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| Samuel Goldwyn |
When the glow cast by his Oscar-winning
film, The Best Years of Our Lives, still lingered, people -- or at least press agents -- spoke admiringly of "the
Goldwyn touch." But today, if
he's remembered at all, it's for the malaprop gems known as
"Goldwynisms": "Include me out," "Directors
always bite the hand that lays the golden egg" and so on. Or
else people assume he was one of the heads of the most famous movie
studio of them all, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. But although Sam
Goldwyn almost certainly uttered a few genuine Goldwynisms, most of
them were invented by Hollywood gag writers and publicists. And
Goldwyn never had anything to do with MGM. That company was created
by a merger in 1924 of Metro Pictures with a studio run by Louis B.
Mayer and the studio Goldwyn had founded. But he had been ruthlessly
elbowed out of Goldwyn Pictures two years earlier.
Those may be the
central ironies of Goldwyn's life. He wanted to be remembered as a
man of taste, but he lingers in popular history as a buffoon. And he
wanted to leave a legacy in his name, but that name was appropriated
by a more powerful institution. And irony upon irony, it wasn't even
his name to start with, and he had to fight to keep it. He was born
Schmuel Gelbfisz, in Warsaw, probably in 1879. He became Samuel
Goldfish when he left Poland for England in 1895. The name Goldwyn
wasn't created until 20 years later in America, when Sam Goldfish
formed a partnership with Edgar and Archibald Selwyn. As Goldwyn's biographer A. Scott
Berg explains, "The partners realized that several portmanteau
words could be formed from the names Goldfish and Selwyn. . . . In
1916 Goldwyn Pictures was incorporated. . . . For years, show
business wags joked about the abandoned syllables of their surnames."
Just as Selfish
Pictures wouldn't do, the appellation Sam Goldfish also failed to
inspire the respect the company's head wanted. Those of us born to
relatively euphonious names can laugh, but it makes perfect sense to
me that, when a man named Goldfish receives mail and phone calls for
"Samuel Goldwyn," he should decide to make it his legal
name. So in 1918,
Goldfish became Goldwyn. Five years later, after he was ousted from
Goldwyn Pictures, Sam Goldwyn tried to form a company called Samuel
Goldwyn, Inc. Goldwyn Pictures Corp. protested that he had no right
to the name, which had been the company's before it was his own.
Eventually, Judge Learned Hand (who certainly must have known what's
in a name) ruled: "A self-made man may prefer a self-made name."
For there's no more quintessentially American tale
than that of the rise of Sam Goldwyn, the epitome of the self-made
man. It's a story that would have Horatio Alger goggling. Born in the
poverty and despair of the Eastern European ghetto, through pluck and
luck Goldwyn amassed an estate that was worth more than $16 million
when he died in 1974. And he did it all in an industry that didn't
exist -- was undreamed-of -- when he was born.
He was almost
present at the creation: He produced the first feature-length film
made in Hollywood, The Squaw Man, in 1913. He made his
last film, Porgy and Bess, 46 years later. Without having
a bit of education, talent or taste, he produced a long string of
movies noted for their literacy, skill and finesse. Of course, he
knew how to use the education, talent and taste of others -- up to a
limit. It's that limit that makes Goldwyn's story so interesting.
As an
independent producer in the heyday of the great studios, Goldwyn
challenged enormous odds. Until 1947, when the Supreme Court made
them sell off their theaters, Paramount, Loew's (MGM's parent
company), Warner Bros., Twentieth Century-Fox and RKO owned 70
percent of the first-run theaters in the nation's largest cities.
This gave them an obvious advantage: an easy outlet for their own
films. Independents such as Goldwyn had to wheel and deal to get
their films distributed, and to secure the services of big stars,
good directors and technicians, and the rights to plays and novels.
Goldwyn played
this game longer than anyone else, and he played it better than
everyone except, perhaps, David O. Selznick. Unlike Selznick, Goldwyn
never produced a Gone With the Wind, never discovered a
star of the magnitude of Ingrid Bergman or a director of the stature
of Alfred Hitchcock. On the other hand, Selznick, 20 years younger
than Goldwyn and the son of industry pioneer Lewis Selznick, got his
start in the big studios before going independent. He also died, a
burnt-out case, nearly a decade before Goldwyn.
