Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

Goldwyn had Kaye’s big musical debut in the works, when all his most trusted associates urged him to “take the loss in pride and money and call the picture off—to forget Kaye.” For nights, Sam argued with himself, refusing to say die. One hot morning in the summer of 1943, Sam and Frances were watching “those endless Danny Kaye tests” for the umpteenth time, when Goldwyn grabbed the telephone and called for the studio hairdresser. “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” he shouted into the phone. “Expect Kaye in ten minutes. He’s having his hair dyed blond!” Makeup finished the job, completely brightening Kaye’s screen image.

  The actor willingly accepted the cosmetic changes; but he and his wife resisted Goldwyn’s efforts to remodel his comic character. More than the composer of the star’s clever specialty numbers, the petite Sylvia Fine Kaye was the sawiest judge of what material worked for her husband and what did not. The moment they arrived in Hollywood, the Kayes saw that Goldwyn was trying to duplicate his great success with musicals in the thirties by recycling Cantor’s material. “Everybody, Sam Goldwyn included, thought a comedian who wasn’t cruel or bombastic had to play a nebbish,” Mrs. Kaye explained. “But that’s not who Danny was. He played the eager beaver. That’s quite different. He’d trip himself up in enthusiasm.” For months, every time Sam Goldwyn passed Danny Kaye on the lot, he would greet the performer with a big smile and an enthusiastic “Hello, Eddie!”

  Goldwyn put Owen Davis’s 1925 comedy, The Nervous Wreck—the source material for Whoopee!—under Don Hartman’s supervision. Several writers updated the story to the present, preserving little more from the original material than its hypochondriacal hero. In Up in Arms, Danny Kaye would play a “kid” named Danny, a pill-popping elevator operator (in a medical building, so he could be close to his doctors) who gets drafted along with his buddy Joe Nelson. Danny is secretly in love with a WAC, who is in love with Joe; her best friend secretly admires Danny. In a series of mishaps, the girls wind up on the boys’ ship as it heads overseas. The situation allows for several big musical numbers and plenty of physical comedy, as Danny tries to hide the stowaways. On a Pacific island, he is thrown into a guardhouse, which gets captured during a Japanese raid. Through his buffoonery, he manages to turn his captors into prisoners, marching them at gunpoint into camp, where he is hailed a hero. The Kayes were unhappy with Goldwyn’s obvious attempt at reproducing Eddie Cantor with that moth-eaten twenties plot. But it had holes big enough for a few Danny Kaye specialty routines—notably a patter song known as “The Lobby Number” (a satire on motion picture spectaculars, officially titled “Manic-Depressive Pictures Presents”) and a scat song from Let’s Face It called “Melody in 4F”—both by Sylvia Fine.

  Kaye was still performing in New York when Goldwyn called the star’s wife into his office to announce that he had a test of the actress he had settled on for the picture. “She’s just great. Wait till you see her,” he said, full of enthusiasm, inviting Sylvia Fine to what he called his “projecting room.” Moments later, she sat looking at a pretty blonde, with big blue eyes slightly close together—rather like Frances Goldwyn’s. “Oh my God,” Mrs. Kaye said to herself. “That’s the girl who worked with ‘Pansy the Horse’!”

  Mrs. Astor’s Pet Horse was a revue Billy Rose produced at his Diamond Horseshoe in New York. One night in late 1942, he invited the Goldwyns and Mrs. John Hertz to visit his nightclub, where he pointed out the girl in the “Pansy” act—two comedians in a horse costume who joked, sang, and danced with the curvy straight woman. Her name was Virginia Jones, but she borrowed her brother-in-law’s surname—Mayo. Lelia Alexander, the Goldwyn studio researcher, was convinced that her boss’s entire sense of beauty had sprung from “a poor little boy’s dream of a fairy tale princess.” Nobody personified that image more than Virginia Mayo. Within a moment of her leaving the stage, Goldwyn asked Billy Rose if he would object to the girl’s going to Hollywood. So long as she completed the run of the show, Rose said he was happy to have been part of her discovery. She signed a seven-year contract.

