MOVIE MOGULS WHO GAVE THE GOLDEN ERA ITS SHINE

If anyone had told me that one day I would look back on the era of Samuel Goldwyn, Jack Warner and Harry Cohn as the Good Old Days, I would have considered calling for the men with the butterfly nets. These gentlemen were the Hollywood Pirates, about whom Ben Hecht once said, “There’s nothing wrong with this town that three good murders wouldn’t cure.”

We all felt that way at the time. I was the youngest writer on the Goldwyn lot, but it wasn’t long before I realized the truth of Sam Goldwyn’s proudest boast: “I don’t get ulcers; I give them.”

He generously gave me one. Or maybe it was the combination of Sam and Harry and Jack. I worked for all of them, in my innocent youth. And complained bitterly. Only now, with Hollywood in the throes of a technological and economic revolution, with the sale and carving-up of proud old studios like MGM and 20th Century Fox by huge corporate entrepreneurs whose only motive is profit, turning the storied sound stages and film vaults into videotape and condominiums, do I realize who these pirates really were and what they accomplished. The new masters of Hollywood have no tradition linking them to a nation during a period in its history when wars and Depression were attacking its very fiber, and motion pictures were our best entertainment.

It is these accomplishments, dreams and talents of an entire generation crammed into thousands of cans of film, that are now being packaged and sold over the air and on cassette by these too-modern corporations, who openly admit they do not have the talent or the courage to take the risks to produce new cans of dreams for today’s fickle audience.

There were giants in our town in the old days; now all we have are the dodgers.

The old pirates loved movies, and the business of making them. That’s one of the important things that has been lost. The love.

Louis B. Mayer, at MGM, was head of a huge corporation, even in those days, though he ran it as his personal fief. But Goldwyn, Warner and Cohn each headed a family operation, in which their personal funds and those of their brothers, wives, aunts, and uncles were involved. And sometimes the kids’ piggy banks. Only Cohn didn’t have the family name on his studio. Maybe his family objected. Nobody but Sam, Jack, and Harry made any decision at their studios involving more than 15 cents. Each of the three ran a mom-and-pop store, but the goods on their shelves were worth millions and included the golden girls and golden boys of Hollywood’s most golden era. And the girls and boys did exactly what they were told to do, or they didn’t work again--anywhere.

When World War II came around and leading men in Hollywood were at a premium, things changed a little, because those few stars who weren’t in the Army could demand almost anything they wanted. Jack Warner--he was Col. Jack Warner then, and wore the uniform to the studio and, for all I know, to bed--once said to me, during those trying times, “Won’t it be wonderful when the war is over and all the actors are starving again?”

Sometimes, in these days when movie stars have their own corporations and control every aspect of their pictures--and get enough cash up front so that, if their judgment is wrong, they do not suffer financially--I find myself sympathizing with the Colonel. Even though he fired me. I guess he liked to see starving writers, too.

Jack and Sam and Harry made motion pictures to please their own tastes. Sometimes, it is said, it was the lowest in the country. But the immigrant Sam Goldfish, who changed his name to the more elegant Goldwyn, had dreams of the greatest artistic glory and it didn’t bother him much when sometimes he was barred from the set of his own productions, like “Wuthering Heights” and “The Best Years of Our Lives.” Sam made them, didn’t he, two of the most literate of American films? They bore his name. That’s what mattered. His name. Even though he never quite learned to speak the English language properly.

“Take everything he says with a dose of salts.” “Include me out.” “An oral contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.” Goldwynisms. Maybe he said them, maybe he didn’t. The point is, he could have.

We didn’t get along. Regularly, every time I was due for a raise, I would ask Goldwyn to release me from my contract. Finally, his story editor came to my office and delivered the message that Mr. Goldwyn was at last giving me my freedom, but “only in a fit of pique.” I told him that if Sam would repeat those words in my presence, I would stay.

I left that afternoon.

Many years later, when the Producers’ Assn. honored Samuel Goldwyn with a testimonial dinner on his 80th birthday, I went up to congratulate him.

“Mr. Goldwyn,” I said, “you probably don’t remember me, but a long time ago I used to work for you.”

He looked at me through his gold-rimmed glasses, a white-haired (what there was of it) old man who used to outwalk everyone in his studio on his energetic lunch-time strolls, and surprised me.

“You done me proud,” said Sam the Pirate.

Maybe he thought I was Ben Hecht.

My most poignant insight into Jack Warner’s real self came after he had lost the Warner Bros. studio--sold it, he told me, for much less than it was worth, in a deal in which he felt he had been cheated. He asked me to write the book for a Broadway musical he was producing--and financing, to the tune of $1 million dollars, from his own pocket. It was titled, “Jimmy,” the story of the career of New York’s fabled Beau James, Mayor Jimmy Walker.

When I phoned him in Hollywood from Philadelphia, where the show was trying out, to beg him to close the show--it was a big vacuum cleaner, everyone was trying to siphon gold out of Warner’s pockets--he said, “Stop worrying about my money--it’s only a mil.”

I protested that if he brought this turkey to Broadway, the New York critics would murder it--they were waiting for him.

He said (I can still hear his voice), “If I close the show, who’ll have dinner with me?”

Sadly, he meant it.

After the critics destroyed it opening night, Jack kept “Jimmy” running on Broadway for three months.

It was only another mil. And his pride.

That’s what you can’t buy when you buy a studio. There’s no market for it on television.

Harry Cohn? The Pirates’ pirate. Columbia was his flagship, and he kept it afloat and sailing into battle until the day he died. It was Sinatra who supposedly said, looking around at the crowd that turned out for Harry’s funeral, “You see? Give the public what they want . . . . “

They still talk about the time, at lunch in his private dining room, Harry told about seeing a preview of an overlong, overripe Civil War epic David Selznick had just produced. “Gone With the Wind,” it was called, a flop if Harry ever saw one. He had squirmed in his seat, first this way, then that way, then this way again. Herman Mankiewicz, sitting across the table from him, inquired, “Harry, what makes you think you have the monitor rear end of America?”

Herman couldn’t work at Columbia after that. So he wrote “Citizen Kane.”

But the truth is, all of the Pirates flew by the seat of their pants. And most of the time, Harry Cohn did have the monitor rear end of America. What Harry’s rear end could stand, America took to its heart and made Harry a millionaire many times over. On a shoe string, he produced films like “It Happened One Night” and “From Here to Eternity” and dozens of Academy Award winners. It was Harry’s studio, Harry’s money, so he kept all the Academy Awards for himself and displayed them proudly on the shelves behind his ornate desk in his overfurnished office.

And the occasional films those Pirates made that were intended to lose money, films about opera and history and literature, because of the fierce thirst for culture of these showmen, immigrants and sons of immigrants. They were made for one reason: to give the names of Cohn and Warner and Goldwyn a meaning beyond profit.

Pride.

Too bad Hollywood had to grow up. Or did it?