Was this the most significant Hollywood duo in history?

Telegraph

10-03-2025

They don't make 'em like this anymore. It's 1921, and William Daniels turns up for the umpteenth retake of a scene in Erich von Stroheim's Foolish Wives – only to find his cameras missing. 'I got a car and went after them,' he recalled. Alas, not only could Daniels not recover the kit, by the time he was back on location his lights had gone too. It turned out that the studio's new manager, Irving Thalberg, had confiscated the equipment and was calling time on the shoot. 'If you were not my superior,' von Stroheim snapped, 'I would smash you in the face'. 'Don't let that stop you,' came Thalberg's cool reply.
What really goaded von Stroheim was Thalberg's age. At the time of this dressing-down Thalberg was just 22. 'Since when,' von Stroheim sneered, 'does a child supervise a genius?' Sorry, Erich, you're in the wrong game. No film-lover doubts your genius, but if you wanted to use it unsupervised you would have been better off writing poetry. In the movie business – and before they're anything else, the movies are a business – the talent takes orders from the suits.
Thalberg wasn't merely a money man. Though he never wanted to write, he had spent his sickly childhood reading the great novelists and philosophers. A devotee of William James, he had an instinctive feel for the pragmatics of storytelling, how to tighten and tune a tale until it sang. In The Last Tycoon, F Scott Fitzgerald, who worked for Thalberg at MGM, reimagined him as Monroe Stahr – a visionary Icarus who 'saw a new way of measuring our jerky hopes and graceful rogueries and awkward sorrows, and… came here from choice to be with us at the end'.
Sadly for Thalberg, that end wasn't far off. He was dead at 37 – a couple of years older than Mozart at his passing, a year younger than Caravaggio. Like Fitzgerald before him, Kenneth Turan is in no doubt that this was a tragedy. In his joint biography of Thalberg and Thalberg's father-figure champion, Louis B Mayer, the former movie critic of the Los Angeles Times goes in for some startlingly old-fashioned film aesthetics. Forget the auteur theory that dominates popular talk on the cinema. Though Mayer and Thalberg always insisted their names not appear on the finished product, they were, Turan argues, always the guys who called the shots.
Not that they were martinets. Thalberg's run-ins with von Stroheim are justly famous, but anyone with a cool head can see that while the director was a genius he was also a goofball. Hitchcock once said that the length of any movie should be determined by the endurance of the human bladder. Von Stroheim's rough cut of Greed clocked in at nine hours-plus. Ordered to trim some fat, he got it down to a mere five-and-a-half – at which point Thalberg reached for his shears.
Von Stroheim aside, everyone else got on well with Thalberg. Men liked him because if they followed orders he left them to their own devices. Women liked him because he left them alone. Happily married to one of MGM's biggest stars, Norma Shearer, he invited girls to his office not to put the moves on them but to ask what movies they liked. 'When you've got a picture women want to see,' he explained, 'the men have to go along. A woman can always keep a man away from a picture that attracts only him.'
No, it isn't exactly feminism, but nor is it sexism, and it resulted in some of the best 'women's pictures' there are: Camille, Queen Christina, Anna Karenina. (Incidentally, Mayer was only slightly less morally exemplary. Save the odd bottom-pinch, the closest he got to the casting-couch was placing his hand on the young Judy Garland's chest as he encouraged her to sing from the heart.)
Eventually, of course, Thalberg and Mayer fell out. Though Mayer was the boss with the bigger pay cheque, he was far less cultured than Thalberg, and he came to resent the man Hollywood went on calling 'the boy wonder'. As Thalberg's demands for pay-hikes and profit-shares got louder, Mayer gradually edged him out. In 1933, Thalberg suffered a massive heart attack (his second) and demanded a year off to recuperate. Mayer hired his son-in-law, David O Selznick, as stand-in. A few weeks later, Thalberg was advised that his job had been abolished. In 1936, he died.
Turan, who calls Mayer and Thalberg's partnership 'arguably the most consequential in Hollywood history', tries his best to make a weepie of all this. Fair enough, although he never faces the basic fact: though MGM always made more money than its rivals, next to Warner Brothers or RKO it was an also-ran in the quality department. For every 80-minute masterpiece like Red Dust, there was a four-hour clunker like Gone with the Wind; for every moody melodrama like Anna Christie, there was a soporific sudser like Grand Hotel. As for the Marx Brothers, only a blockhead could find their work for MGM (A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races) more fun than their work for Paramount (Horse Feathers, Duck Soup). Maybe it's for the best that they don't make like 'em that any more.