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.
One of his favorite songs was “The Rosary.” He would weep buckets just talking about it. He thought there was a fine picture idea in the lyrics and assigned two of his favorite writers to create a script. After nine months’ hard labor they turned in their typescript. He discovered their story was set in a New Orleans whorehouse. That was the last assignment they ever got from the outraged Mr. Mayer.
As Louis concentrated increasingly on playing god, more and more responsibility fell on Ida’s shoulders. She set up the talent school that trained a skyful of future stars who made millions for Loew’s—Jackie Cooper, Freddie Bartholomew, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Liz Taylor, Kathryn Grayson, Donna Reed. It was Ida, called “Kay” by her friends, who suggested having the elaborate sound-recording system installed which opened a whole new horizon in musicals. Stars like Nelson Eddy, Jeanette MacDonald, Grace Moore, and Lawrence Tibbett were freed from the double burden of acting and singing at the same time, because their voices could now be recorded separately to the filmed movement of their lips.
Ida had the feel in her bones for talent that Mayer imagined he had. She discovered a young Adonis named Spangler Arlington Brugh fresh out of Pomona College and saw to it that he was rechristened Robert Taylor. She heard an overgrown Boy Scout sing at a Los Angeles concert, which is how Nelson Eddy arrived on the scene.
Ida and a handful of others, including Lionel Barrymore, were impressed by the movie test of a husky, beetle-browed actor from a downtown stage show—he played his scene in a cut-down sarong with a flower behind one flapping ear. “A woman knows what appeals to women,” was a rule she worked by, so she had the test rerun for an audience of Metro’s messenger girls and secretaries. On the strength of the raves they scribbled on their comment cards, Clark Gable was signed.
Ida devised what she called “the rule of illusion” that captured daydreams on celluloid and convinced the public that Hollywood was paradise on earth. “A star,” she considered, “must have an unattainable quality.” Another specification of hers: “A star may drink champagne or nectar, but not beer.”
Ida was a Christian Scientist who, incredibly in the motion-picture business, clung to her job because, as she saw it, her special position of power gave her a phenomenal chance to do good. “If you can’t help somebody,” she used to say, “what are you put here on earth for?”
That philosophy contrasted violently with her boss’s point of view. He behaved as if the earth had been invented exclusively for Louis B. Mayer. He gave and withheld his favors like Ivan the Terrible. If you crossed him, he sought vengeance. During the filming of the first version of Ben-Hur, its star, Francis X. Bushman, offended Mayer, who saw to it that the actor was kept off the screen for the next twenty-three years.
He tried to force his attentions on practically every actress on his payroll. Jeanette MacDonald had to invent an engagement and buy herself the ring as a desperate sort of defense against the tubby, bespectacled little tyrant. He chased me around his desk for twelve years until my contract came up for renewal. “Why don’t you say yes to him for once and see what happens?” said Ida, before I was ushered into his all-white sanctum to talk a new contract.
I found Louis in good form. “Why do you always resist me?” he demanded. “If only you’d been nice to me, we could have made beautiful music together. I could have made you the greatest star in Hollywood.”
“I was wrong, Mr. Mayer. There are only two questions—when and where?”
His blown-up ego exploded with a bang like a toy balloon. With a stricken look he turned on his heels and ran out the private exit of his office as fast as his legs would carry him. He just liked to talk about it. (I might add that my contract was not renewed.)
Louis owned a stableful of race horses; Ida lived simply. She once inscribed a photograph to our friend, Virginia Kellogg, who was a script writer until she married director Frank Lloyd. “I would rather have the small worries of too little,” Ida wrote, “than the empty satisfaction of too much.”
She lived in a rented apartment, drove a Dodge that Mayer gave her in a rare burst of generosity. In the evenings she listened to music or played her grand piano, which was one of the great joys of her life. Or she embroidered petit point bags as gifts for friends. What money she could save, she used as down payments on little houses, which she’d do over and resell at a small profit.
Howard Hughes wanted her with him at RKO, offered her three times the salary she was making. She refused. She had too high a regard for Howard. She knew that if she walked out on Mayer, it would set him off on a vendetta to destroy Howard Hughes, and Louis, with Hearst’s friendship, had the power to do him a lot of harm.
