Myrna Loy (30 page)

For an at-home interview with
Photoplay
’s Dixie Willson, Myrna greeted the reporter in the garden, wearing no makeup and a sweater and skirt, “a peasant handkerchief tied under her chin.” Willson wrote that she considered Myrna Loy’s glamorous movie-star image to be a contradiction of her offscreen naturalness. “What a pity that so young, so completely without artifice, she should be so clever an actress that in roles of fashion and sophistication we suffer a loss of the enchanting Peter Pan Miss Loy actually is.” MGM wanted its stars to look like stars at all times, to live up to the fabulous images created by still photographers like George Hurrell and Clarence Sinclair Bull and by the costumers and cinematographers who created their screen images. In public—at restaurants, elegant parties, or premieres—Myrna complied, feeling that she had a responsibility to look glamorous. But on her own turf, unless she was dressing for one of Arthur’s formal dinners, Myrna preferred to be casual. She was no Joan Crawford, known for wearing heavy makeup and trying out several outfits before picking the right one for an interview. Myrna confessed, “I hate clothes. I’m dressed to the nines all day every day on the set, every detail perfect, every hair in place, a mirror poked under my nose every time I turn around. I’m tired of clothes. I’m tired of ‘looking my best.’ I loathe the very mention of shopping. In the isolation of Coldwater Canyon I can wear slacks [although she favored skirts] and shuffle along in slippers.”
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The Hornblows employed a large staff, which included Helmut, the German chauffeur; Sergei, the Russian cook (who specialized in borscht and lamb sashlik); and Jim, the head gardener. There were seven gardeners in all and a trainer for Arthur, an excellent tennis player and a fitness buff. They had several maids, including one devoted exclusively to laundry and another, Theresa Penn, who cared for Myrna’s clothes and helped in the kitchen. Theresa adored Myrna. “She never bawls you out or orders you around.” Myrna took Theresa to MGM once, explained the cameras and mike cables to her, and introduced her to William Powell, Penn’s favorite actor. Powell, who knew of Penn’s admiration for him, told the flustered woman, “Theresa, no actor thinks you’re fresh when you pay him a compliment. He thinks you’re smart.”
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Myrna remained grateful to Theresa over the decades and remembered her in her will with a bequest of $1,000 and a pair of antique rose diamond ear clips.
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Like most women of her generation, Myrna had been programmed for wifehood. “I wanted marriage, we all did,” she says in
Being and Becoming
(123). But not until her late twenties did she unlock her mother’s grip and move in with Arthur, settling into a love relationship she couldn’t fully enjoy until it became official. Now she had legitimacy, but she couldn’t quite match the picture of domestic bliss in her head to her current situation. She’d always wanted children. She loved them and had a knack for taking care of people. (Pets too. She had a series of dogs.) But the possibility of bearing children of her own had been closed off after her premarital abortion. Loy acknowledges the abortion in her autobiography but not the sterility; she obviously considered that revelation too intimate for public disclosure, cutting too close to the bone. She admitted she’d had moments of yearning for a child but conceded that perhaps, considering her dedication to her craft and career, and the failure of so many other Hollywood actresses to make a success of motherhood, it was for the best. For the same reason, and no doubt because of Arthur’s wariness, she didn’t pursue adoption.

The pain of her lost pregnancy and subsequent barrenness lingered. The scene in
To Mary—with Love
where Mary (Myrna Loy), after losing a baby, with characteristic understatement silently turns her head away on her hospital bed pillow, carries a particular poignancy and truthfulness. She avoids her husband’s direct gaze, never breaking down in sobs. As the picture’s producer, Kenneth MacGowan, told Myrna decades after she created that moment, “You turned your face to the wall and it was devastating” (
BB
, 126). In that scene she paused midsentence as she spoke memorable words from the Richard Sherman script: “They say the movies should be more like life; I think life should be more like the movies.”

