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.
MABEL NORMAND