One tends to think of the Goldwyn output as being the best of the Hollywood product, and to some extent, it generally was. “A Goldwyn Picture” came to mean a quality product.
The fact is that Samuel Goldwyn, like everyone else in the business, had more failures than successes. Perhaps, overall, six failures for every success.
But workers in the arts are, thank fortune, remembered for their successes and not their failures.
No producer was ever more courageous or more daring than Goldwyn. All the more credit to him that he continued to work and to produce well into his eighties. Even then, he was vigorous and ambitious and driving.
A good part of this remarkable condition stemmed from the fact that he took great care of himself. He respected himself as a being and attended to his body as he would to any possession.
He always presented himself as a careful, successful arrangement of elegant details. I am not certain how all this was accomplished but I suspect that Frances Goldwyn had a good deal to do with it. Since she was
Mrs.
Goldwyn, she took pride in
Mr.
Goldwyn. One noticed his shirts and ties and socks. His manicure.
The last time I saw him, he was nearing ninety and his health had quite suddenly broken down. He was irritated and irritable, impatient and outraged—yet there was not a single wrinkle on his cherubic face. Mrs. Goldwyn once told me that Sam believed in facial massage and arranged to have one virtually every day of his life.
“In his case, at least,” she said, “it seems to have worked, doesn’t it?”
I cannot believe it was that alone.
There was the matter of diet. He was always a careful, sensible eater.
One evening, I was dining with him at Le Pavillon in New York. The famous dessert wagon was rolled by, bearing confections and pastries and delectable creations.
Goldwyn watched it, sighed, and said, “Every time I see that, it’s like they’re wheeling away the body of an old friend of mine!”
He drank moderately, sensibly.
As to smoking, he had a nerve-testing custom. He smoked one cigarette each day. No more, no less. The cigarette would be produced after dinner, ceremoniously lit, carefully smoked, and enjoyed, and that was it until the following evening. How many are capable of similar discipline?
Throughout the years, he made a point of taking various forms of exercise, usually combining them with business activity.
Back in the days when I worked for him, he would sometimes send for me at six o’clock, as the studio was closing, and say, “Get in the car and ride home with me. There are a few things.”
The first time I did so, and the chauffeur took off, I wondered how I was going to get back to the studio. The thought never occurred to Goldwyn. From his point of view, I was being honored, favored in some way.
He asked me about the daily doings around the studio, ever avid for any scrap of information. What did I think about the day’s rushes? Why was Willie so slow? Was there some way to force those goddamn actors to learn their lines before they came on the set? Did I know anyone in New York who would be good for the part of the press agent? He was getting sick and tired of these same old Hollywood faces in every picture.
All at once, to my horror, the car pulled to the curb. The chauffeur got out, came around, and opened the door. Goldwyn got out. I followed. We were at the top of The Strip, where Sunset Boulevard divides.
Goldwyn strode off and I was soon making every effort to keep pace with him. He continued his questioning. My mind was only half on the answers. I was trying to calculate the distance I was being asked to walk. I was not overly familiar with the
geography of Beverly Hills at that time, but I figured it out to be about a mile from his home at 1200 Laurel Lane. A mile! And some of it uphill. Should I protest? Impossible. My estimate was off. It turned out to be two and a half miles, precisely. Goldwyn had measured it and by walking from his house to this spot every morning and back again every evening, he put in his five miles.
Goldwyn was much taller than I am, with longer legs and a greater stride. I had a hard time keeping up with him and often felt as though I were running.
Forty minutes later, we reached the house. I was exhausted, he was exhilarated.
He thanked me, said goodnight, and disappeared into the house.
I stood for a moment, regaining my breath and wondering what to do next, when my second-hand Buick came though the gate, driven by my secretary, Jean.
“Pretty good,” I said. “But how did you—?”
“Al, the driver. He phoned me and told me. He says Mr. Goldwyn does it all the time. So Al always calls, either somebody with the guy’s car or a cab or something.”
Tycoons do not concern themselves with unnecessary details—such as how is someone else going to get home.
That was 1937. Years passed. A war or two came and went. I returned to Hollywood for a short stay.
