Myrna Loy (22 page)

The novel, not being subject to the restrictions of the Hays Office, is also racier, with Nora at one point asking Nick if he “got excited” when tussling with mendacious Mimi. Hammett’s novel makes perfectly clear what is only vaguely hinted at in the film—that Nick and Mimi were briefly lovers some years back when they “killed” a couple of afternoons together, presumably in the sack. Nora’s ability to shrug off Nick’s casual extramarital philandering has discreet echoes in the movie script. When she catches Nick embracing young, pretty Dorothy Wynant (Maureen O’Sullivan) to comfort her, all Nora does is act surprised and make a face at him. Nora knows that Nick doesn’t view her as the only attractive female on the planet, but in the movie she has less to forgive.
⁶

The Hacketts, a witty, stylish pair of New Yorkers who lent to Nick and Nora much of their own dash and affection for one another, wrote scripts for the first three
Thin Man
pictures. Frances Goodrich’s nephew David Goodrich makes the case that “the real” Nick and Nora are the Charles-like Hacketts, but Hammett said he based the character of Nora on his own relationship with the playwright Lillian Hellman. Hammett had been a detective in San Francisco, and he was a notorious boozer, so there may be more than a little of Hammett in Nick. Hammett and Hellman were lovers, political allies, and drinking companions who liked to kid one another, and Hellman, like Nora Charles, often had urged her mate to return to working as a detective. Of course fictional and dramatic characters can come from diverse sources and are seldom photographic copies of actual people. They’re composites. Lillian Hellman herself confessed that when Hammett gave her the manuscript of the novel
The Thin Man
to read and told her she was Nora, she first felt “it was nice to be Nora, married to Nick Charles. . . . But I was soon put back in my place. . . . Hammett said I was also the silly girl in the book [Dorothy Wynant] and the villainess,” manipulative, lying, money-greedy Mimi.
⁷

The Hacketts were initially underwhelmed by the prospect of adapting the novel
The Thin Man
, which had gone through six editions since its 1933 publication and had been serialized in
Redbook
magazine. Despite the book’s popular success, Frances Goodrich wrote to her agent that she hoped the producer Hunt Stromberg would decide to scrap the idea of doing it as a movie. “I hope so. It stinks.” She and Albert Hackett nonetheless completed a sterling script in three weeks, a script some consider even better than the novel. Van Dyke had told the Hacketts he wanted them to focus on the interplay between Nick and Nora, not the complicated plot about the missing inventor, Wynant; his engaged daughter, Dorothy; shady girlfriend, Julia; and grasping ex-wife, Mimi. “I don’t care anything about the story,” he told them; “just give me five scenes between those two people.”
⁸

Powell and Loy’s light touch and flair helped the movie adaptation, which had been budgeted as a B picture and which no one at MGM expected to go anywhere, become a surprise smash hit.
The Thin Man
was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Director; earned initial profits of more than $700,000; and became one of the most celebrated films of 1934. Although Myrna Loy was ignored in the nominations for the Oscar, she wasn’t ignored by adoring fans, who took both Nick and Nora to their hearts and tended to think of Loy and Powell as two sides of the same shimmering coin. Theirs was a marriage that may have been “made in Culver City,” as one observer put it, but it “played like heaven.”
⁹

Aware and considerate, Powell and Loy shared a droll sense of humor. There was plenty of joking on the
Thin Man
set. According to Loy, “We got into the habit of clowning around, having a good time.” Myrna claimed that the memorable scene where Powell shoots Christmas ornaments and party balloons with his new air gun began as off-camera antics. Powell often made jokes at his own expense. He pointed out, for instance, that he could never have become a for-real sleuth because “I have never been able to solve anything in my life, not even high school algebra. I have to call in the entire household to help me find a collar button. I am absolutely no good as a detective without a
Thin Man
script.”
¹⁰

Powell loved practical jokes. When Loy turned thirty-five, he sent her a funeral wreath for her birthday, adorned with a ribbon that read, “Be brave, dear.” When fans elected her Queen of Hollywood, consort to Clark Gable’s King, Powell sent what looked like a florist’s box of long-stemmed roses; it turned out to contain bunches of sour grapes and dry leaves, accompanied by a note that offered “Love from William the Fourth,” because Powell had come in fourth in the popularity poll conducted by Ed Sullivan that Gable won (
BB
, 146). On the day they were scheduled to plant their footprints in cement in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Loy and Powell alarmed Sid Grauman by showing up on Hollywood Boulevard laughing, each sporting a pair of floppy swim flippers large enough for Bigfoot. Powell said they wanted to make a big impression.
¹¹

