Hollywood (38 page)

In Hollywood, Ethel Barrymore accepted Judy’s Oscar. At La Zambra Café in New York, the excitement was so intense that the ABC crew failed to make the necessary connections and although Judy made a touching little speech, it was neither broadcast nor heard by more than a few people at her table.

Thus, through the quiet defection of one star and the fading brilliance of another, a new star was indeed born. Judy Holliday went on to make a string of successes:
The
Marrying Kind
,
It Should Happen to You
,
The Solid Gold Cadillac
(in which she was at last reunited with Paul Douglas), and
Bells are Ringing
.

She was an unlikely type for movie stardom but made it by dedicated use of extraordinary talent. Her death in 1965 at the age of forty-two deprived the screen of one of its most uniquely gifted artists.

Many Hollywood producers were called, or called themselves, “independent,” but Samuel Goldwyn was the only truly independent producer I ever knew. He purchased this independence expensively by putting up his own money to produce his films.

Other so-called independent producers, and even the majors, borrowed money from banks, from institutions or from private lending sources, at high interest rates, giving up, of course, pieces of the finished product. Goldwyn used his own money, often losing it. But when he made a success, the profits were all his.

He fought the distributors and exhibitors, believing them to be largely parasitic, and at one time, undertook the complicated method of hiring a theatre and exhibiting the picture on his own.

Once, I heard him talking to the house manager of a theatre in Chicago which he was using for the release of
The Best Years of Our Lives
. He was giving all sorts of instructions, many of which I did not understand. I heard him say, “Well, then, the only thing you got to do is put a chaser on. Get some kind of chaser. Or I’ll have somebody here get you one. You know, like a two-reel travelogue about Denmark or something like that. And you see that you use it. If we don't get a turnover, we’re not going to get a gross.” He hung up.

“Did you say ‘a chaser’?” I asked.

“Certainly. Chaser. What’s wrong with that?”

“What’s ‘a chaser’?”

Goldwyn laughed. “My God,” he said, “you’re taking me back. You know, you wouldn’t believe it, but there was a time when the whole movie business practically was chasers. You see, they had these vaudeville houses and on rainy nights, or cold nights, or sometimes if they happened to have a couple of good acts, somebody would buy a ticket and go in, and maybe stay for two or three shows sometimes. Say, listen. I remember not so long ago, M-G-M, they were telling me what they were going to do at the Capitol. In New York City. They had this movie,
Babes in Arms
. Remember that? Dick Rodgers and Hart?”

“Of course.”

“Well, it turned out good and they wanted to break all the box-office records in the history of the Capitol Theatre. They thought this would be a good exploitation thing for later, if they could say to the exhibitors, ‘This picture broke every record in the history of the Capitol Theatre.’ So Arthur Freed was at my house one night and he was telling me about what they were going to do, to break all the records of the Capitol Theatre. He said that Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland—they were the two stars of the picture— and they were great. Well, say, those young people are great. And Arthur said to me, ‘We’re going to send Mickey and Judy to make personal appearances at the Capitol.
We’re going to play six shows a day and seven on weekends, and we’re going to have Mickey and Judy make a personal appearance at every single show. Not long. Maybe they’ll just come on for, say, ten minutes, and maybe do a couple of numbers and talk to the audience, but we’ll be able to say: ‘In person Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland,’ and what the hell? They’re so young, they can
do
seven shows a day. They’ll just stay in the theatre and go on.’ And I said to him, ‘Arthur, you’re making a big mistake. This is a strong picture, and if you play enough shows at the Capitol, you will break the records. This personal-appearance thing is not so good, and anyway, it’ll take up too much time. You could put in an extra show without the personal appearance. And there’s another reason.’ But Arthur wouldn’t listen to me and he said, ‘No, no. It’s all been decided.’ And they went and they did it. Do you know what happened? The first two days, not only they didn’t break any records, but they had practically the lowest gross the Capitol had had in years, for those first two days.”

I was puzzled. “But how could that be?”

“I’m telling you. Trying to. If you’ll stop interrupting me, f’Chrissake. You’re like Arthur Freed. He wouldn’t listen either. This is what happened. This is what I wanted to tell him was going to happened. This was such a great attraction, this fine picture and this personal appearance, that what happened was that people bought a ticket and they went in and stayed for two, three shows. Like if they went in two or three of them together, one of them would go out and buy some candy or popcorn or food, or go to the bathroom, and other ones would save his seat, and then they would come back and they would sit through a second show and sometimes these kids sat through a third show. So instead of each seat being sold several times, during the morning, it was only sold once.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!”