  For all her natural beauty and ability to sing and dance, Samuel Goldwyn saw in Virginia Mayo only the next in a long line of women he hoped to mold into his first female star. He provided her with acting lessons, voice lessons, speech lessons, and dance lessons. Twice a week, Hollywood’s leading “charm coach,” Eleanore King, instructed her in posture and appearance. A nutritionist put her on a diet. A masseuse “contoured” her face after Miss King pronounced Virginia Mayo’s cheeks “too fat for screen work.” Goldwyn himself called her every night at nine o‘clock, inquiring if she was keeping up with her lessons and if she had brushed her hair one hundred strokes.

  After six months of this regimen, Virginia Mayo had improved in every department. But one problem remained. Every time a motion picture camera turned her way, she froze. The experience of each test warmed her up a little; but as Sylvia Fine Kaye watched her latest tests, she could only think of “that poor girl talking to two guys in a horse costume.” She knew her husband would never stand for it and said everything she could to dissuade Goldwyn from hiring her for the lead in Up in Arms.

  Goldwyn cast Constance Dowling and Dinah Shore as the two WACs in Up in Arms. Dana Andrews played the best friend. Like all the Goldwyn leading men before him, he realized, five years into his contract, that the only worthwhile jobs he was picking up were off the lot; Fox would give him his first important role in the 1944 film Laura. Virginia Mayo was sent down to the chorus, becoming one of the thirty-six new Goldwyn Girls.

  Another producer might very well have sent her back to New York, especially in those days when the images of the nation’s sex goddesses were changing radically. As men in films assumed a new wartime virility, their female counterparts matched them in femininity. Virginia Mayo was a definite throwback to the former beauty queens, pretty tame alongside such new screen sirens as Lana Turner, Hedy Lamarr, Ava Gardner, Veronica Lake, and Lauren Bacall—who had recently flunked a screen test for Sam Goldwyn.

  Musicals, as Up in Arms illustrated, also changed in the forties. Gold diggers and babes on Broadway became “jills” in jeeps, pin-up girls, cover girls, and “oomph” girls; white tie and tails were replaced by khaki. The public wanted to see red-blooded boys and plenty of cheesecake. Fred Astaire glided off the screen for a few years, making room for the more gymnastic Gene Kelly. Alice Faye and Ruby Keeler and Ginger Rogers stepped aside for the likes of Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth. Movie music swung.

  Agnes de Mille had just revolutionized dance on Broadway with her choreography in Oklahoma! Goldwyn was so determined to hire her for Up in Arms, he interrupted her honeymoon to offer her the job. After she turned him down, he signed Danny Dare, who had just worked on Paramount’s Holiday Inn. Dare staged an exhilarating “Jive Number,” composed by Harold Arlen, which showed off Danny’s Kaye’s considerable dancing abilities. A dream sequence—inspired by the success of Lady in the Dark—allowed Dare to parade the chorus girls in scanty costumes instead of their drab uniforms.

  Sam Goldwyn was confident that his entire two-million-dollar investment could be seen on the screen; but he feared he would not see a return on his money. For all his victories in the battles of production and distribution, Goldwyn was still waging his Thirty Years’ War with exhibitors.

  Paramount, Loew’s, Warners, Twentieth Century-Fox, and RKO owned most of the nation’s important theaters. In the 92 American cities with populations over 100,000, at least 70 percent of the first-run theaters were affiliated with one or more of the “big five.” RKO had stuck to its distribution contract, which gave Goldwyn final approval of every rental deal they negotiated; and they gave him favorable terms when they ran his films in their theaters. But in those territories in which RKO had no houses, Goldwyn was forced to accept whatever terms the other “majors” dictated.

  Warners and Paramount theaters were Goldwyn’s leading foes. They usually consented to show Goldwyn’s films only for a flat rental fee, with no additional percentage of receipts if a
film’s business exceeded that sum. Even on those occasions when the big five’s theaters agreed to pay bonus “coverages,” they would play the Goldwyn product at off hours, always accommodating home-studio product over his. As a result, a Goldwyn picture in a Warners theater sometimes earned as little as one eighth what it might have made elsewhere. If this sort of business was not illegal, Goldwyn thought it should be.

  Such apparent antitrust violations became the top priority of the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers, an organization whose membership included William Cagney, Chaplin, Disney, Sol Lesser, Mary Pickford, David O. Selznick, Edward Small, Hunt Stromberg (who had been a major producer at MGM for sixteen years), Walter Wanger, Orson Welles, and Sam Goldwyn. For years, they had tried to build a case against studios that owned their own theaters. On July 20, 1938, United States of America v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. et al. (a suit that named Columbia, Universal, and United Artists in addition to the five majors) had been filed in the District Court of the United States, but it was moving toward trial with glacial speed. Sam Goldwyn felt he could push it along by dramatizing the problem.

