His MGM was a film factory, with stars as assembly-line workers and a hit formula — chaste
romance, apple pie and Andy Hardy.
Dan Quayle would have loved Louis B. Mayer, a man for whom the words family values
had real meaning. Motherhood, the Stars and Stripes and God were equal parts
of a lifelong strategy that would establish Metro Goldwyn Mayer as the industry's
dominant film factory, from the silent era through the talkies revolution. While
the other early moguls were simply trying to make the best movies they could,
young Mayer was an ideologue intent on using the power of the new medium to exert
what he considered the proper moral influence on the American public.
Mayer went West in 1918, just after the first wave of Hollywood pioneers. He
had been on the move since his threadbare family left its Cossack-ridden Ukrainian
village in the late 1880s and a few years later settled in St. John, New Brunswick.
There his father Jacob Mayer struggled as a junkman. Little Louie, half starved,
battled anti-Semitic bullies and helped his father--whom he despised as much
as he adored his mother. Escaping St. John in his late teens, he moved on to
Boston, where he discovered the Nickelodeon, the embryo of the moving-picture
business.
Quick to seize his opportunities in the young business of film distribution,
Mayer earned a breakthrough $500,000 by putting up $50,000 for a lopsided 90%
of the New England ticket sales on the first movie blockbuster, The Birth of
a Nation. Now ready to produce his own pictures, he inveigled a popular actress,
Anita Stewart, into breaking her contract with Vitagraph, and in 1918-19 starred
her in a series of teary films at the modest studio leased from the Selig Zoo
in downtown Los Angeles, where my father B.P. Schulberg joined him in the now
vanished Mayer-Schulberg Studio in 1920. A major step up for Mayer was entertainment
tycoon Marcus Loew's reaching out to him as commanding officer of a new company
merging Metro and Goldwyn, with Mayer soon adding his big M to the mix.
He raised the contract system to a state of the art, using it to rule over a
stable of stars who were legally bound to the company for years. In L.B.'s studio,
with frail, dedicated lieutenant Irving Thalberg at his side, L.B. worked hard
to project himself as a father figure to his extended family of stars, directors
and producers. He was the master manipulator, and it was generally acknowledged
that of all the great actors on the lot--the Barrymores, Spencer Tracy, Lon Chaney,
Garbo — L.B. was No. 1. When Robert Taylor tried to hit him up for a raise,
L.B. advised the young man to work hard, respect his elders, and in due time
he'd get everything he deserved. L.B. hugged him, cried a little and walked him
to the door. Asked, "Did you get your raise?" the now tearful Taylor
is said to have answered, "No, but I found a father."
BORN July 4, 1885, in Minsk, Russia (now Belarus)
1907 Buys and rebuilds a movie theater near
Boston
1917-18 Starts Louis B. Mayer Pictures; first
release: Virtuous Wives
1924 With Marcus Loew, forms Metro Goldwyn
Mayer. Goldwyn backs out
1925 Signs Greta Garbo
1932 Rift with production chief Irving Thalberg
divides studio
