WHIZ KID

What Old Hollywood’s “boy genius” understood.

- BY ADAM GOPNIK

The afterlife of the great American movie moguls is uncertain. Way back when, you might one day be on the cover of Time, the next day lost to time. Some who were once famous and feared, like Harry Cohn, of Columbia Pictures, have vanished into the sands. Sam Goldwyn persists only after having been made into a Yogi Berra, good for sideways wisdom—“Include me out,” and so on. But Irving Thalberg, the head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the nineteen-twenties and thirties, left a lasting echo, in part because he died young enough to be remembered romantically, but mostly because he was the model for the title character of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel “The Last Tycoon” (1941). Indeed, Kenneth Turan’s “Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation,” from Yale University Press's Jewish Lives series, takes its subtitle from Fitzgerald’s posthumously published roman à clef. “Not a half dozen men have been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads,” Fitzgerald’s narrator, Cecilia Brady, the daughter of a character based on the studio’s boss, Mayer (his ethnicity switched from Jewish to Irish), explains of the Thalberg character, who can.

Thalberg produced some three or four hundred movies in his years at M-G-M, ranging from big pictures like “Mutiny on the Bounty” to the Marx Brothers’ late-career hit, “A Night at the Opera,” though he left his name on almost none. (“Praise you give yourself is worthless,” he said.) It was Fitzgerald who fixed Thalberg, as Monroe Stahr, in the world’s imagination as a type: the sensitive boy genius who knew the secrets of storytelling in a new technology and tried patiently to share them with a stuffy literary establishment. The type endures into our own tech era.