One of the legends that haunts the typewriters of most of Hollywood’s five hundred resident reporters and columnists insists that our town is just like Podunk, a typical American community with a heart as big as Cinerama. (Are you there, Louella?) This is true, of course—give or take a few billion dollars a year. Provided Podunk can muster three dozen and more Rolls-Royces outside a movie house for a new picture opening. And pay a good cook $500 a week to steal her away from the best friend. And produce half a dozen houses with built-in pipe organs and one with wood-burning fireplaces in both the master and children’s bathrooms—it used to belong to Maggie Sullavan and Leland Hayward but Fred MacMurray owns it now.
If the majority of people in Podunk worship money like a god, then there isn’t much to choose between us. Take a man like Dean Martin. If Podunkians judge their fellows by how many dollars they earn, then Dean would be right at home. There was the day he got to arguing with his press agent about Albert Einstein.
“I made $20,000 last week,” Dean said. “What do you think he made?”
“You’re right,” said the press agent, a thoughtful soul. “That Einstein’s a dummy. I bet he never earned more than $12,000 a year in his whole life. He’s got to be an idiot.” Dean had the grace to grin. In Hollywood, where the love of money can change people’s nature every bit as fast as in Podunk, he has a reputation for cool blood behind his beaming Italian charm.
He isn’t alone in his class. It’s an obvious weakness among singers. Perry Como, for instance, sets few records for making appearances for charity. Bing Crosby, who enjoys almost nothing about his profession except the income it brings him, can’t be dragged to a benefit. It took his fiery little Irish mother, Kate, to push him out of his house to one Academy Awards show when he was at the top of his career. “You’ll go,” she threatened, “or you’ll never hear the last of it from me.” Kate was a woman to be reckoned with and still is. That was the night Bing got his Oscar for Going My Way.
Jerry Lewis on one occasion begged one big star to join him in New York on an all-night telethon to raise funds in a muscular-dystrophy drive. “You know what you can do with those crippled kids,” was the response he received from this father of a big family, who has a reputation for charming birds off trees.
Some of our inhabitants cherish the quaint idea that the number of charity performances he gives is an accurate yardstick for measuring an entertainer’s heart. More accurate, anyway, than the size of his bank account. It’s easy to sing a song or two, harder to stand up and be funny for half an hour. Yet the comics measure up well; Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Jerry Lewis, George Burns—all knock themselves out in the sweet cause of charity.
Our number-one citizen on that score is Bob Hope, and we’re proud as peacocks of him. There isn’t a place in the world he wouldn’t fly to for charity and work without drawing a nickel. He’s ham enough to love the publicity it brings him, but he does a monumental amount of good. Bob has literally made the millions that everybody believes Bing has stashed away in the vaults.
Money is talked about in our town more than elsewhere, perhaps, because there’s more of it around. Bob, who could safely be called thrifty, has splurged on a private three-hole golf course valued at more than $100,000. Elvis Presley owns fifteen automobiles, including an all-pink Cadillac with a television and hi-fi set. Beverly Hills High School has an oil well on its campus which brings in $18,000 a year.
Beverly Hills is an oasis of thirty thousand inhabitants and thirty thousand trees set in the steppes of Los Angeles. Many of its people earn their living in the entertainment industry or as doctors, lawyers, agents, soothsayers and headshrinkers, living on the backs of the others. Most of the trees that line the sidewalks are palms, though magnolias, eucalyptus, and acacias thrive in the gardens, and the evening scent of pittosporum drifts over the streets as sweet as the song of nightingales.
It’s a separate community with its own schools, police, firemen, and local government. As a contented resident, I’m happy to say that it enjoys the lowest tax rate for miles around. I am not so happy to report that in our town, where there’s at least one Olympic-size pool to the block, and sometimes five, Esther Williams found nobody she asked would give her the regular use of one for classes in teaching blind children to swim. She finally found a pool in Santa Monica, thirty minutes’ drive away, two days a week.
Acting as a kind of buffer between Beverly Hills and Los Angeles proper is Hollywood, with a population of some quarter of a million, which is the workplace of most of the stars who live in Beverly Hills. The rest of our population seems to be Texans, who are flocking in and who can usually leave the movie colony standing with dust on their faces when it comes to worshiping the golden calf.
