The afterlife of the great American movie moguls is uncertain. Way back when, you might one day be on the cover of Time, the next day lost to time. Some who were once famous and feared, like Harry Cohn, of Columbia Pictures, have vanished into the sands. Sam Goldwyn persists only after having been made into a Yogi Berra, good for sideways wisdom—“Include me out,” and so on. But Irving Thalberg, the head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the nineteen-twenties and thirties, left a lasting echo, in part because he died young enough to be remembered romantically, but mostly because he was the model for the title character of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel “The Last Tycoon” (1941). Indeed, Kenneth Turan’s “Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation,” from Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, takes its subtitle from Fitzgerald’s posthumously published roman à clef. “Not a half dozen men have been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads,” Fitzgerald’s narrator, Cecilia Brady, the daughter of a character based on the studio’s boss, Mayer (his ethnicity switched from Jewish to Irish), explains of the Thalberg character, who can.
Thalberg produced some three or four hundred movies in his years at M-G-M, ranging from big pictures like “Mutiny on the Bounty” to the Marx Brothers’ late-career hit, “A Night at the Opera,” though he left his name on almost none. (“Praise you give yourself is worthless,” he said.) It was Fitzgerald who fixed Thalberg, as Monroe Stahr, in the world’s imagination as a type: the sensitive boy genius who knew the secrets of storytelling in a new technology and tried patiently to share them with a stuffy literary establishment. The type endures into our own tech era.
Fitzgerald, with the fair-minded detachment he applied to all the crises in his life, was enthralled by Thalberg in part because the writer ruefully accepted that film was replacing fiction. “I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art,” he wrote in “The Crack-Up.” By “communal,” he meant not only the studio system’s grinding collaborations—five or six writers on a single script—but also the audience’s shared, almost churchlike, experience: hundreds gathered in a single building, often the most beautiful in town, silent together in the dark. In this new order, a boy genius who could make the mechanical art feel meaningful would be as central an American figure as the novelist had once been.
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Nor was this a wholly projected fantasy. Samuel Marx, one of the lesser but more trusted producers on the lot, once wrote that “Thalberg looked on literary rules as if through the lens of a camera, exchanging the patterns on a printed page for the pictures he envisioned on the screen.” We want to believe that someone knows how to exchange the set of patterns on the page for the pictures on a screen, and Thalberg’s legend speaks to that urge.
Turan, who spent many years as a Los Angeles Times movie critic, sees that, since show business is a business, Thalberg makes sense only within a kind of twin-star system, orbiting Mayer, his partner and more narrowly money-minded corporate superior. Mayer, in the world of Hollywood myth, is noted for lacking exactly the refinement that Thalberg is celebrated for, and so together they create the aura of a premonitory Vito-and-Michael relationship, though they were separated in age by only fifteen years. Mayer’s taste “was primitive and mawkish, even for those rather primitive and mawkish days,” Budd Schulberg, a screenwriter and novelist who had known him since childhood, wrote. Mayer craved formulas; after “Forty-second Street” was a hit for another studio, he told the great wit Herman Mankiewicz that he wanted “Forty-third Street,” “Forty-fourth Street,” and “Forty-fifth Street,” adding, “Don’t come to me with anything new!” But Thalberg, we’re told, wanted pictures that were singular and inimitable. “When Mayer came roaring out of the preview of the Clark Gable–Joan Crawford starrer ‘Possessed’ wanting an immediate sequel,” Marx recounted, “Thalberg said, ‘Sure, L.B., and we’ll call it ‘Repossessed,’ then turned his attention to more original notions.”
Some of the difference between the men came down to background. Irving Thalberg, born in 1899, grew up in the genteel Brooklyn of German-Jewish doctors and rabbis, a world apart from Mayer’s rougher caste of Eastern European Jews hustling for scrap metal in cold maritime Canada. Both entered the movie industry when it was still New York-based, and the first generation of Jewish movie men—many with thick Yiddish accents who’d stumbled into show business—still held sway. As Garson Kanin dramatized in his 1979 novel “Moviola,” some got into the business simply because their “long stores”—drygoods shops on the Lower East Side with deep interiors—could double as makeshift movie houses. Thalberg, a lover of theatre and books, found work with one of them, Carl Laemmle, and, after absorbing all he could, latched on to Mayer, who took him under his wing and brought him to Los Angeles.
