He was the premier dream-maker of his era—a fierce independent force in a time when studios ruled. He was a producer of silver-screen sagas who may have been, in the words of Harper's Bazaar, “the last Hollywood tycoon.” In this riveting book, biographer A. Scott Berg tells the life story of Samuel Goldwyn, as rich with drama as any feature-length epic, and as compelling as the history of Hollywood itself.
He was the premier dream-maker of his era—a fierce independent force in a time when studios ruled. He was a producer of silver-screen sagas who may have been, in the words of Harper's Bazaar, “the last Hollywood tycoon.” In this riveting book, biographer A. Scott Berg tells the life story of Samuel Goldwyn, as rich with drama as any feature-length epic, and as compelling as the history of Hollywood itself.
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Overview
He was the premier dream-maker of his era—a fierce independent force in a time when studios ruled. He was a producer of silver-screen sagas who may have been, in the words of Harper's Bazaar, “the last Hollywood tycoon.” In this riveting book, biographer A. Scott Berg tells the life story of Samuel Goldwyn, as rich with drama as any feature-length epic, and as compelling as the history of Hollywood itself.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781101497357 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/01/1998 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 592 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
1 Exodus
Samuel Goldwyn was not born on August 27, 1882.
For most of his life he swore it was his day of birth, but both the name and the date were fabrications. He promulgated other distortions of the truth as well, liberties he took for dramatic effect. He spent years covering his tracks, erasing those details of his origins that embarrassed him. The reason, he revealed to a psychotherapist at the pinnacle of his career, was that ever since childhood he "wanted to be somebody." Starting at an early age, Samuel Goldwyn invented himself.
Schmuel Gelbfisz was born in Warsaw, probably in July 1879. Records vary, and Jews were known to falsify their sons' birth dates to protect them from future conscription in the czar's army. He was the eldest child of Hannah and Aaron David Gelbfisz, Hasidic Jews. The family had lived in Poland for generations, but their surname was new. Not until 1797 were the Jews of Warsaw ordered to adopt patronymics. Many fashioned names from house signs, which were often hieroglyphs painted in a single color. The picture of an animal might refer to part of a family's history or simply represent a family member's trade. In Poland, the spellings of these names were often a mixture of languages. "I'm sure there was a fishmonger somewhere back there," said one Gelbfisz descendant; and his house sign, as the German first syllable indicates, was painted yellow.
Aaron had been a rabbinical student in his youth but went to work at an early age to support his new family. A sickly and gentle man, he had a handsome face with fine, even features. He liked to read. Goldwyn remembered him as "a sensitive fella." He struggled with a small store that sold "antiques"-mostly secondhand goods and junk. Fluent in several languages, he supplemented his measly income by reading and writing letters for his neighbors.
His wife, Hannah Reban Jarecka, was born in 1855, three years after her husband. Except for their religious beliefs and their mutual birthplace, Warsaw, they were essentially opposites. Hannah was a tall brunette, so stout that she was known as lange Hannah-Big Hannah. She had piercing eyes and squashed features, a combination that produced a constant scowl; and she tended to shout rather than speak. One granddaughter remembered, "She wore the pain of many generations of suffering." Like many women of her period, she ruled the house.
The Gelbfiszes, whose marriage had been arranged according to tradition, did not especially care for each other. Within sixteen years, they produced five more children-Mania (born in 1884), Barel (later known as Bernard, who was born the following year), Natalia (called Nettie, born in 1889), Ben (born in 1890), and Sally (born in 1894). Hannah showed a stringent affection for her family.
In 1882, the Jewish population of Warsaw reached 130,000; it was the largest Jewish community in Europe. A generation later, the Jewish population there had almost trebled. Natural increase was responsible for only part of this growth; immigration made up the rest. After the Russian pogroms of 1881, tens of thousands of Jews had fled to Warsaw from all corners of the Russias.
The age-old history of ambivalence toward Jews caught up to Poland. The country needed them, for they contributed to the nation's economy and growing mercantile class; but when they succeeded, the Gentile population felt the need to punish them, and subjected them to higher taxes, restrictive laws, violent attacks.
The Gelbfisz family of eight lived in two rooms of a flat on a crowded street in the Jewish sector of Warsaw, one narrow building wedged against another. Fear surrounded them. The three boys shared one hard bed. "You can't visualize how we lived," Ben recalled years later. "All I can see is pogroms." The Gelbfiszes never starved, but once they survived an entire week on a handful of potatoes. In a vulnerable moment, Goldwyn volunteered three adjectives to describe his life in Poland: "poor, poor, poor." Almost everything under the sun disappointed Hannah; and she complained constantly of her plight, making life miserable for her husband.
