Two for the Road

One thing this photo tells me:  it is unwise to attempt an Adrian look unless you actually have Adrian dressing you.  This comes close - but Norma really should have known better.

Au Petit Matin

MGM's 1938 Marie Antoinette is a film better known as the Widow Thalberg's last fling with the Grade-A Prestige Pictures she'd been making since she hit her stride at the top of the decade than it is as an actual movie-to-have-seen.*  I haven't, and so was all the more surprised to see, as above, how realistically - for a Norma Shearer picture - it plays the dénouement of the sad lady's life.  Would you know this was Norma Shearer, if you didn't know it was Norma Shearer?

All of which comes to mind because today marks the 219th anniversary of the onetime Austrian archduchess's death-by-guillotine.  It was an extreme end to a life of extravagance and so has remained a source of much fascination ever since. 

As a character, the indispensable IMDb tells us, the ill-fated queen has appeared in nearly 100 differents guises on the large and small screens, with a cavalcade of actresses joining Shearer, from silent pioneer Julia Swayne Gordon in 1916's My Lady's Slipper to Jayne Meadows as a guest on Steve Allen's faux/historico talk show, Meeting of Minds.  She has inspired at least one contemporary opera, The Ghosts of Versailles (I was at the premiere, but really almost all I remember is Marilyn Horne playing Samira the Turkish Entertainer in an interpolated star turn that really could be a Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion all on its ownsome).  She also crops up in La Révolution française, the 1973 rock opera by the team of Boublil and Schönberg, who went to on operatize, as it were other picturesque conflicts in Les Mis and Miss Saigon.   She gets to sing a very pretty song, "Au petit matin (16 October 1793)", which you can sample here.

All of which risks our losing sight of the two women really on my mind, the queens of France and MGM.  You can see Shearer's excellent work en route to the scaffold here, but it's best to turn off the execrable music.  The woman she's portraying certainly could never have dreamed how very wrong things would go in her once-charmed life, nor that her death and those of her family would set a dark pattern for so many to follow: her nephew (several times removed), Maximilian of Mexico; the Romanovs in their Ekaterinberg basement; the boy-king of Iraq and his family.  Shearer, of course, kept her head (although, in the end, not her mind), but lost her career. 

Both, I suppose, might be seen in different ways as object lessons of what happens to vain, silly women who suddenly find themselves defenseless after a lifetime of cosseting, but that seems unduly harsh to both.  How much nicer to remember the pretty girl, actress and archduchess alike, setting out on a great adventure that brought her, for a while at least, to the top...

* But oh, you say, what about The Women?  Well, it certainly was an A, even an A+, but it's an ensemble epic, by no means a star vehicle, and by no means a typical Shearer outing.  Actually, it should have been the picture that reinvented her, but after that there are just three pale copies of her earlier triumphs, over and out.  The Women is a treasure, but for Mrs. Thalberg, a dead end.

The Last Flapper

I just came across a remarkable obituary in that staple of the almost lost art of writing them, The Telegraph. Would you believe - and I very nearly don't - that the limpid-eyed young lady above has only just left us this month? She was the euphoniously named Frederica Sagor Maas, and at the time of her death she was, at 111, the third oldest person in California.

That alone is, to an extent, remarkable in itself. What has me gobsmacked, though, is that she was very likely among the very last links to the silent-film era at its most vibrant. A scriptwriter, she worked on films including the major Clara Bow vehicles The Plastic Age and It (generally identified, inaccurately, only with the hyperflorid writing of Elinor Glyn), as well as one of Louise Brooks's more notable Stateside efforts, Rolled Stockings (as evocative a Jazz Age title, in its way, as any, no?). She even had a hand in the great Garbo-Gilbert Flesh and the Devil.

She and her husband, Ernest, had a varied time of it, and while their work on Betty Grable's 1947 vehicle The Shocking Miss Pilgrim helped make that picture a hit, they left Hollywood, and Frederica spent the balance of her professional life in the somewhat less fraught field of insurance adjusting.

