Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  When the recession in Hollywood threw Vidor onto the street, he bounced from one independent producer to another. He tried running his own small studio, and when that failed, landed at the “tottering” Goldwyn Company. Vidor remembered “the studio workers expressed their precarious position with the phrase, ‘In Godsol We Trust.’”

  Erich von Stroheim, Joseph von Sternberg, and Victor Seastrom made pilgrimages from overseas to work in the movie capital. Ernst Lubitsch quickly became one of the most admired directors in town because of his sly and sophisticated “touch.” Another foreign director to make his name in Hollywood was George Fitzmaurice, an Irishman born in Paris in 1895, who had set up Famous Players—Lasky’s London studios. In late 1922, attorney Neil S. McCarthy suggested a venture between him and Goldwyn. Like Goldwyn, Fitzmaurice was an elegant dresser, and his films reflected both aspirations and style. Unlike Goldwyn, he was a gourmand and oenophile, with good looks—a full head of dark, slick-backed hair, intense eyes, and a neatly trimmed chevron of a mustache.

  Fitzmaurice was receptive to the notion of a partnership. Goldwyn would select, finance, and sell their productions; Fitzmaurice would direct and cast, and develop the scenarios. He wanted to be an equal partner in the films’ net earnings and receive a salary of $2,000 a week. “FEEL THAT I KNOW FITZ VERY WELL,” McCarthy wired Goldwyn, “AND THAT HE IS HONORABLE AND DEPENDABLE AND OF HIGHEST INTEGRITY.” By the end of the year, both men had agreed to a partnership, starting February 16, 1923, once Fitzmaurice’s contract with Lasky expired. That gave Goldwyn little time to scare up material, financing, and a distributor.

  Fitzmaurice recommended a play Paramount had filmed in 1915, Sir Hall Caine’s The Eternal City. The rights could be purchased from the author; and Fitzmaurice’s wife, an attractive writer named Ouida Bergere, had already suggested updating this love story, set against post-Risorgimento Rome, to Mussolini’s Italy. A sturdy drama fraught with timeliness would certainly make for a debut worthy of the name he had established over the last five years, but Goldwyn doubted the commercial possibilities of such a film. His financial instincts told him to debut with a splashy comedy, one that would assure distributors and exhibitors that the prestigious Goldwyn name also meant money in the bank.

  Goldwyn had his eye on the “Potash and Perlmutter” stories, a series about two quarreling partners in the garment business. Goldwyn had known the stories since his glove days, when the works of the author, Montague Glass, appeared in The Glovers’ Review. More recently, Glass had woven several vignettes with his ethnic characters into a play. It was a hit on Broadway in 1905 and even bigger in its 1913 revival. Most people in the movie business had a natural aversion to any material so blatantly Jewish. Goldwyn recognized its possibilities in a nation whose immigrant population had soared in the last twenty years.

  He bought the film rights to both properties. In so doing, he established a pattern for his production slate that he would follow most of his career, alternating a serious drama with a light comedy.

  Goldwyn needed a distributor and $200,000 to start up his new business. He turned for help to the same man the United Artists were trying to lure to their company, the producer insiders called “Honest Joe.” Joseph Schenck—with a big potato nose and saggy jowls—was reputed to have the best connections in town. Since resigning in 1917 from the Loew organization—where his brother Nick was company secretary—he had quietly ruled over his own expanding duchy.

  He began simply by managing the career of his wife, Norma Talmadge. She called him “Daddy,” and he hired the best writers, directors, and designers to highlight her considerable beauty and talent. She caught on. Secrets and Camille made her a major star, with a big contract from First National to release her films. Schenck worked as hard for her sister Constance and their sister Natalie’s husband, Buster Keaton. Meantime, Schenck bought a controlling interest in the United Studios in Hollywood and stock in West Coast Theaters.

