Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  He received unparalleled notices. Abel Green of Variety called the film “one of the best pictures of our lives.” The New York Times said the film “sets the highest standards of cinematic quality and meets them triumphantly.” Newsweek spoke of it as “epic” art; Time said Goldwyn had put together “a sure-fire hit ... with good taste, honesty, wit—and even a strong suggestion of guts.” James Agee grudgingly doled out words of praise on a story he found inherently pat and timid. He granted that “this is one of the very few American studio-made movies in years that seem to me profoundly pleasing, moving, and encouraging.” In a follow-up article two weeks later in The Nation, he wrote: “I can hardly expect that anyone who reads this will like the film as well as I do.... But it is ... a great pleasure, and equally true, to say that it shows what can be done in the , factory by people of adequate talent when they get, or manage to make themselves, the chance.” After the film had its Christmas-week qualifying run in Los Angeles, Goldwyn pulled the picture until its nationwide opening in the spring—at which time he hoped to garland the advertisements with Oscar nominations.

  Best Years grossed close to ten million dollars in its first year of release. It became the second-biggest moneymaker in talking-picture history to date, bettered only by Gone With the Wind.

  For months, letters both adulatory and congratulatory crossed Goldwyn’s desk—from René Clair to General Omar Bradley, who told Goldwyn, “You are helping the American people to build an even better democracy out of the tragic experiences of this war.” Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal said it was “a credit to both you and Industry.” War correspondent Bill Mauldin said it was “the first real, honest-to-God sincere thing I’ve seen about the war and its aftermath.”

  The film had a healing effect on the wounds of the nation and, it seemed, of every citizen who saw it. No message moved Goldwyn more than the seventeen words Western Union relayed on the night of November 21. “I HAVE JUST SHED THE BEST TEARS OF MY LIFE. YOUR LOVING AND VERY PROUD DAUGHTER, RUTH.” “When it is all said and done,” Goldwyn wrote her back, “it’s what our own think of us that really counts, and I don’t mind admitting that I love being told you are proud of me, and I will always do my best to keep things that way.”

  On December 14, 1946, he and Frances had sailed from New York on the Queen Elizabeth for England. The Goldwyns spent the holidays with Sammy and arranged the London bookings of Best Years. The film opened there in the spring and played to crowded houses for over a year, grossing as much in its twenty-second week as it did in its second. It became a similar phenomenon everywhere in the world, from Sydney to Rio de Janeiro. It received the British Academy’s award for the best foreign or domestic picture of the year, and several international equivalents—the French “Victoire,” the Danish “Filmprisen,” the Japanese “Hannya.”

  The Goldwyns returned to New York on the same ship, ringing in 1947 with the news that the New York Film Critics had voted Best Years the best picture of the year. On January 6, Goldwyn picked up a bronze plaque from the Newspaper Guild of New York, their Page One Award for his “outstanding presentation of the responsibilities of society to the returning servicemen.” The Hollywood Foreign Correspondents Association presented him with their “Golden Globe.”

  Upon returning to Los Angeles, Goldwyn learned that he was for the seventh time in the running for the one prize that still remained beyond his grasp. The Best Years of Our Lives led that year’s Academy Award nominations with eight—Best Picture, Best Actor (Fredric March), Best Supporting Actor (Harold Russell), Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Sound Recording, Best Scoring of a Dramatic Picture, and Best Film Editing. The Jolson Story received six nominations and The Razor’s Edge four, including Best Picture. The three other competitors for the top honor were Olivier’s Henry V, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, and The Yearling. Goldwyn was not the favorite. The Yearling and The Razor’s Edge were products of major studios, MGM and Twentieth Century—Fox, which voted in blocks; and Darryl Zanuck had already made it known that he intended to campaign hard for his Oscar.

  NOVELIST Robert Nathan said, “Sam Goldwyn was so busy taking bows that year he didn’t pay much attention to his other projects—my book among them.” Goldwyn had two promising literary adaptations in the works that suffered from neglect, but he was leading a charmed life those days.

