Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  The next fifty were another matter. Milestone rewrote much of the dialogue into what Miss Hellman would later call “a sort of Gregory Ratoff patois.” Bigger changes followed. “I understood that you were satisfied with the script and would not begin to add to it your own particular director’s imagination and knowledge,” Hellman wrote Milestone on February 19, 1943. “I was, therefore, shocked to find that you are evidently not satisfied with the script, and that you seem to feel no hesitancy in basically changing not only the sequence of the story, but its characters, and its plot.” Miss Hellman said, “just such goings-on is the reason why decent writers don’t like to work in Hollywood. It is an ugly and insulting conception of writing. Art is not made by democratic meetings, with contributions.”

  Each day on “the Russian story” lessened Hellman’s faith in both the project and the producer. “My letter may not have dampened his enthusiasm,” she wrote Goldwyn about Milestone, “... but his ‘suggestions’ have definitely dampened mine. They weren’t ’suggestions‘: they were basic changes, and as I wrote Milly [Milestone] it was not so much that he should have wanted to make them, as it was the nature of the ones he wished to make.” In her growing disinterest, Miss Hellman, atypically, almost never fought a single point to the finish. Goldwyn even sent her several telegrams egging her on to disagree whenever she felt her script was being harmed. “I LOVE YOU TOO MUCH TO DO ANYTHING YOU FEEL SO STRONGLY AGAINST,” he wired. “AND I LOVE YOU TOO MUCH TO TELL YOU ABOUT IT IN A TELEGRAM,” she replied, then sat on her hands.

  Miss Hellman attended the picture’s casting sessions but failed to protest any of the choices until after the film was released. Walter Huston and Ann Harding, whom Warners had just starred in Mission to Moscow, headed an all-American company of actors. A handsome, dark-haired newcomer, just seventeen, named Farley Granger was hired to play Damian opposite Teresa Wright. Only days before filming—after rehearsals and costume fittings—Goldwyn’s only contract star broke it to the producer that she was pregnant. Goldwyn always suspected Niven Busch, whom he had recently fired, of inseminating her just so she would not have to play so small a part in the picture. Goldwyn borrowed Darryl Zanuck’s latest discovery, Anne Baxter, for the role. He hired Aaron Copland to write the music and Ira Gershwin the lyrics for several folk songs. Again Miss Hellman expressed nothing less than pleasure at the choices. She would have been welcome on the set, to speak her piece at any time; but Hellman stayed away for the entire shoot.

  At the end of production, Goldwyn saw an assembly of a scene he felt needed to be reshot and rewritten. He asked Frances to contact Miss Hellman. After three weeks with no response to her letter, Frances asserted herself more aggressively. “WE FEEL VERY STRONGLY THAT A FEW SCENES SHOULD BE ADDED IN ORDER TO CLEAR UP LAST PART OF PICTURE,” she wired on July 10. “COULD YOU POSSIBLY COME OUT IMMEDIATELY TO SEE IT. YOU WILL THEN I’M SURE SEE WHAT’S NEEDED AS I KNOW IF YOU DO ONE WEEK’S WORK THIS WILL BE THE BEST PICTURE YOU OR SAM EVER HAD.”

  Hellman went west. Forty minutes into the rough cut of the film, she started to cry, first quietly to herself, then histrionically. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Goldwyn yelled. “How dare you cry!”

  “Don’t tell me when to cry,” Hellman replied. “You’ve turned it into junk.” Over the next few minutes, the film still running before them, the two argued so violently that the projectionist came out of his booth to prevent mayhem. “You let Milestone turn this into a piece of junk!” she screamed. “It will be a huge flop, which it deserves to be.” She insisted she was through listening to Goldwyn ever again. She returned to her hotel room, where, as she remembered, she cried all day.

  At five o‘clock, Goldwyn’s secretary called Miss Hellman to say her boss had gone home and wished to see her. A taxi drove her to Laurel Lane and waited for her in the large courtyard. As she entered the house, Goldwyn shouted, “I hear you tell people that Teresa Wright was your discovery!”

  “What does this have to do with anything?” she asked.

  “Answer my question,” he demanded.

  “No,” she said. “I will not answer any questions. I told you this afternoon, I take no more orders from you. Ever.”

