Myrna Loy (13 page)

Don Juan
, an overblown extravaganza with a diffuse script by Bess Meredyth, provided Barrymore the opportunity to match his onscreen lovemaking talents to those of Valentino and to pit his athletic prowess against Douglas Fairbanks’s. Publicity put out by Warners claimed that he bestowed 191 kisses in the course of the movie. (Myrna Loy may be the only lovely woman in the picture he did
not
kiss.) He portrayed his own father, seduced countless gorgeously gowned ladies, leaped from balconies, swung from vines, escaped from a prison tower into the Tiber, fended off the advances of scheming Lucretia Borgia, dueled with the villainous Donati (Montagu Love), rescued an innocent maiden from torture, and galloped off with her on a white steed. Mary Astor, who portrayed the maiden, called it a “turgid, rambling melodrama.” She said that the director, Alan Crosland, a drinking buddy of Barrymore’s who took on the assignment after Lubitsch turned it down, lacked the spine to hold the large company of players together. “He’d walk around, brushing a waxed mustache with a finger,” trying to tame the crowds of noisy extras. “The sets were dark, gloomy, smoking with torches; the costumes . . . elaborate and heavy.”
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Myrna Loy, as Lucretia Borgia’s “chief poisoner” (
BB
, 49), made an appropriately sinister display of Hollywood-style Roman decadence, lurking under balconies to spy, casting sideways glances, and “slinking around with vials of this and that.” With a hood over her hair and a curl on both her lip and her forehead, she rides a horse onscreen for the first time. Her performance garnered praise from the playwright Robert E. Sherwood, at the time the movie critic for
Life
magazine.
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Despite its excesses,
Don Juan
has secured a place in film history as the first movie feature with a recorded soundtrack. It had no audible dialogue, but it did have sound effects and a synchronized Vitaphone sound-on-disc musical score, recorded at the Manhattan Opera House by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra using technology Warners developed in partnership with Western Electric.
Don Juan’s
New York premiere on August 6, 1926, followed a program of short Vitaphone films, including one in which the film czar Will Hays, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, cleared his throat and then spoke in lifelike audible tones. “No story was ever written for the screen as dramatic as the story of the screen itself,” he intoned. The six subsequent Vitaphone shorts delivered concert performances, mostly of weighty classical music interpreted by esteemed musicians and designed to impress. The program put Warner Bros. on the map as the cinema studio at the forefront of sound technology. “Vitaphone Stirs as Talking Movie,” ran a
New York Times
headline the day after the much ballyhooed
Don Juan
opening at the Warners Theater on Broadway, at the time the only theater in the world equipped to screen movies with synchronized sound. “New Device Synchronizing Sound with Action Impresses with Its Realistic Effects” ran the review’s subtitle. “Vitaphone Bow Is Hailed as Marvel,”
Variety
concurred. The first five
Don Juan
screenings brought in almost $14,000, and the value of Warner Bros. stock soared. A film that had cost $546,000 to produce would earn more than three times that and become Warner Bros.’ most profitable film to that time.
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Not to be outdone by New York, Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre was fitted with wires, speakers, and turntables for playing wax discs, in preparation for the Hollywood
Don Juan
premiere two weeks later. The crowd outside the theater stretched for two blocks in each direction on Hollywood Boulevard as John Barrymore trod a path strewn with rose petals to enter the theater and searchlights on the roof of the Egyptian beamed an electric rainbow. All the stars and supporting players in the picture came out, among them Myrna Loy. Warners’ radio station KFWB broadcast the voices of the formally attired actors as they entered the courtyard.
