Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  After months of deliberation, Goldwyn optioned Edna Ferber’s Nobody’s in Town, a short novel set in Manhattan. Sidney Howard agreed to write the screenplay, his first film assignment since completing his adaptation of Gone With the Wind. His correspondence with Goldwyn was full of old affection. Howard quickly got a draft on paper and pronounced “much of it fresh, lively, human and entertaining.” Over the next few months, he intended to spend as much time as possible on his farm in Tyringham, Massachusetts, where he would rewrite the script. One day that August, he cranked a tractor while it was still in gear, and it crushed him to death. He had not completed the screenplay, nor did he ever see the final results of his work on Margaret Mitchell’s novel. He left three children from his second marriage, to Polly Damrosch, and a daughter, Jennifer, from his first. Nobody’s in Town never reached the screen.

  Knowing that most stars’ careers burned bright for but a few years, Goldwyn felt he had to strike while his irons were hot, even if his properties for them were not. In the mid-thirties, Douglas Fairbanks had dreamed up an idea of a film for himself about Marco Polo. When his popularity dimmed, he decided to produce the picture, perhaps starring his son. After divorcing Mary Pickford and marrying an English social climber, he came to Sam Goldwyn for assistance. Three meetings later, Fairbanks found Goldwyn taking over every aspect of the production. He begged his close friend David Rose, Goldwyn’s new vice president and general manager, “to get him out of the deal.” Goldwyn had no problems with that: He would simply produce the film alone.

  He hired Robert Sherwood, who wrote a cheeky romantic adventure, built around the explorer’s discoveries of spaghetti and fireworks and his teaching Oriental beauties the Western custom of kissing. At the court of Kublai Khan, the rakish Marco Polo falls for the royal daughter, Princess Kukachin. Part of the script’s humor lay in its twentieth-century dialogue coming from the mouths of thirteenth-century characters. Goldwyn commandeered Gary Cooper into the role, the first film under his new contract. Sherwood thought Cooper was all wrong for the part as written.

  A sure-handed director—someone who could bring out all the virility of the piece and have a good laugh about it at the same time—might mesh the sly script with the shy actor. John Cromwell, who had done just that with Ronald Colman in The Prisoner of Zenda, got the job. Seventeen-year-old Lana Turner had a bit part, as a Eurasian handmaiden. The naive young blonde was thrilled that Mervyn LeRoy had loaned her out for this, her third movie role; it made her think she just might have a career in motion pictures.

  Merle Oberon, with her exotic Oriental looks, would have been the obvious choice to play the leading lady, Princess Kukachin. But she was in England, working for Korda, the part was too small, and Goldwyn still resisted drawing attention to her Asiatic features. Instead, he cast his newest discovery, a fair, high-foreheaded Norwegian named Sigrid Gurie, and promoted her as the “Norwegian Garbo.” A month later, his twenty-seven-year-old “siren of the fjords” filed suit for divorce from a hitherto unsuspected husband, and news quickly broke that not only had Miss Gurie been married to an American luggagemaker but she had been born in Brooklyn—Flatbush, no less. The revelation stunned Goldwyn only momentarily. He told the press it was “the greatest hoax in movie history.”

  Shooting proceeded without incident for five days before Goldwyn realized that director John Cromwell was playing Sherwood’s tongue-in-cheek script completely straight. A shouting match in Goldwyn’s office ensued, from which the director emerged announcing his resignation. Goldwyn turned to Willy Wyler, who asserted that the problem was with the lead, that the role cried out “for a swashbuckler like Fairbanks or Errol Flynn. But Goldwyn said Cooper was the biggest star in the world and that he could play anything.” Wyler refused the assignment and went to Europe, while his contract was “suspended and extended.” Goldwyn pressed John Ford, mopping up after filming The Hurricane, into temporary service. He directed a blizzard sequence and a crossing of the Himalayas. At last Goldwyn signed Archie Mayo, who had no special qualifications for The Adventures of Marco Polo other than his availability.

  The movie fell flat on its face. Newsweek commented that the $2 million production was “a disappointing case of touch and go with the Goldwyn touch.” Few reviews were as kind. Even with the pull of Gary Cooper, the film ended up $700,000 in the hole, the first big slip in the actor’s career. When Goldwyn rereleased the film in the forties, Sigrid Gurie’s name was lost in the ad copy, and Lana Turner was billed as Cooper’s co-star, despite her appearance on screen for no more than a few seconds. Following the $725,000 loss of The Goldwyn Follies in the company ledger, Samuel Goldwyn suffered his biggest dip in earnings.

