“They designed an entire solar system in just six seconds. It took God six days, if you believe the Old Testament.”

—Gene Roddenberry in an interview

“It’s not his life, it’s a fairy story,” wrote John Dos Passos of the life of Sam Goldwyn in a documentary section of Mid-Century (1961). Even though Dos Passos had to depend almost entirely on canned “facts” and public relations handouts, together with an extended personal interview, his little seven-page section, “The Promised Land (old style),” manages to say more, more truly and deeply, than A. Scott Berg’s massive (580 pages), much-promoted, widely advertised, and extensively reviewed Goldwyn: A Biography. But the comparison and contrast is not quite fair. Dos Passos was a major writer. You don’t read Berg for the fine writing or for the refinement and depth of his perceptions; you read him for information he has gained and gleaned from years of honorable hard labor and for his undeniable knack at organizing and refining a heap of factual raw materials into some cumulative and chronological patterns. Dos Passos was dead right, though. The life of Schmuel Gelbfisz of Warsaw, Poland, who became Samuel Goldfish in Birmingham, England, and finally, in America, the one and only Samuel Goldwyn, can justly be taken as an old-fashioned fairy tale of magical transformation—sow’s ear into silk purse. It would make a pretty good movie, all in all, following the inexorable rise, from anonymous glovemaker to famous filmmaker, of a passionate, rootless, ruthless (and lucky) survivor who escapes from the grinding, almost hopeless material poverty of one country and century to find great wealth and eminence and some tokens of honor in another nation and century, ending his days at last physically “reduced to a vegetable,” as his son says. And although his actual bones rest and rot appropriately in opulent and vulgar Forest Lawn, there is a sad and symbolic sense in which he may be said to rest forever in an intellectual and spiritual potter’s field, that haunting place the dictionary describes as “a burial place for strangers and the friendless poor.” It could, thus, be a tragic tale, certainly a pathetic one, if Goldwyn had not also been so uniformly and famously funny—this biography has the greatest collection of “Goldwynisms” yet assembled—and, behind all the fun and games, if he were not so consistently and irresistibly wicked in his dealings with all other creatures great and small, friend and foe alike. And, too, if his line of work, almost wholly exploitative and parasitical, show business pure and simple, were not, after all is said and done, asserted and debated, essentially inconsequential.

Something else inhibits the shadows and undertones of pathos—our nostalgia for the rough and ready hard grabbers of an earlier, simpler time. It is so much easier to like Blackbeard the Pirate than Ivan Boesky, Captain Kidd than Donald Trump, Lucretia Borgia than Leona Helmsley. Slick contemporary corporate people, CEO’s and even the lesser lords and ladies, are boring (and dangerous to health and welfare) with a capital B. Sam Goldwyn lived and died as an Independent Producer. In the years between The Squaw Man (1914) and Porgy and Bess (1959) he produced a long list of picture shows, some of them pretty good, and one of them. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), earning him a belated Academy Award. Goldwyn knew and worked (and fought) with practically everybody in the history of Hollywood. (The photographs of them are well chosen, great and good fun.) And allowing for the enforced limits of seeing the world from a single, unheroic point of view, Goldwyn is a solid history of the movie business and, as well, of this nation that supported that business. There is an odd and interesting inversion there; for the movie industry thrived most when the nation’s economy was in worst shape and vice versa. It could be said, though it hasn’t been, that our national best interests and theirs are often contradictory. It is probably a good idea to compare and contrast Berg’s Goldwyn with more general recent histories, most pertinently Neal Gobler’s excellent An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. But Goldwyn is solid and scholarly and interesting and easy to read, worthy of all the excellent reviews it has been receiving; although the very best of these (so far), John Gregory Dunne’s “Goldwynism,” in The New York Review of Books (May 18, 1989), has serious reservations and revisions to make.

I, too, would like to make a couple of minor corrective points.

