After six months of travail, Porgy and Bess was scheduled to shoot just after the Independence Day weekend. On Tuesday, July 1, 1958, Sam and Frances toured Stage 8 (one of the two largest stages in Hollywood, 400 by 800 feet), making a final inspection of the set and costumes and props. A complete dress rehearsal for the Technicolor and Todd-AO spectacle was called for nine the next morning. More than two million dollars’ worth of materiel stood ready to go.
A little after 4 a.m. that Wednesday, a blaze broke out on Stage 8. Flames were leaping 300 feet into the air when the fire department arrived. The entire north wall of the structure fell inward, producing a thunderous roar. Within hours, the stage was reduced to rubble.
Frances received word at Laurel Lane but kept it to herself until she heard Sam stirring. She ordered his breakfast tray, then gently broke the news that the entire set and all the costumes had been destroyed. Years earlier, a similar fate had befallen Adolph Zukor, and Goldwyn had been impressed with his first reaction; he had simply asked, “Was anybody hurt?” Forty years later, Sam, without batting an eye, reached for his tray and asked the same question. Nobody was.
Frances placed the difficult phone calls. Smoke was billowing when set designer Oliver Smith, art director Joe Wright, and the studio’s general manager, Milton Pickman, arrived. Irene Sharaff burst into tears. Irving Sindler watched flame and water wipe out thirty years of props he had accumulated and stored in the lower part of the soundstage. Mamoulian was especially supportive, Frances noted, standing “rocklike” beside Sam. Telegrams and calls of support streamed in for days. Frank Freeman at Paramount, Loew’s Joseph Vogel, and Jack Warner each offered use of his studio. David Selznick expressed great concern, as did Willy Wyler, who wired from Rome that “STAGE EIGHT HELD GREAT AND FOND MEMORIES FOR ME.” The most touching message came from Cecil B. DeMille, who was at Cedars of Lebanon, recovering from a heart attack that struck him after he completed The Ten Commandments. “Tell Sam,” he said, “the phoenix arose from the ashes of a great fire and so will you with your great strength.”
Recent events gave Goldwyn reason enough to question whether he should even try. At the presentation of the thirtieth annual Academy Awards that March, he had become the second recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He could have retired that night and remained for a quarter century the only producer ever to win that award as well as the Thalberg and Best Picture trophies. Another special Oscar given at the same ceremony went to Gilbert M. Anderson. The latter’s name meant almost nothing to the thousands sitting in the Hollywood Pantages, but it meant everything to Sam Goldwyn. Anderson was none other than “Broncho Billy,” the star of the western that had lured Goldwyn off the streets of Times Square in 1913 and into motion pictures. Broncho Billy had bowed out of films in the twenties, his extant two-reelers the only fossils that marked his place in Hollywood’s prehistory.
Perhaps worse than Anderson’s obscurity was the passing in ignominy of three of Goldwyn’s peers, once-mighty patriarchs who had not known when to quit: In October 1957, Louis B. Mayer had died, in studio exile. Just months earlier, Goldwyn had heard of his plotting a comeback to the troubled MGM and immediately bought a block of shares in the company; waving his receipt before Sammy, he said with glee, “Here are 10,000 votes against him.”
Less than three months later, Jesse Lasky died, penniless. Goldwyn’s former brother-in-law and first partner in the motion picture business had just minutes earlier been promoting his unsuccessful book of memoirs. Although he continued to revile Lasky, Goldwyn chipped in several thousand dollars (with Cecil DeMille) so that Bessie Lasky could hold on to her house.
In February 1958, Harry Cohn, who had run Columbia Pictures since its creation in 1920, died. When a member of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple asked Rabbi Magnin if he could not think of “one good thing to say” about the deceased, the rabbi paused and said, “He’s dead.”
