Myrna Loy (27 page)

One part of the
Escapade
saga that has not figured in any prior account needs attention here. Myrna had had an abortion a few weeks before reporting to the set to play Leopoldine. In addition to her issues with the role, she was contending not just with the loss of the baby she had conceived with the still-married Arthur but with even more devastating news. After the abortion she contracted a septic infection that rendered her sterile and ruled out future pregnancies. Myrna adored children and had eagerly anticipated motherhood. At the time of her crisis at MGM she was trying to come to terms with this private and painful new reality. She suffered enormous emotional turmoil, as well as physical exhaustion. She could not summon her usual resilience.
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The probable date of the abortion was early March 1935.
Escapade
went into production just a month later. The
Los Angeles Evening Herald Express
had reported that Myrna Loy was a patient at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco, “but the nature of her illness was not disclosed by her physician, Dr. Saxton T. Pope of Burlingame [who] indicated that the illness was of a minor nature.”
Variety
’s “Chatter” column confirmed both the hospitalization and the secrecy, reporting only that “attendants at the University of California hospital decline to discuss ailment which confined Myrna Loy.”
Photoplay’s
Dorothy Manners wrote of Myrna, “Several weeks ago she entered a San Francisco hospital for treatment of a bad case of nerves.”
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As soon as she could, after securing her release from MGM, Myrna took a plane to New York—her first-ever cross-country jaunt. Her seat mate on the flight, which included an Ohio stopover, was Leland Hayward, at present the partner of Myron Selznick at the Selznick-Joyce Agency in his professional life and in his private life trying to negotiate conflicting romantic alliances with Katharine Hepburn and the actress he was about to marry, Margaret Sullavan. Once in New York, Hayward, “a great charmer,” accompanied Myrna on her town-car ride through the Holland Tunnel into Manhattan and on to her first view of Fifth Avenue, pausing at 59th St., where he deposited her at the stately and luxurious McKim, Meade and White–designed Savoy Plaza Hotel, adjacent to Central Park. The electric wattage of New York City seduced Myrna at once. She fell in love with Manhattan at first sight, and the metropolitan romance continued for the rest of her life (
BB
, 104).

Via Myron Selznick she let it be known that her breakaway from MGM might last a while; she was on the warpath, demanding better terms on her contract. MGM was, to put it mildly, displeased. The studio had given her a release from a specific picture, not permission to flee on an open-ended vacation. Eddie Mannix sent a telegram to her at the Savoy Plaza ordering her to report to work at the Culver City studio at 10 o’clock in the morning on Wednesday, May 15, 1935. MGM suspended her salary and, in her absence, cast Rosalind Russell as her substitute in
Rendezvous
, opposite William Powell.
²⁴

Before she left New York, the
New York Times
reported that Myrna Loy, though new to Manhattan, toured it “with the gay assurance of a true cosmopolite,” craning her neck to see the Empire State Building and sampling cocktails “from some of the better bars” but passing up the chance to ride the subway. The columnist Ed Sullivan and famed hostess Elsa Maxwell were among the many Manhattanites who sought her out, wining and dining her. Myrna was living it up.
²⁵

Her first excursion to Europe, via a restorative voyage on the
SS Paris
, followed immediately. Arthur, already in London on Paramount business, had urged her to join him. He served as tour guide and companion, but since they weren’t married, his presence by her side had to be concealed from the press and the public. He sent her a radio telegram that she read while still aboard ship: “Welcome Welcome Darling. Don’t Mind the Weather We Can Pretend Its Christmas. I Can Hardly Wait Bunty. A.” (
BB
, 105).

