Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  Then he zeroed in on the one studio in town that needed him as much as he needed them. Radio-Keith-Orpheum had been a breeding ground for talent and speculative investment since its creation in 1928, but financially it had never taken root. In January 1940—after reaping its share of profits from the great harvest of 1939—the studio had earned its way out of receivership and trumpeted a “new RKO.” But the company was burdened with a new strain of film moguls whose interests were in business more than motion pictures, in distribution rather than production. Except for Walt Disney’s feature-length cartoons of the early forties (Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi), there was no consistency to the RKO product, as all their important producers, directors, and stars left them. RKO was so desperate to distribute Goldwyn’s films, they agreed to all his terms, including a 17.5 percent distribution fee—less than Goldwyn had paid United Artists. It was so low that RKO barely stood to profit, even from his successes. As the producer approached his thirtieth year in motion pictures, they were banking on Goldwyn’s best work’s still lying before him.

  AFTER Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxer proved to be a Broadway hit in 1939, Goldwyn decided he wanted the rights. “But Mr. Goldwyn,” cautioned his story editor Edwin Knopf, “it’s a very caustic play.”

  “I don’t give a damn how much it costs,” Goldwyn snapped back. “Buy it!”

  Miss Hellman had recently finished the third year of her three-year contract with the producer; but because of extensions upon her refusing inferior material he offered her, it had almost another two years to run. She began adapting her play about greed in the industrializing South on February 28, 1940. To his dying day, Goldwyn referred to the property as “The Three Little Foxes.”

  Lillian Hellman had based her well-made play on the maternal side of her family. Her first three versions had detailed the marriage between Regina Hubbard and Horace Giddens, a syphilitic Southerner. After ten drafts, Hellman had changed the venereal disease to a coronary condition, and the domestic drama of infidelity corroded into one of rapacity: Regina blackmails her way into a deal with her two shady brothers, who are attempting to take over a cotton mill they intend to run on cheap labor. Her scrupulous husband stands in their way, until she causes his death. Their daughter, Alexandra, disgusted to learn of her conniving, leaves Regina a loathsome victim of her own cupidity.

  As much as he liked the play, Goldwyn felt the average moviegoer would have trouble relating to the viperous Regina. He asked Miss Hellman to conventionalize the story without diminishing its impact. After two months, the playwright had not only opened up the script—creating scenes outside the Giddens house wherever possible—but also invented a new character, a newspaperman named David Hewitt, who became a love interest for Alexandra. After Willy Wyler read the script of The Little Foxes, his next assignment, he wrote Goldwyn: “I believe the main difficulty—in fact the only serious difficulty that confronted us with the play has been solved because Lillian was able to find, and add, the delightful character of David, who, together with Alexandra, make up a romance of the most delightful kind—a romance of two charming, kind, attractive and normal people, and ... together they contrast the somewhat abnormal characters of the story.”

  Everybody else Goldwyn listened to disagreed. Edwin Knopf argued that each scene with the new character caused Regina to lose “the sharp bitter materialistic quality that made her so great upon the stage.” Jock Lawrence agreed that too much love story detracted from the central themes of the play; but he thought the way to refortify Regina was in strengthening David, making him the dissenting voice of justice. Goldwyn borrowed bits of everybody’s thinking and told Lillian Hellman that in her next draft he wanted less love story but more bite to it. “By that time,” she recalled years later, “I had written over a dozen versions of ‘The Little Foxes,’ and I was through with it.” Her thoughts had also turned to a play about resistance against German fascism, called Watch on the Rhine. She recommended that three friends complete the rewrites—her former husband, Arthur Kober, Alan Campbell, and his wife, Dorothy Parker. Goldwyn understood that Hellman was written out on the subject, and he hired the trio. When Goldwyn realized they were boondoggling, he ordered the latest of his young story editors, Niven Busch, Jr., to dismiss them. “I’d rather cut my heart out than tell you what I’m about to tell you,” the polished Princetonian said upon entering Miss Parker’s office. “Niven,” she interrupted, “let me stop you. If you act on your first suggestion, no one will care less than I.”

