Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  To “provide better understanding of our partners in this war,” MGM adapted Pearl S. Buck’s Dragon Seed, with Katharine Hepburn and Walter Huston as Chinese peasants taking on the Japanese. Sam Goldwyn believed Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve would “do more to build up good will in America than any propaganda sent out of England since the war began.”

  Above all, Mellett emphasized, “We would like to see more and more true pictures of America.... You know it is true and you know also, I am sure, that the real America is a better sort of place and real Americans are perhaps a little better people than their average in the pictures that foreigners see.” Warners’ life of George M. Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, was the quintessential flag-waver of the day—in Sam Goldwyn’s opinion, “by far the best musical show ever made.”

  Goldwyn chalked the first picture on his slate after Pearl Harbor upon receiving an indirect message from the President himself that America needed a film about Russia. Lowell Mellett and New Dealer Harry Hopkins had been the links between Pennsylvania Avenue and Formosa Avenue. On December 10, 1941, Goldwyn wired Mellett that he wished to proceed with a documentary film that he would release commercially. Days later, Hitler’s army marched within miles of Moscow. “The Russian news was very bad that winter of 1942,” Lillian Hellman remembered of the time when Sam Goldwyn first discussed his notion with her, “but all of America was moved and bewildered by the courage of a people who had been presented to two generations of Americans as passive slaves.” She was “wild” to do a picture about the Soviet Union. So was William Wyler, who had just wrapped on Mrs. Miniver.

  Wyler and Hellman went to Washington to see the Soviet ambassador, Maxim Litvinov. He said making such a film would be impossible without the complete cooperation of the Russian government. The next day Stalin’s foreign secretary, Vyacheslav Molotov, approved the idea.

  An excited director and writer returned to New York, where they met with Sam Goldwyn at the Waldorf Towers. He agreed that they should make a quick trip to Russia to see what sites could be photographed. “Because of the enormous American admiration for the Russians in those days,” remembered Miss Hellman, “we were an almost guaranteed success before we started. Goldwyn recognized that, of course, and knew that a large part of the cost of the picture—planes, camera crew, extras—would be supplied by the Russians.” The meeting was the most harmonious Goldwyn’s creative team had ever had with him—until Wyler said that while he was in Russia, he wanted his salary paid in monthly installments to his wife. “This simple request,” Miss Hellman observed, “caused Goldwyn’s face to change, and I remember knowing immediately that something was going to happen.” Hellman said she wanted her salary paid in two chunks—“half on the day we started photography, half on the day I arrived home, even if I came back in a coffin.” Then Goldwyn blew his top.

  For the next twenty minutes, he challenged Hellman and Wyler on their political convictions. “You say you love America, you are patriots you tell everybody.... Now it turns out you want money from me, from me who am sacrificing a fortune for my government because I love my country.” Wyler said he did not understand Goldwyn’s point. “This picture is being made for commercial release and you intend to profit on it as you profit on any other movie,” he said. “You’re not putting up a nickel for ‘your government.’ The Russians, as a matter of fact, are giving you most of a free ride.” Hellman said the entire discussion was nonsense; they should be paid on this as they would be on any picture. “Nonsense?” Goldwyn exclaimed, rising to his feet. “You call it nonsense to take money away from your government?” Wyler was all for prolonging the argument; but Hellman saw that Goldwyn had lost his sense of reason. “Sam,” she said, “your problem is that you think you’re a country ... and that all the people around you are supposed to risk their lives for you!”

  Hellman and Wyler both knew all along that Goldwyn had every intention of paying them, that he was just looking for a way to shave their salaries. In the weeks before everybody was again talking amicably, Goldwyn heard from the director’s attorneys that Wyler had, in fact, filed on December 9, 1941, with the War Department for a commission in the Signal Corps and that the vigorous thirty-nine-year-old had subsequently passed his two physical examinations at Fort Monmouth. “I DO NOT KNOW HOW MUCH OF THIS INFORMATION IS CORRECT AND NATURALLY HAVE NO DESIRE TO ATTEMPT, EVEN INDIRECTLY, TO INTERFERE WITH WYLER’S INDUCTION,” Goldwyn wired Lieutenant Colonel Darryl Zanuck of the Signal Corps, “BUT ON THE OTHER HAND, I DON’T WANT HIM TO USE THE ARMY AS AN EXCUSE TO AVOID A COMMITMENT WITH ME. WOULD APPRECIATE YOUR CHECKING FACTS AND ADVISING ME AS PROMPTLY AS POSSIBLE WHETHER THESE REPRESENTATIONS ARE CORRECT.”

