Hollywood Madonna (2 page)

By the time Gladys was twenty-six, she was the mother of four. When the third child arrived, the Youngs had their own home where, on 6 January 1913, Gretchen Young was born, followed by her brother John a year later on 7 October 1914. “Gretchen” did not become “Loretta “ until she was fifteen and on the brink of stardom. But to her family she was always Gretchen, whom her sisters dubbed “Gretch the Wretch” owing to her aggressiveness.

According to the studio biographies, which are often more like hagiographies, Loretta was born on Hollywood Avenue, the address an implicit harbinger of things to come. In this case, the biographies were partially correct. The Youngs did live on Hollywood Avenue, but not in 1913. According to the 1914
Salt Lake City Directory
, they lived at 288 J. Street, within walking distance of what was then the city’s commercial and business center. The houses on J Street ranged from baronial to cottage-size, the latter most likely the kind in which the Youngs lived. Theirs was a respectable neighborhood, where residents included
a large number of businesspersons
.

In 1915, the Youngs were at a different address: 1422 Hollywood Avenue. John was now working as a clerk for the Oregon Shortline Railroad Company. Hollywood Avenue was about four miles from the center of the city in what would now be considered the suburbs. Exactly why the Youngs moved is difficult to say, yet the move was part of a sequence of relocations: sometimes within a city, at other times to another state. Possibly the Youngs—or at least Gladys—thought Hollywood Avenue would provide a better environment for the children, since the area was still somewhat rural. The family was not at that address very long, yet
it was the only one that Loretta remembered, having no recollection of J. Street. She obviously gave the Hollywood Avenue address to studio publicists, who invested it with a significance that it never really had.

Loretta rarely spoke about Salt Lake City. By the time she was four, she was living in Los Angeles with her mother and siblings. When Gladys could no longer endure her husband’s infidelities, which made a mockery of their marriage vows, it was relocation time again. She and the children moved to Los Angeles, which became their permanent home.

Gladys had a reason for bringing her children to Los Angeles in 1917. Her sister, Charlene, lived there with her husband, Ernest Traxler, a production manager and minor director (e.g.,
Caleb Piper’s Girl
and
Go Get Em, Gerrity
, both 1919) at Famous Players-Lasky, the precursor of Paramount. To supplement their income, Charlene took in boarders, and Traxler found extra work for their three-year-old daughter. Since his sister-in-law’s children were attractive, Traxler found them work, too. John, for example, was often cast as Wallace Reid’s son. No sooner had Gladys and her family arrived in Los Angeles than Traxler, who had connections at other studios, managed to get the children cast as extras in Universal’s
Sirens of the Sea
(1917), a retelling of the Lorelei legend with the four-year-old Loretta as a nymph. Loretta knew nothing about nymphs or the Lorelei, nor did it matter. She was exposed to the excitement of on-location shooting; besides, she was paid the munificent sum of $3.50 for doing relatively little.

In 1917,
Universal released films
in three, then four, categories in order of prestige: Jewels (later Super Jewels), Bluebirds, and Red Feathers.
Sirens
was a Jewel, requiring location filming, which took place on Catalina Island and the Channel Islands (now part of Channel Islands National Park) off the coast of Southern California. The Young children were only used in the Catalina exteriors. Still, it must have been thrilling for them to board the ferry to Catalina (probably from Long Beach), even if they did not understand the reason for the excursion. To them, it was a holiday; they donned funny clothes and stood in front of an odd piece of equipment that bore no resemblance to anything they had ever seen. Yet the experience left an impression on both Loretta and Elizabeth Jane, who had been exposed, however briefly, to the magic of movies.

The atmosphere, hectic but exciting, was a welcome diversion from their uneventful lives. The children would not have phrased it that way; they would have just called it “fun.” But it was also fun that in a few years, show business would bring both sisters much more than $3.50. Meanwhile, Loretta was at her uncle’s studio, Famous Players-Lasky,
where she played the “anonymous child” in
The Primrose Ring
(1917), starring Mae Murray, who became a short-lived fairy godmother. Roles in
The Only Way
(1919),
White and Unmarried
(1921), and
The Sheik
(1921) followed.

