Goldwyn

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by A. Scott Berg


  A golden age of the Broadway musical was climaxing—a decade and a half in which the art form’s leading practitioners were creating the greatest works of their careers. Hollywood’s recent success in enhancing size, sound, and spectrum made motion pictures feel they were at last fully able to do those works justice. Between 1955 and 1958, four Rodgers and Hammerstein classics reached the screen—Oklahoma!, Carousel, The King and I, and South Pacific (which Goldwyn called “Southern Pacific”). Invigorated by the success of An American in Paris, MGM attacked the genre in the fifties with all the artillery the big studio could muster. They filmed Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate in 3-D in 1953, Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon in CinemaScope the following year, Kismet the year after that. When Hollywood ran out of recent Broadway hits, it turned out original musicals and revived old favorites by Berlin, the Gershwins, and Jerome Kern.

  Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls had opened at the 46th Street Theater on November 24, 1950. Before the second-act curtain had fallen that night, Samuel Goldwyn later noted, “I made up my mind to bring that show to the motion picture screen.” Unfortunately, so did practically every other Hollywood producer there. After its three-year run, the show’s owners auctioned the property. On March 3, 1954, Sam Goldwyn found himself bidding against MGM, Paramount, and Columbia. He won with an offer of one million dollars (against 10 percent of the picture’s worldwide box-office gross)—the highest figure yet paid for a story property in motion picture history.

  Guys and Dolls was based on a Damon Runyon short story, “The Idyll of Sarah Brown,” with several of his other touts and tinhorn characters thrown in. Screenwriter Jo Swerling laid the groundwork for the play, and Abe Burrows (formerly a radio gag writer) finished it; Frank Loesser wrote a dozen original songs. The musical tells two love stories—one between Nathan Detroit (proprietor of “the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York”) and Miss Adelaide, a nightclub performer with a persistent “bad, bad cold,” the psychosomatic result of their fourteen-year engagement. The other lovers are Sky Masterson, a freewheeling smoothie who will bet on anything, and Sarah Brown, a volunteer at the Save-a-Soul Mission. All of them take a chance and wind up winners at a double wedding ceremony in Times Square.

  It was a peculiar moment to produce Guys and Dolls. Hollywood, in its attempts to attract crowds, had split itself along generational lines. The old guard believed in making pictures bigger still, more fantastic. (Such new box-office champions as Quo Vadis, Cinerama Holiday, and The Robe supported their case.) The Young Turks saw the effectiveness of realism on the silver screen, using the camera as a kind of microscope. Mumbling young men in black leather jackets (The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause) were fast becoming the screen’s heroes of preference; gritty slums (The Blackboard Jungle) proved exciting screen locations. Smaller, psychological works full of sexual tension—William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic , and Splendor in the Grass and Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo and Suddenly Last Summer—spoke to a new generation of moviegoers. Even in directing Oklahoma! Fred Zinnemann strove for realism, shooting much of the action outside the confines of the soundstage, in actual cornfields. For Goldwyn, these trends were ill winds. As his son noted, “Now he was living in a world he didn’t like.”

  “One day, around 1954,” Mrs. William Wyler later observed, “there was a whole crowd of new faces in town.” Many were a breed of young television executives who saw their medium as the dominant communication and entertainment force of the future. Other Hollywood tenderfoots made up a new generation of movie executives, men with little stake of their own in the industry. Directors, actors, agents, and new independent producers were building businesses from chips of the crumbling studios. The very concept of an independent producer would soon seem outmoded—and a misnomer. As studios began to phase out their supervisors (executive producers), “independent” came to designate anyone with an idea who went to a studio in search of backing—making him, in fact, an extremely dependent producer. Those few, like Goldwyn, who still financed themselves, struck most of the industry as archaic. Hollywood was falling into the hands of men who had no passion for the “garments” they manufactured, no feel for the material.

  Sam Goldwyn was one primordial producer not ready to trudge into extinction. He drew strength from Cecil B. DeMille, who was just then moving heaven and earth to produce the greatest spectacle of his career, a remake of his 1923 The Ten Commandments. (Jesse Lasky, the third in that triumvirate of Hollywood pioneers, was reduced to writing his memoirs to pay his bills.) Goldwyn grew determined to produce Guys and Dolls as the ultimate film musical, an epic. He would demonstrate for the world that none of his powers had diminished, the cost be damned. Every element of the film was “special ordered,” to the extent that the handiwork drew attention to itself. Goldwyn spent $5.5 million overproducing the movie.

