The Jews in America Trilogy (134 page)

That left Adolph Zukor with what was left of Automatic Vaudeville, which, with its principal crowd-pleaser, the train, removed, was not much. The five-year collaboration also set a pattern for internecine warfare and distrust that would dominate the motion picture business—which would become an almost exclusively Eastern European business—for the next half-century and more.

For a while, Adolph Zukor operated a nickelodeon, next door to the old Fourteenth Street location, which did well enough—as did anything, it seemed, that offered the magic flicker shows. Then, with more breezy self-confidence than anything else, he formed what he called the Famous Players
Company, the purpose of which, according to Zukor's slogan, was to produce “Famous Plays and Famous Players.” His windy press releases, however, failed to mention that he owned no famous plays, nor did he have any famous players under contract.

It was another gamble. But the gambler must allow for luck, and in 1911 Luck reached out and touched the shoulder of the thirty-eight-year-old Adolph Zukor. A French silent film, called
Queen Elizabeth
, had been exhibited with success in Europe. It starred “the divine” Sarah Bernhardt, the most famous actress in the world at that time. Its subtitles were in French, which was the only language Miss Bernhardt could perform in, and this fact had persuaded American impresarios that
Queen Elizabeth
was not exportable for American audiences. The American rights to the film were therefore both available and cheap. But Zukor knew that, on earlier American tours, Bernhardt—speaking in French in such stage vehicles as
Camille
and
Fedora
—had left audiences cheering and standing on their seats at the end of her performances, even when no one had understood a word she had said. The French subtitles could easily be redone in English. Would it matter that the words on the screen would not exactly coincide with the movements of the Divine Sarah's lips? Zukor decided not. The audience would be paying more attention to Bernhardt's exaggerated gestures, the wild tossing of her head, the beating of her breast, and to her famous blazing eyes.

Zukor acquired the rights to
Queen Elizabeth
, and the subtitles were translated. He then arranged for a celebrity-studded premiere in the summer of 1912 in a first-rate legitimate theater—the Lyceum on Broadway. The offering was a huge critical and popular success, and Adolph Zukor was hailed as a production genius. And so, when Zukor approached Goldfish and Lasky in 1914 and proposed a merger, it sounded like another wonderful idea. It would be a pooling of both talent and money. The resulting company was named Famous Players–Lasky. Zukor was president of the new company, Goldfish was chairman of the board, and Lasky was vice-president.

Almost immediately, however, Zukor found Sam Goldfish as difficult to deal with—as stubborn, temperamental, and unpredictable—as any of his previous partners. The two men couldn't agree on who was running the company, or who was
to make decisions. The movie business had become—as it remains today—a curiously bifurcated business, with a certain basic clumsiness built into it. It operated on two coasts, the East and the West. Production was all done in California. But the largest audiences were in eastern cities, along with the newspapers and critics that mattered the most. Even more important, the banks and investment houses, upon whom the movie companies relied for financing, were all in New York. Everything that was done in Hollywood, then as now, was predicated on “what New York says.” Then as now, motion picture producers were constantly having to shuttle back and forth between the East Coast and the West.

When Sam Goldfish was in New York talking to the money men, and Zukor was in California trying to grind out movies, Goldfish took over policymaking. And when Goldfish was in California, and Zukor was in New York, the opposite happened, and Goldfish took over production—and even the direction—of the films. The limbo periods—those four or five days it took to travel across the continent by train, and whoever was traveling was incommunicado—were worst of all, when each man was convinced that the other was scheming diabolically behind his back.

