Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  In January 1962, Ben Fish died of a heart attack. To the end, he worshiped the brother who had brought him to this country and employed him for much of his life. Sam and Frances went immediately to the family’s side and later to the funeral at Forest Lawn. Ben’s widow, Augusta, practically a stranger to Sam, said how glad she was he was there. “Why shouldn’t I be?” he said indignantly. “He was my brother.” It was the first Jewish service Sammy had ever attended with his father. Every detail fascinated him, even though he hardly knew the deceased. The traditional recitation of the Kaddish, an Aramaic song of mourning, all but threw him into shock. He could barely believe his ears as that most solemn of all Jewish prayers pealed from his father’s mouth.

  The sudden death of Moss Hart at fifty-seven, and that of Edward R. Murrow (the same age, a few years later), also took their toll. Then Goldwyn suffered the worst loss of his life.

  “David Selznick was really my father’s son,” conceded Sam Goldwyn, Jr. “I was more like the grandson.” Since The Third Man, coproduced with Alexander Korda in 1950, Selznick had had his hand in but three films, all with his wife Jennifer Jones. The last was A Farewell to Arms in 1957. After that he diligently prepared Tender Is the Night, a package with his wife that he ended up selling to Twentieth Century-Fox. The studio left him completely out of the production.

  “Sam went to such extreme lengths to get David reestablished and able to function with sufficient freedom that David became really sentimental about him,” Irene Selznick wrote in her memoirs. He practically begged several studios to give Selznick some kind of production deal. “I have known David since he was nine years old and have always found him to be a perfect gentleman and a man with great ability,” Jack Warner wrote Goldwyn in January 1965; but like the rest of Hollywood, he wanted nothing more to do with him.

  Amid his latest schemes and strategies, Selznick suffered a series of heart attacks. He admitted them to Irene but swore her to secrecy, especially in concealing his ill health from Goldwyn. If Sam knew, he suggested, “It’ll kill him.” On June 22, 1965, a fifth attack finished Selznick off.

  That night, Goldwyn called his son and said he was “very depressed.” Sammy was preparing to meet one of the Selznick boys at the airport, but his father said he would send a cab, that it was more important to “come and sit with me.” Sammy drove to Laurel Lane at ten-thirty and met his father in the library. “For the next two and one-half hours,” Sammy recalled, “my father poured out every mistake David had ever made, vilifying him. He paced back and forth saying, ‘I tried to straighten that boy out.’ When he finished he sat down and dissolved into tears and cried like a baby.”

  Goldwyn had another hard time three years later, at Harold Mirisch’s funeral. The turnout appalled him. The first person he saw was Steve McQueen, sporting long hair. “You’re not going to have long hair like that,” he insisted to Sammy, whom he had pressed into accompanying him. When Zsa Zsa Gabor walked by, he came undone. “Whores, lawyers, and agents!” he cried. “That’s all that showed up for this wonderful man.” He made it clear to Sammy that he wanted his own funeral small and private.

  Disaffections in the sixties ate at Sam Goldwyn even more than deaths. He viewed his career as nothing but the dispensing of opportunities, so it horrified him to find few who ever gave him anything back. Only two actors, he felt, properly appreciated him. One was Gary Cooper, who sent Goldwyn a photograph of himself—inscribed “To Sam/who made my career possible”—just before he died of cancer in 1961. The other was David Niven, whose film career had been resuscitated by Around the World in 80 Days. That led to an Academy Award for Separate Tables and another three decades in the picture business. On April 2, 1966—practically thirty years to the day since Goldwyn signed him to his first contract—Niven handwrote him a three-page letter from his château in Switzerland. “After thirty years of incredible good fortune,” he concluded, “...I just had to sit down in my Swiss cuckoo clock after a good day’s skiing and thank you once again from the bottom of my heart for all you did for me when it really counted.” Except for Cooper and Niven, everybody else with whom Goldwyn ever did business seemed only to take from him.

  William Wyler, who still played gin rummy with Goldwyn, was suing him. The director claimed $400,000, part of his 20 percent share of net profits on Best Years, which Goldwyn had withheld through creative bookkeeping. Goldwyn felt betrayed; he had offered the profit participation to Wyler in the first place, and it had already paid off a jackpot close to $1.5 million. They settled out of court in 1962. “Just a word to tell you how pleased I am that our small financial differences have been amicably settled, and that they never had any effect on our regard and friendship for each other,” Wyler wrote Goldwyn on October 16. But the relationship was not the same. Goldwyn never invited Wyler to lunch with him at the studio; and when Best Years played on television, Goldwyn asked his lawyers to see if there was any way to exclude Wyler from those profits. There was not.

