Myrna Loy (26 page)

The antic Roz Russell, a total pro as an actress and full of beans on and off the set, quickly won the friendship of both Powell and Loy. The corny movie that brought them together squandered a bevy of talents, breaking most of its promises.
Variety’s
review got it right: “There’s all the material here for a sock film, but it’s unlikely to get that rating.” The “strong sob yarn” and “money cast” failed to rescue a disappointing picture.
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Eager to correct her mistake in turning down
It Happened One Night
, Myrna accepted Frank Capra’s next offer, which required her loan-out to Columbia Pictures. By now Capra occupied one of Hollywood’s few seats as a director who qualified as a star in his own right. He wanted Myrna for the role of Alice Higgins, female lead in
Broadway Bill
, a horse-racing yarn based on a Mark Hellinger story and scripted by Robert Riskin, the celebrated screenwriter who’d worked with Capra to revise the
It Happened One Night
script, making both of its lead characters more appealing. Myrna had rejected it as just awful before the character of Ellie acquired her rebellious spunk.
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Most of
Broadway Bill
was filmed in San Mateo, south of San Francisco at the Tanforan Race Track and at a nearby ranch for thoroughbreds. It’s the story of easygoing regular fellow Dan Brooks (Warner Baxter), a dissident member of the patriarchal J. L. Higgins family. Married to snooty Margaret (Helen Vinson), one of several Higgins sisters, Dan chafes at the arrogant self-satisfaction of his wife’s father (Walter Connolly), who also happens to be his boss at the Higgins Paper Box Company. Old man Higgins pretty much owns the town of Higginsville, so to incur his wrath is to risk a lot. What Dan really wants is a rough-and-tumble, no-necktie life devoted to thoroughbred horses, rather than thoroughbred people. He quits his job managing the Higgins Paper Box Company to ready his horse, Broadway Bill, to compete in the Imperial Derby. Aided by his African American trainer Whitey (Clarence Muse) and by the tender ministrations of his wife’s younger sister Alice (Myrna Loy), who sells her jewels to raise money for the race’s entrance fee, he beats the odds and asserts both his independence and his determination to surmount adversity. Broadway Bill wins the race after a series of setbacks almost keeps him out of the running, but the horse dies of a burst heart at the finish line. Margaret ultimately divorces Dan, leaving him free to marry her warm-hearted younger sister, the unselfish, horse-savvy Alice, who, like Ellie in
It Happened One Night
, has rebelled against her stuffy family.

Myrna enjoyed the
Broadway Bill
shoot. She had worked previously with the solid if lackluster leading man Warner Baxter and grew fond of Capra, a man whose depressive tendencies were nowhere apparent during filming. She remembered Capra as a director with a sense of fun and an appreciation for detail. To convey the conformity of the Higgins family, Capra shows them all lifting their soupspoons to their mouths in synch at the dinner table. “He was able to put fantasy into real things that were going on, in a very charming way.”
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Since
Broadway Bill
was a Frank Capra movie, it had to champion folksy and colorful everyday Americans, who, in this tale, are caught up in the excitement of betting on horses, scheming, grooming thoroughbreds, and cheering for them at the track. To build tension before the big race for the Derby, Capra’s usual cinematographer Joseph Walker put together a montage of quick headshots of two-dollar bet-placers, secretaries, nurses, and other underpaid types using the phone to gamble on Broadway Bill, a horse rumored to have a shot at defeating the favorite. (A blonde Lucille Ball plays a bit as a telephone operator.) Some stock horseracing footage was used in the racing sequence, but the live footage shot by Joseph Walker throbs with a special energy. He mounted two cameras on a platform installed on the chassis of a charging Pierce-Arrow to photograph an actual race. Because there was a law on the books that prohibited racing the same horses twice in one day, there could be no retakes.
¹³