Marcus Loew was a member of that first generation, who, owning a chain of theatres, went west to see whether he could get involved in actually making movies—like a modern-day tech tycoon with a platform looking for product. Loew was made the mark in a kind of confidence game, Schulberg recalls, with Thalberg and Mayer putting on a show of activity at the failing Louis B. Mayer Productions that nonetheless impressed the Hollywood innocent. His father, B. P. Schulberg, felt betrayed by Mayer; the two had been planning to start their own production company before Mayer allowed Loew to “prevail” on him to run the new, combined outfit. B.P. rose to the top ranks of Paramount, but he never got over Mayer’s treachery; if he died suddenly, he declared, he wanted someone to blow his ashes in Mayer’s face.
Thalberg was a wunderkind, and one of the tricks of being a wunderkind is to leverage a youthful aura—selling the Kind to increase the Wunder. Norma Shearer, an M-G-M star who became his wife, told the tale of meeting him for the first time and taking him for a demure office boy. Though she represented this as a lovably artless self-presentation, Thalberg obviously knew the effect he was having. Mankiewicz, who co-wrote “Citizen Kane,” said of him, “Thalberg celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday today with bigger celebration than last year’s twenty-sixth birthday. Plans bigger twenty-sixth birthday celebration next year.”
Bill Walsh, the sage football coach—and very much the Thalberg of the N.F.L.—once said that “rising to the occasion” really means executing normally while everyone else panics. This came naturally to Thalberg, whose first major triumph at M-G-M, in 1924, was rescuing an over-budget production of “Ben-Hur” in Rome, where cast and crew were treating the shoot as an extended holiday. “The location had become a sinkhole of graft and lust,” Irene Selznick, Mayer’s daughter, recalled once, in an interview with this magazine. Seeing that the film’s structure was sound, Thalberg, with Mayer’s backing, calmly brought it home and re-started in Hollywood. He spent even more, building a vast set for the chariot race and championing an ingenious special-effects trick: tiny dolls suspended on a matte painting to stand in for the Colosseum crowd.
The wisdom Thalberg showed then was double: he recognized that a strong story that has worked before (“Ben-Hur” had been a best-selling novel and a successful stage play) will probably work again, and that pulling the plug on a vexed but basically sound project may save money in the moment but cost more later. Along with that insight came several others, all as persuasive now as then, including that someone who had once been a significant force, or hitmaker, was unlikely to have lost his or her talent, and just needed a new deal and frame. This is why he was eager to keep Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers in the movies when everyone else thought they were washed up.
That didn’t make him a soft touch. He fired Erich von Stroheim from “Greed,” the first of the “Heaven’s Gate”-style crises that litter Hollywood history—a runaway production being filmed far from Hollywood under the control of a mad artist-director. Stroheim delivered a nine-hour version; Thalberg had it cut to two. The hard call was not knowing when to stop spending but knowing what was worth spending on and what wasn’t. Again and again, he kept faith with projects even as the budgets rose if he thought them worth doing and likely to draw an audience. “If it’s good, it’s good; if it isn’t, it isn’t,” he said flatly of another expensive project, “Grand Hotel.” “The only way to save a lot of money is not to make it.”
The real difference between Mayer and Thalberg, it becomes clear, was not that one was classy and one was not; it was that they had different theories, still alive today, about how to make the most money possible in the entertainment business. Mayer believed in reliable formulas, endlessly repeated for predictable profit; Thalberg believed that the entertainment business is a gold-rush, bonanza enterprise, in which one very big hit can make up for minor failures, many small successes can’t make up for the absence of a very big hit, and the big hit tends to be the new thing splendidly done. A wise tycoon tries to anticipate where the audience wants to go and get there first.
The sheer Jewishness of Thalberg, Mayer, and the other studio heads is a subject that has been much turned over; Turan, writing a book for a series on Jewish lives, naturally puts it front and center. At a time when it was considered perfectly fair to mock Jews in power as Jews—Samuel Marx, for instance, was described in a 1932 Fortune profile of M-G-M as “an intelligent Hebrew with a Neanderthal forehead”—they were unapologetically of their kind. One might have expected Mayer, given how desperately he wanted to be accepted by the likes of Herbert Hoover, to be a timid or “self-hating” Jew. Not a bit of it: in fact, his father presided over the Mayer family table at night wearing a yarmulke and pursued his own obsessions as a Torah scholar by day. And when Norma Shearer and Thalberg wed, she felt compelled to convert, taking Hebrew lessons and immersing herself in a mikvah, explaining, with hilarious artlessness, “I decided that I had no particular religious convictions—that I could find it in the Jewish faith.” (Thalberg’s very Jewish Jewish mother, Henrietta, was a constant presence at home.)
