Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  “By the time I started the Goldwyn Company,” a ghostwriter for Samuel Goldwyn wrote a few years later, “it was the player, not the play, which was the thing.” Only a few of the hundreds of silent holy ghosts on the screen could regularly draw worshipers back to their shrine. The public was fond of creating new overnight favorites—a tragedienne (such as Nazimova), a cowboy (Tom Mix), a comic (Buster Keaton). Maidens galore were offered every week: Norma Talmadge signed with Lewis Selznick; Anita Stewart with Louis B. Mayer; Gloria Swanson and a bevy of what became known as “bathing beauties” with Mack Sennett. The dream of every producer was to place a new star at the high altar of the trinity—alongside the swashbuckler, the tramp, and the virgin named Mary.

  Goldfish went on a shopping spree, but not randomly. A lesson he learned in Gloversville guided him. The Elite Glove Company had specialized in fancy-dress gloves—making fewer better. “No one ever succeeded by thinking down to people,” Goldfish realized. “Unless one ‘thinks up’ constantly, the public will eventually reject them.” He was determined to produce only the top of the line. His archenemy was the model he intended to emulate.

  Zukor’s production company was built on an international star (Bernhardt), a young innocent (Pickford), Broadway leading ladies (such as Pauline Frederick), and now an opera star (Farrar). Within three months of the formation of Goldwyn Pictures, the president had signed Maxine Elliott (a renowned star of the English stage), Mae Marsh (the Biograph star), Madge Kennedy (a famous player from Broadway), and Mary Garden (Farrar’s leading rival)—each to a six-figure contract. Holding four queens, Sam Goldfish hoped to draw a joker.

  Mabel Normand was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1892 to an Irish mother and an alcoholic French father. “Her family was temperamental, improvident, and often in transit,” noted Mack Sennett, whose life was to become entangled in hers. Her parents and two siblings always called her “Baby.” Insecure from birth, she thought of herself as unintelligent and unattractive. She compensated endlessly, becoming a tireless athlete, taking pratfalls for a laugh, peppering her talk with profanities—anything to get people to like her.

  At thirteen, encouraged by so many people telling her how pretty she was, Mabel became an artists’ model. She posed for Charles Dana Gibson and James Montgomery Flagg, then for photographers in the booming advertising business. She had a curvy figure and huge brown eyes with long lashes, but she never developed enough confidence to take a compliment. She responded to praise with some goofy action, as though trying to divert one’s gaze from her looks.

  One day in 1909, another model told her there was bigger money to be earned at the Biograph studio, especially for girls with as much personality as Mabel had. She immediately found work in the Biograph brownstone on Fourteenth Street as an extra but did not attract much more attention than that. Only a big, stocky Irishman who had been loitering around the studio noticed her. “I was a hanger-on, leaning against a wall, hoping to get noticed and put into the picture myself,” remembered Mack Sennett of Mabel’s first day before a motion picture camera.

  She was hired to play a page and carry a queen’s train out of a room. She performed, grabbed her five dollars, then left, failing even to inquire if she should ever return. A week later, as Sennett remembered it, he bumped into her on Fifth Avenue. He told her she could have a future in motion pictures, if only by returning to film the scene that had been held in abeyance until the extra who played the queen’s page could be found. That next shot called for the queen’s entrance into the chamber, with the same page carrying the train.

  Sennett became enamored of Mabel and spoke to her about someday directing his own pictures—in which she would star. Within a few years, Mabel became the focus of his comedies—the poor but good girl triumphing over “ruffians, villains, and amiable boobs.” She delivered the screen’s first pie in the face—Sennett remembered it as custard directed toward the crossed eyes of Ben Turpin; Minta Arbuckle said it was raspberry thrown at her husband, Fatty.

  “Mabel was the moth to Mack’s flame,” said Madge Kennedy, who was to become her dressing-room mate. Mabel followed Sennett from Keystone to Triangle and stuck by him when his other stars accepted larger salaries elsewhere. Off camera she was less sure of herself. “Whenever she got too close to someone,” Miss Kennedy observed, “she felt she had to pull back. Mabel thought of herself as ‘the Ugly Duckling,’ and she was afraid people would see her imperfections.” For all her spunk in front of crowds, she was, in Miss Kennedy’s eyes, “a frightened little creature.” Alcohol removed the edge; cocaine made her fearless.

