Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  Cash trickling in again, Goldfish considered moving film production to California: Triangle Films in Culver City was offering a lot of cheap space and light. It was an economy measure that would buy more time for his floundering company. It also meant putting a continent between the production and business ends of the company. Goldfish was especially reluctant this time, having worked so hard to give meaning to the name of Goldwyn. In everyone’s eyes he embodied the entire company. In fact, mail often arrived at the office addressed to “Samuel Goldwyn.” The Goldwyn Company switchboard plugged calls for that nonexistent person straight through to him.

  On December 2, 1918, he petitioned to change his name. Two weeks later, Justice Thomas F. Donnelly ordered that “said Samuel Goldfish be and he hereby is authorized to assume the name of Samuel Goldwyn in place of his present name.” The Selwyns spoke of suing Goldwyn for “stealing half our name,” but they realized they had no case.

  More than vanity prompted Goldfish to change his name. It was again survival. Goldwyn became an imaginary character through whom Schmuel Gelbfisz—just six months shy of turning forty—could live. Goldwyn’s would be the face he would show the world.

  He tried out the new character on his daughter Ruth, during his infrequent weekends with her. Goldwyn liked taking her to the Central Park Zoo. Uncomfortable at small talk, he would show her the lion’s cage and talk about the animal as Ruthie’s lion. Then he would wax eloquent on how her lion had been the inspiration for his company’s symbol.

  More often, Goldwyn made dates with Ruth and canceled them because of business. Despite all the gifts and sudden rushes of attention, the young girl saw right through him, becoming more reluctant with each visit ever to see him again. “I have not one memory of ever spending a single night under the same roof as my father,” she said a lifetime later. “Not one. There are no family memories—no family anything—that include him so far as I’m concerned. He was not proud of me.”

  Young Ruth hammered out her own emotional armor. While still in elementary school, she assumed a posture that would protect her. “I grew up,” she explained, “never expecting anything from anybody. That way I’d never get hurt.”

  Her father had his own way. For the rest of his life, whenever fear or anger or grief threatened to pull him under, he would indulge in a short crying jag, then pull through by saying to himself, “I’ve still got Goldwyn.”

  7 The Business of America

  PAST THE New Amsterdam Theater’s Pre-Raphaelite-style lobby awaited the Ziegfeld Follies. Appearing in the 1918 edition of the show—backed by Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr.,’s patented chorus line of beautiful women—were Marilyn Miller, Eddie Cantor, W C. Fields, and a lariat-twirling Oklahoman who could drawl for hours in the most charming manner on whatever topic popped into his head. He especially liked poking at politicians. Will Rogers became, in the words of the producer’s wife, Billie Burke, “Ziegfeld’s greatest star.” He never missed a performance, and he never failed to bring the house down. Producer and performer were bound only by a handshake.

  Rex Beach was just then adapting his book Laughing Bill Hyde for Goldwyn Pictures. His wife thought their friend Will Rogers would be perfect to play the lead in this love and adventure story set in the Klondike gold fields. Rogers, who had never appeared before a motion picture camera, told her he didn’t “know anything about the blamed thing. I thought pictures were made up of just three people: Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks.” She said, “That’s all right, you can learn.” He liked the book enough to want to go along with the venture, so long as he did not have to renege on his promises to Ziegfeld.

  Sam Goldwyn had mixed feelings about Will Rogers. “He knew that being a star on stage had nothing to do with becoming a star on the screen,” said Arthur Mayer. But Goldwyn took a chance, and Will Rogers made Laughing Bill Hyde at the Fort Lee studio in the late summer of 1918, leaving the set each day in time to make his nightly curtain at the New Amsterdam.

  Bridling Will Rogers for work in the movies seemed hopeless from the start—“they had to put a hitch on my upper lip to get me to smear paint all over my contour. Even that could not disguise this old, homely pan of mine.” He felt like a complete rube. Hobart Henley, the director, explained the setup of the first scene to Rogers—“the scene where your old pal dies. You have broken out of jail, and he gets hurt and you are bringing him into the doctor’s office at night to get him treated, and he dies. It’s the dramatic scene of the whole opera.” The actor cried, “But I haven’t got out of jail yet!”

