Samuel Goldwyn, the motion picture producer, today achieved his eightieth birthday and his fiftieth year in the movies. It is an event, like the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, that beggars the resources of the protocol and makes puny the chorus of trumpets that announces it.
Perhaps only Goldwyn himself possesses the proper vocabulary to describe this colossal, this awe-ful anniversary. Certainly, he will be furious this morning if he wakes and finds the front pages frivolled with such minor trumperies as U Thant’s visit to Moscow, Southern Rhodesia’s police powers, the prospect of chaos in Algeria.
“The Goldwyn Press Agent” wrote his first and best biographer, “does not expect praise in proportion to the amount of Goldwyn’s stuff in the newspapers; he expects blame according to the percentage of non-Goldwyn stuff that gets in.”
Until the man himself is heard from, wits from Sunset Boulevard to Wardour Street will be busy coining the official Goldwynism to cap the legend of the shrewdest man handler of the English language since Bully Bottom.
Hard times
This great man, who has the barbered, rubbery face of a circus clown on his day off, the hands of a violinist, the clothes of an Egyptian hotel manager, and the temper of Attila the Hun, was to the manner, if not the manor, born of a medieval baron. The hard facts of his birth in Warsaw, his scrimping childhood, his one year of school, his stint as an office boy, and then as blacksmith’s helper, are irrelevant to the natural majesty of his temperament.
He tired of his sleepy Slavonic background at the age of 12 and so ran away to England. More desperate still, he settled in Manchester, but his relatives there also dared to exercise a little discipline. At 13, therefore, he decided to invade and take the American continent alone. He sailed into New York in steerage, for the first and last time. He worked as a glove-maker and then as a New England salesman, terrifying the horny-handed Yankees into buying gloves for all inappropriate occasions. He may be said to have established the tradition that the last of the great Yankee drummers were invariably Polish Jews.
Then Woodrow Wilson became President and the phenomenon to be known as Hollywood became inevitable. For the new Administration lowered the tariff on skins, and Sam Goldwyn and other glove men decided to get into another business. As if by the touch of Aaron’s rod, they all suddenly heard the clatter of nickels in the box offices of the first nickelodeons. Years before the doltish Anglo-Saxons, they had a vision of the motion picture rising from the gutter of the flea circuses and queening it over the stage and the concert platform to the tune of billions of dollars.
Blundering Malaprop
Goldwyn no sooner saw a scratchy two-reel film of Bronco Billy Anderson than he chased vaudeville theatre owners and bankers to put up money for a motion picture than would tell a romantic tale, last an hour, and demand 25 cents a seat. He was dismissed as a maniac until he got the money, and the film (The Squaw Man), and started the motion pictures on a 50-year adventure that will surely end in five hours of Twentieth Century Fox’s Cleopatra at £2 per reserved seat.
Today, as he touched the hem of his Swiss silk suit, there is time only to try and find out exactly who is the object of our worship. There are four Goldwyns. The first is the successful comic strip immigrant, with accent to match, who made a world reputation by stumbling through the English language with inspired infelicity, and made millions of dollars by fooling most of the people most of the time. This is the Goldwyn that has an hysterical appeal for Europeans. It can be counted on for laughs, for sneaking admiration, and for confirmation of the deep suspicion that successful Americans are funny, ingenious, vulgar originals.
The second Goldwyn is the first of the American legends; a blundering Malaprop but a shrewd salesman who hired and rooked the best brains in the movie business and by some unexplained cussedness became a billionaire. This is closer to the facts but it is mainly the creation of his press agents, of Hollywood’s gossip columnists, and of enraged ex-employees.
The third Goldwyn was created to erase the impression of the second. It was a comparatively sophisticated effort, undertaken (for a handsome stipend) by one of the most cunning of America’s public relations counsellors. The problem put to this Higgins was brutal but realistic. After the Second World War there were a least two educated generations that thought of Goldwyn as the exemplar of all that was most clownish, most provincial, and most egotistical about Hollywood. If they were to join the line of paying customers for Goldwyn’s films they would need to have a more amiable image of him.
