The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Everyone knew, furthermore, that Goldwyn never paid any attention to the three-hour time difference between New York and Los Angeles. Therefore, when Goldwyn telephoned Marcus Loew’s son Arthur in New York, and woke him at two o’clock in the morning, and when Loew said, “My God, Sam, do you know what time it is?” no one should have been surprised to hear that Sam turned to his wife and said, “Frances, Arthur wants to know what time it is.”

  Even more famous than the Goldwynisms, within the movie industry, was Goldwyn’s ability to assume the offensive in any business deal, and to immediately get his opponent on the run. At MGM, David Selznick was in charge of loan-outs of performers, and a typical phone call from Goldwyn would begin, “David, you and I have a very big problem.” Asked what the problem was, Goldwyn would reply, “You have an actor under contract, and I need him for a picture.” Another tactic was to completely befuddle a competitor, to throw him off his guard by making him think he was losing his mind. Goldwyn once telephoned Darryl Zanuck to get him to part with a director whom Zanuck had under contract. He was told that Zanuck was in a meeting. Goldwyn told Zanuck’s secretary that Zanuck must be got out of his meeting, that the business was urgent, an emergency, a matter of life and death. When, after a long delay, Zanuck finally came on the phone, Goldwyn said pleasantly, “Yes, Darryl. What can I do for you today?” He used the same technique on Lillian Hellman to get her to write the screenplay for Porgy and Bess. After spending several days trying to locate her, and leaving urgent messages for her in a variety of locations, he finally found Miss Hellman at her summer home on Martha’s Vineyard. He opened the conversation with, “Hello, Lillian. How nice of you to call. What can I do to help you?”

  Though he relied heavily on the talent, it irked him whenever an actor, director, or writer tried to take credit for the success of a movie that he, Sam Goldwyn, had produced. When Eddie Cantor, already a radio star, came to Hollywood to do Kid from Spain, he was nothing but trouble. He refused to accept the dressing room assigned to him because it had once been Al Jolson’s, and Jolson’s career had petered out, and Cantor was superstitious. Cantor also tried to get his wife, Ida, into the publicity buildup for the film, thus diluting Goldwyn’s own publicity campaign. He gave an interview to reporters in which he complained about Goldwyn’s studio policies, and about the low salary Goldwyn was paying him. Yet, when the film was finished, Goldwyn was pleased with it, and at a private screening he instructed his staff, “don’t anybody tell Cantor how good he is. I want to use him for another picture.” Then, when Kid from Spain became a hit, Eddie Cantor had the temerity to announce that it was all thanks to him, and to the popularity of his radio show. Goldwyn was furious. “Are you kidding me?” he roared at Cantor. “A little radio show made a big motion picture? Why don’t you do a little motion picture, and get a big radio show?”

  “I make a rule for you,” he said to his story editor, Sam Marx, when Marx proposed buying a novel called Graustark that was set in a mythical kingdom. “I make a rule for you—never bring me a story about mythical kingdoms.” Then, from rival MGM, along came The Prisoner of Zenda, set in a mythical kingdom, and a big hit. Immediately Goldwyn wanted to buy and produce Graustark. When the negotiations for Graustark were completed, Goldwyn said to Marx, “Look—who thought of Graustark? I did! Why didn’t you think of Graustark?” Marx reminded him of the recent rule. “I didn’t mean classics,” replied Goldwyn. He had to have the last word.

  Occasionally, Goldwyn’s last words betrayed his essential innocence. When the filming of Romeo and Juliet was proposed to him, Goldwyn liked the story, but wondered if it couldn’t have a happy ending. Jokingly, an associate said, “I don’t think Bill Shakespeare would like that, Sam.” Goldwyn replied, “Pay him off!” And, long after the rule against mythical kingdoms had been discarded, Goldwyn conceived the idea of making a movie of The Wizard of Oz, and ordered his secretary to send out for a copy of the book. The only copy that could be found was a child’s edition, in large print and with pop-up illustrations. Seeing Goldwyn poring studiously over this volume, an aide said, “Don’t bother reading it, Sam. MGM has already bought the book.” Furious, Goldwyn picked up the telephone and called L. B. Mayer. “L.B.,” he said, “I am sorry to report some very bad news to you. You have bought a book that I want.”