At 99, she published an autobiography that was, apparently, equal part bitterness and exposé, full of lurid tales of Paramount orgies and Metro misbehavior. She didn't think much, it seems, of most of the studio types she worked with, and she doesn't seem to have gone out of her way to have played the Hollywood game.

It's amazing to think that until just a couple of weeks ago there was someone among us who could have told us, first person, what it was like to watch Clara Bow at work and play, someone who was a peer and counterpart of Frances Marion, who was hard at work as a scriptwriter years before Dorothy Parker headed West. Not to mention someone who likely danced the Charleston and Black Bottom alongside Lucille LeSeuer in some LA nightclub and who was a friend of Norma Shearer's (before Mrs. Thalberg became the semi-petrified Boss's wife and no matter what she thought of the man she dismissed as a "mama's boy").

At 110, the Telegraph reports, she asked for "a large chocolate cake" on her birthday. She earned it.

Trailer Trash: We Were Yawning

Norma Shearer ended her onscreen days with a trio of pictures that proved, more or less definitively, that what had seemed like a new direction in The Women (Norma playing a spirited, contemporary woman with a sense of humor) was actually a dead end, for they took her back to the aristo settings and Great Lady moments that had made up too much of her work in the '30s.

This isn't, as some have suggested, a case of a studio easing out a falling star (as Warner's did Kay Francis) by throwing her into quickies or stinting on production values. No; it's simply that suddenly it's the 40s, and what Norma does just doesn't play any more. Escape, Her Cardboard Lover, and this one, We Were Dancing, all had respectable sources (a popular novel, a stage favorite, and a pair of Coward one-acts) and were given the full glossy MGM finish - sets, costumes, lingering flattering close-ups, and hordes of extras when necessary. Escape had a Special Prestige Guest Star in Alla Nazimova, and both it and Cardboard Lover paired Norma with rising favorite Robert Taylor.

We Were Dancing is the Shearer picture that time forgot, and this trailer goes a long way in showing why. It's perfectly fine to fill out out a movie with people like Lee Bowman and veteran character player Alan Mowbray; it's quite another to claim that they constitute part of a "7 Star" cast. It doesn't help that Norma's been burdened with a coiffure that appears to be equal parts meringue and Sue Ann Nivens, or that even when being slapped, Melvyn Douglas looks to be waiting for his next date with Ninotchka. This is the Norma Shearer parodied by Charles Busch - lavish, exquisite in her self-regard, and totally pointless.

All of which is to say I can't wait to see it in its entirely when next the opportunity arises - on top of Norma, Norma, Norma, it has a bit by a very young Ava Gardner, a turn by Marjorie Main as a lady judge, and a moment or two for professional dowager Norma Varden. With all that and Norma's dresses, what more could one ask?

Everybody Have Fun Tonight

Three A-list ladies show that it's possible, in fact, to enjoy yourself at even the most elaborate of Hollywood costume parties. It's a magic moment in their lives, and I like to think completely genuine:

Marion oblivious of the double chins and passing years, hoping, perhaps, that Norma being at her party meant, finally, an end to all that gossip...

...Norma, carefully composing her face in one of the six trademarked expressions that successfully hid her "difficult" eyes...

...and Merle, with that tight shopgirl's smile, incongruous as always on her perfect face, that betrayed a certain painful nastiness of character (and, in this case, the knowledge that her mantilla overshadowed even that of the boss's widow).

Do you suppose that in sixty years anyone will find as much interest in deconstructing a party snap of Anne Hathaway, Kirsten Dunst, and Jessica Biel, to grab three random names from today's casting lists? Given that I can hardly stay awake thinking of them now, I have my doubts...

Hollywood Legend

Rumor has it that by late '38, Louis B. Mayer was so eager to get the Widow Thalberg out of Marie Antoinette that he tested every single actress on the lot. Sadly, Marjorie Main's supposedly heartbreaking reel has disappeared, and all that remains of Margaret O'Brien's is this haunting still. Yeah, yeah, yeah - I know she wasn't born 'til '37, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it. You explain how this damn picture came to be...

