Volume 30, Number 21 & 22 · January 19, 1984
Her Way
By Sara Laschever
A Private View
by Irene Mayer Selznick
Knopf, 384 pp., $16.95
On the day after Irene Mayer Selznick asked the M-G-M publicity department to announce her separation from producer David O. Selznick, she received baskets of flowers from the wives of three other producers, one of whom she did not even know. If the flowers indicate that being a producer's wife can make for a hard life, that comes as no surprise, but they suggest only a portion of the difficulties with which Mrs. Selznick has had to cope in her seventy-odd years. Not merely, for a time, the wife of one producer, she was also the daughter of Louis B. Mayer, perhaps the single most powerful figure in the history of the American film industry. And after her separation, despite what many would consider a persuasive education in the dangers of such a choice, Mrs. Selznick went on to a producing career of her own. Although she became a producer in the theater rather than in films, she attained success comparable to that of her father and former husband, counting among her credits Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, John Van Druten's Bell, Book and Candle, Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden, and Graham Greene's The Complaisant Lover.
Review, 4182 words
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