She was also one of the lucky ones, with a half-million dollars to invest and a happy marriage. Most of the other silent-screen victims, observed Budd Schulberg, succumbed to gradual suicide: “Behind the locked doors of their Beverly Hills mansions, the talkie drop-outs searched for an answer to their fears and frustrations in the amber bottles their bootleggers hauled to the back door by the case.”
Ronald Colman was another of the lucky few. With that first showing of Bulldog Drummond at the Apollo Theater in New York City, his stock as a screen personality skyrocketed. He became the first big silent film star to emerge an even bigger talking star. Sam and Frances Goldwyn asked Colman to accompany them to the black-tie opening of the film in Manhattan, and at the film’s conclusion the star was swept to the stage by the audience’s thunderous ovation. A beaming Goldwyn joined him and shared in the bows. The critical praise for the film was unanimous, practically every reviewer extolling Colman’s cultivated voice and easy manner. In the June 10, 1929, issue of Film Weekly, Goldwyn proclaimed, “What Chaplin is to the silent film, Colman will be to sound!”
Goldwyn could back his boast. Pickford, Fairbanks, and Chaplin still attracted their legions into theaters, but Colman was outdrawing them, grossing over a million dollars for Goldwyn’s company in less than a year of play dates. Bulldog Drummond earned another half-million the next year, netting Goldwyn three quarters of a million dollars—almost as much profit as all his independent silent films put together.
After months of planning and postponements, the first Academy Awards, for the film year 1927—28, were presented on May 16, 1929, at a black-tie dinner in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. After the two hundred seventy guests had dined on squab and lobster, awards were presented in eleven ategories—with special awards given to Chaplin “for versatility and genius in writing, acting, directing and producing ‘The Circus,’” and to Warner Brothers for producing “the outstanding pioneer talking picture, which has revolutionized the industry.” Each winner was handed a thirteen-and-one-half-inch, eight-and-one-half-pound statue of gold-plated Britannia metal, designed by Cedric Gibbons, in the shape of a man standing atop a reel of film, holding a sword in front of him.
Hollywood came out of its spin, completing its changeover to sound. By the end of 1929, the sixty leading film studios had recording apparatus, and more than five thousand theaters across the country were equipped to reproduce sound. Theaters welcomed an additional ten million weekly patrons. Four out of the five Best Picture nominees for the 1928—29 year were talkies. Thalberg starred Greta Garbo in Eugene O‘Neill’s Anna Christie, and he lured her faithfuls and many new converts just by placing two words above the title on the theater marquees: “GARBO TALKS. After that—with the exception of Chaplin’s City Lights and Modern Times—silent films became ancient history.
AFTER several years in their rented house on Hollywood Boulevard and Camino Palmero, the Goldwyns bought a place of their own, just a block away on the northeast corner of Franklin Avenue and Camino Palmero, near the dead end of the palm-tree-lined street. It was a two-story Italian-ate house, 6,500 square feet, which had been constructed in 1916 and valued then at $21,000. The outside of the house at 1800 Camino Palmero featured an impressive symmetrical facade and an entrance portico with Doric columns. Dozens of leaded glass windows adorned each side of the square stucco house.
The ground floor had large, nicely proportioned rooms, all trimmed in heavy, dark wood. The wainscoted dining room stretched from one side of the foyer, the living room from the other. A wide central staircase with three perpendicular banisters led up to a complex of suites. Two of the corners were occupied by adjoining bathrooms and bedrooms, one for Sammy and one for Catherine, the governess who had looked after Ruth. The master suite had its own dressing room, a large bedroom, and a modern bathroom, strictly for Frances’s use. “My mother,” noted Sammy years later, “would never share a bathroom with anyone.”
The back of the house gave way to a lovely yard and a swimming pool that had been built in 1918, one of the first in the area. Beyond that was a “sun house,” a pavilion Goldwyn promptly designated his cardroom. A large garage, complete with apartment, housed a vintage Rolls-Royce-driven only by the chauffeur, a German veteran of the war—and a blue Packard, which Goldwyn himself took out for short jaunts.
