Norma

One from the heart, and about as personal as celebrity bios get, as Quirk limns his friend Norma Shearer, who was his uncle James Quirk's love while he was editor-publisher of Photoplay (1914-1932). Despite this closeness to his subject, Quirk writes warmly but unworshipfully, always giving Shearer's performances the compliment of honest opinion. A Scot-English Canadian from Montreal, Shearer was first trained as a pianist, then won a beauty contest (despite poor teeth and a cast in her eye) and slipped into acting. She, her sister Athole, and mother Edith dumped their despairing failure of a dad/husband and took off for N.Y. to find stage careers for the two girls. In later life Norma was always attracted to father figures, men who made up for her father's weaknesses. Thus, after many small parts and starring roles in a string of middling features, she married Irving Thalberg, the boy wonder in charge of production at MGM, and her career took off with the choicest roles in town. Many critics found her a chilly actress, seeing her features as serenely unclouded. Quirk sees her as unique and glamorous, with intrinsic class and a compelling aura, ""an individual stamp, a shimmering radiance, and a poised self-containment"" unmatched by actresses in the late 1980's. Viewers and readers who saw her recent revival on PBS, especially in Noel Coward's Private Lives with Robert Montgomery, may agree with Quirk about Norma's great inner spark and comedic charm. When Thalberg died, the highly sexed, 36-year-old widow inherited a large block of MGM stock and kept herself in top pictures until retiring, like Garbo, at 42. As ""the First Lady of the Screen,"" she had her vanity and high-strung moments, and had many, perhaps physically unconsummated, affairs with much younger actors, including bisexual Tyrone Power. At 42, she married a very young ski instructor and lived happily ever after--almost. Her last years, in her 80's, reduced her to a blind vegetable. The Return of Norma Shearer. See it!

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.