Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  Within a week of its July 25, 1939, opening, many theater owners who had bought They Shall Have Music had dropped it to the position of second feature. It made half the money of even so unsuccessful a film as The Cowboy and the Lady, but it rang up incalculable prestige for Goldwyn. Among the powerful people he called his friends, he would long be remembered as the man who put Jascha Heifetz in the movies, the one Hollywood producer quixotic enough to try elevating the taste of the American public. Hearst and Paley, the Harrimans and the Swopes, all took notice. So did Arthur and Iphigene Sulzberger of the New York Times, whose friendship the Goldwyns had recently cultivated. Their hospitality whenever the Sulzbergers were in town was more than reciprocated in 1939.

  For weeks before They Shall Have Music was released, the Times covered the production from every possible angle. When Goldwyn went to New York to open the picture, Lynn Farnol arranged for a Times reporter to meet him, in an effort to squeeze a few more column inches out of him. Thomas Pryor, the young interviewer, who later became the editor of Daily Variety, went to Goldwyn’s suite in the Waldorf Towers for a drink. Goldwyn rhapsodized about his plans for bringing more serious music to the screen. “Next,” he said, “I’m putting Toscanini and Stokowski together.” When Goldwyn saw that Pryor was not taking any notes on this scoop, he added, “This is a front-page story.” Pryor guessed that the two maestros would never even sit in the same room with each other. When he pressed Goldwyn for details, he discovered nothing had yet been negotiated. “Mr. Goldwyn,” the young reporter said, “this is really just an idea you have.” Goldwyn jumped up and asked, “You calling me a liar?” Pryor insisted he was not, simply looking for the evidence of a deal, which would make a good story. “You’re calling me a liar!” Goldwyn now insisted. He shouted for his secretary to ring up the Sulzbergers. “I’m going to have you fired,” he said. Pryor gulped his Scotch and left. Upon his return to the office, he learned that “the old man” was plenty mad at him, but that he still had his job. Because of his friendship with Sam Goldwyn, however, Arthur Sulzberger found himself sitting in the hot seat.

  The next day, They Shall Have Music opened, and Times critic B. R. Crisler wrote a sarcastic review. He noted that “the screen debut of Jascha Heifetz ... has been announced as Opus I in the musical works of Mr. Samuel Goldwyn” and that his temptation was to write about the superb music and “to skip lightly over the movie with some graceful side remark, such as ‘All is not Goldwyn that glistens.’”

  Sulzberger picked up a copy of that night’s bulldog edition of the paper at a newsstand on his way home, and he “exploded.” “What agitated him,” said Pryor, “was the wise-guy attitude. Crisler hadn’t disliked it respectfully.” Still edgy over Pryor’s treatment of his friend Goldwyn, Sulzberger raced back to the office, where he ordered one of the paper’s second-string reviewers, Bosley Crowther, to rewrite the review. Crowther devoted more of his review to the brilliance of Heifetz’s playing and gently dismissed the rest of the picture as a “tear-jerker.” Somebody in the composing room at the Times tipped off Walter Winchell, at the Mirror. He ran an item that for the first time in history, the New York Times had changed reviews between editions. At four o‘clock the next afternoon, Arthur Sulzberger summoned Pryor, Crowther, and Crisler to his office. “Gentlemen,” he said, looking at each of them soberly, “I want to apologize. I did something last night I’ll never do again.”

  GOLDWYN got more mileage that year out of friends in even higher places. One night in late 1938, President Roosevelt’s eldest son, James, attended a large motion picture industry gathering at MGM. Sam Goldwyn approached him and asked young Roosevelt about his career plans. When the President’s son said he did not know, Goldwyn invited him to his studio. Over lunch, he found before him a well-spoken, attractive thirty-one-year-old with some of his father’s irrefutable charm and unlimited connections. Goldwyn offered him a vice presidency in his company, somehow replacing David Rose, who was looking to change jobs. “There was no question,” admitted James Roosevelt many years later, “he created the job for me ... so that Sam Goldwyn could say the son of the President of the United States worked for him.”

  On January 3, 1939, Roosevelt reported to his small pine-paneled office on the seventeenth floor of 729 Seventh Avenue, where United Artists had its Manhattan headquarters. He issued a formal statement to a crowd of journalists about how happy he was to be associated with Mr. Goldwyn. Then he told the reporters he did not know precisely what his duties would be.