Capra immediately antagonized San Francisco newspaper readers by hiring a few rich socialites, including the blue blood investment banker William H. Crocker, to play some of the four hundred three-dollar-a-day extra roles. California was still gripped by the Depression, and local papers showed a photo of the high-hat Crocker collecting a paycheck while unemployed would-be performers grimly look on.
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Broadway Bill
has some funny and affecting moments, and Myrna Loy came through with a natural, wholly endearing performance. André Sennwald of the
New York Times
hailed her for reaffirming “our faith in her, both as a light comedienne and as a person.” Her ease with horses contributes to the relaxed feeling she conveys; her early days on a Montana cattle ranch served her well here. But Capra didn’t work hard enough against looming sentimentality, otherwise known as “Capra-corn.” Alas, mawkishness taints the film.
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Capra had wanted Clark Gable to play Dan Brooks, but MGM didn’t want to lend him again to Columbia Pictures. Why allow Columbia to cash in on the box-office appeal of a huge Metro star? Warner Baxter’s Dan Brooks frustrated Capra because the actor was terrified of being bitten or kicked by a horse, especially one with its tail up. “As a result,” Capra writes in his autobiography, some “warm scenes I had in mind between the man and his horse I could not do,” and those he did shoot fell short. He vowed to remake the film one day using a male lead in love with horses, and he eventually kept his promise to himself. In the 1950 musical remake for Paramount,
Riding High
, Bing Crosby, in private life an owner and breeder of thoroughbreds, became the Un-Warner Baxter. Because of budget concerns, the remake used footage and a few of the same actors from
Broadway Bill
. For many years it was hard to find a print of
Broadway Bill
, which was pulled from distribution after
Riding High
was released. Capra turned the 1934 film into the disinherited black sheep of his family of Capra pictures, ignoring it in favor of the Crosby version, in which Crosby sang “Camptown Racetrack” and Coleen Gray played the role of Alice. There was no Myrna Loy in sight.
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Myrna had turned down a role in
It Happened One Night
partly because she was suffering from overwork and exhaustion, maladies that had plagued her since soon after she began her now-decade-long screen-acting career. In the spring of 1935, as she neared her thirtieth birthday, she took stock. By now she had appeared in eighty-six films, twenty of them since signing with MGM three years back. She still wasn’t married to Arthur but passionately wanted to be. Stuck in what she considered a rut, she felt something had to change. She yearned for a breather, a chance to journey somewhere distant with the well-traveled, French-speaking Arthur. She had the itch to see parts of the world beyond Montana, California, Hawaii, or Mexico—the only places she knew firsthand.

Myrna was also becoming impatient with Louis B. Mayer, resentful of MGM’s refusal to fully acknowledge and financially reward her new status as a bona fide star and as William Powell’s equal. She considered Powell’s higher rank and double salary profoundly unjust, although Powell had enjoyed star status far longer than she and had carried films on his own rather than as part of a duo. Her original MGM contract, signed in 1931, would not expire until 1937, but she felt entitled to new terms. Her chance to escape MGM and make her point came during shooting of a film called
Escapade
.

