We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
212 Hollywood Rajah
one in studio streets. As one employee put it, he usually proceeded with "the air of a man on his way to give somebody hell.,,
And yet he was generally looked up to and even admired by lesser employees, who were glad to have a man of evident confidence and authority as the head of the studio. In such an uncertain business as the manufacture of films it was comforting to feel that a definite mogul controlled the company's destinies.
Mayer himself got great enjoyment from exercise of power and from feeling himself responsible for advancement of someone's career. "I've taken this boy and I have made a great actor (or director or producer) out of him!" That was one of his favorite and oft repeated remarks. He felt he needed to make people grateful and beholden to him. He literally bathed in the sunshine of his own self-esteem.
One of the famous beneficiaries of his good offices was Mervyn Le Roy, whom he hired as a high-priced producer in 1937 — the year that Mayer made a memorable trip abroad. Le Roy had been working at Warner Brothers and was married to Harry Warner's daughter when Mayer pulled him away with an offer of $300,000 a year. The figure was so stupendous that it was officially announced at $150,000, so other producers on the lot would not yelL
Le Roy had made a reputation with such bold and hardhitting Warner films as Little Caesar, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Anthony Adverse, and Oil For the Lamps of China. His first job at Culver City was a feeble item called Dramatic School, which helped to tumble its star, Luise Rainer, from the brief eminence she had obtained. After that he did the charming but fanciful and escapist Wizard of Oz, which was a perfect example of the sort of film Mayer adored. Le Roy was inevitably regarded as a favorite of the studio head.
Mayer's trip to Europe in the summer of 1937 was primarily aimed to permit him to conduct an inspection of a new