  Wyler was excited about directing another Hellman work, the most literary screenplay he had ever been assigned. He regretted only that he had to make the film for Goldwyn, for he was starting to squirm under the producer’s thumb. His recent loanouts to other studios had felt like paroles. Directing Jezebel and The Letter at Warner Brothers had not only resulted in some of his finest work (both Academy Award nominees for Best Picture) but had been pleasant experiences. Warner Brothers reflected their pride in having Wyler direct for them in all their billing and publicity.

  When Wyler returned to his home studio, his ill will toward Goldwyn festered. He hired a publicity man of his own; and he told several friends that the theme of exploiting cheap labor in The Little Foxes interested him so much because it was the story of Sam Goldwyn. He eyed Warner Brothers longingly. In addition to the nicer treatment there, they had Bette Davis—his favorite actress, former lover, and the only person he could envision playing the role of Regina on the screen.

  Realizing that Wyler had become his most important piece of manpower, Goldwyn instructed Lynn Farnol to start drumming up publicity for him, plenty of write-ups about his upcoming assignment on The Little Foxes. Goldwyn took to inviting Wyler to play gin rummy with him, foolproof pocket money Wyler could never resist. He also agreed to amend the director’s much-extended contract, taking him off the weekly treadmill for a new two-year deal; it guaranteed him $75,000 for each of two pictures annually, plus 10 percent of the profits. And Goldwyn went to Jack Warner to borrow Bette Davis.

  The very idea was ridiculous. Ever since she had challenged her contract in court in 1936, Warner Brothers had improved the quality of the roles they offered Miss Davis, and they firmly refused ever to loan her out. Warners’ policy may have cost her many good parts, but they had turned her into the current champion at the box office and at the Academy Awards. Goldwyn’s request, like all of its kind in the past five years, was denied.

  Jesse Lasky had just hit bottom of the biggest dip of his roller coaster career. Nothing kept him going except his eternal optimism and one good idea—the life story of Alvin C. York, a mountaineer from Tennessee who went off to the Great War a conscientious objector, only to return its “greatest civilian soldier.” Ever since Sergeant York’s ticker-tape parade up Fifth Avenue in 1919, Lasky had envisioned a film of his story; but the soldier told the producer that his life was not for sale. With America about to become the great arsenal for democracy, Lasky approached him again, this time changing York’s way of thinking with a $50,000 check, enough to finish the Bible school York was building back home. There was only one actor Lasky could see in the role, probably his only means of securing a production deal in town—Gary Cooper.

  Lasky borrowed $25,000 on his life insurance to cover the check he had written York and peddled his story to the major studios, promoting the possibility of Cooper’s being involved. All except one turned him down, declaring war pictures dead. Harry Warner, a superpatriot, insisted that his brother make a deal.

  Then Jack Warner told Lasky to think of some other actor for the part. During Goldwyn’s production hiatus, Cooper had appeared in Meet John Doe for Frank Capra at Warners, and the studio head said there was no way Sam Goldwyn would ever agree to loan Cooper out for a second Warners picture. Feeling nobody else could pull off the role, Lasky humbly went to his former brother-in-law; he knew full well that Sam had not forgiven him for his actions twenty-five years earlier. To his astonishment, Sam assured him that he
had no objection to loaning Cooper for the part. Lasky returned triumphant, and he later remembered Jack Warner’s reaction as one of incredulity. Warner got Goldwyn on the telephone. “Sam,” Lasky overheard, “I understand you’re loaning us Gary Cooper for the York picture.... That’s wonderful, Sam—I can’t express my appreciation for ... I can? ... How? ... You’re kidding! ... Bette Davis is our biggest star! I can’t do it!” Whereupon Warner hung up.

  In a note as well-timed as it was cordial, Goldwyn then reminded Warner of a recent $425,000 gambling debt. “The wolf has hit me very hard,” Jack Warner wrote back. “I would like to settle the deal for $2,500.00 [their code for $250,000]. I will appreciate it if you will do this. Someday I will do the same for you.... Nothing to do with the above. If you are willing to trade Cooper for Bette Davis, I am working on this in your behalf—the deal to be that you pay Cooper and we pay Davis.” Goldwyn agreed to both halves of Warner’s offer. It would be Bette Davis’s only loanout from Warner Brothers between 1937 and the expiration of her contract in 1949.

