Word: selznicks
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Quickie Stakes. Selznick's passing mood of pessimism was only a momentary fall from the relentless exuberance that made him appear as an outsized (6 ft. 1 in.) Teddy Roosevelt at costume parties, decide at one point to give up sleeping on Monday nights, and put chips on almost every number when playing roulette. "Live expensively!" advised his father, a Russian-born immigrant who became a multimillionaire in silent films. "Throw it around! Give it away! Always remember to live beyond your means. It gives a man confidence...
...Lewis J. Selznick set the pace for his sons to follow. He lived in a 17-room Park Avenue apartment that in the early 1920s was a sort of Brown Derby East for the movie set. When his freewheeling days ended in bankruptcy in 1923, so did Son David's $300-a-week allowance and hopes for Yale. With his elder brother Myron, David staked himself for a trip to Hollywood by turning out two quickies that netted $16,000. Once there, David sold himself as a $100-a-week script reader at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, within months...
Undisputed king of Hollywood at the time was Louis B. Mayer, who was convinced that "those Selznick boys will come to no good." Proving him wrong, David left MGM, became a $104,000-a-year boss at Paramount-and married the crown princess herself, L. B. Mayer's daughter Irene. L.B. imperiously refused to greet Selznick at the wedding, though when David at 30 returned to the M-G-M fold, wags quipped, "The son-in-law also rises." It was a canard that was not buried until Mayer's 1957 will, in which L.B. noted that...
Finest Hours. In fact, assistance was something that Selznick always felt he could dispense with. "Your ideas may be right," he once explained to Director George Cukor while in the process of firing him, "but if I'm going to fall on my face, it is going to be entirely my own mistake." What Selznick did be lieve in was quality, talent and free-spending, and it turned out to be a formula that gave Hollywood some of its finest hours. Selznick's Bill of Divorcement introduced Katharine Hepburn to films; Freddy Bartholomew was discovered for David Copperfield...
...Hollywood, Joseph Gotten, Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, Carole Lombard, Joan Fontaine and Myrna Loy advanced with Selznick's help. From abroad came Ingrid Bergman. But far and away, Selznick's most-discussed discovery was actually not his but his brother Myron's. In 1938 G.W.T.W. had gone into production with the hunt for an actress to play Scarlett O'Hara still in full cry.* While the old sets on Selznick's 40-acre lot in Culver City, Calif., were being fired and thus providing the climactic scene of the burning of Atlanta, Myron emerged through...