Write Stuff

BY

FRED W. WRIGHT JR.

PHOTOS BY

©STEPHEN MICHAEL SHEARER ARCHIVES

ORevered and highly sought-after people and to act on stage to overcome this. biographer and I found it to be a great outlet for creatividocumentarian ty. I could become whoever I needed to be while acting. I fell in love with that. When Stephen Michael I graduated, I had full intention to act as a Shearer has the innate career.” Like thousands before him, Shearartistic ability to regale er headed in the early 1980s to the mecca of stage dreams, saying jokingly “thinking the tales of Hollywood I’d take New York City by storm. Instead, I legends onto the page, waited tables.” stage, and screen. Shearer also did some TV gigs, getting small roles on such shows as the soap Genbefore the snows arrive, Stephen Michael Shearer will commute from his kitchen to his home offi ce where stacks of notes and his computer await. Past his monitor, out the window, the scene reminds him of Manhattan’s East Forties, a place he remembers fondly.

As a fi lm historian, Shearer has written about celebrities of all types over the years – headliners in Las Vegas, stars of the silver screen, celebrities who have trod the stage on and off Broadway. The culmination of his dive into the lives of celebrities has been names that live as the goddesses of fi lm – Patricia Neal, Gloria Swanson, Hedy Lamarr. And there are more to come.

Perhaps Shearer’s life work was, as they say, written in the stars. At age 10, he began reading fi lm biographies; his favorite author was Gerold Frank (The Boston Strangler). At 11, he wrote his fi rst stage play (Hellen and Ellen in the Wilderness) and dreamed of becoming a fi lm actor.

“I was a typical Midwestern kid,” Shearer recalls. “I have two older sisters, but I was pretty much on my own. I really wanted to be an actor. I also did well in school.” After high school, he went to university on scholarship and graduated “with a B.S.E. in both vocal and instrumental music, with a minor in psychology. I later did post-grad work in theatre arts. Throughout every summer of college, I took courses in theater and English.”

The stage provided Shearer a way to pursue his dreams and to overcome a tendency to be introverted. “I had an innate shyness,” he said. “So, I forced myself to be in front of

ON AN AVERAGE Minneapolis

morning,

eral Hospital. Eventually, in the mid-‘80s, he returned to Dallas and changed careers.

Shearer joined the corporate world and worked for American Airlines in Texas. A little while later, he returned to New York City and took positions with the cruise lines, moving quickly up the corporate ranks. While at American Express, his last corporate position, he lost 11 colleagues in 9/11 when the World Trade Center North Tower fell. “I spent the next year making life changes,” Shearer said succinctly.

While in New York, Shearer’s corporate career allowed him to work in off -Broadway theater. After university, he did live and print modeling extensively in Minneapolis, Tulsa, Dallas, and then in New York City. He has done extra and under-fi ve work in numerous fi lms such as Split Image (1982), Handgun (1982), The Cotton Club (1984) and appeared in various TV episodes of Dallas (1981-82) and in Central Park West (1995). Over the years, Shearer starred in numerous community theatre productions and off -Broadway plays such as Luigi Jannuzzi’s The Appointment, which won the Samuel French Award in 1994.

Patricia Neal

Shifting gears, Shearer began writing fi lm history and biography. In his younger years, he wrote reviews on fi lms which were published in national publications. He also contributed research to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Library. His close friend, actress Patricia Neal, was his muse, Shearer says. They met after one of his performances in The Appointment. Something connected right off . “After 9/11, she kept asking me if I was going to write her biography,” Shearer said. More profoundly, “Patricia Neal was a major force in my becoming a writer,” Shearer recalls. “We had become very good friends.”

His fi rst biography was Patricia Neal -- An Unquiet Life (University Press of Kentucky, 2006). It won Shearer positive reviews, critical acclaim and contracts for more fi lm biographies: Beautiful -- The Life of Hedy Lamarr (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Press-Macmillan, 2010) and Gloria Swanson -- The Ultimate Star (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Press-Macmillan, 2013). He also has written an unpublished novel, September -- A Passion.

