The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  And yet there was obviously something about the man that fascinated her—his brusqueness of manner, his cocky self-assurance, his obvious need to dominate every scene in which, and every woman with whom, he found himself—even though he was more than twenty years older than she. When he telephoned a few days later and asked her to have dinner with him, she found herself saying yes. At the time, she was living in a small apartment at Eighty-first Street and West End Avenue. When she gave him the address, he said, “I can’t be seen in that part of town. Take a taxi to my hotel, the Ambassador, on Park Avenue.” Even with that, she went. They dined at the Colony Restaurant and, on what was their first real date, Sam Goldwyn asked her to marry him.

  Frances had been talking with Paramount about the possibility of doing a film on the West Coast, and so her reply to his proposal was an airy, “Well, perhaps I’ll see you in California.” But, less than four months later, when she arrived in Hollywood, Frances Howard was the second Mrs. Samuel Goldwyn. “It wasn’t that he was a bit nice,” she said later. “He had the most appalling manners. And it wasn’t because I wanted to marry a movie producer to get into the movies. He’d made it very clear that the only career I was going to have was as his wife. And it certainly wasn’t because he was rich because, at the time, I knew he was up to his ears in debt to the Bank of America. But there was something about him that was different from any man I’d ever known. He seemed so lonely—the loneliest man I’d ever known. Maybe it was because he brought out the mothering instinct in me.”

  Her family was appalled. There was the difference in their ages, and the difference in their religions. Still, Frances Goldwyn was to prove herself a stubborn woman who knew what she wanted and who, when she had it, was determined to keep it. She had made Sam promise that any children would be raised as Catholics. She knew of Sam’s reputation as a flirt and a womanizer, and knew only too well of his long-standing relationship with Mabel Normand, but had decided wisely to overlook such matters. She knew of Sam’s reputation as a high-stakes gambler, and decided that, if she could not change that, she would live as best as she could with it. She knew of Sam’s love of ostentation and display—he operated on the theory that the more money he owed the more he must therefore spend, lest the competition suspect he was in difficulties of any sort—and in an effort to trim his budget got him to dispose of his “show-off Locomobile.” She understood Sam’s ghetto-bred fear of tying up money in real estate, but she was also determined that they would live in a house and not spend their lives, as Sam had been doing, in a series of hotel suites. Her wedding gift to him was typically understated and commonsensical: a dozen neckties from Macy’s.

  Frances Goldwyn was both thrilled and horrified by the Hollywood of the mid-1920s that she discovered when she arrived. She and Sam had no sooner stepped off the Santa Fe Chief than he advised her that they were invited to a dinner party that evening. Hastily, she selected a pink chiffon dress embroidered with tiny imitation shells, but she was totally unprepared for what she saw when she arrived at the party. There was Pola Negri in a silver lamé turban, a dress covered with sequins, and most of the upper part of her body cascaded in diamonds. There was Constance Talmadge in white satin with a waterfall of orchids in dozens of different colors pinned to her shoulder and hanging to the floor so that she had to kick the corsage out of the way with her feet as she walked. Her sister, Norma, was also in orchids and in a long dress stitched with opals and moonstones. There was Ernst Lubitsch, King Vidor, the almost-too-handsome John Gilbert, and—most exciting of all to Frances—Earl Williams, the Robert Redford of his day. Frances Goldwyn had had a desperate girlhood crush on Earl Williams and had kept a Huyler’s candy box full of photographs of him clipped out of Photoplay magazine. Dizzily, she discovered that she had been seated next to him at the dinner table. But, once seated, she discovered something else about her idol. Earl Williams was totally without conversation. Desperately, she tried one topic after another—politics, the theater, the stock market, recent books, even the weather. Earl Williams responded by munching on celery sticks. At last she decided to try bringing up her Huyler’s candy box. Immediately he was transfixed, and wanted to hear more. Which photographs had she liked best? Which profile did she prefer? Did she think his eyes were too small? Did she prefer him smiling or looking serious? She had discovered a fact that would stand her in good stead with every Hollywood actor: Earl Williams was interested only in Earl Williams. On the subject of his photographs he became voluble, and monopolized her for the rest of the evening. When he said good night to her, he told her, “You are the most fascinating woman I’ve ever met!”