She was more than Mayer’s conscience; she was his entree to Republican politics. Through Ida, he snuggled up close to Herbert Hoover, begged Hearst to jump on the Hoover bandwagon, got himself chosen as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Kansas City that resulted in the Great Engineer succeeding silent Cal Coolidge in the White House.
Grateful for Mayer’s support, the new President invited Louis and his faithful wife Margaret to Washington as his first informal guests after the inaugural. Hearst, who saw a lot of Louis now that Cosmopolitan Pictures was under Metro’s wing, gave the visit the full treatment in his newspapers, which was oil to Louis’ ego.
He thought he was really going places then, with the President in his pocket. A place in the Cabinet? An ambassadorship? When years passed and none of his pipe dreams came true, he pinned the blame on Ida. Suddenly she could do nothing right for him.
He fumed because he had to pass her next-door office and see her whenever he went out his own door. She was running the show instead of him, he raged. She was usurping the power that was his. He turned on her like a tiger. That was Mayer’s way. But she had too many friends for him to reach her at that time.
Another woman and, indirectly, another President saved Ida from Mayer’s fury. The woman was Mabel Walker Willebrand, a brilliant attorney. The President was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was now in the White House with a Congress behind him that was out for Mayer’s hide. I met FDR only once, and that in his White House office. “You’d have been a great actor if you hadn’t been President,” I said, “but I’m never going to come and see you again.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m a Republican, and if I saw you again, you might turn me into a Democrat.” He laughed so hard and tipped back in his chair so far I was scared he’d topple clean out of it.
But the Democrats weren’t laughing at Louis. They were gunning for him with a reform bill that included a provision stating that breeders of race horses could claim no depreciation and write off no losses unless the stables were their stock in trade or principal business. That pinpointed Louis. His prodigal style of living demanded some income benefit from his stables. The staggering take he enjoyed from Metro put him up in solitary splendor in the ninety per cent tax bracket when a bite that size was virtually unheard of. If the bill were voted into law, he was going to bleed.
He had two key allies when he took on Congress: an accountant, Mr. Stern, who was paid the princely sum of $100 a week for taking care of Louis’ personal bookkeeping, and Mabel Willebrand, who earned as much as $75,000 a year as his attorney. Out of her Washington office she battled to stave off the new bill. In the middle of the fight she came to Culver City to confer with Louis. She found he wanted to devote the time to denouncing Ida Koverman, whose value to the studio was well known by Mabel.
He paced his thick white carpet, pausing only to stand in front of the mirror in the room to admire the effect he hoped he was making. “Kay Koverman talks too much,” he raved. “I’ve got to get rid of her. People don’t want me to, but I will.”
“Mr. Mayer,” cut in Mabel, “we have to work day and night to keep this tax measure from passing. I need your cooperation and Kay’s too. I will tell you right now that unless I can have her help with yours and unless you keep her on the payroll, we can’t possibly win.”
That stopped him in his tracks, and not in front of the mirror. He wriggled like a struck fish trying to get off the hook, but Mabel wouldn’t let him free. Finally, he swallowed her line of argument. “And you can have unlimited money to hire anybody else you think we need,” he said, in a typical complete turnabout.
But Mabel needed nothing extra except Ida’s experience and wisdom in developing her strategy. Ida had been in the habit of making half a dozen trips a year to Washington to lobby for MGM interests. In joint Senate-House committee the tax bill was beaten by just one vote. Mr. Mayer said his thank-you to Mabel, but made it clear that he couldn’t really give her any credit. After all, wasn’t it the magic name of Mayer that had worked the trick in Washington? She didn’t enlighten him, but she made a bargain. To make sure Ida was kept in her job, Mabel Walker Willebrand waived her fee for a period of one year for what she’d achieved.
Ida went on working way into her seventies, her back still straight as a ramrod, her hair iron-gray. “I wouldn’t have to do it,” she used to confide, “if I’d provided for myself when I was younger.” Mayer refused to put her on the studio’s old-age pension scheme. It was discovered later that her entire estate, including furniture, pictures, and insurance policies, amounted to less than $20,000. After twenty-two years of it she suffered a stroke and had to go into the hospital, where it was feared she would never walk again. She was forced to sell her car to pay her medical bills. Mayer didn’t lift a finger to help.
