Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1938)

A warm and human story of a gallant woman who finds in her past the courage to make the present always worth living jv never, from that night on, did she admit to m doubt that she could and would become Miss Norma Shearer an actress, her wagon lcefully hitched in fact, to . . . Miss Norma jf'arer ... a star! [lir she didn't take into account such terms as »f'he second memory she shares with us . . . i any night in April in New York City seven Mrs later. (he, her mother and her sister, the family o|une lost in the aftermath of war, had come o^ew York to earn a living. At the wickets ifBroadway agents, of commercial photogshers, Norma and her sister took turns askrr if anything was to be had today. At night njheir third-floor room, they took turns makn tidy their clothes for tomorrow. Their :her managed the evening meal on the gas ilte. >.nd so, on an April night, a steady noiseless a smearing the lights across the street, tfrma, in her crepe kimono (since it was Athole's turn to mind the dresses) helped their mother; counted out three slices of bread, three cups of tea. She remembers as though she were hearing it now, the shrill voice in the street of the dwarf who sold night papers. She remembers, as though she were still watching it, the spongy shape of the leak on the ceiling. But most vividly of all, she remembers how she hoped that tonight her mother had managed a new kind of meat, hamburger, stew . . . anything at all except more of the cracker-dipped variety (what brand of meat she didn't quite know) which had been their menu for six nights in succession! For though it put up a fine appearance on the meat platter, it left Norma in a state frankly known as hunger! She had been hungry for a week! For a week she had awaited each evening meal hoping for a change even to good oldfashioned bologna! But hope was again in vain tonight. The smell of frying proved to presage, after all, only V little girl, "not yet eight," hopefully hitched her /gon to . . . Miss Norma Shearer ... a star! Came )■ struggle for a foothold . . . finally, a "break," in tch a georgette dress played an amusing part . . . sucjs . . . and her marriage to the brilliant Irving ThalJg . . . a honeymoon in Heidelberg . . . working toI her . . . playing together . . . then tragedy striking close the heels of that great picture, "Romeo and Juliet" . . . lirement . . . today, a new Norma Shearer . . . star again more of the same. And things had now cumv. to a pass where a sight of this fish, flesh or fowl, whatever it was, was something the young Miss Shearer felt she simply could not endure again! "Mother," she said, with the hesitance of apology for seeming to me difficult, "but couldn't we have some other kind of meat tomorrow? Eating this doesn't do any good. You eat it, but you're still hungry." "Well, of course," reminded her mother, "we haven't had very much money, and so. . . ." And so the classification of the "piece de resistance" was now divulged. "And so," laughs Norma Shearer, "there's one dish which to the end of my days I shall consistently decline. I found out that night that what had been on our table for a week, disguised as meat . . . was egg plant." A THIRD memory, the thrilling day when, with a four-week contract, Norma Shearer arrived in Hollywood. At the desk of Hollywood Hotel she signed the register, making it, however, as inconspicuous a bit of business as possible since she hoped not to be noticed until she could appear in the one fine dress she proudly possessed; proper support for the fact that she was now a person in pictures. For, in this history-making lobby, lounged the directors, producers and important "innocent bystanders" who measured and manipulated fortune and fame. And in Hollywood you couldn't divine what accidental moment would prove the great one. The block-long veranda with its palm-tree shade, porch chairs and summer swings, was "Peacock Alley," no less, for the entrances and exits of this, that and the (Continued on page 87)