Santa Monica,
California
March 1934
Jeanette MacDonald squealed. “Why, Charles, I had no idea you were so naughty!”
Irving handed her a bourbon on the rocks. “I warned you.”
Charles Laughton raised his hands in mock protest. “I merely said that if your Merry Widow character owns fifty-two percent of all the cows in Marshovia, then she’s entitled to milk whatever—or whomever—she pleases.”
“You didn’t say ‘whomever’!” Jeanette protested. “Nor did you say ‘milk.’”
Charles parted his thick, rubbery lips and leered at her. “The milk was implied.”
Elsa Lanchester picked up her husband’s brandy snifter and handed it to him. “Drink up before you get us thrown out, you old fraud.”
“Old?” Charles pushed out his chest like a Shakespearean king about to get it in the back. “Wench! How dare you! I’ve yet to see my thirty-fifth birthday.”
“Oh, yes?” With her sharp-edged voice and brittle delivery, Irving hoped to find her a role someday. “How do you explain that you’re playing Norma’s father in The Barretts of Wimpole Street?”
The only sound in the Thalberg dining room was the splutter of Jean Harlow trying to stifle a snort into her highball. Irving was pleased that she had accepted his invitation to tonight’s dinner party. Like a trooper, she had returned to work not long after Paul’s death, but he couldn’t remember the last time he had seen her at the Cocoanut Grove or the Wilshire Bowl. It was a joy to hear her giggle.
Charles thumped the table; Norma’s pewter salt shaker from a Loch Ness souvenir stand toppled over. “IT’S! CALLED! ACTING!”
Elsa didn’t miss a beat. “Some of us call it overacting.”
A finger alighted on Irving’s wrist. “I cannot tell if they are serious.”
Irving whispered back, “It’s their shtick.”
“Shtick?”
He hadn’t expected Greta to show up for this dinner party. With Queen Christina pulling in enormous crowds, perhaps she was in a rare sociable mood.
“Fear not, Miss Garbo,” Charles said. “You need only be alarmed when you see me lobbing heavy objects hither and yon.” He pointed to a crystal vase sitting on the sideboard. “And I shall start with that monstrosity.”
“The hell you will!” Norma exclaimed, her laughter braided with fear. “That’s Lalique. I lugged it all the way back from France. If you so much as touch it, I’ll upstage you on set tomorrow so badly the camera won’t even find you.”
Charles lifted an unconcerned eyebrow. “I’d like to see you try.” He drained his remaining brandy and held up his glass. “I’d also like more of this. Napoléon, if I’m not mistaken. Thank the immortal Greek gods that America’s great blunder is over and we can enjoy the delights of alcohol again without being threatened with incarceration.”
Irving retrieved the bottle from the sideboard. This evening was going better than he’d hoped, and much better than he had expected.
Not long after their return from Europe the previous year, Irving had asked Norma if she would take on the role of Elizabeth Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street. After playing mostly flappers and divorcées, he knew that she would balk at taking on a real-life nineteenth-century British poetess. He was correct; she had turned him down right off the bat, but he’d countered with “What if I get Charles Laughton to play your father?”
Apart from Dave Selznick’s Dinner at Eight and Jean’s Bombshell, he thought MGM’s output for 1933 had been a meager offering. But now that he’d been demoted (“Not demoted,” Mayer had insisted. “Reorganized.”), he had to ensure that his movies shone more brightly than anyone else’s. His new creed was Only the most popular stars, only the most talented writers, only the most prestigious material. Randolph Besier’s play had had a year-long run. Starring Katharine Cornell and Brian Aherne, it dripped with refined culture.
However, for the first three days of production, nothing had proceeded according to plan.
