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Hollywood
Lives: The First Family
This weekend I finished
Scott Eyman’s
book Lion of Hollywood; The Life and Legend of Louis
B. Mayer. I
picked up this book on the recommendation of the aforementioned Mr. Rogers who
had told me that he “couldn’t put it down,” and that I “was
all over the book.” That’s hyperbole, of course; but I’d forgotten
that the author interviewed me a few years ago about the Mayers/Goetzes/Selznicksand had also read a piece I wrote for Quest on the Mayer sisters – Edie
Goetz (pronounced gets) and Irene Selznick – called Sisters
of Celluloid,
back in 1994. I’ll reprint it here on these pages one of these days as
it’s a classic tale of sibling rivalry enhanced by its environment (Hollywood/Movie
stars/ Broadway/ New York/Society), fame and fortune.
I had the
great good fortune during my years spent living in Los Angeles to meet
and learn much about the history of the creators and principals of motion picture
business. This came through social connections that I’d forged out there,
and also through working with Debbie Reynolds on her autobiography (Debbie;
My
Life – William Morrow 1988) as Debbie was one of the very last of the stars
developed and under contract to MGM in the last days of L.B. Mayer’s twenty-five
year reign as head of the Studio that bore his name.
I’d also
been recommended for that assignment by a woman named Lillian
Burns Sidney who was a close adviser to Debbie and who’d worked from 1938
through 1952 as Acting Coach at the Studio and had a great deal of influence
on matters of talent and the politics of the talent with “Mr. Mayer” as
she always referred to him.
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DPC
with Lillian Sidney at a book party for Debbie
Reynold's Debbie; My Life. Los Angeles,
1988.
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Interestingly
Lillian, whom many of the actors and actresses called “Burnsie” (she
was married throughout most of those years to director George Sidney)
does not
come off as influential in the Eyman book as I knew her to have been – but
more about that later.
When I was working on Debbie’s book, Lillian directed me
toward many individuals
who’d worked at the Studio, as well as others in the industry in order
to
research Debbie’s career. She was also a fount of information about “the
picture business” as she and so many others called it.
I met Edie Goetz about 1980 through our mutual friend Luis
Estevez,
the fashion designer who had a business in Los Angeles and was
an active member of the social
scene of the movie colony as well as the international jet set. Edie was very
fond of Luis, and it was at his request – because he knew about my intense
curiosity about matters historical – that she first agreed to meet me.
She had been, for many years – mainly the 1940s through the late 1960s
– the leading hostess in Hollywood. She had come to this position via her birthright – eldest
daughter of L.B. Mayer, and more specifically succeeded her sister Irene who
had divorced producer David Selznick and moved to New York where she became a
successful theatrical producer.
Edie’s position was taken very seriously even by those who
pooh-poohed it (and there were lots of those). Edie was never without
controversy as number
one Hollywood princess, but the late Jean Howard, now famous
for her beautiful photographic anthologies of that time in the movie business,
once the focus of
LB Mayer’s libidinous desires and later married to the great and powerful
agent Charlie Feldman, put it succinctly to me: “They all talked about
Edie behind her back but they kissed her ass to be invited.” The late Billy
Wilder also told me that despite what people said about Edie, “it
was a
lot of fun at the end of the day at the studio to go to the Goetzes’ to
dinner.”
Scott Eyman’s biography is not only a story of a man and
his family, but of an industry, a studio, its players, its employees,
its stars and the development
of popular American culture that exists today in a thousand different ways. Anyone
who is a fan of film and/or movie stars, or a student of 20th-century American
culture should love this book which is a perfectly appropriate mixture of technical,
financial, psychological, creative and sociological information about what now
appears to have been a magical time in the arts. In my experience reading it,
I learned more not only about the genius and personality of Louis B. Mayer, his
brethren, his exponents, but about “how he did it,” how he became
King of Hollywood, the Lion of Hollywood.
The Family. “He was hungry, always hungry” is the first line of Eyman’s
biography of Mayer. He was born with the family name of Baer or Maer, the given
name of Lazar, sometime in early July in 1884 or 85. He later, as Louis B. Mayer
chose the birthdate of the Fourth of July, 1885, a direct reflection of his profound
sense of patriotism. His father was Russian Jewish and his mother was of Jewish
origins from Austro-Hungary. His father and mother and their children emigrated
to Saint John’s, New Brunswick, Canada sometime in the late 1880s, early
1890s.
As a young boy, he helped support the family as a collector, a
scavenger really, of metal scrap. From an early age, however, his
ambition, his hardscrabble scrappiness
shone through. After a hard day’s work, however, the kid would go to the
local theatre to watch vaudeville. He loved show business. For him it stimulated
dreams of a better, bigger life.
In 1904 he left New Brunswick and moved to Boston where he met
Margaret Shenberg, a very pretty young daughter of a kosher butcher.
They married and their first
child, Edith was born over Hyman Shenberg’s butcher shop
on August 13, 1905. Soon after, the young family moved to Brooklyn where Mayer
continued his
business of acquiring junk. Two years later Irene was born on April 2, 1907,
and shortly thereafter the family moved back to Boston.