It was an impressive piece of property in what had become the established residential area of the Hollywood community. Outside his bedroom, on the second floor of this solidly built mansion, Samuel Goldwyn at age fifty could stand on the balustraded balcony, the Doheny estate on the hill above him and a magnificent vista of most of Los Angeles below. Herbert Hoover had barely moved into the White House, assuring the continuation of national prosperity, and Sam Goldwyn was voting Republican now. Financially, he was no Jesse Lasky—who Variety had recently calculated was the eighth richest man in show business, worth some twenty million dollars. But with neither partners nor stockholders, Goldwyn’s had become a million-dollar motion picture production company. He was square with his bank loans; he had a savings account in six figures; and he had hundreds of thousands of dollars tied up in the stock market. Having pulled through even this latest career cataclysm, Samuel Goldwyn had never felt so secure in his life. Frances resisted giving in to the feeling.
The last week of October 1929, the New York stock market collapsed. On Wednesday the thirtieth, Variety capsulized the tragedy in the most famous headline in its history: “WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG.”
12 Making Whoopee
SAW GOLDWYN—with no partners and no stockholders (except for some token company shares to such loyal employees as Abe Lehr and James Mulvey)—was successfully overseeing an autonomous small studio.
The crash dented his finances but hardly daunted him. Most of his investments in the preceding few years had been in himself—in Samuel Goldwyn, Incorporated, of California; in the heavy-beamed house that stood at 1800 Camino Palmero; in $130,000 worth of life insurance. His books at the start of 1930 showed a surplus of over $1 million in cash in his business account; the rest of his assets equaled that much again.
Each studio steeled itself for the unknown fate of the thirties, finding safety in assuming an identity, a style of film the public could count on. RKO stock steadily declined over the next two years, but that did not stop the company’s producing a new picture practically every week for its theaters. David Sarnoff hired thirty-year-old David Selznick, who had recently resigned from Paramount. Selznick, in his own words, “sold him the idea ... that the whole system of assembly-line-production picture studios was absurd, and that the business had to be broken into small producing units.” He created the title “executive producer,” under which such men as Kenneth MacGowan and Merian C. Cooper supervised pictures for RKO, creating its image of a smart outfit that produced sophisticated films. Goldwyn took an immediate interest in Selznick, to see if he might succeed where his father had failed.
Fox stock fell gradually, but the company kept its production up, projecting plucky optimism in its wholesome films—vehicles for Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, Will Rogers, and a propman named Marion Michael Morrison, who was suddenly the star of Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail and renamed John Wayne. In 1930, Fox also introduced a new tough guy in a trifle about an ex-convict, Up the River; Spencer Tracy would play heavies for the next few years.
Warner Brothers ripped many of their ideas for movies off the front pages. They ground national headlines about gangsters, unemployment, civic corruption, and juvenile delinquency into hard-hitting, naturalistic dramas. Mervyn LeRoy directed such gangster epics as Little Caesar and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, making stars out of Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni. In 1931, Cagney squashed a grapefruit in Mae Clarke’s face and became the screen’s public enemy number one.
Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg competed constantly for control of MGM, but there was always consensus about their making “beautiful pictures for beautiful people.” The company s
tock fell from 64 to 50 within weeks of the crash, but Garbo, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, and platinum-blond Jean Harlow helped the company live up to its motto. Over the years, their leading men (especially Clark Gable) proved just as glamorous. Sam Goldwyn marveled at MGM’s efficacy, how they built their success on “two big ideas—they had great stories and they created great personalities,” each in service of the other.
Except for a few of Lubitsch’s sophisticated comedies, Paramount remained decidedly middlebrow—schmaltzy musicals, romantic dramas, and western epics under the direction of Cecil B. DeMille, who was back in their fold. Jesse Lasky signed Marlene Dietrich, a German blonde with shapely legs and cheekbones to rival Garbo’s. Two other Paramount players proved deft in all genres, from costume melodrama to farce—Miriam Hopkins and Paris-born Claudette Colbert, who helped define femininity for her generation with her chic manner. For all their mass production, Paramount was feeling the ground beneath them shake. Hundreds of their newly acquired theaters had been purchased partly with cash, the rest in company stock to be redeemed later at a fixed price—one well above the new stock-market value of the company.
