I
n the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the legendary producer Samuel Goldwyn achieved the greatest success of his fabled career – which had begun with the making of Hollywood’s first feature-length film (a 1914 western called The Squaw Man, directed by the novice Cecil B. DeMille) and which included such classics as Wuthering Heights and The Pride of the Yankees. Except for his failure to master the English language (which resulted in such famous “Goldwynisms” as “Include me out!”), Goldwyn had long since shed all traces of his impoverished beginnings a world away from Hollywood. Schmuel Gelbfisz, a Hasidic Jew born into poverty and squalor in Warsaw in 1879, had walked across Europe as a teenager, sailed to America, reinvented himself as a complete gentleman dressed in Savile Row suits and founded a motion-picture dynasty. His 68th production, The Best Years of Our Lives – inspired by a TIME magazine article about soldiers coming home from the Second World War and trying to adjust to civilian life – became a blockbuster hit, the highest-grossing film of 1946 and his greatest commercial success ever.
Nominated for eight Academy Awards, Best Years won seven of them, including Best Picture. Crowning that year’s Oscar ceremony, Goldwyn received the Irving G. Thalberg Award for his body of work. After the night’s celebrations, the chauffeur drove Goldwyn and his wife, Frances, home to their Beverly Hills mansion. She waited upstairs for Sam to come to bed; and when he did not, she searched the house. Frances found him sitting in the living room, alone in the dark – his Oscar in one hand and his Thalberg in the other – sobbing. Goldwyn considered the trophies a curse. He had long preached to his son, Samuel, Jr., that the higher you climbed, the harder you would fall. While Goldwyn had a few promising movies in the works, he immediately felt Best Years marked the end of his own best years. With labour troubles arising in Hollywood, McCarthyism strangling the studios (a movement Goldwyn resisted) and the threat of television killing attendance at movie theatres, Goldwyn sank into a serious depression. He received help from a remarkable therapist named Hilde Berl, a diminutive Austrian trained in graphology. She periodically appeared in New York and Los Angeles, where