Myrna Loy (25 page)

Hammett sold the rights to the characters of
The Thin Man
to MGM for $40,000 in 1937. For him Nick and Nora had long since lost their magic, though they continued to pay some bills. Hammett would revisit them to write scripts for many episodes of the two-year television
Thin Man
series, which began in 1957 and starred Peter Lawford and Phyllis Kirk. Those reliable meal tickets, Nick and Nora, by now really got on his nerves. He wrote of them to Lillian Hellman: “No one ever invented a more insufferably smug pair of characters.”
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The public disagreed. Nick and Nora Charles, a.k.a. Powell and Loy, took on a mythic life of their own. To devotees of Hollywood’s Golden Age they are as indelible and as inseparable as Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Onscreen they still launch helium-balloons of delight.

CHAPTER 9

Myrna Loy vs. MGM

A Hollywood columnist named Robbin Coons visited the set of
After the Thin Man
in November of 1936. By then, Myrna Loy was nearing the peak of her popularity. A
Motion Picture Herald
survey had placed her box-office drawing power above that of Irene Dunne, Marlene Dietrich, and John Barrymore but well behind the likes of Garbo and Mae West.
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At the time of Coons’s MGM visit the press kept whispering that William Powell and his constant companion, Jean Harlow, might be tying the knot sometime soon. Because of Harlow’s closeness to Powell, Myrna had gotten to know her well. Myrna treasured her. Like most people who became acquainted with Jean Harlow by spending time with the actual person rather than the celluloid image, she responded to Jean’s combination of innocence and frank sensuality, her unaffected manner, humor, and warmth.

Much of
After the Thin Man
was filmed on location in San Francisco, where Powell, Loy, and Harlow all stayed at the St. Francis Hotel, but the particular sequence being filmed when Coons visited—the movie’s opening scene showing Nick sneaking drinks in their Pullman drawing room compartment while Nora packs her lingerie before getting off the train in downtown San Francisco—was shot on the MGM lot in Culver City.

“On stage 12 today William Powell and Myrna Loy are taking up where they left off nearly three years ago [in
The Thin Man
],” Coons wrote for the benefit of his Hollywood-besotted readers. “Detective Nick Charles and wife have returned to San Francisco for their first scene to find their home a New Year’s Eve bedlam. Nick, so thoroughly at home in New York, now is in a hot-bed of in-laws,” a reference to Nora’s San Francisco kin, a tribe of boring, snobbish, dilapidated blue bloods Nick can barely tolerate. Coons continued:

[Director W. S.] Van Dyke signals a move over to Stage 24. He finds that his set isn’t there yet. It is being utilized for some tests for

Parnell

. . . . Van Dyke yells to production manager Arthur Rose: “Hey, Rose, where’s my set?”

Through the great stage door a truck backs in bearing an open section of a sleeping car drawing room on a portable platform. Eight men strain to pull the camera up an incline to position; property men dash in with the Charles’ luggage.

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The blow-by-blow account was meant to add to the orchestrated buzz MGM’s publicity department wanted to create about
After the Thin Man
.

At MGM the vogue of
The Thin Man
meant that engines immediately began revving for a sequel reusing Dashiell Hammett’s seductive mix of hard-boiled characters, wit, and mystery. The second Thin Man movie, which took several years to mount, would ideally boast another script spiked with Hackett and Goodrich’s zingers, propelled by Van Dyke’s full-speed-ahead directorial style. Most important, the sequel needed the sparks kindled onscreen by Hollywood’s reigning make-believe Mr. and Mrs. America, William Powell and Myrna Loy, who simply had to be tailed by Asta, the scene-stealing white wired-hair terrier first portrayed by a dog named Skippy. (There were several Astas over the years.) The threesome—elegant, bantering couple plus winsome, mischievous dog—had become emblems of a brand, like Coca-Cola. Their likenesses, on display everywhere, could not be escaped, unless you stayed home day and night with the shades drawn.

Skippy, whose name was changed to Asta, had become a star in his own right and would soon be fought over as “Mr. Smith” by warring screwball spouses Irene Dunne and Cary Grant in
The Awful Truth
and as “George” digging up dinosaur bones in
Bringing Up Baby
. Asta’s favorite fireplug, however, was banned in 1936 from subsequent
Thin Man
movies because Joseph Breen objected to all the dog toilet jokes in
After the Thin Man
. Well, he had a point. Not that moral sensibilities are outraged, but rather that the repeated cute joke overstays its welcome.
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For Myrna Loy, who had certainly appeared in urbane, dialogue-driven comedies prior to
The Thin Man
, but whose celebrity as Nora Charles sealed and embossed her claim on lead parts in such pictures, the hunt was on not just for additional Nora Charles outings but for more roles that showcased her now-acclaimed gifts both for acting in light comedy and for portraying likable wives.

