Following Escape, Shearer was off the screen for two years, marrying the man she would remain with for the rest of her life. He was an Irving Thalberg look-alike, a ski instructor she met in Sun Valley, Martin Arrouge. Hollywood gossip went wild when Norma Shearer married a skier who was younger than she was. She rocked the town, even though she’d given fair warning she was still alive. Following a suitable period after Thalberg’s death, she had embarked on a red-hot love affair with George Raft, and was also rumored to have had an affair with—hold on—Mickey Rooney. Her two final films were both released in 1942: We Were Dancing and Her Cardboard Lover. Where Escape had at least been geared to current events, these two lackluster movies were throwbacks to her 1930s sophisticated comedies. She had mastered the material, but it was now wrong for the times where it had once been right.
In We Were Dancing, her light touch is still in place, but it’s dated: too brittle, too silly. She is still classy and elegant, but she seems irrelevant. The day of the sophisticated lady with jewels, furs, and concerns about adultery is over—at least her version of it is. The persona she had honed so carefully for herself as the crème de la crème of MGM, which had helped to define her as a star, was going down the drain as the age of teenagers, bobby-soxers, democratic little girls-next-door, waitresses and welders, and gals who could sing and dance and show off their great legs was getting ready to take over. There wasn’t going to be any room for a Norma Shearer. At least that’s what she began to fear.
By the time of Her Cardboard Lover (1942), America was at war and women needed to put their hair up in nets and get out to the factory to weld their way to victory. Shearer, the woman who had aspired to being Lynn Fontanne or Gertrude Lawrence, was out of step.* Her entrance in Her Cardboard Lover is classic Shearer. She’s in diamonds, of course, and a filmy black formal gown with matching stole. She has a huge peony fastened on her bosom (“they’re not real flowers,” she tells Robert Taylor, handing them over as a token). She wears a smart 1940s hairdo, carries a cigarette holder a foot long, and literally sweeps into a gambling casino. She’s every inch the smart sophisticate of the 1930s, the kind of woman such an establishment always keeps a special chair for in its main hall. The problem is that it’s now the 1940s. Shearer’s out of date on the home front. Although she’s still slim, elegant, and impeccably dressed, it doesn’t matter anymore. She’s described as “a doll in the toy shop window,” a character who so overwhelms Robert Taylor when he meets her that he can’t speak for several minutes (we can bless her for that).
After We Were Dancing, Shearer was said to have been offered the title role in Mrs. Miniver, which might have revitalized her career and updated her image. But, allegedly, at forty she didn’t want to play a mother. (She was one, of course.) And so, with MGM no longer behind her as it had been, the star who had spent most of her career there just quit. She never appeared again in a movie.
Many reasons have been offered for Shearer’s departure: no Thalberg to guide her, good roles were deserting her, she didn’t want to play mothers, her new husband, her children, the desire for a rest—she had been working most of her life—and just plain age. The latter can be eliminated. She looked fabulous and acted with grace, but perhaps she had learned a business lesson from Thalberg. She was no longer good box office. Once she understood that, she left and never came back. She got out while the getting out was good and lived to be eighty-one, dying in 1983.
