Myrna Loy (19 page)

Myrna would later freely admit that Leslie Howard almost drove her to stray from Arthur. While Howard was still alive (he would be killed when his plane was shot down by the Luftwaffe in 1943), she stayed mum. But, never naming names, she once told an interviewer that sometimes a love relationship needs to be threatened by a third party if it’s going to endure. “It takes three to make a love affair,” she maintained. “When a girl isn’t truly in love with John Doe, she finds that out after meeting John Roe. But when a girl’s truly in love with John Doe, even a temporary infatuation for John Roe only makes her realize how much she loves the first one. . . . Not that I recommend the method—it’s too chancy!” Her devotion to Arthur kept her on the straight and narrow.
¹³

Several reviewers praised Myrna’s performance as Cecelia.
Variety
said she “made a vivid figure as the Lorelei wife.” Mordaunt Hall in the
New York Times
wrote that Miss Loy as Cecelia “does capital work. She speaks her lines nicely and suits the action to the words, and some of her best scenes are with Mr. Howard.” Jerry Hoffman, in the
Los Angeles Examiner
, went all out, declaring, “Myrna Loy, as I’ve been yelling for seasons, is one of the most greatly underrated actresses on the screen. She is no one type. She hasn’t a marvelous background of stage training. But this young lady has a feeling for character portrayal equal to the best and most famous of our recognized stellar actresses.”
¹⁴

David O. Selznick must have appreciated what Myrna accomplished in
The Animal Kingdom
. He borrowed her from MGM again for
Topaze
, another RKO film that treats adultery with utter casualness and would be denied permission for a reissue by the PCA in 1936. Based on a Marcel Pagnol play and voted Best Film of 1933 by the National Board of Review,
Topaze
had a Ben Hecht script and starred John Barrymore as Professor Auguste Topaze, a naive but principled schoolteacher who loses his job when he refuses to alter the failing grades of one of his students, the obnoxious Charlemagne de La Tour-La Tour, whose parents are a wealthy baron and baroness. Auguste Topaze then goes to work for the baron, who has a business manufacturing soft drinks. Professor Topaze appears in an ad endorsing the baron’s product, and the baron names the drink Bubbling Topaze, which becomes the rage. Topaze trades in his beard, pince-nez, and threadbare morning coat to become a natty, affluent man about town, winning the affection of the baron’s mistress along the way.

Myrna Loy is Coco, the baron’s elegant mistress. In the opening scene we see her, clad in Chinese silk pajamas, conversing with the much older baron before a sitting room fireplace in a cozy domestic scene that is interrupted when the baron leaves to go home to his wife and son. Later, thrown together in the lab of the baron’s chemical company, Coco and Topaze are increasingly drawn to one another, but the sexual nature of the attachment is only suggested. They escape together to racy movies with titles like
Man, Woman and Sin
. Although the Coco role provided many opportunities for Myrna to seduce the camera, the formulaic part didn’t provide much of an acting challenge.

John Barrymore did fine character work as Dr. Topaze, a scholarly, soft-spoken man without any of the preening vanity or swashbuckling dynamism of his 1926 Don Juan. Myrna found him sadder and quieter than the man she remembered from six years earlier. She concluded that things at home were not going well for him, because when she asked him about Dolores Costello and their two children, he would change the subject. Repeating a scene from their days at Warner Bros., he walked right by Myrna, failing to recognize her, on their first day on the
Topaze
set. When the director, Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast, brought this social blunder to his attention, Barrymore apologized to Myrna, blaming his slight on an alcohol-induced haze (
BB
, 78).

