Possessed (5 page)

“From the day Lucille arrived in Hollywood,” according to journalist Adele Whitely Fletcher, who knew her for over a half century, “she worked ceaselessly towards becoming a star. Aware that her youthful plumpness would be exaggerated by the cameras, she jogged every morning before going to the studio—this in a day when no one but athletes had ever even heard of jogging!”

The newcomer was a quick study in every aspect of filmmaking; she may have lacked education, but she had a keen native intelligence. A studio writer, director and producer named Paul Bern noticed her; he was a cultivated German immigrant who quickly became a mentor and guide to Lucille, as he was to other young actors. Bern was known and admired perhaps especially because he made no demands (sexual or otherwise) on those for whom he was both a generous protector and an unofficial tutor.

John Arnold, who had photographed fifty-two films since 1914 and became the head of Metro’s camera department, also took Lucille aside and showed her how, with the right makeup and eyeliner, she could significantly improve both her appearance and her chances of success. He also filmed a few brief scenes of Lucille alone, so that she could see what he meant. “I’m not saying I was good,” she recalled. “I just wasn’t impossible.” But she was extremely self-critical about what she saw: “a big mouth” she didn’t like, as well as “shoulders wider than John Wayne’s, not much in the bosom area, and a lot of bones that showed. The only thing in my favor was my legs and my eyes.” But over time and with the help of wardrobe designers, she learned to exploit for the best what she once regarded as handicaps.

She also developed poise and confidence before the camera with the patient help of still photographer Tommy Shugrue, employed by Metro to inundate newspapers and fan magazines with eye-catching photos of contract players, usually young women placed in situations and in attitudes that had nothing to do with any movie at all: the idea was simply to promote the studio and its roster. There were photos of Lucille and others at the seashore, or walking a dog, or tossing a ball, or cheering a team of athletes.

When attractive young men invited Lucille out on a date, she accepted—but only if they went dancing, and only to a place frequented by columnists and photographers, for she knew she had to be seen in order to make an impression. “Everybody was on the make,” she said years later, “and I don’t mean just for bodies. The men you dated didn’t want you—they wanted to be
seen
with you and get noticed.” For her part, Lucille was winning dance trophies by the dozen: before 1927, she had collected eighty-four silver cups for dancing the Charleston and the Shimmy.

BY THE END OF
her first month at Metro, things had changed forever. Lucille was cast as the double for Norma Shearer in
Lady of the Night,
directed by Monta Bell. Shearer played two roles, and when both characters had to appear in a single shot, Lucille stepped in, back to the camera, to play one or the other. “I tried to watch everything Norma did, for she was that wonderful being, a star.”
¹

Shearer made no secret that she had set her matrimonial sights on powerful Irving Thalberg, and Monta Bell made no secret that he had his keen eye set on Shearer. But he was no competition for the head of production, who had ordered that Norma was to be meticulously photographed. This Bell did—which was no easy task, for despite her beauty, Shearer was slightly cross-eyed, which challenged cinematographers.

Born in Montreal in 1902, Norma Shearer had already appeared in more than two dozen movies. Her parents were severely disabled emotionally, and her sister, Athole, spent more than forty years in an asylum until her death in 1985. Despite her achievements and favorable public image, Norma lived in dread of inheriting the familial tendency toward mental illness. Her brother, Douglas, however, was not only psychologically healthy, he was also a brillianttechnician, and from the beginning of the talkies, he supervised Metro’s sound department for decades.

Following her affairs with directors Victor Fleming and Monta Bell, Norma had turned her attention to Thalberg, convinced he would be her ticket to better roles. For the present, however, Thalberg was pursuing actress Constance Talmadge.

