The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (275 page)

Although a major figure of the German industry some years before Fritz Lang entered it, May looks like Lang’s dull brother. One of the originators of the German adventure serial, May was outclassed by Lang’s
Die Spinnen
and Mabuse films. And while May worked in Germany, France, and America—exactly Lang’s pattern—he only illustrated the way Lang regularly exceeded German limits. And yet Lang was May’s scriptwriter on
Die Hochzeit im Excentric-club
and
Das Indische Grabmal
, at a time when May had his own production company and was married to a leading actress, Mia May. May’s first American film,
Music in the Air
, was a Gloria Swanson picture at Fox, while
Confession
was made for Warners. He settled down at Universal on second features, of which
The Invisible Man Returns
, with Cedric Hardwicke, is the most interesting. His last film, for Monogram, paired Simone Simon and the young Robert Mitchum.

Carl Mayer
(1894–1944), b. Graz, Austria
“He was a careful, patient worker,” wrote Paul Rotha. “He would take days over a few shots, a year or more over a script. He would wrestle and fight with his problems all day and all night. He would go long, lonely walks with them. He would never deliver a script until he was wholly satisfied that the problems were solved. He would rather cancel his contract and return the money than be forced to finish a script in the wrong way. He had iron principles arising from the film medium itself, and never once departed from them. His instinct and love for film dominated his way of living. Film mattered most and he gave everything, including his health, to it.”

The tone of that eulogy may say as much about Rotha’s sense of an unwholesome industry as about Carl Mayer. But it does suggest a man of exceptional integrity and a writer interested only in writing with film. Mayer is a central figure in silent German cinema, an author who hardly wrote for any other medium than film, and a man closely involved with the development of the most purely cinematic branch of German filmmaking, the work of F. W. Murnau. His role in the history of
kammerspielfilm
cannot be contested. Mayer was responsible for scripts that abandoned titles, that endeavored to represent psychological atmosphere, and that led directly to Murnau’s expressive camera movements.

When Mayer was sixteen, his father committed suicide, having failed to break the bank at Monte Carlo with a system. That Dostoyevskyan background forced Mayer to fend for the family. He did any job involved with the theatre, painting, or drawing. During the war, he seems to have been on the verge of mental illness. That experience may have conspired in his association with Hans Janowitz on the screenplay of
Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari
(19, Robert Wiene). I have argued elsewhere that the potency of that film may be curiously anonymous in that its novelty came about by accident.
Caligari
was unlike the body of Mayer’s work, but it undoubtedly fixed his ambitions on the cinema.

In the next few years, Mayer became the most significant writer in German films. Rotha claimed that he often influenced the direction and supervised the editing of films. That is always a difficult claim to assess, but it seems clear that Mayer’s importance in affecting the
kammerspielfilm
was nonliterary:
Brandherd
(20, Hans Kobe);
Der Bucklige und die Tanzerin
(20, Murnau);
Der Gang in die Nacht
(20, Murnau);
Genuine
(20, Wiene);
Johannes Goth
(20, Karl Gerhardt);
Das Lachende Grauen
(20, Lupu Pick);
Grausige Nachte
(21, Pick);
Die Hintertreppe
(21, Leopold Jessner and Paul Leni);
Scherben
(21, Pick);
Schloss Vogelod
(21, Murnau);
Phantom
(22, Murnau);
Tragikomodie
(22, Wiene);
Vanina oder die Galgenhochzeit
(22, Arthur von Gerlach);
Erdgeist
(23, Jessner);
Der Puppenmacher von Kiang-Ning
(23, Wiene); the original story for
Die Strasse
(23, Karl Grune);
Sylvester
(23, Pick);
The Last Laugh
(24, Murnau);
Tartuff
(25, Murnau); the idea for
Berlin, die Symphonie der Grosstadt
(27, Walter Ruttmann).

When Murnau was bidden to America by Fox, it was Mayer—still in Germany—who wrote the screenplay for
Sunrise
(27, Murnau), a remarkable instance of German material being made into an American subject (it came from a Hermann Sudermann novel). Mayer also supplied the script for Murnau’s next American film,
Four Devils
(28).

