Louis B. Mayer: the King of M-G-M
METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER (M-G-M), for decades the biggest, most successful — and squarest — Hollywood studio, began in 1924 when Marcus Loew, creator of the Loew’s movie theater chain, bought and combined two Hollywood studios, Metro and Goldwyn. Loew lived in the East, and didn’t much like California, or want to live in Beverly Hills or Bel Air. So he needed a strong, successful Hollywood producer to run Metro-Goldwyn for him.
The man Loew chose was a short, bombastic guy with a square head and big glasses, LOUIS B. MAYER. Mayer ran the studio with great skill and made money for a lot of people. He was also sort of a monster, but he was an interesting man, with good qualities too, and a lot of the meanness in him came from a rough childhood.
He’d been born Lazar Meir in the Ukraine in 1884 (not in Minsk, Russia on the Fourth of July, 1885, as he liked to claim). After pogroms and other Ukrainian outrages, his Jewish family had immigrated to New Brunswick, Canada and entered the scrap metal and junk business.
Lazar Meir changed his name to “Louis B. Mayer” and dove into the Bay of Fundy to pull up metal from shipwrecks. Forced to grow up too fast, Mayer dropped out of school at 12 and, for the rest of his life, felt ashamed of his lack of education. By the time he was 15, he was running the family business. Mayer was a vulnerable boy doing a man’s job. People were hard on him because he was short, homely and wore glasses. He was very bright, but English was a second language. His competitors in the scrap metal and junk business were not distinguished by enlightened attitudes toward immigrant Jews. And he never processed the emotional scars of those teenage years.
Some instinct told Mayer to move south to the United States and by 1907, Mayer had a stable, not-very-happy marriage, and was living in New England. He was determined to make a lot of money but wasn’t sure how. Mayer was intrigued by the movie industry — but wary. It was a volatile business, only a decade old; film companies had sprouted up all over the place, but most of them went bankrupt, leaving behind angry creditors. Most theater actors and directors looked down their nose at the movies. Most businessmen believed moviemaking was too risky a field.
So Mayer moved slowly. He began by buying movie theaters in the Boston area. He found a down-at-heel burlesque house in Haverhill, Massachusetts called “The Garlic Box” remade it as a glamorous movie palace, and called it “The Orpheum.” When that theater did well, he bought and fixed up others. Today when we go to a movie, we usually watch it in a dingy little “multiplex.” But in 1915, people liked their movie theaters to have live birds in great cages, and goldfish swimming in massive bowls, and 800 plush seats and marble statuary and, at night, searchlights shining across the marquee. Mayer gave them that kind of elegance.
In 1915, Mayer saw that director D.W. Griffith’s new film “The Birth of a Nation” was going to sell a lot of tickets. It was a Civil War picture with a big star, Lillian Gish, great battle scenes, panoramic long shots and (wrongly) depicted black men as sexual predators. To buy exclusive rights to show “The Birth of a Nation” in New England, Mayer needed to raise a quick $25,000 — so he sold his wife’s wedding ring. Mayer’s instinct was right; “The Birth of a Nation” was a smash hit, and he made close to a million dollars showing it in New England.
But Mayer knew the real money to be made in movies was in making the movies, and showing them in your own theaters without having to pay a fee. To do that, Mayer would have to run a studio, and by 1915 movie production was moving to Hollywood, California.
Mayer also concluded that despite D.W. Griffith’s aesthetic innovations, making money in the film business required creating movie stars. That was the whole key, to find actors with great charisma in front of a movie camera, light their faces well, give them a few good lines to say — and ride their popularity as long as you could. It was, Mayer said later “a business of making idols… Everything else was secondary.”
By 1917, Mayer had moved to Hollywood, and in 1918 he formed his own production company in East Los Angeles. He knew what kind of films packed the theaters. What he needed to learn was the mechanics of running a studio, the inner workings of Hollywood, and he worked very hard to do that in the early 1920’s and became known as a producer of films that consistently made money. In this he was helped greatly by his Chief of Production, a young man named Irving Thalberg. By 1924, Mayer was fully ready to run M-G-M.
