Louis, who had issued strict orders that he was not to be disturbed, was furious. She brushed aside his protests in her best, no-nonsense manner. “I want you to come right now and see yesterday’s rushes on The Pirate,” she said. “You must see a dance scene Gene Kelly and Garland did together.” She kept at him until he angrily excused himself and stumped out on his bandy legs with her.
In the projection room she gave the order for the film to be rerun. The scene was a hair curler. Gene and Judy had flung themselves too eagerly into the spirit of things. It looked like a torrid romance. “Burn the negative!” screamed Louis. “If that exhibition got on any screen, we’d be raided by the police.” He summoned Kelly to his office next morning for an ear-blistering lecture on how to behave while dancing.
Mayer, who was his own best talent scout, met Mrs. Koverman when she first came to California to rally Republican women in support of Herbert Hoover. When he hired her away from the future President to join Metro as Louis’ executive secretary and assistant, she was thought to be Jewish. But Ida Raynus—her maiden name—was a widow with Scottish blood. And her Scottish pride kept her from asking Louis for a raise. For twenty-five years, she was held at her starting salary of $250 a week.
On that comparative pittance she had more power than anybody in our town over stars earning forty times more than she did; over the whole product of Loew’s, a quarter-billion-dollar empire; over Mayer himself, who pulled down a total of $15,000,000 over the years and preened his feathers every time the newspapers tagged him the world’s highest-paid executive. Until they came to a parting of the ways, she was the only living soul in Hollywood he would listen to when she told him what was what and why.
In next to no time Ida was all but running the studio from her office next to his. Louis never personally made a picture in his life; didn’t know how. That was left to Irving Thalberg, the slim, neurotic wonder boy who could carry the plot and production details of half a dozen pictures simultaneously in his head. The sheer strain made him a nervous wreck, with a trick of sitting in conference with a box of kitchen matches, carefully breaking every stick into tiny pieces and piling the bits in a mixing bowl on his desk.
Louis, however, was the impresario, who prided himself on knowing intimately what made the human heart tick. Nobody on the lot could outdo him at chewing scenery when the mood came on him. This thwarted thespian was a hypochondriac who could faint to order, fake a heart attack to win an argument or stave off somebody’s salary increase. He would project anger, indignation, piteous pleading, or tears like a home movie show.
One of his favorite songs was “The Rosary.” He would weep buckets just talking about it. He thought there was a fine picture idea in the lyrics and assigned two of his favorite writers to create a script. After nine months’ hard labor they turned in their typescript. He discovered their story was set in a New Orleans whorehouse. That was the last assignment they ever got from the outraged Mr. Mayer.
As Louis concentrated increasingly on playing god, more and more responsibility fell on Ida’s shoulders. She set up the talent school that trained a skyful of future stars who made millions for Loew’s—Jackie Cooper, Freddie Bartholomew, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Liz Taylor, Kathryn Grayson, Donna Reed. It was Ida, called “Kay” by her friends, who suggested having the elaborate sound-recording system installed which opened a whole new horizon in musicals. Stars like Nelson Eddy, Jeanette MacDonald, Grace Moore, and Lawrence Tibbett were freed from the double burden of acting and singing at the same time, because their voices could now be recorded separately to the filmed movement of their lips.
Ida had the feel in her bones for talent that Mayer imagined he had. She discovered a young Adonis named Spangler Arlington Brugh fresh out of Pomona College and saw to it that he was rechristened Robert Taylor. She heard an overgrown Boy Scout sing at a Los Angeles concert, which is how Nelson Eddy arrived on the scene.
Ida and a handful of others, including Lionel Barrymore, were impressed by the movie test of a husky, beetle-browed actor from a downtown stage show—he played his scene in a cut-down sarong with a flower behind one flapping ear. “A woman knows what appeals to women,” was a rule she worked by, so she had the test rerun for an audience of Metro’s messenger girls and secretaries. On the strength of the raves they scribbled on their comment cards, Clark Gable was signed.