I Loved Her in the Movies

by Robert Wagner

  Norma wed Irving Thalberg in September 1928 and their marriage immediately vaulted her ahead of every other actress on the MGM lot, with the exception of Garbo.

  Every really great star offers something familiar that an audience has come to expect in their favorite actors and actresses, but presents it in a new package. Leading ladies are going to be beautiful, men are going to be handsome, or at least striking, but there has to be a little something extra, something unique in the mix if they’re going to succeed in the long term.

  Contrary to those who argue that she wouldn’t have been anything without Irving Thalberg cherry-picking projects for her, Norma had been a considerable star before they married, in such roles as a cheerful barmaid in Ernst Lubitsch’s The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg and an ambitious young actress in Upstage.

  What Thalberg did do for his wife was to raise her to the highest level of stardom by casting her in gilt-edged properties that had a high probability of success; he didn’t make her a star, but he made her a much brighter star than she would have been on her own.

  This doesn’t disqualify Norma from critical consideration, because the path of her career is typical of most starring careers—they have to be managed. There are very few stars who are their own best managers, who can function on a self-contained basis. Garbo came close, but even then it was MGM that figured out a formula for her pictures that would be acceptable to mass audiences: She loved, not wisely but too well. And she suffered. Boy, how she suffered.

  Whether the setting was the past (Garbo often worked in period films) or the present, no expense was spared when it came to her wardrobe and the settings. After about 1928, she was presented in one primary way—as a woman only recently awakened to sex, who finds herself capable of the most transformative love imaginable, love with a touch of the holy to it, love that often led to great sacrifice. She may have been a bad girl before, but true love turned her into an idealist.

  That was how the studio persuaded the mass audience into accepting Garbo, despite the fact that she resembled them not at all, not physically—nobody has ever resembled Garbo physically—and certainly not emotionally. MGM made sure that Garbo gave up everything for love . . . or was willing to.

  Garbo’s primary attribute was her face, which was infinitely fascinating—you couldn’t get enough of looking at it, and because her displays of emotion were always muted, the dramatic effect was quite subtle. You never really got tired of either her face or her acting.

  But there was only one Garbo.*

  Norma’s great attribute, in contrast, was versatility: She could play sentimental dramas, romantic comedies, and out-and-out farce. She even tried Shakespeare and got out alive. She could play crude, but not convincingly. In the early 1930s, she played a series of women who discovered their sexuality by stepping out on their faithless husbands or boyfriends.

  Norma had it both ways; although her strength, her fallback position, was always class (which is what she embodied in her own life), she was a harbinger of the modern woman in movies like The Divorcee and Riptide, where it was made quite obvious that she enjoyed what a man did to her in bed. “I’m glad I discovered there’s more than one man in the world, while I’m young enough and they want me,” she announces to her errant husband in The Divorcee. “From now on, you’re the only man in the world my door is closed to!”

  These pictures shook people up. “[Norma Shearer] has murdered the old-time Good Woman,” intoned Motion Picture magazine in 1932. “She has cremated the myth that men will never marry ‘that kind of woman.’”

  The fact of the matter is that Norma wasn’t doing anything that her public wasn’t doing. One out of four women born between 1890 and 1900 had lost her virginity before marriage. For women born between 1910 and 1920, it was seven out of ten.

  Norma even pretended to play the part of the libertine offscreen, although in fact she was a very faithful wife to Thalberg. In one interview she declared, “The morals of yesterday are no more. They are as dead as the day they were lived. Economic independence has put woman on the same footing as man. A discriminating man and a fastidious woman now amount to the same identical thing. There is no difference.”

  Culturally speaking, in 1932 those were fighting words everywhere except in certain plush precincts of major cities. In some places, they’re still fighting words. But Norma was essentially right.

