Word: mayers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...reason so many people showed up at his funeral was 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...
...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...
Whirling through his career with airy speed, Sanders tells how he might have become a matinee idol if he had not been too bored to keep a crucial lunch date with Louis B. Mayer, how he was signed to replace Ezio Pinza in South Pacific but could not face the tedium of nightly performances on Broadway. "During the five years I was married to Zsa Zsa Gabor," he confides, "I lived in her sumptuous Bel Air mansion as a sort of paying guest." Communicating with Zsa Zsa was never easy, since she seemed to do almost everything under a hair...
...could Europeans stomach U.S. plans to have Walt Disney stage the games' pageantry (fireworks, 20,000 balloons, an orchestra of 1,285, a chorus of 2,645 singing the opening hymn These Things Shall Be). Harrumphed Switzerland's Otto Mayer, chancellor of the International Olympic Committee: "All this hoopla has little to do with the Olympic spirit, and I've wired the U.S. accordingly." Shrilled Zurich's Sport: "Assigning the Games to Squaw Valley was a big mistake. The committee fell for the big bluff of smart American businessmen...
Trying to create characters with the sheen of surface and intensity of innard required to support his conception, Mr. Mayer has miscarried in one important direction. The young poet who represents innocence against both its opposites is an egregious failure. He spouts fine writing of one sort or another almost every moment he is on stage, and makes himself constantly obnoxious by being out of period and out of it generally: a verbose, stupid, and mawkish...