The legend of Irving Thalberg is the deceptively accessible tale of a Brooklyn boy who survived illness to become Hollywood’s “Boy Wonder.” He ran Universal at age twenty, cofounded Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at twenty-four, and worked with management genius Louis B. Mayer to make stars of Lon Chaney, Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, and Joan Crawford. He innovated story conferences, sneak previews, and extensive retakes; introduced the horror film; and coauthored the Production Code.

By age thirty-seven Thalberg was Hollywood’s greatest producer, his films a rare blend of commercialism and taste. Then, as he stood poised to lead the cinema to new heights, he died. With a legacy of classics such as Ben-Hur, Tarzan the Ape Man, Grand Hotel, Mutiny on the Bounty, and The Good Earth, surely his place in the pantheon was assured.

Thalberg’s films were not reissued for twenty years; in that time, critics such as Pauline Kael used foolish, sometimes hostile apocrypha to smear his legend, portraying him as an advocate of canned theater, an exploiter of writers, and a myopic obsessive who foisted an untalented wife on an unwilling public. The documents that inform this book tell a very different story.

Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince is the first biography of the fabled producer to elucidate the genius of his methods, using unpublished production files, financial records, and revealing correspondence. It also illuminates the human being behind the legend, using unpublished interviews with stars such as Helen Hayes, transcripts of Thalberg’s conversations, and notes from Shearer’s unpublished memoir notes. Mark A. Vieira has been a photographer and filmmaker for more than forty years. It is this perspective that makes Irving Thalberg both an absorbing narrative and a definitive biography.


IRVING THALBERG
Boy Wonder to Producer Prince
Mark A. Vieira

ISBN 978-0-520-26048-1
416 pages, 36 bw photos
$34.95, £24.95 hardcover
November 2009
University of California Press

Available worldwide



REVIEWS

Mark A. Vieira's book is exceptionally well researched and makes a tremendous contribution to our understanding of an extraordinary era.

-- Kevin Brownlow


This is not, I’m happy to say, a “revisionist” biography of the fabled movie executive, nor is it a goldmine of new information. Yet Mark Vieira has accomplished something quite extraordinary: he amplifies, clarifies, underscores, and illuminates what we already know about Irving Thalberg, to create the most thorough and empathetic biography ever written about this legendary figure.

To achieve this, Vieira has done exhaustive research over many years’ time. Crucial to telling his story was acquiring a the unpublished manuscript of Norma Shearer’s autobiography and gaining access to all the interviews conducted several decades ago by Bob Thomas for his groundbreaking biography of Thalberg. The result is a fascinating portrait of a man who justly became a Hollywood legend, with insights into his youth, his relationship with his mother, his ambition, and his way of doing business, especially during his decade at MGM. The chapter about his final days is remarkably detailed and particularly poignant. . . . This is the definitive volume about a towering figure in the history of Hollywood.

-- Leonard Maltin, www.leonardmaltin.com


Being the son of David O. Selznick and the grandson of Louis B. Mayer, I have read many books about Irving Thalberg, but no one has brought this elusive figure to life as does Mark Vieira. Because he had access to Norma Shearer’s memoir notes and because he painstakingly reconstructed each year of Thalberg’s brief life, a new figure emerges. Where before we saw a gentle and sensitive man who devoted great care to his films, we now see fierce concentration, arrogance, impatience with stupidity, and a compulsion to oversee every detail of every M-G-M film. Whatever it cost—and it cost him his health—it resulted in a body of work unprecedented in the history of the medium. I found Irving Thalberg compelling reading, masterly in its ability to keep me reading chapter after astonishing chapter.

-- Daniel Mayer Selznick


Using previously untapped sources like production files, financial records, and correspondence, Vieira has written the definitive biography of Thalberg.

-- Teri Shiel, The Library Journal, October 15, 2009


"Vieira’s is the third biography of Thalberg, and far and away the most thoroughly researched, comprehensive, and penetrating. The book follows from, and carefully fills out, the biographical essay that Vieira wrote for his sumptuous but serious coffee-table book Hollywood Dreams Made Real. . . . In the new work Vieira recounts what Thalberg accomplished, how he was able to achieve what he did, and over whose live bodies he brought it all off. This book is as close to definitive as any biography of Irving Thalberg is likely to get."

-- Joseph Epstein, The Weekly Standard, January 18, 2010

 

FINALLY: WHAT DID NOT HAPPEN BETWEEN NORMA SHEARER AND MICKEY ROONEY

I've been concerned about the apocrypha floating around that concerns Norma Shearer’s family tree and the dubious "Mickey Rooney affair." I recently spoke with a member of the Thalberg family who had helped me with my biographies.

Suzanne McCormick was married to Irving Thalberg Jr. from 1956 to late 1970. Needless to say, she saw a lot of Norma Shearer. In my conversations with Suzanne, I’ve gotten a different impression of Norma in retirement than I did from Gavin Lambert’s 1990 biography Norma Shearer. Suzanne told me that part of the problem was that Lambert did not use a tape recorder or even take notes when he interviewed family members. Lambert did not show his manuscript to the family, so it was printed with errors in names and lineage.

For the record, here are the correct names of the Thalberg family members.

Irving Thalberg Jr. and Suzanne (McCormick) Thalberg had three children:
Deborah, Elana, and Shoshana.

Richard Anderson and Katharine (Thalberg) Anderson had three children:
Ashley, Brooke, and Deva.

Suzanne enjoyed a more than cordial relationship with Norma. Norma was sociable and generous. Imagine being invited to meet Greer Garson and Katharine Hepburn! (Neither was mentioned as a friend in Lambert’s book.) Suzanne remembers vividly how Norma enjoyed making a grand entrance at a party. “No one made an entrance like Norma,” says Suzanne. “Everyone in the room looked at her when she walked in. She had that special something.”

I had to ask Suzanne about the persistent stories that Norma had an affair with Mickey Rooney in 1939. “When I was dating Irving and hadn’t met Norma yet, I asked him about that,” says Suzanne. “He laughed and said, ‘Yes, there was a short red-headed male going in and out of Norma’s dressing room while she was making The Women. It was me.’” Irving Jr. would have been eight at the time. “Irving used to visit Norma a lot,” says Suzanne. “People who were looking for gossip may have mistaken him for Mickey Rooney.”

But what about Rooney? “Even in the 1950s,” says Suzanne, “Rooney was a family joke. Norma told me that he had been pestering her at M-G-M, but she had her secretary shoo him away. She referred to him as ‘that Munchkin.’”

It is possible that the garrulous Mr. Rooney resented the attention Jackie Cooper had gotten when he revealed in his 1981 autobiography that Joan Crawford had seduced him in 1939. Who knows? Rooney certainly resented Norma’s lack of interest. A fellow film historian told me that Rooney recently admitted (off the record, of course) that the affair with Norma Shearer never happened.

Sic transit historia Hollywood.