  In late spring 1942, Wyler went on official leave to the United States Army to make a documentary called The Negro Soldier. In short order, he was a major in the Army Air Force, filming bombing missions over Europe. By then Gregg Toland had also left his post at Goldwyn Studios, becoming a Navy lieutenant in Hawaii.

  Neither Goldwyn nor Hellman wanted to abandon the Russian project. After more discussion, they agreed she should write what she called a “semi-documentary,” to be shot in Hollywood, for which she would be fully paid. It would be months before Goldwyn would have anything to film, and by then the thinning ranks under his command were all but depleted. “Actors, directors and writers are fast joining the armed forces,” Goldwyn wrote Joe Schenck in July 1942. “Fifty-six men in my studio have left.... The same proportion applies at the other studios. It looks to me as though we are in for a long war, but I have every confidence in the world that in the long run we are going to win.”

  Were it not for the government’s cry for patriotic pictures, Goldwyn most likely would never have even considered what became his next project, a baseball story. “It’s boxoffice poison,” he told story editor Niven Busch, without even hearing the specifics of the plot. “If people want baseball, they go to the ballpark.”

  Busch nonetheless proceeded to recommend a story about the life of Lou Gehrig, who had recently died at the age of thirty-seven. On July 4, 1939, the New York Yankees herculean star of 2,130 consecutive games had appeared on the diamond of Yankee Stadium for the last time, to bid his public farewell; he was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. “I’ve been walking on ball fields for sixteen years, and I’ve never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans,” he said. After acknowledging his teammates, past and present, the sportswriters, his team managers, his parents, and his wire—“a companion for life ... who has shown me more courage than I ever knew”—the “Iron Man” began to lose control. “People all say that I’ve had a bad break,” he found the strength to add; “but ... today ... today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

  Busch ran the newsreels of “Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day” for his boss. When the lights came on in his screening room, Goldwyn was mopping his eyes. “Run them again,” he said.

  After the second viewing, a fully composed Goldwyn barked, “Get Mulvey in New York. We’ll get the rights.” In an instant, Goldwyn was talking to his senior associate—whose wife, Marie “Dearie” McKeever, had recently inherited a one-quarter interest in the Brooklyn Dodgers from her father. “Mulvey,” he said, “call Mrs. Gehrig. Tell her there’s a remote possibility that we might be interested in the story of her husband.” For some $30,000, she sold the rights.

  While Goldwyn was negotiating with publicist and sports enthusiast Christy Walsh for the services of Babe Ruth and other real New York Yankees, Busch realized the extent of Goldwyn’s ignorance about the game. After a particularly grueling bargaining session, Goldwyn pulled Busch aside and quietly asked him what position Lou Gehrig played. “First base,” Busch replied. “First base?” Goldwyn asked, making sure he got it right. “First base,” Busch underscored, emphasizing it in such a way that “I think he got the idea that there were ten bases and one worked his way up to first.” Negotiations continued that afternoon until the round of Goldwyn screams
that customarily closed each session. “You’re robbing me!” Goldwyn yelled at Walsh. “I’m not going to pay through the ass for just some lousy ... THIRD baseman!”

