Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  Goldwyn felt good about Raffles, mostly that Niven had proved he could carry a picture. But just when Goldwyn was at last able to reap the benefits of having developed a certifiable new star, Niven returned home to join the Royal Air Force, unable to shake the “nasty feeling” that he might never see Hollywood again. “If when I get home,” Niven wrote Goldwyn in valediction, “I am told that they definitely have nothing for me to do, then the streak of light half way across the world will be Niven returning to Goldwyn!” Complained Goldwyn upon his departure, “Movies aren’t enough! Now I’ve got the whole World War on my hands!”

  Meantime, Goldwyn was engaged in battle against his own allies, the United Artists. Flanked by James Mulvey, James Roosevelt, and his attorney, Richard Dwight, he had marched into the annual stockholders meeting on January 16, 1939, and dropped a bombshell. Chaplin had sent his legal proxy; but Korda, Pickford, and Fairbanks were present when Dwight opened the meeting with a brief statement. It was an ultimatum based on his client’s feeling trapped in a blind alley: Like the old Goldwyn Company, UA lacked sufficient outlets for its product. Goldwyn, he said, wanted to be made its sole voting trustee. He did not want their stock, just the right to vote it, thus enfranchising him to elect his own board of directors. Without that power, Goldwyn did not see how he could deliver any more pictures to United Artists. He wanted all or he wanted out, and he intended to veto every proposition of his fellow stockholders until he got his way.

  Everyone sat in “shocked silence” until Chaplin’s attorney, Charles Schwartz, asked if he was serious. Dwight assured the stockholders that he was. Schwartz replied that his client would release Goldwyn from his United Artists contract, which had another three years to go, if he would surrender his stock—then worth some $500,000. Alexander Korda expressed equal astonishment at Goldwyn’s demands, and said he would agree to Schwartz’s settlement plan. Goldwyn, of course, refused.

  And he rejected everything else that was put before him that day. Formal adoption of the Silverstone Plan reached the floor, the very scheme he had helped devise by which producers would be rewarded for their productivity. Goldwyn alone said nay, though its passage would have earned him $200,000. As a business formality, Fairbanks requested permission to form a new company with outside capital, which would make pictures for UA to distribute. Goldwyn said he would veto that unless Fairbanks agreed to this new voting trust. “Sam,” Fairbanks said, “I’ve been your friend for many years, and now that I ask this thing, you attach this condition. Surely you don’t mean it?” Goldwyn simply replied, “Yes, I do.” Fairbanks left the room without another word.

  Korda requested permission to substitute pictures from his new company for those owed by his London Films—another technicality. Goldwyn dissented.

  The partners overrode Goldwyn on all the day’s proposals, insisting that these measures did not even require a vote. But the man everybody in Hollywood had been warned never to take on as a partner had made his point. The meeting adjourned with Charles Schwartz shouting at Goldwyn, “Get out, you punk ... and take your ‘Murdering Heights’ with you.”

  The United Artists partners could not ignore the fact that Goldwyn’s fifty pictures had been the mainstay of United Artists for the last fourteen years. But Murray Silverstone told a reporter from Fortune that if they let Goldwyn dominate the company, UA “would lose every producer it has.” Even Goldwyn’s friend David Selznick went on record saying there would be no “producer-parity” if Goldwyn gained complete control of the company. Dr. Giannini asserted that such successful filmmakers as Frank Capra, Leo McCarey, and Gregory La Cava would have come into UA had they not feared fighting with Goldwyn; it was well known around town that Walt Disney had left UA because of him.

  Two months after the board meeting, Goldwyn filed suit in the New York Supreme Court for a release from his United Artists distribution contract. The formation of Korda’s and Fairbanks’s new companies, allowing them to benefit from the Silverstone Plan, and permitting Korda to submit films from his new company, Goldwyn claimed, constituted breaches in his contract. Technicalities drove the case from one bench to another, until it landed in a federal court in April 1939. It went through legal gyrations for months, then got temporarily stuck when Douglas Fairbanks suddenly died in his sleep in December 1939.

