In the marketplace, Chaplin’s latest picture, Modern Times, released in February 1936, was a serious financial disappointment. David Selznick and Alexander Korda, recent additions to the company, could be counted on for a couple of releases that year. Even Mary Pickford, realizing the crunch her company was in, partnered with Jesse Lasky on two films. But none of them could improve United Artists’ position with the exhibitors.
Goldwyn saw only one way they, as independent producers, could stand up to the major theater chains, and that was by bringing the best of the studio producers into their camp. For months Goldwyn entreated Irving Thalberg; and his UA partners backed him up by extending generous offers. The idea appealed to him. The frail MGM producer saw how he might truly flourish away from L. B. Mayer, the way Darryl Zanuck, for one, came into his own when he left the Warner brothers. But ultimately, UA could not offer Thalberg the security he already had. And so, as had been the case for five years, if United Artists was to chug along, it needed Sam Goldwyn to stoke its engine.
Goldwyn continued his pursuit of George Bernard Shaw, this time adding Pygmalion to his list of wants. The playwright was as contemptuous of Hollywood as ever and wrote Goldwyn that nobody out there had any “more notion of telling a story than a blind puppy [has] of composing a symphony.” He was convinced that any of the studios would put his play in the hands of “the bellboy, in whose view life is a continual going up and down stairs and opening and shutting doors.” Granting that Goldwyn was “a bit different from the ordinary Hollywood mental patient,” Shaw said he would sell his plays for 10 percent of his films’ grosses plus the right to alter the scripts and cut the pictures.
Goldwyn spent much of the year chasing trends instead: John Ford’s The Informer had become one of 1933’s great hits; so Goldwyn wanted his own story about Ireland’s political turmoil. Ever since It Happened One Night, Goldwyn had been itching to come up with a “screwball comedy.” Natural disasters had become a recent rage in films—a locust plague in The Good Earth and an earthquake in San Francisco—so Goldwyn snatched the rights to a new novel by Mutiny on the Bounty’s authors, Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, The Hurricane. Having proved successful adding sound to The Dark Angel, Goldwyn figured he would remake his other great silent tearjerker, Stella Dallas.
Goldwyn also pursued two projects that imitated nothing currently playing at the movies. One was an Edna Ferber novel called Come and Get It. Goldwyn paid $100,000 for the rights to this lusty tale of Polish-Americans who worked in the lumber mills of Wisconsin. It followed the ruthless Barney Glasgow, who would let nothing stop him as he shinnied his way from lumberjack to logging king—not even his love for a beautiful dance-hall singer, Lotta. Years later, he meets the woman’s granddaughter and falls for her, foolishly hoping to recapture lost time. Edna Ferber sold the book to Goldwyn, believing he understood the seriousness of her intentions in this book, that “it is primarily a story of the rape of America ... a story of the destruction of forests and rivers by the wholesale robber barons of that day.”
Come and Get It had much of the spirit of Barbary Coast. Despite his trepidations about Howard Hawks’s messing with scripts and letting actors improvise lines, Goldwyn had to admit the director had a way with brawling, sprawling stories. When he learned that Barney Glasgow was based in part on Hawks’s grandfather, Goldwyn was convinced he was the right man for the job. Even Edna Ferber was impressed. After meeting with the charming Hawks, who said he wanted to fix a few details in Jane Murfin’s tidy script, she felt confident enough to give him such license. Jules Furthman was brought in to rewrite the picture; it became the first of several celebrated collaborations with Hawks, who reveled in Furthman’s cynicism and his “great ability to think of new ways of doing things.”
Hawks began to exert his influence over Goldwyn in other ways as well. Although Miriam Hopkins had been announced to star in the dual roles of Lotta, she was not Hawks’s type. He looked at countless tests of young starlets until he saw a UCLA graduate in a sixteen-millimeter student film. Her name was Antoinette Leeds, and she had a freshness Hawks liked, wholesome but sassy. Goldwyn put her under contract and changed her first name to Andrea. But even after agreeing that Miriam Hopkins was not right for the role of Lotta, he did not think Miss Leeds was equipped to carry a picture. He cast her in a supporting role. Before he knew it, Hawks was urging him to give the lead to a young actress with as little experience.