  Busch assigned Paul Gallico to write the story for the film, called The Pride of the Yankees. Knowing the climax of the picture, Gallico worked backward, fleshing out the people Gehrig had referred to in his valedictories. He told the story of the immigrant Gehrigs, especially Lou’s mother, who had worked as a cook at a fraternity at Columbia University so her son might get an education and become an engineer. When she suddenly needed an operation, Lou did not tell her he obtained the money for it by accepting an offer from the Yankees. Then Gallico followed Gehrig’s rise to the major leagues and his rivalry with Babe Ruth. The centerpiece of the film would be the love story between the bashful athlete and the sophisticated Chicago socialite Eleanor Twitchell—their cute courtship, his untying himself from his mother’s apron strings, and the Gehrigs’ final acceptance of his fatal illness. Jo Swerling and Herman Mankiewicz wrote a screenplay that landed right on the foul line between earnest and maudlin. The New York Times would later note that “without being pretentious,” it was “a real saga of American life—homey, humorous, sentimental and composed in patient detail.”

  Goldwyn saw Gary Cooper in the lead from the start. It was the last commitment he had from the actor under his present contract, and it was the first time Goldwyn had offered him a role commensurate to his screen status. Niven Busch successfully pushed Goldwyn to give Teresa Wright, whom he was soon to marry, her first starring role, as Eleanor. Walter Brennan played yet another Cooper sidekick, a sportswriter friend. The no-frills Sam Wood was hired to direct. It was “a tough picture to produce,” Goldwyn admitted to Joe Schenck upon the film’s completion, “as there are so many people throughout America who knew Gehrig that his biography had to be handled with the greatest of care.” The biggest problem grew from Gary Cooper’s being as unfamiliar with baseball as Sam Goldwyn was.

  Except for his years in England, Cooper had spent most of his childhood on a horse in Montana, and he had never held a bat in his hands. To make matters worse, he was right-handed, and Gehrig was one of the most celebrated southpaws in the history of the game. Sam Wood could cover certain running and fielding moves by filming a double in long shots, but there was no escaping Cooper’s having to step up to home plate and take a convincing whack at the ball. The actor went into spring training with several ballplayers and learned to throw, catch, slide, and bunt properly. He even developed a strong, steady swing, but he just could not master it left-handed. Film editor Danny Mandell saved the day with an ingenious idea. He suggested to Goldwyn that they allow Cooper to bat right, but have him run to third base, not first. If the costumer reversed the letters and numbers on the players’ uniforms in those few shots, Mandell could simply flip the film over, giving the impression of a lefty running to first base.

  Goldwyn later admitted that his major challenge on the film was “to watch my baseball so that it didn’t get the best of the personal story. As the picture now stands, the baseball is purely a background and the love story is the dominant factor.” To ensure that The Pride of the Yankees ended up a picture for the millions of women left at home as much as a sports movie, Goldwyn insisted on a nightclub sequence, featuring the dance team of Veloz and Yolanda. The Gehrigs’ favorite ballad, Irving Berlin’s “Always,” wafted through the film. Goldwyn’s heavy dose of romance proved the secret to the film’s success.

  Charles Skouras—whose brother Spyros had moved that year from managing the Fox Metropolitan Theaters in New York to the presidency of the parent company, Twentieth Century—Fox—liked The Pride of the Yankees enough to pass on several recommendations. Goldwyn followed his advice of exhibiting the picture at as much as 25 percent over the regular general admission price of movies “and in no event at less than fifty-five cents general admission.” Skouras also suggested creating a word-of-mouth campaign by premiering the picture in just one city. After New York, the picture moved across the country, capped by a benefit at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood that raised $5,000 for the Naval Aid Auxiliary. “From what I understand,” Goldwyn wrote Joe Schenck, “it will be the last opening that Hollywood will be allowed to have for the duration of this war. As you know they are stopping night baseball and all outdoor sports at night. Nor can we shoot any more scenes at night. From now on all this is ‘verboten.’”

  Goldwyn made more money off The Pride of the Yankees than from any film he had yet produced. Several thousand dollars came from such producers as Pandro Berman and Buddy DeSylva, who had bet that the film would not gross more than $3 million, the benchmark those days for blockbuster business.