When Shearer left the MGM screen, she more or less deeded it, without necessarily intending to, to the woman who did take the Mrs. Miniver role and earned an Oscar for it, Greer Garson. Garson’s career actually has its own longevity and box office power, but it’s seldom discussed that way. She began in films in 1939 and made her last real movie in 1967 but continued with theatre and television, making her final appearance on ABC’s hit television show The Love Boat in December 1982. That’s forty-three years, and considering that she didn’t have to work (her husband was rich) and that she didn’t enter films until she was thirty-three, she racked up an impressive record. Her career was one of the strongest of any female star of her era. Her problem today stems largely from the scorn she received from latter-day critics, especially Pauline Kael, who loved to ridicule both her movies and her “grand lady” style of acting. Nevertheless, Garson was a box office powerhouse, and she was also nominated for an Oscar seven times: for Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), Blossoms in the Dust (1941), Mrs. Miniver (1942, for which she won), Madame Curie in 1943, Mrs. Parkington in 1944, The Valley of Decision (1945), and finally for Sunrise at Campobello in 1960. It’s a mark of how dominant she was as a star to realize she was considered a Best Actress candidate in 1939, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1945 (and she should have been nominated in 1940 for Pride and Prejudice).* American audiences have always had a curious desire for Garsonesque “great lady” movie actresses to be cast in “important” female roles and bring “dignity” to Hollywood’s presentation of women. Starting in the silent era, with Norma Talmadge, and continuing through early talkies (with Ann Harding) and proceeding through Shearer to Garson and onward to Deborah Kerr and even Grace Kelly, Hollywood has fed the audience’s need for the “class” actress.† These women were stars who could go beyond mere ladylike performances, soaring into Great Acting to portray the Great Women of History. They were noble, grand, fine, brave, representing the need for everyone (the business and its audience) to think that Hollywood had more than female sex symbols or untalented beauties: It had actresses. This tradition continues today in the form of Meryl Streep, our modern doyenne of Great Lady in Great Pictures. (If Madame Curie is remade, Streep will be cast.) Lady Meryl is a slightly rum-pot version of this tradition, but she’s still the logical successor to the Talmadge/Shearer/Garson tradition.
LORETTA YOUNG, Irene Dunne, Norma Shearer, (and Greer Garson, for that matter) were all actresses who made films over three decades, with Young lasting even longer. Besides Young, Dunne, and Shearer, there were two other big-name female movie stars who were famous for doing things their own way: Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck. Hepburn was Jean Arthur in reverse. In an interview in a 1934 issue of Liberty, Hepburn tells Adela Rogers St. Johns that she doesn’t like to talk about herself and then proceeds to talk about herself: details of her family, her upbringing, her theatrical background, her brother’s death, how psychology can be used in acting, her personal creed, her ideas about golf, et cetera. Finally, coyly, yet performing with stunning guile, she says, “I hope you like me.” And it worked. St. Johns concludes her article by saying she feels that “someday Katharine Hepburn will be our greatest actress.” Hepburn cleverly took charge of her interviews, defining herself as someone too unique and independent to need promoting: a way of remaining inside the publicity machine while claiming to be separate from it. Hepburn, of course, could afford to be independent. She not only had personal style and considerable talent, but also was bolstered by a college education (Bryn Mawr) during an era when few movie stars had even finished high school. Hepburn had solid family support from a group of equally strong-minded and well-educated people who, while not rich-rich, were well off. (When she became dissatisfied with her RKO contract, Hepburn bought herself out of it. Having such options automatically guaranteed her independence from the studio system.)
Stanwyck’s independence grew out of her need to feel financially and professionally secure. Stanwyck found having a studio contract to be a source of safety, so she sidestepped total control by signing a nonexclusive contract. (This meant that, although she was under studio contract and subject to the studio’s whims, she could at the same time play roles offered to her by others if she so wished.) A tough negotiator from a hardscrabble background, Stanwyck was smart enough—and talented enough—to sign nonexclusive contracts with more than one studio at the same time. This gave her maximum security (two studios owned her) and maximum flexibility (she could move back and forth from one studio to the other, choosing which roles she’d play, when she would play them
, and whom she’d play them with). It wasn’t about being independent from the studio system for her, but about being free to work for as long as possible, as often as possible, and in the best possible roles. She never wanted to own the shop, like Loretta Young; she never found personal happiness outside her career like Dunne; and although she married two men in show business (Frank Fay and Robert Taylor), she never let a man run her career like Shearer did. Barbara Stanwyck did things her own way, making the system itself her source of independence. One of her directors, Jacques Tourneur, said of her, “She only lives for two things, and both of them are work.”
The stories of Young, Dunne, and Shearer might suggest that career lon- gevity for women as stars may be linked to breaking the machine. Dunne resisted typing by being able to play across three genres, and she came to Hollywood already a star. Shearer, who became a big star in the silent years, stepped aside from manipulation by putting herself in Thalberg’s hands. Young found a way to trick the machine. She used it but kept her name and a personal identity without getting trapped into an image and label she couldn’t maintain as she aged. Their careers are among the great exceptions to the rule of the machine.
