2

Beverly Hills,

California

December 1925


Irving watched the progress of the second hand on his bedside alarm clock.

Should he switch on the radio? What would be worse—missing the live broadcast or listening to it?

Tick. Tick. Tick.

This was supposed to be his night of triumph. He had transformed a disaster into the most talked-about picture of the year. He should have been taking his victory lap, waving to the crowds, posing for the rotogravure.

But where was he instead? In his bedroom. Alone. No applause. No champagne. No congratulations. Just a blanket on his lap and a silent radio set.

“IRV-ING?” His mother bellowed up the staircase. “ARE YOU AWAKE?”

Henrietta Thalberg was a formidable woman who made up for in drive what she lacked in stature. Not every blue baby stricken with cyanosis was also blessed with a mother possessed with enough German stamina to see him through childhood. Nor had she dithered for a moment when he’d come down with rheumatic fever at sixteen, further damaging his already flawed heart.

She charged into Irving’s room and began to tuck the blanket around his legs.

He pushed away her fussing hands. “Thank you, but I’m fine.”

“Your broadcast is about to start.”

My broadcast? It’s everybody’s but mine. “I’m well aware of the time, Mother.”

She stepped past his wheelchair and flipped the switch on his dual-speaker Wurlitzer. As it sputtered to life, she picked up an empty bottle of Royal Crown ginger ale. “We’re having liver and onions for dinner, with peas and cauliflower. I think I’ll add some spinach. It’s loaded with iron. You need to build yourself up again.” She bustled from the room as a voice barked out of the radio.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I wish you could see this grand tableau outside the George M. Cohan Theater on the Great White Way, here in the heart of New York City. In every direction, I see faces—hundreds and hundreds of people, eager to join the excitement generated by the stupendous cinematic achievement of Ben-Hur. Yes, indeed, listeners, this is a momentous night for the wildly talented folks at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.”

“So he did it,” Irving mumbled under his breath. “L.B. finally talked his way onto the logo. Good for him.”

Irving rarely took to people right away, but when he and Louis B. Mayer had first shaken hands, he’d sensed that he had much in common with this funny little penguin of a man. They loved the movies, and loved making them. They were ambitious, and knew that the only limitation was their imagination. Sure, those imaginations took flight in entirely different directions: Mayer was as much a pragmatist as Irving was an idealist. But after Irving had accepted L.B.’s offer to lure him away from Universal, they soon discovered those differences complimented each other perfectly.

“Ladies and gentleman, one of tonight’s stars has alighted from his limousine. Mister Bushman, this broadcast is going out to millions of people across America. What would you like to say to them on this auspicious night?”

“Good evening, America! This is Francis X. Bushman speaking to you live from New York!”

Irving smiled to himself. Being a picture actor, it didn’t matter that Bushman had a broad Baltimore accent. Nobody would ever hear him. But, Irving had reminded him before filming on Ben-Hur had begun, it would pay to cultivate a mid-Atlantic accent for radio appearances. Evidently, Bushman had been taking elocution lessons.

“What can you tell us of the chariot race?” the interviewer asked. “What about that dreadful accident on set?”

“It was ghastly! Wreckage and horse limbs sticking out in every direction. But I had the presence of mind to steer clear of it at the penultimate second, otherwise I may well have ended up in the thick of it. Why, I might not even be here tonight.”

Three of the chariots had been reduced to a morass of twisted rubble; seven horses had had to be euthanized. Fortunately, no people had died, which was a terrific stroke of luck because the cameramen had captured everything on film.

Those pains Irving had felt that day on the Circus Maximus set had only been warning signs. By the time he’d reached the wreckage, he felt fine. Well, perhaps not fine. He was still weak, and his hands shook, but adrenaline had taken over as he helped pull at the busted wheels and tangled reins. It wasn’t until later, when his life had become a blur of late-night marathon editing sessions, that a series of stabbing pains had filled his chest and he had fallen to the floor. If his lead editor hadn’t called for an ambulance so fast, Irving wouldn’t be listening to the broadcast of a premiere for a movie that might not have happened if it hadn’t been for him.

