Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  After his hitch in the Army, Sammy elected to stay in Europe. He left Wiesbaden for London, where he sought a job in motion pictures. Goldwyn fought with himself over his son’s blooming independence, then tried to lure Sammy home. “I think I ought to tell you that a good percentage of the Goldwyn Company stock is laid away in trust for you,” he wrote before his son had made any commitments abroad; “and your big interest in the future is going to be in the Goldwyn Company as between you and Mother you will own most of the business. Therefore, I agree with you that you should learn as much as you can about the picture business. As I have always told you, my own interest now is for you and all the organizing I am doing and everything else for that matter is for the day when you will come in and carry on, as I personally do not care to work any longer than I have to.”

  Sammy chose to remain in England. The J. Arthur Rank film company hired him as an associate producer. At first, his father expressed nothing but “every faith in you and all the confidence in the world that you will make a great success of your new undertaking.” Then Goldwyn became obsessed with his namesake’s reflecting badly on him.

  He encouraged his son to make his own decisions but constantly proffered unsolicited advice. He berated him for not volunteering more about his work, then criticized the decisions Sammy wrote home about. He took pride in hearing that the Goldwyn name had become a magic carpet into London society for his son; but when Sammy’s name appeared in the social columns once too often, Goldwyn reminded him: “you are the son of a Hollywood producer and as such you are very vulnerable.... I should hate to see you go to London and start going around to cafes and behaving like a rich man’s son.”

  George Cukor went to England at that time and wanted to introduce Sammy to such friends as Cecil Beaton and Somerset Maugham, whom young Goldwyn greatly admired. “I would love to do more to help Sammy,” Cukor told Frances; but, thinking of the sexual implications, he said, “It would look bad if I did it.” Instead, he neatly arranged for Maugham to invite the young man to lunch.

  The harder Sammy worked to create a life for himself in London, the harder Sam worked to get him home. In October 1946, he wrote: “It’s very hard on mother and me to have you so far away as you know you’re all we have—and you mean more to me than anything in this world outside of mother; my entire life is wrapped around you.” And in May 1947:... I feel very strongly that you should come home—that by being here with me for a month you will take back with you things that may help you in your future work there....

  As I told you on the phone, one of the things that bothered me about your coming home was the fact that you might come back here and start going back to your old routine; but after thinking it over and analyzing your activities abroad, I have great faith that you are on a different footing now and that you fully realize your responsibilities—so I am not as much worried about this as I was.

  Goldwyn established a trust fund for his son, which would provide him with an annual income, more than $25,000 in the next year alone.

  The twenty-one-year-old was determined to stay abroad, if only to prove his mettle to himself. After resisting his father for a year, Sammy gently declared his independence. In late April 1948, he wrote:You know how badly I want to carry on the name and the tradition of quality for which it stands. I can only do that by being a fine director-producer. I couldn’t get along on the basis of your fine work. I must do my own. I don’t want people to say he’s good but his father was better. I want to be better than you and I hope someday to have a son who’ll be even better than I hope to be. Please try and understand this, Daddy. I love you and Mother very dearly.... Please try and see that what I am doing is what I feel is right.

  Goldwyn immediately telephoned his son, then recorded his sentiments in a letter. “I want you to do what you feel is best for yourself,” he insisted. “You never need accept my advice unless you feel like taking it.” Within weeks, he warned James Mulvey that Sammy was likely to try borrowing money from the trust. Under no circumstances, said Goldwyn, were any more funds to be released to him. “He is on his own,” Goldwyn said, “and if he wants to fool around Europe, it is up to him to take care of himself.... I feel he has no right to hang around over there when he can be earning money here.”

