Three months later, the Japanese bowed down. America went on a thirty-six-hour spree from “V” Hour on Tuesday, August 14, when the Allies accepted Japan’s unconditional surrender, through the following day. Studio employees were paid for their holiday. Each week brought the return of more soldiers, but Sammy stuck it out and graduated to second lieutenant, Company D, 112th Infantry Training Battalion, at Camp Robinson, Arkansas. During the months it took the Army to muster out its troops, he thought about Special Service. His father urged him not to “hesitate to call on me. After all, the war is over and any lift I can give you would seem to me to be perfectly legitimate.” Sammy gave the high sign and through Goldwyn’s contacts got assigned to the Public Relations Division in the European Theater within weeks. Stationed in Germany, he worked on a number of projects, producing Army shows and writing press releases.
Hollywood war casualties seemed mercifully few, and the return of most of its leading men was an occasion in itself. MGM’s 1945 release Adventure would be forgotten long before its advertising copy: “Gable’s back and Garson’s got him.” Goldwyn’s professional family came home virtually unscathed. Gregg Toland was back in time to photograph The Kid from Brooklyn. David Niven returned a hero, having served king and country from Dunkirk to Normandy; his other liege, Sam Goldwyn, had permitted him to appear in a number of service films during the war, as well as a few commercial ventures he thought might keep the actor’s name before the public. Niven never got over the telegram from Goldwyn mentioning the possibility of his playing one of J. M. Barrie’s most popular fictional heroes: “THINK CAN GET YOU ADMIRAL CRICHTON WITH PARAMOUNT,” Goldwyn dictated to his secretary. Niven did not end up playing the Admirable Crichton, but Goldwyn loaned him out for several pictures before he had a movie of his own for his biggest, though not fully proven, star. A huge banner—“WELCOME HOME, DAVID”—was strung across the main gate of the Goldwyn lot, and a black-tie dinner was thrown in his honor.
No such tantara greeted Goldwyn’s most anxiously awaited veteran. In 1944, Lieutenant Colonel William Wyler had made a highly praised documentary called Memphis Belle, the story of a Flying Fortress on its twenty-fifth mission over Germany. Wyler was furloughed when the film was released, and visited his wife at the Plaza Hotel in New York. The unusual way in which they met, coming toward each other down a long corridor, got indelibly etched in his memory.
Wyler returned to Europe to film another documentary, Thunderbolt, about the one-seat fighter planes that had helped liberate Italy. His photographer had not captured Rome and the Italian coastline exactly as he wanted it, so Wyler wedged himself in the waist of a plane and ran his own camera during a flight from Rome to Grosseto. The blasts of wind and engine noise had knocked Wyler’s hearing out before, but this time it did not pop back in. His auditory nerves suffered severe damage. In time, partial hearing returned only to his left ear. He was shipped stateside by boat, then went through several Air Force hospitals, where doctors offered little hope. Lillian Hellman saw Wyler before he took the train home to Los Angeles. “I never saw anybody so thoroughly depressed in all my life,” she remembered. “He was sure his career was over.”
Fortunately, Wyler discovered that if he wore an earphone that hooked up to the sound engineer’s equipment, his hearing was good enough to discern even the actors’ inflections. The contract he had signed with Goldwyn before going overseas lessened his resentment over having to deliver one more picture to him. He was to receive $2,500 per week, plus 20 percent of its profits.
Wyler browsed along the shelf of Goldwyn’s unproduced properties and found that only MacKinlay Kantor’s Glory for Me excited him. He and Goldwyn agreed that nobody but Robert Sherwood could adapt such difficult material, that he was one of the few writers “able to present his political and economic ideas in a very solid, commercial form.” In August 1945, when he learned that the playwright had completed The Rugged Path, Goldwyn arranged a meeting in Hollywood with Sherwood and Wyler. On the fourteenth, Sherwood signed the contract to write the film.
