Sic transit gloria mundi:
Charlie Chaplin’s first film in seven years, Monsieur Verdoux, flopped miserably; and his personal life had finally turned the press against him. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Treasury Department, and Immigration were dogging him; so was Mary Pickford, who saw United Artists going down the drain. The Hearst papers said this “moral nonentity” should be denied the privilege of being even “a paying guest” in the United States. The FBI questioned Goldwyn about Chaplin’s rumored political activities, but he could offer no evidence of his old friend’s being a Communist. “Charlie would never join the Party,” Goldwyn later quipped to friends; “he’s too cheap to pay the dues.”
Adolph Zukor still held the title of chairman of Paramount’s board, but the 1948 Supreme Court decision forcing their theaters to split from the producing companies threw Paramount into turmoil. A special Academy Award to Zukor—“a man who has been called the father of the feature film in America, for his services to the industry over a period of forty years”—in March 1949 was Hollywood’s way of handing him a gold retirement watch. Zukor would live almost another thirty years—to 103. His influence declining with each passing day, “old creepy,” as his employees called him, retired to his fabulous estate in New Jersey. “Zukor,” Goldwyn told Alfred Crown, “stole more money from this business than anybody who ever lived.”
Billy Wilder would never forget a 1948 dinner with the Goldwyns at Romanoff’s that was perhaps the most telling illustration of Hollywood’s entering a new age. They were seated in one of the booths to the side of the bar when a very tall gray-haired gentleman came right up to Goldwyn and brandished his long index finger. “Here you are, you son of a bitch,” he growled drunkenly; “I ought to be making pictures—” Before he could say another word, Frances scared him off by hissing, “Get away from here, you silly man.” Sam just sat there agape, and Frances asked who that was. Looking as though he needed a drink himself, he said, “D. W Griffith.” A few months later, the medium’s first titan was dead. At the request of the Motion Picture Academy, Goldwyn attended Griffith’s memorial service at the Hollywood Masonic Temple as an honorary pallbearer. Wilder’s next picture would be a mordant elegy to the silent-picture era, Sunset Boulevard.
In 1950, American box-office receipts fell off one quarter of a billion dollars—the disappearance, Goldwyn figured, of some fifteen to twenty million once regular customers. Goldwyn’s only solace was that all of Hollywood was in a tailspin.
A sharp production executive named Buddy Adler carried Columbia into a new era of respectability with such successes as All the King’s Men and Born Yesterday. Jerry Wald, who had been a writer for a decade, produced Johnny Belinda and The Glass Menagerie. Still in his thirties, Stanley Kramer began tackling human issues in such realistic films as Champion, Home of the Brave, and The Men, as well as a widely admired production of Cyrano.
After twenty-five years, United Artists could pretend no longer. Grosses in 1950 were half what they had been in 1946. Pickford and Chaplin averted bankruptcy for their brainchild by surrendering it to a pair of New York attorneys, Arthur B. Krim and Robert S. Benjamin. In 1955, the courts ordered the auction of the United Artists lot—what an erstwhile partner had baptized the Samuel Goldwyn Studios. Only two bids were submitted: $1,501,000 from Goldwyn; $1,525,000 from Mary Pickford. The studio was hers, unless James Mulvey on Goldwyn’s behalf could better her price. There were fifteen raises in open court, then Goldwyn won the lot outright for $1,920,000. After thirty years of quarreling, Mary Pickford had no reason to talk to Sam Goldwyn ever again. She shook hands with Mulvey, then told the press, “I want to forget business for a while.”
In 1948, Howard Hughes bought RKO. Production executive Dore Schary could not conform to his new boss’s nocturnal hours and felt uncomfortable because, he later noted, “I knew more about motion pictures than he.” Schary became a vice president at MGM. Within three years, he was head of the studio, after the Loew’s management asked Louis B. Mayer to “resign.” Goldwyn rejoiced at Mayer’s dismissal.
