THE LION'S KING
from The Wall Street Journal, April 29th 2005
Mark Steyn
LION OF HOLLYWOOD
By Scott Eyman
(Simon & Schuster, 596 pages, $35)
To modify The Wizard of Oz: “I’m afraid there’s no denyin’ / He’s not a dandy lion.”
This month, what’s left of MGM chose to mark the publication of Scott Eyman’s Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer by finally going out of business. “The Lion That Will Roar No More” roared the Herald Tribune’s headline, which was news to those of us who thought the moth-eaten old snagglepuss hadn’t roared for a good 30 years.
MGM still has something to do with James Bond--though it doesn’t make the movies and it’s a toss-up whether Louis B. Mayer would have disapproved more of 007 shagging his way round the globe or of him entering the top-secret Soviet facility in Goldeneye by means of a men’s-room stall. (Mayer had been opposed to on-screen water closets since 1928, when King Vidor put one in The Crowd and, as LB saw it, threw the whole picture down the toilet.) Still, whatever MGM’s connection with Bond, if you buy a DVD of any movie in the series, the opening trailer starts with the lion and the “Ars Gratia Artis” motto plus its current less rarified and less plausible slogan--“MGM Means Great Movies,” which is quite a claim for a company that Kirk Kerkorian has spent the last four decades selling back and forth to himself in an ever more diminished state.
The movie library went to Ted Turner in 1985. Dorothy’s red slippers were auctioned off in 1969. Whatever it was that got sold to Sony this month, for most Americans who still recognize the initials, MGM will always be the studio that defined the studio system, in a three-decade reign beginning with The Big Parade, a toilet-free King Vidor smash that single-handedly accounted for one of the third of the entire movie industry’s grosses in 1925. The big parade that followed gave us the Thin Man, Tarzan, the Marx Brothers, Andy Hardy, Garbo vonting to be alone, Cyd Charisse vamping it up with Astaire and Kelly in smoky dream ballets, the movie’s top-grossing dog (Lassie), and cat and mouse (Tom & Jerry).
Louis B. Mayer’s MGM boasted of “more stars than there are in heaven.” Now most of the stars are in heaven, and the man who made them is an indistinct blur, like the other colossi of the Golden Age in sepia photographs behind the receptionist’s desk. The only one who endures as a brand is the one who was a pipsqueak at the time: Disney. As for the rest, Warner Brothers manage to get along without any brothers named Warner, and at Columbia Harry Cohn has been succeeded by the Japanese and, even weirder, a Welshman. But in the proverbial graveyard of indispensable people Louis B. Mayer actually was: His MGM was the greatest studio of all, and without him it fell harder and faster than all the others.
He was born, of course, in the Russian empire--part of the mass evacuation that became Tsar Alexander III’s unintended gift to American popular culture. The Mayers came to Hollywood via Saint John, New Brunswick, and LB would be bemused to discover that today the average Canadian city is far more of a backlot than any California studio. Mr. Eyman writes that “the Mayers were naturalized as Canadian citizens in 1892,” which is a clever trick given that there was no such thing as Canadian citizenship until 1947. But this is one of those biographies where the author has interviewed 200 people and pored over all the yellowing archives and is so eager to shovel in evidence of his research that he doesn’t always make quite the point he thinks he’s making.
Midway through the book, he recounts a conversation between a couple of unnamed movie men. “I wouldn’t work for that bastard Mayer for all the money in the world,” says one. “What did he do to you?” asks the other. “Nothing,” says the first. “I’ve never met him. But I’ve heard all the stories.”
That’s what Mayer is to us these days--all the stories, the vast accumulation of anecdotage piled up by armies of former subordinates, elderly actors, writers and directors determined to reinforce, like a Cole Porter laundry list, one central point: But if, baby, I’m the talent, he’s the pits--the stunted philistine goblin ruthlessly enforcing bland family values even as he got his jollies pawing young Judy Garland and emptying bottles of uppers down her. There’s no evidence for the Judy stuff, by the way. But on page 247 Mr. Eyman does produce what may well be the all-time perfect Golden Age mogul anecdote:
After Edward VIII abdicated, Mayer called in story editor William Fadiman and asked, ‘What’s he doing?’