  Nor did Goldwyn know what Roosevelt’s duties would be—only that he would tap him whenever the Roosevelt name might grease a stuck wheel. As much as possible, Goldwyn wanted him out from behind his desk, glad-handing bankers, exhibitors, and ambassadors. Just for announcing Roosevelt’s hiring, Goldwyn received press coverage from coast to coast. Roosevelt’s parents had always encouraged their children “to live our own lives,” Jimmy later recounted; “but when this situation with Sam Goldwyn came up, I think they held their breath.”

  The other shoe never dropped. “He never once asked anything of me that related to my parents,” Roosevelt added. In fact, Goldwyn became a contributor to FDR’s future campaigns and a faithful listener to his fireside chats. He never failed to send a telegram after an especially rousing speech. “Hollywood at that time was not looked down on at all, and with the growing interest in national defense, it was about to rise to the great occasion,” James Roosevelt observed. “In fact, Hollywood was potentially important to my father,” he added, suggesting that the President might even have benefited from his son’s connection.

  Eleanor Roosevelt enjoyed her few encounters with Goldwyn. On April 13, 1939, she arrived at 1200 Laurel Lane for a small dinner before the premiere of Wuthering Heights. She joined Irving and Ellin Berlin, Norma Shearer, Merle Oberon with an escort, and a few others. As they filed into the courtyard to make their way to the theater, Frances said, “Sam, suppose you take Merle and go along with Mrs. Roosevelt. I’ll see to the others and follow.” Weeks later, Merle’s escort would rebuke Frances for slighting him; but Frances knew just what she was doing.

  Pandemonium greeted the Goldwyn party as they arrived at the Hollywood Pantages. Searchlights crisscrossed in the sky, photographers flashed pictures, and screaming mobs tried to push their way past the police lines. Just as Frances Goldwyn had envisioned, her husband strutted up the red carpet into the theater, Merle Oberon—in stunning clothes and jewels and carrying a bouquet of white orchids—on one arm, the First Lady on the other.

  The screening was a triumph—“not a dry eye in the house,” remembered James Roosevelt. The film elicited the same response in New York at the Rivoli Theater. Practically every review repeated those sentiments. “It is unquestionably one of the most distinguished pictures of the year,” wrote Frank Nugent in the New York Times, “one of the finest ever produced by Mr. Goldwyn, and one you should decide to see.” Critics sang the film’s praises for months. “This is the one I’m going to be remembered by,” Goldwyn told his wife and son.

  Only Willy Wyler remembered the opening of Wuthering Heights, as a bittersweet evening. He had come to accept the fact that the “perfectly awful” cloud-walking tag did not destroy the rest of the picture; but he would never get over Goldwyn’s completely excluding him from the festivities. The Wylers had not been invited to dine at Laurel Lane or to appear in the photograph sessions in the lobby of the theater, not even to shake Mrs. Roosevelt’s hand. “This was Goldwyn’s evening,” Wyler said forty years later, “and he didn’t want to be reminded that I had anything to do with the picture.” Indeed, whenever anyone spoke of William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights, Goldwyn was quick to correct. “I made ‘Withering Heights,’” he would say; “Wyler only directed it.”

  The film did brisk business in its opening weeks but lost its momentum by summer. Hospitals reported a rush of newborns being named Cathy that year; but it would not be until those babies approached their teens that Wuthering Heights, in rerelease,
would show a profit. Discriminating audiences, however, championed the movie all year. Reviewers wrote enthusiastic follow-up articles; Mrs. Roosevelt heaped kind words on it in her newspaper column. When James Roosevelt went to England to host the London premiere, his father asked him to call on King George and Queen Elizabeth, in anticipation of their impending visit to America; Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy planned his visit to Windsor Castle, and young Roosevelt arranged for their majesties to see Wuthering Heights. At the Paris premiere, his honored guests were the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. In less than a year, Jimmy Roosevelt would be off the payroll.