Motion picture contracts became more complicated, as stars demanded bigger pieces of the profit pie; many directors as well as actors established independent production companies. Their agents gathered more power as they became more resourceful. Myron Selznick had died in 1944, and his partner, Leland Hayward, sold their agency to start a career as a Broadway producer; Charlie Feldman became a motion picture producer. That left the town wide open for big dealmakers to hang out their shingles—such agents as Phil Berg, Bert Allenberg, and Sam Jaffe. There was a young powerhouse at the Famous Artists Corporation named Ray Stark. Abe Lastfogel helped build up the William Morris Agency. No organization of artists’ representatives enjoyed greater success than the Music Corporation of America. Within Jules Stein’s expanding empire, agents Lew Wasserman, Jennings Lang, and Taft Schreiber were fast becoming important figures in their own right. “I have to give Sam Goldwyn credit for helping me get a foothold out here,” said Jules Stein shortly before his death in 1981, when his empire had grown to be worth more than a billion dollars. “Sam was the one who introduced me to all the right people.” Stein formed a separate friendship with Frances, who explained to him the less obvious power games in town.
A new wave of foreign filmmakers invaded Hollywood. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s British production of The Red Shoes gave Americans an intimate look at the international world of ballet; the French exported Jean Cocteau’s The Eternal Return and Beauty and the Beast, and Jean-Louis Barrault’s Children of Paradise. The Italians made the greatest impact, starting with Roberto Rossellini’s semidocumentary Open City, the first film in a foreign language to be nominated for an Academy Award—for its Sergio Amidei and Federico Fellini screenplay. The next year, Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine was nominated in the same category.
Goldwyn detested the Italian postwar realism but began issuing statements about how much “we have ... to learn from the terrible experiences which the European countries were suffering.” In February 1949, he and Roberto Rossellini announced a business partnership that would include Ingrid Bergman, then at the peak of her fame. They told the press they were going to make a picture called Stromboli, in which Miss Bergman would be the only professional actress. At their joint press conference, Rossellini expounded at great length on his revolutionary new method of filmmaking, in which he and his cast and crew would just appear at a location with more of an outline than a script and improvise the scene. As Rossellini enthusiastically carried on, Goldwyn leaned over to George Slaff and whispered, “New? That’s the way we made pictures thirty-five years ago!” Sam Goldwyn, Jr., insisted that his father was never genuinely interested in partnering with anyone—“certainly not Rossellini. It just seemed like the best way to get some good publicity just then.” Before Rossellini left Hollywood to start Stromboli, Goldwyn had withdrawn from the project.
In an article under his byline in the Winter 1949—50 issue of Hollywood Quarterly, Goldwyn asked if the industry could survive “the most difficult competition imaginable,” that “form of entertainment in which all the best features of radio, the theater, and motion pictures may be combined.” The American population—with its sudden boom in new parents and students on the GI Bill—was getting used to staying home for its nightly entertainment. There were already close to one million television sets installed. America’s rooftops became metal forests.
Sam Goldwyn saw the future of the medium as early as February 1949, when one of the nation’s advertising magnates, Roy Durstine, wrote him that General Electric, General Motors’ Chevrolet Division, Philco, and Texaco had already pledged at least one million dollars apiece to television advertising; Admiral, Sanka Coffee, Motorola, Emerson Radio, and American Tobacco were not far behind. Before the coaxial cable had linked together nationwide networks, before the new medium’s programming had been determined, Goldwyn accurately described the kinds of programs the new industry would be
producing. He also speculated that the “greatest potentialities” for audiences and producers lay in an experimental device called “Phonevision.” This form of pay television, he said,is a system by which any television-set owner will be able to call his telephone operator, tell her that he wishes to see “The Best Years of Our Lives” (if I may be pardoned for thinking of my favorite picture), or any other picture, and then see the picture on his television set. The charge for the showing of the picture will be carried on the regular monthly telephone bill.
At age seventy, Goldwyn put two pictures in the works, contemporary stories he thought would speak to the changing American audience. With the vast majority of the country’s moviegoers under thirty, Hollywood tried to lure them out of their new suburban houses with the subject it thought would interest them most—the American family. While most “family films” still embraced motherhood and America, audiences were growing allergic to pasteurized scenarios. Movies were successfully exploring social issues; race and religion were no longer cinematic taboos. People wanted to see that the “typical American family” did not exist, that every family had its troubles.