‘I don’t know what he’s doing,’ replied Fadiman. ‘He was just King of England.’
‘What do you think he gets?’
‘I don’t know, but he’s a very rich man, Mr. Mayer. I don’t think it’s a question of getting him.’
‘Cable him.’
‘Cable him what?’
‘He was King of England, wasn’t he? I want him to be the head of our European offices…’”
Is this true? Who cares? It’s the history of the era distilled into one yarn. We all know the caricature of the studio era: self-made men, Jews, Eastern European immigrants, untutored, socially insecure, crass, convinced you could buy anybody if the price was right and surrounded by flunkies too terrified to scoff. As Mr. Eyman adds: “Everybody said that it was a brilliant idea, everybody thought it was a ridiculous idea.”
Oh, I don’t know. After a brief and undistinguished stint as governor of the Bahamas, the former king spent the rest of his life as a novelty dinner-party guest for wealthy Americans, including a fair number of showbiz types, like the Cole Porters. Why is MGM signing the duke of Windsor any more ridiculous than WeightWatchers signing the duchess of York? If you replace “Mayer” with “Dreamworks” and “Edward VIII” with “President Clinton,” it sounds not only terrifyingly plausible but the sort of thing that would have Tina Brown and Maureen Dowd whimpering columnar orgasms over.
Mayer’s life is a great story, not just great stories. I warmed up tremendously to him as the book progressed. Every quote intended to reveal him as coarse and blinkered seemed rather shrewd and insightful. On Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis: “The guinea’s not bad, but what do I do with the monkey?” No one’s ever come up with a good answer to that. Asked to replace the journeyman George Seitz on the Andy Hardy series, he replied: “If you get a better director, you won’t have as good a picture.” Whoever signed Ang Lee for the Hulk movie should have that line chiseled on his desk.
Along the way, LB invented the Academy Awards. “I found that the best way to handle [moviemakers] was to hang medals all over them,” he said. The present-day plonkingly humorless all-non-singing, all-non-dancing Oscar dronefest, in which surly celebrities read out lists of their lawyers and accountants for five hours, is the triumph of a culture in which filmmakers are no longer “handled” at all. Under the famously “stultifying” and “constricting” studio system, LB allowed Arthur Freed’s musicals unit to blow a fifth of the budget on one number for An American in Paris--the concluding ballet re-creating images from Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas. Today, happily, there’s no crowd-pleasing hicksville schlocko ballets based on French painters but instead tremendous envelope-pushing boundary-breaking creative freedom where you get to greenlight a new Ben Affleck flop every three months.
We tell ourselves that the Affleck films are more “real” because you can say “Shut the f--- up, muthaf----r” without the Hays Office altering it to “Gee whiz, Andy, let’s do the show right here!” But that’s merely the exchange of one fantasy for another. Mayer despised the phony realism of the “realists” because he understood that total "freedom" would, in fact, restrict the range of stories that got told.
It’s pointless to mourn for Louis B. Mayer’s lost empire. The best thing about Mr. Eyman’s book is that by bringing LB back to life he gets you thinking about all the assumptions in today’s movie business. The worst aspect is that, in dealing with Mayer’s “notorious” (i.e., perfectly unexceptional) conservatism, he can’t put aside his own assumption that somehow the creative industries ought to be politically “liberal.” The best take on that comes from Arthur Laurents, a quintessential limousine liberal and the co-author of Gypsy and West Side Story: “LB was a terrible reactionary. Very corny. He was against anything progressive…“And those terrible reactionaries made better pictures than the liberals who run Hollywood now.”
The Wall Street Journal, April 29th 2005 |
