Word: mayers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...years Gable floated among minor theatrical jobs, then caught the attention of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. There was just one problem-those ears. Milton Berle would later describe them as "the best ears of our lives," but Warner Bros, had already decided that they made young Gable unfit for the screen. M-G-M simply pinned back the Gable flappers with adhesive tape, and cast him in The Painted Desert. As Gable rose toward his coronation as The King-a ceremony actually performed in 1937 by Spencer Tracy with a cardboard crown-he shed the tape...
...partners have it. Both Hanna, 50, who was born in New Mexico and raised in Los Angeles, and Barbera, 47, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, had drifted among the big-time animation mills-Terry Toons, Looney Toons, Merry Melodies-before they came together at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1937. There they created the most exciting mano a mano in the history of film cartoons-matchless Tom and Jerry. For 18 years they manipulated the big cat and the little mouse for MGM's critical and financial profit, year after year sat mousily at home uninvited while some...
Once, when Actor-Director Erich von Stroheim offended Mayer (by announcing flatly that "all women are whores"), the head of M-G-M clouted Von Stroheim right on his Teuton nose. At home, though, the 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...
...town in later life Mayer was an equally contradictory character-a classic Hollywood hunter who 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...
Hedy Lamarr, Crowther claims, earned her chance in Hollywood by sailing from London to New York on the same ship with Mayer, "ostensibly traveling as a sort of governess for a boy violinist." Around the studios, says Crowther, "it was long suspected that Mayer was after Jeanette MacDonald and Myrna Loy, both of whom had the experience of being indulged and then disfavored by him." And to Luise Rainer, Mayer complained: "Why don't you sit on my lap when we're discussing your contract, the way the other girls...