MOVIE MOGUL
Matt Bomer evokes faded Hollywood glamour in ‘Tycoon’
I F Don Draper ran a Hollywood studio instead of a Manhattan ad agency, he would be Monroe Stahr, the hero of “The
Last Tycoon,” an unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald that has been made into a TV series for Amazon. As played by Matt Bomer, who won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of a doomed AIDS patient in “The Normal Heart,” he cuts an equally glamorous figure in snazzy suits, fedoras and even vintage pajamas. But there is one important difference between the two characters. Born with a congenital heart defect, Monroe is living on borrowed time.
“He’s someone who’s seeking a legacy, some kind of permanence, even with the limited amount of time he has because of his heart condition,” says Bomer, 39, at the Whitby Hotel in midtown Manhattan.
Monroe may dress as nattily as Draper, but his trajectory closely follows that career path of Irving Thalberg, a Brooklyn-born dynamo who helped create MGM with Louis B. Mayer and who was made the studio’s head of production in 1925. Despite the congenital heart disease that contributed to his untimely death at age 37, Thalberg produced 400 films and guided the early careers of Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, among many others.
Bomer drew heavily on Thal- berg’s life as an invalid. “I lost 20 pounds so I could be slender and frail like him,” he says. “As a child, there was a lot of time spent indoors. While other children were outside playing, he was reading the classics of literature. That’s what his understanding of storytelling grew out of.”
As a studio executive of the mid1930s, one of Monroe’s pet projects is to create a new star as vibrant as his late wife, the Irish-born Minna Davis (Jessica De Gouw). Haunted by her ghost, he begins to snap out of his funk when he meets studio commisary waitress Kathleen Moore (Dominique McElligott). Soon, the Irish-born Kathleen is dubbing footage of Minna from an unreleased film and Monroe thinks he’s struck gold.
“He’s projecting a lot onto her,” says Bomer, who is married to Hollywood publicist Simon Halls. “He’s in such a vulnerable place, he’s just ripe for the taking. Over the course of the [show] the relationship becomes deeper and more profound than that.”
“Tycoon’s” love story lightens some of the novel’s — and show’s — gloomier themes, which include the influence on Hollywood by German film distributors during Hitler’s rise and the migration to California by Americans who lost their homes during the Depression. Kelsey Grammer plays Monroe’s mentor, fictitious studio boss Pat Brady, who is mortified by the people living in Hoovervilles on the edge of the studio property.
In addition to these social topics, the series mixes the occasional real-life legend (Marlene Dietrich) among the supporting characters and even has a messenger deliver the script for “The Wizard of Oz” to Monroe’s office.
Should “Tycoon” be renewed, writer Billy Ray will have to go beyond the novel to develop Fitzgerald’s theme of what lengths people will go to for success.
“Monroe is a mystery,” Bomer says. “He has everything but is really empty inside. And you see how being a workaholic has isolated him from having any intimate relationship in his life.”