Customer Reviews

Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was anxiously awaiting the publication of this book, and it was well worth the wait. Finally a book about the much maligned Louis B. Mayer that is balanced and objective.

While the book primarily is devoted to telling the story of how Mayer went from dealing in scrap metal to running the classiest movie studio in Hollywood (o.k., Culver City) and then describing Mayer's eventual fall from grace, a wide cast of characters fills out Mayer's story. This book relates commonly circulated stories as well as some new ones. However, Eyman meticulously has researched his subject and allows his readers to draw their own conclusions by evaluating the validity of some of these stories which would be considered questionable.

Eyman also provides his reader with an exacting description of the dynamics that came into play while Mayer was running a large movie studio as well as the dynamics within his own family.

The list of those people Eyman interviewed while writing this book is mind-boggling. Many of his interviewees have died since he began this book which makes a lot of the information provided in this book even more significant.

This book was long overdue and I am glad the author took this project on while there were still enough people alive who could provide first hand information about the subject.

I am hoping that I don't have to wait too long for Mr. Eyman's next book.

What distinguishes this book about Louis B. Mayer, the fearsome and legendary Hollywood mogul of the classic MGM era, is that it's far more than a biography. I was tempted into reading not by a fascination with Mayer (though I came to be fascinated once I began reading) but by the author's, Scott Eyman, previous books about Hollywood and the studio system. His knowledge and understanding of movie-making back in the Golden Age of Hollywood are outstanding, nuanced and multi-faceted. "Lion of Hollywood" is so much more than just an insightful biography of a complicated man -- Eyman's expansive book is also about the ins-and-outs MGM, from the business practices to the personalities, and how Mayer forged American cinema because he was the head of the greatest movie studio in Hollywood, therefore the greatest movie studio in the world.

There is a lot of well-researched information and carefully argued hypotheses of Mayer's personality and home-life, and while Eyman is full of understanding for his subject, he never lets Mayer off the hook for his hypocrises or cruelties. He didn't write this book to redeem Mayer into a "good man" -- he wrote this book to properly give Mayer the place in movie history he deserves. When he and the other moguls arrived, L.A. and Hollywood consisted of orange groves and dirt streets. Mayer didn't build Hollywood with his hands, he did it with his massive will, guile, business acumen and cunning understanding of mass entertainment. What comes through in the book is not what a nice man Mayer was, but what a *great* man he was. Flawed and venal, yes. Brilliant and complicated, also yes.

It's easy to look back at the movie moguls, with their terrible reputations for crushing actors and directors, their womanizing and vulgar ways, and condemn them as "what's wrong with Hollywood". But without them, without Mayer, Hollywood as we knew it wouldn't have existed. They set up and ran the studio system that nurtured such stars as Greta Garbo, Clark Gable and Gene Kelly. Mayer was a major reason American movies are the hallmark of mass entertainment all throughout the world today, and it wasn't because he was a great artist himself. He was that very rarest of beings: a businessman who understands, recognizes and nurtures talent in others. He was instrumental in setting up the Academy Awards because he instinctively got that actors and directors would almost prefer the prestige of awards over money. He was a dedicated Republican but hired Communists, Socialists, lefties of all stripes -- and said so to the McCarthy witch hunts -- because political affiliation had nothing to do with talent. He covered up murders, hushed up scandals, arranged marriages for gay stars: anything to keep the machine of movie-making well-oiled.

Mayer knew movies and he knew his audience -- he prided himself on being the "average movie-goer" -- and he was a savvy enough businessman to know that you have to spend a dollar to make a dollar and ten cents. He was a man of many contradictions, especially in his personal life, and an emotional ogre, not someone I would like to sit down to dinner with, but I finished the book absolutely convinced of Eyman's overall theme: that Louis B. Mayer did a lot for the movies, perhaps more to build the glittering empire known as "Hollywood", than any other man or woman.

You can always rely on Scott Eyman for a readable, well-researched and even-handed bio. This is no exception: it's fascinating to see L.B. Mayer not as the monster so many have painted him, but as a well-rounded human being.

