Hollywood Balagan

In the anxious days last winter when fires were burning Los Angeles down, I was reading about two men who, almost a century earlier, helped build Los Angeles up, in Kenneth Turan’s altogether wonderful Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation. I might have called the book something more poetic, like “Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: A Tale of Shutfus and Broiges,” but of course Turan’s title is a nod to the enduring phrase from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald’s protagonist Monroe Stahr is modeled on Thalberg in most respects, except for many of the interesting ones. He is said to be one of a half-dozen or so men able to see the whole equation of the movie business. Like a man standing atop Griffith Observatory watching LA traffic, he could see how all parts of the industry flowed together.

Irving Thalberg was not a technician or a writer or even a credited producer on many of his greatest successes at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. That kind of credit he saw as beneath him; real power involved hovering over the movies he made, like God over the waters of creation. He shaped and tweaked and molded talent and ego and material until it turned into the modern American studio movie. Born with cyanosis, a heart condition that doctors said would kill him before age thirty, Thalberg had about him an aura of doomed genius. Even if Turan describes him as always having acted “as if he were invulnerable,” Thalberg’s colleagues said that his skin remained a mild shade of blue even when he was in his villa-sized office dictating story memos. Thalberg moved quickly—with the rat-a-tat-tat alacrity of a 30s movie character—from office boy to assistant to, finally, prince of Hollywood’s greatest studio, MGM, working alongside the splenetic, barrel-shaped Louis B. Mayer. Thalberg married a movie star, Norma Shearer, whose career he helped shape, had two children, and remade the American movie studio into something altogether more efficient, streamlined, and grand—the schmatte factory that produced what Orson Welles called cinema’s “ribbon of dreams.” He outlived the doctors’ predictions by seven years, his death coming from pneumonia, not his heart condition, hastened by such stresses as dealing with Louis B. Mayer and intensive planning for a reading at the Hollywood Bowl to benefit threatened Jews in Europe.

Reading Turan’s book, Thalberg’s life feels like an actual fairy-tale existence—both charmed and cursed. Throughout his life, Thalberg would travel yearly to a doctor in Germany for treatment (until the Jewish doctor, evading Nazi capture, fled to New York). Other than that, he was all studio business, most alive in story meetings and confabs about which foreign actors might be turned via MGM’s magical process—dentists, hair stylists, posture experts, and, after the advent of talkies, elocution teachers—into stars. It was during one of Thalberg’s trips for medical care that Mayer saw his chance to demote him, the man he’d lavishly praised as like a son or, sometimes, “like a brother” (definitely close family, even if the specifics sometimes could elude Mayer, who had the self-control of an overboiling vat of soup). How did the Mayer-Thalberg relationship go from over-the-top affection to one so filled with enmity? Well, over money and credit, of course. But Turan tells the story so well, making such good use of the luminaries who orbited them—those articulate and obsessive observers known as “writers” and “actors”—that the story of this volatile, strange, but also deeply familiar relationship is so gripping that you suspend your foreknowledge of how LA and the movie business turned out and enjoy the ride.

Under Mayer-Thalberg, the exemplary MGM movie was a star-studded affair, a la Grand Hotel. Turan’s book feels like this too, with appearances by Cecil B. DeMille! Greta Garbo! Luise Rainer! Dorothy Parker! F. Scott Fitzgerald! The Marx Brothers! Buster Keaton! And a thrilling backdrop of chaparral and orange trees, rapidly transforming into a great city.

Mayer was only fourteen years older than Thalberg. But his hardscrabble rise—from somewhere in Eastern Europe, no one quite knew where (with a middle initial that stood for nothing and a last name that was a spin, at best, on whatever his family name had been before); an invented birthday of July 4; and a past that maybe included marine salvage before he started buying shabby burlesque theaters—made Mayer seem at least a generation senior. Thalberg, whose parents were established German Jews, may not have been looking for more family when he joined Mayer Pictures (his mother, Henrietta, even came to Hollywood to keep looking after him), but he needed a place to hang his hat and make movies after he didn’t get the raise he had expected at Universal from Carl Laemmle, who staffed his company with some seventy actual family members. So Thalberg went to work for Mayer at “the Zoo,” which was not some funny nickname for the studio; at that point in his career, Mayer could only afford offices at the actual Selig Zoo, a combination wild animal training facility and silent picture soundstage complex.

