Although he had first put writers on the assignment in 1938, the time never seemed more ripe for a king-sized, colorful musical based on Hans Christian Andersen. He suddenly realized this when Paramount tried to buy one of the scripts he had commissioned on the subject. It blended Andersen’s life with several of his fairy tales; and Goldwyn thought it could somehow conclude with a Balanchine ballet featuring Moira Shearer, the star of The Red Shoes. Danny Kaye heard about Goldwyn’s intentions to get the film made. Even before there was a satisfactory script, he saw it as a wonderful vehicle for himself and made it clear to Goldwyn that he was “crazy to do the picture.” It cost the producer close to $200,000 to get his former contract player.
For another $75,000 and 5 percent of the net profits, Goldwyn hired Moss Hart, the author of Lady in the Dark, the musical that first brought Kaye to the public’s attention. He sent Frances to New York with two earlier treatments of the material, in the hope of enticing the crowned heads of Broadway, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, to write an original score. “This has been a long labor of love,” Goldwyn explained in a letter to the songwriters, “because if ever I loved anything in my entire career, this has been it.” After they turned him down, Goldwyn appealed to Frank Loesser, who had composed the theme song for Roseanna McCoy before writing Guys and Dolls, then in its second year on Broadway. Loesser accepted.
In trying to pull a script together from the thirty-two versions Goldwyn owned, Moss Hart leaned most heavily on the 1938 treatment by Myles Connolly. Concluding that Andersen was a rather drab, often unsympathetic, character, Connolly had outlined the film as a “sort of fairytale” of the writer’s life, illustrated with Andersen’s stories. Hart and Loesser selected those best suited for setting to music—“Thumbelina,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and “The Little Mermaid”; then the writer had to string those songs into a story.
Hart’s version of Hans Christian Andersen is a completely fictitious account of a moonstruck cobbler who delights the children of Odense with his charming tales to the point of distraction and to the utter dismay of the local elders. Banished from town, he journeys with his apprentice (Peter, an unexplained young ward) to Copenhagen, where he hopes to ply his trade. Almost immediately upon arriving in the capital, however, he is incarcerated for unwittingly violating a town ordinance. Imprisoned, he sings a story to a little girl outside his cell window (“Thumbelina”) while Peter hides out at the Royal Theater. There he overhears Doro, a temperamental ballerina, shrieking for a cobbler. Peter suggests Hans, who is released from jail so that he can make her slippers. Hans falls in love with her, unaware that she is married to her equally temperamental ballet director.
Hans pines for her, and masks his deep feelings in a story called “The Little Mermaid”—a tale of misplaced love. It accidentally lands in the hands of the dancer, who mistakes the billet-doux for a ballet plot. Peter tells Hans of the mishap. He chastises the youth and rushes to Doro to proclaim his love for her, only to find that the ballet company has left town.
In her absence, Hans opens his shop, but incurably reverts to his old ways of charming children with his tales. “The Ugly Duckling” so comforts the bald-headed child to whom it is sung that his father, a newspaper editor, prints it. Hans becomes a famous writer. The ballet company returns, performing “The Little Mermaid,” but Hans does not get to see it because the dancer’s husband locks Hans in a closet. The next day, he declares his love for Doro, only to be told the truth—that she is married and, for all the marital strife, loves her husband. Returning to Odense with Peter, Hans is welcomed a hero by all the admirers of his stories, young and old alike.
Within ten weeks, Moss Hart had the screenplay on paper. Over the next ten weeks, he moved into the guest suite on Laurel Lane and wrote five more drafts. He stretched the plot everywhere possible to accommodate another half-dozen Loesser songs—including “Inchworm,” “I’m Hans Christian Andersen,” “Wonderful Copenhagen,” “No Two People,” and a bewitching ballad called “Anywhere I Wander.” He paced the story fast enough to move the audience from one tune to another without their paying too much attention to the plot. Alfred Crown suggested that Goldwyn was so anxious to get a film in production—“he thought it might blot out the memory of that string of losers”—that he did not notice how nonsensical the story was. It was a case of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: Everybody was afraid to tell the leader that he had bought a bum bill of goods. Only Farley Granger, cast under protest in the unsympathetic tertiary role of the ballet master, spoke up. He said the script was so “ridiculous” that it was becoming a joke around town. “Look at that plot,” he said. “Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets boy.”
