Hollywood (16 page)

“There it was. All our money, and all our investors’ money, shot. Listen, I’m not ashamed to say it. I cried—and Jesse cried, too, but what good was that gonna do? Well, the next day, we started to try and see what could be done and everybody was putting the blame on everybody else. You know how it is in the movie business. They
still
do it. Everybody blames everybody else. The cameraman, the lab, the actor. What it was, was DeMille had to use different cameramen with different cameras. Pathé, Edison, Lumière. And they didn’t match. And he didn’t know it. Or
we
. Finally, by luck, we found this film technician. In Philadelphia. By the name of Sig Lubin. So we’re on the train again. Again, with the cans of film on our laps. And Sig Lubin said he could fix it. He was a technician. Remember, there weren’t many in those days. But we had to raise some more money and you can imagine how easy
that
was. It was like getting people to invest in a sunken ship! But some way or another we made it. We sold everything. Hocked everything. Gave up most of our interest but we had to save that picture. Our first picture. And Sig Lubin, he came through for us. He saved us—and when that
picture went on and didn’t jump around, it was damn good. In fact, a hit. We were in business…

“We put together this company. Cecil—Jesse and me—B. Demille. We called it ‘The Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company.’ Jesse was the president. I was the treasurer and the general manager, and Cecil was the something. I can’t remember. And we signed up Geraldine Farrar, from the Metropolitan Opera. We gave her twenty thousand dollars. To make three pictures. In eight weeks. Everybody thought we were crazy. Not the three-pictures-in-eight-weeks part, but the twenty-thousand-dollars part.”

“But why Geraldine Farrar? She was an opera singer. The main thing she could do was sing, and you weren’t going to use
that
on the screen.”

“I’ll tell you. This was an idea Cecil B. DeMille had. He was very smart—young and smart—and he noticed something. What he noticed was he noticed how most of the stage actors didn’t act
big
enough. Now, you got to remember the movies then were not too clear, sometimes they would be grainy and sometimes the focus would not be in focus. In certain places, sometimes the screen would go dim, and sometimes because there wasn’t enough regular theatres, they couldn’t get it dark enough, so on the screen, it was sometimes hard to see. So Cecil figured out that one way to get around this was for everybody who acted for the camera, they should act pretty big. But there were some of them, these stage actors, who they didn’t want to do that. They thought they would look foolish, or hammy maybe. So Cecil said, ‘In the opera, everybody acts big, with big gestures and big expressions on their faces.’ So that’s how he got the idea that opera people would be good. For on the screen. Dim or dark or whatever. Big enough would be the answer. And that Geraldine Farrar! My God, she was beautiful anyway. So it was a good idea. And we went on like this for two, three years.”

“Excuse me,” I said, “but how come it was called ‘The Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company’?”

“Well, he got together—Jesse—most of the financing,” said Goldwyn. “And that’s how he wanted it. So we let him have it. Listen, I didn’t care. In those days, I didn’t realize how important it is to make your name. Anyhow, for me in that time, the main thing was to get into the business. But then, well, what can I tell you? Partners. That’s why I’ve never had partners. If you have one partner, that’s already trouble. When you have
two
partners, you might as well go kill yourself. And Jesse started to get very ambitious. We had a lot of competitors, and one of the worst ones—I mean,
best
ones—was Zukor. Adolph Zukor. He had a company. The name of it was ‘Famous Players.’ And Jesse got the idea that if we would merge our two companies, we would really have some power. And wouldn’t spend too much time and energy and time fighting each other, or one another. So the merger went through and that’s how it became Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. Jesse and Cecil, they were going to make the pictures, and Adolph and me were going to take care of the business. But you remember what I said about two partners? So now I had
three
partners and I couldn’t stand it. So I got out. I sold out my stock. And I tried to put something together myself, but I wasn’t ready. So there were these two men I loved and I respected very much. They were no doubt the finest theatrical producers in New York. Brothers. Edgar Selwyn and his brother Archie. Archibald Selwyn. That’s a funny name, Archibald. People used to make fun of it, so finally he just used to call himself Arch Selwyn. But his real name was Archibald. Don’t let him kid you. And we formed our company and for the name of
it, we decided to take half of each name. Half of my name, Goldfish, and half of their name, Selwyn, and so we called it the Goldwyn Pictures Corporation. It came out Goldwyn because we wanted to put our names together—and listen, it was the only way to do it. Archie—he was the jolly brother—I remember he said, ‘Another way to do it is to call it
Selfish
Pictures, Incorporated.’”