Hollywood at Play

'Round about 70 years, Edgar Bergen - pioneer and, really, sole practitioner of the very odd profession of radio ventriloquist - gave a party. The theme? The Gay '90s. It looks like it was great, if slightly quirky, fun.

The host, of course, entertained, in the company of a blackfaced Charlie McCarthy.

Ray Bolger lent some of his own unique talents to the entertainment;

Which also included a bevy of period-costumed lovelies. Here, Betty Grable and Martha Raye launch into an impromptu can-can competition, which seems to puzzle Mary Martin.

Martha, of course, was always such a shrinking violet.

Miriam Hopkins and a puzzlingly costumed if thoroughly disguised Tyrone Power had a rather more sedate time, although they certainly seem to be enjoying themselves. Miriam Hopkins without her eye makeup, however appropriate to the era, is not necessarily a sight for the faint-hearted.

Norma Shearer was her usual contrary self, turning up sans costume and in the company of the second Mr. Mrs. Thalberg.

But in the end no one had a better time than Dorothy Lamour. And that made it all worthwhile, if you ask me.

5 Non-Blondes

Pages from the Sydney Guilaroff Hall of Shame. Looks that never should have been.

Loretta "Goldie" Young

Bette "Cookie" Davis

Joan "Jayne" Collins

Norma "Torchy" Shearer

Cherilyn Sarkisian Bono Allman*

Kindest just to file these under "what were they thinking?" and move on. But first, gaze at the trainwreck that misguided glamour can be, and learn.

*A name that, when written out in full, is literally impossible to make any trashier. God knows I've tried.

Birth of a New Tradition

"Honestly, Irving, I don't see what you're getting so worked up about. Your mother? For God's sake, you can just tell your mother it's something else. Oh, I don't know ... some kind of - Chanukah bush! That's it!"

A Deep, Deep Peace...

Here we see, at the height of her distinguished career, the very last of the great actresses to retain the seventeenth-century affectation of being called only by her married name. Although born Stella Tanner, she was known the world over as Mrs. Patrick Campbell, despite the gentleman who bestowed that name on her having played only the equivalent of a walk-on in her colorful life.

She comes to mind today as the originator of one of my favorite quotes about marriage. Wedlock, she said, is "the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue." And it really is.

I was pleased to discover, in checking the wording of the above, that she also came up with two additional contributions to the canon.

To a young actress, who had complained of the predilections of two of the gentlemen in their troupe, she said, "Does it really matter what these affectionate people do - so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses?"

And she more than earned her reputation as a scatty troublemaker, during her brief career as a second-string Marie Dressler at MGM, by sweeping into a party and trilling out to her studio's star producer, "Dear Mr. Thalberg, how is your lovely, lovely wife with the tiny, tiny eyes?" (Another version has her saying, in her usual stage-whisper, as Mrs. T. passed by, "Sweet Norma - she has such lovely little eyes - and so close together!").

Portrait Gallery: the Unfortunate Archduchess

Today of course, is the legendary Quartorze de Juilliet. A big celebration in Paris and other centers of francophilia, but I tend to think of it as the beginning of the end for a woman who really deserved better. It was three more years before Marie Antoinette met her death before a jeering mob, but after July 14, it was only a matter of time.

Several of the most interesting portraits of the Queen were by artists who were themselves women of accomplishment, like Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun, who helped create the Marie with whom we are most familiar, a confection of feathers, powdered hair, and impressive frontage.

She started out a very long way from her sordid end; she was born the Archduchess Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna of Austria, daughter of the formidable Empress Maria Theresa.

Her place in the pop-cultural firmament seems continuous and unshakable, the subject of portrayals ridiculous...

...and sublime.

In the end, though, I can't shake the memory of how very badly it all turned out.

This posthumous portrait was by an aristocratic admirer, the Marquise de Bréhan - not quite the painter Vigée-Le Brun was, but I'm sure her heart was in the right place.