AMERICAN HITCHCOCK - PART III (1960-1976)

THE BEGINNING OF THE END
PECKING OUT A LASTING LEGACY IN THE SIXTIES

“Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.”
- Alfred Hitchcock

By 1960, Alfred Hitchcock was an international celebrity – instantly recognizable around the world. Only part of this notoriety was due to his films. Hitchcock’s more palpable form of celebrity came from his weekly appearances, introducing segments of his own television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents on NBC. Budgetary restrictions and the fast pace of shooting television would come to serve as a template for Hitchcock’s next, and arguably his most popular, cinematic endeavor.

Often sited as the film that matured American cinema into its present state of sublime cynicism, Psycho (1960) is based on a novel by Robert Bloch that has its roots in the real life criminal activity of a deranged farmer who quietly butchered his neighbors. In the book, Norman Bates is a rather pudgy middle aged recluse – easily identifiable as someone with a darker side to his character. By transplanting the attributes of a serial killer onto the seemingly normal and youthfully handsome Anthony Perkins, Hitchcock plays upon our erroneous misperception that evil is immediately identifiable or, as Shakespeare most astutely observed, “he that smiles may smile and be a villain.”

Budgeted at a remarkably modest $800,000, Psycho went on to earn forty million in its first release – a telling sign of the more cost-cutting that would come to exemplify film making in the sixties. Joseph Stephano’s screenplay carried an immersive under layer of psychoanalysis, perhaps because the writer was also in therapy at the time he wrote the script.

The story begins with Marion Crane (Janet Leigh); a hot and bothered secretary whose lover, Sam Loomis’ (John Gavin) is unable to commit to marriage because he is struggling to pay for his ex-wife’s alimony. To expedite her way to the altar, Marion decides to steal fifty thousand dollars from her employer as a runaway down payment for the fantasy life she misperceives can be hers.

Unfortunately, en route from Phoenix to Fairfax the weather turns ugly, forcing Marion to take a night’s refuge at the Bates Motel from which she will never return. The motel’s proprietor, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) a congenial mama’s boy on the surface quickly develops a paralytic sexual frustration toward Marion that manifests itself as murderous psychosis while pretending to be his mother. After stabbing Marion to death inside one of the motel showers, Norman disposes of her body in a nearby swamp. Enter private investigator, Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam). Assigned by Marion’s employer to track her down, Arbogast eventually traces Marion’s route to the Bates Motel and shortly thereafter suffers the same fate as our heroine. Forced to take matters into their own hands, Marion’s sister Lila (Vera Miles) and Sam journey to the motel and that now infamous old gothic house on the hill – actually a free standing set built on Universal’s back lot.

Lila hides herself in the cellar, the last place she thinks anyone will look for her. Unfortunately, the basement is home to the real truth behind Norman Bates; that his mother, who earlier figured prominently as a possible suspect in Marion’s disappearance is actually a mummified corpse, dressed in a shawl and wig, but rotted nonetheless. Hitchcock frames Lila’s terrifying moment of realization in extreme close up, with mother’s back to the camera, then slowly spins her chair around to reveal a shriveled corpse, its cavernous sockets blankly staring into the camera.

For its time, Psycho was a disturbing revelation in American cinema signifying the weakening of the Production Code of Censorship that would never have allowed such a grotesque moment to be seen on the screen. The shower sequence in Psycho remains one of the most effective and masterful bit of editing ever put on film.

Involving ninety cuts, a partially nude stand in for Janet Leigh, and a melon being slashed to simulate the sound of steel cutting into flesh – the sequence unravels as an assault on the audience’s collective expectation of what murder should be – providing quick horizontal and vertical cuts whereupon our collective imaginations reassemble those bits and flashes into a brutal homicide that, in truth, is never entirely realized on screen.

When the film debuted it was readily denounced by the Catholic League of Decency as well as by a select few film critics who condemned the movie and Hitchcock as going too far. The backlash, coupled with Universal’s clever marketing of the movie only served to further fuel the public’s rabid fascination to see it. In the final analysis, Psycho became Hitchcock’s most successful movie to date.

Immediately following the film’s triumphant premiere, Hitchcock took a three year hiatus from making movies. However, he was far from idle – investing a considerable amount of effort in continuing his television series and returning to the screen with what would be his last great cinematic triumph; The Birds in 1963. Working from a short story by his favorite author Daphne du Maurier, Hitchcock commissioned screenwriter Evan Hunter to flesh out the story and provide cohesion to du Maruier’s episodic series of bird attacks.

The plot eventually concocted concerns the quaint hamlet of Bodega Bay: weekend getaway for hotshot defense attorney Mitchell Brenner (Rod Taylor). While in San Francisco, Mitch tweaks the nose of Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), a spoiled wealthy socialite and practical joker whose wild past has been expounded in the tabloids.

Mitch and Melanie quickly escalate their mutual interest in one another from tempestuous rivalry to smoldering romance; a move quietly abhorred by Lydia (Jessica Tandy), Mitch’s mother and even more quietly observed by old flame, Annie Haywood (Suzanne Pleshette). But then, there are the birds – those fine feathery fowl who run amuck in the town, smashing into buildings, attacking school children, pecking out a farm neighbor’s eyes and blowing up the town gas station.

From a technical vantage, The Birds remains Hitchcock’s most ambitiously mounted film, relying heavily on matte photography that only occasionally belies its origins under today’s closer scrutiny of special effects. The sodium screen employed in the film’s matte photography was largely the invention of Disney SFX specialist Ub Iwerks after Hitchcock became dissatisfied with the less than stellar results reproduced by the more traditional ‘blue screen’ process. While ‘blue screen’ tended to produce blue halos around hair and other fine details, the sodium screen process generated a virtually flawless matte with no discernable traces of separation between the various photographed elements.

Hitchcock’s second unit spent days at the city dump photographing thousands of sea gulls circling the skies and then matting them into the foreground action shot on location and on the Universal studio back lot.

Admired from a Seago shampoo commercial, but with no prior acting experience to her credit, Tippi Hedren was Hitchcock’s first and only choice to play the film’s central protagonist, Melanie Daniels. Groomed in the manner of a Grace Kelly, Hedren received a lavish wardrobe designed for her by Edith Head prior to principle photography commencing on the film. In retrospect, Hedren is the last of the memorable Hitchcock blondes; statuesque, cool and strangely removed from her surroundings.

