Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  Wyler pushed for Robert Newton harder than ever, insisting that he was a “young Muni” and that even Alexander Korda thought he was ideal. Goldwyn agreed to additional tests with Newton, suggesting that a mustache might make him appear more like Ronald Colman. The director was now convinced. “NEWTON MAGNIFICENT HEATHCLIFF,” he cabled Goldwyn; “HAS STRENGTH AND POWER WHICH OLIVIER LACKS STOP OLIVIER HAS UNAVOIDABLE WEAKNESS.” He suggested that Goldwyn’s first choice would make a much better Hindley—Cathy’s lily-livered brother. “OLIVIER ALSO ADMITS NEWTON BETTER HEATHCLIFF,” concluded Wyler, “WHY CANT YOU BELIEVE ME ABOUT NEWTON AM YOUR AGENT NOT HIS.”

  In all the ruckus, Olivier asked his dearest friend, Ralph Richardson, if he should take the role. Richardson said, “Yes. Bit of fame. Good.” Without warning, Olivier announced his change of heart to Wyler, who cabled Goldwyn from aboard the Queen Mary on his return to America. “OLIVIER NOW VERY EAGER. CAN BE STALLED UNTIL MY ARRIVAL ALSO SOLD VIVIEN LEIGH ISABELLA.” In the end, Goldwyn would not meet her price, and she chose not to accompany Olivier. He sailed alone.

  After a few months, “blind with misery at being parted from Vivien,” Olivier learned that his agent’s brother, David Selznick, was ready to start shooting Gone With the Wind but still had not cast Scarlett O‘Hara. The night the producer ordered the burning of forty acres of exterior sets on his back lot, which were doubling for battle-blazed Atlanta, she appeared with Myron Selznick. “David,” he said, as flames illuminated Miss Leigh’s face, “meet Scarlett O’Hara.”

  The colony of British actors in Hollywood—which had grown large enough since talking pictures to support a thriving cricket club—filled the cast of Wuthering Heights. Leo G. Carroll, Cecil Kellaway, Cecil Humphreys, and Miles Mander took the supporting roles. Jack Warner loaned out Irish-born Geraldine Fitzgerald (newly arrived in California) to play Isabella and Donald Crisp as Dr. Kenneth. Wyler imported Flora Robson from England to play the story’s narrator, Ellen Dean. That left uncast only the role of Edgar Linton, what the poor bloke who ended up playing it would call the “actor’s nightmare.” In supporting the tempestuous leads, there was little for the character to do but simper and snivel. Goldwyn thought the role called for a “sympathetic, charming, and fine actor”; after three years of grooming, he thought David Niven had at last become worthy of such a break.

  “But it’s the most awful part ever written,” Niven told Goldwyn, “and one of the most difficult; please don’t make me do it.” Goldwyn assured him he would have “the best director in the business.” After the humiliation he had suffered at Wyler’s hand on Dodsworth, Niven opted to refuse the part and go on suspension. “I could not afford it,” Niven recounted later, “... but the combination of Edgar and Wyler was too daunting.” Goldwyn sent Wyler to do his bidding again. A couple of weeks into Niven’s forced vacation, Wyler invited him to dinner at Dave Chasen’s restaurant. Over drinks, Niven called Wyler “a son of a bitch to work with.” Wyler laughed and said he had changed, that Niven should join this wonderful cast. “It’ll be a great picture and I’ll make you great in it,” he said assuringly. Niven acceded.

  Amid the splendid scenic design of James Basevi, Wuthering Heights began shooting on December 5, 1938, near Chatsworth, California. Goldwyn had sent a crew to Yorkshire to film the moors, which he matched in the craggy barrens of Ventura County. Wuthering Heights was constructed atop one of the rolling hills, complete with hundreds of panes of hand-blown glass. Kilos of heather were imported from northern England and replanted in southern California among four-foot-high shoots of bristling broom. It drove horticulturists mad to see the inconsistency, but as Wyler noted, “it looked more like a field of heather than a field of heather.” Animal lovers squawked when they read in a press release that the ducks and geese had been hired from a trainer who had snipped the fowls’ vocal cords.

