Hollywood is a high-stakes, high-strung business, necessarily governed by uncommonly anxious, competitive, and emotional artists, hustlers, and entrepreneurs. The writing of its history—often left, incidentally, to screenwriters with time on their hands and scores to settle or, worse, authors who never made it as screenwriters—is impeded by the national obsession with fame, money, sex, power, and other fringe benefits of making it big in America’s favorite industry (in other words, dish), none of which have much to do with who or what makes a good movie good or a bad movie bad.
It says a lot about how we see Hollywood that even a hundred years after its founding, this enduring melodrama of trivia—who slept with whom, who screamed at whom, who made the most money, who snorted what—still passes for The Record. (Let me ask you: Who did Thomas Edison sleep with? And is that why we have electricity?)
One of the great reliefs of Kenneth Turan’s commendable dual biography of MGM co-founder Louis B. Mayer and head of production Irving Thalberg—among the most consequential figures in the whole history of show business—is that he gives us the non-awful truth about two giants a lot of lesser giants had giant feelings about, and with good reason: they held the purse strings. In writing about the studio heads, many who have gone before chose to malign them as tyrants and philistines, but Turan, Los Angeles’s premier movie critic for nearly 30 years, is so balanced in his evaluations, few who come to the book looking to curse the venality of the titans will leave it in that spirit.
The truth is—and I don’t think Turan intended this, so fair is his reporting—I came away with even more admiration for Mayer, whom I always esteemed, and less for Thalberg, who I always suspected had the best publicist of all time, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who based his unfinished final novel, The Last Tycoon, on the Thalberg legend. This is not a popular view, but when was the last time you saw that hallowed name attached to a favorite movie? Grand Hotel? (That’s a joke; you’ve seen Grand Hotel once, if you’ve seen it at all.)
I’ll let George Cukor, director of such esteemed Thalberg-style literary adaptations as Romeo and Juliet, Camille, and David Copperfield, speak for me: “Louis B. Mayer knew that the coin he dealt with was talent. He would husband it and be very patient with it and put up with an awful lot of nonsense if he really believed in it. Of course, he was tough, and he could be ruthless and very disagreeable but [books that] represent the great showmen simply as monsters—that’s stupid.”
I came away with even more admiration for Mayer, whom I always esteemed, and less for Thalberg, who I always suspected had the best publicist of all time, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
As Turan makes clear, the story of Mayer and Thalberg is more than a tale of two producers, two Jews in America; it is a story about an industry trying to define itself. Mayer, all emotion, was drawn to actors; Thalberg, a thinker, was drawn to writers. In fledgling Hollywood, Thalberg’s literary leanings raised him to the level of the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. And so, talkie Hollywood, needing words to speak, found its patron saint in the decidedly un-showmanlike (read: more goyish) Thalberg. Mayer, by contrast, became—as far as screenwriters were concerned—the heavy.
In anecdote after anecdote, screenwriters tell us Thalberg was a genius because he respected the written word. And it’s true: he had a librarian’s taste for movies. But who goes to the movies to read? Screenwriters and novelists antagonistic to the medium also liked Thalberg’s personality; he was elegant. His movies pretended to be.
Dying young, at 37, helped Thalberg’s legacy. They called him “Boy Wonder,” and boys, if they are to remain pure, cannot grow old. But the enduring glory of MGM was its stars. Therefore, credit should go to Louis B. Mayer, who picked them, indulged them, fought them, made them his family—with all the neuroses and nurturing that entails. If there was such a thing as a writers’ studio, it was not MGM under Thalberg but Columbia under Harry Cohn, or Fox under Zanuck, or Paramount, where Lubitsch, Sturges, and Billy Wilder were under contract.
That Hollywood itself has perpetuated the legend of Thalberg reveals, once again, the insecurity in its divided heart. Are we intellectuals or entertainers? Olivier or W. C. Fields? Like the clown who wants to play Hamlet, we have always been ashamed of what we should be proudest of. The death of Thalberg was a personal tragedy, not an artistic one, and for all of his producer’s courage—ordering additional takes when good enough wasn’t good enough—the history of MGM belongs, as it should, to Mayer. That’s entertainment.
Sam Wasson is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and the author of several books about Hollywood, including The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story, as well as a co-author of Hollywood: The Oral History