She was Frances Farmer, a leggy blonde of twenty-two, who auditioned for a small part in the film and bowled Hawks over. In her youth, she had stirred up trouble in her hometown, Seattle, when she won a national magazine competition with her essay “God Dies.” At the University of Washington, she had entered another contest and won first prize, a trip to the Soviet Union. Returning through New York, the heavenly girl met some Paramount executives, who put her under contract. For all her great physical strength, young Frances was psychologically frail. Within her first few months, she made three films in rapid succession for Paramount; the sudden overload of all that fell upon her in Hollywood came close to crushing her. Before she walked out of Hawks’s office, he said, “You ought to play the lead.”
This Aryan goddess’s beauty was not lost on Goldwyn either, but he doubted her ability to pull off the double roles. Hawks worked overtime with her. In her first test, she tried to become the character of the mother by using a lot of makeup; Hawks urged her to create the role from within. They cruised beer joints together one night, until they found a woman who Hawks thought was the same type as the character. He instructed the ingenue to return to the bar every night and become that woman. The screen test, said Hawks, was “fabulous. She was a blonde, a natural, but she just used a dark wig; that’s all she put on. No change in make-up, just her face changed. Her whole attitude changed, her whole method of talking.” Goldwyn was coming around to Hawks’s way of thinking, a process hastened by bigger casting problems and the lack of time he had to give to the film’s preparation.
Come and Get It needed a strong actor at the center. “Louis,” Goldwyn boldly announced when he got his archrival, Mr. Mayer, on the telephone, “we’re in trouble. You’ve got Spencer Tracy and I need him.” Not even from an enemy would Mayer extort a lot of money for Tracy’s services. After several years of the actor’s playing petty racketeers and ordinary guys, L. B. was grooming him for more sympathetic, even heroic, roles. The next few years would see Tracy as priests, lawyers, newspapermen, and doughty fishermen. Hard-pressed for a dynamic Barney Glasgow, Goldwyn settled on Edward Arnold—not a major movie star but able to carry a picture.
Goldwyn was trying to accomplish as much as possible before leaving with Frances and Sammy for Europe. He meant to conduct business in England and France that March, but the voyage was intended as a vacation, to calm his volcanic stomach. “Sam Goldwyn didn’t get ulcers,” King Vidor said, thinking back on the time when he was preparing Stella Dallas, his fourth film for him, “he gave them.” In fact, Goldwyn—who had worried about stomachaches since his father’s death—had recently been suffering from sharp abdominal pains, which his doctor tried to curb dietetically.
Goldwyn’s most unusual property that season promised to be his most prestigious film to date. Back when Sidney Howard was writing Arrowsmith for Goldwyn, he had tipped the producer off to another Sinclair Lewis work, which he thought would make a wonderful motion picture, the 1929 novel Dodsworth. Howard said Goldwyn could buy the rights for $20,000. When the producer refused, he turned the book into a play, a smash hit starring Walter Huston. Now Goldwyn came around to buy the rights to film the story, only to find the price had jumped to $160,000. Howard pointed out that Goldwyn could have bought the same story just a few years earlier for a fraction of that. Goldwyn proved himself the shrewder for the waiting. “This way,” he told Howard, “I buy a successful play. Before it was just a novel.”
There were many reasons why no producers had shown interest in Lewis’s book. Dodsworth was the story of a
retired automobile manufacturer from the Midwest who retreats to Europe with his frivolous wife, Fran. While she skims along the surface of European society, dipping into one love affair after another, he earnestly attempts to absorb a culture other than his own. As his wife dallies with an English playboy, a Middle European banker, and an impoverished count, he falls in love with an American widow, Edith Cortwright. Fran stupidly thinks she will marry her count, until his forbidding mother confronts her. Then she wires for her husband to take her home to Zenith, Ohio, where Dodsworth discovers that his silly wife is none the wiser. He unexpectedly about-faces and returns to Edith and a happy future in Europe. It was more a story of character than of action; and all the lead roles were middle-aged, giving the studios opportunity neither to cast from their stables of glamorous young talent nor to appeal to the growing audience of young moviegoers. Where many producers saw Dodsworth as a tale of immorality, Goldwyn saw it as the “story of a man who held on to his pride—and then surrendered his soul to love.” Sidney Howard wrote the screen adaptation.
