Myrna Loy (23 page)

From that initial scene together, Powell would remember, “a curious thing passed between us, a feeling of rhythm, complete understanding, an instinct for how one could bring out the best in the other.” Powell had shared the screen with several actresses—he was too much the gentleman to name names—who
didn’t
connect with him, actresses who, he said, “seemed to be separated from me by a plate glass window” (
BB
, 88, 92). With Myrna there was instant connection, no plate glass.

Manhattan Melodrama
is the only film William Powell ever made with Clark Gable, who’d been at MGM since 1930 and had established himself as a major box-office draw, especially among women. He was
the
male sex symbol of the 1930s, occupying in that decade the spot vacated by Rudolph Valentino with his untimely death in 1926. Gable and Powell got along just fine. They shared off-camera laughs while
Manhattan Melodrama
was being filmed, but they were congenial colleagues rather than close friends. As individuals and male types they couldn’t have been more different. Unlike Gable, Powell didn’t consider himself a lady-killer. After playing a gigolo in
Ladies Man
in 1931 he demurred, “Someone like Valentino should have played this part. Not Bill Powell.” His tastes were more highfalutin than those of rough-and-ready Gable, a high school dropout who’d worked as an oil-rigger and telegraph linesman. Powell admitted that he had a reputation around the studios for being “a bit of a fuss pot,” someone who “always wants to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t.’ ” He’d been known to lavish time on the just-right arrangement of a silk square in a chest pocket.
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Powell saw himself as a pigeon, not a peacock. He believed his God-given looks were nothing special and that he had to make up for that deficit by donning what he called “fancy tail feathers.” He wouldn’t dream of making an appearance without a tie, much less without a shirt. Powell’s best male friends tended to be other stars, fellow film actors with whom he’d worked. The elegant, theater-trained Brit Ronald Colman was a Powell buddy, as was the sleek-haired former D. W. Griffith favorite Richard Barthelmess. Gable, an outdoorsman, preferred hanging out with men not connected with the film world who’d go hunting or fishing with him. When it came to palship within the Hollywood movie industry, he picked athletic, motorcycle-riding Victor Fleming, who’d directed him opposite Jean Harlow in
Red Dust
.
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Powell and Gable would end up competing for 1934’s Best Actor Academy Award, Gable for his work as Peter Warne in
It Happened One Night
—made when MGM agreed to loan him to Columbia Pictures, possibly to bring him down a peg—and Powell for
The Thin Man
. Gable won.

As Louis B. Mayer saw it, Gable and Powell were opposites who wouldn’t usually attract the same woman. Gable was the square-shouldered hunk, an instinctive man of action, with an untamed cowlick and a waggish grin enhanced by dimples and recently installed false teeth. Louis B. Mayer once told a writer who was scripting lines for Gable to “write a story from the neck down. Action only. . . . He doesn’t have to say anything that means anything.” Compare cerebral, white-collar Powell, a man of many well-chosen words; a skinny six-foot beanpole; a slope-shouldered, citified, and silver-tongued baritone. (Gable spoke with a mid-western twang in the tenor range.) A sophisticate who’d been to Paris and took to it, Powell had a bit of the dandy about him. With Gable the whole idea was to make his most ardent fans imagine him in the raw.
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Loy’s talent for partnership allowed her to draw on one side of herself when she faced Powell, another side with Gable. She excelled at picking up and answering cues, falling into step, “listening” with her entire body. As a kid she’d practiced social dancing in the living room, sometimes being led by her friend Lou, sometimes taking the lead herself. In
Manhattan Melodrama
, when she and Gable have a scene together, Gable dominates, while keeping his emotional distance. Love scenes with him were difficult to act, Loy claimed, because Gable was so protective of his macho image that he was afraid to show any feelings that could make him look soft or vulnerable (
BB
, 88). His character, Blackie, likewise shrugs off his girlfriend’s rejection, never revealing that he hurts. He’s more visibly pent-up in his two-shot scenes with Powell, especially the concluding death chamber sequence with Blackie gamely marching off to his own execution, than he ever is with Loy’s Eleanor.