  “The worst predicament of all is to fall in love with an actress with whom you are in business,” Mack Sennett noted years later in pathetic retrospect. They got engaged and unengaged twenty times. On the eve of one of their phantom wedding days, Miss Normand discovered Sennett in the compromising company of another actress, Mae Busch. Mabel and Mack’s personal relationship was never the same.

  Sennett tried to make amends with extravagant baubles. He bought a patch of land on Sunset Boulevard and built the Mabel Normand Studio. She rejoined Sennett. After his success with the first feature-length comedy (Tillie’s Punctured Romance, with Chaplin and Marie Dressler), Sennett proposed a similar venture for Mabel. He sank everything he owned into Mickey, the story of an innocent girl in New York. After the six reels were assembled, Baumann and Kessel notified Sennett that Mickey was a flop before it even opened, that they could not interest a single exhibitor in showing it. It was consigned to a shelf, and Mabel Normand’s career was up for grabs.

  Sam Goldfish had been smitten ever since Mack Sennett first allowed Mabel Normand to show off in movies. He was not alone. In this early world of ephemeral stardom, Mabel Normand was one of the few genuine living legends to walk the earth. Every critic praised her as the greatest comedienne of the silent screen; “nobody,” said Madge Kennedy, “had more heart.” In real life she was even more alluring, a Lorelei who drove men wild. Chaplin rued decades later that he never got closer to a love affair with her than one passionate kiss on those “full lips that curled delicately at the corners of her mouth, expressing humor and all sorts of indulgence.” Another man attempted suicide over her by trying to drown himself in a toilet bowl. “Many of us became queens overnight,” said Miss Kennedy of the sudden status granted to motion picture stars, “but Mabel became a goddess.”

  The moment Goldfish learned that Mabel Normand was running from the clutches of Sennett, he fixated on her. He became, in the words of Blanche Sweet, Mabel’s friend from their Biograph days, “a stark-raving, crazed, insane, lunatic madman.” By the time Sennett arrived in New York to win her back again, he learned that Normand was poised to sign a five-year contract with Goldfish for $1,000 a week. Mack interceded, insisting that she ask for more money. After weeks of wrangling, Mabel wired Mack, “SIGNED TODAY.... START WORK SEPT. I. COMPANY SAID I DIDN’T LOOK WELL. MUST REST AND GO AWAY UNTIL THEN. WINTER STUDIO FLORIDA. SO I WON’T BE ABLE TO PEEP AT YOU EVER AGAIN.” The agreement was a one-year contract for $2,500 per week. To the man who had built Mabel her own studio and literally put her name in lights, this bargain-basement contract was like salt on his wounds.

  After Goldfish signed two of Zukor’s biggest stars, Geraldine Farrar and Pauline Frederick, the competition around town began knocking the Goldwyn Company as the “old ladies’ home.” The company president set out to bag some male actors.

  For thirty years, Rex Beach reigned as one of the most popular novelists in the United States. Known for his “he-man” stories set on rugged frontiers, he struck discriminating critics as a poor man’s Bret Harte or Jack London. He became the first popular author to take a great interest in the production of motion pictures. Goldfish offered the kind of contract generally reserved for a few stars, one that allowed Rex Beach to form his own production company and keep half the net profits of the films based on his books. Upon his signing a contract that called for three films a year, Goldwyn Pictures a
lso signed Tom Moore—the handsomest of three Irish-born brothers who all took up movie acting. (One of them, Owen, married Mary Pickford.) Then Goldfish put Jack Pickford and Griffith star “Bobby” Harron into his all-star lineup.

  Having watched Zukor soar to prominence by building an octopus of production, distribution, and exhibition, Goldfish insisted the Goldwyn Company immediately branch out. On April 25, 1917, the Goldwyn Distributing Corporation was established, capitalized at one million dollars. They opened a separate office at 509 Fifth Avenue, on the eleventh floor. The new company was given a twenty-five-year license to sell all Goldwyn pictures, exacting their fee from the profits at the standard rates of 35 percent domestically and 50 percent in foreign markets; they would receive 25 percent for any outright sales of Goldwyn films.

  Goldfish spent money as though there were no tomorrow—opening offices to wholesale the Goldwyn product in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Seattle, Atlanta, and Boston. Over the next three years, branch offices were opened in another fourteen cities across the country. The company’s goal was to produce a new film every two weeks.

