All That Glitters is not Goldwyn: Early Hollywood MogulsPerhaps no weapon in America’s media arsenal has proven as lasting as the Hollywood movie. What began as a low-grade form of entertainment, a somewhat disreputable venture at the turn of the nineteenth century became the most powerful international tool of American cultural power. Will Hays, the president of the original Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, called the film industry “the quintessence of what we mean by ‘America’.”
The founders and inventors of this “quintessential America” were almost without exception, immigrant and first-generation Jews. Within a few years of each other, Carl Laemmele built Universal; Adolf Zukor and Jesse Lasky, Paramount; Louis B. Mayer and the Schenks,
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; and Harry Cohn, Columbia. Together with the Warner Brothers, William Fox, and Samuel Goldwyn, these Moguls, whose lives and times are richly documented in the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society, created a constellation as brilliant as any the firmament could offer.
Who were they? A remarkably similar group --Yiddish-speaking immigrants or their sons, born in grinding poverty in shtetlekh or ghettoes, to pedigree-poor families, headed more often than not by ne’er do-well fathers. The Moguls, the men who invented the majesty and mystery of Hollywood, were a rough-hewn bunch of ambitious men determined to thrust themselves into the epicenter of American life.
Like Sam Goldwyn, famous for his malapropisms, many were semi-literate in English and made vulgarity and crudeness their stock in trade. At a dinner he gave to honor Madame Chiang Kai Shek, the flippant, fast-talking Jack Warner, a frustrated stand-up comedian, turned to the
evening’s guest of honor and exclaimed, “Holy cow, I forgot to pick up my laundry.” When Albert Einstein visited his studio, Warner later boasted of telling the greatest scientist since Newton, “You know, I have a theory about relatives, too—don’t hire them.” And the acerbic, oftentimes slashing Harry Cohn once said, “To hell with the critics. They
are like eunuchs. They can tell you how to do it but they can’t do it themselves.”
They began arriving in America during the 1880s, penniless boys drifting restlessly from job to job. Cutting their teeth on the ragged, half-world of fashion and retail, they became masters in gauging market swings, acquiring a special feel for detecting public taste. They finally
struck it rich with the Nickelodeon, among the first to realize that people who were willing to stand in an arcade for a penny to see a movie, would pay a nickel to sit, as opposed to a quarter for live entertainment. 1903 was the turning point, the year that Carl Laemmle, Adolf Zukor, William Fox, and the Warner brothers came upon this paying invention. Within the next two
decades they transformed a practically non-existent industry into one of the largest in America.
As immigrants themselves, the moguls in the making picked up on the dreams and aspirations of other immigrants and the working class, two largely overlapping groups, who would comprise a large portion of the early movie-going audience. By 1910, most of the future moguls were owners of small chains of moving-picture parlors that boasted whitewashed exteriors, uniformed ushers and male vocalists. Clever tacticians with a nose for making money, they understood that real profit lay in the distribution and eventually in production of movies.
Carl Laemmle, who blithely appropriated the name Universal in 1915 from a passing truck advertising a firm called “Universal Pipe Fittings,” was among the first Jewish producers to move to Hollywood. Three years earlier Sam Goldwyn and his brother-in-law Jesse Lasky, founders in Hollywood of the Lasky Feature Picture Company, produced Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Squaw Man,” giving birth to the celluloid Wild West.
These dream peddlers were particularly adept at turning a spark of talent into a blazing star. William Fox took credit for “discovering” Tom Mix and Theda Bara, a Jewish tailor’s daughter from Cincinnati born Theodosia Goodman. Carl Laemmle did the same for Mary Pickford. Harry Cohn’s credits included Ronald Coleman, Jean Arthur, Barbara Stanwyck and Cary Grant. Louis B. Mayer, a super-patriot who appropriated the Fourth of July for his birthday, created stars as diverse as Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr, Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. Sam Goldwyn (nee Gelbfisz) exploited the movie potential of Eddie Cantor, Danny Kaye, Gary Cooper and Joel McCrea, while Jack Warner turned such names as Robinson, Bogart, Raft, Garfield, Flynn, Muni and Davis into box-office gold.
The Moguls were uncomfortable with their Jewishness. When they finally gave to Jewish causes, they gave, according to Ben Hecht, as a way of doing penance for not being good Jews. And when they didn’t give, they were often nasty about it. Asked to support the cause of Jewish relief, Harry Cohn, the only mogul to be both bar-mitzvahed and posthumously baptized, said, “Relief for the Jews? How about relief from the Jews.” His other abrasions included
defiantly keeping Columbia Pictures open on Yom Kippur.
The Moguls wanted desperately to be regarded as Americans and not as Jews. In a slew of anti-Nazi films Hollywood produced in the thirties and forties, nary a word is mentioned of anti-Semitism abroad. As for anti-Semitism at home, barely a frame was devoted to the subject until the making of “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” produced by one of the few gentile producers in the industry, Darryl Zanuck of Twentieth Century Fox. The birth pangs of Israel elicited little interest, and “Exodus” made its way to the silver screen only when the Jewish state was a foregone conclusion, a fixed reality in the minds of the movie-going public.
Neither scholars nor gentlemen nor very good Jews, the Hollywood Moguls, nevertheless, sounded a fundamental chord of American life. They had their finger on the pulse of Main Street as well as the main chance. Connoisseurs of mass entertainment, they reinvented a nation in the image of their dreams and gave it its most enduring cultural legacy.
written by Dr. Kenneth Libo Ph.D and Michael Skakun
made possible by a generous grant from the Smart Family Foundation
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