She found one other form of release. In late 1947, Frances, in her forties, went to the small third-floor office of Assistance Unlimited, an odd-jobs agency on the corner of Selma and Vine in Hollywood. Having called ahead to inquire about their rates for typing, she left three short chapters of a novel, ten badly typed pages corrected in blue pencil. She gave neither her name nor her phone number, saying only that she was “out a lot” and would return in a few days with more to be typed. For several weeks she came around with pages of an insider’s look at Hollywood, a novel sprinkled with real names of stars; she asked if the secretaries could help her get an agent. They speculated about the identity of their “mystery lady.” Just as the tenth chapter was being typed, Life published pictures of a Hollywood party their reporters had attended, and there, among the celebrities, was Frances Goldwyn. The women at Assistance Unlimited were delighted to have unmasked the mystery lady; word quickly spread through the building’s secretarial grapevine. Within days Walter Winchell’s column reported that Mrs. Samuel Goldwyn was writing a semiautobiographical novel. Her anonymity broken, she never returned to the typists’ office. Before proceeding any further with the venture, she did show her pages to her husband. They were either quite embarrassing or so promising that he feared she might launch a career of her own. Whichever, he told her they were terrible. She discarded them and abandoned the project.
Alcohol-induced changes in Frances’s behavior—sudden depression and provocative comments—added to Sam’s anxiety. But he chose never to confront her about her drinking. That was her private affair. His insomnia worsened. He needed somebody to talk to without having to watch what he was saying; and he got considerable relief from May Romm, an eminent psychiatrist who had proved extremely helpful to several of Hollywood’s elite. After a few sessions, Frances made him stop. She said, “Psychiatrists break up marriages,” and pointed to Dr. Romm as the culprit behind the recent divorce of David and Irene Selznick. Knowing he should not, Sam obliged her.
With tensions persisting, Goldwyn called on Hilde Berl, the therapist who had proved so helpful in dealing with the family’s crises during Sammy’s adolescence. He told her he had made more money than he had ever dreamed, but that he was not deriving any pleasure from it. She suggested he buy paintings.
“Paintings?” Goldwyn asked incredulously. She said his entire outlook would change, starting with the atmosphere in which he lived. Beyond that, she said, it would be like learning a wonderful new language, one without words. Goldwyn hesitated after pricing some paintings, but he began to notice that many of the important people he respected most collected art. Hilde Berl nudged him to look first at the French Impressionists. In 1948, he purchased a Matisse called Les Anémones for $13,500. A Braque followed, then a Picasso still life from 1938 for $10,000. When Lillian Ross came to town to chronicle for The New Yorker John Huston’s filming of The Red Badge of Courage, she overheard a conversation in which a roly-poly man said, “I’m at Sam Goldwyn’s last night and he says he’s got a new painting to show me. So he takes me over to the painting and points to it and says, ‘My Toujours Lautrec!’” Paintings became favorite gifts between Sam and Frances. They amassed an impressive collection, mostly works by famous names.
OVER the next three years, Goldwyn stepped up his production to its prewar level, two pictures a year. But the seven films he released between October 1948 and December 1951 revealed only a gradual diminution in his powers of judgment. “I think the old guy was hurting,” said Alfred Crown, one of the new recruits to the Goldwyn organization. “I think it’s a sure sign your imagination is starving when you start living off your reputation and feeding off yourself.”
The first film of this cycle was a remake of his 1942 hit Ball of Fire. Even the story’s creator, Billy Wilder, admitted the inherent creakiness of the plot; to haul it out again only seven years later suggested desperation. The writer wanted nothing more to do with it.
Goldwyn approached the original film’s director, Howard Hawks, even though each had vowed never to work with the other again. He hounded him to think of a new approach to the story of the shy professor who falls in love with the stripper. Hawks resisted, until the producer offered him $25,000 a week. The eight encyclopedists writing about “Slang” became a muster of musicologists analyzing “Jazz.” Harry Tugend accepted the screenwriting assignment, which involved little more than plugging musical references into the Brackett and Wilder script. No accommodations were made for the new cast: Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo would simply stand in for Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. Goldwyn spangled the movie with “stunt casting”—jazz artists Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, and Lionel Hampton. Benny Goodman played one of the professors.