Her stock, if not her paycheck, had risen at MGM, partly owing to her own soaring popularity and partly to flukes. She now rated a deluxe dressing room with her name painted in gold on the door. Two leading Metro actresses had departed the studio, creating vacancies at the top level. Marie Dressler died, leaving a big hole in many hearts, including Myrna’s. And Marion Davies, along with the rest of Cosmopolitan Productions, decamped for Warner Bros. when head honcho William Randolph Hearst, Davies’s lover and protector, had a falling out with L. B. Mayer over who would play Marie Antoinette in an upcoming Thalberg production. (Norma Shearer won the part.) Mayer went on the lookout for properties that could become “Myrna Loy pictures,” especially any with the potential to be William Powell vehicles as well.

Of course, even a studio capable of producing films with the assembly-line speed, precision, and efficiency of MGM’s Culver City plant couldn’t come up with product right away. Scripts had to be written, budgets planned, contracts signed, talent lined up, sets designed and built; the calendars of much-in-demand players and crew had to be cleared of rival commitments before the cameras could roll on
After the Thin Man
. Powell, milking his immense fan base, signed a loan-out agreement with RKO, while in-demand Loy costarred with Spencer Tracy, Warner Baxter, Cary Grant, Robert Montgomery, and Clark Gable, as well as with Powell in two non–
Thin Man
features before reprising her role alongside him as Nora Charles.

After the Thin Man
wouldn’t be released until December of 1936, almost two and a half years after the original
Thin Man
opened. MGM backed it with a huge ad campaign and spent wildly on this spin-off: $673,000 compared to $231,000 for the first
Thin Man
. The studio was doing all the things it hadn’t bothered to do for the original, which had self-ignited in its relatively low-rent corner nonetheless.
After the Thin Man
would yield profits of more than $1.5 million, doubling the grosses
The Thin Man
achieved on its first run.

In
After the Thin Man
the Hackett and Goodrich script and Van Dyke’s direction succeed in completing the action set in motion back in 1934, as if they were finishing a sentence that had been left hanging in midair. Even Asta’s leash matches the one in the last scene in
The Thin Man
. The Hammett story zeroes in on the already-established class difference between Nick and Nora, emphasizing Nora’s swanky but desiccated aristocratic roots and Nick’s preference for the far more colorful and down-to-earth company of boxers, boozers, and ex-cons. A boyish-looking Jimmy Stewart was put to work playing a villainous cad who’s in love, in a twisted way, with Nora’s cousin Selma (Elissa Landi). The character actor Sam Levene, fresh from his Broadway stage outing in
Three Men on a Horse
, installed himself as a series fixture playing Lieutenant Abrams, head of the homicide squad.

To film on location, Powell and Loy arrived in San Francisco on the Sunset Limited, accompanied by Jean Harlow, who according to the
San Francisco Chronicle
announced that she was serving as the official chaperone. She denied that she and Powell were on their honeymoon. Every detail of the stars’ appearance merited comment: “Miss Loy’s costume was a navy blue tailored suit, a dusty pink blouse, a saucy little blue hat, and sables. Miss Harlow wore a sports outfit of a lighter and more vivid blue. Her hat, gloves, bag and shoes were bright yellow suede, her furs a double . . . fox scarf. Powell wore tan slacks and a checked coat.” The Southern Pacific train depot at Third and Townsend, the paper announced, would serve as the location for the next three days of moviemaking.
⁴

San Francisco, where Dashiell Hammett had worked during his days as a private eye, came through as a picturesque backdrop, providing the requisite fabulous views, a few of them contrived. Nob Hill mansions don’t really overlook Coit Tower, but never mind. Making the most of the scenery, Van Dyke at the same time had to battle low-hanging fogs that played havoc with his lighting. He contended with crowds of noisy, overly enthusiastic locals who came to gape during shooting on the steps of the de Young mansion on California Street. “We did succeed,” Van Dyke remembered, “in filming most of our exteriors up and down San Francisco’s throbbing streets and around its historic landmarks, with the mighty Golden Gate [still under construction at the time] and the [just completed] San Francisco–Oakland Bay bridges, symbols of the new and greater San Francisco, constantly in the background.”
⁵

