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This
was the first of two biographies (the other by Gavin Lambert, which see)
about Norma which hit the stores within two years of one another. Quirk's
reads as a more sentimental version of Norma's life, with, we feel, some
interesting personal hypotheses mixed in. It's notable in that Norma's
later years are treated with a touching humility, not total realism, and
the debilitating mental illnesses are barely acknowledged. Perhaps because
Quirk knew Norma, he was loathe to give away too much. His is definitely a
love story, a paean to the respect and admiration he felt for her.
FROM THE BOOK:
One
of the reasons Shearer had refused Mrs. Miniver was her feeling that it
would harm her image to be seen as what she called "a middle-aged
wife and mother of two grown children." In 1942 she would turn
forty-two, at that time considered an advanced age for an actress, and
appearing youthful and vivacious, on screen as well as off, had become one
of her main preoccupations. She was determined, she told her sister
Athole, to get a new lease on life-and love-and had developed what we
would now term a mind-set-her mind was firmly set on fresh horizons,
maximum physical attractiveness, the maintaining of peak energies.
Since she had to do two more pictures to get free of her contract, and
since she had set her happiness-goals elsewhere than in movies, she
determined to find something light, fluffy, even frivolous.
"I
just don't know what's come over Norma," Hunt Stromberg recalled
saying to L. B. Mayer at the time. "She's become so flighty, so
flibbertigibetty, so nervous-scared, somehow." "Of course she's
scared," Mayer replied, his voice registering a kind of gruff
compassion. "She's scared of growing old...
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