  Goldwyn commanded her to leave. “I will not get out of this house,” she said, “until you have left this room.” All the color draining from his face, he reissued his order. She restated hers. They stared each other down, and he blinked first, crying out for Frances. She ran into the room, trying to make peace, and he stormed up the stairs. Upon his exit, Hellman walked out the front door.

  A few weeks later, many people walked out of the preview of The North Star in Inglewood. But that did not shake Goldwyn’s confidence in the film. He pleaded with Charles Skouras to help him get bookings in Los Angeles theaters before the first of the year, because “THIS PICTURE HAS GREAT CHANCE OF RECEIVING ACADEMY AWARD.” In setting up a screening for Arthur Sulzberger in New York, he unabashedly referred to the film as a “classic.”

  The North Star opened in early November 1943, at a time when political convictions often ruled reviewers’ sensibilities. Most of the New York press found the picture moving enough to compensate for what Bosley Crowther in the New York Times called its “departures from reality.” Henry Luce was mad for the picture, and Time called it a “cinemilestone.”

  The film critic at The Nation, James Agee, found the documentaries being produced as part of the Army Orientation Series far more effective.In its basic design Lillian Hellman’s script could have become a fine picture: but the characters are stock, their lines are tinny-literary, their appearance and that of their village is scrubbed behind the ear and “beautified”; the camera work is nearly all glossy and overcomposed; the proudly complicated action sequences are stale from over-training; even the best of Aaron Copland’s score has no business ornamenting a film drowned in ornament: every resourcefulness appropriate to some kinds of screen romance, in short, is used to make palatable what is by no remote stretch of the mind romantic.

  Agee, who later wrote the screenplay of The African Queen, conceded that the “picture represents the utmost Hollywood can do, within its present decaying tradition, with a major theme.”

  “I don’t care if this picture doesn’t make a dime,” Goldwyn said when The North Star was released, “just so long as every man, woman, and child in America sees it.” He tried to rally support for the film by appealing to his eighty-year-old friend, William Randolph Hearst. Goldwyn was still in disfavor with Hearst for having voiced his pleasure with Citizen Kane, and he tried to get back in his good graces by shipping a print of The North Star to him at Wyntoon, the ranch to which he had retreated when he was told that San Simeon was an obvious target in the eventuality of a Japanese attack on California. “YOU ARE A VERY GREAT PRODUCER SAM BUT I THINK A GOOD AMERICAN LIKE YOURSELF OUGHT TO BE PRODUCING PRO-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA INSTEAD OF PRO-RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA,” wired WRH after viewing it. “THANK YOU FOR YOUR WIRE AND FOR THE COMPLIMENT,” Goldwyn replied. “I ASSURE YOU THAT ‘THE NORTH STAR’ WAS NOT MADE AS PROPAGANDA FOR ANYTHING BUT PURELY AS ENTERTAINMENT AND THE LOCALE MIGHT JUST AS WELL HAVE BEEN POLAND, HOLLAND OR ANY AMERICAN FARM COMMUNITY.” Even though several Hearst critics liked the film, all favorable reviews of it were pulled from his syndicate. He issued an order not to print a word about the film, except to smear it as red propaganda.

  The North Star had its fans, seemingly in proportion to their involvement in the war effort. A special screening in Washington for a dozen senators was a success; and Lowell Mellett heartily endorsed it. But after a big opening week, the public showed no interest in it. For the first and last time in his career, Goldwyn sold off the rights to one of his films. By then he would kid, “When Stalin got depressed, he ran that picture.” Later, as the cold war heated up, twenty-two minutes’ worth of sympathetic references to the Soviets were deleted and stock footage of the Hungarian revolt of 1956 was inserted, turning The North Star into an anti-Communist action picture.

  Lillian Hell
man never stopped bemoaning the bastardization of her script. After The North Star opened, she aired all her grievances in a long interview in the New York Times. In her memoirs twenty-five years later, she maintained that her screenplay “could have been a good picture instead of the big-time, sentimental, badly directed, badly acted mess it turned out to be.”

  More than the botching of this one movie had been bothering her. Lillian Hellman felt Sam Goldwyn had played dirty pool with her three-year contract, then entering its eighth year. After The North Star, Goldwyn scavenged his larder of unproduced properties and sent one to the writer as her next assignment. “I don’t agree with this method of handling the Hellman situation,” James Mulvey wrote Goldwyn on the subject. “Hellman we know will not agree to do [it] and I feel you have no intention of doing it or wanting her to do it.” Goldwyn proceeded all the same.