One reason MGM was so willing to rent or barter Myrna Loy’s services to other studios was that even though Metro would report profits of $9.3 million in 1932, a rigorous attempt at cost cutting was under way. Movie theaters across the country were closing at an alarming rate, and cuts in actors’ salaries were attempted—usually under protest. Even L. B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg submitted in July 1932 to 35 percent pay reductions. Enforced pay cuts for all actors who made more than fifty dollars a week went into effect, though only for a short time, in March of 1933 after the newly inaugurated President Franklin D. Roosevelt closed the banks. Soon the federal government started making noises about the unseemliness of paying a screen star $2,000 a week at a time when American labor was fighting for a minimum wage of forty cents per hour. Government-enforced pay cuts for movie actors, mandated by the National Recovery Act, seemed imminent. In response to this threat, and also because most actors believed that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was a producer-dominated, antiunion organization and did not speak for them, the Screen Actors Guild was founded. Although colleagues Robert Montgomery, Boris Karloff, and Frank Morgan were among the founding members, Myrna herself did not join until 1937.
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The leadership of MGM changed radically after Thalberg had a heart attack late in 1932 and left for a rest in Europe. His once close relationship with L. B. Mayer had grown competitive and shaky, and there was speculation that he might even sever his connection with MGM altogether. In his absence David O. Selznick departed RKO to become producer for his father-in-law at MGM, taking on powers no one but Thalberg had been allowed until then. Rough and tough Eddie Mannix, a former bouncer and “an Irishman with the face of an English bulldog,” took on new responsibilities as production manager. When Thalberg returned, he became the head of just his own unit, rather than of all MGM production.
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MGM finally saw fit to cast Myrna Loy as a leading lady in an elaborate production opposite Ramon Novarro, but the film,
The Barbarian
, was a throwback to the days of Rudolph Valentino in his silent Sheik roles and Novarro’s own earlier turn as
The Arab
. The screenwriter Frances Goodrich, who, with her husband, Albert Hackett, did a few days’ work on the script before Anita Loos and Elmer Harris replaced them, couldn’t bear the creakiness of the assignment. She complained to her agent that writing about sheiks and ladies in distress in California in 1933 felt completely phony. “It was all so false, all hooey.” Goodrich got it right, and she and Hackett bailed out, but Myrna was stuck with the assignment.
¹⁷

The Barbarian
, originally titled
Man of the Nile
and shot partly in Yuma, Arizona, was a vehicle for a once top-ranked leading man, Ramon Novarro, whose star was now fading, though he was still highly paid. He portrayed Jamil, an Egyptian dragoman or desert guide who, of course, turns out to be actually a prince. As a suitor who tries to win Myrna Loy’s camel-riding character, Diana, a name lifted whole from
The Sheik
, away from her stodgy British fiancé, played by Reginald Denny, Jamil shows himself capable of both romantic savoir faire—he serenades Diana and drops orchids on her as she sleeps—and caveman-type savagery. He kidnaps Diana, deprives her of water, forces her to walk the desert sands, and embraces her against her will. She in turn humiliates him, striking him with a whip and throwing water in his face during a marriage ceremony in his village. They end up floating in a boat down the Nile as newlyweds. Their union avoided another potential clash with the PCA rule against miscegenation because Diana has confessed to Jamil that her mother was an Egyptian, making her half-Arabian.

The 6.4 magnitude Long Beach earthquake on March 10, 1933, shut down production of
The Barbarian
for part of the day and sent the back lot into pandemonium. As the earth heaved and rumbled, power went out, arc lamps tumbled, and palm trees doubled over outdoors. Cast and crew fled the soundstages in panic. The quake killed 115 people in the Los Angeles area. Losing half a day of shooting and scaring the pants off people seemed like minor calamities compared to the lost lives.

Back on the set, Myrna appeared in a scene showing her afloat and apparently nude (she actually wore a flesh-colored body stocking), in a pool strewn with rose petals. “Tits and sand sell tickets,” MGM producer Hunt Stromberg once judiciously observed. The suggested nudity provoked the wrath of the censors and had to be cut to eliminate “all shots in which the girl’s body is visible through the water.”
The Barbarian
made a profit of $100,000 but was added to the list of movies denied permission for rerelease on moral grounds after strict enforcement of the Code began in 1934.
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Ramon Novarro and Myrna became chummy during production of
The Barbarian
. She found him a “gentle, quiet man” whose company and musical talent she enjoyed. She attended a musicale he gave in his own home theater at which Thalberg, John Gilbert, the set designer Cedric Gibbons, Jeanette MacDonald, Randolph Scott, and Cary Grant also turned up. She stayed in Novarro’s house when he went to Europe to give more vocal concerts. When MGM’s publicist Howard Strickling decided to promote the friendship as a torrid romance, the usually compliant Myrna balked. She hated the Hollywood gossip mill and resented being forced to be fodder for it. She succeeded in getting Strickling and his publicity department to cease and desist but not until after a flurry of newspaper and fan magazine articles with titles like “A Secret Wedding for Myrna and Ramon” had been published. How ridiculous, Myrna insisted. “Ramon wasn’t even interested in the ladies” (
BB
, 80).
¹⁹