  At that first Hollywood party Frances Goldwyn learned other things less pleasant. She noticed, for example, the prodigious consumption of bootleg liquor. She noticed that, even in 1925, there were certain other chemicals involved in the Hollywood social scene. “There was something they sniffed, and something they smoked,” she would recall. She also learned, to her dismay, what the position of a woman was in the movie capital. Across and around the table, where she tried to catch as much of the conversation as she could when Williams was not going on about himself, she heard the men talking, and the men were doing most of the talking. The women smiled and preened and nodded, and studied their reflections in the mirrors of their compacts. The men spoke of this gathering or that, and of who was there, and it was all first names—“Jack,” and “Joe,” and “Nick,” and “Cecil,” and “Sam” and “Charlie,” and “Darryl,” and “David,” and “Lew,” and “Doug.” Then someone would add, almost as an afterthought, “And the usual wives, of course.” At that dinner party Frances Goldwyn decided that, whatever happened, she would not let herself become just another of Hollywood’s “usual wives.”

  Because, like the Polish crown prince he had observed as a youth in the streets of Warsaw, Sam Goldwyn now absolutely refused to carry money. Frances did that for him (even when they were engaged, she had had to pay for everything where cash was required). Now, she began handling his accounts, writing out his checks, balancing books that no bookkeeper had looked at for fifteen years. Though he did his best to keep his gambling debts a secret from her, she usually managed to find out about them anyway, and quietly see that they were settled—a cardinal Hollywood rule said that a man’s gambling debts must be paid before all others. She had a series of meetings with Mr. Giannini at his bank. When one of Sam’s girl friends threatened to cause trouble, Frances just as quietly bought the lady off with a diamond bracelet from Cartier—“Not too expensive. I wanted to save our money.” Sam began bringing home movie scripts for her to read, and when she criticized them, he criticized her criticisms. They argued, but the more they argued, the more Frances Goldwyn was learning about the motion picture business.

  At the studio, she began noticing examples of extravagance and waste, and proposed cost-cutting methods. Lights that had theretofore been left burning all night long were ordered turned off at the end of a working day. Lavish stars’ dressing rooms were divided to make a more thrifty use of space. Budgets for films were trimmed, salaries were held in rein. She also kept an eye on studio maintenance. When she discovered faulty plumbing in the men’s room, she had it repaired. When a roof leaked, she had it patched. In short, she was doing things that no other Hollywood wife had ever dreamed of doing.

  Most important, in the inevitable intra- and interstudio fights and skirmishes that were forever erupting, when horns locked and heads knocked together, it was Frances who coolly took on the job of patching the cracked skulls. One fact about Sam Goldwyn had become quite clear by that point in his producing career: he had a certain difficulty getting along with the people he worked with. When frictions arose, and Sam seemed on the point of exploding, it was Frances Goldwyn who stepped in to smooth things out with tact and diplomacy. Whether he realized it or not, Frances Goldwyn was running Sam Goldwyn. And, whether he knew it or not, he had acquired his most important business asset when he married her. Though she would always
modestly deny it, it is quite possible that Sam Goldwyn would have failed utterly as a producer if it had not been for her. He was in a business for which he was temperamentally unsuited because it was one that required cooperation and coordination. These he could never manage. But she could. Never, after marrying Frances, would Sam Goldwyn stalk angrily out of a meeting or boardroom again. When he wanted to pay her a particular compliment, he would tell her that she reminded him of his first wife, his fairy princess. She shrugged it off, knowing that it wasn’t true.

