Doctors gave Irving Thalberg until thirty; he ran MGM at twenty-six
Born with a heart defect that doctors expected to kill him young, Irving Thalberg answered a newspaper advert asking fifteen dollars a week for secretarial work. Within a few years he was running production at MGM, overseeing hundreds of films and inventing habits Hollywood still uses, like the sneak preview.
Thalberg was born in Brooklyn on May 30, 1899, to German Jewish immigrants. Soon after birth he was diagnosed with blue baby syndrome, and specialists told the family he might reach twenty, perhaps thirty. At 17 rheumatic fever kept him in bed for a year. His mother brought lessons and tutors home, and he filled the time reading novels, plays, biographies and philosophy, including William James.
Reading Upton Sinclair and Bernard Shaw briefly made him a socialist. In 1917 he wrote speeches for the mayoral candidate Morris Hillquit and gave street-corner talks in Union Square despite harassment from Tammany Hall enforcers. Hillquit lost, and Thalberg came away disillusioned with politics. Too frail for college, he clerked in shops by day and learned typing, shorthand and Spanish at night school.
The advert worked. He became a secretary at Universal's New York office, then assistant to its founder Carl Laemmle, earning 25 dollars a week for sharp notes on screenings. Laemmle left him to watch over the Los Angeles lot, and Thalberg rose to studio manager, supervising about a hundred pictures in three years, The Hunchback of Notre Dame among them.
He then joined Louis B. Mayer, and when Mayer's studio merged with two others to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Thalberg became head of production in 1925. Over twelve years he produced some four hundred films, from Grand Hotel to Mutiny on the Bounty, and pioneered story conferences with writers, test screenings and heavy reshooting. He helped write the Production Code on screen morality and shaped the careers of stars including Greta Garbo, Clark Gable and Norma Shearer, whom he married. He died on September 14, 1936, aged 37. Since 1937 the Academy has handed out an award in his name to producers of consistently high-quality work.
Source: Irving Thalberg
