7

The Producer and the Star

One hundred years from now, when the history of Hollywood is written, it will tell of a man by the name of Samuel Goldwyn who made a baseball picture without a man by the name of Harry Ruby, who was considered the greatest authority on baseball of his time. Prosperity will look upon this as the greatest blunder since the “Charge of the Light Brigade.”

—telegram to Samuel Goldwyn from Harry Ruby, fanatical fan and co-songwriter/screenwriter behind the Marx Brothers’ films Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, and Animal Crackers

In Hollywood there was no starker contrast between baseball fans and baseball know-nothings than Harry Ruby and Sam Goldwyn. Goldwyn was utterly ignorant of the sport, and Ruby, a native New Yorker, was dubbed America’s Number One Baseball Fan. For Ruby to hear that his friend Sam was making a film about Lou Gehrig without him—and which would not have much baseball in it—must have felt like a Bob Feller beanball to his temple. Ruby’s fandom was so deep that he asked God why He let someone else write “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Ruby aspired to a Major League baseball career. He collected uniforms. He played second base for the Washington Senators in an exhibition at the invitation of his friend, the pitcher-turned-manager Walter Johnson. But after blowing a double play he was waived by the owner, Clark Griffith. He also played several games for the Hollywood Stars and Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League that found their way into official records of the authoritative Baseball-Reference.com.

Ruby had the right background to write and score Pride if Pride were the baseball film he dreamed of making. He had cinematic sports experience as one of the writers and composers of 1932’s Horse Feathers, one of the best pre-Pride sports films, albeit an anarchic Marx Brothers comedy. Ruby and the Marx Brothers satirized amateurism in college sports, a continuing joke to this day. In the film, Professor Quincy Adams (Groucho Marx) addressed a gathering of academics at fictional Huxley College by impertinently declaring, “And I say to you, gentlemen, that this college is a failure. The trouble is, we’re neglecting football for education.”

Helping to make Pride would have let Ruby slip on Yankee pinstripes, play second base, pal around with Cooper and Ruth, and take a few swings from the minor-league pitchers hired for Pride.

Eleanor and Lou may have fallen in love to one of Ruby and his songwriting partner Bert Kalmar’s hits, such as “I Wanna Be Loved by You.”

Instead of recruiting Ruby, Goldwyn signed a group of screenwriters, including Gallico and Herman Mankiewicz, who were laden with baseball knowledge. And he persuaded Irving Berlin, his card-playing and backgammon pal, to license “Always,” which he wrote for his wife, Ellin, as the love theme of Pride.

Had the irascible Goldwyn hired him, Ruby might have chafed under his friend’s autocratic ways, as many others did, and sought solace in famous lyrics from one of his songs in Horse Feathers: “Your proposition may be good/But let’s have one thing understood/Whatever it is, I’m against it!”

Of course, Goldwyn wasn’t asking for permission to make Pride his way. Pride would follow his fiats. He never hid his nonsporting intentions—rather, he was excited to announce that in matters of Pride, baseball was tangential.

“First of all, The Pride of the Yankees is not to be, in a strict sense, a ‘baseball picture,’” he wrote in a letter to a Hollywood reporter. “I have not been motivated, for example, by the fact that baseball is America’s greatest sport that no ambitious motion picture has ever been made with big league baseball as its background, or that 1941 was ‘baseball’s greatest year.’” That last phrase suggests someone was helping Goldwyn with baseball history; 1941 was indeed the season when Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 consecutive games and Ted Williams batted .406.

Gallico, Goldwyn’s first hired hand to create the story, accepted the producer’s dictum. Gallico, who adored the Babe and wrote often about the national pastime as a columnist for the New York Daily News, surrendered to Goldwyn’s vision nonetheless, saying, “Baseball on the screen is dull. That’s because the game is a drama in itself, with its own heroes, villains and clowns, its own conflicts and its own suspense. You can’t show all that in a picture; all you can show is a long shot with little figures galloping around the diamond. So in The Pride of the Yankees, we treated baseball as simply one man’s profession.”

He added, “The game itself is incidental.”

Goldwyn, who fled Poland as a teenager, alone and virtually penniless, might have felt some affinity for Gehrig, the son of German immigrants. Goldwyn said the story is “in a broad sense, the story of the opportunities that America offers every boy and of the whims with which life sometimes favors a few and then destroys them.”