“What they should have done—what I wanted to tell Arthur to do—was to run this on a schedule basis. One show, then you clear the house. Then, another show. Nowadays you can do that. In the old vaudeville days, the ones I was telling you about, they didn’t know how to do that. And it was too complicated. So what they used to do was, they used to buy a movie from us—like a two-reeler, sometimes a one-reeler—usually terrible, and at the end of the last vaudeville act, they would put this movie on. And people hated it so much they would leave the theatre. That’s why they got to call them ‘chasers.’ You still have them. All those shorts and those travelogues, and that junk they put on between the shows. To get people out of the theatre. So that’s what I was just now telling him in Chicago he has to do. You never heard of that, huh? You didn’t know what a chaser was. My God. Some people.”

Long careers are interesting careers, especially in the film business. The life-span of a movie star is comparatively short. “We’re something like the common housefly,” Spencer Tracy once said, although the length of his own career belies his crack. Directors and writers, too, come and go, lose their touch or use up their bag of tricks or begin to repeat themselves or fall out of fashion.

Samuel Goldwyn’s span was the more extraordinary because it encompassed the full story of American filmmaking from its virtual beginning until the present day. He was producing feature films with great stars and important directors long before the word “Hollywood” was known to the general public.

In one of the most recent manifestations of film activity—the leasing of libraries for television viewing—Goldwyn, in his eighties, proved to be the most brilliant negotiator of them all.

The value of old films for television exhibition was wildly undercalculated by most of the owners of the vaults. Great blocs of films were leased, sometimes sold, for television for a few hundred thousand dollars, when their actual worth turned out to be in the millions. The revenue was considered at first to be something of a windfall. Found money. And, of course, there exists, in the hard-hitting business community, an element of greed.

In the first years of this new development, Goldwyn sat tight, refusing to make any of his films available for television.

“They’re gonna
kill
it!” he said passionately. “They’re gonna kill the whole damn
business
. You think people are going to go out and pay for something they can get home free and a bottle of beer and their shoes off? All right, sure, those television wiseguys will pay a few dollars but that won’t go far, and these bastards here, they’re gonna kill the whole business. I’ll tell you what the box is. The box is just a different kind of a distribution business. That’s all. We’re going to have to figure out some way to use it, but to use it like a
distribution
business. Not to sell some goddamn toothpaste, f’Chrissake.”

René Clair is not only one of the three or four greatest of film directors; he is also a philosopher and theoretician of the medium.

When he visited Hollywood in the mid-1950s, I thought Goldwyn would be interested in hearing Clair’s ideas and arranged a meeting. It lasted three hours. Goldwyn appeared to be greatly impressed, but he was habitually so cagey, undemonstrative, and careful, that I could not be certain.

Goldwyn phoned me the next morning and said, “Listen, all that stuff he was saying. That Mr. Renéclair. Tell him I would appreciate it very much for him to write it down and send it over here.”

“I can’t do that, Mr. Goldwyn.”

“Why not? I thought this Renéclair was a friend of yours.”

“Well, yes, he is. But I can’t ask him to sit down and write a whole article just for you to read.”

“It’s not just for me, f’Chrissake! I want to show it to a lot of people. And who’s talking about an article? Did I say article? Just tell him to write me a letter.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Goldwyn. I don’t see how I could do that. Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

“
Myself
? Because he’s not a friend of mine. He’s a friend of
yours
.”

“Even so—”

“All right, God damn it, if you don’t want to do me a favor, don’t.” There was an awkward pause. Then, he continued, brightly, “Say,
you
were there.
You
heard it. Why don’t
you
write it down and send it over here?”

“For how much?” I asked.

“What?” The sound he made was the very definition of outrage.

“I'm a professional writer, Mr. Goldwyn,” I said. “I live by my pen. So I don’t think it’s right for you to ask me to do something like that as a favor. You don’t ask actors to act for you as a favor, or directors to direct for you.”

“I don’t know what’s happened to you,” he said sadly. “When I first met you, you were a nice quiet kid with a lot of ambitions and you were interested in pictures. I remember how you used to come back to the studio every night and run my pictures to learn the business. You cost me a goddamn fortune, f’Chrissake! And
now
look what’s happened to you! All you think about is money. That will get you no place.”

I said nothing.

“All right,” he continued. “
Don’t
write it down. You think I don’t remember what he said? I remember. I remember it better than you do.”

“All right, then,” I said. “Why don’t
you
write it down and send it to
me
?”

“Wisecracks,” he said. “I’ve told you how many—a thousand times maybe—there’s no money in wisecracks.”

