Part 22

Sylvia’s best friend and next-door neighbor in Santa Monica was Norma Shearer, who decided one day to give the Fairbankses a party, inviting Doug’s closest friends. At 7 P.M. that evening Sylvia telephoned Norma: “I’m terribly sorry but we can’t come. Douglas was taken ill this afternoon, and he’s much worse now.”

Their two place cards had been removed from the table when the other guests sat down to dine at nine o’clock. During the first course her butler whispered a message to Norma. She turned pale for a moment, but the dinner went on into dancing, some party games, and all kinds of fun until things broke up at 3 A.M. By that time Douglas Fairbanks had been dead five and a half hours. Later I asked Norma: “How could you do it? Your guests were Doug’s best friends.”

She answered: “What could I do? I couldn’t say anything. It would have spoiled the party.”

Not all Doug’s money was left to Sylvia. Douglas, Jr., was more than comfortably off when he married Mary Lee Epling, divorced wife of financier Huntington Hartford. They live in old-world style in a small London town house with their three daughters. Douglas, Jr., does not stray from the hearthstone. They are extremely social, with British and European royalty and ambassadors of all nations, including one of our own, Winthrop Aldrich, who had a penchant at parties for pinching old ladies in the Latin fashion. They absolutely adored it--no one had paid them such attention for years.

Hollywood has all the excuses you find anywhere for divorce--boredom, egotism, emotional immaturity, and the rest. It also has some special reasons of its own--press agents who can get bigger headlines with a scandal than with a happy home life; producers who resent a husband or wife “interfering” in a star’s business; managers who stop at nothing to hold onto their percentages. Elsewhere in the world, children are usually a bond that holds parents through many a squabble. But that’s not always the case in the Empire of Guff, which was one of Gene Fowler’s labels for us.

This is a hard, rocky place for a child to grow up in. Some of them don’t know who their fathers really are because they’ve had so many in the family. They’re brought up by nurses, cooks, and chauffeurs instead of parents because mother and father are too busy to give them any time. All the children can be spared is money, which is a stone to suck on when a child needs love.

Eddie Robinson, Jr., was spoiled. His mother, Gladys--the first Mrs. Robinson, Sr.--was never allowed by her husband to lay a hand on the boy. At thirteen he “borrowed” other people’s cars without asking. He has been in one automobile accident after another. Now he has a wife and child, whom Gladys helps support. Edward G. Robinson couldn’t be accused of being stingy toward his son, however, since he continued to make Junior an allowance of $1000 a month.

Dixie Lee Crosby brought up her four sons strictly but well. Bing somehow found other things he had to do, so the children didn’t see a lot of their father. Dixie had problems in her pregnancies, when she virtually was forced on to brandy to survive. She had to stay home, sick, when Bing sailed off to Paris at the time Queen Elizabeth was crowned, taking Lindsay with him and having a gay old time. The boy went to London to see the coronation and stayed with the Alan Ladd family at the Dorchester. Bing was having too much fun in Paris to leave. Lindsay was the youngest and sweetest of the four sons. Like Gary, Philip, and Dennis, he started whooping it up the minute Dixie’s restraint was lifted.

Henry Ginsberg for a while attempted to be a kind of foster father to the Crosby boys, inviting them to use his apartment as a second home while Bing was courting Kathy Grant. Finally Henry got tired of their drinking and other night-owl habits which brought them to his door at two and three o’clock in the morning. “I like you, but I can’t put up with it any longer,” he said, and the door was closed to them.

I have seen the frightening looks given to her mother, Lana Turner, by Cheryl Crane, who was found guilty of stabbing Lana’s good friend, the hoodlum muscle man, Johnny Stompanato. I’ve argued with Joan Crawford after she told the oldest girl of her four adopted children that she had to leave home. “This at a time when she needs love and protection most?”

“She’s a wild girl with no respect for anything,” snapped Joan.

I know one young girl, the daughter of one of our most married stars, who fell madly in love with her mother’s fourth husband and made up her mind to steal him away by hook or crook. She went to her mother and said: “He tried to make love to me.”