The four-million-dollar spectacle started shooting several months later than Goldwyn had originally expected. The delays cost him several important elements. George Balanchine could not change his schedule with the New York City Ballet, and Moira Shearer got pregnant. She was replaced by Renée Jeanmaire, prima ballerina with the Ballet de Paris, the dance company of her husband, Roland Petit. He was hired to choreograph Hans Christian Andersen. Directors’ prior commitments forced Goldwyn to go far down his list of choices until he got to Charles Vidor, whose most notable films had been Cover Girl and Gilda, with Rita Hayworth. Filming on Richard Day’s gingerbread-house sets—about as realistic a depiction of Denmark as the plot was true to Andersen’s life—was scheduled to last more than four months, through the spring of 1952.
Age seventy-three, Goldwyn was a new man. “Things are getting very exciting around the studio these days,” his secretary wrote Sammy. “Some of the sets are nearing completion and they are truly magnificent ... gorgeous costumes are in work—tests are being made—and a million other things seem to be going on at the same time. Mr. Goldwyn is working very hard but is thriving on it. He is in the best of health and seems to enjoy every minute of the day.” The producer could not keep himself away from the set; for months he hummed “Thumbelina.”
Goldwyn unleashed his most elaborate promotional campaign. The film’s publicist, David Golding (whom he called “Goulding”), urged him to spend $25,000 on the world-class photographer Gjon Mili; his extraordinary shots in lieu of the usual production stills resulted in several extravagant magazine layouts. Goldwyn tapped into television everywhere he could. Dinah Shore sang “Anywhere I Wander” on her program; Ed Sullivan presented a retrospective of the producer’s life and work. George Burns and Gracie Allen threw in an exchange about the film in the short routine that closed their program. Edward R. Murrow used the production as a window into “the new Hollywood” on his program of on-the-spot journalism, See It Now.
Months before the film’s fall opening, Danes protested that Samuel Goldwyn was desecrating their national monument. Andersen scholars insisted that Danny Kaye bore no resemblance to the actual storyteller; the Danish foreign ministry railed in both the American and the Danish press that “the setup is so crazy and is ... more Mexico than Denmark.” Goldwyn screened an early cut of the film for Mogens Skot-Hansen, the United Nations representative to the motion picture industry. He publicly announced that it could only “promote the interest for Andersen’s fairy tales not only in the U.S.A. but also in Denmark when it is released.” Skot-Hansen told his countrymen only to worry about where they would “find room for the millions of tourists” whom the film would attract.
Danny Kaye visited Denmark in July 1952. From the airport he went straight to the statue of Andersen in one of Copenhagen’s central parks, to lay flowers. More than fifty policemen were needed to escort him through the throngs who awaited him at the memorial. “I came here to see if you would murder me,” he said, only to be assaulted with cheers. He climbed the statue and embraced Andersen, then had to be carried on policemen’s shoulders past the thousands of fans. Kaye performed a special concert of the film’s score, broadcast on radio across Europe, before a live audience of 250 Danes who had been selected from 75,000 applicant
s for tickets.
By attaching a disclaimer, Goldwyn spiked the guns of any critics who might attack his film’s lack of authenticity. The film began by stating, “Once upon a time there lived in Denmark a great story-teller named Hans Christian Andersen,” and that this film was not a biography “but a fairy tale about this great spinner of fairy tales.” Most viewers of the film played along, subordinating their objections to the plot and character to the many charms of Danny Kaye’s silver-throated renditions of the Loesser songs.
Hans Christian Andersen opened Thanksgiving week 1952 and became an immediate box-office champion. From his room at the Sherry Netherland Hotel, Goldwyn could look down on the long line of New Yorkers waiting to see his movie at the Paris Theater. “That’s what I’ve got to be thankful for,” he told his son. It earned more than six million dollars in its initial run—the most of any Goldwyn film to date except for Best Years; and it was nominated for six Academy Awards (music, song, sound, cinematography, costumes, and sets). Cecil B. DeMille won the Best Picture Oscar that year with his version of circus life, The Greatest Show on Earth. That victory was something of a message to the public, that the struggling medium of motion pictures could still deliver something television could not.