Initially, filming began with high spirits; the chemistry between Hedren and Rod Taylor, palpably engaging. However, after being told by Hitchcock that a pivotal scene involving Melanie attacked in the upstairs bedroom of the Brenner family home after the birds have pecked through the roof would be shot using matte photography and reaction shots, Hedren arrived on set to discover that the entire bedroom set had instead been enclosed in a cage, and, that real life birds – hurled at her by a wrangler – would be used instead.

Reluctantly, the actress submitted to an afternoon of being assaulted by live animals after which she quietly slipped into a catatonic state from that she failed to recover from by the following Monday morning. Hedren’s failure to report back to work necessitated the use of her double for a subsequent sequence where Melanie’s badly pecked at and bloody head is bandaged by Lydia in the living room.

The overwhelming box office success of The Birds was encouraging to Hitchcock. Perhaps, in Tippi Hedren he had at last found a replacement for the blonde ideal that Grace Kelly had once represented so clearly for him. His faith in Hedren secure, Hitchcock cast her in Marnie (1964) – a Freudian psychological sex mystery where she played a manipulative and compulsive thief, but with a sinister underlying current of sexual frigidity.

Hitchcock had wanted to make Marnie immediately following Psycho and, from the start, he had envisioned the story as Grace Kelly’s triumphant return to the screen. Although Kelly had initially agreed to do the film she eventually reneged on her acceptance and at the last minute – after Hitchcock had already commissioned a screenplay from John Michael Hayes. Reports on Hitchcock’s reaction to Kelly’s final decision vary from utter rage to sad disappointment. What is true enough is that after learning Kelly would not be able to do the film Hitchcock issued a polite letter of regret to the Princess; then chose to shelve the project rather than recast her part.

By the time Hitchcock had convinced himself that Tippi Hedren would be ideal to play the lead in Marnie he was readily clashing with screenwriter Evan Hunter over the handling of a scene in which Marnie – having been forced to marry Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) or face imprisonment for stealing from his publishing company is then forced to have sex with her husband after launching her own strenuous objections.

The ‘rape’ scene – as it came to be known – generated a creative impasse between Hitch’ and Hunter; the latter arguing that if any sympathy was to remain for the character of Mark he could not be seen forcing himself on his own wife. Hitchcock readily disagreed and promptly fired Hunter in favor of Jay Presson Allen (a novice in the medium of film, and with only two professional stage writing credits to her name).

In rewriting the story, Allen altered key sequences that were part of Winston Graham’s original novel and Haye’s original treatment; changing the office lover’s triangle between two men, Mark and his rival for Marnie’s affections – Terry – to the more subversive pseudo-lesbian fascination finally embodied by Lil,’ Mainwaring (Diane Baker). She also removed a key sequence where Marnie seeks professional treatment in the office of a psychoanalyst. Henceforth, the responsibility of getting at the crux of Marnie’s sexual repressions fell to the character of Mark – possibly as a way of redeeming him in the public’s eyes after he had already raped his wife.

Clearly an attempt on Hitchcock’s part to revisit themes and issues he had more readily and to better effect rounded out in Spellbound, upon its release, Marnie received almost unanimously negative and scathing reviews from the critics. Its failure at the box office effectively ended Tippi Hedren’s brief career and arguably wounded Hitchcock’s reputation as the purveyor of solid chills. That reputation would be further dismantled with Hitch’s next project.

In hindsight, Hitchcock’s shortcomings on Marnie seem at once more pronounced, yet more easily forgivable. Tippi Hedren is wooden next to Sean Connery who, despite his enviable charm, still comes off as something of a sexual sadist and a cold-hearted brute while trying to deconstruct his wife’s troubling sexual past. By promoting Marnie as a ‘sex mystery’ Hitchcock creates a false audience expectation that perhaps damaged the film’s box office potency.
Marnie is not about sex but rather the absence of any intimacy in the sexual act itself. The linkage between Marnie’s frigidity and the convoluted logic behind her kleptomania is fundamentally flawed and not readily apparent on a first viewing of the film. Allen’s screenplay takes far too much time unraveling the bizarre relationship between Marnie and her mother, Bernice (Louise Latham) while seeming wholly disinterested in the more weirdly sexual obsession that lures Mark into marrying Marnie in the first place.
Liberal changes in the cultural climate toward a more perverse and voyeuristic standard, the erosion of the studio system, and, the removal of the Production Code that precluded explicitness of any kind on screen: these were perhaps disquieting developments that an old master like Hitchcock found out of step with his star-driven slickly packaged movies from the 1950s. In that vein, Marnie is very much a throwback attempt by Hitchcock to revisit his atypical ‘50s glamour. The film is not a ‘sex mystery’ except if one chooses to entertain the screenplay’s very loose interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis.

In hindsight, Marnie is the real finale to Hitchcock’s American career. Though Hitchcock continued to make movies well into the decade, he had arguably and irreversibly lost his toe-hold in cinema as its undisputed master of suspense.


THE FAREWELL YEARS

Torn Curtain (1966) is probably Hitch’s most awkwardly miscast thriller. It improbably stars fresh-faced pert and plucky Julie Andrews miscast as Dr. Sarah Louise Sherman; fiancée to a brilliant lecturer, Professor Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman). The two are in Copenhagen for a conference where Sarah begins to suspect that Mike is becoming a communist defector. Like Lina’s contemplation over her husband’s innocence in Hitchcock’s Suspicion, made nearly two decades before it, Sarah’s assumptions about Michael in Torn Curtain turns out to be false and misleading – the screenplay by Brian Moore incessantly toying with her ‘what if’ scenarios and generally blowing them out of proportion with ironically timed unhappy accidents.

From its conception, Torn Curtain struck a decidedly sour note for all concerned. After penning a score for the film, a personal disagreement effectively ended Hitchcock’s association with long-time musical collaborator Bernard Herrmann. His score would eventually be replaced by Hitchcock. Paul Newman, a method actor out of sync with Hitchcock’s way of working, frequently clashed with his director over his part. Worse, the chemistry between Newman and Andrews failed to materialize as principle photography commenced. Hitchcock, who acknowledged that Julie Andrews had been thrust upon him by studio executives who found her enchanting in Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, readily tired of making any attempt to mold a plausible dramatic performance from his star, choosing instead to grumble over the fact audiences would expect Andrews to break into song.