  During the resultant contract extension, Hellman bumped into Joe Schenck in the dining car of the Twentieth Century, where they discussed her bondage to Goldwyn. Schenck said he would help secure her release by signing a new contract with her. He handed Miss Hellman a menu and told her to write on the back of it the terms she wanted. The next morning, over breakfast at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, Schenck signed it. Neither fully believed in the menu’s legality, but it carried enough weight to put her release in motion.

  “I was the first writer ever to pay my way out of a contract to Sam Goldwyn,” said Lillian Hellman. “I owed him one more script and he said he’d let me out for forty thousand dollars. It was the meanest goddamned gesture I’d ever heard of.” On September 18, 1944, Lillian Hellman signed a three-page document that officially terminated her Goldwyn contract (which dated back to January 1936) once the sum of $27,500 had been paid. Goldwyn and Miss Hellman hardly saw each other ever again.

  In the saber-rattling spirit of 1943, The North Star picked up six Academy Award nominations, mostly in the crafts. It took home no trophies. Most Oscars that year went to more romantic evocations of war: For Whom the Bell Tolls and the year’s big winner, Casablanca. The Best Actress Oscar went to Jennifer Jones in her first starring role, The Song of Bernadette. It was a kind of annunciation of the wave of immensely popular religious films (such as Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s, with Bing Crosby) that would console the war-worried nation during the next few bloody years.

  Between March and September of 1942, the Office of War Information tallied 260 feature films dealing with some aspect of the war, at home or abroad. The OWI still wanted “war aims and war progress impressed and re-asserted on America’s conscience”; but it discouraged “the industry’s undue emphasis on the exciting, blood-and-thunder phrases of the war and its sloughing of equally significant problems in civilian life as well as of the basic issues of the struggle and what is implied in the peace after victory.” Boxoffice editor Maurice Kann said the nation’s exhibitors felt the same. Their new cry was: “Give us light stuff. Give us comedies, slanted with the war if you like. Give us serious war pictures, of course, but please, Mr. Producer, exercise a little restraint.”

  After thirty years of considering comedies as but the mortar between his dramatic works, Goldwyn made them the building blocks of his career. He continued to develop movies about the fighting on each of the fronts, even one about the Army band; but over the next four springs, he produced only The North Star and five comedies. He began talking to reporters about the need for “escapist” pictures—to “give people an opportunity to forget for an hour and a half the troublesome and perturbed world we live in.”

  Wartime Washington became a popular venue for motion picture plots. Basil Rathbone, in his sixth outing as Sherlock Holmes, cemented ties between the two English-speaking powers by solving a 1943 spy mystery there; Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, and Charles Coburn made the most of the housing shortage in the nation’s capital that year in George Stevens’s The More the Merrier. And Sam Goldwyn bought a story from Leonard Spigelgass and Leonard Q. Ross called “The Washington Angle.” Its sinuous plot involved a bungling ex—foreign correspondent who tries to win back his job by cracking a spy ring. Goldwyn sent a draft of the absurd script to Charles MacArthur, hoping he could dress it up enough for Cary Grant—who had become Hollywood’s most debonair leading man.

  “I happen to think that farce needs more solid foundation than comedy and the present structure seemed shaky to me and badly motivated here and there,” MacArthur wrote Goldwyn in refusing the project. He also questioned Goldwyn’s choice of casting. “My vote,” he said, “would be Bob Hope, because I think he can get away with more inconsistencies than Grant, whom I prefer to see.” Goldwyn completely rethought his movie by drawing a bead on the comic talent fast becoming the most popular in the world.

  Goldwyn negotiated with Y. Frank Freeman, who ran Paramount, for the release of Bob Hope as the balance of payment on their Gary Cooper-Billy Wilder trade the year before. He hired a series of gag writers to plant punch lines throughout the script. Wishing some of the success of the recent Road to Morocco might rub off on him, Goldwyn also drafted that film’s director, David Butler, and the series’ leading lady, Dorothy Lamour. Austrian-born director Otto Preminger played the Nazi heavy, one of his few screen roles before embarking on a controversial directing career.

