The Postcard
A postally unused J.J. Series postcard that has a divided back. The image is a glossy real photograph.
Norma Shearer
Edith Norma Shearer, who was born in Montreal, Quebec on the 11th. August 1902, was a Canadian-American actress who was active in films from 1919 until 1942.
Norma often played spunky, sexually liberated women. She appeared in adaptations of Noël Coward, Eugene O'Neill, and William Shakespeare, and was the first five-time Academy Award acting nominee, winning Best Actress for The Divorcee (1930).
Reviewing Shearer's work, Mick LaSalle called her a feminist pioneer:
"The exemplar of sophisticated modern
womanhood, and the first American film
actress to make it chic and acceptable to
be single and not a virgin on screen".
-- Norma Shearer - the Early Years
Shearer was of Scottish, English, and Irish descent. Her childhood was spent in Montreal, where she was educated at Montreal High School for Girls and Westmount High School.
Her life was one of privilege, due to the success of her father's construction business. However, the marriage between her parents was unhappy. Andrew Shearer was prone to manic depression:
"He moved like a shadow or
a ghost around the house."
Her mother was Edith Mary (née Fisher) Shearer. Young Norma was originally interested in music, but after seeing a vaudeville show for her ninth birthday, she announced her intention to become an actress.
Edith offered support, but as Shearer entered adolescence, she became secretly fearful that her daughter's physical flaws would jeopardize her chances. Norma Shearer had no illusions about the image she saw in the mirror. She acknowledged:
"My dumpy figure, with shoulders too
broad, legs too sturdy, hands too blunt."
Norma was also acutely aware of her small eyes that appeared crossed due to a cast in her left eye. By her own admission, she was "ferociously ambitious" even when she was young.
The childhood and adolescence that Shearer once described as "a pleasant dream" ended in 1918 when her father's company collapsed, and her older sister Athole suffered her first serious mental breakdown.
Forced to move into a small, dreary house in a "modest" Montreal suburb, Shearer found her determined attitude was strengthened by the sudden plunge into poverty:
"At an early age, I formed a philosophy
about failure. Perhaps an endeavor, like
my father's business, could fail, but that
didn't mean Father had failed."
Edith Shearer thought otherwise. Within weeks, she had left her husband and moved into a cheap boarding house with her two daughters.
A few months later, encouraged by her brother, who believed that his niece should try her luck in "the picture business", then operating largely on the East Coast of the United States, Edith sold her daughter's piano and the family dog.
In her pocket was a letter of introduction for Norma, acquired from a local theatre owner, to Florenz Ziegfeld, who was preparing a new season of his famous Ziegfeld Follies.
-- Norma Shearer's Career
In January 1920, the three Shearer women arrived in New York, each of them dressed up for the occasion. Norma remembered:
"I had my hair in little curls, and
I felt very ambitious and proud."
Her heart sank, however, when she saw their rented apartment:
"There was one double bed, a cot with
no mattress and a stove with one gas jet.
The communal bathroom was at the end
of a long, dimly lit hallway.
Athole and I took turns sleeping with mother
in the bed, but sleep was impossible anyway—
the elevated trains rattled right past our
window every few minutes."
The introduction to Ziegfeld proved equally disastrous. He turned Shearer down flat, reportedly calling her a "dog", and criticizing her crossed eyes and stubby legs.
However Norma continued doing the rounds with her determination undimmed:
"I learned that Universal Pictures were
looking for eight pretty girls to serve as
extras.
Athole and I showed up and found 50
girls ahead of us. An assistant casting
director walked up and down looking
us over. He passed up the first three
and picked the fourth.
The fifth and sixth were unattractive,
but the seventh would do, and so on,
down the line until seven had been
selected—and he was still some ten
feet ahead of us.
I did some quick thinking. I coughed
loudly, and when the man looked in
the direction of the cough, I stood on
my tiptoes and smiled right at him.
Recognizing the awkward ruse to
which I'd resorted, he laughed openly
and walked over to me and said:
'You win, Sis. You're Number Eight.'"
Other extra parts followed, including one in Way Down East, directed by D. W. Griffith. Taking advantage of a break in filming and standing shrewdly near a powerful arc light, Shearer introduced herself to Griffith and began to confide her hopes for stardom:
"The Master looked down at me, studied
my upturned face in the glare of the arc,
and shook his eagle head. 'Eyes no good',
he said.