Eyman also gives his readers credit for intelligence and judgment: he repeats the questionable stories (John Gilbert hitting Mayer; Mayer cheating Marie Dressler out of money), but then cites his sources and lets us make up our minds as to how legitimate these stories are.

No doubt Mr. Eyman is taking a well-deserved breather after this book, but I al already anxiously awaiting his next project.

I couldn't put it down. What an incredible journey into the years of building the famous movie studios from their beginnings as nicolodeons right up to the razzle-dazzle of the 40's and 50's! To read about Louis B. Mayer and the amazing people he drew in around him, is to read about the minds behind the images that so profoundly affected all of us growing up in America in the last century--whether we realized it or not. As a story of one immigrant's rise from abject poverty to fame and influence that few people ever acheive, Mayer's unstoppability wakes you up and inspires you to get to work on making your own dreams come true.

Scott Eyman's book tells the story of a man who helped build the American filmmaking industry which still dominates the world today. Louis B. Mayer was a true American success story - an imperfect man yet a true giant and innovator. A great read for those who are facinated by the old Hollywood dream machine.

I'll have to remember from now on that MGM never gave any diet pills or sleeping pills to Judy Garland, a liar and drug addict who brought all her problems on her own shoulders and whom MGM only tried to help. Even firing her from ANNIE GET YOUR GUN was them helping her. This is one of literally hundreds of revisionist lessons that Scott Eyman reveals in his new biography of studio mogul Louis B. Mayer, in LION OF HOLLYWOOD (2005).

Did you know that Mayer was so progressive he hired Lena Horne even knowing full well that he'd never be able to cast her in any proper roles because of the racial climate of 1940s and 1950s America?

Did you know that Clarence Brown (the director of THE YEARLING and INTRUDER IN THE DUST) was America's greatest director and that everything he touched was magic?

Did you know that Dore Schary, the man whom Loews, Inc, turned over MGM to after deposing Mr. Mayer, was a "yes and no man," so untalented and mediocre that he couldn't even produce a single decent picture and fired Gable and Ava Gardner to replace them with ordinary average schlemiels like James Whitmore and Nancy Davis?

Did you know that Irene Selznick, LB's daughter, became Broadway's greatest theater producer, while not one person showed up for the funeral of Edie Goetz, the other, inferior daughter who preferred collecting art to giving LB Mayer more grandchildren?

Eyman is a great biographer but he is opinionated to an astonishing degree and sometimes his opinions just get in the way. His snipes at such beloved figures as Nelson Eddy or Lana Turner are amazing, and so unnecessarily distracting an editor might have cleared his throat once or twice? Otherwise the book teems with new and useful information, grand analysis of cultural trends, a real sense of history. There might have been a few more photos perhaps. But you can't have everything.

How and when did so many great Americans get thrown into the dust bin of history? We really need hero courses in our schools to provide kids with information on these grand, legendary figures. Instead, we work to undermine what little hero worship there is. John D. Rockefeller is one such figure, Teddy Roosevelt another. No doubt, one could come up with a dozen such creators of new worlds, but instead they are belittled and destroyed by neglect. Louis b. Mayer has his detractors and no doubt deserves them, but the man we are talking about created one of the greatest arts institutions in the world. Unlike the founders of theatres and ballet companies, however, this great institution will last forever, or certainly as long as the great movies he produced can be preserved. The studio itself is long gone, of course, but through Turner we learn the films themselves will survive. This is a well-written, well-documented biography of one of America's titans of industry. His flaws are great, but in the end we must acknowledge the result of this man's devotion to great film making and admit that if he was flawed so are we.

I enjoyed reading this book; however, I found it jarring at times. I've always said it was a mistake to stop teaching sentence diagramming in grade school. I think this book proves my point. It's a great yarn and has a lot of good information as well as all of the Hollywood dirt. That said, the writing could have been more clear--excessive use of reflexive pronouns left me re-reading more than one passage. Thoughts that should be separate sentences find themselves as subordinate clauses in lengthy awkward paragraphs. Despite its subject matter and presumably myriad dynamite photos out there, the photograph section was pretty stingy. In a Hollywoood bio, this is definitely a negative. Overall a good read, but requiring more effort than it should have. I don't like when I have to edit passages myself to make them make sense.