Driving to the Beverly Hills Hotel early one evening, I saw him. The same erect figure, the same long stride, and beside him a small young man bouncing along in an awkward attempt to keep apace. Was it still me, I wondered? Some leftover form of me?
For Samuel Goldwyn, not much had changed across the years. He had found a practical plan of life and work, and there was no need to deviate from it.
About that beautiful home on Laurel Lane, Mrs. Goldwyn recalls:
“For a long time, we thought of building a house of our own. Sam had never really had one. But, of course, it’s a project, isn’t it? And there never seemed to be time. Then one day, we had lunch with Joe Schenck at his place and afterward, sitting out on the patio—they hadn’t begun calling them lanais yet, thank God—Sam suddenly looked up at this hill and said, ‘That’s a nice hill up there. That would be a nice place to have a house.’ It was a casual, throwaway remark, nothing more. So I was good and surprised when we left at Sam insisting I drive up to this hill. Well, you know what Beverly Hills is, especially in this area and it took me what seemed like hours to find a way to it—but I did, eventually. And we padded around in the underbrush and I ruined my shoes and stockings but Sam was like Balboa discovering the Pacific. Something about the spot drew him to it and he couldn’t rest until we’d taken title to it. And the day
that
happened, he said to me, ‘Now darling, I want you to go ahead and build our house. That’s your job. You go ahead and you do it and I don’t want to mix in because I don’t know how to build a house.’ And I said, ‘Neither do I, Sam.’ And he said, ‘Sure you do.’ That was all. He never discussed architects with me, or plans or specifications or costs. As a matter of fact, I soon learned that he didn’t want to discuss it at all. He was afraid it would distract him from his work at the studio. So in the year that the house was in progress, the subject hardly ever came up. Oh, he was aware, of course, that it was going on— but that was about it. Well, if you’ve ever built and furnished a house, I don’t need to tell you. It was a full-time effort, what with the house and grounds and landscaping. Pool. Tennis court. And then the carpeting and drapes and furniture. Mind you, this was all
from scratch. Well. Finally, finally, finally. It was ready. As ready as I could make it. And staffed. And full of flowers. And ready. So one evening, I picked Sam up at the studio. The driver knew my plan, so nothing more needed to be said. We drove off. It had been a rough day at the studio, I gathered. Sam looked absolutely harassed. Anyway, we drove along and when we reached Coldwater Canyon, the driver turned right and Sam began to yell, ‘Where’re you going? Where’s he going?’ And I said, ‘Take it easy, Sam. It’s all right.’ But he didn’t like it and said, ‘I don’t want to go for any joy rides tonight. I’m tired. I want to go home.’ And I took his hand and got his eyes and said, ‘That’s exactly where we are
are
going, Sam. Home.’ Well, he began to get the idea—that at last at last, after all this time and this long wait and tremendous expenditure of time and money and energy—our home was finished, ready. He looked as though he couldn’t believe it was happening, and he held onto my hand tightly, tightly. We drove up the hill to Laurel Lane and into the driveway and there it was. I thought it was the most beautiful house in Beverly Hills—in fact, I still think so. And we sat for a moment and I said, ‘We’re home, darling.’ Now from this point on, Sam behaved like a man in a dream—and in a way, that’s what it was. We went to the door and the maid opened it and curtsied. Sam offered his hand and they shook hands. He went in and began floating about—looking, looking. I don’t know what he was thinking—but as I watched him, I was all choked up— and I was thinking of that penniless little orphan boy of thirteen coming to this strange country, wondering what would happen to him, going to Gloversville and working, then later New York and the struggles and the disappointments—and that awful disaster of the first picture—and the near-bankruptcies—and now here he was on top of the world—and the master of this beautiful home. And I began to follow him around. He didn’t say a word. He went through every room, looked into the closets, saw the projection room and the paintings on the walls, the dining room—we’d set the table with the best silver and china and linen—the grand kitchen and finally he started up the stairs and I let him go by himself—because it was the upstairs part I was really proud of. It had been conceived and designed and executed out of my understanding of him. And I was confident he’d be pleased with his bedroom and bathroom and dressing room, study, gym—all his things that were and always would be the heart of the house. I wanted him to take it all in by himself. So I waited downstairs, knowing full well that what he would find up there would thrill him. Then I heard his voice—excited—shouting ‘Frances!
