WHEN THALBERG FINALLY DECIDED to cross his Rubicon he did so without telling Mayer. As far as the studio brass knew he was still "hard at work on the preliminary phases of shaping Margaret Mitchell's yet to be published blockbuster into nothing less than a cinematic masterpiece." For Thalberg, it was essential his plans for using MGM's option on Gone With The Wind to prevent some other producer from stealing TABOO!'s¹⁴³ civil war thunder were kept absolutely secret until they reached the "fait accompli" stage. During his convalescence Mayer made it "perfectly plain"¹⁴⁴ to him he couldn't—and wouldn't—stand by much longer while the clock kept ticking on an option that might not be worth the paper it was written on if the as yet unpublished Gone With The Wind turned out to be a flashinthepan bestsellerwise.

     "Don't get me wrong, Irving. My faith in your talent for doing justice to this epic remains undiminished," Mayer told him. "The only question I have is whether you can get the job done staminawise." It didn't take a genius of Thalberg's stature to understand what Mayer was saying between his friendlysounding lines. Unless he started showing some tangible results from what he described as his "postrecuperative preproduction ruminations" Dave Selznick was waiting eagerly in the wings to replace him as Gone With The Wind's producer.

     "Believe me, Lou; I'm quite capable—mentally, spiritually and physically—of overcoming every obstacle to the making of this monumental film. In 5 or 6 weeks you will see the first fruits of my labors; and I don't think you'll be disappointed by them."

     "Isn't that exactly what you promised me 2 months ago?"

     "You know how I hate platitudes, Lou; but the one about looking before you leap is applicable to an enterprise of this magnitude. After all, the Rome set for DeMille's last extravaganza wasn't built in a day—and when my Gone With The Wind is in the can it'll make his Cleopatra look like choppedliver."

     "Yes," Mayer added ruefully, "and so will I when some little old lady from Pasadena stands up at the next shareholder's meeting and asks me for a status report on what the trades are calling 'Mayer's make or break movie!'"

     "The morgues of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter are filled with Louis B. Mayer obituaries that turned out to be premature."

     "Maybe, but in this case the bastards might win a goddamn Pulitzer prize for clairvoyance! Unfortunately for us that other bromide equating time and money couldn't be truer. The last time I looked at our corporate balance sheet we were running ruinously short of both! Accordingly, my friend, I am left with no choice but to issue this ultimatum: Unless you can lay a script, a shooting schedule and, above all, a budget on my desk 3 weeks from today I must put this film into the hands of another producer who will."

     "Are you serious?"

     "Do I look and sound as if I'm anything but!"

     "So, while you and your snakeinthegrass soninlaw were making all that noise in public about your 'complete confidence' in my full recovery—privately you were both plotting to manufacture some phony excuse for removing me from the Gone With The Wind picture!"

     "That's a damned lie and you know it!" roared Mayer. "As for this sibling rivalry between you and my soninlaw I can only repeat what I've always said on that subject: I'm running Hollywood's premier movie studio—not a popularity contest between a pair of producers acting more like adolescent primadonnas than the hardheaded businessmen they're supposed to be! And it is in my official capacity as the President of MGM that I'm telling you in capital letters 10 feet tall: COME HELL OR HIGH WATER WE ARE GOING TO RELEASE GONE WITH THE WIND IN TIME FOR THE 1939 XMAS SEASON OR MY NAME ISN'T LOUIS B. MAYER!"

     "Unofficially," Mayer resumed with a vocal tone that was still grave but noticeably less dictatorial after dismounting from his high moral horse, "despite what you think is the favoritism I show toward Selznick because he happens to be my daughter's husband, it was always you and you alone who were—and still are—the apple of my fatherly eye." Taking a handkerchief from his breast pocket Mayer used it to dramatically wipe the tears streaming from his eyes. After which he added: "When a life and death crisis like this presents itself to a man with my executive responsibilities he must be willing to sacrifice even the most prized of his personal relationships. I don't need to remind you we aren't dealing with the survival of some halfassed Hollywood studio, do I?"

     "Of course you don't—" Thalberg responded dutifully.

     "MGM has always been the one studio towering above all the others not only for the quality of its product but as an authentic American institution!"

     "And, if I may say so: A personal monument to the heroic role you frequently played in elevating it to such an exalted status."

