Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer

PROLOGUE
In the summer of 1944, when he looked out his window on the third floor of the Thalberg Building, Louis B. Mayer saw a studio -- his studio -- that covered 167 acres. Lot 1 encompassed seventy-two acres, housed all the thirty soundstages, office buildings, and dressing rooms, the seven warehouses crammed with furniture, props, and draperies. Lot 2 consisted of thirty-seven acres of permanent exterior sets, including the town of Carvel, home of the Hardy family, and the great Victorian street from Meet Me in St. Louis. Here was the house where David Copperfield lived, there the street where Marie Antoinette rolled to the guillotine.
Lots 3, 4, and 5 were used for outdoor settings -- the jungle and rivers that provided the backdrop for Tarzan, much of Trader Horn, the zoo that provided the animals, including the lion that heralded each and every Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film. Connecting everything was thirteen miles of paved road.
In periods of peak production, which was most of the time, the studio had six thousand employees and three entrances to accommodate them -- the gate between Corinthian columns on Washington Boulevard; another one farther down Ince Way; and a crew gate on Culver Boulevard, where the workers punched time clocks.
MGM owned forty cameras and sixty sound machines. Thirty-three actors were officially designated stars, seventy-two actors were considered featured players, and twenty-six directors were under contract. "Anywhere from sixteen to eighteen pictures were being shot at one time," remembered actress Ann Rutherford. "They were either shooting or preparing to shoot on every soundstage....You could stick your nose into any rehearsal hall or soundstage, and it was just teeming with life."
The studio had its own dentist, its own chiropractor, its own foundry. It made its own paint, its own rubber molds. There were shops where old cars could be fabricated and assembled; electric, glass, and plastic shops. If a prop could not be found in the vast warehouse, it could be made overnight, or purchased; the studio spent $1 million a year buying props.
About 2,700 people ate in the commissary every day, while the research department answered about five hundred questions daily. The studio's laboratory printed 150 million feet of release prints every year. Power was supplied by an in-house electrical plant, which was of sufficient size to light a town of 25,000.
MGM maintained a police force of fifty officers, with four captains, two plainclothesmen, an inspector, and a chief -- a force larger than that of Culver City itself. Each member of the MGM police was trained to recognize all contract players and to salute each star.
The MGM police had a slightly different mandate than most police forces. Part of their job was protecting the studio's assets from the public, but they also had to protect those assets from themselves. No matter what an MGM actor did, police chief Whitey Hendry had to beat the local police to the scene, where publicity chief Howard Strickling would make arrangements to keep the story out of the papers. To do this, the studio had paid informants in every local police department.
Twenty years earlier, when Mayer had moved onto what was then the Goldwyn lot, the studio had consisted of forty acres, five stages, six cameras, six stars, a half-dozen directors, and six hundred employees. In the intervening years, Louis B. Mayer and his lieutenants built a company that was regarded by the public and his peers alike as the pinnacle of the industry.
"It was the studio in this town," said screenwriter Bernard Gordon. "When I came out here in 1939, I drove by MGM and I thought to myself, 'By God, that's Hollywood.' No other studio compared, and Mayer was the boss. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Mayer!"
Each studio had its own specific ambience, and MGM's was a luxury that was a synonym for quality. The songwriter Harry Warren used to have a stock story about the difference between Metro and the competition: "At Warner Brothers, you come in the gate at seven in the morning. The guards on the walls keep their guns aimed at you. At 7:05, Hal Wallis calls out, 'Have you written that song yet?'
"At Metro, the birds sing. The grass is green. Everybody smokes a pipe and has the Book-of-the-Month under his arm. Nobody works at Metro. You watch the flowers grow."
For the audience, MGM was predominantly a means of escape. In the 1930s, MGM came to symbolize an alternate reality from the drabness and squalor of the worldwide Depression, an escape into a dreamworld of Park Avenue swells. During World War II, MGM movies were serving simultaneously as escape and rallying cry -- Mrs. Miniver rallied support for England and, by implication, the internationalist cause, while the home front was bolstered by The Human Comedy and Andy Hardy.