His daughter replied: “Not until the other day, when I went to see him in Queen Christina with Garbo.” I asked what she thought of him. Her head lifted and her eyes glowed: “I thought he was wonderful.”
He was, but we treated him badly.
Sixteen
I live in a town that sells dreams but is ruled by nightmares. Its stock in trade is illusion, which it manufactures in fear; not mere apprehension about fading profits or a decline in reputation, but stark terror of God’s honest truth.
Power in the movie business fell into the clutches of men who stopped at nothing to lay their hands on it. In the process they picked up a chronic infection of guilty conscience. They couldn’t afford to let the public glimpse the facts behind the fiction; they’d rather shell out a million dollars. They were always terrified of being found out.
There were—and are—so many closets bulging with skeletons. I’ve rattled a few of them in my time when I’ve been convinced the cause was good. But never was there such a rattling as I gave our one and only self-appointed monarch, Louis B. Mayer, and his temporary crown prince, Dore Schary. I’m glad to say it scared the living daylights out of them.
The cause was a worthy one: one of the few unsung heroines of our town had been pushed off the payroll in outrageous ingratitude for all she’d contributed to MGM. She badly needed her job back after a long illness, and I was determined that she should have it. One of the rattling sets of bones was labeled “Politics,” another was “Greed,” and a third was “Messages.” I don’t think Dore Schary has ever forgiven me.
Ida Koverman was the tall, stately, gray-haired queen mother who stood behind King Louis’ throne. She taught the little gormandizer about table manners, how to handle a party without throwing Emily Post into strictures. Ida transformed the once inarticulate ex-peddler of scrap iron into an after-dinner orator in love with the sound of his own voice, and she rehearsed him in the speeches that rolled off his tongue.
She was the behind-the-scenes arbiter of good taste in the greatest motion-picture studio of them all. There was a day when she burst into his office when he was deep in conference with the New York investment bankers who had control of Loew’s Incorporated—Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is Loew’s trade name, Loew’s is the parent corporation.