iron but glamour. He was the boss of gorgeous girls, the kind he could
only have dreamed about before. Margaret stayed home, the _Hausfrau_,
unable to keep pace with him. This was a Jewish family with strong ties
of faith and custom, and Louis waited a long time before he flew the
coop. But the outcome was inevitable.
Once in New York, before the final break came, he asked me, since I
wore smart clothes and was on his payroll, to take Margaret out and
make sure she bought some decent clothes. We shopped all day, while she
tried on dress after dress, always finding some fault, usually the size
of the price tag. When we’d finished, she had just one package to show
for our pains: a new girdle, which I insisted upon.
She tried her best to hold him, but it was a million miles from being
good enough. She fell ill, and he put her into a sanitarium, but she
refused to stay. “This has come on me because I dieted,” she told me.
“Louis likes slim girls, and it’s left me like this.” She took a suite
in a New York hotel, with a sitting room overlooking Central Park. Her
behavior there grew more and more erratic. Her memory wandered. She’d
start a sentence, then break off and go on to something else.
After a year she moved back to Hollywood, into an apartment daughter
Edie found for her. Louis wasn’t living with her by this time. He had
other social interests. One was a singer. Another was a woman with a
child for whom he bought a house in Westwood. Yet another was a lovely
chorus girl who hitchhiked from Texas and joined the Ziegfeld Follies.
Louis fell hard for her. His courtship coincided with her romance
with a big agent, though Mayer didn’t know about that at first. His
suspicions were aroused shortly before he was due to leave on a trip
to Europe, where she was to join him in Paris. Before he left he put
a detective on her trail. The private eye’s sealed report crossed the
Atlantic ahead of the girl, but Louis restrained himself from opening
the envelope until the next morning after she had joined him. The
battle royal that broke out then exploded Louis’ plans to marry her, so
she married the agent.
Mayer’s revenge was to bar the bridegroom from MGM and persuade some
of his pals at other studios to follow suit. The bridegroom had a hard
time of it for quite a few years. Then Louis met Lorena Danker, an
ex-dancer thirty years younger than he was and the widow of an account
executive at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. He had already
divorced Margaret, which cleared the way for Mrs. Danker to become the
second Mrs. Louis B. Mayer. Now she’s Mrs. Michael Nidorf. After she
married Mayer, he adopted the daughter she’d borne Danny Danker; Louis
left her half a million dollars in his will.
Other producers and big shots habitually took their cue from Louis, who
carried a lot of weight in our town. He was the emperor who set the
social pattern. So long as he stuck by Margaret Mayer, they stuck by
their wives, too. But Louis’ divorce, after forty years of marriage,
let them loose. In the next few months there were more top-level
divorces than there’d been for years before.
Divorce has made sensational headlines and spicy dinner-table gossip
from the days when a former Denver bellhop catapulted into fame with
a sword in his hand and dagger in his teeth as Douglas Fairbanks. His
first wife, Beth, was the daughter of Daniel Sully, otherwise known as
the Cotton King of Wall Street. As a wedding present, her father gave
her a beautiful string of pearls, which kept the Fairbankses going year
after year, when Doug was a struggling Broadway actor.
When the larder was bare, she’d pawn the pearls and redeem them again
as soon as Doug got into another play. Those pearls also paid for many
a trip to Europe. The Fairbankses lived at the Algonquin Hotel in New
York, which bulged with actors, from Jade Barrymore to John Drew.
Included among the residents was Hedda Hopper with the only husband she
ever had. In the lobby I used to stop to chat with a little boy with
a frightened manner, kept forever under the wing of his mother or his
nurse--Douglas, Jr., whom his father had determined should never get
into show business.
Beth found the Hoppers their first Hollywood house when we followed
the Fairbankses out to that never-never-land where it seemed that the
rainbow had finally come to earth and deposited a crock of gold for
everybody. Some years after that a brisk little blonde named Mary
Pickford got herself a bungalow in a Beverly Hills canyon. Doug, Sr.,
was a gentleman caller. Beth and I used to walk past the place, but she
didn’t know who was inside. I did. One day my heart turned somersaults
when she peered through a window. She saw nothing amiss. But after
that I steered our walks in a different direction. Beth was ever
unsuspecting about sex. Her own blood ran cool. She claimed Doug spent
too much time practicing handsprings and jumping over barns to be an
effective lover.