If Goldwyn was looking to abandon Porgy and Bess without losing face, the studio fire had provided the opportunity. Instead, he sent a wire back to his oldest friend in the industry: “DEAR CECIL: YOUR MESSAGE WAS VERY SWEET AND IT IS JUST LIKE YOU TO ALWAYS WANT TO HELP. YOU REMEMBER THE EXPERIENCE WE HAD ON ‘THE SQUAW MAN.’ THAT WAS EVEN WORSE AND WE CAN TAKE IT BETTER NOW THAN WE COULD THEN.” For weeks, the town buzzed that the fire had been the work of black arsonists trying to shut down the picture. Goldwyn publicly denounced the theory and stuck to the explanation that an unextinguished cigarette had been the cause; but studio insiders held to the arson theory. In shrugging off the disaster as just one of those things endemic to motion picture production, Goldwyn told one reporter, “Well, there’s allays a crisis. If it’s not me, it’s Israel.” Goldwyn ordered the sets of Porgy and Bess rebuilt and the costumes resewn; the cast was told there would be but a six-week delay. Before the film’s completion, Cecil B. DeMille died.
During the weeks of reconstruction, director Mamoulian tried to impose on the film ideas that had not gone over before. Goldwyn argued for strict adherence to the original Gershwin score; Mamoulian wanted to use the jazzier arrangements that Breen had used in his production. The director also said the script begged “for more visual and action build-up” and that the production should not be shackled to the set. He often made snobbish remarks about Goldwyn’s lack of understanding, even his inability to read. Not until the director hired his own press agent did Goldwyn fire him; and then, said Sam Goldwyn, Jr., “it was for colossal indecision.” Willy Wyler volunteered to direct the picture, if Goldwyn was willing to postpone the production for a few months. Goldwyn did not want to wait. He paid Mamoulian his full $75,000 salary and hired Otto Preminger, who had worked for Goldwyn only once, as an actor in They Got Me Covered. Except for a polite announcement to the press, Goldwyn refused to discuss his decision.
Mamoulian was incensed that after working for eight months preparing the script, hiring and rehearsing the cast, prerecording the music, and supervising the sets and costumes—all to the producer’s approval—Goldwyn should then dismiss him for “frivolous, spiteful or dictatorial reasons not pertinent to the director’s skill or obligation.” He brought his case to the Directors’ Guild of America, which brought action against the producer, notifying all guild members—including Preminger—“that they may not enter into a contract with Samuel Goldwyn.”
That brought the Screen Producers Guild into the fray, protesting “with shock and dismay the hysterical assaults upon the dean of American producers, Mr. Samuel Goldwyn, for exercising his prerogatives as an employer by changing directors on ‘Porgy and Bess.’” They pointed out that Goldwyn had honored the contract with Mamoulian to the letter, paying him off in full; they said he was “completely within his rights in refusing to present his side of the story to a kangaroo court.”
The influence of a French film review called Cahiers du Cinema was just breaking on American shores those days, especially its promotion of the “auteur theory.” This philosophy spotlighted directors as the true stars of the medium and emphasized the thematic consistencies of their works. Community sympathy tilted toward Mamoulian.
The director stepped up his charges against Goldwyn. He claimed that the producer had not properly informed him of the termination of his services. Then his press agent, Russell Birdwell, called a special news conference, at which he presented an old black actor who had played a small role in both the original play and the musical of Porgy. Leigh Whipper said he was withdrawing from this production in support of Mamoulian because he believed Porgy and Bess had fallen into hands “unsympathetic” to his race. He aspersed Preminger specifically, calling him “a man who has no respect for my people.” This brought about a flurry of reaction from almost every member of the movie’s cast, many of whom had worked with Preminger on Carmen Jones. At last, even Mamoulian’s agent, Irving Paul Lazar, thought his client had gone too far; he informed Variety that the director had grossly misrepresented the facts in the case. After three weeks of nasty press, Goldwyn was compl
etely exonerated, even praised. Said Goldwyn in the end, “I’m the only one in this thing who’s exhausted from not talking.”
Goldwyn and his new director got off to a peaceable start. Preminger asked for changes in the script, the set, the rehearsal schedule, and insisted on shooting the central picnic sequence on location—Venice Island, near Stockton, California. Goldwyn agreed to everything. In negotiating Preminger’s contract, they bickered only on the director’s share of the profits. Goldwyn offered 10 percent, and Preminger was accustomed to 50. In a kindly moment, the director told his brother (and agent), Ingo, “Look, let’s leave it to Goldwyn. When the picture is finished and he sees it he can decide what my percentage should be.” Taken aback by such trust, Goldwyn promised to be fair.