Arthur’s young son Terry provided an outlet for Myrna’s maternal bent. He lived mostly with his mother in Virginia but would visit California, spending every other summer with Arthur and Myrna. Myrna showered him with affection and at least once took him along to the studio with her, allowing him the fun of riding in her chauffeur-driven black limo and visiting the set. (When she could, Myrna preferred to drive her own roadster.) While his mother, Juliette, was in Reno obtaining her divorce, Terry had stayed with his father and Myrna in Bel Air. Myrna went out of her way to be kind and attentive to the somewhat lost and fragile five-year-old boy. She brought home six ducklings for him to keep and cuddle, and she put them into his bed with him; they promptly soiled the sheets. Terry responded to Myrna’s warmth and ease with him. When he was just learning to hold a pencil and to form letters into carefully printed words, five-year-old Terry wrote to her from Warrenton, Virginia: “i am sorry I went away from you. How is Blackie.” Myrna saved this touching child’s version of a
billet doux
. Terry and she remained close for the next six decades.
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Terry found his father, by contrast, a formidable opponent. Formal in demeanor, demanding, and harsh, Arthur aroused fear and, at times, loathing. Arthur made few spontaneous gestures of affection to Terry. When Terry rode with him in his car, he issued directives to his chauffeur via a microphone installed in the backseat of the car, rather as if he were the Wizard of Oz projecting commands from behind a screen. After a separation of months, Arthur would greet his visiting son with a handshake, not an embrace, and once Terry was installed in the house on Hidden Valley Road, Arthur would stand at the threshold of Terry’s room rather than enter it. When Terry misbehaved in some egregious but now forgotten way when he was eight years old, Arthur decreed that by way of punishment, no one in the household, including the servants, should speak to him. For lesser infractions he was given black marks on a sheet of paper.
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Arthur was dutiful and financially responsible, never missing an alimony payment to Juliette and regularly doling out funds for the elite private schools Terry attended, which didn’t come cheap. Though very bright, Terry had a chip on his shoulder and could act out. He didn’t shape up as a student until quite late in his academic career, eventually completing medical school and training further as a neurologist. He started prep school at age ten at the academically rigorous, socially traditional Allen-Stevenson School in New York City (“An Allen-Stevenson boy is a Scholar and a Gentleman”), then attended Deerfield Academy in western Massachusetts for three years. At Deerfield he was caught drinking and smoking, unforgivable breaches of campus rules. Terry completed high school at Cheshire and then got into Columbia College, but he flunked out his freshman year. Arthur’s advice to his son when he was beginning Columbia, Arthur’s alma mater, had been, “Always wait for the green light.” He offered another maxim: “Keep your fly zipped up.”

Terry was an angry kid and rebelled against his father’s rigid personality and social elitism. He didn’t trust Arthur’s tendency to surround himself with famous people and to this day disdains celebrity culture. Terry valued Arthur’s Jewish side, associating being Jewish with the warmth of his nurse Nana, and he gives Arthur credit for acknowledging his part-Jewish heritage during the Hitler era. Arthur wrote to Juliette, whose distinguished father had served as the assistant secretary of the treasury under Woodrow Wilson, to tell her he didn’t want Terry, then in prep school in the East, to grow up believing himself to be 100 percent Anglo-Saxon and Protestant.

In fairness to Arthur it should be said that to his stepson Michael he proved a very different, much kinder, and less judgmental paternal figure than he was to Terry. Michael, born to Arthur’s third wife, Leonora Schinasi Morris, during her brief marriage to her first husband, Wayne Morris (a Warner Bros. actor, friend of Ronald Reagan, and later, navy pilot and decorated war hero), was a gentler, more compliant boy than Terry, a darling instead of a rebel and a good student who did everything right. Michael saw little of his biological father and bonded readily with his stepfather. He proved to be easier for Arthur to love than the problematic Terry, who must have reminded Arthur of his failings during his first marriage. Arthur legally adopted Michael, and Michael, encouraged by Leonora, dropped the surname Morris to become a proud bearer of the Hornblow moniker.
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Myrna’s closeness to Terry wasn’t something she shared with the press, but the fans certainly knew she had a husband. Despite this, men all over were being encouraged to entertain their own fantasies about settling down with filmdom’s Perfect Wife. “Must Marry Myrna” clubs began forming around the United States, and she had at least twenty fan clubs in Great Britain. Myrna’s fan mail, according to the
Los Angeles Herald Express
, included around seventy marriage proposals a month. “It is curious to note the fact that the marriage of a movie queen affects not at all the number of letters she receives proposing marriage.” The state of denial about Myrna Loy’s availability carried over to the MGM dining room, where Jimmy Stewart went around saying, “There ought to be a law against any man who doesn’t marry Myrna Loy” (
BB
, viii), and Spencer Tracy installed himself at the We Hate Arthur Hornblow table.
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MGM, meanwhile, had every intention of milking Myrna Loy’s talent for wifehood for all it was worth.

