WIDOW AND STAR

 

The cynical few who had questioned the Thalberg-Shearer marriage were silenced by the depth of Norma Shearer’s grief. For a time, she blamed herself for Thalberg’s death. Then she herself fell ill with pneumonia. Ironically her husband’s death and her illness increased interest in Romeo and Juliet, but it had gone so far over budget that nothing could help it break even. However, it was praised as Thalberg’s legacy, as were Camille, A Day at the Races, Maytime, and The Good Earth.

 

Shearer had barely recovered when she learned that Louis B. Mayer was trying to eradicate Thalberg’s name from M-G-M publicity—and deprive his widow and children of something as vital. Thalberg’s contract entitled him to be paid 37.5 percent of profits made from the films he had supervised. This would continue for the entire duration of his M-G-M contract (April 1924 through December 1938). Mayer and legal counsel Robert Rubin declared that Thalberg’s death rendered the clause null and void—and stopped sending checks to Shearer. She needed this annuity for herself and her children. Thalberg had fought for it, and it was rightfully theirs. 

 

Thalberg had left Shearer and the children only $1 million each (after taxes), a surprisingly modest amount for an industry leader. Shearer strategized. She first announced that she would no longer be making films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which shocked Loew’s. Then she appeared on Louella Parsons’ radio show to tell her public that she needed to support her family. This sent a wave of opprobrium to Mayer’s door. In short order, he and Rubin backed down and offered Shearer a contract: six films at $150,000 each. Shearer signed it on July 14 (Bastille Day 1937), which was significant, because the first film in the agreement would be the long-delayed Marie Antoinette.

 

 

054: Newspaper article of Shearer vs. Mayer

055: Legal papers annotated by Shearer 

 

 

The Comeback

 

When Norma Shearer started work on Marie Antoinette in January 1938, M-G-M had already spent a million on it. Its four-year gestation had included scripts by eleven writers, imported 18-century furniture, and an exhaustive casting process. If Shearer felt more elated than intimidated to be at the center of this production, it was because she was carrying out Thalberg’s plans and was supported by Sidney Franklin, one of his favorite directors. 

 

Then, at the last minute before shooting was to begin, Louis B. Mayer forced Franklin to resign, replacing him with W.S. Van Dyke, ostensibly because “One-Take” Van Dyke would complete the project in less time. It is possible that Mayer wanted to pay back Shearer for the inheritance dispute. Unlike Franklin, Cukor, or Goulding, Van Dyke was not known as an actor’s director, so Shearer would not have the guiding hand of a coach. 

 

Shearer was outvoted in this matter, but she retained control of the project in every other way, seeing that producer Hunt Stromberg kept tabs on Van Dyke’s work. What resulted was an epic that never lost momentum or warmth, and in which Shearer gave a remarkable performance, illuminating the character from blushing girlhood through sensual adulthood to regal power and tragic demise.

 

Marie Antoinette was given an advertising campaign to match its monumental production values, and a premiere that outshone every previous one. When Shearer entered the French court in the film’s second scene, she was cheered by the audience in the Carthay Circle Theatre. There was no doubt that her comeback was a success. The film grossed more than $3 million. Unfortunately, like a number of epics (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Crusades, The Rains Came), it had gone too far over its budget to break even, much less make a profit. But its grosses proved that Shearer was still a Film Daily Top Ten Star.

 

 

056: Marie Antoinette production still

057: Marie Antoinette premiere 

 

 

Romance

 

As the official mourning period for Irving Thalberg ended, Norma Shearer found herself alone in a city of younger people, but at thirty-five she looked young and was in good health. She began dating. Among her regular dates were actors George Brent and James Stewart. In August 1939, while visiting the New York World’s Fair, she was introduced to the Warner Bros. star George Raft. A romance ensued, and it lasted for more than a year, ending only when Raft’s wife blocked a divorce by demanding a huge settlement. Mickey Rooney later claimed to have had a romance with Shearer, but this has been refuted by Shearer family and friends. Shearer was often photographed with him because he was the highest-grossing star of 1939, but when she sensed that the teenager was intent on an affair, she had him kept away.

