EDDIE MANNIX & HOWARD STRICKLAND, THE MGM HOLLYWOOD FIXERS

Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling (a mob-related New Jersey laborer and the quiet son of a grocer 
became the most powerful men at the biggest studio in the world)
are virtually unknown outside of Hollywood and little remembered even there, 
but as General Manager and Head of Publicity for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, they lorded over all the stars 
in Hollywood’s golden age from the 1920s through the 1950s (and later) including legends like Garbo, Dietrich, Gable and Garland. 
When MGM stars found themselves in trouble, it was Eddie and Howard who took care of them—solved their problems, 
hid their crimes, and kept their secrets. They were “the Fixers.” At a time when image meant everything and the 
stars were worth millions to the studios that owned them, Mannix and Strickling were the most important men at MGM. 
Through a complex web of contacts in every arena, from reporters and doctors to corrupt police and district attorneys, 
they covered up some of the most notorious crimes and scandals in Hollywood history, keeping stars out of jail and 
more importantly, their names out of the papers. They handled problems as diverse as the murder of Paul Bern 
(husband of MGM’s biggest star, Jean Harlow), the studio directed drug addictions of Judy Garland, the murder 
of Ted Healy (creator of The Three Stooges) at the hands of Wallace Beery, and arranging for an unmarried 
Loretta Young to adopt her own child, a child fathered by a married Clark Gable.


Illegal yet Legal for its times Abortions: 
(some excerpts are according to Vanity Fair Magazine)

Abortions were our birth control,” an anonymous actress once said about the common 
procedure’s place in Hollywood from the 1920s through the 1950s. While patriarchal political 
powers connive to block women’s legal access to abortion in 21st century America, in Old Hollywood, 
abortions were far more standard and far more accessible than they often are today, more like aspirin, 
or appendectomies. How and why did a procedure that was taboo and illegal at the time become so ordinary, at least, 
among a certain set?

According to Petersen, rumor had it that “Blonde Bombshell” Jean Harlow 
couldn’t wed William Powell because “MGM had written a clause into her contract 
forbidding her to marry”—a wife couldn’t be a “bombshell,” after all. 
When Harlow became pregnant from the affair, she called MGM head of publicity 
Howard Strickling in a panic. Shortly thereafter, according to E.J. Fleming in The Fixers (book): 
Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling and the MGM Publicity Machine, “Mrs. Jean Carpenter” 
entered Good Shepherd Hospital “to get some rest.” She was seen only by her private 
doctors and nurses in room 826, the same room she had occupied the year before for an “appendectomy.”

In the 1930s, vamp and man eating thespian aka horny as hell Tallulah Bankhead got 
“abortions like other women got permanent waves,” 
biographer Lee Israel quips in Miss Tallulah Bankhead. When virtuous singing sensation Jeanette McDonald 
found herself pregnant in 1935, MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer told Strickling to “get rid of the problem.” 
McDonald soon checked into a hospital with an “ear infection,” according to Fleming’s The Fixers.

Praise For Loretta Young who said she is not afraid of dying but of living:

Ironically, the rebel of her day was Loretta Young, not because she had an abortion, 
but because she refused to have one. A devout Catholic, Young journeyed abroad in 
1935 to recuperate from a ‘mystery illness,’ after she found herself with child by 
Clark Gable under shady circumstances—and avoided the press. She gave birth to her 
daughter at home in Los Angeles. Young initially gave the child up for adoption—and then, 
a few months later, officially adopted her, according to The Fixers.


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