It is rare that highly successful businessmen possess or are able to satisfy the urge to create art. The worlds of business and art demand such different talents and are each so separately absorbing that success in one would seem to decree failure or only minimal success in the other. Samuel Goldwyn, who was born a hundred years ago, was one of the few exceptions. The public image of Goldwyn as an enormous ego and purveyor of malapropisms, bad-tempered, dictatorial, and vain, who went out of his way to court the rich and famous, is largely accurate. At the same time, there was more than a touch of the artist in Goldwyn, and it was this unexpected combination of artistic instinct and shrewd business acumen which was responsible for Goldwyn’s unparalleled success as an independent film producer.

T.S. Eliot wrote that he would have liked an audience for his plays that could neither read nor write so that their response to his work would be pure and unblunted by education. Goldwyn fulfilled this requirement. Unschooled though he was, he had a primitive, instinctual response to art which enabled him to judge, often without being able to explain why, if a work was good or bad and whether it was likely to succeed. To say that a film had the “Goldwyn touch” was—in his heyday—one of the greatest of compliments. That touch, as Alva Johnston described it, was not “brilliance or sensationalism,” but rather “something that manifests itself gradually in a picture; the characters are consistent; the workmanship is honest; there are no tricks or short cuts; the intelligence of the audience is never insulted.”

Goldwyn could often tell at a glance if an actress was right for a part or if a set had an air of authenticity. Though he could hardly remember his own address or the names of his associates, he had a prodigious memory for everything connected with films. At the same time,. during the making of his films, he was immensely suggestible. He picked the brains of all around him, and was open to advice or criticism if not always acknowledging it. One of Goldwyn’s executives described him as “the kind of man who, if he understands what you tell him, thinks he thought of it himself.”

Goldwyn boasted that “I make my pictures to please myself” and he was a hard man to please. He made only a handful of films a year and was determined to spare no effort, hiring the best actors, writers, directors, technicians, and designers available, and possessing a remarkable gift—when he chose to use it—for getting them to work together as a team. He never made B-pictures, gangster, or exploitation films (not one of his films was ever censored) and he went to enormous lengths—and expense—to find good writers: “I’d hire the devil himself if he’d write me a good story,” he once said. When he began to make sound pictures, he rehearsed fully before shooting began, though this was not the standard practice in Hollywood at the time. He had no hesitation about having a scene filmed over and over again Until he got what he wanted. Sometimes this perfectionism went to extreme lengths. After spending over $400,000 on the first version of Nana, he decided that he didn’t like it and scrapped it completely. In Bulldog Drummond (1928), his first sound picture, the opening scene is set in a posh dinner club where a waiter drops a spoon and someone exclaims, “What is the meaning of this infernal din?” After the scene was shot, Goldwyn saw it and asked what the word “din” meant. He had the set rebuilt and the actors rehired, at enormous cost, just to have the word “noise” substituted for the offending “din.” In the end, he changed his mind and the original scene was used.

Goldwyn was one of only two outstandingly successful independent producers in Hollywood during its first half-century (the other was David Selznick). He took complete responsibility for his films, bearing the financial risk, choosing the scripts, casting the films, and virtually directing his directors. He also took charge of publicity and distribution. Still, he needed collaborators and did his best work with those who could separate his sense from his nonsense, and say no to the nonsense.

Goldwyn’s readiness to spare no expense in getting the best is illustrated in one of his famous Gold-wynisms. Advised not to buy a script because “it’s too caustic,” he replied: “To hell with the cost. If it’s a good story, I’ll make it.” He is supposed to have told the novelist Edna Ferber that he would rather make a great artistic film than eat a good meal. On a visit to London, he tried to persuade Bernard Shaw to write for him. By Goldwyn’s own account, Shaw turned him down, saying afterward, “There is only one difference between Mr. Goldwyn and me. Whereas he is after art, I am after money.”