  Nobody admired Schenck’s initiative more than Dr. A. H. Giannini, founder of the Bank of Italy. As early as 1909, Giannini had been interested in the motion picture business. That year, the San Francisco banker opened his first out-of-town branch in San Jose and loaned $500 to Sol L. Lesser to invest in a nickelodeon on Fillmore Street. Seven years later, Lesser had a regular line of credit with the bank and headed All Features Distributors. In 1918, the Bank of Italy loaned $50,000 to Famous Players—Lasky. In 1919, Giannini took over the East River National Bank on Broadway, just a few blocks south of Fourteenth Street, the cradle of the moving picture business. After a few years of small loans to the early producers, “Doc” Giannini loaned $250,000 to First National, which put up a film, The Kid, as security. Joe Schenck’s credit line expanded with his empire. When Giannini opened Los Angeles branches of his Bank of Italy, he named Schenck to the advisory board, along with Cecil B. DeMille. “Since the banks were becoming more and more interested in motion pictures,” DeMille recounted, “I thought it would be a good idea to have a foot in their camp; and a new bank in Hollywood apparently thought it would be good to have a motion picture man among its officers.”

  Schenck opened talks between Goldwyn and both First National and Giannini’s Commercial National Bank. Goldwyn’s old friend Cecil DeMille came to his aid as well. He had never forgotten his career debt to Sam Goldwyn; and in 1923, he repaid it.

  Sam’s request for $200,000, DeMille recalled, “had been turned down by a number of the soundest bankers.It was a big loan, bigger than any that had yet come across my new desk in the Cherokee Avenue branch of the Commercial Bank. In the Giannini empire, it was expected that requests for unusually large loans would be submitted to headquarters in San Francisco. But I knew Sam; and I approved the loan.

  DeMille took the next train north.

  In Giannini’s new office building on Powell Street in San Francisco, the two men sat down to discuss the Goldwyn loan. The hearty Italian said, “No good, C. B. He has no assets.” DeMille said that in fact he had already okayed the loan, and Giannini let out a roar. “You say Sam Goldwyn has no assets,” offered DeMille in defense. “You’re right. He hasn’t. He has no assets, except talent, which is the only asset worth anything in the motion picture business. I made that loan on talent and on character.” DeMille asked whether he had the authority to make such judgments or whether he should resign. Giannini turned to DeMille and said, “It’s all right, C. B. But don’t do it too often!”

  First National also came through for Goldwyn, offering him a distribution contract. They would not change company policy for Goldwyn by allowing him to review all contracts they made for his films with the exhibitors, but Goldwyn signed anyway. There were compromises to be made with Fitzmaurice as well, namely the director’s insistence that he receive top billing in advertising. They agreed to release their films as “George Fitzmaurice Productions, presented by Samuel Goldwyn.”

  Goldwyn Pictures Corporation protested when they learned that their founder was about to form Samuel Goldwyn, Incorporated. In September 1923, they filed an action in the United States District Court to enjoin Goldwyn from “using the legend ‘Samuel Goldwyn presents’ in his First National releases, on the grounds that the name Goldwyn had been used by [their] company since the 1916 incorporation, and before Samuel Goldfish became Samuel Goldwyn.” They maintained that they owned the rights to that name, especially important just then, while they were shopping for new partners. Years later, tears would literally roll down Goldwyn’s face whenever he thought of what he called that “black period” of his life, that time when “they wouldn’t let me have my name!”

  On October 18, Federal Judge Learned Hand rendered his decision. “A self-made man,” he proclaimed, “may prefer a self-made name.” He decreed that Goldwyn was entitled to use it so long as he made clear his dissociation from his former company. He was required to run the banner “Samuel Goldwyn Presents” before the title of his pictures, and the disclaimer “Presented by Samuel Goldwyn (not now connected with Goldw
yn Pictures)” elsewhere in the advertising copy. Most people assumed he was posting his name everywhere for vanity’s sake, but he insisted he was simply complying with the law.

  Samuel Goldwyn, Inc., opened for business at 383 Madison Avenue, the same building out of which First National operated. Goldwyn intended to keep his base of operations in New York City, but from the beginning he was tugged in several directions.

  In 1923, moviemakers were raving about one place—Italy. Its film industry, trying to recover from the war, offered inexpensive skilled technicians and fully equipped facilities. Goldwyn had already sampled the troubles that could beset a business when its production and business ends were separated. But the potential savings and the guarantee of authenticity in this instance seemed more than he could resist. Reluctantly he allowed George Fitzmaurice’s company of The Eternal City to journey to Italy (where Goldwyn’s former company was preparing Ben-Hur.). Along with the glamorous leading lady, Barbara La Marr, sailed a cast that included Lionel Barrymore and Richard Bennett. The latter’s teenage daughter Joan would have a walk-on in the movie as a pageboy. A square-jawed English newcomer named Ronald Colman, in Rome filming The White Sister with Lillian Gish for director Henry King, also got a bit part. Still unknown to the world, he was mistaken by those who had seen footage of him as some “new Italian actor.”