'A cast in one and far too blue; blue eyes
always look blank in close-up. You'll never
make it', he declared, and turned solemnly
away."
Still undeterred, Shearer risked some of her savings on a consultation with Dr. William Bates, a pioneer in the treatment of strabismus. He wrote out a series of muscle-strengthening exercises that after many years of daily practice successfully concealed Norma's cast for long periods of time on the screen.
She spent hours in front of the mirror, exercising her eyes and striking poses that concealed or improved the physical flaws noted by Ziegfeld or Griffith. At night, she sat in the galleries of Broadway theatres, studying the entrances of Ina Claire, Lynn Fontanne, and Katharine Cornell.
In desperate need of money, Shearer resorted to some modeling work, which proved successful. On her modeling career, she commented:
"I could smile at a cake of laundry soap
as if it were dinner at the Ritz. I posed
with a strand of imitation pearls. I posed
in dust-cap and house dress with a
famous mop, for dental paste and for
soft drink, holding my mouth in a whistling
pose until it all but froze that way."
Norma became the new model for Kelly-Springfield Tires, and was bestowed with the title "Miss Lotta Miles." She was depicted seated inside the rim of a tire, smiling down at traffic from a large floodlit billboard.
Finally, a year after her arrival in New York, Norma received a break in film: fourth billing in a B-movie titled The Stealers (1920).
In January 1923, Shearer received an offer from Louis B. Mayer Pictures, a studio in Northeast Los Angeles that was run by a small-time producer, Louis B. Mayer.
Irving Thalberg had moved to Louis B. Mayer Pictures as vice president onthe 15th. February 1923, but had already sent a telegram to Shearer's agent, inviting her to come to the studio.
After three years of hardship, she found herself signing a contract. It called for $250 a week for six months, with options for renewal and a test for a leading role in a major film called The Wanters.
-- Norma Shearer in Hollywood
Shearer left New York around the 17th. February 1923. Accompanied by her mother, she felt "dangerously sure of herself" as her train neared Los Angeles.
However when she was not welcomed at the station, even an hour after her arrival, she realized that there would be no star treatment from her new studio. Dispirited, she allowed Edith to hail a taxi.
The next morning, Shearer went to the Mayer Company on Mission Road to meet with Thalberg. Shearer was momentarily thrown by their confused introduction, but soon recovered:
"I was impressed by his air of dispassionate
strength, his calm self-possession and the
almost black, impenetrable eyes set in a pale
olive face".
Shearer was less impressed, however, with her first screen test:
"The custom then was to use flat lighting,
to throw a great deal of light from all
directions, in order to kill all shadows that
might be caused by wrinkles or blemishes.
But the strong lights placed on either side
of my face made my blue eyes look almost
white, and by nearly eliminating my nose,
made me seem cross-eyed. The result was
hideous."
The day after the test had been screened for Mayer and Thalberg, cameraman Ernest Palmer found Shearer frantic and trembling in the hallway. Speaking with her, he was struck by her "fierce, almost raging disappointment", and after viewing the test himself, agreed that she had been "poorly handled".
Under Palmer's own supervision, a second test was made and judged a success by the studio brass. The lead in The Wanters seemed hers for the taking, until the film's director objected, finding her "unphotogenic". Again, Shearer was to be disappointed, relegated to a minor role.
Norma accepted her next role in Pleasure Mad, knowing that:
"It was well understood that if I didn't
deliver in this picture, I was through".
However after only a few days of shooting, things were not looking good. Shearer was struggling. Finally, the film's director complained to Mayer that he could get nothing out of the young actress, and when summoned to Mayer's office, she fully expected the axe to fall:
"But to my surprise, Mr. Mayer's manner
was paternal. He said: 'There seems to
be a problem. Tell me about it.'
I told him that the director had shouted
at me and frightened me. Nobody had
warned me that Mayer was a better
actor than any of us, and I was
unprepared for what happened next.
He staged an alarming outburst,
screaming at me, calling me a fool and
a coward, accusing me of throwing
away my career because I couldn't get
on with a director. It worked. I became
tearful, but obstinate. I said to him:
'I'll show you! You'll see!'
Delighted, Mayer resumed the paternal
act. He said, smiling: 'That's what I
wanted to hear.'"
Returning to the set, Shearer plunged into an emotional scene:
"I took that scene lock, stock, and
barrel, fur, fins and feathers."
This earned her the respect of her director and her studio, and as a reward, Thalberg cast her in six films in eight months.