 

 

058: Shearer with James Stewart

059: Shearer with George Raft 

 

 

The Greatest Year

 

Norma Shearer was a prominent personage in 1939, which was later dubbed “Hollywood’s Greatest Year” for an abundance of excellent films. The studios, fearing that the European market (thirty-two percent of their income) would be lost if war broke out, unilaterally increased budgets, bought big properties, and planned road-show presentations so that revenue would roll in before the anticipated conflict began. Their efforts resulted in a catalogue of classics, one of which enshrined Norma Shearer in the popular hall of fame.  

 

Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt had starred in Robert Sherwood’s antiwar play Idiot’s Delight, and Shearer wanted to emulate Fontanne, so Idiot’s Delight became Shearer’s next vehicle, a curious project for her. The PCA was loath to let M-G-M film Sherwood’s play because of a threat from the Italian government: if M-G-M tried to release the film in Europe, all its pictures would be banned, in both Italy and Germany. Hunt Stromberg made cuts in the script and then teamed Shearer with Clark Gable to improve the film’s appeal. After all this, the film was still banned in Italy and other parts of Europe, which cut into profits. Those who saw the film were delighted by Shearer’s dual characterization (American circus aerialist and European countess), forgetting that this had been her stock in trade since 1924. 

 

 

The Women

 

Marie Antoinette was still playing around the country when Idiot’s Delight was released, and the French queen would become Shearer’s favorite role, but the film that brought her the most fans was surely George Cukor’s The Women. Clare Boothe Luce's 1936 play portrayed Park Avenue matrons as capricious, vain, and mean. Stromberg retained the play’s conceit, so its cast of 135 (including dogs and monkeys) was all female, which was unprecedented in Hollywood. 

 

Befitting her status, Shearer got the central role, the upstanding wife who loses her husband to a perfume salesgirl. “I hesitated a long time before playing this part,” Shearer told Hedda Hopper. “Then I decided that fighting to hold a husband is every woman’s problem.” Fighting to stay on top of the heap was every star’s problem. “Norma Shearer is chucking a clause in her contract,” wrote the Los Angeles Times. “It guarantees that her name will be featured above that of any other woman in her pictures. She is stipulating that both Joan Crawford and Rosalind Russell shall be given equal billing with her in The Women.” Shearer made this concession only after Russell went on strike. 

 

Shearer also had an on-set squabble with Crawford, who expressed years of resentment by clicking her knitting needles when Shearer was reading her lines. “I’m just paying her back for all the rudeness she and Irving gave me!” said Crawford. At the completion of filming, Shearer threw a party. Crawford did not attend. When Crawford attended the Los Angeles premiere of The Women, Shearer did not attend. Squabbles aside, The Women became one of the top ten moneymakers of 1939, and The New York Times praised Shearer’s performances as “one of the best she has ever given.”

 

 

060: Shearer on the set of The Women

061: Shearer with the entire cast of The Women

 

 

Escape

 

By 1940, World War Two had begun and M-G-M had lost much of the European market, so it was finally deemed safe to make films about Nazi oppression. In Mervyn LeRoy’s Escape, Shearer played the American mistress of a high-ranking Nazi. Because she sympathizes with a young American man who is rescuing his mother from a concentration camp, she tricks the Nazi and causes his death. Shearer had less screen time than usual, but her role was a pivotal one and her performance was striking for its restraint, comparing favorably with those of the distinguished supporting players Conrad Veidt and Alla Nazimova. The film was banned in Germany but became a box-office success.

