Glamour Starter --- Norma Shearer --- Part Two


Part of Shearer's campaign was to marry MGM production head  Irving Thalberg, Norma blessed with saintly patience toward that end. Here was where iron discipline bore fruit. Thalberg was gifted, many said a genius, but withal a man with judgment enough to see wedded future with Shearer as much a benefit for him as for her. Thalberg had uncanny story sense. You could take an insurmountable script problem to his throne room, and emerge quick time with a solution. Thalberg oversaw a repair bench for everything Metro released during the early thirties. Any employee who thought he/she was last leaving the lot at night would look up and see Thalberg’s office light burning. When he finally get home, Mother would have his pajamas laid neat upon the marital bed, her dominance continued even unto residence with Thalberg and his wife. Mrs. Thalberg would have preferred her son marry Carl Laemmle’s daughter Rosabelle, to her mind a more useful alliance, or perhaps Constance Talmadge, which would have netted in-law status with Joseph Schenck, Norma Talmadge, and Buster Keaton, among industry-connected others. Shearer proved a best choice, as what was value in Rosabelle Laemmle once her father sold out and was gone from Universal, let alone Constance Talmadge, her star blinkered out with the arrival of talkies.
Norma Shearer knew dialogue would require a heightened realism in her screen portrayals, and so arranged (furtively, it was said) to have sexed-up portraits taken by freelance ace George Hurrell, then flung the sizzling portfolio into Thalberg’s lap one morning at the breakfast table. Torrid pre-code Norma Shearer is more or less agreed to have arrived that day, this a bracing intro for whatever audience we introduce The Divorcee or Strangers May Kiss to, and who knows, there may be truth in it. The trade ad shown here confirms her status. Actress rivals at MGM included Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford, Crawford the more so because hers was a bitter run-up, mutual antipathy doubtless borne of the fact that Shearer and Crawford were cut from similar bolts of cloth, gentility on the surface, ferocious ambition within. Today’s workplace tensions would seem prosaic beside such ongoing struggles at Metro.


Kitty Carlisle rented Shearer’s former beach house one summer and availed herself of an attic search one rainy afternoon. This was some years after Norma’s retirement, and what Kitty found was a Solomon Mine of Shearer ephemera --- dresses, scrapbooks, more dresses, many more scrapbooks --- all hidden behind a locked door and no doubt left to fate after she sold the place. What becomes of a star’s treasures once stardom is gone? If they make it to old age, are there even fans left to care? Shearer may have asked herself that question over the forty years that followed her final screen appearance (here she is with Dick Powell and June Allyson on a mid-fifties skiing holiday). Thalberg had died in 1936 when he was only thirty-seven, leaving Shearer to tender mercies of Louis Mayer . He and fellow execs tried to hoodoo her out of the percentage deal Irving had made with Loew’s/MGM a few years before. This is where Norma’s steely resolve asserted itself, and her very public battle with studio brass ultimately yielded the lifetime of gravy she had coming (forty years later, she’d still harass Metro bookkeepers --- even chiding them for failure to mount a 70's re-issue of that "sure money-maker," the silent Ben-Hur!).



















If you’d been a Nibblers patron during the seventies, chances are you saw Norma and her second husband (the ski instructor) having lunch at the counter. Up until then, they were fairly active socially. Norma even got down with the latest dances --- imagine her doing the twist in a sixties club --- yet there she was,  Shearer sightings around town not uncommon. She had aged, not alarmingly so. Still, she was consumed with a dread of aging, and of sharing her sister’s emotional breakdown. Friends who showed Norma home movies in which she appeared were later asked to edit out unflattering footage. Sister Athole (pronounced "Ethel") found relief through recently available medications, but Norma had less success battling depression. Brother Douglas Shearer, longtime sound engineer at Metro, seems to have been spared the family curse, and lived into a peaceful old age (died 1971). Norma became increasingly addled in later years, some good days, more bad ones. She wrote angry letters to MGM when they included but a glimpse of her in 1974’s That’s Entertainment, and regularly drove dinner guests over to Culver City for yet another screening of Marie Antoinette, her favorite of the Norma films. She took to calling her husband "Irving," and finally was placed in the Motion Picture Country Home. She died there in 1983. Shearer was at least eighty, maybe more, depending on which account you believe. She died too soon to enjoy the Norma pre-code renaissance that would come in the following decade, joining that circle of greats, including Bela Lugosi, Oliver Hardy, and a few others who just missed the applause of a whole new generation of fans. Gavin Lambert wrote a stellar biography in 1990, and most of the Norma Shearer would happily become available on DVD.