Books, Arts & Manners: Uncle Sam’s Cabana

Goldwyn, by A. Scott Berg (Knopf, 579 pp., $24.95)

Many readers will begin A. Scott Berg’s thorough and entertaining new biography, Goldwyn, expecting, as this reviewer did, to detest the subject. Samuel Goldwyn, formerly Samuel Goldfish and originally Schmeul Gelbfisz, born in Warsaw’s Jewish quarter in 1879, was a ruthless, occasionally paranoid megalomaniac who hated his ancestral roots. He was ashamed of his ghetto relatives (although he kept many of them on allowances), and in later life, when asked to help start a film industry in newly independent Israel, he barked, “My God, there are enough rotten Jews in Hollywood!” Fate was just, however, for Goldwyn’s second (and last) wife, Frances, was a beautiful but neurotic Midwestern Catholic whose mother, an unhinged anti-Semite who, among other things, raised turkeys in her living room, nearly outlived her nonagenarian son-in-law, whom she usually dismissed as “that Oriental.” In the last irony of a long life, Goldwyn was buried next to her in the family vault.

AB

About the Author

Aram Bakshian Jr.

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Goldwyn, by A. Scott Berg (Knopf, 579 pp., $24.95)

Many readers will begin A. Scott Berg’s thorough and entertaining new biography, Goldwyn, expecting, as this reviewer did, to detest the subject. Samuel Goldwyn, formerly Samuel Goldfish and originally Schmeul Gelbfisz, born in Warsaw’s Jewish quarter in 1879, was a ruthless, occasionally paranoid megalomaniac who hated his ancestral roots. He was ashamed of his ghetto relatives (although he kept many of them on allowances), and in later life, when asked to help start a film industry in newly independent Israel, he barked, “My God, there are enough rotten Jews in Hollywood!” Fate was just, however, for Goldwyn’s second (and last) wife, Frances, was a beautiful but neurotic Midwestern Catholic whose mother, an unhinged anti-Semite who, among other things, raised turkeys in her living room, nearly outlived her nonagenarian son-in-law, whom she usually dismissed as “that Oriental.” In the last irony of a long life, Goldwyn was buried next to her in the family vault.