#173 Louis B. Mayer (MGM Studios)

**David Senra** (0:00)
Mayer was dead now, his body wasted by the violent disease that had come upon him in the last bruising clash of his career.
And so it has come to this funeral, the last ritual of the long and stormy career of Hollywood's most dynamic and momentous film producer, Louis B. Mayer. But how many in the solemn gathering knew the departed man?
Who had seen beneath his surface?
Did they know that he had often struggled through sleepless and terrifying nights?
Lashing himself with anxieties and piercing himself with doubts and fears?
Did they know that he went into tantrums that were something quite different and apart from the bursts of anger that he often put on to make a point?
Did they know that in the silence of his bedroom, he would sweat and grovel and moan?
Samuel Goldwyn, who never loved Mayer, remarked at the end, the reason so many people showed up at his funeral was because they wanted to make sure he was dead.
It is no wonder that Mayer, with his concentration of power and his unassailable position from which to throw weight in the community, was one whose attentions and favors were sought and whose counsels on matters largely swayed the movie industry. Those whom he favored regarded him as a demigod.
Those whom he did not thought of him as a monster.
Studios and stars, individuals and companies waxed and waned.
Mayer held strong for three decades.
David Selznick proclaimed that Louis B. Mayer was the greatest single figure in the history of the motion picture industry. It is my hope that this observation of the life and times of Louis B. Mayer will help serve to illuminate more than a Hollywood type, more than the monolithic figure of Mayer.
For I find that this man is characteristic of a large group of magnets and tycoons who have marched across the landscape of industrial America.
With them, he is in the phalanx of men of aggressive bent who seized on the opportunities that an expanding civilization exposed.
With them, he ascended to high places along an upwardly spiraling route that was there to be ascended by those who had the necessary stamina and drive.
And with some of them, he was unsettled and rendered dizzy by the heights, so much so that he could not control his footing when the road itself began to narrow and fall.
I wish to offer this volume as an inspection of one of those giants.
It embraces a long and lusty drama, and it ends in tragedy.
That was an excerpt from the very old book that I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is Hollywood Rajah, The Life and Times of Louis B. Mayer, and it was written by Bosley Crowther. So this book actually came out in 1960 And the way I found this, I was actually reading, I constantly reread through my highlights of past books that we've studied on founders, so I can remind myself of the lessons that we're all learning. And on founders number 111, I covered the biography of David Geffen. So that book is called The Operator. David Geffen builds, buys and sells the new Hollywood. And in that book, this book is mentioned twice, and that's how I discovered it. So David Geffen read this book. He was around 20 years old when the book came out.
And he used it as inspiration throughout his career. So I want to read two quotes from The Operator that puts into context how influential this book was to David Geffen. And then how I arrived at essentially the opposite conclusion that David Geffen did. So it says, Arriving in Hollywood for the first time, David thought he had found paradise. It was even more intoxicating than he had imagined. His life ambition was soon established after he read a new biography of MGM Studio boss, Louis B. Mayer, written by Bosley Crowther. It was called Hollywood Rajah. I want this job, he thought to himself.
And then the second quote was, Geffen was riding high, yet he remained unsettled and... Okay, so this is really interesting actually.
As I read these next three sentences to you, this is a description of David Geffen from his biographer. But really this could be word for word, a description of Louis B. Mayer and why I find his tale more of a cautionary tale. The beginning of his life is very obviously inspirational, starts out unbelievably poor and works his way up to being one of the most influential, if not the single most influential person in the movie industry history. But he loses his way along the way after he finds a lot of success. And he's very deficient as a personality and very similar to how I felt David Geffen was as well. So again, this is a description of David Geffen, but really now re-reading it, it's a description of Louis B. Mayer. So it serves a dual purpose here. Yet he remained unsettled and plagued by feelings of insecurity and dissatisfaction. He was driven by a devil that constantly told him he needed to be bigger, more, and something else. He simply was not the kind of man who was gonna stand in place for very long.