  Two days after Christmas 1939, Goldwyn received the greatest gift of his career to date, a telegram from Kate Cameron, president of the New York Film Critics, announcing: “YOUR FINE PRODUCTION OF ‘WUTHERING HEIGHTS’ WAS VOTED THE BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR.” It was the first major award he had ever won, and it came in the toughest year of competition in motion picture history. The New York Film Critics had chosen to pass over the odds-on favorite, Gone With the Wind, which had opened in Atlanta only two weeks earlier, at a premiere as spectacular as the picture. Upon learning of his victory, Goldwyn wired Ben Hecht, “MOST OF THE CREDIT FOR WUTHERING HEIGHTS GOES TO YOU AND CHARLIE AS I HAVE ALWAYS FELT THAT IT WAS THE FINEST WRITING THAT WAS EVER HANDED TO ME SINCE I HAVE BEEN PRODUCING PICTURES.” Visions of his first Oscar—the awards would be made in February—danced in his head.

  Goldwyn had losses on his mind as well as gains. Beside the meager returns on Wuthering Heights and They Shall Have Music, he lost most of his talent that year. His leading lady and his most promising ingenue surrendered to that common desideratum of actresses—security. Merle Oberon did not give up motion picture acting, but she did realize that her best shot at a claim to English society lay in marrying the British film industry’s leading figure, her longtime protector, Alexander Korda. The decision came at an opportune moment, because after Wuthering Heights, both Sam and Frances Goldwyn examined the financial returns of her pictures and decided it would be best for them if they could cancel her contract. When he politely raised the issue, Miss Oberon voluntarily withdrew from their arrangement, forgoing a settlement of any kind. It was so generous a gesture that Frances called her the next day, saying, “Merle, if there’s ever anything we can do ...” (Years later, there was: Miss Oberon was eager to own prints of her Goldwyn films, the cost for which she was willing to pay. Frances telephoned again, this time to say that she simply could not allow copies of her husband’s films to float around town.)

  Following the September 1939 release of The Real Glory, Andrea Leeds also left Goldwyn to marry. Months later, after but a handful of appearances in films, which included her performance as the suicidal actress in Stage Door, she chose to retire from the screen.

  Joel McCrea, at the end of his fourth year under contract, told Goldwyn that he wanted out. Worse than the producer’s making a 600 percent profit off the actor on loanouts was that in seven pictures, Goldwyn had not once cast him effectively. With Gary Cooper making films for Goldwyn, McCrea knew he would never read a script that did not have Coop’s fingerprints on it. “No one has ever asked to be out of a contract with Sam Goldwyn!” Sam Goldwyn yelled at McCrea. The actor knew that Ronald Colman had asked exactly the same thing, but he sat in silence as Goldwyn assured him that he would “never work in this town again.” McCrea headed directly to Cecil DeMille, who put him before the cameras in Union Pacific. “Everybody has a little trouble with Sam,” said DeMille. “What do you think Jesse and I went through?” Joel McCrea promptly came into his own as a leading man. The next year, Hitchcock cast him in Foreign Correspondent, then Preston Sturges created roles for him in Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story. McCrea enjoyed another twenty years of screen stardom as a western hero.

  Goldwyn needed stars. While a wave of Anglophilia swept the country, he thought of remaking Raffles, which had helped put Ronald Colman across as a talking-picture star nine years earlier. No fewer than ten writers worked on the new script, updating the Edwardian comedy-thriller to modern times. A. J. Raffles would still be the suave gentleman thief trying to lay his hands on Lady Melrose’s emeralds to bail out a school chum in debt; but contemporizing the play exaggerated the artificiality of the drawing-room genre so popular decades earlier. Working from Sidney Howard’s 1930 screenplay, playwright John Van Druten brushed up a shooting script good enough to interest Cary Grant. Goldwyn found him willing to work for less than his regular pay because he liked the role so much. Sudden threats of another actor’s defection, however, forced Goldwyn to reconsider his leading man.

  After less than four years in Hollywood, David Niven was grateful to Goldwyn for the fact that he “had given me a chance when nobody else would touch me.” But it was dawning on him that he, too, was getting his best parts in loanouts. Niven convinced himself that Goldwyn was taking advantage of him. His agent, Leland Hayward, said, “Leave Goldwyn to me. You’re making a fortune for him. I’m going in there and ask for a lot of money and a contract for five years straight with no layoff and no options, a limited number of pictures and six weeks’ guaranteed vacation.”

