The elder Laemmle was seventy-five but seemed as venerable as the Grand Lama. He was to die the following year, but when I met him, he was bright and cheerful and funny and loved to talk about movies and the movie business. “You know,” he said, “somebody should write a book about me, someday.” “Somebody did,” his son reminded him. “That Drinkwater thing? By John Drinkwater?” He waved a deprecating palm. “That was a press release. That was not a book. What kind of book is a man going to write when you hire him to write it? We hired him to write it. For money. So he wrote it. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I mean a real book. About how this whole thing started. And how it is now. And about what’s going to happen to it. It’s very interesting. It would be interesting.” His speech retained traces of a German accent. He was a tiny man. Now, in age, he had shrunk even more. I had been anxious to meet him because he seemed to me, from the record, one of the most fascinating and imaginative of the motion-picture producers.