To make matters even worse, Sam Goldfish and Jesse Lasky were crossing swords. The problem was Blanche Lasky Goldfish's complaints about her husband. Blanche, it seemed, even though she now had a young daughter to care for, felt very much pushed into the background by the two most important men in her life, her brother and her husband. She felt, with some justification, that if it had not been for her, the two men might never have come together in their filmmaking venture. Now she was being ignored on the sidelines of their mounting success. “If I hadn't suggested the flickers that afternoon in New York, where would they be?” she complained. Blanche also considered herself a performer, and whereas men like Cecil B. DeMille put their wives and other relatives into their films, Blanche had never been cast in a single Goldfish picture. On top of it all, she suspected that now that Sam was in show business, he had formed a fondness for younger showgirls, and she may have been right. Sam's office door was often locked while he conducted lengthy interviews with aspiring actresses. On his transcontinental trips, he was frequently accompanied
by female “secretaries.” And there was no doubt that Sam Goldfish was fond of beautiful women. His film “discoveries” were invariably female, and he spent a great deal of time fussing over his actresses' hairstyles, makeup, and dress. Blanche was developing a full-scale case of classic wifely jealousy. There were the customary bitter accusations, recriminations, scenes. Sam Goldfish, meanwhile, a big, barrel-chested man with a bullet-shaped head, the wide, square jaw of a fighter and a temper to go with it, was not the sort of man to be bothered by the whinings of a mere woman. The more Blanche complained and demanded, the more he cut her off with a door slammed in her face.

Blanche took her complaints to her mother, who naturally sympathized with her daughter. Blanche also complained to her brother, who found himself very much in the middle. He was unhappy about his brother-in-law's presumed philanderings, but there was little he could do about the situation. Sam, after all, was not only the chairman of the board of the company; he was also the major stockholder in it, and in a very real sense, Jesse Lasky was Sam's employee. The fact that for a number of years Sam, Blanche, Jesse, and Mrs. Lasky had lived under the same roof only made matters stickier.

At her mother's suggestion, Blanche Goldfish hired a private detective to monitor her husband's activities, and the detective's findings seemed to confirm her suspicions. Confronted with this, Sam flew into a towering rage, and when his wife left their house to consult a lawyer, he had all the locks changed and refused to let her back in. The ensuing divorce proceedings were bitter and acrimonious on all sides, with a great deal of ugly name-calling, and with Sam, among other things, claiming that his small daughter, Ruth, was probably not his own child. One result of the divorce would be that Ruth, custody of whom was given to her mother, would not learn for twenty years who her father really was.

Inevitably, the domestic upheavals
chez
Goldfish had an effect on the already uneasy partnership. His problems at home seemed to make Sam even more irascible and autocratic at the office, and during one of Sam's out-of-town trips Adolph Zukor flatly told his board of directors that he could no longer work with Mr. Goldfish. Either he or Goldfish would have to go. When Sam returned from his travels, he faced a chilly board
of directors who asked for his resignation. Huffily, he resigned, uttering, according to legend, his famous ultimatum, “Include me out!” Later, he would disclaim this comment, saying only, “I didn't think it was a very nice thing for them to do.” But it was not an altogether un-nice thing for Sam Goldfish. To help persuade him to relinquish his chairmanship, he was given an even million dollars' worth of stock in Famous Players–Lasky.

Now on his own, like so many others of his competitive and rising generation, Sam Goldfish turned his back on both Zukor and his former brother-in-law, and went scouting for new partners with whom to invest his money. Soon he found them—two brothers named Edgar and Archibald Selwyn, who had been successful producers of legitimate plays on Broadway—and with them formed the Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, a name taken from the first syllable of Sam's last name and the last syllable of the Selwyns'. Into this new arrangement, Sam brought his million dollars, and the Selwyns brought a healthy clutch of stage plays ready to be turned into movies.

In 1918 Sam Goldfish petitioned the New York courts to have his name legally changed to Goldwyn. There had been titters among audiences, he had heard, when the words
PRODUCED BY SAMUEL GOLDFISH
appeared on the screen, and Sam was no longer a man who took titters lightly. Since Sam, for corporate reasons, had taken the precaution of having the name Goldwyn copyrighted, consent was required from the copyright holder. But since the copyright holder was Sam himself, who was also president of the company, this technicality presented no problem. Permission was granted by the court. As Judge Learned Hand put it, “A self-made man may prefer a self-made name.”

*
The charges of Jewish ritual murder of children, and cannibalism, date back to pre-Christian times, along with the bizarre claim that human sacrifice is condoned by the Talmud. The canard has been repeated throughout the centuries, and in the fourteenth century even made its way into Chaucer's “Prioress's Tale”: “O yong Hugh of Lincoln, slayn also/ With cursed Jewes, as it is notable/ For it is but a litel whyle ago,/ Preye eek for us.”

