The Jews in America Trilogy (148 page)

To be sure, there was the tradition of the Yiddish theater to be considered. At the same time, while the Yiddish theater was enjoyed as spectacle, those connected with its performances were held in low esteem, and though Yiddish theater was transported to the Lower East Side, it can in no way account for the enormous outpouring of show-business talent that emerged from Jewish immigrants in the United States. In Russia, there had also been the tradition of the
badchen
, or street jester, juggler, or fiddle player—but the
badchen
was also a figure of scorn and ridicule, little better than a beggar, an organ-grinder with his monkey, a blind man with his cup. And yet, as a singing waiter, Irving Berlin had been an American
badchen
,
just as Eddie Cantor—singing and telling jokes and doing imitations at weddings and bar mitzvahs—had thereby launched himself as a comedian.

Still, this does not satisfactorily explain the phenomenon of American Jews in show business. One can, of course, assume that part of the explanation was the fact that, once the Jews were freed from the shackles of poverty and discrimination, great wells of talent that had been forced into hiding in the old country became uncapped in the new, and that with this came a longing for more than respectability—for achievement, recognition, and fame; the name in lights on Broadway, the cheers and applause of an audience. But sheer ambition does not invariably lead to fame, nor is it necessarily an accompaniment to theatrical talent.

It is true, however, that by the 1920s much of the business end of show business was in Jewish hands. Many of the legendary producers and impresarios on Broadway, such as Billy Rose (William Rosenberg) and Florenz Ziegfeld, were Jewish. So were many of the theatrical agents. The theaters themselves, meanwhile, were in the hands of the formidable brothers Shubert—Sam, Lee, and Jacob—the sons of an immigrant Syracuse peddler, who by the 1920s were to Broadway showplaces what the Rockefellers were to Standard Oil. All this helped Jewish performers find employment without fear of anti-Semitism, and among the careers launched by Flo Ziegfeld were those of Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and Fanny Brice. Then there was the fact that, by 1920, much of the Prohibition liquor trade was in Jewish hands, and a good number of the speakeasies and nightclubs where would-be stars could do their turns were also Jewish-owned. But still, where did so much
talent
come from? How to account for the wonderful songs—that seemed not to be written, but simply to “happen”—from the musically untutored Irving Berlin?

Much of the answer may lie in the streets of the Lower East Side themselves, where a bit of theatrical talent—or a plucky stab at it—could be a means of survival. More than gumption and street wisdom were required of a Jewish child to make it through the average day of taunting and bullying, and an ability to improvise was often helpful. If a Jewish youth were slightly built and not particularly athletic (like Irving Berlin), a potential tormentor could often be as diverted by a soft-shoe shuffle, a
bit of clever mimicry, a comedy routine, or a song as by the use of fists. Once diverted by the young performer, the tormentor found himself disarmed and going along with the joke. The explosion of talent that erupted from the Lower East Side in the 1920s very likely grew out of the art of self-defense.

Having found that he could hold an audience, the young performer discovered that he could sell his ability for pennies in the street, or in the shabby saloons along the Bowery, or in the speakeasies of Brooklyn and Harlem. From there, the next step might be an engagement at one of the increasingly lavish resort hotels, such as Grossinger's and the Concord in the Borscht Belt of the Catskills. Here, vacationing Jewish families demanded entertainment of all varieties when not sunning themselves in lawn chairs, eating sumptuous meals, and admiring mountain scenery. Here, Meyer Lansky would establish several pleasant, and illegal, gambling parlors, and here budding comics, singers, and actors would hone their techniques and develop new routines. At one of these hotels, a young comedian named David Daniel Kominski, the son of a Russian-born Brooklyn tailor, later to be known as Danny Kaye, was hired to do zany acts in the lobby on rainy days to prevent guests from checking out. These Jewish performers, furthermore, were playing for Jewish audiences and were delighting them with a kind of Jewish self-parody that a generation later might have raised eyebrows. Fanny Brice, for example, did her acts in a heavy Yiddish accent—full of “oys!” and “Oy vehs!”—which she actually had to teach herself, since hers had not been a Yiddish-speaking family. Danny Kaye's comedy relied heavily on mocking Russian-Jewish mannerisms and shibboleths and speech patterns—a takeoff on a newly rich Jewish businessman with an unpronounceable name was a particular favorite—and the Marx Brothers had a routine called “Misfit Sam the Tailor.” Sophie Tucker, meanwhile, could always bring the house down by closing her act with a rendition of “My Yiddishe Mama.” It was at the Catskill resorts that producers and agents were scouting for fresh talent, and, for the performer, the next step might be the vaudeville circuit, or Broadway, or Hollywood.

