Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  For many years, Dorothy Arzner was the only woman directing at any of the major studios in Hollywood. She grew up in Hollywood, where her father owned a restaurant next to a theater, and found work at Famous Players-Lasky—as a typist, then as a script girl. After a few months, she moved into the cutting room, becoming one of the studio’s most talented editors. She got to film a few shots for Valentino’s Blood and Sand, and she began writing scripts in her spare time for Columbia. Upon submitting her next screenplay, Miss Arzner insisted that she would not sell it unless she could also direct it. Columbia accepted the deal, only to have her home studio better it when they heard Arzner might leave them. Goldwyn told her he thought Christopher Strong was the best picture of the year and that he hoped she could do as well with Sten as she had with Hepburn. Arzner had hoped for “a more important script” to help her in the task, but she accepted the challenge. “The only thing I could do,” she later said of Sten, “was not let her talk so much.”

  Goldwyn’s publicity machine went into overdrive, getting a lot of mileage out of his having junked $411,000 worth of film. When he liberally computed that starting Nana over again doubled his investment, Anna Sten suddenly became his “Million Dollar Discovery.” Over one thousand newspapers carried his explanation: “When you are presenting a great star for the first time, and she is under contract to you for more than one picture, it is better to lose money on the first picture to make way for the second and third and so on.”

  Radio City Music Hall booked Nana—unprecedentedly guaranteeing Goldwyn a two-week run and 75 percent of the profits. “The country was Sten-conscious and eagerly awaited news of the opening,” recalled George Oppenheimer. The Goldwyns had gone to New York for the February 1, 1934, premiere, in time to see Lynn Farnol’s latest publicity effort. Every day for a week, the newspapers ran a different photograph of Sten in a seductive pose, captioned only with her name and an adjective: alluring, wistful, worldly, fascinating, mysterious, captivating. Then the name of the film was introduced into the ads, followed by such phrases as “America’s Great New Star” and “A brilliant comet is born.” W R. Hearst pulled for his friend, splashing articles about Anna Sten all across his newspapers. Opening day of Nana broke all existing records at the Music Hall.

  “IN SPITE OF FIRST BIG STORM HERE IN WEEKS,” Goldwyn wired Abe Lehr on February 1, 1934, “PICTURE OPENED TO SENSATIONAL BUSINESS STOP THEY HAVE BEEN PACKED SINCE DOORS OPENED THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE STANDING IN LINE.” In response to Alfred Newman’s telegram of congratulations, Goldwyn wrote him on the fifth, “In all my years I have never known a woman to sweep ... New York as she has. The line has never stopped at Radio City Music Hall since the picture opened. The success of STEN is the talk of New York.” Goldwyn ordered the star hidden away, to add to her mystique. She went to Palm Springs incognito, and Goldwyn refused to let her be interviewed, not even by Louella Parsons.

  The overnight reviews of Nana commented on the star’s beauty but found the picture ordinary in every other respect. Practically all the criticism that followed (like the one in Literary Digest) pointed out Goldwyn’s mistake in “presenting his young Ukrainian actress as one of those lyric, mysterious and studiously ‘glamorous’ screen personages that strive so desperately for the laurels of the great Garbo.” Customers found the star as oversold as critics had found the movie overdone. The queues disappeared in the big cities and never even formed in the small towns. The film would not return its highly publicized cost. Zola’s heirs applied to the French courts for permission to sue Goldwyn on the grounds that Nana had been “disfigured to a point where it is unrecognizable.”

  “Irrespective of how much I may lose on NANA,” Goldwyn wrote Chicago theater owner John Balaban, “I am still going ahead and making and planning more Sten pictures.”

  Goldwyn’s story department homed in on the actress’s motherland for source material, settling on Tolstoy’s auspiciously titled Resurrection. At first, the story of the spiritual regeneration of a young Russian nobleman hardly seemed grist for the movie mill. The novel had in fact reached the screen four times already, first in 1909, under Griffith’s hand.