  Back on the Paramount lot, Cooper played a cosmopolitan millionaire opposite Claudette Colbert in an Ernst Lubitsch production called Blueheards Eighth Wife. The film’s failure made Goldwyn anxious to get Cooper back into Stetson and chaps, preferably with Merle Oberon at his side. A fixture in Hollywood since the days of one-reel silent comedies, Leo McCarey, heard of Goldwyn’s situation and provided the spur. “He could create hilarious situations, and imaginatively, almost inexhaustibly, develop those situations,” said Garson Kanin. “He was not a writer, but he was a superlative talker, and in a time and place where there was a paucity of readers and a plethora of listeners, talkers were more effective (and more successful) than writers.”

  Goldwyn gathered his team of story editors and assistants to listen to McCarey’s latest idea for a picture. None realized he told his whole story off the cuff. For the better part of an hour, he painted scenes that would show off stars, he invented comic situations, he described gags. McCarey’s story boiled down to nothing more than the standard boy-meets-girl formula, involving a red-blooded cowboy and a blue-blooded daughter of a presidential candidate. It was called The Cowboy and the Lady. Goldwyn was not quite sure an entire plot had been revealed during the sales pitch, but he was ready to buy it.

  The next morning, Goldwyn asked each of the men who had been present to tell the plot of The Cowboy and the Lady. After the ninth version, he had enough sense of what the story might be that he bought it for $50,000. That night, Kanin ran into McCarey and congratulated him. “Yeah,” McCarey said, “but now the trouble is, I’ve got to write it down ... and I can’t remember what the hell I said.” A dozen writers developed his twenty-five-page outline, including such literary talents as Anita Loos, Dorothy Parker, Robert Riskin (who had written most of Capra’s classic films), and S. N. Behrman, who got screen credit.

  Cooper never liked the script, but he was glad to get back in western gear. Merle Oberon buttered up Goldwyn with a gift of a black smoking jacket, in an attempt to get out of the picture. She consented to play in it only if she had a good director to guide her. Goldwyn offered his best. Wyler thought the script was “awful, just awful,” but he could not afford another suspension. He weaseled out of the assignment legally.

  Knowing his pace drove Goldwyn crazy, Wyler put in three days on the picture, using up more film than usual. Goldwyn discharged him. He kept Merle Oberon’s feathers unruffled by promising a part in the picture to her current flame, David Niven, and letting her choose the new director. She picked Henry Potter, who had directed her in Beloved Enemy. He lasted most of the shooting, before Goldwyn replaced him. Niven’s part was ultimately cut from the picture.

  The Cowboy and the Lady cost $1.5 million and became Goldwyn’s third loss in a row. After a year of requesting new stories in which his two stars could appear together, he now insisted they be kept apart.

  His next project for Cooper was an out-and-out adventure film, practically all action. Robert Riskin and a battery of writers developed The Real Glory, the story of an American doctor and two soldiers of fortune (Broderick Crawford and David Niven, sporting a mustache) in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. Cooper would play the mainstay of civility in a white community threatened by Moro terrorists run amok. In the course of an hour and a half, he would cure a cholera ep
idemic, blow up a crucial dam for an officer who had gone blind, challenge rapids, and win the final battle in the bloodiest sequence ever recorded in a Goldwyn picture.

  The 1939 release of The Real Glory, on the heels of Cooper’s great adventure performance in Beau Gerte for Paramount that year, helped shore up the actor’s slippage at the box office. But the actor knew Goldwyn had shoved him into three mediocre parts in a row, just to cash in on his name. He went to Goldwyn’s general manager and pleaded to be let out of his contract. David Rose assuaged him with the promise of better pictures.

  Merle Oberon, meanwhile, backed into the role of her life. Goldwyn had all but been conned into producing the film, but it would become his all-time favorite. Its route to the screen began in 1936, when Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur summered on their friend Alexander Woollcott’s private island in the middle of a lake near Bomoseen, Vermont. There, on speculation, they adapted Wuthering Heights. Knowing Woollcott was a hopeless snoop, they wrote ten pages of a dummy script, which they left for him to find—scenes of Heathcliff’s lost year in the New World, written in what Hecht called “Ugh, ugh, heap big pow-wow dialogue” between Heathcliff and Chief Crooked Head. The prank kept Woollcott out of their hair for the eight days they needed to complete one of the best scripts of their years of collaboration.