In Hollywood, however, the situation for the Jewish performer was somewhat different from what it was in the Catskills or even in New York. Though the motion picture business—led by men like Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, William Fox,
Adolph Zukor, Marcus Loew, and the brothers Warner—had become a heavily Jewish industry, its national audience was not. Jewish jokes and Jewish themes might be popular in the Borscht Belt or even on Broadway, but Hollywood, with its eye ever on the largest possible box-office receipts, made carefully de-Semitized films for the Christian majority. During the 1920s and even into the 1930s, it was unlikely that a Jewish actor would be cast as a romantic lead unless, like John Garfield (Julius Garfinkle), he happened not to “look Jewish.” Part of this had to do with Hollywood's preoccupation, during this period, with turning out Westerns, and it was assumed that a Jewish face or physique would appear incongruous dressed in a cowboy outfit. But there was also genuine business fear that Christian audiences would not react kindly to Jewish stars. Theda Bara's Jewishness was a closely guarded secret, as was the fact that Douglas Fairbanks's mother had been Jewish. There was a great deal of elaborate name-changing, in the course of which Irving Lahrheim became Bert Lahr, Emmanuel Goldberg became Edward G. Robinson, Pauline Levee became Paulette Goddard, and so on. One of the most ingenious of these changes was made when an actor named Lee Jacob became Lee J. Cobb. The euphemism used in studio casting offices was “Mediterranean type,” and if an actor was branded a Mediterranean type he usually found good roles in the movies hard to come by. Both Rudolph Valentino and Clark Gable had, in the early stages of their careers, difficulty getting parts because they “looked Mediterranean,” though neither was Jewish.

The one area of films where an actor could get away with being Jewish, or looking Jewish, or where one could pretend to be Jewish even if one was not—where it was even an advantage to be Jewish—was comedy, and so it is no coincidence that some of the greatest comedians in the world—Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, Fanny Brice, the Marx Brothers—have been Jews nourished to prominence by Hollywood. For years, it was assumed that the greatest movie comedian of them all, Charlie Chaplin, was Jewish. He had to be, because he was so funny. He went to his grave, however, heatedly denying the rumors.

But it is an interesting comment on the timidity and insecurity of Hollywood's Jewish moguls who, by the 1920s, had become the most powerful purveyors of mass culture in
America—a comment, perhaps, on their own ethnic embarrassment or even downright shame—that the only way a Jew could be a Jew on the screen was to play a tramp, a clown, a grifter, or a
nebbish
.

And yet, it had to be admitted, playing the
nebbish
had helped many a bright young Jew make it through the Lower East Side, out of it, and onto a theater marquee.

9

HIGH ROLLERS

One of Sam Goldwyn's gifts as a filmmaker was his genius at generating publicity. Though he personally oversaw every detail of the movies he produced—from the writing and editing to the actresses' hairstyles and makeup—the part of his job he relished most was getting his name, his studio's name, his stars' names, and his pictures' names in the papers. One of the great social events of the Prohibition era was the wedding, in 1927, of one of Goldwyn's stars, Vilma Banky, and Rod La Rocque, an actor under contract to Cecil B. DeMille. The affair was almost entirely staged—and was completely paid for—by Goldwyn. He had discovered Miss Banky on a trip to Budapest, and after getting her to trim down by some twenty pounds and having her teeth capped, Goldwyn brought her to Hollywood to make her a star. (It mattered not, in those days of silents, that she spoke not a word of English.) In the process, Goldwyn had created the myth that she was a “Hungarian countess”—though in fact he had met her getting off a streetcar.

There were many prenuptial showers for the bogus countess, all paid for by Goldwyn, and he had hired the pastor to perform the rites and had selected the Church of the Good Shepherd,
the most fashionable Catholic church in Los Angeles. He paid for a fifty-voice choir to sing at the church, selected and paid for the bride's wedding gown, and offered her a veil borrowed from his studio's wardrobe department (Miss Banky had worn it in
The Dark Angel
). Goldwyn had chosen the bridesmaids for their newsworthiness, and they included Mildred Lloyd, Norma and Constance Talmadge, Norma Shearer, Marion Davies, and Dolores Del Rio. Louella Parsons, Hollywood's most powerful press figure, was matron of honor. Tom Mix arrived at the wedding wearing a purple cowboy costume and purple ten-gallon hat, driven in a purple coach-and-four with footmen in purple livery, and nearly stole the show. When everyone had settled in the church, and the Wedding March was struck up, there was no bride. She finally appeared, fifteen minutes late, as Goldwyn had instructed her to be, for added suspense and drama.