One of these has to do with the claim made by Berg, in his book and in a number of recent published interviews, that he has enjoyed nearly perfect freedom in the making of this book. Anybody who has ever done any biographical work knows that unless the subject has been dead for several centuries, only an unauthorized biography, built upon materials in the public domain and depending in no way on the resources and good will of the subject’s estate, can ever be “free.” Berg tells us that Samuel Goldwyn Jr. sought him out to write the biography and that he, Berg, refused the task unless he had complete access to all materials and freedom to call it any way he saw it. Well, maybe. Just maybe. But I kind of doubt it. In the absence of a published copy of the actual contract, we are asked to take this unlikely tale on faith. What Berg really tells us in the book is: “He [Goldwyn Jr.] assured me that he would make himself available to discuss his mother and father and that he would exercise no control over the contents of the biography.” It is virtually unheard of for anybody to relinquish all rights of review and revision; and chip off the old block Sam Jr. certainly seems an unlikely candidate to render himself highly vulnerable on the basis of some kind of vague authorial honor system. The old man probably never said, “A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.” But you can believe he could have.

Berg offers many of the warty details of Goldwyn’s life and career; so that, in a relative sense, Goldwyn is far removed from your typical puff job. But Berg remains uniformly kind to the memory of old Sam; and he is especially generous to (and unquestioning of) the life and times of Samuel Goldwyn Jr. Not that Berg has suppressed anything, or, anyway, anything we can know about; but the context he creates tends to understate the insatiable greed, the insufferable arrogance, the brutal indifference to the needs of others, including his own family, the chicanery and manipulation, the lying, stealing, and cheating that seem to have characterized old Goldwyn’s ways and means from the beginning to the end.

It is probable that Goldwyn was a somewhat better human being than most of the other old-timey Hollywood tycoons, but whether that should be emblazoned in heraldry remains to be seen. It can be and probably should be mentioned that these colorful, freebooting, claw-fingered barbarians who truly created the myth machine, the dream factory of Hollywood, these alien pirates of whom Goldwyn may have been the best man, are not entirely blameless in some serious matters of our social and cultural history. Sure, they fed us a diet of dreams and we paid them very well for the pleasure of it. But are not some of those dreams, whether formed out of ignorance or shrewd design, almost antithetical to the larger (truer?) American dream? Are not some of those dreams false and corrupt? Once upon a time there certainly was much more to the American dream than the ruthless, obsessive, and rapacious pursuit of success, status, riches, comfort, and celebrity. There were also, from our beginnings, the ideals, especially for the privileged and the lucky, of duty, honor, service, and sacrifice. And for all of us there was the dream of liberty, the hope for brotherhood and equality.

By their highly profitable art and by the example of their dedicated if dissolute lives, the Hollywood dream salesmen helped to change all that for the worse. And our generation has lived to witness a deadly serious confusion of show business and self-government, a world in which the distortions of publicity and contrived perception replace facts as, in Frost’s phrase, “the sweetest dream that labor knows.” Though, sooner or later, all skulls are reduced to smiling, Sam Goldwyn’s must be grinning broadly.

One of the most contemptible times of the Hollywood old-timers was “the McCarthy era.” It was show business, from the beginning, and it was chiefly Hollywood that fueled all the sad nonsense and created and kept the blacklists. There are strong hints in the subtext of Berg’s book that blacklisting was an old Hollywood tradition and a useful weapon in Goldwyn’s armory. Nowadays it is Hollywood that tells us, repeatedly, that the whole country was tainted and sick with “McCarthyism.” Maybe so; maybe not. But there can be not the least doubt that Hollywood was infected. According to Berg’s book, Sam Goldwyn, true to form and his guardian inner spirit, took and held the moral middle ground in this matter as in everything else that matters.

Well then. A lively, at times a fascinating story, a modern fairy tale where dungy straw is spun into threads of gold. Yet in a real sense Hollywood movies fail, the way Goldwyn, even at his finest, failed, by finally avoiding or anyway slighting the hard truths, by ignoring the really hard questions and hard sayings that are the very blood and guts of this nation, its people, and their aspirations. Blood and guts he could do without, though he once apologized to Thurber for making a story of his too “blood and thirsty.”

“It turned out just as he had dreamed,” Dos Passos writes. “He’d reached America and he’d made his fortune. It was what they called freedom.”

[Goldwyn: A Biography, by A. Scott Berg (New York: Alfred A. Knopf) 580 pp., $24.95]