  Norma’s great flaw was a quality that grew more pronounced as she got a little older—her need for nobility. It shows up in everything from Marie Antoinette to The Women, which is one of the reasons that Joan Crawford steals the latter picture: Joan is letting go and having fun playing a frankly greedy female, while Norma is playing the loyal wife to the hilt. Lesson: A self-aware, charming villainess with a sense of humor is a lot more fun than a dutiful heroine sticking around for the sake of the children.

  But it needs to be said that in the last part of Marie Antoinette Norma is remarkable. Something in her responded to the plight of a woman who is losing everything—her lover, her child, her position, her life. It was as if she sensed what was waiting for her just around the corner—she’d already had to face the death of her husband, and perhaps had a premonition about the end of her career.

  Because of her kindness to a kid she didn’t have to be kind to, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Norma. I still do. I saw her regularly years later, usually at Sun Valley, where she liked to go skiing with her second husband, Martin Arrougé. Marti looked a great deal like Irving Thalberg, except he was extremely athletic, unlike Thalberg, who had been limited by the rheumatic heart that shortened his life. I respected Marti—he made Norma extremely happy, he was devoted to her, took impeccable care of her, was there for her every minute of the day. He sincerely loved her.

  Socially, Norma always remained the star, making an entrance so that you never forgot for an instant who she was, and even if you didn’t happen to know who she was, you could certainly tell that she was Somebody. Since I liked to study the radiant female of the species, Norma’s affectations were attractive, but I could see how it would be difficult to live with someone like her. In fact, both of Norma’s children, Irving Jr. and Katherine, kept their distance from their mother in later years. Irving became a professor of philosophy in Chicago, and Katherine ran a bookstore in Aspen. The Thalberg bent for quality came out in Katherine. Her bookstore, Explore, is one of the finest I’ve ever been in, created with loving hands, in everything from the furniture and shelves to the stock of books. In her own way, Katherine Thalberg was a kind of artist, as well.

  As for Norma, later in her life she seldom ventured east of Sun Valley.

  In our occasional conversations when she was older, she admitted that she had been a fiercely ambitious young woman, but she seemed perfectly happy in her retirement. Unlike other great stars who walked away from the movie business—Mary Pickford, Garbo—she never made any tentative moves to get back in the game.

  It’s fair to say that Norma’s reputation today is not what it was at the height of her fame, mostly because of the type of woman she played and the kind of films she made later on in her career, which are the ones that most people now see. Well-dressed, loyal wives in sentimental domestic dramas are relics of an earlier time and that time’s dramatic conventions. They can be watched now more as interesting sociology than as involving dramas.

  But Norma Shearer was my first movie star. She began my habit of thinking about stars, how they lived, and why they flourished . . . or didn’t. Her picture didn’t fit in my treasure chest, but her memory has always had a special place in my mental equivalent. Norma Shearer happens to be on the top of the list because she was the first. But there are others from that era that I also cherish.

  • • •

  I was born in 1930, so I grew up following the stars of the period before and during World War II. I had no personal memory of silent films, although I began watching
them years later, and I was enthralled. It wasn’t just the delicacy and firmness of Lillian Gish; it was the way someone like Clara Bow could express complete freedom, or how Louise Brooks could embody sex without a trace of the guilt or sentimentality that infested the popular attitudes of the day. Every generation thinks it has invented sex, but the people who were growing up just before and after World War I really might have, at least insofar as America is concerned.

  Of course, on-screen in that period, the biggest female movie star was Mary Pickford, who generally played girls ten or fifteen years younger than her actual age. But there are actors who serve as comforting anchors in changing times, and there are other actors who signify those changing times. Pickford was one of the former, Norma Talmadge and Gloria Swanson the latter. All of their careers were stunted or ended by sound.

  There were a few women directors in the early days of the silent era—Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Weber—but with the onset of sound, women were traditionally slotted into other jobs: screenwriting, certainly, and editing, frequently. Margaret Booth was a huge power behind the scenes at MGM, where she was supervising editor, and who was still at it in the 1970s, when she ran Ray Stark’s editing operation.

