With both parents in steady decline, the pressure increased on Sammy. He remarried in August 1969, in Sagaponack, at the summer home of his childhood friend Mary Ellin Berlin and her husband, Marvin Barrett. The bride was Margaret Elliott Krutilek, a successful television writer from El Paso, who used the pen name Peggy Elliott. Sammy returned to Los Angeles and spent as much time with his father as possible. At one point, Sam and Frances had to check into St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica for their respective maladies, and Sammy would scurry between rooms. Even though he was stopping by three times a day, his father scolded him for never coming to see him.
Only one other nonmedical person paid regular house calls. Ruth would sit in the sun with her father on the back portico for hours at a time. Alone with her and his thoughts, Goldwyn would tearily hold her hand—and call her Blanche.
For four years, Goldwyn drifted, one day blurring into the next. He became a permanent resident of his bedroom, where the procession of strong male nurses were met almost daily by one doctor or another, attending Goldwyn’s diminishing state. Drugs quelled his periodic irrational rages. Through it all, Frances kept her own frustration inside; she never stopped playing the family caretaker, no matter how arduous the role. She was understandably shaken on April 10, 1971, when her mother—after a lifetime of tormenting Frances—died in a Catholic rest home at the age of ninety-one. Helen Victoria Howard McLaughlin was quietly buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale.
Sam Goldwyn—only weeks apart in age from Bonnie—continued to rely on Frances, sapping her strength. On August 27, 1971—Sam’s official eighty-ninth birthday—she tried brightening the pall that had descended upon the house by throwing two family birthday parties for him—one at lunch, the other in the afternoon. He ate cake at both meals. “Sam was delighted,” she told the press.
By his next birthday, Frances looked completely worn out and seemed ready to throw in the towel. “Last year’s was a fiasco,” she confessed to Bob Thomas of the Associated Press. “It was simply too upsetting and exhausting for Sam, and he was days getting over it. This year I have told the family not to mention the birthday, and I’m praying that he doesn’t know about it. Being a large year—90th—it would be worse than usual.” Sick of masquerading, she allowed, “I don’t lie any more. He has the heart and blood pressure of a young man—but nothing else seems to work. Except his appetite.” When people asked how her husband was, she wearily said, “He’s off on a long ocean voyage.”
Only one other day in that long spell at sea stood out from the rest. On Friday, March 26, 1971, the phone rang at seven-thirty in the morning—“long distance,” Frances remembered, “the White House wants to reach Mr. Goldwyn.” She was sure it was a prank and hung up. At noon it rang again. This time a secretary said, “A little after eleven tomorrow, President Nixon plans to call on Mr. Goldwyn.” “Oh, dear,” Frances said, “is this true?” The voice at the other end said, “I swear it is.”
The next morning, Frances went to her husband’s room and instructed him to get “all dressed up” because the President was coming. Goldwyn coolly replied, “I’ll be glad to see him.” By nine-thirty, Laurel Lane was swarming with security men and news crews. Sammy and Ruth arrived. At exactly eleven, Goldwyn was wheeled into the living room, immaculately groomed and dressed. To those who had not seen him in years, he looked markedly different. For all the excess weight he was carrying for the first time in his life, he looked smaller. His wizened face had shrunk to a sour caricature. He did not appear to comprehend anything that was happening.
The President arrived and made a few minutes of small talk. Sitting beside Goldwyn, he said, “I’ll never forget the first time I was defeated for the Presidency, you telephoned me and telephoned me and you insisted that I often lunch with you. Each time you said, ‘Stay with it. You’ll win.’” Goldwyn appeared comatose.
Then Nixon got to the business at hand. He had come to present Samuel Goldwyn with the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. The President made a speech before hanging the medal around Goldwyn’s neck, and the hollow rhetoric about the wholesomeness of the recipient’s films made Sam junior suspicious. It rang of an old speech written for the late Walt Disney, and he guessed that Nixon was just doing some early electioneering, trying to win the support of the motion picture industry. Goldwyn’s head nodded forward. In raising it, he tugged at the President’s coat. The President bowed, putting his ear close enough to Goldwyn to hear him whisper, “You’ll have to do better than that if you want to carry California.”
