Movie Mogul
Goldwyn: A Biography.
by A. Scott Berg.
Knopf. 579 pp. $24.95.
According to a by-now familiar script, the Jewish moguls of Hollywood arrived on these shores penniless, like Joseph in Egypt; even more remarkably than the biblical Joseph, they proceeded not so much to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams as to do his dreaming for him. Their desire for success and acceptance, projected into a thousand theaters, became the stuff of American myth. The latest examination of this myth, A. Scott Berg’s Goldwyn, is a vast, minutely detailed portrait of a single figure in that heroic company, one of the most famous of the independent Hollywood producers and an acknowledged builder of the movie industry.
Berg’s narrative invites such easy biblical comparisons. The first chapter of Goldwyn, indeed, is titled “Exodus” and is prefaced by a half-page summary of Jewish history phrased, like the voice-over at the start of the movie The Ten Commandments, in pseudo-biblical cadences:
. . . and the children of Israel dispersed, embarking on an endless cycle of settlement and influence that invoked persecution and expulsion.
Is it any wonder that from such beginnings we should find by Chapter 10, when Goldwyn and his second wife, the young and beautiful Catholic actress Frances Howard, have moved to Hollywood, that we have arrived in “Canaan”?
Born in Warsaw in 1879, Samuel Goldwyn began life as Schmuel Gelbfisz. Finding himself, at age fifteen, fatherless and poor, he walked 500 miles to Hamburg with a vague hope of reaching America. Three years later he arrived somewhere near Maine, entering the United States illegally by walking across the Canadian border.
Goldwyn’s early rise in the glove business is an American success story in itself. He started in upstate New York’s Gloversville, sweeping a factory for three dollars a week, and ended as a prosperous sales representative for the Elite Glove Company in Manhattan. Achievement enough for a first-generation immigrant—but men like Goldwyn were out to recreate themselves. In 1913 Samuel Goldfish, as he was then called, saw a “flicker” in a Herald Square theater; it was only a “Bronco Billy” Western, but the brief image of a man leaping on a horse was like a burning bush, out of which spoke the spirit of America, and it changed his life. That day he vowed he would produce a film, and talked his brother-in-law into joining the venture.
From a company Sam Goldfish formed in 1916 with the playwright and producer Edgar Selwyn, the name Goldwyn was created. Even after he was forced out of the company, Goldwyn retained the name as his own. It was one more step on the road to self-invention: he named himself after his company the way actors in real life imitated the selves they invented on screen. In the following years Goldwyn participated in the establishment of one production company after another, playing a formative role in such enterprises as Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and United Artists. A man who argued with everyone (even when in agreement), Goldwyn was in the end forced to leave them all. For most of his long career, he remained an independent producer.
Goldwyn’s production style was one of total involvement with every aspect of picture-making: handpicking the stars, visiting the sets, examining all the scripts, viewing all the rushes. Like his fellow moguls he was a patriarch—in the sense not only of founding an industry but of taking a close paternal responsibility for every aspect of its health and well-being. The father’s role was played out quite literally: Goldwyn and his kind gave homes to an entire population of young runaway girls who came to Hollywood to become stars. And if these actresses needed fathers, men like Goldwyn needed families. Learning that his discovery Vilma Banky, the silent film star, intended to elope with Rod La Rocque, Goldwyn demanded: “How could you do this to me? . . . I brought you to this country. I acted like a father. I protected you. What are you, ashamed?” Then he threw the largest wedding in Hollywood memory.
With his own family he was not so successful. He did not speak to Ruth, the daughter of his first marriage, for eleven years after a fight over a baked potato. His son was a typically neglected rich kid dumped in Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Sundays while his father sneaked off to play poker. Goldwyn sent money to his own mother in Poland, but though he traveled extensively he could not face the country of his birth, forcing her to come to Frankfurt, Germany to see him. Perhaps it was a similar desire to efface the past that kept him from visiting his dying sister in America. “I hate hospitals,” he told her daughter. “When Eddie Cantor was sick in the hospital, I didn’t even visit him.”