  Niven sat in the anteroom of Goldwyn’s office as a confident Hayward walked into the meeting. Two minutes later, he was back with his client, who asked if their demands were met. “Not exactly,” Hayward said. “Goldwyn has barred me from the lot. Now I can’t even talk to him.”

  Niven and Goldwyn entered a “really ridiculous war of nerves”—ridiculous, the actor realized, because it was a losing battle. The producer snubbed him on the lot, suspended him for turning down another poor role, and complained that Niven had developed a swollen head. Louella Parsons spread the “news.” Suspended without salary, Niven picked up some cash by performing on various radio programs. After several weeks, controller Reeves Espy informed Niven that according to their contract, Goldwyn was entitled to all moneys his contract player was earning—but that he would sportily settle for half. Niven’s next radio show was with Bing Crosby, sponsored by Kraft Foods. “At the end of the show, as was often the custom,” Niven recalled, “I was presented with a large hamper filled with all the Kraft products—cheeses, spreads and sardines.” When he got home, he “meticulously removed half the spread from the jars, cut every cheese in half, every sardine in half; then with an envelope containing a check for half my salary from the show, I sent the lot to Goldwyn inside half the basket.” Goldwyn sent for the actor.

  In his office, the producer cheerily announced that he wanted to rip up the papers between them and replace them with a more remunerative seven-year contract. The lead in Raffles was Goldwyn’s bait. Niven was stunned by the offer and even more by his agent’s rejecting it. Hayward counseled Niven to play hard to get. “Your contract is running out,” he said. “He doesn’t want to lose you—he’s just playing games. I know Sam. We’ll get the deal we want.”

  Goldwyn had his own game plan. A few days later, he called Niven to the studio to appear in some costume tests for another movie. All morning, Niven noticed a man hovering nearby in white tie and tails. He was posing for still photographs halfway up a ladder, while holding a revolver in one hand and a strand of pearls in the other. He was obviously meant to look like Raffles. After lunch, Niven approached the man, who was posing for more pictures, and asked what he was doing. The young actor, a handsome thirty-year-old named Dana Andrews, was not sure himself. He had signed his own seven-year contract with Goldwyn earlier that year; and his instructions on his first major assignment were to wear the Raffles costume and follow Niven around having pictures taken. Niven signed his new contract without further hesitation. Goldwyn borrowed Olivia de Havilland from Jack Warner to play the romantic interest in Raffles, and the rest of the predominantly British cast was assembled by late summer.

  Talk of a possible war had everybody on the set in jitters through the first weeks of filming. A tired Sam Wood—who had directed that year’s valentine to Albion, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, as well as severa
l sequences in Gone With the Wind—maintained a businesslike atmosphere through most of the shooting. Then on September I, Hitler invaded Poland, and two days later England declared war on Germany. Confusion overcame the British colony in Hollywood, especially on the set of Raffles.

  Goldwyn sounded his own alarm. He felt everybody’s nerves were making the film play flat. He wanted a script doctor to pep up the love scenes. Edwin Knopf recommended a writer who was in town trying to finish a novel about Hollywood, its protagonist based loosely on Irving Thalberg. F. Scott Fitzgerald reported for work on the Goldwyn lot the first week of September, carrying a briefcase packed with Coca-Cola. He sat in a corner of the soundstage with his secretary, dashing off pages and handing them to the director. Between scenes, Niven talked to Fitzgerald of returning home to fight and his premonitions of not living through the war. After a week on the job, the author was thanked for his work with $1,200 and no screen credit. “You always knew where you stood with Goldwyn,” Fitzgerald wrote in his notes for what became The Last Tycoon, “—nowhere.”

  With several weeks on the picture remaining, Niven, a former Highland Light Infantryman, announced to Goldwyn that he had been called to the colors and had to leave immediately. “Goldwyn, as usual, was far smarter than I gave him credit for,” Niven remembered. “Within half an hour he had checked with the British Embassy in Washington and had been told that nobody outside the British Isles had yet been called up.” In fact, Niven had long since resigned his commission and probably would never be asked to serve. But he genuinely felt silly parading about in costumes when he ought to be in uniform.