Goldwyn Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  1 Exodus

  2 New York

  3 Synapsis

  4 Dramatis Personae

  5 Musical Chairs

  6 A Name for Himself

  7 The Business of America

  8 Elba

  9 Leading Ladies

  10 Canaan

  PART TWO

  11 Interregnum

  12 Making Whoopee

  13 Coming of Age

  14 “That Little Something Extra”

  15 “The Goldwyn Touch”

  16 Annus Mirabilis

  PART THREE

  17 “We Did It Before and We Can Do It Again”

  18 Best Years

  19 The Plague

  20 Dinosaurs

  21 A Slow Fade to Black

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  INDEX

  PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  “A thorough job of research ... interesting but little-known facts are brought to light.... How this boy of the ghetto transformed himself into that film-baron fashion plate is the real meat of the story.... One is left to wonder if, fame and riches aside, Goldwyn wasn’t motivated not so much by the mere will to survive, which exists everywhere, as by the iron-and-granite will to be great, to reach for and possess power.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Richly detailed, at once a biography of Samuel Goldwyn and a business history of Hollywood—Berg is especially good on the backgrounds of film deals. It is also a biography of the inner dreams that energized the great era of Hollywood.”

  —Vogue

  “Thoroughly engrossing ... The book is peppered with hundreds of Goldwyn’s famous and infamous malapropisms, dozens of anecdotes about his critical and commercial failures as well as his outstanding successes, and details of his relationships with, among scores of others, Eddie Cantor, Ronald Colman, Merle Oberon, Gary Cooper, George Cukor, William Wyler, Billy Wilder.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Meticulously researched ... Besides discovering stars like Gary Cooper, David Niven and Ronald Colman ... Goldwyn invented the ‘package’: He was the first to buy the book, hire the screenwriter, stars, crew and director. His fifty-year career established the model for today’s independent producer.”

  —Harper’s Bazaar

  “Berg has done a painstaking job of re-creating this epic life.... We see Goldwyn-the-lonely-tyrant-of-tinsel-town working with the most brilliant writers, directors, and stars.”

  —Cosmpopolitan

  “Does something no other Hollywood history has ever accomplished: this book explains Hollywood, is the best single-volume education in the movie business.... In the long run, Berg’s book, meticulous, restrained, yet passionately empathetic to Goldwyn and the contract players of his life, will certainly take the cake among Hollywood histories of the age.”

  —Manhattan Inc.

  “Whether you own a thousand film books or nary a one, room ought to be made for Goldwyn.... The films we watch now, with either gritted teeth or contented smiles, are the products of an industry that ended up taking its shape from the psyche of this tumultuous man.”

  —GQ

  “Superb ... a complex portrait of a man and an era. There has never before been a Hollywood biography as profound as this.”

  —Playboy

  “As meticulous, as sterling in quality and as large in scope as independent movie producer Samuel Goldwyn always (but not always very accurately) claimed his movies were.”

  —People

  “It’s a great place to start reading about the movies.... Cukor said of the gregarious mogul, ‘He acted as though every part were given just for him.’ Thus does he dominate Berg’s big, rich, graceful biography. One hates to close it for the last time as one hates to see Goldwyn and his larger-than-life moviemaking come to an end again. Berg’s achievement is spectacularly rewarding.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  PRAISE FOR A. SCOTT BERG’S

  Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

  “A highly readable work of literary history.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “An extraordinarily fine and moving portrait of the man who assembled America’s favorite literary gang—Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wolfe & Company.”

  —Russell Baker

  “The interest in this book lies not in Perkins’s literary or commercial acumen but in his private life. He is revealed as a man of painfully repressed passion, but of great tact and nearly heroic steadiness of character. Decency was his art. A. Scott Berg has told this story unobtrusively and with great feeling, and he has (perhaps just in the nick of time) rescued Perkins from permanent obscurity.”

  —The Atlantic Monthly

  “[An] exhaustive, penetrating and wholly satisfying biography ... scrupulous, thoughtful, touching, memorable and eminently rewarding.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “Berg’s whole narrative is first-rate-filled with humor and feeling. Max would have published it in a minute.”

  —Newsweek

  “A. Scott Berg’s biography is, surprisingly, the first major study of this legendary figure, and it would thus be welcome for that reason alone. But this superb book is so meticulously researched, so richly detailed, so beautifully ‘cultured,’ that it will undoubtedly become an indispensable account of modern literary life in America, as well as a highly rewarding portrait of a man previously hidden behind the scenes.... While lamenting a lack of space to describe fully the incredibly fascinating detail that marks so much of this outstanding book, we must recommend A. Scott Berg’s biography of Max Perkins as one of the most important, most readable books of the year.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “A delightful biography, rich in literary anecdotes, and a mine of advice for writers and editors.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  ALSO BY A. SCOTT BERG

  Lindbergh

  Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by The Berkley Publishing Group

  A member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published or unpublished material may be found following the index.