When Loretta was seven, her aunt, also an extra at Famous Players-Lasky, rushed home and told Loretta to head over to the studio, which happened to be just across the street. A child was needed for a scene in
The Only Way.
Loretta had been making mud pies and arrived with her face splattered with mud, only to be told to come back after she washed her face. When she did, she was placed on a strange looking table and told to cry. The scene worked.
The Only Way
is a lost film, but if it ever resurfaces, Loretta can be seen as the “child on operating table.”

At seven, she had no idea that the star of
The Only Way
, Fannie Ward, had been a popular actress on both the New York and London stages before making her film debut in 1915. Cecil B. DeMille, who followed the theatre scene, cast Ward against type in
The Cheat
(1915), in which she was obviously too old (forty-three) to play the young wife who loses money in the market and is forced to negotiate a loan from an ivory dealer (Sessue Hayakawa), whose terms are quite simple: She must pay with sex. When she is able to repay the loan, he retaliates by ripping her dress and branding her. The film was a hit, with Ward and Hayakawa receiving high praise for their performances. His film career lasted longer than hers, which petered out in the early 1920s, after which Ward played vaudeville.

During the filming of
The Only Way
, Ward sensed that there was something exceptional about Loretta, who did not strike her as a mere extra. But Ward was too busy promoting her own career to advance Loretta’s. Now forty-seven, Ward knew her Hollywood days were drawing to a close, and she did not have any intention of living vicariously through a protégé. Besides, Ward still had her fans, who could see her on the stage, if no longer on the screen.

It was quite the opposite with Mae Murray, who was immediately attracted to the “anonymous child” in
The Primrose Ring
. Loretta personified the kind of daughter Murray envisioned for herself but could never have. Murray was now on her third husband, director Robert Z. Leonard, whom she married in 1918 and divorced seven years later. Like her previous two marriages, the one with Leonard was also childless. Murray would eventually have a son by her fourth and last husband. Meanwhile, to fill the void in her life, Murray implored Gladys to allow Loretta to live with her and Leonard and enjoy the privileges that
affluence could bring. Gladys, knowing it would be “
one less mouth to feed
,” agreed, and Loretta, with the Traxler’s youngest child, Charlene, as her companion, become part of the Leonards’ household.

Five-year-old Loretta had never seen such elegance: a beautifully furnished home, servants, a new wardrobe for herself, and, to cap it off, ballet lessons. But Cinderella’s golden coach reverted to a pumpkin, when,
according to Loretta
’s daughter, Judy Lewis, Murray wanted Loretta to move to the East Coast with her and her husband. Gladys refused, either because her maternal instincts prevailed or possibly because she sensed that Murray’s obsession with Loretta was a sign of mental instability, as later proved to be the case. If Murray and Leonard had any real notion of leaving Los Angeles, they soon abandoned it. Murray worked steadily in Hollywood, racking up a total of thirty-one films between 1918 and her swan song in 1931. Loretta resumed her mundane life. But achieving Murray’s lifestyle became Loretta’s goal. Eventually, her prosperity would surpass Murray’s.

Loretta’s brother John had even better luck when Ida and Angus Lindley offered to take him into their home. Again, Gladys agreed, but not to a permanent arrangement. John, who was never close to his mother, resented the matriarchal household in which he lived. Once Gladys realized the extent of John’s disaffection, she untied the apron strings and gave him his freedom. John was then eight. The break was permanent, and eventually John Royal Young changed his name to John Lindley.

Gladys’s son was the youngest male to exit her life. She may not have realized how easy it is for a child to transfer affection from a parent to a patron who can offer a substitute for parental love along with a charmed life. But what else could Gladys do? She knew that the family’s survival depended on her. In imitation of her sister, she borrowed money from a local priest and opened a boarding house of her own. Many of Gladys’s boarders were actors, and their presence made Loretta increasingly aware of a world that she knew she would enter. The boarding house also served another purpose: The income it generated enabled Gladys to send her children to Catholic schools, the only kind that she would consider.

Since Gladys was particularly concerned about Loretta’s education—perhaps because she sensed her daughter’s star quality—Loretta was taken out of one school and enrolled in another. She stayed only for very brief periods at St. Brendan’s and Sacred Heart Convent School (now Sacred Heart Academy) before Gladys discovered Ramona, in Alhambra, California, eight miles from downtown Los Angeles and founded in 1899
by the Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus and Mary. At Ramona, Loretta endeared herself to the nuns, who found her candor refreshing. When one of them gently admonished her for her mediocre grades, Loretta replied—with an innocence reinforced by self-confidence—that she did not need good grades because
she was going to be a movie star
. Once Loretta did achieve star status, the studios made much of her being “convent educated.”