  A team of salesmen was assembled to peddle the product in each region; and Goldfish himself spent much of his time charting their marketing strategy. He knew he would not stand a chance competing against the major distributors head to head. Zukor, for example, could force theaters to rent an entire slate of mediocre films, just to get their hands on one Mary Pickford feature. So Goldfish emphasized that “Goldwyn is not a program.” It was the company’s intention to offer “a quality product, costing from four to five times more money than any other regularly or otherwise released productions to be found in the entire market. With the facilities we now have,” he announced in a bulletin to his salesmen, “we could easily make one hundred or more productions of the so-called program pictures, but we have limited ourselves to 26 pictures.”

  The company hired a casting director named Robert B. McIntyre, two dozen players to fill in their stock company, ten scenarists, a playwright named Edith Ellis (who became the company’s first “story editor”), a team of cameramen, and a dozen directors, headed by Clarence Badger and Victor L. “Pops” Schertzinger. The lesser directors could count on salaries of several hundred dollars a week; Hobart Henley got a year’s contract at two thousand dollars a month; a bright hotshot director—such as Allan Dwan—would be hired on a picture-by-picture basis at one thousand dollars a week.

  Arthur Hopkins, who was to oversee production, suggested hiring famous designers to create a look for the company’s films. Goldfish appropriated the idea and put it into action. A team of four men came to work under the noted painter and muralist Hugo Ballin, a New Yorker who had studied art in Rome. For two hundred dollars a week, he introduced elaborate architecture and set design. A film could assume a visual point of view. The “Ballin touch,” a philosophy of set design he passed on to Goldfish, maintained the utmost in simplicity, understatement. “He eliminated useless detail,” noted Kenneth MacGowan, who would one day work in Goldwyn’s story department, before becoming a screenwriter and film historian. “He used large spaces of clear wall with restrained detail. In the decoration he began to suggest more of the habits and nature of the characters of the story than had until that time been attempted.” (One of Ballin’s assistants at Goldwyn, Cedric Gibbons, would later break away and create a far more lavish new style in Hollywood films.)

  By the summer of 1917, all the departmental phalanxes of Goldwyn Pictures had been assembled. Even though Goldfish had decided that the company should make its films in New Jersey instead of California, he was usually too busy at one of its Fifth Avenue addresses to spend much time on the set. He needed a right-hand man, someone whom he could deputize and trust implicitly.

  He looked to Gloversville—and offered a job to his first business partner, Charlie Sesonske, with whom he had tried to start a glove business back in 1901. The movies interested Sesonske, but he turned Goldfish down. Even with the promise of a large salary and an important position, Sesonske was not prepared to move to New York City.

  Then Goldfish approached his first friend from the glove trade, Abe Lehr, the man who used to swap his best hides for an hour of Sam’s overtime. Lehr had for years been vice president of Dempster and Place Glove Company in Gloversville, and he was ready to break away. Even more than business acumen, he had the equanimity to work alongside the paroxysmal Goldfish. When Sam offered him $26,000 a year as “Vice President in charge of Producing Operations of Goldwyn Pictures Corporation,” Lehr accepted.

  AT eight o‘clock in the morning, a Pierce-Arrow limousine would arrive at Samuel Goldfish’s new apartment at 310 West 86th Street, between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. The chauffeur would drive the thousand-dollar-a-week executive to 125th Street and the Hudson River, where they boarded a ferry for the motion picture capital of the world. On the other side, the car would wind to the top of the Palisades, on which Fort Lee perched. The town’s wide variety of scenery—woods, brooks, hills and valleys, swamps, meadows, and country lanes—coupled with its proximity to New York City made it desirable to motion picture makers.

  The first studio in the borough had been erected just north of the town line, in Englewood Cliffs, in 1909. A half-dozen more studios quickly followed in Fort Lee. They were cavernous greenhouses, their walls and roofs made of glass panes for the flooding of as much sunlight as the New Jersey skies would permit. Employees, even the actors, generally worked from nine to five, six days a week. Most businesses in 1917 operated half days on Saturday, but knowing the importance of catching every minute of light, most everybody willingly worked those extra few hours on Saturday.

