Presents the story of the most influential man of Hollywood's golden era, Louis Mayer, who was fiercely protective of his stars and who went to great lengths to cover up the shocking truths of their lives. Reprint.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Movie mogul Louis B. Mayer (1885-1957) is often depicted as a lecherous ogre, but film biographer Higham ( Errol Flynn ) humanizes the M.G.M. titan in this revelatory, wonderfully vivid biography based on archival files and interviews with the Mayer family and surviving M.G.M. executives. The multifaceted Mayer is portrayed as a hypochondriac haunted by his mother's painful death, an absentee husband whose extramarital romances pushed his mentally disturbed wife to multiple suicide attempts, and a stern yet loving despot who protected his homosexual stars and covered up alleged acts of manslaughter by John Huston and by Clark Gable. Higham reveals how director Victor Saville, a British intelligence agent in WW II, swayed Mayer to make anti-Hitler movies. He offers new details about Mayer's close ties with Herbert Hoover, his betrayals of and by Irving Thalberg and his detestation of Greta Garbo, for whom he provided a cover when she worked as a British agent fighting Hitler. This star-studded, gossipy bio is packed with indelible anecdotes and on-set lore. Photos.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Ukrainian-born Lazar Meir graduated from Canada's St. John High School as Louis Mayer in 1902 and by 1912 was a successful film exhibitor in the northeastern United States. In Hollywood he helped create and drive the classical studio system by supervising productions, while finding and nurturing talent. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer became a great studio under Mayer's regime. By turns callous, empathetic, vulgar, and loving, Mayer hobnobbed with government figures at many levels, including the presidency. The wealth of information here is en grossing because Higham ( Elizabeth and Philip , Doubleday, 1991) balances the often shocking personal habits of stars and executives with nitty-gritty filmmaking details. Merchant of Dreams deserves a place beside Ethan Mordden's The Hollywood Studios ( LJ 5/15/88) and Neal Gabler's An Empire of Their Own (Crown, 1988).
- Kim Holston, American Inst. for Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters, Malvern, Pa.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
- Kim Holston, American Inst. for Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters, Malvern, Pa.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Long on gossip, short on facts,
By
This review is from: Merchant of Dreams: Louis B. Mayer, M.G.M., and the Secret Hollywood (Hardcover)
Being a huge fan of classic Hollywood, I snapped this book up and devoured it quickly, thoroughly enjoying all the juicy bits and behind the scene information. Once I got over the initial excitement of so much gossip all at once, I took a closer look, and found that in many, many instances, Higham gets the most basic information completely wrong. Information that is laughably easy to verify. For example:1. Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg's daughter is named Katherine, not Barbara. She was born in 1935, not 1936. And so on... In addition, Higham is very partial to some stars and absolutely hates others; these attitudes come across in Mayer's biography so strongly that they are often distracting from the story itself. Garbo is a monster of selfishness. Crawford is a bed-hopping tramp. Shearer is a terrible snob. Some of which may be true, but I'm sure these people had their good sides, too, but you won't find such balance here. At first glance, there is quite a bit of fascinating, never-before-known "information" in this book. After realizing how little the author checks his facts, though, I have to wonder if any of these incredible tales are true, or even close to true.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
rich in detail,
By
This review is from: Merchant of Dreams (Mass Market Paperback)
In his prologue, Higham tells us that much of the information he discloses has been drawn from hitherto sealed government files. Its more believable that he had long conversations with Howard Strickling, since Strickling was head of MGM's publicity department during the reign of Louis B Mayer, and the one responsible for the covering up of the secret lives of the stars. I guess the fun about gossip is in the discovery of the sordid details. Perhaps it's then only fair that I drop some of the names mentioned and let you discover the particulars. There's actually not a lot that was previously unknown to me. There's the death of Jean Harlow's husband Paul Bern, and then later the death of Harlow herself. The day of the lamentable shortage of knockworst in the commissary when no jockstraps could be worn under tights. The not too surprising inclination of Garbo's mentor Mauritz Stiller. Garbo's repeated no-shows for marriage to John Gilbert, and Mayer's dislike of Gilbert stemming from behaviour long before Garbo came into the scene. Why Garbo never bore a child. The fate of the footage of extras being drowned in Ben-Hur. The men killed by both Clark Gable and John Huston. Lee Tracy's forced retirement. How George Cukor nearly lost the job of directing Camille, as well. The supplier of drugs to Judy Garland. And Leni Riefenstahl's attempts to join MGM. The scandals seem to dissipate once we hit World War 2, or is that Higham's focus is more on Mayer's infidelities, and eventually his clashes with Nicholas Schenck and Dore Schary? Higham also presents a filmic history of the studio and it's output. I wish he'd only given us more dirt, because I get the impression that these scandals are just the tip of the iceberg.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Great Hollywood Bogeyman in Three Dimensions,
By Saffron Leander (Ontario) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Merchant Of Dreams, Louis B. Mayer, M.G.M., And The Secret Hollywood (Paperback)
Louis B Mayer looms larger that few others over the Golden Age of Hollywood, though he is little understood as his own man. He battled with John Gilbert. He was fond of Katharine Hepburn. He drove Judy Garland to what eventually would become her ruin, and then tried to save her when it was too late. Mayer certainly could be cruel, vindictive, petty, lecherous, and tyrannical, but at the same time he was hopelessly sentimental, emotional, prudish, family-oriented, unlucky in love, and had conflicted relationships with his equally strong-minded daughters. As a businessman, he ruled like a father. No smut, No tawdriness. Family fare. That was his motto. He tried, often unsuccessfully, to live it himself. And much less successfully to do so for his staff. MGM employees were his children and he covered up their exploits from homosexuality (illegal at the time and even more of a career killer than it is now), to assaults, to allegedly even murder. Mayer was successful. He was a showman and a purveyor of glamour. He wanted the best and hired the best. Though he was himself deeply right wing he hired David Ogden Stewart, Dalton Trumbo, George Cukor, Katharine Hepburn, all big-time liberals. He was smart enough to let artists do what they did best as long as it was clean.
