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The Tears of a Mogul

Samuel Goldwyn needed to be persuaded to make a film about Lou Gehrig, who played a sport that he did not know as a recreational pursuit, much less a subject for a movie. He got that push from Niven Busch, Jr.—a writer whose Hollywood aspirations led him to screenwriting and a job as story editor for Goldwyn. In 1929, he was still in New York, writing short takes about speakeasies and profiles of studio chief Adolph Zukor and baseball umpire Bill Klem for The New Yorker.

That summer, shortly before the Great Depression shattered the nation’s economy and psyche, Busch had a new profile assignment—Gehrig—that sent him north to a classically suburban address, 9 Meadow Lane, in New Rochelle.

He climbed the steps of a house that had been Lou’s first big purchase as a Yankee, a son’s devoted gift to his parents. Lou also lived there, perpetuating the dynamic that Lou’s mother dominated her only child and that he was too socially awkward to find a girl, marry, and break away from her. The modest house, on a quarter-acre, had a screened-in porch and built-in benches flanking the front door.

It wasn’t the home of a wealthy man but that of an upwardly mobile ballplayer whose Yankee salaries would ensure a fine income through hard times.

Two months older than Lou, Busch was a well-dressed, handsome man with a broad face and slicked-back hair who was building a reputation as a writer in New York. He was working for Time magazine and The New Yorker, whose boss, Harold Ross, would reign for twenty-two more years.

Busch’s hankering for Hollywood would cut short his journalism career. His father, Briton, had been the treasurer at Lewis Selznick’s World Film Company. Lewis’s son, David, the future producer of Gone with the Wind, was an errand boy at World’s office in Manhattan “who once in a while let me sweep out a cutting room,” Busch told film historian David Thomson. “And that was a big treat because of the smell of the film, for chrissake!”

From the opening words of the Gehrig profile, Busch’s attitude toward his subject was contemptuous. If Busch was seeking someone recognizably cinematic, someone fascinating, he chose the wrong Yankee. Certainly, if Busch gave any thought to a ballplayer as a fascinating subject, he would have sought out Babe Ruth. Gehrig, he wrote:

has accidentally got himself into a class with Babe Ruth and Dempsey and other beetle-browed, self-conscious sluggers who are the heroes of our nation. This is ridiculous—he is not fitted in any way to have a public. I don’t think he is either stimulated or discouraged by the reactions of the crowds that watch his ponderous antics at first base for the Yankees or cheer the hits he knocks out with startling regularity and almost legendary power.

Busch continued:

He was the sort of boy who laughed whenever you spoke to him. Big for his age, he had reached the period when the change from short to long trousers was imminent but he still wore short ones; their tightness exaggerated the size of his fat round legs.

The story took its title from the unfortunate nickname for Gehrig that had been used by the frat boys his mother cooked for: “The Little Heinie.”

Lou was five full seasons into his career, two seasons past his astonishing MVP performance in 1927, when he hit 47 home runs, knocked in 173 runs, and batted .373. He was in the midst of a so-so ’29 season, in which he would only hit .300, but Lou’s reticence and lack of color had earned Busch’s disdain. Busch’s story compass gravitated to Lou’s mother, Christina; he portrayed her as a strong, nearly heroic woman who “exercised a good deal of care on his upbringing”; who prized her son’s time at Columbia University so much more than his baseball career that she sometimes called him “Columbia Lou.” She was, to Busch, a hostess nonpareil, who continually cooked for her only surviving child: “apple-cake and cookies with raisins and pieces of bright red suet in them, making roasts and frying the fish and eels he catches in the Sound.” Busch’s picture of Pop Gehrig is very much like the one constructed in Pride: a Milquetoast nonentity and indolent worker who agreed reflexively with his wife for fear of angering her.

Busch wrote Gehrig off as an urban bumpkin and mama’s boy whose teammates remembered him early on as “one of the most bewildered recruits that ever joined the club… He was slow-witted—could find no comebacks for the wisecracks directed at him—and his schoolboy’s peculiarities were an inspiration to the team wits and a source of worry to Manager Miller Huggins.” One wonders how Busch, a baseball fan, could fail to connect with Gehrig on the sport Lou so excelled at, regardless of the ordinariness of his personality. Busch couldn’t look past Gehrig’s shyness and inability to be more like Ruth. When Busch failed to persuade Lou to confirm he had gone on a date to the movies with a “red-cheeked German girl who wore a bunch of flowers in her hat,” he asked if he would ever marry.