  The broad strokes of the plot offered a strong role for Sten. A servant girl named Katusha is seduced by her mistress’s nephew, Prince Dmitri, who leaves her pregnant and cavalierly joins his army regiment. She sinks into a life of prostitution in Moscow after the death of her child and soon stands trial for the murder of one of her customers. She meets Dmitri again in court, where he, about to marry into considerable money, is part of the jury unjustly condemning her to Siberia. He atones for all his wrongdoing by surrendering his property to his servants and joining her on the long march to exile, declaring, “All I ask is to live again with your forgiveness and your help and your love.”

  Goldwyn believed he had found the ideal director in Russian-born Rouben Mamoulian, who after years of experience in theater and film, had just directed Dietrich in Song of Songs and Garbo in Queen Christina. Tolstoy’s Resurrection was one of his favorite books. Goldwyn told Mamoulian that despite its having been filmed several times already, “no one had ever understood the story in its true richness and drama,” that it “has not been made until I make it.”

  Willard Mack was Goldwyn’s first writer to adapt the Tolstoy novel. Of the old school of Hollywood scenarists, he detailed every piece of business and camera angle, so that the script “could be shot by the property man if we should all drop dead.” Mamoulian was one of the new breed of directors who wanted the writer just to get the story down on paper in as few important speeches and scenes as were necessary. He liked to punch them up with his own strong visual style. Once Mack had the structure on paper, Mamoulian urged Goldwyn to give the pages to playwright Maxwell Anderson, whose adaptation of What Price Glory? and All Quiet on the Western Front combined poetic language with prosaic situations.

  After several weeks, Goldwyn felt that Anderson was creating the characters out of marble more than flesh and blood. He called in Preston Sturges, a charming newcomer to Hollywood, “to bring out the people, emphasize the human as well as the class conflicts, and insert more lightness and humor.” Sturges demanded $1,500 a week, a big enough jump in his asking price to make Goldwyn both distrust him and respect him. Sturges humanized the script with his special brand of banter. Goldwyn appreciated the contribution—what he once referred to as the “snappy nineteenth century dialogue.” But after a few weeks he asked Mamoulian, “When can we get rid of this Sturgeon fella?”

  Goldwyn hired one Leonard Praskins. His job was to blend the contrasting styles of his predecessors and to modulate the dialogue specifically for the voices of Anna Sten and Fredric March, whom he had been able to borrow from Irving Thalberg at MGM. March’s career in pictures was just taking off after his winning the Academy Award for his performance in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and he was reluctant to appear second-billed opposite the possibly leprous Anna Sten. One hundred thousand dollars for a few weeks’ work brought him around.

  In late spring 1934, shooting of the picture, retitled We Live Again, began. Goldwyn then hired two of the director’s friends from Broadway—Paul Green and Thornton Wilder—to give the script a final polish and to stay close at hand during production.

  Fredric March was a dutiful soldier, making the most of his leaden supporting role and suffering in silence. One day, Goldwyn came on the set and found him morose. “Freddie,” he said, trying to lift his spirits, “you got the best part in the picture.” Then Goldwyn saw Sten sitting practically beside him. “And Anna,” he added, without missing a beat, “you got the best part too.”

  Anderson, Praskins, and Sturges were the only writers to receive credit on the picture. The Screen Writers Guild had been formed in 1933, in an effort to put some teeth into what had previously been a more informal Writers Club. The Guild promptly composed a list of desires if not demands—that the industry become a guild shop, that contract writers not be lent between studios, that writers not be asked to write
on speculation, that all writers working simultaneously on the same material be so notified by the producer, that blacklists be prohibited, and that writers receive screen credit according to their contribution to a picture. Over many years, those conditions would be met. For the time, producers still determined whose names they put on their films.

  “Anna Sten shows dramatic ability of high order in a role less glamorous, but more exacting than her first,” said Variety in its September 22, 1934, review of We Live Again. Within weeks of the opening, Anna Sten died again. “The public,” Sam Goldwyn told George Cukor, “stayed away in droves.”

