Selected Works by Stephen Michael Shearer
Gloria Swanson Hollywood's First Glamour Queen
Gloria Swanson is most remembered today for her role as "Norma Desmond" in Billy Wilder's noir sound classic Sunset Boulevard (1950), but Swanson during her heyday was heralded as filmdom's leading fashion queen, as proclaimed by director Cecil B. DeMille in such silent motion pictures as Male and Female (1919), Why Change Your Husband (1921), and The Affairs of Anatol (1922). Throughout that decade and well into the 1930s, Swanson set fashion standards on and off the screen in creations designed by such illustrious couturieres as Mitchell Leisen, Paul Iribe, Norman Norell, Sonia Delaunay, Max Ree, Capt. Edward H. Molyneux, Coco Chanel, Rene Hubert, and later Edith Head. In the 1950s, she designed and managed her own line of ready to wear fashion patterns called Forever Young for women of a discernible age.
Gloria Swanson: Hollywood's First Glamour Queen is a photographic tribute to this extraordinary woman. Focusing on sense of style and fashion, the book contains hundreds of personal and professional photographs, many never before published, and running biographical commentary by biographer Stephen Michael Shearer, author of the definitive book of the star, Gloria Swanson: The Ultimate Star (St. Martin's Press-Macmillan). - Globe Pequot / Lyons Press • Pages: 288 • Trim: 8½ x 11 • 978-1-4930-7704-5 • Hardback • January 2025 • $75.00
Glamour and Style The Beauty of Hedy Lamarr
She was called "the most beautiful girl in the world" and during Hollywood's Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s, she set standards of beauty and sophistication copied throughout the world during the three decades of her film career. When she made her American cinema debut opposite Charles Boyer in Walter Wanger's moody 1938 romance-drama, Algiers, her character's first appearance in that film literally took audiences' breath away. Her exotic beauty was heralded in picture after picture. Hedy Lamarr is a photographic tribute to this extraordinary woman. Focusing on her spectacular beauty, it will contain hundreds of personal and professional photographs, many never before published, along with private letters, memorabilia, ephemera, estate jewelry, and gowns. It will have a running biographical commentary by biographer Stephen Michael Shearer, author of the definitive book of the star, Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr (St. Martins Press). This book will give the film fan and avid reader an ample opportunity to view and understand this most remarkable, beautiful woman
"Gloria Swanson: The Ultimate Star"
Gloria Swanson was Hollywood’s first successful glamour queen. Her stardom in the mid-1920s earned her millions of fans and millions of dollars. Realizing her box-office value early in her career, Swanson took control of her life. Soon she was not only producing her own films, she was choosing her scripts, selecting her leading men, casting her projects, creating her own fashions, guiding her publicity, and living an extravagant and sometimes extraordinary lifestyle.
She also collected a long line of lovers (including Joseph P. Kennedy) and married men of her choosing (including a disposed Marquis, thus becoming America’s “first” royalty). As a devoted and loving mother, she managed to successfully raise three children. Perhaps most importantly, as a keen businesswoman, she also was able to extend her career more than sixty years, and her astounding comeback in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard not only catapulted her back into the limelight, but it also created her long misunderstood personae.
In this comprehensive biography, Stephen Michael Shearer tells the life story of the woman who defined what a movie icon is.
"Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr"
Hedy Lamarr’s exotic beauty was heralded across Europe, but she became infamous for her nude scenes in the scandalous film Ecstasy. She became literally trapped in a marriage to Austria’s munitions baron, a man who befriended Mussolini and hid his Jewish heritage to become an “honorary Aryan,” at the beginning of World War II.
Lamarr fled Europe for Hollywood, where she became one of its most glamorous stars, appearing opposite actors such as Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and James Stewart. But as her beauty faded and she went from one husband to the next, her personal troubles and legal wranglings cast a shadow over her former image and phenomenal intelligence.
Beautiful separates the truth from the rumors about Lamarr’s life, and highlights her astonishing role as inventor of a technology that has become an essential part of everything from military weaponry to cell phones.
"Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life"
With her commanding presence, legendary actress Patricia Neal anchored such classic movies as The Day the Earth Stood Still, A Face in the Crowd, and Breakfast at Tiffany's. She is perhaps most well known for her crowning acting achievement: her performance as Alma in Hud, which earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1963.
Neal grew up in Packard, Kentucky, and began acting as a teenager. Her career soared after moving to New York, where she performed in several Broadway plays, winning a Tony Award for Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest. She was then courted by Hollywood, and after being cast in The Fountainhead, Neal quickly became regarded as one of the most promising actresses of the era. In 1965, several years after marrying famed children's author Roald Dahl, Neal suffered a severe and debilitating stroke, after which Variety mistakenly reported that she had died. After a difficult recovery, Neal returned to film acting, earning a second Academy Award nomination, and appeared in a number of television movie roles in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1986, Neal received the Women's International Center Living Legacy Award.
LVRJ: Legendary Las Vegas Headliners
Las Vegas Review-Journal: Legendary Las Vegas Headliners - HISTORICAL
November 22, 2009 Bob Newhart
November 15, 2009 Rusty Warren
November 8, 2009 Pat Boone
November 1, 2009 Arlene Dahl
August 23, 2009 Trini Lopez
August 16, 2009 Brenda Lee
August 9, 2009 Rich Little
August 2, 2009 Carol Lawrence
May 31, 2009 Patrice Munsel
May 24, 2009 Julius La Rosa
May 17, 2009 Rhonda Fleming
May 10, 2009 Shecky Greene
February 22, 2009 Jayne Meadows/Steve Allen
February 15, 2009 Connie Francis
February 8, 2009 Leroy Van Dyke
February 1, 2009 Mamie Van Doren
November 16, 2008 Norm Crosby
November 9, 2008 Phyllis Diller
November 2, 2008 Smothers Brothers
October 26, 2008 Rose Marie