios not to make films with them anymore. Louis B. Mayer stood behind those who were under contract to him. That year, MGM presented Lubitsch’s production of Ninotchka, luring audiences by announcing, “Garbo Laughs!” MGM also unleashed Joan Crawford in her first unsympathetic “bitch” role, in Clare Boothe’s The Women. MGM’s talented young actors peddled the values
of “the American way of life.” In addition to playing the title role in that year’s production of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mickey Rooney was in the middle of a fifteen-picture cycle of films that depicted the Hardy family of Carvel, Idaho. Rooney’s co-star in another picture he made that year, Babes in Arms, was Judy Garland; in 1939, she sold America on the philosophy “There’s no place like home,” after visiting a land over the rainbow in The Wizard of Oz. Admiration of strong, traditional values was nowhere more in evidence that year than in MGM’s version of James Hilton’s novel about British schooldays, Goodbye, Mr. Chips. It starred Robert Donat and, in her debut, a heavenly red-haired Anglo-Irish beauty named Greer Garson. The themes of patriotism and freedom got aired openly in Idiot’s Delight, starring Norma Shearer, Edward Arnold, and Clark Gable. The “King” was also about to assume the most commanding male role of the year, Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind. In exchange for his services, Louis B. Mayer won the rights to release the film from his son-in-law David Selznick.
As much as Mayer, Darryl Zanuck influenced the films his studio produced; and Twentieth Century-Fox also emerged in 1939 as a leader in popular entertainment that extolled American virtues. John Ford directed Henry Fonda in Young Mr. Lincoln and Drums Along the Mohawk. That same year, Fonda and Tyrone Power turned the lives of Frank and Jesse James into a touching family drama, Spencer Tracy went in search of Cedric Hardwicke in Stanley and Livingstone, Don Ameche composed some of America’s most beloved songs in Swanee River and invented the telephone in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell. The studio saluted England in 1939 by pairing Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in The Adventurea of Sherlock Holmes. By the end of the year, production was under way on The Grapes of Wrath, with John Ford again directing Henry Fonda, as Tom Joad.
Warner Brothers’ films in 1939 reflected the national spirit as well. Cagney and Bogart appeared in The Roaring Twenties, but it proved to be among the last of the studio’s gangster pictures. Tough guy Edward G. Robinson turned G-man in Confessions of a Nazi Spy. The former “fugitive from a chain gang,” Paul Muni, had become the cinema’s most luminous impersonator of historical heroes—Pasteur, Zola, and, that year, Mexican revolutionary leader Juárez. In 1939 alone, Muni’s co-star as Empress Carlota, Bette Davis, would appear as the queen in Elizabeth and Essex (opposite Errol Flynn) and as tragic victims in two of Warner Brothers’ vintage “women’s pictures”—Dark Victory (with George Brent) and The Old Maid (opposite Miriam Hopkins).
The drop in quality and quantity of Paramount’s production that year revealed their ongoing economic turmoil, but a few big names kept the truth in their advertising: “If it’s a Paramount picture, it’s the best show in town.” Adolph Zukor, in his mid-sixties, had been kicked upstairs as chairman of the board, but he kept his hand in production matters. Under him, DeMille limned “the story of the spanning of America by steel” in Union Pacific. Gary Cooper—who had made more than forty films for Paramount in ten years—appeared in Beau Geste.
No filmmaker captured the optimism of the human condition so vigorously as Frank Capra. In 1939, he draped all his favorite themes in Old Glory in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, again for Columbia Pictures. While James Stewart was playing Senator Jefferson Smith, Harry Cohn also had Cary Grant in Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings.
The smaller studios contributed to the cornucopia of films in 1939 as well. Universal presented their treatment of law and order in Dertry Rides Again, with Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart, who this time played a mild-mannered sheriff, Thomas Jefferson Destry. RKO offered such solid entertainments as Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, and Love Affair, with Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer, the screen’s new “great lover.” The studio also began distributing the films of Walt Disney. After six years with United Artists, Disney left for RKO’s better terms on the eve of his completing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first feature-length cartoon. RKO had also just closed a deal with the force behind the Mercury Theatre, Orson Welles; they offered him the chance to write, direct, and star in a film of his choice. He began work on Citizen Kane.
United Artists remained the magnet for the industry’s most prominent independent filmmakers. Walter Wanger produced the archetypal western Stagecoach, starring John Wayne. Hal Roach produced the second in his series of “Topper” pictures, then turned serious, hiring Lewis Milestone to direct an adaptation of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Samuel Goldwyn’s only full partner at United Artists to produce any films that year was Alexander Korda, who made Priton Without Bars and The Four Feathers. And David Selznick upheld his commitments to UA, completing Made for Each Other, a melodrama with James Stewart and Carole Lombard, and signing a contract for another four pictures. The first of them, released while Gone With the Wind was in production, was Intermezzo, a remake of a Swedish love story between a married violinist and his protégée, played by Ingrid Bergman. Simultaneously, Selznick imported Alfred Hitchcock from England to begin work on another best-seller he was adapting for the screen, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.
