King of the lurid spectacle

What a strange, gifted little martinet he was, this celluloid Nixon who demanded that his every word, no matter how trite or banal, was preserved exactly by his ‘field secretary’ while another acolyte, the ‘chair boy’, ensured that wherever he was he could sit down without looking. Surrounded by these perpetual attendants and telling his crews, ‘You are here to please me, nothing else on earth matters,’ he forged a career that began with the silents and went on to encompass 70 films. In the process he became a household word for a heady mixture of religion and sex. This proved a potent box-office martini which made him a multimillionaire who remained virulently anti-union and a much-quoted reactionary voice. During the McCarthy period he proposed that the membership of the Screen Directors’ Guild sign a non-Communist loyalty oath and it was only the broadside unleashed against him by John Ford, one of the founders of the Guild, that defeated him.