  Of the three principals, Niven was most spared the director’s rod; but if Wyler had changed, it was only for the worse. He made Niven play his first scene over forty times. More than once he reduced Merle Oberon to tears. Twice she ran from the set an emotional and physical wreck: her death scene and the scene in which she recognized that her spirit was as dark as the “gypsy scum” she loved and had to declare, “I am Heathcliff.” Wyler humiliated her in his efforts to get her through these two most difficult dramatic moments. When Cathy had to run out into a gale, trying in vain to stop Heathcliff from riding off, the director came across as nothing less than sadistic. Over and over, he ordered her into the propeller-fanned winds, water hosed through the blades and whipping at her face. Miss Oberon kept cowering in the tempest, but Wyler wanted her to defy it, to be a part of it. After repeated takes, she would take no more. Her shivers gave way to shakes; she began choking and vomiting. Fragile in the best of times, Miss Oberon took to a hospital bed, where she ran a fever for several days. Her absence cost the production thousands of dollars. When she returned, she refused to work under such adversity any longer. But Wyler still had not got the shot the way he wanted it. Goldwyn authorized heaters to be rigged alongside the fans so that the water was warmed before she had to stand up to the bitter storm.

  Olivier most suffered the director’s lashings, and not without cause. “I was over-acting appallingly,” the actor admitted forty-five years later. Time and again, Wyler would catch him in the middle of some stagy posture or extravagant gesture. One day he said, “For Christ sake, what do you think you’re doing? Do you think you’re at the Opera House in Manchester or something?” The classically trained actor was not one to leave the set in a huff. He parried the insults and, in front of much of the cast and the entire crew, lunged back, saying, “I suppose this anemic little medium can’t take great acting.”

  Olivier and Oberon never saw eye to eye. “I think she may have thought that because I was a stage actor of considerable experience by that time, I ... looked upon her as a little pick-up by Korda,” said Olivier, “which she was.” Their mutual animosity came to a head during one of their intense scenes together at Peniston Crag, their childhood “castle.” Oberon complained more than once that drops of Olivier’s saliva were hitting her in the face during the scene. “Why you amateur little bitch,” Olivier shouted, “what’s a spit for Christsake between actors, you bloody little idiot. How dare you speak to me ...” Oberon ran to her dressing room in tears. Wyler told Olivier to go after her and apologize. The actor refused, saying he would not be “insulted by snippets like that.” Wyler repeated his orders, because Olivier had called her an “amateur.” He pointed out that her standing in motion pictures was much higher than his and that she knew plenty about acting for the camera—“a hell of a lot more than you do.”

  After three weeks of shooting, Goldwyn’s churning stomach told him Wuthering Heights was lagging dangerously behind schedule and the performances were below par. He found Wyler guilty of overshooting and overdirecting, and he wrote up all his charges in a letter on December 29, 1938. Goldwyn did not send the letter. He chose to face the accused and hear him out. No director in Hollywood would have subscribed more strongly to the notion of a director’s self-effacement in his work; but Wyler explained that he was trying to create mood in Wuthering Heights, which could come only from shooting unusually. He repeatedly told Goldwyn “not to worry, that it would all piece together.” Film editor Danny Mandell saved the day and, said Wyler years later, “I’m sure he saved my job.”

  Wyler got Mandell to work overtime so that Goldwyn would view as few unedited sequences as possible. The producer thought it “disgraceful,” for example, when he saw the many camera angles from which the simple scene of Heathcliff’s throwing himself on his pallet in the stable and thrusting his fists through the windowpanes was photographed. He felt—as he wrote in his unsent letter—it was “utterly impossible for me to permit you to continue tactics which you used in this scene.” When Goldwyn saw the best of those shots spliced together, drawing in on an extreme close-up of Heathcliff, he appreciated the intense emotional effec
t Wyler had created.

  After seeing the first days’ rushes of Merle Oberon, Goldwyn realized that she was not fully equipped to play her heaviest dramatic moments in Wuthering Heights. He wanted the director to redo her deathbed scene, reminding him, “This is a somber scene and if you remember, I especially wanted Oberon beautifully gowned and beautifully photographed to help lighten it.” Wyler could not have disagreed more. He believed that “when beautiful movie stars allow themselves to look terrible, people think they’re really acting.” Instead of cutting to gorgeous close-ups of Merle Oberon, Wyler and Mandell kept her in less glamorous longer shots as much as possible. After Goldwyn saw the death scene assembled, he wrote to the actress, congratulating her “on the finest scene you have done since you have been in pictures.... Your performance does not surprise me, as I knew you had it, but it will be a surprise to those who do not know you as well as I. I believe you should kiss Wyler for his direction of this scene.”

