The Hand of the Director : A TALENT FOR TROUBLE: The Life of Hollywood’s Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler.<i> By Jan Herman (Putnam: $30; 500 pp.)</i>

‘A Talent for Trouble,” Jan Herman’s biography of William Wyler, is subtitled “The Life of Hollywood’s Most Acclaimed Director . . . .” I don’t know whether he is or isn’t--unless you count his 12 Oscar nominations as director, three as producer, the three statuettes he actually bagged and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement. That’s acclaim, all right, and if Herman over-stresses the academy’s seal of approval, it is because Wyler’s posthumous star has dimmed so radically that he is one of the most underreported of big-name directors. That alone makes this biography welcome and useful.

Awards are not to be sneezed at and neither are the box-office records Wyler racked up over the years with the likes of “Mrs. Miniver” and “Ben-Hur,” two movies that put the reputation problem in a nutshell, come to think of it. But Wyler also made “Dodsworth” and “The Letter” and “The Best Years of Our Lives,” pictures that will likely survive the Hollywood hoopla. Some critics argue they are greater works of craftsmanship than art, but craftsmanship is rare enough these days and show me the art without it.

Herman, a Times staff writer, notes that Wyler has long posed a problem for auteurists, who see directors as the principal creative force in film: He is so hard to pinpoint and pigeonhole. How do you reconcile the snarling toughness of “Detective Story” with the silky misogyny of “The Little Foxes” or the homespun modesty of “Friendly Persuasion”? How to account for both the bloated grandiosity of “The Big Country” and the taut intimacy of “The Collector”? Can the flared-nostril melodrama of “Jezebel” come from the same man who delivered the quiet decencies of “The Best Years of Our Lives”? What about the charm of “Roman Holiday,” so alien to the chill of “The Heiress”? How to compare the over-the-top romanticism of “Carrie”?

One way to account for such chameleon variety is versatility. Herman hammers away at this, noting fairly that auteurists have turned it against Wyler. He writes that “eclecticism tended to hurt his reputation with purists who preferred to think of artists as people obsessed by a lifelong subject or two. . . . Anyone whose body of work does not conform to that pattern may be regarded as deficient: lacking depth or purpose or--the ultimate deficiency--a true calling.”

But Herman wants it both ways. He leans heavily on auteurist papa Andre Bazin’s admiring remark that Wyler had an “invisible style.” What is that exactly? Apart from “impersonal,” which is what American auteurists like Andrew Sarris hate about him. Personality--or personal style--has been invoked to enshrine all kinds of meretricious trash, but try to think of a great picture without it.

Wyler’s films don’t suggest personality or style as much as they do career, which may have been his true calling. It is why he has never been forgiven for “Ben-Hur,” still the all-time Oscar champ, as Herman’s pages tirelessly remind us (11 awards including director, though Wyler didn’t even film the only thing anyone remembers: Yakima Kanutt did the chariot race).

Herman has done his homework on the career. He presents Wyler’s European background with brisk clarity. Luckily, young Wyler indulged in enough high jinks and schoolboy pranks, sowed enough wild oats and rode his motorcycle fast enough to (barely) justify the cute title of this book (which the author attributes to his publisher). But young Wyler was shrewd, too, and his future was not blighted by his mother’s being a first cousin of Universal’s Carl Laemmle, whose cheerful nepotism was immortalized in Ogden Nash’s couplet “Uncle Carl Laemmle / Has a very large faemmle.”

Wyler began in Uncle Carl’s mail room in New York but talked his way to Hollywood and became, at 23, Universal’s youngest director, turning out quickie westerns. In an early memo he wrote “to hell with artistry--we want action and box office.” He got both by working on Lon Chaney’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame” and as one of 62 (!) assistants on the first break-the-bank version of “Ben-Hur.” Irving Thalberg, in a rare lapse of judgment, called him “worthless Willy,” but Wyler soon proved his worth to Sam Goldwyn, for whom he made some of his best and best-remembered pictures.

He directed and married and divorced Margaret Sullavan, directed and made love to and fought with Bette Davis and became the actors’ director everybody wanted to work with-- except when they didn’t.

He was notorious for “eating actors alive,” demanding “do it again” and “do it better” until he got whatever it was he wanted. “I’m the director,” he would say. “They pay me to get you to do the part the way I want you to do it.” Herman provides ample evidence of how maddening and effective that way could be. Theresa Wright thought it might be “sadistic,” but Charlton Heston thought him not “interested in making you feel good. He was only interested in making you be good.” Writers made the same complaint and handed down a similar verdict. Philip Dunne said, “I worked harder on scenes for Willy than I ever worked in my life.”

Herman’s level-headed premise is that Wyler’s films were structured around the material at hand, rather than around a style or theory. Which--radical thought--may be enough. Wyler seemed to think so and was surprisingly unpretentious about it. “It’s 80% script and 20% you get great actors,” he told somebody. “There’s nothing else to it.”

There was, in fact, a lot more to it, and the author does a workmanlike job of presenting the evidence. His best writing details not Wyler’s Hollywood career at all but his documentary filmmaking during World War II. Herman provides a clear and compelling narrative of the logistic nightmares, supply shortages, physical dangers and courage Wyler displayed in making the legendary “Memphis Belle,” which made him deaf and was perhaps his finest hour. The author skillfully links the harrowing wartime experience to the making of “The Best Years of Our Lives,” which may be Wyler’s most accomplished and enduring work.

There is enough anecdotal stuff here to keep the pages turning, but there are a couple of whoppers, too. Anyone who has seen “The Heiress” even once will realize that Herman gets the ending wrong. Wyler’s agent was Herman, not Henry, Citron, and Barbra Streisand did not sing “Second Hand Rose” and “My Man” in “Funny Girl” on Broadway.

But these are niggles. Wyler was one of the shrewdest practitioners of the Hollywood system, knowing how to manipulate it even when he scorned it, often giving it better than it wanted or deserved. More often than not, he got the best from the people he worked with, which paradoxically may be why his films seem so impersonal. They aren’t about him; they’re about the characters and stories.

The film of “Dodsworth,” finally, doesn’t linger in memory as Wyler’s “Dodsworth” or Goldwyn’s or Sinclair Lewis’ or even Walter Huston’s. It lives on as Sam Dodsworth’s “Dodsworth” because Wyler’s storytelling allows it to do so. Does that justify acclaim? Makes sense to me.