The Jews in America Trilogy (153 page)

Even her own two sons never learned how to deal with her, so violently did her opinions of them swing from day to day. Her relationship with her son Horace was particularly explosive. “Horace is a genius!” she would exclaim one day. “Horace
is gaga!” she would announce the next. But there was no doubt that she was as shrewd as she was tough. When a thirty-room triplex penthouse at 625 Park Avenue, one of the avenue's most luxurious buildings, became available, she wanted to buy it, offering cash. She was advised that the cooperative building's board of directors did not want Jewish tenants. So Helena Rubinstein simply bought the building.

Meanwhile, her policy on salaries was becoming notorious. She would demand to know what a prospective employee wanted to be paid, and when he or she mentioned a figure, Madame Rubinstein would offer exactly half. When cleverer job seekers tried asking double what they expected to get, Madame somehow sensed this and offered a quarter of the figure. The Rubinstein payroll structure thus became somewhat surreal. Like Sam Bronfman, Madame was a demon about keeping down office expenses, and about twice a month she took unannounced after-hours inspection tours of her offices, turning out unnecessary lights and poring through the contents of wastebaskets, fuming at evidence that office time had been used for personal business, or at staff members who had failed to use up both sides of a scrap of paper. At the same time, employees discovered working late at their desks were given grunts and clucks of approval.

A great many members of her large family were on her payroll in one capacity or another, but even kinship did not protect her relatives from the vagaries of the boss's quixotic personality or high-handed business tactics. When her sister Stella, who was in charge of Rubinstein's French operations, was about to be married, Madame Rubinstein asked for a thousand dollars of company funds to buy Stella's wedding present. When asked to whose account these funds should be charged, she replied, “Stella's, of course!”

She was a woman who, seeing an ad for manufacturer's seconds of hosiery at Bloomingdale's, would send her secretary out to snap up as many pairs of stockings as she could carry at ninety cents a pair. At the same time, she was amassing a million-dollar collection of paintings (a number of them portraits of Madame herself), and another spectacular collection of African art. She claimed to care little about her personal appearance, and indeed her mascara was often smeared and her lipstick streaked. But she spent another fortune on clothes
and other personal adornments—diamonds, rubies, sapphires, ropes of emeralds, and yards of pearls. She scavenged wastebaskets for reusable paper clips while, at the same time, buying houses and estates all over the world and filling them with antiques. Soon, in addition to the Park Avenue triplex, there was a town house in Paris on the Île Saint-Louis, a country place at Combe-la-Ville, a town house in London, and an estate in Greenwich, Connecticut. She often held business meetings in her bedroom while she sat in bed, munching on a chicken leg.

One of her most brilliant business coups occurred in 1929. Had she somehow foreseen the great stock market crash that would occur later that year? In some uncanny way she may have, because early in 1929 she arranged to sell her American business to the banking house of Lehman Brothers for eight million dollars. She then repaired to Paris, where she planned to concentrate on her European operations. Then came the Crash, and Helena Rubinstein stock tumbled along with everything else. Meanwhile, she expressed dissatisfaction with the way Lehman Brothers was running her American company. They were taking her products “mass market”—into small groceries and drugstores, whereas previously they had been sold only through prestigious department and specialty stores. She decided to buy her American company back. She did this by writing thousands of personal letters to small Rubinstein stockholders, most of whom were women, asking them if “as one woman to another” they thought that a bunch of Wall Street bankers could run a woman's cosmetic business as well as a woman could. If they agreed with her, would they please give her their voting proxies? Meanwhile, she bought back as much Rubinstein stock as she could at bargain-basement prices. Thus, within a year, she had enough stock and votes to force Lehman Brothers to sell the company back to her at her price, which was somewhat under two million dollars. Her profit: over six million dollars. “All it took,” she would shrug, “was a little chutzpa.”

“I make a rule for you,” Sam Goldwyn would say—it was one of his favorite expressions, and he was always “making a rule,” usually jabbing a stubby forefinger into the chest of an opponent as he made it. When asked why the sets of his motion
pictures were always the scene of so much strife, turmoil, and dissension, he replied, “I make a rule for you. A happy company makes a bad picture.” He may have had a point because a number of good and profitable pictures did emerge from production companies that were famously unhappy.