“Uncle Carl Laemmle/has a very large faemmle,” ribbed poet Ogden Nash. But in several instances, Laemmle relatives were raising Universal Studios from its bog of mediocrity. William Wyler, the son of a cousin in Alsace, learned his craft directing silent western shorts; he suddenly found himself directing Charles Bickford, Walter Huston, and John Barrymore. (An ingenue named Bette Davis tested for him, but made no impression.) When sixty-six-year-old “Uncle Carl” handed the keys to Universal City over to his son in 1929, twenty-one-year-old Carl Laemmle, Jr., brought new vigor to the lot. He signed a British director named James Whale, who ushered the macabre film into the talking era with Frankenstein. And “Junior”’s production of All Quiet on the Western Front—the ninth film to be directed by the Russian-émigré Lewis Milestone—won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Direction in 1929—30.
Independent Sam Goldwyn was determined to make films the way he had for the last seven years, one at a time. He could not do otherwise, for he had only one star, Ronald Colman, whom he was promoting as motion pictures’ “King of Romance.” Within thirteen months, the producer starred him in no less than three movies, each a bit more amatory, as both sound equipment and Colman’s status as a screen lover improved. The first picture was an adaptation of a recent best-seller that Sidney Howard had liked, Condemned to Devil’s Island. The hero is a convicted thief imprisoned in the French Guianan penal colony, who falls in love with the wife of the fiendish warden. After his escape and surrender, and the warden’s death, she promises to meet him in Paris upon completion of his prison term. In the film’s final shots, she does.
Howard’s final script was nothing so lofty as he had originally hoped. The title got shrunk to Condemned and the psychology of the story with it. This simplistic melodrama offered little more than a chance for Colman to display a broader acting range than he had previously shown. In the interest of making his character as attractive as possible, several pieces of comedic business were tossed into the production. Upon completing the film, Colman at last realized how liberating the addition of sound was for him. “It has let me play a character who has a sense of humor!” he told Film Weekly. “I have played sombre roles for so long—it was a relief to play a man who smiled not only at the things about him but also a little at himself.”
Condemned opened at the Selwyn Theater in New York the first week of November 1929, and then at a glamorous preview, complete with klieg lights and a national radio broadcast of interviews with the stars, at Grauman’s Chinese. Thoughts of a depression seemed thousands of miles away from the throngs who crowded Christmas-decorated Hollywood Boulevard that night. The steady arrival of limousines, their passengers in furs and jewels, was the nation’s assurance that its gods were in their heaven and all was right with the world.
The film netted the Goldwyn Company almost $350,000, half what it made on Bulldog Drummond, but enough to instill confidence. For Colman’s next picture, Goldwyn harked back to a role more akin to the Drummond character.
Raffles had been a war-horse of the London stage since 1903. Based on the 1899 novel The Amateur Cracksman, by Ernest William Hornung, it is the story of an elegant, cricket-playing burglar, determined to reform for love’s sake but drawn into another heist when a friend becomes suicidal over a debt. The gentleman thief (first portrayed on screen by John Barrymore in 1917, and destined to become the prototype of one of motion pictures’ most durable stock characters) manages to get a diamond necklace into the hands of his friend, who collects a handsome reward. Taking for himself only his ladylove’s promise that she will join him, Raffles departs for a new life in Paris.
“The day of the director is over and that of the author and playwright has arrived,” Goldwyn announced as he was getting his slate of talking pictures under way. With scripts detailing every camera angle and vocal inflection, and Goldwyn overseeing every piece of costume, construction, and casting, directors on his sets were reduced to technicians. Invariably, they became his whipping boys.
Arthur Hornblow was generally dispatched to the set after watching the dailies with the boss. Goldwyn would utter his irritations, and Hornblow would translate them into specific objections for the director to dispense among the cast and crew. On rare occasions Goldwyn invaded the director’s territory. “You could always hear him coming,” recalled Bruce “Lucky” Humberstone, who served as assistant director on Raffles and several Goldwyn pictures thereafter, “because he walked heavy on his heels, very fast. You could be anywhere on the sound stage, and off in the distance you’d hear those footsteps. They’d get louder and louder, and pretty soon there wouldn’t be another sound on the set, only his heels hitting the floor, and you knew somebody’s goose was cooked.”
