Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  2. Correctly remember balls you are dead on.

  3. Have patience with fellow members who are not as good as you are.

  His club members gave Goldwyn a handicap: Generally he was excused from hitting through the center wicket, and he was entitled to a consultant during play. Neither helped much. Nobody ever wanted to be Goldwyn’s partner, because he neither listened nor improved. Goldwyn just wanted to win—to hit his ball through the wickets and smash his opponents’ balls to kingdom come. He cheated by moving his ball whenever he thought nobody was looking, and he often made up house rules that were to his immediate advantage.

  Playing on the Goldwyn court was not about advancing one’s career. Curiously, there was not even any betting. “Even tempers, polite memory, and noble unselfishness were our guiding spirits,” recounted Negulesco. “Until we walked onto the court. Then the spirit of Hollywood croquet exploded.” One time when George Sanders was about to smash Sam’s ball, Goldwyn pleaded, “If you don’t do it, George, I’ll buy you a Rolls-Royce.” Sanders said he already owned one and sent the ball sailing. Another time, writer Charles Lederer found himself playing singles with Goldwyn and noticed him heading for the third wicket without having passed through the second. Lederer called him on it, and they argued back and forth until Lederer quietly said, “Sam, you go to the third wicket and I walk out of this court and never come back.” With high-pitched indignation, Goldwyn turned on his opponent and said, “What’s the matter with you? Are you for Stevenson or something?” Louis Jourdan, with whom he was generally partnered, used to try reasoning with Goldwyn, Socratically asking questions in an effort to teach him the fine points of the game. “I was being too impeccable,” Jourdan realized. “And one day when I went too far, he could take it no longer; and he said, ‘Where are we ... a court of law?’”

  Goldwyn established an annual tournament, complete with awards. Louis Jourdan generally took home the loving cup, and Goldwyn developed an especially warm relationship with him. Otherwise, Sam kept his relationships casual, so that the games could be what Jourdan said were “four or five hours of total escape for him.” He talked as little business as possible; and what advice he tendered those days was platitudinous. More than once, he explained to Jean Negulesco the secret to being a successful producer. “You get yourself a great story,” he would say. “Then you get the best writer available. Then you get the best director. Then you hire a first-class cast, the right cast, and a great cameraman....” The first time Negulesco heard this wisdom, he started to laugh. A dead-serious Goldwyn stopped him, saying, “I mean it. It is the only way.”

  Some eighteen months followed the release of Guys and Dolls before Goldwyn went sniffing for his next project. He had become so finical that almost nothing appealed to him anymore. One night, Goldwyn and playwright John Patrick saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof together. As they exited the theater, Goldwyn asked what he thought of the Williams play. Patrick said it was not his “kind of thing” and that he was, in fact, offended by much of the dialogue and the subject matter. “I feel the same,” said Goldwyn. “And I’m no Polly Adler.”

  There would have been no genuine search for new material had Frances not become her husband’s eyes and ears. She solicited properties from all quarters, and any idea for a motion picture needed her approval before Sam heard about it. She was among the first to see the movie possibilities of The Naked and the Dead, Anastasia, and The Birdman of Alcatraz (as early as 1953); but in her job as story editor, she found herself as stymied as her paid predecessors had been. All dreams of producing another Robert Sherwood script ended in November 1955, when the critic, dramatist, screenwriter, and presidential speechwriter, and one of Goldwyn’s closest friends, died. Francis put pencil to paper, helping her husband write a eulogy.

  A year later, Goldwyn seized upon an idea for a film with William Wyler, The Diary of Anne Frank. Goldwyn thought the successful Broadway adaptation of the young Jewish girl’s journals was “one of the finest dramatic presentations I have witnessed in a considerable time.” The one-set play seemed an unusual departure from Goldwyn’s “blockbuster” mentality at the time; but, as his son explained, “he knew it would make an important picture.”

  Goldwyn sent Wyler to New York, and not even the director’s ambivalence toward the material dissuaded Goldwyn from proceeding. He figured he could talk Wyler out of his reservations. Then Frances spoke up. “Mother was desperately opposed to it,” Sam junior remembered. Because it was a Jewish story, “she was afraid it would lose a lot of money.” Goldwyn considered throwing the project Sammy’s way, but Frances put her foot down. She could live with her husband taking such a chance, but she said, “Sammy’s just starting a career; I don’t want it to be something that will fail.”

