Los Angeles,
California
March 1929
Goldie sat on the edge of her desk, reading a report. “How did she fare?”
Norma’s debut talkie, The Trial of Mary Dugan, was proving to be more of a trial behind the scenes than anything that unfolded on screen. Despite her successful talking screen test, self-doubt had riddled Norma like Tommy-gun bullet holes. Irving had had to take an inordinate amount of time bolstering her spirits so that she could speak her lines out loud, knowing that a microphone was hidden in a nearby bouquet of hydrangeas.
“Norma had nothing to worry about, but try telling her that,” Irving said, his eyes on the report. “Is that for Dynamite?”
“Yep.”
“Do I want to see it?”
“Nope.”
“That bad?”
“Put it this way: if you’ve got a direct line to God, now would be the time to use it.” He went to pull it from her, but she yanked it out of reach. “Take a deep breath first.”
He turned to head into his office. “Why don’t you tell me the bad news while I get a head start on massaging my temples?”
“He’s shut down production.”
“WHAT?”
Irving snatched the report out of her hand and read the final line:
Day 56:
Current expenditure: $507,879.23
Production shut down until further notice.
“The hell it is!” When Goldie reared back, he told her, “Yes, I say ‘hell’ sometimes. When it’s called for. And on a production that’s blown through half a million, I’d say it’s justified.”
She held up her hands in surrender. “You’ll get no argument out of me. But you’ll—I mean, it’s—it’s—you’ll have to take on . . . him.”
Irving was already halfway to the door when Goldie called out, “If you don’t make it back alive? What then?”
“You get to run the studio.”
In the seven minutes it took to reach MGM’s newest director, Irving had worked himself up into a wrathful lather. A studio only shut down a movie as a last resort, like when the entire cast and crew had come down with ptomaine poisoning. And even then, the mortality rate had better be above fifty percent.
The studio had now slipped below Paramount and Warners. It was Irving’s job to restore it to its former position on top of the Hollywood totem pole.
And nobody was going to get in the way.
No, not even him.
Irving walked through the waiting room, where two long wooden benches, unpadded like church pews, lined the north and south walls. Beyond that lay a larger anteroom where three secretaries sat at desks arranged at right angles. Does he need three? I don’t even have that many. A blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. Did he employ them according to hair color? The brunette and redhead each had their hair snipped into a Colleen Moore bob, but the blonde had rolled hers into a chignon. She thwacked the keys of her typewriter as though she were thinking of every ex-boyfriend who’d done her wrong.
“Mr. Thalberg, I’m supposed to announce—”
Irving didn’t slow down.
Without bothering to knock, he flung open the door. One of the studio’s best art directors, Mitchell Leisen, had spent three weeks decorating this bungalow in a Spanish motif with beamed ceilings and whitewashed walls. Bottle-green damask drapes bordered the windows; they matched the visitor chairs. The desk was made of heavy dark wood, with intricately carved panels across the front. On one end, an enormous ceramic vase, glazed in dark ochre, held a spray of calla lilies reaching four feet into the air. An elaborate sand timer with an Egyptian motif stood at the center of a wooden mantel running the length of the room. The man himself sat in a chair, upholstered in claret flocked velvet. The darned thing was big enough to qualify as a throne.
Cecil B. DeMille fixed Irving with a gimlet eye. “I wondered how long it would take for you to come charging in here.”
“Why didn’t you discuss shutting down Dynamite with me?”
“It never occurred to me that I ought to.”
“Mr. DeMille, are you forgetting who’s in charge of this studio?”
DeMille threw down the quill in his hand—The man writes with a quill? What is this, 1629?—and twisted his face in annoyance. “And, Mr. Thalberg, are you forgetting who’s in charge of this picture?”
“You started shooting on January twenty-second; two days later you were already behind schedule.”
“It’s that goddamned microphone.”
“You are making a talkie.” Irving bit off each syllable.