A Song Is Born, as the remake was titled, miscarried. With close to twenty jazz numbers crammed into the film, Time said, the plot served “only as a link between jam sessions.” There was no room for a single Kaye specialty number; and to make matters worse, Danny and Sylvia Kaye temporarily separated during the filming. The star, Howard Hawks remembered, was reduced to “a basket case, stopping work to see a psychiatrist twice a day.... He was about as funny as a crutch.” Goldwyn forced Virginia Mayo to watch Ball of Fire over and over until she could mimic Barbara Stanwyck’s every movement. Goldwyn made her appear even more artificial by hiring another singer to dub the musical numbers. Hypersensitive to the politics of the period, the studio asked Hawks not to “get the Negroes and the white musicians too close together.” The director made a point of never seeing this second version.
Goldwyn received the worst critical clobbering of his career. Danny Kaye fans felt shortchanged, and so did the star. In his five pictures for Sam Goldwyn, Kaye thought, he still had not fully expressed his identity on film. In the meantime, he had become one of the most beloved performers in concert halls around the world. When Jack Warner learned his Goldwyn contract was expiring, he approached him with a comedy (The Inspector General), and Kaye left. Warner also grabbed Virginia Mayo, whom Goldwyn had seldom used as anything more than a decorative foil for Kaye. Instead of pairing them again, Warner put her in a number of dramatic roles, opposite the likes of James Cagney, Alan Ladd, Ronald Reagan, and newcomer Burt Lancaster. Vera-Ellen, who was receiving more fan mail than either Kaye or Mayo, found herself sitting out the rest of her contract because Goldwyn never saw her as anything more than a supporting player. She held her own with no less than Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire on loanouts to MGM; “but after Mr. Goldwyn set me up in pictures,” she said late in life, “he really ruined my career.” Goldwyn’s next film, released two months after A Song Is Born, fared no better with the public and cost him his two remaining lead actors.
The discriminating public savored a number of serious English pictures after the war—David Lean’s Great Expectations, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, and an adaptation of English novelist Rumer Godden’s Black Narcissus. Sam Goldwyn chased the trend. He secured the rights to the latest of Godden’s moody novels, Take Three Tenses. Playwright John Patrick, who had written The Hasty Heart, adapted the Godden book, also a wartime love story.
The house at 99 Wiltshire Place narrates the film, introducing viewers to an old retired general, Sir Roland Dane, his great-niece, Grizel, and the Canadian flier in love with her. Their arrival unlocks the memory of Roland’s thwarted first love, which ultimately brings the young couple into each other’s arms. Beneath bursting bombs they declare their love, as the Dane mansion is shelled, killing the general inside.
Goldwyn had cast Niven in but one picture since his return from the war, but he kept him constantly employed. After a disastrous eight months making Bonnie Prince Charlie against his will in London for Alexander Korda, Niven told Goldwyn he needed a vacation before returning to Hollywood. Goldwyn refused. “David,” he wrote, “don’t for a minute think that you have reached the stage where you are so big on the screen that you can afford to disregard your contract and your studio’s instructions. While I am doing everything possible to build yo
u up to the position that I would like to see you reach, you should for your own sake be doing your share instead of trying to throw a monkey wrench into what we are doing.” Niven complied, pleased to be given the lead in Take Three Tenses, retitled Enchantment.
The part required him to age from a young guardsman in love to the old, melancholy Dane. Teresa Wright played his love interest and Farley Granger the Canadian flier. Goldwyn surrounded them with fine actors, including a child named Gigi Perreau. Her performance was so moving that crew members applauded her on the set after her most dramatic scenes. To play Grizel, Goldwyn sprang Harry Cohn’s newest star, Evelyn Keyes, from her Columbia contract. “Ahhh!” Goldwyn boomed every time he saw her. “My favorite actress!” He hired Irving Reis, triumphant from his RKO hit, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, to direct.