“And here comes the lovely May McAvoy, who will soon be seen in Ernst Lubitsch’s Lady Windemere’s Fan. Miss McAvoy, won’t you please say a few words?”

Irving slapped his wheelchair’s armrest. Lady Windemere’s Fan was a Warner Brothers picture. Why the heck was this idiot giving them publicity?

“Irving,” Henrietta called from the bottom of the stairs. “You’ve got a visitor.”

He hadn’t been forgotten after all! Whoever had come calling, this was exactly the tonic he needed.

Irving whipped the blanket from his lap. It was bad enough that he was in his silk pajamas and bathrobe; he didn’t need to be caught looking like Grandpa Thalberg, too. As soon as he heard footfalls on the creaking hallway floorboards, he launched himself to a standing position and kicked the wheelchair behind him. It cracked against his dresser as Henrietta walked in with his visitor.

Irving stared at the only person thoughtful enough to see how he was doing tonight.

Henrietta addressed the woman standing in the door frame. “You’ll have to excuse my son. He’s been on the quiet side since—well, it happened.”

Norma Shearer smiled at Irving shyly. “Mr. Thalberg, what a relief to see you on your feet.”

“He should be in bed,” Henrietta told Miss Shearer, “but he didn’t want to miss any of the hullabaloo of the Ben-Hur premiere going on back East.” She retrieved the wheelchair and slipped it behind Irving, poking the backs of his knees so that he collapsed into it.

Irving flushed with embarrassment and exasperation. His mother knew Miss Shearer was an employee. How could she treat him like he was a delicate child right in front of her?

But Miss Shearer didn’t notice—or at least pretended not to. She spied a wooden chair parked at his desk and dragged it across the rug to him.

Irving turned down the volume on his radio. “Thank you, Mother. We’ll call if we need anything.”

Henrietta’s eyes bounced from Irving to Miss Shearer, back to Irving, then back to Miss Shearer again for a faintly disapproving up-and-down. “I’ll leave the door open just in case.”

Irving waited until the last of her footsteps on the wooden stairs receded.

“I can’t tell you what it means to me that you’ve gone out of your way like this.”

She sat down and demurely folded her hands across her black snakeskin purse. “I figured you’d have a houseful of visitors listening to the broadcast with you. But then I thought, ‘What if he’s sitting there all by himself?’ So I decided to drive by, and if the lights were on and lots of party noise was pouring out of the windows, I’d return home.”

“But all you heard was a distinct lack of gay laughter bubbling from the living room window.”

“This is your big night as much as it is any of—” she glanced at the murmuring Wurlitzer “—theirs.”

“I’m glad somebody remembered.”

She looked at him obliquely. “Of course, it might help if you allowed your name on the credits.”

“It might at that.”

“But you don’t.”

“No, Miss Shearer, I do not.”

“Please, call me Norma.”

Theirs was a professional relationship. She was the up-and-coming movie star; he was the studio production chief. She was the employee; he was the boss. What if he had to haul her over the coals for a less-than-satisfactory performance? Or improper off-screen behavior? Or if he was forced to recast a role he’d given her? Or worse—fire her altogether? Once a relationship was elevated to a first-name basis, it was impossible to go back.

She fumbled with the hem of her dark blue woolen skirt. “Of course, if you’d rather stick to Miss Shearer and Mr. Thalberg, that’s fine, too.”

What’s wrong with you? Irving chided himself. This girl has come to ensure you didn’t spend tonight with only a radio to keep you company. Of course you should be calling her Norma, and she should be calling you Irving. Why must you be so stiff and formal? You can pull a disastrous movie out of a two-million-dollar hole like it’s the easiest thing in the world, but a thoughtful girl drops by to have a companionable conversation and it’s like she’s asking you to scale Mount Olympus.