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Radio preceded sound pictures at Warner Bros. Responding to the current craze for broadcasting, the studio had installed radio station KFWB on its premises early in 1925, mounting two radio towers in front of the lot. The idea was that radio would help to publicize films and film artists to an audience of millions. Sam Warner, the brother most interested in technology, ran the station, and he was the one who persuaded his brother Harry, the money man in New York, to see and hear a demonstration of a test film made by Bell Telephone Labs, a subsidiary of AT&T. In it a man talked, and a jazz orchestra played. Sam Warner’s idea originally was to use the new technology to create canned music for films, relieving theater exhibitors of the expense of hiring live house musicians to play before and during screenings. When Sam reminded Harry that spoken dialogue as well as music could now be electronically wedded to the movies, Harry’s oft-quoted response was, “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”
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Myrna Loy had a bit part as a curly-headed chorus girl in Warner Bros.’ next pioneering experiment in sound,
The Jazz Singer
, the musical starring Al Jolson that told the story of a Jewish boy who defies his cantor father to become a Broadway singer.
The Jazz Singer
catapulted the underdog studio to a top position, surpassing giants Paramount and MGM, even though this first talkie feature only talks some of the time.
The Jazz Singer
is partly a silent film, with most dialogue indicated by the traditional intertitles. Loy’s single line, “He hasn’t a chance with Mary,” comes via a title card, and she speaks it in a nightclub scene to her ruffle-collared twin in the frame, Audrey Ferris. But this full-length film included sound sequences, folding in the throbbing voice of Al Jolson singing “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” “Mammy,” and four other songs and adding a few hundred words of spoken dialogue, some of it ad-libbed by the star. Jolson actually had uttered the famous lines “Wait a minute, wait a minute, folks. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet” in his vaudeville act and on film in an earlier Vitaphone short, “Al Jolson in a Plantation Act,” but this time the spontaneous-sounding words became indelible. They were a cinematic shot heard round the world, heralding a new era.
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Myrna, who along with other secondary players had permission to stand by on the sidelines of the new soundstage and watch Jolson sing as his voice was being recorded, found him mesmerizing. But “nobody realized that we had entered a whole new age” (
BB
, 52). In fact, Hollywood was filled with naysayers like Louella Parsons, who predicted that sound movies would soon be forgotten. “I have no fear,” she wrote, “that scraping, screeching, rasping sound film will ever disturb our peaceful motion picture theaters. The public has no intention of paying good money to be so annoyed.” MGM’s production chief, Irving Thalberg, also believed that sound was just a fad that would soon pass.
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Sound, however, made Warner Bros. It allowed the studio to rake in $8 to $9 million in profits in 1928 and to buy up First National and take over its Burbank spread. But it also sent Hollywood into a tailspin. “Articulate films will knock this joint agog,” predicted
Variety
’s Jack Conway, and he was right. Just as the artistry of silent movies peaked, almost everything about moviemaking had to be reinvented. Films temporarily lost their fluidity. Cameras became immobile; because they whirred they had to be encased in soundproof booths called “iceboxes.” Actors fell victim to “mike fright.” They had to play to a hidden microphone, perhaps planted in a flowerpot, not to one another, and at first all dialogue sequences had to be shot indoors. Another problem was that scenes with sound could not be edited. The Vitaphone sound-on-disc system required each scene to be recorded without any break from beginning to end. As Hal Mohr, the cinematographer who shot
The Jazz Singer
and many other Warner Bros. films, remembered: “It was impossible to cut the scenes,” and each scene had to be shot “in one operation” lasting (no longer than) eleven minutes. When shooting a short scene, the cameraman would try to stretch it to “make it last long enough to get enough film onto the projector to permit the projectionist to have enough time to thread the other projector machine.”
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Sealed soundstages were erected at great cost. Warners had five of them by fall of 1928, each carrying a price tag of more than $200,000, and the new king on the set became the soundman. New lighting technology was required, in part because of the space taken up by the enclosed cameras. If several of these cumbersome boxed cameras were operating at once, there would be little space left for lights. Moreover, the old arc lights buzzed, and the microphones picked up their sound. Quiet incandescent globe lights had to be introduced, and they entailed film that was panchromatic (sensitive to all colors) instead of orthochromatic (sensitive to green and blue light). The newly installed globe lights produced heat so intense it wilted the actors as they performed their scenes and forced them to keep changing clothes and refreshing their melting makeup.
