Irving Thalberg

Norma Shearer, Irving, Ria and Clark, 1932.

MGM producer Irving Thalberg died 74 years ago today. If it wasn’t for Irving, many classic stars would have never made the marquee–Clark included. As MGM’s “boy wonder” head of production, Irving oversaw  many of Clark’s pictures, including The Secret Six, A Free Soul, Possessed, Strange Interlude,  Mutiny on the Bounty and China Seas. He was never listed as a producer in the credits of any of the pictures he produced, stating that “credit you give yourself isn’t worth having.”

Following his death, the Academy created the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award in his honor. It is presented to “creative producers whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production.” Francis Ford Coppola is set to receive the award on November 13 of this year. You can learn more about the history of the award here. I found it interesting that his widow, actress (and frequent Clark costar) Norma Shearer disliked the initial design of the award so much that she commissioned a sculptor herself to redesign it–and not only that, sent the new design to the past winners!

Here is a memorial piece that appeared in the November 1936 issue of Photoplay Magazine:

As we go to press comes the dreadful news that Irving Thalberg has died.

This one of the greatest losses, not alone to Hollywood, but to the world, that could be sustained.

He was a great artist. He was a great producer. He was a very great man. The influence of his death on Hollywood is impossible to estimate. He stood for the very best in pictures. Irving Thalberg was one of the few men in the motion picture industry who considered that nothing was too good for the public. He believed the world responded to intelligence, beauty and good taste, and his personal fortune attested to the rightness of this theory.

Everyone in the trade believed him wrong when he announced his plans for his current production, “Romeo and Juliet”. “Mutiny on the Bounty” was considred a terrific gamble, but, today, with their creator gone, those two pictures chant his praise in terms of their beauty, their truth and their art.

Thsoe two pictures are a very small measure of the scores of beautiful productions he gave the world. And the scores of pictures he produced show only one facet of the man as a great person.

To Norma Shearer, he was the sum of life. He was her husband, her love, her children’s father–and even more important, her one great friend.

People said of Norma that she had everything. She did, while she had Irving Thalberg. She proved over and over aain that he was all in all to her. Twice she interrupted her career to bear his children. A few years ago, when rest was ordered for him, Norma, without a thought, gave up her personal plans to spend months abroad with him. Never has there been any thought of her career versus Irving. To Norma her career was Irving. He lived and died pictures, and because of that, she wanted to be a success in pictures.

To his studio he was a guiding star to heights which that studio could not have attained without him. Oh, he was not without his crtics. There were those inevitably disgruntled ones who said he spent too much money, that he worked by the trial and error method.  But while they grumbled there was no way in which they could alibi away his consistent success with every medium of entertainment.

Things weren’t always easy for him, either. Political factions are bound to arise around a position as great as his. A few years ago he found himself given four stars who were considered completely passe. He was told to make a picture with those four. They were the Marx brothers and the picture Irving made was “A Night at the Opera””–one of the most hilarious films ever screened. It brought the Marxes back to fame. It left Thalberg untouched in his primary simplicity.

That, really, was his secret. He was completely sincere, utterly unaffected. His was the simple and pure wish to do anything he did the very best he could. He was the pure in heart and against such the world is powerless to harm. He understood equally well the temperament of actors, writers, and the humbler laborers around the studio. All could go to him with their troubles, and nearly all of them did. He sympathized and advised, directed and helped. Because of his generosity of spirit, Metro never had trouble with its actors. There were no contract quarrels. no “walkoffs”. He could soothe the most troubled back to peace.

He died at the moment of his greatest triumph, reading international acclaim of his production and Norma’s acting in “Romeo and Juliet”. He was thirty-seven years old.

He left behind him four unfinished productions, “The Good Earth” in the cutting room; “A Day at the Races” and “Maytime” which were shooting; and “Camille”, almost entirely finished. The variety of these productions–drama, comedy, musical and historical melodrama–reveals why replacing him in the Hollywood scheme will be almost impossible.

His passing came one September morning a half-hour before the stock exchange closed in New York City, three thousand miles away, yet in those few moments the news traveled eastward with a speed that shook the financial capitol and sent his company’s stock tumbling by half a dozen points.

He had been ill for little less than a week with a cold that developed into pneumonia. he had the mind of a genius and the heart of a saint but they availed him not in the least against lungs that were too frail.

Tragic Norma Shearer has this one comfort. Hollywood can never forget Irving Thalberg–not as long as beauty, and truth, and fidelity, and simplicity stay alive in the world.

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For more on Thalberg, I recommend Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince and Hollywood Dreams Made Real: Irving Thalberg and the Rise of M-G-M.

The gallery is back up! Finally! I am still playing with the the layout, but it is at least up and functioning–with new pictures!