Review | Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation
Reviewed by Alexis Pogorelskin, University of Minnesota-Duluth
This often riveting book offers more than a portrait of the collaboration of film producers, Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer. It also provides an account of their context as key figures in American moviemaking in the 1920s and ‘30s, and more specifically, in the creation of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studio. Along with providing an appropriate backdrop for the two protagonists, Kenneth Turan’s Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation contributes to the history of Hollywood in documenting the emergence of the movies in their formative and, arguably, most creative period. Despite those contributions, the book’s subtitle, taken from a line in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, points to the book’s main weakness: the equation is unbalanced. Mayer, the studio head, repeatedly relinquishes pride of place to the producer and boy wonder of Hollywood, Irving Thalberg, who is the more creative of the duo. The line in Fitzgerald’s novel from which the subtitle is taken reads more fully, “not a half dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads” (4). The remark, made in reference to The Last Tycoon’s fictional studio head Monroe Stahr, can also be said of Thalberg, on whom Fitzgerald’s protagonist is based. It is this reviewer’s opinion that Thalberg dominates Turan’s account, while his treatment of Mayer is prone to error.
Turan is nonetheless correct in his study’s organizing principle. To capture MGM from its founding in 1924 until Thalberg’s death in 1936 and beyond, the monograph must embrace both Thalberg and Mayer. Mayer’s son-in-law, David O. Selznick, explained their achievement and their relationship in the following way: “Between them they created MGM. I don’t think either of them could have created it without the other” (171). Others concur that their talents complemented each other. Producer David Lewis, who worked closely with Thalberg and his assistant Sidney Franklin, maintained that Thalberg’s cinematic instincts “made him stand alone in the movie world” (23). Helen Hayes confirmed the point: “When it came to pictures, Irving’s judgment was infallible” (100). Mayer, on the other hand, “was essentially a financier…. He loved the complicated business of making deals” (36).
The two not only complemented each other, they also shared a quality that abetted whatever contribution each made to MGM. Like the movies they produced, both men, their contemporaries agreed, were “spellbinders.” Producer Walter Wanger, for example, insisted Thalberg “could cast a spell on anybody” (98). Lewis added another attribute to Mayer. He was both “a spellbinder and a hypnotist” (88). But then the movies had cast a spell on both of them, and Turan observes they had something else in common. They “shared a passionate belief in the ever-increasing artistic value of film,” and “both were driven to…take the medium seriously” (109).
Mayer and Thalberg worked in tandem. Mayer discovered Greta Garbo in Germany in 1924 and brought her to MGM, proving adept at keeping her happy by negotiating subsequent studio contracts to her advantage. But it was Thalberg on whom Garbo relied. He “guided her career and gained her guarded trust” (113). Even after Thalberg’s death in 1936, the studio could rely on Mayer’s nose for talent. His other discoveries included Greer Garson and Heddy Lamar, signing both with MGM in 1937.
Mayer and Thalberg divided their responsibilities in another way. The director King Vidor said of Mayer’s role at MGM that he “held the whole thing together” (171). In other words, Mayer looked at the studio’s business as a whole, whereas for Thalberg, no detail in the making of a picture was too small to go unnoticed, which was particularly true in the making of The Grand Hotel. Based on Vicki Baum’s novel Grand Hotel (1929), with Garbo as one of its ensemble of stars, the film won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1932. Thalberg had seen the stage adaptation of Baum’s novel and immediately recognized the potential for its “technique and tempo” (his words) to be brought to the screen. In production, he went “over the script line by line” and examined each camera angle scene by scene (162).
Kate Corbaley, officially “assistant story editor,” unofficially known as Mayer’s “Scheherazade” and a member of his inner circle, brought Grand Hotel to the studio’s attention. Unfortunately, Turan misses the real significance of Corbaley’s relationship to Mayer. She figured in what should have made Thalberg and Mayer closer than ever but instead drove a wedge between them: their shared Jewish identity, which, Turan admits, provided a built-in “rift” (5). The author negatively describes Mayer as “a serial eastern European immigrant,” as though his ethnicity imposed a stain, automatically providing him with a barely concealed sense of inferiority (5). Because Thalberg’s family came from Germany, “the two men faced each other across a broad social division” (5).
