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to r.: Après
le Repas by Pierre Bonnard painted in 1925 sold
at Christie's in November 1998 for $8 million; The Goetzes'
private secretary Sonja Gilbert in the dining room on
Delfern Drive in Holmby Hills. |
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“The
three greatest art collections in Hollywood,” recalled
Billy Wilder about the Golden era of the movies, “were Edward
G. Robinson, Josef von Sternberg and William Goetz. Eddie G. lost
his collection when he divorced his wife Gladys and she made him
sell everything they owned (including the living room couch) and
the best of it ended up in the hands of Stavros Niarchos. Von Sternberg
sold all his Impressionists in the 1940s and started all over collecting
the Abstract Expressionists. William Goetz’ collection was
started at the behest of his wife Edith, the eldest daughter of
Hollywood’s king, Louis B. Mayer, outlasting them all until
it was auctioned off at Christie’s in New York after her
death in 1988.”
Great collections
always conceal a subtext of great personal drama. The Goetz Collection
stood before the motley and brilliant Hollywood
elite as the ultimate bastion of taste, wealth and political power
in the film industry. Its accumulation, first just the act of a
devoted husband anxious to please, turned into a quiet obsession
not so much to acquire art as to show Them – them being Dad
and – especially Sister.
Edie, as she was known, would often say forty years later that
she was inspired to collect by the beautiful pictures of Edward
G. Robinson and that she had to push Billy into it.
“Oh Eddie,” she claimed to have appealed many times in a little
girl, who-me tone of voice to the silver screen’s Public
Enemy Number One, “how can I get my Billy to buy pictures?” Billy
already collected first editions. That wasn’t good enough
for Edie. “Books are dead,” she exhorted. “Pictures
live!”
Collecting art, mainly the then fashionable (and still relatively
cheap) Impressionists, was already being done by Irene
and David Selznick who started buying by the mid-1930s, and this was the
key. The Mayer girls, brought up under the maniacally ever-watchful
eye of their father and mother, grew up in a world where the only
culture was the movies. They had no higher education because their
father wouldn’t let them out of his sight. Although Edie
had natural artistic abilities, art to them was whatever their
father’s art directors created (which included their famous
house at the beach in Santa Monica – later owned by Peter
and Patricia Kennedy Lawford, and still standing). |
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The
Goldwyn lot in 1923 just before the merger that created
MGM. 167 acres that eventually became, under LB Mayer's
aegis, 30 soundstages, office buildings, dressing rooms,
7 warehouses
with
furniture,
props, and
draperies, 37 acres of permanent exterior sets including
the town of Carvel, home of the Hardy family, the Victorian
street from Meet Me in St. Louis, the house
where David Copperfield lived, the street where Marie
Antoinette was transported to the guillotine, jungles,
rivers, a zoo, and 13 miles of paved road. In its heyday,
there were 6000 employees, 40 cameras, 60 sound machines;
33 actors designated as stars, 72 featured players
and 26 directors, with 16 to 18 pictures being shot
at any
one time. |
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Irene
was never one to credit another with her ideas about culture
and aesthetics but in fact she and her husband were inspired
to collect by David’s partner in Selznick-International,
the fabulously wealthy New York prototypical WASP, John
Hay (Jock) Whitney,
and by their close friends Dorothy and Bill Paley (he
the founder and head of CBS).
As was everything for the Mayer girls, collecting pictures was a socially competitive
thing. In those palmy days, both girls, the only true princesses of Hollywood
ever, always had their eye on society. They learned that from their father. For
Irene it also served the purpose of impressing her father with her highbrow taste,
as well as one-upping her sister over whom no love was ever lost. It also served
notice on that sister. And sister noticed.
So, after several years of goading Billy Goetz about his dead books, on Christmas
Eve 1939, under the tree along with literally hundreds of beautifully wrapped
and very expensive gifts, Edie found a small package wrapped in brown paper and
tied with brown string.