The apprenticeship served Norma well. On the 26th. April 1924, Louis B. Mayer Pictures was merged with Metro Pictures and the Samuel Goldwyn Company to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Shearer was cast with Lon Chaney and John Gilbert in the studio's first official production, He Who Gets Slapped. The film was a conspicuous success, and contributed to the meteoric rise of the new company, and to Shearer's visibility.
By late 1925, Norma was carrying her own films, and was one of MGM's biggest attractions, a bona fide star. She signed a new contract; it paid $1,000 a week and would rise to $5,000 over the next five years.
She bought a house for herself and Edith at 2004 Vine Street, which was located under the Hollywoodland sign.
-- Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg
Having become a star, Shearer's new challenge was to remain one. Many other talented actresses were at the studio, and she realized she would have to fight hard to stay ahead of the pack.
Seeing that sensational newcomer Greta Garbo was one of a kind, she went to Thalberg and "demanded recognition as one of another kind".
It was just one of the many visits she paid to his office, always to plead for better material, better parts. Thalberg would listen patiently, then invariably advise her to keep toeing the line, that MGM knew best, and that the movies she complained about had made her a popular actress.
Occasionally, Shearer would burst into tears, but this seemed to make "no more impression than rain on a raincoat".
Privately, Thalberg was very impressed by Shearer. In a story conference, when her name was suggested to him for the part of a girl threatened with rape, Thalberg shook his head, and, with a wry smile, he said:
"She looks too well able to
take care of herself."
For Norma, Thalberg's appeal was not primarily sexual. What attracted Shearer was his commanding presence and steely grace, the impression he gave that wherever he sat was always the head of the table. In spite of his youth – he was only 26 – Thalberg became a father figure to the 23-year-old actress.
At the end of a working day in July 1925, Shearer received a phone call from Thalberg's secretary, asking if she would like to accompany Thalberg to the premiere of Chaplin's The Gold Rush. That night, they made their first appearance as a couple.
A few weeks later, Shearer went to Montreal to visit her father. While there, she had a reunion with an old school friend, who remembered:
"At the end of lunch, over coffee, Norma
leant in across the table. She whispered:
'I'm madly in love.'
I asked: 'Who with?' She replied, smiling:
'With Irving Thalberg.'
I asked how Thalberg felt. Norma said:
'I hope to marry him', and then, with the
flash of the assurance I remembered so
well: 'I believe I will.'"
Over the next two years, both Shearer and Irving saw other people. Louise Brooks remembered:
"I held a dinner party sometime in 1926.
All the place cards at the dinner table
were books. In front of Thalberg's place
was Dreiser's Genius, and in front of
Norma's place, I put The Difficulty of
Getting Married.
It was so funny because Irving walked
right in and saw Genius, and sat right
down, but Norma kept walking around.
She wouldn't sit down in front of The
Difficulty of Getting Married – no way!"
By 1927, Shearer had made a total of 13 silent films for MGM. Each had been produced for under $200,000, and had, without fail, been a substantial box-office hit, often making a $200,000+ profit for the studio.
Norma was rewarded for this consistent success by being cast in Ernst Lubitsch's The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg, her first prestige production, with a budget over $1,000,000.
While she was finishing The Student Prince, Shearer received a call summoning her to Thalberg's office. She entered to find Thalberg sitting at his desk before a tray of diamond engagement rings. He granted her the option to choose her own ring; she picked out the biggest.
After weeks of rumors, provoked by wearing the ring, it was announced in August 1927 that they were to wed. On the 29th. September 1927 they were married in the Hollywood wedding of the year. Before they were married, Shearer converted to Judaism so that she could marry Thalberg.
Norma had two children with Thalberg – Irving Thalberg, Jr. (1930–1987), and Katherine (1935–2006).
-- Norma Shearer's Transition to Sound
One week after the marriage, The Jazz Singer was released. The first feature-length motion picture with sound, it effectively changed the cinematic landscape overnight and signaled the end of the silent motion-picture era.
The Jazz Singer also spelled the end of many silent careers, and Shearer was determined that hers would not be one of them.
Her brother, Douglas Shearer, was instrumental in the development of sound at MGM, and every care was taken to prepare her for the microphone.
Her first talkie, The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929), turned out to be a tremendous success. Shearer's "medium-pitched, fluent, flexible Canadian accent, not quite American, but not at all foreign", was critically applauded, and thereafter widely imitated by other actresses, nervous about succeeding in talkies.