Turan is good at reminding us that the early film business then was even more speculative and wild than it is now, so it’s understandable why Thalberg would keep insisting on fair compensation for his visionary sense of what a movie could be. In 1923 at Universal (which Laemmle probably named after a truck for Universal Pipe Fitting that zoomed by while he was consolidating a few different mini studios), he had produced a classy version of Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Lon Chaney. Thalberg had an elaborate cathedral set built for it, when movies had only recently been one-reelers of trains heading toward the audience.

On their first meeting, Mayer and Thalberg discovered a mutual obsession with movies and a sense that they could be partners (that was the shutfus part). Soon, Mayer Pictures would consolidate and merge with Metro and Goldwyn Pictures and become MGM, with Thalberg its head of West Coast operations, occupying an enormous chunk of the newly developed Culver City. Thalberg and Mayer eventually came to an uneasy but well-understood power-sharing arrangement—Mayer would be the outside man, hobnobbing with politicians and eventually banging the drum for Herbert Hoover (most of the studio chiefs, self-made men from humble backgrounds, were Republican, an example of one of the few things that have changed in Hollywood since the 1930s). There was another head of the studio in New York too: Nicholas Schenck, who represented the Loews Corporation’s stake in MGM (Samuel Goldwyn had left the company long ago). But Thalberg was the one who concerned himself with what stories to tell and such details as who might be made a star, who would be traded to another studio when they were kvetching too much, which directors to fire when things just weren’t working out, who should be reprimanded, and to whom they should pay millions. From all accounts, Thalberg did it with a sense of play, flair, and wonder, which actually made the movie business seem, on occasion, like a dignified career to pursue.

A book called “Lead Like Louis B. Mayer” would probably not rocket up the bestseller list these days; the corporate boards that today’s studio chiefs report to don’t tend to admire emotional lability and extremely short fuses (that’s the broiges part). He would also fall to his knees or pretend to faint to make his point and had a tendency to get caught up in tearful tributes to his mother midmeeting. Mayer’s mother, Sarah, died when he was twenty-nine, and Turan quotes Mary Astor as saying mothers in MGM films “never had a thought in their heads except their children” (the MGM commissary also used Mayer’s mother’s recipe for its chicken soup). Mayer’s father, Jacob, apparently had a violent temper, and it would not be hard to see old L. B.’s emotional metronome as constantly ticking back and forth between these two parental extremes. Of course, anyone who has spent much time around a family concern run by Jewish immigrants might ask—what else would you call leadership?

In a different world, Mayer could have been running Chrystie Street’s most competitive herring shop, but for all his obvious ridiculousness, Mayer’s temperament—his grandiosity, perviness (he was obsessed with Judy Garland’s weight and looks), piety (his movies were not to embarrass his wife or daughter), all of it—is the temperament of great studio movies of the golden era. It just happens that it’s more captivating to watch Greta Garbo wrestle with her volcanic emotions than it is a stout man whose vest buttons are straining against his gut.

By the end of his life, L. B. was riding a horse through Beverly Hills, taking his quest for adulation to the leafy streets of the flats. Fitzgerald notes in The Last Tycoon that the Jews in Hollywood were one generation from being chased by Cossacks on horseback; now they got to ride the horses.

Thalberg’s style was altogether cooler. He established himself in his early twenties as a force at Universal when he stood his ground against the hitherto-indulged director Erich von Stroheim. Von Stroheim did not stick to the budget or schedule Thalberg had insisted upon for Merry-Go-Round (1923); one day, his crew reported to work and the cameras were just not there. (the director was allowed to keep the noble “von” he’d added to his name himself when he arrived at Ellis Island.) Orson Welles would call Thalberg the greatest villain in Hollywood history for having pulled the plug on directors’ unbridled power, but Thalberg was in fact adored by most directors, including George Cukor and Howard Hawks. The reason for their adoration was that Thalberg really wanted to make great movies. He was even willing to go into some of them knowing he would lose money.