The President jerked upright, hastily closed the ceremonies, and exited. Sam junior showed him to the door. In the foyer, Nixon asked, “Did you hear what your father said?” Sammy had, but to avoid any embarrassment, said he had not. The President’s shoulders dropped in relief. “He said,” Nixon boomed, “‘I want you to go out there and beat those bastards!’”
Goldwyn returned to his nurses’ care upstairs, where he was “ultimately reduced,” said his son, “to a vegetable.”
Late in the day of Monday, May 6, 1973, a second great fire broke out at the Goldwyn studio, destroying three soundstages. Sammy was in a projection room on the lot; and as soon as the alarms were sounded, he called his mother. “You mustn’t bother me with that now,” she said, her mind miles away; “George is coming to tea.” Sammy explained that this was a major fire, which would soon be on television. “Oh,” said Frances, “well, let’s wait until George leaves.”
Frances refused to acknowledge the two-million-dollar disaster until that Saturday, when Sammy insisted she visit the site. The chauffeur drove them to the studio, and Frances chatted nervously all the way. She said nothing as they inspected the charred ruins ... until, with enormous relief, she sighed, “Oh, thank God this is all over.” Sam was too far gone to know of the fire.
Later that year, Dr. Smith noticed that his patient was sprouting a new head of fine hair over that pate which had been bald for some sixty-five years. One of the nurses took credit, saying he massaged Goldwyn’s scalp every day with Vaseline. With regular checkups showing no letup in the nonagenarian’s vital signs, Dr. Smith mused for a moment that Goldwyn might miraculously be regenerating, that he might just live forever.
A little after two o‘clock in the morning of Thursday, January 31, 1974, Schmuel Gelbfisz’s ninety-four-year struggle “to be somebody” was over. Only a nurse was at his side. Frances was awakened and she sent for a doctor. Minutes later, she telephoned her son. “Sammy,” she said, “he’s gone.”
Sammy arrived at the house, to find his mother in a state of shock. “She lived in fear of that moment for so long,” he later noted, “that she didn’t know what to do.” Dazed, Frances turned to Sammy and the physician and asked, “Should we call a parson?” Sammy could not help laughing at the quaintness of the question; Frances and the doctor laughed too. Then Sammy said he wanted to make a speedy announcement to the media, but Frances insisted nobody must know and that they must not answer the telephones. “It was a knee-jerk reaction,” Sammy observed; “she was far more concerned people would find out than that the event had happened.” He persuaded her that her plan was impossible, that somebody would tip the press and trigger exactly the sort of havoc his father had dreaded. The news hit the front pages of newspapers around the world the next morning.
Within hours of the headlines, Sammy had completed the funeral arrangements. The huge front gates of Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale were swung closed for the first time in the mortuary’s fifty-seven years. For two hours, only the Goldwyn family and Rabbi Max Nussbaum of Temple Israel in Hollywood (whose performance at Harold Mirisch’s funeral Goldwyn had liked) were allowed on the grounds. Their black limousines slowly drove a short way up Cathedral Drive to the non-denominational Wee Kirk o‘ the Heather. At that moment, all the film studios in Hollywood stopped to pay two minutes of private respect.
The rabbi, who did not know the deceased, eulogized him by saying, “He was a
real man. His story of family devotion and dedication to an industry is without parallel. In this, he lived in the ideals of Judaism. With his contribution to the Jewish causes, he identified with his religion.” Sammy paid more personal tribute, a few words about his father’s indomitable will to survive—how no matter how bad things got, he would always say, “I just thank God I’ve still got Goldwyn.”