Unused to such formal language, Norma had fumbled through the dialogue. “It’s so long-winded,” she’d whined. “Can’t we simplify it a little?” It didn’t help that Charles relished densely packed sentences and attacked them with all the verve and aplomb he’d accumulated from his years in the theater. But Charles was as intimidated by MGM’s glamorous queen as she was by the depth he brought to each line. Irving’s solution had been to throw a dinner party. If Charles spilled soup down his necktie and Norma got a bit tipsy, all the better: they would experience each other in an everyday setting. To round out the table, Irving had assembled a most diverting group.
It was a shame that Doug Fairbanks had arrived without Mary, though. When Norma had asked him where she was, Doug had replied, “Don’t know. Don’t care.” Irving had counted on Mary’s ability to make anyone feel welcome, but evidently Hollywood’s golden couple were on the skids. Sensing this perhaps, Doug had thrilled the gathering with some nimble acrobatics. Not bad for someone on the far side of fifty. Jeanette had surprised everyone with an impromptu rendition of “The Jewel Song” from Faust. And all Greta had needed to do was show up and everybody was impressed.
It had all gone so well that Irving felt emboldened to make a play for Charles’s attention. He saw his opportunity when Charles blotted the sweat coating his forehead with a starched paisley handkerchief. As the gang moved into the living room for coffee, he took Charles aside. “Care for a breath of fresh air? The wind isn’t up tonight.”
“Christ, yes!” Charles flapped his pudgy fingers. “Lead on, Macduff.”
The surface of the pool shone silvery in the light of a half-moon.
Charles peered up at the twinkling stars scattered across the clear night sky. “We’re so focused on creating our world of artifice and facsimile that we forget the beauty in nature.” He clapped his hands to his ribcage and sucked in the sea air. “We poor Brits seldom get nights like this. It’s always so damnably cold in what you Yanks like to delusionally call Merry Olde England. I don’t suppose we could take a stroll along the beach? I ruminate more clearly when perambulating.” He reached down and started untying his shoelaces.
“Barefoot?”
“Is there nothing grander than the sensation of sand squelching through one’s toes?”
Minutes later, the two men were trekking across the dunes toward the sound of lapping waves. Irving had prepared a whole speech, but decided to let Charles kick off the conversation.
“You’re a damned sight more audacious than I ever gave you credit for.”
“Why is that?” Irving asked.
“The Barretts subtext is outrageous! Good grief, man, you’ve got me playing a father who harbors incestuous desires for his daughter.”
“Ah, so you picked up on that.”
“Nobody who saw the Broadway production would have missed it. Theater is one thing, but, of course, film is a whole other matter. I told Elsa, ‘Not even Thalberg’ll get this past the censor.’” Charles let out a belly laugh that pleasure-seekers riding the Santa Monica pier merry-go-round might have heard. “But you barely changed a line!”
“You have a gleam in your eye that no one can censor, and I have full faith in your ability. Those who get it will appreciate what you’re doing, and those who don’t will be none the wiser.”
Charles pressed his left hand to his cheek, his eyes piercing the dark.
“What’s the matter?” Irving asked him.
“You—I—” He marched past Irving, toward the water’s edge.
Irving hurried to catch up with him. “Have I offended you?” He felt his plans evaporate into the balmy night air.
“You don’t know how much I needed to hear that.” Charles burrowed his big toe into the cool sand. “I’m so miserable.”
Laughton wasn’t the type who invited physical contact beyond a handshake, so Irving ventured a step or two closer without crowding in on him. “I know that Edward Barrett is a contemptible son-of-a-bitch, but you’ve played Macbeth. I figured you’d relish the acting challenge of—”
Charles waved away the rest of Irving’s speech. “I am a homosexual.” He spat the words out like they were rancid grapes. “It torments me to the very depths of my soul. The guilt. The conflict. The abhorrence. I feel like I’m on a medieval torture rack, torn asunder, inch by inch, until my joints pop, my ribs splinter, and the sheer agony is driving me to the edge of insanity, where—”
He stopped when Irving laid a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t flinch as Irving expected, nor did he shrug it away. Instead, he let it sit there, saying nothing, until they locked eyes. “I’ve shocked you, haven’t I?”
