An immigrant from tsarist Russia, Mayer began in the film business as an exhibitor but soon migrated to where the action and the power were -- Hollywood. Through sheer force of energy and foresight, he turned his own modest studio into MGM, where he became the most powerful man in Hollywood, bending the film business to his will. He made great films, including the fabulous MGM musicals, and he made great stars: Garbo, Gable, Garland, and dozens of others. Through the enormously successful Andy Hardy series, Mayer purveyed family values to America. At the same time, he used his influence to place a federal judge on the bench, pay off local officials, cover up his stars' indiscretions, and, on occasion, arrange marriages for gay stars. Mayer rose from his impoverished childhood to become at one time the highest-paid executive in America.

Despite his power and money, Mayer suffered some significant losses. He had two daughters: Irene, who married David O. Selznick, and Edie, who married producer William Goetz. He would eventually fall out with Edie and divorce his wife, Margaret, ending his life alienated from most of his family. His chief assistant, Irving Thalberg, was his closest business partner, but they quarreled frequently, and Thalberg's early death left Mayer without his most trusted associate. As Mayer grew older, his politics became increasingly reactionary, and he found himself politically isolated within Hollywood's small conservative community.

Lion of Hollywood is a three-dimensional biography of a figure often caricatured and vilified as the paragon of the studio system. Mayer could be arrogant and tyrannical, but under his leadership MGM made such unforgettable films as The Big Parade, Ninotchka, The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, and An American in Paris.

Film historian Scott Eyman interviewed more than 150 people and researched some previously unavailable archives to write this major new biography of a man who defined an industry and an era.

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

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Lion of Hollywood is the definitive biography of Louis B. Mayer, the chief of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer — MGM — the biggest and most successful film studio of Hollywood's Golden Age.

An immigrant from tsarist Russia, Mayer began in the film business as an exhibitor but soon migrated to where the action and the power were — Hollywood. Through sheer force of energy and foresight, he turned his own modest studio into MGM, where he became the most powerful man in Hollywood, bending the film business to his will. He made great films, including the fabulous MGM musicals, and he made great stars: Garbo, Gable, Garland, and dozens of others. Through the enormously successful Andy Hardy series, Mayer purveyed family values to America. At the same time, he used his influence to place a federal judge on the bench, pay off local officials, cover up his stars' indiscretions, and, on occasion, arrange marriages for gay stars. Mayer rose from his impoverished childhood to become at one time the highest-paid executive in America.

Despite his power and money, Mayer suffered some significant losses. He had two daughters: Irene, who married David O. Selznick, and Edie, who married producer William Goetz. He would eventually fall out with Edie and divorce his wife, Margaret, ending his life alienated from most of his family. His chief assistant, Irving Thalberg, was his closest business partner, but they quarreled frequently, and Thalberg's early death left Mayer without his most trusted associate. As Mayer grew older, his politics became increasingly reactionary, and he found himself politically isolated within Hollywood's small conservative community.

Lion of Hollywood isa three-dimensional biography of a figure often caricatured and vilified as the paragon of the studio system. Mayer could be arrogant and tyrannical, but under his leadership MGM made such unforgettable films as The Big Parade, Ninotchka, The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, and An American in Paris.

Film historian Scott Eyman interviewed more than 150 people and researched some previously unavailable archives to write this major new biography of a man who defined an industry and an era.

FROM THE CRITICS

Robert Sklar - The Washington Post

Scott Eyman, distinguished biographer of such film figures as John Ford, Ernest Lubitsch and Mary Pickford, has now set out to reexamine Mayer's life and work -- if not to rescue him fully from opprobrium, at least to tell a massively detailed story of his accomplishments and misdeeds. Half a century on, he still faces Powdermaker's dilemma: a plethora of former denizens of the dream factory with old grievances to air, scores to settle, occasionally homages to pay. He offers a kaleidoscope of memories, more or less evenly divided between haters and admirers -- which itself could be labeled radical historical revisionism. Eyman's evenhanded approach leaves Mayer something of an enigma, but it's a compelling tale all the same.

Manohla Dargis - The New York Times

In his wonderfully readable biography of Mayer, Lion of Hollywood, Scott Eyman paints a vivid portrait of Mayer and the studio he ran with blood and bile rather than an M.B.A., and singular common sense. ''Put on a little weight and get more sex,'' Mayer once told Robert Young, in a bid to burnish the actor's appeal. He added, ''We have a whole stable of girls here.'' For Eyman, the story of Louis B. Mayer is a story not just of one remarkably driven man but of an industry filled with similarly driven men (and the occasional woman), for whom making movies was a matter of stars and stories, not ancillary markets and opening weekends.

Library Journal

Book editor of the Palm Beach Post, Eyman shows how little Louie from the shtetl became the head of MGM. With a three-city tour. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Acclaimed Hollywood biographer Eyman (Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford, 1999, etc.) tackles his most ambitious subject: the mogul of moguls who ran MGM. To Esther Williams he was God, to producer Michael Balcon "the unspeakable Mayer," to Montgomery Clift a gangster on a throne. Yet the real reason it's hard to take the measure of Louis B. Mayer (1885-1957) is not that people held such dramatically different opinions of him, but that so many people were in a position to have opinions at all. The job Mayer held for most of his working life as head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (his name was added a year after the studio was formed in 1924) brought him into contact with everyone who was anyone in Hollywood. The story of his workaholic life is the story of MGM's most successful, indeed only successful, quarter-century, and of the talented specialists who worked for him: production chief Irving Thalberg, designer Cedric Gibbons, producer Arthur Freed. Most are long gone, but Eyman has talked to over a hundred who aren't and supplemented their memories with exhaustive archival research. The result is less a year-by-year chronicle of the legendary mogul's life than a biography of Hollywood's grandest studio during its grandest era. Though Eyman is scrupulously fair in documenting Mayer's "pit-bull aggressiveness mixed with a placating neediness," he defends Mayer against the charges of vulgarity and philistinism, pointing out that MGM's most characteristic films (Grand Hotel, The Wizard of Oz, The Human Comedy, An American in Paris) have dated more obviously than their counterparts at Paramount and Warner Bros. because they spoke more precisely to the audience of their time. Eymanmarshals thousands of facts, and dozens of opinions, with brio, wit and authority to create a monument worthy of the greatest studio head of them all. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)