“My mother makes a home comfortable enough for me,” Lou told Busch—the only quote from him in the profile. That unsophisticated response reflected the limits of his life until then; it predated meeting and marrying Eleanor Twitchell and foreshadowed Lou’s increasingly odd references in Pride to Mom as his “best girl.”

There is no evidence that Busch encountered Lou again, except by listening to or attending games, or whether his view of Lou changed in the next dozen years when Lou had some of his greatest seasons. They soon moved apart geographically; Busch left for Hollywood in 1933, where he wrote screenplays, and, by 1941, he was working as a story editor for Goldwyn, whose track record in Hollywood was not impeccable but was filled with high notes like Dodsworth, Stella Dallas, Wuthering Heights, The Goldwyn Follies, and The Little Foxes.

“Goldwyn was not very smart on stories because he couldn’t really envisage them,” Busch said. “But he had a gut feeling about it. So he’d try this person’s reaction about it and then that person’s. He’d even get his comptroller, Reeves Espy, in there and he’d ask him. Somehow he’d precipitate a good judgment. And once he saw the film he was absolutely infallible. He knew what the audience was going to buy. I got to like him, but he was a tough old Jew.”

Busch tested Goldwyn’s ability to sense a cinematic story when he suggested that he make a film about Lou. Goldwyn didn’t see the value in a baseball story—a game he thought was played with twelve bases on a field. So Goldwyn rejected Busch’s proposal without listening to the details of the story. In one interview, Busch said that Goldwyn asked him, “Who’s Lou Gehrig?” In another, he told A. Scott Berg, Goldwyn’s biographer, that Goldwyn brushed him off with a now-famous declaration: “It’s box office poison. If people want baseball, they go to the ballpark.”

Beneath Goldwyn’s ignorance was an intuitive judgment that sports, baseball in particular, was not yet a genre that Hollywood had explored much or done with broad success. By 1941, the category was a minor one sprinkled with films like Harold Lloyd’s silent comedy The Freshman; baseball trifles by Joe E. Lewis; Knute Rockne, All American; the brilliantly wacky football sequence in the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers; the boxing weepie The Champ and the boxing drama Kid Galahad; and Leni Riefenstahl’s epic Nazi documentary Olympia.

Had sports films produced consistently profitable business, Goldwyn would have known about it and greenlighted a Gehrig film without undue prodding.

But there was no consistent track record—and Busch had to rethink the idea.

Which he did. He invited Goldwyn to watch the newsreels of Lou delivering his “luckiest man” speech on July 4, 1939, between games of a Yankees–Washington Senators doubleheader. Already suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Gehrig shuffled to the field and stood in the heat to express his gratitude at a life that would end in fewer than two years. By any measure, the newsreels were emotional firepower, and Busch believed they would turn Goldwyn around, even more so because Lou had died just a month before he cued up the newsreels.

It was late June or early July at the Goldwyn studio lot in West Hollywood. The lights dimmed in the private screening room where Goldwyn viewed rough cuts and finished films. Goldwyn was likely humoring the talented, persistent, baseball-loving Busch. Maybe he would chastise Busch for wasting his time.

Something else happened, though, something like his tearful reaction at watching the scene in his silent 1925 production of Stella Dallas when Stella’s daughter, Laurel, weeps upon realizing that no other schoolchildren will be attending her birthday party. “It’s a beautiful woman’s story,” he said of the film.

The newsreels hooked him, and he saw the subject’s potential for reaching women. He might have been fidgety and bored until the end, watching a marching band, brief speeches by McCarthy, New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, or Postmaster General James Farley, and the presentation of gifts that Lou could barely lift. But the speech, fewer than three hundred words that still move people nearly eighty years later, changed Goldwyn’s mind.

When the lights went up, Goldwyn was wiping the tears from his eyes.

“Run them again,” he told Busch.

After the second viewing, he demanded that his top advisor, James Mulvey, a whip-smart, mild-mannered executive who had worked for him since the 1920s, be summoned on the phone. He told Mulvey: “Call Mrs. Gehrig. Tell her there’s a remote possibility that we might be interested in the story of her husband.”

It was, indeed, more than a remote possibility. It was a cinch.