If Shaw’s quip was meant with tongue in cheek, it also touched on the heart of Goldwyn’s chief difficulty as a producer—his frustration and rage when he sensed something artistically wrong or missing in a film, but couldn’t express it. This was one of the reasons he could not work with anyone on a truly equal basis: “It took a world of time to explain my plans to my associates,” he once complained, and his press agent, Carl Brandt, wrote rather feelingly: “It is almost painful to see him groping, struggling, bludgeoning his way to clarity, agonizing over ideas he feels but cannot express. . . .”

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Although Goldwyn’s craving for publicity was notorious, next to nothing is known about his early life. A few bare facts and little more: born into an impoverished Jewish family in Warsaw, he ran away from home at twelve; came to England where he spent a couple of years with relatives in Birmingham; arrived in America in 1895 as Samuel Goldfish (he did not change his name to Goldwyn until 1918); worked in a sweatshop cutting gloves in upstate New York; became a traveling salesman selling gloves and made his fortune by 1910, when he married. Nothing is known of his forebears and practically nothing of his family or his early life in Poland. Judging from the fullest biography of Goldwyn to date, by Arthur Marx, even his original name, before he became Goldfish, and the exact date of his birth, are not publicly known.

It is clear, though, that his early life was wretched and that he must often have felt unwanted and unloved. Perhaps this is why he was so obsessed with publicity later on, and would go into paroxysms of rage if his name did not appear often enough in the press. (Sometimes his agents actually hired actors to pose as newspapermen and greet him with questions.) We know too that he experienced anti-Semitism as a child in Poland, and was so sensitive on the subject that he offered Budd Schulberg several hundred thousand dollars not to publish his novel What Makes Sammy Run during World War II on the grounds that it gave fuel to anti-Semites.

In his dictated memoirs, Behind the Screens (1923), Goldwyn tells even less about himself than we know from other sources. He omits to mention even that he was a Polish Jew by birth, leaving a rather Chaplinesque impression that he was born poor in England. Thus, he recalls the memory of “how once as a boy of twelve I wandered for a whole week through the streets of London with no more ardent guaranty of the future than a loaf of bread.” Perhaps the strongest emotion in the book is the narrator’s awe at having come so far. Goldwyn made his first fortune before World War I selling rights to his films in Europe. Describing his feelings at the time, he writes: “As I rode from Berlin to Paris my head reeled with the magnitude of our success. Could this really be I, the poor boy who a short time before had wandered over these very countries with hardly a sou in his pocket?” Several years later, after visiting H. G. Wells in London, he was similarly amazed: “As I left his home that day I remembered suddenly that twenty-five years before, I, who had just been entertained by the most celebrated of the younger English novelists, had wandered without home and without money through these very London streets.” When he came to London in the 1950’s to promote Guys and Dolls, he took a room at the Dorchester Hotel overlooking Hyde Park where, he claimed, he had once spent the night on a park bench. (Chaplin used to take a room at the Savoy overlooking Waterloo Bridge, which led in the direction of his dreary birthplace in south London.)

Goldwyn was fascinated by Chaplin, and his remarks about Chaplin’s love of power and his need for independence and their roots in childhood trauma are true of Goldwyn himself:

Those early years of his in London when, the son of poor vaudeville artists, he experienced hunger and tragedy and the constant terror of the next day, have driven far into his brain. No prosperity can quite rid him of fear. That is why he wants to assure himself in every way of his present strength. For what is it but fear which makes a man conscious always of the thickness of his armor, the sharpness of his weapons?

Films, Goldwyn writes, made up for his own unhappy boyhood. He describes what they meant to him: “an impersonal interest so vivid and compelling that it survives any personal grief or maladjustment.”