Up until the early days of this century, Beverly Hills saw more coyotes than dollar bills. It was a Spanish-owned wilderness of remote canyons and tumbleweed. Then in 1906 it was bought for $670,000 by its American founders, who sold off lots at $1000 apiece on the installment plan, $800 if you paid cash; those lots sell now for $50,000. The big spending didn’t start until soon after World War I ended, but long before that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks had bought a whole hilltop on Summit Drive together with the hunting lodge that stood there. They spent hundreds of thousands on the place that we called “The White House”—Pickfair.
Doug itched to put a wall all the way around Beverly Hills, but he compromised by simply encircling their estate. He and Mary literally made their home a palace. They were America’s royalty and were treated as such in their own country and overseas. Kings and queens entertained them; they rode in Mussolini’s private train. At Pickfair they entertained visiting bluebloods.
The Duke and Duchess of Alba stayed there, but they left a week early because the duke discovered, to his chagrin, that the armfuls of cuddly Hollywood blondes he’d been expecting were not permitted through Pickfair’s portals.
Pickfair had some rich neighbors. Carl Laemmle, the half-pint immigrant from Bavaria who founded Universal-International, built an estate. So did Will Rogers, Gloria Swanson, Charles Chaplin. Chaplin is notoriously tight-fisted. After he’d furnished most of his home on Summit Drive, including his own bedroom, four or five other bedrooms remained empty. He had the head decorator of our biggest furniture store come to see the rooms and suggest their decor. Charlie had all the recommended furniture delivered and kept it for six months, ignoring the bills. Finally, the store repossessed everything it had “lent” him. He applied the same treatment to another store, with the same final result.
During this period, a titled Englishman with wife and entourage wired the Douglas Fairbankses that they’d be arriving at Pickfair with ten in party; could they be accommodated? Pickfair hadn’t room for everybody, so Mary telephoned Charlie, who said he’d take in six of the visitors.
But he’d forgotten that the furniture in his guest bedrooms had been carted off, leaving only an old chest of drawers and mattresses and bedsprings on the floor of each otherwise empty room. When the guests saw the accommodations he’d provided for them, they were astounded; imagined he must be some kind of crazy health faddist, and departed after one night for a hotel.
Harold Lloyd bought his acreage direct from Mr. Benedict himself—that’s the old-timer who put his name on Benedict Canyon. Then Harold bought more adjoining land from Thomas Ince until he had twenty acres of lawns and woodlands. After he married Mildred Davis, his leading woman in Grandma’s Boy, in 1923, he built a forty-room, Spanish-style mansion on the place, with ten bedrooms, two elevators, a theater seating one hundred guests, and a four-room dolls’ house complete with electric light, plumbing, and grand piano. Around the house he had kennels for his great Danes, a swimming pool with fountain, two reflecting pools, and a Greek temple.
Mildred loved it all, then took a second look at the front door and burst into tears. What was the matter? “No keyhole!” she sobbed.
The Lloyds still live there. When he opened the grounds for a local charity a few years ago, today’s generation of stars gasped at this glimpse of how thick the luxury could grow before income taxes gobbled up your pay checks. “How can he possibly afford to keep up this place?” Frank Sinatra asked me.
“Because he’s worth millions,” I said, “and he holds on to them.” That afternoon, though, $69,000 was raised for the Nursery for Visually Handicapped Children. At the suggestion of Walter Annenberg’s mother, when things got dull, I sold endowments for thirteen scholarships to the school at $1000 apiece.
Harold, who is in his late sixties, believes that you can take it with you. There is one servant, a helper and nurse for their grandchild, on the place which used to employ twenty gardeners. Mildred Lloyd does most of the cooking.
Stores and services soon crowded into and around Beverly Hills, to tap the golden stream that poured into the motion-picture industry. You could buy any kind of merchandise or service at a price. Saks Fifth Avenue, J. W. Robinson’s, W. & J. Sloane eventually opened up on Wilshire Boulevard. One lady got in ahead of them with a different kind of establishment on Sunset Strip, just beyond the town line; her girls, dressed to the teeth, were once taken on a conducted tour of the MGM lot. A Metro executive was appalled when, in a moment of confidence, she showed him a wad of rubber checks she’d been given by various male customers. They would have been a prize package for any autograph hound. He offered to collect the debts and split the proceeds with her.
“Oh no, I couldn’t allow that,” she said, shocked to the marrow. “It wouldn’t be ethical.”