When she disembarked at Plymouth, England, she was with comedienne Polly Moran, not a close friend but someone who happened to be crossing the pond on the same liner. At once Myrna rather startlingly announced to the waiting press that she was on the first lap of a holiday from pictures and might never, ever return to acting in them. She would rather live in London than California, she proclaimed with atypical abandon, because she preferred a climate with four seasons. In Southern California, with its eternal summer, “We don’t die. We just wither up and blow away.” She didn’t stay around to take questions. “Miss Loy soon sped away mysteriously in a luxurious car. She refused to detail her plans beyond saying she will stay in Sussex with Mr. and Mrs. Guy Bolton.” Arthur, who met her at the dock, sat beside her in the deluxe sedan as it zoomed off.
²⁶

Guy Bolton, a prolific playwright and screenwriter who wrote the story for
Transatlantic
, served as their British host. He lived with his wife not far from London in Nutbourne, Sussex, at their Elizabethan “Thyme Cottage,” where tipped-off fans and reporters soon “descended like a swarm of hungry locusts on the idyllic peace of the Sussex Downs.” Alfred Hitchcock, who lived nearby, came to pay his respects. (Myrna and Arthur would meet him again in Beverly Hills, where, when she heard him describe his way of working with actors, Myrna privately decided that his dominating methods on the set would clash with her own work mode, and she hoped Hitchcock would never put her to the test by hiring her.) Less-well-known acolytes had no trouble getting wind of her whereabouts, since the MGM publicity machine had swung into gear. The studio may have wanted to spank her for bad behavior, but why not get a little free publicity on the side? Fans who read the newspapers followed Myrna wherever she went, and hikers surrounded the Bolton cottage. When the time came for her to depart Sussex, two young men on bicycles followed her car in drenching rain all the way to London, hovering so close to the vehicle en route that “I was terrified every moment that they would be knocked off and killed.”
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At London’s Savoy Hotel five suitcases of fan mail awaited her. She rushed off to a reception at the Empire attended by three hundred people. Britain clearly adored her, and Myrna found it difficult to convince her throngs of admirers that “there’s nothing sensational about me.”
²⁸

London also provided the opportunity for her to meet Arthur Hornblow Sr. for the first time. Long a resident of New York City, where Arthur Jr. grew up, he’d returned to London after the American magazine he’d founded and edited,
Theatre
, folded in the mid-1920s, and was living with his Scottish second wife in Golders Green. They had a son, Herbert. The senior Hornblow was a cultivated man, once the Paris correspondent for the
New York Herald
, whose interests in theater, books, and all things French his namesake son shared.

Within six weeks Myrna and Arthur touched down in cobblestoned Paris, where they bunked at the Hôtel de Crillon. They were whisked away to be feted by Lady Mendl, the former Elsie de Wolfe (step-aunt of Natacha Rambova), at her Versailles chateau. Stops lasting a few days each in Switzerland, Hungary, Austria, Germany, and Spain, some of these destinations reached by train and others by car, followed. Everywhere they went, they dined in style, and Arthur, who’d been posted in France during the Great War, and who tended to fuss about food and drink, hunted down and ordered the choicest wines he could find to accompany their four-star meals.

In Budapest they ran into Robert Sherwood, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, film critic, former
Life
magazine editor, and scenarist. A future Franklin D. Roosevelt speechwriter who would create the script for
The Best Years of Our Lives
, the tall (6′6.5″), unassuming Sherwood was traveling with the woman he was trying to marry, the former silent screen actress Madeline Hurlock. She had recently divorced the playwright Marc Connelly, once Sherwood’s good friend. Legal snafus delayed their wedding plans, but they did manage to marry quite soon after their Hungarian encounter with Arthur and Myrna. The foursome—two as yet unwed couples stealing a premature honeymoon—lingered for a few days together in romantic, cosmopolitan Budapest, where Myrna was astonished to be recognized as Myrna Loy by an elderly Hungarian passerby who spoke no English but managed to pronounce her name properly (
BB
, 109). Myrna kept being reminded that her fame extended far beyond American shores.