Visiting her in the hospital, I remembered a call I’d made on Louis when he didn’t know a horse’s head from its tail and consequently got himself pitched out of the saddle in the middle of a riding lesson. He landed with such a thump that he broke his coccyx. I found him lying in a hammock strung over the hospital bed, and roared with laughter.
“What’s so funny?” he said.
“You. Everybody in town has longed to see your ass in a sling, and you finally made it.”
The room looked like a gangster’s funeral. There were trees of orchids and roses, forests of gardenias and camellias. Ginny Simms, whom he was squiring at the time, had contributed a full-sized cradle overflowing with roses that played “Bye, Bye, Baby Bunting” when you rocked it.
Louis proudly handed me for admiration a sheaf of get-well telegrams and letters, among them a missive from the then Archbishop Francis Spellman returning a check for $10,000—Louis didn’t miss a trick in trying to win friends and influence people. The archbishop sent his thanks, “but I am sure you must have many charities of your own.” I had to read that letter first, aloud.
“Isn’t that beautiful?” said Mayer, his eyes ready to pour tears down his cheeks.
“Not in the least,” I said. “I’m certain he expected at least $50,000 from a man of your wealth and standing.”
“Haven’t you any sentiment?” wailed Louis.
“None. I’m a realist and believe in calling a spade a spade.”
As Ida’s bills piled up and weeks stretched into months of illness, he came up with the noble thought that she ought to go into the Motion Picture Relief Home, where she could live and receive treatment free. He had Howard Strickling telephone to sound me out about the idea. “Let him do that and he’ll be sorry he was ever born,” I said as I slammed down the receiver.
The only alternative open to her seemed to be to sell her grand piano. Two moving men were actually inside her apartment carting off her pride and joy before her heart began to harden and she decided to fight.
* * * * *
We need to flash-back here to Dore Schary, necktie salesman turned press agent, screen writer turned producer, who had gone the rounds of most of the studios—Columbia, Universal, Warners, Fox, Paramount—before he went to Metro. Starting in 1941, he had a phenomenally successful year and a half, making low-budget hits like Journey for Margaret and Lost Angel. Schary considered himself an intellectual and was happy to be known as a liberal. He thought pictures should carry a social message, not exist exclusively on their merits as entertainment. “Movies,” he said, “must reflect what is going on in the world.” Quite a few other people working in Hollywood felt the same way.
For twenty-five years a running fight was waged in our industry over “messages” in movies. Among those who fought to keep them out, you could number John Wayne; Walt Disney; Ward Bond; Clark Gable; John Ford; Pat O’Brien; Sam Wood, who directed For Whom the Bell Tolls; Gary Cooper; James McGuinness, an executive producer at Metro who literally worked himself to death in the cause; and myself. On the other side stood some equally dedicated people who were convinced they were battling fascism in the days when Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese war lords threatened the world. Many of these politically unsophisticated innocents were used mercilessly by another group who set out in the thirties to infiltrate Hollywood—the Communists.
They were all in favor of propaganda messages; tried to squeeze them into every possible picture. A hard core of professional conspirators baited the hook to land the big stars, to use them to glamorize, endorse, and spread the party line. The strategy paid off. So did many stars who fell for it. They were soaked for millions of dollars in contributions to the party itself and its “front” organizations, like the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which had four thousand dues-paying members at its peak. Leader of the Communist faction was John Howard Lawson, who organized the Screen Writers Guild. He had forty or fifty card-carrying colleagues to help him manipulate the strings that stretched throughout our town and controlled the dupes.
Lawson and his gang flourished in the thirties and during the war years. They got what they wanted by convincing the stooge writers, directors, and stars who fell for what was called the “progressive” line that they were serving humanity by turning out pictures dealing with “real life.” That meant throwing patriotic themes to the winds and focusing instead on bigotry, injustice, miscegenation, hunger, and corruption. What did it matter if audiences still hankered for entertainment and stayed away from most “message” pictures in droves? The Communist answer was: “Better to make a flop with social significance than a hit for the decadent bourgeoisie.”
After World War II was over, however, the decline at the box office of “message” movies finally persuaded the industry as a whole that it was poor business to persist in foisting off “messages” on to the public. It was a decision that combined one per cent of patriotism with ninety-nine per cent of public relations and avidity for profits. Battling communism has never been easy in a town where Sam Goldwyn once confessed: “I’d hire the devil himself as a writer if he gave me a good story.”