  Both Goldwyn and Wyler agreed that Olivier’s performance was too hammy, and the director finally admitted to the producer that he did not know what to do about it. Goldwyn realized that the only solution was to turn Wyler from the actor’s enemy into his ally. One day early in the shooting, Goldwyn appeared on the set. Olivier had been suffering from a case of athlete’s foot so terrible that he could not squeeze his swollen foot into his shoes. He saw the producer and director conferring, periodically looking his way. Olivier imagined that if he hobbled over pathetically enough, Goldwyn would hold out his arm and say, “Willy, you must send this poor unfortunate fellow home. He looks dreadfully tired; we’ve got to rest him now.” Olivier limped toward the producer and right on cue, Goldwyn held out his arm and rested his hand on the actor’s shoulder. “Willy,” Goldwyn said, “if this—this actor goes on playing the way he is, I close up the picture. Will you look at that actor’s ugly face. He’s dirty, his performance is rotten, it’s stagey, it’s just nothing.... I won’t have it and if he doesn’t improve, I’m gonna close up the picture.” Wyler snapped to and said, “Right, Mr. Goldwyn. If you leave it to me ...” Goldwyn needed to hear no more. “Now Willy,” he said in leaving, “don’t you pull your punches with this guy.” From that moment on, Wyler hardly had to say another word to Olivier about his performance. “I was obedience itself,” Olivier himself conceded, “... and very nice to Merle and very nice to Willy who was then prepared to teach me.”

  The improving performance did not stop Goldwyn from squeezing more out of Wyler. When they were alone, Goldwyn said that he had not been kidding: he thought Olivier looked ugly and too dirty. Wyler explained that he was playing a poor stableboy and was not supposed to look any better until later in the picture; he said the coarseness enhanced the chemistry with Merle Oberon. If Wyler was not present, Goldwyn was readier with compliments for the director’s work. Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., remembered watching the wedding scene between Cathy and Linton, in which Wyler had improvised a sweet moment of a little girl’s walking up to the bride with a bunch of white heather for good luck. Goldwyn simply smiled at the touch and clucked, “That’s Willy.”

  But it was “that Goddamned Wyler” who was “trying to kill me”—bringing the picture in thirteen days over schedule, more than $100,000 over budget. By the end of shooting, Goldwyn was delighted with the performances—even Olivier‘s—but he found the rough cut frighteningly somber.

  Few films cried out for music so much as Wuthering Heights. Unfortunately, Alfred Newman, after nine years as music director at United Artists and composer of twenty-three Goldwyn scores, had quit the week shooting of the film had started. The greatest booster in Newman’s career had become his biggest hindrance. The UA producers were not coming up with enough pictures to keep him employed full-time; and Goldwyn was making as much money for himself every time he hired Newman out to another studio—$90,000 in 1936 and 1937 alone. When Darryl Zanuck said he wanted to install Newman as music director at Twentieth Century—Fox, where they produced a new picture every week, the composer eagerly accepted. Goldwyn never stopped thinking of Newman as his own employee and hired him to write the score of Wuthering Heights for $5,000. The hour and a quarter of music in the I03-minute movie would become a model of film scoring and one of the composer’s own favorite works. The haunting melodies were perfectly wedded to the melodrama; Cathy’s theme especially—with the otherworldly strains of humming female voices against dreamy strings—was guaranteed to wring every tear out of an audience.

  Just two weeks after the last retakes had been shot, Wuthering Heights sneak-previewed in Riverside, and Goldwyn saw how wrong he could be. The audience’s questionnaire cards were among the worst responses to a motion picture he had ever read. They found the story hard to follow and seemed to concur with Goldwyn’s initial instincts to the material. He said, “People don’t want to look at a corpse at the end of a picture.” With most of the cast dispersed, saving the film seemed hopeless. It occurred to Jock Lawrence that Flora Robson, whose character related the story of Cathy and Heathcliff to a traveler, was still in town. He thought she could read several short, lyrical speeches that might be dropped in at the half-dozen confusing junctures—“just a little glue to hold the story together.”