However despite the popularity of her subsequent early talking films, The Last of Mrs. Cheyney and Their Own Desire (both 1929), Shearer feared the public would soon tire of her "good girl" image, and so she took the advice of friend and co-star Ramón Novarro to visit an unknown photographer named George Hurrell.
There, she took a series of sensual portraits that convinced her husband that she could play the lead in MGM's racy new film, The Divorcee (1930).
-- Pre-Code
Shearer won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in The Divorcee, and a series of highly successful pre-Code films followed, including Let Us Be Gay (1930), Strangers May Kiss (1931), A Free Soul (1931) with Leslie Howard and Clark Gable, Private Lives (1931), and Strange Interlude (1932).
All of these were box-office hits, placing Shearer in competition with Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Jean Harlow as MGM's top actress through the remainder of the decade.
Shearer's marriage to Thalberg gave her a degree of power in Hollywood that was resented by rivals such as Crawford, who complained that Shearer would always be offered the best roles and best conditions:
"How can I compete with Norma
when she's sleeping with the boss?"
Shearer's pre-Code films included period dramas and theatrical adaptations. Smilin' Through (1932), which co-starred Fredric March, was one of the most successful films of the period.
An adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's four-hour experimental Strange Interlude (1932), which also starred Clark Gable, was a disappointing adaptation of O'Neill, but a showcase for Shearer, thus a major hit.
-- Norma Shearer as The First Lady of MGM
The enforcement of the Production Code in 1934 forced Shearer to drop her celebrated "free soul" image, and move exclusively into period dramas and "prestige" pictures.
Of these, The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) proved to be her most successful at the box office, making a profit of $668,000, in part because the film contained elements that slipped by the newly instituted Production Code.
In that film, Norma played a role made famous by Katharine Cornell. Shearer also took on another play popularized by Cornell in Romeo and Juliet (1936) (her first film of the 1930's to lose money).
Marie Antoinette (1938) had a budget of almost $2,500,000, which was too great for the studio to expect a profit, though the elaborate sets and costumes helped make the film immensely popular with audiences.
Shearer was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress on six occasions, winning only for The Divorcee in 1930.
She was nominated the same year for Their Own Desire, for A Free Soul in 1931, The Barretts of Wimpole Street in 1934, Romeo and Juliet in 1936, and Marie Antoinette in 1938.
Marion Davies later recalled that Shearer came to a party at San Simeon in her Marie Antoinette costume. Davies said that she was not about to remove the door so that Shearer could enter, so Norma made her grand entrance through wider doors leading from another room. Four chairs were arranged so that she could sit at the table in her voluminous skirts.
George Cukor, who directed Shearer in Romeo and Juliet, offered this character sketch of the actress:
“I found that Norma Shearer, when I made
Romeo and Juliet, is a nervous, highly self-
critical woman who has schooled herself to
give an impression of self-confidence.
If one had accepted that impression, one
would have gone far astray in working with
her.
She needed sympathy and reassurance.
Another way in which Miss Shearer might
mislead — I am sure she continually misleads
herself — is in the matter of physical resources
and sheer stamina.
She becomes so engrossed in her work, so
keyed up with a kind of taut, nervous energy,
that she is apt to overtax her strength.
She will play a long, exhausting scene over
and over again without appearing to lose an
atom of her freshness and verve.
When it is over she will tell you she feels fine —
and believe it. Then she will go to her dressing
room and collapse.
If one worked her as hard as she seems to
want to work, she would be worn out before
the film was half finished.
With her, the director has to reverse the
normal process of inspiring his star to greater
efforts. He has to persuade her to spare herself.
The greatest joy of working with Miss Shearer
comes from her complete lack of vanity.
Far from bridling at minor criticisms as many
actresses do, she will criticize herself with a
penetrating, almost unfeminine, impersonal
judgment.
When she sees the unedited versions of the
previous day's footage [“rushes”] she seems
to cease to be an actress and to look at her
own work on the screen with the shrewd and
critical mind of a producer.”
In 1939, Norma attempted an unusual role in the dark comedy Idiot's Delight, adapted from the 1936 Robert E. Sherwood play. It was the last of Shearer's three films with Clark Gable, after A Free Soul (1931) and Strange Interlude (1932). The Women (1939) followed, with an entirely female cast of more than 130 speaking roles.
