The Master Storyteller and the Truth He Chose Not to Tell

To understand Sam Goldwyn, all you need to know is that he wept easily. The irrepressible Hollywood mogul cried when he won an Oscar for producing “The Best Years of Our Lives.” He cried every time he watched the ending of “Stella Dallas,” a movie he liked so much he made it twice, first as a 1925 silent film, then as a 1937 talkie with Barbara Stanwyck. And the Polish-born mogul cried when he told the story of arriving in New York and seeing the Statue of Liberty on his way to Ellis Island, the fabled arrival point of generations of immigrants to America.

His emotions were real, but the story was a fabrication. Having heard that dockside clerks could send immigrants back home, Goldwyn had actually disembarked in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and walked the 500-odd miles to New York City in the dead of winter. His life was a reinvention, one script polish after another, starting with his name: He was born Schmuel Gelbfisz, changed his name to Goldfish when he came to America and then to Goldwyn, naming himself after the studio he’d created, which gives you a pretty good idea of where his priorities in life lay.

It was Sam Goldwyn Jr., a prominent producer in his own right, who encouraged biographer A. Scott Berg to write “Goldwyn,” the 1989 book about his father. It has now been transformed into a fascinating documentary that debuts Sunday night on PBS stations around the country. (Berg served as co-writer with Peter Jones, an Emmy-winning filmmaker who co-directed the film with Mark Catalena.)

When Berg had finished a rough draft of the book, he gave a copy to Sam Jr. to read. The first pages presented Berg’s revised version of Goldwyn’s arrival in America. Sam Jr. was flabbergasted. No one in the family knew the Ellis Island story was a lie. Sam Jr. had even taken his children to see the holy spot where their grandfather first set foot in America. “I had tears in my eyes, looking at the photos of the immigrants, imagining the place where my father told me he’d kissed the ground,” Sam Jr. recalls.

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After the shock wore off, Sam Jr. read the rest of the book, making discoveries along the way.

“One of the things I really miss is being able to confront my father about that story,” the 75-year-old producer said the other day, sitting in his production office. “And I know just what he’d do. He’d wiggle his finger and tell me I’d been talking to a liar and he’d give me a lecture about why finding great writers is so important and where good movie stories come from and soon he would’ve dodged the subject completely.”

The documentary doesn’t let Goldwyn off the hook. It’s jammed with great stories and rare interview footage with Goldwyn regulars, including Howard Hawks, William Wyler, Bette Davis, Lillian Hellman, Danny Kaye and Laurence Olivier, who is seen merrily imitating the producer’s Polish-accented tirades.

Like most of Hollywood’s founding fathers, Goldwyn was an untutored immigrant who came to movies after apprenticing in more mundane businesses: He was a glove merchant in upstate New York before starting a picture company with industry pioneers Jesse Lasky and Cecil DeMille.

Hollywood was even more insular then than now: Goldwyn got Davis, a Warners contract player, to do Hellman’s “The Little Foxes” by forgiving a hefty Jack Warner gambling debt from one of their regular poker games. Goldwyn loathed Louis B. Mayer long before the MGM czar’s pictures regularly trounced Goldwyn’s at Oscar time. Decades earlier, when Goldwyn was wooing Lasky’s sister, it was Mayer, then an obscure junk dealer, who told Lasky that he should do whatever it took to break up the romance.

It is fascinating to see how much Goldwyn--and his taste in films--was shaped by his immigrant sensibility. Like most of the Jewish moguls of his generation, he felt the need to erase his ethnic origins. When Wyler filmed “Dead End,” a slice-of-life drama set in New York’s slums, Goldwyn was so offended by the garbage-strewn set that he would go in every morning and pick up debris.

He married Frances Howard, an aspiring actress and devout Catholic, who insisted that Sam Jr., their only child, be raised Catholic. As Berg explains in the documentary, having a child with a Gentile wife was his way to “purify, bleach the Jewishness out of your children.” When Goldwyn discovered the comic Danny Kaye (whose real name was David Kaminsky), he gave him a real bleach job, dying his hair blond and softening his features with make-up so he wouldn’t look so Jewish.

