Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  Shortly before turning eighteen, Sammy enlisted, passing the qualifying examinations for the Army Specialized Training School. He would stay at Virginia until called, at which time he wanted to apply for Military Intelligence.

  For the first time, the Goldwyns were not together for the holidays. It was lonely for all three of them. Sammy spent a blue Christmas in New York with the Irving Berlins. Sam and Frances offered no resistance to their son’s decision to join the military.

  “Sammy is now in the Army—he was very anxious to join and we did not want to stop him,” Goldwyn wrote in a surprising letter to his daughter, Ruth; “so pretty soon you will have a General as a brother.” Perhaps envisioning Christmases yet to come, a somewhat reformed Goldwyn also sent “all my love to the children, yourself and Mac.” What was more, over the next few years Goldwyn hired his son-in-law as an assistant art director on several films and even allowed him screen credit. Sam invited the two Capps children to swim and play tennis at Laurel Lane, but he hardly got to know them.

  Sammy marked time at college the rest of that term, awaiting orders from the Army and running up bills beyond his $175 monthly allowance. “With the exception of a little mistake like me you have plenty to be thankful for as does Mother,” Sammy wrote his father on their nineteenth wedding anniversary. “Each of you got a fine deal in the other. I don’t think that any son ever had a finer Father & Mother. I have plenty to be proud of.” Goldwyn replied that it wasvery comforting to hear that at last you realize how much we mean to you. You mean just that much to us. You are what we live for, and what I am working for. My great hope in life is that eventually you will be able to take over. When you do I know you will make a great success of it, as I have great faith in you. You are intelligent and understanding, and I know you will be a much greater man than I ever was. You’ll have a much better background than I had, and I know you are going to use it.

  Not having seen his son for most of a year, he raised his allowance to $250 a month.

  “When I see some of your pictures I realize all that I have got to learn,” Sammy wrote his father. “I only wish this war would get over. The day I get my discharge from the Army, I want to start.” More immediately, he studied hard for his first-year examinations, and planned to celebrate his Army induction with a junket to New York City. His parents talked for weeks of joining him there for a round of theater and parties with the Berlins, the Sulzbergers, and the Harrimans. This time they kept their word.

  “I can’t tell you what a pleasure it was for me to spend those few days with you in New York last week,” Sam wrote Private Goldwyn on July 5, 1944.

  I had the best time I’ve ever had in New York. You are so nice to be with, and are such a good companion. And it made me very proud to see how much everyone who met you liked you....

  I know that you’re going to be a great soldier, and that everyone will like you, wherever you are.

  God bless you, my boy, and all the luck in the world to you.

  With all my love—

  Daddy

  Sammy reported to Camp Walters, thirty miles from Fort Worth, Texas, outside a town called Mineral Wells. Just eighteen, he set his sights on officer candidate school, armed for the first time with his father’s admiration.

  The young man had evidently known exactly what he was doing just a few years earlier when he had tried to run away from home. As Sammy later admitted, “The best thing I ever did was get out of that house.”

  18 Best Years

  ASOLDIER’S MOTHER, Frances Goldwyn became a fiend for news, addicted to every newspaper and magazine she could get her hands on. With keen interest she read the August 7, 1944, number of Time, featuring Heinz Guderian, the new Nazi chief of staff, on the cover. Frances kept flipping to the “The Nation” section, where the lead article that week was called “The Way Home.”

  Beneath a large photograph of soldiers hanging out of an old train—“Home Again!!” chalked on its side—ran a story about 370 members of the ist Marine Division, home for a thirty-day furlough after twenty-seven months of battle. En route from San Diego to the East Coast, the Time reporter captured the thoughts of the marines and the “strange embarrassment” of their return. “Somebody’s making money, and it isn’t us,” said a red-haired sergeant from Rochester after paying forty cents for a beer. Another marine asked, “Your wife know you’re coming?” to which his comrade replied, “Sure, I wired her from Chicago.” One proud holder of the Silver Star, awarded for killing seven hundred Japanese on two successive nights, talked of his prewar life as a cabdriver. Many of the men discussed casualties.