What is perhaps even more troubling about the film is that in hindsight it seems desperately struggling for something intelligent to say. More often the screenplay comes up with preposterous bits of dialogue that string the story along to its inevitable and contrived conclusion. The humorous bits are not funny and the dramatic moments are not nearly as suspenseful as they ought to be.

The film’s one memorable moment is the awkward murder of Hermann Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling) a double agent working for the Russians who too late realizes Michael’s defection is a fraud. Here, Hitchcock illustrates for his audience just how difficult it is to kill a man – particularly when the adversaries are evenly matched. Michael attempts to strangle, stab, strike down with a metal skillet, then gas his assailant in a small cottage in the middle of nowhere. He is successful only in the last of these methods.

“When was the last time Hitchcock went to the movies?” one reviewer proposed upon Torn Curtain’s release; an understandable inquiry, given the film’s unnatural blend of matte shots and largely indoor set pieces shot at Universal that seem pronouncedly obvious in their poor recreations of European country sides and utterly one dimensional. Hence, of all of Hitchcock’s later endeavors, Torn Curtain is the one that has worn the least well.

Dated in its fixed cold war premise, its awkward acting and bizarre amalgam of stylistic elements, Torn Curtain today appear as a forgotten relic from some archaic and strangely disembodied decade in cinema history that never existed. The film is neither a product of vintage 60s film fare nor is it an attempt at knocking off the stylish post-war elegance of slickly packaged entertainments like To Catch a Thief or The Man Who Knew Too Much. For all concerned then, Torn Curtain proved to be a forgettable footnote.

Following the Torn Curtain’s disastrous premiere, Hitchcock departed making movies for nearly three years before bringing Topaz (1969) to the screen. He could just as easily have taken another year to convalesce. Based on the sprawling best-seller by Leon Uris, Topaz is the story of a highly ranked Russian official, Boris Kusenov (Per-Axel Arosenius) who defects to America. After a lengthy prologue in which Kusenov and his family narrowly escape Russian agents in Denmark, the film settles into a rather standard and plodding narrative written by Samuel Taylor; the crux being that Kusenov’s defection might actually have been a rouse.

Enter Agent Michael Nordstrom (John Forsythe); a rather benign sort who enlists the aid of his more flamboyant French spy and personal contact, Andre Devereaux (Frederick Stafford) to do a bit of homegrown subversion involving Castro and the Cuban communist resistance. André accepts the assignment, though his wife Nicole (Dany Robin) suspects that part of the allure has to do with sultry Cuban communist, Juanita de Cordoba (Karin Dor) the wife of a dead freedom fighter who is actually a double agent. The plot is further complicated with the introduction of Andre’s son-in-law, Michèle Picard (Claude Jade) who inadvertently uncovers a murder plot - then nearly becomes part of the body count himself.

With the success of the James Bond film franchise in the back of his mind, Hitchcock delves into espionage more deeply than in any of his other films, coming up with his own brand of cloak and dagger that never gets beyond the drawing board stage. In terms of box office appeal, Topaz has the insurmountable task of overcoming an inherent lack of star power. Though each is competent in his/her performance, none of the actors in the film particularly stands out with the sort of ‘star quality’ so vital and necessary for the overall marketability of the film.

Hitchcock’s first sneak preview of Topaz with an ending that had André in a duel inside a vacant soccer stadium was an absolute disaster, universally receiving the worst reviews of any Hitchcock picture to date. In planning another ending for the film, Hitchcock made two compromises, arguably neither completely satisfying – the latter with André and Nicole departing on a plane for France with their seemingly shattered marriage brought back into perspective; the other involving the off camera suicide of Claude Martin (John Van Dreelan) – the suspected head of the international cartel who had had an affair with Nicole.

To suggest that Hitchcock’s sensibilities as a director were hopelessly out of touch with audience tastes of the 1960s is perhaps a tad too sharp a condemnation. However, film critic Leonard Maltin’s suggestion that Hitchcock was making more personal films – not in tune with immediate public tastes perhaps, though solid entertainment nevertheless – is far too liberal a critique than any screening of Topaz should allow for. The film is sluggishly paced and confusing to follow, particularly during its final reels. At best and in retrospect, Topaz remains an unusual error in Hitchcock’s craftsmanship.

If there were those who thought Hitchcock was finished as a director upon Topaz’s release, his next film Frenzy (1972) provided a considerable reprieve, if not completely, then mostly to reinstating his status as the master of suspense. Based on Arthur La Bern’s novel, Farewell Piccadilly, So Long Lester Square, Frenzy represents Hitchcock at his most uncharacteristic and undeniably gruesome. In many ways the film is a throwback to the kind of entertainment Hitch’ was making in Britain prior to leaving England for Hollywood in the mid-1930s.

Shot on a modest budget and on location in the UK, Frenzy opens with the discovery of a naked female corpse floating face down in the Thames; the latest victim of The Necktie Killer. After Hitchcock’s prerequisite cameo, as a passerby who observes the recovery of the body, the narrative constructed by Anthony Shaffer moves to the firing of bartender Richard Blaney (Jon Finch), after being caught by his employer attempting to steal a drink from the pub. Blaney’s girlfriend, barmaid Babs (Anna Massey) encourages Richard to keep a stiff upper lip. Richard is next scene strolling through the marketplace at Covent Garden by friend, Bob Rusk (Barry Foster) – the actual serial killer.

Rusk suggests that Richard move on to greener pastures, but all Richard can think of is to revisit his past; his estranged wife; employment councilor, Brenda (Barbara Leigh-Hunt). Shortly thereafter, Rusk also pays Brenda a call – one that ends with her becoming the next victim of the Necktie Killer.

The killings in Frenzy are not only amongst the most brutal ever created for a Hitchcock film, but they tend to take on a distinct note of pandering to the times. Hitchcock ups the ante he first established in Psycho by inserting gratuitous nudity into several key sequences – titillating his audience with the prospect of exploitative erotica turned upside down; lust escalating into violent crime and death.

