The Hecht-MacArthur script of
Gunga Din
was delivered. They were excellent screenwriters, perhaps the best of their day, and
Gunga Din
was an impressive achievement. Rudyard Kipling’s poem is only eighty-five lines long and has in it no story, no dramatic structure. It is, at most, a character sketch. But Hecht and MacArthur, realizing that the title itself had exploitation value, had invented a story and written an exciting adventure drama involving the British Army in India in the late nineteenth century.
It seemed strange to Hayward that every studio, with the exception of Columbia, had made an offer. Could there have been some mistake? Had the script been delivered to Columbia? He decided to investigate, and called on Harry Cohn.
“I thought I ought to check out about
Gunga Din
,” he said.
“Why?” asked Cohn.
“Well,” said Hayward, “just that every studio but you is interested.”
“I can understand that,” said Cohn. “They’re interested because they don’t own it. I don’t need to buy it because I already own it.”
“What do you mean you own it?” asked Hayward.
“I’ve owned it for seven years,” said Cohn.
Hayward was stunned. “Who did you buy it from?” he asked.
“I bought it from Hecht and MacArthur,” said Cohn, smugly.
“That’s impossible, Harry. Seven years? They only finished writing it three weeks ago.”
“Under this title,” said Cohn. “When
I
bought it from them, they called it
The Front
Page
.”
Hayward, relieved, began to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” asked Cohn.
“
Gunga Din
,” said Hayward, patiently, “has absolutely nothing to do with
The Front
Page
.”
“Have you read it?” asked Cohn.
“Of course I’ve read it.”
“And you don’t see the same picture?”
“Harry,” said Hayward. “Thank you very much. You’ve given me a great Harry Cohn story. I’ll be dining out on this for weeks.”
“Go to it,” said Cohn. “Just don’t try to sell me what I already own.”
It took no more than three or four days for the story to be widely disseminated. The town was, once again, laughing at Harry Cohn.
Then I read the script of
Gunga Din
and stopped laughing. Cohn was absolutely right: Hecht and MacArthur had taken not only the story, but the characters of
The Front
Page
, changed the period, the locale, and the occupations. It was daring and ingenious, but it did not fool Cohn.
The picture was eventually made by George Stevens for RKO. When the hidden
Front Page
structure went unnoticed by a majority of the critics and practically all of the public, I admired Harry Cohn’s perception more than ever.
“Listen,” Cohn said to me one Sunday afternoon, “anybody tells you they’re a starmaker, tell ’em they’re a knucklehead. I broke my ass tryin’ to make a star out of Kim Novak. So what happens? She turned out to be Kim Novak. I tell y’, I gave ’er the best scripts, the top directors, I brought in Jean Louis, and not only him—
other
terrific designers, hairdressers, makeup people, coaches. And if she had to sing, we dubbed her. And if she had to dance, we tricked it. She was a beautiful girl, she was willing, too. We put her in one picture after another. Nothing, nothing, nothing. She had talent, mind y’. In fact, she was good. But, God damn it, she didn’t have that one thing, that plain one thing makes a star. Kim Novak. Jesus. Her name was Marilyn Novack, but everybody would’ve thought we were trying to make it sound like Monroe. So we picked ‘Kim.’ And we did a big campaign on ’er, and then we started ’er out in a movie with the name
Pushover
. Is that bad? Beautiful little blonde. How old could she have been at the time? Twenty-three, twenty-four? Kim Novak in
Pushover
. Sound good? Nothing. Then we stuck her with Judy Holliday and Jack Lemmon in
Phffft
by George Axelrod. Is
that
bad? I figured workin’ alongside of Judy, some of the talent, some of the magic might rub off, right? Nothing. So then we put ’er with Sinatra yet in
The Man with the Golden Arm
. Preminger. The picture was sensational, Sinatra came through like Gangbusters—but her? Novak? Nothing. Then, the biggest hit in the world,
Picnic
. She struck out in that one, too.
Jeanne Eagels.
Well, maybe that was a mistake. Then, we gave her
Pal Joey
,
again
with Sinatra.
Bell, Book and Candle
. And I tell y’ about now I began to give up because I began to see that she was okay, this kid, but no star. No. The public just didn’t grab onto her…Look, I’ve tried it before. Sometimes it works, so you get the idea you’re doing it. But that’s the bunk. It’s always the
public
who’s doing it. You need a better example than Goldwyn with that Anna Sten? I remember him telling me she was the biggest thing ever happened in his whole life. He sank millions into her. Made these tremendous, high-class pictures with her, gave her all kinds of leading men and directors. It didn’t work. He never made a quarter with her.”