His play going into rehearsals, Sherwood returned to New York, in conflict over Glory for Me. He wrote Goldwyn that he had been thinking a great deal about the material and had concluded that, “in all fairness, I should recommend to you that we should drop it. This is entirely due to the conviction that, by next Spring or next Fall, this subject will be terribly out of date.” Sherwood said he found Kantor’s story fundamentally concerned with men who were medically discharged before the end of the war, which rendered them “somewhat lonely figures as veterans in a civilian community.” He was sure the national picture would be “radically different when every American city has tens of thousands of soldiers and sailors who have returned to civilian life and who will already have passed through the first stages of readjustment before this picture can be released.” He even thought the picture would arouse “considerable resentment” in suggesting that the neuroses of the minority of veterans were typical of all returning servicemen. To prove he was not simply reneging, Sherwood told Goldwyn he would gladly work on some other story for him. A volley of calls did not change Sherwood’s mind.
A telegram from Sam Goldwyn on September 4 did. “DEAR BOB,” he wired:I HAVE BEEN THINKING OVER THE TELEPHONE CONVERSATION WE HAD THE OTHER NIGHT AND I WANT TO RESTATE MY FEELINGS ABOUT THE STORY. I HAVE MORE FAITH IN IT NOW THAN I HAD SIX MONTHS AGO BECAUSE I FEEL THE SUBJECT MATTER WILL BE EVEN MORE TIMELY A YEAR FROM NOW THAN IT IS TODAY. AS YOU SAID, THERE WILL BE SEVERAL MILLION MEN COMING HOME NEXT YEAR, AND MORE OF THEM THE YEAR AFTER AND TO RELEASE A PICTURE AT THAT TIME PRESENTING THEIR PROBLEMS SEEMS TO ME TO BE HITTING IT RIGHT ON THE NOSE.... YOU HAD THE RIGHT APPROACH TO THE CIVILIAN POINT OF VIEW IN THE STORY AND THIS, COUPLED WITH YOUR DESIRE TO INJECT SOME GOOD AMERICAN HUMOR THROUGHOUT, SHOULD MAKE IT ONE OF YOUR OUTSTANDING WRITING JOBS. THIS IS THE STIRRING, EMOTIONAL STORY I WOULD LIKE TO PRODUCE, AND THE POINT OF VIEW YOU EXPRESSED WHEN YOU WERE OUT HERE CONVINCED ME THAT IF WE KEEP THE PROPER ENTHUSIASM FOR OUR PROJECT IT CAN BE THE IMPORTANT PICTURE OF THE YEAR.
Sherwood agreed that as soon as his play had opened, he would attack the material. The Goldwyns went to New York to celebrate.
HIS thoughts turning to his first autumns in America, Goldwyn took Frances upstate to what had been the capital of luxury during his salad days—Saratoga Springs. There, thirty miles from Gloversville, Sam Goldfish had gone whenever he had been able to scrape together the trolley fare. In those days, he could only afford to go for a few hours, just long enough to imagine possibilities.
Goldwyn’s arrival made local headlines—“ONE TIME GLOVE SALESMAN, NOW CINEMA GREAT.” When the program chairman of the men’s club of the Kingsborough Avenue Presbyterian Church in Gloversville heard that the town’s favorite son was nearby, he hand-delivered an invitation to speak at the group’s meeting that Tuesday night. Goldwyn refused—until he received a call from his first employer in the glove business, Albert Aaron. Goldwyn made a dinner date with him and agreed to address the men’s club afterward.
Frances Goldwyn had never seen her husband in such a state of nerves as he evidenced on October 30, 1945. He went back and forth through his suits in the hotel room closet, trying to decide which to wear. He did the same with his ties. Then he started on Frances’s wardrobe. Three times along the road to Gloversville, Goldwyn told the chauffeur to pull over so that he could run into the bushes.
The car at last reached the town’s tower of splendor. The Kingsborough Hotel was somewhat the worse for four decades of wear, but the marble floors and mahogany walls Sam Goldfish had remembered all those years still gleamed. He paused to look at the large plate-glass windows that had once fascinated him. Well-wishers jammed the lobby of the hotel. As Goldwyn entered, old glove moguls who had known Goldwyn when—Albert Aaron, Theodore Lehr, Adam Klopot—swarmed around him. Another man approached Goldwyn and touched his arm, saying that in the far end of the lobby was someone who wanted to know if he remembered Hamburg.
