At 61 years old, however, Mayer was getting tired. He no longer had the energy to keep up with the studio and his Perris ranch. With over 200 fine horses, Mayer was often credited with raising the level of California racing. At a black-tie auction on February 27, 1947, he sold his beloved horses at what was then the largest horse sale the state had ever seen. Mayer brought in over $1,500,000 including the $200,000 paid by Harry Warner for the prize horse, Stepfather.
After cancer claimed Mayer’s brother, Jerry, in the fall of 1947, he worried about his own health. The stress and strain of running the studio, along with the divorce and horse sale, was taking its toll, but the worst was yet to come. The following summer Dore Schary resigned from his position at RKO and Nick Schenck offered him the job of associate vice president in charge of production at MGM. Schary returned to MGM on July 1, 1948. Mayer saw it as a personal attack, and theirs was a power struggle from the start.
Later that year, Mayer made Lorena Danker his wife. The couple eloped to Yuma, Arizona and married on December 4, 1948. After a three-day honeymoon in Palm Springs, it was back to reality. Mayer still brooded over his health and worried that his control at MGM was waning. He also fretted over daughter Irene’s divorce from Selznick who had left her for actress Jennifer Jones, perhaps reaffirming his original reservations about Selznick. Mayer and his stepdaughter whom he eventually adopted did not get along. She resented his old-fashioned ideas about children being seen and not heard. The tide was changing and MGM profits were at an all-time low. The public was no longer interested in the types of movies Mayer liked to make. Happily ever after and sainted mothers were out. Realism was in.
Nonetheless, Mayer continued championing upbeat films like Annie Get Your Gun (1950) and Show Boat (1951) while Schary put out hard-edged movies such as the violent Border Incident (1949) about illegal Mexican immigrants and Intruder in the Dust (1949) with its controversial depiction of racism—topics uncomfortable for Mayer. The “class factor” that Mayer had always clung to was going by the wayside. The studio he built and nurtured for over 25 years was turning into a stranger. Loyalties were divided. Some were firmly entrenched in Schary’s new way of thinking while others remained in Mayer’s camp. Television was also lurking. Like many filmmakers, Mayer detested the little box, feeling it was only a fleeting fad, but a competitor nonetheless to the films he made. Schary, on the other hand, saw possibilities on the small screen.
Things came to a head after Mayer received a special Oscar on March 29, 1951 for “distinguished service to the motion picture industry.” Mayer accused Schary of going behind his back after signing a new contract with MGM. He may have felt that the brass thought he should retire, or worse yet, believed his ideas had become passé. He also accused Schenck of being arrogant and stupid. His outbursts came more often as his insecurities mounted. Reportedly, Mayer gave Schenck an ultimatum—choose between him or Schary. Schenck chose Schary. Finally, in the spring of 1951, Mayer resigned and simply left his office in a huff, never to return.
No longer associated with the studio that bore his name, Mayer simply told the press that he was “going to be more active than I have at any time during the past fifteen years at a studio and under conditions where I shall have the right to make the right kind of pictures—decent, wholesome pictures for Americans and for people throughout the world who want and need this type of entertainment.”
Filled with bitterness and trying to find ways to get back into the motion picture industry, Mayer’s health finally failed. He came down with pneumonia. After several tests, the deadly diagnosis came back—leukemia. Mayer, however, was simply told he had a bad case of anemia. Now battling a serious disease that he was unaware of, Mayer’s physical condition deteriorated. After several weeks in the hospital and many transfusions, he was in severe pain and taking morphine. He often hallucinated and fought with the hospital staff. Eventually, he went into a coma and died on October 29, 1957 with Lorena at his side. The Hollywood Reporter declared: “Mr. Motion Picture is Gone.”
The man who brought class and respectability to Hollywood was also the first U.S. executive to earn an annual paycheck of $1,000,000. The money was nice, but the prestige of running a major studio that stood apart from the rest was even better. Both Hollywood kings, Louis B. Mayer and his roaring-lion trademark, had a lot in common.