Quips were in style, on the screen and off. Whether it was a Cole Porter lyric, a Mae West zinger, or a Noel Coward witticism, catchy phrases and rapid repartee ruled during this golden age of both radio and high comedy. Without a script Myrna Loy wasn’t much of a quipster. She was a laugher whose whole face lit up a room when she registered amusement. At times she felt intimidated by Arthur’s witty friends—they included Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Herman Mankiewicz—fearing she couldn’t keep up with their conversational volleys. With Powell, who became part of their social life, she could relax. She didn’t feel called on to perform when off camera. She could simply enjoy his company.

The fact that Powell and Loy never got into bed together offscreen may help explain the durability and warmth of their professional partnership. As Myrna pointed out, if they’d become lovers or spouses, they inevitably would have fought now and then. As friends, they never did.

They did disagree on politics. Loy was a dedicated liberal Democrat and Powell a conservative Republican, when he was political at all. That they voted for different candidates didn’t matter. They savored working together and missed one another during the sometimes-long gaps between films that paired them. He called her “Minnie” or “little Myrna,” even though she was five-feet-six, and he knitted those thick brows over some of her more dubious career decisions. She called him Bill. In general Powell was more of a worrier than Loy. Prone to bouts of depression, he fretted about the possibility of losing fans by turning Nick and Nora into parents, which didn’t happen until the third
Thin Man
outing, 1939’s
Another Thin Man
. Powell thought the addition of Nick Jr. would remind fans of the passage of time and might spoil the devil-may-care magic between Nick and Nora, making them seem staid or stodgy. He knew that part of their appeal to Depression-weary Americans came from their aura of complete abandon. They live in a hotel suite, where they call room service when they want food, or in a mansion staffed by servants. Nora knows nothing of household drudgery. In
After the Thin Man
, suddenly hungry, she talks Nick into getting out of bed in the wee hours to cook her scrambled eggs. Well-heeled, high-living Nick and Nora obviously didn’t have to worry about having another mouth to feed, and in the first two
Thin Man
movies they could shut the door to their posh Manhattan hotel apartment or palatial San Francisco digs whenever the spirit moved them and take off on some new chase, without having to first leave instructions for the nanny about when to feed the baby.

An actual marriage involving stars in Hollywood faced tough odds. Myrna, still single in the spring of 1934, when
The Thin Man
was shot, was twenty-eight years old and enmeshed in a passionate and stormy love relationship with Arthur Hornblow Jr. She wanted to be his wife but couldn’t be until he divorced Juliette Crosby. Arthur felt comfortable living in sin; it was the thought of remarrying that made him break into a sweat.

Powell, forty-one, had lived through two divorces, the first of these quite difficult because it involved a son, Powell’s only child. He blamed the failure of his brief second marriage to Carole Lombard on the competing pressures of two high-powered acting careers. During his current reversion to bachelorhood he was carrying on a prolonged, intense love affair—which the press called an engagement—with the gorgeous platinum blonde Jean Harlow. Harlow, who herself had three marriages behind her by age twenty-three, wanted nothing more than to wed Powell. He returned her affection but was wary of tying the knot with another young, ambitious, and much-in-the-spotlight Hollywood star so soon after his marriage to Lombard failed. It wasn’t hard to come up with additional examples of derailed marriages between stars.