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Movie theaters had to be completely renovated to show Vitaphone pictures, a process costing between $16,000 and $25,000 per theater, depending on its size. Operators had to be trained to handle both a projector and a turntable, and to coordinate the two. They demanded, and got, pay increases. Three or four men now worked in the projection booth, where one or two had sufficed before. If a stylus skipped or if a stretch of film happened to be damaged or missing, the resulting discontinuity produced hilarity in the audience. Because Vitaphone’s cumbersome discs could only be played a limited number of times before they wore out, and because they broke easily, bulky extra discs had to be shipped with each Warners sound film.
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Despite the expense of renovations, exhibitors took the plunge. Talkies had tremendous drawing power. By midsummer 1928 three hundred American theaters had been wired for sound; by fall of the next year eighty-seven hundred had been. Movie attendance reached an all-time high in 1929, the year the stock market crashed. By that time Warners no longer monopolized the talkies, and Vitaphone was being displaced by an optical technology developed by Fox that put sound directly onto film. By 1930 silent movies were just about finished. Only Chaplin continued to carry the banner for the art of filmed pantomime.
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As Hollywood producers scoured Broadway in search of actors with trained theatrical voices, silent players panicked, fearing they would be dropped—and many were. The foreign accents of Emil Jannings, Vilma Banky, and Pola Negri became liabilities, while the stock of a stage-trained American actor such as Conrad Nagel shot way up; MGM signed him at $5,000 a week. Uncertain about how Garbo’s voice and accent would go over, MGM postponed her debut in talkies until 1930. Clara Bow’s stammer and Brooklynese added to her list of woes, but Ann Harding, imported from the Broadway stage, was heralded as “the girl with the million dollar voice.” Audiences laughed at the stilted lines spoken by John Gilbert in his first talkie. Actors with British accents, such as Ronald Colman, enjoyed new stature. Diction coaches flourished, but jobs for even the most articulate screen actors became scarcer. Since production expenses had doubled for talkies, fewer movies were being made. One consolation to multilingual actors was that they might be hired to appear in a foreign-language version of a popular talkie.
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Those actors who successfully maneuvered the leap into talkies had to get used to working in silence. Silent movie sets had been noisy operations, alive with clamor. Directors used megaphones to call out instructions, musicians played background music to create a mood, and carpenters working on sets sawed and hammered away. Now, according to Frank Capra, “all of a sudden you had to work in the stillness of a tomb. If you belched, or if you coughed, you’d wreck a scene.”
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Myrna recalled her first experience with a microphone, on the set of
State Street Sadie:
“Jack Warner took me and Conrad Nagel back to the back of his stage, and they had this room blocked off with a lot of black curtains hanging all around, and there was this thing hanging in the middle of the room, this microphone—a most terrifying object. He said, ‘Say something.’ ” Although she was petrified, Myrna’s silky voice recorded well. It had a pleasing lilt, a built-in smile. Not a big voice, it had personality, class, and great clarity. Myrna could boast of exemplary diction. Ten years down the road, when she was making a film with Spencer Tracy, Tracy’s deaf son Johnny, visiting the set, focused on Myrna as she spoke her lines because he could understand her best (
BB
, 154).
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During the transition to talkies Myrna appeared in several mongrel films that added sound dialogue sequences, sound effects, and musical scores to movies that, like
The Jazz Singer
, were essentially silent. One of these was the lavish epic
Noah’s Ark
, which slapped on awkward, poorly integrated lines of dialogue that sounded like “little more than audible spoken titles.” The
New York Times
critic Mordaunt Hall complained that “when these utterances are heard, they frequently border on the ridiculous.” Directed by Mihaly Kertesz, a recent arrival from Hungary who had helmed epics in Austria and whose name had been Americanized to Michael Curtiz,
Noah’s Ark
cost more than $1 million to produce. Because of the many calamities that occurred during its shooting—star Dolores Costello contracted pneumonia, Curtiz broke a leg while demonstrating how to fall down the steps of a temple, thirty-eight ambulances had to be called, an extra lost his leg, and possibly more than one extra was killed—Dolores Costello called
Noah’s Ark
“Mud, Blood and Flood.”
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