And even
Selznick didn't achieve "the Goldwyn touch," the reputation
for excellence that his best films -- Dodsworth and The Best Years of Our Lives -- deserve. Goldwyn did it largely by hounding and driving the people
who worked for him, demanding precision and clarity in their films --
and by hiring director William Wyler, who was as persnickety as
Goldwyn, often driving actors to tears and rage with his
perfectionism.
''Tell me,"
Wyler asked in 1980, "which pictures have 'the Goldwyn touch'
that I didn't direct?" But the Goldwyn touch was also
cinematographer Gregg Toland's and set designer Richard Day's and
composer Alfred Newman's. The debt Goldwyn owed to them was never
acknowledged. Once Goldwyn overheard someone referring to a Goldwyn
production as a Wyler film. "I made 'Withering Heights,' "
Goldwyn retorted, mispronouncing the title as usual. "Wyler only
directed it."
The trouble is,
the Goldwyn touch hasn't worn well. His best films are still
watchable, but they don't speak to us the way the greatest Hollywood
movies do. Dodsworth is an absorbing, literate film, but
a minor delight, a second-order classic like a novel by Trollope. Wuthering Heights grabs us with the sheer physical beauty
of the young Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, but it never scales
the demonic heights of Emily Brontë's great mad novel. The Best
Years of Our Lives profoundly captured the experience of the
generation that fought World War II, but one has to make an
imaginative connection with its first audiences to enjoy it today.
What's lacking
in Goldwyn's polished, glossy films is personality, the spark that
brings to life the great Hollywood movies. They lack the gargantuan
egotism of Orson Welles, the lively gregariousness of Howard Hawks,
the spacious humanity of John Ford, the delicious perversity of
Alfred Hitchcock, the slapstick cynicism of Billy Wilder, the loopy
bumptiousness of Preston Sturges. Goldwyn's films try too hard to be
perfect. Goldwyn's
perfectionism was of the kind that shades over into paranoia, a fear
that underlings, unless they are watched and hounded constantly, will
goof off -- or worse, intentionally screw up to embarrass the boss.
In The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes a
studio head "with a suspiciousness developed like a muscle."
I can believe that he had Goldwyn in mind, for as Berg pointed out,
Fitzgerald was brought in to labor on a Goldwyn film, and observed in
his notes for The Last Tycoon: "You always knew
where you stood with Goldwyn -- nowhere."
But more
damaging in the long run is that Goldwyn couldn't trust himself. The
self-made man can never go back to what he was before, a child of
ghetto poverty, an illegal-immigrant glove salesman, a show-business
hustler. Those who knew Goldwyn early were frequently surprised at
what he became. His daughter, Ruth, estranged from him after his
first marriage disintegrated, observed when she met him some years
later that "he seemed almost manufactured." Ben Hecht
caricatured him as an almost machine-like assemblage: "The
yellow, billiard-ball head, the nutcracker jaws, the flossy
tailoring, high-priced cologne, yodeling voice and barricaded eyes
that were Sam Goldwyn greeted us en masse." What was barricaded
behind those eyes? Perhaps a man whose experiences, whose energy,
whose drive, if he had allowed them to be unleashed, could have made
better pictures.
Sidney Kingsley's play Dead End, set in a New York street that divided elegant
apartments from squalid tenements, was the kind of "prestigious"
Broadway production Goldwyn could hardly resist trying to make into a movie. But when filming
began, he was enraged when he found the set littered with garbage.
The director, William Wyler, patiently explained that the picture was
set in a slum. Goldwyn persisted in having it cleaned up. It's
certainly not that Goldwyn didn't know what a real slum looked like.
Realism was not the issue: "His pictures had a distinctive look
about them -- a feel that was always tasteful, even in an East Side
slum," Berg noted. The trouble with
Goldwyn, finally, is that he didn't have the courage of his own
vulgarity.
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