Over the next few years, a slew of articles expounding high-minded positions toward motion pictures appeared under Samuel Goldwyn’s byline. Frances Goldwyn wrote several pieces about her life in service to this great man. The Goldwyn name appeared everywhere, from the Congressional Record to Muriel Stafford’s handwriting analysis column in the New York Mirror, in which she said his “altruistic f and y” revealed “he’s very romantic and warm-hearted.” After a year of Sonnenberg’s services, the two men dissolved their agreement. Goldwyn saw that he could generate as much positive publicity as he wanted by himself. Sonnenberg later admitted he had learned as much from Goldwyn as from anybody else “in my black magic racket.”
But Sonnenberg worked periodically for Goldwyn over the next few years, making occasional contacts for him and offering his New York town house when Goldwyn needed a special place to entertain. Shortly after he went off the payroll, Sonnenberg remembered, “I was telling Goldwyn he didn’t really need me, that he should just be himself.” Goldwyn’s eyes burned into him, and then he roared with laughter. “For that,” he said, “I had to pay fifty thousand dollars!”
With their charming absence of malice, Goldwynisms made a permanent comeback, though most people in Hollywood had not realized they had ever left. In time, everybody would hear that in trying to console Billy Wilder after one of his films flopped, Goldwyn told him not to feel too bad: “You gotta take the sour with the bitter.” Walter Winchell reported Goldwyn’s winning a recent argument, saying, “We are dealing in facts, not realities!” Walking from the dining room at Laurel Lane into the den one night, Goldwyn asked Myrna Loy, “Whatever happened to that little guy in Ethiopia—Hail Salesia.” Goldwyn was quick to laugh along with anyone who tittered at the malapropisms in his presence, but in one session with Hilde Berl, his eyes teared as he blurted a tormenting truth—“I hate my mouth!”
Hilde Berl pointed out that the Goldwynisms were not going to disappear, no matter how good his public relations. She reminded him that these gags were good publicity, and actual or not, they were invariably clever and affectionate. “So I asked Sam Goldwyn,” she recalled, “whether he wanted to be a master of these Goldwynisms or slave to them.” It was a simple question of self-esteem.
At one of Elsa Maxwell’s next parties, the guests played a parlor game in which each had to write his own epitaph. Sam jotted three words: “Include me out.”
Except for his new sense of relaxation about his speech, Goldwyn marched through his day with as much precision as the vagaries of his profession would allow. He generally rose just before dawn and immediately reached for the bedside telephone, a private line he used only for talking to James Mulvey in New York. After discussing every foreseeable piece of business for the day and grosses of the night before, he performed an hour of rigorous calisthenics. His breakfast tray arrived, carrying the Los Angeles newspapers, the trade papers, two strips of bacon, two boiled eggs, orange juice, coffee, and an assortment of pills. He enjoyed a visit from a doctor, who would get him through one more day.
He showered, then dressed his firm, barrel-shaped body—a forty-one-inch chest and forty-inch waistline. His suits were all smartly tailored Savile Row, woolen weaves, usually in gray. T. Hodgkinson Ltd., in St. James’s, made his shirts, Sulka his ties and handkerchiefs. Lobb of London made his shoes; and, observed Irene Mayer Selznick, “He was the best shod man in town.” Goldwyn carried nothing in his pockets—no wallet, no money, no keys; friends commented that “he didn’t want to ruin the line of the clothes.” He smelled faintly of The Gentleman’s Knize Ten, a sweet fragrance of sandalwood.
By eight forty-five, he was out the door, striding down Laurel Lane toward Sunset Boulevard, then east onto the Strip as far as Holloway, which cut down to Santa Monica Boulevard—three miles. There the chauffeured Cadillac that had been tailing him picked him up and drove him the rest of the way to the studio. With Frances reporting to the studio every day for work as well, he sometimes varied the routine. They would drive together from the house and walk the last half hour of the trip, arriving in their respective offices by nine-thirty, in later years at ten.
Goldwyn would enter his office through the back stairs, then buzz his secretary when he was ready to begin work. He insisted the temperature be a steady seventy degrees, often difficult to regulate because his outside door was to be kept open except in extremely cold or rainy weather. No windows were permitted open. Goldwyn relied on natural light; lamps were to be lit only on especially gloomy days. His secretary was expected to check the thermostat several times a day.