  Laughing Bill Hyde, running a little longer than an hour, opened at the Rivoli Theater in New York City on September 30, 1918. Motion Picture News commented that “Will Rogers turns out to be such a fine actor, that you would never know he was acting.” Box-office returns were modest, but Goldwyn had reason to give the actor another try. Word around town matched the December 1918 review in Motion Pictures, which said, “This is the very finest film released under the Goldwyn banner.”

  Will Rogers stayed with the Follies through the end of its New York run, then went on its annual tour of major American cities. He received $1,000 a week. Realizing Rogers had created a following in the hinterlands, Goldwyn caught up with him in Cleveland and offered a long-term, full-time contract—$2,250 a week for the first year, with an option for a second year at $3,000 per week. He would have to choose between stage and screen.

  On September 30, 1918, Will Rogers signed with Goldwyn. He played at the New Amsterdam until Saturday night, May 31, 1919, fulfilling his obligations to Ziegfeld and leaving just enough time to pack up his wife, three children, horses, dogs, and goat and report to Goldwyn’s new production headquarters in California.

  By the spring of 1919, most motion picture production had transferred from Fort Lee to Mount Lee, the broad slope of the Santa Monica Mountains that loomed over Hollywood. There were over one hundred motion picture studios in the Los Angeles area by then—clustered mostly to the east and south of the hills, but sprinkled to the west as well. William Fox had established his first studio on what had originally been Colonel William N. Selig’s lot in the Edendale area. Independent producer Louis B. Mayer moved his family from Massachusetts and began making movies on that lot as well. Carl Laemmle had officially opened a large Spanish mission of a studio in 1915 on Lankershim Boulevard, nestled in Cahuenga Pass, the wilds of the San Fernando Valley on one hand and the boom town of Hollywood on the other. Lacking easy access to the downtown film-processing laboratories, Universal City became a self-sufficient enclave, a second home to scores of cameramen, actors, directors, and writers. By 1917, it maintained its own fire department, police department, hospital, commissary, garages, and zoo.

  Most of the action was in Hollywood, within walking distance of Famous Players—Lasky. Zukor had bought all the open land from Selma and Vine avenues to Argyle and Sunset Boulevard. What would become the Paramount studio on Melrose Avenue was originally built in 1918 by the Paralta Corporation. Dozens of small studios and laboratories sprang up on Sunset Boulevard between Gower and Beachwood Drive; Charlie Chaplin and his brother Sydney broke ground on their own studio in the 1400 block of La Brea Avenue, stretching north to Sunset. A few blocks above that, Hollywood Boulevard suddenly found itself lined with one- and two-story boxy buildings side by each, and a forest of telephone poles. In just the years since Sam Goldwyn had been in the motion picture business, the population of Hollywood had jumped from 12,000 to 35,000 people.

  Far beyond this center of activity lay the city’s newest real estate development, a community to the southwest. In 1915, a developer named Harry Culver had offered free land to anyone who would build a motion picture studio in this new city he was naming after himself. Thomas Ince had grabbed the sixteen-acre parcel of parched scrub to the south of a dirt road that became Washington Boulevard just as he and Griffith and Sennett were forming Triangle Films. By 1918, the three partners had disbanded. After a successful winter filming there, Sam Goldwy
n purchased their modest but modern studio facilities for $325,000 in what was considered the backwater of Hollywood. With most of the Goldwyn actors and crews already in California, filming continued uninterrupted under the supervision of Abe Lehr.

  Behind a three-story office building set back from Washington Boulevard stood six glass stages for filming. Scattered about were workshops, storerooms for properties and costumes, and areas for actors to make up. Goldwyn ordered new lawns rolled out, to tie the whole studio together into one tidy community. He offered Will Rogers an old building on the lot for stabling his livestock.

  “Out in Hollywood, they say you’re not a success unless you owe fifty thousand dollars to somebody, have five cars, can develop temperament without notice or reason at all, and have been mixed up in four divorce cases and two breach-of-promise cases,” said Rogers. “Well, as a success in Hollywood, I’m a rank failure. ... I hold only two distinctions in the movie business: ugliest fellow in ‘em, and I still have the same wife I started with.” By Will Rogers’s standards, Sam Goldwyn was well on the road to success—with debts and divorce weighing heavily on his mind.

