ST chs 25, 26 Norma Shearer

[Robin Landseadel]

The “Ticket”? Three fisted tough-guy P.I. Hicks McTaggert (Dick Powell, warming up for his later
role as Philip Marlowe in Murder My Sweet, 1944) has been assigned the task of dragging
Daphne Airmont (Norma Shearer) back to the states and into the loving arms of one G. Rodney
Flaunch (Martin Short).
 
Of course, as we are now firmly in “noir” land, things will turn out about the same way they turn
out in Stankey Kubrick’s “The Killing” (1956):
 
Fay: Johnny, you've got to run!
Johnny Clay: Eh, what's the difference? 
 
 
 
“You don’t approve, I can tell.”
 
“I think it’s the kind of stuff that killed vaudeville, but I’m a professional hey, people care about who they care about, if they didn’t I’d have to be looking for a different line of work.”
 
“Hmm. Tell me what you think,” turning into a sudden three-quarter profile. “People say I look like Norma Shearer.”
 
“Well, maybe in the society pages, right after you’ve kissed off one more of them career lounge lizards, you get almost that same look on your face—ain’t it grand the sacrifice I’m making, and at the same time, whoo, what a relief.”
 
ST 201

. . . The room by now lit up in some unearthly color process, timed
in a far-away film lab so as to present an outward and visible
sign of some strange underacknowledged link between
Hungary and tropical Brazil, energetic dancers in vivid
flashes of parrot colors and fanciful hats gliding elaborately
by, camera angles growing dutched and dizzy, as it all goes
sweeping down a long depth of focus away toward, and at
last funneling into, an elaborate ladies’ lounge or toilet,
and who knows what further vistas of streamlined modernity . . .
ST 190

. . . a depiction of a scene in purely cinematic terms from a Pre-Code musical. Didn't know what
a Dutch Angle was before this, it's a camera tilt off vertical axis, the sort of shot used all the time
in the 1960s Batman TV show.

A lot of the arrows that point to movies in the era of Shadow Ticket are buried the same way
Pynchon buries the lede elsewhere in his writing. My guess is that these two passages, both
explicitly connected to the Name “Norma Shearer”—

—ain’t it grand the sacrifice I’m making , and at the same time, whoo, what a relief.”
 
and:

"Oh how I'll miss you," plus "Whew, out the door at last!"

—means we should probably pay attention, just as we probably should check it out when the
acronym CIA—or the casually name-dropped dear daft numina of Oed’s college days—pops up
in The Crying of Lot 49. We don't have "The Divorcee, staring Norma Shearer" but we do have
the word "divorcee", we have Norma Shearer mentioned more than once, and the Divorcee has
plenty of scenes that involve ghosting professional lounge lizards:
 
"Well, Daphne. See you around the circuit."

"You bet, Hop." Yes, it's the Norma Shearer turn she's always being accused of, "Oh how I'll
miss you," plus "Whew, out the door at last!" Everybody's got her number, all right, and so what?
ST 195
 
And, for all his noble characteristics, at the end of the day Hop is, after all, a species of lounge
lizard.
 
In the Divorcee the dialog appears to be neutral, but the eyes say heartbreak. It's borderline
silent film acting, but Norma Shearer is very natural with the dialog, she earned her Oscar for
this one, with a little help from her friends.
 
Norma Shearer, like a lot of Pre-Code stars, isn’t all that well recognized these days, but in her
time (curiously enough also Gloria Swanson’s time, make of that what you will) she was in the
same catbird seat as Marion Davies (cruelly disfigured as Susan Alexander in the Kenosha
Kid’s filmic debut). There are photos of those two stars, along with Shearer’s Husband Irving
Thalberg, at numerous costume parties at San Simeon; they were “in” with the in crowd, and so
what?:

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1QREN8ApgR/
 
Norma Shearer was a Canadian actress who became one of the biggest Hollywood stars of the
1930's and was known as the "first lady of MGM". She was nominated six times for the
Academy Award for Best Actress, winning once, for her role in 'The Divorcee' in 1930.
 
Her career started in the silent era and she easily made the transition to Talkies, aided by her
brother Douglas, who was Recording Director at MGM. Norma and Douglas were the first
Oscar-winning brother and sister.
 
Her "good girl" image at the start of her career in Silent Movies changed with a series of highly
successful pre-Code, sexually liberated roles. After the Code began to be enforced she
developed a more demure image and she appeared in period dramas and "prestige" pictures
such as 'The Barretts of Wimpole Street' produced by her husband, the young MGM mogul,
Irving Thalberg . . .

. . . New York Modeling and Movies
 
Although the beautiful Norma was rejected by Florenz Ziegfeld for a role in his "Follies", she had
no difficulty in finding work as a model. She also joined a casting agency and began receiving
bit part work, her first appearance being with Athole in 'The Flapper' and 'The Restless Sex',
both in 1920. Later in the same year she had another small role in D.W. Griffith's 'Way Down
East'. She approached the great director for career advice but was firmly told she would never
make a star even if she fixed the cast in her eye and had her teeth fixed.
 
Miss Lotta Miles 1920
 
Luckily, Norma was a very determined and self-confident young lady and she ignored Griffiths's
advice, spending her savings on consultations with an ophthalmic surgeon who recommended a
series of muscle-strengthening exercises for her eyes. She practiced the exercises for many
hours in the years to come and succeeded in concealing the cast in her eyes. She began to
haunt the theaters of Broadway, studying the work of top stage actresses of the day like Ina
Claire and Lynn Fontanne. To help with the finances she increased her modeling work and
spent many hours promoting household goods and auto tyres, getting the billboard name "Miss
Lotta Miles".
 