  “I was very moved,” Frances later recalled after reading that piece in Time, “and I thought, ‘What’s going to happen to these boys when they get back to their hometowns?’ I told Sam he should make a picture treating the readjustments of veterans.”

  Frances remembered Sam’s balking for months. Ever since The North Star, he had been gun-shy of any serious war-related project. Still, every few days she reminded him of all “the drama that was inherent in the situation of veterans returning home,” until at last he told his wife “flat out he’d never do it.” In fact, on August 5, 1944, Goldwyn sent an interoffice communication to his story editor Kay Brown, asking her to register two titles for a possible motion picture: “Home Again” and “The Way Home.”

  That season, Goldwyn learned from an agent that no less a writer than MacKinlay Kantor was passing through town and that he was poking around for a Hollywood assignment. Kantor was the author of two Civil War novels and was serving as a London-based correspondent, flying in combat missions with the U.S. air forces and the R.A.F. over enemy territory. Goldwyn saw signs all around of the story Kantor should write. John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano, a story that tolled the imminent end of the war in Europe, had just been sold to the movies; Hersey had another story in the marketplace, called “Joe Is Home.” David Selznick’s current release was a moving film called Since You Went Away, about an American family’s adapting to the head of the household’s being away at war. It struck Goldwyn that the time was ripe to prepare that story of the soldiers coming home.

  Goldwyn told Kantor his idea for a postwar picture. “Returning soldiers! Every family in America is part of this story,” he said. “When they come home, what do they find? They don’t remember their wives, they’ve never seen their babies, some are wounded—they have to readjust.” Goldwyn showed him the Time article and said he wanted Kantor to write the story lowever he saw fit—“the story you have to tell from your own knowledge.” Goldwyn offered him $20,000—$7,500 for a screenplay treatment, the rest for the story itself. On September 8, Kantor signed a contract and went to New York to write. It was one of the few times Goldwyn had ever given a writer carte blanche. He pinned no special hopes to the project, especially when he learned that Kantor intended to tell his story in free verse.

  Goldwyn turned his attention to more promising projects. He spent months negotiating for the life story of the man he would forever revere as the greatest hero of the twentieth century, Dwight D. Eisenhower. When Goldwyn learned that two other producers attached to the film refused to donate their profits to some charity, as he and the Supreme Commander of the Allied forces intended to do with theirs, he dynamited the whole deal. So began a cordial friendship that would last the rest of their lives. “In my father’s eyes,” Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., later remarked, “Eisenhower could do no wrong.”

  Goldwyn also grabbed at such commercial properties as Arsenic and Old Lace and Life with Father, but they slipped through his fingers. He never even had a chance at such best-sellers as The Razor’s Edge, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Seventh Cross, The Song of Bernadette, and Forever Amber. His difficulties in searching for story material were compounded by “the technical problem of casting”—as he explained to Stella Dallas’s author, Olive Higgins Prouty, who gave him first crack at her latest novel, Now, Voyager. He had to let that go to Jack Warner for Bette Davis, simply because “it was
unsuitable for the people whom we have under contract at the present time.” Fearfully Goldwyn watched a whole new generation of young stars—Gene Kelly, Jennifer Jones, Lauren Bacall, Van Johnson, Gene Tierney, even the ice-skating sensation Sonja Henie—capture more attention than his lineup of Danny Kaye, Teresa Wright, Virginia Mayo, and Dana Andrews.

  The war had made America more prayerful, and a host of “angel” stories was descending upon Hollywood. Such films as Here Comes Mr. Jordan, I Married an Angel, and The Horn Blows at Midnight had all succeeded at the box office. Frank Capra would send Henry Travers down from the stars as Clarence, an angel in quest of his wings, who helps James Stewart discover his worth in It’s a Wonderful Life. Goldwyn wanted such a story for himself. With rumors of David Niven’s imminent return to Hollywood, Goldwyn’s story advisers found just such a project for him and Teresa Wright among the heap of Hollywood rejects—Robert Nathan’s 1928 best-seller, The Bishop’s Wife.