  Dorothy Arzner began her career at Paramount as an editor and ultimately worked her way up to the director’s chair by the beginning of the sound era. By the end of the 1930s, when I started going to the movies, Arzner was the only woman director in the business. Arzner’s ascendance occurred during a period in which movies themselves were changing, and not necessarily for the better. The Production Code, which was instituted in mid-1934, was the result of intense lobbying by predominantly Catholic pressure groups, among them Martin Quigley, who published a trade paper called Exhibitors Herald.

  Quigley and others became convinced that the movies had to have a set of immovable standards. Since the industry has always been terrified of federally mandated censorship, which was being urged by William Randolph Hearst, they acquiesced to self-censorship, in spite of the wisdom of people like Irving Thalberg, who insisted that “The motion picture does not present the audience with tastes and manners and views and morals; it reflects those they already have.”

  The Production Code mandated, among many other things, that crime had to be punished; that the vaguest suggestion of sex, even between a husband and wife, was out of line; and that gory violence was verboten. The movies that flourished in the very early 1930s, before the enforcement of the code, were much bolder, and when you see them now on Turner Classic Movies, they’re frankly amazing—blunt, sometimes coarse. In Baby Face, Barbara Stanwyck climbs the corporate ladder by sleeping her way to the top. These were films in which women took lovers, had babies, and dumped their husbands—sometimes in that order.

  This period has recently become fetishized by some modern fans. In retrospect, while I like these movies, they don’t move me the way the films of the 1940s do. It seems to me that they’re more slice-of-life journalistic than they are sweepingly dramatic, and they lack the sumptuous power of the movies I grew up on.

  But whether they were made before 1934 or after, one thing remained the same—women dominated the box office. The biggest stars tended to be women, and it was women who were reflexively featured on the covers of the dozens of monthly movie magazines that crowded the newsstands. Not every great female star of that era was an adult, however. There was, for instance, Shirley Temple, who just happened to be the second movie star I met.

  That encounter wasn’t really a big deal, and I mention it here only for the sake of completeness. My orthodontist was a man named Alfred Higson. I was nine or ten years old and sitting in his waiting room one day with my mother. There, across the room from me, accompanied by her own mother, was Shirley. I was startled, because Los Angeles wasn’t New York, where you can walk down the street and see all sorts of famous people. Our mothers introduced us, we said hello, we were both polite and slightly awkward with each other, and that was the end of that—for the time being.

  A few years later, I actually got to know Shirley. We often saw each other at the Bel-Air Country Club, where our parents were members. She was dating a friend of mine named Dare Harris, who later achieved fame under the name John Derek, and I tagged along on several of their dates.

  Shirley was crazy about Dare, but then everybody was. Without question, he was the handsomest young man I’ve ever seen in my life—he stopped traffic. Dare was very generous to me, treating me like a younger brother, and took me with him everywhere he went. In later years, he became a curmudgeon, very demanding and egotistical, but as a young man he had a charming personality.

  Shirley was a sweet, vivacious girl. She was sincerely interested in other people and wanted to hear about what was going on in your life. I carefully watched how she handled herself in public, and I realized that being Shirley Temple wasn’t easy. She had been subjected to kidnapping threats since she was a small child, and she usually went out with a hat pulled low so the brim would cover her face. Being famous took away Shirley’s freedom.

  There must have been times when she wondered if it was worth it. Shirley had the strangest career—a huge star at six, washed up by puberty. Well, maybe it wasn’t that strange; the same thing happened to Jackie Coogan in the silent era and would happen to several other child stars, who tend to be famous only so long as they’re cute. Mickey Rooney is one of the few who was able to sustain a career, though he had at least as many craters as peaks along the way.