  Copyright © 1989 by A. Scott Berg

  (clockwise from top) Roman Scandals, 1933 (Samuel Goldwyn Foundation). Ball of Fire, 1941 (Samuel Goldwyn Foundation). Bette Davis in The Little Foxes, 1941 (RKO Radio Pictures, Inc.). Gary Cooper in The Winning of Barbara Worth, 1926 (Samuel Goldwyn Foundation). Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in Wuthering Heights, 1939 (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences). These Three, 1935 (Samuel Goldwyn Foundation). Cary Grant in The Bishop’s Wife, 1947 (Samuel Goldwyn Foundation). Vera Zorina in The Goldwyn Follies, 1938 (Samuel Goldwyn Foundation). Eddie Cantor in Whoopce!, 1930 (Samuel Goldwyn Foundation). Loretta Young in The Bishop’s Wife, 1947 (Samuel Goldwyn Foundation). Dead End, 1937 (Samuel Goldwyn Foundation). These Three, 1935 (Samuel Goldwyn Foundation). Danny Kaye in Up in Arms, 1944 (Samuel Goldwyn Foundation). Vilma Banky and Ronald Colman in The Winning of Barbara Worth, 1926 (Samuel Goldwyn Foundation). The Best Years of Our Lives, 1946 (Samuel Goldwyn Foundation). Gary Cooper in The Pride of the Yankees, 1942 (Samuel Goldwyn Foundation).

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced

  in any form without permission.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com<
br />
  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Berg, A. Scott (Andrew Scott)

  Goldwyn : a biography / A. Scott Berg.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-49735-7

  1. Goldwyn, Samuel, 1882—1974. 2. Motion picture producers and

  directors—United States—Biography. I. Title

  PN1998.3G65B47 1998

  791.43’0232’092-dc21 98-28688

  [B] CIP

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  to

  Katharine Hepburn, Kevin McCormick,

  and Irene Mayer Selznick

  I met a traveler from an antique land

  Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

  Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

  Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

  And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

  The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

  And on the pedestal these words appear:

  “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.

  —SHELLEY, “Ozymandias”

  PART ONE

  ... and the children of Israel dispersed, embarking on an endless cycle of settlement and influence that invoked persecution and expulsion.

  The Hebrews suffered at the hands of the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Romans. Through the Middle Ages they continued to search for a homeland, only to be expelled from England in the 1290s, France in the 1390s, Spain in the 1490s. Into central Europe they poured.

  In 1791, Russia established a Pale of Settlement, that portion of their land in which Jews were permitted to reside. Much of Poland—which was about to endure a century of partitioning among Russia, Austria, and Prussia —lay just beyond the Pale. The continuation of Jewish communal life, forever threatened, found hope in a charismatic new religious movement there.

  Hasidism emphasized piety over learning. Aglow with mysticism, this folk gospel preached that God smiled upon the ignorant as well as the wise and that one’s devotion could best be expressed through passionate prayer. By the nineteenth century, most of Poland’s Orthodox Jewry belonged to the sect. The Jewish faith, bound by laws and tradition, proved imperishable. By 1876, the thriving city of Warsaw, on the left bank of the Vistula, found that one third of its 300,000 citizens was Jewish.

  In 1881, a new czar took hold of Russia; Alexander III imposed on the Jews conditions as intolerable as any they had yet experienced. ...

  1 Exodus

  SAMUEL GOLDWYN was not born on Auguest 27, 1882.

  For most of his life he swore it was his day of birth, but both the name and the date were fabrications. He promulgated other distortions of the truth as well, liberties he took for dramatic effect. He spent years covering his tracks, erasing those details of his origins that embarrassed him. The reason, he revealed to a psychotherapist at the pinnacle of his career, was that ever since childhood he “wanted to be somebody.” Starting at an early age, Samuel Goldwyn invented himself.

  Schmuel Gelbfisz was born in Warsaw, probably in July 1879. Records vary, and Jews were known to falsify their sons’ birth dates to protect them from future conscription in the czar’s army. He was the eldest child of Hannah and Aaron David Gelbfisz, Hasidic Jews. The family had lived in Poland for generations, but their surname was new. Not until 1797 were the Jews of Warsaw ordered to adopt patronymics. Many fashioned names from house signs, which were often hieroglyphs painted in a single color. The picture of an animal might refer to part of a family’s history or simply represent a family member’s trade. In Poland, the spellings of these names were often a mixture of languages. “I’m sure there was a fishmonger somewhere back there,” said one Gelbfisz descendant; and his house sign, as the German first syllable indicates, was painted yellow.

