“Invite him, anyway.”
Hoover didn’t attend the wedding, but Edie got a present from him. She got presents from everybody. There must have been twenty showers given for her. If you were on the MGM payroll, as I was as an actress then, there was somebody to tell you what to take or send for all occasions.
Came the night of the wedding and sit-down supper in the Biltmore ballroom. I was seated at a side table when Ben Meyer, a local banker, came over and asked me to join his group at a more elevated spot. “We don’t know any of these people,” he said. “Will you point out the stars for us?”
Partly as a result of making my first visit to the place as DeWolf Hopper’s wife when he was an idol in the theater, partly as a result of having Harry Lombard, the Boston banker, and his wife as friends, I knew my way around Los Angeles society. But I had to tell Ben Meyer: “I’ll have to get Mr. Mayer’s permission first.”
“You’ll have to what?” he exploded.
“He employs me, remember? Social or anything else, I’ll have to ask him.”
Louis couldn’t understand how I could have a banker asking after me.
“These are my friends, Louis: lawyers, doctors, professional people. They’ve no idea who your stars are because they never see your pictures.” Permission granted, grudgingly. With the Meyers, I sat at the gayest, most gossipy table in the room. At the end of the evening they knew the names of all the stars and most of their histories.
Louis and his son-in-law were thick as thieves for years. Mayer bought race horses, Goetz bought race horses. At one Academy Award banquet Louis put his arm around Bill: “If you just go on the way you’re going, you’ll be a greater man than I ever was.”
William wanted to head his own film company just like his brother-in-law, David. With Louis behind him anything was possible. It looked like a wide-open opportunity when Darryl Zanuck left Twentieth Century-Fox to join the Army in World War II. Louis began maneuvers with his partner at Metro, Nick Schenck, of Loew’s Inc., whose brother Joe was board chairman at Fox. Goetz would replace Zanuck while Darryl was in Washington, D.C. in uniform.