“I’m inclined to agree with you, Harry,” I said. “I remember an evening some time ago when L.B. Mayer—considered quite a starmaker, huh?—came over to Ruth and me in a restaurant in New York. And he sat down and said to us, ‘Why don’t you people write a picture for Howard Keel? I’ll buy it from you sight unseen, if you design it for Howard Keel. We’re building him, so we can use material. He’s going to make Bogart and Tracy and Gable and all those other bums look sick in a couple of years. They’re
old men, they’re on the way down, but Keel, he’s going up like a rocket. So, if you listen to me, take my advice, you’ll write something for Howard Keel.’
“Well, nobody can deny that Keel is a gifted fellow—handsome, tall, good actor, splendid singer, and Metro certainly tried with him. But that big breakthrough never happened.”
“Listen,” said Cohn. “L.B. was good—as good as the best—as me or Goldwyn or J.L.—anybody. But we none of us are God. And only God can make a tree.”
“A tree?” I asked.
“That’s right,” he said. “You gonna argue with me on that? What is it with you, you always like to argue? All you intellectuals. What were you—captain of the debating team in college?”
“I never went to college.”
“You’re tellin’
me
!”
“I thought we were discussing stars. So what’s a tree got to do with it?”
“You didn’t let me finish. That’s another thing with you. Always buttin’ in, interrupting. What I was sayin’ was, ‘Only God can make a tree, and only the public can make a star! Satisfied?”
“Yes.”
“Yes? Well, you’re
still
wrong. My property department can make the best goddamn tree you ever saw!”
“But not a star.”
“But not a star.”
Joseph and His Brethren
was an odd subject for Harry Cohn to have approved. It may have been that he was following the trend toward Biblical subjects that year, and that it was pointed out to him that there was a lot you could get away with as long as you stayed within the Biblical frame of reference.
Still, he was concerned about the production since it dealt with subject matter foreign to him. He decided to do an unprecedented thing and read the script himself.
He told his secretary, Donna, to get him a copy of the final shooting script of
Joseph
and His Brethren
, told her to hold all his calls, and began to read. He had read no more than twelve pages when the intercom buzzers began to sound on desks in offices all over the building. The panic button, the alarm system, the S.O.S.
Members of his staff came hurrying through the halls, some of them sloshing coffee as they ran.
As each one entered the room, he could tell from Cohn’s expression that a crisis was at hand.
When they were all there—Sidney Buchman, the producer; Otto Preminger, the director; Clifford Odets, the writer; the head of the story department; the research man; and assorted assistants—Cohn looked at them and said gently, too gently, “Do I have to do everything around here?” Then came the explosion. “God damn it! All you guys supposed to be doing whatever the hell you do. All you goddamn college men with your diplomas and all that intellectual crap you throw around here all day, and I have to do everything and check up everything and watch the scripts. You guys’ll kill me. Nobody can do everything.”
“Harry,” said Odets quietly. “What is it? What’s the trouble?”
Cohn’s fury was unabated. “The trouble is, God damn it,” he shouted, “I may not be a college man and I’m not supposed to be an intellectual, but there’s one thing I know and nobody is going to tell me different. I know God damn well that in Biblical times people did not go around saying ‘Yes, siree’ and ‘No, siree.’”
“Of course not, Harry,” said Odets.
“Well, then, God damn it!” shouted Cohn. “What’s it doing in the script?”
“Where?” asked Odets.
Cohn slapped the open script down on the desk and pointed to a page. Odets looked at it and nodded as he read, “Yes, sire” and at another point, “No, sire.”
The others moved over to the desk and peered at the page.
No one had the nerve or the courage or whatever was required to straighten Cohn out.
After a time, Buchman mumbled, “We’ll fix it, Harry.”
The staff filed out quietly.
1957 was something less than a banner year for Columbia Pictures.
Full of Life
,
Beyond Mombasa
,
Jeanne Eagels
,
Abandon Ship
,
Pal Joey
,
The Story of Esther
Costello
,
Don’t Knock the Rock
,
The Garment Jungle
,
Three-Ten to Yuma
, and
Operation Mad Ball
represented, by and large, a disappointment.
What made things even more uncomfortable for Harry Cohn was the fact that prospects for 1958 and 1959 were not much better. Pressure was building up in this pressured man. He had the ability to transfer some of the strain to others but always took the final responsibility himself.
Television, too, was beginning to be an irritating thorn. His company had formed a television-producing subsidiary, Screen Gems, but like the others of his generation, Harry Cohn never quite understood television, especially as it related to motion-picture production.
Moreover, his health was failing. Four years earlier, he had undergone surgery for a throat malignancy. It had been successful, but left a scar of apprehension and insecurity. Further, it reinforced a premonition Cohn held: he would die at sixty-seven.