  Goldwyn won Wyler over, then lost the property because of his own vanity. Anne Frank’s father, who did not know one Hollywood producer from another, controlled the rights to his daughter’s story. He was not willing to sell them to anybody without script approval. Goldwyn took this as an insult. A short visit to Europe, a telephone call, even a letter explaining his intentions, would probably have won Mr. Frank over. Instead, Goldwyn rode away from the project on his high horse. George Stevens eventually produced and directed the film. A few years later, looking back over almost sixty years in motion pictures, Goldwyn told his son his biggest disappointment had not been one of the films he had made; it was The Diary of Anne Frank, the one that got away.

  Goldwyn and Wyler became closer for the experience, bringing their relationship to a level of mutual respect; “and the best part,” Wyler said, “is that I didn’t have to work for him.” When the director needed advice on his next offer, he went directly to his former producer. MGM had decided to remake Ben-Hur, hoping the stupendous epic could bail out the scuppered studio, just as the silent version had thirty-five years earlier. Goldwyn urged his friend to take the job, arguing that it would be an opportunity for Wyler to make more money than ever before. He even helped negotiate his contract, assuring Wyler hefty profit participation.

  In 1957, James Mulvey suggested that Mr. Goldwyn (as he still called him after thirty years) act on his fondest dream and make a film of Porgy and Bess. The Gershwins had long refused to sell the film rights; then they got trammeled up with one Robert Breen, who had been directing the opera around the world for years. Mulvey saw a clear way to the rights by paying Breen off.

  In the twenty-two years since it was first performed, Ira Gershwin had counted more than ninety film producers who expressed interest in Porgy and Bess. The recent revolution over racial injustice in the United States heightened people’s awareness of blacks and incited new interest in this musical version of the crippled black beggar in love with a two-timing woman. Arthur Freed, Hal Wallis, L. B. Mayer, Anatole Litvak, Buddy Adler, and Dore Schary all made offers. (Gershwin never seriously considered Harry Cohn’s proposal, once he said he hoped to produce the film with a white cast in blackface—Al Jolson as Porgy, Fred Astaire as the Harlem fast-talker Sportin‘ Life, and Rita Hayworth as Bess.) In May 1957, Goldwyn obtained the rights for $650,000 against 10 percent of gross receipts and announced that Robert Breen would be associate producer of the picture. Breen was hardly heard from again. Goldwyn pledged the profits from the film to charity, to be dispensed through his foundation.

  Applying the formula for great picturemaking that he had spelled out to Jean Negulesco, Goldwyn got the best writer available. He cast a wide net, starting with Langston Hughes. He tried to interest Paul Osborn (who had recently written the screenplays of East of Eden and Sayonara), Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (The Diary of Anne Frank), Sidney Kingsley, and the successful team of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. They all turned him down, praising the material but citing other commitments. Clifford Odets was given the rush over a private dinner at Laurel Lane, but he, too, passed on the opportunity. Sammy, who was producing a western called The Proud Rebel, starring Alan Ladd, recommended one of television’s young writing sen
sations, Rod Serling. Goldwyn got lucky when “out of the blue,” as Frances put it, came N. Richard Nash, the author of The Rainmaker. By Christmas 1957, he had written a hefty first draft. After two major revisions, he put Goldwyn at ease, assuring him that Porgy and Bess was a good twenty-five pages shorter than Guys and Dolls.

  Then Goldwyn went after the best director. Elia Kazan, Frank Capra, and King Vidor (who had directed the all-black musical Hallelujah in 1929) were his first choices. He settled on Rouben Mamoulian, absent from films for nine years until the 1957 production of Silk Stockings. Goldwyn did not need reminding that Mamoulian had directed not only the original stage version of Porgy and Bess but also the play, Porgy, on which the musical work was based.

  Getting “a first-class cast, the right cast” proved to be Goldwyn’s most formidable task on the film. Because black actors had, de facto, long been barred from Hollywood’s major studios—except to tap-dance and play maids and shuffling lazybones—few had the opportunity to become stars. The café-au-lait Lena Horne had come closest to acceptance by white audiences, but her roles in films were mostly “guest appearances,” numbers that could be snipped out of prints playing in southern theaters; it looked for a moment as though James Edwards, who portrayed the victimized soldier in Home of the Brave, might make it, but he did not catch on. Most recently, a fine-featured West Indian named Harry Belafonte was crossing the color line with his performances in Carmen Jones and Island in the Sun.