Joshua Cohen, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2021 novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, provides a nimbler explanation of the cultural rift between them. Cohen has his Eastern European Jewish protagonist observe, “my parents tacked up calendars and cranked the radio; [my wife’s Rhenish Jewish] parents…hung oils and bowed the cello.”[1] The “broad social division” that Turan suggests in fact amounted to a looming cultural gap that divided one mogul from the other. Thalberg possessed a formidable cultural breadth, including a broad exposure to literature. Mayer may not have been functionally illiterate, but he needed a mediator between himself and the written word, beyond the language of contracts. Corbaley quite literally played that role. As his biographer Scott Eyman explained, Mayer “didn’t read stories, but he would have them told to him by Kate Corbaley.”[2] The cultural gap between Mayer and Thalberg bred insecurity and resentment on Mayer’s part in the growing animosity between the two that festered from 1932 until Thalberg’s premature death four years later.
With Mayer on his own from 1936 until his departure from the studio exactly 15 years later, Turan’s account is prone to error, especially regarding the few references to World War II, a significant period for MGM. Turan writes, for example, “While Warner Bros. released anti-Nazi films as early as May 1939’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy, MGM…was slower to respond” because of its large “financial stake in Germany” (305). The statement is wrong on both counts. MGM had already given up on Germany as a worthwhile source of revenue. Since 1938, the studio had regarded the German market with ambivalence, increasingly concerned lest the profits it might generate fail to outweigh the political controversy it would encourage. MGM’s first anti-Nazi film, certainly anti-German, could be said to be Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939) with its opening credit to Thalberg’s contribution to the production, which was an homage three years after his death. Thalberg had purchased the rights to James Hilton’s novel of that title in 1934, before Hodder & Stoughton had even published it.
As for MGM’s disinterest in the anti-Nazi genre, even before the release of Confessions of a Nazi Spy, the studio had begun serious negotiations with the novelist Phyllis Bottome for the purchase of her anti-Nazi best-selling novel, The Mortal Storm (1937/1938). On screen by June 1940, the film was the first feature by a major Hollywood studio to depict the plight of German Jews before the Holocaust. Not only Jewish vulnerability but Jewish identity lay at the heart of the film, whereas Warner Bros.’ Confessions of a Nazi Spy never mentions Nazi antisemitism. Turan rightly notes that Mayer’s “relationship to…Judaism was complex” (303). Examination of The Mortal Storm, in which Mayer took a direct interest, would have revealed the extent of his guilt and ambivalence over Jewish identity as the Nazis swept across Europe in the spring of 1940. The head of MGM agonized for months over whether to employ “Jew” or “non-Aryan” in the film, opting in the end for the latter.[3]
Turan’s account begins and ends with Thalberg. It opens with Thalberg’s funeral. The last five pages contain an account of Fitzgerald’s fascination with the producer, culminating in a discussion of the unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, with its fictional representation of Thalberg as Monroe Stahr. In that last section, Turan appears to justify his own engagement with the “spellbinding” producer. If Thalberg mesmerized no less than Fitzgerald, how could he, Turan, avoid the same spell?
The study under review is an enthralling guide to Irving Thalberg. The reader, however, should be wary of its treatment of Louis B. Mayer, especially in the decade and a half that Mayer guided MGM alone, following Thalberg’s death.
[1] Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, New York Review of Books, 2021, 52.
[2] Scott Eyman, Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer, Simon and Schuster, 2005, 299.
[3] For further discussion of those points, see Alexis Pogorelskin, Hollywood and the Nazis on the Eve of War: The Case of the Mortal Storm, Bloomsbury, 2024.
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