  When Norman Taurog was directing They Shall Have Music for Goldwyn, Goldwyn asked to see a set of daily “rushes.” After watching them, he announced that he couldn’t understand the story. Taurog, protesting that the story seemed perfectly clear to him, finally brought in a six-year-old singer from the children’s choir that was performing in the film, and ran the rushes through for him. The child said that he understood the picture. “So?” said Goldwyn in triumph. “I’m making a picture for six-year-olds?” And somehow Goldwyn’s critical hunch about the film was correct. They Shall Have Music was both a critical and a box-office flop, with the critics complaining that the plot was difficult to follow. As a result, Goldwyn would never again hire anyone who had been associated with the picture.

  One director whom Goldwyn held in considerable awe was the legendary John Ford. In fact, Ford’s reputation for genius and temperament actually frightened Goldwyn. Like King Vidor, Ford had stipulated in his contract that Goldwyn not interfere with his filming in any way. When Ford was directing Hurricane for Goldwyn, which starred John Hall and Dorothy Lamour, Goldwyn secretly managed to see a “rough cut” version of the movie, and became concerned that Ford was not using enough close-ups of the actors’ faces. He fussed privately over this for several days, and then said to an aide, “Let’s take a walk over and see John Ford.” When he approached Ford on the set, Goldwyn was very nervous, and Ford’s look, when he saw Goldwyn coming, was not welcoming. Shifting his weight from one foot to the other, Goldwyn touched on a variety of subjects—the weather, Ford’s health, Ford’s wife’s health, and so on. Finally, Ford grew impatient with the interruption and said, “What’s on your mind, Sam? Spit it out!” Shyly, Goldwyn mentioned what he considered to be the shortage of close-ups. “Listen,” said Ford, “when I want to, I’ll shoot an actor from here up,” and he jabbed Goldwyn in the stomach, “or from here up,” and he poked him in the chest, “or from here up,” and he flipped his finger in the producer’s nose. Walking away from the meeting, Goldwyn said, “Well, at least I put the idea in his mind.” It wasn’t the last word, exactly, but it was close.

  By the 1920s, David Sarnoff was not yet in a position to be a despot, benevolent or otherwise. He was still cautiously working his way up a corporate ladder. Not long after his Titanic triumph, while continuing to work in the Marconi station atop Wanamaker’s, Sarnoff had written a long memorandum to his employers that began, “I have in mind a plan of development which would make radio a ‘household utility’ in the same sense as the piano or phonograph. The idea is to bring music into the home by wireless.” The memo went on to describe what Sarnoff called the “Radio Music Box,” what its range could be, how it might be installed, what kind of antenna it would require, and how much it might cost—Sarnoff estimated that home radios might be made to sell for about seventy-five dollars apiece, and that as many as a hundred thousand Americans might buy radio music boxes. The prophetic memorandum was duly read, filed away, and nothing was done about it.

  Then, in 1919, the American Marconi Company was reorganized as the Radio Corporation of America under the financial sponsorship of General Electric, which had been doing some research of its own into the field of radiotelephony at its laboratories in Schenectady. Owen D. Young was named as head of the new company, and Sarnoff was given the title of commercial manager, though he was not put on the board. Mr. Young, a lawyer, knew next to nothing about radio, but fortunately his twenty-eight-year-old commercial manager knew quite a bit. From the outset, Young found himself turning to Sarnoff for technical advice and suggestions.

  Sarnoff, meanwhile, was busily casting about for new ways to popularize radio as an entertainment medium, and to
sell radio to the general public. What he needed was another Titanic, but preferably not a grim disaster—something that would be lively, entertaining, fun, and popular. In 1921, he believed he had found just what he was looking for.