  To the generation of young black actors trying to break through, the movie screen of the late fifties became as crucial a battleground in the fight for equality as the buses of Montgomery. Porgy and Bess struck many of them as a giant step backward—a story of fornication, drug addiction, and murder, all told in heavy dialect, that did nothing but reinforce negative stereotypes of blacks. Harry Belafonte flatly turned down the lead, and several actors refused other roles. Only Sammy Davis, Jr.—an extremely successful nightclub performer, especially in the new desert playground of Las Vegas—campaigned for a role, that of Sportin‘ Life. One night at a party at Judy Garland’s, he came in and sang several numbers. “Swear on your life you’ll never use him,” said Lee Gershwin, turning to Goldwyn. “Him?” he replied incredulously. “That monkey?”

  “I represent the greatest Negro actor in the whole world,” Lillian Schary Small wrote Goldwyn upon learning of his intentions to make Porgy and Bess. The actor’s name was Sidney Poitier. He was a strapping Bahamian with decidedly Negroid features and dark skin; just thirty, he had picked up a few movie roles since his debut in 1950, then in 1957 worked in three films back-to-back. “He is not a singer,” Mrs. Small wrote, “but that is never too much of a problem where the part requires a fine actor.” For one of the few times, Goldwyn saw an actor’s work that equaled an agent’s claims. He made a firm offer of $75,000 for Poitier to play Porgy.

  Mrs. Small was not actually Poitier’s agent. Martin Baum in New York was, and she was but an independent agent on the West Coast with whom Baum sometimes associated himself. She promised to deliver the actor, even though she had not even discussed the role with him. Unfortunately, as Poitier later noted, “I had a considerable aversion to ‘Porgy and Bess’ because of its inherent racial attitudes.” He flatly refused the part. By that time, however, Goldwyn had announced to the press that he had signed Poitier.

  Mrs. Small might have cleaned up the mess by admitting she had committed her client to the role without authority. Instead, she was determined to make good on her word. Goldwyn went to the press again. He leaked the situation to Leonard Lyons, who wrote in his column that Poitier’s friends were urging him “to change his mind and agree to do ‘Porgy and Bess’ for Sam Goldwyn, without a script-approval clause,” because Goldwyn was “far more sensitive and sensible about such matters than any one in motion pictures.” Then Lyons quoted his friend, Ralph Bunche, the Nobel Prize—winning diplomat, who stated that the play was “a classic, and ought to be preserved on film.”

  “I was being nudged hard because Sam Goldwyn’s nose was publicly out of joint,” Poitier recalled. At last even his New York agent insisted that the actor owed the producer a meeting. Poitier realized failure to do so would result in his name being smeared in Hollywood.

  The meeting at Laurel Lane could not have been more cordial. After several minutes of pleasantries, Poitier voiced his objections to the material. “I understand how you feel, Mr. Poitier, but I disagree with you,” replied Goldwyn, “—this is one of the greatest things that has ever happened for the black race.” The remark was not lost on Poitier, who was impressed that this old glove drummer should have resorted to “such an outrageous bullshit statement.” At the end of the meeting, Goldwyn insisted that he did not want Poitier to do anything against his will. He asked only that the actor give it “some more honest thought. Man to man.”

  While he was thinking, Poitier met with Stanley Kramer, who wanted him for a film called The Defiant Ones. It was the story of two escaped convicts of different races who hate each other but are chained together. Exactly the sort of realistic role Poitier had been aching for, it made Porgy and Bess look archaic. Kramer said he was prepared to draw up a contract—once he had a release from Goldwyn on this Porgy and Bess deal he had heard about. Even if there were no papers between Goldwyn and Poitier, Kramer said he could not start a picture with the actor if he thought Goldwyn might bring suit and shut down the production. Poitier said there was no problem; he instructed Lillian Small to tell Goldwyn he had thought about it, and he was not going to do Porgy and Bess.