Walter Huston, touring the country as Sam Dodsworth, desperately wanted to reprise the role on film. After a few dozen films, the public still did not recognize him as a movie star, but Goldwyn considered nobody else for the lead. He also cast the rest of the roles according to ability more than notability. Ruth Chatterton, in the waning of her short film career, got the part of Mrs. Dodsworth. Goldwyn’s casting director, Robert McIntyre, recommended newcomer Rosalind Russell for the role of Edith Cortwright, but Goldwyn signed Mary Astor instead. He also felt it was time to elevate David Niven, who had spoken a few lines in films off the lot, to a featured role with actual scenes. He was cast as an English playboy, the first of Fran Dodsworth’s lovers.
At the urging of Merritt Hulburd, who would be supervising the production of Dodsworth, Goldwyn had all but promised the project to director Gregory La Cava. After seeing William Wyler’s display of talent in These Three, however, Goldwyn activated the option clause in his three-year contract by giving him Dodsworth to direct. His new favorite went to New York the week before the Goldwyns’ March 4 departure on the Berengaria . He met with the producer and Sidney Howard, who liked him enough not to be put off by his obvious inability “to collaborate in the actual laying out or writing of the script.” Wyler’s shortcomings did not faze Goldwyn. He believed motion pictures were built best when there was a strong division of labor, compartmentalizing the artists.
One night before sailing, Goldwyn asked Wyler to join him and Frances at the Belasco Theater to see Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End. The drama was set on a New York street, between the exclusive East River Terrace Apartments and a series of squalid tenement houses, not unlike Street Scene. As the curtain came down, Goldwyn turned to Wyler and asked what he thought of the play. “Great! Great!” he said between bravos. Before they had left their seats, Goldwyn asked if he would like to direct it. Wyler was beside himself with excitement. Goldwyn had heard that Selznick had recently bid $150,000 for the film rights; so the next day, Goldwyn closed a deal for $165,000. “That was the great thing about Goldwyn,” Wyler said. “If there was some great material and he wanted it, he would just buy it, just like that.” He put $25,000 down as good-faith money and embarked for Europe. His organization was stronger than it had ever been: Two pictures would start filming upon his return, three more would be ready shortly after that, followed by Dead End.
“ SAMMY was wild with anticipation” over his first trip to Europe, Frances recalled, and Sam “was running him a close second.” Frances, however, found herself subjected to inexplicable hysteria. She did not want to leave her new home. She tried to explain herself to her husband, but she could not get the words out. Sam called her “plain crazy” and complained of her moods. During the crossing he did not know she repeatedly locked herself in the bathroom and wept. She had simply been overcome with forebodings of doom because everything had been going so well.
“So we went to London, Paris, the south of France and always I felt trouble staring at me,” Frances remembered. “Finally we took the ship for home. This was some relief, though not much.” April 13, a Monday, she was in the cabin, packing, when her husband staggered in and said, “Frances, all of a sudden I’m awfully sick.” He fell on his bed in pain and convulsed and vomited through most of the night. Once the ship docked, they went directly to Doctors Hospital in New York, where he was diagnosed as having intestinal toxemia. Frances felt instantly relieved when she saw Sam fighting with a nurse who insisted he drink a glass of bismuth. He had returned to his familiar dyspeptic self. His pain persisted, and the doctors recommended removing his gall bladder and appendix.
Frances was terrified. She dispatched Sammy to the West Coast, giving him so little information as to frighten him. Although she had agreed to let him change schools, she re-enrolled him in Black-Foxe Academy, to give the appearance that nothing had changed in their lives. He moved in with the Lehrs. For days, they and James Mulvey were the only people informed of Goldwyn’s surgery.