  Goldwyn also needed material for Danny Kaye. Pat Duggan, a Goldwyn story editor, put out feelers to James Thurber, who said he would be willing to sell “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” for $25,000. Goldwyn was incensed. “The character is worth about $2,500, or at the top, $3,500,” he wrote Miriam Howell in his New York office. He ended up shelling out $15,000 for the rights, and $10,000 more for another Thurber favorite, “The Catbird Seat.”

  Goldwyn was also able to obtain the rights to a book that had attracted him while it was still in galleys. Few others saw the film possibilities of Gwethalyn Graham’s Earth and High Heaven, because it dealt with a subject almost never discussed in fiction or motion pictures.

  Anti-Semitism became a festering problem in the United States in the 1940s—“worse than it has been in years,” Goldwyn noted in a letter to Jack Warner. Rabbi Edgar Magnin suggested that “the country needed a scapegoat for the pain it was suffering, and so a lot of people said to themselves, ‘If there were no Jews, there’d be no Hitler.’” Earth and High Heaven was directed at that backlash. It was the story of a well-born Canadian Protestant girl and a poor but talented Jewish lawyer who want to marry; her anti-Semitic father disapproves. Goldwyn purchased the rights for $100,000 and considered it an investment in something greater than financial returns. “Personally,” he wrote his son, “I believe it is a great love story—and as for the conflict over the Jewish question, it’s something that has never been done before and that’s a contribution I want to make for the screen and I think it can be done through this great love story.”

  Ring Lardner, Jr., was the first to take a crack at it—shortly after co-writing the screenplay for Woman of the Year, the first of nine pictures that would team Spencer Tracy with Katharine Hepburn. Howard Koch, after writing Casablanca, completed four drafts before throwing in the towel. Elmer Rice, whose Counsellor-at-Law had touched on similar themes a decade earlier, wrote three versions himself. From the start, Goldwyn had envisioned casting a tall, dark-haired newcomer, Gregory Peck. In 1947, however, Darryl Zanuck bought the rights to an even bigger book on the subject of anti-Semitism, Gentleman’s Agreement, and Elia Kazan directed Peck in the film version. Goldwyn gradually lost interest in his project and after six years junked it. Not making that one film haunted him more than most of his failures.

  The only Goldwyn project that showed steady progress was MacKinlay Kantor’s novel in verse. “Just now I am extremely grateful to you for having instigated this story,” he wrote Goldwyn in October, seventy manuscript pages in; “I should not have begun writing it at this time except for your enthusiasm and compulsion.” By January, he was writing the screen treatment from his completed novel.

  Glory for Me follows three servicemen, honorably discharged for medical causes, who return to the same hometown. In peacetime Boone City (modeled after Cincinnati), they had come from different walks of life and not known each other; now the lives of the three veterans become enmeshed.

  The novel’s central figure is Fred Derry—“twenty-one, and a killer of a hundred men”—a former soda jerk, now an Air Force lieutenant decorated many times over. Joining him is Homer Wermels, seaman second class, who had left home engaged to the girl next door, only to return a drooling and convulsing spastic. The third passenger in the homeward-bound B-17 is Alton Marrow Stephenson III, Harvard ‘24, assistant vice president of the Cornbelt Trust and Savings, and now a sergeant. He returns to his wife, Milly, and their two grown children, and finds himself uncomfortable with their cushy lives.

  Kantor’s book is a cynical tale of readjustment. In chronicling but a few events—the arrival of each veteran at his home, being reunited with his family, a drunken night on the town—Kantor reveals the psychological problems peculiar to the men who had been overseas. The most significant plot development involves Fred’s discovering his wife, Marie—whom he had known less than two weeks before he married her and shipped out—with another man. He leaves her at the beginning of the novel and is drawn to Al’s daughter, Peggy, by the end. The rest of the 268 pages are bitter impressions of life for the returning warriors.

