Beachwood Drive is one of the main roads into the Hollywood Hills and is a popular one for tourists as it sits directly beneath the Hollywood sign. This shot was taken at the intersection of Beachwood and Graciosa Drives in 1960, where the sign is hard to miss. I suppose if you lived there, you’d see the iconic sign so much that you’d end up not seeing it at all, but personally I can’t imagine looking out my window and not getting a thrill.
That same view in January 2018 where we can see that the trees and greenery have obscured the view of the sign.
And here we have a photo taken while driving through Anaheim to Disneyland. The billboard alerts people to take Harbor Blvd to get to Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom. The car parked on the roadside is a Chrysler Town and Country convertible, circa late 1940s. Disneyland opened in 1955 so maybe the Chrysler was abandoned! These days, Angelenos take the Santa Ana Freeway, which if 5 or 6 lanes in each direction so it’s odd to see that back then the road didn’t even have a curb or a sealed shoulder! As I write this, Disneyland is closing down because of the coronavirus pandemic. It’s only the third time it’s happened in the 65 years that Disneyland has been closed. (The other times were the day of President Kennedy’s assassination, the Northridge earthquake of 1994, and after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.)
What the off-ramp road to Disney (appropriately called Disneyland Drive) looks like in 2020
The word “hoosegow” was a popular slang term in the 1920s and 30s meaning “jail.” But why anybody thought a jail-themed café would make a fun night out is a mystery to me. But the owner of the Hoosegow Café at 7732 Washington Boulevard in Culver City (putting it roughly a mile west of MGM) apparently thought that serving chicken and steak dinners in a jail setting was a great idea. Nor was he the only one. This photo was taken circa late 1920s and at around this time there was also a “Jail Café” at 4212 Sunset Boulevard. Given that this was during Prohibition, perhaps this mini-trend meant that Angelenos treated the idea of jail time as a bit of a joke.
As an author, you never know where or how inspiration is going to hit, but in my experience, you do know when. Back in July 2017, a friend and fellow golden-era-Hollywood fan, Debra Fryd, said to me in an email, “Someone should write a novel about Irving Thalberg. From what I understand he was a complex man and I’d love to read a book that digs into who he was and what he was about.” A little bell inside me went ting! and I thought, Debra’s right. Irving would make a great subject.
Irving Thalberg, head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios
If you’re not sure who he was but his name sounds familiar, it’s probably because of the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, which is an honorary Oscar given to “creative producers, whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production.” (See here for a list of recipients.)
He was also held in such esteem that when, in 1938, MGM opened a new executive administration building, they called it the Thalberg Building, which is still on the studio lot in Culver City.
The Thalberg Building on the MGM studio lot, 1942
As MGM’s head of production, Thalberg shepherded 90 movies to the screen, many of which are now considered to be among the finest that Hollywood has ever produced. Check out his credits on IMDB and you’ll see what I mean.
My next thought was, But a novel about Thalberg has been done already. Back in 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald was working on a novel about Thalberg called The Last Tycoon, but he died before finishing it. It was published posthumously in 1941.
First edition cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, 1941
I figured if Fitzgerald had already written the definitive Thalberg novel, what was the point of my even trying? But I’d never read The Last Tycoon, so I got a copy at my local library.
Yes.
Well.
I lasted about 30 pages.
I had little idea what was going on. Or who these characters were. Or what the point was to any of the scenes. To be fair, Fitzgerald hadn’t finished the novel, but still. It wasn’t readable—at least not to my eyeballs. More importantly, it wasn’t anything like the novel I had in mind. So on I forged, determined to tell Irving Thalberg’s remarkable story my way.
And now, here we are, 32 months later, and I’m ready to reveal some details of my upcoming novel about M.G.M.’s “Boy Wonder,” who was only 24 when he became head of production at an also-ran outfit that would soon become “the Tiffany of studios” where there were “more stars than there are in heaven.”
THE HEART OF THE LION
A novel of Irving Thalberg’s Hollywood
by
Martin Turnbull
The idea behind this cover is that Thalberg preferred to remain in the background. Seeking the spotlight wasn’t his style so he never claimed screen credit because, to quote the man himself, “Credit you give yourself is not worth having.” That’s why the cover portrays him as a hazy silhouette. However, his influence was so great that during his lifetime, he cast a long shadow over Hollywood, which is why his shadow reaches from him into the soundstage, pointing to a movie camera with “MGM” stenciled on the side.
Thalberg is in silhouette because he kept largely to himself. Consequently, he was an enigma, even to the people he worked closely with. It’s one of the reasons I was inspired to write this novel: so that readers would feel they’ve become more familiar with a man whose influence on the Hollywood motion picture industry was unparalleled during his lifetime—and for years afterward.
(If you’re curious about the cover art process, you can see a “before” (aka my not-very-good pencil sketch) and “after” side-by-side comparison here.)
