This is a long biography packed with details and it covers Louis B. Mayer’s life from his birth near Kiev in the 19th century up to his death in UCLA Medical Hospital in 1957. It leans towards the gossipy and the scandalous. It gives a sense of the vast machinery of the studio system (MGM had both an abortionist and a brothel, apparently) without really giving you a good idea of the kind of filmed entertainment it produced. Apart from some side comments about Mayer’s love of family themes and sentimentality there is not a great amount of analysis of the MGM output under Mayer.
I was surprised how much filming took place outside the studio, sometimes in exotic locations like Rome, Africa, or the Pacific Islands and the making-of details behind “Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ” were particularly fascinating.
Higham runs through a ton of films and a ton of stars, name dropping them and occasionally providing some details, but it’s usually details about how difficult they were to work with or how upset they were over their contract and seldom about the kind of performances they gave or the type of artists they were.
The book has a lot of legal details - Mayer was into real estate and participated in some business scams, and before he got involved in pictures he had some interesting businesses that may or may not be relevant to his later career as head of MGM, like selling trash - but it does focus on the dark underbelly of a glamorous era of Hollywood. Mayer was there from almost the beginning, and his reign continued on just past the Hollywood Antitrust Case and the rise of television. In the end he quit his post at MGM when he couldn’t get along with Dore Schary, a rising movie producer from RKO who was installed by the businessmen on the East Coast who really controlled MGM through Loews, Inc. The book ends with a sad coda in which Mayer attempts to gain control of another studio - first Warner Brothers, then RKO - then joins Cinerama, a new motion picture projection technology company, the IMAX of its day, before making one last failed attempt to regain his spot at MGM before he passed away.
This book doesn’t really show you why and how Mayer was important to the history of Hollywood. It gives you all the names and dates of his biography and catalogs all the slights he offered his family and they offered him but a more complete story of Louis B. Mayer’s vision and influence on pictures would have made a more interesting book.
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 25, 2008
Well-written and lively, but highly biased for and against various classic Hollywood figures (Garbo fans take warning!)
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 26, 2016
