Hollywood (15 page)

For most of the 69 million (or so) Americans who were alive on that day, September 14, 1895, was unexceptional.

Grover Cleveland was serving his second but nonconsecutive term as President of the United States.

His Administration seemed remarkably colorless after the fireworks of his candidacy. Accused during his first campaign of having fathered an illegitimate child, he had ordered his aides, “Tell the truth!” They did so. Soon, the whole nation was smirking over the ditty:

The push to the West, an historic population shift, was continuing. Horace Greeley exhorted, “Go West, young man!”—and many did.

The wounds of the Civil War were healing slowly. Children of six and seven worked in fields and factories. The rich were extremely so; the poor, desperate. The financial panic that was soon to overwhelm the country gave no signs of its imminent arrival.

Ellis Island was processing thousands of immigrants daily.

The new century was just around the corner.

It was at this time and place that Sammy Goldfish, a thirteen-year-old orphan, arrived.

He had come from Warsaw, Poland, by way of Hamburg, Germany; Birmingham, Manchester, and London, England. He had entered the United States through Canada because of the quota restrictions.

On that day, although America had countless theatres, music halls, cabarets, and tent shows everywhere, there did not exist, anywhere in the country, a single motion-picture theatre.

Forty-five years later, there were 19,032 motion-picture theatres and an industry that produced some 700 feature films each year to supply them, and no individual in this industry was more important or more powerful than Samuel Goldwyn, who had metamorphosed out of young Sammy Goldfish.

His story bears careful consideration on two counts. First, it is the epic of the American film industry from cradle to almost grave. Second, it proves the United States of America. In Goldwyn’s case, at least, the promised land provided the opportunity it had promised, and he responded with energy, enterprise, imagination, and unflagging effort.

The thirteen-year-old proceeded without delay to Gloversville, New York, because the people who had befriended him in England chanced to be glovemakers. They had
given him the $50 required for immigration entry, and a recommendation for apprenticeship.

In Gloversville, he set to work, learning the trade and acquiring a working knowledge of the English language. According to Goldwyn, he did not become a craftsman.

“I never got the hang,” he explained. “Maybe because I wasn’t too interested. In life, you got to be too interested. I mean, interested. If not, nothing. Even so, I got to be pretty good—not bad—on setting a thumb, though.”

He was possessed of a restless nature and envied the natty salesmen he saw coming to the Kingsborough Hotel and going out into the great world beyond.

He resolved that
he
would become a salesman and wear those highly polished, pointed shoes, fancy cravats, fashionable derbies, and would smell of Lilac Végétal, the way they did.

By the time he was eighteen, he had become an English-speaking glove salesman covering the New England territory.

“I had it on my mind to be a salesman,” he recalled. “I wanted to go around and see people, meet people. Listen, I love people. Why not? Look what people did for
me
. I asked him and asked him—Mr. Lehr, the boss—and at first he laughed at me, at my English. But listen—it got better fast—better than
his
, even. I was going to night school every single day. So—sixteen and a half years old, I said to him one time, to Mr. Lehr, the boss—I said, ‘Listen. Give me the worst territory. Give me a place you can’t sell and let
me
try to sell.’ Hanging around, you understand, I picked up from the salesman that there were such places. So, finally—maybe to get rid of me—he gave me a territory. The worst. In New England. The Berkshires. Pittsfield, Mass. They had a big store there never bought a thing from Lehr. I went there. They looked. Nothing. I went back a few days later and you know what I did? I told the buyer in that store there my story. I told him this was my chance and, if I failed, I was finished. You know what he did? He gave me an order—for three hundred dollars—and I don’t think he even liked the merchandise. I hear them talk sometimes—in a story conference—about Yankees— those tight, mean, hard Yankees and I always get mad. I tell them they don’t know what the hell they’re talking, f’Chrissake. I think of that fellow in Pittsfield. How he took pity on me and helped me out. So that started me.”

Out in the new world at last, he was discovering America.

“I built up that territory from the worst to maybe the best,” he boasted. “So when New York City opened up—Mr. Lehr, the boss—gave it to me. A few years later, you know what I was? A sales manager. But for a different company. Not for Lehr, the boss. I had an office—Fifth Avenue and Nineteenth Street and I lived on Sixty-first. And I walked home every night. They all thought I was crazy. And you know where they all are? They’re all
dead
! Time went by and the next thing, I was a partner in the business. I had a drawing: fifteen thousand a year. That would be like today maybe seventy-five. You could go f’Chrissake in those days to Delmonico’s and get the best steak for maybe a dollar and a quarter.”

