Myrna Loy (31 page)

Despite having both a major drinking problem and a wife, Tracy chased women. He carried a torch for Myrna offscreen, trying repeatedly, without success, to set up dates with her (
BB
, 122). Faithful to Arthur, Myrna kept Tracy at bay, but being desired by a man as gifted, attractive, and complex as Tracy pleased her. She felt a pang of disappointment tinged with jealousy a few years down the road when Tracy told her he had found the woman he wanted to be with: Katharine Hepburn. “As selfish as it sounds, I liked having a man like Spence in the background, wanting me” (
BB
, 154). Over the years Hepburn landed many prizes that Myrna would have liked to claim, down to costarring with Henry Fonda in
On Golden Pond
. After Tracy’s confession about Hepburn’s place in his affections the door shut on what had been an ego-stoking flirtation with the man she called Spence.
⁴

During her post–
Thin Man
heyday at MGM, Myrna Loy never carried a movie on her name alone, nor did she often take on roles conveying overwhelming womanpower or female autonomy. “In most of my pictures I complemented the male character, who usually carried the story,” she explains in her autobiography, drawing a distinction between her signature partner roles and Bette Davis’s powerhouses or Rosalind Russell’s female executives. “This often meant that my roles were subordinate, but that’s the way I wanted it.” Loy didn’t feel comfortable in command position, preferring an identity that Ethan Mordden defines as “consort rather than ruler.” She considered herself miscast in her role as a magazine’s crisply efficient executive editor in 1940’s
Third Finger, Left Hand
and said that her leading man, Melvyn Douglas, an actor whose comic style blended well with her own, had to help her “get through” that one (
BB
, 164).
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Unlike Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, or Norma Shearer, Loy never wore a crown onscreen, although many thought her regal in bearing; and in
The Black Watch
, back in 1929, she’d played the Joan of Arc of India. Fans elected her Queen of Hollywood at the end of 1937, when readers of newspapers around the country cast their votes, choosing Clark Gable king. The syndicated
New York Daily News
columnist Ed Sullivan presented the royal couple’s tinsel and purple velvet crowns at the packed El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood as millions of radio listeners tuned in to hear the coronation on a nationwide hookup on NBC. “I am presenting these crowns on behalf of 20,000,000 readers,” announced Ed Sullivan at the microphone.
⁶

After that, Clark Gable nicknamed Myrna “Queenie.” When Gable, Myrna, and Spencer Tracy appeared together in 1938’s
Test Pilot
—MGM had reunited Gable and Loy partly to cash in on the Ed Sullivan–generated publicity—Tracy would tease Gable on the set with catcalls of “Long live the King!” (
BB
, 152). Myrna held on to her flimsy crown, and savored her moment of glory, but she didn’t allow herself to get carried away. Yes, she wanted her talents to be recognized, put to good use, and financially rewarded, but she kept her stardom in perspective. Being a movie star never defined her as it defined a Joan Crawford. Myrna understood that fame was fickle, and she guessed that her days of stardom might be numbered. She spoke of retiring from the movies while still young.

The closest she ever came to a superwoman role was in
Double Wedding
(1937), where as Margit Agnew, a bossy control freak of a fashion designer / shop owner, she micromanages her sister Irene’s love life, pays the bills for both Irene and Irene’s milquetoast boyfriend Waldo, and acts like a five-star general in any situation. But even in that movie, love trumps power. After encountering the chaos principle in the person of Bohemian artist and acting coach Charles Lodge (William Powell), who sports a beret and lives in a trailer, Margit in the end gives up her independence, yielding even her consciousness—she’s knocked out by an Oscar statuette—to become a bride. Usually it’s Powell who gets to do the physical clowning, but here Loy has a go at it, too. Charlie’s refusal to be cowed by Margit, his willingness to take her on, guarantees that he’s the man she’ll fall for. Too bad
Double Wedding
isn’t a better movie. It’s contrived and flatfooted, and neither Loy nor Powell enjoyed making it, despite its bang-up finale: a free-for-all wedding featuring two brides (Margit and Irene), two grooms, a confused preacher, quite a few drunks from the bar next door, and a maximum of commotion—all crammed into Charlie’s tiny trailer in a Capra-esque crowd scene. Even this witless farce succeeds at fulfilling Myrna Loy’s MGM destiny by leaving her true to type, as Powell’s adoring bride.