From that moment on, Goldwyn had a more difficult time with the director than he had ever had with Mamoulian. He liked Preminger’s strength, but their styles clashed. They argued about practically everything, particularly Preminger’s treating the songs as extensions of scenes, not musical numbers. The director also favored the jazz arrangements, and he thought the producer was spending money on the wrong things. “Look,” he said, “you’ve got a two-dollar whore in a two-thousand-dollar dress.” Their daily shouting matches became the talk of the studio. Preminger remembered, “People used to gather under the open window of my office to hear me bellow at him on the telephone.”
The set was a hotbed of tension. Preminger told his cast at the start, “I want you to know that I grew up in Europe. For me there is no difference between black and white people. So if you behave badly I will be just as tough with you as I would be with white actors.” He proved to be an equal-opportunity tyrant, more than once reducing the fragile Dorothy Dandridge to tears. The day he laced into Sidney Poitier, the actor walked off the set with quiet dignity, unwilling to return until he received an apology. Pearl Bailey busied herself raising the black consciousness of her fellow players. Sammy Davis, Jr.—a recent convert to Judaism—created a small stir when he announced that he would not be showing up one morning because it was Yom Kippur. The night before Miss Dandridge was to play the scene in which Crown rapes Bess, she told Preminger that he simply had to recast Brock Peters, because, she stammered, “he’s so black.” Throughout the shooting, various civil rights organizations and the minority press regularly tarred Goldwyn for his anachronistic attitudes toward blacks. “The only thing left,” said Goldwyn upon completion of the most troubled shoot of his career, “is for me to go to jail.”
One afternoon, Goldwyn invited the Ira Gershwins and a few guests to a projection room, where they sat and just listened to the sound track. For forty-five minutes, Andre Previn’s arrangements of the Gershwin score burst through the finest high-fidelity sound equipment. Everyone was moved. Goldwyn, almost in tears, walked over to young Previn, put his hand on his head, and tousled his hair. “You should be goddam proud, kid,” he said. Then he added, “You should never do another thing in your life.”
Porgy and Bess did not perform so well with the picture added. The two-and-a-half-hour production (with intermission) felt leaden. Columbia released the film with less than enthusiasm. One of their executives predicted a tough sell because of its downbeat ending and suggested a new one, in which Porgy gets up from his cart and walks. In his efforts to remain true to the material, Goldwyn risked further box-office failure by forbidding any references to the film with the word “musical” as either adjective or noun; he ordered it advertised as an “American folk opera.” Just before the release of Porgy and Bess, Ingo Preminger asked Goldwyn what profit percentage he had settled upon for his brother. “You left the participation to me,” Goldwyn announced. “So there is no participation.”
It was a moot point. Goldwyn figured Porgy and Bess would have to gross twice its $7 million cost to show a profit. “Today a fine picture makes more than it ever did,” Goldwyn told one reporter. “You have to pay $3 and you can’t get in. But there is great competition. You have to have the goods. Television has changed it all. Hollywood used to make 600 pictures a year, now it’s only 300. Soon it will be less, and they all better be good.” He intended to take his time exhibiting Porgy and Bess, opening it in New York on June 24, 1959, on a reserved-seat basis.
Porgy and Bess earned half its cost. By the time Goldwyn opened the film in the South, it had become the target for public attacks by uprising black organizations. He pulled the picture from several parts of the country indefinitely, waiting for the militant social climate to change. He could take some pride in the film’s being nominated for three Academy Awards (including sound and costumes). Only Andre Previn and Ken Darby won, for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture, making it the first Goldwyn production to take home a trophy since The Bishop’s Wife. Almost every other award that year went either to The Diary of Anne Frank or to Ben-Hur; the latter became the new Oscar champion by winning eleven statuettes, including Wyler’s third.
On August 27, 1959, Goldwyn called a press conference in his office. The occasion of his seventy-seventh birthday (in fact, he was eighty) was newsworthy enough to capture headlines in the newspapers and on page one of Daily Variety. He and Frances posed for the cameras. She said she had given him a suitcase, suspenders, and some shirts—all of which he could use because they planned to spend most of the next year traveling abroad. “No one is waiting breathlessly for my next picture,” he granted. “They may retire me,” he vowed to the battery of reporters, “but I am never going to retire.” It was exactly the posture the newsmen had come to expect from the man who, as Loudon Wainwright had recently written in Life, was “left standing alone as the last of the great Hollywood moguls.... a unique relic of a vanished species: the one-man gang.”
