Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  “RONALD COLMAN SUES GOLDWYN FOR MILLIONS,” clarioned a six-column banner headline across page one of the September 13, 1932, Los Angeles Herald-Express. Photographs of the two principals filled the remaining two columns at the top of the page. Colman sought one million dollars in actual damages and an equal amount by way of punishment for Farnol’s suggesting “that he was drunk and dissipated.”

  Goldwyn discussed the matter with the man he regarded as the ultimate authority on libel in America, his friend W R. Hearst. “When a man has a weak case,” Hearst handwrote in a six-page letter from San Simeon, “he generally sues for a large amount of money in the hope of frightening the defendant into a settlement.” He did not believe Goldwyn had committed any libel against Colman; and even though Goldwyn was “in a sense responsible for the slander your employe committed,” Hearst did not believe any jury would hold him “responsible in damages for all the loose talk of your employes.”

  Before any further ransom was demanded, Goldwyn hustled Colman into another film, even though he did not intend to release it for most of a year. The Masquerader had a hokey “Prince and the Pauper” gimmick, which enabled Colman to play dual roles—a journalist and his look-alike cousin, a drug-addicted Member of Parliament who becomes incapacitated in time of a national crisis. The double is secretly substituting for Sir John on the floor of Parliament when the actual M.P. dies in seclusion, forcing the masquerader to play the role for the rest of his life.

  Goldwyn never worked with Colman again. The actor dropped his lawsuit and announced that he was “tired of making pictures.” He said he wanted “a voice in the selection of stories in which he is to appear and also that he have something to say about the kind of publicity sent out about him.” When Goldwyn gave him no satisfaction, Colman said he was returning to England and might make pictures there. Goldwyn reminded the actor that he was still under exclusive contract. Colman said he refused to appear in any more pictures for Goldwyn; the producer said he refused to let him work elsewhere. It was a stalemate.

  In 1933, the Art Cinema division of United Artists folded, and a new company moved onto the lot. The dynamic Darryl F. Zanuck had left Warners and formed Twentieth Century Productions with Joe Schenck. (Louis B. Mayer helped finance this rival venture to ensure a position in the company for his son-in-law William Goetz.) As president of this new independent company, Schenck offered Colman a long-term contract. The actor refused it, noting, “As soon as I am free to do so, I shall free-lance. Should you have a story in mind that would suit me and attract me, I should like to make a picture for you.... As to the Goldwyn matter, I never expected any apology. A contradiction, or statement of correction was what we asked for, and it may quite likely be late for that now. In which, freedom from the contract becomes the chief consideration.”

  Because of Schenck’s repeated favors to him over the years, Goldwyn said he would spring Colman from the rest of his contract—“unconditionally” —provided Colman would make one more picture with Goldwyn. “Personally, if you’d accept my advice in the spirit in which it is given,” Schenck wrote Colman, vacationing in France, “I would say that it is important for you not to stay off the screen too long. You have a picture out now—THE MASQUERADER—which is a success and you ought to follow it up with another picture.... You may dislike his method of operation or his method of approach but you surely can stand it for one picture when you stood it for nine years, particularly now that you have had a good, long rest and your nerves are in a much better condition than when you left for Europe.” Colman could not stand it, even at the risk of sacrificing his career. For almost two years, Ronald Colman—one of the biggest stars in the world—did not appear before a camera.

  As soon as Colman had finished serving his Goldwyn time, Schenck and Zanuck offered him the ideal return vehicle, the aptly titled Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back. Free of Goldwyn, Colman’s petrifying career sprang to life. He appeared in the series of roles for which he is still warmly remembered—Clive of India, Sidney Carton (doing a far, far better thing than he had ever done before), Robert Conway in Lost Horizon, The Prisoner of Zenda, and François Villon (proclaiming, “If I were king ...”)—all in just the next four years.