They argued for months over the divorce he wanted. He was willing to
pay her a quarter of his earnings for life as alimony. She demanded
every nickel he earned. The sad climax came in a suite in New York’s
Sherry-Netherland Hotel. In my presence she turned on him in a fury.
“Get out, you Jew!” she said.
Doug’s face was a mask. “You don’t know what you’re saying,” I
exclaimed. “You’re out of your mind.”
“I do, and he knows it. He’s a Jew.”
He said not a word and dragged himself from the room. He couldn’t argue
about his background. His father’s name was Ulman. Doug’s mother was
married five times, and had children by other husbands, one of whom
was named Fairbanks. Beth knew all about it. It had been a secret, wry
joke to her that, through her father’s contacts, she had been able
to make her husband a member of New York’s best men’s clubs, where
anti-Semitism was an article of faith. She collected her money from
Doug--$650,000 in cash and securities that his brother and business
manager, John Fairbanks, carried in a suitcase from Los Angeles to New
York.
Young Doug adored his father, but stayed with his mother after the
breakup. He didn’t emerge as a man until he married Joan Crawford. An
experienced woman can teach a lot to a youngster like Douglas, Jr. He
learned much about women and the world from Joan, though she wasn’t
accepted by her in-laws until Lord and Lady Mountbatten, honeymooning
at Pickfair, asked if they could meet her. The first time she set foot
inside the front door was the night she was invited to a ball to meet
Dickie Mountbatten and his bride.
The senior Fairbankses drifted apart after Mary Pickford made _My Best
Girl_ with Buddy Rogers. In London, Doug got to know Lady Sylvia Ashley
very well, but he had little thought of marrying her. He made a special
trip home to try to patch things up with Mary. But she insisted that
he beg for a reconciliation, and he was too proud to beg for anything.
He decided to sail back to England. For seven hours on the eve of his
sailing Mary tried to reach him by telephone to tell him she was ready
to save their marriage. But she missed him. She was too late. Sylvia
was married on the rebound to Doug, who by the merest coincidence
chanced to be a millionaire.
There was nobody quite like Doug. He loved everyone, and that
sun-tanned charm of his made everyone love him. He would rather leap
over the moon than go to the greatest party in the world, though he
started drinking his way through the nonstop round of parties and
night clubbing to which Sylvia introduced him. Vanity was one weakness
of his. When the two daughters of his brother, John, who was born
Fairbanks, wanted to go into pictures, Doug warned them: “You’ll have
to change your names, you know; there can only be one Fairbanks.”
He had a handsome head on his shoulders, but it was no head for
figures. I’m reminded of that every time I look out of my office window
at a towering gas storage tank a dozen blocks away that looms over the
old United Artists studio which Doug, Mary, and Charles Chaplin built
in 1918. Doug or any of them could have bought it then for $50,000 and
demolished it. But they saved their money--and it cost their company at
least $3,000,000 over the years to shoot around it to avoid having the
tank show up in every movie United Artists made. After many lawsuits
the studio is now owned by Sam Goldwyn. It nets Frances and Sam a
mighty juicy yearly income. The three stars who created it receive
nothing.
Sylvia’s best friend and next-door neighbor in Santa Monica was Norma
Shearer, who decided one day to give the Fairbankses a party, inviting
Doug’s closest friends. At 7 P.M. that evening Sylvia telephoned Norma:
“I’m terribly sorry but we can’t come. Douglas was taken ill this
afternoon, and he’s much worse now.”
Their two place cards had been removed from the table when the other
guests sat down to dine at nine o’clock. During the first course her
butler whispered a message to Norma. She turned pale for a moment, but
the dinner went on into dancing, some party games, and all kinds of fun
until things broke up at 3 A.M. By that time Douglas Fairbanks had been
dead five and a half hours. Later I asked Norma: “How could you do it?
Your guests were Doug’s best friends.”
She answered: “What could I do? I couldn’t say anything. It would have
spoiled the party.”
Not all Doug’s money was left to Sylvia. Douglas, Jr., was more than
comfortably off when he married Mary Lee Epling, divorced wife of
financier Huntington Hartford. They live in old-world style in a small
London town house with their three daughters. Douglas, Jr., does not
stray from the hearthstone. They are extremely social, with British and
European royalty and ambassadors of all nations, including one of our
own, Winthrop Aldrich, who had a penchant at parties for pinching old
ladies in the Latin fashion. They absolutely adored it--no one had paid
them such attention for years.