This was a lie, but the woman believed her daughter. “Get out of my house!” she raged at her husband. “How dare you do such a vile thing?”

“Did she tell you that?” he said, appalled. “Are you willing to take her word against mine? You remember how old she is, don’t you? She’s fourteen.”

“I believe her.”

“Then I’ll go. But I’ll tell you this--you’re going to have more sorrow through that girl than you’ve believed possible in this world. You’ll see.” He proved to be an accurate prophet.

Divorce is often an inherited affliction, passed on from mother to daughter, father to son, like hemophilia among the Hapsburgs. Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Doris Day, and a dozen more came from broken homes. Their own chances of success as wives may well have been blighted. The children of Hollywood’s broken marriages inherit a tradition of trouble. As an example, take a look at the Fonda family tree.

I used to wonder how Henry Fonda could so much as cut his meat when he sat at the table next to mine when we were fellow passengers aboard the boat sailing from Southampton to New York. His table mate was Mrs. Frances Seymour Brokaw, whom he’d met in London, and she was so stuck on him that I doubt she let go of his hands for more than five minutes at a time all the way across the Atlantic.

Hank had already tried marriage once, and so had she. Mr. Brokaw had been the husband of Clare Boothe before she married Henry Luce, the founder of _Time_ and _Life_. Hank had been the husband for two years of Margaret Sullavan.

Frances Brokaw was the second Mrs. Fonda--the knot was tied in 1936--and the mother of two children: Jane, born in 1937; and Peter, who arrived in 1940.

There is a darker inheritance than divorce. As man and wife, the Fondas were seemingly happy for years. But Frances was increasingly possessive, and though no divorce suit ever was filed, Hank wanted his freedom to marry Susan Blanchard. In April 1950, Frances took her life in a Beacon, New York, sanitarium, after cutting Hank completely out of her $500,000 will.

The first Mrs. Fonda, Margaret Sullavan, went on to three other marriages; to director William Wyler in 1934; to producer Leland Hayward in 1936, to whom she bore three children, Brooke, Bridget, and Bill; to financier Kenneth Wagg, who had four children already. Margaret’s life ended in tragedy, too. She was depressed by an ever-increasing deafness, which had crept up on her unnoticed at first. We discussed it together. I spoke about possible treatments, but she dismissed them. “I’ve discovered it too late,” she said.

Then she was set for a New Haven opening of a play which she was tackling after a long absence from the stage and which she didn’t much care for. Her death from sleeping pills was called suicide and blamed on the fact that she didn’t want to open, while Equity rules insisted that she should. Cathleen Nesbitt, who had helped her in the part, could not accept that verdict. “I am as sure as I sit here,” she told me later, “that it was an accident for Maggie.”

But there was no doubt that the second daughter, Bridget, whom Margaret bore Leland Hayward, died of her own choice.

In December 1950, Henry Fonda took his third wife, Susan Blanchard, stepdaughter of Oscar Hammerstein II and mother of Hank’s third child, Amy. The divorce came five years later. In 1957 he married for the fourth time. We see very little of his wife, the former Baroness Afdera Franchetti. She doesn’t particularly care for Hollywood.

One more bit of tragedy hovers over Hank. His best part in years was in _Mr. Roberts_, whose author, Thomas Heggen, he knew and liked. Thomas Heggen decided life was not worth living, too, after the play was a great success.

What her family means to Jane Fonda, only she could tell. She saw very little of her mother, was brought up by her grandmother, whom she adored. Jane went to the Actors’ Studio to study, tackled her own movie career like a she-wolf. She claimed, understandably perhaps, that marriage had no part in her plans. She could manage very well, she told me, without love in her life. When I wrote a column about her, her father telephoned. “I have no control over my daughter,” he said. “But when the right fellow comes along, she’ll marry him. She’s a very smart girl and likes to make headlines.”

One smart girl used to bring documents to me from the J. Walter Thompson agency in Los Angeles not long ago. I hadn’t heard her name until she said: “I don’t think you know it, but I’m John Gilbert’s daughter. I didn’t know my father--he died before I could remember him.”