  T. & D. Theatres in Reno, Nevada, had been a thorn in Goldwyn’s side for years. In 1944, he decided to take them to task and ended up taking on the whole town. Goldwyn rented Tony’s El Patio Ballroom, alongside the Southern Pacific right-of-way in Reno, and announced that he would screen Up in Arms there instead of in a theater. When the local fire department declared Goldwyn’s portable projection booth in violation of local safety laws, his crew moved into the parking lot, where they planned to construct a canvas theater. The town commissioners said that did not comply with local building ordinances, that all seats had to be fastened to a floor. The Goldwyn team moved indoors again, securing chairs to the dance floor and building a platform outside one of the ballroom windows, through which they could project the film. T. & D. took out angry notices in the Reno newspapers, threatening suit “because the platform blocked the sidewalk”; they bemoaned that the good people of Reno had to suffer the indignity of “uncarpeted floors ... the whistle of freight trains ... static in the sound system.” Goldwyn tried turning public sentiment in his favor when he announced the receipts from his show’s opening night would be donated to the Reno Red Cross. He went to Nevada for the occasion, gathering photographers and reporters as he nailed the last chair into the floor.

  On the night of August 22, the ballroom at Tony’s El Patio was packed almost to capacity. The crowd applauded Goldwyn as he vowed to fight what he called “a monopoly which has been able to keep the productions of independent producers from showing their films unless the producers are willing to pay ‘prohibitive percentages.”’ To drive the message home, he introduced a special guest—his former partner at United Artists and one of his most bitter enemies for close to three decades, Mary Pickford.

  “America’s Sweetheart” herself spoke to the assembly, and was broadcast over Reno radio:To produce “Up in Arms,” Mr. Goldwyn spent a whole year of intensive work and $2,000,000 of his own money. This is a lot of time and a great deal of money. But to what avail? Only to be told upon completion that he shall not be permitted to show his picture except as dictated by monopoly.

  I would prefer to sit on a wooden chair, bench or even on the floor to see a fine film than to rest upon plush covered opera chairs and be forced to witness a dull, stupid and boring film in the finest movie palace in the country.

  ... I say it is not merely the question as to whether this one or dozens of Goldwyn’s pictures do or do not play in Reno or the entire state of Nevada. It’s rather the question of whether he or I, or other Americans, are to be given opportunity to carry on our lives and businesses openly and honestly.

  Every major magazine and wire service carried the story. The United States attorney in Reno monitored the event from start to finish. Within months, United States of America v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., et al. was being argued in the courts. Not until its decision of December 31, 1946, did the district court enjoin “the five majors from expanding their present theatre holding in any manner.” The solicitor general of the United States teamed with the attorney general in appealing the decision, claiming that relief had been inadequate. The following year, the Supreme Court sided with them and ordered complete theater divorcement, a process that would take several more years and lawsuits. Sam Goldwyn’s own case against Fox West Coast Theatres in 1950 would drag on until 1961, at which time he was awarded $300,00 in damages.

  All the fanfare over Up in Arms fanned fires at the box office. Besides becoming one of Sam Goldwyn’s biggest moneymakers, the film marked one of the most auspicious debuts in motion picture history. Frank Quinn of the New York Daily Mirror wrote, “Not since Greta Garbo made her cinematic bow has there been anything so terrific as the inimitable Danny.” The rest of the critics fell over themselves reaching for more glowing adjectives.

  Goldwyn believed he had two stars on his hands. After the beautiful Virginia Mayo “straighted” so well as princess to Bob Hope’s pirate, Goldwyn felt confident that she could play opposite Danny Kaye. Goldwyn and his associate Don Hartman minted two original musical comedies in annual succession for this new screen team.

  Wonder Man was a silly story about a pair of twins—a swinging nightclub entertainer named Buzzy Bellew, who is about to marry his dance partner, and a bookworm named Edwin Dingle, who is in love with a librarian. Buzzy has witnessed a gangland murder; and on the eve of his marrying, the mob rubs him out to keep him from testifying. But Buzzy comes back to haunt the body of his brother until the thugs are brought to justice.