* All her life, Loretta Young was called Gretch by her family and those who knew her best. She changed her name to “Loretta” only for movies.
† Young didn’t establish an actual screen type (other than pretty young thing) in silent films, so moving over to sound was not a problem for her. In the beginning of her career, she was sometimes called “the new Janet Gaynor” before the old one had lost popularity. In fact, Gaynor’s career illustrates how a type could move from silent to sound. Gaynor was a somewhat childlike, ethereal, but inherently optimistic silent type. When sound came, she did not cut her silent self loose, but added it onto a perkier, more modern presence. In her first all-talking movie, the musical Sunny Side Up (1929), her character, like many from her silent days, was a poor little working girl, only now she talked and sang and danced and had a sassy 1930s sparkle. At a tenement block party, Gaynor goes up onto a makeshift stage to do a number. For a moment, she just stands there in her tiny shoes, wearing an off-the-rack print dress and holding a top hat and cane for props. Then she cocks her head to the side, smiles a radiant smile, and uncorks a truly insignificant singing voice. The glory of the moment lies in her rendering of the title song, accompanied by a soft-shoe routine right out of a kiddie dancing school. Confident of her charm (which had been tested in silent movies), trusting no one will mind that she’s not Merman, Gaynor sings in a wobbly little voice: “Be like two fried eggs … keep your sunny side up, up … keep your sunny side up!” Audiences saw her as their familiar Janet Gaynor—just with a voice added. Her career trajectory continued upward.
* Young was the product of a remarkable family of intelligent and talented females. First and foremost was her mother, Gladys Belzer, who became a well-known and successful interior decorator (Belzer was her second husband’s name). Two of Young’s sisters also became movie actresses under the names of Sally Blane and Polly Ann Young. Her half-sister, Georgiana, married Ricardo Montalban. Blane, saying how bright Loretta was, also described her sister’s resilience: “She didn’t seem to mind rejection like I did. She didn’t take it personally … Any rejection she got just made Loretta more determined. ‘What do they know?’ she would say. ‘They’re not going to dismiss me.’”
* Young’s religious nature was often a source of hilarity in Hollywood. Joan Crawford once told a guest in her home not to sit in a chair because “Loretta was just sitting there. It probably has the mark of the cross in the seat.”
† Young may not have always been assigned the top directors, but she was always cast opposite the very biggest male stars. In fact, she played leading lady to all the major leading men of four Hollywood decades: Lon Chaney, Edward G. Robinson, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., John Barrymore, Ronald Colman, James Cagney, George Brent, Warren William, Paul Lukas, Franchot Tone, Richard Barthelmess, Spencer Tracy, George Arliss, Clark Gable, Charles Boyer, Tyrone Power, Robert Taylor, Don Ameche, Orson Welles, Gary Cooper, Robert Preston, Fredric March, Brian Aherne, David Niven, Ray Milland, Joseph Cotten, Robert Mitchum, William Holden, Robert Cummings, Alan Ladd, Van Johnson, Jeff Chandler—and more.
* Not many movie stars were fashionable off the screen. Fred Astaire, Katharine Hepburn, and of course Audrey Hepburn had their own personal style, which never changed over the years. But Loretta Young was named to the best dressed list three times, although one mean columnist said, “She dons a hunting outfit to set a mousetrap.” She made fashion into something everyone could appreciate with her dramatic—and much beloved though much ridiculed—entrances through big doors to introduce her weekly television show. Each week, she opened the doors, swept in wearing a spectacular gown, twirled around so the audience could eyeball it front and back, and then graciously informed everyone what the show would be about. No one who saw them has ever forgotten those entrances. They were the 1950s epitome of stardom, glamour, and high fashion.
* James Cagney is very sexy, something that is seldom written about in discussions of his career, probably because most of the writing about him has been by men.
