Motion picture actors and actresses; Motion pictures
Somewhat less than two years after America’s entrance into the War our
pay-roll was ninety thousand dollars. How to meet it--here was the
question which tortured every waking hour. At last I felt it incumbent
upon me, as the largest single stockholder in the company, and as the
individual in our group personally responsible for loans amounting to
eight or nine hundred thousand dollars, to lay the whole situation
frankly before my associates. With one accord they advised that the
company should go into the hands of a receiver.
I could not sleep that night when everything which I had been building
for the past years threatened to go down with the morrow. Money,
credit, my reputation as a producer--how, how was I to save them?
Spent by my vigil I arrived in my office the next morning.
Here after a talk with Mr. Schay, the controller of our company, it
seemed to me that the one reprieve of which I had thought during the
night was really available. The reprieve was this. We had branches in
twenty-five different cities. Each branch represented two or three
thousand dollars of ready money. By removing the total amount from all
of them we should be enabled to meet one week’s pay-roll.
“And how about next week?” asked the controller.
I shrugged my shoulders. But inside I was thinking fiercely that
something had to happen.
It did. The very next week the armistice was signed. From this moment
the entire complexion of the picture situation changed. Shipments to
Europe came about almost immediately. Other difficulties cleared away.
It was not long before the Du Ponts, of Wilmington, and other prominent
financiers invested seven million dollars cash in the Goldwyn Company.
With this new capitalisation all my financial struggles ended. To-day
the organisation which bears my name is one of the three largest
companies in the world.
One day, while the receivership was threatening, Mabel Normand came
up to my desk and handed me a long envelope. “What is this?” I asked
her.
[Illustration: MABEL NORMAND
Whom Mr. Goldwyn pronounces the greatest comédienne in the world.]
[Illustration: MAXINE ELLIOTT
As she appeared in “The Eternal Magdalene” in 1917.]
“My Liberty bonds,” she answered, “There are only fifty thousand
dollars worth of them, but if they will tide you over you may have
them.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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