Shearer was also one of the many actresses considered for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind (1939) and some publications even reported that she won the role in 1938. However, she withdrew herself from consideration after negative feedback from movie fans. Years later when asked about potentially playing Scarlett, Shearer jokingly said:
"Scarlett is a thankless role. The
one I'd really like to play is Rhett!"
Critics praised the suspenseful atmosphere in her next film, Escape (1940), where she played the lover of a Nazi general who helps an American free his mother from a concentration camp. With increasing interest in the war in Europe, the film performed well at the box office.
However Shearer passed up roles in highly successful films Now, Voyager and Mrs. Miniver, in order to star in We Were Dancing and Her Cardboard Lover (1942), which both failed at the box office.
-- Norma Shearer's Retirement
In 1942, Shearer unofficially retired from acting.
After Thalberg's unexpected death on the 14th. September 1936, Shearer retained a lawyer to ensure that Thalberg's percentages of films on which he had worked were still paid to his estate, which was contested by MGM.
When she took the story to gossip columnist Louella Parsons, the studio was forced to give in and granted all the profits from MGM movies made and released from 1924 to 1938, meaning the estate eventually received over $1.5 million in percentage payments.
Nevertheless, Shearer's contract was renewed for six films at $150,000 each.
During this time, Norma embarked on a brief romance with the younger actor James Stewart, and then with the married actor George Raft.
Raft (who had separated from his wife years earlier, soon after they married) stated publicly that he wanted to marry Shearer. However, his wife's refusal to allow a divorce and the disapproval of MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer caused Shearer to end the affair.
Following her retirement in 1942, she married Martin Arrougé (23rd. March 1914 – 8th. August 1999), a World War II Navy aviator, a former ski instructor to her children, 11 years her junior. Arrougé and Shearer remained married until her death.
Despite often attending public events in her later life, Shearer gradually withdrew from the Hollywood social scene. In 1960, her secretary stated:
"Miss Shearer does not want any publicity.
She doesn't talk to anyone. But I can tell
you that she has refused many requests to
appear in motion pictures and TV shows."
-- The Death of Norma Shearer
On the 12th. June 1983 Shearer died at the age of 80 of bronchial pneumonia at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, California, where she had been living since 1980.
She was laid to rest in the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, in a crypt marked Norma Arrougé, along with her first husband, Irving Thalberg.
-- Norma Shearer's Legacy
Shearer's fame declined after her retirement in 1942. She was rediscovered in the late 1950's, when her films were sold to television, and in the 1970's, when her films enjoyed theatrical revivals.
By the time of her death she was best known for her "noble" roles in Marie Antoinette and The Women.
A Shearer revival began in 1988, when Turner Network Television began broadcasting the entire Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film library.
In 1994, Turner Classic Movies began showcasing her films, most of which had not been seen since the reconstitution of the Production Code in 1934. Shearer's work was seen anew, and the critical focus shifted from her "noble" roles to her pre-Code roles.
Even for a pampered star, Norma's output in the sound era was strikingly meager. And yet this was part of her undeniable aura – that she did not make movies lightly and frivolously, but with great care, sincerity and conviction.
Shearer's work gained more attention in the 1990's through the publication of a series of books. The first was a biography by Gavin Lambert.
Next came Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood by Mick LaSalle, film critic at the San Francisco Chronicle.
Mark A. Vieira published three books on subjects closely related to Shearer: a biography of her husband, producer Irving Thalberg; and two biographies of photographer George Hurrell.
Shearer was noted not only for the control she exercised over her work, but also for her patronage of Hurrell, and for discovering actress Janet Leigh and actor-producer Robert Evans.
For her contribution to the motion-picture industry, Shearer has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 6636 Hollywood Boulevard.
On the 30th. June 2008, Canada Post issued a postage stamp in its "Canadians in Hollywood" series to honour Norma Shearer, along with others for Raymond Burr, Marie Dressler, and Chief Dan George.
Shearer and Thalberg are reportedly the models for Stella and Miles, the hosts of the Hollywood party in the short story "Crazy Sunday" (1932) by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In 2008, Norma was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. In 2015, a number of Shearer films became available in high-definition format, authored by Warner Home Video, in most cases, from the nitrate camera negatives: A Free Soul, Romeo and Juliet, Marie Antoinette, and The Women.
Shearer is portrayed in director David Fincher’s film Mank by actress Jessie Cohen.
Norma Shearer was the first person to receive five Academy Award nominations for acting. Her brother Douglas Shearer and she are the first Oscar-winning siblings.