He was unquestionably a most difficult man to work for. He had a theory, for example, that writers and directors were not good for one another, and that on any picture they should be kept as far apart as possible. This meant that any writer-director collaboration that took place had to be done on the sly. Goldwyn insisted on having a hand in every phase of his studio's operation, and was forever interfering with other people's jobs. King Vidor, at one point, refused to direct a Sam Goldwyn picture unless it was stipulated in his contract that Goldwyn remain off the set throughout the shooting of the film.

But Goldwyn paid very little attention to contracts. In the paramilitary structure of the early studios, the producer was the supreme commander in chief, and at the very bottom of the pecking order were the writers, the privates. When Sam Goldwyn at one point wanted Anita Loos to write a picture for him, he called Miss Loos in and offered her a year's contract at five thousand dollars a week, which she quickly accepted. Later, an associate gasped, “My God, Sam! That's two hundred and sixty thousand dollars a year!” Goldwyn replied, “Don't worry. I can get out of the contract when I'm through with her.” And, to be sure, he did.

His running feud with Louis B. Mayer at MGM became legendary. Once, during an altercation in the locker room at the Hillcrest Country Club, Mayer, who was much smaller in size than Goldwyn, managed to back the larger man into a corner and then pushed him into a laundry hamper full of wet towels. By the time Goldwyn had clambered out of the hamper, Mayer had disappeared. The feud occasioned one of Goldwyn's choicest Goldwynisms. When a friend chided him about the amount of bickering and fighting that went on between the two men, Goldwyn looked shocked and surprised.
“What?
” he cried. “We're like friends, we're like brothers. We love each other. We'd do anything for each other. We'd even cut each other's throats for each other!”

In the office, Sam Goldwyn was given the code name “Panama”—for the large white Panama hats he often wore—
and he was referred to as “Panama” in secret little interoffice memos that circulated about the studio. “Panama's on the warpath!” a scribbled note might say, and that inevitably meant that he
was
on the warpath, and when on the warpath he was abusive to his staff as well as to his household servants. Dinners at the Goldwyns' were often punctuated with explosions from the head of the table, at the butler, the maid, or the cook. “Take back these peaches!” he would roar, and Frances Goldwyn, in her role as peacemaker, would quietly explain to the cook, “These canned peaches aren't Mr. Goldwyn's brand.”

At the studio, invitations to Mr. Goldwyn's table in the executive dining room were naturally command performances. Once, when Goldwyn had invited an associate named Reeves Espy to join him for lunch, Goldwyn startled Espy by appearing at Espy's office door to pick him up. It was usually done the other way around. At the time, Goldwyn had been feuding with an art director named Richard Day, and Mr. Day, who had had his fill of Goldwyn, was threatening to quit. Now Goldwyn further startled Espy by saying, “Call Dick Day and ask him to come along for lunch.” Espy was quite sure what Day would think of the invitation. The problem was that interoffice communication was by intercom, and if Espy got Day on the intercom, Sam Goldwyn would be able to hear everything Day had to say. But Espy did as he was told, rang for Day's station on the intercom, and to the voice that answered said quickly, “Dick, Sam Goldwyn wants you to join us for lunch.
Dick, Mr. Goldwyn's standing right here!”

At Goldwyn Pictures, it became a tradition that every departing employee was given a farewell lunch by the boss, and at Goldwyn Pictures people came and went with some frequency. At these lunches, most of the hour was consumed with speeches extolling Sam Goldwyn, and at one of them, producer Fred Kohlmar said, “Sam, this is the fifth of these lunches we've had in a month. Can we have one when
you
leave?”

He was redeemed, perhaps, by the famous Goldwynisms. Each new example of fractured English was passed around Hollywood, chuckled at, and embellished. As a result, a few of the celebrated utterances are apocryphal, but most are true. He really did say, “Let me sum it up for you in two words—impossible!” And he did say, on a number of occasions, “Let me pinpoint for you the approximate date.” But though a
number of his people took the Goldwynisms to mean that the boss was a little soft in the head, there was always a certain germ of truth and sense in most of them. When he said, “Include me out,” it meant that he wished to be included among those who were out. When he said, “A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on,” he was absolutely right—it isn't. When he said, “I took the whole thing with a dose of salts,” one had to admit that a dose was as good as a grain. And when, proposing a toast to the visiting Field Marshal Montgomery, he rose, lifted his glass, and said, “A long life to Marshal Field Montgomery Ward!” one could understand his confusion. When he said, “Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is named John,” he had a point. And a touch of sarcasm could not be ruled out when Edna Ferber mentioned that she was writing her autobiography, and he asked her. “What's it about?”

