I hope you’re all down from your sugar high of Halloween. I haven’t seen so much candy since I saw Michael Jackson cruising Toys ‘R’ Us! Being the party animal that I am, I spent the last weeks of October going from one gala to another, (I get invited to all the grand fetes because by the time the hosts finish paying for the catering and the open bar, they can’t afford entertainment, so they invite me. I don’t mind, being Jewish, I’ll go just about anywhere where there’s plenty of food,) and making a maccha chazzer of myself.

Maybe it was because of the Halloween spirit, or maybe because middle age has made me nostalgic, (or possibly both,) I began thinking back on my days at M-G-M Studios. As some of you may know, I was a contract player from 1963 until 1970, when Kirk Kerkorian, (known by many M-G-M alumni as ‘Hollywood’s Anti-Christ’) bought and slaughtered the loin, and sold out the carcass to raise money for his Las Vegas Hotel. And one thing that I always got a kick out of was the legend of the M-G-M ghosts. The publicity mavens at Metro did their best to keep these stories under wraps, lest work got out that some of their biggest stars were meshugeh. Like the one about dozens of people seeing Carole Lombard wandering around outside what had Been Clark Gable’s bungalow, a couple weeks prior to his death in 1960 from a heart attack. Then there was the one about the man who had drowned in the ‘lake’ on the back lot, seen often on the deck of the paddle wheeler used in the film “Showboat”. And the ever-popular legend of the ghost of Louis B. Mayer’s mother, whose recipe for chicken soup, (a mandatory staple in the commissary,) had been changed, supposedly compelling the old gal to appear to the head chef and berate him. As the story goes, he lost control of his bladder, fainted, and upon being revived, quit his job on the spot.

But, my all-time favorite is one that didn’t even take place at M-G-M. This one took place at the M-G-M Grand Hotel, the end result of Kerkorian’s evisceration of the famed studio.

According to one fireman who was involved with extinguishing the fire that raged through the casino, (by the way, the stories of people’s bodies being left in the elevator shafts during the reconstruction are totally unfounded,) the most bizarre apparition of all appeared in the “Hall of Stars”. This was a long hallway where life masks of the M-G-M stable were displayed in glass cases, surrounded by enormous posters of the star’s films. As the fireman surveyed the damage, he saw a short, squat, bald-headed man in a decidedly outdated suit, walking away from him. Suddenly the man turned and looked at the fireman and laughing, said, “This will show that Mame Yentzer Kerkorian!” and then dissolved into the smoke.

The fireman put it off to fatigue and smoke inhalation; that is until several of his fellow firefighters told of a similar sighting. It wasn’t until the next day that the identity of the old man they had seen was discovered in a photo that had somehow survived the inferno.

The old man was Louis B. Mayer himself, supposedly gleeful over the demise of the hotel for which his studio had been sacrificed.

In the months that followed, many M-G-M stars echoed the phantom’s sentiments. The Hotel never regained it’s former glory, (rumor had it that the Ghost of Mayer had put a curse on the property from beyond the grave,) and ultimately sold out to The Bally Corporation who runs it to this day. Even the half-baked reincarnation of the M-G-M Grand is grand in name only. Its costly theme park was a complete fiasco, being gutted bit by bit and replaced by buildings for various uses. The Art Nouveau lion in front was also a disaster, and was replaced by a gigantic bronze lion surrounded by fountains. Even the indoor attraction of “The Wizard of Oz” was a bust, its robotic characters failing miserably to attract even the younger patrons.

Are any of these stories true? Is M-G-M, its name and legacy haunted by stars and moguls who helped make it great? I couldn’t say. In the seven years I was the studio, I only saw one thing that gave me pause. I was on the back lot, near a medieval castle façade, when I saw a man with long hair and tights on the parapet. Knowing that there was no shooting scheduled there that day, I hurried to the stairs behind the front, and climbed up to the top of the wall. But when I got there, the man was gone. It wasn’t until I described the event to ‘Doc’, a prop master who’d been there since the invention of dirt, who told me that I had seen the ghost of Alan Hale Sr. who had often used the set for his assignations with young starlets.