In another exchange about the film, Hollywood correspondent Thornton Delehanty asked Goldwyn about the diminution of baseball in Pride.

The exchange is bizarre, at best.

Delehanty asked: “What is there so repellent about baseball that you exclude it so rigorously from a picture purporting to be about our national pastime or am I to understand that the allusion to Yankees has to do with the aborigines who infested New England shortly after the landing of the Mayflower, Mr. Goldwyn?”

They parried in a way that suggested the hands of a ghostwriter and publicist at work in Goldwyn’s responses:

Goldwyn: There is nothing aboriginal about this tribe or about the picture either. In fact, it is based on an unaboriginal story by Paul Gallico but hardly more than 5 percent of it has anything to do with baseball.

Delehanty (speaking with what he said was “devastating irony”): I see, you are afraid that if it should leak out that the picture had anything to do with baseball, no one would go to see it.

Goldwyn: There are fifty million people in this country who don’t go to baseball games.

Delehanty: All right, then, so it’s not about baseball—what’s it about?

Goldwyn: That’s what I’ve been waiting to tell you. It’s the story of a young American and his struggle upward to fame. It’s the story of a modest hero and his love for the woman who stands by him through his trials and triumphs. It’s a love story. It’s a success story. It’s the kind of story that could happen only in this land of equality and opportunity. It’s a tender, moving, touching romance.

No one could predict that focusing so much on Gehrig the man, his relationship with Eleanor, and the testing of their romantic bond when he faced death would work. It had elements of standard melodramatic fare, but would people care about a ballplayer and his girl? This was Goldwyn’s only path; he was not persuaded by childhood sentiment for baseball. Had he seen Knute Rockne, All American, he would have seen the effective use of emotionally manipulative situations like the deathbed wish of the star Notre Dame running back George Gipp (Ronald Reagan) that Rockne’s team “win one for the Gipper,” and the mourning over Rockne (Pat O’Brien) after he dies in a plane crash. But he also would have seen too much of a reliance on scripted football action starring actors like Reagan who were well past their college-age athletic prime.

Goldwyn’s gut craved commercial success, not fidelity to a sport he had no affinity for. He longed to produce movies of class, but there was a division in Hollywood about whether he had a creative impulse. Did the so-called “Goldwyn touch” really exist as an artful force, or did he simply drive artists to produce good work? The writer Alva Johnston profiled Goldwyn and concluded that his films bore certain hallmarks: “The characters are consistent; the workmanship is honest; there are no tricks and short cuts; the intelligence of the audience is never insulted.”

Daniel Mandell, who edited Goldwyn films like Wuthering Heights, Meet John Doe, and Pride, suggested that Goldwyn’s greatest skill was knowing when something onscreen was wrong. But, he said, “I never knew what the Goldwyn touch was. I think it was something a Goldwyn publicist made up.”

No publicist could manufacture the depth and unintended comedy of Goldwyn’s baseball ignorance, which fueled tales alleging he didn’t know which direction a base runner took from home or how many bases were on a diamond.

Mankiewicz joked that Goldwyn wanted to cut the baseball rulebook standard of three strikes and four balls to two strikes and three balls.

“Can’t we do that, Mank?” Goldwyn asked Mankiewicz.

“No,” the screenwriter said, “I don’t think that’s going to work, Sam.”

Walsh delightedly pointed to Goldwyn’s lack of baseball bona fides a few days before filming began.

“And honest to goodness,” Walsh burbled with delight to Eleanor in a lengthy letter, “you would have rolled on the floor in tears to have heard Goldwyn in his first meeting with [Bill] Dickey,” Lou’s closest friend and Yankee teammate:

Bill and I (also Dorothy Parker) were in Sam’s office. Sam started explaining the “big scene” at [sic] end of picture when Lou will walk down the dug-out steps. Well, I give you my word of honor, Goldwyn took 20 minutes looking into Dickeys’ [sic] eyes and explaining what a dugout is… what a players [sic] bench is… and a few other “secrets” Dickey has known for 20 years. And Goldwyn kept calling the Stadium the “Polo Grounds.” Dickey and I never cracked a smile but he has told it to 50 people since. Sam also kept calling Dickey “Paul Dickey” and Hug [Yankees manager Miller Huggins] “Muller Higgins.”