* Young and Power made five films together. Love Is News, Cafe Metropole, and Second Honeymoon were screwball comedies. Ladies in Love was a women’s film and Suez an epic biopic. Young said Power was a “dreamy youth … so beautiful … he rather resented it.”
* This nun, Young’s character in Come to the Stable (1949), earned her a second Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Young lost to Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress.
† Loretta Young also made few of the movies that are usually labeled “women’s pictures,” although she did make some. Paula (1952) and Cause for Alarm (1951) were melodramas, noirish in presentation.
* The movie works because of Young’s prudery and her latter-day ladylike dignity. Gable plays the kind of guy who could spot a real woman underneath the cold exterior, and, like the prospector he is, he strikes gold once more. In their big love scene, which takes place in the fog atop Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, Young starts out saying, “I demand respect,” and then switches suddenly from moving away from his advances to turning to him and asking, “Why don’t you kiss me? That’s what you brought me up here for, isn’t it?” This shift scares him so badly (“I’m a longshoreman and you’re a Harvard man,” he has said earlier) that he pulls back his advance. He tells her he respects her, and now she says that everyone respects her. “Disrespect me, puh-leeze.”
† In fact, the glory of having her own TV series meant that Young could—and did—play anything: In one season she was a Japanese wife, a Swedish servant, an Indian Maharani, a gangster’s girl, a waitress—and a nun.
‡ According to an article in Collier’s magazine, she took to speaking them offscreen, also. Interviewer Jim Marshall reported that Young had “taken to giving out like a Delphic Oracle on a variety of subjects, mainly love, courtship, marriage and how to use leftovers.”
* Those who had been stunned by her never forgot her. On a 2005 sports interview show, the octogenarian coach Red Auerbach startled his youthful interviewer by replying to the question “Who’s your favorite star?” by going dreamy-eyed and replying, “This goes way back, but Loretta Young.” He paused dramatically, puffed on his trademark cigar, and added, “She had a little somethin’.”
† Young died on August 12, 2000, at the age of eighty-seven.
* Some other women on the list in those years were Joan Crawford, Janet Gaynor, Jean Harlow, Mae West, and Greta Garbo.
† Dunne’s five Oscar nominations were for Cimarron (1931), Theodora Goes Wild (1936), The Awful Truth (1937), Love Affair (1939), and I Remember Mama (1948). She lost to, respectively, Marie Dressler for Min and Bill, Luise Rainer for The Great Ziegfeld, Luise Rainer for The Good Earth, Vivien Leigh for Gone with the Wind, and Jane Wyman for Johnny Belinda.
* Always an honest and down-to-earth person, Dunne commented at the en
d of the 1980s, “I haven’t held up as well as Loretta, who is a marvel, hasn’t changed or aged a day since I met her and that was fifty years ago.” While it was true that no one aged less than Loretta Young, I can speak as someone who met Dunne in 1981 and she looked fantastic. She was a surprisingly small woman—tiny, really—but never seemed so on-screen.
* There’s one dramatic moment in Dunne’s offscreen behavior. It’s been said that in 1941, she became so sick and tired of the tour buses outside her home that she donned a disguise and rode one, just to hear what was being said about her. That’s daring, all right. By her own words, Dunne summed up her life as “very quiet.” Her lifelong friend Douglas Fairbanks Jr. said, “Everyone adored Irene … She had an impeccable offstage reputation as the virtuous wife of a doctor.”
* Director Gregory La Cava said, “If Irene Dunne isn’t the First Lady of Hollywood, then she’s the last one.”
* She was nominated twice for comedy: The Awful Truth and Theodora Goes Wild.
* There was a slight problem with 1943’s A Guy Named Joe, in which her original love, played by Spencer Tracy (a man in her own age range), dies in the story and is replaced by Van Johnson, who is too young for her. But the quality of the film, which is touching, and her delicate performance make it work.
* What Dunne does is make a low, mocking sound of laughter, a little “uh-huh-huh-huh” when she puts someone down. Most people find it utterly charming because it’s relaxed and natural and unique to her.
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