City of Nets (45 page)

The main obstacle to Mayer's plan, an obstacle about which he knew nothing, was that Miss Howard was in love with a young lawyer-agent named Charlie Feldman. They slept together whenever they could arrange it, and shortly before Mayer's great expedition to Paris, they decided to get married. Miss Borden, apparently doing her paid duty to Mayer, urged her friend not to throw away a free trip to Paris, and Feldman reluctantly agreed to postpone the marriage for a month, until Miss Howard's return to New York. Though Mayer knew nothing of this, he thought it a useful precaution to hire a private detective agency to shadow Miss Howard for a while, just to be sure. When the agency sent him its report, however, he simply stuffed it in his pocket, telling himself that it was surely innocuous, and that he would read it later.

On the boat train from Le Havre to Paris, Mayer finally made it fully clear to Miss Howard what he had in mind. He told her, she said later, that Mrs. Mayer had agreed to a divorce, that he wanted to marry Miss Howard, and that he would provide her with a premarital contract that would make her rich. And more. “Do you realize the power you have?” Mayer exulted. “If you make me unhappy, everybody in the M-G-M studio would feel it. But if you make me happy, it will make five thousand people happy too!”

Miss Howard, perhaps a little disingenuously, claimed to be “stunned.” She had no intention of marrying her aged suitor, but she didn't feel she could explain everything amid the clatter of the boat train. Better wait until they all got settled at the hotel in Paris, the George V. Just as she was settling in there, Strickling knocked at her door and announced that Mayer wanted to see her immediately. “When we went in,” she recalled later, “he was white and shaking, with a large envelope in his hand. . . . It was from a detective agency in Hollywood and told him all about Charlie and me. Suddenly he picked up a bottle of Scotch, poured out a whole glass and gulped it down. He never drank and it made him drunk. He went wild. He roared around the room and then, suddenly, made a move to throw himself out the window. The three of us needed all our strength to hold him back. We got him down on the floor, where he wept and moaned. I went straight back to New York, and Charlie and I were married.”

Mrs. Mayer suffered a relapse. She kept weeping. Mayer brought in psychiatrists from London, who didn't provide much help. Mayer vowed he would be faithful once again. He also sent back orders to Hollywood that Charlie Feldman was never again to be allowed on the M-G-M lot.
*
So they tried to patch things together, Louis and Maggie, but some things can't be patched. There were occasional returns to Riggs, and although Mrs. Mayer spent perhaps two thirds of the next ten years at home, according to her daughter Irene, “she could never quite pick up the threads of her life.”

Then began Mayer's decade of hypocrisy. There were timorous nights out, like the occasion on which the manager of a well-known Hollywood establishment asked all her customers to leave because “Mr. Mayer has just called and wishes to come here incognito. He doesn't like to be here with strangers.” The man who didn't like to have strangers see him at a brothel remained always the man who insisted that there mustn't be too much kissing in his Andy Hardy pictures, and that Mickey Rooney should get down on his knees to pray for the health of his mother. After the decade of hypocrisy, then, Mayer simply announced to his wife, in the summer of 1944, on the eve of their fortieth wedding anniversary, “I'm leaving.” And moved out, first to the San Fernando Valley ranch of his patient publicity man, Strickling, and then into the Beverly Hills house that had once been Marion Davies's bungalow dressing room at M-G-M (it was later hauled across town to make Miss Davies feel at home at Warner Bros., and then finally moved to Benedict Canyon Drive). In his lordly years of power, Mayer had spent a fortune on buying and raising racehorses, and in the autumn of the year of his divorce, he invited several friends to watch him gallop around on his training track. The horse reared up and flung him to the ground. He broke his pelvis, and then, in the hospital, he developed pneumonia. It was a hard year.

When Louis B. Mayer abandoned the long effort to pretend that he was contentedly married to the girl of his youth, that made it vaguely all right for all the other restless tycoons to abandon similar pretenses. Harry Cohn, who always moved quickly, had divorced his Rose a couple of years before Mayer finally walked out on Maggie, and Darryl Zanuck remained with his Virginia a couple of years longer, but the principle was the same: The Andy Hardy series was coming to an end. The person who naturally heard that message most clearly was Mayer's own daughter, Irene. Less than a year after her father had said, “I'm leaving,” she said, in the darkness, “The jig's up.”