  The film was another wildly successful showcase for the star. Virginia Mayo held her own as the librarian. And Goldwyn seemed to have made yet another discovery in pretty Vera-Ellen Westmeyr Rohe. A nineteen-year-old singer and dancer who had just appeared in a revival of Rodgers and Hart’s A Connecticut Yankee, she received outstanding notices using just her first name.

  The next Kaye musical employed the same cast in another recycling of an Eddie Cantor hit, The Kid from Spain. This time, Danny Kaye played a milkman mistaken for a prizefighter. The Kid from Brooklyn grossed over four million dollars, one of the most profitable films on the Goldwyn books.

  Rather than enjoy the success, Frances became obsessed with the war; she could not prevent herself from hoarding enough provisions to get her and Sam through it. Every year at the Thanksgiving table, she said, “I thank God for this house.”

  In the peace and quiet of the Quaker-run Fountain Valley School in Colorado—away from his parents’ self-involvement—Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., at last had a chance to find himself. Besides taking an active interest in his studies, Sammy came into his own in the theater. He produced and directed several plays, always arranging for his parents to visit on the weekends of his shows. It was an easy train ride on El Capitan to Colorado Springs. But, Sammy recalled years later, “There’d always be a telegram at the last minute.” Not once in his two years at the school had either of his parents visited.

  The family communicated through the mails. Frances wrote to her son twice a week, and Sam dictated a letter approximately every ten days. Each letter read like the carbon copy of its predecessor: He would bawl out Sammy for some financial imprudence and describe how he was clearing up the mess. Then he would issue briefs on the strength of his work despite the weakness of his health. There followed some paternal platitudes coupled with some unreasonable expectation, so that the boy could hardly fail to disappoint him. In closing, he would wax effusive about how much he missed his son.What is worrying me right now is getting away from the studio around the first of June.... However, your graduation means everything to me as I have only one son and I love him very much—so I will manage somehow.

  Sammy wrote home religiously once a week. After enthusing about school, he would try to include himself in his father’s life, first by praising him and sympathizing with his being overworked.

  With Sammy’s graduation less than three wee
ks away, he still had not received a telegram. A letter from Frances in mid-May broke the news. The boy was heartbroken, but he had long since learned how to channel his own hurt into ministering to his father’s chronic need for sympathy. “I am really awfully sorry,” Sammy wrote back to his father. “Is there any chance that you could fly here Tuesday morning and go back ten minutes after the services? But I understand how busy you must be with your two pictures and not having a capable director must make things much tougher. You must be working dreadfully hard.” At least Frances appeared at the graduation, carrying a letter from her husband. It read in part:... God bless you and help you; and remember that while I am not present, I am with you in spirit and pray for you every minute. You are my only boy, and outside of Mother, you mean more to me than anything in the world. I know you are not going to disappoint me, and will live up to all the things I hope for you.

  After the graduation ceremony, Sammy went home for eight days. Then he left for the East Coast, where he entered the University of Virginia.

  Sam did not know that his six-foot-three-and-one-half-inch, seventeen-year-old college freshman was harboring a great desire to join the Army. “My attitude toward college,” he recalled later, “was it was a waiting point between Fountain Valley and the service. I wanted to be an officer.” He took examinations to take part in the V-12 program, accelerated training for officers. “I don’t quite know what you are referring to when you say you want to join the V-12,” Goldwyn wrote after Sammy dropped his first mention of his plans to enlist. “I am agreeable to anything you want to join,” he wrote, “—but I certainly feel that you should not miss getting that college education, as it is something that will stand you in good stead for the rest of your life.”

  Sammy enrolled at Charlottesville, and immediately felt at home on campus. He took a particular interest in psychology classes. Letters between parents and son duplicated the missives of earlier years. He never stopped urging Sammy to stick to his studies, as “I want my dreams about your education to come true.” And in matters of Sammy’s financial malfeasance, Goldwyn could turn on a dime:I have today changed my will and left you absolutely nothing [he wrote on September 30, 1943]. I have also notified the trustees that the interest I gave you in the profits of my two pictures, THE NORTH STAR and UP IN ARMS, is to revert to me; for I have come to the realization that I cannot rely upon you. It’s not that I love you less, Sammy—but from now on you’re going to have to stand on your own feet, and accept the responsibility for your conduct. You will be either a good citizen, or, plainly speaking, a bum. That’s a choice and a decision you will have to make for yourself and I cannot live your life for you.