Within a week, Goldwyn seemed better, “complaining of boredom.” Frances allowed word of the operation out. Overnight, one hundred “get well” wires arrived, and flowers filled the room. His friends William Paley and Irving Berlin came to cheer him up, joking with him for several hours. Very early the next morning, Frances was summoned to the hospital. The stitches in Goldwyn’s incision had burst, ostensibly from all the laughter. The problem went deeper than that. His entire system remained poisoned, and he suddenly sank into a serious decline. A doctor pulled Frances aside and told her that her husband had one, maybe two, hours to live. He parked her in the corridor, while they waited to see if the medication they had tried would work some wonders.
In the midst of her fright, James Mulvey raced down the hall with news of his own. “Frances,” he said, “when Mr. Goldwyn made the deal for ‘Dead End’ he secured it with a down payment of twenty-five thousand dollars.” Frances told him she could not be bothered with such thoughts just then. Mulvey said he could not wait any longer, that the remainder of the money due to secure the rights to the play had to be paid by noon that day or they would have to forfeit the property. It was eleven-thirty. “And if Mr. Goldwyn doesn‘t—” stammered Mulvey, “well, it’s up to you, Frances.”
The ever-cautious Frances Goldwyn was forced to fight her own instincts and do what her husband had done by nature almost every day of his life—gamble. “Pay the money, Mulvey,” she said, as though she had just had some vision. “Sam’s going to get well. He’s going to make that picture. And it’ll be good. I’ve got that faith in God and Sam Goldwyn.”
Mulvey wrote the check. For days, Goldwyn lingered, getting neither better nor worse. While he was in extremis, Frances considered calling his twenty-four-year-old daughter, Ruth, then living in Los Angeles, whom he had not seen for more than a decade. But she did not.
The seriousness of Sam’s condition was revealed only to a trusted few. Frances answered the well-wishing wires with calm responses, as though everything were all right. “My mother’s attitude,” Sam Goldwyn, Jr., said years later, thinking of other such moments of crisis in her life as well, “was never to let on that she and my father were in any danger. ‘They must never know,’ she would say. She was absolutely paranoid that if anybody ever found out that they were in danger, they would come and take her house away. They must never know!” It was, evidently, the major reason she had perfected the rights to Dead End.
On Monday, May 11, surgeons operated on Goldwyn a second time, removing several feet of decayed intestine. During the following three weeks, he recovered in the hospital, then he rested at the Waldorf-Astoria until he was able to return home. A half-dozen motion pictures hung in the balance—unknown to the hundreds of workers whose livelihoods would also be affected. Even after he had come out of the woods, Frances was committed to keeping the world from knowing how sick he had been. So all business—Eddie Cantor in the final throes of his leaving Goldwyn, Alexander Korda
renegotiating Merle Oberon’s contract, Merritt Hulburd supervising the final scripts and casting of Dodsworth and Come and Get It, the production staff scheduling the shooting of background footage of Tahiti for The Hurricane, Mary Pickford anxious to close United Artists’ new partnership agreement with producer Walter Wanger, James Mulvey with the emergencies too big for him to handle alone—went through Frances.
Although it would be weeks before he could get to Los Angeles to oversee the commencement of photography on his next two pictures, Goldwyn ordered that it proceed. With nobody to oppose him, Howard Hawks began to turn Come and Get It into something all his own. He granted Jules Furthman new liberties with the script, and he cast the picture according to his taste. He started by giving the role of Swan Bostrom—a character Edna Ferber described as “the strongest man in the North woods”—to bony Walter Brennan. The director also put together his own shooting schedule and a budget $100,000 over what Goldwyn would have allowed. This news got Goldwyn’s blood boiling. He felt Hawks was taking advantage of his infirmity.
Meantime, Merritt Hulburd wired Frances, the insecure William Wyler was “HESITANT AS USUAL BUT HAVE NO DOUBT OF HIS ABILITY TO START AROUND JUNE FIRST.” After seeing Dead End that night with the Goldwyns, the director had spent several weeks in New York, during which time Sidney Howard discovered Wyler’s unique gift for translating the verbal into the visual. He wrote Hulburd that Wyler’s “presence in New York is not wasted ... because I am feeding him sequences at a great rate and he is already hatching any number of good ideas on the earlier portions of the picture.”
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