Frances
!’ And I rushed into the front hall just knowing he was going to have trouble expressing his joy—and there he stood at the top of the stairs and I looked up and he yelled again, ‘Frances!’ And I said, ‘Yes, darling. What is it?’ And he said, ‘There’s no soap in my soap dish!’”
Mrs. Goldwyn tells this affectionately and it always gets the expected laugh, but it is more than simply anecdotal to me.
It expresses perfectly the characteristics that went into the making of the man Samuel Goldwyn.
As he moved about his remarkable new home, he must have appreciated it, but basically, he was not looking for what was right, but for what was possibly wrong, and in time, he found it.
No soap in the soap dish. There are some who see in the account a petty ingrate. Others make the valid point that when a man has invested a million and a half dollars in a residence he is entitled to soap in the soap dish.
By the mid-1960s, Samuel Goldwyn had become set in his ways and in his tastes. He had, after all, been producing pictures for over forty years and was frozen into certain attitudes. He had little artistic resilience, and could not accept the opening up of the screen to the new sense of morality and behavior and expression.
It made him angry. One night, at his home, in the middle of a screening, a nude turned up on the screen for no more than a fleeting moment. Goldwyn rushed to the front of his projection room and began shaking his fist at the screen.
“Get off!” he said. “Get off! Stop the picture. I don’t allow such filth in my house. Stop the picture!”
Mrs. Goldwyn calmed him down, got him back into his seat. The picture did not stop.
The incident, however, provided Goldwyn with a theme for a discourse when the movie had come to an end.
“They’ll go on their ass, f’Chrissake, with that kind of dirty filth. People don’t want dirty filth. Not real people. Not most people. Sure, maybe here or there a few degenerates. And pimps.
They
like to see filth. Filth likes filth—but who makes more money than Disney? Nobody. Walt Disney. Clean family pictures. People go into filth— into the filth business—they go on their ass. I’ve seen it happen a thousand times. They think they can get away with this and with that and for a couple of minutes, all right, so maybe they do. You think we’d have had to have the goddamn Hays Office—Will Hays—and all that nonsense, all that trouble and expenses, if not for these dirty bastards with their goddamn filth? I can’t stand it. Nobody can stand it. Only a few degenerates and pimps. I don’t believe in dirty pictures. Not for the motion-picture business. You want to be in the dirty-picture business, you make stag reels or you go to Paris—to the whorehouses there—but not for a big business, the way we’re supposed to be. These goddamn dirty pictures. They’ll go on their ass…We’ve had them before. Naked women and sex things and even fairies. We’ve had fairies. But people don’t like that. Only
fairies
like that. Fairies like fairies, but people don’t. These goddamn filthy pictures. They’re going to ruin the whole goddamn business.”
Some months later, in New York, I went to see a highly praised Czechoslovakian film called
Closely Watched Trains
, directed by Jiri Menzel.
It struck me at once as being a small masterpiece—if there can be such a thing as a small masterpiece. Perhaps all masterpieces are large.
A few weeks later, I had a meeting in Hollywood with Sam Goldwyn and told him about
Closely Watched Trains
.
“You’ll absolutely be bowled over by it, Sam,” I said. “You, especially. I don’t know why. I think maybe because of its marvelous European color and that spirit. I’ve noticed that you always tend to respond to that.”
“Yes, I am,” said Goldwyn.
“And this picture,
Closely Watched Trains
, is so delicate, so all-of-a-piece, and it’s funny, yes, but also very, very moving.”
“Funny and moving,” said Goldwyn, “is a great combination. When Charlie was good. Charlie Chaplin. That’s what he had more than anybody. Funny and moving. I’ll get this picture. Write it down for me. I’ll screen it at the house. I’ll have Frances call you.”
Three days later, at eight o’clock in the morning, my telephone rang.
“Mr. Goldwyn calling.”
“Sure.”
“Is that you?” said Goldwyn.
“Good morning, Sam.”
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” he asked. “That goddamn filthy picture. Were you kidding me, or what?”