School required Loretta to take a brief hiatus from the movies. Unlike Polly Ann, who attended high school, Loretta’s formal education ended with her graduation from Ramona. There is a gap in her filmography from 1921 to 1927. Loretta must have started grade school around 1918, and even though she had bit parts in three movies (one in 1919, two in 1921), she only had to work for an hour or two. But once she left Ramona, she averaged three and four movies a year, maintaining the same revolving door schedule throughout the 1930s, as she exited one film and entered another. The pace began to decelerate in the 1940s and wound down in 1953, after which a new vista opened up for her: television.

In 1920, Gladys knew she had to do something about her marriage, now one in name only. A chastened and repentant John Earle Young briefly rejoined his family in Los Angeles. But his reformation was short-lived. He continued to cheat on Gladys, who finally realized he was incorrigible. There would be no more separations and tearful returns. Like Robert Royal, once he realized there was no hope of reconciliation John Earle Young abandoned his family,.

Gladys felt she had no other choice but to file for divorce. It was a wrenching decision for a devout Catholic. However,
priests were frequent dinner
guests at the Young home. Loretta’s sisters recalled one such priest, Father John Ward, who advised Loretta to “acknowledge what you have and use it.” Perhaps it was he or another priest—for example, the one who loaned Gladys money for the boarding house—who told Gladys that, under the circumstances (desertion, ignorance of her husband’s whereabouts), a civil divorce is permissible only if followed by a Church annulment after establishing that there is no possibility of reconciliation. In Gladys’s case, there was none; thus, she could remain a Catholic and even remarry. And in 1923, Gladys married one of her boarders, George Belzer.

Remarriage resulted in both a new home and another child, Georgiana, born in 1924. By 1936, Belzer realized he was not the head of his family. His entrepreneurial wife had taken up interior decorating; his stepdaughter Elizabeth Jane, now known as Sally Blane, while not a
star, was a recognizable name; and Loretta was a major star at Twentieth Century-Fox. Raised to think of the husband as provider and the wife as “help mate,” Belzer knew that, as a lowly accountant, he could not compete with women whose jobs were more lucrative than his own. By 1936, his marriage was over. And Gladys, now pushing fifty, knew her marrying days were over. She had her career, and Loretta and Sally had theirs. More importantly, Gladys had her faith.

Gladys was never meant to be a wife, only a mother. She may not have known what a feminist was, but in her own way she was one. She transformed herself from a lothario’s wife into an interior decorator with an eye for color and detail that won her clients. Even Loretta profited from her mother’s expertise when she wanted the right set for her iconic entrance on her television show. Gladys would have been an ideal wife for a man who could bask in the reflected glory of his wife’s success without feeling any diminution of his manhood. But in the early years of the twentieth century, such males were rare. And, as far as Gladys was concerned, they were not missed. Loretta, too, was meant for motherhood, not marriage. If her first husband, Grant Withers, dubbed her “the
steel butterfly
,” he did so because she was not destined for anyone’s net. Steel is an alloy, hard and durable. And so was Loretta Young.

CHAPTER 2
The Creation of Loretta Young

In Hollywood, both past and present (but more commonly past), myth and fact have mingled indiscriminately. Myth is elevated to the level of truth, while facts are given a mythic makeover, so that what was drab and ordinary acquires a glossy overlay, like lacquered wood.

But there are facts that are verifiable. Norma Jean Baker did not become Marilyn Monroe in the same way Esther Blodgett (Janet Gaynor) become Vicki Lester in
A Star is Born
(1937) by picking up her paycheck and discovering that she had been renamed. Although Marilyn has inspired an ever-burgeoning mythology, there was nothing mythic about her name change. Ben Lyons, Fox’s casting director, was obsessed with the Broadway star, Marilyn Miller. He believed Norma Jean was a “Marilyn.” But what about the last name? Alliterative names, or names with liquid consonants (l, m, n, r), always had cachet. When Norma Jean mentioned that Monroe was her grandfather’s surname,
Norma Jean Baker became Marilyn
Monroe. How Gretchen Young became Loretta Young is another matter: There is the received version, which seems plausible, and the alternative one, which is less so.