Even Hollywood's favorite Goldwynism turned out to be laced with truth. The occasion was when Sam and Frances were about to embark on a cruise to Hawaii, and his studio staff came down to the dock to see the Goldwyns off. While the staff stood waving at him from the pier, Sam stood at the ship's railing, waving back, and calling, “Bon voyage! Bon voyage! Bon voyage to you all!” Sure enough, a few days after his return from his holiday, most of those same well-wishers were sent voyaging off into the choppy seas of unemployment.

Everyone knew, furthermore, that Goldwyn never paid any attention to the three-hour time difference between New York and Los Angeles. Therefore, when Goldwyn telephoned Marcus Loew's son Arthur in New York, and woke him at two o'clock in the morning, and when Loew said, “My God, Sam, do you know what time it is?” no one should have been surprised to hear that Sam turned to his wife and said, “Frances, Arthur wants to know what time it is.”

Even more famous than the Goldwynisms, within the movie industry, was Goldwyn's ability to assume the offensive in any business deal, and to immediately get his opponent on the run. At MGM, David Selznick was in charge of loan-outs of performers, and a typical phone call from Goldwyn would begin, “David, you and I have a very big problem.” Asked what the problem was, Goldwyn would reply, “You have an actor under contract, and I need him for a picture.” Another tactic was to completely befuddle a competitor, to throw him off his guard
by making him think he was losing his mind. Goldwyn once telephoned Darryl Zanuck to get him to part with a director whom Zanuck had under contract. He was told that Zanuck was in a meeting. Goldwyn told Zanuck's secretary that Zanuck must be got out of his meeting, that the business was urgent, an emergency, a matter of life and death. When, after a long delay, Zanuck finally came on the phone, Goldwyn said pleasantly, “Yes, Darryl. What can I do for you today?” He used the same technique on Lillian Hellman to get her to write the screenplay for
Porgy and Bess
. After spending several days trying to locate her, and leaving urgent messages for her in a variety of locations, he finally found Miss Hellman at her summer home on Martha's Vineyard. He opened the conversation with, “Hello, Lillian. How nice of you to call. What can I do to help you?”

Though he relied heavily on the talent, it irked him whenever an actor, director, or writer tried to take credit for the success of a movie that he, Sam Goldwyn, had produced. When Eddie Cantor, already a radio star, came to Hollywood to do
Kid from Spain
, he was nothing but trouble. He refused to accept the dressing room assigned to him because it had once been Al Jolson's, and Jolson's career had petered out, and Cantor was superstitious. Cantor also tried to get his wife, Ida, into the publicity buildup for the film, thus diluting Goldwyn's own publicity campaign. He gave an interview to reporters in which he complained about Goldwyn's studio policies, and about the low salary Goldwyn was paying him. Yet, when the film was finished, Goldwyn was pleased with it, and at a private screening he instructed his staff, “don't anybody tell Cantor how good he is. I want to use him for another picture.” Then, when
Kid from Spain
became a hit, Eddie Cantor had the temerity to announce that it was all thanks to him, and to the popularity of his radio show. Goldwyn was furious. “Are you kidding
me?”
he roared at Cantor. “A little radio show made a big motion picture? Why don't you do a little motion picture, and get a big radio show?”

“I make a rule for you,” he said to his story editor, Sam Marx, when Marx proposed buying a novel called
Graustark
that was set in a mythical kingdom. “I make a rule for you—never bring me a story about mythical kingdoms.” Then, from rival MGM, along came
The Prisoner of Zenda
, set in a
mythical kingdom, and a big hit. Immediately Goldwyn wanted to buy and produce
Graustark
. When the negotiations for
Graustark
were completed, Goldwyn said to Marx, “Look—who thought of
Graustark?
I did! Why didn't
you
think of
Graustark?”
Marx reminded him of the recent rule. “I didn't mean classics,” replied Goldwyn. He had to have the last word.