Screenwriter F. Hugh Herbert approached Goldwyn with an original idea about an American family. Our Very Own offered plenty of roles for Goldwyn’s young contract players, plus a plot that was at once simple and controversial: The happy Macauley family is upset on the eve of daughter Gail’s high school graduation when she learns that she was adopted. Goldwyn borrowed Ann Blyth to play the lead. Farley Granger would play her boyfriend (who installs television antennas), Joan Evans a younger sister who lets the skeleton out of the closet. Eleven-year-old Natalie Wood, still in pigtails, would play a third daughter, and Jane Wyatt their mother, good preparation for her future television role as the quintessential American mother. To play Gail’s best friend, a victim of a wealthy but broken home, Frances Goldwyn urged her husband to cast a nineteen-year-old actress she had seen in a play in Philadelphia—Phyllis Kirk.
On Frances’s say-so alone, Sam began negotiating with Miss Kirk’s agent, Paul Small—who was Dore Schary’s brother-in-law. Their dealings in New York were interrupted when Goldwyn suddenly had to undergo prostate surgery. The operation at Manhattan’s Harkness Pavilion was routine; but Goldwyn was having trouble getting the reluctant Miss Kirk to sign a contract. Recovering among three dozen bouquets of flowers (and greetings from another fifty famous well-wishers), Goldwyn grew so anxious he told Small, “If you get her to sign ... when you’re ready for this operation, I’ll pay for it.”
Phyllis Kirk came to Hollywood in late 1949 and was surprised to see the lack of activity at the Goldwyn Studios. It reminded her “of Asbury Park about to be boarded up for the season,” Frances Goldwyn, thriving on her increasing responsibilities, tried to “protect” her by suggesting where she might live. The young actress found Frances “colder than ice, full of pretensions and airs, a real duchess”; preferring privacy, Miss Kirk rented a small flat in town and often drove up the coast to Zuma Beach, where she would sleep in her red convertible, returning to Hollywood just before sunrise for her six o‘clock makeup call. There, on the deserted lot, she regularly bumped into a disheveled man in baggy khakis, who worked on the second floor at the end of the main building on Formosa Avenue. Every morning at daybreak, they shared coffee and a doughnut. He became Miss Kirk’s only friend.
David Miller, who had just directed Love Happy, the last of the Marx Brothers movies (distinguished most for its featuring blond hopeful Marilyn Monroe), directed Our Very Own. The film did respectably at the box office, cashing in on its young stars and elevating Farley Granger to “teen fave” status; but it was one of the most synthetic films ever to carry the Goldwyn label.
Although Phyllis Kirk had a $15,000 contract for eight weeks’ work on her next picture, Goldwyn had nothing else ready for her. In the meantime, Paul Small insisted that she keep an appointment at RKO, which had suddenly become interested in signing her. She was led into an executive office that was pitch black, except for a pool of light barely illuminating a pair of long-fingered hands resting on the desk. Groping in the dark, she found a chair and sat. When Howard Hughes said, “Good morning,” she recognized the voice. It was that of the man with whom she shared coffee and doughnuts. Even though Hughes owned an entire studio, he preferred tinkering on his films at night in the privacy of the small cutting room he kept on the Goldwyn lot. He offered the young actress a contract, but she refused; she figured she was “not exactly Jane Russell”and that she would be paid just to sit around and do nothing. She did no better by Sam Goldwyn, who never worked with her again.
Goldwyn chose to exploit Joan Evans instead, teaming her with his headliner, Dana Andrews, and Farley Granger. The film was Edge of Doom, and as Granger later noted, “That’s where it brought all our careers.” It was based on a dismal novel that delved into the psyche of a delivery boy, Martin, who in a rage over the death of his mother kills a priest for refusing to provide her with a fancy funeral. The parish’s new priest investigates his predecessor’s death, playing cat and mouse with Martin and his conscience. At last Martin confesses, freeing himself with the truth. Such somber material had never interested Goldwyn in the past, but a new force on the Goldwyn lot had become its leading advocate.