CHAPTER 11

Wife vs. Mistress

Asked in 1960 to survey past movie trends, Myrna zeroed in on the changing ways Hollywood had pictured married couples over the decades. “When I began playing leads,” she told the columnist Dorothy Manners, “the troubles and pleasures of the hero and heroine took them right up to marriage, but never into it. Then there was the phase, which lasted a number of years, in which the theme of many pictures was that it was possible to be happy and content, though married. I think
The Thin Man
established this school of thought. Now we seem to be in a cycle showing how to be miserable, though married.” It’s clear she thought that by 1960 the movies had taken a step down since their (and her) glory days in the mid to late 1930s.
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If not every film career fits this marriage-centered template, Myrna Loy’s certainly does. Pre–Nora Charles, she’d played the Other Woman repeatedly and, as talkies came into their own, a few wives, too: the wronged but forgiving wife of a philandering banker in
Transatlantic;
the sexy but unsympathetic wife of publisher Leslie Howard in
The Animal Kingdom;
the district attorney’s at first content, then troubled, spouse in
Manhattan Melodrama
. Post–Nora Charles, she still occasionally got assigned the role of a romantically available single woman, and in
Parnell
(1937) she even managed to be cast as a politician’s mistress; but now it was the wife parts that defined her. Although she didn’t choose to be branded again with a type, typed she was, this time as somebody’s quick-witted and usually upper-class other half.

The wife label took hold before Myrna had wed Arthur in her private life, but by becoming the very social Mrs. Hornblow, often photographed with her producer husband at movie premieres, fashionable restaurants, and A-list parties, she reinforced her glamorous married-woman image. To her fans she remained someone to like, adulate, or desire, even if she’d become unavailable to the legions of men who indulged fantasies about wedding her. Myrna’s friend and fellow actor Robert Ryan claimed that the widespread male desire to marry Myrna Loy helped to boost the marriage rate in the 1930s, but, in fact, during the Depression American couples were postponing their weddings, waiting for less financially strapped times.
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The enormous popularity of
The Thin Man
and the success of Loy’s partnership with Powell sealed her fate. In 1936 alone she appeared in three movies with him, twice as his wife:
The Great Ziegfeld
, a musical extravaganza and biopic in which Powell portrayed impresario Florenz Ziegfeld and she played his second wife, Billie Burke;
Libeled Lady
, a multistar screwball comedy featuring Jean Harlow and Spencer Tracy, as well as Loy and Powell; and
After the Thin Man
, released around Christmas time.

Her screen union with Powell held fast, but theirs was an open marriage that allowed them to reunite periodically after taking off for cinematic escapades with other marital or romantic partners. If she couldn’t appear onscreen as William Powell’s partner, she’d be some other actor’s desirable mate. Over the years after 1934, in addition to Powell she was paired, as either sweetheart or wife, with Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, Warner Baxter, Robert Montgomery, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Franchot Tone, Don Ameche, George Brent, Tyrone Power, Fredric March, Shepperd Strudwick, Clifton Webb, Melvyn Douglas, Walter Pidgeon, Robert Ryan, Charles Boyer, Adolphe Menjou, and (in a made-for-TV film) Henry Fonda. It’s quite a list.

Somehow she missed becoming the screen wife of Spencer Tracy, but she does fall for him—she’s an unlikely jewel thief and he’s a G-man—in
Whipsaw
, her first movie to be released after she went on strike against MGM in 1935. Tracy, recently arrived at MGM from 20th Century–Fox, was at this stage a lesser star than she; her salary was slightly higher. He initially considered her standoffish, because of her habit of studying the script between scenes, but they were soon “on ribbing terms.” As she watched him work, Myrna concluded that she and Tracy shared a similar approach to acting. They both sought naturalness, but each at the same time thought through all the details and planned every move. What appeared spontaneous was usually carefully choreographed (
BB
, 151).
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