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Films gave Goldwyn the means both to blot out and to confront the wretchedness of his youth. Hating poverty and suffering, he gave lavishly to charity but always preferred films about beauty to films about squalor—sometimes going to comic lengths in this preference. Thus, when making Dead End in the 1930’s, he built an expensive replica of the riverfront slums of New York’s East Side (he did not shoot on location in order to maintain full control over the production) but refused to allow any dirt in the setting. He had paid several hundred thousand dollars for that set, Goldwyn complained, and he didn’t want it dirty. In the same way, he could bear only so much misery in his films. When making Wuthering Heights, he had the ending changed, to the chagrin of his director, William Wyler, and showed Heathcliff and Catherine reunited in heaven.

It is interesting, though, that Goldwyn’s outstanding films were the serious and sometimes somber ones (though not without their lighter moments). Almost in spite of himself, his attitude that life is a hard struggle is reflected in his films, and in the way they were made. Comedy was never his strong point and even the films he did with such comic talents as Eddie Cantor, Bob Hope, and Danny Kaye were not among his best.

Poverty also drove Goldwyn to develop a highly effective selling style. He had the aggressiveness, the imagination, the persistence bred of desperation, and the confidence of a gambler who knows that he can never fall lower than he has already been. He was at his best in crisis. When his fortunes were at their lowest ebb, in the days before the Armistice in 1918, Goldwyn was cheerful at the prospect of fighting for survival. When things went well, he was often less cheerful. He claimed that he was not naturally a fighter, but had forced himself to become one, like his hero, Theodore Roosevelt.

He was also the craftiest of businessmen, verging on larceny. In his early days in the glove business he dreamed up a scheme for importing expensive French gloves into the United States without paying import duties. He had the right and left gloves packed in separate crates, and addressed each crate to a fictitious name in some American port city. On arrival, the unclaimed crates with their useless contents would be put up for auction by the customs service. Naturally, there would be no other bidders except Goldwyn, who knew where the mates were to be found, so he would pick up the whole shipment for a song.

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In his pre-movie days, many of Goldwyn’s customers had been recent immigrants like himself and he quite naturally spoke Yiddish to them, of the most colorful kind. Probably his later reputation for mangling the English language—with his self-contradictory turns of phrase and his flair for the oxymoronic—derived, in part, from his use of Yiddish, which is a treasure of the paradoxical and the illogical. How much of this was calculated and how much spontaneous we will never know, since the classical Goldwynisms like “include me out” and “in two words: impossible” eventually became so popular that Goldwyn paid writers to turn them out. (For what it is worth, interviewers in later years were impressed, and perhaps disappointed, by the correctness and clarity of Goldwyn’s English.)

Whether original or not, most of the famous Goldwynisms do give the flavor of the man—they share an element of non sequitur or madcap twist. Thus, when Goldwyn was suing the British film producer, Alexander Korda (lawsuits were a regular feature of his career), Korda happened to be in Hollywood. To Korda’s surprise, Goldwyn invited him to dinner. “How can we have dinner when you’re suing me?” Korda asked. “What’s one thing got to do with the other?” Goldwyn answered.

One of the most quoted Goldwynisms occurred when Goldwyn was warned against filming The Children’s Hour because it was about lesbians. “Don’t worry,” he replied, “we’ll make them Americans.” Again, after hearing André Previn’s orchestration of Gershwin’s music for the film version of Porgy and Bess, Goldwyn, overcome by emotion, told Previn, “You should be goddammed proud, kid—you should never do another thing in your life.” This was typical of Goldwyn—the spirit was there, but the words did not quite match.

Some Goldwynisms were only superficially illogical, however. He once fell asleep while a writer was describing an idea for a film. The writer shook him awake, declaring that all he wanted was Goldwyn’s opinion. Goldwyn replied, “Isn’t sleeping an opinion?” In short, though it served him to play the part on occasion, Goldwyn was certainly no buffoon. He was tall and distinguished looking, always immaculately dressed (he carried nothing in his pockets, lest it spoil the line of his suits), and charming to those who might be useful to him (an acquaintance said he would charm the socks off you and then step on your toes).

