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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