Instead of a lion at the helm, Paramount had Jesse L. Lasky and as Vice President in Charge of Production, he viewed The Jazz Singer (1927) with some skepticism. Lasky had been in the film business long enough to know that the concept of talking pictures had come and gone on several occasions. Believing that this new attempt at sound was no more than a passing fancy, he spoke to a group of salesmen in Atlantic City at their 1928 convention. He frankly told the group that Paramount had no sound pictures scheduled for production although he admitted that sound effects and occasional dialogue might be added to some of their films.
With the unexpected success of Wings (1927) and its loud, buzzing fighter planes, Lasky and Zukor re-evaluated their plan. They soon took some of their completed silent films like the baseball tale Warming Up (1928) and added noise—the quick, cracking sound of a bat as it met the baseball head-on along with the thunderous roar of the crowd as they shouted their approval. This last-minute fix was known around the film colony as “the goat gland process.” It gave otherwise ill-fated silent movies a shot in the arm.
Once Paramount’s first complete talking picture, Interference (1928), was released, there was no looking back. Just three months after Lasky told the Atlantic City salesmen that talking pictures were not part of Paramount’s program, he changed his mind. Paramount would finish the silent movies that were already in production, but only talking pictures would follow. As a result, new sound stages had to be built, but just as the first one was finished, fire destroyed it before a single scene had ever been filmed. It took months for Paramount to replace their loss. Lasky later recalled in his autobiography:
Within a year things were running smoothly again, but with many more craftsmen and auxiliary mechanical devices, less teamwork, more complex organization, less pioneering spirit, more expense, less inspiration, more talent, less glamour, more predatory competition, less hospitality, more doing, less joy in the doing.
Lasky had come a long way from his horn-blowing days at Alaska’s Sourdough Saloon. His total worth was now estimated at $20,000,000. Aside from their estate in California, the Laskys rented a twenty-room apartment in New York that Bessie filled with European antiques. Lasky also renovated their Santa Monica beach house to include ten baths, a gymnasium, two swimming pools and a convertible solarium theater. Louis B. Mayer and Sam Goldwyn lived on either side. Unfortunately, Lasky never thought that his high-dollar income would one day dry up.
Paramount stocks took a dive after the stock market crashed in 1929. With Lasky investing heavily in his studio, his large living was suddenly jeopardized. The Paramount stocks he bought for $1,550,000 sold for a mere $37,500. He closed his New York apartment and moved his family into the Santa Monica beach house. Then, as if things couldn’t get any worse, his beloved sister, Blanche, died on March 12, 1932 after a week-long battle with pneumonia.
New executives with an influx of cash were brought into Paramount. Lasky was told to take a leave of absence and on April 30, 1932, he left his Paramount office for the last time. Lasky described that fateful moment:
… at long last I knew how Sam Goldwyn and Cecil DeMille must have felt when they had been eased out of the company the three of us had helped to launch. The wheel had come around full circle. Sam and Cecil had both gone forward to even greater glories in the business. Would I do the same, I wondered—or did my best work lay behind me? My mind was filled with apprehension.
The following year, Lasky was back to work. He signed a three-year contract with Fox as an independent producer. Beginning with Zoo in Budapest (1933) starring the dark-haired Loretta Young, Lasky spearheaded a total of eighteen pictures. Among his more
popular Fox features were the period picture Berkeley Square (1933) with British actor Leslie Howard and The Power and The Glory (1933), a film written by Preston Sturges featuring relative newcomer Spencer Tracy.
After meeting his contractual obligations with Fox, Lasky briefly teamed up with Mary Pickford to form Pickford-Lasky Productions, Inc. Two pictures later, Lasky turned to radio. His show Gateway to Hollywood was an early type of American Idol. Every Sunday night, the program brought young hopefuls from around the country to Hollywood. During the live broadcasts, a performer would team up with a movie star such as Joan Crawford or Cary Grant and read specially written radio plays for a set of professional filmmakers acting as judges. The victors received contracts and guaranteed screen roles at major studios. Winners like Rhonda Fleming got their start on the show and non-winners like Linda Darnell got noticed.
