Irving Thalberg: Hollywood's First Boy Wonder

Walt Disney... Samual Goldwyn... Cecil B. DeMille... William Wyler... Alfred Hitchcock... Ingmar Bergman... Steven Spielberg... Billy Wilder... George Lucas... Norman Jewison... Clint Eastwood... Warren Beatty... all famous filmmakers synonymous with cinema past and present. But what do they have in common besides lights, camera and action? They are among the honored recipients of the much-coveted Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. So who is this Thalberg, anyway, and why would such a prestigious honor from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences carry his name?

Irving Grant Thalberg’s story began in Brooklyn on May 30, 1899 where as an infant, doctors discovered a congenital heart disorder. They told his mother that her weak son would probably not live much past his thirtieth birthday. What they didn't know was how jam-packed his years would be. Thalberg may have had physical limitations requiring prolonged bed-rest as a child, but he excelled in school. A voracious reader, he unwittingly mastered what we now call story structure—the key to his incomparable success in Hollywood.

After his high school graduation, family friend, Rachel Laemmle, introduced young Thalberg to her husband, Carl, who happened to be the founder of the Universal Film Company. The timing couldn't have been better. Laemmle needed a personal secretary so Thalberg got the job for $25.00 a week. A hard worker, Thalberg had an uncanny sense of the business. Without hesitating, he analyzed problems, and fixed them. Laemmle was so impressed, he promoted Thalberg to studio executive with a whopping $45.00 increase in pay. Within months, Thalberg moved on to the position of General Manager. While still in his early twenties, Laemmle's protegee was appointed production head at Universal Studio and given another raise. The boy wonder now earned $90.00 and Hollywood began to pay attention.

By 1924, Thalberg’s distinguished reputation had spread throughout the silent world of film. Louis B Mayer, head of the recently formed MGM Studios, offered him the position of vice president, second only to himself. With Thalberg on board, their enterprising partnership quickly made MGM the most profitable and powerful studio in the motion picture industry. Mayer controlled the budgets while Thalberg took on the movies themselves.

As a producer, his ideas were almost revolutionary. He insisted on tough pre-production guidelines, as well as post-production previews, targeted at test audiences whose reactions were carefully measured. If they were negative, retakes were scheduled and changes made before the movies were finally released to the general public.

Of course this wasn’t always a fail-safe method of predicting audience reaction. Marion Davies recalled the test run for The Red Mill (1927), a film she made under Thalberg. She claimed that the movie changed directors so many times, it was doomed from the beginning. Curious to see the test audience reaction, Davies brought her mother along to the preview. No one laughed. No one cried. No one liked it. A distressed Davies, found her mother outside the theater with a stack of preview cards.

The next day, Thalberg called Davies to his office. On his desk was a large pile of preview cards filled with praise for The Red Mill. “Marion is gorgeous—the best comedienne in the world.” “Terrific.” “She’s marvelous.” Thalberg couldn’t have been more pleased. A quick-thinking Davies asked if she could have the cards. “I want to show them to my mother. She doesn’t think I’m any good on the screen. I’m having a hard time convincing her that the reaction was good.” Davies not only retrieved the cards, but destroyed them before Thalberg could figure out what happened.

Despite his fragile health, Thalberg oversaw every movie made at MGM between 1924 and 1932 including such classics as The Big Parade (1925), Flesh and the Devil (1926), La Boheme (1926), The Road to Mandalay (1926), Broadway Melody (1929), Grand Hotel (1932) and Red Dust (1932). Eventually, he earned $4,000.00 a week and a guaranteed percentage of profits.

In the middle of his moviemaking, Thalberg met and married Norma Shearer, one of MGM's most popular leading ladies. Some thought that Shearer married her husband as a calculated career move, but Thalberg was one of early Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors, although not a particularly romantic one. When he proposed, he simply told her to pick a ring from a tray sitting on his desk. Nonetheless, he and Shearer respected and complemented each other's individual talent and ambition, quickly becoming one of Hollywood’s royal couples.

As Thalberg’s influence over MGM flourished, Mayer’s affection for him diminished, eventually turning into resentment and jealousy. He didn’t like sharing his power at the studio. Thalberg went to Nicholas Schenk, then President of Loews, Inc. (MGM’s parent company) and reported that Mayer was neglecting his duties at the studio leaving all the work for him. To make matters worse, Schenk gave Thalberg 100,000 shares of MGM stock, and Mayer only 80,000. The added tension between the two men proved too much for Thalberg and on Christmas Day, 1932, he suffered a heart attack.

To help him recover, the Thalbergs took an extended trip to Europe. While they were gone, Mayer brought in his son-in-law, David O. Selznick, as an independent producer. Mayer then sent a telegram to the still traveling Thalberg informing him that his position as Head of Production had been eliminated. When Thalberg returned to MGM in August, 1933, he was just another unit producer. With his health failing, he still managed to produce such classics as Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), A Night at the Opera (1935), San Francisco (1936) and The Good Earth (1937).

Late in the summer of 1936, Thalberg’s assistant, Albert Lewin, brought him a fifty-page summary of the novel, Gone With the Wind, written by Margaret Mitchell. Thalberg read it and agreed with Lewin’s enthusiastic assessment. “It’s sensational. The role is great for Gable and it will make a terrific picture. Now get out of here with it. Look, I have just made Mutiny on the Bounty and The Good Earth. And now you’re asking me to burn Atlanta? No! Absolutely not! No more epics for me now. Just give me a little drawing-room drama. I’m tired. I’m just too tired.”

Thalberg was indeed tired. The cold he caught that Labor Day weekend in Monterey proved deadly. It quickly turned into pneumonia and he slipped into a coma. After thirty-seven years, his sickly heart finally gave in. Thalberg died on September 14, 1936 leaving behind Shearer and two young children. Three days later, MGM suspended production and all of Hollywood paused for five minutes as his funeral began.

During his brief life, Thalberg left an indelible mark on the movie industry, not only in his daily work, but as one of the thirty-six founding members of The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. In turn, the year after his death, the Academy established the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award to honor “a creative producer who has been responsible for a consistently high quality of motion picture production.” It is one of the highest awards a producer can receive.

There's one more thing you should know about Irving Thalberg--he was a modest man. It seems ironic that in a world where credits mean everything, he refused to allow his name to appear in any of his films. “Credit you give yourself is not worth having,” he always claimed. His final film, The Good Earth, released in 1937 after his death, was the one and only film he worked on that carried his name during the opening credits. Thalberg was obviously a man of integrity who believed in always giving his best regardless of whether anyone noticed. Hollywood's original 'boy wonder' left a legacy that, almost a century later, others still strive to equal .