A procession of highly efficient women served as Goldwyn’s secretary, each lasting many years on the job. The secret to holding the position lay in anticipating the boss’s whims. Goldwyn would see no visitors from off the lot without appointments, except for those people the secretary presumed he would want to see. These included the top agents in town—Charles Feldman, Abe Lastfogel from William Morris, and Bert Allenberg. “Mr. Goldwyn likes his desk kept as clean as possible, inside as well as on top,” one secretary instructed her successor. He did not want to be bothered with any mail that was less than essential. Registered letters—generally presaging legal trouble—were always refused unless the secretary was “absolutely certain it is something the company will want to accept.” His secretaries learned to inspect his wastebasket every night to be certain he had not thrown out something that belonged in the files. Because he was obsessive about ridding the office of rubbish, they frequently cleaned the cabinets. One secretary asked if it was all right to discard a large batch of yellowing files. Goldwyn said yes—“just so long as you make copies of everything.”
Three telephones sat on the secretary’s desk. Two connected with Goldwyn’s phone; the third connected with Frances Goldwyn’s office, down the hall. Before a call would be announced to Goldwyn over the Dictograph, the other party had to be holding on the phone—“as Mr. Goldwyn will not wait.” Beside the secretary’s typewriter in the outer office were earphones; she was expected to monitor his conversations and make notes. “One drawback to this,” one of them noted, “is that Mr. Goldwyn automatically expects you to know everything that is going on, forgetting that you can’t, for instance, listen in when he is home or in his dressing room.” The sole exception to the secretary’s eavesdropping on calls was whenever the Goldwyns were talking to each other. Another private telephone sat in a cabinet in Goldwyn’s office; nobody but him was ever to touch it—“no matter how often or how long it rings.” It was another hot line to Mulvey.
Goldwyn went to his private suite for lunch a little after noon. His dining room could seat as many as twelve, but generally served one or two important guests or a handful of his most important staff members. His own chef prepared a hearty hot meal, light on sauces. Josephine Berger, his cook of many years, could always delight him with his favorite dishes, Hungarian goulash or pot roast with potato latkes. Goldwyn counted calories, but he never pushed away Miss Berger’s pastries or a dish of ice cream. His body weight of 175 pounds almost never changed over his entire adult life.
Luncheon was over by two o‘clock, at which time employees excused themselves and returned to work. Almost nobody knew what Sam Goldwyn did until three o’clock every afternoon. No meetings were scheduled, and his secretary told all callers that he was in private conference. In fact, Goldwyn retired to a room off the dining room, where he completely disrobed, hung up his clothes, put on a pair of pajamas, and napped until his secretary telephoned him one hour later.
Goldwyn would work until five forty-five, then begin his journey home. The driver would take him as far as the Beverly Hills border, where Doheny Drive met Sunset Boulevard, and Goldwyn would walk the rest of the way. Because he carried no keys, he entered the house through the delivery entrance near the kitchen, never the front door. He would bathe and change clothes before dinner.
Guests would be invited for seven-thirty. Cocktails (one finger of Old Ben Ledi Scotch for Goldwyn) were served f
or twenty-five minutes. Then the hosts made their way into the dining room—whether their guests had arrived or not. William Dozier remembered being invited to dine with the Goldwyns in 1946, just before he married Joan Fontaine. He and Miss Fontaine (whom Goldwyn was trying to interest in Earth and High Heaven) arrived at Laurel Lane exactly at the appointed hour, only to discover the driveway completely empty and no signs of life coming from the house. They concluded they were either early or had arrived on the wrong night, so they drove down the hill to the Beverly Hills Hotel for a drink. They returned to the Goldwyns’ a little after eight, but instead of being ushered into the living room, they were led directly to the dining room, where the Goldwyns sat eating soup with one other couple and two empty chairs, place settings before them. (The Kirk Douglases had the same experience the first time they were invited to 1200 Laurel Lane.) Other hostesses in town knew to notify Frances if they did not expect to have food on the table by eight o‘clock, so that she could feed Sam a sandwich beforehand. The Goldwyns served wine at their table, but he never drank any. In fact, he did not believe one should drink anything while eating, not even water. He took a cup of coffee after every meal and water (without ice) in between. After dinner, he would light a cigarette, puff it two or three times, and hold it while the ash grew long. Frances, with her fear of fire, used to grind out her cigarette in an ashtray, then pour the crushed remains into an envelope, which she would put back in the ashtray for a servant to clear. After a party, she would spend an hour checking every room for any unextinguished cigarettes.