“If I may ask,” she said, “how come your name never appears in the credits?”

It was because Irving had noticed how wealth and fame tended to make people morally lazy and emotionally superficial. Hollywood’s excesses were seductively insidious, and he found it easier to resist falling prey to them if he denied himself all screen credit. But saying that out loud to an up-and-coming actress seemed judgmental.

“Credit you give yourself is not worth having.”

She let out a silvery, tinkling bell of a laugh. “Why ever not? Would Ben-Hur be making the splash it’s making right this very second if you hadn’t rescued it from Sam Goldwyn’s catastrophic trash heap?”

They had veered onto a subject that made him wish he had a hem he could fidget with to hide his discomfort. But, again, she was the only person checking up on him, so she deserved a more direct answer.

“It’s like this,” he said, crossing his legs to keep them warm—he ought not have thrown that absurd blanket aside so hastily. “The directors direct the picture, the scenarists write it, the actors act it out, and the cameramen photograph it. What I do is shepherd everyone through the process, leaving every member of the team to focus on their particular job. I keep the road smooth to ensure there are no bumps. So what should my screen credit be? ‘Road smoother’?”

“Producer,” she insisted. “It’s a big job, and not an easy one. You should take credit for it.”

She blushed slightly. Irving guessed that she had realized she was telling the boss what to do. But this was not a topic of conversation he wanted to pursue, even if the awkward way she squirmed in her chair had disarmed him.

“Tell me, how did you come to be on the Ben-Hur set that day?” he said, changing the subject. “I had no idea you ran with an A-list crowd. Doug and Mary. John Gilbert. Marion Davies. Talk about the crème de la crème.”

“Oh, and they’re not the half of it!” A relaxed smile lit up her face. “Let’s see, there’s King Vidor and Eleanor Boardman, Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Anita Loos—have you met her?”

“No, but I hear Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is quite the racy read.”

“If you were smart, you’d snap up the rights, tout de suite.”

If I were smart? Is there doubt I might be?”

There was that winsome blush again. If she could summon it on cue, she’d make millions.

She squinted at him accusingly. “Now you’re teasing me.” One of her eyes had drifted slightly off-center; he wondered if she was aware of it.

“Tell me, what else should I read?”

She wagged a finger at him. “Oh, no you don’t! Everybody at the studio knows you’re the most well-read man in Hollywood.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.”

In truth, he probably would. When he had come down with rheumatic fever, the only path to recovery had lain in resting quietly in bed for twelve months. Henrietta could barely keep up with his voracious appetite. He’d plowed through Epictetus, Homer, Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud, and Jung, alternating them with every classic from The Hunchback of Notre Dame to When Knighthood Was in Flower, from A Tale of Two Cities to The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. By the time he had returned to school the following year, he was better read than anyone at Brooklyn Boys High—faculty included.

“Your modesty is a rare trait in this town,” Miss Shearer commented, then added, “and appealing, too.”

An uncomfortable silence followed, broken by Henrietta striding into the room. Irving hadn’t heard any telltale floorboards groaning beneath her weight. Had she been standing outside the door all along?

“I’m checking to see if you’d like anything,” she said, fixing Miss Shearer in her sights. “Ginger ale? Rose hip tea?”

Miss Shearer shook her head. “Thank you, no, Mrs. Thalberg.”

“Suit yourself.” Henrietta folded her arms around her matronly bosom. “It’s very thoughtful of you to come visit, dear, but please do remember that my boy is still recovering from his dreadful episode.” In the intervening month, she’d not once been able to say the words “heart attack” out loud.

“I certainly will, Mrs. Thalberg.”

“Thank you, Mother.” Irving lifted his palm as though to say, And you can go now. He waited until he heard her reach the bottom of the stairs. “Sorry about that.”

“She’s very protective, isn’t she?”

“When I was in high school, I suffered through an illness so serious that the doctor said I’d be lucky to see twenty. That was all Mother needed to hear. She told them ‘To hell with you!’ and started me on a regimen of sponge baths, rub downs, hot water bottles, and forced rest periods.”