As he recalled those days, his small eyes grew larger, his age fell away, his energy increased.

“The glove business was all right, sure. Fine. But I began to find out about
other
businesses—better ones. But I saw—I was a smart kid, y’know—I saw that my chance would be better in some
new
business—because in the established ones it was, first of
all, hard to get in with no connections—and what connections did I have?
No
connections. And to go in business for yourself in one of those businesses you would be in competition right away with the ones who were already in and way ahead of you. No, I could see my best chance was in some
new
business where I could start out even and have some kind of fighting chance.”

“And was that when you met Lasky?”

“No, Jesse came later. First, I mostly would hang around with business friends. You know, customers and buyers and other sales managers. And, also, Abe Lehr, my old boss’s son—we were friends—we liked each other. And we used to go out. To the theatre, sometimes. I always loved it, the theatre. I couldn’t get enough of it. And what theatre then! In those days. Great actors and actresses—real ones, not these plastic, careful kind we got mostly now. Big people who did big acting. Like Nazimova. The first time I saw her, I saw her downtown—The Irving Place Theatre—and she was doing it in Russian—I don’t understand Russian—but I understood talent—and she had it. Wonderful. And Modjeska—well, Polish I understood—she was great. There’s nobody like her now, is there? Who? Why, the way she used to come out and take the curtain call—the bow—I wish I could show you—imitate it for you—but I can’t. She had this way of putting her eyes all over the house so that each and every person thought she was bowing to him alone, or to her. Those were some days—nights. I used to fall in love every night, practically. And the men. My God! David Warfield.
The Music Master
. I cried my eyes out, f’Chrissake.
The Return of Peter Grimm
. And William Gillette. Talk about a gentleman. And what about Holbrook Blinn? Richard Mansfield—a little guy, but great. Ambitious. All of them. Not for money, like now—but to achieve something. Like Belasco. He didn’t give a good God damn for money or expenses—so long as it was great up there on the stage.”

“You sound as though you were really stage-struck. How come you didn’t get into the theatre business somehow?”

“I just told you. You didn’t hear me? You don’t listen. You should learn to
listen
, f’Chrissake.”

“What did I miss?”

“I told you. I was looking for a
new
business. Against Belasco and Frohman and Klaw and Erlanger, what the hell kind of chance did a poor greenhorn kid like me have? Frohman. There was a giant. He had Maude Adams. My God. You would never forget her. So
lively
.”

“So it was then you met Lasky?”

“No. His sister. Jesse Lasky’s sister. Blanche. She was once an entertainer. In the vaudeville. Then in the costume business. We started going around together. A good person. She always was. We got married later—after I met Jesse. Her brother. He was then in the vaudeville, too. A booker. And I was the one explained him how a new business was our best bet.” He chortled happily, remembering. “You should have seen the things he came up with! All kinds of mining propositions. And tamales. He said they were very big in California and we should introduce them to New York. Can you imagine it? Me in the tamale business? And once he was sure we should go in the pectin business. I bet you don’t even know what that is.”

“No, I don’t.”

“It’s to make jellies and jam. Can you see me in that business? And then around Union Square, Herald Square—a few places—like stores—started in to show moving pictures. And everybody went. A novelty. Have you noticed how people like novelties? Miniature golf. A novelty. The gramophone when it first came out. Brownie cameras. People like novelties. Moving pictures. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t too interested. Then somebody—I think Blanche, maybe—told me it was an invention by Thomas Alva Edison and then I wanted to see it. Because to me—he was one of my idols—Edison. What a brain! What a mind! The things he thought up. When I heard he only slept four hours,
I
started in only sleeping four hours—but I didn’t do too good. I became a wreck.” He laughed heartily. “I went to five, then six. But I never went back to eight, I tell you. On account of Thomas Alva Edison. So I went to see these moving pictures. No stories, y’understand. No situations even. Just trains going. And people jumping. Horses. I liked it right away.”

“And went into it? The business?”

