Don’t we all need a “fixer” time and again? 😉

 

From Atlas Obscura,

 

The Fixers Who Buried Old Hollywood’s Biggest Scandals
When stars needed something to be swept under the rug, they summoned these guys.

by Kristin Hunt

 

Loretta Young and Spencer Tracy, both “fixer” charges of Eddie Mannix, for entirely different reasons. Columbia Pictures, 1933 publicity still/Public Domain

 

“Howard Strickling’s phone was always ringing. First it might be Jean Harlow, panicking that William Powell had gotten her pregnant. Then it might be a security guard, informing him that he’d removed a belligerent Spencer Tracy from yet another bar. Once it was Marlene Dietrich, distraught after discovering John Gilbert’s dead body.

 

 

As the head of publicity for MGM, Strickling “handled” all these potentially scandalous affairs for the studio’s stars. From the 1930s through the 1960s, he worked with MGM general manager Eddie Mannix to maintain the carefully curated images MGM had built for each of its movie stars. That meant keeping damaging stories out of the press—or, if it was too late, making those stories disappear.

 

 

Mannix and Strickling were an unlikely team. Mannix, a thug who hung out with mobsters, first caught the eye of film-executive brothers Nick and Joseph Schenck while working construction at their amusement park in Fort Lee, New Jersey. (Josh Brolin plays a loose version of him in Hail, Caesar!) Strickling was a “dapper former journalist” who transitioned over to MGM publicity in 1919. But together, they quashed almost every type of tabloid item imaginable, as detailed in The Fixers by E.J. Fleming….”

 

 

For the rest, click here.

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