At the peak of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the Golden Age of Hollywood, audiences knew the name of the studio on the silver screen signaled something wonderful was about to begin.
“If they would go to a sneak preview, and the film would would start and it would have the MGM logo, people would applaud,” says Kenneth Turan, the longtime film critic for National Public Radio and the Los Angeles Times. “MGM was known as the quality studio.
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“Their motto was ‘More stars than there are in the heavens,’” he says. “They were really high-gloss movies. Often very glamorous movies. They were the best of mainstream entertainment.”
The studio founded in 1924 when movie theater mogul Marcus Loew merged Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and Louis B. Mayer Pictures. With Mayer its CEO and Irving Thalberg the head of production, MGM signed stars such as Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, and Norma Shearer, later to become Thalberg’s wife.
Its movies were both critically and commercially acclaimed, with films such as the original silent version of “Ben-Hur,” the studio’s first best picture Oscar for “The Broadway Melody,” the star-filled “Grand Hotel,” the comedic detective series “The Thin Man,” Garbo’s “Ninotchka,” Gable’s “Mutiny on the Bounty,” and the Marx Brothers’ “A Night at the Opera,” among many, many others.
Turan’s new book, “Louis B. Mayer & Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation,” tells the story of MGM through the lives and partnership of the two men who ran the studio from its birth in 1924 until Thalberg’s death at just 37 in September 1936.
“Sometimes today critics prefer output from other studios that were edgier,” Turan says. “Like Warner Brothers had the gangster films. Paramount had a lot of European directors that today’s critics really appreciate more than MGM films.
“But at the time, what audiences wanted by and large, were MGM films because they were larger than life,” he says. “They were what people thought the movies should be. What people went to the movies for.
“Movies were always trying to elevate their place in society,” Turan says of Hollywood in the days of ornate movie palaces with uniformed ushers. “MGM really was a big part of that. They thought their movies could change things.”
Turan will discuss and sign the book published by Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives biography series at Diesel, A Bookstore in Santa Monica on Feb. 19.
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Turan talked about why he paired Mayer and Thalberg for the project, the significance of their Jewish background, how eBay helped him write the book, and a few of his favorite MGM movies from the Mayer-Thalberg days of the studio.
Q: What made you decide to do a book that combined Mayer and Thalberg?
A: When I first talked to the Jewish Lives people, we had batted a few names back and forth, and they had mentioned Mayer. The more I thought, I thought, well, Mayer is interesting, but I had always been interested in Mayer and Thalberg. Their relationship always seemed to me to be one of the most interesting and consequential and fascinating relationships in Hollywood history.
All of a sudden I said, ‘You know, I don’t want to do just Mayer. What if I did Mayer and Thalberg?’ And they said sure.
Q: And there haven’t been many books that paired the two of them?
A: Yeah, it’s an interesting situation. There have been multiple biographies of both men as individuals. Some quite good ones. And by definition, if you’re writing a biography of one guy, the other guy is going to be a factor. But they’re all mainly from the point of view of the person whose picture is on the front cover.
There just hadn’t been a book on the two of them as an entity, really, since 1975. And that seemed to me to be something that would be interesting to do.
Q: How was it to weave their individual and joint narratives together? How did the book come together for you?
A: I thought this book should have a chronological structure, but it turned out that within the chronology, there were so many different aspects to their lives and MGM’s life that it was really perplexing. I’m used to doing shorter pieces, and with a shorter piece I can pretty much see the piece whole. This book, I couldn’t do that with.
I was really struggling with that until I read a quote attributed to E.L. Doctorow. He was talking about writing a novel but it’s really applicable to any work. He said writing a novel is like driving a car at night through a dense fog: ‘You can only see as far as your headlights allow you to see, but you can make the whole trip that way.’
I realized I didn’t have to have the whole outline from start to finish in my head. That it was OK to do it one small piece at a time. I never finished a day’s work when I didn’t know what I was going to do the next day. And I got used to being able to work without knowing what was down the road.
Q: You explore Mayer and Thalberg’s Jewish roots and how that influenced their lives in different ways. What did you learn?
A: They were both Jewish and I figured that their Judaism would play a part. The real difference between them – and I felt this came to be significant – was that Mayer was an Eastern European immigrant like the classic founding fathers of Hollywood who were immigrants and came from hard-scrabble backgrounds. Worked their way up and discovered the movies and went from there.
Thalberg was born in this country. He was not an immigrant and he was of German-Jewish extraction. The German Jews had gotten to this country before the Eastern European Jews, and initially there was a real hostility between the two groups. The German Jews considered the Eastern European Jews coarse, and were afraid they would ruin things for them.
