Irving Thalberg

• 1. Introduction

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  Irving Thalberg was twenty years old when Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Pictures, told him to take charge of the entire Los Angeles studio. In shock, Thalberg replied, "I'm what?" The young man already carried a death sentence. As a baby in Brooklyn he had been diagnosed with blue baby syndrome, a congenital disease that limited the oxygen reaching his heart. Doctors told his parents he might live to twenty, or at most to thirty. He died at thirty-seven, in 1936. In the years between, Hollywood called him "The Boy Wonder." How did a frail clerk who took night classes in typing come to be called the world's foremost figure in motion-picture history? Why did directors twice his age leave his office feeling young and inexperienced? And why, even at the height of his power, did his name never once appear on a screen while he was alive?

• 2. The Sickly Reader

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  When Thalberg was seventeen, he contracted rheumatic fever and was confined to bed for a year. His mother Henrietta refused to let him fall behind. She brought home schoolwork, books, and tutors, hoping the reading would distract him from the tantalizing sounds of children playing outside his window. With little else to do, he devoured popular novels, classics, plays, and biographies. Those books replaced the streets of New York and led him toward classical philosophy, including the work of William James. He later read Upton Sinclair and Bernard Shaw, who converted him to socialism. In 1917 his mother, a Socialist Party activist, introduced him to mayoral candidate Morris Hillquit, who hired the young Thalberg as a speechwriter. Thalberg also gave his own soapbox speeches in Union Square, facing intimidation from Tammany Hall thugs. Hillquit lost the election, and Thalberg came away jaded toward politics and toward socialism in particular. He finished high school but lacked the stamina for college. At eighteen he placed a newspaper advertisement that read: "Situation Wanted: Secretary, stenographer, Spanish, English, high school education, no experience; $15."

• 3. Asserting The Studio

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  Erich von Stroheim arrived at Thalberg's office still wearing his film costume as a Russian Imperial Guard, escorted by members of his production team. His picture Foolish Wives was Universal's most expensive jewel ever in production, and the director's obsessive spending on unnecessary detail had run it far over budget. Thalberg calmly told him, "I have seen all the film and you have all you need for the picture. I want you to stop shooting." Von Stroheim, surrounded by his assistants, threatened, "If you were not my superior, I would smash you in the face." Thalberg answered, "Don't let that stop you." He soon removed the cameras and took over editing himself, paring five-and-a-half hours of footage down to three. When von Stroheim repeated the pattern on Merry-Go-Round, going to twice the agreed length, Thalberg handed him a long signed letter and fired him on the spot. The letter cited "totally inexcusable and repeated acts of insubordination" and "your apparent idea that you are greater and more powerful than the organization that employs you." Producer David O. Selznick called it the first time a director had ever been fired. Director Rouben Mamoulian said the little fellow at Universal had asserted the primacy of the studio over the director and forever altered the balance of power in the movie industry.

• 4. The Boy Wonder

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  Movie columnist Louella Parsons, on first being introduced to Thalberg, asked, "What's the joke? Where's the new general manager?" After five minutes she wrote that he might be a boy in looks and age, but it was no child's mind coping with the politics of Universal City. Lionel Barrymore, nearly twice his age, recalled walking into Thalberg's office feeling he was addressing a boy, then feeling he himself was the inexperienced one: "I would feel he was not one, but all the forty disciples." George S. Kaufman, co-author of Dinner at Eight, came from New York and told Groucho Marx afterward, "That man has never written a word, yet he can tell me exactly what to do with a story." Norma Shearer, arriving for a job interview, asked at the door whether he was the office boy. He smiled and said, "No, Miss Shearer, I'm Irving Thalberg, vice-president of the Mayer Company." Screenwriter Agnes Christine Johnson said he had a mind like a whip: "Snap! He has an idea, the right idea, the only idea." Conrad Nagel remembered that Thalberg never raised his voice; he looked into your eyes, spoke softly, and cast a spell on you. Studio attorney Edwin Loeb believed the real foundation of his success was his ability to look at life through the eyes of any given person.

