Despite the loss of the foreign market, which came before and during World War II, in the 1940s Louis B. Mayer’s studio continued to outperform all others. In 1941 the company’s profits were 11 million, 11.8 million in 1942, and 14.5 million in 1944, which was all the more remarkable because the company was now making less movies, only thirty that year, as opposed to forty-nine only two years earlier. But because the company was so top-heavy with producers by this time, there was always a struggle among them to get their own pictures made and seldom was one of these producers able to win this struggle more than once a year.

These producers, seeking an audience with Mayer, had to first get past his secretary, the formable Ida Koverman, who came to MGM in 1929 after having previously worked for President Herbert Hoover. A childless, stern-faced widow, Koverman, known as “Kay” to those brave enough to address her as such, literally held the keys to the kingdom, via access to the most powerful man in the movies, in her bony hands. She was one tough cookie, maybe even a tougher cookie than her boss, who, after all, did possess a well-documented sentimental side. In the novel, Beautiful Invention, author Margaret Porter has Mayer refer to her, with minor dramatic license, as “fiercer than Leo the Lion.”

But Koverman was not without her softer side. For example, she championed and protected Judy Garland, who seemingly viewed Mayer’s stern gatekeeper as a beneficent, even maternal, figure, a rarely seen side of Ida’s usually stern character, which would eventually also surface in her biography and be dramatized in another novel, Finding Dorothy.