Goldwyn and Mulvey quickly wrapped up a deal with Christy Walsh, and by July 9, he was helping Eleanor plan her trip west on the Union Pacific Streamliner to Los Angeles to sign the contract. Walsh had negotiated a $30,000 fee for Eleanor—$5,000 on signing, $10,000 the day that shooting started (which was originally to be in November, not the following February), and $15,000 when the picture was released (April 1942, not in mid-July, as it turned out to be). The other principal feature of the contract, Walsh wrote, was “the matter of delegating to me the approval or disapproval of all references to Lou in the film.”

Walsh reminded her of the plan to stage the signing of the contract at three thirty p.m. the following Monday afternoon in Goldwyn’s office to “break” in Tuesday morning papers. He advised her to avoid being photographed on the train so as to avoid unnecessary early publicity and told her not to take the train all the way to Los Angeles but to get off at San Bernardino early Sunday morning, where he would meet her, have breakfast with her, and then put her back on the train to Los Angeles.

“I am not only delighted but really SURPRISED at the deal,” Walsh wrote to Eleanor. “Maybe Sammy has a little Irish in him or something. He apparently has secured some lowdown on me and in every meeting keeps giving me the terrific buildup… which of course I discount plenty. But even admitting he is full of ‘Blarney,’ the fact remains that he has backed his Blarney up with real money and a fine contract. All I can say is… he will never be disappointed.”

Walsh told her about the contract he reached with Goldwyn (for more money than the producer expected to pay him) to orchestrate the film’s publicity, play a role in story meetings, and secure releases from Lou’s teammates to appear as themselves in the film. “I not only think any ballplayer would be happy to be included but he would be ashamed to refuse,” Walsh wrote.

News of the signing did not overwhelm the press.

The coverage was modest, much of it parceled out in Associated Press items that suggested Goldwyn had prevailed in a bidding war against Selznick and MGM and that Eleanor was “under contract to assist prospective writers of the script and serve as technical advisor.”

Within days William Wyler’s name came up in the press as a possible director. Wyler had just finished The Little Foxes and would move on quickly to Mrs. Miniver, so he was interested in the Gehrig film as a change of pace from his recent films. As for the role of Gehrig himself, Eleanor quickly told the Hollywood Reporter that Gary Cooper was her husband’s favorite actor, but that Spencer Tracy would be “ideal for the role which will stress the story of a brave, courageous man, rather than the career of a baseball player.”

To Walsh, the only press clip that mattered was a short item from Queen Louella. “The biggest movie plum, for my money, is the life of Lou Gehrig,” she wrote in her column. “I should think the story of Gehrig, clean living, likable, would make as great a picture as Knute Rockne, All American.”

Now, she advised, it was time to make a splash with the casting of Gehrig.

“This,” she wrote, “will be a job in which all the fans will have as much of a hand as they did in finding Scarlett O’Hara.”

Goldwyn was also listening to Parsons. Days later, in a “Dear Sam” letter to Goldwyn, Parsons elaborated on her comparison between the nationwide search that led Selznick to pick English actress Vivien Leigh to play O’Hara in Gone with the Wind—a spectacle that brought Selznick enormous pre-release publicity—and the search for the right actor to play Gehrig. Parsons wrote:

It seems the whole world is interested in casting the Gehrig role and I think you should encourage the public to write to you. Certainly, Gone with the Wind’s searching for Scarlett O’Hara proved you can arouse interest in casting and there is no public hero so dear to the heart of the American boy as was Lou Gehrig.

A nationwide casting call would have been unnecessary except for the publicity it could generate, which appealed to Goldwyn and his crafty publicity chief, William Hebert. After all, Sam had the right actor under his control: Gary Cooper, who had one picture left on his deal with the producer. He had a testy relationship with Goldwyn going back to their earliest dealings in the mid-1920s and was eager to get his freedom. It is difficult to believe that Goldwyn didn’t have Cooper in mind for the role, even as he was watching the Gehrig newsreel, or that he didn’t think his biggest star could play the part. It certainly wouldn’t have occurred to Goldwyn to deny Cooper the role because he couldn’t play baseball—Goldwyn’s towering ignorance of baseball would have precluded that judgment. And there was not yet any strong demand for actors who could credibly play sports.

Goldwyn embarked on his search, suggesting days after signing Eleanor to the deal that he was starting from scratch.

“Everyone wants to know who I think should play Lou and I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said. The search had begun.