Although the inclusion of violent rape represents something new for a Hitchcock film, the staging of the strangulations in quick cuts is pure homage to the shower sequence from Psycho. Already in declining health, Hitchcock clearly relished the opportunity to revisit some of the familiar locations he had known as a boy. Hence, Frenzy was, in its own way, the return of Hitchcock as England’s prodigal son, come home. A financial success, Frenzy also introduced scores of younger filmgoers to Hitchcock in the movies even though it had become quite apparent to his most ardent fans that his best works were now truly behind him.

Family Plot (1976) effectively brought down the curtain on Hitchcock’s career with a preposterously lumbering bit of inane nonsense. The story concerns a fake medium, Madam Blanche (Barbara Harris) and her taxi driver boyfriend George (Bruce Dern) who cleverly scams naïve rich people out of their life savings. At present, their sitting duck is Julia Rainbird (Cathleen Nesbit), a widower who is certain that the ghost of her dead sister has come back to haunt her.

George and Blanche accidentally cross paths with a pair of spurious diamond merchants Arthur Adamson (William Devine) and his attractive girlfriend Fran (Karen Black). The two are behind a series of VIP kidnappings in the San Francisco Bay area. When Blanche is asked by Julia to channel her nephew, whom she had given away for adoption many years earlier, this improbable greedy foursome concoct a scheme in which to lighten the dowager of her considerable bank load.

Based on Victor Canning’s novel, the plot as reconstituted by Ernest Lehman’s screenplay for the film remains inconsequential, tired and meandering. Everyone seems to be going through the motions – particularly Barbara Harris, who plays up the camp elements of the story more than the suspense, as though the entire production were a sort of Freak Friday Part Two instead of a Hitchcock thriller.

In point of fact, Hitchcock had long admired Harris as an actress. However, his usual indiscriminant zeal for strict adherence to his scripts was, on this occasion, relaxed, allowing Harris to improvise the final scene, whereupon she addresses the camera – and therefore the audience – with a wink.

Hitchcock was also rather lax about re-shooting scenes with actor Roy Thinnes, whom Hitchcock fired after his first choice for the role of Arthur Adamson - William Devanes - suddenly became available. Although Hitchcock was forced to re-shoot close-ups and medium shots already made with Thinnes in the role, for continuity sake, the long shots of Arthur walking away from the camera are not Devanes but Thinnes.

In hindsight, and with his health in steep decline, one wonders why Hitchcock chose to shoot Family Plot at all. In point of fact, he relied heavily on his second unit to lens the more strenuous action sequences. Clearly, Hitchcock was a man of means. He did not have to continue working and yet he did – mostly to the detriment of his otherwise sterling reputation within the industry. Throughout his career, Hitchcock was most readily proud of his MacGuffins - objects or devices seemingly integral to his narrative, yet otherwise inconsequential to the story once their purpose had been served. However, in his last few outings the MacGuffin which had proved so malleable and easily identified within his personal style suddenly becomes strangely absent. The proof is in his body of work. Hitchcock’s last three movies (Topaz, Frenzy, Family Plot) barely resemble the rest of his canon, both from a stylistic and narrative perspective. Instead, and particularly with the advent of home video that has made entire bodies of work viewable in chronological order, these last few Hitchcock films exist today as strange anomalies apart from what was then referred to as Hitchcock’s auteur style.

In recent years Hitchcock’s daughter, Patricia who sometimes costarred in his movies, has defended against the rumors that have circulated about her father: that his humor lent itself more to cruelty than in fun; that he rarely socialized with people outside of the making of his movies; that he derived a sick fascination by playing on actors phobias, and, that he firmly believed all actors were cattle. The Hitchcock family legacy in private reveals a man unlike the persona of the macabre gentleman glimpsed in his features or adroitly providing glib sarcasm on the set as introductions to his weekly television series.

No, Hitchcock in private is arguably not the Hitchcock the public knew and came to love. True enough that as a showman, Hitchcock was ever concerned with cultivating his reputation as a loveably brooding ham and even more meticulous about the films he produced than in the public’s misperceptions about who he was in the roles of man, husband and father. Yet, in the final analysis Alfred Hitchcock lives primarily in the public’s estimation through that on screen persona and with the sort of product he produced during one of the most successful and lucrative tenures in Hollywood.

That the resulting body of work should lean more toward darker tastes and themes was in servitude to giving the public what Hitchcock perceived they wanted and what he knew they had come to expect from him – rather than revealing any sort of deep inner aversion or dower glimpses into the heart of the man behind the curtain. That Hitchcock himself chose work over a quiet retirement is also admirable from the perspective that he remained an aspiring artist to the very end – even if his last few ventures were ‘less than’ what he might have provided his audiences during his golden period.

Today, Alfred Hitchcock is widely regarded, revered and respected both for his public persona and for that body of work. The two remain indivisible in the eyes of his adoring fans. However, the truth about Hitchcock is less nefarious than his plot lines: that he was ever the kindly understanding and devoted husband to Alma Reville: a tenure made more precious to Hitchcock as a man than any piece of celluloid that emerged from his ever creative closet of terror.

@Nick Zegarac 2008 (all rights reserved.)

MEN OF VISION - LOUIS B. MAYER...

...and the Dream Factory that Was

by Nick Zegarac

“He was the most honest man I ever met in Hollywood. L.B. had a sense of romance about the movie business…he was really an entrepreneur in the old-fashioned sense…He believed. He adored the business and he understood it.”
– Katharine Hepburn

In the roughly 51 years since his death, movie mogul Louis B. Mayer has been described as everything from a benevolent father figure to a “courtly polished villain”. Whatever the public’s perception of this great man today Mayer’s legacy has endured as a formidable star maker and purveyor of some of the grandest motion pictures that Hollywood has ever produced. “He was truly a great administrator,” said agent/producer Charles Feldman, “…if they had more men in the business with the sort of imagination and daring that Mayer had in the years of his prime, the business would not be wallowing in the slough of despond that it’s in today.”

