When I saw this thread I was moved to write a little essay on Norma Shearer. I hope you will indulge me.
Norma Shearer has always fascinated me. I think it's because when I first discovered her as a kid in the mid-seventies she was a complete enigma. People like Pauline Kael and David Thomson didn't like her, I don't think her pre-code career had been properly reexamined, and yet she had been a major star with a large following.
I saw
A Free Soul and
The Divorcee and I could see why she was popular. She had that aristocratic voice and the roles were daring. When properly photographed she could be enchantingly beautiful. I liked her. It was the first time I started to watch a star performing on screen with a critical eye. Her acting could be mannered, her voice could come off shrill in some of those early talkies, but she also had a way of looking into the camera or the eyes of her leading men that suggested a smoldering sexuality simmered just under her oh so sophisticated surface.
I moved on to her silent films. She was in MGM's first film
He Who Gets Slapped with Lon Chaney and John Gilbert. She was very good in
The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg and even showed a little comedic flare. I have since seen a few more of her silent films and I think she was well suited to that genre.
I saw more of her early sound films. In that incredible short film
The Stolen Jools she was the victim of the crime which had half of Hollywood's stars as potential suspects. It's all very silly and Shearer comes off as being a little too much in on the joke. She is a little better at playing herself in another short
The Christmas Party. It’s in
The Hollywood Revue of 1929 that I found just a tiny piece of film with Shearer seemingly being herself. It comes between the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene with John Gilbert and the hip jive version they do afterwards. There is something in that brief interlude that rings of the true Norma. It’s in the way she tells Lionel Barrymore that he’s just being sweet, and the way she tells Gilbert that she doesn’t like being called “Auntie.” Also the way Gilbert gently kids with her and brings up Thalberg. There is something about this ancient piece of film that’s like a moment frozen in time. It’s actually rather melancholy in that respect.
When Gavin Lambert published his biography of her I jumped at the chance to gain more insight into her personality and life. It's a good read. Shearer appears to have been a very practical person. She may have taken on daring roles but she was always fully aware of how she stood with her own fan base. She wasn't one to make a false step in either her professional or her private life, at least not during the Thalberg years. He might have worked to make her the first lady of motion pictures, but I think Shearer was fully aware of her own limitations.
I continued exploring the films. She is charming in
Their Own Desire. In
Let Us Be Gay she appears without makeup in the early scenes. It was a different role for her but she put on the glamour in short order. It’s one of her better early films but those initial scenes make me wonder what else she could have done. She marched on as “Queen of the lot”.
Riptide is an interesting failure. She was perfectly suited for the role of Elizabeth in
The Barretts of Wimpole Street.
She was
Marie Antoinette in one of the most lavish productions ever launched by any studio. Her final scenes in that film show a remarkable pathos that lingers in the mind. She goes from frivolous girl to daring Queen to dignified symbol of the old order brought down through violent revolution. It’s quite a remarkable performance actually.
No longer having Thalberg as her mentor she aped Garbo in
Idiot’s Delight and is probably best remembered as Mary Haines in
The Women heading an outstanding cast. It was her last big role. She then made
Escape which is one of my favorite of her films. She gives a wonderfully understated performance opposite Robert Taylor and Conrad Viedt. She herself admitted that her last two films were miscalculations that were her own fault in choosing them.
Her relationship with Thalberg was another thing that always intrigued me. I think it was a great personal and professional match for her. They appeared happy and in love. She took care of him, she bore him children and she patiently bided her time before removing Thalberg from the clutches of his mother. She didn’t act impulsively when something was important. When she and Thalberg were dating, she jokingly referred to herself as Irving’s spare tire. Indeed she had once appeared as “Miss Lotta Miles” for Springfield tire ads. When Irving died she famously sent out cards to all who had offered support referring to herself only as Mrs. Irving Thalberg. It was a sensible course of action but also one more small tribute to the man who would always be the love of her life.
Shearer also had her idiosyncrasies. Lambert tells of one instance when she purposely wore red to a charity ball where all the women participants were told to wear white, and in the process unnecessarily angered Carole Lombard. Her sister Athole suffered from mental illness. This would haunt Shearer throughout her life. She always feared she would succumb to it. Her main charity was the Motion Picture Retirement Home. She was never that active in supporting the war effort like most of her contemporaries. It wasn’t that she wasn’t patriotic it’s just that the Motion Picture Home was her main cause and that was that. This makes sense in that Shearer had a phobia about aging and death and she would spend her last days at the home she had so long supported.
She never fully embraced her family, not even her own children and, later on, her grandchildren. She had a long second marriage to Martin Arrouge. He was younger than her and she often called him Irving. He never corrected her. She gradually withdrew from public life. She was riddled with her own inescapable anxieties. She ended her life bedridden and blind in the Motion Picture home basically forgotten and alone. Lambert recounts how in her last days she reached out to a visitor she could no longer recognize; “Are you Irving?” she asked.
When Norma Shearer died in 1983 her contemporaries appeared to have their status set. Garbo remained a legend. The late Joan Crawford had her legacy turned on its head by an infamous memoir and her persona turned into a cartoon by Faye Dunaway’s over the top performance. Shearer was simply gone. She would not live to see her own modest revival. A renewed interest in pre-code films led people to rediscover her. Mick La Salle’s enthusiastic embrace of her in his book
Complicated Women brought her to the forefront again. Turner Classic Movies made a documentary of that book in which Shearer featured prominently. Another documentary
Thou Shalt Not: Sex Sin And Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood along with nicely packaged and promoted DVD boxed sets have brought Norma Shearer back to the mainstream of conversation again if only among classic film buffs.
I have to smile a little at her resurgence. I think back to the seventies and my little old film books with me staring and wondering about this woman I had never heard of before. I think of decades seemingly alone in the wilderness seeking out forgotten films and blabbering on to doubtful friends about this forgotten actress. Waiting a year or two to see just one film when today over a dozen are easily accessible. Yes, I have to smile and maybe feel a little vindicated and validated in my long held opinions. Most of all I wonder: What would Norma think about all this?
Sources: I have been reading most anything I could find on Shearer for decades but I would have to cite two sources from which I drew information for this essay:
Norma Shearer: A Life by Gavin Lambert, New York : Knopf 1990
A Biographical Dictionary of Film by David Thomson, New York : A.A. Knopf 3rd edition 1994