Before she decided that the jig was up, though, Irene Selznick insisted that her husband see a psychoanalyst. Selznick's behavior was always erratic, but it seemed to keep getting more bizarre. He drank heavily, dosed himself with Benzedrine, gambled wildly, and quarreled with everyone he knew. The divorce and death of his alcoholic brother, Myron, in March of 1944, struck him a heavy blow. Holed up in the Waldorf in New York, unwilling or unable to see anyone, Selznick told his wife that he was “really scared . . . afraid that he was actually going insane.” Mrs. Selznick asked Dorothy Paley, wife of the head of CBS, to recommend a psychoanalyst. Mrs. Paley arranged a meeting with Sandor Rado, one of the pioneers of the psychoanalytic movement in Berlin, who had come to America in 1931 to take charge of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Selznick's behavior was characteristic. He couldn't bring himself to go to Dr. Rado's office; he wanted Rado to come to him. Mrs. Selznick finally escorted her husband to the psychoanalyst's office, and the doctor soon told her his verdict. He said Selznick “was having a breakdown.” He said Mrs. Selznick should take her husband back to Los Angeles and get him into treatment there. There were few analysts in Los Angeles then, and the only one Rado could vouch for was Dr. May Romm. Mrs. Selznick followed instructions.

It is a little hard now to realize how esoteric and how controversial psychoanalysis still was in the early 1940's. Sigmund Freud had long been established as a pop oracle, an explicator of sex, but not as the creator of a psychiatric system that would solve, as its more ardent supporters believed, many of the fundamental problems of mankind. In America, in particular, psychoanalysis was widely regarded as something foreign, alien, and therefore not quite serious, not quite respectable. American psychiatrists tended to be mechanistic, devoted to the study of rats in mazes. If they had a contemporary hero in the era between the wars, it was probably J. B. Watson, the founder of the movement that he named in his book
Behaviorism,
in which he dismissed “the elaborate nonsense the Freudians have written.” Hitler changed all this by uprooting the Freudians from their Central European nests and dispersing them into their golden exile. Freud himself was barely rescued from Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1938, and then only after he signed a statement declaring that he had been well treated (to which he added a sentence that one of his admirers defended as “ironic”: “I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone”).

The psychoanalysts driven into exile were by no means an army. One authoritative account estimated the total who came to America at not more than about two hundred. Most remained in New York, but one of their favorite oases in the West was Los Angeles, perhaps simply because of the climate that so enchanted Thomas Mann, perhaps because people like Mann lived there. Ernst Simmel, a dedicated Socialist who had been one of the founders of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, received word early in 1933 that the Nazis were coming to get him. He left through a back window and didn't stop running until he reached Los Angeles, where he inevitably founded the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Study Group. To this he welcomed such Berlin comrades as Otto Fenichel. (Before he left his last way station in Prague, Fenichel reported, someone asked him what was the most pressing question confronting psychoanalytic research, and Fenichel answered: “The question of whether the Nazis come to power in Vienna.”) Simmel also welcomed that whole group of sociologists known as the Frankfurt Institute, headed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. These Frankfurt exiles cherished the idea of synthesizing Marx and Freud in their critique of modern society, and although they never accomplished anything very substantial, they did their best to serve as an irritant even in southern California. Blessed with foundation grants from the East, they staged little seminars, attended by fellow exiles like Brecht and Feuchtwanger, on various cultural topics, the significance of jazz or the movies.

What attracted the refugee psychoanalysts at least as much as the climate or the émigré atmosphere was, of course, money. Hollywood was full of neurotic people who wanted the meaning of their lives explained to them and who had lots of money to pay for the explanations. At one point in the turbulent life of Judy Garland, for example, when she was in the midst of a floundering affair with Joseph Mankiewicz, he sent her to be treated by Simmel. Just as Simmel was getting started, Miss Garland's mother reported this development to Louis B. Mayer, and Mayer called in Mankiewicz for a scolding, and Mankiewicz quit M-G-M forever. And Miss Garland broke off her therapy.

