Books by critic Kenneth Turan and actor Rupert Everett show two sides of Hollywood
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Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. We are now well past Oscar season. And so the movie business, with all its weird quirks and gigantic corporate machinations, moves on. So we've got two books for you today looking at the movie business from completely different angles.

Up ahead, the actor Rupert Everett, who you might recognize from My Best Friend's Wedding or the Ridley Scott movie Napoleon, has written a hilarious book of short stories inspired by his time in showbiz.

But first, show business as we know it wouldn't exist without super powerful Hollywood moguls in the background running things. Film critic Kenneth Turan, who has been a regular critic on NPR's air, has a new book out about two of them who turned MGM into a powerhouse in the 1920s and 30s.

The book is called Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, The Whole Equation. And Pierre Scott Simon talks to Turan about how this unlikely duo climbed the ranks in Hollywood and how they crafted how we see ourselves as Americans. That's ahead.

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and in fact was often mistaken for the office boy. But together, they made Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer... the great Hollywood film factory of the 1920s through the 30s, turning out musicals that lifted the Depression and epics that stirred hopes. Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, The Whole Equation, is the new book by Kenneth Duran, longtime critic for the Los Angeles Times...

and National Public Radio. It's part of the Yale Press' Jewish Live series. And Ken joins us now from our studios in Culver City, California. Thanks so much for being with us. It's great to be here, Scott. Louis B. Mayer, immigrant family from Ukraine, and his father's scrap metal business at the age of 12. How did he become a Hollywood mogul?

It's a very good question. I think sometimes he must have asked himself the same question because it's such an unlikely trajectory. But he kind of stumbled into the movie business as many of the original moguls did. They were looking for anything that made money. And the movies were making money even in their earliest days. And he turned out to have a gift for it. And, you know, for seven consecutive years, newspapers reported him as the man with the highest salary in the entire country.

And Irving Thalberg, born to a New York German Jewish family and born with a congenital heart disease. He, I think at the age of 19, became a secretary in the film company. How did he rise so high so quickly? Thalberg had this almost innate gift for story and for what audiences would like.

The line is he ran Universal before he was old enough to sign the checks. He was just a phenomenon. Let me ask you about some of the films they made. Ben-Hur, and I don't mean the Charlton Heston one, but Ben-Hur, A Tale of the Christ, a silent film, 1925, Ramon Navarro as Ben-Hur. Crowd scenes are amazing, aren't they? They are. They're quite spectacular. I mean, even by today's standards, you look at them and you say, wow. Because this was before CGI. I mean, how did they do it?

Well, they didn't have CGI, but they did it two ways. First of all, they did gather a lot of people. Great film historian Kevin Brownlow discovered this. They were very shrewd at finding things that they would place in front of the camera, special props that made it look like there were a lot of people. They could manipulate these things. Ultimately, they grabbed people off the streets close to where this was being filmed and said, you know, come inside and watch a movie. Yeah.

Anna Christie. I mean, what a gimmick. Garbo talks. Give me a whiskey. Ginger it on the side. And all three stems, you baby. I shouldn't call it a gimmick, should I? No, no. I mean, the gimmick is the ad campaign, Garbo Talks. There's a story that when Garbo met the man who came up with that line, she looked at him and said, aren't you ashamed? Yeah.

Greta Garbo was a huge star at MGM in the silent era, and they were very careful about how they were going to transition her to sound. And Anna Christie, the O'Neill play, very celebrated play that had been filmed once before, and it was about an immigrant. So the fact that she spoke accent in English was exactly what was called for. So that's how they picked it, and it turned out to be a huge hit for her.

I have to ask about anti-Semitism in Hollywood because there are some very prominent people. And I'm thinking now of a bishop of Los Angeles who did not like Hollywood films and blamed what they did on, and I'm going to quote the L.A. bishop, Jewish studio owners.