I thought to myself that I would never forget the screen’s great lover, destroyed as an actor on the sound stage when the talkies came in. Jack’s first talking picture, _His Glorious Night_, was directed by Lionel Barrymore. I was in it. Jack’s first words were: “I love you, I love you, I love you.” In forming these words, his mouth and nose came together almost like a parrot’s beak. I used to see the glee on Lionel’s face as he watched Gilbert. Lionel was suffering painfully from arthritis, and by four o’clock any afternoon he could scarcely get out of his chair. If anybody tried to help him he’d knock their hands away and yell: “What’s the matter with you? Do you think I’m sick?”

That picture destroyed Jack Gilbert. He was honeymooning abroad with Ina Claire when he lost all his money in the crash of ’29. The day they landed in New York, the picture opened. He went to see it. With the opening sentence the audience started to laugh, and he crept out of the theater like a man condemned to the electric chair.

While he was abroad, the studio had built him a beautiful bungalow and raised his salary to $5000 a week. After his return, when executives saw him coming, they crossed to the other side of the street. They gave him miserable, inconsequential pictures which he did. But he never survived the hurt.

I said to his daughter: “Have you seen your father in any movies?” wondering if she knew that Jack had been desperately in love with Garbo, who was fond of him but would never marry him, for the love of her life was Maurice Stiller.

His daughter replied: “Not until the other day, when I went to see him in _Queen Christina_ with Garbo.” I asked what she thought of him. Her head lifted and her eyes glowed: “I thought he was wonderful.”

He was, but we treated him badly.

_Sixteen_

I live in a town that sells dreams but is ruled by nightmares. Its stock in trade is illusion, which it manufactures in fear; not mere apprehension about fading profits or a decline in reputation, but stark terror of God’s honest truth.

Power in the movie business fell into the clutches of men who stopped at nothing to lay their hands on it. In the process they picked up a chronic infection of guilty conscience. They couldn’t afford to let the public glimpse the facts behind the fiction; they’d rather shell out a million dollars. They were always terrified of being found out.

There were--and are--so many closets bulging with skeletons. I’ve rattled a few of them in my time when I’ve been convinced the cause was good. But never was there such a rattling as I gave our one and only self-appointed monarch, Louis B. Mayer, and his temporary crown prince, Dore Schary. I’m glad to say it scared the living daylights out of them.

The cause was a worthy one: one of the few unsung heroines of our town had been pushed off the payroll in outrageous ingratitude for all she’d contributed to MGM. She badly needed her job back after a long illness, and I was determined that she should have it. One of the rattling sets of bones was labeled “Politics,” another was “Greed,” and a third was “Messages.” I don’t think Dore Schary has ever forgiven me.

Ida Koverman was the tall, stately, gray-haired queen mother who stood behind King Louis’ throne. She taught the little gormandizer about table manners, how to handle a party without throwing Emily Post into strictures. Ida transformed the once inarticulate ex-peddler of scrap iron into an after-dinner orator in love with the sound of his own voice, and she rehearsed him in the speeches that rolled off his tongue.

She was the behind-the-scenes arbiter of good taste in the greatest motion-picture studio of them all. There was a day when she burst into his office when he was deep in conference with the New York investment bankers who had control of Loew’s Incorporated--Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is Loew’s trade name, Loew’s is the parent corporation.

Louis, who had issued strict orders that he was not to be disturbed, was furious. She brushed aside his protests in her best, no-nonsense manner. “I want you to come right now and see yesterday’s rushes on _The Pirate_,” she said. “You must see a dance scene Gene Kelly and Garland did together.” She kept at him until he angrily excused himself and stumped out on his bandy legs with her.

In the projection room she gave the order for the film to be rerun. The scene was a hair curler. Gene and Judy had flung themselves too eagerly into the spirit of things. It looked like a torrid romance. “Burn the negative!” screamed Louis. “If that exhibition got on any screen, we’d be raided by the police.” He summoned Kelly to his office next morning for an ear-blistering lecture on how to behave while dancing.