  In addition to its stars, advertisements for The Eternal City boasted “20,000 others.” One mob scene clearly depicted two men standing on the balcony of the royal palace—none other than King Victor Emmanuel and Benito Mussolini. When the Fascisti caught wind of the film and demanded its confiscation, Fitzmaurice and his crew quickly left the country; Arthur Miller, the cameraman, smuggled the negative safely out of Italy. It was Goldwyn’s first experience filming abroad and his last.

  Closer to the home office, Goldwyn oversaw the New York production of Potash and Perlmutter. It fit more into the mold of most of the 180 films that he had already supervised. He proceeded cautiously, signing Barney Bernard and Alexander Carr, the stars of the 1913 Broadway revival of the play, to recreate their roles, and Clarence Badger, a veteran of the Madge Kennedy and Will Rogers comedies, to direct. Of the filmmakers, only the scenarist was new to Goldwyn, and his choice left little to chance.

  The one aspect of motion pictures in which women had made the greatest strides—indeed, in which they had led the way—was in screenwriting. Anita Loos had sold over one hundred scripts (mostly to Griffith at the old Biograph Company) by the time she was twenty-two; Jeanie Macpherson had been supplying Cecil DeMille with scenarios for years; Louis B. Mayer had relied on Bess Meredyth and Kathleen Norris to provide stories for him. The Goldwyn Company was banking heavily on June Mathis. They were all self-assured young women, much better read than anybody for whom they worked. Most had entered the business as actresses, then recognized they could get farther on their brains than on their looks.

  By the early twenties, none had achieved greater success than Frances Marion. A San Franciscan, born in 1887, she had gone to Hollywood to paint theatrical posters and found herself appearing in Mary Pickford’s A Girl of Yesterday. She discovered she had a knack for writing and became one of Paramount’s most important scenarists. By the 1920s, she was freelancing. In 1922, she wrote eight motion pictures. Her sixth assignment in 1923 was adapting the Montague Glass play for Sam Goldwyn. The plot involved Abe Potash and Morris Perlmutter’s hiring a new fitter, a poor Russian violinist who falls in love with Potash’s daughter, Irma. After much tribulation and a trial (for murder), all ends well.

  On Thursday, September 6, 1923, the comedy passed its first test at the Rivoli Theater in Baltimore. Two Sundays later, it began a successful run at the Mark Strand Theater in New York. “‘Potash and Perlmutter’ has been fashioned into a good movie comedy, far better than one would expect,” commented Variety. The New York Times heaped highest praise, noting, “the picture has as many laughs as a Chaplin comedy.”

  The Eternal City opened on January 20, 1924, also a Sunday night, at the Strand. Again Goldwyn triumphed—critically and financially.

  Meantime, Goldwyn Company stock sank to 8¼. After another unsuccessful financial reorganization, Joe Godsol was asked to take a temporary vacation in Florida. That January, he bumped into Lee Shubert, an early Goldwyn investor, who suggested that Godsol talk to another man wintering in Palm Beach. Marcus Loew was there deciding whether to build up his production capacity at Metro Pictures or to bail out.

  The Goldwyn Company, with its refurbished studio, its roster of relatively inexpensive talent under contract, and its modest string of theaters, looked attractive to Loew. His major reservation was that he had nobody to operate the studio. He was suffering from a heart condition, and Nick Schenck was running the larger parent organization; neither Joe Engel at Metro nor Abe Lehr at Goldwyn seemed strong enough for the position. Loew’s legal counsel, Robert Rubin, recommended his friend Louis B. Mayer, who had built up an impressive studio for himself in just a few years.

  In April 1924, the merger of the three companies was made public. The first phase of the transaction involved Loew’s buying up the Goldwyn Company stock, giving him control of the Metro-Goldwyn Corporation. For $75,000, he absorbed Mayer’s business and included his name in the company’s title. The short, barrel-chested Mayer became vice president and general manager of the new organization; his young associate, Irving Thalberg, became second vice president and “supervisor of production.” They decided to retain the Goldwyn Company’s leonine logo.