     "In addition to which," Mayer went on without bothering to acknowledge Thalberg's flattery, "Gone With The Wind isn't your average movie. We both know this stupendous richestorags civil war saga is that onceinalifetime stuff from which nothing less than the greatest of all major motion pictures can, must and will be made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer!"

     When Thalberg did reply to Mayer's eloquent and not unpersuasive explanation for his "get tough policy," he could only do so from a throat choked with contrition. "Forgive me, Lou! My god! How could I have been so blinded by my own ambition to think that you, the most decent human being I've ever known, would take advantage of my health problems to stab me in the back? Such gross ingratitude deserves more than that stay of execution you just gave me! No! You would have been—and still are!—perfectly justified in terminating me on the spot!" Whereupon he broke down and began weeping uncontrollably.

     "No, no, no—" Mayer protested; shaking his head and covering his ears to indicate he didn't want (or could no longer stand) to hear any more of this painful mea culpa from his wayward protege. A semisilent pantomime of weeping, wailing and histrionic hairpulling by both men ensued for a few minutes before Thalberg regained enough composure to utter the words that would bring the curtain down on this little tearjerking exercise he and Mayer had been improvising.  "Or—" he began tremulously,¹⁴⁵ "if you want my resignation it's yours for the asking, Lou. But before you decide, there's something I need to tell you from the bottom of my heart, which is: Whatever happens, nothing can ever change the fact that in a town whose gods are notorious for devouring their young you have always treated my hubris with the patience of a saint."

     Mayer thought momentarily about trying to eclipse Thalberg's brilliant showstopper but in the final analysis decided it was a lost cause he didn't mind losing all that much to someone whose fate (and/or balls) he now held so firmly in his clenched fist. Not unlike Lincoln at Gettysburg he could afford to be magnanimous toward an adversary whose certain defeat was only a few weeks away. Accordingly he declined the symbolic sword Thalberg was offering him with a (deceptively) simple—"That won't be necessary, Irving." After which the 2 former foes turned what might once have been at least a minor Greeklike tragedy into the bathos of a typical Hollywood "bittersweet happy ending" by rising from their chairs to embrace each other in an unmitigated display of mawkishness which, if an audience of average American moviegoers had actually been witnessing it, would have wrung a flood of tears from them rivaling any produced by Mother Nature during the most tempestuous of her diluvian moments.¹⁴⁶

FOR ALL THALBERG'S STRUTTING & FRETTING he wasn't really concerned about the latest of these Gone With The Wind deadlines. The documents Mayer was demanding had in fact been created more than a month before and were safely locked away in a drawer of the desk behind which he sat while the foregoing "scene" was being played. Thalberg's reasons for having orchestrated such an apparently pointless charade were anything but whimsical. While pretending the stillprecarious state of his health made a production of Gone With The Wind's scope more than he could handle, Thalberg was trying to buy all the time he possibly could to covertly set the stage for an even more grandiose production of TABOO! From the very outset of his "audacious scheme to secretly film what would be my cinematic swan song¹⁴⁷ under Mayer's nose," Thalberg created a tandem of production teams. The first of these was organized according to the standard procedures by which MGM made all of its movies and was conspicuously hard at work using the scant year it had before Margaret Mitchell's blockbusting novel was published shaping it into what Thalberg guaranteed Mayer would be "not just any major motion picture, L. B., but Hollywood's first Megamovie." Meanwhile, using the code name Operation Ugly Duckling he had surreptitiously organized a "task force of dedicated idealists" who were even busier working on a "battle plan" whereby: At a critical juncture¹⁴⁸ in Gone With The Wind's evolution from Bestselling Block buster to Megamovie it would miraculously metamorphose into an Oscarwinning combination of Humanitarian Manifesto and Cinematic Masterpiece.¹⁴⁹

     These furtive activities were carried on under the cover of a company bankrolled by the AntiNazi League. Calling itself "Signet Productions" it leased the Long Beach premises of Pacific Pictures—a microstudio that had specialized in making some of "Hollywood's" bluer movies before the fallout from the 1929 crash finally put an end to even that theoretically most depressionproof of businesses. Signet's Long Beach facility was quickly converted into a smaller but fullyequipped version of the modern soundstages found at any major studio by a crew of craftsmen and technicians Thalberg recruited from the "scum" cast up on Southern California's beaches by the fascist tide inundating what were once Europe's finest film studios. More significantly he had managed to assemble an allstar team of writers, including Bertolt Brecht, Clifford Odets, Nathaniel West, Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Eugene O'Neill, who—in a rare display of altruistic solidarity were collaborating on a TABOO! script that "wouldn't only mesh with the one being written for GWTW but stand on its own 2 literary legs as a universal statement of humanitarian principles and a Black&White love story that would melt the hardest hearted of America's redblooded and -necked racial bigots."