There had been a fifth component of Henrietta Thalberg’s strategy, but the last thing he wanted was for Miss Shearer to picture her boss’s mother administering him an enema. “I probably wouldn’t be here without her.”

“I didn’t mean to criticize—”

“She also drives me to distraction.”

“Forgets you’re no longer a child?”

“Exactly.”

“I have a mother like that, too.”

“Awful, isn’t it?”

“Positively dreadful!”

They giggled at the same time. It was only a few seconds, but he hadn’t laughed in weeks and it made him feel light as a dandelion puff.

Placing her elbows on her knees, Norma rested her chin in her hands. “Did you really edit Ben-Hur on the ceiling of your room?”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Marion, who heard it from Evelyn Brent. Is it true?”

“Yes and no,” he admitted. “Mother wanted me home after I came out of the hospital, but Ben-Hur’s release date was looming. I knew I’d get no work done here, so Bernie Fineman provided his guest room. I couldn’t even sit up, so a studio stagehand rigged up a projector and I saw the rushes on the ceiling.”

“You didn’t!”

“My editor sat next to me and took notes. ‘Cut this here, cut that there, and fifty frames out of the start of that scene.’”

She shook her head in disbelief. “You’re extraordinarily dedicated to your job, aren’t you?”

“That picture came in at just under four million, which ordinarily would be fine because I expect we’ll make double that. But Sam Goldwyn agreed to a ridiculous contract that gave the play’s producers fifty percent of the gross.”

As he talked, he felt a quickening in his pulse. But not how he’d felt it on the set that day. This was a quickening sparked by the excitement he felt whenever he talked about motion pictures.

He didn’t need rubdowns and ten hours’ sleep in a darkened room. Work was his medicine. It was what got him out of bed in the morning and what he went to bed thinking about at night. It gave him boundless energy and carried him through every long day and marathon editing session. It was what spurred him to get better.

Henrietta marched into the room again, interrupting his thoughts. “Irving, I—”

“For the love of God, Mother, is it too much to ask that you leave us alone for ten straight minutes?”

She raised her left hand to show him a Western Union telegram. “I thought you’d want to see it right away so I—here.” She thrust it forward, forcing him to stand out of his wheelchair. When he took it from her, she spun on her heel and left with a breathy harrumph.

He tore open the envelope and read the sender’s address. “It’s from Nick Schenck.” Schenck was Mayer’s boss in New York. Mayer disliked the man intensely, calling him The Skunk in private. Irving, however, hadn’t made up his mind yet. He read aloud, “‘Ben-Hur was the most magnificent opening I have ever witnessed. Your chariot race went over like it was the Dempsey–Firpo fight.’” He refolded the slip of paper and inserted it back in the envelope.

“Sounds like good news to me,” she said.

It was thoughtful of Schenck to take the trouble to send a wire like that, but it was a kick-in-the-shins reminder of what he’d missed out on. Irving forced an amicable grin as he placed the message on his bedside table. The pungent aroma of liver and onions was now invading the room. “Let’s change topics before Mother finds another excuse.”

“How about . . .” Miss Shearer tapped a finger against her chin. “. . . Peggy Hopkins Joyce?”

All thoughts of premieres and chariot races flew from Irving’s mind at the name of America’s most notorious gold digger.

“What?”

“Please don’t think I’m prying,” she assured him. “In fact, I’m rather hoping it’s true. I don’t know anybody who’s met her, and I’d love to know what her appeal is.”

It occurred to Irving that perhaps Miss Shearer was a gold digger herself. The Skunk had recently increased Irving’s weekly salary from $650 to $2000, a substantial sum by anybody’s reckoning. But he liked to think that he knew a flirting female on the make when he saw one: an accentuated bosom, fluttering eyelids, sudden giggles for no reason, revealing hemline. But he could perceive none of the usual markers here.