“Well, he’s gone,” Sammy said of the man and of the character he had invented for himself, “but wherever he is, and whether we are wife, daughter, son, friend—even old enemies—we’ve had Goldwyn and it’s always going to be part of us and we’re damned glad of it.”
The Goldwyns returned to their cars and followed the hearse up the winding roads of Forest Lawn to the highest slope, off Freedom Way. Behind two locked iron doors—accessible only by private key—they entered the walled Garden of Honor. In a serene corner was a gated plot eight by nine feet, the Little Garden of Constancy. A white marble bench sat to one side and a marble tablet, waiting to be inscribed, hung on the back wall. After Rabbi Nussbaum delivered the Kaddish, the casket was lowered into Crypt B—right next to his longtime nemesis, Bonnie McLaughlin. Later, Sammy asked Frances if his father had known of the burial plan. “I didn’t always tell your father everything,” she said, laughing.
SAMUEL GOLDWYN’S estate was appraised at $16,165,490.24. The figure is a small fraction of his legacy. Ownership of several dozen motion pictures, including many classics, would be placed in his son’s hands. They became the bedrock for his own company, which would produce, distribute, and exhibit motion pictures. With the arrival of cable television networks, videocassettes, and methods of film exhibition yet to be invented, those movies alone assume a value in the tens of millions of dollars, the Samuel Goldwyn Company in the hundreds of millions. More than that, Samuel Goldwyn left a treasury of work—pictorial archives that reflect his dreams and permanent artifacts that reveal America in the twentieth century, fables that will enlighten in perpetuity.
Goldwyn’s last will and testament, signed September 26, 1968, left his interest in Samuel Goldwyn Productions in trust for Frances. The restrictions on her controlling his fortune were, according to their son, “his way of running the business from the grave.” He bequeathed gifts ranging from $5,000 to $25,000, according to years of service, to a dozen people in his household and studio employ, and left $1,000 to his barber of long standing. Each of Ruth’s children received $50,000. Sammy’s four children were given equal shares in a $400,000 trust fund, their mother a $50,000 trust fund of her own. Goldwyn provided Ruth with a $250,000 trust and Sammy with $1 million. The rest was left to the Samuel Goldwyn Foundation.
“My mother’s life was over after Dad died,” said Sam junior. Laurel Lane became her penitentiary. Except for visits with her closest friends, she shut herself in and practically starved herself, cutting the weekly grocery order to little more than cottage cheese, canned peach halves, frozen spinach, and some meat—ham butt, liver, or ground round. Once or twice a month, a guest was invited—usually George Cukor, to whom she would serve veal cutlets. She developed a smoker’s hack, the result of her chain-smoking, a worsening habit she claimed began at age twelve in her efforts to kill the smell of her filthy convent school. For years, her face and skin had been erupting in rashes, angioneurotic edema—what she defined as “a short word for a wounded ego.” All her suffering, suggested her son, was the result of the bargain she had struck when she married Sam Goldwyn, that devilish pact Hollywood had joked about for so long. Every time her skin broke out, Frances commented, “I can only have my vanity stepped on so many times.”
The problem ran deeper than that. Unlike her husband, Frances never went to a doctor until a symptom proved unbearable. Even then she never fully disclosed all her ailments to any one physician. By the time one had recommended she see an ear-nose-throat specialist, she was suffering from an advanced state of cancer of the nose and trachea. Dr. Smith said they could operate, but it would mean cutting away much of her face. Frances refused treatment and swore her doctors to secrecy, especially in keeping her condition from her son. She devoted much of her time to prayer.
George Cukor was never less than loving and attentive, but repressed anger even toward him surfaced. One night, he and Frances attended a concert with another couple, a society lady whose husband was rumored to be homosexual. Both gentlemen excused themselves before the start of the performance and did not return to their seats before the intermission. Frances convinced herself that they were “doing something unspeakable.” When she confronted him, she came uncorked, spewing out fifty years of frustration at not being able to share her life with the man she told friends was “the only person I ever truly loved.”