     Thalberg's greatest difficulty concerned the casting of his leading lady, Mona Deeds. The role of Novice F. Moore would be played by no one else but Paul Robeson. In addition to his imposing physical and vocal credentials, Robeson's recent success in the film version of The Emperor Jones and his earlier critically acclaimed Othello on the London stage made him singularly qualified to play the black governor of a "reconstructed" Mississippi. And, being the real life son of a runaway slave his antiJimCrow animus couldn't have been more sympathetic to Thalberg's humanitarian concern for all persecuted minorities in making this riskiest of Hollywood movies.¹⁵⁰  Finding an actress who could or, more importantly, would play Mona Deeds was, however, a not altogether figurative horse—or mare—of another color. Thalberg's obvious choice should have been his wife, Norma Shearer. If not MGM's most glamorous leading lady she was one of its most talented and popular stars. Born in Canada Shearer nevertheless came to typify that pristine Miss America look with which so many female moviegoers identified¹⁵¹—a trait that would be extremely helpful to Thalberg in persuading millions of straightlaced white women to (at least vicariously) cross that most uncrossable of all sociosexual lines: The one separating them from black men.

     And while his wife had been urging him for some time to "spice up" her girlnextdoor image by casting her in roles "a bit more adventurous femmefatalewise," after reading Harvest of Hate she made no secret of her opinion that: "If you're foolish enough to even think I'd seriously consider appearing in a film version of this scandalous book, Irving, that Jewish head of yours is in dire need of psychiatric examination. Moreover," she added tartly, "as long as we're on the subject of civil war novels, what drives me crazy is that here I am, married to the one producer who can give me what every other actress in Hollywood is willing to sell her body and her soul for—just the chance to show him she is the Scarlett O'Hara he needn't waste any more of his precious time searching for!"

AS IT HAPPENED, JEAN HARLOW WAS ALSO crying on Thalberg's Hart, Schaffner & Marx shoulder about "the screwedup state" of her cinematic persona. Ironically her problem was just the opposite of that over which his wife was so exercised. Harlow's complaint had to do with, as she expressed it, "the infuriating fact MGM insists on featuring me as the same beautifulbutdumb blonde in every goddamn picture I make. All I'm asking you for, darling," she pleaded, "is a lousy little test in some halfway decent dramatic part to prove I'm not the completely brainless bimbo everyone in this town takes me for."  Initially Thalberg dismissed Harlow's ludicrous claims "Mayer and his New York cronies¹⁵² were conspiring to keep me stuck in my rut as America's Number One Sexgoddess" as a bad joke whose target was no doubt his wife's equally laughable femme fatale aspirations. But the more he thought about it the better he liked the idea of at least experimentally juxtaposing the prototypical femaleness of Harlow's Evelike Mona Deeds against the quintessential masculinity of Robeson's Adamesque Novice Moore.

     "Or," as Bert Brecht put it in one of his Zen nutshells, "her lilly white yin versus his jet black yang."

     Thomas Mann, on the other hand, added his "2 pfennig's" worth of advice to Thalberg on the possibility of Harlowizing Mona Deeds with the rather more reserved observation that: "While from a moralistic point of view, Harvest of Hate is obviously superior to Gone With The Wind, from a pure storytelling perspective—like Othello's Desdemona—its alltoo predictably submissive heroine lacks the fiery temperament which keeps that onagain-offagain-onagain loveaffair between Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler boiling so furiously with novelistic suspense."