Perhaps. But Mayer’s sense of what made good movies seemed woefully out of touch even by 1950, the last full year of his reign as MGM’s undisputed monarch. That in the post-war years L.B. would see his supremacy in the picture business topple at the behest of lesser men (Dore Schary and Nick Schenck) who misperceived their own stepping into the light at Mayer’s expense, but quickly discovered they could only tread as paltry substitutes in his shadow, speaks not only to Mayer’s preeminence as a ‘great administrator’ but also as one of those truly gifted archetypes of the movie mogul – a extinct breed in Hollywood today, replaced by the bean counter and corporate ‘yes’ man.
During his reign at MGM, Mayer’s policy for building the studio to prominence was simple: hire good people and leave them alone. He trusted and admired creative individuals for the areas in expertise that he admittedly lacked. “Mayer’s great faculty was the wooing of stars,” said director King Vidor, “The perpetuation of the star system.”

True - and every star was equal in L.B.’s eyes. When new contract player, Lena Horne was told that the commissary was closed to ‘her kind’, Mayer invited Horne and the entire cast of Cabin in the Sky (1943) to sup with him in his private dining room for the afternoon, then issued a direct memo to all studio departments that read, ‘All colored performers and other employees at MGM will, in future, have the same access as white performers and employees to all facilities of this studio!’ As if to back this claim through external deeds, Mayer further courted the acceptance of Walter White, president of the NAACP, proclaiming that “I live and breathe the air of freedom and I want it for others as well as myself!”
In hindsight, L.B.’s personal reflections after being deposed from MGM in 1951 were cluttered with residual resentment toward Dore Schary and Nick Schenck – the two men directly responsible for his removal - and a growing bitterness that eventually consumed his every thought, though his words have also accurately foreshadowed the mire of making movies today. Offering his opinion on the business in 1955, the impassioned Mayer publicly fretted that “We have so few real stars today. The glamour’s gone out of the business. Imagine public idols, gods, washing dishes, wearing blue jeans, going to psychiatrists. How can anyone idolize people like that?”

Indeed, by 1960 L.B.’s dream factory was in a bad way. The appointment of Dore Schary by Loewe’s chairman Nicholas Schenck, as V.P. in Charge of Production almost a full decade after Thalberg’s death had been an ill fit for the studio from the start. Schary and MGM were not only strange, but highly incompatible bedfellows. Schary was an ambitious writer/producer and an intellectual, “…so constipated with his own importance that his smallest pronouncement sounds like the Pitt of the Elder” (S.J. Perelman).

He was a man who reveled in what is commonly referred to today as ‘message pictures’ – movies with parables to tell. His artistic sensibilities clashed with MGM’s old world glamour and more importantly with L.B.’s idea of what stars should be. “Louis B. Mayer made more stars than all the rest of the producers in Hollywood put together,” defends director and Mayer loyalist, Clarence Brown, “He knew how to handle talent; he knew that to be successful, he had to have the most successful people in the business working for him. He was like Hearst in the newspaper business…he made an empire out of the thing.”


MAYER VS. SCHARY


“If seriously challenged L.B. would maul you to death. Nick (Schenck) would do you in with a cyanide cocktail.”
– Dore Schary

To understand Mayer’s resentment toward Dore Schary is to first admittedly reflect briefly on the man who would eventually come to be L.B.’s quiet nemesis and successor. Born in 1905, Schary was an MGM alumni thrice removed from power by producer Harry Rapf before being appointed by Nick Schenck to oversee daily production. In his early years at the studio, Schary had been a successful screenwriter, but had also managed to acquire the patina of being a devious backstabber – thanks in part to an incident where he attempted to pass off Irving Brecher’s screenplay for the Marx Bros. Go West (1940) as his own work.

Despite his reputation, or perhaps in spite of it, Schary was a rising star at MGM who had managed a modestly impressive slate of projects under Rapf’s supervision; including Lassie Come Home, Journey For Margaret and Bataan. However, when Mayer elected to cancel two of Schary’s more weighty projects, Schary chose to skulk off to David O. Selznick, then RKO rather than work within Mayer’s framework.

Though Schary’s initial exchanges with Mayer after his appointment as V.P. at the studio had been cordial – even respectful – slowly a quiet crisis between the old and new regimes on the back lot increasingly generated friction in business acumens as well as personal tastes. Mayer had two edicts by which he oversaw daily production: ‘do it big’ and ‘give it class.’ Schary was inevitably more cerebral, some would suggest highfaluting: teach your audience something. Hence, the mounting tensions between Schary and Mayer were both a contradiction of styles and a clash of wills.
To be certain, L.B. could harbor a grudge. He also preferred things be done his own way – not an outrageous request considering that after Thalberg’s death the sole responsibility of daily operations had been placed squarely on his shoulders with much trepidation but with regular success. Mayer intuitively understood the artistic, as well as the business end of making movies. His shift away from more ‘adult’ movies into ‘family entertainment’ bode well with the wholesome appeal for ‘clean entertainment’ during the war years. He would be less successful and popular with the post-war generation.
Worse, the creative landscape of Hollywood that surrounded L.B., the Hollywood that Mayer half-heartedly and unsuccessfully attempted to reenter a half dozen times as ‘star maker’ after his ousting from the studio, had so drastically changed with the onslaught of television that it must have seemed a remote and foreign enterprise to this man who once was regarded as at the forefront of his craft.

Perhaps one of the greatest misperceptions about L.B. Mayer was that he was a very fortunate tyrant – an uncouth and uneducated dictator who made and ruined talent to suit his own changeable whims. On the contrary, upon discovering a talent – any talent - Mayer would do everything in his power to expose and nurture it – cultivate it through acting, dancing and singing lessons, instructing his writers, directors and producers to craft tailor-made product for it and ever fine-tuning finished films to ensure that every star shone brighter than most others in the cinema firmament.

Nothing was too good for Mayer’s protégés. Though not initially one of his favorites, Judy Garland was quickly embraced and even coddled by Mayer’s patience and respect, primarily after L.B. heard her sing ‘Dear Mr. Gable’. Mayer could certainly recognize a talent and with Garland he did not have to look hard or long. Today, Mayer’s sanctioning of prescription sedatives to help Garland quell the emotional fragility that plagued the latter half of her life has been misinterpreted as Mayer’s acting as Judy’s drug dealer – a sort of manipulative rouse by the mogul to get his actress hooked on pills that could be used to bend her will and make her a more manageable commodity for the studio to exploit.