Hollywood has all the excuses you find anywhere for divorce--boredom,
egotism, emotional immaturity, and the rest. It also has some special
reasons of its own--press agents who can get bigger headlines with a
scandal than with a happy home life; producers who resent a husband or
wife “interfering” in a star’s business; managers who stop at nothing
to hold onto their percentages. Elsewhere in the world, children are
usually a bond that holds parents through many a squabble. But that’s
not always the case in the Empire of Guff, which was one of Gene
Fowler’s labels for us.
This is a hard, rocky place for a child to grow up in. Some of them
don’t know who their fathers really are because they’ve had so many in
the family. They’re brought up by nurses, cooks, and chauffeurs instead
of parents because mother and father are too busy to give them any
time. All the children can be spared is money, which is a stone to suck
on when a child needs love.
Eddie Robinson, Jr., was spoiled. His mother, Gladys--the first Mrs.
Robinson, Sr.--was never allowed by her husband to lay a hand on the
boy. At thirteen he “borrowed” other people’s cars without asking. He
has been in one automobile accident after another. Now he has a wife
and child, whom Gladys helps support. Edward G. Robinson couldn’t be
accused of being stingy toward his son, however, since he continued to
make Junior an allowance of $1000 a month.
Dixie Lee Crosby brought up her four sons strictly but well. Bing
somehow found other things he had to do, so the children didn’t see a
lot of their father. Dixie had problems in her pregnancies, when she
virtually was forced on to brandy to survive. She had to stay home,
sick, when Bing sailed off to Paris at the time Queen Elizabeth was
crowned, taking Lindsay with him and having a gay old time. The boy
went to London to see the coronation and stayed with the Alan Ladd
family at the Dorchester. Bing was having too much fun in Paris to
leave. Lindsay was the youngest and sweetest of the four sons. Like
Gary, Philip, and Dennis, he started whooping it up the minute Dixie’s
restraint was lifted.
Henry Ginsberg for a while attempted to be a kind of foster father to
the Crosby boys, inviting them to use his apartment as a second home
while Bing was courting Kathy Grant. Finally Henry got tired of their
drinking and other night-owl habits which brought them to his door at
two and three o’clock in the morning. “I like you, but I can’t put up
with it any longer,” he said, and the door was closed to them.
I have seen the frightening looks given to her mother, Lana Turner, by
Cheryl Crane, who was found guilty of stabbing Lana’s good friend, the
hoodlum muscle man, Johnny Stompanato. I’ve argued with Joan Crawford
after she told the oldest girl of her four adopted children that she
had to leave home. “This at a time when she needs love and protection
most?”
“She’s a wild girl with no respect for anything,” snapped Joan.
I know one young girl, the daughter of one of our most married stars,
who fell madly in love with her mother’s fourth husband and made up her
mind to steal him away by hook or crook. She went to her mother and
said: “He tried to make love to me.”
This was a lie, but the woman believed her daughter. “Get out of my
house!” she raged at her husband. “How dare you do such a vile thing?”
“Did she tell you that?” he said, appalled. “Are you willing to take
her word against mine? You remember how old she is, don’t you? She’s
fourteen.”
“I believe her.”
“Then I’ll go. But I’ll tell you this--you’re going to have more sorrow
through that girl than you’ve believed possible in this world. You’ll
see.” He proved to be an accurate prophet.
Divorce is often an inherited affliction, passed on from mother to
daughter, father to son, like hemophilia among the Hapsburgs. Marilyn
Monroe, Judy Garland, Doris Day, and a dozen more came from broken
homes. Their own chances of success as wives may well have been
blighted. The children of Hollywood’s broken marriages inherit a
tradition of trouble. As an example, take a look at the Fonda family
tree.
I used to wonder how Henry Fonda could so much as cut his meat when he
sat at the table next to mine when we were fellow passengers aboard
the boat sailing from Southampton to New York. His table mate was Mrs.
Frances Seymour Brokaw, whom he’d met in London, and she was so stuck
on him that I doubt she let go of his hands for more than five minutes
at a time all the way across the Atlantic.
Hank had already tried marriage once, and so had she. Mr. Brokaw had
been the husband of Clare Boothe before she married Henry Luce, the
founder of _Time_ and _Life_. Hank had been the husband for two years
of Margaret Sullavan.