“If I remember correctly, she sandwiched me between the Chilean diplomat and the Swedish count,” he said.

“That’s heady company.”

“Says the girl who’s regularly seen with Fairbanks and Chaplin.”

“But what does she have?” Miss Shearer was frowning now, quite serious in her inquiry. “Men fall at her feet, literally killing themselves over her. She’s pretty enough, I suppose, but I don’t see it. Not at all.”

That’s because you’ve never been a young lad, green as that sycamore outside my window. You didn’t spend half your childhood bedbound with a controlling mother who still sees you as sickly. You didn’t reach your twenty-first birthday never having kissed a girl, let alone found one who would let you take her to bed. At least, not without ponying up cash for the privilege.

Miss Shearer also hadn’t kept company with corruptibles like Jack Conway, Cedric Gibbons, and John Gilbert egging him on to try his luck with the redoubtable Peggy Hopkins Joyce. A girl like Norma Shearer wouldn’t know the thrill of comprehending that when a woman like Peggy said yes, she meant it. And when a guy like Irving Thalberg got her into bed and saw that she knew a trick or two about lovemaking, he would be profoundly grateful.

“When you’re an impressionable youth,” he said, “it doesn’t take much to impress. But might I also add that when she learns how much money you make and quickly moves onto a luckless Scandinavian count, you’ll realize that you’ve dodged what could have been a very costly bullet.”

“Congratulations.” A conspiratorial chuckle ran through Miss Shearer’s voice. “I hear bullets can be quite fatal.”

“It’s always a good idea to dodge them whenever possible.”

“Does the same go for Constance Talmadge?”

Peggy Hopkins Joyce had made no effort to hide her gold-digging agenda, but Connie was different. Nobody else brought out his whimsical, playful side. Hell’s bells, he hadn’t known he had one until Connie had come Charlestoning into his life. Nobody else possessed the ability to dispel his serious, cautious disposition with a naughty wink and a shrieking giggle. Every other man whose path she crossed probably felt the same, but he didn’t care. How could he when he was still so desperately, so inexorably, so deeply in love with her?

Irving held fast to his smile as disappointment pooled in his chest. Had Miss Shearer brought up Connie’s name for professional reasons? Connie’s sister was Norma Talmadge, who was married to Joe Schenck, whose brother, Nick, aka The Skunk, was second in command at Loew’s, the parent company of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Was this visit a scouting party to help her maneuver onto the right side of management? Or was she reconnoitering to see if Connie represented stiff competition?

Irving’s initial impulse was to tell this girl that Connie Talmadge was none of her business, but once again he realized that instead of sitting at home on a Wednesday night and staring at the moon, she was the only one who’d bothered to put on a flattering suit of burgundy wool and had driven God only knew how many miles to see him.

“If I knew how to answer your question about Miss Talmadge, I would.”

“But you don’t?”

He let a brief silence answer for him. “I can tell by the intensifying aroma of liver and onions that dinner will soon be served. You’re too lovely to be subjected to my mother’s third degree, so I strongly recommend that you make a break for it.”

If she was disappointed at missing out on the Connie scoop, she hid it by fiddling with the cuffs of her blouse and thanked him for the warning.

“I’ll walk you to your car,” he said, leaning forward in the chair.

“No need. I can see myself out.”

“The dining room is downstairs, so let me walk you to the front door at the very least.” He stood up and let her precede him out the bedroom door.

At the bottom of the stairs, he called out to his mother that Miss Shearer was leaving now. Henrietta hollered “Goodbye!” from the kitchen and left it at that.

He opened the door, letting the chill of the December night blow in from the sidewalk. “And thank you again for coming. I appreciate the gesture more than I can say.”

“I couldn’t bear the thought of you sitting at home alone on a night like this.”

“It was very thoughtful of you . . . Norma.”

Her eyes flared briefly, but Irving caught the reaction nonetheless. To say anything further would have belabored the point, so he made a show of wrapping his bathrobe around him more tightly and stepped back inside the house.