  He had bought “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” only because it sounded like a vehicle for the protean Danny Kaye. Its milquetoast of a hero was reminiscent of the old Eddie Cantor roles; and his daydreams would allow the star to play several different characters, sometimes in song. Goldwyn already envisioned the film in Technicolor, with a dozen Goldwyn Girls.

  New York, 1946. Two years after Frances Goldwyn urged her husband to read a magazine article about returning soldier, the billboard for his greatest production went up in Times Square.

  At the New York City opening—November 1946—of The Beft Years of Our Lives. Williams Wyler with his wife, Talli (left), and Lillian Hellman.

  Frances sits with William S. Paley, who had once tried to talk her into leaving Sam, and with socialite Mrs. William Rhinelander Stewart.

  Hollywood, c. 1940. Left to right: Goldwyn, Jack Benny, Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Charles Laughton, Melvyn Douglas, Myrna Loy, and Tyrone Power.

  Academy Award winners, March 13, 1947. Left to right: Anne Baxter (The Razor‘r Edge), Goldwyn (The Best Years of Our Liver), Olivia de Havilland (To Each His Own), and Harold Russell (The Best Years of Our Lives)—a first-time actor who won two Oscars for the same performance.

  Triumph, after sixty-seven productions and thirty-four years.

  Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Goldwyn, London, 1946.

  Goldwyn signs Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini to a contract, 1949. Once Goldwyn got the publicity he wanted, he let the doal fall apart.

  David Niven returns from the war to the Studio and receives his fan mail. December 1945. He became Goldwyn’s biggest postwar star.

  The Goldwyns entertain Field Marshal Montgomery at Laurel Lane, 1954. At a dinner of Hollywood luminaries, Goldwyn introduced his guest of honor as “Marshall Field Montgomery.”

  The last of Goldwyn’s contract players—Dana Andrews, Farley Granger, and Robert Keith—on the set of Edge of Doom, the nadir of Goldwyn’s career.

  Sam and Frances visit “The Little Mermaid” in Copenhagen while promoting Hans Cbrirtian Andersen.

  Goldwyn with Marlon Brando in 1955 after the making of Guys and Dolls. The Thunderbird was Goldwyn’s gift to Brando for his model behavior during the production.

  Goldwyn Girls rehearse a number from Guys and Dolls.

  After years of disputing the ownership of the United Artists studio, Goldwyn outbid Mary Pickford in court. The new landlord watches the rechristening of the studio, April 21, 1955.

  Writer N. Richard Nash, Goldwyn, and director Rouben Mamoulian at work on Porgy and Bess, 1958. Within months, the film’s main set would burn down, Mamoulian would be fired, and the NAACP’s protests against the film would kill any chances for its success. It was Goldwyn’s eightieth and last picture.

  David Niven. According to Goldwyn, he and Gary Cooper were the only actors who expressed proper gratitude to him for their careers.

  Lucille Ball, after she had risen to stardom in television, 1950s. Goldwyn offered her advice on the expansion of her show business empire.

  Actors Kent Smith and Philip Reed review the Goldwyn rules of the Goldwyn Croquet Club. As at cards and backgammon, Goldwyn cheated shamelessly.

  George Sanders, restaurateur Michael Romanoff, and Goldwyn, c. 1960.

  Goldwyn with Hedda Hopper. Although she had acted in silent pictures for him in Fort Lee, New Jersey, Goldwyn preferred leaking stories to her rival, Louella Parsons.

  Three generations of Goldwyns: Sam junior, his daughter, Cricket, and Sam.

  Sam looked the same decade after decade, bur Frances made changes (she let her hair grow white and had a face lift).

&
nbsp; Billy Wilder with Goldwyn. 1960.

  Jesse Lasky. Sam Goldwyn. and Cecil, B. DeMille, fifty years after The Squau Man launched their careers. Goldwyn outlived his former partners by fifteen years.

  The wedding of agent-producer Charles Feldman and Clotilde Barot, 1968. Gray eminence Sam Goldwvn stands with his arm around Warren Beatty; Jules Stein pokes his head over Goldwyn’s shoulder; Ray Stark, Louis Jourdan, and David Brown stand in the center at rear; Robert Evans, Billy Wilder, Mike Romanoff, Frank Sinatra, and Richard Zanuck to the right; Irving, Lazar at right front.