Thalberg’s sickly childhood, which he spent coddled by his mother and immersed in stories, seemed to prime him for the movies. In some ways, not much changed when he moved to Hollywood. His mother came with him and continued to tend to his every need. When a match was floated for Thalberg with his then-boss Carl Laemmle’s daughter Rosabelle, Henrietta was against it, fearing “the sexual requirements of marriage would exhaust his fragile strength.”

Thalberg had ample time to consider what would transport him and what would not. Why would he waste his time—or yours—on a story that refused to cast a spell? Turan makes the case that Thalberg’s legendary status was earned: He navigated the shift from silents to talkies with aplomb, fought the censors where he could, and stood up for the viability of movies as an art form. And if you wanted to blame him for the advent of a certain kind of self-important prestige picture, bear in mind that he also liked nimble movies like The Thin Man and knew how to cast them (he told Myrna Loy not to let her shyness “put a veil between you and the audience”).

MGM funneled vast amounts of talent into the mill Thalberg more or less invented, and some of that talent got a little crushed in the process—writers would rework other writers’ scripts, and sometimes teams were assigned to work simultaneously on projects without being aware of each other. One of the talents that famously got more than a little bruised by the system was Fitzgerald. His experiences as a screenwriter were bruisingly negative. “I’m a good writer,” he plaintively told Thalberg once, pleading for one of his scripts to make it through to the big screen intact. But he was also besotted by Thalberg, and the self-invention of the moguls struck him as a worthy topic for an American novel. The Last Tycoon was the result, albeit an unfinished one due to Fitzgerald’s death mid-draft, with only his notes and the bickering of scholars to guide us on what might have been.

In Fitzgerald’s book, Thalberg becomes Monroe Stahr, described admiringly as “a rationalist who did his own reasoning without benefit of books—and had just managed to climb out of a thousand years of Jewry into the late eighteenth century.” Louis B. Mayer becomes Brady, an Irishman, a change that gives the book an air of awkward falseness. The family business that might have been schmattes or hardware but happens to be the stuff of America’s dreams gets lost. Fitzgerald’s best lines in his book are aimed, interestingly, not at producers but at his fellow writers, as he writes in the voice of his narrator, Cecilia, a Bennington junior:

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

Ouch.

Both Turan’s and Fitzgerald’s books are ultimately about the MGM mystique and how it came to be. Turan is especially insightful on how the details added up—some were small, as when the music department was firmly instructed that “no minor chord” should appear in an MGM picture. Some were more significant: MGM’s plots tended to allow for big monologues, like Luise Rainer’s minutes-long scene in The Great Ziegfeld (1936), which brought her an Oscar. Thalberg’s sense of “the whole equation” took into account the tiniest of showbiz variables.

Turan is good, too, at the weirdness of making movies like The Good Earth, a well-meaning adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, filmed in the San Fernando Valley with a mostly non-Chinese cast. Anna May Wong had been tested to play Lotus, but she wrote Thalberg that she could not take on the “only unsympathetic role in the picture.” The cultural blindness wasn’t all MGM’s; antimiscegenation laws of the time meant that Paul Muni couldn’t play opposite an actual Chinese actress as his lover. So the Austrian Rainer, who had been criticized in some quarters for not being Polish enough to play Mrs. Ziegfeld, was cast as the Chinese O-Lan, opposite the Ashkenazi Muni’s Wang Lung.

Turan reviewed movies for the Los Angeles Times for decades, and he has a feel for the city and its moviemaking culture that makes its period details feel contemporary—you can picture Thalberg stepping off the lot into Culver City today (it’s less easy to picture Mayer swanning into Erewhon and screaming for a smoothie). Without overstressing it, Turan makes it clear how much has not changed since Thalberg’s heyday: At the dawn of talkies, there was worry about machines taking over the role of humans, and then, too, intellectual property (in the form of prestige novels) was king.