That same year, he went into the theatre business, leasing a small,
vacant burlesque house called The Gem in Haverhill, Massachusetts,
a milltown of 45,000 with more
than 30 shoe factories. Louis’ first theatre was known theretofore as “The
Garlic Box.” But he cleaned it up, redecorated and renamed it The Orpheum.
He made a special “ladies’ section,” raised the ticket price
from a nickel to ten and fifteen cents and opened at Christmastime with a film
called “The Passion Play.”
Three years later, when this photograph of Margaret Mayer and
her two daughters was taken, the 25-year-old Louis was on his way.
Seven years later, the young
father on the beach with his two beloved daughters, had already incorporated
the Louis B. Mayer Company in New York “to purchase, lease, license, sell,
produce, manage, operate and exhibit plays, dramas, operas, musicals” with
an office in New York. The year before he had pawned everything he owned to acquire
the New England rights to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. He would later
claim he made a million dollars off that picture. Whatever it was, it was the
beginning of his fortune. |
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Clockwise
from above: Margaret Mayer and her two daughters
Irene and Edie, c. 1911; Louis B. Mayer with Irene
and Edie at the beach in Winthrop, Mass, 1917;
Margaret and Louis B. Mayer at Marion
Davies.'
Santa Monica beach house, c. 1935.
Below: Irving Thalberg and his wife Norma
Shearer with Louis Mayer on the MGM lot in Culver
City, c. 1936. |
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In 1918,
he moved his family to Los Angeles, joining the burgeoning
film industry and started Louis B. Mayer Productions. That
same year Edie caught the Spanish flu that was epidemic and
had killed millions across the world. The Southern California
climate was also a magnet for the father’s concern for
his daughter’s health. In 1924 he merged with theatre
owner Marcus Loew’s Metro and Goldwyn
companies to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The merger was Mayer’s
lucky strike. It gave him acquisition to the Goldwyn lot in
Culver City and what would become the world famous home of
the Studio, and a business partnership with the man who would
become known as the wunderkind of the film business – Irving
Thalberg (pictured above) with their MGM
star, and later Thalberg’s
wife, Norma Shearer. It also brought the forty-year-old film
producer
a business relationship with William Randolph Hearst, the most
powerful newspaper publisher in the country. Margaret and Louis Mayer are shown
here at a party at the 107 room Santa Monica
beachhouse of Hearst’s mistress, the MGM star, Marion Davies.
The family was closeknit. Mayer was a devoted and adoring
father and husband. Always together, they saw every film their father saw. They
were reared on the business and traveled to New York and Europe with him on his
search for talent, and met everyone when he did.
The girls, however, were like oil and water. Irene adopted her father’s
interest in production as a business. Edie, however, saw herself on the other
side of the camera. Always known as Edi-la to her father, she had been naturally
coddled because of her near-fatal illness at 13. Although Irene looked like her
mother and was the naturally pretty daughter, Edie was by nature self-centered
and vain and had romantic notions of being an actress, a star, fashioning her
image after Norma Talmadge, the silent screen star.
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Irene
and Edie in a rare intimate moment of sisterhood,
1929.
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By their early
20s, still kept under the watchful eye of their Victorian father,
who now headed the most successful studio in Hollywood, they were
both looking to get out from under his thumb in the only way available
to them: marriage. Irene wanted to marry David Selznick, son of
a former competitor of Mayer’s and a budding film producer.
Mayer decreed that Irene couldn’t marry until her “older” sister
was married. Irene later claimed that her father “negotiated” with
the Goetz brothers’ (who owned a film lab in Hollywood)
to “arrange” a marriage between their youngest brother William and
his eldest daughter. However it came about, in March 1930, Edith Mayer married William
Goetz in a ceremony that brought out the crème de la crème
of the motion picture industry and was attended by hundreds. Several weeks later,
Irene married David Selznick in a much smaller simpler wedding, as was her wish.
For wedding gifts, the sisters were each given a house of their choice. Edie
chose a Normandy-style stucco mansion designed by Wallace Neff in
Bel Air. Irene chose a Georgian-style brick mansion designed for her by Roland
Coate across from Douglas
Fairbanks and Mary Pickford’s estate in Beverly Hills.
In short time, the Selznicks became the hot young couple in the Hollywood firmament.
Of the two brothers-in-law, Selznick was the comer. Billy Goetz, while popular
and well-liked,
was regarded as secondary and although he came from an “industry” family,
he clearly did not have Selznick’s appetite (and even lust) for the business.
So, although as daughters of L.B. Mayer, they had social power in the community,
David and Irene were the real stars and it was a reality that did not escape
Edie. |
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Dorothy
Paley with Irene
Selznick at Santa Anita in a photograph taken by Bill
Paley, 1938. |
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Here
Irene is shown at Santa Anita in a photograph taken with Dorothy
Paley by William Paley. The couple who were at the
time, one of the most sought after couples in New York were close friends of
the Selznicks. The Paleys, being “New York” were a rung above the
Hollywood Selznicks, and an important connection especially to Irene. Years later,
when the Paleys divorced, and he married Barbara “Babe” Cushing
Mortimer, Irene turned her back on Dorothy, later claiming that she
owed her allegiance to Jock Whitney, David Selznick’s
one-time partner, and brother-in-law of Babe Paley.
Part II tomorrow. |
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