     While some reservations were expressed about "candycoating TABOO!'s bitter pill so thickly it might lose its medicinal effect," the consensus among Thalberg's Ugly Ducklingites was in favor of "writing a test scene for Harlow and Robeson to see if their explosive chemistry could indeed add an even bigger bang to this cinematic powderkeg of ours when we finally touch a match to it."  A few days later, when Thalberg and Shearer previewed the Harlow/Robeson test in the private screeningroom of their Santa Monica beach house, any doubts he had about "overkilling a picture already super charged with that most controversial of subject matters—miscegenation" were obliterated by what he solemnly predicted would be "a pair of performances that will end up winning an Oscar for everyone associated with what—no matter how begrudgingly—the Academy is bound to call the Greatest Motion Picture Ever Made."  Thalberg's rapture over "this triumphant vindication of my Harlow hunch" was grudgingly ratified by his wife who, although sorely tempted to blackmail him into making GWTW as the vehicle in which she could make her (belated) bid to become Hollywood's sexiest new starlet by spilling the Ugly Duckling beans to Mayer, found herself confessing instead that: "Damn it, Irving, I probably made the biggest mistake any actress could possibly make by failing to trust that godgiven talent you've always had for turning what looks like a sow's ear¹⁵³ into a silk purse!"

     Later that evening Thalberg's euphoria suddenly turned to ashes when he was rushed to the hospital with what would prove to be a fatal case of lobar pneumonia.

OF ALL THOSE WHO MOURNED HIM no one was more genuinely griefstricken than Louis B. Mayer— the man who was known throughout Hollywood as Irving Thalberg's bitterest enemy. Even more surprisingly, when told by Thalberg's doctors that his demise on the very day Mayer's 3 week deadline expired was "strictly coincidental because he died from double pneumonia, not a coronary" Mayer remained convinced his "ultimatum to a man with Irving's wellknown coronary problems was nothing less than a death sentence!" More remarkable still was Mayer's reaction following the funeral at Forest Lawn when, "to set the record straight guiltwise," Norma Shearer told him what her "sainted husband" had been doing behind his—Mayer's—back to sabotage the production of Gone With The Wind in order to film his—Thalberg's— Great American Movie.

     "Thank God!" Mayer sighed with relief.

     Disconcerted—if not astonished—by what seemed like Mayer's tranquil reaction to the treachery of his "protege, adopted son and most trusted colleague," Shearer could only manage to say: "I assume, L. B., that sigh of relief means you no longer feel responsible for my widowhood."

     "My dear Norma, such an assumption couldn't be further from the truth! Nothing you or anyone else can say will ever persuade me I am not guilty of murdering your husband!"

     "Perhaps," Shearer snapped back, "but ordinarily Louis B. Mayer would justify such an act on the grounds he was only defending himself from his victim's homicidal intentions"

     "You're wrong again, Mrs Thalberg. There never was, is or will be anything 'ordinary' about Louis B. Mayer! In this case I wasn't thanking God because your Ugly Duckling revelations made me feel any less guilty for his death. No! I expressed my gratitude to Him because the news of Irving's unfinished magnum opus will allow me to atone for all my sins against him by completing it as the only kind of 'monument' he ever really cared about—one made from celluloid not marble!"

     As the learned men they were, Thalberg's coconspirators knew that pursuant to the immutable laws governing such Grecian tragedies his sudden exit from the stage meant the curtains had closed on their noble but illfated cinematic efforts at making sociopolitical history. Unencumbered by too much knowledge about Hellenistic theology, however, Mayer wasn't willing to take a "no" answer to Thalberg's Great American Moviemaking prayers from "a bunch of pagan gods who don't know shit from shinola when it comes to pushing someone like Louis B. Mayer around! Compared to the tsuris that arch painintheass Nick Schenck has been heaping on my plate for the past 15 years, dealing with an entire pantheon of Mount Olympus bastards will be a piece of cake!"

     At an "emergency" meeting 2 days after Thalberg's burial, to which he summoned the principal participants in the Ugly Duckling operation—most of whom were expecting a Hitlerian tirade followed by their summary execution—Mayer didn't mince his words. "Gentlemen," he told them, "this show you've been plotting to stage behind my back will go on! With," he added after a suitably dramatic pause, "me as the new captain of its fate!"

