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FROM THE BOOK:
"Clothes
are a woman's first duty to herself," Norma Shearer told a reporter from
the London Daily Mail in 1931, on a publicity trip to England. "It
is when she is conscious of being well-dressed that she can do her best work
and get that superiority complex that makes for success."
By
1931, after more than ten years as an actress in motion pictures, Norma
Shearer was flush with success. A succession of roles that had begun
with her Oscar-winning turn in The Divorcee the previous year, and which
included Let Us Be Gay (1930), Strangers May Kiss (1931), A Free Soul
(1931), and the film version of Noel Coward's Private Lives, had
established her as one of the biggest stars in Hollywood: "Queen of
the Lot" at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer by virtue of her box-office clout and
1927 marriage to Irving Thalberg, the studio's production chief.
More so than Greta Garbo or even Joan Crawford, however, Shearer's
statement to the British press revealed how wedded she was to the Metro
mystique, for no star under contract at MGM in the 1930s worked harder to
achieve and sustain an image of enduring glamour.
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