Goldwyn felt that both he and his industry had survived yet another debacle. “It all proves to me that this business of ours is still a great and healthy one,” he wrote one critic. “If you make your pictures for the whole family, the whole family will make a bee-line for the theatre.”
The most fractious reaction to Hans Christian Andersen came from Farley Granger, who was fed up with yet another inferior role. In New York, the Actors Studio was teaching a naturalistic acting technique that grew out of Stanislavsky’s precepts; its “method” was preparing several new talents for the screen who almost single-handedly were changing the image of American leading men: Marlon Brando led this pack of movie “rebels”; Montgomery Clift was a sensitive, introspective version; and in but three films, James Dean would capture the social unrest of his age and come to symbolize an entire generation. Even such conventional newcomers as Tony Curtis, Robert Wagner, and Tab Hunter threatened to eclipse Farley Granger’s time in the sun.
The restless twenty-seven-year-old actor reacted to his disappointment with bad deportment, occasionally disappearing for weeks at a time. In his tenth year under contract, and on suspension again, Granger wrote Goldwyn, “our relationship seems to be going downhill and getting worse rather than better.” He asked Goldwyn to release him. Goldwyn replied with an accounting of all the unrequired boosts in salary and career he had offered the young actor. “We are often our own worst enemies,” he counseled, “and I sincerely believe that your present attitude can only be harmful to yourself. The only way out is not ‘divorce’ as you put it, but to live up to your agreement in all respects.” A short time later, Goldwyn realized he had no future plans for him, and he let Granger—the last of his contract stars—go.
For the first moment in his life, Goldwyn found himself with time on his hands. He discovered unforeseen bliss on July 11, 1951, when Jennifer gave birth to a girl, named Catherine Howard Goldwyn. She and Sammy called her Cricket. Before the child was three months old, Frances sailed to France, where the family was living on a farm outside Paris. She sent Sam a report of her inspection tour, glowing in every department—from Sammy’s job heading SHAPE’s photographic office of the Motion Picture Division to the baby’s blue eyes and red hair “and features any one can see must grow into a beautiful face.”
Goldwyn established a trust for his granddaughter, which he started by signing over the rights to one of his most successful films, The Hurricane. He kept a photograph of the baby on his desk, and snapshots of her with her father, mother, or grandmother in every room of the house. “I just love the looks of that baby,” he wrote Sammy.
Back in mufti, Sammy moved with his family to Central Park West in New York. He launched a show business career of his own in television, working for Edward R. Murrow. Within a few years, he had returned to Los Angeles, where he produced feature films. The first, Man with the Gun in 1955, starred Robert Mitchum. In the ten years after Cricket’s arrival, Jennifer gave birth to three sons—Francis Sidney Howard in 1954, John Howard in 1958, and Anthony Howard in 1961. The doting grandparents showered them with presents; and for a few hours on holidays, Sam Goldwyn became a sentimental family man. (He and Frances’s mother even found it in their hearts to raise flowery toasts to each other.) Like most of the Goldwyns’ friends, Leonora Hornblow observed that “Sam poured into his grandchildren all the love he had withheld from Sammy.” (Meantime, Sam expressed token interest in Ruth’s children: When Blanche Capps married a dentist, Ralph Stern, Goldwyn did help outfit his office; but Goldwyn did not even notice his grandson Alan’s growing interest in photography. When Ruth found the courage to ask her father if he could find even the most menial studio job for her son, Goldwyn only snarled, “Everybody doesn’t have to be in the movies!”)