By 1941, Gateways to Hollywood was over and Lasky was looking for his next picture. He became obsessed with the story of World War I hero Sergeant Alvin C. York. After being turned down at many of the major studios, including Paramount, Harry Warner agreed to let Lasky make his film at Warner Bros. Lasky then bartered with his former brother-in-law and business partner, Sam Goldfish (now Goldwyn and running the Samuel Goldwyn Company), to borrow one of his top players, Gary Cooper. According to Lasky, when he told this bit of news to Jack Warner, he was delighted—until he learned that part of the deal was lending Warner Bros.’ star Bette Davis to Goldwyn for his film classic The Little Foxes (1941). It all worked out, however, when Cooper won an Oscar for his performance as York and Davis got a nomination for her portrayal of Regina Giddens.
Lasky went on to produce only five more films—none, however, equaled the great success of Sergeant York (1941). He completed his autobiography, I Blow My Own Horn, which was published in 1957. Shortly after, he was the guest of honor on the television show This is Your Life, lured to the studio on the pretext that he would be talking about his book.
Lasky, who never recovered financially from his Depression-era losses, was still thinking about movies. He often said “You’re never broke if you have an idea.” He wanted to make a film about high school marching bands and was working on this project when he was struck by a heart attack at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on January 13, 1958.
Of his many outstanding moments, he still took pride in meeting his boyhood idol, bandleader John Philip Sousa. After the band’s performance at a Paramount theater, Lasky confessed his youthful dream. He’d always hoped that Sousa and company would march down his street, hear him play his cornet and place him in the band. He even admitted to still keeping his old mouthpiece next to his bed at night—just in case movies didn’t work out. The maestro laughed: “Well, since they have worked out too well, you’d better thank me for not walking down Santa Clara Street. If I had, you might be sweating in a band uniform out there on the Paramount stage today.”
Unlike Mayer and Lasky who were riding high as the Academy was forming, Harry Warner was once again facing financial ruin. Despite the continued success of their canine star, Rin Tin Tin, Warner Bros. needed a major hit.
Knowing that the solvency of the family business rested on The Jazz Singer, Sam, who had the most experience with sound, took charge. Moving his wife and new daughter, Lita, back to Los Angeles, he put in long hours tending personally to the film’s many details as headaches plagued him. By the time the film wrapped, Sam was exhausted and everyone around him noticed the physical toll that this latest production had taken on the forty-year-old. The pills he had been popping to keep him going were no longer effective.
The Warners planned to premiere their latest feature in New York on October 6, 1927—coincidentally Lita’s first birthday. If this new talking picture revolutionized the film medium the way they hoped, Warner Bros. would once again be a major Hollywood contender. If the picture failed, the company and the brothers were finished.
Instead of heading to New York with his brothers, however, Sam was admitted to the hospital with a case of bad sinuses. Diagnosed with an “acute mastoid infection,” he underwent surgery, but his condition did not improve. Doctors performed a second surgery and then a third. Abe was the first brother to arrive at the hospital, just before Sam’s fourth surgery. Harry and Jack were en route from New York when a cerebral hemorrhage claimed Sam on October 5, 1927. None of the brothers were present for The Jazz Singer’s triumphant premiere. Instead, they were in mourning.
Once family matters were attended to, Harry had to get back to business. It was only a matter of time until other production companies attained the same level of technology and released talkies of their own. In order to stay ahead of the game, Harry boldly borrowed $100,000,000 and bought controlling shares of First National Pictures who also owned one of the largest theater chains in the country. He then reorganized the company. Still the man on top, Harry remained in control of the overall budget. He put his only son, Lewis, now twenty, in charge of the recently acquired Warner Bros. Music. Abe headed up the theater division while Jack continued running the studio with producer Darryl Zanuck overseeing First National. By 1929, Harry Warner was considered one of the most powerful men in the film industry and Warner Bros. made a tidy profit exceeding $14,000,000.