  Their version of Wuthering Heights. neatly extracted the heart of the dark romance between Heathcliff, the waif from Liverpool who became the brooding stableboy, and Catherine Earnshaw, the bewitching girl of the moorlands. In stripping away many characters and telescoping the passage of time, the screenwriters preserved the intensity of the lovers at Wuthering Heights in all their twisted passion. The script was kicked around town for months, before Walter Wanger bought it for his two romantic leads, Charles Boyer and Sylvia Sidney.

  But first Wanger had wanted the actors to appear in Algierr together, with Miss Sidney supporting the ingenue, Hedy Lamarr. Not only did the veteran actress think the stunning newcomer to American films would steal the picture; she thought her own role of the vengeful half-caste was yet “another tenement girl—this time in spangles.” Already studying a Yorkshire accent for her part in Wuthering Heights, she refused to do Algiers. She and Wanger had a violent screaming match, after which he lost all interest in rewarding her with the part of Cathy. Then his second choice for the role, Katharine Hepburn, was labeled box-office poison, and he lost interest in the project. When Wanger muttered that he wanted “to put laughs in the picture,” Hecht and MacArthur asked Sam Goldwyn to buy the script from him.

  Goldwyn was not sure he wanted it. The script was relentlessly grim. Like the novel, it unraveled the story of the unconventional lovers in flashback, which confused him. He did not see why an audience would be pulling for a capricious, irresponsible girl or a hate-filled homeless boy from the streets of England who made good in America, only to seek his revenge. Goldwyn sent the script to Willy Wyler for his opinion. The director was ecstatic; he urgently recommended purchasing it but knew that was not enough to persuade the producer.

  Wyler’s latest picture had just opened to rave reviews. Jezebel, with Bette Davis, made on loanout to Warner Brothers, attempted to cash in on the nation’s mania for the Old South. It beat Gone With the Wind to the screen by better than a year, and Bette Davis forever contended it was the role—her second to win an Oscar—that made her a star. Actress and director were both eager to work together again, and Wyler slipped her the script of Wuthering Heights. She asked Jack Warner to buy it for her. The director knew that was all Goldwyn needed to hear, but his plan partially backfired. Goldwyn was delighted to grab a property Warner wanted, but he knew Warner would never hand over his biggest star. Before buying the script, Goldwyn asked Wyler, “Can Merle play the part?”

  The director had to admit she could. Wanger sold the screenplay to Goldwyn right out from under Sylvia Sidney’s nose, in a moment of what she called “absolute vengeance.” Goldwyn loaned him Sigrid Gurie for the secondary role in Algiers. And each producer thought he had outfoxed the other. The part of Cathy was Merle Oberon’s.

  Goldwyn wanted to do everything possible to brighten the story, but what fascinated Wyler about Wuthering Heights were its shadows. He discussed with Gregg Toland how they might capture the moodiness of the piece. The cinematographer suggested candlelike effects by subtly diffusing the light. He said characters’ faces could be kept in partial darkness, then come into the light at climactic moments. He recommended low camera positions to capture the ceilings of the sets, thereby emphasizing the stifling confines and dour loneliness of Wuthering Heights. The film would be filmed in tight shots as much as possible, focusing on the characters’ tension.

  Even though the Hecht and MacArthur screenplay was beautifully laid out, Wyler had his usual preproduction jitters. He said the script was not ready, and he insisted that his close friend John Huston, who had patched parts of Jezebel, work on it for a few weeks. Once Huston had signed a contract, he and Wyler and Goldwyn met for a series of story conferences. They invariably ended up in shouting fests, as Goldwyn discovered Huston would have nothing to do with making Cathy and Heathcliff more “likable.” Huston could stand the vociferation no longer. “Let’s make a wager,” he said; “each one of us puts up fifty dollars, and the first one who starts yelling loses.” Wyler agreed and put his fifty dollars alongside Huston’s. Goldwyn—who never carried money—went along, saying he was good for his. The three men completed their story conference in modulated tones, and in rising from the table, Goldwyn raked in the hundred dollars. Wyler asked what he was doing. “I win,” Goldwyn said. “What do you mean, you win?” Wyler asked. “Well,” said Goldwyn, trying to pocket the money, “I didn’t yell.”