“No, no. Not so fast. It wasn’t even a
business
yet. It was just a—you know—a novelty. A sideshow. Not a business. No theatres. A few little companies—one of the first ones I can remember was the Universal Film Manufacturing Company—still going, only they changed the name several times—and no more ‘Manufacturing,’ but still Universal. And they made these little movies—two, three minutes. Then Jesse lost his job—the people he was working for went broke—and he started in to sell those little movie strips. That’s how we got to know about it from the ground up—from the beginning. The very beginning.”

“And then did
you
go into it, too?”

“A little later. After I left the gloves. And it didn’t take me long—one, two, three—I said to Jesse, ‘This is nothing, this peddling. What the hell’s the difference if it’s gloves or vaudeville acts? Or moving pictures? Peddling is peddling. We should
make
the product. Let somebody
else
do the peddling.’ ”

I often heard Samuel Goldwyn tell the story of their first production. He never changed it for effect; never embellished it, as most raconteurs do; never deviated from the facts as he remembered them. It was almost a set-piece, and I believed every word of it.

“All of a sudden,” he said, “it
was
a business. There was this one came out,
The
Great Train Robbery
. This must’ve been nineteen-oh-three, or maybe four. A fellow named Porter made it. Not a story, but a situation. A drama. And the
big
thing was—I pointed out to Jesse—there was something you couldn’t do on the stage! In a way, it made me mad because I loved the theatre and I don’t like to see anybody taking advantage of it. Still and all, we saw we had a chance. I put in some money. Jesse some, and Blanche, too, and another fellow—a backer—Arthur S. Friend. And even then I knew the important thing was—the story. Nobody could tell me different
then
. Nobody can tell me different
now
! F’Chrissake. So the first thing we did with our money was we bought a story. A play. It was not a terrific success. A terrific success we couldn’t afford, but it was good. The name of it was
The Squaw Man
. The next thing, we started in looking for a director and there was this fellow, Bill DeMille—William C. DeMille—and Jesse knew him from the vaudeville. He used to put on a lot of vaudeville acts. Also, he was connected with Belasco. So we went to him with the property and we
asked him would he direct it. Well, you should have heard the man. It was like we would have insulted him in the worst way. He
hated
the movies and he thought any actor did it was a disgrace to his profession and that the movies were going to hurt the theatre or kill it and he practically threw us out. Then, a couple days later, he called us up and recommended his brother, Cecil. That’s right. Cecil B. DeMille. C. B. DeMille, and he came around and we made the deal with him—one hundred dollars a week—and the next thing we started going around trying to raise the money. We had to raise about thirty thousand dollars to make the picture, and you can laugh if you want, but in those days to raise thirty was harder than today to raise thirty
million
. But we did it and we made it. In Flagstaff, Arizona. It took eleven days. That was the shooting schedule. Eleven days. I’d like to see Willie Wyler with an eleven-day schedule someday. It takes him sometimes eleven days to decide where to put the camera for the first shot of the day. So anyway, we shot the picture in Flagstaff, Arizona, on account of Indians and in Hollywood, California, on account of cameramen. And cameras. And then it was put together and we took it to Philadelphia to show it to this man who had a little distribution chain. It was one of the first. And this man said all right, he’d look at it, but with an audience—so he could tell the reaction. So, in one of his little theatres down there, we put it on one night—and, so help me God, even to this day when I tell about it, when I think about it, I feel sometimes like I’m having a heart attack because the picture started and—look, what did I tell you? Look at my hands. Sweating. From just
remembering
. The picture started and it started in jumping all over the screen. Just jumping and blurring and, once in a while, for three or four seconds, it would stand still and then it would start jumping again, and the people started in whistling and stamping their feet and laughing. And I was running to find the projection booth to stop it, but I couldn’t find it. And after a while, he stopped it himself—the projectionist—and we went up to the booth to see what happened and the projectionist started in explaining everything, but I didn’t understand. It was too technical. It was something with the sprocket holes. Something was wrong with the sprocket holes. They were all different and not the same like they were supposed to be. And this was it. The theatre man, he didn’t even want to talk to us. A couple of amateurs, he figured. And you should have seen us on that train home from Philadelphia, with the tin cans of film on our laps. I don’t think we said— Jesse or me—three words the whole way home…