What was it that made Mayer falter? Murnau’s death, the Nazis, or the arrival of sound? He went to Paris and wrote the scripts for two Paul Czinner-Elizabeth Bergner films:
Ariane
(31) and
Der Traumende Mund
(32). In 1932, he went to England and never had another screen credit. He was not entirely inactive. Among other films, he worked on
Pygmalion
(38, Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard),
Major Barbara
(41, Gabriel Pascal), and
World of Plenty
(43, Rotha). He was advisor to Two Cities and a friend of Rotha and Gabriel Pascal, but the idleness must have made him despair, or dream of some evil genius who had invented a scheme for scooping the pool at the nearest casino.

Louis B. Mayer
(Lazar Meir) (1885–1957), b. Dymer, Russia
Legend has accumulated an anthology on the barbarous wit and wisdom of Louis B. Mayer. In hindsight, there is a pleasing contradiction in the way he was once the highest paid man in movies yet always a trite, bigoted vulgarian. But it becomes much easier to call a man silly when he is dead and gone. While Mayer lived, people who worked for him feared his whim and prejudice: not only the power of employment that he exercised, the will to favor or victimize a film or a star; not simply the prospect of facing the squat, capricious man in his cream-colored office, uncertain when his maudlin acting out of films made and unmade would turn to attack; but the sense of irrationality in the way so many movie careers and projects—some built on talent, imagination, logic, and determination—could come to a final decision at the hands of a man who had a paranoid Monopoly-player’s attitude toward his own product.

Mayer did not intervene that much on films. There is little to suggest that movies—sitting in the dark with the dream—interested him. But power drove him, and what Metro put on the screen was the treasure that came from L.B.’s power. He ran the West Coast operation. He organized the factory. He picked many future stars from nowhere. And he never relaxed in the attempt to feed America bright, wholesome dreams. That there is so seldom that much going on beneath the surface of Metro films is a measure of Mayer’s insistence on surface values.

While L.B. was still a child, the Mayer family went from Russia to Canada, prompted by who knows what pogroms and dreams of gold. The child was soon helping in his father’s Nova Scotia scrap business, and in 1904 he moved to Boston to set up on his own. It speaks for the pioneering years of the cinema that a junk merchant began to buy up nickelodeon arcades—his first, the Gem, in Haverhill, Massachusetts. He thrived and extended, largely because he exploited the northeast seaboard distribution rights of
The Birth of a Nation
. Griffith in the 1930s, out of work and out of date, may have smiled sadly to think that the largest studio and the most powerful mogul had picked his fruit.

Mayer began to produce films of a sort through the Alco Company, which soon became Metro. But he broke away in 1917, formed the Mayer Company, and built a studio in Brooklyn, before moving to Los Angeles. His company was not prolific, and there is little evidence of Mayer’s participating personally in the production of films. But he did have an early association with John M. Stahl and specialized in leading actresses in romantic melodrama: he presented Anita Stewart in
The Child Thou Gavest Me
(21, Stahl),
Her Mad Bargain
(21, Edwin Carewe),
The Invisible Fear
(21, Carewe),
Playthings of Destiny
(21, Carewe),
Sowing the Wind
(21, Stahl); then produced for his own company
The Dangerous Age
(22, Stahl);
One Clear Call
(22, Stahl);
The Song of Life
(22, Stahl); Renée Adorée in
The Eternal Struggle
(23, Reginald Barker);
The Famous Mrs. Fair
(23, Fred Niblo); Anna Q. Nilsson in
Hearts Aflame
(23, Barker); a young Norma Shearer in
Pleasure Mad
(23, Barker);
Strangers of the Night
(23, Niblo); and
The Wanters
(23, Stahl).

It was in 1923 that Mayer hired Irving Thalberg from Universal as his production chief. When, next year, Mayer amalgamated with Loew’s Metro and the Goldwyn companies to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Mayer was put in charge of the West Coast operation and Thalberg became the supervisor of film production. By 1926, Mayer abandoned all further “presented by” or “produced by” credits.

He liked to boast that Thalberg never proceeded with a film that Mayer himself did not approve; it is likely, too, that Thalberg kept the threat of Mayer for any project that got out of hand. Perhaps they operated like two interrogating policemen, one abrasive and one amiable. And as Thalberg worked very long hours to keep control of the MGM product and to maintain rather hollow production standards, Mayer took charge of the promotion of the studio as the supreme force in film production. It was he who kept in touch with William Randolph Hearst so that the Hearst papers promoted the studio as long as MGM made films with Marion Davies. It was Mayer, too, who sent
Ben-Hur
home from Italy, and then went on through Europe, picking up Garbo and Mauritz Stiller on the way.

