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baffled, hurt. Even in their heyday, however, they were continually being surprised. Louis B. Mayer, for example, saw little future for any actor with the protruding ears of Clark Gable; he opposed one of Gable’s first great triumphs, Mutiny on the Bounty, because he thought the public would never approve of a rebel as a hero. He even rejected a proposal to help finance Mickey Mouse, on the ground that, as he told Walt Disney, “every woman is frightened of a mouse.”
    Mayer did not read scripts or scenarios, much less books, so when some story had to be officially considered, it was acted out for him by a kind of minnesinger named Kate Corbaley, who was paid to tell him stories just as his mother had done years earlier in New Brunswick. One afternoon in May of 1936, Miss Corbaley told Mayer a new story about a tempestuous southern girl named Scarlett O’Hara, and Louis B. Mayer sagely nodded his million-dollar-a-year head and said, “Let’s ask Irving.”
    A summons was issued for Irving Thalberg, the frail and sickly production chief, who was mainly responsible for Mayer’s success at M-G-M. Thalberg had started in New York as a twenty-five-dollar-per-week secretary in the offices of Carl Laemmle. He soon became Laemmle’s chief adjutant at Universal, but when he declined an invitation to marry Laemmle’s eager daughter, Rosabelle, the slighted father made Thalberg’s life so disagreeable that he found himself a new job as vice-president in the fledgling operations of Louis B. Mayer, who offered him six hundred dollars a week and stock options and no marriage proposals. In fact, Mayer warned his twenty-three-year-old protégé that he didn’t want a son-in-law with a weak heart. “If a romance developed between you and either of my girls . . .” he said. “I can’t allow it to happen.”
    While Thalberg lived, he was Hollywood’s supreme wunderkind, the producer who not only kept raking in money but turned out those self-important M-G-M epics like The Barretts of Wimpole Street and The Good Earth, and the Romeo and Juliet that featured Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer. “I, more than any single person in Hollywood, have my finger on the pulse of America,” Thalberg once said. “I know what people will do and what they won’t do.” After his death at thirty-six, he became Hollywood’s lost hero, its martyr. When Scott Fitzgerald returned to work at M-G-M for the last time in 1939, he recreated the vanished Thalberg as Monroe Stahr in his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. Recalling a rare encounter in the M-G-M commissary back in 1927, Fitzgerald included almost verbatim in his novel something that Thalberg had told him about the essence of authority: A road has to be built over a mountain, and surveyors arrive with plans for several possible routes. “You say, ‘Well, I think we will put the road there’ . . . and you know in your secret heart that you have no reason for putting the road there rather than in several other different courses, but you’re the only person that knows that you don’t know why you’re doing it and you’ve got to stick to that and you’ve got to pretend that you know and that you did it for specific reasons, even though you’re utterly assailed by doubts.”
    Thalberg was the Hollywood executive who said of Warner Bros.’ first talking film, The Jazz Singer, that “talking pictures are just a passing fad.” And his sense for “the pulse of America” was well expressed when he dismissed an assistant’s protests about a scenario that called for a love scene in Paris to be played against a background of a moonlit ocean. The assistant brought him maps and photographs to demonstrate that Paris is nowhere near any ocean. “We can’t cater to a handful of people who know Paris,” said Thalberg, refusing to make any