SO IT CAME ABOUT THAT Louis B. Mayer cast himself as Joshua to Irving G. Thalberg's Moses by moving the clandestine production of TABOO! from Long Beach to the Promised Land of Culver City, where it would receive the kind of regal treatment MGM was famous for lavishing on its "prestige"¹⁵⁴ films. Marshaling all the considerable resources he commanded as moviedom's most powerful mogul Mayer "induced" his soninlaw, David O. Selznick, to take the nurturing of Thalberg's "brainchild" under his personal wing as its executive producer. Selznick wasn't happy about playing "nursemaid" to a picture he thought should have been strangled at its birth. "Thalberg's death," he asserted, "was an act of God alright, but one whose notso mysterious purpose was to put the production of GWTW back into my hands where it rightfully belonged from that dark day when Irving bought the screen rights with MGM's money!" It's uncertain¹⁵⁵ if Selznick was sincere in vigorously opposing Mayer's "multimillion dollar guilt trip," or whether he was secretly harboring an underhanded scheme of his own for doing unto TABOO! exactly what Thalberg had been trying to do unto Gone With The Wind. In any event he didn't completely liquidate the phony GWTW production unit set up by Thalberg to cover his furtive operations but secretly kept its key personnel together "on a contingency basis in the event that, for some reason or other, TABOO! just happens to go down the drain."

     Selznick's "contingency plans" turned out to be prophetic when, on 27 June 1937, Jean Harlow, his leading lady and the Hollywood sexgoddess whose superstardom once seemed so deathless,¹⁵⁶ died.

WHICH, DEAR READER, BRINGS US BACK to that heated discussion Mayer and Selznick were having over signing Doris Darlinge to a contract as Harlow's replacement. To Selznick, Harlow's death less than a year after Thalberg's was no mere coincidence. "How much more handwriting is needed on this brickwall we are beating our brains out against, L. B., before you admit this whole TABOO! business is cursed?" he asked. "Handwriting, shmandwriting!" was Mayer's reply. "Make no bones about it, David; we are going to finish Irving's picture come hell or high water! Moreover," Mayer continued, "from what I saw of her test with Robeson, physically she is a perfect lookalike. And, since in the dialect department Harlow sounded more like the Madam of a Coney Island cat house than a Southern Belle, in the final analysis would it be such a bad idea if we did have to reshoot all of her footage."

     "That depends."

     "On what?"

     "Whether you are drawing a distinction between 'bad' and 'expensive.'"

     "That's exactly what I'm doing!" Mayer exploded. "You hit the nail squarely on its head my boy! For once in his life Louis B. Mayer is throwing the financial cautions of MGM's accounting department to the wind! And if I am, why should you be any less generous with someone else's money?"

     "Because, Doris Darlingewise, fiscal considerations are the least of my worries—"

     Still riding an unbroken wave of rapture, Mayer wasn't listening. "I'm telling you David, this girl brings a purity and freshness to the Mona Deeds role Harlow never could because of all that baggage she picked up making trashy Bfilms on her way to becoming the shopworn sexgoddess she really was when her career ended so abruptly at what will no doubt be mythologized as its 'crest.'"

     "Maybe. In my experience, however, when it comes to judging a dame's star potential one man's 'freshness and purity' can just as easily be another man's lack of talent and inexperience," Selznick jabbed away before unloading the first of what he hoped would turn out to be a flurry of fightending combination punches. "But the question we should be asking ourselves is: Who the hell do we think we're fooling with this 'abstract' discussion when we both know damn well what it is you find so ravishing about the virginal Miss Darlinge?"

     "Which is?"

     "That she seems to be naturally endowed with a pair of tits so provocative the Hays Office will have to add them to their list of moviemaking NoNos!"

     "Speaking of which," Mayer responded nonsequitorially, "her agent informs me they are and she is."

     "Are and is what, for Christ's sake?"

     "100 percent kosher, both bosom- and virginwise."

     "You're missing the point, L. B.—"

     "I don't think so, David. Your smutminded reading of my motives in this Doris Darlinge matter misses the mark by a country mile. But even if, by some Freudian stretch of the imagination, you were at least partially right: Would it be such a terrible thing for TABOO!'s historymaking prospects that millions of ordinary Americans were 'suckered' into seeing a movie with a message because they happen to share my plebian appreciation for what is, after all, one—or 2 if you insist on being lewd about it—of the most gorgeous objects d'art ever shaped from the common clay of femalekind by the hands of that Master Sculptor In The Sky?"