  Famous Players had its studio just off the westernmost end of Main Street, about a mile through town. Where Zukor was, Goldfish was never far behind. He was renting facilities from Universal 250 yards away. A vast stage was housed in a steel-framed structure; and an abandoned barn became a rabbit warren of offices and dressing rooms, with thin wood partitions and no ceilings. A young girl from outside Altoona, Pennsylvania—Elda Furry, who went by the name Hedda and married the actor De Wolf Hopper—picked up one of her first film roles there. She remembered, “The cells where we dressed at Fort Lee were uncomfortable, cold, smelly! We didn’t complain. It put granite in our spines.”

  As many as four different companies at once could camp on the stage in the big building. Each crew—consisting of the director, his assistant, the cameraman, and a still photographer—swarmed around a single camera, focusing on the scene. Dissonance filled the air.

  Geraldine Farrar demanded a pianist and a violinist on the set to provide mood music, a string trio for especially dramatic scenes. Madge Kennedy liked a pianist to plink out the bouncy new tunes—“gay and lively was my tempo ... and it was months before I learned my music man was a drug addict. At nine o‘clock in the morning, even!” Mabel Normand liked it hot—a jazz combo blaring away.

  On top of vying strains of music were the clashes of temperament, as motion picture companies were still collections of insecurity and ignorance. Abe Lehr had absolutely no experience in show business; Arthur Hopkins had never made a motion picture, and neither had the company’s first star, Maxine Elliott. “It really was a case of the blind leading the blind,” said Madge Kennedy; “and we were all really grateful for some voice of authority to speak, anybody who could lay down the law and help us get the job done.”

  “You have to remember Sam Goldfish was pretty much a nonentity in the picture business then,” noted J. J. Cohn, who broke into motion pictures as a secretary, cashier, purchasing agent, and “gofer” for the Goldwyn Company. “He was just then making a name for himself. But make no mistake about it. He was the Goldwyn Company; and when he came onto the set with something to say, everybody stopped to listen.”

  In the interest of elevating the art of motion pictures, Arthur Hopkins suggested to Goldfish that they experiment with a new variation in the medium—a completely wordless film. Maxin
e Elliott’s first motion picture, Fighting Odds, was just that: five reels of pantomime, unrelieved by title cards. In a moment of twelfth-hour jitters, Goldfish ordered titles stuffed in, which only underscored Miss Elliott’s exaggerated acting. The Goldwyn Company had its first major flop on its hands.

  Thaïs was not their salvation. Because Mary Garden had sung the definitive Thaïs of her day, it was determined to let her perform it the same way in film—except, of course, there would be no sound. During those scenes in which there had been arias to entrance audiences, Miss Garden simply stood in stiff poses, listing slightly, occasionally heaving a bosom.

  Mary Garden was immediately cast into a second film, a short wartime love story called The Splendid Sinner. Her character shoots a man and goes off to war as a nurse; but she turns out to be a spy, and the Germans finally capture her and stand her before a firing squad. One afternoon during the three weeks of shooting particularly impressed her. Just before filming the scene in which the Kaiser’s marksmen meted out their punishment, Miss Garden looked up and saw Sam Goldfish there among the props, examining “every one of the guns to be sure there were no real bullets in them.”

  Both Mary Garden ventures were fiascoes, which further alienated some theater owners, who thought they were renting a film with a pretty actress of a few years back named Mary Gardener. The singer bid the movies adieu, believing “that every actor and actress in the motion-picture business earn every sou they make.”

  Even for the seasoned professional, hazards always threatened to shut down Goldfish’s business. Madge Kennedy, as stalwart a trouper as the Goldwyn Company had, recalled the dangers imposed by the rudimentary lighting in early filmmaking. “We’d do take after take standing before these klieg lights,” she remembered, “and after each one, the still photographer would run right up to you, practically at your face, and shout, ‘Hold it for a still!’ Then a flash of light would go off right before your eyes.” Miss Kennedy recurringly suffered from the temporary blindness that afflicted most silent-screen actors: “I’d be awakened in the middle of the night by a flash of bright, white light; and when I turned on the light in the room, I wouldn’t be able to see, sometimes for several seconds.” The danger of losing actors because of sightlessness was real; the remedy in those days was to balm the eyelids with castor oil or tea leaves. Actors would often repair to their dressing rooms and lie down, covering their eyes with slices of potatoes or cucumbers.