In its profile of Goldwyn, Life had quoted Darryl Zanuck on the subject’s “instinctive talent”; but “as a publicity expert, at getting attention and newspaper space for Goldwyn,” Zanuck said,he is absolutely a past master—a genius—the greatest in the business.
If he doesn’t have any significant pictures to release, if he is putting out some little musical comedy or other, he will issue a statement that it’s Hollywood’s job to brighten the lives of the people and not worry them about serious issues. And then, when he has a significant picture to release—something like “The Best Years of Our Lives”—he will wait until just a day before it comes out and issue a statement saying that Hollywood isn’t producing enough significant pictures!
So it was with Enchantment. Preview cards indicated that audiences found the picture “confusing” and “slow moving,” with a “want-to-see factor” much lower than the average Goldwyn movie. But the producer boldly wrote Julius Ochs Adler of the New York Times that he began planning Enchantment assomething which might counteract the trend of tough, hard, gangster pictures and others of a similar type ... springing up again after the war.... I wanted to say in “Enchantment” that there was more to life than bitterness and disillusionment or escape through slam-bang crime stories.
Enchantment did not deliver the promise of its title. Most critics dismissed it as a manipulative tearjerker. “The picture flopped,” said Evelyn Keyes. “Sam stopped calling me his favorite actress. He had to blame somebody, and he owned all the other players.”
Not for long. Teresa Wright was announced for his next picture, but ill health stepped in the way. She had made four films for Goldwyn and had dropped out of as many. When the latest private survey from George Gallup showed her “marquee rating” stuck where it had been for the better part of a decade, Goldwyn canceled her contract.
He called David Niven to his office and told him that he, on the other hand, was very lucky: He was being loaned to Korda again, to make The Elusive Pimpernel. Niven said he did not mind local loanouts, but he could no longer tolerate the constant uprooting from his family. Goldwyn reminded the actor that he had picked him up “out of the gutter.” Niven replied that the producer had been repaid a thousand times over. Goldwyn said failure to appear in this picture would result in his suspension; Niven said he looked forward to a holiday, and besides, he had “plenty of money in the bank.” Goldwyn pressed the switch on his intercom and said, “Find out how much money Niven has in the bank.” Three minutes later, the intercom spoke back: “One hundred and eleven dollars.”
After The Elusive Pimpernel, Goldwyn loaned Niven out to play opposite Shirley Temple in A Kiss for Corliss. Meantime, other studios were telling Niven they would have important properties for him if he were a free lance. Niven made an appointment to see his boss. “Look, Sam,” he said, “we don’t see eye to eye anymore. I have two years left of my contract. How about releasing me?” Niven never forgot Goldwyn’s unflinching eyes as he flicked his intercom lever and said, “Give Niven his release as from today ... he’s through.” As the actor slid into a career slump for several years, he got to thinking that Goldwyn actually held the power to blackball him in the industry forever.
For Goldwyn, there was a greater, irreplaceable loss upon the completion of Enchantment. In September 1948, forty-four-year-old Gregg Toland took to his bed for a week, then died suddenly from a coronary thrombosis. Toland was the highest-paid cameraman in Hollywood; he had photographed most of Goldwyn’s talking pictures—thirty—seven in all. The producer was furious not to see a single star among the crowd at Toland’s funeral.
Goldwyn’s story purchases over the next few years were all in service of promoting his two remaining stars, Dana Andrews and Farley Granger. The stories ranged from lachrymose to grim, reflecting his darkening mood. “Something happened in the organization,” Granger recalled. “Goldwyn was suddenly making movies that could have been done by anyone. The other studios were developing their new young stars—Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, and the MGM kids [Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Lawford, June Allyson]. I begged him to split my contract with Fox, because doing one film every year or two for him made me dependent on loan-outs for my career.” But Goldwyn refused. After Granger received fine notices in two unusual films—Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night and Hitchcock’s Rope—Goldwyn starred him in a film for the first time.