A few famous screen actors—Boris Karloff and Mae West for instance—actually liked typecasting. They liked having a niche, being associated with a single role or kind of character—the Quipster Hussy, the Monster Man. An actor with a type owned a kind of work-insurance. She or he always had a safe place to go and could bank on being called on to play similar characters over and over again. Repeating an exaggerated and predictable type had once been the norm for vaudeville performers, for many stage players, and for scores of silent film actors too. Being typed helped both to define you and to sell your talent to the public, which seems to love what it already knows. Eugene O’Neill’s father, James, played the same character in
The Count of Monte Cristo
on the stage more than six thousand times, to his undoing; but the family ate. Being associated with a single type or character fit into a marketing strategy related to advertising slogans, logos, and brand names. It was a way to telegraph your professional identity and invite the audience to get familiar.

Myrna liked being a partner, but she wasn’t among those who enjoyed the safety and simplifying built into typecasting. Although she initially accepted the Perfect Wife moniker, and played along with it in multiple films, most of them produced at MGM, by the end of the 1930s she came to resent being pigeonholed and to tire of the predictability it brought to her career. After a few years of being locked in, continuing to occupy the wife niche started to feel like wearing manacles. Loy hoped to be known as an actress who could handle a range of roles, in drama as well as comedy: sad women as well as happy, virtuous or flawed, married or single. She didn’t want to keep trading on her past successes. “I’m sick to death of playing those women—those . . . sweet wives—who have been crowding in on me with a vengeance in recent years,” she said in 1939. “I aspired to them once. I’m anxious to retire from them now.”
⁷

The problem was that even after the studio finally upgraded her status and started paying her $4,000 a week on a new contract, MGM, the studio with the most stars, the largest plant, and the biggest budgets, found it easier to continue casting her as a congenial wife than to seek out fresh ideas. Loy was making money for Metro. Quigley’s Annual List of box-office leaders in
Motion Picture Almanac
named her one of the ten top-earning actors in Hollywood in both 1937 and 1938, and there seemed to be no incentive to change a winning formula. Innovative in the way it managed star publicity, coordinated multiple elaborate productions, pooled its talent, and showcased the art director Cedric Gibbons’s gleaming set designs, MGM marched to a conservative beat and tended to play it safe. Committed after 1934 to what we now call family values and to making “happy pictures about happy people” (the words are Louis B. Mayer’s), the studio avoided risk when it came to hot-button social issues or politics.

Mayer himself, a staunch Republican and enemy of FDR, was the father of two overprotected daughters. He once told the writer Frances Marion, “I’m determined that my little Edie and my little Irene will never be embarrassed. And they won’t [be], if all my pictures are moral and clean.” Mayer, who started out in the junk business and once owned a burlesque theater, was no saint. He recognized the importance of sex, on the screen and off, and in pre-Code days seems to have had no problem with Jean Harlow’s bombshells, Garbo’s steamy love scenes with John Gilbert, or Myrna Loy’s exotic nymphomaniac kinkiness in
The Mask of Fu Manchu
. He hosted annual alcohol-drenched orgylike Christmas parties at the MGM plant, plied visiting salesmen with starlet “dates,” and permitted himself some extracurricular romances during the waning years of his long first marriage, which ended in divorce. The dissonance between what he advocated and the way he actually behaved does not seem to have cost the wily, capable, and highly theatrical Mayer many sleepless nights. Appearances concerned him, the things the public could see, more than what took place behind the curtain.
⁸

Casting Myrna Loy repeatedly as The Wife spelled safety, both because it fulfilled audience expectations and because it conformed to the enforced Production Code, which decreed, “The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld.” Adultery, once a prime mover of Hollywood plots, now had to be skirted, shunned, or, if depicted, punished. According to the Code, “adultery must not be explicitly treated, or justified, or presented attractively.” Divorce, too, was ruled off limits; it couldn’t be shown in what Breen and his compeers considered to be a favorable light. Abortion, of course, was completely out of the question.
⁹