So there was a difference between Mayer and Thalberg that I thought was not always commented on. They never commented on it but 100 percent I’m sure that they both knew this was a difference and they thought about it.
Q: You’ve said your research was challenging because libraries and collections closed during COVID. I’m curious how you mentioned using eBay to supplement traditional sources.
A: As you say, eBay was an enormous help to me. There was all this paper that people had collected in the ’20s and ’30s when they fell in love with the movies, and they had carefully clipped out of newspapers. You know, if they were Jean Harlow fans, they had clipped out these big ads for Harlow when one of her films came to town. They had saved them religiously and now their grandchildren were selling them on eBay.
I bought so much of this material. So many fan magazines and exhibitor magazines. It helped really immerse me in the period. It really made me feel like I was back in the ’20s and ’30s. All that stuff was enormously helpful to kind of make up for the fact some of the archives themselves I couldn’t get to.
Q: Lots of people called Thalberg a genius for his ability to produce commercial and critical hits. What did he bring to Mayer’s business talents that made their partnership so successful?
A: They really were, while it lasted, just a terrific partnership. I think it developed naturally through their own kind of proclivities. Mayer, at the time he hired Thalberg, had his own company, Louis B. Mayer Productions. It was mainly just him and he felt he needed another person to complement his gifts. Someone who, as it worked out, could work with the writers, could work with the directors.
Thalberg was at Universal. He started working for Universal, I think he was 18, and the line is that he was running the studio before he was old enough to sign the checks. But he was kind of chafing there. He wanted a little more responsibility. Irene Mayer Selznick, who was Louis B. Mayer’s daughter and David O. Selznick’s wife, in her memoir remembers Mayer coming home and saying, ‘I just met this amazing young man.’
Then they met him, and everyone had the same response to him. Not only was he very young, he looked very young. He looked frail. Irene Mayer says, ‘We met this guy, and we looked at him, and we said, “How could this guy help our father?” ‘ But it turned out he had an innate gift for story. He had an innate gift for plot. He understood how movies worked.
Q: Thalberg was especially good at working with writers and directors you’ve said.
A: I mean, even today in Hollywood, one of the things that is the bane of writers is notes from executives. I have friends that are screenwriters and each one of them can tell a story about this kind of inane note that some executive gave them. Writers liked Thalberg’s notes. There was a way in which he intuited how their scripts work. This was just something no one could believe.
There’s a great quote from Ben Hecht that’s in the book. I’ll just read it: ‘A genius who hadn’t the faintest idea of what was going on anywhere in the world except his office. He lived two-thirds of the time in the projection room. He saw only movies. He never saw life, but he knew what shadows could do.’
Q: Do recall what classic MGM movies first made an impression on you when you were growing up?
A: I think the first MGM movies I saw probably were the Marx Brothers movies. You know, Thalberg saved the Marx Brothers’ career. They had their earliest films for Paramount and they did OK, but there’s a certain point their grosses started to go down. Paramount did not renew their contract and it seemed like they were done. No one wanted to hire them. Apparently Louis B. Mayer didn’t want to hire them, either.
But Thalberg felt he saw something he could work with, and he convinced them to work with MGM and convinced Mayer to sign them. It turned out he was right. They had their highest-grossing films ever with MGM. And Groucho Marx, who could be quite acerbic, to his dying day talked about how much he loved Thalberg and how Thalberg had changed his life and career.
Q: As a film lover and a film critic, do you have a few personal favorites from the period Mayer and Thalberg ran the studio?
A: Gosh, it’s almost hard to know where to start, but I think in some ways one of my favorites is ‘Camille,’ the Greta Garbo film, which was one of the last films Thalberg worked on. To my mind it’s maybe Garbo’s best performance. She worked her entire career for MGM, which is rare for a big star. It’s still very moving as a kind of sad romance. And George Cukor did a great job directing.
On the other end of the spectrum, there is this film called ‘Bombshell,’ a Jean Harlow film, which is very, very funny. It’s a spoof of Hollywood, and a spoof of both Harlow’s persona and Clara Bow’s persona. There’s some very funny, inside humor in it. I love inside Hollywood movies and it’s a great one.
Kenneth Turan book event
When: 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 19
Where: Diesel, A Bookstore, 225 26th St. Suite 33, Santa Monica
How much: $30 for a signed copy of “Louis B. Mayer & Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation” and reserved seating. Free seating is limited.
For more: See dieselbookstore.com/event/Kenneth-Turan-Author-signing.