Louis
B. Mayer, at the height of his power as head of MGM in the 1930s, the most
highly paid man in America, maker and breaker of studio executives, the supreme
Beverly Hills poobah, came down with an unconsummated crush on a would-be starlet.
He
courted Jean Howard with fatherly advice about doctors and dentists, avuncular
offers to help with any problems she might have. When Mayer finally asked her
out to dinner, she told him she had a date with a woman friend. Undeterred, he
took them both. “He never grabbed me or tried to kiss me or do anything that
almost everybody else had,” Jean Howard later recalled.
At
the time, she was having a stormy affair with an agent, later a producer, named
Charles Feldman who, she had just found out, was also seeing someone else. When
Mayer asked Jean Howard to go to Paris with him, she agreed, but only if her
woman friend could come along as chaperone.
Soon
after they arrived at the hotel, an MGM press agent called, urging Howard to
come to Mayer’s room where he was clutching a sheaf of papers—-a detective’s
report on her comings and goings with Feldman. “How could you do this to me?”
Mayer screamed, gulped a tumbler of whiskey and tried to heave himself out the
window. It took Howard, her friend and the MGM man (who broke a thumb) to
wrestle him to the floor.
After
being sedated by a doctor, Mayer meekly agreed to arrange Howard’s return to
the States. In the taxi, on his knees, he swore he would divorce his wife and
begged her to marry him, but she left for New York, where Feldman was waiting. (She
married and later divorced him but kept living in the same house, a tempestuous
Hollywood life in which her greatest achievement was taking pictures of the
rich and famous at parties she hosted.)
At about the same time that Mayer was succumbing to passion, the King of England gave up his throne to be with the “woman I love” whom he would not be allowed to marry. No sexual innocent as the Prince of Wales, King Edward VIII had cut a wide swath through a generation of young British women before succumbing to the charms of Wallis Simpson, an American about to be divorced from her second husband.
After
his abdication of the throne, the couple spent the rest of their lives in Café Society
as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, she an imperious figure with a fondness for
jewelry, he trailing her with a sad face and the couple’s dogs.
Obsessive
love touched me when my best friend left his wife and two children to marry a
younger woman who had bewitched him. No philanderer, he had interviewed and written
sympathetically of such women as Jacqueline Kennedy, Ingrid Bergman and
Princess Grace.
When sex
researchers Masters and Johnson wanted a book in their name on love and
commitment, they asked him to write it with them. It ended with the assertion
that “in their later years, it is in the enduring satisfaction of their sexual
and emotional bond that committed husbands and wives find reason enough to be
glad that they still have another day together.”
No so
for my friend. Soon afterward, his young wife casually betrayed him without
bothering to hide it. He literally took that to heart but even on his deathbed
implored me to help in her career as a magazine editor. I kept that promise and
gave the eulogy at his funeral with a heavy and troubled heart.
I
draw a confessional veil over details about the woman who inspired obsession in
me with her grief after a traumatic divorce that left her face as if in a glaze
of broken glass, setting off romantic rescue fantasies that broke my heart but
never touched hers. She took every ounce of my passion and the comforts that
came with it, as if by divine right, and gave back only permission to be
adored. After thirty years, it still hurts.
The
men in these stories did no harm to the objects of their passion, quite the
opposite, yet are seen as addled predators, but no note is taken of the women’s
use of them on their impervious paths to totally self-absorbed lives while
leaving behind the kind of deep endless pain they themselves were incapable of
feeling.
Perhaps
Dante was lucky to have met Beatrice only briefly before she inspired his
passion for “The Divine Comedy.” In real life she married a rich man in
Florence and lived a very ordinary life.
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