Who Killed Superman?
The hero of the latest Coen Brothers film, Hail, Caesar! is a cinephile’s joke. Named Eddie Mannix (and played by Josh Brolin), he runs a Hollywood studio that looks much like MGM did in the Forties. He’s a decent, dependable guy – when not smoothing over scandals among the stars, he’s at home for a meal with his sweet-natured wife.
Although many of Hail, Caesar!’s more unlikely set-ups are based on fact – foul-mouthed swimming stars, actors adopting their own illegitimate children and studio staff taking the rap for celebrity murders – this fictional Eddie Mannix is more or less the opposite of the real-life figure whose name he bears.
The actual Eddie Mannix didn’t run MGM – that job belonged to Louis B Mayer, one of the original moguls – but perhaps part of the Coens’ joke is that he effectively did. Mannix was general manager and vice-president of MGM. “Vice president”, people liked to say, could be taken two ways: Mannix, a tough guy from New Jersey, was the studio’s president of vice – its direct line to the Mob. Nicknamed “the bulldog”, he was one of a duo of “fixers” at MGM: Howard Strickling, the studio’s head of publicity, was the tactical mind behind every story that emerged about the stars; Mannix was the muscle. Strickling fed the press, Mannix fed the police. Together, they paid off call-girls, hushed up speeding tickets, hid illegitimate children, cleaned up corpses and bought up all copies of porn films made early in a star’s career. “I spent my whole life inventing cover-ups,” Strickling once told a friend. If Mannix had any crises of conscience, history has not recorded them.
But perhaps in all the time he worked at MGM, from the Twenties to the Sixties, no scandal was more convoluted, sinister or lastingly open-ended than the one in which Mannix himself was an unofficial suspect. In this story, Mannix does more than run a movie studio: he is a match for Superman.
In the early hours of June 16, 1959, two police officers arrived at 1579 Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles. They found a few drunken houseguests and a body on a bed, shot through the head by a bullet that had left a hole in the ceiling and its casing beneath the victim’s back. The Luger lay between his feet, which were still on the floor as if he’d been sitting on the edge of the bed before falling back. He was naked, a burly 6 ft 2 in, and his blood was spreading across the sheets beneath him like a billowing red cape.
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