She had a competitor in the same line of business who one evening telephoned a visiting English knight in the middle of a dinner party to say she’d seen his name in the papers and could she provide him with a steady companion for his lonely hours.
In Beverly Hills you can call on furriers who’ll be glad to sell a mink coat at $20,000, a chinchilla wrap for $15,000, or an ermine-covered toilet seat. You can have your hair dressed by George Masters, who’ll bill you up to you-name-it for a home appointment, or a make-up by Gene Hibbs, who invented an ingenious, invisible bit of nylon mesh with a rubber band suspended from tiny hooks pulled up through your hair which, for special occasions, takes more years off your looks than plastic surgery.
If you’re a celebrity anywhere, your cost of living takes a leap, but in our town it jumps sky high. Any star looking to buy a house tries to keep his identity secret until closing day or else the price will be doubled. A star of the opposite sex will be charged $5000 by her obstetrician for delivering a baby.
When Norma Shearer was first pregnant, she was aghast to hear what the bill would be. “Very well,” the doctor compromised, “I’ll gamble with you. I’ll charge $5000 for a boy, $1000 for a girl. Okay?” Norma lost the bet when Irving Thalberg, Jr., was born.
Some of our citizens fall into the habits of European royalty and carry no money whatever in their pockets. Shirley MacLaine was working on The Children’s Hour when Sam Goldwyn invited her to dine tête-à-tête with him and see a private showing of his old-time movie, Stella Dallas. It provided an evening out as unsophisticated as a flour sack.
She told me: “While we were looking at the picture, I started to scratch. I was wearing a wool dress I hadn’t had on for months and apparently it had gotten moths or something. I was afraid he’d think I wasn’t enjoying Stella. When we got out, he said, ‘How about a soda?’”
In his Thunderbird they drove to Will Wright’s on Sunset Boulevard. At the next table some youngsters were having a ball burning holes in soda straws to make improvised flutes, then blowing tunes on them. Sam asked for a lesson and soon sat in to play his own straw flute.
“The girl came with our orders,” Shirley reported, “and we ate them. Then he went through all his pockets before he finally said, ‘You got any money on you?’ But I’d left my bag at the studio.”
He called over the waitress, who wore her name on a lapel pin: “Nancy, have you ever been out with a male friend and been so embarrassed because he didn’t have any money with him?” Nancy smiled sympathetically. “How about if I sign an I.O.U. and have my wife, Frances, come down tomorrow to pay you?”
That was agreed. Sam leaned over confidentially toward Shirley. “Since we’re getting ’em free, let’s have a couple more.” They had three each before they went outside and flagged down his chauffeur, who’d followed them in another car.
“You go up and tell Mrs. Goldwyn what happened here tonight,” Sam instructed. “Say Nancy had to trust us for six sodas at thirty-five cents apiece. You come back with the money and see if you can’t scrounge seventy-five cents for a tip—but don’t tell Frances about the tip.”
* * * * *
Evenings were known to be gaudier in the old days. The Basil Rathbones gave a Louis XIV masquerade, and I was set to go as a shepherdess complete with live lamb, who had his hoofs gilded and fleece shampooed. I didn’t get there, but that’s a later story. Mrs. George Temple, Shirley’s mother, went to her first and only big Hollywood party and left a new ermine coat on a bed on top of a pile of others. When the time came to leave, she discovered that one distinguished guest had been taken violently ill in the bedroom with disastrous results to the furs, her ermine suffering most of all.
For one revel at his Mulholland Drive home, Errol Flynn imported a transvestite fairy dressed so skillfully as a girl that nobody guessed the secret. Errol had his swimming pool lit from below and brought on a team of high divers to brighten the evening. When his guests went on chattering, taking not a blind bit of notice of the performance, he dived headlong into the water in protest and refused to speak to anybody except the divers for the duration of the party.
“You’re so generous in many ways and so stingy in others,” I told him, years later. “You spent thousands on those parties, yet you wouldn’t buy a girl a box of candy or send her flowers when you could have saved yourself at least five lawsuits with a single rose each time.”
He worshiped John Barrymore and deliberately started the rumor that he was John’s illegitimate offspring. They came to a parting of the ways, however, when he invited “Father” up to Mulholland Drive. John, who was incontinent toward the end, forgot himself as he sat on a beautiful settee in the lavishly furnished living room that was Errol’s pride. That was the last time John was invited.