There are only two ways of measuring the industrialist in Mayer: the balance sheet or office gossip. By the first test, Mayer triumphs: he had so great a salary because throughout the years of depression MGM alone continued to be profitable. Much of that must derive from the comprehensive safeness of the business operation, reflected in the comfortable propriety and caution of the films. MGM did have a reputation above those of other studios, it was well promoted, and it used its resources sensibly. More than that, Mayer plied the lowest common denominator of the audience, ruthlessly loaned out or abandoned stars he could not use himself, and permitted Thalberg to create a rather specious sophistication. Do not forget that he chose Thalberg, another man whose product is bland, prestigious, and indistinct. Mayer’s own son-in-law David Selznick never worked too long at MGM, perhaps because of his imaginative lust for pictures and his innate rivalry with L.B.

As to the gossip, no doubt Mayer enjoyed playing the ogre. But there was no sham about his power. Marshall Neilan captured the practicing filmmaker’s contempt for Mayer—“An empty taxi-cab drove up and Louis B. Mayer got out”—but Neilan’s career suffered lastingly for that spurt of wit. Mayer adored and hated: he fostered Joan Crawford, but he stuck the knife in John Gilbert. Without doubt he had the will to assert himself, and the instinct for knowing when to strike. Clarence Brown called him “the greatest brains in the picture business.” Von Sternberg said, “He was, outwardly at least, a charming, simple, and sincere person, who could use his eyes, brimming over with tears, to convince an elephant that it was a kangaroo.” Katharine Hepburn adored him. Most of his human properties regarded him as arbitrary, vindictive, reactionary, and as powerful as the tide. In this respect, his reputation does him justice, for just as Mayer is one of the most notorious of business executives, so he acted sometimes out of a calculating attempt simply to express irrational power.

Whenever he stopped calculating and acted spontaneously, he was sentimental, cruel, and anxious. MGM may have been the most successful studio in the great days of cinema, but it is also the dullest. It never risked the sophistication of Paramount, the harshness of Warners, or the range of Columbia and RKO. If you wish to catch American moods of the 1920s, 1930s, or 1940s, you seldom need to go to MGM.

And when Thalberg died, Mayer’s failings were more exposed. His identification with right-wing philosophies and platitudinous family virtues led to Andy Hardy, the film creature that struck most surely at Mayer’s trite heart. The MGM product of the 1940s is especially regrettable, save for George Cukor and the Arthur Freed musical. Consider the growing darkness and humor at RKO, Columbia, and Warners, and then look at the glazed sunniness of MGM.
The Big Sleep
or
Johnny Eager? To Be or Not to Be
or
Mrs. Miniver? They Live By Night
or
The Yearling? The Woman in the Window
or
Pride and Prejudice? A Star Is Born
or
Strike Up the Band? The Outlaw
or
Billy the Kid?

By the late 1940s, MGM was remarkable for its lack of new stars and directors—the great finds, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, had been tragically mishandled by Mayer or proved beyond his control. He defied TV and rejected new attitudes to material and treatment. When public taste changed and competition bit deep, he was helpless. Nothing shows that as clearly as the way he hired Dore Schary as a would-be Thalberg. Briefly at RKO, Schary had produced intelligent, cheap pictures. But Mayer remembered him as the man who had once written
Boys Town
, and at MGM Schary was the lever that removed Mayer.

In June 1951, Mayer left MGM, forced out by East Coast pressure. He issued a statement that included this blithe confession of ignorance and cozy optimism: “I am going to be more active than at any time during the last fifteen years. It will be at a studio and under conditions where I shall have the right to make the right kind of pictures—decent, wholesome pictures for Americans and for people throughout the world who want and need this type of entertainment.” But the studio, the conditions, the decent, wholesome pictures, and even the decent, wholesome Americans were gone for good or sitting at home with the TV. Movies had been taken out of Mayer’s hands by the small, discerning, and aspiringly “indecent” element of the public, and by people who loved film for its own sake.