  Meanwhile, Frances Goldwyn still wanted them to have a house, and when she was not at the studio, she shopped for a piece of property. As usual with Sam Goldwyn, there was a shortage of ready cash; but Frances had managed to scrape a sum together, and within a few months had located a hilltop plot overlooking Laurel Canyon in Beverly Hills. The view was spectacular; visible across the valley, through tapering cypresses, was Pickfair, the home of Hollywood’s royal family, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. A flat space of ground would allow for the mandatory croquet court. The seller of the property wanted seventy-five thousand dollars for the lot. But Frances—“I Gentiled him down”—got it for fifty-two thousand. She supervised the design and building of the house, and then the furnishing and decorating of it. Sam had bought what he had been told was a “fake Picasso.” Frances researched the painting and discovered, to her delight, that it was a real Picasso. It went on a living room wall.

  Throughout the construction of the house, Sam showed little interest in the project, and busied himself making movies. In fact, by the time the house was finished—on their first wedding anniversary—and was ready for the Goldwyns to move into, Sam had not even visited the building site. Now the house was done, down to the last decorative detail, including the ashtrays, and Frances took her husband to tour their new home. He walked through the large and airy rooms, looking bemused, saying nothing. He walked up the curved staircase to the second floor, where Frances had provided one whimsical touch that she thought might amuse him: on each of the white Porthault towels in the bathrooms she had ordered embroidered a small yellow goldfish, to remind him of his earlier name. She waited downstairs for his reaction. There was suddenly an explosion from above. “Frances!” he bellowed. “There’s no soap in my bathroom!”

  “It was absolutely typical of him,” Frances Goldwyn said later. “His first wife must have been terribly bored with him. He was a terrible man. But I loved that terrible man.”

  Goldwyn liked to say that he was only interested in producing “quality” films. “Quality” and “good, clean family entertainment” were two of his principal watchwords. And, to a large extent, he was true to his word, turning out such cinematic milestones as The Eternal City, Stella Dallas—first, in 1925, as a silent, and later, in 1937, with sound—Dodsworth, Arrowsmith, and Wuthering Heights. He liked to say that one of his goals in life was to prove “that fine things, clean things can be done” in films.

  Meyer Lansky was also interested in quality. Just as, with his snobbish streak, he preferred to operate “high-class” gambling casinos in the back rooms of posh Catskill resorts, and chose to offer his bootlegged products to the tonier speakeasies and nightclubs rather than to skid-row saloons, he was also concerned that his liquor customers should receive high-quality goods. Before Prohibition, the liquor business in the United States consisted of small, family-owned distilleries and tradesmen, a number of them Jewish, who turned out spirits and bottled them with no attempt at consistency or quality control, and no two bottles of liquor under the same label tasted quite the same. But since the American drinking public didn’t seem to care, it didn’t seem to matter. Some pre-Prohibition whiskey was bottled as it came out of the aging barrel. More often, it was cut with new whiskey, raw alcohol, and water. In 1899, the Distilling Company of America had been organized—the ill-famed Whiskey Trust—by a group of Jewish distillers who for a while managed to control most of the whiskey-manufacturing business in Kentucky. The trust failed fourteen years later when it could not compete with the lower prices asked by regional distillers in their local areas. Also, Kentucky whiskeys were supposed to be aged three or four years, but the cost of keeping an inventory of three or four years’ production had become prohibitive. To ease its cash-flow problem, the trust sold whiskey, unaged, to distributors as it came out of the still, with the suggestion that the distributors take care of the aging themselves. The distributors, who bottled the whiskey under their own labels, either aged it or not, as they saw fit. Most did not. The result was poor—or, at best, uneven—quality. In view of the number of Jews involved in these somewhat unscrupulous liquor dealings, it would not be unfair to say that one of the unspoken motives behind the Prohibition movement was anti-Semitism, just as, in a later year, there would be a successful movement on the part of the United States to wrest the motion picture business from “Jewish control” by forcing film companies to divest themselves of their theaters. Hints that Prohibition was in part an anti-Jewish reaction lie in the Drys’ arguments that drinking was responsible for bolshevism. Bolshevism meant Russia, and to most Americans, Russia meant Russian Jews.