Irving had met plenty of queers. Costumers, screenwriters, scenery painters, hairdressers, art directors—Hollywood studios teemed with so many that Irving believed motion pictures would be much poorer without the sensibilities they brought. So, no, it wasn’t Charles’s confession that had taken Irving aback.
He pulled his hand from Charles’s shoulder. “I feel like an outsider, too.”
Charles gaped at him. “But you’re Irving Thalberg. You inhabit the top rungs of the ladder that everyone is willing to climb over their dying grandmother to reach. How could you feel like an outsider? Outside what?” He staggered backward a step or two. “I must sit down before I topple over from the shock of it all.”
The two men sank to their knees and landed their behinds onto the sand. The damp seeped through the seat of Irving’s trousers.
“We’re not so different, you and I,” Irving said.
“Perchance not, but at least you don’t possess a face like the arse end of an elephant.”
What a contrast to the droll wag at the dinner table.
“I was twenty-one when Carl Laemmle handed me the keys to Universal,” Irving said. “I had to tell people three times my age what to do. They never even bothered to mask that they were thinking ‘I could take you seriously if you were a big-talking, cigar-chomping womanizer with an ego the size of Texas, but you’re barely out of short pants.’ And then, when I was twenty-four, L.B. appointed me head of production at Metro-Goldwyn. I went from being the boss of hundreds to the boss of thousands. It only put me further out of reach. How many people, would you guess, stop by my office to shoot the breeze? Let me tell you: none. Do you know that bar across the street from the studio? From what I hear, tons of folks go on a Friday night. Where’s my invitation?”
Charles fell backward onto his elbows. “They probably assume you don’t have the time.”
“I don’t. But nobody moseys into my office and asks, ‘How’re you doing?’ Once, just once, it’d be nice if someone struck up a casual, meandering conversation without a hidden strategy to win a role, or an assignment, or a raise, or a promotion, or any sort of recognition from me.”
Where had this confession come from, these words, tumbling out of him like gumballs? It wasn’t the discussion Irving had lured Charles out of the house for, but he felt the better for it.
Farther down the beach, a pair of seagulls were squabbling over a crust of bread. The two men watched them fight it out until the smaller bird nabbed it in his beak and took off into the darkness.
“But you’ve always commanded respect,” Charles said.
“You, too,” Irving countered. “You’re an actor’s actor.”
“Whom nobody wants to chase into the boudoir.” The losing seagull waddled past them without a glance. “Listen to poor, woebegone us, will you?” Charles said with a mournful laugh. “Allow me to extend the hand of friendship. We can get together and shoot the breeze anytime you like. No wives. No agenda. How does that sound?”
A heavy blackness tented overhead, dimming Irving’s vision. “I’d enjoy that very much.”
“Is that hesitation I hear in your voice?”
“I feel like the worst kind of hypocrite.”
“Goodness gracious, the shocks keep coming. So tell me, Irving, why do you feel like that?”
The gloom threatened to press down on him. “Because I threw this dinner party with an agenda.”
“Says the guy who wishes someone would talk to him without an agenda.”
Guilty as charged. “I wanted you and Norma to get to know each other better so as to improve your chemistry.”
“You can stamp that ‘mission accomplished.’”
“But that’s not all.”
Charles barked out a laugh. “You’ve got balls, wan little Irving! Okay, so what else do you have hidden up your bespoke French-cuffed sleeve?”
“I know you’re doing Ruggles of Red Gap at Paramount next, and after that, Les Misérables at Twentieth Century. But when you’re done with them, I want you to play Captain Bligh.”
“From Mutiny on the Bounty?”
Irving’s first effort as an independent producer operating under Mayer’s new structure had been a vehicle for Norma called Riptide. The movie had fared well with the critics and earned respectable box office, but it hadn’t incited lines around the block like Dave Selznick’s Dinner at Eight or Walter Wanger’s Queen Christina. The experience had been a sharp slap across the face and a hard-won lesson: think bigger.
