How two very different men made MGM Hollywood's most successful studio

Kenneth Turan's splendid book on Hollywood Titans Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg is the first in 50 years to tell their story in a single volume. Part of the “Jewish Lives” series by Yale University Press, “Louis B. Mayer & Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation” focuses on the years in the 1920s and 30s, when the two men made MGM the most successful film studio in Hollywood.

On the one hand of this equation was Mayer, the platonic ideal of a film magnate, once described as “a shark who killed when he was not hungry” and a man who was the best paid frame in the United States in a period of seven years. On the other, Thalberg, a sickly but energetic man whose youth, meant that he was often confused with an office boy when he supervised and shaped behind the scenes more than 400 films in his time at MGM. Their commitment to give the public what they believed wanted and to prove that cinematographic films were a serious art form transformed by films.

Mayer, “a hardman's son”, was born in 1884, perhaps in Ukraine, and immigrated to the United States as a child. At 12, he submitted to scrap auctions for his father. During his self-invention trip, he added a central initial and affirmed, with immigrant patriotism, that his birthday was on July 4. Meanwhile, Thalberg, “a boy from Maman Cosset”, was born from German Jewish New Yorkers in 1899. An excellent student, he entered the adult with more impulsive and more impulsive behavior.

Mayer entered films early, acquiring his first theater in 1907 and making a package by exhibiting the racist blockbuster “the birth of a nation”. He moved to Los Angeles when Hollywood industrial practices were still being developed. It was only when Adolph Zukor launched vertical integration in Paramount in the late 1910s that the production-distribution-exhibition commercial model became the norm for studios. When the owner of the theater channel, Marcus Loew, negotiated the merger of Mayer's emerging rating with two others, Mayer found himself putting the operations in a new studio called MGM.

Thalberg began his lightning career as a personal secretary of the universal co-founder Carl Laemmle. Its brilliance was obvious, and it quickly launched with a role with the surveillance of production. When he clashed with Erich von Stroheim during the execution of a film, the director would have seized: “Since when does a child supervise a genius?” Thalberg was 23 years old when he joined the Louis B. Mayer studios as vice-president, shortly before the merger that struck MGM.

Turan writes that the collaboration of Mayer and Thalberg in MGM “was undoubtedly the most consecutive in Hollywood history”. Although it attributes too many examples to cite, “alchemy” of their employment relationship was particularly obvious, suggests Turan, in the “big hotel” of 1932. Transcriptions of history conferences demonstrated the detailed interventions of Thalberg as well as his confidence which, well done, would prove a success. (He won the best film Oscar.) It may be said that, even if Turan calls him “a brand of high water in the Thalberg-Mayer relationship”, he concentrates massively on Thalberg. Mayer holds less our interest: despite all his spells of histrionics and fainting – a star called him “the best actor in the lot” – he was a kind of frank instrument, the company rather than the creative brain. Although he has survived Thalberg 20 years, in recent decades only deserve a small part of the book.

While many MGM films have not resisted the time test, the studio had at least a nomine of best film each year until 1947. Mayer and Thalberg were insightful talented scouts, notably by signing Greta Garbo, whose career in Hollywood was in MGM, alongside Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford and Cark Gable. Whether or not they made MGM the “dullest” of studios, as the film critic David Thomson claims, their commercial success was irrefutable. During the first year of MGM, only Fox Film Corp. was more profitable. In 1926, the MGM was the top, deserving a comparison with “Athens in Greece under Pericles”. “Was the only film company to pay dividends throughout the dark years” of depression.

Turan does a great job by exploring how the Mayer and Thalberg Jewish affected their commercial and artistic life. At a time of generalized anti -Semitism, the two were cruelly caricatured and attacked for the perceived immorality of their films – not to mention Mayer's conservative taste for 19th century style moralization. The two men contributed to the construction of the legendary Hollywood rabbi Edgar Magnin's Wilshire Boulevard Temple. The two had a strong feeling of Jewish identity – Mayer recited Kaddish in tears, a Jewish prayer of mourning, on the anniversary of his mother's death. Nevertheless, which had a business sense for MGM gained the right: it was one of the three studios to remain operational in Germany even after the Nazis prohibited the use of Jews.

Repeated arguments on the profits percentages, the decline in the health of Thalberg and the perfidious mayer maneuvers have finally withered the partnership for men. When Thalberg died in 1936, his relationship with Mayer was bad enough that Mayer would have noticed: “Isn't God good for me?”

Turan is well twinned with his subject. He grew up with Jewish immigrant parents going to flourishing Brooklyn films. He wrote on the way in which the “tradition of Talmudic exegesis” prepared him for life as a criticism. Decades – including more than 30 years of writing for Times – have equipped it with a wide reading which allows it to pepper its historic canvas with a dazzling range of perspectives. In his hands, Hollywood gilded age bristles with a backchat, and not only from obvious characters. Have you ever heard of Bayard VEILLER? He directed MGM's first dramatic talkie, and Turan naturally read his “charming autobiography”. He pushed the academy boxes Margaret Herrick library. He read the unpublished memoirs of the wife of Thalberg, Norma Shearer.

The result is a panoramic vision of an era which quickly fades in popular consciousness. The double biography format perhaps prevents Turan from going further on some of the safest sides in history, including the alleged assault by Mayer by Judy Garland, mentioned briefly, as well as the unforgivable intrusions of the studio system in the private life of its stars. But as a record of a paradigm transfer partnership, it is an entertaining, literate and magnificently designed contribution to the history of Hollywood.

Charles Arrowsmith is based in New York and writes on books, films and music.