  On July 2 of that year—a Saturday night in the middle of a long Fourth of July weekend—the heavyweight champion of the world, America’s own Jack Dempsey, was to fight a foreign challenger named Georges Carpentier, known as “the orchid man of France.” The country was whipping itself into a patriotic frenzy over the event. Millions of dollars’ worth of wagers—many of them being handled by Meyer Lansky and his men—rode on the outcome. Seats in the Jersey City arena where the match was to be fought had been sold out months in advance, and scalpers were hawking tickets for as much as a thousand dollars each. David Sarnoff proposed that RCA broadcast the fight, live, blow by blow, from ringside.

  A number of his RCA higher-ups were dubious. For one thing, RCA had no radio station in the vicinity of Jersey City, and so how could the broadcast be transmitted? Also, since there were only a relative handful of crystal radio receivers in the country, belonging to amateur radio buffs, how would a general public be able to receive the broadcast? David Sarnoff set about solving these problems, and he had very little time to do so. General Electric, it seemed, had just completed the construction of what was then the world’s largest radio transmitter, and Sarnoff proposed that RCA “borrow” it for the fight. But there was a hitch. GE’s transmitter had been built under contract for the United States Navy, which owned it, and the navy brass were unwilling to lend their costly new apparatus for a prizefight. A New Yorker named Franklin D. Roosevelt, however, who had been secretary of the navy under Woodrow Wilson, was presumed to still wield some power with his former naval colleagues. Roosevelt was approached, and he turned out also to be a Dempsey fan. He was able to persuade the Navy Department to part with their transmitter for the fight and “the glory of America.”

  Meanwhile, Sarnoff knew from some earlier experiments with radio communication between moving trains that a tall transmitting tower stood, unused, over the Hoboken railroad station, just two and a half miles from the Jersey City arena. The navy’s equipment was shipped to Hoboken, hooked up to the tower, and the Pullman porters’ changing room at the Hoboken railroad station became a radio station. The telephone company was then persuaded to run a line between the station and the scene of the fight.

  The only remaining problem was how the public was going to hear the broadcast, but to Sarnoff the answer seemed simple enough—in movie theaters. Marcus Loew of MGM, who was in charge of his company’s theater operations, was contacted, and was quicker than most to see the commercial possibilities of the undertaking. For a share of the box-office take, Loew turned over his chain of New York theaters and installed extra loudspeakers and amplifiers for the event.

  The live broadcast was a complete sellout throughout the metropolitan area as families from outlying areas flocked to New York to snap up the precious tickets. Even more happily, Jack Dempsey won, as everyone had hoped he would, knocking out the handsome French challenger in the fourth round. America’s honor had been defended. Boxing had its first million-dollar gate, when more than 90,000 spectators paid $1,700,000 for tickets at the arena. Dempsey himself took home $300,000. Carpentier’s consolation prize was $215,000. RCA and MGM made hundreds of thousands more from the largest radio listening audience in history. The genius of young David Sarnoff was once again a topic at dinner tables everywhere. So was the sudden demand for radio receivers. Virtually overnight, RCA found itself in the radio manufacturing business. Sarnoff was given a raise, and a new title—general manager of RCA.

  Of course, this new burst of fame and public acclaim for David Sarnoff did not assure him of instant popularity within the corporate framework of the company. On the contrary, corporate jealousies being what they are, he was heartily disliked in some quarters, and resented in others. For one thing, there was his obvious youth, his obvious brains, and the obvious fact that he had the ear of the company’s chief executive officer. Then there was the fact that he did not even possess a high school diploma, and that he was Jewish. Also, though he was carefully deferential and polite to those in positions higher up than he, he had adopted a rather offhand manner—a bit brash and cocky, if not actually condescending—to those a notch or two below. He was not exactly a handsome young fellow, but he had large, bright eyes and he always seemed to be grinning over some inner joke. He had a look, in other words, of being rather pleased with himself—as indeed he had every right to be—but to say that this sat well with his fellow employees would be far from the truth. In fact, whenever possible, they rode him unmercifully. Jobs that were patently impossible somehow found their way to his desk. The most difficult, as well as the most boring, salesmen were referred to his office. If a way, however petty, could be found to make David Sarnoff look ridiculous—or, even better, wrong—it was tried. But—and this was the most irritating thing about the man—despite all this, he seemed impossible to ruffle. Nothing seemed capable of erasing the grin, the look of self-confidence, the look of success.