~oOo~
Here is the book description:
Lose yourself in the Golden Age of Hollywood—and discover the story of the man who helped create it.
Hollywood in the 1920s: the motion picture industry is booming, and Irving Thalberg knows it takes more than guts and gumption to create screen magic that will live forever. He’s climbed all the way to head of production at newly merged Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and is determined to transform Leo the Lion into an icon of the most successful studio in town.
The harder he works, the higher he soars. But at what cost? The more he achieves, the closer he risks flying into oblivion. A frail and faulty heart shudders inside this chest that blazes with ambition. Thalberg knows that his charmed life at the top of the Hollywood heap is a dangerous tightrope walk: each day—each breath, even—could be his last. Shooting for success means risking his health, friendships, everything. Yet, against all odds, the man no one thought would survive into adulthood almost single-handedly ushers in a new era of filmmaking.
This is Hollywood at its most daring and opulent—the Sunset Strip, premieres at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, stars like Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford—and Irving is at the center of it all.
From the author of the Hollywood’s Garden of Allah novels comes a mesmerizing story of the man behind Golden Age mythmaking: Irving Thalberg, the prince of Tinseltown.
~
The Heart of the Lion is due for release in June 2020
~
Thoughts? Impressions? Reactions? Dislikes? Questions? or quibbles? I’d love to hear from you, whatever they may be, so feel free to leave a comment.
When I came across this circa 1937 photo of Hollywood Boulevard looking east from Sycamore Ave, the first thing I noticed was how those palm trees on the left and that building on the right are both still there. That doesn’t happen often with vintage photos of L.A. The second thing I noticed was the Owl Drug Co. store on the right. There was another one 10 blocks east on the Vine St corner so I’m guessing that they really were e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e. One of these days, I hope to find a listing of all Owl Drug Co locations in L.A. circa mid 1930s because I’m guessing that list will take up a whole page of the L.A. City Directory.
The same view in April 2018 (ironically the traffic was lighter!)
Poor ol’ Fatty Arbuckle. In the early 1920s, a series of highly publicized rape trials in which he was found innocent irreparably damaged his reputation and he was held up but the more conservative elements as an example of the worst of Hollywood’s deviant excesses. With his movie career in tatters, he opened up a place at 7600 Washington Boulevard on August 2nd, 1928. It wasn’t too far from M.G.M. and he called it the Plantation Club (presumably because it looked like a Tara-style home on a Southern plantation.) As we can see from the sign, he used his real name—Roscoe Arbuckle—because by then “Fatty” was too notorious. And he might have made a real go of it. It opened to great success, his Hollywood pals rallying around him. But then the Depression hit and he was wiped out all over again.
There are a couple of things worth noting in this photo of Hollywood Blvd looking east in 1934: on the left, the vacant lot next to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre is a parking lot called System Auto Parks which offers all-day parking on Hollywood Blvd for 15 cents. The banner across the street is for a Fox film starring Loretta Young called “The White Parade.” It’s a movie about student nurses (the white in the title refers to their uniform) but I suspect is a movie title like that wouldn’t fly these days. Context is everything!
In this circa 1938 shot of the Vine Street Brown Derby in Hollywood, we can see that it was still sandwiched by the Eddie Cantor gift shop to the north and the Satyr Book Shop to the south. But if you look more closely to where the awning stretches the width of the sidewalk, we can see two large white dots, about the size of dinner plates at around knee height. Is that a derby-shaped silhouette we’re seeing? Were they always there? I’ve never noticed them before!
** UPDATE ** : Here’s a close-up of those derby-shaped blocks. Turns out they were planters:
Apparently, it pays well to spread the good word. This is a circa 1930 shot of the 4,400-square-foot Moorish Revival castle on Lake Elsinore (southeast of Los Angeles) that Aimee Semple McPherson built as a retreat in the late 1920s. At the time, she was a very popular and influential Pentecostal evangelist and media celebrity, and famous for her Foursquare Church in the Echo Park area of Los Angeles. McPherson lived in what became known as “Aimee’s Castle” until 1939. In the 2000s it underwent a complete restoration by Foursquare International, a modern incarnation of McPherson’s Foursquare Gospel. The L.A. Times did a story on it which has some rather fabulous photos of how it looks now: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-home-20100509-story.html
By the late 1910s, Charlie Chaplin had become so big that he built his own studio on La Brea Ave, south of Hollywood Blvd, which included six English-style buildings described by the Los Angeles Times reported as “arranged as to give the effect of a picturesque English village street.” The project was completed in 1919 and is where Chaplin filmed many of his classic films. This photo was taken circa mid 1920s and the buildings have—miraculously—remained unchanged during the intervening 100 years. It’s how home to Jim Henson’s Muppets.
That same view in March 2019 (note the big Kermit the Frog statue!)