  Richard Nixon, then President, awards Goldwyn the Medal of Freedom. Frances sits on the couch. Ruth and Sam junior stand behind Goldwyn, March 27, 1971.

  Frances and George Cukor, loving friends to the end.

  In order to make the four-thousand-word Thurber story work as a Danny Kaye picture, writers Ken Englund and Everett Freeman had to invent more than adapt. They changed Walter Mitty from a middle-aged henpecked husband into a younger bachelor hopelessly tied to his mother’s apron strings. They made him a drudge in a publishing house of pulp fiction—a proofreader whose fantasies make it difficult for him to separate reverie from reality. To keep such a plot in motion, Mitty had to get involved in an actual melodrama more fantastic than any he had ever dreamed—one involving a foreign dignitary and his mysterious but beautiful daughter, spies, precious jewels, and a sinister psychiatrist.

  In November 1945, Goldwyn brought the one-hundred-sixty-page script of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty to New York. He told Thurber the first sixty pages were all right and asked him not to read the last one hundred pages, because they were too “blood and thirsty.” Thurber did read the entire script, and—as he later said—“I was horror and struck. Mr. Goldwyn expected me to remove the blood and thirst without reading it but somehow to preserve the melodrama. It was a task for wizards, stated in the wondrous dialectics of Oz.”

  Ken Englund also consulted with Thurber in New York. The former wanted to preserve as much of the flavor of the original story as possible, and the latter understood that the screenwriter had only been following orders. “We could not take out the melodrama,” Thurber reported later of their ten days of work together, “but we could attempt to cover it up with additional dream scenes and other devices.... I wrote that a courtroom dream and a firing squad dream like those in my original story, together with a dozen other suggestions I made, might obscure or at least dilute the melodrama.” Among these suggestions were several bits of physical comedy that struck Goldwyn as nothing more than rusty Keystone Kop routines. He decided Thurber had nothing more to say that was worth listening to.

  The star’s wife, on the other hand, did. Sylvia Fine felt too many of these new dream sequences “slowed up the story” and got in the way of the musical numbers she had prepared for her husband—material Thurber dismissed as “git-gat-gittle songs.” The most famous of these to sneak into the film was her “Anatole of Paris,” which demanded that Mitty become a French fashion designer in one of his fantasies.

  One morning, some twenty people sat around a conference table to discuss the production of Walter Mitty. Goldwyn entered promptly at nine o‘clock to begin the meeting. Counting heads, he saw everybody from Danny Kaye to propman Irving Sindler—everybody except Kaye’s wife. “Where’s Sylvia?” Goldwyn asked. “She’ll be here a little late,” Kaye explained. “In the mornings she goes to the psychiatrist.” Goldwyn turned red and exploded, “Anybody who goes to a psychiatrist—should have his head examined!”

  Again Goldwyn made Virginia Mayo the beautiful object of Danny’s affections, this time rewarding her with co-star billing. Boris Karloff played the villainous Dr. Hugo Hollingshead. Thurber was so embarrassed by the production that he felt it necessary to defend himself publicly. He vented his spleen in the pages of Life, where the editors reported that he “grows almost profane when he thinks of how his story has been corrupted.” One psychiatric scene in particular, which Thurber had hoped would be deleted, “had not only been restored,” Thurber wrote, “but it finally contained a bathing girl incident which will haunt me all the days of my life.”

  “As I need not tell you, the original story, ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,’ is a pure gem, which added great luster to the little magazine in which it was first published,” a ghostwriter for Goldwyn wrote the Life editors in retort. “However, in order to convert such a gem into a feature length motion picture it is necessary first to elaborate it into a screenplay.” Author and producer debated for weeks.

  The reviews pronounced the film solid entertainment, despite its deviation from the source material. The public adored the movie, making The Secret Life of Walter Mitty one of the year’s biggest hits. Goldwyn heard from dozens of people he respected, including Robert Sherwood, who wired him that “with the exception of two or three spots,” he thought the film was “wonderfully good” and Kaye’s performance “really brilliant.”