  When Goldwyn’s sales department reported that they did not like the title Wuthering Heights, Goldwyn instructed his story department to better it. Wyler said such an idea was “crazy.” Jock Lawrence came up with “The Wild Heart,” “Dark Laughter,” and “Bring Me the World,” but told Goldwyn he would “be in for very bad condemnation if this title is changed because it is a classic. It is exactly as if Selznick would have dared to change ‘David Copperfield’ to A Little Boy in England‘ or ’Little Women‘ to ’Katy Wins Her Man.‘” Goldwyn would allow the time period of the novel to be updated by several decades, because Regency costumes would not show off Merle Oberon’s shoulders to their best advantage; but he did stick with Miss Brontë’s title. Because his ear often led his mouth to pronounce words in ways that sounded more familiar, he always referred to the film as “Withering Heights.”

  While the script was being rewritten, Ben Hecht saw a film at home in New York, 21 Days, a Korda production that starred Vivien Leigh opposite an actor who had recently won kudos at the Old Vic, playing Hamlet. “I SAW LAWRENCE [sic] OLIVIER ON THE SCREEN LAST NIGHT,” Hecht wired from Nyack, “AND THOUGHT HIM ONE OF THE MOST MAGNIFICENT ACTORS I HAVE EVER SEEN HE COULD RECITE HEATHCLIFF SITTING ON A BARREL OF HERRING AND BREAK YOUR HEART.”

  Merle Oberon seconded the opinion. But after a dozen appearances in British films, Olivier had not caught on with the moviegoing public. His last visit to Hollywood, in 1933, ended when Garbo herself banished him from the cast of Queen Christina, Olivier later admitted that he had “despised” the notion of acting in motion pictures, and he had no interest in returning to Hollywood just then because he was engaged in a love affair with Miss Leigh. At Goldwyn’s dictation, Merle Oberon cabled Olivier in London: “I HEAR GOLDWYN WANTS YOU FOR WUTHERING HEIGHTS STOP THOUGHT YOU WOULD LIKE TO KNOW PART MAGNIFICENT BEST SCRIPT HAVE EVER READ ALSO HEAR HE WOULD LIKE VIVIEN FOR PART YOUR WIFE PICTURE TO BEGIN SEPTEMBER HOPE YOU WILL BE ABLE TO DO IT.” Neither Goldwyn nor Oberon knew that Olivier did not think much of Merle’s acting ability, and the thought of working with her made the proposition less appealing. Olivier was considering the role of Heathcliff only with the understanding that Vivien Leigh play Cathy.

  Wyler went to London to hire an all-English cast, notably Olivier, w
hom Goldwyn was now bent on signing. For days, Wyler had no luck in bringing him around. Then, on July 7, 1938, he cabled Goldwyn: “HAVE FOUND HEATHCLIFF AMAZING YOUNG ENGLISH ACTOR ... MUCH BETTER THAN OLIVIER.” His name was Robert Newton. The rugged actor with fiery eyes and a crackling voice had appeared in only a few English films, but he seemed perfectly suited to play the character as Emily Brontë had written him. Goldwyn did not like his looks. He maintained that onscreen the role required a man of some physical beauty if the film was to work with audiences at all. At Merle Oberon’s suggestion, Goldwyn tested Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., but found him as weak as he had found Newton ugly. “NEWTON OUT OF QUESTION,” Goldwyn cabled Wyler back. “PLEASE DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE SELL OLIVIER PART AND PERSUADE HIM COME HERE WITH LEIGH ACT PROMPTLY.”

  Wyler took to dining with Olivier and Miss Leigh in their town house on Christchurch Street. One night, the host took Wyler to see St. Martin’s Lane, one of the actress’s films in current release. Wyler never doubted her ability, but at their next dinner together he said he could offer no better than the part of Isabella, the woman Heathcliff marries after Cathy has settled on Edgar Linton. Vivien Leigh plainly had her sights set on a big Hollywood film career and told Wyler point-blank that she would only accept the role of Cathy. Wyler contended that that was impossible, that the only reason Goldwyn was making the film was to showcase Merle Oberon. “Then I don’t want any part,” said Leigh. Wyler tried to explain the facts of studio life to her. “Look, Vivien,” he said. “You’re not known in the States. Nobody’s ever heard of you there. Someday you might become known. But for your first role in an American film, you’re never going to get a better part than Isabella!”