  He started by hiring one of Hollywood’s most prodigious talents to write and direct Guys and Dolls, even though the twenty-five-year veteran of motion pictures had never made a musical. Joseph L. Mankiewicz had, however, won back-to-back pairs of Oscars—for writing and directing A Letter to Three Wives in 1949 and for All About Eve in 1950. Mankiewicz was one of the most intellectual moviemakers ever to succeed in Hollywood. He felt the libretto of Guys and Dolls was thin, and so he wrote an entire script that could have played without any music at all. “My primary, almost only, objective in this writing,” he explained to Goldwyn, “has been to tell the story as warmly and humanly as possible—and to characterize our four principals as fully as if their story were going to be told in purely dramatic terms.” With songs, the film would have run four hours. Goldwyn knew the script was long but liked Mankiewicz’s deepening of the characters and creation of more “romantic interest.” He told him, “You write with great warmth and charmth.”

  Goldwyn and Mankiewicz considered almost every leading man in Hollywood for both male leads. The roles had been rendered practically indistinguishable, different only in Sky’s being required to sing the show’s serious songs while Nathan had to play the more comic scenes. They thought first of Gene Kelly, but MGM refused to loan him out. Then they discussed Tony Martin, Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, and Burt Lancaster. Bing Crosby wanted the role of Sky so much that he sent his attorney to plead his case before Goldwyn. Clark Gable’s agent pushed hard for his client. In a moment of wild inspiration, Goldwyn thought of a team that had proved unusually successful in the last five years, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Mankiewicz put the kibosh on that idea.

  Although nobody knew if he could even carry a tune, one name kept surfacing in every casting session for the role of Sky—Marlon Brando. The hottest actor in films, since his 1950 debut in The Men, he had been nominated for four Best Actor Oscars in his next five roles; he won for On the Waterfront. Because of Brando’s strong aversion to the press, he had been vilified as a “bad boy”; but Mankiewicz, who had directed him in Julius Caesar, considered him the consummate actor. When Goldwyn heard that Brando’s hesitation in taking the part was not his ability to sing so much as the size of the role, he urged Mankiewicz to win him over. “WANT VERY MUCH TO HAVE YOU PLAY SKY MASTERSON,” the director wired. “IN ITS OWN WAY ROLE AS I WOULD WRITE IT FOR YOU OFFERS CHALLENGE ALMOST EQUAL OF MARK ANTONY. YOU HAVE NEVER DONE A MUSICAL NEITHER HAVE I. WE NEVER DID SHAKESPEARE EITHER. I AM CONFIDENT THIS WOULD BE EXCITING GRATIFYING AND REWARDING EXPERIENCE FOR BOTH OF US.”

  In the midst of negotiations, Frank Sinatra’s agent got hold of the script. His client insisted on being in the picture. There would be no conflict in the fact that Goldwyn was about to sign Brando; Sinatra was desperate to play Nathan Detroit. Mankiewicz thought Sinatra was all wrong for the part; in fact, he still hoped to talk Goldwyn into signing Sam Levene, who had created the role on Broadway. But he met the singer at the Beverly Hills Hotel and found that “Frank was just in love with it.” Even though Brando and Sinatra were better suited for each other’s roles, Goldwyn liked the ring of the star
s’ names. Brando received top billing and $200,000 for fourteen weeks. Thinking of MGM’s advertising on Garbo’s first talking picture, Goldwyn thought they might promote Guys and Dolls with two words: “Brando Sings.” When Harry Cohn, who was then working with Abe Burrows, heard this casting news, he said, “Good for Goldwyn, bad for the picture.”

  Goldwyn wanted Grace Kelly for Sarah Brown, the missionary. In the three years since he had first heard about her, she had made two films for Hitchcock, played Gary Cooper’s leading lady in High Noon, and won an Academy Award for her performance in The Country Girl. She would make but a few more films before playing in The Swan (a remake of Frances Howard’s farewell to the silent screen before marrying her “prince”). When she turned this part down because of prior commitments, Goldwyn tried Deborah Kerr, who was also booked. The third choice was Jean Simmons, who had just played Desiree to Brando’s Napoleon.