Loy also maintained that since Gable liked for-real, tough women (he was pals with unaffected Harlow but couldn’t bear the diva airs of Jeanette MacDonald), when facing him onscreen, she had to play it rough. But her feistiness isn’t evident in her early scenes with Gable in
Manhattan Melodrama
. Here she’s mostly willing to accept his rules, asserting herself only when she decides she’s an old-fashioned girl after all (“Maybe I want to wear last year’s hat”), ready to trade in her life as a gangster’s moll for stability sealed with a wedding band and a home. Blackie, she eventually decides, is just “a little boy playing with a big box of matches,” and she wants a crack at settling down with a more grownup mate. Powell’s Jim Wade fits that description.

With Powell and Loy there is more equality, more emotional connection, and a buoyant sense of improvisation. At their corner table at the Cotton Club, pounding mallets on the table to celebrate New Year’s Eve, they display some of the spontaneous and infectious playfulness that would become their trademark as a team. Parties and celebrations keep turning up in their films, but in this outing Powell has many somber, thoughtful moments. He had a dark, “black Irish,” side, perhaps, Myrna conjectured, inherited from his mother, which gets full play in his impersonation of Jim Wade.

While directing
Manhattan Melodrama
, Van Dyke picked up on the chemistry between Loy and Powell. The way they lit each other up made him think these two natural celebrants might click as Nick and Nora Charles in
The Thin Man
, a picture Powell had agreed to play in before jumping from Warner Bros, to MGM.

Van Dyke, convinced that “a murder mystery could be turned into laughable entertainment,” brought Hammett’s detective novel to the attention of Sam Marx, head of MGM’s story department, who bought the rights for $22,000. Van Dyke believed the movie would awaken the public “to the truth that romance actually can exist happily between a man and wife who aren’t newlyweds.”
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Making daily married life look like fun, and romantic fun to boot, hadn’t happened before in movies, which in the past had depicted spouses, wives in particular, either as colorless, hemmed-in drags or embattled victims, vexed by cheating, jealousy, and other forms of misery. A wedding often provided the finish point to a story—usually a story about lovers younger than Nick and Nora, as it did for Myrna Loy and Ramon Novarro at the conclusion of
The Barbarian
. Showcasing a couple who’ve been married a while but who remain loving, sexually interested in each other, and delightful company to boot broke conventions both cinematic and literary. It also pleased the censors, since the Production Code pushed marriage, banning illicit sex from the screen. But having married protagonists worried producers. When a happy and legally wed couple gets the spotlight, the thinking went, where was the conflict supposed to come from, and how could the pair be made compelling to an audience? In
The Thin Man
the mystery of Wynant’s disappearance and the subsequent murder of his mistress, Julia Wolf, supply some of the crowd-pleasing answer, but the appeal of Loy and Powell provides the lion’s share.

Van Dyke championed Loy’s casting as Nora Charles, but Louis B. Mayer had his doubts. He didn’t see Myrna Loy as a comic actress. Van Dyke told Mayer that he’d auditioned Myrna for the role of Nora by pushing her into his Brentwood swimming pool, and she’d aced the test, displaying the game spirit he wanted for Nora (
BB
, 88). Since he’d previously directed Myrna in
Penthouse
and
Manhattan Melodrama
, he didn’t really need to push her into the pool. He already knew she had what it took. The swimming pool story was probably a bit of embellishment used to persuade Mayer, and it worked. Mayer gave in, telling Van Dyke he could go ahead and use Loy in the Hammett picture so long as she’d be free to start her next film three weeks later. “One-Take” Van Dyke won MGM’s gratitude by bringing in the low-budget film in record time. From the first scene to the final shot, Van Dyke recalled, he managed to complete
The Thin Man
in just sixteen days; most films—those not directed by Van Dyke—took about a month to shoot. The head of operations at MGM, Eddie Mannix, reported it took eighteen days, which is still amazing, at a bargain-basement cost of $231,000.
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Van Dyke eased Myrna’s ascent to MGM’s upper ranks by telling Mayer that the studio had been misusing Miss Loy, that she was headed for stardom if assigned the right parts; she should be playing characters closer to her real self: fun-loving ladies, endearing, flirtatious, and well bred. Van Dyke had first directed Loy in
Penthouse
, where as Gertie Waxted she starts off as a crook’s kept woman who admits, “I’m not even a lady.” But by the closing frame she
is
a lady, has in fact become the wife of a rich lawyer. Loy had spent the first part of her career playing exotic vixens and wanton hussies.
Penthouse
marks the exact point where in the eyes of MGM she rises, elevating both her social position and her mood.
The Thin Man
takes her even higher. She’s an heiress who can fund cross-country train trips and long-term hotel stays for both herself and Nick. She decisively joins the enviable ranks of high comedy’s bantering swells. Because of her identification with the Nora role, she will most often be cast as a well-heeled bantering
wife
. Here she’ll make it big, and here she’ll mostly remain. At MGM her upper-class status, once established, became set in concrete. When she once went to Louis B. Mayer with the idea of playing a household drudge based on a character in a book she’d read and liked, Mayer told her that he’d never consent to such casting: “You’re a lady in my book, Myrna, and you always gotta be a lady,” he insisted; no floor scrubbing for the new, improved Myrna Loy (
BB
, 116).

