A Private View, Signed by Irene Mayer Selznick
[Signed by Irene Mayer Selznick] Selznick, Irene Mayer. A Private View. First Edition. 1983. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition—endpapers are discolored. Book is inscribed, “For Kathy Ritchey, much affection, Irene Selznick."
Born into Hollywood royalty as the daughter of Louis B. Mayer and later married to David O. Selznick, Irene Mayer Selznick occupied a front-row seat to some of the twentieth century’s most influential cultural circles. She could easily have written a memoir twice this length. Instead, she pares her story to its essentials—but not without the occasional salacious detail. Particularly memorable are her accounts of family tensions, her feud with sister Edie Goetz, and her portrait of Jennifer Jones, her successor as Mrs. David O. Selznick, for whom she displays a kind of razor-sharp sympathy. Greta Garbo, Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, George Cukor, Cecil Beaton, and Katharine Hepburn all make appearances, but the real attraction is Selznick herself: intelligent, opinionated, and utterly unsentimental. The memoir leaves the distinct impression that its author knew far more than she chose to tell.
“With success and money, life is supposed to get better and more exciting. In our case, it just got bigger and more complex.”
--Irene Mayer Selznick