Loy and Powell became an established romantic comedy team because
The Thin Man
hit the jackpot. MGM executives heeded the clamor for more Powell-and-Loy movies for one reason only: their pairing paid off at the till. “Is your cash register on a diet?” asked an ad in
Variety
, pitched to theater managers, that MGM ran immediately post–
Thin Man
. “Get ready for FAT box-office for Mr. and Mrs.
Thin Man
, the public’s adored couple.” Since Powell and Loy were stuck with each other for as long as they remained at MGM, it’s a good thing they got along so well. They celebrated many birthdays together, since his fell on July 29, hers on August 2, and seem never to have exchanged a cross word.
¹²

With all their gifts, neither Powell nor Loy suffered from swelled-head syndrome. Although Myrna wanted to be paid and esteemed as much as her costar, and in 1935 went on strike against MGM to prove it, her stance was “me too,” not “me first.” But if these two lacked selfishness or preening vanity, they possessed self-assurance. They came before the cameras as veterans, each of whom had served time during the silent era playing wicked foreigners. They each conveyed professionalism and complete ease. And why shouldn’t they? By the time they took the cinema world by storm playing Nora and Nick Charles, Myrna Loy had appeared in eighty-one films and William Powell in close to sixty. These were two seasoned pros.

If the first big surprise about
The Thin Man
was how well it fared at the box office, the second had to do with the way the words
Thin Man
in the title were understood. In the Hammett detective novel and in MGM’s early publicity for the film, they referred to quirky Clyde Wynant, played by Edward Ellis in the movie, who goes missing. The cinematographer James Wong Howe’s shot of a scary elongated shadow of the walking Wynant, and a still of that long, menacing sidewalk shadow silhouette of a walking man in an overcoat and tipped fedora became an emblem of the film for MGM’s
Thin Man
publicity campaign. Howe and Van Dyke quarreled about how many shadowy shots the film should have. Van Dyke and art director Cedric Gibbons wanted shadows everywhere, but Howe favored a naturalistic look and thought that the signature sidewalk silhouette lost impact if surrounded by countless other shadows. He said, “I wanted it stripped of shadows, except for one effect when [Wynant] walks and casts a long thin shadow on the sidewalk.” The result was a compromise, with more shadows in the picture than the artful, independent-minded Howe wished but not as many as Van Dyke wanted.
¹³

Despite the intended focus on Wynant, in no time the public began to assume that the Thin Man of the title referred to William Powell’s slender, fedora-sporting Nick Charles, not Wynant. The studio ran with that assumption. In all the subsequent
Thin Man
films the title refers to Powell, and Myrna Loy’s chicly slim Nora became Mrs. Thin Man.

The Thin Man
was the second film Loy and Powell made together, a rematch. They met while shooting
Manhattan Melodrama
, a Woody Van Dyke quickie completed in just over three weeks for $355,000, in which they play a couple who marry but almost part because of conflict over a friend, an imprisoned gangster played by Clark Gable. Produced by Selznick,
Manhattan Melodrama
became a big moneymaker for MGM and scored an Oscar for best story. The fact that “Most Wanted” gangster John Dillinger was gunned down by FBI agents outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater after attending a screening of the picture no doubt helped it cash in at the box office. MGM was not above bragging in ads, “Dillinger Died to See This Picture!”

Manhattan Melodrama
and
The Thin Man
shared a New York City setting and traded on that city’s grit and glitter. They both featured tough guys, crime, and gold-digging dames, along with high-living swells. James Wong Howe, renowned for his mastery of low-key lighting, which creates moods by emphasizing the contrast between dark and light, shot both pictures. Woody Van Dyke directed the films in rapid succession in the spring of 1934. Originally scheduled for production before
Manhattan Melodrama, The Thin Man
in the end followed it by just a few weeks. Both were released in May of 1934.

When
Manhattan Melodrama
begins, Loy’s character, Eleanor, is still involved with Blackie Gallagher, the high-rolling, gun-toting gambler played by Gable. Powell plays Blackie’s lifelong friend Jim Wade, the upstanding lawyer Eleanor will marry. The camera tracks Eleanor and Jim on election night in New York City, when Wade wins his race to become district attorney. Eleanor, at the time of this Loy-meets-Powell scene, is the longtime mistress of Blackie. She has made it clear to Blackie that she’s getting tired of life with a gangster. She’d happily trade the Cartier diamonds he has draped on her for a less flashy life on the straight and narrow. On this raucous night of celebrating Jim Wade’s election, Eleanor bounds into Jim’s moving sedan and nearly crash lands on Powell’s lap. Powell exclaims in character, “Pardon me if I seem to intrude.” Off camera, seconds later, his first-ever words to the actress who would prove to be his ideal costar and long-term movie mate were a courtly, mocking echo of Stanley greeting Dr. Livingstone: “Miss Loy, I presume?”