  Goldwyn’s neglect drove another longtime employee from his organization. For almost four years, Arthur Hornblow, Jr., had been responsible for attracting almost every important Goldwyn property and writer; he had smoothed actors’ feathers when Goldwyn had ruffled them; he had translated Goldwyn’s garbled demands for improving his pictures into clear and concise suggestions to the artists involved. And after working day by day with Goldwyn on more than a dozen pictures, he had not once received a single credit on the screen. Hornblow broached this inequity with Goldwyn. But as Alva Johnston later recorded, “Sam’s reaction to this was like that of Henry IV when he caught the Prince of Wales trying on the crown; he was wounded to the heart. The fact that Hornblow was entitled to screen credit, by all the canons of Hollywood, did not affect Sam. He was ready to give more money, European vacations, or anything except participation in the Goldwyn fame.” Hornblow’s was one of the few amicable departures in Goldwyn’s life. They remained friends, as Hornblow went on to produce Ruggles of Red Gap, Gaslight, The Asphalt Jungle, Witness for the Prosecution, and Oklahoma! He never hesitated to call on Goldwyn for advice.

  AMID his rotation of Ronald Colman dramas and Broadway adaptations for Art Cinema, Goldwyn had counted heavily on his cash crop, Eddie Cantor. While the financial and critical rewards of his other pictures fluctuated in the early thirties, big-budget Cantor extravaganzas became the staple of his production cycle.

  Cantor had a story idea he had come up with in a Broadway midnight coffee shop, about his childhood friend Sidney Franklin, a kid from Brooklyn who had gone to Spain and become a world-class matador. Cantor could already picture a hilarious finale, with him alone in the ring with a ferocious bull. “Goldwyn,” he remembered, “didn’t think the public would go for anything Spanish at the time.” Cantor disagreed. He pointed out the vast European market Whoopee! had opened up for both of them and said, “besides, to make a picture in which we did a ten-minute bullfight sequence in pantomime—a universal language—how could we lose.”

  The producer committed instead to another story called Palmy Days. It reinforced the flimsy structure of Whoopee! and set in concrete the basic plot of all Goldwyn’s future Cantor productions. The star would portray a mousy but adorable character named Eddie (this time Eddie Simpson, an unwitting assistant to a crooked palmist, mistakenly hired as an efficiency expert at a bakery), who bumps up against a gang of thugs. A secondary story would follow two young lovers, while Eddie becomes the apple of some brassy dame’s eye—in this case, Charlotte Greenwood playing a physical culturist, whom Eddie refers to as a “physical torturist.” Each picture would open with a big production number showing off the Goldwyn Girls, slip irrelevantly into a blackface number, usually about “his girl,” and wind up with a slapstick chase, at the end of which everything is righted. Palmy Days grossed well over one million dollars.

  Cantor renewed with Goldwyn for five more pictures over the next five years. After the success of Palmy Days, Goldwyn asked to see the Spanish story Cantor had worked up and bought it. On this picture, Goldwyn also tried a tactic Irving Thalberg would later adopt in working with the Marx Brothers. He sent Cantor, his songwriters, and Alfred Newman to San Francisco, where, four times a day for a week, the star tried out material in the huge Fox Theater. After “changing, revising, interpolating, [and] polishing” their script, based on public response, they received Goldwyn’s authorization, and cameras rolled.

  Betty Grable led the opening number, “The College Song”; another of the “coeds” was Paulette Goddard. Expelled from the university for raiding the girls’ dormitory, Eddie Williams and his roommate, Ricardo (played by Robert Young), go to the latter’s home in Mexico. Before leaving America, Eddie stumbles into a bank heist and is forced to cross the border. In Mexico, he
is mistaken for a matador and must prove himself in the bullring. Goldwyn invited several friends to watch the filming of the bullfight sequence. Under wide sombreros, among the hundreds of extras, sat Harpo Marx, Harold Lloyd, Douglas Fairbanks, and Chaplin.

  The million dollars Samuel Goldwyn had borrowed in order to make The Kid from Spain was the Bank of America’s first seven-figure loan for a motion picture. Throughout the production, Goldwyn kept assuring Dr. Giannini that he was working overtime, pinching every penny. In a plea for sympathy, he told Giannini that only that morning Frances had remarked, “Sam, how drawn you look.” “What she meant,” Giannini corrected, “was overdrawn.”