Neal is the ideal fi lm celebrity whose career spans the peak years of Hollywood. Virtually every fi lm she performed in, people know, and her co-stars are among the elite of fi lm’s best. For example, one of her fi rst pictures was in 1949 – The Fountainhead, opposite Gary Cooper. Two years later, in 1951, she appeared in the sci-fi classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still directed by Robert Wise. For the next 10 years or so, Patricia Neal’s fi lm work varied. She returned to New York City and Broadway, rejuvenating her stage career by appearing in a revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1952). There, she met and married Roald Dahl in 1953, and they would have fi ve children in 30 years of marriage.

In the 1950s, Patricia also teamed with stage and screen director Elia Kazan for two major achievements. First came A Face in the Crowd (1957), by today’s standards, a prophetic story of demagoguery created by mass media and home-grown fascism, and, replacing Barbara Bel Geddes for two weeks, in the Broadway stage production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) in the commanding role of Maggie. More acclaim came with subsequent productions of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer (1958) in London, and later again on Broadway in The Miracle Worker (1960), co-starring with Anne Bancroft. Ever the versatile performer, Patricia also appeared in Blake Edwards’ fi lm Breakfast at Tiff any’s (1961).

She co-starred with Paul Newman two years later in the role as the housekeeper, the role that won her an Academy Award Oscar for Best Actress, in Hud (1963).

In 1965, while pregnant fi lming John Ford’s 7 Women, Patricia suff ered a se-

ries of near-fatal strokes. She survived, thanks to life-saving brain surgery. Following a diffi cult rehabilitation, Patricia was able to return to the screen and received an Oscar nomination for her role in The Subject Was Roses (1968).

Strong screen roles were fewer after that. She did receive three Emmy nominations, the fi rst for originating the role of Olivia Walton in the 1971 movie The Homecoming: A Christmas Story (1971), a made-forTV fi lm that gave birth to the TV series The Waltons (1972).

“I appeared in Patricia’s last fi lm, Flying By,” Shearer recalls. “Shortly before she died, she asked me to keep her memory alive. The fi lm, An Unquiet Life, is based in part on my biography... Roald Dahl and their marriage. I’ve seen a rough cut of it, and it is very emotional and an excellent picture. A small fi lm. Very tight, very quiet, very tragic. They don’t want it to get lost in the fl ood of after-pandemic blockbusters. It might be a year or two years before it comes out.” For Shearer, his relationship with Patricia is never-ending. “Patricia is very, very much still part of my life. Perhaps that’s another chapter.”

Hedy Lamarr & Gloria Swanson

After the celebrity of Shearer’s inaugural biography of Patricia Neal, two more defi nitive biographies followed. Beautiful -- The Life of Hedy Lamarr in 2010 and Gloria Swanson -- The Ultimate Star in 2013. Unlike Patricia Neal, Shearer admits, “I never knew Hedy Lamarr. I never knew Gloria Swanson. But I did know I had to go to the main sources and people who knew them when they were still alive.

“Because I wrote Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life while she was still alive, I got some of my interviews through her. For Hedy Lamarr, there was a lot of darkness in her life with many colleagues and costars already gone, and it was not always that easy.” As a writer and a biographer, Shearer seeks to capture empathy towards his subject, “Yet I eventually heard Hedy’s voice...as I knew I would, and thus I became more empathetic with her.

“I fell in love with the process of discovering who she was. I also eventually heard the voice of Gloria Swanson, too. I think that is why I love what I do. There was much to discover about Lamarr – not just her celebrated looks but also her brains; she is credited with a U.S. patent that became the nucleus of every cell phone, wi-fi , satellite weaponry, GPS, and even BlueTooth today.

“I am now working on a coff ee table book on Hedy Lamarr. It’s a fascinating experience.” This is Shearer’s fourth book, The Beauty of Hedy Lamarr for Lyons Press, his second on Lamarr. As a larger formatted book, it will focus on images of the actress and on her celebrated, unique beauty.

Gloria Swanson’s career was equally unique, starting out in the 1910s as a feature performer, then starring in dozens of silent fi lms during the 1920s. She later did stage work as well as sound fi lms. Her fi lm credits are lengthy and as varied as any Hollywood celebrity, her two most memorable sound fi lms being Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Airport 1975 (1974). She was nominated three times for an Academy Award as Best Actress, and she performed in scores of TV dramas and sit-coms in the 1960s.