Higham likes to paint Mayer in Shakespearean terms being battled over like King Lear by his daughters. Neither Edie not Irene come off particularly well here. Mayer is a strict Victorian father and the girls are stubborn and willful, and ultimately very much like him. Irene, the more intellectual and grounded of the two defects from husband David O Selznick and become a successful Broadway producer to the delight and surprise of LB who never wanted his daughters to have careers in the first place. Even he can be wrong, though he never admits it. Overall, the girls seem montrously selfish, egged on by Dad's egotism. His later permanent rift with Edie over her husband's professional and political allegiances, haunts LB's later years as he becomes increasingly bitter and consumed by his anger over being ousted from MGM and his overwhelming fear of death. LB's wife of 40 years, Margaret Shenberg Mayer, seems like a cypher here. Her sudden mental collapse is rather nebulously explained by a combination of Mayer's infidelities, her hysterectomy, and her daughters leaving home. She certainly wasn't in the same intellectual league with LB, but her departure seems very sudden. There also the rest of the Mayers including LB's sociopathic brother Rudolph, his sons-in-law (David O and Bill Goetz), grandsons (Jeff and Danny Selznick), and his beloved mother, the spectre that haunted his entire life. The biography does tend to the salacious side including charging Clark Gable with manslaughter and positing that Mayer paid $400,000 to cover up a similar act of manslaughter by John Huston. In current terms $400,000 would be around $5-6 million and it seems unlikely considering Huston was not yet an important player in the Thirties. Many MGM stars come off particularly badly such as Greta Garbo, Luise Rainer, and Joan Crawford. Much of the early part of the book is scandal after scandal in exhausting succession. On the other hand, there are a lot of surprises. LB and Ad Schulberg came out of left field for me (consider LB wanted Budd Schulberg booted out of the country for writing "What Makes Sammy Run?"). His proposition to her seems particularly funny describing him as "an overweight Romeo to her plain-faced Juliet" as he announces that they'll be "King Louis and Queen Adeline and rule Hollywood together". It's almost too funny to be true. LB's romances seem particularly pathetic. Dr. Jessie Marmorsten, when asked if she ever went to bed with him pounded her fist on the table and proclaimed: "Have you ever seen a picture of him?!" though she admitted that he did manage to steal a kiss on her foot when she wasn't paying attention. Besides Mrs. Schulberg and Dr. Marmorsten there were Ann Miller, Jean Howard, and Ginny Simms all of whom turned down both his marriage proposals (and sizeable cash incentives). Overall, LB comes across as a showman and a visionary. Like Henry Ford and Coco Chanel, he conceived of MGM as a company which produced a consistant, quality product. He simply would not let the talent get in the way. He was tough and frugal. He came from nothing and ended up at the top of the heap of the second largest industry in America, after the automobile industry. And he kept on fighting right until the end. His death seems particularly harrowing because there is a sense that he hasn't really finished. Even though he's 75, there's enough fight in him to sustain 10 men half his age. It was a love of showmanship and a profound sentimentality that sustained this essentially conservative, unsophisticated man in a tawdry, glamourous business for several decades. Mayer is Hollywood. He came there when it was dirt roads and left when it was the single greatest cultural force in American life. What Mayer and men like him created continues to have profounf importance on how we are entertained today, nearly a hundred years later
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