  In March 1919, Blanche Lasky married Hector Turnbull, a tweedy Scotsman, who had been the dramatic critic for the New York Herald Tribune. “He was a man for all seasons,” remembered Jesse Lasky, Jr., “a newspaperman, a boxer, war hero, and finally a novelist and film executive.” After writing the stories for several pictures that Sam Goldfish had overseen, Turnbull had become New York story editor for Famous Players—Lasky. “He was quite perfect in every way,” recalled Ruth, who had assumed her mother’s maiden name, “—except he was an alcoholic. But after my father, that was easy to live with. He was an easy man to love.”

  Her father, on the other hand, became more remote than ever. He grew so disturbed over the news of Blanche’s remarriage that he stopped all alimony and child-support payments. His divorce decree had ordered him to pay his ex-wife one hundred dollars a week for the rest of her life, an additional fifty dollars a week so long as she remained unmarried, and fifty dollars more for Ruth’s support. Goldwyn saw things differently. She had a new husband to support them all, and this way, Goldwyn thought, he would be done with his ex-wife forever. By the end of the year, Blanche Lasky Turnbull had hired an attorney named Nathan Burkan to retrieve her back alimony.

  His own attorneys found Goldwyn’s position untenable. They told him he could not arbitrarily stop payments, not even of the fifty dollars a week that were to end upon Blanche’s remarriage; only the court could order that. He was persuaded at least to maintain child-support payments while the case dragged into the following year. In October 1920, the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court would instruct Goldwyn to make the back payments and to keep up his future ones as previously determined. But he would quickly resume his dilatory ways.

  Although Blanche restrained herself from discussing the child’s father, seven-year-old Ruth could not help picking up fragments and choosing sides. In the spring of 1919, the Turnbulls went to San Francisco for several weeks, before moving to Los Angeles.

  Their relocation drove Goldwyn into a panic. He had not spent a fraction of the time with his daughter to which he was legally entitled, but he liked knowing she was available when it was convenient for him. In May, returning from one of his visits to what Will Rogers called “the celluloid coast,” Goldwyn stopped off in San Francisco and tried to pack as much love as he could into two days with Ruth. They talked of writing letters to each other, an obligation his sensitive daughter took seriously.

  Ruth missed her father. She said as much in a series of extremely touching letters that usually closed with “Love from your sweet heart,” a line of X’s, and her name—Ruth Lasky.

  He always replied promptly, with a formally typed, dictated letter, addressed to Ruth Goldwyn. So long as he felt he had recovered some ground with his daughter, he was extremely loving, even gushy. “Father is very, very lonesome for his little sweetheart,” he wrote her on May 13, 1919.I don’t remember enjoying anything in my life as much as I did being with you in San Francisco for two days. You are a wonderful little darling and I love you better than anything in the world.

  I am looking forward to the day when I can be with my little sweetheart all the time because I love you so much that I want to be with you.

  All the love there is, I send to my little darling, with a million kisses.

  If, however, so much as a few weeks passed without her writing to him, Goldwyn reproached the girl, gently at first.

  The correspondence quickly revealed Goldwyn’s dismay with their relationship. He felt he was giving more than he was getting. “I WROTE YOU TWO LETTERS WITHIN LAST TWO WEEKS,” he wired Ruth on May 26. “FATHER NEVER FORGETS YOU. I THINK OF YOU EVERY MINUTE OF THE DAY BECAUSE I LOVE YOU BETTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD. YOU ARE A WONDERFUL LITTLE DARLING AND I ADORE MY LITTLE BABY MORE THAN I EVER DID.” Ruth would write back of her activities—swim—ming and horseback riding—but it rankled Goldwyn to read of another man’s rocking the cradle he never did. He found an ally in Ruth’s nurse, an Irish Catholic named Catherine McDonough, to whom he sent a private fund from which Ruth could buy special items she really wanted—“as presents from me,” he wrote Ruth. There was always a big tip for Catherine as well.

