The Two Larger-Than-Life Jews Who Made Hollywood a Larger-Than-Life Place

In his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald modeled his protagonist, Monroe Stahr, on the great producer of early Hollywood, Irving Thalberg (1899–1936). Stahr, writes Emil Stern, is “described admiringly as ‘a rationalist who did his own reasoning without benefit of books—and had just managed to climb out of a thousand years of Jewry into the late 18th century.’” Elsewhere in the novel, Fitzgerald observes “that the Jews in Hollywood were one generation from being chased by Cossacks on horseback; now they got to ride the horses.” Indeed, Stern notes, Stahlberg’s partner, Louis B. Mayer, took to riding a horse through Beverly Hills.