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recalled a time when Ann Sheridan was showing a young actor around the Warner Bros. lot and encountered an elderly man walking slowly with his head bowed. Occasionally, he bent down, picked up an object, and popped it into his mouth. “Who’s that man and what’s he doing?” the actor asked Miss Sheridan. “Doing what comes naturally,” she said. “He’s picking up nails. His name is Harry Warner, and he happens to be president of the company.”
    The legend of the ignorant immigrants becoming plutocrats is partly fiction. Leo Rosten demonstrated in his detailed study of Hollywood, The Movie Colony (1941) that just as 80 percent of Hollywood actors earned less than $15,000 per year, nearly 60 percent of the 120 leading Hollywood executives had graduated from college and less than 5 percent came from Russia and Poland. Still, the confirmation of all legends, the richest and most powerful of all the semiliterate monarchs, was Louis B. Mayer, who was born in Minsk, probably in 1885, and was probably named Lazar. He himself did not know for sure.
    He spent his boyhood as a ragpicker in New Brunswick, Canada. He was twenty-two when he bought a former burlesque theater in Haverhill, Massachusetts, for a down payment of six hundred dollars and began exhibiting a French film of the Oberammergau Passion Play. Though he stood only five feet seven * , he had powerful shoulders and a fierce temper. He attacked and knocked down Charlie Chaplin for speaking disrespectfully of his own ex-wife; he knocked down Erich von Stroheim for saying that all women were whores. In 1937, as president of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he received a salary and bonuses totaling $1,300,000, which made him the highest-paid man in the United States. He was to retain that ambiguous honor for the next nine years, and when he was finally overthrown in 1951, M-G-M declared that over the course of his twenty-seven years in power, he had “received over $20,000,000 in compensation.” It was part of the folklore at M-G-M that the studio commissary had to serve at lunch every day, in honor of Mayer’s long-dead mother, chicken soup with real pieces of chicken in it, at thirty-five cents a bowl.
    One of the most remarkable aspects of these buccaneers was how little they understood either their business or their audience. “Less brains are necessary in the motion picture industry than in any other,” Lewis Selznick once testified to a startled congressional committee. He cited an occasion when he had made $105,000 on a $1,000 investment within ten weeks. Selznick eventually went bankrupt, so his testimony is not infallible, but the whole history of Hollywood is a chronicle of misjudgments and miscalculations interspersed among the more celebrated successes. The studio tycoons seemed to have no idea, for example, that the cartel by which they had made themselves rich was vulnerable to a federal antitrust suit, or that the suit originally filed by the Justice Department in 1938 would ultimately devastate their empire. They also had no idea of what technology would mean to them and their fortunes. They had stumbled into the use of sound almost by accident, and they were reluctantly beginning to experiment with color; they completely ignored the fact that television broadcasts were already emanating from New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco, and that tens of thousands of people were marveling at this novelty at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow, New York.
    The lords of Hollywood persuaded themselves that they had some mysterious insight into the American public, and that this insight both explained and justified their riches, their courtiers, their palaces and racehorses. They imagined themselves, with the help of their publicity men, as great showmen, daring gamblers willing to stake fortunes on hunches, and when they were eventually dethroned, as most of them eventually were, they seemed surprised,