“You mean the president of the Goldwyn company was Samuel Goldfish?”

“That’s right. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Certainly it was Goldfish. In fact, I didn’t become Goldwyn for a couple of years yet. After that…well, we started signing up people, mostly theatre people that the Selwyns knew. Wonderful people. There was this fellow, Bayard Veiller; he wrote a play,
The
Trial of Mary Dugan
. And then this fellow, Hopwood, who had a big hit every year; and there was Edgar’s wife, Margaret Mayo. What a fine writer! And the Selwyns brought in Maxine Elliott and Jane Cowl and we signed up Robert Edmond Jones—the designer— because all the pictures up to then
looked
lousy. And I remember what Cecil said about opera people. So we signed up Mary Garden. She was the greatest of them all. With Geraldine Farrar with Cecil, we did
Carmen
because that was one of her big parts at the Met. And it was all right. We gave her a leading man, Wallace Reid—he was a fine, handsome man and a great actor and he died a dope fiend. So then with the Goldwyn company with Mary Garden, we decided to do another one of her big opera parts. It was
Thaïs
. To tell you the truth, it didn’t turn out too good. But we got a lot of publicity out of it. It was a religious subject, you know. And they showed it to the Vatican. Right inside of it. The first movie in history to be shown at the Vatican…Then, in Europe—I used to go to Europe—I saw this wonderful picture,
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
. And we bought it to release in America. And we showed it at the Capitol Theatre. And what a flop
that
was! People asked for their money back, but it used to get great reviews, and today they call it a classic. Then we signed up Will Rogers. I knew him from the Ziegfeld Follies. But it didn’t turn out too good. It wasn’t till the talkies he got to be a success. We had him in quite a few pictures…I put in four years with that company. With that sonofabitchin’ company. I was with it longer, but for four years, I was the president. And I nearly killed myself. And then I got out of it. It was too hard. Partners. Partners. Not only the Selwyns, but we even had a board of directors. And it was no good. And I made up my mind, never again partners. No more partners. And, say, listen. I later on made all those
Potash and Perlmutter
pictures. And I said
that’s
the place to be partners. Up on the screen, but not in real life. And I made up my mind. No more. And that’s the way it’s been. I’ve never had any partners.”

“Was that when all that trouble about you using your own name came up?”

“Sure. By then, I’d gone to court and changed my name to Goldwyn. Legally to Goldwyn. It was more dignified. More American. A man with a name like Goldfish, people make fun of it. And that’s one thing I didn’t need. So everybody knew me—I mean, I was to them Samuel Goldwyn. Why not? And then when I left the Goldwyn company, I sold out, and I decided I'm going to form my own company. That’s when they said I couldn’t use my name. My own name. Legal name. It took a year in court. And that great, great judge, Judge Learned Hand, he handed down the decision where it said I could use ‘Samuel Goldwyn Presents,’ except under it, it had to say, ‘Not now connected with the Goldwyn Pictures Corporation’ in the same size type. He was a
great judge, like I said, but that was a goddamn foolish decision. Because it looked ridiculous on the billing. But then, the next year came
another
merger and the Goldwyn company merged with the Metropolitan and L. B. Mayer and they formed the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. M-G-M. And that’s when I made the deal with them that I could say ‘Samuel Goldwyn Presents’ and not have anything under. On the billing.”

Many years later, there was Hollywood talk that a merger was being considered involving M-G-M and Samuel Goldwyn. It was rumored that Goldwyn insisted that if the merger went through, the company be known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Goldwyn.

It would not have worked out in any case. Goldwyn was clearly a loner. Had he not been, the story of the United Artists would have been different.

