The Directors: Edmund Goulding

He is not so well-known today but in Hollywood of the 1920s and 30s he was an eccentric genius whose name was to be reckoned with.  He became well-known for directing a number of highly-polished movies with their well-crafted stories and compelling characters.  Friends and neighbors and coworkers and more than a few sailors and construction workers and European royalty knew him as the host of some of the greatest gay orgies Tinseltown was ever to know.  

Edmund Goulding was the exemplar of good taste in the thirties at MGM with his so-called women's pictures.  All through his career he worked with many of Hollywood's top actresses and he was a favorite to a number of them.  He was known as an actor's director.

He helmed drawing room comedies and turned out solid dramas, weepy romances, anti-war films and big-budget literary adaptations.  He would one day pull off one of the great black-hearted film noirs.  He would be best remembered, however, as the director of one of the greatest movie events of the Depression.  

Some 37 movies were directed by Goulding.  We are highlighting fewer than half of them.  They work out to be the ones I have seen and, in the main, liked.  Several are remarkably well-done.  There is one for which I have great affection. 

So why isn't he well-known by the public?  Goulding kept a very low-profile.  He was very similar in many ways to his director friend and rival George Cukor but Cukor trafficked in some personal fame while Goulding ran from it.  

Even as an actor he hadn't sought fame and now as a director he wanted it even less so.  His notoriety around Hollywood was fame enough but he couldn't stand to think the world at large knew about his personal life.

It's said that Goulding was bisexual but more to the point he was homosexual.  From 1931-35 he was married to a friend who was dying of tuberculosis and he wanted to bring her some comfort that his bank account could provide.  It's unlikely the union was consummated and they never lived together.  He liked guys and he loved throwing those, you know, parties.  We'll get back to them but first, let's handle his beginnings.

Born in London in 1891 his father flew the coop early on but Mama became mother, father, friend, mentor, confidante and stage mother.  She was a theater devotee who had Eddie singing on the stage at nine.  Singing led to acting and he filled up his teenage years appearing in a number of stage productions.  In due time he also took up playwriting and directing.

When Germany declared war on Britain in 1914, Goulding joined the fight.  He was wounded twice and honorably discharged in 1915.  Later that year he moved to New York City and got a gig singing in an opera.  After a brief reenlistment in the war, he started work for David O. Selznick at his east coast studios as a cutter but he also started writing screenplays.  He wrote two successful stories for actor Eugene O'Brien who became his lover.

He made a lot of gay and business connections in New York and in 1922 he used some of those connections to facilitate his move to Los Angeles.  The same year he wrote a seafaring novel, Fury, which became a runaway best-seller.  He fell rather easily into movie directing, silents, of course.  He also fell rather easily into the gay milieu so vibrant in the city.  Of course there was no code so movies were pretty much anything goes.

Goulding (l) and his pal Norman Kerry

Goulding was often seen in the company of actor Norman Kerry (who, in turn, was a close friend of Valentino's).  Goulding and handsome actor William Haines tripped the light fantastic as often as they could.  Goulding, Cukor, and James Whale (the subject of 1998's Gods and Monsters) threw elaborate parties that were a must if you played or were at least open-minded.  Cukor was apparently awestruck when he first met the more accomplished Goulding.

Soon he was palling around with Garbo, Dietrich, Noel Coward, Louise Brooks, Cole Porter, Cecil Beaton and all those who were habitués at Alla Nazimova's Garden of Allah, the converted-home-into-hotel-sex-den frequented by horny rich folks the world over.

Goulding's own parties flourished.  They were guaranteed holiday traditions but they were far more frequent than that.  The parties were legendary... there could be no other word.  Guests included men and women, gay and straight, kinky or standard issue.  About the only rule was that if one said no, it was no, move on.  One 99-year old guest, unaware as she was, called the party a seamy, lecherous world.  Another said sexual excesses were rampant. 

Goulding's drinking and drug use was whispered about in Hollywood for years.  He could be a very difficult man when he was the subject of gossip.  If one didn't partake in all events at the parties, one could watch most anything.  One thing always noticeable was that the host himself like to direct events at his parties.  He moved from room-to-room, I guess, giving pointers.  

Goulding was enjoying his boys and his anonymity outside of the industry and then it happened.  It was almost crushing... the bright lights, his name in Hollywood columns, being spotted in public.  He was not expecting such fame and it was unwelcomed.  But really, was he new in town?  What was he expecting when MGM gave him such a plum assignment?

John Barrymore and Garbo

People come.  People go.  Nothing ever happens.  So it was said about Grand Hotel (1932), a plush Berlin establishment where we nose around into the lives of a few of the more colorful guests.  The story was nothing out of the ordinary but the cast most certainly was.  The public went ape over seeing  Garbo, John and Lionel Barrymore, Joan Crawford and Wallace Beery in one movie.  Well, MGM could afford it and it was top drawer at every turn.  Every once in a while a single movie would make its director a star in his own right and that's what happened to Edmund Goulding.  

A Night at the Opera (1935) is probably the best Marx Brothers movie of them all.  It was Groucho's favorite.  While I wasn't especially enamored of thirties' films and the Marx Brothers were low on the totem pole as well, I confess I laughed my ass off.  Of all the films listed here, it is the one for which Goulding gets the least credit as he only directed a  few scenes for ailing director Sam Wood.