What story could be more epic than Mutiny on the Bounty?
Charles drew in a deep lungful of cool night sea air. “You’re asking me to play yet another grossly unsympathetic character.”
“To put it another way: I’m challenging you with another complex character that only an actor of your rare skill can play by finding the humility behind the cruelty.”
A smirk. “Oh, Irving, you are a flatterer. Tell me, who will play Fletcher Christian?”
“I’m offering the part to Clark Gable.”
But only if Mayer was willing to let Irving have him. For every project he had in preproduction, Irving now had to fight for the players he wanted. And even then, he’d had to settle for second choice more often than not. But if done right, Mutiny had all the earmarks of a milestone picture, and he was prepared to take on Mayer, Schenck, Mannix, and whomever else he had to wheedle and cajole.
“So,” Charles said, part amused, part skeptical, “first you offer me the queen of the lot, and now the king. I’m positively flattered.”
“I’m offering you Bligh because I think you’re perfect for it.”
“Gable’ll never do it. Everybody knows he hates any role requiring him to wear period costume.”
It also meant that Gable would have to shave off his precious pencil mustache, but that was another battle for another day. “You leave Gable to me. Meanwhile, please give Bligh some thought.”
A chilled breeze blew off the water and up the sand. It whipped around their legs and through their jackets.
Charles lumbered to his feet. “It’s starting to get a tad chilly, even for the blood of this Englishman. The others will wonder where we’ve gotten to.”
“Tell them I’ll be along shortly.”
Irving waited until Charles was inside the house before he let himself fall back onto the sand. He unleashed a deep, guttural groan. Almost immediately, an image conjured itself.
On Irving’s first day back from Europe, Mayer had tried to soften the blow of his demotion by offering him the old DeMille bungalow. It was the biggest on the lot and had sat empty since DeMille’s departure. Empty, that is, except for the eighteen-inch-tall Egyptian hourglass over the fireplace, featuring a twin pair of gold-painted serpents and inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Irving wasn’t sure why Cecil would leave his Ten Commandments souvenir behind, but it made a natural focal point for the room, so it remained on the mantel. Occasionally, when a solution refused to reveal itself and the silver medal had failed him, he would tip it upside down and allow himself to become almost hypnotized as he watched the white sand slide through the narrow aperture. By the time the final grain had dropped onto the cone-shaped pile below, he often had his answer. And if not, the prosaic act of sitting in silence, staring at the flowing sand, helped clear his mind.
The vision of the hourglass calmed the anxiety he’d been battling to placate all evening.
All week.
No, all month.
Quit kidding yourself; it’s been all year.
He didn’t know what to call it.
Melancholy? No, not that.
Loneliness? Despite his hearts-and-flowers speech to Charles, not that either.
He wasn’t despondent, nor was he gloomy—Riptide had been a disappointment but no flop, and Mutiny could be the biggest picture of his career.
Throughout his life, he had found himself subject to episodes of reflective solitude. He’d always been a quiet, meditative loner, so this wasn’t new. But when these spells descended on him, his pep and verve seeped away, slowing his breathing until it became labored. Maybe that was why he’d become fixated on the sand in DeMille’s hourglass slipping through the gap, tiny grain by tiny grain, until the last one fell through the abyss.
He had told no one about these bouts, not even Norma, but preferred instead to endure them until they passed. And when they did, he shook himself out of his reverie and got on with the myriad details begging for his attention. But as he lay there on the beach, the imagined Egyptian hourglass disintegrated. In its place appeared two words he’d seen countless times in the Metro screening room, at special previews and opulent premieres: The End.
He jackknifed upright. The blinking lights of a passing ship, far out on the water, caught his attention. He watched them until they slipped below the horizon and out of sight.