Frances made Katharine Hepburn her rival. Not only did the actress enjoy a celebrated friendship with Cukor (the result of collaborating on eight pictures), but Hepburn had become a symbol of female independence, the unmarried woman who shaped her own destiny. Although Miss Hepburn always considered Frances his closest friend, Mrs. Goldwyn used to joke about “George’s harem”: “I’m really his second favorite,” she would say; “Kate’s his first.” In making his father’s funeral arrangements, Sammy had learned there was an extra crypt in the family plot for George Cukor. After the funeral, he raised the subject with his mother. A gentle smile broke across her lips; then she laughed sweetly and said, “Well ... at least Kate won’t get him there.”
Frances spent the next year worrying about her estate and obsessing about her money. She was continually redrafting her will. Ultimately she decided to leave her beloved house and its contents to her son and designated that the studio should be auctioned, the proceeds going to the Motion Picture Country Home.
Frances deteriorated rapidly, her cancer spreading inward to the brain. Sammy remained devoted as she sank into helplessness. In the spring of 1976—fifteen months after his father’s burial—he and his wife made their daily visit to Laurel Lane. Frances had become painfully frail, her breathing labored. Peggy summoned Monsignor Sullivan of the Roman Catholic Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. Sammy ushered him to his mother’s modest room—with only her rosary and her picture of George Cukor as a child within reach on her nightstand, and a crucifix above her on the wall. “I’ve come to see you, Frances,” said the monsignor. “Father,” said the drifting seventy-three-year-old, “I’ve been waiting for you.” Sammy and Peggy waited downstairs while last rites were administered. Frances slipped into a coma.
Three months later—on July 2—Sammy made another of his visits. The nurse descended the stairs, and Sammy had only to look at her face to know the end had come. A funeral service was held the next afternoon.
PEGGY GOLDWYN surprised her husband on his fiftieth birthday—Sep—tember 7, 1976—with a party upstairs at The Bistro in Beverly Hills. Two hundred friends and family members gathered. The most touching moment that night came when Sammy’s oldest friend in the room was asked to make a toast. George Cukor stood and remarked on the fact that he was there at the wedding of Sammy’s parents, that he was there the day Sammy was born ... and, he added, “If circumstances had been different, I might well have been his father.” Almost everybody in the room understood what he meant.
On January 24, 1983, George Cukor died at the age of eighty-three. Upon hearing the news, Sammy telephoned Cukor’s executor to inform him that Frances had made arrangements for Cukor’s burial. The executor said her plans had been stipulated in George’s will. Cukor was interred in Crypt D of the Little Garden of Constancy, alongside Frances and Sam and Frances’s mother in their still-unmarked tomb.
Below the quiet hill in which these four souls rest, the City of Angels stretches far away.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
More than forty years ago, Samuel Goldwyn first expressed a desire to have his biography written; but he told his son that he did not wish to be alive to see it.
In late 1978, Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., asked me if I wanted to write that book. One yea
r later, we agreed that I should have unrestricted access to his parents’ papers and the right to quote from them at will. He assured me that he would make himself available to discuss his mother and father and that he would exercise no control over the contents of the biography. He insisted that the book be “honest.”
Toward that end, Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., gave me the keys to several vaults of material, and he sat for more than sixty hours of interviews. He answered every question put to him with unusual candor. Upon reading the manuscript, he limited his comments to the correction of facts, not the shaping of opinions. I am enormously grateful to him for his time and trust.
Samuel Goldwyn’s daughter, Ruth Capps, was equally frank. From the moment I met her until the completion of this book, her straightforward remembrances have guided me and inspired me.
In an effort to avoid committing more mistakes to Hollywood’s already error-riddled record, I have relied wherever possible on primary source material—the hundreds of thousands of documents in the Goldwyn archives, the Goldwyn films and their scripts, people who knew the Goldwyns. To those named below, and to many others who assisted me in the gathering, interpretation, and presentation of information, my most sincere thanks.
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