Get Happy (12 page)

With several conspicuous exceptions, therefore, Metro’s films were conservative in both form and content. M-G-M would not have countenanced a pioneering work like
Citizen Kane
, a dark, pessimistic drama like
The Informer
, or a ribald and suggestive Mae West comedy like
I’m No Angel
. The last major studio to enter the era of sound, it was also slow to accept color, and it all but ignored the profound political and economic crises of the thirties. Universal was best known for horror films; Paramount, for sophisticated comedies; Warner Bros., for gangsters and crime. But Metro was identified with glossy entertainments: drawing-room comedies like
Dinner at Eight
, elegant romances like
Camille
, and lavish costume dramas like
Marie Antoinette
and
Mutiny on the Bounty
. When they bought a ticket to an M-G-M picture, moviegoers knew, they could escape their troubles and spend a couple of hours with dazzling people in dazzling settings. From Metro they could count on glamour.

Glossy entertainments, expensively packaged in Culver City, were what the audiences of the thirties seemed to want, and M-G-M’s big budgets brought big returns. The studio’s annual balance sheet was proof, if proof were needed, that the rich do indeed get richer. While other powerful studios were humbled by bankruptcy or teetered close to it, Metro remained relatively untouched by the hard times. When Judy was hired in 1935, M-G-M’s profits were greater than the combined total of its seven ranking competitors; for the entire decade nearly three-quarters of the industry’s profits poured into Culver City. No wonder that a grateful Loew’s, Inc., M-G-M’s parent company, paid Louis B. Mayer, the man in charge, $1.3 million in 1937 and gave him the distinct honor then, and for nearly a decade to follow, of earning the highest salary in the United States. And why not? He ran the largest and most prosperous studio in the world, the yardstick by which all the others were measured.

Almost invariably dressed in dark three-piece suits and wearing round glasses that gave him a somewhat owlish appearance, Mayer looked like a model executive, the chairman of a New York or Philadelphia bank perhaps. But he behaved more like a patriarch out of the Old Testament, Culver City’s Father Abraham. Every Metro employee was a member of his family, he thought, and from those who worked for him, whether they were monarchs of the box office like Clark Gable or mere aspirants like Judy, he demanded both love and loyalty.

For the most part he was a benevolent papa, and no other studio inspired such fervent devotion. “It had the climate of Eden” was the fond memory of character actor Richard Ney, and many agreed that amid those unpromising fields and bungalows Mayer had created his own land of milk and honey. To those who agreed to abide by his rules, Mayer offered broad smiles, lifetime jobs—“I keep everybody on who behaves,” he bragged—and the best working conditions in Hollywood. He could be stingy with salaries, but from air-conditioned rehearsal halls, a rarity in the thirties, to lavish dinners for crews on location, Mayer always provided an atmosphere of luxury unknown at the other film factories. “There seemed to be that little air of something special at
M-G-M,” recalled stuntman Gil Perkins. “You went first cabin everywhere.”

For stars, Metro seemed at first glance like a cloudless paradise. Doctors and nurses came running if their heads ached or their throats were sore, limousines stood outside the soundstages to ferry them around the lot, and fully furnished personal trailers, equipped with toilets and telephones, provided many of the comforts of home while they were resting between takes. Did they require a lawyer? A cook or a maid? No need to look. One would be located. M-G-M stars were not to be bothered by the quotidian concerns of ordinary mortals. Did they plan to travel? Tickets would be ordered—the cost would be deducted from their salaries, of course—hotel reservations would be made and someone would roll out the red carpet when they arrived at their destination. “Your problems were taken care of,” said Katharine Hepburn. “It was a wonderful sensation.”

Did they have trouble with the law? Metro could help there, too. If a drunken actress smashed into a tree on Sunset Boulevard, the police would be persuaded to say that her car’s brakes had failed. If an actor, the hypermasculine hero who always walked away with the girl at the end, was arrested for having sex with a sailor in Long Beach, an invisible hand would reach into the police station to erase the incriminating records. Between them, Howard Strickling, the head of the publicity department, and Whitey Hendry, the studio’s police chief, could grease enough important palms to fix almost anything. No less a figure than Los Angeles’s top prosecutor, District Attorney Buron Fitts himself, was on the take. Metro was, or so it seemed, omnipotent.

Living in paradise had its price. Like the original inhabitants of Eden, M-G-M’s stars paid for all this pampering with the loss of freedom and individuality. If no other film company gave its players such twenty-four-hour-a-day coddling, neither did any other company expect them to submit to such smothering, twenty-four-hour-a-day supervision. When he signed his actors and actresses to a contract, Mayer maintained, he bought them: they were his, body and soul. “It’s not your life,” he once informed Mickey Rooney. “Not as long as you’re working
for me. M-G-M has made your life.” Ava Gardner liked to joke that Metro’s stars were the only kind of merchandise allowed to leave the store at night; but, she added, it was not really a very funny situation.