This was one of the surprises for me in researching the book. I mean, I always knew that there was some anti-Semitism in America at the time. But the extent of it and the extent of it as it applied to Mayer and Thalberg really surprised me. And Mayer and Thalberg, they just kind of shrugged it off. You know, this was business as usual for them. They weren't surprised by it. They weren't happy about it. But they just knew this was something they had to endure. Another film I want to ask about. Hey!

Ah, the sound of a weekend edition editorial meeting. Tarzan the Ape Man, played by Johnny Weissmuller, who will forever be the best-known graduate of Senn High School in Chicago. I say that as a Senn grad myself.

This was a famous British novel that the studio put together. And what did they do? They created a franchise. They created a huge franchise, you know, and it's a very interesting story because other people had made Tarzan movies before MGM. But Mayer and Thalberg didn't really care. They felt that their touch would make a difference. And these other movies would just disappear into, you know, the cosmos, which is what happened. And then Irving Thalberg, I think this is Ben Hex's phrase, caught cold and died.

Right? Yes. Yes. He had a heart condition. He was always frail. I mean, people thought that he would die young from, you know, when he was born, right?

And it turned out he died of pneumonia. And, you know, at that period of time, just coming into use were what they call sulfa drugs, things like penicillin. They were practically experimental drugs, but they were being used. But his wife, Norma Shearer, who was a big actress, she was uncertain. But finally, they voted no on the sulfa drugs.

And Thalberg died, and she held herself responsible for a certain period of time. Even though everyone knew that he might die young, it still was a huge shock to Hollywood when he died. It is painful to read about Louis B. Mayer's relationship with Judy Garland. On the one hand, they meant a lot to each other. On the other hand... You know, that's a very sad story.

She wrote an autobiography in which she said, you know, it was not published, but Gerald Frank, who wrote this classic biography of her, uncovered this

You know, where she said that he would molest her. You know, he would say, you know, you sing from the heart. And he put his hand on her breast to kind of emphasize where the heart was. They had a really toxic relationship, even though they meant a lot to each other. It's really one of these puzzling relationships. Did Thalberg and Mayer create what I'll call the American dream factory that became just part of what America is around the world to so many people?

I think so. I mean, there were key players in it. A lot of people, you know, helped contribute to it. Obviously, they wanted films to make money. They were not public servants. They wanted a profit. But they really believed that film could create a culture, could do good in the world. And they really, in a lot of their films, they attempted to do that. They felt that this was something movies could do. Ken, I got to ask. You and a lot of other people in Southern California suffered a serious loss recently. What happened? How are you doing?

Well, you know, my house and everything in it, 40 years of things my wife and I have, you know, gathered together, they're all gone. And you try to move on because there's no other choice. That stuff is not coming back. Kenneth Duran, his new book, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, The Whole Equation. Thank you so much for being with us. Scott, it's been a pleasure to talk to you, really.

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All right, if you run the numbers, most of moviemaking has got to be rejection, right? It's grinding it out, trying to get your ideas out there, being told no by some higher up, and starting over again from square one. Rupert Everett's new short story collection is titled The American No, and it's versions of stories he was trying to pitch as movies, but they never worked out as such. Here's NPR's Scott Simon again.

Rupert Everett, I just want you to know I think The American Know is the best book of stories I've read since Chekhov. There are great possibilities in here. We are all very excited, and you'll be hearing from us very soon. Oh, I'm speechless. The title of Rupert Everett's book, The American Know, is taken from the way American film producers lavish praise on a writer or actor during a meeting and then are never heard from again.

He's written eight stories kindled by ideas that never quite caught fire after such meetings, and they may make you wonder why. Rupert Everett, the actor, has, of course, dazzled on screen for years. Another Country, My Best Friend's Wedding, A Couple of Shreks, The Happy Prince, which he also wrote and directed, and he joins us from the BBC in London. Thanks so much for being with us, Mr. Everett. Thank you very much for having me. Please tell us about this film.

I'll just say distinctive encounter in Soho that you had that led to this book of stories. Well, actually, that I have to confess is also a story, but it was inspired by a kind of real event as well. What happened was I was sitting there one day wondering about my life and what to do next and how to make the next step.