  Most of Wyler’s remaining dealings with Goldwyn concerned Lillian Hellman, whom the producer considered most traitorous. In the fifties, Wyler had asked Goldwyn to permit a television production of The Little Foxes with Greer Garson, because the blacklisted Miss Hellman was then “desperate for money.” Goldwyn granted the permission. In the early sixties, Wyler returned on her behalf, this time to discuss The Children’s Hour. In light of the changing mores, Wyler wanted to remake the movie for the Mirisches without bowdlerizing the lesbianism. Goldwyn said he would be happy to allow Wyler to proceed, but he no longer controlled the rights. He lied, saying they had been put in a trust and that those rights were held by his granddaughter. “But,” Wyler spluttered, “there must be somebody we can talk to, somebody we can buy the rights from.” “I don’t know,” said Goldwyn, slowly stroking one cheek, then the other; “Cricket wants a lot of money.”

  The Mirisches had to pay $350,000. Even though Miss Hellman received none of it, Goldwyn figured that a new version of her play was only to her benefit. But she soon brought suit against him, claiming that Goldwyn had no right to sell the film of The Little Foes to television, that through his authorizing the Greer Garson version of the play, his rights had reverted to the author. (She lost her case.) Goldwyn probably would never have seen Lillian Hellman again were it not for Frances, who heard she was in town. She called Miss Hellman at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and invited her to dinner, insisting that they were all getting older and it was time for everybody to make up and be friends. On the promise that dinner would be a select group, she accepted.

  The table was set for six—the Goldwyns, the Wylers, Miss Hellman, and her former husband, Arthur Kober. “Everything was going just fine,” Miss Hellman remembered, until Bette Davis’s name came up. “I had her in a very good picture I made,” said Goldwyn, “‘The Three Little Foxes.’” Hellman was more irritated than amused that after all this time, he still had not gotten the name of her play right. “Oh, really, Sam?” she said. “Well, I wrote the play and I wrote the movie.”

  “Of course you did,” Goldwyn snapped back. “Who said you didn’t write it? It was a great picture.” Trying to recover, he turned to Wyler and asked, “Did you ever see it?” Keeping the lid on his temper, Wyler said that he had directed it. “Of course you did,” insisted Goldwyn. “Who said you didn’t direct it?”

  Wyler began noticing other signs of age in Goldwyn. Of late, he always seemed to be recovering from some fall or another. (At Jack Foreman’s urging, a discreetly enclosed Inclin-ator had been installed on the back stairs of Goldwyn’s office.) When Miss Hellman came to town again a few years later, Wyler urged her to call on Goldwyn. She refused. He said people were not coming around to see Goldwyn so much anymore, and the least she could do was talk to him on the telephone. She rang up and got an appreciative Frances on the line. “Sam must have been sitting right there,” Hellman remembered, “because I could hear her say, ‘Sam, it’s Lillian on the phone. She wants to talk to you.’ And I heard him say, ‘Tel
l her to go to hell.’” Frances put the phone back up to her mouth and said, “I’m terribly sorry, Lillian, but Sam can’t come to the phone right now ... but he says he misses you very much.” That was her last conversation with the Goldwyns.

  Then William Paley’s worst fears about his friendship with Goldwyn were realized. Even before the premiere of the first Goldwyn movie on television, the producer saw that the deal was not all he had bargained for. In his mind, CBS would draw additional viewers for the prime-time airings of his pictures by advertising the Samuel Goldwyn name. He had not realized that CBS‘s O & O stations intended to run these films on their late shows, that each station could arbitrarily cut off the credits, and that Goldwyn would have no say in the advertising of the pictures. He began collecting evidence, poring over TV Guide each week, looking for omissions of his name in the ads for his films, staying awake into the wee hours to see if his name was on the screen. When he got no relief from his grievance letters to CBS executives, he took the matter up with William Paley himself. Goldwyn recited a long laundry list to him, bad-mouthing some of the network’s finest men. Paley at last shut him up, saying, “Stop it! These are friends of mine.”