Mayer, who was his own best talent scout, met Mrs. Koverman when she first came to California to rally Republican women in support of Herbert Hoover. When he hired her away from the future President to join Metro as Louis’ executive secretary and assistant, she was thought to be Jewish. But Ida Raynus--her maiden name--was a widow with Scottish blood. And her Scottish pride kept her from asking Louis for a raise. For twenty-five years, she was held at her starting salary of $250 a week.

On that comparative pittance she had more power than anybody in our town over stars earning forty times more than she did; over the whole product of Loew’s, a quarter-billion-dollar empire; over Mayer himself, who pulled down a total of $15,000,000 over the years and preened his feathers every time the newspapers tagged him the world’s highest-paid executive. Until they came to a parting of the ways, she was the only living soul in Hollywood he would listen to when she told him what was what and why.

In next to no time Ida was all but running the studio from her office next to his. Louis never personally made a picture in his life; didn’t know how. That was left to Irving Thalberg, the slim, neurotic wonder boy who could carry the plot and production details of half a dozen pictures simultaneously in his head. The sheer strain made him a nervous wreck, with a trick of sitting in conference with a box of kitchen matches, carefully breaking every stick into tiny pieces and piling the bits in a mixing bowl on his desk.

Louis, however, was the impresario, who prided himself on knowing intimately what made the human heart tick. Nobody on the lot could outdo him at chewing scenery when the mood came on him. This thwarted thespian was a hypochondriac who could faint to order, fake a heart attack to win an argument or stave off somebody’s salary increase. He would project anger, indignation, piteous pleading, or tears like a home movie show.

One of his favorite songs was “The Rosary.” He would weep buckets just talking about it. He thought there was a fine picture idea in the lyrics and assigned two of his favorite writers to create a script. After nine months’ hard labor they turned in their typescript. He discovered their story was set in a New Orleans whorehouse. That was the last assignment they ever got from the outraged Mr. Mayer.

As Louis concentrated increasingly on playing god, more and more responsibility fell on Ida’s shoulders. She set up the talent school that trained a skyful of future stars who made millions for Loew’s--Jackie Cooper, Freddie Bartholomew, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Liz Taylor, Kathryn Grayson, Donna Reed. It was Ida, called “Kay” by her friends, who suggested having the elaborate sound-recording system installed which opened a whole new horizon in musicals. Stars like Nelson Eddy, Jeanette MacDonald, Grace Moore, and Lawrence Tibbett were freed from the double burden of acting and singing at the same time, because their voices could now be recorded separately to the filmed movement of their lips.

Ida had the feel in her bones for talent that Mayer imagined he had. She discovered a young Adonis named Spangler Arlington Brugh fresh out of Pomona College and saw to it that he was rechristened Robert Taylor. She heard an overgrown Boy Scout sing at a Los Angeles concert, which is how Nelson Eddy arrived on the scene.

Ida and a handful of others, including Lionel Barrymore, were impressed by the movie test of a husky, beetle-browed actor from a downtown stage show--he played his scene in a cut-down sarong with a flower behind one flapping ear. “A woman knows what appeals to women,” was a rule she worked by, so she had the test rerun for an audience of Metro’s messenger girls and secretaries. On the strength of the raves they scribbled on their comment cards, Clark Gable was signed.

Ida devised what she called “the rule of illusion” that captured daydreams on celluloid and convinced the public that Hollywood was paradise on earth. “A star,” she considered, “must have an unattainable quality.” Another specification of hers: “A star may drink champagne or nectar, but not beer.”

Ida was a Christian Scientist who, incredibly in the motion-picture business, clung to her job because, as she saw it, her special position of power gave her a phenomenal chance to do good. “If you can’t help somebody,” she used to say, “what are you put here on earth for?”

That philosophy contrasted violently with her boss’s point of view. He behaved as if the earth had been invented exclusively for Louis B. Mayer. He gave and withheld his favors like Ivan the Terrible. If you crossed him, he sought vengeance. During the filming of the first version of _Ben-Hur_, its star, Francis X. Bushman, offended Mayer, who saw to it that the actor was kept off the screen for the next twenty-three years.