  Aaron had been a rabbinical student in his youth but went to work at an early age to support his new family. A sickly and gentle man, he had a handsome face with fine, even features. He liked to read. Goldwyn remembered him as “a sensitive fella.” He struggled with a small store that sold “antiques”—mostly secondhand goods and junk. Fluent in several languages, he supplemented his measly income by reading and writing letters for his neighbors.

  His wife, Hannah Reban Jarecka, was born in 1855, three years after her husband. Except for their religious beliefs and their mutual birthplace, Warsaw, they were essentially opposites. Hannah was a tall brunette, so stout that she was known as lange Hannah—Big Hannah. She had piercing eyes and squashed features, a combination that produced a constant scowl; and she tended to shout rather than speak. One granddaughter remembered, “She wore the pain of many generations of suffering.” Like many women of her period, she ruled the house.

  The Gelbfiszes, whose marriage had been arranged according to tradition, did not especially care for each other. Within sixteen years, they produced five more children—Mania (born in 1884), Barel (later known as Bernard, who was born the following year), Natalia (called Nettie, born in 1889), Ben (born in 1890), and Sally (born in 1894). Hannah showed a stringent affection for her family.

  In 1882, the Jewish population of Warsaw reached 130,000; it was the largest Jewish community in Europe. A generation later, the Jewish population there had almost trebled. Natural increase was responsible for only part of this growth; immigration made up the rest. After the Russian pogroms of 1881, tens of thousands of Jews had fled to Warsaw from all corners of the Russias.

  The age-old history of ambivalence toward Jews caught up to Poland. The country needed them, for they contributed to the nation’s economy and growing mercantile class; but when they succeeded, the Gentile population felt the need to punish them, and subjected them to higher taxes, restrictive laws, violent attacks.

  The Gelbfisz family of eight lived in two rooms of a flat on a crowded street in the Jewish sector of Warsaw, one narrow building wedged against another. Fear surrounded them. The three boys shared one hard bed. “You can’t visualize how we lived,” Ben recalled years later. “All I can see is pogroms.” The Gelbfiszes never starved, but once they survived an entire week on a handful of potatoes. In a vulnerable moment, Goldwyn volunteered three adjectives to describe his life in Poland: “poor, poor, poor.” Almost everything under the sun disappointed Hannah; and she complained constantly of her plight, making life miserable for her husband.

  Aaron Gelbfisz periodically disappeared, abandoning his family for days, sometimes months, at a time. Fortunately, a few relatives could assist, especially Hannah’s brother, who had scraped together enough money to invest in a small block of apartments. When there was not enough food to spread among her children, Hannah farmed Schmuel out to her husband’s parents. He adored them.

  Schmuel’s grandparents Zalman and Perele Gelbfisz lived in a tenement on nearby Brovarna Street, in much cozier surroundings than Schmuel was accustomed to. Zalman was a mohel, the man who circumcised male babies on the eighth day after birth in the ritual known as Brith Milah. As such, he held the respect of his community and had the carriage of an aristocrat. He had squirreled away some savings and retired. Schmuel admired the old man’s haughtiness; and he began to model himself after him—the only dominant male figure in his life—especially in his inability to control his own volatile temper.

  Like most Jewish children in Warsaw, Schmuel attended cheder, in black cap and payess, and received an Orthodox Jewish education. He could read and write Hebrew, and he spoke some Polish, except at home. Yiddish was his mother tongue. One day after school when he was still very young, Schmuel was playing with a bunch of friends in the street. A well-dr
essed young man rode past on horseback, followed by a lackey on a donkey. The servant pitched a handful of coins onto the cobblestones, and all the children scrambled to gather them. Long after spending his share, Schmuel held on to that image of a man too rich to carry his own money.

  During one of his extended visits with his grandparents, in 1895, Schmuel was suddenly summoned home. His father had returned from a trip with excruciating pains in his stomach and difficulty breathing. After a short illness, Aaron Gelbfisz died at the age of forty-three, saddling Hannah with the responsibility of six children, the youngest of whom was eleven months old. The eldest, fifteen-year-old Schmuel, would hardly go another day thereafter without catching himself coughing or thinking he felt pain in his stomach.

  As life grew harder for the fatherless household, increased support came from Schmuel’s mother’s family. One of the Jarecka aunts provided a cheaper dwelling for them, a little cash, and various jobs over the years for the children, according to age and ability. Schmuel’s brother Ben, for example, kept her accounts.

  Schmuel saw that his mother, although still young, planned to settle into widowhood, to be supported by her children. Her sons would become laborers or bookkeepers, her daughters secretaries or seamstresses; and she would spend her final years indulging in her favorite pastime, oko—a game like poker, which she played every day.