The circumstances of Goldwyn’s entry into films were as remarkable as his escape from Europe to the New World. Here, too, everything hung on his vision of a new life—for films as for himself—and his faith that taking great risks would be rewarded in the end with success. Today, of course, it does not seem very daring to invest in a movie, but it did in 1913, when the future of motion pictures looked very chancy indeed. Films in those days were made chiefly for showing in vaudeville houses between the acts and their purpose was not even to entertain customers but to drive them out and make room for new ones (for this reason they were known as “chasers”).

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Nevertheless, Goldwyn was so convinced that films could be the main attraction to an audience—if they were good enough—that he talked his brother-in-law, the vaudeville producer Jesse Lasky, into the idea of making a feature film. They hired an actor, bought the rights to a novel, The Squaw Man, and then went looking for a director. Goldwyn, displaying his characteristic audacity in going straight for the best, first tried to get D.W. Griffith to direct the film, but the great man was skeptical, pointing out that Goldwyn had never made a film before. Goldwyn is supposed to have replied that this was his “strongest weakpoint,” since Griffith would have complete control. In the end, Griffith turned him down and Goldwyn settled for a friend of Lasky’s who had had no experience with films whatever, a young playwright named Cecil B. de Mille.

By the end of 1913, they were ready. The venture seemed on the face of it mad: to gamble a huge sum of money on a director who had never directed a film before, with no prepared script and only one actor, to be shot on location in Arizona, where the fledgling crew were hoping to find Indians and other extras to assist in the proceedings. But no sooner had the train pulled out (from Grand Central) than Goldwyn turned to the task of learning about film distribution. With his formidable selling powers he stirred up so much enthusiasm for the film—and others already being planned for the future—that within a few days he had raised about $50,000.

Miraculously, the film was actually made (in Hollywood, rather than Arizona) and proved an instant, spectacular success when it was shown on the East Coast. Thus launched, Goldwyn’s career rocketed within a few months with a string of successes. By the end of 1916 he was practically a millionaire, at which point—again, characteristically—he was voted out of the company he had helped to form. He was a hard man to work with, dynamic and highly capable, but often childish, cantankerous, and unwilling to share control. “A producer shouldn’t get ulcers,” he once said. “He should give them.”

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Clearly Goldwyn’s ruthlessness and hunger for power were in proportion to the insecurity and powerlessness of his childhood. Goldwyn described himself as a lone wolf and a rebel—“I was always an independent, even when I had partners”—and, in the end, he became the most successful independent producer in the business. Toward the end of his career, he fought and won a long court battle against the huge film companies whose monopoly over the movie houses prevented the independents from showing their films. He was unnaturally stubborn. Just as he had broken with his family, he eventually broke with all his partners—including, at various times, Lasky, Adolph Zukor, Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Alexander Korda (incidentally, his name in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation was a fossil of one such partnership; in fact, he had nothing to do with the films made by MGM). Always he functioned best as his own boss, his self-sufficiency making up for his insecurity.

So far as the creative side of filmmaking was concerned, Goldwyn’s partners in the early days, Lasky and Zukor, were not far wrong in refusing to take him seriously. He was such a naïf at first that when de Mille started filming faces in shadow for artistic effect, Goldwyn objected that if the film distributors saw only half a face they would pay only half the price. Traces of this gaucherie—or perversity—remained throughout Goldwyn’s career. He was offered the chance, for instance, to buy the film rights to Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, but emphatically turned it down when he heard the novel was not yet finished: “What is that Hemingway trying to do—rob me?”

