r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Beverly of Graustark TCM showed a 2005 documentary on the life and times of producer Irving Thalberg, Irving Thalberg: Prince of Hollywood, written and directed by Robert Trachtenberg. He had the obvious problem of making a film about a person who’d died in 1936, which meant that just about everybody who’d actually known him and worked with him was also dead. Trachtenberg was able to generate a lot of archival clips of people who had known Thalberg, including Sam Marx, his story editor at MGM; Groucho Marx (no relation), who as part of the Marx Brothers was helped by Thalberg to a major comeback with A Night at the Opera in 1935 after their Paramount career had come to an ignominious end with Duck Soup ini 1933 (it’s one of those movies that was too far ahead of its time and it didn’t find its audience until the 1960’s, when young people discovered it and embraced its satire of politics and the egomania that comes with it); Leatrice Joy Fountain, daughter of John Gilbert and actress Leatrice Joy; Samuel Goldwyn, Jr.; Margaret Booth, MGM’s pre-eminent film editor during the Thalberg era (who kept working until the 1970’s!); and others.
This was primarily the “white legend” of Thalberg, though Trachtenberg did acknowledge some of the man’s darker schemes, including his vendetta against Erich von Stroheim, whom he fred twice (from Universal in 1923 when he was working as Carl Laemmle’s assistant, and again in 1925 at MGM),and the 1934 mock newsreels he produced at MGM to sink the campaign of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair. My husband Charles was struck by the similarities between these fake newsreels – with actors posing as homeless men coming to California to take advantage of Sinclair’s largesse and live off the money of hard-working taxpayers – and the current-day propaganda from Donald Trump and other Republicans about “caravans” of migrants allegedly crossing the border en masse to take advantage of blue-state governors and legislatures. Thalberg was born in New York City in 1895 and raised by a fiercely protective mother, Henrietta, who when he got heart disease as a young boy ruled him and allowed him to read during his convalescence. This gave him a good background in story-telling that served him when, while he was still in his teens, he talked himself into a job at Carl Laemmle’s Universal Studios after meeting Laemmle during private screenings of Universal films. Laemmle offered Thalberg a job at a time when he was still legally underage and, when Thalberg recommended to Laemmle that he appoint a single executive who would head up production at the studio and who would report directly to Laemmle himself, Laemmle said, “O.K. You’re it.”
This film treated Thalberg’s firing of Stroheim from the set of The Merry-Go-Round as the key moment in Hollywood history at which power passed from the director to the producer and studio head. Trachtenberg goes a good job whirling us through the highlights of Thalberg’s career, including his stint at Universal and later his hookup with Louis B. Mayer, who ended up head of production at MGM when that company was founded by the theatre owners Loew’s, Inc. out of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures and Mayer’s independent operation at Mission Road in Hollywood. Mayer and Thalberg worked under a deal by which they would share in the profits of MGM, though they frequently complained that the profits were being low-balled by the parent company, Loew’s, which could sell MGM films to its theatres at discount rates so Loew’s shareholders would get more and Mayer, Thalberg and attorney Robert Rubin, who negotiated the deal for them, would get less. Mayer was good at running the business end of the company and Thalberg was a creative producer who had a knack for picking up stars from other studios whose careers had fallen on hard times and building them back up. Among these were Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler (whom he teamed in a series of films that became highly successful despite the fact that both stars were middle-aged and not conventionally attractive), William Powell, Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy and the Marx Brothers. Thalberg had little respect for directors; if he’d been alive when the auteur theory was formulated, one could readily imagine his withering scorn for it. He said often that if the script were good and the actors talented and well cast, anybody with technical precision and expertise could shoot the picture and make it good.
The film includes a clip from an MGM promotional film made in 1925 that showed some of the directors then working at MGM – and within a year or two most of them (including Stroheim, Josef von Sternberg, Mauritz Stiller, Victor Seastrom, Maurice Tourneur and Buster Keaton) were no longer there. Thalberg, for better or worse, perfected the studio system – it had begun in 1915 by Thomas A. Ince, who ironically built the studio at which MGM was housed during its glory years, but it was Thalbrg who set the parameters of the creative producer who also ran a studio. The film is honest about some of Thalberg’s mistakes, notably in writing off sound films as a passing fad until 1929, when he saw the writing on the wall and green-lighted the musical The Broadway Melody, the first talkie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (even though it seems stiff and ponderous today). Thalberg also invented the all-star production with his 1932 film of Vicki Baum’s novel Grand Hotel, which was plotted because all the stars were under MGM contract and they could be used to film scenes for Grand Hotel during down-time on their other films. Grand Hotel became MGM’s second Best Picture Oscar winner.
One of Thalberg’s quirks was that he was well aware of his own mortality – throughout his life he’d constantly been told that he would die young, and he did, of pneumonia at 37 – and he had a rather driven quality as if he knew he would have to cram a lot of achievement into a relatively short time. The film also mentioned Thalberg’s marriage to MGM star Norma Shearer – once Joan Crawford complained, “How can I compete with Norma? She sleeps with the boss” – and Thalberg’s desire for children (they had two, Irving, Jr. and Catherine) versus Shearer’s wish not to have her career derailed by an all too visible pregnancy. (She made a film while she was pregnant with one of her and Thalberg’s children, and the director used the time-honored trick of having her stand behind chairs, tables, flowerpots and anything else they could think of to conceal the fact that she was “with child.” And the documentary included a clip from Groucho Marx on the Dick Cavett Show recounting the story of how Thalberg kept them waiting in his office all day and never showed up, so the next morning when he did it again the Marx Brothers brought in some potatoes and roasted them in Thalberg’s fireplace – buck naked. Groucho also said he and Thalberg used to argue about politics – Groucho was a Democrat and Thalberg a staunch Republican – though it was Mayer, not Thalberg, who actively cultivated the favor of politicians,which came on handy when, unbeknownst to either Mayer or Thalberg, Loew’s president Nicholas Schenck cut a deal with William Fox to merge Fox and MGM, thereby cutting both Mayer and Thalberg out. Mayer’s connections with the Herbert Hoover administration (which he had helped to elect) came in handy and he was able to get the deal killed on antitrust grounds, though it helped that the stock market crash happened around the same time and Fox’s empire, built on debt, collapsed along with the economy as a whole.