And, you know, frustrated because I had planned to have a career as a writer, actor, director.

It kind of half happened. And then, you know, I pitched and pitched and pitched all my various ideas across this century and a bit of the last. And only one of them really ever managed to make it to the first night. My only film, The Happy Prince. And the others, of course, rested in either just in my head or in screenplay form. And the point about screenplays is if they're not made, they literally don't exist. They're not even ghosts.

And that's frustrating because you put in a lot of energy into ideas and stories and then they just die. Then I had the idea of writing them up into a book of short stories to at least –

give myself a sense of some kind of achievement for them, that they could have some kind of flickering existence at least. The longest story in the collection, a lot about show business, first it's entitled Cuddles and Associates. That's a corporate name, isn't it? Yes, it's called the CAA of the Egg, Sperm and Womb World.

We will explain a – well, I'll get you to explain it because, frankly, it's hazardous for me. Well, all these stories are kind of autobiographical in a way because they all star me as the central character. And so the me in this story is a young, ambitious –

useless actor who arrives in Hollywood in the early 80s and doesn't really manage to get any traction at all and ends up working in the mailroom at William Morris, at which point he comes across

a big matinee idol movie star who is kind of on the skids. This movie star's broke. He's got alimony from two marriages already. He's got mortgages, everything. He's got no money at all and he's not working. And my character manages to sell his sperm to a Turkish supermarket owner's wife. The supermarket owner is a little bit impotent and she's desperate. She's his second wife and she wants to have a child.

And so I arrange for this movie star to give her his sperm. Oh, mercy.

Can I ask you about the way you grew up? I grew up in a military family. A lot of my family are Anglo-Indian. My grandfather was born in India. My great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather, I think, both died in India. But, yeah, I come from a military naval background, very, very straight, very conventional military.

And aged about six, I discovered Julie Andrews. You know, I think it's very difficult for people to imagine now what it was like for our generation who had no recourse to moving images, no television at first. The cinema was in the local town. And my first visit to a, you know, classic provincial cinema, you know, those huge old places with dress circles and upper circles, was

Slightly smelling of sex and toilet cleaner and where couples would go and make out in the back row and families would sit at the front. I saw Mary Poppins and it really, that was one of the most important creative moments, I think, in my life. Julie Andrews became...

Well, my mother. I decided she was my mother, in fact. And I decided I was Julie Andrews' daughter. And my mother had thrown away an old tweed skirt, and I wore this skirt religiously. And years later, of course, I had a wonderful payoff to this childhood fantasy because I got the part in

Andrei Konchalovsky's film Duet for One, where Julie Andrews was playing the cellist Jacqueline Dupre, who died of multiple sclerosis, and I got to play her protege. So it was very exciting, and it was the beginning of a real relationship with Julie that has spanned three films, and I adore her. When she goes, I'm going. There's a line that you use to talk about

how the theater, how film opened up a world for you. It was a world with all the dials turned up. Is it still that way? Well, I don't really know what it's like now because, you know, when you get older in it, you're kind of settled within your own kind of inverted glitter ball. And I don't really know what's going on in the real world of show business anymore because, you know, I quite often luckily get wheeled out to do something. But...

I'm not really kind of in the thick of it, I wouldn't say. But I think the dials are turned up. Well, maybe they've been turned down a little bit more recently. In the old days, it was an extravagant world. It was very exciting. You know, you got totally lost in it. Writer, occasionally director and actor Rupert Everett, his new collection of stories, The American No. Thank you so much for being with us. Thank you very much for having me.

That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. If you want more, you can sign up for our newsletter at npr.org slash newsletter slash books. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The podcast is produced by Danica Panetta and Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Mayer. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Adriana Gallardo, Lindsay Tati, Courtney Dornan, Alejandra Marquez, Taylor Haney, Ashley Montgomery, Dee Parvaz, Michael Radcliffe, Fernando Naruman, and Shannon Rhodes. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer.

Thanks for listening.

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