  Sammy stayed abroad through most of 1948, working on several small pictures and producing a play in London. After two years with the Rank Organisation, he moved to France with a friend, Blaine Littell. By the end of the year, he had come to accept his father’s assurances of independence and opportunity in Los Angeles. If he would just come home, Sam and Frances guaranteed he could produce a picture. After being away most of a decade, he returned, leaving behind $7,000 in debts, which his father paid. Goldwyn was so delighted to have his son back, he threw in a bonus of a $100-a-week allowance. Sammy got a job as associate producer to Leonard Goldstein at the newly merged Universal—International, on a picture starring James Mason, called One Way Street.

  At Laurel Lane, Sammy’s parents subjected him to their constant criticism of old. He moved into his own apartment, but still they quarreled with everything he did. They disapproved of practically every girlfriend he presented to them; and, recalled Ira Gershwin’s wife, Lee, “Frances did everything she could to bust the important relationships up.”

  On March 8, 1950, the studio publicity department released the story Goldwyn had dreamed of for a quarter of a century: His son was joining the company as a producer. Goldwyn junior’s first production, the announcement said, would be an idea of his own, which he would write with Blaine Littell, then working for the Denver Post. Called No Time Like the Present, it was the story of an American soldier in the occupational army in Germany who befriends a family there. For the first time in three years, Goldwyn seemed to be coming out of the dumps.

  Sammy chose that moment to spring on his parents the news that he intended to marry a girl with whom he had reacquainted himself, a cousin of his friend Blaine Littell. Jennifer Howard had grown even more attractive in the few years since he had first met her, and she had proved herself most gifted on the New York stage. The daughter of Sidney Howard and his first wife, actress Clare Eames, and raised among the Damrosches, America’s most distinguished musical dynasty, she seemed a perfect match for the handsome young producer. The senior Goldwyns demurred. She was older than Sammy; she was an actress; and she had already been married. More to the point, George Cukor noted, “Frances wasn’t about to approve of anybody Sammy wanted to marry.”

  The twenty-four-year-old was determined to cut the cord. To Lee Gershwin, the boy’s fervent desire to marry and start his own family was inevitable: “Sammy had nobody, just his parents ... and I think he had to plant some roots, and surround himself with children.” Jennifer, both of whose parents were deceased, had the same desire. Sam and Frances had been in New York for the unsuccessful opening of Edge of Doom, and there was a question of their getting to California for the small wedding celebration. They flew in the day before.

  By the time Sammy returned to Los Angeles from his brief honeymoon in Carmel, his father’s dreams of working with him were disappearing. North Korean troops, equipped with Soviet-made weapons, had already rumbled across the thirty-eighth parallel to invade South Korea. A picture about the peacetime army suddenly seemed anachronistic, out of touch. “Sam, Jr.”—as his father had taken to calling him in business—informed the defense authorities in Washington that No Time Like the Present was being put on ice.

  One night that summer, Sammy arrived at Laurel Lane with Jennifer, flashing a letter that had arrived that afternoon. Second Lieutenant Goldwyn, on inactive duty in the Army Reserve, had been called up. “He could see no reason why, with all the able-bodied young Americans there were who had never seen service,” his father later related, “he had to be singled out to go back.” Goldwyn agreed, railing that he, too, “was being discriminated against.” Frances said it did not seem fair to her either. The family groused long after dinner—all except the
newest addition, who sat in polite silence.

  At last Jennifer spoke up. She turned to Sammy, Goldwyn remembered, and said, “Lord knows I don’t want to see you go—but why shouldn’t you? You stayed in the Reserve because you thought that was the right thing to do. Now they’ve called you, so what are you kicking about? They probably won’t ship you overseas right away, and till they do, I can be near your camp. Lots of wives have done it. I can too.” Nobody liked the situation, but she said, “Maybe we ought to be thankful for what we’ve got and can keep instead of griping about what we have to give up!”

  Goldwyn did not sleep that night, only partly out of paternal concern. He awakened Frances at three o‘clock to tell her he had a new idea for a motion picture. He wanted to “tell a story of the effect of America’s rearming on the lives of the American family today.” He saw a film of universal significance and artistic importance.