In 1921 she at last got a speaking part in the 'B' movie 'The Stealers' and more roles in East
Coast movies such as 'A Clouded Name' and 'Channing of the Northwest' followed. She began
to make a name for herself and she came to the attention of Irving Thalberg, the young west
coast producer who, when he joined Louis B. Mayer in 1923, gave Norma a five year contract to
work in Hollywood. She was on her way.
 
Hollywood 1923
 
After initial problems with screen tests, Shearer quickly learned how to conceal her out of focus
eye under the strong white lights of the film studios and she began to get more prominent roles
in a number of movies. After appearing with John Gilbert in 'The Wolf Man' in 1924 she became
much better known and when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was formed in 1924 she was cast in the
studio's first official production, 'He Who Gets Slapped'. She quickly became one of MGM's
biggest box-office attractions appearing in popular productions such as 'Lady of the Night' (with
her MGM future rival and nemesis, Joan Crawford,) and 'His Secretary', in 1925 and 'The Devil's
Circus' the following year.
 
Silent Star 1927
 
In her first four years under contract Norma appeared in thirteen silent movies for MGM, all of
which were box-office hits. In 1927 she received her reward, firstly by being cast in her first big
budget production, Ernst Lubitsch's 'The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg', and secondly, after
converting to Judaism, she married her boss, Irving Thalberg in September, 1927. It is alleged
that Louis B. Mayer had little regard for Shearer and would have dropped her were it not for
Thalberg. Instead she rose swiftly, with her pick of films, parts and directors . . .
 
Norma Shearer - Hollywood's First Queen https://www.hollywoodsgoldenage.com/actors/norma_shearer.html

Which brings us to the implied figure, Irving Thalberg:

“ . . . Actress Norma Shearer, whom he later married, was surprised after he greeted her at the
door, then walked her to his office for her first job interview: "Then you're not the office boy?"
she asked. He smiled, as he sat himself behind his desk: "No, Miss Shearer, I'm Irving Thalberg,
vice-president of the Mayer Company. I'm the man who sent for you." . . . “
 
Irving Thalberg - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Thalberg

The Wiki post is worth reading. Like Shearer, Thalberg came from hardscrabble youth,
managed MGM to the top of all movie studios during the Great Depression despite having a
heart condition that took him out at age 37. His name links to many of the names in Shadow
Ticket, he was the man behind Greta Garbo, Wallace Beery, Norma Shearer, others.
 
Wandering  ‘round the internet, looking for a source pointing to Fox Films’ attempted takeover of
MGM, seeing as Irving was behind the wheel during the years that William Fox attempted to
acquire MGM and that Thalberg also headed production at MGM during the years that Pynchon
and Company’s investments in Fox Films were wiped out,  I stumbled into a really useful
resource, free access to Vanda Kreftt’s “The Man Who Made the Movies, The meteoric Rise and
Tragic Fall of William Fox”. It gets into considerable detail concerning the fall of Fox Films:

“ . . . Three days earlier, on Thursday, February 28, 1929, Film Daily had run a front-page article
headlined “Fox Buys Loew’s, M-G-M.” The text began, “The biggest deal in motion picture
history has been closed.” According to Film Daily, in an agreement finalized the previous
Monday, Fox, whose Fox Film was Hollywood’s third largest movie studio, had secretly acquired
a controlling interest in Loew’s, Inc., a 175-house national theater chain that was also the parent
company of M-G-M, Hollywood’s second-most-successful studio. With the American movie
industry growing explosively— 1928 revenues had doubled those of 1926—Loew’s was a red-
hot property. The company had total assets of $109 million and annual profits of $8.6 million,
and it owned some of the country’s most prestigious theaters. Almost all of Loew’s venues were
Class-A, high capacity, first-run houses, and not one was a “shooting gallery,” as cheap penny
arcades were known. M-G-M, which Loew’s owned entirely, ranked second only to Paramount in
assets and boasted stars Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Buster Keaton, John Gilbert, Lionel
Barrymore, Lon Chaney, William Haines, and Norma Shearer. Moreover, because deceased
company founder Marcus Loew had been exceptionally well liked and admired for his integrity,
the company enjoyed tremendous goodwill within the industry . . . “
 
Pg. 3

During the next six months, despite the attempted stimulus, both GTE and Fox Film stock prices
tumbled head over heels. Two of the brokerage firms that participated in the trading syndicates
were ruined. Pynchon & Co., formerly one of the nation’s largest financial houses, was
suspended by the New York Stock Exchange on April 24, 1931, for financial instability arising
mainly from its GTE and Fox Film trading activity. As Fox heard the story, on the day of the
suspension, firm head George Pynchon pulled a $5 bill and two singles from his pocket and told
a colleague, “This is all I have got left in the world.” Four days later, West & Co., $5 million in
debt, filed for bankruptcy. As the ultimate underwriter of the new GTE shares, the Chase Bank
got stuck with most of them and would never be repaid the $6 million it loaned to fund the stock
market manipulations.
 
Pg. 722
 
Vanda Kreftt - The Man Who Made the Movies The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox (2017) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/vanda-kreftt-the-man-who-made-the-movies-the-meteoric-rise-and-tragic-fall-of-william-fox-2017/page/n721/mode/2up?q=pynchon+

It’s searchable.

"There must be a pony in here somewhere."