As a top-notch Hollywood producer, Mayer thought he deserved a chunk of stock in the new company that Marcus Loew hired him to run. Loew said no, he couldn’t give Mayer stock in the company, and Mayer would always have to answer to Loew — but he’d have a very high salary and a free hand to run Metro-Goldwyn, so long as he turned a good profit. Mayer countered that if Loew wasn’t going to issue or sell him any stock, then he wanted the name “Mayer” on the company. And that’s how Metro-Goldwyn became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or M-G-M. Samuel Goldwyn, to the end of his life, never called it anything but “Metro-Goldwyn.”
Mayer insisted that Irving Thalberg be hired to assist him.
Marcus Loew’s number two man, who dealt weekly with Mayer, was Joseph Schenck (pronounced “Skenk”) whom Louis B. Mayer thought it witty to call “Joseph Skunk.” Schenck loathed Mayer and often urged Marcus Loew to fire him, but Loew doubted they could find anyone as good to run M-G-M.
In 1925, the studio’s big film was a remake of “Ben-Hur.” A popular Lew Wallace novel, it had been made into a so-so movie in 1907. To play the corrupt Roman tribune Messala, Louis B. Mayer cast heartthrob Francis X. Bushman. “Ben-Hur” was a chaotic production and went way over budget — but Mayer stepped in, imposed order on the production and it was a hit with the public. For the pious in the audience, Mayer had the film showing Christ curing leprosy. For atheists, he had a great chariot race in the last reel.
Mayer looked with a skilled eye at the assets he’d acquired with Metro and Goldwyn. The Metro studio had taught all its young starlets “the Metro walk” — which required sucking in one’s stomach, squaring the shoulders, and walking like a queen. Joan Crawford was the acknowledged master of “the Metro walk.” Mayer liked it and decided to make the Metro walk part of M-G-M. Eventually, M-G-M, under Mayer would train starlets in everything: not only how to walk, but how to talk, how to sit down, how to shake hands, how to kiss, how to smile, eat, and pray. All of it simplified, choreographed, designed to appeal to the camera.
From the Goldwyn studio, Mayer got a lot of gifted creative people, and he promoted the better ones, and used them well. The financial people at Goldwyn he either fired or installed in lowly jobs. After all, Mayer figured, the reason Goldwyn had failed as an independent studio was its money people were no good with money. That made a certain sense, but also made an enemy of Samuel Goldwyn.
Mayer acted like a dictator at M-G-M. When Lana Turner got pregnant, Mayer got word to her that an abortion would be best; pregnancy didn’t fit her image as a “love goddess.” Stars who were closeted homosexuals were told to get married: ‘Your fans expect it.’
For messages of that sort, Mayer had a publicity man named Howard Strickling do the dirty work. Strickling and Eddie Mannix were “fixers” for Mayer — hard-working guys with an edge to them. They knew how to keep the studio’s dirty laundry out of the newspapers and out of police jurisdiction. Director, producer, star… if you got in trouble, got in a police jam, you didn’t call your lawyer. You called Howard Strickling or Eddie Mannix, and those two men laid down the line, and told you how this would be handled.
In 1932, when the M-G-M producer Paul Bern was found shot dead in his home in Benedict Canyon, Howard Strickling, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg were called in before the police. Bern may have been murdered by an ex-wife, but M-G-M didn’t want Bern’s new wife, Jean Harlow, to be involved. The studio got the cops to declare it a suicide, and keep Harlow out of court.
Louis B. Mayer savored accounts of how he ran the studio “with an iron fist.” He wanted everyone at M-G-M to know they could be blacklisted if they crossed him. He even blacklisted Francis X. Bushman, whose performance in “Ben-Hur” had done so much to launch M-G-M.
But Mayer could also be helpful to the movie stars at M-G-M, and one star who liked him was Joan Crawford. Early in her career at M-G-M, there was a lunch for exhibitors and Mayer convinced Crawford to come to the lunch. When she’d showed up in slacks and a sweater, Mayer came rushing over, quite agitated, and told her to go straight home and to return looking like a star. Crawford had been taken aback by this, and somewhat resentful, but over time she came to be very grateful for what Mayer had done for her that day. She was sure it had lengthened her career, and she never again appeared in public without looking, and acting every inch the screen goddess.
Crawford and Mayer scrapped with each other verbally, and he bluntly opposed all three of her marriages — and also all three of her divorces. But she noticed that beneath the gruff exterior, the exasperated phrases, he was trying to give her good advice, and help her through the process. It was almost touching, though she knew not to thank him openly, or he’d cut the conversation off with a final blast.