  Paley asked several people to see that Goldwyn’s name somehow stood out in future advertising; and the next time he went to Los Angeles, he made a lunch date with Sam. But when he walked into Goldwyn’s office, he found his friend of forty years “sitting straight as a ramrod,” just staring. “He was hurt,” Paley later said, “that his name wasn’t large enough and that I had stood by my CBS friends.” Over the years, Goldwyn would derive intense pleasure from the Nielsen ratings on his films as they broke in wider markets; Myrna Loy visited him in 1966, and she remembered the childlike giddiness with which he said, “Guess what! Wuthering Heights had a 72 percent rating in Pittsburgh!” But for years William Paley heard that Goldwyn was still “hurt” over what had happened between them. He said, “We were never good friends since.”

  Goldwyn blamed his general counsel, chief adviser, and spokesman of twenty years, George Slaff, for allowing CBS to get away with a contract like that. Then he and Staff had stronger words over another longtime ally, Sylvan Ostreicher. A corpulent, white-haired attorney with a passion for tax law, Ostreicher had been the brains behind the many corporate reorganizations of Samuel Goldwyn, Inc., over the years, business maneuvers that had saved Goldwyn millions of dollars. When Ostreicher presented a bill for $250,000, Goldwyn went berserk. To make matters worse, Slaff said he thought Ostreicher was entitled to the money. Eventually he paid Ostreicher close to what he demanded. The ultimate price, however, was that the trust between Goldwyn and Slaff was broken. Slaff organized a private law firm and in August 1968 tendered his resignation.

  Only one other defection left a larger void in Goldwyn’s life. In the lull that followed Porgy and Bess, James A. Mulvey retired from the presidency of Samuel Goldwyn, Inc., to pursue his interests in baseball, having married years earlier into the Dodger organization. “He’d just had enough, always being at the end of the telephone,” remarked George Slaff of the quiet, dapper Irishman who had been a bookkeeper before Sam Goldwyn had got hold of him. When Goldwyn went to buy him out of their partnership agreement, he felt he got the back of Mulvey’s hand.

  Goldwyn proceeded all according to law, paying what his accountants told him was the market value of Mulvey’s share in the company. He well knew the figures were off by almost half. (He did the same for his brother Ben’s estate, whose small percentage, they said, was worth $117,000.) Both parties balked at Price Waterhouse’s lowball estimates. In 1967, Mulvey slapped Goldwyn with a lawsuit, charging further that the producer’s block sale of films to television violated antitrust laws, reducing Mulvey’s profits on those hit pictures in which he participated. Augusta Fish sued too.

  It was almost four years before each suit was concluded. The Fish estate received $200,000 for Ben’s interests, Mulvey in excess of $1 million. By then, none of the litigants for either of the settlements was even present in court.

  On Thursday, March 6, 1969, Mulvey’s lawyer deposed the defendant. The next day, Goldwyn did not come to the office, stepping out of the house only for a visit with one of his doctors in Beverly Hills. He checked out remarkably well, especially for a man close to ninety. He spent a quiet weekend at home, the first in months away from Palm Springs. Sammy was on the tennis court with his sons John and Tony and a friend; he was leaving that night to scout locations for his next film, Cotton Comes to Harlem. From upstairs in the house, he suddenly heard his mother scream to him, “Come up and bring somebody with you!” Goldwyn had slipped and collapsed. Sammy and his tennis partner moved him into a bed and a doctor arrived in minutes to announce that Goldwyn had suffered a cerebral thrombosis. He explained how the aging process was largely the result of the gradual diminution of oxygen flowing through the body. Sammy reflected and counted what he now thought had been several small strokes, starting as far back as the year Hants Christian Andersen was released. How much the ensuing forgetfulness, falling, and fighting were the result of these strokes was anybody’s guess.

  There was no prognosis whether Goldwyn would regain all his faculties, but he appeared to have retained some powers of mobility. He did not lose his ability to speak, though he would submerge into deep recesses of silence. A male nurse was on duty at Laurel Lane before sunset. Frances’s immediate concern was the public reaction. She still subscribed to the theory that “they must never know.” Not until the next morning did she call studio manager Jack Foreman, and then it was just to say in a calm voice, “Sam won’t be in today ... and maybe not tomorrow.”

  Several days later, she imparted the whole truth. Word around town spread quickly. Most people kept a polite distance from Laurel Lane. Marvin Mirisch phoned Goldwyn’s office on the eleventh, and Warren Beatty—the last call marked in Sam Goldwyn’s appointment book—on the twelfth. By then, one part of the cloudy future seemed clear. Frances told Jack Foreman, “You just conduct the business the way you see fit.” Sam Goldwyn never returned to his studio.