Frances Brokaw was the second Mrs. Fonda--the knot was tied in
1936--and the mother of two children: Jane, born in 1937; and Peter,
who arrived in 1940.
There is a darker inheritance than divorce. As man and wife, the
Fondas were seemingly happy for years. But Frances was increasingly
possessive, and though no divorce suit ever was filed, Hank wanted his
freedom to marry Susan Blanchard. In April 1950, Frances took her life
in a Beacon, New York, sanitarium, after cutting Hank completely out of
her $500,000 will.
The first Mrs. Fonda, Margaret Sullavan, went on to three other
marriages; to director William Wyler in 1934; to producer Leland
Hayward in 1936, to whom she bore three children, Brooke, Bridget,
and Bill; to financier Kenneth Wagg, who had four children already.
Margaret’s life ended in tragedy, too. She was depressed by an
ever-increasing deafness, which had crept up on her unnoticed at first.
We discussed it together. I spoke about possible treatments, but she
dismissed them. “I’ve discovered it too late,” she said.
Then she was set for a New Haven opening of a play which she was
tackling after a long absence from the stage and which she didn’t much
care for. Her death from sleeping pills was called suicide and blamed
on the fact that she didn’t want to open, while Equity rules insisted
that she should. Cathleen Nesbitt, who had helped her in the part,
could not accept that verdict. “I am as sure as I sit here,” she told
me later, “that it was an accident for Maggie.”
But there was no doubt that the second daughter, Bridget, whom Margaret
bore Leland Hayward, died of her own choice.
In December 1950, Henry Fonda took his third wife, Susan Blanchard,
stepdaughter of Oscar Hammerstein II and mother of Hank’s third child,
Amy. The divorce came five years later. In 1957 he married for the
fourth time. We see very little of his wife, the former Baroness Afdera
Franchetti. She doesn’t particularly care for Hollywood.
One more bit of tragedy hovers over Hank. His best part in years was in
_Mr. Roberts_, whose author, Thomas Heggen, he knew and liked. Thomas
Heggen decided life was not worth living, too, after the play was a
great success.
What her family means to Jane Fonda, only she could tell. She saw
very little of her mother, was brought up by her grandmother, whom
she adored. Jane went to the Actors’ Studio to study, tackled her own
movie career like a she-wolf. She claimed, understandably perhaps, that
marriage had no part in her plans. She could manage very well, she told
me, without love in her life. When I wrote a column about her, her
father telephoned. “I have no control over my daughter,” he said. “But
when the right fellow comes along, she’ll marry him. She’s a very smart
girl and likes to make headlines.”
One smart girl used to bring documents to me from the J. Walter
Thompson agency in Los Angeles not long ago. I hadn’t heard her name
until she said: “I don’t think you know it, but I’m John Gilbert’s
daughter. I didn’t know my father--he died before I could remember him.”
I thought to myself that I would never forget the screen’s great lover,
destroyed as an actor on the sound stage when the talkies came in.
Jack’s first talking picture, _His Glorious Night_, was directed by
Lionel Barrymore. I was in it. Jack’s first words were: “I love you,
I love you, I love you.” In forming these words, his mouth and nose
came together almost like a parrot’s beak. I used to see the glee on
Lionel’s face as he watched Gilbert. Lionel was suffering painfully
from arthritis, and by four o’clock any afternoon he could scarcely get
out of his chair. If anybody tried to help him he’d knock their hands
away and yell: “What’s the matter with you? Do you think I’m sick?”
That picture destroyed Jack Gilbert. He was honeymooning abroad with
Ina Claire when he lost all his money in the crash of ’29. The day they
landed in New York, the picture opened. He went to see it. With the
opening sentence the audience started to laugh, and he crept out of the
theater like a man condemned to the electric chair.
While he was abroad, the studio had built him a beautiful bungalow and
raised his salary to $5000 a week. After his return, when executives
saw him coming, they crossed to the other side of the street. They gave
him miserable, inconsequential pictures which he did. But he never
survived the hurt.
I said to his daughter: “Have you seen your father in any movies?”
wondering if she knew that Jack had been desperately in love with
Garbo, who was fond of him but would never marry him, for the love of
her life was Maurice Stiller.