So, though the imaginative world the moguls presided over was, with few exceptions, cleansed of Jewishness, the real lives they led were obdurately Jewish. This duality—publicly shaping an industry that hid Jewishness while privately remaining steeped in it—mirrors the larger duality of Thalberg’s career. Ostensibly a master of high-minded refinement, he was at the same time an unrelenting pragmatist, a drygoods merchant in a Greek tunic, every bit as inclined to judge beaux arts by box-office as his boss.
How good was he at it, really? The anti-Thalberg case has been made many times, by those who see him as a cynical salesman of limited if real gifts, chief among them a knack for making people believe he was something more than that. Indeed, it long ago became a settled view of American movie criticism that the work of the lesser studios—the Astaire-Rogers musicals at R.K.O., or the crime melodramas of Warner Bros. that eventually evolved into the genre French critics dubbed “noir”—resonates in ways that the cautious prestige productions of M-G-M do not.
The film historian Mark A. Vieira tried to rescue Thalberg’s reputation, a decade and a half ago, in a diligently detailed and fair-minded study of what Thalberg really did, called “Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince.” The recounting of Thalberg’s process—a stenographer kept notes on several story meetings, which Vieira reproduces—tells much. Thalberg’s attention to detail is hugely impressive; you see why writers loved him. Working on something called “Blondie of the Follies,” in 1932, he probed the failures of the script and supplied some bracing realism. “All that drama of the father’s [outrage] is so false,” he says of this unprepossessing project.
Working on “Grand Hotel,” Thalberg went over the footage “almost angle by angle,” Turan relates. “No specific was too small for him. He wanted, for instance, to open a scene with Grusinskaya—the Garbo character—‘sweeping into the lobby, flowers preceding her,’ so the audience knows she’s had a triumph.”
Thalberg’s passionate concern for details could make you miss the truth that they were pretty much all he cared about. In the end, his beautiful story solutions are formulaic fixes laid over those details, meant to do little more than the eternal work of cajoling the audience into rooting for the leading players. They didn’t like the hero because he slept with another man’s wife? Make it another man’s sister. They didn’t like the boxer losing the bout and then losing his life? Have him win the bout and then die. In every case, narrative savvy comes to sound suspiciously like allegiance to the obvious formula, only with the obvious formula so thoughtfully considered that it seems to return as original insight. He was a confidence man who truly had confidence in his confidences. “In an industry where so few have the courage of their convictions,” he said, “I saw that if I made them do it my way, they’d never know if their way would have been better.”
It could pay off. Of all the movies he produced, the Clark Gable–Charles Laughton “Mutiny on the Bounty,” from 1935, may best display his virtues, since he made it, intently, while recovering from a heart attack and supervising relatively few other projects. At first, every moment feels studied and false—when two boys on a Portsmouth dock kick their legs, you can pretty much hear the director telling them to do it. Yet soon one is overcome by Charles Laughton’s creepy, convincing portrayal of Captain Bligh’s sadomasochism: most of the first fifteen minutes is taken up with floggings and other shipboard disciplining of half-naked men, shown in detail while Laughton looks on with long-lipped lasciviousness. In fact, sublimated sexual perversity seems an overlooked ingredient in the classy Thalberg formula. Laughton does something similar in another Thalberg production, “The Barretts of Wimpole Street,” in which, as Elizabeth Barrett’s dad, and under Thalberg’s specific guidance, he makes clear his incestuous attraction to his daughter; the lesbian undercurrent in the Garbo vehicle “Queen Christina” was also wholeheartedly encouraged by Thalberg. (“Handled with taste it would give us very interesting scenes,” he urged.) The films of the Thalberg system that seem most alive now have an erotic core: the “Thin Man” series with Myrna Loy and William Powell, for instance—or, in a campier way, the “Tarzan” movies, which are absurd but feature the still unmatched, and often nearly nude, pairing of Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan.
In “Mutiny,” the arrival in Tahiti is offered with much less National Geographic leering than one would expect, and more dignity than such “exotic” moments were usually given at the time. The provident sensuality of the Polynesian culture is played very straight; there’s even a tender, anthropological turn about the number of words for “look” in Polynesian. The movie is never racist: “The native woman, as you choose to call her,” Gable says of his lover, witheringly, to a British officer. Polynesian civilization is dramatized as superior to the straitened and brutal British one. You might still rather watch Gable unleashed in something as energetic and instinctively, lightheartedly poetic as Frank Capra’s “It Happened One Night,” for which he was “loaned out” to Columbia, but you see as well that Thalberg’s taste and intelligence really were raising the brow of popular entertainment.