He tried to force his attentions on practically every actress on his payroll. Jeanette MacDonald had to invent an engagement and buy herself the ring as a desperate sort of defense against the tubby, bespectacled little tyrant. He chased me around his desk for twelve years until my contract came up for renewal. “Why don’t you say yes to him for once and see what happens?” said Ida, before I was ushered into his all-white sanctum to talk a new contract.

I found Louis in good form. “Why do you always resist me?” he demanded. “If only you’d been nice to me, we could have made beautiful music together. I could have made you the greatest star in Hollywood.”

“I was wrong, Mr. Mayer. There are only two questions--when and where?”

His blown-up ego exploded with a bang like a toy balloon. With a stricken look he turned on his heels and ran out the private exit of his office as fast as his legs would carry him. He just liked to talk about it. (I might add that my contract was not renewed.)

Louis owned a stableful of race horses; Ida lived simply. She once inscribed a photograph to our friend, Virginia Kellogg, who was a script writer until she married director Frank Lloyd. “I would rather have the small worries of too little,” Ida wrote, “than the empty satisfaction of too much.”

She lived in a rented apartment, drove a Dodge that Mayer gave her in a rare burst of generosity. In the evenings she listened to music or played her grand piano, which was one of the great joys of her life. Or she embroidered petit point bags as gifts for friends. What money she could save, she used as down payments on little houses, which she’d do over and resell at a small profit.

Howard Hughes wanted her with him at RKO, offered her three times the salary she was making. She refused. She had too high a regard for Howard. She knew that if she walked out on Mayer, it would set him off on a vendetta to destroy Howard Hughes, and Louis, with Hearst’s friendship, had the power to do him a lot of harm.

She was more than Mayer’s conscience; she was his entree to Republican politics. Through Ida, he snuggled up close to Herbert Hoover, begged Hearst to jump on the Hoover bandwagon, got himself chosen as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Kansas City that resulted in the Great Engineer succeeding silent Cal Coolidge in the White House.

Grateful for Mayer’s support, the new President invited Louis and his faithful wife Margaret to Washington as his first informal guests after the inaugural. Hearst, who saw a lot of Louis now that Cosmopolitan Pictures was under Metro’s wing, gave the visit the full treatment in his newspapers, which was oil to Louis’ ego.

He thought he was really going places then, with the President in his pocket. A place in the Cabinet? An ambassadorship? When years passed and none of his pipe dreams came true, he pinned the blame on Ida. Suddenly she could do nothing right for him.

He fumed because he had to pass her next-door office and see her whenever he went out his own door. She was running the show instead of him, he raged. She was usurping the power that was his. He turned on her like a tiger. That was Mayer’s way. But she had too many friends for him to reach her at that time.

Another woman and, indirectly, another President saved Ida from Mayer’s fury. The woman was Mabel Walker Willebrand, a brilliant attorney. The President was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was now in the White House with a Congress behind him that was out for Mayer’s hide. I met FDR only once, and that in his White House office. “You’d have been a great actor if you hadn’t been President,” I said, “but I’m never going to come and see you again.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m a Republican, and if I saw you again, you might turn me into a Democrat.” He laughed so hard and tipped back in his chair so far I was scared he’d topple clean out of it.

But the Democrats weren’t laughing at Louis. They were gunning for him with a reform bill that included a provision stating that breeders of race horses could claim no depreciation and write off no losses unless the stables were their stock in trade or principal business. That pinpointed Louis. His prodigal style of living demanded some income benefit from his stables. The staggering take he enjoyed from Metro put him up in solitary splendor in the ninety per cent tax bracket when a bite that size was virtually unheard of. If the bill were voted into law, he was going to bleed.

He had two key allies when he took on Congress: an accountant, Mr. Stern, who was paid the princely sum of $100 a week for taking care of Louis’ personal bookkeeping, and Mabel Willebrand, who earned as much as $75,000 a year as his attorney. Out of her Washington office she battled to stave off the new bill. In the middle of the fight she came to Culver City to confer with Louis. She found he wanted to devote the time to denouncing Ida Koverman, whose value to the studio was well known by Mabel.