Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  The only trace of Ruth to remain in Goldwyn’s life was her baby nurse, who still served as nanny to Sammy, then starting elementary school. Catherine McDonough had become a senile crone and a constant burr to Frances. She often filled the boy’s ears with strange ravings. When they were alone, she would rant mysteriously about this girl Ruth, whom he had never heard of. One day in late 1932, she showed him a photograph in the newspaper of Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and said, “This is a very bad man. If he comes to run this country, they’ll take your father away.” She would arbitrarily punish the boy by locking him in his bedroom closet. “But I didn’t want to lose her,” Sam Goldwyn, Jr., later recalled. He instinctively craved the insulation she provided against his father’s overheated temper and his mother’s icy reserve.

  One day at Marion Davies’s beach house, Sammy was in the oceanic pool when Catherine came out, screaming, “Nanny didn’t give you permission!” She proceeded to “raise such hell” that Frances ran poolside, fearing bloody murder. When she learned the extent of the offense, she summoned all her courage and fired the woman on the spot. Sammy ran away in tears. Frances won the round, and the dismissal stuck. “Mother constantly spoke of that day,” recalled Sam junior, “as her day of liberation.”

  Not long after that, Goldwyn prepared for a business trip, and Sammy pleaded with him not to leave. He cried “that this very bad man would keep him out of the country.” In the boy’s bedroom, Sam asked what he meant. He got to the bottom of the story and realized that Catherine had definitely overstayed her welcome. But he insisted on Sammy’s thinking kindly of the old woman—“because she was wonderful with your sister.” Sammy sat on his bed, stunned to learn that he had a sibling.

  Sitting by his side, Goldwyn proceeded to tell him about Ruth. He spoke of her in the kindest way. “She’s a wonderful girl,” he said, his eyes starting to well up.

  “When will I see her?” Sammy asked eagerly. For the longest time, Goldwyn sat in silence, tightening his lips, looking all around the room as though searching for answers.

  When Sammy asked him again, his father began to sob.

  14 “That Little Something Extra”

  WHILE MOTION PICTURE attendance steadily dropped, it seemed that a handful of actresses was keeping the major studios afloat. Bette Davis led Warner Brothers’ fleet of films, appearing in eleven roles in 1932 alone. By the time she was eight, the insuperable optimism of Fox’s Shirley Temple had made her the number one box-office attraction in America. Katharine Hepburn had become the pride of RKO, making four films back to back in her first eighteen months in Hollywood. Marlene Dietrich and Mae West kept Paramount breathing hard. MGM met the public’s appetite with a steady serving of Joan Crawford pictures; and they dangled a Garbo film before the public annually. Without a leading man or leading lady to his name—except for the specialty act of Eddie Cantor, good for one production a year—Sam Goldwyn was desperate for an actress around whom he could mobilize his production army, a woman with star power, what George Cukor called “that little something extra.”

  With a whole new generation of talking-picture personalities, Hollywood turned to the meatiest volumes on the shelves of source material, confident of its ability to adapt history and the classics. Darryl Zanuck produced The House of Rothschild, Clive of India, Cardinal Richelieu, and Les Misérables, all within two years of founding Twentieth Century. At MGM, Irving Thalberg’s reputation continued to grow, with his film versions of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Mutiny on the Bounty, and Rasputin and the Empress, starring John, Lionel, and Ethel Barrymore; he would soon hire George Cukor to direct Romeo and Juliet and Camille. David O. Selznick left RKO in 1933 and produced David Copperfield, Anna Karenina, and A Tale of Two Cities in a single year on his father-in-law’s lot. In 1935, he established his own company; under the Selznick-International shingle he made Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Prisoner of Zenda, and Tom Sawyer.

  After thirty-four independent productions over the preceding ten years, Sam Goldwyn had not based a single film on a time-honored work of literature or an important historical figure. Most of his pictures had been translations of Broadway hits or recent popular novels. Sitting in his Hollywood office in early 1932, he suddenly seized upon the idea of producing a version of The Brothers Karamazov. The book itself could never have captured Goldwyn’s attention; a woman’s face staring out at him from the rotogravure section of a New York newspaper did. The actress’s likeness was part of an advertisement for a German film of the novel that was playing at a small art theater off Broadway. Her name was Anna Sten.