  Goldwyn was still not prepared to give up on her. Where the classics could not put Anna Sten across, Goldwyn figured, a new story with a strong leading man could. He had wanted to work with Gary Cooper ever since the cowboy slipped away after The Winning of Barbara Worth. In the ensuing eight years, Cooper had risen to stardom in thirty-seven pictures, his salary jacked to $6,000 a week plus whatever money he could pocket from the films he made off the Paramount lot. The Goldwyns invited Cooper and his new wife, Rocky (a former starlet, born Veronica Balfe), to dinner to discuss the possibility of his appearing with Anna Sten in an adaptation of a novel called Barbary Coast. By the time they had agreed on $75,000 for what would amount to a four-week job, Goldwyn had decided to put that costume piece in mothballs and to star Cooper opposite Sten in an original modern drama.

  After more than a year with the assignment, George Oppenheimer found only one property for Anna Sten. The Wedding Night, by Edwin Knopf, was the love story between a jazz age novelist, who retreats to Connecticut to rediscover his muse, and a Polish peasant girl, the daughter of a neighboring tobacco farmer. The writer is already married to a socially ambitious wife in New York, and the girl is engaged to a local Polish farmer. A convenient snowstorm leads the reluctant lovers to kindle their feelings for each other. Manya, the beautiful Pole, proceeds with her marriage—only to race back to her new love on her wedding night. She trips to her death—providing an ending sure to appease the Furies at the Hays Office.

  Goldwyn signed King Vidor to direct The Wedding Night as the first in a two-picture deal. Vidor looked forward to filming the Connecticut countryside and the colorful ritual of the Polish wedding that would be the climactic centerpiece of the film, but he dreaded working with the actors. Gary Cooper in the role of a Fitzgerald-like novelist seemed bad casting to Vidor; after hearing him mumble through a reading of the script, he “wondered how he could have carried his great success into the talkies.” Anna Sten revealed more than a trace of an accent, as well as heavy gestures held over from her days in Russian silent pictures. The first day of shooting, Vidor discovered that Cooper could not get through a scene without forgetting some of the words, and it was difficult to make out those he remembered. After he saw the first day’s rushes, however, Vidor discovered “a performance that overflowed with charm and personality.”

  Anna Sten had no such luck. While the film was still in preproduction, Vidor had protested to Goldwyn that there was “too much dialogue for Miss Sten’s capabilities,” that Garbo and Dietrich had proved most effective drawing out a long “Yes” or “No” in response to long speeches by the other actors. But Frank Capra had just bowled Hollywood over with It Happened One Night, in which Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert rattled off mouthfuls of dialogue at lightning pace. Goldwyn wanted Vidor to match that effect.

  The challenge proved greatest in the scene in which Anna Sten was supposed to recite a few lines of Browning, which Cooper had inscribed in a book for her: “Earth’s returns/ For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!” No matter how much she practiced, she tripped between the first two words every time. Her tongue got twisted further when Goldwyn chose the moment they were rehearsing that scene to inspect the set. “He plunked into an empty chair close to the camera and peered anxiously at the two embarrassed lovers,” recalled Vidor. Both actors gave all they had, but with Cooper’s natural reticence and Sten’s facial contortions as she spat out the words “Earse returzs,” Goldwyn could not help interrupting the scene. He respectfully asked Vidor if he could have a word with the actors, then begged them to cooperate and concentrate. Goldwyn worked himself up over “the dwindling receipts at the box office” and said his whole career was staked on the success of this picture. “And I tell you,” he said, reaching the climax of his speech, “that if this scene isn’t the greatest love scene ever put on film the whole goddamned picture will go right up out of the sewer.” He turned on his heels and marched out of the vast soundstage. Cooper turned to Vidor. “Did he say it, or didn’t he?” he asked. “He said it,” Vidor replied. The two of them burst into laughter. Vidor resumed rehearsal, but every time Anna Sten got to “Earse returzs,” the set went to pieces. Behind her back, Gary Cooper called his co-star Anna Stench.

  By the first weeks of 1935, The Wedding Night was filmed and assembled. The first preview was held in Glendale. Goldwyn emerged from the theater and huddled his creative team in a sidewalk conference. “You’ll have to shoot the big love scene over,” he said to Vidor. “That girl can’t say ‘earse.’”

