Glamour in a Golden Age: Movie Stars of the 1930s

6. Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford: Rivals at the Glamour Factory

129 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ 6 Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford Rivals at the Glamour Factory DAVID M. LUGOWSKI Two of the signature glamour icons of the Great Depression, Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford, have much in common. Both endured a period of struggle in their youth, possessed incredible drive and ambition, and reached stardom during the silent 1920s, only to achieve greater fame in the 1930s while many Jazz Age stars faded away. Neither had theatrical training, but both became Oscar-winning actresses. Both were contracted to MGM when they became stars, and each stayed there for about eighteen years, Shearer until her 1942 retirement and Crawford until she left for Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford. Both photos collection of the author. new opportunities at Warner Bros. in 1943. Both became notable young matrons of the day, Shearer after marrying the physically frail “boy genius” Irving Thalberg, MGM’s executive producer under studio head Louis B. Mayer, in 1927, and Crawford also joining Hollywood royalty when in 1929 she married Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and later when she wed the well-bred New York stage actor turned Hollywood lead Franchot Tone in 1935. Shearer and Crawford worked for several of the same directors, too, making some of their finest films with George Cukor and W. S. Van Dyke. Both were among the era’s most popular stars, especially early in the decade, when they annually made Motion Picture Herald’s lists of top box office names after the poll began in 1932. Shearer placed sixth in 1932, ninth in 1933 (when she had no new films in release but her 1932 releases kept generating income), and tenth in 1934. Crawford enjoyed even greater popularity; she was third in 1932, tenth in 1933, sixth in 1934, fifth in 1935, and seventh in 1936 (she appeared more times in the top ten than any other female star of the decade except Shirley Temple [Eames 82, 100]). Both Shearer and Crawford also encountered professional and personal hurdles in the later 1930s, and made fewer films—some largegrossing , others expensive box office disappointments. After one Crawford vehicle lost money (Dorothy Arzner’s The Bride Wore Red [1937], a selfaware take on glamour construction which now seems like one of the star’s more interesting films of the period) and others showed a dip in profits, she was dubbed, somewhat unfairly, “box office poison” in an infamous exhibitors’ poll in 1938. Shearer, meanwhile, was offscreen in 1933 after Thalberg’s heart attack, had her second child in 1935, and appeared in the costly and prestigious (but not profitable) Romeo and Juliet in 1936. Her career was most notably interrupted in 1937 by Thalberg’s death, which cost her her biggest champion at MGM. Shearer and Crawford even worked together twice, and these joint appearances appropriately and indeed ironically bookend their two decades at MGM. They first appeared together when Crawford, a new hire, doubled as the back of Shearer’s head when Shearer, one of the just-formed studio’s crop of fledgling stars, essayed a dual role in Lady of the Night (1925). Already a pattern appeared, with Shearer given a flashy showcase and an ever-ambitious Crawford struggling to emerge from the shadows of being second fiddle. Fifteen years later they also shared the frame, this time face to face, equals in magnitude, as their onscreen characters fought over the same man in the catty comedy The Women (1939). Significantly, both also sought some of the same roles at MGM, and they played roles that paralleled each other (Crawford as Peg Eaton, friend to Andrew and Rachel Jack130 DAVID M. LUGOWSKI son, in her lone period epic The Gorgeous Hussy [1936], Shearer as another controversial historical figure in Marie Antoinette [1938], for example). Once they even played the same part, the eponymous high-society jewel thief of The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, Shearer in 1929 and Crawford in the identically named 1937 remake. Not surprisingly, Shearer’s early talkie had a stagy but amusingly coy lightness to it, while Crawford’s film was more glossy, naturalistic , and emphatically dramatic. And significantly—for the purposes of this essay—each of them apparently disliked the other intensely. Legend has Crawford saying, “How can I compete with Norma when she sleeps with the boss?” But how and why did they “hate” each other, and how did the fan magazines and the...