It probably came as no surprise because Edie was too controlling to be kept out
of the loop on a big secret. Nevertheless, like a scenarist working on one of
her father’s pictures (the silent ones), in her recollection, she created
the mise en scene for the story to unfold, which was in this case:
When she
impatiently tore away the paper, the first thing she saw was the
little brass nameplate: Renoir. She was so “overcome
with emotion that Merle had to lend (her) a hankie.” Merle
being Merle Oberon, then the wife of Sir
Alexander Korda (and called as she wished
to be, Lady Korda), who was staying with the Goetzes
at their rambling Cape Cod style clapboard mansion at the beach in
Santa Monica because Sir Alex wanted to shelter his wife from the
winds of war in Europe. At the time Merle had been making “Wuthering
Heights” and Sir Alex probably didn’t want his famously
randy wife to be too footloose and free for her fancies. |
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The
first picture that became the cornerstone of
the Goetz collection painted by Renoir, c. 1916.
Purchased in 1939 and
later sold at Christie's in 1988 for $1,000,000.
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After
Billy
Goetz’ initial gift of a Renoir to his wife, (which sold at auction almost
fifty years later for $1 million), over a period of fifteen years, and especially
in seven years after World War II, the Goetzes acquired more than fifty pieces
of fine art and sculpture including works by van Gogh, Gauguin, Degas,
Dufy, Fantin-Latour, Cezanne, Picasso, Braque, Bonnard, Lautrec, Monet, Manet,
Matisse,
Renoir, Roualt, Sisley, Morisot, Soutine, Vlaminck, Derain, Modigliani and Vuillard.
Their purchases were augmented by two gifts – a Boudin bequeathed to Edie
by Cole Porter in 1964, and a Picasso given to them by their dealer, Sam Salz
(which fetched $8 million at auction after Edie’s death).
It was completely private, exhibited
publicly only once, in San Francisco in 1959. Both Goetzes, while being rank
amateurs as art experts, had an especially good eye with a strong sense of color.
In 1972, three years after William Goetz’ death at age 66, to pay the taxes
on his estate, sixteen pictures were auctioned off by Sotheby’s for more
than $3 million. That was considered a record-breaking sale in those days but
it was nothing compared to the final sale in 1988 of 28 pieces from the collection
for $81 million. |
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La
Plage à Trouville by Claude Monet, 1870. |
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Chaim
Soutine's Le Chasseur, 1926. |
Modigliani's
Lunia Czechowska, 1918. |
The
Goetzes life was quintessential Hollywood, more glamorous than
almost any star, full of wealth and privilege. Once when Billy
bought Edie a Rolls limousine matching the size of the Queen,
she complained that “now everyone will know wherever I
go.” Half-true for the small town that Hollywood was. They
lived like real royalty. Edie’s last English butler Harold
Lodge, who’d come from service in the Royal Household,
said that “Madam was more royal than the Queen herself,
more like the Queen Mum.” He meant that as a compliment,
explaining that the Queen Mother cared deeply about her staff.
According to Armand (Ardie) Deutsch, the Sears-Roebuck heir who was a close friend
of Billy Goetz and who lived most of his adult life in Los Angeles and worked
at MGM under Dore Schary (who succeeded L.B. Mayer as head of
the studio): “Edie
reigned for thirty years over a kingdom that finally, like Norma Desmond’s
disappeared and left her alone.” Her chef was always the best in Southern
California and when they traveled (on their private DC-3 airliner – this
was before private jets), the chef went too – along with Edie’s personal
maid and Billy’s valet.
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Boudin's
Trouville Scène de Plage, 1879.
Bequeathed to Edie Goetz by Cole Porter.
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In her heyday
an invitation to dine at one of the Goetz mansions at the beach
or Bel Air, and later, finally, Holmby Hills, were events that no one turned
down. Billy Goetz was a convivial host who poked fun at everyone including his
wife and her deeply self-serious sister Irene. Although everyone laughed (including
Irene), she was not amused, referring to his language as “disgusting” and
his character as “a schlep.”
Edie, who never
so much as boiled an egg in her entire lifetime, claimed she could
taste a dish just from reading a cookbook. She considered her dinner
parties
her greatest achievement because of that and because she “was
not impressed by famous people.” "I’d met them from the time
I was
a little girl,” she explained, “so I was very good at seating people.”
She always had “the greatest food in Hollywood,” recalled Billy
Wilder, “the
greatest pictures,” and a guest list that impressed even the guests. “Only
the stars were invited,” noted Ardie Deutsch, “Stars, star directors
and star producers, in that order. No writers unless it was Gar Kanin,
Cliff
Odets, Moss Hart, Truman (Capote) or Gore Vidal.”
