Screen savior
Amazon’s latest series adapts F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tale of a tragic, passionate Hollywood tycoon
IN 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald dragged himself back to a place he hated “like poison” — Hollywood.
Drowning in debt, he had no choice. While polishing scripts for MGM, he started writing the novel that would capture the allure — and brutality — of the movie business. His inspiration was the one studio executive who’d been kind to him: Irving Thalberg, MGM’s legendary head of production.
Fitzgerald never finished the novel, “The Last Tycoon,” before his death in 1940, but its six chapters contain some of his finest writing. Amazon has adapted the novel into a nine-part miniseries of the same name, which premieres Friday. “The Last Tycoon” stars Matt Bomer as Monroe Stahr, the brilliant, enigmatic and tragic movie executive modeled on Thalberg. “He was a genius,” said celebrated screenwriter Ben Hecht (“The Front Page”) of Thalberg. “He lived two-thirds of the time in the projection room. He saw only movies . . . But he knew what shadows could do.” Thalberg was also a man in a hurry. Born in Brooklyn in 1899 with a congenital heart deformity, he knew he could die at any time. After graduating from Bushwick High School, he skipped college and applied for a job at Universal Studios in New York. Its founder, Carl Laemmle, liked the young man, who was always the last to leave the office. When Laemmle left for California in 1920, he took Thalberg, his personal secretary, with him, then promoted him to general manager of the studio. Thalberg was 20.
Louis B. Mayer, the ferocious founder of MGM, also recognized Thalberg’s talents. He lured him away from Universal in 1923, offering him money and power as the head of production. With his talent for storytelling — and his eye for charismatic young actors — Thalberg made MGM the most successful studio of the 1920s and ’30s. Under his watch, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Myrna Loy and John Barrymore all became stars. Thalberg produced 400 movies, including the original “Ben-Hur,” “The Broadway Melody,” “Anna Christie,” “Grand Hotel” and “The Barretts of Wimpole Street.”
Mayer and other rough-hewn Hollywood moguls prized his taste, refinement and charm. Women adored him, and after several affairs he married Norma Shearer, one of the most beautiful stars in Hollywood.
They had a spectacular beach house in Santa Monica, Calif., where they threw lavish parties. Fitzgerald attended one in 1931 and got plastered. He brought the party to a halt by singing to Shearer’s poodle. Many hosts would have shown this sloppy drunk the door. But Thalberg let Fitzgerald wind it up; he admired good writers and tolerated their demons.
Still, he didn’t rise to the top of Hollywood without being ruthless. If writers didn’t deliver, he fired them. He drove directors to the point of nervous exhaustion, demanding endless retakes until a scene played just as he wanted it.
But Thalberg had a weakness: his health. A heart attack forced him to take a sabbatical in Europe. Mayer (fictionalized by Fitzgerald as Pat Brady and played by Kelsey Grammer in the miniseries), threatened by Thalberg’s power and demands, took advantage of his absence and demoted him to producer. Too sick to fight, Thalberg turned to what he did best, making movies, including “Mutiny on the Bounty” and “The Good Earth.”
In 1936, over the Labor Day weekend, Thalberg caught pneumonia. He died a week later at the age of 37.
“Thalberg has always fascinated me,” Fitzgerald once wrote to an editor. “His peculiar charm, his extraordinary good looks, his bountiful success . . . he is one of the half-dozen men I have known who were built on a grand scale.”