Aaron Gelbfisz periodically disappeared, abandoning his family for days, sometimes months, at a time. Fortunately, a few relatives could assist, especially Hannah's brother, who had scraped together enough money to invest in a small block of apartments. When there was not enough food to spread among her children, Hannah farmed Schmuel out to her husband's parents. He adored them.
Schmuel's grandparents Zalman and Perele Gelbfisz lived in a tenement on nearby Brovarna Street, in much cozier surroundings than Schmuel was accustomed to. Zalman was a mohel, the man who circumcised male babies on the eighth day after birth in the ritual known as Brith Milah. As such, he held the respect of his community and had the carriage of an aristocrat. He had squirreled away some savings and retired. Schmuel admired the old man's haughtiness; and he began to model himself after him-the only dominant male figure in his life-especially in his inability to control his own volatile temper.
Like most Jewish children in Warsaw, Schmuel attended cheder, in black cap and payess, and received an Orthodox Jewish education. He could read and write Hebrew, and he spoke some Polish, except at home. Yiddish was his mother tongue. One day after school when he was still very young, Schmuel was playing with a bunch of friends in the street. A well-dressed young man rode past on horseback, followed by a lackey on a donkey. The servant pitched a handful of coins onto the cobblestones, and all the children scrambled to gather them. Long after spending his share, Schmuel held on to that image of a man too rich to carry his own money.
During one of his extended visits with his grandparents, in 1895, Schmuel was suddenly summoned home. His father had returned from a trip with excruciating pains in his stomach and difficulty breathing. After a short illness, Aaron Gelbfisz died at the age of forty-three, saddling Hannah with the responsibility of six children, the youngest of whom was eleven months old. The eldest, fifteen-year-old Schmuel, would hardly go another day thereafter without catching himself coughing or thinking he felt pain in his stomach.
As life grew harder for the fatherless household, increased support came from Schmuel's mother's family. One of the Jarecka aunts provided a cheaper dwelling for them, a little cash, and various jobs over the years for the children, according to age and ability. Schmuel's brother Ben, for example, kept her accounts.
Schmuel saw that his mother, although still young, planned to settle into widowhood, to be supported by her children. Her sons would become laborers or bookkeepers, her daughters secretaries or seamstresses; and she would spend her final years indulging in her favorite pastime, oko-a game like poker, which she played every day.
As for Schmuel, he realized he had been dealt a bad hand. Upon the death of Aaron, he began to cut himself off from people-even his family-becoming indifferent, often bitter. Schmuel felt deprived of a father and blamed his mother for "killing" him. For years, he admired the way she had kept her large family together under adverse conditions. Now he felt neglected and forced into unendurable circumstances-all of which he attributed to her. For the rest of his life, Sam Goldwyn, encountering a baleful situation, would shake his head and say, "You don't know how many rotten mothers there are in the world."
At age sixteen, Schmuel, his mother's eldest son, assessed his future in Warsaw. His responsibilities had suddenly increased sevenfold, and life in the Jewish ghetto showed no signs of improving. The tall, skinny teenager, with his doleful eyes, saw only hopelessness around him, and the probability that as a Jew he would serve as cannon fodder in the czar's army. His face-with its jutting jaw and mashed nose-had already experienced many fights. He had become what was often referred to as a "miniature Jew," those Jewish youths who carried the burdens of adults. He felt too young to assume those responsibilities but old enough to act on a fantasy he had been fostering.
"When I was a kid . . ." Goldwyn later admitted, "the only place I wanted to go was to America. I had heard them talking about America, about how people were free in America. . . . Even then America, actually only the name of a faraway country, was a vision of paradise." Because of the prohibitive cost, Schmuel knew he would have to make his journey in stages. His mother had a married sister in Birmingham, England; that was his first milestone if he intended ever to cross an ocean.
Schmuel took one of his father's suits to a tailor, who altered it to the boy's narrow frame. He sold off the rest of the clothes that he thought had any value. The old clothes grubstaked his future. Lange Hannah had long sensed Schmuel's restlessness, but upon learning of his plans, she wailed for days. At the same time, eleven-year-old Mania remembered, her mother wanted him to go. Even at that age, she felt her mother believed Schmuel was the member of the family most likely to survive, that with prayer he might make it to America. He might even prosper enough to help the rest of his family toward a better life.
Schmuel stopped off at his grandparents' flat. His grandfather was out playing chess; his grandmother asked if he wanted supper or to spend the night. Schmuel replied that he had come over "just to kiss you." Then he left Warsaw for the port of Hamburg as tens of thousands of Jewish pilgrims did-he walked.