  A number of very talented, gifted people applied themselves to the problem of reconstituting Shirley’s stardom when she became a young woman. Darryl Zanuck let her go after the expensive flop of The Blue Bird, and she went on to make movies for David O. Selznick, MGM, and John Ford, who had liked her when she starred in his film of Wee Willie Winkie. Some of the pictures she made for these men were successful, notably Selznick’s Since You Went Away and Ford’s Fort Apache, but they were successful movies in which Shirley Temple happened to appear, not successful Shirley Temple movies.

  Shirley basically walked away from show business when she got married for the second time in 1950, and proceeded to live a long and happy life spent successfully focusing on politics and her family.

  Our loss. Her gain.

  • • •

  I was a teenager when I first met Gloria Swanson. The year was 1948, and she had just gotten the part of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. I was going out with her daughter Michelle at the time, and I had just broken into the movies at MGM, making a tiny appearance in a movie directed by William Wellman called The Happy Years. (It shows up on Turner Classic Movies from time to time; if you watch it, you’ll see me in what seems to have been my prenatal state.)

  At the time, my knowledge of Gloria Swanson was limited. I knew she had been in silent movies, but in my mind she was mostly just Michelle’s mother. Of course, my respect for her increased exponentially when I saw Sunset Boulevard a little more than a year later. Around Hollywood, it was regarded as the most glorious comeback in a generation, which didn’t stop them from giving the Oscar to Judy Holliday, who was brilliant but had also played her part in Born Yesterday hundreds of times on stage.

  Gloria’s Norma Desmond was completely original and utterly unforgettable, and what made it all the more surprising was its emotional accuracy. In 1949, silent movies had only been gone for twenty or so years, but outside of the Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax in Los Angeles, or the Museum of Modern Art in New York, they were regarded as antiques and more or less impossible to see. But now we’re fortunate in that many of these films are available on DVD and Blu-ray, not to mention on Turner Classic Movies.

  In one sense, Norma Desmond provided a confirmation of popular taste—silent movies must have been pretty grotesque if people like that became household names. To which I say, you should have observed some of the players in 1949 Hollywood.

  Before Sunset Boulevard, Gloria’s movie career
had more or less ended in the mid-1930s. She had been the biggest female star of the 1920s, then made a terrible mistake by falling under Joe Kennedy’s influence, as well as under Joe Kennedy. He convinced her that she should produce her own pictures for United Artists, but Gloria was an actress, not a producer. She couldn’t control her costs, and everything she made went over budget. Queen Kelly, a movie written and directed by Erich von Stroheim, was never properly finished and resulted in a dead loss of $800,000, which was just about all her ready cash.

  Along came talkies, and she had a big hit with her first sound film, The Trespasser, which seemed to put her back on top. But it was a fluke; audiences just wanted to hear what she sounded like. Curiosity satisfied, they moved on to other, younger talents. Each succeeding Swanson film made less money than the one before it; at one point, she had to sell her United Artists stock back to the company to raise the cash to finish a picture.

  Gloria Swanson

  Irving Thalberg threw her a lifeline at MGM, planning to cast her in Dark Victory. When Thalberg died before that could happen, MGM sold the property to Warner Bros., where Bette Davis had a huge hit with it. Gloria never made a movie at MGM.

  Sunset Boulevard changed everything, although not in terms of cash—Paramount paid her less than $75,000, a piddling amount of money for the starring part in a major feature, but the hard reality was that there wasn’t a lot of demand for Gloria’s services by then. The movie upped her recognizability to such an extent that she was able to leverage the picture into a continual buzz of activity for the rest of her life. Not much of that activity consisted of acting, but Gloria didn’t seem to mind.

  Gloria was generous. She knew I wanted to be an actor. Everybody knew I wanted to be an actor, because I broadcast my ambition to anyone who would listen, and quite a few who wouldn’t. Gloria did her best to help me, giving Michelle and me copies of the script of Sunset Boulevard and putting us through our paces with Billy Wilder and Charlie Brackett’s dialogue. I took William Holden’s part, and Michelle played Nancy Olsen’s.