In fact, Mayer was only making available to Garland whatever medicinal cures existed in a concerted attempt to straighten out her erratic behavior. Since Mayer knew nothing of mental illness or even that prolonged exposure to such sedatives leads to addiction, it seems highly unlikely in retrospect that his intensions toward Garland were laced with anything but the milk of human kindness. To be certain, Mayer wanted Garland back on the job – but not unhealthy or uncontrollable, to hold up the company with countless costly delays.

For Mayer, Judy was necessary to MGM’s musical success – ergo, she needed to be cured. That no cure proved instant or lasting was a tragedy and likely not one that Mayer would have wished on one of his most popular stars. Mario Lanza – whose ego alone could have occupied two floors of the Thalberg Memorial Building also could do no wrong as far as Mayer was concerned. Mayer’s nephew Gerald would later admit “I think there’s a misapprehension that he (Mayer) was lucky. Most men won’t hire people who can replace them, but he hired Thalberg and Cedric Gibbons and a lot of others…He had a kind of genius.”

That genius would be tested immediately following the untimely death of MGM’s V.P. in Charge of Production Irving Thalberg in 1936. The relationship between Mayer and Thalberg, as all relationships between Mayer and fellow colleagues who were at least on equal creative and/or business plains, had been periodically strained. Following Thalberg’s demise, it had been quietly rumored around town that MGM’s supremacy in the industry would soon be in jeopardy. Instead, Mayer took control as few of his peers expected, ushering in the golden age of musicals under Arthur Freed while developing and maintaining complete and absolute control over all daily operations.

“L.B. wasn’t crude at all,” Esther Williams would later reflect, “Super-intelligent people might have found him common or crass, but he was trying to be the kind of executive that Lew Stone or Walter Pidgeon would play. He may have been an immigrant with a good suit of clothes, but never forget that this was a man working hard to be an American!”

At the dawn of her MGM tenure, Williams had been one of Mayer’s reluctant discoveries. Although Mayer’s initial response to signing this champion swimmer had been “How the hell do you make movies in a swimming pool?” a quiet and mutual respect developed between mogul and future star almost from the moment the ink on her contract had dried. Williams no nonsense approach to celebrity garnered L.B.’s admiration.

Reportedly, after their first and only disagreement, Williams quietly let L.B. rant for a few moments before informing him that he should not raise his voice to her again. When asked by a perplexed Mayer why this was so, Williams calmly added, “Because you can’t get to the other end of the pool.” Mayer considered that he was not a great or even a good swimmer. “They’d say swimmer take your mark,” Williams went on, “I’d go to the other end and you’d go right to the bottom.” Agreed. It was a tete a tete between equals. Mayer had his strengths. Williams had hers.


THE BEGINNING

& THE END


“Placed in his proper perspective, he was probably the greatest single force in the development of the motion picture industry to the heights of prosperity and influence it finally attained.”

– Daily Variety

Louis B. Mayer was born Eliezer Mayer in Minsk Russia in 1885, the son of an immigrant junk dealer who moved his family from New York to Halifax before settling in Haverhill Massachusetts in 1904. He was Jewish but only by birth, forever extolling the virtues of God in public and in print while rarely entering the synagogue to confirm that devotion. Mayer was not formally educated but he became master in his profession and a legitimate authority on movie making. It was not an immediate or an easy climb.

Purchasing a small theatre in Haverhill, by 1914 Mayer was president of the largest theater franchise in New England. But his heart and ambitions lay elsewhere. He would later cogitate, “I realized then that movies are the only thing you can sell and still own.”

In 1917 Mayer launched Louis B. Mayer Productions, entering into a lucrative business arrangement with theatre magnet Marcus Loewe; moving his producer operations to Los Angeles while acquiring Metro Pictures in the process. There, an alliance with Samuel Goldwyn (who had already been successfully producing) resulted in the creation of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios – a company that in a mere ten years became the largest and most profitable film factory on the west coast, in no small part thanks to L.B.’s constant foresight and vision.

Certainly, MGM’s V.P. Irving Thalberg was responsible for the slate of super productions that MGM made during these early years. But Thalberg made these movies with Mayer’s unassuming guidance and quiet faith that whatever Thalberg did – especially in the early days of their alliance – was destined to garner the studio both profits and prestige. “When I came out here in 1939,” screenwriter Bernard Gordon proclaimed, “I drove by MGM and thought to myself…by God – that’s Hollywood. No other studio compared and Mayer was the boss. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Mayer!”

At the time of Thalberg’s death, Mayer could already lay claim to the most up to date production facilities, most proficient technical staff, an ever-growing roster of top quality star talent and the biggest commissary in Hollywood. With its own fire and police departments and an educational facility for its expanding youth roster, MGM was legally classified as a city – Culver City. The studio’s supremacy in the public’s mind drew loud applause in theaters even as Leo the Lion roared before each feature.

But MGM’s stature was also reflected in films made at other studios. When Warner Bros. or Paramount gambled on their own one or two big movies per annum, these were readily referred to by critics as ‘of MGM’s quality.’ In fact, what other studios spent on two or three movies made up the budget of just one MGM movie; and a B-feature at that. B movies were afforded A-list budgets and A-list movies exemplified the studio’s wealth and stature with mind-boggling artistry. Of the top 10 box office draws in the country, at least 5 were under contract to Mayer’s dream factory at any one time between 1933 and 1949.
A formidable businessman, Mayer’s lack of formal education didn’t seem to hurt his prospects. As he ruled MGM with an iron fist though arguably gentle hand, Mayer became the highest paid personage in the industry and President Hoover’s very first guest at the White House. Despite his accolades and admiration from without, within the organization of Loewe’s Incorporated, Mayer had his detractors. When Marcus Loewe died, Mayer found himself pitted against wily corporate wheeler and dealer – Nicholas Schenck. When Schenk plotted in the late thirties to sell MGM to rival mogul William Fox – a move Mayer successfully thwarted through his political connections – a professional wound opened that would have serious repercussions for Mayer and his studio years later.

The rift between Schenck and Mayer, though bitter, was perhaps not quite as apparent immediately after Thalberg’s death. After all, there were too many good movies being made at MGM; The Human Comedy, Girl Crazy, A Guy Named Joe, Meet Me In St. Louis, Gaslight, National Velvet, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, The White Cliffs of Dover to name but a handful. With profits soaring, Schenck had to concede that Mayer knew what he was doing. “Mayer had wonderful intuition,” Esther Williams would later reflect, “He worked purely from instinct. He didn’t read. He couldn’t create from scratch. But give him the framework and he could assemble the pieces like his life depended on it…which it did.”