  If anything, David Sarnoff’s air of self-confidence seemed to grow maddeningly more pronounced. He had already begun to think of himself in nautical terms—as the man “on the bridge,” the skipper of some great ship, the pilot plotting the course of radio communications through the stormy seas of the future. He would draw a parallel between the date of his own birth, in 1891, and “the birth of the electron,” as though some cosmic destiny awaited him as the result of these coincidental dates—overlooking the fact that it was newspaper work, not electronics, that he had originally chosen for a career.

  But there was no doubt that, at age thirty, David Sarnoff was already a tycoon in the making.

  In a famous novel, Budd Schulberg addressed the question “what makes Sammy run?” But in the case of many of these Eastern European success stories, the question could be asked: were they running for something, or away from something? Unlike the stolid German Jews who had come to America intent on bettering their lot, because America was “the land of golden opportunity,” because there were nineteenth-century fortunes to be made and they fully expected to make them, the Russians had come for an entirely different set of reasons. They had come to save their lives, and their children’s lives. Success had been the last thing on their minds, much less success on the scale of a Sam Goldwyn, a Sam Bronfman, a David Sarnoff, or even a Meyer Lansky. Yet success had happened anyway, and so quickly, and almost as if by crazy luck or accident. Was this what they had wanted? Not in the beginning, surely, and now it was more than they had ever dreamed of, more than they felt psychologically comfortable with.

  They came from a Russian-Jewish culture, furthermore, that for centuries had taught that there was high honor in poverty. Poverty itself was holy. The poor man was more blessed than the rich man—the Talmud taught this, and the rabbis preached it. God and Mammon could not both be worshiped. To be a Jew was to be poor, and to suffer. Perhaps this helps explain the curious double personalities of these early Eastern European tycoons, why they could be loving husbands and fathers at home, but hellions at the office. Sam Goldwyn also had his tender, generous side. When distant cousins in Poland heard of their relative’s success, they wrote to him, telling him their problems. He was soon sending regular gifts of money and clothing to people across the ocean whom he had never met. And yet he was a man who really believed that a “happy company” could not make a good product. Perhaps it was because America had handed men like Goldwyn more than they had asked for—more than they had been taught it was right to accept—and they were embarrassed, even ashamed, to be caught accepting it by the shades and memories of their proud, poor ancestors.

  Nowhere was this Jewish dilemma more poignantly apparent than in the story of Anzia Yezierska. Touched by the golden wand of Hollywood, handed a check for ten thousand dollars—more money than she had ever seen in her life—taken to a private lunch with Gol
dwyn, offered a stunning contract by William Fox, she had behaved, some might say, quite foolishly. At lunch with Goldwyn, she had babbled almost incoherently about “art.” And, offered the Fox contract, she had simply run away. After the Hollywood experience, in fact, whatever talent she may have had seemed to dry up, and it was years before she was able to write again. But Hollywood was not entirely to blame.

  In 1950, sixty-five years old and virtually forgotten, she wrote a memoir, Red Ribbon on a White Horse, in which she tried to come to grips with what had happened all those long years ago. Flushed with excitement over her movie sale, her ten-thousand-dollar check from Goldwyn for the sale of her first novel in her hand, she had run eagerly to tell her father, expecting from him some word of praise, pride, or congratulation. She was disappointed. Her father, an Old World Jeremiah of Hester Street, spent his days at the shul or in his tenement flat poring over his phylacteries and holy books. Faced with his daughter’s accomplishment, he berated her mercilessly for her preoccupation with money and earthly success. A woman’s only earthly concern, he told her, was to marry and bear children. She had done neither. She might as well be dead or, worse, never have been born. As she remembered the dreadful scene:

  “Woe to America!” he wailed. “Only in America could it happen—an ignorant thing like you—a writer! What do you know of life? Of history, philosophy? What do you know of the Bible, the foundation of all knowledge?”