Because Nora brought the money to the Charles marriage, the balance of power tilts in an unorthodox direction. Her father bequeathed her stocks, a lumber mill, and a narrow-gauge railroad. It’s Nora’s wealth, which Nick manages, that has freed Nick to give up being a New York detective and for the past four years to devote himself to a life of leisurely drinking, high spending, and generally living it up in California. When Nora urges him to resume his career by taking on the Wynant case when they are visiting New York, he tells her, “I haven’t the time. I’m much too busy seeing that you don’t lose any of the money I married you for.” It’s been a sweet life, and he’s in no hurry to give it up to return to his old job as a gumshoe, though he’s still on friendly terms with lots of hoodlums he once helped nab. They have names like Face or Stutsy and toss around lines about being sent up the river or spending time in stir. Nora is always politely amused at these plug-uglies, receiving them at the Charles’s hotel apartment with good-humored hospitality. Joseph Breen and the PCA had protested the presence of so many con and ex-con characters. He was trying to discourage films that glorified gangsters and complained after reading Hammett’s book that its “general tone is one of crime, deceit and sexual immorality. The characters are a heterogeneous collection of criminals and psychopaths.” If Breen had a problem, Nora didn’t. She wasn’t a snob or a moralist, and she found the “dese” and “dem” crowd entertaining.
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Nora doesn’t just urge Nick to take on the Wynant case; she wants to be a partner in helping him solve it. She likes the adrenalin rush detective work provides and can’t bear being left out of the action. One scripted scene that was either cut or never filmed had Nora disguise herself as a man so that she can sneak into Wynant’s plant and help Nick find the murdered Wynant’s body, or maybe score by finding it herself. A still photo of Loy in drag, costumed for this scene, is in the MGM photo files. A scene that got both shot and retained shows her trying to horn in on Nick’s act when he and police detective Guild (Nat Pendleton) get into a cab that will take them on an exploratory mission and Nora tries to join them. Instead, Nick tricks her into boarding another cab, telling the driver to take her to Grant’s Tomb. Here, giving her the slip, Nick treats Nora like a pesky kid. She shrugs it off. The accepting, uncomplaining movie-Nora doesn’t explode in anger the way Hammett’s Nora does in the novel, when Nick belittles her theories about the murderer: “Don’t be so damned patronizing,” she snaps.
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Nora has a strong personality and a mind of her own that urges her to go off alone occasionally, but she’s essentially a partner, not a soloist, and she avoids confrontation. She is defined by her relationship to Nick. The offscreen Myrna Loy, like Nora, tended to be a man’s woman, content to let others manage her money and reluctant to scold. The all-important difference was that Loy had focused on a performing career since her teens and from age eighteen had paid her own way. She didn’t need a man to support her, but her private emotions now concentrated on her cherished Arthur and her consuming desire to marry him. Referring to the elusive prize of marriage, she told Gladys Hall, “Santa Claus hasn’t put that priceless gift in my stocking yet.” Marriage had become the Holy Grail, the fulfillment, she thought, of her dreams. No matter how often she’d played the Other Woman in movies (most recently in
When Ladies Meet
), in her heart, she revealed, “I am all on the side of the wife.”
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