Water, as well as drugs and alcohol, attracted Errol. He was sun-bathing mother-naked one day on a sailboat in the Mediterranean when a sight-seeing craft loaded with American schoolteachers came by. He chose that moment to stand up and stretch. One gasping teacher fell overboard, covered in blushes, and he promptly plunged in to retrieve her.
Errol used to live directly across the street from me during his marriage to Lili Damita. All I had to do to pick up an item or two for the column was sit by my bedroom window and listen to them shrieking at each other. I got the low-down on their separation by just lying in bed and listening. It was a screaming, juicy bout.
I was all set to put it on the wire the next morning, when Errol came over in dressing gown and slippers at 7 A.M., got me out of bed, and begged me not to print it, saying they hadn’t even talked about a property settlement. Like a fool, I promised to keep silent until he gave me the cue. But he couldn’t keep his own secret and told Louella, who scooped me with my own story. I could have throttled him—but that’s Hollywood.
The last time I saw Errol was in Paris, when he was making The Roots of Heaven. He wanted his teen-age popsie to stay in the room while I interviewed him. She wouldn’t go, so I did, interview or no interview. But I kept a soft spot for him in my heart in spite of the several kinds of ruin he brought on himself.
* * * * *
After ten o’clock on a weekday night, Podunk would probably look like Broadway compared with Beverly Hills, which is strictly a roll-up-the-sidewalk community. After that witching hour, police in prowl cars stop anyone they see out walking to ask if they’re residents and, if they’re not and have no good reason for being around, escort them to the nearest bus stop.
By ten-thirty virtually every household has gone to bed. Working actors and actresses have to be up by six or six-thirty. Then it’s a cold shower to get the eyes open, a shampoo and a finger wave in the case of actresses. Most women have a shampoo every morning; blondes from necessity because they use gold dust in their hair, brunettes to make their hair shiny. Half a dozen eggs makes the basis of many a brunet shampoo.
Under the dryer, the Beverly Hills workingwoman takes the juice of a lemon and a cup of hot water. Then a look over the script for the day’s shooting while she downs orange juice and black coffee. After leaving instructions for the cook and servants—and nurse, if there are young children—she drives to the studio, where curls are combed out and make-up applied. If she’s wearing an evening gown, she’s whitened to the waist; it’s cold and sticky.
She’s squeezed into her costume, and a stand-by car takes her to the sound stage. Director, crew, and rest of the cast say their good mornings. Because their moods will be affected by hers, she has to set the emotional climate for the day—no headaches, heartaches, or bellyaches for her.
If she knows her lines, some other cast members may not. So the company rehearses until everybody’s letter perfect. Lights are set, sound adjusted, cameras roll. Then somebody fluffs a cue or a move, and that’s contagious. “Dear God, don’t let it happen to me,” she mutters. The same scene may be done over forty times before the director is satisfied. Some of them are sadists, who’ll keep their players sweating just to prove who’s boss.
At noon, lunch is called. Her dress is usually so tight that a cup of hot soup, green salad with cottage cheese, and more black coffee is as much as she can stand. It’s hard to relax after that bit of bunny food.
Maybe there’s a long-distance call waiting from some relative who never did a lick of work, complaining that the allowance will have to be upped because baby Peggy needs braces or the car has to have new tires or Auntie May has set her heart on a Florida vacation.
Then she hurries back to work. If she happens to have a crying scene to do, it will be easy. When she comes out of it, she catches the eye of an extra whose thoughts are as plain as if shouted aloud: “Were you ever rotten in that! I could show them how to handle it.” When our girl’s nose, eyes, and mascara are all running simultaneously, the head of the studio walks on with a banker from New York.
So it goes until six o’clock, when she goes to the projection room to see the previous day’s rushes, then back to the dressing room to remove make-up. If she’s a blonde, the gold dust is brushed out, hot oil applied, and her head’s wrapped up in a bandanna like a Christmas pudding.
Home at last, where the servants are eating high on the hog, but she has a tray with hot broth, one lamb chop, spinach or string beans, and perhaps a dab of apple sauce. There’s time to play with the children for half an hour, look over tomorrow’s script, sign dozens of checks a secretary has laid out in a folder for her. Then a body massage, and what’s left of her crawls to bed.
Is it any wonder that there hasn’t been a real, big-star hostess in our town since Doug Fairbanks deserted Mary Pickford? Hundreds have tried, but nobody’s succeeded, not even Mary. As Mrs. Buddy Rogers, she lost the glory.