  Mindful that he owned everything that sat on the United Artists lot (even though Pickford and Fairbanks owned the property), Goldwyn asked his advisers if there was anything to prevent his changing the studio’s name. They said there was not. One morning in 1939, the United Artists switchboard operators arrived for work and received orders to answer the telephones with the name of its owner—“Samuel Goldwyn Studios.” When “March of Time” came to film Goldwyn for some newsreel about the movies, he suddenly noticed a prop behind him, clearly marked “United Artists”; he ordered them to reshoot the interview without the prop. The United Artists brass plate at the entrance of 1041 Formosa Avenue was replaced with one bearing the name of the building’s landlord.

  Having just turned sixty, Sam Goldwyn began asserting himself with greater authority than ever. Still inventing himself, he set out to prove once and for all that he was a force in the industry, different from the hundreds of other independent producers—the “little promoters,” as he called them. From his corner office at Samuel Goldwyn Studios, he took on all comers—not just his UA partners but the industry at large. For years, Goldwyn had individuated himself by taking unpopular stands; the odd magazine piece on some controversial issue occasionally appeared under his byline. Throughout his years of legal battles with United Artists, he launched an argosy of press releases, each aimed at some common business practice of the major studios that he found offensive.

  He raged against “block booking,” that system by which theaters bought a studio’s entire yearly output. He called for the “abolition of the deadliest menace that has ever faced the motion picture industry—the practice of having two feature pictures on one program.” As early as 1934, Goldwyn had been exclaiming that the next important development in motion pictures would be not the perfection of color but the advent of television. In 1939, he was the only producer to stand up at the meetings of the Association of Motion Picture Producers and address the fact that “television has made tremendous strides technically ... [and] the television people are doing everything possible to keep the picture people out of their industry because they naturally foresee a conflict of interest.”

  Goldwyn went public with none of these visionary positions for the amelioration of society. “If you look at every one of those issues,” his son later observed, “you’ll see that they posed a threat to him, a small independent film producer. Getting support for those stands he took was the only way he saw that he could survive.”

  Goldwyn reveled in his high visibility. A picture and quote of Sam Goldwyn became essential to any article on Hollywood, totemic. “Boy,” he told a photographer that year at a big industry bash after Life had recently published an unflattering pose of him, “I don’t care how you take my picture just as long as you spell my name right.”

  WHILE the professional Goldwyn became more public, the personal man became more private, cut off, severing even the strands that bound him to his family. Sam and Frances continued to provide for each other, but their love seldom overstepped into intimacy. Emotionally, they lived separate lives. George Cukor, who often suffered pangs of resentment over the Goldwyn marriage pact, said, “Frances settled for bread and pretended it was cake.” Sammy, entering his teens, scraped for crumbs.

  Dinner at the Goldwyn house was served promptly at seven, prepared by a Swedish cook. Sam Goldwyn, Jr. , remembered almost always dining with his parents in the Laurel Lane house—except for the two or three nights a week when they were invited out and the two or three nights a week when they entertained. He was permitted to join the company if the guests were the Harpo Marxes, the Fred Astaires, or A. C. “Blumy” Blumenthal, a pint-sized dynamo who was the brain behin
d some of the industry’s biggest real estate and stock deals. Family fare was “very simple, beautiful food”: soup almost every night; broiled chicken, pot roast, or lamb stew served with salad; a light dessert, berries or applesauce. Thursday was cook’s night off, and the three Goldwyns usually went to Romanoff’s or Chasen’s.

  “The table conversation,” Sam Goldwyn, Jr., remembered, “would begin with the crimes of the day—somebody who was trying to kill him.” His father enjoyed starting the meal with some horrific tale of Hollywood—preferably at Louis B. Mayer’s expense. Then he would run through the rest of his activities. Before leaving the table for a card game, he would mechanically inquire about his son’s day. “No matter what I said about school made him express his great fear that I didn’t VALUE EDUCATION,” Sammy later recalled. “I could never quite satisfy him that I was getting an education.”