  Jock Lawrence tried to talk Goldwyn into letting Bette Davis play two roles in the film, Regina and her daughter. The producer resisted, because he had to think beyond this picture. He had no female stars under contract, and Alexandra had been made into a choice enough role to launch a young actress’s career. Recently there had been much talk in Hollywood of Teresa Wright, a fresh-faced ingenue debuting on Broadway in a small role in Life with Father. The next time he was in New York, Goldwyn caught a performance of the Clarence Day play at the Empire Theater. While the actors were still taking their curtain calls, Goldwyn went backstage and awaited the twenty-year-old. “Miss Wright was seated at her dressing table when I was introduced, and looked for all the world like a little girl experimenting with her mother’s cosmetics,” Goldwyn would remember. “I had discovered in her from the first sight, you might say, an unaffected genuineness and appeal.” He offered her a contract that night.

  In signing, Miss Wright joined a company of Broadway veterans, most of the original cast of The Little Foxes. Regina’s wheelchair-ridden husband, Horace, would be played by Herbert Marshall, who had just played Bette Davis’s husband in The Letter. On the set, Goldwyn paid particular attention to the ingenue, ensuring that the film captured Miss Wright’s freshness. “Teresa,” he called out from behind the camera one day in an effort to loosen her up, “let your breasts flow in the breeze!”

  Wyler and Gregg Toland, after four pictures together, had never collaborated so closely. Several of their scenes were to become classics because of their staging. “Movies are primarily visual, and ‘Little Foxes’ was very talky,” Wyler said years later, in one of his few explications of his work; “and so I tried to make the audience see ordinary things in a different way. With all the talk going on, I just wanted to draw them into the scene.” The opening sequence, around the dining room table, for example, is full of small character twitches, every one of which is picked up by a roving camera. Carl Benton Reid and Dan Duryea later discuss Horace’s safe-deposit box while they are in a bathroom: Father and son are shown shaving back-to-back, catching glimpses of each other in their opposing mirrors, sudden close-up reflections of each man punctuating the dialogue.

  Toland’s camera was most potent during the climactic scene in which the helpless Horace begs Regina to fetch his heart medicine. She refuses. The primary action in the scene is the struggling man, forced to totter from his wheelchair up the stairs; but according to Wyler, “what is interesting here is the wife. The scene is her face, what is going on inside her. You could have him out of frame completely, for example, just hear him stagger upstairs, coughing, whatever. It was, of course, more effective to have him in the background out of focus trying to get upstairs.” Toland-just back from loanout to Orson Welles, for whom he photographed Citizen Kane—had been experimenting with a technique called “deep focus,” in which the camera could record both a near and a far area at once. It allowed the director to achieve the effect he wanted, of making audiences “feel they were seeing something they were not supposed to see. Seeing the husband in the background made you squint, but what you were seeing was her face.” Years later, Lillian Hellman admitted that much of the film—that scene in particular—worked better than the play, all because of “Willy’s vision.”

  Precisely that created the most violent arguments ever on a Goldwyn picture. This time, however, Sam Goldwyn played referee. Weeks before the first day of shooting, Bette Davis developed her own ideas about the playing of Regina, which were in direct opposition to Wyler’s. “We fought bitterly,” the actress later acknowledged in describing her third collaboration with the director. “I had been forced to see Tallulah Bankhead’s performance. I had not wanted to. A great admirer of hers, I wanted in no way to be influenced by her work. It was Willy’s intention that I give a different interpretation of the part.” But after seeing the Bankhead version—“ etched in acid”—Davis insisted that that was the only way to play the part. Wyler thought Regina was a complex character, still full of the charms that had attracted her husband in the first place. He believed the actress secretly resented playing the mother of a seventeen-year-old and was trying to distance herself from the role by overdoing her makeup and resisting any subtleties in the character that might humanize her. Wyler had had the same experience with Ruth Chatterton when she played Fran Dodsworth; but this time he was up against the screen’s quintessential bitch-goddess.