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But as the years passed, this crudeness gradually wore off: Goldwyn educated himself in the arts and his natural taste developed. He saw as much theater as he could, both in America and abroad, and was a regular operagoer with his own box at the Metropolitan. On trips to Europe, he made frequent pilgrimages to the great art galleries and eventually became a collector. He had a taste for European avant-garde cinema—it was he who brought classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to America—but cared little for actors, famous though they might have been, preferring the company of artists and intellectuals. Like many self-made men, he also had a snobbish streak and was not above associating himself with a name or title for its own sake: once he tried to hire an ancient British aristocrat to work as story editor in his London office; another time he invited Freud to Hollywood to write a film script about psychoanalysis; most blatantly of all, he gave Franklin D. Roosevelt’s son, James, a sinecure as a vice-president of his company. At the same time, he had a sharp, intuitive knowledge of psychology, particularly useful in dealing with actors. At one point, for example, he had two rival prima donnas, Pauline Frederick and Geraldine Ferrar, under contract to him at hefty salaries, and the two were fiercely jealous of each other. One day—so the story goes—Pauline Frederick walked into Goldwyn’s office and dropped a script on his desk, with the words, “I hate it.” Goldwyn, without missing a beat, called in an assistant, and chastised him for giving the script to the wrong actress. “This was supposed to go to Miss Ferrar.” Instantly, Pauline Frederick changed her mind and decided to have another look at the script.

Despite his natural intelligence, Goldwyn was a poor reader who preferred a synopsis to an entire work. “I read part of it all the way through,” he once told a luckless writer, and it supposedly took him a whole week to read The Wizard of Oz, which the average reader could get through in a couple of hours (he did not make the film in the end but sold the rights to MGM). Goldwyn bought the film rights to Thurber’s story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” on the basis of a synopsis, and later apologized to the author for his screen treatment of the work, saying that it was “too blood and thirsty.” Thurber agreed: “I was horror and struck.” Had Goldwyn actually read the story, he might have made a better film.

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In general, Goldwyn’s films reflected his own interests—he believed that what he liked the public would also like, and on the whole he was right. Few of his silent films are remembered today, but he made stars of Ronald Col-man, Vilma Banky, and Gary Cooper, and some of his films, including The Eternal City, Stella Dallas, The Dark Angel, and The Winning of Barbara Worth, are still admired by students of cinema. From Bulldog Drummond (1928) through Porgy and Bess (1959), his last picture, Goldwyn made movies uninterruptedly for a total of thirty years. During that time, his stars included the likes of Laurence Olivier, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Merle Oberon, and David Niven. Perhaps his most ambitious—and certainly his most successful—film was The Best Years of Our Lives, which was awarded the Oscar for the best film in 1947 and also the Best Producer award.

Along with his many successes and discoveries, there were also some blunders. After making The Winning of Barbara Worth, he let Gary Cooper go over to Paramount; he passed up Greta Garbo (she was too peasantish and her feet were too big) and Clark Gable (his ears stuck out); and although he had Lucille Ball on his payroll as a Goldwyn Girl, he never recognized her comic genius. Then there was the fiasco of making a silent film starring the opera star Mary Garden, and the prolonged debacle of three movies with the Russian actress Anna Sten who could hardly speak English. But in spite of such mistakes, many of his films proved to be of lasting interest and importance, especially those directed by William Wyler and written by Sidney Howard or Lillian Hellman, like Dodsworth, Wuthering Heights, The Little Foxes, Dead End, and The Best Years of Our Lives.

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Goldwyn’s life was a classic American success story. By the time of his death in 1974, he was a legend. In ways both admirable and otherwise, he typified many of the Eastern European Jewish immigrants who came to the United States at the end of the 19th century. As one who had been an impoverished Polish Jewish child born into a troubled family, he brought a knowledge of life’s brutality to the make-believe world of Hollywood. His arrogance and ruthlessness complemented his creative drive and imagination.

His best films were essentially the work of a realist who, though tempted by fantasy and escapism, preferred to look life in the eye. In the end, though, his greatest creation was Goldwyn the showman, colorful, insouciant, aristocratic, whose name was a virtual guarantee of good entertainment and, at times, even of art.