On February 23, Metro released
Lady of the Night
—along with dozens of photographs of Lucille Le Sueur that were unrelated to the Shearer movie but added to the sexy but inoffensive image Mayer and Thalberg preferred their contract players to project. The publicity department began to receive some mail about the anonymous girl in the still photos, and one enterprising journalist learned that she had appeared without credit in the Shearer picture. With that, Mayer’s staff and the editors of
Movie Weekly
joined forces in a contest common in the world of movie publicity, from the earliest days through the 1950s. The ploy was simple, and this time it involved Lucille Le Sueur, whose name Mayer thought was the silliest and least pronounceable he had ever heard. And so the contest—"Name Her and Win $1,000"—was announced on March 27, with the victor to be announced that summer.

DURING THE EARLY DAYS
of the movie industry—for about twenty years, beginning in the early 1890s—very few actors were identified in the films that were unspooled in penny arcades, nickelodeons and music halls. People worked anonymously in these “flickers,” which were considered a form of entertainment for the lower classes, on a par with carnival sideshows. Performers with theater experience feared they would be denied future employment if it became known that they had appeared in these fake pantomimes, and so established stage actors like Sarah Bernhardt and the members of the Comédie-Française appeared only briefly in the early cinema. In addition, the first nickelodeon owners, worried that performers would demand higher salaries, were hesitant to promote them by name.

The first person credited in a movie was Florence Lawrence, a stageperformer since childhood who had worked for Thomas Edison’s company from 1906 and later appeared in films under the direction of D. W. Griffith, one of the first directors to employ a kind of stock company of players (most notably, Lillian Gish). At the same time, a comic actor, director, writer and producer with the stage name Max Linder made a fortune in and for Pathé Frères in France.

By 1920, movies had become somewhat more respectable fare, and audiences, recognizing their favorite performers from picture to picture, wanted to know more about them. Producers saw financial advantages in creating and promoting certain players they soon called “stars,” perhaps because they shone brightly in the darkness of movie theaters. Mary Pickford—"America’s Sweetheart,” forever photographed in outfits far too youthful for her age—was perhaps the first true American movie star; she had foreign counterparts like Francesca Bertini in Italy, Suzanne Grandais in France and Shotaro Hanayagi in Japan.

The so-called golden era of the studios—a period of twenty years, from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the Second—coincided with the fame, fortune and power of great movie stars, who became absolutely essential in promoting the products. (Directors, on the other hand, were mostly ignored, and for a very long time, few of them—with exceptions like Chaplin and De Mille—had any real clout; most were regarded as secondary to a movie’s success.) It became clear with each passing season that neither talent, acting ability nor studio publicity had much to do with the creation of a star: that was the result of the public’s
need.
The French philosopher Edgar Morin was on the mark when he wrote, “The imaginary life of the screen is the product of this genuine need for an anonymous life to enlarge itself to the dimensions of life in the movies; the star is its projection. People have always projected their desires and fears in images,” and the movies are but the most recent sign of this (literal) projection.

Of course the studios had to recognize what audiences wanted, and they had to respond to this need. The conventional wisdom held that only the stars and producers turned movies into hits, and so Hollywood executives selected young people they felt the public liked and essentially created identities for them—even to the point of changing their names and insisting on certain patterns of conduct in their private lives. Archibald Leach, an acrobat from England, became Cary Grant. Spangler Arlington Brough was renamed Robert Taylor. Ruby Stevens was turned into Barbara Stanwyck. Later, Roy Scherer was rechristened Rock Hudson. Thousands received new identities, and backgrounds were created for them that sounded more interesting, more exotic or more polite than the truth suggested.

Thanks to powerful studio publicists and “talent handlers,” the public never knew that so-and-so might be socially inferior or unacceptable according to the standards of the day. Non-Caucasian actors were rarely cast as anything but servants, laborers, criminals or people of low intelligence. Under threat of dismissal from the studio or permanent demotion to minor, stereotyped roles, lesbian and gay actors were forced to go out in public with proper “dates” of the opposite sex—or even to marry for the sake of their careers. This hypocritical requirement is common even in the twenty-first century.

