He lies beside his wife, Irene Fenwick; Jack Barrymore was buried on her other side by Lionel’s order. Years before, Jack had been in love with her, but his big brother broke up the romance and later tried to commit suicide. Then Lionel fell in love with her, and to marry her, he left his wife and two sons, both of whom died in their early teens. Few people knew he had children.
Studio heads dangled the carrots at contract-signing time and cracked the whip once the ink on the paper was dry. Not so long ago David Selznick was reminiscing about those tightly disciplined days with me: “I’ve called Jack Barrymore into my office for not knowing his lines; he was contrite and apologetic. I had to speak to Leslie Howard, who was embarrassing Vivien Leigh by not being prepared for the scene. But you never had to speak a second time. They recognized their fault and corrected it.”
Garbo was never late. She appeared on the set at 9 A.M. sharp, made up and ready to work and no nonsense. But she was patience itself if an older member of the company had trouble remembering lines. She was considered demanding when she wanted to know who would produce, who co-star, who direct. Once she turned down a story Metro wanted her to make, David remembered, “and they cast her opposite Tim McCoy in a Western as punishment. When Lionel Barrymore heard it he said: ‘That’s like cutting Tolstoy’s beard so he wouldn’t write any revolutionary novels.’”
Now we have Elizabeth Taylor picking up more than $2,000,000 for Cleopatra, jeopardizing the whole future of Twentieth Century-Fox by her behavior, and getting herself proposed for a seat on the board of directors by a disgruntled stockholder. We have Mr. Brando collecting more than a million from Mutiny on the Bounty, plus overtime for every day’s delay his antics caused. Selznick calls such ventures “movies of desperation.”
“The men who make movies have been digging their own graves,” he says. “They’ll put up with anything for a transient advantage. They have no long-term concern because they’re busy getting dollars for the next statement, watching the effect that statement will have on the company’s stock.” I second that.
What went wrong with Hollywood? Well, something like this....
The founding fathers didn’t know what competition was. They had it all their own, undisputed way so long. They hit on something, motion pictures, that the world took to like babies take to candy. The handful of families that ran the big studios made a cozy little clique by intermarriage, bringing in their relatives, sticking together like mustard plasters.
The same men owned the studios, the distributing companies, and many of the biggest movie theaters. Right down the line, they controlled what audiences saw and how much they paid to see it. An independent theater owner in any town at home or abroad either was deprived of the pictures he wanted or else had to accept block booking. To lay hold of, say, a sure-fire Humphrey Bogart picture from Warners, he had to take three others that he’d have to take a chance on.
But a picture had to be a real turkey not to pay its way, at least. If people wanted an evening out, in most cases, they had no place to go except the movies. There’s never been a monopoly that brought such sweet rewards to the men who ran it. Radio proved to be no kind of competition. If I paid them enough—and some big stars demanded $5000 to stand up and read a script—I could get virtually anybody I wanted, including Dore Schary, on my weekly show when I crashed into broadcasting. A loud-speaker was no substitute for the screen, where a kind of earthy paradise was on view. Illusion had to be put into pictures, not just into words.
The film factories were organized like an automobile assembly line. They had to be. The demand for movies was insatiable. Our town turned out four, five hundred pictures a year, with close to a thousand actors and actresses under contract. Every year the bosses prepared lavish promotion programs to light a gleam in the exhibitors’ eyes, listing the four colossal musicals, the half dozen scintillating comedies, the seven searing dramas, and so forth which the particular studio would deliver in the months ahead. Many times these promises were pure blue sky. They’d invent a title, pencil in the stars, then a team of contract writers would knock out a story. Today no production head can promise what next year will bring because the system’s out of his control and he just doesn’t know about tomorrow.