Word: crowther
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...because they wanted to be sure he was dead." Thus, the legend goes, did Movie Magnate Sam Goldwyn dispose of his longtime colleague and competitor, Louis B. Mayer. By quoting the remark near the start of his new biography, Hollywood Rajah (Holt; $5.50), New York Times Movie Critic Bosley Crowther makes plain that he feels no kindlier toward the onetime junk dealer who became one of Hollywood's gaudiest tycoons, created stars from Garbo to Rooney, wrote his name on some of the best and worst pictures of his day, and ruled much of the movie business with...
...Author Crowther retells the familiar story of how the ambitious son of Russian immigrants parlayed ownership of a Haverhill, Mass, nickelodeon into the Hollywood eminence that earned him the highest salary in the U.S. for seven years in a row ($1,139,992 in 1943). What makes the biography unusual is the gossip columnist's relish with which normally dignified Critic Crowther rummages through Mayer's private life...
...studio slugger cut a different figure. Early one morning he fell on his knees in his daughter Edith's room and cried un controllably until she promised to let him take over the Hollywood Biltmore for the lavish wedding he wanted for her. "He grabbed her hands," says Crowther, "held them to his face, and started sobbing and weeping until her hands were soaked with tears...
...nevertheless "preferred to think of the women he embraced as sacred vessels,-potential mothers, rather than as what they obviously were." With less restraint than Hedda Hopper, the biographer names the vessels Mayer may or may not have embraced. On one of his frequent European talent safaris, reports Crowther, Mayer was completely entranced with an unknown Hungarian actress named Haj-massy; he signed her to a contract as Ilona Massey immediately after a dance floor accident, when a broken shoulder strap "exposed a great deal more than was normally intended of the actress' smooth poitrine...
Under its present editor, Donald Tyerman, 51, who took Crowther's place when Crowther became managing director in 1956, the Economist cleaves to the course set by Founder Wilson. "If," said the Economist a century ago, "we know that a nation is capable of enduring continuous discussion, we know that it is capable of practicing, with equanimity, continuous tolerance." Continuous-and highly intelligent-discussion is the Economist's contribution to Britain and to journalism...