On nights out, Goldwyn liked to be home by eleven, but he was no stick-in-the-mud. “Sam Goldwyn had the best time at a party,” observed George Cukor. “He acted as though every party were given just for him, and he was always on his best behavior in public.” At a party at the Lewis Milestones’ in 1944, Arthur Hornblow, Jr.,’s wife, Leonora, witnessed a rare instance in which Goldwyn lost his composure and a lot more. A simple buffet was set up next to a lot of bridge tables for the dozens of guests. Mrs. Hornblow noted:Sam was the first back at his table with a plate laden with food. Although I was looking at him, I’ll never know how it happened, but he must have tripped, as he certainly lost his balance and fell right into the bridge table which, of course, collapsed. The glasses were broken and Sam was soaked. A chicken leg stuck like a flower behind his ear. All the china on the table was broken as well as the glasses. There were quite a few glasses as they served two kinds of wine as well as water. The women’s purses were drenched as was the rug. Sam and the entire collapsed table had to be taken away. The horror note is that everyone burst into wild, uncontrollable and unending laughter, especially me. And Sam unable to bear the idea that he had been so clumsy turned upon me and said, “You pushed me.”
Goldwyn sulked for days if he heard about a glamorous party to which he had not been invited; it made him feel like just another pawn on the Hollywood chessboard.
In their separate bedrooms, Sam and Frances were each sleeping a little more soundly those days. He was contributing $60,000 a year to more than fifty different charities. His donation to the United Jewish Welfare Fund soared to $25,000. He never lost his itch to gamble, but the fever had broken. In lieu of the all-night poker games, he seemed just as happy settling for smaller bets—on anything. The only way he found baseball games tolerable was in betting on each pitch. In July 1944, he bet socialite Evalyn Walsh MacLean $500 (to her $250) that FDR would not run again. Weeks later, he wrote Sammy, “While I have never voted for him, as you know, and while I’m as bitterly opposed to a fourth term as I was to a third, I feel it would be a mistake to change governments at this time.”
Goldwyn actively supported the Roosevelt-Truman ticket. In addition to the $5,000 he and Frances each contributed to the Democratic National Committee, he solicited more than $50,000 from others in town. He sent congratulatory messages to the President after each major speech, assuring him of his faith and support. On December 1, President Roosevelt wrote Goldwyn “just ... to tell you how deeply I appreciate the loyalty and confidence which prompted you to work so hard in my behalf.” In January, Goldwyn wrote the President again to congratulate him on “the happy occasion of the inauguration of your fourth term and the equally happy occasion of your birthday.” He asked national committeeman Edwin Pauley if the President would autograph a picture for him.
In February 1945, Roosevelt’s administrator of the Federal Economic Administration asked Goldwyn to proceed to England on a confidential mission as special adviser. The government wanted him to inspect battle-torn Britain and report on the country’s economic circumstances, specifically in terms of Reverse Lend-Lease and Mutual Aid. On the seventeenth, the Army’s Air Transport Command flew Goldwyn from New York to London, where he bivouacked at Claridge’s. Over the next three weeks, he visited aircraft, motor, and munitions plants engaged in war work; he also inspected hospitals and various bombed parts of the city. He had a two-and-a-half-hour lunch with Winston Churchill. “That was really the high spot of my visit to England,” Goldwyn wrote his longtime friend Colonel William Paley afterward, “as I found him tremendously interesting.” He told one reporter that he thought Churchill would make a good film star because he was “the greatest poisonality” in Britain.
On February 28, Goldwyn went to Coventry, where the mayor escorted him through the ruins of their great cathedral. Goldwyn said it was “the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life.” The next morning, he left for Oxford, where he took tea at Balliol College and delighted his capped and gowned audience when he said he was so impressed with the university that “you can include me in.”