It was the job of the Richelieu of American public relations to set in motion a more appealing legend: that of a plucky immigrant who learned the English language as well as the next man, who deliberately coined and circularised the more naive Goldwynisms to drug the gullible smart guys with whom he was about to do business; a man who in fact knew Europe better than most of his audiences and a entrepreneur who would spend vast sums in bringing to any movies of his creation an artistic authenticity that could be recognised in Glasgow or Hong Kong as the Goldwyn touch.
As a character study, or psychograph, of the real Sam Goldwyn this was only slightly less preposterous than the one it was meant to supplant. But by the subliminal ruses of modern publicity techniques, which are more advanced in the US than outside it, and by the surprising willingness of its victim to believe it and become it, it succeeded. (The very fact of this piece is a proof of it.) So that in the last dozen years or so the popular impression of Sam Goldwyn has subtly and irrevocably changed. He is the most independent of the movie-makers, the most astute; moreover, one who in his earnest immigrant way (the primal European hungering for the fine things) has a sure feel for what is artistic and irresistibly entertaining at the same time.
The truth is that for years Goldwyn’s idea of artistic merit was almost entirely a matter of the trappings. He would waste thousands of dollars on the correct reproduction of a Napoleonic interior while the dialogue going on inside it was puerile in the extreme. But more and more as he aged he trusted no one but himself to procure a strong plot and sense the kind of mass emotion that touched people where they lived in any given year.
In the psychiatry-riddled America of 20 years ago he cashed in on the pathological family life of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. (in private Goldwyn could believe that anyone who went to a psychiatrist “ought to have his head examined.”) The year after VJ Day he banked on the patriotic appeal of a paraplegic in The Best Years of Our Lives. In 1947, when old soldiers were reduced to battling traffic and office memoranda, he converted James Thurber’s Walter Mitty into a lucrative folk hero.
Enthusiasm
Goldwyn worked as an equal with other movie barons for only two years, at the end of which he decamped, taking the first cut of the profits at the second syllable of Arch Selwyn, his partner (he was admitted to the US as Goldfish and has tried to forget it ever since). For 40 years he has had no board of directors, no partners, only driven underlings.
If he has produced the finest pictures that ever crossed a million dollars, it is also true that he laboured with equal solemnity over three ghastly, and ruinous, attempts to immortalise the frail and very mortal talent of Anna Sten. He had, and has, no more notion of what makes a good writer than the treasury of a wood pulp company. From Goldwyn’s point of view, Rex Beach was the equal of Thomas Hardy; and Mary Roberts Rinehart, the moment she published a bestseller, was the greatest writer since Shakespeare.
It is true that he has a rapt, incurable admiration of writers. He does not need to read them. By the pricking of his thumbs he knows that this hack is the equal of that genius. Faulkner and Elinor Glyn equally made the grade with Goldwyn. When Maurice Maeterlinck failed miserably in his Goldwyn-sponsored fling at the movies, Goldwyn saw him off at the station, put his arm generously around the giant, and said, in utter sincerity “Don’t worry, Maurice, you’ll make good yet.”
Levantine sleekness
Of the four Goldwyns, doubtless the most interesting is the last, the man himself. Unfortunately, the art of the image-makers has been so sedulously practised on the Polish Eliza Doolittle that it is no longer possible for any but a handful of intimates to know what Sam Goldwyn is like. All that emerges from a session with him is the impression of an old man of peculiar grace, with extraordinarily delicate hands, a levantine sleekness about his dress and movements; an unlettered man of infinite foxiness, well aware of his reputation as tycoon and a charmer, who is not going to invest an hour of his time or a cent of his money in any enterprise, whether it be the solution of the Berlin crisis or the salvation of India, that does not simultaneously promise the satisfaction of his own desires and the rattle of a million dollars at the box-office.
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