Dore Schary and Metro came to a parting of the ways over a “message” picture in 1943. He wanted to film a script called Storm in the West, which was to be a sort of Western, only the villains would be easily identifiable as Hitler and Mussolini. Metro’s executive committee wouldn’t swallow that, but Schary refused to yield, and Mayer released him pronto from his $2000 a week contract.
David Selznick immediately picked up Schary as a producer for David’s new Vanguard company. Then when Vanguard was put on ice, he farmed Dore out to RKO, later let him join that studio as its head of production. That job lasted until Howard Hughes, who had meantime bought RKO, criticized another movie, Battleground, that Schary badly wanted to do. So contract number three was torn up, and Schary was at liberty again.
This was now 1948, and the anti-Communist campaign in Hollywood was out in the wide, open newspaper spaces. The town had endured a strike sparked by Communists, which saw John Howard Lawson and his “progressives” marching in picket lines around Warner Brothers studio in Burbank. After one of these “peaceful demonstrations,” seven tons of broken bottles, rocks, chains, brickbats, and similar tokens of affection were cleaned up from streets in the area. Congressman J. Parnell Thomas steered his House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee to investigate our labor troubles, check into propaganda in our pictures, and make a name for himself in the headlines.
Forty-one people from the movie industry were called to Washington to testify before the House investigators. Nineteen of them announced in advance that they weren’t going to answer any questions as a matter of principle. So the Committee for the First Amendment blossomed overnight. That amendment to the Constitution, remember, guarantees freedom of religion, speech, of the press, and right of petition. The committee which was christened for it covered John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Evelyn Keyes, and a whole lot more.
They sashayed off to Washington the day Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, was due to testify. The producers had been shouting “witch hunt.” They took full-page ads alleging that the industry was being persecuted. Bogey and Betty Bacall and the rest thought they’d lend their lustrous presence in the hearing room to support Johnston.
But Parnell Thomas pulled a fast one on them. The first witness put on the stand wasn’t Johnston but John Howard Lawson, who screamed abuse and yelled “Smear!” until the guards had to be called. In evidence against him there was a copy of his membership card in the Communist party. There were nine more cards on view, too, to identify the full complement of the group that came to be known as the “Hollywood Ten”: Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Herbert Biberman, Adrian Scott, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner, Jr., Dalton Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk, and Alvah Bessie.
On their sorrowful way home from Washington, Bogey, Betty, John Huston, and Evelyn Keyes limped into my living room. I poured a drink or two, and we got to talking. They’d been had, and they knew it. I wanted to know from Bogey how they could have let themselves be suckered in. When Bogey started to answer, John Huston interrupted him.
It hadn’t been a good day for Bogey. He turned on John to get some of the steam out of his system. “Listen,” he snarled, “the First Amendment guarantees free speech. That’s how we got dragged into this thing. Now when I try to talk, you’re trying to deprive me of my rights. Well, the hell with you. I’ll have another drink.” And he talked. In fact, they all did.
One of the witnesses before the House committee was Dore Schary. He was called to Washington along with producer Adrian Scott and director Edward Dmytryk, who had worked for him on Crossfire. He made no bones about his admiration for their work. As for the “Hollywood Ten,” he believed—in the words of one reporter—that they “had a right to whatever they believed and did not necessarily deserve to be thrown to the dogs if it served the best interests of the producers.”
The committee’s chief investigator, Robert Stripling, asked: “Now, Mr. Schary, as an executive of RKO, what is the policy of your company in regard to the employment of ... Communists?”
Schary replied: “That policy, I imagine, will have to be determined by the president, the board, and myself. I can tell you personally what I feel. Up until the time it is proved that a Communist is a man dedicated to the overthrow of the government by force or violence, I cannot make any determination of his employment on any basis other than whether he is qualified best to do the job I want him to do.”
That made him a controversial figure in some people’s judgment. When Nick Schenck wanted to see Schary, he flew out in secret from New York to avoid getting involved in the probing of communism, which was still drawing blood in our town.