     Selznik knew when his fatherinlaw started talking in "pseudotalmudic" terms it was futile—and frequently dangerous—to gainsay him. Any further feuding over the Doris Darlinge issue was bound to degenerate into a shouting match. One in which Mayer's talent for unleashing a nonstop barrage of mixed metaphors would leave Selznick branded as a "Cain!" "Judas Iscariot!" "Benedict Arnold!" "Brutus!" "Prodigal Son(inLaw)!" "Rasputin!" "Alfred Adler!" "Marie Antoinette!" "Jezebel!" "Mata Hari!" and that vilest of all ingrates—"Captain¹⁵⁷ Nick Schenck!"—for biting the "proverbial¹⁵⁸ hand" that was feeding him so handsomely."¹⁵⁹  The result of the Mayer/Selznick showdown was that MGM signed Doris to a 3 year $1,000 per week contract. After which she promptly began the series of "crash courses" in diction, elocution, acting, poise and basic stellarization calculated to transform her into what the studio's Publicity Department was already hailing as "THE MOST HEAVENLY—AND TALENTED¹⁶⁰—Body To Dazzle America's Moviegoing Public Since The Late & Great Jean Harlow Blazed Her Own Brief But Legendary Path Across The StarStudded Sky Over Hollywood."

     Doris applied herself to the daunting task of filling the void created when Harlow suddenly left millions of matinee idolaters in a sexgoddess lurch with such energy and dedication even Selznick was forced to "grudgingly admire the girl's pluckiness." With few exceptions all those who got to know her in the "makeover"¹⁶¹ process were deeply impressed—if not amazed—by "the genuine grace and humility" with which she accepted her fairytale rise from lunchcounter rags to the fabulous riches of glamorgirldom. "Maybe," they said, "her beautiful blueeyed and platinumblonde head is in the clouds, but those size 12EE waitress' feet of hers remain firmly planted on the floor where most of America's workingclass women must stand to earn their daily crust of bread." For Louis B. Mayer the most pleasantly surprising of the remarkable talents "his discovery" exhibited, however, was a gift for acting no less natural—and potentially even more impressive—than those twin anatomical features that stretched her sweaters so tautly; and whose unboundable amplitude overflowed even the puritanical neckline of the snow white wedding gown she would wear in TABOO! as Novice Moore's bride. According to her drama coach, Percy Percival, the dean of Hollywood's superannuated Shakespeareans: "With the proper training, the passage of enough time and just a little luck, L. B., this 'Liza Doolittle' of yours could mature into one of Tinseltown's most accomplished actresses."

ON THE BIG DAY, WHEN DORIS was slated to start shooting her first TABOO! scenes, MGM's No. 3 Sound Stage was filled to capacity with an invited audience comprised of showbusiness luminaries, the creme de la creme of Southern California society, politicians from both parties in local, state and federal government and, of course, members of the Hollywood and national press corps. Not to mention every secretary, stenographer, typist, carpenter, grip, scriptgirl, cameraman, seamstress, stuntman, stagehand, editor, extra and roustabout who could wangle his or her way in to witness what was being advertised as "not just the advent of another Major Motion Picture, or the birth of a MGM's new leading lady, but a turning point in the history of Hollywood filmmaking." Behind this most theatrical of scenes, however, a storyline of even greater dramatic suspense was unfolding. Or, to be more accurate—and as we will see in the next chapter—unraveling.

Book Two Chapter 4 Part 1   Return to Index

Footnotes

143 Thalberg knew if Harvest of Hate were to have any chance of attracting a mass audience it needed a "sexier" title to make its medicinal message more palatable for a depression era moviegoing public not accustomed to swallowing even the least bitter of Hollywood's pills that weren't generously sugarcoated.

144 These quotation marks (and those which follow) are only being used for the lack of any other way to punctuate the conversation which allegedly took place between Mayer and Thalberg; and should not be regarded as constituting the editoress' endorsement of their accuracy—J.P.

145 The effect of which was to imbue his voice with a recitative quality not unlike that used so effectively by Gianni Schicchi when, during that most pregnant of operatic pauses, he approaches the footlights and speaks directly to the audience—before Puccini punctuates the finale of his one act masterpiece with 4 furiously fabulous bars of orchestral exclamation points.

146 To a dryeyed drama critic this "rampant display of raw human emotions" by Mayer and Thalberg wouldn't have been altogether unmixed with a measure of that mutual admiration even the most egomaniacal actors exchange in such clinches when they know they have each given a virtuoso performance. Moreover, upon an even closer scrutiny of their embrace, one could have detected an "invisible dagger" held in the hand with which each of them grasped the other's back.