• 5. Building MGM

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  Cecil B. DeMille wanted to hire Thalberg first, telling his partner Jesse Lasky, "The boy is a genius. I can see it. I know it." Lasky refused, saying, "Geniuses we have all we need." In late 1922 Thalberg met Louis B. Mayer, who afterward told attorney Edwin Loeb, "Tell him if he comes to work for me, I'll look after him as though he were my son." Mayer hired him as vice president in charge of production, valuing the younger man's ability to combine quality with commercial success. When Mayer's company merged with two others to become Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the twenty-four-year-old Thalberg became part-owner and head of production. He was made head of production of MGM in 1925, at the age of twenty-six. Three years after the merger, MGM became the most successful studio in Hollywood. Under his management the studio released over 40% more films yearly than Warner Brothers, and more than double Paramount's releases. MGM became the only movie studio to consistently show a profit during the Great Depression. The formula was considered revolutionary at the time: combine stars, a Broadway hit or popular classic, and high standards of production. The other studios began following MGM's lead.

• 6. Directing On Paper

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  "Thalberg directed the film on paper, and then the director directed the film on film," recalled his assistant Lawrence Weingarten. He developed scripts through story conferences with writers before filming began. He held sneak previews and gathered audience feedback through written questionnaires, then arranged for scenes to be reshot where he felt improvement was needed. "The difference between something good and something superior is often very small," he once said. He introduced the first horror films to audiences and coauthored the Production Code, the set of moral guidelines that all film studios agreed to follow. Opposed to location shooting overseas where he could not control costs, he kept hundreds of back-lot carpenters at work building realistic sets, as he did for fifteenth-century Romeo and Juliet and for China Seas, which replicated the harbors of Hong Kong. He made his cinematographers careful in their use of light and shadow, manipulating lenses, filters, and lighting instruments to affect the viewer. His judgment was not infallible. After the success of The Jazz Singer in 1927, he believed talking pictures were a fad, and he did not think color would replace black-and-white. When an assistant protested a Paris love scene with an ocean background, he refused to change it, saying, "We can't cater to a handful of people who know Paris."

• 7. Making The Stars

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  Marie Dressler was working as a maid when MGM screenwriter Frances Marion suggested her for a new film. The fifty-nine-year-old had once been top-billed above Charlie Chaplin in the first feature-length comedy, Tillie's Punctured Romance, but could no longer get roles. Thalberg approved her without a screen test, explaining his theory that anybody who once hits the bull's-eye has the brains and stamina to stage a comeback. By 1932 she was the country's number one box office star. He did the same for Wallace Beery, fired by Paramount after sound arrived. Thalberg cast him in The Big House in a role meant for the recently deceased Lon Chaney, and within two years Beery was the studio's highest paid actor and an Oscar winner for The Champ. In 1925 he gave a screen test to a twenty-year-old Greta Garbo, brought from Sweden and unable to speak English. Author Frederick Sands called the result electrifying. Thalberg arranged to fix her teeth, helped her lose weight, and gave her an English tutor. When stars began failing during the Depression, he paired two in a single film, matching Garbo with John Gilbert, Clark Gable with Jean Harlow, and William Powell with Myrna Loy. That experiment grew into Grand Hotel, a five-star production that won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1932. He insisted on Luise Rainer for The Great Ziegfeld over Mayer's objection, and she became the first actress to win two consecutive Oscars, a feat not matched until Katharine Hepburn thirty years later.

• 8. The Tired Producer

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  "I'm tired. I'm just too tired," Thalberg told his screenwriter Albert Lewin in 1936, turning down a film based on a soon-to-be-published book called Gone with the Wind. He had just made Mutiny on the Bounty and The Good Earth, and he wanted a little drawing-room drama instead. He also told Mayer that no Civil War picture ever made a nickel. Shortly after returning from a Labor Day weekend in Monterey, he was diagnosed with pneumonia while on the set of A Day at the Races. He required an oxygen tent at home and died on the 14th of September 1936, at the age of thirty-seven. Sam Wood, directing A Day at the Races, took the news by phone and returned to the set in tears. Work stopped and hundreds of people wept. When his funeral began, the other studios across Hollywood observed five minutes of silence. Producer Sam Goldwyn wept uncontrollably for two days and could not attend. Erich von Stroheim, whom Thalberg had fired, came to pay his respects. Among the ushers were Clark Gable and playwright Moss Hart. President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote, "The world of art is poorer with the passing of Irving Thalberg." Thalberg had refused to take credit as producer, so his name never appeared on screen while he lived. "If a picture is good, they'll know who produced it," he said. "If it's bad, nobody cares." His last film, The Good Earth, opened with a dedication to his memory, calling it his last great achievement. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who shared with him a prodigy's gift and a heart ailment, later made him the model for Monroe Stahr in the unfinished novel The Last Tycoon.