Beachwood Drive is one of the main roads into the Hollywood Hills and is a popular one for tourists as it sits directly beneath the Hollywood sign. This shot was taken at the intersection of Beachwood and Graciosa Drives in 1960, where the sign is hard to miss. I suppose if you lived there, you’d see the iconic sign so much that you’d end up not seeing it at all, but personally I can’t imagine looking out my window and not getting a thrill.
And here we have a photo taken while driving through Anaheim to Disneyland. The billboard alerts people to take Harbor Blvd to get to Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom. The car parked on the roadside is a Chrysler Town and Country convertible, circa late 1940s. Disneyland opened in 1955 so maybe the Chrysler was abandoned! These days, Angelenos take the Santa Ana Freeway, which if 5 or 6 lanes in each direction so it’s odd to see that back then the road didn’t even have a curb or a sealed shoulder! As I write this, Disneyland is closing down because of the coronavirus pandemic. It’s only the third time it’s happened in the 65 years that Disneyland has been closed. (The other times were the day of President Kennedy’s assassination, the Northridge earthquake of 1994, and after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.)
The word “hoosegow” was a popular slang term in the 1920s and 30s meaning “jail.” But why anybody thought a jail-themed café would make a fun night out is a mystery to me. But the owner of the Hoosegow Café at 7732 Washington Boulevard in Culver City (putting it roughly a mile west of MGM) apparently thought that serving chicken and steak dinners in a jail setting was a great idea. Nor was he the only one. This photo was taken circa late 1920s and at around this time there was also a “Jail Café” at 4212 Sunset Boulevard. Given that this was during Prohibition, perhaps this mini-trend meant that Angelenos treated the idea of jail time as a bit of a joke.
When I came across this circa 1937 photo of Hollywood Boulevard looking east from Sycamore Ave, the first thing I noticed was how those palm trees on the left and that building on the right are both still there. That doesn’t happen often with vintage photos of L.A. The second thing I noticed was the Owl Drug Co. store on the right. There was another one 10 blocks east on the Vine St corner so I’m guessing that they really were e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e. One of these days, I hope to find a listing of all Owl Drug Co locations in L.A. circa mid 1930s because I’m guessing that list will take up a whole page of the L.A. City Directory.
Poor ol’ Fatty Arbuckle. In the early 1920s, a series of highly publicized rape trials in which he was found innocent irreparably damaged his reputation and he was held up but the more conservative elements as an example of the worst of Hollywood’s deviant excesses. With his movie career in tatters, he opened up a place at 7600 Washington Boulevard on August 2nd, 1928. It wasn’t too far from M.G.M. and he called it the Plantation Club (presumably because it looked like a Tara-style home on a Southern plantation.) As we can see from the sign, he used his real name—Roscoe Arbuckle—because by then “Fatty” was too notorious. And he might have made a real go of it. It opened to great success, his Hollywood pals rallying around him. But then the Depression hit and he was wiped out all over again.
There are a couple of things worth noting in this photo of Hollywood Blvd looking east in 1934: on the left, the vacant lot next to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre is a parking lot called System Auto Parks which offers all-day parking on Hollywood Blvd for 15 cents. The banner across the street is for a Fox film starring Loretta Young called “The White Parade.” It’s a movie about student nurses (the white in the title refers to their uniform) but I suspect is a movie title like that wouldn’t fly these days. Context is everything!
In this circa 1938 shot of the Vine Street Brown Derby in Hollywood, we can see that it was still sandwiched by the Eddie Cantor gift shop to the north and the Satyr Book Shop to the south. But if you look more closely to where the awning stretches the width of the sidewalk, we can see two large white dots, about the size of dinner plates at around knee height. Is that a derby-shaped silhouette we’re seeing? Were they always there? I’ve never noticed them before!
Apparently, it pays well to spread the good word. This is a circa 1930 shot of the 4,400-square-foot Moorish Revival castle on Lake Elsinore (southeast of Los Angeles) that Aimee Semple McPherson built as a retreat in the late 1920s. At the time, she was a very popular and influential Pentecostal evangelist and media celebrity, and famous for her Foursquare Church in the Echo Park area of Los Angeles. McPherson lived in what became known as “Aimee’s Castle” until 1939. In the 2000s it underwent a complete restoration by Foursquare International, a modern incarnation of McPherson’s Foursquare Gospel. The L.A. Times did a story on it which has some rather fabulous photos of how it looks now: 
By the late 1910s, Charlie Chaplin had become so big that he built his own studio on La Brea Ave, south of Hollywood Blvd, which included six English-style buildings described by the Los Angeles Times reported as “arranged as to give the effect of a picturesque English village street.” The project was completed in 1919 and is where Chaplin filmed many of his classic films. This photo was taken circa mid 1920s and the buildings have—miraculously—remained unchanged during the intervening 100 years. It’s how home to Jim Henson’s Muppets.