  Poitier believed she never delivered the message. Goldwyn said he was holding him to the agent’s promise; and Martin Baum reminded Poitiet of Goldwyn’s power to blackball the actor. ‘As I saw it,“ Poitier later wrote,”in my career there was a real beginning for a breakthrough—not only for me, but for other blacks in films.“ He and his agent closed their contingency deal with Kramer, then went to Goldwyn. ”I know that I’m caught in a bind,“ he told Goldwyn, ”—I want to do Kramer’s picture. I know you know about the Kramer deal. I understand that you’re not going to let me off the hook from the promise my agent gave you. If that is correct, then I’ll do ’Porgy and Bess.‘“

  Goldwyn said, “I don’t want you to do ‘Porgy and Bess’ unless you’re going to do it the best way you know how. It’s no good me spending all this money if you’re not going to come in with team spirit and a feeling of participation.” Poitier replied that he was a “professional actor,” and as such he would “do the part to the best of my ability—under the circumstances.” Goldwyn welcomed him to the project. On December 10, 1957, he introduced Poitier to a corps of newsmen, and Poitier explained the reasons for his turnabout. They were, he said, “pure and honest.”I have never, to my conscious knowledge, done anything that I thought would be injurious to anyone—particularly to my own people. Now this is a personal choice. I do not pretend to be the conscience of all Negroes.

  I am happy to say that my reservations were washed away by Mr. Goldwyn and Mr. Mamoulian in their plans for “Porgy and Bess.” I was convinced irrevocably that it will be a great motion picture and tremendous entertainment and that it will be enjoyed by everyone—little and big—people of all races and creeds.... I’m happy that I met with Mr. Goldwyn and Mr. Mamoulian—and I found them almost as sensitive as I am.

  Goldwyn contributed one thousand dollars to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

  Controversy over Goldwyn’s all-Negro production raged. For the first time, such criticism came from the black community. It had proved so difficult to find players for the film that Goldwyn’s staff had gone scouting in the sports world, considering Jackie Robinson and Sugar Ray Robinson. Once Sidney Poitier was signed, the rest of the cast fell into place. While the actor was making The Defiant Ones, Dorothy Dandridge, the sultry star of Carmen Jones, changed her mind and agreed to play Bess; Pearl Bailey said she would take part, as long as the costumer, Irene Sharaff, understood that she
refused to wear a bandanna, because it smacked of Aunt Jemima. Brock Peters was cast as the wicked Crown, and a young beauty with a fine voice, Diahann Carroll, was given the part of Clara, whose “Summertime” sets the tone for the entire piece. Goldwyn tried hard to get Cab Calloway to play Sportin‘ Life, but complications threw the part to Sammy Davis, Jr. Most of the cast were professional singers, but almost all their songs were dubbed by others.

  Goldwyn hired Andre Previn to be music director. Born in Berlin in 1929, Previn had moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was ten. MGM began hiring this wunderkind as an arranger while he was still a schoolboy; at nineteen, he was given his first composing assignment. Over the next ten years, he scored two dozen films for the studio, including some of their biggest musicals. Not yet thirty, he had just completed work on Gigi, for which he would win an Academy Award.

  Goldwyn gave Previn complete control over the music of Porgy and Bess. His only edict was that all the singers heard in the film had to be black. Goldwyn had hoped Leontyne Price would perform Bess’s songs, but she told him, “No body, no voice.” The original soprano he hired had to be paid off and sent away after a test was made of Dorothy Dandridge, because Goldwyn decided she did not sound the way the star looked.

  The art directors created the worst sets money could buy. At Goldwyn’s insistence, the streets of Catfish Row in the Charleston, South Carolina, wharf district looked clean enough to eat off. This ghetto reeked of studied shabbiness. Irene Sharaff was restricted in the amount of wear and tear her costumes could show. When the women singers in the chorus lined up for the first costume review before the final dress parade, Miss Sharaff recalled, Pearl Bailey “created havoc by screaming, ‘No one is going to wear a bandanna in any picture I’m in!’” There ensued “a discussion somewhat like an international conference—and a compromise was reached whereby only a few of the women at a time would wear bandannas.” The incident later struck the costumer as “ridiculous, particularly since shortly afterwards many black women took to wearing bandannas as symbols of what they were fighting about.”