During her European tour Myrna often felt she was living in one of her movies. The steamship she’d sailed on reminded her of the one in
Transatlantic
, and when she boarded the Orient Express en route from Paris to Budapest, “I had to pinch myself to realize it wasn’t a scene from
Stamboul Quest
.” The delights of Paris, and the fun of being feted at a French chateau, must have made her think of
Love Me Tonight
.
¹⁹

Back in New York in mid-July, Myrna immediately got down to career matters. With a New York law firm now advising her on how to get what she wanted from MGM, she pushed her argument with the studio powers up one notch. She publicly demanded a new contract, one that would give her full marks for being a star whose movies brought considerable money to the coffers of MGM. In the past, she pointed out, before she clicked with the public, she had waived an increase in salary at option time; now the studio owed it to her to make amends. “The gentle manner of Myrna Loy conceals a will of steel,” one observer wrote.
³⁰

She held one powerful card in her hand: her partnership with Powell.
After the Thin Man
, already in the planning phase, required her participation. Rosalind Russell might do just fine in some pictures demanding a smart, wry brunette; and Ruth Hussey, a new hire who could play sardonic ladies, would work in others. But only Myrna Loy would do as Nora Charles.

Nick Schenck, head of Loews, Inc., the parent company of MGM, worked from a New York office, and Myrna believed that he disliked her; she certainly had no use for him. “He expected all actresses to be whores, and treated them accordingly.” She found him merely crude, in contrast to the wily and theatrical L. B. Mayer. A shrewd and pragmatic businessman, Schenck realized despite his contempt for actresses in general that Myrna Loy had significant value to MGM. Her legal team in New York had convinced him she meant business and was not about to back down without concessions on the studio’s part. He got on the phone to urge Mayer in Culver City to negotiate peace with her,
now
. Mayer at once called Arthur at Paramount, inviting him to breakfast to discuss the Myrna crisis (
BB
, 115).

“Myrna Loy Abrogates Contract” ran a front-page headline in the
Los Angeles Examiner
. Her New York attorney, Bill Saxe, claimed that he’d discovered a contractual breach on MGM’s part that invalidated her present contract, which she wanted to see revised rather than totally destroyed. Making it clear that she hoped to return to MGM on her own terms, or at least better terms than those currently accorded her, she issued a statement widely carried in newspapers all over the country: “I was given the customary assurances [that my contract] would be adjusted if I achieved stardom,” she stated. “I have also begged for stipulations such as the right to have an occasional holiday. The manner in which I have been handled finally led to a near breakdown. After fifteen pictures in two years—three times the normal number—I felt the time had come for fair treatment.” Even though she hadn’t even become a member of the Screen Actors Guild as yet, Myrna Loy became a poster girl for actors’ rights.
³¹

In her autobiography she indicates that she believed herself to be a trailblazer in taking on the Hollywood studios. It’s true that Jean Arthur’s fight with Harry Cohn at Columbia and those of Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland with Warner Bros, had yet to happen. But she was forgetting that way back in 1922 Rudolph Valentino had gone on strike against Paramount, with what ultimately proved to be disastrous consequences for his career. Still, she showed courage and initiative, standing her ground and getting expert counsel until she prevailed.

Some members of the press corps whispered that the previously sunny and uncomplaining Myrna Loy had suddenly transformed into a demanding, temperamental diva. But
Variety
’s Cecilia Ager jumped to her defense, assuring readers that Miss Loy “was never a field mouse” and had not become a prima donna. “She is not quarrelling with Metro,” Ager wrote after an interview with the woman kicking up all the dust. “Metro, alas, is quarrelling with her. Miss Loy speaks of Metro in respectful, guarded and friendly terms,” while maintaining that though she may have been soft-spoken in the past, she “has always been, she says, an independent creature in her funny little way.”
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That independent spirit announced itself with still more vehemence when her representatives revealed to the world that Myrna Loy had just thumbed her nose at MGM by signing a rival contract with Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, writers who together headed their own unit at Paramount’s Astoria Studios, writing, developing, directing, and producing their own films. A press release announced that she was going to appear in a movie scripted by the successful Hecht-MacArthur team, coauthors of
The Front Page
and
Twentieth Century
, to be titled
Soak the Rich
. Myrna had visited MacArthur and his wife, Helen Hayes, at their Nyack, New York, home, and the idea of announcing the contract offer from the irreverent team, jokingly dubbed the Katzenjammer Twins, was hatched during that visit. Word went out that for her appearance in
Soak the Rich
Loy would be paid $75,000 for five weeks’ work, $15,000 more than she received for a forty-week period at MGM.
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