  With Betty Grable unavailable to play Miss Adelaide, Goldwyn hired Vivian Blaine, who had originated the role onstage. A chorus of new Goldwyn Girls was recruited. Michael Kidd was asked to re-create his original choreography, and Goldwyn rounded up several members of the Broadway cast—including Stubby Kaye (whom Goldwyn called “Stubby Toe”).

  A septuagenarian producing his seventy-ninth film, Sam Goldwyn had the enthusiasm of a neophyte. No detail of the production escaped his Argus eyes. One afternoon, Mankiewicz and Loesser were supposed to discuss with Goldwyn the placement of a new song in the picture. “We didn’t want to argue in front of him,” the director later recounted; “it’s better to be a unified front.” So on their way to his office, they stopped at a supply closet and hid inside. “We were discussing the situation,” said Mankiewicz, “when suddenly the door opened. There was Sam. We both felt awful. A couple of shits. Like we were stealing from him or something. Sam just looked at us with a look of hurt dignity and said, ‘I want you to know—I’m not the kind of producer who shoves the money under the door.’”

  Irene Sharaff, who designed the costumes, discovered Goldwyn’s basic passion for his work as well. She would long remember the day she quietly laughed behind Goldwyn’s back when she overheard him tell Mankiewicz he wanted a “close-up” of Brando in one of the dance numbers, “with his feet”; but she also never forgot the day just before they were to film the wedding finale. He and the director had already approved of the dress Jean Simmons was to wear, but as Goldwyn and Sharaff were walking along, he suddenly grabbed her arm and said, “How about the uniform and holding the bouquet instead of the wedding dress?” Ordinarily, the designer later said, “I would have put such a query down to his shrewd budget-paring, but in this instance he was absolutely right. The incident, brief and beyond the film of no consequence, won me over.”

  Despite the public’s new taste for slice-of-life realism, Goldwyn still believed movies should make magic. “People don’t want to pay good money,” he told Alfred Crown, “to see somebody else’s kitchen.” So the sets of Guys and Dolls were nothing like the streets of New York—not even as Stanley Donen had colorfully captured them in On the Town. Keeping his films stage-bound, Miss Sharaff suggested, was “his way of maintaining control.” In this case, Oliver Smith’s sets were a vivid mixture of scenery both realistic and stylized. “As a result,” wrote Stephen Sondheim in Films in Review, “they have the disadvantages of both, and these disadvantages work against the very special nature of Runyonesque story-telling.” They added a dimension of phoniness to the proceedings, offering little wit or irony.

  Joseph Mankiewicz’s direction did not help. Sam Goldwyn, Jr., suggested that the director had become so taken with the spectacle of production numbers that he was inclined to keep the camera still, often producing a static quality. Furthermore, the film felt padded, its songs often proving redundant alongside the protracted nonmusical scenes. Orson Welles told Abe Burrows, “They put a tiny turd on every one of your lines.”

  Vivian Blaine and Stubby Kaye (particularly in his rousing rendition of “Sit Down, You’re Rockin‘ the Boat”) recaptured the essence of the show. Nobody found Frank Sinatra noteworthy, but with the addition of a new song, “Adelaide,” he sang enough to satisfy his fans. For Goldwyn, the most unexpected surprise proved to be the beautiful Jean Simmons, whose sweet voice and strong acting made him think the love story worked better in the film than onstage. “I’m so happy,” he said, bustling toward her after seeing the rushes one day, “that I couldn’t get Grace Kelly.”

  The first time the Goldwyns heard the recording of Brando’s songs, Frances tried to make the best of a painful moment. “He sounds like ... a young Astaire,” she offered. Frank Loesser rolled his eyes skyward. Gordon Sawyer and his crew of sound engineers worked hard to patch together respectable versions of his numbers. In the end, Goldwyn was so pleased with Brando’s performance onscreen and off that he rewarded him with a white Ford Thunderbird. Seeing no strings attached, Brando accepted it.

  “Faithful in detail, the picture is false to the original in its feeling,” read the November 14, 1955, Time review of Guys and Dolls, stating the objections of practically every other critic.

  Predictably, Goldwyn ordered his biggest promotional push ever. Richard Avedon took publicity photographs, Ed Sullivan featured numbers on his show, and even the reclusive Brando (feeling indebted to Goldwyn for the new car) gave interviews and attended the film’s premieres. When he finally had enough, he announced at one press conference that the film was “nothing to get on your tricycle about.”