  Frances was still tossing in bed at night as her husband seemed to be constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul, waiting for foreign sales of the last picture to help pay off the debt on the present one, whose returns would be applied toward financing the next. By 1932, Goldwyn was discernibly coming out ahead. An accounting of that year’s first five months showed a profit close to $70,000, bringing the assets of Samuel Goldwyn, Inc., and its subsidiary companies just above $2 million. Most was tied up in his productions and United Artists stock; the rest of his portfolio, conservatively invested in utilities, had lost one third of its value in the last year. Goldwyn’s personal account for day-to-day expenses was close to $200,000. His life was insured for $305,000 under nine different policies.

  This Cantor picture did slightly less business than its predecessor, but it was still big box office. Goldwyn promptly paid back his Bank of America loan. Within a few years, he had a credit line of $4 million. That increase made Frances nervous. While her husband’s primary interest in making money was to be afforded the luxury of making more movies, Frances still yearned for security.

  As Hollywood continued building up into a prosperous business district, it became less fashionable as a residential area. Frances wondered whether her present property would hold its value. In the heart of the motion picture community—on a knoll just above the Beverly Hills Hotel and below Pickfair—she saw three lots on a short, winding private road off Coldwater Canyon called Laurel Lane. Director Wesley Ruggles lived in the one house already built (which tire magnate Leonard Firestone would later buy); a second lot would remain vacant for decades; and Frances Goldwyn persuaded her husband to buy the third—two and one-half acres full of promise.

  With all her fears about spending money, she was completely in charge of constructing their house. She built the place piecemeal, whenever she saw enough money in the family cookie jar to pay for each job. Architect Douglas Honnold drew the plans, but she called on Richard Day and Alexander Gollitzen from the studio to cut corners wherever they could. Studio labor installed the guts of the house. “The result,” observed Sam Goldwyn, Jr., “was that so much of the place—like the electrical wiring—was very Mickey Mouse.” It would take more than two years before the Goldwyns could leave the Camino Palmero house in Hollywood.

  Until then, Sam Goldwyn was front-page news—building his dream palace in Beverly Hills, receiving praise for the artistry of his pictures, tangling with prominent actors and writers. His scuffles with the English language became the delight of Hollywood columnists. The current favorite making the rounds followed several days of bad weather that held up filming on The Kid from Spain: Goldwyn told director Leo McCarey, “Tomorrow we shoot, whether it rains, whether it snows, whether it stinks.” His active press department worked overtime seeing to it that whenever he appeared in print, he sounded eloquent and looked elegant.

  Nobody took greater note of this new image than Goldwyn’s daughter, Ruth. “He was loud and his clothes were loud,” she remembered. “And then suddenly there he was beautifully and quietly dressed, and very courtly. It was all so strange; he seemed almost manufactured. And I used to ask myself, ‘Is it possible he’s my father?’”

  To Ruth, her father was exactly the man he had been for most of the last decade, absent and hostile. He had nothing to do with her or her mother. For more than four years, Goldwyn had failed to make his weekly alimony and child support payments. Ruth’s allowance was to double to five thousand dollars per annum upon her twenty-first birthday.

  Ruth had grown into an attractive young woman, tall and slender. In her late teens, she studied art in Paris, where she met and fell in love with a gentle and good-looking artist named Henry McClure Capps. He went by the name Mac. “I was dying to marry him,” Ruth recalled, “but to help me be sure, I sat down with a pencil and paper and made two columns and listed the pros and cons.” The biggest liability she could jot down was “He’ll never make a lot of money.” After reading the words, she put her pencil to the opposing column and wrote, “Doesn’t matter.”

  When Ruth told her mother’s mother that she was marrying this Episcopalian from Jacksonville, Illinois, old Sarah Lasky reared back. Religious only in her refusal to eat pork, she shouted, “You can’t marry a Christian!” Ruth asked why and was told, “Because Jews make the best husbands!”

  “You mean like my father?” Ruth snapped back, silencing her grandmother.

  On January 20, 1932—five days short of her twentieth birthday—Ruth married Mac Capps. “We both had very small allowances,” Ruth recalled of those years when they were starting out in New Haven, Connecticut, where he studied stage design at the Yale School of Drama; “but I honestly don’t know how we ever ate.”