After Thalberg’s death, Mayer assumed total control of all MGM productions with what affectionately became known around the back lot as his ‘college of cardinals’ – a troupe of producers beholding to Mayer and responsible for making his kind of entertainment; light, frothy and lavish. “MGM functioned like General Motors", recalled Ricardo Montalban, “It was run with such efficiency that is was a marvel…it was amazing.”

For a while this formula assembly line worked, particularly since what became known as ‘the MGM style’ remained a slow, though ever-evolving constant on the screen, overseen behind the camera by Production Designer Cedric Gibbons. Henceforth, MGM’s movies were an architectural treat for the eye as much as they were emotionally satisfying for the heart and soul. Mayer’s zeal for ‘family’ films bode well with war time audiences who sought escapism over reality. However after the war, audience tastes changed considerably while Mayer’s perception of wholesome entertainment did not.

Nick Schenck, who had been forced into silence after his failed merger with Fox and during the heady profit-driven days, could be more public now with his distemper toward Mayer. MGM had failed to earn a single Oscar between 1946 and 1948. What had been popular with the masses a few short years earlier was now either only moderately successful or falling shy of expectations. The world of entertainment was evolving. MGM was not. Something had to be done.

In the interim, Mayer had become preoccupied with interests outside of the studio’s domain. First on this list of distractions was Mayer’s divorce from his first wife, Margaret. By all accounts, L.B.’s sexual appetites were robust. After Margaret’s hysterectomy, Mayer confided to close male friends that the thought of making love to his wife was repugnant. Gradually, Mayer’s eye began to wander – first to close female friends, then starlets under contract, though as an aging lothario L.B.’s technique in the art of seduction was hardly on par with his prowess as MGM’s mogul and chief. A series of light-hearted ‘social’ affairs often ended badly. Then finally, L.B. became smitten with society matron Lorena Danker. The two were eventually married.

However, Mayer had also found time away from skirt chasing to indulge yet another passion that had absolutely nothing to do with making movies. At any given time of day, L.B. could be found on Lot 13 – a quaint euphemism for Santa Anita Racetrack where he frequently bet on his ever-increasing stable of prized thoroughbreds.

It is likely that if MGM had been taken care of first, Nick Schenck would have continued to look the other way on everything else that Mayer had been investing his time. But with profits at their lowest since the Depression, Schenck seized upon the opportunity to project his own authority over Mayer. Ordered by Schenck to find ‘another Thalberg,’ Mayer settled on Dore Schary. More Schenck’s choice than Mayer’s own hand-picked candidate, Dore Schary moved into his Vice Presidency with all the comfortable assurances from both Schenck and Mayer that one might expect of a man who had just been handed the keys to the most formidable kingdom in all of Hollywood.

The argument has often been made in Schary’s defense that, unlike Mayer, he was a man trying to keep up with the times; meaning he desperately wanted to make more socially conscious films that reflected an awakening away from the glamorous haze that movies in general and MGM movies in particular had provided audiences. To this end, Schary’s revamping of the studio’s film line up resulted in individual budgets being slashed by 25 percent.

However, Schary, unlike Mayer, had far too many blind spots to effectively run MGM – except perhaps, into the ground. He simply could not see the validity in maintaining a certain status quo that had been – and might have continued to be - MGM’s bread and butter. Schary also had little stomach for molly-coddling delinquent stars. Lana Turner’s late night carousing and various public scandals were a prime example. To censure Turner without appearing outwardly obvious, Schary instead put the actress in two colossally stupid movies – their back to back flops at the box office suggesting both to Turner and her fans that her days as MGM’s reigning sex goddess were rapidly coming to an end.
Schary also had no taste for musicals – a genre he did not appreciate or even understand, as is apparent by his suggestion to producer Arthur Freed that the climactic shooting match between Annie (Betty Hutton) and Bill (Howard Keel) be cut from Annie Get Your Gun (1950). The problem herein was that musicals were an MGM main staple – like shredded wheat or ma’ and homemade apple pie. Worse, Schary believed that both MGM’s star system and its producer system were top heavy hindrances to the fiscal future of the company. In his tenure at MGM Schary would add only two actors to its roster, James Whitmore and Nancy Davis – both credible actors, neither up to Mayer’s vision of the classic ‘star.’ Responding to Schary’s ambition for producing message pictures, producer/director Mervyn LeRoy reportedly told his boss, “If you want to send a message, go to Western Union!”
The alliance between Mayer and Schary eventually became so confrontational it resulted in a showdown that ended disastrously for Mayer. Assuming that his tenure through ‘lead by example’ had provided him with a Teflon coating, Mayer gave Nick Schenk an ultimatum – “It’s either me or Schary!” The die had been cast. Schenk fired Mayer in 1951 almost without blinking – his belief in Dore Schary as Mayer’s successor shaken to its core a scant four years later when Schary’s ambitions eventually sank the studio’s bottom line deep into the red.

Over the next several years Mayer made several attempts to regain his foothold in the film business – but these ventures – such as his appointment to run the board responsible for Cinerama - were half-hearted at best. By 1957, the strain of struggling to prove he was still worth his metal was too much. Embittered and alone, Mayer resigned himself to ranting in private, than publicly to anyone who would listen on how he had been wronged by Schary and Schenck. That same year, a lethargic Mayer would check himself into the hospital for a general physical only to learn that he was dying of leukemia. He did not last the year. His last words were to friend and publicist Howard Strickling, “Nothing matters…nothing matters.”


REFLECTIONS

ON A GREAT MAN


“Dore Schary could write a script and Dore Schary could make a speech. But Mayer was a showman. He had an uncanny knack for picking talent in executives and actors. He knew how to delegate power, which many executives can’t. He was more of a businessman than a creator, but don’t you think it takes creativity to build a company like MGM? He couldn’t write. He couldn’t direct. But he had a greatness.”
- Ralph Winters

Those who knew L.B. Mayer in his prime have had conflicted recollections of the great man since. Debbie Reynolds has echoed the vast perception shared by many from the old MGM alumni of ‘Papa Mayer’, a gentle, almost saintly coddler of his stars. “He would do anything for us,” former child star Freddie Bartholomew jokingly observed years later, “except pay us what we were worth.”