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froze. “Looking startled,” Frances recalled, “you headed across the lobby. I followed. In one of those leather chairs I’d heard so much of was a very old man. You stared at him hard, then said, ‘Why, of course ... of course.’ And you put your arms around him.” It was Jacob Liebglid—now spelled Libglid—who had taken in the teenage runaway Schmuel Gelbfisz back in Hamburg and helped him get to his aunt in England. Amazingly, just months after Sam Goldfish had left Gloversville for New York City in 1906, Libglid left Germany for Gloversville. The two men had not seen each other since the old country. Libglid was living in the hotel, still working in the local industry. Goldwyn, his eyes moistening, asked if he needed anything. Libglid said, “No, I’m a pretty good glove maker.”
“Good?” Albert Aaron interrupted. “He’s the best in my plant, the best in America.”
Some sixteen people, Libglid included, went into the dining room, where the hotel served its finest meal. Everybody reminisced, then talked about the declining state of the local industry. From the way her husband joined in, Frances realized he could “still manage fairly well in gloves.”
They all walked into another room for the club meeting. Frances was the only woman there. She chose a seat in the back row, which was empty except for one man. He looked her over, looked again, and hurried away. Goldwyn went to the front of the hall, where he was introduced. He was so nervous that he forgot to put his hat down—he just fidgeted with it throughout his short speech. “Gentlemen,” he said, “this is the most exciting moment of my life. Gloversville to me and coming here tonight is like coming home. I have a great affection for this town. This is the place that gave me my first start in life.”
He said that Gloversville was where he got his first job and his citizenship papers—“which is perhaps the greatest gift to any man to become a citizen of this great country.”
“When I was a boy my one outstanding ambition was to get enough money to have dinner in the Hotel Kingsborough,” he said. “And after that I wanted to stroll through the lobby, back and forth, in front of the window and watch the pretty girls as they walked up and down the street. I realized my ambition, but couldn’t resist the impulse to do it again tonight while I was in the lobby.” He told of his reunion with Jacob Libglid, and how that man had raised the money so that Goldwyn might continue on to America. Still fussing with his hat, he said, “Gentlemen, I would like to stay here all night and just talk to you, but that is impossible. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for allowing me to come here to talk to you. God bless you all.”
By the time Sam had finished, the man who had eyed Frances so closely had returned to his seat. He poked her with a small package containing a pair of white kid gloves. “Put them on,” he whispered. “In a minute you’re going to be shaking hands with the club members.” Frances did not understand at first, until the man pointed out that Frances’s gloves were cotton—“ for all sorts of reasons perfectly satisfactory,” she realized, “except for wearing in Gloversville.” That moment, she later told her husband, made her “understand something about Gloversville—and something more about you.” The Goldwyns returned to Saratoga Springs, and a few days later to Los Angeles.
Within a month, Tiffany’s sent a round gold pocket watch with Roman numerals—valued then at two hundred dollars—to the New Kingsborough Hotel (as it had been renamed). It was inscribed: “JACOB LIBGILD {sic}. A FRIEND INDEED. SAMUEL GOLDWYN.” Libglid carried it with him everywhere he went. Locals remember his pulling it out on any occasion to call out the time, then regaling everyone around him with an amazing tale from an earlier time. Over the next few years, Libglid’s health deteriorated. Goldwyn sent money regularly, right up to the octogenarian’s death in 1950.
HOME from his sentimental journey, Goldwyn became consumed with adapting Glory for Me. After The Rugged Path’s short Broadway run, Robert Sherwood and his wife arrived in Los Angeles in early December 1945, with more than one hundred pages of screenplay. Sam and Frances put them up at Laurel Lane. They were free to come and go as they pleased; but for weeks Sherwood sequestered himself in the downstairs guest room before a typewriter. The two couples usually dined together, but Goldwyn made it a rule not to discuss the story. “Bob worked hard all day and I felt that he should relax and see a picture or meet people at night,” Goldwyn later told Sherwood’s biographer, John Mason Brown. “But during dinner one evening he said he would like to talk to me when we were through. After dinner he said, ‘Sam, I feel I have failed you. I just can’t get this story—something blocks me.’” Goldwyn told him, “I have had writers fail me before. Let’s see what the trouble is.”