  After more than a decade of profitably releasing his films through RKO, Goldwyn changed distributors. The Howard Hughes film enterprise was in a corporate tailspin, and by 1958 would be run into the ground. Goldwyn found the best terms for himself at MGM, which, since the expulsion of Louis B. Mayer, had been nosediving as well. Nicholas Schenck, the president of Loew’s Inc., the studio’s parent company, made much of Goldwyn’s at last joining the organization that had long borne his name. Goldwyn privately delighted in the fact that after all those years, he could make that claim and the exiled Mayer could not. Guys and Dolls did over thirteen million dollars in business, becoming the number one box-office attraction of the year.

  The film also received Oscar nominations in the three visual categories—sets, costumes, and cinematography—but it won no awards. For the third year in a row, the Academy’s grand prize want to a smaller-screen, black-and-white $350,000 production, Marty—the story of a lonely butcher that had originated as a live television drama. “It is neither high, wide, nor handsome, and it has been photographed with a camera designed to present films of the type we used to know and love before CinemaScope opened new and lunatic vistas for enjoyment,” said The New Yorker review. Marty also won trophies for Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor, and it grossed in the millions.

  Goldwyn continued to back his style of Hollywood entertainment. He sent the Goldwyn Girls on a world tour, from Australia to South America; and Guys and Dolls became a huge international hit, rivaling MGM’s overseas records set by Gone With the Wind. Sam and Frances resumed their globe-trotting, to preside at as many foreign openings of the picture as possible, traveling as far as Tokyo. When he learned that Marlon Brando was in Japan filming Teahouse of the August Moon at the time of the Guys and Dolls premiere there, Goldwyn asked him to attend. Brando refused, saying, “I’ve done enough for that white Thunderbird.” The film grossed almost half a million dollars in that country alone, twenty thousand dollars in Venezuela, over one million dollars in England.

  Box-office receipts, increased holdings in stocks and bonds, investments in gushing oil wells, and swelling trust funds were still not enough to make Frances feel completely secure. She was never comfortable enough with her wealth to splurge. One friend said, “The only reason Frances even went along with buying all that art was because she knew it was a good investment. It’s why she also preferred jewels to clothes.” Wherever she stayed—in her stateroom on the Queen Mary or at Claridge’s in London—she traveled
with her own tin of Sterno, a jar of Maxwell House instant coffee, and a teakettle. Sam, on the other hand, had at last allowed himself to loosen his belt. On vacations, he indulged in rich food, and once he went through an entire tray of pastries. The Goldwyns booked an apartment for a month at the Grand Hotel de l‘Europe in Bad Gastein.

  Goldwyn needed a pastime. Sammy suggested croquet, which had become the rage on several Long Island estates. Louis Jourdan, a French actor who had come to America under contract to David Selznick, was generally regarded as the best player in town; he also set the pace for the weekenders at Darryl Zanuck’s Palm Springs house. A game with that much social cachet and so few physical demands appealed to Goldwyn. Although it was far more complicated than he ever took time to learn—“It’s like playing chess on a lawn,” explained Jourdan—he became an overnight devotee.

  In 1953, the lot across the street from the Goldwyns and the Firestones, crowning Laurel Lane, had come up for sale for $50,000. Leonard Firestone suggested the two families buy the property jointly, agreeing that if either left the cul-de-sac, the other would have the right to buy the half-interest for $25,000; until such time, the neighbors agreed that no additional dwelling could be constructed on it. As a birthday present for her husband a few years later, Frances bought the Firestone share of the parcel (extravagant, but a good investment) and converted the property into one of the finest croquet courts in the country, complete with gazebo for spectators. Then, “rather like casting ‘Best Year,’” suggested Louis Jourdan, “he surrounded himself with the best players he could find.” Besides the handsome Frenchman, George Sanders, restaurateur Michael Romanoff, writer Casey Robinson, Howard Hawks and his brother Bill, Gig Young, and director Jean Negulesco became regulars all day Saturday and Sunday. (Humphrey Bogart occasionally played there; in fact, his last outing before succumbing to cancer in 1957 was to watch some old friends play on the Goldwyn court.) The proprietor had cards printed up for his special guests, making them life members of the “Goldwyn Croquet Club.” On the back were printed the organization’s three rules:1. Don’t get excited.

 

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