Eyman is one of the best film biographers going around and Mayer deserved reappraisal - he's been long mocked/pillored in Hollywood history because of his behaviour: attacking the writers guild and communists, sobbing and wailing to actors and talking about family values and mother worship and wholesome pictures, terrorising poor little Irving Thalberg and Dore Schary, punching out John Gilbert.
There was more to him than that. Mayer was a genius filmmaker in his way - not a writer, director or even producer, but a great manager of MGM at it's peak. He set up a small, struggling operation, merged it with others and created a colossus which led Hollywood. It was an amazing achievement, even by the mogul standards, and deserves to be acknowledged and praised.
A great "what if" of Hollywood history: what if Mayer hadn't quit MGM in a huff in 1951 over fighting with Dore Schary? Could he have kept the studio up with the times? Who knows... MGM struggled before Schary's arrival when it was just Mayer. But Mayer had management genius that eluded Schary, and his taste was in greater line with that of the American public than Schary - for instance, The Great Caruso was a Mayer pet project. And that Andy Hardy type wholesome picture continued to be very popular on TV (Father Knows Best, etc) - I think Mayer could have come up with great TV ideas.
Schary gets a fair bollocking in this book, a little unfairly, I think: Schary was no Mayer, or Thalberg, and in hindsight was the wrong person to run MGM; he should have joined them as a unit producer, where he could have concentrated on turning out film noirs and hard hitting dramas, instead of expanding into areas where he had no idea, like musicals, comedies and discovering and dealing with stars (all the things Mayer was good at in other words, and which made MGM). But he was a talented man and one of the few moguls who had a decent career after being a mogul.
Anyway Schary is only one character in this book. There's plenty of others, notably his duelling daughters Edie and Irene (who would have been a great movie producer but instead worked on the stage), his poor first wife who was dumped and basically driven ga ga, a nice enough second wife (Mayer had a mid life crisis), the enigmatic Thalberg, the feuding Nick Schenck, the movie stars who were forever traipsing into Mayer's office with their problems (Greer Garson and Jeannette MacDonald could wrap him around their little finger, he was distant from Clark Gable, liked Kate Hepburn's class, didn't know what on earth to do with Judy Garland, dealt with Van Johnson's homosexuality in a matter of fact "fixer" way).
It's all deftly handled by Eyman who combines scholarship with entertaining gossip. He probably over-quotes Esther Williams and doesn't get into the dark side of the MGM vision (eg in the Andy Hardy films, it's not just about Andy's high spirits and the judge being sensible, it's also about the mother being a blithering idiot and the daughter having her spirit crushed), but its still a great book.
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