Having reviewed
her meticulously kept records confirm that the most casual dinners
(for eight or ten) were often as not made up of Gary and
Rocky Cooper,
Annabella
and Tyrone Power, Leland and Slim Hayward (and later Pamela
Churchill), Mary
and Jack Benny, Claudette Colbert and her husband Dr. Jack Pressman;
Jimmy and
Gloria Stewart. When the list expanded, so did its luminescence – Clark
Gable, Cary Grant, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor,
Barbara Stanwyck, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra. When Garland or Sinatra
entertained
after dinner, Johnny Green who ran the MGM orchestra, played
the Steinway. Edie
had fashioned her entertainments in the style of Frances Goldwyn, Dorothy
Paley,
and afterwards
on Dorothy’s successor Babe Paley. Only they, in her opinion,
could match her. Irene granted her that, rather than compete on a level she regarded
as inconsequential.
After Bill Goetz died and Edie fell almost instantly from grace, many
made fun
of her hifalutin ways. Nevertheless, Jean Howard who first went
to dine at the Goetzes as the date of Cole Porter, recalled “for
years those same
people who now made fun of her all kissed her ass to be invited.”
Born on a swelteringly hot August day in 1905 over
her maternal grandfather’s
kosher butcher shop in the bleak milltown of Lawrence, Massachusetts, she was
not a pretty child, even almost ugly, resembling her father as she did, sharp-faced,
small, intense, almost suspicious eyes, thin lips and a slightly receding jawline
that came to a point. But she was “dainty” and feminine and to the
adoring father, a princess who would inherit, along with his countenance, his
temperament which was singleminded and volatile.
Twenty months
later, Irene was born. She was the pretty child, resembling her
mother with her dark hair, bright brown eyes and soft olive complexion. She too
would have many of her father’s characteristics although her willfulness
would never quite match, or more specifically, overwhelm his ... or her sister’s.
When the girls
were barely teenagers (and still at father’s insistence,
sharing the same bed and room), Mayer moved his family to California where he
set up production offices in the old Col. Selig Zoo on Mission Road (where he
met Leo the Lion) in what is now downtown Los Angeles. Within four years the
hyperactive producer merged his fledgling company with Marcus Loew’s floundering
Metro Pictures and Sam Goldwyn’s bankrupt production company, creating
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
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| The
first great epic of the newly formed MGM
was an already in production Ben Hur which
was hemorrhaging money. Mayer went to Italy
to try to salvage it, taking (left
to right)
Margaret, Irene, and Edie (striking a pose). |
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Although the sisters were children of the industry, their father was vigilantly
protective. When they traveled with him to Germany to meet the director Mauritz
Stiller and his protégé, the young unknown and then overweight Greta Garbo, the closest they came to the actress (who was a couple of years
younger) was in sharing an elevator. Once while sitting in front of the house
on the beach in Santa Monica, Joan Crawford (also younger than
they) came jogging
by in shorts and a cotton blouse (“with no bra underneathe”). They
invited her in for lunch. Later when their father heard about it, he exploded
in rage: “How dare you socialize with an actress!”
Irene was intimidated
by her father’s outburst but Edie fought back: “Why
don’t you lock me up in a convent and throw away the key if you want me
to be the Virgin Mary?!” she yelled back at her father.
Although the two were always together, they couldn’t have been more incompatible.
Edie liked clothes and makeup and romantic novels. She dreamed of running away
to New York to become an actress on the stage. She took her fantasies seriously
and was oblivious to Irene’s ridiculing them. As it happened, the special
attention she received as a child when she was asthmatic, she was able to garner
all her life. Irene, on the other hand, dreamed of a serious life – she
wanted to go away to college – to Vassar or Smith or Radcliffe and become
a scientist.
However because of their possessive father, the only life the girls had was the
picture business. They went to every screening, every preview that he did. They
learned story and camera technique like pros. Irene was interested. Edie just
wanted to be a star, preferably like Norma Talmadge. Soon Irene
had the reputation in the community for being the smart one. When her father
said “if she
had been a man she could have run a studio,” she was flattered but resentful
also. The resentment, however, was focused on Edie whom Irene considered selfish,
vain and silly.
“Mr. Mayer,” according to screenwriter/playwright Leonard
Gershe, “handled
Edie and Irene the same way he handled everybody else: divide and conquer.”
He was effective.