  She was born Anjuschka Stenski in Kiev in 1908. Another fatherless beauty, she found her way to that actors’ mecca, the Moscow Art Theater. After several small roles in one of Stanislavsky’s companies, she was admitted to the prestigious Mezhrabpom-Russ film studio. Anjuschka Stenski made several pictures and became the protégée of director Fedor Ozep. They married and went to Berlin, just as the Nazis were turning the German film industry into their propaganda factory. Ozep shortened his star’s name and directed her in The Brothers Karamazov.

  No prints of the film were available in Los Angeles, so Goldwyn wired his New York office to scare one up and rush it out by air express. The print arrived the day he was departing on a business trip to New York, literally minutes before he left the office. He hastened to his projection room and watched the first reel. The newspaper photograph had not done her justice. Anna Sten did not have the angular beauty of Garbo and Hepburn, then in vogue. She was the classic girl of Goldwyn’s fantasies—a fair face, soft and round, with a slightly pug nose; huge, inviting eyes; cascades of flaxen hair; a curvaceous, fleshy body. When she opened her generous mouth, she spoke with a low, attractive throatiness. She moved with sensuous authority. Her acting was earthy and realistic. By the start of the second reel, Goldwyn had seen enough. He had not felt this way since first casting eyes on Vilma Banky. Racing for his train, he dispatched Lynn Farnol to Europe to sign her. Without even knowing if she could speak a word of English, he was determined to present her in an American version of The Brothers Karamazov.

  Miss Sten had recently been in a minor automobile accident, and out of the other car had emerged an attractive man named Eugene Frenke. As Miss Sten told it, they fell in love—rather the way people in the movies did. She left Ozep to marry Frenke, who would manage her career. When Goldwyn’s agent called on them, she followed Frenke’s lead and played dumb.

  Goldwyn believed one got what one paid for, that spending more made something worth more. If he expected to launch Anna Sten into the stratosphere of stars, Goldwyn figured he should pay her as one. Sten and Frenke sat there mute as Farnol offered her a four-year contract—$1,500 per week for forty weeks of work the first year, $2,000 a week the second. They grabbed it.

  The salary was nothing compared to the money Goldwyn would lay out to justify his expenditure. He intended to spend more promoting Anna Sten than had ever been invested in a new star. Ultimately, Anna Sten would have to pay the price.

  While negotiating for the rights to the German version of The Brothers Karamazov, Goldwyn marshaled all his promotional forces into developing a public persona for Anna Sten. Above all, Goldwyn believed every star needed individuality. “Any time that an actor tries to imitate or copy another,” he said in a local radio interview, “he is finished ... the public never wants to see two stars of the same type.”

  Lynn Farnol, the chief engineer of Anna Sten’s public facade, concurred. He told Goldwyn that “it would be a mistake to try to play [Anna Sten] up as a Greta Garbo-Marlene Dietrich.... For one thing, she doesn’t exactly belong in the group, and the comparisons that would inevitably follow might not be good.” Farnol suggested they build on her actual history as much as possible, that they capitalize on her being the first great star from the new Soviet Union. On March 7, 1932, Farnol wrote Goldwyn from Europe, reeling off Sten’s many assets. He did not forget to add one liability: “She speaks ... not a word of English.”
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  With too much stardust in his eyes to see that as a problem, Goldwyn chose to turn Anna Sten into a mysterious fairy-tale princess. “The Passionate Peasant” was the title of the first major publicity piece he authorized. “The Soviet Cinderella,” it read, “embarked in a sea-going pumpkin for a fling at Hollywood fame and fortune.” Over the ensuing months, Goldwyn assumed that the world would be gripped by her allure as he was, spellbound by that countenance of timeless, enigmatic beauty. “She has the face,” Goldwyn took to telling people, “of a spink.”

  Goldwyn urged the United Artists offices in Europe to keep Anna Sten under wraps. Because the first impression she would make in America was of such importance, Goldwyn sent her to Paris for Chanel to outfit her. While the Europa was at sea, Goldwyn cabled Farnol to “PLEASE GIVE SOME THOUGHT TO AN EXPRESSION OR REMARK STEN MAY MAKE ON ARRIVAL NEW YORK THAT WOULD BE OF SENSATIONAL NATURE BUT AT SAME TIME NOT OFFENSIVE OR DETRIMENTAL TO HER PERSONALITY.... GIVE THIS CAREFUL CONSIDERATION AND DISCUSS WITH OTHER GENIUSES OF YOUR TYPE AND WIRE ME.”