I told him it was a silly idea—on a par with tea-leaf reading and astrology.
“You’ll see,” he said darkly.
“Of course,” I said. “If you work hard on an idea like that, you’ll
make
it happen. Because you hate to be wrong.”
In mid-February 1958, his wife, Joan, observed that tension had reached the breaking point. She insisted they go off to Phoenix for a holiday. Cohn agreed. After all, there were plenty of telephones at the Arizona-Biltmore.
The first two or three days passed off successfully. Cohn walked and rested, read, played cards, played golf, and talked to a few strangers.
On the evening of February 27, 1958, while dressing for a dinner party he was giving, and whistling happily (in the dark?), he felt suddenly ill. A friend who was with him urged him to call off the party and go to bed.
“Bullshit!” said Cohn. “I ain’t gonna be sixty-seven till the twenty-third of July!”
During the party, his discomfort increased noticeably. His wife took charge, got him to their bungalow, and sent for medical assistance.
By morning, his condition had worsened. An ambulance was summoned. Joan insisted upon staying at her husband’s side throughout the journey. She and the doctor and Cohn were sped toward the hospital.
Harry Cohn, according to his wife, was game and courageous.
“You’ll be all right, darling,” she said. “Don’t worry, it’s all right.”
She held his hand tightly.
Cohn, using the dregs of his fading energy, shook his head almost imperceptibly.
“Too tough,” he whispered. “It’s
too tough
!”
And died.
In the spring of 1947, Samuel Goldwyn phoned me.
“I’m sending you this book,” he said, “and I want you to read it. Right away. It’s the most beautiful story. A love story. You’ll love it.”
“What’s it called?”
There was a pause as he tried to remember.
“What the hell’s the difference?” he asked, in a sudden temper. “F’Chrissake! I tell you I’m sending you a great story will make a great picture and you don’t ask me about it or the subject matter or who could play it—you’re only worried about the
title
, f’Chrissake—like you’re the
sales
department. I’ll send it to you. ‘The Highest Heaven,’ that’s the title. You satisfied?”
He hung up.
A few days later, the book arrived—
Earth and High Heaven
by Gwethalyn Graham. I read it at once, expecting the phone to ring at any moment.
The novel—a Canadian work—turned out to be a beautifully written story but of no interest to me. A young Canadian man (Jewish) meets a young Canadian girl (gentile). They fall in love and what with her family’s objection to him and his family’s objection to her and the concerns of their friends and their inability to achieve reservations at a resort hotel in the Laurentians, they have a hard time getting to a happy ending.
A curious subject for Goldwyn, I thought, until I remembered that this was the year of
Gentleman’s Agreement
. Laura Z. Hobson’s best-selling novel about contemporary anti-Semitism had been made into a successful movie by Twentieth Century-Fox. Darryl F. Zanuck had produced it. Screenplay by Moss Hart. Directed by Elia Kazan. Starring Gregory Peck. Academy Awards.
Clearly, anti-Semitism was
in
. A salable commodity. Fashionable. Discussed at the best dinner tables over the best dinners.
The phone rang. I picked it up.
“Isn’t that the most
beautiful
love story you’ve ever read?” asked Sam Goldwyn.
“How do you know I’ve read it?” I asked.
“Why not?” he asked.
“I
have
read it, Mr. Goldwyn. Of course.”
“Of course.”
“It’s beautifully written and—”
“
Why
don’t you want to do it? Give me one reason. You should. You
owe
it!”
“Mr. Goldwyn,”—I still called him that—“listen…”
“Go ahead, God damn it.”
“How long have you and Mrs. Goldwyn been married?”
“Frances?”
“Yes.”
“Twenty-two years. What are you
talking
about?”
“Wait. Ruth and I have been married for four and a half.”
“Congratulations. I don’t see—”
“Would you say your marriage has been a success?”
“Of course. Certainly.”
“Fine. So has mine. Now. Frances is gentile and so is Ruth. And you and I are Jewish.”
“Why do you take up my time with all this kind of—?”
“You don’t see it?”
“See what?”
“Why I can’t get interested in the drama of this subject—and why I don’t see how
you
can?”
“You know what that book cost me? A fortune! Everybody wanted it, but I got it. It’s a
great book
and it’s going to make a
great picture
! I want to tell you something. You’ve lost something in your talent. I used to have hopes for you. Now I’m not so sure. You can’t seem to discuss stories seriously. You want to make jokes all the time. Jokes are nothing. A dime a dozen. Gags. Gagmen. The best gagmen in the world—they work for Jack Benny and Bob Hope and Eddie Cantor. You know what they make? They make a hundred dollars a week. The
best
ones! So you want to be a gagman?