A businessman, Goldwyn was not simply out to make money. The early immigrant desire to belong, to be an American, shaped his taste and aspirations. Though he was, in director Billy Wilder’s words, “A titan with an empty skull, not confused by anything he read, which he didn’t,” he nevertheless had an “instinct for the better things.” This yearning for what was “classy” showed itself in Goldwyn’s expensive wardrobe, in his tennis and riding lessons, his hiring of President Roosevelt’s son, his art collection. He added a special division called “Eminent Authors” to his film company, employing writers he had never read for the sake of their reputation or social standing alone. George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells were repeatedly wooed, without success. Maurice Maeterlinck, the Belgian Nobel Prize winner and author of The Life of the Bee, was imported to Hollywood, given a house on a hilltop and a large salary, and introduced to the press and at parties by Goldwyn as “The greatest writer on earth. He’s the guy who wrote The Birds and the Bees.” When at last Maeterlinck was sent home (he produced nothing but an abstract and unusable story called “The Power of Light”), Goldwyn comforted him, “Don’t worry, Maurice. You’ll make good yet.”
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In all these respects Goldwyn could not have been more unlike the famous literary editor Maxwell Perkins, who was the subject of Berg’s first biography. Perkins, the equal of the artists he worked with, inspired writers like Thomas Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald to create their finest achievements. Goldwyn was a semiliterate, uneducated man, as famous for his malapropisms as for his movies, who gathered around him men and women of talent he would then bully and bribe into making the kind of art he valued. Goldwyn’s own experience as a poor, self-made man put him, he believed, in deeper touch with the moviegoing public than were the writers and directors he employed. His concerns for that audience’s sensibilities translated themselves into “The Goldwyn Touch”—a vague blend of restraint and decorum under a veneer of sentimentality that was somehow drawn out of all who worked for him. The astonishing thing is that, in his own way, Goldwyn often brought out the best in those he hired. Laurence Olivier, having previously worked only on the stage, claimed it was Goldwyn’s blustering on the set that turned him into a film actor.
Goldwyn survived longer than most in the industry, making films into old age (he died at ninety-four). During World War II, echoes of the Holocaust reached him—one of his sisters and her husband were deported and killed—but though his donations to Jewish philanthropies increased, he remained absorbed in the making of pictures like Guys and Dolls that would appeal to a wide American audience, free of politics or controversy. He always preferred seeing his own movies to anyone else’s, and would watch Stella Dallas and Wuthering Heights over and over, crying.
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Unlikes Neal Gabler in An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, A. Scott Berg declines to speculate here about the strange link between the Jews and Hollywood, concentrating instead on the life of his subject and the movies he made. But such speculation obtrudes nevertheless. Surely one of the intriguing aspects of men like Goldwyn has to do with all the things they sought to hide—their Jewish accents, their crassness, their eccentrically disguised insecurities. Yet in retrospect, and despite everything they tried self-consciously to push away or cover over, they also seem, more even than later generations in American Jewish life, peculiarly free. They have the appeal of Jewish gangsters, looming as large as any first generation of pioneers and incidentally forming a link to a vanished world of Eastern European Jewish exuberance.
At the same time, there seems something pitiable and lost about them, and their disguises and evasions can strike us as pathetically empty gestures. Goldwyn in particular reminds one of the Wizard of Oz, as that figure is finally revealed in the movie version: a little man hiding behind a curtain as he projects tremendous and beguiling images on a screen. If Dorothy, that quintessential American girl, can go home whenever she wants, and will reawaken surrounded as ever by her faithful traveling companions, loving relatives and friends all, the wizard will forever remain a stranger—a peddler, a Gypsy (why not a Jew?), no more at home in Kansas than in Oz, and soon enough to resume his endless journey.
Goldwyn opens with a portentous epigraph from Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” with its thundering line, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” But it is hard to match this poem’s image of ruination and hollow triumph with the figure of Goldwyn as Berg presents him. The epigraph suggests that if Goldwyn and men like him begin as Joseph they end up as Pharaoh, constructing great towers that fall to dust and serve only as monuments of human vanity. But there is no real evidence of this in the book, which gives us rather the rambling life of an American producer who had his ups and downs but essentially enjoyed an unusually prosperous and successful career which he seems never to have regretted.
This is hardly to suggest that Goldwyn is not an enigmatic figure; only that the enigma is not explored here. Goldwyn is altogether a book without a thesis—part biography, part Hollywood history, part trivia storehouse. In the final chapter, “A Slow Fade to Black,” epigraph and ending merge. We see Goldwyn the titan fighting to the last—when a nurse offers to help him eat, he replies, “Help? How the hell do you think I got out of Poland?” Lastly we are given Goldwyn buried in his crypt like Ozymandias in his bed of sand, while “the City of Angels stretches far away.” The melodrama of the close is more tribute than condemnation. It is as if, even from the grave, Goldwyn had successfully seduced one more writer into falling under the spell of “The Goldwyn Touch.”
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