The original formation of United Artists, dedicated to the freedom of film expression, involved D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, and Samuel Goldwyn. What should have been a perfect partnership disintegrated because each member of the combine was a loner, and none more than the incomparable Chaplin.

Artists create art forms. In exceptional cases, the form creates the artist.

Charles Spencer Chaplin is the outstanding exemplar of the latter case.

Charlie Chaplin (both the creator and the creation) is the most important single figure in films till now.

I have never known life without Chaplin. His name, I am told, was part of my earliest vocabulary. I learned to identify that derbied, mustached, baggy-pants image along with “horse,” “tree,” and “trolley car.”

For a long time, it was “chollychaplum.” Anything and everything funny in my budding life was a chollychaplum. If my father played the clown, if my brother walked funny, if my cousin Davie threw a rock through a window, I would scream delightedly, “Chollychaplum!”

Later on, childhood games were similarly involved with this folk hero.

Was this used for rope-skipping? Ball-bouncing? What? Memory fails, but I have always known how much eight times eight is.

Charlie Chaplin invited imitation. At children’s dress-up parties there would be more Charlies than Indians. Little girls, especially, were attracted to the idea of the trousers, mustache, and derby.

Growing up, we identified with him on a more serious, social plane. He was all of us: downtrodden, kicked-around, treated unfairly by life and by fate. His enemies, like ours, were the bosses of the world, the bigger-than-us guys, the cops, and all other forms of authority. Charlie could outsmart them, he could charm them. Small wonder that he lived in our blood.

His impact was not confined to the United States. Silent films were as universal an art form as music or sculpture or painting. Thus, he was known and loved in France (Charlot), in Italy (Carlo), in Spain (Carlos), in Germany (Scharlie). Charles de Gaulle, at the height of his popularity in France, was known affectionately as “Le Grand Charlot.”

When Samuel Goldwyn brought me to Hollywood “to learn the business,” I took immediate advantage of my good fortune. I returned to the studio nightly to run pictures. I began with the Goldwyn library, running one film each night, sometimes two. Once in a while, three (at twenty-four, sleep matters less). On weekends, I would continue. The projectionists on overtime adored me and I heard no objection from the front office. I was, after all, following Mr. Goldwyn’s orders—“learning the business.”

I singled out a few superior pictures and began to study them in earnest, ordering from the files the original material, the early treatments, the first draft screenplay, the revisions, the final shooting script, the cutting continuity. I would then run the film, often reel by reel, rerunning intricate or especially interesting sections. I must have seen John Ford’s
Arrowsmith
twenty or thirty times. I ran William Wyler’s
Dodsworth
, the original
Stella Dallas
with Belle Bennett. Also failures such as
Roman Scandals
,
The Dark
Angel
, and
Nana
to see if I could figure out what was wrong with them. In a few months, I qualified as an expert on the oeuvre of Samuel Goldwyn.

I turned now to important films from other studios, many of which I had never seen. In time, I felt I was ready to begin my study of the work of Charles Chaplin. I had heard that Chaplin still maintained his own studio, although he used it infrequently, and that he kept a skeleton staff on the payroll mainly to look after the prints and negatives of all his films in the vaults.

I asked John MacIntyre, Goldwyn’s production executive, if I could arrange to screen the Chaplin films.

“I don’t see why not,” he said. “Most of them were released by us, by United Artists.”

I ordered
Shoulder Arms
.

“Not available,” came the reply.

“How about
The Kid
?”

“Not available.”

“
City Lights
?”

“No.”

I discussed the matter with someone in charge at Chaplin’s studio and was told that Mr. Chaplin’s pictures were not loaned out.

“Could I come over there and screen them?”

“No. Sorry.”

My frustration turned into a challenge. I was determined to have my way. There seemed to be something sick about the attitude. What if Picasso were to lock up his paintings? Or Stravinsky his music?

I picked up the phone and said to my secretary, “Get me Charles Chaplin.”

“Who?” she enquired.

“Mr. Chaplin,” I said.

“Do we have his number?”