“Our efforts to deaden sound weren’t the least bit effective, so I got stagehands to lay bolts of felt all over the set. It still recorded like we were standing in an echo chamber, so someone suggested we replace the iron bars on the prison set with wooden ones. I didn’t think it would work, but it did.”
“But did you have to replace the second lead and start over?”
“That Carole Lombard piece of skirt wasn’t taking her work seriously. This is a heavy drama, and she was laughing it up like this was a Mabel Normand yuck-fest. And anyway, performers get fired all the time.”
“You had Mitchell fire her. What were you thinking, getting your art director to discharge a member of the cast? That shows poor leadership, and a picture sinking under its own weight needs strong leadership.”
DeMille ran his finger along his ink blotter. “So it really boils down to a question of who’s in charge.”
As far as Irving was concerned, that wasn’t the issue at all. He was head of production, which meant he was in charge. Of everyone. Including Cecil B. DeMille—who now took Irving’s silence as an invitation to keep bulldozing.
“You resent that they brought me to this studio without being consulted. You resent how much I’m being paid. And you resent that on a DeMille picture, there’s only one final authority, and that’s mine. I’ll run Dynamite as I see fit. And that includes closing it down.”
He was right on the first two counts. L.B. Mayer and Nick Schenck had lured Hollywood’s most prominent director to Metro with a $175,000 per picture guarantee and a percentage of the profits. The first Irving had heard about it was when he’d noticed the studio employees building a brand-new bungalow. But that bit about him being the final authority around here? Irving wasn’t prepared to take that one lying down—even if this was the great DeMille.
“Your budget has exceeded half a million dollars. I can’t have your cast and crew stand around doing nothing.”
“They’ll have to until I figure out how in God’s name I can stage a cave-in with immovable cameras and a microphone that’s more sensitive than a prima ballerina. The whole idea is utterly impossible. And let me tell you, Mr. Thalberg, that simpleton you’ve got running your sound department is of absolutely no use. To me or anyone.”
Irving furtively snaked his way forward to the edge of his chair. “Now, hold on a minute—”
“It’s bad enough that he’s running around my set telling my crew where they have to put the microphones, but it’s patently obvious that dope doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“He knows more than anybody else at the studio.”
“He can’t tell the difference between a microphone and that pole I want to shove up his ass.”
“You need to give him more time.”
“What I need is an expert, and he’s hardly that.”
“Of course he’s not. Nobody is!” Irving was half-shouting now. He knew that he should calm down, but the supercilious look on DeMille’s face was rubbing him raw. He inched forward to gain a little more height. “This is all brand new. We’re making it up as we go along.”
“If you haven’t mastered it yet, then why in tarnation are you forcing me to make a talking picture when even the dunderhead in charge of sound is clueless?”
“No, he’s not,” Irving said.
DeMille picked up a briarwood pipe and waved it dismissively. “You have to say that because he’s your brother-in-law.” Irving went to respond, but DeMille cut him off. “There’s no need to apologize. I’ve given my brother, William, several roles he wouldn’t otherwise have won.”
“Douglas Shearer isn’t nepotism.”
As DeMille lit the pipe, the flare of the matchstick caught the skeptical look in his eye. “Isn’t it?”
It wasn’t an unfair question. Nepotism was rife in the motion picture business. During Irving’s days at Universal, it sometimes felt as though half the people on staff were related to Uncle Carl Laemmle. “Have you seen The Broadway Melody?”
“Your musical?”
Irving ignored DeMille’s withering tone. “The finale is a number called ‘The Wedding of the Painted Doll.’ Huge cast, dozens and dozens of people on stage. We didn’t have enough microphones in the entire studio to record it all and weren’t sure what to do. That is, until Shearer pointed out that we already had a good recording of the music. He suggested that we play it and have the performers go through the number, then combine the film and soundtrack in the lab. Our so-called dope came up with an innovative solution and quite possibly saved the picture. If you give him a chance, he might well do the same for you.”