Escapade
was a remake of the Viennese movie
Maskerade
, shown in the United States in 1937 as
Masquerade in Vienna
. “Story concerns a sophisticated young rake,” to be played in the American version by William Powell, “who tumbles in love with an innocent sprite,” to be played by Myrna Loy,
Variety
reported. The sprite, named Leopoldine Dur, was “a shy little person,” companion to a countess, who becomes innocently drawn into a scandal concerning an adulterous wife who posed for a portrait while wearing little more than a mask and a fur muff. In the original Viennese version, an actress called Paula Wessely played Leopoldine. Myrna told writer Elizabeth McDonald that Wessely’s performance in
Maskerade
was “so absolutely perfect that the studio wanted me to be as much like her as possible. I was to imitate another actress.” The entire film copied the original, shot by shot.
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From the get-go Myrna felt unenthusiastic about the role and the slavish copying. Mayer cajoled her into accepting it, making her believe he only wanted the best for her and telling her, “Myrna, you’re like one of my family. If you were my mother, my wife or my mistress, I could not be more sincere” (
BB
, 98). Recalling the unhappy episode, she said, “I knew
Escapade
was all wrong for me. I was supposed to be a little gamine flower girl who Bill [Powell], portraying an artist, discovers, and paints a portrait of, and you know that’s not the right kind of part for mama.” It drove her crazy that “they were copying every detail” of the German-language
Maskerade;
there seemed to be no chance for her to put her own stamp on the role. MGM had bought both the print and the script of the Viennese original and had Herman J. Mankiewicz, who knew German, write the adaptation.
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Since when was Myrna Loy the sort of actress you’d cast as an “artless, unsophisticated girl”? Since never. Her sophisticated air had followed her throughout her ten-year movie career, a link yoking the early exotic temptress roles to the fetching upper-class women she had played more recently. Myrna believed that the studio was purposely trying to humiliate her, but that seems unlikely. Executives were probably guilty of simple thoughtlessness, joined with their usual interest in the bottom line. For Mayer the only thing that mattered was promptly finding another Loy-Powell vehicle while the two were at a peak of popularity. Myrna also maintained, and here there is evidence to back her up, that after ten days of shooting, MGM, and, in particular, producer Bernie Hyman, really wanted her out of the picture, preferring to substitute the newcomer Luise Rainer, a German-born actress under contract at MGM but not yet put to work, as the ingénue. Max Reinhardt’s son Gottfried, a director, writer, and producer, had recommended Rainer based on his knowledge of the work she’d done with his father in Vienna. Anita Loos also put in a good word for Rainer. A refugee from the Nazis, Rainer had a big talent, which quickly won her the enthusiastic backing of her
Escapade
colleague, William Powell. With a characteristic generosity of spirit, Powell insisted that Rainer be ranked beside him as costar, or he would “look like an idiot.”
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Despite the scope of her acting talent, Rainer would turn out to have no knack for adapting to the ways of Hollywood, which she would soon come to consider crass, superficial, and artistically stifling. She would resent her lack of control at MGM, the studio’s not allowing her to choose her own roles: “I was just a piece of machinery with no rights.” Insisting that a psychologically acute performance had to come from the inside, from the actor’s soul or psyche, she held Louis B. Mayer in contempt—and made no secret of it—for saying he could make an actress out of any “good looker.” A cosmopolitan European, she bonded with Thalberg, a fellow book lover who was comfortable with writers, but felt at sea after his death in the fall of 1936. A few years down the line, after she’d won two Oscars in a row—one for her work in 1936 as Anna Held in
The Great Ziegfeld
, the second the following year for her star turn as O-Lan in
The Good Earth
—Rainer, by then tumultuously married to the writer Clifford Odets, broke her contract with MGM and left town after Louis B. Mayer told her, “We’ve made you and we are going to kill you.” She quickly became a Hollywood has-been. But in early May of 1935, when she reported to the set of
Escapade
, she was still an eager newcomer at MGM, collecting a weekly paycheck until the studio found the right first Hollywood role for her.
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Myrna had made no secret of her discontent with her part in
Escapade
, but she knew the consequences if she simply quit without first ironing out the contractual implications of abandoning the set. It was her devoted hairdresser Eleanor who revealed to Myrna that she’d just done Rainer’s hair for a screen test—for the very same
Escapade
role that Myrna had been unhappily and unsuccessfully trying to play (
BB
, 99).

Here the story gets even more complicated. The director Robert Z. Leonard apparently agreed with Myrna that she had been miscast. Ten days into shooting, producer Bernard Hyman and studio manager Eddie Mannix plotted to replace Loy, explaining to the public that she had voluntarily withdrawn because of illness compounded by exhaustion. Escorted by Hyman to Mannix’s office, Myrna was informed that she no longer had a part in
Escapade
. Mannix advised her to go to Palm Springs and rest “until the whole thing blew over.” Myrna told him no, she was not going to agree to plead illness. At that point, displaying a feistiness that came as a shock, she simply walked. That night, Myrna recalled, “I had dinner with my agent, Myron Selznick, and we hatched a plan. The next morning I went right back to the studio and told Eddie Mannix I was getting made up and would report to the set unless they gave me a legal release saying it was not my fault. They knew that I would upset Luise if I appeared on the set, so they rushed over with the release.” Release in hand, with her MGM contract at least partially protected against future legal penalties for her absence from the set, Myrna felt free to leave town.
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