City of Nets (69 page)

The most lethal competition, though, came from the new fad called television. At the end of the war, there had been only 6,500 TV sets in existence, mostly in bars, and there was nothing much to see on them. By 1948, the number of sets had climbed past one million; it would quadruple in 1949, then triple in 1950, to more than eleven million. The number of commercial broadcasters increased from seven to seventeen in 1947, and to forty-one in 1948, and the FCC authorized seventy more. Smart operators began combining stations into networks. The availability of TV transmission cables along the East Coast inspired both political parties to hold their 1948 presidential conventions in Philadelphia. Milton Berle became a national celebrity on Tuesday night's Texaco Star Theatre, and then came the Kraft Television Theatre, the Philco Television Playhouse, the Alcoa Theatre, the General Electric Theatre (which would soon feature Ronald Reagan). What was visible on the ten-inch screen was not the “vital, thinking men's blockbusters” that Darryl Zanuck had said the postwar audiences would want, but it was all available in the living room (or bar), and, most important of all, it was free.

Millions of people suddenly stopped going to the movies. Attendance sank from eighty million per week in 1946 to sixty-seven million in 1948 to sixty million in 1950, and it kept sinking. M-G-M, long the biggest and richest studio in Hollywood, suffered grievously from these financial blows. Loew's, Inc., which had earned a gross income of $18 million in the first twelve months after the end of the war, declined to $4 million during the fiscal year from September of 1947 to September of 1948, and that led to a 1947–48 net deficit of $6.5 million. Louis B. Mayer, who was supposed to be the great showman, didn't know what to do, and neither did the company president, Nicholas Schenck. One day in 1948, David Sarnoff of NBC asked to meet Schenck to discuss an alliance, and Schenck politely declined. “I said, ‘David, what have you got to offer? We've got the pictures,' ” Schenck told Schary some years later, apparently without any realization that he had behaved like a fool. “So the same thing goes today. What have they got to offer?”

One thing Schenck did know was that Mayer could not be left in despotic command of M-G-M. For all his white furniture and his million-dollar salary, Mayer had never actually made a movie, and his lordly dominion over his producers tended to reduce them to subservient creatures whose only aim was to please him. Garson Kanin has provided a telling snapshot of Mayer's vice-presidents and producers assembled in the executive dining room on the top floor of the Thalberg Building. There was one long table, set with expensive linen, silver, china, crystal. “In front of each place was a collection of pill bottles,” Kanin recalled. “No executives had less than a dozen. Some had as many as twenty or thirty. Various pills and capsules and drops had to be taken with various types of foods, for all sorts of ailments, some real and some imagined.”

Benny Thau, that vice-president who Herman Mankiewicz had said was responsible for informing Mayer of any appearance of the north wind, arrived one day and swept all his pill bottles into a manila envelope. He told the waitress to throw them away, not needed any more. Amid a general buzz of curiosity and concern, Thau ordered knockwurst and sauerkraut, wolfed everything down, then took off his wristwatch and studied it, then interrupted the general conversation by saying, “Excuse me, please.” “He unbuttoned his vest, leaned back in his chair,” Kanin reported. “Conversation continued. Thau took no part in it. He remained in his strange, withdrawn position for five minutes, then sat up brightly, and said, ‘I swear to God, it works.' ” When somebody asked what it was that worked, Thau earnestly answered: “This new short-wave radio treatment I'm on. There's this new doctor and I'm on a short-wave with him. After every meal, he sends out these short-waves and they completely digest my food.”

But somebody had to get the work done, to produce the movies. The legendary Thalberg, whatever his shortcomings, had actually had ideas about what films should be, which was more than anyone could say of Benny Thau and the other sycophants who clustered around the throne of Louis B. Mayer. Schenck insisted that Mayer discover a new Thalberg, and Mayer, who had secretly hated Thalberg, could only acquiesce. Schenck was the boss, known to many of his underlings as “the general.” Mayer started, inevitably, by propositioning his lost son-in-law, Selznick, and Selznick just as inevitably refused. Mayer then tried some even more implausible gambles. He propositioned Walter Wanger, and even Joe Mankiewicz, who had quit M-G-M after the row with Mayer over his affair with Judy Garland. Both of these prospective victims rejected Mayer's advances. Then Mayer (or Schenck) heard that Schary had walked out on Howard Hughes.