His daughter replied: “Not until the other day, when I went to see him
in _Queen Christina_ with Garbo.” I asked what she thought of him. Her
head lifted and her eyes glowed: “I thought he was wonderful.”
He was, but we treated him badly.
_Sixteen_
I live in a town that sells dreams but is ruled by nightmares. Its
stock in trade is illusion, which it manufactures in fear; not mere
apprehension about fading profits or a decline in reputation, but stark
terror of God’s honest truth.
Power in the movie business fell into the clutches of men who stopped
at nothing to lay their hands on it. In the process they picked up a
chronic infection of guilty conscience. They couldn’t afford to let the
public glimpse the facts behind the fiction; they’d rather shell out a
million dollars. They were always terrified of being found out.
There were--and are--so many closets bulging with skeletons. I’ve
rattled a few of them in my time when I’ve been convinced the cause was
good. But never was there such a rattling as I gave our one and only
self-appointed monarch, Louis B. Mayer, and his temporary crown prince,
Dore Schary. I’m glad to say it scared the living daylights out of them.
The cause was a worthy one: one of the few unsung heroines of our town
had been pushed off the payroll in outrageous ingratitude for all she’d
contributed to MGM. She badly needed her job back after a long illness,
and I was determined that she should have it. One of the rattling sets
of bones was labeled “Politics,” another was “Greed,” and a third was
“Messages.” I don’t think Dore Schary has ever forgiven me.
Ida Koverman was the tall, stately, gray-haired queen mother who stood
behind King Louis’ throne. She taught the little gormandizer about
table manners, how to handle a party without throwing Emily Post into
strictures. Ida transformed the once inarticulate ex-peddler of scrap
iron into an after-dinner orator in love with the sound of his own
voice, and she rehearsed him in the speeches that rolled off his tongue.
She was the behind-the-scenes arbiter of good taste in the greatest
motion-picture studio of them all. There was a day when she burst into
his office when he was deep in conference with the New York investment
bankers who had control of Loew’s Incorporated--Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is
Loew’s trade name, Loew’s is the parent corporation.
Louis, who had issued strict orders that he was not to be disturbed,
was furious. She brushed aside his protests in her best, no-nonsense
manner. “I want you to come right now and see yesterday’s rushes on
_The Pirate_,” she said. “You must see a dance scene Gene Kelly and
Garland did together.” She kept at him until he angrily excused himself
and stumped out on his bandy legs with her.
In the projection room she gave the order for the film to be rerun. The
scene was a hair curler. Gene and Judy had flung themselves too eagerly
into the spirit of things. It looked like a torrid romance. “Burn the
negative!” screamed Louis. “If that exhibition got on any screen, we’d
be raided by the police.” He summoned Kelly to his office next morning
for an ear-blistering lecture on how to behave while dancing.
Mayer, who was his own best talent scout, met Mrs. Koverman when
she first came to California to rally Republican women in support
of Herbert Hoover. When he hired her away from the future President
to join Metro as Louis’ executive secretary and assistant, she was
thought to be Jewish. But Ida Raynus--her maiden name--was a widow with
Scottish blood. And her Scottish pride kept her from asking Louis for
a raise. For twenty-five years, she was held at her starting salary of
$250 a week.
On that comparative pittance she had more power than anybody in our
town over stars earning forty times more than she did; over the whole
product of Loew’s, a quarter-billion-dollar empire; over Mayer himself,
who pulled down a total of $15,000,000 over the years and preened his
feathers every time the newspapers tagged him the world’s highest-paid
executive. Until they came to a parting of the ways, she was the only
living soul in Hollywood he would listen to when she told him what was
what and why.
In next to no time Ida was all but running the studio from her office
next to his. Louis never personally made a picture in his life; didn’t
know how. That was left to Irving Thalberg, the slim, neurotic wonder
boy who could carry the plot and production details of half a dozen
pictures simultaneously in his head. The sheer strain made him a
nervous wreck, with a trick of sitting in conference with a box of
kitchen matches, carefully breaking every stick into tiny pieces and
piling the bits in a mixing bowl on his desk.
Louis, however, was the impresario, who prided himself on knowing
intimately what made the human heart tick. Nobody on the lot could
outdo him at chewing scenery when the mood came on him. This thwarted
thespian was a hypochondriac who could faint to order, fake a heart
attack to win an argument or stave off somebody’s salary increase. He
would project anger, indignation, piteous pleading, or tears like a
home movie show.