Goldwyn started life far from the American sandlots depicted in Pride, but his immigrant’s story is remarkable, a tale of long travels, hard work, and determination told by his biographer A. Scott Berg.

Born in Poland as Schmuel Gelbfisz, Goldwyn was the eldest of six children living in Warsaw with little expectation of seeing his lot improve in the Jewish ghetto. At age sixteen, with his father dead and his relationship with his mother distant, he set out for America—walking three hundred miles to the Oder River; paying to be smuggled to Germany; walking to Hamburg, where he learned glove-making; taking a boat train to England, first to London, then to Birmingham, where he became a blacksmith’s apprentice, and selling sponges before sailing from Liverpool to Canada. Briefly he found himself in Manhattan before he boarded a train to upstate Gloversville, New York, a company town north of Johnstown that dominated the United States manufacturing of gloves.

He learned to make and sell gloves, rising to sales manager of a firm that uprooted itself for New York City. One day in 1913, he recalled walking home from his office when he stepped into a nickelodeon theater and was mesmerized by a cowboy, “Bronco Billy,” jumping from his horse onto a moving train. It was a revelation, he said, that “brought me into a whole new, exciting world and I wanted to be a part of it.”

With an excess of ambition, arrogance, and guile, he willed himself to become one of Hollywood’s shrewdest operators. As the Americanized Samuel Goldfish, he entered silent-movie production with his brother-in-law, Jesse Lasky, a mild-mannered producer and ex-vaudevillian. As their company, Famous Players-Lasky, grew, Goldfish became increasingly testy. Lasky, whose sister had by now divorced Goldfish, was deputized by their other partners to show him the door. Showing the bullheaded resilience that marked his career, he formed a new company with theatrical brothers named Selwyn. They created Goldwyn Pictures, a new corporate name carved out of pieces of theirs, and Goldfish eventually adopted Goldwyn as his new name, branding himself and leading the Selwyns to sue him. Federal judge Learned Hand ruled in favor of Goldfish-turned-Goldwyn, writing, “A self-made man may prefer a self-made name.”

Goldwyn created yet another company and spotted an opportunity in providing pictures that United Artists—the superstar studio owned by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks—could distribute. He made dozens of movies for the studio over nearly two decades. He amassed increasingly more power but ran afoul of them (Pickford, in particular, loathed him), and after a long boardroom fight, Goldwyn’s distribution contract was canceled and he received several hundred thousand dollars to go away.

“They called me the lone wolf, and I have been called some other things,” he told an interviewer, explaining his difficulties working with peers. “I had partners but I discovered I was spending more time trying to explain to them what I was doing than in making pictures.”

He began anew, again, with Samuel Goldwyn Studios.

Ronald Colman, Vilma Banky, Eddie Cantor, Verna Zorina, David Niven, and Danny Kaye topped Goldwyn’s marquees over Goldwyn’s career.

But no Goldwyn star was bigger than a lanky Montana cowboy who came to Hollywood with the name Frank Cooper, soon to become Gary. He was a stuntman and actor in bit parts, including two with a dog, when he arrived at Goldwyn’s office in 1926 and filled out a biographical card where he listed his education (three years in England and Grinnell College in Iowa), ambition (director), favorite author (Alexandre Dumas), and address (Carlos Avenue). Not much stood out except for the hobby he listed after freehand drawing: taxidermist.

There was serendipity in his move to Hollywood, which was kick-started by his father’s move from Montana to Los Angeles, leaving the judicial bench for lawyering. In late 1924, he met a group of Montana cowboys who picked up extra money as stuntmen and extras in low-budget Westerns. He quickly picked up work, but it was more an accidental profession than what he had planned to do. “I had planned to do my suffering over an easel in the privacy of a garret,” he wrote. “I had not planned to be an actor and make a public spectacle of my troubles.” With good looks and plenty of horse-riding and stuntman skills, he caught on, and by 1926 was unexpectedly elevated from a minor role to a major one in The Winning of Barbara Worth when Harold Goodwin was not released in time from his role in the film The Honeymoon Express to play Abe Lee.

Watching a scene with the inexperienced Cooper, Goldwyn told director Henry King: “Henry, he’s the greatest actor I have ever seen in my life.” Before shooting a subsequent scene, where he was to die in Ronald Colman’s lap, Cooper was advised by the older actor: “Easy does it, old boy. Good scenes make good actors. Actors don’t make good scenes. My own feeling is that all you have to do is take a nap and every woman who sees the picture is going to cry her eyes out.”

