Samuel Goldwyn

Later on, when a writer tried to dissuade him from a certain depressing play and said, “Sir, it’s a very caustic play,” Sam shut him up with,” I don’t care how much it costs, buy it.”  Finally, when the Gershwin brothers came to his house for a conference, Goldwyn, who had just learned the rudiments of American football, announced from the floor above that he would come down in a jiffy and the three of them could then “have a cuddle and decide.” The Gershwins burst out laughing and Sam always held it against them.

Goldwynisms were the talk of the town for sixty years and then some. Sam didn’t get along with the Marx Brothers and we can guess why. They were much too irreverent for a man who used his Norman Rockwell lens to filter and film America. He was wounded when Groucho, a fellow Jew, made his famous wisecrack about the disparity in the chest development of Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr, playing Samson & Delilah in the Cecil B. De Mille epic. “Why is he making fun of prehistoric Jews?” was the way I assume he would have put it.

Yet all those Mittel Europa Jews did invent a Norman Rockwell America of white picket fences and naughty boys with bandages on their knees and smudges on their faces. Louis B. Mayer of MGM, Harry Cohn of Columbia, Jack Warner of Warner Bros, and Goldwyn invented America and made it a better place despite their personal failings. Harry Cohn was such an ogre that when he died in 1958 and a member of his family asked the rabbi if he could think of one good thing to say about him, the rabbi Magnin answered, “He’s dead.” Christian religious groups and civic organizations dedicated to cultural uplift felt that European “fatigue” might undermine traditional American values. They were right, but thirty years too early. By the time all the moguls were dead, the untalented and very nihilistic had taken over. The F-word became a gerund and violence the norm, always the true sign of someone who, lacking talent, substitutes it with explosions and vulgarities.