  Thurber had already accepted ten thousand dollars from Goldwyn as an option payment on his story “The Catbird Seat.” Five thousand dollars more were due upon submission of a motion picture treatment, and another forty thousand dollars if Goldwyn produced a film of the story. Thurber returned the ten-thousand-dollar option payment with the hope that Goldwyn would tear up their contract. The author told Miriam Howell that he had “only the kindliest of feelings” toward Goldwyn personally; he just could not endure another such adaptation of his material. If Goldwyn chose to accept Thurber’s terms, James Mulvey suggested that he send Thurber a check for $2,500 to cover his legal and agents’ fees. Goldwyn did.

  “I defy every convention,” Goldwyn told an interviewer that year. “I make a picture to please me—if it pleases me there is a good chance it will please other people. But it has to please me first.” He admitted he was difficult but said he could not help that: “That’s the way I make pictures.... Usually when people are happy making a picture it’s a ... stinker.” If the converse were true, Goldwyn’s next picture had all the makings of a huge success.

  Leonardo Bercovici’s screenplay of The Bishop’s Wife retold Robert Nathan’s story of Henry Brougham—a bishop so desperate in his attempts to raise money from wealthy parishioners for a new cathedral that he has woefully neglected everybody else in his life, especially his wife, Julia. After a particularly discouraging meeting with his leading benefactress, Henry prays for help. From heaven arrives a devil-may-care angel named Dudley, whose miracles are more in the nature of prestidigitation. He wreaks change on the lives of everybody he encounters—including Henry, whom he makes jealous of his relationship with Julia. The bishop’s love rekindled, Dudley realizes his work on earth is done and disappears, leaving neither trace nor memory of his visit, except for everybody’s new acts of charity and love. Goldwyn thought the script lacked the whimsy of the source material.

  He tried to entice his Oscar-nominated team to patch it up. William Wyler would have no part of it. As soon as he had completed his work on Best Years, Wyler had fulfilled all legal obligations to Sam Goldwyn. He would never deny that Goldwyn had sparked his career, but after ten years of the scourge, Wyler wanted nothing more to do with him beyond receiving his 20 percent of the profits on that final film. He joined a production company Frank Capra had organized for directors eager to be their own bosses. It was aptly named Liberty Films. The company lived long enough to see only its founder release pictures with its trademark of a huge tolling bell—It’s a Wonderful Life and State of the Union; but over the next ten years, Wyler became his own producer, creating a string of important (though occasionally bloated) films, which included The Heiress, Roman Holiday, Friendly Persuasion, and The Big Country. Wyler never failed to invite Goldwyn to an early screening of each film—anxious for his approval, eager for his advice. “Nobody,” Wyler claimed to the end, “knew how to market a picture like Sam.”

  Robert Sherwood found all the bones of The Bishop’s Wife in place but thought its heart and soul were missing. “I THINK IT N
EEDS FAR MORE THAN A QUICK POLISHING JOB,” he wired Goldwyn in October 1946. “THE MOST SERIOUS DEFECT IS THAT THE BISHOP IS NOT A HUMAN BEING. HE IS A DREARY STUFFED SHIRT WHOM IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR AN INTELLIGENT WOMAN TO LOVE AND I DOUBT THAT EVEN DAVID NIVEN COULD MAKE HIM SYMPATHETIC.... BELIEVE THE STORY CAN BE FUNDAMENTALLY GOOD BUT IT REQUIRES AN ENTIRELY NEW APPROACH.” Over the telephone, Goldwyn talked Sherwood into finding just that.

  Although it remained to be seen whether David Niven could deliver an audience, Goldwyn drew up a new contract—with a hefty raise—for his newly arrived star. The Hollywood press corps had kept his name alive over the years, constantly reporting on his military heroics; and the insouciant actor seemed to have matured considerably over the last few years. Upon signing his new agreement, Niven wrote his producer “that so long as I am in your employment you will have my complete loyalty in all things and that I shall bend every effort to give you full value for your money.” He read the new script of The Bishop’s Wife and “adored” it. Unfortunately, he thought he was to play the role of the angel. When he learned otherwise, he protested so much that Goldwyn threatened to keep him out of the picture altogether.