Mrs. Kirk Douglas and her friend, the present Mrs. Gregory Peck, have their dreams along those lines. Veronique pretended to be a writer so she could get a private interview with Gregory when he visited Paris with his first wife, Greta, and openly told a companion, Brenda Helser of Diplomat magazine: “I’m going to be the next Mrs. Peck.” Her plan worked like a charm.
The current Mrs. Edward G. Robinson would like to be a hostess with the mostest, but she has not attained the status of Gladys, his former wife, who entertained in great style and set him going on his way to being a great art collector. It was Gladys who had the knowledge and chose most of the paintings. Collecting pictures is a neat trick for cutting down on income tax, highly recommended by financial consultants if you can afford it. You donate the paintings to a museum as an act of charity, but have the pleasure of them hanging on your walls for a lifetime.
The William Goetzes mix social ambitions with art collecting and what may be lightheartedly called “cultural leadership.” The walls of their home—it takes seven servants to run it—are adorned like a museum with works by Monet, Matisse, Roualt, Dufy, Lautrec, and a reputed Van Gogh, which Bill bought for $50,000 in 1948 from a New York gallery. When the painter’s nephew had doubts about its authenticity, the Metropolitan Museum assembled a jury of three experts. After they’d pored over the canvas, they declared that they, too, were unwilling to accept it as an original. A European art critic, Dr. Jacob Bart de la Faille, who had vouched for the picture’s genuineness in the first place, insisted that he’d made no mistake and the buyer hadn’t been taken. Then five European experts took a look and said it was a Van Gogh, sure enough. Where that leaves Bill Goetz, I don’t know, because he hasn’t told me. We aren’t in each other’s confidence and never have been.
He married Edith, Louis B. Mayer’s older daughter—Irene, the other, became David Selznick’s wife. When Edie’s engagement was announced, Louis put Ida Koverman in charge of wedding arrangements, with orders to invite all the old-line Los Angeles socialites. As Herbert Hoover’s former aide, Ida knew them; Louis did not. Edie was always drawn by pictures of one sort or another. She paid almost daily visits to Ida’s office, whose walls were hung with autographed pictures from the biggest people in America, to bombard her with fresh instructions.
She stopped in front of the then President’s photograph (“To my dear Ida ... Herbert Hoover”) and asked: “Have you invited him?”
“You don’t know him,” Ida said.
“You do and father does. Send him an invitation. I’d like to see what he sends me.”
“But he’s the President of the United States.”
“Invite him, anyway.”
Hoover didn’t attend the wedding, but Edie got a present from him. She got presents from everybody. There must have been twenty showers given for her. If you were on the MGM payroll, as I was as an actress then, there was somebody to tell you what to take or send for all occasions.
Came the night of the wedding and sit-down supper in the Biltmore ballroom. I was seated at a side table when Ben Meyer, a local banker, came over and asked me to join his group at a more elevated spot. “We don’t know any of these people,” he said. “Will you point out the stars for us?”
Partly as a result of making my first visit to the place as DeWolf Hopper’s wife when he was an idol in the theater, partly as a result of having Harry Lombard, the Boston banker, and his wife as friends, I knew my way around Los Angeles society. But I had to tell Ben Meyer: “I’ll have to get Mr. Mayer’s permission first.”
“You’ll have to what?” he exploded.
“He employs me, remember? Social or anything else, I’ll have to ask him.”
Louis couldn’t understand how I could have a banker asking after me.
“These are my friends, Louis: lawyers, doctors, professional people. They’ve no idea who your stars are because they never see your pictures.” Permission granted, grudgingly. With the Meyers, I sat at the gayest, most gossipy table in the room. At the end of the evening they knew the names of all the stars and most of their histories.
Louis and his son-in-law were thick as thieves for years. Mayer bought race horses, Goetz bought race horses. At one Academy Award banquet Louis put his arm around Bill: “If you just go on the way you’re going, you’ll be a greater man than I ever was.”
William wanted to head his own film company just like his brother-in-law, David. With Louis behind him anything was possible. It looked like a wide-open opportunity when Darryl Zanuck left Twentieth Century-Fox to join the Army in World War II. Louis began maneuvers with his partner at Metro, Nick Schenck, of Loew’s Inc., whose brother Joe was board chairman at Fox. Goetz would replace Zanuck while Darryl was in Washington, D.C. in uniform.