LATE one night, the lone survivor wanted the next day’s newspaper. He asked Frances for some change, but all she could find was a twenty-dollar bill. He took it, got in the Cadillac, drove himself to the drugstore in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, double-parked, went in, bought the paper, and came out again. Back behind the wheel, he felt a knife blade against his neck. The mugger said he wanted all of Goldwyn’s money, or else he would kill him.
Goldwyn drove home and related the story to Frances. Then he handed her a ten-dollar bill.
21 A Slow Fade to Black
HOLLYWOOD SNICKERED in the late fifties at a joke about the Goldwyns. As Joseph Mankiewicz remembered it, young Frances Howard married Sam Goldwyn, looking forward to his timely demise and her long, merry widowhood. But ten years pass, and she’s thirty to his fifty-seven; she’s fifty, he’s a hale seventy-seven. And, as the story goes, she’s a broken-down ninety and he’s still hanging on, at one hundred seventeen. “There he is, at last, on his deathbed,” recounted Mankiewicz, “and Frances finally says everything she’s been longing to get off her chest all this time: ‘For seventy years I have served you,’ she says. ‘Every time you touch me, my skin crawls. Every time you kiss me, I want to vomit. Every time you make love to me, I want to die.’” After Frances has spoken her piece, Goldwyn calls out to the crowd of mourners waiting in the hall. “Guess what!” he cries. “Frances wants me to marry again!”
For those who saw the Goldwyns regularly, the anecdote was not so funny. Sam’s pink face and powerful physique seemed hardly to have changed in all the years of their marriage. His gait had slowed only slightly. Frances, on the other hand, had lost weight over the years. The sleeves on her dresses billowed over her bony arms; her azure eyes sank deeper into her heavily lined face; her hennaed hair and the always-fresh gash of lipstick made her complexion look pasty. Through it all, she remained faithful to her marriage contract, eager to please her husband. “Poor Virginia Zanuck ... having to live with such a monster,” she once said to Leonora Hornblow. “Nobody,” Mrs. Hornblow noted, “ever said that of Frances Goldwyn.”
Sam Goldwyn was her entire life. Frances maintained few friendships—Mrs. Fred Astaire and Mrs. Irving Berlin, both of whom she telephoned once a week, and her favorite sister, Dede, with whom she tal
ked of spending her future widowhood. Her mother had gone almost completely mad but still maintained a strange emotional hold over the daughter who had never stopped supporting her. Bonnie continued to cook up unguents and potions, she read extreme-right-wing literature, and she told everybody she was growing a third set of teeth! She raised turkeys indoors and refused Frances entrance into the feather-filled rooms—which continued to be paid for by the very man she had once sworn would never marry her daughter. George Cukor and Frances still spoke at least once a day.
Although the Goldwyns entertained less often, Frances could still turn on the perfect dinner party. She never lost her regal bearing. “Of all the social queens,” noted Mrs. Billy Wilder, “she was the classiest. She was also the most fun ... and supportive.” Frances always paid attention to her husband; she took to calling him “Mr. Goldwyn” in front of others. As he grew impatient with chitchat, she discouraged lingering in the dining room, so they all might get on with that night’s screening.
Sexual liberation in the sixties turned the motion picture screen into an orgiastic playground, and most of Hollywood’s latest product turned Goldwyn off. His private screening of Blow-Up in 1966 was going just fine until the scene in which David Hemmings cavorts with a couple of young girls. “Oh God,” Goldwyn cried out, calling a stop to the screening; “this is a goddamned dirty picture!” Not long after that, Goldwyn complained to Billy Wilder that he had seen an even more disgusting display—Hello, Dolly! Wilder was puzzled—not only because he could not imagine anything scurrilous in that harmless musical but also because Darryl Zanuck had not released it yet. Goldwyn insisted he knew what he saw, and it was one of the filthiest pictures he had ever seen. Wilder asked him to recite the plot. “Sam,” he interrupted upon hearing about the drug-taking and sex lives of three aspiring actresses, “I think you’re referring to Valley of the Dolls.” “That’s just what I said,” Goldwyn insisted. “Valley of the Hello Dollies.”
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