Besides his son’s sons, Goldwyn came to see charity as a way to perpetuate his name. In 1951, he offered the University of California one million dollars for the construction of a hospital on the Los Angeles campus. When the university was unable to meet the financial demands entailed in erecting the Goldwyn Pavilion, he created a scholarship at UCLA for medical students. In 1954, he established the Samuel Goldwyn Award in Creative Writing, to be presented annually. (Francis Ford Coppola would take first place eight years later.) The Samuel Goldwyn Award, $2,500 for “the best painting by a Southern California artist,” was funded in 1957. A $75,000 contribution to the Permanent Charities Committee in 1956 made possible the purchase of a lot and the erection of their new headquarters, the Samuel Goldwyn Building. Goldwyn also served as president of the United Jewish Welfare Fund, and when the state of Israel achieved its independence, Abba Eban invited him to introduce the new nation’s president, David Ben-Gurion, at a fund-raising gala. (Although Goldwyn never stopped supporting Israel, he did have limits. One day Edward G. Robinson went up to Laurel Lane to discuss the idea of helping the young country start its own movie industry. “My God,” said Goldwyn. “There are enough rotten Jews in Hollywood!”)
Aside from Ronald Reagan (the former Warners star who became host of television’s General Electric Theater), Hollywood claimed few political supporters more active than Sam Goldwyn. In October 1951, he had written General Eisenhower ex cathedra: “I can tell you without reservation that every single bit of evidence which comes to me from all parts of the country demonstrates beyond doubt that the American people unreservedly want you to serve them.... The people want you. The people will continue to want you. And, unless I have no knowledge whatever, the people will demand you!” Goldwyn bombarded the general with similar cables and letters until he accepted the nomination of the Republican party. “TO ME,” Goldwyn wired the new candidate in July 1952, “THIS IS A DREAM COME TRUE.” One of Ike’s biggest contributors and fund-raisers, he attended the inauguration and became the President’s most diehard constituent. Over the years, they became friends, with Goldwyn sending flattering messages after every important presidential speech. The only time he questioned the President was in the dog days of 1954, at which time he expressed his opinions to Chief of Staff Sherman Adams. “Day by day I grow more and more concerned with the evil which McCarthy works upon our country,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, he was elected as a Republican and, as a party, we will remain cursed with the stigma of McCarthy unless he is repudiated unqualifiedly.” He suggested the President take aggressive action, but Eisenhower maintained silence.
For the greater part of the two years following Hans Christian Andersen, Goldwyn enjoyed his leisure. He and Frances traveled to Hawaii, weekended in Palm Springs, and even indulged in a three-week visit to the Austrian spa of Bad Gastein. They spent close to six months touring the capitals of Europe. Goldwyn became a hound for publicity, especially in his absence, when there was no news to report. “If a day went by wit
hout something about him in the paper,” Dave Golding remembered, “he’d say, ‘You bastard, Goulding—you let me die.’”
Back at the office, he was walking in circles. One of his brightest executives, William Dozier, had quit because “Goldwyn just didn’t seem interested in making pictures. He wasn’t buying anything.” He had an early crack at Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy but resisted because the suggestion of adultery in the plot would prevent the film from getting the Motion Picture Association’s seal; at the same time, he wrote to Eric Johnston, insisting that the industry update its production code. Goldwyn contented himself contemplating remakes and meeting with representatives of several new companies that were offering large sums of cash to motion picture studios for the license to distribute their films on television. Danny Mandell cut down two dozen Goldwyn pictures so that they might air in hour-long versions; but then he refused to sell. Robert Sherwood and Willy Wyler, both between projects, discussed the idea of getting together with Goldwyn on another one, but—as Wyler said—“it seemed like too much bother for everybody.”
Instead, Goldwyn rereleased The Best Years of Our Lives, modified to play on a wide screen. It opened with all the hoopla of a new picture, including a gala premiere in Washington, D.C., on February 3, 1954, with Sherman Adams, five Supreme Court justices, two cabinet members, and twenty-four senators in attendance. “As far as I am concerned, what counts is what is in the picture, not when it was made,” Goldwyn told the press. “A literary classic is just as important in its 10th or 20th or 100th edition as it was when it was first written, and the public accepts this as a matter of course. The same should be true of motion pictures.” With a quarter-million-dollar campaign advertising it as “The Most Honored Picture of All Time,” Best Years grossed another million dollars. “I am not yet ready to make a specific announcement about my next picture,” Goldwyn was telling the press, “but when I do you can rest assured that it will be one worth hearing about.” It was.
Goldwyn Page 64