I got wind of it and flashed a “hurry home” message to Darryl, who was on duty in Washington. He raced back three days before the intended change-over. Shortly thereafter it was announced that Mr. Goetz had resigned from Twentieth Century-Fox, to become production chief at Universal-International.
Ten years later, in 1953, he quit that job, too. A controlling interest in the studio had been bought by Milton Rackmil, who found in the course of negotiating a new contract for his head of production that Goetz set his price at $5000 a week while fellow executives got less than $2000. Later he had a spell at Columbia, and now Bill Goetz sits on a bank’s board, has real-estate interests. The movies lost their attraction when he underestimated Louis, a fierce Republican, and backed Adlai Stevenson in 1948 despite his father-in-law’s pleas. Louis did not speak to him after that. When he died in 1957, his will left $500,000 to his daughter Irene and similar bequests to her sons by Selznick. He cut out Edie and Bill Goetz and their children entirely.
* * * * *
Los Angeles society is much like the frog that wanted to inflate himself bigger than a bull. New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit all have social leaders with recognizable names that stand for something in America and, in some cases, around the world. Los Angeles is different, for all its size. Outside our city limits, its “society” with few exceptions doesn’t mean much, primarily because our standard isn’t “Who are you?” but “How much have you got?”
In the early days Los Angeles socialites lent their gardens and exteriors of their houses to movie making on a business basis, donating proceeds to charity. But they didn’t invite picture people in to dine with them. The dividing line still exists, though it’s narrower than it used to be. For one thing, international leaders and celebrities don’t give a damn about Los Angeles society when they visit here. They want to meet and be entertained by the stars, because they give the best parties and are more fun to be with.
Now Sam Goldwyn mingles with Mrs. Norman Chandler and the music crowd since they’re both deeply involved in fund raising for the music center housing the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Opera Company. Danny Kaye and Jack Benny conduct concerts for the symphony. One that Danny did brought in $185,000. But movie people can no more get into the Los Angeles Country Club for either love or money than they could when Cecil De Mille battered in vain on its doors.
Harpo Marx, whom I adore, once told me he couldn’t understand why he couldn’t join a local country dub. “That’s easy,” was my reply. “You belong to a different club, where they don’t take in Christians. So in a way they’re sort of even.”
“I never thought of that,” said he. The following day, Eddie Mannix, a feisty Irishman, joined Harpo’s country club.
Generally speaking, Los Angeles society in the beginning would have nothing to do with the movie crowd; now the movie industry has little to do with Los Angeles society. In some cases the bar went up because they worked in movies, sometimes because they were Jews. Our town and every suburban Podunk across the nation have something in common with that prejudice.
Hollywood treats the subject simultaneously as a joke, a jinx, and a business risk. Sinatra and the Clan allow themselves the privilege of kidding each other as “wops” and “kikes” but protest publicly against racial discrimination. One comedy star doesn’t wince when men on his payroll refer to him as “Super-Jew.”
When Louis B. Mayer first saw Danny Thomas, who is a professional Lebanese, on a night-club stage, he liked everything about him except his looks. “I would put you under contract immediately,” he told Danny, “except you look too Jewish. I want you to have some surgery to straighten out your nose.”
He imagined it was doubt about the possible result that made Danny decline with thanks. “Well, then, I understand you have a brother. Here’s what we’ll do for you. We’ll have his nose done first as a sample.” He was amazed when that offer was turned down, too.
Because of his “lady complex,” I was approached by Louis, who begged me to get his daughters into our most private private school, whose principal was a friend of mine. There was no point in mincing words. “Mr. Mayer,” I said, “they don’t accept them.”
“But they’ll take my daughters,” he snapped. “Can’t you tell the head mistress how important I am?”
“It won’t do any good. You can’t win that one. They will not take Jews.” He had no choice but to accept the truth, no matter how disagreeable.
When Samuel Goldwyn was preparing Guys and Dolls, I heard he was talking about having Frank Sinatra play Nathan Detroit, the gambling man, brilliantly played by Sam Levene on Broadway. I bearded Samuel in his den. “Sinatra’s no more fitted for that part than I am. He’s a great entertainer, but not in that role. Nobody but nobody can play it like Sam Levene. Why don’t you get him?”
“You can’t have a Jew playing a Je