“Get it from somewhere. Goldwyn’s office. Somebody must have it.”

“Chaplin, did you say?”

“Chollychaplum!” I heard myself say.

“Oh,” she said. “Charlie Chaplin. Of course.”

In less than a minute, the buzzer sounded. I picked up the phone. “Hello? Mr. Chaplin?”

“Who is this?” asked a high, fractious voice.

I identified myself as one of Mr. Goldwyn’s assistants, which seemed to melt but not break the ice. I described my long efforts to get to see his films, explained why I wanted to do so, and did not forget to include about a minute and a half of shamelessly fulsome flattery.

When I finished, there was a long pause, then he asked, “Do you play tennis?”

“No, sir, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Well, come on over here anyway some day and we’ll talk about it.”

Could I believe my ears? Was I being invited over by Charlie Chaplin?

“When?” I asked.

“Any time,” he said. “Any afternoon.”

“How about right now?” I asked.

He laughed and said, “All right. I’ll tell you where I am.”

“No, no,” I said. “Don’t bother. I’ll find you!” I hung up, stepped into the outer office, and said grandly to Jean, “I’m going over to see Charlie Chaplin. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

My neighbor was Lillian Hellman. I stuck my head through the door of her office and said, “I’m going over to see Charlie Chaplin.”

Lillian looked at me, blankly. “What about it?”

“Nothing. I just thought I’d tell you.”

“Is it about anything?” she asked bemused.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m going over to not play tennis.”

“Well,” said Lillian, “that should be enjoyable. Send me a postcard.”

Mr. Goldwyn always wanted to know where each member of his staff was at any given time. We were all hooked up to the Dictograph on his desk. Frequently, there would be a buzz. I would press my button and hear his voice say, “Come on in here.” If he ever buzzed me and I was not there, I would certainly have to explain where I had been. I thought it best to check in.

I buzzed him and asked, “Is it all right if I skip the staff meeting this afternoon, Mr. Goldwyn? I’m going over to Charlie Chaplin’s house.”

“What the hell are you going to do
that
for?”

“He invited me.”

Immediately suspicious, he asked, “What’s it about? What does he want you for? What do you want
him
for? Come on in here.”

I did.

“What’s all this about?” said Goldwyn, as I walked into his office. “All this Chaplin business. You don’t work for him. You work for me.”

“I know that, Mr. Goldwyn. It’s just that I’m interested in screening some of his pictures and he doesn’t want to make them available, so I’m going to try to change his mind.”

“What the hell do you want to look at
his
for, f’Chrissake? They’re so goddamn old-fashioned. He’s old-fashioned, that man. Nobody can tell him a goddamn thing. That man.”

“Well, that may be, Mr. Goldwyn, but Chaplin is the greatest man in films and I certainly wouldn’t want to miss an opportunity to meet him.”

“Oh, f’Chrissake,” said Goldwyn. “You haven’t learned a goddamn thing around here. I pay you every week for nothing and you don’t even want to come to the staff meeting.”

“I’ll be here,” I said.

“No, no,” said Goldwyn. “Go on. Go to Chaplin.” It was a bad moment. I started out and heard Goldwyn’s voice. “By the way, come back after and tell me what he said about me.”

I stopped in Mr. Goldwyn’s outer office and got Chaplin’s address and instructions on how to get there.

As I approached the high wall surrounding Chaplin’s house on Summit Drive, I could still scarcely believe what was happening to me. I drove through the gate, parked my car, and was about to ring the front doorbell when I heard a tennis game in progress.

I made my way around to the tennis court. A tall, handsome man, whom I would later know as Tim Durant, was playing against Bill Tilden. Actually, he was taking a lesson from Bill Tilden. Bill Tilden! The greatest tennis player in the world and Charlie Chaplin in the same day. It was too much. Chaplin rose and came to greet me at once.

“Why, you’re just a kid,” he said.

“Call me Jackie Coogan,” I said.

Chaplin smiled and led me to a table. He was even smaller than I had imagined but vital and bursting with energy.

“Iced tea?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said.

