Hollywood Saga (1939)

CHAPTER I In the late summer of 1913, four young men were having lunch together at the Hotel Claridge on Forty-fourth Street and Broadway. The quartet was destined to make motion-picture history, though none of them suspected it. The group consisted of two theatrical men, a glove salesman and a lawyer 5 their ages ran from twenty-six to thirtytwo. The theater was represented by my younger brother, Cecil B. deMille, and his friend, Jesse L. Lasky; the glove salesman was Lasky’s brother-in-law, Sam Goldfish, now known as Samuel Goldwyn through his having combined his name with that of the brothers Selwyn in a wise choice of syllables 5 and the lawyer was Arthur Friend, an intimate crony of the other three. Times had been hard that summer both for Cecil and for Jesse. In the years just preceding, Cecil had abandoned his profession of acting because he was determined to be a producer in the theater. He had produced a succession of plays, ranging from cheap melodrama to high-class comedy, all of which had at least one element in common : a complete lack of power to please the public. He had been more successful in producing for Lasky several brief operettas in vaudeville, but at the moment the world looked dark 5 his latest play had followed its predecessors into oblivion and his bank account suggested the deep, red glow of a western sunset. Jesse Lasky, too, was feeling far from optimistic. He had 35