  The film ended up being called They Got Me Covered. Its bang-up business softened the blow of the reviews, which mostly shifted the spotlight from the producer to the star.

  Goldwyn could not resist developing another Hope picture, this time applying the “Goldwyn touch.” In order to get the most out of the $133,500 he was paying Paramount for twelve weeks of the star’s services, he intended to back him up with $2 million worth of Technicolor, fairytale art direction by Ernst Fegte (a German refugee Goldwyn called “Faggoty”), a rich score by David Rose, and plenty of pulchritude. He also invested heavily in the script, which was pulled together by Don Hartman, a forty-year-old collaborator on several “Road” pictures and the latest “genius” to join Goldwyn’s staff, as a writer and associate producer.

  The Princess and the Pirate was custom-made for Bob Hope. He played Sylvester Crosby, a loud-mouthed vaudevillian of the 1740s, who boards a merchant ship in the West Indies and finds himself in the company of a princess, running out on the marriage her father has arranged for her. Brigands seize the ship and the princess and Sylvester. One-liners and desperate schemes again rescue the star, in a plot all but identical to his preceding venture—except for the ruffled shirts, the sea battles, the mutinies, and the treasure map tattooed on Sylvester’s chest. He even does a quick turn at the Bucket of Blood Tavern, performing with “Ye Goldwyn Girls.” Ninety-five minutes later, the princess’s father sails to the rescue, then permits her to marry any man she chooses. Sylvester winds up for a romantic clinch at the fade-out, only to have the princess walk right past him and hurl herself at one of the king’s mariners—Bing Crosby. “I work my brains out for nine reels,” Hope says to the camera, “and some bit player from Paramount comes over and steals my girl. That’s the last picture I’ll ever make for Goldwyn.”

  It was, but not for lack of success. It became one of the year’s biggest hits. Paramount kept their star on a short leash after that, limiting him to movies on their own lot when he was not back at the front lines. Goldwyn was riding too high to be upset. He was taking in so much money, his accounting firm of Olvany, Eisner & Donnelly in New York recommended liquidating Samuel Goldwyn, Inc., and establishing “collapsible corporations” for each new picture. The goal of these maneuvers was “to convert ordinary income into capital gains,” with its more favorable tax schedule, and to benefit from certain depreciation tactics. Just by pushing paper around, Goldwyn made $800,000 from his studio property in 1942 alone. On top of his six-figure salary, there were now big profits from his pictures. His stock portfolio thickened. His net worth climbing past $10 million—$3 million invested in war bonds—he handily met his 1944 income tax bill of $578,020.15. What was more, Goldwyn had just signed a
man he believed was the greatest discovery in motion pictures since Eddie Cantor.

  Goldwyn had pursued Danny Kaye for several years, ever since seeing him perform his zany antics and patter songs at the Martinique in New York. At the start of 1941, Kaye all but stole the reviews from Gertrude Lawrence in Lady in the Dark, in which he sang a breathless number called “Tchaikowsky”—reciting the tongue-twisting names of forty-nine Russian composers in about as many seconds. By late October, he had left the cast to headline in another show, Let’s Face It.

  Goldwyn kept trying to sign him to a motion picture contract, but the new star stalled, weighing several studio propositions. “Danny must make his own choice,” wrote agent John Hyde from Hollywood to his boss, William Morris, in the New York office. “We here would very likely favor Goldwyn because as an individual he would be Danny’s employer, producer and sponsor. Furthermore, Goldwyn is ripe and eager to make stars with comparative unknowns, and of course we believe with Goldwyn’s help Danny must reach the top in movies.” After two years of patience and persistence, Goldwyn got his commitment to make movies for him.

  There was never any question of Danny Kaye’s phenomenal talent as a singer, dancer, or comedian. But once Goldwyn had him in Hollywood, he realized why none of the other studios had signed him. The dark-haired triple threat (born David Daniel Kaminsky), with his wild eyes and pronounced nose, photographed badly. “In that first screen test,” Frances Goldwyn later remembered, “Danny’s face was all angles and his nose so long and thin it almost was like Pinocchio’s. More tests were made. Then more. In each a new makeup was tried and different lightings. And none was good.” Some people suggested he looked too “sinister,” a euphemism for Jewish. The uninhibited Harry Cohn at Columbia said he had not signed Danny Kaye because “he looked like a mountains comic.”