The Jews in America Trilogy (175 page)

But Sarnoff the visionary also remained to the very end Sarnoff the canny businessman. In 1965, when Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, the heads of Random House publishers, wanted to sell their company, Sarnoff decided that Random House, which had published such distinguished authors as William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, and George Bernard Shaw, would be an elegant capstone to RCA's communications empire. Naturally, he wanted to acquire this little gem for as little money as possible.

His first offer was half a share of RCA stock for each share
of Random House. This was rejected by Cerf as too low. Sarnoff soon came back with another offer—three-fifths of a share of RCA stock for each Random share, a sixty percent offer instead of fifty, and a considerable increase. But this still did not satisfy Cerf and Klopfer, who asked for sixty-two one-hundredths of a share instead of sixty one-hundredths. Two one-hundredths of a share might not have seemed much to haggle over, but in money it amounted to more than a million dollars.

Negotiations remained at a standoff for several weeks. Then a High Noon confrontation was scheduled at Sarnoff's town house on East Seventy-first Street for a Sunday in December. Cerf arrived for the meeting to find Sarnoff's wife watching a boring and unimportant football game on NBC. Cerf reminded her that the good game that afternoon was on CBS. “I don't watch CBS,” Lizette Sarnoff replied loyally, and then, remembering Bennett Cerf's long affiliation with the rival network, added, “The only thing I watch on CBS is
What's My Line?”

Then the two businessmen got down to the matter at hand. Sarnoff was adamant. Sixty percent was as high as he would go. Cerf was equally firm. Sixty-
two
percent was as
low
as he would go, and, Cerf added, since things seemed to have reached a stalemate, they might as well forget the deal and sit back and enjoy the game. Sarnoff paced the room, silently fuming. Finally he exploded.

“You may not realize it, Bennett,” he shouted, “but you're dealing with a very arrogant and egotistical man!”

Cerf replied calmly, “General, I'm just as arrogant and egotistical as you are. Let's watch the game.”

“We had better talk tomorrow,” said Sarnoff, to which Cerf replied that there was really no point in further discussion, and besides, he was leaving the next day for California and a holiday.

Sarnoff was flabbergasted, and said, “You mean to say that with this deal hanging fire, you're going to go off on vacation?”

Cerf reminded him that there was
no
deal hanging fire, since he had already rejected Sarnoff's final offer.

There followed several weeks of silence from the board chairman of RCA, during which Cerf began seriously to wonder if he had overplayed his hand and, in the process, lost a sale that would have amounted to some forty million dollars. But a few weeks, it seemed, was the face- and ego-saving period
required of Sarnoff before he could capitulate. In the end, Sarnoff came back, grumbling that Cerf was being very difficult, and offering him, as a magnanimous gesture, what Cerf had been asking for all along—sixty-two percent.

Using the royal first-person plural, Sarnoff said loftily, “We're not going to argue with you over that two one-hundredths of a share.”

Ego—it could almost take the place of a religion. Since it was not possible, or even theologically appropriate, to attribute to the Deity the bountiful good fortunes that had fallen upon the shoulders of these Eastern European immigrants, what remained to celebrate was the Self. One could not even credit ancestors, or the importance of good genes, when one looked back at one's life and saw the awesomeness of everything that had happened. The ancestors, in nearly every case, had been poor, not arrogant, for more generations than anyone could count, and lay in unknown weedy graveyards with their Hebrew inscriptions tipped askew above their heads, in places whose names were no longer on any map. Who else could the self-made man worship but himself? “A very arrogant and egotistical man.…” The closest things to religious holidays became the anniversaries of the self—the birthdays, the wedding commemorations, the funerals.

For Mr. Sam Bronfman's funeral in 1971, Jewish tradition was abandoned altogether. Judaism treats death as a very private affair, frowns on pomp and oratory, and particularly opposes the public displaying of the remains of the deceased. But Mr. Sam lay in state, in a silver shroud and an open coffin, in the center of the great rotunda of the Montreal headquarters of the Canadian Jewish Congress. At the funeral services, eulogy followed eulogy from prominent laymen, in defiance of Jewish custom, which dictates a simple homily delivered by a rabbi. The Seagram executives who had planned the ceremony also saw to it that the mourners included as many Christian leaders as possible from both Canadian and U.S. business, political, and academic communities, the irony being that many of these men and women had snubbed him all his life.

In California, Frances Goldwyn had given lavish birthday parties for her husband for nearly fifty years, and the big house
at 1200 Laurel Lane had been the scene of many other grand entertainments. Winston Churchill had dined there, as had President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy, not to mention the movie royalty—Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, George Cukor, Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, and on and on. But by the late summer of 1973, the manicured croquet court at the foot of the sloping lawn lay empty and the house was strangely silent. The only sounds were the periodic beeps of the electronic surveillance system that patrolled the grounds, and the whispered comings and goings of the round-the-clock nurses and doctors who attended the ninety- (or, more likely, ninety-three-) year-old man who lay in an upstairs bedroom, incontinent and uncomprehending: Sam Goldwyn. He had been unable to attend—and had probably not been aware of—the hundredth birthday party of his onetime partner Adolph Zukor, earlier that year. He had lain this way for more than five years.

