Hollywood by Garson Kanin Page B

screen it. Although he did not respond favorably, he was forcibly struck by its star, Anna Sten. He arranged to meet her, was further impressed, and soon had her under contract.
    Discussing the Anna Sten saga, he said to me one evening, “Everybody thought she was German, some people still think so. Maybe because she made all those big hits in the German movies. But no. She was Russian. Ukrainian. That’s right, she was born in Kiev. And she was on the stage in Russia. In Moscow, in fact. And she made movies there, too. But it wasn’t till she went to Berlin—I don’t know why, something with a husband—that she made her sensation…I tell you, you never know. The day I signed her I thought it was the greatest day of my whole career. I thought, ‘This is some star!’ She had everything. She had looks and style and sex and class. She had tremendous life and she could act like a son of a bitch…And we talked and talked for almost a year to try to figure out what we could make with her. She was a great actress, and a great actress has got to have a great part. And after a while we went to the classics. And somebody came up with Nana by Zola. A great story. A great part. I got two fine writers and I decided, for a woman’s story like this, why not a woman director? There was only one woman director in those days—Dorothy Arzner—and she was good. And my God, what a cast I got to surround her! Sten, I mean. Phillips Holmes, remember him? What a good-looking boy! Lionel Atwill, one of the greatest actors. And Richard Bennett, maybe the greatest actor. And even in the small parts, I had Mae Clarke, Reggie Owen, people like that. We didn’t spare a goddamn thing. Rodgers and f’Chrissake Hart even to write a song for the picture. But it didn’t go. I tell you, looking back on it, I think the original property was a mistake. We couldn’t do the real story because the censor wouldn’t let us. And when you tell a story, you’ve got to be true to the story. If you’re not true to the story, then don’t make it in the first place.”
    I said, “I read somewhere that you said she was—just a minute.” I took a note out of my pocket and read, “ ‘An actress whose beauty seems to have sprung from the soil, and whose intelligence is that of the instinctive artist and the earnest student of life.’ ”
    Goldwyn waved a hand at me in a deprecating way. “Some goddamn press agent,” he said. “Probably Pete Smith.”
    “Pete Smith, the comic? The one who does those great one-reelers?”
    “That’s the fellow. He used to be my press agent. He was a good press agent. Listen, I made him into a good press agent. He made himself into a lousy comic. That’s how people are. They don’t know what to do with themselves.”
    “Well, then what happened with Anna Sten?”
    “Who knows? Another goddamn classic we had to go for, in fact another goddamn Russian classic, how do you like that ? I must’ve been crazy that year. We took the Tolstoy book Resurrection . We figured nobody would know what that means, that title. In fact, they wouldn’t even know how to pronounce it. So we called it We Live Again . Amounts to the same thing. And you talk about writers. Did I have writers on that one! Preston Sturges. Maxwell Anderson. I can’t even remember who else. I got her Fredric March, how do you like that ? He was about the best actor around in the movies at that time. So what happened? Great reviews and no business…Then Eddie Knopf did an original and I got her King Vidor and I gave her Gary Cooper. The Wedding Night , that was the name of it. So what happened? Again, nothing. In fact, more nothing than before even…Well, I don’t know much about baseball, but I know that three strikes is ‘Out.’ So we had a few meetings. Pleasant. They were nice people. Anna and her husband and me. And we all decided we should call it quits…I look back now. That night, I sat in that room and I saw that goddamn Karamazov thing and