  The house at 1200 Laurel Lane became bedlam. Goldwyn still had the strength of half his body, and the frustration of incapacitation doubled his ferocity. Though slurring his words, he could still holler. “He’d rage over nothing,” said Foreman, “around the clock.” Over the next two months, he went through fifteen nurses, men and women. Sammy—his eighteen-year marriage unraveled—commuted between coasts every weekend. When Dr. William Weber Smith saw Frances buckling under the strain, he suggested moving the patient to Las Encinas in Pasadena, a small convalescent hospital where many wealthy alcoholics dried out. Over the next two months, Goldwyn went through another dozen private nurses there. He took to imagining that people were plotting his murder. During a visit from his longtime friend David Rose, Goldwyn growled, “Get me out of this place!” Rose went to Frances and said, “Look—Sam Goldwyn ... that he should end up here. You can afford to bring him home and set up as good or better facilities in the house.” Besides, he pointed out, her drives out there twice a day were killing her. Dr. Jules Stein helped spring Goldwyn from the place.

  On May 31, 1969, Dr. Judd Marmor, one of the city’s eminent psychiatrists, consulted with the Goldwyn family, then began months of therapy with the patriarch. His counseling eased a lot of tension, and Goldwyn looked forward to his house calls from “Dr. Murmur.”

  He returned home July 2. Frances had a team of nurses in place and a precise schedule for everybody. That first afternoon, Goldwyn was sitting on a couch in the living room, when he was told it was time to go upstairs. In getting to his feet, he lost his balance and broke his fall by collapsing against a Chippendale end table, smashing it to smithereens. Frances just looked at David Rose, then to heaven, and exhaled audibly.

  For several months, Goldwyn seemed to be coming around, responding well to both psychotherapy and physical therapy. He insisted each day that his nurse bring him downstairs for meals. Bathed and fully dressed (never in ni
ghtclothes), he sat at the table. One afternoon, he was having great difficulty getting the food from his plate to his mouth. When the nurse reached for a spoon to feed him, Goldwyn reared in indignation. “But, Mr. Goldwyn,” the nurse said, “you need some help.”

  “Help?” Goldwyn cried. “How the hell do you think I got out of Poland?”

  On October 16, 1969, Goldwyn’s attorney petitioned in Superior Court to have his wife appointed as conservator of his $19.7 million estate. Goldwyn’s medical condition and his yearly income of $650,000 were all entered into the public record. On November 3, Superior Judge Arthur K. Marshall ruled that Goldwyn was too old and ill to manage his own affairs and that Mrs. Goldwyn had the authority to continue operation of his motion picture business.

  “You’re a goddamned fool,” said Goldwyn to Sammy, who had helped effectuate the conservatorship. Sam knew that his wife did not fully grasp the business he had built over the last forty-six years; and he partially blamed his son for giving it away to her. “You have let a little bird out of the cage,” he explained. “And it will fly to the ceiling, and hit the ceiling, and hit the ceiling ... until it collapses.” Jack Foreman urged Frances to work out of her husband’s office.

  Even when she sat behind Sam’s desk, her mind was always back at Laurel Lane. Sixty-six-year-old Frances showed up at the studio with less frequency; in time, she stopped leaving the house altogether. George Cukor could lure her out for dinner with him and a few friends, but even that became a trial for her. Unbeknownst to almost everybody, she began suffering a series of small strokes herself.

  “He is up a part of every day, walking around the house and garden, and there is still plenty of the old fight left in him,” Frances wrote a friend in England in late 1969. Each day saw him wheeled more than he walked. He dabbled at painting, which his old friend Irving Berlin wrote him was “great therapy. It takes your mind off yourself which is good, and who can tell, you’re liable to paint something that will be worth more in dollars than any picture you ever produced.” Such old friends as Arthur Hornblow, Jr., and David Rose stopped by, but the visits became hard on everybody. Jack Foreman would patiently listen to his new delusion of the Mafia’s taking over the studio. “I’d sit with him,” George Slaff remembered, “and he’d start bawling.” Goldwyn could still view movies at night. In May 1970, he saw Easy Rider. After a while, he wanted to see only films he had produced. Two in particular he would watch time and again—Stella Dallas and Wuthering Heights—and cry.