*
More than personal vanity may have accounted for the uncertainty about Sam's real age, and there may have been a more poignant explanation. In Russia, Jewish parents often falsified the ages of their male children, in order to postpone for as long as possible the age of forced conscription into the czarist army. In one community near Kiev, the Jewish congregation actually burned down its own synagogue to destroy birth records. It seemed that more girl children than boys had been born that year, and the congregation feared official reprisals if the shortage in the supply of males was discovered.

*
After whom Dustin Hoffman's star-struck mother named her son.

5

HEROES AND HEROINES

Leah Sarnoff liked to describe her four sons—David, Lew, Morris, and Irving—in terms of superlatives. One was “the handsomest.” Another was “the smartest.” The third was “the kindest.” But David—“Ah, David,” his mother would say, “David has all the luck.”

Within four days of his arrival in New York, David Sarnoff had found a job selling newspapers on Grand Street on the Lower East Side to help support his younger brothers and sisters. He was nine years old, and the secret of his success as a newsboy was not so much luck as speed. When Sarnoff began hawking copies of the
Tageblatt
in 1900, which happened to be the year Rose Pastor began submitting her wistful romantic verses to the same paper, it was necessary for the newsboy to snatch his bale of papers as it tumbled off the conveyor belt, snap its binding wire with a jackknife, and run with the papers, shouting “Extra! Extra!” through the streets. The papers were not returnable, and if a newsboy did not dispose of his quota quickly, the business would go to his competition. David Sarnoff was a small, wiry, intense boy with large dark eyes, jug ears, and a ski-jump nose. He was also quick on his feet, and
soon realized that he could be even quicker and more efficient if he were mobilized. Taking his cue from the pushcart vendors, he fashioned a makeshift cart out of a packing crate and four mismatched bicycle wheels picked up on the street. With this contraption he was able to build up a route along which he sold as many as three hundred
Tageblatts
a day. His profit was a penny for every two newspapers sold—fifty percent, since the
Tageblatt
retailed for a penny a copy—and this could add up to earnings of $1.50 a day, or $7.50 a week (the paper did not publish on the Sabbath). He was also able to earn an additional $1.50 a week singing soprano in the synagogue choir. This, it might be pointed out, was a princely income, compared with what older children were being paid for long hours of work in the sweatshops, and David's working day was seldom more than two hours long. This left him time to go to school.

It was not long before the enterprising new newsboy in town caught the attention of a group that called itself the Metropolitan News Company. Metropolitan News was a commercial distributor, or jobber, that bought newspapers in bulk and delivered them to newsstands, candy stores, and other retail outlets, using a horse and wagon. As the
Tageblatt
's biggest customer, Metropolitan got the first papers off the presses, before anyone else. Sarnoff's business was street sales and some home delivery, but it looked attractive enough to Metropolitan for them to approach him with an offer to buy his route. At first, their offer was ten dollars, but Metropolitan's price rose steadily until it reached the staggering figure of twenty-five dollars, which was almost an offer he could not afford to refuse—more than a month's earnings for one little route. But, instead of accepting, Sarnoff took a gamble and made a counterproposal. Metropolitan could have his route—he could always build up another—for nothing. In return, Sarnoff asked only for the first three hundred copies of the daily press run, enough to give his cart a head start. The deal was accepted. Within weeks, he had built up a new route, and, as he had expected, Metropolitan was soon after him again with an offer to buy that one.

David Sarnoff could probably have gone on parlaying his paper routes into cash until Metropolitan controlled the entire Lower East Side, which, of course, was what it wanted. But there was danger here. In 1902, a rival Yiddish publication had been founded by an enterprising young Russian
immigrant named Abraham Cahan. This was the
Jewish Daily Forward
, and since it offered a more socialistic, less uptown-establishment editorial point of view, it had quickly become popular with New York Jews who had been forced to leave Russia for reasons more political than anything else. Circulation wars between American dailies had become commonplace, and these had been known to be unpleasant, even bloody, with the newsboys of the competing papers most often the victims of the bloodshed. Sarnoff was wise enough to see that he could not go on expecting Metropolitan News to pay him cash for his routes forever; they might easily resort to more forceful methods. Besides, he had another idea.