Artie Shaw, who spent the war years leading a navy band on hectic tours of overseas military bases, was another one of those who felt that he was cracking up; the navy agreed, granting him a medical discharge. “This was in 1944,” Shaw recalled, “and at that point I wanted nothing more than to lie down somewhere in a deep hole and have someone shovel enough dirt over me to cover me.” Being an avid reader, Shaw duly found his way to psychoanalysis and to Dr. May Romm, who began leading him back through his days as young Arthur Arshawsky of the Bronx. No sooner had he recovered sufficiently to start courting Ava Gardner than he wanted her to join him in consulting Dr. Romm. Miss Gardner dutifully began to prepare herself for analysis, but then Shaw began to worry that his own analysis might cure him of wanting to marry Miss Gardner, so he gallantly abandoned Dr. Romm.

Beyond such contretemps, there was a more serious controversy that tormented the psychoanalysts when they established themselves in Hollywood in the early 1940's. Was Freud's system basically a philosophy, an attempt to explain the world's problems, or was it a medical therapy, a cure for what people now called “mental illness”? The former alternative seemed important in 1945, when the world was trying to comprehend the successive shocks of the Nazi death camps, of the atomic bomb, and then of the epochal war coming to an end. But although Freud's writings provided insights into contemporary disasters, American psychoanalysts showed a certain practicality in arguing that their system was basically nothing more than a medical therapy, that analysts were not theoreticians but simply doctors, certified by MD degrees, who devoted their time to curing the sick.

One unfortunate victim of this practicality was Otto Fenichel, who had come to Los Angeles in 1938 with impressive credentials as one of the leaders of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Fenichel believed passionately that Marx and Freud both offered answers to the disaster engulfing Europe, but there was very little that one lonely refugee could do. When Fenichel conducted a seminar on literature at Simmel's Psychoanalytic Study Group, one admirer commended the effort with the somewhat ambiguous judgment that it was “one of the last refuges of the avant-garde period of the psychoanalytic movement before it became a commercialized specialty.” To keep in touch with his scattered allies, those who believed in the Marxist aspects of psychoanalysis, Fenichel sent out a series of more than one hundred circular letters, or
Rundbriefe,
reporting on who was doing what, and what he thought of their activities. It was a hopeless task. In his last
Rundbriefe,
in July of 1945, Fenichel wrote mournfully that he had recently spoken with several sympathetic colleagues and wondered whether any of them would suggest organizing a conference of politically minded analysts. “Silently I thought that such a wish would be a sign that the
Rundbriefe
still have some meaning . . .” Fenichel observed. “No one suggested a meeting.”

The psychoanalysts of Los Angeles didn't want to get involved in politics. They wanted to get established and make money. And in that city of cults, where, as Nathanael West had written, people preached the crusade against salt and the Aztec secret of brain-breathing, the psychoanalysts wanted respectability, medical certification. Freud had argued fervently for the development of “lay analysts” who could spread the faith without years of medical training, but the American psychoanalytic establishment insisted on exactly that training, that respectability. Fenichel had earned his medical degree long ago at the University of Vienna, which didn't count for much in Los Angeles now. So in the summer of 1945, after sending out his last
Rundbriefe,
he decided to start earning new credentials by becoming an intern at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. He was forty-seven, and fat, and a friend who visited him on night duty noted that he looked out of shape in a tight and ill-fitting white uniform. He complained of exhaustion. He worried about his ability to keep up with new developments in medicine. He talked vaguely of finding another hospital that didn't require night shifts. Within six months, he collapsed and died of a ruptured cerebral aneurism.

But Hollywood found that psychoanalysis was fun. David Selznick enjoyed pouring out his thoughts to Dr. Romm, and that outpouring apparently helped him to get back to work. Then, of course, he began treating Dr. Romm as one of his employees. “He became too busy for Romm,” Mrs. Selznick recalled. “He was forty minutes late, if he showed up at all. When he arrived on time, he was often unwakable through the entire session. He recounted these antics as though they were amusing. . . . He misinterpreted her patience as enchantment with him; in fact, he was afraid she was falling in love with him. He rang her doorbell at midnight and, standing outside, demanded to be heard. He found it unreasonable of her to refuse.” After nearly a year of this, Dr. Romm decided to cancel Selznick as a patient. Selznick didn't seem to mind. He told his wife that he now “knew more than she did;
he
could analyze
her.
”