Between 1880 and 1910, one and a half million Jews joined wagon trains of pushcarts leaving Eastern Europe. In the 1880s alone, the family of Louis B. Mayer left Demre, near Vilna, in Lithuania; Lewis Zeleznick (later Selznick) ran away from Kiev; William Fox (formerly Fuchs) emigrated from Tulcheva, Hungary; the Warner family uprooted itself from Krasnashiltz, Poland, near the Russian border; Adolph Zukor abandoned Ricse, Hungary; and Carl Laemmle left Württemberg, Germany-gamblers with nothing to lose, all from within a five-hundred-mile radius of Warsaw.
In 1895, Schmuel Gelbfisz walked alone, almost three hundred miles due west to the Oder River. There he paid someone to row him across; half the fare was for the ferrying, half for smuggling him out of the Russian empire into Germany, past police who guarded the border on both sides. "This took most of the little money in my pocket," Goldwyn later recounted, "and then I tumbled into the water, got a good soaking, and lost the rest." He walked another two hundred miles to Hamburg.
He was drawn to the harbor, a maelstrom of activity. Emigrants speaking German, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, and Latvian piled onto ships in pursuit of happiness. Schmuel got by on his Yiddish. He stood on the dock, penniless, and watched the throngs of those able to proceed. Gazing at the boats departing for England, he considered stowing away.
Schmuel was not completely alone in Hamburg. His mother had given him the name of a family that had moved there from Warsaw. The boy wandered the streets until he found the storefront bearing the name Liebglid. "I stormed into the shop with my ragged clothes and dirty, tear-stained face," Goldwyn remembered, "and told the proprietor my story. 'I can't go back,' I cried, 'I am on my way to America and I won't go back.'" The comforting shoulder offered him belonged to Jacob Liebglid, a young glovemaker who had left Poland only a few years earlier for many of the same reasons Gelbfisz had. In Hamburg, Liebglid had cut out a tolerable life for himself.
Schmuel was put to work and stayed for several weeks, learning the rudiments of glovemaking. He realized he could remain in Hamburg and become a glovemaker like Liebglid; but he refused to settle. He insisted he had to move on. Liebglid canvassed the Jewish neighborhood, raising the eighteen shillings necessary to put Schmuel on a boat train to London.
Great Britain was at the zenith of empire, but poverty was the same everywhere. Schmuel scrounged around London to subsist. He lived off scraps and stolen food, and he slept for three nights in the bushes of Hyde Park. Finding all doors in London closed to him, he pressed on to his relatives, who would at least provide him with food and shelter.
The next leg of his odyssey was the 120-mile walk from London to the Midlands. He lived for two days on a single loaf of bread. In Birmingham, he found the ghetto, and his mother's sister and her husband, Mark Lindenshat, a foreman in a factory that made fireplace tools. They welcomed him, but they could not support him.
With little meat on his bones and speaking but a few words of English, Schmuel became an apprentice to a blacksmith. His job was to pump the bellows with his feet. "This did not last long, however," he admitted years later, "because I lacked the strength to keep up a good fire." He was discharged and was subsequently let go from several other backbreaking jobs in the industrial city.
Schmuel later admitted that he often cried openly in front of his relatives. Convincing himself that he would never be strong enough for any physical labor, he often took to his bed. "I was too weak to do the work and they didn't understand," Goldwyn later admitted to his son; "that's why I was crying."
The overburdened Lindenshats packed him off to other relatives, Dora and Isaac Salberg. Dora claimed that she taught the boy how to use a handkerchief and a knife and fork. She also took credit for anglicizing his name, translating Schmuel Gelbfisz to Samuel Goldfish. She explained the disadvantages of emphasizing his Jewish heritage. People began to call him Sam.
In 1897, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland celebrated the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. The pomp of the occasion threw into greater relief Goldfish's miserable circumstances. It also helped shape his taste, converting him into a lifelong Anglophile. He coveted the best that was British-manners, clothes, speech, looks, and, especially, an air of self-confidence.
For a while, Sam Goldfish sold sponges. Isaac Salberg, having failed in business in Birmingham, packed up one day and moved to South Africa. Before leaving, he had invested a small sum of money in a sponge dealership. Goldfish was supposed to peddle the wares and return the original investment to the company. It never saw a farthng.
Goldwyn later claimed that while staying with the Salbergs he was struck by a quote from Benjamin Franklin in a reader from which he was studying English. The essay was called "Information for Those Who Would Remove to America"; the phrase was: "America, where people do not inquire of a stranger, 'What is he?' but 'What can he do?'" By the fall of 1898, Sam Goldfish felt the urge to move on. He journeyed another hundred miles, northwest to Liverpool.