 

062: Shearer on the set of Escape

063: Shearer with Alla Nazimova

 

 

“These Last Two”

 

Shearer looked at the remaining films in her contract and reasoned that given the sad state of world affairs, comedies were in order. She had been reading scripts from M-G-M’s story department, and rejecting all of them. She also rejected Mayer’s offers of Madame Curie or Mrs. Miniver, both of which became major hits for his discovery Greer Garson. Instead, Shearer had Robert Z. Leonard direct her in an adaptation of We Were Dancing, one of the ten short plays in Noël Coward’s Tonight at 8:30. It may have worked on a London stage in 1936, but after being reworked by M-G-M producer Orville O. Dull, it didn’t work on the screen: Shearer and Melvyn Douglas slogged through one artificial, unfunny scene after another.

 

Shearer’s last film should have been auspicious. Her Cardboard Lover was directed by George Cukor and based on a successful two-act play by Jacques Deval. Unfortunately, the two acts lacked substance and the addition of a third act pulled the film from farce to slapstick without improving it. Shearer was at the height of her powers—sleek, elegant, knowing—but she was wasted in situations that were even more artificial than those of her previous film. A worthless script defeated a great star and a gifted director. 

 

 

064: Shearer on the set of We Were Dancing

 

 

LEAVE THEM CRYING FOR MORE

 

When Her Cardboard Lover flopped, a rumor sprang up that Mayer was trying to get rid of Shearer—which he had supposedly done with Greta Garbo and would do with Jeanette MacDonald, Myrna Loy, and Joan Crawford. The Twilight of the Goddesses was not Mayer’s plan to make room for new talent (Lana Turner, Judy Garland, and Greer Garson), but it did accomplish that. Still, when Norma Shearer was asked about We Were Dancing and Her Cardboard Lover, she said: “On these last two, nobody but myself was trying to do me in.” After nineteen years, Shearer and Mayer parted company. 

 

 

065: Shearer waves goodbye to M-G-M 

 

 

Friends

 

Norma Shearer became friends with movie stars Helen Hayes and Merle Oberon while Irving Thalberg was living, and after his death she came to rely on them as confidantes, even when Hayes began to reside primarily in Nyack, New York, with her husband, the writer Charles MacArthur. Oberon was Shearer’s closest friend. Her other friends included Charles Boyer and his wife Pat Paterson; David Lewis, an associate producer under Thalberg; Sylvia Fairbanks, her next-door neighbor and widow of Douglas Fairbanks Sr.; and Mignon Winans, a popular Beverly Hills hostess. After Shearer left the studio, she began traveling, and because she enjoyed athletics, she visited Sun Valley, the newly developed Idaho ski resort. 

 

 

066: Shearer w Merle Oberon

067: Shearer w Helen Hayes, James Stewart

 

 

Second Marriage

 

Sun Valley had been developed by the railroad scion W. Averell Harriman as an American counterpart to St. Moritz. This included the innovation of chairlifts and a fine corps of instructors. Jacques Martin Arrougé (born 1914, San Francisco) was working at the lodge as a ski instructor when David Niven brought Shearer there to meet Harriman, who saw star visits as a publicity benefit. Shearer began dating Arrougé, disregarding the difference in their ages and status. 

 

The couple filed for a marriage license in Los Angeles on August 19, 1942, and three days later Arrougé signed a prenuptial agreement. The wedding took place on August 23 at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. Although Shearer had converted to Judaism in 1927, this ceremony was Roman Catholic.

 

 

068: Shearer- Arrougé wedding

069: Detail of guests at Shearer- Arrougé reception

 

 

Projects

 

America was fighting World War II, and Martin Arrougé had pledged to serve in the Armed Forces. On December 10, 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Because he had been flying for eight years, he was deployed as a flight instructor. 

 

In May 1943 Shearer made the papers for contributing $100,000 to a war bond drive. She also contributed to the Studio Club, where aspiring actresses could live safely, and in 1942 she helped fund the construction of the Motion Picture Country House in Woodland Hills, a facility for film-industry retirees.

 

Though she had left M-G-M without a plan, Shearer did not consider herself retired. Offers were coming to her. Edmund Goulding’s production of Old Acquaintance was to star Bette Davis as a writer in the mold of Lillian Hellman and Shearer as the self-involved friend who writes romance novels. Shearer reportedly turned down the role because she was unwilling to play the mother of a grown daughter. It is more likely that she was unwilling to work with Davis; indeed, Goulding pleaded illness to get off the film. When David Lewis joined the newly incorporated Enterprise Pictures, he bought a Fannie Hurst short story, She Walks in Beauty, expressly for Shearer. But Enterprise failed with its first film, Arch of Triumph. 