For all Thalberg’s genius, there were also many missed opportunities, such as when he sent Clark Gable to Columbia the way you’d send back a bad piece of salmon. Columbia ended up making It Happened One Night with Gable, and it won a passel of Oscars and set the standard for romantic comedies for decades to come. Still, when Thalberg died in 1936, Turan writes, it felt seismic. “IRVING is dead! The King is gone and there is no other king,” wrote W. R. Wilkinson, the owner of the Hollywood Reporter. The town, it seemed, really loved him.

In his novel, Fitzgerald reproduced a meeting he had with Thalberg, which Turan quotes:

Suppose you were a railroad man. You have to send a train through there somewhere. Well, you get your surveyors’ reports, and you find there’s three or four or half a dozen gaps, and not one is better than the other. You’ve got to decide—on what basis? You can’t test the best way—except by doing it. So you just do it.

That’s in the novel, but Fitzgerald’s notes from the actual meeting continue:

You know in your secret heart and no one else knows, that you have no reason for putting the road there rather than in several other different courses, but you’re the only person that knows that you don’t know why you’re doing it and you’ve got to stick to that and you’ve got to pretend that you know and that you did it for specific reasons. . . . The people under you mustn’t ever know or guess that you’re in any doubt because they’ve all got to have something to look up to.

“This mix of expertise and uncertainty, of seeming omniscience but also harboring misgivings in your secret heart—how couldn’t a novelist find that entrancing? And how could Hollywood not love him for maintaining that he did know and made all of the thousands of choices that he did for “specific reasons”?

On the way back from Thalberg’s funeral, Mayer, who in public spoke only of his love for Thalberg, reportedly turned to a peon and cackled, “Isn’t God good to me?” Even by the standards of Hollywood, this remains a pretty shocking thing to say. But spurned love is like that. If Turan’s writing has any drawbacks, it’s an occasional tendency to understatement—“something bordering on rancor” is how he describes Mayer’s thrilling at Thalberg’s death. What, then, would actual rancor look like?

But Turan’s understatement and his clear-eyed, well-informed affection for these characters feels like a virtue when you think about the two dominant modes of Hollywood chronicle: breathless hype on the one hand and viperish archness on the other. In these dark days when Malibu is still a wasteland, film production in Los Angeles keeps dropping, and (as I write) protesters are facing National Guardsmen in the street, it feels like a balm to be reading about a time when Hungarian émigré playwrights roamed studio lots not knowing why they were there, a place where moguls screamed passionately about their love of their mothers and the timeless quality of their soup.

Not that the dream factory was ever entirely dreamy. The Los Angeles of Thalberg and Mayer’s era was a place where smart-mouthed starlets were discovered, their hair was bleached, they cracked wise and were unfortunately underestimated before dying tragically young of kidney failure, like Jean Harlow. But also where a princely executive could hop in a private trolley carriage, ride across town, and go about the business of fixing the end of the new big costume drama Marie Antoinette. Paradoxically, that movie, starring Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer, and half a dozen other stars, is more or less entirely forgotten, along with many others Thalberg shepherded, while Thalberg’s own life story still enchants. His unique combination of mastery and vulnerability, along with his untimely death, makes him a very American kind of hero.

By contrast, Mayer’s own mix of explosive bluster and mastery of a different kind positions him as an original sort of American magnate, one admired less by novelists. Mayer lived long enough to see himself ousted from MGM. In his wilderness years, he bred horses (perhaps confusing them with actors, as when he compared one thoroughbred to Greer Garson) and took night walks in Beverly Hills. When Mayer died in 1957, Richard Nixon had some kind words, and Spencer Tracy delivered a touching eulogy, but his many enemies got their revenge in the press.

Despite dying two decades apart, both Thalberg and Mayer were eulogized by Rabbi Edgar F. Magnin at the same synagogue that they both helped build, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple. By then, the whole equation was beginning to show its instability and indeed has remained unstable ever since. But reading Turan’s book brings back the winning absurdity of the days when replicas of Notre Dame were built on former chicken farms and Chinese villages were constructed in the San Fernando Valley. It also allows its readers to relive the excitement of two partners who may both have loathed and loved one another but at least knew what they were doing—even if they were also making it up as they went along.