That same year, Harry bought a twenty-two-acre farm in Mount Vernon, New York for his wife, Rea, and their three children. Betty, the youngest, recalled:
Mother … went back to the city, where they were dismantling famous homes, homes that had belonged to the original 400 families, like the Astors, and bought whole rooms—walls, ceilings, and floors—and transplanted them to Mount Vernon.…
… father loved the farm. He had all kinds of animals, pigeons, sheep, cows, dogs, and rabbits. He continued to practice and be proud of his butchering and breeding of prize chickens. He thought of himself as a first-generation Jewish cobbler and butcher turned movie mogul.
Harry also added a fourth child to the family, Sam’s daughter, Lita. Convinced that Lina Basquette was an unfit mother, he took custody of the three-year-old and raised her as his own.
During this time, Harry was also grooming Lewis to one day take over the leadership of Warner Bros.—another thing that irritated Jack. Outgoing, smart and talented, Lewis loved music, had many friends and enjoyed the good times and privileges that came with being his father’s son. That all changed in the spring of 1931 when the young man experienced an infected wisdom tooth. After having the tooth pulled and against his doctor’s advice, the twenty-two-year old headed to Cuba for a vacation arranged by his father. Once there, the infection spread to his gum. Lewis’ condition grew worse despite the best efforts of a Cuban dentist. Harry sent a plane to Havana and flew his son to Miami. From Florida, Lewis caught a train to New York where he was hospitalized and surgery performed. Five weeks later, he caught pneumonia and died on April 5, 1931. Harry’s dream of passing the studio on to his son was gone and Jack was biding his time.
With the Great Depression taking hold in the early 1930s and box office sales down, Warner Bros., like many other companies, was feeling the pinch. Forced to let almost 1,000 employees go and impose pay cuts on those remaining, the studio continued releasing gritty gangster films like Public Enemy (1931) with the grapefruit friendly James Cagney and Little Caesar (1931) featuring the tough-talking Edward G. Robinson. The studio also threw in an occasional western like Somewhere in Sonora (1933) with John Wayne or a musical such as 42nd Street (1933) with its groundbreaking Busby Berkeley choreography. All proved popular with an economically challenged public.
By the end of 1934, flames claimed much of the Burbank studio with losses totaling more than $2,000,000. The Warner Bros. fire chief died from a heart attack after fighting the blaze. Aside from losing the chief, Harry was particularly distressed about the irreplaceable prints that were destroyed—twenty years worth of films were lost. Thankfully, 1935 was better. The studio finally turned a profit after several lean years. Harry moved his family from New York back to California to a home in Be
verly Hills. He also purchased Jesse L. Lasky’s lavish Santa Monica beach house as well as a 1,100-acre ranch where he, like Louis B. Mayer, raised racehorses. Abe remained in New York to handle the business there. For Harry, the downside to living and working in California meant more confrontations with Jack.
Without Sam to act as a buffer, the oldest and youngest Warner constantly quarreled. Harry loudly disapproved of Jack’s many romantic dalliances and what he perceived as Jack’s devil-may-care attitude toward the business. As for Jack, he still resented the power that Harry wielded and encouraged his brother to find a girl and have some fun. A devoted family man, Harry was appalled at the very idea.
By 1939, trouble was lurking in Europe prompting Harry to close their offices in Germany. He also gave the go-ahead for Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) with Edward G. Robinson as a G-man. The film’s political statement condemned Germany and their Nazi nation. Harry and Jack both received death threats over their controversial picture. Even Congress dismissed the film, accusing Warner Bros. of “creating hysteria among the American public and inciting them to war.”
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Harry, now vindicated for the backlash from Confessions of a Nazi Spy, and his studio joined the war effort. He told his department heads that they were going to make training films for the U.S. government and further declared that he expected no profit from any of them. The studio went on to make a series of shorts—some strictly for training soldiers with others geared toward all U.S. citizens. Proud of these pictures, Harry was so delighted when a New York Times journalist wrote that Warner Bros. was “combining good citizenship with good picture making” that he had those very words stretched across a billboard near the studio.
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