 

In 1947 Jack Warner wanted Shearer for The Decision of Christopher Blake, but Shearer felt that the story of a child’s reaction to his parents’ divorce was not a fitting vehicle for her return. A better choice would have been Joseph Mankiewicz’s production of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir at Twentieth Century-Fox. Darryl F. Zanuck wanted Shearer but a deal was not struck, perhaps because of Shearer’s agent Charles K. Feldman. Letters from Shearer to Feldman show that she wanted to work but that he was not responding. He had become more interested in packaging projects like Red River than in merely supplying talent.

 

 

The Decision

 

In her years with William Daniels and George Hurrell, Shearer had acquired a technician’s eye for lighting effects. She believed that she could no longer be photographed to look like the image that they had created. In addition, she probably knew that fighting with Mayer for a better project would be easier than fighting the changes that were overtaking the entire industry. In the late 1940s she let it be known that she was retired. She later told studio publicist Dore Freeman: “I believe that a great star should leave them laughing—or crying for more.” 

 

 

070: Shearer selling war bonds

071: Shearer at late 1940s premiere

 

 

HOLLYWOOD SOCIALITE

 

Norma Shearer and Marti Arrougé chose not to live in the house on the beach, residing instead im a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They were frequent guests at parties given by friends such as Ronald Colman and his wife Benita Hume; Ray and Fran Stark; and Charles Feldman and his wife Jean Howard. They spent the winter months at the Lodge in Sun Valley 

 

 

Discoverer of Talent

 

In 1946, after seeing a photograph of a girl in a souvenir album at the Sun Valley lodge, Shearer recommended her to M-G-M’s casting executives. The studio signed the girl and changed her name from Jeanette Morrison to Janet Leigh. Only then did she meet Shearer, who had been campaigning on her behalf. They became lifelong friends.

 

In 1956 Robert Evans was on a business trip for his family’s clothing firm, Evan-Picone, when Shearer spotted him at the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel. She immediately suggested that he audition for the part of Irving Thalberg in the Lon Chaney biopic in preproduction at Universal. Evans acted in films for several years before becoming a celebrated studio executive.

 

 

072: Shearer at a 1950s party

073: Shearer with Robert Evans 

 

 

LATER YEARS

 

In the late 1950s Norma Shearer and Marti Arrougé moved to a one-story home above Sunset Boulevard. Sierra Alta Way appeared to be beyond the Beverly Hills border but was actually in West Hollywood. If fans seeking autographs encountered Shearer watering her front garden, she usually invited them in and gave them a portrait of herself as Marie Antoinette. 

 

 

074: Shearer in 1960

075: Shearer in 1970 

 

 

Memoir Attempts

 

The 1950s saw the publication of numerous books on early Hollywood. These included The Lion’s Share, Bosley Crowther’s history of M-G-M, and The Self Enchanted, Mae Murray’s autobiography. Shearer was eager to join the parade but her first manuscript was rejected by publisher Bennett Cerf as insubstantial because she had pointedly omitted anything unpleasant or controversial from her autobiography, ending it abruptly in 1932. She revised her manuscript in the 1960s and again in the 1970s, but her refusal to recount such major events as her conflicts with Louis B. Mayer doomed the project to a file cabinet drawer.

 

 

Illness

 

Shearer’s parents both suffered from senile dementia, and her sister fought depression for most of her life. Shearer began to experience depressive symptoms in the 1970s, when treatment was not as advanced as it became in the twenty-first century. Her husband kept her isolated from friends and family. When her condition deteriorated to the point that fulltime care was needed, she was admitted to the Motion Picture Country House. 

 

 

Death

 

Norma Shearer died of pneumonia on June 12, 1983.