Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1938)

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Try Phelactine Depilatory For quickly removing superfluous hair from face. Sold at cosmetic counters everywhere. to plunge immediately into the most delicate and tender love scenes of the whole picture because Tyrone had been allowed just three weeks away from his own studio. The first day they met they kissed each other all day! DUT the main difficulty was this: just before shooting started, Norma's favorite director, Sidney Franklin, took sick. To realize the blow this was to Norma, consider that her finest, most successful pictures were made under Franklin's direction. Someone had to take over at once. And the only man in Hollywood who could do a thing like that on twenty-four hours' notice was W. S. Van Dyke. Now the relationship between a star of Shearer's importance and her director is a delicate thing. Clashes between stars and directors have made much of Hollywood's fiery history. Van Dyke, too, is notorious for running his shows. He has walked out on people like Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald. But Norma Shearer was something else — she was a power in Metro-GoldwynMayer. What would happen? Some Hollywood prophets gave the situation three days to last. Then, they predicted, either Van Dyke or Norma Shearer would blow up and walk out on the picture. At once, to make matters worse, a silly story got out. It went like this: Van Dyke shot four takes of one of Shearer's scenes, then said, "That's all." Norma Shearer objected, "No — one more." Van Dyke replied stubbornly, "I said that was all." And Shearer strode off the set in a huff. IT was pure fiction. It never happened at all. But it was in the newspapers and a lot of people believed it. The "Marie Antoinette" set was closed tight. That, said the wiseys, was to keep the terrific battles that were going on inside out of the press! A tension like that can show in a finished picture. It can seriously damage it. It could ruin Shearer's comeback. Norma Shearer may have realized that it was up to her. Or again maybe it was a series of accidents. No one will ever know but herself. But a day or two later, she tripped on the hoop of her gown, although she had practiced wearing it for months, stumbled and took a sprawling, comedy fall right in the midst of an emotional scene. The whole stage roared. Script girl, colored maid, juicer, Barrymore, Van Dyke and Shearer — screamed with laughter. All the pent-up nervousness vanished like air from a punctured balloon, and suddenly things were as sunny as a spring day. Woody started calling Norma "Kid" and "Baby" and she glowed with delight. Everybody eased up. The threat was gone. From then on other happy accidents helped the good feeling along. Norma blew up on her lines with John Barrymore. She mixed her French and English up with ludicrous results. The ostrich feathers on her dress played tricks. She acted some scenes on the floor. She became so warmly human that instead of fearing her, the whole company fell in love with Norma Shearer all over again — and her welcome back was complete. Woody Van Dyke phrased the feeling characteristically when he said, "She's the sweetest dam' woman in Hollywood!" NORMA SHEARER will never leave her career again, unless some unforeseen event in her life forces an absence. Not only by what she has told her friends, but by the unmistakable radiance about her is it certain that she is happier back at work than she has been since Irving Thalberg passed on. She is already deep in eager plans for "Idiot's Delight" and whether or not "Marie Antoinette" is the great success it now seems certain to be, Norma Shearer will continue to be one of the greatest possible assets to M-G-M. She is as fresh and beautiful as she ever was, if not more so, and miraculously youthful. There is no line in her face to betray the stunning tragedy she has lived through. If there was any cleverness in M-G-M's coupling her romantically on the screen with Tyrone Power, if there was any thought of using his brimming youth to revive the illusion of hers, it was entirely wasted. Their love scenes ring as true as a new coin. If anything, Norma Shearer, widow and mother, seems the younger. Right now as never before, Metro Goldwyn-Mayer misses Irving Thalberg and his peerless tradition. Norma Shearer still exemplifies that as does no one else in Hollywood. They were the royal couple and she is still queen. As queenly as Toinette herself. There was only one way in which Norma Shearer used any personal influence in the filming of "Marie Antoinette." That was to plead for the hiring of several old-time screen stars that the forgetful Hollywood parade has now passed by. To one, a big star yesterday but nobody now, Norma lent her own dressing room. She sent her private car for her in the mornings and took her home nights. She helped her on the set. Knowing the forgotten star was no great personal friend of Norma's someone asked her why she did it. "I like her," Norma answered simply, "because she holds her head up!" Norma Shearer might have said those same words of herself. But she doesn't have to. Hollywood is saying them for her. Born for Romance to his room; he's leaving next week — and California seasons slipping indefinably into each other, and the first year going by, and being five at long last. . . . nE jumped out of his big car, with "Famous" printed in white on the front door, and came dashing around the corner of the house, shouting: "Gretchen! Gretchen!" From a puddle behind the geranium hedge a small figure emerged. "Here, Uncle Ernest," it said, and stretched out mud-caked arms to be lifted. "Damn," said Uncle. "Well. Never mind. There's no time to dress you now. Would you like to be in the movies?" She regarded him in silence for ten seconds. Then her small voice soared in frightened screaming. Uncle Ernest picked her up. "Okay, now," he said. "Come along. We'll see." Half an hour later Director George Melford looked up from the script he was reading, kicked his megaphone aside, and regarded the dreadful little kid who confronted him. Her tears had made the mud run, but the bright blue eyes were intelligently interested and the small smile she offered him had a wistful kind of charm. "My niece," muttered Uncle Ernest apologetically, "was sort of playing when I found her." "So I see," Melford nodded. He grinned suddenly. "She'll do. Bring her around tomorrow. Clean." She worked two days, at twenty-five (Continued jrom page 15) dollars a day, and after that she was impossible, and there was no holding her. Glamour sat astride her skinny shoulders, masked her freckles, made her little companions forget the accepted beauty of Polly and Betty, made them cluster around Gretchen, saying, "D'you wanna play? D'joo like some candy?" Her mind said, There is a way — I HERE was a year of glory, then. A year in which the basement suddenly grew a rough, packing-box stage and a sagging curtain made of innumerable gunny sacks, and sounded to the excited rehearsals of homemade drama, of the sugary little-girl tradition, and heard the applause of assembled boarders who had paid five cents to witness Gretchen's latest production. One year, during which Gladys Young, in desperation, sought until she found the answer to her problem. "A convent, dear," she said happily to Gretchen that evening. "A lovely little school in San Gabriel, and the Sisters will be so nice to you. Now, you mustn't . . . please, dear, little girls have to be educated so that when they grow up . . . now listen! I will not have any child of mine neglecting her schooling to go into the movies. You may just as well stop that tantrum. You're going — to Ramona Convent — in the morning." And it was so. She got used to it, after a while. Never reconciled; but the quiet discipline and the soft chapel mood gradually stole into her consciousness, so that in the embittered young heart, long used to fighting the early wound of inferiority, there came a serenity that demanded no heroics to sustain her. She was no longer the smallest, the plainest; she was one of many, and there were smaller girls than she. And there were less attractive girls. As the years went by with their measured organ tread, Gretchen learned the trick of dignity. Her exuberance, her restlessness, misdirected at first, became in essence a joyful spirit held in restraint; like a bowl filled above the edge-level with clear water which, through some physical law, would not overflow until the slightest sound — the slightest vibration — should set it loose. There was danger, here. There were the minor escapades, of course: forbidden chocolate bars kept under pillows until they proclaimed themselves to the watchful sisters by melting; the insignificant lies, the careful whispering, the breaches in decorum — all duly punished. There was, as a matter of fact, little scope for mischief. Caged, Gretchen's exuberant growing personality sought desperately for some kind of release and found it at last in the dreams you can conjure from books. You must see this. It is so important to your understanding of what followed— of what must always follow in 86