It was based on a novel about America’s most famous feuding families, the Hatfields and the McCoys. Roseanna McCoy was an Appalachian version of Romeo and Juliet, in which the young title heroine falls in love with the hot-blooded son of her clan’s rivals. With Teresa Wright, it might have assumed greater stature. Even Cathy O‘Donnell might have made a go of it, but Goldwyn lost interest in her career when she suddenly married Willy Wyler’s brother Robert. Goldwyn launched a nationwide star search and became smitten with a slightly pudgy teenager named Joan Eunson. The Goldwyn publicity department changed her surname to Evans and built her and Farley Granger up as one of the screen’s great new love teams. Frances Goldwyn, who had been cultivating friendships with important agents and writers on both coasts, persuaded novelist John Collier to write the screenplay.
Farley Granger remembered Collier’s having captured much of the mysticism of the mountains in his version of Roseanna McCoy, but it was too literary for Goldwyn. Several other writers, Ben Hecht among them, whittled it down to hokey melodrama and hillbilly clichés. Director Irving Reis was sent to the Sierra Madres to film even before the script was finished. He spent several days shooting action sequences of his principals before shutting the production down while the screenplay was completed. The film ended up with a lot of kissing scenes in the woods and Johnse Hatfield forcing himself upon the reluctant Roseanna McCoy.
The Goldwyn studio churned out a pulpier movie on a neighboring soundstage. It drew even sharper criticism, probably because it sprang from a higher source. At the urging of Julius and Philip Epstein, twins who had written Casablanca and Mr. Skeffington, Goldwyn purchased the rights to a New Yorker short story called “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” by the literary sensation of the day, J. D. Salinger. It was a spare tale of an afternoon between two former college roommates, one a lush who—it is implied—had entered her loveless marriage without revealing her pregnancy by another man. In the Epsteins’ version, more than had ever been suggested would be shown, resulting in a “four handkerchief” movie with a farfetched plot. For the alcoholic central character, Goldwyn borrowed Susan Hayward from Universal. Dana Andrews would play the unsuspecting father of her child (another role for Gigi Perreau). Mark Robson had just impressed the town directing Champion and Home of the Brave; Goldwyn thought they were so “brilliant” he signed him to direct three pictures, starting with this one—My Foolish Heart. Goldwyn hired one of the schmaltziest melodists in Hollywood, Victor Young, to score the picture and write a title song. His Oscar-nominated title tune ran through the picture and became a big hit.
John McCarten, The New Yorker reviewer, said My Foolish Heart was so “full of soap-opera clichés ... it’s hard to believe that it was wrung out of a short story ... that appeared in this austere magazine a couple of years ago.” Robert S
herwood could not help telling Goldwyn how “phony” he found the picture, the victim of “that old long arm of coincidence.” A few months later, Goldwyn expressed interest in buying the screen rights to Salinger’s latest work, The Catcher in the Rye, only to learn that the author refused to sell them. Hollywood’s interest in those rights never waned over the years, but as a result of the bastardization of “Uncle Wiggily,” Salinger resolved never “to sell any more of his works to the screen regardless of financial sacrifice” to himself.
The national election of 1948 did nothing to lift Goldwyn’s spirits. Although he continued to write the occasional letter of praise to the President, Goldwyn wanted Truman out of the White House. Billy Wilder remembered attending a rollicking Election Night party at the Goldwyns’ that November, dozens of their friends toasting with champagne as the radio announced Governor Dewey’s apparent victory. A little after midnight, Wilder left to pick up his future wife, a nightclub singer named Audrey Young. By the time they returned to Laurel Lane, Wilder discovered the house awash in gloom. “Sitting in the living room on the carpet, with their backs to the wall,” he remembered, “were Charlie Brackett, Mary Pickford, and Louella Parsons—all dissolved in tears.” They were bemoaning the sudden change in events. “We’re leaving the country. Truman won. The Reds are taking over,” they cried. “Goldwyn,” recollected Wilder, “was just staring into space, completely pale. Now, believe me, I lived through Hitler being appointed Chancellor, and we took it better than that.”
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