  Providing a happy ending for the film seemed more difficult, until Goldwyn remarked that MGM’s Three Comrades had recently managed to raise the dead, rejoining the departed friends in the form of spirits. If Wuthering Heights was such a great love story, Goldwyn saw no reason why Cathy and Heathcliff could not be shown as ghostly figures, united at last, walking hand in hand to heaven. Wyler refused to shoot it, insisting it violated the nature of the film. Besides, Olivier was performing onstage in New York and Merle Oberon had left for London. These were small stumbling blocks to Goldwyn. He got Henry Potter to run a camera on Olivier’s and Oberon’s doubles, filming from the rear. “It’s a horrible shot,” Wyler maintained, but Goldwyn simply superimposed it against the final frames of Peniston Crag before the fade-out. He took the doctored film to Santa Barbara for a second preview, and a burst of applause drowned out the last bars of the music over the end credits. “Well,” Goldwyn remarked to the team huddled around him, “they understood it.”

  Still Goldwyn had a marketing problem on his hands. The salesmen were having difficulty booking so unconventional a film. The low marquee wattage of the cast did not help. The most alluring tag line his promotional staff could propose was: “The strangest love story ever told.”

  While Wuthering Heights had started with a strong script and no cast, his other major production in early 1939 had a world-renowned star already filmed and absolutely no story in which to slot his scenes. Ever since Goldwyn began collecting cultural icons for The Goldwyn Follies, he had fixated on the idea of putting Jascha Heifetz in the movies. But after a succession of writers had suggested dozens of plots, all Goldwyn had was the original germ—that Heifetz would portray himself and give a performance that would somehow affect the film’s outcome.

  Unfortunately, the violinist’s schedule would not permit him to wait in Hollywood indefinitely while Goldwyn’s writers fiddled with scripts. Knowing he would spend the summer of 1938 in California, he had signed a contract that gave Goldwyn any four weeks of that season for $75,000. The summer was drawing to a close, and Goldwyn was desperate for a story.

  Finally, writer Irmgard von Cube provided what Goldwyn was looking for. The film’s new focal point became an urban music school about to go under. Heifetz could be used twice—in a concert at Carnegie Hall that would inspire a juvenile delinquent to take up the violin, and later at a concert to benefit the school. The script was far from finished when Goldwyn hustled Heifetz onto a soundstage, where he performed works by Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saens, and Mendelssohn. In September 1938, just before Wuthering Heights had gone before the cameras, Goldwyn conscripted Wyler.

  Months later, John Howard Lawson submitted a script that was to Goldwyn’s satisfaction. “The Restless Age,” as the picture was then called, was meant t
o be a heartwarming drama with a social conscience. A series of coincidences—a young tough finding a violin, his subsequent discovery on the street of a ticket to a Heifetz concert, and his dog running into a music school—kicked off the story, in which music worked wonders on “kids with dirty faces and hungry hearts.” Walter Brennan would play the good-souled taskmaster who teaches music to the underprivileged children for free. Joel McCrea (in yet another two-dimensional supporting role) and Andrea Leeds would provide the music school’s predictable love story. By the time Goldwyn was ready to film the finale, Jascha Heifetz was back east.

  Goldwyn offered him $10,000 to return for one week of filming, but Heifetz refused. His wife said he would accept nothing less than $25,000. The star got his price and rearranged his schedule so that he could film again in late March.

  Goldwyn reluctantly put They Shall Have Music, as the film came to be called, into the hands of Archie Mayo, the man he had blamed for the failure of The Adventurer of Marco Polo. In fact, Goldwyn had tried to fire him after that fiasco, but Mayo had a five-year contract. The producer tried torturing Mayo into leaving. He ordered the director to the studio at odd hours for no reason at all; he publicly dressed him down; he gave him such menial tasks as delivering cans of film from one cutting room to another. “That’s all right, Mr. Goldwyn,” Mayo would say, biting the bullet, “so long as you pay me.” A chagrined Mayo explained to Wyler that he had just bought a big house based on his contract, and he was sure the producer would let up on him at last. But Goldwyn seemed to resent him for being the only director in town who was available. One day he telephoned Mayo on the set. Joel McCrea was walking by as the director was obviously getting chewed out. After a moment, Mayo broke his silence and spoke back into the phone: “Maybe I am, Mr. Goldwyn, but I’m your son of a bitch!”