During their off-work hours, women contracted to movie studios were advised not to appear in public without makeup and a fashionable outfit. Men had to behave so that they were regarded as unimpeachable gentlemen, and any studio player could be dismissed for failing to adhere to certain moral standards, sometimes defined in their contracts, or simply invented in a whimsical moment by a mogul. For the sake of image, public appearances and romantic rendezvous were arranged by studio publicists, in concert with fan magazines and the daily press, and journalists were duly alerted in advance concerning the whereabouts of the celebrities.

If a movie star was an alcoholic, a drug abuser, unfaithful to a spouse or found guilty of a crime, the studios could take care of that. Movie executives routinely arranged for media silence, bribed the police and negotiated with newspapers and gossip columnists. In the so-called glory days of Hollywood, the studios thus manipulated the lives of countless thousands. All this control was taken for granted as part of big business.

HENCE THROUGH THE JOINT
efforts of Metro and the fan magazine
Movie Weekly,
everyone was invited to submit a new name for Lucille Le Sueur. The winner, as it turned out, would not in fact receive one thousand dollars as the advertising indicated: that was the total amount of money to be awarded. The top prize would be five hundred dollars, with ten other prizes of fifty dollars each for those who submitted the ten next-best names. “She has beauty! She has personality!” shouted the contest headlines. “She photographs remarkably well and is far above the average in intelligence. She is strictly an American type, she is energetic and ambitious, and she has a charm and elegance that stamps her as a daughter of Uncle Sam"—which meant that she was native-born and Caucasian.

Thus the studio trumpeted its find wherever possible. For a behind-the-scenes short subject about Metro that spring, an intertitle—a “card” with dialogue or descriptions inserted between shots—accompanied a brief bit of business: “Our wardrobe designer drapes the beautiful figure of Lucille Le Sueur, an M-G-M find of 1925.” They even took advantage of her busy nightlife and her accumulation of dance trophies, sending photographers on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings to the Montmartre Club, where she invariably turned up for exhibition dances, to the Cocoanut Grove on Fridays, to the beach clubs on weekends and to Saturday afternoon tea dances at the fine hotels. This sort of busy nightlife was fine when she was not making a film, but it would soon have to be severely curtailed. Meantime, as she said later, “you never found me dating a boy who couldn’t dance.”

At first, the publicity actually worked against her. An energetic and tireless figure like Lucille, unmarried but often seen in the company of good-looking young admirers, was presumably a woman of easy virtue. By her own admission, she was certainly no candidate for the convent, but the assertions of wild promiscuity that accumulated after her death are impossible to corroborate.

In this regard, it is interesting to cite one incident in her early career. A particularly salacious letter came to Metro’s publicity department, claiming that the sender owned a short pornographic film featuring Lucille Le Sueur. More to the point, the film would be given to newspapers unless Metro bought it for atidy sum. Mayer asked that the owner have his “representatives” deliver a copy to Culver City; if the person involved in the little movie was indeed Lucille Le Sueur, the man would be compensated in exchange for the film and his silence.

But when Mayer and company saw the bit of celluloid, they laughed loudly. “It’s very clear,” L.B. bellowed, “that the girl in this picture could be anybody—anyone at all—except our Lucille.” A minatory letter was hurried off to the blackmailer, whose house mysteriously burned to the ground the following month.

Harry Rapf was quoted during the several months of contest publicity: “I know she will be a remarkably clever motion picture artiste—but her name is unsuitable for the screen, because it is difficult to remember, hard to spell and still harder to pronounce correctly.” In fact, Louis B. Mayer himself wrote those words to his colleagues when he initiated the contest. To give the competition an aura of gravity, the identities of the official judges were also publicized nationwide: Adele Whitely Fletcher, the editor of
Movie Weekly;
Harry Rapf; the movie star Florence Lawrence (real name: Florence Bridgwood), drama editor of the
Los Angeles Examiner;
and Edwin Schallert, drama editor of the
Los Angeles Times.

Every week until the end of August, the national press reminded the public of the rules to be followed in submitting a name:

1. It must be short or only of moderate length.

2. It must be suitable to the individual, who will use it during her entire picture career.