Which returns us to Fitzgerald’s novel. The best parts of “The Last Tycoon” concern screenwriting and moviemaking, including the touching sequence about Stahr’s longing to re-create his love for Minna with her look-alike Kathleen. Yet these persuasive quiet bits sit within the larger shape of a book that was meant to be melodramatic and violent. The novel, as Fitzgerald planned it, was supposed to climax with the Mayer and Thalberg characters hiring hit men to murder each other. It seems bizarrely improbable to us now, but it seemed to Fitzgerald the logical outcome of the mix of moguls and mobsters that he had experienced in Hollywood. Indeed, Fitzgerald, who died in 1940, was prescient about the forthcoming tumult—the eventual Hollywood strike mixed, as in his novel, actual Communists with Red-baiting anti-Communists as the Mob looked on and profited.
Part of what startled Fitzgerald’s generation about their studio experience was how near at hand the real bad guys could be. This helps explain the culture shock that runs through Hollywood memoirs by S. J. Perelman and others; they were used to making commercial art, but not to the brutal truths of American commerce being made so brutal. It would be hard to imagine a novel of the same period in which Bennett Cerf, the Random House co-founder, is about to whack his star editor, Saxe Commins. In Hollywood, the Mob hovered closer to the surface—Robert S. Bader’s recent biography of Zeppo Marx tells us that the most harmless-seeming Marx brother actually served as a front for Israel (Icepick Willie) Alderman in a Las Vegas casino deal, and argues that he was engaged in a Hollywood jewelry-heist ring. If Zeppo was mobbed up, who wasn’t? Yet, in the end, violence was rare. After Mayer and Thalberg did at last have a bitter falling out—over money, predictably—they eventually wrote each other letters of apology, with the manipulative father-son hysterics of a novel by Philip Roth, not Mario Puzo. The horse’s heads are kept for the movies.
The real reason for the enduring Thalberg myth has less to do with any of this than with that perennial idea, which fascinated Fitzgerald as it does us, that there are secrets of storytelling, to which a few are privy. Yet good Hollywood films have more or less a single story. Raise the stakes, place insuperable obstacles before the protagonist, have the protagonist somehow surmount them while becoming braver and better. What works for Dorothy works for Rocky. In truth, we may follow stories, but we respond to themes; the story is just the tonality in which those themes are played. A producer with story sense may remind the composer that a dominant seventh must resolve to the tonic, that every major has its relative minor. But it’s not the chord changes we remember—it’s the melody. No one can recall the ins and outs of Salozzo’s drug scheme in “The Godfather,” but we remember Pacino’s face in closeup: we come for the story, stay for the sublimations.
Genres never quite die, but they do change in function as others rise. Going to the movies is now nearly as niche a practice as attending a concert of instrumentalists playing German music. Oscar winners are pleading for the movie theatre in Los Angeles the way European conductors once pleaded for concert halls in Milwaukee. If Thalberg understood one new thing, however, it was that moving pictures, even those crafted by many hands, escape their makers’ purpose and resonate on their own. The most memorable scene in Fitzgerald’s novel involves Stahr spinning, for a disgruntled British playwright named Boxley, a meaningless scenario. A girl comes into a room:
The pun lands nicely, making pictures being all he does, but it points to a truth: images fascinate us for their own sake. Christian Marclay’s avant-garde masterpiece, “The Clock,” recently on view at MOMA, illustrates the point: it’s made of disconnected moments across a century of film, each clip linked only by the presence of a clock marking a minute of the day. We can watch for hours, needing nothing more than the flow of time and the play of faces. We don’t really care what happens next; we care what happens. As Thalberg understood, we see unspooling images as dreams even when they’re meant as dramas. Watching the best of the M-G-M tradition—“The Wizard of Oz,” “The Band Wagon”—we sense something deeper, more primal, than we find on the page or the stage. We are stirred when reading of flying monkeys, but we are haunted when we see them on a screen. Our imaginations demand wider screens and stranger affects than our lives provide. Making pictures is what our minds do naturally with the fragments of our experience. Of this truth, money, and movies, might still be made. ♦
