For Katie's Birthday: Norma Shearer's Head On A Plate

It's Katie-Bar-The-Door's birthday today and what better way to celebrate than by trashing her least favorite actress of the pre-war era, Norma Shearer. At least that's what she asked for, along with the more traditional gold earrings and chocolates from Godiva.

And while taking shots at Norma Shearer is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, sometimes you're in the mood for seafood and where else are you going to get it besides the fish barrel? The ocean? Not likely.

So here you are, Katie, Norma Shearer wrapped in newspaper with a side order of French fries and tartar sauce. Bon appetit.

Now, Katie would be the first to tell you that there were actresses in Hollywood in the 1930s with less talent, but she'd also point out, and this is what gets her goat, they weren't (1) famous, well-connected, (2) pompous, preening egomaniacs who (3) took on roles they were unsuited for, depriving other actresses of work and (4) winning an Oscar for it. I mean, yes, Luise Rainer won a couple of Oscars during the decade, but she flamed out so quickly and was otherwise so anonymous, it's hard to work up any personal animosity toward her.

Besides, Norma was just so goody-goody, it's hard to swallow that much saccharine without suffering at least a little insulin shock.

I guess it's possible you're reading this and don't quite remember who Norma Shearer was. Have you ever seen The Women, probably the most celebrated "chick flick" of all time (the 1939 original, that is)—Norma Shearer was the boring one who gets eaten alive by bitch goddess Joan Crawford and her catty pal Rosalind Russell. Like most of Shearer's later roles, she's dated, faintly musty and more than a little ludicrous.

You can see most of Shearer's shortcoming as actress right in this movie. She doesn't act, she declaims, repeating her lines like a kid reciting a poem she's memorized but doesn't understand. She plays every role as if she's in a melodrama. And she took longer to abandon the broad, theatrical gestures of the Silent Era than any of her contemporaries, and some she didn't abandon at all.

She seems completely unaware that anyone is on the stage with her, except as a prop to maneuver around. If acting is listening, as many actors have insisted, she's not acting at all because she's never listening. It doesn't help that she was cross-eyed and to cover the fact was almost always photographed in three-quarter profile. It leaves her face pointed at nothing in particular, certainly not at the person she's supposed to be talking to.

In fact, she was self-conscious about nearly every aspect of her appearance—in addition to her eyes, she hated her waist, her legs, her hands, her chin—and used dozens of tricks, catalogued at length at "Divas The Site," to cover them up. The result is that she's so busy turning her chin just so, holding her hands just there and hiding her legs behind this and her waist behind that, that she forever comes across as someone uncomfortable in her own skin and trying too hard to look the opposite. I mean, sure, Cary Grant always admitted that "Cary Grant" was an artificial construct, but he could bring it off; Norma couldn't.

And that's just Norma Shearer the actress. You add to that Norma Shearer the person and no wonder Katie can't stand her. Shearer was the wife of powerful producer Irving Thalberg, and played it to the hilt, muscling her way into roles she wanted as opposed to ones that suited her, firing directors she didn't like and using the studio publicity machine to carve a monument to her own vain self-image. She had the power to choose the roles that suited her ambition, so it's her fault and hers alone that she chose, say, to star in Romeo and Juliet at age 36 and followed it up with Marie Antoinette, both rewarded with undeserved Oscar nominations.

Anyway, she took home the Oscar for The Divorcee in 1930 and was nominated for five other movies, Their Own Desire, A Free Soul, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and the aforementioned Romeo and Juliet and Marie Antoinette. Personally, I don't think she's good in any of them.

The dope has it that she was offered the part of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind, but turned it down, saying, "Scarlett O'Hara is going to be a thankless and difficult role. The part I'd like to play is Rhett Butler." Personally, my mind rebels at the thought. I prefer to think the offer, if it happened at all, was never serious and was part of some polite publicity stunt designed to keep Norma happy and in the public eye. I truly believe the only way David O. Selznick would have cast Norma Shearer in Gone With The Wind is if she had had nude photographs of him with a chipmunk—and even then he would said, "To hell with it! Who hasn't had sex with a chipmunk!" To think otherwise is just too perverse to contemplate.

Some also claim Billy Wilder offered her the part of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, but I don't believe that either.

Actually, I refuse to believe Norma Shearer was ever offered the part in any movie. I think she owned a cache of blackmail photos to rival J. Edgar Hoover's and simply whipped one out whenever a movie role piqued her interest. Really, it's the only explanation that makes sense.

Anyway, once she retired in 1942 she stayed retired, which is to her credit. She died in 1983.

Which is also to her credit.

Next up: A few words about her power couple marriage to Irving Thalberg.

[3/18/2010 And yet Norma Shearer wins the Katie Award for Best Actress of 1931-32 with her career-best performance in Private Lives. Click here to read the essay.]