Yet, Bartholomew’s assessment seems grossly unfair in retrospect and casts a miserly pall on an individual who in truth was far from Ebenezer Scrooge. While it can be argued that Bartholomew’s MGM salary pales to what child stars receive today, it was nevertheless a proportionally responsible pay scale for its own time, comparable with what other child stars of his day were being paid at rival studios – save Shirley Temple’s gold star treatment at Fox (and rightfully so, since Shirley alone was responsible for pulling 20th Century-Fox out of receivership).

Furthermore, Mayer was ever the philanthropist throughout his life’s work. Whatever his personal failings, he always found time to invest in projects that could in no way advance his reputation as a film maker. He frequently invested in entrepreneurial projects put forth by other people and gave freely of both his funds and time in doing good by both the young and old. Perhaps it was all merely a façade; just another way to present himself to the world as a great man. Those who knew him best, however, doubt such planned cleverness. “I found him wonderful,” recalled Howard Keel, the star of such MGM classics as Showboat and Kiss Me Kate, “Doing benefits for charities and old people. When I reached out to shake his hand and thank him for the opportunity he had given me he pulled back a moment and pointed his finger at me, saying ‘Don’t thank me. Thank your mother.’”
Gene Kelly’s glib response to an interview in 1990, “I didn’t like him, he didn’t like me…it was mutual” also seems more than a tad unfair in assessing Mayer’s general respect for talent – given Kelly’s repeated penchant for defying studio edicts by doing his own stunt work. If, as Kelly has suggested, Mayer never cared for him particularly, then Mayer could so easily have black-balled the fledgling star, not only from MGM but Hollywood in general. With Mayer’s overriding integrity and power it would have been so easily accomplishable. The fact that he did not fire Kelly during the mid-forties, long before Kelly proved his own saleable commodity at the box office with mega-hits like On The Town, An American in Paris and Singin’ In The Rain, attests to a more patient and forgiving nature than Kelly has ever given Mayer credit for.

In recent years, Mayer’s own words have come back to haunt his reputation. Upon leaving the funeral services for Irving Thalberg, Mayer is reported to have nudged Eddie Mannix and muttered, “Isn’t God good to me?”; a murderous statement by any standard. Yet, given the climate of tension, conflict and perceived animosity between him and his Vice President at the time of Thalberg’s death, one can almost sympathize with Mayer’s sense of relief. A thorn had been removed from his side.

The more recent rumor, that L.B. Mayer somehow managed to hasten Thalberg’s demise by generating more stress in Irving’s professional life, also seems rather misguided. If anything, following Thalberg’s first heart attack in 1933, Mayer tried to alleviate his stresses by giving Irving his own production unit while creating smaller units not under his authority, thereby lightening Irving’s load of responsibilities by with more time for convalescence. That Thalberg was impassioned about his job, an obsession that drove every fiber of his being past the point of no return is well documented.

As First Lady of the American Theater, Helen Hayes would reflect on Thalberg running the studio, “It killed him. He died of genius” – not Mayer! If Mayer did nothing else to temper this dynamo, he also did not add to Thalberg’s uncontrollable zest for his work, work and more work long after the twenty-four hours in each day had already been thoroughly spent.
After Mayer’s dismissal MGM was never quite the same again. The consistency that Mayer had provided – the idyllic circumstances for a fertile proving ground where creative talents could function at their zenith was gone. Schary’s tenure at the studio was brief, rather than galvanic, and disastrous to say the least, and, it was followed by an ever-changing cavalcade of appointments that barely had enough time to place their personal seal on any film before being ousted in favor of another major executive upheaval. “I think when (Mayer) died he took the studio with him,” reflected June Allyson – Metro’s most popular musical sweetheart, “…so he didn’t really lose in the end.”

There is little to deny that many of the films produced after Mayer’s departure lost some of their showmanship and ability to recapture the imagination that exemplified the best of the studio’s product under L.B. While the lion’s share infrequently managed a bit of the old luster that lived up to the studio’s motto of ‘ars gratia artis’ – loosely translated into ‘art for art’s sake’ with mega-hits like North By Northwest (1959) Ben-Hur (1959) Gigi (1958) and Doctor Zhivago (1965) for the most part, a genuine and overriding sense of finality to the good ol’ days had crept onto the back lot.

Indeed, by 1959 the studio system that Mayer had worked so diligently to cultivate and preserve was, sadly, a thing of the past. If Mayer had succeeded in making his comeback to Culver City he would have discovered a very different studio awaiting his command. Instead, and perhaps with the underlying knowledge that the times had made his sort of autocratic diplomacy as much of a relic as the Weimar Republic, Mayer chose an imposed isolationism for his final years. Though few who had trailed on his coattails visited him in the twilight of his life, if nothing else, L.B. Mayer could reflect with pride that his had been the most prosperous tenure of any mogul at any of the film studios in Hollywood.

The old edict once applied to Thalberg – “as long as Irving lives we are all great men” – could just as easily be ascribed (and should have been) to L.B. Mayer. Esther Williams has quipped, that Mayer’s number one compensation for his lack of culture and education was ‘intimidation’. To some extent this is true, as in the time Mayer became so displeased with resident operatic diva Jeanette MacDonald’s singing that he dropped to his knees to belt out a Jewish hymn with tears in his eyes to illustrate for MacDonald how she should carry a tune.

Yet, those who found Mayer temperamental were themselves temperamental artists of considerable merit. Hence, Mayer may have bruised their vanity, though little else. If he exuded God-like control over his stars and starlets he was in keeping with the general mentality of his contemporaries (Jack Warner, Darryl F. Zanuck, et al) in exercising rights of ownership in order to ensure that every artist at his studio came off like a gentleman or lady.

Perhaps former child star and frequent L.B. favorite Mickey Rooney best summed up the confusion surrounding Mayer’s legacy with, “After he died everybody wrote every nasty book about him, while he was alive he was the greatest guy in the world to everybody…I mean everybody.”

@Nick Zegarac 2008 (all rights reserved).