  Anna Sten received her best notices to date. Not only did Vidor photograph her at her most dreamy, but he extracted what he considered “an honest performance” from her. More than one critic commented that she had at last become something more than a publicity stunt. Newsweek noted that “the Ukrainian actress might someday live up to Goldwyn’s opinion of her.” When the public failed to embrace her the third time, Goldwyn decided that he could not afford to give her another chance. He told her they were through working together, and the picture became known around town as “Goldwyn’s Last Sten.” She said that she wanted out of their deal. With fifteen months left to run, at $2,500 a week, Anna Sten annulled their contract.

  Miss Sten later claimed that she was “up for fabulous contracts after I left Goldwyn, but I think I was on the run.” She and Frenke went to London, where they made one film together; and she answered the call of a minor studio, Grand National, a few years later for two pictures. Then she vanished from the public eye as quickly as she had materialized. Anna Sten became an asterisk in the annals of motion picture history. “Sam Goldwyn wanted to make her a star in the worst way,” said Rouben Mamoulian. “That’s just what he did. She never really had a chance.”

  “THE mention of Anna Sten’s name made Frances apoplectic,” said George Cukor, the only friend in whom Sam Goldwyn’s wife confided about such matters. With her marriage entering its seventh year, she was just beginning to enjoy Sam’s obvious pride in her rapid advance to the social fore and feel confident as Mrs. Samuel Goldwyn. During the flush months, she had started to acquire expensive silver and crystal while the new house on Laurel Lane was being constructed; she bought up china pieces of Napoleon’s coffee service that Cartier had for sale. Then the two-million-dollar Sten debacle hit her in the pit of her stomach, making her feel exactly as she did when her father had lost everything, reducing the McLaughlins to mere subsistence.

  “In the early days on Camino Palmero, I felt happy and secure, but then the atmosphere in the house changed and there was great hostility at home,” remembered Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., who had been too young at the time to understand what was happening. The boy heard bits of arguments between his parents about money and women and gambling, and how his mother would not tolerate it any longer.

  The Goldwyns loved their son dearly; and they beat their breasts about only wishing the best for him. But the deeds of Sam and Frances—both emotionally crippled by their own childhoods—often fell short of their desires. They wanted Sammy to have every advantage, but never handed to him on a silver platter—privilege without losing the common touch. They did not want to send the boy away, but they made almost no time for him at home. He does not recall eating a single dinner with his parents in the elegant wood-paneled dining room. (He took his meals in the kitchen, alone with the cook.)

  In the westward migration of Hollywood’s
elite, the Gardner Street School was left with a racially mixed bag of students from middle-class families and lower—and Sammy Goldwyn. Although the school was a few blocks from home, Frances had her boy—in short pants, jacket, and tie—chauffeured there and back every day, sometimes in the Rolls-Royce. “The kids would tease me,” Sam junior later recalled, “and I was always getting into fights.” Some of the children picked on him for being Jewish, which stupefied him, because until he attended a friend’s bar mitzvah at the age of thirteen, he had never been exposed to a trace of Hebraism. “Let ‘em know they can’t push you around,” Sam kept urging, while Frances strictly forbade him ever to fight. A solution was found in a rigorous new military school at Melrose and Wilcox avenues, established by a retired army major and a former silent-screen actor, Earle Foxe. Seven-year-old Sammy, barely able to fill his uniform, was enrolled. “Black-Foxe,” Goldwyn junior said fifty years later, “was sheer fucking hell.”

  “I loved Frances Goldwyn,” George Cukor admitted to his dying days; she was a comforting confidante to this most sensitive man, the repeated victim of unrequited—sometimes heartbreaking—love affairs. “But,” he said (with some frustration of his own), “she was one terrible, terrible mother. After a few years, she really lost interest in the boy. She looked after him, but she was never really interested in taking care of him.” In making Sammy the daily charge of a school that prided itself on discipline, Frances felt she had done only what was best for her son.