  Farnol agreed that a piquant statement from Anna Sten would create the kind of stir they all hoped for; but he also had the duty of reporting: “HER KNOWLEDGE OF ENGLISH ... IS STILL GROTESQUELY BAD AND GROSSLY INADEQUATE FOR EVEN ORDINARY CONVERSATION.” Without a proper wardrobe, Farnol also found her “COMPARABLE ORDINARY PICTURE PLAYER.” Farnol arranged an unpretentious arrival. “Darling, sweetheart,” Anna Sten told the crew of reporters waiting at the dock on April 18, 1932, “I lof you.” Then, in her Chanel frock and hat and her own mussy imitation-fur coat and rubber-soled tennis sneakers, she was hidden away at the Hotel Pierre. Four days later, Farnol chaperoned Sten on the train journey across America to Hollywood, where he had set up interviews only with “people of assured sympathy and interest.”

  After journeying close to ten thousand miles, Anna Sten had the rug pulled out from under her. Goldwyn announced that he was not going to produce The Brothers Karamazov after all. He had gotten enraged over the property’s legal complications and had also been engaged in battle with Ronald Colman, whom he had hoped to star. Goldwyn scrapped the project and told his staff to find a project worthy of a star. “You see,” Goldwyn would later explain, “she is such a dominating personality, it would have been out of the question to cast her in secondary roles.... Either she would be a star or nothing ... the thing was to present her as brilliantly as possible, and see whether or not the public would accept her. She could not have been brought before them slowly. She wasn’t the type.”

  Before leaving his employ, Arthur Hornblow had thrown the plots of several classics at Goldwyn until he heard one he liked, Nana. Zola’s girl of the Parisian streets was just the sort of doomed heroine Garbo was making so popular. When Goldwyn heard that Nana had raised herself from the gutter by becoming a chanteuse (which would allow his star to show off her singing ability, like Dietrich), he was sold. Goldwyn’s team of writers spent the better part of a year breaking the massive book down into a shootable film script. The process took longer than usual because of Arthur Hornblow’s absence. Two men were necessary to fill his shoes: Twenty-seven-year-old Fred Kohlmar took over the production duties; and an energetic man of letters named George Oppenheimer, who had helped found the Viking Press, assumed the editorial responsibilities. Goldwyn called him “Oppenheim.”

  Meantime, Anna Sten was stashed in a rented house in Santa Monica. She spent two hours each morning and each afternoon with an English teacher—“she was a German,” recalled Miss Sten. “I don’t know how I ever got out of it without a German accent. I never had any American teachers. My voice was given to me by God, not by Mr. Goldwyn. If he was worried about my accent, why did he give me a German teacher?” Goldwyn arranged for her to see at least three American motion pictures a week.

  She endured more than a year of grooming. Fifty-one tests were made, to record not only the progress of her English but also her acting ability. Gregg Toland tried out every angle and lens for the optimal way of capturing her hair, her eyes, her costumes on film. Various makeups were tested under different lightings. “There were a good many jokes about Goldwyn with his accent instructing Sten with hers,” noted George Oppenheimer, “but they were unfounded. Goldwyn backed up his confidence in his protégée with the best of everything—an English coach, dancing and singing teachers, speech instructors, a trainer and masseuse, since the lady had a tendency to put on weight and a rather unbridled appetite.”

  Goldwyn called on three of the foremost clothes designers to outfit her—Paramount’s Travis Banton, Ziegfeld’s John Harkrider, and MGM’s leading stylist, Adrian. He went after no less a director than von Sternberg himself to stage her debut in American films. And he solicited Cole Porter to supply Nana with “a sexy recitative” along the lines of “Love for Sale” and a torch song in the manner of “What Is This Thing Called Love?” “YOU ARE THE ONE MAN IN THE WORLD TO WRITE TWO SONGS TO BE SUNG BY ANNA STEN IN HER FIRST PICTURE FOR ME,” Goldwyn wired Porter in Paris in the spring of 1933. Porter refused, because he was composing a new musical; but he did salute the producer in the third refrain of his new show’s title song:If Sam Goldwyn can with great conviction

  Instruct Anna Sten in diction,

  Then Anna shows

  Anything goes.

  Goldwyn got Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart to write a minor-key lament called “That’s Love.”

  WHILE the movies had done their best to keep America from fearing fear itself, times in Hollywood got harder. Even with theaters slashing ticket prices and adding a second film to the program—a double feature for the price of one—attendance in just the preceding two years had fallen off by one third, to some fifty million weekly viewers. After the new President launched his attack on the nation’s economic crisis by closing the banks, studio leaders felt empowered to take drastic measures of their own.