Be
a gagman.”
There was a long pause. Finally, I said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Goldwyn. I didn’t mean to upset you and I don’t know what you mean about gags. I was simply trying to explain why this subject is not for me.”
“You said for
anybody
.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“That’s what you meant. If you were smart, you’d trust
my
judgment. I’ve made more hits than you, f’Chrissake.”
Another pause.
“How’s Ruth?" he asked. “Your wife.”
“She’s fine,” I said.
“Give her my love,” he said gently.
“All right.”
“Call me up when you change your mind,” he added, and hung up.
Earth and High Heaven
was never made by Goldwyn, or by anyone.
We met soon afterward, and hundreds of times subsequently, but he never mentioned the subject again.
There were many such projects in Goldwyn’s life—stillborn or aborted. He clung to some of them for years before abandoning them. Even then, he considered the abandonment only temporary.
He had arranged to pick up Mrs. Goldwyn late one afternoon at Elizabeth Arden’s beauty salon in Beverly Hills. From there, they were to proceed to a reception at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
He waited outside in the car for five minutes—a long wait for him—then jumped out of the car, went through the famous red door, and strode into the teeming establishment.
“May I help you, sir?”
“Where’s Mrs. Goldwyn?” he shouted, as though he were a knight come to rescue a maiden held against her will.
Before the receptionist could reply, he was on his way into the main room. What he saw there galvanized him. He stood, gaping. He could not believe his eyes. Rows and rows of women under dryers and hairdressers’ hands. Manicurists. Pedicurists. Setters. Wavers. Tools. Machines. Lotions. Creams. Cosmetics. A conglomerate of glittering action. A new world.
Mrs. Goldwyn, on the verge of leaving, was tipping her manicurist, and was astonished to see her husband. She approached him.
“What is it, Sam? Is something the matter?”
“Look at this!” he exclaimed, pointing into the establishment. “All this.”
“Yes,” she said gently.
“This is some
business
!”
She led him out, reflecting that if forty years earlier he had chanced to see a beauty parlor in operation, he might now be the head of the coast to coast Goldwyn Salons, Inc., rather than of the Goldwyn Studios.
The Goldwyns went on to the reception, but Mr. Goldwyn kept thinking of the extraordinary sight he had just seen. He talked about it, told about it, inquired about it.
A seed had been implanted. Hundreds of people, hundreds of thousands of dollars were to be involved before the matter could be put to rest. Endless man-hours and woman-hours would be expended. Personal upheavals would take place. Careers would move forward and backward. Friends and enemies would be made. And all because Mrs. Samuel Goldwyn was five minutes late emerging from Elizabeth Arden’s.
“Do you know how much women spend in the beauty parlors and for hair and cosmetics and treatments and facials and all like that?” Mr. Goldwyn asked us all at a conference one day. “Go ahead. Take a guess,” he added, smiling secretly. Clearly, he knew the answer.
The guesses were slow in coming. To win the game here, it was necessary to get a
wrong
answer, not a right one. Whoever got the right one would offer a personal affront to the boss, would reveal himself as a know-it-all.
“A hundred million,” said someone.
“Ha!” cried Goldwyn. “Did you hear that?” He added a scornful echo, “A hundred million. F’Chrissake.”
“
Two
hundred million,” said Fred Kohlmar.
Goldwyn’s pink face crinkled and he giggled, delightedly.
The guesses continued up and down the scale, to Mr. Goldwyn’s immense delight.
Most of them had been on the low side. I decided, in the considerable time I had to think, to go in the opposite direction. Be outlandish. Think big. The sky’s the limit. They love big numbers out here.
A pause. Everyone seemed to be looking at me. I shrugged modestly and said, “Two and a half
billion
!”
It got a titter from everyone, with the notable exception of Mr. Goldwyn. In contrast to the merry, smiling faces in the room, his own sudden, dark frown seemed even more forbidding than it was.
He looked at me, petulantly. The color of the room changed. I had blundered. Again, damn it. Would I ever learn? I had spoiled the boss’s day.
“Who told you?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just a guess.”
“Who
told
you?” he repeated firmly.
“I must’ve heard it somewhere. Read it?”
“Where the hell would
you
read a thing like that? You read women’s magazines and something? What’re you? A fairy?”
No laugh. It was worse than we thought.
“I guess someone told me,” I said softly.
“Who?” he demanded.
“I don’t remember.”
“Well, God damn it, see that you
do
remember. Later—or the latest tomorrow. Don’t forget.”
“All right.”