Downstairs, Frances Goldwyn, greeting a few friends who had dropped in for a brief call, tried to put as cheerful a face on things as possible. “Oh, we have our little excitements,” she said. “We try, on most nice days, to wheel him out onto the upstairs deck for a little fresh air and sunshine. The other day, when the nurses weren't looking, he toppled out of his wheelchair and cut himself. Oh, yes, there's always something going on. He wouldn't be Sam if there weren't.” Some months before, President Nixon had come to the house to present Sam Goldwyn with an achievement medal. It had been possible to get the old producer dressed and photographed with the President, receiving the medal. There were even occasional flashes of the old fire, brief moments of lucidity when the old man would seem to realize what was going on—and there were even touches of humor in these. Richard Zanuck had come for a visit, and Goldwyn had suddenly begun berating him for making “a piece of filth like
Hello, Dolly!”
Bemused, Zanuck replied that while he did indeed plan to produce
Hello, Dolly!
, filming had not yet begun, and why should Sam describe a light-hearted musical as “a piece of filth”? Sam was insistent—
Hello, Dolly!
, he said, was “cheap pornography.” Finally, Zanuck thought he saw a connection, and said, “Sam, are you talking about
Valley of the Dolls?”
And Sam, true to his wife's
observation that, though you could be right, he
could not
be wrong, snapped back, “That's right—
Hello, Valley of the Dollies.”

In 1972, when Charlie Chaplin had ended his twenty-year self-exile from America, and returned to Hollywood to receive a special Oscar from the motion picture academy, he was then eighty-three and aged into near senility himself. His picture had appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
, and a copy of the paper happened to be lying beside the bedridden Sam Goldwyn's bed. Suddenly Goldwyn noticed it, sat up, and said hoarsely, “Is that Charlie? Is that Charlie?” Then, collapsing back into his pillow, he muttered, “He looks terrible.”

For years, during the golden era, Sam and Frances Goldwyn had represented one of the most durable partnerships in Hollywood, a town not known for long and stable marriages. He, she often said, made “all the lordly decisions, and I see to it that all the bits and pieces are in good order.” With uncharacteristic modesty, Sam declared that this was too limited an appraisal of her role. “I'd be lost without Frances,” he said. “She's the only real, close partner I've ever had.” It was true that she was one of the few people in Hollywood with whom he was able to get along. But the later years had not been easy. In 1969, after experiencing a series of circulatory ailments, Goldwyn named his wife to take over the operation of his studio and the management of his personal fortune, estimated then at twenty million dollars. A court order in Los Angeles approved a petition naming Frances Goldwyn as her husband's conservator and placed Samuel Goldwyn Productions in her hands—none of which pleased the couple's only son, Sam Jr. An eventual accord was reached. But from then on, relations between mother and son were strained.

“Shall we go up and see him?” Frances Goldwyn suddenly suggested to her visitor. They mounted the curved staircase together and entered Sam Goldwyn's dimly lighted bedroom. He lay—a huge man, grown obese from lack of exercise—hands folded on his stomach, gaze fixed on some indefinite space, flanked by life-sustaining apparatus. “It's me, Sam,” said Frances. There was no visible response.

Later, sipping one of her special martinis that she would allow no one else to fix—a special proportion of gin and water that only she understood—she said, “The doctors say that his
heart is as strong as a twenty-year-old boy's. Of course I think it's mostly guts and pride that's keeping him alive. This could go on for years and years.” Then, turning her back to be unzipped, Frances Goldwyn prepared to go upstairs again, change into a robe, and have her supper on a tray beside her silent husband.

It did not go on for years and years. Within the year, Sam Goldwyn died in his sleep. Friends who had hoped that Frances would now be able to enjoy some well-earned freedom and travel were shocked when, not long after her husband's death, she had a heart attack. Now it was she who lay speechless and immobilized in the upstairs room with nurses around the clock, able to communicate only by writing notes on slips of paper. She died two years later, in the summer of 1976, at seventy-three.

Not long before her death, she had said to a friend, “Just think—more than thirty million dollars in the estate! He had a lot to be proud of. I always thought that everything we had was owed to Mr. Giannini's bank!”

*
Lauren has not been altogether consistent in explaining the name change. Not long after telling this writer that his older brother changed it, he told a reporter for the
New York Times Magazine
(issue of September 18, 1983, page 112) that their father was responsible for the change.

Image Gallery

Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. The eye examination for trachoma was much feared.

“Gibson Girl” shirtwaists, the fashion rage of the early 1900s.