The Shearer Bio

When the offi cial Stephen Michael Shearer biography is written, the reader will discover just how peripatetic this fi lm historian has been, both in terms of geography and in terms of subject matter and media. As a young performer, Shearer appeared, sometimes more or less anonymously, in fi lms as an extra or an “under fi ve” – someone who spoke less than fi ve lines of dialogue. As an historian, he has appeared in numerous TV and feature fi lm documentaries, such as Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story. His fi rst book An Unquiet Life, has now been made into a major motion picture starring Hugh Bonneville, Keeley Hawes and

OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP: Book signing Barnes & Noble downtown Minneapolis, October 2013.

OPPOSITE PAGE, LEFT: On stage as “Philip II,” with actor Clay Reynolds (left) in “The Lion in Winter,” 1977

OPPOSITE PAGE, MIDDLE AND LOWER RIGHT: Stephen Michael Shearer during his modeling days TOP: On the set of FLYING BY (Arte Films, 2009) with Patricia Neal, Bill Ray Cyrus, and director Jim Amatulli. (Courtesy of Arte Films, LLC.)

LEFT: With actress Heather Massie in New York after a performance of her acclaimed onewoman play “Hedy! The Life and Inventions of Hedy Lamarr,” 2017.

Sam Heughan, as Paul Newman. Also upcoming, Shearer will be seen in the feature documentary, Boulevard: A Hollywood Story, based in part on his third book on Gloria Swanson.

Prior to his life as an author, Shearer did live and print modeling extensively in Minneapolis, Tulsa, Dallas and New York City. Meanwhile, his TV and fi lm credits continued to grow: Split Image (1982), Handgun (1982), The Cotton Club (1984) and various episodes of Dallas (1981-82) and Central Park West (1995). Over the years, Shearer starred in numerous community and off -Broadway theatrical productions such as Luigi Jannuzzi’s The Appointment, which won the Samuel French Award in 1994.

The Writing Life

“A biography is a story in itself,” Shearer observes. “You learn as you go. You collect all the pieces in the puzzle and put it together; the story unfolds before your eyes. I started reading adult biographies when I was 10. I was fascinated with fi lm and entertainment history. I have come to realize that the life of my chosen subject will be inevitably much more complicated than I had originally imagined. With each book, it is a diff erent approach. With each book, there are complicated personalities.”

Fortunately, Patricia Neal was a most willing collaborator and subject. “Patricia was very gracious. She opened up her archives and her letters from such people in her life as Gary Cooper, Lillian Hellman, and Roald Dahl.” Therein lies the dilemma for the biographer when the subject is a close friend too. “She was a very dear, close personal friend. The worst thing a biographer can do is be an overt fan,” Shearer notes. “Fan book writers tend to make their subjects walk on water.”

Patricia Neal knew this. “I’m fi rst and foremost an actress,” she told Shearer when he began her biography. “Don’t make me out to be a saint. Write the truth, warts and all.” And so he did. “There were times, believe me, when I had to step away from it on an emotional level.

“Facts are real; facts are true. One must try and level your work out and I am proud of the fact that I had to search sometimes for unfl attering comments of her work because her personal reviews were always good even in bad projects. Anybody can write a biography. It can read like a dictionary or it can have a compelling narrative. Being a writer, you have to make your work interesting.”

To do that, Shearer, like many writers, has a ritual each day before he begins work. “I have a process I try and maintain when I write. As a writer, one spends a lot of time alone with one’s subject. When I sit down at my desk, I do meditation to clear my mind so my work will be unbiased.”

Yet, there are some days when nothing works as planned.

“There are some days I cannot sit at my computer. I have to recharge. There are times I start my work when it is still dark in the morning and oftentimes, I don’t end until late at night. There are days I fi nd every excuse I can not to approach that computer.”

Shearer moved to Minneapolis in 2008. It’s a vibrant city with one major challenge to those who live there – eight months of snow. Weather permitting, Shearer stays in shape with a 3-to-5-mile power walk every morning. “I’m not terribly young,” Shearer confesses, “but I’m not decrepit yet, either.”

And Shearer’s fi fth book? Well, contractually, he can’t tell you who the person is yet. No names yet, please. But like every really good Hollywood historian and writer, Shearer promises the biography will be based on a legendary Hollywood name and it will have “murder and mayhem, Hollywood and Broadway, even a leap off the Empire State Building,” he teases. “It is a tragedy…dark, stark and bleak.” We can’t wait.