  Goldwyn went directly to Robert Sherwood. “YOU HAVE A WONDERFUL IDEA AND IT SHOULD OBVIOUSLY BE CARRIED THROUGH AT THE EARLIEST POSSIBLE MOMENT,” Sherwood wired; but he begged off developing it, citing Broadway commitments. Irwin Shaw, who had just published his first novel, The Young Lions, agreed to write the screenplay of what became a multiple love story. He tore its title right off the Uncle Sam enlistment posters—I Want You.

  As in Best Years, this picture told the story of three men, this time all in the same family. World War II veteran Martin Greer lives with his wife and runs the family construction business with his father, a World War I veteran still bragging of his military heroics, and his younger brother, Jack, just graduated from high school. The Greer household is thrown into turmoil when Jack gets drafted and does everything he can to dodge it. In the end, Jack goes into the service, and the army makes a man of him; his father is exposed as a fraud who had been but a general’s orderly in the Great War; and Martin, after wrestling with his own conscience, reenlists, leaving his wife, his mother, and his brother’s girlfriend patriotically awaiting the return of their soldiers. Years later, Shaw admitted he had been “whoring” when he wrote the script, which he rationalized by saying, “I just gave Sam what he wanted.”

  The screenplay, with all its American stereotypes, contained big roles for Goldwyn’s two leading men, Dana Andrews (in his last picture under his Goldwyn contract) and Farley Granger (in another unsympathetic part for the twenty-five-year-old teen idol). It failed to attract any major stars to support them. Goldwyn borrowed Dorothy McGuire from Selznick and gave her second billing.

  I Want You was one of Goldwyn’s most trouble-free productions. From its opening, with an aerial introduction to a small American town, to its nuptial finale, Goldwyn resolved any problems by duplicating what had worked in Best Years of Our Lives. Everything came easier this second time around. Mark Robson put up none of the interference Goldwyn had come to expect for so many years from William Wyler. Richard Day, who had not designed sets for Goldwyn since the thirties, returned to create a look Newsweek would note “has all the exaggerated realism of a painting by Norman Rockwell”—just the way Goldwyn liked it.

  Ironically, the catalyst for the picture was nowhere near its production. Sammy had transferred his commission to the Signal Corps, where he would direct and produce documentaries; he accompanied Dwight Eisenhower on his return mission to Western Europe as supreme commander of NATO’s defense forces. By the time I Want You previewed in Santa Barbara, cease-fire negotiations in Korea had already begun. The audience reaction that September night was tepid. Goldwyn was nonetheless committed to an all-out promotional attack, for reasons that went beyond business.

  Goldwyn had turned hawkish. In 1951, he became one of the nation’s leading supporters of the Committee on the Present Danger, an organization committed to the belief “that we can compel peace through the sheer force of United States strength.” Goldwyn believed “the most important single thing which we, as a nation, can do at this time is to build our own defenses by supporting the military and economic defense of the free world as proposed in the Administration’s foreign aid program.” With this cinematic statement of his philosophy, he intended to reclaim the summit he had held four years earlier.

  Goldwyn made up for any artistic inferiority in the picture with advertising superiority. He pegged every article, letter, and interview about I Want You to its being no mere movie but a statement of national importance. He likened the film at every opportunity—whether it was a letter to General Eisenhower or to General Adler of the Times—to Best Years. Because it was a Goldwyn production, critics did not dismiss I Want You out of hand; but they stopped just short of describing it as a cartoon.

  Goldwyn remained obsessed with topping Best Years. He realized he had failed to find any new trend in movies as show business entered the television age. He had miscalculated seven times in a row, and his biggest question was which way to proceed.