Frances Goldwyn no longer hid her power. While her husband wallowed in his worst funk since his expulsion from the old Goldwyn Company in 1922, Frances saw an opportunity to assert herself. She kept the studio under tight rein, and she delighted in her own efficacy. She became Goldwyn’s chief scout for talent and material; she worked on every speech and article he put before the public; she had all but his ultimate word on production matters, from script to costumes. On business trips, she carried their money and a small notebook, in which she entered even the pettiest cash outlays. She assumed much of his correspondence, including the persistent financial requests from his relatives in England. “If you continue bothering Sam for extra moneys,” she wrote his sister Sally in August 1950, “your allowance will be instantly cut off.” On their next trip to London, the Goldwyns cordially greeted Sam’s nieces in their suite at Claridge’s; the instant he left the room, Frances turned to the younger, Pola, and insisted she had no reason to dun him any longer, because she had become a pretty woman. Said Frances, “You can walk the streets.”
While protecting her husband’s fortune, Frances swaddled herself in Catholicism. Indeed, she had recently told Lillian Hellman she thought she would become a nun after Sam died. She converted half her bedroom at Laurel Lane into a “nun’s cell,” furnished with little more than her narrow bed, a crucifix on the wall, and a nightstand, on which sat rosary beads and a small picture of her friend of thirty years, George Cukor—with whom she spoke on the telephone every day. (Their relationship had deepened in the 1940s, as he suffered personal and professional humiliations. Frances was always there for him, though he kept most of his private life from her. She did know, however, that he was, as she said, “unlucky in love” and that he had been cruelly taunted in the Army for being homosexual. No longer a staff director at MGM, where he had become known as Hollywood’s leading “woman’s director,” he had a seesaw career over the next thirty years—with several forgettable films in between such classics as Born Yesterday, Pat and Mike, A Star Is Born, and My Fair Lady.) Until she was ready to make a further commitment to God, Frances served Sam Goldwyn. She read the galleys of Edge of Doom and was desperate to turn it into a film. She convinced him it was the story of a man fighting for redemption of his soul, and every bit as compelling as The Informer.
Mark Robson would direct it as the second film under his contract, but Goldwyn had a difficult time finding anyone to adapt the dreary material. Philip Yordan, who had written an unpretentious film about another murderer, Dillinger, for “B”-movie factory Monogram Pictures, took the job. The psychological bones of the story were removed, and all that remained, as Walter Winchell commented, was “raw meat.”
At the first sneak
preview, in Santa Barbara, half the house gave the film its lowest rating, “poor.” Most of the audience found the film “depressing” and “morbid.” The Pasadena crowd the next night was less kind. After several months of editing, Edge of Doom opened at the Astor Theater in New York. Critics crucified it. It played next door to the Victoria, where Our Very Own had opened the week before. This meant Goldwyn’s name and product could be plastered for an entire block overlooking Times Square. By the second week, not even Farley Granger (whose presence at the Boston opening required police to control the mob of bobby-soxers) could draw crowds into the Astor.
Goldwyn was desperate to breathe life into the stillborn picture. Jock Lawrence reminded him how they had “saved” Wuthering Heights by adding a narration. Using that same technique and adding two scenes to bookend the film, they could turn Edge of Doom into the story of a priest who makes good rather than a boy who went bad, thus underscoring its uplifting message—redemption through faith. Doctoring a film that had already opened was practically unheard of, but Goldwyn hired Charles Brackett and Ben Hecht. Even with their new scenes, Edge of Doom seemed beyond salvation.
Goldwyn was chewing out his staff one day for not creating a successful advertising campaign for the film. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you,” he said to them. “This is a simple story about a boy who wants a fine funeral for his mother, so he kills a priest.” Upon hearing his own words, he suddenly grasped the fundamental problem with the movie. With his next breath he said, “Let’s not spend another dime.”
After a three-year string of losers, Goldwyn was furious, having to concede, as he did to Alfred Crown, that “we won’t even get our money back for prints, advertising and distribution costs.... The slowness with which these pictures are played—and that goes for all the pictures—is enough to bust anybody!” More than the profits and losses of a few films were at stake; there was his company’s future to consider. He had built a library of seventy-five films, which he and his wife owned outright, and Sammy had reached his majority. In the wake of Frances’s recent failure with Edge of Doom, Sam took a new look at their son.
Goldwyn Page 62