Goldwyn craved respectability. Many of his films were made from classic novels and sophisticated Broadway plays. He hired famous writers and dressed up his sets with immaculate production design.

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Real life was no different. The mogul transformed himself into a tweedy aristocrat with tailored suits and a croquet field in the backyard of his Beverly Hills home (which was built on the cheap by studio labor). His grandson, John Goldwyn, now Paramount’s production chief, recalls the grandchildren being summoned to Friday night dinners there.

“It was very formal, as if you were having dinner at a good English home,” he recalls. “We would have dinner and a report would be made to parents afterwards. My grandparents always appeared vaguely aristocratic, as if they were above it all. Their home had the same pedigree and attention to detail that you saw in Goldwyn’s movies.”

In Berg’s phrase, Goldwyn was a one-man band pretending to be a whole studio. His only stockholders were his wife and son. Sam Jr. says his most vivid memories aren’t of meeting movie stars but of seeing his father come home after paying off the bank on a picture. “He’d give me a little glass of beer, because he wanted to celebrate. He’d say, ‘We beat them again.”’

The Goldwyns ended up being a rare three-generation movie clan. Sam Jr. flirted with being a TV newsman, but before he was 30 he was producing movies. John wanted to be a lawyer, but he got the bug too, going to work for Alan Ladd before moving to Paramount, where he became head of production a decade ago. John’s brother Tony has also made a name for himself as an actor and director. As John puts it: “The movie business was a way of life in our family.”

But as the documentary makes clear, the movie business has inalterably changed since Goldwyn’s heyday, when studios were still run by movie men, not corporate overlords. Goldwyn was a gambler, following his nose, his life savings often riding on a picture. In today’s Hollywood, no one outside of a few desperate indie filmmakers is crazy enough to finance a film with his or her own money. I asked John, if his grandfather were to show up in his office, would Goldwyn recognize the way his grandson does business today. John laughed, shaking his head.

“Sam Goldwyn wouldn’t be in my office--he couldn’t be a part of today’s studio environment. It’s a different universe now. He was one of those men who reinvented their culture, and we don’t have enough of that today. He didn’t chase things people wanted. He chased things he loved.”

For John Goldwyn, it was especially inspiring to see, on film, the origins of his grandfather’s movie dreams. “As good as the book is, I connected with him more in the movie because I could see his face and hear his voice. It’s great to see him laughing. That’s what really comes across: how much Goldwyn and Adolph Zukor and Louis B. Mayer loved what they did. They invented a medium where they could draw on the rich oral tradition in Jewish culture and use it to tell stories full of emotion and beauty.

“Everyone today loves to complain about salaries and difficult actors. We all act like we’re prisoners in movie jail. ‘What if my picture fails?’ ‘What if I lose my job?’ We basically fulfill roles other people set for us. The men of Goldwyn’s generation defined themselves. My grandfather knew Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Paley, Averell Harriman and Darryl Zanuck--all men who created things out of nothing and changed the world. How could you not enjoy yourself doing that?”

Much is made of Goldwyn’s famous mangling of the English language: asked once about Frances Goldwyn’s contributions to his pictures, he replied, “My wife is the best man I have.” But Goldwyn appreciated good writing, hiring Billy Wilder (before he became a director), Ben Hecht, Hellman, Jules Furthman and Robert Sherwood. It sets him apart from today’s producers, who throw teams of writers at scripts or let their stars bring in pet writers to polish scripts. “My father may have been uneducated, but he wasn’t as contemptuous of writers as people are today,” explains Sam Jr. “He always said the writer is the architect of the movie.”

Sam Jr. remembers once when he was a boy celebrating his birthday, he took a long time studying the candles before he blew them out. “One of my friends asked my father what I was thinking about and Sam said, ‘He’s thinking of a good story.’ That’s what it was all about for him. You know, Scott Berg learned his lessons well. One reason this documentary is so good is that the writer of the book had final cut on the picture.”

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The Big Picture runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.