  The only writer Goldwyn thought could possibly translate the text into drama was Robert Sherwood. Unfortunately, Sherwood had given up screenwriting after Rebecca in 1940. Since then he had become a presidential aide and speechwriter and head of the overseas division of the Office of War Information. There had been rumors that he was eager to leave the government, so Goldwyn sent him Kantor’s treatment. He was impressed but said he was more interested just then in writing a war play of his own, “The Rugged Path.” Goldwyn told Sherwood he would wait until it was completed before assigning anyone else to the script. Pride, even more than practicality, made Goldwyn wait for the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. Goldwyn had become rich during the war, almost entirely off escapist comedies, but the serious trophies of his profession still eluded him. At sixty-five, he believed his only chance for realizing his dreams was in embracing the character who had carried him this far, that self-invention that stood for quality, “the Great Goldwyn.”

  As he became one of Hollywood’s leading purveyors of comedies during the war, so too did he become the number one butt of the town’s jokes. Goldwynisms—as his colorful misuses of English were popularly referred to—abounded. With so many gag writers working for him, hardly a lunch in Hollywood went by without somebody’s concocting a malapropism and passing it off as something Sam Goldwyn had just said to him. No Hollywood column was complete without a risible reference to Goldwyn. Myriads of funny sayings were thus falsely attributed to the producer: “We’ve passed a lot of water since then,” he purportedly told a long-lost friend; “I’ve been laid up with intentional flu”; “I would be sticking my head in a moose”; “Anything that man says you’ve got to take with a dose of salts.” Upon being informed that a sundial told time by the sun, Goldwyn was alleged to have remarked, “My God, what’ll they think of next?” Garson Kanin was certain his former boss never said, “A verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.” Chaplin took credit for sticking an old music hall gag on Goldwyn: “I can answer you in two words. Im possible.” At least a dozen different people have claimed Goldwyn uttered “Include me out” in their presence—on twelve different occasions. Averell Harriman often used the phrase during diplomatic negotiations and always credited his friend.

  In 1943, while Sammy was in college and the object of considerable ribbing from his schoolmates because of his father’s clownish image, Goldwyn sought somebody to clean up his act. Albert Lasker recommended one of his disciples—Benjamin Sonnenberg, a short, shiny-domed New Yorker with a walrus mustache, who had become the leading figure in the burgeoning business known as public relations. “You must understand this was Tycoon Territory. Big shot stuff,” Sonnenberg later recalled of those early days. “It was like the Cabots and the Lodges. Lasker spoke only to Goldwyn and Goldwyn spoke only to Lasker.” Sonnenberg and Goldwyn met on Labor Day at the beach house of Harry Warner’s daughter Doris and agreed on a thousand-dollar-a-week deal, gua
ranteed for two years. Sonnenberg’s task, he said, was “to transform him from Mr. Malaprop into an English don.”

  The first step in making Goldwyn over was to write “a definitive brief” entitled “Samuel Goldwyn—The Man Versus the Legend.” It was a twenty-three-page report that presented the “basic publicity line which I was anxious to have used in all stories to be published about you.” It stressed the uniqueness of Goldwyn, his independent stands and his attraction to fine writing. Of the countless gags circulated about his “alleged peculiarities of speech,” Sonnenberg said: “At first they were amusingly tolerated by Mr. Goldwyn in a spirit of sportsmanship—something like the way old Henry Ford laughed at the old ‘tin lizzie’ jokes.”

  Then Sonnenberg tried “to get space in organs of quality.” For several months, he got Hedda and Louella, Winchell and Lyons, to lay off the Goldwynisms with promises of scoops. He arranged for profiles of Goldwyn to appear in magazines whose readers would ordinarily look down on articles about motion picture people.