  Goldwyn did not even notice that his son was becoming a passionate reader. “My mother gave me the joy of books,” said Sam Goldwyn, Jr.; “my father gave me the power of books. But ours was not a home in which culture played a part. Movies were our life, not books.” As her husband got more caught up in himself, Frances found much solace in literature. She devoured every word she could find about French history, especially Marie Antoinette. She and Sammy often spoke to each other in French, but Sam resented it. As Sammy explained, “He didn’t like things going on that he didn’t understand.”

  Publicly they kept Sammy on a short leash. “Frances used to trot him out at parties,” remembered Mrs. Albert Lasker, “—long after the days when she would dress him up in his little party outfits. And Sam liked to make fun of him, sometimes to the boy’s face.”

  By 1939, Sammy had left Black-Foxe Academy and enrolled at Beverly Hills High School. Even there, he found his surname was more of a liability than an asset. But he began making friends as he grew into a tall, handsome young man. He swam on the school team, setting records in the breast stroke. After coming home from several meets repeatedly triumphant, he later recalled, “I was feeling very up. And my father gave me a terrible lecture about the elation of victory. He warned me to be careful. He loved victory, but he said if you enjoyed something too much it could be a serious problem. And then he’d tell me, ‘Success ruins more people in this business than failure.’”

  While Sam consistently shook his son’s confidence, Frances infused him with fear. From her mother, Frances’s feelings about Jews became more confused. She was perfectly comfortable being married to one, but she never let up in reminding her baptized son that he had to beware because he was Jewish. Just before Sammy began dating, he had wanted to attend a dancing school at the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades. “You can’t go there,” Frances warned him; “they don’t allow Jews.” When Sammy reeled off the names of several Gentile friends who were going there, Frances said, “That’s fine for them, but you’re different.” A few years later, Sammy broke his nose, leaving a slight bump in the middle of his otherwise Aryan features. “Mother,” he remembered, “was horrified I’d carry these scars for the rest of my life.”

  Frances’s paranoid reactions were little more than an extension of her mother’s continually bizarre behavior. Bonnie McLaughlin was still able to tyrannize Frances. She tried to create trouble for the Goldwyns at every turn, even though she lived off an allowance provided by her son-in-law On her holiday visits to Laurel Lane, she never failed to wear a big feather in her hat, knowing Frances still feared birds. More than once she reported Sam to the police for some imagined crime. She still wished Frances had married someone else; and a present to Sammy one year revealed who that was. She gave him a box of bookplates that read: “Ex libris: George Goldwyn.”

  Sammy entered what he later described as “a very bad year.” Suddenly Sam and Frances had an adolescent before them, and they had absolutely no idea how to handle him. To compensate for their years of inattention, they began to monitor his every move. “I got stubborn and resentful,” their son remembered, “My parents were right on top of me. It became important for me to get out, and nobody knew how to cope with it. There comes a point when a person just must get out.”

  One night, Sammy ran away. He did not get much farther than a friend’s house on a neighboring knoll in Beverly Hills. Sam’s first response was to call the police; Frances feared that her son had been kidnapped and said, “Nobody must know. They must never find out.” She called Ira Gershwin’s wife, Leonore, who calmed them through the night. At sunrise, the boy reappeared. Frances never figured out what had prompted his flight. Sam, the former teenage fugitive, was even more perplexed. “Can you imagine,” he asked Lee Gershwin, “running away from this house?” Just when there seemed no way the three Goldwyns could peacefully coexist under one roof, a mysterious stranger entered their lives.

  Hilde Berl was a small Austrian woman, whose dark brows accentuated her piercing blue eyes. A trained graphologist with psychological training and extraordinary insights into human behavior, she spent a few weeks each year in New York. Many people found her a “charlatan,” but at least as many had benefited from her almost mystical gifts. The Goldwyns met her in 1938 at a large party hosted by a mutual friend, and Frances said, “I hear you do such remarkable work. It is ridiculous to exploit you at a party.” Miss Berl said “Yes,” ending their conversation. A few months later, she appeared at a gathering in Los Angeles at which the Goldwyns were present. This time, Frances asked if she could write something for Miss Berl to examine. She said “Yes” again, and Frances wrote a few sentences. “Your only trouble,” Hilde Berl said upon analyzing her high cursive, full of big loops and cut-off endings, “is you can’t handle your son.”

