The Last Mogul

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

He was a slender, dapper man, so vain that he refused to carry a wallet or even a pocketful of change lest unsightly bulges spoil the line of his bespoke suit. More of the truth about Samuel Goldwyn was revealed by his actual appearance than by his popular image as the archetypal movie mogul--ignorant, tyrannical, malaprop-spewing.

Goldwyn's tongue did sometimes lag behind his racing brain. At least, one would like to believe that he really did declare that verbal contracts are not worth the paper they are printed on, or that extra Indians could be quickly recruited at the nearest reservoir. Or that he dismissed an objection that a script was "too caustic" by announcing that if he liked it he would make the movie no matter what the cost.

Most of these beauties, alas, were the creations of his pressagents or the chronically disaffected habitues of the commissary writers' table. What truly distinguished Goldwyn was his fussy insistence on applying the same standards of "good taste" to his movies that he applied to his dress. Even more important was his ability to maintain those standards while defending his independence for nearly 50 years -- despite the nearly irresistible drive for industry consolidation. The nerve, shrewdness, and energy with which Sam Goldwyn maintained his freedom in the Hollywood jungle now seem at once exemplary and unduplicable.

The truth about Goldwyn was more interesting than any one-liner. He was, for example, the only producer in history who was named after one of his own corporations. Born in a Polish ghetto, he received his first American name -- Goldfish -- from an immigration official when he arrived in New York City in 1896 as a 13-year-old. Under it, he prospered as a glove salesman and entered the movies as a partner of Jesse L. Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille. In 1913 they made The Squaw Man, one of the first feature-length films produced in Hollywood. The trio sold out to the combine that became Paramount, and Goldfish teamed with two brothers named Selwyn to make "Goldwyn" pictures. He took the name with him when he was forced out of the concern in 1922-- before it merged with Metro and Mayer to form perhaps the most famous movie name of all. "A self-made man may prefer a self-made name" was Judge Learned Hand's remark, after Goldwyn's former associates sought to restrain him legally from using it on his independent releases.

Culture Talks. Thereafter, he operated with no restraints at all -- not even from a board of directors. He bet his own money on his hunches. If he lost big when he tried to convert an opera star like Mary Garden into a movie star, he won big by importing exotic Vilma Banky from Europe.

His immigrant's yearning for cultural respectability paid off, particularly after pictures began to talk. Street Scene, Arrowsmith, Dead End, Wuthering Heights, The Little Foxes were expensively produced, soberly realized borrowings, often from the second drawer of other arts. They formed the basis for his bankable reputation at a time when the middlebrow public tended to administer a literacy test before taking a movie seriously. By persuading audiences and critics to regard at least some films as an art form, Goldwyn did his industry an enormous service.

Ironically, Goldwyn's own pictures exercise surprisingly small claim upon memory; today they seem impossibly culture-bound. It is, however, a tribute to his blithe showmanship that he put them over (along with such later high-minded successes as The Best Years of Our Lives and Porgy and Bess) at the same time that he was fabricating his own broad comic reputation. Sam Gold wyn was his own greatest production, and one can only be saddened that, at 91, death last week finally included him out.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.