147 Thalberg had no illusions concerning the brevity of the life left for him to live after his last coronary. More than anything else it was this fatalism which convinced him TABOO! was the Great American Movie he'd been born (with a defective heart) to make.

148 Thalberg was betting that: Before the serious shooting of GWTW got underway the increased persecution of Germany's Jews coupled with the declining postpublication popularity of Mitchell's "vastly overhyped novel" would make TABOO!'s boxoffice prospects that much brighter. He knew it was a long shot and, if all else failed, he would raise the stakes even higher by asking Nick Schenck—the money man who really called the shots at MGM—to finally decide who was more essential to the studio's continued profitability and artistic prestige (the 2 not being mutually exclusive): Louis B. Mayer or Irving G. Thalberg. But this was also a gamble that, despite his mystique as Hollywood's most talented moviemaker, Thalberg was by no means certain of winning. Healthwise it was no secret he had been living on borrowed time for the last 5 or 6 years and wouldn't be the ideal choice of a coldblooded businessman like Schenck as the captain of MGM's multimillion dollar fate. Nevertheless Thalberg could rely on the loyalty he had earned among the majority of the studio's least expendable personnel if creative push came to commercial shove. Accordingly, his chances for using TABOO! to turn the Presidential tables on Mayer weren't quite as far fetched as they might seem to those of us who are more or less ignorant of the Byzantine power struggles that went on behind the scenes when an AllAmerican institution like MGM was being created.

149 An objective he never achieved but one which was posthumously enshrined by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science as the Irving G. Thalberg Award "for the most consistent high quality of production achievement by an individual producer based on pictures he had personally produced during the preceding year."

150 Although, as Robeson stated to Thalberg: "In all honesty, Irving, if this Quixotic crusade of yours turns out to be nothing more than a celluloid windmill I don't have an awful lot to lose in a town where schwarzes are typecast as domestic servants, shiftless lowlifes and watermeloneating& catfishfrying buffoons."

151 Whose own virginity was sacrificed on the backseat of some high school Romeo's jalopy or—worse yet—the altar of a misbegotten marriage.

152 At that time Louis B. Mayer's Culver City strings were pulled by Nick Schenck from his Manhattan office as the President of Loew's, Inc.—the company controlling the distribution (and hence the "creative" content) of MGM's films.

153 According to Doris Darlinge, Thalberg was never quite sure if this sow's ear metaphor was intended to flatter his judgment vis-a-vis what was generally thought to be an "unfilmable novel" or disparage what was commonly rumored to be Harlow's "considerably less than upstanding state of mammary affairs"

154 Thalberg is always given credit for coining this cachet, but it was Mayer who, in a speech he gave at the inauguration of the MGM studio on 26 April 1924, stated: "From the production standpoint you can count on it that [we] will reach a point of perfection never approached by any other studio. If there is one thing I insist upon, it is quality. Hence our motto—Ars Gratia Artis—which, as you know, means Art for Art's Sake."

155 According to the official history of how Gone With The Wind was made, Thalberg urged Mayer to forego exercising MGM's first option on Margaret Mitchell's upcoming bestseller because "no Civil War picture ever made a nickel." Whereupon Selznick snapped up the rights to what would become his independent production of "the most famous motion picture of all time." The author explains the discrepancies between this orthodox version of the facts and the one told to him by Doris Darlinge as a natural result of the conspiracy between Mayer and Selznick to diminish Thalberg's reputation as "the best of what Hollywood did best." [All quotations are from Thalberg: the Last Tycoon and The World of M-G-M —J. P.]

156 Along with Billy the Kid, Harlow was immortalized by Michael McClure in one of the greatest American plays ever written—The Beard.

157 A nickname the despotic CEO of Manhattan's Leow's Inc—and Mayer's nemesis—was justifiably proud of having earned among the mandarins of Hollywood's entertainment industry who prided themselves on their own reputation as "the most tyrannical sons of bitches west of the Hudson River."

158 Which was Mayer's devious way of avoiding the blasphemous implications that would otherwise arise if he didn't blur the lack of distinction he had a habit of not making between his mogulesque generosity and that of the Supreme Being toward Selznick.