He picked up a pitcher full of iced tea with one hand, and a glass with the other, and did something extraordinary. He put the spout of the pitcher onto the rim of the glass, then spread his arms, one high and one low, creating a long stream of tea from pitcher to glass. He brought his hands together again, put the pitcher down, and handed me the glass.

It is not possible, I reflected for this great, great clown to do anything in the ordinary way. I wondered if he took his comic sense along when he went to bed with a girl. He told me later, much later, that he often did. In fact, he considered it larkish to fix his sights on the least likely, least attractive female he could find and play Don Juan to the end. Often, he told me, with astonishing results.

It turned out to be the most pleasant of afternoons. Following a short discussion of my situation, he agreed to let me screen any of the films I wanted to see. He preferred that I run them at his studio and made it clear he would expect Goldwyn to assume the expense. Before I left, he invited me to dinner the following week. He became a warm and generous friend.

I spent the next three months running Chaplin pictures. The scripts were hard to come by, but now and then I was able to find a treatment or a sketch. Discussing the work with some of the players, I learned that there was a great deal of improvisation during each shooting day. Whenever possible, I met with Chaplin himself to ask questions about his pictures.

“What did you think—what went through your mind when people like George Jean Nathan and Gilbert Seldes and T.S. Eliot began to discuss your work in terms of great art? After all, you were a music-hall comic, the son of a music-hall comic, doing the job you’d done for years on end, and all of a sudden, sort of—just because you were now doing it in front of a camera, you were being hailed as a great figure in the arts.”

“What’s your question?” asked Chaplin.

“Well, I mean—what did you think of all this? How did it affect you? You must have been pleased, but were you surprised?”

“Not at all,” said Chaplin. “I always knew I was a poet.”

Charles Chaplin employed a unique and personal method. An idea for a film would strike him. He would then tell it to someone, acting it out, improvising as he went along.

The next day or night, he would tell it to someone else, changing, developing, building. A week later, he might have friends in for lunch or dinner and again, he would present it. His new creation. He might do this fifty or sixty or a hundred times, and finally, he would have it, fully developed, in his head. Then, it was only a matter of capturing the concept on film, building the complicated props (the feeding machine in
Modern Times
), finding the right actors (Jackie Coogan for
The Kid
), settling on the best location (Alaska for
The Gold Rush
), and, finally, improvising, creating, and inventing as each day progressed.

I must have seen him perform
The Great Dictator
a dozen times or more and never have I learned more about the creative process. The dance with the globe of the world began, in an early recital, as a funny little piece of business. Alone in his quarters, Hynkel picks up the globe, holds it possessively for a moment, then twirls it about on his finger. In subsequent performances, the action developed as his audience responded. Charlie gave more. It turned into a routine and finally into a spectacular ballet. The globe became, as he described it, larger and larger still. The dance became more graceful, more audacious.

I never dared ask but I felt certain that between performances, he was rehearsing and practicing details by himself.

It was no small part of his genius that he could do or learn to do virtually anything. Consider his roller-skating expertise (
The Rink
), his juggling (
The Circus
), his falls and trips and dives throughout the overflowing cornucopia of his work.

As is the case with all original creators, Charles Chaplin’s working life was an amalgam of arrogant self-confidence and deflating self-doubt. With
The Great Dictator
, his worries proliferated along with his ideas. In 1938, to joke about Adolf Hitler was no joke. It was a nervous world in which anything might happen at any given moment. There might come a sudden time when Hitler might prove to be an impossible subject for comedy. A film takes a long time to make, especially when it is being made by a
perfectionist.
The Great Dictator
would take, perhaps, a year and a half. What if Hitler were to die in the interim? What if he were assassinated? What if the United States went to war against him? (An unlikely thought but one that had to be considered.) These questions and many more were constantly under discussion.

Yet, there was something magnetic and irresistible about the subject and Chaplin’s creative juices were flowing. Several times, he abandoned the project completely. Each time, he returned to it.

Someone suggested that he arrange to go to Washington and do the whole damn thing for President Roosevelt and let
him
decide. Chaplin considered this plan for a week or so, decided against it.