  Blanche Turnbull had found as much happiness as her newlywed daughter. The former vaudeville cornetist, who had ached all her adult life to be free of show business, was about to get her wish. Hector Turnbull had just managed to “goad the new head of Paramount into settling his contract for a considerable amount of cash.” With this money, recalled Jesse Lasky, Jr., “he and Blanche planned to fulfill their dream of retiring to Pennsylvania on the old farm he had rebuilt with his own hands.” Before moving, Blanche dragged her ex-husband into court, seeking $33,168.45 in back payments. “She had no feelings about him at that point,” Ruth said. “Mother saved every penny from my father in a separate account for me.”

  Goldwyn claimed exemption from the payments because of custody violations of the divorce decree. He failed to mention that he had shown no interest in seeing his daughter for seven years, ever since the baked potato incident. Responding to the suit on January 25, 1932, Ruth’s birthday, Goldwyn further claimed that her having a husband should exempt him from any further payments.

  Goldwyn’s pettifoggery took its toll on Blanche. Physically exhausted from weeks of legal battle, she agreed to settle out of court for $20,000 in cash. That was meant only to bring the records up to date, not to cancel future payments, to which she and Ruth were entitled for the rest of their respective lives. Living at the Ambassador Hotel in anticipation of her move east, Blanche contracted pneumonia. On March 3, 1932, the settlement papers were drawn up and Blanche signed them. Nine days later—while the documents were in the hands of Goldwyn’s lawyers, awaiting his signature—Blanche died at the age of forty-nine.

  Days passed, and Goldwyn still did not sign the agreement. It appeared he was trying to bury the whole matter with his ex-wife. Blanche’s lawyer approached Ruth and said, “Your mother started this. I think you should finish it.” She agreed, and the lawyer pressed for Goldwyn to affix his signature. On March 19, he complied and paid the $20,000.

  Bereft of blood relations, Ruth started her own family. Within the first year of her marriage she was pregnant. By her sixth month, Ruth had celebrated her twenty-first birthday and her father had already missed the first two payments on the new $5,000 annual allowance due upon her coming of age. Ruth hired an attorney and served legal notice on her father. Both parties saw the opportunity to come to some kind of settlement, one that would cut the cord between them forever. Goldwyn informed James Mulvey, “For your personal information I would like to pay about $15,000 top.”

  On May 24, 1933—weeks into the lawyers’ negotiating—Ruth handwrote a simple letter. “Dear Father,” it said:You will probably think it str
ange to hear from me but I thought you might be interested to know that I am going to have a baby, in June.

  I am of course very pleased about it though it is difficult to get accustomed to the idea of being a mother.

  I daresay it will seem equally strange to you to think of being a grandfather.

  Your daughter

  Ruth

  Goldwyn’s gut response was “to completely ignore the letter,” believing that Ruth’s lawyer had put her up to writing it. “If I had no lawsuit I would never answer the letter as I don’t feel she is entitled to one,” Goldwyn informed Mulvey, “and I don’t intend to answer it.” His attorneys also thought it was a ruse.

  One month after Ruth’s missive, McClure Capps wired the father-in-law he had never met: “RUTH HAD A BABY GIRL TONIGHT BOTH ARE SPLENDID.” The birth signaled a weekend of truce to a month of lawyers’ wrangling. Ruth’s attorneys refused to budge from their demand for $25,000. First thing Monday morning, Goldwyn instructed Mulvey that he was “AGREEABLE TO PAY TWENTYFIVE THOUSAND BUT STRONGLY FEEL TWENTY THOUSAND SHOULD BE TOP.” At the end of the day, Goldwyn asked Mulvey in a night letter to ascertain in which New York hospital Ruth was staying and to send flowers, with a card saying, “Am very happy for you. Father.” The baby was named Blanche.

  For the next three months, the lawyers haggled over $5,000. In mid-September, Goldwyn agreed to the $25,000, $10,000 on signing the agreement, the rest in quarterly payments without interest. On November 29, 1933, Ruth Capps signed quitclaims that forever discharged her father of all obligations.