“I don’t like this sneaky stuff around here.”
A long pause. Mr. Goldwyn’s secretary, Jack Hutchins, came in and handed him a note. As Goldwyn read it, Hutchins looked about the room. He sensed, correctly, that we were living through a minute of tension. He glanced at Goldwyn, poured a glass of water from the silver carafe, and placed the glass in front of Goldwyn.
“Call him back in twenty minutes,” said Goldwyn, handing back the note. “Did
you
tell him?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“
Him
,” said Goldwyn, pointing at me.
“Tell him what, Mr. Goldwyn?”
“The figure,” said Goldwyn, testily. “The beauty figure.”
“No, sir.”
“No,” said Goldwyn. “I didn’t think so.”
Hutchins left quietly. Goldwyn drained the glass of water, slowly. He set down the glass and looked around the room. He smiled, creating the air of the beginning of a meeting.
“Gentlemen,” he said. “Do you know how much women in the United States spend each year in the beauty parlors? Not only Elizabeth Arden’s and Rubinstein and those— but small ones—in small towns, even—the smallest.” He put on his glasses, picked up a typed report, and read impressively, “Two billion six hundred and forty million dollars!”
Whistles of amazement.
“My God.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Holy mackerel.”
And I said, “Whew!”
“So don’t tell
me
,” said Goldwyn, “that we haven’t got a subject here. A
big
subject.”
No one
had
told him that, but he needed pretended objection to give power to his positive thought.
“It stands to reason,” said Merritt Hulburt. “It all comes down to what one is selling. Is there a demand for it or must a demand be created?”
“Listen to all this!” Goldwyn commanded the rest of us. He leaned back, comfortably, delighted to hear one of his bought brains in action. Hulbert went on.
“There’s an old bucolic saw on the subject. ‘The best business is selling something that everybody needs every day.’ Now, in this case, it isn’t
everyone
—but say half. And what they’re selling, you see, is not only things, objects—but a kind of hope. An abstract. They’re proclaiming to all women, everywhere—‘You can be beautiful!’”
If Merritt Hulburt had pulled the plug of a hand grenade and tossed it into the middle of the room, he could not have caused a more startling detonation.
Goldwyn leaped to his feet and yelled, “That’s
it
!”
Someone applauded.
“You can be beautiful,” said Goldwyn. He came out from behind his desk and said it again, this time as if it were a title, “‘You Can Be Beautiful.’”
He went to Hulburt and shook his hand, warmly.
“I want to tell you something, my boy. That is
some
title
you just came up with. That is the greatest title I ever heard and this picture needs a great title because it’s a great picture. I want to tell you something, my boy. You just earned your whole goddamn salary for a whole goddamn
year
!” He turned to the rest of us, asking, “And you all know what he gets, don’t you?”
“Sure,” said Fred Kohlmar. “Two billion six hundred and forty million dollars.”
A big laugh, at last. We were all on our feet. The meeting was over. Nothing could top this. Merritt Hulburt was blushing. The day was saved.
You Can Be Beautiful
became part of the daily life of the studio and remained so for the whole year I was there. Lillian Hellman worked for a time on the story and screenplay, so did Anita Loos and John Emerson. So did Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell, and so did Cecelia Ager, who had been spirited away from
Variety
, where she had made a reputation specializing in feminine slants.
Frequently the assignments overlapped and writers or teams of writers would find out only by accident that they were all working, confidentially, on the same subject. Embarrassing? Of course. Humiliating? A bit. But $2000 a week pays for a lot of humiliation or embarrassment.
Goldwyn’s plan in this instance, since he was starting from scratch, was to get as many ideas, notions, slants, openings, finishes, routines as he could. In time, he would engage one writer—a constructionist—to put it all together. It was a method that failed more often than it succeeded but Goldwyn liked it because it gave him a feeling of activity and effort going on all about him.
He often used this method in other ways. A novel would be submitted. He would acquire several copies, then call us in, one by one, and say, “I want you to read this. It’s very important. Read it tonight. Tomorrow morning come in—Jack will fix a time for you—and give me your views.”
For most of us, it meant canceling everything and staying up half the night with coffee and Benzedrine. The following morning, or afternoon, perhaps even a day later
or a week later if Goldwyn forgot or became involved in more pressing matters, we would be summoned, one by one, and ordered to recite.
“Don’t give me a synopsis,” Goldwyn would say sternly, pointing his finger. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a synopsis. Just tell me the story. Tell me the story in your own words. Don’t give me an opinion. Just give me the story.”
“I thought you said you wanted my views,” I said one bleary-eyed morning.
“Later,” he said impatiently. “I’ll get your views later. Right now, just tell me the story.”