Loy played her first career woman, the novelist Mary Howard in
When Ladies Meet
, but here she’s no self-sufficient pillar of feminine strength. Her working-gal status in
When Ladies Meet
counts for less than her tangled love life. She has a devoted journalist boyfriend, played by Robert Montgomery, but is in love with her married publisher, portrayed by Frank Morgan. The surprise twist in the plot comes with an extended, potentially disastrous encounter between Loy’s character and the publisher’s wife, played by Ann Harding, during a rainy weekend in the country. Just by coincidence, Mary is completing a novel about a woman in love with a married man, and without realizing she’s speaking to her lover’s wronged wife, she solicits Harding’s opinion on what a wife should do when her husband strays. In the end Mary must face the reality that the publisher she thought would love her forever just wanted a short-term romp in the hay and that she’s been painfully deceived. The pain doesn’t last too long, however. She has dreamboat Robert Montgomery waiting in the wings and ready to offer both a wedding ring and undying devotion.

Robert Montgomery, who would appear in two more pictures with Myrna, had a lot in common with her. Here were two attractively slim sophisticates good at playing society high hats, two MGM actors who each had a way with elegant attire and a witty line. Each could summon the kind of champagne-bubble effervescence one would hope to find at a ritzy dinner party or, more likely, at a screen version of one. For some years Loy and Montgomery were political allies and fellow partisans of FDR, but that changed in the postwar era as Montgomery veered to the right. When they worked together on
When Ladies Meet
, though, Loy and Montgomery became quite friendly. Alice Brady, who played a dithery older woman in
When Ladies Meet
, would get together with the two of them after work, forming a spontaneous and affectionate trio primed for a good time.

Myrna Loy’s performances were being regularly singled out in reviews as the harbingers of stardom. The
Hollywood Reporter
hailed her work as Mary Howard in
When Ladies Meet
as “another shining milestone in what promises to be a brilliant career.”
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Her work as shady lady Gertie Waxted in
Penthouse
prompted a chorus of raves. Gertie was different from the characters Myrna had previously played at MGM. Finally, the studio allowed her to smile, crack wise, crinkle her nose, and show off her party clothes. In this movie she’s neither a high-hat snob nor a menacing she-devil. She’s a likable dame, the warm-hearted mistress of a gangster. That liaison doesn’t hold her down; Gertie makes it clear that she’s available to other men and doesn’t expect to be punished for her sins. At a nightclub she frequents, where socialites rub elbows with thugs sporting fancy suits, she meets the lawyer Jack Durant (Warner Baxter), the man she’ll go home with that night. Durant has already learned that Gertie isn’t the sort who would mind sleeping over in the penthouse of a man she hardly knows. “She’ll come to dinner, and she won’t give you an argument if you ask her to stay for breakfast,” Nat Pendleton grins when he’s about to present Gertie to Durant. She wears a big black bow on the bodice of her white gown, as if she’s a walking box of chocolates waiting to be unwrapped and sampled. Censorship concerns mandated that she and Jack Durant don’t actually get into the sack together, but she does borrow his pajamas and spend the night at his place. She’s a tough cookie, capable of slugging the butler, but smart and sassy enough to engage her wealthy host in spirited repartee
and
to help him elude a murder trap set by her nasty underworld boyfriend.

Writing for the
New York Herald Tribune
, Richard Watts Jr. extolled the “lovely and distinctive humor” that Loy brought to the role.
Variety
gushed: “Myrna Loy reveals new skill in the management of light scenes—light on the surface but with the inference of tenseness in the background. This actress has progressed in command of technique with each picture she has done until she now stands as one of the most serviceable femme leads in the Hollywood lists, one who has escaped from a limited type to a broad range of leading roles.”
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