At one point in 1935 unsavory news of Goulding's parties attracted the attention of the police and others that caused MGM boss Irving Thalberg to send Goulding off to Europe until the furor died down. 

By 1937 he was encamped at Warner Brothers.  While he was  clearly a director more suited to the luxury and pastels of MGM and most certainly not of the rowdy, hard-nosed Warner camp, Goulding teamed up with the queen of the lot, Bette Davis, for a few weepies, all critical successes.  I guess he wasn't a woman's director for no reason.  With the exception of William Wyler, no director served Davis as well as Goulding and she adored working with him. 

Their first collaboration was That Certain Woman (1937).  Henry Fonda is the leading man.  An overwrought soaper all the way, it's a remake of Goulding's own 1929 Gloria Swanson-starrer, The Trespasser.  It's the least interesting of their collaborations.

Adding a little variety Goulding did a war film.  I think The Dawn Patrol (1938) turned out to be a bit of a surprise hit.  All about British flying aces during WWI, it features Errol Flynn in one of his best roles as a squadron leader who can't stand to see his young pilots used in battle against experienced German fighters.  

Returning to the more familiar terrain of soap opera, Goulding steered Davis in two of her best of the period... Dark Victory and The Old Maid, both 1939.  Dark Victory, one of Davis's most famous movies, is a rather irresistible tearjerker concerning a haughty socialite who learns humility as she starts to go blind from a fatal illness.  Though it wasn't easy, Goulding said he got Ronald Reagan to add some gay touches to his character.

Boy, they pulled out all the stops for The Old Maid.  The story of warring cousins, a man they shared, a baby they shared and so many secrets, became a huge hit for Goulding, Davis and Warner Bros.  The antagonism onscreen between Davis and Miriam Hopkins paled in comparison to the ruckus they created off screen.  Hopkins was green with jealousy over Davis's success and she hated Davis for sleeping with Hopkins's husband.  Goulding tried to intervene but said they were too much for him. The studio loved it and played it up until ticketbuyers practically shoved each other to get into the theater first.  

Davis & Hopkins poking fun at their dark relationship

The Great Lie (1941) felt more like a Wyler-Davis collaboration but Davis knew she was in good hands with a sensitive director like Goulding.  This time Davis was pitted against Mary Astor (who won an Oscar for her role... take that, Queen Bette) as a pregnant concert pianist who exploits Davis's kindness.

Goulding started filming Old Acquaintance (1943), once again with Davis and Hopkins, but he apparently couldn't stand the friction between the two actresses and rather than asking to be replaced, he feigned an illness that seemed to last as long as the film was in production.  He was replaced with Vincent Sherman.

We recently reviewed The Constant Nymph (1943), the story of a 14-year old in love with an older family friend.  It is rightly considered one of Goulding's best directorial achievements.  Despite those good notices, Goulding left WB afterwards... probably due to the problems on Old Acquaintance.

He then moved to 20th Century Fox where he would remain until the end of his career.  Nine films would be involved but only the first three were anything to shout about.  It's too bad his career sort of petered out at the end but he, of course, wouldn't be the only one who could lay claim to this.

By the mid-40's Goulding invited his mother and sister to live with him which they then did for years.  They knew to stay in their wing of the house during the parties.

Claudia (1943) was a hit when it was released but this marital comedy is quite dated by today's standards.  Dorothy McGuire plays a newlywed who misses her mother too much to be much of a wife to Robert Young and she negotiates all kinds of schemes to again live near her.

Goulding with Ty Power and Gene Tierney

Goulding's next two films, both with Tyrone Power, are my favorites of the director's works.  The Razor's Edge (1946) is a terrific version of Somerset Maugham's story of a man who gives up everything to pursue a spiritual quest.  A supporting cast including Gene Tierney, Anne Baxter, John Payne and Clifton Webb helped make this one a big crowd-pleaser.  Goulding told Power to keep it butch and for Webb to play it as a homosexual.  The three of them were buddies offscreen.

Power turned in the most unusual performance of his career in the dark noir Nightmare Alley (1947).  He is a carnival con man who outsmarts himself and suffers the consequences.  Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray and Helen Walker support Power all the way.

Linda Darnell and her director

After the darkness of the last project, Goulding opted for another comedy and Everybody Does It (1949) certainly has its moments.  The public had been clamoring for another Paul Douglas-Linda Darnell pairing after their boisterous pairing in A Letter to Three Wives earlier in the year.  Fox wasted no time.  Here, Douglas's rich wife (Celeste Holm) decides to pursue an operatic career but finds she is lacking.  Around the same time opera star Darnell finds that Douglas has a wonderful voice which causes untold problems for the three of them.

Teenage Rebel (1956), despite its exploitative title, has some  appeal as a family struggles when a daughter's life unravels when her mother remarries.  I liked what it had to say and could even get through Ginger Rogers's occasional cornball dramatics.  

His swan song was a saccharine Pat Boone movie (was there any other kind?), Mardi Gras (1958), with Tommy Sands and Sheree North.  It was a sad ending to a rather storybook career.

A year after the release of Mardi Gras, Goulding died in Los Angeles at age 68.  I have read that he committed suicide but more accounts say that he died during heart surgery.

In the public's eye, some of his movies are well-known, often favorites.  But most would be hard-pressed to name the director.  In the movie industry, of course, he is known for the films he made and highly regarded for them.  But it's no secret among that crowd that he was better known for those wild parties.

Next posting:

A little something from the 90s