  On March 20, 1952, he got his answer. Danny Kaye hosted the twenty-fourth presentation of the Academy Awards, at the RKO Pantages Theater in Hollywood. A Place in the Sun and A Streetcar Named Desire were the evening’s favorites for top honors; Quo Vadis was a contender, while The African Queen and Death of a Salesman were expected to pick up awards along the way. Because musicals, even more than comedies, had long been dismissed as too frivolous to win the grand prize, Jesse Lasky startled most of the motion picture community when he opened the Best Picture envelope and announced An American in Paris. It was as far afield as one could get from the American primitives Sam Goldwyn had been producing. Arthur Freed’s sophisticated spectacle, directed by Vincente Minnelli, was a two-hour depiction of an expatriate painter, which climaxed with a seventeen-and-one-half-minute ballet: In and out of sets in the style of Dufy, Renoir, Rousseau, Toulouse-Lautrec, Utrillo, and Van Gogh, 120 dancers moved to the Gershwin symphonic suite that gave the film its title.

  It was the same piece of music George Balanchine had choreographed for The Goldwyn Follies in 1937, which Goldwyn had struck from the picture.

  20 Dinosaurs

  BY 1950, American consumers had spent more than one billion dollars on television sets. That figure more than doubled in 1951. Over a six-year period, this new mania hooked enough people to keep movie attendance in its postwar decline, plunging from seventy-six million to fifty million patrons a week. Five thousand theaters closed. “My father was suddenly dealing in a world of great changes, which he didn’t always grasp,” said Sam Goldwyn, Jr., about his father in the fifties, when television took hold of American life.

  Show business suddenly found itself with a new set of rules. Many former vaudevillians and nightclub performers found that their acts played better on the small box. Tuesday nights, most American families adopted a favorite “uncle,” Milton Berle. Radio favorites Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, and Arthur Godfrey found themselves no less at home on their own television shows. Goldwyn’s scouts urged him to sign a versatile comic named Sid Caesar—“the funniest guy alive,” said Lynn Farnol—to a picture contract. Before an offer could be put on the table, television came unto Caesar and made him one of the most innovative forces in entertainment. He was hailed every Saturday night. Syndicated newspaper columnist Ed Sullivan became ringmaster of a variety show that ran every Sunday for twenty-three years.

  With the promise of more celebrity in a single night than it took most movie stars a decade to attain, some performers preferred visibility on television to what the movies offered. One former Goldwyn Girl, a redhead who seldom got her name on a theater marquee, found the perfect arena for her talent in a Monday-night half-hour situation comedy. By the end of 1951, everybody in America loved Lucy.

  Bob Hope starred in regular television specials. The Marx Brothers broke up as a screen team, and Groucho became a television quizmaster. Only five years after winning her Oscar for The Farmer’s Daughter, Loretta Young hosted a weekly series of original dramas, many of which she starred in. Charles Boyer, Dick Powell, and David Niven (who had not yet found his footing after Goldwyn gave him his walk
ing papers) formed a television production company called Four Star Television, Inc. (even though they were unable to persuade a fourth star to join them in the venture).

  Over the next decade, every studio sought to capitalize on motion pictures’ greatest strength; they developed techniques for making their larger-than-life images even larger. Screens were widened, new sound systems were developed, and color was enhanced. In 1952, Spyros Skouras bought the rights to a French patent that Twentieth Century—Fox christened CinemaScope; this wide-angle process proved commercially successful in its debut, the otherwise routine biblical epic The Robe. There were experiments in three-dimensional, stereoscopic photography (what Variety called 3-D), in which images seemed to protrude right out of the screen. Goldwyn was wary of all the new effects, cautious of “novelty in place of real values.”

  “Goldwyn used to say, ‘You’re only as good as your next picture,’” recalled Alfred Crown. Upon the failure of I Want You, he had half a dozen projects in development: a few domestic dramas; a western; a Broadway hit about the twenties, called Billion Dollar Baby; and an adaptation of the Mary Poppins books. But he chose to resurrect a project he had buried years earlier, the only one that might match the charm and sophistication of An American in Paris. Goldwyn lost interest in everything else. Noted Sam Goldwyn, Jr., “My father got compulsive about producing each picture as though it were his last. That was the one he would go out on, the one he’d be remembered for.”