Nick, the soft-spoken boss of Loew’s who directed the world-wide empire and its 14,000 employees from his New York office, had a monumental mission to perform. He had come to take a look at Dore Schary, whom Louis B. Mayer now wanted back at Metro as vice president in charge of all productions, as Irving Thalberg’s successor, as Mayer’s crown prince. And Schary was insisting that if he took the job, Louis would have to keep his hands off Dore’s key decisions.
Nick Schenck approved of the plan. Schary received contract number four—seven years “in charge of production” at $6000 a week. He started in on July 1, 1948. In my July 19 column, I wrote: “It will be ironically amusing to watch some of the scenes behind the scenes now that Dore Schary is the Big Noise at Metro-Goldwyn-Moscow. He testified on the opposite side of the fence in Washington from Robert Taylor, James K. McGuinness, Louis B. Mayer, Sam Wood, and other men with whom he will work....”
As soon as he read that, Mayer shut the studio gate in my face. But I didn’t have to go there to get news; my friends inside telephoned me every day. Two weeks later Louis telephoned: “I’ve got to see you.”
“Impossible. How can you? You barred me from the studio.”
“I mean at your house.”
“Louis,” I said, “fun’s fun. What makes you think you can come into my home when I can’t go into your studio? Turnabout is fair play.”
But he badgered and bullied and begged until I agreed to see him at five o’clock that afternoon. He was standing on the doorstep as the clock struck. He came in, and we shouted at each other for an hour. “How could you do this to me, write such a column?” he kept bellowing.
“How could you do it to yourself and the studio? You fired him for putting messages in your pictures. Now you take him back as head man. You don’t agree with anything he stands for. But you’ve given him the power to do as he likes, and he’ll get you out.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Besides, who else was there?”
I’d never seen fear in his face before. I saw it then. Before he left, he invited me to breakfast the next morning at his house on Benedict Canyon. I guessed what would happen there.
We were having a second cup of coffee when the doorbell rang. Somebody came in. I didn’t turn around. “Dore just arrived,” Mayer said. “Will you speak to him?” Of course. Moving into the library where Schary was waiting, Louis muttered a brief hello, then left us.
“You were mighty hard on me, weren’t you?” asked Schary.
“I intended to be,” I said. “I think messages should be sent by Western Union. I don’t believe they have any place in motion pictures. Your politics should be a thing apart from your business.”
“If I promise to put no more messages in my pictures, will you be my friend?”
“Yes. But I doubt whether you can. You’re too full of your own ideas.”
“You have my promise. Will you shake hands on that?” We shook hands, but I gave him fair warning: “The moment you start putting messages in, I’ll be on your back again.” But, sure enough, the “message” pictures got into production again.
This was the time that Ida Koverman faced stark poverty through her prolonged illness. She had to have a job. I went to Schary and asked him to take her back on the payroll. He was only too willing to have her. He needed her.
Ida went back on salary for the last five years left to her. She had to walk with a cane for those years. The cane appeared the day she returned to Culver City in a black limousine, which carried her from set to set. Clutching the cane, she made her entrances to cheers, crowds, and an outpouring of affection from everyone who saw her. On her last Christmas on earth I dropped by on my way home from the office to give her a check. I asked: “What did Louis send you?”
“Go into the living room. You’ll find a shoe box. Take off the lid and you’ll see.” It was filled with homemade cookies.
While I was at her home, a huge silver bowl containing five dozen American Beauty roses arrived from K. T. Keller, president of Chrysler Motors Corporation. When I got back to my house, I called Louis Lurie, a friend of Louis B. Mayer, told him what had happened, and asked him to mail a check to Ida immediately, so she’d have it Christmas Day. He wrote a check on the spot for $250.
She lived to see King Louis deposed from his throne. It couldn’t have given her any joy, because she wasn’t that kind of woman. The mammoth studio, in spite of all its stars and resources, was being driven to the wall by this thing called television, which Hollywood despised. Metro lost millions when Mayer was in charge of production in the late forties. When Schary took over the job, there were some early money-makers, but not enough to offset the other kind, which he couldn’t resist making.
Time and again he crossed swords with Louis. If the dueling threatened to go against him, he was quick to appeal to Nick Schenck for support. In the end Schenck had to choose between Mayer and Schary. He chose Schary, who in turn was ousted years later and, when he left, col