Goldwyn made time in his busy schedule to visit with J. Arthur Rank, who in the mid-thirties founded a distribution company and committed himself to the revitalization of the British film industry. Within a decade, the Rank Organisation owned several English film studios, Denham and Pinewood among them. Its trademark of a squat, muscular man beating a gong sounded the advent of an ambitious new generation in British cinema. Rank distributed the successful Alec Guinness comedies made at Ealing Studios, as well as the early works of such directors as David Lean (Great Expectations and Oliver Twist), Carol Reed (Odd Man Out and The Fallen Idol), and Laurence Olivier, who produced, codirected, and starred in Henry V. (Its success encouraged him to proceed with a film version of Hamlet.)
Goldwyn’s report to the FEA recommended a program of documentary films that would capture England’s present circumstances and show the “two-sidedness” of Lend-Lease.
“For the present,” the London journal Picture Post reported Goldwyn as saying, “the film industry is taking a breath ... before its plunge into the future.” No doubt thinking of his having put Glory for Me in abeyance, he said, “What the public wants now is escapist films—melodrama, entertainment. The great films about the war won’t come for another five years at least.”
A series of distractions contributed that spring to the calm that Goldwyn had predicted. An endless succession of parties celebrated each piece of favorable war news. The Goldwyn organization in New York was settling into new offices in the RKO Building at Rockefeller Center. In Hollywood, two unions warring for jurisdiction over a group of set decorators made it practically impossible to hire any draftsmen or painters on the lot. And on April 12—a photograph still waiting to be signed and sent to Goldwyn from the Oval Office—Franklin Roosevelt suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Goldwyn sent two telegrams to Washington that afternoon—one to Mrs. Roosevelt, the other to Harry Truman at the White House. “IN THIS HOUR OF OUR SORROW MAY WE WISH YOU STRENGTH AND THE BLESSINGS OF HEAVEN IN THE WORK THAT LIES AHEAD OF YOU. WE PLEDGE YOU OUR SUPPORT AND OFFER YOU OUR PRAYERS,” he wired the new President. “I have confidence that Truman will make a success of his job,” Goldwyn later wrote Sammy, then working through OCS at Fort Benning, Georgia. “I like him very much, and he has some very fine people around him.”
After nine days of mourning, the Goldwyns threw themselves a party in honor of thei
r twentieth wedding anniversary. Forty people arrived at Laurel Lane for dinner, and another forty afterward, Under Secretary of State Archibald MacLeish among them. Some of the guests stayed until six in the morning. Mrs. Goldwyn gave her husband a watch, inscribed: “April 23, 1945 meaning twenty happy years. Love Frances.” Sam gave her a gold necklace and earrings. “I’ve never seen her look as lovely as she did Saturday night,” he wrote Sammy of the occasion. “I’m very proud of her and the twenty wonderful years we’ve had together—and I’m just as proud of my son.” He was also “very pleased that our marriage is considered one of the most successful in Hollywood.” (The following year, Goldwyn’s anniversary present to his wife was a legal document—a gift of pictures and associated rights that he owned, with the wish that “your ownership of these pictures {may} bring to you a small portion of the happiness which these twenty-one years have brought to me.”)
Conforming to the President’s wishes, there was no national holiday on May 8, 1945, V-E Day—only a hiatus of a few minutes during Truman’s speech to the nation. The smell of victory in the air, Sammy contemplated his escape from the service. He told his father on the telephone that “if Japan suddenly surrendered I would resign. The reason being that my chances of getting out would be very much better as an enlisted man than as an officer.” The father of Private Goldwyn, then just a few months away from becoming an officer, was greatly disturbed. “I feel that you ought to keep on trying just as hard to graduate as you did when you first went in,” he wrote Sammy on July 31, 1945. “Never start a thing unless you can finish it—and you should make that apply to everything you do.”
“Don’t get the idea that I’m a quitter,” Sammy wrote back, standing up to his father for the first time. “That really hurts coming from you. I never asked you to help me get a soft job did I? I took whatever I got and I’ve done it on my own.... I’m proud of that but once I get out of here the Army is going to be strictly passe. But it really hurts me for you to say things like you did in your last letter. My life has a lot more to offer me than being an Army man all my life. As long as there is a war on I’ll do my best at whatever I’m assigned but afterward I want out but quick.”
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