After the Thin Man
does the best it can, which is pretty well, considering that it’s a sequel. But as Woody Van Dyke knew, first tries generally win any freshness test. “There is no formula by which a true natural can be duplicated,” agreed Otis Ferguson in reviewing
After the Thin Man
. The humorist Irvin S. Cobb uttered what may be the final words about the inevitable deficiencies of sequels. “A sequel,” he told Myrna, “is like a second helping of casaba” (
BB
, 142). If only MGM had been listening.
⁶

Myrna already had completed principal shooting on one film,
Stamboul Quest
, which was ready for editing and retakes just as
The Thin Man
made the rounds for its first run.
Stamboul Quest
is no romantic comedy, though it provides romance aplenty, and in it Loy portrays a single woman, not a wife. Supposedly based on the memoirs of a drug-addicted former World War I–era German spy known as Annemarie Lesser, who, according to Myrna, was still alive and residing in a Swiss sanatorium when the film was made,
Stamboul Quest
turned Myrna Loy into the mysterious, possibly sinister, and definitely German Fräulein Doktor who falls in love with an American medical student, improbably played by the jowly thirty-five-year-old Irishman George Brent.
Stamboul Quest
was MGM’s attempt to cash in on the popularity of previous hits featuring star actresses portraying glamorous shadowy ladies: Greta Garbo’s spy turn as Mata Hari and Marlene Dietrich’s secret agent picture
Dishonored
. Loy’s Fräulein Doktor prowls around Constantinople in a black cape and a huge slant-brimmed hat. “Look for the woman spy in the most popular of luxury cafes,” Cecilia Ager teased in “Going Places,” her
Variety
column. “She will always be the most conspicuous lady in the joint. It is a fallacy, the spy picture explains, to think that a spy wants to go unnoticed.” George Brent, borrowed from Warners, made a satisfactory but uncharismatic leading man, and the estimable Herman J. Mankiewicz, screenwriter for
Dinner at Eight
and later coauthor of the script for
Citizen Kane
, got credit for penning the formulaic screenplay. Donald Ogden Stewart wrote a treatment for it in 1933 that seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle.
⁷

Stamboul Quest
did fairly well at the box office, earning a profit of $235,000 and winning markets both foreign and domestic, although a movie theater manager in Nampa, Idaho, provincially complained, “Not one person in 50 knows what Stamboul means, or gives a darn if you tell them. Not one person in two knows what Quest means. The producers should rediscover this United States, with its one hundred thirty millions who are not reading decadent novelists.” So much for attempting to import to the Corn Belt cosmopolitan cloak-and-dagger types who sip Turkish coffee on the Orient Express.
⁸

Loy and Powell were reunited in
Evelyn Prentice
, released seven months after
The Thin Man
. This film was also a reunion for Loy and the director William K. Howard, one of her favorites since
Transatlantic
made waves among the critics and turned Myrna Loy into an elegant and tony American wife. The melodramatic Lenore Coffee script used those old familiar standbys—adultery, blackmail, courtroom reversals, murder—as plot hooks. Except for one goofy scene wherein the Prentice family does leg lifts together on the carpeted floor,
Evelyn Prentice
submerged the comic gifts of the stars, asking them to play it straight as an upscale, workaholic lawyer and his lovely and loving but neglected Park Avenue spouse. This was Loy’s first outing as a mother (to a daughter played by Cora Sue Collins), and the two generations act enough heart-tugging scenes together to qualify the film as a weeper.

Evelyn Prentice
marked Rosalind Russell’s movie debut. Russell played a wealthy femme fatale client of Powell’s who, with the help of Powell’s legal savvy, is acquitted of a manslaughter charge and then does her best to lure her willing-to-stray attorney, Powell, from the path of marital fidelity. In her autobiography,
Life Is a Banquet
, Russell wrote that during her starting days at Metro she was usually cast as a husband-stealer, making off with the spouse of a drop-dead gorgeous actress such as Joan Crawford, Loy, or (in
China Seas
) Jean Harlow. “There would be Jean, all alabaster skin and cleft chin, savory as a ripe peach, and I’d be saying disdainfully to Gable or Bob Montgomery, ‘How can you spend time with
her?
’ ” In
Evelyn Prentice
Russell’s attempt to steal Powell from Loy backfires, but it leads Loy’s character, the eponymous Evelyn, into a disastrous intrigue that has violent consequences that appear to implicate her in a murder. Fear not. Everything’s hunky-dory in the end, by which time Loy and Powell have both amply demonstrated that if called upon to emote and tug at heartstrings, they can.
⁹