On Raffles, it was that of Harry D‘Arrast, the director, a hot-tempered Basque. After but a few days of filming, Goldwyn did not like what he saw. “I think it was all playing too fast for Goldwyn, and he had trouble making out some of the words,” recalled Humberstone. “Harry D’Arrast said that comedy had to be played at a certain speed, but Goldwyn didn’t think it fit in with Colman’s style.” Invectives flew. “You and I don’t speak the same language, Mr. Goldwyn,” the director allegedly said. “I’m sorry, Mr. D‘Arrast,” replied Goldwyn, “but it’s my money that’s buying the language!” D’Arrast was fired, and George Fitzmaurice (who continued to direct for Goldwyn after their partnership dissolved) was on the job the next morning. His leading lady was Kay Francis, who had just appeared in the Marx Brothers’ first film, The Cocoanuts.
With practically all the nation’s theaters now wired for sound, Raffles was the last picture Goldwyn produced in both a silent and a talking version. It grossed more than $1 million, $200,000 in profit. “Considering the condition of the country,” Goldwyn wrote Abe Lehr in a memorandum dated October 2, 1930, “I think this is marvelous.” Goldwyn continued his search for properties and a leading lady worthy of his star.
In 1930, the master of Russian cinema, Sergei Eisenstein, entertained several offers from American studios. He accepted Jesse Lasky’s invitation from Paramount. After failing to get both his story of the California gold rush and his adaptation of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy approved by the feuding Lasky and Schulberg, Eisenstein backed out of the deal and met with other film potentates. Sam Goldwyn was reputed to have said to him, “I’ve seen your film ‘Potemkin’ and admire it very much. What I would like is for you to do something of the same kind, but a little cheaper, for Ronald Colman.” After a great misadventure making a film in Mexico, Eisenstein kissed Hollywood goodbye and returned to a far less vagarious life under Stalin.
Goldwyn found his next project for Colman in London, where he and the star went for the opening of Bulldog Drummond. He canvassed the West End for some play he might bring back. Through Arthur Hornblow he met with one of England’s most successful playwrights,
Frederick Lonsdale, whose drawing room comedies, paragons of literate wit, had been the rage of London for almost a decade. Goldwyn was as charmed with the forty-nine-year-old writer as he was with a story Lonsdale created, one that was perfect for Ronald Colman.
The Devil to Pay is the story of a lovable cad, the black sheep of an English titled family who is as loose with his money as he is with his women. But when Willie Leeland meets socialite Dorothy Hope, he renounces all others, even his former girlfriend, Mary Crayle. Unfortunately, Dorothy jumps to the incorrect conclusion that the wastrel playboy is nothing more than a mountebank after her money. Goldwyn paid Lonsdale $25,000 for the story and screenplay, plus a percentage of the producer’s gross. He also picked up the tab for Lonsdale’s visit to California, including a $350-a-monch suite at the new Beverly Wilshire Hotel, a Florentine palazzo in the middle of the business district of Beverly Hills. Lonsdale thanked Goldwyn for “one of the happiest business associations I have ever had.”
Not until Goldwyn had seen the first two weeks of shooting did he decide to stop the entire production. Lonsdale’s story, steeped in English manners, was coming out tepid and weak—underdressed sets, inconsistent accents among the actors, none of the nuance Goldwyn felt was necessary to make the picture convincing. This time, director Irving Cummings heard the heavy heels of Mr. Goldwyn on the set. Again George Fitzmaurice filled in.
The ingenue in the film, Constance Cummings, was also dismissed, largely because of her strong American accent. Her replacement was an eighteen-year-old from Salt Lake City. Like so many girls who drifted into the movies, Gretchen Young had been abandoned by her father. Her mother moved to Los Angeles, where she ran a boardinghouse and sent Gretchen out to pick up money working as an extra in films. In Naughty But Nice, she had a role large enough to get billing. The star, Colleen Moore, arbitrarily changed Gretchen’s name to Loretta.
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