  But the law that went into effect in January, 1920, would have the paradoxical result of improving, in the long run, the liquor Americans drank. Prohibition quickly made bootleggers much more careful and choosy about what they were selling to their customers. To be sure, a few unprincipled sellers might offer poisonous wood alcohol disguised with flavorings, and call the result sloe gin, but this was not a very good way to encourage repeat business. Meyer Lansky and his friends figured, quite sensibly, that it would be unwise for word to get around that Lansky offered anything but the real thing. Similarly, men like Samuel Bronfman began to be much more careful about what they sold to men like Meyer Lansky. A bad batch of whiskey could have a distressing domino effect, with repercussions bouncing from the unhappy customer to the local bootlegger, to his supplier, and finally to the manufacturer. Lives—and money—could be heavily at stake along the way. And so “quality control”—a notion unheard-of before 1920—came willy-nilly to the liquor business, forced on it by Prohibition.

  Of course, there were little games that could be played. Scotch, for example, when Lansky first entered the bootleg trade, cost him about $25 a case, including overhead—the cost of bribing border guards, hiring boats to transport the contraband across the Jewish lake and stevedores to do the loading and unloading, and warehousing. The going price for bootleg Scotch was about $30 a fifth, which gave Lansky a profit of about $330 a case, or 1500 percent. Soon, however, he was able to devise a system that tripled his profits, to $1,000 a case, or 4500 percent.

  One of the yawning loopholes in the Volstead Act was that, although alcohol could not be sold, it could be prescribed by doctors for patients who required it for medical reasons. Therefore, medicinal alcohol continued to be manufactured perfectly legally in the United States, and all at once a great many doctors seemed to have a great many cases where daily dosages of alcohol were required to keep patients in the full bloom of health. In every major American city there was at least one government-licensed manufacturer of medicinal spirits, and what Lansky and his group began to do was to buy up these companies. Later, Lansky would admit that it was occasionally necessary to apply strong-arm tactics, with “offers that couldn’t be refused,” but for the most part licensed manufacturers were more than willing to take in new partners when they were apprised of the spectacular extra profits they could expect to earn.

  The system worked like this: Every quart of illegally imported Scotch whiskey was mixed with approximately two quarts of inexpensive, legal, and cheap raw alcohol. Then coloring agents were added to make sure that the resulting mixture had the right hue. Lansky hired professional chemists and tasters to make sure that the final flavor was indistinguishable from that of real Scotch. Obviously, the mixture had to be sold in Scotch-looking bottles with Scotch-looking labels, and so Lansky bought bottle manufacturers and printing companies to t
urn out the distinctive bottle shapes and labels of Johnnie Walker, Haig and Haig Pinch, Dewar’s, and so on, which were near-perfect facsimiles. In the process of turning one bottle of authentic Scotch whiskey into three bottles of counterfeit Scotch-alcohol blend, Lansky soon found himself in the real estate business, since it was also necessary to buy warehouses in which to store his vast stocks. At the height of Prohibition it was estimated that sixteen million gallons of legally produced alcohol were being used to make forty-eight million gallons of Scotch a la Meyer Lansky.

  It has often been said of Lansky that, had he chosen a more legitimate enterprise, he could, with his business genius, have run General Motors. In 1925, Lansky himself boasted that his business was probably bigger than Henry Ford’s, and he may have been right.

  His profits, by the mid-1920s, were enormous, but then so were his expenses. Approximately a hundred thousand dollars a week—or over five million dollars a year—went for bribes and “grease” for city officials and for other forms of protection. In New York City alone, the payoffs to police ran ten thousand dollars a week, paid all the way down the line from precinct captains to patrolmen on the beat. Still, Lansky and his partners were dividing a net income of over four million dollars a year, while enforcement of Prohibition by law went out the window. During the decade and a half that Prohibition was in effect, federal agents arrested 577,000 suspected offenders, confiscated over a billion gallons of bootleg liquor, seized 45,000 automobiles and 1,300 boats assumed to be involved in the illicit trade. And yet the assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury, Lincoln C. Andrews, who was in charge of enforcing the Volstead Act, estimated that less than five percent of the liquor traffic was being stemmed. Looked at another way, bootlegging had become the most cost-efficient business in the world.