  The reviews rivaled the receipts, particularly those of several individuals whose opinions Goldwyn greatly respected. Eleanor Gehrig said the film was all she could hope for and that she was “completely happy with it.” Wendell Willkie, whom Goldwyn had supported for President in 1940—told him, “Sam, you have done something very important here. You help democracy everywhere by showing what opportunities there are in America.” Goldwyn replied, “Why shouldn’t I—who knows better than I do the opportunities in America?” The picture was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Actor. Goldwyn assumed that all the film’s glory would clinch Gary Cooper’s resigning with him.

  Instead, the actor resigned. Goldwyn’s one leading man could hardly wait to end his relationship with the producer. After his experience with Goldwyn, Cooper chose to become an actor for hire, making his lucrative deals one at a time and proceeding to enjoy more than a decade of solid hits. One year younger than the century, Cooper had been too old to enlist in the armed services, but in 1943 he went on a five-week tour of American bases in New Guinea. The movie actor had little he could perform on a stage beyond striking an unaffected pose and reciting Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech. That invariably brought the men to tears, then to their feet in inspired applause.

  Teresa Wright won an Oscar that year, but not for The Pride of the Yankees. She had also been nominated as Best Supporting Actress in Mrs. Miniver and collected her statuette for playing Greer Garson’s daughter. That picture’s award sweep included a first Oscar for Major William Wyler, then flying somewhere over Europe. Goldwyn had not counted on Miss Wright’s becoming such a sensation so quickly, and he had no starring roles ready for her. In fact, the only part he saw available was in the ensemble of his Russian picture.

  Lillian Hellman had recently taken her friend Willy Wyler to task for making “such a piece of junk” as Mrs. Miniver. She claimed to have walked out of a screening in tears because it was “a lot of sentimental crap—soft and saccharine, really beneath him.” Writing her Russian story that summer, she vowed to keep her film from becoming such a marshmallow. Her first draft, completed in August 1942, was more bitter but no better.

  “The time of the picture is the morning of June 21st, 1941, the day before the German invasion of the Soviet Union,” Miss Hellman wrote on page one of The North Star. “The opening of the picture takes place in a small village—the village of a collective farm—near the Soviet border.” Over the next one hundred pages, the playwright interwove the stories of the peasant neighbors on “the last morning of peace.” A group of young people at the start of their summer vacation from school, Tanya and Damian and their friends, are about to set off on a walking trip to Kiev for their first glimpse of the big city. For seventy-five pages, the script tracks the happy vagabonds as they prepare for their trip and take to the road. Wise old Karp warns the youths not to go—“because the morning smells bad.” But they proceed, only to have a squadron of Nazi bombers interrupt their journey. The last quarter of the film details the farm’s mobilization as the village comes under attack. “Comrades,” good farmer Rodion tells his neighbors, who have elected him their soviet representative, “this is not a time for mourning. It is a time for revenge.”

  Goldwyn was so gung ho about the
project that he rushed it into production. Miss Hellman raged to her dying day that Sam Goldwyn “phonied” up her film. In truth, the very premise of The North Star—all its characters drawn in broad strokes and primary colors—was as subtle as a propaganda poster.

  With the war thinning the ranks of Hollywood’s directors as well as of its leading men, Sam Goldwyn considered himself lucky to engage Lewis Milestone, who had directed the World War I masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front. But Milestone’s talent had gone off of late, as he turned out several stale comedies and the soggy Edge of Darkness, about the Nazis storming Norway. Upon reading the first draft of Hellman’s script, he announced that he “had very little criticism to offer.” Almost everyone else who had read the script had great reservations, but Goldwyn’s patriotic fervor for this project made the readers feel that voicing them would have been tantamount to treason.

  Over the next few months, Milestone suggested several ideas to Miss Hellman. He wanted the film to show the Nazi atrocities she had only suggested. At his urging, the writer blinded one character and maimed another. The role of a doctor was invented, someone to challenge his German counterpart in the occupational army. The German doctor would be played by Erich von Stroheim, enjoying a brief renaissance in his acting career now that movies needed a man “you love to hate.” In this picture he would bleed the local children for plasma. He says he is sorry about the deeds he must perform, but he is only one helpless man in a changing world. Hellman appreciated most of Milestone’s notes for the first fifty pages.