“A bunch of tap-dancing faggots is one thing, but I’ve built a cave on your biggest stage and we need to fill it with three tons of dirt. So it’s hardly the same, is it?”
“Broadway Melody has gone over so huge in New York that we’re planning a year-long road-show engagement. I expect it’ll be a four-million-dollar hit, so you tell me: who wouldn’t want that on his résumé?”
DeMille raised his upper lip into a sneer, but Irving could tell he’d made his point. It was about as close to a victory as he was likely to get. Battling the DeMille ego felt like pushing a boulder uphill. It was time to retreat. Irving’s chair scraped the floorboards as he stood.
“This isn’t a feudal system, and Metro isn’t your fiefdom. Dynamite is a talking picture, and it’s your job to figure it out. Preferably with Shearer’s help.”
Amid the tumult of the studio, Irving’s throbbing headache came on swiftly. By the time he reached his office, it pounded his skull like a battering ram. He emptied a packet of Goody’s Headache Powders into his water glass and stirred the mixture with his finger.
Had that confrontation achieved or resolved anything? Irving didn’t know. Nor would he until they had tallied the final box office. In Hollywood, that was the ultimate mark of success. He dove back into his drawer and fished out a second packet.
When Norma stepped out of the Thalberg Duesenberg (which they had nicknamed “the Thalenberg”) Irving took her hand. “Have I told you yet how chic you look tonight?”
The soft caramel light of a balmy March dusk made her look radiant in her black sheath, which ran to mid-shin and was topped with a layer of semi-translucent matte satin. But that wasn’t why he’d said it. Not completely, at any rate.
They had been married for a year and a half now and were still living with Irving’s parents. Henrietta had insisted that Irving and Norma maintain separate bedrooms, citing Irving’s precarious health and his need for restful sleep. As true as that statement may have been, she had overplayed her hand when she’d insisted that their respective bedrooms lie at opposite ends of the house.
The two lovebirds had circumvented the edict by waiting until well after the household had retired for the night before sneaking to one another’s rooms.
Irving appreciated Norma’s patience with how difficult it had been for Henrietta to let go of her precious golden boy. Norma hadn’t complained or lashed out, which Irving took as a demonstration that she was playing for keeps. And so if it took time to wrest her husband from his mother’s strangling grasp, she was prepared to sit it out. A scorned mother-in-law was a thorn not easily plucked free, so handling this situation took tact and forbearance.
But he couldn’t expect his wife to sit on the sidelines forever.
Her blue eyes glowed. “Why, thank you!” She ran her fingers over the rope of pearls looped around her neck. “Not too much for a beach party, is it?”
“If this were Marie Dressler’s beach party, perhaps, but not for Jesse Lasky.”
Lasky had founded Famous Players-Lasky, which had now become Paramount Pictures, who were as keen as Metro to regain their former status as the most successful studio in Hollywood before those Warner upstarts had invented the damned talkies.
Inside the front door, they almost collided with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who was protesting to Dave Selznick’s brother. “But Myron, my voice recorded like a god-awful pipsqueak. I seriously doubt that I shall ever get used to it.”
“You will,” Norma said with a laugh. “The cure is to watch the movie four or five times so it won’t come as such a shock at the premiere. It’s what I did with my first talkie.”
Mary looked like she’d been stricken with dengue fever. “Coquette’s coming out in a week.”
“Only the first three times are ghastly. After that it’s merely awful.” Norma took her by the arm and hugged it to her. “Come on, let’s see if Jesse’s bootlegger has tracked down some of that Seagram’s whiskey. They’re rum-running it from two French islands off the coast of Newfoundland, so it’s perfectly legal.”
Doug stepped in to fill the void. “Her voice recording is all I’ve been hearing about for weeks.”
“You’ll have to give Mary some time,” Irving said. “She’s not theater trained like you.” He scanned the room for DeMille, who had worked for Lasky. After that skirmish earlier in the week, he was the person Irving most wanted to avoid.
“I keep telling her,” Doug continued, “if she doesn’t keep up, she’ll be left behind. Especially seeing as how we’ll start filming The Taming of the Shrew soon.”
Irving swung around to face him. “You’re taking on Shakespeare?”
Doug beamed his million-dollar grin. “From Robin Hood to Zorro to d’Artagnan to Petruchio. How’s that for a progression?”
Jealousy engulfed Irving like a brush fire.
He longed to film Shakespeare. Almost any play would do: Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Othello, Much Ado About Nothing. Shakespeare had been a comfort during that solitary year he’d spent recovering from rheumatic fever.
It was strange to think about it now, but Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo, and Juliet had helped to keep his loneliness at bay. Stabbings, betrayals, witches, poisonings. Schemes to take the crown of England. The fate of the Roman Empire. Ah, how they had fired his imagination! And oh, how they fired it still. But the opportunity had slipped past him. He could think of nobody he’d rather cede his dream to than Doug and Mary.
They stepped farther into the living room, where luminaries and their spouses sat, stood, and lay on the various chairs, sofas, and chaise longues arranged into manageable groupings. Irving spotted Conrad Nagel at the broad window paralleling Santa Monica Beach. Irving would have flagged him down, but not tonight.
Conrad was starring in Dynamite. Irving would rather avoid anyone and everything connected to his most intractable problem. Douglas had wandered off to talk with L.B., so Irving beelined for Marion and Norma and Mayer’s daughters, Irene and Edie, careful not to catch Conrad’s eye.
“I enjoyed myself on Show People,” Marion was saying, “but I would have enjoyed it more if I’d known it was going to be my la-la-la-last silent picture.”
“Have you done your voice test?” Norma asked.
“God, no!” Marion pressed her hands against her mouth, then spread her fingers wide enough to say, “I can’t bring myself. I kee-kee-keep putting it off.”
“You’re going to have to do it eventually,” Irving said gently.
“Or I could quit altogether!”
“I doubt W.R. would let you.”
Practically everybody in Hollywood said that Marion wouldn’t have a movie career if not for William Randolph Hearst. Irving didn’t subscribe to that theory. Privately, he believed that by putting her in stodgy and tedious vehicles that creaked with outmoded storytelling, Hearst had hindered her career more than helped it. But nobody told The Chief what to do.
“W.R. can order whatever he likes,” Marion admitted into her gin, “but that won’t stop me from being terrified when the day of my test dawns. I’ll be shaking like limp lettuce in a wind storm.”
“Did you hear what Joan Crawford’s reaction was when she heard hers?” Irving asked. “She said, ‘That’s a man!’”
“No!”
“An exact quote from someone who was there.” He had given the job to one of his most trusted directors, who’d spent the whole day coaxing Joan through her five-minute test. “The trick is: a little nip of sherry.”
“Sweet or dry?”
Conrad was now circling the perimeter. Irving rotated to the right. “You should ask Dr. Marafioti.”
“Who’s that?” Marion asked.
“He trained Caruso, so he might know a thing or two about how to exercise control over one’s voice.”
“Is he here in town?”
Who wasn’t? Since The Jazz Singer and Glorious Betsy had made it clear that talkies were here to stay, every voice teacher between Santa Fe and Saskatchewan had descended on Los Angeles to help coach terror-stricken actors and actresses.
“I’m sure W.R.’s secretary will track him down in two shakes.”
“And when you do,” Norma said, “send him over to Pickfair. Mary is beside herself.”
Marion’s blue button eyes blinked. “Well, if Mary Pickford’s n-n-nervous, what am I worried for?” She let out a high-pitched giggle.
Conrad used the break in conversation to make his move. “Evening, all. It’s a veritable who’s who in here, isn’t it?” He waited until Marion and Norma had formed their own huddle. “I heard about your brouhaha with DeMille the other day.”
Irving feigned surprise but knew that the studio grapevine would have been quivering with chatter before he’d returned to his office. “I wouldn’t call it a brouhaha.”
“You bawled him out for shutting down the production.” Irving was about to deny that rumor—dissent among the executive ranks didn’t make for a good morale booster—but Conrad beat him to it. “Good for you. He needs someone with the guts to call his bluff.”
“Bluff?”
“He’s got no idea what he’s doing, and he’s not used to that. These talkies have thrown him for a loop.”
“He’s not alone there.”
“Yes, but he’s been the king of the castle since he arrived in California to make Squaw Man. In his mind, he’s the one who sets the pace, not follows it. He didn’t think sound would last. He told me he’s yet to see a talking picture that was worth the price of admission and refuses to believe that people would give up the mystery of silent movies. Oh, and he’s flabbergasted at the success of your Broadway Melody.”
“May I put in my two cents’ worth?”
The query came from Irene Mayer. Unlike her debutante-socialite sister, she was level-headed and analytical, with a sharp eye and an even sharper sense of humor. The grapevine had also been agog with the rumor that she was secretly dating Dave Selznick. Irving could see the attraction but doubted that her father would approve.
“By all means,” Irving replied, shifting aside to welcome her into the conversation.
“DeMille is at sixes and sevens over his next release, The Godless Girl. I’ve got a friend in New York who’s a reader at that new studio, RKO. She told me DeMille has browbeaten Pathé into premiering it as a silent picture, even though they’ll have to go back and edit sound in and then re-release it. Not that it matters. It’s an awful picture and is sure to bomb. And if Dynamite flops, that’s two in a row, which is more than the monstrous DeMille ego can bear.”
“Sometimes I think he’d be happy to make The Ten Commandments over and over,” Conrad said. “Thank god you’re no ostrich with your head in the sand.”
The conversation continued between Conrad and Irene, centering on RKO’s first release, a musical called Syncopation. But Irving heard only snatches of it. He started replaying his meeting with DeMille in his head.
Dynamite is my picture and I’ll run it as I see fit.
A one-person department is a clear indicator of your confidence in the future of sound pictures.
If you haven’t mastered sound yet, why are you forcing me to make a talkie?
I wondered how long it would take before you came charging in here.
That clever bastard saw me coming. He doesn’t want to admit that he’s an ostrich, so he made it about who’s in charge. Sorry, Cecil, but the talkies are here to stay.
Irving cast back to the night of The Jazz Singer, and his glib line about how novelty was welcome, but talkies were a passing fad. I was as blind as DeMille, he thought, but at least I’ve reconsidered in view of the overwhelming evidence that audiences prefer talkies. Why are we in this business if not to give them what they want?
It wasn’t his job, he suddenly realized, to force DeMille to deliver a movie on time and on budget. It was to help him see that it was adapt-or-die time. It was DeMille’s name on the credits, his reputation on the line, not Irving Thalberg’s. A successful picture was a high tide that raised everybody’s boats; a flop only dragged everyone down.
Norma slipped her warm hand into his. “Come with me.”
Now that he had figured the route forward, the tensions of the past week melted away as Norma led him through the chatter until they were outside. Lasky’s back patio was paved with huge terracotta tiles glazed with a dahlia pattern, white petals gleaming in the moonlight. Stars were sprinkled across a clear sky and, two hundred yards away, ocean waves tumbled onto the shoreline with metronomic rhythm.
She laid her head on his shoulder. “Lovely, isn’t it?”
He breathed in the briny air. “Very peaceful.”
“Imagine if we lived here at the beach. After a long, hard day at the studio, wouldn’t it make a tranquil sanctuary for the two of us?”
Taking her gently by the shoulders in his hands, he leaned in and kissed her on the mouth. Not because of the moonlight. Not because of the tiles. Not because of the soothing waves. But because of the ever-so-slight emphasis she had placed on the word “two.”