AUTOGRAPHED SIGNED MEMOIR

MERVYN LEROY:

TAKE ONE

BY Mervyn LeRoy

As Told to Dick Kleiner

Illustrated with 32 pages of photographs

Signed Autographed Inscribed

By

MERVYN LEROY

MARGARET O’BRIEN

KATHRYN GRAYSON

 

This is the frank, intimate autobiography of one of Hollywood's most consistently successful motion picture directors—a giant in the film industry with more than seventy-five pictures to his credit, including such classics as Little Caesar, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, Quo Vadis, Oil for the Lamps of China, Waterloo Bridge, Tugboat Annie, Anthony Adverse, The Wizard of Oz, Random Harvest, Mister Roberts, The Bad Seed, No Time for Sergeants, Johnny Eager, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Little Women, The FBI Story, Gypsy, and Madame Curie.

He also has the unique distinction of having had twenty pictures shown in Radio City Music Hall.

Leroy began his career hawking newspapers in San Francisco at the age of ten after his father's death. Soon he got a bit part in the play Barbara Frietchie, which cast the die for his love affair with show business. Winning a stage contest for the best imitation of Charlie Chaplin earned for him a solo act stint with Sid Grauman's gaudy midway show. Then he joined with Clyde Cooper to play the vaudeville circuits billed as "LeRoy & Cooper, Two Kids and a Piano."

After World War I he left vaudeville to try his luck in Hollywood, starting off as a wardrobe assistant and graduating to a job with

William DeMille. He finally found his true role when he was assigned to direct Mary Astor and Lloyd Hughes in No Place to Go, followed by Harold Teen—and the rest is history: a span of eventful years that comprises the most memorable era in the industry and shows in graphic detail LeRoy moving serenely in the company of such giants as Jesse Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille, Jack L. Warner, Irving Thalberg, and Louis B. Mayer in addition to Hollywood's greatest stars and several whom he discovered (such as Clark Gable and Lana Turner).

About the Coauthor: Dick Kleiner is a native of New York but a Californian by adoption. He majored in journalism at Rutgers University, then spent four years as a radio intercept operator in the U.S. Signal Corps' signal intelligence units.

In 1947 he joined NEA-Newspaper Enterprise Association-and has been with that organization since that date. He has served in the Cleveland and New York bureaus and since 1964 has been NEA's West Coast editor based in Los Angeles.

He has written hundreds of magazine articles, several songs, and this is his fifth book, including The Ghost Who Danced with Kim Novak,

"Considering the scope and record of Mervyn LeRoy's unique achievements in the film industry and his deep understanding of every aspect of the medium, few autobiographies have been written with such modesty, or as interestingly, informatively, and entertainingly."

—Cary Grant

"Mervyn's favorite last-minute exhortation to his actors is a whispered, 'Now let's have a nice scene with a lotta feeling!' and that rather sums up the way he works, the way he moves through life. Professionally expert, with instinctive taste and a natural flair for movie-making. Mervyn at work is perceptive, honest, fun-loving, and warmly kind. A LeRoy set is a happy set and this book is a happy book.

Around my friend Mervyn, it's always a nice scene with a lot of feeling."

—Greer Garson

"Mervyn LeRoy helped make the film an art form, and his coloriul, often moving, always interesting rags-to-Hollywood-riches story should make film buffs out of every reader.

...His book is an upbeat, happy account of his life from vaudeville through silent films to the golden age of the industry."

-Hal Wallis

"The famed film producer-director who gave you Tugboat Annie, Mister Roberts, Gypsy, now gives you the most moving picture of all — himself. An insider's candid and colorful narrative of Hollywood's great events and personalities. Family fare and recommended."

-Irving Wallace

"Mervyn LeRoy's lively memoir adds immeasurably to our picture of motion pictures in their feisty early days when the moguls still strode the earth and created an art form almost in spite of themselves. ... Take One watches a golden era come and go."

—Charles D. Champlin

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