Irving Thalberg’s death left a great void in Goldwyn’s heart, which David Selznick began to fill. Goldwyn liked giving the prodigious producer—twenty—three years his junior—endless advice, mostly about the marketing of pictures. He felt more than recompensed just by the pleasure of Selznick’s zestful company—especially at the card table, where the compulsive thirty-seven-year-old proved to be one of the town’s pigeons. (Frances Goldwyn was already several steps ahead of her husband, having pursued Irene Selznick years earlier. It was inevitable that these two perspicacious women—each able to play all the Hollywood social games without ever losing the ability to laugh at them—would become fast friends for life, confidantes who discussed the inner workings of Hollywood during long walks around the Stone Canyon Reservoir.)
“No matter how much success he had,” said Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., thinking especially of this period in his father’s career, “he was still an outsider.” Goldwyn’s successful example of quality independent production was proving increasingly attractive to the most creative producers in town. Even so, the deck remained stacked against the independents. The major studios were still rich and powerful enough to control most of the important properties and actors. Unwilling to die, Goldwyn aggressively tried to change all that.
Throughout the thirties, as Gary Cooper steadily climbed to the top of the list of box-office stars, he and his wife found themselves increasingly frequent guests at the Goldwyn dinner table. Some evenings, the two couples just played bridge together. One night, Goldwyn kept Cooper in the dining room while the wives withdrew for coffee. He knew that Paramount had been negotiating a new contract with the actor, but Cooper said that nothing had been signed. Goldwyn offered to top anything they offered. Unknown to Zukor, the actor and his agent agreed to a six-picture deal with Goldwyn over six years, each film guaranteeing Cooper at least $150,000.
Goldwyn could not help announcing in Variety his “exclusive contract” with Gary Cooper. It was as ill-timed as it was untrue. Not only had the actor not completed his commitments to Paramount, but he would still be able to appear in other studios’ films when Goldwyn was not employing him. Furthermore, Paramount claimed that the fine print in Cooper’s present contract kept him from accepting another offer until he had rejected one from them. The matter fell into the hands of studio attorneys. Goldwyn knew the litigation would run on for several years, during which time he intended to make his few movies with Cooper while giving him plenty of time to honor any other contracts. The courts ultimately ruled the same. Shuttling between Hollywood lots, Cooper earned $482,819 in 1939, making him the top wage earner in the nation.
For months, Goldwyn looked in vain for projects for Cooper and Merle Oberon, who was growing as both a movie star and an actress. He announced their appearing in “Maximilian of Mexico,” “Hans Christian Andersen,” and a romance set in a mythical kingdom c
alled “Graustark.” All three productions were scrapped. His New York story editor, Miriam Howell, had tried to interest him in Rebecca and Dark Victory for Oberon, but Goldwyn was not interested. West Coast story editor Edwin Knopf met similar indifference when he pleaded with Goldwyn to option The Grapes of Wrath for Cooper. Lillian Hellman also urged Goldwyn to obtain the rights to the Steinbeck novel, which she was eager to adapt, but the “gloom and the sordidness of the background and the people plus a pro-Communist indication” made him shy away. After Fox bought it for John Ford, Goldwyn said to Hellman, “Let Zanuck make a mess of it.”
Goldwyn might have done just that with another work that became a screen classic. To remove the stink of “poison” from her name, Katharine Hepburn retreated from Hollywood until she could find the right vehicle to chariot her back. In late 1938, playwright Philip Barry discussed with her a play he was calling The Philadelphia Story. She agreed to star in it and bought the film rights. After she had made a hit of the play on Broadway, producers pounded on her dressing room door. It was not enough, Hepburn told them, that she re-create the role on the screen; more important to her was whom they would provide for support. To reinstate herself with the public, Hepburn felt she needed on each arm a man with strong box-office appeal. Goldwyn was mad for the material. He offered Gary Cooper and sent Willy Wyler to Hepburn’s town house in New York to discuss the play. In the end, Cooper felt he was wrong for the role—not that he could not portray the debonair Main Liner C. K. Dexter Haven, but because his presence in the film would rob the play of its suspense, the audience knowing that the heroine would inevitably end up with him. When Louis B. Mayer promised Cary Grant and James Stewart, Hepburn shook hands on a deal. “I AM HEARTBROKEN AND I HOPE WHAT I HAVE HEARD IS NOT SO,” Goldwyn wired the star at the Shubert Theater. It was; and she made nine films for MGM in the next decade alone.
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