“But I’m not interested in money, Mr. Goldwyn.
You
know that.”

“Listen,” he said. “I want to tell you something.”

“Yes?”

“I want to thank you very much for bringing over that Mr. Renéclair. He’s very intelligent and I like his ideas and I appreciate it very much that you brought him over, and gave me an opportunity to hear his views. Good-by.”

Actually, Goldwyn’s second suggestion would have been simple to carry out. I had been so struck by René’s thesis that I had already written it all down.

René had said: “We are not yet thinking of this television business in the right relation to the ‘mauvaise.’” (Although René’s English is splendid, there are a few words he sticks on and this is one of them. To him, the “movies” were always the “mauvaise.” Freudian?) “I see a screen. For me, it is not different if the screen is a large one in a theatre, or a small one in my room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. A screen is a screen,
n’est-ce
pas
? Now. What is the job? The job is to tell a story, to hold the interest, foot by foot, on that screen, with scenery and actors and dialogue and music and the most important thing always—the cutting. So. For me, the television is a form of the mauvaise. Now everyone I meet here in the business and in France, too, everyone considers the television to be an enemy. A competition. I say not. I say it is another form. An extension. To look at the situation as it is today only, that is the mistake. That causes the disaster in the thinking. One must think back, back in time to the time of Lumière and Edison. Then one must think forward so far as possible. Then looking at the whole story, the whole history, one can begin to perceive what is the true situation. I wish to pose something to you—upon the subject of inventions. Let us say, let us imagine that for all our lives there has been such a thing as television, that when all of us were children there was, in every home in France and in America, such a box. This box, which had the capability of receiving, through the airwaves, images of football games, Le Tour de France, a performance from the Comédie Française, or the Ziegfeld Follies, or a speech by a politician. So. All our lives we have known this. We have seen this. And used it. Lived with it. Now!” He had jumped up excitedly and had begun pacing about as he reached the penultimate point of his imagining. “Suppose now, this year, in 1958, some brilliant inventor, somewhere, invents such a thing as film. We have never heard the word ‘film.’ We are not sure what is celluloid, but now he invents it. And it
becomes possible to put all these things, the politicians, Le Tour de France, the Follies, onto this film and the film onto reels and this can be put onto some machine and shown on the television. The television we have always known. And this film can even be sent from place to place and stored and put on whenever it is wanted or needed. Now, would not this thing, would not the invention of film be the most profound, the most greatest thing that has ever happened in the history of television? And not such a bad thing for this new film idea, either. And if we could be, any of us, in either business, in the television business or in the film business, which would we choose? I do not know of you—but me? I prefer the film business because the film is, after all, the product, and the television, the box, is only, after all, the means of distribution,
n’est-ce pas
? If we can think of it in such historic terms, then we can recognize that the invention of television is
not
the enemy of film-making but maybe its best friend.”

This is, in essence, the argument Goldwyn found attractive. I often heard him repeat it. I never heard him credit “Mr. Renéclair” with the idea, and at times, he presented it in a maddeningly garbled state. Still, as always, Samuel Goldwyn was able to communicate what was in his heart and mind.

“Say, you want to hear another mistake of mine? I’ll tell you. Gary Cooper. That was some mistake. I always liked Westerns. I like to watch them, to see them, but I never made one. Maybe because I didn’t think I knew how. But then we got ahold of this book by Harold Bell Wright. A great book. Very popular. The name of it was
The Winning of
Barbara Worth
and it appealed to me. And Henry King—a very fine director—loved it. And this woman, this Frances Marion, she did the screenplay. And we were starting in to cast and somebody brought in this fellow. He was very tall and he looked a little on the dumb side. Dumb but nice. And he didn’t talk much. There was a nice part in this picture. Not the lead. That was Ronnie Colman. But there was this part, a kind of a cowboy part, and I can’t tell you why, but this big, tall fellow appealed to me. So we tried him out and took a chance and he made it. He was in it.
The Winning of Barbara Worth
. Vilma Banky. Beautiful. The picture did very well and I had this fellow, Cooper, under contract. But I tell you the truth, this Western was very hard to make, with all the locations and the outdoor stuff and the weather. And I thought, what the hell? I’m not going to make a lot of Westerns. And this guy? What am I going to do with him in the kind of pictures I make? So what did I do? I went ahead and I sold his contract to Paramount. You know, looking back, I still see why I did what I did, but it turned out to be, I would have to say—I would have to admit it—it was a mistake. See? Even
I
make a mistake. Once in a great while, I mean.”