Then he got into the production end of movies. He dealt now not in old iron but glamour. He was the boss of gorgeous girls, the kind he could only have dreamed about before. Margaret stayed home, the Hausfrau, unable to keep pace with him. This was a Jewish family with strong ties of faith and custom, and Louis waited a long time before he flew the coop. But the outcome was inevitable.
Once in New York, before the final break came, he asked me, since I wore smart clothes and was on his payroll, to take Margaret out and make sure she bought some decent clothes. We shopped all day, while she tried on dress after dress, always finding some fault, usually the size of the price tag. When we’d finished, she had just one package to show for our pains: a new girdle, which I insisted upon.
She tried her best to hold him, but it was a million miles from being good enough. She fell ill, and he put her into a sanitarium, but she refused to stay. “This has come on me because I dieted,” she told me. “Louis likes slim girls, and it’s left me like this.” She took a suite in a New York hotel, with a sitting room overlooking Central Park. Her behavior there grew more and more erratic. Her memory wandered. She’d start a sentence, then break off and go on to something else.
After a year she moved back to Hollywood, into an apartment daughter Edie found for her. Louis wasn’t living with her by this time. He had other social interests. One was a singer. Another was a woman with a child for whom he bought a house in Westwood. Yet another was a lovely chorus girl who hitchhiked from Texas and joined the Ziegfeld Follies.
Louis fell hard for her. His courtship coincided with her romance with a big agent, though Mayer didn’t know about that at first. His suspicions were aroused shortly before he was due to leave on a trip to Europe, where she was to join him in Paris. Before he left he put a detective on her trail. The private eye’s sealed report crossed the Atlantic ahead of the girl, but Louis restrained himself from opening the envelope until the next morning after she had joined him. The battle royal that broke out then exploded Louis’ plans to marry her, so she married the agent.
Mayer’s revenge was to bar the bridegroom from MGM and persuade some of his pals at other studios to follow suit. The bridegroom had a hard time of it for quite a few years. Then Louis met Lorena Danker, an ex-dancer thirty years younger than he was and the widow of an account executive at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. He had already divorced Margaret, which cleared the way for Mrs. Danker to become the second Mrs. Louis B. Mayer. Now she’s Mrs. Michael Nidorf. After she married Mayer, he adopted the daughter she’d borne Danny Danker; Louis left her half a million dollars in his will.
Other producers and big shots habitually took their cue from Louis, who carried a lot of weight in our town. He was the emperor who set the social pattern. So long as he stuck by Margaret Mayer, they stuck by their wives, too. But Louis’ divorce, after forty years of marriage, let them loose. In the next few months there were more top-level divorces than there’d been for years before.
Divorce has made sensational headlines and spicy dinner-table gossip from the days when a former Denver bellhop catapulted into fame with a sword in his hand and dagger in his teeth as Douglas Fairbanks. His first wife, Beth, was the daughter of Daniel Sully, otherwise known as the Cotton King of Wall Street. As a wedding present, her father gave her a beautiful string of pearls, which kept the Fairbankses going year after year, when Doug was a struggling Broadway actor.
When the larder was bare, she’d pawn the pearls and redeem them again as soon as Doug got into another play. Those pearls also paid for many a trip to Europe. The Fairbankses lived at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, which bulged with actors, from Jade Barrymore to John Drew. Included among the residents was Hedda Hopper with the only husband she ever had. In the lobby I used to stop to chat with a little boy with a frightened manner, kept forever under the wing of his mother or his nurse—Douglas, Jr., whom his father had determined should never get into show business.
Beth found the Hoppers their first Hollywood house when we followed the Fairbankses out to that never-never-land where it seemed that the rainbow had finally come to earth and deposited a crock of gold for everybody. Some years after that a brisk little blonde named Mary Pickford got herself a bungalow in a Beverly Hills canyon. Doug, Sr., was a gentleman caller. Beth and I used to walk past the place, but she didn’t know who was inside. I did. One day my heart turned somersaults when she peered through a window. She saw nothing amiss. But after that I steered our walks in a different direction. Beth was ever unsuspecting about sex. Her own blood ran cool. She claimed Doug spent too much time practicing handsprings and jumping over barns to be an effective lover.