  Universal Studios suspended all their contracts by invoking the “national emergency” clause. Fox’s 1,900 employees—from stars to messenger boys—volunteered to go on a four-week “salary holiday.” Most other studio heads asked their workers for permission to cut wages by 50 percent for eight weeks, enough time to get through the emergency. All except one Goldwyn employee agreed to those terms. “This request comes at a time when I am in difficult financial straights [sic] because I have been here for ten months and during those ten months I have had lay-offs without pay for five and one-half months,” Anna Sten wrote Goldwyn, then in New York. “I fully appreciate your own difficulties in the present crisis, and am willing to meet you half way by accepting half salary now, with the difference to be repaid me at a later date when conditions improve and you start my picture.”

  Sam Goldwyn was no doubt pleased to see the improvement in Anna Sten’s English, but he fired off a telegram to her Beverly Hills house that minced no words:YOU MUST REALIZE THAT THIS COUNTRY IS IN STATE OF PANIC AND CONDITIONS ARE MUCH MORE SERIOUS THAN CAN BE EXPLAINED IN TELEGRAM BUT ITS WELL YOU UNDERSTAND THAT LAST WEEK MY OWN PERSONAL RECEIPTS ON PICTURES WERE AFFECTED TO EXTENT OF EIGHTY THOUSAND DOLLARS THEREFORE ALL REASONS YOU ARE GIVING ME IN YOUR LETTER ARE GOING TO BE OF NO AVAIL STOP YOU WILL HAVE TO TAKE CUT JUST AS EVERYBODY CONNECTED WITH MOTION PICTURES WHETHER IN CALIFORNIA OR ANYWHERE ELSE IN COUNTRY....

  Anna Sten would not play ball. All she could see was “that I am asked to take a loss of $5,000 while you gain $5,000.”

  For weeks, the two Slavs engaged in a cold war marked by brinksmanship. Goldwyn accused her of lying about other stars who had refused to sign the agreement and threatened her with official actions he must take before the Motion Picture Academy. After a year of costly grooming, Sten knew perfectly well that Goldwyn was not about to jeopardize his investment. She claimed all these discussions were giving her heart trouble. In the end, Sten got her way.

  Goldwyn’s well-oiled machinery continued to crank out glowing publicity about her. He turned to his old friend Condé Nast, who agreed to a spread in Vanity Fair, with photographs by Edward Steich
en. New stories of Goldwyn’s dramatic discovery were released to all the syndicates.

  By the summer of 1933, Goldwyn decided that Nana was ready to shoot. The Hays Office approved the script—so watered down from the original material that the credits would say the film had been “suggested by the novel by Emile Zola.” Goldwyn engaged George Fitzmaurice, who had just directed Garbo in Mata Hari. Anna Sten took direction obediently but thought the film was “horrible.” She later said, “It was not Nana, it was not me. I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t exciting.”

  Into its fourth week, Goldwyn sat in the screening room for hours one afternoon, running the film over and over. Although he had invested close to $200,000 in Anna Sten and as much again in the film, he announced that he was shutting the picture down. The star asked for her release. Goldwyn assured her they were on the same side in this matter. The picture was “good enough” to play in theaters, he said, just not good enough to put her across as a star.

  He commissioned veteran scenarist Willard Mack to pull together a more dramatic version of the script, he discharged the cast, and he paid off Fitzmaurice. It ended their relationship of eleven films over ten years. A few weeks later, Mack returned to Goldwyn’s office and read the entire new script to him. Cameras were ordered to roll again. Lionel Atwill, fresh from the set of Song of Songs, opposite Dietrich, took over as leading man.

  Goldwyn tried to hire George Cukor (then in the middle of his successful cycle of films for David Selznick at RKO), even though he felt the director had a tendency “to put lace panties on every scene.” Frances, who fretted over her friend’s career as much as her husband’s, cautioned him against doing the picture. In addition to the chaos of the production, she thought the source material was too “artistic” and the star unproven. Cukor refused Goldwyn’s offer, and the producer cursed him for weeks, saying Cukor was “biting the hand of the goose that laid the golden egg.” When Cukor insisted he was too busy editing Little Women, Goldwyn turned to the director of Christopher Strong, Katharine Hepburn’s second film.