Sherwood kept on talking, Goldwyn remembered, while his wife, Madeline, packed and Frances tried to get plane reservations for them to go home. After a couple of hours, Sherwood said, “Madeline, don’t pack—and don’t bother about the reservations. I’m going to my room and think about this.” The next morning at seven o‘clock, Goldwyn got word that Sherwood wanted to have breakfast with him. At the table, Goldwyn recalled, “he told me the story, scene for scene, just as it was finally put on the screen.”
Sherwood had suddenly realized how he could turn MacKinlay Kantor’s tone poem into a fugue, interweaving the three stories and transposing the entire piece from a minor to a major key. The secret lay in developing one dominant story line—the relationship between the banker’s daughter, Peggy, and Fred Derry. Instead of allowing the former soda jerk to discover his wife with another man at the start of the piece, as Kantor had done, Sherwood imposed a more traditional three-act structure over the material. He allowed Fred to come home to his wife and try to pick up where his marriage had left off; then he would discover that neither of them loved the other; and not until the end of the film would he decide to leave her. At the same time, Sherwood needed to enlarge on the character of Peggy—so that Fred could meet the girl, lose the girl, then get the girl. In return for Sherwood’s working three months on the script without any contractual obligation, Goldwyn pledged that “there would be no changes in or rewriting of his script.”
Sherwood made all the other stories in the revised screenplay serve that central love story. The pivotal scenes in which Fred and Peggy meet, and when Fred breaks off their budding romance, would occur at a bar owned by Butch, the uncle of the spastic Homer. Fred and Peggy would finally come together at Homer’s wedding to Wilma, the girl next door.
Goldwyn saw opportunities for all his young contract players. Dana Andrews would play Fred Derry; and Virginia Mayo had been progressing enough in her acting lessons to pull off the role of his floozy of a wife. Farley Granger could play the spastic, Homer, and Goldwyn’s latest discovery, Cathy O‘Donnell, could play Wilma. Teresa Wright would be Peggy Stephenson. Goldwyn had hoped to sign Fred MacMurray and Olivia de Havilland to play her parents, Al and Milly, but they found the roles too inconsequential; “third banana,” said MacMurray. Leland Hayward suggested two of his clients, Fredric March and Myrna Loy. March’s days as a leading man were over, and Goldwyn knew he would eagerly accept the role. Myrna Loy’s popularity in “The Thin Man” series had made her the movies’ “perfect wife” and kept her a star. Even though Goldwyn doubted she would ever accept so small a role, it took only one dinner at Laurel Lane to discover that her arm needed no twisting. “I had read the book,” Miss Loy remembered, “and when Sam Goldwyn asked if I would play the part, I said, ’Yes‘—fast.” Though it was not the largest role in the film, hers was the biggest name and, accordingly, got top billing.
The only change in casting occurred because neither Wyler nor Sherwood thought spasticity was suitable for the screen. They figured any actor’s accurate portrayal would be too grotesque to watch, and anything less than that would look phony. Wyler and Sherwood were visiting veterans’ hospitals looking for character details when the director suddenly recalled an Army Pictorial Service documentary he had seen about a young sergeant who had lost both his hands. Diary of a Sergeant had been produced to help other amputees r
eadjust to their lives. The star of the film was a former meat cutter named Harold Russell, who—as he explained—“got into an argument with a block of T.N.T. and lost. The score was two hands off about six inches above the wrist.” He was fitted with a set of steel claws controlled by a shoulder harness and moved by elastic bands. More than Russell’s mastery of his “hooks” interested Wyler; it was his acceptance of his disability. “That was just the attitude required for the role,” said Wyler, “because in our story, Homer, in spite of his physical disability, makes a better adjustment than the other two veterans ... who both had emotional disturbances caused by the war but no physical injuries.” Harold Russell got the role intended for Farley Granger.
Sherwood spent the next few months rewriting. He credited Goldwyn for steering him from the politics of the drama toward more human interest. “I don’t want you to think of this as a Hollywood picture,” the producer told him. “I want something simple and believable.”
On April 9, 1946, Sherwood submitted his final screenplay, which ran twice the length of a normal script. The plight of readjusting veterans and observations of postwar America were inherent in every scene, but the 220 pages proved to be a timeless drama about love and marriage. Sherwood found a new title, one full of hope and irony, in a phrase Marie Derry tossed off just before walking out on Fred on page 201: “The Best Years of Our Lives.” Goldwyn found it cumbersome, but it would stand until something better came along.
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