Both girls went after their goals and objectives ferociously and
competitively, always mindful of the other and especially “who Dad
loved the most.” The opinions were mixed. Friends of Irene’s felt
it was she who Dad loved the most. On the other hand, Jack Cummings, Mayer’s
nephew (by his sister Ida) felt it was unquestionably Edie. Jean Howard agreed: “It
was Edie; he adored Edie.” Lillian Burns Sidney, the only woman executive
at the studio and perhaps the only one who openly opposed him when she disagreed,
rejected both assessments: “The only person he ever loved was himself.
He was a great filmmaker but a completely selfish, self-centered man.”
The sisters’ rivalry affected every area of their lives although publicly
they always put up a front. Louis and Margaret doted on Edie and her “frail” health.
This galled Irene. But by the time they were young women, Irene was the popular
one with the young set like the Thalbergs, Selznicks and Schulbergs.
She was
the one Mr. Hearst would invite to visit and talk with him when
he was in residence
at Marion Davies' beachhouse up the road. She was also the first
to be asked out
on a date.
However, if
Edie didn’t have a date, Irene couldn’t go. That was
Dad’s edict. Furthermore, Edie never seemed humbled by her lack of popularity.
She appeared not even to notice. In fact, as she matured, in Irene’s eyes,
Edie became more self-centered, more self-obsessed and more demanding; not to
mention impatient with Irene’s resentments. “I don’t know why
Irene was always so jealous of me,” she would say decades later, feigning
innocence, ignoring her sister’s rage.
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| On April
29, 1930, a little more than a month
after Edie married Bill Goetz, Irene and
David
married. L. to r.: LB Mayer,
Irene, David Selznick,
and Margaret Mayer. |
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The final blow
for Irene came when she was twenty-two and David Selznick asked
her to marry him. Dad was not pleased. But instead of rejecting the idea, he
set a condition: that they wait until Edie married. Irene was outraged; Edie
didn’t even have a steady boyfriend. And as far as she was concerned, Edie
might never have a steady boyfriend: “Who could put up with her?” she
wrote in her memoir a half century later, still seething at the thought of it.
As luck would have it for all parties, Billy Goetz came along. Irene wrote in
her memoir that it was arranged between Dad and Harry Goetz – Billy’s
oldest brother – that both men would kick in $500 a month for living expenses
for the couple. Wedding plans were made. Dad had bought his princess a prince.
600 attended Edie and Billy’s wedding. Irene was maid of honor and the
ten bridesmaids were all MGM stars – including Marion Davies, Vilma
Banky,
Clara Bow, Billie Dove and Carmel Myers. Edie’s
heroine Norma Talmadge
and her husband Gilbert Roland lent the newlyweds their apartment and gave them
a cook for a year. Dad provided a car and a chauffeur (Edie never learned to
drive either).
All Hollywood competed in the lavish gift-giving to the newlyweds. Irene noted
in her memoir that it was the first indication their father ever had of his importance
in the community. Mr. Hearst who had an independent production company (for Miss
Davies) at Metro, saw to it that the Hearst papers gave extensive coverage to
the marriage of the “filmland princess.”
A month later,
David and Irene were married in a contrastingly simple wedding.
David’s brother Myron (the agent who brought Vivian
Leigh to David to play Scarlett O’Hara) was best
man. Edie was matron of honor.
The 1930s were the decade of the Young Selznicks. David was head of production
at RKO. It was he who first signed up Fred Astaire (whose dance team with his
sister Adele – considered the star of the two – had broken up when
she married an English marquis). For a short while, David went over to his father-in-law’s
studio and then teamed up with Jock Whitney with his efforts culminating in “Gone
With the Wind.”
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LB
Mayer and his son-in-law Bill Goetz
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Still in their
twenties, they entertained on a grand scale, and always exclusively
for Irene was her own brand of snob: “how can you invite him?” she
once asked a friend who’d included Julius J. Epstein (“Casablanca”)
on her guest list; “he’s just a writer!”
1939 was the greatest year in the history of filmmaking in the 20th century.
It was MGM’s greatest year and for Edie’s brother-in-law David, it
was the year of “Gone With the Wind,” still arguably the most popular
movie of the century. The decade of the 30s for the Goetzes, however, was slow
going, comparatively. There were no “achievements” in the picture
business for Billy Goetz who was, instead, the butt of the famous Hollywood remark
about “the son-in-law also rises.”
Stay tuned for the Final Chapter tomorrow |
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