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"Let Your Hair and Your Beard Grow": Dana Andrews on His First Meeting With Sam Goldwyn
From: Columbia University
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Columbia University Oral History Research Office |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Dana Andrews (1909-92) became famous in the 1940s as a leading man in such Hollywood films as The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). In the 1950s, he went on to star in My Foolish Heart (1950), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) and While the City Sleeps (1956). In this 1958 interview with the Columbia University Oral History Research Office, Andrews reminisces about his first meeting with studio head Samuel Goldwyn--who was so powerful that Andrews had to seek his permission before getting married. |
 he interview was really quite short. He had a picture--he obviously had in mind the idea of making a picture with Gary Cooper as Abraham Lincoln; I don't know what the play was--but I remember he had a picture of Gary Cooper made up as Abraham Lincoln, and while he was talking to me he was showing me this picture of Gary Cooper and asking me what I thought of Gary Cooper as Abraham Lincoln. I remember the big wart they had on his face, and the tie. He seemed very curious to get my opinion on this. I later learned from many years of experience with Mr. Goldwyn that this is one of his practices. He asks everybody, from the hairdresser on the set to the head of the business department, what they think about little things like hairdos, or whether a man's clothes fit properly, or questions about his personality. A lot of people say, "Goldwyn asks everybody what they think and then does what he thinks." But I think what he thinks is made up to some extent (or influenced, certainly) by what he hears from various people. |
Dana Andrews reminisces about Sam Goldwyn.
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It has been my experience--and I've heard the same from other actors--that Mr. Goldwyn is one of the easiest men to see. For one thing, he had only his own studio. He didn't make pictures for other studios. Independent Productions was one of the few early ones--David Selznick and Goldwyn, and I think Mr. Goldwyn was before David Selznick as an independent producer. He is the Goldwyn of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but he sold that name to them. About 25 years before, he had sold his interest in that, in the name. So all the time I was under contract to Goldwyn, 50 percent of the public thought that I was at MGM because of the name Goldwyn. |
I found him a good person to do business with. He's a very charming man. He's a very tough man to get along with at times. When his mind is made up, he will leave no stone unturned to get what he thinks is right, and I think this is commendable, in a way, but it can be very annoying when you think he's wrong. We had some very pleasant experiences, and I did some very fine pictures with him. |
The first picture I did was just a bit in a Western, only because they needed somebody and they wanted to break me into films. He was at that time having a lawsuit, or had had one, about how to break his contract with United Artists--with the Douglas Fairbanks—Mary Pickford—Charlie Chaplin combine--because of something that hadn't been foreseen when the contracts were made up: the fact that these partners could refrain from making motion pictures, and this is what had happened. Mr. Goldwyn was the only one that was making pictures. Chaplin and Pickford (and I think Harold Lloyd--I'm not sure) were just profiting from his pictures, and he tried to get out of the contract. This had been, apparently, very carefully drawn up, and there was no way for him to get out, so he was on a sit-down strike at the time that I went into his studio. He'd decided, "I won't make any pictures either, and then they'll do something about it, because there will be this overhead and no income." This was later resolved, so that he got out from under that particular burden. |
Consequently, I wasn't being cast in any pictures by him, though he was paying me a salary, a rather nice one--better than any of the young fellows I knew from Pasadena Playhouse were receiving, at least at first. Goldwyn wanted to farm me out. I kept working at the Pasadena Playhouse, with his permission. I later learned that a lot of the students there and the other participants in the plays were pretty envious of the credit line under my name, which said "Courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn." I did a lot of plays there at the time, because he couldn't sell me to other studios. They said, "Let Sam use him in his pictures"--but he wasn't making any, which they never thought about--"and then we'll use him." |
I was in a Western with Gary Cooper, for my first picture. I can remember a lot about it, it being my first picture. One of the things was that I got married. There was no warning about my being in the picture, because it didn't amount to much of anything, so I had planned with this girl I met at the Playhouse, whom I'd known for about two years, to get married. The amusing thing was that I had gone to Mr. Goldwyn's vice president in charge of the studio and told him I wanted to get married, and he said, "Look, you haven't worked in pictures yet, and we need a little publicity. What about squiring some girls around town to the nightclubs, so we can get a little publicity for you which will help you along? I would suggest you wait a while." |
This was not a dictum, but nevertheless I thought it was something that I should pay some attention to. I talked to the girl who is now my wife about it, and of course she was pretty much upset about the whole thing but conceded that possibly it was a good idea. So some months went by. I went to Rees Espey and said that I still wanted to get married, and he said, "Well, you're no good with the Hollywood nightlife. But why don't you talk to Sam? He'd like to feel that you thought enough of your responsibility to him to ask him." |
So I made an appointment with Mr. Goldwyn, and on the morning I was supposed to see him, at 10:30, I was there. He was held up for a little while, during which time they told me that I could walk around the studio and be back at 11:00. A fire occurred on the lot at the time, and the crowd gathered. James Roosevelt was working for Mr. Goldwyn then, and he was in looking at a picture, and there was a conflagration of some kind in the projection room. When a fire occurs in the studios of Hollywood, of course all the fire departments from everywhere descend upon it, because these things can go up in a second. They're very dry, mostly wood, all the soundstages. So with the people gathered around, the fire engines in all directions, and the terrific banging of an alarm that continued all through this, right over us, I looked across and saw Mr. Goldwyn, who motioned me to come over to him. |
With the firemen running by with their hoses, he said, "You want to talk to me?" I certainly thought I'd had a speech all prepared, about my wanting to get married and so on, how long I'd been going with this girl--I had it really worked out to a very fine point, with the clincher at the end and all that. I certainly didn't think this was the place to do it. I said, "Well, Mr. Goldwyn, if you don't mind, I'd rather wait and beard the lion in his den." |
He sort of smiled and took me by the arm and led me over two paces, which helped not at all, but away from the crowd just a little bit, and said, "Beard me now." |
So I blurted out that I wanted to get married and wanted to know what he thought about it. He smiled very benignly and said, "I'll think it over and let you know." |
Weeks went by. I thought he'd call me in a few days, or even the next day. Finally I decided I'd have to go to him instead. I was in the office, on some other business. I did this, I thought, very cleverly. I was walking away from him, and then I turned around and said as if it mattered not at all, "Oh, by the way, you remember my asking about my getting married?" |
He said, "Oh, I forgot all about it. Go ahead, that's fine." [Laughs.] |
Here were these two people, hanging on tenterhooks for weeks. It must have been four weeks. So we had arranged the wedding, and about a week before the wedding was planned, I got a call from the casting director: "Let your hair and your beard grow; you're going to be in a Western." |
So I had a week's growth of beard at my wedding, and in the society column of the Santa Monica paper (where my wife lived) there was a big picture of the two of us, me with this beard, and it said, "Mr. Andrews is an actor. Note the beard." |
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