Following the ceremony, Goldwyn put on a huge wedding breakfast and reception, and, throughout it, kept nervously asking everyone in sight, “Is Sunday a legal day? Is Sunday a legal day?” No one knew what he was talking about, but Goldwyn did have some reason for concern, though it had nothing to do with the legality of Miss Banky's marriage to La Rocque. It seemed that La Rocque was involved in an ugly lawsuit over his contract with DeMille, though Goldwyn had chosen DeMille to be La Rocque's best man. It had occurred to Goldwyn that this somewhat unusual arrangement might have been seen, by lawyers, as some sort of collusion between the two parties to the lawsuit. He need not have worried because, as it turned out, Sunday was
not
a legal day.

Much champagne was consumed at the reception, and only when the guests felt it was time to turn to the food—huge hams, turkeys, and standing rib roasts of beef had been spread out on a long table—did they discover that all the viands were plaster of pans imitations, borrowed from the Goldwyn prop department. Not a morsel of the nuptial repast was edible. When it was time for the bride and groom to depart, and the new Mrs. La Rocque tossed her bridal bouquet, it was caught, by prearrangement, by Norma Shearer. This was because she was to be married later that year in another wedding that would be much publicized—to Irving Thalberg, production head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

During its early years, Goldwyn's company had prospered from a number of now almost forgotten hit films. Goldwyn had hired the beautiful opera star Geraldine Farrar to make
The Turn of the Wheel
, and she had gone on to make a series of lightweight romances for him. From Oklahoma, Goldwyn had brought an offbeat, crooked-grinned comedian named Will Rogers, and introduced him in a movie called
Laughing Bill Hyde
. When the pretty daughter of an Alabama congressman won a beauty contest, Goldwyn put her under contract and starred her in something called
Thirty a Week
. Her uncommon name was Tallulah Bankhead. For writers, Goldwyn hired such big names of the day as Mary Roberts Rinehart, Rex Beach, Gertrude Atherton, and Rupert Hughes.

In the beginning, financing his films had been a problem, as it was with other Jewish producers, and each new film was paid for out of the earnings of the last, which meant that each film was another roll of the dice. The big commercial banks in the East had little interest in the fledgling motion picture business. It was considered much too risk-ridden and, too, there was an element of snobbishness and anti-Semitism here. Nearly all the eastern banks were controlled by wealthy Protestants, bound together into a fraternity with old-school Ivy League college ties. By unspoken gentlemanly agreement, they refrained from involving themselves with Jewish enterprises. In California, however, Sam Goldwyn had found an exception in the person of an Italian Catholic banker named Amadeo Peter Giannini. Mr. Giannini had formed his Bank of Italy—later the Bank of America—in 1904 with the express purpose of offering loans to small farmers and businessmen, particularly Italian immigrants, who had similar difficulty borrowing money from such older established California banks as the Crocker, Anglo, and Wells Fargo. Giannini had flown in the face of banking tradition and orthodoxy by actively soliciting loan customers, instead of the other way around, and his bank had become the popular bank “of the little man.” With A. P. Giannini, Sam Goldwyn found a sympathetic reception, and soon Goldwyn's pictures were being produced in financial partnership with Giannini's bank.

Shortly after the war, however, the film industry went into what would be one of its periodic slumps, and Goldwyn's company got into serious trouble. He had temporarily exhausted
his borrowing power at the Bank of Italy, and a new source of working capital had to be found. This was why, when Goldwyn's friends Lee and J. J. Shubert, the Broadway theater owners, told him of a man the Shuberts claimed had an uncanny knack for making money, Sam was immediately interested, and asked that the fellow be brought around. The name of this alleged financial genius was Frank Joseph Godsol, and upon meeting him, Goldwyn immediately brought Godsol in as a partner. Uncharacteristically—so pressing was his need for ready cash—Goldwyn made no attempt to investigate Mr. Godsol's background. In view of what was to happen, one cannot help wondering if Sam had been taken in by a Shubert brothers scheme to ruin him, even though he considered the brothers his friends. The Shuberts were not his competitors, exactly, but at the same time the popularity of movies was having its effect on the box-office receipts at legitimate Broadway theaters, on which the Shuberts had a virtual monopoly. What interest could the Shuberts possibly have had in helping out a financially troubled movie producer? And if Frank Joseph Godsol was such a financial wizard, why hadn't the wily Shuberts snapped him up for their own organization? Beyond the vague claim that Godsol had a talent for making money grow on trees, the Shuberts appeared not to have looked into Godsol's credentials, either.