Samuel Marx; Hollywood Story Editor, Chronicler

Samuel Marx, the story editor who became guru to some of America’s leading writers when they came to Hollywood to write for films that they often felt were beneath them, has died of congestive heart failure, his family said.

Marx, a tailor’s son who became a literary institution in this city and an intimate of such film giants as Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer, was 90 when he died Monday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

In a career that began in the 1920s and extended into a TV documentary about Metro Goldwyn Mayer to be shown later this month, Marx wrote or produced such classic films as “Lassie Come Home,” some of the Andy Hardy series that starred a youthful Mickey Rooney and “The Beginning or the End,” about the creation of the atom bomb.

Of more enduring importance to film buffs, he also secured the film rights to “Grand Hotel,” “Tarzan the Ape Man,” “Mutiny on the Bounty,” “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” and “The Thin Man.”

He met Thalberg, who was to become head of production at MGM, after being forced by his father’s death to withdraw from Columbia University’s journalism school. Both young men were working in the New York export office of Universal.

He came to California in 1929 and Thalberg hired him as story editor at MGM, where he sifted through the mail and read books looking for movie plots.

In that post he came to supervise the screenwriting careers of P. G. Wodehouse, Ben Hecht, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Anita Loos and many more.

Fortune magazine once reported that “more members of the literati work under him than it took to produce the King James version of the Bible.”

And when that aspect of his career ended, Marx turned to chronicling the years and the characters of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

His books included “A Gaudy Spree: The Literary Life of Hollywood in the 1930s,” “Mayer & Thalberg, the Make-Believe Saints,” “Rodgers and Hart: Bewitched, Bothered, and Bedeviled” (written with musical star and TV actress Jan Clayton), and in 1990 “Deadly Illusions,” an examination of the scandal surrounding the supposed suicide of MGM executive Paul Bern, husband of Jean Harlow.

Marx was a tall, imposing man who, unlike the moguls who employed him, was highly approachable and likeable.

After hearing a weeping Louis B. Mayer exclaim, “Isn’t God good to me?” (by letting him live) at Thalberg’s 1936 funeral, he asked Mayer to let him give up his title and return to the writing he really enjoyed. Instead Mayer made him a producer on secondary films. Marx made a few, left and worked for Samuel Goldwyn for a year and then for Harry Cohn at Columbia. He returned to Metro in 1940, stayed until 1950, worked there again from 1951 to 1953 and then for a final time in 1981 when David Begelman prevailed on him to examine the story properties on the lot that could be made into sequels.

During the 1950s he also worked as a TV producer for MGM, Desilu and 20th Century Fox.

In 1979 he was interviewed by Thames Television for its “Hollywood” series and throughout his life was considered a prime source of information by film historians around the world.

Survivors include his wife, Sara, sons Richard and Kenneth and three grandchildren.