Word: mayers
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...years ago, at 51, Cinemagnate Louis B. Mayer discovered that all work and no play were making him, a dull boy. He tried golf, and decided he was not the type. Then he bought a race horse, and found a plaything that appealed to his instinct for high drama and fascinating figures. He confided to friends: "I'm going to run this stable the way I run my studio -build it on personalities." But once the heady smell of the stables got him, things got out of hand...
...when horse racing was changing from rich man's sport and poor man's ruin to big business, Metro-Goldwyn's Mayer became one of the top spenders. He sank more than $5,000,000 in horseflesh and horse farms. A man who likes to run things himself, he found that he was working harder at his hobby than at running Hollywood's richest movie studio. Last week, after convincing himself it just wasn't fun any more, L.B. sold...
...Mayer to Warner. L.B. watched intently, talked little, listened closely as his friend and lawyer, Neil McCarthy, bid up to $135,000 for the mare Busher. McCarthy figured he had a good buy even though the 1945 Horse of the Year was a semi-cripple. Said he: "I've already been offered $50,000 for her first foal. . . . What better investment could a man make?" Most other bids looked dizzily high. Mayer had picked a good time to sell...
...seemed to care least how much he spent was rival Movie Tycoon Harry M. Warner. He bought the apple of L.B.'s eye, a soft-eyed filly named Honeymoon, for $135,000. Then Warner, afflicted with the same fever Mayer once had, paid the evening's top price-$200,000-for Stepfather, a Kentucky Derby hopeful...
Although the sale ended Louis B. Mayer's big day as a racehorse owner, he was not through with horses. On a 504-acre ranch at the edge of the Mojave Desert, he still has a splendiferous breeding farm, with 15 different kinds of grass, a resident veterinarian, and everything but gold-handled pitchforks. There he keeps 74 of the finest brood mares in the land, whose offspring he will raise and sell each season as yearlings. Breeding, says L.B. now, is the side of the horse industry that is really sporting...