To
Mary—with Love
, a melodrama made when Myrna was on loan to 20th Century–Fox, is a film about a marriage. It tracks the first ten years in the tumultuous union of Mary (Myrna Loy) and Jock Wallace (Warner Baxter), wed in 1925. As it follows them through the decade, the movie tests the Code’s moral boundaries. It touches on both adultery and divorce, and while it doesn’t show an abortion, it does include the intimate, emotionally devastating aftermath of a stillbirth. Joseph Breen made a laundry list of objections to the script, and some of the required cuts and revisions were made by 20th Century–Fox, which was paying Myrna $3,000 a week but was giving Metro $9,000 a week for the privilege of borrowing her. Despite Breen’s initial protests, much of the redlined material stayed in the completed film, which still managed to win a purity seal. In
To Mary—with Love
adultery threatens to unmoor the Wallaces. Mary starts packing to leave Jock immediately after she finds another woman’s compact in the couple’s bedroom, but Jock, repentant, persuades her to stay. The lady with the compact (an ironic Claire Trevor) makes it clear, though, that she’d happily run off with Jock, given the chance. Mary, too, has encountered temptation but resists the professed love of an old friend with a yen for her.
¹⁰

The much-tested Wallace marriage just barely stays afloat, buffeted by economic ruin after the crash of 1929, unemployment, a period of living on Mary’s scant earnings as a candy store clerk, Jock’s boozing, the shared heartbreak of a stillbirth, and a string of divorce threats. Punctuated with newsreel clips that recall such actual events as the Tunney-Dempsey fight and Lindbergh’s welcome-home ticker-tape parade, the Richard Sherman screenplay does a meager job with both characterization and structure. John Cromwell’s haphazard directing doesn’t help. The seemingly endless sequence of highs and lows, fights and reconciliations, lean years and fat lacks focus and becomes wearying.
Variety
had reason to slam
To Mary—with Love
as a “hash-over of the semi-realistic glamorized Hollywood approach to unemployment and tough times,” tagging it condescendingly as a movie that “will please women, but it will make men restless with its meandering triviality and lack of action.” But the most telling response to this film comments not on its dubious success as a movie but rather on the institution of marriage. The reviewer for the
London Observer
wrote of To
Mary—with Love
, “It begins where most pictures end, with confetti; it ends where all marriages end, with compromise.”
¹¹

With adultery banished, sex within marriage became the thing. Myrna considered her role as Linda Stanhope, wife of the publisher Clark Gable in
Wife vs. Secretary
, one of her sexiest. She and Gable are constantly smooching. “That woman had one foot in the bed through the whole story,” Loy told David Chierichetti. But the Breen office objected even to married love when shows of affection became too overheated onscreen. Warner Baxter’s kiss on Loy’s bare shoulder in
To Mary—with Love
elicited an outcry from the Production Code Administration, although that particularly erotic bit stayed in the movie. Breen filled his notes with warnings to cover up. The exposed flesh married couples displayed in the privacy of their bedrooms, when caught by the camera, troubled him. Where Gable, in
Wife vs. Secretary
, is supposed to appear naked from the waist up, Breen writes to Mayer, “Please put an undershirt on him.”
¹²

The cash register ruled, and placating Breen while trying to also please the public demanded deftness.
Wife vs. Secretary
tames Jean Harlow’s persona, not eliminating her sexiness (with Harlow that couldn’t be done) but toning it down. Previously cast as a come-and-get-me platinum blonde, she’s a more subdued “brownette” here, dressed demurely. As Gable’s efficient, businesslike secretary “Whitey,” she wears office-appropriate blouses, jackets, and skirts. The original script placed Whitey at home in luxurious digs that, as Breen saw it, made her seem too much like a kept woman. Revisions by the uncredited script doctors Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett downgraded her to a modest home shared with her parents, who invite boyfriend Jimmy Stewart over for dinner with the folks. Even toned down, however, Harlow remains a shapely knockout who inspires everyone who sees her alongside boss Gable to suspect hanky-panky. Gable’s wife, Linda (Loy), at first a trusting soul who brushes aside suggestions that her handsome husband is having an affair with Whitey, eventually succumbs to jealousy, which nearly wrecks her marriage. Whitey, who’s attracted to boss Gable but doesn’t want to be a husband-stealer, tells Linda she’d be a fool to leave her marriage, and Linda listens. Husband and wife kiss and make up.