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signed her contract on Friday, January 16—"as a member of our stock company,” as casting director R. B. McIntyre confirmed in a memo to Mayer, Thalberg, Rapf and the payroll clerks.
    To compensate for the gaps in her professional preparation, Lucille spent many hours wandering around the Metro lot, wherever scenes were being rehearsed or filmed. She watched actors and spoke to those who gave her a moment of their time, and with her hundred-watt smile and Southern-accented charm, she put questions to cameramen, directors and every technician she could beguile into conversation. In the process, she established some lifelongfriendships with, for example, the actors William Haines, Eleanor Boardman and Marion Davies, and another newcomer named Myrna Loy.
    “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