  Fur flew. Wyler resorted to his standard routine of repeated takes to break down his actress, but she would not bend. If anything, Miss Davis’s performance became more venomous. They were heard screaming at each other on the set and off, their disagreements assuming the stridency of lovers’ quarrels. Goldwyn could barely assert himself between these two iron wills: He could but remind Davis that Wyler had already helped her deliver her best performances; and he told the director that “she must know what she’s doing, because she’s made a damned good career out of playing these bitches.” After a few weeks of standing up to her director, the star phoned in sick.

  “Hollywood was licking its chops this morning over rumors and counter-rumors regarding Bette Davis,” Hedda Hopper clucked on her May 21, 1941, radio broadcast of movieland news. “Some say she isn’t ill, and she’s definitely out of ‘Little Foxes’ because she’s rowing with director Willy Wyler.... Others claim she’s going to have a baby, and still more say she’s having trouble with her husband.” Miss Hopper adopted the studio’s party line and dismissed the gossip as nonsense. For the next three weeks, Wyler shot around the absent star.

  Miss Davis returned to the picture more vigorous than ever. The passionate arguments were over, but the basic disagreement about the character was not. For the most part, Davis got her way, until one afternoon, when she refused to reshoot a scene Goldwyn wanted filmed again. Miss Davis went to her dressing room and changed into her street clothes. Goldwyn stomped onto the set and suggested that she phone her lawyer. He warned her that the rest of the cast would remain in costume until she returned and that he would sue her for all costs until they resumed work. She disappeared for a few minutes, apparently to consult with her attorney and accountant. Minutes later, she was back before the cameras.

  Goldwyn tied his impeccable production together with a score by an Iowan who had almost no film-composing experience. That Meredith Willson—who had once toured with John Philip Sousa’s band—had recently written some of the score to Chaplin’s Great Dictator was recommendation enough to Goldwyn.

  The Little Foxes was a great success. Lines formed outside Radio City Music Hall and every other theater where it played. The press was unanimously enthusiastic, almost all critics rating it higher than the play. One of the most respected members of the new wave of young film critics, James Agee in Time, quibbled over Bette Davis’s mimicking Tallulah Bankhead’s performance so closely, and wrongly blamed Wyler. But almost everyone else marveled at the film. The Motion Picture Academy nominated The Little
Foxes for nine Oscars—including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actress, and two for Supporting Actress (Patricia Collinge and Teresa Wright)—the most Goldwyn had ever received for a single produc tion. He was back at his former cruising altitude, but still no higher. His film took home no trophies that year.

  After five Goldwyn films—not counting The Winning of Barbara Worth—Gary Cooper was at the acme of his popularity; but his most successful roles had all been off the Goldwyn lot. In the last year alone, he had limned two of his most memorable characters—the near-suicidal hero in Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe and Sergeant York, for which he won an Oscar. Goldwyn constantly berated his story department for failing to find exciting material for Cooper. He needed a quick fix of pure inspiration.

  Billy Wilder—born Samuel Wilder in 1906 in Galicia, not far from Sam Goldwyn’s birthplace—had become a name to every producer after only five years in America. The former free-lance writer (and occasional gigolo) in Vienna, then Berlin, fled Germany while the Reichstag was still smoldering. He arrived in Hollywood in early 1934 with an offer to write a screenplay from one of his stories for $150 a week. His English vocabulary then consisted of little more than popular song lyrics, but his affection for American jargon made learning the language easy for him. He and his collaborator, Charles Brackett, specialized in sophisticated farce, brittle humor that was hard on the outside and romantic within. By the end of the decade, he was writing some of the slyest English dialogue ever to make its way onto the screen—including Garbo’s in Ninotchka. After a particularly frustrating experience watching one of his scripts get mangled at Paramount, Wilder decided it was too frustrating to write material that he could not direct.