Made In America - Bill Bryson [166]
It would be putting it mildly to say that Goldwyn never entirely mastered the nuances of English. Though many of the expressions attributed to him are apocryphal – he never, for instance, said to a pretentious director who wanted to make a movie with a message: ‘If you want to send a message call Western Union’ – he did actually say ‘I was on the brink of an abscess’, ‘Gentlemen, include me out’, and ‘You’ve bitten the hand of the goose that laid the golden egg’. Warned that a Broadway production to which he had acquired rights was ‘a very caustic play’, he shot back: ‘I don’t give a damn how much it costs.’ And a close friend swore that once when they were walking on a beach and the friend said, ‘Look at the gulls,’ Goldwyn stopped in his tracks and replied in all seriousness, ‘How do you know they’re not boys?’ He had a particular gift for mangling names. He always referred to Mervyn LeRoy as ‘Moiphy’ LeRoy, to Preston Sturges as ‘Preston Sturgeon’ and, to his unending annoyance, to Ernst Fegte as ‘Faggoty’.13
Not just the studio chiefs, but directors, composers, art directors, musicians and actors were as often as not foreigners working in this quintessentially American medium. The 1938 movie The Adventures of Robin Hood, for instance, starred an Australian, Erroll Flynn, and an Englishman, Basil Rathbone, was directed by a Hungarian, Michael Curtiz, scored by a Czech, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and had sets designed by a Pole, Anton Grot. Consider the backgrounds of just a few of those who made Hollywood pulse in its early years: John Ford (born Sean O’Fearna) was Irish, Greta Garbo Swedish, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant and Stan Laurel English, William Wyler Alsatian, Billy Wilder Hungarian, Frank Capra Italian (at least by birth), Fred Zinnemann and Erich Von Stroheim Austrian, and Ernst Lubitsch German. Never has an industry been more international in its composition or more American in its output.
As the years passed studios endlessly formed and reformed. Mutual, Reliance and Keystone amalgamated into the Triangle Film Corporation, which, despite having America’s three leading directors – D. W. Griffith, Mack Sennett and Thomas H. Ince – soon went under. RCA and the Keith Orpheum theatre chain teamed up to form RKO. Joseph Schenk’s Twentieth Century Pictures and William Fox’s Fox Film Corporation merged into Twentieth Century-Fox. Many more fell by the wayside: Star, Biograph, General Film and even the Edison Company. But Hollywood itself went from strength to strength, filling the world with a distinctively American mix of glamour, adventure and moral certitude.
If the stars hadn’t changed their names already, the studios often did it for them to make them fit more neatly into the pleasantly homogenized heaven that was Hollywood. Names were changed for almost any reason – because they were too dull, too exotic, not exotic enough, too long, too short, too ethnic, too Jewish. Generally, it must be said, the studio bosses knew what they were doing. Who after all could imagine John Wayne as Marion Morrison or Judy Garland as Frances Gumm or Mary Pickford as dowdy Gladys Smith? Spangler Arlington Brugh is a name for a junior high school woodwork teacher; change it to Robert Taylor and you are already halfway to stardom. Archie Leach might pass muster as the kid who delivers groceries, but if you want a man of the world it’s got to be Cary Grant. Doris Kappelhoff is the 200 lb. chocoholic who baby-sits your little brother; Doris Day dates the quarterback. Even little Mortimer Mouse had his name changed to Mickey just four years after his creation in 1923.
In the very early days of the movies stars hadn’t had to change their names because they weren’t allowed any, at least not as far as their fans were concerned. Until the second decade of the century actors and actresses weren’t billed at all. For years Mary Pickford was known only as ‘Little Mary’ and Florence Lawrence as ‘the Biograph girl’. Then, as producers realized that audiences were drawn by certain faces and even styles of film-making,