Mayer invited Schary to his house and offered him, without any preliminaries, the job of vice-president in charge of production, the same job he himself officially held. Mayer spoke of retiring in a year or two. Then he drifted off, as he usually did, into talking about the old days with Thalberg. “Believe me, [he] was a genius, but he was money mad,” Mayer said. “That was his problem. Money—money—that ruined him.” Schary had no such problem. All he asked was six thousand dollars a week (this at about the time that Arnold Schoenberg was forced into retirement from UCLA on a pension of $29.60 per month) and complete authority over all the studio's productions. Nick Schenck flew in that weekend, traveling incognito because he was avoiding a summons in some now-forgotten lawsuit, and they sparred a bit over Schary's terms. Mayer later telephoned Schary to tell him not to compromise. “Schenck will give in—he has to—he wants you,” Mayer said.

So the deal was made. Schary arrived at M-G-M in June of 1948, bringing along several of his wife's paintings, a bowling trophy, a collection of lead soldiers, and the script of
Battleground,
which he had bought from Hughes. Mayer also disliked
Battleground,
but Schary was in charge now, with Schenck behind him, so he ordered the film into production (and it made a handsome profit). Mayer, playing the role of mentor, warned Schary against Schenck. “Don't trust him,” Mayer said. “He'll bring you caviar when you leave New York and flowers in your room when you get back there—but he's only smiles and caviar and roses—and the rest of him is all shit.” Mayer also said that he had defended Schary against Westbrook Pegler's view that he was a Communist. “Do you think I'd have a Communist work for me?” he had asked the columnist. “Well, L.B., thanks,” Schary answered. “But you know, people get strange ideas. About a month ago, someone I know asked me, ‘Dore, how is it that you, a liberal, can work for a fascist?' I put him in his place by defending you.”

Well, Schary was a nuisance, but Mayer had other things on his mind. Like romance. There was a Russian-Jewish doctor named Jessie Marmorston who had entered his life in 1942, a specialist in endocrine glands, a dark and handsome and very forceful woman who fascinated him but was not quite what he wanted. He courted a somewhat less forceful dancer, Ann Miller, and a somewhat less forceful singer, Ginny Simms, but neither of them particularly wanted to replace the aging Maggie Mayer, even though the divorce court had certified Mayer's financial vulnerability by ordering him to settle upon his wife the impressive sum of three million dollars. Then, in the midst of selling off all his racehorses, including the one that had thrown him and broken his pelvis, Mayer met a onetime Warner Bros. dancer named Lorena Danker, widow of an advertising man, Danny Danker. Once again, at the age of sixty-three—or was it sixty-six?—he was in love.

In December of 1948, Mayer proposed that they fly to Yuma, Arizona, to be married, all by themselves, away from the Hollywood press. Then came a storm that made all flights impossible, and Mrs. Danker, who was not so demure as some of her predecessors, said, “Now or never.” So Mayer and his prospective bride took the train, along with the inevitable Howard Strickling, the publicity man, and Whitey Hendrey, chief of the M-G-M studio police, plus Mrs. Danker's eleven-year-old daughter, Suzanne. They arrived in Yuma at four in the morning, and tried to have breakfast at a motel, and inevitably the reporters and photographers began to assemble. So they finally fled to the office of Sheriff J. A. Beard, where, overlooking the bare yard of the Yuma County Jail, Louis B. Mayer pledged himself to his new wife.

 

“This is a tough one,” Dore Schary kept saying on the phone to New York. “But our feeling is to take her out because otherwise you're going to be in a hole—and you won't have a movie.”

“Do what you have to do,” said Nick Schenck.

What they had to do was solve the problem of Judy Garland, who was practically synonymous with M-G-M's famous musicals—Judy Garland of
The Wizard of Oz
and
Babes in Arms
and
Meet Me in St. Louis.
For that Judy Garland, the studio had bought Irving Berlin's
Annie Get Your Gun,
but the star was by now such a prisoner of her drug addiction and her unreasoning fears that she often could not even get to the studio, and her performances there were nearly worthless. More than one million dollars invested so far, and nothing to show for it. And yet she was still only twenty-six. “Do what you have to do,” said Nick Schenck.

