Cinema: Mr. Motion Picture

By 1907 the citizens of Haverhill, Mass. had shrugged off the motion picture as a flickering freak. Then an enterprising young (22) junkman named Louis Burt Mayer came to town and laid out $600 as a down payment on a onetime burlesque house. Mayer hid the shoddy past of his theater with a coat of white paint, installed an organ, and dug up a religious film called From the Manger to the Cross. His opening was a socko success. The lines of ticket buyers taught L. B. Mayer a lesson he never forgot: Americans want simple, clean entertainment.

As he added theaters to his chain, Russian-born L. B. Mayer soon ran out of his kind of films. In 1918 he opened a studio to supply his own demands. Six years later, prodded by Theater Owner Marcus Loew, he merged his two companies with Producer Sam Goldwyn’s studios to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The ex-junkman confidently made himself production chief. With Irving Thalberg, his brilliant assistant (and the model for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon), Mayer set about remaking the motion-picture industry.

The Star System. His success was dazzling. For three decades tough, cocksure L. B. Mayer was the most important man in Hollywood. He knew exactly what Americans wanted and he gave it to them, by ballyhooing unknown kids into superglamorous movie stars. He found Robert Taylor at Pomona College and Joan Crawford in a chorus line. His star system, soon copied by his competitors, developed Gilbert, Murray, Gable, Tracy, Garson, Garbo, Powell, Astaire and Turner, clustered them and others in such big-money films as Ben Hur, The Good Earth, Grand Hotel and Dinner at Eight. If need be, Mayer could alter his proclaimed moral standards to fit the freewheeling ’20s and ’30s, turned loose Gilbert and Garbo in some sizzling love scenes, and let Harlow’s neckline find its natural level.

Mayer’s contract with M-G-M gave him 10% of the studio’s profits. For seven years in the late ’30s and early ’40s he was the highest-paid executive in the nation, in 1937 made $1,296,503. Success never softened his muscle. Hollywood had it that at one time or another he used his fists tellingly on Charlie Chaplin, Walter Wanger and Sam Goldwyn.

Enter Senary; Exit Mayer. But even Mayer turned out to be vulnerable. In 1948 he startled Hollywood by handing over production of M-G-M films to onetime Scriptwriter Dore Schary. The two soon clashed over the proper themes for the studio’s pictures. Finally the old man quit MGM, talked vaguely of again making pictures that “you can take your mother and children to see.”

He never did. Instead, he shrewdly multiplied his fortune by investments (oil, real estate), spent hours avidly watching television. Last July, when he suddenly lost his oldtime pep, he dropped in at Stanford Lane Hospital in San Francisco for a checkup. The doctors first said it was anemia, then spotted leukemia. Mayer entered the U.C.L.A. Medical Center in September, had a series of blood transfusions. There last week, at 72, Louis B. Mayer died. Close by his bedside was his television screen, the only other force that had changed Hollywood as much as he himself had. Headlined the Hollywood Reporter: MR. MOTION PICTURE IS GONE.