Jetta Goudal (Her first name is
pronounced ZHET-eh) was a star in films silent era, or at least she was until
she sued movie mogul Cecil B. DeMille
for breach of contract. Adding insult to injury, she won the suit. Not that it
mattered, it was a pyrrhic victory at best. Her career was over the second she
sued DeMille.
Goudal was born the daughter of
Mozes Goudeket, a wealthy, orthodox Jewish diamond cutter in the Jordanian
neighborhood of Gou, Amsterdam, Holland although she went through her life
denying she was Jewish and claiming to be French or French-Canadian. She denied
her birth father and said that she was the daughter of Maurice Guillaume
Goudal, a fictional European lawyer. She also lied about her age claiming she
was born in Paris in 1910, making her ten years younger than she actually was.
Goudal left Europe and appeared
on Broadway in 1921 but she was made to be filmed. She was beautiful, tall and
regal and when the legendary producer/director Cecil B. DeMille saw her in two
small roles, he was mesmerized by her and placed her in four big films made
between 1925 and 1927. The films were
successful, but Goudal was known far and wide across Hollywood as an extremely
difficult talent to work with, a screamer with an inexhaustible temper.
Her ultra-diva mood cost the
studio money because she delayed filming by complaining over every conceivable
aspect of movie making, from her lines to scenery. Rather than deal with her
any more, DeMille her contract and fired her.
Her fits of rage had already
gotten her fired from two other smaller studios with Goudal suing them for a
breach of contract. In turn, Goudal sued DeMille for breach of contract, saying
“I came here as a foreigner: I had not been married or divorced: there was no
scandal attached to my name. They had to say something about me, so the
publicity departments wrote stories of their own fantasy and called me
temperamental and hard to handle. They ended up believing their own creations.”
She won the suit largely because
DeMille couldn’t provide proof that Goudal had cost him tens of thousands in
production money. It wasn’t that he didn’t have the records to prove the cost,
it was that the studios didn’t want their peculiar and shady finances made
public, so they let Goudal win the battle, but they won the war. (The court
granted her $31,000 in damages, a very substantial amount of money at the time,
about a half a million dollars today)
After the suit, the studios
closed ranks on Goudal, not that anyone wanted to hire her anyway, her temper
tantrums had sealed that fate, but also because by then, sound had been added to film, and Goudal’s
thick accent made her almost impossible to understand in person and wouldn’t
work at all on film.
She did make a few more films but
by 1932, her once-promising career was over.
Goudal married art director Harold Grieve and left films forever. The
couple ran a successful interior design business in Hollywood for decades. In
the 1940s, Goudal lost nearly all her relatives in the Holocaust. Her sister
Bertha died in a concentration camp in 1945. Bertha’s husband died at the same
camp a year earlier. Jetta's 82-year-old father, her step-mother and nephew
were killed at Sobibór extermination camp.
Always plagued by health problems
and a heart condition, Jetta Goudal's
last years were grim. In 1973, a fall left her an invalid. She died 12
years later, in 1985.
Just because someone’s name
appeared in Red Channels, that doesn’t mean they were blacklisted. It just
means there name appeared in Red Channels.
Just because a person said they
were blacklisted doesn’t mean they were. Many people in Hollywood have lied about
being blacklisted over the years.
If a person was actually blacklisted…and not
many were actually blacklisted….it was the studios and TV sponsors who
blacklisted them. Not the United States federal government.
If a person claims the blacklist
ruined their career, they should be able to prove they had a career before the
blacklist.