It was, in fact, a deadly serious one. Most of the stars, particularly the women, might just as well have worn a sign saying “Property of M-G-M.” Having sex with the female help was regarded as a perk of power, and few women escaped the demands of Mayer and his underlings. Even the mother of little Shirley Temple was pawed and propositioned by Mayer, who, according to Judy, was one of the worst of the sexual predators. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty, Judy herself was to be approached for sex—and approached again and again. “Don’t think they all didn’t try,” she said. Top on the list was Mayer himself. Whenever he complimented her on her voice—she sang from the heart, he said—Mayer would invariably place his hand on her left breast to show just where her heart was. “I often thought I was lucky,” observed Judy, “that I didn’t sing with another part of my anatomy.”

That scenario, a compliment followed by a grope, was repeated many times until, grown up at last, Judy put a stop to it. “Mr. Mayer, don’t you ever, ever do that again,” she finally had the courage to say. “I just will not stand for it. If you want to show where I sing from—just point!” To her surprise, Mayer reacted not with anger, but with tears, sitting down, putting his head in his hands and crying. “How can you say that to me, to me who loves you?” he asked, looking so miserable that Judy found herself consoling him. “It’s amazing how these big men, who had been around so many sophisticated women all their lives, could act like idiots,” she was later to write.

Some of the propositions those big men made borrowed more from screwball comedy than scenes of seduction. When she was seventeen, Judy and a girlfriend spent a weekend in Arrowhead Springs, a resort east of Los Angeles. There, in the hotel lobby, they encountered Benny Thau, one of Mayer’s chief lieutenants, and three or four other Metro executives. Thau had a reputation for dour silence—“when he laughs, dust comes out of his nose,” as one actor put it—and at a cocktail party that night Judy was flattered to be singled out for his paternal attention. The next day he was less fatherly, however. As he was leaving the swimming pool, Thau called her off the nearby tennis court, then met her on
the slippery incline between the court and the path to the hotel. As she leaned down to hear what he wanted, he grabbed her, then, as he tried to plant a kiss on her mouth, lost his footing and started to slide down the hill. Once again she came to the aid of one of Metro’s lascivious moguls, holding him up against what might have been a nasty fall.

Not all such attempts were so comical. Another executive—Judy did not identify him—summoned her to his office, as he had summoned so many other, more glamorous Metro stars. Eschewing any pretense of small talk, he demanded that she, too, have sex with him. “Yes or no, right now—that was his style,” Judy recalled. When she refused—“No, sir, I’m sorry,” she said—he began screaming. “Listen you—before you go, I want to tell you something. I’ll ruin you and I can do it. I’ll break you if it’s the last thing I do. You’ll be out of here before I’m finished with you.” As Judy later told the story, she simply smiled and quietly replied, “Oh, no, you’ll be gone before I will.” And she was right. A few months later he was out, accused by Mayer of scheming to take his own job.

No aspect of its players’ lives escaped Metro’s scrutiny. Stars were told not only how they should look, but how they should dress and how they should behave, whom they should date and whom they should marry. Women were even advised when they should and should not have children. Many did not mind such gross interference and manipulation. Others, who found the atmosphere stifling, came to regard themselves as little more than indentured servants. From Mayer’s gaze there was no hiding. Like his friend and hero, J. Edgar Hoover, whose photograph was on prominent display in his office, he insisted on knowing everything about everybody. “Young girls don’t need locks if they have nothing to be ashamed of,” Mayer said when his two daughters asked for locks on their bedroom doors, and he might well have said the same thing to his many foster children in Culver City.

He granted them, in any event, no privacy at all, and Metro’s network of informants, both inside and outside the lot, reported their every movement. “Mr. Mayer had spies everywhere, eyes in the back of his head,” said Ann Rutherford, who played Rooney’s girlfriend in the
Andy Hardy films. “We never knew quite who the culprits were, but whatever we did, the word got back.” Hanging over everyone’s head was the morals clause in the studio contract, which, among many other things, cautioned against doing anything that would “tend to shock, insult or offend the community.” The wording of the clause was so vague, yet so all-embracing, that almost any action that irritated the front office was grounds for suspension.

The existence of spies was common knowledge. What few realized was just how much further Metro’s intelligence service would go to keep them in line. At the end of every day, for example, Mayer’s chief henchman, Eddie Mannix, was handed copies of all the telegrams, personal as well as official, that had passed through Western Union’s M-G-M branch. Since telegrams were then used for all kinds of communications, the way long-distance telephone calls and e-mail messages are today, Mannix and Mayer were aware of who was cheating on a spouse, who was in financial or legal trouble, and who was worrying about a sick friend or relative. They missed nothing.

Like all dictators, Mayer had an unshakable belief in his own rectitude. Whatever he did, he was convinced, was for the benefit of the studio in particular and the movie industry in general. “His relationship with God was intimate and confidential,” the playwright S. N. Behrman observed with a touch of amusement. “He spoke for Him as well as for himself; they thought along the same lines.” Unable to admit error, Mayer found it impossible to respect an opposing view. Those who held one, or who otherwise rebelled, learned that while their boss could be excessively indulgent to those who obeyed, he could also be mean-spirited and vengeful to those who did not. “I hate disloyalty!” he exclaimed. And he expanded the word’s meaning to include disagreement of any kind.