Louis the Lion

"The reason so many people showed up at his funeral was because they wanted to be sure he was dead." Thus, the legend goes, did Movie Magnate Sam Goldwyn dispose of his longtime colleague and competitor, Louis B. Mayer. By quoting the remark near the start of his new biography, Hollywood Rajah (Holt; $5.50), New York Times Movie Critic Bosley Crowther makes plain that he feels no kindlier toward the onetime junk dealer who became one of Hollywood's gaudiest tycoons, created stars from Garbo to Rooney, wrote his name on some of the best and worst pictures of his day, and ruled much of the movie business with his special brand of sanctimonious piracy.

Author Crowther retells the familiar story of how the ambitious son of Russian immigrants parlayed ownership of a Haverhill, Mass, nickelodeon into the Hollywood eminence that earned him the highest salary in the U.S. for seven years in a row ($1,139,992 in 1943). What makes the biography unusual is the gossip columnist's relish with which normally dignified Critic Crowther rummages through Mayer's private life.

Once, when Actor-Director Erich von Stroheim offended Mayer (by announcing flatly that "all women are whores"), the head of M-G-M clouted Von Stroheim right on his Teuton nose. At home, though, the studio slugger cut a different figure. Early one morning he fell on his knees in his daughter Edith's room and cried un controllably until she promised to let him take over the Hollywood Biltmore for the lavish wedding he wanted for her. "He grabbed her hands," says Crowther, "held them to his face, and started sobbing and weeping until her hands were soaked with tears."

On His Lap. On the town in later life Mayer was an equally contradictory character--a classic Hollywood hunter who nevertheless "preferred to think of the women he embraced as sacred vessels,-potential mothers, rather than as what they obviously were." With less restraint than Hedda Hopper, the biographer names the vessels Mayer may or may not have embraced. On one of his frequent European talent safaris, reports Crowther, Mayer was completely entranced with an unknown Hungarian actress named Haj-massy; he signed her to a contract as Ilona Massey immediately after a dance floor accident, when a broken shoulder strap "exposed a great deal more than was normally intended of the actress' smooth poitrine."

Hedy Lamarr, Crowther claims, earned her chance in Hollywood by sailing from London to New York on the same ship with Mayer, "ostensibly traveling as a sort of governess for a boy violinist." Around the studios, says Crowther, "it was long suspected that Mayer was after Jeanette MacDonald and Myrna Loy, both of whom had the experience of being indulged and then disfavored by him." And to Luise Rainer, Mayer complained: "Why don't you sit on my lap when we're discussing your contract, the way the other girls do?"

Crowther also reports Mayer's yen for a new starlet who seemed to prefer the company of a young actress-writer of impeccable social background (an attraction the great man could not fathom). Eventually the starlet married a Hollywood agent, and Mayer, monumentally enraged at this lese-majeste, never quit trying to ruin the agent's career. The case caused almost as much gossip as the night one of Hollywood's flossier madams asked all her clients to leave: "Mr. Mayer has just called and wishes to come here incognito."

On His Knees. Through it all, Mayer maintained what seems, to Crowther at least, a sense that he sat at the side of God. During the filming of an Andy Hardy movie, Mayer shouldered the director aside to instruct Mickey Rooney. "Mayer fell to his knees beside a chair, clasped his hands and raised his eyes to heaven. 'Dear God,' he said solemnly, 'please don't let my mom die, because she's the best mom in the world. Thank you, God.' With that he jumped to his feet . . . 'Let me see you beat that for a prayer!' ':

But derogatory anecdotes cannot erase the fact that Mayer had a vision of sorts and fierce energy. He rode like a Cossack whenever he got the opportunity; he played golf using five balls and three or four caddies at a time. Everything had to be done his way or not at all. He even had the native hubris in 1934 to take on his friend, William Randolph Hearst, because the publisher refused to back a Hoover comeback against F.D.R. Hollywood understood the extent of the rift when Marion Davies' fabulous bungalow was broken into three sections and moved all the way across town, from the M-G-M lot to Warners.

Long before the end of his story, Crowther's dislike for his subject becomes loudly obvious. When 72-year-old Louis B. Mayer died in 1957, defeated in his final effort to win back control of the empire he built, he left the bulk of his $7,500,000 estate to a charitable foundation set up in his name, with no instructions for the disposition of the money. "Possibly," suggests Crowther, "he expected his executors to find some way to send it on to him."

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