Show Business: Louis the Lion

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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."