By Hollywood standards, M-G-M had been exceptionally sympathetic and understanding. Late in 1946, after the success of
Ziegfeld Follies
and
Till the Clouds Roll By,
the studio had torn up her $3,000 per week contract and promised her a prodigious $5,600 per week for the next five years. And she didn't have to make more than two pictures a year, and she would always be the star. Then the studio had bought her S. N. Behrman's
The Pirate,
with her husband, Vincente Minnelli, as the director. But she had dieted so much that she weighed less than a hundred pounds, and often she didn't show up on the set for two or three days at a time, and when she did, Minnelli had to chauffeur her directly from the studio to her psychiatrist, the eminent Dr. Simmel. Simmel was old and refused to watch over her on the set, so another psychiatrist, Frederick Hacker, was hired to stand by at the studio. None of this really worked. One night, she telephoned the Ira Gershwins and asked if she could spend the night there, then lay on a guest room couch and simply started screaming. After several minutes of screaming, she stopped and said to Mrs. Gershwin, “Do you believe me?”

“Yes,” said Lee Gershwin. Then Judy Garland went back to her screaming until she finally passed out.

Soon after that, she made a pretense of attempting suicide. “I'm going to kill myself!” she shouted in the midst of an argument with Minnelli. She ran to the bathroom, locked herself in, broke a water glass, and scratched herself across the wrist. Minnelli broke down the door to rescue her, but a Band-Aid was enough to stop the bleeding. Dr. Simmel recommended the Las Campanas sanitarium in Compton. After a few weeks there, she came home again. Then a new psychiatrist named Herbert Kupper suggested the Riggs Foundation in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. After a few weeks there, she went shakily back to work at M-G-M to do
Easter Parade,
again with Minnelli as director. But in the midst of rehearsals, Dr. Kupper told Arthur Freed, the producer, that it would be bad for Miss Garland to work for her husband, so Minnelli was summarily removed from the project. (As an added plot twist, the leading man, Gene Kelly, broke his ankle playing softball, and that was how Fred Astaire came to be the male star of
Easter Parade.
)

“We are happier apart,” Minnelli said in announcing the separation that ended the marriage in that summer of 1948. But
Easter Parade
was such a success that M-G-M paid a record price for
Annie Get Your Gun
and announced that a three-million-dollar production was being designed just for Miss Garland. She couldn't get through it. “We started the picture, we did a couple of scenes, and I knew I wasn't good,” she said later. “We made all the prerecordings. But I was in a daze. My head wouldn't stop aching.”

She would lie awake all night, telephoning people to ask questions like, “What kind of a day do you think it will be?” She took pills—Nembutal, Seconal, amphetamines, tranquilizers. Her skin broke out in rashes. Her hair began to fall out. Yet another new doctor, Fred Pobirs, put her in a hospital and had her undergo six electric shock treatments.

When she returned to
Annie
in the spring of 1949, she was repeatedly late for work, keeping scores of people standing around idle. Mayer, who had been her boss since childhood, had a fatherly talk with her; Schary, too, tried having a talk with her. She kept saying that she was trying as hard as she could. “Do what you have to do,” said Nick Schenck.

On Saturday, May 7, Miss Garland came to the studio late, then walked off the set and simply sat in her dressing room, banging her head against a wall. On Monday, she didn't appear at all. On Tuesday, she arrived late and was welcomed by a warning letter from an M-G-M vice-president named Louis K. Sidney: “You must be aware of the fact that your contract with us requires you to be prompt in complying with our instructions. . . .” If she continued to be late, the letter said, the studio would exercise its rights, “including, but not limited to, the right to remove you from ‘
ANNIE GET YOUR GUN.
' ” She started shouting protests to anyone who would listen. “I never lost anybody any money in my life!” she cried, waving the letter around.

Reports from the battlefield soon reached the M-G-M executive offices, and after lunch, an official emissary named Lester Peterson arrived at Miss Garland's dressing room with a new letter from Sidney. “You have refused to comply with our instructions . . .” it said. “This is to notify you that for good and sufficient cause and in accordance with the rights granted to us under the provisions of Paragraph 12 of your contract of employment with us . . . we shall refuse to pay you any compensation commencing as of . . .” And so on.