  By the end of the year, Goldwyn’s letters to Ruth were following the pattern of his visits. There simply was no time for him to maintain a full-time relationship with anyone, certainly not while his company was sinking. Goldwyn Pictures Corporation had all but broken even in 1918, but in 1919 they suffered a $100,000 loss.

  “The war for motion picture supremacy had moved on to new battle-grounds,” observed Terry Ramsaye. “Now in its next phase it was becoming an issue of theatre seats, real estate investment and large scale financial investments.” Companies bigger than Goldwyn‘s—such as Fox and the new First National Exhibitors’ Circuit—got bigger still. Adolph Zukor’s spreading empire now included Paramount-Artcraft, Famous Players—Lasky, and Select (out of which he had aced Lewis Selznick, practically into obscurity). Then Zukor joined forces with William Randolph Hearst, who had established Cosmopolitan Productions to showcase the talents of his mistress, Marion Davies. Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, Wallace Reid, Dorothy Gish, Marguerite Clark, and Gloria Swanson all fell under Zukor’s aegis. D. W Griffith, who had gone bankrupt producing Intolerance, found himself signing on to make films for Artcraft Pictures in 1917. Zukor showed his understanding of the business by purchasing flagship theaters in all the major cities.

  Companies smaller than Goldwyn’s, and some that were just starting up, were surpassing him. Metro Pictures, for example, had been reduced to producing the cheap “program” filler between main features; but in the summer of 1919, their president, Richard Rowland, and his attorney, J. Robert Rubin, went to Zukor to propose that Metro join his team. “The only reason I’d have to take you in,” he reportedly told the two, “would be to put you out of business.” After being shown the door, Rowland and Rubin called on another former furrier. Marcus Loew’s chain of theaters had grown considerably over the past five years. Loew had picture houses from Atlanta to Boston, from New Orleans to Hamilton, Ontario, plus a few new ones in New York. When he decided to acquire some theaters on the West Coast, he refinanced his company, securing a loan just short of $10 million. Loew, like Zukor, saw that the only way to be a superpower in motion pictures was to combine production with exhibition.

  Loew’s Incorporated bought Metro Pictures Corporation—which owned a charming lot of green-shuttered buildings at Cahuenga Boulevard and Romaine Street in Hollywood—for $3 million, half in Loew’s stock. A darkened New York office went with the deal, along with a modest roster of talent, notably the alluring new star Nazimova. Loew had a long way to go in order to catch up to Zukor, but at least he had a factory in which to make the goods.

  In just seven years, motion picture actors had risen from obscure employees to international idols. T
he most ambitious were establishing their own production companies. Benjamin P. Schulberg, who began as a press agent for Zukor and became a studio executive, thought the biggest stars in pictures should form an organization and distribute their own pictures, thus retaining the bulk of the profits they generated.

  In a series of conferences, Pickford, Fairbanks, Chaplin, William S. Hart, and director Griffith kicked the idea around. Hart immediately dropped out of the discussions, citing his loyalty to Zukor (who was paying him $200,000 per picture). The lawyers for the others drew up papers establishing a corporation. On February 5 , 1919, the four undisputed giants in motion pictures affixed their autographs, agreeing to “become associated with each other in the marketing of motion pictures and to set up a company with headquarters in New York having the name United Artists Corporation.”

  The “big four” set their distribution fee at 20 percent of the gross domestically and 30 percent foreign, thereby operating more as a service organization than as an investment; the rates were lower than those charged by Zukor or First National or even Goldwyn. Hiram Abrams, who had been running Paramount’s theaters, fell out with Zukor and became general manager, B. P. Schulberg his right-hand man. Thus, even a handful of artists were staking a greater claim than Goldwyn in competing against the corporations that controlled the American motion picture market. “So,” remarked Richard Rowland when he first heard of United Artists, “the lunatics have taken charge of the asylum.”

  Goldwyn’s stars steadily dimmed. Geraldine Farrar’s next few vehicles were box-office failures, so he suggested she stay off the screen for a while, even though her contract guaranteed an annual $125,000 over the next two years. Farrar, the ultimate professional, took out her contract and ripped it up right before Goldwyn’s eyes. Pauline Frederick cost him much more money; she appeared in several expensive failures before her contract expired.