LION OF HOLLYWOOD is a good portrait of the often maligned L.B. Mayer.
Eyman does a good job of articulating the massive amount of research that he did in researching this biography. And there inlays the problem, the book needed to be revised at the start of the narrative thread of when L.B. Meyer was a child, his poor upbringing, his "gutter education", and then throws the reader--somewhat in a scattershot manner--in the midst of his MGM days. That however is a minor flaw and I only say that because that occurs in the first 50-60 pages of the book, after that it is a great read and well put together, and truly illuminates L.B. Meyer, a man who had a major hand in creating the visual images that many believe are the "American Dream".

Very few people have the great good fortune to be in the right place at the right time to influence an industry in the direction they want it to go. Henry Ford was one such man. Howard Hughes was another. So were Henry Kaiser and David Sarnoff. And so was Louis B. Mayer.

Scott Eyman's biography of Mayer traces him from his birth in an obscure Russian viallge, through his hard childhood in Saint John, Newfoundland, to his entry into the film business as a theater owner and exhibitor, to the establishment of his own production company in Hollywood, and how, following the merger of his Louis Mayer Productions with Metro and the Goldwyn company, he became first the studio boss of MGM and ultimately the emperor of Hollywood for a quarter of a century until he was ousted in a palace coup engineered by Dore Schary and Nicholas Schenck. But for that quarter of a century, Mayer's vision of what America was, what it was all about, and what it could be, directly influenced the motion picture industry and through the movies, the mores, culture and ethics of the United States.

Eyman spent five years interviewing those who had known Mayer, from his surviving family members, to the actors, actresses, directors and back-office personnel who had helped him make MGM the greatest of the Hollywood studios, the class of the world. He interviewed people who loved Mayer and loathed him. He went though archives in several states, searching out the papers of Mayer that survive, as well as those of Schenck, Schary, MGM, Goldwyn, Mayer's daughter Irene (herself a notable Broadway actress and producer), and many others. He delved into Mayer's past, seeking the motivations not only for what Mayer became, but how and why he made the movies as he did; and he does a brilliant job of it.

Unlike earlier biographies of the Lion of Hollywood, Eyeman's is even-handed. He shows Mayer not as an emperor or a demi-god, but as a human being. Part of the reason those who knew L.B. either loved him or loathed him had to do with Mayer's perception of his role as the studio: not a benign despot, though he was that too, but rather as a father figure who gave those who worked for him what they needed in a father figure, whatever that happened to be. He further points out that alone among the big studio heads, Mayer was a showman. He understood in his bones what it was the audience wanted, and his bones seldom steered him wrong. He also points out that what finally cost Mayer command of the studio that bore his name was the fact that times had changed, and American tastes had changed, influenced by our exposure to the world in a world war and the rise of television that brought the outside world into our living rooms, warts and all. Mayer's vision of the world and America was idealized; he simply could not cope with a world that suddenly demanded realism, more realism and nothing but realism. His time had passed him by.

The Epilogue of the book, which traces the fall of MGM from Schary's takeover to the late 1960s, will tear the heart out of anyone who loves Old Hollywood, with its recollection of the breaking up of the MGM collection, the scam run by Ted Turner that stripped MGM of its film library and thereby launched TCM, and the selling off of the MGM back lot to be turned into strip malls and an industrial park. More than anything else in the book, the Epilogue symbolizes what Louis B. Mayer game to America - and what we lost when he lost his studio and ceased producing movies.

Lion of Hollywood is a remarkable work of research in addition to being Mayer's most accurate biography to date. It shows the inner workings and machinations of the Dream Factory at its peak; and how each of the several units at MGM did their thing differently from each other. If you love movies made in the days when the end title of an MGM film read simply,: "Made in Hollywood, USA by Metro-Goldwn-Mayer" and said without another word that movies got no better, this book belongs in your collection. It's a long, rich read. You will savor every page of it and begrudge not one second you spend reading it.