[NOTE. If this footnote leaves you somewhat confused—or even totally flummoxed—don't despair dear reader! I myself spent the better part of a day trying without success to parse its Byzantine syntax before finally deciding not to delete it for the sole reason that: As with the experimental prose of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett—In the fullness of time that confusing sentence might seem like so much child's play to a postMorons Awake! generation schooled in the "elementary" skills of neobaroque novelreading.—J. P.]

And, while we're at it, that enigmatic footnote raises a related issue of what I believe is no small importance, namely: The habit so many women have when reading even the most simpleminded novel to disregard those words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs and even whole pages whose "less than selfevident" meaning escapes them in the frantic rush to consummate their happyending expectations. By now it should be plain to everyone who has come this far that, like all fine art—including that of foreplay—the key to maximizing your psychosexual satisfaction from reading Morons Awake! lies in postponing its Grand(iose) Finale for as long as it is humanly possible to do so.  But until books such as this become the rule rather than the exception it remains a depressing fact of our late 20thcentury literary life that: Every novelist, poet, playwright, screenwriter and journalist seeking to massmarket her or his "concepts" does so by deliberately eliminating from every sentence they craft the slightest soupcon of style, whit of wit, suggestion of satire, hint of paradox, scrap of irony, tinge of tintinnabulation, trace of doubled entendre, glimmer of genius and/or scintilla of purely aesthetic adornment. Just as "modern" architecture dominates all of our metropolitan skylines with its mediocre monoliths so too has the state of our sociocultural affairs reached a point of such absurdity that Holden Caulfield's seemingly contradictory statement—"I'm quite illiterate but I read a lot"—isn't as oxymoronic as it sounds. If this minimalist trend in sentence construction were to persist—which, thank Goldberg and Klutz it shouldn't!—we will soon be communicating in terms not much more elegant than our cavedwelling ancestors did. One only has to switch on a television set or radio to imagine the kind of "conversational" skills practiced by the Neanderthals at the end of another day in their daily grind to survive in a world where some 50 or 60 thousand years would have to pass before the superiority of brains over brawn became an established fact of human life. Or has it?—J. P.]

159 Selznick was married to Mayer's daughter, Irene; a "privilege" for which his eternal gratitude was expected—and frequently sought—by his kingly fatherinlaw.

160 This clause was inserted by the Legal Department "to deflect any criticism for what might otherwise be (justifiably in our opinion) construed as MGM's deliberate attempt to capitalize on the more prurient aspects (no matter how Godgiven they might be) of Miss Darlinge's screen persona."

161 During which Doris was discovered to be not only the scarcest of blueeyed sexgoddess commodities—a dyedinthewool platinumblonde—but that her ancestral roots were the rarest of all genealogical rarities; those buried deeply beneath the prehistoric turnip patches of Moronia. When this fact was disclosed to Mayer he reacted, not unexpectedly, by saying he'd never heard of the place. "Where the hell is it exactly?" he asked the poor publicist who was chosen by a lottery to be the bearer of these dubious tidings. "Somewhere in Europe, not far from Cretiny and Transylvania ," he answered evasively.
     "Jesus," Mayer commented, "I don't like the sound of that. Isn't that Frankenstein country?"
     "Actually, L. B., I think I'm correct in saying Dracula is Transylvania's claim to geographic fame. As for Cretiny—"
     "Holy shit!" Mayer exclaimed while rising from his chair as if he had been sitting on a tack, "If she's from Moronia that must make her a goddamn Moron!"
     "To be more precise; Doris is a Moroness. According to the social customs of Moronia a female—"
     "Screw the social customs of Moronia! It's the American social custom of calling people who behave like morons 'morons' that bothers me! Here we are busting our balls to overcome the ''brainless blonde' image of this exlunchcounter waitress only to find out it's perfectly kosher to call her a Moron!"
     "But, according to our Legal Department, only if a capital 'M' is used. Otherwise—"
     "I'll capitalize some 'M's' for those wiseguy shysters alright—as in: Mister Louis B. Mayer is not aMused by your MealyMouthed solution to MGM's probleMs you Misbegotten Motherfuckers!"

    To shorten what was in fact a long story Mayer used his considerable political clout in LA's City Hall, Sacramento and Washington, D.C. to provide Doris with a birth certificate, high school diploma, driver's license and social security card; all of which established beyond any doubt her credentials as a 100% authentic American success story.