The David Selznicks live beautifully. His income comes largely from selling or leasing his backlog of pictures, made in the days when David had walked out of MGM to open up as an independent producer. The backlog does not include Gone With the Wind, which makes a sure five or six millions every time it’s sent on the rounds again. Under the terms of the ruthless bargain Metro drove with him before he could have Gable play Rhett Butler, every cent of income goes now to that studio, not to David.
At the second gala premiere held not long ago in Atlanta, where GWTW first opened in December 1939, he was asked: “Don’t you feel dreadful that you don’t receive a thin dime from all this?”
“No, I did it with my own little hatchet,” he said. “I never regretted it.” He has his own grandiose plans to stage a musical version of his greatest movie on Broadway, using two separate casts, producing it in two halves on successive evenings. Alfred Hitchcock once asked the unanswerable question about David’s checkered career: “When you’ve produced a picture like Gone With the Wind, what can you do to top it?”
David still loves parties as he always did, but most always goes alone. Instead of going with him, Jennifer stays home and reads or applies herself to yoga, which she took up long ago. Sometimes she takes a trip to India to meditate. She went twice to Switzerland to see Carl Jung but was too late the second time. He was ill and receiving nobody. “If I had pressed it, I might have seen him,” she said. “I shall always regret that I didn’t try harder.”
If David ever thinks about it, he must notice the contrast between Jennifer, who is very gracious and feminine, and Irene Mayer, who had a brain like a man, plus sound business sense and an instinct for the theater. She was also bossy like her father, and David rebelled against it. He would come home tired from slaving at a studio, which he did as a habit then, but she’d say: “Take those old clothes off, get into a tub and dress. We have guests arriving in fifteen minutes.”
He’d grow so mad he’d toss his clothes on to the floor and stomp on them. Then: “David, pick those things up and put them away properly.” Louis B. Mayer used to tell me about those scenes. “If I were married to Irene, I’d hit her,” he said. “I love her, but I see all her faults.”
David and Jennifer have one daughter, whom they adore. They also have the two sons she had by Robert Walker. Bob, Jr., is twenty-five now. He looks exactly like his father. He lives with his wife and their baby in a cottage on the Selznicks’ estate. George Seaton, the director, tells me Bob will be as fine an actor as his father. The younger son is also following in his father’s footsteps, cutting quite a swath with teen-age beauties in our town. It must be easy for Jennifer to remember and mighty hard to forget.
Eleven
Sorting out fact from fiction can be harder on the constitution than separating milk from whipped potatoes in a cupful of vichyssoise. And when you succeed, the results may taste sharper than vinegar on the tongue. Let’s take the case of Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst.