Santa Monica,
California
November 1930
The nanny rapped on the doorjamb of the nursery. “Miss Norma won’t be much longer.”
Irving couldn’t bear to pull his gaze away from his infant’s hypnotic face. “Thank you, Marie.”
From the instant Irving had first laid eyes on his son, he knew that his life had changed. His professional life would always be a scramble to impose order on the messy process of shepherding motion pictures. But once the day was done, he was free to hold Irving Junior in his arms and stare into that innocent, trusting face. Oh, how he reveled in the joy this little tyke brought him. Here in the nursery, he was just Daddy, who could spend blissful hour after hour watching his son. Those spontaneous smiles. Those tiny fingers. The gurgling. The yawns. The way he’d belch and peer up at Daddy, mystified about what had just happened.
Every day was different. A fresh hair. A new expression. A little more weight. A smidge more growth.
“Do you know how much trouble you gave Mommy?” Irving must have asked the kid twenty times already, but he never tired of telling the story. “Poor Mommy! She was in labor for so long. You didn’t want to come out. No siree, you did not!” Irving lowered his voice to a whisper as he always did when he reached this part of the story. “Confidentially, I suspect Uncle Slickum broke a few speed limits that day getting me to the hospital. But he knew how eager I was to meet you.”
A translucent bubble of spit, the size of a pearl, ballooned from between those perfect little pink lips. Irving popped it with his fingernail. Junior’s eyes flew open. “What went pop? Can you say that word? Pop! Pop! Pop!”
Irving ached for the day when his son said his first words, and dreaded the all-too-real possibility that he might not be there.
Another rap on the doorjamb. “Sir?”
“What is it, Marie?”
“Miss Norma wants to know when is the very latest you can leave.”
“The awards ceremony starts at eight.”
“Is seven-thirty too late?”
Junior gave a tiny yawn and struggled to free himself from his swaddling blanket. “Isn’t he due for a feeding?”
“Right after you leave for the Ambassador.”
“Personally, I’d prefer to stay here all night, but it’d be bad form for my wife to miss her category.”
Marie was middle-aged, dotted with freckles, with a maternal air about her. She lowered her voice. “Junior’s birth wreaked havoc with Miss Norma’s figure, and tonight’s gala is her first public appearance, so she’s anxious about making a good impression.”
“She’s Norma Shearer. She always makes a good impression.”
“She’s changed her dress four times, but has finally decided. I doubt she’ll be much longer.”
Irving waited until Marie’s hurried footsteps receded into Norma’s room. “I wanted to laugh in Mommy’s face when she told me she wanted this role. I didn’t dare because she would have killed me. But she showed everyone a side of her that none of us knew existed. Between you and me, Junior, Daddy isn’t wrong very often. And when he is, it cuts him to the quick. But—” Irving wagged his finger; Junior’s eyes zigzagged back and forth “—he’s the first to admit it. And I hope you’ll be like that when you grow up. Because one day you’ll be wrong, too, and your wife will be so right that she’ll win an Academy award. But you won’t care because you’ll be so very proud of her.”
The Ambassador Hotel’s cavernous Fiesta Room hummed with the din of chattering guests. Jewels glinted from every corner. Two years before, the first awards had been an intimate affair with 250 guests in the Blossom Room at the Roosevelt, but now it was the industry’s biggest yearly event. Irving surveyed the assembled hordes. L.B. had been right after all: movie people fell over themselves to get their hands on a shiny prize.
As the Thalbergs wound through the maze of tables, nodding here, waving there, Norma caught the eye of every person they passed. Look at her, their faces seemed to say: Doesn’t she look marvelous after enduring that horrendous birth? She’s certainly pulled herself together. But then again, I would too if I’d beaten out Garbo.
They arrived at their table, where Norma’s brother, Douglas, and his wife were already seated. The Ambassador had long dispensed with the pretense of serving alcohol in teapots. A bottle of Korbel Californian champagne stood at the center.
Irving offered Norma a chair and turned to Douglas. “You haven’t even opened the champagne yet?”
“We waited until you arrived,” he said. “Of course, if we’d known how late you were going to be . . .”
Douglas’s wife elbowed him. “We should be thankful Norma’s here at all.” She rolled her eyes and turned to smile at Norma. “You look fabulous, by the way. You’re the envy of the room, and not solely for your win, which you surely deserve.”
“What, and I don’t?” Douglas had also won an award in a new category, Best Sound Recording, for his work on The Big House. This made Norma and Douglas sibling winners, which Strick and his team of publicists had exploited to ensure Metro reaped maximum coverage in the press leading up to tonight.
“That goes without saying, you silly boob. But did you endure thirty hours of excruciating labor? Now, will someone please open this bottle?”
Irving made short work of removing the Korbel’s cork and filling each coupe. He proposed a toast to the “first brother-and-sister act in Academy history.”
They were several sips in, waiting for the host, Conrad Nagel, to kick off the ceremony, when Norma said, “You’ve been looking at me funny.”
“I have?”
“Somebody ought to have warned me about what giving birth would do to my body. Everything takes forever now.”
“You must have expected some things would change.”
Terror overtook her face. “You haven’t even commented on my outfit.” The woman at the center of attention in a room filled with hundreds of admirers pushed out her bottom lip. She ran her hand down the front of her dress. It was a matte satin wraparound, with black fur cuffs on mid-length sleeves and a huge flower over her left hip. “You hate it.”
“Don’t go putting words in my mouth.”
“It’s an Adrian design. And I know how much you love what he comes up with for Joan, obscuring those Olympic swimmer shoulders of hers.”
“I got him to do your wardrobe for The Divorcée, didn’t I? You’ve won the Academy award, haven’t you?”
“It’s the Best Actress award, not Best Dressed Actress.”
What Irving wanted to say was, If you’re not happy about your win, I’m sure Greta Garbo will be more than happy to take that award off your hands. But the ceiling would cave in if he said that.
“Have you not noticed how practically everyone in this room is ogling you with envy? I’m as proud as punch to be by your side tonight.” When he saw Norma’s face thaw, he threw in for good measure, “And tomorrow night. And all the tomorrow nights to come.”
Her public smile resurfaced and her eyes flittered about the room.
Irving took another sip of his champagne and wished it were whiskey.
Had he been looking at her oddly? In Norma’s current mood, it was hard to know. But he probably had, because his current frame of mind hardly had Norma’s best interests at heart.
It wasn’t about her dress or her girdle or what shape she was in. Her body might have been octagonal now for all he knew. He hadn’t seen his wife naked since the day she’d given birth to Junior. And if the labor had been particularly taxing, he didn’t begrudge her whatever time she needed to recover. But three months sleeping alone was eroding his patience.
It wasn’t only that, though. Norma had been focusing all her energies on recovering her figure. Diet, exercise, facials, hair treatments—she had stuck to her post-natal regime like she was training to meet Dempsey in the boxing ring. Irving understood how actresses traded on their appearance, but she was doing so at the expense of their son.
She hadn’t been ignoring Junior completely. She had been feeding him. Most of the time. And she visited him, but only for short periods. Everything else—diaper changing, night feeding, baby formula preparation, bathing—she left to Marie and spent the rest of her days working to be camera-ready.
But there was another spear poking at Irving’s vanity as though it were a caged bear.
Over the past six years, he had built Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer into an influential studio. He’d gotten used to being the arbiter who decided what got made and how best to go about it. But Norma’s triumph in The Divorcée had shown that she knew better about what was good for her career. It had consolidated her unassailable position on the Metro lot, giving her first call on the best stories.
All of which added up to a shift in the balance of power—away from him and toward her. He wouldn’t dare admit this out loud any more than he would have admitted that Anna Christie was a better movie and Garbo’s performance the superior one. To do that would have resulted in marital self-immolation.
He felt like a credit-hogging Napoleon for even thinking along those lines. He’d kept them to himself and only dwelled on his small-mindedness at night with his wife sleeping several rooms away. But her statement about his looking at her funny hinted that he wasn’t as accomplished at obscuring his resentment as he’d assumed.
When Douglas and his wife headed for the dance floor, Irving spotted his boss making straight for him.
“I hate to talk shop on a night like this,” Mayer said, taking Douglas’s chair.
Irving downed the last of his champagne. “This is a shop party, L.B. What’s going on?”
Mayer pointed out a trio of men a few tables away, all sporting sun-bronzed faces. Movie cowboys was Irving’s guess. “The middle one holding the cigarette. I want you to give him the brother-in-law role in the new Constance Bennett picture.”
It was unusual for Mayer to involve himself in casting, especially minor roles. Irving guessed that he must have owed the cowboy money. Poker, most likely.
“Why him?”
“I have a strong feeling about that fellow. We should get him under contract, and soon. Then we can set about grooming him for movie stardom.”
Irving watched the man Mayer had pointed out shake the other cowboys’ hands and step away from the table. He was tall—Irving guessed around six feet—but that was about all he had to recommend him. His ears stuck out at an awkward angle; that was a problem right there. And those teeth. Ugh. Distractingly small and a dull shade of yellow.
“That guy’ll be lucky to find work as an extra, and only then because he fills a tux pretty well. Sorry L.B., but you’re way off the mark.”
Mayer’s eyes took on a determined beadiness. “I know star power and sex appeal when I see it and he’s got it, I tell you.” He craned his neck like a periscope. “Have you seen Benny?”
Benny Thau was Metro’s head of casting. Blessed with an even-keeled temperament and an air of sincerity, he was one of the few people at Metro—in all Hollywood—whom Irving trusted. If Benny shared Mayer’s opinion, then he’d go along with it.
As though on cue, Thau appeared carrying a couple of highballs. Mayer called him over and pointed out the newcomer, who was now dancing with Renée Adorée.
“I’d cast him as a villain,” Benny said. “Not even that. Maybe a henchman. Yeah, third henchman on the left. Why? Who is he?”
Irving breathed out a sigh of relief. “L.B.’s new protégé. I don’t see it either.”
Mayer huffed as he withdrew a cigar from his breast pocket and bit off the end. “I’m surrounded by unimaginative ignoramuses.”
“Now hold on a minute,” Irving said. “We’re the most profitable studio in Hollywood and have been for the past few years.”
“And that’s during a depression,” Thau added, “which they’re now spelling with a capital ‘D’, so you know things are truly abysmal. But not at Metro. We must be doing something right.”
Mayer cocked a withering eyebrow. “Half right.”
“Which half?”
“The ladies. We’ve got Norma, and Garbo, and Crawford. But what about the men? William Haines and Ramon Novarro. They’re good actors with broad appeal, but, damn it, they’re queers and aren’t willing to play the game. It didn’t matter during the silent days, but now we’ve got talking pictures, our actors are more accessible. People can see and hear them. Traits like that are harder to hide from audiences. Wallace Beery is a fine actor, but he’s not leading-man handsome. Nor are Basil Rathbone or Lawrence Tibbett. Gilbert was, but that schmuck’s falling apart at the seams.”
Irving saw no evidence of star power in this newcomer, but Mayer was right about Jack. Way for a Sailor had sounded good on paper, but somewhere en route to the screen, it had degenerated into a woeful mess. His follow-up, The Phantom of Paris, was designed to return Jack to the dashing roles of his silent films, but Irving suspected it would be a case of too little, too late.
“And so, gentlemen,” Mayer got to his feet “we have a problem and you need to fix it.” He prodded the glowing end of his cigar toward his new greenhorn. “And we start doing that by casting him in The Easiest Way.”
The fastest route from MGM to Glendale took at least an hour, but it was an hour without jangling telephones, unscheduled visits, ego-massaging, or contract negotiations, so all in all, there were worse ways to spend that time than sitting in the back of the Thalenberg.
“I still don’t get it,” he told the woman to his left.
Frances Marion had become a reliable sounding board after her sterling job adapting Anna Christie.
“Trust me on this.” She winked at him with that maternally artful manner only she could get away with. It was little wonder that Mary Pickford had collaborated with her so frequently. “You’ll see.”
“I’ve sat through the final cut of this picture twice.”
“Pictures can only be judged in front of regular moviegoing folk. Mary was twenty-eight when we did Pollyanna. I thought she was pushing the whole good-little-girl act too far, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. We held a preview, and the folks gobbled it up. And they’ll do it tonight. Women want to be with this guy and men want to be like him. I refuse to believe you can’t see it.”
“Well, I can’t.”
“Not yet. But haul him through the Metro star-making machine and you’ll be glad L.B. forced you to sign him.”
The hundred-foot chalk-white column rising out of the Alexander Theatre sharpened into view. If Mayer wanted to throw away money on an actor of limited appeal, then so be it. The Easiest Way was still a decent picture. Constance Bennett, Adolphe Menjou, Anita Page, and Robert Montgomery had all put in winning performances. So what if anyone in tonight’s audience even noticed some nobody called Clark Gable?
Irving didn’t allow himself to be distracted during a preview. They were expensive to run and the future success of a picture could depend on how closely he and his team paid attention to the audience’s reaction. But this was the first one he’d attended since Irving Junior had been born, and his mind kept wandering back to the nursery. What was Junior doing this very minute? When do children start talking? Is five months too early? How I’m going to hate missing his first words. What comes first? Walking or talking? There’s so much I don’t know and I want to experience it all.
The end credits started rolling and the audience stirred in their seats.
Frances yanked away her eyeglasses. “Now do you see it?”
“See what?”
“Did you honestly not feel the electricity every time that Gable fellow appeared?”
Irving shook his head and followed her into the foyer, where she positioned them in the center of the sapphire-and-silver-flecked terrazzo floor.
They stopped a pair of women in home-knitted cardigans. “Excuse me,” Frances said, “may we ask you what you thought of the picture?”
“Fine, fine,” one of them said.
The other looked Irving and Frances up and down. “Are you movie people? You made this one?”
Irving asked her, “Did you like it?”
“I’m a big Constance Bennett fan. I go see everything she’s in.”
“What did you think of the actor who played the brother-in-law?”
“A bit rough around the edges, but he’s sure got something memorable about him.”
The next half-dozen conversations were facsimiles of the first: “I’ve never seen that guy before, but I hope I will again.” “I couldn’t take my eyes off him, even when he wasn’t sayin’ nothin’.” “He reminds me of the boy down the street, and did I ever have the biggest crush on that kid.”
After the final patron left the theater, Irving put on his brown Homburg and headed for the curb, where Slickum was waiting for them. “Evidently I’m in the minority.”
“You should put him in the new Crawford picture.” Frances thanked Slickum for opening the car door, stepped inside, and slid across to make room for Irving. “He’s too green for the lead, of course. Give him a smaller role, like the bootlegger.”
“You think he’s that good?”
“Not yet, but the potential’s there.” She let out a throaty bark of a laugh. “Tell me you can’t see him and Joan going at it, boudoir-wise.”
As Slickum headed west toward Culver City, Frances prattled on about the new Marion Davies picture she was writing. Irving was only half listening.
I would never have thought to cast Norma in The Divorcée, and now it looks like I was off-base with this Gable guy. Am I losing my touch? He battled to keep from sinking beneath a rising tide of uncertainty and indecision. We’ll have to pin back his ears. And we must get him to a decent dentist. He’s handsome, all right, but that face. It’s a big one. Wide. Meaty. It needs breaking up. Maybe a mustache. But small. Subtle. A pencil mustache? Yes, that could work.
As they crossed the Los Angeles River into Los Feliz, Irving pictured Gable and Crawford getting busy between the sheets. It didn’t take much imagination, and that, Irving had learned, was a sure-fire sign of hot-and-heavy cinematic chemistry.