M-G-M thrived on formula. All through the 1920’s and 1930’s, Louis B. Mayer built up M-G-M, putting out more and more movies. M-G-M was a producer’s studio, with well-designed “assembly line” productions which left little room for improvising by the actors or directors. But Mayer gave the cast and crew a 167-acre lot to play on, with 30 different sound stages. There were fake jungles. There was a real zoo, in which lived the lion who famously roared before each M-G-M film. There were gardens planted with French heather, because Greta Garbo loved French heather, and lilies because Norma Shearer loved lilies.
The M-G-M lot had its own barbershop, and its own police force. Its commissary was open 24 hours a day and served chicken soup at 35 cents a bowl according to Louis B. Mayer’s personal recipe: nine kosher hens for every three gallons of liquid. The lot had a house bookie, an opium den, and a Christmas Eve orgy that, said one employee “would have made Caligula feel at home.”
Somewhere in his youth, Mayer decided that hating his business rivals, and being hated by them, was functional. He didn’t regret his fistfight with Charlie Chaplin in the dining room of the Alexandria Hotel. He seemed to enjoy being hated, to get a kick out of seeing his Hollywood rivals distracted from business by seething hatred. He giggled as they lost track of their own interests in favor of trying to screw Louis B. Mayer. He loved the idea of Samuel Goldwyn sitting down to dinner with his family, on hundreds of nights, fuming about what Mayer had done that day. And in the long, numbing days when Mayer was making complex deals he used his own hatreds and turmoil for fuel.
But Mayer didn’t ever want hate to get into his movies. In 1942, with America in the Second World War, William Wyler was directing the M-G-M film “Mrs. Miniver.” The heroine of the film, Mrs. Miniver, finds a Nazi pilot hiding in her garden. He’s crash landed in England, he’s a fanatic, he’s holding up good Mrs. Miniver at gunpoint, and William Wyler directed the actor to play this Nazi pilot with a nasty edge. Mayer heard about it and promptly called Wyler. No, no, no, he told him. “We don’t make hate pictures.” Let Warner Brothers do that. Mayer reminded Wyler that M-G-M films played around the world — even in Berlin.
Mayer felt Hollywood movies should never show sex on the screen. He felt even shots of a married couple’s bedroom should show twin beds, as if husbands and wives didn’t sleep together. Never mind that many American families were not wholesome at all, and that a typical movie audience had plenty of married men out with a mistress. And, privately and very much off the record, Mayer felt that sleeping around was good for his actors. He once surprised the young actor Robert Young by advising him: “Put on a little weight and get more sex. We have a whole stable of girls here.”
Mayer believed that movies had a great and important power to define who Americans are, what our history means, what our values are. He loved knowing that when Hollywood films went around the world, a certain number of immigrants would set sail from distant countries for America because of the wonders or the promise they saw in an M-G-M film.
Louis B. Mayer made sure M-G-M films celebrated America, “the wholesome American family,” the wisdom of parents, the goodness of children and the fidelity of married couples. His very first Hollywood production, a 1918 silent film, was called “Virtuous Wives.” The 15 “Andy Hardy” movies M-G-M cranked out between 1937 and 1946 centered on excitable young Andy Hardy, who had good intentions, bad judgment and a father whose stern façade couldn’t hide a deep well of humor and sympathy. In each movie, Andy had a problem — with money, with a girl — but all he really needed was a good heart-to-heart talk with Dad. The message was clear: Americans are good people; problems aren’t hard to solve; and honesty is crucial to character.
On the other hand, Mayer never held himself to the coded values of a Hollywood movie, nor assume that those he did business with would. Life was brutal; success required ruthlessness. Sometimes you have to dive into the Bay of Fundy and get the goods before the other guy does.
Mayer believed that an ambitious man should never give way to feelings, because feelings made you a sucker for anyone a little bit tougher. Louis B. Mayer was not going to be taken in by anyone. He once visited President Franklin Roosevelt in the Oval Office. He knew the President had rare powers of persuasion. He’d heard the President “could have anyone in his pocket within 18 minutes.”
So after greeting President Roosevelt, Mayer took off his wristwatch and laid it down on the President’s desk. Over the next few minutes, he glanced at it several times, and after 17 minutes in the Oval Office, Mayer said a quick goodbye and walked out.