  Frances froze, then uttered, “Can you tell me more?” Her eyes burning into Frances’s, Miss Berl asked, “Do you love him?” Frances reared in indignation and walked away.

  A few minutes later, she returned with her husband. Sam took Hilde Berl’s hand and said, “Listen, why do you go back to New York? We need you here.” She explained that her life was in Europe, but that she was spending the summer at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Frances asked if she could call on her. “She was very serious about it,” Hilde Berl remembered. “She wanted to know what she could do. She wanted to show she really loved her son.” At their first meeting in her hotel suite, Miss Berl asked, “Are you ever with him alone?” Several sessions followed Frances’s negative response, and then Miss Berl asked to see her husband.

  Before they even spoke, Miss Berl examined her subject. She saw “great pain” in Goldwyn’s face, which he masked by detaching himself from those around him. His clothes revealed his obsession with his image. “So you use him as an amusement,” she said, starting right in, “—to entertain your friends, right? What impression do you think you make?” The suddenness of Hilde Berl’s approach surprised Goldwyn, but he stayed to talk. “That boy,” he said more than once, “look at what he has. Much more than I started out with.” Goldwyn came back a few days later. “He was feeling plenty sorry for himself,” Miss Berl said, “but he was willing to talk about it.”

  Goldwyn’s pain originated from what he considered his mother’s early loss of interest in him, her seeming not to care when he ran away for America. Hilde Berl immediately turned the image around in Goldwyn’s mind. She proposed that young Schmuel was, in fact, his mother’s favorite child, the smartest and strongest. Miss Berl reminded Samuel Goldwyn of the pogroms Hannah Gelbfisz had lived through and the absolute poverty. “Perhaps,” she said to Goldwyn, “she thought one of her children could get out, would not have to be exposed to what she had endured. And that’s why she wanted him to go. She felt he was the only one capable of reaching that world out there and surviving on his own.”

  Before leaving Los Angeles, Miss Berl asked Sam and Frances to visit her together. They arrived in a state of anxiety, sorry she was leaving, afraid of where she was leading them in their treatment of Sammy. “If you really love him,” Hilde Berl said to the boy’s mother, “you mus
t send him away.” Frances would not hear of it. Miss Berl turned to Sam and asked, “How much do you think this boy can take?” She pointed out that everything Goldwyn had perceived as his son’s advantages—his money and his name—were the boy’s heaviest baggage. She urged the Goldwyns to enroll Sammy in a new private academy called Fountain Valley School of Colorado—“ where there were sons of more famous men than Sam Goldwyn, and richer men too.”

  “I can’t,” said Goldwyn, for no apparent reason other than not wanting to let go. “How much longer,” she asked, “are you going to make that boy suffer?” Goldwyn said, “Nobody speaks to me like that.”

  “Well, I do,” replied Hilde Berl. “And if you don’t wish to hear it, let’s not waste each other’s time any longer.” The Goldwyns exited.

  The following year, Frances learned that Miss Berl was to be in New York when they were. She called to say she was investigating the school in Colorado. From that day forward, only geography kept the Goldwyns and the therapist apart. Over the next decade, they saw each other regularly if infrequently.

  Fountain Valley School, in Colorado Springs, was founded by a group of educators eager to emulate in the West the best of the eastern preparatory schools. In the shadow of Pikes Peak, on a 1,600-acre hacienda-style ranch, the ten-year-old institution was a sheltered world unto itself for its one hundred pupils. “From the moment I walked in that place,” an adult Sam Goldwyn, Jr., recalled, “I sensed I belonged there. It was the kind of education I’d never dreamed existed, a master-student relationship, in which you could just go to the master for instruction. It was the first time anyone treated me with respect as a student.” Sammy saw his parents only during Christmas, Easter, and summer vacations. “I never really came back home after that,” he recalled, “and it became the turning point in my relationship with my father. We began to have a personal relationship.”