Cooper said he followed the advice, napped in Colman’s lap, and nearly wept as he watched the rushes.

“How easy can acting get?” he asked himself. “I had yet to learn.”

The relationship between Cooper and Goldwyn was productive but occasionally tempestuous. Cooper had a clear idea of his rising value in Hollywood during the shooting of Barbara Worth in the Nevada desert and let Goldwyn know it. They haggled via telegram, with Cooper demanding $200 a week to make one picture in his first year. Goldwyn’s trusted aide, Abe Lehr, agreed to yearly options of $10,000, $15,000, $25,000, $40,000, and $45,000, “providing his father, who is a Los Angeles attorney, approves terms.” But the terms changed in Goldwyn’s favor within two weeks, and Cooper wired Goldwyn his acceptance of a $125 weekly salary and options of $9,000, $12,000, $15,000, $25,000, and $40,000.

In his telegram to “Garry Cooper,” Goldwyn ordered him to sign the contract within four days of returning to Los Angeles.

A decade later, with Cooper now a major star, Goldwyn wanted him to star in his retelling of Hans Christian Andersen, about the Danish children’s storyteller, whose possibilities as a film were starting to obsess the producer. Goldwyn was about to release another Cooper film, The Real Glory, an action film set in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, when he sent Cooper a script for Andersen.

“I believe the possibilities of Andersen are enormous, providing we get the right script,” he told Cooper. Cooper never made the film. Eventually, Goldwyn piled up thirty-two scripts before assigning it to Moss Hart for a musical starring Danny Kaye, a very different actor from Cooper, in 1952.

Later in 1939, Cooper rejected the script for a Goldwyn film tentatively called Vinegaroon (it would be renamed The Westerner) because his character, Cole Harden, “was still inadequate and unsatisfactory for me.” He was angry that, as the putative star of the film, his role was smaller than that of Walter Brennan, who was playing the hanging judge Roy Bean. “I have a position to uphold,” Cooper wrote to Goldwyn on November 18, 1939. “My professional standing has been jeopardized from the beginning.” Goldwyn threatened to sue Cooper for $400,000 for expenses, then blame him for lost jobs if he didn’t report for work.

Cooper reluctantly and angrily wrote to Goldwyn:

I bow to your threats, since normal reasoning and friendly relations mean little if anything to you… Your reaction serves as confirmation that my experience since the beginning of the contracts had been consistently unsettled, insecure, lacking inspiration and enthusiasm and it is, therefore, best for you to realize that our association is incompatible, holding small hope for any mutually happy solution and I fail to see how we can profitably continue this strained relationship.

He showed up on the morning he was due in Tucson and did as he was told—he was getting $150,000 a picture, regardless of the size of the part or his happiness with it. He was castigated by Alsatian-born director William Wyler, who compared him with ensemble-oriented European stars who didn’t demand rewrites to beef up their modest parts into leads. Cooper admitted that the criticism made him feel “pretty small” but insisted that he was protecting his image, not being boorish. He apologized to Goldwyn, who responded with gratitude expressed in the mangled English he was known for.

“Glad to hear you feel that way, Gary,” Cooper recalled the mogul saying. “It wasn’t much fun the other way. Relations were getting pretty strange.”

Cooper had assessed the situation well. When the film was released in 1940, it was neither his nor Brennan’s (who won his third Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for the film). Brennan had the better part. “My part is such that it cannot help but steal the spotlight,” Brennan said.

That would not happen again to Cooper.

Over the next two years, during film reunions in Meet John Doe, Sergeant York, and Pride, Brennan’s roles were subordinate to Cooper’s, even in York as the powerful, bushy-browed Pastor Pile. “Ordinarily, I play hellers,” Brennan said. “Bad ones, too. Now I find myself warning Gary Cooper that the devil has him by the shirt tails and exhorting him to wrestle him, wrestle him like he would a b’ar.”

In Pride, he defined utter subservience to Cooper. As Sam Blake, he played several roles wrapped in an idol-worshipper: a reporter who ghostwrote Gehrig’s columns, scouted Gehrig for the Yankees, introduced Lou to Eleanor, traveled in a train compartment with Lou, and accompanied Lou to the clinic where he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. He was the classic sidekick.