  All parties enthusiastically supported the merger—save one. Samuel Goldwyn did not approve of the deal, and he did not approve of being recompensed with preferred stock of the new corporation. He especially objected to Louis B. Mayer, with whom there had been bad blood since the days when Mayer submitted his opinion regarding Goldwyn’s engagement to Blanche Lasky. For one million dollars, Goldwyn was bought out of the company that would thereafter bear his name. On April 25, 1924— in front of stars and reporters—Abe Lehr handed a large ceremonial key to the big studio on Washington Boulevard to Louis B. Mayer.

  The merger conformed to a consolidation trend in American business. By the end of the twenties, two hundred companies would control one half the nation’s corporate wealth.

  Famous Players-Lasky continued to acquire theaters and stars (including Valentino types Ricardo Cortez and Rod La Rocque). It was soon reestablished as Paramount Pictures Corporation. Fox Film Corporation cashed in on the dark, handsome looks of John Gilbert and a Mexican youth named Luis Alonso, who acted under the name Gilbert Roland. Buying into West Coast Theaters, Fox went from two exhibition halls to one hundred fifty, then five hundred. In 1920, they grossed $12,605,725 and netted $1,413,542; five years later, those corporate earnings had practically doubled. In 1923, Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner expanded into production on the West Coast, establishing Warner Brothers Pictures, Incorporated. Under Sam and Jack’s supervision, their Hollywood studio signed Ernst Lubitsch, John Barrymore, and one of the decade’s biggest draws at the box office, an Alsatian sheep dog called Rin Tin Tin—many of whose heartwarming runs to the rescue were being written by a twenty-two-year-old Nebraskan, Darryl Francis Zanuck. Now Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (“Controlled by Loew’s Inc.,” read the bottom of the big new sign towering over Culver City) promised to become the largest corporation of studios and theaters in the world.

  No longer a manufacturer of programs of films, Goldwyn was committed to independent production, one picture at a time. It was virtually impossible to compete against the big corporations for properties to film. In the flush of his first two marginal successes, Goldwyn thought of several stories at MGM that he had brought in but that were lying fallow. To obtain those rights meant going hat in hand to Louis B. Mayer. Weeks passed before Goldwyn swallowed his pride. On his next trip to Los Angeles, he made an appointment with Mayer.

  Goldwyn arrived at his former Culver City headquarters and drove past guards and workers who had recently been his em
ployees. At Mayer’s office he discovered his own former secretary, who announced his arrival to her boss. He waited for what seemed an interminable amount of time before he was ushered in. Goldwyn stood in front of a big desk, at which Mayer sat signing checks out of a large book. “Yes?” he asked flatly, without stopping what he was doing, without looking up, without offering the man before him a chair. At last, Mayer sat back and faced his petitioner. “What have you got on your mind?” he asked. Goldwyn controlled his temper and began to plead his case. Halfway through his appeal, he started to sputter, “Louis ... you’re ... a son of a bitch!” He stormed out of the office, determined to have nothing more to do with the company.

  Over the decades, this second great motion picture complex he had helped establish became the best-known studio in the world. The sandwiching of “Goldwyn” in the celebrated trio of names caused no end of confusion or of publicity for the man himself. Goldwyn never passed himself off as being a member of the company, but he never denied it either—especially if it could help him get a room in a foreign hotel or a table at a crowded restaurant. Because of his enmity toward Louis B. Mayer, he never included the man’s name when he spoke of the new organization. To his dying day he referred to MGM as the “Metro-Goldwyn Company.”

  Joe Godsol disappeared from the scene as mysteriously as he had entered. He stole to Europe, and died in Switzerland in 1935, leaving a large estate.

  In the new world of corporate Hollywood, Sam Goldwyn became the first of the great independent American film producers. The year after Learned Hand’s decision, MGM agreed that he could present films without disclaiming his association with Goldwyn Pictures Corporation. If at all possible, he wanted to remain in business by himself, with neither stockholders nor partners. He intended to become the industry’s “rebel,” a lone wolf—one of the few in the history of the industry who could state at the end of his career: “My pictures were my own. I financed them myself and answered solely to my self. My mistakes and my successes were my own.”